Some musings on the intrinsic worth of humans

M Tobis found somehow a twitter thread by someone musing about "humanism", and I also find myself agreeing with part of it.  I won't try to copy all of it, but it starts:

And the bit I am most interested in:

I tend to find comparative religion interesting for the way in which they can construct a motivation for choosing the "pre-rational" belief of human life having intrinsic value.

In many, of course, the idea of an after-life reward is an obvious motivation. 

But going back to this week's topic of Buddhism, I always have had a problem with understanding how it reconciles its teaching about the illusory "non-Self" nature of self and its ethical teaching about that you should treat other "non-Selves" well.   Some pro-Buddhist advocates sell its view of the self as entirely consistent with modern, scientific materialist's views;  but if so, it seems to mean that Buddhism loses the benefit that I see in other religions of providing a "pre-rational" motivation for treating all humans as having value. 

If recall correctly, in Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality,  he argued that games theory provides a basis for ethical behaviour being entirely rational (and therefore having no conflict with science) but his views are pretty eccentric, and I am not sure that there is any widely accepted view games theory means the "pre-rational" belief of intrinsic human value is in fact rational (or, perhaps, a necessary conclusion of rationality.)

I have been thinking about this for a long time.   The distinction between "pre-rational" and rational arguments was basically behind a university essay (or was it during an exam?) on Rawls and his A Theory of Justice.  I thought it a very fine effort at providing a rational argument towards what you might call a universal theory of ethics;  but I remained unconvinced that it showed why alternative uses of rationality with harsher conclusions towards fellow humans were not just as valid.   I was still feeling that it didn't really work to show why the "pre-rational" judgement of the value of humans was something that must be adopted.  

I suppose you can take two attitudes towards this - argue that rationality can never resolve the matter, or (like Tipler, or Kant) argue that rationality can lead you to the "right" conclusion about human value.   I am inclined to be on the side of the latter.            
  

Things suddenly looking much, much worse for Republicans

Lots of tweeting going on about an interview Rachel Maddow has done with Parnas - one of the key figures in the Ukraine scandal - in which he is dumping on absolutely everyone from Trump down.  He reckons Bolton will back all of this up.   As Corn says:

How could the Republicans in the Senate possibly justify not calling him and Bolton as witnesses?

I was a bit sceptical when Jennifer Rubin ran the line in WAPO this morning that they had to call witnesses or they would loss all credibility, but after this interview, I think she is right.

So, this is what "no AGW" looks like

From Real Climate.

Here's what Sinclair Davidson was saying in 2011:

I would like to draw your attention - and your readers - to the work of Professor Terrence Mills of Loughborough University. He has literally written the book on time-series econometrics. He has also written, at least, 3 papers on temperature time-series data. One of the conclusions that he draws is "At the very least, proponents of continuing global warming and climate change would perhaps be wise not to make the recent warming trend in recorded temperatures a central plank in their argument."

The GWPF kept relying on Mills's work, but the obvious flaw with it was explained here:

And so we have the latest such unphysical climate prediction, made in a report by Loughborough University statistics professor Terence Mills, on behalf of the anti-climate policy advocacy group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The report essentially fits a statistical model to past global and local surface temperature changes, and then uses that statistical model to forecast future temperature changes. It’s an approach that’s been used to predict financial market changes, for example.

The obvious flaw in this application is that the Earth’s climate is a physical system, and the statistical model includes no physics whatsoever. You simply cannot accurately predict how a physical system will change if you ignore physics, like the increasing greenhouse effect. As DeSmogUK put it, the GWPF report predicts no global warming by ignoring the main cause of global warming. And as climate scientist James Annan wrote,

The basic premise is that if you fit a nonsense model with no trend or drift, you generate a forecast with no trend or drift (though with huge uncertainty intervals, necessary to allow for the historical warming we’ve already seen). Amusingly, even with those huge uncertainty intervals, the temperature is already outside them

Or as Ken Rice explained in one of the links above:

Here’s the key point; projecting future warming requires some kind of estimate for future emissions. Trying to forecast future warming using some model with no physics and based only on past temperatures is obvious nonsense. Even a Professor of Statistics should be able to get this utterly trivial point. Maybe Terence Mills is so clueless that he really can’t grasp what is a pretty straightforward concept. 

My first question:  when will Sinclair Davidson admit he was wrong to be so easily influenced by Mills?

Second question:  why does he think there is value in running a blog that is chock full of "there is no AGW" denialism in both posts and comments.

Come on, Sinclair, don't be shy. 

Buddhism makes my brain hurt

The problem with Buddhism, I find, is that while the face of it is often relatively appealing - the serene temples, the earnest looking monks, the chanting and incense that is not a million miles from old style Catholic or High Church services - the fundamental ideas seem more conducive to nihilism than providing a solid basis for acting ethically.  

I bring this up because my post on the robot priest in a Kyoto temple apparently recites (or talks about?) the Heart Sutra, which is famous.  So, let's look at one translation of it:

Avalokiteshvara,
when practicing the profound perfection of wisdom,
did light up and saw that
five aggregates were of emptiness
and he overcame all suffering and misfortune. 
Sariputra!
 
Form is emptiness
and emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness
and emptiness is not other than form.
So is the same for feeling,
perception, mental formation,
and consciousness.

Sariputra!
The mark of emptiness of all phenomena 
is not of birth, not of death,
not of impurity, not of purity, 
not of increase, not of decrease.
 
Therefore, in emptiness
there is no form, feeling, perception,
mental formation, and consciousness,
no eye, no ear, no nose, 
no tongue, no body, and no mind,
no form, no sound, no odor, 
no taste, no touch, and no mental object,  
no eye sphere, and further no consciousness sphere, 
no ignorance, and also no cessation of ignorance,
further no aging and death,
and also no cessation of aging and death,
no suffering, no origin of suffering, 
no cessation of suffering, 
and no path to enlightenment, 
no wisdom, and also no attainment. 
Since there is no attainment, and
all Bodhisattvas rely on the perfection of wisdom,
there is no obstacle in their mind.
 
