Floods and economics considered

The recent monsoonal rainfall event in North Queensland has certainly been devastating to the cattle industry:

The latest estimate is that 500,000 cattle have perished in the floods. That is a death toll of biblical proportions.

At a value of $1000 a head, that’s $500 million worth of livestock gone.

But this is about more than the dollars.

Many of these cattle have been kept alive by desperate farmers who have battled seven years of drought — drought that continues despite one dump of rain. They have spent thousands of dollars on fodder they can no longer remember once growing themselves.

The toll on those farmers is enormous. Unthinkable even.

Agforce chief executive Michael Guerin rightly described it as a “massive humanitarian crisis”.
“The loss of hundreds of thousands of cattle after five, six, seven years of drought is a debilitating blow, not just to individual farmers, but to rural communities,” said Mr Guerin, whose organisation is the state farming association.

Looking to the future, the CSIRO openly admits that it is very difficult to be sure of the long term rainfall effects of climate change in Australia.   I thought they generally expected North Australia to get wetter, but Southern Australia to dry out, but the Climate Change in Australia website says this about the Monsoonal North:

Providing confident rainfall projections for the Monsoonal North cluster is difficult because global climate models offer diverse results, and models have shortcomings in resolving some tropical processes. Natural climate variability is projected to remain the major driver of rainfall changes in the next few decades.

By late in the century, rainfall projections have low confidence. Potential summer rainfall changes are approximately -15 to +10 per cent under an intermediate emission scenario (RCP4.5) and approximately -25 to +20 per cent under a high scenario (RCP8.5). Per cent changes are much larger in winter in some models, but these changes are less reliable because average winter rainfall is very low.

Impact assessment in this region should consider the risk of both a drier and wetter climate.

They do, however, expect extreme rainfall events to increase:

Despite uncertainty in future projections of total rainfall for the Monsoonal North cluster, an understanding of the physical processes that cause extreme rainfall, coupled with modelled projections, indicate with high confidence a future increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall events. However, the magnitude of the increases cannot be confidently projected.

Drought will continue to be a feature of the regional climate variability, but projected changes are uncertain.

In terms of risk, let me muse this:   the problem is surely with the frequency with which extremes occur - if a flood of this kind that formerly happened only once in (say) 100 - 300 years starts to occur 2 to 3 times within a lifetime (say, every 20 - 30 years), you can readily imagine that certain agricultural enterprises will just abandon that form of land use due to the "wipeouts" coming at such a rate that it becomes too much of a risk, even if you can get some good years out of it in the intervening years.

This is why I am completely sceptical of economic predictions of the effect of climate change:  even if you make guesses on whether certain regions become generally wetter or drier (and therefore more or less potentially agriculturally productive), the confounding factor is in the details of the frequency of wet or dry disasters within the big picture.  

There's no way of confidently predicting that at the moment, so how can you deal with it in economic models?

Mars One on the way out

I was dismissing the Mars One project as an obvious bit of PR flim flam back in 2015, and I see that it is finally looking as if it is on its last legs.  Although there is a mystery investor who may be stepping in, apparently.

I wouldn't put it past being Peter Theil - he's nutty and rich enough.

Singapore holiday - Part 1

Well, let's get going with a post about my recent Christmas holiday to Singapore, with side trip to Malacca.

I hadn't been to Singapore for about 17 years, and although I have probably been there three times before, they were all fairly brief stays.  Maybe 2 to 3 nights each?

It has changed a lot since the 1980's when I first went there.

This time, we stayed down in the Chinatown area, which, stupidly, I don't think I had ever wandered into before.  To be perfectly honest, in previous trips, I find it hard remembering going anywhere much further afield than Orchard Road and the area around Raffles.  (I did actually spend one night at the famous hotel, alone, in the 1980's, no doubt before the last couple of renovations.  The place is yet again under refurbishment, to re-open this year.) 

Anyhow, given the extent of the MRT system now, staying in any of the districts is convenient, but the streets of Chinatown area are pretty attractive in that old Asian terrace house sort of way:

 



That large apartment building you can see - here's a better view from our hotel window (the Amara Hotel, which I highly recommend.)

Singapore loves spectacular and interesting architecture, of course, and that rooftop garden spanning 6 tower blocks reminded me of a poor (OK, modest income) man's Marina Bay Sands Hotel rooftop.

I went for a walk towards that building and found out, completely fortuitously, that you can go to the end block on the left and get a ticket from a tiny,  hidden office to go to the rooftop garden decks for all of $5 (I think).   So the next day, I did exactly that, and took some panorama shots which will look a bit crappy here, but good if not compressed to fit inside Blogger.  (You can click to make them bigger, though.)

