Where Do People Use Top Sheets and Why?

Where do people use top sheets?

In the British Isles (i.e. Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, plus some small islands in the vicinity) people don't use top sheets. They put a fitted sheet on a bed and a duvet with a duvet cover which is washed from time to time. This practice is pretty much universal in the British Isles from the cheapest hostel or AirBnB, to the most deluxe four star hotel, and pretty much everything in between.

This is also the predominant practice in some of Northern Europe (including all or most of Scandinavia) although I don't have detailed geographic boundaries for this practice worldwide.

In the U.S. and Australia, in contrast, people put a fitted sheet on a bed, then a matching top sheet, and then on top of the top sheet, a bedcover, a quilt, or a comforters (a.k.a. duvet) usually without a duvet cover.

If I recall correctly, they also use top sheets in New Zealand, even though parts of its are cooler than the U.S. and Australia in the summer, probably mostly out of cultural influences from the U.S. and Australia.

Why does this happen?

The key point is that summers in the British Isles and much of Northern Europe aren't very hot. The average high in July in London, near the southern end of the geographic range of this practice, is 72º F.

There is no place in Australia that is that cool in the summer (a season it experiences when it is winter in the Northern hemisphere).

There is only one major American city that is that cool in July: Anchorage, Alaska, where the average high in July is 65º F (although San Francisco has the same average high temperature in July at London, as does Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada).

Basically every major city in the continental U.S. (even in Maine and Washington State) and Hawaii and in other U.S. territories is warmer than London in July, although a few high elevation mountain towns are an exception.

In places that are warmer than London in the summer, it is frequently too hot at night for a duvet or comforter to make sense, especially if one is trying to be thrifting by not using excessive air conditioning only to warm yourself against the air conditioning with insulation at night. 

In middle latitudes of the U.S. interior in places like Denver and Cincinnati, it is frequently too hot for a comforter from sometime in May until sometime in September. Further south, the comforter season is even shorter. Further north, it is a little longer.

On the the other hand, even if it is too warm for a comforter, people in the U.S. and Australia often still like to have something over them while they sleep, both for modesty and to keep out the occasional flies, gnats and mosquitos that manages to make it into the house. Some people find that having something on top of them while they are in bed also helps them to sleep.

Often, to keep the bed pretty when it is made and not being used, people in the U.S. or Australia will also add a pretty bed cover such as quilt or thin, not very warm blanket. But, the top sheet is necessary to avoid having to clean the quilt or blanket (or in colder months the uncovered comforter or duvet) in the laundry on a regular basis because it prevents the harder to clean fabric from being exposed to sweat and smells. 

The duvet cover fills that role in cooler climates, and since it is very rarely too warm to use a duvet at night in the places where this is the common practice, they is no need to have top sheets as a substitute for duvet covers when it is warmer.

Global Chaos

I am struck by how much U.S. life seems to be proceeding on a business as usual basis when immense upheavals have defined recent history in so much of the globe, even though I am reluctant to use this to "normalize" Donald Trump's unprecedented missteps. 

But, even in the U.S., a series of natural disasters and ineffective responses to them in Puerto Rico have led to sustained malaise in that U.S. Commonwealth, and there are been recent epic wildfires in California.

Here are some of the big upheavals around the world for those who haven't been paying attention (and I'm sure I've missed at least one or two, if not more, notable cases):

* Coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China is becoming a global pandemic, killed thousands in China, and caused the nation to go into lockdown and schools to close for a month.

* Coronavirus has shut down schools for a month in Japan. Meanwhile, Japan is in the midst of an intense economic downturn with GDP falling at a more than 6% annualized rate in the last quarter of 2019.

* Months of intense rioting in Hong Kong over efforts by China to strip away its distinct freedoms and democratic institutions.

* China has put more than a million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps and is terrorizing this entire society.

*  India is facing continuing mass street riots that have bubbled into a full on massacre in Delhi over a Hindu Nationalist government's immigration bill that has been perceived as anti-Muslim.

*  The ongoing insurgency/conflict in Kashmir recently entered as hot and violent phase.

* Myanmar recently had a government led genocidal expulsion of Rohingya Muslims with a mass refugee flight to India.