Since there is no obstacle in their mind, 
they have no possession of fear,
completely abandon wrong and illusory perception,
and arrive at the ultimate of Nirvāṇa. 


Since all Buddhas in the past, present and future
rely on the perfection of wisdom, 
they attain unsurpassable complete enlightenment.

Therefore, one should know that 
the perfection of wisdom is 
truly the profound mantra, truly the luminous mantra, 
the highest mantra, peerless mantra 
that put an end to all the suffering,
that is true and is not untrue. 

Therefore, proclaim the mantra 
that is the perfection of wisdom.
The mantra is said thus:

Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!


Hmm.

According to this website, this will change my life forever [one has one's doubts about that]:

One thing we can safely say about the Heart Sutra is that it is completely crazy. If we read it, it does not make any sense. Well, maybe the beginning and end make sense, but everything in the middle sounds like a sophisticated form of nonsense, which can be said to be the basic feature of the Prajnaparamita Sutras in general. If we like the word “no,” we might like the sutra because that is the main word it uses—no this, no that, no everything. We could also say that it is a sutra about wisdom, but it is a sutra about crazy wisdom. When we read it, it sounds nuts, but that is actually where the wisdom part comes in. What the Heart Sutra (like all Prajnaparamita Sutras) does is to cut through, deconstruct, and demolish all our usual conceptual frameworks, all our rigid ideas, all our belief systems, all our reference points, including any with regard to our spiritual path. It does so on a very fundamental level, not just in terms of thinking and concepts, but also in terms of our perception, how we see the world, how we hear, how we smell, taste, touch, how we regard and emotionally react to ourselves and others, and so on. This sutra pulls the rug out from underneath our feet and does not leave anything intact that we can think of, nor even a lot of things that we cannot think of. This is called “crazy wisdom.” I guess I should give you a warning here that this sutra is hazardous to your samsaric sanity.

 And more:

Besides being a meditation manual, we could also say that the Heart Sutra is like a big koan. But it is not just one koan, it is like those Russian dolls: there is one big doll on the outside and then there is a smaller one inside that first one, and there are many more smaller ones in each following one. Likewise, all the “nos” in the big koan of the sutra are little koans. Every little phrase with a “no” is a different koan in terms of what the “no” relates to, such as “no eye,” “no ear,” and so on. It is an invitation to contemplate what that means. “No eye,” “no ear” sounds very simple and very straightforward, but if we go into the details, it is not that straightforward at all. In other words, all those different “no” phrases give us different angles or facets of the main theme of the sutra, which is emptiness. Emptiness means that things do not exist as they seem, but are like illusions and like dreams. They do not have a nature or a findable core of their own. Each one of those phrases makes us look at that very same message. The message or the looking are not really different, but we look at it in relation to different things. What does it mean that the eye is empty? What does it mean that visible form is empty? What does it mean that even wisdom, buddhahood, and nirvana are empty?

 Indeed.  

I remain....unconvinced.

This should be a huge scandal...

Have a read of the texts just released between a weirdo wannabe Republican candidate and Giuliani's off sider in Ukraine, indicating that they had someone inside (and outside) of the embassy tracking unco-operative US ambassador Yovanovitch, and talking about how she could be taken care of, for a price.   

And Giuliani thinks he can help the President defend himself against impeachment?   Just nuts.

Conservatives and Markle hate

I have been reluctant to say anything about the Harry and Meghan escape to Canada story - it is an exceedingly unimportant story in the grand scheme of things.

But what I cannot get over is how utterly convinced conservatives can be that they know and understand what an evil bitch (in their minds) is Meghan. 

I still go over and read Sinclair Davidson's Ship of (ageing angry white, mostly male) Fools  (and man, do they get unpleasant when Sinclair is away - his pal Franklin telling another commenter to slit his own throat, for example, because he insulted the accuracy of a former pal's book); and I can report that their vehement certainty that climate change is a crock is matched closely with the same certainty that Meghan is a scheming, selfish disaster of a wife who they just cannot stand.     

I think the only explanation is that the same gullibility it takes to believe climate change "sceptics" - actually just culture war motivated denialists - makes them prime gullible targets for negative media reporting on anyone getting into the Royal family who they can deem a Lefty "woke" figure.   They completely fail to take into account the money making motive in both fields - climate change denialists who make a living by writing columns, running sites or hosting late night Sky News shows, and the tabloid papers which know all about Royal story "clickbait", both have every incentive in the world to push one invented line without a scintilla of care for balance or the truth.

And what about this Michelle Markin tweet, which has been rightly attacked as just nuts:

Very strange, very "culture war".  

This article at AP, which notes some of the racially tinged bias in British reporting on Meghan, is also worth a look.

Doesn't look futuristic enough for Antarctica

Brazil has opened a new base in Antarctica, but the design looks a little dull:

See my previous post (from 2011!) about my preferred, more futuristic, Antarctic outposts.

Robot religion

Vox has an interesting short article:

Robot priests can bless you, advise you, and even perform your funeral 

My first reaction:  cool.

Some extracts:

A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some ... unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.

Mindar is a robot.

Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the $1 million machine is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline.

For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same preprogrammed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators say they plan to give it machine-learning capabilities that’ll enable it to tailor feedback to worshippers’ specific spiritual and ethical problems.

“This robot will never die; it will just keep updating itself and evolving,” said Tensho Goto, the temple’s chief steward. “With AI, we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles. It’s changing Buddhism.”

Well, still cool:  but I'm not a big fan of its looks - 

The article goes on to make an interesting case as to why Buddhism in particular seems suited to robot priests:

Buddhism’s non-dualistic metaphysical notion that everything has inherent “Buddha nature” — that all beings have the potential to become enlightened — may predispose its adherents to be receptive to spiritual guidance that comes from technology.

