In further praise of Singapore (Part 1)

As you well may know, I really enjoy visiting Singapore.  In fact, I'm threatening my family with running away to join the Buddhist College of Singapore (the temple complex of which I actually visited) if that's the only way the country would let me live there.  

Oh dear, I see I've actually missed the cut off age by 27 years, and I'm not a devout monk of one year's standing.   But what a bargain this is - a four year degree course for free, by the sounds:

All meals, accommodation and daily necessities will be provided by the college. Students will also receive a monthly allowance during their period of study at BCS.

Oh well, back to reality.

The recent week in Singapore was my first post COVID travel overseas since COVID reared its ugly head, and was in fact pretty much like a Part 2 of the last overseas trip I made with the family in December 2018(!).   This time, it was just with my wife, but the similarities were high:

a.    very cheap flight on the cut price, but pretty reliable, Singapore based airline Scoot out of the Gold Coast (I strongly recommend keeping track of their sales for all destinations in Asia);

b.    flew again on their bendy winged 787 Dreamliner (a comfortable enough aircraft, even though with Scoot there is no such thing as an inflight entertainment centre.  It's a case of load up enough material on your fully charged phone or tablet and entertain yourself for 7 to 8 hours.)

c.   even stayed at the same hotel, Amara Singapore near the Tanjong Pagar MRT station on the edge of Chinatown.   The hotel needed a bit of renovation since we last stayed there:  mould in bathrooms is the perpetual enemy of every hotel in the country, I'm sure, and it did feel a bit understaffed as I think all hospitality businesses in the world currently are.   But despite this, I found it still a comfortable hotel in an excellent location.  (They were also completely understanding when on the second day I asked for a top sheet for the bed, instead of just relying on the extremely annoying but now ubiquitous hotel habit of expecting guests to sleep directly under a covered doona, making temperature regulation during sleep an "all or nothing" affair. I hate that this has become an industry standard, but travel infrequently enough that I always forget about this problem between holidays.  Anyway, as long as on request the hotel gives me a sheet to use, I'm happy.)

So, what did we do and see this time around?    Let a series of photos illustrate:

Of course, the place is just architecture heaven:

This precinct is opposite the Suntec shopping centre, and the impressiveness of that long, louvred roof thing is hard to capture in a photo. Trust me, it's huge in real life. 

 

 Another big awing thing, a short walk from our hotel:
 

This the public area outside Tanjong Pagar MRT station, where if turn around, it looks ridiculously green and luscious:

This is a planted footpath back near Suntec:

It's just the very definition of lush, in so many parts of the city.

Including on the tops (and in the middle) of skyscrapers.  It's a lovely, Green futuristic, trend:

That's a herb and fruit garden on the 51st floor of the new CapitaSpring building, where you get awesome views like this:

And from the middle part of the building, floors 20 to 17, another garden/recreation area like this:

 

Slightly oddly, I thought, while they put high barriers up on the 51st floor that would make jumping from there difficult, they seem to have no concerns at all about putting anything other than normal railings on this 20th floor area.  I know, it's not usual to have apartment buildings of that height with normal balconies, but having this larger, open area still just cordoned off with normal height rails seemed a bit risky to me.   Incidentally, both the roof garden and this area are open to the public from 8 to 10.30, then 2 to 6 pm.  In the middle of the day, it is supposed to be reserved for the workers in the building as a lunch break relaxation place, with charging stations built into the seats, and these amusingly named things:

 

  

 

 

 

 Which, it turned out, was just these birdcage-y sitting spots:

Anyhoo, this is the building from the ground, with the bent metal giving the impression of something large having recently escaped from within:

It's so impressive.  (And there is a cheapish, clean hawker centre on the ground floors too.)

Of course, it's the mix of the old and the new that makes it special, too.  One side of the street is Raffles (now fully opened, and with a heap of high end shops and courtyards you can walk around:

 

And this across the road:

I had photos of Marina Bay Sands, the most iconic building in the city state now, in my last holiday post, so I won't specifically repeat it.  But I did make a trip to Gardens by the Bay again at night to see the very family friendly mid Autumn festival light displays:

 

Young woman with spoilt looking doggie (an increasingly common sight in Singapore) here:

  This was 9.45pm on a Sunday night, and the place was busier than the photos might indicate:

It's just a ridiculously impressive public space.   Like this, the "satay street" at Lau Pa Sat hawker centre:

I've been spending too long on this post, so I must make a part 2 later...

