The law of Karma, dubiously illustrated

I posted recently about the law of Karma, and remembered today that I had been meaning to post about how it is illustrated in one very well visited place in Hanoi.

In the old presidential compound next to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, there's a Buddhist temple (well, I think it's a reconstructed one - I don't think it was always there) which looks like this from the outside:

On the inside, it has, shall we say by way of understatement "a lot going on":

Now, I was particularly interested in how Vietnamese temples seemed to mix up Buddhism and Confucian elements to an extreme degree, but that's not the main point of today's post.

In the temple courtyard, there are several posters up illustrating example of the Law of Karma:

 which is something I don't recall ever seeing before.

The illustrations alone are eyecatching for their often lurid nature.   Cow demon in Buddhist hell features more than once, for example:

 

And some of the sins were very specific, and modern:

I thought it a little amusing about how quite a few were about not rocking the clerical boat, so to speak:

Just how much trouble have they had with someone "pretending to be a monk to destroy the Buddhism", I wonder.

Being community minded earned good marks:

As did not betraying the government:

Computer viruses get a mention, as does etiquette around Buddha statues:

And doing the right thing by"saints" is important, and even gets rewarded by good looks:

Now, I don't know who is behind this project, and it's a little hard to tell if the illustrations were designed to cause amusement, or not.

It didn't take me long to work out what the illustrations reminded me - the lurid comic books of Jack Chick, which were around when I was in high school (and are very well known in America - his death in 2016 attracted many obituaries): 

Anyway, I don't have anything deep to say about it - in part because I find it hard to tell how seriously the locals in Vietnam (or elsewhere) would take these examples.    But it's interesting, nonetheless.

Too much talk

Seems to me that there is way too much talk by people who really wouldn't have a clue about the legal merits, and political outcome, of the Trump indictments yesterday.   The major papers have published contradictory accounts by actual lawyers on the matter, and while my gut feeling is that the "pro indictment" side sounded more convincing, of course I'm not really in a position to be 100% sure of my judgement.

And neither are 99% of those who are deriding the case.   

Craig makes a good point

A religious discussion in time for Easter

Oh look - Christianity Today has started a series of articles called "Engaging Buddhism."  This is the second one, looking at the doctrine of karma.

Is Karma a ‘Relaxing Thought’? For Many Buddhists, It’s Not.

The articles compare the attitude to karma in two different branches of Buddhism - what they call Thai Theravada Buddhists and Taiwanese Humanistic Buddhists.

The Theravada Buddhists have the more "old school" take on it:

About 95 percent of Thais practice Theravada Buddhism, the oldest tradition of Buddhism, which hews closely to Buddha’s teaching and emphasizes reaching enlightenment through one’s own efforts.

Hilderbrand, who moved to Bangkok in 1999, found that the idea of karma is enmeshed in everyday life, regardless of how familiar a person is with Buddhist texts. When a car accident, natural disaster, or sickness occurs, people will mutter “karma,” resigned that it was the result of a person’s actions in this life or a past life.

“In a truly Buddhist worldview … if you are born ugly or crippled or poor, it’s because you deserve it,” Hilderbrand said. “And so, there’s not a tendency to help other people, except insomuch as it gets you brownie points or earns you merit for doing so.”

If the news reports that a rich person hit a poor person with his car, it’s accepted that the poor person did something wrong in her past and deserved what happened to her, Hilderbrand said. Unlike in Christianity, there is no concept that people are equal and have special value.

People who are born poor or disabled accept that their role is to live off their karma while doing good to impact their future lives. Some parents won’t permit their child born with a cleft palate to have surgery because it would take away the “karmic duty that the person has to bear through this life and therefore wouldn’t get the merit for the next life,” said Paul De Neui, a former missionary to Thailand and professor of missiology at North Park Theological Seminary.

At the same time, De Neui has found that often people born with physical disabilities are the most joyful people he’s met and are treated with a special kind of reverence despite their difficulties. They recognize their duty based on what has been passed on from a past life.

Thais are very self-aware of who they are and what their limits are, said Hilderbrand, unlike Westerners who have been taught that they can achieve anything. The challenge is that “it’s difficult for them to establish a way of how they can better themselves,” Hilderbrand said. For instance, if individuals aren’t good at math, they just accept that as part of who they are and don’t naturally try to change their situation.

At the same time, monks must be physically perfect—with ten fingers, ten toes, no disabilities, and no birth defects—because it means they have good karma from their past lives. When Hilderbrand’s friend and fellow missionary came to Thailand, the government refused to give him a missionary visa because he was blind; in their worldview, being blind meant he had bad karma and couldn’t be a religious teacher.

So, the fatalism of the concept, like the caste system, is problematic in certain ways.   (Mind you, I guess you could accuse Calvinists and their double predestination as not being very psychologically useful, either.) 

