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February 22, 2020 at 06:30PM
If you played BioWare's wonderful Mass Effect trilogy, you'll be familiar with its morality system.
Ostensibly reflecting "good" and "bad" playthroughs, the Paragon and Renegade system let players choose different lines of dialogue and key actions that each would each contribute in some way to their character's Paragon or Renegade score. Paragon points would be obtained for compassionate and heroic actions, while Renegade points were obtained for being ruthless or, well, a bit of a dick.
Paragon and Renegade each had their own scores, which meant being nice every now and then wouldn't adversely affect a player's dodgy rep, and vice versa. However, a certain number of points in either track would open dialogue options with significant impact (in the first Mass Effect, high scores would unlock high ranks in the Charm and Intimidate skills).
Microsoft Flight Simulator has all the airports in the world, its developers have said.
37,000 airports were manually edited by the developers.
In the video below, Sven Mestas, lead game designer at French studio Asobo reveals the astonishing work done by its airport team, which expanded on the 24,000 simulated airports in 2006's FSX, to the hugely ambitious target set for this year's game.
It's official. 4A Games are fully committed to ray tracing technology for its next big game and the implications are exciting. The firm is in preparing for the next generation with initial work concentrated around RT - strongly suggesting that ray tracing support isn't an afterthought built into next-gen console silicon, but a key feature of the design.
In an interview centred on 4A Games' excellent work in bringing Metro Redux to Switch, we asked CTO Oles Shishkovstov for his reaction to publicly revealed aspects of next generation console hardware. "We are fully into ray tracing, dropping old-school codepath/techniques completely," he told us.
The firm is keeping its cards close to its chest but 4A has already shipped Metro Exodus on PC with DXR ray tracing support and is currently assessing options for its next step. "Internally we experimented a lot and with spectacular results so far. You will need to wait to see what we implement into our future projects," Shishkovstov told us.
It began with Doom 2016 - a Switch port so ambitious, it simply didn't seem possible. However, since then, a procession of technologically ambitious current-gen console titles have migrated onto the Nintendo console hybrid, culminating in the arrival of the wonderful Metro Redux from 4A Games - highly impressive conversions and perhaps the closest, most authentic first-person shooter ports we've seen. So what's the secret? How do developers manage to achieve such impressive results from five-year-old Nvidia mobile hardware?
"At first, I did have really big concerns performance-wise," admits 4A's chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovstov. "You know, going from base PS4/Xbox One with approximately six and a half or seven CPU cores running at 1.6 GHz to 1.75GHz down to only three cores at 1.0GHz sounds scary. The GPU was fine, as graphics can be scaled up and down much easier than, for example, game simulation code."
The results of the conversion work are certainly impressive bearing in mind the yawning gap in CPU specs. 4A started out by translating over the existing Metro Redux games from PS4 and Xbox One (and to stress the point, Switch doesn't get last-gen ports here), a process the 4A team carried out very quickly, but this early version of the game could only manage frame-rates of around seven to 15 frames per second. The games were entirely CPU-bound.
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February 21, 2020 at 03:00PM
Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has settled its lawsuit with Crytek over the alleged misuse of the latter's CryEngine.
Crytek's lawsuit, which first came to light last December, argued its licence with Cloud Imperium only granted the Star Citizen developer the right to use CryEngine for one game. Since the agreement was made, however, development of Star Citizen has splintered off into two separate projects - Star Citizen and standalone single-player story title Squadron 42 - which Crytek believed contravened the terms of its licence with CIG.
Crytek was also unhappy that CIG had removed its logo from Star Citizen's marketing material, despite their inclusion allegedly being part of an agreement between the two parties to licence CryEngine at a "below-market rate".
Apex Legends is getting a touch nostalgic this weekend, as the free-to-play battle royale game returns to its roots by ushering in its original Kings Canyon map.
Granted, they're not particularly long roots, given that Apex Legends is barely a year old at this point, but fans have been clamouring to return to the original, unsullied Kings Canyon since Respawn jettisoned it in favour of Season 3's World's Edge map last October.
Kings Canyon has returned to the game previously, but only in a special nighttime form, as used in Apex Legends' Grand Soiree and Fight or Fright limited-time events. From today, 21st February until Monday, 24th February, however, players will be able to traipse their way across the original, pre-season version until their nostalgia is adequately sated.
Waiting on the Switch Lite to get cheap enough that buying one is irresistible? Today might be your lucky day, as the popular Nintendo handheld is now going for just a hair above £160.
To get the deal, head over to the Currys Ebay store, choose your favourite Switch Lite colour and put in code PARTY5 at the checkout to knock £9 off the listed price of £169. That's an excellent deal for a brand new Switch Lite, and it's even cheaper than the console ever went on Black Friday a few months back!
Here are some quick links to the Switch Lite in each colour:
The weekend's here and the diary is clear so what better way to spend it than tucking into a game? But what if you fancy something new to play to tide you over until Doom Eternal or Animal Crossing New Horizons? Well, perhaps one of this week's best game deals will tempt you.
First up, many remasters of PS1 era classics are down to some of their lowest ever prices right now. Crash Bandicoot is there. Spyro is in too. I'm still disappointed that Croc hasn't been given the same treatment. One day, maybe. Anyway, you can pick up any of these for £20 on PS4 or Xbox One. Switch versions are also reduced for £24.99.
Meanwhile, Amazon has also brought back its lowest price on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. If you missed the deal last month, you can pick it up for £37 again. Wes has been enjoying it a lot recently following the return of multiplayer map Rust.
Five of the Best is a weekly series about the bits of games we overlook. I'm talking about hands, maps, cats, startup screens - things we ignore at the time but can recall years later because, it turns out, they're integral to our memory of the game. Now is the time to celebrate them!
It works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. We've had some great discussions in our other Five of the Best pieces. So come on, what are you waiting for? On we go!
When I gaze out of the big windows beside me I see building works and grey skies. Oh February. Oh England. What I wouldn't give to be padding through the warm sands of a beach somewhere else, somewhere hot - somewhere I can splosh in and out of the water all day, drying lazily in the sun.
I know there are a lot of Warhammer 40,000 video games covering a lot of genres, but I never thought I'd see a Warhammer 40,000 aerial combat video game - all about Orks.
Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron is due out on PC and consoles during the fourth quarter of 2020, and is described as a "fast-paced, aerial shooter where the player is an Ork Flyboy, taking to the skies to do what Orks do best - fight!".
You start off as a lowly Flyboy and conquer worlds as you work your way up to the position of Warboss. We're promised multiple planets, a 20+ mission campaign, a "grim humour" tone and various techniques, such as dog fighting, dive bombing and carpet bombing to master. "All of the player actions revolve around fighting," reads the official blurb. "Building and crafting is for the grots."
Needless to say, on the back of this little hit, with the most viewed version even peaking on Billboard Hot 100 at #32 in January of 2019, the company that owns the channel, SmartStudy, has managed to spin it into not just success across several YouTube channels they own, but to a Nickelodeon series and merchandise the world over- from blankets to clothes, diapers, and, of course, toys. Kellogg’s even created a Baby Shark cereal.
