Derangement noted

From the Economist,  a report on a campaign stop on 1 August:

The presidential race: Donald Trump’s disastrous fortnight | The Economist:

The speech that followed was even more rambling than usual, and peppered with personal gripes; the boasts were fewer, his haranguing of the media (“some of the most dishonest people”) went on for longer.

At times, Mr Trump sounded deranged. Some of the negotiators he says he will commission to improve America’s trade terms “are horrible, horrible human beings”, he said. “Some of them don’t sleep at night, some of them turn and toss and sweat, they’re turning and tossing and sweating and it’s disgusting, and these are the people we want to negotiate for us, right?” Whose experience, actually, was he describing? With three months to the election, it is early days, and the contest looks close; yet Mr Trump’s campaign is a mess. In Mechanicsburg it was tempting to think he really had seen the writing on the wall.

Out-nutted

Well, what a pain that Senator Blofeld Leyonhjelm got re-elected.  I see his total vote in New South Wales was 3%, but his position on the ballot paper was pretty good again, and I also thought the big fault under the new system is the tiny size of the party logos at the top of their columns.    I strongly suspect that this factor, and the parties use of  the word "liberal," again benefited him, and I expect if he was way to the right of Liberal column, you could shave off at least a third of his votes. 

But as a big a nut he is on guns and other matters, he will certainly be out-nutted in the Senate by the Queensland no.2 Senator for Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts.   An ageing engineer (a professional which produces some of the most obnoxious examples of Dunning-Kruger), he's the climate change denier whose mutterings about international banking family conspiracies made even Andrew Bolt distance himself from his group.   I see from the link that he's also (naturally) an Agenda 21 conspiracist completely opposed to any support of renewables (even though, as Abbott found out, quite a lot of people who might be dumb enough to vote for Hanson actually quite like their solar panels on the roof).   I bet he's a goldbug, too.  And, I wouldn't be surprised if he loves his guns as much as Leyonhjelm.

So, it's going to be interesting, and worrying, to watch what crap he will come out during Senate speeches.
  

Unsettled weather

Just saying, but the weather in Brisbane in the last couple of weeks has been all over the shop, in a way that I think's quite unusual for this time of year.  We've had a late winter burst of quite cold mornings after some very clear nights, but then it seems out of the blue will come cloud, wind and rain.  Last night it was from an east coast low, which I don't think are very common at all in early August.  Now its sunny and warm again, although maximums are still relatively modest. (Whoops - spoke too soon, it's gone cloudy and breezy again.)

I have been noticing in other recent years that Augusts have not been very cold at night at all - I pay attention to these things because of insisting on sitting and staying at the Ekka for fireworks.  But this year - unless this messy weather all clears up - I am thinking it is going to feel colder there at night, like it used to sometimes be when I went as a child.

Is it all part of global warming causing a more turbulent and changeable mixing of the atmosphere?

Support warranted

Guardian Australia has made a difference – with your help, it can do more | Media | The Guardian

I see that The Guardian Australia is asking for subscribers (or donors, if you will) and suggesting $10 a month or $100 a year.

I think this would be well deserved support for a great paper and website.  (I already subscribe to the SMH too.)  

Get our your credit cards.

The drop out option

Would Donald Trump really consider dropping out?

A good consideration here of what would happen if Trump dropped out, and why he probably won't.   (Although I still suspect he might if enough Republicans continue to repudiate him.)

Update:  and here's Vox on what the party can do to try to get him out of the race.  (They can't force him.)

My suggestion for the next James Bond

He's dark haired; darker skinned (for a bit of character variety); good with gadgets; knows his way around Europe; and the ladies love him.   [OK, so 4 out of 5 is not bad.] :)

Anyway, he would make an excellent Q, at the very least.

