Forget about it

I bet Sabine Hossenfelder is not impressed:

Plans for a machine that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider have been drawn up by researchers at Cern to take over the baton in the search for new physics in the latter half of the century.

The €20bn (£17.8bn) machine, named the Future Circular Collider, would smash particles together inside a 100km (62 mile) tunnel, making it four times the size of the LHC, which at present is the largest scientific instrument on the planet.

The proposal for the FCC is described in a conceptual design report released on Tuesday by Cern, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva. It comes at a time when physicists around the world are considering where to build the next cutting-edge particle collider, with other machines under discussion in Japan and China.

Look, particle physicists - that type of money will, at that the time you want to spend it, be better used to do something about climate change.

How Americans die

Yeah, that American opioid death situation is not improving much:

For the first time in U.S. history, a leading cause of deaths — vehicle crashes — has been surpassed in likelihood by opioid overdoses, according to a new report on preventable deaths from the National Safety Council.

Americans now have a 1 in 96 chance of dying from an opioid overdose, according to the council's analysis of 2017 data on accidental death. The probability of dying in a motor vehicle crash is 1 in 103.

"The nation's opioid crisis is fueling the Council's grim probabilities, and that crisis is worsening with an influx of illicit fentanyl," the council said in a statement released Monday.

Fentanyl is now the drug most often responsible for drug overdose deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in December. And that may only be a partial view of the problem: Opioid-related overdoses also have been undercounted by as much as 35 percent, according to a study published last year in the journal Addiction.

Mind you, I was surprised to realise recently how poor the road death rate is in the US compared to Australia:

After spiking higher for two straight years, traffic deaths in the United States pulled back slightly in 2017, according to a new report by the National Safety Council.
The NSC estimates there were 40,100 motor vehicle deaths last year, which would be a drop of about 1 percent from the total of 40,327 in 2016.

On a population basis, it is extraordinarily bad compared to, well, just about everywhere:

Disturbing to watch

I've confessed before to occasionally wasting time on Reddit.

Last weekend, at the top of the popular list for a while was one of the more disturbing things you're ever likely to see there - and close to 100% of commenters were appalled:  a group of (temporarily) relatively attractive looking high school girls (with some money in their families, by the looks of the car) smoking meth before going into school.

There must be a fair chance the families will see this?   Or is it old and been posted as a cautionary thing by one of the participants?   Anyway, it's puzzling as to why the video is on line at all.

Nutty floating anthropology

Somehow, in the 1970's, I missed reading about an ill fated experiment in which an anthropologist picked a set of people to float across the Atlantic with him on a raft to see if there would be sex based conflict. 

The Guardian talks about it in the context of a documentary that has been made. 

Weekend stuff

*  Watched the well reviewed Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation on the weekend, which features not one but two Nicholas Cages.    A bit meh, if you ask me.   I have never seen Being John Malkovitch, I have to admit, which might be a better movie.   But Adaptation is a bit too transparent in concept and how it came about - I remembered reading a bit at the time that Kaufman did get a bad case of writers block when trying to adapt the real book about orchids that features in the movie.   So he put the writers block in the screenplay, and also his anxiety about being a unique Hollywood voice and not following the industry idea, embodied by Robert McKee, that movies really only work best with 3 act stories with conflict that is to be resolved by the end.

The end result is a movie that is about writers block being resolved with a silly 3rd act that pretends it's like what Hollywood would come up for the resolution.

Robert McKee, I learned after watching it, did advise Kaufman on fixing his 3rd act on his first draft - and it's a bit puzzling to wonder whether McKee still sees the ending as ironic or not.   (He must, surely.)

Anyway, it's a case of being too meta for its own good.   Or not being innovatively meta enough, perhaps.

* The Gold Coast was looking very nice on Sunday.   Must actually swim next time.

*  The Washington Post has an article looking back at the Boston molasses disaster of 1919 - a huge tank of the sticky stuff broke and the flood killed 21 people and injured 150.   A very unique disaster.

*  Oh look - the New Yorker has an article asking "Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?"  Lots of cautionary warnings there, and my strong, strong hunch remains that American style liberalisation of marijuana laws will be seen as a public health mistake within a couple of decades.

Friday random thoughts

*  2018 seemed to be the year of bisexual women characters turning up in US TV shows - and always dealt with in a non-judgemental, this is just normal, sort of way.  I'm thinking Rosa on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the frequent bisexual interests of Eleanor in The Good Place, and the (OK, she's just lesbian, now that I think of it) glove wearing sister in Haunting of Hill House.   I don't know - but it feels a bit faddish to me.

