In the history books, PM Morrison is going down as the shallow, hapless PM who thought he could PR his way to success, while not being bright enough to realise he's not good at PR. This line of attack yesterday was just so inane:
The Liberal Party seems to really be specialising in giving us living examples of the Peter Principle, this last decade. Abbott was perhaps the best example of that, as he arguably gave earlier indications of maybe being a good political operator, only to turn out as PM to be a weirdo with a "mummy" thing going on with his chief of staff. Turnbull's problem was not exactly one I would call a Peter Principle issue; more just a simple lack of courage against the climate change deniers in his own party. But the PP definitely applies to PM Smirko. It's just that it hit very early in his working life, and somehow didn't stop further promotion. Politics can be like that, given it's often a case of "least worst option".
Who's next to take the mantle of "risen to his level of incompetence"? Seems likely it will be Dutton, the potential PM with the weirdest looking head since Federation. The only problem is, you can see the media narrative now: even if he proves the slightest bit effective as a campaigner, journalists will not be able to resist a "surprise! the public is finding him likeable after all" take.
The Beatles: Get Back review – eight hours of TV so aimless it threatens your sanity
Most people tweeting about it seem to strongly disagree - but then, they might have gone the full 8 hours yet.
(As for my own views - like everyone else, I was pretty stunned at the clarity of the film that was shown on the preview some months ago - as if it was made yesterday (subtle pun) instead of 50 years ago. And it was very pleasing to see them looking happier than we all had been led to believe. But I am not the world's biggest Beatle fan, so yeah, 8 hours might be pushing it for me.)
You would think she might be smart enough to hold off making this point for a case where it didn't take two months for the white men who shot a black unarmed man on the street (and videoed it) to be arrested.
And for which a white prosecutor is being charged for obstruction of justice.
What’s
left, then, is some distant hope that a profound national crisis could
jolt Republicans away from their embrace of authoritarian politics. Just
as the tragedy of Sept. 11 brought Democrats and Republicans together,
perhaps a major national shock could cause Republicans to rally back
toward democracy. But we’ve already had two major crises — Jan. 6
and a once-in-a-century pandemic — and they’ve made the GOP more
extreme, not less. If a violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol aimed at
overturning an election and more than 770,000 dead Americans in the
pandemic aren’t enough of a jolt, what would it take?
The
conclusion is depressing, but we must face reality: The battle for the
Republican Party is over. The Trumpian authoritarians have won — and
they’re not going to be defeated by pro-democracy Republicans anytime
soon.
So, I learn from Cathollaxy that Breitbart has a story up about how George Pell spent part of his time in cells writing up his whiny, non-expert, and patently out of date thoughts on how climate change is not real.
We've long known he was the captive of ageing crank geologist (and atheist) Ian Plimer's utter nonsense of climate change denial - funny how a religious conservative let himself be conned by a non believer into thinking that it was all hysteria caused by modern folk having lost religion!
I'm referring to the accuracy of GPS, about which I will never stop feeling awe as a technological and scientific marvel. I didn't realise, until watching a youtube about its monitoring applications, that high end, scientific research versions of GPS receivers can be this accurate:
High-end users boost GPS accuracy with dual-frequency receivers and/or
augmentation systems. These can enable real-time positioning within a
few centimeters, and long-term measurements at the millimeter level.
I have the feeling I knew this before, but had forgotten.
Here's the video, by the way:
Someone in comments to the video notes this:
I frequently vacation in coastal Oregon, where earth movement is a big
concern. GPS stations (the most accurate in the world) measure earth
movement as small as one third of a millimetre and they discovered the
study area oscillates east and west every two weeks. Japan uses the
same accurate GPS equipment, and I believe Oregon got their equipment
from Japan (the US military probably has more accurate stuff). Good
post! Thanks for sharing it with us.
Other people question the millimetre accuracy, but it seems not out of the question:
I'd assume it's not just GPS. I'm 99% sure GPS does not provide millimetre level resolution. They're probably using a combination of positioning systems.
New research has shed light on a sudden
cooling event 34 million years ago, which contributed to formation of
the Antarctic ice sheets.
