Don't Look Up: I see what you were trying to do there...

[This post contains spoilers, to a degree.]

Talk about a curate's egg (good in parts) of a movie:  the much discussed Don't Look Up on Netflix.  

On the upside:

* all of the actors are really good, and I thought that Mark Rylands as the self involved tech billionaire was excellent.  He's the sort of actor who seems to inhabit roles, rather than act them.

*  some of the satire of Trumpian politics worked well - especially the dumb son as Chief of Staff.  Meryl Streep herself wasn't bad, but the role as written was ambiguous - you never really could tell if she was just dumb, like Trump; or smart but just so self-involved as to be dangerous.

* sure, I get the overall intention of a satire where the political opportunism and media messaging (and tech's manipulation of what interests in the public) is more important than the actual information;  but for broad satire to work it has to feel a tad more credible to me.

On the downside:

*  I think there are two key problems - the first being that the screenplay seemed to bend over backwards to avoid the risk of characters being identified exactly with any living person or institution.   So, for example, the Trump-ian President is shown getting a hug from Bill Clinton in a photo - is that just there so the writer can say "see, I'm not saying she's necessarily a Republican"?   The tech billionaire - you got a sense he was designed to vaguely remind us of Steve Jobs, but a dumber version. (That guy's dead, so defamation wouldn't have been a problem if the character was more like him.  It would have upset Apple fanboys, however.)   We all know that the worst tech billionaire is probably Zuckerberg, but the character as written was not given any of his obvious features (in terms of age or terrible haircut), so it seems to me it was again "playing it safe".   And the terrible morning TV show - surely Fox News should be the target, but they took a fair amount of care to make it something more generic.  If I worked on one of the mainstream morning breakfast shows in the US, I would be a bit insulted by this aspect, actually.   

* The second problem - is it too much to ask of satire to be more scientifically accurate?    I think - without looking it up - that the chances of a comet being found to have valuable minerals is next to nil.  An asteroid - sure - but if the movie had gone with that, they wouldn't have had the ability to make the joke that the disaster was literally staring the idiot part of humanity in the face.   (Also, I suspect in real life, the comet would have been obvious in the sky earlier than it was in the film.)   I didn't care for the silliness of the plan to cut up the comet, either.   And really, very popular disaster films have made the public (and even media stars) aware of what the end of the world by giant meteor or asteroid strike would look like - it's just not really credible to have this news immediately downplayed on virtually any media network - even (dare I say it) Fox News.

I suspect that a more realistic scenario would have worked better as satire - say, that it was an asteroid, and that the problem turned out to be an ageing, libertarian inclined astronomer with Republican connections coming up with his own calculation that it was only a 50% chance of it hitting - not the 99% chance that NASA gave.  (Or he could calculate that it would hit the North Pole and not really endanger the planet - just some unfortunate Russian Northern cities that can be evacuated.)    And the President and her party runs with the contrarian advice...

It wouldn't be as broad a satire, but that would (in my opinion) be a good thing.

  

 

1950's science fiction

Google, via the Youtube algorithm, decided to get me looking at 1950's science fiction again, and so the other night I watched most of This Island Earth, of which I think I had only previously seen bits and pieces.

It is pretty deliciously silly, but it was in bright Technicolor and features an actor with the name "Rex Reason".   I fell asleep in the last third, but saw the "climax" (it's a film with a remarkable lack of dramatic arc) which features the crash of the good alien's spaceship into the ocean, and - cut to credits.   Lots of old science fiction had the really abrupt ending, I seem to recall.  Perhaps because they often ran with another feature, so it's not as if it's the only thing the audience came to see.

So today, Youtube decided I would like to watch Commando Cody - Sky Marshal of the Universe - not a movie but a serial of 12 episodes given I think both theatrical then TV release.  This guy:

 

He was the original rocketman character, and I have an early memory of getting a thrill from the flying suit sequences.   And you know, I still kind of like the way they did them - I think it must be a dummy flying along a wire line, or something, but you can't tell exactly how it was done.   (Have a look here, at the 3.50min mark to see the bits I am talking about.)  The print quality of this on Youtube is high, but as for story - the space villain is ridiculously Flash Gordon in design.     

Still, it's worth a laugh.  Just as in This Island Earth, there's a lot of nuclear science being done in tiny laboratories.  I guess the movie makers in the 1950s had much idea about the size of the Manhattan Projection.   

Some really bad looking movies

A few posts back, I noted a list of potentially interesting looking movies due for release in 2022.

I should balance that by noting how God-awful a couple of trailers for some forthcoming big budget movies look - the first being Moonfall, by "the End of the World is my only interest" schlock director Roland Emmerich.  As Ars Technica writes in its commentary on the trailer:

Hello, police? I'd like to report a murder—the sacrifice of credible science on the altar of entertainment,

The other really, really bad looking trailer is (unfortunately) featuring the very likeable Tom Holland, who apparently now does Spidernam level stunts even in movies in which he's not in that costume.  Look how silly this looks:

It's based on some well loved games which I had never heard of. Not sure that there is any good movie that's ever been created that way.

Some Biden commentary to agree with

Jonathan Freeland in The Guardian, on the very "The Trump menace", makes some commentary about Biden which rings true:

It’s worth recalling here how shaky the president’s position was from the start, seeking to govern with a diminished, razor-thin Democratic majority in the House and a 50-50 deadlocked Senate. Despite that, he has passed some major bills and made some big, even transformative moves. As the former speechwriter to George W Bush David Frum puts it: “In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57.”

And yet, it’s not enough. Biden passed a vital infrastructure bill, but his larger package of social spending and action on the climate crisis is stalled. His poll ratings took a hit with the speed of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after August’s chaotic US withdrawal. And his 4 July declaration that America could celebrate its “independence from Covid-19” now looks horribly premature.

