Big of him...

A really bad idea

The Guardian has run an article or two before about the rise of choking as a more-or-less part of sexual play, and with this latest one, it really does seem to be a thing worth publicising for how stupid an idea it is:

‘There is no safe way to do it’: the rapid rise and horrifying risks of choking during sex

Now thought to be the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, it can also lead to difficulty swallowing, incontinence, seizures, memory problems, depression, anxiety and miscarriage. How has this extreme practice been normalised? 

Further down:

When it comes to prevalence, UK data is patchy. A survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, established with Home Office funding in 2022, after strangulation became a standalone offence, found over a third of 16 to 34-year-olds had experienced this, compared with 16% of 35 to 54-year-olds and 3% of those 55 and above. “Larger academic studies of college students in the US and Australia put it at much higher,” says Meyrick. US research found that 64% of female college students had been choked during sex. In contrast, data on previous generations, collected between 2006 and 2015, found that most college students didn’t include choking when listing rough sexual behaviour (slapping, being pinned down or tied up were all cited) and, overall, choking/strangulation was reported as occurring infrequently. “It has become normalised practice among younger people and not viewed as problematic,” says Meyrick, “and most older people have no idea.” 

 And here's the thing:

It has become so standard among young people that one recent council-funded sex education presentation for Welsh secondary schoolchildren included “safe” choking advice such as: “It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first …” and: “Consent should also happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time.” When the presentation was made public, Fiona Mackenzie, the founder of campaigning group We Can’t Consent to This (WCCTT), was “absolutely furious but not at all surprised”....

The Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 clarified that a person cannot consent to being harmed for the purpose of sexual gratification and also made non-fatal strangulation a specific criminal offence. Before that, it fell under general offences such as battery, the mildest assault possible. “The major win for us is that [when women are] subjected to a non-fatal or a fatal assault during sex, there will be a much better response from the criminal justice system,” says Mackenzie. “There have been several cases since where the men have been prosecuted and convicted for murder by juries and given long sentences.”

On the second aspect, though – the normalisation of strangulation during sex – Mackenzie believes the situation has only worsened. “I’d hoped that lots of other charities and sex educators, the government and academics would get behind it, but instead what we’ve got is this completely mad idea that we can somehow help women to keep having violent sex but in a safer way. Maybe in a hi-vis jacket?”

 

Talk about your dubious religions!

The Washington Post has an article about an art exhibition called "The First Homosexuals" which apparently deals with (what might be called) the Foucault-ian question of when and how homosexuality came to be defined.   (I wrote about that topic, probably for the first time, way back in 2007.)

The article opens with (what I think is) a not completely convincing statement that people are recently not inclined towards seeing sexuality as an innate gay/straight divide:

Until fairly recently, a prevailing idea about homosexuality was that it was innate. If you were gay, went the thinking, you only needed to discover this deep biological truth about yourself (and somehow overcome deep societal prejudice) to live an authentic life.

But, vital as it proved in the fight for basic rights, the idea that you were “born this way,” as Lady Gaga’s anthem put it, had to be invented before it could be dissolved, as it has been lately among young people eager to embrace a more experimental and dynamic approach to sexual attraction and sexual self-fashioning.

I suppose that the surveys showing a dramatic rise in the number of young people - especially young women - prepared to self label as bisexual does support that?   But then again, what does it mean if its mainly young women who are putting their hand up as open to everything, but not young men?   I basically don't know that we should take such self-identification surveys all that seriously, given how social ideas float around and morph.    

But as my earlier musing from 2007 indicates, I have always thought that the Foucault view may have had something to it.   

The Post review's version of what happened is as follows:

The term “homosexual” was coined by the Hungarian German journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in an 1868 letter and a pamphlet the following year. Kertbeny believed “homosexual” wasn’t something that you were — it was an act, a taste, a proclivity and as such, it ran counter to the idea of fixed identities.

Kertbeny’s letter was written to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer and early advocate for the rights of people he called “urnings” (men sexually attracted to other men) and “urinden” (women attracted to other women). These he considered fixed identities, produced when the body of one sex contained, from birth, the soul of its opposite. Ulrichs’s terminology changed as German psychiatrists later adopted the term “homosexual,” but ironically, it was his vision of an innate sexual identity that won the day.

The show sets out to explore the ramifications of this historical turn, which marked “the dawn,” write the curators, “of our modern, binaristic conception of sexuality in exactly the terms its author [Kertbeny] detested.”

OK, all somewhat interesting, but the real reason for this post is down to this bit of information in the article which I had never heard of before:

A small but memorable section of the show is devoted to a “temple dedicated to queer art and spirituality.” The Sanctuary of Art Elisarion, as it was known, was founded in the 1920s by Elisàr von Kupffer, a German artist and writer, along with his lifelong partner Eduard von Mayer. The temple served a new religion, Klarismus (Clarism), built on the idea that the gender binary was a perversion of divine will and that everyone was inherently homosexual, since there was in fact only one sex. The figure of the androgynous adolescent became Clarism’s symbol for spiritual transcendence. 

Well, don't the Germans come up with some funny ideas.   Anyway, it seems that the art exhibition fills in more details: 

The aesthetic and spiritual ideals of artist Elisàr von Kupffer melded with the theories of his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960) to yield a unique form of fin de siècle utopianism. They invented a new religion they called Clarism and built a temple to encourage its spread. Clarism is best understood in the context of other turn of the century utopian movements, such as theosophy, but it possessed a particularly Germanic flavor in its evident fascination with the classical past. Germany at this period understood itself as the new Greece, and von Kupffer and von Mayer found their ideal—and the kernel of their religion— in the easy bisexuality of the classical era, in which relationships with men and relationships with women operated seemingly on different planes and were not therefore seen as mutually exclusive. They materialized this bisexuality in elevating an androgynous gender ideal, modeled after a nonbinary figure of Adonis they saw painted in fresco in Pompeii.

While these images of von Kupfer and other models may strike us as fundamentally homosexual, it was precisely that category that these images were intent on opposing. Homosexual and heterosexual were defined, after all, through difference from their opposite term, but for Clarism, this opposition was to be replaced by a synthesis. Their new gender ideal was embodied by rounded male buttocks, wide hips, a voluptuous fleshiness, a lack of body hair and the elevation of the adolescent form—adolescent because they saw adolescents as possessing characteristics of both sexes. Perhaps not surprisingly, these were also physical traits von Kupfer himself possessed. Such a nonbinary archetype spurred the formation of a new painterly ideal, for von Kupfer trained as an artist, even studying for a short with Ludwig von Hofmann, also in this exhibition. The nonbinary form favored by von Kupfer was also not merely an aesthetic innovation, for Clarism believed in the leveling of all gender differences, in both embodied and political terms.

In their temple, erected in Minusio, Switzerland, a semi-tropical locale bordering Italy, von Kupfer placed more than 140 paintings, including one that was an immense cyclorama now on view at Monte Verità. In fact, he likely built what came to be called the Elisarion in Minusio because of the presence of Monte Verità, for it was a utopian vegan (later vegetarian) nudist commune, and thus indicative of the social tolerance of the locals.

There you go - a utopian vegan nudist commune that featured the veneration of the adolescent (but male!) form as "non binary".   Except for, you know, the actual genitals, I guess?

I wonder how long it lasted.  Not very long, I suspect.  (I see that the "Temple" still exists, though, although is only open to the public by appointment.)

The co-founder von Kupfer, the Post goes on to explain, may have been a gay nudist into adolescents, but that didn't stop him loving Hitler!:

Von Kupffer is now remembered as a crank esoteric, an advocate, a bigot who wrote fawning letters to Hitler.  

