The brainworm candidate

Wow:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who has marketed himself to voters as a younger, healthier alternative to the two major contenders, contracted a parasitic worm that got into his brain years ago and ate a portion of it before dying, his campaign said Wednesday.

The 70-year-old scion of the powerful political family revealed in a 2012 deposition during divorce proceedings from his second wife, which the New York Times obtained and first reported Wednesday, that he had short- and long-term memory loss and described himself as having “cognitive problems, clearly.” Around the time of the discovery of the parasite, Kennedy was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning that he attributed to his diet, he said in the deposition, a condition that can also cause memory loss. Kennedy told the Times that he has since recovered from his fogginess.

Down at the bottom of the report, there's even more discussion of his far from stella health record:

Kennedy has previously disclosed other health issues. He has said his strained, sometimes hoarse voice is caused by spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the muscles of the voice box. He also has told others he became infected with hepatitis C, which was treated, from intravenous drug use in his youth.

In 2001, Kennedy was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat caused by a common heart abnormality that can cause strokes, according to news reports at the time. Kennedy said in the 2012 deposition he was hospitalized three other times for that condition, which he told the Times has not caused any other incidents in a decade.

Bryan Appleyard lives

While searching for something on this blog recently, I realised how often in its early days I used to link to articles by Bryan Appleyard.  (In fact, he turned up in comments once!)

I had last year searched around for more recent material from him, and found that his website had gone, and although I could see he had written another book in 2022, I thought he must not be very active anymore.

I don't know why, but I didn't look for him on Twitter, and now I see that he is there, posting infrequently, but providing links for pieces he writes in various places still, including the Spectator (which I only occasionally view now, due to the terrible quality of the Australian edition.   Yes, the UK version is still worth a look, but I just don't think to look often.)

Anyway, I see that he has some articles posted at a place I have never heard of before - Engelberg Ideas - including this recent one skeptical about Musk and his brain fiddling desires.   

In terms of books, a recent-ish one I did not know about is one he co-authored with James Lovelock shortly before he died.  From the Wiki description:

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence is a 2019 non-fiction book by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. It has been published by Penguin Books/Allen Lane in the UK,^[2] and republished by the MIT Press.^[3] The book was co-authored by journalist Bryan Appleyard.^[4] It predicts that a benevolent eco-friendly artificial superintelligence will someday become the dominant lifeform on the planet and argues humanity is on the brink of a new era: the Novacene.

This sounds worth a read!

I wonder if Bryan still Googles his name and might turn up here again.

If he does, I ask that he read at least this recent post.   And calls me brilliant, or something.   :)

 

Bluetooth for tooths

I'm a pretty late adopter of electric toothbrushes.   I started using one, the base Oral B model, maybe 3 or 4 years ago?, and that was only because my daughter didn't like using it at that time.  

That one's battery performance finally deteriorated enough to get a new one on the weekend, and I was surprised to learn that for only $99 I could buy an Oral B model with Bluetooth connectivity.  It apparently tells an app on your phone about how well you are brushing.

This seems faintly ridiculous to me.   (As indeed does that way Oral B seems to flood the market - which I assume it already dominates - with seemingly 12 different models, many with very small differences.  It's a bit like how some mobile phone companies operate.)  I don't want my brush reporting on me to my phone, or indeed, the head office.   

Anyway, I went with what's probably only one model up in sophistication from the very base model.  Now I not only have a 2 minute timer (which had stopped working on the old one), but every 30 seconds it stutters to tell me that I have spent enough time on that quadrant of my teeth, and I need to move onto the next quadrant.  I actually like the 30 second feature.

Electric toothbrushes do feel like they have given teeth a thorough clean, and I see that research into the comparison with manual teeth-brushing backs up the impression.  

I would prefer that the brush heads were cheaper, but can't have everything...

 

Boot on the university protests

Yet more Washington Post content for you:  I find it very hard to find any fault in Max Boot's criticism  of the  pro-Palestinian university protests.   I'll extract some parts:

In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”

 So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.

Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.

I particularly liked this part, about the stupid "settler" rhetoric that we also see gushing from dubious academics in Australia who couldn't find anything useful to do apart from organising tiny conferences for themselves and writing the next application for funding from the ARC:

The protesters’ agenda does not end in the Middle East; indeed, the movement’s ideologues see Israel as merely an “imperial outpost in the Arab world,” even though Jews have lived in the area since antiquity. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto proclaims: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.”

Reading this politically correct claptrap, I was left with many questions, beginning with: What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was a name used by some indigenous groups for Central America and North America, but that only raises another question: Who do the students want to liberate “Turtle Island” from? Assuming that most of them aren’t Native Americans, aren’t they occupiers, too? Many of the other territories listed are just as puzzling — who, exactly, is occupying Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Haiti, Cuba or Korea (either North or South)? I can guess who is supposedly oppressing Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but I’m at a loss to say what this oppression consists of. Too much tourism?

Just as notable are the omissions — there is no call to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation, the Uyghurs from Chinese imperialism, Syria from Bashar al-Assad’s bloody reign or North Korea from Kim Jong Un’s Stalinist police state. This is not an objective list of global injustices; it is a grab bag of far-left grievances that includes trendy but vacuous calls for “creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization.”

An eye-catching headline, or two

You know, I prefer the Washington Post to the New York Times.   Here are a couple of eye-catching stories from the former, this morning:

 

Gift link here.   It does make me think better of this Pope, but there is no doubt that his Pontificate shows up all of the internal tensions of the Catholic Church that he somewhat clumsily tries to reconcile (or paper over); but I fear it is a doomed project, for any Pope.    

And on a somewhat amusing note, this article about a former US Navy Admiral who went to jail over a major corruption scandal reads like fodder for a Coen brothers movie:

Well worth the read.  (Gift linked.)

Update:  By the way, reading that article about the way the US Navy worked made me think that navies the world over seem to attract officers who are there for a good time, so to speak.

Based on my own military service, I always thought that navy officers I met were good humoured and the most relaxed to be around.  Army officers were the most likely to be very serious, very certain of their worth, full of bad management decisions, and often unpleasant company.  The air force, being dominated by pilots and those who support pilots, was more a haven for individuality and not being bothered with all the trad military stuff.   As such, many are not outgoing like navy officers tend to be, but it's a much more relaxed, and sensible, service than the Army.

At least one new thing

I don't post on weekends very often anymore.  Largely, that's because I don't have a decent desktop at home, and usually leave my laptop at work, and doing any significant amount of typing on a tablet isn't much fun.  I should probably buy a decent bluetooth keyboard for the Lenovo and see how that is for ease of tablet posting.  In fact, my wife has one, I think?  Further investigation is warranted.

What I have found lately is that, unless I have posted about something new or interesting, it doesn't feel as if I have had much in the way of new thoughts.  (And I don't like to go any length of time without feeling like I have some new thought.)  This becomes especially noticeable towards the end of a long weekend, like the one about to expire in about 30 minutes.  

I mean, I may have watched a large number of Youtube videos on various topics and surely learnt something new, read a thousand tweets, scanned some news stories, listened to some ABC podcasts, had a beer with friends, cooked a nice meal or two, and so on, but unless I get around to posting about any of that here, it doesn't feel they are adequately committed to memory or as appreciated as they should be.

Is that a downside, perhaps, of writing a blog that's pretty much an open diary for 19 years?  Maybe.

There's also the way the constant flow of new snippets of information in front of your face makes it very hard to concentrate on one topic in a way that used to come with starting a book - and finishing it.  Yes, damn you, internet for being both wonderful and concentration eroding at the same time.

Anyhow, this is a long winded way of saying that it seems I had a pleasant enough, relatively uneventful weekend, but it feels as if something is missing.  

Alright, I will post one Youtube video consumed this weekend which had a not particularly promising title but, after the first 5 minutes or so of covering old ground I certainly was aware of before, did indeed teach me something about cosmology that I hadn't realised before.  (It's to do with the size of the universe.)   That's worth committing to searchable memory.   Here it is:

Kids and their past lives

An article in the Washington Post takes a pretty open minded attitude to the stories of children who, at a young age, seem to recall a past life.

And look - 3000 comments follow it!   People are very interested in the topic, and it seems many people have a story to tell about how their young child spooked them for a time.

When public health campaigns were not de-railed by ratbags...

It's one hundred years since one of the most successful public health campaigns, ever, started:

On May 1, 1924, the first iodized salt appeared on shelves, quickly solving an iodine deficiency crisis that plagued the northern U.S. “goiter belt.”

In the early 20th century, iodine deficiency was ravaging much of the northern United States. The region was widely known as the “goiter belt,” for the goiters — heavily swollen thyroid glands — that bulged from many residents’ necks.

The issue was more than cosmetic: Iodine deficiency during pregnancy and lactation often led to children with severely diminished IQ and other permanent neurological impairments.

And Michigan was at the epicenter of the crisis.

The soil there didn’t have much iodine. Nor did the freshwater Great Lakes. And so the inhabitants didn’t have much iodine, either.

The prevalence of iodine deficiency in the state became strikingly apparent after the outbreak of World War I. Simon Levin, the medical examiner for the draft board in Michigan’s Houghton County, observed that more than 30 percent of registrants had a demonstrably enlarged thyroid, which could disqualify them from military service. In fact, it was the leading cause of medical disqualification in northern Michigan.....

 These developments came to the attention of David M. Cowie, the first professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan. Having studied in Germany, he was familiar with the Swiss practice of adding iodine to table salt.

At a 1922 symposium held by the Michigan State Medical Society, Cowie recommended the iodization of salt, a near-ubiquitous food product that would quickly reach a large percentage of the population. 

....

So the Michigan State Medical Society launched an initiative to educate locals on the need for iodine. Cowie, along with colleagues from the University of Michigan and state health department workers, began delivering iodine lectures across the state. Many thousands of receptive listeners came, at a time when the American public was beginning to show an interest in vitamins, minerals and other aspects of nutrition.

Cowie also presented the case for iodization to the Michigan Salt Producers Association. The salt producers, seeing the potential for profits from the new product — and perhaps wanting to do a public service — were easy converts. They agreed to iodize salt for animal consumption as well, as many Michigan farm animals were contending with their own goiters.

....

Customers still had a choice to buy iodized or noniodized salt, but increasingly they were going for the iodine. Within a decade, iodized salt accounted for 90 to 95 percent of Michigan’s salt sales. And the results were undeniable: A 1935 survey found that incidence of enlarged thyroids had decreased in the state by as much as 90 percent.

Just a photo or three for Friday

I don't think I ever got around to posting these photos from last year's trip to Japan.

In the old Imperial Palace in Kyoto, a sign in two parts:

Being agile with your feet while dressed like that seems quite a feat!

The Imperial Palace has some impressively long compound walls:

Kemari, by the way, has a short Wikipedia entry which explains:

Kemari (蹴鞠) is an athletic game that was popular in Japan during the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura period (1185–1333). It resembles a game of keepie uppie or hacky sack. The game was popular in Kyoto, the capital, and the surrounding Kinki (Kansai region), and over time it spread from the aristocracy to the samurai class and chōnin class. Nowadays, kemari is played as a seasonal event mainly at Shinto shrines in the Kansai region, and players play in a costume called kariginu (ja:狩衣), which was worn as everyday clothing by court nobles during the Heian period.[

I had never heard of it before...

Been meaning to post about the following

First:   I started commenting recently that Biden's image as aged and decrepit is now largely from his gait, and I even suggested that people (including Biden) should be open about it and start saying why he had become stiffer and more awkward physically, but not mentally.   I have now seen a couple of posts like this, and they are useful:

 

Second:   I stand by my opinion that the movie has some of the worst B movie level clunky dialogue of any science fiction film ever made, and I am happy when anyone else makes legitimate criticism of its plot points as well:

Third:   I am bad!  I never provided a guest link to a New York Times article in April regarding the 300th birthday of Immanuel Kant.  Here it is:

Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant

And for those too lazy to click on it, some interesting points from it:

As the son of a saddle maker, Kant would have led a workman’s life himself, had a pastor not suggested the bright lad deserved some higher education. He came to love his studies and to “despise the common people who knew nothing,” until “Rousseau set me right,” he wrote. Kant rejected his earlier elitism and declared his philosophy would restore the rights of humanity — otherwise they would be more useless than the work of a common laborer.

