Bopp and the future

[1604.04231] Time Symmetric Quantum Mechanics and Causal Classical Physics

Fritz Bopp, who I have never heard of,  from a university in a city or town I don't know, has nonetheless got a paper on arXiv that seems to have some interesting ideas (about causal structure and quantum physics); but I don't full understand them...

Update:  seems he is a physics professor, and Siegen is in Germany. (He is the son of Fritz Bopp, who also worked on quantum physics, but died in 1987.  I assume that father and son had some complicated discussions over dinner.)

Probably click bait, but still

Texting in movie theaters? Bring it on | Amber Jamieson | Opinion | The Guardian

Only last weekend, I was telling my kids as we waited for Zootopia to start that, apart from the perennial problem of people who manage to make 15 seconds of loud plastic crinkling to reach just one bit of candy (and take an hour to eat one bag thereof), my latest noticed cinema going anti-social obscenity is the person who decides to light up their mobile screen and text in the middle of a film.

And many readers of the Guardian agree.  Some funny/sarcastic responses to this column:

I hope the theaters who allow/encourage phone/other gizmo use during
film showings are confiscating all weapons at the door, cause this kind
of thing is really going to bring out that kind of thing.

and

Great idea!
Also I miss the drive in experience, so can I bring my truck into the theater as well? Oh, and I never want to see a movie without my howler monkey(s), who love to sit in the back of the pick up and "sing" during a film - people love it!
Amber you are so smart and revolutionary!

Adam has a dream

Land tax: now that really would be reform worthy of the name

A peculiar column by Adam Creighton - he has a dream, a mighty dream - that land tax reform could replace a huge slab of income tax.   Then he ends up by noting that it would be impossible to sell this to land owners.

Give up, Adam.  There are equity arguments for and against it, as with all taxes, but it just isn't going to happen.  (Well, not on the scale you want.)   And I reckon some of your predictions as to the long term effects are really just guesswork.

I can imagine him in retirement like a later day Jim Cairns, sitting in a street market corner selling his esoteric book about how everything will be fixed, if only we could have land tax replace income taxes.

Greenland's record

Scientists: Greenland ice sheet is melting freakishly early

When an April high temperature record is broken this early in the month, by this amount, (even in Fahrenheit), it is remarkable:

Greenland's capital, Nuuk, reached 62 degrees (16.6 degrees Celsius) on Monday, smashing the April record high temperature by 6.5 degrees. Inland at Kangerlussuaq, it was 64 degrees (17.8 degrees Celsius), warmer than St. Louis and San Francisco.

Langen and other scientists said this is part of a natural weather system, but man-made climate change has worsened this. Tom Mote of the University of Georgia said had this natural event happened 20 or 30 years ago it wouldn't have been as bad as it is now because the air is
warmer overall and carries more rain that melts the ice faster.

"Things are getting more extreme and they're getting more common," said NASA ice scientist Walt Meier. "We're seeing that with Greenland and this is an indication of that."

Caravaggio considered

Not sure that I would have put it in the attic,  but it surely would be hard to find the right spot in the house to hang the gruesome work that everyone's talking about.  I mean, look how big it is:

Perhaps in the guest's bedroom, when you really don't enjoy having guests stay over?

Anyhoo, as they say in the classics, I can't remember much about the artist, so went on a quick Google, only to find that the matter of whether he was gay or not has been a popular topic of debate since, well, since he was painting naked or semi naked youth of the male variety.  As an article at The Guardian notes:

A key figure in resurrecting Caravaggio from oblivion was the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, whose university students included none other than the gay Marxist writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The curly hair and lingering eyes of Caravaggio's painted youths haunt Pasolini's cinema – a beautiful angel in his film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew seems to have stepped straight out of a Caravaggio painting. His films helped to establish Caravaggio as a modern gay icon, a process completed in the 1980s by Derek Jarman's biopic Caravaggio and the Caravaggio-quoting photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Recently there has been a backlash. The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon argues in his biography, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, that no real evidence exists to prove Caravaggio was homosexual and that his apparently sensual paintings of young men are, in reality, religious allegories. For instance, Caravaggio's painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit, from which a youth looks at us woozily, his shirt artfully fallen to reveal a muscular shoulder, offering a luscious array of fruits for us to taste, is interpreted as an image of Christ's love whose apparent eroticism refers to the sacred love expressed by the Song of Solomon.

A lengthier article from 1998 goes into the debate in more academic detail, noting that these paintings are taken as evidence of his homoerotic interests:

(Actually, I'm no Robert Hughes, but is that even a good painting when it comes to the neck and shoulder area?  Doesn't seem quite right, that bone and musculature.  The fruit, on the other hand, yeah they look good.)

OK, apparently one critic takes this one as clinching the deal:

The title is Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and, I have to say, it's a pretty odd bit of art.  Apart from the bare shoulder (again), I get a bit of an unfortunate feminised Rowan Atkinson-ish vibe from that face.  The article I last linked to noted one Donald Posner wrote this:

In this painting, homosexuality is pointed to by the fact that the boy's "hands do not tense with masculine vigor in response to the attack; they remain limp in a languid show of helplessness. His facial expression suggests a womanish whimper rather than a virile shout."

Gee.  I might have just gone with the flower in the girl-ish hair.

What about his Love Conquers All, though, which modesty prevents me posting here?   Well, yes, through modern eyes, that would be one that I would think gave his inclinations away.  Yet Wikipedia urges caution:

Inevitably, much scholarly and non-scholarly ink has been spilled over the alleged eroticism of the painting. Yet the homoerotic content was perhaps not so apparent to Giustiniani’s generation as it has become today. Naked boys could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticisation of children is very much a cultural artefact of the present-day rather than Caravaggio's. Certainly neither Giustiniani, who was not a homosexual, nor his visitors, appear to have been concerned by the question of modesty – or to have even raised it – and the story that the Marchese kept Amor hidden behind a curtain relates to his reported wish that it should be kept as a final pièce de résistance for visitors, to be seen only when the rest of the collection had been viewed – in other words, the curtain was to reveal the painting, not to hide it. (According to the historian Joachim von Sandrart, who catalogued the Giustiniani collection in the 1630s, the curtain was only installed at his urging at that time). The challenge is to see the Amor Vincit through 17th century eyes. 

Yes, I guess so.  But one has one's suspicions...

   

Hardly a priority

Can an $100 Million Investment Launch Laser-Based Space Travel?

Oh, it's all very fun, I suppose, doing research into pie in the sky stuff that has a rather useless goal.  (I haven't seen the explanation as to how a bunch of micro chip ships getting to Alpha Centuri are supposed to send back useful information, anyway.)

But really, isn't there a whole bunch of more useful local space activities as a goal?   An off planet repository for Earth life on the nearby Moon, for example?  Working out once and for all if there is useful underground water anywhere there?   A space based swarm of micro satellites that could work as an adjustable shield for global warming?   Lunar based manufacturing and launch via innovative methods (lunar elevator, mass driver?)

(I have my doubts space based solar being beamed to Earth is ever going to be practical on a large scale, so pass on that one.)

But year, why not research space stuff that's more directly useful?

An observation

It's been quite a while (4 or 5 years?) since there's been any news of interesting research results in parapsychology studies done by proper researchers.  It would seem the field has diminished in effort over the last decade or so, and regrettably, it probably suffers reputational damage from the crappy and unwatchable "ghost investigators" shows made for American cable TV.

But someone, somewhere, is still doing useful work on it, I trust? 

The cost of rapid economic growth

Counting the cost of China’s left-behind children - BBC News

Here's a problem that doesn't get much publicity - the huge number of Chinese kids who are growing up without one or both parents due to work.  

Warming on the plateau

From the abstract of an article looking at the changing climate on the Tibetan Plateau (TP):

The TP is overall getting warmer and wetter during the past decades. Temperature is significantly increased, especially since the 1980s. The overall warming rate ranges from 0.16 to 0.67 °C decade^–1 since the 1950s during different periods. The TP shows a uniform warming trend with the most significant warming in the northern part.

Sure sounds like a rapid warming rate for some parts of Tibet, then...

The Handel (sort of) scandal

Inspired by a radio announcer (ABC, of course) informing me today that it is the 275th (I think) anniversary of the first performance of Handel's "Messiah" in Dublin, I decided to Google "Handel scandal" and see what popped up.

Indeed there was a bit of associated scandal around this production.  A short summary is given in this NYT review in 2000 of a (apparently, not very good) play about the oratorio:

In 1741, Handel, then 56, was in debt and in crisis. His royal patron and ardent admirer, Queen Caroline, the wife of King George II of the House of Hanover, had died in 1737. His Italian operas were losing popularity. He was suffering from the aftermath of a partial stroke. In the summer of 1741, Charles Jennens, a wealthy squire and music connoisseur, who had written the libretto for Handel's oratorio ''Saul,'' sent him a new script. It had no characters; it simply told the story of the Messiah using biblical scripture compiled by Jennens. At first Handel was baffled by it. But when a performance opportunity arose in Dublin, he composed a score in three weeks.

All the characters in Mr. Slover's play are based on historical people, and they are quite a gallery. Susannah Cibber (performed by Mary Miller), was a singer and actress who had married the co-manager of the Drury Lane Theater to assist the flagging career of her brother, the composer Thomas Arne. She was ruined by her part in an adultery scandal, the salacious details of which were circulated in a best-selling book at the time, the Starr report of its day, as Mr. Slover has called it. The play includes quotes from the book and the trial transcript. The Dublin and London premieres of the ''Messiah'' were Cibber's comeback.

