The big double standard continues

This is topical - Trump talked about stopping HIV transmission in his State of the Union speech (something Conservatives commentary has made no mention of, as far as I have seen - no doubt because it hardly accords with their priorities).   Amusingly, I heard someone say that this idea appealed to Trump because he had so much feared catching it himself from his random sexual encounters in the AIDS heyday.   Sounds a very likely explanation.

Anyway, clearly a crucial tactic for this will be to increase use of PrEP, which allows users to greatly reduce any chance of catching it even with unsafe sex.

But, as I have written before, people do question the tactic if it's going to vastly increase the risk of other STDs spreading through the community.   This should be a particular concern when drug resistant strains of things like gonorrhoea are starting to really be a worry. This is the topic of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, discussed here.

Generally speaking, it argues that doctors should not worry about the "risk compensation" rise of unsafe sex amongst those on PrEP.   But look at the reason given:

"PrEP does not protect against non-HIV sexually transmitted infections, but concerns about risk compensation do not justify withholding PrEP," said lead author Julia Marcus, Assistant Professor of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School. "According to the World Health Organization, sexual health is not only the absence of disease, but a holistic state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality. By enabling condomless sex with less fear of HIV transmission, PrEP has the potential to facilitate the intimacy and pleasure that can enhance sexual well-being for many people."

As the authors note, however, previous studies have suggested that clinicians may discount the importance of the psychological aspects of sexual health.

Look, the aspect of this that seems to be a case of self induced blindness when it comes  to considering gay folk is this:    no one is at risk of catching HIV if they are in a monogamous relationship with a HIV negative person.    But now the argument is that it's crucial to gay men's psychological sexual health to be able to have casual sex with men without a condom.

It is surely a clear case of a double standard here:    a straight man who picks up a woman at a club and has unprotected sex with her that night that results in pregnancy or an STD is going to be thought of at least as someone who made a mistake and let his libido override his common sense.

A straight man who for years goes out regularly and keeps sleeping with women he's just met without a condom is going to be thought of as really pretty dumb, and no one is going to be surprised if he catches a STD or ends up an unexpectedly father.

Surely doctors or friends knowing that's how he's living such a lifestyle are going to say "look, we know condoms don't feel great, but they are pretty reliable and it's not as if you are going to be using them the rest of your life.   If you get a proper girlfriend who you trust as monogamous, and you are too, and that she's using reliable contraception, then you can pretty safely drop the condoms."

How much freaking concern is a friend or doctor of such a straight young man going to have that telling him to use a condom is going to hurt his psychological sexual health?   I think we all know the answer - none whatsoever.

But with gay men, apparently they cannot be psychologically happy if they can't have condomless sex at any stage of their life in any circumstances.

I cannot get over the feeling that PrEP's widespread use is a form of too much indulgence of hedonism, and for just one sector of the community. 

Saletan on the State of the Union

Seems to me that the State of the Union addresses from any US President are weird bits of self serving, insincere theatre, and it's a bit hard to understand why more commentators don't just say that instead of poring over every detail.

I suppose that with a person as dumb, changeable and narcissistic as Trump, the speech might be worth paying attention to if it gives any indication of which way the wind blows with him:  but the problem is, everyone knows any view he holds is disposable and not based on any consistent or principled belief.

It's also gobsmacking that anyone, let alone an Australian, can view Trump as giving a good speech of any kind.   His voice, his mannerisms, his mugging very reminiscent of a Mussolini at times, all override content anyway.

But in any case, here's Saletan, one of the best critics on Trump's dangerous nature, discussing the authoritarian aspects of the speech:

The Alarming Message in Trump’s State of the Union

 The president’s speech wasn’t dull. It was dangerous.

About the North magnetic pole

About time I noted the news about the wandering north magnetic pole:  I see that Vox has a good summary:

The locations of magnetic north and south have always been moving targets. Because of that, NOAA and its partners in the UK release an updated magnetic model of the Earth every five years. That way, navigation systems that use magnetic compasses, like those used by airplanes, can be more accurate and correct for the difference between the magnetic poles and the geographic ones.

The next update wasn’t supposed to happen until the end of 2019. But magnetic north has been moving at a rate of 31 miles a year since the last update in 2015 — faster than usual. 

“The pole moved maybe about 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] between 1900 and 1990, and it’s also moved about 1,000 kilometers between the late 1990s and today, so it’s really sped up,” geomagnetic modeler William Brown explained to The Verge.

Baby food

Last week, I discussed an article from The Conversation regarding the advances in meat preservation (refrigeration and canning) in the Victorian era that led to much greater meat consumption in England (and, presumably, elsewhere).

The author noted that there was a bit of push back against imported meat, however, which included this rumour:

In my archival research, I’ve even discovered concerns that boiled human babies were entering the food chain.