 

The Return of the King

Not me, although I am back from holiday.  But while I was gone, we got a King again, one with unhealthy looking swollen fingers, a hatred of fountain pens, and a somewhat urgent need for a better PR agent (one who is brave enough to tell him that cameras and mics pick up every grimace and complaint.)  

I'm no great fan of the royal family, and ignore most of the news about them.  I do find the (largely Right wing media driven) hatred of Meghan Markle utterly ridiculous, though.   I mean, why do people bother paying attention to her at all?

The most interesting thing about the funeral arrangements to date is how everyone (well, nearly everyone) has resisted the urge to grab the imperial crown and (at least) put it on their own head for a second, before being tackled by 20 coppers.  (Some of those on guard around the coffin have looked rather old for the job, though, and might break a hip in the fracas.)   Alternatively, I would have liked to see a heavy duty drone zoom in on it with a hook while it was being paraded on the street, for it to be dropped off in a villain's lair nearby.  (Maybe an abandoned Underground station, of which there are several.  If it were a Batman movie, that's how it would have gone down.)

Anyway, on a slightly more serious note, my initial thoughts on the death of the Queen was that it felt symbolically like the true end of the 20th century.   I mean, while there are lots of world figures around who have done much of their work in the tail end of that century, including of course Joe Biden, Queen Elizabeth started her "career" so far back in the last century it really felt she was more truly embodied within that period than any other leader still hanging around. 

I haven't noticed anyone else saying this, but in the millions of words spilt on the topic, it might not be an original thought.   

Anyway, the funeral's later today.  I guess I'll watch some of it live, just in case something unexpected happens.

The packing is about to begin

I'm about to do something new - travel overseas for a week with just a carry on bag.  This one:

Total weight allowed is 10kg.  Very manageable, I think, as long as you are going somewhere warm.  

Women find it harder to imagine this working than men. But my wife is doing the same.  I think it will feel liberating, actually.

It must be a bad judgement

Noted on Twitter

 

Noah on the Trump problem

 Update:   I think "a decade" is too long.

A bit busy here....

I'll be going on a short holiday later this week, and have an embarrassingly large pile of paper on my desk to try and move around before then.

So I might not be able to post much for a few days.

But you never know - if really interesting stuff pops up, there's always some time to be found :)

Anyway - some random thoughts:

 *  reading online reaction to the latest Trump rally, I think it's pretty clear that even Trump sympathisers recognise that a 2 hour performance of his greatest "hits" is looking very stale.  Groupies will still go to it, but I have read that even they start to leave before it's finished (I think that has happened before.)  I also noticed someone on Twitter saying how many MAGA characters (especially the dumb and awful Marjorie Taylor Greene) are more about wanting to be a celebrity than anything else.  Just a case of following their leader, I guess.

* Lots of positive twitter reaction to that son of the late Foo Fighter drummer standing in for his Dad.  Only trouble is, I don't understand the appeal of any Foo Fighters song, even though their lead singer seems a nice enough guy.

* Lots of talk on American twitter last week about how school closures under Covid had a very negative measured effect on kid's education level now.  Has the Australian system found the same thing?  I get the impression not, or not as bad as America.   I wonder whether we did a better job at coming up with teaching via the internet than the Americans did.

*  I haven't had time to watch the Biden "we must defend Democracy" speech.  Am surprised that the Washington Post chose to editorialise it somewhat critically (although, of course, just about all of their regular commentary team that I follow praised it.)   The reaction from the Right is pretty much what was always to be expected - if they are stupid enough to still prefer Trump over any Democrat despite Jan 6, there is no hope of convincing them that they are "semi-fascists".   

Update:   Oh, Ross Douthat did a Sunday column arguing that Biden and the Democrats don't really believe democracy in the US is in crisis, otherwise he wouldn't sound so partisan (or something.)   You can read it here, but do read the hundreds of comments following criticising this take, too.

He also went on Twitter to defend the column, but the best rejoinder is this:

There is a simple rule to understand about Trump and pro-lifers like Douthat: they will bend over backwards to excuse him of anything because he facilitated the overturning of Roe, which is in their minds the biggest political issue ever. 

 

Old drawing device

I was somewhat aware of some controversy about the extent to which some famous artists may have worked with the aid of optical devises, but until Youtube popped this into my recommendations, I didn't know the details of how a (relatively well known) optical aid for drawing worked:

 

It's oddly interesting, and makes me wish I had one too.  For my retirement fun, perhaps.:)

Losing a pundit to a subscription service

Oh dear.  The main reason for visiting Hot Air has for a long time been the anti Trump attitude of Allahpundit, but he has left the site and is going to write (under his real name, which it seems is a well guarded secret?) at The Despatch, which I think is a subscription only site.

In his final post he writes that he has been at Hot Air since the beginning, when it was started first by Michelle Malkin, who I hadn't thought about for a long time.  I think she from mainstreamy conservative Right wing to "into the reactionary paranoid nutjob Right" didn't she?  (Yes, I've checked her Wiki entry - she did.)

I don't recall what he was like in his early days, but many who read Hot Air would say he has followed the opposite - all because he cannot stand Donald Trump and condemns him and the influence on the party regularly.

Let's extract some of his last post:

What is the right’s “cause” at this point? What cause does the Republican Party presently serve? It has no meaningful policy agenda. It literally has no platform. The closest thing it has to a cause is justifying abuses of state power to own the libs and defending whatever Trump’s latest boorish or corrupt thought-fart happens to be. Imagine being a propagandist for a cause as impoverished as that. Many don’t need to imagine.

The GOP does have a cause. The cause is consolidating power. Overturn the rigged elections, purge the disloyal bureaucrats, smash the corrupt institutions that stand in the way. Give the leader a free hand. It’s plain as day to those who are willing to see where this is going, what the highest ambitions of this personality cult are. Those who support it without insisting on reform should at least stop pretending that they’re voting for anything else.

I agree with others who say that, fundamentally, the last six years have been a character test. Some conservatives became earnest converts to Trumpism, whatever that is. But too many who ditched their civic convictions did so for the most banal reasons, because there was something in it for them — profit, influence, proximity to power, the brainless tribalism required by audience capture. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” Eric Hoffer wrote. We’ve all gotten to see who the racketeers are.

I would rather fail as a writer than succeed if success means being some demagogue’s footstool. To the extent my work at Hot Air has made that clear, I’m happy with it.

Never forget, it’s not the 30 percent of Trump worshipers within the party who brought the GOP to what it is. It’s the next 50 percent, the look-what-the-libs-made-me-do zombie partisans, who could have said no but didn’t. I said no. Put it on my tombstone.

He also says this, and it's infuriating because I reckon he would know this to be true (my bold):

Lastly, to those who spent the last seven years barking insults at me in the comments for not genuflecting to Trump, I’ll give you this: You’re not phonies. You believe what you say. We have that much in common. I respect honesty and paid you the respect of being honest. It would scandalize you to know how many of your heroes sound like you in public and like me in private. Audience capture has brought most of conservative media to ruin by making it predictable and shrill.

I hear Lincoln’s words in my head as I write that: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Let’s hope. But let’s also be real: To a certain sort of Very Online Trumpist weirdo, having the right enemies is what politics is all about. To any who insist upon having me as one, I’m okay with it. Few badges of honor shine as brightly as the scorn of authoritarians.

Of the other writers there, Jazz Shaw is very interested in UFOs and so he's worth a look.  Ed Morrisey is Catholic conservative but not pro-Trump, I think.  Just doesn't attack him and MAGA as much as he should.   Karen Townsend is the worst - a shrill Right winger verging on Fox News level of personal animosity towards Biden and the Left generally.

Anyway, I will be visiting it less now.

Not sure anyone predicted this when the internet started...

OnlyFans has paid out more than $500m (£433m) to its reclusive owner in the last two years, as the British-based subscriber platform synonymous with pornography reported record profits.

Leonid Radvinsky, the site’s Ukrainian-American 40-year-old owner, is the sole shareholder in a business that has seen its profits boom, as users spent $4.8bn on the site last year.

The financial results mean OnlyFans is one of the most financially successful British tech start-ups in recent years, succeeding where other more mainstream companies have failed. The company’s latest accounts show pre-tax profits rose by 615% to $432m in the 12 months to September 2021.

Here's the article, in The Guardian.

I have to say, I find it a bit puzzling that people who post home made porn don't feel any embarrassment about immediate family stumbling across it.... 

