Much ado about Mahler

So, I ended up going to a concert at the Queensland Conservatorium last night which featured Mahler's 5th Symphony.

I'm here to tell you:   I officially do not care for this composer's work.   I've heard something of his once before at a concert, but I forget what.  I think this is the first time I sat through a whole symphony, though.

I take it from the notes on the program that he was into creating innovative work that might not be understood for another 50 years.  Well, we've gone 120 years and I still don't get it.   

From what I can gather (and I am speaking a music illiterate who just goes to concerts and "knows what he likes," and then tries to justify his gut reaction later), the fourth movement (a string-y romantic love poem for his much younger wife) is famous, sort of conventional, and much admired.  It seems to have escaped my attention entirely until last night, but I thought it entirely underwhelming.   Why is it popular?

Out of the 5 movements, I thought the 3rd was the most interesting and pleasing.   As for the 5th and final movement - talk about a composition in search of a final climax!  There were so many points where it seemed to be building to an end, only to flitter away again.  I know, I have felt this about other classical pieces at times, but for this one it felt particularly acute.

The basic problem I have with the whole piece is the sense of a lack of direction, or structure, or ...something? There are portions that are good and pleasing enough (and pretty loud - if you like it when an orchestra gets dramatically loud [and I do] - there are some good bits), but the thing just doesn't seem to hang together in any pleasing way.  I think that some orchestral players may like the way he does give every part of the orchestra a big role at different times - the students playing last night seemed really happy at the end - but that's not enough to satisfy me, in the audience.

Happily, the internet being the internet, Google searching the topic "I find Mahler completely overrated" shows me that I am not alone - even people who don't understand why that 4th movement is considered good:

it feels like his music sounded better on paper than in reality.For example, the legendary Adagietto from Symphony no. 5 didn't move me that much - in fact, sounded kind of cliché to my ears.

(Actually, it didn't move me at all.)   

It would seem that Reddit contains a fair bit of pro- and anti- (or at least, not getting) Mahler argument, both sides saying they don't understand the other.   But it's good to find people much more familiar with music than me sharing what was just my gut reaction:

Often when I listen to something by him for the first time I have a hard time making much of it. There often doesn't seem to be an obvious sense of direction or a clear emotional implication at any given moment like you would find in Beethoven/Mozart etc.

Or this:

Also, I feel like a lot of Mahler's music doesn't have much of a sense of momentum. Yea, he might make this part faster or louder than that part, but music by composers like Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms, seem to have an intrinsic sense of momentum and development. Brahms never has to force the music to go from here to there, it just happens naturally. Something about Mahler's music feels forced to me.

Yes, exactly.

As for Mahler as a person, here he is, looking stern, as I guess all classical composers usually do:

 Curious things Wiki tells me about him:  

*   his parents had 14 children (!), a lot even in those days, surely;

*   he was big on German philosophy:

Mahler developed interests in German philosophy, and was introduced by his friend Siegfried Lipiner to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. These thinkers continued to influence Mahler and his music long after his student days were over. Mahler's biographer Jonathan Carr says that the composer's head was "not only full of the sound of Bohemian bands, trumpet calls and marches, Bruckner chorales and Schubert sonatas. It was also throbbing with the problems of philosophy and metaphysics he had thrashed out, above all, with Lipiner."^[18]

 (Maybe I can blame a fondness for Nietzsche as ruining his music...heh.)

*  What a surprise, he could be a jerk:

In spite of numerous theatrical triumphs, Mahler's Vienna years were rarely smooth; his battles with singers and the house administration continued on and off for the whole of his tenure. While Mahler's methods improved standards, his histrionic and dictatorial conducting style was resented by orchestra members and singers alike.^[67] In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff.^[68]

*  He did face a lot of anti-Semitism though, so he sometimes had reason to be cranky.

*  This was mentioned last night - he married a woman 19 years younger than him who was already a pianist and composer of some talent (they did some of her songs last night, as it happens), but as part of the marriage deal was that he insisted she stop composing.  As Wiki explained:

Alma soon became resentful because of Mahler's insistence that there could only be one composer in the family and that she had given up her music studies to accommodate him. "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner ... I'm asking a very great deal – and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange."^[91] She wrote in her diary: "How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of ... things closest to one's heart."^[92]

Huh.

Anyway, that's it for my amateur take on a classic.   Maybe the Ring cycle ruined him a bit for me - classical music that was, more or less, going somewhere, even it if was 15 hours!  I see that in fact Mahler was big on Wagner:

Along with many music students of his generation, Mahler fell under the spell of Richard Wagner, though his chief interest was the sound of the music rather than the staging. It is not known whether he saw any of Wagner's operas during his student years.^[14]

It says he became a leading interpreter of Wagner.  Did they ever meet?   Not exactly:

 It was on 02-03-1876 at a performance of Lohengrin in the Vienna State Opera. ... Mahler saw Wagner in the wardrobe, but as a young student (aged 16) and admirer he did not have the courage to talk to him. It was the second time Wagner conducted his Lohengrin.

Wait!   I was about to end this now meandering post, when I find that even his wife didn't think much of his work, and was very upset that he demanded she stop composing:

On her part, Alma moderately appreciated Mahler’s music: she wrote in her journal “As a composer, I do not believe in him very much”. When she received Mahler’s letter on Friday, the 20th of December 1901, her heart froze “Surrender my music? Give up the reason I have lived for until now? My first reaction was to refuse. I cried, I couldn’t help it, because I had just realized I loved him”. Alma finally said yes and agreed to give up her vocation – she would however keep a grudge against her husband her entire life.

