Galactic empires discussed

Via Peter Whiteford's fantastic twitter feed, a link to a review (a few month's old, but still) of a John Scalzi book, which is most interesting for its opening description of the common theme of galactic empire science fiction:

ACCORDING TO Donald A. Wollheim, Golden Age science fiction typically imagined the future would unfold according to a certain pattern:

1. humans explore and colonize the solar system;
2. humans explore and colonize extrasolar planets;
3. a Galactic Federation/Republic/Empire emerges;
4. the Empire enjoys a peak period characterized by a stable metropole in the galactic center (however constituted) and ongoing exploration at “the Rim”;
5. this peak period is followed by decadence and collapse;
6. the collapse is followed by a Dark Age (of whatever length);
7. a second Empire is established that is imagined to be perfected and permanent;
8. and, finally, the people of the future undertake The Challenge to God: sometimes this literally culminates in overthrowing some sort of malevolent God Thing, while at other times it involves innovating some way to survive the heat death of the universe (or evolving into energy beings of pure light, et cetera).

From Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas (and on and on), one discovers this basic narrative recurring over and over again in science fictional narratives about the human “destiny” to inherit the stars. 

[Speaking of reviews and science fiction-y writing, I also saw that The Australian yesterday put on its twitter feed a link that actually worked to a review of Helen Dale's Kingdom of the Wicked: the first mainstream media review I have seen.   (At Amazon, women who writes at The Spectator sometimes, as does Dale, complains that reviewers are deliberately ignoring the book because they are all Lefties still wanting to punish her for the Hand That Signed the Paper hoax.)    Anyway, the review is not good.
 Update:  I see now that a short, negative, review has also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.  I found that via a tweet on Dale's own twitter feed.  She also indirectly referenced The Australian's review.  Yet I am sure she said somewhere that she doesn't read mainstream reviews, after her experience with HTSTP.] 

Listening in from a distance

Readers probably have already seen the various reports that some scientists decided to turn a radio receiver towards that elongated asteroid now heading out of the solar system, just in case it was a spaceship or something artificial.

I meant to post this part of that story, because it says a lot about the sensitivity of radio telescopes:

Breakthrough Listen announced Monday that the program will start checking ‘Oumuamua this week for signs of radio signals using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The interstellar asteroid is now about twice the distance between the Earth and the sun from our planet, moving at a brisk clip of 38.3 kilometers per second. At this close distance, Green Bank can detect the faintest frequencies. It would take the telescope less than a minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a cellphone. If ‘Oumuamua is sending signals, we’ll hear them.

And here's a report on the first results:

The first batch of four observations ran from 8.45pm UK time on Wednesday until 2.45am on Thursday morning and spanned a frequency range from 1 to 12 GHz. While the search for alien signals has so far found nothing in the 1.7 to 2.6GHz range, the rest of the data is still being processed.

Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley Seti Research Center, told the Guardian that a review of all four bands observed Wednesday night had come up blank. “We don’t see anything continuously emitting from ‘Oumuamua,” he said. “We’re now digging into some of the intermittent candidates, and trying some new machine learning-based techniques we have been working on. We expect our next observation window to be scheduled for Friday or Saturday, when we should get a view of additional phases of ‘Oumuamua as it rotates.”

A very UFO Christmas

Just when we all thought all genuine UFO research had been made redundant by the plague of floating fire lanterns, flares, rocket launches/re-entries, meteors and (now especially) cheap LED drones which have probably been behind 99% or more of claimed sightings over the last 20 years, the New York Times reports that the Pentagon says it funded new research into them from 2007 to 2012.

The big catch:  it seems it was mainly a subcontract with Robert Bigelow, who came to the project already with complete belief that we have alien visitors.   As someone in comments to the story says:

A billionaire with a secret govt. contract does not help the credibility of this program

And it's true, part of what they were doing is what I've long considered the least credible line of UFO research, as it has followed dead ends so many times I didn't think anyone took it seriously:

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.

Also, Harold Puthoff got involved.  I really don't think it helps Bigelow to be taken seriously when he gets on board the guy who had convinced himself Uri Gellar was psychic.  (Mind you, I still find some things reported about early Gellar puzzling.) 

