Smart people can be nuts

I had noticed Trumpy Right wingers citing the opinion of the (now dead) inventor of the PCR test as proving that it's useless or misleading as a COVID test.  I never looked into it in detail:  obviously, culture warriors of the Right are gullible and cling to anything, no matter how stupid, that they think supports their "independent thinking"; and the actual medical authorities saying that PCR is really the test to use were just always likely to be right.

So yeah, I didn't really realise how nutty the inventor of PCR had gone, until I read this article.  Highlights include an encounter with a glowing talking raccoon (probably an alien using a screen memory), and having his life saved by an astral travelling woman he later met for a sexual hook up.    

All very, very plausible.

For those waiting for my last Ring review...

[...hi Tim, although I'm not even sure if you care.  :)]

 Anyway, this last weekend I only got through Act 1 of Götterdämmerung and didn't have time to finish.

The story has taken a turn I wasn't quite expecting - with the new love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde (literally, just one night old) the subject of interference by the very oddly named (even by Wagnerian standards) Gibichungs.   

I really liked the orchestral bit when Siegfried sets off on the Rhine -  it's back to the first theme in the first opera, of course, and elaborated at some length.   And, as people said in their commentary on watching the whole cycle, by this stage, you really start to enjoy recognising the prior themes popping up, even briefly, and being mixed up.   

I hope the end of the world in flames lives up to its hype...

The Chinese puzzle, continued

Noah's substack piece about what on Earth China thinks it is doing with its attack on its own successful tech industries was really good, a few weeks back.  I think I forgot to link to it?  Here it is...

Believe it when I see it

I smell a strong whiff of Murdoch-ian playing both sides of the fence for economic gain in this potentially (kinda, sorta, maybe) big news today reported in the SMH:

News Corp Australia, an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars, will end its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies and advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions....

From October 17, the company will run a two-week campaign that will advocate for a carbon net zero target to be reached by 2050, which is expected to focus heavily on jobs in a decarbonised economy, particularly blue-collar industries such as mining, resources and agriculture. The campaign, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they are confidential, said it will be fronted by news.com.au columnist and former Studio 10 host, Joe Hildebrand.

Several sources said Sky News will support the cause that will feature across the metropolitan tabloid mastheads. The Hildebrand-led campaign will not appear in the national masthead, The Australian, they said, but the newspaper will continue to temper its editorial stance on the issue.

The Australian wingnut Right already doesn't think Hildebrand isn't one of them - any campaign by him will be readily ignored. 

The far, far bigger issue is this:

A plan has been devised to limit – but not muzzle – dissenting voices among News Corp’s stable of conservative commentators, who will be expected to reframe their political arguments both in print and on its subscription news channel, which is now broadcast across regional Australia on free-to-air on WIN.

Well, it's impossible to imagine Bolt, Jones and the idiot show that is Outsiders "re-framing" their climate science denial in any meaningful way.   If the Murdochs successfully muzzle them on the issue, well and good.  But I can't see it happening.

 

Odd things seen last weekend

I accidentally ended up at a country athletics meet.  This was an unusual thing for me - to be at something involving sporting competition - so it warranted photographic proof:

(I was actually at the Mulgowie farmer's market.  The athletics meet on the same field was not something that had attracted me.   Fantastically good corn was purchased, by the way.  And a truck on the side of the road at Gatton - not so far away - was selling 20kg of potatoes for $20.  We passed it twice, but my wife wouldn't let me buy a sack.)  

 

The next day, it was fake Italy on the Gold Coast:

To be honest, I don't mind Disneyesque fake environments in terms of buildings, at least. I could do without the imitation art though, in the form of the nude dude.  That's pushing it too far.

Some interesting tweets on China and socialism

Sunday deep thoughts

By the way, that Oklahoma story is so intensely attention grabbing for anyone who believes the Right has been driven nuts by the culture wars, I have been suspecting it might be too good to be true.  Not seen it debunked yet, though.

Update: yes, it would seem the doctor who made the Oklahoma claim was, at the very least, exaggerating.  (I am curious to know the number of cases of Ivermectin poisoning there are, though, whether in that State, or elsewhere.)  Still, my sense of "too 'good' to be true" seems to be working well.

Well, when you put it that way...

Some further tweets from the thread:

Record intense rainfall causes flash flood...again

My prediction for years that flooding will be a key factor in convincing people and governments that dangerous climate change is real seems to be getting vindicated repeatedly this year:

Why is my screenshot not always capturing the image in a tweet now?  It's annoying.

Stare into the robot's eyes

One of the most surprising bits of research of recent years has been that about the effect of people staring into eyes.   

It seems that robot gaze even has an effect:

In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others’ intentions, goals, and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot’s gaze (mutual or averted) influences the way people strategically reason in a social decision-making context. Specifically, participants played a strategic game with the robot iCub while we measured their behavior and neural activity by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Participants were slower to respond when iCub established mutual gaze before their decision, relative to averted gaze. This was associated with a higher decision threshold in the drift diffusion model and accompanied by more synchronized EEG alpha activity. In addition, we found that participants reasoned about the robot’s actions in both conditions. However, those who mostly experienced the averted gaze were more likely to adopt a self-oriented strategy, and their neural activity showed higher sensitivity to outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that robot gaze acts as a strong social signal for humans, modulating response times, decision threshold, neural synchronization, as well as choice strategies and sensitivity to outcomes. This has strong implications for all contexts involving human-robot interaction, from robotics to clinical applications.

Update:   hey, this reminds me - I recently got around to watching the modest budget, but pretty good, science fiction movie Ex Machina on Netflix.  Staring into a robot's eyes is a key part of that movie.   I recommend it.

That Texas abortion law is a really bad way to deal with the issue

I find it hard to believe that anyone of moderate Conservative values (say, Douthat), can run a credible defence of the Texas anti abortion law as being good for society when it operates by enabling private actions against abortion.   From Axios:

Details: Texas' Senate Bill 8 does not provide any exceptions for rape of incest. It also allows for people to sue anyone suspected of helping a person to obtain an abortion, regardless of whether they have a direct relationship with the person or not.

• Those who are successful can be awarded at least $10,000.
• Texas Right to Life set up a "whistleblower" website where people can submit tips on individuals that they believe are violating the law... 
  

  Texas' abortion ban is hard to challenge because the state is not the one enforcing the law, private citizens are.

• "The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals," Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, told TIME.
• "That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights," Tribe added.

And this:

 This is real serious culture war stuff:   enabling those with pretty fundamentalist views of the morality of abortion to sue others who do not agree with them.

True observation

 

Bad smells from COVID

This video about the odd, sometimes long lasting, side effect of COVID 19 called parosmia (whereby normal food smells become unpleasant) is well done and quite interesting:

From the "Can't they just put this dangerous jerk in jail?" files

 

Hard to keep up with what's going on in China

I saw a link to this article last week - it would seem that, perhaps after toying with softening official attitudes to gay relationships (I had posted not so long ago about the surprisingly sympathetic treatment given to the issue on some CGTN Youtube stories from 3 years ago), the government that thinks it can control everything is now trying to dissuade public discussion of it, and actually did place media control over its depiction from 2016:

Earlier this month, China's do-everything app (which is also a leading social media platform) WeChat permanently suspended the official accounts of more than a dozen LGBTQ+ campus advocacy groups. The move was part of the Chinese state's tightening grip over civil society, but also indicative of a rising backlash toward LGBTQ+ rights within the general population.

And further in the article:

In February 2016, the Chinese gay series Heroin (known in Chinese as Addicted, 上瘾 shàngyǐn) was banned from broadcasting online. In 2018, Sina Weibo declared a ban on all LGBT-related issues — though the state-owned Party newspaper People’s Daily came to the defense of individual citizens, offering a glimpse into the inconsistent and contradictory stances on the matter within the state apparatus. State censors also barred the Beijing International Film Festival from screening Call Me by Your Name, the Oscar-winning movie revolving around a same-sex couple....

One may be tempted to view the backlash toward LGBTQ+ content and viewpoints as entirely state-driven, yet this would be an oversimplification. Several prominent Weibo influencers took to gloating over the government’s recent censure of campus LGBTQ+ groups, with blogger Zǐwǔxiáshì 子午侠士 declaring that they were “so glad that the government is finally taking some action on the LGBT organizations.” Elsewhere, conservative, reactionary voices have celebrated the elimination of what they deem to be the perversion and distortion of established sexual norms and family values.

Many more have come to associate the movement with perceived foreign interference and Western meddling in China’s “domestic affairs” — a motif oft-recycled by official sources and leading media figures alike in castigating ideals deemed to be “Western” or “anti-Chinese.”

So, their new wave of nationalism may well be behind the new "let's never talk about this again" attitude.

Yet the article indicates public sympathy has already taken a very Western path:   

According to sociologist and LGBT+ advocate Pān Suímíng’s 潘绥铭 research, in 2006, 52.2% of surveyed respondents disagreed with the statement, “Homosexuals should be completely equal to other people,” a percentage that declined to 28.3% by 2015. The percentage of individuals reporting a “strong desire to have sexual relations with someone of the same sex” increased from 1.3% in 2000 to 5.1% in 2015.

Those last figures sound a bit dubious, but still.

And meanwhile, someone has posted this about the new online games restrictions: