Swimming with Lincoln

Also at NPR, a story about how the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is to be drained and cleaned to try to rid it of a parasite that's been killing ducks, and can irritate humans too.

Interestingly, the article then wanders into a discussion of how the pool has never had swimming allowed, but obviously this was not always strictly enforced, as this photo from the 1920's shows:

Where did they swim officially around Washington?:

According to the site Histories of the National Mall, the District of Columbia operated three small whites-only public pools near the Washington Monument in the mid-1920s and early '30s, which were demolished in 1935.

The site says that starting in the 1880s, there were segregated swimming areas near the Mall in the Tidal Basin: "In 1914, Congress voted to create an official beach on the Tidal Basin for white patrons. African Americans swam nearby in a segregated area that never received funding or buildings. Facing increased criticism from black leaders and concerns that the water was polluted, Congress voted to ban swimming in the Tidal Basin in 1925."

Considering that the Brisbane Spring Hill Baths, which I wrote about in detail in 2011, were opened in 1886, it would seem we were pretty advanced compared to other cities in providing that type of facility.

Still pretty dark in parts of Africa

A surprising story at NPR:

Authorities in Mozambique say bald men are being killed, allegedly because of the belief that their heads contain gold.

So far five bald men have been killed, all in central Mozambique: two in May in Milange district close to the border with Malawi and three this month in the district of Morrumbala.

Bald men across the country are afraid of exposing their scalps. Some stay indoors. Others hide their baldness with caps....

Dina accused traditional healers of conniving with the murderers of bald people because of the cultural belief that their heads contain gold. It is also possible that the goal is to obtain body parts to use in rituals aimed at bringing wealth — the reason that albinos have been targeted for their body parts in some countries.

Ready for her close up

There's been too many words here lately, and not enough cute.  Here's some:

And here's a prisma filtered shot:

Cockroaches, retrocausality, event horizons, and Titus-Bode is still a thing...

I've been scrolling through arXiv again, as you do on a rainy day, and suggest the following papers are worth a look:

* Can we Falsify the Consciousness-Causes-Collapse Hypothesis in Quantum Mechanics?
I see that it's co-authored  by someone from the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies from San Francisco State University - which sounds about the unlikeliest school on the planet to expect a groundbreaking paper in quantum physics to come from.

Sorry, perhaps that's too impolite, because I did like it.  As you may see, the paper discusses experiments that could use living creatures to test the hypothesis - with cockroaches being touted as a potential candidate.  (Cats who can walk through walls are one thing, but I hope cockroaches never manage that trick.)  Anyway, it ends up making the point that CCCH (see the title) is probably unfalsifiable, because to test it properly would require removing any arguably conscious thing (a cockroach brain, for example) out of the thermal effects that (apparently) can confound such an experiment.  In other words, whatever you use would have to be taken down to a temperature within a few degrees of absolute zero.  Since no one expects that anything arguably conscious can be conscious at that temperature, it's effectively unfalsifiable.   Neat argument - I wonder if it is right?

*   Did you know that there was a Centre for Time at the University of Sydney?  No, nor did I, but someone from there has written a short paper outlining the way that retrocausality can help sort out some of the perplexing problems in quantum mechanics.   (The only problem is, I thought that some experiments designed to show retrocausality hadn't come up with anything yet.  I have some posts about Cramer's experiment in the past, but here's a not so old media story about his failure.)

*  It's not quantum physics (although it involves it), but there is still some argument happening about whether event horizons really exist around black holes.  Because if they don't, it avoids the information loss paradox.   (I see one of the authors is from Macquarie University, by the way.)  

*  Hey, I didn't realise that scientists still puzzled about the Titus-Bode rule that applied to planetary orbits around the sun, but they do.  (I remember that in a Heinlein novel, the interstellar explorers find that other solar systems exhibited the same rule, and it was still being puzzled over.  I either hadn't heard, or had forgotten, that we already know that some other observed systems do eem to follow the rule.)   I learnt all of this from the intro to this paper, which is short but argues a physical cause for it.  It's not the clearest explanation I've ever read, but here's the abstract:

We consider the geometric Titius-Bode rule for the semimajor axes of planetary orbits. We derive an equivalent rule for the midpoints of the segments between consecutive orbits along the radial direction and we interpret it physically in terms of the work done in the gravitational field of the Sun by particles whose orbits are perturbed around each planetary orbit. On such energetic grounds, it is not surprising that some exoplanets in multiple-planet extrasolar systems obey the same relation. On the other hand, it is surprising that this simple interpretation of the Titius-Bode rule also amounts to a straightforward refutation of the celebrated theorem of Bertrand that has been in existence since 1873. 

A convenient memory

I just noticed from Twitter someone referring to Trump's own lawyers, back in 1992, saying that they always met him in pairs:

This was noted in a Buzzfeed report last year.

25 years later, and inane Trump fans think Trump is now the one you can always believe if it's his word against another person's?   It's just nuts how gullible they are.

Poor badgers - lucky cows

Only recently realising that there were badgers in America (so, I didn't study zoology), I now see that they are also in Japan, and being culled at an excessive rate.  (And also eaten!)

Time to check Wikipedia to get a better grip on badger distribution.  Here we go:

Key: Gold = Honey badger (Mellivora capensis) Red = American badger (Taxidea taxus) Teal = European badger (Meles meles) Dark green = Asian badger (Meles leucurus) Lime green = Japanese badger (Meles anakuma) Blue = Chinese ferret-badger (Melogale moschata) Indigo = Burmese ferret-badger (Melogale personata) Azure = Javan ferret-badger (Melogale orientalis) Purple = Bornean ferret-badger (Melogale everetti)  (It says I have to acknowledge the author - so here: By IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, species assessors and the authors of the spatial data., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16275523)

As for eating them (an idea I find rather unappealing - not keen on eating a creature that lives off worms):

Although rarely eaten today in the United States or the United Kingdom,^[39] badgers were once a primary meat source for the diets of Native Americans and white colonists.^{[40][41][42][43][44]} Badgers were also eaten in Britain during World War II and the 1950s.^[41] In Russia, the consumption of badger meat is still widespread.^[45] Shish kebabs made from badger, along with dog meat and pork, are a major source of trichinosis outbreaks in the Altai Region of Russia.^[45] In Croatia, badger meat is rarely eaten. When it is, it is usually smoked and dried, or less commonly, served in goulash.^[46] In France, badger meat was used in the preparation of several dishes, such as Blaireau au sang, and it was a relatively common ingredient in countryside cuisine.^[47] Badger meat was eaten in some parts of Spain until recently.^[48] In Japan, badger is regarded in folktales as a food for the humble.^[49]

I'll pass, thanks.

And as for other eaten mammals - I noticed on TV recently that there is a sudden push in India to give broader, Hindu based, protection to cattle:

A sweeping ban on trading cattle for slaughter, imposed by India's Hindu nationalist Government, is being seen by the nation's meat and leather industries as an attempt to destroy businesses conservative Hindus do not agree with.

Other critics argue the ban is an attempt to control what people eat, and accuse the Government of using prevention of cruelty as a justification for imposing Hindu values.
"They [the Government] want to destroy people engaged in leather industry," said Seth Satpal Mall, a hide trader in Punjab's industrial hub, Jalandhar.

"They just want to kill us."

The snap Government decree, issued last week, requires documentation proving any cattle sold are for "agricultural purposes" only, effectively outlawing trade for slaughter.

The report also notes "cow protection groups" have become violent vigilantes recently, bashing up people they suspect of slaughtering cattle.

Religion and politics in a different form from what we normally read about lately, hey.

Shopping centres as living rooms

I'm been meaning to ask this out loud for about 6 months now:   who came up with the idea of making shopping malls into living rooms?

Honestly, the amount of trendy looking, living room-ish style furniture that has appeared in public spaces of the local large shopping mall in the last year or so is pretty astounding - and I'm not saying that I don't like the look of it, really.  It just strikes me as slightly odd.   I assume that it must be based on some research that shows that if you let people relax in a colourful high back chair, with a funny shaped coffee table in front of them, probably while they use their mobile phones to check up on Facebook, they'll end up buying more?

But we all know that retail rents are already astronomical in large Australian shopping centres - and my local one also seems to having a series of prominent departures of smaller retailers, perhaps due to leases that started when they opened the last extension about 5 or 6 years ago expiring.    So, you just have to wonder whether the cost of all these mini lounge rooms appearing every 30 metres or so down every walkway is really worth it.   (Not to mention the question of how often they will end up needing to be cleaned and/or replaced.)  The retailer tenants will end up paying for it, no doubt.

I'm guessing that the idea originated in America, or England, but it's a very distinctive change.

Emperor to abdicate

So, Japan has done the right thing and will let the Emperor abdicate.  The BBC has a "ten things you may not know" article about him, which includes this:

1. He has a really long family history Born 23 December 1933, he is the 125th emperor of a line which is traced back more than 2,600 years, according to official genealogies. That would make it the world's oldest continuing hereditary monarchy.

In keeping with ultra-formal royal tradition, he was raised apart from his parents in an imperial nursery from the age of two.

Let's check in on how the brains trust* forecast the UK election..

 

And how are they taking the news of a very, very close result?:

* sarcasm of the highest order.   And yes, I did get the last US presidential election wrong - but this is still fun.

Placebo, placebo

Two  links about the placebo effect for you:

*   people act drunker if they think that what they drink should make them drunk, faster.   (It's a study about mixing Red Bull and alcohol.)   I'm pretty sure this type of effect was already pretty well established, but it's still interesting how anticipation of how a drink should affect you does influence how you feel.

*  Over at Vox, there was a fascinating interview recently with a researcher who says that, for some conditions, giving patients a placebo, even while they know it's a placebo, still helps!:

About five years ago, I said to myself, “I’m really tired about doing research that people say is about deception and tricking people.” 

Let’s just try to see if we can be honest, transparent: Is it possible that [the placebo effect] would work giving a placebo pill and telling people the truth? People said I was nuts. 

The first open-label study we did was in irritable bowel syndrome. 

People on no treatment got about 30 percent better. And people who were given an open-label placebo got 60 percent improvement in the adequate relief of their irritable bowel syndrome.

He admits this makes little sense:

Brian Resnick

What I still can’t wrap my mind around: Okay, the placebo effect is real, and it’s not just about people’s expectations. Fine. But why on earth does the effect still work when you tell patients the drug isn’t real? That it’s just sugar?

Ted Kaptchuk

First of all, I have no idea.

Brian Resnick

That’s actually a refreshing answer.

Ted Kaptchuk

Ultimately, it’s very peculiar. Our patients tell us it’s nuts and crazy. The doctors think it’s nuts. And we just do it. And we’ve been getting good results.

I don’t know if this is going to keep working [in clinical studies]. It’s really novel and new, in infancy. This needs to be replicated. We need to test it over time, too.

One other surprise in the article - I would not have guessed this:

Placebo effects accompany real drugs. Morphine given without a person knowing — surreptitiously, in a IV drip — is 50 percent less effective than when it is given in front of them. That’s the placebo effect. 

Fascinating! 

And here's a thought, seeing I was recently writing about hallucinogens - to what extent can you reduce LSD or other hallucinogens dose and still talk people into having what they perceived as a full blown trip if they think it is full strength?   Has anyone studied that?

Take that, Monsanto

It might make weekend gardening a lot more fun for the average husband, too:

Laser-based weed control can eliminate herbicides

(Actually, it's currently just an idea for a start up - sounds pretty fanciful to me.)

Let's not worry too much about a vacuum decay end of the universe

I'm making another attempt at a Trump free Friday, so instead I'll refer the reader to a vaguely optimistic post by Bee about why she doesn't worry too much about the potential for the universe to disappear rapidly as a result of quantum vacuum decay.

Go to Mars and die

Yet more research indicating that travelling to Mars is very risky business for astronaut's health.

Collateral damage from cosmic rays increases cancer risks for Mars astronauts. New predictive model, published in Scientific Reports, shows radiation from cosmic rays extends from damaged to otherwise healthy 'bystander' cells, effectively doubling cancer risk

I think one of the first facilities that would need to be set up in a Mars colony would be a nursing home with palliative care.   

Glittergate

So, the video from the guy who was filming the two who assaulted Andrew Bolt has turned up on the net.   Fairfax has it here.

In my previous post, I questioned whether Bolt had gone too far in (so he said) kicking one of the assailants in the groin, while he was down.

The funny thing is, unless there was yet more fighting than appears in this video, and I don't think there is, I can't see that a clear kick happened at all - or at least, not as Bolt described it.   (The young looking Fairfax journalist writing it up is completely on Bolt's side, by the way, saying "He fights back fiercely, kicking and punching his two assailants in the face and groin before they give up and start to walk away."  But I can't see clear evidence of a kick, or not of a kick as Bolt claimed.)

Let's revisit how Bolt himself described it:

I hit the head of one so hard that my knuckles are still tender, and when he was down, legs sprawled apart, I kicked.

Post that footage, moron.

Um, unless my eyes deceive, there is no one " ... down, legs sprawled apart".

He keeps talking about the kick, too.  Here is how he first put it:

Luckily the cameras do not capture me kicking one between the legs. I cannot have my children see me acting like a thug.

(I said it was an insincere, boastful, apology.)

Here's my take on the matter, after seeing this second video:

* It does make Bolt's reaction to swing out and fight them perfectly understandable (not that I ever questioned that);

* It actually shows Bolt stumbling in a way that the previous video didn't show - his performance as a street fighter does not look quite as good as his words suggest.  (Not that he didn't, in a general sense, do well enough);

* I think he's greatly exaggerating the kicking part of his fight, because that plays well to his fan club. (Really, who can avoid the feeling that Bolt secretly thinks this is the best PR he has received in a decade?)

So I reckon he's OK on the disproportionate response to provocation - if he hadn't exaggerated what he had done, I wouldn't have even raised it.

Update:  Again, just to make it clear I make no excuses for the idiot assailants - the three involved ought to face charges.  Even if it's a fine that their family pays for them, they deserve a conviction for assault on their record.

Update 2:  it's still being said on many sites that the stuff sprayed at Bolt was shaving cream, but it sure doesn't look like that on the videos, and it's supposed to have involved glitter and dye.   Last I looked, shaving cream comes only in non-dying white, and without glitter.  You can, however, get glittery hair colour spray, mainly used by kids.   I would suspect that that is more likely what was used, which is a stupid thing to be spraying towards someone's face.

Update 3:  It's not just me.  Despite every single Catallaxy commenter probably having watched the Bolt videos ten times, I see only one asking the same question I have - where's the groin kick on someone down?

And that, I expect, is about where their inquirying minds will leave it.

And now - pop culture

Tom Cruise's The Mummy movie is not exactly getting rave reviews.  Metacritic puts it at 37%, with the great majority of reviews "mixed", which is borderline as to whether I should see it at the cinema.   It does look like too much of a CGI fest on the trailers, but it does have Tom in it...

Agency, consciousness and maths

It's all a bit complicated to follow, but I gather that it is a mathematical argument that emergent consciousness is much more than the sum of its parts.  But as that seems sort of obvious to most of us as lived experience, it's hard to understand the significance of a mathematical proof.  And the reductions dispute it shows anything new at all.

Anyway, have a read:   A Theory of Reality as More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Trump expects loyalty, but doesn't give it

Mike Allen at Axios has a look at Trump's poor record of loyalty to his aides:

So what's with the constant needling and belittling?

