This is an interesting Comment is Free article at The Guardian - arguing that Christianity really caught on as a result of a plague in the 3rd century which made a religion with a teaching and obligation to help the poor and suffering look much better than the pagan religions, in which the gods were capricious and mainly to be feared and appeased.
I wonder if some will challenge the image of pagan religion this relies on, though?
Each to their own, of course: but the thing about cricket that I find unforgivable is the incredible length of time it takes up.
I'm finding it a bit hard to think of a worse year over the last several decades, in a "reasons to feel optimistic about the direction the planet is heading in," sense. I guess people may have felt this way in (say) the mid 70's - a far from happy decade - but I was still somewhat of a techno-optimist at that stage and had a teenage life to live.
But gee, I mean - now we have the whole Middle East a complete humanitarian disaster again; much of Africa in terrible governance and humanitarian crisis, again; the danger to the West and Western interests from Russia and China, again; the unbelievable election of Trump, again; the loonies he wants to put in control and the drug addled, power hungry billionaire who helped put him in place (well, I guess this not a case of again - it's like a bad gothic Batman story come to life for the first time.) Another Christmas market terror incident in Europe just puts the cherry on top.
Also - overlaying all of this (which was not the case in the 70's) is the global climate disruption that Right wing (mostly ageing) idiots still refuse to acknowledge, and which we can only deal with by waiting for them to die.
Anyway, I'm talking about the vagus nerve because of this interesting story at CNN:
Vagus nerve stimulation may relieve treatment-resistant depression, study finds
And this story that it opens with - about how depression struck someone - surprised me (due to its sudden onset:
Nick Fournie was 24 years old when severe depression upended his life.
Fournie had been married to his longtime sweetheart for two years, and had no reason to suspect he had any mental health issues.
“I just thought to myself, ‘If this is it, if this is all there is to life — if it ended now, I’d be OK with it,’” Nick, now 62 and based in Illinois, said of that fateful day outdoors nearly 40 years ago.
But one day as he was mowing the lawn, his perspective on life abruptly flipped from light to dark. The shift would set him and his wife, Mary, on a tumultuous, yearslong journey of fighting for his well-being and another chance at a happy life together — until they learned of an alternative, obscure treatment that would change everything.
I wonder how often that happens - I am much more used to the idea that it develops somewhat gradually, or perhaps as a result of a sudden crisis such as a nervous breakdown.
This is at the Nature website:
In 1773, US polymath Benjamin Franklin argued that scientists should try to invent a method of embalming such that a human could be revived in the future. He admitted “a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence”. Neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston thinks that such brain preservation and revival could well become feasible. But his complex book acknowledges this proposition as “scary and disquieting” — requiring us to scrutinize our own mortality, “a deeply unpleasant task”.The book is The Future Loves You. The description at the publisher's site is:
A brilliant young neuroscientist explains how to preserve our minds indefinitely, enabling future generations to choose to revive us.I look forward to reading a lengthier review!
Anyway, I am surprised at the observation of Benjamin Franklin - quite ahead of his time there. (I see that Frankenstein wasn't published until 1818, and I presume it may have popularised the concept of revival of the dead.)
You sure want to pick the right 100 year period to be revived in, though. I mean, he died in 1790, and although the world of 1890 had undergone the industrial revolution, it had got nothing on the changes between 1890 and 1990. I'm not sure we'll ever see anything quite like that century again, in fact!
I think the Medical Journal of Australia used to run humorous short pieces at Christmas, so I had a look at it today, and instead became depressed while reading this article:
It's open access, so you can read it and marvel too at the intensity of what I sometimes describe as "sociology talk": the use of a terminology invented for their own field and which has gone on to become the navel gazing justification for academic careers: whole careers devoted to taking to talking to each other about their own terminology and world views, and telling others that they just don't get it like they do.
Now, I know: you could have the same criticism of philosophy, which is a field I am generally sympathetic to. But at least philosophers don't turn up at government meetings arguing that their insights are crucial to solving social disadvantage - they by and large have the good sense to let economists worry about economics, and doctors and epidemiologists worry about improving health, and so on.
To clarify: it's not as if I am one to think you ignore everything (say) a remote indigenous community thinks about their health services if you want to improve it. But that's the immensely irritating problem I have with the likes of this article: its insights could be condensed to something like this: "indigenous people come from a different cultural background, and it pays to try to work with them and take their views into consideration when trying to improve their health services."
But no, let's spend money on career academics and researchers and their conferences that spin a simple principle into well paying careers of waffle.
Here are some key paragraphs:
Decolonisation
Colonisation stems from, as well as perpetuates racial imbalances of knowledge, knowledge production and knowledge practice. Decolonisation and decoloniality are a few of many tools used in attempts to dismantle, hinder, reverse, stop or remove colonising practices, with the aim of privileging the rights of Indigenous people.13,20,21,22 We acknowledge the various, and sometimes conflicting conceptualisations and applications of decolonising and decolonial practices. These conflicts are influenced by place, people and socio‐political contexts, including the lack of transformative actions that should be of benefit to Indigenous peoples.21,23,24,25,26 Three key features, of the many, relating to decolonial and decolonising practices that we implement in our team are described below.
Establish and understand positionality
Positionality is where one speaks from; it is reflective of values, beliefs and worldviews and how these underpin daily life.1 For Indigenous peoples, positionality is reliant on relationality, whereby relationships to Country, family and community underpin values, beliefs and worldviews.1,3 Positioning includes one's professional context and intentions of research, as much as it is about positioning within the workplace.21 Furthermore, understanding one's workplace and the relationships formed with Indigenous communities, past and present, is essential. Positioning in context of colonisation is also important. Non‐Indigenous people need to understand their own positioning in relation to colonisation, including privileges associated with unearned power.20 Whereas Indigenous peoples' positioning with colonisation is linked with both historical and contemporary forms of oppression, which aims to eradicate Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Indigenous peoples have another link to colonisation; one that is associated with survival, resistance and a reclamation of Indigenous Knowledges and practices
Ugh.
Ross Douthat seems to have had such a good holiday in Italy, visiting a famous Benedictine monastery, that he has written a column headed:
Religion Has Been in Decline. This Christmas Seems Different.
The reasons he presents for this seem way, way, more about his good mood after a holiday, rather than a serious consideration of evidence.
If anything, even if you restrict the view to the USA, the fact that even Catholics have swung to a character like Trump should give more grounds for pessimism about the future of religions, rather than optimism. I mean, here is the Washington Post talking about the Trump flunky just appointed to be his Vatican ambassador:
Burch co-founded Catholic Vote, a lay advocacy group in 2005. The organization backed Trump in 2020 and 2024. Burch is the author of the 2020 book, “A New Catholic Moment: Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good,” and co-author of a 2021 book “America Catholic Daily Reader,” about Americans who have been shaped by their Catholic faith.
According to exit polls, Catholic voters supported Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin. In 2020, Catholics backed Biden, who would become America’s second Catholic president, by a five-point margin. In both years, just over 1 in 5 voters were Catholic.
The only reason I think Ross can sense a mood swing might be around certain culture war ones such as the extremes of trans rights. But just because the extremes of identity politics might be undergoing some successful pushback hardly means a return to mainstream religion in the population overall.
Update: a more interesting article, to me, in the NYT is a short discussion with famous writer on early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, who really must be getting on in age. (Yes, I see she is 81.) This passage explains her views:
You have a foot in each of two worlds, faith and academia, that often seem like rival sides of the God gulf. Can we find paths of mutual respect to bridge that chasm?
The Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry. Intellectualizing these traditions — or turning them into dogma — doesn’t make them spiritually deep. What we call Christianity is not a single thing. Instead, it consists of a 2,000-year-old collection of stories, prayers, liturgies, music, miracles — sources drawn from traditions as different as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Pentecostalism or Christian Science. No one can swallow the entire tradition: It’s undigestible. Instead, anyone who identifies as Christian chooses certain elements of it.
A professor friend said to me: “I’m an atheist. How can you believe all that stuff?” First of all, as I see it, “believing all that stuff” is not the point. The Christian message, as I experienced it, was transformational. It encouraged me to treat other people well and opened up a world of imagination and wonder.
Your own faith journey seems to bridge the chasm. You were raised in a household hostile to faith, then became an evangelical, then had a crisis when a friend died and you were told he wouldn’t go to heaven because he was Jewish.
When some Christians said to me that non-Christians are going to hell, I left their church. That made no sense to me. What about Jesus’ message of God’s love? At that point I left Christianity behind. For some people, there’s no middle ground. You’re either in or out — that’s how it’s often practiced. So for years I was out, although I knew that something powerful was there. But after years of being out, I kept wondering, what made that encounter with Christianity so powerful?
So I had to go back, asking questions. How were these stories written? How do they affect us so powerfully? They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience. For we can respond to the same story in more than one way. As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story. But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle. As poet Seamus Heaney writes, “Believe that a further shore / is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles.”
This research sounds important:
Dark energy 'doesn't exist' so can't be pushing 'lumpy' universe apart, physicists say
But I guess I have to wait for Sabine Hossenfelder's view on it before I can tell how seriously to take it!
(And I wish the article did more to explain the "'timescape' model of cosmic expansion". Or did Sabine already talk about this? It's hard to remember, she puts out so much content!)
Have a look at this very well made, graphics filled, article in the Washington Post that explains a lot about the rising ocean, and in particular, how it is likely going to be bad in the the south of the USA.
This section, for example, explains stuff that is very often missed out in the discussion:
First, as ice melts in Greenland or Antarctica, meltwaters spill into the ocean, raising global sea levels everywhere. But, counterintuitively, the coastlines farthest from the ice sheets are hit hardest.
That’s because the ice sheets are gigantic — so gigantic, in fact, that they exert a gravitational pull on the ocean. (The Greenland ice sheet weighs approximately 2.7 quadrillion metric tons, equal to about 450 million Great Pyramids of Giza; the Antarctic ice sheet is 10 times heavier.)
Normally, that enormous weight pulls oceans close to the ice sheets, making sea levels around Greenland and Antarctica higher than they would be otherwise. But as the ice melts, that effect lessens. Sea levels close to the ice sheet fall, and sea levels farther away rise.
Jerry Mitrovica, a professor of earth sciences at Harvard University and one of the leading experts on melting ice sheets and ocean levels, recalls looking at a plot of sea levels near Greenland. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was just an incredible thing to see around this melting ice sheet that sea level change, at least regionally, is dramatically going down.”
Researchers use satellites to track this effect. Two GRACE Follow-On satellites, launched in 2018 by NASA and the German Research Center for Geosciences, orbit the Earth about 140 miles apart — as they do, subtle changes in Earth’s gravitational pull yank one farther from the other. Those shifts paint a picture of the planet’s gravity, which scientists can use to predict the precise pull of the ice sheets on ocean waters.
Here's the start of an article at The Atlantic entitled:
Postpone Your Pleasures, And enjoy them all the more.
which I haven't read in full (paywall), but the point appeals to me:
My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with: “Well, during the civil war …”
One evening, a few months before he died, he read in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”
Would I be happy with an Atlantic subscription? Possibly. Digital is $90 (US) a year. Maybe I ask the family to each pay a third.