And yet - some of the details in the story are still surprising.   First - why don't I remember the video in the article showing something with clear edges (although with an apparent glow around it) rotating and puzzling the military pilots?

Secondly, what about this?:

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

But the ending doesn't all that inspiring.  The one guy in the Pentagon who used to look after such research (I hope his office looked like Mulder's in X Filers) has resigned, but it now talking up a commercial venture:

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.  In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

I find this all rather puzzling.   If some modern military video/radar cases are truly inexplicable, why wouldn't the top end of the Pentagon and government admit it?   God knows, if Trump had been told UFOs were real, we would have heard about it on his Twitter feed by now.  Maybe childish hints along the lines "I've just been told the biggest secret ever by someone - I can't say who, but he wore a uniform - and it's huge.  Really huge."  

Is it a case that if something is inexplicable, someone just files it away as "interesting" and it doesn't really get followed up?  And Presidents who ask are told "we don't think it's anything to worry about, Mr President"?

China and the libertarians

One of the reasons I am reluctant to go onto Twitter is because it often drives me nuts not understanding clearly what people think when they link to something with scant comment about it.  If I was able to respond tweet, I would have the urge to frequently try to clarify the degree to which they approve of the material, or challenge support which appears inconsistent with other views, or out of character, or whatever.

Case in point:  yes, it's J Soon time again.   Having linked to an interesting article about how the Chinese are actively taking Africans to teach them about the Chinese system of government and development,  I know from other tweets that Jason is not exactly a fan of Chinese influence in other countries.   Yet he also is supportive of the moderate libertarian position of less US involvement internationally, at least militarily.  As a generic fan of smaller government, I don't imagine he is all that impressed with government supplied international aid to poor countries.   International effort to reach agreements on CO2 decrease seems to carry little interest, too:   I don't think he cares at all about the Trumpian withdrawal from that (quite vital) field of international effort.

(Sorry to speak of you in the third person, Jason.  Please correct anything in comments.)

And yet - isn't following those views an actual, active encouragement for a liberty challenged superpower like China to fill in the voluntarily created void by Trump and his libertarians quasi supporters in international influence in the developing world?

I'm not exactly a fan of China's political, legal or social system either - except that I think that it is an example of  development which actually shows up how economists like the woeful bunch at Catallaxy are wrong - there is not one way for making rapid economic advancement, and the (even quite heavy) hand of government involvement is not always a poisonous path to socialist collapse.   (I would think a similar thing can be said about South Korea; and to a lesser extent, perhaps, the Scandinavian countries.) 

I was reading Science magazine this morning (go on, subscribe for just $55 a year) and noted how there are pages and pages of advertisements encouraging scientists to come work in Chinese universities and technical institutions.   Again - a nation taking science and development really seriously, while America reverts to nonsense culture war refusal to believe in it, and the libertarians there just shrug their shoulders and go "well, what can ya do?" 

So yeah, I would like to know how Jason squares the circle around this.   The way I see it, if you're a small government libertarian, you're part of the problem of letting China take the place of Western influence.

I think there may need to be a category above "First World problem" for this...

At NPR:

Avocado Hand Injuries Are Real. Is A Seedless Fruit The Answer?

The flesh of the seedless avocado in the photo looks as pale and unappealing as a cucumber.   Seriously, Western people who can't cut an avocado without lobbing off a hand:  are you actually growing so useless that the idea of living in a Matrix-like wet pod while you have your nutrition pumped into you seems like a good idea?

The story the world was [not] waiting for...

Wow.   Talk about The Guardian scraping the bottom of the music journalism barrel to come up with this:

Can't stand the song; couldn't stand the group. 

Deep salt

I happened to be watching Michael Portillo wandering around England on trains again on SBS last night, and was surprised to learn about an extensive underground rock salt mine that still operates at Winsford.  Here's a BBC article about it, as well as the mine's own website.

Started in the 19th century, it's about 150 m underground and huge - 160 miles of tunnels, and vast open spaces supported by pillars of salt left in place.  (I'm a bit puzzled how they know, structurally, how wide a space they can leave unsupported):

A part of it is now also used to store archive materials!

This rock salt was all laid down 220 million years ago, when England had salty inland seas.  

This is something I found completely unexpected and very interesting...

Too much of anything is bad for the environment

Surely I'll find a happier story soon, but in the meantime - this article at The Atlantic indicates that we should think not only about Bitcoin chewing up electricity, but the explosion in internet porn, too.

The entertainer: the only problem with the world is the 50% of it that doesn't share my genitalia

Lower end of the range looking increasingly unlikely

ATTP notes that there is increasing confidence that the Nic Lewis/Matt Ridley promoted "lower end of climate sensitivity is more likely" argument is wrong.

There was also an interesting recent post at Carbon Brief noting how closely the rise in CO2 follows the general slope of temperature increase:

Well, that's depressing

From an NPR article  about how American schools have to include "lock down" drills:

On average, there's nearly one school shooting a week in the United States, according to Everytown Research, a non-profit organization which advocates for gun control. Just in the past month, six people, including the shooter, died in a school shooting in Rancho Tehama, Calif. Three people, including the shooter, were killed in a shooting at Aztec High School in New Mexico.

But guns everywhere makes gun lovers feel better, and that's what's really important.

Worst tagger ever

(LONDON) — A British surgeon has admitted assaulting two patients by burning his initials into their livers during transplant operations.

Simon Bramhall pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of assault, in a case a prosecutor called “without legal precedent in criminal law.”

Bramhall used an argon beam coagulator, which seals bleeding blood vessels with an electric beam, to mark his initials on the organs.

Here's the link.

The entertainer is back

Sometimes, the reaction to events involving sexual and "normal" politics at Catallaxy is so ridiculously, stupidly, extreme it makes me laugh out loud.   One of my "favourite" commentators makes this observation post the Roy Moore non-election:

A series of minor observations

*  This seems to be a good season for big, tasty, and cheap mangoes.  Stone fruit:  not so much.  Still waiting to see how the lychees pan out.

*  Summer in Brisbane so far has been rather pleasant - days not too hot or humid; nights still cooling down considerably.   Very little need for airconditioning, so far.

*  Perhaps it's due to Brisbane's mild winters, which don't really require any night time heating, but we got our most recent electricity bill, and it was just under $300 for the quarter.   This is for a family of four - two adults, two teenagers - with solar hot water but no solar panels.  We actually currently have three refrigerators running, all quite large.  (One is kept on the minimum setting and is not often opened, but we are finding unlimited fridge space quite a pleasure at the moment.)  

Anyway, for all the talk of high electricity costs in Australia, doesn't this seem remarkably cheap?   The key may well be in the solar hot water system - people north of Sydney who don't have one are crazy.

* My daughter has a completely unreasonable fixation on owing an iPhone - she doesn't care what size or model, as long as it is an iPhone.  It would appear that she does not know a single female friend (and she seems to have a lot) who uses an Android phone, as she is forced to.  When walking down the street, she looks at every phone other people are using, and if it is an iPhone, she knows which model.   (It's like walking around with an annoying car obsessed guy who comments on every single car passing on the street, regardless of what you may be talking about.)  

My wife objects to any 15 year old being gifted a $500 (minimum!) phone which is eminently lose-able or broken, yet it would appear that the vast majority of other parents of teenage girls don't care.  Maybe many are hand-me-downs from parents who upgrade?

I am very happy with my $350 Android (Moto G5 Plus, in case you had forgotten), and my wife is happy enough with hers.   The complete domination of Apple with teenage girls is something of a puzzle to me. 

Curb your enthusiasm

It's cheering that Alabama has shown that the South is not completely mad;  on the other hand, it's a little depressing to see the racial divide in the voting pattern*:

Well, how depressing it must have been for Obama to get just 15% of the white vote there!   While today's result is much more encouraging, 70% of white voters preferred Moore?  

It's still a worry.

* that's from the Washington Post exit poll analysis, which cuts the results up in many interesting ways.