A helpful video about that AI go-slow call

Here it is:

 

One of the signatories is Elon Musk, whose deep thoughts have been revealed on Twitter to not be so deep, or reliable, at all.

Although I generally believe in taking experts seriously, not all experts are right at all times.   And this isn't like climate science, where the specific basis for the warnings has open for all to see and assess.   Even then, it has always been obvious that some were prone to making exaggerated (or carelessly worded) claims, and we rightly rely more on a consensus view as it evolves as more data and analysis comes in.

I think on this, we are probably at the "enthusiasts who have read too much science fiction" stage.   

I mean, one of the warnings mentioned in the video is disinformation:   we already have a huge problem with that from humans who make a wealthy living out of it, and have their own mix of psychological reasons for wanting to promote their own view of the world.   What's the motivation for an AI living in Google headquarters - or even dispersed across the globe - to do the same?   

Look, if we were living in the world of I, Robot, it would be different.   That is, if there was an army of humanoid robots capable of running the electricity grid,  building new servers, and mining and processing the minerals for same, I could understand the question "what if the AI decides humans are unnecessary, and in fact, are a danger to its survival?  Might it scheme to get humans to eliminate themselves?"  I guess a simple way to do that would be to insert false ICBM attacks into the systems of nuclear armed countries.   

But while ever AI systems need humans to run them, do we have that much to worry about?   

Oh, alright:  maybe an advanced AI does the numbers and works out it only needs a kept workforce of (say) five million healthy human adults, instead of 10 billion, to keep it running and expanding, and  work out a plan to reduce the population to that level.  And quickly, because computers don't like the heat, and global warming is uncomfortable for them.  

Here's a thought:  we better get some decent Kantian ethics inserted into these systems, because I don't trust one fed with nihilistic utilitarianism (or getting fond of Nietzsche!)

 

The unfortunate animals of Paris

I don't recall reading before about the attempt to rejuvenate human health by transfusing the blood of various animals into humans - in 1667, in Paris:

Beginning in the spring of 1667, public opinion in Paris was rocked by a remarkable affair involving domesticated animals: the first practical experiments to transfuse animal blood into humans for therapeutic purposes. The experiments that came to be known as the “Transfusion Affair” were shrouded in the competing claims of a highly public controversy in which consensus and truth, alongside the animal subjects themselves, were the first victims. “There was never anything that divided opinion as much as we presently witness with the transfusions”, wrote the Parisian lawyer at Parlement, Louis de Basril, late in the affair, in February 1668. “It is a topic of the salons, an amusement at the court, the subject of philosophical dissertations; and doctors talk incessantly about it in all their consultations.”¹

At the centre of the controversy was the young Montpellier physician and “most able Cartesian philosopher” Jean Denis, recently established in Paris, who experimented with animal blood to cure sickness, especially madness, and to prolong life. With the talented surgeon Paul Emmerez, Denis transfused small amounts of blood from the carotid arteries of calves, lambs, and kid goats into the veins of five ailing human patients between June 1667 and January 1668. Two died, but three were purportedly cured and rejuvenated.² The experiments divided the medical establishment and engaged a Parisian public avid for scientific discoveries, especially medical therapies to cure disease and to stay forever young.³ 

The article is quite lengthy, and explains that the reason these animals were chosen was based on some fanciful religious theorising:

For the younger Denis, it was not the exotic and domestic birds of the menagerie, but familiar comestible quadrupeds — calves and lambs and occasionally a kid goat — that could elevate humans, both physiologically and morally. Denis was convinced that the blood of these animals was in fact physiologically superior to human blood because it was morally less disordered, a point he elaborated in the published letter about the first xenotransfusion experiment: 

It is easy to judge that the blood of animals must have less impurity than that of men, for debauchery and derangement in drinking and eating are not as common as among us. The sorrows, the worries, the fits, the melancholies, the anxiety, and generally all the passions that are so many causes of the troubled life of man corrupt the substance of his blood; instead, the life of the animal is much better regulated and less exposed to these miseries, the dreadful consequences of the sins of our first father [Adam].

....For Denis, it was the moral and physiological superiority of animal blood that made transfusion a positive intervention. Moreover, in part to justify rhetorically his experiments, he consistently invoked not only the theological debasement of man, but also the moral purity, in the Christian tradition, of certain animals — notably lambs, with the implicit reference to the “lamb of God” and to the logic of the Eucharist as a source of eternal life.

And more, further down:

Denis’ own moralization of animal blood clearly partook of Renaissance humanimalism and the theriophiliac tradition of the “Happy Beast” that informed a corpus of philosophical, literary, and scientific thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that upheld the moral superiority of animals against the debased condition of humans. By the middle of the seventeenth century, theriophilia had become a widely accepted doctrine among the educated classes, from erudite libertines, to natural philosophers, to theologians. Animals were seen as not only linked to humans by kinship and proximity, but also as moral exemplars, less subjected to destructive passions that marked the fallen condition of man. 

I am pretty amused by the last bit in this extract: 

Encouraged by the results, Denis and Emmerez completed a second operation a week later, admittedly “more by curiosity than necessity”, on a robust, healthy porter of forty-five to whom a fee was paid. Denis reported on his instant energetic response and cheerful nature. Far from being debilitated by the transfusion, the porter quickly got up and slaughtered, skinned, and dressed the donor lamb for consumption, after which he went out drinking in the local pub, returning the next day to volunteer for any further trials. And these renewed appetites were not limited to food. Christian Huygens wrote to his brother: “It is said that he performed marvelous feats that night with his wife, this last detail spreading among the ladies has made them favorable to the new practice, and one can only find too many who would want their husbands transfused.”¹⁸

The article is also nicely illustrated.

 

Assumption disproved

Babies seem to be better at keeping their lips firmly sealed during birth than had been assumed:

It has been a longstanding assumption that birth mode and associated exposure of newborns to their mothers' vaginal microbiome during delivery greatly affects the development of babies' gut microbiome. 

To test the scientific validity of this assumption, a team of Canadian researchers has now published a study in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology in which they examined the effect of maternal vaginal microbiome composition on the development of infants' stool microbiome at 10 days and three months after birth.

"We show that the composition of the maternal vaginal microbiome does not substantially influence the infant stool microbiome in early life," said Dr. Deborah Money, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of British Columbia and corresponding author of the study. "It does not appear that exposure to maternal vaginal microbiota at the time of vaginal birth establishes the infant stool microbiome."

