First, Milo:
Adam Creighton has been busy being upset about her banning:
Each of these characters have been mentioned favourably recently at Catallaxy.
Update: speaking of Catallaxy, I see that Steve Kates is now sharing Gateway Pundit fantasies of Fauci (and others) being on trial for...well, you can see.
It's one of the great mysteries of life that Sinclair Davidson seems to think he's performing a service to the world by keeping a forum running where his mates regularly show themselves off as, well, ridiculous idiots. His former RMIT buddy Steve Kates is currently endorsing COVID as being a vast conspiracy to bring down Trump and hence Western civilisation. But we've seen that before.
Today's entry, rather, for going "straight to the pool room" comes from Man Who Loves Women (Just as Long as They are Exactly Like my Catholic Mum circa 1955), with this:
It's better than having a trade or other war. The West needs to infiltrate Chinese social media and continue spreading this idea:
Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by "lying flat".
The new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts.
China has a shrinking labour market and young people often work more hours.
The term "tang ping" is believed to have originated in a post on a popular Chinese social media site.
"Lying flat is my wise movement," a user wrote in a since-deleted post on the discussion forum Tieba, adding: "Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things."
The comments were later discussed on Sina Weibo, another popular Chinese microblogging site, and the term soon became a buzzword.
The idea behind "tang ping" - not overworking, being content with more attainable achievements and allowing time to unwind - has been praised by many and inspired numerous memes. It has been described as a spiritual movement.
...in that the future was not the cynical Two Minute Hate, forced on a populace by authoritarian government, but a whole 180 Minute Hate every evening brought by an ageing billionaire for profit and influence:
As with climate change, they think they can pluck any statement made by a perceived enemy out of context and think that it proves their point. They think they're the smart ones, when they are just nasty and dumb and tribal to the point of preferring self harm to listening to expertise.
I recently watched two videos of interest regarding quantum computing.
As you might expect, Google is going into it in a big way, and while the comedy in this does not really work, it's still interesting:
And Bee Hossenfelder had an informative video on the various approaches to creating quantum computing. I didn't realise there were so many:
Update: I have been meaning to say, since I first posted a photo of these early quantum computer set ups, that I like the lacy, intricate design of the Google quantum computer, which is all about the need for extreme cooling. Which has made me wonder - how do you cool something down to below the temperature of space? This article gives some indication, although I still don't understand exactly how it works:
“Quantum chips have to operate at very low temperatures in order to maintain the quantum information,” Clarke said. To do this, Intel uses cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems from specialist Blufors.
The refrigerator features several stages, getting colder as you go down - all the way "down to temperatures just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero - that is really cold. In fact, it's 250 times colder than deep space,” Clarke said. “We use a mixture of helium isotopes as our refrigerant to get down to these very cold temperatures, in the tens of millikelvin.”
While the refrigeration system can bring temperatures down to extremes, it can't remove heat very quickly - so if you have a chip in there that's creating a lot of heat, you're going to have a problem.
"You're probably familiar with the power dissipation of an FPGA," Clarke said. "This would overwhelm the refrigeration cooling capacity. At the lowest level of a fridge, you typically have about a milliwatt of cooling power. At the four Kelvin stage [higher up in the fridge], you have a few watts."
Future fridge designs are expected to improve things, but it's unlikely to massively increase the temperature envelope. "That imposes limitations on the power dissipation of your control chips."
It is distinctly odd, the way the Trump blog has been abruptly discontinued. The Guardian explains.
Is there a connection with the widely discussed report that Trump is telling people he will be "re-instated" in August? Did he write a blog post all about that, and people around him have thought it was going to hurt him if posted?
This article at the Financial Review, and not behind a paywall, describes the issues in the case and argues the settlement definitely was a capitulation by Porter.
I would also comment that the world of defamation lawyers seems particularly incestuous, even taking into account that the world of barristers and judges is routinely kinda incestuous.
I think that everyone now is curious about the additional redacted evidence that Porter wanted to keep out of the trial. Particularly from the guy who said he had a relevant conversation with Porter about his time with the deceased.
Oh, so just as I thought from the look and manner of the guy, there is apparently reason to suspect the credibility of Luis Elizondo:
A Pentagon whistleblower known for speaking out about UFOs is accusing his former agency of waging a disinformation campaign against him, a report says.
Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other offenses at the agency, according to Politico.
and Jazz Shaw, the right wing blogger at Hot Air who is a firm believer in UFOs has a story about emails apparently deleted in the Pentagon, which he thinks is a Big Deal. I wonder if it'll turn out to be more incompetence than anything else.
According to some China critical Youtube channel I subscribe to, the Shenzhen SEG Plaza is still shaking from time to time, and remains closed and under investigation.
I see now that Bloomberg ran an informative story on the building, and the general problems with China's high rise industry:
In 1996, the company went public and rolled some of the proceeds into SEG Plaza. Last week, Chinese media unearthed a report on the building’s construction authored by a (then) graduate student. She noted that “Shenzhen speed” wasn’t speedy enough for SEG Plaza: The tower was raised at a rate of one floor every 2.7 days. She also found that the building’s construction began before the design and review process was even complete, and that updated plans were delivered throughout the project, meaning that completed sections would often have to be reworked.The writer says the plaza has long been home to shody electronics sales:
SEG Plaza wasn’t the only project to cut such corners. For years, Shenzhen’s contractors made cement with sea sand. It’s far cheaper than river sand, and for good reason: It corrodes the structural steel that holds up buildings. In 2013, the city identified 31 companies that had used sea sand in construction and suspended eight of them for a year — but it never identified any at-risk buildings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, building collapses are a regular, recurring tragedy in China.
A few years after opening, for example, SEG Plaza became a global hub for trading cheap, used electronic components — rather than the new ones that the company had hoped to drive. Chinese traders in, say, New York might buy 5,000 used desktops from a Wall Street bank and ship them to south China. Within a couple of months, their semiconductors would be on sale in an SEG stall.
It wasn’t the kind of business that Shenzhen wanted to advertise to the world (when dignitaries were in town, the government would actually shut the plaza down). Its mere existence hinted at the city’s relatively flexible attitude to intellectual property. But over the years, the neighborhood surrounding SEG Plaza filled with malls also marketing used components to up-and-coming manufacturers who weren’t exactly scrupulous about patents and trademarks.In recent years, it became obvious that SEG Plaza’s best days were behind it. Chinese consumers who once sought out the largely disposable electronics built from SEG’s inventories were moving up to better devices. When I first visited the tower in the mid-2000s, the dim 10-story mall at its base was a crowded and relentless warren of stalls, all packed with chips and computers for sale. In the last half-decade, the stalls have become increasingly populated with beauty products, electronic cigarettes and crypto-mining rigs. Shenzhen’s freewheeling days as an unaccountable manufacturer of low-cost goods are over.
France 24 has a story about UFOs being treated seriously now, and includes this very improbable story:
What officials and scientists aren’t saying is that these are aliens coming from another planet to visit us. They simply don’t know what these objects are, they say. The discussion is still largely couched in distinctly concrete terms and centers around the concern that these craft may represent a threat from enemies here on earth.
At least one official has been willing to go further, though. In December 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the space directorate of the Israeli Defence Ministry, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that humans have been in contact with extraterrestrials and have signed a co-operation accord with them.
“There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens,” he told the newspaper. "They signed a contract with us to do experiments here."
Former president Donald Trump was in on the secret, he said, and had been “on the verge of revealing” it but was asked not to due to fears of “mass hysteria”.
Eshed’s assertion doesn’t seem to represent the consensus view in Israel. The chairman of the country’s Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel, told the Times of Israel that while the scientific community thinks the chances that there is life in outer space is “considerable, not small,” he doesn’t believe “there were any physical encounters between us and aliens".
I said ages ago that if some government agency had proof of alien presence on Earth that they thought should be kept secret, there is no way they would have told Trump, as he would blurted it out at his next rally and tried to take narcissistic credit for being the person to tell the world.
Update: Eshed has made other claims:
Eshed makes implausible claims that include stories of how aliens prevented potential nuclear disasters, including an unspecified nuclear incident during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[24][25]
* Christian Porter: still a political problem for PM Smirko. Labor is right to be calling for the independent inquiry which was the obvious thing that Smirko should have set up as soon as this started. I suspect Smirko, who has shockingly bad judgement in this sort of thing, is going to try to tough it out as something not needing further consideration. (And Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning did a bad devil's advocate style interview with Labor's Mark Dreyfus which set up the arguments you can see Smirko trying on. He was probably taking notes.)
* That Friend's reunion interview, which I have no interest in, has at least had the benefit of causing quite a lot of people on Twitter coming out as saying they never thought the show was very good, and many hated it. I am not alone. (I didn't hate it, but it was only intermittently amusing; certainly not worth watching at all in later seasons. A show vastly overrated is the correct assessment.)
* Brisbane has had an unusually cold run of nights and mornings for this time of year. Days are still OK, by and large.
