About champagne

A good summary of how it's made, and its history, is up at the TLS.   Here's some esoteric history for your next dinner party:

No single person can be credited with the invention of champagne, but the English can take some of the credit. In 1657, a book by Ralph Austen, a cider manufacturer from Oxford, described adding a “walnut” of sugar to cider bottles to make the drink sparkle. In December 1662, the physician and scientist Dr Christopher Merrett gave a lecture to the Royal Society which described how to make wines “brisk” by the addition of molasses. In France, champagne had always been enjoyed as a still wine; the occasional sparkling bottle was considered flawed. But the taste caught on, from Britain to France, and such research made it possible to replicate the effects in the production process itself. In the meantime, the famous courtier and adventurer Sir Kenelm Digby had been experimenting with making bottles strong enough to withstand the additional pressure brought about by fermentation.

Digby’s experiments showed foresight. The main problem facing the Champenois in the early nineteenth century was the casse – broken bottles. Without a proper understanding of how much sugar was needed to create an adequate sparkle, or mousse, and without proper temperature control in the cellar, bottles would explode under the pressure of excessive carbon dioxide. In 1828, for example – a year known as la grande casse – eight out of ten of all champagne bottles were smashed.

The problem was definitively solved in 1837 by André François, a pharmacist from Châlons-en-Marne, whose work had an incalculable effect on the history of champagne. François worked out the precise formula needed to ensure that enough sugar was added to create the mousse, but not enough to create excessive fermentation. As the official “notes on the history of champagne” presented at the 1899 Exposition Universelle proudly stated: “Since M. François’ important discovery, the sparkling wine trade has considerably expanded”.

Brisbane River sharks, revisited

Last week there was a report of a large hammerhead shark being caught near the mouth of the Brisbane River.  But from what I saw, how close was a bit of a mystery.

Now, however, I see that the bull sharks, which are known to swim all the way up to Ipswich, are also in the news:

A young rower had her scull attacked at the weekend while training near the Kurilpa Bridge in the CBD.
Coach Peter Toon said teeth marks were left on the rower's craft after the attack.
"She saw the fin and it went around and gave it a big snap on the stern of the boat," he said.
"It put some big gouges into it and it upset her quite a bit as you could imagine."
Mr Toon said despite the scary incident, the rower had been back on the water this week.
"I've been coaching for over 25 years and I've never heard of an incident where a bull shark has attacked a rower."

Yikes.  There's a photo at the link if you want to see the damage to the boat.

I wrote a lengthy post about bull sharks in the river in 2010.  

And wrote science fiction in his spare time...

I never took much interest in the story of Casanova, so it's handy to have a review of a new biography about him to fill in some gaps in my knowledge:

Casanova moved with ease in all strata of society. As well as hordes of nobility, he met Benjamin Franklin, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Pope Clement XIII, Rousseau, Voltaire and Mozart. He mixed with financiers, ambassadors, Freemasons, magicians and government ministers, in addition to an awful lot of gamblers, rakes, actors, dancers, courtesans and common prostitutes.

Perhaps his most famous exploit was his escape, after 15 months of miserable incarceration, from one of Venice’s state prisons, known as I Piombi, to which he was confined in 1755 at the age of 30, ostensibly for irreligion. This was the story he was most often asked to tell, and the account of it he published in 1788 was one of the few literary successes of his lifetime. He also wrote poems, a translation of Homer into ottava rima, librettos, some pamphlets on mathematics, historical studies on Poland and Venice and — among other things — a five-volume work of science fiction set in the Earth’s interior. He envied the literary fame of Goethe and Voltaire, and could not quite understand why they were more highly regarded than he was.

The desire for renown as a man of letters came early for Casanova, as most things did. By his account, it arrived around the age of 11, when he stunned the diners at his tutor’s house with a risqué Latin witticism. At about the same time, the tutor’s younger sister gave him his first taste of sex. The other achievements of his adolescence included a doctorate of law awarded at the age of 16, expulsion from a monastery, a spell as a trainee priest, a love affair with a putative castrato (whom Casanova correctly believed to be a girl in disguise), a stint in the army, various other affairs and the start of his mostly unsuccessful gambling career.

We'll leave the story before we get to the incest; maybe readers already know about that?

He took her advice...

Kellyanne Conway wants people to look into Donald Trump’s “heart,” not “what’s come out of his mouth”

News from Tanzania

Sometimes, when I am at a loss for something novel to post about, I pick a random country's news website to see what's happening there.