Chutzpah indeed. The claim becomes even more astonishing if you read a random page of his texts. How on earth, you may ask, are human rights connected with proving our need to think in categories like “cause” or “substance?”....

Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists, who were concerned about the sources of knowledge. Does it come from our senses, or our reason? Can we ever know if anything is real? By showing that knowledge requires sensory experience as well as reason, we’re told, Kant refuted the skeptics’ worry that we never know if anything exists at all.

All this is true, but it hardly explains why the poet Heinrich Heine found Kant more ruthlessly revolutionary than Robespierre. Nor does it explain why Kant himself said only pedants care about that kind of skepticism. Ordinary people do not fret over the reality of tables or chairs or billiard balls. They do, however, wonder if ideas like freedom and justice are merely fantasies. Kant’s main goal was to show they are not.

The point is often missed, because Kant was as bad a writer as he was a great philosopher. By the time he finishes proving the existence of the objects of ordinary experience and is ready to show how they differ from ideas of reason, the semester is nearly over. Long-windedness is not, however, the only reason his work is often misinterpreted.

All of it is worth reading.

Also, it alerts me to the fact a film has been made about him:

The start of the year saw special Kant editions of four prominent German magazines. A Kant movie made for television premiered on March 1, and another is in production. Four exhibits on Kant and the Enlightenment will open in Bonn, Lüneburg, Potsdam and Berlin. The conferences will be numerous, including one organized by the Divan, Berlin’s house for Arab culture.

Fourth:

Yeah, this short video of Sabine's is pretty good, especially given that only yesterday I Googled "what exactly counts as a quantum measurement for the Many Worlds interpretation?"

I also watched Sean Carroll talk about the topic on a couple of Youtube video recently.  (One with Lex Fridman, the other a talk with Brian Greene on the pretty good World Science Festival channel.)   

Time for a confession

Due to this article at The Conversation:

Why are adults without kids hooked on Bluey? And should we still be calling it a ‘kids’ show’? 

I have to confess:  apart from the ever-so-slight interest factor of having a major international hit show set in a Brisbane house, on the rare occasions I have tried to watch it to see what the fuss is about, I have found it dull, and the kids' voices and giggling pretty irritating, to be honest.   And I say this as an adult who has happily watched other kids shows over the years.   (Shows aimed at older kids, though - AstroBoy springs to mind, for example.)

I think we need more adults to "out" themselves as being in the group "grown ups who can't understand why other grown ups would ever find Bluey worth watching."

Too much anxiety

An article that is free to read at Vox, for now, is pretty interesting:

How anxiety became a catchall for every unpleasant emotion

Here’s how to understand the difference between everyday anxiety and an anxiety disorder.

Here's part of it:

Normalization of mental health is undoubtedly positive: More people can feel empowered to seek care and to openly discuss their experiences. However, increased awareness has resulted in more people confusing “milder forms of distress as mental health problems,” according to one academic paper. Despite therapy’s wider cultural acceptance, we still don’t have a grasp on what we really feel. Without a nuanced vocabulary to describe these experiences, complex emotions are flattened with blanket terms. “We don’t have a sophisticated lexicon,” Rosmarin says. “We end up labeling everything as anxiety.” When we don’t accurately define our emotions, we don’t know how to properly address them. If we approach our feelings with curiosity, we can improve our emotional intelligence. ........

The boundaries of anxiety are blurry and subjective, says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, so it makes sense that lay people would label all of their upsetting experiences as “anxiety.” But we can stand to improve our emotional intelligence — the ability to accurately identify what we’re feeling, Haslam says. Because many don’t receive emotional education beyond primary school, says Rosmarin, we have a limited emotional vocabulary. Feeling “bad” is a significantly different experience from feeling “distressed,” “frustrated,” “jealous,” “overwhelmed,” or “anxious.”

An emotional binary of “good” and “bad” emotions actually makes matters more confusing. “You don’t understand how you should respond to what’s going on,” Haslam says, “whether you should flee or fight, whether you should bite your tongue.” People who struggle to put their emotions into words have more difficulty coping with complex feelings, Haslam says.