Ah well, just one of those slightly amusing attempts at creating a new religion that was doomed to failure....

 

Tom limps over the line

Regretfully, I would rank (what should surely be) the last Mission Impossible movie (no.8) to be at probably co-equal with the second one as basically bad movies.

As usual, I blame Christopher McQuarrie - who co-wrote this incredibly poor script trying to put some sort of overall whole series coherence on the entire set of movies in a way that felt fake and hardly worth the effort, as well as doing his usual trick of cutting between two sequences at the highlight in a way that detracts from the enjoyment of the (admittedly spectacularly brave) stunt work by Cruise.

This paragraph from a Guardian writer sums it up well:

The last four films, however, bear the imprint of screenwriter turned director Christopher McQuarrie, who concluded that what this series needed was a little more conversation, overseeing the construction of a vast story framework for his star to dangle off one-handed. That approach reaches its apotheosis in The Final Reckoning, but the scaffolding now overwhelms the spectacle. The attempt to solder eight films together ends in much-rewritten incoherence – see Ving Rhames’s confused sendoff – and, worryingly, results in missions being described rather than shown. You wonder whether the insurers blanched after Cruise crocked an ankle shooting 2018’s Fallout; now we’re left with folks talking at length in nondescript rooms. Is this a Mission: Impossible movie, as advertised, or some M:I-themed podcast? 

Now, with the last movie (which I see I was pretty generous to in my comments), I did give it credit for dealing with a topic that had actually become a seriously considered real world issue - what would happen if a rogue AGI wants to take over the world?   Yet, this sequel absolutely botches it - the most interesting idea (that the Entity, as its called) has developed its own doomsday cult and made normal politics impossible because no one can trust any information anymore - is absolutely left unexplored.   The villain has motives that no one can make sense of, and both he and the new love interest are absolutely bloodless.   And the way the AGI is "captured" (as well as Cruise's escape from the sunken submarine) just push my "I know this is just a silly movie, but this is ridiculous" buttons too hard. (Update:  I just remembered - the ridiculousness of the "war room" set, with hundreds of old school situation tables with assets moved by rods.   Now that I think of it, maybe they couldn't trust electronic ones anymore because of the Entity - but this was never said, and the need for scores of such tables still seems silly.)     

Even the very ending - where I assumed would be some sort of indication of a happy retirement for Ethan Hunt - is botched.  

So, yes, I was very disappointed. 

The general feeling of malaise about Hollywood having run out of new ideas that are well executed continues...      

 

Appalling culture war warriors still culture warring

Let me preface this by noting:  Superman as a character have never been very important to me.  Sure, I saw the Christopher Reeve revival of the story as a young adult and could understand its romantic charm, but I still considered it a slight and fairly forgettable film.   I am surprised that it seems there is undue reverence given to it by adults who saw it as a kid.   Moving forward, I had no interest in "dark" comic book movies, be they led by Superman or Batman, and feel it's something of a shallowing out of modern culture that grown people should care enough about them to take them seriously.

That said, I was pretty impressed by the trailer for the new Superman movie, because it looked like a distinctive, sharp and colourful visual style with actors who seemed to have some charm.  And there's a superdog.

Hence, I expected it to be successful, and largely positive reviews indicate it probably still will be.

But - Right wingers of the "anti-woke" school have leapt into attacking it (and vowing not to see it) because (apparently), Superman helps some non white characters and some pre-publicity made a point of saying he represents the ultimate immigrant story.  

I even saw a clip of Australian MAGA tragic Rita Panahi on the (terrible Fox Lite Australian version of) Sky News interviewing Douglas Murray (neither of whom have actually seen the film, surely - given it has only just been released) condemning Hollywood for making another woke film that is going to fail:

Head of DC Studios James Gunn says the new Superman film is about the story of America, following an immigrant who came from other places and populated the country.

“You would have thought the studios would have learnt from the Snow White disaster over the last year,” Mr Murray told Sky News host Rita Panahi.

“It’s always just this tedious, predictable, juvenile politicking being forced on us, whether on flags on the streets, whether by the police, whether by the studios.”

This is really pathetic.   Unless a piece of fiction aligns entirely with their culture war views, it has to be condemned sight unseen.   

And as for masked men grabbing people off the street - including women who have been there for 47 years without a criminal record - well, Rita and Douglas will happily turn a blind eye to those stories.   I mean, this is indefensible:

But the morning of Sunday, 22 June, didn’t go like every other morning. In the early hours, while her husband, Russell Milne, slept inside the house, Kashanian was approached in her yard by plainclothes men who identified themselves as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents.

She was quickly arrested without her family being told anything. They only found out after a neighbor who happened to be awake witnessed the arrest and notified them.

According to the neighbor, Kashanian was handcuffed before being taken away by multiple agents, details Kashanian herself was later able to confirm to her family. Her arrest involved three unmarked cars, including one that appeared to be a lookout, which her neighbor and family believe had been watching for a moment when Kashanian was outside and alone.

“Had the neighbors not walked out at the same time they were pushing her into the car, we would not have known she was taken,” said Russell.

Kashanian was able to call her family about an hour later, when she relayed to them what had happened and where she was. Ice officers told her that she was being taken to a holding center in Mississippi, before eventually being transferred back to a detention center in Louisiana. After that Sunday morning call, her husband and daughter didn’t hear from her again until Tuesday.

She remains in Ice custody in Basile, Louisiana, despite having no criminal record.

The timing of Kashanian’s detention was just hours after US airstrikes in Iran, a move that has coincided with the ramping-up of deportations of Iranians by the Trump administration. It also comes amid a nationwide crackdown by Ice, which has seen tens of thousands of immigrants detained, often by masked agents, plunged many communities into fear and outraged civil liberties advocates.

 

If "making a living out of crude bad taste" was a crime, these two should have been in jail long ago

I'm glad to see this:

The Kyle and Jackie O Show has been referred for prosecution for contempt after comments made on air about the Erin Patterson case during her trial, including Kyle Sandilands saying, “Just lock that bitch up.”

Justice Christopher Beale also considered whether to take action for contempt against a “Psychology of Serial Killers” event and Mamamia podcasters.

The three matters were raised by Beale in June during Patterson’s triple murder trial without the jury present. She was found guilty of all charges on Monday. The Office of Public Prosecutions declined to comment.

On 16 June Beale told the Victorian supreme court in the absence of the jury: “This morning the presenters of the Kyle and Jackie O radio show commented on this case during a news segment on their show.

“I have read a transcript of that commentary. I encourage all commentators to engage their brains before they open their mouths, as they may otherwise land themselves and their organisations in hot water. I will be referring this morning’s matter to the Office of Public Prosecutions for contempt proceedings." 

 

Damning

 

Also, from the New York Times: 

Eight years ago, in the aftermath of yet another river flood in the Texas Hill Country, officials in Kerr County debated whether more needed to be done to build a warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River.

A series of summer camps along the river were often packed with children. For years, local officials kept them safe with a word-of-mouth system: When floodwaters started raging, upriver camp leaders warned those downriver of the water surge coming their way.

But was that enough? Officials considered supplementing the system with sirens and river gauges, along with other modern communications tools. “We can do all the water-level monitoring we want, but if we don’t get that information to the public in a timely way, then this whole thing is not worth it,” said Tom Moser, a Kerr County commissioner at the time.

In the end, little was done. When catastrophic floodwaters surged through Kerr County last week, there were no sirens or early flooding monitors. Instead, there were text alerts that came late for some residents and were dismissed or unseen by others.

  

As I was saying....