At the temple in Kyoto, Goto put it like this: “Buddhism isn’t a belief in a God; it’s pursuing Buddha’s path. It doesn’t matter whether it’s represented by a machine, a piece of scrap metal, or a tree.” 

“Mindar’s metal skeleton is exposed, and I think that’s an interesting choice — its creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, is not trying to make something that looks totally human,” said Natasha Heller, an associate professor of Chinese religions at the University of Virginia. She told me the deity Kannon, upon whom Mindar is based, is an ideal candidate for cyborgization because the Lotus Sutra explicitly says Kannon can manifest in different forms — whatever forms will best resonate with the humans of a given time and place.  ...

Abrahamic religions like Islam or Judaism tend to be more metaphysically dualistic — there’s the sacred and then there’s the profane. And they have more misgivings than Buddhism about visually depicting divinity, so they may take issue with Mindar-style iconography.

They also have different ideas about what makes a religious practice effective. For example, Judaism places a strong emphasis on intentionality, something machines don’t possess. When a worshipper prays, what matters is not just that their mouth forms the right words — it’s also very important that they have the right intention. 

Meanwhile, some Buddhists use prayer wheels containing scrolls printed with sacred words and believe that spinning the wheel has its own spiritual efficacy, even if nobody recites the words aloud. In hospice settings, elderly Buddhists who don’t have people on hand to recite prayers on their behalf will use devices known as nianfo ji — small machines about the size of an iPhone, which recite the name of the Buddha endlessly.

Yes, I must admit, to the Christian mind, the idea common (in some parts, at least) of Buddhism that repetition of mechanical prayer (or of a "holy" image) is a metaphysically useful thing to do is pretty  foreign.    ("Oh look, a temple with 1,000 statuettes of Buddha", for example.)   But then again, the meditative state of a rosary session approximates something of repetitive chanting, I suppose.

Anyway, as robots can be designed to look male but have no penis, the Catholic Church should be considering them as a useful, less troublesome, adjunct to the fleshy troublemaker version of the priesthood.

About the late Roger Scruton

I can't say I followed him all that closely, but when I Google search my blog, I see he got a mention a dozen or so times.

On the good side - he took his anti-communism seriously enough to be actively involved in supporting dissidents, and his overall philosophy of the values of a conservative mindset seemed a useful contribution to political philosophy (and has endeared him forever to the American Right).  His writing on aesthetics could be interesting.  He was very badly treated by the New Statesman last year for no good reason.

On the not-so-good side:  he was lauded early on as being a (rare in global terms) conservative who took climate change as a serious issue and didn't deride it as something to be ignored.  But, like some other conservative figures (hello, John Howard), he moved from apparent initial acceptance of science to interpreting it so thoroughly through a culture war lens that you could pretty much say he ended up a friend of deniers.   The GWPF quotes him, for example, and he was happy to be out supporting IPA events.   If only he took that issue as seriously as his anti-communism.

I had also forgotten how strenuously conservative he was on matters of sexuality early on, but he came to change his mind somewhat.  He also was a secret paid shill for tobacco - a really disreputable way for a conservative to make a living, if you ask me.

Finding conservatives who don't have - shall we say - "problematic aspects" to their lives and beliefs is quite the challenge.

Smoke issues

Also noted, from the Washington Post of all places:

 In the state of New South Wales, home to Sydney, health officials said emergency room visits for asthma and breathing problems increased more than 34 percent in the period from Dec. 30 and Jan. 5 compared to a year earlier. Ambulance calls for respiratory issues were also higher, about 2,500 compared to the five-year average of about 1,900. Similarly, hospital admissions increased to more than 430, surpassing the five-year average of 361.

Looks and sounds good

My testosterone must be low today - the Washington Post has a vegan recipe up that sounds and looks pretty delicious:

Giant Jesus and Hindu god face off

It's important to keep up with giant statue news, especially when it's a Battle of the Gods type situation:

Catholics in India are seeking to erect the nation’s tallest statue of Jesus, over objections by Hindi groups who say one of their gods lives on the hill designated for the project.

Work began last week on the statue, planned to be nearly 100 feet tall, on 10 acres of land owned by the Archdiocese of Bangalore. If completed, the statue would be almost as tall as Poland’s 108-foot Christ the King statue, completed in 2010. Poland’s statue is believed to be the tallest statue of Jesus in the world.

Hindu groups have opposed the project, objecting that the Kapalabetta hilltop is the abode of their deity Kapali Betta. They said Christians cannot set up a statue there.

Feeling a bit glum

I need some news to cheer me up.

Any ideas?

Update:  here's one reason to be slightly cheerful - I do not live in this country:

(The caption, from The Guardian :  People travel on overcrowded trains after attending the final prayer of Bishwa Ijtema, considered the world’s second largest Muslim gathering after the hajj.)

Update 2:    more good news (kinda):  this was a false alarm -

Canadian officials accidentally push nuclear alert to millions, warning of 'incident' at Ontario plant

Not a good thing for people who think nuclear for Australia is the only way forward, though.  No other power station comes with this sort of need.

Pasta and not pasta

Two recipes made recently by me, for my future reference:

1.  Linguine with prawns, chilli, garlic and rocket:   the base recipe (from Taste and which I will copy below) is good, and makes one of the "drier" style pasta dishes which I find more appealing lately.

340g  Linguine
1/3 cup (80ml) extra virgin olive oil
5 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 tsp dried red chilli flakes
1 tsp finely grated lemon zest
Large pinch of salt
20 large green king prawns, peeled, deveined, tails intact
60ml (1/4 cup) white wine
1 tbs lemon juice
1 large bunch rocket, stems trimmed, leaves shredded [I reckon baby spinach leaves would work just as well]

Cook the linguine in a large saucepan of lightly salted boiling water, according to packet instructions or until al dente. Drain well and return to pan.