* While talking sexualities, I've never read anything about why the service industries seem to be the "go to" jobs for so many gay men?   Once again, flying at Christmas, the extremely obvious sexuality of the male flight attendants, as well as one of the concierges at the hotel, and even a guy serving us at Malaysian McDonalds of all places, made me wonder about this.  I suppose I should Google the topic instead of just asking out loud.  I just don't get the connection between "I'm gay, and I really want to serve people".

*  Gawd, I didn't start writing this with these topics in mind, but I now I see that Benjamin Law is getting publicity in The Guardian for his show which I think is way over-rated by the usual sort of people who find any comedy with a sympathetic gay theme to be brilliant.

*  Should I see Aquaman at the cinema?  My son is dubious, but it is a genuine box office hit.  (It's going to break the billion dollar barrier, surprisingly.)  I don't really expect it to be great, but perhaps a bit weirdly amusing enough.

* Oh, someone at The Guardian reads Catallaxy - and notes "former IPA man" (former?) Sinclair Davidson's comments about the right wing rally last weekend.   He missed the Davidson "I'll make a weirdly eccentric claim that even the nutty conservatives reading Catallaxy think is over the top, and  then not justify it" comment of the week -

Gavin – people who advocate a two-state solution are anti-Semitic.

 I like it when he makes a big statement that leaves even the readers of that blog backing away slowly, which is pretty much what they did in that thread.

Oddly, he also posted about a vegetarian topic (noting the Impossible Burger) the same week I have - and sent the nuts in comments into a frenzy because how dare anyone suggest that making a "fake meat" burger that people want to eat is not a bad idea.   Next thing, socialists will be banning meat, don't you know?

It is the nuttiest collection of stupid right wingers in Australia.

 

Deep ocean warming, and cooling

There was a paper in Science last week that seems to have attracted no media attention, even though it is not what most people would expect.  (A paper on ocean heating in PNAS did hit news outlets, but this is different.)

Apparently, the deep ocean in the Pacific is still cooling (slightly), while the Atlantic depths have been heating, and at a much faster comparative rate.  The reason is quite surprising - it takes a long, long time for top water to circulate to the bottom in the Pacific, and so cooling from centuries ago is still affecting its depths:

At depths below 2000 m, the Atlantic warms at an average rate of 0.1°C over the past century, whereas the deep Pacific cools by 0.02°C over the past century....

Deep Atlantic waters are directly replenished by their formation in the North Atlantic, but deep Pacific waters must propagate from the Atlantic and Southern oceans. Radiocarbon observations (11) indicate that most waters in the deep Atlantic were last at the surface 1 to 4 centuries ago, whereas most deep Pacific waters have longer memory due to isolation from the atmosphere for 8 to 14 centuries (6). As a result of differing response times, Atlantic temperature trends reflect warming over recent centuries, including that associated with anthropogenic influences, whereas the Pacific is still cooling as a consequence of ongoing replacement of Medieval Warm Period waters by Little Ice Age waters.

The paper indicates that their modelling and re-examination of some records indicate that surface cooling from the Little Ice Age is a good explanation of the deep Pacific cooling.

I gather, from looking at the diagram in the paper, that the total increase in heat in the Atlantic depths means that, on average, the global total ocean depths are still heating.   But it certainly appears that (like sea level rise), deep ocean heating is much "lumpier" when you look at the regions than I would have guessed. 

Science in India

I did post last year about how Hindu fundamentalists in India - including the PM! - believe silly things in the same way Creationist Christians do:

During the 2014 inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Modi pointed to the scientific achievements documented by ancient religious texts and spoke of Ganesha, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head: “We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human. There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.” Modi did not respond to a request from Reuters that he expand on this remark.

and now, Hindu "ancient science" beliefs got an airing at an Indian science congress:

At this year's annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress from Jan. 3 to 7, senior research scientist Kannan Jagathala Krishnan dismissed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as "a big blunder" and said Isaac Newton didn't really understand how gravity works.

Nageswara Rao, a vice chancellor at Andhra University in South India, said that Ravana, a demon god with 10 heads, had 24 kinds of aircraft of varying sizes and capacities — and that India was making test-tube babies thousands of years ago.