Meanwhile, I still, lazily, haven't decided if I should drop the NYT or WAPO. I feel I only need one.
* Clive Robertson, the cranky persona-ed news reader and broadcaster, died last week. I hadn't thought about him for years, but his death reminded me how much I used to enjoy his late night news show. His droll, dry wit was very amusing, and I miss that we have nothing similar today.
* Australian author John Marsden has also just died (at only 74 - as I age, I long to read only about deaths that are at older ages than that!). I only read his famous first book in the "Tomorrow - When the War Began" and thought it was OK, but I knew he had been very influential in the youth fiction market, and in youth education generally. I didn't recall this:
John’s youth was harrowing in different ways, and he never hid the fact that he was a bit bruised by life. He became suicidal as a university student and was institutionalised; he once wrote that the world of the psychiatric hospital was in some ways “more real than the one outside. In here the masks are off, people don’t pretend so much. [They] don’t have the energy or strength.” Perhaps that’s why he was able to inhabit his characters so fully. It is extraordinary for a man of his generation to write teenage girls so convincingly and with such empathy.
Update: yes, as Tim points out below, now Michael Leunig has died, aged 79. (Again, fellas, for my long term planning, I only want to see people start to leave this mortal coil from about 85!) I guess like most people I didn't mind Leunig at his peak, but his brand of idiosyncratic eccentric takes did start to wear thin in the long term.
I see that Sabina Hossenfelder has a video up about her scepticism of Musk's Mars colonisation plans.
If anything, I reckon it was way, way too gentle on Musk, even though she doesn't think his plans will happen any time soon.
She spends too much time on the long term difficulties of permanently colonising Mars (the issue of it not being to retain an atmosphere due to solar wind is covered, for example) without talking enough about the short term wild implausibility of Musk's fantasy - the huge number of rocket builds and launches needed, the totally tricky orbital re-fueling that has not been tried and is (I reckon) always going to be a high risk manoeuvre - probably with the potential to create a huge mess of orbital debris - and the routinely overlooked matter of how difficult it will be to build a biologically self supporting colony on Mars.
I think this latter issue is just common sense - look at the problems the Biosphere experiment went through, and that was on a planet where all the organic material needed could just be driven in on the back of a truck.*
At least I saw some support in the video comments for my view that if you want a "lifeboat" for planet Earth, why not build it on the Moon? (The only plausible reason against it that I can think of is that no one knows what effect low gravity pregnancy will have on the babies - but then, the same might turn out to be an issue in Mars gravity too. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out it's really, really difficult to carry a baby to term in low gravity, for some reason we have no idea about at the moment. That would ruin Musk's "longtermism" pretty rapidly.)
I remain very confident that Musk will face a downfall sooner or later, and people will wonder why more experts didn't speak out about his wild overconfidence earlier...
* Have a look at the website for a long on-going research project of the European Space Agency to develop a closed system for life support, including food, called Melissa. As far as I tell, they might be up to trying it out on a small rat colony. And I liked this part from their FAQ page:
Why after 30 years the project is not finish yet ?
The proper answer to this one is probably:
Why man has no try to duplicate the Earth functions earlier ? In other words, although humans are fully depending of the Earth ecosystem functions (e.g. oxygen, water, food, ...), we have today no back-up. Anyone who looks a bit more carefully to the challenges of artificial ecology will rapidly perceive the enormous difficulties. We have seen over the years many similar projects : CELSS, CEEF, CERES, BIOSPHERE 2… almost all of them had to stop due to incorrect evaluation of the challenges, and necessary amplitude and duration of the efforts.
Yeah, I've slowed down a bit in my reading of the abridged version of Journey to the West, and I note as follows:
a. it takes to about the half way point of the book before the journey actually begins;
b. I am now 55% percent in, and we still haven't met the 4th travel companion (Sandy in the TV series);
c. I was rather surprised that in Chapter 17, the Heart Sutra suddenly appears in full. I had just watched one of the Doug's Dharma videos on Youtube in which he spoke about it.
The Heart Sutra has had my attention before. I think I am now closer to understanding its point, though....
So, we're getting a fair bit of handwringing over much of the public reaction to that US health fund executive being murdered:
And it has made me finally post a thought I've had about Trump for years.
I predict - if ever he is successfully assassinated, I reckon the reaction of about 60% of Americans (and 90 of the rest of the globe) will be exactly like the end of the Seinfeld episode in which George (accidentally) kills his fiancée Susan: a couple of awkward exchanges and half sincere mutterings of "that's so bad", and within 60 seconds, "so, wanna get some coffee?"
The New York Times has an article about this:
Black Americans experience schizophrenia and related disorders at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s a disparity that has parallels in other cultures.Here's a bit:
As a growing body of research reveals, Black people in the United States suffer the hallucinations and delusions of psychosis — the voices that seem to emanate from outside a person’s head, the visions, the paranoias, the breaks with common reality — at a rate roughly twice that of white people. In Europe, racial disparities regarding psychosis are yet wider. Even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address issues of diagnosis, the alarming racial gaps remain.
Studies suggesting a link between minority or outsider status and psychosis run back about a century. A 1932 study looked at hospital admissions for psychosis in Minnesota. It found that Norwegian immigrants were admitted at twice the rate of native Minnesotans or Norwegians in their home country. By the 1970s, researchers were turning specifically to racial divides in psychiatric disorders, and by the 2000s, the relationship between race and psychosis (which appears to outstrip any correlation between race and more common conditions like depression) was becoming well studied in both the United States and Europe. Yet despite the mounting data, in the United States, until recently, the issue was relegated to the edges of mainstream psychiatry — or perhaps beyond the edges.
