I can feel my brain starting to hurt

A paper on arXiv:

The conception of reality in Quantum Mechanics

Disputes on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics often involve the conception of reality, without a clear definition on which aspect of this broad concept of reality one refers. We provide an overview of conceptions of reality in classical physics, in philosophy of science and in Quantum Mechanics and its interpretations and analyse their differences and subtleties. Structural realism as conception in philosophy of science will turn out to be a promising candidate to settle old problems regarding the conception of reality in Quantum Mechanics. We amend the analysis of three main interpretations and their relation to structural realism by three well-known informational approaches in the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Last we propose an additional class of structural realism supported by QBism.

In other movie news...

In Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Keshav (Akshay Kumar) isn’t expected to build a monument like the Taj Mahal that a Mughal emperor had built for his beloved wife, but a utility-friendly toilet for his bride (Bhumi Pednekar) who refuses to defecate in the open fields like the other women in his village.

I hope it's on SBS in due course.   The reviewer is having some fun further down:

The second half was decidedly a crash course on the existing government’s noble attempts at providing toilets across India and to highlight the narrow-mindedness among Indians who are shackled by cultural and religious beliefs.

But don’t give up on this film yet, because it has some golden moments scattered across it....

 The first half is smooth, but it’s the second half that gets constipated. The premise which is intriguing and novel becomes repetitive and laboured. Some of the scenes in the second half seems contrived to make the current government shine and sparkle. Keshav and Jaya’s domestic problem snowballs into such a stinker of an issue that the entire state seems to be involved towards the end. There’s a good chance that you may have lost interest and your steam by all that drama surrounding a toilet-building battle.

Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, which clocks 175 minutes ...

175 minute Bollywood extravaganza about defecating in India!   Hollywood should pay attention, as it is scratching around for new ideas....

Sending him nuts

Tony Abbott is going a bit loopy, if you ask me:

Tony Abbott has called for Australia urgently to consider a missile defence shield to protect against attack by nuclear-armed North Korea.

Kevin Rudd just blathers on, so it's silly to say Tony's not nuts because Kevin said the same.

And Malcolm should be shutting up on North Korea too, I reckon.  Or at least, not giving them reason to try an experimental lob of a missile in our direction.

I also see (via Jason) that Tony's hyperbole about same sex marriage has been contradicted by Chris Kenny.   I agree, Kenny's column is an unusually calm and measured one which I find hard to disagree with.  I'm sure that Kenny will go back to being a bloviating political twit tomorrow.

My only puzzle is whether I take part in the silly postal opinion poll, or "vote" against it.   I am half inclined to do something to amuse the counters, like vote "No" but ruin the ballot by writing on it something about how I don't want to see Tony Abbott hitching up with long time suitor David Marr.    And I wonder how many papers will be not counted because of the addition of a male genitalia squiggle.   Maybe men only do that if they are forced to vote.

A funny tweet

I see that mockery of Brendan O'Neill is popular:

A long, long way to go

Here's an article in Nature  that suggests that those science fiction stories where the brain is scanned in 20 minutes and then the mind it hosts is uploaded into a computer, or another person, are just a tad unrealistic.

Even under the most humdrum conditions — “normal lighting; no sensory cues; they're not hungry”, says Zlatic — her fly larvae can be made to perform 30 different actions, including retracting or turning their heads, or rolling. The actions are generated by a brain comprising just 15,000 neurons. That is nothing compared with the 86 billion in a human brain, which is one of the reasons Zlatic and her teammates like the maggots so much.

“At the moment, really, the Drosophila larva is the sweet spot,” says Albert Cardona, Zlatic's collaborator and husband, who is also at Janelia. “If you can get the wiring diagram, you have an excellent starting point for seeing how the central nervous system works.”

Zlatic and Cardona lead two of the dozens of groups around the world that are generating detailed wiring diagrams for brains of model organisms. New tools and techniques for slicing up brains and tracing their connections have hastened progress over the past few years. And the resulting neural-network diagrams are yielding surprises — showing, for example, that a brain can use one network in multiple ways to create the same behaviours.

But understanding even the simplest of circuits — orders of magnitude smaller than those in Zlatic's maggots — presents a host of challenges. Circuits vary in layout and function from animal to animal. The systems have redundancy that makes it difficult to pin one function to one circuit. Plus, wiring alone doesn't fully explain how circuits generate behaviours; other factors, such as neurochemicals, have to be considered. “I try to avoid using the word 'understand',” says Florian Engert, who is putting together an atlas of the zebrafish brain at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “What do you even mean when you say you understand how something works? If you map it out, you haven't really understood anything.”