Dinosaurs were created by the Hindu god Brahma, said Ashu Khosla, a scientist with expertise in paleontology at Panjab University in the North Indian city of Chandigarh.

Not exactly the kind of remarks you would expect at an event whose mission is to advance and further the cause of science, to stimulate discussion on scientific theories and to create an awareness of science-related issues, especially among children — and that is funded by the Indian government's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Krishnan, Rao and Khosla were addressing a group of 5,000 children assembled from all over the country at the event's Children's Science Congress. Their lectures were posted on YouTube and reported widely by the press. The congress organizers were red-faced, and the scientific community in India was outraged. 

 

Vegetarianism and counting lives

By way of update to my last post, speculating on the relevance of the number of animal lives lost to meat eating, I see that the Dalai Lama has been quoted on the same topic:

An Indian friend told me that his young daughter has been arguing with him that it is better to serve one cow to ten people than to serve chicken or other small animals, since more lives would be involved. In the Indian tradition, beef is always avoided, but I think there is some logic to her argument. Shrimp, for example, are very small. For one plate, many lives must be sacrificed. To me, this is not at all delicious. I find it really awful, and I think it is better to avoid these things. If your body needs meat, it may be better to eat bigger animals.

Come on:   why did he have to choose prawns as an example?   If you're going to start worrying about prawns' lives too much from an ethical point of view, you're well on the slippery slope to fretting about whether you accommodate cockroaches and termites in your house.  Or bacteria in that infection in your foot.

I never really did trust this Dalai Lama - who himself is not a strict vegetarian, I see.  (For health reasons, but I also have read that Tibetan Buddhism, due to the great difficulty of having access to vegetables there, is not a branch that has ever been hung up about avoiding meat.)

Anyway, it still seems to me to be a good question - is it better to eat one relatively smart cow that has had a pretty free range, happy life for a number of years, or (say) 30 not very bright chickens that have been raised in a shed for 7 weeks and never seen the light of day?    And what if raising the chickens produces less CO2 and greenhouse gases?   

Worrying about my food

I noticed this tweet via Andrew Revkin over the holidays:

I'm starting to get worried that I'm starting to develop a guilty conscience over meat eating.

I'm not entirely sure of the metrics I use to avoid worrying about animal life and suffering.   Can 7 weeks as a broiler hen in a shed ever be called a happy life?   Should I worry too much about what a hen would like to be doing, given that left alone, they'll spend a lot of time fighting other hens anyway (depending on living conditions, though, I guess.)   But what about the rooster chicks in the egg industry who get conveyor-belted into a grinder while they are still cheeping because they were born with the wrong genitals?  Is that more or less "tragic" than  being fed in a shed for 6 weeks purely to put on weight and having bodies that couldn't cope in the wild anyway?   

And 65 billion chickens a year killed to satisfy our fried chicken lust?  Seems a bit, well, excessive.  I mean, we do factor in numbers in assessing degree of tragedy involving death - should that also apply in some complicated fashion to working out if the egg industry or the broiler meat industry is the "worst" in terms of least justified termination of animal lives?

Look, I don't think I am ever in any danger of worrying about interfering with the life (or life enjoyment) of a prawn, or fish.   But when it comes to mammals and chickens, it's starting to feel complicated. 

Perhaps I should feel more sympathy for relatively smart creatures like cattle fearing what's coming at the abattoir, but at least they have gotten "more out of life" by having lived in the sunshine for a number of years before meeting their fate.   (At least in this country.) 

But back to the other hand - in terms of environmental impact, I think it's pretty well acknowledged that chicken does way less harm than big mammal farming.

And if I concede on chicken, there is a danger I'll start to fret about certain things further down the evolutionary scale - I recently saw this at the back of food market in Chinatown, Singapore:

Now look, I don't even like frogs, but looking at a bunch piled up, some peering out of the cage; one with its little, um, hand on the wire:

...and I felt sorry for them.   Of course, they are probably big enough that they would eat a small mouse given half a chance, and I like mice a lot more than I like frogs, so that would change my feelings again. 

Anyway.

I remember reading an essay by Paul Johnson in a collection he put out a decade or so ago, written probably in his 70's, in which he said ageing had made him feel more sympathetic to all life, and that he found himself even giving flies a chance to escape out of the window before reaching for the spray. 

I'm getting a bit worried I am heading the same way... 

This is really bad news

The number of really dangerous irukandji mini-jellyfish stings is really up this year in South East Queensland, and the warnings are that they are only likely to continue heading south.

If people, in 20 years times, are going to be worried about stings requiring hospitalisation from swimming at, say, my beloved Noosa Heads, it will be pretty bad for tourism.

From the Guardian:

Twenty-two people have been hospitalised this summer with Irukandji stings – which are so severe they can cause brain haemorrhages and a debilitating sensation of impending doom, known as Irukandji syndrome....

....the potentially fatal Irukandji stings – especially near Queensland’s Fraser Island – are sparking the most concern.

Prof Jamie Seymour from James Cook University said the density of Irukandji, a species of box jellyfish, and the rate of stings had been steadily growing in southern Queensland as sea waters warmed.

“We published a paper some years back looking at Irukandji syndrome in Queensland and we had a look at the number of stings,” he said. “Fifty years ago the southernmost sting for Irukandji was in the Whitsundays, and now the southernmost sting is Mooloolaba beach. And if you look at the number of stings at Fraser Island, they are steadily increasing. More and more animals are getting down there....

“In Queensland alone, we put more people in hospital due to Irukandji stings than shark attacks, crocodile attacks and snake bites combined. This is something that we need to address now. I can see a time when we have to shut major beaches on the Sunshine Coast. It is going to happen.”

He added that the current spate of stings at Fraser Island was due to “a perfect storm” of conditions: warmer water, more Irukandji and more people in the ocean during the Christmas holidays.

“You have hot water down there which is 29 or 30C, which is unheard of,” he said. “The animals love that sort of thing. The people being stung are on the western side of Fraser Island, where it is nice and calm, and this has coincided with the Christmas break where you have more people in the water.”

The new socialists

Of course, I think the rise of American youth and politicians labelling themselves as "socialist" is mostly a function of the American Right going nuts and so stupid and extreme that it has made the use of the formerly dubious label look reasonable in response.    (Part of this being the way the Right itself, using it foolishly as a boogeyman scare word - whereby other Western nations' health care systems are "socialist medicine"  for example - have drained it of its historical meaning,  and the reaction tends to be "if that's socialism, count me in!")

But it would seem that Jacobin magazine, which I have noticed being tweeted by respectable people like Peter Whiteford, might be able to claim some of the credit too.   

Here's a lengthy article, which I must admit I haven't read carefully yet, about its creator.

  

Trans, gay and snowflake all in one day

I've been watching SBS/Viceland a lot lately, and I don't think that it is conceivably possible for the network to give any greater promotion to that British "we've got a transgender boy/girl and we have to fight for his right to stop puberty" drama, Butterfly.    (I have the read the synopsis, and that is indeed what it is about.)   It's hard to believe that people who have seen the same ad about 5,000 times over the space of a few weeks could possibly still want to see the actual show, such is the annoyance factor of such intense repeat exposure.

It's also extremely hard for me not to see the show as assisting to promote at least some degree of social contagion of the idea that gender issues are at the heart of many emotionally fragile children's unhappiness.   And it's coming from Britain - which, I am sure I have noted some years ago in one of my more "cranky conservative" sounding assessments - seems to have transformed in the space of 50 years from the nation that used to go out of its way to unnecessarily punish gay men, to the one which is the most intensely celebratory of everything gay/transgender.    Is it all down to the public school system?   There must be some explanation.  

And when SBS is not running the Buterfly promo, it's likely showing the other extreme high rotation advertisement, the one for a new series of  Benjamin Law's slight autobiographical comedy The Family Law.   While Law himself seems witty and smart when I occasionally see him on TV,  this show about a younger version of himself is dull, not very funny, and barely worthy of a light comedy budget -  even though it may give some deserving Australian Asian actors a badly needed income.   The latest series seems to have the young Law coming out to his family, dressing gayly, and screaming as his mother opens the door while he's doing - something.   Gee, never seen something like that gag before.  The ads make it look very tired and past its use by date. 

That said, it's no where near as bad as some past SBS "home grown" content -  anyone would have to admit, Housos made The Family Law look like Altman in comparison.  I have no idea what goes on in the comedy commissioning mind of SBS - but it's not good.

And back to Britain:   that PR campaign for the Army would have to be the most ill conceived and readily mocked advertising idea since - doh, I'll get back to you as soon as I think of a more atrocious advertising idea.  Apparently, the "snowflake" soldier is threatening to quit, and the someone from an advertising agency (who I like to hear in the voice of Rick in The Young Ones)  gives some delightfully British wanky defence of it all:  

Although, for Dan Cullen-Shute, chief executive and founder of creative shop Creature of London the ads have "got everyone talking".

"It also looks beautiful. I make no apology for applauding that," he wrote in The Drum.

Responding to criticism on Twitter that the campaign copy had been written "by an old man", Shute added: "I don’t believe you have to be the target audience to write about the target audience. I know that’s a slightly contentious belief to hold nowadays, but I stand by it.

"It’s our job in advertising to understand people brilliantly, and then to craft compelling stuff that makes them think, act, or feel differently.

Yeah.

To be honest, the campaign is an embarrassment but in an interesting way.  It's like you can hear the pitch for it in the boardroom:   "we need to reassure the self involved, overly sensitive, short attention span, annoying youngsters of today that we can see what's good and worthy deep inside of them"; but in execution it's impossible not to read the posters as meaning just "Hey, if you're an annoying young prat, like the arrogant jock pictured here, come work for us. We love arrogant prats."

Amuses me

Headline at The Onion:

Hillary Launches Campaign To Raise $100 Million Or Else She’ll Run For President

Opium wars revisited

While not knowing a lot about it, I have always wondered why the West, generally speaking, doesn't seem to spend any time feeling at least a bit guilty about the Opium War of the 19th century.

There's a handy summary of what led to it, including opposition to the idea in Britain, in this review at TLS.   Good to know that it was controversial in its day.   For example:

And as news of opium seizures and rumours of war reached the British public, which previously had little knowledge of the business, a vocal movement against opium and conflict with China quickly mobilized. The strongest, and best-organized, opposition came from working-class activists and the Chartist reform movement, which recognized the parallels between opium use abroad and gin abuse at home as methods of capitalist control. After Elliot’s convoy opened fire on a fleet of Chinese war junks while repairing from Macao to Hong Kong – the preliminary battle of the Opium War – an editorial in The Charter condemned “this contemptible category of businessmen and politicians . . . who behave like thieves and bullies gloating over the prospects of the bloodshed”.

Some critics feared that Britain was risking its entire future trade for the vaguest, most impetuous goals, as national self-regard consumed long-term strategic thinking. Others focused on the military consequences of engaging the Chinese, warning that it wouldn’t be as easy an affair as pro-war advocates like Jardine had argued. Platt quotes the opinion of an English captain of the Hyderabad army, who conceded that in the short run a small British expedition could invade China, but “what then would be gained?” other than provoking the Qing dynasty into mobilizing its vast resources and turning itself into a formidable power against which “the combined nations of Europe would hardly compete”.

When Parliament finally took up the question of war in April 1840, those opposed to attacking China were scattered throughout the benches. Some, like the former Whig-turned-Tory MP James Graham, conjured the Sinomania of the eighteenth century, designating China a civilized part of the earth, where language, laws and feelings of pride had been transmitted without interruption for centuries, and whose people boasted “of their education, of their printing, of the civilisation, of their arts, all the conveniences and many of the luxuries of life existing there, when Europe was still sunk in barbarism, and when the light of knowledge was obscure in this western hemisphere”. From the other side, the Secretary at War and arch promoter of empire, Thomas Macaulay, countered that the Chinese were brutes slowing the inexorable tailwinds of History. Perhaps the most surprising intervention came from George Staunton, who as a young boy had accompanied Macartney’s ill-fated mission to China in 1793, during which he had spoken briefly with the Emperor. He was Britain’s leading Sinologist, and had done more than anyone to promote respectful opinions of China. But he was a patriot, too, and a great believer in British prestige, which, in the end, countermanded his Oriental sympathies. As he saw it, the Empire was held together by force of opinion, and any show of weakness in China could ripple out and distress the foundations of British rule in India. Lin’s provocations harmed British trade in China, he said, but they also challenged the imperium as a whole.

MPs voted 271 to 262 in favour of war, a “lukewarm” blessing in Platt’s words. The irony was that most of the Canton trades didn’t much care about the events of 1839, and the showdown between Lin and Elliot. They just wanted to be compensated for the opium they had lost, something Elliot promised the British government would see to. But there were those among them for whom British force served grander commercial aims, including free access to ports and the coastline, as well as favourable treaties that boosted trade. Jardine worked sub rosa to ensure that a war for reparations became a war that would crack China open to commerce.

Read the whole thing, though.