Reason for optimism

Due solely to my wife's influence, both of my kids are musically talented.  They both do it as a subject at their (State) high school, and my daughter also has long been in various levels of the Queensland Youth Orchestra, which practices weekly during school terms and has mini concerts at the Old Museum at the end of each term, as well as one big concert at the Performing Arts Centre at the end of the year.  My son has been less active in using his talent, but his school bands have been in various inter-school competitions, one year ending up in a final concert involving schools from all over Queensland.   (Much to my surprise, it would appear that tropical North Queensland has some great music teachers and the school orchestras up there are terrific.)

Some years ago, my daughter was also persuaded by her violin teacher to participate in the annual Creative Generation concerts that Queensland Education has put on since 2005.   It's a show put on in the Convention Centre auditorium which features many excellent student vocalists (mostly from High Schools, but some primary school kids too), an orchestra backing that plays for just about the whole two hours, massed choirs, hundreds of dancers, drumming, a Big Band section, and even drama students sometimes doing a bit.  The staging and lighting is done by professionals, and there are some (not many) adults lending a hand musically.   But the end result (and we have been to three now) is a very professional and enjoyable show that is open to the public for 4 performances.   (Tickets are pretty cheap, but they don't sell out  -  it seems to me it doesn't get the publicity it deserves.)

Of course, they don't allow photos or video during the performance, but this is what the pre-show stage looked like on Saturday night:

And here is a screenshot (taken from their Facebook page video, so it's not great quality) as to what it looks like when nearly everyone is on stage at the end:

This is not one of those cheesy inter-school performance competitions that used to be popular and were dominated by private schools that taught microphone technique from year 7 3. (Have they stopped? You don't see them on TV any more.)    They feature primarily "pop" pieces but with the orchestra and massed choirs, can be quite moving in parts -  both from the effect of the music, and also when you see Special School kids being incorporated into segments.  

And this year, my daughter got out of the orchestra and did one "solo" bit (by which I mean, she and two other violinists were standing on stage doing their shared solo parts on one song.)   For that, she had the fun of being professionally made up and having her hair styled by a team of make up artists.   Of course, the end result was startlingly "adult" on a 15 year old, but she got used to it.  

Even though it may be self serving publicity, I am inclined to believe those from Queensland Education who say that our State system instrumental and music programs are top notch.   (Of course, a lot of the talent would be having private lessons too, like mine, but still...)   I am curious as to what the comparisons are like with the other State's public education systems.

But the end result is this:   for any ageing person suffering from the old "young people aren't what they used to be" syndrome,  and even those who whine endlessly about our education system, their attitude is surely held in ignorance of these school and community activities. 

This is the best thing about having kids participating in these things:  it makes it pretty much impossible to stay pessimistic about the future of the world when you know about the effort and talent of large numbers of our youth as shown on Saturday night, and at QYO too.

Never was the saying "takes one to know one" more accurate

Have a look at this sophisticated bit of analysis of Australia's energy policy from Catallaxy, and be sure to glance at the comments too.  

They take their fire drills seriously in India

It's hard to believe that a bunch of Indian college students were made to jump off a second floor balcony into a safety net below as part of a fire drill.   (The story is about a student who was pushed, hit her head on the way down, and died.)  Have a look at the photo in the article, which will explain her nervousness.

What a nutty drill.  Don't they have fire exits in that country?

In the "funny 'cos it's true" category

From The Onion:

Herpes and brains

Ed Yong has an interesting look at the previously rejected, but now somewhat more plausible, idea that herpes infections in the brains may play a significant role in many cases of Alzheimer's dementia.

To love a jerk you have to be a jerk

Just checking how the angry, angry, entertainer is going.  Here he explains when he started to love Trump:

It's so transparent, it's embarrassing for them:   just as in the US, to love Trump you basically have to be an over 50 year old white guy (the older the "better") who has never come to grips with feminism, climate change or the change in sentiment to gay relationships:

and:

The latest Washington Post-Schar School poll, released Friday, highlights the differences in the way women and men see Trump. Overall, the president’s approval rating among men is 54 percent positive and 45 percent negative. Among women, it’s 32 percent positive and 65 percent negative.

He's the last Hoorah of those, particularly men, who have already lost the culture wars, and think that exposing their anger at losing is a way that it'll be won back.

Time travel discussed

It's fairly generic, from a BBC show, but it has bits which are of interest.

'We can build a real time machine'

I have been mulling over an idea for a time travel story of my own, so any such discussion of the topic is of interest.    

A light anthropology study on Trump cult members

I recommend this Twitter thread by David Roberts, about his look at some twitter accounts of Trump followers.   (Very much like what you find at Catallaxy, by the way.)

Simple things sometimes work

Quite an interesting article at NPR about a relatively straight forward anti-suicide strategy implemented in some emergency rooms in the US which has shown good results.

I think I posted an article once before where it was mentioned that delaying the ability of people to impulsively make a suicide attempt can work - hence a barrier on bridge that might not be impenetrable, but just make it more difficult to climb over, may prevent a lot of attempts.   This program just takes that approach, it seems:

The intervention studied by Stanley and her group starts in the ER or a clinic, before the suicidal patient is released. First, a health care professional talks with the patient and tries to understand that person's warning signs for a suicide attempt.

"If they've grappled with being suicidal, they know what their warning signs are," says Stanley. For example, she says, someone might say, "'I find that I'm staying in my room, not answering the phone, not answering texts, not answering emails.' That could be a warning sign." Others might have repeated thoughts that they're not worthy.

The next step is for the patient — with help from the clinician — to come up with a set of coping strategies to help get through moments of intense suicidal ideation.

For most people, this intense state lasts only from between a few minutes to a couple of hours, she says.

The coping strategy could be something as simple as playing video games, watching TV or talking to a loved one.

If people contemplating suicide can distract themselves with something they enjoy doing, they can bypass that narrow window during which suicidal thoughts can overpower them, notes Stanley. "For suicidal people, the passage of time is their friend," she says. 
 

That insect movie

A quick review of Ant-man and the Wasp:

*  Perhaps not quite as wittily enjoyable as the first Ant-man, but fun enough, and certainly amusingly inventive in its action use of varying sized cars, buildings and people.   I think it's likely to be one of the most appealing Marvel movies to the under 12 demographic.  

* Quite a funny cameo by Stan Lee.

* You might think it ridiculous that I say this, given the genre, but my fantasy physics toleration boundary was being pushed to its limits at quite a few points.   Even for Marvel, it seems particularly careless about providing  explanations of how some things happen (how the lab building has power no matter where it's enlarged, for example.)  But then again, some science-y explanations attempted in parts were very cringe worthy, especially the "healing quantum power" that features at the end in the post credit sequence that, nonetheless, achieves one of those satisfying tie ins with the greater Marvel universe storyline.

*  I do admire Disney/Marvel for making entertainment that is readily embraced by adults and children of all ages.   The ability of these films to appeal to the 9 year old, the cynical teenager, and the 50 something year old who never even cared for superheroes in their comic book incarnation, is quite the achievement.

The return of syphilis

The other night, I tried the first episode of The Frankenstein Chronicles on Netflix (it was OK, but after the lush, expensive looks of Babylon Berlin, the production values looked a little on the cheap side.  I'm also not that big a fan of Sean Bean).   I was interested to see that the main character is revealed to be suffering from syphilis.   (I would guess that, going forward in the series, this might be significant for introducing ambiguity as to whether what he is investigating is real or not.)  The show is set in  1829, from memory.

