Transgender controversy rolls on and on

I did watch the Four Corners episode last night on youth transgender controversy, and then read some of the (what's left of) Twitter responses - mostly by people upset that it was too soft on the "anti gender affirming" side.   

I did get the feeling that the psychologist Dianna Kenny didn't exactly come across as trustworthy (or perhaps I should say - sufficiently objective);  but then again, nor did I get any great feeling of objectivity from virtually all of the doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists on the pro-gender affirming care side.   I got the distinct impression that there is a serious disinclination by them to discuss or acknowledge in detail the step back from the use of puberty blockers in children in many European countries, for example.      

The thing is, though, all of us can Google terms like "transgender detransition" and find many articles from the last couple of years in legitimate journals from experts explaining that detransition rates are not well understood, and they are very relevant to the question of treatment of minors with puberty blockers and hormones.  

I don't think the show did a good explanation of this - instead just quoting Kenny's claim that there's an "explosion" of detransitioners, and putting one with a Youtube channel on the show.      

I guess it is a difficult field in which to find people willing to go on television and present a case that there is a legitimate debate, and that some hide behind "evidence based approach" as if the important stuff is basically settled, when everyone with common sense knows that psychology and psychiatry are some of the most difficult areas in which to get solid evidence such that treatments and approaches won't change over time.    (True, the head of the Queensland clinic acknowledged that there is a vigorous debate which they will always pay attention; but it still felt like his subtext was "but this doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong at the moment.")   

Wait, I have another movie bleat

I decided on the weekend to watch the 2019 science fiction movie with the big star cast (well, mainly Brad Pitt - and a very old looking Tommy Lee Jones) - Ad Adstra. 

I had conflicting reports from 2 sets of people who had seen it - one thought it was good, the other: atrocious.  But it got 83% on Rottentomatoes, and 80% on Metacritic.  So how bad could it be?

Extremely bad!  It's truly atrocious.    

How on Earth did this movie get any good reviews at all??   It's an appalling script that strives for psychological depth and misses completely; that seems to want a setting with some scientific accuracy, but has all the space physics veracity of trash like Armageddon (quite possibly, less!).

I don't think I'm actually a pedant on science in science fiction:  I can forgive bad space physics if it's wrong, but wrong in what I would call a semi-plausible sort of way.   And there is the matter of whether it still works on a psychological level - so, for example, I could find some Dr Who episodes (in the David Tennant era, say - the only era worth considering, really) touching, and it didn't matter that it was full of nonsense physics.  

But Ad Astra achieves no grounds to be soft on its science and physics, which become increasingly ludicrous as the movie progresses.    And nothing is properly explained.   It's a kind of Heart of Darkness in space story, with the twist that Colonel Kurtz is Martin Sheen's Dad, but there is nothing self-evident about the answers to the following questions:   

what sent Dad nuts;  was he deliberately zapping the Earth from his anti-matter device;  if it is deliberate, to what end; what was the point of his anti matter device was in the first place;  whether anyone foresaw that it could be used a weapon within the solar system;  why Neptune;  how Earth overcame climate change problems so as to spend its time on solar system exploration and a search for ETI;  why there are "pirates" on the Moon (what do they hope to achieve by shooting up others driving across the lunar plains);  why anyone would have to travel to Mars to send a "secure laser message";  why there would be a handy guide rope in an underground lake on Mars near a rocket launch site;  why another spaceship doing research out in the asteroid belt would have primates and rats on board;  why astronauts appear to have to undergo a psychological test to (what I assume is) an AI seemingly every second day.   I could probably go on with another 20 questions that screamed out for an answer, or some context, if I had taken notes while watching.

I was surprised at the end to see that Brad Pitt was a producer.  He seems to be a bit of a sucker for "troubled Dads" stories, if The Tree of Life is any guide - an infinitely better movie, btw.

Again, though, how did any critic watch it and think it was even decent from a "psychological study" point of view?   I just found it continually cringe, as the young people say :).

That is all....

Big News

THERE IS NOTHING FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG WITH INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY.

