As the photo says...

Something happier for Christmas

There's a new full length and very recent concert recording of The Messiah up on Youtube, and although I haven't listened with headphones yet, the quality sounds very good.   I haven't seen this live for a couple of decades:

 

 

What a difference a State makes

 

Oh no - another month of indoor masking and staying away from crowds too much for handle for the libertarian/conservative set?

Noted on Twitter:

If Gray suffers a coronary, or Jason falls off his bike, they might appreciate not being "ramped" at a hospital in the ambulance, and having staff actually able to deal with them promptly.  Not to mention people needing on going care and treatment for cancers, etc.

Or do they think that because everyone's going to get it, the (generally young and relatively fit) nurses and doctors that catch it but have a mild dose should just continue coughing on patients for the good of the nation?  Even if they think "the patient will catch it eventually anyway", don't they think it would be better to catch in the future, after the patient has got over their current illness?   Do they think making staff who cough or sneeze and test positive stay at home for the 1 to 2 weeks to test negative is unreasonable? 

I can see a very plausible case as to why virtually every nation on the planet, regardless of vaccination rates, is temporarily, at least, tightening restrictions in light of Omicron, even though it looks increasingly clear that it will kill a much smaller percentage of patients than Delta.

And yes, it may well represent the beginning of the end of the severe effects of the pandemic.

But I see no problem at all with not wanting all of the Omicron cases to pile up at too fast a rate because of the obvious potential to cause the heathcare system to be severely understaffed (and possibly, not enough ICU beds) in the near term. 

I wonder how rich Steve Kates is

What does Steve Kates, the ageing crank Trump cultist and only economist in the world who truly understands where economics all went wrong (just ask him), think of how his bete noire (Keynes) made heaps of money from good investment strategy?

An article at The Conversation talks about it, and concludes he would not have invested in Bitcoin.  I certainly would hope not!

A simple question

Why would Putin be worried about Ukraine from a security point of view anyway?:

Russia doesn't want conflict with Ukraine but Western powers must provide Moscow with "unconditional security guarantees", President Vladimir Putin has said.

Speaking at his annual news conference, Mr Putin said the US has missiles at "Russia's doorstep" and the "ball is in the West's court" in relation to security in the region.

Which country in the West would actually want Russia?   For what?  Their gas?  As if that would be worth the trouble of war.    

Update:  the Guardian offers some kind of analysis.   And the gas supply issue is complicated - but I still don't really see the security aspect well explained anywhere.

A reason for caution

An article at Nature today indicates that if a "high risk" person gets very sick from the Omicron version of Covid, it may well be harder to treat:

Strained hospitals bracing for a COVID-19 surge caused by the quickly spreading Omicron variant could face another grim possibility: preliminary experiments suggest that most of the antibody treatments for the disease are powerless against Omicron^1,2,3,4.

Doctors use artificial versions of natural antibodies to stave off severe COVID-19 in high-risk people who are infected with the coronavirus. But a slew of publications posted on preprint servers report laboratory evidence that Omicron is totally or partially resistant to all currently available treatments based on these monoclonal antibodies. The publications have not yet been peer reviewed, but some of the companies that manufacture antibody therapies already concede that their products have lower potency against Omicron than against other variants.

I guess the question still is - how many high risk people are going to get seriously sick from it in the first place. 

Update:  this seems a really good Twitter thread on the good news/bad news about Covid which (as the doctors says) is enough to make your head spin.  It includes more detail about the antibody therapies above, as well as the supply issues for other new treatments which seem pretty insurmountable. 

The deep irony (and/or stupidity)

Those of a libertarian/conservative bent who are carrying on most about the "totalitarianism" of public health decisions regarding Covid (see the awful Richard Hanania, for example - I think I have to unsubscibe from his Twitter feed because he seems to tweet about 200 times a day and every second or third one is appalling) are also likely to be Trump apologists and not concerned at all about the detailed revelations of a  plan to actually fraudulently get reinstated as President in what would have been a stunning totalitarian overturn of democracy normally associated with some lawless tinpot regime.

Which, I should add, is not to say that governments are above criticism for some of their Covid decisions.

Proteins are pretty incredible

I guess this aligns with my recent post about card shuffling and the mind boggling mathematics of the number of possible outcomes.  

Proteins have the same feature.  From a Science magazine article, nominating AI work on working out protein structures as the breakthrough of 2021:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses. They contract our muscles, convert food into cellular energy, ferry oxygen in our blood, and fight microbial invaders. Yet despite their varied talents, all proteins start out with the same basic form: a linear chain of up to 20 different kinds of amino acids, strung together in a sequence encoded in our DNA. After being assembled in cellular factories called ribosomes, each chain folds into a unique, exquisitely complex 3D shape. Those shapes, which determine how proteins interact with other molecules, define their roles in the cell.

Work by Anfinsen and others suggested interactions between amino acids pull proteins into their final shapes. But given the sheer number of possible interactions between each individual link in the chain and all the others, even modest-size proteins could assume an astronomical number of possible shapes. In 1969, American molecular biologist Cyrus Levinthal calculated that it would take longer than the age of a universe for a protein chain to cycle through them one by one—even at a furious pace. But in nature, each protein reliably folds up into just one distinctive shape, usually in the blink of an eye.

All about Mary

Oh, here's a summary of Christian (mainly Catholic and Orthodox) beliefs regarding Mary.

I knew all of it, but not in the precise detail given here.    For example:

The early centuries of the Christian tradition were silent on the death of Mary. But by the seventh and eighth centuries, the belief in the bodily ascension of Mary into heaven, had taken a firm hold in both the Western and Eastern Churches.

The Eastern Orthodox Greek Church held to the dormition of Mary. According to this, Mary had a natural death, and her soul was then received by Christ. Her body arose on the third day after her death. She was then taken up bodily into heaven.

For a long time, the Catholic Church was ambiguous on whether Mary rose from the dead after a brief period of repose in death and then ascended into heaven or was “assumed” bodily into heaven before she died.

Belief in the ascension of Mary into heaven became Catholic doctrine in 1950. Pope Pius XII then declared that Mary

was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.

I am curious as to how Pope Pius XII could be so certain of this detail.   How exactly does the Holy Spirit whisper this level of detail?

Anyway, does it mean that she didn't die at all?   Apparently, that remained an open question, but a more recent Pope said:

On 25 June 1997 Pope John Paul II said that Mary experienced natural death prior to her assumption into Heaven. 

OK, well still seems to me there is room for speculation on how soon after the death the rise into the sky happened.  I mean, it could have quite the surprise for those preparing the body for burial.

Or does "ascend into heaven" have to mean a sky ascension  such as that of Christ?   Could it be done by the body just disappearing into the higher dimension of heaven?  I know that art has favoured the former, but a more subtle form of "ascension" might be easier for the relatives to handle.

I didn't know this, too:

Indeed, Mary is mentioned more often in the Qur'an than in the New Testament.

 Huh.

Update:   OK, so this (Catholic) University of Dayton site (also called "All about Mary") cites one of the earliest writings (perhaps back to 5th century) about what is supposed to have happened, and it went into a lot of detail:

This text, more commonly known as Transitus (passing on, crossing over) Mariae, and attributed to Melito of Sardes tells of Mary's homegoing in detail:

In the presence of the apostles gathered around her bed, also in the presence of her divine Son and many angels, Mary died and her soul, rose to heaven, accompanied by Christ and the angels. Her body was buried by the disciples. Difficulties developed among certain of the Jews who wished to dispose of her body. Various types of miracles occurred to convince them to honor Mary's body. On the third day, Christ returned. At the request of the apostles the soul of Mary is reunited with her body. Accompanied by singing angels, Christ brought Mary to paradise.

So, that's where the Eastern Church's "dormition of Mary" comes from.   

And I see from reading this article that I was getting confused in my post - that the doctrine is definitely the assumption of Mary, not the ascension:  although I still think it fair to say that artist representations make it look like an physical rising into the sky:

It is essential and significant to note the distinction between the resurrection and ascension of Christ, who rose up, in contrast to Mary who is assumed or taken into heaven. The early poetry on the Assumption of Mary, which originated and circulated widely in the Eastern Church, expresses this difference and parallelism.

Anyway, the Transitus was pooh-poohed, for some reason, by a Pope soon after:

In the early sixth century, a papal decree, Decretum Gelasianum, classified the Transitus Mariae writings as apocryphal, but this did not hinder the wide distribution of well over thirteen-hundred manuscripts throughout the West. In England, it was known well before the thirteenth century and is one of the first poetic texts written in early English. There are many versions among the hand copied manuscripts. The Transitus Mariae was incorporated into the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It is also incorporated into a text known as Vita BVM et salvatoris rhythmica (The rhythmic life of the BVM and redeemer), written in the mid-thirteenth century. These later texts add many embellishments to describe Mary's entry into heaven. All the saints and angels come to greet her and do her homage as her Son crowns her queen. These texts are gathered uncritically from various sources, but they nevertheless express faith-filled devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On the question of how, nearly 1,900 years later, it could be declared as dogma, is explained as follows:

The proclamation of the dogma was part of a plan of Pope Pius XII to honor Mary. He appealed to the faith of the Church as partial basis for the definition. As O'Carroll writes:

"The faith of the Church had been manifest in different ways. Between 1849 and 1950, numerous petitions for the dogma arrived in Rome. They came from One hundred and thirteen Cardinals, eighteen Patriarchs, twenty-five-hundred-five archbishops and bishops, thirty-two-thousand priests and men religious, fifty-thousand religious women, eight million lay people. On May 1, 1946 the Pope had sent to the bishops of the world the Encyclical Deiparae Virginis, putting this question to them: 'More especially we wish to know if you, Venerable Brethren, with your learning and prudence consider that the bodily Assumption of the Immaculate Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith and whether in addition to your own wishes this is desired by your clergy and people.' When the replies were collated, it was found that twenty-two residential bishops out of 1181 dissented, but only six doubted that the Assumption was revealed truth--the others questioned the opportuneness." (p. 56)

Pius XII considered this response as a "certain and firm proof" that the Assumption is a truth revealed by God.

So this paints it as if it was more or less by popular demand - but the "8 million lay people" is surely a tiny fraction of the overall number.  Look at these counts of the global Catholic population over a century:

 

This graph doesn't give us the totals for 1950, but adding them up, it looks like it might have been around 400 - 500 million?:

Well, this puts the significance of the number of laity petitioning for the doctrine - and it seems it was 8 million over the course of a century - making the total at any one time a tiny fraction of the actual laity.

If dogmatic doctrine can be made by popular demand of a small fraction of the most conservative laity (and a bigger group of bishops and priests), can they be reversed by a more overwhelming popular vote in future?  But these are the knots that the Church has tied itself into unnecessarily.

 

Indoor mask wearing

 I agree.   Seems to me that at this highly uncertain stage as to the effect on our health system of an incredibly transmissible disease, it's just common sense to adopt even marginally beneficial practices which carry no huge burden - such as making mask wearing in shops and public transport mandatory.   (And I mean, it doesn't even raise the trickier issue of mask wearing in schools at the moment - school's not in for another month, by which time Omicron will be better understood.)

Update:  two articles explaining the idea that used to be considered mainstream common sense, until paranoid conservatives more interested in culture warring than living decided it wasn't.   

Update 2:  Katharine Murphy on the Morrison spin politics of mask mandates is very good.   I cannot wait to see the back of him as PM. 

Update 3:

He doesn't hold the hose, you know.

Ancient Christian bling

This ring looks like it would have been expensive:

Quantum needs imaginary numbers

I hadn't realised this was a contentious issue before:

Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. 

In fact, even the founders of quantum mechanics themselves thought that the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting. In a letter to his friend Hendrik Lorentz, physicist Erwin Schrödinger — the first person to introduce complex numbers into quantum theory, with his quantum wave function (ψ) — wrote, "What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of complex numbers. Ψ is surely fundamentally a real function."

Schrödinger did find ways to express his equation with only real numbers alongside an additional set of rules for how to use the equation, and later physicists have done the same with other parts of quantum theory. But in the absence of hard experimental evidence to rule upon the predictions of these "all real" equations, a question has lingered: Are imaginary numbers an optional simplification, or does trying to work without them rob quantum theory of its ability to describe reality?

Now, two studies, published Dec. 15 in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, have proved Schrödinger wrong. By a relatively simple experiment, they show that if quantum mechanics is correct, imaginary numbers are a necessary part of the mathematics of our universe.

 

 

A simple problem with Covid

I've been meaning to note that I read a thread on Twitter recently, perhaps from an overseas doctor, which made the somewhat under-appreciated point that a big problem COVID presents, especially with the wildly transmissible Omicron, for hospital managers is the lengthy period positive testing staff have to be away from work.  Hence, even with modest increases in actual COVID patients in a hospital, it may still be really suffering from inadequate staff for all of their patients.

Certified

I've mentioned before the frenetic Twitter commentator Richard Hanania, who got recommended by a couple of well known internet intellectuals and seems to have thereby picked up a heap of followers.

But, seriously, the guy is a certifiable creepy libertarian sociopath, if you ask me.  And look, it might be a cheap shot, but he has a face that would fit so well with being a Batman villain - he's got a Joker vibe going even without makeup.

The latest evidence:

This take completely ignores that Right Wing media (Fox News particularly) has combined undying support of Trump with vaccine/Covid scepticism for a year or more now.   There is no reason to think they are going to start believing Trump on this issue - they are going to put it down to "something Donald likes to bullshit about, but we like him anyway."  They know they still have "and just like that, Covid will go away" Trump from 2 years ago.

Worse:  

He is, like so many at Catallaxy, sure that there is a masculinity crisis ruining the world.   It's a view often held by incels, of which it would hardly be surprising Richard is a member.  There is also considerable irony in him calling others "twitter dorks".

 

Yeah, just being a smug jerk. 

OK, so this doctor's recommendation sounds over the top and ripe for ridicule.  Problem is, Richard's reaction sounds like he wants to blow up her apartment and practice and would think he is doing the world a good.

Sociopath who thinks we understand Omicron enough to know it's safe to spread.  We do not.   In a month or two, we will know how dangerous it is.  But it's foolish in the extreme to be like him.

 

He doesn't have to manage hospitals and health systems - so all good!   Richard's happy that people want to avoid him - a very reasonable reaction, given he doesn't care if he gives someone else a disease that might kill them.   

Comment that made me laugh:

Japanese content

First, France 24, of all channels, has a short but good report on the decline of the Yakuza in Japan:

 

And secondly, quite a charming short video by young Japanese guy Shunchan, in which he surprises his grandparents with a visit after quitting his salaryman job. (He's not your typical Japanese!) My daughter keeps saying "is he gay?" based on his often somewhat Korean boy band-ish fashion sense, but he has clearly indicated in previous videos that he isn't.  I always feel a bit sorry for him, as a guy who can't really work out what he wants to do in his life, but he has a very likeable Youtube persona. 

This isn't very Christmassy, but: an exorcism co-incidence

Well isn't that odd - American funny man (I don't really know what his main job is) "JonTron" finally put out another video, and it's a review of a fairly recent (and terribly, terribly amateurish and unconvincing) documentary by the original director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin, about a real life exorcism in Rome.   The guy swears a bit, but he's pretty funny:

 

And then, today, I see this article in The Guardian, which seems just a co-incidence: 

Boy whose case inspired The Exorcist is named by US magazine 

The article gives some details of the case, which dates back to 1949.   If they are correct (a big "if"), and comparing it to the Rome in Friedkin's flaky documentary, it would indicate that demonic possessions is not what it used to be.

Long time readers would know I am not totally averse to "woo"; I think I even count as more than merely "woo curious".   But I've never been all that sold on demonic possession.  And, as it happens, I've only ever seen little bits of The Exorcist, and feel very confident that it would not be at all unsettling for me.   I think it looks very dated and ludicrous, and find it hard to believe that it did convincingly scare people back in the day.

True, that

 

Why?

I assume from the photo that the article is talking about commercial rent hikes?   If so, why would this be the case?   Companies have just spent 2 years learning they can operate pretty well with half the staff on any one day working from home.  My expectation would be that city commercial renters will only take half the space when they renew, leading to a glut of cheaper space available in the city.

Where is that expectation wrong?

Hossenfelder tries to explain superdeterminism

Well, I knew she would have to be doing this soon, given the recent arXiv paper in which she was a co-author.  Here's Sabine Hossenfelder trying to explain superdeterminism and her expectation that it
solves all quantum oddities:

 

I don't understand the issues fully, but my impression is that Sabine underplays the philosophical significance of it. I wonder what other physicists think.  (To give more detail:  she seems to make an argument that it has no "real" implication at the macro level - but I am not sure that's right...) 

Update:   from comments following the video on Youtube, I pick out a couple that deal with the retro-causality interpretation, which she never mentions:

Before measurement of the particle in the double slit experiment, it is non-localised in time, it literally occupies all possible positions starting when it was emitted up to the point it is observed. This is how a single particle can go through both slits and interfere with itself. After it is observed, it becomes localised in time and acts like a single particle, not a wave. This is why observing before the slits eliminates interference, and does not if you observe afterwards. The crazy part is that the act of observation retroactively affects the past. If you observe before the slit, you do not get interference. If you observe afterwards, you get interference. This is because the wave collapse propagates backwards to the point the particle was emitted. Particles moving forwards and backwards through time acting like a wave, until the point they are observed at which point they never moved forwards and backwards through time in the first place and were always single particles, explains all the 'spookiness' and also explains that the hidden variables are hidden in time and as entities moving linearly through time we will never be able to observe them. Once you get your head around this concept, the weird behaviour of particles in quantum mechanics becomes obvious and logical.

 Mind you, the commenter was "Microdoser", so I'm not sure I should trust him (or her) given my skepticism about that practice.

Another one:

I would add that many physicists assume entaglement can only propagate forward in time. Basic time invariance says that entanglement must be able to propagate backward in time just as well as forward.

And:

So Is Superdeterminism described more by the future affecting the past, or by particles/ wave functions reacting differently depending on what is around them and what they interact with? thank you for the video

Last one:

If the detectors are far apart, and they do influence the measurement, then there is fast-than-light effects happening. (aka "spooky action at a distance"). And maybe this is the misunderstanding in communications with Bell or Zeilinger. As far I understand, they assumed superdeterminism to be a loophole to remove non-locality, in the sense to say the detector isn't actually choosing the angle of measurement, randomly, but is deterministic as well, and the particles kind of "know" this. Bell even got so far as to take a photon from the cosmic background radiation to determine which angle to measure at, which would leave the entanglement of the detector all the way back to the big bang.. and thats what I think they called absurd in "no free will". Thus SD and keeping non-locality, yeah why not. No issue with it, it is supposed to fix non-locality, I really would like to see a backdown how it should work, without making the universe holistic (and thats where I said in effect destryoing non-locality all together). Honestly, I don't have an issue with real faster-than-light effects as long the "cosmic censorship" is somehow in affect that it doesn't allow information communication. So maybe the wave form is physically real (the so called particle is really smeared out) and maybe the collapse is really faster than light. And maybe in case of entangled particles the waves are really connected far apart until collapse. So what. If this is reality, I don't care if Einstein wouldn't consider it beautiful ;)

Another bit of "yeah, but apart from that, what did the Romans ever do for us?"

New research suggests that the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate is the one that built the Biar Aqueduct, the most sophisticated ancient aqueduct of the Jerusalem area. The study also uncovered the way the unique aqueduct was constructed.

The aqueduct is part of the ancient water system serving Jerusalem. Biar, the shortest of the aqueducts, brought water from a point south of Bethlehem to Solomon’s Pools. Other aqueducts carried the water from there to Jerusalem. The five-kilometer aqueduct includes the Biar Spring, an underground shaft tunnel running about three kilometers, a surface channel and dozens of piers used for its construction and maintenance....

Archaeologists exploring Jerusalem have known of the aqueduct for a good 150 years. It has been dated from the Hasmonean period, in the second century B.C.E., through Herod to the late Roman period of the second century C.E. Yechezkel’s team used carbon dating of plaster to suggest that the aqueduct was built in the mid-first century C.E., before the destruction of the Second Temple. They believe Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect from 26/27 C.E. to 36/37 C.E., known for condemning Jesus to death, ordered its construction.

It's from a Haaretz article, which is quite interesting.

The mug

This is the photo print mug I got made at Kmart last weekend.  Cute, no?

Rats and New York

 The BBC reports on the new (Covid led) trend for outdoor dining in New York city, and its detrimental effects, including more rats than ever before.

The city's ridiculous garbage collection system gets plenty of mention too, but it would seem no one considers that a move to actually using bins with lids is possible.   Surely more rubbish being put out in bins with lids helps limit rat access to it?

This looks good

This movie trailer is getting a lot of positive comment - and I can understand why.  

 

Yes, it's another "multiverse" themed movie, but (no insult to the new Spiderman, I do intend seeing it) it's good to see it being done with fresh new characters.

Real tragedy

Children's deaths in the news are always distressing, but it feels particularly worse in the imagination when it happens while having innocent fun.

The news is going world wide, with the New York Times story indicating that this might be the biggest number of deaths from any "bouncy castle" accident.  Ugh.

A modern tragedy

So a woman in a private hospital room is upset:

Cassie of Sydney says:

December 16, 2021 at 1:54 pm

1. I was double jabbed by October 2021…the AZ vaccine.

2. As demanded by NSW Health and all NSW hospitals, prior to my admittance to hospital on Monday 6 December, on Friday 3 December I had my first Covid test ever. It returned negative.

3. Last Saturday morning, 11 December, before being transferred to another hospital, I had my second Covid test. It returned negative. I was transferred to my new hospital on Sunday morning 12 December.

4. On Tuesday afternoon 14 December, the first hospital rang the second hospital to tell them that I may have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the Covid Omicron strain. The contact would have happened sometime Saturday afternoon. At about 4.30p.m. on Tuesday 14 December a nurse came in in protective clothing and performed a Covid test on me…..we are still waiting on the result.

5, So, since Tuesday 14 December, at 4.00 p.m. precisely, I have been isolated in my hospital room. I am not allowed to leave, no visitors. Nothing. The nurses and physio come in to the room attired in protective clothing….as though I have Ebola! 

6. We are still waiting on the result of the first Covid test however I have been told that as a matter of security the hospital does a second Covid test, this will be one done tomorrow afternoon and sent off.

7. I will not know any result until at least Sunday….so I am locked in a hospital room until 19 December.

8. I ask genuinely….what was the point of getting jabbed?

9. There is no way…and I mean no way….that I will be having a third, fourth, fifth or sixth jab.

10. Given the above, as you can all imagine my mental health at the moment is not the best, I hope this doesn’t impact my surgical recovery.

11. I am very upset.

Considering that she has more privacy than most get in hospital, food made for her, internet access and help on call, going berserk over a 5 day period of relative isolation strikes me a pretty pathetic plead for victimhood by a woman whose constant angry on line presence I now consider due to a mental weakness.   (She is getting plenty of support from the other tossers at Cathollaxy.)   

Toughen up, dear....

(I can afford to be rude to her, as she has been endlessly rude to me when engaging directly with her on Catallaxy.)

 

An article for anti vaxxers

How do people not feel furious at the anti-vax peddling Fox News and websites (including the Australian wingnut Christofascist ones) when you have credible and detailed reporting from actual hospitals about the crisis that the un-vaxxed cause?

Take this article, about the experience in Kentucky, from Bloomberg.   

It just shows the power of relentless political/culture war propaganda to susceptible minds, doesn't it?    

Update:   just appalling.  Fox News is a plain force for human suffering in the interests of a bunch of insane hypocrites making money:

 

Allahpundit is appalled too:

I wrote 1,000+ words this morning on the new data about whether Omicron is truly “mild” or not. It might be, or its mildness might be a partial mirage created by the youth and broad natural immunity from previous waves that South Africa enjoys. The key point in all analyses of Omicron, though, is that a virus that’s freakishly infectious, as this one appears to be, needs to also be freakishly mild for there not to be a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. Assume that Omicron is half as lethal as Delta but, as some studies have indicated, four times more transmissible. We’d expect a virus like that to produce twice the death toll Delta did (at least in the non-immune population) despite it being technically “milder.”...

The insanely steep spikes we’re seeing in European cases may not be evidence of Omicron surging and replacing Delta but evidence of Omicron and Delta infecting different sub-populations at the same time. That’s the CDC’s nightmare scenario, that Omicron will hit here full force but won’t sideline Delta by doing so. Instead the two will circulate in tandem, sometimes infecting the same people, and creating a double-whammy wave of sickness with Delta patients suffering somewhat more severe outcomes.

 If that’s true then Saphier’s advice is insanely reckless. She’s telling people, including unvaccinated people, to go out and have no fear when doing so risks exposing them to Delta, not just Omicron. What is she thinking? Can we maybe wait a month to confirm that the variant is nothing worse than the “sniffles” before giving this advice?

 

Cult fight

The non-existant fraud

A good Allahpundit post at Hot Air.   (The comments usually indicate he is despised by most of the site's readership.  He is too reasonable for them.):

 I can’t believe we’re more than a year removed from the election and efforts are still ongoing to convince people that a candidate who lost the popular vote in his first national run, never had 50 percent job approval as president, got impeached, helmed the country during a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and was regarded as a boorish loose cannon even by his admirers might have legitimately lost to a well-known generic Democrat.

And not by a lot. By a few thousand votes in some states. Yet it seems unfathomable to some that it could have happened, starting with the man who lost.

The AP assigned at least eight reporters and many months of research across hundreds of local election offices to this impressive but totally futile project. They went district by district across Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia to see how many cases of potential voter fraud had been identified by local authorities in each. Were there enough suspect votes to account for Biden’s margin in any of them? Answer: Not remotely. “The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.”

Won’t matter. The point of the gassy conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines is that devotees realize piecemeal fraud could never happen to a large enough degree to flip a state unless it’s “Florida 2000” close, which none of the states won by Biden were. There has to be some unified field theory of massive under-the-radar vote-rigging in which ballots are switched en masse by the thousands or millions to explain those margins. That’s why all conspiracy roads ultimately lead back to Dominion and Smartmatic. Maggie Haberman is right, though, that the AP analysis is useful in one respect. It challenges the suspicion that laws that were relaxed during the pandemic to make voting by mail easier meaningfully increased the amount of fraud at the polls. They didn’t.

Even poor old JC from Catallaxy, and who continues to appear at fascist Cathollaxy (where he seems to think most of the other commentators are idiots, but he still hangs out there) believes that the election fraud was real. 

I wonder if Sinclair Davidson, who seemed half convinced by dubious statistical mathturbation claims that the election count must have been fraudulent, still believes that.   Since the downfall of Catallaxy, I don't know what he believes any more.   I should check his twitter, I suppose, but I seem to recall it's a pretty dull read, and mostly talks blockchain crap.

A surprising eye innovation

The New York Times explains:

An eye drop that improves close-range vision could make misplaced reading glasses less of an inconvenience for many of the 128 million Americans who suffer from age-related deficits in near vision. Vuity, which became available by prescription on Thursday, is a once-a-day treatment that can help users see up close without affecting their long-range vision.

“For anybody who doesn’t want to fiddle with reading glasses, this might be a really helpful alternative,” said Dr. Scott M. MacRae, an ophthalmologist at the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science. Dr. MacRae was not involved in the clinical trials for the drug, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in late October.

But the way it works sounds, well, a little dubious:

Vuity improves near vision by constricting the size of the pupil. “It makes the pupil small, creating what we call a pinhole effect,” that way reducing the amount of peripheral light that passes through the eye that can make it hard to focus, said Dr. Stephen Orlin, an ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Won't that mean it's harder to see in the dark?   Yes it does:

Although the clinical trials did not report any serious side effects, 14.9 percent of subjects who took Vuity reported mild headaches, compared with 7 percent of subjects who took placebo drops. Up to 5 percent of subjects taking Vuity reported other side effects such as eye redness, blurred vision, eye pain, visual impairment, eye irritation and an increased production of tears.

Because the eye drops reduce pupil size, they also make it harder to see in the dark, so they are not recommended for people who drive at night or need to see well in low light for other reasons, Dr. Waring said.

I think I'll pass.

 

 

 

Too stupid to know to call an ambulance

Not that I care about Sex and the City or its current sequel series at all (in fact, I pretty much consider it a blight on humanity that this set of characters ever existed), but I have been amused to read about how a fictional death could lead to much discussion about how dumb it makes the key character appear.

Read this amusing take on the matter (with expert opinion from a cardiologist) in The Vulture.

An unusual success story in criminology?