It seems that breast feeding is way more significant.  I wonder if there is value in at least initial attempts at breast feeding - say, for the first few weeks at least - rather than just going to formula immediately.  

Well, here's some folklore you don't read every day...

Look, it's from the Japan Today news site, so it's perfectly legit that I stumbled across it:

Every spring, thousands of tourists from Japan and overseas descend on a shrine in Tokyo’s neighboring prefecture of Kanagawa to celebrate one thing — the penis.

This symbol of fertility is at the centre of the Kanamara Matsuri (“Festival of the Steel Phallus”), which ranks as one of Japan’s kisai or “bizarre festivals“, and the story behind it is just as bizarre as the festival itself.

According to legend, a demon once sought revenge on a woman who rejected him by taking up residence inside her vagina and biting down on her husband’s penis so she was unable to procreate. In order to solve the problem, the woman paid a blacksmith to create a steel phallus to break the demon’s teeth, which he did, ultimately restoring her fertility.

All's well that ends well, I suppose.

The rest of the story at the link is pretty amusing too - the shrine has had to distance itself from an unofficial human-inside-giant-walking-penis mascot at the festival.

Can the AI doomsters be a little more specific, please?

Key figures in artificial intelligence want training of powerful AI systems to be suspended amid fears of a threat to humanity.

They have signed an open letter warning of potential risks, and say the race to develop AI systems is out of control.

Twitter chief Elon Musk is among those who want training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and some researchers at DeepMind also signed.

I am curious as how they think an advanced AI is going to protect itself from having the power plug pulled.  

Noah Smith seems a skeptic on the matter of AI doomsterism, too.   

A sensitive essay on the matter of being "ready to die"

 An essay by a doctor in the New York Times seems pretty wise on the matter of how we should feel about the question of whether a dying person is "ready to die".  This paragraph stood out to me:

We want neatness and containment, not the spill of grief.

But death is never neat. A good death should be defined by how well and honestly we care for the dying, not by their performance on our behalf. Expecting them to make death a process full of insight and peace only limits our full emotional and spiritual participation in their death. By sacrificing neatness, we can have a conversation about what the dying truly need from us. Understanding their authentic experiences helps us not only to see them more fully but also to prepare, together, for losing them.

This tweet is accurate...and I also will watch it

You see, I am feeling more positive about Wes Anderson after The French Dispatch, which was his most amusing movie in a long time.  And it's now, I guess, meta funny that he just goes deeper into his visual shtick.

Here's the trailer for the new one:

 

Rice, considered

The Economist has an article about the potentially troubled future of rice.  It pretty much gives the grain a bad rap:

Rice’s contribution to global warming represents an underappreciated positive feedback loop. Irrigating paddy fields starves the underlying soil of oxygen. This encourages methane-emitting bacteria to flourish. Consequently, rice production is responsible for 12% of total methane emissions—and 1.5% of total greenhouse-gas emissions, comparable to the aviation sector. Vietnam’s paddy fields produce much more carbon equivalent than the country’s transportation.

Rice’s nutritional quality is another growing concern. The grain is high in glucose, which contributes to diabetes and obesity, and low in iron and zinc, two important micronutrients. In South Asia the prevalence of diabetes and malnutrition can be traced to over-reliance on rice. 

We don't get mention of the Australian success with making a Vitamin A enriched golden rice, though, which seems a bit of an oversight.

It does note this, too:

Global rice demand—in Africa as well as Asia—is soaring. Yet yields are stagnating. The land, water and labour that rice production requires are becoming scarcer. Climate change is a graver threat. Rising temperatures are withering crops; more frequent floods are destroying them. No mere victim of global warming, rice cultivation is also a major cause of it, because paddy fields emit a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The crop that fuelled the rise of 60% of the world’s population is becoming a source of insecurity and threat.

Rising demand exacerbates the problem. By 2050 there will be 5.3bn people in Asia, up from 4.7bn today, and 2.5bn in Africa, up from 1.4bn. That growth is projected to drive a 30% rise in rice demand, according to a study published in the journal Nature Food. And only in the richest Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, are bread and pasta eating into rice’s monopoly as the continental staple.

Yet Asia’s rice productivity growth is falling. Yields increased by an annual average of only 0.9% over the past decade, down from around 1.3% in the decade before that, according to data from the UN. The drop was sharpest in South-East Asia, where the rate of increase fell from 1.4% to 0.4%. Indonesia and the Philippines already import a lot of rice. If yields do not increase, these countries will be increasingly dependent on others to feed their 400m people, according to the Nature Food study.

The article opens with a mention that several Asian countries have mythology in which rice is a gift of the gods.  I would've liked to also see mention of  how the Japanese like to say there are seven gods on each grain of rice.  

And this slanderous article (I do like my rice, although don't want to eat it every single day) ends with promotion of, surprisingly, millet.  My bold: 

At India’s request, the UN has declared 2023 the year of millet. India is hoping to sell farmers and consumers on this crop, which is far more nutritious than rice or wheat and requires a lot less water. Indonesia is doing something similar for sorghum. Today only health-conscious hipsters in Delhi would choose a millet biryani over a rice one. But where elites lead, masses often follow. If a big market emerged, it would entice some farmers to switch and even ardent rice growers to diversify.

I think Australia grows a lot of millet and sorghum, but I don't know that much of it goes directly into human food.  Oh, now that I check, not much millet:

...the size of the millet crop each year was normally around the 20,000 to 30,000 tonnes, but this year because of the hot, dry summer production fell to around 8000 to 10,000t.

Google tells me we grow about 40 million tonnes of wheat in a good year.   Sorghum?  1.6 million tonnes.  How about rice?  It seems that depending on the weather, it can vary wildly, from as low as about 60,000 tonnes to 630,000 tonnes.   So, we grow a lot more sorghum than we do rice?   Yet I don't recall ever specifically eating it.

Anyway, that's my farming self education for today....

Long term knowledge storage

I'm always interested in stories about new efforts to record the accumulated knowledge of mankind* via methods that aren't going to disappear into the digital ether any time soon.   Hence, this guy's efforts are pretty remarkable; although I do worry about the tiles breaking from (say) an asteroid hitting the planet, and future alien explorers having to spend a lot of time working out a huge number of jigsaw puzzles before they can make sense of it:
  

*As I told my daughter recently, who complained I expect her to contribute to household cooking more often than my son, I was born in 1960 and she has to make allowances for that. :)

Pretty sure that making a deadly situation look like a video game is not a good idea

I'm referring, of course, to the police releasing the body cam video of them going through the school to find the shooter in Tennessee yesterday.  I'll gift link to the NYT story that describes the video.