Also - he once had a long consultation with Freud:

In 1910, he was shaken by an uncontrollable burst of depression when he discovered his wife Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius. Divorce was out of the question. Mahler thus looked for help with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The treatment was too brief though (a sole four-hour discussion-walk) to show results.

Ah, just another typically dramatic life for a temperamental artistic type.   I mean, how many of them ever have a life that was simple and pretty straight forward?   "Met his wife at age 20, married and remained devoted to each other until his death at the age of 75, enjoying good health, financial success and the company of his family until then".  

Fin.

A happy face

I'm lacking inspiration for a post, so....

More on China

 

Agree with this, and note again how the Catholic Church is also on side with globalisation for poverty reduction.  Conservatives who think countries (and their people) should be left to rot because it might hurt Western economic prosperity do not follow Catholic social teaching.   

This is a test of Queensland luck, if ever there was

It's kind of incredible that Brisbane, and Queensland, have avoided extensive COVID outbreaks this long into the pandemic.

Given our charmed run, I wonder if this will break it, or if we will continue to have a semi-mysterious ability to avoid it, despite relatively slow vaccination rates...

Space based manufactured patriotism

As regular readers (all 4 of you!) know, I recommend people look at videos on China's propaganda news  network CGTN to get an idea of what the nation is thinking - or perhaps more accurately, what the government wants the nation to think.   (Or is it what the government wants other governments to think the nation is thinking? Who knows?)

Anyway, the advent of the recent semi-built space station is being used for what looks to Western eyes like some extremely corny and old fashioned manufactured patriotism.  Have a look at all the saluting and reverence at this press event where the latest three taikonauts were introduced: 

 

And then the send off ceremony when the blasted off a few days ago:

  

The thing is, it's hard to know whether the Chinese public is also cynically aware of how intensely media manufactured this looks, or are they genuinely swept up in this space based patriotism.  

I also am always amused at how they are obviously pretty good at this space stuff now,  except for an apparent inability to design sleek and futuristic uniforms and spacesuits.   These always look to me to pretty baggy and daggy to me - like they are still being designed with a left over Mao era vibe.

If ever they have a death on a mission (and surely they are bound to eventually), I hate to imagine the media dramatics that would be around the funerals.

The incremental future gets overlooked

I agree with the sentiment of this tweet by a science fiction author (who I don't particularly care for, but his tweet account is OK.)

I think it's the incrementalism of the change in technology that sort of blinds us to how different things are.

Too much information

I'm not entirely sure why this is important to physics, but still, here's the abstract of a study trying to estimate all of the information capacity of the visible universe:

The information capacity of the universe has been a topic of great debate since the 1970s and continues to stimulate multiple branches of physics research. Here, we used Shannon’s information theory to estimate the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe. We achieved this by deriving a detailed formula estimating the total number of particles in the observable universe, known as the Eddington number, and by estimating the amount of information stored by each particle about itself. We determined that each particle in the observable universe contains 1.509 bits of information and there are ∼6 × 10⁸⁰ bits of information stored in all the matter particles of the observable universe.

But but - this doesn't include the information possible by how you arrange the elementary particles, does it?  It's all a bit confusing...

 

Against nuclear

I find it hard to fault the arguments in Greg Jericho's recent piece about why nuclear power is not the saviour for Australia.

I do tend to wish, however, that governments everywhere were trying to come up with very specific and concrete proposals as to how they are going to swap to all renewable energy in a relatively short space of time.   Making targets alone is not really enough.

Good grief

 

I do enjoy a good Allahpundit rip into Trump

This is about Trump's classless (to put it mildly) press release on the death of Colin Powell.   

It’s gratuitous since he wasn’t obliged to say anything about Powell’s passing. It’s narcissistic, turning Powell’s death into a complaint about Trump’s critics. It’s petty in that it’s unwilling to honor Powell’s accomplishments, of which there were many. It’s obsessed with media coverage, particularly how other figures are covered relative to how Trump himself is. And it’s dishonest inasmuch as Trump doesn’t actually care about the Iraq WMD debacle or Powell’s role in it. That was the low point of Powell’s public service and so it’s cited here opportunistically, to bolster Trump’s case against Powell to the reader. To 45, there’s only one test of a man’s value: Was he pro-Trump or anti-Trump?

If Powell had supported him, Iraq would have been forgotten and Trump would have celebrated his career.

 

We're dealing with idiots (or at least, fools), part whatever

The increased role of roof top solar

There was an article at Forbes recently that summarised a study which argued that the world could make significant inroads in clean energy by vastly expanding the amount of roof top solar panels - particularly in the densely populated parts of India and China, they argue.

I still say it should be a compulsory part of the building code in most of Australia, along with a minimum amount of home battery storage.   An extra $20,000 or so on your average build (which is around $300,000) isn't going to kill anyone, especially when you get the savings on electricity and gas costs.

Japan and zoning laws

Here's the video you always knew you wanted to see - explaining the loose Japanese zoning laws that allow for a very highly mixed use of land in very small spaces:

 

This guy's videos are always good and interesting.   He does make the interesting point at the end that the Japanese system seems both very capitalistic (allowing lots of freedom within a certain moderate set of restraints) but also sort of socialistic in the living spaces it develops (cars are not king; shops and facilities within walking distance - and neighbours living very close by - giving a sense of community).  

I think the key thing he perhaps misses here is that Japanese communitarian cultural values came first; its not as if the zoning laws created them.   And the Japanese are perhaps also inclined to just put up with certain inconveniences because of those values - such as people in apartments and houses living with loud talking drunks coming out of the pub or restaurant downstairs at 11.30pm every night to catch the last train. 

So, it's probably a mistake to think that such zoning would work as well in Western countries.

Well, duh

Today's life advice: wet your pods first

I like using laundry detergent in pod form.   They are convenient and not at all messy to use (well, subject to what I am about to say); it's easy to take a couple if you are going away for a few days and might need to wash clothes during the break; and they don't run any risk of gunking up pipes in the way the usual method of getting the detergent into a front load washing machine apparently can.    They're also very clear in terms of working out value, as there is a simple and direct cost per wash on the price ticket on the supermarket, given they have to show unit price.   (And by the way, they are a product on which supermarkets do this rotating specials thing continually - there always seems to be one brand which is on special for about 32 cent per pod, whereas the full price of the more expensive brands is close to $1.  I only buy them on the cheaper pricing.)

But, I have found with the new front loading washer in my house that they can sometimes get squished against the window/door and fall into the rubber seal crease at the bottom, and take too long to get properly dissolved.  This is because the way to use them in a front loader is said to be to put them in the drum and then load clothes on top of them.  But, front loaders add water slowly, so they can be stuck spinning around for a while before everything gets wet enough for it to burst, and in the meantime can they move into the worst location for water contact.

My life hint, after trying worse methods (such as cutting them with scissors, or squeezing them with a cloth in the machine 'til they burst) is to briefly rinse the pod you are about to use under cold water and then put it in the machine.  This seems to give the dissolving process a head start, and I have noticed that the detergent seems to be released quite quickly this way.  

I do actually like watching the start of the cycle in our front loading machine to tell when the detergent seems to be released.   Family members do think it rather odd when I do this, but we all have our special interests.  :)

You can thank me for this important life advice, and I look forward to being the new Jordan Peterson.

Update:  it didn't work this morning. :(

Further investigation required.

A very odd commentator

I only noticed this commentator because someone I more or less trust (I forget who now!) linked to one of his tweets, which sounded sensible. But man, I don't think I follow anyone else who swings so wildly between sounding more or less sensible, to just ridiculous. 

He is, I gather, a small government libertarian type, and as such takes a "a pox upon both your houses" attitude towards the political parties in the US. But (I am reminded very much of Jason Soon) the thing that really seems to agitate him the most is Left wing identity politics. Which, as I have been saying for years, is a bit nuts in terms of how to prioritise serious problems. 

Anyway, to illustrate my point of how wildly he swings, have a look at these examples. Is he always serious? I think so, but it's hard to tell. I would pretty much bet a $1,000 that he is single, though!

A self explanatory link

https://digg.com/2021/this-reddit-thread-of-the-most-useful-websites-that-you-might-not-know-about-will-enhance-your-internet-browsing-experience

Update:  ok, here's a click-able link.  

Very naughty

Remember the early, quite funny, "Uncle Roger" video in which he took orders at a well regarded Singaporean food takeaway cafe at a market in London run by a young, blond, part Asian woman?   I didn't remember her name, but it's Elizabeth Haigh, and her reputation has just taken a serious nosedive after a cookbook she published has some pretty extensive plagiarism from another Asian woman's cookbook from 2012.

A long post giving examples is here.

It really does appear very blatant - and I would guess that the only way she could retain some credibility would be if it turns out it was largely ghost written, and the ghost writer is the one who did the copying.  I mean, that's not good, when you claim to telling personal anecdote;  but it's still a bit better than being the person doing the cutting and pasting with full knowledge.

Dog detective problem

I hadn't heard about this before:  the important role cadaver smell detecting dogs (and one dog in particular) have played in some American murder convictions - yet based on some very dubious science.

Modern parents and violence

A Sydney primary school has asked parents to make sure their children do not watch the popular Netflix series Squid Game, which depicts “extreme violence and gore”, because students are mimicking the games in the playground.

On what should I blame the modern parental de-sensitisation to violence being viewed by kids?   The parents themselves being de-sensitised by ever increasing violence in movies, TV and video games, I expect.

As someone who remembers as a child in the 1960's seeing some relatively B grade movie in the cinema (I forget what it was now) which featured a guy getting shot with a harpoon in his stomach, and feeling that was really kind of disturbingly violent, it is completely surprising to me that parents do not think that kids can imagine the effect of violence to a more visceral degree than adults.      

I haven't watched Squid Games.   I saw some of the violent first game while my daughter was watching it and thought it didn't look like my sort of thing.   I have seen commentary saying that it is worth watching even if it makes you uncomfortable, but I am not so sure.  I have never been one for the dystopia "games played to the death" scenarios.  Always seemed a bit silly to me.   Unless we're talking gladiator era stories, I guess.  

Billionaire has worries

 I do hope Gina is feeling isolated though.  I would expect she's been on the phone to Barnaby a lot lately.  He is giving the impression of feeling under pressure - and as I said in my last post, is this just because the government is being told bluntly by its top public servants that it just has to start being credible on the issue?   

Sounds plausible

I also assume, though, that part of the government's problem may be that there are absolutely no public servant heads prepared to advise them there is any plausible way to deny climate change is real and that Australia can go it alone in ignoring it.   Mind you, that has probably been the gist of the advice for years, but are they at the point of saying "Look, pretending to do something effective has become untenable"?
 

Some good guys winning news

Clive Palmer has lost his High Court battle with Western Australia in a challenge to a law which prevents him suing the state for up to $30 billion.

...

It was a colourful and unusual High Court hearing involving the mining magnate, running over several days instead of the usual one.

Mr Palmer's companies were represented by senior barristers but he represented himself, breaking down as he told the court he'd been personally targeted as a Queenslander.

The case harks back to decisions made by an earlier Liberal government about Mr Palmers's Pilbara Balmoral South iron ore project.

The project has never gained the necessary approvals, despite mediation.