By coincidence, I've noticed two other reference to baby eating recently in Netflix shows I've been watching:  Fargo (season 3, which is very eccentric), in which a Russian bad guy talks about parents eating babies during the famines; and The Alienist, with a serial murderer writes a ranting letter about filthy foreigners eating babies.(Or was it kids generally?  I could be wrong there..)

This is a topic of which I know little.  Googling it comes with various bits of information of some interest:

*  some sites note it as a form of the old Jewish blood libel.  It's sort of funny how the rumour was easily transferred from Jews to Christians as the villains.  From a 1976 article:

How come with Christians it became specifically babies?  And then, with Christians, the accusations became of Jews using the blood of children, not babies.   All peculiar, how it changed over time.

*  As for Russians and famine - there are plenty of horrible photos on line, but it would seem anyone (children in particular?) was at risk of being eaten, not specifically babies.

*  More recently, it's the Chinese in particular who have been in the firing line, in significant part because of a stupid performance artist who had photos taken of him eating a fetus, leading Snopes to run an article "Fact Check:  Are human fetuses 'Taiwan's hottest dish'?"  (Most people doubt it was a real fetus in the pics.)

Apparently, this story did a big sweep through tabloids back in 2001, leading to Taiwanese officials complaining to a Malaysian publication:

Government officials have filed a complaint with a Malaysian weekly tabloid that published an unsubstantiated story that an unnamed local restaurant had served human fetuses and the bodies of babies to its customers.

The publication has promised to publish a correction in its next issue.

But there are many other stories on the 'net - usually from tabloid-ish or otherwise unreliable sources - claiming that Chinese doctors eat aborted fetuses for good health (or sexual virility!) 

I have complained before that one big thing that really needs to change about Chinese culture is its stupid belief that eating certain animals gives particular vitality or health benefits.   If people there would spend less time interested in consuming rare and endangered animals for illusory benefits, maybe they would also stop being targetting for rumours of fetus eating, too.

Anyway, this is an unpleasant topic.  Moving on...

Regulatory failure noted

Am I the only person flabbergasted that a high rise apartment building in Melbourne can start to burn up because of cigarette flung off a balcony?

MFB Fire investigators spent most of the day at the apartment building and concluded that the most probable cause was a discarded cigarette that ignited combustible materials stored on the balcony.

The only mild encouragement from that is that at least it doesn't mean that the cladding itself was directly ignited by the cigarette butt.   Some small comfort, though.   The building was apparently audited for safety for its cladding after the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Seriously, what were architects, builders and regulators thinking when putting any "combustible in the right circumstances" material on a high rise building?     Has this practice stopped completely yet?   

Good grief

Pretty much from the "only in America" category, I see a Vox headline:

Why Bible-inspired diets and fitness plans are catching on

Ezekiel bread, the Daniel fast, and Holy Yoga all take their cues from Scripture.

 People who want to get fit, lose weight, and eat more healthfully often turn to trainers and dietitians for advice. But today, they might also to turn to a Bible-inspired or faith-based wellness program. Take actor Chris Pratt. He announced last month in an Instagram story that he was on day three of the Daniel fast.

“It’s 21 days of prayer and fasting,” he explained.

The program takes its name from the Old Testament prophet Daniel. While it’s called a fast, it does not require complete abstinence from food. Instead, “some foods are eaten while others are restricted,” according to the Daniel fast website. Those who go on the fast hope to not only get their weight and diet under control but also draw closer to God.

Look, Pratt is a likeable enough screen presence, but his strange mix of apparent seriousness about religion and willingness to talk a lot of sex jokes (as well as getting divorced with a young son at home) is a bit odd, if you ask me.  And peculiarly American too.

Time travel murder needed

I see that the matter of whether it's ethical (or just a good idea) to go back in time and kill baby Hitler was on the internet recently (see the Vox explainer here); but I have a better idea - someone needs to consider going back in time to kill Dorothy Mackellar.   

If you are not Australian, you may need to be informed:  she was an Australian poet who wrote a piece beloved of primary schools of my era which nearly every Australian (at least over the age of 50) has had to learn. 

The problem:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.   

means that climate change deniers, like those that flood (ha, a bit of a topical pun) Catallaxy, think that the one line in there eans that they never have to admit that record breaking rains and associated floods in Australia are being worsened by climate change. 

OK, maybe she doesn't need to be killed.   Just someone get their hands on that pretty turgid piece of writing and tear it up.   

Tim being a naughty boy

Tim Wilson has been attracting much attention for his ridiculously blatant partisan hijacking of the economics committee.

One wonders - could Victoria polling for Liberals be so bad that even his seat is in danger?  It would explain the hint of desperation that his actions here indicate.

In tech news best kept away from paranoid schizophrenics...