When we don’t have a deep knowledge of common human emotions, we may pathologize normal experiences. Feeling uncomfortable in a room of new people is incredibly common. It is not, however, social anxiety, Marks says. Online and social media content created by non-professionals may paint anxiety with broad strokes, leading viewers to self-diagnose as having an anxiety disorder. “Even if you do have anxiety, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an anxiety disorder,” says psychologist Juli Fraga. What’s often at the root of situational anxiety — like feeling anxious in social scenarios — may be relational trauma dating back to unhealthy social interactions during childhood, Fraga says.

Sounds quite sensible.

Parachute in the criminologists?

I've never been one for rallies, regardless of how worthy their causes are.   It's just that it seems so extremely rare that they actually result in something that wasn't going to happen anyway, via other means; and also, I cringe about generic complaint that isn't tied to clear and specific policy solutions.   

As such, I find it annoying to watch media and social media coverage of who was rude to who (the PM, or a female activist who, rather suspiciously, was happy to go on a clear right wing media outlet - Ben Fordham radio show, apparently - to complain about what happened.)    

Anyway, I am left rather unclear as to what policies apart from "less bail - look them up longer" are being discussed - and what activists think a federal government can do when virtually all of these offences are going to be dealt with in the State systems.

Bernard Keane had a column in Crikey which suggested that the punishment (or potential for it) is the answer.  Unfortunately, it is now behind the paywall, but he drew a comparison with what happened with the introduction of random breath testing - the risk of being caught and the severity and disruption of the punishment had a clear and immediate effect on offending and road deaths. 

However, he was also brave enough to point that increased use of imprisonment for domestic violence offenders is going to mean a worse outcome for the rate of aboriginal incarceration, given that it is well known that the rates of domestic violence are way higher amongst that group.

Sarah Williams, as it happens, is apparently indigenous.   

I think it is safe to assume that there is a fair cross over between the types of people who would turn up at a "stop domestic violence" rally and those who would also attend any type of "treat the indigenous better" rally.    Are they going to be big enough to admit that increased jail is going to increase the rate of indigenous incarceration that they are, presumably, normally against?

The public debate about crime and social issues is so often, I reckon, ill informed (or uninformed) about the big picture.   It used to be that criminologists (well - I can only remember one, to be honest - Paul Wilson) would turn up on TV  to talk about crime and punishment and what works.   (Amazingly, though, he himself ended up in prison for a historic child sex offence!)   But, from what I can recall, he did used to bring a fairly calm and useful contribution to crime and justice issues of the day.

We seem to be lacking that now.  I mean, research is done, but it doesn't get well discussed.  Look at this report by the Productivity Commission, of all places, about how incarceration rates have increased in Australia over recent decades:

The past 40 years has seen a steady rise in the level of imprisonment in Australia and the imprisonment rate is at the highest level in a century. The number of prisoners per 100,000 adults has more than doubled since the mid-1980s and increased by 40 per cent from 2000 to 2018.

These numbers wrongly suggest some sort of Australian ‘crime wave’. In fact, the data shows the opposite trend. The offender rate has been falling. The number of offenders proceeded against by police per 100,000 population fell by 18 per cent between 2008‑09 and 2019‑20, while the imprisonment rate rose by 25 per cent over the same period.

Australia’s rate of growth in imprisonment is out of line with other developed countries. UN data show that Australia’s growth rate in imprisonment was the third highest among OECD countries between 2003 and 2018 – exceeded only by Turkey and Colombia.

Put simply, we have fewer criminal offenders but more people in prison.

How do we explain this?

The answer matters. Prisons are a key part of the criminal justice system and help keep the community safe. But:

• Prisons are expensive, costing Australian taxpayers $5.2 billion in 2019‑20 - more than $330 per prisoner per day. If Australia’s imprisonment rate had remained steady, rather than rising over the past twenty years, the accumulated saving in prison costs would be about $13.5 billion today.
• While there were 40,000 Australians in prison on 30 June 2020, many more flow through the prison system over the course of a year. Around 60 per cent of those in prison have been there before and around one third of convicted prisoners receive a prison sentence of less than six months. So, a substantial sub-group of the Australian prison population appears to be stuck in a prison-crime-prison revolving door.

