The scooter controversies

I hadn't been into the Brisbane CBD for a while, so I didn't realise until I was near there yesterday that Lime electric scooters had started appearing.  I first noticed them (or was it another app based sharing service, I forget?) actually being used  in Singapore during my recent holiday.

I think they look pretty cool, really, although I can understand how they could be a nuisance in the hands of idiots too.  I presume you have to use them with a helmet here, as I noticed helmets attached to them in Brisbane.

Their safety has been a hot issue.   Mother Jones had an article noting a study about the injuries incurred in using them in Los Angeles, and its tweet about it copped a lot of criticism for seemingly ignoring the injuries caused by cars.  As to the number of injuries, here's a key part:

Digging through records from two Los Angeles-area emergency rooms, the researchers found 249 patients with injuries serious enough to warrant a trip to the ER. In comparison, they found 195 bicyclists with injuries and 181 pedestrians with similar injuries during the same period.

But that alone is potentially misleading:  surely the rate of injuries is more significant?  There are (I would guess) a lot more bicycle riders in LA than scooter riders, and doing a lot more distance too.  

I also see that even in liberal California, there is a move away from legislating helmet use for bicycles and now scooters:

Only 10 of the people brought to the ER were wearing head protection. During three observation sessions, the study’s authors documented that 94 percent of the riders they saw didn’t use a helmet, and 26 percent rode on the sidewalk. Bird and Lime encourage their users to wear helmets, offering to ship free ones upon request. But it’s unclear how many riders follow safety guidelines, like wearing protective gear and staying off the sidewalk to avoid pedestrians.

As of January 1, adult scooter riders are no longer required to wear a helmet in California. Bird lobbied for the legislation, arguing that it would create parity with cyclists, who may ride helmet-free. The company’s chief legal officer told the Sacramento Bee that the goal was to help people “more easily embrace sustainable shared mobility options.” Lerer, who filed a class-action suit against Bird and Lime for negligence, calls removing the helmet requirement a “huge mistake.” She notes the suddenness and severity of the injuries she began seeing as soon as the scooters were introduced. “So many of the people I’ve spoken to have serious brain injuries,” she says.

Surely the US must provide a lot of evidence for researchers about the effects of legislating for things like helmet use?   Because it seems that their obsession with liberty means lots of places keep repealing things which other countries (or at least Australia) think are well worth keeping on public health grounds.  Only a week or so ago, I saw a Reddit post about the motor cyclist death rate increase in Florida when it repealed compulsory helmet use in 2000.   (No surprise - the death rate went up substantially.)   It appears that other American states softened helmet laws in the same period.  From a 2004 study:

Between 1997 and 2001, nationwide motorcycle rider fatalities increased by 50% while motorcycle registrations increased by 31%.1,2 The rise in death rates may be related to the concurrent weakening of motorcycle helmet laws in Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida. In comparing rates the year before (1996) and the year after (1998) the helmet law change, Preusser et al.3 found a 21% increase in motorcyclist deaths in Arkansas and a 30% increase in Texas. This analysis tries to determine the effect of weakening Florida’s motorcycle helmet law.

Remember a post I wrote recently about the way the comparative American death toll from traffic accidents had started going up over the last few decades, and the reason given was that other countries followed evidence-based policies shown to have reduced fatalities?   Seems they may have the same problem when it comes to helmets. 

Anyway, this post was partly inspired by watching this pretty interesting video about how Tel Aviv has embraced electric scooters, partly because they don't have public transport on the Sabbath (it seems Shabbat is the preferred word now?)   I thought it pretty interesting:

 

The Aquaman review

Just got back from finally seeing Aquaman.  I feel like a 15 year old for using this description, but it's pretty awesome.  And mainly, I'm talking visually.

It's not just the pretty, trippy luminosity of much of the underwater settings (the semi-alien glowiness in some parts reminded a bit of Avatar, actually), but the incredible amount of creativity in creature, costume and vehicle design.   A lot of it, I thought, had a sort of hallucinatory intensity about it: but I presume you wouldn't want to watch it under the effects of LSD, given some of the creepy creatures.  (Or maybe a hallucinogen cancels it out, and you end up thinking you're watching a black and white episode of Sea Hunt?)  

Anyway, apart from it being just continuously, eye-bogglingly visually impressive, I thought the direction was pretty good too.  I know that all heavy CGI movies let the camera (real or virtual) move around a lot, but I thought this one really embraced the idea that filming an underwater world is equivalent to filming in space - freed of gravity, you can visually zoom around anything in all directions, and it often does.  

The story was fit for purpose, and moved along at considerable pace despite the length of the movie.  It was just witty enough, I think, although given my strong preference for superhero movies to be outright funny, a couple of more good, unexpected jokes wouldn't have hurt.

So, pretty good overall, and led me to have a post viewing conversation with my son about why I prefer this to, say, Batman in any incarnation, or Lord of the Rings.  Because, I said, Aquaman felt more realistic than either of those.

You can imagine what kind of virtual spit-take that got, so I had to rush on to explain:  "realism" has to be taken in the context of what the movie is selling.  So, for Wonder Woman or Aquaman, it's a given, from the start of the film, that the hero comes from a world where some Greek myths, and the superpowers they involve, are real.   So, you just accept that and have to view the "realism" of the rest of the story through that prism.   

Batman, on the other hand, seems intended to be so close to the real world, this becomes part of the problem for me.  by setting it in something too close to reality, the whole troubled, orphaned, ridiculously costumed vigilante who doesn't actually kill and chases villains who dress up just because they can has never felt like a scenario of which I can ignore the silliness.  

OK, what about Spiderman? I hear someone say.   Yeah, well, perhaps it's the lighter touch of this character and his scenario that means I can ignore the stupid physics and find his universe is more real than that of Gotham City.       

As for Lord of the Rings - look, I simply feel no affinity for that style of fantasy.  And visually in the movies, I've always thought it looked blown out of proportion to fit modern sensibilities and that has bothered me too.  And the setting was just not that interesting for me. 

So yeah, that's how I defend talking about "realism" in justifying what superhero movies I like or dislike.

And finally:   Nicole Kidman's gold fish consumption in the film reminded me - I had just read an article in The Atlantic that detailed a college fad for goldfish eating in the USA that started in 1939!:

It started out with one. One live goldfish, swallowed up by a Harvard freshman on a dare. Three weeks later it rose to three, and four days after that it jumped to 24. By the end of April 1939, the record for the number of goldfish swallowed stood at 101. Students at colleges across the country -- the University of Michigan, Boston College, New Mexico State, among others -- had popularized a quest to see how many goldfish a single person could eat in one sitting.

I had no idea that young Americans in that momentous year would be into such an icky, silly stunt.   Read the whole article, it's well worth it.

Two suggestions for dealing with the drug problem at music festivals

1.  Ban all music festivals aiming for the under 30 market, especially the ones with suss names like Hardcore Till I Die, at which 6 men were taken away yesterday in serious or critical condition.

2.  Don't ban the festivals, but legislate that the Music Police must attend, at the organiser's cost, and are there next to the stage power supply ready to cut it as soon as an Ambulance worker calls him or her to advise he's taking away a illicit drug victim.   Yes, all attendees will be advised that if it happens, they can listen to the rest of the show done in acoustic style, so to speak.  Don't want that to happen?  Then don't take any of the drugs you either brought in or have brought from the in house criminals.  (Note that this has the advantage of doing away with drug sniffer dogs too.  Let them bring whatever they want in - just that as soon as one person is carted away because of it - off go the amplifiers.  You don't have to leave - they sit around and bang on drums, perhaps.  But presumably, most would leave.)

The whole issue of pill testing at festivals has, I think, met with surprisingly strong push back from the "sends the wrong message" section of the community.   In general, I've always argued that Australia's drug laws did not need major alternations because to a large extent, much more so than the USA and rather like Europe, governments here have treated it as a health issue for users as well as a criminal one.  Hence needle exchange, heroin injection rooms, government run methadone programs, etc.   And I think the public is by and large happy with that.