An amusing comment about Friedman

Noahpinion: How are Milton Friedman's ideas holding up? Part 1: For some reason, Friedman is treated a bit like a secular saint in policy discussions. If you criticize "Idea X", fine. We can have an argument. But if you criticize "Milton Friedman's Idea X", then WHO ARE YOU, LOWLY WORM, to criticize the great FRIEDMAN?? If you say government is a lot more useful and important than Reagan and Thatcher and Art Laffer and Friedrich Hayek and Ed Prescott and Greg Mankiw think, well, fine, that's your opinion. But if you say government is a lot more useful and important than Milton Friedman thought, then you're wrong wrong wrong and don't you know that Friedman proved government was bad in the 70s?? Etc.

OK, I might be exaggerating as an excuse to use lots of capital letters and italics, but Friedman is such a towering intellectual that criticizing him does feel a bit like tipping a sacred cow. Fortunately I'm from Texas, where cow-tipping is a way of life.

Interesting technology for the drinker

Flexible wearable electronic skin patch offers new way to monitor alcohol levels -- ScienceDaily

Any suggestions?

Ridiculing Trump has become a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel for everyone, so I'm getting a bit bored with that.   Seems to me the only thing providing any real tension in the Presidential election is what's in emails that Julian Assange is determined to try to take down Clinton with, and when they'll be released.  I can't dismiss the possibility that there might be real problems for her in this - but Assange is going to be winning no friends on the Left by playing games with the timing of release, and he has no friends already on the Right.   He's stuffed either way, then.  

I wonder, though, whether Trump might do something really unprecedented - such as pulling the pin himself on his run if enough Republican figures say they can't endorse him.  His musing about a possible rigged election seems potentially on the path to something like that, and he obviously is worried about how he'll cope with one on one debates with Clinton.   Let's see...

I haven't even been posting much science lately - I think most scientists must be enjoying the NH summer holidays, because I don't think that much of interest has been in the media recently. 

Oh - here's something:   Brian Cox's new series from the BBC started last night - Forces of Nature - and as with his previous similar shows, it's beautiful to look at, and I find it rather endearing watching a man who seems continually blissed out about science and nature.  Could be a bit better edited - there seemed to be a little bit of unnecessary repetition in last night's episode - but overall, it's highly recommended.


Apart from that, I feel like calling for suggestions as to what I might find interesting on the 'net at the moment...

When any publicity is not good publicity

Some would say this is hardly surprising, given the source, but I am still amused to see this group of headlines re Trump on the Washington Post website today:

A very odd thing to say

Gee, for a man who has a long association with the IPA, with its transgender staffer Mikayla Novak and its past high profile gay spokes-ego Tim Wilson, Sinclair Davidson sure likes to buy into moral panic about high school students and sexuality.  And he has done so today in a truly spectacularly oddball way. 

This is the post in question, about a scholarship body that has started asking teenage applicants if they identify a gay/transgender etc, apparently with the intention of specifically offering money to some in that category.  SD notes, however, that the applicants will often be below the age of consent, which leads to his ending his post with this:

"...perhaps this is a matter for the police and not reporters from The Australian."

Now look, I have long, long argued in this blog that sexuality of school students is something best dealt with at school as a matter of emphasising privacy and respect for all (and therefore don't particularly care for teenagers in high school who go out of their way to be "out"), and I would agree that gay identity politics influencing sex education may have gone so far as to advertently or inadvertently put inappropriate pressure on students to categorise themselves in ways they should not need to.   So do I think it makes much sense in principle to be offering scholarships based on sexuality?  Of course not.

But do I think that they're aren't some teenagers who have a pretty good understanding of their sexuality as not being heterosexual?  Of course not.

Everyone who has read anything by, or talked to, gay adults knows that a great many do feel sure fairly soon into puberty that their sexuality is at least different, and (even before the modern Western openness to discussing homosexuality) recognized it as homosexuality, or at least bisexuality.  And in most cases, this is prior to any actual sexual experience at all.  

Therefore, it is obvious that asking a 15 or 16 year old if he or she identifies as gay, etc, (and leaving it open for them to decline to answer) carries no necessary implication about whether they are or have ever been sexually active, or will be before it becomes "legal" by virtue of their age.   So in what implausible way does SD think asking this question on a piece of paper could induce an underage teenager to have gay sex?  A scholarship possibility means they'll just go and try out the gay stuff to make sure they can honestly answer the question?    Yeah, sure.   Is it meant to be just be like how detailed sex education encourages straight students to have sex early (when in fact, if anything, it probably has the opposite effect)?   