Disappointing personal news

From an article at The Conversation, entitled :

The U-shaped happiness curve is wrong: many people do not get happier as they get older

On average, happiness declines as we approach middle age, bottoming out in our 40s but then picking back up as we head into retirement, according to a number of studies. This so-called U-shaped curve of happiness is reassuring but, unfortunately, probably not true.

My analysis of data from the European Social Survey shows that, for many people, happiness actually decreases during old age as people face age-related difficulties, such as declining health and family bereavement. The U-shaped pattern was not evident for almost half of the 30 countries I investigated.

So why the difference?

My study corrects a misinterpretation of research methods in previous studies. The U-shaped idea comes from statistical analyses that adjust data to compare people of similar wealth and health in middle and old age. That adjustment is intended to isolate the effect of age from other factors that influence happiness.

But given that people often become poorer and less healthy during old age, the adjustment can be misleading. When we omit the adjustment, an age-related decline in happiness becomes evident in many countries...

This decline is steeper in countries with a less effective welfare state. That’s especially true of Turkey, where happiness (measured on a scale from zero to ten) falls on average from 6.4 at retirement age to less than 5.0 among the very old.

For Estonia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, happiness falls steadily, beginning in people’s early 30s.

I wonder what the figures look like in Australia.

I'm amused

 Update:  I had the same thought:

All of Mar-a-Lago looks cringe to me, and certainly wildly out of place in a hot climate, to be honest:

It is a genuinely older building though (nearly 100 years old), and not some Trump invention. Still looks stupid for Florida.

Update 2:

Heh

In "another strange guy goes trad Catholic" news

Slate reports that Shia LaBeouf has said he is converting to Catholicism - and that it is in large part because of attraction to the Latin mass.

The article gives a fair summary of the reputation of the Latin mass for attracting Right wing reactionaries:

The traditional Latin Mass is at the center of an ongoing controversy in the Catholic church: the small, conservative group promoting it claims it is a beautiful and true expression of the faith, while more progressive Catholics—and Pope Francis—see it largely as a breeding ground for reactionary beliefs and conflict in the church. The TLM, as it’s called by those who celebrate it, refers to the “extraordinary form” of the Roman rite that makes up the rituals and prayers of the Mass and which was in use until the 1960s, at which point the Second Vatican Council took place and ushered in the “ordinary form” (Novus Ordo, or NO).

The overwhelming majority of Catholics attend Novus Ordo Masses; indeed, the overwhelming majority of Catholics today have likely never seen anything else. But traditional Latin Masses have a small but highly enthusiastic faction in the church. The main difference between the two rites is in style and not substance: In the extraordinary form, priests recite prayers in Latin instead of the vernacular; they celebrate the Mass facing the altar, with their backs to the congregants; there are no female altar servers. Proponents of the TLM describe it as solemn, beautiful, ancient, mysterious, sacred. Traditionalists believe that the Latin Mass is key to reviving the faith among young Catholics....

There’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the Latin Mass. (With the caveat that some traditionalist groups, such as the semi-legitimate Society of Saint Pius X, incorporate fully outdated parts of the pre-Vatican II liturgy into their worship, which can include explicitly anti-Semitic elements.) In the interview, LaBeouf explained that he was drawn to the Latin Mass because it was “immersive” and felt “almost like I’m being let in on something very special.” Fair enough!

But the traditionalists who love the TLM can be deeply toxic. “Trads” embrace traditionalism that goes beyond the language spoken in services. Many of them reject the reforms of Vatican II altogether, and stick to uncompromising positions on gay marriage, divorce, and the dress of women and their role in society. Their extreme counterparts, the radical traditionalists, or “Rad Trads,” often go further, idolizing the crusades, making vile comments about Jews and Muslims, and spreading conspiracy theories that decry the infiltration of the church by evil forces and accuse Pope Francis of being an antipope or even antichrist. The Rad Trad community flourishes on Twitter and Reddit and Discord, trafficking in memes about the saints and feminists and monarchism.

These highly engaged traditionalists may be small in number (most Catholics are blissfully unaware of the “liturgy wars,” as this debate is called). But they are well represented among clergy, including bishops and cardinals. And over the course of Francis’ papacy, their dissent has grown increasingly loud, to the point that many liberal Catholics began to worry that the culture wars in the church would lead to schism. The controversy came to a climax last summer when, in an effort to crack down on the “division” sown by the traditionalists, Pope Francis laid down strict rules for when and where the traditional Latin Mass can be conducted. The outcry that followed was intense. Pope Francis has not backed down from his position; In June, he said that those who “call themselves guardians of traditions, but of dead traditions” were “dangerous” to the church. Traditionalist Catholics have continued to claim to be martyrs.

