Made me laugh

 And more:

Talking big figures (while we wait for the US election's big figures)

I've been browsing arXiv again, and turned up this recent paper The Information Catastrophe:

Currently we produce 10 to power 21 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, or 10 to power 50. After 250 years, the power required to sustain this digital production will exceed 18.5 TW, or the total planetary power consumption today, and 500 years from now the digital content will account for more than half of the Earths mass, according to the mass energy information equivalence principle. Besides the existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy and security, our estimates here point to another singularity event for our planet, called the Information Catastrophe. 

Um, not entirely sure what to make of this.  All sounds a bit silly, really.  Here is the conclusion:

In conclusion, we established that the incredible growth of digital information production would reach a singularity point when there are more digital bits created than atoms on the planet. At the same time, the digital information production alone will consume most of the planetary power capacity, leading to ethical and environmental concerns already recognized by Floridi, who introduced the concept of “infosphere” and considered challenges posed by our digital information society [27]. These issues are valid regardless of the future developments in data storage technologies. In terms of digital data, the mass-energy-information equivalence principle formulated in 2019 has not been yet verified experimentally, but assuming this is correct, then in not a very distant future, most of the planet’s mass will be made up of bits of information. Applying the law of conservation in conjunction with the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, it means that the mass of the planet is unchanged over time. However, our technological progress inverts radically the distribution of the Earth’s matter from predominantly ordinary matter, to the fifth form of digital information matter. One could say that we are literally changing the planet bit by bit. In this context, assuming the planetary power limitations are solved, we could envisage a future World mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code.

 

Horses again

With this happening yesterday in the Melbourne Death Race 2020:

 ...I am reminded of my very reasonable proposal of last year for racing to change into robot horse racing, with these transitional provisions:

a. University engineering schools to develop courses devoted to robot horses, and their rechargeable batteries (the entire economy will benefit from the latter).

b. Race meetings to immediately move to having half of all races run with jockeys and trainers in pantomime horses until sufficient robotic horses start to come on track.

c. All retired thoroughbred horses to be housed in spare bedrooms of the breeders.  That should solve the over-breeding issue.

I think this is a wise and reasonable suggestion.  If there was a way retired horses could shoot injured pantomime horses I would try to factor that in too, but I am a realist.

Actually, I was thinking:  it's going to take a while to get to battery powered horses with jockeys on their back to be able to run, quickly, the sort of distance that will satisfy punters.    Ideally, as a further transitional provision, I would now add:

*   Jockeys allowed to carry robot horses on their backs over the rest of the race.

Of course, should they break their legs doing so, some real horses could probably be trained to shoot guns, couldn't they?   Even if just a tranquilliser, the imagery would be terrific.

Islamic State really hates education

News from Kabul:

At least 22 people have been killed by gunmen who stormed Kabul University before engaging security forces in an hours-long battle on Monday.

A spokesman for the Afghan interior ministry said the attack was eventually stopped when three gunmen were killed.

A regional Islamic State group claimed responsibility in a statement....

The Taliban denied involvement and condemned the attack shortly after it began on Monday. Hours later the Islamic State group issued a message on the Telegram app saying it had targeted "the graduation of judges and investigators working for the apostate Afghan government".

And last week (and going back further):

A massive suicide bombing on October 24 outside the Kawsar-e Danish educational center in west Kabul was the latest attack cruelly targeting the Hazara Shia minority. The explosion took place in a crowded, narrow street outside the center, killing 30 people and injuring more than 70, mostly children and young adults between 15 and 26 years old who were attending classes.

Since 2017, the Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood, home to a predominantly Hazara community, has seen numerous attacks on civilians. A bombing at the Imam Zaman mosque in October 2017 killed 39; an attack on a school in August 2018 killed more than 34 students; and twin bombings at a wrestling club in September 2018 killed 20, including journalists and first responders who arrived after the first explosion. In May, gunmen murdered 15 women in the maternity wing of the Dasht-e Barchi hospital, many of whom were in labor or had just given birth.

The Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan branch of the Islamic State (ISIS), claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack.  The armed group has claimed responsibility for many such bombings and has long singled out Afghanistan’s Hazara Shia community for attack.

Nothing says "let's set things back a 1,000 years" like attacking schools and universities.  And so cowardly when targeting kids and older students.

I don't get the ideology - they want high tech when it comes to weaponry and (probably) modern communication that allows for co-ordination of attacks.   But for nothing else.  So stupid.

 

The "let's praise the narcissist and see if that works" strategy clearly didn't work

Hey, wasn't this the same person who earlier this year thought Trump was really on top of the details and believed science?  Yes, yes it was:

“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data,” Birx said. “I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

She deserves to feel stupid.