My son asked if taking mercury, as the guy does in the show, really did cure it.  Good question, I said.  I didn't think so - it might have helped a little, but there was always the risk that the mercury would kill the patient before the disease.   I had to double check, but I think my summary was right.   See this article from 1990, but there are several around discussing the many centuries of attempting to use mercury successfully.

Anyway, that's by way of background to some startling bad news from my home State:

In the last six years, six babies have died in the state from syphilis — a sexually transmitted disease that was nearly eradicated in the early 2000s.

In 2008, two cases were diagnosed in Queensland, and in the decade since, more than 1,100 other cases have been recorded in the north of the state, with about 200 new presentations each year.

The numbers continue to grow, despite penicillin being a cheap and effective cure.

Cairns sexual health clinician Dr Darren Russell works in the epicentre of the outbreak and said it was "out of control". 

It is, unfortunately, centred on the aboriginal communities in the north:

The outbreak started in the Indigenous community of Doomadgee, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, in 2011 with a handful of cases.

At the time, sexual health services across Queensland were cut by the Campbell Newman-led Queensland government, and health workers claimed the opportunity to stop the escalation was missed.

The number of cases quickly spiralled out of control because of the transient nature of people in Indigenous communities, and the outbreak spread across Queensland, into the Northern Territory, and into South and Western Australia.

I thought that it was at least one of the more obvious diseases to have realised you have caught, but according to this health worker:

Aboriginal Health worker Neville Reys from Wuchopperen Health, said testing — and therefore treatment — was hindered because of shame and stigma.

"Syphilis can draw out up to six months before you really realise that you have got it, and in that timeline there's lots of sexual activity, so it can be spread around really easily."

Well, now that I double check the timing, I see that the first, painless chancre can take  10 days to 3 weeks to appear, and particularly in women, may be internal and not noticed.  The secondary rash can take 2 to 10 weeks after the chancre.  So, yeah, that is getting close to 6 months if the primary indication is missed.   I would assume, however, that most men who have it for more than a few months have ignored the sore on their penis.  

Still, its appalling that the disease has been spreading so widely without successful public health intervention.

Clown culture wars continue

Everything has to be seen through the prism of culture wars, if you're an idiot with his own Sky News slot to fill:

The same high five-ing of men for being all round great was on the Catallaxy open thread too.

An appropriate feminist response might be along the lines of shrugging shoulders and saying, "well, now that you mention it, when was the last time you had a woman lead a bunch of teens into a cave  that might not have been the safest place to go in the circumstances and needing rescuing?"  

But note, no feminist went there first (as far as I know.)

Universal Basic Income discussed

A pretty good article (by way of a book review) of the dubious idea of a Universal Basic Income is at Slate.   Here are a few paragraphs:

 UBI is having a moment right now. The idea has been around for centuries, but there’s something about UBI that’s resonating today, with dozens of books written on the subject from all manner of different perspectives. The most common takes come from the left (as Lowrey does), from the right (as a means of dismantling the welfare state), and from the techno-dystopians, who worry about a future where the robots have taken over and no one has a job. The appeal of a UBI to all three groups is easy to see: It appears to be a very simple solution to any number of incredibly complex problems. Think of it as the “put it on the blockchain” of political economy....

Lowrey’s UBI is “an ethos,” she writes, as much as it is an actual proposal. It’s a way of espousing a certain set of beliefs; it’s “a lesson and an ideal”; it’s a push “to keep imagining, so that when the future arrives, we are ready.”

Perhaps that’s because UBI is a pretty inefficient way of giving poor people money. Think about it this way: Just 40 percent of a UBI’s expenditure would go to the bottom 40 percent of the population, and a mere 10 percent would go to the 10 percent who need it most. What would happen to the rest of the money? 

Study after study has shown that when you give money to the homeless and the very poor, they don’t spend it on frivolities like booze and tobacco: In fact, rates of drinking and smoking invariably go down rather than up. On the other hand, if you gave me an extra $1,500 per month, no strings attached, I’m sure a significant chunk of that would end up in my wine fridge. That might be popular with my local wine merchants, but as a means of redistributing society’s wealth in the interests of fairness and equality, it does leave something to be desired.....

Lowrey understands this, and is not particularly wedded to a truly universal basic income. In India, she toys with the idea of excluding anybody fortunate enough to own an air conditioner. In the U.S., she says, the UBI could be applied only to the bottom 60 percent of the population. She also brings up the idea of instead giving “baby bonds” of $50,000 to everybody born into the lowest wealth quartile, or implementing some kind of jobs guarantee. At one point, she writes that an “even better idea would be to implement a UBI as a negative income tax” that takes your annual income and, if it’s below a certain minimum level, raises it to that level. 

There are always trade-offs. A negative income tax would not benefit anybody much above the poverty line, and in that sense, it would lack a key feature of the UBI, which is that it’s needs-blind and benefits everybody. If only the poor benefitted from a negative income tax, that would create resentment among the middle classes: The slogan coined by British sociologist Richard Titmuss is that “a policy for the poor is a poor policy.”

Fishy

On the weekend, I was looking for a white, firmer fleshed fish to cook.  Fresh Australian caught fish has become ridiculously expensive.  Even at Coles, the most suitable looking stuff (ignoring barramundi, an overrated fish with flesh that is usually too mushy) was $32 a kilogram.

I went into Aldi and found frozen ling (which I know from past experience is a reliably firmer fish) for $16 - I think for a kilogram pack.  It was from Iceland, of all places, and had 5 thick fillets packaged in individual plastic pockets, so you can cook as many as you want and save the rest.   It worked fine in my baked Mediterranean fish recipe. 

Seems to me there is something a bit out of whack with the way the world operates when it is much cheaper to buy highly processed, conveniently packaged (yes, I feel a bit guilty about the plastic packaging) ocean fish from Iceland rather than any fish from Australia, or even New Zealand.  

Odd news

I'm feeling like there's little blogworthy news today:  sure, Brexit is blowing up (see David Frum's pretty good article);  the death toll in Japan is shockingly high (and the coastal town of Mihara, which my family went through on the way to Okunoshima, the Rabbit Island, a couple of years ago has featured in Japanese media as badly hit);  everyone loves a successful underground rescue;  and Sinclair Davidson is complaining about the ABC continually reminding everyone about his and Berg's IPA connections, when it turns out that they wrote their anti ABC book on the RMIT payroll.   (Why does RMIT pay its economics academics to write books about the ABC?  Seems a weird institute.)  

But, here's the odd news that I will post about: 

Samsung has just opened the world's biggest smartphone factory in - India?    Surprising.

And:   I watched a doco on SBS last night by Michael Mosley in which he looked at e-cigarettes and came to conclusions which I thought were strangely unjustified by the evidence he presented during the show.   Britain has been remarkably soft on e-cigarettes, it seems to me, with much support for them (including from Mosley now) as an aid to stop smoking.   Yet, he ran a mini trial of people who were trying to stop, and I think the group that used patches or other nicotine replacement stopped just as successfully as those who used e-cigarettes.   So why complicate health issues by supporting a product with completely unresearched long term effects of inhaling flavourings and carrier chemicals if nicotine via a simple patch or gum can work just as well?  

And behold:  this morning, I see another report that indicates smoking nicotine laced e-cigarettes may be pretty much as bad for vascular effects as smoking a real cigarette.

Mosley also ignored evidence about teenage use in other countries, such as the US.   It was not one of his best efforts.   

You can't please everyone

So, some guy writing in the Washington Post complains that he thinks that the latest series of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee shows that it has "run out of steam".  

As it happened, I watched the first, longer than usual, episode with Zach Galifianakis last week, and thought it was particularly funny.  

The whole concept of the show ensures that individual episodes will be pretty hit or miss - much depends on the mood of the interviewee on the day, surely.   But Jerry himself always comes across as a very non judgemental, empathetic ear interested in all sorts of comedy.    He doesn't really deal in emotion at all - and can sometimes feel a bit coldly practical - but I like the way he keeps things in perspective (such as in the Galifianakis episode, he shrugs off being recognized in the public as no big deal).  

Not so incredible

Went and watched Incredibles 2 yesterday.

I'm not sure if I can review it fairly - even though it was a midday screening, I felt unusually tired during much of it.   The cinema was pretty empty, too, so there was no reliable sense as to how well it was or wasn't playing with a bigger audience.  The people who were there were pretty quiet during the whole thing

But I have to say, based on the trailers, which I thought were uninspiring, I went in with pretty low expectations and they weren't exceeded.

I think it's far too talky (and Brad Bird wrote the script, so he only has himself to blame there) and while many people seem to find the action is great, it didn't have the same innovative feeling about it as did the first movie.   It felt a bit too overwhelming - sometimes throwing in too much movement and busy-ness on the screen reduces its effectiveness and becomes a tad tedious*, and I think that's why I didn't really get a thrill from the action this time around.   (Interestingly, my son, who said he liked the movie, came out of it complaining about having a headache, which is pretty unusual for him.  He wondered if the flashing light sequences might have caused it, and I'm not sure if they could, but I think it was a mistake including those sequences in the movie because they aren't much fun to watch, headache or not.)

There are funny sequences, but they're too far apart.  And to be honest, I didn't even really care for the additional detail in the character animation.  This (to my mind) was a bit distracting rather than engaging.

I'm making it sound as if I really disliked it, which isn't quite accurate.  It was just more of a feeling that I was unmoved and it was wasted effort by a talented director.   I can honestly say I liked the ideas and execution of his Tomorrowland much more than this one - despite the fact that it got much worse reviews, overall.   

* see my comments on the visually awful Lego Batman movie

Climate change deaths in Japan, noted

Nearly a year ago, I posted about the regularity of record summer rainfalls in Japan causing death and destruction. 

This year's record rainfall story seems particularly bad:

The Japan Meteorological Agency reported on Saturday that rainfall in many of the affected areas had reached record levels — with some areas reporting rain two or three times as high as the monthly average for all of July over just five days.

“This is a record high rainfall which we never experienced,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a Saturday morning ministers’ meeting, urging his cabinet to take “every measure to prevent the disaster from worsening by taking advance actions.”

It's affecting some famous cities, too (Hiroshima and Kyoto):

By Saturday evening, at least 51 people were dead and 48 were missing, according to the public broadcaster NHK. More than one million people in 18 districts had been ordered to evacuate their homes and 3.5 million had been urged to leave.

The infrastructure damage in that country is hardly likely to be able to explained away as being caused by new development - it's not as if it's a booming population expanding out into the countryside.  Quite the opposite.

I would also like to know how the economists and their rubbery calculations of "up to temperature increase X, benefits of warming outweigh damage" manage to figure in the loss of life and infrastructure from floods.  

Climate change is real and causing deaths now.

Victorian medicine remembered

From the London Review of Books, a review of this:  The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine.

Go read the whole thing, but here are some highlights: 

Even the worst corner of the worst slum couldn’t compete with hospital wards and dissection rooms for filth. Berlioz trained as a doctor and recalled a visit to the ‘terrible charnel-house’ of a Paris dissecting room. ‘The fragments of limbs, the grinning heads and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off’ made him feel ‘terrible revulsion’. Sparrows squabbled over morsels of lung; a rat gnawed at a vertebra. Berlioz jumped out of the window and ran home to take sanctuary in music. Surgeons took pride in aprons so dirty they could have stood up on their own; Robert Liston, who pioneered the use of anaesthesia, stored his instruments up his sleeve between surgeries to keep them warm. The mortality rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly succumbed to pyaemia, a kind of blood poisoning caused by the spread of pus-forming organisms which cause abscesses. The pus drained from his body could be measured by the pint.

 The Great Stink played a role in advancing the state of medical science:

... one of the strongest challenges to the anti-contagionist theory came not from a paper in the Lancet, but from the Great Stink of 1858. The Thames, by this stage little more than a sewer conveying effluent to the North Sea, began to emit a stench which, according to Faraday, could be observed ‘rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface’. Londoners fled; there was a proposal that the Houses of Parliament be evacuated. And yet there were no epidemics that year, contrary to the expectations of proponents of the miasma theory.

 And then Lister got the idea of cleaning wounds with carbolic acid by a bit of luck:

Lister’s greatest advance was prompted by a newspaper report. In Carlisle, sewage engineers gagging at the smell of liquid waste spread over nearby fields had addressed the problem by covering it with carbolic acid, a substance used with indiscriminate enthusiasm for tasks including preserving ships’ timbers and preventing body odour. But a curious side-effect was observed: an outbreak of cattle plague in the carbolic-soaked fields was halted, the plague-causing parasites having been eradicated. Lister, who had abandoned his trials with potassium permanganate, quickly obtained a sample of carbolic acid. Shortly afterwards, treating a child whose leg had been shattered by a cart, he faced a choice: whether to amputate to forestall the inevitable gangrene, or to test his theory that carbolic acid could prevent infection. With the arrogance necessary to the practice of medicine, Lister decided to put carbolic acid to the test. Some weeks later the boy walked out of the hospital.

He then went on to treat Queen Victoria:

In a broadside reminiscent of those levelled at Darwin, one opponent castigated Lister for portraying nature as ‘some murderous hag whose fiendish machinations must be counteracted’. Nonetheless, when Queen Victoria could no longer bear the pain caused by an abscess under her arm, it was Lister who was summoned to Balmoral, accompanied by a copper pumping mechanism known as a ‘donkey engine’, which sprayed a fine mist of carbolic acid (including, to the horror of onlookers, into the queen’s face). The abscess and the surgical instruments were soaked in antiseptic; the pus was drained; the wound healed well; and Lister – with what one imagines to have been a rare flash of humour – declared himself ‘the only man who has ever stuck a knife into the queen’.

Moral philosophy of the Aztecs (just ignore the human sacrifice bits)

I'm not entirely sure whether there is much to be gained from the study of a human sacrificing society's moral philosophy, but this intermittently interesting article at Aeon indicates that Aztec moral reasoning wasn't all that far from your ancient Greek ideas.   Take this:

At its core, Aztec virtue ethics has three main elements. One is a conception of the good life as the ‘rooted’ or worthwhile life. Second is the idea of right action as the mean or middle way. Third and final is the belief that virtue is a quality that’s fostered socially.

 The difference with Greek virtue ethics is said to be this: 

While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.

This distinction bears on an important question: just how bad are good people allowed to be? Must good people be moral saints, or can ordinary folk be good if we have the right kind of support? This matters for fallible creatures, like me, who try to be good but often run into problems. Yet it also matters for questions of inclusivity. If being good requires exceptional traits, such as practical intelligence, then many people would be excluded – such as those with cognitive disabilities. That does not seem right. One of the advantages of the Aztec view, then, is that it avoids this outcome by casting virtue as a cooperative, rather than an individual, endeavour.