You know why I think pill testing seems to be a public health line too far for many people?   Because the use of party drugs (especially in association with electronic dance music that is apparently only really enjoyed by altering your brain chemistry)  feels just too hedonistic in a sort of hippy self indulgent way.  Sure, you could say heroin is hedonistic in first use, but people feel sorry for those addicts because of the difficulty they have in stopping.

Alcohol doesn't have that same hedonist ic vibe - for a few thousand years, people have enjoyed its effects in moderation at home, in a bar, at a restaurant, as part of worship even.   People, by and large, don't use it to alter their emotional state to any high degree and get ultra buzzed, or ultra deep and meaningful and huggy:  it is taken for pleasure but not in a highly hedonistic fashion.

And I think it rightly annoys people over 40 to see that kind of self indulgence and the risks it brings.

I can see the arguments for allowing pill testing (paid for the organisers of course) and it may be that it might be a measure that reduces some deaths.  I can even see the counter productivity of drug sniffer dogs, who cause many to unwisely swallow their pills in one hit, apparently.

But, sorry, I'm sticking to the  "wrong message" crowd - I do not want any sense of acceptability of this type of drug use to seep in further than it already has.   I don't want that type of chemical hedonism be the standard outing for so many young people.  Find pleasure in other ways.   A few years in the Army would do them good!   (OK, getting carried away there.)

But seriously, if Singapore, Japan and Sweden can be successful, rich societies in which party drugs are a non existent problem and young people deal with their ennui in other, less brain addling ways, then that's the way more Western countries should aim, if you ask me.

A depressing read

The Guardian has a feature article up, detailing the stories of 5 internet bred conspiracy victims.

As I have said before, the internet is so bad at spreading and helping maintain dangerous conspiracy belief (you're no longer a loner in your room reading a pamphlet a nutter handed you in the street:  you can feel part of a real time, self supporting community of [what they think is] insiders who really know what is going), I am feeling more inclined towards heavy government intervention in content control.

Author uses party drugs?

A piece in The Conversation makes the point that drug use (be it alcohol or "party drugs") can have the social benefit of, well, having fun in groups. 

Hmmm.   No doubt people do talk fondly of parties or nights out aided by alcohol, or (I presume, I have never met a person who told me they used them) party pills.   That it was necessary to do research on that seems a tad odd:

The social benefits of drug use are more complex to quantify. But there are now numerous studies showing people use alcohol or other drugs in social settings such as bars, clubs and parties to enhance their interactions with others through increased confidence, greater sociability and less anxiety. For some people this leads to longer-term benefits such as stronger bonds with friends.

This was shown in recent Australian studies where young people reported cultural gains from drug use, such as strengthening social ties and gaining access to social networks that offered a form of cultural capital.

But here's my real issue with the article: 

At La Trobe University, we recently conducted a study which explored party drug use – including use of crystal meth – among Australian gay and bisexual men who are living with HIV. Consistent with what we know about party-drug use, we found the men in our study almost always used party drugs socially – at nightclubs and dance parties or to facilitate sexual pleasure.

More surprisingly, we also found men who were occasional or regular users of party drugs reported significantly better social outcomes than non-users on a range of measures including a higher level of resilience, less experience of HIV-related stigma, and a greater sense of support from other people living with HIV as well as from their gay and bisexual friends.

This is important because all of these outcomes are strongly associated with greater emotional well-being among people living with HIV.

Just wait a minute.   Isn't one of the well known issues with party drug use in the gay clubbing scene is that it makes men much more likely to have unsafe sex??   Yes, this has been known for many years.

Hence it seems particularly weird that a researcher should be talking about the social benefits of HIV positive men using party drugs, when there is a good chance that use of the drug led to them being HIV positive in the first place!

Now, I suppose you could say I am being unfair - if asked, the author would no doubt acknowledge the link between drug use and unsafe sex in HIV spread.

But my problem is that not mentioning it seems perverse, even if you want to mainly talk about your (hardly necessary) research that seems to put a positive spin on the continued use of even a ridiculously dangerous drug like crystal meth. 

Medical practice can be a funny thing...

I saw this issue discussed on a recent doco on SBS about the contraceptive pill and its benefits and risks:  

Earlier this month, updated guidelines from the Faculty of Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH) indicated that the seven-day break commonly recommended in most contraceptive pill regimens has no health benefits. Under the new guidelines, people taking the pill are free to reduce or stop this pause, allowing them to skip their monthly bleeds.

Understandably, these changes were widely reported by the media, with most reports suggesting an unusual explanation for the original recommendation of the hormone-free break. Speaking to the Telegraph, Professor John Guillebaud, of University College London, said: “The gynaecologist John Rock devised [the break] because he hoped that the pope would accept the pill and make it acceptable for Catholics to use. Rock thought if it did imitate the natural cycle then the pope would accept it.”

The author of this article in The Guardian says that this explanation is a bit fanciful, and that the break was really to reassure earlier users that they were not pregnant.   That does sound a bit more plausible.

Still, as she says, it's remarkable that doctors went many decades without questioning whether the break was the ideal way to use the product.

Weather observed

In Brisbane, the summer so far has not been extremely hot, with most maximums in the low to mid 30's, which is bearable especially if minimum gets to low 20's at night.  But it has been unusually dry.  For summer.

That is all.

The Victorian era blamed for people liking meat?

I think someone (perhaps not the author?) got a bit carried away with the headline for this article at The Conversation:

The Victorians caused the meat eating crisis the world faces today – but they might help us solve it

Crisis?   Wouldn't go as far as that, despite my recent guilt twangs about the number of animals being killed and the conditions under which they live.   They are not so bad as to stop me really enjoying a beef rendang last night - I think it's the King of Curries.

But the article itself is interesting enough, noting that Victorian England was able to very substantially increase its consumption of meat when technology allowed it to come from far away:

the root of this problem can be traced to 19th-century Britain, when global meat markets emerged as a revolutionary way of dealing with a mid-Victorian “meat famine”.

The famine was caused by a mismatch between a fast increasing, urbanising population and a levelling out in domestic meat production. What helped stave it off was the groundbreaking development of preservation and transportation technologies that enabled the British to eat livestock that was reared, slaughtered and processed in the Americas and Australasia.

As a result of these innovations, products such as chilled and corned beef, frozen mutton and meat extracts including Bovril and Oxo became staples throughout British homes. Per capita meat consumption increased dramatically, rising from about 87lb per year in the 1850s to 127lb annually by 1914, despite the fact that Britain’s population nearly doubled in this period.

Cost was the major factor driving this change. When one can get a half-price leg of mutton from the other side of the globe, remarked one prominent food writer, one sets aside “all sentimental considerations in favour of the roast beef of Old England”.

Mass marketing campaigns alongside positive media coverage also helped promote these new forms of meat. Victorian commentators celebrated frozen meat’s capacity to feed the “energetic, flesh-fed men” required to sustain British industry and imperialism. Meanwhile “beef tea” was widely advertised as a life enhancing force in Britain’s fights against alcoholism, influenza, European rivals and imperial perils.

I liked this detail which I had not heard of before:

The globalisation of Victorian meat eating was revolutionary, then, but it was also highly controversial. Advocates of the canning and refrigeration industries championed their capacity to deliver healthy, wholesome, inexpensive and sustainable meat supplies from Britain’s colonies and the “new world”. But home-reared meat was seen to be of better quality and safer, especially early on in the development of these industries.

Many potential customers were put off by scandals involving putrefied meat, as well as scare stories surrounding the meat’s origins. Metropolitan meat eaters feared that overseas farmers were feeding them offal or meat from diseased animals. In my archival research, I’ve even discovered concerns that boiled human babies were entering the food chain. 

Anyway, I can imagine the article getting up Jason Soon's nose somewhat.   Are you still here Jason, I never know anymore.... 