Today, therefore, I can inform you that the hot news in Tanzania (which, incidentally, seems to be hosting several Chinese government officials - I think China is going to own that continent soon enough) includes the following:

Two top Mtwara Coop officials held over ‘lost’ cashewnuts

THE Prime Minister, Mr Kassim Majaliwa, yesterday ordered the arrest of four officials, including two from the Masasi-Mtwara Cooperative Union Limited (MAMCU), following the loss of over 2,000 tonnes of cashewnuts.

The company deals with reserving the crops in warehouses. The four are accused of laxity, which has led to 2,138 tonnes of cashewnuts to go missing.

Mr Majaliwa gave the order during a meeting he had convened in Songea that brought together officials from MAMCU, owners of BUCO storehouse and a group of six farmers from Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Societies (AMCOS) in Mtwara and Masasi.

In other news, capital works are badly needed for one village:

ABOUT 29,000 residents of Majimoto village at Mamba Division in Mlele District, Katavi Region are in severe shortage of water to the extent of buying a bucket of the liquid at 1,000/-.

Report from the area shared with the ‘Daily News’ showed that water that is commonly fetched in the village is drawn from Majimoto hot spring, but is unsuitable for human consumption because it has a lot of volcanic ashes, besides having unpleasant taste and smell.
According to Majimoto Ward Councillor, Mr Nyangoso Serengeti, who is also Mpimbwe Council Chairman, the residents of the area have been suffering for so many years without any alternative to provide them with safe and clean water. He said that the residents as a result are forced to walk a distance of seven kilometers to the neighbouring Mamba village to draw water especially women and children. “Majimoto hot water spring is the only source of water we have at Majimoto village for all sorts of domestic purposes including washing clothes, utensils and cooking.
But it is not safe for drinking,” he pointed out. He said that the situation has forced cyclists fetching the liquid from the neighbouring village to sell it locally to other villagers at 1,000/- a bucket. But for the poor, he said that they are forced to drink it since affording 1,000/- per bucket for an ordinary household is expensive.

 And finally, if you can make any head or tail of this columnist's column, please explain it to me...  

Suicide best option for ex-village mate

Telephoning the dead

A nice post here about Japanese taking comfort from telephoning the departed.  

Seems to me to be the making of a good movie in there, somewhere...

What if tornadoes increased anyway?

Back in 2011, Roy Spencer wrote disparagingly of the suggestion that global warming was likely to increase the number of tornadoes in the US.  Wrong, said Spencer: if anything, global warming suggests fewer tornadoes.

I assumed he might be right on that; but then again, it seems Nature may not have got the message:

The frequency of large-scale tornado outbreaks is increasing in the United States, particularly when it comes to the most extreme events, according to research recently published in Science.

The study by researchers including Joel E. Cohen, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, finds the increase in tornado outbreaks does not appear to be the result of a warming climate as earlier models suggested. Instead, their findings tie the growth in frequency to trends in the vertical wind shear found in certain supercells—a change not so far associated with a warmer climate."What's pushing this rise in extreme outbreaks, during which the vast majority of tornado-related fatalities occur, is far from obvious in the present state of climate science," said Cohen, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor at Rockefeller University and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, who conducted the research while a visiting scholar in UChicago's Department of Statistics.

It reminds me of the not entirely unforeseen, but not as widely expected as it might have been, phenomena of the AGW-primed wandering polar vortex sucking cold air further South in NH winters, while the Arctic has exceptionally warmer Christmases.  In other words, a case of a bit of a topsy-turvy effect of AGW.  Just the potential for the Atlantic currents to slow and make England and Northern Europe colder in winter, too.  (See a few posts back, if you missed it.)

Climate change is perhaps a bit, um, lumpier than some may have expected. 

Or, it may be a case of Spencer being wrong, but for the right reason?  Which makes a break from his general AGW line of being wrong for the wrong reason.

Missing the point, somewhat

I see that China is making an effort to improve its toilets, which don't have the best reputation amongst tourists.  (I have never been there, but yes, I have read of this problem, I'm sure.)

Here's the photo of the best in the land, apparently:

Now that is a pretty fancy male toilet, and although I appreciate their effort toward the inter-urinal privacy screen (something of which I have long been a proponent, and lament the frequent failure of new public toilets in Australia to incorporate), making the screens transparent seems to be missing the point, a bit...

Long memory

Wow, Tim Blair has a long memory.  I see that he has linked to a post here from 2006 in which I did something I haven't done for a very long time - defend Mark Steyn.

For some, this will no doubt raise the question of how much my political colours have changed since I started the blog.   It has certainly long irked Catallaxy commenters that I maintain "conservative" in the title of this place, despite my support of the Gillard government, disdain for Tea Party and "conservative" politics of America, dismay at the election of Trump, and full support of climate change action (ideally, by a carbon price - but I remain skeptical of emissions trading schemes).

Now I have been through this exercise before, but it doesn't hurt to re-state it:

People should remember that  I was completely unimpressed by Kevin Rudd from the start, and was calling out his apparent personality issues long before their true extent became clear;  I have never resiled from basic support of the Howard government; I still think much of the criticism of George W Bush was overblown even though the Iraqi intervention turned out to be something of a disaster; I would much prefer that gay relationships were recognised as civil unions rather than marriage; I'm pretty skeptical of the way many now think of transexualism, too;  I'm leery of IVF and certainly against the mooted "brave new world" of things such as three parent babies; I think much of pro-decriminalisation of drugs argument is ill founded and continually oversimplifies the issue, and I would be perfectly happy if we could maintain the one legal drug of alcohol, with appropriate constraints;  I've been as dismayed as anyone about the rise of ISIS and the ongoing fallout the world is suffering from an internal Islamic dispute stemming back more than 1,000 years.   I've posted quite a few times about the seemingly peculiar susceptibility of Islamic societies to conspiracy and rumour; although since the rise of the importance of fake news to the Trump voter, clearly I can now be called out as being a bit unfair in singling out the Islamic societies in that regard.

Here's the thing:  it's the American Right (and its Australian followers) that has moved since the start of this blog from a position of "reasonable" conservatism to one of unreasonable, ideologically based positions that are no longer pragmatic, but in fact aggressively dismissive of evidence.

The prime bell-ringer of this change is global warming, of course, where Mark Steyn and his ilk have basically been conned by a mere handful of contrarian scientists and a much larger body of amateur self-aggrandising wannabe scientists and propagandists (Monckton, Watts, Inhofe, etc).   It's the climate change denialists who have moved from mere skepticism about the exaggeration of some forecasts of the imminent effects of climate change  into the world of dishonest or disingenuous cherry picking of graphs and quotes, and conspiracy belief about how science works, and thus unwisely decided to double down rather than admit they were wrong.  Steyn in particular fully deserves to be sued for defamation by Mann, who I hope succeeds in his action.   Andrew Bolt is similarly impervious to evidence.

The same thing can be said of economics, too:   the American Right can't get over belief in Laffernomics, despite recent and older examples of its failure.   In a sense, though, their gullibility on this is more explicable than it is on climate change - as I noted recently, there is so much going on in societies that economics presents a wealth of opportunity to come up with multiple explanations for current economic success or failure.  I don't think that climate change science allows even half way plausible alternatives.

And then there is the issue of Islam.  It is a serious problem, of course, whenever a group of immigrants seek to bring illiberal attitudes, violence or crime into a society that is prepared to given them a home.   But the likes of Steyn have, I think, lost historical perspective on the matter, and are now prone to exaggeration on the risk of terrorism.   Furthermore, it seems to me that anyone on the Right who supported the Iraq invasion has some gall if they try to shift the blame for the humanitarian crises we see subsequently from the Islamic Middle East onto a Left which never supported the de-stabilising effort in the first place.

I think Andrew Bolt is particularly offensive with his "who let them in?" dog whistles whenever there is migrant crime in Australia.   There is no doubt humanitarian immigration is something worthy; there is also no doubt that sometimes it comes with  gang related problems, for a time.  And there is also no doubt there is no magic detector for working out which migrant families may harbour future gang members.

Other examples of the ways in which the American Right has come to dismay me:  the barely disguised racism underpining much of the Right wing populist attack on Obama, and their non common-sensical approach to gun control which would consider Ronald Reagan to be a Lefty on the issue.

So there you have it - it's so called American Right wing conservatism which has walked away from the reasonable, under the influence of  a variety of self serving interests;  not me.   And Mark Steyn is a prime example of someone who has followed this sad path.   

Update:  the blips on my hit map alert me to the fact that Mark Steyn has picked up on Tim Blair's post, and in doing so has linked to my old post too (and referred to this blog by name.)   Obviously, Mark is not a regular reader here...and nor will many of his referrals if they look around the modern incarnation of the blog!

Russia, Putin and how we got here

Tom Switzer (a bit to my surprise) has a go at Putin/Russian apologetics in Fairfax today.   They're not so bad, he argues, just making sure their borders are well protected by things like, well, being prepared to annex neighbours on the other side of the border.  (I think that's how the argument goes.)  Colour me skeptical of the effort.