The rooftop gardens are nicely kept and quiet - there is no pool (only a imitation one!)


and the area is really for the residents, as this not exactly promoted as a tourist attraction.  The views are very spectacular, though, and I was very happy with the serendipitous discovery that I could get up there:










The thing I had forgotten about Singapore is that, although it's small and now super easy to get around, the reason I had been there a few times before and never got around to doing the tourist hits like the zoo and Sentosa Island is because the ridiculous humidity means you just want to be indoors between 10 am and 6pm, and getting inside good airconditioning makes it difficult to go outside again.

Fortunately, the biggest tourist attraction now - the Gardens by the Bay, behind the Marina Bay Sands Hotel - has air-conditioned conservatories which are spectacular and, of course, very popular:

I didn't realise that Singapore did Christmas with an intensity which I suspect is only surpassed by European countries.  In the gardens outside the conservatories:

If you're wondering what the stuff in the air is, it's fake snow (sort of soap foam, I think) that gets blown out at the end of the Christmas music and light show.   People find it exciting, making fake snow in 25 degrees and high humidity - who am I to question the logic of it!

And you know what - that was the only big tourist attraction we got to!   Still haven't been to the zoo or Sentosa.  But we did see more spectacular architecture:



I love the way so many buildings incorporate plants - including this hotel, near ours in Chinatown, nearly completely vine covered.

And, of course, there is the spectacular Marina Bay Sands Hotel with fancy shopping centre below it:

 









I was interested to read about the engineering of the building - the infinity pools on the top deck presented a special challenge:

Keeping an edge straight and level is hard enough, but let’s make it harder by putting the pools on top of three tall towers. We know a pool this size is going to be heavy. Yes, we know the towers are going to sink over time as their foundation cause the clayey earth and landfill to shift. Each will subside at a different rate, and each tower may rotate. You can’t expect the ground under each tower to be of even density and hardness. Yes, the wind will cause the maximum deflection at the top of the towers, also differently for each tower. But you’re engineers. You’ll figure something out. That infinity pool must work.

The weight of the pool was going to be staggering. When full, the three pools held 380,000 gallons (1.44 million liters) of water. Add to that the 422,000 pounds (191,000 kgs) of stainless steel that formed the bulk of the pool structure, and then the 250.000 ceramic tiles cemented on…

Support of the stationary weight was one thing, and keeping the whole deal flat was another. Arup, the firm hired to complete structural analysis of the towers, could handle stationary weight. Since they were roof top pools, a specialist was brought in: Natare Corp., a pool manufacturer on the other side of the world in Indiana. Natare devised a system of hydraulic jacks, 500 of them, that would level the pool no matter the movement of the towers. Though the lateral movement of the towers could be almost 20 in, the jacks were able to keep the wall to within 4 mm over the entire 478 ft length (146 m).

That ride in the shopping centre looked a bit too "Las Vegas" to me, but its fun to watch the swirling water from above anyway.    The public areas outside of the hotel and shopping centre are very attractive, though:

 

The Cathedral of the Good Shepherd is one of the few old buildings I photographed - mainly because I really don't think it looks particularly Catholic in architectural design.   (Looks more like what I imagine would be American Episcopal.)   But no, I see from its website that it's always been Catholic.    It was full to overflowing on Christmas Day, and I stood outside in the still withering humidity at 6pm listening to a very cloying American style sermon, as it happens.  I don't know whether the Singaporean Church stands in terms of the current slow moving crisis between modernisers and conservatives - it would be interesting to know.    You would think the Chinese in it would not be eager to normalise gay relationships - but then again, I know of a gay chinese couple (from Singapore originally) in Australia who have been making babies via surrogacy - so who knows.

 

Oh, here's another old-ish building - the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Chinatown [wait a minute - no it's not - I didn't read carefully about it, obviously - it was only started to be built in 2005! I thought I had read it was an old, refurbished temple, but apparently not.]   Anyway, it which has some massive works going on beside it at the moment, detracting a bit from the aesthetics.

We stopped during a rather popular looking service was going on:

 

Singapore seems keen to promote itself as clean and green - certainly, I was on the look out for the otters that are now famous, but I never spotted them.  I did see movement in the bushes beside the water at Gardens by the Bay, and thought it might be one, but it turned out to be a monitor lizard instead: 

The cutest wild animal I got to see was a squirrel:

I had never known they were on Singapore, although I had read about an Asian squirrel colony that had set itself up in Perth some years.

There is much more to be said about Singapore and how much I like it, despite the heat.   Here's a list of various thoughts:

*  on the downside, apart from window shopping, it really is hard to find anything free to do that is in airconditioned comfort.  I think every single art gallery and museum has an entry fee:  the Singaporean government seem to have no concept of completely funding such facilities, and despite its riches, moneyed Singaporean families don't seem to have spent their money this way either.  Anyway, it still means there is much for me to see.

*  I'm not entirely sold on it being that great a place to eat - I mean, I do tend to worry about the degree of refrigeration used in the cheaper hawker centre outlets, which are also routinely too hot most of the day to be comfortable;  and just before I went on this holiday, a Singaporean couple (not the gay guys mentioned above) recommended I eat in Tangs Department store if I wanted cheap, good food that would be safe to eat.  (I did, and it was good.)   Hotel food tends to be great, of course, and you can do OK in food court outlets in terms of price too.   But overall,  I find Japan is the best country to swoon over food, and never worry about its safety.

* It seems to be that, in broad terms, Chinese Singaporeans are always cheery and good to deal with;  Indian Singaporeans can be OK, but are sometimes grumpy, and Malayas working there are often not particularly cheery at all.   Does this just reflect their general economic standing in the country?

* There are an amazing amount of Australian produce in Singaporean supermarkets now.   The country imports 90% of its food - although I was reading the government is trying to increase self sufficiency in some things.   I think it takes half of its water from Johor as well, although I saw something about a desalination plant on a Youtube video as well.  

*  Tiger Beer is still a good, standard beer.   Craft beer seems not to have had the same impact there yet as in other countries.

*  The MRT is great, although it could do with more ticketing machines in most stations.  

*  Singapore has heated up much more rapidly than the rest of the world in recent decades, but that is acknowledged as being in large part due to the massive urban heat island effect of the place":

The island is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world - at 0.25 degrees Celsius per decade - according to the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS). It is almost 1 deg C hotter today than in the 1950s.

 But there is no scepticism at all to be found in Singaporean government websites or media about climate change and the potential threat from it.  In fact, there is a video shown at the end of one of the Gardens by the Bay conservatories which is full of warnings about climate change and the need to address it - and I found that the largely Asian audience was paying close attention to it, too.

Climate change scepticism is a mugs game for American Right wing players and their Australian and English sycophants, primarily.  

Apart from the humidity, I thought it very noticeable that Singapore doesn't seem to have breezes, despite being surrounded by water.  Not sure why that would be, but I see someone else on Reddit saying the same, so it's just not me.

*  Channel News Asia is very good for local Asian news and stories.  There was one about a popular young Iman in Indonesia who is very influential via social media (and he is a convert from Catholicism!)  I must track that down, it was very interesting.


Overall, given that I like stylish urban development, eye popping architecture, fantastic infrastructure, a distinctly pro-environment sentiment about the place, and a mix of cultures that hardly spend any time fighting each other - I really like it.   As someone wrote somewhere, it does have a Disneyland vibe - lets build a new city from the ground up and see how cool we can make it look and work. 

I want to visit again.

I will do a separate post about the side trip to Malacca: this one is long enough.

Push and shove at Tim's place

Tim Wilson's not-very-merry band of "don't touch my government refund of tax I didn't pay" retirees are getting pushy:

Margaret Chuck, 63, was the lone speaker in favour of Labor's policy and was repeatedly booed by the crowd during her presentation.

"This is not money these people have earned. This money comes out of other taxpayers' pockets in such a large amount that it would cover the funding of public schools all across Australia," she said to groans from the audience....

....one man..interrupted the beginning of the Chatswood session by repeatedly yelling "this process is a sham" and "this process is a scam".

The man was forcibly removed by other attendees - during which he tripped and fell over, prompting the crowd to cheer and clap. Asked if there was a security presence, Mr Wilson said: "No, because we don't normally have this childish behaviour."

Bad judgement continues

I've noted before that Sinclair Davidson has a solid history of bad (and self serving, for a libertarian) calls on Royal Commissions, and I see he is still at it:

But, to his credit, Ken Henry spoke truth to power when he appeared at the Banking Royal Commission late last year. Yes, he was arrogant – treating the Commission with the contempt that it deserved being as it was a political hit job by the Labor and National parties. 

I do perversely wish the Coalition would pay more attention to him and his eccentric priorities, as it would ensure their demise is deeper and longer.

Astronomer likes to speculate

Abraham Loeb was the key guy suggesting that the recent asteroid Oumuamua was possibly an alien probe, and he like to think science fiction-y thoughts generally, it seems from this Scientific American piece he wrote:

Meeting a piece of advanced technological equipment developed by an extraterrestrial intelligence might resemble an imaginary encounter of ancient cave people with a modern cell phone. At first, they would interpret it as a shiny rock, not recognizing it as a communication device. The same thing might have happened in reaction to the first detection of an interstellar visitor to the solar system, ‘Oumuamua, which showed six peculiar properties but was nevertheless interpreted as a rock by mainstream astronomers.

Because it would likely be relatively small, most advanced equipment could only be recognized in the darkness of space when it comes close enough to our nearest lamppost, the sun. We can search for technological “keys” under this lamppost, but most of them will stay unnoticed if they pass far away. More fundamentally, one may wonder whether we are able to recognize technologies that were not already developed by us. After all, these technologies might feature subtle purposes—like the cell phone communication signals that a cave person would miss.

He then talks a bit about directed panspermia - the idea that Earth was seeded for life deliberately by alien probes.

Have I ever said this out loud before? - I have long imagined a science fiction comedy starting with a scene in which a UFO lands on a barren Earth for an alien toilet break, and that's how life gets started here.

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.