Lasers have been used to send targeted, quiet messages to someone from several meters away, in a way that no one nearby would be able to hear.

How it works: To send the messages, researchers from MIT relied upon the photoacoustic effect, in which water vapor in the air absorbs light and forms sound waves. The researchers used a laser beam to transmit a sound at 60 decibels (roughly the volume of background music or conversation in a restaurant) to a target person who was standing 2.5 meters away. 

A second technique modulated the power of the laser beam to encode a message, which produced a quieter but clearer result. The team used it to beam music, recorded speech, and various tones, all at conversational volume. “This can work even in relatively dry conditions because there is almost always a little water in the air, especially around people,” team leader Charles M. Wynn said in a press release. Details of the research were published in Optics Letters. 

Next steps: In theory, the technique could be used to direct a message to a single person at range, without any receiving equipment. The team plans to get the technique to work outdoors, at longer ranges. It isn’t too much of a stretch to see it being used for military or spying purposes, and of course there’s always the ever-present specter of super-targeted advertising.

The Link.

The 1TB phone will soon be here

Samsung announces it has a new 1TB chip for use in mobiles and tablets.   It is, quite frankly, incredible what is being fit on a chip this size:

On its new drive, despite having the same 13 x 11.5mm dimensions as smaller flash drives, Samsung says its new 1TB module boasts sequential read speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps, twice that of a typical SATA-based laptop SSD. Additionally, random read speeds are allegedly 38 per cent faster than on an equivalent 512GB flash drive, with random writes speeds as much as 500 times higher than a high-performance microSD card.

"Fatherhood" is rarer in nature than I realised

From an AEON essay, by an anthropologist who got into studying fatherhood:

In the first instance, as someone who began her graduate career as a primatologist, I knew that fathers who stick around, rather than hot-footing it as soon as copulation is complete, are vanishingly rare in the primate world, limited to a few South American monkey species and completely absent from the apes, with the exception of ourselves. Indeed, we are among the only 5 per cent of mammals who have investing fathers. I knew that, given the parsimonious nature of evolution, human fatherhood – with its complex anatomical, neural, physiological and behavioural changes – would not have emerged unless the investment that fathers make in their children is vital for the survival of our species.

The whole essay is interesting.  Go read.

Nothing like a good chart, part 2

Nothing like a good chart

Sounds interesting

NPR talks about a film looking at the stories of (some) Jews who chose to "hide in plain sight" from the Nazis in WW2:

Hanni Weissenberg, now Hanni Lévy, survived as a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Today, the petite and lively 94-year-old lives in Paris. Earlier this month, she returned to Berlin, her home during the war years, to attend the screening of a film about her and other Jews who survived while hiding under the noses of the Nazis.

The Invisibles, a German documentary-drama based on the accounts of four survivors, opened Friday in the U.S....

Schieb says about 1,900 Jews survived the war while hiding in and around Berlin.

Comedy and animals

Gee, I'm finding I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from watching Rosehaven on the ABC now.

It's just the best comedy writing and acting in an Australian series since, I dunno, Frontline maybe?   Everyone seems so comfortable in their roles, and you have to imagine they take pleasure in making it.   Who writes it?  I must look it up.

Anyway, last night's return episode featured a pig which they decided to "rescue" from what they presumed was a fatal return to the local butcher.   And oddly, there is a story in The Guardian today about real farmers who have had even larger scale sudden conversions:

A farmer was recently on the road to the abattoir when he changed direction and drove his trailer full of lambs 200 miles to an animal sanctuary instead. Sivalingam Vasanthakumar, 60, from Devon, now plans to grow vegetables.

Vasanthakumar is not the only farmer to perform this kind of reversal. In 2017, Jay Wilde, of Bradley Nook farm in Derbyshire, took his cattle to a sanctuary and decided to become a vegan farmer (the film telling this story, 73 Cows, has been nominated for a Bafta). In the US, the Illinois-based charity Free From Harm has gathered tales of many farmers who have had epiphanies and switched to veganism.

 Why veganism though?   Isn't vegetarianism enough?

Heh

In "vegetarianism is looking a little better" news...

The Illinois State University,  of all places, has developed a high protein rice cultivar:

Utomo and his team developed a high-protein line of rice cultivar, 'Frontière,' which was released in 2017. The rice was developed through a traditional breeding process. It's the first long grain high-protein rice developed for use anywhere in the world, he says. On average, it has a protein content of 10.6%, a 53% increase from its original protein content. It also needs less heat, time, and usually less water to cook. This high-protein cultivar is currently marketed as "Cahokia" rice. It is grown commercially in Illinois.

The article is about how they are not trying to improve yield.

So, how much protein is in food by weight percent, anyway? 