Yes, amusing

(A reminder: I did start, but didn't stick with, The Man in the High Castle.  Too bleak, and alternative history is generally not my thing.)

Cult watch continues

Just when you thought he couldn't get any nuttier, Steve Kates at Catallaxy gives Trump credit for catching COVID:

Trump has done everything possible, including catching the disease and then recovering from it, to demonstrate his bona fides in regard to the pandemic.

That has more than a touch of messianic imagining about it - He came and risked His life for us so that He could show us the pathway out of adversity.   

Hard to believe he has lost friendships over his cult membership, isn't it?  

[American] cooking discussed

First:  for future reference - I followed this American recipe for Mongolian beef stir fry on the weekend, and it worked out pretty good.   Just did it in the big, non stick skillet on the wok burner (not the wok), and the larger area of heated surface from the skillet did make it easier to sear both the beef and vegetables.  Woks on home stovetop gas wok burners only get hot in the tiny centre, and even then not really searingly hot like the jet burner powered woks at restaurants.  I'm going with the skillet from this point on.

Second:  that recipe came from an American site where I noticed a recipe for "home made sloppy joes".  I was never 100% sure what was in them, but now that I know, it's a really unappealing way to eat mince:

And once again I say - what is it with American cooking and onion and garlic powder.  It's like they invented the stuff (maybe they did?), but you would be hard pressed to find an American meat dish that does not use one or the other, or both.  They're obsessed with it.

Third:  OK, I am being mean to American cooking, because I did start recently watching Adam Ragusea, who I see has a million subscribers on Youtube.  I like the style of his videos - the concentrating on the food and the cooking, not his face; his rapid commentary; his sense of humour.  And when he's not showing how to cook something, but does a video about the history of some food or condiment, he's pretty interesting too.  I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know about vinegar by watching this one recently:

 

I see from the net that he doesn't have a professional background in food at all.  (He used to teach journalism and is also a musician.) I guess that makes him a little like our own Adam Liaw.

As with a lot of  home made Youtube content, I reckon it mostly depends on having a likeable personality come through in the videos.   I don't mind watching, for example, the former travel vloggers who have been doing a "watch us renovate our crappy RV home over the next 8 months" series.  They're just a likeable couple.  

She's officially now "positively annoying"

I'm talking Patricia Karvelas, who was never at risk of losing her presumably high paying job as a well known ABC broadcaster, but whined endlessly during the Melbourne lockdown about how hard it was not being able to send her kids to school. Anyway, here are recent tweets that I find annoying (these and her endless stupid studio dancing tweets): 

A fair assessment

On the topic of the Queensland election:  I think everyone expected Labor to win, so it was no surprise.  Queensland politics never seem to attract politicians who I find particularly impressive, which makes it harder for me to have an interest in following its intrigues closely.   

That said, the LNP current leader Deb Frecklington I find has a quite unappealing media presence and manner.   I was surprised she didn't just resign at the concession speech on Saturday.   Probably because the LNP has had particularly talentless and charmless politicians at the State level for such a long time now.

I was actually quite rude to some LNP "how to vote" poll booth people on Saturday.   Only because they looked university student age.  They gave me a cheery greeting, and I responded by asking what was wrong with them, that they were too young to be in such a stupid party.  They took it quite well, actually - I think one of them said "I don't really have a come back for that" (and no one else was within hearing distance, it wasn't like I was trying to make a scene.)  I have never done this before, but really, Young Liberals are just hard to put up with.

Update:  Oh, so she has resigned today.  Why not say on Saturday that she'll consider her future and make a decision in a few days' time?

Good luck, I say sarcastically...

I've mentioned this always coked-up sounding MAGA tradie from Melbourne who now comments all the time at Catallaxy:

There is much excitement generally at that blog as they grasp at all and any last minute figures that they think proves Trump is about to have not just a slim victory, but a glorious, vanquishing-his-enemies-forever type of victory.   

If Trump loses, and I expect he will, Catallaxy will be an interesting place to watch.   Steve Kates, at the very least, will require sedation for a month.

Monday quantum physics

I have been watching Youtube videos on quantum physics recently, and thought that these two were very good, from the point of view of explaining how the ideas evolved.  As the guy who made them says:

More in-depth than most presentations for laypersons, but without the mathematical rigour needed by a specialist in the field.

These are 5 years old now, and unfortunately, he seems to have stopped at two.  Although I haven't watched his other videos, it would seem he got into some huge fight with both creationists and post-modernists and stopped making videos.

Anyway, so I don't lose track of them in future:

 

and

Insulting commentary from both sides of the fence

No doubt France has a serious issue with Muslim extremism - as does Britain with the random terror attacks that have gone on there over the last few years.  It is an awful problem.

