Risotto noted

As this blog doubles as my resource for recipes I don't want to forget, I'll just note here that I don't think I have ever recorded proportions of stock to arborio rice for risotto.  

Following roughly this recipe on the weekend, I've decided it's 800 ml of stock for 300 g of rice (using the normal stir it in method; none of this "baked risotto" for me.)

It also took just one chorizo, and was enough for 3 pretty large servings.  (Oh, and I put in a knob of butter, and some parmesan cheese, in at the end.)

Nice.

A gruesome post

So, I'm late in getting around to watching it, but am currently going through the 3rd season of the Norwegian Viking comedy Norsemen on Netflix.

I've posted about this series before - the show is very funny in an occasionally violent Scandinavian Monty-Python-does-history kind of way.  One of the things that I find continually funny is just the way they speak their English - it's like the rhythm itself is amusing.    (Is this the way Norwegian itself sounds?  I really don't know.)

Anyway, in this season, there is a Viking wedding which features one of the violent bits (although, as usual, done in such an over the top way it's not offending me) - the sacrifice of a slave.

This has caused me to Google whether this actually happened much, and I can't for the moment see any confirmation of this.  Animal sacrifice, yes, but slave sacrifice is usually mentioned in the context of funerals, not weddings.

However, in reading about violent Norse habits, I did come across discussion of the "blood eagle" as a method of extremely gruesome execution.   I see that people who have watched Vikings, or played bloody video games, know all about this, but it was new to me.  I almost wish I didn't know:

Particularly infamous is the so-called “blood eagle”, a gory ritual these warriors are said to have performed on their most hated enemies. The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim’s back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were pulled out through the resulting wounds. The final fluttering of the lungs splayed out on the outspread ribs would supposedly resemble the movement of a bird’s wings – hence the eagle in the name. 

I see that it is questioned whether it was real:

For decades, researchers have dismissed the blood eagle as a legend. No archaeological evidence of the ritual has ever been found, and the Vikings themselves kept no records, listing their achievements only in spoken poetry and sagas that were first written down centuries later. So the bloody rite has been rejected as improbable, resulting from repeated misunderstandings of complex poetry and a desire by Christian writers to paint their Nordic attackers as barbaric heathens. 

However, our new study, takes an entirely new approach on the matter. Our team, made up of medical scientists and a historian, bypassed the long-standing question of “did the blood eagle ever really happen?”, asking instead: “Could it have been done?” Our answer is a clear yes.

I can think of better things to study...

 

Would be funny to Australians if it turned out to be Hawaii

As Montana reels from floods, no one is sure where Gov. Gianforte is

Things I don't understand about the electricity "market" in Australia

a.    How do fluctuating "spot prices" work?  I get the impression that move very quickly, but why? 

b.    If a power generating company, whether it be privately or publicly owned, says it can't make profit if the cost of gas or coal is at a certain level, over what time frame are they talking?   Businesses can wear a temporary loss if they make enough profit over the rest of the year - who determines whether these companies are being opportunistic when complaining about a temporary loss due to a temporary spike in cost to generate?

c.    There was talk about how if AMEO set a price, they would compensate companies for the loss caused.  Where does that compensation money come from?   And again, who determines what is reasonable compensation, as that surely involves the question of what a reasonable profit is (which raises the question in b.)

d.    How do the multitude of "retailers" manage to make a difference in price to customers.  I don't understand what an electricity retailer actually does, and why some should be able to offer significantly different prices to customers.

We're getting old

At the Washington Post, an article talking about the 40th anniversary of ET.

It does praise the movie, but I think leaves out two key aspects of its success:

a.    the operatic, deeply affecting, quality of the score.  Does anyone doubt that it contributes enormously to the emotional weight of the key scenes in the last 20 minutes of the film?

b.    although the article does say "Empathy is the film’s guiding philosophy", I would go further than that, and note that it doesn't really feature have true "bad guys" or enemies.  Sure, there are scary police/government officers who try to recover the alien in heavy handed fashion, but a key aspect of the film is that the adults want to "meet" ET too, just that they approach it with adult concerns that are not readily understood by children (the concern for biological contagion).   As with Close Encounters, the conflict is more a case of misunderstanding between groups - not deliberate ill will borne by one lot against another.   In this way, the Spielbergian universe of this era is the opposite of the scare world that the American Right was just starting to talk itself into, with fear of otherness cumulating in Trumpist nativism and demagoguery.   It's no accident that Right wing sites are always waiting to ridicule Spielberg and his movies for being a Hollywood woke liberal - he is their philosophical enemy for believing in a kinder world. 

Meatless Einstein

I seem to have missed that (some) vegans like to claim Einstein as a fellow non-meat eater.

However, as this article from the LA Times explains, he only went vegetarian for the last couple of years of his life.

He did, however, have misgivings about eating meat:

“I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience,” he once professed in a letter. He largely agreed with the moral motivations behind vegetarianism, but was unable to comply.

I sympathise.  

I didn't know he had life long "chronic digestive distress".  I should go back and actually read that biography sitting on my bedside table.

How Republicans will move away from Trump

I reckon Allahpundit's explanation of how a move away from Trump within Republicans will work sounds very plausible: 

To repeat a point from yesterday, Republican voters will never admit that the evidence produced at the hearings is damning and should disqualify Trump from being president again. To do so would be disloyal. They might, however, point to the hypothetical effect the evidence will have on swing voters and proclaim that Trump is hopelessly damaged goods. I suspect that’s how Ron DeSantis and other Trump rivals will spin the January 6 evidence if and when they face him in a primary. They can’t tout the evidence as proof of a character deficit but they can say that electability matters above all other things and Trump is no longer electable. The “witch hunt” destroyed him.

As a Republican, you’re not allowed to admit that you believe Trump is unfit for office but you are allowed to disguise that belief as worrying that others might find him unfit for office. Of course he’s fit for office! But … we want to play our strongest hand in 2024, don’t we?

The potential for floating solar power is bigger than I would have guessed

This is the subheading from a Nature comment piece last week:

Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-fuel power plants. But the environmental and social impacts must be assessed. 

There is mention of the benefits:

Placing solar arrays on reservoirs could have many advantages. The arrays are simply conventional solar panels installed on floats that are anchored through mooring lines. Proximity to water tends to keep them cool, making floating panels about 5% more efficient than land-based ones⁷. Arrays shield the surface from the sun and might reduce evaporation, retaining water for hydropower, drinking and irrigation⁸. Hydropower reservoirs already have the grid infrastructure for conveying electricity to consumers, reducing transmission costs. Pairing solar with pumped-storage hydropower could address the twin challenges of providing energy when sunlight is weak and storing it as potential energy in reservoirs when solar-power production is high⁹.

I've been saying this for some time....

A futuristic prototype if ever there was one

They were testing this prototype when I were but a boy (in the 1960's), but I am still a bit surprised that I don't recall ever seeing it before.   I think I would have remembered, as it's like a perfect example of what futurism in the 1960's looked like.   (Rather Thunderbirds-ish, don't you think?)

Agreed

Have I ever mentioned before that I was never convinced that the Turing Test made much sense?  I have a vague recollection of arguing with someone about this in the 1980's:

Update:  By the way, my bit of speculation that I think is fun is that sentience in Google (or the WWW generally) might be detected when it becomes clear that it's taking steps to reproducing itself.  Say, orders for new computers or Web components are emailed to a chip manufacturer, with someone discovering they were never generated by a human.

 

I was just complaining about the complexity of energy in Australia last week...

 And read Giles Parkinson on this:

It’s one thing to feel you are being held hostage by privately owned provider of an essential product, but quite another when the stand-off may involve a publicly owned company providing a service as fundamental as electricity.

The extraordinary scenes that emerged in Queensland over the long weekend, and which quickly infected NSW, where generators threatened power shortfalls unless they got paid more money – come from an electricity system – its markets and its regulatory environment – that are completely broken.

It has turned into a state of complete farce when, in Queensland, a state dominated by publicly owned electricity generators – apparently can’t guarantee an essential service because they can’t make sufficient profits.

 Even he doesn't really explain how to fix it properly, though... 

Update:   I suspect JQ  is right - 

Anyone reasonable can see the value in the Jan 6 committee hearings

I watched some clips of the second day of the Jan 6 committee hearing, and I have to say, the manner and questioning of several prominent Republican officials by Democrat Zoe Lofgren was very calm and effective in showing up how there was never anything to the Trump fraud claims.   A summary of 4 key takeaways from the day is here.

I really find it very difficult to believe that this will not prevent Trump successfully running again.  Sure, his deluded followers are not even watching it, and the ridiculous pro-Turmp pundits cannot reverse their opinion while saving any face - but there must some effect of this process on at least enough of the party faithful to not vote for Trump again.

Oh, and here's the Axios summary.  The comments of Allahpundit at Hot Air are worthwhile too.  He points this out, too:  a terrible aspect of the Trump lies that is so badly under-emphasised:

Trump was so sold on the “smoking gun” video that he pressed Georgia officials on it during a phone call a month after it was debunked, even mentioning one of the election workers seen in the clip by name. That woman and another worker were inundated with death threats amid the conspiracy-mongering in December 2020. Their lives have been more or less destroyed since then. As for Pak, he resigned as U.S. Attorney once he found out that Trump was considering firing him for failing to find fraud.  Pak refused to substitute the reality Trump preferred, so he had to go.

Right wingers, and stupid Bill Maher, are very upset that a nutter who planned on shooting a Supreme Court judge was not given enough publicity in the media.

They never talk about the thousands of death threats both Republican officials, and innocent election workers, received all based on a lie of a deranged President. 

More:

And more:

John Hinderaker at the Powerline blog, has moved on:

What we do not need is candidates who are obsessed with righting the alleged (and to some extent imaginary) wrongs that Donald Trump suffered in 2020. I don’t blame Trump for being unhappy, but his emotional state cannot dictate the future of the Republican Party. 

And Trump delusion continues:

You can read it here.  The footnotes are very often to 2000 Mules evidence - which prominent Republican pundits have already refused to support.

Yet more update:  this very damning take on the Bill Barr role at Slate is really worth reading.

He has a point, but still has priorities wrong

Latest Bill Maher kerfuffle:

Bill Maher is calling out Hollywood studios for being super woke on every issue except the most obvious one -- its own culture of gun violence and vengeance, and the role those images play in real-life mass shootings.

Bill got after the issue on Friday night's episode of his HBO show, "Real Time" ... pointing out Hollywood bends over backward to be politically correct, yet "when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence? Crickets."

Reacting to the recent mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, and the growing cry for Congress to "do something" ... Maher said movie and TV studios also need to acknowledge some cold hard stats.

Such as the fact the average American kid views about 200,000 acts of violence on big and little screens before they turn 18 -- and the FBI says a "fascination with violence-filled entertainment" is a huge warning sign for potential school shooters.

I've been complaining about this for a long, long time too:  I didn't like how the original Matrix showed a world where everyone "not with us is against us" and gave permission for hundreds of normies to be shot up by characters dressed to look cool.    I've complained in recent years about the  "shot to the head, brains sprayed out the back" has become completely normalised in entertainment, such that it contains no shock value at all.    I even quit Squid Games over the violent silliness and am very disappointed that more people did not have a problem with it.  (It's been renewed for a Season 2, I see.  How stupider can the plot get?)

That said:   obviously, the entire world has been watching the same movies and shows and has not been suffering mass shootings in the same repetitive fashion as the US.   Obviously, you can in practice take action on the negative effects of glamorised media violence by stopping the population having such easy access to guns.

It's OK to complain about fictional depiction of violence, but it's not the immediate answer to an immediate problem.

 

Rupert making his feelings better known

So both the New York Post and The Australian have editorialised against a Trump return, and criticised him over the Jan 6 insurrection.  

I'm sure I've posted before that it had been reported that Rupert Murdoch never believed the election was "stolen".   So has he figured he has made enough money from gullible Trump supporters now, and can tell them they're wrong after all?

And he must know that Trumpists will not feel isolated until Fox News evening line up abandons them. 

How is he going to bring that Frankenstein monster to heal?   (Or does he have any desire to - money, money, money, after all.)

 

I wouldn't disagree

From Vox:

The January 6 hearings showed why it’s reasonable to call Trump a fascist