The whole thing is pretty odd, as explained in this part (with my bold):
In the United States, Black-white ratios are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall, Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three to one.
Among the immigrant groups, one plausible factor is the dislocation and stress that can come with the immigrant journey itself. But while such trauma may seem an obvious trigger, given that many immigrants arrive in their new nations after dangerous journeys and unable to speak the language that surrounds them, researchers have found repeatedly that second-generation immigrants to the United States and Europe develop psychosis at rates at least as high as their parents. Something is happening in the new country.
Compared to some people, I suppose I have pretty small exposure to social media, given that Twitter (and now Bluesky) was my only real social media app (if you don't count blogs with active threads - now a rarity - or YouTube). And one of the problems of Bluesky now being pretty good is that I am finding it too easy to just keep...on...scrolling...scrolling (and often avoiding reading the in depth articles sometimes linked.)
There was this doomster column today in The Guardian about the loss of attention span:
Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist and world expert on divided attention, warned in 2022 that we are now living in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023.
But we’re not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley’s dirtiest design feature – which is everywhere once you spot it – is the infinite scroll, likened to the “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly “refills” manipulates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless “seeking” can become addictive.What will happen if we don’t get a handle on our declining cognitive health? The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris told US Congress in 2019 that billions of people – “a psychological footprint about the size of Christianity” – now receive their information from platforms whose business model “links their profit to how much attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ to extract attention by hacking lower into our lizard brains – into dopamine, fear, outrage – to win”.
His warnings are about as stark as they come. “Persuasive technology is a massively underestimated and powerful force shaping the world,” he said. “It has taken control of the pen of human history, and will drive us to catastrophe if we don’t take it back.”
The worst thing about it (internet brain rot) is likely the loss of book reading amongst everyone, especially the young.
I have been meaning to say for some time, but as I get older, I am surprised that I am still drawing connections between my life experience and some incidents in novels that have stuck in my head from what I might have read 30 or 40 (or more!) years ago. What I mean is - I have just recognised the truth or insight in the writing that long after reading it. It's quite surprising, and I just can't see people who have grown up in social media (with ruined attention spans for reading novels) being able to have the same experience, and it does feel like a real loss, but they won't realise it....
In Science magazine, this abstract:
In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5K above the pre-industrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17K. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers including anthropogenic warming and the El Niño onset fall short by about 0.2K in explaining the temperature rise. Utilizing satellite and reanalysis data, we identify a record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap. The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a multi-annual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will be crucial for assessing the current and expected future warming.Of course, how to work out the net effect of clouds has been one of the main bugbears of climate modelling. The skeptic hope was that higher temperatures would mean more cloud and more albedo to keep the earth from getting too hot. (I thought that was how the late Richard Lindzen's iris effect idea worked, but now that I double check, it was more that cirrus clouds would reduce and allow more IR to escape - so I'm not sure if an increase of lower, brighter clouds was actually part of that theory or not.)
Anyhow - it remains a major worry that it is unclear whether the modelling has got the cloud effects underestimated, so that global temperature increases could be more rapid than expected.
Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a brief commentary on the paper here. There is quite a bit of talk in the comments following about whether to credit reduced sulphur emissions from shipping as causing the albedo decrease, too.
The story over the last week or so about people claiming there is a lot of unusual large drone activity in the night skies of New Jersey is pretty intriguing.
It made the New York Times on the weekend, but then there is a somewhat skeptical take at this website.
I get the feeling that there is something to it - some of the descriptions of a line of drones one after the other seem unusual. But - if it is a company trying out some new tech, it's hard to imagine why they (or the authorities wouldn't be open to it. That's why it's intriguing.
I have mentioned once before though - it does seem at times that the airspace over parts of the US is not as well monitored as one might assume. Maybe too many things going on to keep track of all of it?
I see that the Bluesky user counter shows a considerable slowdown in the rate of sign ups since it hit 24 million. It will take quite a while at this rate to hit 25 million.
That's a pity, because it really has already become a good Twitter replacement. The only thing I kind of miss is a "trending" list - but half the time those was false alarms anyway. "Why is this person suddenly trending - has he/she died?"
I would also like to see more local accounts so that I could search for comments on breaking local news.
But I really recommend people look at it.
Speaking of comedians, Ronny Chieng has been on a roll hosting the Daily Show this week. This day's clip was particularly good I think - every joke seemed to hit:
This has always felt sort of mysterious to me - what agents for actors and comedians actually do on a day to day basis.
I'm talking about this because of this news:
The Junkyard, managers of Australian comedians like Aaron Chen and Sam Campbell, goes into administration
Let it be known that, of the younger Australian comedy set, I've always enjoyed Aaron Chen's comedy persona. That Sam Campbell - well I first saw him recently on an episode of Would I Lie to You (english version) and it was a few years old, but he seemed amusing in a similar eccentric persona to Chen. But then I think I watched some other clip of him on Youtube and didn't like it, so I dunno.
Anyway, back to the point: about the only fictional portrayal of a talent agent I can remember is from that Matt Berry series - Toast of London. And it fitted in with what is probably a widely shared assumption that actor's agents sit around doing nothing much all day other than reading the occasional casting call news and ringing up people on their list and saying "why don't you try this, I think it suits you". It seems like such a flaky way to make a living - even if, in the case of top Hollywood agencies, it's a very lucrative one.
But is it really like that? Does no one do a realistic portrayal of this line of work because it's hard to make "networking" interesting?
Update: Maybe there was an agent or two featured to a little extent in Bill Hader's dramedy Barry. But I think that shows attack was more against the incredible flakiness of cable television executives. In fact, I found it kind of amazing that the executives at (I think) HBO let such a damning portrayal of their job be part of the story! I presume they thought - it's not our network's execs he's attacking - it's the one down the road.
Gee, this has become a pretty familiar story - a small start up company manufacturing a clean, green energy product that just doesn't stack up in quality and reliability, then goes broke and tarnishes the reputation of clean energy overall:
A similar story happened in 2009 with some Stirling engine solar power plant that might have looked cool, but never worked well. (I see now that even the webpages for the long defunct American Stirling engine solar power company Infinia are gone! I always liked the look of their dishes. There's a photo on one of my posts from 2008.)
Not to mention failure to develop geothermal power in Australia: see this story, and this one.
[Oh, and I nearly forgot - the failure of various wave energy schemes. Frankly, this idea has always seemed to me to be extremely dubious - my gut feeling was always that there is too little movement in any single device riding waves to generate significant enough power to be worth the expense and maintenance.]
The common theme seems to be that they are not crank schemes per se (in that they are systems obviously capable of making energy) - but they need a lot of finesse to make them reliable and economical. Small companies grab the idea but don't have the resources to make it work like it should - and unfortunately, can start to sell the systems before they are proven.
Seems to me that what it all lacks is big companies with the resources to build and test properly the systems before selling them.
Following last weekend's flash flooding around parts of Brisbane, the ABC has this article up:
More wild weather forecast for Queensland raises questions about how Brisbane drains handle intense rainfallwith one guy saying:
"With the bureau forecasting more frequent events, the storm drains across the city simply aren't designed to take in flows of run-off and intense rain," Mr Winders said.
Rather than being flood-resilient, Mr Winders suggests residents need to become "storm-resilient".
"The local council can't do anything about the network, the drains are already in place and there's too much existing development," he said.
"All these things impede the ability of the council to provide any relief from local flooding."
And I suspect he's right.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the article, and that I'm pretty sure would be true, is that Brisbane's drainage system does seems to often handle much higher total rainfall events without flooding, compared to cities such as Melbourne, and probably Sydney too?
I mean, over the years, I have seen many news reports of flash flooding from storms in other cities, and the rainfall totals that caused it often seem to be well under the rainfall we hear about in Brisbane storms or rain events.
So I have always suspected that our drainage system has been engineered to expect higher surges than those of drier cities. (Melbourne in particular seems to get most of its rain in far less intense events than Brisbane - it's just spread out over drizzly days rather than in 10 or 15 minute bursts like here!)
But I have never heard an expert confirm that.
* A month or so ago, I posted about whether or not I should go see a performance of Beethoven's 9th (for the first time.) I was encouraged to do so, but delayed buying tickets. I checked about 9 days ago if seats were available, and some were, but I still didn't book. Then, on Sunday, I thought I should check again - then thought "whoops - it's December!". I had become so busy with one work matter that I had completely forgotten the concerts were on last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. :(
Maybe I didn't miss much? Actually, seems I did:
When the seated choir (Brisbane Chamber Choir Collective) rose to their feet, we were in for a surprise. Unexpectedly, around the concert hall – in the stalls and side balconies – other choir members also stood with opened books. Undercover, plain-clothes, choral operatives had been inserted into the midst of the unsuspecting audience.
As the instrumental and vocal volume swells, Clerici is conducting a 360-degree enterprise. The sound is heavenly, harmonious. Beethoven has played his trump card. The pitch rises as the beautiful voice of the soprano soloist soars above the music and the choir.
The performance earns the orchestra and conductor a standing ovation. Orchestral sections are individually applauded. Clerici shakes hands warmly with the concertmaster, Natsuko Yoshimoto. As the soloists exit, Umberto bows graciously to the two women before giving the baritone a hearty high-five. A tremendous performance by our state orchestra and a triumphant conclusion to the 2024 season.
Ugh...
* There was flash flooding yet again in Brisbane last Sunday, yet oddly enough, in my corner of the city, it got dark and a bit thundery, but virtually no rain at all. Only 15 km down the road, people went to a well know pub car park, only to get their cars inundated:
This spring and early summer in Brisbane, and the south east generally, has been so wet that it is making me worried that Brisbane is in for yet another flood this summer. I checked the SEQ Water dam levels, and virtually all are full or overflowing, except for Somerset and Wivenhoe (the ones that protect the Brisbane River from flooding) and they are at 80%. (The last time I checked, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, they were 80% then, too. I'm guessing water is being released enough to keep it there.)
But, gee, I don't know. Seems to me it wouldn't take too much more torrential rain in the right spot to cause another major flood.
* So, Biden pardoned his son. I can't get too excited about it, especially with the absolute nutjobs who Trump wants to appoint who seemingly want to spend another 4 years of wasted effort on trying to pin corruption on him. Jon Stewart isn't happy - but his takes are only right about 75% of the time, it seems...
I saw a video on the "Megabuild" channel on the weekend about how Singapore is massively expanding its port facilities, from the seabed up. It's - kind of amazing:
But - if you don't have time to watch that, you can view instead a good multimedia graphics explanation that appeared a couple of years ago at the Straits Times website here.
It also explains something I was curious about - wouldn't the steel reinforcement that is throughout the giant concrete caisson corrode quickly when its in seawater? Would the whole box be a crumbling mess in 20 years?
Apparently, it's solved by spraying a sealant on the sea exposed parts. Huh.