So how much have they made off of it? This is hard to quantify given, as noted, they’ve leveraged the song to bolster the company and its parent company as a whole across multiple channels and industries. But to begin with, on ads alone on the main video’s 4.6 billion views, after reaching out to a few children’s channel creators and coming up with a ballpark CPM and general monetization fill rate for children’s channels (including looking at the numbers before the relatively recent change in children’s ads on Youtube), it would seem they’ve probably earned around $7 to $14 million off of the main video youtube ads.
On top of this, according to SmartStudy, its Baby Shark song has at different times ranked #1 on iTunes, Apple Music, Google Play, and Amazon, so generating an undisclosed, but likely very significant sum, from there.
And, of course, their Baby Shark content has brought in a number of new subscribers and regular views of the channel. As for numbers there, the furthest back we could find accurate data on their main Pinkfong channel is March of 2017, about a year after the video started to take off. In that month, they got about 80 million views and 71,000 new subscribers. Fast-forward to today after the Baby Shark phenomenon went global, and they get approximately half a billion views and 1M new subscribers every single month in recent months…
And that’s just one of their countless popular channels in various languages, with the trending data on the top ones we looked at all pointing squarely at the timing of Baby Shark’s rise kicking all of them into high gear…
And as for SmartStudy and potential gross earnings, their revenue in 2015 was about $8.5 million. The next year, when Baby Shark became a big thing, they jumped to just over $15 million. The year after that, they rose to $24 million. The year after that, in 2018, they were up to $34.3 million. We couldn’t yet find definitive data on their total 2019 figures, though based on their top channels’ data progression, among other things we looked at, we’d be surprised if they aren’t pushing into the $45+ million range for 2019. On top of that, the company’s stock, as well as its parent company, Samsung Publishing, have been soaring of late, making the Kim family behind the two companies a combined net-worth well in excess of $100M in their personal stock shares alone.
The funny thing about all of this is- they don’t actually own the rights to the song they based their version on.
In fact, nobody knows who does, as nobody knows who first wrote it. However, while you’ll here from this from literally every source we could find, including from representatives from SmartStudy, that the original song is in the public domain as it originated in the early 1900s, based on our research, the evidence at hand does not seem to support that hypothesis at all. It actually appears that SOMEBODY may still hold the copyright, if they can prove they wrote it. Or, at the least, they’d have a good enough legal argument to pursue the matter.
So where did the song actually come from?
Often mentioned along with this “early 1900s” narrative as supporting evidence that versions of the song have been around forever include pointing to the French “Bébé Requin”- a 1967 song which, translated, means “Baby Shark”.
The problem with this is that, other than the title and that it features a portion where a figurative baby shark is going after someone, this song bears little resemblance to the Baby Shark ear worm we know today and its direct predecessors. Translated to English, the pertinent part states:
I am a baby shark
With a white tummy and pearly white teeth
I’ll pull you down
Into the warm waters
And without your knowing,
With love, with sweetness,
hmhmhmhm..
I, pretty Baby Shark,
Want to devour your heartBaby shark, velvet baby
Baby shark, baby of love…To keep you
I will fight with my sisters
I want to be the only one
To eat your heart
Needless to say, it’s a bit of a stretch to call this song an ancestor to the Baby Shark we have today.
Moving on from there, the German Kleiner Hai (“Little Shark”) is commonly pointed to as yet more evidence the song has been around forever. In fact, a version of this song performed by Alexandra Müller, aka Alemuel, actually went viral in Germany, resulting in the first, albeit brief and isolated, Baby Shark craze all the way back in 2007 and 2008.
Now, we’ll grant that our research-fu when it comes to German is lacking compared to our abilities in English. But, for what it’s worth, we could find no documented version of this German version that predates the first known English version which we’ll get to shortly. And even anecdotal accounts from Germans only seem to go back to around the 1990s or so on this song. That’s not to say it’s not possible people were singing the German version before this, just the document trail doesn’t seem to be there. Though, if any native German speakers care to correct us if you know of something sooner, we’re all ears.
Also, seriously, everyone go watch the Alemuel version. It’s… interesting… and a virtual time-capsule of a video on what the early days of YouTube were like.
This brings us back around to English and what appears to be the actual origin of the song.
It turns out, it would seem the 1975 film Jaws.
This is very important to SmartStudy in particular as in the United States at least, after January 1, 1978, to quote copyright.gov, “copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first.” For works prior to 1978, there are many factors involved in determining the copyright status, which may or may not be important depending on how quickly after Jaws came out the song was written and the exact circumstances.
This brings us to the earliest documented instance of a version of the Baby Shark song, which comes to us from the 1981 children’s music book, Making Music Fun: A Complete Collection of Games, Puzzles, and Activities for the Elementary Classroom.
Noteworthy here is that the song is not called “Baby Shark”, but rather, “Jaws”. However, it otherwise strongly resembles the Baby Shark song, “doo doo doos” and all. Starting “JAWS du du du du du Jaws du du du du du” etc. It also includes a portion that mentions “Baby Jaws” and a “Giant jaws”, a lady-swimming, etc. It also mentions, “One of the aspects of the song that is the most fun is putting gestures to it,” implying some form of the chomping movements and the like were likely there as well at this point.
Now, you might be thinking, “Of course they called it ‘Jaws’, it was a huge franchise at the time, so perhaps they were just co-opting a pre-existing song in the public domain and changing the name to ‘Jaws’.” That is always possible. But, first, despite our sincerest efforts, we could come up with zero documented evidence of such a song pre-dating Jaws, including looking for all sorts of potential modification to lyrics and the like. Fast-forward to the 1980s, however, and the song pops up all over the place.
Now, it’s always possible the popularity of the film made some ultra obscure children’s song more popular, and we’d love it if someone found earlier hard documented evidence of the song, as it’s always fun to track these sorts of things down definitively, especially on topics nobody else has seemingly done a deep dive on. But even if such a song did exist, there is a key factor of this version, which is integral to the modern version, that points to it being a creation AFTER Jaws, and is significant enough that it would likely still be eligible for copyright as a derivative work based on these changes that still exist in the Pinkfong version.
We’re guessing a large percentage of you have already spotted it, but to make it explicit- the evidence that this version of the song came after Jaws, and perhaps the entire song itself given the lack of evidence to it before, can be found in the famous “doo doo doo doo” part of the music. Change the tempo a bit to be a bit more ominous and slowed down from the way it’s sung today and you get arguably one of the most famous movie themes of all time- the music played as Jaws approaches its victims.
As for where the aforementioned Making Music Fun 1981 music book got the song, they do not claim authorship, simply stating “Here is a song that we learned from a second grader at the St. Thomas School in West Hempstead New York About Jaws…”
In the end, given the timing some version of the song first started appearing in documented history, anecdotal accounts from people singing it at kid’s camps and the like not starting until the 1980s, and the inclusion of a version of the Jaws theme, all evidence to date seems to indicate the song came AFTER Jaws, probably written by some camp counselor or kid’s music teacher, and spreading and being adapted from there.
And speaking of improvised lyrics, all documented early instances of the song more or less followed the trend of having the family of sharks going along chasing and then eating someone, or a group of people, with some version of the “doo doo” sped up Jaws theme in between each progression. This is in stark contrast to the Pinkfong version where the humans get away.
So how did we get the slightly more tame version? It turns out the credit for that seems to go to children’s entertainer Johnny Only, who even posted a music video of it on YouTube all the way back September of 2011- 4 years before Pinkfong’s first version and almost 5 before their viral version.
