Modern fiction

It has occurred to me in recent years that, sometimes, novels with which you were not so impressed as a younger man can contain scenes that hang around in memory for decades, often because they contain the seeds of a truth that you only understand, or recognise, after more life experience.* 

This has left me feeling that I should try reading modern fiction again, because now I may appreciate insights into character and behaviour more quickly, and not have to wait decades to appreciate it fully.

But - it seems that modern literary fiction is dominated by women, and looking at synopses of the popular novels around, I find their choice of topics rather uninspiring.  (I don't know who this guy is, but I don't find much to disagree with in his post Is fiction too female coded?)

My other lament, which I have mentioned before in the context of movies, is that the weird political scene in the US, and the culture wars generally, seems extremely ripe for fictional, probably satirical, treatment; but it just isn't happening, as far as I can tell.   Where (as other have asked) is the modern Tom Wolfe?

I have given up on science fiction, as "it's all been done before", and I remain steadfastly resistant to fantasy.  I know a lot of people liked Terry Pratchett, but I'm not drawn to his oeuvre. 

Do I blame authors, publishers, or the book buyers themselves?   Probably all them, to some degree.  

I guess I can always go back and read some of the famous 20th century authors who I never got around to - but I'm not sure who to start with, and besides, I do feel I want something set in the contemporary world too, because it has become so strange!

So yeah, I am not sure what to read that is set close to the current day, and it's bothering me.

Update:  So, it's not a fiction book, but I can still marvel at what some people think is worth writing about.  From a summary of up and coming releases in the New York Times:

The Dry Season
by Melissa Febos

Reeling from the end of a “ravaging vortex” of a relationship, Febos — a self-described serial monogamist who gave up alcohol and drugs at 23 — decides to give up sex and dating at 35, if only for three months. “To my great surprise,” she writes, those months become “the happiest of my life,” and turn into a year. This ode to female celibacy interweaves personal memoir with literary and historical research, incorporating the influence of Sappho, Virginia Woolf, Octavia E. Butler and others.

Oh, I see this is her background:

Febos is the author of Whip Smart (St Martin's Press 2010), a memoir of her work as a professional dominatrix while she was studying at The New School. 

So she makes both kinky sex and no sex into publication money.  I propose she stop talking about it completely.

 

*   Admittedly, sometimes it's memorable only because of a surprise element, which is not such an achievement.  Other stories sometimes come back to mind for no obvious reason, even when I remember at the time of reading it I may have been pretty dismissive of its quality and thought it was a bit of a waste of time.   I really don't know how my father's brain worked in this regard - he would get my mother to go to the library about once a fortnight and take out (I think) three books - always "mainstream" novels and not particularly literary or genre based - and would read them all.   He wasn't fussy, although I suppose my Mum always chose books that looked of interest to men, not women.   Anyhow, how much of these stories stuck in his head; or does reading fiction constantly work like an overwriting of the memory banks?  

Everyone's been everywhere

Following the brief trip to Indonesia (mainly Yogyakarta), I've been watching some Youtube content about other parts of Indonesia.   I am rather inclined to visit Lake Toba in Sumatra - the largest caldera freshwater lake in the world, created about after a massive explosion about 70,000 years ago that may, or may not, have nearly wiped out all of the early humans around the world.   I feel I have something of a "Ha! See, we beat you Mother Nature!", success-is-the-best-revenge, motive for wanting to see the lake from a hotel on the island in the middle.

I gather (from both Youtube, and someone I know) that it used to be an up and coming tourist destination up until about the 1990's.  It now looks sleepy and underdeveloped.  That's a bit of a pity, because my "claiming revenge on the part of humanity" motive would like to view it in the greatest comfort possible.   But I still think it looks good for a short visit.

Another place, apparently now popular with Indonesians too, is Labuan Bojo, which seems to be in an area of remarkable clear water and good coral reefs that have managed to avoid destruction, as well as the jumping off point to see komodo dragons on the main island people go to see them.  I have low interest in komodo dragons, but yes, the islands and reefs look spectacularly nice.  

Anyway, this is by way of preamble to wondering out loud whether watching too many Youtube amateur travel videos (many now done with remarkable high quality) makes people feel like not needing to really go to places in person.  I think a lifetime of TV nature documentaries on Africa did that to me - I seem to have accumulated so many viewings of lions taking down antelope that I have no interest in seeing it in person.   And I would just as soon not have an elephant charging the safari viewing vehicle.  So, with the exception of Egypt and perhaps Morocco:  I feel no need to see any of that continent.   (And even then, I recently have seen people who videoed the climb inside the big pyramid at Giza to the central chamber, and its looks way too claustrophobic and hot for me to consider.)

I know the first hand experience is different, but you can watch so many people doing the same circuit (and the same things on the same circuit) that it can take away at least the surprise element for some destinations.

Anyway, it's probably just a matter of self control, and not clicking on every link the All Knowing Google algorithm throws up.   But it's hard to resist....   

 

A vegan experiment

My "vegan curious" status continues - although I still swear I will never give up eggs, cheese or crustaceans.  

For a long time I have been wondering about a decent vegan mince replacement.  Quorn is too soft and pretty tasteless;  textured vegetable protein is still around, but not as much as it used to be, and it's OK but I'm curious to try other types. 

 After watching some Youtube suggestions, and given my wife is away and I bear any possible digestive issues alone, I tried using a combination of dried (but soaked) shiitake mushrooms, walnuts (also soaked for a while), and a block of high protein firm tofu.   These were all ground up in a food processor, and while I thought the ingredients meant it was more expensive than beef mince, as it turned out I didn't use all of the mushrooms and walnuts.   So I would say the total cost of the ingredients used was perhaps $13 dollars, but I ended up with enough for about 6 or 7 meals.

(It was also flavoured with some dark soy, onion powder, some chilli powder and dried oregano.   The lesson I learned from some Youtuber was to not overly flavour it, so that you can add other seasonings for different types of meals.   You don't want it full of cumin, for example, if you are using it in a pasta sauce.)

So, how did it go?   Pretty good, actually!   By itself it smelt good, and I did use it in 3 or 4 different styles of meals, all pretty successful and filling.  The only thing I would say is that to fry it, being full of reconstituted dried mushrooms, it did tend to suck up the olive oil pretty readily, and I think using it in a non stick frying pan works best.   The shiitake mushrooms give a bit of a meaty bite, and I love their flavour generally.  I assume the walnuts are good for me, in moderation, and the tofu was there for protein.   (Maybe not that much per meal, but better than the suggestions that were only walnuts and shiitake.)

I will probably make it again in future.   It did cause some gas, but it was bearable!

All perfectly normal...in a fascist state

 

On the Coalition divorce

Blind Nick

This made me laugh on the weekend:

Nick Minchin, as far as I know, has never changed his mind on his climate change skepticism, which is effectively denialism. 

He and his ilk are the reason a large slab of the electorate cannot stomach the Liberals until they repudiate once and fall Minchin's views on that crucial subject.

 

Update:  Sure enough, reading the article that Latika is promoting, there is not a mention of climate change, even in passing.   Just mostly "but women aren't voting for us".

As I was saying...

This is obvious

 

The tweets following do show in fact that there has been some talk in the media about the security risks.  An article at The Hill ends with this:

Trump’s argument that the new Qatari aircraft would save taxpayer dollars is far from sound. The gifted aircraft would need to be retrofitted from the inside out with new power systems, electrical wiring and other technology for secure communications and self-defense — such as in the case of an electromagnetic attack.

That process could take years to complete and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to aviation experts. What’s more, the aircraft would need to be extensively swept for any foreign software modifications or embedded technology.

This article at Defence News has someone saying an upgrade to full Air Force One level would cost "billions".   

It's just a ridiculous idea, let alone emblematic of the laughable openness to corruption of Trump.

Update:   I should have checked the Washington Post.  It has an article about it:

...retrofitting the 13-year-old aircraft to current Air Force One requirements would take years of work and billions of dollars, current and former U.S. officials say. Such a task would be impossible to complete before Trump leaves office.

The Air Force referred comment to the White House, and the Secret Service declined to comment. L3Harris also declined to comment.

Of course they did!  That's how authoritarian regimes work.

More:

The president’s jet has a raft of security, communications and support requirements that are highly classified and have proven costly and cumbersome.

“This is a flying nuclear-hardened command post,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of Air Force One operations. “It has to have secure capability at multiple levels.” The Air Force would have to “rip” open and rebuild the Qatari plane — which has been flown for years in service of other countries and individuals — to bring it up to standard, said the official.

Counterintelligence is also a concern, said former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. “We would have to be sure nobody had planted bugs on the airplane,” he said.

High-end communications have to be protected from jamming, cyberattacks and nuclear blasts, current and former officials said.

“You’d pretty much have to take that plane down to the skeleton and put it back together,” said Mac Plihcik, a retired Secret Service agent who worked on President Barack Obama’s detail. “The security of every individual component is a big deal.”

Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent who was a supervisor in Trump’s first administration, said rigorous inspections are performed after all presidential transport vehicles leave the production line. The gifting of a plane from a foreign government would probably warrant an even harder look, Eckloff said.

 If Trump is given a "free pass" by MAGA aligned commentators to waive the obvious security risks of using this aircraft, it will show how true it is that he is a cult leader.   And that's not even considering the corruption aspect.  But in the tiniest sliver of hope for America - I see that even Mark Levin, amongst other pro-Trump excuse makers, think it is a bad idea.  

Update 2:   Even one of the brown-nosiest of "respectable" blogs for Trump, Powerline, says "...it's a very bad idea", and most of the comments following agree.  This one gets 4 likes:

 

 

Adolescence is overrated

Look, you can probably ignore this opinion as I did try watching Episode 1 after a steak dinner with two (small) glasses of red wine, and starting at about 9.30pm.   I think everyone can guess the outcome for any human male over the age of 60 - sleep after about (I think) 25 minutes.

But, I don't know - I still think that I saw enough to feel it wasn't engaging.   Sure, lots of work and skill in the continuous shot stuff, but I really prefer those to just be a highlight of a more normally edited thing - too much of it dilutes the effect. 

One thing I definitely did  not understand was why the British police would got to such extremes in arresting a 13 year old boy accused of a knife murder.   The scene played more like they were dealing with an adult terrorist who they feared had a house full of home made bombs.  Why didn't this seem a tad silly to TV critics?

It doesn't take much to Google up an article that agrees with me:

First and foremost Netflix’s Adolescence is a fictional drama that does not claim to be wholly accurate of what would actually happen in similar real-life cases. That being said, even the very first scene was somewhat questionable when it comes to police procedures.

“But if they found the body at 10.30 pm why are they waiting until the morning to arrest him?” Steven told Time Out. “That’s one thing the police are really good at. They move fast. Is the raid realistic? I used to do raids like this and if we’d had firearms officers in this situation, we would have looked at each other and gone: ‘This is a 13-year-old boy, we don’t need two big lads with a shield.’ Yes, a knife is a deadly weapon, but they have baton rounds (rubber bullets). You would have so many things to de-escalate in that situation.”

There was also the lack of “evidence preserv​ation” and situational recordings that could have landed DI Bascombe in legal trouble in the real world.

He explained: “But the search was poor. The police use specialist search teams. You literally do training for it. You get paid extra money. You get brought in at three am in the morning for murders. You don’t throw mail on the floor.

“You don’t pour shit on the bed like it was in the 1970s and rummage through it. It would all be documented with cameras. DC Bascombe has his camera off in the van and the solicitor would say: ‘Why’d you turn your camera off? What did you say to my client?’ Nowadays, a police officer’s word is good for nothing if it’s not recorded.”

 I know the show has been criticised from the Right due to "race-swapping", and no doubt a lot of the criticism from that side of politics is not going to be fair.  However, this person does give a nuanced critique, arguing that the lead character doesn't have the characteristics he has observed in his experience of young gang murderers.   

I don't think I need continue watching it...

Finally, Sabine talks about the future affecting the past

I've mentioned the idea from physics that the future might affect the past many, many times over the years, yet it doesn't seem to get discussed often in online popular science anymore.

 Hence I was happy to see that Sabine Hossenfelder finally did a video that talked about it - included the rarely mentioned transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics by John G Cramer.

 I'm pleased to see that she thinks the whole concept is worthy of consideration and further work. And going by the number of comments, it's an idea that seems to hold a lot of appeal to people who like to follow her.   Is it because it might be a way of incorporating both free will (which, I know, Sabine doesn't believe in) and determinism?   

Anyway, here's the video:

The Entertainer

Lots of amusing online comments on the return of Legend in His Own (and Gina Rinehart's) Mind, Timbo Wilson:

Then Tim himself made a contribution:

Which seems to have to caused one of the fastest cases of buyer's regret ever to be seen, post-election:

This tweeter had similar sentiments:

But for others, it was entirely unsurprising:

Quite a few Labor voters are hoping he runs for the leadership!

Good news for Labor

 They're both awful!

Against assuming the "lab leak" theory has been proven

A bunch of people (mainly on the Right) seem to think that the Covid lab leak theory has been shown to be true, when it hasn't at all.

A new study shows that the first origin story is still very much on the cards:  

In a study published on Wednesday, a team of researchers compared the evolutionary story of SARS with that of Covid 17 years later. The researchers analyzed the genomes of the two coronaviruses that caused the pandemics, along with 248 related coronaviruses in bats and other mammals.

Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study, said that the histories of the two coronaviruses followed parallel paths. “In my mind, they are extraordinarily similar,” he said.

In both cases, Dr. Pekar and his colleagues argue, a coronavirus jumped from bats to wild mammals in southwestern China. In a short period of time, wildlife traders took the infected animals hundreds of miles to city markets, and the virus wreaked havoc in humans.

“When you sell wildlife in the heart of cities, you’re going to have a pandemic every so often,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and an author of the new study.

You can read the details here.

The article ends:

Dr. Eloit and other scientists agreed that finding an intermediate form of SARS-CoV-2 in a wild mammal would make a compelling case for a natural spillover. Chinese authorities looked at some animals at the start of the pandemic and did not find the virus in them.