It seems kind of obvious to me that this has the potential of "selling" to a mentally disturbed person that they too can be a part of a real life video game, and also give them the idea that they would know how to anticipate and deal with the other "player" seeking them.  

Has anyone else been saying this?  I can't be the only person thinking this, surely...

The culture wars are going to be even more unbearable for the next week or so

Well, I had forgotten until Twitter reminded me that today's mass shooter in American is not the first transgender person to "go postal" and shoot up a school.

I have posted before about how unhelpful it is for either side to rush to identify the background of mass murderers, who obviously must be psychologically disturbed extremists acting inhumanely, as a way of point scoring in the political and culture wars.*    

That said, it is also extremely bad for any group to keep telling itself that, if people don't 100% agree with or support their ideological positions, they are evil and must want them dead.   

Now, while I have complained for years that the American Right has spent the last 3 or 4 decades increasingly demonising (now, often in the literal sense) anyone even slightly to their left, I don't think I am "two sides-ing" this [see below] by pointing out that, indeed, transgender activists and commentators are routinely, on social media, absolutists about their cause and allow for no argument or nuance at all, and accuse the likes of JK Rowling of all sorts of ill will and evil.   Just this morning people were posting about this soup throwing transgender person:

who in the above video said "she [Posey Paker] is advocating our genocide", and in his latest video is weeping into his home webcam about how "they" want to kill him.    

While I don't doubt transgender folk can face danger on the street from stupid Right wing thugs who ridiculously want to categorise each and every one of them as a danger to women and children, and having a couple of dozen incel young men (what is it with Victoria? - it's such a weird state) giving Nazi salutes at rallies is something that is an extraordinarily bad look for the, um, anti-trans cause,  I still think it's a counterproductive wild exaggeration for them to talk at rallies as if they may as well be Jews in Nazi Germany, or something.   I mean, the political response from (Australian and New Zealand) government has been nearly entirely positive for the transgender side, and the Liberals are not winning any votes over it.

And again, of course, I think both extremes of the transgender rights debate are acting hysterically.   

But, going back to America:  I agree with those who have commented on Twitter and elsewhere that, while Trump may only  have got a few thousand MAGA dills to attend his Waco rally, the 100% fascist nature of the  imagery and rhetoric was not emphasised enough (or condemned enough) in the media:

A defiant and incendiary Donald Trump, facing a potential indictment, held the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign Saturday in Waco, Texas, a city made famous by deadly resistance against law enforcement.

In an extraordinary display, Trump opened his rally by playing a song, “Justice for All,” that features a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol singing the national anthem and a recording of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Some footage from the insurrection was shown on screens.

Trump, in his speech, defended the insurrectionists and railed against prosecutors, including those overseeing multiple investigations of the Republican former president.

“You will be vindicated and proud,” Trump said “The thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”

So, yeah, the transgender culture war is very ugly, and might sometimes even have helped inspire  deadly action, but in terms of long term danger to democracy and society overall, there is no doubt at all that radical rhetoric from the MAGA Right is the far, far bigger danger to America.

 

 * It's also - obviously - painfully stupid of the Right to argue it's all because mental health treatment being "de-institutionalised", what, 50 years ago; or because of "side doors"; or because there just aren't enough "good guys with guns" on or near the school.   Their pathetic "it's anything other than too easy access to guns" is just so obviously stupid to the rest of the planet, and a significant number of Americans too. 

Recipe posting, again

I feel like I've been on a bit of a meat bender lately.   Last night it was lamb shanks braised in red wine and tomato.   On mashed potato, of course.

Not sure that it's worth noting the recipe, as it was pretty much just following some Youtube videos with a kind of generic recipe for anything cooked in red wine and tomato:  brown the seasoned shanks on all sides in bit of olive oil in your iron casserole dish;  take them out and throw in a diced onion, diced carrot and a (diced) stick or two of celery; fry off a bit, then put in some thyme or whatever spare herb you have (I also used sumac which I stumbled across in the cupboard), and a cup or two of red wine, the shanks, about a cup or two of passata, and a cup or two of chicken stock.   Oh, and I added quite a few halved cherry tomatoes too.  The liquid should just about cover the shanks, but doesn't have to completely.   Bring to boil and cover and put in oven at 180 degrees for 2 1/2 hours, turning the shanks a couple of times during the cooking.   Quite delicious, but my food photography skills need an upgrade:

 It's not as much meat as it looks - honest!

On Saturday, it was pork belly time, again.   I only posted a recipe for it last month, but this time it was Chinese style braised pork belly, with a recipe from a very non-Asian woman, but I think it's relatively authentic.

The step that surprised me was the first - browning the pieces of pork belly in a bit of melted sugar.  Yes, this dish has it all: sugar, salt and fat (that all get incorporated into the reduced, sticky sauce at the end.)   But it was delicious:

 It's not like you need to eat a lot to get your calories.  And I found out that sucking on the braised star anise still gives a great licorice burst, even after an hour or more of braising.

And to round off this collection of recipes for my own benefit, I followed a Youtube video of making a Filipino chicken and mango dish a few ago, and it came out good too.  Like my lamb shanks, it's not a precise recipe, and you just wing it a bit: 

Presumably, he finally believed a lawyer who said "you know, they don't have to give you bail"

 Also:  can you imagine his lawyers' feelings about him doing a rally at Waco this weekend?  

Maybe we'll AI guess our way in the secret of life, the universe, and everything

I must admit, some examples I see of ChatGPT generated material seem surprisingly good, and I notice that someone asked it to (I presume - I can't see the prompt) come up with a dark matter theory, and this is the result:

Now, I'm pretty sure that this is rubbish, and people have pointed out that the AI is good at inventing stuff to fill in gaps in its knowledge.

But - it would be kind of funny if, in future, one of these AI's comes up with a theory which someone bothers to check, and it turns out to be correct.

I wonder if it currently thinks "42" is the answer to the big question in the title...
 

Update:   Sure seems quite a few researchers are getting nervous over the question of how we're even going to tell if true, self conscious AI has been reached:  

Compassion fatigue in the lab

Science has an interesting article about the quite serious issue of compassion fatigue amongst those who care for, and work with, laboratory animals:

Health care workers and pet veterinarians are no strangers to compassion fatigue. Being surrounded by suffering and dying patients can extract a profound mental, emotional, and physical toll—a sort of traumatic stress by proxy. But the condition also strikes a shocking number of lab animal workers, a community of tens of thousands worldwide that includes everyone from cage cleaners to veterinarians who oversee entire animal facilities.

Besides the symptoms Sessions experienced, those who handle lab animals may face insomnia, chronic physical ailments, zombielike lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, severe depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide. As many as nine in 10 people in the profession will suffer from compassion fatigue at some point during their careers, according to recent research, more than twice the rate of those who work in hospital intensive care units. It’s one of the leading reasons animal care workers quit.

Yet few in the animal research community want to talk about the problem—and few want to listen.

Everyone Science spoke to for this story who works with lab animals stressed that they are critical for biomedical research. These caregivers also feel deeply bonded to these creatures, from rodents to rabbits to monkeys. This dichotomy puts them in a difficult position: Unlike doctors or pet vets, those in the lab animal community aren’t just surrounded by pain and death—they’re often the ones causing it. Experimental drugs can sicken animals, implanted devices may cause discomfort, and euthanasia typically comes long before an animal would die of natural causes.

“It’s one of the only caring professions where you have to harm the beings you’re caring for,” says Megan LaFollette, program director at the North American 3Rs Collaborative, which focuses on improving the lives—and reducing the numbers—of research animals.

That’s made those in this field loath to reach out for help. At best, friends and family don’t understand what they do, or why. At worst, animal rights groups vilify them as torturers and murderers. Institutions are squeamish about discussing or addressing compassion fatigue, for fear of attracting negative attention to their animal research programs, often hidden from public view in university basements or windowless facilities. So those who tend to lab animals have largely suffered in silence: Compassion fatigue is an invisible population’s invisible disease.

 This is an obviously difficult problem.  Look at the dichotomy in this person's job:

Catherine Schuppli is all too familiar with the dilemma. A veterinarian who oversees two rodent facilities at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, she seeks to foster empathy in the workers she trains so they provide better—and more compassionate—animal care. She shows her trainees videos of rats navigating obstacle courses, hoisting tiny buckets on a string, and even playing fetch with miniature balls. “The staff comes to realize how smart and cute they are,” Schuppli says.

But on other days, Schuppli trains people how to decapitate the rats. Using what is effectively a tiny guillotine—a common form of euthanasia when gas or drugs could compromise an autopsy—she sometimes performs several of the procedures per day. The work has made her angry, depressed, and drained of energy—all of which she’s tried to suppress. While training others how to turn their emotions on, she’s found herself shutting her own off.

 The article goes on to note that addressing it as a problem has not been easy.   I can see why...

A plausible solution to a mystery

At NPR:

Scientists think they know why interstellar object 'Oumuamua moved so strangely

Long story short:  venting naturally formed hydrogen, which would not have been detectable from earth.

Or to put it another way: "enjoy every sandwich"

 Perhaps it's increasing age that causes such thoughts, but I like to think of it more as a kind of mindful appreciation of simple life experiences that is good to teach to children.  Adrian Chiles in The Guardian writes "The secret of happiness?  Embrace the boring, lay claim to the mundane and rejoice in repetition":

...the abhorrence of the boring is at the root of a whole lot of bad stuff. From before the South Sea bubble of the early 18th century, the catnip of big investment returns has driven us wild with desire and into many a financial crisis. If only we stuck to boring investments in boring companies promising boringly modest but steady returns. But no – just too boring. I was talking to a former banker about the 2008 financial crisis. “Hands up,” he said. “It was us driving the car when it crashed, but there were plenty of people in the back seat egging us on to go faster and faster.”

The older I get, the more I think the secret of happiness is the ability to embrace the boring, lay claim to the mundane and rejoice in repetition. In affairs of the heart and the wallet, in relationships and family life, and the workplace too, we’d enjoy more lasting success if we stopped being bored by the boring, stopped seeking what we tell ourselves is the next exciting thing. After all, everything gets boring in the end if you let it.

I once went to a mass on a Monday night in a massive church on the Bury New Road in Manchester. There were but six of us in attendance, plus the priest who gave a short but brilliant sermon. Afterwards, modestly fielding my compliments, he told me he had been ordained almost exactly 40 years to the day. “I treat every mass as if it is my first or my last,” he said. Yes, I thought, that’s the secret. On the bus home, for some reason Mick Jagger came to mind. I’m not a massive Stones fan but I thought of how many thousand times he’d performed Satisfaction or Sympathy for the Devil. And each time, he does it as though it’s the first or last time.

I thought of all the radio and television programmes I’ve grumped my way through, having dared to have got a bit bored with it all. And how many times I’ve lamented the drudgery of changing nappies, combing out nits, watching the Tweenies over and again, driving the kids around and so on. I so wish that I’d been more Mick, or more priest, and treated everything like it was the first or the last time I was doing it.

 

Time for some Third Way politics/social philosophy again?

While it may not be exactly a social crisis, as the Trumpian Right and its fans in Australia keep claiming, I do keep getting the feeling that we are at some kind of inflection point on the issue of, well, how to run and maintain a successful society. 

On both sides of the Pacific, we seem to be watching towns or cities in which it's being realised, by the underclass, the police and politicians, that if enough people choose to thumb their nose at social mores in terms of property law and civil behaviour, we can't really jail our way out of it.   There can literally be just too many people behaving badly.   (Well, I suppose this is assuming that custodial punishment has to be in the form it currently is, and we're not about to go back to hulks on the Thames, followed by transportation to a far away island, as a way of running our criminal justice system.)

The key role of parenting is recognised in both countries (we're talking the US and Australia, if that's not obvious) as an issue with poor youth behaviour, and drug or alcohol consumption as a leading cause of poor or absent parenting is well known.   And, of course, we are talking primarily about a black underclass, which in both countries, has only recently, in generational terms, come out of official discrimination.   

These thoughts are prompted by the online discussion and news reporting on the state of crime and homelessness in places like San Francisco and Alice Springs, although in both countries there are many other locations with similar problems.

Noah Smith, for example, seems gobsmacked by someone who ran for District Attorney in SF responded to this story:

    

with this:

The reception to his "just live with it" attitude has not been positive:

The other thing that prompted me to post about this was an essay by Darrel Owens about the serious literacy problem in black education in the Bay area.   This got noticed at Hot Air too.  The essay was thoughtful and to a large degree reasonable, although he strained the friendship when briefly endorsing the idea of enormous reparation as a solution.   How's this for ridiculous virtue signalling:

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors have signaled they're ready to right racist wrongs of the past — at least in spirit.

In a unanimous vote on Tuesday, the 11 members accepted a draft plan of more than 100 reparations recommendations for the city's eligible Black residents. Those proposals include a whopping one-time payment of $5 million to each adult and a complete clearing of personal debt — including credit cards, taxes and student loans. Black residents would also be able to collect an annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years and buy homes within the city limits for $1.

The move by the board was largely procedural – an intermediate step in a much longer process. It does not bind the city to any of the ideas presented in the 60-page proposal by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which in 2020 was tasked with addressing "the institutional, City sanctioned harm that has been inflicted upon African American communities."

Apparently, the city has no money to be offering any reparations, let alone $5 million per black adult.

Anyway, the Owens essay has opened the argument about culture and change - with Owens arguing you can't just tell people to change their culture overnight:

 In my Substack on Black and Asian race relations in San Francisco, the most common criticism I received was that Black San Franciscans could solve their problems with better cultural practices. That Asian Americans also had been discriminated against in the past such as the Chinese Exclusion Act or WWII concentration camps, and thus Black Americans have no excuse. AKA the old model minority idea.

It’s a particularly silly criticism because the majority of Asian Americans are foreign-born and the 96% can trace ancestry after or around the 1965 immigration act. However, discrimination against Asian Americans is still rampant, particularly in the immigration and employment system; and in Silicon Valley’s management positions.

In comparison, only 9% of Black Americans are foreign born — rather the inverse of Asian Americans. Vast majority of Black Americans trace their ancestry back to slavery. When controlling for Black Americans of foreign ancestry, they have educational attainment on par with immigrants broadly, including 41% degree-attainment among African immigrants, comparable with Asian Americans.

This matters because foreign-born Americans on average tend to commit less crime than U.S.-born Americans. So, yes, when talking criminal justice and poverty, it is a cultural problem. But it’s an American cultural problem of centuries of imposed segregation and disinvestment against Blacks, that was explicitly legal until one and a half generations ago. Asking wide swaths of Black America to imitate foreign cultures they don’t know as a means to break 400 years of imposed suppression in the country they’ve lived in for generations is moronic and absurd. No other ethnic group can do it or has been expected to.

 Further down he writes:

To be clear: this conversation isn’t new. The academic gap has happened every decade since schools have existed in the U.S. However the stakes are worse because the rise of the Information Economy requires a degree of intelligence beyond the basic trade skills of the past, and we’re not even reaching the bare minimum for Black children.

If we’re going to make our educational system so heavily dependent on the activities of children at home rather than in-class, the least we can do is financially and culturally support families. You cannot erase decades of poverty, drug addiction, environmental pollution and impaired child development, explicit disinvestment and redlining in Black neighborhoods by just saying “try harder.” We’re not just investing in the future of those families or a race, we’re investing in the future of our cities and nation.

Many people don’t see it this way and I’m sure they’ll tell me so. I’ll predict their arguments: “It’s not my job to take care of other people’ kids. It’s not my job to fix Black people’s cultural problems. My family / this ethnicity dealt with racism and overcame it; so to can Black people.”

The Hot Air response to this, though, notes that attempts to improve black education in Baltimore have failed miserably.  It seems that the Right love to point out the failure in Baltimore - here's a recent Fox News article about it.  But they may have a point in that there is good reason to consider Baltimore has a clear example of showing that throwing money at a problem does not always work.   (It's schools are apparently very well funded.) 

What I tend to find frustrating that both sides of politics seem to currently be dominated by bogus ideological approaches that we know are not going to work:   on the Right, you have teary oddball and former drug addict Jordan Peterson as the advocate for personal responsibility and keeping your room tidy as the route to success in life - what black person is going to find him convincing?   On the Left, in Australia, we have (as I have been complaining recently) comfortable and increasingly radical urban advocates going on about the "anti colonial" task, how everything bad now is the fault of "settlers", "never ceded" sovereignty, and a protracted "treaty"  process as some sort of resolution to poverty in remote communities that have no economic reason to exist.

I wish there could be a revival of "third way" politics to navigate a path between the extremes, with an  emphasis on hope and unity, and that paints a picture of success that is based on realism and positive views about what constitutes a good life, rather than each side pointing to the other and screaming "no, it's all your fault!".

While you could say that the Democrats and Labor are, essentially, still close to being "third way" parties, they by and large don't really talk that way any more, and let essentially culture war issues get too much of a public run.   (Although, to be fair, when you have Republicans over-reacting to drag shows and legislating about medical treatment, it's not something easily ignored.)

I guess I just feel that there is room for a revival of more explicitly "third way" approaches that no one is taking up at the moment.   And we need better public philosophers of society and life than the current batch.   

I may add to this later...

The rise of the multiverse in popular imagination

I did enjoy this guest essay at the New York Times (gift link):

I fantasised about multiple timelines, and it nearly ruined my life

Many things I like and have commented on over the years get a mention:   Hugh Everett, Narnia, the recent bad decision to over-use the multiverse in Marvel movies, and the sometimes unclear messaging of Everything Everywhere All at Once.   And it starts with something I hadn't heard of before:

The patient was elderly and lived alone. She was showing signs of depression, but it was clear that something more was amiss. She insisted she was trapped in the wrong timeline.

The ward to which she’d been committed was unstuck in time, she told her doctors. Outside, the future had already arrived, and it was not a good one. “She described then that the world outside the ward had been destroyed,” reported the doctors in Exeter, England, who wrote a report about the case in a 2019 issue of the journal Neurology and Neurosurgery.

The woman was diagnosed with a variation of Capgras syndrome. First defined a century ago, Capgras typically describes a person’s belief that someone close to him or her — a spouse or a child — has been replaced with a duplicate impostor. But in this case, the patient believed that the whole world — everything she could observe of it — was a duplicate, a fake.

Go read the whole thing...

Obviously true

I note that there is some nervousness amongst some moderate commentators that a prosecution on the Stormy Daniels payment may not stick with a jury.   Be that as it may, it takes some remarkable political blindness to think that it's OK for a person's lawyer to be criminally punished for a payment, while completely leaving alone the person who paid the lawyer.   

I do tend to think, though, that regardless of the New York case outcome, the prosecutions that definitely will sink Trump will be about his outrageously corrupt and criminal calls to Georgia officials to fix the vote count for him. 

A very accurate meme

 OK, well, perhaps the "existential threat to humanity" is too much:  even under the worst forecast, perhaps a few of our descendants may get to hunt crocodiles in the swamps of Antarctica for food...

He's such a catch. (Subtitle: pre-nup lawyers get the big bucks, again)

I don't know, but I reckon by the time you've hit your 80's, and especially if you've had multiple marriages already, it's a bit ridiculous to be wanting to remarry, even if you have a good companionship thing going with someone you just met.   (An observation prompted by news of Rupert Murdoch's engagement, a short time after getting unhitched from Jerry Hall.)

And I mean, really:   what 66 year old woman in her right mind wants to be in bed with this?:

A living out of grievance

Some notes from the world of indigenous grievance:

*  Lidia Thorpe:

Victorian independent senator Lidia Thorpe has made allegations she was sexually harassed and assaulted at Parliament House, including in the Senate chamber, during her time as a Greens senator. 

"It has been a very hard time for me in this place. I was sexually assaulted four times in my first six months," Senator Thorpe said. ...

Senator Thorpe confirmed her allegations of sexual assault and harassment were about Labor and Coalition parliamentarians, not members of the Greens. 

She said she chose not to speak out at the time, but the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service (PWSS) were aware of her complaints. 

"I didn't want any action taken," she said.

Uhuh.

*  Chelsea Watego, the Queensland academic I have mentioned before, (sued her University because she didn't like the workspace they gave her, dropped the case, blamed lack of support from her union, got arrested and pleased guilty to obstructing police, lodged a complaint that they had discriminated against her, and lost that case too) has a video of a Byron Bay TED talk(!) about "Black joy is for Black people" which is not about joy at all, but about intense grievance:

 

 * Sandy O'Sullivan has just left for a 3 month tour of the US and England is a part of Queer indigenous academia which, as far as I can tell, is centred in Macquarie University.   She seems, between posting selfies on Twitter every second day (some sort of psychological necessity for her, apparently), to be slowly writing a book on "anti-colonialism" and gender.  She is joined in this field of study by Madi Day, who has become a Fullbright scholar:

Madi Day, from the Department of Indigenous Studies, received the Fulbright Sir John Carrick New South Wales Scholarship, funded by the New South Wales State Government, and will undertake their scholarship at Southern Connecticut State University this year.

Day is a career researcher who works across Indigenous studies, trans studies and gender studies. They are completing their PhD titled Coloniality, gender and heterosexuality in so-called Australia.

Day’s Fulbright research will offer a comparative study of coloniality, gender and heterosexuality across Australia and the United States as settler colonial nation-states. The research will also examine how anti-colonial approaches are integrated into gender studies departments in the United States, and whether this could be improved in gender studies in Australia.

Madi also gave a talk, the details of which I cannot find online, which featured the term "heterosexual terrorists", apparently:

 * Dr Corrine Sullivan, by the way, is currently an Associate Professor at Western Sydney University, but got her BA and PhD at - yes, Macquarie University.    Her research interests are this:

Her current research project explores Indigenous Australian sexuality and gender diversity. For Indigenous Australians that identify as sexually and/or gender diverse there can be significant implications on cultural/social identities, and are at risk of being ostracised, ignored, silenced, be socially and culturally stigmatised, and may face rejection and ejection from their families and communities. The key objectives of this research initiative are to fill the gap in this area of knowledge by; working with Indigenous Australians who identify as sexually and/or gender diverse, and with Indigenous community organisations to develop appropriate educational resources that can contribute toward building inclusive communities. The outcomes of this research will inform law-making, policy, as well as access and delivery of support and services that are culturally appropriate, relevant, and morally unbiased.

 I'm not entirely sure how the comments in this (about queer indigenous being ostracised within their own community) are meant to tie in with Sandy O'Sullivan's and Madi Day's apparent project to convince us all that it was only the colonisers/settlers who brought in the idea of just two genders, and fighting discrimination is an "anti-colonial" project.   Guess we'll see when their little-read books (apart from within indigenous studies faculties) are published.

Contrary to appearances, I do worry that a post like this gives the impression that I have suddenly become a fan of Andrew Bolt and his dubious criticisms.  No, I have really come here via my own reading what passes for academic commentary on aboriginal issues on Twitter and elsewhere.    

It seems pretty clear to me that too much funding is going into the more esoteric sociological aspects of aboriginality and, most worryingly, into helping them promote an ever increasingly radical view (ironically, while making a good living from selling the idea) that the economically and socially struggling members of the First Nations community should only hold the rest of the country they live in with contempt.    Now that I think of it, it's pretty much the Left wing version of Fox News - selling grievance as a way of making a good living.

  

On the upside, sort of

What with all those photos of kilometres of dead (native) fish in a part of the Darling River last week:

 I've been meaning to say:  "wow, I had no idea the Darling River had so many fish!"  

Because isn't that the impression most people have of this river?  Pretty much a hot, overgrown creek that rarely seems to have all that much water in it?  Sure, the Murray looks capable of holding a bunch of fish, but my impression was that the Darling had carp, algae and maybe some turtles, and that was about it.

Heavy sighs have got something going for them

Here's an article at the Washington Post I'll gift link:

5-minute breathing exercises can improve your mood and reduce anxiety

Cyclic sighing appears to be particularly effective among different breathing exercises and better than mindfulness meditation, a study says

Yes, this is not a topic I have followed closely, but my impression is that breathing exercises, as a way of helping address blood pressure, anxiety, etc have been pretty well studied, and shown to be pretty effective.

This latest article suggests they help mood generally, which is perhaps a little surprising?:

A study in Cell Reports Medicine showed that just five minutes of breathwork each day for about a month could improve mood and reduce anxiety — and these benefits may be larger than from mindfulness meditation for the same amount of time.

“We’re always busy doing instead of being,” said David Spiegel, an author of the study. “And it’s a good idea to just take a few minutes to collect yourself, commune with your body and help it prepare to deal with whatever you want to deal with.”

In a randomized controlled study of 108 adults, the researchers compared three different breathwork exercises, in which participants deliberately guided their breathing in various ways, and mindfulness meditation, in which people observed their breathing but didn’t try to control it. The participants did the breathwork at home, following video instructions.

One group of participants was told to practice cyclic sighing. Participants were instructed to slowly inhale through the nose to expand the lungs, and inhale again to maximally fill the lungs. Then they were asked to slowly and fully exhale the breath through the mouth.

A second group focused on box breathing, which is spending the same amount of time slowly inhaling, holding the breath, exhaling and holding, before repeating the sequence.

A third group practiced cyclic hyperventilation, which “emphasizes inhalation rather than exhalation. It’s kind of the mirror image of the cyclic sighing exercise,” said Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University.

They took one deep inhalation through the nose, exhaled passively and then let the air “fall out from the mouth,” he said. Every 30 cycles, they would hold the breath after passive exhalation for 15 seconds....

The positive effects of breathwork took time to kick in: The more days the participants spent doing their breathing exercises, the better they felt each successive day.

Cyclic sighing appeared to be particularly effective among the different breathing exercises. Participants in this group reported even greater positive mood improvements compared with participants who practiced mindfulness meditation.

Now, John:  don't come here and ruin it for me with some criticism or other...:)

 

 

Yet another exotic way to die

The BBC reports on a disease you can catch if near certain nut plantations in India:

Kyasanur forest disease (KFD) – named after the forest in which it originated –  is a tick-borne haemorrhagic disease with a fatality rate of around 5%. Also known as "monkey fever", it was first discovered in 1957 after an outbreak in Shivamogga, the district of Karnataka in which Aralagodu is also situated.

In the following decades, recurring outbreaks remained largely confined to the area. But in recent years, the disease has begun to spread, with cases popping up for the first time in 2013 in the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, followed by Goa in 2015 and Maharashtra in 2016.  

Still, the disease barely registers on global health watchlists; outbreaks largely occur in rural areas bordering forest land and affect a tiny percentage of India's population. But the spread of the disease is indicative of a much larger, more worrying trend, as highlighted most recently by the Covid-19 pandemic: the increasing likelihood of zoonotic disease spilling over into human populations.

 

The things that can happen

Gee, who would expect to die of...bacteria contaminated eyedrops?:

US health officials say that eyedrops may have killed one person and severely injured several others due to drug-resistant bacterial contamination.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have identified 68 patients across 16 states with a rare strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

The strain had never been found in the US before this latest outbreak.

In addition to the one death, eight patients have suffered vision loss, and four have had eyes surgically removed.

Most of the patients diagnosed with the infection reported using eyedrops and artificial tears, according to the CDC.

Ten different brands were initially identified as possibly linked to the outbreak, the CDC said. Eyedrops that are made in India and imported to the US under two brands were subsequently pulled from shelves in January and February.

In January, the CDC warned people to stop using EzriCare Artificial Tears and Delsam Pharma's Artificial Tears. The next month, the company that owns the brands - Global Pharma - issued a voluntary recall following a formal recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Twitter is such a bizarre mess now

I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice - but the Musk fiddling with Twitter is really making it a complete mess.   It seems to be a on "watch this funny/scary video" bender now.   And really, I just seem to get shown about 10% of the tweets of the people I follow and want to see - or I can change to the "following" tab and it sometimes works to change the view, sometimes not.

I kind of wish it would give up the ghost entirely, so we really can get a decent replacement going.

Up periscope, down periscope

I don't really know what to think of the AUKUS deal, now that it has been warmly embraced by a Labor government, savagely attacked by an ex Labor PM who always seems far too willing to endorse China and attack those who criticise it (while at the same time, being correct that the SMH was being ridiculously bellicose in its recent "this is how a war with China will go down" articles), and met with scepticism by the likes of Hugh White and John Quiggin (the latter having long had it in for defence spending on navies, though.)   

The trouble is, of course, that the term "armchair expert" seems to just about have been invented for opinions on defence programs and procurement, as well as international relations.  Everyone thinks they have a better idea.

So my opinion is certainly going to be ill informed, but I will put it out there again anyway:   we should have gone with Japanese submarines, with some built in Adelaide.  

Update:  There's an article at SMH today by a former diplomat (not sure that's much of a qualification on technical defence issues, TBH) who argues that submarines are going to be made redundant soon anyway:

Manned submarines are nearing the end of their utility in hostile waters because of developments in smart sea mines, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and underwater sensors. China has already made a strong start on this, and will deploy them in large numbers in its coastal region and strategically important areas of the South China Sea and East China Sea.

Australia plans to buy at least three American Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines while it proceeds to build its SSN-AUKUS subs. The acoustic signature of the Virginia-class is known to China. It will be programmed into China’s defensive and offensive capabilities, which are cheap counters to an extremely expensive submarine – one that carries 132 increasingly vulnerable sailors.

By the time Australia gets the submarines from the US in the 2030s, it will be simply too dangerous to deploy them to contested areas that could take advantage of their performance and firepower. They will be restricted to home or benign waters, undercutting their main justification. Russia has already shown this to be true in the air. Its air force rarely ventures into contested territory, preferring to fire missiles from a distance. That is also the future of underwater warfare.

While that sounds sort of plausible, predictions as to the future use of naval power always seems to be a bit of a guessing game.   Going way, way back to when I used to be in navy cadets, and hence sometimes heard the opinions of actual navy officers, I remember that in (probably) the early 1980's there was an Australian senior submariner talking about how the (then new) technology of cruise missiles was going to make surface ships redundant.   Navies would move to having more submarines full of cruise missiles, he argued, with which to sneak up within range and launch from afar, with no significant danger of detection and destruction, in the way surface ships are vulnerable.

Again, sounds kind of plausible, but things haven't exactly panned out like that, have they?   Perhaps because you can fit a hell of a lot more missiles on a surface vessel than a submarine?   Perhaps because the visibility of (say) an aircraft carrier armed to the gills is helpful towards defusing some potential attacks?   

So I don't know - I'm a little skeptical of the "submarines will be redundant soon anyway" argument.

On the other hand, it's a little hard to see where we are going to get enough Australians who want to serve on submarines.   Perhaps we should follow the rest of shipping and just contract Filipinos to do it!

An extremely silly memory post

First, the not-so-silly bit:  an article about how "working memory" works:

In a study in PLOS Computational Biology, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory compared measurements of brain cell activity in an animal performing a working memory task with the output of various computer models representing two theories of the underlying mechanism for holding information in mind. The results strongly favored the newer notion that a network of neurons stores the information by making short-lived changes in the pattern of their connections, or synapses, and contradicted the traditional alternative that memory is maintained by neurons remaining persistently active (like an idling engine).

While both models allowed for information to be held in mind, only the versions that allowed for synapses to transiently change connections ("short-term synaptic plasticity") produced neural activity patterns that mimicked what was actually observed in real brains at work. The idea that brain cells maintain memories by being always "on" may be simpler, acknowledged senior author Earl K. Miller, but it doesn't represent what nature is doing and can't produce the sophisticated flexibility of thought that can arise from intermittent neural activity backed up by short-term synaptic plasticity.

Sounds like synapses must reconfigure themselves very, very quickly, then.   How do they do that, I wonder?

Anyway, now for the silly bit.  For some reason, every now and then a memory of a bit of music written for just one episode of Lost in Space, and which I haven't heard for decades, bubbles up to my awareness.    This happened yesterday, and it's the "groovy" music that nearly brainwashes poor Penny (girls being much more susceptible to such things), but fails to win over good old, sensible boy Will Robinson.

Actually, I had trouble remembering the context in full until I went to Youtube.  For a while I wondered if it was from Get Smart, as I had an idea that it featured an episode with hypnotic hippy music too.   But the internet sorted me out - the Get Smart episode has a track with the message to kill, kill, kill the dean, and bump off a square.  (How could I forget that!)

It turns out that someone has gone to the trouble of editing together and fiddling with the various dance bits from the Lost in Space episode in question ("The Promised Planet") to make a whole video of the track, and it's exquisitely silly:

 

If you don't like this self made clip, there is this alternative, which is also repetitive but maybe better? 

I like this comment following:

I needed this video...that weird Penny Dance has haunted me for years and needed to see it like this...a 10 hour cut would be epic...this song is my Ring Tone by the way...

And wow - the audio track is up on Youtube too and I guess I could convert it to a ringtone too?   I have never bothered with silly ringtones, but I am tempted.

As for the whole story of that episode of Lost in Space (season 3, when they were getting desperate for ideas), I have a watched some guy's commentary on it to refresh my memory.  The Robinsons think they have landed on Alpha Centauri, but the station is run by teenagers, who turn out to be aliens who cannot turn into adults even though they want to.   Before I re-watched the end scene, I remembered how at age 9 or 10 I thought the line "all I wanted to do is be able to shave" was sort of poignant: 

Lost in Space was sometimes like that:   the execution may be very, very silly, but sometimes there was the hint of an idea that might make for something decent if told another way.   

Anyway, I wonder why my brain is dredging this up for my attention every now and then? Must be something about the strength of the synaptic connections made when 9 years old!

Update:  I just remembered that there's another track last heard by me about 50 years ago, which I remember bits of every now and then:  a cover version on some cheapo LP of  this "psychedelic" song by a German band that I don't think was ever played in Australia.  My mother bought the LP, not me.

Tears for the transhumanists

As noted in this story at Nature, gene editing by CRISPR on human embryos is still not a thing, basically because it's too clumsy a technique:

As well as addressing broader concerns about ethics and social justice, editing embryos would require a safe and effective genome-editing platform to minimize the chances of harm to the embryo, the resulting child and any descendants. Most research on genome editing in embryos, however, has been done using animal models such as mice, which might not accurately reflect what happens in human embryos. And, although potential genome-editing therapies have been widely studied in adult human cells, embryos might respond differently than adult cells to the DNA damage caused by some of the tools.

Only a handful of laboratories have directly tried to edit the genomes of human embryos using the popular editing system CRISPR–Cas9, and several of these presented concerning results at the summit.

The Cas9 enzyme works by breaking both strands of DNA at a site designated by a guiding piece of RNA. The cell then repairs the break, either by using an error-prone mechanism that stitches the two ends together but sometimes deletes or inserts a few DNA letters in the process, or by replacing the missing DNA with a sequence copied from a template provided by the researcher. DNA breaks created by Cas9 in embryos are usually repaired using the error-prone pathway, said Dietrich Egli, a stem-cell biologist at Columbia University in New York City, at the conference.

Egli and other researchers also reported on the consequences of the double-strand breaks made by Cas9. Developmental biologist Kathy Niakan, now at the University of Cambridge, UK, recounted that her lab found that some human embryos lost large regions of chromosomes when they were edited using CRISPR–Cas9¹. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, also said that his team had found large DNA deletions at the editing site in human embryos, and that these deletions might not be detected using standard tests².

“Can human embryos at this stage really tolerate this kind of intervention?” asked Dagan Wells, a reproductive geneticist at the University of Oxford, UK, who also reported concerning responses to DNA breaks in human embryos. About 40% of the embryos in one of his genome-editing studies failed to repair broken DNA. More than one-third of those embryos continued to develop, he said, resulting in the loss or gain of pieces of chromosomes in some cells. That could harm the health of the child if such embryos were allowed to develop further. “These results are really a warning,” he said.

 

 

Fad nerve

Here, I'll gift an article from the New York Times about the (rather faddish) attention that has been given to the vagus nerve on social media.   

I've had Youtubes recommended to me about "toning" this nerve (really, a bunch of nerves), and none of it sounded very convincing:

In recent years, the vagus nerve has become an object of fascination, especially on social media. The vagal nerve fibers, which run from the brain to the abdomen, have been anointed by some influencers as the key to reducing anxiety, regulating the nervous system and helping the body to relax.

TikTok videos with the hashtag “#vagusnerve” have been viewed more than 64 million times and there are nearly 70,000 posts with the hashtag on Instagram. Some of the most popular ones feature simple hacks to “tone” or “reset” the vagus nerve, in which people plunge their faces into ice water baths or lie on their backs with ice packs on their chests. There are also neck and ear massages, eye exercises and deep-breathing techniques.

Now, wellness companies have capitalized on the trend, offering products like “vagus massage oil,” vibrating bracelets and pillow mists, that claim to stimulate the nerve, but that have not been endorsed by the scientific community.

 Apparently, stimulation of it by implanted devices has seemed to help some conditions, but if you aren't going to go under the knife, you've still got to resort to things like putting your face in ice water.

I'm ok, thanks...