Searching for the real Buddha

This lengthy essay at AEON talks about the little that is known, or guessed, about the historical Buddha.   (Very, very little is known with any certainty.)

The author paints this picture (and make sure to read to the end):

Bringing the reliable historical fragments together, and discarding mythic elaborations, a humbler picture of the Buddha emerges. Gotama was born into a small tribe, in a remote and unimportant town on the periphery of pre-imperial India. He lived in a world on the cusp of urbanisation, albeit one that still lacked money, writing and long-distance trade. More importantly, we might ask what happened to Gotama after he had been drawn into a counterculture of ascetics and philosophers, and especially after he had attained his ‘awakening’. The texts say that the Buddha achieved remarkable success as a teacher straight away, but this seems unlikely.

The Pali account of the Buddha’s ‘First Sermon’ claims that its five recipients immediately attained enlightenment. But other texts give reason to doubt this. Indeed, these disciples are hardly mentioned again in the textual record, and in fact the occasional appearance of some of them is not entirely flattering. One text tells the story of an encounter between the Buddha and Koṇḍañña, the most prominent of the first disciples. After a lengthy absence from the Buddha, Koṇḍañña acts like a supplicating devotee, not an enlightened Buddhist saint (arahant): he is said to prostrate himself on the ground, stroking and kissing the Buddha’s feet, all the while announcing: ‘I am Koṇḍañña, I am Koṇḍañña!’

Another prominent member of the group of five, called ‘Assaji’, is mentioned in a few more places. But one text records the occasion when he was ill and became upset because he could no longer attain meditative absorption. Just like the text on Koṇḍañña’s emotional reunion with the Buddha, Assaji is not depicted as an enlightened saint. This suggests that, within the old Buddhist literature from ancient India, pre-mythic stories about the Buddha’s life have survived. Further historical fragments can be retrieved from myth, for example the primary Pali account of the Buddha’s ‘awakening’, where we are told that Gotama considered not bothering with teaching, since nobody would understand him. After Gotama did decide to teach, the first person to encounter him, an ascetic called Upaka, was not impressed. Upaka asks who Gotama’s teacher is. When Gotama replies that he is fully awakened, and so has no teacher, Upaka simply shakes his head and walks off, saying ‘maybe’.

That's sort of amusing.

The next section of the article is really interesting too - emphasising that Buddha's reputation may have been built by his "quietism".  And if one wants to be cynical, it almost comes across as describing an ancient version of Being There (a movie I don't care for, incidentally.)   That is, a case of people reading too much into simple, enigmatic statements, or insistent silence.

I doubt that it was the writers intention to give me that impression, but that's what came to my mind.

Science fiction and comedy has toyed with various ideas about Christ;  maybe it's time for a "Life of Gotama" too.

Once again, the pain behind the comedian

I didn't know much about Mel Brooks' personal life, except that I recall something about an unflattering biography.  Not sure if the book was the one reviewed in Jewish Review of Books (a publication I had not heard of before!), but here are some extracts which I thought noteworthy:

Funny Man tells the improbable story of how Melvin Kaminsky, the short, unbookish, unhandsome son of Kitty Kaminsky, became a comedy icon, an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar winner. He was Kitty’s fourth son, supremely coddled and cared for. “I’d had such a happy childhood,” Brooks claimed, and maybe so, though its outlines were Dickensian. The Brooklyn Kaminskys were poor (“so poor, we do not even have a language—just a stupid accent!” wails a woman in History of the World: Part I). The family was grieving a tragedy—the death of Brooks’s father when Brooks was two. The main absence-presence in Brooks’s life, his father haunts this biography, as he apparently haunted Brooks long into adulthood....

Brooks was an incorrigible goofball, but he was fundamentally serious about comedy in a way that mirrored the seriousness of the times. In early 1944, just before D-Day, Brooks enlisted in the army and shipped out to France. Like so many soldiers, he returned scarred, damaged, prone to mood swings and depressions. He’d seen devastated French villages, streets strewn with fresh corpses. The experience “added a layer of outer shell to his personality,” McGilligan writes, insulating him from his own emotions and from other people’s....

The delightful Brooks, such grand company, gets short shrift in Funny Man, elbowed aside by the angry, belligerent Brooks. Beneath anger, there’s usually pain, and in Brooks’s case, there were reservoirs of it. In the 1950s, while writing Your Show of Shows, Brooks suffered frequent nervous breakdowns. There were bursts of hypomania; sudden, acute bouts of mourning; and at least one episode of paranoid psychosis. Finally, Brooks submitted to therapy. “All I did was cry,” he recalled of his psychoanalytic sessions. “For two years. I did nothing but sob.” Brooks’s dark night of the soul lasted six years.

By all accounts, Brooks learned much about himself, trading misery for ordinary unhappiness. What all that therapy didn’t do was change Brooks. He seems to have suffered from a looming sense of emptiness, an affliction not to be therapized away. In the showbiz mindset he carried with him, attention is oxygen; wealth is validation; prizes and praise are sustaining. The problem, McGilligan makes clear, is that no amount of applause could satisfy Brooks; his needs were bottomless. Even after he won an Academy Award for his short film The Critic, Brooks often felt neglected and unappreciated.

George joins the microbial food future

I mentioned last year that I had not been able to track down the (I think) RN Science Show in which it was claimed that the future of cheap, bulk food to feed the masses was going to come from vats of microbially sourced protein.   Not the (way over-hyped) meat grown from meat cells, but from the right kind of bacteria, which is then processed into food.

Well, it seems George Monbiot has got excited about this idea too, as he explains in this article in (where else?) The Guardian.      It starts:

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

Here's a BCC article on the same company.   The only thing that sounds a bit unnecessarily complicated - they say they will use hydrogen make from electrolysis of water as part of the feed to the bacteria.   Hence they need cheap (renewable) electricity for this to make environmental sense. 

Can't they do more with - I don't know, I'm just guessing here - GM algae, or something that doesn't need the hydrogen? 

Still Lost in Space

I've watched the first two episodes of the second series of Netflix's revamped Lost in Space, and I have to say, I still find the show very likeable.   I don't say it's monumentally great, but this part of an on-line review sums it up well:  Lost in Space remains aggressively fine in Season 2.

To sum up the things which keep impressing me:

*  the production design - is it weird that I spend much of every episode wondering why I love the interior of the Jupiter 2 so, so much?   Apart from that, the spacesuits they wear look solidly authentic compared to most science fiction.  And even the other gear they wear around inside sometimes - it all looks exactly how I think it should look.   The production staff deserve some kind of award;

*  the special effects - they seem particularly good this season, and certainly cinema movie quality;

*  the incredible ability of Posey Parker to make her (intentionally) horrible, manipulative Dr Smith so intensely dislikeable.   She really takes it up another level, but I am sort of enjoying the intensity of the cringing whenever she is doing one of her manipulation attempts on any of the crew.

*  the general level of acting is pretty fine all around, really.  As with the TV series, a lot hangs on young Will Smith, but this actor is handling it really well.

I hope it is rating well...

Update:  I meant to throw in that, while I appreciate that it is not exactly realistic,  I find it almost amusingly endearing now how the screenwriters take the attitude that there is never not enough time for the family to be having some interpersonal bickering - they might have 60 seconds left to avoid certain death by doing something or other, but at least one of the kids and at least one of the parents will still have time to have some back and forth about how they don't feel appreciated, or aren't being given enough responsibility, or some such.   The words "Shut up, we don't have enough time for that right now" seem to have been banned.

Joe Hildebrand: fact arsonist

So, "I'm just trying to be reasonable" professional opinion sprouter Joe Hildebrand put out a tweet saying this:

The problems start with item 1.