For a bigger picture of what Putin wants Russia to be, in future geo-political terms, the end of year article at The Interpreter has some good links, several arguing he wants a kind of return to the past.  The pre-revolution past. 

But the best thing I have read is this lengthy article at Foreign Policy by someone well on the inside of the Obama approach to Russia, who argues how things went well for a while, but fell apart, with a fair bit of Russian paranoia being the cause.  A very convincing read, it seems to me...

I've been thinking...

...about free will, determinism, etc, as you do when you want a good intellectual headache. 

One thing that occurred to me is that, if your allegiance is with the libertarian strand of politics, and as such left wing identity politics gets up your nose, (I'm looking at you, J Soon), you don't really have much to complain about if you're also happy with "there is no such thing as free will" arguments being run by your scientist atheist pals (who, incidentally, are quite likely very liberal politically) all the time.  Because it sure seems you're endorsing the key thought behind most of it, namely the immutability of "identity".

Secondly, I see that there is a (former?) astronomer (Bob Doyle) who has spent years pondering the question, and created a very extensive website that seems well worth reading - The Information Philosopher.   He's also published a book about it (although I think self published, which is not usually a good sign.)  I suppose he counts as a very enthusiastic amateur philosopher, but doesn't present as a nutty one.  I like some of his historical perspective on the whole question, too.  Jerry Coyne doesn't like Doyle's solution to the issue, but Coyne reads as a bit of a jerk to me, so I'm not sure I should worry.

I see that a professional philosopher last year published a book  How Physics Makes Us Free, which is a good title.   A guy at Forbes reckons it's the science book of the year, and a very detailed (and largely positive) review appears here.

I think the author may be onto something...

It's physics/philosophy time!

*  A fairly lengthy essay by Steven Weinberg is at the New York Review of Books, with the alluring title "The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics".   Not bad.

*  I see, via Jason Soon, that there is a long collection of short science pieces by various science-y people, many famous, at Edge.org.   A couple of them bring up some topics long of interest:  David Christian writes about the Noosphere (a great word, and concept, I think);  and the old "is he is crazy, or not?"  Omega Point physicist  Frank Tipler (who supports Trump and is a climate change skeptic, so the "crazy" verdict is starting to look pretty convincing) gets to write again about parallel universes of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics and free will.  Here's the argument:

The free will question arises because the equations of physics are deterministic. Everything that you do today was determined by the initial state of all the universes at the beginning of time. But the equations of quantum mechanics say that although the future behavior of all the universes are determined exactly, it is also determined that in the various universes, the identical yous will make different choices at each instant, and thus the universes will differentiate over time. Say you are in an ice cream shop, trying to choose between vanilla and strawberry. What is determined is that in one world you will choose vanilla and in another you will choose strawberry. But before the two yous make the choice, you two are exactly identical. The laws of physics assert it makes no sense to say which one of you will choose vanilla and which strawberry. So before the choice is made, which universe you will be in after the choice is unknowable in the sense that it is meaningless to ask.

To me, this analysis shows that we indeed have free will, even though the evolution of the universe is totally deterministic. Even if you think my analysis has been too facile—entire books can and have been written on the free will problem—nevertheless, my simple analysis shows that these books are themselves too facile, because they never consider the implications of the existence of the parallel universes for the free will question.

He's less sure what the Everett scenario of ever branching universes means for the problem of evil, but he does say:

No analysis of why evil exists can be considered reasonable unless it takes into account the existence of the parallel universes of quantum mechanics. 

 I also liked Jim Holt's short entry on the mistake Einstein made in not calling his theory of relativity "invariant theory" instead.

OK, seeing Tipler brought up free will, I also can't go past commenting on the problem with  Jerry Coyne's article asserting that there is no free will (and which physicist Bee endorses without reservation).  The consequence, he says, is (my bold):

Now this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t punish criminals. We should—in order to remove them from society when they’re dangerous, reform them so they can rejoin us, and deter others from apeing bad behavior. But we shouldn’t imprison people as retribution—for making a “bad choice.” 

Um, in what sense can their be "reform" of criminals if it is not involving the idea of them using free will to not re-offend?  Lobotomy?  Operant conditioning?  

See, if you don't believe in free will being behind personal responsibility, it logically opens the way for the State to seek to exert control over criminals/dissents via direct biological methods - the Clockwork Orange scenario - because that's the way the universe operates.   You can't rely on logic and persuasion to work - indeed, if think they do work, aren't you re-opening the very question of free will that you deny?  

