Impressions of Vietnam (Part 2)

We took a day trip from Hanoi to Ninh Binh, the river area with the spectacular limestone hillocks that, as the tour guides say, is "Ha Long Bay on land".  A couple of photos make the comparison clear:

 That's the enclosed bay you get to via Luan cave, in Ha Long Bay.   The next one is Ninh Binh:

I now know that this is called karst geology, and I think it's pretty remarkable that it all starts with an ancient build up of limestone up to 3 kilometres deep (!).  

The rest of the geological history is explained here:

The recipe for this scenic splendor calls for just three simple ingredients: abundant limestone, vigorous recent tectonic activity, and a tropical climate. The first ingredient, a blanket of limestone up to 3 kilometers thick, accumulated during an extended, 130-million-year span from the Mid-Devonian through the Early Triassic, when the South China crustal block, to which Northern Vietnam belongs, was submerged beneath the ocean. The rest of Southeast Asia was appended to the South China block in a complex series of collisions with microcontinents during the Indosinian Orogeny, 250 million to 240 million years ago. The second ingredient — vigorous recent tectonic activity — began to roil the region about 40 million years ago, when Northern Vietnam again rumbled to tectonic life with the intrusion of granites and the onset of major faulting. The 1,000-kilometer-long Red River Fault is Northern Vietnam’s dominant tectonic feature. The Red River, which follows an exceptionally straight course through the country, passing through Hanoi en route, lent its name to the fault, which has been moving with right-lateral motion for the last 5 million years.....

..... movement along the Red River and companion faults has jumbled the surrounding blocks of marine limestone, tilting and folding them in complex ways and ultimately making them more susceptible to dissolution.

When bathed in groundwater, limestone easily dissolves, creating distinctive karst topography. Because this dissolution is speedy in Vietnam’s warm, tropical climate — the third and final ingredient needed to create Northern Vietnam’s legendary scenery — the area’s once-continuous blanket of limestone became riddled with caves until the subterranean texture resembled something like Swiss cheese. The cave roofs eventually collapsed, creating sinkholes, and ultimately, the bedrock left undissolved and still standing comprised landscapes of limestone spires. Northern Vietnam and southeastern China constitute the world’s largest (and, many would argue, the most spectacular) karst region, which visitors can easily access at several stunning locations.

As any survey of travel vlogs on Youtube will show, both Ninh Binh and Ha Long Bay are incredibly popular, with local and international tourists.  There seem to be at least two different places where you can start on a 2 hour or so rowboat trip on the river around Ninh Binh, and I don't even know the name of the place where we started, but it had a new looking, very large tourist building:

The scenery on the river is, of course, spectacular, and there are parts with some type of temple on them which it seemed some people got to visit, but not us.  (I suspect they are modern, and part of the intense development of the area into a prime tourist spot.)   There are long caves you go through (on boat), too.

 

There's also a famous lookout in the area, but I didn't go up it due to my wife's current hip problem.  We rode some bicycles instead.   The fields were currently a bit rice bare, but I can imagine this ride looking good when the rice is fully grown:

And unfortunately, when I see ducks in this setting, my mind does wander to the question of whether they are breeding the next dangerous bout of avian flu:

Being a bit science nerdy, the main thing I would have liked to have added somewhere on the tour is an explanation of the geology of the area.

But yeah, like Ha Long Bay, it's an area you just have to visit if in Hanoi and the weather is up to it.

Back to work now...

Religion videos recommended - again

I've posted some of his videos before, but man, I do love the quality of the content and the presentation style of Andrew Henry at his Religion for Breakfast Youtube channel.

For example, his recent video summarising Tibetan Buddhism covered all the key stuff in his usual succinct and clear style, and made a point I guess I hadn't clearly "got" before:

 

And for Easter, I watched his summary of the debate over the likely site of the tomb of Jesus:

  

I've noticed on his Channel that the view numbers of his videos seems to swing wildly from modest to high. I mean, I don't watch all of them either, but overall, he deserves a wider viewership...

Impressions of Vietnam (Part 1)

I've been meaning to do a holiday summary post, from my recent short trip to Hanoi (and some surrounding areas in late February.  Let's go.

My overall summary of Hanoi, and the bit of Vietnam around it:   there's a lot going on.   If you look at Youtube travel videos, no one ever says a bad word about the place, and is usually overwhelmed by Hanoi's Old Quarter, with its narrow, crowded, somewhat frenetic streets, French design influence, and overall liveliness.  It's hard to imagine how badly the Covid must have hurt the place.   Yet, despite the obvious importance of tourism, the Old Quarter is still a part of the city used by locals - I mean, this is the (very nice) hotel we stayed at:

..and metres down that road there were sidewalk shops selling un-refrigerated meat and lots of fruit and vegetables. 

Oddly, despite the huge number of scooters, I never noticed exhaust fumes, and it's true:  to cross the street, you just have to be brave and walk in straight lines and at a steady pace, so they can (more or less) flow around you.   The biggest worry was watching my wife looking at Google maps too closely and losing situational awareness, so to speak.

I did see one accident, but it was on the day trip to Ninh Binh, when an old guy on a scooter ran into a guy in my group, knocking him over from behind, in a temple area and on a wide thoroughfare that I wouldn't even call a normal street.   You can see for yourself:

 

The old guy wanted compensation for some broken pots, but the tour guide and some local official defended the young-ish Malaysian tourist (in fact, the guide told him not to offer compensation).   It had the feeling of a possible scam, although the driver was pretty old (I would guess his 70's?) and I am inclined to put it down to his feeble driving skills, as I doubt he was into deliberately taking a fall off his scooter.

Funnily enough, when I took street photos in Hanoi, they never really seemed to convey adequately the actual busy-ness of the roads:

 

 

OK, I guess the last pic looks a bit busy - but it's worse in real life.  (Too many tourists walk around doing selfie videos, and I didn't want to join that set.) 

As for general liveliness:  there was some good quality music played on the street near the hotel on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night:

And we could hear it pretty clearly from our room:

but it ended at 10pm sharp each night, so it was fine.

We were near Hoan Kiem lake:

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the wide road to the side of it was closed to traffic on weekends, and flooded with families.   

These kids carts were very popular, and even the tiniest child can go for a ride, as they can be remote controlled by the parent!:

The Monkey King is popular, too, as are balloon vendors:

 

 

 

 

 

One thing that's hard to understand about the place:  how do dogs learn to just calmly watch traffic and people and not end up having very short lives at the wheels of scooters?

Anyhow, as for the general vibe, it feels a little odd to be in an ostensibly communist country that seems so intensely capitalistic.   I kept thinking that it's "Marx meets Ayn Rand", and wondered if it would cause some sort of ideological crisis for Sinclair Davidson if he visited.   It's a little bit scam/tout prone - some apparent taxis are not to be trusted, although even then, the "triple the normal price" is still likely to be substantially cheaper than what you would pay in Australia.  

The touts are not too persistent.  A simple "no thanks" is enough.  My favourite scammer was the guy on the footpath outside the entry to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum who assured me I needed to buy a face mask off him or I would not be allowed entry.  (I could see plainly by turning my head that this was not true.)  I was a little surprised to find that there were so many touts for "massage" if I was out walking by myself - including men, or in one case, a woman, who would pull up beside me on their scooter, flash a pic of a scantily clad woman on their phone while offering to take me there.  It felt a bit more like Thailand in that respect than I expected.

Of course, the food is cheap and (usually) very good.  We just had one egg coffee (where the coffee is topped by heavily whipped whole egg - sounds dubious but it's very nice, as a sort of sweetish treat), but I wish we had more.

The best single higher class restaurant we ate at was one my wife found on Facebook, of all places.  It's called Sente, and has a menu based on emphasising everything lotus.   Every course was great, and it was a quiet and pleasant setting.  The total cost for everything (several courses, a few beers and coffee) was still around $60 AUD.

One final thing about the country:   I know that all warmer Asian countries have a way of conducting their commerce on the street.   But I kept feeling while in Hanoi that the Vietnamese really do seem to conduct their entire life (outside of the bedroom) in public, so to speak.   Even when not selling their wares on the footpath, or washing dishes there, or repairing or making stuff right in the doorway to their little shop, the Vietnam seem particularly keen on socialising and eating together, in the open.   Maybe coffee culture accounts for part of it, too?  For an Australian, it looks like a kind of social connectedness to be somewhat admired, although I guess that could come with its own stresses, too.

Anyway, it's a ridiculously photogenic country in terms of landscapes, and I'll make a separate post about the trips to Ha Long Bay and Ninh Binh.

    

 

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: