Would be sensational, if true...

Activists Urge Hillary Clinton to Challenge Election Results: Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

Even if an audit did not show hacking across enough States to make a difference to Trump getting at least 270, it would be a sensational development if there were any hacking done to favour him. 

Message to Homer

My condolences on your recent loss.   (I would comment at your blog, but I have this problem with not being sure if my comment will lead to my Google + account..)  I saw Sinclair in comments at Catallaxy wanted to pass on the same message.

Seems selfishness always wins in libertarian land

Gee.  Could Sinclair Davidson possibly create a worse impression of the moral  and intellectual vacuum at the heart of small government/libertarian world view?:

Still missing the obvious after all these years. What about those of us who simply do not care if the planet is warming up, or cooling down, or going side-ways; we simply do not want to pay more tax. Or incur higher utility bills.

It has always struck me that this is the ultimate cause of so-called climate scepticism. Except few people want to say so. Lord Stern famously argued that if we don’t care about future generations, we won’t care about climate change. If we stop and think about how we treat other people living and breathing today, why imagine that we care about people who are yet to be born? Now this is a positive statement, not a normative statement. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about future generations, I’m suggesting that we don’t care about future generations.

As is not uncommon with SD, however, by the time you get to the end of an explanation, it can be hard to tell exactly what his position is... 

Bigger pupils means smarter person?

Pupil Size and Intelligence - Neuroskeptic

First of a three part series, apparently

The shifting sexual norms in Japan's literary history | The Japan Times

This is always an interesting topic - how sex and love has been viewed very differently in Japan over the centuries.   As the article says, though, it's easy to over simplify:

The homosexual bonds between samurai meanwhile, nurtured in the relationships between a wakashū (adolescent boy) apprenticed to an older man, were considered ennobling to both and the foundation of lifelong friendships — and used to bolster existing power relationships, giving young samurai added motivation to lay down their lives for their lord. One of the most
famous examples, later depicted in the kabuki plays of writers such as Tsuruya Namboku IV, was the devotion of the 17-year-old youth Mori Ranmaru (1565-1582) to the brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582). It was so intense that he died alongside his lord — possibly by his own hand.

When wakashudō (the pursuit of young boys) fanned out to the more commercially minded and fun-loving middle class in the Edo Period, the number of male prostitutes soared and young kabuki actors often moonlighted as prostitutes, desired by both men and women.

There is a temptation though to see the sexual attitudes of this period as relaxed and open compared to later repressions of the Meiji Era. But it should not be forgotten that this seeming “liberalism” was operating within highly prescriptive power structures controlled by a patriarchy. Relaxed attitudes to sex and gender did not extend to anything that might have disrupted the social order — women were subservient to their husbands and adultery was a criminal offense
punishable by death (for both men and women).

The oppressive aspect of Edo Period morality is acutely depicted in the bunraku and kabuki plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725). Also, the horrific consequences of adultery have been depicted in classic films, such as Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Crucified Lovers” (1954), based on a 1715 Chikamatsu’s play.

During this period, so-called pleasure quarters were demarcated as the only acceptable areas for men to relieve sexual frustration and energy with prostitutes before returning to the fold of social conformity. Falling in love with an indentured prostitute often had fatal consequences — the plot of many tragic works including Chikamatsu’s 1720 play “Shinju Ten no Amijima” (“The Love Suicides at Amijima”).

In the name of order, the ruling shogunate watched these quarters closely to ensure they did not exceed certain bounds. The Edo Period saw a long stream of edicts by the shogunate proscribing immoral behavior, including the banning of licentious books and art works

A very curious finding

U.S. Dementia Rates Are Dropping Even as Population Ages - The New York Times

Heh

Rabett Run: And Then They Came for Richard Tol

I've posted before, I think, about the great concerns Brexit is causing for academics, who formerly (I gather) enjoyed a great freedom of movement between jobs in Europe due to Britain being in the EU.

Now Richard Tol is complaining about this too, which, given the political company he keeps, is pretty funny.

Cheer up, Adele

I understand that tickets for the singer Adele's concert in Brisbane next year go on sale today.

I half watched a replay of her "Adele Live" at the BBC show last week, and while I think she's certainly a talented singer and songwriter, has she ever written a song which has a simple "I'm in love and happy" theme?   I get the impression that a whole concert with her would be quite a downer.  

My daughter - soon to be 14 - half heartedly asked about seeing her, mainly in the context of her recent realisation that all of her friends have been to at least one blockbuster concert already.   I pointed out that a string of "it could have been great, but wasn't" failed relationship songs are not all teen girl friendly, really, regardless of the quality of her great vocals, and my daughter did not disagree.   Besides, the acoustics of a concert at cricket grounds would be pretty awful, I expect.    

Thin skinned weirdo

The President-Elect Can’t Stop Criticizing “Overrated” Hamilton, Insists on Apology

Yes, for those keeping count at home that’s the fourth time
the president-elect took to Twitter in a span of 24 hours to hit out
against a Broadway musical that has received lots of praise for, among
other things, bringing some much-needed diversity to a Broadway stage.

How the hell does anyone expect this weird President elect to be able to keep things in perspective?

Update:  Even Hot Air gets it:

Someone seriously needs to take away Trump’s iPhone or Droid and never let him touch it again. His demand of an apology from the Hamilton creators and actors is rather #headdesk inducing, because there’s no need for it. Trump is going to have to get used to being criticized or this is going to be a long four years for him. If anything, Trump’s thin skin and hyperbolic statements will only enhance the fear from his detractors that he’s some dictator in waiting, looking to crack down on dissent whenever possible. 

Actually, as it helps remind the world that it's dealing with an emotionally needy nitwit, perhaps it's best that he be allowed to continue to tweet.

Note the Parkes connection

Long-sought signal deepens mystery of fast radio bursts : Nature News & Comment

Whales and cannibals

Here's another late review you never knew you needed.

Watched "In the Heart of the Sea" last night on Stan (the home of the "not quite A level" movie, it seems.)    You may or may not recall - this was the fairly recent box office flop of Ron Howard (and star Chris Hemsworth) based on (one of the) real life inspirations for Moby Dick:  the sinking of the whaling ship Essex after being rammed a couple of times by a whale.

First things first:   yes, it's a chance for me to whine about historical movies again, and whether or not I approve of what liberties they take with facts.

But, as far as how factual it was, I don't have too much to complain about:  it seems it was more or less accurate, with one notable exception.

Spoiler section:   No, the whale didn't pursue the survivors as the movie suggests.   This story element is understandable in a dramatic sense, but also a bit patently silly.   I think it should have been dropped, but true, it is hard to come up with dramatic highlights in a story of lifeboats drifting at sea.  End of Spoiler section.

But, apart from that, I have to say, it seemed a very good attempt at the general depiction of Nantucket whalers' lives at that time.   And the practical side of how whaling was done was, I'm pretty sure, quite authentic.   There are couple of articles linked below which certainly indicate this.

And while aware of the Essex story, I had forgotten about the cannibalism that was a large part of it;  the movie isn't gory in what it shows, but it doesn't shy away from the topic either.   The bit where the bones were strewn on the floor of the boat when the captain was saved was, apparently, accurate.

So, overall, I recommend the movie for this reason alone.

However, at the technical level, there were two very curious problems.

The minor one:   Chris Hemsworth did seem to have trouble with staying in the same accent.  Not that I'm sure what a Nantucket whaler from the 1800's should have sounded like, but his accent did seem to wander.  Did the voice coach give up?  Is Chris too big a star to correct?

The major one:  For a big budget movie with a famous director and star, it did have some really serious issues with the uneven quality of the special effects.   The land based look of the film is very fine - the recreation of Nantucket looks authentic.  But at sea, it is sometimes a very different matter.  As my son said during one of the worst looking sequences (when the ship first runs into bad weather), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End  looked more convincing, even in fantasy like conditions. (I still feel that that movie is seriously underrated, by the way.)

Then there are later sequences where some shots look fine, but they are intercut with other shots which have the glow-y fake look that I've complained about in the Lord of the Rings movies and the Star Wars prequels.  The inter-cutting of variable quality shots in the one sequence makes it look very obvious, if you ask me.  

I would guess that two different effects companies worked on the shots which were then spliced together, and somehow they never got the "look" to match.  If I were Ron Howard, I would be rather upset about this.

Or am I imagining it all?  I doubt it.

Anyway, I don't want to put anyone off watching it for these reasons.   Because, well, the life of the seamen in those days was ridiculously tough, and the history of whaling from Nantucket is very fascinating.

To get a good summary, here's a lengthy article in The Smithsonian by the author of the book (Nathaniel Philbrick) that the film is based on.  It's a great read.

As for an article that talks more generally about how often whales sank ships, you probably can't do better than this one at Quartz.   Here's a key section:

In fact, nearly 200 years after the Essex went down, a huge mystery still hangs over the story: Was the sperm whale that attacked the Essex actually acting out of vengeance—and are these great animals even capable of such calculated violence?

Not just the Essex

It might seem that way given that the Essex was hardly the only whaleship to be rammed by a sperm whale. Others include the Pusie Hall in 1835, the Lydia and the Two Generals in 1836, the Pocahontas in 1850, the Ann Alexander in 1851, and the Kathleen in 1902 (all except the Pusie Hall and the Pocahontas sank). Another, the Union, went down near the Azores in 1807 after running into a whale in the night. These perilous encounters with sperm whales ended abruptly after the mid-1800s, thanks in part to the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859—a substitute for whale oil—as well as to rising wages, as Derek Thompson explained in The Atlantic. Another factor was that after 1850 most new ships were built not with wood but iron, which even an 80-ton whale can’t splinter. Tellingly, the last ship that sank due to a run-in with a sperm whale, the Kathleen, had been built in 1844, and was therefore made of wood.

The mystery of Mocha Dick

However, there might have been other sperm-whale attacks than just these seven—particularly if the legend of Mocha Dick is true. The story, first recorded by newspaper editor Jeremiah Reynolds, tells of a mammoth white whale near Isla Mocha, off the Chilean coast, that was famed for assailing whaleships. (As you probably have guessed, Melville took even more of his inspiration from the Mocha Dick legend than the story of the Essex.) The whale was said to have sunk some 22 whaleships between 1810 and 1830.

And as for cannibalism at sea:  this review in The Economist of Philbrick's book indicates he talks in detail about it:

With almost voyeuristic minuteness he has found out that when a body is deprived of water, the lips shrink as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length, and the skin so contracts round the eyes as to prevent blinking. He has discovered that the fat on starving bodies turns to a “translucent gelatinous substance” and that the meat such a body could yield would be of doubtful nutritional value without fat to accompany it. He can tell us too about the psychological effects of starvation, and the descent into “feral” behaviour as evidenced by Auschwitz survivors. 

On that gruesome note, I'll end.

The frightening appointments begin....

Michael Flynn, Trump’s new national security adviser, loves Russia as much as his boss does - Vox

From the article, look what Powell thinks of him:

Colin Powell wasn’t pulling punches.

“I spoke at DIA last month,” the former secretary of state wrote
in a hacked email released this summer. “Flynn got fired as head of
DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got
fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad
management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since.”

Update:  wow, look at what CNN's reporting about the right wing social media nuttiness of Flynn's son, who works closely with Dad.

Update 2:  perhaps Flynn won't accept, because there are some real issues with his on line behaviour.  In July, the Jerusalem Post reported:

The former general– who GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump considered for his running mate, and who last week delivered a primetime speech to the Republican National Convention– was responding to accusations by the Clinton campaign that Russia was behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, and a subsequent leak of e-mails, in order to help Trump's candidacy.

Flynn wrote that "the corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything" to get Clinton elected. "This is a new low," he said, retweeting a message that read: "Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore."

He has since apologized for the retweet, calling it "a mistake."

Yellen speaks sense

Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan : The Two-Way : NPR

Let's wait for Trump to release his flying monkeys onto her.

A curious line

A curious line from the "yay for the coming break up of the EU - I don't like regulation, so I don't like it" column by Adam Creighton:

Not to mention the inflationary potential of Trump’s promised $US550 billion ($735bn) infrastructure binge financed by a huge tax cut.

Sarcasm?  With small government, libertarian-ish economists, and their fondness for Lafferism, it can be hard to tell...

About selfie deaths

Data Scientists Chart the Tragic Rise of Selfie Deaths: The team also found that the most common cause of death was falling from a height. This reflects the penchant for people taking selfies at the edge of cliffs, at the top of tall structures, and so on.

Water also accounts for a large number of deaths. And a significant number involve water and heights—things like jumping into the sea from a height and so on.

Interestingly, in India, trains feature significantly as a cause of selfie death. “This trend caters to the belief that posing on or next to train tracks with their best friend is regarded as romantic and a sign of never-ending friendship,” they say.

Another feature is the significant proportion of selfie deaths in the U.S. and Russia caused by weapons. “This might be a consequence of the open gun laws in both the countries,” the team suggests.

Because they were healthier in the first place?

Older Moms May Live Longer | TIME

Both do like labels...

The Link Between Autism and Trans Identity - The Atlantic

Sorry, still more Trump talk to consider

Megyn Kelly: Trump's lawyer threatened me, seemed OK with me getting physically hurt.

You should read it, to have an idea of the nastiness of (some) people supporting Trump.

Into the Right

Inside the Sacrifice Zone | by Nathaniel Rich | The New York Review of Books

Interesting review of a book by someone trying to understand the American Right by talking to them.

Too many things I want to copy, but I hadn't realised that Louisiana was another State that did the Lafferite thing and not have it work:

Louisiana’s governor is among the most powerful chief executives in the nation, a legacy that dates back to Huey Long’s administration, and under Governor Bobby Jindal’s dictatorship, between 2008 and 2016, the state’s prospects declined with unprecedented severity. After he reduced corporate income taxes and expanded the exemptions granted to oil and gas companies, the state’s revenue tumbled roughly $3 billion. He transferred $1.6 billion from public schools and hospitals to oil companies in the form of new tax incentives, under the
theory that the presence of oil and a robust petrochemical infrastructure were not incentives enough. (The Louisiana Legislature is not only soaked with oil and gas lobbyists—during a recent session there were seventy for 144 legislators—but many lawmakers themselves
hold industry jobs while serving in office.) Jindal fired 30,000 state employees, furloughed many others, cut education funding by nearly half, and sold off as many state-owned parking lots, farms, and hospitals as he could.

Despite these punishing cuts, he managed over the course of his administration to turn a $900 million budget surplus into a $1.6 billion deficit. National agencies downgraded the state’s
credit rating. The damage was so great that it helped to bring about one of the most unlikely election results in recent American history. Jindal’s successor is John Bel Edwards, a Democrat—the only one to hold statewide office. Edwards is vehemently pro-life and agnostic about climate change, but he is determined to hold the oil and gas industry responsible for funding their share of coastal restoration. He currently enjoys a 62.5 percent approval rating. Almost a year into his first term, however, despite several emergency measures, the state remains in arrears.

And yet I see that Louisiana just voted 58% to 38% for Trump!


Much of the book review talks about the conservative paradox - why so many people who vote Republican do so against their own interests.  The author comes up with a "deep story" that she thinks explains it best:

The deep story that Hochschild creates for the Tea Party is a parable of the white American Dream. It begins with an image of a long  line of people marching across a vast landscape. The Tea Partiers—white, older, Christian, predominantly male, many lacking college degrees—are
somewhere in the middle of the line. They trudge wearily, but with resolve, up a hill. Ahead, beyond the ridge, lies wealth, success, dignity. Far behind them the line is composed of people of color, women, immigrants, refugees. As pensions are reduced and layoffs absorbed, the line slows, then stalls.

An even greater indignity follows: people begin cutting them in line. Many are those who had long stood behind them—blacks, women, immigrants, even Syrian refugees, all now aided by the federal government. Next an even more astonishing figure jumps ahead of them: a brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, “fluttering its long, oil-drenched wings.” Thanks to environmental protections, it is granted higher social status than, say, an oil rig worker. The pelican, writes Hochschild,

needs clean fish to eat, clean water to dive in, oil-free marshes, and protection from coastal erosion. That’s why it’s in line ahead of you. But really, it’s just an animal and you’re a human being.

Meanwhile the Tea Partiers are made to feel less than human. They find themselves reviled for their Christian morality and the “traditional” values they have been taught to honor from birth. Many speak of “sympathy fatigue,” the sense that every demographic group but theirs receives sympathy from liberals. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one Tea Partier tells Hochschild. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

When Hochschild tells her deep story to some of the people she’s come to know, they greet it rapturously. “You’ve read my mind,” says one. “I live your analogy,” says Mike Schaff. She concludes that they do not vote in their economic interest but in their “emotional self-interest.”
What other choice do they have?

 All very interesting...

A typical story

Wired started a recent article with this anecdote:

In mid-October I wandered into a Trump field office in Youngstown, Ohio and met Coni Kessler, a kind 75-year-old Youngstown native with penciled-on eyebrows and a Women for Trump button on her Trump 2016 t-shirt. She sat me down in a chair just beside her, and for more than an hour, explained why she detested Hillary Clinton and was ecstatic to vote for Trump this year.

Clinton, she told me, is an atheist who wears an earpiece during debates so billionaire George Soros can feed her talking points. The day Clinton collapsed into the back of her van when she was sick with pneumonia? According to Kessler, the Clintons hired a young actress to run up and give Clinton a hug for a staged photo after the collapse. Kessler also said she’d seen videos of Bill Clinton raping an underage girl but that the video had mysteriously disappeared. She wondered why no one was talking about Bill Clinton’s illegitimate, half-black son. And she said that whenever she talks negatively about Clinton online, “they”—presumably the technology overlords—shut her phone down.

At some point, I stopped Kessler to ask her where she’d gotten all these stories, stories I knew were false Clinton conspiracy theories. Her answer: “It was on my Facebook page.”