There's a detailed article here at the Washington Post (gift link) about how close we may be to electric cars becoming routinely part of domestic renewable energy storage.
It's pretty impressive sounding, and it's easy to imagine it happening to a large scale in large parts of Australia, where the sun shines a lot.
One of the oddest aspects of the "Chinese spy balloons over America" saga is this:
The top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later.
“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command.
One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.
I mean, I would have thought that something as big as that balloon and its payload, moving with the wind, would make for a big radar target that would be readily identified (as a balloon at least, if not the country of origin.)
But I would remind my feeble number of readers that there are some remarkable oddities about US airspace awareness where they can't identify a big aircraft even when they are visually identified by other pilots. I think I have posted about this incident before: a 2017 case where airliners saw another aircraft flying high over Oregon, it had no transponder turned on, and despite some F 15s being scrambled, it seems no one knows where it ended up. (You can read even more detail about it in this follow up post. I mean, it seems it was not a small aircraft, but was something like airliner size. How can they lose track of that over the West coast? Of course, if it really was a UFO, that could explain it! But it apparently looked like a large, white aircraft, and was flying fast, but at airliner type speed.)
So, it would seem US identification of what's going on in its airspace is not as foolproof as you would expect.
Yes I know, ideally I would become a vegetarian, but beef does taste so, so good. And my daughter used to have low iron, so it's healthy, right? (Any excuse is a good excuse.)
Anyway, beef brisket was on special yesterday and I've never cooked with it before. My wife has, but not me. Decided to go with a recipe from Taste.com, Cantonese beef brisket noodle soup, and it really was a success. My bowl:
I worry about link rot, so I had better reproduce most of the recipe here:
So, trim the brisket of fat (the only painful exercise in this recipe), cut into big chunks and boil for 5 mins. Skim the top, and take out the meat and fry in oil in a frying pan to brown the outside, then add the liquid (soy sauces, fish sauce, rice wine and the sugar) and just get it combined, then put it back in with the stock.
The spices - recipe says to put the cardamon, star anise and peppercorns in a muslin tie up and bash them a bit. Instead, I crushed them a bit in a mortar and pestle then put then in a metal tea infuser - worked fine.
All of the other ingredients go in and simmer for 90 minutes. Boil egg noodles and put in bowl and put soup on top (and the boiled vegetable.) I guess anyone could guess the last bit.
Things that surprised me: the two bits of orange peel really make a strong, fragrant contribution. And the seasoning level with these ingredients was just right.
It's funny, in a way, how 21st century Right wing Americans think that most of the West is on the highway to Hell due to sexual licentiousness and violence, when in fact there was some really weird stuff going down in their own country in the 19th century.
I'm pretty sure I have read something about it before, but I don't seem to have posted previously about the Oneida Community, which comes to my attention this morning due to a book review at the Washington Post. It's about the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, and how the assassin was a former member of the (sex) utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York.
The review doesn't give many details, but puts it this way:
From the outside, the Oneida Community looked idyllic. Led by the preacher John Humphrey Noyes, it was the most successful utopian colony of the period, spanning more than 30 years. At its height, tourists flocked to what Wels describes as the “wild woodland” in Upstate New York, with orchards, livestock, “whizzing mills” and women with “queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts.” But behind the facade, Oneida’s free-love philosophies descended into pedophilia, incest and experiments in eugenics.
So, let's trip over to Wikipedia:
The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven (a belief called perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), group marriage, male sexual continence, and mutual criticism.
The male sexual continence thing seems a hard sell, if you ask me:
Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children ; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called "male continence" , in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control.
A different website explains:
You see, rather than using the withdrawal method, coitus interruptus, which was one of the most effective birth control methods historically, and is surprisingly just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy, even in real world practice, the community instead practiced coitus reservatus as their main method of birth control- where the man was not to orgasm at all. The idea was that this would simultaneously prevent pregnancy, ensure the man maintained his vitality (the belief at the time was that the loss of semen negatively impacted a man’s health), and made sure the woman was optimally pleasured for maximal spiritual benefit.
As to the question of the age of sexual partners, it gets creepier still;
Women over the age of 40 were to act as sexual "mentors" to adolescent boys, because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout.
Then there is the system for self improvement, which is like group therapy turned on its head into something like group psychological lynching:
Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting.[15] The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits.
It's notable that the community was still going strong at the time of the Civil war - I can't see anything about whether any male members went off to fight, but I have my doubts that they would. Hence, 100 years before free love hippies of the Vietnam era were having sex instead of going to war, free love (alleged) Christians were doing the same.
As utopian communities, free love or not, inevitably do, it all fell apart when leadership was attempted to be handed over, and oddly enough, most of us probably have seen the word "Oneida" because of this:
The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited.
Anyway, back to the assassination of Garfield, this is really a remarkable coincidence:
...Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was at the train station and saw Garfield’s shooting. It was the second presidential assassination he witnessed, having been at his father’s side as he died in 1865.
And as this website explains, he arrived in Buffalo years later on the same day President McKinley was shot!
Presidential assassinations seemed to follow him around. He did live to 83 though, so I guess he wasn't as unlucky as he could have been. (He also attended the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 - there's a photo of that at the last link.)
The main prominent free love community I know of in my lifetime is the Rajneesh movement - which of course all fell into a heap when the leader aged, too.
Anyway, always good to remember that radical ideas about sexual utopianism have been around for a long time.
There's a book review at Nature that is somewhat interesting - Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism, which apparently argues this:
The work of mathematicians from centuries or even millennia ago speaks to their living peers in ways that practitioners of other disciplines must find baffling. Euclid’s proof that the list of prime numbers never ends is just as elegant and clear now as it was in around 300 bc, when it appeared in his book Elements.
Yet mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Alma Steingart explains in Axiomatics.
A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States. Mathematicians’ push for abstraction was mirrored by — and often directly triggered — parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. Steingart quotes some scientists who saw their liberation from merely explaining the natural world as analogous to how abstract expressionism freed painting from the shackles of reality.
Further down it notes this:
To the mathematical-theory builder, abstraction is not a destination, but a journey. As Steingart puts it, ‘abstract’ is not an adjective but a verb: ‘to abstract’. In the 1930s, owing largely to the influence of German mathematician Emmy Noether, mathematicians began to construct axiomatic systems that were increasingly abstract and general. This revealed familiar objects such as numbers, card shuffles and geometrical symmetries to be special cases of the same concept.
The trend towards abstraction and generalization is often associated with a school of mathematics that blossomed in France after the Second World War. But, as Steingart shows, it took root in the 1930s in the United States and came to define the country’s mid-century mathematical culture. Steingart exemplifies the trend with the story of Foundations of Algebraic Topology, a 1952 book by US mathematicians Samuel Eilenberg and Norman Steenrod. It dealt with various calculation techniques to distinguish between geometric shapes, but the authors introduced the subject backwards, claiming that students should first familiarize themselves with highly technical algebraic tools and only later learn their relevance to shapes, or why the tools existed in the first place.
This reminds me of the argument Paul Johnson made in Modern Times (his history of most of the 20th century) - that the relativism in Einstein's physics introduced (or helped spread) moral relativism to the masses. (I know many dispute that, but I think technology and science probably does have subtle, not always recognised, effects on the psychology of the masses.)
So while Twitter staggers on (everyone agrees that it isn't as good as it used to be, it's just that the alternatives aren't really there yet) I'm still looking at it and finding myself amused by the odd thread:
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Seems not to be well known:
Speaking of crime, Noah Smith seems to have actually found something to praise Australia about: the way we give lengthy training to police (compared to the trivial amount given in the US.) From his free to read Substack post about this:
One of the reasons for obvious policing problems in the US which I think Noah could have touched upon, but didn't, is the way they have an absolute myriad of different police type forces at all different levels of government. Now, with 50 states, and a big federal government, I would have said that there was always going to be at least (say) 70 or 90 different "policing" organisations across the nation. But the true figure, according to Wikipedia, is astounding:
Policing in the United States is conducted by "around 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, all with their own rules". Every state has its own nomenclature for agencies, and their powers, responsibilities and funding vary from state to state.[3] 2008 census data from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)[4] revealed that this constitutes:
- 73 federal agencies
- 50 primary state law enforcement agencies
- 638 other state agencies
- 1,733 special jurisdiction agencies
- 3,063 sheriff's offices
- 12,501 municipal, county, tribal, and regional police departments
Well, that's crazy...