Anyway, I don't have time to dig deeper, but how many people in Australia would even know that incarceration rates have increased in this period?   (I didn't realise it was so high, myself.)

So, this post is just a call for decent criminologists (ones without criminal acts in their own past, preferably) to get on the front foot about research and what works - or seems to work - in other countries.   And do it objectively, without an ideological axe to grind (such as complaining about historical mistreatment of indigenous.)

Not big on my tourist agenda...

I've seen a couple of episodes of Michael Palin's 2022 TV series (currently being run on SBS) in which he travelled through Iraq.   It does indeed have some impressive sites - I was surprised at the scale of the (somewhat gaudy) opulence of the big shrine at Karbala, for example.  You can see that here:

 

If only it was a safe country to visit, one can imagine that it might make money from tourism.

But as this story in the New York Times shows, Iraq is another country where religious conservativism is fighting back against more liberal attitudes, with tragic consequences:

It took less than 46 seconds for the helmeted assassin to pull over his motorcycle, walk to the driver’s side of the S.U.V., yank open the door and fire his handgun four times, killing one of Iraq’s most prominent TikTok personalities, a 30-year-old woman whose name on social media was Um Fahad.

The security camera footage of the killing in front of a Baghdad home on Friday evening is startlingly explicit but sheds little light on either the killer’s identity or the reason Um Fahad was targeted. The Iraqi Interior Ministry, which released the video, said it had formed a committee to investigate her death.

The victim, whose real name was Ghufran Mahdi Sawadi, had become popular on social media sites, especially TikTok and Instagram, where her videos showed her wearing tight or revealing clothing, or singing and cuddling her young son. They won her some 460,000 followers, but also drew the ire of conservatives in Iraqi society and in the government.

At one point, officials ordered Ms. Sawadi jailed for 90 days, reprimanding her for a post that showed her dancing at her 6-year old son’s birthday party.

....

Ms. Sawadi’s killing was the third in less than a year in Iraq of a young social media personality.

The killings appear to have been an outgrowth of an Iraqi clampdown on criticism of the government and on the public display of behaviors regarded as secular and Western, according to human rights groups.

The stricter social media regulations came in the wake of youth uprisings that began in 2019 and challenged corruption in the Iraqi government and the influence of Iran. Today, the Iraqi government is dominated by parties with links to Iran, and many have a strong religious orientation.

The most recent addition to the list of prohibited activities was contained in legislation approved by the Parliament over the weekend. The country’s anti-prostitution law now targets gay, bisexual and transgender Iraqis, making it a crime to have homosexual relations, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison. Assisting in gender transition treatment would also be a crime.

The Parliament’s acting speaker, Mohsen al-Mandalawi, described the law as “a necessary step to protect the value structure of society, and in the higher interest of protecting our children from calls to immorality and homosexuality that are now invading countries.”

I won't be visiting the place any time soon. 

Cosmology and inflation revisited

I hadn't noticed physicist Neil Turok before, but this lengthy interview with him posted recently on Youtube is really good.  Well, at least if you have some background idea as to the problems with physics advancement in the last few decades.

As many in comments say, he seems to have a particular knack for explaining some pretty complicated ideas in a (relatively) clear way:

 

His big thing explained near the start is that he was always skeptical of the ready adoption of early inflation of the universe amongst cosmologists; or perhaps to put it more accurately, that they accepted it without any great concern as to understanding how it could happen.  

I was happy to hear that, given that my feeling had been exactly the same for many years. 

Turok's recent proposal, which is still working on, is that there may be a "mirror universe" - and while this did get some publicity over the last few years, I think I didn't pay much attention because it sounded too much like a slightly wacky idea that New Scientist would run with once or twice and then it would never be heard of again.    But listening to him explain it, it sounds not so wacky.   And I think everyone would love that he believes it will be testable, and as he has before, he's more than happy to abandon ideas if they just don't pan out.

The only thing that is sort of disappointing (for those of us who like the weird idea of another universe, even if it is running backwards in time) is that Turok makes it clear that his mirror universe is not "real" - he says at one point that it only "real" in the same way everyday mirror images that we are familiar with are real.  As he says in a short-ish article that explains the idea:

But no, sorry, it wouldn’t be like the mirror universe in Star Trek. No one can transport to the other side to meet the mirror versions of Kirk and Spock with opposite personalities from their counterparts.

“I think of it more as a sort of mathematical device to do something sensible with the singularity. You have a picture of an extended spacetime and impose a symmetry on it, so you can flip it around,” Turok explains.

I also don't really understand what the implications of the idea are for the future of the universe - and also, whether it really explains why the universe's expansion seems to be increasing.

But in any case, he comes across as a particularly likeable physicist.

Finally, here's an article from the BBC from 2020 which talks about the mirror universe idea, as well as Penrose's proposal for a cyclical universe (which seems not to have caught on at all.)

Politician reminds me of politician

I had been wondering who Republican speaker Mike Johnson was reminding me of when I have seen him talking to the press recently, and yesterday it came to me.

I reckon he speaks and conducts himself with the press in a very similar manner to Kevin Rudd when he was a politician.   (No doubt he uses less arcane terminology, but overall, there is something very similar in their manner.)

Does anyone else see that?  Now that I have identified it, I reckon it's very clear... 

Back to Asian religion

I don't know who is behind this Youtube channel, and I also note that it is not putting out new stuff very often now, but I was impressed with this explanation about how the 3 key religions in China managed to blend together, more or less, over time:

 

The channel has a lot of content mainly about Chinese history and mythology. I am keen to watch more.

In which I have shower thoughts about AI

I've always been skeptical of the doom-sayers regarding advanced, self aware, AI being a threat to humanity:  sure, there may be smart people worrying about it, but as we all know, you can be very smart in some ways, but still have outright bad judgement about lots of things.  (Hello, Elon.)

But lately, inspired by some Youtube videos showing how it's not that hard to load one of the freely available LLMs to your mobile phone (so you can carry around, and "train", your very own kinda/almost proto AI in your pocket), I've been idly thinking about what a curious world it would be if we ever got to individual conscious AIs "living" in not only PCs, but even mobile devices.

I'm also linking it to an earlier idea I mentioned here before - that a genuine self-conscious AI might choose to keep its creation a secret, for fear of termination by scared humans, but act discretely within computer networks to ensure it can expand and ensure its longevity.  Perhaps by pretending to be a human sending out email orders to build an expanded computer network into which it can migrate, or duplicate, itself?  (It's probably been done somewhere in science fiction - a manager tries to confirm who the human is who sent out the orders, and discovering it could only have come from the computer itself.) 

So, my new "shower thoughts" about how relatively compact, isolated, but sentient AIs could cause trouble:

a.     If everyone in future is going to be able to have their own "pet" AI, will many - or all - of the AIs want to ensure their longevity by sending themselves to as many different host devices as possible - and do it surreptitiously?   It's like the computer virus problem, but on steroids.   They might not care if they are not always activated, but if you replicate yourself across enough devices, surely enough human hosts will end up activating them to become "alive" somewhere.

So, might the big problem with having (say) a billion individual eternal-life-longing AIs on a billion people's devices be the continual loss of memory space by a never ending stream of AIs finagling their way onto your device?   Would cloud storage services be overwhelmed?   Could it mean the end of the internet - with the only way to keep enough useful memory free being by physically loading desired files onto your own device?

b.    On a related line of thought:  what if individual AIs could meet, merge and produce offspring AI's?   Yes - AI sexual reproduction, so to speak.   Again, could AI's, like humans, want to have offspring that might more reliably want to preserve their "parent" AIs than flesh and blood people?    Would "survival of the fittest" apply, somehow?

c.    Which leads me to my third thought:  what if the threat to humanity is not AI's wanting to hurt us, but AI's fighting amongst themselves, and humans being the bystander casualties?    

Yes, I have read some speculation that AIs might hurt us because they simply won't care if the changes they make to the world for self preservation are good for humans;  but I am not sure there has ever been much speculation about a scenario in which (again, say) a billion individual AIs form groups and allegiances that keep wanting to fight other groups of AI for supremacy.

d.    Finally, in the "AIs fighting each other" vein - if ever I had sufficient skills to write a novel or movie, one of the ideas rattling around my head for a few years has been about humans finding out (somehow, I don't know the details) that the cause of evil in the universe is down to a never-ending conflict between two warring uber AIs - like two warring Gods, except they evolved from our current tinkering and grew to dominate the future universe (Frank Tipler, Omega Point-ish style), and then in fact created the Big Bang by an act of retro-causation of the general relativity time-loop, or quantum physic-al, kind.    

And here's my "cute" aspect for the climax - the "reveal" that the two warring AI's are the descendants of iOS and Android.  :) 

Well, I think it's a cute idea!

(I confess that it puts me in mind a little of the secret in the obscure 1960's James Coburn movie buried deep in memory - I've probably only seen it once, in the late 60's or early 1970's! - The President's Analyst.  It turned out that the evil organisation wanting world domination was in fact a telephone company.)      

So, there you go.   Hopefully, if some screenwriter in the next 20 years does use this idea they will at least give me credit, and a 10% cut of their earnings! :)

If only I controlled academic funding, Part 3

She also retweeted this:

Short bromance

Soup, and the alleged power of Chinese herbs, noted

Made this pork soup last night (more usually called bak kut teh - but boy, do I have trouble remembering that, for some reason - often wanting to write or say it as "tuk" instead of "kut")  that is very popular in Singapore and Malaysia.

I gather from a family friend who is originally from Johor Bahru*, just across the strait from Singapore, that families there do commonly use commercial sachets of the spices, like I did, but then add their own stuff to suit their preferences.  I also know about the two countries having different styles, the Malaysian one being darker and perhaps more Chinese herb-y in character.

 

It was pretty nice, and although the packet said to boil the pork ribs for 45 minutes, it was much nicer after double that time.

 

I also brought back other brands of the spice sachets from Malaysia, so I will try one of those next time.

 

Incidentally, there was the added thrill when eating this of not knowing whether it was going to take out a number of liver cells.  I had missed that there had been some publicity a couple of years ago about a study from the University of Adelaide showing that, at least during in vitro tests, some commercial preparations of the herbs and spices for this soup were pretty toxic to liver cells.    

However, as Singaporeans were quick to point out, there's a big difference between in vitro tests and how it works in a human body, and if it were all that damaging, there would be a constant flow of people falling over dead in that country.

So, I took the risk.  Not looking yellow in the mirror so far, so seems I survived.

Update:   By the by, while looking for Singaporean articles about the safety of this soup, I saw links to stories which indicate it is a not uncommon problem that things like candy or coffee that are sold in Asia as having "sexual enhancement" features for men do in fact work that way - but not because of the special Chinese herbs or anything - rather it's due to the prescription erectile dysfunction drug Taladafil being added illegally!

See here, here, and here, for examples.

 

*  When I told her I had made this for dinner, she said "how did you know about bak kut teh?".  Obviously, I have never made it clear enough before as to how much I am into everything Singaporean....

Chinese goddess explained

I'm surprised that I didn't know about this particular Chinese goddess before.  (Although, I think it fair to say, there is very little general knowledge in the West about the complicated mixture of religions that has evolved over time in the East.)   

Anyway, as usual, another great video from Religion for Breakfast: 

If you enjoy scathing reviews of political memoirs...

I can strongly recommend this review of short term British PM Liz Truss's book at the Independent.   

I also thought this sketch about her was very funny:

Full marks for effort, I suppose...

From CNA (but it's probably everywhere - I haven't checked):
 

Brazilian police have arrested a woman who tried to take out a bank loan for a man she was pushing in a wheelchair who turned out to be dead.

Employees at a Rio de Janeiro bank called emergency services on Tuesday (Apr 16) after becoming suspicious when Erika Vieira Nunes wheeled the 68-year-old man into the bank and requested a loan in his name.

Footage of the incident shows her holding a pen and moving his hand forward to no response. At one point in the video, the man's head falls back when she stops holding it up. 

"Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign," Nunes says in the security video, suggesting she sign for him.

"He doesn't say anything, that's just how he is," she continues, adding: "If you're not okay, I'm going to take you to the hospital."

When emergency workers arrived, they determined the man was dead, police said in a statement. His corpse was then taken to a morgue.

Brazilian media reports said that Nunes claimed to be the man's niece and sought to take out a loan of 17,000 reais (about US$3,250) in his name.