As might be expected

Over at Quillette, a profile of Boris Johnson has some lurid passages.  Here is a memory of him from 1983, debating at Oxford:

With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

This writer, Toby Young, then says that Boris argued all over the shop, appeared unprepared, and prompted laughter, but he (Toby) still seemed to find it all a cunning plan:

You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else. To say I was impressed would be an understatement.

Now, to be fair, Young makes it clear in the rest of the article that he has plenty of reservations about how Boris will perform as PM, but at the end of the day, it's the feelz:

The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties. What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special, someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been able to dispel that impression.

Update:  following Jason's assurances about how good the UK Spectator is, I see that it has a Nick Cohen anti Johnson/Brexit column which reads in part:

Brexit was won with an impossible promise that we could have wrenching economic and constitutional change without suffering. Now the men and women who sold the false prospectus have 100 days to try to make good on their word. They will either succeed and leave the little people to live with the consequences or be thrown out of power and freed to play the role of martyr that appeals as much to the Brexit right as the Corbynite left.

As they chunter in their think tanks and newspapers and rage on the Web, they will say that they at least remained pure, they at least remained true to the lies they told to themselves as much as others. They were riding the unicorn to a glorious future until they were betrayed by the EU, by the remainers, by the elite. By anyone but them.

As if a rush to Mars wasn't nutty enough

Axios says that Robert Zubrin, who has spent a lot of time trying to promote a complicated way of getting to and from Mars, and a couple of other "space evangelists" got caught up in the excitement of the Apollo 11 celebrations by saying that actually, colonising Titan is a better long term for humanity.   By 2069.  

Ha ha. 

I will write a post about the continual confusion about the aims of a space program sometime soon.

But what's really important

What a tosser:

Yeah, because the fear of the white male (and the occasional Asian one) being so oppressed that they can't talk about how annoying they find the cultural Left is the major danger to the world at the moment.  

Actually, last night I was thinking:  people like Latham and his latest acolytes from Catallaxy past and present (he is big at Catallaxy at the moment, which people should take as a bad sign) complain that the cultural Left is all about "feelz" - claiming victim status, seeking out offence whether it intended or not, etc.    But their reaction against it has exactly the same over-emotional colour - how else can you inflate the matter of "PC-oppression" into such a large scale, crushing problem of global proportion?    You're into the "feelz" just as much as they are, Latho. 

Sounds all above board [sarcasm]

I really like the spaghetti diagram of Adani's financial set up in this article which lists these key points:

 Key points:

• The company responsible for the Carmichael coal mine has current liabilities of more than $1.8b versus current assets of less than $30m
• The auditors signed off on the company being a "going concern" because of a 12-month guarantee from the Indian parent firm
• Accounting expert Sandra van der Laan says "effectively on paper they are insolvent. I wouldn't be trading with them"

Woke mining executive

The chief executive of the world's largest mining company has endorsed drastic action to combat global warming, which he calls "indisputable," and an emerging crisis.

"The planet will survive. Many species may not," BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie told a business breakfast in London on Tuesday.

"This is a confronting conclusion but as a veteran geologist once said, 'you can't argue with a rock.'"

The link is here.

A pod of pea brain opinion writers for The Australian are drafting their pooh-poohing columns in response as I write.

Domestic violence of the American kind

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy — though an FBI spokeswoman later clarified the percentage is smaller.   ......

At a congressional hearing in May, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division testified that the bureau was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases and that of those, about 40 percent involved racially motivated violent extremists. Most in that group, he said, were white supremacists.

That's from the Washington Post.

But the real problem is that a journalist/opinion writer who knows he gets up the nose of Leftist thugs stood in the middle of a protest involving some of them and got beaten up, hey Jason.  

Some Guardian funnies

Author John Marsden has a piece at The Guardian in which he complains about over-parenting and the harm he sees it doing to kids education these days.  (He apparently now runs a couple of private schools in the bush where physical activity is far from discouraged.)

Anyway, I thought this comment was not too far off the mark, but the follow up comment was a bit funny nonetheless:

Yeah, sure

Axios headline:

Top 2020 Dems would punish China over mass detentions of Uighurs 

Had missed the support that China has received from some countries:

Context: Earlier this week, 37 countries — including North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia, among other mostly-authoritarian states — signed a letter defending China's policies in Xinjiang.

• This came shortly after 22 other countries formally condemned China's abuses in the region.

The bottom line: Most of the world has been largely silent on this issue due in large part to China’s economic clout and penchant for lashing out over criticisms of its internal affairs. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized China but not acted on concrete proposals to impose costs on Beijing.

I don't think anyone can do much about it anyway.

I think it will be very interesting to see if such an attempt at compulsory mass re-education to love your authoritarian government can actually work.  

An unusual form of dark matter detector

At Science, an article explaining that scientists think they can rule out one form of dark matter, because if it existed, " people would be dying of unexplained ‘gunshot’ wounds". 

The idea boils down to this: If a certain type of dark matter particle existed, it would occasionally kill people, passing through them like a bullet. Because no one has died from unexplained gunshotlike wounds, this type of dark matter does not exist, according to a new study....

A less mainstream dark matter candidate, known as macros, would form heavier particles. Although macros would be much rarer than WIMPs, any collisions with ordinary matter would be violent, leaving an obvious trace. The new study explores what those traces might look like if the macros hit people.

Glenn Starkman and Jagjit Singh Sidhu, theoretical physicists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, were originally searching for traces of macros in granite slabs when a colleague made a suggestion. “Why can’t you just use humans as a detector?” they recall Robert Scherrer, a co-author and theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville saying. “The energies you’re talking about, these things would probably at best maim a person, at worst kill a person.”

The team forged ahead with the idea and modeled macros that would have a similar effect to a fatal shot from a .22 caliber rifle. Such particles would be minuscule, but very heavy, and thus release the same amount of energy as a bullet as it passes through a person. Their calculations focused on the millions of people living in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe over the past decade because researchers say these countries have more reliable data on how many people died and from what causes.

In this sample, scientists would expect to see a handful of reports of unexplained deaths from invisible dark matter “bullets.” But there were none, the researchers report this week on the preprint server arXiv. These deaths would not go unnoticed—they would leave victims dead or dying with a tubular wound where their flesh was vaporized.

Good thing it doesn't exist, I guess.

Ups and downs (global warming is not as simple as some want it to be)

Well, that's interesting.  And Graeme will be along in comments today to say that he's taken time off from contemplating space cows on Ceres, unlimited electricity in space, water oceans on the Sun,  and ancient greenhouses on Mars to say "try science, Steve."

 Climate-related risks are dependent not only on the warming trend from GHGs, but also on the variability about the trend. However, assessment of the impacts of climate change tends to focus on the ultimate level of global warming¹, only occasionally on the rate of global warming, and rarely on variability about the trend. Here we show that models that are more sensitive to GHGs emissions (that is, higher equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)) also have higher temperature variability on timescales of several years to several decades². Counter-intuitively, high-sensitivity climates, as well as having a higher chance of rapid decadal warming, are also more likely to have had historical ‘hiatus’ periods than lower-sensitivity climates. Cooling or hiatus decades over the historical period, which have been relatively uncommon, are more than twice as likely in a high-ECS world (ECS = 4.5 K) compared with a low-ECS world (ECS = 1.5 K). As ECS also affects the background warming rate under future scenarios with unmitigated anthropogenic forcing, the probability of a hyper-warming decade—over ten times the mean rate of global warming for the twentieth century—is even more sensitive to ECS.

Here's a press release type report about the same study.

Mayor Pete and the loss of well written, politically topical novels

Slate has an article up looking at a Pete Buttigieg speech in which he referenced the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American (but, in Slate's view, somewhat misread its message.)   I see that the book came out in 1955 (I thought it was a bit later than that.)

All very interesting, and a great reminder that this is what we seem to have lost in recent literature - authors who are widely travelled, well read, and can write really well with a distinctive perspective  about the current, complicated, state of the world.   

 Instead, modern literature seems to have become intensely navel gazing and way less interesting for it.

I should really go read more of Greene.  (I think I have read 4 or 5.)  I think even some of his lesser known works have key parts that have lodged in memory due to their distinctiveness.

Moon telescopes

Once again, I wonder: why hasn't there ever been a decent science fiction novel (that I know of) about the far side of the Moon?   I mean, there are good astronomical reasons for having a base there, but if orbiting communications satellites stopped working, it would be about the loneliest place in the local corner of the universe.   Surely the potential isolation could be a good setting for a story?  

Anyhow, that's all by way of preamble to noting that Science magazine has an article about possible astronomical uses for the far side, from low frequency radio telescopes:

Charting the dark ages' 21-centimeter radiation “is essential. It has to be done at some point,” says radio astronomer Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works on the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a vast radio telescope spread across northern Europe. The problem is that after 13 billion years of cosmic expansion, photons from the dark ages arrive at Earth stretched to frequencies below 50 MHz, where they not only have to contend with the ionosphere, but also with confounding signals from ham radio, aviation, and long-distance communications. LOFAR, for example, has struggled to detect the 21-centimeter signal from that epoch (Science, 7 November 2014, p. 688). The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, which Hewitt and others are building in South Africa, may have a better shot. But Falcke and others are looking to the Moon.

Burns's 35-year campaign for a lunar radio telescope won him NASA funding in 2008 to form a team called LUNAR to work out how to build it. The researchers designed a lunar telescope array that would include hundreds of simple dipole antennas laid flat on the ground. They demonstrated how autonomous rovers could lay out strips of conducting film to act as antennas. In a 2013 experiment, astronauts on the International Space Station remotely guided a rover that laid out antenna strips on a simulated moonscape at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to show how a future crew onboard NASA's proposed Moon-orbiting Lunar Gateway station could supervise construction.

 to optical:

One solution, proposed by a NASA-funded team last decade, is to build a liquid mirror. The idea is simple: Construct a large shallow circular dish, fill it with a liquid, and set it gently spinning. Centrifugal force will pull the surface into a parabolic shape. Liquid mirror telescopes on Earth use mercury, which is naturally reflective. The biggest so far was the 6-meter Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia in Canada. That testbed telescope, built in 2003 and now decommissioned, paved the way for the 4-meter International Liquid Mirror Telescope, which will take its first view of the sky from the Devasthal Observatory in India later this year. Although a liquid mirror is limited to looking straight up, the rotation of Earth—or the Moon—scans it across the sky.

Mercury won't work on the Moon—it would evaporate in the lunar vacuum and is too heavy to transport from Earth. In its place, the NASA team came up with a class of organic compounds called ionic liquids, essentially molten salts, that would remain liquid in the frigid lunar night. Ionic liquids are not reflective, but could be glazed with silver to make an ideal reflecting surface. Superconducting bearings could levitate the dish and keep it spinning frictionlessly. “In principle there is no limit on the size,” says team member Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. “This would be totally impossible in space, but not that expensive on the Moon.”

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) followed up the NASA study by looking at the practicalities of building such a scope. “There were no showstoppers and the mechanical tolerances were more relaxed than for a space telescope,” says Paul Hickson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A 20-meter telescope, CSA concluded, would require no more than 3.5 tons of material to be transported to the surface. An even larger instrument, as big as 100 meters across, “would be in a class of its own,” Hickson says, able to study the very first stars that formed and coalesced into galaxies at the end of the dark ages.

No beer burps in space

At NPR, they have an article talking about the way astronaut food has changed over the years, and end on this point (my bold):

Astronauts must go without many popular foods and beverages on the International Space Station, including soda — the carbonation goes wacky in space and could wreak havoc on the digestive system; perishable items, because food poisoning would be pretty terrible in space; and alcohol, because it could damage water recovery equipment and impair astronauts' judgment.

And some have been staples since the early missions. Tang, a beverage nearly synonymous with spaceflight, remains popular among astronauts today. What you won't hear about as often — shrimp cocktail. "Shrimp cocktail has almost forever been [one of] their favorite foods," Bourland says (and Kloeris agrees).

New Scientist once had an article on beer in space, and noted:

Unfortunately for thirsty astronauts, beer is poorly suited to space consumption because of the gas it includes. Without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.

“That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have carbonated beverages on the space menu,” NASA spokesperson William Jeffs told New Scientist.

Burping got coverage in another article, which explained: 

You can't burp in space - at least not like you do here on Earth.

"You can't burp in space because the air, food and liquids in your stomach are all floating together like chunky bubbles," Hadfield replied on Twitter.

"If you burp, you throw up into your mouth. So guess where the trapped air goes?"

But you can try to time your burps right:

If you do end up going to space, there was one enterprising astronaut who found a way to belch without bomiting. According to the book What's it Like in Space? by Ariel Waldman, NASA astronaut and physicist Jim Newman, who has spent 43 days in space, developed what he called the "push and burp."

"He found that by pushing off a wall, he could create a force in lieu of gravity that kept his food down in his stomach, giving him a brief chance at expelling gas without consequence," Waldman wrote.

Ultra violence as entertainment

Yesterday, my wife had put on John Wick 2 on Netflix but proceeded to spend all of her time looking at her phone, while I occasionally saw bits of it from the kitchen. 

I once started watching the first one, but left it before the violence started.   (I think I thought some of the acting was bad, and wasn't interested in a revenge over a dog story anyway.)

Well, the tiny amount I did see of JW2 I thought was pretty dismaying regarding the desensitisation of society to graphic violence.  It was what, back in 1969 (in the news this weekend for obvious reasons), would have been called shocking ultra-violence.   It's still ultra-violence, but now people watch it for entertainment.

I really do not like the way this incremental change happened to society, and continue to be  dismayed at the lack of critical thought applied to the question of the depiction of violence.

I would also add that while Keanu Reeves get all this adulation for being such a nice guy, to my mind he has no taste for being in these movies.  

Serious Catholics who do not have a problem with the film (such as this guy) need their head read.   

Raw

Guess what I ate for the first time on Saturday? 

Steak tartare.  It was at a French cafe at South Bank which my wife and I quite like; and no, I didn't order it for myself, but my wife had it as a main and there was too much for her.

The idea of the dish has never appealed to me (I am not even that keen on seafood sushimi), but it was pretty nice.  I expected a raw meat flavour but the seasoning overrides all of that.

See, all of you with an electric cook top can now cut your electricity bill substantially by eating the way lions do, and help save the planet from CO2 emissions.   (This line designed to annoy Jason.)