Death and sorghum

There's a short transcript of (parts of) an interview up at NPR with an American comedian who I'm not aware of, but who has taken to talking about his grief process since his wife died. 

He made one comment that rings very true:

One thing that I've learned since what happened to me happened is: You don't know the kind of pain and loss other people may have gone through — even close friends and acquaintances. ... In really awful science fiction terms it is like putting on the sunglasses in They Live and then seeing the world for what it really is. Do you know what I mean? Obviously I knew there was loss and death and depression, but you can only sympathize so far until it directly happens to you.

And he ended with a bit which I thought was pretty funny (after earlier saying that he personally didn't buy the idea that getting physically fit was a help with grieving):

On whether he's disappointed people who expected him to be funny
Sorry for bumming you out. I'm very sorry. Go walk for half an hour; it will flood you with endorphins. ... What am I saying?! You're NPR listeners. You're used to being bummed out. Now let's cut to some sad jazz. Stay tuned: We're going to talk about things to do with sorghum. It's sorghum season!

Oddly, as it happens, only last weekend I was pointing to a crop in a field near Mulgowie and opining that it might be sorghum.

Also somewhat oddly - I have no memory at all as to how it is that I know what sorghum looks like.  Perhaps it was covered in primary school?   In fact, behind my primary school, there were several factory buildings, one of which used to be a place that dealt with different seeds/grains - I think truck loads of stuff would arrive there and perhaps be distributed out in smaller packaging.   The place had a distinctive, but not unpleasant, smell.  It's no longer there;  I was in the area about 6 months ago.

And for the uneducated, here is sorghum in the field:

Yes, I am sure that is what I was seeing out of the car window in the Lockyer Valley.

By the way, fresh corn from the Valley is particularly delicious at the moment....

Scratching mice

Just a test, posting a page from Science magazine, about how scratching is "contagious" amongst mice, as with humans.

Oh, that works well...At least on my tablet.  Click on the image and I can read it easily.

About Bill Leak

There are sufficient numbers of people of Left inclination on Twitter saying that Bill Leak was smart and funny in real life to make me not doubt he was more likeable in person than his recent years' cartooning output would indicate.  And it is not a good look for anyone to be celebrating his death as the means of ending that output.      

What those people should wish for is that he were alive but that his work showed more thoughtful, subtle and diverse opinion than the narrow, bitter, and quite extreme Right wing, culture war politics that they routinely did in the last few years.

He had become a tribal hero of  those who you could say are the Australian equivalent of the Tea Party Right - a group who I am frankly pleased to see not get its daily endorsement that their views are widespread and reasonable.    I really did intensely dislike his recent output for that reason:  foolish people are not best served by public endorsement or incitement of their foolish views.   But do I wish it ended this way?  No. 

As some have noted on Twitter, too, one can surely resent the editorial guidance of The Australian for never pulling him back.   I doubt that even his tribal admirers could often describe his recent work as witty - I think they were more inclined to laugh in delight their views were being endorsed in an over the top way - and in a (little read) national paper!  Brilliant!  (/sarc).  That's not the same, in my books, as smart, witty cartooning.

It remains an open question as to whether his personality, judgement or political views were changed by the serious head injury he suffered some years ago - it seems his work was just politely dropped (by the likes of The Insiders) when it became more extreme, rather than anyone who knew him wanting to talk openly about why he had gone that way. Perhaps, in coming months, we might learn more about whether that incident really did seem to have personality changing effects...

Update:   I had forgotten that Leak had written in 2012 that he knew that critics were saying he had gone strongly Right wing after his head injury, and denied it.   I am curious as to what people who knew him well are prepared to say (apart from Right wing commentators, who clearly have no problem with his continual Muslim baiting, for example), but I guess it may be some time before we'll hear.