High-resolution simulations of ocean
circulations show that the tectonic opening of Southern Ocean seaways
caused a fundamental reorganisation of ocean currents, heat transport
and initiated a strong Antarctic surface water cooling of up to 5°C....
“A 600m change in the depth of an ocean
gateway can cause a dramatic drop in coastal temperatures and,
therefore, the fate of the Antarctic ice sheet.”
The last land bridges connecting
Antarctica with its surrounding continents, Australia, and South
America, broke off about 34 million years ago. This tectonic event did
not only leave the polar continent isolated by other land masses; it
also led to a major reorganisation of ocean currents in the Southern
Ocean.
A circumpolar current started to flow,
preventing subpolar gyres from transporting warm surface waters to the
Antarctic coast. At the same time, ice sheets started to build on
Antarctica and the Earth underwent one of its most fundamental climate
change events, transitioning from warm Greenhouse to cold Icehouse
conditions.
The role of the opening seaways in the
formation of Antarctic ice sheets versus decreasing amounts of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has always been strongly debated by
scientists.
There is much excitement over at dover beach's Cathollaxy, a pro-Christofascist blog, over the "success" of the large demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney last week over vaccination and mandates, etc.
The so called ‘governments’ are taking orders from above.
Unless the freedom fighters start proper full blooded violence, they wont win.
and
flyingduksays:
Unless the freedom fighters start proper full blooded violence, they wont win.
Quite, some people are afraid this will lead to all out war, the people v their governments – I am afraid it wont.
Which led to a severe dressing down by the blog controller:
Hey, …..Hey, ……..they’re killing us.
They are killing our children.
They’re imprisoning, enslaving us.
They have taken all our freedoms and separated families.
The army are now dragging people away to camps.
But………Don’t be so uncivil and threaten violence back, FFS, says the forever submissive.
Write a strongly worded letter.
That should do it.
Well it didn’t work did it?
And peaceful rallies just increase the speed of their growing tyranny as they start to see the need for urgency.
What do they need to do before you suggest they’ve crossed a line , here?
At what point do you pick up a rock?
Dover beach was at the rally himself, and posted boring photos of it. He routinely notes dubious analysis of the Covid vaccines.
Catholic conservative wannabe Christo-fascism at its finest. [That's sarcasm, for any Federal domestic violence authorities who are reading.]
An article at The Conversation, about how Chinese school books are developing the personality cult around Xi Jinping.
I don't know - in the digital world, it feels it should be harder for a personality cult to be built up in children - or teenagers - especially when Grandpa won't let them play video games except for a few hours one night a week.
Not only that, but it seems to me that the wingnut Christofascim of Australia has a distinctly Catholic colour to it - unlike America where it's primarily Southern evangelical. I mean, last week it was a statue of Mary being paraded in front of the "hang Dan Andrews" rallies; on the weekend it was a long time nutter and Australia's own wannabe Michael Flynn starting his speech before the "Freedom rally" with the Lord's Prayer. (He is Catholic, and amusingly, I've noticed many people at dover beach's Cathollaxy think he's gone too nuts and Qanon-like.) Here's the video, if you can stomach it:
He called for a general strike until the country bends to his views - I am curious how many absentees there were today as a result of this call. I doubt it's many.
How much should we worry about the nutty Freedom rallies? They are scary in the way they illustrate the power of the internet to co-ordinate protest, internationally; but at the same time, the vaccination rate here (Australia) would indicate that their numbers over the entire population are not as large as they might think. I know - there would have been some vaccinated people in the crowd who were protesting for the rights of the un-vaccinated - but I suspect they would be in the small minority. So vaccination rates in the big states would tend to indicate the number of people whipping themselves into an anti-vaccination frenzy is probably under 10%, perhaps less than 5%? Yet the internet gives cranks the impression that their numbers are larger than they really are.
Children of women who use marijuana
during or soon after pregnancy are twice as likely as other kids to
become anxious, aggressive or hyperactive, according to a new study.
The findings add weight to a growing body of evidence linking cannabis
use during pregnancy to psychiatric problems in children. The behavioral
issues may be driven in part by changes in the activity of genes found
in the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the
growing fetus.
For pregnant women, cannabis isn’t just a means of getting high. Some women use it to ease severe morning sickness and anxiety, and they may not be aware that it can pose risks.
Women “tend to think smoking and drinking
during pregnancy need to be avoided at all costs, but not cannabis,”
said Yoko Nomura, a behavioral neuroscientist at Queens College, City
University of New York, and a co-author of the new study. “We have a
long way to go to educate pregnant women, policymakers and even OB-GYN
doctors on this issue.”
Research suggests that a growing number of women are using cannabis during pregnancy: One study found that in 2016, nearly twice as many women in California reported using cannabis while pregnant than in 2009.
Yet for more than 40 years, research has been raising concerns about the
effects of marijuana use during pregnancy. A longitudinal study
that began in 1978 linked maternal cannabis use with children’s
behavioral problems as well as deficits in language comprehension,
visual perception, attention and memory. More recent research has linked
cannabis use in pregnancy to low birth weight, reduced IQ, autism, delusional thoughts and attention problems, although some other studies have not identified such associations.
Of concern, too, is that cannabis today is nothing like the cannabis of
years past. Levels of THC, the compound responsible for most of
marijuana’s psychological effects, have increased significantly in
recent years. “One joint today is like 17 joints in the 1970s,” said Dr.
Darine El-Chaâr, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at The Ottawa
Hospital in Canada who studies the health risks of marijuana use during
pregnancy and was not involved in the new study.
That's quite some list of potential poor outcomes for the child!
I still suspect the US is going to regret the normalisation of marijuana use.
The topic: superdeterminism as a "solution" to the quantum measurement problem.
The reason I am writing it: possibly, because my future self is causing me to do so; but more clearly, because I see that everyone's favourite Youtube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder appears as co-author on a paper up at Arxiv with the title The Quantum Eraser Paradox.
She made a recent Youtube video in which she downplayed the retro-causality interpretation of the experiment. Let me post it: here we go -
Now, she has previously come out as suggesting that superdeterminism is probably going to turn out to be the best explanation of quantum measurement issues, and she has also gone on about how free will in humans does not exist.
In this new Arxiv paper, if I understand it correctly (and I have only had a quick read), it would seem that she and her fellow authors propose a new quantum experiment the results of which may show a difference between retrocausation as the explanation, and superdeterminism.
Interestingly, it seems there is some potential cross over between both explanations (the future causing the past, and the now being predetermined.) On the Wiki page, for example, it notes:
Some authors consider retrocausality
in quantum mechanics to be an example of superdeterminism, whereas
other authors treat the two cases as distinct. No agreed-upon definition
for distinguishing them exists.
But is that what Sabine addressing in her proposed experiment: a way of distinguishing the two, empirically?
In Anderson's article, he writes:
Although there is no information transfer from future to past, so you can’t remember the
future, there can be causal effects at the quantum level and relativity
is not violated provided cause and effect are within light speed of one
another. In that sense, you cannot know the future yet it can cause the
present and the past. It can change reality itself, switching the
electron spin orientation for example, or changing what reality was
before you became aware of it.
This
is why a better term for superdeterminism is “Future Input Dependency”.
Thus, my actions in the future might, counter-intuitively, be
determining my actions now rather than the reverse. Moreover, my future
actions might even determine reality itself in the present. Thus, how I
set up an experiment years in the future might determine the state of an
electron emitted now.
Well, still count me as confused, then.
But, I don't know - if what I do in the future in some sense influences a decision I made in the past, is that a backdoor way to let a kind of free will in? Because if it's myself doing the retrocausation, it has at least a whiff of free will about it.
But how much I trust my future self to make the best retrocausative decisions? Being good now seems a sound way to ensure your future self is not a complete jerk - hence retrocausation might fit in well with your classic way of thinking about ethics. It's just that it's all circular (perhaps with a Mobius strip twist) instead of straight line running in one direction.
It's funny, too, isn't it, how we feel it's comforting to think our love relationships were meant to be - we give free will a hall pass to wander off when it comes to something like that, but want it back if it also means we're destined to die an early death (or end up in Hell forever.)
Anyway, I've written posts about retrocausation before on this blog. I find it appealing, and I'm just here trying to work out why.