 

He makes a good point

 My personal aversion to exercise makes it hard to take sides on this one...:)

Local religion news

I want to know more about this:

This article explores how local Chinese authorities employed various strategies to promote the Patriarch of Sanping’s cult in post-Mao China from 1979 to 2015. It argues that the cult of the Patriarch of Sanping became an invented tradition for expanded religious tourism in Pinghe County in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province. Local state agents employed various placemaking strategies to promote Sanping Monastery and endorse the deity’s efficacy, creating an opportunity for resources to be channeled from other parts of China, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities to develop Pinghe County. This study shows that, on the one hand, local state agents have propagated miracle tales to entice devotees to visit and make donations to this monastery while, on the other hand, they have courted scholars, journalists, and tour guides to generate attention and interest in the cult. Overall, this article demonstrates how local government placemaking and marketing strategies have contributed to the transformation of a Buddhist master from a local deity to a popular god in contemporary China.

That's the abstract to an article in Critical Asian Studies: The making of a local deity: the Patriarch of Sanping’s cult in post-Mao China, 1979–2015.

Will see if I can access later.

That's some last line

In a Guardian story about a young-ish Catholic Spanish bishop who has given it all away to marry an "erotic novelist", the report ends on this note:

Novell, who has a degree in agricultural engineering and who was ordained in 1997, is now reported to be working for a company that extracts and sells pig semen.

A tea cup reading fortune teller of young Novell would have had quite the interpretation challenge. 

Update:  today I learned that tea cup/tea leaf/coffee grounds reading has a fancy name - tasseography.

Weekend stuff

*  Ate a very delicious yiros (lamb and haloumi) that made me think that is the best thing you can have at Greek cafe.  (But don't get me wrong; Greek food remains a basically uninteresting cuisine.)

*  Found out that Kmart can print photos on mugs immediately, if they are not busy (normally a next day service), and they cost $6.   That seems ridiculously cheap.

*  I didn't realise that Kentucky had a Democrat governor until watching the news of the amazingly damaging tornadoes.  Of course, wingnuts are working themselves into a lather over any suggestion climate change has anything to do with it - and I remember some years ago Roy Spencer getting indignant that increased atmospheric temperature should mean less (from memory) shear winds (or something?), so he was upset that anyone was suggesting that big summer tornadoes were due to it.   Others who make a career out of claiming climate scientists are exaggerating risk (Pielke Jnr) like to point out that the IPCC has said clearly that no trend is yet detectable.   But obviously, that doesn't rule out a connection to an unusual event like the weekend's - just we don't know for sure yet.

Yes a sad day

He did distinctive country rock and pop-ish work after the Monkees too, writing both memorable  break up songs (Different Drum) and great love songs.  Of the latter, I have always been very fond of Harmony Constant, and thought it would be a tearful/joyous song for anyone leaving behind a partner they love.

Here's a link to it.

It has begun...

I for one welcome our new furry overlords:

A man attacked by a pack of otters in a Singapore park has said that he thought he was going to die during the ordeal.

Graham George Spencer, a British citizen living in Singapore, said he was chased, pinned down and bitten “26 times in 10 seconds” by a family of otters while out for an early morning walk in the botanic gardens.

Spencer told The Straits Times he was approaching the gardens’ entrance on 30 November when he spotted about 20 otters crossing a path in front of him.

The animals were moving quietly but “went crazy” after another man ran towards them, Spencer told the paper. The runner was able to avoid the animals but Spencer was not as lucky.

He said they lunged at him, biting his ankles, legs and buttocks and causing him to fall over.

“I actually thought I was going to die – they were going to kill me,” he added.

Spencer’s friend, who was about “15 paces” away from him, ran up screaming in a bid to scare away the otters.

“I was bitten 26 times in 10 seconds. If it wasn’t for my friend, I don’t think I’d still be here. I’d be dead,” he told local outlet Today.

I'm trying to find a way to fit an insult to the British into this post too, without sounding too mean.  It's not coming to me, so far.

 

Just ludicrous

 

As someone else pointed out, this Rev's speech sounds very much like the satirical one Dan Ackroyd delivers to the rioting mob in 1941, which I get to mention twice in a week.  

 

To be honest, it would be incredibly funny if someone managed to torch the second tree - hundreds of millions of people would consider him (or her) a comedy troll hero. 

Sympathy (and sports terrorism) called for

I don't know why, but the start of the cricket season this year has given me a more heightened resentment than usual about the way it tramples over everything else - whole radio and TV channels previously full of potentially interesting programming overrun for days at a time by stuff I not only have no interest in, but I positively resent because of the way it pushes my mental landscape out of the way.   

Oh well.  I can always entertain myself by imagining revenge.   Throwing bottles of glycophosphate from a helicopter came to mind this morning....   

Update:  OK, here's how to keep me happier - special cricket channels that start operating during cricket matches (or cricket season), and leave the rest of the networks alone.    That way, everyone who wants cricket in their ear for 24 hours a day can get it, and I can pretend it doesn't exist as normal programming continues.

 

A good question

I think there's a lot that sounds right in this David Brooks article in The Atlantic:

What Happened to American Conservatism?

 He seems to annoy a lot on the Left in America, but I don't mind him.

Bleaching history

This morning, while using bleach to clean a sink, I realised I knew nothing about the history of this very useful, cheap product.   This article reminds us that making fabrics white used to be a very laborious process:

Humans have been whitening fabrics for centuries; ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans bleached materials. As early as 300 B.C. , soda ash, prepared from burned seaweed, was used to clean and whiten cloth. During the Middle Ages, the Dutch perfected the bleaching of fabrics in a process called crofting, whereby fabrics were spread out in large fields for maximum sunlight exposure. Textile mills as far away as Scotland shipped their material to the Netherlands for this bleaching. The practice quickly spread throughout Europe, and bleaching fields were documented in Great Britain as early as 1322. In 1728 a bleaching company using Dutch methods went into business in Galloway, Scotland. In this process, the fabrics were soaked in a lye solution for several days, then "bucked," or washed clean. The fabrics were then spread out on the grass for weeks at a time. This process was repeated five or six times until the desired whiteness was achieved. Next, the fabric was treated with sour milk or buttermilk, and again bucked and crofted. This method was lengthy and tedious, and it monopolized large tracts of land that could have been used for farming.

Late in the 18th century, scientists discovered a chemical that had the same effect as crofting, but yielded much quicker results. In 1774, Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele discovered the chemical element chlorine, a highly irritating, green-yellowish gaseous halogen. In 1785, the French scientist Claude Berthollet found that chlorine was an excellent whitening agent in fabrics. Some mill operators attempted to expose their fabrics to chlorine gas, but the process was so cumbersome and the fumes so strong that these attempts were soon abandoned. 

Another site goes into more detail about how the Dutch cornered the whitening market:

The whitening process with this lye method is a bit tricky. Additionally, it is cumbersome because it consumes several hours. Furthermore, it warrants extra care as it is pretty strong.

The Dutch are attributed for the modification they brought about in this sphere in the 11th and 12th century AD. During this time, they emerged as experts on the science of laundering in the entire European community. To soften the harsh effects, they seasoned lye with sour milk. They never let anybody know about their secret and, as a result, the process remained a mystery for many years.

Till the mid-18th century, the Dutch dominated and maintained their supremacy in the bleaching trade. Thus, all brown linen, manufactured at the time principally in Scotland, was shipped to Holland for the purpose of bleaching.

The entire course of action, from its despatch to return was a long process - it took about seven to eight months. 

As for the modern form of liquid household bleach, it wasn't a thing til the start of the 20th century:

 It wasn't until 1913 that a company named "The Electro-Alkaline Co", started to make a sodium hypochlorite bleach by chlorinating a solution of caustic soda, also known as sodium hydroxide (Mulrooney, 2013).

And here's the history of that company (the Clorox company as it became):

Clorox was founded in 1913 as the Electro-Alkaline Company by five Oakland, California-area businessmen, only one of whom had any knowledge of chemistry. Their objective was to convert brine from ocean water into sodium hypochlorite bleach using an electrolytic process considered to be technologically advanced for its time. Each partner invested $100 in the new venture, and in August 1913 they purchased a plant site. The company's first product, Clorox liquid bleach, was packaged in five-gallon returnable containers and delivered by horse-drawn wagon to local breweries, dairies, and laundries for cleaning and disinfecting their facilities. Labels for the new product identified it as being "made by electricity."

An initial stock issue of 750 shares at $100 each provided $75,000 in start-up capital. The company struggled through its early years and often depended upon personal loans from its directors to pay expenses. 

In 1916 a less concentrated liquid bleach product--5 percent sodium hypochlorite instead of 21 percent--for household use was developed and sold in amber glass pint bottles. William C. R. Murray, the company's general manager, came up with the idea of producing and promoting household bleach. Murray's wife, Annie, gave away samples of the formula to customers of the family's Oakland-based grocery store. Its value as a laundry aid, stain remover, deodorant, and disinfectant was also promoted by door-to-door salespeople who demonstrated how a solution of Clorox bleach and water could whiten an ink-stained piece of fabric. Orders were collected on the spot and then given to local grocers who purchased the necessary inventory from the company to fulfill them. Small and local at the time, Clorox was not affected by World War I. 

That 21% sodium hypochlorite formulation must have been pretty powerful stuff, given how quickly your ordinary 4 to 5% solution can white spot your clothes if it gets on them undiluted.  I can imagine  a 21% formula dissolving a hole in your pants immediately.  (Not to mention what it might have done to your skin.)

Anyway, now I know more.

The medical news that will launch about 1,000 late night chat show jokes

Viagra could be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease, study finds

Researchers then used a database of claims from more than 7 million people in the US to examine the relationship between sildenafil and Alzheimer’s disease outcomes by comparing sildenafil users to non-users.

They found sildenafil users were 69% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than non-sildenafil users after six years of follow-up. To further explore the drug’s potential effect on Alzheimer’s disease, researchers developed a lab model that showed that sildenafil increased brain cell growth and targeted tau proteins, offering insights into how it might influence disease-related brain changes. The findings were published in Nature Aging.

Cheng cautioned that the study does not demonstrate a causal relationship between sildenafil and Alzhemer’s disease. Randomised clinical trials involving both sexes with a placebo control were needed to determine sildenafil’s efficacy, he said.

 

Still with us

I wondered recently if biologist and writer E.O. Wilson was still with us (I spotted an unread book of his at home, above my sock draw), and I see from this interview at Vox that he is.  Looks pretty sharp for 92, too.   

Positive reviews noted

It's not that I hold West Side Story in any particular high regard as a musical (although, truth be told, I have never watched all of the original movie - in fact, maybe only 15 mins or so?), but I am still thrilled when Spielberg gets a lot of love, and proves again that he worth 20 (at least) Tarantino's.

His movie, which doesn't start here until Boxing Day, is getting very good reviews from both American and British critics  (even The Guardian, usually a bit Lefty cynical of him, I reckon).  A score of 95 on Rottentomatoes, and 86 on the more reliable Metacritic.

In anticipation of my liking it too, I would say that the USO dance hall sequence in the much (and unfairly) maligned 1941 made me think as far back as 1979 that he would be fantastic at making a dance heavy musical. Here it is on Youtube:

 It's not a great quality upload (don't try to watch it full screen), but it still gives you an idea of how it was put together.  Apart from the camera movement and composition of shots, I like how it's not over-editted to the point where you can't admire the choreography and timing as an extended event - the main fault of most modern dance movies being in the choppy, rapid fire editing which ends up making a dance look like a hundred individual 1 second scenes stuck together in the cutting room.  

(Triva point:  I think I might have seen 1941 twice at the cinema - I liked it that much.  It remains a guilty pleasure.)

 

The longest wait

Bad news for my planned first opera outing (taken with an over-the-top, take-no-prisoners approach) to the Ring Cycle in Brisbane.

It's been delayed to - the end of 2023!

It was supposed to be at the end of 2020.   That's time enough for a whole new pandemic to start!

Still busy, but Morrison has appalling judgement

As Michelle Grattan writes:

Labor’s Chris Bowen made a very pertinent contribution on Monday to the debate over whether the Liberals should run Gladys Berejiklian, the subject of an ICAC investigation, in the Sydney seat of Warringah.

What would the Liberals and the media be saying if it were a Labor figure in a similar position? Bowen asked.

Of course we know the answer. They’d be outraged and they’d be justified.

The push within the Liberal party, backed by Scott Morrison, for Berejiklian to stand is a case of the “whatever it takes” brand of politics....

Morrison said Berejiklian was “put in a position of actually having to stand down and there was no finding of anything. Now I don’t call that justice.”

Without saying it explicitly he creates the impression the ICAC forced her to quit her job. In fact, she chose to resign, judging that just standing aside while the inquiry was on was politically untenable.

Steggall on Monday pushed back strongly against Morrison, saying the words he’d used in parliament were “outrageous”. “We should be seeing leadership to raise trust, call for more accountability, not undermine accountability.”....

Does Morrison really think it was okay for Berejiklian not to disclose her closeness to Maguire, who was well known as an urger of the first degree?

That certainly wasn’t the view of former NSW premier Mike Baird, a good friend of Berejiklian, who said in evidence at the ICAC “certainly I think [the relationship] should have been disclosed”. Baird is another high profile figure the Liberals have pursued to stand in Warringah, but without success.

If the Liberals fielded Berejiklian ahead of the ICAC report, they would be adding insult to injury in their performance on integrity issues.

Update:  and this:

 

Too much work

I got too much work on my hands at the moment.

Maybe should only post after work?   I always say stuff like this then find something during the day that demands a post.

How do you govern the Dunning-Kruger set who think experts are out to kill them and their children?

Yes, the stupid have always been with us, but outside of individual cults, never have the self certain holders of bad takes (not technically just "stupid", even though I am far past caring that they deserve any respect - I know these people make a living and are not dumb as such) had the ability to so easily reinforce their views in a community of the like minded.  Some reactions today at Cathollaxy, on the matter of Covid vaccination for children:

Tom says:

December 5, 2021 at 8:27 am

This is what happens when you insert politics into science. It’s pure evil.

Our politicians think they can ride public fear of Kung Flu all the way to re-election whatever the cost — especially to the most vulnerable, our children.

areff says:

December 5, 2021 at 8:55 am

The last time and place the young were sacrificed for the alleged benefit of the old was at the altar atop an Aztec pyramid.

Arky says:

December 5, 2021 at 10:19 am

STOP: DO NOT FLICK BACK TO THE OPEN THREAD JUST BECAUSE YOU SEE A GRAPH DOWN PAGE.

..
Eventually you’re going to conclude, like me, that most people are too stupid to comment.
This, sadly, now applies to the cat readership too.
I think those vaccines are eating people’s brains. The deterioration in the quality of commentary since the vaxx rollout is marked.
It’s like being the only person staying sober at a party and watching as the night goes on as the rest of the company starts slurring their words, and then finally decide to skinny dip in the dam opposite the ammonia plant.
We could be experiencing the moment the vaccines make people too damn stupid to read the graphs showing that the vaccines are making people too damn stupid to read the graphs.

Fat Tony says:

December 5, 2021 at 11:24 am

Health Minister Greg Hunt says subject to final checks from the vaccination experts on the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, the federal government will start rolling out the Pfizer vaccine to 5- to 11-year-olds from January 10.

This is why the protests must continue and escalate. There is a war to be fought and, hopefully, won.
These arseholes are not going to relax, or stop for a Christmas break, or to go fishing on the weekend. They want us all dead.

Fat Tony featured on another thread, making a protest trip for nothing:

Fat Tony says:

December 5, 2021 at 1:42 am

Just a thought regarding protests…
Do the people thinking we should hold off for a while think the politicians/government/WEF scum are going to have a break for a while too?

We have only a very short time before all resistance in Australia is crushed – we can worry about our weekend shit next year if we prevail.

The protests should be constant, on-going and escalating – our enemies are relentless and will crush us as quickly as possible. We have very little time before this turns very ugly.

I spent 3 hours today travelling from home to Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens and back home on the off-chance there would be a protest march today – there wasn’t.

 

Heh.  Loser.

Physicist gets up other physicist's noses, again

The particle physicists who spend much of their time lobbying governments for ever bigger particle accelerators must really dislike Sabine Hossenfelder's take on things.   She's at it again in today's video on the question of why there's more matter than anti-matter in the universe:  

Australian far Right muttering about violence

dover beach's Cathollaxy continues to attract those wishing for a violent uprising against Australian governments.   Today, the protest in Melbourne was apparently smaller, according to "Behind Enemy Lines":

It’s a much smaller crowd than the last two weeks. Still a decent crowd, given that people have responsibilities that don’t end on weekends. Plenty of familiar faces and flags. Am still seeing some newbies, too (welcome, Japan!).

So, here we are.

None of the federation’s checks-and-balances safeguards have protected what was left of our already much-diminished rights. And the normies’ attempts at a People Power approach hasn’t achieved what they hoped for (because of course People Power is just another example of the left’s perpetual money-go-round).

Granted, I’ve been happy to turn out for protests because it shows the government’s lack of legitimacy. Plus, ordinary people need to know they aren’t alone.

Well, now they know.

Yet Victoria now lives under a dictatorial enabling act while the federal government, courts and major political parties sit on their collective thumb.

Barring any surprise relief, the ‘normal’ political process has just ended.

A new stage begins.

Oh and earlier this week, dover beach, a fool, leaves up a post featuring a string of images, ending with one of Dan Andrews in the Obama "Hope" poster format, but substituted with "Rope".  A real knee slapper, that one.

Update:  for some reason, I couldn't upload it last night, but here it is:

 Where's that National Security Hotline - here it is 1800 000 634.