Meanwhile, heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the garlic, chilli flakes, lemon zest and salt, cook stirring for 30 seconds or until aromatic. Add the prawns and cook stirring occasionally for 2 minutes or until golden brown and just cooked through. Add wine, simmer until reduced by half. Remove from heat.

Add the prawn mixture [and a punnet or so of halved cherry or grape tomatoes] to the hot pasta with the lemon juice, remaining olive oil and rocket, toss until well combined. Serve immediately with freshly ground black pepper.

 2.  Zucchini "noodles" (or "pasta")  with anchovy butter, garlic and chilli flakes.

Zucchini has always been low on my vegetable interests, but I have also long wondered whether the "spiralized" version of it done in lieu of pasta would be any good.

My daughter gave me the equipment at Christmas - one of these:

and I twisted a couple of large size zucchini through it, letting them sit on paper towels to absorb a bit of the moisture before cooking.

Internet research indicated you barely need to cook the zucchini strands, and I took a punt and made (as a side dish) a butter, anchovy, garlic and chilli sauce sauce for it.  The basic idea is here, although I am not sure that the 2 kg quantity of zucchini seems in right proportion to the other ingredients.

Amounts:  for two large zucchini's worth of "pasta":   about 7 or 8 anchovy fillets; about a couple of tablespoons of butter; about the same of olive oil; a few minced garlic cloves, and half a teaspoon or so of chilli flakes.   Just heat the oils in a deep frying pan, add the anchovy fillets and break them up until they are pretty much dissolved; add the garlic & chilli flakes, and then the zucchini "pasta".   Use tongs to move it around and cook for just 2 or 3 minutes until heated but still "al dente".   Check for saltiness and add some if needed.

The texture of the (barely cooked) zucchini was one of the most pleasant things about the dish - it had bite and texture more so than your average cooked zucchini, which can go mushy and watery.

Oh, the resolute stupidity

So the mayor of massively burnt out Kangaroo Island is a climate change denying Liberal from way back, who is upset that Obama made a tweet connecting the first to climate change.  I presume he didn't lose his own house, which is a bit of a pity.*  (It wouldn't have changed his mind, but there would have been poetic justice.)

As has been noted by many, old white men are killing the planet, and too stupid to learn anything new.  


*  Other property loss I would put down as evidence of a Righteous God - a gas explosion taking out the IPA's offices;  a meteor writing off this:

(That's Lachlan Murdoch's new home in Los Angeles, according to a weird, tabloid style article in the SMH today, that features more creepy photos of old man Murdoch in the water with Jerry Hall.) 

A space based quantum internet - and why it will be needed

It hadn't sunk into my consciousness 'til now, the matter of why a quantum internet was being keenly pursued as a research topic; but this article explains it's because of quantum computing's potential to break all present, mathematically based, encryption.  It then goes onto explain the technical issues with creating a quantum internet, and paints a pretty convincing picture that it is going to be best based in space, in orbiting satelittes:

First some background. At the heart of any quantum network is the strange property of entanglement. This is the phenomenon in which two quantum particles share the same existence, even if they are separated by vast distances. It ensures that a measurement on one of these particles immediately influences the other, a marvel that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

Physicists usually distribute entanglement using pairs of photons created at the same point and instant in time. When the photons are sent to different locations, the entanglement linking them can be exploited to send secure messages.

The problem is that entanglement is fragile and hard to preserve.  Any small interaction between one of the photons and its environment breaks the link. Indeed, this is exactly what happens when physicists transmit entangled photons directly through the atmosphere or through optical fibers. The photons interact with other atoms in the atmosphere or the glass, and the entanglement is destroyed. It turns out the maximum distance over which entanglement can be shared in this way is just a few hundred kilometers.

How then to build a quantum internet that shares entanglement across the globe? One option is to use “quantum repeaters”—devices that measure the quantum properties of photons as they arrive and then transfer these properties to new photons that are sent on their way. This preserves entanglement, allowing it to hop from one repeater to the next. However, this technology is highly experimental and several years from commercial exploitation.

So another option is to create the entangled pairs of photons in space and broadcast them to two different base stations on the ground. These base stations then become entangled, allowing them to swap messages with perfect secrecy.

In 2017, a Chinese satellite called Micius showed for the first time that entanglement can indeed be shared in this way. It turns out that photons can travel much further in this scenario because only the last 20 kilometers or so of the journey is through the atmosphere, provided the satellite is high in the sky and not too close to the horizon.

Khatri and co say that a constellation of similar satellites is a much better way to create a global quantum internet. The key is that to communicate securely, two ground stations must be able to see the same satellite at the same time so that both can receive entangled photons from it....

I won't extract the next few paragraphs, detailed the new paper's calculations as to how many satellites at what orbit would be needed, and cut to the conclusions:

Khatri and co suggest that the best compromise is a constellation of at least 400 satellites flying at an altitude of around 3,000 kilometers. By contrast, GPS operates with 24 satellites.

Even then, the maximum distance between base stations will be limited to about 7,500 kilometers. This means that such a system could support secure messaging between London and Mumbai, which are 7,200 km apart, but not between London and Houston, 7,800 km apart—or indeed between any cities that are farther apart. That’s a significant drawback.

Nevertheless, a space-based quantum internet significantly outperforms ground-based systems of quantum repeaters, say Khatri and co. Repeaters would have to be spaced at intervals of less than 200 kilometers, so covering long distances would require large numbers of them. This introduces its own set of limitations for a quantum internet. “We thus find that satellites offer a significant advantage over ground-based entanglement distribution,” say Khatri and co.

That's pretty fascinating, and it sounds like China is really interested in it.  Maybe Huawei will build it! 

He doesn't look or sound well

I didn't watch much of his (Thursday morning?) post-airbase attack speech from the White House, but did notice the (now quite common) slight slur of words that comes when he is trying to stick to script, like he has false teeth that don't quite fit, or something.   Many Lefties talk about his sniffing a lot during these speeches, but I tend to think that may well be a nervous tic that comes from, well, just sticking to script.

The attempt at Messiah image, by his coming out of the room with the light behind him, was just too, too obvious; and somewhat offset by the awkward appearance of the "disciples" behind him:

...especially that top brass to the right of him in the photo - he always looks like he hasn't slept for 2 weeks and is on the verge of panic, if you ask me.

But this subsequent photo from another event also makes Trump look pretty unwell:

 And it's not just one photo:

At the very least, he looks very, very tired.  But given the somewhat mysterious recent visit to a hospital, I think there is reason to suspect he is not well with an ongoing condition.

Yes, there is a small corner of Lefties who go on about how any sniff means he's doing cocaine, or he obviously has dementia, or whatever.   I don't think it has any real widespread traction though.

Unlike, of course, the utter conviction that existed amongst Right wingnuts that Hilary Clinton was on her death bed, virtually, during the campaign.  

We can be 100% certain that if Hilary Clinton were President, showing the same speech tics and with blue bags under her eyes like Trump, the Wingnut Right would be speaking about it all day, every day.

Searching for the real Buddha

This lengthy essay at AEON talks about the little that is known, or guessed, about the historical Buddha.   (Very, very little is known with any certainty.)

The author paints this picture (and make sure to read to the end):

Bringing the reliable historical fragments together, and discarding mythic elaborations, a humbler picture of the Buddha emerges. Gotama was born into a small tribe, in a remote and unimportant town on the periphery of pre-imperial India. He lived in a world on the cusp of urbanisation, albeit one that still lacked money, writing and long-distance trade. More importantly, we might ask what happened to Gotama after he had been drawn into a counterculture of ascetics and philosophers, and especially after he had attained his ‘awakening’. The texts say that the Buddha achieved remarkable success as a teacher straight away, but this seems unlikely.

The Pali account of the Buddha’s ‘First Sermon’ claims that its five recipients immediately attained enlightenment. But other texts give reason to doubt this. Indeed, these disciples are hardly mentioned again in the textual record, and in fact the occasional appearance of some of them is not entirely flattering. One text tells the story of an encounter between the Buddha and Koṇḍañña, the most prominent of the first disciples. After a lengthy absence from the Buddha, Koṇḍañña acts like a supplicating devotee, not an enlightened Buddhist saint (arahant): he is said to prostrate himself on the ground, stroking and kissing the Buddha’s feet, all the while announcing: ‘I am Koṇḍañña, I am Koṇḍañña!’

Another prominent member of the group of five, called ‘Assaji’, is mentioned in a few more places. But one text records the occasion when he was ill and became upset because he could no longer attain meditative absorption. Just like the text on Koṇḍañña’s emotional reunion with the Buddha, Assaji is not depicted as an enlightened saint. This suggests that, within the old Buddhist literature from ancient India, pre-mythic stories about the Buddha’s life have survived. Further historical fragments can be retrieved from myth, for example the primary Pali account of the Buddha’s ‘awakening’, where we are told that Gotama considered not bothering with teaching, since nobody would understand him. After Gotama did decide to teach, the first person to encounter him, an ascetic called Upaka, was not impressed. Upaka asks who Gotama’s teacher is. When Gotama replies that he is fully awakened, and so has no teacher, Upaka simply shakes his head and walks off, saying ‘maybe’.

That's sort of amusing.

The next section of the article is really interesting too - emphasising that Buddha's reputation may have been built by his "quietism".  And if one wants to be cynical, it almost comes across as describing an ancient version of Being There (a movie I don't care for, incidentally.)   That is, a case of people reading too much into simple, enigmatic statements, or insistent silence.

I doubt that it was the writers intention to give me that impression, but that's what came to my mind.

Science fiction and comedy has toyed with various ideas about Christ;  maybe it's time for a "Life of Gotama" too.

Once again, the pain behind the comedian

I didn't know much about Mel Brooks' personal life, except that I recall something about an unflattering biography.  Not sure if the book was the one reviewed in Jewish Review of Books (a publication I had not heard of before!), but here are some extracts which I thought noteworthy:

Funny Man tells the improbable story of how Melvin Kaminsky, the short, unbookish, unhandsome son of Kitty Kaminsky, became a comedy icon, an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar winner. He was Kitty’s fourth son, supremely coddled and cared for. “I’d had such a happy childhood,” Brooks claimed, and maybe so, though its outlines were Dickensian. The Brooklyn Kaminskys were poor (“so poor, we do not even have a language—just a stupid accent!” wails a woman in History of the World: Part I). The family was grieving a tragedy—the death of Brooks’s father when Brooks was two. The main absence-presence in Brooks’s life, his father haunts this biography, as he apparently haunted Brooks long into adulthood....

Brooks was an incorrigible goofball, but he was fundamentally serious about comedy in a way that mirrored the seriousness of the times. In early 1944, just before D-Day, Brooks enlisted in the army and shipped out to France. Like so many soldiers, he returned scarred, damaged, prone to mood swings and depressions. He’d seen devastated French villages, streets strewn with fresh corpses. The experience “added a layer of outer shell to his personality,” McGilligan writes, insulating him from his own emotions and from other people’s....

The delightful Brooks, such grand company, gets short shrift in Funny Man, elbowed aside by the angry, belligerent Brooks. Beneath anger, there’s usually pain, and in Brooks’s case, there were reservoirs of it. In the 1950s, while writing Your Show of Shows, Brooks suffered frequent nervous breakdowns. There were bursts of hypomania; sudden, acute bouts of mourning; and at least one episode of paranoid psychosis. Finally, Brooks submitted to therapy. “All I did was cry,” he recalled of his psychoanalytic sessions. “For two years. I did nothing but sob.” Brooks’s dark night of the soul lasted six years.

By all accounts, Brooks learned much about himself, trading misery for ordinary unhappiness. What all that therapy didn’t do was change Brooks. He seems to have suffered from a looming sense of emptiness, an affliction not to be therapized away. In the showbiz mindset he carried with him, attention is oxygen; wealth is validation; prizes and praise are sustaining. The problem, McGilligan makes clear, is that no amount of applause could satisfy Brooks; his needs were bottomless. Even after he won an Academy Award for his short film The Critic, Brooks often felt neglected and unappreciated.

George joins the microbial food future

I mentioned last year that I had not been able to track down the (I think) RN Science Show in which it was claimed that the future of cheap, bulk food to feed the masses was going to come from vats of microbially sourced protein.   Not the (way over-hyped) meat grown from meat cells, but from the right kind of bacteria, which is then processed into food.

Well, it seems George Monbiot has got excited about this idea too, as he explains in this article in (where else?) The Guardian.      It starts:

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

Here's a BCC article on the same company.   The only thing that sounds a bit unnecessarily complicated - they say they will use hydrogen make from electrolysis of water as part of the feed to the bacteria.   Hence they need cheap (renewable) electricity for this to make environmental sense. 

Can't they do more with - I don't know, I'm just guessing here - GM algae, or something that doesn't need the hydrogen? 

Still Lost in Space

I've watched the first two episodes of the second series of Netflix's revamped Lost in Space, and I have to say, I still find the show very likeable.   I don't say it's monumentally great, but this part of an on-line review sums it up well:  Lost in Space remains aggressively fine in Season 2.

To sum up the things which keep impressing me:

*  the production design - is it weird that I spend much of every episode wondering why I love the interior of the Jupiter 2 so, so much?   Apart from that, the spacesuits they wear look solidly authentic compared to most science fiction.  And even the other gear they wear around inside sometimes - it all looks exactly how I think it should look.   The production staff deserve some kind of award;

*  the special effects - they seem particularly good this season, and certainly cinema movie quality;

*  the incredible ability of Posey Parker to make her (intentionally) horrible, manipulative Dr Smith so intensely dislikeable.   She really takes it up another level, but I am sort of enjoying the intensity of the cringing whenever she is doing one of her manipulation attempts on any of the crew.

*  the general level of acting is pretty fine all around, really.  As with the TV series, a lot hangs on young Will Smith, but this actor is handling it really well.

I hope it is rating well...

Update:  I meant to throw in that, while I appreciate that it is not exactly realistic,  I find it almost amusingly endearing now how the screenwriters take the attitude that there is never not enough time for the family to be having some interpersonal bickering - they might have 60 seconds left to avoid certain death by doing something or other, but at least one of the kids and at least one of the parents will still have time to have some back and forth about how they don't feel appreciated, or aren't being given enough responsibility, or some such.   The words "Shut up, we don't have enough time for that right now" seem to have been banned.

Joe Hildebrand: fact arsonist

So, "I'm just trying to be reasonable" professional opinion sprouter Joe Hildebrand put out a tweet saying this:

The problems start with item 1.

Arson definition:  Arson is the act of intentionally and maliciously destroying or damaging property through the use of fire.  Definition from the Australian Institute of Criminology, which is where Joe cites support for his claim.

The AIC report he is presumably relying on is this one, from 2008, which analysed figures from all Australian States, and came up with this conclusion:

Hence, I would have thought that anyone sensible would not claim anything more than "up to half of all bushfires might be deliberately lit", but even that would be misleading.

The correct summary would be "one study indicates that at least 13% of bushfires are deliberately lit, but if all suspicious fires are assumed to also be arson, then it might be as high as 50%".

And even then, it would be fudging somewhat on the qualifications the AIC gave:

Some caution should be taken when considering these figures. Just over 40 percent of vegetation fires across Australia do not have a cause assigned by the responding fire agency. Furthermore, inconsistencies exist between and within agencies in recording data. For example, different agencies may have different thresholds as to when they consider a fire to be deliberate, suspicious or unknown.

Well, that indicates that the exact figure for "arson" is extremely uncertain - and if you want to say that maybe some of the 40% of fires that don't have a cause assigned might be arson, then I would ask "do those fires matter much?  Is a cause not assigned because they were too small to worry about?"   And even if a fire is deliberately lit, it's not always by people who could be held responsible for their action.  Just this week, there was the report of an elderly man believed to suffer from dementia facing 4 charges of lighting fires.   His example might technically be arson, but it's irrelevant to the question of why this fire season is so bad. 

What Hildebrand, if he were honest, or smart, cannot claim is that the study he cites proves that "bushfires are started more by arson than any other cause". [I see in his Twitter defence against lots of people who are pointing this out to him that he now says "I didn't say it caused most fires", as a way of denying that he grouped "suspicious" with "deliberate".   But he must have to some extent to make his claim - "accidental" accounts for 35%, so for "arson" to get above that he has to have arbitrarily added at least 23% to "deliberate" from the "suspicious" column.] 

Why is he surprised that his so-called attempt at common sense consensus fails at step one?

It is, in fact, one of those exercises of "both side-ism" that carries a bias towards one side by giving it a credibility it does not warrant, assisted by his own dodgy number fiddling. 

Truth be told, most of us would feel he could do less harm if this were true...

Sunrise does something useful?

It's been obvious for sometime that Sunrise shows what might be called a "soft Right" bias in its politics now, so it is a little surprising to see that they had a guest to give clear pushback against the "it's all about the fuel load" claims of climate change denialists:

Well, that (almost) helps make up for Channel 7 helping pushing the other big denialist diversionary line that the arson issue is really behind the current crisis.   

The Victorian country fire authority chief yesterday hosing down (ha, a pun) the fuel load reduction issue was also useful. 

Here's the thing - scientists (and economists who believed them) gave clear warnings of a substantial increase in bushfire danger by 2020, and the events of this summer show that they were pretty much spot on.   Right wing climate change denialists (or lukewarmers who think economies growing as fast as possible are more important than environmental catastrophes that will get much worse after they are dead) are highly motivated to distract from the correct predictions.

Why is swords and sorcery fantasy more popular than ever?

Watched the first episode of The Witcher on Netflix last, and was completely underwhelmed.

I am not alone in this - I see that it only got 53% on Metacritic - but isn't Netflix saying it has huge ratings?  (Yes, it is.)

I guess people just can't get enough of their bloodthirsty, gratuitous boob, fantasies since Game of Thrones finished.  But what is the appeal of this genre?   It's always eluded me - even if it's family friendly fantasy such as Tolkien's.   If anything, the adult version offends me more for what has always struck me (since the first Conan the Barbarian and its imitators started appearing in the early 80's) as a too obvious attempt to broaden the market for an outdated genre by ramping up the soft porn and violence to appeal to young men.  But now, with the internet, the "let's give young guys access to soft porn" aspect is completely redundant, making it more gratuitous than ever.   So what are we left with - magic, the occasional monster and (let's face it) stuff that would have formerly been considered gratuitous ultra violence, but is now watched by women as well as men.   (And by the way, I don't think the fighting scenes were even well directed in that first episode.)

I don't understand the appeal at all...

Yes, she is appalling

El Nino predicted

Some news at the end of last year -

A group of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Beijing Normal University and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen has found a way to predict El Niño events up to a year before they occur. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their complexity-based approach to better predicting the seemingly random weather events. ...

Once they found that pattern, the researchers went analyzed yearly surface temperature data from 1984 to 2018 to make predictions about El Niño events in the past. They report that their method correctly predicted nine out of 10 El Niño events (and had three false positives.) Additionally, they found that the higher the disorder the previous year, the stronger the following El Niño event. The researchers conclude that it is now possible to predict El Niño events up to a year in advance with reasonable accuracy. 

Some of the work has come from an Israeli university, it seems, so the research got a lot of reporting in the Jewish press.  For example:

“This novel climate network approach is very promising for improving El Niño prediction,” said Prof. Shlomo Havlin, an Israel Prize-winning physicist from Bar-Ilan University who was involved in developing the algorithm.

“Conventional methods are unable to make a reliable El Niño forecast more than six months in advance. With our method, we have roughly doubled the previous warning time,” stressed JLU physicist Armin Bunde, who initiated the development of the algorithm together with his former PhD student Josef Ludescher.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Climate Impact Research, explained: “This clever combination of measured data and mathematics gives us unique insights – and we make these available to the people affected.”

He pointed out that the prediction method does not offer one hundred percent certainty: “The probability of El Niño in 2020 is around 80%. But that’s pretty significant.”

As El Nino is usually associated with less rainfall and higher temperatures in Australia, the 2020 prediction is really not good news.

Quantum overview

I quite liked this simplified list of quantum interpretations that appeared in a recent book review in TLS.  John Gribbins came up with this:

As it stands today, depending on how you want to interpret the results from a litany of physical and mathematical experiments all validating each other, you are left, basically speaking, with only so many possibilities of how you might understand the world. Gribbin chooses six of the more scientifically realized and commonly endorsed. As he summarizes them:

One. The world does not exist unless you look at it.

Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.

Three. Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.

Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.

Five. Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.

Six. The future influences the past.

As explained further down, this list equates with the Copenhagen Interpretation (number one, roughly) and the rest are:

the Pilot Wave, Many Worlds, Decoherence, Ensemble and Transactional interpretations

I like this bit of quirky information, too (in my bold):

Bohr said that the world revealed by measurements is the only reality worthy of the name, that the act of measurement actively constructs the reality that is being measured. Put an electron in a box. According to the Copenhagen interpretation – as Jim Holt describes in When Einstein Walked with Gödel – it “does not have a definitive location until we look inside to see just where it is. Prior to that act of observation, the electron is in a mixture of potential locations spread throughout the box”. This mixture is “mathematically represented by a ‘wave function,’ which expresses the different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various locations inside the box”. In French the wave function is poetically called the densité de présence, which is a helpful way of thinking about it.

Successful solar thermal?

I noticed an article at Bloomberg on a (pretty much) completely failed solar thermal plant in Nevada called Crescent Dunes.   I've reached my limit of free articles for Bloomberg, but if you haven't, here's the link.   Also, it has a wikipedia entry.

This made me think:  is there a company that is a clear leader in solar thermal that is making it work?

This seems a difficult topic on which to find solid information.

This site lists 8 companies, which work in CSP (concentrated solar power), but it doesn't really explain if they are making money. 

The Bloomsberg article said that that big problem with it is how cheap PV solar has become;  solar thermal's advantage is that it is not limited to making electricity during the day. But at what cost, is the issue, I suppose...

Standard Republican gaslighting

Update: and now -

The smoke hazard

One of the most surprising things about the terrible bushfires has been the seriousness of the smoke issue in Canberra (and to a lesser degree, Sydney).

I mean, I think this story was under-reported, if anything:

An elderly woman has died in Canberra tonight after she went into respiratory distress when exiting the plane to the tarmac which was filled with dense smoke from the bushfires.

The New Daily has confirmed the Canberra woman was on a Qantas plane arriving from Brisbane.

She was alive when she left the plane but relatives believe she went into respiratory distress after disembarking. ACT police and ambulance were called to the airport to assist.

Maybe there will be subsequent reports detailing properly the number of hospital admissions and increased mortality (one disturbing thing is that they say poor air quality and SIDS has a clear connection, making parents of newly born babies freak out with worry.)

But apart from that, it's the galleries and public buildings that are staying closed; the flights cancelled; the terrible images of smoke obscuring all views being spread across the globe.   You can imagine it having a terrible effect on summer tourism for some years to come.

It's part of what makes Right wing excuse making about how we've always had bushfires seem especially pathetic.   

Some criminal underworld stuff going on in Brisbane?

This is a surprising story:

Mr Percival's bar on Brisbane River hit by gun shots weeks after being firebombed

Shots have been fired at a bar on the Brisbane River that was firebombed on December 21.

The shots came from a boat on the river and were aimed at Mr Percival's bar at Howard Street Wharves, under the Story Bridge, according to police.

Police confirmed the shots were fired from a boat carrying three to four people.

 We're not used to bars being firebombed in Brisbane.  The most notorious one was in 1973, and the investigations into it just went on forever. 

Movie viewed

I finally got around to watching The Death of Stalin last night (on SBS On Demand).

It was very good.  It was also good to read this article at Slate as to which parts were true, or at least, half true.  

As I didn't go into it expecting great historical accuracy (as I don't expect there was really all that much humour to be found in the inner circle machinations after his death), the blender approach to the history behind it didn't bother me in this case.  (Mind you, I still wonder about the choices made.  Why make out that his daughter was sent immediately to Vienna?)

Jewish success considered

I'm still catching up on posting about things I read while I was away on a short break.   This is one of them.

As a result of Bret Stephen's recent controversial article in the New York Times, Noah Smith reminded us of a blog post he had written in 2013 which looked at explanations other than high IQ, culture (or conspiracy) which may well show that the apparent success of Jewish folk is somewhat illusory, or explained in more mundane ways.

I thought it raised many good points which I had not heard of before.

GRAEME:  DON'T COMMENT IT WILL BE DELETED

Northern sea surface temperatures: is this unusual?

I am doing a bit of "man in his shed" speculating here, but I had noticed somewhere that, even though there is a delayed start to the monsoon season in North Australia this summer, the sea surface temperature anomalies are pretty high up that way (in the Indian Ocean, and the Timor and Arafura Seas, at least):

Which made me wonder - very high sea surface temperatures were a feature of the summer before the 2011 floods.  How does today compare to then?

Unfortunately, this map does not use the same colour scale, so you have to convert it in your brain:

Now, I know one is a year long analysis, and the other is a one day snapshot:  but still, it seems to me that both show a large accumulation of anomalies in the 1.5 to 2 degrees range, with the difference that this year it is bunched up further north.

Still, is the large blob of hot water unusual for this time of year, and does it indicate that when the wet comes, it will be very wet indeed?

I guess we will soon find out...

Global debt considered

I always worry when someone writes something about economics that seems very reasonable to me, but extremely few commentators are discussing the issue at all.   Is it my lack of understanding of economics, or is it a case of the obvious being ignored by most economics commentators for political or other reasons? 

That's the feeling I have with this short piece in The Guardian by Phillip Inman:  Debt will kill the global economy.  But it seems no one cares.

An aviation thing I didn't really understand before

I had always wondered whether unlucky sailors might be covered with an obvious fine spray of aviation fuel if a passenger jet was doing an emergency fuel dump over them.  Apparently not, although they may still smell it:



Read the article that the video is from at Business Insider.

Events that were made for comedy writers

For future reference

A couple of things I noticed via Twitter or the web over the Christmas break:

This tweet and the thread following contains some useful warnings about how not to improperly access academic stuff:

 Good to know how not to do anything wrong!

And this site is one I had never visited before, but yeah, looks really good:

Update:  now there is Anna's Archive.   Extremely useful.

Hazard reduction

This ABC Factcheck article on the matter of hazard reduction burns for bushfires is pretty detailed, and (as I would have expected) strongly indicative that there is not a fundamental problem of Greenies gone berserk and ruining all attempts at hazard reduction under the current system.

Why would I say "as I would have expected"?   Because, in case you hadn't noticed, it is primarily politicians on the Right, and their culture war warrior commentator supporters, who immediately start complaining about it whenever bushfires start.   It's remarkable, in fact, how conservative commentators who rarely get out of the city are suddenly armchair experts on how much fuel has been left in the forests and how bad those damn Greenies have let it get.   (They appear to have found one case of small scale environmental protest that interfered with one hazard control burn in the last couple of years, as far as I can tell.  From that, they just know that it's all about Greenies interference.)

Seems to me, using my common sense, that if it were a serious issue, the experts in the field (metaphorically, not literally) and the people who manage forests and hazard reduction would be the ones complaining about it.   By and large, they aren't.

Update:   a useful Twitter thread to read by someone with clear knowledge of the system.

Also - Jack the Insider also disputes the "Greenies caused all of this" fake excuse.

While there are environmental groups who campaign to restrict hazard reduction burns, in terms of political representation, there are 1273 councillors in New South Wales. Only 58 of them are Greens. There are no Greens on my local council and not one in the state government. In the Shire of Wingecaribbee, it’s a raft of independents, many National Party aligned, pock-marked with the odd property developer. It is hardly Leichhardt at 600 metres above sea level.

While I can’t speak for the rest of the country, I decided to go to the source, the local RFS, who tell me the real difficulty in hazard reduction burns is the country is so dry. Two consecutive winters with rainfall well below average make hazard reductions well, hazardous.

There was a furore in April 2018 when NSW Fire & Rescue performed a controlled burn in Hornsby which threatened homes as far south as Curl Curl and blanketed Sydney in smoke haze. Do people not remember this?

And let's not forget Graham Readfearn's earlier Factcheck article in The Guardian which I had previously linked to, containing quotes such as:

A former NSW fire and rescue commissioner, Greg Mullins, has written this week that the hotter and drier conditions, and the higher fire danger ratings, were preventing agencies from carrying out prescribed burning.

He said: “Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim.”