The true death toll of COVID

Two articles I have noticed about this:   one in Nature that starts:

On 1 November, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passed 5 million, official data suggested. It has now reached 5.5 million. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show many more people than this have died in the pandemic.

Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as simple as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.

And after explaining the complexities, concludes with this:

Amid the search for ways to count deaths, Andrew Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine, says the pandemic and the increased demand for real-time mortality figures highlight a demographic shortcoming that goes back decades: many countries simply don’t collect good data on births, deaths and other vital statistics. “Demographers have been part of the problem, because we have helped to put band-aids on this for 60 years. We’ve developed all sorts of techniques to estimate demographic rates in the absence of hard data,” he says.

That means the true death toll of COVID-19 might always be disputed. “We still don’t know how many people died in the 1918 [flu] pandemic, but I always figured we would know pretty well how many people would die in the next one, because we live in the modern world,” Noymer says. “But we don’t actually, and that’s kind of sad for me as a demographer.”

Over at Science, the particular difficulties of counting deaths in India is discussed in detail in a paper.  (I have always said that I would not be surprised if the true death rate effect of heat waves in that country was not clear at all.)   Here's the abstract:

India’s national COVID death totals remain undetermined. Using an independent nationally representative survey of 0.14 million (M) adults, we compared COVID mortality during the 2020 and 2021 viral waves to expected all-cause mortality. COVID constituted 29% (95%CI 28-31%) of deaths from June 2020-July 2021, corresponding to 3.2M (3.1-3.4) deaths, of which 2.7M (2.6-2.9) occurred in April-July 2021 (when COVID doubled all-cause mortality). A sub-survey of 57,000 adults showed similar temporal increases in mortality with COVID and non-COVID deaths peaking similarly. Two government data sources found that, when compared to pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27% (23-32%) higher in 0.2M health facilities and 26% (21-31%) higher in civil registration deaths in ten states; both increases occurred mostly in 2021. The analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.

 

This is making "King Kong" island more believable

I'm still really surprised at how long it is taking to get a good idea of the amount of damage in Tonga.   It has reminded me of the start of King Kong, with an island that is unobservable.   If ever we have a significant meteor strike causing tsunamis all over the Pacific, it's obviously going to take ages to learn the full extent of what has happened.

The ABC notes:

Tonga's internet could be down for more than two weeks after a violent volcanic eruption cut the kingdom's only undersea communications cable, isolating the country from contact with the outside world.

Surely Elon Musk ought to be promoting Starlink private internet services as a solution to this problem?  

Another thing that had escaped my attention, until now

I don't have much interest in language as a topic, which probably explains why it had escaped my attention (until Google wanted me to learn it - yes I am talking recommendations on Youtube again) that it is widely held that the Koreans have the easiest writing system (alphabet) ever invented. 

   

Huh.  I just thought it looked weird, but as I say, languages are not my "thing". 

 

The big bang in Tonga

I'm kind of surprised, in this modern day of communications, that Tonga could apparently be so easily cut off from the rest of the world.   What about satellite phones?   Do all governments keep a bunch of them on hand in case cables are cut?   But then, I thought, maybe satellite phones don't do well under a giant cloud of volcanic ash?   Anyway, some communications have taken place, apparently, but using what system?

 It also would not be at all surprising to see some global cooling as a result of this:

 

Further evidence that all smart, likeable people like They Might be Giants

(I don't care for the Pixies, though.)

Steamy, boring personal news

I bought a new steam iron and it's good to be ironing with steam again.  [Oh my.  I just checked  and it would appear that I have been putting up with using a water spray bottle while ironing, instead of using a continuous stream of steam, for just over 5 years!  How did I last so long?]

Gone with Tefal this time - this one:

The company makes a song and dance about having "anti-calc" systems which involve openings into the iron and the ability to remove scale (or bits of it.)   I was thinking of just using distilled water in it (as I happen to have some in the garage), but they actually recommend against using it!   

I am a tad sceptical, but we will see. 

People won't freeze to death in their Tesla

I had been wondering about this:  in frigid climates, if people drive electric cars, how long can the battery keep the interior warm if they are stuck in traffic for a very long time, as was the case recently in Virginia?

It turns out a guy on Youtube ran a test on two Tesla models, at least, and the results were pretty impressive.   Starting at a 90% charge, and keeping the inside at a nice 21 degrees C (70F), and without any human body warmth to help maintain the interior temperature, the test indicated the batteries should last well over a day, perhaps 36 hours.   (And in reality, people might turn the heater down to under 20 degrees if they have concerns about how much power was left.)    This is better than I would have expected, to be honest.

Here's the video:

Biden being punished for things beyond his control

I have no doubt at all that Biden is the one who is getting punished in public opinion polls for things not  within his control:

* the intransigence of two conservative Democrat Senators.   Manchin (who tells lies about the filibuster) and Sinema do appear to be just awful people who, if they had principles, would get out of their party;

* a COVID variant which the behaviour of the Right has made much worse;

* inflation which is thought to be at a temporary high.

I think I have to stop following moron Creighton

 Also:

 It's pretty simple:  it takes a jerk to like a jerk.