However, given that the latest attack happened inside of a Catholic church, this has sent the Catholic cranks of Catallaxy over the top:

Given that the Muslim population of France is apparently 5,670,000 or so, I wonder if CL thinks all of them should be rounded up and sent on a decade's long flotilla of ships over the Med to, where exactly?, just some random bit of desert where they can be quietly dumped?   Or only the "recalcitrant" Muslims - which I assume you can assess by asking them all to fill in a survey question "Are you for or against the beheading those who insult the Prophet?"   

Anyway, CL does actually do something useful later on the blog - he points to a Twitter commentary on the matter by ageing Mahathir Mohamad, in which he brings up the low standards of the West by noting that many women there wear g-strings and people go nude on some beaches.   That is, shall we say, unhelpful.   (I particularly dislike how his criticism which reads "The killing is not an act that as a Muslim I would approve" which leaves open the suggestion that he thinks other Muslims with sterner opinions than him might not be unreasonable in approving it.*)

Time for him to ride off into the sunset, I think.

*  Oh, I see know that he did also say that Muslims have "the right" to kill millions of French based on how many Muslims the French have killed in history, but I think that tweet has been deleted.   That's even worse, I suppose, but it is more along the lines of one of those rhetorical flourishes (equivalent to the CL one) where you know he would say if pressed  "I wasn't meaning that it should be done - of course that would be terrible in reality")

All the more reason not to like sport

I was surprised by this:  

I would have guessed more Democrat donations from the NBA.   And is baseball more Democrat because it has its biggest  fans in liberal, North East states?

Anyway, I'll take it as another piece of evidence in justification of my general rule of thumb that sport is basically all bad and a waste of time and money, except for when it leads to 24 hour bar openings. 

But Mum, I don't want to control monkey brains with light

 

I underestimated the stupidity of Trump supporters/cultists

I was opining earlier in the year that the problem for Trump would be the inability to hold campaign rallies due to COVID-19.  Little did I realise that not only the intense narcissism of Trump would mean that he would insist on them, but his dumb cult followers would attend, even in the freezing cold:

At least seven people were hospitalized and 30 had to receive medical attention during and after a Tuesday evening campaign rally with President Trump in Omaha, Nebraska.

You would have to suspect that campaign induced spread of COVID is going to be a significant factor in reduced Republican turn out.

Update:  just been amusing myself on a meme generator page -

 

That rare thing: stand up I like

You all know I am generally not a big fan of stand up comedy.   But no one probably recalls that I thought the (deliberately?) amateurish show Aaron Chen Tonight, which turned up on some obscure ABC secondary channel slot a couple of years ago, was likeable.

Well, superstardom seems to be escaping Mr Chen, but Youtube has thrown up at me some more recent short clips of his stand up (probably because I watch Uncle Roger videos), and I do find his whole comedy persona pretty funny:

Much worrying speculation

Maybe you've seen on Twitter this nightmarish scenario:   Trump loses, but not by enough of a margin to immediately concede, and in fact announces a bunch of lawfare to try to knock out enough votes to let him cling on.

At this time, perhaps midway through a couple of months of chronic uncertainty as to who the real winner is, China decides to make a move on Taiwan, confident that America doesn't know who speaks for them anyway (and while redneck militia take pot shots in the streets against Democrat protesters who think Trump must step down.)   

It has a worrying sort of plausibility about it, no?

The BBC wrote:

Is China preparing to invade Taiwan? It's a question being discussed with feverish intensity on many China forums right now. And what should be one of the top geopolitical concerns for the incoming US president.

The temperature was raised further last on 13 October when China's President Xi Jinping visited a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corp base in southern Guangdong province and told the marines there to "prepare for war".

In response some newspapers ran headlines suggesting an invasion is imminent.

It almost certainly isn't. But there are good reasons for the urgency with which China experts are now discussing the future of Taiwan.

I don't know:  the main reason for doubting the scenario is that it would seem China would be buying itself a region full of bitter and unhappy citizens - more trouble than it's worth, I would have thought.

 

 

Girls are weird

Sorry for the Bart Simpson-like analysis in the heading, but this does seem really odd to me:

Girls who do not live with both parents from birth to age two may be at higher risk of starting puberty at a younger age than girls living with both parents, research published in the open access journal BMC Pediatrics suggests. The authors suggest that their findings support the hypothesis that stress in early life may influence puberty onset. The risk of early puberty onset could potentially be mitigated by interventions aiming to improve child wellbeing, according to the authors.  

A team of researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, U.S., found that girls who did not live with both parents from birth to age two were 38% more likely to begin their period before the age of 12 compared with girls who lived with both parents. Girls who did not live with both parents between the ages of two and six were 18% more likely than girls whose parents lived together to begin their period before the age of 12.

I am surprised that stress at such a young age can have such a specific biological effect 9 or 10 years later.

