Why is swords and sorcery fantasy more popular than ever?

Watched the first episode of The Witcher on Netflix last, and was completely underwhelmed.

I am not alone in this - I see that it only got 53% on Metacritic - but isn't Netflix saying it has huge ratings?  (Yes, it is.)

I guess people just can't get enough of their bloodthirsty, gratuitous boob, fantasies since Game of Thrones finished.  But what is the appeal of this genre?   It's always eluded me - even if it's family friendly fantasy such as Tolkien's.   If anything, the adult version offends me more for what has always struck me (since the first Conan the Barbarian and its imitators started appearing in the early 80's) as a too obvious attempt to broaden the market for an outdated genre by ramping up the soft porn and violence to appeal to young men.  But now, with the internet, the "let's give young guys access to soft porn" aspect is completely redundant, making it more gratuitous than ever.   So what are we left with - magic, the occasional monster and (let's face it) stuff that would have formerly been considered gratuitous ultra violence, but is now watched by women as well as men.   (And by the way, I don't think the fighting scenes were even well directed in that first episode.)

I don't understand the appeal at all...

Yes, she is appalling

El Nino predicted

Some news at the end of last year -

A group of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Beijing Normal University and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen has found a way to predict El Niño events up to a year before they occur. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their complexity-based approach to better predicting the seemingly random weather events. ...

Once they found that pattern, the researchers went analyzed yearly surface temperature data from 1984 to 2018 to make predictions about El Niño events in the past. They report that their method correctly predicted nine out of 10 El Niño events (and had three false positives.) Additionally, they found that the higher the disorder the previous year, the stronger the following El Niño event. The researchers conclude that it is now possible to predict El Niño events up to a year in advance with reasonable accuracy. 

Some of the work has come from an Israeli university, it seems, so the research got a lot of reporting in the Jewish press.  For example:

“This novel climate network approach is very promising for improving El Niño prediction,” said Prof. Shlomo Havlin, an Israel Prize-winning physicist from Bar-Ilan University who was involved in developing the algorithm.

“Conventional methods are unable to make a reliable El Niño forecast more than six months in advance. With our method, we have roughly doubled the previous warning time,” stressed JLU physicist Armin Bunde, who initiated the development of the algorithm together with his former PhD student Josef Ludescher.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Climate Impact Research, explained: “This clever combination of measured data and mathematics gives us unique insights – and we make these available to the people affected.”

He pointed out that the prediction method does not offer one hundred percent certainty: “The probability of El Niño in 2020 is around 80%. But that’s pretty significant.”

As El Nino is usually associated with less rainfall and higher temperatures in Australia, the 2020 prediction is really not good news.

Quantum overview

I quite liked this simplified list of quantum interpretations that appeared in a recent book review in TLS.  John Gribbins came up with this:

As it stands today, depending on how you want to interpret the results from a litany of physical and mathematical experiments all validating each other, you are left, basically speaking, with only so many possibilities of how you might understand the world. Gribbin chooses six of the more scientifically realized and commonly endorsed. As he summarizes them:

One. The world does not exist unless you look at it.

Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.

Three. Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.

Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.

Five. Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.

Six. The future influences the past.

As explained further down, this list equates with the Copenhagen Interpretation (number one, roughly) and the rest are:

the Pilot Wave, Many Worlds, Decoherence, Ensemble and Transactional interpretations

I like this bit of quirky information, too (in my bold):

Bohr said that the world revealed by measurements is the only reality worthy of the name, that the act of measurement actively constructs the reality that is being measured. Put an electron in a box. According to the Copenhagen interpretation – as Jim Holt describes in When Einstein Walked with Gödel – it “does not have a definitive location until we look inside to see just where it is. Prior to that act of observation, the electron is in a mixture of potential locations spread throughout the box”. This mixture is “mathematically represented by a ‘wave function,’ which expresses the different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various locations inside the box”. In French the wave function is poetically called the densité de présence, which is a helpful way of thinking about it.

Successful solar thermal?

I noticed an article at Bloomberg on a (pretty much) completely failed solar thermal plant in Nevada called Crescent Dunes.   I've reached my limit of free articles for Bloomberg, but if you haven't, here's the link.   Also, it has a wikipedia entry.

This made me think:  is there a company that is a clear leader in solar thermal that is making it work?

This seems a difficult topic on which to find solid information.

This site lists 8 companies, which work in CSP (concentrated solar power), but it doesn't really explain if they are making money. 

The Bloomsberg article said that that big problem with it is how cheap PV solar has become;  solar thermal's advantage is that it is not limited to making electricity during the day. But at what cost, is the issue, I suppose...