I have now seen 3 Youtube reviews of the movie version of Wicked, all by male reviewers who are not the most "bro" reviewers around, but still feel like their tastes skew towards the Rightwing-ish views on "woke" as a cultural issue. And they all enjoyed the movie quite a lot - saying they went in with no or low expectations, and two I think said they had never seen the stage play (nor have I), so they were surprised about how good they found it.
I think this is particularly surprising given that (as the Critical Drinker said in a video about the lead actress going a bit nuts about changes to the movie poster), the musical could be said to have started something of a "woke-ish" cycle of movies about a misunderstood villain (often female) who we would have some sympathy for if only we understood the backstory and her perspective.
So, maybe I should see it...
I quite enjoyed this article, which I found via Bluesky:
Why "manifesting" is far more irrational than using a medieval service magician
In the medieval past, people would routinely employ "cunning folk" or "service magicians" to help them. They were much more effective, rational, and ethical than many spiritual practices today.
This part, about love magic, I found pretty amusing:
Before there was Tinder, there was seduction magic. It was deemed so powerful that a thirteenth century Christian theologian named William de Montibus felt it necessary to warn his fellow believers about the perils of consuming food prepared with a love spell, infused with the essence of a courting woman in, well, rather unique ways.
The first worry was that one might consume a loaf of bread kneaded not by hand, but by buttocks. Bread, a staple of a medieval diet also used in religious rites, could be a vector for an irresistibly magical feminine essence embedded in the dough, particularly if the cunning woman had sat on it and wriggled around in her natural state to prepare the loaf.
Martha Gill (who I am unfamiliar with) writing at The Guardian talks a bit about Jordan Peterson's new book, and notes more broadly that his approach sort of fits in with a general renewed popularity of New Age-ish ideas amongst the younger set:
With mainstream religion in the west in long-term decline, something else is emerging. Not quite religion, not quite self-help – but a tantalising mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookshops once contained straightforward advice on dating, dieting or getting rich quick, now they ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.
You see it, for example, in the astonishing popularity of astrology among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope is an embarrassing secret, this can be jarring. At a recent party, I was surprised to stumble into an earnest astrology conversation between people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were Capricorns, and analysing their moon signs in great detail.
Really, of course, it was a jumping off point to open up about their lives, relate to each other, and explore how they tended to deal with problems. No wonder generation Z seems to find it therapeutic. The global market for astrology was valued at $12.8bn in 2021 and was projected to nearly double in the following decade.
Then there is tarot, which is also on the rise, driven mostly by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method for calming down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See, for example, the huge success of The Power of Now, a book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness has meanwhile fused with a set of anti-science beliefs, including the idea – dangerously championed by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, via your “inner sense” of what will cure you.
This sits alongside a cabal of celebrities on the right – Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson – who are tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as a route to the answer. The market is growing: the largest segment of buyers of self-help books is now men aged 25 to 34. They are sold a rebranded and cherry-picked system of faith, drawn from various religions and packaged to fit their needs.
The bit about astrology is interesting. I thought it was long dead and buried; or at least, now a very fringe interest with much less popular following than in what seems to have been its heyday from the 1960's to the 1980's. But then again, I was surprised recently to see the most generic type of astrological weekly forecast pap being put up near the end of one of the commercial TV news services on (I think) a Sunday.
And, of course, as I don't use TikTok, I have no idea what things are gaining popularity there with the youth.
Anyway, Gill ends with a bit of overreach, I think:
Mystic self-help may largely be harmless but we should ask what its popularity says about us and where we are going. After all, we owe nearly all modern progress to the fight against religion, allowing rational deductions to hold sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now seeing the dawn of a post-information age?
Still, it's a topic that always interests me - how people find meaning and how much religion or other metaphysical beliefs really have to do with it.
Surely I am not alone in thinking this: never has my opinion of billionaires been lower, in light of recent events.
The prime example, although there are so many to chose from, is (of course) Elon Musk. A peculiar man seeking to exercise immense power by proxy, having succeeded in helping get said proxy elected via his social media empire, dwindling though it may now be.
Yet if questioned, he would claim it is all in the interest of "making humanity multiplanetary", his perceived vital long term goal.
What is irking me at the moment, with the "gee whiz" factor of the recent Starship test flights (the most recent one featuring a gormless Trump in tow), is that the future technical challenges to doing anything especially useful with this rocket system seem so far below the public radar.
I mean, relying on both a booster and the enormous manned vehicle to land safely via retrorocket and guidance that are to work perfectly each time? The deadstick landing of the space shuttle had a worrying enough component of "everything has to go right", but at least if they got close to the ground but not near a runway, there was some chance of exit of the horizontally moving machine. Seems to me that there are going to no similar systems possible on Starship, because if there is going to be a major problem, it is more likely to be at the very last minute, with the rocket having no opportunity to align itself to allow a slower descent or an attitude to allow easy crew escape.
Sure, the landing system looks cool, and it's not great disaster if it doesn't work each time with the booster - although there is a very good chance of huge and expensive destruction of the landing pad and facilities. But the manned rocket? I reckon it will only take a couple of fatal accidents and people will leap from "that's so cool" to "you know, this is just inherently dangerous and can you really ever use such a system reliably enough for humans?"
And how many people are really following the development story close enough to realise that it's going to be an enormous problem getting the thing to the Moon, or Mars, because of the need for in-orbit refuelling?
Have a read of this lengthy article from earlier this year, pointing out that it seems already the system is heavier than expected, and noting the huge difference it makes to the whole re-fuelling idea:
“Currently, Flight 3 would be around 40-50 tons to orbit.”
To understand the significance of this statement, one only needs to review prior statements about Starship’s performance. Ever since Musk’s 2017 presentation, Starship’s estimated payload capacity has ranged between 100 and 150 tons to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). SpaceX’s official Starship Payload Users Guide clearly states that “At the baseline reusable design, Starship can deliver over 100 metric tons to LEO” [3]. For the past six years, Starship’s diameter, height, and propellant mixture have remained constant. The most straightforward interpretation of Musk’s comment is that the rocket is suffering from a 50% underperformance.....
The success or failure of the Human Landing System program will be decided by Starship’s payload capacity. Due to its high dry (unfueled) mass, Starship HLS cannot reach the Moon without first refueling in LEO. To complete the Artemis 3 mission, SpaceX must therefore implement orbital refueling on an unprecedented scale. Even on Earth, loading cryogenic propellants into a launch vehicle is no easy feat; if anything, this will be more difficult in space. Prior to every Artemis mission, a flotilla of reusable Starship tankers will transfer liquid oxygen and liquid methane to an orbiting propellant depot. The lunar lander will then launch, receive a full load of fuel and oxidizer from the depot, and continue onwards to the Moon.
The number of tanker flights which will be required to complete Artemis 3 is hotly debated. Estimates range from four [5] to nineteen [6] launches of propellant per lunar landing. Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin recently noted that the probability of mission success is directly correlated with the number of launches in each refueling campaign [7]. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that each individual Starship launch, plus the subsequent propellant transfer operation, will have a 98% probability of success once the procedure is refined. If five tanker flights are required, the mission as a whole will succeed in 90% of scenarios. In contrast, if twenty launches are needed, that probability drops to just 67%.
The precise number of tanker flights depends on several variables, including the Starship launch rate and the rate at which cryogenic propellant boils off to space while the depot is in orbit. However, no parameter is more important than the vehicle’s payload capacity. If Starship’s payload mass grows, the number of tanker flights required to complete an Artemis mission will decrease. Conversely, a reduction in payload capacity will increase the number of propellant launches.
The current iteration of Starship can store 1,200 tons of liquid methane and liquid oxygen in its propellant tanks. Recent renderings suggest that the lunar lander will be slightly taller, with a propellant load of approximately 1,500 tons. If each tanker can deliver 100 tons of fuel to orbit as advertised, then it will take 15 flights to complete an Artemis mission. This number is large, but given SpaceX’s demonstrated ability to scale up to a high cadence of missions, it is not insurmountable in medium- to long-term timeframes.
However, if SpaceX is only able to launch 50 tons of propellant to orbit inside each Starship tanker, then it will need to launch the world’s largest rocket a staggering 30 times to refuel a single lunar lander. Two additional launches will be required to place the Starship HLS and the propellant depot into orbit. To make matters worse, this hypothetical manifest does not take boiloff into account. Even if NASA and SpaceX achieve their stated goal of a 6-day turnaround between Starship launches, it will take over half a year to stage all of the propellant in orbit. Several additional flights might be required to replace the oxygen and methane which are lost during this time period.
I know there has been some publicity about the extraordinary complicated system NASA has been planning all these years for a return to the Moon, but it seems to me not enough.
And it's all because making a large rocket land vertically looks cool.
Another irony about Musk - I mean, beyond the one where he thinks everyone should have lots of kids, yet seems like the most absent father possible to his own - is the recent discussion on Sabine Hossenfelder's channel about concerns that we are getting much closer to a making low earth orbit unuseable due to a Kessler syndrome disaster.
Given that Muck Musk is already cluttering up the orbits with Starlink (another example of something with a "cool" factor but on deeper consideration, we might be better off not using), the ultimate irony would be an exploding Starship in orbit, combined with his hundreds of his other satellites, making low Earth orbit pretty much impossible to safely traverse to get to Mars.
Here's the video:
I think there is a better than even chance that Musk will go down in history as leading humanity to disaster and/or expensive dead ends, rather than being the saviour he thinks he will be.
You can see I'm still looking at Twitter for laughs and giggles - seriously though, if Noah Smith ever abandons it for Bluesky, I'll probably only be back there once a week or so.
But have a look at this for an absurd claim:
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Such shameless stupid gaslighting. He would be insta-blocked by so many at Bluesky if ever he shows up there.
How old is Rowan Williams now?* Have his eyebrows been allowed to grow ever higher til they reach his hairline?
Well, that's a bitchy way to start talking about him, because despite his strong inclination towards the sort of modern Church of England waffle theology that tries to offend no one and ends up losing relevancy because of it, I have always had a soft spot for him. Let me search this blog to see if this is right - gosh, yes, I have mentioned him in posts a half dozen times over the years, and yeah, I had forgotten I once described him like this:
"...seems to be a philosopher who ended up a Church's world leader by accident. He's a nice enough sounding man, but one suspects he has helped more people out of his Church than into it."Anyway, here he is turning up in The Guardian to offer his review of Jordan Peterson's latest version of his version of "how to find modern meaning in the Bible without really believing anything in it happened or that there is necessarily a God".
I suppose, now that I think about, that there is something pretty common in their approaches - except that if I recall correctly, Williams did try to convince us that he really did believe that God (or something close to God - "ineffable transcendence" or some such, probably! - was real.)
I actually have been feeling the need to talk about the whole "how do we find meaning in the modern world" topic, but work is so busy today. Will come back to it soon....
*74 - about the age he has seemed for 20 years.
This very much reflects my views, and it explains why I am not worried about the "but it's bad to have echo chambers" aspect. (See, Tim T, if Krugman agrees with me, how can I be wrong!):
Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.
