Ridiculous technology

While I take great pleasure in marvelling at what technological capacity there is in cheap mobile phones these days (my current phone was under $100 last Christmas), I would love to have the new Samsung Note 7, which, I see, comes with a pre-order offer of a micro SD card of 256 G capacity (at a price of $1348 at Harvey Norman.)

Carrying around 256G of storage in your smart phone (even more if you count part of the in built 64G)?  And on such a tiny card?

This is just ridiculously awesome, and young folk who are growing up with this need to understand how incredible it is.  (Hence I spend time doing this with my own kids, and encourage all adults over 40 to do the same.)

I suspect this phone is going to do well for Samsung, given the way some markets (such as India) go for the big "phablet" devices if they can only afford one computing device.  Reviews seem positive.

And, back to my under $100 Samsung phone - I have recently tried a new launcher - Smart Launcher - and I like it a lot.

Trump's still running?

The Trump campaign has been a disaster for the Trump brand - The Washington Post

Some spectacularly bad PR for Trump yesterday/today, hey?  Even being generous to the idiot that he didn't mean gun nuts could shoot her, I reckon the least you could plausibly interpret it as would be speculating about armed intimidation of a Clinton presidency over her choice of presidents (of the "open carry" type of demonstration that makes the country look like a hick third world nation.)

The article linked deals with something I had been wondering about - wouldn't all of this woeful publicity be hurting anything branded "Trump"?  I mean, if you were a Democrat who previously might have holidayed at a Trump resort, and just joked with your friends about the apparent support for an eccentric TV character that this entailed, wouldn't you now take it more seriously and definitely avoid having anything to do with his name?

Census 2016

I find it hard to understand the privacy freakout by certain folk with respect to the 2016 census.  I strongly suspect it is age related - I reckon you have to be over 45 to worry about it at all, even though I well and truly belong to that category, and don't.  I'm guessing that 95% of people under 30, most of whom have so little regard for privacy that they post about their strings of partners (temporary or longer)  on Facebook, and have probably at least once sent or received pics of their naked bits through the aether,  have no concerns at all.  

Bernard Keane has been particularly overwrought about this - and didn't he write a novel about surveillance  which featured many sex scenes?  He has some other odd obsessions, including donkeys and greyhounds.  (None of which, I trust, are involved in the novel.)   I wish he would just stick to politics.

Anyway, no I couldn't complete it on line tonight either, and I'm sure I'll get sick of hearing about this government tech failure over the next week.  

I don't know why they just didn't call it "Census Week" to make it clearer people could do it on line over (say) 7 to 14 days.  Seems an obvious way to avoid the rush of "census night", no?

Laffered out of a job

Conservative Lawmakers Ousted in Kansas Primary Election - WSJ

Even the Wall Street Journal notes the failure of the Laffer inspired Kansas experiment in large tax cuts.

Good to see some politicians paying for it.

Warming lakes not so good for them

Decline of fishing in Lake Tanganyika 'due to warming' - BBC News

Steel story

The (largely false) globalization narrative - The Washington Post

I was surprised by this explanation of what happened to the American steel manufacturing industry.

Lol indeed

I was just on Youtube looking at the video of the old Safety Dance song (for no particular reason other than it's catchy - I've embedded it before.)  Thought I would look at the recent comments, and found this:

This song attracts the funniest comments...

Olympics

For what it's worth:  I quite liked the Rio opening ceremony.   It was, apparently, a much cheaper production than recent Olympic openings, but was actually better for it - it reminded me of the scale of the Sydney opening, which was also great but with less mechanical contraptions than seem to have turned up at later openings.   It again showed how much can be done with the clever projectors they use at all these events now.  (I particularly liked how the early airplane I had never heard of before seemed to be designed backwards.)

And yes, it was appropriately sexy in a Brazilian way.

Politics

*  Wasn't Insiders interesting yesterday, with new Senator Malcolm Roberts sealing the deal as having outpaced Leyonhjelm as the biggest nutjob in the Senate, by far.   Apparently, only 5 years ago he let some "very strong researcher" from Queensland convince him that the "sovereign citizen" movement was the way to go to try to argue against a carbon tax.  (I hadn't even heard of this bunch of nutters until Malcolm came along.)   He seems to have changed on this in more ways than one - originally trying to claim he had no knowledge of the movement, now saying it was "a mistake".

The guys looks nutty; he definitely sounds nutty; and he committed his nuttiness to paper - I think based on his "empirical evidence" insistence, I can declare the evidence is in:  he was and is a nut; and a slippery dishonest (even by normal political standards) one at that.

*  Also on Insiders, Gerard Henderson* was claiming that One Nation was a long term problem for the Coalition, as having 4 Senators and staff meant they could consolidate their credibility before the next election.

Yeah, sure, Gerard.   The track record of parties based around one personality is obviously dire - especially when they are run by self interested populists like Palmer or Hanson.  (Hanson does well out of elections whether she wins or not.).    At least people like Xenophon or Don Chipp - smart guys running for a neglected centre of politics - might establish parties that run some distance, but even then the Democrats show they won't be around forever.

Gerard's gone downhill as a political commentator; time to retire, I suggest.

*   Is Trump still the GOP candidate?    The longer this campaign runs, the more it shows that the power of positive thinking may take a BS artist who starts with a family fortune quite a long way, but it does absolutlelynothing to encourage insight.

The thing is, the more he derides Hillary's mental state, the more the electorate will see it as projection.  But he obviously doesn't see that risk.

Update:  *  even after just having watched the nut filled interview performance of Roberts.  But Henderson has always given undue credence to climate change denialism - he gave Salby a venue at which to claim he had discovered the end of AGW.   Where's Salby now?   Completely discredited, where ever he is.

Sleeping dog

Quantum papers

Yay, two papers of interest have turned up on arXiv in the quantum section.

First, one talking about the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, which I've mentioned here before, and been wondering whether it's going anywhere.  I haven't done much other than scan the paper (it's a heavy read, and I'll be skipping the maths), but it's worth looking at more carefully, I think.

Secondly, here's one talking about the enduring puzzle of the double slit experiment with the enticing title Can a Single Photon Modify Two Remote Realities Simultaneously?   Here's the abstract:

The concept of wave-particle duality, which is a key element of quantum theory, has been remarkably found to manifest itself in several experimental realizations as in the famous double-slit experiment. In this speci?c case, a single particle seems to travel through two separated slits simultaneously. Nevertheless, it is never possible to measure it in both slits, which naturally appears as a manifestation of the collapse postulate. In this respect, one could as well ask if it is possible to "perceive" the presence of the particle at the two slits simultaneously, once its collapse could be avoided. In this article, we use the recently proposed entanglement mediation protocol to provide a positive answer to this question. It is shown that a photon which behaves like a wave, i.e., which seems to be present in two distant locations at the same time, can modify two existing physical realities in these locations. Calculations of the \weak trace" left by such photon also enforce the validity of the present argumentation.

Death by (lack of) fashion

Neanderthals' failure to make parkas may have sealed their demise: A quartet of researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada has found evidence that suggests that the reason early humans were able to survive the ice age while the Neanderthal perished is because humans figured out how to make parka-like clothing to keep warm and Neanderthals did not....

The researchers also note that other evidence of humans crafting warm
clothes has been found as well, such as bone needles for sewing and
other tools that could be used to scrape pelts. Also, a set of figurines
wearing parka-like coats and dating back approximately 24,000 years was
found in Siberia. No such evidence of Neanderthals wearing crafted clothes has ever been found.


As to why the Neanderthals would not have crafted clothes to survive
the cold, the researchers suggest they may have lacked the intelligence
or simply because their cultural traditions were standing in the way.

 I can imagine some Neanderthal bloke pointing at some newly kitted out non-Neanderthal guy and saying "ha!  look at the girly man in his new 'parka.'  Clothes are for wusses."

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