My quick assessment of Rogan as not worth paying attention to seems vindicated

 

Yes. Increase the court.

This woman is showing no good sense on anything:

 

Another worry

At the Washington Post:

A seven-hour international flight to Ireland this summer has been linked to 59 coronavirus cases in the country, Irish researchers said in a report.

Thirteen of the 49 passengers onboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus, even though the flight was only 17 percent full, according to the report released last week by the Irish Department of Public Health. Those 13 passengers went on to infect 46 more people throughout Ireland, the report says, which “demonstrates the potential for spread of SARS-COV-2 linked to air travel.”...

Masks were utilized by nine of those 13 infected passengers, with one child not wearing a mask and three passengers’ mask use “unknown,” the report noted.

A full return to something like "normal" international air travel is likely some way off.

 

The writing process

I thought this interesting, because I have a story I would like to write (would prefer it as a screenplay, to be honest) but while I can imagine certain scenes very well, haven't got the overall thing to work in my mind yet:

 

If you want some really worrying reading today...

...try this abstract from a new paper in Nature Geoscience:

Equilibrium climate sensitivity above 5 °C plausible due to state-dependent cloud feedback

The equilibrium climate sensitivity of Earth is defined as the global mean surface air temperature increase that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For decades, global climate models have predicted it as between approximately 2 and 4.5 °C. However, a large subset of models participating in the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project predict values exceeding 5 °C. The difference has been attributed to the radiative effects of clouds, which are better captured in these models, but the underlying physical mechanism and thus how realistic such high climate sensitivities are remain unclear. Here we analyse Community Earth System Model simulations and find that, as the climate warms, the progressive reduction of ice content in clouds relative to liquid leads to increased reflectivity and a negative feedback that restrains climate warming, in particular over the Southern Ocean. However, once the clouds are predominantly liquid, this negative feedback vanishes. Thereafter, other positive cloud feedback mechanisms dominate, leading to a transition to a high-sensitivity climate state. Although the exact timing and magnitude of the transition may be model dependent, our findings suggest that the state dependence of the cloud-phase feedbacks is a crucial factor in the evolution of Earth’s climate sensitivity with warming.

What an appalling man, and President

This was really shockingly shallow and narcissistic:  

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

As I have said before, I can only assume that anyone who works in the American health system who knows the truth must be grinding their teeth daily.  It would have to mean that only the most dimwitted who work in that industry could vote for him.

Very deadpan, and funny

This one's for Jason, who hasn't made an appearance in comments for a long time.  From The Onion:

 

So, how's the debate going?

Which means his cult members will think he's doing fantastic, because he's confirming their "insider who thinks he/she knows what's really going on" status.  The rest of the country, though... 

Update:

Again, his cult members, who are all about punishing those who don't align with their politics, will see no problem.

Hugh Hewitt: Give me my tin-pot dictatorship and give it to me NOW!

What a laugh:

 Get this next bit:

It's too much for even the White House to take seriously?   

As always with Hewitt's columns at WAPO, the comments are about 99% mocking him.   This one is moderate in tone, but sums it up correctly, for anyone who isn't part of the Trump cult:

Just a minor detail

So I just had a look at the New York Post to see what is behind the pants wetting excitement on the low information Right about Tony Bobulinski.

Seems to be all about an email in which Hunter Biden makes (what Tony says is a) cryptic reference to Joe Biden getting a cut in a deal with a Chinese firm in 2017.

I had to read way down the article to get to this:

What is not clear yet is whether Joe Biden had secret stakes in any of Hunter’s other deals. As for this one, while the date on the May 2017 email would be nearly four months after Biden left the White House, it’s not known when discussions among the partners and with the Chinese first began. Certainly they started before the email.

And while such deals would be legal for Joe Biden when he left government service, the facts take on extra significance during a campaign where China policy is a frequent topic — and a big dispute between Trump and Biden.

So, when the Right sees sudden disclosure of a Trump company in China making money, it's all just shrug shoulders, legitimate business deals.   And they have no interest whatever in the fact that no one understands Trump's  true financial position because Trump has stonewalled on providing the information for at least 5 years.

But when its Joe Bodin, it's a matter of national security that he (possibly) had a cut in a deal in China.   

Right. 

Just a random thought...

....it's been rattling around my mind for a while that whiny, whiny Trump is like an unfunny version of Rodney Dangerfield.  He "don't get no respect", and no  laughs either.  I think his deliberately stupid dancing at rallies has re-kindled the thought.

Someone else somewhere would probably have made the comparison a while ago, but I personally haven't seen it.   Oh look, someone did a "deepfake" video last year that has Trump's face on Dangerfield's head.  Doesn't look all that different, though.

Yeah, thanks again, unfettered social media

In Berlin, there's been some vandalism of items in a museum, and while it seems they are not 100% certain, the media thinks there is probably a connection to this:

....the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit and public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, which broke the news together, were the first to draw a link between the vandalism and conspiracy theorists.

One of the conspiracy theorists who's gathered a large following of coronavirus deniers, Attila Hildmann, has claimed a number of times on his Telegram channel that the Pergamon Museum is the center of a 'global Satanism scene' which, his followers allege, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been using for 'human sacrifices,' noting that she lives opposite the Museum.

 

A most unusual election

A few observations:

*  Isn't it weird that while Republicans and their Right wing media have been on a blitz to emphasise Hunter Biden's drug problems, they haven't been able to stop the president's own son from making appearances in which he looks either coked up or mentally unwell?:

Yes, that’s a real clip of Donald Trump Jr. lying in bed with his head in such a position that his neck is completely obscured, nursing what appears to be a serious sunburn, and claiming that Instagram has been purposely hiding his posts from his legions of followers. “Hey guys, hope you’re doing well,” the president’s eldest son says, again, from his bed. “Just watching my algorithms getting crushed. I guess I did something to piss off the Instagram gods, so hopefully you’re seeing this stuff anyway. We’ll do what we can. Talk to you soon.”

From the outside, it’s extremely difficult to understand why Donny boy posted this clip, the only logical explanation being that he thinks he looks good.

*  Have we ever had an election before in which the issue of men masturbating has featured so prominently?

*  Just today, we have Republicans claiming that fake emails threatening Democrats to vote Trump are actually intended to hurt Trump.   Because they are too obviously fake?  Or they think they come from Iran, and of course they would not want to help Trump?   But John Ratcliffe is a completely unreliable pro-Trump appointee:

On Monday, Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to bolster an unconfirmed news report by The New York Post related to the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in the Ukraine. Mr. Ratcliffe suggested on Fox Business that the Obama-Biden administration had committed (unnamed) criminal abuses of power and that voters should take these supposed actions into account in the upcoming election.

Such personal political commentary for a sitting intelligence leader is virtually unprecedented. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, tweeted that Mr. Ratcliffe’s actions were “reprehensible” and worthy of a “tin-pot dictatorship.”

 Can he believed about the nation behind the emails?

Why is the intern hours problem so slow to be properly addressed??

So, last night I was at a high school awards night, and the guest speaker was a graduate from 2008 who now works as a doctor in the Queensland hospital system.

She explained that she initially studied for a science degree, but after a couple of years swapped to medicine.   This means she would have been an intern only about, what?, 5 years ago?

While she is very happy in her job now, she did say that the intern years were the worst - 70 hour weeks I think she said, and so stressed and tired she would cry when she got home.  And get this:  if she raised her exhaustion at work, the response from senior doctors was the old "well, that's what we had to go through, so suck it up."

That way of thinking has been driving me nuts for decades!   I saw it in an unrelated profession in my 20's, and it has offended me ever since.  (That's a story for another day.)

It's consistent with a Four Corners story on this problem in 2015 (and in fact, she would have been an intern around then.)

But 5 years later, what sign is there that the problem is being actually addressed?

Here's a report from last year:

Almost half of Queensland's junior doctors working in the public system are concerned they are so exhausted that they will make a clinical error, the state's peak doctors association has warned.

The Australian Medical Association Queensland's latest Resident Hospital Health Check report surveyed almost 900 of the state's junior doctors, of which 46 per cent reported concern about their long working hours burning them out.

The figure is unchanged from the year before....

Dr Abdeen said junior doctors worked long hours, with some going on call for 120 hours in a row.

"You're working day shifts, you're on call all night, getting called multiple times per day, and then going back to work the next day, of course you're going to be fatigued," Dr Abdeen said.

"All of these factors lead to a person who is going to be burnt out and ultimately prone to mistakes."

Dr Abdeen said he himself had just recently covered two other doctors on a single shift, forcing him to do the work of three doctors and treat all of their patients.

Here's a report from earlier this year:

The Black Dog Institute and UNSW Sydney have published Australian-first research examining the relationship between average working hours and the mental health of junior doctors.
 
And the results are stark.
 
A quarter of all junior doctors work unsafe hours, which researchers found doubles their risk of developing mental health issues and suicidal ideation.
 
Associate Professor Samuel Harvey, study co-author and Chief Psychiatrist at the Black Dog Institute said working long hours has been an accepted part of the culture of medical training for decades, but ongoing research is changing perceptions.

‘We’re now starting to understand the human cost behind these excessive workloads,’ he said.
 
‘Pressure on junior doctors to “earn their stripes” by taking on long work hours has always been common, but what we now know is that this can have profound mental health impacts, with concerning implications for both the individual doctors and our broader health system.’
 
A cohort of almost 43,000 randomly selected junior doctors in Australia were invited to participate in Beyond Blue’s National Mental Health Survey, with 12,252 providing data to form the research – the largest and most up-to-date national figures available on doctors’ mental health outcomes.
 
Junior doctors who worked over 55 hours a week were more than twice as likely to report common mental health disorders and suicide ideation, compared to those working 40–44 hours per week.  
 
The same results applied regardless of age, gender, level of training, location, marital status or whether the doctor was trained overseas or locally, confirming a link between long working hours and poorer mental health among junior doctors.

So it's pretty clear that the problem is still not being adequately addressed.

I presume it's a combination of inadequate hospital funding, variable intern numbers, and A PERSISTENTLY STUPID ATTITUDE OF [SOME] SENIOR DOCTORS IN HOSPITALS.

Because honestly, if it wasn't for the latter, you should have doctors at every election telling people to vote for governments that will do their utmost to address the problem.

 

Mud brick city

A story at the BBC says that a palace made of mud bricks in Yemen is in danger of collapse (due to poor maintenance and heavy rain.)

It's a big building, and you wouldn't guess it was mud bricks:

But even more interesting, further down in the story, is a photo of a large number of crumbling mud brick houses "in the Old City of Sanaa":

I had no idea there were such large mud brick buildings anywhere in the world.   

Another site has an interview discussing this place:

These are homes for Yemenis. I know some people had to leave because their homes were damaged. But what is life like in these buildings?

The house develops, as I said, in vertical. So you have the lower floor: storage, the kitchen and so on. And two or three rooms per floor where the family or the extended family lives. So, of course, now they have more modern services. The toilets and so on are more modern than the old ones, but still they live in the same way. 

I'm guessing there are no elevators. So if you have company over, they have to walk up nine stories if you're on the top floor.

Absolutely. And not only that, but you are at 2,200 meters high. It's one of the highest capitals in the world. So it is quite an effort, I would say.  

You're running out of breath by the time you get up to the ninth story. 

I would say so. But the inhabitants are used to that. 

I've been in mud brick structures before, some two stories high. But it's hard to imagine anything in mud brick taller than that. As an architect, what in your training prepared you to appreciate this construction? 

These are the highest buildings in mud brick in the world. The fact that they are one adjacent to the others, of course, helps with the height. But they are all individual houses with different plans and layout, built around a staircase — a stone staircase that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor. And the rooms open around this staircase. So people move all the time from one floor to another and some floors are dedicated to the kitchen, some other to women. And as you move up, you know, there are more open space and the public space for the house and the community. 

Oh well.  A fair chance that climate change might wash away this city over the next century, perhaps?

Catholics for Trump are fine with this, because it's better than Obama making a Catholic hospital provide for its staff to be able to get contraception under their health insurance

Maybe that's the longest post title ever, but the sickening state of conservative Catholicism and American politics makes it worth it.  Here's the story:

 

 

Not sure what it means

Rabbit obsessed Noah Smith has a thread on twitter about how the Middle East is now "a big mess of proxy wars", starting and ending with these:

For all of the claims that the US meddling in the Middle East was more trouble that it was worth, I am not sure that this alternative makes for a better situation for the West, or the globe generally.  

The salad is made

I finally made the chickpea salad recipe which I had seen in the Washington Post earlier this year:

(Their photo, not mine.)

It took me some months to find I had actually gathered all of the relevant ingredients and all were still OK to use.  (We don't routinely have mango chutney in the house, nor plain Greek yoghurt.  We also tend to use curry spices more than curry paste.  But I did use Japanese mayo, and we always have a large bottle of that delicious stuff in the fridge.) 

As I expected, it is very nice as a side dish, and when layered thick as a sandwich filling.    

Chickpeas are just the best legume. 

Update:  because I am sure there is a large audience out there as interested in them as I am, I found a list of "10 interesting facts about chickpeas", compiled by an Australian snack making company.  (On the Sunshine Coast, so not so far from me, too.)

Actually, most of the facts aren't that interesting, except for these two:

Ground chickpeas have been used as a coffee substitute since the 18th century and are still commonly used as a caffeine-free alternative today. Widely available, the taste is said to be delicious – why not give it a go!

[Never heard of that before.]

India is the world’s number one leader in chickpea production, with a staggering 8,832,500 metric tons reportedly produced in 2013. Interestingly, the country coming in second place was Australia! With 813,300 tons produced in the same year. “Production of chickpea by countries” UN Food & Agriculture Organisation 2014.

 And yes, more recent figures still show Australia was the second biggest producer in 2018 (figures are for 1,000 metric tons):

I cannot wait to enhance dinner conversation with my kids with this fact.   