Yet more ABC praise

Foreign Correspondent last night was about the lucrative vanilla bean industry in Madagascar, of all places.   Apparently, that's where 80% of the world's natural vanilla comes from, even though the plant is actually from Mexico.  (And in Mexico it is pollinated by a native bee;  in other countries such as Madagascar, it has to be hand pollinated, with very careful timing.  I had read about this before - it's an amazing story.) 

The Mexico connection made me wonder out loud - why doesn't Mexico try getting rich on vanilla instead of opium and cannabis?

Anyway, once again it made me feel like strapping Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg to a chair and forcing them to watch, Clockwork Orange style,  40 straight hours of fascinating ABC content that is completely dissimilar to what is made on commercial TV, and only release them on the promise to shut up, leave the ABC alone, and go and do something useful with their lives.   Crapping on about blockchain does keep them off the street, though, I suppose. 

Hope I do better than that...

From an article at The Atlantic about the matter of what people tend to say as they are about to die:

At the end of life, Keeley says, the majority of interactions will be nonverbal as the body shuts down and the person lacks the physical strength, and often even the lung capacity, for long utterances. “People will whisper, and they’ll be brief, single words—that’s all they have energy for,” Keeley said. Medications limit communication. So does dry mouth and lack of dentures. She also noted that family members often take advantage of a patient’s comatose state to speak their piece, when the dying person cannot interrupt or object.

Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”....

In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general. (However, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s have difficulty understanding figurative language, and anthropologists who study dying in other cultures told me that journey metaphors aren’t prevalent everywhere.)

The article does not the quite common experience of people on their death bed reporting other people in the room - often deceased relatives, and particularly spooky if said relative has died recently and the dying person had not been told.

Yay for the ABC (again)

ABC TV has been re-playing a lot of Backroads over summer, and while not every episode is as interesting as some, last night's one on the incredibly hot and remote town of Marble Bar in Western Australia was particularly good.

I had no idea at all what the place would look like.   In fact, I sort of assumed that with its far-from-unusual days over 45 degrees in summer, that it might have been an iron mining outpost with no permanent residents.  It was apparently 48, 48.5 and 49.1 degrees there last month.  Who would voluntarily live in such a place?

But no:  it's an old gold mining town still with 200 residents, including a guy and his wife in their 70's running their own personal mini mine that they hope will one day run into the gold vein that test drilling indicates is somewhere near them.  The town has also been "greened up" over the years, so now it features not just red dust in the main street, but substantial trees too.

There is also more in the way of cattle stations in the area than I would have expected.  Again, I had assumed that cattle would be keeling over dead in temperatures over about 45 degrees, but apparently not.

It was a really remarkable episode. 

My flight went smoother than this (and the benefit of low expectations)

Poor Scoot airlines in the news due to a flight from the Gold Coast to Singapore having to be diverted back to Australia after a drunk guy got into a brawl.  Video at the link.

I feel a bit sorry for airlines that get this far from good publicity when it is not their fault.

Scoot is the budget airline owned by Singapore Airlines, and my family and I caught it from the Gold Coast to Singapore and back in December.  (I've been a bit slow to do my usual "this was my holiday" post.)  Other cheap airlines fly out of the Gold Coast to Asia, including Jet Star and Air Asia.  I would never fly Air Asia, given its dubious safety record.   But I trust everything Singaporean, so I had no problem using Scoot.

As with other budget airlines, as long as you go into the experience expecting very basic service, and quite possibly delays, you'll be fine.  It's like I used to say about Tiger Airlines - think of it as a Greyhound bus that just happens to travel in the air instead of on the ground.  I suppose it's a little bit like the Soup Nazi episode on Seinfeld, too - you want their product because it's great value: you have to strictly follow their rules.

Scoot uses Boeing 787's on the route, so the aircraft itself is pretty new.   The only thing is, at least the models used by budget airlines, is that I think they have really small and basic toilets.  I used to prefer toilets in 747s to what you get now.

Scoot does nothing by way of in flight entertainment.  Nothing at all.  All food must be paid for, and apparently if they notice someone eating food they brought on the aircraft, they'll tell them "no".  (I didn't see anyone try it - just I read that on a review online.)  I think everyone brings on a water bottle of their own to keep them going.  It is not as if the attendants are going to be offering it to you if you forgot.

The light lunch I had was fine, but did cost $15.   Someone sitting beside me had one of the pre-ordered hot meals, but gee, it looked very, very basic.   I know not to bother doing that if I fly them again.

The attendants were all good looking Asians - all women on the return flight, but a couple of very gay sounding males on the flight over.   I cannot imagine any of them being able to physically handle a violent passenger, but I suppose that goes for all flight attendants no matter the cost of the airline.

My wife was apparently told she couldn't sit at a vacant row on the way back, but I missed that.  She didn't think the service was nice enough.  I thought they did look a bit harassed and disorganised with the meal service.   But really, I get the feeling that flight attendants on all budget airlines are likely working under pay and conditions which probably does leave them perpetually dissatisfied.   Again, I factor this into my low expectations on budget airlines.

So, overall, how did I find it?

It was fine.   My low expectations were met - the flight over was delayed a couple of hours;  I was only notified by text message and felt an email probably would have been a good idea too;  we had to be bussed from the plane to the terminal in Singapore; my wife's seat would not recline on the flight back; a couple of bogan-ish Australians (in their 30's by the looks, so they should have known better) kept reclining their seats in front of me on the daytime flight over.

But it was fine!  The return cost, at a peak season, was about $800 per person, two of us with 20 kg baggage.  I now get email offers of much cheaper off season fares  - it looks like I could a return trip in April for about $430. 

I would fly them again, even though my wife dissents.   Maybe I need to take a break by myself...

She is looking impressive..

What a good reply:

About Gillette

A few comments, if I may:

*  I don't think the ad, or promo, or whatever it is, is actually well made.   No problem with the concept, just I think it doesn't do a great job in execution.

*  Of course, the wingnutty reaction against it is completely over the top.

*  Amusingly, when in the supermarket with my son to buy shaving products on Saturday, he said he would not buy Gillette so as to stand in solidarity with his 4Chan friends.  He was joking.

*  I did buy Gillette foaming gel shaving cream.  I haven't used this product for years, but I still find it cool how it works, and it lasts for ages compared to your old style shaving foam.   It was going for half price (no connection with wingnuttery, I'm sure.)

*  I maintain that the best value, multiblade razor is the Coles or Woolworths home brand 5 blade razor.   (I think both are from the same, US manufacturer or assembler, but the blades made in Mexico, of all places.)   Replacement cartridges are $1.50 each, compared to the ridiculous $4 - $6 you can pay for Gillette or Schick. 

Wot I've been watching

 Venom - the adult-ish Marvel entry from last year.   I watched it with my son via Google Play on the weekend.

You might think my sensitivities to media violence would make me worry about a movie in which a few people have their heads bitten off.   But it is done in a completely blood free and far from graphic way to bad people (I think - I can't remember who exactly all the victims were now).   And while my son commented at about the 30 minute mark that it was a bit boring, it all turns around at about 40 minutes and becomes a pretty amusing and fun movie for the remainder.   The humour comes from the alien "parasite" being able to talk in the head of the hero, and take control of his body without his consent.   Loss of bodily control to another entity can often make for good fun, and it does so here.

I'm not at all sure why it got so many poor reviews - 29% on Rottentomatoes and 35% on Metacritic.  It was, in my opinion, a much more entertaining movie than Black Panther - the most wildly overrated superhero movie I have ever seen. 

The Alienist - just started watching this on Netflix.   Based on a book I have never heard of, it's one of those mixes of real and fictional characters, with a bit of a New York version of Watson & Holmes vibe, except I don't think John Watson was heavily into prostitution and drinking like this guy.  

The best thing about it is how fantastic it looks - I presume a lot of it is the utterly convincing use of CGI to re-create 1896 New York - but (very much like Babylon Berlin) it seems to have hundreds of extras and looks like squillions was spent on art direction and sets.  It is a real pleasure to watch just for the visuals.

The acting and dialogue is a little theatrical at times;  but people really did talk different then and I think it's just a matter of getting used to it.  

The show really reminds me (and my son) of Babylon Berlin in many thematic ways- a seedy and somewhat surprising sexual and corrupt underworld beneath the glamour of a city that combines riches and stark poverty is a key feature of both - and so if you did enjoy the former, this series is likely to please as well.

I am really enjoying it so far (watched two episodes).

So transparent

Female MPs from the Liberals are jumping ship like the government is already at the 45 degree tilt of the Titanic on its final slide to the bottom, so of course The Australian is running an article on Labor's so called "gender problem":

It's been like this for many, many years;  but its "we must try and counter bad news for the Libs in any way we can" policy is almost amusingly transparent now.

Protestants, Catholics and suicide

An interesting article at AEON talking about something that is apparently well known in certain circles, but of which I was unaware:

In his classic Le suicide (1897), Durkheim presented aggregate indicators suggesting that Protestantism was a leading correlate of suicide incidence. The proposition that Protestants have higher suicide rates than Catholics has been ‘accepted widely enough for nomination as sociology’s one law’.

Protestant countries today still tend to have substantially higher suicide rates. This fact suggests that the relation of religion and suicide remains a vital topic. Every year, more than 800,000 people commit suicide worldwide, making it a leading cause of death, in particular among young adults.

The article looks at research on suicide rates in 19th century Prussia, when apparently there were careful records kept, and it was also easy to account for the mix of Protestant and Catholics in different counties.  The research apparently confirmed the Protestant suicide connection:

As a consequence of this geographic pattern of diffusion, the share of Protestants is higher near Wittenberg. So is the suicide rate. The share of Protestants in a county is clearly positively associated with the suicide rate. The average suicide rate is notably higher in all-Protestant counties than in all-Catholic counties. Numerically, the difference in suicides between religious denominations in Prussia is huge: suicide rates among Protestants (at 18 per 100,000 people per year) are roughly three times higher than among Catholics.

OK, interesting.

Next up, I would like some sociological/economic research on why some intensely Catholic countries develop well entrenched criminal gangs that will cause death and mayhem on a remarkable scale, while the gang members still nominally think of themselves as decent Catholics - the Mafia in Italy, the drug cartels in Mexico and some other Central and South American countries; the corruption in The Philippines.  Is it just a case of Catholicism not being as good as Protestantism at creating wealth, so the poverty in those countries is the breeding ground for criminal gangs?

More on American driving safety (or lack thereof)

Further to my recent post about the (not widely know?) fact that America has become a terrible place, comparatively, for traffic accident deaths, I've Googled up a bit more.

Remarkably, the American situation is one where their safety figures show remarkable comparative deterioration.  There was a 2017 article in the New York Times explaining this:

It didn’t used to be this way. A generation ago, driving in the United States was relatively safe. Fatality rates here in 1990 were roughly 10 percent lower than in Canada and Australia, two other affluent nations with a lot of open road.

Over the last few decades, however, other countries have embarked on evidence-based campaigns to reduce vehicle crashes. The United States has not. The fatality rate has still fallen here, thanks partly to safer vehicles, but it’s fallen far less than anywhere else.

As a result, this country has turned into a disturbing outlier. Our vehicle fatality rate is about 40 percent higher than Canada’s or Australia’s. The comparison with Slovenia is embarrassing. In 1990, its death rate was more than five times as high as ours. Today, the Slovenians have safer roads.

Some evidence that Americans don't realise this - the writer of the article didn't know either:

I was unaware of this country’s newfound outlier status until I recently started reporting on the rise of driverless cars.

As to the specific factors behind the higher death rate:

“The overwhelming factor is speed,” says Leonard Evans, an automotive researcher. Small differences in speed cause large differences in harm. Other countries tend to have lower speed limits (despite the famous German autobahn) and more speed cameras. Install enough cameras, and speeding really will decline.

But it’s not just speed. Seatbelt use is also more common elsewhere: One in seven American drivers still don’t use one, according to the researchers Juha Luoma and Michael Sivak. In other countries, 16-year-olds often aren’t allowed to drive. And “buzzed driving” tends to be considered drunken driving. Here, only heavily Mormon Utah has moved toward a sensible threshold, and the liquor and restaurant lobbies are trying to stop it.

There are graphs in the article indicating that Americans are much, much more likely to be speeding or not wearing a seat belt than in a couple of comparable European countries.

I wonder how seatbelt wearing compares to Australia?  Well, this recent report says that 8% of Queenslanders do not wear one - which is higher than I expected - but the NYT article suggests it is 15% of Americans.    Given the report goes on to say that in Queensland, a quarter of fatalities involved people unrestrained, the lack of seatbelt wearing must be a huge factor in the high US fatality rate.

So why does America not make the legislative changes that have worked so well in other countries?:

The political problem with all of these steps, of course, is that they restrict freedom, and we Americans like freedom. To me, the freedom to have a third beer before getting behind the wheel — or to drive 15 miles an hour above the limit — is not worth 30 lives a day. But I recognize that not everyone sees it this way.

I find this quite surprising that it is not a bigger issue in the country - do libertarian types there really argue against measures that can so clearly be shown to have dropped death rates in other nations?  

The evidence would seem to be in that freedom kills.  

Update:   thought I should check what American seat belt laws exist.  Turns out that it's a complete dog's breakfast: 

There are mandatory safety belt laws in all states except New Hampshire. In some states, these laws cover front-seat occupants only, but belt laws in 29 states and the District of Columbia cover all rear-seat occupants, too. 

Belt use laws in only 34 states and the District of Columbia are primary, meaning police may stop vehicles solely for belt law violations. In other jurisdictions, police must have some other reason to stop a vehicle before citing an occupant for failing to buckle up. 

British madness

What's at the heart of the British nuttiness at the moment?   Why is Jeremy Corbin so wishy washy on an alternative path forward?   Why aren't there more Remainers in Parliament openly pushing for another referendum?  I missed that Politico had an article late last year that listed 8 different "Brexit tribes" within the Tories!  How is that not a embarrassing shambles for the party as a whole?     Why did the pound go up after May's loss - surely the only explanation is finance and business hoping that it means that the whole idea might be abandoned?  And what about libertarians and Brexit?   I get the impression that ones like Helen Dale like the idea in principle, but aren't open enough to admit they didn't understand the complexity and that in retrospect it was a dud idea from the start.   (She apparently wrote about it in the Australian recently?   But she spends most of her time on Twitter just complaining that she's sick of the whole thing.)  I see that Nick Cohen took a stick to libertarian influence on the poll last November.

Despite debate over how the question would be structured, polling indicates that if you do it with multiple choices on a first past the post basis, as their politicians are elected,  the Remainers would win.

But then again, perhaps a good case can be made for it being the first past the post elections behind the whole problem with UK politics generally.   I certainly get the feeling Australians feel better represented for having preferential voting.

Forget about it

I bet Sabine Hossenfelder is not impressed:

Plans for a machine that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider have been drawn up by researchers at Cern to take over the baton in the search for new physics in the latter half of the century.

The €20bn (£17.8bn) machine, named the Future Circular Collider, would smash particles together inside a 100km (62 mile) tunnel, making it four times the size of the LHC, which at present is the largest scientific instrument on the planet.

The proposal for the FCC is described in a conceptual design report released on Tuesday by Cern, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva. It comes at a time when physicists around the world are considering where to build the next cutting-edge particle collider, with other machines under discussion in Japan and China.

Look, particle physicists - that type of money will, at that the time you want to spend it, be better used to do something about climate change.

How Americans die

Yeah, that American opioid death situation is not improving much:

For the first time in U.S. history, a leading cause of deaths — vehicle crashes — has been surpassed in likelihood by opioid overdoses, according to a new report on preventable deaths from the National Safety Council.

Americans now have a 1 in 96 chance of dying from an opioid overdose, according to the council's analysis of 2017 data on accidental death. The probability of dying in a motor vehicle crash is 1 in 103.

"The nation's opioid crisis is fueling the Council's grim probabilities, and that crisis is worsening with an influx of illicit fentanyl," the council said in a statement released Monday.

Fentanyl is now the drug most often responsible for drug overdose deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in December. And that may only be a partial view of the problem: Opioid-related overdoses also have been undercounted by as much as 35 percent, according to a study published last year in the journal Addiction.

Mind you, I was surprised to realise recently how poor the road death rate is in the US compared to Australia:

After spiking higher for two straight years, traffic deaths in the United States pulled back slightly in 2017, according to a new report by the National Safety Council.
The NSC estimates there were 40,100 motor vehicle deaths last year, which would be a drop of about 1 percent from the total of 40,327 in 2016.

On a population basis, it is extraordinarily bad compared to, well, just about everywhere:

Disturbing to watch

I've confessed before to occasionally wasting time on Reddit.

Last weekend, at the top of the popular list for a while was one of the more disturbing things you're ever likely to see there - and close to 100% of commenters were appalled:  a group of (temporarily) relatively attractive looking high school girls (with some money in their families, by the looks of the car) smoking meth before going into school.

There must be a fair chance the families will see this?   Or is it old and been posted as a cautionary thing by one of the participants?   Anyway, it's puzzling as to why the video is on line at all.

Nutty floating anthropology

Somehow, in the 1970's, I missed reading about an ill fated experiment in which an anthropologist picked a set of people to float across the Atlantic with him on a raft to see if there would be sex based conflict. 

The Guardian talks about it in the context of a documentary that has been made. 

Weekend stuff

*  Watched the well reviewed Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation on the weekend, which features not one but two Nicholas Cages.    A bit meh, if you ask me.   I have never seen Being John Malkovitch, I have to admit, which might be a better movie.   But Adaptation is a bit too transparent in concept and how it came about - I remembered reading a bit at the time that Kaufman did get a bad case of writers block when trying to adapt the real book about orchids that features in the movie.   So he put the writers block in the screenplay, and also his anxiety about being a unique Hollywood voice and not following the industry idea, embodied by Robert McKee, that movies really only work best with 3 act stories with conflict that is to be resolved by the end.

The end result is a movie that is about writers block being resolved with a silly 3rd act that pretends it's like what Hollywood would come up for the resolution.

Robert McKee, I learned after watching it, did advise Kaufman on fixing his 3rd act on his first draft - and it's a bit puzzling to wonder whether McKee still sees the ending as ironic or not.   (He must, surely.)

Anyway, it's a case of being too meta for its own good.   Or not being innovatively meta enough, perhaps.

* The Gold Coast was looking very nice on Sunday.   Must actually swim next time.

*  The Washington Post has an article looking back at the Boston molasses disaster of 1919 - a huge tank of the sticky stuff broke and the flood killed 21 people and injured 150.   A very unique disaster.

*  Oh look - the New Yorker has an article asking "Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?"  Lots of cautionary warnings there, and my strong, strong hunch remains that American style liberalisation of marijuana laws will be seen as a public health mistake within a couple of decades.

Friday random thoughts

*  2018 seemed to be the year of bisexual women characters turning up in US TV shows - and always dealt with in a non-judgemental, this is just normal, sort of way.  I'm thinking Rosa on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the frequent bisexual interests of Eleanor in The Good Place, and the (OK, she's just lesbian, now that I think of it) glove wearing sister in Haunting of Hill House.   I don't know - but it feels a bit faddish to me.

* While talking sexualities, I've never read anything about why the service industries seem to be the "go to" jobs for so many gay men?   Once again, flying at Christmas, the extremely obvious sexuality of the male flight attendants, as well as one of the concierges at the hotel, and even a guy serving us at Malaysian McDonalds of all places, made me wonder about this.  I suppose I should Google the topic instead of just asking out loud.  I just don't get the connection between "I'm gay, and I really want to serve people".

*  Gawd, I didn't start writing this with these topics in mind, but I now I see that Benjamin Law is getting publicity in The Guardian for his show which I think is way over-rated by the usual sort of people who find any comedy with a sympathetic gay theme to be brilliant.

*  Should I see Aquaman at the cinema?  My son is dubious, but it is a genuine box office hit.  (It's going to break the billion dollar barrier, surprisingly.)  I don't really expect it to be great, but perhaps a bit weirdly amusing enough.

* Oh, someone at The Guardian reads Catallaxy - and notes "former IPA man" (former?) Sinclair Davidson's comments about the right wing rally last weekend.   He missed the Davidson "I'll make a weirdly eccentric claim that even the nutty conservatives reading Catallaxy think is over the top, and  then not justify it" comment of the week -

Gavin – people who advocate a two-state solution are anti-Semitic.

 I like it when he makes a big statement that leaves even the readers of that blog backing away slowly, which is pretty much what they did in that thread.

Oddly, he also posted about a vegetarian topic (noting the Impossible Burger) the same week I have - and sent the nuts in comments into a frenzy because how dare anyone suggest that making a "fake meat" burger that people want to eat is not a bad idea.   Next thing, socialists will be banning meat, don't you know?

It is the nuttiest collection of stupid right wingers in Australia.

 

Deep ocean warming, and cooling

There was a paper in Science last week that seems to have attracted no media attention, even though it is not what most people would expect.  (A paper on ocean heating in PNAS did hit news outlets, but this is different.)

Apparently, the deep ocean in the Pacific is still cooling (slightly), while the Atlantic depths have been heating, and at a much faster comparative rate.  The reason is quite surprising - it takes a long, long time for top water to circulate to the bottom in the Pacific, and so cooling from centuries ago is still affecting its depths:

At depths below 2000 m, the Atlantic warms at an average rate of 0.1°C over the past century, whereas the deep Pacific cools by 0.02°C over the past century....

Deep Atlantic waters are directly replenished by their formation in the North Atlantic, but deep Pacific waters must propagate from the Atlantic and Southern oceans. Radiocarbon observations (11) indicate that most waters in the deep Atlantic were last at the surface 1 to 4 centuries ago, whereas most deep Pacific waters have longer memory due to isolation from the atmosphere for 8 to 14 centuries (6). As a result of differing response times, Atlantic temperature trends reflect warming over recent centuries, including that associated with anthropogenic influences, whereas the Pacific is still cooling as a consequence of ongoing replacement of Medieval Warm Period waters by Little Ice Age waters.

The paper indicates that their modelling and re-examination of some records indicate that surface cooling from the Little Ice Age is a good explanation of the deep Pacific cooling.

I gather, from looking at the diagram in the paper, that the total increase in heat in the Atlantic depths means that, on average, the global total ocean depths are still heating.   But it certainly appears that (like sea level rise), deep ocean heating is much "lumpier" when you look at the regions than I would have guessed. 

Science in India

I did post last year about how Hindu fundamentalists in India - including the PM! - believe silly things in the same way Creationist Christians do:

During the 2014 inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Modi pointed to the scientific achievements documented by ancient religious texts and spoke of Ganesha, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head: “We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human. There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.” Modi did not respond to a request from Reuters that he expand on this remark.

and now, Hindu "ancient science" beliefs got an airing at an Indian science congress:

At this year's annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress from Jan. 3 to 7, senior research scientist Kannan Jagathala Krishnan dismissed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as "a big blunder" and said Isaac Newton didn't really understand how gravity works.

Nageswara Rao, a vice chancellor at Andhra University in South India, said that Ravana, a demon god with 10 heads, had 24 kinds of aircraft of varying sizes and capacities — and that India was making test-tube babies thousands of years ago.

Dinosaurs were created by the Hindu god Brahma, said Ashu Khosla, a scientist with expertise in paleontology at Panjab University in the North Indian city of Chandigarh.