Against smartphone panic

After that article in The Atlantic about teenagers being ruined or destroyed or laid waste, or something like that, by obsessive use of smart phones, I've been a bit more interested in the counter articles than the original one.

Is that just because I think smartphones are awesome?   I do dislike aspects of how they are used:  everyone sitting at a table just using their phones is a bad thing.   (And I find a lot of adults are as bad at that as their kids these days.)   But then again, if you talk about what you're reading on it (and other people look up to listen), it's not as bad as it could be.  And as for people not watching a performance  directly, but viewing it on their phone screens while they record it (always with such crappy sound quality that you can't really enjoy playback at home anyway), that is a stupid habit.

Anyway, here are the articles against moral panic:   one from Slate, and one from The Guardian. There are probably more out there, waiting to be found. On my phone...

The lesson: don't have Pepsi Max with your pizza

This article notes that it would seem that drinking a diet soda on a more or less empty stomach may not be so bad, but drinking one in combination with carbohydrates may be asking for trouble.

Complicated, our bodies...

Sounds rather "Rambo"

SHANGHAI

A Chinese action film that depicts the country's soldiers saving war-ravaged Africans from Western baddies soared to become China's all-time top box-office earner this week, headlining a summer of patriotic cinematic fare.

The wildly popular "Wolf Warriors 2" boasts the ominous tagline "whoever offends China will be hunted down no matter how far away they are", and millions of Chinese cinema-goers have lapped it up since the movie's release less than two weeks ago.

The blockbuster has raked in more than 3.4 billion yuan ($500 million) since debuting on July 27, according to unofficial China box-office trackers Maoyan, a leading ticket merchant, and other industry tallies.

Update:  Don't say that I don't put in effort for my reader[s] - here's the trailer from Youtube.  And yes, it does involve Chinese Rambo rescuing poor Africans from bad guy Caucasians.  Which, given China's recent inroads into African development, makes obvious propaganda sense.   I look forward to future Chinese attempts to right the dysfunctional governments of that continent.  They should have a crack at Afghanistan and the entire Middle East (save for Israel), too.



Update 2:  I'm a bit annoyed that the Youtube is stuck on the flipping the finger scene.  This blog usually has higher standards.  On the other hand, it is of interest, I suppose, that it would seem that this is universally used insult across nearly all nations now. 

About PSA

Simon Chapman writes pretty convincingly on the anti-prostate screening side in his article at The Conversation.  

Red light discussed

This article in The Conversation notes that women avoid walking through red light streets - streets with a lot of strip clubs or other forms of "adult entertainment", such as King Street in Melbourne - for fear of sexual harassment by drunk men.   That's pretty wise of them.

This may be unfair to women who have to divert from what might be the shortest route, but does this mean you shouldn't have red light streets at all? 

One of the weirdest things in Brisbane, I have long thought, is that there is a strip club right in the Albert Street part of the main pedestrian mall.  It's like 15 m from the dead centre of the mall.   It doesn't have lurid pictures outside, which is something to be grateful for, but I have still always thought that this is a very strange place to put this type of venue.  Yet it's been there for years and years.

Another oddity is the the old Grovenor Hotel on George Street.  Decades ago, it used to be a normal sort of pub (not that I ever recall going there), but for a long time now it has been a topless venue.  (including the ability to get a haircut from a topless woman.)   This used to be just across the corner from the Supreme Court (since demolished and re-located), but it's still just across another corner from the high rise home of the Justice Department and the DPP.    Again, this has always struck me as a bizarrely inappropriate place to running an adult entertainment venue.

Brisbane's actual red light district, such that it was, used to be in Fortitude Valley, but it was only ever a few venues, I think.  I get the impression driving through it now that it barely has an "adult entertainment" venue now at all.   It's more the scene for doof doof music clubs and party drugs.  Unfortunately it has proved strongly resisted to commercial revival in many respects - Chinatown had a lot of money spent on it, and yet it still feels like it is going through a protracted commercial death.   The McWhirter Centre, last time I visited it, felt like a complete failure as a retail centre.    I think I did see someone from the tattoo shop engaged in a drug deal, though.  