And in news sure to cause claims of woe at the IPA and the assorted, sordid Catallaxy blogs, "contrarian" reef scientist remains sacked and uncompensated for his sacking:

Controversial Queensland academic Peter Ridd has lost a High Court battle over his sacking for disparaging remarks about colleagues working on the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef. 

Apart from anything else...

...why isn't anyone commenting on how the comic book artwork in that panel looks...bad:

I mean, what's with that jawline and cheek on the left?  Looks like it's made of metal instead of flesh.  

Anyway, Allahpundit explains that Josh Mandel, who sees the End of America because of a comic book only a handful of adult fanboys will read, is a Republican Ohio Senate primary candidate.  

Allahpundit goes onto explain that the conservative performative uproar is due to Superman being the ideal American (or alien identifying as American), and:

He’s great because he’s good, the personification of our idealized past. It’s no wonder then that Mandel and other nationalists would take special offense to the character now displaying a trait that was forbidden in the era when Superman became an icon. It’s a cultural affront insofar as it signals that the America of today is fundamentally different from the America of the “glory days” of the mid-20th century. That core grievance is the whole reason Trump and Trumpism became a thing, notwithstanding Trump’s own tolerant views of gays.

True, except its overlooking somewhat that the character is Superman's son, not Superman himself.  

Having a normal one in Aussie wingnut land (climate change and energy edition)

This comment appears at one of the offspring blogs of dead Catallaxy after a fairly ordinary (that is, by Rafe standards) post whinging about renewable energy:

Meanwhile, the rest of us are agog at how the Murdoch press has turned on a dime, no doubt confusing/dismaying its rusted on readers:

 

I haven't seen much on Twitter about how Sky News is covering this, only this, also from Kevin:

So, Murdoch is trying the tactic of populist anti-climate change advocacy on Sky News, while trying to convince readers in the most populist titles of print that its real and the government just has to act.  

How's that meant to make sense?   When can we expect the Sky News hosts to start attacking the editorial line taken by their companies print editors?    

And as for the government line, Katherine Murphy was nice and scathing on the weekend:

Keith Pitt, the resources minister, made headlines this week when he opened the boondoggle bidding on net zero. Pitt told Phil Coorey at the Australian Financial Review if Scott Morrison wanted agreement from the Nationals on a net zero target ahead of the Glasgow climate conference, he should put $250bn on the table.

Yes, that’s “b” for billion.

According to Pitt, if this transition was actually on, Australians taxpayers should bear the risks. Pitt floated a cartoonishly bad idea where taxpayers would underwrite the financing and insurance of fossil fuels – including for overseas-owned companies – all because naughty Australian banks weren’t inclined to make bad bets.

If you’ve missed Pitt’s parable of the bad banks, let’s recap that quickly: bad banks are now more interested in virtue signalling to their obnoxiously woke inner-city clientele than backing salt-of-the-earth fossil fuel projects in the regions.....

But before anyone could say Venezuela, Pitt’s Queensland Nationals colleague Matt Canavan – a former Productivity Commission economist now apparently estranged from capitalism – was out and about with a different parable.

Canavan told a mildly startled Kieran Gilbert on Sky News that Australians should be prepared to pay higher interest rates in order to stare down international financiers managing carbon risk in global markets. Canavan’s Big Idea™ was actually wilder than Pitt’s, but it attracted significantly less attention.

A political observation

I don't know how people find the time to consider themselves thoroughly expert in their opinions on matters of interstate politics.  I find I can barely know enough about the politics of my own state, let alone others. 

Having said that, and speaking with only fleeing glimpses of his performance on the news:  that Dominic Perrottet strikes me as physically and vocally uncharismatic.  He keeps reminding me a bit of an aged version of how David Byrne looked in his old Once in a Lifetime video, and with a similar awkwardness.

Weekend update - curry edition

I tried making lamb rogan josh (a recipe name that keeps making me wonder if I mixing it up with Rogan the broadcaster), and it was considered successful.

Given the variation in recipes on line, I will note that it was this one I followed, although in somewhat simplified form (I couldn't find the cloves in the cupboard for example).  I also didn't bother blitzing the onion to a paste, and just used jar ginger and garlic, which makes for a much quicker prep.   Also - some passata instead of tomato paste plus a tomato.   And just a bit of sunflower oil instead of ghee - that's probably much healthier, too.  [Oh, wait a minute: it was some other recipe that insisted on it being ghee, not this one.]

But - this spice mix worked well for 600 g of lamb:

• 1tsp fennel seeds
• 1tsp cumin seeds
• 3 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp red chili powder 

(The seeds were toasted and ground.)   It's not a hot curry, just one with lots of flavour.  Cardamom is important - I like the burst of flavour when you bite into a cardamom pod.   Use more than 4...

Update:  I'll just add the rest here too, because link cancer may mean I lose it:

Onion Paste:

• 1 large red or brown onion, roughly chopped
• Water

Ginger Garlic Paste:

• 4cm piece ginger, peeled and chopped
• 5 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
• Water
  

• 4 tbsp oil
• 4 green cardamom pods
• 5 cloves
• 2 dried bay leaves
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 tbsp canned diced tomatoes or 1 tomato, diced
• 600g lamb, cut into small bite sized pieces
• 1 1/2 tbsp natural yogurt
• Salt to taste
  

To cook:  

1. Heat oil in a large casserole over medium-high heat. Stir fry cardamom, cloves and bay leaves for 1-2 minutes.
2. Add onion paste. Cook, stirring, for 1-2 minutes or until the raw smell disappears. Add ginger garlic paste. Cook, stirring, for 2 minutes or until fragrant.
3. Stir in spice mix. Cook for 1 minute or until aromatic. Add tomato paste and canned tomatoes. Cook, stirring often, for 1-2 minutes.
4. Add lamb. Season with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Stir yogurt into the curry. Cover lamb with 250 ml hot water. Bring to the boil.
5. Reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer, covered and stirring occasionally, for 30-40 minutes or until lamb is cooked through.
   

Odd doctor

One of the few advantages of the anonymous chat room participation on the net is that it can alert you to the fact there are people in certain fields who you would not want to be dealing with.   Given this comment at one of the new Catallaxies...:

 ...if I were a patient in the SA hospital system, I would take it as a warning to ask for reassurance that the anaesthetist or surgeon is COVID vaccinated. 

An old question considered

I missed watching this video put out by Sabine Hossenfelder some months ago:

It deals with, although too briefly, the question of whether it is possible to consider the 4 dimensional spacetime universe as being embedded in a higher dimensional universe.   I mean, the idea of extra dimensional objects (or beings) being able to pass through our lowly 3 (spatial dimension) universe was very popular for a while in 20th century science fiction, but I don't think it ever got a mention much in real physics, and I never understood why.   (And yes, I know that string theory was about compacted extra dimensions, but that's different.)

She said (with no further explanation, and starting at about the 6 min 30 second mark) that yes, you could consider our universe to be embedded in higher dimensions and to be expanding into them, but it (generally) takes 10 dimensions to make this work, and as they are understood (or "constructed"?) to be non observable, it is not scientific to think they are real.

Well, now I need to know why it takes 10 dimensions... 

Update:   OK, so according to this explanation in AEON, the 10 dimensions that Sabine mentions is about the extra compacted dimensions that are relevant to string theory - but as I said before, I didn't think compacted dimensions were relevant to the idea of our universe being embedded in extra dimensions that it can expand into.    Anyhow, here is the explanation:

If moving into four dimensions helps to explain gravity, then might thinking in five dimensions have any scientific advantage? Why not give it a go? a young Polish mathematician named Theodor Kaluza asked in 1919, thinking that if Einstein had absorbed gravity into spacetime, then perhaps a further dimension might similarly account for the force of electromagnetism as an artifact of spacetime’s geometry. So Kaluza added another dimension to Einstein’s equations, and to his delight found that in five dimensions both forces fell out nicely as artifacts of the geometric model.

The mathematics fit like magic, but the problem in this case was that the additional dimension didn’t seem to correlate with any particular physical quality. In general relativity, the fourth dimension was time; in Kaluza’s theory, it wasn’t anything you could point to, see, or feel: it was just there in the mathematics. Even Einstein balked at such an ethereal innovation. What is it? he asked. Where is it?

In 1926, the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein answered this question in a way that reads like something straight out of Wonderland. Imagine, he said, you are an ant living on a long, very thin length of hose. You could run along the hose backward and forward without ever being aware of the tiny circle-dimension under your feet. Only your ant-physicists with their powerful ant-microscopes can see this tiny dimension. According to Klein, every point in our four-dimensional spacetime has a little extra circle of space like this that’s too tiny for us to see. Since it is many orders of magnitude smaller than an atom, it’s no wonder we’ve missed it so far. Only physicists with super-powerful particle accelerators can hope to see down to such a minuscule scale.

Once physicists got over their initial shock, they became enchanted by Klein’s idea, and during the 1940s the theory was elaborated in great mathematical detail and set into a quantum context. Unfortunately, the infinitesimal scale of the new dimension made it impossible to imagine how it could be experimentally verified...

It goes on to explain that the idea got revived in the 1960's to help explain the weak and strong nuclear forces:

Kaluza’s and Klein’s ideas bubbled back into awareness, and theorists gradually began to wonder if the two subatomic forces could also be described in terms of spacetime geometry.

It turns out that in order to encompass both of these two forces, we have to add another five dimensions to our mathematical description. There’s no a priori reason it should be five; and, again, none of these additional dimensions relates directly to our sensory experience. They are just there in the mathematics. So this gets us to the 10 dimensions of string theory. Here there are the four large-scale dimensions of spacetime (described by general relativity), plus an extra six ‘compact’ dimensions (one for electromagnetism and five for the nuclear forces), all curled up in some fiendishly complex, scrunched-up, geometric structure.

And there's more explanation that Witten came up with 11 dimensions:

There are many versions of string-theory equations describing 10-dimensional space, but in the 1990s the mathematician Edward Witten, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Einstein’s old haunt), showed that things could be somewhat simplified if we took an 11-dimensional perspective. He called his new theory M-Theory, and enigmatically declined to say what the ‘M’ stood for. Usually it is said to be ‘membrane’, but ‘matrix’, ‘master’, ‘mystery’ and ‘monster’ have also been proposed.

So, what about the type of extra "large" dimensions that was the subject of Flatland and science fiction?   Well, it might be there, as AEON explains:

In 1999, Lisa Randall (the first woman to get tenure at Harvard as a theoretical physicist) and Raman Sundrum (an Indian-American particle theorist) proposed that there might be an additional dimension on the cosmological scale, the scale described by general relativity. According to their ‘brane’ theory – ‘brane’ being short for ‘membrane’ – what we normally call our Universe might be embedded in a vastly bigger five-dimensional space, a kind of super-universe. Within this super-space, ours might be just one of a whole array of co-existing universes, each a separate 4D bubble within a wider arena of 5D space.

OK, that's more like it.

Update:   I realised on the weekend (because Youtube pointed it out to me) that Sabine Hossenfelder had done earlier videos on the extra dimensions idea, explaining the stuff that appeared in the AEON article above.   I didn't previously realise that the idea of compacted extra dimension had been around for so long, with string theory really just reviving it.

A funny comment on DH Lawrence

I really have little interest in DH Lawrence, but that doesn't stop me from reading a short review of a new biography about him.   I found this bit amusing:

Wilson points out that having rejected traditional religion, Lawrence more or less designed his own, though his understanding of just what this meant never seemed entirely clear. “For all his claims to prophetic vision,” Wilson writes, “Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world,” she observes.

The Dreher chronicles

I've never especially followed what Rod Dreher might be saying:  he's quite popular with people at Catallaxy, which is a good sign he is a wrong headed and probably offensive conservative.  But I had noticed that he had become one of the Right's fanboys of Hungary and Orban - and this marks him as "conservative willing to discard democracy if it means propping up his losing side in the culture wars" and therefore not worthy of serious consideration.  

However, I can't resist noting the well deserved ridicule he has received on Twitter and elsewhere for his lack of a self filter when discussing circumcision.   It's also hard to believe he couldn't see the reaction he would get.  Is he just dumb, or did he run with "let's just see how much Twitter chatter I can provoke"?

Update:   One of the ideas of Dreher's that is lately often mentioned favourably at Catallaxy is his "Benedict Option":

There was a time when Christian thinkers like Dreher, who writes for The American Conservative, might have prepared to fight for cultural and political control. Dreher, however, sees this as futile. “Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to … stop fighting the flood?” he asks. “Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.” This strategic withdrawal from public life is what he calls the Benedict option.

I find it a pretty laughable idea, but here's Melbourne's sometime depression sufferer Arky speculating on the same thing, more or less:

Human’s require each other for economic, social and procreation reasons. In order to enjoy all the benefits of human society you have to move in proximity to other people. However, as these times of raving covidity prove that more and more of our fellow humans are complete douche nozzles of the lowest order, the question sneaks into our consciousness: Is it really worth hanging around with these complete penises?

If in order to work you need an, at this point, open ended series of jabs with weird concoctions; if schooling means sending your child to a progressive indoctrination centre where they might also require an open ended series of those weird concoction stabs for zero net benefit to themselves; when socializing means being harangued by cultists; if being entertained requires also to be lectured; if indeed, the entire structure of the society you live within is riddled with that which you find repugnant; is the warmth worth the pain anymore?

Mind you, here he is in comments in a different thread:

I have said in other places that it feels mean to criticise a guy who writes posts explaining that he has suffered depression, but he now spends all his time catastrophising about how Australian government response to COVID has all been about e-vil control over the population, and despairing that people were not rebelling against it.  He is, of course, against COVID vaccination.  

I am sorry, but I have little sympathy for a person, whether prone to depression or not, if he does not have enough sense to contemplate that he might be the one who is wrong and being led up the garden path by bad faith, blind culture war warriors.   He also sounds like he has serious anger issues.

Anyway - my message to all the Benedict Option fans at Catallaxy (and libertarians anywhere longing to set up their new utopia in the middle of no-where):  please, go ahead and do it.  You're a danger to the rest of us.
 

 

Record dangerous rainfall, again

At Axios:

Northwestern Italy has been hit by record rainfall from a complex of thunderstorms, triggering flooding and mudslides, per AP.

By the numbers: 29.2 inches of rain fell in 12 hours on Monday in Rossiglione, Genoa province, just south of Milan. That's a new, all-time European record, meteorologists noted Tuesday.

 

Backup to GPS

I forgot to post about this when I saw it recently.   Given my view that satellite based global positioning is  an incredible thing that is greatly under-appreciated,  I just thought this was interesting:

SpaceX's Starlink satellites may be used for navigation and global positioning in addition to their core function of broadband Internet, a new research study suggests.

Engineering researchers external to SpaceX found a way to use the Starlink constellation signals for navigation similar to the capabilities provided by global positioning satellites (GPS), which are used in the United States and several other countries. The study represents the first time Starlink was used for navigation by researchers outside of SpaceX, the team members stated.

Researchers triangulated the signals from six Starlink satellites to fix upon a location on Earth with less than 27 feet (eight meters) of accuracy, the team reported in a statement. That's pretty comparable to the typical GPS capabilities of a smartphone, which typically pinpoints your spot on Earth to within 16 feet (4.9 m), depending on the conditions....

Kassas noted that Starlink's accuracy, using this methodology, will increase as more satellites in the fleet fly to orbit. SpaceX has about 1,700 working satellites today, the team stated, but the company hopes to launch more than 40,000 into orbit. (Recent launches have been delayed due to a liquid oxygen shortage induced by higher medical needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The researchers suggested this method of using Starlink navigation could supplement traditional GPS navigation, the latter of which has vulnerabilities. Since GPS has been around for a generation (more than 30 years) and has a well-known signal, it is easy to use on smartphones or vehicles — but also more "vulnerable to attacks", the team stated.

 

Economists, big coins, and the theory of money

I'm just thinking out loud here, so don't shoot me anyone who has studied economics and thinks I don't know what I'm talking about:   it seems to me a serious problem for the field of economic theory if economists cannot agree on the effects of something as big as the Trillion Dollar Coin gambit if it were actually used in the USA. 

Here's a Washington Post article about it, explaining some points succinctly:

What’s the downside to the $1 trillion coin?

Experts are not entirely sure, mostly because the idea is entirely theoretical.

A major concern for economists is hyperinflation. Minting the $1 trillion coin would be like creating money out of thin air. When all that new money poofs into existence, the other currency in circulation becomes less valuable. That could hurt consumers, who are already dealing with price inflation.

Then there’s the question of what a $1 trillion coin would mean for U.S. monetary and fiscal policy. Monetary policy means making decisions about the money in the economy. That’s mostly left up to the Federal Reserve, which is somewhat insulated from political tinkering. Fiscal policy means making decisions about what the government spends money on. That’s an entirely political process left up to Congress and the president.