CS Lewis wrote an essay about this back in (I think) the 1950's, and I still fail to see how the "no free will" atheists seriously address the issue.   The essay contains a line which many conservative/libertarians love to quote (and rather irk me when they do so) - this one:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The problem is, they cite it for trivial matters - a complaint about restrictive smoking laws, for example;  they use it as if there is no valid Christian interest in governments making laws for the common good.

But despite that gripe of mine, it makes the argument against treating punishment as only being about reform or deterrence as relevantly today as it did when it was written.

Some optimism for Friday

*  From the CSM:

Gigafactory begins battery production: Start of something big for Tesla?...

Tesla has said the Gigafactory, said to cost $5 billion and expected to be one of the largest buildings in the world once it is complete, will significantly lower the cost of its products. The start of production there, then, marks progress for the ambitious goals of the company and its chief executive, Elon Musk, to revolutionize energy use....

The Gigafactory is currently operating at 30 percent, but is forecast to eventually transform battery production on a global scale. When it is expected to reach peak production capacity in 2018, the Gigifactory plans to produce 35 gigawatt hours per year of lithium-ion battery cells, nearly as much as the rest of the entire world’s battery production combined, the company notes. Put in other terms, this scale of production could power New York City for about three years, Tesla has previously said.

 *  At least some newspapers are bucking the trend?:

The Washington Post expects to hire more than 60 journalists in the coming months — a sign of remarkable growth for a newspaper in the digital age.

After a year of record traffic and digital advertising revenue, the Post newsroom will grow by more than 8 percent, to more than 750 people. The extent of the newsroom expansion was first reported by Politico. The Post will add a "rapid-response" investigative team, expand its video journalism and breaking news staff, and make additional investments in podcasts and photography.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post in October 2013 and reportedly invested $50 million in the company last year. That investment is paying off, according to a memo from publisher Fred Ryan that said the Post is now "a profitable and growing company." Ryan said the Post's online traffic had increased by nearly 50 percent in the past year, and new subscriptions have grown by 75 percent, more than doubling digital subscription revenue.

Meanwhile, subscriptions at The New York Times have also surged. Times CEO Mark Thompson said on CNBC that the paper added 132,000 new subscribers in the 18 days after the election, a tenfold increase over the same period a year ago. The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal also reported record growth in subscriptions.

*  Cancer death rates (in the US, but I'm sure in most Western countries) are way down:

Cancer death rate has dropped 25 percent since 1991 peak

The drop is the result of steady reductions in smoking and advances in early detection and treatment, and is driven by decreasing death rates for the four major cancer sites: lung (- 43% between 1990 and 2014 among males and -17% between 2002 and 2014 among females), breast (-38% from 1989 to 2014), prostate (-51% from 1993 to 2014), and colorectal (-51% from 1976 to 2014).

 *  Bizarrely, my long time preferred priority for a space program - a lunar base - may end up getting traction under a Trump presidency.   (He'll still be a disaster, though.)

An underestimate of an important effect of climate change?

Oh my.  Until relatively recently, it seemed that there wasn't that much concern in the climate change science community about increased temperatures and glacial melt causing (at least any time soon) a major slowdown in the Atlantic overturning currents that help keep England and Northern Europe relatively warm.  But last year, it was noted that the current is already slowing down, which did raise some eyebrows as to whether it was part of a temporary cycle, or a sign of something worse.

Now, from Real Climate, looks like some detailed analysis shows the risk of a major shutdown has been underestimated.

What's not explained is how serious for parts of Europe the cooling (in winter?) may be. 

A chemical problem I hadn't heard of...

Quite a fascinating article appeared at the Atlantic recently, explaining the dire health effects of carbon disulphide, an important chemical in some industrial processes, but which I had never heard of.

As usual, the poor workers of 19th century factories which first started using it (in rubber manufacture) were the ones worst hit.  In 1887, for example:

Peterson had heard of carbon-disulfide insanity in Europe, so he alerted his colleagues in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now known as The New England Journal of Medicine) that the problem had come to America. In England, the new term “gassed” had arisen, defined in the Liverpool Daily Post as “the term used in the India rubber business, and it meant dazed.” The British physician Thomas Oliver had recalled watching as people working in rubber factories left after their shifts and “simply staggered home,” apart from themselves. The effect could be deadly. “Some of them have become the victims of acute insanity,” Oliver wrote, “and in their frenzy have precipitated themselves from the top rooms of the factory to the ground.”

Obviously, occupational health and safety wasn't a thing that travelled fast in the 19th century, since the  dangers of the chemical had been known about in Europe for over 20 years:

Evidence piled on in 1856, when a professor of medicine at the University of Paris named Auguste Delpech reported several cases of carbon disulfide poisoning to the French Academy of Medicine. The symptoms ranged from disturbing dreams to compromised memory to mania. The cases were so fascinating that he turned the focus of his career to carbon disulfide. In a medical newspaper, he told of a 27-year-old who, after just three months of working with carbon disulfide in the rubber industry, appeared prematurely aged and whose “sexual desire and erections were abolished.”

By 1863, Delpech had accrued enough case studies to write a 100-plus-page paper on the dangers of carbon disulfide, particularly among workers in balloon and condom factories. He observed two distinct phases of intoxication: a period of mental disturbance followed by disruptions of the distal nerves, causing weakness and numbness in the extremities. Hypersexuality gave way to impotence, bypassing the middle ground. Chronicling these effects put Delpech at the front of the emerging discipline of the science of the mind.

Mitochondria replacement risks

No, it's not just conservative reservations about fiddling with genetics that makes me annoyed that this line of work is being pushed by some scientists.

Plenty of scientists worry that it is risky to the potential child.

I can't for the life of me understand why people don't see the problem with this:   when did the interests of  adults who know they have a inheritable major health problem to nonetheless have a child with their own genes start over-riding the obvious moral problem of experimenting in a way that runs a serious risk of creating a child with serious health problems as a result of the experiment? 

The moral thing to do, surely, is for that very small part of the population to not insist on propagating their own (or, particularly, the mother's) genes:  adopt or use egg donation.   With the latter, the mother still gets all the experience of pregnancy, even. 


 

More bad jellyfish news

We're up to 10 Fraser Island area irukandji stings (all requiring hospitalisation, I think) this summer holiday.

As I said a few posts back, if this keeps spreading south, it's a real worry for summer tourism.

If I were the State government, I would be putting plenty of money into research on the matter. As the Guardian's report on the 9th sting indicated, it is difficult to be 100% certain that it is irukandji or a jellyfish in the same family.  More needs to be known before any hit further south and the really busy beach areas.

Another underwhelming dystopia

For some reason (he must have read somewhere that it was good, but I don't know where) my son has been pestering me to rent the 2006 dystopia movie Children of Men.   I vaguely recalled that it had been well reviewed, even if a box office dud, so despite my general dislike of the dystopia genre, we watched it last night.

It is, by my reckoning, a deeply unpleasant film with nothing to recommend it.  Well made, sure, but with no character to particularly care about, a pretty silly premise (it's 18 years since the last baby was born, and the world still doesn't have a clue as to what's going on?   Come on - give science some credit.   It's a scenario that could readily have a scientific explanation - after all, they have been working on the idea of genetically engineering viruses to make pest mammals infertile for some time.  But apparently the director doesn't like  movies that explain too much - hence virtually nothing in this film is explained properly.)

It did, though, confirm in my mind why it is that I can't take to the dystopia genre - with 1984 being my prime precedent.   It's because they routinely fail to make how the world got there in any way plausible. 

Sure, small individual countries with the breakdown of government and a reversion to tribalism (but armed with modern weaponry), or fanciful social experiment, can fall into dystopia for a time.  But global dystopias where everything has collapsed, and/or all government has become authoritarian, and/or all happiness has been sucked out of the world, on an apparently permanent basis - now that takes some explaining.  There's no true historical precedent, and, so often, these scenarios just show too many humans acting with no humanity.   Dystopia novels or movies never get me over that plausibility line.

A fan of the genre could argue, I suppose, that plausibility is not their main point:  it's the warnings they give about human nature, or the nature of power, or some such.   But sorry, for me, that just doesn't cut it.  Set your lesson in some example of a real temporary dystopia, if you will (I'm thinking The Last King of Scotland, for example), but why create a fake, implausible world?

Unimportant news

I did not care for the season opener for Sherlock.  And, from reading the lengthy comments at The Guardian, it seems many other people agree with my assessment that the episode was an underwhelming mess, with busy-ness substituting for quality.   It did have some of the the worrying hallmarks of the fate of post-Tennant Dr Who, which became unwatchable.

Also, as with many at The Guardian, I had no concern over the fate of a certain character, whose "secret life" subplot had never been convincing.  

Blending in