About bump stocks

It would appear likely that "bump stocks" were used to allow the rapid, virtually automatic, gun fire at Las Vegas.

There's a good article about them that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2013.   And yes, a Democrat Senator warned about their danger.  You can watch a video of them in action here.

They are legal in the US.

But someone can kill 50 people in a car, so what's the point of doing anything, hey?

Update:  or - Freedom!   Having a device that's purely designed to achieve rapid fire with limited accuracy is just a bit of fun, and who wants to interfere with fun?  As this guy says at the end of an article at The Guardian:

“I got my fun out of it but the novelty kind of wore off,” Rich said. “It’s definitely not reliable as a self-defense method or anything else.”

He said on Monday night that he expected the devices would face intense scrutiny, and that some politicians would call to ban them, which he said would be regrettable.

“I don’t want to see anything banned because of the actions of one person,” he said. “That just doesn’t jive with my principles of freedom.”

Libertarians are the pits...

Update 2:  Here's another prediction - if testing of the guns used in the Las Vegas killings show that the bump stock ones weren't actually used, the argument will be "well, he didn't use them so why ban them?"   

The nonsense against common sense is unleashed again

This is by far the most frustrating thing after every mass shooting in the US - watching the nonsense arguments getting a run again by the gun lobby, and the Right generally (both conservatives and libertarians.)

In fact, it gets boring even posting about them, but honestly, as I keep saying, we've never seen the Right stupider - both conservative and libertarian.

Here's the arguments we're seeing, again:

*  if any of the guns were illegal - well, it's all about enforcing current laws better then, isn't it - there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.

*  if all of the guns were legal and nothing was missed on background checks - well, there was no way of stopping this man or [implied but not often stated]  anything at all about how many he killed and how quickly,  and hence there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.

*  people can kill scores at once by using trucks, cars or explosives - therefore what's the point in doing anything about gun laws?   [I find this just about the stupidest of all stupid arguments - why not just say "Everyone dies - what's the point of ever legislating to make anything in life safer - you're just delaying the inevitable?"] 

*  if the guy had mental health issues - then it's all about controlling the mentally ill better, because [again, implied but not often stated]  legal gun owners are never OK at the time they buy and then go nuts - the mentally ill are just obvious and if we can stop them getting guns we'll be OK  

*  most gun deaths in the US are not mass shootings, therefore there's nothing wrong with current laws and nothing should be changed about them.  [Even a casualty count of more than 500 isn't beating that one.  Perhaps a single incident of 1,000 might do the trick?]

*  a particular change to gun laws not directly related to the means of this most recent killing spree (say, correcting the loop hole on background checks on those who buy at gun shows) would not have stopped this most recent incident, so what's the point of pursuing such a law change now?    

The answer is a given - "there's no point in changing gun laws (unless it's to relax them, because gun owners are the Righteous protectors of the nation and their families)", and the arguments deployed don't need to make sense, as long as they end up at the same point.

The good thing about Jimmy Kimmel's emotional plea was not that it was not just a "do something" argument - it specifically noted that it's not just a case of the NRA and Republicans wanting to keep things as they are - they actively work to make access to guns easier, even with law changes which a majority of Democrats and Republican's don't actually support - and it should be scandalous. 

Gopnik goes there

Yes, I think any normal person hearing Trumps tweet of "warmest condolences" to the families of victims of the Las Vegas shooting must have thought "that's a very peculiar way of wording a condolence message".   Gopnik thinks it tells us something about Trump's personality:

President Trump, deprived from birth by some genetic accident of all natural human empathy—one should listen to a recently recovered tape of Trump, speaking to Howard Stern, in which he is actually boasting of his indifference to a man he thought was dying—speaks empathy as a foreign language and makes the kinds of mistakes we all make in a second language that we have barely mastered, placing adjectives in places that no native speaker ever would. Who sends warmest anything to the families of murder victims? Vice-President Mike Pence, who is not a sociopath, merely a Republican, knew that the right language is the language of bafflement, talking about “senseless violence” and the rest.

Pretty harsh, but I suspect it may be right.   He certainly doesn't seem to have the normal range of emotions.

Automatic fire

A pretty stunning revelation here about the number of automatic weapons held legally by Americans, all courtesy of the nutjobs of the NRA, largely:

New fully automatic weapons were banned completely for civilians—except manufacturers and gun dealers—the following year [1986] by an amendment to the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, also known as McClure-Volkmer. That law didn't solve the problem of semi-automatic conversions. And the bill as a whole contained pro-gun measures that won it support from the NRA, even though the organization denounced the automatic weapons amendment. In fact, then–NRA lobbying chief Wayne LaPierre was quoted in an article in the NRA newspaper Monitor as saying that repealing the automatic weapons ban would be “a top priority.” As detailed by the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann in the Huffington Post in 2013, that article announced that an evidently short-lived organization, the National Firearms Association, had been created specifically to repeal the machine gun ban and to “educate the public about automatic firearms.”

Machine guns made prior to the cutoff date in 1986 remain legal but highly expensive—typically running in the five figures—and are tracked closely and individually by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. According to the NRA, the state of Nevada, where the shooting occurred and where Paddock reportedly lived, does not impose any further restrictions on legally owned machine guns. There are reportedly around 193,000 pre-cutoff machine guns in legal ownership nationwide, and special events around the country offer gun enthusiasts space to celebrate and fire these weapons. In August 2016, the Atlantic’s John B. Fischer reported on the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot. “For two days in June, hundreds of people traveled to Wyandotte, Oklahoma, for the opportunity to fire nearly every species of automatic weapon from the past century,” he wrote. “There were UZIs and M16s, Barrett .50-caliber rifles, WWII-era belt-fed Brownings, and even a Minigun—a giant, chair-mounted cylindrical device powered by a car battery.”

Gun owners who want weapons capable of fully automatic fire can’t legally modify the internal components of their semi-automatic rifles to accomplish this. But they can buy legal accessories like the Slide Fire or the GatCrank that help shooters mimic automatic fire without altering a semi-automatic gun’s internal mechanisms.

Update:  Wired has an article talking about how easy it is to convert a semi automatic to a fully automatic.   I'm not sure that it's all that good an idea to publicise that at this ti,me, except that I suppose anyone who wants to do it already knows.

Movies, noted

*  To my surprise (come on, it's not as if Ridley Scott movie sequels have been riding high lately), the new Blade Runner movie has received really good reviews.   I wrote here recently that watching a DVD of one of the narrator-less versions really made me wonder about the original being overrated, but nonetheless, I'll probably go watch it next weekend.

* Now for a movie review you don't need - the 2006 widely acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro .    Just saw it on Netflix this past weekend, and I have to say I don't really get the critical enthusiasm.   Yeah, sure, while somewhat visually imaginative and well made, I had too many reservations.   For one thing, the violent cruelty of (and even towards) the stepfather felt too gratuitously graphic.   But the main problem was that I didn't feel the story had any narrative push to it - things happened, but there was no feeling of building towards a climate.   (There was no reason, for example, to see why the girl was given - or imagined - the quest like tasks with a time limited urgency.)   I also didn't really feel convinced about the girl's character being portrayed consistently, with a rather key "breaking of the rules" during one fantasy quest not being foreshadowed or explained satisfactorily.   The movie has an interesting, if not novel, premise,  but it just isn't fleshed out well enough.   There is next to no interplay between the fantasy sequences and what is happening in reality, and that is what I think the movie really lacked.    

*  Also watched 1978 cheapo disaster flick Avalanche being given the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment on Netflix.   What on Earth were Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow thinking?   Evidently desperate for money that year, it would seem, even though Hudson had gone through the 1970's consistently earning money on the long running TV detective show McMillan & Wife.   (I remember little about that, except that I think it had one or two funny characters in it.)    Hudson looks chubbier than I ever remember him in this movie, too.   I see that he would have been about 53 at the time (I would have guess a bit older than that), and within 6 years of the film, he would be diagnosed with AIDS and die shortly thereafter.    Anyway, the MST3K episode featuring it did make me laugh, a lot.  (Mind you, most episodes do.   Why isn't it confirmed as coming back for another season??)  

A well deserved corrective

I complained back in June about an article that appeared in the Fairfax weekend magazine that painted a very normalising picture of LSD use for recreational fun, and which contained only a mild warning of the possibility of a bad trip.

I am somewhat pleased to see that Fairfax is today running another article by the same writer, who appears to some degree to be making amends by telling the story of a Sydney teenager who had a very, very bad time with LSD.  His mother contacted the writer after reading his first article. 

It's better than nothing, and I liked the way it showed that precautions don't always work.  The teen in question (up to a point) tried to be careful - using a kit to check its purity, for example.   But perhaps it would have been better if Fairfax hadn't run the "it's all just a bit of mind expanding fun if done cautiously" original article.

On the Hefner death

A few observations:

a.  One suspects The Onion have been saving up this pun in their bottom drawer for years: 

Officials Investigating Hugh Hefner’s Death Suspect Foreplay

OK, it is pretty great as far as puns go.

b.   Helen Razor is, I reckon, by far the worst opinion writer in the land who still somehow manages to make the occasional buck doing it.   (She has her fans, bizarrely.)   I just can't stand her highly mannered, self  absorbed style, and I only occasionally look at it to awe at its awfulness.  She writes about Hefner's passing here, but you won't learn a thing, except that she's in ongoing psychiatric care, apparently.  (Which makes me feel a tiny bit guilty about attacking the quality of her work, but she's not a shy retiring petal, even though I wish she would retire.)

c.   There are umpteen articles around on the same theme - how do you judge his legacy when it's a balancing act between his liberalising and exploitative influence on attitudes to sex?   I think he deserves far more derision than praise; although I have to say, the UK culture of tolerance of topless page 3 girls in their tabloid papers - which started in 1970 in the Murdoch owned Sun (and, with his usual stunning lack of morals, it apparently upset him until he started counting the money it brought in) - was perhaps a worse exploitative thing than the high gloss Playboy.

Still rubbish after all these years

Having just looked at an article by a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fan at Philosophy Now, I remain as convinced as ever that the author's "metaphysics of quality" is a vastly overrated bit of opaque hooey.

That Cuban mystery

Rather remiss of me not to have posted earlier about the ongoing, very weird and rather science-fictiony, mystery of what's been happening with the American Cuban embassy, and why it makes little geopolitical sense why it is happening at all.  (Actually, mischief making Russia would seem to have more motivation than Cuba.)

This recent article at The Atlantic sums it up, and this article at The Guardian had a couple of experts talking about the potential use of ultrasound to cause illness.

I see that in another Atlantic article, there is even more worrying news:  Tillerson likes trash novelist Ayn Rand!:

Weaponization of sound was a plot point in the book that Secretary Tillerson has called his favorite, Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. In it, the federal science institute creates a weapon of mass destruction which deploys ultrasonic waves. The head of state uses the device to flatten a goat in a demonstration of power, and later to destroy the work of industrious private inventors, successfully stifling private-sector innovation.

Fire him at once.  Fondness for Rand = can never be trusted politically.

I see that Berg, Davidson & Potts are hard at work on their next blockchain essay

Have a read of their essay at Medium for an explanation.

Idle libertarian hands must do something to amuse themselves, and it seems RMIT is happy to indulge them.

Schrodinger: love cat/rat

I just noticed at Bee's blog that she did drew a card of famous physicist Schrodinger,  in which one of his claims to fame is noted as "practised open polyamory and got away with it."   Can't say that I recall reading that about him before. 

But, yeah, he was unconventional in his love life, and tuberculous didn't hold him back.  From a book "Great Physicists" we get the general picture:

 

For more detail on the menage a trois arrangement that lasted a long time, there's this summary:

Erwin Schrödinger ... lived in an open polyfamily: a ménage à trois with his wife Anny Bertel and partner Hilde March. They had the blessing of March's husband, the physicist Arthur March, who was himself a lover of Anny's. Together the three raised Erwin and Hilde's daughter, Ruth March.

Despite his brilliant career, world fame, and 1933 Nobel Prize in physics, Schrödinger was apparently rebuffed at Oxford and Princeton for his unconventional home life. Eventually, in 1940, the family settled in Ireland by the grace of the Irish prime minister (a mathematician).

His wife, Anny, had another lover apart from March, apparently:

...Schrödinger asked for a colleague, Arthur March, to be offered a post as his assistant with him where he went.

The request for March stemmed from Schrödinger's unconventional relationships with women: although his relations with his wife Anny were good, he had had many lovers with his wife's full knowledge (and in fact, Anny had her own lover, [the mathematician and physicist] Hermann Weyl). Schrödinger asked for March to be his assistant because, at that time, he was in love with March's wife Hilde.

Gee, it's a wonder that these physicists doing the great ground breaking work of the first half of the 20th century had the energy to come up with their insights, after all this bed-hopping.

Schrodinger's love of love was not without it's unfortunate consequences, though:

He kept a detailed log of his numerous sexual escapades, included a teen-aged girl he seduced and impregnated while acting as her math tutor. [Well, there he goes as a poster boy. –Ed.] He had children by at least three of his mistresses...

 And the reputation of a liking for the very young girls apparently followed him around:

However on a darker note, it also triggered “his fascination with young girls on the brink of adolescence.” And although Gribbin is careful to point out that Schrödinger never really acted on these urges, it was not always for lack of trying (he was once warned off a colleague’s 12-year-old daughter) and the fixation certainly is troubling.