The $1 trillion coin would completely mix the two. It would have the president use monetary policy (creating new money) to solve a fiscal problem (the government is running out of borrowing capacity). Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Tuesday that such a move “compromises the independence of the Fed.”....

“This is equivalent — the platinum coin is equivalent to asking the Federal Reserve to print money to cover deficits that Congress is unwilling to cover by issuing debt. It compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy,” she said. “And instead of showing that Congress and the administration can be trusted to pay the country’s bills, it really does the opposite.”

On the inflation side, we get these competing views:

 And this end one might have a point:

Is that at the heart of this, really?   That economics still has no good theory of what creates money and how it "works"?   I had a post about an article that argued this in 2019 - but I think Noah Smith, whose opinion seems pretty well informed, was not impressed. 

 

 

Yep, no change

So how's the Murdoch greenwashing announcement going?:

I do have to say, though, regarding the European and Chinese energy shortages:   I have never really understood how cold climate countries can show that they are really serious about zero carbon emissions (without nuclear) until they come up with the plan for dealing with their freezing winters with renewable energy.   I mean, years ago, I was saying that it seemed odd for a cloudy winter country like Germany to be putting too much reliance on home solar.   Sure, it might work well enough for half the year, but be of pretty limited utility for the part of the year where energy is really needed just to keep warm.

As I too am still not keen on nuclear, I suspect that, apart from extra wind power (which does not always work in winters), the only path forward for these countries to be a combination of long distance transmission of solar power (turn a few arid countries in North Africa into giant solar farms with cables running into Europe - it's not like they're doing anything very useful with the land anyway), plus utility scale storage.  I think - just a hunch - that flow batteries may be the way to go there - maybe some in the African countries itself, and some in Europe.

As for Australia - we can do the same, but on smaller scale, since not that much of the country gets that cold.   Still, we have the natural advantage of a northern part of the country enjoying dry, sunny winters,  which could supply winter power to the colder, cloudy winter parts of the country.   And, to a degree, vice versa in summer.

I think there is also much greater scope in Australia for domestic scale batteries - really, I don't see why the government just doesn't mandate home scale storage in all new house builds.  Economy of scale, you know.

Yes, we need to talk about..nurses

Nurses - (mostly) lovely people, doing a job that we all deeply appreciate when we need their services, and in many cases working under trying conditions: but gee it's disturbing how many of them are nonetheless capable of holding deeply unscientific views even on matters of medicine.  

I think this has always been the case - certainly I remember from my 20's (when for a time I used to socialise with nurses who I met through work and our communal living arrangements) that they could come out with some wacky stuff at times.  I have seen more than one doctor with a somewhat strained relationship with nurses too, for pretty much the same reason.

So I know that we can usually get by with ignoring some dubious beliefs they may express (and God knows we also need to ignore males in certain professions [*cough* engineers] when they get particularly prone to idiosyncratic and unwarranted certainty about matters outside of their expertise), but my toleration level for nurses who are against COVID vaccine mandates is non-existant.

Sack them, sack them, sack them.   

And I find it really outrageous that there are opportunistic Right wing aligned "workers associations", masquerading as "unions", which are trying to make political mileage out of pandering to them:

A set of “fake unions” with links to current and former Liberal and National party figures are capitalising on anti-vaccination fears to recruit doctors, teachers and nurses and exploit dissent within the labour movement about mandatory vaccinations.

Queensland-based Red Union claims nurses from Victoria and NSW are flocking to join its associations, which it says are adding more than 200 members a day amid fears of vaccination orders. In NSW, Liberal Party member John Larter is setting up three workers’ associations to compete with established unions for allied health, policing and paramedics.

Not much more to say about this, as no one is going to convince me I am wrong.   But I do note this, from the Onion, as a particularly wry take on it:

 

Facebook too big to fail?

Kevin Kruse tweeted:

and got a lot of pushback in comments that people use it for business, finding homes for animals in urgent need of shelter, and otherwise socially isolated people use for keeping in contact.   And lots say "of course I only use it responsibly."

I find this a bit irritating - it sort of suggests that people were highly unconnected socially before the internet.   Maybe some were - but of course, it is very likely that there was more personal contact back in the day, too.    

I think people really need to have less of a "too big to fail" [or, more accurately, "too big to be forced to change the way it operates] attitude towards Facebook - there are ways of alternative online networking that maybe have a modest degree of greater inconvenience, but we're not talking re-inventing the wheel totally here.

All of this is on back of the 60 Minutes whistleblower story about Facebook.  This Gizmodo summary is good:

9 Horrifying Facts From the Facebook Whistleblower's New 60 Minutes Interview

The first one seems pretty big to me:

Haugen explained to 60 Minutes how Facebook’s algorithm chooses content that’s likely to make users angry because that causes the most engagement. And user engagement is what Facebook turns into ad dollars.

“Its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” Haugen told 60 Minutes.

“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” Haugen continued.

Now, of course, years and years of reading Catallaxy and its later spawn has shown me that any online community can spend most of its time on re-posting to each other stuff that is designed to re-enforce anger, so its not as if Facebook stopping that aspect is going to kill all problems with the net.

But gee, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  

As for the site being down suddenly earlier today, I laughed at this suggestion:

 

 

 

Transparent oceans?

This had crossed my mind recently when thinking about Australia and nuclear submarines:  it's a little surprising that they haven't worked out ways to see further into the oceans yet, at least deep enough to detect submarines.   I mean, they do all this sophisticated stuff to look inside buildings with cosmic muons now.   Is there any chance of that being usefully used in the oceans?

Anyway, a report in the Guardian says that, yeah, to a large extent (although it is very short on details) the oceans may be "transparent" to submarines by mid century.

The Australian National University’s National Security College report Transparent Oceans? found that transparency is “likely or “very likely” by the 2050s, a decade after Australia’s new fleet of nuclear-powered subs is due to enter service.

A multidisciplinary team looked at new sensor technology, underwater communications and the possibility of tripwires at choke points. They also examined new ways to detect chemical, biological, acoustic and infra-red signatures, finding that even with improvements in stealth submarines will become visible.

I haven't got time to look at that link yet, but maybe later.

A very important video about fusion (and it's not good news for energy techno optimists)

It's pretty amazing that we all had to wait for this very clear explanation of how the fusion research community loves to have the public confused (or actually misled) about where they hope to get to with the fantastically expensive ITER project.

Watch it all - I think that it's actually a Right wing politician in America could legitimately call a scientific scandal, were it not for the time they spend on imaginary scandals:

While we're in a tearing up contracts mood, maybe just go Japanese?

Seems pretty obvious to me that we are not going to build our own nuclear submarines in Australia:

Australia's switch to nuclear-powered submarines is prompting a government push for the fleet to be built faster, possibly at the expense of local industry content, to make up for time lost under the now-scrapped French deal. 

I mean, why bother if you are never going to build your own reactors - and I am pretty sure we are not going to go to the trouble of doing that.

The whole complexity of the Australian submarine deal was trying to do it in a way to keep shipbuilding jobs here.   But submarine building is surely such a specialised thing, why bother trying to keep expertise here when you only need it for a small fleet?  

I am therefore dubious about the whole US/UK nuclear sub deal.   

Why not work with another country, closer to us, sharing our own regional interests, and just let them build us some convention subs that are quieter than nuclear anyway?

Hence - it pains me to say it, but Tony Abbott might have had the right instinct on something for once - why not go for the Japanese building us a fleet, but not the Soryu class, their latest design instead?: 

Like the last two boats of the Soryu class, the Taigei will be equipped with lithium-ion batteries as a power source. Japan has conducted extensive research into the use of lithium-ion batteries onboard submarines since the early 2000s, and says they require less maintenance and are capable of longer endurance at high speeds while submerged, compared to lead-acid batteries.

Japan is the only known country to have operational submarines using lithium-ion batteries.

I like the idea of something as ubiquitous as lithium ion batteries powering a submarine; although I trust they have figured out the issue with them occasionally bursting into flame.   But it is pretty rare in mobile phones, isn't it?

And look, they're even politically correct:

The Taigei subs also have another important new feature: all-gender bathrooms. Japan is following the U.S. Navy’s lead in integrating women into the submarine force, and Taigei will have bathrooms for both men and women. The issue isn’t just gender equality, but also the country’s declining population, which is creating a smaller pool of potential recruits. Opening subs to women effectively doubles the number of people that could serve in the Maritime Self Defense Force.

It's pretty incredible, really:  countries may want plenty of submarines, but have trouble finding people willing to work in them.

And what about the cost?   

Japan has plans for two more Taigei-class submarines, and has asked for $654.1 million for one more boat in the Defense Ministry’s latest budget request.  

Assuming that is US dollars, sounds like the cost of one is roughly $1 billion AUD?  

But we were planning on spending $90 billion on French submarines?   

Gee -  how many people does building subs here employ?  Some government paper says:

The naval shipbuilding plan indicated that construction of the Future Submarine Program (FSP) is expected to sustain around 1,100 Australian jobs in direct build and around 1,700 Australian jobs through the supply chain.

So, tops, 3,000 or so people?

You could pay them a tax free income of $100,000 per year for $300 million per annum.    Times a 20 year project - $6 billion.

Plus, say, 10 Japanese subs at about $1 billion each - grand total of $16 billion?

I have just saved the government $74 billion...

 

Things I didn't know about the potato

In a free to read article from The Economist's 1843 magazine:

Scientists reckon that potatoes originated in the Peruvian Andes. It was probably from here that the first ones were ferried back to Europe in the 16th century by Spanish conquistadores.

Europeans at first treated potatoes as a botanical curiosity, and mostly used them to feed livestock. Over time, however, they became a staple in many countries. But the Peruvian strains of potatoes were used to a consistent 12 hours of equatorial sunlight – they’re now known as “short-day potatoes” – and fared poorly in the longer but weaker summer sun of higher latitudes in Europe. Nevertheless, Europeans became so hooked on spuds that when an epidemic of potato blight hit crops in the mid-19th century, it caused the “great famine” in Ireland and beyond.

 After the famine, most farmers in Europe switched to the “long-day” species native to Chiloé. It is these Chilean varieties that, through decades of micro-evolution and selective breeding, developed into the common spuds we now see in our supermarkets. Most potatoes these days are grown in Europe and Asia: China, India and Russia are the three top producers. The citizens of Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia are the most voracious consumers, eating around 500g of potatoes a day each, or two large spuds. Yet more than 90% of modern potato varieties cultivated across the world today can be traced back to Chiloé.

It explains at the start of the article:

Off the coast of northern Patagonia, some 1,220km south of the capital of Chile, lies an island shaped like a peanut. The patchwork farms and wood-shingled churches of Chiloé lie below moody skies that often unleash horizontal raindrops amid howling winds. Get enough drizzle in your eyes to blur out the volcanoes in the distance, and you’d swear the radiant green hills belonged not in South America, but half a world away in Ireland. And just like Ireland, the staple crop on Chiloé is the potato.

Seems odd that I don't recall reading about this Very Important Island before.   

Here it is: