An interesting result

Magic-mushroom drug lifts depression in first human trial : Nature News & Comment

As readers would know, I'm the last person to endorse recreation use of drugs (beyond alcohol), but persistent and deep depression is a very serious thing, and if one dose of a hallucinogen seems to be shown to help most people with the condition, it's worth considering.

The biggest buffoon to ever run for President

I had missed the "Trump complains about modern hairspray" story from last week, but here it is, covered by Colbert:



You would have to be seriously stupid to consider voting for this clown.

Oh look - Steve Kates is still making sympathetic posts about him.   (And a bunch of Right wing culture warriors still think he's great, 'cos he annoys "Leftists".)   I see that some anonymous contributor to the blog is also now re-posting items from a Fox News commentator about Hilary Clinton.   Seriously, the place has become so dire that you can feel it slowly sucking intelligence out of the universe. 

Probably a bad thing...

If California legalizes marijuana, consumption will likely increase. But is that a bad thing? - LA Times: The data from Colorado and Washington, where voters legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, are still preliminary. We do know, however, that the number of Coloradans who reported using marijuana in the past month increased from about 10.5% in 2011-12 to nearly 15% in 2013-14. In Washington, reported use increased from just above 10% to almost 13%.

Given that both states' preexisting medical systems already provided quasi-legal availability, it is hard to imagine that commercial legalization did not account for at least some of these increases. (That said, other factors could influence marijuana use and it will be some time before researchers have enough data to conduct rigorous analyses. Some of the increase could also come from respondents being more honest now that marijuana is legal in their states).

But is an increase in marijuana consumption a bad thing from a public health standpoint? Not necessarily.

I didn't realise the increases were that large, but this article is from a pro-legalisation advocate.

On the matter of public health, the problem is partly the length of time it takes to work this stuff out.  The rate of increase in smoking in the relatively young is the major issue, but its full effect may take years to clearly establish.

Given that the worst possible health effect (apart from possible car accident death) is a really debilitating mental illness (schizophrenia), surely you don't need too much of an increase in the rate of that to say that its increased use is a real public health negative.

Good grief

Donald Trump to meet with Henry Kissinger on foreign policy.

I see that Kissinger is 92 now.  Mind you, his safe "use by" age was probably 40.

Viewing recommendations

Greece With Simon Reeve | SBS On Demand

This documentary/travel show about Greece (last night on SBS) was very good, if somewhat depressing, viewing.   From the (pretty obvious) environmental degradation of the Mediterranean sea around Greece, to the surprisingly nutty men of Crete, it was fascinating in a way I didn't quite expect.

After that, although I missed part of it, there was Matthew Evans' show What's the Catch, about where our seafood comes from.  This is a repeat, evidently, but I had missed it the first time around. 

Again, this was very eye-opening.   The fishing practices around Thailand, to make the fish meal that is fed to their cheap farmed prawns that I already refuse to buy at the supermarket, were a real worry.  The problem is, places like Dominoes pizza will source their prawns from countries with such dire environmental practices.

Anyway, all praise SBS and ABC, again: for running educational material you won't see on commercial television.

Looking at why evangelicals would support Trump

Trump’s success with evangelical voters isn’t surprising. It was inevitable. - The Washington Post

The short answer:  because the modern, politically engaged, American evangelical typically has views that are not really Biblically based at all - except when it comes to homosexuality, I guess. 

On the other hand, NPR has an article about some evangelicals who are saying they can't in good conscience vote for Trump.

Letting Laffer off lightly

Cutting taxes to balance the budget? You're having a Laffer - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

It seems to me that when journalists here write about Art Laffer, they tend to let him off pretty lightly.   (Kansas rarely gets a mention, strangely enough.  How's it going?  - still terribly, I see - you have to go to somewhere like Forbes to find a "free market" proponent to run the Laffer line that it'll all work out for the good - just you wait and see; give it a decade or so.  Oh, and universities and highway funding - who needs them? It's all a "spending problem", not a revenue one.  Lol.)

But nonetheless, Ian Verrender's explanation of what's happened with low interest rates (companies are paying out big dividends, while simultaneously having earnings decline) was interesting.

My duty to note Spielberg

A Word With: Steven Spielberg - The New York Times

I will read, and usually post about, any Spielberg interview I find.   As usual, he presents as the smart, self aware, and very likeable man I've always perceived him to be.

I see that The BFG seems to have received enough positive reviews at Cannes (well, it seems to me the British press were kinder to it than the US media) to ensure it will be a success.  

Trust me, I'm a business man

So, a high profile business man is not only able to completely misrepresent and massively exaggerate about a Labor Party policy, but he's also able to completely and utterly backtrack on a former position? :

 

That's what self serving business men do, hey Symond?  