Furthermore, the Right wing meme is around that the stress of the HRC complaints (all dropped or dismissed in relatively short time, and nearly 3 months ago) caused his heart attack.  He clearly did complain about the stress of it all:

"It shows what a farcical process this is. I've got News Corp backing me legally. But if I was a private citizen, this would have cost me an absolute fortune," he told The Australian.

"She has put me through a month or so of incredible stress. She never met me, she doesn't have to justify anything she does. No one asked her any questions and it doesn't cost her a cent. As a consequence my life has been thrown into utter chaos. And at time when it just happens to suit her, she just decides this could turn into a bit of a hassle, so she can withdraw it."

Look, I just don't understand this - I have read elsewhere that he moved house once due to Muslim death threats - now that I can understand being stressful. 

But being stressed out by complaints lodged by distant complainants about an aboriginal themed cartoon when you have the full backing of your employer to legally fight said complaints?    No, I actually don't get that.

I'm sorry, but this reminds me too much of Andrew Bolt's martyrdom over his columns - in both cases, I think the complaints could have been resolved easily with good will (a "sorry if any offence caused, but it was not done with racist intent" style apology from Leak, and correction of errors in Bolt's case), and they could have been free to continue to complain about what they perceive as the HRC interfering with their work.   I also entirely understand Leak being unhappy with the HRC inviting complaints. 

But really, I find the stress complaints from deliberate provocateurs hard to sympathise with.

Sorry if that sounds like a criticism of Leak too soon - it's partly a statement of puzzlement.  But, to be honest, if we're all going to agree that Left wingers and their stupid "trigger warnings" idea is a matter of pandering to people's exaggerated sensitivities too much, I don't see why some on the Right should be free of the same criticism.

Update:  Richard Fidler talking on Radio National about his long friendship with Leak was interesting.   He says Leak was once one of the most Left wing guys he knew, and his politics did change, although Leak would claim they hadn't.   Nonetheless, Fidler was very sad about it, as are many Left leaning journalists.    There seems no doubt about his charm and wit as a friend, which in a way makes some of his work all the harder to understand....

Hey Jason...

I don't think Thiel sounds all that bright, really.   Not just because of climate change (although my  rule of thumb about that still applies), but the other quotes from him lately.

He just sounds rather vapid to me.

Krugman's take

Krugman has taken a very dispassionate tone on this column on the Republican health plan.  I presume he is correct.

Ryan's lost his lustre

Paul Krugman has complained bitterly for years that Paul Ryan's treatment by much of the media as the Republican's reasonable and moderate smart guy was completely unwarranted, and I would have to  guess that he is probably laughing wildly about how Ryan is, indeed, making himself look foolish in the fight over Obamacare.

The quote, which I heard this morning on Radio National, that the problem with Obamacare is that it's a case of the healthy young paying for treatment of older sick people (that's a pretty close paraphrase) just sounded like the silliest possible criticism of health insurance you could hear from a politician's mouth.

You can read about that line, and much twitter reaction to it, here.

OK, here's the actual quote:

“The fatal conceit of Obamacare is that we’re just going to make everybody buy our health insurance at the federal government level. Young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for the older, sicker people. So the young, healthy person is going to be made to buy healthcare, and they’re going to pay for the person, you know, who gets breast cancer in her 40s or who gets heart disease in his 50s,” Ryan said.

Talk about your simple solutions

From the Atlantic:   Can Salted Doorknobs Prevent Superbug Infections?

...it was a casual conversation with a former butcher that led Brayden Whitlock, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, to design a pilot study that put salt and copper head to head. Coupon-sized strips of pure, compressed sodium chloride were covered in an MRSA culture, alongside similar strips of antimicrobial copper and stainless steel. Whitlock found that salt killed off the bug 20 to 30 times faster than the copper did, reducing MRSA levels by 85 percent after 20 seconds, and by 94 percent after a minute.

That was “considerably faster” than expected, Whitlock says—and he believes this efficiency could have major ramifications for how bugs like MRSA spread. “It’s great to be able to eliminate pathogens over the course of a few hours,” he says, “but if you think of a busy place that has a doorknob, or a push pad, can you imagine a time when it goes more than a few minutes without being touched? The answer to us is no. And that’s why this is really exciting.”....