Wait a minute: three weeks?    He composed it in 3 weeks?  They don't make composers like they used to.  Let's look more into that (at Wikipedia):

The music for Messiah was completed in 24 days of swift composition. Having received Jennens's text some time after 10 July 1741, Handel began work on it on 22 August. His records show that he had completed Part I in outline by 28 August, Part II by 6 September and Part III by 12 September, followed by two days of "filling up" to produce the finished work on 14 September. The autograph score's 259 pages show some signs of haste such as blots, scratchings-out, unfilled bars and other uncorrected errors, but according to the music scholar Richard Luckett the number of errors is remarkably small in a document of this length.^[26] The original manuscript for Messiah is now one of the chief highlights from the British Library's music collection.

At the end of his manuscript Handel wrote the letters "SDG"—Soli Deo Gloria, "To God alone the glory". This inscription, taken with the speed of composition, has encouraged belief in the apocryphal story that Handel wrote the music in a fervour of divine inspiration in which, as he wrote the "Hallelujah" chorus, "he saw all heaven before him".^[26] Burrows points out that many of Handel's operas, of comparable length and structure to Messiah, were composed within similar timescales between theatrical seasons. The effort of writing so much music in so short a time was not unusual for Handel and his contemporaries; Handel commenced his next oratorio, Samson, within a week of finishing Messiah, and completed his draft of this new work in a month.

 I really like The Messiah, but have never read much about Handel.  There's a short but entertaining account of him and, the music scene in London in which he worked, to be found at Smithsonian.com.   Here are some of my favourite parts:

Increasingly elaborate opera productions led to rising costs due, in part, to hiring musicians and singers from Italy. "It was generally agreed Italian singers were better trained and more talented than local products," notes Christopher Hogwood, a Handel biographer and founder of the Academy of Ancient Music, the London period-instrument orchestra he directs. But beautiful voices were often accompanied by mercurial temperaments. At a 1727 opera performance, Handel's leading sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, actually came to blows onstage, with their partisans cheering them on. "Shame that two such well-bred ladies should call [each other] Bitch and Whore, should scold and fight," John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), the mathematician and satirist, wrote in a pamphlet describing the increasing hysteria of London's opera world.

As for Handel himself, it sounds like he was a mix of physical greed and generosity:

Despite his fame, Handel's inner life remains enigmatic. "We know far more about the environment in which he lived and the sort of people he knew than about his private life," Keates adds. Part of the explanation lies in the dearth of personal letters. We must rely on contradictory descriptions of Handel by admirers and detractors, whose opinions were colored by the musical rivalries of 1700s London.

Although he neither married nor was known to have had a long-lasting romantic relationship, Handel was pursued by various young women and a leading Italian soprano, Vittoria Tarquini, according to accounts by his contemporaries. Intensely loyal to friends and colleagues, he was capable of appalling temper outbursts. Because of a dispute over seating in an orchestra pit, he fought a near-fatal duel with a fellow composer and musician, Johann Mattheson, whose sword thrust was blunted by a metal button on Handel's coat. Yet the two remained close friends for years afterward. During rehearsals at a London opera house with Francesca Cuzzoni, Handel grew so infuriated by her refusal to follow his every instruction that he grabbed her by the waist and threatened to hurl her out an open window. "I know well that you are a real she-devil, but I will have you know that I am Beelzebub!" he screamed at the terrified soprano.

Handel, who grew increasingly obese over the years, certainly had an intimidating physique. "He paid more attention to [food] than is becoming to any man," wrote Handel's earliest biographer, John Mainwaring, in 1760. Artist Joseph Goupy, who designed scenery for Handel operas, complained that he was served a meager dinner at the composer's home in 1745; only afterward did he discover his host in the next room, secretly gorging on "claret and French dishes." The irate Goupy produced a caricature of Handel at an organ keyboard, his face contorted into a pig snout, surrounded by fowl, wine bottles and oysters strewn at his feet.
"He may have been mean with food, but not with money," says Keates. Amassing a fortune through his music and shrewd investments in London's burgeoning stock market, Handel donated munificently to orphans, retired musicians and the ill. (He gave his portion of his Messiah debut proceeds to a debtors' prison and hospital in Dublin.)

The picture painted of the turbulent world of opera at the time sounds like it would make a good movie or play.  Pity the one attempt the NYTimes reviewed was not good...

Someone else who only likes superhero comedies

‘Deadpool’ Isn’t the Only Solution. But ‘Batman v Superman’ Is the Problem. - The New York Times

This take on the matter of superhero movies sounds pretty right to me - except that I assume I would dislike the violence and poor language in Deadpool.

Because you weren't?

I didn’t I know I was transgender.

Reading this article of a former butch lesbian who has decided she is transgender after all does little to encourage sympathy; but that may just be me (and my new best friend Germaine - ha).

I think what really grates with me is the use of medical effort to endorse something which (in this woman's case) sounds more like a curious exercise in what it will feel like to be more manly in appearance than she already is.  

Not a good look

News Corp journalists reject domestic violence views of Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair | Media | The Guardian

Actually, I had read Tim Blair's post about the ABC adding "domestic violence leave" to its work conditions, and didn't take much offence.  (It does seem to stretch the imagination that the ABC employs people who would be in violent relationships - we like to imagine that smart people don't get themselves into that situation, but then again, we all know of examples where it has happened.)

Still, it's a very embarrassing look for Tim to be taking this line when it turns out his own company is doing the same:

A constant critic of the ABC, Blair ridiculed the ABC staff for asking
for domestic violence leave but appeared ignorant that his own
colleagues had logged a similar claim in the current bargaining round.

Honestly, his constant ridiculing of the ABC has long since spilled over from ridicule of pretentiousness to what reads like sour grapes and an unhealthy obsession with every single person who works there (and makes a good quid out of it.)   The same can be said of Andrew Bolt, of course, although with Blair it feels more, I don't know, personal.   (He did have a brief attempt at a radio show there, didn't he?)

Maglev, if you must

High speed rail: wrong train, right track?

Michael Pascoe argues that if you must have high speed rail in Australia, use maglev.  

He might be right...

The perfect Guardian storm

Heh.  I don't think I can imagine a more perfect storm for Guardian readers' response than an opinion piece criticising Germanine Greer for her, um, less-than-entirely-endorsing-transexuals opinions. 

Large scale measurement issues

Measurement of Universe's expansion rate creates cosmological puzzle : Nature News & Comment

Scratching the high speed itch

As much as I like taking the Shinkansen when in Japan, count me as skeptical about the prospects of a successful very fast train that runs any distance in Australia.   But if we have to build one, instead of doing all this tunnelling (I heard someone on the radio saying that the Melbourne to Sydney one requires sixty something kilometres of tunnels) I'd like to see this design:

How cool was that?   Avoids the 'roo on the track issue, too (unless you catch a very unlucky one mid-bound.)  And instead of having just one leave the station every 2 hours or so, you could have one small one leave every ten minutes.   Sort of like Musk's Hyperloop, without the claustrophobia.

Clearly, this desire to try for something like a Shinkansen in Australia will not go away from the public's mind.  But like some itches that need to be scratched, it's probably best to try small scale before committing to large.   Buy just a couple of handweights before putting that home gym machine on the credit card; or a set of rubber cuffs before the deluxe ceiling swing.  (I have no idea what I am talking about in either case.)

So, just build the thing for a relatively short, relatively useful distance, like Sydney to Canberra, and see how that goes before spending money on expanding it beyond that.  In fact, given how long both projects will seemingly take, build it from the new airport site at Badgerys Creek to Canberra, maybe?    Put a relatively fast train from Central to Badgerys, perhaps - with an automatic luggage transfer to the really fast train?   (I am assuming that might cut costs a fair bit.)

You can thank me later, Australia, for my useful suggestions....

The history of a denier meme

The Volcano Gambit � RealClimate

I'm not sure why Gavin Schmidt is re-visiting this right now, but it's still good to read of the origin of the mistaken meme on the matter of volcanoes and their greenhouse gas contributions.

More "in praise of higher taxes"

I'm an American living in Sweden. Here's why I came to embrace the higher taxes. - Vox

There was a very similar article to this in one of the other American sites I visit earlier this year, and I think I posted about it, too.

I feel I should point out something, in light of how often I post about this:  it's not that I'm an ideologue when it comes to taxes and the role of government,  and I don't think every country should (or can) be like Scandinavia.   For one thing, the physical size of countries surely helps determine what governments can reasonably be expected to provide, and all European nations benefit from the small geography and high density of living.  Singapore does, too.

There is also the cultural element that affects the way a government can succeed (or not), so that (for example) a country like Japan can expect societal co-operation in some policies (ease of access to alcohol, little societal interest in illicit drugs) that others can't.

My attitude is more that the international examples of how countries and economies work show us the many ways different tax and government spending regimes can work, so that it is clear that low tax, limited government is not the only way to success and a happy society.

It's more a case that I am interested in showing that the libertarian/small government/low tax position that is powerful in the US and parts of the Australian Right is more pure ideology and belief system than something that is inherently the best way to approach economics and how we should run Australia.

Human misbehaviour less than expected

Fathered by the Mailman? It’s Mostly an Urban Legend - The New York Times

Yeah, I think I have read this before:  the old estimates of how many children are fathered by someone other than their assumed father are way over the top, and many scientists think the true figure is closer to a relatively modest 1%.