Unfortunately for Only, while his song, music, dance moves, etc. are all exceptionally similar to the PinkFong/SmartStudy version (some say too-similar, which we’ll get into in the Bonus Facts in a bit), his music video didn’t take off, even today only having just shy of 150,000 views. PinkFong’s, on the other hand, which is far better crafted to appeal to the littles visually, has since made SmartStudy many tens of millions of dollars as noted. And, unlike adult-music fads like Macarena and Gangnam Style and the like, as this one’s kid’s related and there are always new kids to come along to enjoy it, it’s not likely to stop making the company massive sums of money, really potentially forever if they keep leveraging it as entertainment mediums evolve, and creating new versions they can continue to copyright.
So next time you’re sitting in your car in traffic going to your dead-end job that you loath, just remember, there is a company out there who has literally made at minimum tens of millions of dollars already off a song they plucked from, allegedly, the public domain, modifying it only slightly from an existing version, claimed the copyright on that version based on those tiny modifications, did a few minutes of recording, presumably a day or two of video editing, uploaded it on the interwebs, and now will be cashing checks for it for the rest of their lives, as well as their kid’s lives and beyond.
Of course, in truth, that’s an oversimplification as before releasing that video they also did several years of work uploading almost 400 videos, improving their craft and building their platform in the process, all culminating in that video having a chance to go viral in the first place. Then, with the early going of views seeming promising, it spurred them to focus a ton of marketing efforts and money into keeping it going, with their marketing team ultimately helping it along to becoming a global phenomenon and leveraging its popularity to make money in other mediums… But quit trying to ruin the no-effort, overnight, rags to riches narrative.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
Bonus Fact:
As you might expect given that Johnny Only was the first known person to create a version of the Baby Shark song that cuts out the whole eating people thing, and that Pinkfong’s version is extremely similar to his, and that they are making Scrooge McDuck money off it, as well as getting all the credit for the song to boot, this hasn’t set too well with Only.
Says Only of the similarities, “The shortened length, the key, the addition of instrumentation, the type of instrumentation, the rhythm, the tempo, the sanitation of the lyrics for toddler age audiences, the tempo change mid song, the splash at the beginning… Even some of the harmony styles and things like adding a lower voice when they introduce daddy shark…. all the ones before mine are camp versions with blood and gore, loss of limbs, and frequently death. The toddlers also like the shark family and the fact that I made it shorter.”
Nevertheless, despite the similarities, he did not initially pursue any legal action against SmartStudy as he just assumed the song was in the public domain, and thus any version he made would be too, so they were free to use it as far as he was concerned. It was only after the Liberty Korea Party reached out to him to ask for permission to use his version of the song, which he granted as the thought he had no right to say no, that things came to a head. You see, SmartStudy threatened to sue Liberty Korea for infringing on their copyright, with the Liberty Party naturally responding that Only, not SmartStudy, owned the copyright to the version they were using. Said Only of this, “If Pinkfong’s song is so close to mine that they can’t even tell the difference, and Pinkfong tries to claim copyright infringement against their version when the political party is using my version, doesn’t that mean that my version also has copyright protection?” This got him looking into the legal side more, as well as SmartStudy’s version compared to his. Given the similarities, you’ll perhaps not be surprised to learn that whether they infringed on Only’s copyright or not is currently being decided in court.
Expand for ReferencesThe post How Much Has Baby Shark Made Its Creator? (And Who Really Created It?) appeared first on Today I Found Out.
Of course, deforestation on the scale he was talking about is a drop in the ocean when talking about climate on a global scale and scientists for a couple thousand years since mostly thought the Earth’s general climate had remained largely unchanged since the beginning, outside of things like religious based ideas of mass flooding and the like.
Around the early 19th century, however, the matter began to be revisited. For example, in the 1830s Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz published his groundbreaking work on glaciers. He summed up of his research, “[G]reat sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface”. Thus, contrary to the notion of a stable historic global climate, at some point, things must have been very different from documented history.
With ideas like these gradually gaining steam, scientists the world over started considering what could have possibly caused such a drastic change on a planetary scale.
It turns out the seeds of the solution were already known. For example, going back about a decade before Agassiz’ publication, in 1824, Joseph Fourier of mathematical formula fame, noted that the Earth was warmer than it should be strictly by the solar radiation reaching Earth. He hypothesized that the atmosphere must be allowing the rays through to the surface and radiation from the surface must not be able to pass through some element or elements of the atmosphere back into space as easily.
A few decades later, physicist and inventor Eunice Newton Foote began attempting to quantify in a scientifically rigorous fashion how sunlight warmed various gasses differently. Unfortunately, in 1856, she was barred from presenting her work at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference owing to the fact that she wasn’t born with a penis. However, thanks to a friend, Smithsonian scientist Joseph Henry, her paper nonetheless got presented without her.
So what did she find? Among other things, compressed air heated more in the sun and likewise the more moisture in the air, the more the heating effect was observed. Significantly, she also found, “the highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas [carbon dioxide]… An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if…at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action…must have necessarily resulted.”
Expanding on this speculation, a few years after that, Irish scientist John Tyndall demonstrated that various gasses in the atmosphere and their proportions, including water and carbon dioxide, could have been the root cause of drastic changes in climate throughout history, noting in a lecture in October of 1861,
Similar remarks would apply to the carbonic acid diffused through the air, while an almost inappreciable admixture of any of the hydro-carbon vapors would produce great effects on the terrestrial rays, and corresponding changes in climate… Such changes, in fact, may have produced all the mutations of climate which the researchers of geologists reveal.
He expounded upon this in 1863, explaining in a nutshell how this greenhouse effect actually works: “The solar heat possesses the power of crossing an atmosphere, but, when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits the entrance of the solar heat but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”
In other words, sun rays mostly pass through the atmosphere to the surface where they warm it. From there, infrared energy is emitted back up, which is absorbed and emitted by things like water molecules, methane, and carbon dioxide, keeping some of that energy from escaping so readily back into space.
And if you’re wondering on this one, it’s estimated that before the Industrial Revolution, Earth would have been approximately 33 °C (59 °F) cooler if it wasn’t for the greenhouse effect occurring from such elements in the atmosphere- meaning we’d all be living on a bit of a Popsicle planet. Or, more likely, not living at all.
At this point, however, the leading minds of the age generally thought water vapor the dominate element here, with most dismissing the effect of carbon dioxide given its extreme low density in the atmosphere.
Slightly more progress was made, however, thanks to Swiss scientist and Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius who, in 1896, in his own attempt to explain past climate change published a paper with quite extensive calculations that indicated carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere could be a likely culprit, with only a halving or so of the then levels of around 280 parts per million in his estimation potentially resulting in about a 4-5 degree Celsius drop in global temperature. He felt this would be sufficient to cause an ice age.
From there, thanks in part to a colleague, Nils Ekholm’s, 1899 suggestion that the burning of pit coal could ultimately double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at some point, Arrhenius went on to theorize what would happen if that occurred. He eventually concluded that this would result in an approximately 5-6 degree Celsius increase in global temperature and that it would take about 3,000 years for man’s industrial emissions to cause such a thing. He further thought this would be a very good thing, stating, “We would then have some right to indulge in the pleasant belief that our descendants, albeit after many generations, might live under a milder sky and in less barren surroundings than is our lot at present.”
That said, few paid much attention to this at the time, with those who would research the matter in the decades following ultimately concluding, to quote Sir George Clarke Simpson, then director of the British Meteorological Office in 1929, “[It is] now generally accepted that variations in carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, even if they do occur, can have no appreciable effect on the climate.”
So who would finally convince the experts that they were wrong if not a Nobel Prize winner? Well, it turns out, just a random Guy- Guy Callendar, to be precise- collecting data as a bit of a hobby on the side from his day job as a steam engine engineer.
Born on February 9, 1898, Guy was the son of one of the leading scientific minds of the 19th century, physicist Hugh Callendar. Guy’s dear ol’ dad was a man who was called by the “father of nuclear physics”, Ernest Rutherford a “universal genius”. Hugh did everything from inventing the platinum resistance thermometer, which allowed for extremely accurate ultra high temperature measurements, among other things advancing the field of metallurgy, to developing non-scientific things like the Cambridge system of shorthand as a way to making writing more efficient and thus get more studying and research done in the same amount of time.
Thanks to Guy’s father’s extreme success in using his academic talents towards not just advancing science, but inventing things that sold well, Guy grew up in a 22 room mansion and was given, along with his siblings, an extensively equipped laboratory converted, ironically enough given what Callendar would go on to be remembered for today, a greenhouse.
Of course, not all things went swimmingly in his early days as a budding researcher, in part owing to one of his brothers accidentally blowing up the children’s laboratory when he was attempting to make TNT… Also at one point that same brother accidentally blinded Guy in his left eye… Thankfully Guy retained the use of the other eye, which we like to think he nicknamed “Old reliable.”
When he wasn’t getting himself blinded or tinkering away in what was apparently the most badass kid’s lab of all time, after attending Durston House School, Guy apprenticed under his father during WWI, working for the Air Ministry in various research and advancements for the war effort, such as developing an X-ray system for use in analyzing engine blocks to make sure they were free of defect.
Beside that, he also received a degree in Mechanics and Mathematics from the Imperial College, but after abandoned any further formal education, though eventually took the mantle from his dear old dad as the leading steam engine engineer in the UK.
Among other hobbies on the side, including a love of sports, however, he also eventually began collecting weather data. As to why, well, Callendar simply noted, “As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time-scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change.”
In short, he was curious.
As he began collecting the data, first, as others had observed, he noticed the global temperature had increased over the last half century or so. He thus began to consider all the various factors that could cause it, including properties of gases in the atmosphere, average sunlight in different regions, ocean currents, etc. etc., attempting to account for every possible variable he could and then figuring out which elements were causing the change and how.
Towards this end, he corresponded with scientists and researchers the world over collecting massive amounts of data from a couple hundred weather stations and performing literally tens of thousands of calculations by hand in his spare time.
By 1937, he was ready to publish his findings. As to what he found, the data showed that carbon dioxide density in the atmosphere had risen from about 274-292 parts per million in the late 19th century, to just over 300 parts per million in the late 1930s. (For reference, it currently stands at just over 400 parts per million today.) Via calculating the estimated amount of carbon dioxide humans were releasing into the atmosphere each year and estimating how much various mechanisms in the ocean and the like could absorb of this, he also found that the rise could be directly attributed to the net-increase from man-made activities. On top of that, when crunching the numbers on the extra infrared absorption this would result in among other factors to consider, it directly correlated to the observed global temperature increase in the half century before his paper was written.
Unfortunately for him and the thousands of hours of his spare time he put into this, nobody cared.
In fact, when he submitted his paper, The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature, for publication on May 19, 1937, nobody even bothered to look at it until February 16, 1938- almost a year later. Shortly thereafter, in April of 1938, it was published to little fanfare, though he was able to present his research to six climate scientists at the Royal Meteorological Society.
They weren’t impressed. Or, more aptly given the minutes recorded of the discourse after his presentation, which are a quite fascinating read including Callendar’s responses to objections, they were impressed with the amount of effort he clearly put in, as well as the extremely professional way in which he presented the data; they merely thought little of that data and thus the conclusions he came to.
The aforementioned Sir Simpson, who was one of the panel members, also explicitly noted Callendar was a “non-meteorologist”; in essence, he didn’t know enough to know what he was talking about, and all his data showed was a mere coincidence- correlation does not equal causation. And more to the point, they questioned the accuracy of Callendar’s carbon dioxide and temperature measurements in the first place, despite the extreme effort Callendar explicitly went to to reduce the noise in the data and account for the potential error bars.
And if you’re curious just how accurate he was given our more enlightened vantage point and snazzy super computers able to crunch the numbers far more effectively and with massively greater and more accurate datasets, modern estimates from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analyses Center indicate that from 1887 to 1937 the net amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere from mankind’s activities was about 140,000 million tonnes. Callendar, in contrast, sat in his little office in England compiling data from across the globe, using it to make estimates of absorption and emissions, all the while crunching the numbers by hand. His result? 150,000 million tonnes. Presumably if Callendar were still alive today, the revelation of the CDIAC’s number in comparison with his would have resulted in one of the most delayed mic drops in scientific history.
Going back to his presentation, his lone supporter of sorts on the panel, Dr. C. E. P. Brooks, at the least agreed a climate change had been occurring, not just evidenced by temperature data, but a variety of other observable and irrefutable phenomenon, but “did not think that a change in the amount of carbon dioxide could cause such a differential effect.” He did, however, state he thought Callendar’s paper could be a valuable addition to the study of climate change and was worthy of further discussion and research among the wider scientific community to see if perhaps the scientists of the day were incorrect on this point.
Nevertheless, as before, Callendar’s work was largely dismissed and the consensus remained that even if he was correct on his measurements of carbon dioxide and the like, this still was insufficient to cause any measurable change in global temperatures. Something else must have been the real cause, if such a change was occurring.
Undeterred, Callendar, with no outside funding or support, soldiered on… quite literally as not long after he joined the war effort working for the British military during WWII doing things like helping design a fog dispersal system to be implemented in aerodromes in Britain.
Called FIDO, the system worked by warming the air around the air strips using rows of pipes that more or less amounted to giant burners. Key in this system was that it had to use as little fuel as possible to create the desired result and make sure the whole thing didn’t create any smoke. To accomplish both of these things, Callendar was tasked with developing the trench burners, among other elements.
While you might think surely such a system couldn’t work on the scale they needed it to, when the first tests were conducted, they were a rousing success. After the FIDO system was lit, mere moments later the fog dissipated around the aerodrome, allowing Allied planes to come in and land safely. Once switched back off, the protective fog quickly enveloped the aerodrome as the ambient temperature and the dew point once again met, keeping the site from the prying eyes of enemy bombers.
When Callendar wasn’t working on systems like this for the war effort, on the side he continued his research, collecting more and more data that continued to show that man was affecting the global climate, with carbon dioxide seeming to be the key driver.
Far from considering this a bad thing, however, like Arrhenius before him, Callendar stated, “[It] may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel, whether it be peat from the surface or oil from 10,000 feet below, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance the above mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure… In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.”
Over the next couple decades of his life until his death in 1964, Callendar continued to publish papers and articles about the issue with little fanfare and significant resistance from those scientists who were reading his work.
As to why no one would accept what the data was saying, Callendar had his own ideas on that too, which proved to be every bit as accurate among climate change skeptics today as then. He postulated:
a. The idea of a single (easily explained) factor causing world wide climatic change seems impossible to those familiar with the complexity of the forces on which any and every climate depends. b. The idea that man’s actions could influence so vast a complex [system] is very repugnant to some. c. The meteorological authorities of the past have pronounced against it, mainly on the basis of faulty observations of water vapour absorption, but also because they had not studied the problem to anything like the extent required to pronounce on it. d. Last but not the least. They did not think of it themselves!
He would later sum up, “How easy it is to criticise and how difficult to produce constructive theories of climate change!”
All that said, while few were listening, few was not none. One such individual was Charles Keeling who, in 1958, was able to use far more accurate measurement equipment, partially of Keeling’s own design, to start gathering data at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The result was ground breaking and finally got scientists the world over paying attention. After all, these results, while more or less correlating with Callendar’s own data, came from a PhD and left little room for debate given the known accuracy of the instruments used.
In what would be called the Keeling Curve, the graph, besides accurately charting the fluctuation of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels throughout the seasons, showed a steady increase year over year that could be directly attributed to mankind’s activities.
From here, as the matter became more and more studied, the effects of added methane in the atmosphere also began to become just as concerning, primarily thanks to its potency as a greenhouse gas.
And while you might comedically think methane from the rising human population’s flatulence might be a culprit, it turns out, contrary to popular belief, only about 1/3 of humans have measurably significant amounts of methane in their rear valve’s gaseous expulsions, and even then only in certain circumstances. We’ll have much more on this fascinating phenomenon in the Bonus Facts shortly.
It turns out the real problem is the gas from another creature- cows, with livestock the largest source of methane gas emissions worldwide, contributing over 28% of those total emissions. (Wetlands, leaks from oil refineries and drills, and landfills also significantly contribute methane gas to the atmosphere.)
It’s commonly stated from this that cow farts are the burning problem, but this isn’t actually correct. According to researchers at New Zealand’s Crown Research Institute, AGResearch, up to 95 percent of the offending emissions come from the cow’s mouth rather than its behind, which is too bad for the darkly hilarious notion of cow farts someday significantly contributing to the demise of humanity should the extreme worst case ever happen… Sort of Bessy’s revenge for, you know, all the milking and slaughter which combines to give us delicious, mouthwatering cheeseburgers…
To put the effects of all this burping in perspective, as noted in the 2020 edition of the always interesting Bill & Melinda Gates Annual Letter, if the cattle the world over we use for our absolutely essential and God-given hamburgers and cheddar were a nation of their own and we calibrated the effect of the methane to an equivalent effect by a given amount of carbon dioxide, cattle would slot just behind #2 on the list of worst greenhouse gas emitters- the United States. (For those wondering, China is #1 here.)
In any event, going back to Keeling’s research, after he published his data, climate scientists and a handful of world leaders finally started paying attention. The problem was, in general, the wider public wasn’t really.
This all culminated in NASA’s James E. Hansen’s famous 1988 speech to the US Senate at the behest of Colorado Senator Tim Wirth. To make the presentation as effective as possible, it was purposefully planned during one of the hottest periods of the year in what was then one of the hottest summers on record. To drive the point home, Senator Wirth also had the air conditioning turned off during Hansen’s testimony. All combined with record temperatures, droughts, and abnormal weather patterns the world over, the public started listening too.
Naturally, with the public en masse now more aware of the problem and a bit panicky, efforts on both sides were almost immediately put in place to both lobby the governments of the world to help facilitate a solution, as well as on the other side, various major industries that could be negatively impacted in the immediate by such efforts, throwing a whole lot more money at convincing everyone there was no problem at all- everything is fine. Nothing to see here, move along. And, indeed, in their defense, the datasets and models of the era did allow for reasonable doubt on what the ultimate effect of all of this would be, something still debated today even with far better models and better idea of what temperature changes are likely to occur.
Of course, in the process of all of this, the matter became politicized- a sure fire way to ensure few among the public or politicians care about what the actual data says or the consensus of the experts in the field, and rather just whether the general idea was supported or not by the political party they, or in some cases their parents, ascribed to.
This all leads us to the hot mess we have today, with effectively a universal consensus among climate scientists the world over that climate change is happening, nearly as strong of a consensus that humans are the primary driver of that change, and a slightly lesser consensus on what the results of all of this will be- everything from an increase in temperatures over the next century sufficient to cause cascading and possibly unstoppable warming thanks to massive amounts of further greenhouse gasses being released as the polar regions melt, to more mild estimates of a mere couple degree increase. On the latter point, this is still a concern as it will result in obscene amounts of money needed to maintain coastal cities as well as resulting in millions in poorer regions of the world dying as a result, but at the least with humanity otherwise fine in the grand scheme of things so long as steps are taken in the interim to make sure the problem doesn’t get worse.
So what’s to be done?
On the simpler side of things, some have suggested dumping a few million tons of sulfur dioxide annually high in the atmosphere to more or less counter the effects of the additional carbon dioxide and methane added. At the cost of only in the billions for such a program, this is far less than is already being spent to counter the current effects of climate change on coastal cities. Of course, the downside of that are things like rather unhealthy air pollution and, once started, it could potentially be catastrophic to just stop the program all at once, depending on how long it had been going.
Thus, few find a method such as this a viable solution. It’s a blanket over the dried cat vomit on your couch. Sure, you can now use the couch as before without fixing anything and not get any vomit on you. But remove the blanket, and the vomit is still there. Nobody wants a vomit covered couch.
Others suggest a more environmentally friendly approach that actually adds to usable land on the planet- for instance covering the Sahara, among many other deserts, with forest. While this might seem an impossibility, it turns out this very thing has been done on a much smaller scale in places like the very doorstep of the Sahara, the region known as the Sahel. For example, after a series of droughts left tens of thousands dead, efforts were made in Burkina Faso to try to figure out a way to restore the soil, including via low tech, dirt cheap means. For example, one extremely effective method was placing long lines of small stones which allowed water to remain in the hard, cracked soil long enough for grass seeds to sprout. This, in turn, led to the area around this to retain more water and be cooled, which in turn spread until in only a handful of years fields where this was done were restored and could once again be farmed.
Additional efforts to accelerate the process included digging thousands of shallow holes and placing manure and tree seeds inside. This also all encouraged termites to setup shop, with these termites in turn digging tiny little trenches throughout the soil to help water get absorbed, instead of washed away. The combination of this resulted in the trees and subsequent vegetation thriving, with, for example, one man, Yacouba Sawadogo, managing to turn 50 acres of bare desert he owned into a giant private forest in relatively short order. Among other trees in his little forest included the jatropha curcas, with a mere 50 acres of these trees capable of offsetting the current carbon footprints of over 500 Americans per year.
On a much grander scale, using similar techniques, the populace of Niger managed to salvage a whopping 40,000 square miles of land in this way. For reference here, there are 15 states in the United States that are smaller than this area.
Of course, doing this in these regions bordering a desert is one thing; doing it in regions like the Sahara itself, and on that kind of scale (for reference the Sahara is 3.5 million square miles) is another.
And, while this is a significantly nicer blanket on the cat vomit, the underlying problem would still be there. In the end, solutions such as this are often seen as more appealing as they require no one to change the way we do anything and outsource the actual work to someone else…. Which, on that note, if anyone would like to volunteer to come clean up the dried cat vomit I currently have under a blanket on my couch, I’d really appreciate that…. It’s pretty gross…
As to fixing the underlying problem, it turns out that’s incredibly complex too, touching on basically every single facet of human life. For example, direct energy production to power our lives only accounts for about 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions humans are responsible for. So even if 100% of this type of energy we produce was switched to zero emission solutions, there’s still the big old elephant in the room of the other 75%, comprising such things as manufacturing of steel, cement, and plastics, maintenance of large buildings which are kind of essential to humans humaning. And you can take our cheeseburgers from our cold, dead hands.
There are no easy or cheap solutions, aside from somewhat undesirable ones like massively polluting the atmosphere in a cooling way, thereby simultaneously fixing one problem by creating new ones. It’s a complex problem that requires complex and very diverse and numerous solutions implemented across the globe and countless industries, all combining to simultaneously reduce additional greenhouse gas emissions, find ways to remove the rest, and at the same time help those most affected by the inevitable changes we can’t prevent in the meantime. As to this group, as Bill Gates aptly points out in the aforementioned Annual Letter, “The cruel irony is that the world’s poorest people, who contribute the least to climate change, will suffer the worst.”
In the end, while the problem is complex, humans are rather good at solving problems, especially when cheeseburgers are on the line. And in the last decade particularly, we’ve finally started admitting en masse that we have a cheeseburger, and climate change, problem, which is always the first step to finding a solution. Hope is not lost. As Gates sums up in the aforementioned annual letter,
Tackling climate change is going to demand historic levels of global cooperation, unprecedented amounts of innovation in nearly every sector of the economy, widespread deployment of today’s clean-energy solutions… and a concerted effort to work with the people who are most vulnerable to a warmer world… [This] is one of the most difficult challenges the world has ever taken on. But I believe we can avoid a climate catastrophe if we take steps now to reduce emissions and find ways to adapt to a warmer world.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
Bonus Fact:
Going back to human methane in our rear expulsions, in one small study it was found that those that did have measurable amounts of methane only produced it when fed significant amounts of fiber. (The fiber free version of their farts was almost wholly made up of nitrogen for all subjects.) With the fiber version, the average fart only contained about 3.6% methane. The bulk of these individuals’ flatus was made up of hydrogen (51%) and nitrogen (30%).
Why only some people produce methane in their flatus isn’t entirely clear, though at least in part this has to do with what microbes call one’s intestines home. So far, only three microbes have been identified as methane producers (methanogens) in humans: Methaniobrevibacter smithii, Methanospaera stadmagnae and Methannobrevibacter oralis.
Scientists have identified a few factors in predicting if a person is a methane producer, and one of the most important of these appears to be where you live (although it’s not clear if genetics plays a role as well in some way). For example, while 77% of Nigerians and 87% of South Africans produce methane, only 34% of Norwegians and 35% of those who live in and around Minneapolis do so. In addition, adult women are more likely to produce measurable amounts of methane in their farts, and young children are less so. Finally, if both your parents produce methane, then there is a greater likelihood that you will, too, with one study indicating as high as a 95% chance that the spawn of two methane producers will also produce methane.
Expand for ReferencesThe post Forgotten Heroes: The Hobby Scientist Who Discovered Global Warming and Its Cause appeared first on Today I Found Out.
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February 20, 2020 at 07:30PM
Developer Keen Software House's construction-focussed sandbox game Space Engineers is finally making its way to Xbox One on 15th April.
Space Engineers, which keen describes as a "sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets", launched in its version 1.0 guise last February on PC, having been in Steam early access for almost five and a half years.
It's an absurdly ambitious game, enabling players (either working solo, co-operatively, or competitively in survival or creative modes) to build everything from planet-bound outposts to space stations and ships, piloting the latter through space to explore ever further.
Half-Life: Alyx is just over a month away, and those looking to step into the heady world of VR gaming have a new range of options to consider courtesy of HTC, which has just unveiled three new iterations of its Vive Cosmos headset.
The original Vive Cosmos launched at the tail-end of last year, offering a high-end PC-based VR experience that, in terms of price at least, occupied the middle ground between Oculus' £399 Rift S and Valve's maxed-out £919 Index, coming in at £699.
Vive Cosmos' three new variations - the Elite, XR, and Play - all have the same 90Hz 2,880 x 1,700 LCD display as the original model, but each utilises its own (removable) faceplate, providing support for a range of different features.
Hostel director Eli Roth is helming Gearbox's long-in-the-works Borderlands movie.
A film adaptation of the popular post-apocalyptic comedy shooter was first announced all the way back in 2015, with development being handled by movie studio Lionsgate. At one point, there were rumours that Saw and Insidious co-creator Leigh Whannell was attached the project, but little else has been heard since its initial reveal.
Now though, it seems all systems are go once more on the Borderlands movie; according to the Hollywood Reporter, Eli Roth will be directing from a script by Craig Mazin (creator of TV series Chernobyl), with Avi Arad and Ari Arad producing alongside Erik Feig.
Console wars are so last decade: everyone knows it's all about cross-play nowadays, and PUBG's latest console update is bringing everyone together by letting PS4 and Xbox One players party up. As for PC players - looks like you're still on your own, sorry.
After introducing limited cross-console play back in October, PUBG's 6.2 update finishes the job by allowing PS4 and Xbox One players to squad up in a single party. Until this point console users could play in the same matches, but not join a squad together - which is ultimately the feature everyone actually wants cross-play for.
Those wanting to bridge the console gap need only search for their buddy's Xbox Live Gamer Tag or PSN Name in PUBG's friends list. The update is already live on public test servers, so you can jump in with your friends right away.
Today's Nintendo Direct has revealed that terraforming is coming to Animal Crossing for the first time, with players able to carry out construction work such as paving paths and modifying cliffs and rivers.
It's one of several new features coming to the Nintendo Switch title, due on 20th March. Soon after launch, a new feature in the Nintendo Switch Online app will appear allowing New Horizons functionality. Called NookLink, it's where you can engage in voice chat or import designs from the 3DS' New Leaf and Happy Home Designer by scanning in QR codes. Customisation is also much deeper this time out, with cues being taken from Happy Home Designer as player's own designs can be applied to furniture.
That'll be part of several free updates coming to New Horizon, with the first coming on launch day that will enable Bunny Day in April - one of a number of planned in-game events coming to the new Animal Crossing.
Mount and Blade 2 will roll its medieval combat into early access on 31st March, priced £39.99 via Steam or the Epic Games Store.
It's been a decade since previous game Mount and Blade: Warband first arrived for PC, and this follow-up has been many years in the making.
Exactly what's included in this version will be explained closer to release, developer TaleWorlds said in a new Steam blog.
PlayStation will no longer attend PAX East due to "increasing concerns" surrounding coronavirus.
PAX East (operated by Eurogamer's US parent company Reedpop) opens its doors next week in Boston (US, not Lincolnshire).
"Today, Sony Interactive Entertainment made the decision to cancel its participation at PAX East in Boston this year due to increasing concerns related to COVID-19 (also known as 'novel coronavirus')," PlayStation said in a statement.
The Capcom Cafe in Japan is known for its wonderful video game-themed food and drink, but its new Street Fighter-themed menu could be the best yet.
The Capcom Cafe, in Shinjuku, Tokyo, now has dishes inspired by famous Street Fighter characters such as Blanka, Dhalsim and Sakura, as well as drinks inspired by Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken and Gill.
Here's a selection:
Fortnite has revealed its Chapter 2 Season trailer - and with it, the island's new theme as today's patch lands. It's all about... spies!
The trailer shows Fortnite favourites from the past being called to action - alongside several of this season's new skins. Top candidate for new favourite skin? Agent Meowscles - a buff half-cat half-man thing first glimpsed way back in season 7 and teased in Fortnite's recent ARG.
"The Island has been taken over by covert operatives - members of Ghost and Shadow. Will you join the fight?" the trailer's description reads, as Bushranger, Peely and Lynx leap into action.
To begin with, in Britain, conjugal visits aren’t a thing, though in some cases when prisoners who have been locked up for a long period are getting close to their release date, if they are considered particularly low risk for committing crimes or going off on their merry way, they may be allowed to have family leave time for brief periods. This is time meant to help re-acclimate them to the world outside of prison and get their affairs in order, including re-connecting with family and friends, looking for work, etc.- all as a way to try to help said person hit the ground running once fully released.
Moving across the pond to the United States, first, it’s important to note that prisoners in federal custody and maximum security prisons are not allowed conjugal visits. Further, in the handful of states that do allow conjugal visits, prisoners and their guests must meet a stringent set of guidelines including full background checks for any visitors. On the prisoner’s side, anyone who committed a violent crime, has a life sentence, is a sex offender, and other such serious crimes are also not eligible. Further, in Connecticut, if an inmate is a member of a gang or even thought to be so, they are also banned from conjugal visits. On top of that, pretty much everywhere, any inmate who does anything wrong whatsoever while in prison also finds themselves either temporarily or permanently banned from such visits.
This brings us to how the whole conjugal visit thing got its start in the United States; the earliest official-ish policy with regards to allowing, in this case male, prisoners to enjoy the company of the fairer sex started in the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm) in the early 20th century. This was instituted as a way to get its black prisoner populace, who were used pretty literally as slave labor, to work harder while working the 20,000 acres of land at this institution. In fact, the superintendent of the prison at the time was actually a farmer himself, which is why he was hired to oversee things. As historian David M. Oshinsky, author of Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, notes, “[The Administrator’s] annual report to the legislature is not of salvaged lives. It is a profit and loss statement, with the accent on the profit.”
Prisoners who didn’t work hard could be beaten and other such “stick”-type incentives leveraged. On the other hand, prisoners who worked hard, were willing to help keep their fellow prisoners in line, etc. etc. were given various rewards. In fact, in the extreme, a prisoner who managed to kill another prisoner attempting to escape could even be rewarded with a full pardon for that and whatever crime they’d previously committed to get locked up in the first place.
Most pertinent to the topic at hand, for those prisoners who were particularly well behaved and worked the hardest, one reward they could be given was the company of a prostitute on their Sunday off-day. To help facilitate this, every Sunday a literal truck load of women would be brought in to tend to the best behaved prisoners. Later, the policy was expanded to include girlfriends and wives for the men who preferred their company.
To illustrate the thinking of the prison officials in perhaps the most offensive way possible, we have this time-capsule of a quote from one contemporary prison guard from Mississippi- “You gotta understand that back in them days n***ers were pretty simple creatures. Give ‘em pork, some greens, some cornbread, and some poontang every now and then and they would work for you.”
Moving very swiftly on from there, the effectiveness of promised sex for a male prisoner, regardless of race, if they toed the line caught on and, as the century progressed, around 1/3 of the states in the U.S. eventually adopted the practice, as well as many other countries through the 20th century also instituting similar programs.
As for that effectiveness, former warden of Great Meadow Correctional Facility in New York State, Arthur Leonardo, explains, “We don’t have much to give to people in prison. If you don’t have anything to take away from someone, you don’t have anything to take away to urge them to do the right thing.”
Illustrating the effectiveness on the prisoner’s side, one Ray Coles, whose temper resulted in an assault that saw him given a nine year prison sentence, states of the incentive the conjugal visits give him to never step out of line, “Every action or choice I make is made with my wife in mind.”
As for what actually goes on during a conjugal visit, the Hollywood idea and reality, as ever, are somewhat different. While in film and TV shows, a conjugal visit is a time to get hot and sweaty with your partner, the reality is that, while sex may or may not be involved, much of the time is spent just doing normal things with not just a partner, but kids and other family members. In fact, in New York, it’s reported that around 40% of conjugal visits don’t include a spouse or the like, rather often just children and other loved ones. For this reason, these visits are usually officially called things like “Extended Family Visits” or, in New York, the “Family Reunion Program”.
As one California inmate summed up of his extended family visit with his partner, “I got to spend 2 1/2 days one-on-one with my partner, my best friend, my confidant, my life partner. It wasn’t about the sex.”
For further context here, in the United States for most prisoners, at best during normal visitation they might be allowed a brief 2 second hug with their partner and a peck on the cheek, if the latter is allowed at all. On top of that, everything you say or do is being watched, and the time together is relatively brief.
As you can imagine from this, for many prisoners, regardless of their crime, whatever prison sentence was doled out often comes with a generally unmentioned punishment of the finishing of a relationship with their partner. Combined with limited access to phones and the extreme expense of prison and jail phone calls, this also often sees a near complete disconnect from their kids, friends, etc. while in prison.
Thus, for prisoners, while sex may or may not be involved, the reality of the extended family visit is just that- depending on the exact rules for a given prison, 6-72 hours where you can spend time with your partner, kids, and sometimes other family members or friends in a somewhat normal setting, doing normal things.
As for frequency, while in movies it’s a regular thing, and little lead up time, in reality in the United States, this may be granted at best once per month all the way up to once per year, or not at all.
Towards the end of facilitating family bonding, many prisons that allow this provide a couple bedrooms to accommodate a couple and their kids, as well as things like board games, a TV, and potentially food, though costs of things like food are footed by the inmate or their loved ones. For reference, the wife of the aforementioned Ray Coles, Vanessa, states she pays around $100 per extended family visit for things like food, which is then provided by the prison.
As for regions outside the United States, places like Canada allow for extended family visits up to 72 hours in length once every couple months, including allowing anyone with a close familial bond to take part, even friends if the authorities deem the bond strong enough. As in the United States, food and other such items are paid for by the inmate or their family or friends.
Interestingly one of the most generous of the nations when it comes to family visits is Saudi Arabia, which allows a once a month visit; but if you have multiple wives, you get once per month per wife! On top of that, beyond allowing such frequent visits, the government actually pays for the travel of those coming to see you.
Back over in the United States, at its peak in the late 20th century, extended family visits were allowed in about 1/3 of states, but began dropping precipitously starting around the 1980s and 1990s to just four states today- California, Washington, New York, and Connecticut.
This was around the same time a number of such programs designed to keep people from being repeat jailbirds were given the axe across the nation, unsurprisingly directly corresponding to the prison population in the United States absolutely exploding, in the four decades since rising an astounding 500%! For reference, before the 1980s, the growth was relatively slow and steady, more or less tied to population growth. More on this in the Bonus Fact in a bit.
As for the impetus for cutting the extended family visit programs, this is generally tied to increased public sentiment starting around the 1980s and 1990s that prisoners are there to be punished, not to be coddled, and that the program costs too much. For example, in New Mexico, who relatively recently killed the extended family visit program, it was costing taxpayers about $120,000 per year.
Now, this might sound like a lot, and if you go read the news reports, this was certainly used as the driving political rhetoric to get the program nixed by the politicians involved. However, it’s noteworthy that New Mexico reports an average cost per inmate annually is a whopping $35,540, which is pretty close to the national average of about $31,000…. Meaning the entire extended family visit program was costing about what it costs to house just over 3 of their approximately 16,000 inmates per year.
Of course this is still costing taxpayers something… except when you consider, for example, a 1982 study done on New York’s prison populace which found that prisoners who were allowed extended family visits were almost 70% less likely than other prisoners to end up back in prison within three years. This makes it potentially the single most effective recidivism program known, even soundly stomping on the second king of recidivism programs- education, which we’ll talk a bit more about in the Bonus Facts.
As to why family visits seem so effective at reducing recidivism, as the aforementioned warden Arthur Leonardo, notes, those who are able to maintain family bonds while in prison, when they get out, have “someone who loves you and will help you, and in the case of children, people who depend on you…”
Going back to the reality of an extended family visit, it’s usually required that partners and the inmates be tested for STDs and come out clean before being allowed to have their little rendezvous. Further, the prisoners themselves are strip searched both before the extended family visit and after. Should they test positive for drug or alcohol use after, they are then banned from future visits indefinitely, and those who brought in the contraband may also be banned from taking part again.
On top of that, those that are visiting the prisoners must be cleared as well, though strip searches, at least in the United States, are not allowed on the visitors, so contraband may occasionally be smuggled in in certain orifices or the like. To try to get around this in, for instance California, inmates and their families are searched regularly during the extended family visits, usually at a rate of about once every four hours.
This brings us to what you can bring for an extended family visit. Well, not much- mostly just things like clean linens, certain toiletries, strictly regulated clothing, and the like. No cell phones, no electronic devices, and really not much of anything else. Even things like family pictures are pretty strictly regulated in number, type, and size. Going back to clothing, one Myesha Paul, wife of California inmate Marcello Paul who is in prison for robbery, states, “They don’t want you to have anything that’s form fitting… although we come with hips and all that, so it’s kinda hard to find what don’t fit around, you know? I just buy some men’s sweat pants and make it work.”
If you go look at the California regulations on this, they also have strict regulations when it comes to colors of clothing, for example no blue denim or forest green pants, no tan shirts, no camouflage, nothing strapless, no skirts or dresses or non-capri shorts- the list goes on and on.
Myesha also helpfully describes what a real extended family visit is like, stating, “We sat outside and played dominoes on Saturday. After that we went in and watched TV, watched movies.” And while she states her and her husband do have sex during the visit, as is almost universally noted by every other inmate and their partner we looked it, it’s more about the closeness and little things like getting to hold your partner’s hand or just hold them in general, as well as waking up next to them. She states, “It feels good… because I don’t get that at home. Ya know. At home I’m sleeping by myself, unless my grandbaby or one of my kids wanna sleep with me. But they’re grown. But they still do sleep with me sometimes. But other than that, you know, I’m waking myself up in the morning, or the alarm clock is waking me up, or my grandson comes and wakes me up. It’s good to have my husband waking me up. It’s the nicest thing about being married. Isn’t it? Waking up?”
She also states of her husband, “He watches me through the night… I know he does ’cause sometimes I wake up and he’s looking at me. And I do the same to him. Sometimes he’s sleeping and he wakes up and I’m watching him.”
Similarly summed up by the aforementioned Vanessa Coles, the value of extended family visits is about keeping her family together- “It keeps our bond going, keeps our marriage strong and keeps him on track.” As for the couple’s young kids, “The little one needs it because that’s all he knows. The older one needs it to remember what he knows.” And as for those arguing against allowing such visits, she states, “[The prisoners] are being punished. I get it. [But] destroying your marriage and family should not be a part of your sentence.”
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Bonus Facts:
Going back to what caused the massive spike in U.S. incarcerations starting in the 1980s that has more or less continued unabated since, one thing often pointed to is that this was around the time the war on drugs was ramped up, generally considering to account for about 25%-50% of the increase in inmate population. This still leaves the rest, which is the majority. And unless you just think U.S. citizens are far more likely to commit crimes than, for example, our European brethren, obviously there is something weird going on. As to what, a variety of factors are pointed to including the cutting of many programs designed to keep people from being repeat offenders, marked increase in sentence length, especially compared to the rest of the world for similar crimes, and perhaps the catch-all which has driven a lot of this to the extreme- the privatization of prisons that occurred at this time, making many prisons for-profit institutions.
In the decades since, these entities have heavily lobbied for things that seem pretty directly tied to doing everything possible to make prison sentences longer and keep people coming back for more- most pertinent to the topic at hand, cutting costs wherever possible for themselves, including any and all recidivism programs. After all, they get paid per inmate, so aren’t too concerned with what the total cost is to the state, other than the greater that cost, the more they make.
Naturally, the longer sentences and increased likelihood of repeat offenders, at a rate of about 45% within 3 years and 76% within five, has seen prison populations skyrocket in the United States since the 1980s. The net result of all of this being that, at present, the land of the free currently houses almost one quarter of all inmates imprisoned in the entire world! The cost of housing these inmates comes to about $50-$70 billion annually. This does not include the police and judicial costs that get the prisoners put there in the first place- all summing up to massive sums of money being spent and many more crimes being committed while proven recidivism programs that see massive reductions in repeat offenders going largely unused. And noteworthy here is that about 95% of prisoners do get out at some point.
And speaking of recidivism programs like extended family visits, a study done by the United States Department of Justice noted that prisoners given access to educational programs were, for vocational certificates 14.6% less likely to find their way back in prison within 3 years vs. the general prison populace. For those achieving a GED while in prison, they were 25% less likely to end up back in the slammer. And those who attained an Associates degree were the highest of all in their study at about 70% less likely, approximately the same benefit as those given access to extended family visits.
Averaging it all out, the net effect of the educational programs was about a 43% reduction in rate of returning to prison within 3 years. From this, crunching the numbers, the study showed that this meant for every $1 spent by the states towards educating prisoners, it saved $5 annually thanks to the reduction of prison population, let alone other cost savings in court and police expenditures and, of course, a reduction in crime rate. Given each year about 700,000 inmates are released in the United States, that amounts to a massive reduction in crime, while a rather large increase in a better educated and more skilled populace.
Finally, one more bonus fact- while violent criminals are almost always seen as the most dangerous and most likely to re-offend by the general public, the data does not back that up at all- not even close. According to the United States Department of Justice, the highest rate of re-offenders within 3 years after being released were those stealing motor vehicles at 78.8%! Next up are those in prison for selling stolen property at 77.4%. The list goes on and on, but essentially, those who steal are generally about 70%+ likely to re-offend within 3 years and are the highest at-risk re-offenders. In stark contrast, violent crime convicts are massively less likely to re-offend. For example, rapists and murderers are only 2.5% and 1.2% likely to re-offend respectively. Of course, the latter is much more news worthy and traumatic, leading to the skewed public perception.
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