You can make a strong case that none of these things is Biden’s fault. His spending bill is stalled thanks to two Democratic senators who simply refuse to get on board. (Given their politics, Biden probably deserves credit for getting them to back him as often as they have.) The withdrawal from Afghanistan was under a deal agreed by Trump; indeed, Trump’s exit would have come earlier. As for Covid, what could any president do when more than a quarter of the country – overwhelmingly Trump supporters – refuse to get vaccinated?

I would also add, that if teacher's unions are causing even Democrat voters to get angry over their refusal/reluctance to re-open schools, they have much more reason to be concerned about teacher's health in a country where a  high certain percentage of students will be denied access to vaccination by their un vaccinated parents, and with Delta still a threat.

 

Too stupid to engage with

Poor old JC - he never knew who to listen to on climate change, and while he still argues with racist idiots at the Catallaxy replacements, on the lost Trump election, he has adopted the super convenient line of the truly stupid:  "No, it's up to you to convince me that my suspicion is wrong.  And you can't!":

Yes, just incredible

 

COVID and churches

The Economist has an article up about something that had crossed my mind over the last couple of Covid years - how bad will it be for churches in terms of diminishing congregations who have become used to not having to attend services?:

And this:

...the streaming of services has made it easier for worshippers to “church hop”. In a poll of practising Christians in America in 2020 by Barna Group, which conducts worldwide research into religion, 14% had switched churches, 18% were attending more than one church, 35% were attending only their pre-pandemic church and 32% had stopped going to church altogether (see chart 2).

Certainly, the Right wing conservatives in the Catholic Church have been upset that Archbishops (and the Pope) went along with vaccinations and abiding by government restrictions on services at all; but I guess they will still be going along to whatever conservative parish they can find in any case.

Unexpected movie optimism

Actually, this BBC list of 22 movies to watch out for during 2022 contains a surprising number of potentially interesting ones to watch.   Let's hope Covid lifts enough to let us re-engage with going to the cinema whenever we want to.

Test secured

So, unless the Queensland government guidelines have changed in the last 30 minutes (always a possibility), it would seem that as a close contact of a positive Covid case I am supposed to take a RAT immediately even though I have no clear symptoms.   (I am now leaning towards the itch and kinda rash on my neck being an insect bite from a couple of nights ago -  after standing outside for 10 minutes waiting for the dog to finish pooping, I did feel something soft and squishy on that side of my face which I flung off.  A spider perhaps?  But it didn't feel like I was bitten at the time.  Odd.) 

In one of the few useful things Zuckerberg has achieved, apparently it was Facebook that alerted my nearby co-workers that a gym nearby was selling RATs and they rushed and acquired a pack of five, and delivered one to my home.  [Update - no the story of how the test was located is wrong - my co-worker had left their name at a pharmacy next to a gym, and maybe got notified this morning that they were in stock?  But they were not giving them out to people walking in off the street.  So Facebook remains a blight on humanity.]  

Interestingly, the guidelines say that a close contact is not allowed to leave home quarantine to buy a retail RAT - only to go to a testing centre.   I suppose they have to say that especially as the lack of RAT availability means people could be wandering around all day trying to find a shop with them in stock, but still, unless your lucky like me and was able to get one delivered home, this is a significant problem with reliance on home administered RATs.  Would be much easier if they were available at doctors or pharmacies for free and people needing them allowed to go by car to pick one up.   Now that I think of it, you could even allow for them to be handed to people in their cars.

I now have one in my hands.  Self administered nasal.  Ugh.

Will report back!

Update:  yay, negative.

Too early in the year for some democracy depression?

Here's a long, depressing take on the question of the future for American democracy at Vox:

How does this end?

Where the crisis in American democracy might be headed.

It all sounds very depressing, but there is one aspect I think the article doesn't seem to take into much account - the poisonous role of Murdoch, Fox News and the Right wing infotainment industry in creating and maintaining "pernicious polarisation", with the awful feedback loop it has built with the Republican Party.

What happens, I wonder, if Fox News has a major turnaround and becomes actually interested in not stoking Right wing doom-mongering and hatred?   Yeah, I know, fat chance:  and does it mean that its fan base just moves onto OAN instead?   And the fascist problems in other nations in the last 40 or so years happened without the same media influence.

But does the obvious role of the Right wing media in US politics mean that it is actually capable of healing partisan divisions if major figures (cough, Murdoch family) took it on as their role to do so?

I'm clutching at straws for optimism, so sue me.

I'm also struck by the tiny amount of time the article devotes to this issue, which I think is an obvious problem that Americans (or the British) just never seem to spend much time contemplating:

Even more fundamental reforms may be necessary. In his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, political scientist Lee Drutman argues that America’s polarization problem is in large part a product of our two-party electoral system. Unlike elections in multiparty democracies, where leading parties often govern in coalition with others, two-party contests are all-or-nothing: Either your party wins outright or it loses. As a result, every vote takes on apocalyptic stakes.

A new draft paper by scholars Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne uncovers strong evidence for this idea. In a study of 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, they find that ordinary partisans tend to express warmer feelings toward the party’s coalition partners — both during the coalition and for up to two decades following its end. 

“In the US, there’s simply no such mechanism,” Gidron told me. “Even if you have divided government, it’s not perceived as an opportunity to work together but rather to sabotage the other party’s agenda.”

Drutman argues for a combination of two reforms that could move us toward a more cooperative multiparty system: ranked-choice voting and multimember congressional districts in the House of Representatives.

Yes.   

Meanwhile, I continue to agree with David Roberts' outrage.  Some examples:

 

 

And someone else notes in the thread following, an observation that became clear to me years ago when reading Sinclair Davidson trying to run climate change denialism:

COVID at home?

We're presently waiting for the outcome of a COVID PCR test for my daughter, which only took a 6 hour line up from 6 am yesterday to get administered.

She's not super sick, but the friend she was out with (and at whose house she stayed at) on New Years is apparently feeling very ill and tested positive.  My daughter's symptoms:  a sore throat and headache mainly, and not too bad for the first couple of days, but somewhat worse this morning.   You can imagine how sensitised that is making me to every throat twinge or nose drip.  Or even itch and whether my neck glands are swollen.   I had forgotten how in the early days, there were lots of symptoms being associated with it.

So, of course, I am the type of person most keen to seen RATs actually available, and I find it hard to understand why no one knows when the stock is to be delivered.  I think the head of Chemist Warehouse on Monday night was predicting plenty of stock by the end of the week, baring transport difficulties.   But I noticed that Coles seems to be having trouble re-stocking even the stuff that is not the subject of panic buying - such as chips and nuts.  So I guess Omicron may well be taking out truck drivers.

Anyway, maybe we will know more by tomorrow.   Everyone else at home seems OK. 

Update: on the topic of COVID more generally, I find far down on the Guardian's website this interesting article:

Could microclots help explain the mystery of long Covid? 

Update 2:   Yes, daughter did get a positive PCR test for COVID, so now it's a case of de-ciphering the lengthy current rules for home quarantine for the rest of us.  Do we have enough food to last the period?  It actually might help encourage the using up of a ridiculous amount of frozen items we keep at home... 

Boring content not about Covid

Once, maybe twice, a year we get to eat off our Spode fancy schmancy dinnerware.  The ones with this pattern:

I must admit, I like how the busyness of the design encourages much staring and trying to work out what is going in the scene.

I'll crop for you:

We seem to have cows in the water, to the consternation of a man and woman (I think) on the shore.  But what's going with the figure on the right, sitting on a box, and behind what exactly?

Maybe a priest? Or woman?  Sitting behind what looks like a fake rock face, like what they would build for a film.  Or is it something my brain just hadn't made sense of yet?

In fact, a lot of the design looks a bit Escher-esque, no?  Like this:

I'm not sure all of those angles make sense.  And now that I think of it, it's perhaps a tad Dali-esque too. 

Anyway, maybe everyone else knows about this pattern, as it's more famous than I knew:

The Blue Italian design was launched by Josiah Spode II in 1816, and this decorative vignette provided the perfect showcase for his father’s revolutionary blue underglaze transfer printing process. It depicts a classic Italianate landscape – although the origins of the scene remain a mystery, as no single place in Italy seems to match the various elements.

And Country Life magazine explains what's going on:

And so it was that, when Blue Italian was launched in 1816, it couldn’t have met with a more eager audience. Its Imari Oriental border of exotic flowers and scrolls gave a nod to the industry’s history, but within dwelt a fairytale as pretty as a picture. The scene is the Italian countryside: a shepherd and his lady tend their flock by a river that meanders lazily past a picturesque ruin, two lovers hold hands on the riverbank and, beyond, the river curves dotingly around a tiny chapel towards a medieval castle on high.

Trees and flowers permeate the landscape, both earth and sky, as if Man and his soft-edged edifices are there merely by Nature’s benevolent wish, and clouds scud overhead, reminding us that blue and white come in so many beautiful hues.

The "lovers holding hands on the riverbank" certainly don't get much prominence. 

The details of the design seem obscure enough that you could probably make a stupid Da Vinci Code style story out of it - it's a map to a hidden treasure somewhere in Italy, with the involvement of the Church (I'm going with the figure sitting on the mystery box being an Italian-ate priest.)

You can thank me later, Hollywood.

Crappy parts of the world explored in detail

Over the break, I did have the chance to watch a fair bit of longer Youtube content, and caught up with recent ones by Indigo Traveller, the New Zealand guy who seems to make a good living now out of his independent, on the ground, documentaries about the current situation for ordinary people in some of the poorest and most troubled countries on the planet.   

The recent series he did on Nigeria was really remarkable, and I strongly recommend it.  I thought the over-water slum of Lagos looking pretty unique - although I still don't really understand how it came to be created, sitting above 4 or 5 feet of filthy water.  

West Side Story: exquisitely directed, very flawed musical

Well, I have much to confess about lack of background knowledge:  I've managed to never watch a production of Romeo and Juliet of any kind, on screen or stage.  I only know the story from summaries, as I'm not the sort of person to read Shakespeare for fun.  Nor have I seen the original West Side Story in full - I started watching it once, and thought the finger clicking street dancing was a little silly.  Maybe I saw a bit of later dancing, but never watched it all.

So, I come to the Spielberg movie with a moderately clean slate, which leads me to say this - I actually get why it hasn't found a young audience.   The musical is a period piece of its day, based on a play with a story that surely must only convince by the poetry of its language rather than the probability of its plot.  I mean, I certainly hope  Shakespeare does a better job of convincing his audience that the love at first sight of this couple is plausible.  (I don't deny that people do say they "knew at first sight", so perhaps I shouldn't be so dismissive, but I have a deep preference for the slow burn romance over the instant "I knew he/she was for me" any day of the week.  In fact, let's mention now the deep irony that Robert Wise directed for the screen both WSS and The Sound of Music, the latter featuring the most utterly charming and convincing "falling in love during a dance" sequence that I know of in a movie - the crucial  difference being that the second Maria had known this dude by being a part of his household for at least months before the ball.  In West Side Story, it's more a case of seeing each across the crowded dance floor, a 60 second dance like a pair of mating birds, and that's it.  I know which I find more convincing.)

For me, the musical is flawed in other ways - I thought a key dramatic song A Boy Like That, which I was hearing for the first time, is both musically and lyrically a real dud.  In fact, that song is related to the biggest single thing that doesn't help the musical: Bernardo (who is killed by Tony/Romeo) being turned into Maria's brother instead of her cousin, as in the original Shakespeare.   Sure, Maria seems to have a tense relationship with him, but she still seems to love him as a brother, making her instant forgiveness (and more!) of Tony much harder to understand.    

OK, so I am full of criticisms - but despite all of this,  the movie infected my dreams in the way that a good movie does - and all because it is exquisitely directed.

The dance numbers in particular - as I wrote before, I knew from as early as 1941 that he should be able to do them well, and honestly, the amount of pleasure I got from the way any dancing is directed and editted in this film was pretty immense.

