How Far Is Europe Swinging to the Right? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/22/world/europe/europe-right-wing-austria-hungary.html <comment><USER2> The "moving to the right" analysis is wrong both in Europa and in the US where claims of Fascism seems to be the primary analysis of Trump.

What we are seeing is an increasing number of people seeing no fundamental benefit of globalization or technology who are simply using their democratic voice to say "hey what about us?"

These are voters who have been completely ignored by the politicians both in the US and in Europe who have been more busy with pushing technology, globalization, outsourcing and insourcing cheap labour.

To confuse this with what we normally consider right-wing is not only getting the analysis wrong but also show why Trump so repeatedly have been underestimated.

In Europe the "right wing" parties have repeatedly been doing better than any poll predicted I expect the same thing will happen in the US with Trump.

They are not racist or facists. They are just afraid of the change that is hitting them and have no other way of expressing this fear. In Europe and in the US.

<comment><USER3> Just as one example, the FPö, which just very narrowly lost the Austrian elections, was literally founded by nazis. They explicitly promote an ethnic- nationalist Austrian identity at the expense of any notion of cosmopolitanism or post-nationalism. Their frequent talk of Heimat is not all that different from the blut und boden of earlier times.

If this isn't right-wing identity politics, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER4> So? Doesn't mean they plan a genocide or aggressive expansionist policies... Japan has been doing something similar for years, only there it's apparently not called "right-wing politics"

<comment><USER5> Lebensraum was about unifying a diaspora of German speaking people into one collective country.

These people want racially based geopolitical partitioning. The ones with a diaspora and victimhood narrative certainly advocate for an aggressive "homeland of the x people" where racist law keeps it that way.

<comment><USER6> TOOT-TOOT! Fact-checking police: (...)Lebensraum was an ideological element of Nazism, which advocated Germany's territorial expansion into Eastern Europe(...) As the very name says - "living space"

<comment><USER5> You seem to be correct!

My mistake! I know what I described was a Nazi policy but after reading wikipedia, Lebensraum wasn't the name of it.

Thank you for the education and correction

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How far do we have to go before abolishing the 'right/left' distinction? It's very complicated nowadays. The US by european standards only has "conservative right" and progressive right". The far right in europe is actually national socialism. The far left (e.g. syriza in greece, maybe podemos in the future) caves in to market forces because it needs the market more than they need them. Centre-right germany is socialist according to americans. Communist china is way more capitalist than socialist sweden.

Since most countries have become two-party systems, what does right/left dictate? social progress vs traditionalism? centralization vs the opposite? equal opportunity vs equal outcome? It sure as hell is not about the economic policies anymore.

<comment><USER8> I thought that left/right was originally and primarily about state involvement or not, so I guess centralisation/individuality.

<comment><USER9> Originally it was about who supported the monarchy in France, and who didn't in the constitutional assembly and first legislative assemblies after the French revolution.

The constitutional monarchists and aristocrats sat on the right. Those opposing the monarchy sat on the left.

Through the 19th century, the groups classifying themselves as left grew to encompass (going left to right) anarchists, left-libertarians (right- libertarianism wasn't founded until about a century later), communists and other revolutionary socialists, social democrats and classical liberals (in modern day Europe classical liberals sometimes are considered centre-right).

On the right, the 19th century saw the collapse of support for absolutist monarchies and feudal systems, followed by the start of a splits along religious lines (many European countries have "Christan democrats" competing against usually mostly Christian but not religiously aligned conservatives) and between rural and urban forms of conservatism (e.g. special interest parties targeting farmers or rural populations are common many places), and eventually the rise of right-wing libertarianism and populism.

State involvement or not is a red herring - e.g. a lot of the splits on the left have been about level of state involvement, ranging from wanting to destroy the state completely to wanting a strong state. Similarly on the right since the rise of right-wing libertarianism from the 50's-60's onwards.

Basically you can't make sense of this on a single axis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Far right" has become a synonym for racist/anti-immigration, but it's important to note that many of these parties aren't actually right wing parties in any other sense.

Parties like "Dansk Folkeparti" in Denmark is pretty much Social Democrats, except they are harder on immigration. Leaving out the anti-immigration part, I would say that most of these parties are still to the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US.

<comment><USER11> The original Fascism (as well as National-Socialism aka Nazism) was quite hot on certain forms of socialism -- Mussolini was originally a socialist. They advanced welfare, were not shy about nationalising industries, and were in fact quite good for large sectors of the population -- hence their popularity in spite of violence and otherwise appalling beliefs.

The establishment in both Italy and Germany originally built alliances with these movements only because they were seen as "better than the reds", because of their nationalism and belief in strong hierarchies (whereas socialists and communists were internationalist and against hierarchies back then). They didn't necessarily like a lot of their social programs.

Leaving out the anti-Jewish thing, Hitler and Mussolini were very much on the left of both the Republican and Democratic party in the US (today as well as yesterday).

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Nazi stands for "national socialism", exploiting our tendency towards ingroup/outgroup thinking combined with financial advantages and a strong feeling of belonging and purposes for the members of the ingroup, at the expense of some minority.

Its historically interesting though that the capitalists were generally supporters of the nazi party, even before the times of slave labour and war time profits. I guess social darwinism was a good match for the capitalist competition mindset.

<comment><USER13> Instead of elaborating why the tired "Nazi stands for 'national socialist'" meme is irrelevant I'll just link to the early history of the DAP/NSDAP (the Nazi Party) on Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Origins_and_early_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Origins_and_early_existence:_1918.E2.80.931923)

To summarize: they were initially just called the "German Worker's Party" and had a strong basis in the middle-class. They weren't interested in socialism (i.e. social ownership of capital) but merely in profit sharing (i.e. paying workers better). Their leaders were nationalist, anti-Semitic and racist pretty much from day one -- which is also why they were categorically opposed to communists and other (anti-national or non-nationalist) socialists.

The entire party can be explained as a radical reaction to the fallout from WW1 in Germany: economy in ruins, political lack of power, basically Euro- crisis Greece but significantly worse because everybody hated them and there wasn't an international union trying to fix them.

The reason capitalists liked the NSDAP was that there literally wasn't much capitalisting to do in Germany without first re-asserting Germany's political (and military) power in Europe -- and that's one of the main things the NSDAP tried to do. Though I'm sure Jewish or non-anti-Semitic (remember: before WW2 anti-Semitism was socially acceptable) capitalists weren't too thrilled about the rampant anti-Semitism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> With Trump and Sanders in the US, Brexit in Britain and the rise of what's being called the "far right" in Europe, we're seeing a referendum on globalism.

The pendulum swings back and forth and this move shouldn't be surprising to anyone who reads history. People who believe in a Fukuyama-style 'end of history' scenario are shocked that nationalism is bubbling up again, but it is a natural correction. Local governance, culture and economy have a de facto legitimacy among people that de jure unions never will.

The Left's challenge is to acknowledge this and help create a framework for a peaceful world of disparate cultures and loose alliances.

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't say it's globalism per se. More that in a recession everyone looks for someone to blame. It's far easier to blame "those dirty foreigners" than it is to accept the vagaries of economics. Or that maybe the blame is almost entirely on ourselves.

It's a kind of fundamental attribution error [1]. People are very quick to blame others for their personal characteristics ie. lazy foreigners (personal), no good scroungers of welfare (personal), instead of the situational context of recession/war/etc. Whereas when it comes to talking about themselves, they're hard working people who just can't get a break (situational), the recession is at fault (situational), no education because my teachers were bad and the school was crap (situational), the foreigners took our jobs (situational)...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)

<comment><USER16> How ironic. Have you considered that maybe people who vote for certain parties may have good reasons for it? I don't like those parties either, but saying people vote for them simply because people are stupid racists is ridiculous. You're pathologizing people who have opinions that you don't like while most likely not actually having spoken with them and talked about what they think and why they think it. It's easier to blame "those dirty racists" than it is to accept the vagaries of reality.

<comment><USER15> Not ironic at all, just coincidence. Of course there are situations out of our control like recession and war. But blaming others doesn't actually fix anything. All that anti-globalisation will do is massively raise prices on everything.

In my grandfathers era, a working man would have two sets of clothes, one for work and one for sunday best. Nowadays, even the poorest in a western society have a plethora of clothing. That is down to cheap chinese labour.

You can't get round it; if you raise tariffs, you end up with expensive chinese clothes. If you then build your own factories and bring it back onshore, you end up with expensive western-made clothes. The people may have good old-fashioned industrial jobs, but they can no longer afford to live. And that's before you even get into retaliatory tarriffs, where our high-price items suddenly lose half their export market. How much of Apple's revenue growth over the last few years has been from iPhone sales in China?

<comment><USER16> How did you jump from talking about racists to tariffs for China?

<comment><USER15> Because the original comment I responded to was about globalism. My response assumed that talking about Trump and globalism was dog-whistling for the less pleasant elements of society and so touched on both racism and real economic issues.

<comment><USER16> > My response assumed that talking about Trump and globalism was dog-whistling > for the less pleasant elements of society

Yes, and my response was precisely about that assumption, which is really a different issue than economic policies like tariffs for China. This doesn't just apply to the reaction to Trump, but also to the reaction to the (supposed) rise of the right in Europe, the main topic. The assumption that these people are voting like that because they're stupid and racist is going to kill the left.

<comment><USER15> Well, actually you were the one to call them "stupid racists", there was no mention of it in my original comment. I was pointing out that people are quick to blame the personal failings of others, "lazy welfare scroungers" rather than debate the actual economic issues behind globalism.

<comment><USER16> Come on, your whole comment was about people being stupid and racist. Here's one line: "It's far easier to blame "those dirty foreigners" than it is to accept the vagaries of economics.". The rest was very much in the same spirit. Entertain the idea that if people vote in a way that you don't like, it might not necessarily be for reasons that are irrational and bigoted. Rather than analysing their supposed psychological pathologies to explain why they have a different opinion than yourself, maybe just talk to them? I'd ask somebody who says "those dirty foreigners" the same question: why not talk to them? Perhaps they turn out to be decent people after all.

<comment><USER15> Nope, original comment was nothing to do with stupidity or racism, just human nature that it's easier to lay the blame abroad rather than look inward.

I know and have debated many people on differing sides of the UK/EU referendum here in England. None of them I consider to be stupid or racist. But they are blaming Europe for all of Britain's woes instead of looking inward. The EU is a net benefit, but just last week we've had otherwise intelligent people scaremongering about Turkey joining the EU and hundreds of thousands of Turkish people swarming the border. It's a crass and absurd lie, and it's downright manipulative.

I never claimed any kind of "psychological pathology" either. That would imply mental illness which is not correct at all. I mentioned a very common human trait which we're almost all guilty of at some point or other.

You seem to enjoy putting a lot of words in my mouth that I never said. I think I'll end this here rather than waste my time attempting debate.

<comment><USER16> I have not put any words in your mouth. Instead of considering that the opposing side may have good reasons for their opinions, you analysed their psychology as racist and stupid. I see this attitude a lot, but particularly on the left, which I consider myself most aligned to. I'm afraid the left is currently in the process of killing itself by not taking working class people seriously. "Champagne left" has never been more salient. The solution to this is _not_ even more demonizing of people who don't vote "correctly".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What seems to be happening in the background is an increasing divide between rural and urban areas, where the rural areas vote for populist right-wing politicians (Trump, FPÖ, AfD, Front National) while the urban areas vote for left wing (in the European sense) or liberal (in the US sense) parties. Most illustrative for this are the results of sunday's Austrian presidential elections, where the voters had to choose between a right-wing, populist candidate (in blue) and a left-wing, liberal candidate (in green): [http://derstandard.at/2000037433421/Ab-1700-Hochrechnungen-u...](http://derstandard.at/2000037433421/Ab-1700-Hochrechnungen- und-Gemeindeergebnisse)

Overlay it with a map of Austria and the rural areas voted very strongly for the right-wing candidate while the larger cities (Vienna, Innsbruck, Graz,...) voted for the green candidate. I'd really like to find the chance to overlay the last elections results for UKIP, Sweden Democrats, Trump, AfD etc. with population density maps.

<comment><USER14> These demographics underline an interesting shift in Left and Right across the west. The Left used to align itself with the working class, struggling against capital. Now it aligns with the cosmopolitan and against the unsophisticated.

In the US there has been a flight toward cities, increasing the numbers of people with a cosmopolitan perspective. These demographics are worth watching.

<comment><USER18> > The Left used to align itself with the working class, struggling against > capital. Now it aligns with the cosmopolitan and against the > unsophisticated.

Huh? That's not really true. Part of the reason the GOP is having such a hard time in the US right now is because minority populations are quickly starting to rise in numbers and they don't vote Republican for any number of reasons.

These populations aren't what you'd consider traditionally "cosmopolitan" or "sophisticated" by any means. I mean, a voting base of cosmopolitans wouldn't really be enough to win an election anyway.

There's a reason the GOP is trying really, really hard to win over more Hispanic voters lately.

If you're arguing that minority populations are voting for the Left in spite of the Left being aligned with the elite, that's a fairly gross mischaracterization.

<comment><USER14> > Huh? That's not really true. Part of the reason the GOP is having such a > hard time in the US right now is because minority populations are quickly > starting to rise in numbers and they don't vote Republican for any number of > reasons.

There's a shift underway. I think we'll see a repositioning of the GOP that will lead it to a majority in less than 10 years if not sooner. Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first wave of this.

<comment><USER18> > There's a shift underway. I think we'll see a repositioning of the GOP that > will lead it to a majority in less than 10 years if not sooner.

I'd argue mostly the opposite. There's a shift underway, but I don't think it'll be to the GOP's benefit. Fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are slowly starting to realize they're very different and becoming irreconcilable platforms. You can see the fracturing already this election cycle.

Repositioning, sure. Majority? I think that'll take quite some time while they figure out what they want to be.

> Trump's surprisingly high support from Latinos in the Primary is the first > wave of this.

Err maybe in comparison to Ted Cruz, but it's not really a contest for the general even according to Fox News:

[http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/05/20/latinos...](http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/05/20/latinos- favor-clinton-over-trump-by-3-point-margin-fox-news-latino-poll-finds/)

<comment><USER14> Wait and watch. There will be a thing called the GOP but it will not look like our current conception of the GOP. The conservative hand-wringing over Trump's complete indifference to the traditional platform is the first step in transformation.

We'll always have a two party system in the US. What the parties stand for changes drastically over time.

The thing I think most people don't get is that politics is never resolved. There will always be a fight. And in a two party system, no one party will stay in power more than a couple of election cycles. There's a homeostatic mechanism at play.

<comment><USER18> I guess we'll have to agree to disagree :).

<comment><USER14> Or we could bet on whether either party ever again has five term Presidential run. ;) It would be interesting either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting to note that Spain, Portugal & Germany, countries with a long and famous history of right-wing dictatorships, are some of the countries that fare best. And Italy, also with a similar history, is seeing its right-wing party support go lower on each election. Only Britain and Czech Republic fare similarly well. Although me being Spanish I can say that while we may not have any party in congress "openly extreme right" (nazi like etc), our Partido Popular, one of our top 2 parties and currently in power, is definitely right wing and a direct descendant of franquism (dictatorship), since many of the top dogs in the party were ministers with Franco himself. In other words, here in Spain the right wing successfully camouflaged itself as democrat as to apparently mislead anyone that we don't have a problem here, when we actually do. Maybe the situation in Italy and Portugal is the same, I don't know. I'm also surprised to find out that while Golden Dawn's rise in Greece was all over the media as "the new rise of nazism etc", other countries have MUCH higher rates of right wing parties and nobody seems to care.

<comment><USER20> Austria had Hitler. Now they have a party that has - presumably deliberately - making subtle links back to those days e.g. [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36342362](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36342362)

<comment><USER21> And thank god we dodged that bullet yesterday! It was a close call though - 50,3% to 49,7% (edited)

<comment><USER22> Two questions:

1\. what percentage of the population turns out to vote in Austria?

2\. what level of education is most common in Austria?

I have a hard time believing well educated people turn out in droves to vote for the hard right - I mean sure, there is always a percentage and many fiscally conservative people come from money so they tend to be educated, but as I understand it, that's not what they were voting for in Austria, they were basically voting for social conservatism which is anti-immigration, etc.

Then again that percentage is pretty much what the US faces in every Red vs Blue presidential election in the past half-century.

<comment><USER21> 1\. There are 6.382.507 eligible voters, of which 4.643.154 have voted, thats 72,7%. [1]

2\. The ORF did a survey, where it turned out, that 76% of people who have an education of a-level or higher voted for the left-wing candiate. Only 38% of the people with education less than a-level voted for the left-wing candiate. [2]

[1] [http://wahl16.bmi.gv.at/](http://wahl16.bmi.gv.at/)

[2] [https://www.facebook.com/ZeitimBild/photos/a.381568636877.16...](https://www.facebook.com/ZeitimBild/photos/a.381568636877.161891.182146851877/10154093891311878/)

<comment><USER22> 8 million population so 50% of all people in Austria vote

surprisingly almost the same as the last USA presidential election (numbers are far lower for other kinds of votes)

<comment><USER23> The voting percentages are always calculated based on eligible voters, not total population. The 2012 presidential election had 54.9% of the American votes turned up to reelect Obama: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> With the exception of Hungary, the graphs don't look to me like a "swing to the right" so much as a "swing to the margins"; the centrist parties are losing votes to both "far right" and "other" parties.

<comment><USER25> And _in principle_ I'd say that's a good thing. If all we have is a bunch of parties crowded around the center, there isn't anything left for voters to choose.

I just wish they picked different margins to swing to...

<comment><USER24> _If all we have is a bunch of parties crowded around the center, there isn 't anything left for voters to choose._

Yes and no. The median voter theorem suggests that voters' choices were accounted for as parties put their platforms together -- effectively, voters chose, but not when they thought they were choosing.

 _I just wish they picked different margins to swing to..._

I think there's a problem caused by voters swinging to margins, no matter which margins they swing to: It increases the gap between the voters and their government (either because extremist voters don't like a moderate government, or because one group of extremists hate a differently-extreme government), which diminishes public confidence in the state. Much like a lack of confidence in the justice system, a lack of confidence in the state tends to have very negative consequences, as people "take matters into their own hands".

<comment><USER26> But there is always only so many topics any one party and median voter agrees on. Many don't really adopt party identity and live by it. So having only few big parties is likely to cause distrust to political parties in general, because nobody accurately represents you. Which ought to translate to distrust to goverment as the big players have the power.

<comment><USER24> _nobody accurately represents you_

Does it help if you have someone who accurately represents you, but she is marginalised within the legislature and has no chance of ever being part of the government? If anything, I'd expect that to make you trust the government even less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Left/right is not the best distinction. I live in Germany and I'd characterize the trend as a move towards more authoritarian ideals. Right now it is mostly fueled by a right wing agenda (omg you should fear these evil immigrants) but the left has the same ideal (fight evil capitalism/globalisation via more state regulations). I think it is a very worrying trend because the hunger to outsource more life to the state for more piece of mind is actually pretty widespread I'd say. I feel like it is very easy to pass legislation that infringes on personal freedom in a tradeoff for "let the state take care of it" Just promising less change and more of the same or "back to the good old days" is a simple but unfortunately well working political platform.

This is pretty alarming since I don't really see any counterarguments that ask for less state. We have one party that should nominally do it (FDP) but their agenda is not very liberal if you dig deeper (not very libertarian in the US sense I suppose).

Edit: The other problem is disillusion about the elites not caring about the people which often leads to protest voting for more radical parties. A party that supports some sort of direct democracy and more personal freedom (and also responsibility) is needed and probably has the potential to be somewhat disruptive. I might just be naive but I feel like there's no good non radical offer for people who feel like what they say doesn't matter at all for the established parties.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how they decided how to color each party. In Europe right-wing/left- wing are not as sharp terms as in US where these labels have been curated and polished for many decades.

<comment><USER29> > I wonder how they decided how to color each party.

Exactly. It would make more sense if they used red for the left (due to their Bolshevik legacy).

<comment><USER30> This is an American news outlet. In the US the republicans ("right") are usually depicted in red, and democrats (slightly less "right") in blue.

If you want really weird, consider Denmark where there is a right wing party called "Venstre" (meaning "the left") :)

<comment><USER9> It's not that weird - it just reflects history. Norway as well as a centre- right party called Venstre and a right wing/conservative party called Høyre ("right"). In our case it dates straight back to the fight over parliamentarism in Norway, and the left/right naming took inspiration directly from the origin of the left/right axis in the aftermath of the French revolution (where those seated to the left were those against the monarchy and those seated to the left were supporters of the monarchy), so the most monarchy friendly party was "obviously" right wing.

The name first started looking weird when the Labour Party (then revolutionary socialists, now social democrats) was formed well to their left, followed by further splits up until todays situation where there are - depending on how you place two of the more centrist parties - between four and six parties to the left of Venstre in Norway, counting parties that have or have had a member of parliament at some point. I don't know the history of the Danish party names, but I'm expecting it is a similar history of very literally _being_ the left when formed only to have the balance shift substantially to the left since.

The US colour use is different in that it was simply a matter of _not_ taking historic use of the colours into account and arbitrarily applying it in election broadcasts, only to have it stick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> By right the writer means extreme right wing. Lot of right parties (PdL in Italy, VVD in NL, ...) are not listed in that category (and least not in the fancy charts)

<comment><USER32> On the other hand, in the French chart "DivD" is listed as far right when it's just a collection of non-affiliated right-wing candidates going from center- right to far-right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> not the best job in the history of data collection. Lot of percentages are incorrect, categorization for many parties debatable (if not plain wrong)...

</comment><comment><USER33> The People's Party in Romania is a left-wing party, not a right-wing one.

</comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi It's not a swing towards the right. It is a swing towards parties and politicians that are anti-establishment and promise to actually listen to citizens rather than to the elites.

While in the article's graphs they highlight the far right, in Spain, Portugal and Greece it is the left that has multiplied their support in recent years. In Italy it is M5S, which is hard to locate in a left-right spectrum. And in the US, it is arguably both sides: Trump has surpassed all expectations from the right, but Sanders has also done so from the left (Sanders would probably be considered center or even center-right by European standards, but he's clearly leftist for the US - and were not for the superdelegates of the democratic party apparatus, he would have decent chances of winning too).

The establishment should really exercise self-criticism. I don't know how it feels in the US, but in Europe the system feels really inflexible. The establishment pushes their agenda (e.g. austerity) against the will of a majority of citizens, large demonstrations are totally ignored, referendums are made and the results ignored, mass media are becoming more and more unreliable, etc.

A flexible beam will bend under pressure, an inflexible beam will not bend, but will suddenly break when the pressure is enough. I hope the system exercises some flexibility or we may be in for rough times...

</comment><comment><USER34> Just checked the dutch data, it states that LPF won in 2002 by 17%. But that happened in 2003. [[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_Pim_Fortuyn#Oppositiepar...](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_Pim_Fortuyn#Oppositiepartij)]

Just as the VVD, a right-wing liberal party is marked as center-left center- right. But if those are marked as center. Same with left wing parties, which show up as 'other'

<comment><USER35> The VVD is traditionally right-wing, but I think the article uses "right-wing" here to mean "extreme right" or perhaps "new right" or "non-traditional right" or whatever you would call it. Not sure really...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article misses an important point. Many of the far right ideas and tactics are very much part of the agenda pushed by mainstream parties all over Europe and the US.

For instance, spreading lies about immigration is the preferred tool of Tory brexiteers in the UK. The German CSU is not that different from the AfD either.

And in many ways the GOP (even without Trump) is far more right wing than some of the parties considered to be on the extreme right in Europe

</comment><comment> norea-armozel All these parties who seem to fear globalism don't get that the real power isn't in their nation's capital but in the various financial districts across the world. London, New York, Beijing, and so on run the world. To turn back the clock in terms of the world economy to a world without free trade is impossible. The iPhone has components made from raw materials from all over the world. Sure it's assembled in China, but the ore comes from Africa. The designs come from Cupertino. And the marketing is done everywhere. The fact these parties are trying to push back is laughable to me. Short of a total revolution and ceasing of assets, which would include manufacturing, there's not going to be a reversal of globalism. It's full steam ahead regardless of their helpless mewling.

</comment><comment><USER37> Yeah, it would have been interesting to see how many parties were on hard left too - not that I'm equating the two things morally.

In the UK there is a lot of rhetoric that Europe is moving toward the far right rapidly. But if you look at the big players, in Germany, Italy and Spain the far right wing plays almost no role, in France it does but that has not changed appreciably over time.

Meanwhile, in the UK I think story of UKIP is complicated because, while it is clearly appealing to far right themes, essentially it's a single issue party about EU membership.

What UKIP would do if the UK decides to remain (or leave?) the EU is quite hard to foresee.

I'd suggest the picture is messy enough that you can read whatever your pet theory is into it. If there is another deep recession then anything could happen, but you can always say that.

<comment><USER38> Frankly it may be better for UKIP if the UK stays in the EU. The Brexit people are going to be angry, and will still want to vote for Euro sceptic parties. You could also see the Conservatives adopt a more Euro sceptic posture in trying to placate their more vocal Brexit supporters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The rise of Trump was best summed by Vox's article and the radio talk shows that magnify that fear (short version: [http://www.vox.com/2016/5/20/11720276/donald-trump- authorita...](http://www.vox.com/2016/5/20/11720276/donald-trump- authoritarianism) Long version: [http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump- authoritarianism](http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump- authoritarianism))

The same is not happening as much in Europe, especially in countries where such fear propaganda didn't set in (like here, in Portugal)

</comment><comment><USER40> There's a big anti EU sentiment in Europe after years of financial repercussions because of the financial crisis and the refugee crisis. And the only parties who are even critical of the EU are on the far right and on the far left.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have a two vague ideas of what left and right represent based on US current news / politics and some very hazy memories of a more precise definition in political science class.

Perhaps someone can allude to me what this article means by right and left (not trying to be snide or anything). Is it compared to US or the more traditional academic version (or maybe I'm mistaken that there is an academic version)?

<comment><USER42> Why don't commenters skip these much-abused emotive references to '(far)right' \--> '(far)left' and state what they admire or object to, regarding a group position?

For the man in the street, far-right fascism and far-left communism equate to to more or less identical levels of coercion and control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm a bit shocked how this issue is down played in the comments here. There are good reasons for people to be frustrated and if looking at this as a system, you can influence it in the right direction by listening to people and prevent the social downwards spiral.

But there are banking bailout and massive cutbacks on social system which has direct effect on the European people. Yet nothing happened. There were some demonstrations and established parties might lost some votes but it's not comparable to the move to right we see right now.

So is the refugee crisis more dangerous to the European people's safety and prosperity? I highly doubt that. Yes, 1.2M is a big number. But that's like 1 refugee per >400 'natives'.

The reason why people are complaining and new right wing parties get established is because they _are_ racist. And there are plenty of explanations for that, yet this is sometime that needs to be taken very seriously. And the worst thing we can do is just blaming politicians and ignoring how much suffering the new right wing causes.

<comment><USER44> personal experience, a person my wife hardly knew begged us to let him come stay in england for a short while so he could establish himself here. where he was staying in rotterdam had been overrun with migrants, he was regularly getting mugged in the street and people were banging on the doors in the middle of the night aggressively demanding money. perhaps a distinction needs to be made between ideological racism and generalisation learnt from experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To the right? All I see is it moving to the left while a few countries detached from this.

</comment><comment><USER45> PP at Spain marked as Center-right? Hahahaha.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hardly swinging to the right.

For that, we must import US's talk radio shows and let it brew for years.

Hope no right wing guy is seeing this.

</comment><comment><USER46> My main beef with this article is : You really cannot define the entire political spectrum on 1 axis !

</comment><comment><USER47> >Most people I know don't like the sanctions against Russia

>people's "No" vote is just ignored

>Maybe because the "extreme" left and right have much less affiliations and friends in the EU

This points make me really sad. First, because right-wing parties are actively propped up by Russian govt [1]; second, because Russia openly engaged in propaganda and false flags campaign against Ukraine in EU [2]; third, because I'm Russian, an external pressure on the regime is one of the few hopes for a change, and it seems like Russian govt is strong at least in your network, so the pressure will not become stronger. Additionally, quite a few nice people will probably be infected by memes that poisoned Russian society for decades.

It's really sad.

[1]: [http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500-putinism-and- the-...](http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/world/2500-putinism-and-the-european- far-right)

[2]: [https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and- europe/2016/04/03/azo...](https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and- europe/2016/04/03/azov-video/)

<comment><USER48> The way I see it, but please correct me if I'm wrong (don't hold back), Putin (and Russian politics in general) is caught between the old and new generations of Russia, during the Jeltsin era we saw that being an all out liberal, democrat, power to the people person did not land you at the top of the country at all. This is still true probably (because you need backing of the old powers) so what is currently at the top in Russia is probably what will keep Russia together. I think that with the younger generation growing up, Russia will become more and more liberal, it will take time. Yes, many things in Russia are as they were here in the 60's (gay rights etc) but here we also had the time to mature (especially regarding personal freedom) without much violence. Why does the west have to rush things, make a Woman with a mustache win the EU song festival in the Ukraine, make the world press photo a gay couple in Russia? Is such pressure really the best?

Why not be friendly with Russia, show them the benefits of our society without enforcing our ethics? Why the war mongering? The EU also sneakily, under suspect circumstances put a pro EU person in Power in the Ukraine. This makes Russia afraid of the ever growing NATO. Are you part of a liberal minority? I can see you want change as fast as possible but what is as fast as possible?

I apologize if I come across particularly ignorant, it's difficult to find the truth between western news and RT. whenever I read RT I can certainly see and understand the fear of the NATO.

I'm currently reading the new Tsar (about Putin) so far he seems to be loyal to the wrong people sometimes but much less corrupt than he could have been given the people around him (but I'm only half way.) Also he didn't attack Turkey after they took down that fighter, even though Turkey is doing oil business with IS.

I'm not pro-Russia or Pro-Putin, I think we are worse of if we don't try to be friends. (I think the Russians love their children too ;) )

<comment><USER49> >Why not be friendly with Russia, show them the benefits of our society without enforcing our ethics? Why the war mongering? The EU also sneakily, under suspect circumstances put a pro EU person in Power in the Ukraine

Wait now... You are calling EU war mongering? Remind me again who invaded Ukraine when the Ukrainian people wanted to turn towards the west. In direct violation of the Budapest Memorandum.

Putin is no weakling being manipulated by the oligarchs. He may not show off his wealth but make no mistake, he tightly controls the Russian state and oligarchs - not the other way around.

<comment><USER48> The pro EU leadership was put in place under very suspect circumstances [0] and can very well be seen as a big FU to Russia. It's all a power game, Russian economy suffers, EU economy suffers, US military-industrial complex and oil industry benefits.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkFVNRZv2eM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkFVNRZv2eM)

<comment><USER49> The Russian Economy suffers because they INVADED another country, and shot down a civilian passenger jet among other things

The Maidan movement may be suspect but pale in the comparison to Russia's actions.

<comment><USER48> I thought they just asked the people there whether they preferred to be part of Russia or part of a more EU focused new Ukraine. Then the People voted.

And did they shoot down that jet? There really does not seems to be any motive for them (the Russians) to do that. Maybe they fired on a fighter flying in the radar shadow of the commercial jet? How ethical is that? There is still a lot of vagueness around that incident and it not just from the Russians.

But ok, Putin may not be a nice man, I don't really know, somehow he is never ever in the news here. Whenever I look up stuff on the internet he comes across as quite intelligent, not like a tyrant. My point is, should we make the EU's and Russia's economy suffer? I'm betting you don't know any people in agriculture, the flower or the fruit business that lost their jobs because of this stupid boycott. I'm betting it's much worse in Russia. And who are we punishing? Putin? No, those nice people that live in Russia and work hard to make a living.

How would you feel if you lost your job because suddenly the EU would stop trade with the US because your president build a wall on the Mexican border and kicked out friendly Muslim Families? It's all a game to these people. Let's not humiliate ourselves by screaming in forums what they feed us in the media.

When goods don't cross borders, armies will. Were just getting ready for another senseless war because our leaders are dicks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > Most people I know don't like the sanctions against Russia because they > impact our economy

I.e. they are collaborateurs. It seems that Russians use proper name "GAYrope" for part of Europe at least.

Let me remember you that Russia shot civil plane MH17 from Amsterdam to "show that Donbass territory is not controlled by Ukraine anymore".

<comment><USER51> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11760362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11760362) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The graph for Britain is clearly wrong. David Cameron is clearly far-right by any European standard, so the country's swing to the right should be a lot more pronounced.

<comment><USER24> By the standards of some European countries, Obama is far-right, but Obama becoming president was certainly not a sign of a shift to the right in American politics.

What matters here is where parties and politicians lie compared to the historical norms of their country, and Cameron is far closer to that then, say, Thatcher.

<comment><USER53> How the parties are positioned depends indeed on the country. As an example, on our case in France, there is the "Front de Gauche" which would probably be considered communist in the US/UK whereas on our case, we have the actual communists, in the traditional sense. Religion also plays close to no parts in politics and conservative and republican means a very very different thing. Most of the English news I see report quite wrongly on the subject.</comment></comment></comment>


Verizon to Stop Sharing Customer Location Data with Third Parties - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/06/verizon-to-stop-sharing-customer-location-data-with-third-parties/ <comment><USER2> So, the only way to get a customer location is through their ad network?

<comment><USER2> They don't have one yet?

Oh, they will... -- Yoda meme</comment></comment>


How To Throw An Awesome Launch Party + Get Featured In TechCrunch + VentureBeat - <AUTHOR>

Want to know how to throw an awesome launch party and get major press?  Find out how here: http://blog.atthepool.com/post/37089565882/how-to-throw-an-awesome-launch-party-and-get-featured <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, here's the link: [http://blog.atthepool.com/post/37089565882/how-to- throw-an-a...](http://blog.atthepool.com/post/37089565882/how-to-throw-an- awesome-launch-party-and-get-featured)

</comment><comment><USER2> That's actually a great article, loved to read it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. Alex could be Zuck 2.0. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> great read - I think there's a lack of good PR advice on hackernews.</comment>


The revolutionary technology pushing Sweden toward the goal of zero emissions - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1010273/the-algoland-carbon-capture-project-in-sweden-uses-algae-to-help-the-country-reach-zero-emissions/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Buckets of algae collect carbon dioxide emissions of some small factory. The algae is fed to pigs, who fart the carbon to atmosphere anyway.</comment>


Cheap Lights with Spherical Harmonics - <AUTHOR> http://astroids.tv/blog/cheap-lights-with-spherical-harmonics

<comment><USER2> There's another great application of spherical harmonics in (non-real-time) lighting, used by Weta for Avatar. Instead of precomputing the terms for a particular lighting setup as above, they use SH to store an environment map for every point on an object, including the effect of occluding geometry. This is independent of the camera and light positions. At render time it's then cheap to rotate the environment or move the lights, and still get correctly occluded diffuse lighting. They won a technical Academy award for it.

Easy-ish overview: [https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-science-of-spherical- ha...](https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-science-of-spherical-harmonics-at- weta-digital/)

SIGGRAPH 2010 paper, focusing more on the creation of the SH cache than it's use: [http://dbonline.igroupnet.com/ACM.FT/1780000/1778774/037-pan...](http://dbonline.igroupnet.com/ACM.FT/1780000/1778774/037-pantaleoni.pdf)

Slides about same: [http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Lehrstuehle/Leh...](http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Lehrstuehle/Lehrstuhl_XV/Teaching/SS13/BaMaSeminar/Eckert_Slides.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Similarly, circular harmonics [0] allows you to project a function onto coefficients of a single angle instead of two.

[0] - [http://www.blackpawn.com/texts/ch/default.html](http://www.blackpawn.com/texts/ch/default.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Ah, interesting. I was familiar with spherical harmonics for Ambisonics [1], a technology for representing the directional sound field at point (or perhaps a head-sized sphere), using the spherical harmonic decomposition to approximate the sound field in a reasonably small number of discrete channels.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics)

</comment><comment><USER5> spherical harmonics! Cool to know that aren't only used in quantum mechanics :)</comment>


Cryo-electron microscopy breaks a key barrier - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01658-1 <comment><USER2> The headline is potentially confusing, it doesn't mean that this is the first time individual atoms were measured, but the first time this particular method has been pushed to such a high resolution that individual atoms could be distinguished.

Cryo EM is a very hot method right now to determine the three-dimensional structure of large molecules like e.g. proteins or protein complexes. Something like 10-15 years ago the best you could get was maybe 1.5 - 2 nm (these are rough numbers from memory), the results described in the article are 0.17 nm.

<comment><USER3> Further, atomic resolution is routine in electron microscopy, it's specifically Cryo EM (a sub-technique aimed at imaging proteins, which are extremely fragile compared to, say, chunks of metal or computer chips) where the advance has happened.

This is phenomenal! The title still feels a bit sensationalized, but don't they all?

<comment><USER4> Cryo EM is really cool (not just in temperature! ;-) ) technology! :) Recently I had a chance to go on a tour in the two-part CEITEC research center in Brno, a city with long history of electron microscopy manufacturing and research.

One part of the CEITEC research center does "dry" tech - chemistry, robotics, motor and machine control and chips. Of course, they have quite a lot of cutting edge electron microscopes to image various nano structures. All looking super high tech as you watch their shiny metal over the clean room window. All the machines stand on concrete slabs embedded into the hill below the building to avoid vibrations and have ultra high vacuum inside.

The other part of CEITEC does "wet" research - proteins, cells, bacteria, microorganisms. Of course also they have cutting edge, cry electron microscopes. These looked quite different to the other ones - it was a huge black cube, reaching almost the high ceiling of the room. You could not see all the glistening internal components like in the previous case. In this case they even let us to the room itself - apparently given all the volatiles in the samples, the cleanliness requirements in the room containing the machine are not as strict & it likely (my guess) needs to keep quite a bit part of the machine at very low temperatures, explaining all the covers. IIRC the software controlling the camera runs on Linux & engineers from Brno working for one of the big EM manufacturers were involved in building this enormous cryo EM machine, which was a pretty nice touch. :)

<comment><USER5> Small world :)

<comment><USER6> Until you start counting them in moles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a structural biologist that uses CryoEM to study archeal viruses. I'd be happy to answer any questions about CryoEM.

I did want to point out though that this title is misleading. The researchers didn't get an image of an atom. Instead, they reconstructed hundreds of thousands of images of the protein to determine where the atoms are almost exactly. So there's no actual image that shows an atom, as cool as that would be.

<comment><USER8> What are the limitations of this technique in determining spatial structure of the proteins? Do they get denaturated when cooled?

<comment><USER9> No, the proteins are vitrified very rapidly in liquid ethane at approx. -200°C, so that the structure ist conserved.

<comment><USER10> Protein "structure" is a slippery concept. In situ measurements, molecular dynamics simulations and basic common sense pretty conclusively show that most proteins actually have a number of conformations they access during normal biological processes. In many cases, these conformations are required for the proteins normal functions. I used to work in the de novo protein field and it was a constant source of irritation to me that what we mainly designed were crystal structures, not dynamic functional proteins.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. Would it be fair to say that crystallized protein is always in one specific confirmation? Compared to that, would vitrification have the chance (however random) to capture protein molecules in different conformations?

<comment><USER7> Yes, a crystallized protein will always be in a single conformation, or you won't be able to see it because the electron density map will be an average of all possible conformations, and therefore meaningless.

Single particle gives you the opportunity to see different conformations, but only if the data is discrete. If there's a continuous amount of conformations (think a molecular motor that's rotating) you would need nearly infinite data to resolve a nearly infinite number of conformations. If the data is less than continuous, you can image enough particles to see all the different conformations by constructing multiple models in parallel and using 3D angular searching to bin them by what conformation they are in. This is a computationally exhausting process, however.

<comment><USER11> I hate to be that guy, but your first statement is technically incorrect: you can have discrete alternate conformations superimposed in the electron density (usually 2-3 is the most that can be resolved), and you can have different conformations of multiple copies of the molecule. (I've personally worked with both, although the differences in the second case were small.) That's not even counting ensemble-based approaches to modeling the crystal structure, although that's arguably just a different way of representing the uncertainty.

All that aside, crystallization certainly biases it towards specific conformations, which single-particle EM does not.

<comment><USER7> Didn't realize that. My experience with xray crystallography is limited. Obviously there's some variance, but I always assumed it would simply be unresolvable/disordered in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While this is a breakthrough within the field of cryo-electron microscopy it is important to appreciate that for many questions in structural biology we also need to understand how protein structure changes over time.

With the presented method the structure sampling time seems to be O(10 s) which easily is about 10 orders of magnitudes slower than the dynamics we're interested in seeing.

A direct consequence of this is that for achieving atomic spatial resolution they _needed_ to use a "rock-solid" protein -- one that has an exceptionally stiff structure (one that does not wiggle a lot). The presented method is great and cool, but this is a pretty severe limitation. Most proteins wiggle a lot :-).

Background: protein structure-function relationship can often be well understood only when considering the structural dynamics of the protein (key words: conformational changes, the entropic contribution to free energy).

That is, in the ideal case we would be able to measure molecular structure not only at high spatial resolution, but also at high temporal resolution.

How can one make such a measurement _much_ faster, by ~10 orders of magnitude? By irradiating a _lot_ of light. Via X-ray free electron lasers (XFEL).

XFEL-based techniques are expected to revolutionize structural biology (as always, also still a long way to go):

> XFEL protein crystallography not only determines high resolution structures > of proteins, but also reveals the time-stamped conformational changes of > proteins.

\- [https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.3070.pdf?origin=ppub](https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.3070.pdf?origin=ppub)

\- [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6678726/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6678726/)

(PhD in structural biology/bioinformatics, investigated dynamics of proteins with molecular dynamics simulations)

<comment><USER13> You're glossing over the advantages specific to cryo-EM though, which is it can give you a good picture of large ensembles of small things at this accuracy, with a lot less computational/interpretation hardship than X-ray crystallography or NMR. So for seeing structures of large protein complexes and how the super structure varies with heteromeric variation this is a really big deal. If you wanted to see what viral capsids in-situ looked like down to the atoms this is what you'd use. There are a lot of places this is going to be useful, there is no one method to rule them all in structural proteomics simply because nothing can offer all of the spatial and temporal scales one might need. Plus cryo would only give you the surface hull of these complexes, you'd still need a different method to fill in all the exact structures inside. Writing up these methods as if there is some competition for "best" is an entirely false impression to a lay person reading. The best is all methods improve and researchers collaborate to provide every possible scoped view. Even mass spectrometry is doing crazy things for investigating the structure of disordered proteins. You'd never use that for something you would use cryo- EM for.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for this reply and the additional level of detail. I didn't mean to imply that one method is generally better than another. The combination of a variety of methods applied to the same problem space is certainly the way to go whenever we really want to unravel molecular mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had the privilege to ocasionally work with Holger Stark on similar structure determination challanges and can confirm that they really pushed the limits here thanks to very smart statistical methods. The resolution heavily depends on correctly sorting/classifying the large amount (> 10k for sure) images of these small particles.

There exists a race in the structural biology community about the next big method that allows to determine structures of proteins that were hard to crystalize and it seems that CryoEM is becoming the winner in this race.

As an alternative approach, people are building large X-ray lasers that have extremly high intensity and short pulse lengths which they plan to shoot at single particles and resolve individual scattering images. This method can very likely also achieve atomic resolution of non-crystaline particles, even without the need to freeze them down.

It will be exciting times for the whole bio-chemical physics community. Congrats to Holger and the team for another great publication in Nature.

<comment><USER11> Having worked in X-ray crystallography on synchrotrons and XFELs, I can't take the single-particle XFEL concept seriously any more. Ten years ago it seemed impressive, but the EM technology has advanced so much faster - and it's a fraction of the cost. There are some neat applications of nanocrystallography, but that too seems like a niche application now, not a magic bullet for accelerating protein structure determination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The real breakthrough here is that with this technique you don't have to crystallize the proteins anymore, which is the biggest bottleneck in X-Ray Crystallography.

Relevant; they used Cyro-EM to elucidate the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein [1], which is a big step towards the development of a vaccine. This is a resolution of 3.5 ångström, but still a very nice feat.

[1]: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1260](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1260)

<comment><USER16> 3.5Å cryo-EM structures have existed for some time. The important thing coming down under 2Å or so, is that it drastically improves the quality of the molecular dynamics simulations you build of these structures.

<comment><USER11> I'm skeptical of molecular dynamics and docking studies... but the ability to clearly resolve bound drug molecules, or host-pathogen interactions, is very valuable indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, pardon my ignorance, but can we finally say that atoms are particles with concrete dimensions? Last time I checked the whole field seemed measuring everything into probabilistic and statistical terms.

<comment><USER18> You can resolve atoms despite all the uncertainty just like you can resolve a tree at distance despite it not having a clear surface.

The electron distribution falls with an exponential function on large distances, what is much cleaner than a tree surface anyway.

<comment><USER19> This is a good analogy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could someone confirm what we're looking at in that picture please? In that spider web of blue points joined by blue line segments: Those tiny blue points are atoms? The blue line segments are covalent bonds? And what's the difference between the blue and purple areas?

If those line segments are probability distributions of shared electrons, that means our high school mental model of a covalent bond (drawing a line between two atoms) is not too bad.

<comment><USER11> The line segments define surfaces around the regions of highest electron density. This is how X-ray crystallographers traditionally viewed electron density, probably because that simple mesh was the best that early computer graphics systems could handle. In this particular image they've shown nested surfaces - my guess would be at 1 (purple), 2, and 3 standard deviations above the mean, or something like that. Again, not atoms, just electron clouds, but obviously the regions around the atoms have the most electrons.

<comment><USER20> So it's not like what I thought at all. If I understand you correctly, then each one of those bright blue balls is a cloud of electrons at the center of which is a nucleus (but we don't see the nucleus itself). The tiny blue lines and vertices are just computer generated imagery to define the "surface" of an atom. Those hexagons with six blue balls joined by purple mesh are benzene rings? So each purple area defines a cloud of shared electrons in a benzene ring?

<comment><USER21> > computer generated imagery to define the "surface" of an atom

The grids are isosurfaces of electron density. Analogous to isolines on a map illustrating mountain terrain height.

Atoms are sticky little fuzzy balls. The fuzz, electron density, falls off exponentially. They don't have an "edge" in a non-fuzzy-object sense. Analogous to a stereotype volcano having an arbitrary perimeter. Where would I place it? Where you need climbing gear? Where biking up gets hard? In the foothills? Somewhere on the sloped plain? You place the perimeter wherever is convenient for what you're trying to use it for. People are usually interested in the densities between sticking atoms, which are several orders of magnitude down from peak density. Analogous to drawing an isoline at "the towering volcano is here high enough to start stubbing your toe on it". The picture draws isosurfaces of electron density at something like "around here one atom would 'bump' another, and you can see bonds" and at "I wrap a single atom only, but still have an interesting shape".

To show the various features of interest, one draws multiple isosurfaces. As with a terrain map. But an exponential electron density scale is harder to represent than linear height scale. And it's hard to clearly draw more than a couple of nested 3D isosurfaces. So instead of placing many iso's at linear steps, here there are just a couple, more like an order of magnitude apart.

<comment><USER11> The terrain analogy is great - this is how the first structural biologists had to view electron density: [https://image.slideserve.com/105608/electron- density-maps-of...](https://image.slideserve.com/105608/electron-density-maps- of-proteins-sperm-whale-myoglobin-2-4-angstrom-resolution-l.jpg) I think this is a stack of 2d "slices" through the density, printed on transparencies. But I've also seen 2d representations of charge density (some of which is just theoretical studies) that are even more similar to a terrain map.

<comment><USER21> Neat. I've been exploring visual representations of electron density, optimized for educational use with XR. Intending to illustrate that science education content could be made transformatively less wretched.

Isosurfaces and nonlinear color gradients are educationally problematic. And fuzz gradients are hard to visually stereo fuse. And on near-term AR displays, black is transparent, and background environment colors can't be manipulated, which limits the space of attainable colorizations.

My current thought is to approach it as a volumetric light source. Composed of several linear scales, each a different color, with density as transparency. And respecting their true density when combined, so higher density scales "shine through" lower. We'll see. Maybe overlay random sample "sparkles" to maybe improve sense of spatial extent.

I've not seen much similar work. If you know of any, I'd love to hear of it. Also, it seems there was a push some years back to emphasize electron density when teaching intro chemistry. A push that doesn't seem to have gelled. I've guesses, but I'd value thoughts on why.

<comment><USER11> I've been out of the field for a few years, but I know that the graphics hardware (and accompanying software tools) make what you're describing much easier. This is best example I can come up with: [https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1758-29...](https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1758-2946-4-17) (see page 12)

Random asides: 1\. once you're used to it, the simple isosurface mesh is super easy to work with (i.e. build molecules into), and for structural biologists the broad approximation is perfectly adequate 2\. even so, the amount of unexplained blobs - some of which are definitely not noise - in my (xray) electron density maps was always both fascinating and frustrating. that's one reason why we don't spend much time on fancy renderings of experimental density at anything worse than subatomic resolution, because you're just sharpening the features that your atomic model doesn't explain.

<comment><USER21> Thank you.

> once you're used to it, the simple isosurface mesh is super easy to work > with

One wouldn't know it from the state of content, or even of much education research, but educational representation is much harder than professional. Students are unable to untangle features reflecting careful correctness, from artistic license. So both seed mis/conceptions. Professionals can downregulate misconceptions... though that can be surprisingly localized - asking first- tier astronomy graduate students "What color is the Sun?"... gets you a common misconception.

Consider that ball-and-stick wrapped with electron density in Fig 9. Imagine coming at it cold. What is that stick? Well, maybe it's a ridge in electron density, thus symbolizing the surrounding not-so-stick-shaped region of increased density which constitutes a bond. But then what are those balls? They're way too similarly sized to be electron density. Ok, maybe they're spherical crosshairs for nucleus location, and the stick is a linear crosshair for the ridge. Variously sized because... something. Oh, no, some of the sticks are doubled, and density certainly doesn't have two ridges, or (here) increased density. So we've a paper notation that badly misrepresents actual electron distribution, blended into a physical representation with a... my head hurts.

I saw a professional chem ed content discussion yesterday, around a misconception, that in a two-species ionic solid, one atom bonds to another, in pairs. Rather than to "4 to 6" neighboring atoms... because one common printed diagram draws 4 neighbors, and another 6. It was like they were non- scientists, thinking they could wordsmith their way to correctness, without the slightest need to examine the actual characteristics of the real physical systems being described, or to consult with someone deeply familiar with them. The focus remained on models, decoupled from reality. I see a lot of that.

Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent". Maybe XR can serve as an excuse to do better?

<comment><USER11> All I can offer in response is vague, hand-wavy speculation about human perceptive and cognitive limitations and how this impacts scientific representations. Coming from a biology background, I'm very used to artistic license and gross oversimplifications - and from years of habit, it almost hurts my brain to think about molecules as anything other than chicken-wire! From your complaint about those representations, I'm guessing you're unfamiliar with "Richardson ribbons": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_diagram)

Even the developers of these visualizations would probably agree that it's dangerous to rely on them too much, and they are only a way to convey specific information in a way our eyes and brain can quickly process. Crystallographers in particular tended to over-rely on those chicken wire views and that plus software limitations yielded a lot of very poor-quality structures with poor atomic packing. The developer of those ribbon diagrams (Jane Richardson) has done a lot of other work to educate the field about how to visualize packing and other molecular properties and avoid screwing up the analysis. Over the long term, I think constant self-criticism makes up for the occasional sloppiness in scientific research.

<comment><USER21> My own focus is more on science _education_ representations. And on how badly they describe the represented physical systems. Emphasizing that this seems as much a science community failure, as an education community fail.

Consider an illustration of the solar system in some introductory astronomy content. Let say, that not atypically, it misrepresents sizes, positions, orientations, lighting, and Sun color. Thus creating and reinforcing misconceptions known to be a problem in K-12, in undergrad, and even on into astronomy graduate school. In contrast, consider a line representing an Earth- Mars transfer orbit. It seems unlikely that students will say think there's a material long pole there, and worry about it hitting satellites and cities. Students and teachers are both clear on the aphysicality of the line, but not of the Sun color. Hmm, though using a minimum-energy line to represent an energy landscape _is_ a source of misconceptions.

Similarly, common representation of atoms and molecules are known to be causatively associated with the stew of misconceptions that pervade students and teachers of chemistry. Ribbons, perhaps not so much. Hmm, though also similarly, they're often used without indication of regional flexibility, and so perhaps contribute to the underappreciation of configuration landscapes, of the importance of tuned floppiness. Perhaps.

Consider a currently implausible goal, of science education which accessibly describes the physical world, and conveys a transferable understanding of it. Arguably its content would look much more like scientific visualizations than content does at present. But being for education, it faces additional constraints, challenges and tradeoffs, distinct from those of professional scientific visualization. Creating such would require a collaboration of both deep scientific and educational expertise. For which very little incentive exists at present.

I'm trying to come up with an XR-compatible visual representation of electron density, that is physically correct, accessible, and bears in mind patterns of misconceptions in chemistry education. That task should probably be more than one random software dev's lockdown hobby hack. But as far as I know, that's were we're at. The related NSF-funded work I've seen... doing this bit well wasn't their focus. Same with XR ed tech side. Same with chem ed apps. And scientific visualization programs. And chem ed research. There may well be something nice out there, but I've not yet seen it. And big ed side... I was chatting with a leading textbook publisher, which onboards content creators with the indoctrination that their liberal arts background, and complete unfamiliarity with science and tech, is not a problem... because there's "a scientist" on call. Deriving electron density, with current nice python libraries, and GPUs, has surely gotten vastly easier than it was with old fortran messes, but still... it seems something more is needed here. Some societal staffing seems missing. No?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I thought an individual atom has been imaged before, at least roughly. Anyway, this is fantastic science. I'm excited to see how imaging atoms affects our understanding of quantum mechanics and atomic structure in general.

<comment><USER23> I think they mean that this is the first time individual atoms have been imaged using this specific type of electron microscope. Individual atoms have of course been imaged as early as the 1980s using scanning tunneling microscopy. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious could you use AFM/STM to image molecules? I'm curious how that would compare with this approach.

<comment><USER2> You can, and it has been done. But that was with very small, flat molecules. Cryo EM can be used with very large molecules or complexes with many tens of thousands of atoms.

<comment><USER25> Feels like this might be useful for exploring the surface of cancer cells to identify receptors and other features that might be useful for developing targeted therapies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Dumb question, but if electrons are basically point particles, why is hard to get below 1 angstrom resolution?

<comment><USER27> At these scales, electrons behave more like waves than particles. Also the way that they are scattered by the subject and manipulated via em lenses causes information loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For the record, individual atoms were imaged for the first time back in 1955:

[http://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8348atoms.html](http://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8348atoms.html)?

> On Oct. 11, 1955, Pennsylvania State University physics professor Erwin W. > Müller and Kanwar Bahadur, who at the time was a Ph.D. student working with > Müller, made history by being the first people to image individual atoms. > The scientists were using a relatively simple and inexpensive instrument, > and with it they directly observed individual tungsten atoms at the tip of a > sharply pointed tungsten specimen.

</comment><comment><USER29> I had heard once that new imaging modalities that advance a lot of new research invariably translate to Nobel prizes. Would that be expected of cryo EM techniques?

</comment><comment><USER30> What would be the "realistic" potential use cases?

<comment><USER31> We don't know yet. That is the idea about research.

When the microscope was invented, people made the same question: What is the use of it? Just watching things we already know bigger?

That is a recurring question. So much that Aristotle created the book MetaPhysics(meta meaning different from the Physics book) with the idea that this particular book did not need to be useful to be created. It was a compilation of non useful things.

This non useful compilation helped create science as we know it.

<comment><USER15> Oh please, this philosophical stuff is unnecessary. Cyro-EM is about a decade old and is just an alternative to X-Ray Crystallography for elucidating the structures of proteins. This article describes a way to improve the resolution of Cyro-EM, matching it to X-Ray Crystallography. The biggest bottleneck of X-Ray Crystallography is the production of protein crystals which is not necessary with Cyro-EM.

<comment><USER32> It's unbelievable how cryo-EM has come on. When i was a student, it was an also-ran behind crystallography and NMR, something that a few weird groups used to study a few special cases. Now you have to wonder if there's any point doing crystallography at all!

I still like NMR, because you're looking at proteins in solution. But if the freezing is good in cryo-EM, maybe even that becomes moot.

<comment><USER33> I'm not sure if it applies to proteins, but for smaller molecules there seemed to be some really interesting results a few years ago about using MOF's to adsorb analytes in a spatially repeating manner so x-ray diffraction techniques could be used without crystallization. Haven't followed closely enough to know if anything is panning out though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Where can I find the pictures?

<comment><USER7> There aren't any. The way cryo-EM works is it images hundreds of thousands of copies of the molecule and uses those to construct a 3D model, in this case, with atomic resolution. However, a single micrograph doesn't necessarily contain atomic resolution.

<comment><USER35> No longer need for hundreds of thousands. The aim is for just few thousands in few hours to reach acceptable resolution.

The development goes real fast with both SW and HW.

<comment><USER7> Depends greatly on whether or not what you're imaging has symmetry.

<comment><USER35> You can see that the record tests are being done with apoferitin or gaba. It all depends on the improved qualiry of direct detection cameras, filters, things like afis, fringe free imaging, ... The innovation goes insanely fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 1-KB-OK Makes me think of that one Simpsons scene where Mr Burns finds atoms in his factory

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgvHUg_vxY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgvHUg_vxY)

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like atomic rez is only possible with certain very stable proteins. Hopefully the tech will improve to allow broader application.

</comment><comment><USER37> Now I would like to see a Corona virus with it.

<comment><USER38> Another commenter linked to a study that did just that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23415625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23415625)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> how do we know atoms exist?</comment>


Show HN: UI system completely painted on HTML5 Canvas (early demo) - <AUTHOR> http://codeclamp.com

<comment><USER2> IMO this is interesting as a technical exercise, and stops there.

        Its dynamic layout, dynamic stylesheets, customizable
        painting and conceptual simplicity beats modern
        desktop/plugin/platform-locked technologies

That sounds like HTML+CSS+JS.

Bitmap drawing is nothing new. What are the expected advantages of creating a whole new renderer, graphics library, and UI kit inside an enviroment that already offers essentially the same?

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't call this approach radically new, this was already done with GTK3:

<http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/>

Also we already have a lot of browser UI toolkits that behave the same in modern browsers. I don't really feel this could bring anything new to the table.

A lot of the time in fact we don't want our UI to look the same everywhere, for example I would love my site to scale down and degrade gracefully on mobile or in other words: progressive enhancement.

Performance and legacy browsers still plague the canvas element, so I won't rely on that as the foundation of a UI technology.

And last but not least: this UI framework has to duplicate a lot of behavior that the browser already does, which I feel is both a waste of time and a waste of resources.

I don't want to look too negative about this, but I'm really skeptical that a UI framework like this would be better than what we already have.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is my latest startup. The current version (0.1) is a very early version, it is not intended for production usage yet. I am interested in opinions on the approach, and also would be happy to find investors.

<comment><USER5> Sorry man, this just goes against the grain of the web - the future is imo in using browser as a smart, hw accelerated runtime that is native on every platform, not in creating a dumb/slow proprietary emulation layer inside. Flash has already lost, and whatever good it had (fast accelerated video) has already been made native.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with this is that the web is driven by commitees, so innovation is terribly slow. For example there is no real dynamic layout in web standards, which is crazy. (Look at my v0.1 GridPanel class and compare it to CSS layout...) I want to create a system in which people can create their own components, own layout managers, etc... This thing should not replace the web, but has a place in UI tech research and application development.

<comment><USER6> Kind of like Java Applets or Flash?

These are also dead or dying platforms. I don't see a compelling reason for another one to rise, even if it runs atop canvas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I smell a new flash coming. No accessibility and it emulates things, that browser can do nativly, without using JavaScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> If we call this 'flash': My dream is to create a better flash than flash. I do this in my spare time, so the features a I've put into this are very limited as of yet, but once I will have more time/resources I will try to do my best on things like accessibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Firefox 8.0.1: Click on the demo app area, everything disappears.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the bug report. I've tested on Firefox 8.0.1 on Windows 7, it works here. Maybe it behaves differently on different operating systems?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps - I'm on OSX. Tried it in Chrome on the same system and it works fine, so it's definitely an OSX/Firefox issue. Ping me here if you make changes and need someone to retest...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Learning Ruby/RoR -- Which open source projects should I learn from? - <AUTHOR>

It's ruby time! I ditched xp for ubuntu to streamline my quest into ruby/rails. I followed the guides @ http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ which are very helpful, thanks!<p>Can the rails veterans recommend some open source projects I can learn from? I'm looking for best practices and well structured code to model after. Thanks HN. <comment><USER2> For fun, I dove into this recently. The only strong opinion I have is for Rails projects to ship with Cucumber as means for acceptance testing. Here are a few good Rails projects which satisfy that.

* The Rails Dev Directory: <http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory/>

* Spree: <http://github.com/railsdog/spree>

* And Gemcutter: <http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter>. Gemcutter also uses Gemfile.

* Fat Free CRM: <http://github.com/michaeldv/fat_free_crm>. It doesn't use Cucumber, but it's still good code.

If you want to get setup with Rails 3.0, check out this gist I wrote: <https://gist.github.com/50be644a99ff372d5b1f>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic_example>

Teaches you how to use the Authlogic plugin for authentication. Uses neat things like before_filters, helpers, partials, layouts, and more.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> the Pickaxe Book is maybe the best resource on starting Ruby. The Poignant Guide ought to be its preface.

<http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/>

Also, check out the Rubyquiz. It's a weekly programming challenge much in the spirit of Project Euler; something to cut your chops on.

<http://rubyquiz.com/>

Edit: These aren't quite what you're asking for, but you'll find plenty of very elegant code to study.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminded me of this RubyFlow thread (more Ruby than Rails):

What are real-world prime examples of good Ruby code? <http://www.rubyflow.com/items/1817>

</comment><comment><USER6> don't miss out on _why's poignant guide to ruby: <http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Since you are looking for open source projects you can study the source of: Rails itself, Highline (JEG), Choice, Shooes (GUI).</comment>


Hallo.js, a simple rich text editor for the web - <AUTHOR> http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/hallo-editor/

<comment><AUTHOR> For HN readers in Berlin: we're having a hackathon about VIE, Create.js, and Hallo next week. If you're interested, add yourself to the event page on Lanyrd: <http://lanyrd.com/2012/createjs-hackathon-berlin/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Definitely interesting - I dislike how it overlays the text to be edited in some cases, but that's probably a configuration option.

I like Aloha, in concept, but it looks like it's kitchen-sinked. An absolutely minimal configurable editor is definitely preferable.

<comment><AUTHOR> We started with Aloha as well, but some of the project partners needed an editor option with more permissive licensing (Aloha is AGPL, Hallo is MIT). And of course getting rid of the huge ExtJS dependency was a plus.

Here is an old video interview we had with the Aloha Editor team back when things were just getting started: <http://vimeo.com/12914595>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Kwpolska, you can't respond here (about the buttons toggling) since you're banned from HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really interesting especially for editing large blocks of data that are generally static (think something like a profile summary instead of something like a blog post). I'm definitely going to try it out in a little weekend project I am working on.</comment>