Even when asked to clarify in comments what he could possibly mean about police looking into this, the Professor does not retract at all, and seems to make his concern sound even more like extreme conservative, moral panic, ridiculousness.   People who work in a body offering scholarships to a gay identifying 15 or 16 year old are "grooming"??  The police should look into this instead of pursuing George Pell??   In fact,  we all know the police would be rolling their eyes and writing "just plain nuts" in their notebooks. 

It's remarkable how SD can take a matter on which moderate conservatives might agree (do we really need scholarships based on sexuality?) and take the argument to such an unjustified extreme that makes it immediately dismiss-able not just by Lefties, but by any sensible social conservative too.  

Trump-ism of the day

Trump says he hopes Ivanka would quit if she got harassed: Kirsten Powers

Apparently, from a telephone interview with Trump:

What if someone had treated Ivanka in the way Ailes allegedly behaved?

His reply was startling, even by Trumpian standards. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said.

But most women don’t have the financial resources of Ivanka. They can’t afford to quit their job without another in hand, something that is impossible to do when you are under contract and forbidden to speak to competitors. Most importantly, why should a woman be expected to upend her career just because she ended up in the crosshairs of some harasser?

Hand cleaning considered

Health Check: should we be using alcohol-based hand sanitisers?

Here's something I didn't know about alcohol based hand cleaners:

In a hospital setting, health-care workers use medicated soap and water
wash or alcohol-based hand rub to remove germs and kill pathogens.
Alcohol-based hand rub has the added bonus of providing an additional 20
minutes of residual action on the surface of the health workers’ hands
to keep pathogens from multiplying to a level that can cause infection
in vulnerable patients.

Milling about in the dark

Tokyo’s surreal and shadowy world of Pokemon Go after dark - The Washington Post

The photos aren't that special really; but yes, I can just imagine how incredibly popular this game will be there.

The Apollo astronaut I saw

Mike Collins Talks About Mars, and How to Handle Apollo Hoaxers | Daily Planet | Air & Space Magazine

I have mentioned here before, but I saw Michael Collins in the late 1970's in the bookshop of the Air & Space Museum, when he ran the place. (I thought it was the 1980's, but I was also there in either '78 or '79, and he was the director up to 1978, apparently.)

He's 85 now, and recently gave an interview (linked above) which has a few funny parts, including this:

Is there anything particular that provokes memories of the Apollo days?

Well, the moon kind of surprises me sometimes. I’ll be out at night and I’ll see a nice moon, and say, “Hey, that looks good.” Then I’ll say, “Oh shit, I went up there one time!” Kind of  surprises me. It’s like there are two Moons, you know—the one that’s usually around, and then that one.

Trump and the Russians, continued

Trump: Don’t worry, Putin won’t go into Ukraine � Hot Air

When even Hot Air keeps noting how Trump is making a complete mess with his media appearances, you know he's in trouble...

Heh

Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context

It's a few days old now, from The Onion, but it's pretty funny.

Some skepticism called for

Computers will require more energy than the world generates by 2040 - ScienceAlert

Oh, and by the way:

YES, BAN THAT MILITARY GRADE FLASHLIGHT - IF THAT WILL STOP IT APPEARING AS AN ADVERTISEMENT EVERYWHERE I GO ON THE NET.

Evolving interpretations of ancient sexuality

TLS Greek homosexuality

This (sort of) review of a re-published important book about Greek homosexuality takes a broader look at how its ideas were received, and it's pretty interesting.   The author of the book - KJ Dover - also sounds like quite a strange character.

Getting mileage from your toilet

An interesting story has appeared at the LA Times about Japanese (and American) progress with hydrogen powered fuel cell cars.  (The Japanese are using sewerage to make the gas.) 

It sounds like there is more work going on with this technology than I realised.