End Times noted

Phil Plait has a fun post up noting that, provided protons do not decay, the last big thing to happen to the universe might be black dwarves (modest size star remnants) exploding a bit like supernovae.   But it will take a very, very, very long time:

When enough iron builds up, they too will collapse and explode, leaving behind a neutron star.

But pycnonuclear fusion is an agonizingly slow process. How long will that take before the sudden collapse and kablooie?

Yeah, I promised earlier that I'd explain this number. For the highest mass black dwarfs, which will collapse first, the average amount of time it takes is, well, 10^1,100 years.

That's 10 to the 1,100th power. Written out, it's a 1 followed by eleven hundred zeroes....

And that's the black dwarfs that go first. The lowest mass ones take much longer.

How much longer? I'm not terribly glad you asked. They collapse after about 10^32,000 years.

That's not a typo. It's ten to the thirty-two-thousandth power. A one with 32,000 zeroes after it.

 He also points out, though, that at time frames like that, the expansion of the universe will mean that the observable universe is actually pretty small, so that you would have to be lucky to even have one of these explosions observable. (!)

All sound rather implausible - which Plait acknowledges readily, since it seems more likely that protons do decay, this puts a much "shorter" timeframe for everything to disappear.

Anyway, I expect everyone will have moved via black holes into alternative, much younger and newer universes well before this.

 

 

Funny and true

A restaurant worth noting

I've been so busy I have not got around to praising a Brisbane restaurant.

Last Friday night, I was shouted to a fantastic meal at Moda, a tapas restaurant/bar at Paddington, Brisbane.  It was not planned ahead of time, we had just headed into Paddington hoping to get into another restaurant without a booking, but of course in this Christmas post-COVID season, a lot of places were full.

I like tapas bars as a concept, but its been a while since I have been to one where I thought every plate was great and good for the price.

Well, let's deal with the price issue first:   Moda is not cheap.   But - the quality of each and every item we had was fantastic.   (Making it simpler, if expensive, we had the $95 a head chef's selection of plates, mains, and desserts.  It was pretty much a blow out meal that you probably really only want to tackle if you have missed lunch.  Which I had.)   

What can I remember of the dishes?   A duck liver parfait that was just about the best I think I have ever had; ceviche that was also pretty spectacularly nice; an octopus salad; some pipis in a cream sort of sauce; baked figs with something or other;  a couple of croquette type things; some lamb; some beef with something (the details are starting to get fuzzy) and the desserts cake and pastry pieces.  

To drink, we had a $60 bottle of Spanish cava - which I continue to say I find to be a more reliably pleasant sparkling wine than French champagne.   And a glass of chilled French muscat at the end - it was delicious too.

Service was great, and the food came pretty fast and at pretty much the right rate (a bit surprising especially give that the place was packed inside, while we managed to have a pretty pleasantly quieter time at a table outside).

Honestly, it was the best restaurant meal I have had for years.   I wish the place well.

Oh, and now that I look at reviews for it (as I said, we just ended up there by luck, really), it's not just me who thinks it's good:

 

Heh

 

A Senate problem

Greg Sargent's column on Mitch McConnell's attempt to convince every single Senator to not object to the Democrat electors in January explains it as well as any.   (He fears that if forced to vote, the Trump base will be able to identify specifically those who have abandoned Trump, and want to punish them.)  

I would think it hilarious if dimwit curly hair Rand Paul ruins this plan.  

Yes, I certainly have mixed feelings about what China is doing at the moment

I have also been meaning to say this:   an unfortunate effect of Australia feeling lucky in its avoidance of COVID 19 (the heavy lifting for which was to a large extent done at State level) is that Scott Morrison is getting approval ratings he really does not deserve.  

And yet conservatives still support him

 

 

Yay

Just happened an hour or so ago:

 

I am guessing that Parler is going off.

Also - how stupid of Republicans in some states to be assigning what someone on Twitter called cosplay alternative electors.   

Seriously, I think the party has to split for any part of it to regain credibility.
 

That Supreme Court decision

It was good news yesterday that the Supreme Court in the US stopped the Texas/Republican anti-democracy action.   

Now that so many Republicans signed up for it (completely foolishly - since what was the point of joining in on a Trump loyalty test when it was so unlikely that the case could be successful?), and yet still the Proud Boys want to destroy the GOP, we go back to the question I have been asking - how bad is the split in the GOP going to be between Trump loyalists who want to treat him indefinitely as the next president in waiting, and those who want to put an end to his era?

I am not alone

 I felt that way after only two episodes.

John Oliver on Pringles

John Oliver can be pretty funny, and his ranting about Pringles amused me this week:

 

 

 

Like him, I have questioned the point of Pringles. I'll eat them, but I agree - a well made normal chip is much nicer.

How stupid

 As someone else tweets:

He's right, I think, and as I keep saying, I reckon it spells trouble for the Republicans in the coming years, until Trump either goes to jail, has a stroke, or otherwise loses interest in trying to control the Republicans as a vanity project.

Or - I could be completely wrong.   I mean, who can tell with the weird, weird state of American politics now?

Republicans and the civil war fever

Noticed this on Twitter:

His article at Daily Kos, written in early 2019, is a good reminder about how long the wingnut Right has fantasised about getting to use their guns in a civil war.

Busy but some thoughts

The office workload is high at the moment:  it is always is at this time of year, and it always dispels any sense of a holiday mood.  Oh well.

Anyway, some various thoughts I normally would have posted separately about:

 *  By virtue of falling asleep and waking up with the TV still on, I found myself watching on SBS last Friday a documentary about Hank Williams, of all people.   Like most Australians, I guess, I knew the name, would probably recognise a couple of songs as being him, but had absolutely no idea about his life.  I would have guessed he lived into the 1960's, but he died aged 29 in 1953, seemingly of a combination of alcohol and medically administered morphine.

So yeah:  turns out he was like he was like the early country version of Amy Winehouse:  big talent, unhappy life, drugs and alcohol their ruination.  (Not that I know much about Amy Winehouse either, but I think that's the general gist.)   Fame is good for very, very few people.

* This Texas Supreme Court last ditch effort to try to stop Biden becoming President:  it's too cute by half, surely?   Given that the litigation is only against those States where Biden won, the political motivation is just too obvious - I mean, couldn't they find a Trump voting State where some technical argument might be possible about how that State had changed its voting procedures in the last year and join them in the action to try to gain some pretence of it not being purely about trying to install Trump?   

And if the Supreme Court gave it any credibility, surely it would be opening a Pandora's Box of potential future litigation. 

I see that a lot of people have noted that the 17 States joining in are basically the States of the old South, making it like a revenge attempt for losing the Civil War.   It's also been noted that its being run by the "States rights are important" party - sure, until they vote for the wrong President.

I am no expert on American constitutional law - but it seems wildly improbable that this will go anywhere.

* Assuming that this is all done and dusted soon - the biggest story of 2021 will be how seriously the Republican party splits.  Here's a bit of speculation:  the "best" thing that could happen for the party to recover would be for some QAnon, "the election was stolen" nutter to shoot or blow up up some Democrat (or even Republican who didn't endorse Trump's fake win claims) office - this would finally give the appalling "leadership" of the Party a reason to say "Enough is enough.  The election was lost legitimately and people have to stop believing it was all a conspiracy that's going to be cured by armed rebellion."

 

The very messy state of marriage in India

At the BBC, a quite long article on the mess that is inter-faith marriage in India.  Some points:

Every year, some 1,000 interfaith couples get in touch with a Delhi-based support group and seek help.

Hindu and Muslim couples usually approach Dhanak when their families deny them permission to marry. Aged between 20-30 years, the harried men and women want the group to talk to their families or help them seek legal assistance.

Among the couples who come to Dhanak, 52% are Hindu women planning to marry Muslim men; and 42% are Muslim women planning to marry Hindu men

"Both Hindu and Muslim families in India fiercely oppose interfaith marriages," Asif Iqbal, founder of Dhanak, told me.

"They will stoop to any level to stop them. Parents even smear the reputation of their daughters to dissuade her lover's family. The so-called 'love-jihad' is another weapon to discourage such relationships."

The bogey of "love-jihad", a term radical Hindu groups coined to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage, has returned to haunt India's interfaith relationships. 

Last week, police in northern Uttar Pradesh state held a Muslim man for allegedly trying to convert a Hindu woman to Islam - he was the first to be arrested under a new anti-conversion law that targets love-jihad. At least four other states ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are planning similar laws. Party spokespeople say such laws are required to stop "deception, fraud and misrepresentation".

"When a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman, it is always portrayed as romance and love by Hindu organisations, while when the reverse happens it is depicted as coercion," says Charu Gupta, a historian at University of Delhi, who has researched the "myth of love jihad" ....

 

Monogamous, arranged, heterosexual and same-community marriages are idealised - more than 90% of all marriages in India are arranged. Interfaith marriages are rare. One study put them at just over 2%. Many believe the spectre of love jihad is resurrected from time to time by Hindu groups for political gains.

That such strident campaigns against interfaith unions have a long and chequered history in India is well-documented.

In the backdrop of rising religious tensions in the 1920s and 1930s, Hindu nationalist groups in parts of northern India launched a campaign against "kidnapping" of Hindu women by Muslim men and demanded the recovery of their Hindu wives.

There's a lot more at the website.