However, wildlife vendors at the Huanan market removed their animals from the stalls before scientists could study them. And once China put a stop to wildlife sales, farmers culled their animals.

“There’s a big missing piece, and you really can’t dance around it,” said Dr. Pond.

Stephen Goldstein, a geneticist at the University of Utah who was not involved in the new study, said that the research served as a warning about the risk of a future coronavirus pandemic. Wild mammals sold in markets anywhere in the region where SARS and Covid got their start could become a vehicle to a city hundreds of miles away. “The pieces of these viruses exist in all these places,” Dr. Goldstein said.

 

As I have been saying for years...

Now, of course, you could argue that climate change fence sitting has not stopped the public going for the Liberals before over the last 15 years - but the apparent success of the Teals in two elections now does strongly suggest to me that it has become a key issue for well off Australians based in the capital cities - who would formerly be seen as the Liberal's natural constituency.  

As I'm sure I have written before, Malcolm Turnbull is the one who should have dragged the party into facing reality on this issue.  He should have demanded that those who are going to continue casting doubt on the matter being a real, scientifically verified, issue should leave the party, and make any continuing coalition also dependent on the Nationals not undermining him.   Maybe the Queensland melding of the parties would have made that difficult/impossible - but he should have acted decisively on it, instead of allowing the alternative to Labor to continue looking disingenuous in their strategy of "we believe in it - don't listen to our MPs and Senators who don't - but to keep the doubters happy we will nag continuously about renewables and undermine other action for political advantage."

Update:   it seems still unclear if Tim Wilson will regain Goldstein, but you know, him being one of the few Liberal "wins" out of this generally disastrous election would actually amuse me, given that he is so ambitious that it will be funny to see how little he can achieve by being in such a diminished and talentless Opposition.

Child nutrition in Indonesia

Watching a bit of evening commercial TV in Indonesia last week, one thing that really struck me was the amount of advertisements dedicated to kid's nutrition.  Not just baby formula, but those toddler formula, and other foods, often with emphasis on health and development.

It reminded me that I had read before about the extent to which children in that country were considered to have "stunted" growth due to poor nutrition.  I thought I had posted about it before, but can't find it in my blog search.

 Googling it certainly brings up the stories, though:

The World Bank Board of Executive Directors on June 26, 2023,  approved a program to provide additional support to expand Indonesia’s efforts to improve the delivery and quality of health and nutrition services for adolescent girls, pregnant women, and young children to accelerate the reduction of stunting among children under five.

Stunting, caused by undernutrition and frequent infections, can result in slower growth, cognitive damage, and impaired learning. The World Bank’s Human Capital Project identifies stunting reduction as crucial for countries to reach their full productive potential. Concerted efforts by Indonesia have lowered stunting rates from 31.4 percent in 2018 to 21.6 percent in 2022, and the country’s goal is to cut stunting further to 14 percent by 2024. The World Bank’s Investing in Nutrition and Early Years (INEY) Phase 2 Program will extend the duration and scope of World Bank support to the Government of Indonesia’s National Program for the Acceleration of Stunting Reduction.

This article at the ABC from 2019 has this surprising fact:

The country is classified as middle income by the World Bank, but its stunting rate is higher than those in South Sudan and Somalia. 

The government has responded by implemented a massive free meal program for schools and elsewhere:

 Indonesia has launched a transformative free meal program designed to combat malnutrition and support underprivileged communities.

Championed by President Prabowo Subianto, the initiative aims to provide nutritious meals to almost 83 million Indonesians by 2029, focusing initially on school children and pregnant women.

However, logistical challenges, budgetary constraints and feedback from beneficiaries and experts highlight the complexities of implementing such a large-scale program.

 But, the program is not without its problems:

Nearly 80 students across two high schools in Cianjur, south of the capital Jakarta, fell ill after eating the meals this week. Most of those who ended up in hospital have since been discharged.

This is the latest in a series of food poisonings that have been linked to the programme, a signature policy of President Prabowo Subianto.

Authorities investigating the case say the suspected cause is negligent food preparation. Samples from the vomit of students have been sent for lab testing, and police say they have questioned people handling the food, from cooks to packers to delivery workers....

Across the world, programmes offering free meals to students have proved to be effective in improving health, academic performance and attendance.

But Indonesia's $28bn (£21bn) version - shaping up to be the most expensive of its kind - has become the target of food safety concerns and heated anti-government protests.

In February, when thousands took to the streets to protest at budget cuts, they aimed their ire at the hefty price of Prabowo's free school meals: "Children eat for free, parents are laid off," read one of their protest signs.

 So, I guess it is no wonder that I saw kid's nutrition featuring on TV ads often...