And here's the biggest danger sign that LaBeouf is going "Rad Trad":

There’s another reason it seems LaBeouf knows exactly what side he’s taking: he told the interviewer that he had sought guidance from Mel Gibson in his conversion process. Gibson is not just an unabashed anti-Semite; he is also someone who speaks at traditionalist Catholic events, builds churches for disaffected orthodox Catholics, and makes friends with radical right-wing priests. (His father, Hutton Gibson, was a leading proponent of the idea that all popes since Vatican II have been antipopes.) In fact, in the interview, LaBeouf said that Gibson was the one who had shown him where to find the illicit Latin Masses.

 

 

When you've lost the Wall Street Journal

So even the Wall Street Journal is putting up videos in which an increase in flash flooding in the USA is noted, and the connection with climate change and increasing temperatures is fully acknowledged:

Huh.

Synthetic milk closer than I realised?

I was only musing recently about the slow progress in making synthetic dairy milk, but here's an article talking about it, and how a company in Melbourne is working on it:

In Australia, start-up company Eden Brew has been developing synthetic milk at Werribee in Victoria. The company is targeting consumers increasingly concerned about climate change and, in particular, the contribution of methane from dairy cows.

CSIRO reportedly developed the technology behind the Eden Brew product. The process starts with yeast and uses "precision fermentation" to produce the same proteins found in cow milk.

CSIRO says these proteins give milk many of its key properties and contribute to its creamy texture and frothing ability. Minerals, sugars, fats, and flavors are added to the protein base to create the final product.

 

Honestly, who would care, especially in France?

An odd story from Rolling Stone:

On the FBI’s list of documents seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, item 1a is listed solely as “info re: President of France.” For Trump, that has been a subject of intense — and tawdry — interest for years.

Specifically, Trump has bragged to some of his closest associates — both during and after his time in the White House — that he knew illicit details about the love life of French President Emmanuel Macron, two people with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. And the former president even claimed that he learned about some of this dirt through “intelligence” he had seen or been briefed on, these sources say.  ...

In his musing on Macron’s alleged indiscretions, Trump was light on details and specifics, according to the sources. And as a notorious gossip peddler for decades, it’s difficult to know if any of what he says is grounded in reality. “It is often,” one of the sources says, “hard to tell if he’s bullshitting or not.” 

 

Moral philosophising about the future

I haven't read all of this yet, but it is worth coming back to:

The New Moral Mathematics

In his new book, philosopher William MacAskill implies that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky.

 

Incident in France

I found this rather amusing:

 In the comments following, some further discussion of how things are done in France

I love their food, though.  And really thought they must be the most attractive Europeans on the street in all of Europe.

 

Stand over tactics

Allahpundit on lickspittle Lindsay Graham's weekend comments:

When it comes to making veiled threats dressed up as dispassionate observations, I see that this rodent has learned at the feet of the master.

In fact, Trump himself posted this video last night on Truth Social.

Graham isn’t wrong. If Trump is indicted, “riots in the streets” are plausible. But it’s one thing to say that as an analyst and another to say it on television as a well-known, influential Trump crony. Why, if I were a cynic, the clip below might look to me like a U.S. senator dangling the prospect of violence to try to influence a decision by the Justice Department on whether to charge someone. Imagine one of John Gotti’s goons musing in an interview about people getting hurt if the boss is charged. Then imagine electing that guy to the Senate.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Lindsey Graham has engaged in blatant civic malfeasance on Trump’s behalf either.

Graham is correct that Trump should be held to the same standard as Hillary Clinton. If he mishandled classified information no more recklessly than she did, he should walk. But we don’t know yet whether he did and neither do any of the would-be rioters. I understand why some were offended by Joe “The Uniter” Biden describing parts of Trump’s base as “semi-fascist” but if we’ve reached the point where a sitting senator is hinting at mass violence if his caudillo is charged and all of us look around at each other and think, “Yeah, that could definitely happen,” maybe we shouldn’t feel so offended.

He ends on a strong note:

It should not to be too much to ask cretins like Graham to accept moral responsibility for the worst excesses of the populism with which they’ve aligned themselves. If he wants a caudillo, let him make the case for having a caudillo. Blaming the Justice Department for riots on “look what you made me do” grounds is weak sauce even for a weakling like him.

 

 

This is what you do when you go to the North Pole via luxury French icebreaker

I wish they wouldn't do video thumbnails of Kara's skinny body, but still - it's interesting to see what a  luxury cruise to the North Pole does for entertainment when they get there:

 

One other thing:   I suppose I expected the ice to be a little thicker, even in summer.  I mean, yeah, submarines can break through it, so it can't be too thick.   But still, it seemed there was more open water around, and ice that was easily broken, than I expected.

Also, if you watch the video, you will probably understand why I find this couple cringey at times - they kiss and tell each other they are "so proud of you" in about every second video.

Amusing tweets noted

Lulz at that second one in particular...

Interesting comparison

Dark Brandon IS rising

The Dark Brandon meme continues to make for pretty amusing tweets:

Mexico needs better folk saints

Wow, this isn't the usual Axios fare:

Devotion to unsanctioned Catholic folk saints is one of the fastest growing religious movements in Latin America and is surging in the U.S., experts say.

The big picture: Some Latinos who feel alienated by Christian traditions are turning to saints not sanctioned by the struggling Catholic Church for spiritual guidance around love, crime and money.

• Catholic leaders worldwide have denounced unofficial "narco" saints as sinful, but makeshift shrines continue to pop up, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to New Orleans.

Details: Catholic canonization of saints often takes years of thorough reviews of miracles performed and of the figure's contributions. Believers say unsanctioned saints offer divine assistance to steal gas, move a drug shipment, cross a border, or bless an LGBTQ+ romance.

• They're gaining devotees in Mexico and the U.S., said Andrew Chesnut, the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan chairman in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The funniest unofficial saint would have to be this one:

Santo Niño Huachicolero, a perversion of the Roman Catholic image of Santo Niño, depicts the Christ child with a can of gasoline and a hose.

• He's the patron saint of gas thieves who ask for help to avoid arrest, prevent fires and protect their families from a different kind of flame

Here he is:

I feel the need for the eye roll emoji...

 

China peaks (in population, at least)

 Also on the Nature website:

When will China’s population, the world’s largest, peak? It’s a point that demographers say is fast approaching. The country’s health department announced this month that the population will peak and then begin to shrink in the next three years. Others think it could happen much sooner.

“The turning point is right around the corner,” says Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “I won’t be surprised if population decline is reported at the end of this year.”

After years of falling birth rates, the National Health Commission wrote in an article published online in early August that China’s population growth has slowed significantly and will start to decline between 2023 and 2025. According to an estimate published last month in a peer-reviewed Chinese journal, Social Science Journal¹, Wei Chen, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing, concluded that, on the basis of national census data released in 2020, China’s population might have already peaked in 2021 (see ‘Projected peak’).

Here's the graph:

 

Waiting for my brain stimulation

I still think this research attracts less attention than it deserves:

People’s ability to remember fades with age — but one day, researchers might be able to use a simple, drug-free method to buck this trend.

In a study published on 22 August in Nature Neuroscience¹, Robert Reinhart, a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues demonstrate that zapping the brains of adults aged over 65 with weak electrical currents repeatedly over several days led to memory improvements that persisted for up to a month.

Previous studies have suggested that long-term memory and ‘working’ memory, which allows the brain to store information temporarily, are controlled by distinct mechanisms and parts of the brain. Drawing on this research, the team showed that stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — a region near the front of the brain — with high-frequency electrical currents improved long-term memory, whereas stimulating the inferior parietal lobe, which is further back in the brain, with low-frequency electrical currents boosted working memory.

“Their results look very promising,” says Ines Violante, a neuroscientist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. “They really took advantage of the cumulative knowledge within the field.”

Memory boost

Using a non-invasive method of stimulating the brain known as transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), which delivers electrical currents through electrodes on the surface of the scalp, Reinhart’s team conducted a series of experiments on 150 people aged between 65 and 88. Participants carried out a memory task in which they were asked to recall lists of 20 words that were read aloud by an experimenter. The participants underwent tACS for the entire duration of the task, which took 20 minutes.

You can read the rest at Nature.

 

Floods continue

*  In Pakistan:

Record monsoon rains were causing a "catastrophe of epic scale", Pakistan's climate change minister said on Wednesday (Aug 24), announcing an international appeal for help in dealing with floods that have killed more than 800 people since June.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but each year it also brings a wave of destruction.

Heavy rain continued to pound much of Pakistan on Wednesday, with authorities reporting more than a dozen deaths - including nine children - in the last 24 hours.

"It has been raining for a month now. There is nothing left," a woman named Khanzadi told AFP in badly hit Jaffarabad, Balochistan province.

"We had only one goat, that too drowned in the flood ... Now we have nothing with us and we are lying along the road and facing hunger."...

Zaheer Ahmad Babar, a senior meteorologist office official, told AFP that this year's rains were the heaviest since 2010, when over 2,000 people died and more than 2 million were displaced by monsoon floods that covered nearly a fifth of the country.

Rainfall in Balochistan province was 430 per cent higher than normal, he said, while Sindh was nearing 500 per cent.

*  In the USA:

The summer of big flash floods strikes again.

Up to a foot of rain fell across parts of central Mississippi on Wednesday, leading to life-threatening situations and numerous rescues. The intense rain swept away portions of a highway, while floodwaters partially submerged cars and trees....

The highest totals seen in the past day or two are at least 1-in-200-year or 1-in-500-year rainfalls, rare events that have only a 0.5 to 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year.

A full analysis may show some locations end up with an even rarer rainfall. This flooding event could be the sixth 1-in-1,000-year rainfall in recent weeks in the United States. In other words, it has a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Increased moisture availability in a warming world is a factor in these events.

 

A gut reaction

I think the Biden student debt forgiveness decision is being very disproportionately attacked from the Left.  (See the Washington Post editorial on it, for example.)   I doubt it will have as dire an effect as some are claiming.    

I mean, I would like to see the Left get as agitated by Republican moves that are much worse.

Updating the membership of the B Ark

I think that Douglas Adams had the "B Ark" filled with the following:

"....the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants."

Updated to the present day, I sure know that this category would now be at the top of the list:

As I said to friends recently, and perhaps a bit meanly, because I actually do admire so much of their work on Youtube, it would also be full of crackshot video editors under the age of 30.   

Perhaps I should throw in drone operators too (again, despite my actually liking their contributions to travel vlogging - it's just that there is so much of it now I'm starting to feel the number needs culling.)

I also keep having an urge lately to tell the two travel vlogging couples that I like to watch (The Endless Adventure - a very likeable couple, and that Kara and Nate - the somewhat irritating pair into "personal challenges" but who are OK some of the time) something like this:   "Look, you're in your early 30's now, you've had a lot of fun travelling the world and getting paid for it, but unless you stop and have a child, you're going to miss out on the simpler, domestic pleasures of life.   Don't do that for the sake of 'the next big travel adventure'."   I mean, they both say "we're not sure if we are ready to have a child yet, or if we will", yet they seem to like their relatives' kids, and they are leaving the child bearing decision to that dangerous point in life at which many couples find they can't easily get pregnant even if they want to.

Speaking of drone shots, here's another ridiculously attractive one of yet another Chinese temple built where no sensible person would build:

Why 83?

Google kept trying to get me to watch a short Youtube about a Buddhist parable, so I did today, and quite liked it:

 

The only problem is: why so specific with 83 problems?  Reminds me a bit of the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything being 42. (Actually, in the parable, there are 84 problems, and half of that is 42.  A connection?)

I also can't see where the parable is supposed to have originated.  Quick Googling indicates in not in any old Buddhist material, and some say it sounds kind of Zen, but I wouldn't have thought it should be hard to track down a source, if it's relatively modern.   Maybe I try again later.  It's one of my current 83 problems...

As simple as that?

I was only criticising Matt Damon as an actor earlier this week, but now he has turned up on my Twitter feed with a simple, plausible explanation for why movie studios are so risk averse in the type of film they make now:

 

The example he gave was a movie that might cost $25 million to make (a very modest one, then) will have a publicity and distribution budget of another $25 million, so $50 million all up, and revenue has to be shared with the cinemas, so it needs to make more than $100 million to turn a profit.   

The only thing I continue to be puzzled about is that I thought that digital projection was going to save heaps of money in terms of physical distribution.   Why hasn't that translated into making smaller, riskier films worth trying?   