So, it makes for a weird conflict in terms of recommending the film  - I completely understand if you don't think it's a good musical, that it has a silly story, and even the actor playing Tony being the weakest of the stars (the women are uniformly terrific, and the other male leads really good too - and obviously ridiculously talented) - but you should see it anyway and be in awe of how it is put together.  If you're lucky, it will give you some nice musical dreams afterwards, too.

On some end notes:   the movie is remarkable for attracting highly political partisan commentary from both the nutty, Trumpian Right ("it's too Woke!") and the identity politics obsessed part of the Left ("it still trades on racial stereotypes - this musical should be forgotten!").   I think the attempts to drag it into more modern relevance were quite OK - and I find it hard to fault Spielberg and Krushner's liberal, inclusive, instincts.  I thought occasionally that the lack of subtitle for some Spanish was a bit harmful to understanding, but as an artistic decision, I basically have no problem with it.   The lack of youth appeal, as I said above, goes back to the faults in the musical itself.  Oh, and young women (like my daughter) wanting vengeance on Ansel Elgort for sexting a girl while he had a girlfriend.)  

The politics of Leonard Bernstein, and of America post WW2, were the subject of a very interesting article at Slate last month, and I strongly recommend reading it to give context to the musical.  

 Update:  I watched this lengthy discussion of the two movies last night, and it goes into a lot of interesting history of the musical itself, how Hollywood treated stars who couldn't sing well enough, and casting decisions.   (The bit about Natalie Wood being lied to as long as possible that her recorded songs were going to be used was pretty amazing.)   All very interesting:

The Christmas handyman report

It's been an odd Christmas break - seems I have done both a lot, and little. The family stayed at home, a decision which, given the showery, definitely not good beach weather, was a very wise for this year of an accurately predicted wetter summer. I suppose I should pity the people paying (at least) $1800 for a week in a seaside apartment only to be looking at the showers rolling in again, but instead I uncharitably just kept feeling upbeat that I was not in the same boat. 

The (sort of) downside of staying at home was the decision to spend a lot of the break on cleaning things in the house that hadn't been cleaned for years, as well as doing certain maintenance that I had been putting off for months, if not longer.

Hence, the ancient fat encrusted (well, sorry, but on certain internal parts, it was true) rangehood got dismantled and replaced, more or less successfully, by me.  (It works fine, but there remains something about the fit which makes me suspect I have done something wrong, but I can't see how it's possible.  I think unless it's pointed out to a visitor, it would not be noticed.  I certainly didn't til the next day!)

 I also replaced a lot of sealant around sinks and benchtops in the kitchen, one bathroom, and laundry, with the guidance of handyman Youtube.  I think I managed to make it look pretty neat and almost, but not quite, professional.  It's the sort of thing you definitely get more confident with the more you do it.  (I also didn't realise how much sealant you waste even when doing it "right".)

Curtains that hadn't been washed for (I think) 18 years (God, we sound a lazy household) were successfully cleaned, dried between showers and re-hung without falling apart, and windows, flyscreens and security grills cleaned thoroughly both inside and outside.  There was one window in particular that was, to my mind, mysteriously filthy on the inside.  It was behind a curtain behind the TV and near the modem and wifi router, but it seemed as filthy as an outside window that hadn't been touched for 20 years.  Could electrostatic effects from the electrical equipment be behind this?   

This has taken up a large amount of time, even with the occasional, reluctant, bits of assistance from 2 adult children.  And we haven't even started on the upstairs yet!  Or the outside, which badly needs attention.  I might get something done today, as weeds growing out of the mulch in the gutter above the garage is not a good look.  I did put up some replacement clothesline, though, this time with wirecore which hopefully cannot sag as quickly as your standard line does, with Youtube teaching me a new knot that turned out to be useful. 

I think I have made 6 or 7 trips to Bunnings over the period to achieve this - not being a handyman by inclination means frequent realizations of not having the appropriate tool or equipment.  As well as rangehoods not coming with the recommended carbon filters.    

And for entertainment - very little happened.   Both kids went off to their own parties on New Years Eve, and we didn't have people over either.  I heard distant fireworks from bed at midnight, and was cool with it.  

I did go see West Side Story, and it deserves a post of its own.  

But yeah, I'm feeling somewhat satisfied with successful handyman stuff.  Gee, before you know it, I'll be into woodwork for recreation, like ageing men often seem to.  (Not likely.)

As the photo says...

Something happier for Christmas

There's a new full length and very recent concert recording of The Messiah up on Youtube, and although I haven't listened with headphones yet, the quality sounds very good.   I haven't seen this live for a couple of decades:

 

 

What a difference a State makes

 

Oh no - another month of indoor masking and staying away from crowds too much for handle for the libertarian/conservative set?

Noted on Twitter:

If Gray suffers a coronary, or Jason falls off his bike, they might appreciate not being "ramped" at a hospital in the ambulance, and having staff actually able to deal with them promptly.  Not to mention people needing on going care and treatment for cancers, etc.

Or do they think that because everyone's going to get it, the (generally young and relatively fit) nurses and doctors that catch it but have a mild dose should just continue coughing on patients for the good of the nation?  Even if they think "the patient will catch it eventually anyway", don't they think it would be better to catch in the future, after the patient has got over their current illness?   Do they think making staff who cough or sneeze and test positive stay at home for the 1 to 2 weeks to test negative is unreasonable? 

I can see a very plausible case as to why virtually every nation on the planet, regardless of vaccination rates, is temporarily, at least, tightening restrictions in light of Omicron, even though it looks increasingly clear that it will kill a much smaller percentage of patients than Delta.

And yes, it may well represent the beginning of the end of the severe effects of the pandemic.

But I see no problem at all with not wanting all of the Omicron cases to pile up at too fast a rate because of the obvious potential to cause the heathcare system to be severely understaffed (and possibly, not enough ICU beds) in the near term. 

I wonder how rich Steve Kates is

What does Steve Kates, the ageing crank Trump cultist and only economist in the world who truly understands where economics all went wrong (just ask him), think of how his bete noire (Keynes) made heaps of money from good investment strategy?