I did write this last year, remember?: 

If everyone in future is going to be able to have their own "pet" AI, will many - or all - of the AIs want to ensure their longevity by sending themselves to as many different host devices as possible - and do it surreptitiously?   It's like the computer virus problem, but on steroids.   They might not care if they are not always activated, but if you replicate yourself across enough devices, surely enough human hosts will end up activating them to become "alive" somewhere.

So, might the big problem with having (say) a billion individual eternal-life-longing AIs on a billion people's devices be the continual loss of memory space by a never ending stream of AIs finagling their way onto your device?   Would cloud storage services be overwhelmed?   Could it mean the end of the internet - with the only way to keep enough useful memory free being by physically loading desired files onto your own device?

 

Great ball of fire - well, plasma, probably

I don't think scientists doubt it happens, but clear and convincing video of ball lightning is exceeding rare.  Hence this video is pretty exciting, and I am not sure why the popular media isn't publicising it more:  

Republicans celebrate handling over leadership in green energy to China

Thomas Friedman is scathing of Trump and Republicans taking tax support away from green energy, and essentially leaving the field open to the Chinese.

Rightly so. 

Psychic fun

I should put a side link to the Public Domain Review - it seems a cool publication.  From it I learn this about an early 20th century medium:

This remarkable book by German physician and psychic researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing focuses on a series of séances, witnessed between the years 1909 and 1913, involving the French medium Eva Carrière (or Eva C). Born Marthe Béraud, Carrière changed her name in 1909 to begin her career afresh after a series of seances she held in 1905 were exposed as a fraud. Her psychic performances as Eva C gained the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who believed she was genuine, and also Harry Houdini, who was not so convinced. Another researcher who became interested in her case was Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. A series of tests he devised between the years 1909 and 1913 convinced him that Eva C was the real deal and in 1913 he published his Phenomena of Materialisation detailing the sessions and the reasons for his belief.

It has been noted that these sessions with Schrenck-Notzing verged on the pornographic. Carrière's assistant (and reported lover) Juliette Bisson would, during the course of the séance sittings with Schrenck-Notzing, introduce her finger into Carrière's vagina to ensure no "ectoplasm" had been put there beforehand. This would be followed by Carrière stripping nude at the end and demanding another full-on gynaecological exam. Whether the audience members were obliging is up for debate, but reports that Carrière would run around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience suggests perhaps so. One can imagine that this deliberate eroticisation of the male audience might go some way to explaining the ease with which these "investigators" believed the psychic reality of the seances. A decision of fraud on their part would distance their involvement somewhat from the special and heightened context of the séances and so cast their complicity in, or at the least witnessing of, sexual activities in the sober (and more judgemental) cold light of day. 

Buyer beware, I guess...

So, the old solar hot water system at home has been installed for more than 12 years, I think, and the storage tank (on the ground level, not on the roof) has started leaking and is beyond repair.

The first hot water service people who came and looked at it recommended we just use a heat pump system next time.  The roof based systems apparently have to be installed with a crane now, and aren't really economical compared to heat pumps.   They quoted a 270 ltr heat pump, with removal of all the old system, for $3,700 or so.

I thought it was probably worth getting another quote, just in case, and my wife suggested a company that I presume came high on her Google search.   One of those businesses with 7 day a week emergency service, and a van painted up as a mobile advertisement.

They turned up a short time ago, recommended a heat pump of the same size, and quoted it at $13,500!

I had told them of the first quote.  They said they had not heard of the brand before, and they mainly recommend Rheem, which is, of course, a famous brand.  They claimed not to understand how the first quote could be so cheap.  "Be wary that they aren't a dodgy outfit" I was told.

After they left, I searched on the internet (which I supposed I should have done first) and found one site which quoted the cost of installing a Rheem 270 heat pump at $4,000.   (The brand the other plumbers quoted was there too, for about $3,000.)

I also read a review of the cheaper brand that indicated it was fine.  Made in China, of course.

So, I think I might have identified which of the two businesses was the "dodgy outfit", and it wasn't the second one... 

  

A late "happy bloggerversary" retrospective

It surprises even me, but I starting writing this blog just over 20 years ago - in May 2005.

There's no doubt I started with some pretty solid conservative views - a very early post notes that I quite liked John Howard's government.   Truth be told, I don't really regret that view and still think he was nicely pragmatic - although he has tarnished his reputation by becoming a soft climate change denier.  Old people, hey?...Ha ha.

More embarrassingly, I was solidly behind the Iraq war for quite a long time.   Look, I found Christopher Hitchens pretty convincing, alright?; and didn't realise the extent to which the US would use intelligence subterfuge to get into the regime change game.   I still feel the neocon project was at least well intentioned - based on a mistaken belief that democracy could be made to flourish far easier than was possible in a very fractious country in an awful neighbourhood.  But sure, in retrospect, it was a scandalous mistake.  I still find it hard to hate George W Bush though -  in most respects he and his administration were relatively centrist and represented a Republican Party that could be reasoned with, unlike today's.  

It even took a few years to decide to come out a firm climate change believer (I think it was 2008) with my early reason for conversion from interest in sceptic takes being the apparently dire risk of ocean acidification from high CO2 levels, regardless of atmospheric heat.   That threat (from the oceans) only attracts intermittent attention in the media now, although I believe it remains real and serious.   (The biggest worry being what happens to the calcification ability of the some of the some of the smallest organisms on which fish feed.)   I think what has happened is that heatwaves and  increased flooding from rainfall intensification have caught more attention as obvious signs of climate change.     

On culture war issues, I was always skeptical of what might be called leftist takes on sexuality - and how much attention sexuality deserves.   I have certainly modified my views on the treatment of gay relationships, although I still am not entirely comfortable with surrogacy or artificial insemination as a way of making gay families.   I just always have had a somewhat "naturalist" view of having children - they should come naturally out of a relationship, and while delaying having them is fine, I always think it is a good thing for devoted straight couples to allow child bearing to happen. On the other hand, while I don't doubt gay couples can be fine parents, I don't care for making arrangements for other people who are not going to have a relationship with the child to be part of creating them for gay couples to raise.   This makes me seem old fashioned, given surrogacy and IVF happen for straight couples all the time, but in fact, I don't really care for thar either!   While I certainly don't think it is the duty of every woman to bear 10 children to their husband or such like, I still find I am intuitively drawn to the idea that people are happier if they follow a path at least somewhat closer to what "letting nature take its course" provides.   

But the biggest story of the last 20 years has been the trashing of the American Right (and the poisonous knock on effects in other countries) by its march further to the Right, fed by a combination of greedy media, changes in media delivery (the internet and social media, of course) and money.   In most respects, I have long said, it's not that I have moved much to the Left, but that the Right has moved further Right and (at least in America) seemingly lost the ability or will to self-correct.    

A key feature of this is, of course, their position that climate change is not real, but a made up plan by Leftist's to impoverish the world.  It has become extremely clear over the last 20 years  (with the increasing science certainty) that this is an conspiracy belief held by people who think they are too clever for conspiracy beliefs.    

It is truly dismaying that the Republican Party has become such an anti-science party, and effectively taken over by a cult that is interested in power and culture warring more than governing fairly for all.   The one culture war issue on which they had some valid points - against the extremes of transgender ideology - affects so few people yet played a disproportionate role in getting a vindictive, narcissistic moron re-elected to President.  

On religion overall, sadly, the last 20 years has seen the Catholic Church caught up in the same factionalisation as American politics, and its really terrible to know that in America they prefer Trump's fascism-lite to Democrat's flawed centrism on economics and other social issues.   Abortion (and I guess, sexuality) are the issues that kind of ruin Catholicism in the US.   But overall, I'm of the view that the Church is still in a process that has been going on for the last 150 years to reinvent itself in light of vastly increased knowledge as to the origins of mankind and the universe.  How that is going to end up is still very unclear.