Anyway, my impression is still that strip clubs are best kept in one, small area, rather than having them in the middle of normal retail areas.  I don't think that these dubious enterprises should be "normalised" by being in ordinary retail or commercial districts.  

To be honest, in this day and day of internet pornography I don't know how or why strip clubs survive at all.    Brothels I understand (so to speak), but strip clubs when there is so much more explicit things to be seen on the net?   Very odd.   But if they are going to exist at all, keep them out of the way, I say.

Brilliant

You know that West Virginian governor who just swapped from being a Democrat to a Republican?  Well, sure seems that in doing so he boosted up the average Democrat politician IQ several points:

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice said Donald Trump is “really interested” in his plan to prop up Appalachian mining by giving federal money to power plants that burn the region’s coal.

Justice, a coal and real estate mogul elected governor last year as a Democrat, announced at a West Virginia rally alongside President Trump last week that he’s becoming a Republican. Justice has recently spent a “goodly amount of time" meeting one-on-one with Trump and has liked the feedback to his pro-coal proposal. The plan calls for the Department of Homeland Security to send $15 to eastern U.S. utilities for every ton of Appalachia coal they burn.

“He’s really interested. He likes the idea,” Justice said in a phone interview on Wednesday when asked about Trump’s reaction. “Naturally, he’s trying to vet the whole process. It’s a complicated idea.”

Google; Men; Women

Physicist Bee has a somewhat complicated (I suppose some would say "nuanced") take on the matter of Google sacking that guy Damore.    As for me, it's outraged that alt.right, so I find it hard to be believe Google can be completely in the wrong! 

I think the NYT article "The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley" is pretty good, and it notes that some hope it may be the start of a sort of right wing internet (which I think would not be a bad thing, as the alt.right's base is not, I reckon, as big as it thinks it is):

There is a certain poetic justice in the alt-right, largely an internet-based political movement, turning against the companies that enabled it in the first place. Like most modern political movements, the alt-right relies on tech platforms like YouTube and Twitter to rally supporters, collect donations and organize gatherings. In that sense, Silicon Valley progressivism isn’t just an ideological offense to the alt-right — it’s an operational threat.

In an attempt to build a buffer against censorship, some alt-right activists have begun creating their own services. Cody Wilson, who describes himself as a “techno-anarchist,” recently opened Hatreon, a crowdfunding site that bills itself as a free-speech alternative to Patreon. Gab, a Twitter clone, was started last year after Twitter barred several conservative users. RootBocks, a right-wing Kickstarter knockoff, bills itself as “a crowdfunding site that won’t shut you down because of your beliefs.”

These companies are still tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but their supporters say that one day they could serve as the foundation for a kind of parallel right-wing internet where all speech is allowed, no matter how noxious or incendiary.

In another NYT report on the matter, they do point one pretty good sounding reason why he was sacked:

Mr. Damore’s comments also raised another issue around Google’s peer-review system. Employees at the company are expected to judge their colleague’s work in a peer-review process that is essential to deciding whether someone gets promoted. By expressing certain beliefs — such as that women are more prone to anxiety — the concern was that he could no longer be impartial in judging female co-workers.

For a company steeped in a rich history of encouraging unconventional thinking, the problem was not that he expressed an unpopular opinion, but a disrespectful one, according to Yonatan Zunger, who left Google last week after 14 years at the company to join a start-up.

“We have a long history of disagreement over everything from technical issues to policy issues to the most mundane aspects of building management, and over all, that has been tremendously valuable,” Mr. Zunger said in an email. “The problem here was that this was disrespectful disagreement — and there’s really no respectful way to say, ‘I think you and people like you aren’t as qualified to do your job as people like me.”

Good point.

My modest same sex marriage suggestion

While I think a compulsory plebiscite on same sex marriage, held at the next election as a way of minimising cost, is not a bad idea, it is hard to understand the point of a voluntary postal plebiscite on the topic.

It will, surely, simply be a deeply methodologically flawed attempt at gauging the public's opinion, at the enormous cost of $122 million.

If the Coalition were honest about it, why could they not acknowledge that a more reliable way of gauging public opinion would be to pay for, say, Newspoll, to devise an exceptionally large sample one off poll on the matter, with a simple question, so as to gauge public opinion nation wide within a very small margin of error.

The methodology could be devised so as to capture more than your standard landlines, no?

How much could that cost, really?    I would take a stab and say that it couldn't be more than $5 to $10 million. Wouldn't some department or other have the funds to commission it, without getting the sanction of Parliament?