• A person who has experienced Trump's moods said: "He feels some sort of deep--seated emotional need to assert his primacy over people he has very clear primacy over. These are people you need to trust, and to be loyal to you."
• Trump's treatment of his aides is a factor in the unwillingness of some top talent to go into the White House, according to an official involved in the search: "You never know when you're going to get thrown under the bus. He has this constant need for reassurance and affirmation that he takes out on the staff."
• An irony: It's people who were with Trump on the earlier side (Sessions, Priebus, Spicer) who seem to take the brunt of his fickleness, while later arrivals like Gary Cohn and Dina Powell (so far) have escaped Trump's crowded doghouse.
• Sound smart: Quick! Name a top-titled White House official — not named Ivanka or Jared — who authentically likes or feels sincere loyalty toward Trump. Then, quick, name a top-titled official — not named Jared or Ivanka — who Trump genuinely likes or feels loyalty toward. This is a problem.

No wonder Trump likes Putin

Both like to talk about how women have "bad days" because of menstruation:

When Stone asked Putin during a tour of the Kremlin if he ever had bad days, Putin said being a man meant he did not have to worry about this. “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days. I am not trying to insult anyone. That’s just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles,” Putin told the director, according to Bloomberg News, which has seen an advance version of the documentary.

History repeats - Republicans don't learn

News today out of Kansas that there's been a revolt over not raising taxes:

Kansas lawmakers have voted to roll back a series of major tax cuts that became an example for conservative lawmakers around the country but didn't deliver the growth and prosperity promised by Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican.

A coalition of conservative Republicans, some of whom voted for sweeping tax cuts in 2012 or defended them in the years since, sided with moderates and Democrats to override Brownback's veto of a $1.2 billion tax increase.

The law to increase taxes over the next two years comes as legislators seek to close a projected $900 million budget gap for that same period and bolster funding for K-12 schools under a Kansas Supreme Court order.

Which reminds of the Reagan administration and what Republicans in the past have had to do:

Everyone remembers Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. His admirers are less likely to tout the tax hikes he accepted as the 1981 recession and his own tax cuts began to unravel his long-term fiscal picture–a large tax increase on business in 1982, higher payroll taxes enacted in 1983 and higher energy taxes in 1984. A decade later, when a serious recession and higher spending began to upend the fiscal outlook again, the first President Bush similarly raised taxes on higher-income people in 1991; Bill Clinton doubled down and raised them again in 1993. 

Why are the current bunch of Republicans so slow to learn?  Why is Laffer still granted credibility?   At the risk of repeating myself:  it seems that it's mainly to do with the small government/libertarian strain in the American Right - it just doesn't like, on principle, government doing things, and strangling revenue is a means to an end for them.  It's not economics that suggests deep tax cuts are always a good idea - although I gather that Laffer does his best at mathturbation to try to show lower tax States do better than higher taxed ones.   (I suspect this is one of the examples where the huge range of factors that are difficult to account for in economics lets an economist construct a result he desires.)   But the public does expect government to do things now, and the Republicans eventually have to come back towards reality.

As I was saying (about Red States and renewables)

Remember last week I said I was relatively sanguine about the consequences of Trump leaving the Paris Accord* because, surprisingly, Republican States were actually already taking up renewable energy despite their rhetoric on climate change?

Well, there's a full article in the NYT talking in more detail about this, and it's far more widespread than Texas.    Here's how it starts:

Two years ago, Kansas repealed a law requiring that 20 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2020, seemingly a step backward on energy in a deeply conservative state.

Yet by the time the law was scrapped, it had become largely irrelevant. Kansas blew past that 20 percent target in 2014, and last year it generated more than 30 percent of its power from wind. The state may be the first in the country to hit 50 percent wind generation in a year or two, unless Iowa gets there first.

Some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election.

The five states that get the largest percentage of their power from wind turbines — Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma and North Dakota — all voted for Mr. Trump. So did Texas, which produces the most wind power in absolute terms. In fact, 69 percent of the wind power produced in the country comes from states that Mr. Trump carried in November.

*  which is not the same thing as saying I think it was a wise decision - quite the contrary.  It was a stupid decision made only to get applause from rednecks at rallies and libertarian billionaires and those who they fund.