In other, uh, "news"

 

Why aren't there more calls for an end to this self-gaslighting?

Honestly, I find the Right wing media's tactic of promoting every verbal stumble of Biden as evidence that he's virtually a nursing home patient let loose on the Presidency is despicable.

Not because I think the likes of Hannity actually believe their fool's game (although, you don't know - never underestimate the ease with which repeatedly pretending something is true eventually convinces you it really is);  but because far too large a slab of the country genuinely is in the grip of a miasma of politically self serving conspiracy theories, and Murdoch and his employees must know that this is bad and dangerous for functioning democracy, and society as a whole. 

It's especially ridiculous when the people buying this genuinely think Trump was the smart one.  

The end of this can only come from prominent Republicans calling for it to end - but they are gutless.

 

True crime issues

From an NPR review of a book about an apparently over-looked serial killer in New York in the early 1990's, this paragraph about "true crime" writing (and TV - it's really getting too prominent on Netflix, if you ask me) sounds about right:

Last Call is journalist Elon Green's first book, but he is not new to the genre of true crime, nor is he a stranger to the problems that lie within it, most notably the genre's enduring, pernicious whiteness, and how it has trained us to believe that white women are most often the victims of murder (this is not true; the most commonly murdered demographic are men, by other men). The genre has also trained us into believing that serial killers are masterminds, evil geniuses, rather than opportunists who get lucky — or that they treat murder like some kind of art (a la Hannibal). In other words, the killers often become the focus, the object of fascination.

This is not true in Last Call, which puts the victims first, and which, when it does reveal the discovery of the killer, doesn't attempt to make him seem like an anti-hero.

Another bit from further down, which I hadn't heard of before:

There's a stink to the judge's decision that's reminiscent of the attitude police had when one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims, drugged, naked, and bleeding, escaped into the street only to be politely returned to Dahmer's clutches by police officers who chalked up the incident as a "domestic squabble between homosexuals" (the victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was 14; Dahmer was 31).

Wow.

By the way, there is a little bit more description of the murders - committed by a gay man who found his victims in New York's gay bar scene in the early 1990's - in this review of the book at The Guardian.

Zapping desire

I haven't read anything about transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for cognitive improvement for a while.  Oddly, this seems a subject that has never attracted much mainstream media attention, for whatever reason.

But I see in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (thank you Sci Hub), that there is another purpose for which TMS has recently been tried - to see if it can dampen sexual arousal in those who suffer from hypersexuality.  Although this was just a "proof of concept" study, the authors seems encouraged that it did work on dampening sexual arousal.   

The study was pretty basic, though.  And if I read the graphs properly, it wasn't like it killed all arousal after a 15 minute treatment.  But it did seem to have a effect on those who received the real TMS over those who received the sham version.

Interestingly - the study seemed to confirm that stimulation to only the right side had an effect.  The area of the brain is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC to its friends:

Meta-analytic neuroimaging findings provide robust evidence for bilateral involvement of the DLPFC in neural processing ofvisual sexual stimuli.10  Our study complements this correlative evidence by showing a causal brain-behavior relationship between the right (but not left) DLPFC and sexual arousal. More specifically, it demonstrates that increasing the activity of the ight DLPFC by high-frequency rTMS leads to a decrease in sexual arousal. Thus, this relationship suggests a specific role of the right DLPFC in regulating, that is, inhibiting, sexual arousal.Moreover, our results affirm previous conclusions, drawn from fMRI, that the right DLPFC is involved in self-regulation of sexual arousal due to its increased activity during attempted inhibition of sexual arousal,  that seems to be specific to the sexual domain.

So, it seems that stimulating the part of the brain that is involved in resisting sex stimulation aids inhibition of arousal.