Arson definition:  Arson is the act of intentionally and maliciously destroying or damaging property through the use of fire.  Definition from the Australian Institute of Criminology, which is where Joe cites support for his claim.

The AIC report he is presumably relying on is this one, from 2008, which analysed figures from all Australian States, and came up with this conclusion:

Hence, I would have thought that anyone sensible would not claim anything more than "up to half of all bushfires might be deliberately lit", but even that would be misleading.

The correct summary would be "one study indicates that at least 13% of bushfires are deliberately lit, but if all suspicious fires are assumed to also be arson, then it might be as high as 50%".

And even then, it would be fudging somewhat on the qualifications the AIC gave:

Some caution should be taken when considering these figures. Just over 40 percent of vegetation fires across Australia do not have a cause assigned by the responding fire agency. Furthermore, inconsistencies exist between and within agencies in recording data. For example, different agencies may have different thresholds as to when they consider a fire to be deliberate, suspicious or unknown.

Well, that indicates that the exact figure for "arson" is extremely uncertain - and if you want to say that maybe some of the 40% of fires that don't have a cause assigned might be arson, then I would ask "do those fires matter much?  Is a cause not assigned because they were too small to worry about?"   And even if a fire is deliberately lit, it's not always by people who could be held responsible for their action.  Just this week, there was the report of an elderly man believed to suffer from dementia facing 4 charges of lighting fires.   His example might technically be arson, but it's irrelevant to the question of why this fire season is so bad. 

What Hildebrand, if he were honest, or smart, cannot claim is that the study he cites proves that "bushfires are started more by arson than any other cause". [I see in his Twitter defence against lots of people who are pointing this out to him that he now says "I didn't say it caused most fires", as a way of denying that he grouped "suspicious" with "deliberate".   But he must have to some extent to make his claim - "accidental" accounts for 35%, so for "arson" to get above that he has to have arbitrarily added at least 23% to "deliberate" from the "suspicious" column.] 

Why is he surprised that his so-called attempt at common sense consensus fails at step one?

It is, in fact, one of those exercises of "both side-ism" that carries a bias towards one side by giving it a credibility it does not warrant, assisted by his own dodgy number fiddling. 

Truth be told, most of us would feel he could do less harm if this were true...

Sunrise does something useful?

It's been obvious for sometime that Sunrise shows what might be called a "soft Right" bias in its politics now, so it is a little surprising to see that they had a guest to give clear pushback against the "it's all about the fuel load" claims of climate change denialists:

Well, that (almost) helps make up for Channel 7 helping pushing the other big denialist diversionary line that the arson issue is really behind the current crisis.   

The Victorian country fire authority chief yesterday hosing down (ha, a pun) the fuel load reduction issue was also useful. 

Here's the thing - scientists (and economists who believed them) gave clear warnings of a substantial increase in bushfire danger by 2020, and the events of this summer show that they were pretty much spot on.   Right wing climate change denialists (or lukewarmers who think economies growing as fast as possible are more important than environmental catastrophes that will get much worse after they are dead) are highly motivated to distract from the correct predictions.

Why is swords and sorcery fantasy more popular than ever?

Watched the first episode of The Witcher on Netflix last, and was completely underwhelmed.

I am not alone in this - I see that it only got 53% on Metacritic - but isn't Netflix saying it has huge ratings?  (Yes, it is.)

I guess people just can't get enough of their bloodthirsty, gratuitous boob, fantasies since Game of Thrones finished.  But what is the appeal of this genre?   It's always eluded me - even if it's family friendly fantasy such as Tolkien's.   If anything, the adult version offends me more for what has always struck me (since the first Conan the Barbarian and its imitators started appearing in the early 80's) as a too obvious attempt to broaden the market for an outdated genre by ramping up the soft porn and violence to appeal to young men.  But now, with the internet, the "let's give young guys access to soft porn" aspect is completely redundant, making it more gratuitous than ever.   So what are we left with - magic, the occasional monster and (let's face it) stuff that would have formerly been considered gratuitous ultra violence, but is now watched by women as well as men.   (And by the way, I don't think the fighting scenes were even well directed in that first episode.)

I don't understand the appeal at all...

Yes, she is appalling

El Nino predicted

Some news at the end of last year -

A group of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Beijing Normal University and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen has found a way to predict El Niño events up to a year before they occur. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their complexity-based approach to better predicting the seemingly random weather events. ...

Once they found that pattern, the researchers went analyzed yearly surface temperature data from 1984 to 2018 to make predictions about El Niño events in the past. They report that their method correctly predicted nine out of 10 El Niño events (and had three false positives.) Additionally, they found that the higher the disorder the previous year, the stronger the following El Niño event. The researchers conclude that it is now possible to predict El Niño events up to a year in advance with reasonable accuracy. 

Some of the work has come from an Israeli university, it seems, so the research got a lot of reporting in the Jewish press.  For example:

“This novel climate network approach is very promising for improving El Niño prediction,” said Prof. Shlomo Havlin, an Israel Prize-winning physicist from Bar-Ilan University who was involved in developing the algorithm.

“Conventional methods are unable to make a reliable El Niño forecast more than six months in advance. With our method, we have roughly doubled the previous warning time,” stressed JLU physicist Armin Bunde, who initiated the development of the algorithm together with his former PhD student Josef Ludescher.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Climate Impact Research, explained: “This clever combination of measured data and mathematics gives us unique insights – and we make these available to the people affected.”

He pointed out that the prediction method does not offer one hundred percent certainty: “The probability of El Niño in 2020 is around 80%. But that’s pretty significant.”

As El Nino is usually associated with less rainfall and higher temperatures in Australia, the 2020 prediction is really not good news.

Quantum overview

I quite liked this simplified list of quantum interpretations that appeared in a recent book review in TLS.  John Gribbins came up with this:

As it stands today, depending on how you want to interpret the results from a litany of physical and mathematical experiments all validating each other, you are left, basically speaking, with only so many possibilities of how you might understand the world. Gribbin chooses six of the more scientifically realized and commonly endorsed. As he summarizes them:

One. The world does not exist unless you look at it.

Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.

Three. Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.

Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.

Five. Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.

Six. The future influences the past.

As explained further down, this list equates with the Copenhagen Interpretation (number one, roughly) and the rest are:

the Pilot Wave, Many Worlds, Decoherence, Ensemble and Transactional interpretations

I like this bit of quirky information, too (in my bold):

Bohr said that the world revealed by measurements is the only reality worthy of the name, that the act of measurement actively constructs the reality that is being measured. Put an electron in a box. According to the Copenhagen interpretation – as Jim Holt describes in When Einstein Walked with Gödel – it “does not have a definitive location until we look inside to see just where it is. Prior to that act of observation, the electron is in a mixture of potential locations spread throughout the box”. This mixture is “mathematically represented by a ‘wave function,’ which expresses the different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various locations inside the box”. In French the wave function is poetically called the densité de présence, which is a helpful way of thinking about it.

Successful solar thermal?

I noticed an article at Bloomberg on a (pretty much) completely failed solar thermal plant in Nevada called Crescent Dunes.   I've reached my limit of free articles for Bloomberg, but if you haven't, here's the link.   Also, it has a wikipedia entry.

This made me think:  is there a company that is a clear leader in solar thermal that is making it work?

This seems a difficult topic on which to find solid information.

This site lists 8 companies, which work in CSP (concentrated solar power), but it doesn't really explain if they are making money. 

The Bloomsberg article said that that big problem with it is how cheap PV solar has become;  solar thermal's advantage is that it is not limited to making electricity during the day. But at what cost, is the issue, I suppose...

Standard Republican gaslighting

Update: and now -

The smoke hazard

One of the most surprising things about the terrible bushfires has been the seriousness of the smoke issue in Canberra (and to a lesser degree, Sydney).

I mean, I think this story was under-reported, if anything:

An elderly woman has died in Canberra tonight after she went into respiratory distress when exiting the plane to the tarmac which was filled with dense smoke from the bushfires.

The New Daily has confirmed the Canberra woman was on a Qantas plane arriving from Brisbane.

She was alive when she left the plane but relatives believe she went into respiratory distress after disembarking. ACT police and ambulance were called to the airport to assist.

Maybe there will be subsequent reports detailing properly the number of hospital admissions and increased mortality (one disturbing thing is that they say poor air quality and SIDS has a clear connection, making parents of newly born babies freak out with worry.)

But apart from that, it's the galleries and public buildings that are staying closed; the flights cancelled; the terrible images of smoke obscuring all views being spread across the globe.   You can imagine it having a terrible effect on summer tourism for some years to come.

It's part of what makes Right wing excuse making about how we've always had bushfires seem especially pathetic.   

Some criminal underworld stuff going on in Brisbane?

This is a surprising story:

Mr Percival's bar on Brisbane River hit by gun shots weeks after being firebombed

Shots have been fired at a bar on the Brisbane River that was firebombed on December 21.

The shots came from a boat on the river and were aimed at Mr Percival's bar at Howard Street Wharves, under the Story Bridge, according to police.

Police confirmed the shots were fired from a boat carrying three to four people.

 We're not used to bars being firebombed in Brisbane.  The most notorious one was in 1973, and the investigations into it just went on forever. 

Movie viewed

I finally got around to watching The Death of Stalin last night (on SBS On Demand).

It was very good.  It was also good to read this article at Slate as to which parts were true, or at least, half true.  

As I didn't go into it expecting great historical accuracy (as I don't expect there was really all that much humour to be found in the inner circle machinations after his death), the blender approach to the history behind it didn't bother me in this case.  (Mind you, I still wonder about the choices made.  Why make out that his daughter was sent immediately to Vienna?)

Jewish success considered

I'm still catching up on posting about things I read while I was away on a short break.   This is one of them.

As a result of Bret Stephen's recent controversial article in the New York Times, Noah Smith reminded us of a blog post he had written in 2013 which looked at explanations other than high IQ, culture (or conspiracy) which may well show that the apparent success of Jewish folk is somewhat illusory, or explained in more mundane ways.

I thought it raised many good points which I had not heard of before.

GRAEME:  DON'T COMMENT IT WILL BE DELETED

Northern sea surface temperatures: is this unusual?

I am doing a bit of "man in his shed" speculating here, but I had noticed somewhere that, even though there is a delayed start to the monsoon season in North Australia this summer, the sea surface temperature anomalies are pretty high up that way (in the Indian Ocean, and the Timor and Arafura Seas, at least):

Which made me wonder - very high sea surface temperatures were a feature of the summer before the 2011 floods.  How does today compare to then?

Unfortunately, this map does not use the same colour scale, so you have to convert it in your brain:

Now, I know one is a year long analysis, and the other is a one day snapshot:  but still, it seems to me that both show a large accumulation of anomalies in the 1.5 to 2 degrees range, with the difference that this year it is bunched up further north.

Still, is the large blob of hot water unusual for this time of year, and does it indicate that when the wet comes, it will be very wet indeed?

I guess we will soon find out...

Global debt considered

I always worry when someone writes something about economics that seems very reasonable to me, but extremely few commentators are discussing the issue at all.   Is it my lack of understanding of economics, or is it a case of the obvious being ignored by most economics commentators for political or other reasons? 

That's the feeling I have with this short piece in The Guardian by Phillip Inman:  Debt will kill the global economy.  But it seems no one cares.

An aviation thing I didn't really understand before

I had always wondered whether unlucky sailors might be covered with an obvious fine spray of aviation fuel if a passenger jet was doing an emergency fuel dump over them.  Apparently not, although they may still smell it:



Read the article that the video is from at Business Insider.