The salt-covered doorknobs, meanwhile, are already in the market. Doug Olson, the former butcher who first told Whitlock about the idea, has already received a patent for the technology in nine different countries, and registered the trade name Outbreaker. Prototypes have been built by local salt companies—the compression process is identical to how salt licks for livestock are made—and discreetly installed in a handful of settings around Edmonton, Alberta’s capital, over the past few years. Compressed and smooth, with a feel akin to ceramics, Whitlock says most users have no idea that what they’re really grabbing is a fistful of table salt.

Corruption in Russia

An interesting piece here via Sky News about Putin and a recent report on the way corruption is done in Russia. 

It also features a photo of what appears to be a rather dangerous form of "celebration" in the backwoods

The caption reads:

A man tries to get a prize from a pole during a celebration in Krasnoyarsk last month

No need to add salt?

From the BBC:  Why a German lab is growing tomatoes in urine.

(Answer - to develop systems for future use by astronauts.)   It's more interesting than you might think.

Stroke your rodent

From the Improbable Research site - a serious study involving stroking mice, as type of mouse massage, to see how it affects their immune system.  (It does them good, it seems.)

Large scale clean power storage soon a reality?

Yeah, this guy was on Radio National this morning, saying that Tesla batteries are capable of being deployed on such a scale that they could have prevented SA losing power during that recent heatwave.

Quite remarkable, if true, and possible at acceptable cost:

Tesla's confidence of being able to plug gaps in grid power has been buoyed by its successful completion of a similar assignment in southern California last year, when it built an 80MW battery farm in 90 days after a gas peaker near Los Angeles leaked tonnes of methane and had to be mothballed.

Tesla was one of three battery companies to step forward when the California power system operator called for emergency storage and it is one of a large number of battery companies vying for the 1.6 million solar rooftop homes and businesses in Australia.
"We could install everything and get it up and running within 100 days," Mr Rive said at the launch of Tesla's Powerwall 2 battery in a converted substation at Newport, near Melbourne.

"We had a similar challenge in southern California ... We got 80MW up in 90 days. That's unheard of. You just don't get power plants running up and down that fast." 

Read more: http://www.afr.com/news/tesla-battery-boss-we-can-solve-sas-power-woes-in-100-days-20170308-gut8xh#ixzz4amuio0lU
Follow us: @FinancialReview on Twitter | financialreview on Facebook

Cause for slight optimism

China's world-leading coal consumption fell for the third straight year in 2016, government data showed Tuesday, as the planet's biggest carbon emitter struggles to break its addiction to the heavily polluting fuel.

Coal consumption fell by 4.7 percent year-on-year in 2016, and the share of coal in the country's energy mix slipped to 62.0 percent, down 2.0 percent year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a report.

Overall coal production also fell, dropping 9.0 percent to 3.41 billion tonnes in 2016.
The data suggests that "coal consumption probably peaked around 2014," according to a statement from environmental group China Dialogue.

It added that "there is still some concern about a 'rebound' in coal demand if China continues to stimulate its economy by infrastructure investment".

The link.

As the world turns...

I hadn't heard this before, and I don't know if the Indian commentator, writing in The Japan Times, is reliable, but according to him, Putin is getting friendly with the Taliban in Afghanistan, for his own reasons:

Almost three decades after the end of the Soviet Union’s own war in Afghanistan — a war that enfeebled the Soviet economy and undermined the communist state — Russia has moved to establish itself as a central actor in Afghan affairs. And the Kremlin has surprised many by embracing the Afghan Taliban. Russia had long viewed the thuggish force created by Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency as a major terrorist threat. From 2009 to 2015, Russia served as a critical supply route for U.S.-led forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan; it even contributed military helicopters to the effort.

Russia’s reversal on the Afghan Taliban reflects a larger strategy linked to its clash with the U.S. and its European allies — a clash that has intensified considerably since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea spurred the U.S. and Europe to impose heavy economic sanctions. In fact, in a sense, Russia is exchanging roles with the U.S. in Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan used Islam as an ideological tool to spur armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. Reasoning that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, the CIA trained and armed thousands of Afghan mujahedeen — the jihadi force from which al-Qaida and later the Taliban evolved.

Today, Russia is using the same logic to justify its cooperation with the Afghan Taliban, which it wants to keep fighting the unstable U.S.-backed government in Kabul. And the Taliban, which has acknowledged that it shares Russia’s enmity with the U.S., will take whatever help it can get to expel the Americans.

Something you don't read about every day

Tiny (and I mean tiny) people/aliens sightings - a wave of which apparently took place in Malaysia in 1970!

Jason Soon can perhaps inform us of his knowledge of these matters...

DNA data storage keeps getting better

I forgot to mention a month or so ago - one good thing (the only good thing?) to come out of having Trump as President is that the AAAS ran a big subscription campaign to get more people supporting science, which meant I now get full access to Science magazine for a year for the princely sum of $50 (US)!  

This week's edition had a story about new techniques being done to see how good DNA data storage could be - and the answer is very, very good.   From the free article about it:

Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks....

Erlich thought he could get closer to that limit. So he and Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at the New York Genome Center, looked at the algorithms that were being used to encode and decode the data. They started with six files, including a full computer operating system, a computer virus, an 1895 French film called Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon. They first converted the files into binary strings of 1s and 0s, compressed them into one master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code. They devised an algorithm called a DNA fountain, which randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, to which they added extra tags to help reassemble them in the proper order later. In all, the researchers generated a digital list of 72,000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long.

They sent these as text files to Twist Bioscience, a San Francisco, California–based startup, which then synthesized the DNA strands. Two weeks later, Erlich and Zielinski received in the mail a vial with a speck of DNA encoding their files. To decode them, the pair used modern DNA sequencing technology. The sequences were fed into a computer, which translated the genetic code back into binary and used the tags to reassemble the six original files. The approach worked so well that the new files contained no errors, they report today in Science. They were also able to make a virtually unlimited number of error-free copies of their files through polymerase chain reaction, a standard DNA copying technique. What’s more, Erlich says, they were able to encode 1.6 bits of data per nucleotide, 60% better than any group had done before and 85% the theoretical limit.

So, at 215 million gigabytes of storage per gram, I was curious as to how much information could be potentially stored in a human body's worth of DNA.

Googling the question "how much does all the DNA in a human weigh?" came up with estimates that seem to vary from around 6 g to 300g, but then there is also the question of DNA in all the microbes we host in our guts.  

But sure, it seems that, in theory, a human could be an enormous data storage device...

Some great Colbert

Like all late night chat show hosts, Stephen Colbert has some nights that are better than others, but I really thought this series of bits from yesterday's show, talking about the Republican's underwhelming reform to Obamacare, the rather odd Ben Carson, and spying on us through Samsung TVs, were all very funny:







I'm very pleased that he is now doing so well, ratings wise.

Rich and thick

Peter Thiel gave a talk the other night at some energy conference, and curiously, it has not yet been widely reported.

But here is what one site has quoted:

HOUSTON -- Peter Thiel, the technology investor and advisor to President Donald Trump, questioned the global push toward restricting carbon emissions as "group think" while speaking Tuesday at an international energy conference here.

"I'm not sure I'm an extreme skeptic of climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme ways that people try to push it through," he said. "Even if climate change is quite as bad as people think it is, if we group think we're more likely to misdiagnose the problem. Maybe it's methane emissions, and the real problem is eating steak."

I suppose I should be cautious and note that perhaps he is not being entirely serious with that last line.

But he supports Trump, so why should I give him any benefit of the doubt?  No, I'm going with the Greek yoghurt theory - he's rich and thick.