I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.
But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.
Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis.And yes, most of the new Bluesky posters I find useful are liberal, but that reflects the modern right’s anti-intellectualism rather than political bias on the part of the site.
I have no idea what this means for X’s financials, and I don’t care. What I see is that you can indeed ruin a network if you try hard enough. And it’s starting to look as if Musk has managed to pull it off.
We have never seen anything like this, and it's bound to end badly. The only question is "how badly?"
Update: It did occur to me that this might be a photoshop, and while I have seen many MAGA types claim it is, I have seen others deny it and claim it was on Musk's own feed. If there is an original photo "hair on", I haven't seen it yet...
On the ABC news this morning:
Brisbane City Council is working with police to crack down on "anti-social behaviour" at the city's homeless camps.
Council City Standards chairwoman Sarah Hutton said the council was receiving increasing numbers of complaints from local residents and businesses near the tent cities.
"Following the Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner's personal call to the Police Commissioner, we've established a joint taskforce to help address escalating violent, aggressive and anti-social behaviour in Brisbane parks," Cr Hutton said.Roma Street resident David Mech said he had repeatedly complained to the council about the state of homeless camps around the inner city.
He said he wanted to see homeless camping criminalised to make the Brisbane cityscape "aesthetically beautiful" again.
The retired porn star gave a speech at council chambers on Tuesday last week, where he advocated that Brisbane follow the likes of Florida and make public camping a crime.
He told ABC Radio Brisbane there should be a designated campsite in Brisbane where homeless sleepers were permitted, but outlawed everywhere else.
"There's an old saying all around the world that beggars can't be choosers, but here in Brisbane they absolutely can," Mr Mech said.
As I've complained before - it's pretty much a modern nonsense to think that a reasonable response to homelessness is to let encampments develop in any public park or space. I know we are far behind America in the extent of the problem, but as the backlash there is finally gathering pace, I see no reason to let our cities even start developing the same issue.
I really don't care at all for director George Miller's movies, but I do usually find Tilda Swinton extremely watchable. Hence I decided to take a chance and watch their 2022 fantasy flop 3000 Years of Longing on Netflix.
I found it extremely dull, with problems that should have been obvious from the screenplay to any studio funding it. I can't think of any other film with such long, long periods of purely narrated flashback story, without the characters on the screen in said scenes actually speaking. And the fantasy versions of the past were just too silly, even for a movie about a genie from a bottle.
Overall, after the first 10 minutes (which do seem to show some promise), once another 20 or 30 minutes passed I found it impossible to avoid thinking "when is this film going to give us a hint as to where it's going." It does, eventually, get to a relationship of sorts between the two characters, but there is no reason at all to feel invested in it; and once established (like the rest of the movie) it has a profound feeling of "going nowhere". It is such a badly written film. Nothing feels real about any of the characters, including Swinton's, or their reactions. (And Miller co-wrote it, so he can bear all the blame.)
Yet it seems George Miller gets some sort of "benefit of the doubt" all the time from reviewers. I can't help but feel it's something to do with the glasses and always seeming to give off the (pretty typical for an Australian director) vibe of "I'm in the artist class, so if your politics are Left you must appreciate me". Here, for example, Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave it 3 out of 5, but his description suggests it deserves a "fail" more than a "pass":
It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline. Swinton and Elba sit around in the hotel room while all the exotic drama is given to us in flashback-fragments of wonder. There is something very old-fashioned about it, and I think a younger film-maker might have wanted to engage more knowingly with ideas of orientalism, race and gender. Yet for all that it is a little bit underpowered, with not much of a screen-relationship between Elba and Swinton.Of course, I have to admit that some people seemed to like it, if online reviews are anything to go by. I can't fathom why, but I guess its commercial failure gives me some encouragement that my view is the more widely shared.
It's rare that I have any interest at all in a boxing match, but I'm having a particularly hard time understanding why anyone on the planet would be keen to watch Jake Paul fight Mike Tyson. Yet somehow, this has been promoted as if it's something consequential.
It feels more to me like the modern Roman circus in the days of a declining empire.
Paul is 27, I see. With his heavy set body, tatts and beard, he could easily pass for 40.
I wonder if even Jason Soon is cynical about this?
Here we were thinking the first Trump presidency was full of weirdness; but the American public decided to just see how much weirder it could get, and man, are they being rewarded.
Trump's Reckless Choices for National Leadership
Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.
For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.
But even away from Trump, this seems pretty weird too, doesn't it?:
The Onion wins auction to take control of Alex Jones’s InfowarsAnd a random one:
Human in Bear Suit Was Used to Defraud Insurance Companies, Officials Say
Footage of a bear rifling through luxury cars was submitted to insurance companies, which paid out $140,000. But something seemed off.
But here is some decent news:
Liberals are fleeing X again — this time for BlueskyYes - I can confirm that BlueSky is looking pretty good - for whatever reason, I finally seem to have managed to stop the weird overrun of my "Discover" feed by cat photo and amateur anime art accounts. (It took a fair bit of blocking accounts for the first week or two - or maybe they changed something else in the algorithm - I really don't know.)
But it is now feeling somewhat like old Twitter: pretty much a micro-blogging site with a liberal bent, although still without the quick and often witty community input, because the numbers aren't there yet. At least a lot of journalists, commentators and scientists who I like to follow have made the move recently, and I like it. (The thing I miss about old Twitter was that its popularity meant it was actually good for breaking news in your own area - if a big storm was happening, say, you could search "Brisbane storm" and find a lot of contributions to how bad it was in other parts of the city.)