The article goes on about moderation as being important, and the "aptness" of behaviour, which sounds fairly practical and sensible, except when taken too far (my bold):

Our actions are virtuous, then, when they are aptly expressed. This aptness of expression turns on the circumstances (eg, how formally we should dress), our social position (eg, male or female, commoner or noble), our social role (eg, warrior or physician), and whether we are performing a rite of a specific sort. A memorable example of this last kind concerns drunkenness. Public drunkenness was severely punished in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire; for nobles, the penalty was death. But the elderly at a wedding were not only permitted, but expected to become drunk.

Anyhow, it's interesting how he doesn't address the elephant (being a still beating, ripped out human heart in this case) in the room.

Maturity level in the negative

Here's a reaction at Catallaxy to the news that a judge with Army Reserve experience has been investigating SAS members about some long standing war crime allegations:

Just when you think you might have seen peak school boy immaturity from that convalescent home for the Perpetually Angry Rightwing Culture Warrior (who really wish they could just get out and shoot a few people, like the SAS get to do), you're proven wrong.

Stand proud again, Sinclair Davidson, for the service you provide in ensuring that cohenite and his angry, like-minded kin need never feel alone.  

Gina and and her minions

Damn.  Isn't it annoying when you get to a paywalled article once via someone's Tweet, but find you can't a second time, even on a different device?

Anyhoo, was fascinated to read a Courier Mail story this morning about this:

Daughter's bid to involve Barnaby Joyce in bitter court battle an attempt to embarrass former deputy PM, Gina Rinehart says

Bianca Rinehart seems to want clearly disclosed in her ongoing court fight with her Mum the amount of donations Gina has made to Barnaby Joyce and the IPA.

The report  mentioned Gina's donations to the IPA and some other body (was it their fake environmental lobby group?  not sure)  of around $5 million, which is not small change for a lobby group that shows revenue in 2016/2017 of $6.10 million, and cash freaking reserves of $3.83 million.

(Doesn't stop them panhandling regularly for yet more donations.   Defending the right of billionaires to make yet more money by mining the coal that's destined to flood scores of cities both rich and poor doesn't come cheap, obviously.)  

She is, of course, an Honorary Life Member - more like puppet master, by the sounds.

The only puzzle about her involvement at the IPA is the Alan Moran scandal.   He got sacked from the IPA in 2014 for some anti Muslim tweet, but continues to write his completely untrustworthy analyses of energy policy (wherein renewable is bad, always bad) at Catallaxy (and the AFR, I think.)

Anyway, Alan's shtick is surely right up Gina's alley (perhaps I should re-phrase that), so I wonder if she was upset at his IPA sacking?   Did she try to stop it?  Or did he cross her in some other fashion?   Because I've always found his departure a bit odd - I mean, really, how much Muslim support do you  think the IPA would have?   


 

Yet more Nietzsche summarised

Over at the TLS, yet another summary of what Nietzsche was on about.

I like to read these to reinforce my continual surprise as to why people respond to his pessimism and ambiguities which are obviously dangerous for their ready application by those who want to refute a morality based on a common sense view of decency.  [And, quite frankly, his complaint that morality - whether based on Christianity or utilitarianism, according to this article - is "inhospitable to the realization of human excellence" and/or "makes man ridiculous and contemptible" is just nonsense of the kind that barely separates him from Ayn Rand, and I have trouble understanding why people continue bothering to study him.]

Anyhow, I was interested in this section, talking about the philosophical background he was coming from, and in particular, a writer who was obviously very influential in Germany in the mid 1850's, but of whom I had never heard:

Nietzsche’s classical training had educated him about ancient philosophy; the Presocratic philosophers (with their simple naturalistic world view) were his favourites, while his disagreements with Socrates and Plato persisted throughout his corpus. But it was only by accident that he discovered contemporary German philosophy in 1865 and 1866 through Arthur Schopenhauer and, a year later, the neo-Kantian Friedrich Lange. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (which was first published in 1818, but only came to prominence decades later, contributing to the eclipse of G. W. F. Hegel in German philosophy) set Nietzsche’s central existentialist issue: how can life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, possibly be justified? Schopenhauer offered a “nihilistic” verdict:  we would be better off dead. Nietzsche wanted to resist that conclusion, to “affirm” life, as he would often put it, to the point that we would happily will its “eternal recurrence” (in one of his famous formulations) including all its suffering.

Lange, by contrast, was both a neo-Kantian – part of the “back to Kant” revival in German philosophy after Hegel’s eclipse – and a friend of the “materialist” turn in German intellectual life, the other major reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s.  Materialism exploded on the German intellectual scene of the 1850s in such volumes as Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, a publishing sensation which went through multiple editions and became a bestseller with its message that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”. (Think of Büchner as the Richard Dawkins of the nineteenth century: a popularizer of some genuine discoveries, while also an unnuanced ideologue.)  Nietzsche, who first learned of these “German Materialists” from Lange, wrote in a letter of 1866, “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange – I don’t need anything else”.

More on working in America

Last month I wrote about a chat I had with an Australian who had some first hand knowledge of American work conditions, and how there's good reason for full employment to not result in everyone feeling good about their situation.  (Mind you, they also seems to have lowered their expectations as to what "doing OK" means, too.)   Here's some more grist for that argument:

*  an article at The Guardian noting the high injury rate in American pig meat processing plants:

Records compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reveal that, on average, there are at least 17 “severe” incidents a month in US meat plants. These injuries are classified as those involving “hospitalisations, amputations or loss of an eye”.

Amputations happen on average twice a week, according to the data. There were 270 incidents in a 31-month period spanning 2015 to 2017, according to the OSHA figures. Most of the incidents involved the amputation of fingers or fingertips, but there were recordings of lost hands, arms or toes. During the period there were a total of 550 serious injuries which cover 22 of the 50 states so the true total for the USA would be substantially higher.

Obviously, with their love of pork, there must be many who work in this industry, but that still sounds like a high rate of serious accidents.   It would be good to see some international comparisons.  (Except from China - I would assume that their records, if they were ever available, would be appalling.)

*  in the Washington Post,  an article with the self explanatory title:

Is it great to be a worker in the U.S.? Not compared with the rest of the developed world. 

is worth a read.  It's about a lengthy OECD report that does some comparisons.   This is a key finding:

In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

It's also interesting to read about how temporary American jobs can be:

Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of countries in the study.

If people are moving to better jobs, labor-market churn can be a healthy sign. But decade-old OECD research found an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.

Now, sure, getting rid of an employee in Australia can be ridiculously difficult, but once again, America sets itself out as ridiculously uninterested in fairness for the worker:

The United States and Mexico are the only countries in the entire study that don't require any advance notice for individual firings. The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.

So, yeah:  full employment in the US can, understandably, make people not feel as happy as it does in other countries.

No report?

Lots of women on Twitter are calling this Guardian journalist's piece about being attacked by men (strangers on the street) not once, but twice, in her young lifetime a "powerful piece".

I'm nervous to express dissent because, basically, I sympathise with its main point about women who have been sexually attacked being unfairly asked why they put themselves in harm's way by being on the street, alone. 

But... I just can't get my head around how a young woman, not long out of high school, could be raped by a stranger outside and not report it to the police due to being "ashamed" of having put themselves in danger within 10 minutes of their flat.    She does say "violated" and the post rape description sounds like it was digital, but I could be wrong.   Perhaps that kinda, sorta, explains how she could rationalise not reporting it?