An article at The Conversation talks about it, and concludes he would not have invested in Bitcoin.  I certainly would hope not!

A simple question

Why would Putin be worried about Ukraine from a security point of view anyway?:

Russia doesn't want conflict with Ukraine but Western powers must provide Moscow with "unconditional security guarantees", President Vladimir Putin has said.

Speaking at his annual news conference, Mr Putin said the US has missiles at "Russia's doorstep" and the "ball is in the West's court" in relation to security in the region.

Which country in the West would actually want Russia?   For what?  Their gas?  As if that would be worth the trouble of war.    

Update:  the Guardian offers some kind of analysis.   And the gas supply issue is complicated - but I still don't really see the security aspect well explained anywhere.

A reason for caution

An article at Nature today indicates that if a "high risk" person gets very sick from the Omicron version of Covid, it may well be harder to treat:

Strained hospitals bracing for a COVID-19 surge caused by the quickly spreading Omicron variant could face another grim possibility: preliminary experiments suggest that most of the antibody treatments for the disease are powerless against Omicron^1,2,3,4.

Doctors use artificial versions of natural antibodies to stave off severe COVID-19 in high-risk people who are infected with the coronavirus. But a slew of publications posted on preprint servers report laboratory evidence that Omicron is totally or partially resistant to all currently available treatments based on these monoclonal antibodies. The publications have not yet been peer reviewed, but some of the companies that manufacture antibody therapies already concede that their products have lower potency against Omicron than against other variants.

I guess the question still is - how many high risk people are going to get seriously sick from it in the first place. 

Update:  this seems a really good Twitter thread on the good news/bad news about Covid which (as the doctors says) is enough to make your head spin.  It includes more detail about the antibody therapies above, as well as the supply issues for other new treatments which seem pretty insurmountable. 

The deep irony (and/or stupidity)

Those of a libertarian/conservative bent who are carrying on most about the "totalitarianism" of public health decisions regarding Covid (see the awful Richard Hanania, for example - I think I have to unsubscibe from his Twitter feed because he seems to tweet about 200 times a day and every second or third one is appalling) are also likely to be Trump apologists and not concerned at all about the detailed revelations of a  plan to actually fraudulently get reinstated as President in what would have been a stunning totalitarian overturn of democracy normally associated with some lawless tinpot regime.

Which, I should add, is not to say that governments are above criticism for some of their Covid decisions.

Proteins are pretty incredible

I guess this aligns with my recent post about card shuffling and the mind boggling mathematics of the number of possible outcomes.  

Proteins have the same feature.  From a Science magazine article, nominating AI work on working out protein structures as the breakthrough of 2021:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses. They contract our muscles, convert food into cellular energy, ferry oxygen in our blood, and fight microbial invaders. Yet despite their varied talents, all proteins start out with the same basic form: a linear chain of up to 20 different kinds of amino acids, strung together in a sequence encoded in our DNA. After being assembled in cellular factories called ribosomes, each chain folds into a unique, exquisitely complex 3D shape. Those shapes, which determine how proteins interact with other molecules, define their roles in the cell.

Work by Anfinsen and others suggested interactions between amino acids pull proteins into their final shapes. But given the sheer number of possible interactions between each individual link in the chain and all the others, even modest-size proteins could assume an astronomical number of possible shapes. In 1969, American molecular biologist Cyrus Levinthal calculated that it would take longer than the age of a universe for a protein chain to cycle through them one by one—even at a furious pace. But in nature, each protein reliably folds up into just one distinctive shape, usually in the blink of an eye.

All about Mary

Oh, here's a summary of Christian (mainly Catholic and Orthodox) beliefs regarding Mary.

I knew all of it, but not in the precise detail given here.    For example:

The early centuries of the Christian tradition were silent on the death of Mary. But by the seventh and eighth centuries, the belief in the bodily ascension of Mary into heaven, had taken a firm hold in both the Western and Eastern Churches.

The Eastern Orthodox Greek Church held to the dormition of Mary. According to this, Mary had a natural death, and her soul was then received by Christ. Her body arose on the third day after her death. She was then taken up bodily into heaven.

For a long time, the Catholic Church was ambiguous on whether Mary rose from the dead after a brief period of repose in death and then ascended into heaven or was “assumed” bodily into heaven before she died.

Belief in the ascension of Mary into heaven became Catholic doctrine in 1950. Pope Pius XII then declared that Mary

was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.

I am curious as to how Pope Pius XII could be so certain of this detail.   How exactly does the Holy Spirit whisper this level of detail?

Anyway, does it mean that she didn't die at all?   Apparently, that remained an open question, but a more recent Pope said:

On 25 June 1997 Pope John Paul II said that Mary experienced natural death prior to her assumption into Heaven. 

OK, well still seems to me there is room for speculation on how soon after the death the rise into the sky happened.  I mean, it could have quite the surprise for those preparing the body for burial.

Or does "ascend into heaven" have to mean a sky ascension  such as that of Christ?   Could it be done by the body just disappearing into the higher dimension of heaven?  I know that art has favoured the former, but a more subtle form of "ascension" might be easier for the relatives to handle.

I didn't know this, too:

Indeed, Mary is mentioned more often in the Qur'an than in the New Testament.

 Huh.

Update:   OK, so this (Catholic) University of Dayton site (also called "All about Mary") cites one of the earliest writings (perhaps back to 5th century) about what is supposed to have happened, and it went into a lot of detail:

This text, more commonly known as Transitus (passing on, crossing over) Mariae, and attributed to Melito of Sardes tells of Mary's homegoing in detail:

In the presence of the apostles gathered around her bed, also in the presence of her divine Son and many angels, Mary died and her soul, rose to heaven, accompanied by Christ and the angels. Her body was buried by the disciples. Difficulties developed among certain of the Jews who wished to dispose of her body. Various types of miracles occurred to convince them to honor Mary's body. On the third day, Christ returned. At the request of the apostles the soul of Mary is reunited with her body. Accompanied by singing angels, Christ brought Mary to paradise.

So, that's where the Eastern Church's "dormition of Mary" comes from.   

And I see from reading this article that I was getting confused in my post - that the doctrine is definitely the assumption of Mary, not the ascension:  although I still think it fair to say that artist representations make it look like an physical rising into the sky:

It is essential and significant to note the distinction between the resurrection and ascension of Christ, who rose up, in contrast to Mary who is assumed or taken into heaven. The early poetry on the Assumption of Mary, which originated and circulated widely in the Eastern Church, expresses this difference and parallelism.

Anyway, the Transitus was pooh-poohed, for some reason, by a Pope soon after:

In the early sixth century, a papal decree, Decretum Gelasianum, classified the Transitus Mariae writings as apocryphal, but this did not hinder the wide distribution of well over thirteen-hundred manuscripts throughout the West. In England, it was known well before the thirteenth century and is one of the first poetic texts written in early English. There are many versions among the hand copied manuscripts. The Transitus Mariae was incorporated into the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It is also incorporated into a text known as Vita BVM et salvatoris rhythmica (The rhythmic life of the BVM and redeemer), written in the mid-thirteenth century. These later texts add many embellishments to describe Mary's entry into heaven. All the saints and angels come to greet her and do her homage as her Son crowns her queen. These texts are gathered uncritically from various sources, but they nevertheless express faith-filled devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On the question of how, nearly 1,900 years later, it could be declared as dogma, is explained as follows:

The proclamation of the dogma was part of a plan of Pope Pius XII to honor Mary. He appealed to the faith of the Church as partial basis for the definition. As O'Carroll writes:

"The faith of the Church had been manifest in different ways. Between 1849 and 1950, numerous petitions for the dogma arrived in Rome. They came from One hundred and thirteen Cardinals, eighteen Patriarchs, twenty-five-hundred-five archbishops and bishops, thirty-two-thousand priests and men religious, fifty-thousand religious women, eight million lay people. On May 1, 1946 the Pope had sent to the bishops of the world the Encyclical Deiparae Virginis, putting this question to them: 'More especially we wish to know if you, Venerable Brethren, with your learning and prudence consider that the bodily Assumption of the Immaculate Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith and whether in addition to your own wishes this is desired by your clergy and people.' When the replies were collated, it was found that twenty-two residential bishops out of 1181 dissented, but only six doubted that the Assumption was revealed truth--the others questioned the opportuneness." (p. 56)

Pius XII considered this response as a "certain and firm proof" that the Assumption is a truth revealed by God.

So this paints it as if it was more or less by popular demand - but the "8 million lay people" is surely a tiny fraction of the overall number.  Look at these counts of the global Catholic population over a century:

 

This graph doesn't give us the totals for 1950, but adding them up, it looks like it might have been around 400 - 500 million?:

Well, this puts the significance of the number of laity petitioning for the doctrine - and it seems it was 8 million over the course of a century - making the total at any one time a tiny fraction of the actual laity.

If dogmatic doctrine can be made by popular demand of a small fraction of the most conservative laity (and a bigger group of bishops and priests), can they be reversed by a more overwhelming popular vote in future?  But these are the knots that the Church has tied itself into unnecessarily.

 

Indoor mask wearing

 I agree.   Seems to me that at this highly uncertain stage as to the effect on our health system of an incredibly transmissible disease, it's just common sense to adopt even marginally beneficial practices which carry no huge burden - such as making mask wearing in shops and public transport mandatory.   (And I mean, it doesn't even raise the trickier issue of mask wearing in schools at the moment - school's not in for another month, by which time Omicron will be better understood.)

Update:  two articles explaining the idea that used to be considered mainstream common sense, until paranoid conservatives more interested in culture warring than living decided it wasn't.   

Update 2:  Katharine Murphy on the Morrison spin politics of mask mandates is very good.   I cannot wait to see the back of him as PM. 

Update 3:

He doesn't hold the hose, you know.

Ancient Christian bling

This ring looks like it would have been expensive:

Quantum needs imaginary numbers

I hadn't realised this was a contentious issue before:

Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. 

In fact, even the founders of quantum mechanics themselves thought that the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting. In a letter to his friend Hendrik Lorentz, physicist Erwin Schrödinger — the first person to introduce complex numbers into quantum theory, with his quantum wave function (ψ) — wrote, "What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of complex numbers. Ψ is surely fundamentally a real function."

Schrödinger did find ways to express his equation with only real numbers alongside an additional set of rules for how to use the equation, and later physicists have done the same with other parts of quantum theory. But in the absence of hard experimental evidence to rule upon the predictions of these "all real" equations, a question has lingered: Are imaginary numbers an optional simplification, or does trying to work without them rob quantum theory of its ability to describe reality?

Now, two studies, published Dec. 15 in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, have proved Schrödinger wrong. By a relatively simple experiment, they show that if quantum mechanics is correct, imaginary numbers are a necessary part of the mathematics of our universe.

 

 

A simple problem with Covid

I've been meaning to note that I read a thread on Twitter recently, perhaps from an overseas doctor, which made the somewhat under-appreciated point that a big problem COVID presents, especially with the wildly transmissible Omicron, for hospital managers is the lengthy period positive testing staff have to be away from work.  Hence, even with modest increases in actual COVID patients in a hospital, it may still be really suffering from inadequate staff for all of their patients.

Certified

I've mentioned before the frenetic Twitter commentator Richard Hanania, who got recommended by a couple of well known internet intellectuals and seems to have thereby picked up a heap of followers.

But, seriously, the guy is a certifiable creepy libertarian sociopath, if you ask me.  And look, it might be a cheap shot, but he has a face that would fit so well with being a Batman villain - he's got a Joker vibe going even without makeup.

The latest evidence:

This take completely ignores that Right Wing media (Fox News particularly) has combined undying support of Trump with vaccine/Covid scepticism for a year or more now.   There is no reason to think they are going to start believing Trump on this issue - they are going to put it down to "something Donald likes to bullshit about, but we like him anyway."  They know they still have "and just like that, Covid will go away" Trump from 2 years ago.

Worse:  

He is, like so many at Catallaxy, sure that there is a masculinity crisis ruining the world.   It's a view often held by incels, of which it would hardly be surprising Richard is a member.  There is also considerable irony in him calling others "twitter dorks".

 

Yeah, just being a smug jerk. 

OK, so this doctor's recommendation sounds over the top and ripe for ridicule.  Problem is, Richard's reaction sounds like he wants to blow up her apartment and practice and would think he is doing the world a good.

Sociopath who thinks we understand Omicron enough to know it's safe to spread.  We do not.   In a month or two, we will know how dangerous it is.  But it's foolish in the extreme to be like him.

 

He doesn't have to manage hospitals and health systems - so all good!   Richard's happy that people want to avoid him - a very reasonable reaction, given he doesn't care if he gives someone else a disease that might kill them.   

Comment that made me laugh:

Japanese content

First, France 24, of all channels, has a short but good report on the decline of the Yakuza in Japan:

 

And secondly, quite a charming short video by young Japanese guy Shunchan, in which he surprises his grandparents with a visit after quitting his salaryman job. (He's not your typical Japanese!) My daughter keeps saying "is he gay?" based on his often somewhat Korean boy band-ish fashion sense, but he has clearly indicated in previous videos that he isn't.  I always feel a bit sorry for him, as a guy who can't really work out what he wants to do in his life, but he has a very likeable Youtube persona. 

This isn't very Christmassy, but: an exorcism co-incidence

Well isn't that odd - American funny man (I don't really know what his main job is) "JonTron" finally put out another video, and it's a review of a fairly recent (and terribly, terribly amateurish and unconvincing) documentary by the original director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin, about a real life exorcism in Rome.   The guy swears a bit, but he's pretty funny:

 

And then, today, I see this article in The Guardian, which seems just a co-incidence: 

Boy whose case inspired The Exorcist is named by US magazine 

The article gives some details of the case, which dates back to 1949.   If they are correct (a big "if"), and comparing it to the Rome in Friedkin's flaky documentary, it would indicate that demonic possessions is not what it used to be.

Long time readers would know I am not totally averse to "woo"; I think I even count as more than merely "woo curious".   But I've never been all that sold on demonic possession.  And, as it happens, I've only ever seen little bits of The Exorcist, and feel very confident that it would not be at all unsettling for me.   I think it looks very dated and ludicrous, and find it hard to believe that it did convincingly scare people back in the day.

True, that

 

Why?

I assume from the photo that the article is talking about commercial rent hikes?   If so, why would this be the case?   Companies have just spent 2 years learning they can operate pretty well with half the staff on any one day working from home.  My expectation would be that city commercial renters will only take half the space when they renew, leading to a glut of cheaper space available in the city.

Where is that expectation wrong?

Hossenfelder tries to explain superdeterminism

Well, I knew she would have to be doing this soon, given the recent arXiv paper in which she was a co-author.  Here's Sabine Hossenfelder trying to explain superdeterminism and her expectation that it
solves all quantum oddities:

 

I don't understand the issues fully, but my impression is that Sabine underplays the philosophical significance of it. I wonder what other physicists think.  (To give more detail:  she seems to make an argument that it has no "real" implication at the macro level - but I am not sure that's right...) 

Update:   from comments following the video on Youtube, I pick out a couple that deal with the retro-causality interpretation, which she never mentions:

Before measurement of the particle in the double slit experiment, it is non-localised in time, it literally occupies all possible positions starting when it was emitted up to the point it is observed. This is how a single particle can go through both slits and interfere with itself. After it is observed, it becomes localised in time and acts like a single particle, not a wave. This is why observing before the slits eliminates interference, and does not if you observe afterwards. The crazy part is that the act of observation retroactively affects the past. If you observe before the slit, you do not get interference. If you observe afterwards, you get interference. This is because the wave collapse propagates backwards to the point the particle was emitted. Particles moving forwards and backwards through time acting like a wave, until the point they are observed at which point they never moved forwards and backwards through time in the first place and were always single particles, explains all the 'spookiness' and also explains that the hidden variables are hidden in time and as entities moving linearly through time we will never be able to observe them. Once you get your head around this concept, the weird behaviour of particles in quantum mechanics becomes obvious and logical.

 Mind you, the commenter was "Microdoser", so I'm not sure I should trust him (or her) given my skepticism about that practice.

Another one:

I would add that many physicists assume entaglement can only propagate forward in time. Basic time invariance says that entanglement must be able to propagate backward in time just as well as forward.

And:

So Is Superdeterminism described more by the future affecting the past, or by particles/ wave functions reacting differently depending on what is around them and what they interact with? thank you for the video

Last one:

If the detectors are far apart, and they do influence the measurement, then there is fast-than-light effects happening. (aka "spooky action at a distance"). And maybe this is the misunderstanding in communications with Bell or Zeilinger. As far I understand, they assumed superdeterminism to be a loophole to remove non-locality, in the sense to say the detector isn't actually choosing the angle of measurement, randomly, but is deterministic as well, and the particles kind of "know" this. Bell even got so far as to take a photon from the cosmic background radiation to determine which angle to measure at, which would leave the entanglement of the detector all the way back to the big bang.. and thats what I think they called absurd in "no free will". Thus SD and keeping non-locality, yeah why not. No issue with it, it is supposed to fix non-locality, I really would like to see a backdown how it should work, without making the universe holistic (and thats where I said in effect destryoing non-locality all together). Honestly, I don't have an issue with real faster-than-light effects as long the "cosmic censorship" is somehow in affect that it doesn't allow information communication. So maybe the wave form is physically real (the so called particle is really smeared out) and maybe the collapse is really faster than light. And maybe in case of entangled particles the waves are really connected far apart until collapse. So what. If this is reality, I don't care if Einstein wouldn't consider it beautiful ;)

Another bit of "yeah, but apart from that, what did the Romans ever do for us?"

New research suggests that the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate is the one that built the Biar Aqueduct, the most sophisticated ancient aqueduct of the Jerusalem area. The study also uncovered the way the unique aqueduct was constructed.

The aqueduct is part of the ancient water system serving Jerusalem. Biar, the shortest of the aqueducts, brought water from a point south of Bethlehem to Solomon’s Pools. Other aqueducts carried the water from there to Jerusalem. The five-kilometer aqueduct includes the Biar Spring, an underground shaft tunnel running about three kilometers, a surface channel and dozens of piers used for its construction and maintenance....

Archaeologists exploring Jerusalem have known of the aqueduct for a good 150 years. It has been dated from the Hasmonean period, in the second century B.C.E., through Herod to the late Roman period of the second century C.E. Yechezkel’s team used carbon dating of plaster to suggest that the aqueduct was built in the mid-first century C.E., before the destruction of the Second Temple. They believe Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect from 26/27 C.E. to 36/37 C.E., known for condemning Jesus to death, ordered its construction.

It's from a Haaretz article, which is quite interesting.

The mug

This is the photo print mug I got made at Kmart last weekend.  Cute, no?

Rats and New York

 The BBC reports on the new (Covid led) trend for outdoor dining in New York city, and its detrimental effects, including more rats than ever before.

The city's ridiculous garbage collection system gets plenty of mention too, but it would seem no one considers that a move to actually using bins with lids is possible.   Surely more rubbish being put out in bins with lids helps limit rat access to it?

This looks good

This movie trailer is getting a lot of positive comment - and I can understand why.  

 

Yes, it's another "multiverse" themed movie, but (no insult to the new Spiderman, I do intend seeing it) it's good to see it being done with fresh new characters.

Real tragedy

Children's deaths in the news are always distressing, but it feels particularly worse in the imagination when it happens while having innocent fun.

The news is going world wide, with the New York Times story indicating that this might be the biggest number of deaths from any "bouncy castle" accident.  Ugh.

A modern tragedy

So a woman in a private hospital room is upset:

Cassie of Sydney says:

December 16, 2021 at 1:54 pm

1. I was double jabbed by October 2021…the AZ vaccine.

2. As demanded by NSW Health and all NSW hospitals, prior to my admittance to hospital on Monday 6 December, on Friday 3 December I had my first Covid test ever. It returned negative.

3. Last Saturday morning, 11 December, before being transferred to another hospital, I had my second Covid test. It returned negative. I was transferred to my new hospital on Sunday morning 12 December.

4. On Tuesday afternoon 14 December, the first hospital rang the second hospital to tell them that I may have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the Covid Omicron strain. The contact would have happened sometime Saturday afternoon. At about 4.30p.m. on Tuesday 14 December a nurse came in in protective clothing and performed a Covid test on me…..we are still waiting on the result.

5, So, since Tuesday 14 December, at 4.00 p.m. precisely, I have been isolated in my hospital room. I am not allowed to leave, no visitors. Nothing. The nurses and physio come in to the room attired in protective clothing….as though I have Ebola! 

6. We are still waiting on the result of the first Covid test however I have been told that as a matter of security the hospital does a second Covid test, this will be one done tomorrow afternoon and sent off.

7. I will not know any result until at least Sunday….so I am locked in a hospital room until 19 December.

8. I ask genuinely….what was the point of getting jabbed?

9. There is no way…and I mean no way….that I will be having a third, fourth, fifth or sixth jab.

10. Given the above, as you can all imagine my mental health at the moment is not the best, I hope this doesn’t impact my surgical recovery.

11. I am very upset.

Considering that she has more privacy than most get in hospital, food made for her, internet access and help on call, going berserk over a 5 day period of relative isolation strikes me a pretty pathetic plead for victimhood by a woman whose constant angry on line presence I now consider due to a mental weakness.   (She is getting plenty of support from the other tossers at Cathollaxy.)   

Toughen up, dear....

(I can afford to be rude to her, as she has been endlessly rude to me when engaging directly with her on Catallaxy.)

 

An article for anti vaxxers

How do people not feel furious at the anti-vax peddling Fox News and websites (including the Australian wingnut Christofascist ones) when you have credible and detailed reporting from actual hospitals about the crisis that the un-vaxxed cause?

Take this article, about the experience in Kentucky, from Bloomberg.   

It just shows the power of relentless political/culture war propaganda to susceptible minds, doesn't it?    

Update:   just appalling.  Fox News is a plain force for human suffering in the interests of a bunch of insane hypocrites making money:

 

Allahpundit is appalled too:

I wrote 1,000+ words this morning on the new data about whether Omicron is truly “mild” or not. It might be, or its mildness might be a partial mirage created by the youth and broad natural immunity from previous waves that South Africa enjoys. The key point in all analyses of Omicron, though, is that a virus that’s freakishly infectious, as this one appears to be, needs to also be freakishly mild for there not to be a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. Assume that Omicron is half as lethal as Delta but, as some studies have indicated, four times more transmissible. We’d expect a virus like that to produce twice the death toll Delta did (at least in the non-immune population) despite it being technically “milder.”...

The insanely steep spikes we’re seeing in European cases may not be evidence of Omicron surging and replacing Delta but evidence of Omicron and Delta infecting different sub-populations at the same time. That’s the CDC’s nightmare scenario, that Omicron will hit here full force but won’t sideline Delta by doing so. Instead the two will circulate in tandem, sometimes infecting the same people, and creating a double-whammy wave of sickness with Delta patients suffering somewhat more severe outcomes.

 If that’s true then Saphier’s advice is insanely reckless. She’s telling people, including unvaccinated people, to go out and have no fear when doing so risks exposing them to Delta, not just Omicron. What is she thinking? Can we maybe wait a month to confirm that the variant is nothing worse than the “sniffles” before giving this advice?

 

Cult fight