Brexit, and Boris

I actually read a piece by Helen Dale about the English political turmoil over Brexit and thought it sounded a plausible enough analysis.   Yet it left me with two thoughts:

a.  for a (now) "card carrying Conservative" who supports Brexit, this is not the first time I have read her commenting about Brexit, and it seems to me that she has always spent very little time on explaining why it will be for the good of the country:  even in this column she says people should treat as exaggerated any forecasts of how bad a "no deal" Brexit will be from Treasury or the Bank of England, but then goes on to list the punishing tariffs that can be expected under it anyway.  It seems that she wants it to be taken very much as a matter of faith that things will be better - eventually.  Instead, she just wants to talk about how terribly messy the politics of it all have become.

b.  she does not mention the lack of preferential voting in the UK as being part of the problem.   This has seemed to me to be an increasingly likely cause of the Parliamentary mess now that the country has 3 key parties in play - although I guess no one can have any idea without very detailed research as to exactly what difference to numbers in Parliament it might make if adopted.   But it makes sense to expect that a system in which local members who most in their electorate don't want to win can still win is a problem, no?

As for the Boris Johnson apparent ascendancy to the Prime Ministership - I think it's clear that he resembles Trump in that he is the beneficiary of a culture war inspired cult of personality that will let him slide past things which would sink any "normal" politician - such as the bizarre matter of getting his girlfriend upset enough that the police were called.  The neighbour who rang the police has had to deny that being a Remainer was his motivation for the call - and one can be certain that the internet's Wingnut flying monkey unit has descended on him and his girlfriend.   The fact that Johnson refuses to talk about what went on in the flat indicates something obviously problematic did.   But the gullible and dumb Right, as with Trump, prefers to believe conspiracy.

As to his suitability for the top job generally, The Guardian has assembled an impressive list of people who have worked with/known him for some time and who all highly critical of his character.   Also, Mary Beard has written about Johnson, who joined her for a charity debate a few years, in a way which also sounds quite accurate - that his problem is:

...a persistent pattern of misrepresentation, of cutting corners for argumentative advantage, and of disguising untruth or partial truth under a fog of enthusiasm and unthinking optimism.

 I expect no good to come out of his leadership. 

The likely truth about the Trump spin on calling off an attack

As Allahpundit at Hot Air explains, no one sensible believes that the Pentagon does not tell the President the number of anticipated casualties for a missile attack on foreign soil until after it is authorised.  And Trump himself has changed the story already, saying the attack had not yet been launched when it was called off, but still claims he was the one who had to ask about casualties, and his "military team" had to go find out to inform him.

Allahpundit, a conservative Trump skeptic, nonetheless flies the kite on a theory that maybe Trump deliberately wanted Iran to think that he was the only person in his administration concerned to not attack the country unnecessarily, so they ought to trust him in negotiations.  

A far more likely explanation:  because two of his prime advisers - Hannity and Carlson on Fox News - are in disagreement about going to war with Iran, Trump doesn't know what he should do.   Erring for once on the side of caution, his narcissism goes for the only way to explain his indecision and reversal - he's the nice guy who thinks the loss of life would be disproportionate.  (He must have been awake for that part of his briefing at least - it's not a word one expects is normally in his vocabulary.   Or perhaps more likely, he's changed his mind and asked his minders how he was going to best spin this.)

PS:  any brownie points which hard or soft supporters of Trump outside of American might be contemplating giving him for not following the advice of Bolton and the hawks in his circle should surely be tempered by the fact that Trump himself started the current problem with Iran by foolishly abandoning the nuclear deal that Obama had reached with the country.  As noted at this opinion piece in the Washington Post, something close to the same deal is the only obvious peaceful way forward.

Modi the yogi

I seem to have missed that Indian PM Modi is very much into yoga.  (In fact, I wasn't sure how conservative Hindu folk viewed it - I thought they might have seen it as too modern with its current, slightly new-agey feel - but it must get the tick of approval from them if Modi is into it.)

There's a video clip at CNA about International Yoga Day in India, featuring some shots of Modi engaging in yoga in real life, and via avatar (!).   He's been tweeted out animated videos of himself teaching yoga positions from earlier this year.  I'll come back and embed an example later...

Update:  as promised -

What were they thinking?

Haven't been over to James Lileks site for ages - got a bit bored with reading about his mundane life, so I concentrate more on recording my own mundanities. 

But he does collect some funny pop culture stuff, and this photo of  a recipe card from (I would guess) the 1970's had me laughing:

Lilek's commentary: 

The crew of the Nostromo set down on LV-426 in response to an automated distress beacon. They'd heard about the creatures, and the horrible way they sprang from their coccoons. What they didn't realized that over time they had evolved, and we now capable of sophisticated, coordinated dance routines.

 He has some good comic covers too:

Heh.

Mapping the world by 3 words

I don't catch QI all that much since Stephen Fry left, but it can be OK in moderate doses.

The episode shown this week on the ABC I watched in full, and found it quite enjoyable.   This is how I learnt about What3Words, which I see has been around for about 6 years, but until now escaped my attention.

The Wikipedia entry explains:

what3words is a geocoding system for the communication of locations with a resolution of three metres. What3words encodes geographic coordinates into three dictionary words; the encoding is permanently fixed. For example, the omphalos of Delphi, believed by the ancient Greeks to be the center of the world, was located at "spooky.solemn.huggers". what3words differs from most other location encoding systems in that it displays three words rather than long strings of numbers or letters.

What3words has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API that enables bidirectional conversion between what3words address and latitude/longitude coordinates. As the system relies on a fixed algorithm rather than a large database of every location on earth, it works on devices with limited storage and no Internet connection.

According to the company its revenue comes from charging businesses for high-volume use of the API that converts between 3 words and coordinates; services for other users are free of charge.^[1]

The "about" section of the business's website (I haven't downloaded the app - even though I can see many thrilling but potentially baffling conversation starters by telling new people I've just met the 3 word location in which we are standing) explains more:

3 word addresses are intentionally randomised and unrelated to the squares around them. To avoid confusion, similar sounding addresses are also placed as far from each other as possible. The app will account for spelling errors and other typing mistakes and make suggestions, based on 3 word addresses nearby.

I, like Sandi Toksvig, find this whole thing oddly intriguing.   Yet when I tried to pass on the excitement to my teenage kids over dinner last, my son said he could describe the conversation in 3 words: "This is boring".   This made his sister declare that the first joke he had ever made that she found funny.

Hence, via nerd-dom, I brought my children closer together.  

I am now going to download the app.

Update:  Cool - one grid close to my house's front door has "robots" in the 3 words, and in such a way that the two preceding words can be taken as describing them.     Using the voice search function though is a bit silly.  Because the phrases are randomised, if the phone hears the phrase slightly wrong, it will throw up locations all around the planet.  It does give a choice of three possible versions of what it thinks it heard.   Easier to type it in, though.

So that's why imported canned Italian tomatoes are so cheap?

Europe's a lovely looking place (that, unfortunately, I have not actually seen much of in person), but it does somewhat tarnish its reputation for being more progressive (and therefore nicer) than the deplorable infected governments of the United States when you read articles like this one about the "slave labour" picking tomatoes in Italy.   (Remember though that Spain also has a terrible reputation for exploiting immigrant labour in vegetable growing.  I posted about Simon Reeve revealing episode 4 of his Mediterranean series about that topic not so long ago.)

Mind you, Australia's treatment of backpackers in rural areas is also often a disgrace - but at least they are free to give up and return home.  

Would Trump be told if UFOs were alien in some sense?

While I'm not sure that there would ever be any strong reason for any US government agency to not want the public to know the Truth about UFO's (in the sense of them being of non human origin), you would have to suspect that any such agency would not want Trump told if they thought it best be kept from the public, for the time being at least.

This speculation is brought about by news of some Senators getting a Pentagon briefing about the Navy UFO cases, and Trump in his recent interview responding that he doesn't "particularly" believe in UFOs. 

The transparent motivations of libertarians, and why private currencies are a bad idea

Ha!   I reckon it's perfectly clear that the enthusiastic reception to the Facebook currency (and future alternative private currencies) given by the RMIT libertarian set of Potts, Davidson and Berg in the AFR this morning (which can be read via the ever ridiculous Catallaxy) is explained by their thinking that it will give them the form of government they want - small, tax starved and with limited spending power.

As such, they spend next to no time talking about the obvious problems of private currency - instead they see both dollar signs in front of their eyes (Australia should enthusiastically try to become a base for future private currencies, they argue) and the thrill that governments will be crushed if they try to step in the way of the inevitable, glorious, future of having less control over an economy.   Take this line, for example:

Governments that pursue irresponsible fiscal policies will see even greater capital flight.

As usual, then, libertarians are best ignored as ideologically driven money lovers always prepared to downplay the common good if it steps in the way of anyone - especially the already rich - making more money.  Their worst sin, of course, for which they should never be forgiven:  address global warming?  -  no, that might mean a new form of tax, so they would rather run a disinformation campaign to cripple united Western political action for 30 years while their mining friends add to their billions.  

As for why private currencies are a problem that should not be welcomed, the New York Times has a good article today:   

Launching a Global Currency Is a Bold, Bad Move for Facebook 

It lists four problems with the idea:  the first, that there is doubt it will be set up with all of the safeguards for misuse of a currency that governments and banks spend much money and time on establishing:

Banks pay attention to details, complying with regulations to prevent money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting. Recreating such a complex system is not a project that an institution with the level of privacy and technical problems like Facebook should be leading. (Or worse, failing to recreate such safeguards could facilitate money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting.)

Second, the US (at least?) stops banks from getting into other commerce areas in order to prevent exploiting commercial information against customer interests.  Can any Facebook associated enterprise be trusted not to do that?

The third:  if as successful as Zuckerberg hopes, it may be yet another financial entity that is "too big to fail" on a global scale.

And last, I'll just quote this one:

Enabling an open flow of money across all borders is a political choice best made by governments. And openness isn’t always good. For instance, most nations, especially the United States, use economic sanctions to bar individuals, countries or companies from using our financial system in ways that harm our interests. Sanctions enforcement flows through the banking system — if you can’t bank in dollars, you can’t use dollars. With the success of a private parallel currency, government sanctions could lose their bite. Should Facebook and a supermajority of venture capitalists and tech executives really be deciding whether North Korean sanctions can succeed? Of course not.

A permissionless currency system based on a consensus of large private actors across open protocols sounds nice, but it’s not democracy. Today, American bank regulators and central bankers are hired and fired by publicly elected leaders. Libra payments regulators would be hired and fired by a self-selected council of corporations. There are ways to characterize such a system, but democratic is not one of them.

 

Another dinner to be happy about

Sort of an Italian soup with meatballs and pasta.  Very tasty.

[Maybe it tasted better than it looks - that's some parmesan cheese on top.  But it did taste very good.]

No one trusts Zuckerberg*

He is such a weird looking and acting man, it's no wonder there is a lot of instant antagonism to Zuckerberg setting up his own Facebook currency.   This article at The Conversation is a big ramble, but the woman writing it (gee, I wonder what her sexuality is) really dislikes Facebook quite intensely, by the sounds.

I even saw on IPA Twitter Chris Berg talking about it, saying something about governments should be fearing this big time.  So not only do Sinclair Davidson and Berg now seemingly make a large part of their living by talking about blockchain at RMIT, even the IPA wants to talk about it?   Is the IPA running out of topics to cover?   I take this as a sign that certain funding from certain sources might have dried up.  Did Gina get upset that Alan Moran was sacked?   Have the tobacco funders moved on?  Because the topics up at the IPA website are very generic now, it seems to me.   (Too much red tape, etc.)

Anyway, where libertarians stand on cryptocurrency and companies getting more powerful seems a bit of a mess to me at the moment.   On the one hand, I think they are drawn to the idea of government losing control of money because that will affect taxation and that means small government, something they hold as a matter of faith as being a Good Thing.   On the other hand, they don't like it when companies are "woke" on any issue, because, I don't know, that interferes with them making money?   In other words, one part of them thinks it would be cool if companies displaced government; the other part of them resents it when companies, even at this early stage of potential government displacement, start flexing their muscle.  

I trust Sinclair Davidson will be along to explain it all any hour now...

* except libertarians.  See my post above.

A high suicide rate

Axios reports:

The suicide rate for Americans aged 15 to 24 years old — the older half of Generation Z — is the highest it's been since at least 1999, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

I was curious how this compared to Australian recent suicide rates for youth.   Turns out the American rate is very high, by the looks:

Against the Boris

Oh look:  a very anti-Boris Johnson opinion piece in, of all places, National Review:

As I explained a few weeks ago, the Conservative party is facing possible extinction; their complete failure to implement Brexit has lost them the majority of their voters. Many of Johnson’s supporters in Parliament are deeply skeptical of his character, but they are voting for him because they see him as the only way out of their crisis. This is the point made by Madeleine: Boris Johnson is not Jeremy Corbyn — if the Tories are to face a general election, they want a chance of surviving it.

But are they wrong to see him as a winner? In the long term, absolutely. Johnson is no longer the same man who twice won the London mayoral election. In those days, he was seen as a pro-immigration liberal conservative — the Tory for people who don’t vote Tory. Now, rightly or wrongly, he has become associated with a hostile brand of divisiveness — and it is Rory Stewart, as it happens, who has adopted the “outsider Tory” mantle. Johnson’s showman popularity among right-wing voters might be enough to win him the next election, but the average age of a Conservative voter has been increasing consistently for decades. People are forgetting that this is a party that has had one outright majority in 25 years. If it wants to survive, it needs to attract voters from the center ground.

For the party, then, there are no good outcomes. Either they opt for a candidate who will delay Brexit, thereby postponing an election but further weakening their immediate position, or they opt for an unpredictable renegade who, if tamed, might help them keep their parliamentary seats. I am writing this while listening to a fascinating discussion of the issue on the Talking Politics podcast (highly recommended to anyone with the slightest interest in British affairs). Here, the ever-insightful David Runciman asks his Cambridge colleagues the following: Is the fact that the Tory party is even contemplating making Boris Johnson its prime minister such an unusual thing that it’s a symptom of a party that’s already dying?

It’s an interesting question, and it pays a moment’s thought. Ask almost anybody who has worked closely with Johnson, and they speak of a Class A impostor — in the words of former Telegraph editor Max Hastings, a “gold medal egomaniac.” Any scarce praise usually refers to his ability to delegate — deference may suit a mayorship, but it will not suffice as prime minister. A deeply questionable personal life aside, Johnson’s career has been a collection of mishaps — one of which, during his time as foreign secretary, helped send a British citizen to prison. He is charming because of his Bertie Wooster-esque meandering mode of speech, but baseless bluster is not a characteristic that bodes well for a future as prime minister. He has never been a good performer in the House of Commons or in media interviews, and one daren’t imagine how his waffle will fare in Prime Minister’s Questions.

Jason, this is very consistent with my view of Johnson as stated in my recent comment in response to you, and I hadn't even found it at that time.   

Weird deal positions

As Slate notes, re the Trump administration and Iran:

The move comes as Iran has threatened to disregard uranium restrictions outlined in the 2015 nuclear deal that aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in return for sanctions relief. After years of deriding the nuclear deal as “the worst deal in history,” President DonaldTrump withdrew the U.S. from what’s formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and reinstated sanctions on Iran. The Trump administration, already suffering from a serious credibility deficit with allies, is now in the awkward position of demanding that Tehran comply with an agreement the American president has not only derided but pulled out of! “Administration officials found themselves Monday grappling with whether to press the remaining parties to the deal, including Britain, France and Germany, to demand that Iran stay in compliance,” the Associated Press reports. “They must also consider if such a stance would essentially concede that the restrictions imposed during the Obama administration, while short of ideal, are better than none.”

Tariffs and long term pain

A pretty convincing sounding explanation at The Atlantic about how China is responding to Trump's tariff war in ways that may well result in long term harm to parts of the American economy. 

Ethics from the BBC

Not a bad essay at the BBC:

Deep Ethics:  the long term quest to decide right from wrong

Hot stuff for renewable energy storage

One energy storage idea is just to heat stuff up when you have enough spare power, and use the hot stuff to make steam for a turbine when the renewables are off line.

While we would have all heard of that as being an advantage of solar thermal plants which use molten salts, there are simpler materials that can be used for heat storage.  Surprisingly, Siemens has just opened one in Germany that uses volcanic rock:

Spanish renewable energy giant and offshore wind energy leader Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy last week inaugurated operations of its electrothermal energy storage system which can store up to 130 megawatt-hours of electricity for a week in volcanic rock....

The newly-opened electric thermal energy storage system is billed by Siemens Gamesa as “The Future Energy Solution” and as costing “significantly” less than classic energy storage solutions. Specifically, according to the company, even at the gigawatt-hour (GWh) pilot scale, ETES “would be highly competitive compared to other available storage technologies.”

The heat storage facility consists of around 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock which is used as the storage medium. The rock is fed with electrical energy which is then converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that, in turn, heats the rock to 750°C/1382 °F. When demand requires the stored energy, ETES uses a steam turbine to re-electrify the stored energy and feeds it back into the grid.

In the comments to that article, someone points out that an Australian company has just started using hot molten silicon!:

1414 Degrees is pleased to report progress with the GAS-TESS implementation at the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The full suite of ten biogas burners are commissioned and performing above expectations. The silicon storage reached operating temperature and the turbine started generating electricity on Saturday 25th May. It is supplying hot water from the turbine exhaust to the treatment plant, augmenting the continuous hot water supply from the biogas burners exhaust. Electricity is being delivered to our load bank pending SA Water completing the approval processes to connect to the National Electricity Market.

An innovative energy storage system from South Australia?   I hope it works...

Something to be happy about

How's that for a Tuesday night dinner? 

Thanks to my wife and Costco...

A little bit "Macron Youth"?

Not entirely sure about this idea:

Nearly two decades after France phased out conscription for men, some 2,000 teenagers on Sunday began a pilot programme for a new national civic service, a pet project of French President Emmanuel Macron.

For a fortnight, the 15- and 16-year-olds will leave home for training in first aid and other basic skills, followed later by another two weeks of volunteering.

Macron caused surprise on the campaign trail in 2017 by promising to introduce a month-long compulsory national service, saying he wanted to give girls and boys "a direct experience of military life".

The proposal got a cool response from the army, which baulked at the prospect of having to put millions of teens through their paces, prompting the government to come back with proposals for a compulsory civic service instead.

Some 2,000 youngsters, including 50 disabled teens, were chosen out of 4,000 volunteers for the first part of the trial, which started Sunday at boarding schools, holiday villages and university campuses around the country.

The group includes high school students, drop-outs, apprentices and vocational school trainees.

Each volunteer will leave home for another region for the two weeks, during which time they will be required to wear navy uniforms and sing the "Marseillaise", France's national anthem, every morning.

Described as an "integration phase", teens will be taught first aid, map reading, emergency response for different scenarios and other skills.

It'll probably end up in some form of under-age sex scandal, and that will be the end of it.   The uniform is a bit, um, naff? too:

Things to be unhappy about

*  Economic malaise in Australia:   I'm sure some people voted for the Coalition out of concern that reforms by Labor would drive down confidence in at least the real estate market.   It seems pretty clear, however, that the Coalition win had hardly brought signs of improved confidence to any market.  I bet retail is still flat as a tack, and what worse nightmare could any Sydney real estate who specialises in high rise apartments endure than the dramatic cracking appearing in two buildings in under 6 months?    (In fact, it will be interesting to see how that affects all "off the plan" sales in every capital city.   I wonder if it even has an effect on the country's reputation for tertiary education - it's not exactly the best advertisement for engineering expertise.)  

I'm not entirely sure anyone really has a good grip on why there is, more or less, an air of impending doom on our economy.  Greg Jericho does a lot of graphing, but it doesn't explain why things seem stuck on "not getting any better". 

Does everyone sense we are in some sort of transition, and to what, no one knows?   The economy can only bear so many new burger chains and craft beer outlets, I guess, and maybe people are sensing that we're reaching saturation level with them.

* "Summer" movies.   Well, it's far from the first holiday movie season for everyone to be complaining about the number of unwarranted sequels - but this one seems to be full of underwhelming entries.   I was thinking of seeing Men in Black International, but if a trailer can't come up with much in the way of funny bits in what is meant to be a comedy, I am inclined to believe the lukewarm reviews are right.   

*  The Trump administration:  who has confidence that it won't stumble into/deliberately provoke an unnecessary and dangerous war with Iran?   Who (with a brain) thinks the trade war tactics are good for America, let alone the globe?   How's that government deficit going?   It's a slow moving policy disaster.

* Boris Johnson as PM of Britain:   the English equivalent of Trump in many ways, showing how terrible Right wing politics has become around much of the world.   And they have a uniquely bad example of Left wing politics in that country too.   That country, if not the whole globe, seems to be suffering some kind of bad alignment of the stars at the moment.   When will it pass?

A quantum argument against uploading your mind

I have only skimmed through this paper on arXiv, and don't have any idea about its plausibility, but it's interesting at least.  Here's the abstract:

Killing Science Fiction: Why Conscious States Cannot Be Copied or Repeated

Several philosophical problems arising from the physics of consciousness, including identity, duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, and the Boltzmann Brain problem, hinge on one of the most deeply held but unnecessary convictions of physicalism: the assumption that brain states and their corresponding conscious states can in principle be copied. In this paper I will argue against this assumption by attempting to prove the Unique History Theorem, which states, essentially, that conscious correlations to underlying quantum mechanical measurement events must increase with time and that every conscious state uniquely determines its history from an earlier conscious state. By assuming only that consciousness arises from an underlying physical state, I will argue that the physical evolution from a first physical state giving rise to a conscious state to a second physical state giving rise to a later conscious state is unique. Among the consequences of this theorem are that: consciousness is not algorithmic and a conscious state cannot be uploaded to or simulated by a digital computer; a conscious state cannot be copied by duplicating a brain or any other physical state; and a conscious state cannot be repeated or created de novo. These conclusions shed light on the physical nature of consciousness by rendering moot a variety of seemingly paradoxical philosophy and science fiction problems.

How's that Indian heatwave going?

Some rains have arrived, but the death toll (such that is known - again I have extreme doubts about accurate numbers on this) has risen.   What's more, it was a pretty bad scene in some areas, apparently:

Tens of thousands of people in drought-affected villages in north India have left their homes because they do not have any drinking water either for themselves or for their cattle.

Even in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the Himalayas, where many Indians go to escape the summer heat, the temperature has reached 39C.

The rush to the higher ground resulted in huge traffic jams at the weekend that snaked around the mountains. People had to sleep in their cars because towns such as Shimla and Nainital – known as hill stations from the days of the British Raj – had no spare hotel rooms.

“It was unbelievable. The hills were alive and heaving with cars and SUVs and a journey that should take one hour took five,” said Sumith Verma, a Nainital resident.

About two-thirds of the country has been affected by the blistering heat, which looks set to become the longest heatwave the country has ever experienced.

But hey, Rowan Dean's wearing a funny tie; rich retirees travel the world and see shrinking glaciers (one of the clearest markers of global climate change) and say "natural variation";  and Al Gore made some incorrect predictions.   [Just my routine go at the incredible non-seriousness of everyone associated with Catallaxy.]

Tighter regulation

Is there a bit of a pushback against the way legalisation of marijuana is happening in the US? 

An opinion piece in the NYT argues it should not be sold to those under 25 on health grounds - a suggestion likely to not go over well in colleges across the nation.

The Washington Post reports that the high potency of marijuana products sold in Colorado is causing problems, as well as where it can be sold:

The critics also insist that more must be done to maintain tight regulation of the industry. That’s not been the case so far, they argue, with dispensaries opening near high schools in Seattle and with retail and medical pot shops in Denver outnumbering Starbucks and McDonald’s locations combined. 

Americans are rather naive, it seems to me, when it comes to the matter of  how regulation affects society.

Some Krugman techno optimism tweets of note

Nuts in the country

Nothing's creepier than stories of rural nuts who would exploit backpackers, sexually or otherwise, as per some of the stories told in this ABC article.

Maybe it's just the results of the recent Federal election annoying me, these stories are certainly helping feed my current biases against anyone who lives more than (let's say) 150 km from a capital city.

A strange story of Hollywood inspiration

According to a book reviewed at Nature, the 1998 movie Enemy of the State inspired research to implement new, powerful surveillance technology:

it was ..an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.

He traces the development of that technology, called wide-area motion imagery (WAMI, pronounced ‘whammy’), by the US military from 2001. A camera on steroids, WAMI can capture images of large areas, in some cases an entire city. The technology got its big break after 2003, in the chaotic period following the US-led invasion of Iraq, where home-made bombs — improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — became the leading killer of US and coalition troops. Defence officials began to call for a Manhattan Project to spot and tackle the devices.

In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)

Some books use blockbuster action films to demonstrate — or exaggerate — a technology’s terrifying potential. Here, Enemy of the State shows up repeatedly because it is integral to the development of Gorgon Stare. Researchers play clips from it in their briefings; they compare their technology to Big Daddy (although their camera is so far only on aircraft, not a satellite). At one point, incredibly, they consult the company responsible for the movie’s aerial filming. (It set me wondering — which government lab out there is currently building the Death Star from Stars Wars?)

Further to my fusion power scepticism

First, I have to admit that there is a degree of techno-optimism regarding fusion power, such that it has managed to get an extra-ordinary amount of money devoted to fusion research.   The long delayed ITER project being built in France being the prime example:

Take ITER, an enormous superconducting fusion reactor currently under construction in France. When the international collaboration began in 2005, it was billed as a $US5 billion ($7 billion), 10 year project. After years of setbacks, that price tag has risen to roughly $US40 billion ($55 billion) Optimistically, the facility will now be completed by 2030.