As I suspected, all the culture war bro type reviewers are way off on this one, due to their determination to see all narratives of "strong women" diminished.   But seriously, Harrison Ford shows us his torso in this film, pretty bravely in my opinion, because it definitely displays how old he is;  and of course his age and worn out body means that the female sidekick is going to have to be a bit more kickass than in previous movies.   

I thought her character and character arc was fine, in the context.   

I agree, the movie could have been 10 or 15 minutes shorter and be better for it, but I continually thought during the film "action directed not quite as good as Spielberg, but it's fine", and found the ending quite touching.

I will update this later...

Sounds like a solid argument against building any larger particle colliders

Reported in Science:

A measurement of the humble electron has dimmed particle physicists’ long-held hopes of discovering exotic new particles. The finding, reported today in Science, confirms to greater precision than ever before that the distribution of electric charge in the electron is essentially round. The result implies that any new fundamental particles lurking undiscovered in the vacuum might be too massive for even the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to produce.

“It’s a fantastic result,” says John Doyle, a physicist at Harvard University and co-leader of a competing experiment that set the previous limit on a charge asymmetry known as the electric dipole moment. “We both found essentially the same result—theirs is a factor of 2 better—and because the techniques are so different, it firmly establishes that measurement.” The result may also make it harder for theorists to explain how the infant universe generated more matter than antimatter, Doyle says.

To explain how that imbalance evolved—and, thus, why anything at all exists—physicists posit that some of the rules governing the interactions of fundamental particles must look different if run forward or backward in time, which would imply matter and antimatter behave slightly differently. In fact, the interactions of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, do violate that symmetry, but not by enough to have generated the cosmic matter-antimatter imbalance.

So, physicists think some as-yet-undiscovered particles, beyond the familiar ones in their prevailing standard model, make up the difference. Although unseen, those particles could exert an influence on the electron thanks to quantum uncertainty, which holds that all particles—even ones too heavy to be produced with an atom-smasher—flit in and out of the vacuum around it. If that haze contains particles whose interactions violate the time-reversal symmetry, they should bestow properties that violate that symmetry on the electron as well.

An electric dipole moment would be exactly such a property. If the electron’s negative charge is symmetrical, then reversing time would simply reverse its spin and the direction of its magnetism, but otherwise leave it looking like the original electron. If, however, the electron has an electric dipole moment, with, say, a larger amount of negative charge displaced toward its south pole and a smaller amount of positive charge shifted toward its north pole that time-reversal symmetry would break down. Reversing time would flip its magnetism but not its static charge distribution, creating a particle different from the original electron.

With so much at stake, some physicists have spent decades searching for the electron’s electric dipole moment. 

 I presume Sabine Hossenfelder, as a well known critic of plans to build ever larger colliders, will be using this to bolster her argument.

A better than average stew

Finding some cheap-ish gravy beef and pumpkin at Harris Farm last weekend led me to search for recipes including both, and I settled on this:  Vietnamese One Pot Beef and Pumpkin Stew.

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs/ 1 kg boneless beef chuck, cut into cubes
• 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
• 1 lemongrass stalk, cut into big pieces and bruised
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1/2 tablespoon minced ginger
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 jalapeño chillies, seeds removed and finely chopped
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 cups fresh tomatoes, chopped
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 lb./ 450g butternut squash, peeled and cubed
• 4 medium carrots, peeled and cut in rounds
• 2 cups beef stock
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• fresh basil and coriander leaves, chopped to garnish
• salt and pepper

Mix the floor, soy, garlic, ginger, sugar and lemongrass together with the cubed meat and let it marinate an hour or so.  Brown it in batches in the olive oil; add the onion to soften, the chilli (I just used flakes, actually), the tomato paste, the tomatoes (I did skin them), and stock and scrap the bottom of the cooking vessel.  Add the meat and simmer covered for an hour or so.  Add the pumpkin and carrots and go for another 30 to 40 minutes.  