OK, no not really.    Let's face it, it's still absolutely nuts to just go on knowing that there's some man in the neighbourhood willing to attack and push to the ground random women on the street/in the local park at night and not report it to the police.

So, yeah, of course I'm sorry for her having been attacked.   But her reaction to the first one, I just can't see that as doing anything other than hurting the "power" of her piece. 

Testosterone is an up-seller's best friend

Isn't it odd that anyone even thought of doing this study?   Testosterone (allegedly) makes men do this:

....testosterone, the male sex hormone, increases men's preference for status goods compared to goods of similar perceived quality but seen as lower in status.

The paper, "Single-Dose Testosterone Administration Increases Men's Preference for Status Goods," is published in Nature Communications. The research reveals that consumption of status goods (e.g., luxury products or experiences) is partly driven by biological motives. The results are the first to demonstrate that testosterone causally influences rank-related consumer preferences and that the effect is driven by consumers' aspiration to gain status rather than power or a general inclination for high quality goods....

To gain more insights on the role of testosterone on social rank and status associated behavior, a study was conducted involving 243 men of similar age and socio-economic background. Randomly, half of them received a single dose of testosterone that mimicked a testosterone spike that could occur in an everyday situation causing an increased testosterone level; the other half received a placebo treatment. All subjects then participated in two tasks.

In the first one, they were asked to choose between pairs of brands. The pairs were composed of brands that were all pretested to have polarised social rank associations but did not differ in perceived quality. That is, one brand was seen to lift its owner much higher in the social hierarchy (e.g., Calvin Klein) than the other (e.g., Levi's). For each pair, participants were asked "which brand do you prefer and to what extent?", on 10-point scale anchored with each brand. The findings reveal that men who received the testosterone doses showed a higher preference for the status (positional) goods associated with higher social rank (such as a luxury brand). This suggests a causal link between testosterone and rank-related consumer preferences.

The second task meant to investigate the effect of testosterone on the two distinct routes to high social rank—status and power. While status refers to the respect in the eyes of others, power comes from one's control of a valued resources. The research team used six different product categories from coffee machines to luxury cars and created three different framings for each product category, with a similar wording but emphasising the target product in terms of its status benefits, power benefits or high quality.

For example, the mock ads variously described a Mont Blanc pen as "the internationally recognised symbol among the influential" (status), "mightier than the sword" (power) "an instrument of persistence and durability" (quality), says David Dubois.

The researchers then asked participants how much they liked the product description and the product itself. Here testosterone did not increase liking when the product was perceived as a quality product or a power enhancing one but only when it was described as conveying status. These results establish a causal link between testosterone and increase of preference for status-enhancing goods.

I say again - that's really weird.  And sort of funny.  

Unbearable indeed

I finally got around to looking up the details behind the recent headline about some town in Oman recording a record high minimum temperature.   It really is pretty amazing:

The small fishing village of Quriyat located in Oman's northeast coast has just set a new world temperature record. Last week the temperature remained above 108.7 ^oF (42.6 ^oC) for 51 straight hours, making it the highest low temperature observed on Earth's surface.

Despite being in a desert environment, Quriyat's is also a very humid place as the water temperatures off the sea of Oman are usually very warm this time of year, with values reaching 93 ^oF (34 ^oC). So imagine a night in Quriyat with such high temperatures and such a humid environment. Unbearable!

So, a 42 degree night in a town surrounded by water of 34 degrees!  It's a wonder the fish caught aren't already poached.   

Update:   there's a lot of water which (at the surface) is between 30 - 35 degrees.   Here's the global temps for 4 July:

I don't know who runs that site - it seems to have no information about that at all.  Odd. 

Speaking of mobile phones...

Wow.   I wonder how many relationships might end as a result of this:

Accidentally texting a photo to the wrong person can be mortifying. But when your phone spontaneously texts your photos to random contacts without your knowledge, that’s downright freaky, especially if you have private or sensitive pictures in your camera roll. 

According to Samsung users posting on Reddit and official Samsung forums, this is exactly what is happening to them. In one instance, a Reddit user said that his Galaxy S9+ sent his entire photo gallery to his girlfriend in the middle of the night. Another user said that both his and his wife’s phones spontaneously sent photos to each other. 

It appears that the photos are being sent through the default Samsung Messages app, and some users have reported that there is no trace in their Messages app that the files have been sent at all—instead, people are finding out that their phones have sent the photos after the recipient replies to their unintentional message. 

Initial reports indicate that the bug has affected Galaxy S9/S9+ and Note 8 phones, but it is still unclear how many users or models may be impacted.  A Samsung spokesperson told the Verge that the company is “aware of the reports” and that it is “looking into” the problem.

A series in desperate need of a science adviser

My son and I (more at my insistence and facing his reluctance) have been ploughing through Netflix's Lost in Space.   Just one more episode to go.

I still like its looks, and the actors are fine, all with the possible exception of the regularly grimacing face of Parker Posey as Dr Smith.  (I'm still not convinced by her acting, or the role as written - it has taken far, far too long to get to the bottom of what's going on with her, and I find it hard to credit how Maureen could feel a friendship with her in the early stages.)    The show has moved too slowly, generally speaking.

But the main, screaming out problem with it is the obvious lack of any attempt at all to make key parts of it even vaguely scientifically plausible.   I mean, the Jupiter spaceships run on methane, which seems to be in liquid form but doesn't seem to be pressurised or cold in one episode?  And which they can cook up from alien dried poop in a waste converter in sufficient quantity within a few hours to get off the planet???

Not to mention the misuse of Hawking Radiation as a dangerous thing in and of itself.

I know, in my first post on the show (in comments following) I defended the loose use of science as not being important - but as the series has gone on, and sciencey/technological aspects have become more important to the plot, yes it has started to bug me more and more.   It's like the writers have a little knowledge of science (they know that black holes make Hawking radiation, for example), but then use the concept in completely unscientific way.   Same with the methane - it's a potential fuel for a rocket engine, but there's no talk of LOX as a oxidiser (as all spacefaring rocketships need), and you have alien creatures that eat and swim in it, with no obvious place on their planet where they would have developed their love of it.    And yes, the writers obviously know that you can get methane from a sewerage system, but the idea that concentrated alien poo will make thousands of gallons of the liquidified gas in a "waste converter" within a few hours - that's ridiculous. 

They just keep doing this - taking a tiny bit of real science, then blowing it up in an completely unrealistic way.

I see that the show has been renewed for a second season.   Please, I beg of you writers:  start using science consultants, and give them power to demand changes to make it at least vaguely more accurate.

Update:   Actually, I'm wondering if what happens is something like this:

Writers to science consultant:   well, we want the planet or its sun to be in danger and they have to leave quickly.  What's a good scenario for that?

Science consultant:   maybe a black hole close to the sun - so close that the daylight brightness means they don't notice it with the naked eye

Writer:  Cool.   How might they detect it?

Science consultant:   The right instruments could see the sun's gas swirling into the black hole - and maybe some subtle orbit changes?

Writer:   don't black holes make Hawking radiation?

Science consultant:  yes, but, I reckon that's not so -

Writer:  OK, thanks.

Script:   Maureen hears warning "Danger - Hawking radiation"

Science consultant watching show:   tears hair.

  

Hello Moto

I see there's a new Motorola phone out - Moto G6 - and it has a great review at CNET.

Readers who care, who really really care, about keeping track of my life, will remember that I bought a Moto G5 Plus last year, and I consider it extraordinarily good.   (It counts as a "budget" phone, and as such I don't expect its camera to be as good as a high end Samsung or IPhone that may cost 3 times as much;  but as a phone and internet device it is great.   My wife also has one, and the only problem it has ever had - a sudden apparent battery drain problem - turned out to be the fault of the Hotmail app, and disappeared when that was deleted and she went back to using Gmail.   I use the Yahoo app for mail, and I never have had a problem.)  

Anyhow, here's the favourable words for the new phone:

How do you follow up last year's wonderful budget-friendly Moto G5 Plus? Well, you could start with the outside. Add a second rear camera for portrait mode photos. Trade that Micro-USB port for a USB-C. Get rid of the 16:9 screen ratio and go tall with a trendy 18:9 display that shows more vertically. Say bye to the metallic back side and hello to a glass back with curved edges, specifically Gorilla Glass 3.

The overall result would be a phone that looks decidedly 2018, but with pretty much everything we loved about last year's Moto G5 Plus. And that's exactly what the Moto G6 is.
Last year's Moto G5 Plus hit a sweet spot between features, design, performance and price. The Moto G6 hits most of those, but just misses with a shorter battery life than last year's Motos.

Honestly, Motorola has cornered the market for value for money in mobile phones, I reckon.

But - it is weird how the same model in different countries will have different features.  (You have to be particularly careful with NFC it seems.  I actually have NFC on my Moto G5 Plus, but I have been a bit too lazy to start using it for credit card payments.  Must get around to that one day soon...)

A tourism opening

Probably part of China's revenge on Trump's stupid trade war?:

• China has warned citizens travelling to the US of “frequent” shootings, expensive medical care, and the risks associated with running into border patrol agents.
• The Chinese Embassy in Washington issued a notice warning travellers that “shootings, robberies, and theft are frequent,” and urged citizens to remain calm and hold onto evidence if they feel they are being discriminated against by border agents.
• Last year the US saw a drop in foreign tourism, which at the time was dubbed the “Trump Slump.” 

Well, surely there's an opening for the Australian tourism push in China then:  a ad featuring our low "homicide by gun" rate, perhaps, and the inside of some our nicer public hospitals. 

Pity that the (mainland) Chinese tourist does not have the best reputation for manners, though.   (They are not that popular in Japan in particular, I believe, where the issue of manners really rubs the Politest Nation on Earth the wrong way.)

And speaking of manners, I recently went to a Japanese jazz/bosso nova singer's concert that featured a Chinese heavy audience.   (At the concert hall in QPAC - so a formal, seated venue.)    The young Chinese guy next to us kept pulling out his phone and doing something on it.  (He wasn't taking photos or video, which was banned, but the continual fumbling for his phone and the dull glow of his screen was really distracting.    At interval, I asked the attendants if we could possibly move, and they indicated better seats we could go to.   The show starts up again, and I discover that the (caucasian) woman and her boyfriend/partner (they seemed to be late 20's, early 30's)  next to me were talking to each other more or less continuously during the songs!    I let it go for one or two songs, hoping they would shut up, then when they started up again I leaned over and said tersely "excuse me, you're not in your living room".   They both apologised, with her saying (in a perfectly normal voice) "I'm sorry, it's because I'm deaf."   ??   So, they stay relatively quiet during the next song, then the guy leans over and starts interrogating me as to how I came to be sitting in the seats.   Turns out  it was a corporate row, or something, and he had decided after initially apologising that he didn't like me telling him to shut up because (I guess) he considered it was his company's seat and how dare an interloper point out his rudeness.   They then resumed talking during songs.

So, there you go.  The mainland Chinese do not have the market cornered for public inconsideration.

So, RMIT libertarian types have been busy promoting Xi Jinping's favourite technology....

Well, isn't this ironic (in the wrong sense of the word - which is well overdue for a populist change of meaning.)

Berg, Davidson and Potts, the trio of libertarian/IPA economists have been busy writing boring articles to give them something to talk about at the international blockchain conferences they've been attending, and all the time it would appear that Xi Jinping has decided that yeah, blockchain is a great idea for government control.  From Axios:

China had a short, whirlwind relationship with Bitcoin before unceremoniously dumping it last September. Now, President Xi Jinping calls the underlying blockchain technology a "breakthrough."

What's going on: Xi is differentiating between cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In his view, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could fuel financial risk and even jeopardize Communist Party authority. But in blockchain, he sees something he cherishes — even greater government control.

How it works:

• Blockchain technology uses a network of computers to create a record of any string of events, from financial transactions to the origin of an oyster. Every time the thing being tracked changes hands, it's publicly recorded, so its legitimacy can be verified while eliminating human intermediaries.
• Cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin being the most prominent — are digital monies that live on the blockchain.
• Those distrustful of governments are drawn to blockchain for its anonymity. But if only a few can enter transactions, blockchain could increase government power.

I've read stuff before about warnings that cryptocurrencies and blockchain may end up being quite attractive to authoritarian regimes:  see this article in The Atlantic, which I may have posted about before:

In certain circles, the technology has been hailed for its potential to usher in a new era of services that are less reliant on intermediaries like businesses and nation-states. But its boosters often overlook that the opposite is equally possible: Blockchain could further consolidate the centralized power of corporations and governments instead.

Even without Xi taking away anonymity as a feature of blockchain, some were warning that Bitcoin wasn't exactly the anonymity dream of libertarians after all.  

Or am I being unfair - are Berg and all writing stuff about how to defeat authoritarian applications of blockchain?    I don't really see how it is possible anyway - can't governments just legislate their control of entries onto key blockchain uses?   If so, what is the whole point of Berg, Potts and Davidson's excitement?

Defamation please

You all know I can't stand David Leyonhjelm - when it comes to women, he's a chronically immature throwback to the 1970's (see this evidence, as I think that was the decade I heard this "joke") and a one note politician who certainly never got into Parliament on the strength of his personality.  

Amongst his other faults, it would seem that he doesn't take the advice of lawyers, unlike Sky News, which has been full of (late) apology for his appearance on the also chronically immature "Outsiders" program.  

I have no idea why he thought it a good idea to go on 7.30 last night - is he that desperate for publicity that he doesn't care how big a loser he looks when he can't explain the exact words that prompted his stupid rejoinder?  

I don't care for Sarah Hansen-Young as a politician either, but I do hope a defamation case comes out of this, because I suspect Leyonhjelm is silly and arrogant enough to either defend himself, or hire some jackass young law graduate whose only recommendation will be having joined the LDP and commented at Catallaxy.

It would be entertaining, if nothing else.

Unwanted review - Shutter Island

I've always been of the view that Martin Scorsese is over rated, and while there's nothing wrong with his directorial style, I find it more workmanlike than particularly inspiring.   (OK, there is usually a bit of noticeable flair here and there, but he doesn't give me the near constant pleasure that I find in the best works of Spielberg, Hitchcock or even Brian de Palma when he was at the top of his game.)

The point is, I don't rush to see any of his movies, although I often do see them eventually.

Hence, I only watched 2010's Shutter Island on Netflix on the weekend.

It's not a bad movie, but an oddly old fashioned one, particularly thematically in how it deals with psychiatry.   The book it was based on is only from 2003, but it feels it could be much older.   It reminded me a bit of Hitchcock's Spellbound, at least in terms of the way it treats "talking therapy" with a seriousness which we're not exactly used to seeing in the modern era of pharmo-psychology.  (Actually, now that I re-read the plot of Hitchcock's movie, which I have only seen once perhaps 30 years ago, it has other similarities too.)

