In praise of an add-on

I use Firefox as my preferred Windows browser.  (It's not bad in Android too, but just a little bit slower than Chrome.)

But I just have an odd urge to praise its add-on Lightshot, a screenshot addition that I use frequently in blogging, but also quite often at work.   It is just one of the handiest things to have at hand, and I really appreciate its simplicity, reliability and utility.  Thank you, its creators.

And now back to your regular programming...

Much, much bigger on the inside

It's hard not to think of the Tardis when reading a paper like this one:  On the volume inside old black holes.   It talks about the mind boggling concept of the insides of evaporating black holes being much larger than the exterior surface indicates.  The abstract reads:

Black holes that have nearly evaporated are often thought of as small objects, due to their tiny exterior area. However, the horizon bounds large spacelike hypersurfaces. A compelling geometric perspective on the evolution of the interior geometry was recently shown to be provided by a generally covariant definition of the volume inside a black hole using maximal surfaces. In this article, we expand on previous results and show that finding the maximal surfaces in an arbitrary spherically symmetric spacetime is equivalent to a 1+1 geodesic problem. We then study the effect of Hawking radiation on the volume by computing the volume of maximal surfaces inside the apparent horizon of an evaporating black hole as a function of time at infinity: while the area is shrinking, the volume of these surfaces grows monotonically with advanced time, up to when the horizon has reached Planckian dimensions. The physical relevance of these results for the information paradox and the remnant scenarios are discussed. 

And then, from within the paper itself:

A few numbers
Before closing this section, let us put the above in perspective: when a solar mass (1030 kg) black hole becomes Planckian (it needs 1055 times the actual age of the universe), it will contain volumes equivalent to 105 times our observable universe, hidden behind a Planckian area (10−70 m2).

Perhaps more pertinent is to consider small primordial black holes with mass less than 1012 kg. Their initial horizon radius and volume are of the order of the proton charge radius (10−15m) and volume (10−45m3) respectively. They would be in the final stages of evaporation now, hiding volumes of about one litre (10−9m3).

 Impressive, to put it mildly.

And as we approach the solemn occasion of the 5th anniversary of the "stagflation" warning...

The ABC reports:

Consumer prices have fallen for the first time since December 2008, with deflation of 0.2 per cent in the March quarter.

The Bureau of Statistics data show inflation was just 1.3 per cent over the past year.
Economists surveyed by Bloomberg has expected inflation for the quarter to come in at 0.2 per cent and 1.7 per cent over the year.

(One) of my earlier posts on the 2011 warning (which has proved to be about as wrong as it could possibly be) by Sinclair Davidson here. 

Update:   I see today that Sinclair was to be on Andrew Bolt's show on Sky News  last night.   I don't get cable TV, so I wonder whether Andrew asked him what happened to the stagflation warning that he talked about on the Bolt Report nearly 5 years ago.  

Another good question

Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy - The Atlantic

Here's a key paragraph from the interview:

Raghunathan: That's the plight of most people in the world, I would say. There are expectations that if you achieve some given thing, you're going to be happy. But it turns out
that's not true. And a large part of that is due to adaptation, but a large part of it also is that you see this mountain in front of you and you want to climb over it. And when you do, it turns out there are more mountains to climb.

The one thing that has really really helped me in this regard is a concept that I call “the dispassionate pursuit of passion” in the book, and basically the concept boils down to
not tethering your happiness to the achievement of outcomes. The reason why it's important to not tie happiness to outcomes is that outcomes by themselves don't really have an unambiguously positive or negative effect on your happiness. Yes, there are some outcomes—you get a terminal disease, or your child dies—that are pretty extreme, but let's
leave those out. But if you think about it, the breakup that you had with your childhood girlfriend, or you broke an arm and were in a hospital bed for two months, when they occurred, you might have felt, “Oh my goodness, this is the end of the world! I'm never going to
recover from it.” But it turns out we're very good at recovering from those, and not just that, but those very events that we thought were really extremely negative were in fact pivotal in making us grow and learn.

Everybody's got some kind of a belief about whether good things are going to happen or bad things are going to happen. There's no way to scientifically prove that one of these beliefs
is more accurate than another. But if you believe life is benign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. If you think life is malign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. It's kind of like a placebo effect. Given that all of these beliefs are all equally valid, why not adopt the belief that is going to be more useful to you in your life as you go along?

Ice on the way out

Citizen scientists collected rare ice data, confirm warming since industrial revolution

Interesting use of old ice formation records from two parts of the world explained here.

My Kitchen Rules wrap up

Things I learnt from watching MKR this year:

*  pasta seems to be extraordinarily "in", again.   It seemed that only a couple of episodes (and there were many, many episodes) didn't feature at least one of the team making their own pasta, using the tortuous pasta machinery that 99% of Australian households cannot be bothered with, given the range of fresh and dried pasta available everywhere.

*  smearing stuff on plates still seems to be "in", despite my hearing a restaurant food critic in Brisbane on the radio earlier this year say that it was definitely "out".  But, I guess, given that the same critic said that fine dining was generally "out" too, in favour of more casual, relaxed (and cheaper!) eating, who would know.

*  not enough people understand the magic of serving food on wood platters.  These made a disappointingly small number of appearances on the show (actually only once that I can recall now - I notice because I do tend to loudly assure whoever is watching with me that the food must be good because of that.)   What is it?   Because MacDonalds use them on their "create your own" burgers they are now too downmarket?

*  cauliflower is way "in".   One of my least favourite veges tastes pretty good as a quasi chip, apparently.  I would never have worked that one out myself.  A recent article in The Guardian also confirmed the cauli's rise.

*  never try making your own gnocchi on a food competition show.  It only ever seems to work right about half of the time.

*  no one in the universe thinks a meal of one giant meatball on pasta is a good idea:  except for that (normally more sensible and somewhat funny)  woman on MKR.

*  chefs (or at least wannabe chefs) really touch the food you're about to eat an awful lot.   I'm not sure I'd even be comfortable within my family as to the amount of direct food massaging on the plate that seemed to go on this year, but from these strangers?   I hope professional kitchens use plastic gloves more than that.

That's all I can think of for now.   Ben Pobjie's final comedy review about the show perhaps wasn't one of his strongest (like the judges, he does start to run out of steam by the end of the season), but I liked the opening paragraph:

And so it has come to this. Who would have thought, when this season of My Kitchen Rules began, that it would one day end? And yet, after sixty-eight months of intense culinary competition, laughter, tears, success, failure, drama, failure, suspense, failure, heartbreak and some more failure, we come to the 2016 MKR Grand Final, the night of nights for people whose friends once told them they were good at cooking.

An Army too far

I was surprised recently at the cinema to see the trailer for a movie version of Dad's Army.  It certainly inspired no enthusiasm to see it: if you can't make a good trailer out of 100 minutes of material it's generally a warning about the quality of the full length version.  And it seemed very strange that they assumed audience knowledge of the characters and situation - whereas you have to be pretty much over 50, surely, to be in that category.  How many movies aiming for that demographic succeed commercially?   (Although, it is true, there does seem to be a minor industry in twee British films featuring aging characters made for an aging audience.)

In any case, reading the comments in the Guardian following Peter Bradshaw's lukewarm review lead me to this interesting aspect of the original series.  I may have read about this many years ago, but had forgotten:

The main difference of course is that many of the actors in the original series were real WW2 veterans themselves.
Most interestingly, Arnold Ridley, who played the gentle pacifist, Private Godfrey, was actually a very badly injured and highly decorated veteran of WW1 and WW2.
In WW1, as a volunteer with the Artists Rifles, he was gassed, shot, injured by shrapnel, and suffered bayonet wounds to the extent he was invalided out of the army in 1916.
In 1939, he was recalled to the colours and received a Commission, although as an officer looking after supplies in France. But circumstances thrust him into action again, and he found himself commanding one of the rear-guard elements protecting the evacuation of Boulogne. His command fought to the final minute and just made onto the last RN Destroyer in Boulogne Harbour. They sailed out under continuous by attack German dive bombers, where once again Lt Ridley was badly wounded by machine gun-fire.
He was once again invalided out of the forces, but as soon as he had recovered sufficiently, volunteered for the Home Guard, the real "Dads Army"!
John Le Mesurier, (Sergeant Wilson) commanded a Tank Squadron through North Africa and Western Europe, while other members of the cast had similar backgrounds.

 Maybe that's what Hollywood is lacking these days - ex military who are now actors.

Speaking of which, there is a long list at IMDB of actors who served in the US military.  Some are well known (Jimmy Stewart, for example), but others are new to me:   Jamie Farr (Klinger on MASH) actually did serve in Korea?  But so did Alan Alda.  Didn't know that...

And Rock Hudson served in The Philippines as a Navy aircraft mechanic?   Huh.  And for true action heroes:  Paul Newman flew as a turret gunner on torpedo bombers in the Pacific, and Don Adams was a marine who served in the Battle of Guadalcanal

Makes our modern crop of under 50 actors seem like self indulgent wimps.   

The Whitening (and the Wrinkling)

The coming Republican demographic disaster, in 1 stunning chart - The Washington Post

The demographics for the Republicans do look really bad.

A politician being a politician - but it's still annoying

Federal election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull out on a limb over negative gearing

Peter Martin illustrates well that Turnbull is being an opportunistic politician of the typical kind in his willingness to now run a scare campaign on changing negative gearing, when he used to criticise its economic effects.

Suicide in Greenland

Greenland Has The World's Highest Suicide Rate, And Teenage Boys Are Especially Vulnerable : Goats and Soda : NPR

What a great, if somewhat depressing, bit of journalism here - a lengthy consideration of the high rate of suicide in Greenland.  And even if you don't read it all, have a look at the stunning photos of a very bleak looking part of the world.

For an Australian, the similarities between the problem in that country and that in remote aboriginal communities are obvious.  Despite smaller communities supposedly having the benefits of  social connections, it seems a combination of being caught between two cultures, and the lack of opportunity that physical isolation brings, makes for a high suicide rate.

NPR investigates

How Much Money Do Uber Drivers Really Make? Send Us Your Screenshots : All Tech Considered : NPR

I'll be interested to see what they come up with.

NPR really does some good work - I must get around to adding them to my blogroll.

Missing from any Anzac Day march I've ever seen

...is anyone dressed like this:

....although I suppose if they were allowed in the march, they'd be slipping over anything resembling a banana skin on the road. 

Yes, I guess these chaps (real soldiers from World War 1 - you can read about their entertainment troupe at the Australian War Memorial blog) could give a whole new meaning to "Company clown".  

I'm tempted to try to make some pun or other about how they died - many times, on stage - but that would be inappropriate.

Lurking around

I have my doubts I should have been there, but the creaky old stairway that looked not very safe was no longer blocked off (probably due to some work being done on the weekday, by the looks), and there was no one around.   So I had a look in this roof space area that I'm not sure has ever been open to the public.  (Maybe it was when it used to be used for something else.   And I do have childhood memories of its former use.  But now that I think of it, the handrail you can see in one photo looks fancy enough that it used to be for public access.   And why put a nice big stained glass window in if it couldn't be seen by the public?  So yes, I think it probably was formerly open, but hasn't been for a long time.)

The very observant reader of this blog may know which Brisbane building I refer to.

Good Lord - Donald Trump sounding not unreasonable

Donald Trump was asked about anti-transgender bathroom bills. His answer was … correct. - Vox

No, this is not the start of any turn around in his credibility.

It's just that it's near impossible for any person to be completely wrong on every single political/cultural issue.

Not grokked

Prince Defied Conventional Notions of Race and Gender - The New York Times

He did?

Not meaning to sound mean spirited; and not meaning to detract from the sadness felt by his fans; and perhaps showing my musical and cultural ignorance to an embarrassing degree:  but I "grokked" Prince to an even lesser degree than Bowie.

Bowie in interviews could come across as a knowing performance artist who was witty and pretty normal beneath it all:  I'm not sure that Prince ever seemed to be more than an embodied performance.  (Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that, people.  You could say that about quite a few eccentric but talented artists. And, of course, it is not as if I - or many people, it seems - knows what he was like in private.)

I should stop writing now, as it's generally not wise to be going against the popular flow so soon after an artist's death.

Good to know

Need to remember something? Better draw it, study finds

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that drawing pictures of information that needs to be remembered is a strong and reliable strategy to enhance memory.

We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always
came out on top," said the study's lead author, Jeffrey Wammes, PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology. "We believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive memory trace that better integrates visual, motor and semantic information."

Extraordinary video

China dust devil lifts boy into air - BBC News

(Note:  boy not seen lifted into the air in video, but seeing the effect on the ground, the picture showing him in the air is entirely plausible.)

Canned fish, re-visited

Last year, I wrote of my search for the nicest canned sardines (and referred readers to a much more extensive taste guide than I could manage.)  (By the way, I recently found that, oddly, the deli style shop sitting in the middle of the spanking new Pacific Fair extension on the Gold Coast had a really extensive range - including my favoured Portuguese brand - at very cheap prices.   Haven't tried the Croatian ones yet - not sure if I should.)

Since I'm trying to shed a few kg again (I now know I definitely have to do what Michael Mosley said he does - move from a 2/5 diet to a 1/7 diet if I want any hope of maintaining my lower weight,)  I'm back on the sardines for lunch kick, but I've also been trying the range of canned herring which seems to have become popular.

And I must say, I am enjoying them.  King Oscar's are fine, and even the attractively packaged Brunswick brand (which I quite disliked for sardines) has a  canned kipper in water which was quite acceptable.  I haven't tried the Aldi brand yet - I think they are from Poland, but in a can which is a bit inconveniently too much for one person.

The canned fish I never care for is the "flavoured" tuna (or salmon).   They're never terribly nice, and it just seems a way to minimise the amount of tuna in the can with cheaper filling.  But a good quality tuna in olive oil is always nice:  and it forms the basis of my daughter's favourite meal - salad nicoise, as prepared by me.  (It is one of the few dishes - very few dishes - which my children acknowledge as being better when made by their father instead of their mother.  I did win the Great Chicken Cook off last Christmas too, with my Italian baked chicken versus teriyaki baked chicken, even though my wife did not realise it was a competition.  But I digress...)

Although I haven't had it for a while, there are some cans of broiled fish in soy sauce sold in Asian supermarkets which make for a nice enough light meal on rice.  Just as with the old cans of braised steak and onions, you can heat it up by boiling the can before you open it, and just tip onto a bowl of rice.  Here it is, this brand:

Next up:  it's about time I put pen to paper about my observations of precipitation (and shovels) when I visited Yorkshire.  :)

Speaking of people who annoy me...

...I'm so glad that we now have the IPA view on Britain exiting the European Union getting an airing in our Senate via its conservative fop James Paterson.

Next up:  I expect a decent lecture on the righteous adventures of Milton Friedman in Chile. 

[All /sarc, of course.]

Irritation noted

Beyondblue anxiety mental health campaign worthless: Helen Razer

I've recently noted how annoying I find Razer's whole writing oeuvre,  which I find difficult to describe clearly.  "Tendentious anti-tendentiousness" seems to summarise this column which I don't recommend.  She has something of the quality of perpetual irritant Brendan O'Neill: writes a 100 words when 20 would do, always seems to be wanting to find something to complain about.