Anyway, I should add that Damon doesn't appear to be in any way dislikeable in real life:  my only problem with him is I don't find him a very convincing actor.

Google is a harsh mistress

As much as I admire the free services Google provides, I do think it's faceless approach to customer service is a real worry.  

I mean, I did try to contact it once with respect to a real, work related problem, and I was deemed not worthy of response.   

But this story from the New York Times, of people who have been cast into the darkness due to being inappropriately labelled as having saved child porn, is a bit of an eye opener about relying too much on everything Google.  

Long story short - a guy (with his wife's knowledge) takes a photo of his toddler boy's infected genitalia for a doctor's televideo consult, which does happen (and there is a record of that and the treatment provided.)  The photo, however, gets automatically backed up into Google's cloud, and an automated AI system tags it as child porn, and the father automatically loses access to his Google accounts.   Appeals have no success.

As the article notes:

...in 2018, when Google developed an artificially intelligent tool that could recognize never-before-seen exploitative images of children. That meant finding not just known images of abused children but images of unknown victims who could potentially be rescued by the authorities. Google made its technology available to other companies, including Facebook....

A human content moderator for Google would have reviewed the photos after they were flagged by the artificial intelligence to confirm they met the federal definition of child sexual abuse material. When Google makes such a discovery, it locks the user’s account, searches for other exploitative material and, as required by federal law, makes a report to the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The nonprofit organization has become the clearinghouse for abuse material; it received 29.3 million reports last year, or about 80,000 reports a day. Fallon McNulty, who manages the CyberTipline, said most of these are previously reported images, which remain in steady circulation on the internet. So her staff of 40 analysts focuses on potential new victims, so they can prioritize those cases for law enforcement....

In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.

The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.

Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked.

“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.

Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.

“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail. After getting a notice two months ago that his account was being permanently deleted, Mark spoke with a lawyer about suing Google and how much it might cost.

“I decided it was probably not worth $7,000,” he said.

 It's kind of nuts that Google doesn't listen to appeals about incidents like this.

Update:   I was thinking of this last night, and thinking how Google is like the Old Testament God - sort of a "take it or leave it, them's the rules" being that is inscrutable, as in the Book of Job.   (On the other hand, I know, there are parts where God does grant the appeal, so to speak.  We're still waiting for Google to reach that level.)

 

 

Chinese property problems noted

This seems a good and detailed explanation of the developing crisis in China's property market by someone who seems to know that they are talking about:

The property sector in the Chinese economy has always been something of a puzzle. At its peak, it accounted for a quarter of the nation’s economic output, broadly measured. And it sees people in Beijing and Shanghai paying house prices similar to those in San Francisco and New York, despite having just a quarter the income of American buyers.

Now many believe that we are about to see a violent contraction of the property market in China. The government wants to intervene to curb speculation, and rein in what it calls the “three high” problem: high prices, high debt and high financialisation. The approach has been nothing short of dramatic. Financing for property developers has tanked. Earlier this year, property sales declined by as much as 20-30%, in-progress developments are not being completed and people have taken to the streets, banding together to stop mortgage payments on such projects in protest.

Many of China’s largest property developers are failing to repay their debts. Even the survivors are cash-strapped and in a liquidity crisis. The risk is that the property market crisis will drag the broader economy down with it, hitting suppliers, small- and medium-sized companies in construction, as well as household consumption. And dangerously, the banking system has at least a quarter of its assets in property.

But, fortunately, there is this:

Nor is a full-blown financial crisis likely. Major banks are state owned, and will not be allowed to fail. There are no complex, opaque chains of intermediation that characterise the western banking system. Foreign creditors to Chinese property developers will have to take a massive haircut, but the ripple effect on the international economy is likely to be limited. Foreign players have limited exposure to Chinese assets in general: today, less than 5% of Chinese equities and bonds are held by foreigners. This is unlike mortgage-backed securities, where the whole world was exposed leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

And we don't want that

 

Odd residence noted

There was an article about Bryan Dawe, of Clarke and Dawe satire fame, in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, about how he fell for an online scam.

But the odd feature that struck me was this:

Dawe, who now lives in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, offered to forge an unlikely partnership with the Palestinian photographer and leverage his considerable public profile in Australia.

How did he end up living there??  His wiki entry sheds no light.  This ABC article says he went there after John Clarke died - still seems a really odd choice.

From the Onion

It does seem lately to be going better (for Ukraine) than many expected.