The paper also mentions that it had been thought that deep brain stimulation of the hypothalamus might work.  But (apart from requiring surgery), it might have an unwanted side effect (my bold):

Based on case reports of stereotaxic interventions in paraphilic patients in the 1970s, the ventromedial hypothalamus was recently hypothesized to represent a promising target for deep brain stimulation.  Although the side effects of deep brain stimulation in general might be lesser than systemic side effects of antiandrogenic drug therapies,it is undeniable that side effects of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques might even be comparatively negligible. Considering not only the involvement in sexual arousal but also its crucial role for encoding sexual preference,33neurostimulation of the hypothalamus might lead to unwanted side effects regarding sexual orientation, for example altered sexual partner preference as observed in male ferrets with lesions of the preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus. In contrast, our non-invasive approach of cortical stimulation may provide a more specific, better tolerated,and safer method that is easy to apply

Well, that's an invitation to Google the topic of "stereotaxic interventions" (I think just means surgical work on lesions) on the hypothalamus and its effect on human sexual behaviour.   From the 2006 paper Neurological Control of Human Sexual Behaviour: Insights from Lesion Studies:

In the 1970s, certain psychosurgical techniques were developed to target sexual behaviour. These were based on experimental work in animals that demonstrated that destruction of the hypothalamic ventromedial nuclei led to the conversion of feline post‐amygdalectomy hypersexuality to hyposexuality.¹³ Roeder and colleagues¹⁴ subsequently developed a stereotaxic method of treating “sexual deviations” in humans. Stereotaxic lesions of the ventral medial hypothalamic nucleus were performed in 10 patients with “sexual deviation” ranging from paedophilic homosexuality to intractable exhibitionism. The results showed that sex drive was diminished or abolished in all cases.¹⁴

Some more specific examples of how brain abnormality has led to problematic sexual behaviour: 

Poeck and Pilleri¹⁵ described a female patient who displayed periodic hypersexual and aggressive behaviour after encephalitis of unknown aetiology. Neuropathological examination revealed extensive lesions to limbic structures, including the hypothalamus, thalamic nuclei and the fornix. Ortego and colleagues¹⁶ described a woman with neuropathologically confirmed multiple sclerosis who developed hypersexuality and multiple paraphilias, including paedophilia, zoophilia and incest over the 2 months prior to her death. She had extensive lesions of limbic structures, including the hypothalamus, basal frontal, septal and temporal regions. Frohman and colleagues¹⁷ described a male patient with altered sexual behaviour characterised by an obsessive and insatiable desire to touch women's breasts. Neuroimaging showed enhancing lesions on the right side of the hypothalamus and mesencephalon.  

The article goes on to give lots of other examples of problems within other parts of the brain that can led to hypersexuality.   

It's all a little disturbing to read such cases, due to the damage they may cause to "faith" in self control and free will.   I would hope it's more an example of "extreme cases making for bad law", so to speak:  you really don't want people who don't have brain lesions to think they can follow impulses because they're just a meat robot with no control.      

On the up side, maybe someone is working on Woody Allen's orgasmatron via TMS?  Ha.  (Actually, the only thing I see about using TMS to increase libido has been about women.)

 

Twitter humour

 

Consider the colon

There's a rather interesting article at Scientific American:

Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

and I thought this paragraph, taking a sort of comparative overview of our digestive systems, was pretty interesting:

Our guts are remarkably similar to those of chimpanzees and orangutans--gorillas are a bit special--which are, in turn, not so very different from those of most monkeys. If you were to sketch and then consider the guts of different monkeys, apes and humans you would stop before you were finished, unable to remember which ones you had drawn and which ones you had not. There is variation. In the leaf-eating black and white colobus monkeys (among which my wife and I once lived in Boabeng-Fiema, Ghana) the stomach is modified into a giant fermentation flask, as if the colobus were kin to a cow. In leaf-eating howler monkeys the large intestine has become enlarged to take on a similarly disproportionate role, albeit later on in digestion. But in most species things are not so complex. An unelaborated stomach breaks down protein, a simple small intestine absorbs sugars and a large (but not huge) large intestine ferments whatever plant material is left over. Our guts do not seem to be specialized hominid guts; they are, instead, relatively generalized monkey/ape guts. Our guts are distinguished primarily (aside from our slightly enlarged appendix) by what they are missing rather than what they uniquely possess. Our large intestines are shorter than those of living apes relative to the overall size of our gut (more like 25 percent of the whole, compared to 46 percent of the whole in chimps). This shortness appears to make us less able to obtain nutrients from the cellulose in plant material than are other primates though the data are far from clear-cut. The variation in the size and details of our large intestines relative to those of apes or gorillas have not been very well considered. In a 1925 study the size of colons was found to vary from one country to the next with the average Russian apparently having a colon five feet longer than the average Turk. Presumably the differences among regions in colon length are genetically based. It also seems likely that the true human colonic diversity has not yet been characterized (the above study considered only Europe). Because of the differences in our colons (and ultimately the number of bacteria in them) we must also vary in how effectively we turn cellulose and other hard to break down plant material into fatty acids. One measure of the inefficiency of our colons is our farting, which we all know varies person to person. Each stinking fart is filled with a measure of our variety.³ Aside then from the modest size of our colon, our guts are strikingly, elegantly, obviously, ordinary.  

 

At last, a Dr Seuss excuse

I'm not making this up:  for some years, I have occasionally wondered if I could find an excuse to insert a joke reference in a post to an unpopular Dr Seuss title "My Testicles Need Spectacles" - and I could never think of one.

The time has now arrived.  I will soon start looking for Seuss like illustrations that can be adapted for the cover art...

Singapore and floating solar

I've been complaining for a year or two that floating solar cells are an obviously good idea, but no one listens.

But look, my favourite effectively one Party state with very competent technocratic inclined leadership is building quite a bit of it.

Space-starved Singapore builds floating solar farms in climate fight

Neat.

Although floating solar cells at sea must be fraught with difficulties in most parts of the world due to the problem of waves, I would assume that the permanently pretty calm conditions around Singapore must make it pretty ideal for this system.  Only if there weren't so many ships wanting to be there, too.

More American nonsense

 

Trial by media the only option Scott Morrison and Christian Porter left open

I find this exasperatingly stupid.

The only reason we now have people like Andrew Bolt and even his ideological enemy Phillip Adams attacking or questioning the credibility of a rape claim made by a deceased women (Adams tweeted concern about Crikey reporting that it may be a case influenced by recovered memory therapy - or theory?) is because Morrison and Porter tried to tough it out by pretending that a Police non investigation is the same as an actual investigation.   

So now we have the unedifying spectacle of Bolt publishing an example of what was in the material the women's friends sent to politicians, and attacking Labor for saying it was a "credible" claim, and tonight we will have Four Corners presumably with a few people the deceased knew saying that she seemed credible in her recall to them.

It could all have been avoided by Porter stepping down while a discrete, independent inquiry was held.  Seems to me it could have been finalised within 4 to 6 months, tops;  and the media would have stopped talking about it.

PS:   if there is stuff in the dossier that makes it look like an independent investigation would find insufficient grounds for acting on the complaint in any manner - how stupid does Morrison (and Porter) look for taking the apparent tactical decision ("can't blame me for not acting if I didn't read the material") of saying they had not read the details before deciding no investigation is warranted?

 

Monday observations

*  A minor but very useful change made to my Android settings - using the power button to hang up on a call.  I have found hanging up an issue if, during a call, I have gone looking for something else on the phone - like a contact number I wanted to pass on.  I then have had the fiddly task of finding the "phone" screen again amongst other open apps, and it's a bit of a pain.   

But seeing I usually hold the phone in my left hand, I have a finger close to the power button all the time, and using it to hang up is much simpler.

You can thank me later. 

*  A Democrat/Biden victory on COVID support is a pretty big deal.   But in conspiracy land:

*  I have been meaning to link to Jonathan Chait's interesting column from a week or two ago:

The Republicans’ Long War to Roll Back the New Deal Is Finally Over

It starts with this:

The Democratic Party is on the verge of passing an economic-rescue bill twice the size of the one they enacted under Barack Obama. And yet the Republican opposition, which could block any bill by turning just one senator, has invested shockingly little energy in its opposition. While no Republicans seem likely to vote in favor, they have responded with resignation, rather than the paroxysms of outrage they mustered against previous Democratic administrations (and over far more limited measures).

Biden’s relief bill is extremely popular, yes — but this is a result of the GOP’s muted opposition as much as it is a cause. Meanwhile, Republican leaders are assenting to a restoration of earmarks, a budgetary practice they had once flamboyantly banned as a symbol of big government excess.

Many observers in both parties anticipated that the switch to a Democratic president would drive the GOP back to the libertarian purity that it has habitually clung to in opposition. But more than a month in, barely a sign of it can be found. The absence of a renewed anti-government impulse suggests a profound historic change may be afoot: The Republican Party is finally abandoning its crusade to roll back the New Deal.

But go read the rest.

 

A good summary

So, a different law professor (Ben Saul in Sydney - never heard of him before) has put up in a twitter thread the position with having an independent inquiry into Porter.  I agree with it completely:

 My legal views on Christian Porter: 1) it is normal that the same conduct of a person may be subject to different legal processes for different purposes - criminal, civil, employment, disciplinary, human rights, ombudsperson, coronial etc

2) The standards of proof may differ between processes for different purposes. Non-criminal processes may not depend on the existence of any criminal process, let alone a conviction on evidence beyond reasonable doubt, or the views of police

3) The govt is not legally required to establish an ad hoc inquiry into the matter. It is a political question of what our democracy expects of the character and fitness of any politician, particularly a cabinet minister and first law officer

4) and whether we trust the Prime Minister alone to judge it when he has a clear partisan political conflict of interest, the matter is so serious, and larger issues of violence against women are of such public concern

5) It is well accepted that the content of due process varies according to context. An inquiry for determining the fitness of the Attorney-General could readily meet necessary due process standards if appropriately structured  

6) It is irrelevant that Porter thinks all he could do in an inquiry is deny the allegations. It is his choice not to respond more fully. The purpose of an inquiry is to allow the complainant’s evidence to be independently tested so far as possible...

7) including by considering any views Porter may wish to put after he is fully informed of the evidence; to forensically test his version of events; and to consider other evidence or witnesses. An inquiry would ensure, not undermine, due process in these circumstances (end)  (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1367382998727847940)

I noticed Phil Coorey wrote a column bemoaning "no one will ever know the truth", and indicating that this means there is no point in having an independent inquiry.   This is a completely ill conceived criticism, and it sure as hell hasn't stopped governments calling enquiries into historical matters of much less consequence than a criminal sexual assault by the first law officer of the nation.  ("Ms Gillard,  did you or did you not pay for that kitchen renovation?")

No one knows the details of the evidence this woman, and/or her friends, have compiled.   The woman's family would like an enquiry now.

Sure, there is every chance that the enquiry will conclude that the events of the night concerned are so uncertain that Porter should be given the benefit of the doubt (even applying a civil law "balance of probabilities" test) - but you don't know that for sure until you have the enquiry.

The social media rumour mill which Coorey is complaining about actually makes it more important to have an enquiry.   

If Porter had any sense, he would see that the best chance of getting past this would be to step aside and co-operate with an independent enquiry.   

But he has been a terrible Attorney General all round, so why should he stop now?

Update:   and more along these lines:

We're dealing with dishonest idiots here

Matthew Ygelesias is making some good points lately (not that I always agree with him):

 

Don't tell Carlson, but the Chinese are coming after his precious bodily fluids

I noticed this a few days ago:

and then read this today (my bold):

In a new paper published by Nature Communications, The Lundquist Institute (TLI) Investigator Wei Yan, MD, Ph.D., and his research colleagues spell out an innovative strategy that has led to the discovery of a natural compound as a safe, effective and reversible male contraceptive agent in pre-clinical animal models. Despite tremendous efforts over the past decades, the progress in developing non-hormonal male contraceptives has been very limited.  

The compound is triptonide, which can be either purified from a Chinese herb called Tripterygium Wilfordii Hook F, or produced through chemical synthesis. Single daily oral doses of triptonide induce altered sperm having minimal or no forward motility with close to 100% penetrance and consequently male infertility in 3-4 and 5-6 weeks. Once the treatment is stopped, the males become fertile again in ~4-6 weeks, and can produce healthy offspring. No discernable toxic effects were detected in either short- or long-term triptonide treatment.

So, don't put it past the conspiracy addled brains of the Right to come up with a story that the Chinese have putting triptonide in the water supply of the West in a long term plan to out populate it.

More seriously - it would be pretty incredible if a natural compound found in a herb really did prove to be a super effective and safe male contraceptive.

It's an odd country

Having a read of a story about a transgender (man to woman) person in Korea who was kicked out the military (and now has killed herself), I see this:

South Korea is far less tolerant of the LGBTQ community than its East Asian neighbours.

Being LGBT is often seen as a disability or a mental illness, or by powerful conservative churches as a sin, and there are no anti-discrimination laws in the country.

In Ms Byun's case, anti-LGBT campaigners had attempted to identify her online. They also held demonstrations urging the military to dismiss her after news about the case emerged and have called for further demonstrations.

Which all strikes me as odd, given the extremely obvious and deliberate androgynous styling of K Pop males, especially BTS.  

Meanwhile, in America

Not to mention the Dr Seuss kerfuffle - a decision made by the owners of the books, and under no particular "cancel culture" pressure.

Private high school boys sticking together?

I see Chris Uhlmann is still running with "Porter's been cleared and this is a disgraceful witch hunt" line (which is ludicrous, seeing the police never even properly started an investigation); and some are complaining that Andrew Probyn from the ABC sounded unusually sympathetic to Porter at the end of his press conference.  

Probyn went to Scotch College (all boy's school);  Uhlmann to a Marist Brothers college in Canberra.   Porter himself to an Anglican boys school.

Gives me an uncomfortable feeling that journalist sympathy is only possible if you've also gone to an all boys' high school, with their dubious reputation for seeing all girls as potential sexual conquests.  (An attitude I noticed had developed in guys I knew who went to Catholic boy's education after a mixed sex primary school.)

Update:  Peter van Onselen -

Went to - The Scots College, Sydney.  All boys.

(Also, lots of people pointing out he has openly said he's a friend of Porter.)

On TV this morning, every talking head said that you can't just leave it at this, there has to be a form of independent enquiry.   

And when you think about it, with all the uncertainty as to how the dossier sent to the police was compiled (it is apparently not even certain it was all done by the complainant), open questions about when she started telling friends about it, etc, it is possible that Porter could come out of an enquiry looking better "cleared" than merely by his own denial.   

He is being politically self serving by claiming it is so unfair because he can't prove that something didn't happen. 

Professor black and white

James Allen, the Right wing law professor that who I have long thought a twit, writes about Christian Porter:

And if you agree with me about this [the criminal standard of proof being beyond reasonable doubt, and the accused having the right to cross examine their accuser]  – to repeat myself, many do not – then you will see immediately (as I said) that on the facts of these allegations no legal system with any commitment to fair procedures would ever consider Christian Porter as anything other than wholly innocent.  End of story.  That’s how it should be.  Let me be unequivocally clear about that. 

What he does not want to mention, although being a lawyer he would be completely aware of it, is the civil law standard of proof of "balance of probabilities".    Hence, you have situations where a person is acquitted of a crime, but can still be found civilly liable to pay compensation.   Hello, OJ Simpson.

Questions of appropriateness of positions held in a government should not be decided on simple "did he commit a crime or not according to criminal burden of proof" - especially in a case where no complete police investigation is possible due to the death of the complainant.  

Quite disingenuous, just as Porter's "but no one told me any of the details" claims today.

Porter denial

Bernard Keane makes the point which I agree is the weirdest thing about how Morrison and Porter have chosen to deal with the historical rape allegation:

What has emerged from Christian Porter’s media conference this afternoon — where he vehemently and repeatedly denied the allegations made against him in relation to a sexual assault in 1988 — is a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of multiple parties about some of the gravest claims that can be made against any individual, let alone one occupying the position of chief law officer of the Commonwealth.

First is Porter’s own lack of curiosity about allegations he claims he was aware were circulating about last November — that he had “offended against” (his words) a woman in the past. Porter did not seek to obtain details of the allegations or see the documents involved. And, when asked by the prime minister last Wednesday about the allegations, Porter merely denied them, and did not ask to see the documents involved.

And as part of his insistence that he is the victim of a trial by media (and especially the ABC), Porter says no one has put the allegations to him — a claim that may yet be fiercely contested by others.

It has no bearing on the veracity of the claims made against Porter which, to repeat, he rejects completely. But it is peculiar behaviour for the first law officer of the Commonwealth to be so completely uninterested in claims that would be politically destructive, even to the point of not being sufficiently moved to ask the prime minister to hand a copy to him when asked about them.

But it enabled Porter to insist this afternoon that he had no idea about the claims made against them and to profess outrage that he had been subjected to such a “whispering campaign”.

Then there is Scott Morrison’s own lack of curiosity. The prime minister says he was “fully briefed” on the claims made against Porter but did not bother to read the relevant documents. Nor did he show Porter the documents — an incurious prime minister and an incurious attorney-general.

I cannot see how this attitude can play out well - it makes it look like a case of men protecting men on the part of Morrison in particular:   "I don't even have to read the full details of this matter - if Christian denies it, that's good enough for me."   

I can see no credible way out of this other than to have some form of enquiry - unless Porter just resigns "for health reasons".   While it certainly not impossible that the complaint was an imagined event from a person who suffered mental health issues, you can't have the freaking Attorney General the subject of such an allegation from a person he did socialise with and take the attitude "well, she's died before a police investigation could be started, so (whew) no need to look further into it."    

 

A random post

It's a little surprising, isn't it, that scientists are still working on ways to quickly generate genuinely random numbers.   Here's the start of an article at Science:

Human-made physical random number generators (RNGs) can be traced back 5000 years or more. Early examples such as knucklebones, two-sided throwsticks, or dice have been found in the Middle East, India, and China. RNGs were used for fortune telling and games of chance, with the oldest known board games of similar age as those of the number generators. Today, RNGs are vital for services and state-of-the-art technologies such as cryptographically secured communication, blockchain technologies, and quantum key distribution. Moreover, RNGs are needed in machine learning and scientific applications such as Monte Carlo numerical methods. On page 948 of this issue, Kim et al. (1) demonstrate an ultrafast RNG based on a broad-area laser with a multispot beam that is analogous to generating random numbers by using many dice at once.

Random numbers are often generated by using a software algorithm running on a computer, called “pseudo”-random because the sequence eventually repeats. Moreover, relations among the numbers can exist that reveal that the numbers are not uniformly random. Hence, true RNGs (TRNGs) are of great interest, providing random numbers based on physical measurements that involve some noisy or stochastic process. All TRNGs have some nonidealities, such as generating zeroes more frequently than ones for a binary-output device, which must be mitigated by carefully engineering the device and postprocessing the data to improve the randomness quality.

Some applications require generating random numbers at very high rates, such as encrypting data in cloud-computing data centers, high-speed communication networks, or massive simulations. Photonic devices are a natural fit for these applications because of their potential for high-speed operation, compact size for chip-scale devices, and low power consumption.

Recently, Marangon et al. (3) developed a TRNG that is based on interfering two different lasers on a beam splitter and detecting the resulting powers that emanate from its two output ports. The randomness comes about from quantum fluctuations in a laser due to a process known as spontaneous emission of photons.

I wonder if fortune telling is improved by using the very best form of random number generator - one involving quantum effects, for example.