* Ethnic conflict and more put masses on the streets and led to military brinksmanship in Thailand. This is related to a sixteen year old and ongoing "South Thailand Insurgency".

* Indonesia had a week of mass street protests in September last year across the nation, over governments efforts to eliminate anti-corruption institutions in the country.

* Wildfires and heatwaves across Australia have dramatically disrupted life there and horribly disrupted the ecological balance.

* Antarctica has had unprecedented high temperatures accelerating glacial melting that could trigger rapidly rising sea levels. So has Greenland.

* An active civil war/Saudi Arabian war against Shiites is raging in Yemen.

* The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seems to have escalated and gotten more violent, mostly due to Israel being more aggressive.

* An active civil war is raging in Syria with Russian backing.

* An active civil war is raging in Libya.

* An active civil war is raging in Somalia which still doesn't really have a functioning and universally recognized central government.

* An active civil war is raging in the Eastern Ukraine with Russian backing.

* Far right movements have surged in parts of Europe such as Hungary and Poland that have shredded democratic institutions and tolerance.

* An active civil war is continuing with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

* There are violent active, verging on genocidal insurgencies and Muslim-Christian clashes across the African Sahel.

* France has had months of general strikes and large scale fairly violent street protests.

* While less violent and disorderly, the United Kingdom has left the U.K. as Brexit happened.

* The economy and social cohesion of Venezuela has totally melted down into hyperinflation and chaos. This has also produced mass street protests.

*  Much of Mexico and Central America has descended into an orgy of cartel and gang violence with extremely high murder rates. More than 35,000 people were killed in 2019 in the "Mexican Drug War" which has killed 115,000 people since it began in 2006. Many of these countries have had massive street demonstrations (including parts of Mexico) and this has triggered a surge of refugees headed for the United States. Costa Rica, however, seems to have been mostly spared.

* Bolivia recently had a coup also involving massive street demonstrations.

* Haiti has had recent mass unrest.

* Brazil under a far right President has epic levels of crime and its interior has turned into a free for all of violent self-help of resource industry capitalists in anti-indigenous people oriented actions. Massive wild fires, some intentionally set, have been burning in the Amazon where other forms of deforestation haven't already occurred.

* Peru is in a continuing constitutional crisis also involving wave after wave of massive corruption.

The Rise Of The Nones?

Secularism is swiftly becoming the norm in Western Europe and Japan, and is becoming significantly more common in many places in world.  But, signals are mixed in much of the world as well.

The story does not discuss, however, the surge in Christianity generally in Africa, or the rise of Evangelical Christianity in lieu of Roman Catholicism in Latin America, or the massive return to religion from Soviet era levels in the former Soviet Union and to a lesser extent in China.  South Korea's mild step towards secularization, likewise follows a surge in Christian adherence in the 20th century that made it the Asian country with the highest percentage of Christians by far.

It isn't clear if there have been any shifts in religious adherence in predominantly Muslim and Hindu areas where religion has also become far more entangled in politics and nationalistic struggles.

Europe

* For the first time in Norwegian history, there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. 

* For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday. 

* A recent survey found that 0% of Icelanders believe that God created the Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to be. 

* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected to close within the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low attendance. 

* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards, 24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34% of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God, or life-force.”

North America

* In the United States, somewhere between 23% and 28% of American adults have no religious affiliation, and these so-called “nones” are not only growing in number, but they are becoming increasingly secular in their behaviors and beliefs. 

* Among Millennials - Americans in their 20s - over 35% are non-religious, constituting the largest cohort of secular men and women in the nation’s history. 

* In Canada, back in 1991, 12% of adults stated “none,” when asked their religion - today that is up to 24%.

Latin America and the Caribbean

* In South America, 7% of men and women in Mexico, 8% in Brazil, 11% in Argentina, 12% in El Salvador, 16% in Chile, 18% in the Dominican Republic, and 37% in Uruguay are non-religious — the highest such rates of Latin American secularity ever recorded. 

* Over 20% of Jamaicans are now non-religious.

Australia and New Zealand

* In Australia, 15% of the population said they had no religion in 2001, and it is up to at least 22% today. 

* In New Zealand, 30% of the population claimed no religion in 2001, but it had risen to 42% in 2013.  

East Asia

* In Japan, about 70% of adults claimed to hold personal religious beliefs sixty years ago, but today, that figure is down to only about 20%; In 1970 there were 96,000 Buddhist temples throughout Japan, but in 2007, there were 75,866 - and around 20,000 of those were un-staffed, with no resident priest. In the 1950s, over 75% of Japanese households had a kamidana (Shinto altar), but by 2006 this was down to 44% nationwide, and only 26% in major cities. 

* While 11% of South Koreans were atheists in 2005, that has increased to at least 15% as of late, and the percentage of South Koreans who described themselves as religious has dropped from 58% to 52% over the past decade. 

* Over 50% of Chinese adults are secular (although in Communist dictatorships where religion is officially oppressed, valid information on people’s religiosity is always hard to come by).

Africa

* In Africa, while religiosity remains high, there are none the less growing pockets of irreligion: over 5% of the those in Ghana claim to have no religion, and 9% of people in Madagascar and Tanzania, and 11% of people in Gabon and Swaziland are now non-religious. 

* Approximately 20% of Botswanans now claim to have no religion. 

Per the Huffington Post.

The Case For A New Australia

Imagine that you are the Vice President of the West African country of Liberia, an elder statesman by Liberian standards who went to college with a man who is just now retiring early from his career as a Swedish prison warden because he wants to see the world, and also with a woman who is now the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa, and another who is the U.S. Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department.

You fervently want to recruit the talent needed to get your country on the right track after years of civil war and economic malaise.

What do you do?

Suppose you invite all three of your well connected allies to meet you for an informal lunch at a Liberian restaurant in Washington D.C. not far from the Liberian embassy, to hear your proposal.

Liberia would extend offers to men and women serving long prison terms in federal prisons in the United States to migrate to Liberia at Liberia's expense where, under the supervision and control of the former Swedish prison warden who would provide for their daily living needs, they would apply their personal and professional skill sets to the development of the Liberian economy.  Volunteers who successfully complete a five year program would be granted freedom, Liberian citizenship, a homestead and modest lump sum compensation award for their service, and an unconditional pardon for their crimes, but would have to give up their U.S. citizenship.  Volunteers who were not successful in the program would be transferred to Liberian prisons to serve the remainder of their terms under their U.S. prison sentences.

A treaty negotiated by the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa, and a commutation decree drafted by the U.S. Pardon Attorney, who would vet candidates for offers before they could be extended, who facilitate the arrangement.

The initial program would involve an ambitious group of 300 inmates serving sentences for crimes including securities fraud, computer crimes, drug dealing, and immigration offenses, who would receive their orientation in a shuttered Liberian military base in the Liberian countryside where they would be housed in abandoned military barracks.  A similar sized class of inmates would be admitted to the program in each successive year.

The Swedish director of the program would use the techniques he used running Sweden's famously human and rehabilitation oriented prison system to help Americans who would have otherwise rotted in U.S. federal prisons for decades turn a new leaf performing meaningful work that utilizes their professional skills and cultural capital as once functional participants in advanced industrial society to developing Liberia's economy.  Graduates of the program would emerge familiar with the day to day workings of the Liberian economy, more educated and skilled than the vast majority of Liberians, with international connections, and a small nest egg that could be parlayed into Liberian based business empires.

These inmates would be free of clan, tribal and political faction ties, would have no scores to settle with powerful Liberians in and out of power, and would be subtly pressured to focus on what they have in common as opposed to their own differences with each other, by the utterly foreign nature of the society and physical environment that they find themselves immersed in as part of the program.  This would allow them to rise above the corruption that paralyzes so many emerging economies.

The same willingness to achieve their ends with outside the box solutions that landed them in prison in the United States might be more functional as they try to devise solutions that hidebound international development bureaucrats would never consider.

The U.S. would achieve the goal of exiling these individuals from their own society, and would save something on the order of $10 million in the first year, $20 million in the second year, $30 million in the third years, and so on, saving half a billion dollars from the federal prison budget in the first decade by reducing the number of federal inmates at the end of a decade by 3,000 people.

If the program worked well in its first decade, there is no reason it couldn't be replicated in a dozen other places.