And some MIT associated folk have been making claims which are extremely hard to believe:

Bob Mumgaard, CEO of the private company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has attracted $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni, said: “The aspiration is to have a working power plant in time to combat climate change. We think we have the science, speed and scale to put carbon-free fusion power on the grid in 15 years.”

Notice that?  Private money being put into the project - of course there is every incentive to exaggerate how quickly progress can be made.  In the same link, a British scientist comments:

Prof Wilson was also cautious about the timeframe, saying that while the project was exciting he couldn’t see how it would achieve its goal of putting energy on the grid within 15 years.

However, achieving and magnetically containing a power generating plasma is one thing;  building it within something intended to be a long lived, safe, electricity generating facility is a different thing, and one of great complexity.  I think you only need to read the abstract of this article (from this year) to note that they are really just talking now about how they are going to try to address the various engineering problems in a timely enough fashion to allow the presumed breakthroughs to be turned into something useful.

In comments I made in a previous post, I noted that one retired plasma scientist had written articles sceptical that fusion would ever be a viable source for electricity generation.   His name is Daniel Jassby, and he had two articles in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the topic.  (I strongly recommend people read the second of those, linked at "articles", about the ITER project.)  Of course, other scientists who have worked in the field dispute his pessimism, but even when doing so, they have to admit the nature of the problems:

Fusion neutrons will surely damage the internal components closest to the plasma. In the first fusion pilot plants, materials in the regions with the highest neutron flux would need to be replaced every 6-to-12 months of full-power operation. There are options for new nano-structured materials that are more neutron-resistant. These can be developed and qualified for fusion application using computer simulations and small-scale tests, as well as tests in the pilot plants themselves and in follow-on fusion power sources, as was done for fission. Fusion will have nuclear waste, but the lifetime of this waste will be measured in decades, not millennia. Fusion neutrons can in principle be used to breed fuel for weapons. But because no breeding materials should be present in a fusion power plant, this will be much more straightforward to detect and deter, as compared with fission reactors where the production of large quantities of weapons-usable material is intrinsic to the process. 

There was another retired atomic scientist, William Parkins, who appeared in Science magazine in 2006 expressing engineering scepticism about it ever being viable.  His views were immediately disputed by others in the field, notably in this Nature commentary, claiming that the issues raised by him had already been considered and dismissed in the 1990's. But the counterargument claims that the cost of replacing parts in fusion reactors has already been factored in, and this:

 Ward says that current estimates of the cost of fusion electricity are between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The US Department of Energy predicts that US electricity will average just under 10 cents per kilowatt-hour this year. "I think fusion could compete with coal today in Europe," says Ward, because of the economic costs produced by emissions regulations.

 Excuse me, but given the engineering problems yet to be solved for real fusion generation, I am extremely sceptical of forecasts from the 1990's of the possible cost of fusion power.

This is what's at the heart of my scepticism - put enough money into fusion and the scientific problems of how the plasma can be contained and power harnessed might be solved.  But from an engineering cost point of view, there is a lot of reason to doubt it will ever be a cost effective source of power.

Seems to me that anyone who has witnessed the huge underestimates of cost for other projects involving more in the way of new engineering than new science (like for each new fighter jet program in the US) should also be sceptical of the claims about the cost of fusion power.   And the difference is that defence projects develop their own momentum, with huge corporations having great political influence and able to sell upgrades in defence capability as essential.   The world of electricity generation doesn't have that same dynamic, so it is a bit harder to imagine them getting the unlimited government support in cost overruns that defence related corporations enjoy.

Crazy Rich Chinese Singaporeans

So, Crazy Rich Asians has unexpectedly turned up on Netflix and I have finally caught up with it.

I quite enjoyed it, finding it particularly fun recognising nearly all of the locations due to the recent trip to Singapore.   (Well, it is a small place, my wife observed.)   Sure, it seems almost like a co-production of a government tourist board, but everywhere in the film - interiors and exteriors - looks gorgeous.  I was wondering, though,  how they managed to get some filming done in outdoor locations before the actors started breaking out in sweat - it gives no sense of the crushing humidity.

The story is serviceable (if somewhat improbable) in a rom-com way, and the two leads are likeable.  In fact, it would have to be one of few successful rom-coms of the last 15 to 20 years:  everyone agrees that Hollywood has pretty much forgotten how to make them without throwing in a bit of raunch and not especially charming male leads.  On that last point, as quite a few noted when the movie came out, CRA is especially interested in rehabilitating the screen image of Asian men as not just sidekicks but handsome leads.  (It's too obvious about it, but I suppose there are decades of gratuitous shower scenes of female actors to balance up against.)

Anyway, Channel News Asia last Christmas had a lot of "year in review" talk about the success of the movie, and gave the impression that it went over very well there.   But Googling the topic, I see that some didn't care for the near invisibility of other races in the movie, given the melting pot that is the city state.   Vox ran a particularly serious complaint about how it "gets Singapore wrong", but it seems the "it's only a movie" crowd won the day, and fair enough I say.   

Two last points:  really, who thought the dress that the female lead (Rachel) wore to the wedding was a good look on her?  I mean, there is even a mean joke in the movie about her breast size, so why wear a dress that seemed to emphasise that?

Secondly, I see a line that I didn't get has an explanation in a review:

You also know that it is in fact Singapore on the screen when you hear “ku ku jiao” — the crude Singlish phrase for penis — being chanted repeatedly.

Presumably, I'm not the only one who didn't know that.

Update:  I just decided to check how much money it made.  It took $238,500,000 internationally, which seems not as much as I expected, given the publicity it got; but then again, I don't know what rom coms of the last decade have made.   Still, with a budget of $30 million, it was definitely a money maker.

The poor Tokyo neighbourhood

An interesting article in The Guardian about a Tokyo neighbourhood long known for being one for itinerant male workers, many of whom are now ageing and still live there in cheap hostels.

Pezzullo discussed

That Mike Pezzullo was in the news earlier this week, for taking offence at what a couple of Senators had to say about his attitude towards scrutiny, and I have been curious to know more about him.   I think Bernard Keane doesn't like him much, or at all, but lots of people have been talking about the respect he has from both sides of politics (he has worked with both Labor and Liberal governments.)

Interestingly, I was just listening to Hamish Macdonald on Radio National having a lengthy discussion with John Blaxland from the ANU about Pezzullo.

Blaxland's background is exactly in the same areas as Pezzullo and one would assume they would know each other.  Blaxland seemed to me to bending over backwards to smother anything he said as even the mildest criticism for Pezzullo's behaviour this week with praise for Pezzullo's abilities, and even his personality.   I wonder if other ABC listeners have some cynicism about this.

I don't care how smart, well read, and how personable-in-person-but-intimidating-when-he-needs-to-be a top public servant may be:  if his area of responsibility has taken on a more secretive and authoritarian air (suiting the government in power, particularly under Abbott) he shouldn't be above criticism.

PS:  one thing I should give Pezzullo credit for, though, is that I think Blaxland said he believes in climate change as a coming important regional issue with security implications.   How does a public servant like that live with having numbskull climate change denier politicians as his boss then, I wonder.

RU OK, Jason?

Gee, Jason, you're sounding a little like a cross between Peter Thiel and Lyndon Larouche with tweets like this:

OK, you and Thiel are half right - there is a uselessness about a lot of new, internet based business ideas which are an extremely wasteful use of capital when there are serious problems - well, mainly one, big, long term, planet wide serious problem - to tackle.   Yeah, the problem that Thiel doesn't even think is really that big a deal. 

But space colonisation and fusion?   Both are so off in the outer limits of do-ability that the technological development to get them to a stage beyond mere experiment is a ridiculously big hurdle.  The only credible fast track path to Mars for decades yet is likely to be via one way death trips.  (Indeed, the trip itself may kill the astronauts, given the hardly resolved problem of adequate radiation shielding.)   Large scale space colonisation is going to have to be a low priority while energy and climate change are cranking up as serious challenges.   (And yeah, I doubt fusion is a useful avenue to pursue - it's the "flying car" of the energy world, with futurists and small start ups telling us for the last 50 or more years that it's always just around the corner of becoming practical.  I don't think anyone takes it seriously anymore as an energy solution.)

And what about this silly claim:

You're not even half right there - in that Isis and Al Qaeda were never plausible threats to Western civilisation.  

So panicking about "woke corporations" being a threat to western civilisation now are we?    I assume your concern is not too much to do with companies pushing around conservatives on gay or transgender rights in the US?   How's that a threat to civilisation, unless you think it has to be one in which toilets have to be strictly gendered and gays shouldn't marry?

So what is it?  That some groups are wanting to divest money from carbon based energy and mining?    What are you upset about with that?   That some people with capital are starting to believe scientists and take action when they governments that are not?    

Here's the thing:  I don't think you have never faced up to the fact that the biggest single movement behind preventing the largest economy in the world (and the Australia one too) from consistently  embracing a proper, capitalist friendly, response to climate change has been libertarianism/small government/small tax advocates.  If it weren't for them, fossil fuel divestment groups would have less to worry about.

To be fretting that "woke capital" is a threat to western civilisation is just silly wankery coming from reading too many conservative publications, and paying attention to eccentric IT billionaires.   

Or come here and justify it.

Only in India?

 I have posted about this topic before, but perhaps did not realise how high the number of deaths are from this peculiar problem:

At least 31 children in India killed by toxin in lychees 

At least 31 children have died in northern India in the past 10 days from a brain disease believed to be linked to a toxic substance found in lychee fruit, health officials have said.

The deaths were reported by two hospitals in Muzaffarpur in Bihar state, famed for it lush lychee orchards, officials said.

The children all showed symptoms of acute encephalitis syndrome (AES), senior health official Ashok Kumar Singh said, adding most had suffered a sudden loss of glucose in their blood.

The outbreaks of the disease have happened annually during summer months in Muzaffarpur and neighbouring districts since 1995, typically coinciding with the lychee season.

“The health department has already issued an advisory for people to take care of their children during the hot summer when day temperature is above 40 degrees,” Ashok Kumar Singh said.

Known locally as chamki bukhar, the disease claimed a record 150 lives in 2014.

In 2015, US researchers had said the brain disease could be linked to a toxic substance found in the exotic fruit.

 Given that we grow lots of lychees here up around the Bundaberg region, I am curious as to why this disease is apparently unknown of here, but only appears in India.

Where are the real eco-warriors when you need them?

It's still not clear that the Adani mine will actually go ahead, despite the last Queensland approval going through today; but if it does, how much trouble can one little blog writer get into by thinking out loud that lengthy rail lines through a sparsely populated region which are key to mine development probably make a pretty susceptible target for eco-terrorists?   Actually, "terrorism" is too strong - the aim would not be terrorising the public.  Just stopping an economic activity.   

I mean, silly radicals of the 60's and later used to have bogus ideas about communism or anarchy being a viable and desirable thing, and would act on it.  Now that today's younger folk have actually really good reason to be contemplating useful property destruction, of a kind that could easily be envisaged as being done without loss of life, they're probably all too pre-occupied in twitter fights, identity politics, and organising the next animal liberation farmer harassment instead of looking at rail maps and making more useful plans.

Young people of today.  I don't know....

East Asian gender wobbles

I've posted about this before, I think, but the NYT has another article on the popularity in China (in youth culture, at least), of de-masculinised males:

BEIJING — In late April, The Beijing News, a popular daily, ran a collection of profiles on Chinese millennials in celebration of the May Fourth youth holiday commemorating a 1919 student movement. Alongside a best-selling writer, an amateur architecture historian and a producer of popular science videos there was Cai Xukun, a 20-something male pop singer with such a huge following that a recent social media post of his was viewed more than 800 million times.

Mr. Cai belongs to the tribe of “little fresh meat,” a nickname, coined by fans, for young, delicate-featured, makeup-clad male entertainers. These well-groomed celebrities star in blockbuster movies, and advertise for cosmetic brands and top music charts. Their rise has been one of the biggest cultural trends of the past decade. Their image — antithetical to the patriarchal and stoic qualities traditionally associated with Chinese men — is changing the face of masculinity in China.

Innocent as they may seem, the little fresh meat have powerful critics. The state news agency Xinhua denounces what it calls “niangpao,” or “sissy pants,” culture as “pathological” and said in an editorial last September that its popularity is eroding social order. The Beijing newspaper’s decision to include Mr. Cai in its profiles apparently prompted the Communist Youth League to release its own list of young icons: patriotic athletes and scientists, whom it called the “true embodiment” of the spirit of Communist youth.

I find it somewhat amusing that in this respect, the ultra masculine world of the alt.right (not to mention that gender/sexuality worrying commenters at Catallaxy) has something in common with the Chinese Communist Youth League. 

I just find it odd, and peculiar how it has spread throughout East Asia, starting from Japan and Korea, but spreading into China.   Too much soy in the diet, or something.  :)

Safer scooters

I've been thinking about the number of injuries turning up everywhere from those electric hire scooters which I am tempted to try.  (See here, for example.)

Having watched people on them (and some videos of people going all wobbly on them - you can search Youtube yourself), I reckon that part of the problem is that they do seem to need more of a sense of balance than they should. 

Hence:   why not have a three wheel design?   They exist:

or this:

Surely these are better from a balance point of view?   Surely the additional cost of an extra wheel is worth a safety increase?

I'd be tempted to legislate this, if I were in charge.

He's so sorry

I watched Alan Jones on Anh Do's program last night, where he got to softest of receptions from the always affable Anh.  Jones revisited the Julia Gillard "her father died of shame" insult, and as this tweet notes:

It was a very non-apology apology.

What's worse was Jones giggling that he had encouraged Malcolm Fraser to run with one of the original scare campaign ads based not on the other's side actual policy, but an imaginary one which you want voters to fear might become their policy.  (And yes, everyone agrees that Labor used it in the case of "Mediscare" - but all sensible people thought these were ethically dubious at best, not something to giggle about.)

There was a discussion of him having had a heart attack in (as I now see via Googling) in 2017.  Honestly, why doesn't the guy give up his day job and travel more while he has the time?    He's politically obnoxious and full of himself and political discourse would only improve by his absence.

Americans get the health care they deserve?

Hey, it was only last week that I was speculating that Americans seem culturally inclined to want to avoid pain at all cost - hence opting for things like easy prescriptions to dangerous opioids, and epidurals for child birth over laughing gas.

Today I see that there's an article at The Atlantic that argues along similar lines - saying that maybe the American health system doesn't get the value for money that other nation's systems do because of American patients' expectations:

For years, the United States’ high health-care costs and poor outcomes have provoked hand-wringing, and rightly so: Every other high-income country in the world spends less than America does as a share of GDP, and surpasses us in most key health outcomes.

Recriminations tend to focus on how Americans pay for health care, and on our hospitals and physicians. Surely if we could just import Singapore’s or Switzerland’s health-care system to our nation, the logic goes, we’d get those countries’ lower costs and better results. Surely, some might add, a program like Medicare for All would help by discouraging high-cost, ineffective treatments.

But lost in these discussions is, well, us. We ought to consider the possibility that if we exported Americans to those other countries, their systems might end up with our costs and outcomes. That although Americans (rightly, in my opinion) love the idea of Medicare for All, they would rebel at its reality. In other words, we need to ask: Could the problem with the American health-care system lie not only with the American system but with American patients?

Another couple of paragraphs:

For example, one cost-reduction measure used around the world is to exclude an expensive treatment from health coverage if it hasn’t been solidly proved effective, or is only slightly more effective than cheaper alternatives. But when American insurance companies try this approach, they invariably run into a buzz saw of public outrage. “Any patient here would object to not getting the best possible treatment, even if the benefit is measured not in extra years of life but in months,” says Gilberto Lopes, the associate director for global oncology at the University of Miami’s cancer center. Lopes has also practiced in Singapore, where his very first patient shocked him by refusing the moderately expensive but effective treatment he prescribed for her cancer—a choice that turns out to be common among patients in Singapore, who like to pass the money in their government-mandated health-care savings accounts on to their children.

Most experts agree that American patients are frequently overtreated, especially with regard to expensive tests that aren’t strictly needed. The standard explanation for this is that doctors and hospitals promote these tests to keep their income high. This notion likely contains some truth. But another big factor is patient preference. A study out of Johns Hopkins’s medical school found doctors’ two most common explanations for overtreatment to be patient demand and fear of malpractice suits—another particularly American concern.

Go read the rest.

  

How's that heatwave going

Still hot in India in a very long pre-Monsoon heatwave:

Nearly two-thirds of India sizzled on Tuesday under a spell of a heatwave that is on course to becoming the longest ever as scalding temperatures killed four train passengers, drained water supplies, and drove thousands of tourists to hill stations already bursting at the seams.

Across large swathes of northern, central and peninsular India, the mercury breached the 45 degree mark, including in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, Churu and Bikaner in Rajasthan, Hisar and Bhiwani in Haryana, Patiala in Punjab, and Gwalior and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh.

The Capital, which sweltered on its hottest June day in history on Monday (48 degrees Celsius) recorded as maximum temperature of 45.4 degrees Celcius at Palam in spite of a spell of light rain in the morning.

I see other news sites say that the death toll from the heatwave is 36:  but isn't it hard to believe that there are not more premature deaths than that in the poorest part of the community that has trouble accessing air conditioning?

Stay the course, Japan

An article at Japan Times argues that the country just has to get with the times, and stop discriminating against tattoos.   I didn't realise this aspect of how they came to be associated with criminality:

Why does Japan fear tattoos so much? According to “Modern Encyclopedia of the Yakuza” (2004), the government in 1720 decided to reduce the punishment on some criminal offenses. Criminals would no longer have their noses or ears removed. Instead, their crimes would be identified with tattoos on the skin, usually the arms.

So, it wasn't a voluntary thing, initially.

The article continues:

Tattoos were popular with gangsters before and after the war for a number of reasons. Symbolically speaking, however, the act of being tattooed once showed a resolve to sever ties with ordinary society and live in the underworld.

Still does, in my books!  OK, well, perhaps "live in the underworld" is a bit harsh, unless you mean the underworld where kitch rules.   (As usual, I make exceptions for genuine tribal tattooing for people genuinely from tribes.   And I don't mean the Bogan tribe.)   

Anyway, the argument is that modern Japanese crims aren't getting them anymore: 

According to a National Police Agency study in the early 1990s, 73 percent of all gang members had a tattoo. It’s likely this number has decreased since 1992, when the first anti-gang laws went into effect and gangsters began hiding their identities. Obviously, if you want to blend in and pass yourself off as an ordinary businessman, tattoos aren’t a plus.

The new generation of gang members doesn’t get tattoos. Criminals are increasingly declining to get tattoos, while the rest of the world is embracing them as body art. Does anyone think U.S. pop star Ariana Grande is a menace to society?

I've heard some of her music.  Yes.  Yes she is.  :)

A small but symbolic mass

From France 24:

The Notre-Dame cathedral will host its first mass this weekend since a fire ravaged the Paris landmark almost two months ago, the city’s diocese said Tuesday. 

The mass led by Archbishop of Paris Michel Aupetit will be celebrated on a very small scale late Saturday, the diocese said.

It will take place in a “side chapel with a restricted number of people, for obvious security reasons,” it said.

Just 20 people are expected to take part, including priests and canons from the cathedral.
The event will be broadcast live by a French television channel so that Christians from all over France can participate, the diocese added.

They take their architecture seriously in Indonesia

A headline on the Jakarta Post:

Actually, it looks pretty nice to me:

No passport future?

I meant to post about this a month or so ago - the story about how face recognition and other biometric databases are expected to lead to "no passport" processing through airports in the future.

Your treasured and travel-weary passport may soon become, like your first mobile phone, a relic of the past, if border agencies from the UK to Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and our own have anything to do with it. 

The race is on to create a system whereby travellers will no longer need to present their documents to either a border official or passport kiosk.

For the Australian traveller, this could mean the days of standing in line at our international airports will end.

The article does note that this whole system does carry the risk of extremely long delays if there is a hitch in the IT system.

In related news, in the USA today, we get this:

Licence plate images and photos of individuals who travelled in and out of the United States were taken in a malicious hack impacting U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to a report in the Washington Post. The agency learned last month about the breach, which took place thanks to a hack of an unnamed subcontractor.

CBP, which blamed the subcontractor for failing to follow security and privacy rules by transferring the agency’s photos to its own network, operates a database of visa and passport photos as part of a face recognition system and database used widely at American airports despite criticism for privacy and accuracy failures. The agency processes over 1 million travellers per day and is building up to use the face recognition system in at least 20 airports thanks to a Trump executive order.

I wonder about the point of such a hack...

Geoengineering the oceans

Nature has an article (a comment piece) about the dearth of serious research into various suggestions made over the years to use the oceans to counter global warming.   Its seems a lot of ideas are briefly floated but hardly anyone thinks about them very carefully.  

The article does mention a lot of unintended possible consequences of some ideas:

A lack of funding is not the main reason for the research gaps. Although there have been few funding programmes targeted at marine-geoengineering experiments and modelling so far, many basic tests are cheap and can be done in the lab — for instance, assessing whether impurities in mineral powders are toxic to marine life. And a range of negative-emissions technologies, such as enhanced weathering of rocks to increase ocean alkalinity, are already being funded in targeted research programmes, including one in the United Kingdom. Other streams of research, such as modelling, are under way in Germany, and a call for research proposals has been made in Japan. Private money is being invested in some marine approaches, such as a proposed pilot study of the impacts of iron fertilization on fisheries off Chile. However, that project has stalled, largely because of a lack of support from scientists (see Nature 545, 393–394; 2017).

Another problem is that many geoengineering proposals and analyses are found on transient websites, not in peer-reviewed journals. For example, only half of the web links to ideas, plans and documents cited in a detailed 2009 synthesis study of marine-geoengineering approaches⁴ still worked when we examined them in 2018. By contrast, academic and intergovernmental documents from that era are easy to find.

Again, the reasons for this are unclear, but could include inadequate funding, privacy concerns about disclosing details of the methods, and maintenance of proprietary rights over technologies. Some scientists worry that even starting geoengineering research or reporting results could lead to deployment of inadequately studied approaches⁵.

Yet it is essential that investigations are solidly researched, openly discussed and made readily available, as demonstrated by the most-studied geoengineering approach, ocean iron fertilization. Much of the work drew from ocean biogeochemistry and has involved lab experiments, pilot studies in the Southern Ocean and modelling across ocean basins. All of this activity showed that the method will not work as anticipated⁶. Fertilizing 1,000 square kilometres of the upper ocean would increase the growth of phytoplankton but could have alarming side effects. For example, sinking algae could release methane, a greenhouse gas that is many times more potent than CO₂. 

It's clear that there is no simple idea that is an obvious panacea.

Psycho on the streets

This week's Four Corners story on the background to the Bourke Street "murders by car" case was very good.  Here's an article about how the show was put together.    (It has a link to the show itself too.)

Again, the sort of investigative TV journalism that we only see on the public broadcaster. 

A Prime problem

It's annoying to note that subscribing to Prime to watch Good Omens has revealed a technical problem that seems to affect many people - there is a well publicised issue, going back a couple of years, that people with Samsung smart TVs in particular find that using the Prime App leads to an audio sync problem.   The audio comes out slightly ahead of the video - meaning lips do not quite match the sounds by a continually noticeable half second or so.

It was much worse when watching Episode 1 of The Man in the High Castle, where there seemed to more close ups of talking faces in serious discussion.

From what I can gather, many think that it's a case of Amazon and Samsung blaming each other and no one ever coming up with a solution. 

The way around it, I found last night, is to use a laptop that can cast to a Chromecast via Chrome.   Annoyingly, the Prime Android app does not have a "cast" button built in - because Amazon does not get on with Google, either.

Casting from my mobile phone turned out to be a bit complicated (Chrome on Android seems to either always, or sometimes, not have a "cast" function built in, so I had to do screen mirroring which seemed to lead to something like standard definition video quality on the TV, not high definition.)  

Anyway, it worked fine when casting from my son's laptop, at high definition.

But this really seems a (admittedly, very First World) problem that shouldn't exist.  

The count continued

I've posted a few times over the years regarding the question of the number of people who count as "not straight".   I took a guess (based on certain polls and studies) that it was probably about 4 to 5%, and seemingly had that vindicated (at least for America) by a Gallup poll last year which gave the figure of 4.5%.

I see that at The Conversation today, there's an article looking at various Australian survey evidence which might give an answer for here, but also usefully discussing the complexity of the matter. 

I think that, while the surveys quoted seem to come in at a little under 4% for gay or bisexual, there is sufficient rubberiness that a 4 to 5% figure here may still be pretty accurate:

Less is known about change over the time in the number and share of Australians who are non-heterosexual. This is because most data collections only began asking about sexual orientation in recent years.

Estimates based on the 2001/2002 and 2012/2013 instalments of the Australian Study of Health and Relationships (each canvassing about 20,000 men and women age 16-59), suggest an increase in the prevalence of non-heterosexuality across different measures.

The share of men identifying as homosexual or bisexual went up from 2.5% to 3.2%. The share of women identifying as lesbian or bisexual also rose, from 2.2% to 3.8%. While the share of men expressing some same-sex sexual attraction increased slightly (6.8% and 7.4%), this increased more markedly for women (12.9% and 16%). Similarly, the prevalence of lifetime same-sex sexual experience increased for both sexes, with the increment being more pronounced among women (8.5% to 14.7%) than men (6% to 6.6%).

Or perhaps Australians are slightly less "queer" than Americans?  That would be hard to believe.