There are some aspects which hurt its credibility.   As one bad review says:

He stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

Yeah, there is one early sequence in which the score is just completely over the top.   It's impossible not to notice it, and I can't understand why Scorsese let it stand. (Interestingly, I see that there was no original music used at all - it was all bits and pieces of existing works selected.   And here I thought I could perhaps gives Hans Zimmer a blast for being overbearing again.)

The art direction bothered me too, in both extremes - the opulence of the psychiatrist's home in the mental asylum,  and the dungeon like quality of the old asylum.   I mean, the plot is essentially a bit B grade trashy (nothing wrong with that, per se), but having so much that seems OTT in art direction kept making me think that it's a bit ridiculous that they spent so much money on it.

As to final scene and what it means - my son, to his credit (unless he had already read this on line - I should double check) picked up on the intended meaning immediately, before I had thought of it.  But this article, full of spoiler of course, indicates that he was correct.

My final verdict:  I wouldn't say don't watch it, but go in with low expectations and you may end up satisfied enough.

Update:   in retrospect, it could be argued that my complaint about the art direction is unfair, given the explanation of the entire situation that comes close to the end of the film.   (This is hard to discuss without doing a big spoiler).    But we are never shown the difference between reality and delusion, and it would not have been hard to do so.   Physically, everything about the place looks the same, making the art direction problem still feel like a problem.

Guru worth watching

If my blog search bar is reliable (and it generally isn't, so don't blame me if this is wrong), the last time I mentioned the Hoodoo Gurus was in 2009.  (!)

I've always had a soft spot for that band, despite my distinct lack of a general long haired rock sensibility.   For guitar heavy rock, I always thought they were pretty tuneful, and often wittily eccentric with lyrics.   In fact, they are one of the few classic Australian rock bands I have seen live in their heyday: in Newcastle circa 1986, I reckon.   Yeah, they were loud.

All of this is by way of preamble to saying how much I liked Julia Zamiro's Home Delivery episode with Dave Faulkner on the ABC last night.    I don't think I have ever heard him interviewed before, let alone talking in detail about his childhood.   As I would have hoped, he presented as intelligent and hard working in developing his musical career.  His father's story was interesting and touching too.

And I still have this conviction, despite making allowances for people sometimes just inexplicably taking a dislike to some TV personalities,  that if a person doesn't find Julia a warm, empathetic, charming interviewer, there's something a bit wrong with them.

Bored with the chef

I've been meaning to write this for some years.  Now with news that his very fancy and expensive looking Sydney restaurant Jade Temple, which I happened to walk past on a brief visit to Sydney last August, is closing, I am inspired to say it.

Neil Perry has become boring.

Not that I've eaten at any establishment that has anything to do with him.  It's just from my reading his recipes.

It seems that he has had the recipe page  in Fairfax's Good Weekend for many years, even decades?, and it has occurred to me, in the last couple of years, that his recipes just never sound interesting anymore.   I used to find them interesting and enticing, even though I can't remember if I ever closely followed one.   These days, a lot of them seem too simple to me, or contain an oddball ingredient that I would have to go searching for in some special shop.   I no longer ever read one and think "that sounds nice, I'd like to give that a go."  

He might be a nice guy in real life - I wouldn't know.   I do know he has a terribly dull TV presence - he was on that disastrously short lived instant restaurant show on Channel 7 in 2015.  But I am really not sure how he manages to still be considered a success.

I wonder whether I'm on my own in this feeling about him...

Or, it might be an alien spaceship after all?

There's an abstract up at Nature about that interstellar visitor of last year, with the tantalising title:

Non-gravitational acceleration in the trajectory of 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua')
 
Here's the key part:

Here we report the detection, at 30σ significance, of non-gravitational acceleration in the motion of ‘Oumuamua. We analyse imaging data from extensive observations by ground-based and orbiting facilities. This analysis rules out systematic biases and shows that all astrometric data can be described once a non-gravitational component representing a heliocentric radial acceleration proportional to r⁻² or r⁻¹ (where r is the heliocentric distance) is included in the model. After ruling out solar-radiation pressure, drag- and friction-like forces, interaction with solar wind for a highly magnetized object, and geometric effects originating from ‘Oumuamua potentially being composed of several spatially separated bodies or having a pronounced offset between its photocentre and centre of mass, we find comet-like outgassing to be a physically viable explanation, provided that ‘Oumuamua has thermal properties similar to comets.

I know it's a long shot, but I guess it still leaves it open that it was an alien spaceship venting or trying to accelerate?

You actually don't have to have uranium in your drinking water

When I first saw the story on ABC's 7.30, I assumed that the reason no action had been taken to remove uranium out of bore water used in some remote aboriginal communities might have been because it's really hard to filter it out.   (Would have to be a pretty fine filter, I figured.)   In fact I thought that it sounds like a good reason to propose closing down certain remote settlements, if you can't even get reliable water at them.

And then I Googled the topic and found that getting uranium out of ground water is far from an uncommon problem in the West, and this, from an American local government health department:

Point of use devices are installed directly at the tap and are used to reduce contaminants at that location. Several technologies are available that are effective in removing uranium. For most households, a single point of use treatment system on the drinking water tap will be sufficient to provide safe water for drinking. Point of use reverse osmosis (RO) and distillation treatment will remove many different contaminants from your drinking water, including uranium and radium.

Reverse osmosis is a process that filters most impurities from water by passing it through a fine membrane. Contaminants such as uranium are left behind on the membrane while treated water passes through. You may need to install a pre-filter before the reverse osmosis system. The World Health Organization reports that reverse osmosis treatment will remove 90-99 percent of uranium. Point of use RO systems are available from a variety of different sources, and WUPHD recommends that you purchase a unit which is “NSF certified for radium 226/228 reduction”. (NSF does not offer a uranium certification.) For more information, please visit the NSF website.

A reverse osmosis system typically costs around $300 and you can save money by doing the installation yourself. A point of use RO system will typically produce about 7 to 14 gallons a day of drinkable water. This amount of production should meet the cooking and drinking needs of a typical household. To fix a uranium or radium problem, it is necessary only to treat the water you drink because uranium gets into the body through ingestion. It is safe to take baths using untreated water because uranium or radium is not absorbed through your skin.

 Um, that doesn't sound like it's a difficult problem to fix at all.

What on earth is the reason Australian governments are saying it's years away before it can be done here?   

Great health system, America

At Vox:

A baby was treated with a nap and a bottle of formula. His parents received an $18,000 bill.

I just don't like stand up comedy

I've explained before, but I've never been a fan of stand up comedy of the modern era.   I don't mind Seinfeld, as most of what he does is not intensely about himself.  But comedians who base their shtick on a sort of public self analysis - that's never held much appeal.   Or put it this way - I can enjoy some of that from some comedians in small doses.  For example, I've recently watched parts of Netflix specials by 3 female comedians I quite like:  Kitty Flanergan, Judith Lucy and Chelsea Peretti (the awful Gina in Brooklyn Nine Nine - I didn't know she was a stand up comic as well as an actor until this special)  All of them do a very similar style of self deprecation, with a fair amount of content about how awful a lot of their boyfriends or dates have been.   I find I can take it for a while - maybe 45 minutes, before I start losing interest.   And it's not  because I think their jokes about men are bad.    Kitty Flanergan, in particular, is about as cheery as you can expect a female comedian to be.  And although she makes jokes about men, she's pretty even handed with her attitude towards women too. 