A similar project in world history, called Australia, worked out rather well.  There is no reason that it couldn't be repeated.  The core principles aren't so different in either case.  We shed a drain on our economy without sacrificing our principles, and Liberia receives the benefit of an economic resource which we are wasting.

Everything In Australia Can Kill You

Australia has far more deadly animals and climate conditions than just about anyplace else in the world, at least on a per capita basis.

These include four kinds of deadly snakes, two kinds of deadly jellyfish, disease carrying flying foxes, deadly ticks, spiders and centipedes, poisonous fish, octopuses, and fresh water amoebas, sharks, crocodiles, large flightless birds, hail, and extreme heat.  And, those of just the highlights.

The toxic and deadly fauna can largely be chalked up to extreme Red Queen type evolutionary competition in a hot, arid environment, and a relatively brief period of high density human habitation to exterminate smaller threats.

The people in Australia, on the other hand, are generally quite nice, even though they have funny accents and judges who wear wigs.

Short Dog Breeds And Other Genetic Dog Tales

Why are dachshunds, corgis, basset hounds and five other short-legged dog breeds short?

It comes down to a single dominant "retrogene." The "trait called chondrodysplasia — causing legs that are short relative to body size, curved and heavier-boned than normal."

[R]esearchers pinpointed an extra stretch of DNA on chromosome 18 in every dog from the eight short-legged breeds [95 dogs in all], but in none of 204 control dogs they examined.

Retrogenes arise when RNA erroneously puts an extra copy of a gene into a genome, in this case a gene related to limb development.

This particular trait is not found in wolves, so it probably arose "after dogs first became domesticated and before division of early dogs into modern breeds, putting the range . . . anywhere between 300 and 15,000 years ago."

The Domestication of Dogs

Dogs appear to be the first animals to be domesticated. All other domesticated animals appear to have been domesticated after the neolithic revolution, a technological revolution in human pre-history, which took place roughly contemporaneously in several separate places around the globe with the domestication of different plants and animals.

Dogs also appear to be the only domesticated animal that proto-Native Americans brought with them to the New World from Asia, again vouching for their domestication as pre-neolithic.

Australia's native dog, the Dingo, unlike most distinctive Australian fauna, is not marsupial. "Dingoes were the only big placental mammals in Australia, apart from humans." They are most closely related to the dogs found in Thailand. The breed appears to have arisen in the vicinity of Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia about 5,000-5,500 years ago. Current theories place its arrival in Australia at 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, probably via boats from Southeast Asia that landed on Australia's North Coast. This is consistent with genetic evidence of a very small founding population for dingos, possibly a single pregnant dog. This date is also consistent with the absence of dingos from Tasmania, which separated from Australia about 12,000 years ago, after aborigine populations arrived, but before the dingos arrived on the continent. Dingos are believed to have caused the extinction of several species, including the Tasmanian devil, on mainland Australia.

Dogs were not domesticated 40,000 years ago. Dingos arrived tens of thousands of years after Australia's aborigines originally migrated to Australia, a date at least 40,000 years ago and quite probably 70,000 years ago.

Aboriginal populations were present in both mainland Australia and Tasmania when Europeans first arrived. At that time there were 315,000-750,000 or so aboriginals people living in Australia divided into 250 or more nations with separate but related languages. Old world diseases like smallpox killed about half of the aboriginal population early on in British colonization including about 90% of people in the area of first contact.

Melting glaciers caused the distance between Australia and other land masses to increase and flooded the land bridge between Australia and New Guinea around 6,000 years ago. At the time the Australia aboriginal population is believed to arrive, the trip would have involved sea intervals of a minimum of 55 miles by sea.

Pre-European Australia did not see the domestication of plants and animals, or the development of farm economies found on other continents in the neolithic revolution outside the Murray Basin, in far Southeastern Australia, where there was fish farming and hay stacks of stored grain were found.

Dark Haired Wolves

Another trait with a clear genetic identity in dogs and wolves (who can interbreed as a single species) is the gene for a black coat, which wild wolves appear to have inherited from a domesticated dog mating.

A specific mutation in a stretch of DNA called the K locus is to blame for giving some domesticated dogs black hair . . . most black labs, poodles and shepherds have this mutation. . . . researchers found that 102 of 104 black-colored [North American gray] wolves [in Yellowstone National Park] carry the same mutation in their DNA as black dogs, whereas none of 120 lighter gray-colored wolves had the mutation.

Dark fur has proven adaptive for forest wolves, while light fur is more common in wolves on the tundra.

Japan and Immigration

A recent article in The Economist illustrates the fact that opposition to immigration has very little to do with absolute levels of immigration.

In Japan, just 1.7% of the population is considered non-Japanese (about 2.2 million out of 127 million), of which 400,000 are people of Korean descent born in Japan and assimilated almost entirely into its culture (some even have parents born in Japan). Thus, only about 1.4% of the people in Japan are foreign born.

Another large share of immigrants in Japan, probably about 350,000 people, are of Japanese descent and came to Japan since the late 1980s from Brazil and Peru "to work in the industrial clusters around Tokyo and Nagoya in Aichi prefecture that serve the country’s giant carmakers and electronics firms." The immigrants may not be as assimilated, but look much more like typical Japanese natives and often have Japanese last names.

There are about 600,000 Chinese immigrants and about 200,000 first generation Korean immigrants.

Despite these very low absolute levels of immigration, and the fact that Japan has among the highest life expectencies and lowest fertility rates on the planet, creating a shortage of Japanese residents of working age, there is great political and public concern about immigration, with many of the Japanese wanting to restrict immigration further.

Also, notably, the Japanese see profound differences between East Asian ethnicities, like Koreans, the Chinese, and the Japanese, that would all be lumped into a single sub-ethnicity or race by American demographers, something that illustrates how socially constructed the boundaries of race are, even though the differences in apparence that come with ancestry are purely hereditary.

By comparison, the United States, with a population of a little more than 300 million people, has a foreign born population in excess of 33 million (about 12 percent of the total population), and the U.S. considers everyone born in the United States to be an American (as well as many naturalized U.S. citizens who are foreign born). About 19% of the residents of Canada and Australia are foreign born.

If I recall correctly, there have also been studies that show that the greatest political opposition to immigration comes from places like the American South, where immigration is least common in absolute terms, while places like Southern California, the Texas border and New York City with very large immigrant populations, tend to support more lenient immigration policies. Familiarity breeds comfort, not contempt.

Flu Shot Duds

The Denver Post reports today that this year's flu shot is a dud against one of the most virulent flu viruses circulating this season, an Australian variant of a strain that was vaccinated against.

My household, of course, all of whom got their flu shots in a timely fashion this past fall learned this the hard way over the past week.

First Australia brings us colony collapse disorder wiping out our bees. Then they bring us a nasty case of the flu. Coincidence? I think not. We need to invade Australia now for the stealthy biowarfare.

More seriously, these incidents show just how impotent our nation would be in response to a pandemic flu epidemic. I'm less concerned than some about bird flu in particular and our lack of ER capabilities (discussed here). It seems to me that the real problem is that early recognition and prevention is very difficult to pull off and that sometime, somewhere, a bad virus will break through the defenses.

Australia Limits Asset Protection

The U.S. Bankruptcy Code was recently amended and one of the many changes involve limit the benefit of what are called "fraudulent transfers" (i.e. asset transfers designed to avoid creditors).

Australia's new bankruptcy code amendments have taken similar measures which are in many respects more direct, cutting through the Gordian knot of legal doctrine behind many such methods, in what could be a model for American lawmakers:

[T]he new laws allow a trustee in bankruptcy to sell the family home on behalf of creditors even if only one spouse declares bankruptcy and regardless of whose name is on the title to the property. Moreover, the amendments double the time period in which a bankruptcy trustee may access the bankruptcy assets from 2 years before the filing of bankruptcy to 4 years for “under market” transactions, which are generally assets that are transferred to relatives, including a spouse, through a gift or a sale for less than market value.

The law also allows a court to look through the title of property to consider who contributed financially to its purchase and maintenance.

Some of biggest impacts are predicted to be on business debts from businesses with no limited liability protection, and in creating an incentive to share business income with a spouse so that both will have contributed financially to household expenses, so a house is not fully attributed to an earner spouse.