Not exactly the kind of remarks you would expect at an event whose mission is to advance and further the cause of science, to stimulate discussion on scientific theories and to create an awareness of science-related issues, especially among children — and that is funded by the Indian government's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Krishnan, Rao and Khosla were addressing a group of 5,000 children assembled from all over the country at the event's Children's Science Congress. Their lectures were posted on YouTube and reported widely by the press. The congress organizers were red-faced, and the scientific community in India was outraged. 

 

Vegetarianism and counting lives

By way of update to my last post, speculating on the relevance of the number of animal lives lost to meat eating, I see that the Dalai Lama has been quoted on the same topic:

An Indian friend told me that his young daughter has been arguing with him that it is better to serve one cow to ten people than to serve chicken or other small animals, since more lives would be involved. In the Indian tradition, beef is always avoided, but I think there is some logic to her argument. Shrimp, for example, are very small. For one plate, many lives must be sacrificed. To me, this is not at all delicious. I find it really awful, and I think it is better to avoid these things. If your body needs meat, it may be better to eat bigger animals.

Come on:   why did he have to choose prawns as an example?   If you're going to start worrying about prawns' lives too much from an ethical point of view, you're well on the slippery slope to fretting about whether you accommodate cockroaches and termites in your house.  Or bacteria in that infection in your foot.

I never really did trust this Dalai Lama - who himself is not a strict vegetarian, I see.  (For health reasons, but I also have read that Tibetan Buddhism, due to the great difficulty of having access to vegetables there, is not a branch that has ever been hung up about avoiding meat.)

Anyway, it still seems to me to be a good question - is it better to eat one relatively smart cow that has had a pretty free range, happy life for a number of years, or (say) 30 not very bright chickens that have been raised in a shed for 7 weeks and never seen the light of day?    And what if raising the chickens produces less CO2 and greenhouse gases?   

Worrying about my food

I noticed this tweet via Andrew Revkin over the holidays:

I'm starting to get worried that I'm starting to develop a guilty conscience over meat eating.

I'm not entirely sure of the metrics I use to avoid worrying about animal life and suffering.   Can 7 weeks as a broiler hen in a shed ever be called a happy life?   Should I worry too much about what a hen would like to be doing, given that left alone, they'll spend a lot of time fighting other hens anyway (depending on living conditions, though, I guess.)   But what about the rooster chicks in the egg industry who get conveyor-belted into a grinder while they are still cheeping because they were born with the wrong genitals?  Is that more or less "tragic" than  being fed in a shed for 6 weeks purely to put on weight and having bodies that couldn't cope in the wild anyway?   

And 65 billion chickens a year killed to satisfy our fried chicken lust?  Seems a bit, well, excessive.  I mean, we do factor in numbers in assessing degree of tragedy involving death - should that also apply in some complicated fashion to working out if the egg industry or the broiler meat industry is the "worst" in terms of least justified termination of animal lives?

Look, I don't think I am ever in any danger of worrying about interfering with the life (or life enjoyment) of a prawn, or fish.   But when it comes to mammals and chickens, it's starting to feel complicated. 

Perhaps I should feel more sympathy for relatively smart creatures like cattle fearing what's coming at the abattoir, but at least they have gotten "more out of life" by having lived in the sunshine for a number of years before meeting their fate.   (At least in this country.) 

But back to the other hand - in terms of environmental impact, I think it's pretty well acknowledged that chicken does way less harm than big mammal farming.

And if I concede on chicken, there is a danger I'll start to fret about certain things further down the evolutionary scale - I recently saw this at the back of food market in Chinatown, Singapore:

Now look, I don't even like frogs, but looking at a bunch piled up, some peering out of the cage; one with its little, um, hand on the wire:

...and I felt sorry for them.   Of course, they are probably big enough that they would eat a small mouse given half a chance, and I like mice a lot more than I like frogs, so that would change my feelings again. 

Anyway.

I remember reading an essay by Paul Johnson in a collection he put out a decade or so ago, written probably in his 70's, in which he said ageing had made him feel more sympathetic to all life, and that he found himself even giving flies a chance to escape out of the window before reaching for the spray. 

I'm getting a bit worried I am heading the same way... 

This is really bad news

The number of really dangerous irukandji mini-jellyfish stings is really up this year in South East Queensland, and the warnings are that they are only likely to continue heading south.

If people, in 20 years times, are going to be worried about stings requiring hospitalisation from swimming at, say, my beloved Noosa Heads, it will be pretty bad for tourism.

From the Guardian:

Twenty-two people have been hospitalised this summer with Irukandji stings – which are so severe they can cause brain haemorrhages and a debilitating sensation of impending doom, known as Irukandji syndrome....

....the potentially fatal Irukandji stings – especially near Queensland’s Fraser Island – are sparking the most concern.

Prof Jamie Seymour from James Cook University said the density of Irukandji, a species of box jellyfish, and the rate of stings had been steadily growing in southern Queensland as sea waters warmed.

“We published a paper some years back looking at Irukandji syndrome in Queensland and we had a look at the number of stings,” he said. “Fifty years ago the southernmost sting for Irukandji was in the Whitsundays, and now the southernmost sting is Mooloolaba beach. And if you look at the number of stings at Fraser Island, they are steadily increasing. More and more animals are getting down there....

“In Queensland alone, we put more people in hospital due to Irukandji stings than shark attacks, crocodile attacks and snake bites combined. This is something that we need to address now. I can see a time when we have to shut major beaches on the Sunshine Coast. It is going to happen.”

He added that the current spate of stings at Fraser Island was due to “a perfect storm” of conditions: warmer water, more Irukandji and more people in the ocean during the Christmas holidays.

“You have hot water down there which is 29 or 30C, which is unheard of,” he said. “The animals love that sort of thing. The people being stung are on the western side of Fraser Island, where it is nice and calm, and this has coincided with the Christmas break where you have more people in the water.”

The new socialists

Of course, I think the rise of American youth and politicians labelling themselves as "socialist" is mostly a function of the American Right going nuts and so stupid and extreme that it has made the use of the formerly dubious label look reasonable in response.    (Part of this being the way the Right itself, using it foolishly as a boogeyman scare word - whereby other Western nations' health care systems are "socialist medicine"  for example - have drained it of its historical meaning,  and the reaction tends to be "if that's socialism, count me in!")

But it would seem that Jacobin magazine, which I have noticed being tweeted by respectable people like Peter Whiteford, might be able to claim some of the credit too.   

Here's a lengthy article, which I must admit I haven't read carefully yet, about its creator.

  

Trans, gay and snowflake all in one day

I've been watching SBS/Viceland a lot lately, and I don't think that it is conceivably possible for the network to give any greater promotion to that British "we've got a transgender boy/girl and we have to fight for his right to stop puberty" drama, Butterfly.    (I have the read the synopsis, and that is indeed what it is about.)   It's hard to believe that people who have seen the same ad about 5,000 times over the space of a few weeks could possibly still want to see the actual show, such is the annoyance factor of such intense repeat exposure.

It's also extremely hard for me not to see the show as assisting to promote at least some degree of social contagion of the idea that gender issues are at the heart of many emotionally fragile children's unhappiness.   And it's coming from Britain - which, I am sure I have noted some years ago in one of my more "cranky conservative" sounding assessments - seems to have transformed in the space of 50 years from the nation that used to go out of its way to unnecessarily punish gay men, to the one which is the most intensely celebratory of everything gay/transgender.    Is it all down to the public school system?   There must be some explanation.  

And when SBS is not running the Buterfly promo, it's likely showing the other extreme high rotation advertisement, the one for a new series of  Benjamin Law's slight autobiographical comedy The Family Law.   While Law himself seems witty and smart when I occasionally see him on TV,  this show about a younger version of himself is dull, not very funny, and barely worthy of a light comedy budget -  even though it may give some deserving Australian Asian actors a badly needed income.   The latest series seems to have the young Law coming out to his family, dressing gayly, and screaming as his mother opens the door while he's doing - something.   Gee, never seen something like that gag before.  The ads make it look very tired and past its use by date. 

That said, it's no where near as bad as some past SBS "home grown" content -  anyone would have to admit, Housos made The Family Law look like Altman in comparison.  I have no idea what goes on in the comedy commissioning mind of SBS - but it's not good.

And back to Britain:   that PR campaign for the Army would have to be the most ill conceived and readily mocked advertising idea since - doh, I'll get back to you as soon as I think of a more atrocious advertising idea.  Apparently, the "snowflake" soldier is threatening to quit, and the someone from an advertising agency (who I like to hear in the voice of Rick in The Young Ones)  gives some delightfully British wanky defence of it all:  

Although, for Dan Cullen-Shute, chief executive and founder of creative shop Creature of London the ads have "got everyone talking".

"It also looks beautiful. I make no apology for applauding that," he wrote in The Drum.

Responding to criticism on Twitter that the campaign copy had been written "by an old man", Shute added: "I don’t believe you have to be the target audience to write about the target audience. I know that’s a slightly contentious belief to hold nowadays, but I stand by it.

"It’s our job in advertising to understand people brilliantly, and then to craft compelling stuff that makes them think, act, or feel differently.

Yeah.

To be honest, the campaign is an embarrassment but in an interesting way.  It's like you can hear the pitch for it in the boardroom:   "we need to reassure the self involved, overly sensitive, short attention span, annoying youngsters of today that we can see what's good and worthy deep inside of them"; but in execution it's impossible not to read the posters as meaning just "Hey, if you're an annoying young prat, like the arrogant jock pictured here, come work for us. We love arrogant prats."

Amuses me

Headline at The Onion:

Hillary Launches Campaign To Raise $100 Million Or Else She’ll Run For President

Opium wars revisited

While not knowing a lot about it, I have always wondered why the West, generally speaking, doesn't seem to spend any time feeling at least a bit guilty about the Opium War of the 19th century.

There's a handy summary of what led to it, including opposition to the idea in Britain, in this review at TLS.   Good to know that it was controversial in its day.   For example:

And as news of opium seizures and rumours of war reached the British public, which previously had little knowledge of the business, a vocal movement against opium and conflict with China quickly mobilized. The strongest, and best-organized, opposition came from working-class activists and the Chartist reform movement, which recognized the parallels between opium use abroad and gin abuse at home as methods of capitalist control. After Elliot’s convoy opened fire on a fleet of Chinese war junks while repairing from Macao to Hong Kong – the preliminary battle of the Opium War – an editorial in The Charter condemned “this contemptible category of businessmen and politicians . . . who behave like thieves and bullies gloating over the prospects of the bloodshed”.

Some critics feared that Britain was risking its entire future trade for the vaguest, most impetuous goals, as national self-regard consumed long-term strategic thinking. Others focused on the military consequences of engaging the Chinese, warning that it wouldn’t be as easy an affair as pro-war advocates like Jardine had argued. Platt quotes the opinion of an English captain of the Hyderabad army, who conceded that in the short run a small British expedition could invade China, but “what then would be gained?” other than provoking the Qing dynasty into mobilizing its vast resources and turning itself into a formidable power against which “the combined nations of Europe would hardly compete”.

When Parliament finally took up the question of war in April 1840, those opposed to attacking China were scattered throughout the benches. Some, like the former Whig-turned-Tory MP James Graham, conjured the Sinomania of the eighteenth century, designating China a civilized part of the earth, where language, laws and feelings of pride had been transmitted without interruption for centuries, and whose people boasted “of their education, of their printing, of the civilisation, of their arts, all the conveniences and many of the luxuries of life existing there, when Europe was still sunk in barbarism, and when the light of knowledge was obscure in this western hemisphere”. From the other side, the Secretary at War and arch promoter of empire, Thomas Macaulay, countered that the Chinese were brutes slowing the inexorable tailwinds of History. Perhaps the most surprising intervention came from George Staunton, who as a young boy had accompanied Macartney’s ill-fated mission to China in 1793, during which he had spoken briefly with the Emperor. He was Britain’s leading Sinologist, and had done more than anyone to promote respectful opinions of China. But he was a patriot, too, and a great believer in British prestige, which, in the end, countermanded his Oriental sympathies. As he saw it, the Empire was held together by force of opinion, and any show of weakness in China could ripple out and distress the foundations of British rule in India. Lin’s provocations harmed British trade in China, he said, but they also challenged the imperium as a whole.

MPs voted 271 to 262 in favour of war, a “lukewarm” blessing in Platt’s words. The irony was that most of the Canton trades didn’t much care about the events of 1839, and the showdown between Lin and Elliot. They just wanted to be compensated for the opium they had lost, something Elliot promised the British government would see to. But there were those among them for whom British force served grander commercial aims, including free access to ports and the coastline, as well as favourable treaties that boosted trade. Jardine worked sub rosa to ensure that a war for reparations became a war that would crack China open to commerce.

Read the whole thing, though.

Time and physics

Two arXiv papers that have caught my attention:

*  From someone working in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this one is hard to follow after the introduction, and I have no idea whether there are any grounds to suspect a "compactified special time co-ordinate" really exists.  Still, sounds interesting:

*  Sometimes I read arXiv papers which I think are likely to be considered important - even though it seems I am not often right.  [I still want to know what other physicists thought of this paper from China that I noticed nearly two ago, as it seemed to say something important about quantum mechanics fundamentals.  But I have read nothing about it.] 

Anyway, here I'll take a stab at another paper that seems to have a potentially important idea:  Time Dilation as Quantum Tunneling Time. 

The abstract doesn't do it justice.   The point seems to be that (although I think this is perhaps a controversial point) experiments have shown that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous, and this may have big implications:

 Tunneling times of 80-100 attosecs were measured for their system. Tunneling can in some sense be understood as the collapse of a superposition of two spatial location for a particle. The wave function represents the probability that a particle can exist in various locations. For a particle with a finite barrier interposing itself on the wave function, some of those locations will be outside of the barrier and some inside. Thus it can be said to exist in a superposition of being behind the barrier and outside of it. The collapse of this superposition is what is measured when tunneling time is measured. Given this, one might expect that the collapse of a state function for entangled states also wouldn’t occur instantaneously. Generally this could imply that the update to quantum mechanical state information requires a non-zero time. The question of non-zero collapse time for an entangled pair can and should be settled by experiment as it was done for quantum tunneling time. If this is true then we have a mechanism which could explain the microscopic relative behavior of time in a higher mass-energy location.  ....

They then have a go at suggesting they can derive the mass energy time dilation formula based on the quantum tunneling time, and they seem to come up with a plausible result. Here's the discussion at the end:

This attempt to derive the mass-energy time dilation equation using the tunneling time formula from quantum mechanics has the appeal that one can recover a believable quantum correlation distance proportional to the causal light cone. As well as a vacuum energy density consistent with older and higher estimates is also recovered. This might be significant since a large issue in reconciling quantum mechanics with General relativity has been accounting for the large vacuum energy density predicted by quantum mechanics. Here the large energy density follows, as a natural consequence of this derivation.

Starting with the gravitational time dilation equation one should be able to re-derive Einstein’s field equations. Here the governing idea is that mass-energy slows the update of quantum states due to the finite time it takes to update quantum correlations in parallel. It is this differential in time updates which drives the emergence of the force of gravitation.

But whether this is just another theoretical physics mis-step - who knows?

  

A very, very late movie review - Barry Lyndon

I had noticed ages ago that Barry Lyndon was on Netflix, and I've lived in fear for months that I would check again when finally deciding to watch it only to find it had been removed.

But happily (sort of), I have been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days and decided yesterday to really rest properly, which presented the perfect opportunity to spent an afternoon in front of the TV.

In short, I reckon it's very good; much lighter in tone and more enjoyable than I expected.

Down memory lane for a moment - I think at the time it came out (1975) my mother might still have bought some long defunct movie magazine and I may have first read about it there.   (She didn't go to the movies all that often, but I think it was more a case of really liking to see photos of her favourite stars - such as Paul Newman and [especially] Robert Redford.)   So I have long known its reputation for painterly composition and leisurely pace.  The technical innovations that allowed for a lot of scenes to be shot in natural candlelight I perhaps read about later.   I also have long known it didn't exactly attract a big audience on first release.

It is considerably better than that reputation - although I can see how the downbeat ending (which I presume comes from the book) may have left audiences feeling a bit underwhelmed.  (Actually, the Wikipedia entry on it says that critic's views of the film have been revised upwards since it first appeared, so my positive feeling towards it is not alone.)

Most significantly, I think it's Kubrick's most realistic depiction of human character.   I've long said he seemed to have real trouble writing normal human behaviour and character, not that it meant his films could not be great for other reasons.   But there does seem to me to be a lot of ordinary humanity in much of Barry Lyndon, and it's pleasing to see.

One very obvious thing that keeps happening in the film (especially in the first half - or did I just stop noticing it so much in the second half?) is a gradual zoom out to show the larger vista.  I'm not sure what the thinking behind the repeated use is, but it is not displeasing.

Oh, that's right - now that I Google it, I think I might have watched this Youtube commentary (I'll link to it at a Reddit thread devoted to the topic) about this aspect of the movie years ago, and it has a really good go at explaining the significance of its use.   Sounds pretty convincing to me, and also makes me glad I'm not a student of film having to come up with my own interpretations of cinematic language and intent!

Other things the movie made me Google:

*  whatever happened to Ryan O'Neal?   I didn't  think he was too bad in the movie, even though it seems many critics felt the acting could have been better.  I had forgotten entirely what a troubled personal life O'Neal has had.  He's 77 and still with us, but both he and at least his son has had frequent trouble with drug use, sleeping around a lot and generally dissolute behaviour.   Looking back, it's actually easy to argue that he has followed something like a downwards trajectory of the character in the movie.

*  what about those stick on beauty spots wore by both women and men in the film?     There are several websites which explain their history and context:  this one is pretty good, and this shorter blog entry mentions that, apart from velvet, they could be made from mouseskin (!), and it also gives the secret code behind facial placement:

the middle of the forehead - dignified

the middle of the cheek - bold

heart shape to the right cheek - married

heart shape to the left cheek - engaged or committed to a lover

touching edge of lower lip - discreet

on nasolabial fold - playful

near corner of the eye - on the look out for a new 'friend’

beside the mouth - will kiss but go no further

And so on….

I wonder what the source of that information is, and whether obsessive Kubrick was ordering placement of the spots on his actors with some knowledge of its code.   (He was such a detail nutter, it would be no surprise if he was.)

*  I see from this lengthy essay that Kubrick cut down the book a lot, which apparently contains much more farcical and roguish behaviour of the title character than appears in the movie. 

So, go watch it if you've missed it and have Netflix.

Catholics in comedy

I seem to have missed last month a column in the Catholic Herald that noted comedians from America who are Catholic (or at least, of Catholic background):

In any case, one area where Catholics have excelled is comedy: Fred Allen, Dom DeLuise, John Candy, Chris Farley, Bob Newhart, Bill Murray, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Kevin James, Jay Mohr and a host of others have all practised the Faith with varying degrees of intensity. Bob Hope converted late in life after decades of marriage to his devout wife, Dolores, and endowed two statues of Our Lady of Pontmain: at the parking lot outside his parish church in North Hollywood, and with an accompanying altar and chapel at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. Naturally, that particular apparition is also called “Our Lady of Hope”.

Well, there are a lot of names there that I did not know had a Catholic background, and although I don't know the work of all, I would have to say that, overall, that list seems to comprise a bunch of quite likeable actors/comedians.   (Did the author cull from the list any that I would find offensive, I wonder?) 

Anyway, just goes to show the value of Catholicism - it might make for nicer comedians.  :)

Economic genius

As he had done previously, Trump tweets as if it is other countries that have to pay tariffs to the US:

I would love to know the percentage of his "base" which thinks this is how tariffs work. 

I would also love to know how any economist (hello, Trump cultist Steve Kates) manages to excuse such lack of knowledge which is, well, about as basic a fact of economic and trade policy as you can get.   Can't any economics adviser get it into the Trump skull that he's making himself look foolish by continually giving the impression that he thinks other countries pay the tariff?

In other, tariff related news, I was interested to read Yglesias's column at Vox suggesting that Apple's problems in China are perhaps not all that tariff related:

Of course, this assumes that Trump’s saber-rattling and tariffs are the real source of Apple’s China sales woes.

There’s some reason to doubt that. After all, in May 2017, before any of this trade stuff was heating up, technology analyst Ben Thompson predicted Apple would suffer iPhone XS sales problems in China, not because of trade but because of WeChat. Chinese people use WeChat for everything, which makes smartphone operating systems less important:

Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz tried to explain in 2015 just how integrated WeChat is into the daily lives of nearly 900 million Chinese, and that integration has only grown since then: every aspect of a typical Chinese person’s life, not just online but also off is conducted through a single app (and, to the extent other apps are used, they are often games promoted through WeChat).

There is nothing in any other country that is comparable, particularly the Facebook properties (Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp) to which WeChat is commonly compared. All of those are about communication or wasting time: WeChat is that, but it is also for reading news, for hailing taxis, for paying for lunch (try and pay with cash for lunch, and you’ll look like a luddite), for accessing government resources, for business. For all intents and purposes WeChat is your phone, and to a far greater extent in China than anywhere else, your phone is everything.

Whether you own an Android phone or an iPhone, if you’re in China, you are using the same WeChat app to do basically everything. Outside of China, Apple’s sales proposition is phone hardware and a unique operating system. In China, it’s really just the hardware. Thompson predicted this would spell trouble for Apple whenever it tried to market a phone in China that didn’t look new. And right now Apple is trying to market the iPhone XS, a phone that looks identical to the iPhone X.

I did notice on my short holiday to Singapore and Malaysia that Samsung and (more surprisingly) Oppo had a very big store front presence in those countries.  Lots of posters for a new Huawei phone in the Singapore MRT stations, too.  

Yes, it seems Apple has lost the innovation edge.

Update:  a slightly more detailed explanation of the effect of tariffs from Business Insider, just so I can't be accused of not understanding that tariffs may affect Chinese trader's profits indirectly:

“A tariff is a tax on imported goods. Despite what the President says, it is almost always paid directly by the importer (usually a domestic firm), and never by the exporting country,” Gleckman wrote. “Thus, if the US imposes a tariff on Chinese televisions, the duty is paid to the US Customs and Border Protection Service at the border by a US broker representing a US importer, say, Costco.”

Facing a higher cost for the imported goods, US importers can decide to either absorb the increased costs into their margins – thus lowering profits and possibly forcing cost cuts elsewhere – or pass on the cost increases on to consumers to make up the difference.

“A business will, if it can, pass its higher after-tax costs on to consumers,” Gleckman wrote. “Thus, the price of Chinese TVs sold in the US may rise rapidly.”

So while the Treasury Department may be collecting more tax revenue because of the tariffs, most of the money is ultimately coming from US businesses and American consumers, rather than from China.

Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, highlighted this problem in a December note to clients after Trump’s tweet in which he dubbed himself “Tariff Man.” The economist said some Chinese exporters may be forced to take lower margins to get their product to the US, but also asserted that American consumers would be the biggest losers.

“Tariffs are a tax on consumers, primarily, though some of the hit might be borne by Chinese exporters, forced to accept lower margins. But for the president to boast that the U.S. is ‘taking in billions’ on tariffs makes no sense at all,” Shepherdson wrote. “The ostensible objective of the tariffs is to force China to negotiate a new trading relationship with the US, not to raise money – from U.S. consumers! – for the federal government.”