According to this short-ish list from the British Nutrition Foundation, most meats are around 30%;  fish in the low 20's, and beans and other higher protein vegetables around 10% or under.  I'll just copy the whole list:

Meat	Chicken breast (grilled without skin) Beef steak (lean grilled) Lamb chop (lean grilled) Pork chop (lean grilled)	32.0 31.0 29.2 31.6
Fish	Tuna (canned in brine) Mackerel (grilled) Salmon (grilled) Cod (grilled)	23.5 20.8 24.2 20.8
Seafood	Prawns Mussels Crabsticks	22.6 16.7 10.0
Eggs	Chicken eggs	12.5
Dairy	Whole milk Semi-skimmed milk Skimmed milk Cheddar cheese Half-fat cheddar Cottage cheese Whole milk yogurt Low fat yogurt (plain)	3.3 3.4 3.4 25.4 32.7 12.6 5.7 4.8

Plant protein
Pulses	Red lentils Chickpeas	7.6 8.4
Beans	Kidney beans Baked beans Tofu (soya bean steamed)	6.9 5.2 8.1
Grains	Wheat flour (brown) Bread (brown) Bread (white) Rice (easy cook boiled) Oatmeal Pasta (fresh cooked)	12.6 7.9 7.9 2.6 11.2 6.6
Nuts	Almonds Walnuts Hazelnuts	21.1 14.7 14.1

So this new rice is now up above chickpeas and kidney beans.  And tofu.   Look at almonds though!  Eat a friand and it's getting close to eating a piece of mackerel, protein by weight wise.

And peanuts!  Seems that they are 25% protein by weight.  

Learn something new every day.

The alt.right will love this theory...

The title to an article in The Atlantic:

A Bold New Theory Proposes That Humans Tamed Themselves

A leading anthropologist suggests that protohumans became domesticated by killing off violent males.

A few key paragraphs from it:

In fact, Wrangham’s notion of human evolution powered by self-domestication has an ancient lineage: The basic idea was first proposed by a disciple of Aristotle’s named Theophrastus and has been debated several times since the 18th century. This latest version, too, is bound to provoke controversy, but that’s what bold theorizing is supposed to do. And Wrangham is nothing if not bold as he puts the paradox in his title to use. In his telling, the dark side of protohuman nature was enlisted in the evolution of communal harmony.

Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication. Much as the Russian scientists eliminated the fierce fox pups from the breeding pool, our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages (which recalls the patrolling chimps that Wrangham reported on earlier in his career). The twist in his current theory is that such ambushes are turned inward, to protect the group from one of its own: They serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.

The idea is intriguing, and it is indeed true that human hunter-gatherers, whose societies exist without governments, sometimes collectively eliminate bad actors. But such actions are rare, as the Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee emphasized in his extensive studies of the !Kung, which include the report of an unusual case: After a certain man killed at least two people, several other men ambushed and killed him. My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (Female bonobo coalitions would seem primed to serve a similar taming function.)

Modern humans due to the luck of plate tectonics?

Well it's a theory, and if true, not sure what it means about the prospects of highly intelligent life of our kind on other planets.   From a review in Nature of a book "How the Earth Made Us":

In this age of worldwide climatic deterioration, many authors have documented what we are doing to our planet. Lewis Dartnell turns the tables in his book Origins. He asks how Earth has affected us, through our long evolution to big brains, small jaws and scrawny bodies that somehow cooperate with each other enough to make us the planet’s dominant eukaryotic species. All this began, Dartnell argues, with the tectonic processes that created the East African Rift — the area that today runs from Somalia and Ethiopia down to the coast of Mozambique. The uplift of mountains here caused a rain shadow that dried and warmed East Africa, turned jungle into a park-like savannah, and enticed early hominins to leave the trees and become game hunters, runners, thinkers, cooks and, eventually, empire builders.

More educational TV viewed

That Simon Reeve is a likeable, informative host of travel/social commentary documentaries, isn't he?  I have been watching his 2018 BBC series about journeying around the coast of the Mediterranean (on the ABC), and it was very good.

Last night's episode, in large part about the huge, plastic greenhouse market gardens in one part of Spain was particularly surprising.   First, they look ridiculously ugly and obviously environmentally unsound. Second, it would seem most of the labour is dirt poor African migrants who live in ridiculous rented hovels near the gardens, working in (literally) sweathouse conditions which sometimes kills them.  Thirdly, apparently all the UK big chain stores are happy to source their vegetables from there, and don't give a hoot about the conditions of workers.

It seems surprising that this is the first time I have heard of this as an issue.

The episode is one iView, and it looks like elsewhere on line.

I also learned from it that one, ridiculously popular Spanish beach resort area is ugly as, compared to the Gold Coast of Australia.   (And I prefer the Sunshine Coast anyway, which looks like heaven compared to that Spanish resort area.)

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?