Part of it is that I don't like the crudeness and language of much modern stand up, but even if I come across one with pretty clean language, I still usually can't help but feel a bit bored with the style.

Anyway, why am I talking about this?   It's because of the international praise being heaped upon Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" on Netflix.    I started watching it, but apparently I stopped before it became more serious.  I had a fair idea where it was going, but still, in fairness I should go back to finish it.

My reaction to the first 30 minutes or so that I did watch:   I thought it was interesting that she, as a high profile lesbian, was complaining about the pressure other lesbians' identity politics has put upon her.   (She says at one point that it's not like she spends much of each day doing things that are specifically lesbian.   But having started with a lot of lesbian content early on, she had the problem of being accused of not being lesbian enough in her later shows.)    I thought this was a refreshing thing to hear from a LGBT comic. 

But the rest of the material - she makes the point early on that she is going to be giving up comedy because of the self deprecation involved, which she realised wasn't healthy.   Again, I think this is pretty refreshing.    But...I still have a bit of a sympathy problem for her taking 10 years to realise this. 

Actually, in the Chelsea Peretti special I watched most of, she does some weird cut away stuff that seems to be about the same point - that's she's aware that the nature of this style of comedy is not great for self esteem.    So it's not as if Gadsby is the first to realise it.

I have to admit, I have never found Gadsby's comic persona, such as on that Adam Hills' show, very likeable.   I don't understand the popularity she has in certain circles.   And yes, I guess while watching her I am often trying to self analyse why I don't like her, wondering how much of it is a reaction to her lesbianism.   (I have to admit, I find difficulty feeling empathy with butch lesbianism at the best of times.)   But I think there is more to it than that.   I think maybe I have always had a bit of sense that she was too sensitive (or smart?) to be doing comedy.

Anyway, I guess I have to go watch the last part of it, but I have my doubts I am going to find it life changing as some people claim.

And besides, I just don't like stand up...

The germs, the germs; and the bags

Does anyone with common sense really believe that people are going to be keeling over with salmonella due to their filthy, filthy re-useable carry bags?

If ever there was a study worth being sceptical about, it's the one Andrew Bolt and a bunch of no common sense Right wing plastic lovers are citing from the US about what happened when San Francisco moved away from disposable plastic bags.  Here's a pretty thorough debunking of that study.   (There are others around the place too.)   Yes, if you thought it sounded suss, it was indeed, very very suss.

You know what this reminds me of?  The ridiculously elaborate instructions that wingnuts used to circulate about how extremely careful to be when cleaning up a shattered compact fluoro bulbs.   The elaborate instructions always read like urban myth material, and was faintly ridiculous when no wingnut used to be in a blind panic about what would happen if a full length fluoro tube broke.  As it happens, the compact fluro was only an interim step to the LED, which are pretty brilliant and save many people lots of money.  

It's obvious what they do - when they don't like an environment protecting law due to the minor inconvenience it causes, they gullibly promote any alleged safety hazard of the law.  

As for the grocery bag issue itself:   I note that those sceptical of its benefits keep citing a Productivity Commission report from 2006 - 12 years ago, and presumably based on information from some years further back.   And I think a guy involved in that still thinks the ban is ridiculous.

But hey, don't Right wing folk even take into account changing circumstances?

There's been a hell of lot of emphasis since 2006 on the problem of plastics in the oceans.   There was even a Senate report about this in 2016, with submissions (which I haven't yet read) by the likes of the CSIRO.*   

I strongly suspect that the decrease in use of super thin grocery bags is justifiable in the interests of ocean and river pollution, but not for land pollution.   And if people start buying more bin liners and thicker plastic bags because of that, well, I suspect they will not end up on beaches and oceans at the same rate as thin grocery bags.   I reckon most people already buy bin liners anyway, and that use of grocery bags for rubbish is just doubling up.

So, yes, I can live with it.

Maybe a few wingnuts will think they've caught the runs from reusing a bag, and that'll be a plus.

* Update:  here's a 2017 report about plastics in the oceans, with some comments from Australian academics.   Yes, we're far from the worst plastic polluting countries, but doing something with little inconvenience helps, I can't see the problem.   

You too can have a body like this

There's a more interesting than I expected article at The Guardian about those Men's  Health "transform your body " covers, where former flabby dudes end up looking, what's the word?, "chung"?    Well, that's how one guy puts it:

After a month spent learning muay thai in Thailand, Tom Usher, 30, felt himself change. “I wasn’t scared of anyone,” he muses. “When you look chung physically, you feel chung – and that confidence translates into how you act around women, but also men.

I think I'll using that word around my kids, and see what reaction I get.

Pancakes and the cosmos

A very short post to note that whenever I am cooking pancakes, as I frequently do on Sunday mornings for breakfast, and flip them and watch it start to puff up, I always think about the expanding universe.  This happens so routinely that perhaps my thoughts are now along the lines of "here we go again, I can't stop myself thinking about the expanding universe." 

That is all.

Update:  no it's not.   Could it be that some novel scientific thought is trying to tunnel its way into my consciousness through this process?   The only thing I can think of is this:  the pancake is expanding due to the heat energy of the frying pan it's sitting on.  Is our universe's expansion similarly powered by a dark energy seeping into it from an adjacent hot universe?  Of course, someone else would already have thought of this:  wait, yes, I see someone asked the question on Quora.    At least I don't think it's been given much attention as a concept.

Tax cuts not paying for themselves

Amidst all the news about the Supreme Court decisions and the civility wars, Jennifer Rubin writes about a more important long term story:

The Congressional Budget Office is out with its 2018 long-term budget outlook, and the bottom line is not pretty. CBO finds:

At 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt held by the public is now at its highest level since shortly after World War II. If current laws generally remained unchanged, CBO projects, growing budget deficits would boost that debt sharply over the next 30 years; it would approach 100 percent of GDP by the end of the next decade and 152 percent by 2048. That amount would be the highest in the nation’s history by far. Moreover, if lawmakers changed current law to maintain certain policies now in place—preventing a significant increase in individual income taxes in 2026, for example—the result would be even larger increases in debt. The prospect of large and growing debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policymakers with significant challenges.

 We know why the debt is increasing — Congress is spending more on big entitlement items while slashing revenue. Those Republicans who insisted the tax cuts would pay for themselves should hang their heads in shame. And as “as members of the baby-boom generation (people born between 1946 and 1964) age and as life expectancy continues to rise, the percentage of the population age 65 or older will grow sharply, boosting the number of beneficiaries of those programs,” the CBO says. Rising health-care costs have increased spending on Medicare and other health-care programs. Interest on the ever-growing debt is skyrocketing while revenue is “roughly flat over the next few years relative to GDP,” according to the report. Unless Congress is prepared to see massive tax hikes in 2026, the gap between entitlements and revenue will continue to grow.

 And just a reminder as to how Australia compares, have a look at this from Statista:

I'm not sure if this factors in the recent tax cuts, or not.  (I suspect not)

In any case, it seems we are in a much better overall public debt position that the US.   Which makes you wonder (well, not really - he belongs to a cult and so is beyond reason) how Steve Kates and his Catallaxy homies whine about Australian debt all the time, but aren't in a panic about the forecast US debt.

Selfish Right defined

Spotted at Catallaxy, the same obnoxious ageing writer for Quadrant who came to attention for his bombing the ABC fantasies shows us what a selfish jerk he is:

Is he serious?   Because, um, it's not like the next person to have the misfortune to use his cabin would mind the fact that after two days of illicit smoking it's going to stink like hell.