So, savings of at least $110 million, and a more accurate outcome.   Much less for Labor to complain about.

What is wrong with this idea?

An exceptionally good optical illusion

Noticed at Boing Boing, which I rarely visit these days:

Impossible hurdles

I have a hunch that the Impossible Burger, if it's as good as people claim, will make lab grown meat hardly worth pursuing.    

But the NYT notes that the company is having trouble convincing the FDA that it should declare the key magic ingredient - it's blood tasting soy leghemoglobin - safe to consume.   Which is odd, given that they can sell the burger without that endorsement.

It wouldn't stop me from trying it.

By the way, one of the best fake meat things I tried in the last couple of years were some type of frozen nugget made from shiitake mushrooms.  They went very well in a butter chicken sauce, and had the firmer texture that is often missing from soy based fake meat (or Quorn, which is too expensive and also too soft).  They were from an Asian supermarket, but I haven't seen them there again.  I can't even remember where they were made.  Anyway, it's a pity, because I did like them.

Re: North Korea

This story:

North Korea now has a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be mounted on a missile, according to an analysis by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the Washington Post reports. North Korea has claimed to have this capability for some time now, and for planning purposes, U.S. military commanders had already been working under the assumption that those claims were true. However, Tuesday’s revelation is a much stronger confirmation.

seems a little conveniently timed, doesn't anyone think?

I see that the Right, at least in the form of Trump supporting Ace of Spades, is already getting comfortable with the idea of a pre-emptive nuclear strike:

A pre-emptive nuclear strike is not a great option, but we're out of great options, and now down to only the less-bad ones.

So, all we need now is for ageing Rupert Murdoch to email the producer of Fox and Friends  that they should run a "US should strike first" line, and Trump will be reaching for the phone to the Pentagon.

I see one expert in Time says it might be best to do nothing:

As things stand, neither diplomacy nor sanctions seem likely to derail the North’s nuclear program. So regime change looks more and more attractive. But better that it come from within. Given Kim’s reckless habits—drinking and driving are two of his favorite pastimes—a self-inflicted biological solution is more than possible. So is the chance that an insider will finally get angry enough to take him out, never mind the consequences.

Update:    Uh-oh.  Fox News already getting on talking heads seemingly suggesting pre-emptive strike (possibly nuclear) not such a bad idea:

On Fox Business, Trish Regan interviewed former Lt. Gen. Ralph Peters, a military pundit, on the next steps the administration should take. “I don’t want this to be a war,” he said. “I don’t want it! Nobody in their right mind wants it. But we cannot allow North Korea to have an array of missiles, an arsenal of missiles, of nuclear-tipped missiles that can hit the United States. If it comes to that, I would hit them first and hit them hard knowing that it will be bloody and ugly if we do so."

Message to Jason, future Buddhist

Or, you could become a Buddhist. A lot less sweat and pain involved.  Not to mention very little risk of concussion. *

Speaking of Buddhism (I fear people are thinking that I am at risk of conversion to it due to a fondness for Monkey King movies from Hong Kong/China), there's a book out by Robert Wright called "Why Buddhism is True" which is attracting some attention. 

There's a short interview with him at NPR.

In his new book, Why Buddhism is True, Wright makes the case that some Buddhist practices can help humans overcome the biological pull towards dissatisfaction.

"I think of mindfulness meditation as almost a rebellion against natural selection," he says. "Natural selection is the process that created us. It gave us our values. It sets our agenda, and Buddhism says, 'We don't have to play this game.' "

He says:

Certainly when you think about the logic of natural selection, it makes sense that we would be like this. Natural selection built us to do some things, a series of things that help us get genes into the next generation. Those include eating food so we stay alive, having sex — things like that.

If it were the case that any of these things brought permanent gratification, then we would quit doing them, right? I mean, you would eat, you'd feel blissed out, you'd never eat again. You'd have sex, you'd, like, lie there basking in the afterglow, never have sex again. Well, obviously that's not a prescription for getting genes into the next generation. So natural selection seems to have built animals in general to be recurrently dissatisfied. And this seems to be a central feature of life — and it's central to the Buddhist diagnosis of what the problem is.

Well, I think I have a bit of a problem with this.   It seems to me that you can respond to a recurrent bodily desire (the satisfaction of which gives pleasure) in one of two ways:  resenting the fact that the desire keeps returning, or celebrating the repeated satisfaction of it.   (Assuming you can satisfy it.)

I tend to think Buddhism's attitude is too much like the former, whereas other religions take the more physical life affirming view.   Sure, you can say that Christianity or (say) Hinduism thinks asceticism has spiritual value too, but I don't think you could ever say that it thought it was for everyone.  With Buddhism, I'm always getting the feeling that it thinks people are fooling themselves if they feel good after, say, a good meal and good sex.  (No doubt, some Buddhist would argue I'm completely misunderstanding it.)

The other fundamental problem I've always had with Buddhism is that it seems in its purist form to be a philosophy which de-emphasises the value of charity and help to others.    I know Buddhists will argue about that too, but I'm not so sure.  It seems a philosophy primed for the argument "hey, poor starving person, you need to realise that your desire for a full stomach is an illusion - I will help you meditate to overcome your hunger pains"  instead of getting in and helping them build a better farm.
Wright is perhaps on stronger grounds when he notes some similarity between Buddhism and cognitive therapy (a therapy I've always thought sounded sensible and valuable):

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works by kind of interrogating people about the logic behind things like fears and anxieties, like, Is there really much of a chance of you projectile vomiting while speaking to a crowd? You've never done it before. ... So there's a suspicion there about the logic behind feelings.

Well, in Buddhism there's a suspicion of the logic behind feelings more broadly, I would say. But as a practical matter, Buddhism works at the level of feeling. They don't interrogate the logic explicitly, but you deal with the feeling itself in a way that disempowers it. And there's a kind of bridge between cognitive therapy and Buddhist practice in evolutionary psychology; because evolutionary psychology explains that, indeed, a lot of the feelings we have are not worth following, for various reasons. They may have literally been designed to mislead us to begin with by natural selection. ... We live in an environment so different from the environment that natural selection designed us for that we have these counterproductive feelings, like fear of public speaking. So evolutionary psychology gives a back story, explaining why it is that we so often are misled by feelings ... and then Buddhist meditation tells us what to do about that.

*  For other readers:  comment made as a result of his tweet that he felt this article came uncomfortably close to describing the reasons for his own "athletic obsessions".   

Speaking of poisonous social media

The threads of Catallaxy work as a form of social media, where (as I have taken to repeating), the foolish and obnoxious find comfort in other people who share their foolish and obnoxious views, or at the very least,  not call them out for it.  

I've mentioned their fondness for armed revolution fantasies before, and I see they're (OK, to be fair, some) are still at it:

I've called out nutty Bosi before - an ex SAS twit who would not be out of place in one of the US armed militia fantasy clubs that thought they would liberate the nation when Obama started kicking their doors in to confiscate every gun in the land.

Yes, please publish your violent fantasy paper on Catallaxy.   Free speech and all that, hey Sinclair...

Young adult fiction eats itself

There's a long, interesting article at The Vulture about the silly, silly modern political correctness in social media campaigning about young adult novels that dare to have characters that say something offensive to current PC sensibilities.  

The article shows how one precious dill led an attack on a novel by selecting particular un-PC lines, and completely ignoring the bigger picture - that the novel is about a character recognising and coming out of intolerance.  But gullible followers of said dill use social media to join in the attack without even reading the book and understanding they are being mislead.   I like the way one agent comments:  

“None of us are willing to comment publicly for fear of being targeted and labeled racist or bigoted. But if children’s-book publishing is no longer allowed to feature an unlikable character, who grows as a person over the course of the story, then we’re going to have a pretty boring business.”

This is an area ripe and overdue for ridicule and satire, is it not?   But have the PC Left enough power to even prevent that?  I doubt it.

One thing I do know - you don't cure the madness of lefty, over precious social media crowds via a counter attack by mad, more than happy to offend, alt.right social media crowds.  If anything, that surely is counterproductive.   There is something very poisonous and corrosive about social media campaigning, no matter which side it is coming from.   Social scientists will be studying this for many years yet, I bet.

Fanciful thinking on elevators

So, architects, at least, are thinking about what could be done if elevators went away from steel cabled up and down things, to something more like the "go anywhere" deal on the Starship Enterprise.

All sounds very cool, but I would have thought that the destruction of the World Trade Centre, and recent London and Dubai fires, are making the idea of living or even working on (say) the 100th floor less attractive than ever.  Not sure that I had realised how high a building going up in Jeddah was going to be:

Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today’s structural technology.