"Not an extreme skeptic" = fence sitting lukewarmer, happy to watch temperatures rise with no carbon pricing because "taxes - I hate taxes", and then say "well, they were right 30 years ago - too late to do anything about CO2 now.   Here, I've got this great geoengineering idea I can sell you.  Please pay in bitcoin to my floating island in Tahiti.  See ya." 

Update:   other reports don't repeat the "steak" comment, which is odd.  From Axios:

"I don't know whether I am an extreme skeptic on climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme way that people try to push it through, and I would say that I would be much more convinced of climate change, of the need to do something, if I thought there was a more open debate in which both sides were given a full hearing."

 And other sites point out that he has provided funding for some clean energy ideas (some sounding very improbable.)  

But no, he is simply not to be trusted on climate change.   Or anything much, in my books...

Bubble world

Surely this is what it feels like to an outsider visiting North Korea and hearing everyone endorsing how great their Dear Leader is doing?   Being told how He will protect them from the nefarious forces that want to harm them?

Because I have never seen anything like the self delusion that is accompanying those endorsing Trump.   Look at Steve Kates, with this fantasy today:

I don’t know whether this was what Trump intended but the stories about Russian hacking the election have gone absolutely dead, as have almost all stories related to Obama having placed some kind of phone surveillance on Donald Trump himself. Having become blindingly clear that the Obama White House had indeed initiated that surveillance, with the virtual certainty that none of it would have been done without Obama’s complicity, the entire episode seems to have vanished into air. Since there is nothing that can any longer be used in bringing Trump down, it has gone into hibernation across the media and will remain that way unless something happens that the left and the media believe can again be used to undermine Trump.

This is part of what disturbs me about the blog support network on the right. It is entirely defensive. A story that was utterly preposterous, that Trump and his associates had collaborated with the Russians was, and is, treated as a genuine issue that needs to be sorted out, rather than as a pathetic and disgusting ploy by a bunch of leftist loons and their scribes to harm Trump and short circuit his election.

The only way this can possibly be explained is that he lives in an absolute self imposed information bubble - only reading news from Fox or Breitbart (or worse) that he knows in advance will align with his pro-Trump stance.

In totalitarian states, the State has to impose the media control that leads to such brainwashing - in the West, citizens gleefully impose it on themselves, building self reinforcing belief systems impervious to outside information - because it is, by definition, not to be trusted.

The other thing to note is the paranoia and siege mentality involved - Kates is always beating it up into a "end of civilisation" crisis if Trump (or at least Republicans) lose control of their country.   And, indeed, Bannon is known as a "clash of civilisations" panic merchant, and Trump will use that language when it suits. 

As for Kates' claim that no one is talking about the Trump Obama tweets now, he obviously cares not to observe twitter on matters Trump, or read the NYT, where this account of Trump's mad tweeting Saturday was given (again, apparently leaked by people close to him):

That led to a succession of frantic staff conference calls, including one consultation with the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, as staff members grasped the reality that the president had opened an attack on his predecessor.

Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

He sounded defiant in conversations at Mar-a-Lago with his friend Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, Mr. Ruddy said. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on an American citizen.

Mr. Trump also canvassed some aides and associates about whether an investigator, even one outside the government, could substantiate his charge.

Kates in his bubble world wouldn't have heard of this...

This won't fit neatly into the Conservative Catholic narrative

I think the Catholic Herald is pretty mainstream and moderate/conservative as far as Catholic media outlets go, so this story does not come from a liberal Catholic site:

A spokesman for Egypt’s Catholic Church has praised local Muslims for helping embattled Christians after a series of Islamic State attacks in Sinai.

Fr Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Coptic Catholic Church, said Christians must differentiate between ordinary Muslims and extremists.

“Ordinary Muslims are kind and try to help however they can – they’re often first on the scene, rescuing the injured and taking them to hospitals,” he told Catholic News Service March 3, as Christians continued to flee Egypt’s North Sinai region.

Fr Greiche said the attacks had affected only Coptic Orthodox Christians, but added that Catholic churches and schools in Ismailia had offered shelter to Orthodox families with help from Caritas.

Fr Greiche said Islamic State militants were now “strongly entrenched” in North Sinai, having been allowed by the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood organisations to use tunnels from the Gaza Strip.

It is, though, a worry to read how IS is running around the Middle East trying to find a new area to terrorise.  

The Daily Trump

Yeah, I get a bit sick of posting about Trump all the time too, but honestly, it's so incredible to watch this weird situation, falling as it does so close to unbelievable fiction, it's hard to stop.  So today's highlights:

*  I've really been enjoying John Cassidy's pieces on Trump at The New Yorker:  it's a calm style that is perhaps all the more effective for it.   Here, in his latest piece, he opines: 

Trump has learned a couple of things since the start of his Presidential campaign, in 2015. The first is that the media, especially the broadcast media, has an insatiable desire for “news breaks,” even fake ones, and thus is easy to manipulate. The second is that he can say virtually anything, however false or outrageous, without suffering any political consequences with his base. He can call a female journalist a “bimbo,” insult a political opponent’s wife, make bogus accusations of widespread voter fraud, say Obama founded ISIS, claim he won a bigger majority in the Electoral College than any President since Reagan—and none of it alienates his core supporters. Arguably, these outbursts make them like him more.

In his tweets this weekend, however, he may, just possibly, have gone too far. Trump has now added his voice to the calls for a proper public investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. The only way for Congress to properly assess the truth of Trump’s claim about Obama would be to call on Comey and other senior officials to provide a full accounting of the interagency investigation into alleged contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. Is that really what the White House wants?

He then summarises what we do know, from leaks and public comments, in a calm way, and how none of it backs up Trumps claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement.  With Comey's response, it is quite the opposite.

*   Back to the question though - who is manipulating who in Trump world?   As Axios notes, Trump has just made a series of Tweets directly about stories he was obviously watching on the teeth gratingly awful  Fox & Friends.     Now, are the editors of that show pitching stories to please Trump?    Does Trump believe everything they claim, uncritically?  

I think most people, with common sense, are concluding that yes, he does believe, uncritically, anything  which he thinks useful propaganda, because he's a dumb, insecure, narcissist.  If challenged, he will not "own" his own judgement, he'll just deflect by claiming "well, that's what other people say."

And some people think this is not something to be very concerned about.... 

What would happen if you actually had an experiment where someone at Fox put up a story that ran against a long held Trump belief or bias?    (Ha!  As if that will happen - there's no money in scaring away your nutty base.   All Murdochs are too cynical to put the interests of actually educating the viewers ahead of making money.)

*  Speaking of Trump re-tweets of Fox, here is The Washington Post on one of them:   You'll never guess who tweeted something false he saw on TV. 

*  If former CIA directors think things are bad, they probably are:

As Michael Hayden, the CIA director under George W. Bush, noted on Morning Joe on Monday, “We’ve been in continuous crisis now for 45 days, and none of it has been externally stimulated. This is all an intramural game within our own government. No one’s tickled us from abroad. So I can only imagine what this is going to look like when we actually start to get pressure, events start to happen, that do require that sober, methodical response from a government that doesn’t appear as if it’s gotten itself organized yet.”

 And in the same article, someone asked in December some good questions, the answers to which no one has a right to feel confident about:

In December, Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at George Washington University who studies decision-making in foreign policy, listed eight questions she had about how President Trump would handle an overseas crisis: Where is Trump physically, since he’s so frequently away from the White House? What is the state of Trump’s relations with U.S. intelligence agencies? Which of Trump’s staffers briefs him on the crisis? Which officials are brought into the deliberations about what to do? How many options are given to Trump and how are they described? Will those who oppose the preferred option express their concerns? Who will execute Trump’s decision? And will a record be kept of how the decision was made?