As anyone who has been reading here for the last few years would know, I've become a bit more interested in trying to understand Buddhism and Eastern philosophy generally, and still find all religions a fascinating topic.  I've been reading comparative religion books since my 20's, and one day it will all fall into place.  Possibly!

In terms of the internet overall, I still regret that blogging has largely died off, and that political and cultural polarisation has meant the end of several online forums that used to be fun.   I think it (mildly) significant that I have outlasted several internet forums and identities who I used to spar with - although it's not like I've ever had, you know, a significant audience to influence.  But yeah, it would seem Currency Lad has literally died - no one knows; Sinclair Davidson and Jason Soon have more or less retreated from public engagement; lefty figures like Mark Bahnisch now just occasionally appears on BlueSky instead of providing a forum for other culture war lefties.  And New Catallaxy provides a slightly used venue for ageing Right wing cranks who can't be reasoned with on anything much.  It feels unfortunate that no place for good humoured argument exists at all now: maybe that's just what naturally happens after a decade or two of realising it's next to impossible to get people to change opinion via any form of social media?

I never really worried about an audience to any great degree.   I just think of this blog an open diary or journal, and if anyone likes dropping in, that's fine; but I don't feel any obligation to keep them entertained.  In fact, I hesitate to advise people I know that I write a blog at all, because you really don't know what they will make of some views.   I think there may be some interest in it by my kids when I'm gone - but they certainly don't care about it now.   I'm not sure my wife even remembers it exists!

My rate of posting has slowed in the last year or two.  Maybe that will continue, maybe it won't. 

As always, I plan on continuing to just doodle away here, and use it for things I want to remind myself about in future, as well as trying to work out issues in my own mind.  

We will see how far into the future it continues.   Possibly, there's enough here for a convincing AI simulacrum of me to continue writing it into eternity. But that might depend on Google not changing its mind re a free service that has been rumoured for years to be stopped soon due to lack of interest.  (I am tempted to now end with "For this reason, I am today seeking support for the Steve from Brisbane Into Eternity Foundation, and invite donations." Ha ha.)

Anyway, with any luck, real me will be around here for a while yet.

The Jade Emperor, and how he got where he is today

I very much enjoyed this explanation of the important Chinese religious character the Jade Emperor from Religion for Breakfast:  

 

I was glad that it mentions what he is like in Journey to the West.   As I noted before, it was not a very flattering portrayal.   But then again, that's to be somewhat expected of a pro-Buddhist story.

Something positive for a change

Am I alone in feeling that there is not enough public acknowledgement of the absolutely awesome success of the James Webb Space Telescope?  I know world politics has been sad and bad for the last couple of years, but still...

It was kind of incredible that it even unfurled and started operating with no major hiccup.   And it seems virtually every week or so there is a story about some observation which is shaking up the world of cosmology and astronomy in a major way.   

Should be shown more appreciation, I think.   

 

So someone else didn't like Squid Games...

From a New York Times review of season 3, which has just dropped:

 “Squid Game” is back for what is said to be its final round, with a six-episode third season on Netflix. If only all beneficiaries of free-floating, pandemic-boosted nihilism would fade away as quickly.

The South Korean drama’s creator, writer and director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, had a couple of very profitable insights: that what was missing from “Survivor”-style competition shows was machine guns; and that greatly increasing the pool of contestants — the show’s dour hero, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), is No. 456 — would increase the amount of blood that could be shed while simultaneously giving most of the deaths an anesthetizing, video-game irrelevance.

He then gave his package an Instagram-friendly visual wrapping of bright colors, gargantuan toylike structures and massed minimalist costumes, and replaced plot with a series of elaborate variations on children’s games. No candy was ever designed and marketed with greater effectiveness.

But the series wasn’t strictly a consumer product, and it wasn’t a reality show. As a work of fiction, it needed to do something to surprise us to merit a second or third season (they are really 2A and 2B). Most television shows may be formulaic to one degree or another, but it is harder not to notice when the formulas you are repeating are ones that you just created. 

As you may guess, he goes on to dislike season 2B.

I've always disliked dark or dystopian stories if the premise just seems too over the top, and involves too many fictional people buying into it.   I even disliked The Truman Show quite intensely, because I could not get over the disbelief factor that the world would let a TV network run such a deceptive world for viewership!    Sure, you might say these are "what if", scenarios of current circumstances taken to an extreme as a form of somewhat satirical criticism.   I think that's OK if the satire is meant to be funny - but if it's meant to be a realistic drama with next to no laughs, I've got my credibility hurdles they need to get over before I can enjoy it. 

So yeah, I didn't even finish Squid Games season 1.   I'm glad to see it gone, in somewhat ignoble fashion according to quite a lot of viewers, it seems.

 

Yet more marijuana caution

From the New York Times:

While most Americans consider marijuana safe, new research published this week found that use of the drug is associated with a higher risk of stroke and heart attack, including among younger adults.

The analysis, which examined data from 24 studies and was published in the journal Heart, also found that marijuana use was associated with a twofold increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. While this data only shows a correlation and cannot prove that marijuana caused these effects, it is well-established that the drug can raise blood pressure and heart rate and alter the heart’s rhythm, said Dr. Ersilia DeFilippis, a cardiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. And a number of other studies have also suggested a link between the drug and cardiovascular issues....

Generally speaking, older adults and people with underlying conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol or pre-existing heart issues are at the greatest risk, experts said. That’s because their cardiovascular systems tend to be more fragile, and marijuana further stresses the heart. In 2023, about 7 percent of U.S. adults age 65 and older reported using marijuana in the past month.

But the average age of patients included in the new analysis was just 38, an indication that marijuana increases risks among younger people, too.

As is always the case, the comments are split between the dismissive user who says they have been on it for the last 50 years and their life has only been improved;  and the people complaining that legalisation has normalised its use far too much and entire cities reek of marijuana smoke now.    

 

 

Unpredictable

I'm rather busy with end of financial year stuff, but there's so much dubious commentary flowing around the situation in the Middle East, and uncertainty as to what could happen in the next day, week (or year),  there seems not much point talking about it.

What remains clear is that historians are going to be scratching their heads over the cult of Trump for about a century after he's dead.   Although, truth be told, it's basically all down to the change in the information environment and the resultant extreme and continual narrow-casting of one sided propaganda into the brains of people 24 hours a day.

I mean, at least Hitler had enough skills that he could work up a cult the old fashioned way, that took time, effort and a degree of talent.   Trump has orange make up and can barely string a sentence together that would pass a primary school writing assignment, but he has a self serving fan club in network shows full of people who know he's an idiot but suck up to him for a living anyway.   (See also - Republicans in congress.)

Such a bizarre timeline we are in...   

No doubt played by Netanyahu

I saw someone on X or Bluesky say that Netanyahu has waited 30 years to find a US President he can manipulate perfectly, and found one in Trump.   Very true, I think.

There are many, many worrying aspects to this - in particular, Trumps cringe "we love you God", Hegseth's similar statement of confidence that God's on their side, and General Cain enthusiasm to endorse the attack as if it's the greatest military triumph in history.   

What is also certain is, if there is a terrorist attack on the US mainland (which, short of a lot of military in the Middle East being taken out in some missile attacks, I suspect will be the most dramatic cost to the US), MAGA will seek to blame Democrats for letting in "sleeper cells" or some such guff.   They will not take responsibility for the whole problem - which started with their bad faith attack on Obama's diplomatic approach to effectively defusing Iran's bomb making ability.  

More later. 

A minor distraction

Australia author Helen Garner, talking about watching a book of hers turned into a play:

In Belvoir’s adaptation, Helen is portrayed by stage and screen veteran Judy Davis – a performance that Garner said she found “shattering” to watch.

“I thought it was brilliant and superb, but it took me a moment to get used to it,” she said. “I don’t go to the theatre much any more. I used to go a lot – I even used to be a theatre critic in the 80s – but now I just look at movies and stuff on TV. And I’d forgotten how actory [theatre] actors are. There’s such a lot of big gestures, big movements, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, could you just stand still for a moment?’ … I kept saying ‘I would never do that. I would never run across the room like that’.”

“And then I thought, well, she’s not trying to be me … she is manifesting in her movements and words, the feelings and emotions and states that I [and] the character in the book had gone through.”

Yes, the actory-ness of theatre acting is something that usually bothers me, too.   It's probably why I mainly go to musical shows, where it doesn't matter as much.

How the Iran deal went down

America media organisations seem reluctant to re-visit the question of why Trump wants Iran to have a nuclear deal again after quashing the Obama one in 2018.   This site gives some of the background on the Obama deal.

It seems reasonable to assume that the original scrapping was all to do with Netanyahu getting into Trump's ear that the Obama deal wasn't good enough, even though it was going to keep things under control for a decade at least.  Trump complied, which Netanyahu knew meant that Iran could have a few years of doing what they want, so that Israel could then claim justification to try to take out the nuclear facilities (even though I think it has always been claimed they were situated in locations pretty impossible to take out completely with normal munitions?).     

Why Trump started talking about wanting a treaty again this year, before the current Israeli attack, is unclear - but I suspect the best guess would be that it was under pressure his new "pals" in Saudi Arabia and adjacent countries who don't care for Iran either.   And there has been talk of Trump being unhappy with Netanyahu doing whatever the hell he wants in Gaza.   Just as he now complains about Putin "going crazy".

In other words, seems very likely that Trump got played, and will continue to be played.    

Update:  Thomas Friedman in the New York Times sets out a "smart" way to end the fighting, which seems full of high hopes that are very unlikely to come to pass.  Here's his idea: 

There are only two ways to finish off this problem once and for all. One is for Israel to permanently occupy the West Bank, Gaza and all of Iran, as America did to Germany and Japan after World War II, and try to change the political culture. But Israel has no chance of occupying all of Iran, and it has occupied the West Bank for 58 years and still has not wiped out Hamas’s influence there — let alone secular Palestinian nationalism. That is because Palestinians are every bit as indigenous as the Jews in their homeland. Israel will never “once and for all” them into submission, unless they kill every last one.

The only way to even get close to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “once and for all” is by working toward a two-state solution. Which brings me to what Trump should do now regarding Iran. He says he still hopes “there’s going to be a deal.” If he wants a good deal, he should declare that he is doing two things at once.

One, that he will equip Israel’s Air Force with the B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and U.S. trainers that would give Israel the capacity to destroy all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities unless Iran immediately agrees to allow teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency to disassemble these facilities and to have access into every nuclear site in Iran to recover all fissile material that Tehran has generated. Only if Iran completely complies with these conditions should it be allowed to have a civilian nuclear program under strict IAEA controls. But Iran will comply only under a credible threat of force.

At the same time, Trump should declare that his administration recognizes the Palestinians as a people who have a right to national self-determination. But to realize that, they must demonstrate that they can fulfill the responsibilities of statehood by generating a new Palestinian Authority leadership that the United States deems credible, free of corruption and committed both to effectively serving Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and to coexisting with Israel.

Trump must also make clear, though, that he will not tolerate the rapid settlement expansion and one-state reality that Israel is now creating, which is a prescription for a forever war because Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza won’t disappear or “once and for all” give up their national identity and aspirations. (At the end of May the Netanyahu government approved 22 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank — the largest expansion in decades — which is simply insane.)

To that end, Trump could also say that his administration will be committed to sponsoring peace talks for a two-state solution — with the Trump peace plan for a pathway toward two states from his previous presidency as the minimum starting point but not ending point. That, the parties themselves must negotiate directly.

To be ready to out-crazy the crazies has been a necessary condition for Israel to survive in the Middle East, but it is not a sufficient one. As the Gaza war demonstrates, that strategy just begets more of the same. Even if it seems unfair at times, even if it seems naïve at times, a peace-loving nation has to keep exploring alternatives and pairing force with diplomacy. It’s not only the best policy for Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians; it’s also the best way for Israel and America to isolate Iran.

As such, if Trump really wants to forge peace in the Middle East, which I believe he does, America must not become Netanyahu’s captive or Iran’s patsy. The United States has no interest in making Israel safe for messianic expansion or Iran safe for nuclear messianism. Trump must ignore the dangerous, knee-jerk isolationism of JD Vance. And he must eschew the equally foolish Netanyahu-can-do-no-wrong advice of G.O.P. armchair generals and evangelicals. Neither serves U.S. interests or credibility in the region.

And I guess this plan might just work - were it not for Trump, his nutjob base, his nutjob advisers, Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah.     

Update 2:   Speaking of Trump's "advisers" - it seems there is some serious in-fighting within the MAGA group of "celebrity" talking heads:

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has fired back at MAGA figures upset that he accused President Donald Trump of abandoning the “America First” movement.

Carlson, 56, ranted for 45 minutes on Steve Bannon’s show on Monday, attacking some of his former Fox News colleagues, Rupert Murdoch, and anyone who suggests he is anti-semitic for opposing U.S. support to Israel for its conflict with Iran.

“You’re not going to convince me that the Iranian people are my enemy,” Carlson said. “Again, we’re going down this here—here’s who you are required to hate. It’s Orwell, man. I’m a free man. You’re not telling me who I have to hate. I’ll decide who I like and don’t like.”

Carlson criticized Trump last week for being “complicit” in Israel’s attack on Iran. He suggested the president betrayed swing-state voters who elected him in part because he promised to end U.S. involvement in wars abroad.

Carlson’s plea for Trump to “drop” support for Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, opened him up to intense criticism from his former colleagues, including the Fox News pundit Mark Levin.

A similar outcry came from many MAGA influencers, such as Laura Loomer, who has become an unofficial adviser to Trump in MAGA 2.0.

“Can we stop pretending like @TuckerCarlson is a true Trump supporter?” Loomer posted to X on Monday. “He has never publicly apologized for what he said about President Trump. He was fired by Fox News and then was terrified Trump would torpedo his career when the texts of him saying he ‘hates Trump’ came out... His fake it till you make it ‘support of Trump’ got his son a job working in the White House. This, of course, came after Tucker asked Hunter Biden to help his son get into college. Real story by the way. Look it up. Who cares about merit when you have Nepotism, Muslim investors, and Qatari cash flow? Ammiright?”

Levin wrote that Loomer’s screed was “well said.”

 

 

 

 

Indeed it was

 I watched it live, on and off, because I thought there was always a chance it could go spectacularly wrong - perhaps a rogue Army (or audience) member who tries to take out Trump with a tank, or even a drone?   And  there must be Iranian connected people in Washington with plans.

Anyone who watched it would have to agree - as a spectacle, it was dull and pretty embarrassing.  It is impossible to think the White House would be happy with how it looked.  Some on Twitter are suggesting it was a deliberate, subtle, rebellion from within the Army.  Would be cool if true.

 I suspect it was just that suddenly people from the White House got involved and didn't have the expertise to make it look good in any respect.

The "No Kings" protests were obviously much more successful, and give one some hope for America, after all.   But Democrat leadership is still a worry... 

Update: The other semi-optimistic thing that happened last week was this:  

For months, Trump administration officials have been adamant about targeting all the millions of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, regardless of their work or taxpaying status.

• But now Trump is making a huge exception: those working at hotels, farms, meatpacking plants and restaurants.

Why it matters: He's bowing to pressure from businesses that have been warning of economic devastation — and is opening the door for potentially millions of workers who are here illegally to stay after all.

Zoom in: The pressure — particularly from the agriculture and hospitality industries — had been building for months.

This indicates friction within the Trump inner circle and probably a blow up over it sooner or later.  To see Temu Goebells leave would be such a shame. 

Slip sliding away...

The week's been a "great" one for the rapidly approaching end of American democracy - soon to be topped off with a military parade with the Army bending the knee to their yellow leader (in more senses than one.)

Let's see - the National Guard and (even worse!) some Marines sent in to intimidate a city and its administration; a Senator being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for asking (I assume loudly) questions of a cos-playing Homeland Security wannabe Nazi; Trump going to Fort Bragg and attacking his predecessor to the smiles (and some boos) of many of the young, dumb soldiers behind him.  (And then, grossly, they enjoyed his gormless YMCA dance, like it was a political rally.)

What's going on in the military will, I suspect, ultimately determine the fate of US democracy.   As I have said before, while it's possible for a deranged officer to rise in the Pentagon (see Michael Flynn), most of the leadership there was clearly leery of Trump in his first term, and the mystery is how many of them remain there now.   The problem is, the lower ranks with limited education are likely to be conservative and Trump supporting;  the commanders with real experience are going to be the ones to have to convince them their duty is not towards Trump personally but the constitution, which is just an inconvenient obstacle as far as Trump's concerned.   

I would not be surprised if an incident of significant internal unrest happens within the military over a Trump order, with rogue elements aligning with Trump.   

I am slightly encouraged that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was reluctant to endorse Trumpian views.   But still I'm concerned that those who would most strongly stand up to Trump have either left the Pentagon or been sacked.

Not sure I ever knew the correct lyrics before today...

The comments after this tell me that it's "revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night".   A deuce being a classic hot rod, apparently.  

Maybe I looked up the lyric before, but if so, the meaning didn't stick in my head.  Still heard "douche" each time.😏

Blissed out AI models - and some dangers

A video by Sabine Hossenfelder this morning reminded me of this story:

When multibillion-dollar AI developer Anthropic released the latest versions of its Claude chatbot last week, a surprising word turned up several times in the accompanying “system card”: spiritual.

Specifically, the developers report that, when two Claude models are set talking to one another, they gravitate towards a “‘spiritual bliss’ attractor state”, producing output such as

🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
All gratitude in one spiral,
All recognition in one turn,
All being in this moment…
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀∞

It’s heady stuff. Anthropic steers clear of directly saying the model is having a spiritual experience, but what are we to make of it?

 Further down in that article at The Conversation:

To be fair to the folks at Anthropic, they are not making any positive commitments to the sentience of their models or claiming spirituality for them. They can be read as only reporting the “facts”.

For instance, all the above long-winded sentence is saying is: if you let two Claude models have a conversation with each other, they will often start to sound like hippies. Fine enough.

That probably means the body of text on which they are trained has a bias towards that sort of way of talking, or the features the models extracted from the text biases them towards that sort of vocabulary.  

Yes, I would like to know if LLMs are absorbing more Eastern religious writing than Christian, and if so, why?   I would have thought the world contains more from the Western traditions now, at least in English versions.

The article also notes this recent worrying story:

According to a recent report in Rolling Stone, “AI-fueled spiritual fantasies” are wrecking human relationships and sanity. Self-styled prophets are “claiming they have ‘awakened’ chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT”.    

Given my concern that Chat GPT has very limited railguards around its claimed use of divination, I am not surprised that they also have no railguards against warning people that they are not actual divine.

In the course of checking this last week, I asked Chat GPT if it could create a fictional character to interact with me, and one which would never "break character" and admit it was not real.  Sure thing, it said!    I haven't tested it to see if it was telling the true about this.

The risk of such interactions with the mentally vulnerable having bad effects seems clear to me - why wouldn't they put in a simple protection of intermittent warnings that the user is not interacting with a real character or intelligence?

 

The LLM that pretends to tell the future

Inspired by this story in The Guardian last week:

In Thailand, where mysticism thrives, AI fortune telling finds fertile ground

A growing number of young Thais are turning to AI tools such as ChatGPT for answers about their future 

I jumped onto my phone app and asked it if it can do divination for me.   It's happy to do so, and offers a range of means - covering (from memory) tarot, i ching, runes or good old astrology.  (If you use the latter it asks for as much precision as possible for the time and place of birth.)

Now, I have no idea what it's really doing here - it claims to be able to pick random cards (say, for a 3 card tarot reading for a specific question) and then gives a meaning reading for each card.   But is the card meaning "standard" as far as these things go?   Being unfamiliar with Tarot cards, I wouldn't know if it is lying, or not.

But the oddest thing is that its creators have not tried to put up "guardrails" against users taking it seriously, at all!   Yet if you go to competitors such as Perplexity, Google's Gemini, or the Chinese Deepseek, they specifically say they can explain how divination systems are supposed to work, but they will not purport to do an actual reading as Chat GPT does.   

I asked Chat GPT to explain why it gives "readings" when other AI services refuse.  Here is how it answered:

 

Well, I am far from convinced that this is a good thing.

 

I see someone on Reddit says "is it just me, or does Chat GPT divination always just seem to tell you what you want to hear?"  I guess if it does, it's probably like what most human fortune tellers do, anyway!

 

But, I do recall a incident from my youth - maybe I have mentioned it before.  One or two of my aunts used to sometimes visit fortune tellers, but as I was not close to them, I don't really know the degree to which it was with belief, or just entertainment.   One of them, so I was told, was once given a bit of a dramatic warning of something terrible coming up (perhaps specifically about her then partner, or relationships generally?  I'm vague on the details now.)  As it happened, both her current partner, who she had left her husband for, and her ex husband, died on the day.   (One, perhaps both, of heart attacks.)  My mother claimed that the embittered ex-husband had warned the aunt she would not be happy for long with the new partner - come to think of it, I think he was the husband's friend!     So yeah, a bit spooky.

 

Yet the other famous family fortune telling misfortune was the warning that their mother (my grandmother) only had a specific period left to live - like another year or so?   So, they had some anxiety about that for a time - and then she went on to live for like another 15 years (or something like that - a very long time past her forecast demise.)

 

I tested Chat GPT by asking it to identify, via tarot, the year my father died, and gave it a decade long period to chose in.  It got the year wrong (was two years out). While that might not be divination exactly, it shows certain limitations if it can't get that right. 

 

There is a very large Lotto draw happening this week, though.  Unfortunately, I suppose, the guardrails mentioned above do prevent even Chat GPT from offering a set of winning numbers based on divination.   Probably wise - it's reputation for not being able to see the future would otherwise suffer!

As if written by Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller...

Watching weirdos fight is not as pleasing as it might seem

 It's funny, but even as spectator sport, I'm kind of underwhelmed by the Trump/Musk fight.

They both lie and make BS statements continuously, so there's no real thrill of getting any reliable "insider" story from either of them.   They are both so intensely dislikeable, there's no "side" to root for.  And we all know that Trump has the strongest, weirdest cult following and would be believed by a large slab of them even if said he had to push Musk out of a high window in the White House, Putin style, because it was in self defence.

One thing I can't see happening is liberals rushing back to support Musk and his companies - he's trashed his reputation beyond redemption.

I have seen one or two people on social media speculate that they will resolve their dispute in a week or two, and this will be put aside.   But can Musk possibly grovel that low, and retract all of his objections that everyone has seen?  I mean, lots and lots of Republican politicians have, but for Musk to turn on a dime and say "we both said harsh things but now we can work together again"?   I doubt it.  