The rainfall in Auckland that caused last weekend's flooding really was remarkable:
This marks an unprecedented rainfall event for Auckland and its surrounding areas, with some places getting a season's worth of rain in one day.
- Auckland has recorded more than 769% of its normal January monthly rainfall and over 38% of its "entire ANNUAL rainfall" as of Monday morning local time, according to New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
- Auckland Airport halted flights until Saturday after almost 11 inches of rain fell, flooding parts of the terminal and stranding hundreds of people over Friday night.
By the numbers: Kumeu, a suburb north of Auckland, observed 79% of its normal summer rainfall in just 15 hours, with more than 6.5 inches of rain, per NIWA.
When you see pictures not just of floods, but the landslides that follow, and you note that this is what is happening under just 1.1 degrees of temperature rise, you really have to wonder how climate change lukewarmers (the "it's real, but not as big a deal as they make out" types) can still get that to make sense in their heads.
"Let's just wait and see how cities and town cope with the level on increased rainfall intensity at 2 degrees" just isn't a credible option. (Not that it ever was.)
This really was very funny to watch - some idiot on Fox News being shown up, live, when he attempts to keep a Paul Pelosi conspiracy going:
As far as I can tell, the only significant figure who has offered a (brief, and hardly adequate) apology about helping spread a ridiculous conspiracy is Elon Musk. The Independent calls it a "half hearted" apology, and notes that it was in response to a tweet by a woman mostly famous for claiming Bill Clinton raped her (hence, it seems, he still gets to stir up anti Democrat support at the same time.)
I still think it's kind of ridiculous that the Californian justice system didn't push back harder on swirling, politically influential, rumours, when it had the evidence to dispel them sitting on a shelf all this time.
This article at Crux comes up with some surprising figures showing that the Catholic Church not only has had big growth in Africa, but in terms of participation in it, the numbers really blow away some of the "traditional" Catholic nations of the world:
In Nigeria, a reported 94 percent of Catholics say they attend Mass at least weekly, followed by Kenya at 73 percent. Lebanon clocks in at a robust 69 percent and the Philippines at 56. By way of contrast, the highest percentage anywhere in Europe is in Poland, at 52 percent, and in western Europe, the best performer is Italy at 34 percent.
The WVS study also asks people to say whether they consider themselves “religious,” independent of how often they attend religious services, and the CARA blog note the two things do not always correlate – large percentages of Lebanese say they go to Mass, for example, but the share of Catholics considering themselves “religious” is no more than in the UK.
A better correlation, according to the CARA analysis, is between both Mass attendance and religiosity on the one hand, and per capita GDP on the other. With a couple of striking exceptions, the poorer a country is, the more vibrantly religious it’s likely to be.
(Those exceptions include Brazil, where Mass attendance is lower than what one would expect given per capita GDP, and in Italy, where it’s higher.)
Now for the numbers:
The two largest Catholic countries in the world are Brazil and Mexico, with Catholic populations of 123 million and 97 million respectively. Yet Mexico has a Mass attendance rate of 47 percent and Brazil just 8, which means that together, they see about 55.4 million Catholics showing up for church every Sunday.
Nigeria and Congo together, meanwhile, generate 68 million weekly Mass-goers. In other words, Africa’s two largest Catholic nations outperform the two biggest in Latin America by about 20 percent.
Drilling down, the gap would only grow. Colombia, with Latin America’s highest Mass attendance rate at 54 percent, has 36 million Catholics, meaning 19.4 million are regularly practicing. Uganda, with a similar Catholic population of 34 million, would produce 28.4 million weekly Mass-goers, or 38 percent more.