Interesting...

Peta Credlin suggests government lawyers said boat turnbacks were illegal | Australia news | The Guardian

I'm not surprised:  advice given to Labor governments about the likely illegality of the practice would not have changed.

In my opinion, Australian journalism has been far too supine in accepting the Coalition government's refusal to discuss "on water" or "operational" matters.  And unwilling to spend the money to find out the fate of some returnees. 

Deep thoughts for a Monday

Physicist Bee H tweeted a link to this interview, so I presume she found it interesting.  Here's the best part:

Seeing as you’re a physicist who has thought so deeply about Gödel’s theorem, do you think the absence of a theory of everything in mathematics suggests there might be no theory of everything in physics?
I totally think about that. Why should we think, since physics is so rooted in mathematics, that there is going to be a physical theory of everything? The way we usually think about the Big Bang is: The universe is born, and it’s born with initial data. There are laws of physics, and somehow the initial data is just… something else. We really are dishonest about where that comes from. What if the law of physics that describes the origin of the universe is something that has to make a claim about itself, which is a classic self-referential Gödelian setup for a tangle. [A Gödelian tangle is an unprovable, self-referential mathematical statement, such as, “This statement is unprovable.”] What if the laws of physics have to make a claim about themselves in such a way that they themselves become somehow uncomputable?

I’m also super interested in the idea that the initial data of the universe could contain irrational or uncomputable numbers. Then the universe could never finish computing the consequences of the initial conditions. Maybe we can’t predict what’s coming next because every digit of the initial data is a toss of a coin.

But it’s not enough if I only have words, and I’ve never found something to write down in math, so I’ve just kind of waffled. I think a smart thing to do would be to look at a specific Gödelian tangle that exists in mathematics and try to map that to fictitious laws of physics. Then you would have a universe in which there was a Gödelian tangle. There are constructive things to try.

Just plain nuts

TLS | Otter ego

Is this to be taken seriously?   Sounds more like an April Fool's joke.   But if not, seems to me that this piece would be more appropriate in The Guardian as an example of self indulgent eccentricity, but here it is in the Time Literary Supplement.  An extract:

The real novelty of Foster’s approach, however, lies in his second
instrument. Foster is going to inhabit – not just imaginatively but
physically – the landscape of his target animals. He exchanges
hallucinogens in the living room for adoption of the lives of the
badger, the otter, the fox, the red deer, and the swift.

Foster is not someone who believes in half-measures. To replicate the
life of a badger, Foster and his eight-year-old son live for several
weeks in a “sett” – more accurately a hole in the ground gouged by the
JCB digger of a farmer friend – in the Welsh Black Hills. Like badgers,
they sleep in this sett by day, and crawl around the forest on their
bellies by night, eating worms, grasshoppers (and lasagne provided by
aforementioned farmer friend), licking slugs and smelling their
surroundings (they even construct a scent map of the forest). Over the
weeks, the importance of vision, in this new, dark, ankle-high world
they inhabit, is progressively replaced by hearing and smell.

If anything, Foster’s approach to being an otter is even more
demanding. Spraint is otter dung – used to mark their territory and
often deposited in highly visible locations, such as the rocks beside a
river pool. Foster enlists the help of his children, encouraging them to
deposit their own “spraint” along the riverbanks of Devon. They all
then learn to identify, using their olfactory abilities, each other’s
spraint, assigning individual piles of it to individual persons. Foster
completes his inhabiting of the life of an otter by sleeping in storm
drains by day – nestled warmly in a bed of nappies and syringes – and
swimming in the rivers of Dartmoor by night, attempting, unsuccessfully,
to catch fish with his teeth.

Update:  Ha!   I just click over to The Guardian, and what do I find?   Another story, this one about a British guy trying his hardest to become "goatman"!:

Thwaites spent three days in Alpine meadows, doing his best to mix with a herd of goats. “No one was using that much energy, there weren’t wolves around, we weren’t being driven along a mountain path, but it was still difficult, especially going downhill,” says Thwaites. “After a while, the prosthetics started rubbing, and I got sweaty and cold.” This physical discomfort “encroached” on his attempts to think like a goat.

Is there something in the water over there that the government ought to be looking into?

On shifting the blame for Trump

I don't always care for Bill Maher, but in this clip about how some on the American Right are attempting to blame the Left for the rise of Trump as a presidential candidate, he is spot on:

For those of us who can't get enough Wittgenstein anecdotes

Freeman Dyson in a review in 2012 (don't think I've linked to it before, although I certainly did refer to the book he's reviewing):

When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

That is weird

The Mothership of All Alliances: Scientology and the Nation of Islam | New Republic

I now know slightly more about Nation of Islam, and am particularly surprised to learn it's a science fiction religion, just like Scientology (which it is in the process of embracing):

Farrakhan himself has called white people “a race of devils” and the
Nation teaches that the apocalypse will involve a UFO, or “mother
plane,” that will eradicate all Caucasians.However, there are
some striking theological overlaps that might help explain how Farrakhan
came to adopt a religion invented by a white man. There is, of course,
the attachment to science fiction: Scientologists believe in an alien
dictator, Xenu; the Nation holds that the white race was created by a
mad scientist named Yakub.

 

Marvel-lous box office (even if I don't care for them)

Here I was, idly thinking "is it just me, or has this latest Marvel Captain America movie really not had much build up and media attention - are people getting less excited about these multi superhero movies, which increasingly all look the same?"; and then I decided to check the box office numbers.

Worldwide gross of $765 million, in about a week??   Gee.   (It has had generally good reviews too, so it might not burn out as fast that [Bat V Super] x man critical failure.)

Marvel fanboys and fangirls obviously still care - as so do some reviewers - for a genre I don't (much). 

A gay explanation?

Genetic tug of war linked to evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in beetles | EurekAlert! Science News

In this study the scientists looked for evidence to support the
theory that genetic links exist between SSB and other characteristics
which carry benefits in one sex but not the other. Thus, SSB in one sex
could occur because genetically linked traits are favored by natural
selection in the opposite sex - the genetic tug of war.

The scientists based their hypothesis on the fact that most genes
are expressed in both males and females and often code for more than one
characteristic. For example, previous studies have reported that the
same genes that code for SSB are also the genes that code for mobility.
Mobility is known to be costly to female seed beetles as they do not
need to range as far as males to mate.

To test their hypothesis, the team of scientists selectively bred
male and female beetles to display increased SSB, studying how this
affected their mobility and reproductive success compared to beetles
that had been bred to display decreased SSB. The scientists showed that
when a particular sex had been bred for increased SSB, siblings of the
opposite sex enjoyed an increase in reproductive performance. They also
showed changes in traits such as mobility and sex recognition after
selective breeding on SSB, providing evidence for genetic links between
SSB and these traits across the sexes, according to the researchers.

Not sure about the design

Inside the world's largest cruise ship, Harmony of the Seas | Travel | The Guardian

There's no doubt about it, these massive new cruise ships look awesomely, um, massive, and are surely marvels of modern engineering.

The waterslides look a bit scary, though:

And I have two other reservations:  the way these cabins look across the void straight into other cabins - not much privacy there without a closed curtain (although no doubt much better than being stuck in an windowless internal cabin):

And - I'm no marine engineer, but the whole ship looks a bit disturbingly top heavy, doesn't it?:

There's a hell of a lot of ship for a side on wind to blow against...

Dubious journalism continues

The Right is thrilled that a person who appeared on Q&A and made an entirely valid point about tax rate changes turns out now to have some pretty serious sounding criminal convictions, too.

I would have thought sensible people would at least have misgivings about national media giving front page treatment to this guy's past - is embarrassing a Liberal politician on the ABC enough grounds for the Murdoch press to do that?   But, there is the aspect that an Q&A producer had (unwisely) referred to him as a "national hero" in a tweet, and the fact that lots of people promised money to him when they didn't know the full story.   So I find it hard to say that his background is completely un-newsworthy; but surely it is still being handled disproportionately and with no regard to how it may affect Storrar and his family.

Of course, Storrar himself could help by, say, getting someone to agree to be trustee of the money on a trust set up for his daughter's education and benefit.  That is, if any of the money promised now materialises.

And my complaint about Sinclair Davidson (who thinks the ABC should be running around investigating the private live of everyone who has ever appeared on Q&A) remains:  he was calling this guy a "parasite" before any of this came out, and simply because he doesn't pay net tax.

Update:  it's been decades since I have seen it, but the movie Absence of Malice just came to mind.  I remember few details, except I'm sure it dealt with the journalistic ethics of printing stories that were technically newsworthy, but which carried a strong chance of "collateral damage" to people who were part of the story.    (I only remember one scene, which must mean it was really effective - the poor woman who, I think, had had an abortion after an affair with a politician? running around the neighbourhood in the early morning, trying to pick up newspapers delivered on the front step before they could read them.  I wonder if I have that right?)   Pretty much the same goes here.

Update 2:  I just checked the plot of the movie on Wikipedia - I was pretty close.

New summer melt record seems increasingly likely

People who follow these things closely are increasingly saying that early conditions are so below average for this time of year, a record summer Arctic ice melt this Northern summer seems on the cards: