Bee on free will (again)

Backreaction: Free will is dead, let’s bury it.

As much as I like Sabine H's blog, I still have trouble getting my head around her arguments about the (lack of) free will.  And she seems to get cranky when people disagree with her.

I should read her post more carefully and come back to explain why I have a problem with it.

Re: David Bowie

I think it fair to say that I sort of get the appeal of David Bowie, but am perhaps just a bit too young to fully get it.  I think his biggest fans are those who started following him from the start, and at that time as a pre-teen I was certainly much more interested in the actual space program than in a sexually ambiguous, psychedelic tinged pop musician's introverted way of looking at it.   (That really was the most annoying thing about the 60's and early 70's:  just at a time the world could be celebrating and extending a stunning  outreaching milestone in the history of humanity, youth culture in the nations that had achieved it went instead down the rabbit hole of sex and druggie self indulgence.)

But sure, he had many good and catchy songs and an eclectic style; and later came to make enough anti-drug comments that he was once quoted by my local parish priest!   I also saw him in self-mocking mode in Zoolander just on Sunday night - the first time I have ever watched it.  Yeah, he seems to have a been a pretty nice guy in his private life (once he cleaned his act up, at least), and it is sad that he's died relatively young.

Probably good news for the germ phobic

You're Probably Not Mostly Microbes - The Atlantic

Seems to have taken a long time for this correction to be made.

Some startling implications for the legal system

Why too much evidence can be a bad thing

I had never heard of this point made in the opening paragraph:

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.

Then what they actually tested:

The researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in
which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.

In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very large impact on the results overall. Specifically, they show that when only 1% of the line-ups
exhibit a bias toward a particular suspect, the probability that the witnesses are correct begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications. Counterintuitively, if one of the many witnesses were to identify a different suspect, then the probability that the other witnesses were correct would substantially increase.

The mathematical reason for why this happens is found using Bayesian analysis, which can be understood in a simplistic way by looking at a biased coin. If a biased coin is designed to land on heads 55% of the time, then you would be able to tell after recording enough coin tosses that heads comes up more often than tails. The results would not
indicate that the laws of probability for a binary system have changed, but that this particular system has failed. In a similar way, getting a large group of unanimous witnesses is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, that it's more likely that the system is unreliable.

Back to the KKK and the history of American lynchings

It was only back in 2009 that I learnt something about the incredible openness with which American racial lynchings had taken place in the late 19th and early 20th century.  (See my post here, although it would appear that the BBC documentary link no longer works.  There are short extracts of it on Youbtube, though.   Here and here.)

This was all brought to mind by this article at New Republic that first sounds a bit light weight:  How the Klan Got Its Hood - but in the course of the explanation, it looks at this matter of the openness with which people could support the movement.

It is very startling to read things like this:

Lynchings were not spontaneous outbursts of “mob” violence, but the predictable result of institutional support and the outright participation of political elites. The lynchers of Leo Frank, in Marietta, Georgia in 1915, included a former governor, judge, mayor and state legislator, sheriff, county prosecutor, lawyer and banker, business owner, U.S. senator’s son, and the founders of the Marietta Country Club. Frank’s atypical case—he was white and Jewish—attracted media attention that thousands of black victims never received, yet it exposed the ways that elites and authorities exonerated themselves by blaming mob violence on so-called “crackers.” Meanwhile, Mississippi governor, later U.S. senator James K. Vardaman said in 1907, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”
 
Vardaman didn’t wear a white hood. Neither did the first woman U.S. senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, who said in 1897, “If it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.” They were cloaked, instead, in state power and popular support, and what their platforms concealed was the truth: Wells-Barnett’s reporting and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) research had disproved the “thread bare lie” of the lynch mob as honorable defenders of white women. Besides the fact that the myth of the black rapist was a white supremacist fantasy, 70 percent of lynchers didn’t even bother to invoke it to justify their violence. Lynchers killed for such alleged offenses as “sassing,” wanting a drink of water, being “troublesome,” “conjuring,” and often, as in the murders of Mrs. Jake Cebrose and an eight-year-old child named Parks, no excuse at all.

And to read the horrifying details of some lynchings:

In 1918, Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey wrote to the NAACP, “I believe that if the negroes would exert their ultimate influence with the criminal element of their race and stop rapes that it would go a long way towards stopping lynchings.” The “criminal element” he was referring to was Mary Turner, who had threatened to press charges against the lynchers of her husband, Hayes Turner, and of nine other men. The lynchers, as reported by the Savannah Morning News, “took exceptions [sic] to her remarks as well as her attitude.” They lynched Mary, who was eight months pregnant. Journalist Walter White, whose ability to pass as white enabled him to interview the murderers themselves, reported that they had hung Mary upside-down, set her on fire, cut out her fetus and stomped it, then shot Mary’s body multiple times. The Brooks County coroner’s jury ruled that all the victims had died “at the hands of parties unknown” and closed their cases; a lyncher served as jury foreman.

 But back to the question in the title of the New Republic article:  it appears Hollywood, in the form of Birth of a Nation, as well an enterprising mail order business, gave the Klan its "classic" look.

Not even just a border skirmish?

Saudi Arabia rules out war with Iran | GulfNews.com

Sorry, I shouldn't make light of it, but the Middle East is such a basketcase.  Or does North Korea deserve the top title for that?

Well handled by Obama

'American Sniper' widow confronts Barack Obama over gun control | US news | The Guardian

Seems very odd indeed that she should be taking the line "let's look on the bright side" when her fellow pro gun ownership lobby is always focusing on the need to arm themselves for self protection.

Seems a bit like the hydra-headed aspect of climate change denialism:  any line of argument will be used with complete disregard for consistency.

Encouraging information

I see that Bryan Appleyard liked Bridge of Spies quite a lot, and he did an appreciative interview with Spielberg and Hanks in which this information is found:

Spielberg is now 68, but as his mother is 95 and still running her Milky Way kosher restaurant in Los Angeles, and his dad is 99, we can take it he has a few decades of film-making left. 

Excellent.

Star hopping

Alien life could thrive in ancient star clusters : Nature News & Comment

Until now, scientists have largely discounted the idea of finding
extraterrestrial civilizations in globular clusters, which each contain
thousands to millions of stars. Out of the thousands of known extrasolar planets,
only one has been found in such a cluster, and many astronomers think
that the gravitational interactions among tightly packed stars would
have long ago hurled any accompanying planets into deep space.

But the proximity of all those stars may actually be an advantage for
supporting life, says Rosanne Di Stefano, a theoretical astrophysicist
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Lots of closely packed stars could also mean lots of
planetary systems within easy travelling distance. “If there is an
advanced society in an environment like that, it could set up outposts
relatively easily, because we’re dealing with distances that are so much
shorter,” she says.

With such networking, civilizations in a globular cluster might endure
for billions of years, and thus be around for humans to communicate with
today or in the future.

Teargate

Blog: Obama's fake tears?

The stupid thing is, after reading this latest evidence of, what? some sort of deranging brain damage afflicting the Right of American politics?, I actually re-watched the video to see if some of the "analysis" had the details right.  They don't.  (Surprise, hey?)

Krugman forgets to mention light bulbs - energy saving light bulbs - drives them nuts

Deadly Snits - The New York Times

Market breaks, and the coming crisis (allegedly)

Interesting bit of history here on the market of built in stock market trading breaks.

I see that Soros is going on about a potential financial crisis again, even though it would seem that it would not be based on anything too closely resembling what happened in 2008.  I get the feeling Soros is crying "crisis" too often now.   How old is he?  85?

I'm sorry, but this is pretty much the age at which my rule of thumb about being able to safely ignore the warnings of older men kicks in. Look at Rupert Murdoch's (84) peculiar recent tweet:

Mind you, this rule can be subject to modifications:   if libertarian, subtract at least 45 years, for example. 

Good point

Why the opioid epidemic is making a libertarian rethink drug legalization - Vox

Haven't I made the same point last year?  Yes; yes I have.

See, sometimes even a libertarian moves closer to my (always reasonable) opinion!

Rand doesn't do "chat" well

Gee.  Rand Paul has appeared on Colbert, and doesn't he come across (for the most part) as uncomfortable and awkward in that format?   I don't know that any of his attempts at humour work, although (as usual) Colbert has some good moments.

However, Rand's point about the lack of knowledge and gravitas on the part of Trump on minor matters such as, you know, potentially being in charge of the world's second largest thermonuclear stockpile, is well made.  

And it's also interesting to note that it appears Paul thinks it is trivialising him if interviewers always  want to talk to him about marijuana.  He appears genuinely annoyed that the topic has been broached, apparently breaking a pre-appearance deal.

I also learn that I am not the only person who think his hair is odd.

Watch the whole thing:

At last, the critics are catching up with me

While still getting not so bad aggregate scores on the likes of Metacritic, I have read enough mainstream critics' poor reviews of Tarantino's Hateful Eight to consider that they are (finally) really starting to turn against him and his oeuvre.   For example, Anthony Lane ends on this note:

Above all, we get confirmation of the director’s preëminent perversity: patient and elaborate in his racking up of tension, he knows only one way to resolve it, and that is through carnage, displayed in unmerciful detail.To be fair, the more blood is spilled, the more some people lap it up; the audience at my screening howled with glee as Daisy’s face was showered with the contents of someone else’s head. Chacun à son goût. By the end of “The Hateful Eight,” its status as a tale of mystery and its deference to classic Westerns have all but disappeared, worn down by the grind of its sadistic vision. That is the Tarantino deal: by blowing out folks’ brains, he wants to blow our minds.

David Edelstein:

You wonder what he has up his sleeve in The Hateful Eight, but gorgeous as that sleeve might be, what’s up it is crap. The movie is a lot of gore over a lot of nothing.

Dana Stevens in Slate:

What is Quentin Tarantino’s game these days? Who is he making movies for? Is it only my fun-hating prudishness that makes me regard this historical-revenge-fantasy bender he’s been on since Inglourious Basterds as ineffably evil?

Cool design, even if ridiculously risky.

Chinese drone maker unveils human-carrying drone

Just in case you needed reminding..

here's Sabine Hossenfelder (sounding very serious and, well, very German) explaining the correct answer to whether light is a particle or a wave:



Readers might also be interested in her speculating on how a lightsaber might work.  Or should that be "lightsabre"?

Colbert too smart for the times

Stephen Colbert is fantastically talented at comedy acting: energetic, sharp as a tack, probably the only chat show host in the history of television who also happens to be serious enough about religion to teach Sunday School at his Catholic Church, and he has a crack team of writers behind him.

He's also moderately liberal, which means a large slab of the American public (the part that thinks Obama really is a Muslim, and that Trump is the best thing to happen to politics) cannot stand him.

So it doesn't really surprise me that after a strong start, his chat show is now running third in the ratings.

But get this:  the lightweight, dumb comedy of Jimmy Fallon is number one.  I don't find Fallon offensive, but I fail to see that he has any great talent; and I just don't think his writers come up with great lines.  He is, at least, slightly hip with da kids in a way the daggy Jay Leno never was.  (I mean, who could believe that he routinely out-rated David Letterman, even when DL was at his peak.)

Yes, it's not just Colbert:  late night America doesn't tend to like its chat show hosts to be too smart.  But especially at this extremely peculiar time of distressing, spreading stupidity amongst much of the American public, Colbert was always going to have a hard time being the ratings leader.

So that's all by way of preamble to a couple of recent clips from his show that I found amusing:



 

Peter Martin on how the net didn't quite change things as expected

Why the blockbuster is far from dead

I liked this column from Peter Martin.

On the subject to the net and movies, as I have written before, I also find it curious that the change to digital projection, and therefore digital distribution, of movies has not seemed to have had the cost cutting benefits to movie making that would have seemed to be a natural consequence.  (Or maybe it has, but just other movie making costs have increased anyway to "compensate".)   

By way of comparison

1.  David Leyonhjelm, in 2016, when it is a matter of female journalists being made to feel uncomfortable at work:

2.  David Leyonhjelm, in 2014, when the issue was how he felt about John Howard's gun laws:

"All the people at [Sale that day] were the same as me," Leyonhjelm tells me, his light-blue eyes blazing. "Everyone of those people in that audience hated [Howard's] guts. Every one of them would have agreed he deserved to be shot. But not one of them would have shot him. Not one." He found it offensive, he adds, that Howard "genuinely thought he couldn't tell the difference between people who use guns for criminal purposes, and people like me".