While Catholicism officially numbers around 1.3 billion adherents worldwide, a good share of that total is fairly nominal. In terms of setting the tone within the church, those who are more active generally punch far above their weight – generating a greater share of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, for instance, as well as various lay roles.
This is likely to be a very substantial issue for the cultural evolution of the Church.
I watched the recent science fiction (UFO themed) film Nope last night.
It didn't give me much reason to revise my opinion of writer/director Jordan Peele. He makes movies which are very competently made - I mean, they look good and are well acted, and always have some meancing foreboding - but I am never satisfied with the resolution/explanation of what's been going on.
That said, I would say I enjoyed this one more than his first two movies, because I basically like the UFO trope in nearly any form. But really, this movie reaches a point where it doesn't make psychological sense for the characters to do what they do. And perhaps I can say that about all of his films - things happen without real logic, as they do in dreams or nightmares. As for the explanation as to what has been going on - it's a bit of a silly idea, and this might sound an odd complaint if you haven't seem the film, but I could have gone with it more if there was different design work on the mystery thing. But the way it carried on at the end, it just wasn't convincing.
I repeat my earlier complaint: can he please stop writing his own stories, and at least work with a story collaborator?
Although I had watched a video or two about Daoism recently, it's not a philosophical approach of that great an interest to me (although recognising it as influencing the ill defined Force in Star Wars was is always neat.)
Having said that, I was interested in this recent The Conversation article on Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (also known as Zhuang Zhou or Master Zhuang), a Daoist figure, but not with a simple approach.
As the article says:
What is known as the Golden Age of Chinese Philosophy lasted from the sixth to the third century BCE in the period of the Zhou dynasty. The flourishing of different philosophical views during that time is known as the Hundred Schools of Thought.
Intellectual society existed to guide society and its rulers towards the Way (also known as the Tao) – the central concept and practical feature of Taoism.
The two dominant schools of the Hundred Schools of Thought were Confucianism and Mohism. Broadly speaking, Confucianism centralises ritual propriety and familial piety as just some of the necessary virtues of the “gentleman” – that is, the upstanding and model citizen or ruler.
The Mohists were critical of the Confucians. They advocated a calculated impartiality in our distribution of care – a view in many ways reminiscent of what the West would later term “utilitarianism”.
A common critique of Confucianism is that it places too much emphasis on social order through rituals and hierarchies. One could argue, with respect to the Mohists, that too much emphasis is placed on establishing a universal moral principle in a way that risks overlooking the complex features of our individual moral lives.
Zhuangzi opposed the full spectrum of such views, supposing instead that being persuaded by the Confucians or the Mohists, for example, depended largely on one’s individual perspective. Traditions and schools of thought set transcendental ideals, which risk drawing our souls out of us in their quest for righteousness and truth.
For Zhuangzi, what really matters is that we maintain a sensible, sceptical distance from conventional distinctions and resist committing to any one specific worldview.
This paragraph reminded me a bit of Wittgenstein:
We should not be overly sceptical, however. “Words are not just blowing wind.” We must simply remember that words “have something to say” and that language is only a repository for meanings, not meaning itself.
And indeed, now that I look at the (very detailed entry) on Zhuangzi at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Wittgenstein gets a mention:
Indeed, much of the Zhuangzi’s philosophical appeal may stem from its seemingly deliberate open-ended texture, the interpretive malleability of its dialogues which invites, even perhaps requires, us to join the author(s) in their philosophical reflection.I get the feeling I should read more about him.
This appeal stems only partly from the quality and sophistication of his episodes; each illuminated a patch of philosophical territory ending with a question for further pondering—rather like Nietzsche or the Later Wittgenstein. Each exchange presents or illustrates shards of insight with open-textured conclusions—all laced with Zhuangzi’s obvious joy in exploring paradox—particularly linguistic ones of the sort that appeal to analytic Western thinkers.