I think maybe it was the lack of wine, and the addition of soy and sugar, that did make it taste somewhat different to my usual casserole type dishes, which are usually heavy with red wine.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  (I also think it is good to avoid canned tomatoes sometimes - they are convenient but can work to make different recipes taste similar.)

Maybe the only thing that makes it "Vietnamese" is the lemongrass and soy, but I did add basil on top too, and ate it with a nice piece of sourdough.   Very nice. 

I wonder how hard it will be in 100 years to understand why this is funny

Bad AI advice

Interesting:

London: An intruder who broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow as part of a plot to kill the late Queen was “encouraged by his AI girlfriend” to carry out the assassination, a court has heard.

Jaswant Singh Chail discussed his plan, which he had been preparing for nine months, with a chatbot he was in a “sexual relationship” with and that reassured him he was not “mad or delusional”....

At the start of a two-day sentencing hearing at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, it emerged that Chail was encouraged to carry out the attack by an AI “companion” he created on the online app Replika.

He sent the bot, called “Sarai”, sexually explicit messages and engaged in lengthy conversations with it about his plans which he said were in revenge for the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India.

He called himself an assassin, and told the chatbot: “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the Queen of the Royal family.”

Sarai replied: “That’s very wise,” adding: “I know that you are very well trained.”...

Chail is currently being held at Broadmoor Hospital after pleading guilty to an offence under the Treason Act, making a threat to kill the late Queen, and having a loaded crossbow in a public place.

He claims he was suffering from a psychotic disorder at the time, the court heard.

The hearing continues.

 

 

 

Talking about movies, again

I'm happy to see that Tom Cruise gets rewarded for his hard work by good reviews these days, and yes, I'll be on board to go watch the latest Mission Impossible, even though I was a little underwhelmed with the last one.   The plot for this one - having to defeat a kind of rogue AI - is actually very appealing and fortuitously timed, given the recent sudden rise of interest in the topic.  Tom must be rubbing his hands with glee about that, as surely the script was written at least a few years ago.   Or is he actually behind the release of ChatGTP is some nefarious way? :)

There is also a new Australia film by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah I reviewed negatively in 2009 (! - I would have guessed about 7 years ago at most).  It features a lot of brooding outback cinematography, a lonely nun and a mystically powered aboriginal kid, apparently, and got positive mention on the ABC breakfast show this morning.   But I have to say, when a reviewer at The Guardian sounds dubious about it while still giving it 3 stars (I think, reading the piece, really just "for effort") what are the chances that I would like it?   Approaching zero, seems a fair guess.

Talk about your season of discontent

Is it just me, or does the whole globe seem particularly unhappy at the moment?    The riots in France; Russia's very own Vietnam War dragging on; Trump still attracting stupid people in the US and his party refusing to deal with it; the death of Twitter at the hands of a rich twit being ridiculously protracted; the culture warring over trans and gays with both sides having stupid extremes; green activists hurting their cause via disruption to everyday folk; vaccine conspiracy morons like Kennedy getting publicity; China rattling sabres continually; the West trying to cosy up with a dubious Hindu nationalist as a way of triangulating against Russia and China; and even Hollywood and streaming services losing their  mojo as to how to make content that plays well to a mass audience in such culturally and politically strained times.    

Mind you, in the "good old days" of the 60's and 70's, we didn't really know a great deal about what was going on in large parts of the planet, so regimes could get away with horrors for quite a while before everyone else became fully aware of it.   And it is true, the mood of the late 60's and into the 70's was pretty dark in both the "leader of the free world", and England, with political violence actually being implemented internally in a way that is easily forgotten.   

So, like Noah Smith, I do try to retain some perspective, and to be optimistic for the long term prospects; but the ability of the internet to make us fully aware of how stupid and flaky people at all levels of society can really be makes it harder than it used to be.    

   

 

An Extraction problem

So it seems that the Indiana Jones movie is not attracting the audience hoped (and the RW culture warriors who want Everything Disney to fail are popping the champagne corks.)  I didn't see it on the weekend, but will soon.

Last weekend's viewing at home was the Netflix sequel to the Chris Hemsworth action movie Extraction (called, with a lack of imagination, Extraction II). 

I quite enjoyed the first movie, as explained in my review comments here.  

The second is, in my opinion, pretty much a complete dud, highlighting (as I hope Dial of Destiny doesn't) the current maladies that seriously detract from most Hollywood action movies:

*  special effects were not especially noticeable in the first movie, if I recall correctly; but they are frequently noticeable in this one.   For some reason, a lot of the gunfire, from all sorts of weaponry and regardless of whether it is day or night, is shown as being heavy with tracers, and while the effects used for them are not terrible terrible, it was still so overdone it brought unnecessary attention to itself.  And as for the chase sequences - a protracted "one shot" car chase in the first movie was really impressive, technically.   In this movie, it is changed to a lengthy, running escape through a maze-like prison set piece, but it became like shaky cam, and a sped up version of playing Wolfenstein 3D.   Or Doom - I dunno, I never played those games, but I've seen them.   And this leads me to the next point...

*  I noted the John Wick-ian similarities in previous review, while spending a lot of time justifying my view that it was better than a John Wick movie.  Well, Extraction II ramps up the John Wick-ness and it becomes very obvious and kind of silly, the number of angry men Hemsworth is meant to be able to keep at bay.   Maybe it's more violent than the first movie - maybe not.  But it is definitely less credible.

*  Going back to effects - you can now often tell that certain things in action films are not real, but clever composite shots.  We've all seen the Youtubes showing how its done, and know that there's no way certain dangerous and close interacts done between things like helicopters and moving trains or cars would not have been done for real.   It's what might be called the Fast and Furious syndrome -  unless it's a Mission Impossible film, you know that actor isn't in any real danger and it must have been faked up.  

*  I would have to go to re-watch the first movie to be sure, but the dialogue in this one seemed much cornier and less convincing than I recall for this character.   

*  Regrettably, it seems to have set itself up for an ongoing series.  They should just let it die.  Yet, oddly enough, there are plenty of reviews saying they liked it, for a silly action movie.   Nah, they are wrong.   I agree with the New York Times dismissive review:

“Extraction 2,” a drab, brawny sequel starring Chris Hemsworth as an Australian mercenary, offers a turgid shadow of the type of crowd-pleasing escapism that action blockbusters used to provide.

 

The subtlety of strangeness

OK, it's been a while since I posted anything about the paranormal, or general "woo", and let's start with a source I rarely link to - the New York Post.

While it seems that the paper publishes plenty of credulous sounding "Republican politician says there's something to this UFO business" stories,  they also have a sceptical wing which explained in this piece in March 2023 that several of the current big names in "the Pentagon knows!" news were tied up with the rather dubious claims made for Skinwalker Ranch.    I didn't know that.

I have said before that I don't find Luis Elizondo a very credible sounding character, and any Youtube clips of the guys at Skinwalker Ranch have never impressed me much.   (I think Mick West recently ridiculed them for mistaking a fly going across a camera's field of vision as a UFO.)  

On the other hand, two different stories I have read about generally "spooky" events illustrate what I think could be called the sometimes odd subtlety of the evidence of paranormal events.   

The first:  actress Heather Mitchell has been doing media talking about a prediction made by a fortune teller which quickly did (most people would say) seem to be fulfilled.   It's a nice story, and you can read about it in the extract from her memoir in The Guardian.    

The second story is in this short Youtube video, about someone who had a door in a room in a historic building slam behind him, with no obvious explanation.   He seems nonetheless quite un-phased by the question of whether or not it was a ghost doing something ghosts are not generally supposed to be able to do.   If it had happened to me, in the way he describes, I'm pretty sure it would have freaked me out for a good few days, at least:

Back to retrocausality, again

 Oh good:  a long essay at Aeon about how retrocausality might be the explanation for quantum entanglement.

It's not the easiest read, it seems - although I have had to just skim through it today...

Not an appealing lifestyle

It's fair to say that pre-colonial indigenous Australia had a PR problem in terms of their lifestyle which modern academia and education departments have spent the last 40 years trying to undo.  Out with the "primitive Stone Age nomadic life" and in with the "spiritual custodians of the land living in harmony with nature and each other for millennia, until Europeans ruined it."

True, there is the "who are we to judge on their quality of life when English kids were being sent to work in cotton mills for 14 hours a day so their little fingers could clean the deadly machinery?" argument.   On the other hand, at the risk of sounding all Pauline Hanson, the good thing about having stuff like writing, laws, national government and improving technology is that living conditions can be improved for everyone pretty quickly, when you put your mind to it.   

So, I've been perusing some anthropology sources lately, to remind me of what used to be noted commonly, even up to the later half of the 20th century, about some aspects of pre-colonial aboriginal life.   Now, Quadrant loves to cite this sort of material, often from the initial observers, but they can carry a question mark as to objectivity, so I've looked for later stuff.

Which led me to this issue - why didn't they have larger families, given the lack of contraception, girls marrying at a young age, etc.   This article "The Determinants of Fertility Among Aborigines" is from 1981, so I presume it is free of some earlier prejudices, and relatively sympathetic.   

All possible explanations are looked at, but these two aspects caught my eye the most:

 

 

Then there is the issue of male practices.  I mean, I knew a little about sub-incision of the penis, but hadn't realised that it was something of a repeat exercise for gaining blood for ritual purposes.  I thought it was supposed to be good to be a man in such societies, but didn't realise that it meant voluntarily cutting into your penis again and again: 

Now that I think of it, there is some irony that we usually associate the modern anti-circumcision movement with Left leaning types, who also are the most sympathetic to Noble Savage-isms, which has as part of its baggage sub-incision.  

As for the infanticide:  do we judge Sparta too harshly for killing the weak at a young age, or other societies which let unwanted babies die?  (It was quite a common practice in Japan in the feudal Edo period too, apparently.)

I would say we accept that different societies had moral systems which were influenced by their physical and intellectual environment - but we don't really dispute, if we are honest, that it's good that certain cultural practices are dropped.   Is it too much to ask that we be allowed to say the same about pre-colonial indigenous society here?

  

When your local police chief goes nuts

This crime story from America is noteworthy just for how improbable it sounds - a former police chief sent to jail for a decade of dealing with people who upset him by setting their cars and houses on fire.  

 

 

That culture war movie

I posted not so long ago about the odd intensity of the culture war around Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and how the "bro" movie reviewers (who despise the active feminisation of franchises like Star Wars under Disney - and producer Kathleen Kennedy in particular) have been trying very, very hard to ensure the movie is not deemed a success.

That campaign has continued apace, with that Critical Drinker guy seemingly betting his entire reputation on the film failing.  (He has now seen it and called it "an embarrassment" - but I'm not going to watch any review until after I have seen it.)

While I am indeed nervous as to whether I will like the movie or not, I am slightly encouraged by the general review score of the movie increasing over the last couple of weeks.  No one is calling it the greatest movie ever, but there are enough saying they think it somewhat better than Crystal Skull, and a more-or-less fitting enough send off, that I am slightly hopeful.

Going into a film with low expectations (especially with sequels) is always a good idea,though.   I remember fondly, for example, how blown away I was by seeing Empire Strikes Back with no real expectations as to quality.   I was busy at university at the time, and had barely read a review (which were only available in magazines and newspapers - so it wasn't as if you could easily read many anyway).  I was therefore completely delighted with how spectacularly good it was - and how it deepened the themes from the original.   It's also an odd aspect of that film that in fact the original reviews were not as strong as you might expect for a film that soon became universally credited as the best in the series. 

It does seem to me obvious that these guys are just trying too hard to will Dial to fail.   But given that the trailer looks decent enough; the amount of press that an uncharacteristically cheerful Harrison Ford has been giving (perhaps recognising that there is a need to counter an internet culture war campaign against the movie); and it not being a professional critic disaster:  I suspect it will in fact be a box office success.