Standard Republican gaslighting

Update: and now -

The smoke hazard

One of the most surprising things about the terrible bushfires has been the seriousness of the smoke issue in Canberra (and to a lesser degree, Sydney).

I mean, I think this story was under-reported, if anything:

An elderly woman has died in Canberra tonight after she went into respiratory distress when exiting the plane to the tarmac which was filled with dense smoke from the bushfires.

The New Daily has confirmed the Canberra woman was on a Qantas plane arriving from Brisbane.

She was alive when she left the plane but relatives believe she went into respiratory distress after disembarking. ACT police and ambulance were called to the airport to assist.

Maybe there will be subsequent reports detailing properly the number of hospital admissions and increased mortality (one disturbing thing is that they say poor air quality and SIDS has a clear connection, making parents of newly born babies freak out with worry.)

But apart from that, it's the galleries and public buildings that are staying closed; the flights cancelled; the terrible images of smoke obscuring all views being spread across the globe.   You can imagine it having a terrible effect on summer tourism for some years to come.

It's part of what makes Right wing excuse making about how we've always had bushfires seem especially pathetic.   

Some criminal underworld stuff going on in Brisbane?

This is a surprising story:

Mr Percival's bar on Brisbane River hit by gun shots weeks after being firebombed

Shots have been fired at a bar on the Brisbane River that was firebombed on December 21.

The shots came from a boat on the river and were aimed at Mr Percival's bar at Howard Street Wharves, under the Story Bridge, according to police.

Police confirmed the shots were fired from a boat carrying three to four people.

 We're not used to bars being firebombed in Brisbane.  The most notorious one was in 1973, and the investigations into it just went on forever. 

Movie viewed

I finally got around to watching The Death of Stalin last night (on SBS On Demand).

It was very good.  It was also good to read this article at Slate as to which parts were true, or at least, half true.  

As I didn't go into it expecting great historical accuracy (as I don't expect there was really all that much humour to be found in the inner circle machinations after his death), the blender approach to the history behind it didn't bother me in this case.  (Mind you, I still wonder about the choices made.  Why make out that his daughter was sent immediately to Vienna?)

Jewish success considered

I'm still catching up on posting about things I read while I was away on a short break.   This is one of them.

As a result of Bret Stephen's recent controversial article in the New York Times, Noah Smith reminded us of a blog post he had written in 2013 which looked at explanations other than high IQ, culture (or conspiracy) which may well show that the apparent success of Jewish folk is somewhat illusory, or explained in more mundane ways.

I thought it raised many good points which I had not heard of before.

GRAEME:  DON'T COMMENT IT WILL BE DELETED

Northern sea surface temperatures: is this unusual?

I am doing a bit of "man in his shed" speculating here, but I had noticed somewhere that, even though there is a delayed start to the monsoon season in North Australia this summer, the sea surface temperature anomalies are pretty high up that way (in the Indian Ocean, and the Timor and Arafura Seas, at least):

Which made me wonder - very high sea surface temperatures were a feature of the summer before the 2011 floods.  How does today compare to then?

Unfortunately, this map does not use the same colour scale, so you have to convert it in your brain:

Now, I know one is a year long analysis, and the other is a one day snapshot:  but still, it seems to me that both show a large accumulation of anomalies in the 1.5 to 2 degrees range, with the difference that this year it is bunched up further north.

Still, is the large blob of hot water unusual for this time of year, and does it indicate that when the wet comes, it will be very wet indeed?

I guess we will soon find out...

Global debt considered

I always worry when someone writes something about economics that seems very reasonable to me, but extremely few commentators are discussing the issue at all.   Is it my lack of understanding of economics, or is it a case of the obvious being ignored by most economics commentators for political or other reasons? 

That's the feeling I have with this short piece in The Guardian by Phillip Inman:  Debt will kill the global economy.  But it seems no one cares.

An aviation thing I didn't really understand before

I had always wondered whether unlucky sailors might be covered with an obvious fine spray of aviation fuel if a passenger jet was doing an emergency fuel dump over them.  Apparently not, although they may still smell it:



Read the article that the video is from at Business Insider.

Events that were made for comedy writers

For future reference

A couple of things I noticed via Twitter or the web over the Christmas break:

This tweet and the thread following contains some useful warnings about how not to improperly access academic stuff:

 Good to know how not to do anything wrong!

And this site is one I had never visited before, but yeah, looks really good:

Update:  now there is Anna's Archive.   Extremely useful.