But there's more!

I didn't realise that it's a variety of chickpea that is made into split peas, and ultimately dhal:

 

The larger variety that is canned and favoured in Mediterranean cooking are the kabuli variety.

This is setting me up for some great dinner time imparting of knowledge to my offspring!

 

Back to tiny black holes

It's been ages since I searched arXiv for black hole papers.  But I did one today and found another paper on a favourite topic - micro black holes and whether they evaporate, and are a good candidate for dark matter.  The abstract:

The nature of dark matter is still an open problem. The simplest assumption is that gravity is the only force coupled certainly to dark matter and thus the micro blackholes could be a viable candidate. We investigated the possibility of direct detection of microblack holes with masses around and upward the Planck scale (10−5g), ensuring classical gravitational treatment of these objects in the next generation of huge LAr detectors. We show that the signals (ionization and scintillations) produced in LAr enable the discrimination between micro black holes or other particles. It is expected that the trajectories of these microblack holes will appear as crossing the whole active medium, in any direction, producing uniform ionization and scintillation on all the path.

I had to look up LAr - it's liquid argon.

The introduction section of the paper gives a good summary of the questions around evaporating black holes:

An important issue is to show that black holes do not radiate in some conditions and which are their characteristics, as an argument to explain that these relics objects can survive from early Universe. We would need to detect the black holes or to have strong indirect evidence of their existence, as well as to show that they do not radiate. At present we are far from doing this.

In a classical paper, Hawking [2] suggested that unidentified tracks in the photographs taken in old bubble chamber detectors could be explained as signals of gravitationally collapsed objects (μBH). The mechanism of black hole formation is well known. As a result of fluctuations in the early Universe, a large number of gravitationally collapsed objects can be formed with characteristics determined by the gravity and quantum behaviour. For masses above the Planck mass limit of10−5g quantum behaviour is prevented.The small black holes are expected to be unstable due to Hawking radiation, but the evaporation is not well-understood at masses of order of the Planck scale. Helfer [3] has shown that none of the derivations that have been given for the prediction of radiation from black holes is convincing. It argued that all involve, at some point, speculations on the physics at scales which are not merely orders of magnitude beyond any investigated experimentally(∼103GeV), but at scales increasing beyond the Planck scale (∼1019GeV), where essentially  quantum-gravitational effects are expected to be dominant and various derivations that havebeen put forward, not all are mutually consistent. 

Given the profound nature of the issues addressed, some disagreement and controversy exists over exactly what has been achieved. Balbinot [4] demonstrated that when a blackhole becomes more and more charged, the Hawking radiation decreases and in the limit of maximum charge containment there is no radiation. Certain inflation models naturally assume the formation of a large number of small black hole [5] and the GUP may indeed prevent total evaporation of small black holes by dynamics and not by symmetry, just like the prevention of hydrogen atom from collapse by the standard uncertainty principle [6].Chavda and Chavda [7] introduced a different idea: gravitationally bound black holes will not have Hawking radiation. They examine the range10−24kg≤MBH≤10−12kg where quantum aspects must be considered. These limits of masses are controversial regarding the stability of the black holes, see for example [8].

And we can't have that, can we?

 

The very definition of precocious

NPR has a story about a 12 year old (black) American boy in college:

Caleb's mother, Claire Anderson, says it didn't take long to see that her son was ahead of the typical baby milestones. When he was just 3 weeks old, she says, he started copying her motions. She got certified in sign language so she could teach it to him.

"Because I thought though that he wanted to communicate, but he didn't have a [means] or a way to do that. Then he started picking up sign language really fast," she says. "When he was about 6 months old, he started reading. And by 9 months old he was already signing over 250 words."

Anderson says Caleb was doing fractions when he was 2. He passed the first grade when he was 3. When time came for middle school, she says, he could have skipped it altogether. "But we still decided to put Caleb into the seventh grade to build social skills and just think about the well-rounded child."

Those years were not easy for Caleb.

"They looked down on me because I was younger than them. And not only that, the curriculum was boring to me because I learn really, really fast. One day I came to my mom and she asked me, 'Are you happy here?' and I said, 'No, I'm really bored. This isn't challenging me,' " he says.

Now Caleb is in a dual program at Chattahoochee Technical College in Marietta working toward an associate degree while getting his high school credits. It gives him a chance to dream of NASA, SpaceX and flying cars.

Gee.  I wonder if there are other brilliant 6 month olds who get handed an iPad and start having their intelligence sucked out of them by the internet.

 

I like this

An advertisement for South Korean tourism caught my eye on Youtube this morning: 

 Cool.

Speaking of nuts

I called out this ex-SAS dude (Riccardo Bosi) as a nutter some years ago, when he used to comment at Catallaxy.  (Many there liked him.)   He now spends his days running pointlessly as an independent (most recently, in the upcoming Queensland elections):

ISIS metastasized

Interesting article at Washington Post arguing that recent ISIS activities in Africa show how the problem has not gone away under Trump, and that Trump's woeful inability to be credible and consistent has make an international response more difficult.

Oh my - someone agreeing with me on the excessive use of "shock value" on TV?

Someone at Wired seems to both sort of like and sort of hate The Boys - a show whose second series has been notable for a number of exploding heads, apparently.  (I saw the first episode of the first season and did not want to watch any more of it.  I explained why at the time.)

Boy oh Boys. It’s easily the best and worst of the bunch. If there’s a way to push superheroes any further than this—full-on rapey murderers whose villainy is covered up by the pharmaceutical giant that not-so-secretly made them—the culture would have to combust. It’s not even postmodern, at this point. Deadpool was postmodern. Guardians and Thor were postmodern. The Boys is some pure metamodernist BS, so committed to sharpening its edge on the whetstone of canon it forgets to cut anything with its trenchant blade.

The show wants you to talk about it, but what more is there to say? There’s a racist supe with a Nazi past who radicalizes sad male fans through memes; there’s a lesbian supe with a drug problem and a redemption arc; there’s a sexually predatious supe who’s involved in a scene with a boat and a whale that—computer-generated though the whale may be—should nonetheless have violated sundry animal rights laws. These social-justice shocks the show seems forced to administer, in an effort to make you feel more alive than you are, sinking into your couch, losing your head. When the evil-Superman Homelander, played with such disgusting magnificence by Anthony Starr that the patriotic suit and cape should be permanently retired, masturbates on the roof of a skyscraper, he is The Boys itself, naked and shameless.

This is the crisis so-called “prestige TV” finds itself in (if it was ever prestige to begin with). There’s not just an expectation of quality but of seeing something new, like a whale-murdering boat, or lightning Nazis. So shows proceed as episodically as ever, but they have to keep getting bigger, badder, uglier, realer, even if there’s no reason for it. One head explodes early in the season, so 10 must explode later on. In this, television mirrors real life. Or real life as it’s been, After Corona: a series of escalations. When you sit down to a new TV show at the end of your day, you’re not distracting yourself or escaping. You’re reinforcing the escalating, episodic tension of your everyday existence. The jolts of recognition might feel nice, but they’re not at all healthy. They’re destructive, and they’re the reason you feel deader after a binge.

It's the sort of thing I have been complaining about recently when re-watching old movies. 

Switching to vaudeville

It's not that I have been seeing much of the recent Trump rallies, but I get the distinct impression that he has, as they say, just "thrown the switch to vaudeville".   The silly dancing to music (the owners of which keep telling his campaign to stop using); the repeated "threats" to not come back to the states which don't vote for him, or even the entire country; the talk of him looking more handsome that JFK (leading, if I heard it right, to chants of "we love you".   (I see now that I Google to check that last point that it has been happening at several rallies.   What more confirmation of this being more a cult than a normal political movement could you get?)

The rambling speeches seem to be as devoid of policy detail as his last campaign - even emptier in fact.   He just lies about what he has accomplished and promises more of the same.  

I think what's going on is that he knows it's looking bad and he's just out to get the last ounce of narcissism enhancing adulation he can get by saying whatever ridiculous thing he wants.

The boasting of his looks and the positive reaction it got strikes me as particularly telling of his audience.  I don't think it's likely something the majority of his audience take all that seriously, but I think many probably do take it as an endorsement of their own way of telling themselves lies about their own appearance:  along the lines of "I'm overweight too but you know, I'm comfortable with my looks just like Donald".   It's the same thing as for their racism, misogyny and conspiracy beliefs - he gives permission for people to be the worst they can be and they "love" him for it.

On re-watching Casino

A couple of months ago I posted about re-watching Goodfellas for the first time since I saw it at the cinema, and finding it more enjoyable than I remembered.

Well, I've now done the same thing with Casino, and once again I can say that virtually nothing of what happened in the movie had stuck in my mind - I could not even get a even a snippet of memory for this one.  

And on re-watching it, I can see why.   It's a flashy movie in search of a story, really.  Unlike Goodfellas, which is all about how someone grows up and tries to make his way in the mobster life, this one starts with the characters already corrupt and sleazy, and the main thing that goes wrong is the de Niro character picking a bad wife.    Sure, Sharon Stone is really good, and there is plenty of music of the era (even more so than in Goodfellas, I suspect), but in retrospect there is so little to it, story wise.   I don't remember being particularly disappointed in it after seeing it in the cinema, so in this case, I think it is worse than how I "remembered" it.

My overall lukewarm assessment of Scorsese feels very justified by this experience.