But the article argues that Chinese Mahayana Buddhism (or at least the part of it from Taiwan) has adopted a more Christian-like view:

Humanistic Buddhism emphasizes integrating Buddhist beliefs into everyday life and caring for issues in this world. It’s embodied in the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation: Formed in Taiwan in 1966 by a Buddhist nun and 30 housewives saving money to give to needy families, it’s now an international humanitarian aid group working in 100 countries and territories around the world. Tzu Chi volunteers engage in medical aid, environmental protection, and disaster relief—at times showing up to a disaster site before the government.

Mahayana Buddhists believe that bodhisattvas are higher beings that delay nirvana out of compassion to help the suffering. Karma and rebirth are still central tenets, but the doctrine has a different emphasis. While all Buddhists seek to alleviate suffering, Theravada Buddhists seek to accomplish this over cycles of lifetimes and reaching nirvana. Mahayana Buddhists are more concerned about alleviating suffering in the here and now.

Even if karma dictates that individuals did something bad in their past lives and deserve their situations, “what always builds up good karma, regardless, is to help them in their suffering,” said Easten Law of Overseas Ministries Study Center. “If your priority is enlightenment, what’s always good is to be compassionate: It’s good for your karma, and it’s good for their karma.”

In the late 19th century, Chinese Buddhists wanted to reform their religion and move beyond funeral rites, says Lai Pan-chiu, a religious studies professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They saw the work Christians were doing in building hospitals, starting schools, and engaging in social issues and began developing their own. They even started youth fellowships and Sunday schools.

As these reformers transformed Chinese Buddhism “from a religion for funerals to a religion that benefits daily life,” more and more Taiwanese became adherents.

Humanist Buddhists see karma in a social or collective light.

Well, I have always said that I find Mahayana Buddhism more appealing than the other schools.  

The article goes on to note that the Bible is very clear in rejecting karma.  Apart from the example of Job, there is this:

When the disciples asked Jesus in John 9:1, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” they were expressing a karmic view of the world. Yet Jesus’ answer reveals a more complex understanding of suffering—one that is in the hands of a loving, caring, and just God, not an impersonal force: “Neither this man nor his parent sinned … but this happened so that that the works of God might be displayed in him” (v. 3).

By viewing it that way, though, it does raise more of a (shall we say) ethical puzzle as to the nature of God and his toleration of evil.  I suppose the appeal of the Buddhist doctrine is that it treats it in a more impersonal way -  it's just a law of nature, and you can't blame laws of nature for being what they are.   

Still, it's interesting how certain Buddhists recognised the greater charitable dynamism in Christianity and incorporated it.

A worthy case of religious syncretism, of sorts?

 

 

Protons are not fully understood

The impression I had from watching certain Youtube videos was that how the proton worked (with its internal oscillations between quarks) was pretty well understood.   But it seems that's not really right:

For all we understand of its behavior, the proton's internal structure is a chaotic mess of activity scientists are still deciphering.

A new experiment conducted at the US Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility sheds light on this mystery, revealing more about proton innards and indeed how matter itself is put together at the smallest scale.

Researchers from across the US were able to measure the movements of tiny fundamental particles called gluons that hold protons together. Formerly referred to as the proton's gluonic gravitational form factor, this measurement acts as a sort of window into the mass structure of the positively charged nuclear particle.

What the team discovered was that the radius of the proton's mass varied from the radius covering the distribution of its electrical charge, often used as a proxy for a proton's size. While those values wouldn't necessarily be expected to match, the differences between them can tell scientists more about how a proton is put together.

"The radius of this mass structure is smaller than the charge radius, and so it kind of gives us a sense of the hierarchy of the mass versus the charge structure of the nucleon," says Mark Jones, a senior staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia.

As gluons lack charge and mass, their measurements must be indirectly taken, such as from the decay products of pairings of quarks and antiquarks known as mesons. The experiment involved an electron beam and a photon beam passing through liquid hydrogen, which resulted in interactions that produced a type of meson called a J/ψ particle.

By measuring the fallout from the J/ψ particles and comparing the results with theoretical models, the scientists calculated the different distributions of mass and electrical charge within a proton.

The greater radius of electrical charge means the mass of the proton is concentrated, suggesting some of the gluons may extend beyond the mass bearing quarks, possibly confining them.

Happy arraignment day

A few comments about the news:

*  it has suddenly brought up a story that had been reported before, but forgotten by most, even if we saw brief mention of it previously (I think that's me!):  the hush money payment to a doorman about a possible Trump illegitimate child.

*  I heard a guy on Radio National saying that the trial won't be until the end of next year - the election year.   If true, that alone is enough to put a spanner in a Trump campaign.   

*  I am wondering if any conspiracy nut is going to come up with the argument that the judge not giving a gag order now is actually a devious plan to lure Trump into making statements that can be used in evidence against him, and as such is all part of the great conspiracy against him. 

*  Can someone with more time on their hands than me ask one of those AI image generators to come up with a celebration cake for Happy Arraignment Day - perhaps with 34 candles on it?   

Update:  well, this article is pretty close to what I predicted - a Trumpy commentator complaining that not gagging Trump and just giving him a warning is "a trap" - they're just waiting for him to mouth off.  Well, duh.