Rogan tactics noted

So Joe Rogan, who I have never cared to listen to, got very publicly corrected on a COVID/vaccination risk point, and didn't like it, as explained in these tweets:

 

Filibuster commentary

The COVID messaging wars - shouldn't the message be "the importance of consensus"?

Man, I'm sick of the COVID messaging/expertise wars.   I read the article yesterday in the AFR (which I can't link to now as paywall is up), about the fight between Nick Coatesworth and "Ozsage", which started:

A year ago, when he was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth told colleagues to watch out for a group of doctors and academics who, he felt, were so concerned by SARS-CoV-2 they would advocate for excessive measures against the virus.

Yet Coatesworth himself was partially wrong in his pooh-poohing of 25,000 a day from Omicron:

University of NSW modelling has suggested NSW could have up to 25,000 new cases a day by February - eight times higher than the current number. 

However, Dr Coatsworth slammed that figure as ­not 'accurate', challenging claims by clinical immunologist Dr Dan Suan that the state was 'sleepwalking into an Omicron disaster'.

Sure, you might say he turned out to be right "in the big picture" on his very early guess (because, really, that's all it could have been) that Omicron would result in much lower hospitalisation and might, maybe, be (kind of?) the end of COVID.   (Although, as far as I can tell, it is still completely unknown how much protection an Omicron infection might give against future variants.)  

I've complained from the start of the pandemic, pretty much, that people on all sides seemed to be overconfident of their positions on the basis of very clearly complicated and early information that would be very hard to sort out and take years in some cases to understand well.    

If anything, it has made me think of the importance of consensus in science and policy matters - you will always get a range of opinion even from normally credible experts, and there will always be the influence of personal and social political philosophy on expert's views as to how to respond.  But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as valid expertise on which to draw reasonable policy responses.

The important thing, I think, should be is to look at a science and policy consensus position, and always have sufficient regard to the uncertainties of novel and evolving events.   

Pyramid scheme that also wastes huge amounts of energy

 

Has Boris Johnson given all Conservatives permission to look ridiculous?

 

Cost of weather and climate disasters in USA

The report by NOAA has some good analysis of the cost of weather/climate disasters in the US over recent years.  I took this screenshot from it:

A reminder:  conservative wingnuts obsess over the cost of BLM rioting - which was widely reported last year as probably ending up costing insurance between $1 to $2 billion.

Personal COVID update

My daughter started feeling over her COVID on Sunday, with no symptoms yesterday and today.  She (and the rest of the family) are supposed to have RAT's today, the 6th day after her positive test was taken, but the problem was - how to get them.   Apparently, there was a fair chance we could get them free if we went to a testing clinic, but as far as I know, people are still lining up for hours (whether in  or out of a car) to get processed.  (Last week, apparently, a friend of my daughter and her Mum went at 3 am to line up in their car for a test - and there were already 30 cars ahead of them.  It took until 9 am!)

So, although the official rules for isolation say that I wasn't supposed to leave the house, as I had taken a negative RAT last Friday, and did not have any symptoms since, yesterday I decided to check 4 or 5 chemists near me, mainly 3 Chemist Warehouse outlets.   No tests were to be found, and I went both in the morning and afternoon.  People were practically stalking delivery vans, asking the guy if his delivery included tests.   (I did ask too, at a smaller chemist.)    People are obviously very happy to use these tests, and pay for them, if only they were available.

But then, behold, Facebook did something useful for once, and I got a text at about 7.30pm from my worker that they were available at Coles nearest me.  They were selling only one pack per customer (or two tests), and so my wife (no symptoms either) came with me.  Success!

About to test my daughter...she will be irate if it's positive!

Update:  I reckon the test came back a clear "invalid".  Ugh.  I don't entirely trust this brand.  My son's test didn't seem to give a clear result either.

Update 2:  my wife and I tested negative, clearly.  That's good, at least.  Meanwhile, the government advice as to coming out of isolation for even the diagnosed is somewhat ambiguous.   Clearly, though, they are changing the rules almost every day to deal with the problem with testing such a large number of people who would like a test, but can't get their hands on one.

 

Richard's nutty obsession

I had to stop following this guy on Twitter, because his scores of oddball tweets every day were just too much to put up with, for the occasional one that I might be of genuine interest.  But someone else has re-tweeted this, and it did remind that I don't think I have posted before about his absolutely nutty obsession with the (alleged) outrageousness of children wearing masks.  Fortunately, some people in tweets are starting to tell him he's ridiculous:

 

Excess deaths and COVID - UK edition

I still don't know why it is that Sky News UK is allowed to be sensible and responsible in terms of its reporting and commentary on things like climate change and COVID, while Rupert wants Sky News Australia (at least at night) to be a wingnutty branch of Fox News in its takes.   

Anyway, this explanation and analysis today of excess deaths in the UK from COVID is well done:

 

It illustrates why I think the correct line to take with wingnuttery in the Australian blogosphere that insists this was never a "serious" pandemic is just "you are too stupid to engage with".  (The only trouble being, they vote!)

The cost of climate change

I think this is quite a balanced take on the matter of the increasing cost of natural disasters to the world, and the relationship with climate change, from DW News:

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.