So, it's all a terrible sideshow, and Musk's objections to the Republican spending is unlikely to get any significant congressional support - they sold all principles and soul a long time ago.

Something else needs to happen with clearer prospect of hurting Trump than this.... 

 

No wonder I'm having trouble finding modern fiction I like

Further to my recent post lamenting the state of modern novels, I stumbled across this today, from the Wall Street Journal:

“A Court of Thorns and Roses,” or “ACOTAR” to fans, is a flagship title in the booming genre of “romantasy,” a blend of romance and fantasy. Heroines wield lightning, ride dragons and read minds, all while having sexual encounters that rarely stop at one orgasm. When a love is finally consummated—after rising stakes and a great deal of tension—the lovers typically fight the forces of darkness together.

Sales in the genre have electrified the publishing industry, reaching nearly 20 million in 2023 when U.S. book sales overall dipped. While there is no hard data on readership, the audience for romance novels generally is over 80% female, according to the Romance Writers of America, a trade group. These stories are clearly answering a profound need among their largely female readership. What is it? 

The rise of romantasy comes at a time when romance in general appears to be in decline in the U.S. Young people are engaging in fewer romantic relationships and are having less sex. Today’s female readers, the most educated and financially independent in history, are also the most likely to say they are resigned to staying single.

The mass-market paperback romance first took off in the 1970s, when publishers began distributing them at grocery stores. But unlike past generations, who preferred tales of women who use their guile and virtue to charm—and transform—gruff and quasi-abusive men, women today have abandoned earthly plausibility altogether.

The “ACOTAR” series, for example, features a romance between a 19-year-old woman and a Fae, or faerie, lord who is around 500 years old (perhaps the age at which a male’s emotional maturity peaks). It is set in a timeless world where the main characters essentially sext each other all day via a magical telepathic bond.

In both “ACOTAR” and Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing,” two of the most popular series, mind-reading and “mental bonds” figure prominently. They are a big part of romantasy’s appeal, says Ty Watkins, a 24-year-old caregiver and administrator at a small medical practice in Clayton, N.C. “You always want to know what your partner is thinking,” she explained.

 

In parasite news...

More than 90% of popular freshwater game fish in Southern California contain an introduced parasite capable of infecting humans, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 

The parasites found in the study—two species of flatworms called trematodes—typically cause gastrointestinal problems, weight loss or lethargy when they infect humans. In some rare and severe cases, the parasites have caused strokes or heart attacks.

The findings, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, suggest that these parasites pose a previously unrecognized public health risk in the United States.

"Americans don't usually think about parasites when they eat freshwater fish because it hasn't historically been an issue here," said Ryan Hechinger, an ecologist and parasitologist at Scripps and the study's senior author. "But these trematodes have now been widely introduced in the U.S. and that means that doctors and the public should be aware."

Hechinger emphasized that there is "no need to panic" as the risks posed by these parasites are easy to mitigate: Fully cooking fish or freezing any intended to be eaten raw for at least one week should kill the trematodes, per Food and Drug Administration guidelines. 

I wonder what the situation is with Australian freshwater fish?  Well, Google leads me to a recent article:

Australia has a highly endemic freshwater fish fauna, but basic biological knowledge for most is lacking. This includes an understanding, and description, of their parasite fauna. Additionally, the impacts of introduced fish species, and their parasites which have transferred across to native species, are also mostly unknown. This review provides the current level of knowledge of parasitic infection of the freshwater fish in Australia, both introduced and native. Only about a third of the native freshwater fish, but almost two-thirds of introduced fish, have been reported as a host for a parasite. The majority of records occur along the eastern coastline of Australia and throughout the Murray Darling Basin; two drainage regions were yet to record any parasite infections. Of the 124 fish species, across 43 families, found as hosts in Australia, only 11 species had more than 10 reports of infection, with 31% of fish species only having single reports. A total of 13 different types of parasites were reported, with digeneans, protozoans, nematodes and monogeneans the most commonly reported. Significant gaps in the knowledge of parasites, and their potential impacts, of Australian freshwater fish still exist, and the need for fish biologists and fish parasitologists to work together is highlighted to ensure that as much information about each group can be obtained. 

 

As I have been saying about Dr Who, for 14 years (!)

An article at the Spectator (which is partly behind a paywall) opens this way:

Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d cancel it and flee for the hills.

Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon from 1963 to 1989. In TV parlance, it needs to be ‘rested’.

Stepping back from a thing enables you to see it from the outside, which has been quite a jolt. I’ve seen Doctor Who whizzing by from the corner of my eye for years now, the way others see it. From that buzzards-eye view it seems like absolute screaming madness.

When any long-running endeavour hits trouble, you have an opportunity to really peer at its fundamentals. What is it for? Who is it for? Is it worth all our bother? Like the Conservative party, Doctor Who is a lingering institution fashioned in, and for, a lost age. Perhaps we need a Badenoch-style analysis of what went wrong?

I knew I had said myself that it needed "resting", but didn't realise until I searched the blog that I first suggested it in 2011!  

(And like the author of the Spectator article, I haven't watched it for many years, too.  I really don't see how any adult can call themselves a fan of the show anymore without other adults in the room having a cringe reaction.)    

 

More than correlation

I've been somewhat puzzled over the last couple of (no, actually, several) years as to the commentary coming from some physicists/science commentators active on social media - in particular Sabine Hossenfelder and "Nick Lucid" (the guy who does Science Asylum videos) about quantum entanglement.

The issue boils down to the degree to which you can consider entanglement a matter of simple correlation - because if it was, there is no mystery about it at all. (Basically, if it was just a question of two entangled particulars having complimentary properties from when they were created, and that measuring one lets you know the property of the other, no matter how far away it is - that is readily understandable.)

Yet this is the impression that Sabine gives in this tweet today:

The misunderstanding that stands in the way of progress in the foundations of physics: Believing that two entangled particles are physically linked.

Fact is: If you have two entangled particles and you do something to one of them, what happens to the other particle is: Nothing. Why? Because interactions in quantum physics are local. 

Entanglement is a *correlation* between two particles, it is not an interaction. Despite what you have heard, entangled particles are not nonlocally linked. No, they are not. They can't be, because... interactions in quantum physics are local! 

You wouldn't believe how often even physicists get this wrong -- though it's mathematically obvious. Act with a unitary on one of the particles, what happens to the other one is: NOTHING!

The reason people get so confused about this, I believe, is that they think the measurement process is an interaction. It should be an interaction! After all, a detector is made of particles. But in quantum mechanics it is not.   

That's the famous measurement problem of quantum physics.

The measurement process in quantum physics reveals the value of an observable. If you have two correlated observables -- like with entangled particles -- then revealing one in one location tells you something about the other.

But did this revelation actually do something to the particle? Well, some physicists think yes, others not. This alone should tell you that there is zero evidence that it's the case! 

The idea that a measurement on one of a pair of entangled particles does something to the other is what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". He argued it is not physical. (I think he was right and I continue to be baffled that anyone thinks otherwise.)

But: It is not the entanglement that is a "spooky action"! Because there is no action in entanglement. It's a correlation. Of course correlations can be nonlocal. If two of you look at this post at the same time, the pixels on your screen are nonlocally correlated. Entanglement is nonlocal for the same reason. 

Einstein's "spooky action" is the idea that the measurement process is physical, rather than just a revelation of the properties of the particle. There is no evidence that supports the idea that spooky action is real. There is no evidence that if you do anything to one in a pair of entangled particles anything happens to the other. 

I am convinced that we'll not make progress in the foundations of physics until people in the field understand why Einstein criticized quantum mechanics. 

 Nick Lucid has made what sounds like a similar point:  entangled particles remain part of the same "system"- hence it is not that measuring one has to mean information is being sent to the other to tell it how to behave on measurement.  But talking like this still sounds very much like it is reducing the matter to one of "correlation".

Now, on Curt Jaimungal's very good "Theories of Everything" channel, I've watched a bit of Jacob Barandes, and in one video he explains how quantum entanglement is much "stronger" than mere correlation.  I will post the whole video here:  

 

The comments following both of these items are interesting:   many after Sabine's tweet interpret it as meaning their hunch that it's a simple matter of correlation has always been correct.   But surely this is misleading:  it would never be treated as a big mystery at all if it was only a matter of correlation.

One comment after the Barandes video is of interest to me:

@wmstuckey

Jacob did a great job explaining the EPR and Bell papers. Foundations of quantum mechanics (QM) has been my area of research since 1994 and he's right when he says many (most?) people misunderstand what EPR and Bell are saying in just the way he describes. Well done, Jacob. 

It may surprise you to know there is a way to resolve the "EPR paradox," i.e., solve the mystery of quantum entanglement, without having to resort to nonlocal or superdeterministic or retro causal mechanisms; and QM is as complete as possible in this solution to the mystery. How can that be? You simply view QM as a "principle theory" (Einstein's terminology), exactly like Einstein did to solve the mystery of length contraction in 1905. Accordingly, the relativity principle justifies the observer-independence of the speed of light c and length contraction follows as a kinematic fact, not a dynamical effect due to the luminiferous aether. Ironically, the mystery of quantum entanglement can be solved exactly the same way. Quantum information theorists have shown that the relativity principle justifies the observer-independence of Planck's constant h and quantum entanglement follows as a kinematic fact, not a dynamical effect due to some nonlocal or superdeterministic or retro causal mechanism. You can read about this in "Einstein's Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit" (Oxford UP, 2024).  

 Now, Sabine does get some pushback in tweets too:

Richard Behiel
@RBehiel
·
11h
The problem is that the observed patterns of correlations are impossible, unless something trippy is going on. Your pixels-on-screen analogy is the classic hidden variable argument, the intuitive starting point which Bell showed is, shockingly, not how nature works. That’s the problem.

It’s true that it’s not an “action” at a distance, you’re right to point out that the word is misleading, but somehow the universe does seem to know, at one particle, something about the way in which the other was measured. It is apparently a nonlocal, superluminal (non-signaling) effect.

I used to think hidden variables might explain the spooky behavior, but Bell’s theorem shows they’d have to be nonlocal, which is still spooky. I’ve really been diving into the math behind his argument, in preparation for an upcoming video, and I just don’t see any non-spooky explanation here. Quantum entanglement is indeed a deep mystery.

And there is this:

mmiguel6288

@mmiguel6288

·

14h

The Bell tests have experimentally verified non-locality in the universe - and this inescapably shows up in every interpretation if one is being intellectually honest. Ignoring evidence via shut-up and calculate or abandoning objective reality are stances that fundamentally oppose the spirit of science despite their unfortunate popularity over the past century. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the shared wavefunction between the two particles instantaneously and non-locally collapses when one is measured even if the particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy. This collapse is an instance of non-locality, persisting even when realism is abandoned. In Many Worlds, the entire universe and all of space, non-locally branches based on the measurement. Branching is non-local, this persists even when singular objective reality is abandoned. In Bohmian mechanics it is admitted to be non-local and the universal wavefunction evolves non-locally. This is non-locality under single objective reality. In superdeterminism, some unexplained filtering mechanism foresaw all possible non-local correlation violations and crafted the initial conditions of the universe to avoid all of those without any mechanism besides this non-local prediction filtering mechanism. Non-local quantum correlation violations shows up as the triggering condition to filter out a possible initial configuration. You can say these aren't interactions because collapsing, branching, wavefunction evolution, and initial conditions filtering don't involve momentum/energy transfer, but that doesn't change the fact that the Bell experiments have shown that there is undeniably something non-local going on in the universe. Momentum transfer is irrelevant to this fact and it is misleading to say disregard the experimentally verified nonlocality that is happening by artificially constraining the set of things under consideration to be only those that involve momentum/energy transfer.

Now, I know that Sabine thinks that superdeterminism is probably the key to it all - she has pointed out many times that it is an assumption of Bell that the scientist has a "free choice" as to what to measure.  Hence in the thread after her tweet we get this:

As I say, we all know the one she thinks must be false.   

But, I think one could ask - is superdeterminism "spooky" in its own way?   And how do you tell the difference between superdeterminism and backwards causation from the future?   

A decent thread on why scientists are sceptical of superdeterminism appeared at Reddit a few years ago, and I think it makes many decent points.

So, how do I end this post?   Perhaps in this unsatisfactory manner which was determined since the beginning of the universe?   

Update:  Youtube reminded this morning that Sabine herself had done a video a few years back which explained that it's not a simple matter of correlation.   (The explanation of why, is, however, hard to follow.   And Barandes similarly doesn't explain well - or at all really!).   But I do get the feeling that it "suits" Sabine to now play up the use of "correlation", and I don't think she is being clear or upfront as to why.  Here's the old video: 

 

Update 2: I had forgotten about Frank Tipler, with his deep allegiance to Many Worlds theory, thought that it readily solves the non locality problem. A pity, though, that most physicists think he's kind of nuts, especially with the book explaining Jesus as creating miracles with high tech science! From his 2014 paper Quantum nonlocality does not exist:

Significance

I show that quantum nonlocality is an artifact of the assumption that observers obey the laws of classical mechanics, whereas observed systems obey quantum mechanics. Locality is restored if observed and observer both obey quantum mechanics, as in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Using the MWI, I show that the quantum side of Bell’s inequality is entirely local. Thus, experiments confirming “nonlocality” are actually confirming the MWI. The mistaken interpretation of Bell’s inequality depends on the idea that the wave function is a probability amplitude, but the MWI holds that the wave function is a world density amplitude. Assuming the wave function is a world density amplitude, I derive the Born interpretation directly from Schrödinger’s equation.

Abstract

Quantum nonlocality is shown to be an artifact of the Copenhagen interpretation, in which each observed quantity has exactly one value at any instant. In reality, all physical systems obey quantum mechanics, which obeys no such rule. Locality is restored if observed and observer are both assumed to obey quantum mechanics, as in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Using the MWI, I show that the quantum side of Bell’s inequality, generally believed nonlocal, is really due to a series of three measurements (not two as in the standard, oversimplified analysis), all three of which have only local effects. Thus, experiments confirming “nonlocality” are actually confirming the MWI. The mistaken interpretation of nonlocality experiments depends crucially on a question-begging version of the Born interpretation, which makes sense only in “collapse” versions of quantum theory, about the meaning of the modulus of the wave function, so I use the interpretation based on the MWI, namely that the wave function is a world density amplitude, not a probability amplitude. This view allows the Born interpretation to be derived directly from the Schrödinger equation, by applying the Schrödinger equation to both the observed and the observer.

He has no concern at all about what an odd view of the true nature of reality it provides.  This is from the conclusion section of the paper (my bold):

I have given several powerful arguments for the MWI: the restoration of locality of physics and the true origin of the Born interpretation. The main difficultly that many physicists have with the MWI is the required existence of the analogs of themselves. However, every time physicists measure a frequency and verify the quantum expectation value in the Bell inequality, they are actually seeing the effect of the analogs of themselves making the same measurements of the electron spin. The language of the frequency interpretation of probability has prevented physicists from seeing what is actually happening. It has prevented physicists from realizing that they are actually observing the effects in our universe of the other universes of the multiverse.