Two other points about Guardians 2

*   The Washington Post has an article noting that the movie really doubles down on the use of retro pop music, and it did feel a tad excessive compared to the more restrained use in the first movie.  The article criticises this whole genre of movie as getting a bit lazy:

When needle drops have been curated carefully and deployed judiciously, they can enhance a film’s atmosphere and its characters’ unspoken feelings. Too often, though, they’re lazy ploys to earn the audience’s buy-in, or to signal the connoisseurship and impressively arcane tastes of the filmmaker. Music that should be used to convey added layers of environmental and emotional information is instead used simply for nostalgia appeal and self-congratulation.

Yes, I concur.

*  Has anyone else yet mentioned that Ego's origin story seems to draw on the idea of a Boltzmann Brain?  Let me Google it - yes, someone at IMDB has already commented on this.  (It is very hard to be first on the internet!)

Speaking of China

The BBC is reporting that morning in Beijing currently looks like this:

Makes me want to cough just looking at it.

And how bad is the air quality?  Spectacularly bad:

Beijing's environmental agency said that as of 11:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the PM2.5 reading - which measures pollution in the form of small breathable particles - was 500 micrograms per cubic metre.

The WHO says the maximum safe level should be 25 micrograms per cubic metre.

A good survey of the rise of China

This review of a book on Asia's rise contains an interesting summary of what has been going on with China.   Some things of note:

Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to 4.4 billion people. But its story is disproportionately about China’s economic growth. Beijing’s official statistics are notoriously unreliable, but by most reckonings, China became the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit rates every year for two decades....

Rachman links China’s newly aggressive policies to President Xi Jinping, noting that the month after he took office “Chinese military aircraft entered Japanese-controlled airspace for the first time since 1958,” and that in his first eighteen months Xi “paid more official visits to the People’s Liberation Army than his predecessor had done in a decade.” Xi has paid equal attention to building public support for his newly assertive policies, bolstering decades of Communist Party propaganda that China, at long last, is claiming its rightful place as a world power after more than a century of foreign humiliation.

This “aggrieved nationalism” coexists with an equally strong feeling of insecurity within the Chinese government—a dangerous mixture. The Communist Party’s legitimacy no longer rests on ideology but on economic growth, which is slowing. The Party is convinced that the West fomented the string of so-called color revolutions demanding democratic governance that took place during the 2000s—from Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and Iran. It fears and expects similar subversion in China. Outrage at elite corruption was a common feature of these movements, and corruption is rampant in China. So Xi has launched a vigorous campaign against it—conveniently jailing many of his political opponents. The difficulty, as Rachman points out, is that “arresting more than one hundred thousand people…risks creating political instability by another route.”

Scenic Norway

This photo appeared on Reddit recently, noting the unusual and spectacular setting for a soccer field in Norway.   (I am interested in what the buildings on the point beyond the field are, as well.  Looks like a lighthouse keepers house?)   No wonder there seems to be a surge of interest in Norway as a scenic wonderland.

Another rule of thumb

A politician (or political adviser) unduly obsessed with immigration and how it's wrecking the place (and allegedly so unfair on those already here) is never a good sign.

The case in point:  Steve Bannon.

The trouble with wisdom teeth

Forgot to post this last week: an article explaining why so many of us moderns need our wisdom teeth out:

Sarah Zhang: I’d like to begin with where your book ends, which is the modern scourge of impacted wisdom teeth. Our ancestors had wisdom teeth, they did not have dentists, and they did not have so many problems. Aside from possibly being over-diagnosed, why are impacted wisdom teeth a uniquely modern problem?

Peter Ungar: It’s a uniquely modern problem because we don’t grow our jaws long enough to accommodate our teeth. It turns out that nature has selected our jaw length on the basis of what it expects us to be doing during the period of time the jaw is growing. The more frequently you put force on the jaw, the longer the jaw grows. Nature has to guesstimate how long your jaw should be for teeth of a given size. Today we don't achieve that because we’re eating mush as kids.

I don't think my diet was particularly mushy, but these things are relative, I suppose...

Inheritance taxed

Adam Creighton does something relatively useful today (don't worry, he's bound to say something stupid or otherwise objectionable tomorrow) by doing some straight reporting on what a visiting Japanese banker says:

He said Japan’s “40 to 50 per cent inheritance tax (on) wealthy people” helped keep a lid on inequality in Japan, which made politics more stable. It capped house price growth too. “Here people have a strong incentive to buy a house for kids, whereas less so in Japan,” Mr Yoshizawa said.

He also said the financial sector could learn from Japanese banks, which have not been caught up in fraud and mis-selling scandals that have cost major US and European investment banks up to $320bn in fines since the financial crisis.

“In Japanese culture staff have a long-term commitment first of all. And the compensation system is flat,” he explained. “There’s less incentive to make a quick result.”

Colbert should apologise

While it is, of course, ridiculously hypocritical that anyone on the alt.right (or even those who decline to criticise them) should criticise Colbert for using an insult because they say it is politically incorrect, it's still true that Colbert should apologise to his audience for using an insult that no one should use.

There's nothing politically correct about my attitude to this:  I've always disliked the insult because it is juvenile and can be readily be taken by any truly homophobic and violent gay basher to be sympathetic to their attitude.

Update:  reading my link above, which seems to suggest that Colbert should never use any form of gay jibe for the relationship between Trump and Putin, I think that is a step too far.  There are fine lines to be drawn here, to be sure, but I don't really have a problem with a comedian mocking Trump and Putin by pretending they are gay lovers, especially given their reputation as uber heterosexuals (and in Putin's case at least, outright homophobic.)    But an insult based specifically on a homosexual sex act is different - it suggests (as Putin himself presumably thinks) that a particular sex act itself is degrading, but only when done by two men.  By specifying it as being about a homosexual sex act, it is too easily read as either directly or indirectly mocking homosexuality itself.

I suspect Colbert will apologise.

Ketamine and depression

It's pretty surprising how people use drugs for their hedonistic pleasure, but it takes so much effort for scientists to properly understand what said drug is doing in the brain. 

Not very funny

Here's another thought that I choose to speak in the open here:   there seems to me to be a disproportionate number of gay people in stand up comedy in Australia at the moment.

I could be completely wrong - stand up comedy has never been my thing, really.   The modern version is too crude, and (with few exceptions) involves too much self disclosure and seems too much of an attempt at self therapy. 

But on the ABC, you get to see comedians on panel shows and that's where I have the impression there seem to be a lot of gay stand up comedy.

And the trouble is, I don't find any of them particularly witty or funny.  I don't think it's a gay bias thing - I've always found Stephen Fry can be funny and witty, although I think some people do go over the top in their admiration of him.  Ellen Degeneres - well, I think she is a bit over rated, but she can be witty and a basic likeability is undeniable.  

But Tom Ballard - I find him hard to warm to.  Rhys Nicholson - can't see the wit there.  Josh Thomas - maybe he doesn't count as a stand up comic, but I was very underwhelmed by what I saw of his dramedy TV show.  Hannah Gadsby - surely a case of attempted public therapy, lasting years and years now.   Seems uncomfortable in anything I see her on.

But perhaps I should warm more to Gadsby, as she has decided to give up stand up and actually sounds as if she has reached a sensible position about gay identity:

The knotty complexities of the contemporary identity conundrum has been one of the thoughts weighing heaviest on Gadsby.

"I've come to realise I don't like the word queer, for myself at least, because it takes that concept of identity beyond sexuality, in my mind. I guess I was born under the star of Nanna. I realise at the moment there's quite a lot of pressure to declare how you identify, particularly in the LGBT community, so to be totally honest, I probably identify as 'Grandma'," she reveals. "The idea of Queerness - with a capital Q - is about making a statement, so I don't identify as that because I never set out to go, 'Oh I want to be different.' When I was a kid, being not normal was incredibly dangerous and unsafe, but I was powerless to change that, so I was just, y'know, not normal, in a sort of generic, none specified way. I desperately didn't want to stand out. I think that's why I've always been friends with old ladies - even though I'm not that old."

 To be fair, I should point out that I have no idea whether I would find stand up by many of our straight comedians very satisfying, either.  But I did watch some of a Kitty Flanagan stage show on Stan, and she was OK.   I like Tom Gleeson's comic persona of the moment, too.  

Not sure why so much of the younger set seems to be gay, though...

Lukewarming danger

I liked this article at New Republic, making it clear that scientists have been warning of the disingenuousness (and therefore danger to good policy) of the lukewarmer argument on climate change for years.   It is right that should be an outcry against the New York Times hiring one.  

Modern thoughts in Mongolia

I enjoyed last night's Foreign Correspondent - Mongolia - The Last Eagle Hunters. 

Apart from making me wonder, yet again, at how humans have this remarkable ability to learn to love the landscape and lifestyle in some of the most desolate looking places on Earth, the thing that really caught my attention was how these isolated people were expressing thoughts that were more modern than what you'll spot on some Western conservative websites.

The two examples of that - the 55 year old who said he remembered childhood winters were snowier and colder than they are now, and he thought that global warming probably meant that winters there would not be like that again.   Yes - global warming accepted as true by a nomadic, dirt poor Muslim who has probably never been on the internet.    Way to go, internet, to enable the conning of large slabs of the population of the West.   (I think I have read that you similarly won't get any arguments about global warming from the Inuit in Canada.)

The second example - the 12 year old girl (well, around that age anyway) who was learning to be an eagle hunter, expressing the view that girls who apply themselves can do anything a boy can do. This is location where most women are married off by about 19 and become homekeepers.  

Modernity is indeed spreading.

In praise of LED lights

Every time I use LED lights, I'm pretty amazed.   Use the torch app on a mobile phone on a really dark path - it seems ridiculously bright for such a tiny source.   Put a bulb in a lamp and leave it on overnight - it's still just a little bit warm to the touch in the morning.   Take a modern torch using 3 or 4 LEDs - impressively brilliant beam with quite long battery life.

It bothers me a little that, like the computing power and location finding utility in a mobile phone costing even only one or two hundred bucks, LEDs are a technological marvel that people just instantly get used to without thinking about the stunning results science and engineering have delivered literally into their  hands.

Think about your LEDs when you use them, and encourage your children to do so, too.  And get unimpressed responses from them if they are teenagers.  But you have to try...

More than you needed to know

The BBC is running an article originally from The Conversation - all about the physics of defecation.  (There's a phrase you don't hear often in a lifetime.)  A highlight (if that's the appropriate word):

What else did we learn? Bigger animals have longer feces. And bigger animals also defecate at higher speed. For instance, an elephant defecates at a speed of six centimeters per second, nearly six times as fast as a dog. The speed of defecation for humans is in between: two centimeters per second.

Together, this meant that defecation duration is constant across many animal species – around 12 seconds (plus or minus 7 seconds) – even though the volume varies greatly. Assuming a bell curve distribution, 66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It's a surprisingly small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters. How can big animals defecate at such high speed?

The answer, we found, was in the properties of an ultra-thin layer of mucus lining the walls of the large intestine. The mucus layer is as thin as human hair, so thin that we could measure it only by weighing feces as the mucus evaporated. Despite being thin, the mucus is very slippery, more than 100 times less viscous than feces.

During defecation, feces moves like a solid plug. Therefore, in ideal conditions, the combined length and diameter of feces is simply determined by the shape of one's rectum and large intestine. One of the big findings of our study was that feces extend halfway up the length of the colon from the rectum.

Putting the length of feces together with the properties of mucus, we now have a cohesive physics story for how defecation happens. Bigger animals have longer feces, but also thicker mucus, enabling them to achieve high speeds with the same pressure. Without this mucus layer, defecation might not be possible. Alterations in mucus can contribute to several ailments, including chronic constipation and even infections by bacteria such as C. difficile in the gastrointestinal tract.

Guardians 2 noted

I went off to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 yesterday.

Unfortunately, I have to say I was pretty underwhelmed.   I didn't think the story had much narrative push to it, and was a bit silly even for a silly, not to be taken seriously, comic book story;  there was one sequence which reminded me a little too much of Tarantino trying to make mass slaughter cool;  baby Groot was too transparently cute; and the look of the film really moved into CGI overload, if you ask me. 

It's not terrible, but in a way it reminded me of the second Men in Black film - not a great story, and not enough original elements to make it feel like it wasn't just trying to get more money from its audience.  (Although I think MIB2 was more enjoyable than this film.)

Perhaps number 3 will have a better story and script?  MIB3 did...