Well, you can learn something disreputable every day, it seems...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

...it would seem that a high energy cosmic ray started its trip towards Earth.

This science story from earlier this week is pretty interesting, as is the way high energy ray direction was worked out:

To spot enough of the extremely rare highest energy cosmic rays, a detector array has to be huge, however. Auger consist of 1660 particle detectors covering 3000 square kilometers, an area nearly the size of Rhode Island, in the Pampa Amarilla in Argentina. Each detector is a tank holding 12,000 liters of ultrapure water that produces a flash of light when struck by particles. In addition, four stations of telescopes overlook the ground detectors.

Spotting the sources of the most energetic rays was always going to be tough. Because they are electrically charged, cosmic rays swirl in the galaxy’s magnetic field. To point back toward their sources, they have to be so energetic that their paths do not curve too much. More common lower-energy cosmic rays—thought to emerge in the aftermath of supernova explosions in the Milky Way—curve so much in the galaxy’s magnetic field that they appear to come from all over the sky.

In spite of the difficulties, at first it seemed that Auger would find the sources of the higher-energy rays. It started taking data in 2004, and in 2007 Auger researchers announced that cosmic rays with energies above about 60 exa-electron volts (EeV) appeared to come from the fiery hearts of galaxies thought to contain supermassive black holes feeding on in-falling debris, so-called “active galactic nuclei.” However, that correlation has not held up as more data has come in. Moreover, Auger researchers had expected the highest energy cosmic rays to be light-weight protons, which bend less in magnetic fields. Instead, they have found that many of the rays consist of heavier nuclei, which curve more—making the job of figuring out their origin tougher.

 So this is what one cosmic ray detector looks like:

Kind of pleasingly mundane looking for science technology.

Catholics and Nietzsche, again

It was a Catholic acquaintance of mine, many years ago, who first alerted me to the fact that there was to some degree a sympathetic following amongst the religious to nutty old Nietzsche.   Here's an example of same from the Catholic Herald:  Is Nietzsche the antidote to the snowflake generation?

I'll quote one part, which perhaps explain why some Catholics think his views on Christianity can be downplayed:

Despite his enthusiasm for his subject, West is not overawed by him. He includes several humorous asides, such as “Nietzsche had much in common with Karl Marx – nationality, money problems, a duelling scar, imposing facial hair, disciples who understood the master very badly indeed…”

Shot through Get Over Yourself is Nietzsche’s loathing of Christianity. My criticism of the book in this respect is that West doesn’t place this hatred sufficiently within the context of Nietzsche’s upbringing within a stifling, narrow-minded, Prussian Lutheranism. He saw what Matthew Arnold also observed: the hypocrisy of outwardly respectable Christian habits, but bereft of the person of Christ. Essentially he inveighed against the late 19^th century’s corruption of Christianity.

Boring daydream believer

Can someone pass on this message to Tim Blair?:  the endlessly repeated return to the fantasy of no government funded ABC for Australia is an incredible bore.  

Like climate change, it's time you learnt to face reality:   the ABC is trusted and its funding is popular.

Something to do with hedonism?

I reckon people will be puzzling over the reasons for this odd finding from a new drugs survey:

The analysis, to be released on Thursday, shows people who identify as homosexual or bisexual are six times more likely to use ecstasy or meth/amphetamine, which includes ice and speed, than heterosexual people.

"Homosexual and bisexual people were almost six times as likely as heterosexual people to use each of these drugs, and were also about four times as likely to use cocaine as heterosexual people and three times more likely to use cannabis or misuse pharmaceutical drugs," AIHW spokesman Matthew James said.

On the other hand, this is not so surprising, at least in regards to meth use:

The report found mental illnesses were becoming more prevalent among illicit drug users.

Among people who had used an illicit drug in the previous 12 months, about 27 per cent had been diagnosed with, or treated for, a mental illness, an increase from 21 per cent in 2013.

Mental illness rates were particularly high for ecstasy and meth/amphetamine users.

"In 2016, 42 per cent of meth/amphetamine users had a mental illness, up from 29 per cent in 2013, while the rate of mental illness among ecstasy users also rose from 18 per cent to 27 per cent," Mr James said.

"Drug use is a complex issue, and it's difficult to determine to what degree drug use causes mental health problems, and to what degree mental health problems give rise to drug use."

Those who tend to talk about ecstasy as a pretty harmless party drug have some explaining to do too.  (They'll probably just fall back on the self medicating excuse, like they have for decades on marijuana.)