Oh my Gawd...

In The Guardian:

So Russell Brand was baptised in the Thames, and all his sins were washed away. Cheaper than a lawyer, I suppose

And Bear Grills, who I have also disliked for a long time, was part of the show.

As some paragraphs at the end explain:

Both are prone to emanating a certain sense that the rules that apply to lesser mortals are an affront to themselves. Discussing his financial affairs, Grylls once told an interviewer: “I find it demoralising to pay income tax at 40 per cent when I work really hard and spend a lot of time away from my family.” Mm. Can’t help feeling he should toughen up a bit.

There’s not a whole lot less appealing than someone now worth an estimated £20m whining about paying his fair share like everyone else from nurses to teachers. That said, I’m a huge fan of people who talk about making extremely lucrative TV shows like it’s a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Appallingly, Bear’s only got an OBE. Where’s his George Cross for taking down Una from the Saturdays in the Central American jungle? 

Concluding with Brand, his spiritual journey has been what you might expect of a bog-standard sex-case-turned-wingnut. He was previously a Buddhist, then earlier this year began endorsing a Roman Catholic prayer app called Hallow, and seems to have settled for now on whichever branch of the Anglican faith permits telly survivalists to rebirth you. “Week one as a Christian has been amazing,” Brand said the other day, adding that he felt “changed, transitioned”. Onlookers are unlikely to spot the difference. He still has a conspiracist TV portal in which viewers are treated to material on the deep state/Bill Gates/the plandemic – in short, all the usual suspects of the usual suspects. It’s hard to know how long his conversion will last. But you can’t help thinking there will only be room for one messiah in that relationship – and unfortunately, it won’t be Jesus.

 

Feeling sorry for Noumea - and me!

Just when I was contemplating a possible trip to Noumea later this year, this news:

New Caledonia has announced a curfew from 6pm to 6am following overnight riots that saw vehicles torched and roads blocked in the South Pacific French territory, following proposed constitutional reforms.

In addition, the country's main airport, La Tontouta International, has been closed.

Protests and violence broke out ahead of a vote in the French National Assembly on changes to the New Caledonian constitution.

The French High Commission in New Caledonia said in a statement overnight on Monday that there had been further significant and ongoing disturbances in the capital, Noumea and surrounding townships.

It added that security forces had been mobilised.

All gatherings had been banned in the greater Noumea area, and a curfew and liquor ban had been put in place.

 The place has a personal significance, as it's where I met my wife...

Cass talks about the American situation

Interesting interview with that Hilary Cass about her report on transgender youth treatment in the UK, and comparing it to attitudes in the US.

(At one point she makes the obvious point that the aggressive political response by Republicans probably means you get the medical groups being overly defensive in reaction.)  

Continued polling panic

So, lots of people I follow on Twitter are feeling a bit panicky about the latest NYT poll which shows Trump winning in most of the six "key swing states".   

Here, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post looks at the figures more closely, and it does indicate some really odd dynamics currently playing out in US politics.  For example:

Particularly remarkable is how much better the Democratic brand does than Biden.

While Biden trails by six points in the six states combined, a generic Democratic Senate candidate leads by four points among likely voters — a 10-point gap, on the margins.

While Biden is close to tied among young and Hispanic voters, that Democratic Senate candidate leads among them by 19 and 16 points, respectively. That generic Democrat also leads by 59 points among Black voters, compared to Biden’s 40-point edge.

As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, the biggest gulf in performance between Biden and other Democrats is in Nevada, where Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) takes 28 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of young voters who are otherwise voting for Trump.

All of which suggests that many of these voters aren’t balking at Democrats — just Biden.

Overall, I would say the strength of Trump in Arizona doesn't make much sense - I had the impression that his permanently soft focus, chronic Trump suck up Kari Lake was floundering quite a lot.   

And it seems wildly strange that primary voting Republicans are still registering protest votes against Trump in pretty substantial numbers, yet this doesn't seem to show up in polls.

(I also find it hard to believe that Trump is gaining popularity from his court room appearances.  His recent rallies are playing as duds, too.)   

It's a very weird situation.   Given all of the factors (including reports of Republicans far behind in getting organised for the election), I still don't think the polling can be an accurate prediction of what will happen in November.

Update:  Sure, I agree that the nutty Left is very nutty at the moment - the ones who say they will punish Biden for not being tough on Israel by helping ensure a rabid pro-Israel supporter like Trump gets the job instead.   And this is bad optics for Biden.   But as many have been saying, it's not exactly like the same crisis as the anti-Vietnamese war era, and I doubt it will be as electorally important come November as it now seems.

 

On a technical note - oddities of Google Chromecast

I don't know how many people use these, as I only use one because my (now getting old) Samsung TV's operating system would not allow the app for one of the newer streaming services to be added, but I use a Google Chromecast dongle plugged into the TV.

So now I have the choice to watch Youtube either on the old app already on the Samsung (which works fine), or to watch it using the version of the app that came loaded already on the Chromecast.   I usually use the Chromecast version, as the Chromecast provides quick access to Netflix as well.

Within Youtube, I have two accounts - but I mainly use one. 

For some reason, on the weekend, videos watched through the usual account started playing in really low quality.   It was obvious, and I knew something was wrong.   

I initially suspected a very low internet speed, as on one recent check, it had been abnormally slow.   But the speed wasn't too bad (by Australia's low standards), so I checked for fault within the TV, and spent much time checking settings, rebooting it, etc.  Then I tried rebooting the Chromecast, checking its settings, and considered re-setting the app.   

I then realised that videos watched via the Samsung Youtube app (using the same account as on the Chromecast) worked fine.  And then I discovered that videos on my second Youtube account on the Chromecast app were normal resolution too.   Why would that be?   It was making little sense.

I finally discovered that within the main account, on the Chromecast Youtube app, if I went to the information screen for an individual video, I could check resolution, and found it was set as 720p.

Changing the resolution on just one video (from the access to settings within the video info screen) to 1080p changed it for all videos on the main Youtube account.

This is pretty odd - I have no idea how the resolution setting from that part of the app would have got changed to 720p - I never have normal cause to be looking at Youtube settings at all.

 And why such a settings change, if it arose spontaneously within the app, would affect only one account, and not the secondary account, I have no idea.

This may be a boring post, but it just serves as an example of weird things that can happen with Google apps, and take a long time to resolve.   (I Googled the issue asking in many different ways, but it was such an odd problem to explain to get useful suggestions.)     

Monday catch up

I've been very work busy lately.   Still am.

Here's a catch up of things that have caught my attention:

American infrastructure really does sound crap:

From the Washington Post, a description of the very decrepit sounding courthouse where Trump is being tried in Manhattan:

When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”

He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.

The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.

Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much irritation to the defendant). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.

Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.

Jealous that I'm not in Tasmania:

More about Buddhist influence only Greeks and others

Remember how three four years ago I posted about my surprise that Buddhists had probably travelled as far West as Egypt well before the time of Christ, and how Greeks had seemingly had some interaction with them?  No?  Well, you just don't pay enough attention.

Anyhow, instead of reading, you can now view a video from the wonderful Religion for Breakfast pretty much on the same topic.  (Lots of people in the comments that follow say things like "yeah, this really is not common knowledge, and perhaps it should be."  So it's not just me.)

 

Climate change and extreme weather

It seems that every few days lately there is another extreme flood from some part of the world, as well as temperature records being broken.  (South East Asia has been dangerously hot for the last couple of months.)

It's kind of interesting how people who decided a decade or two ago that climate change was all an imaginary crock (not that they will admit it, but their implicit view is that it's a grand conspiracy theory by thousands of scientists) can look at the news and just think "meh, the weather hasn't been too exceptional outside my front door lately, so there's still nothing to it."

The old cranks at the remnants of Catallaxy blog will never change their mind - there's too much face to lose by admitting they picked the "crank" side of the debate long ago.  I wonder if Sinclair Davidson has recanted?   We don't hear much from him anywhere any more.

Jail and alternatives

Since I recently posted that we don't hear enough from criminologists, I should post here about the article that appeared a couple of days ago at the ABC:

There are fresh calls to put more domestic violence offenders in prison. But mounting evidence suggests that 'jailing is failing'

With articles like this, I tend not to have trouble with the analysis of the problem (broadly, how our current implementation of custodial punishment is not working well from a rehabilitation point of view), but have more concerns about the vagueness of how alternative programs could be expected to work on a large enough scale.   

To be fair, I don't have this attitude from an extensive reading on the topic - but it just seems an obvious problem that there seem to be so few successful example of programs that they can point to within Australia, and that overseas examples are often specific to those countries settings and may not be easily translatable to here.

For example, in this article:

In fact, alternatives to incarceration have been shown to be radically more effective at reducing reoffending rates. Instead of one-in-two going back to jail, a recidivism rate of as low as 13.6 per cent has been achieved in Spain by emphasising and supporting healthy lifestyle choices, connections with family and emotional development.

The Productivity Commission recommended Australia pursue policies like those in Norway by paying more attention to "the underlying causes of offending" to achieve "better long-term recidivism outcomes" and lowering the cost of crime to the community. Doing so, it said, "would move Australian prison systems towards a stronger emphasis on rehabilitation and have the potential for better long-term outcomes".

 OK, because I have trouble imagining that the social environment from which criminality arise in Norway translates at all well to that from which a large part of ours comes (indigenous population, often in rural and remote areas), let's look at the link to the Spanish story.

Hmmm.   It reads rather like strong self promotion by an organisation (Diagrama Foundation) that claims large success in Spain, but these are the groups they are largely helping there:

We work with some of the most disadvantaged children in society. In our centres we work
with boys and girls aged 14-23 3 , typically convicted for violent offences. They face a full range of challenges – disengagement from education, from different types of family background, and with a wide range of health, social and other challenges, including learning difficulties, substance misuse and mental health issues. Many of our centres include therapeutic units for those with significant mental health conditions and we also run specific centres solely for young people in the justice system who have mental health issues.

When our centres were first established, more than 85% of those we worked with came from Roma communities, marginalised by society. We continue to work with children and young people from diverse backgrounds across all our services. We run over 75 residential shelters for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children as well as integration programmes to address the challenges faced by people socially excluded by race or religion. We also manage medical and educational programmes for vulnerable communities in Senegal and Kenya.

We are commissioned by 15 of the 17 counties in Spain to run either custodial or non-
secure facilities. Each region of Spain is different in terms of culture, language, climate and
geography. We run centres in the middle of cities, and in distant parts of the countryside. 

While I don't doubt that Roma communities are far from ideal for children being raised within them, I also find it hard to believe that the social background is anything much like the social dysfunction in the Northern Territory towns the report is looking at. 

Also - I'm a tad sceptical about the section of the report which says they achieve this in Spain with about half the staffing of current detention facilities in the NT.

And here's the thing - many of the facilities in Spain are in towns and cities, where it is surely going to be much, much easier to attract the type of worker you need in the very "hands on" rehabilitation centres, compared to trying to fill such jobs in places like Katherine or Alice Springs:

Social educators - Qualified to degree level and guided by the Technical Team, they support young people throughout every aspect of their day, from getting up in the morning to when they go to bed and including in classes, vocational training and leisure activities. They are at the heart of our approach and genuinely care about the young people they work with.

Technical Team - formed of qualified psychologists, social workers and reintegration workers (who support planning for release - housing, education, jobs), working alongside healthcare staff. They plan and deliver assessments, integrated case management, interventions and reintegration programmes.

Security staff – who act as a last resort in incident management. 

So yeah, I am far from convinced about how readily you can make that work here.   

Not that I know what the alternative is, really....

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.)