At the heart of the Liberal problem

With the historic by-election loss on the weekend, Malcolm Turnbull gets to go all "ha ha, told you so":

Turnbull, a moderate who has strongly criticised the growing conservative focus of the party since his departure, told Guardian Australia on Sunday that “the problem is that they have to move back to the centre”.

“It is hard to see how that can be done with a leader who is so indelibly associated with the right of the party and whose support base in the Murdoch media is calling for the Liberal party to move further to the right.”

But, as I have complained before, Turnbull chose not to read the riot act on climate change to his party when he was leader, so I find it a bit rich for him to be complaining about any subsequent leader not doing likewise.  

I mean, the problem with this key policy area, for the Coalition, is arguably not so much their "official" position, but the continual internal erosion of the sincerity of that position by climate change deniers who are tolerated by the party.  For example:

 And this from their media supporters:

And this:

 

Matthew Stratton's article ends on this note:

The future, like the past of the Liberal Party, is conservative. The constant moderate Liberal fear-mongering over our 1.2 per cent of global carbon emissions; and the recent turn to reshape the Liberal Party from selecting our brightest and most capable candidates with MPs, Premiers, and Prime Ministers declaring it’s not what you have in your heart, but what you have between your legs.

This decade's long game of trying to straddle the barbed wire fence on climate change, with one foot in the "it's a urgent serious problem" camp and the other on the "don't be ridiculous, it's no problem at all, you've all been conned by scientists who can't be trusted" side may have worked for a time, but if you ask me, the bushfire emergencies under Morrison are what killed it off once and for all, and the success of the Teal candidates is strong evidence of that.

So in my humble opinion, unless the Liberals confront the formal schism that is needed (in the form of a demand that elected party members who don't believe it is a real science problem must leave the party), the Liberals are stuck in a losing position.   

Update:  And who could forget this (former) shining light of the Liberal Party, who tweets today:

 

About that indictment

I wasn't impressed with the sub-heading above a commentary piece in the New York Times (gift link):  

For more than two centuries, American presidents were effectively shielded from indictment. But the case against former President Donald J. Trump breaks that taboo and sets a new precedent.

That sounds like setting the ground for a two sides-ing "this is potentially too disruptive of our political system to bother doing it".

But now that I read the article itself, I guess it's not that bad.   It makes the pro-prosecution for crimes side pretty clear:  

While the indictment of Mr. Trump takes the country into uncharted waters, the authors of the Constitution might have been surprised only that it took so long. Justice Department policy maintains that sitting presidents cannot be indicted, but the framers explicitly contemplated the prospect of them being charged after leaving office.

A president impeached by the House and convicted and removed from office by the Senate “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law,” Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution declares.

“Generally, we consider that language to suggest that, whatever may happen with respect to an impeachment while a president is in office, he still may be held liable civilly or criminally after he leaves office for his misconduct in office,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina.

In other words, no former president was immune from criminal liability. “The framers would have been horrified at the possibility of a president ever being above the law while in office or after leaving it,” Mr. Gerhardt said.

Indeed, while voting to acquit Mr. Trump at his second impeachment trial — the one charging him with inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky, said he did so because Mr. Trump was no longer in office but added that he was still subject to criminal prosecution.

“My view is that so long as the case that is brought is for a crime that is not unusual to charge, and the proof is also as strong as one would normally have — i.e. that one wards against the problem of selective prosecution — then it is imperative that we hold politicians to account regardless of what position they hold or held,” said Andrew Weissmann, a deputy to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Meena Bose, who is the executive dean of Hofstra University’s Peter S. Kalikow School of Government and runs a presidential history project, said that a country plagued by polarization and concerns about democracy would be stronger by enforcing responsibility on its leaders. “An active and continuing commitment to making sure all public officials follow the rule of law is essential to addressing those challenges,” she said.

The Trump lackeys on the other side say stuff like this:

In 2008, voters in two small towns in liberal Vermont approved resolutions accusing Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of “crimes against the Constitution” and instructing their town attorneys to draft indictments. Nothing ever came of it, but it is not hard to imagine a conservative local prosecutor trying to charge President Biden with, say, failing to adequately guard the border.

“This presents the opportunity for potentially thousands of state and local prosecutors to investigate and charge a president without the impediment imposed by D.O.J.’s policy against indicting sitting presidents,” said Stanley M. Brand, a former House counsel whose firm represents a couple of Trump associates in the investigation into the mishandling of classified documents. “It theoretically subjugates the presidency in a way I don’t believe was ever constitutionally contemplated.”

Mr. Goldsmith said any prosecution could tear at the fabric of the system. “Especially if this indictment is followed by even a justified indictment from the special counsel, we will see recriminations and retributions in the medium term, all to the detriment of our political national health,” he said.

And a bit more blather follows, but the article then points out how, in many other long established democracies, former leaders are not given a permanent "get out of jail free" card just by virtue of having been President.

For what it's worth, I also do not give any great credence to the "it will only make him stronger!" line of argument.   It won't.   

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?: