Don't worry, you're almost certainly real (and so is everything else)

I've never been really taken with the idea that the universe is just a computer simulation running on some advanced intelligence's computer.   I don't know - just always seemed a bit redundant to argue that instead of looking at reality at every single level from quarks to galaxy clusters, we're looking at someone's super computer simulation that's good enough to make every single level from quarks to galaxy clusters look, feel and behave real. 

And I see that I'm in good company - physicist Bee at Backreaction has a ranty post complaining about the whole idea, too.   Here are some of her key paragraphs:

If you try to build the universe from classical bits, you won’t get quantum effects, so forget about this – it doesn’t work. This might be somebody’s universe, maybe, but not ours. You either have to overthrow quantum mechanics (good luck), or you have to use qubits.

Even from qubits, however, nobody’s been able to recover the presently accepted fundamental theories – general relativity and the standard model of particle physics. The best attempt to date is that by Xiao-Gang Wen and collaborators, but they are still far away from getting back general relativity. It’s not easy.

Indeed, there are good reasons to believe it’s not possible. The idea that our universe is discretized clashes with observations because it runs into conflict with special relativity. The effects of violating the symmetries of special relativity aren’t necessarily small and have been looked for – and nothing’s been found.

For the purpose of this present post, the details don’t actually matter all that much. What’s more important is that these difficulties of getting the physics right are rarely even mentioned when it comes to the simulation hypothesis. Instead there’s some fog about how the programmer could prevent simulated brains from ever noticing contradictions, for example contradictions between discretization and special relativity....

And this section made me smile:

Stephen Wolfram (from Wolfram research) recently told John Horgan that:

“[Maybe] down at the Planck scale we’d find a whole civilization that’s setting things up so our universe works the way it does.”

I cried a few tears over this.

The idea that the universe is self-similar and repeats on small scales – so that elementary particles are built of universes which again contain atoms and so on – seems to hold a great appeal for many. It’s another one of these nice ideas that work badly. Nobody’s ever been able to write down a consistent theory that achieves this – consistent both internally and with our observations. The best attempt I know of are limit cycles in theory space but to my knowledge that too doesn’t really work.

Again, however, the details don’t matter all that much – just take my word for it: It’s not easy to find a consistent theory for universes within atoms. What matters is the stunning display of ignorance – for not to mention arrogance –, demonstrated by the belief that for physics at the Planck scale anything goes. Hey, maybe there’s civilizations down there. Let’s make a TED talk about it next. For someone who, like me, actually works on Planck scale physics, this is pretty painful.

To be fair, in the interview, Wolfram also explains that he doesn’t believe in the simulation hypothesis, in the sense that there’s no programmer and no superior intelligence laughing at our attempts to pin down evidence for their existence. I get the impression he just likes the idea that the universe is a computer. (Note added: As a commenter points out, he likes the idea that the universe can be described as a computer.)

So put away your Matrix movie DVDs (I never really got past the first one anyway - it might have them that put me off the simulation idea.)  Go out and smell the (real) roses.

Rats -v- Mice

There are some charming descriptions of rats from medical researchers in this article explaining how they are becoming more popular as the preferred animal model (over mice) for certain research (autism is the one discussed in detail.)  For example:

In a shoebox-sized cage on their own floor in the Anderson Building at the Baylor College of Medicine, two little white mice with pink ears and skinny tails scurry over a bedding of corncob strips. They run from corner to corner, now and again standing on hind legs to press their paws against one of the cage’s clear plastic walls. Occasionally, they bump into each other and take a sniff. Mostly, they do their own thing.

On another floor of the same building, larger cages hold white rats that can’t seem to stay away from each other. They pounce, wrestle and roll. It’s impossible to avoid the comparison: They act like puppies.

“You can actually grab the rats and put them in your hand and treat them exactly how you would treat a puppy,” says Surabi Veeraragavan, a behavioral geneticist at Baylor in Houston, Texas. Regular handling, she says, helps rats get used to the scientists who study them. “You can put them on your shoulder, you can put them on your arms; they will go to sleep right away. You can pet them and play with them.”

Holding a rat can be like cradling a baby, adds Rodney Samaco, the molecular geneticist who leads the Baylor team. “They like to put their head in the crevice of your elbow,” he says. They practically purr. “You tickle their stomachs; they like that.”

“They love that!” says Veeraragavan.

The Baylor team also studies mice, which were there long before the rats and still outnumber them. But when Samaco and Veeraragavan talk about the lab’s mice, their words are less affectionate: The mice are less social, their behaviors simpler; they aren’t nearly as cute.

If you put a mouse on your arm, as you would a rat, it wouldn’t end well, says Samaco. “They would look very nervous,” he says. “Then, they would bite you.”

See - it's not just me who finds them cute...

Made me laugh

I was going to comment "surely Roxette are only 20 years old, tops." But no, formed in 1986 (!)

Comments on a Lady

My wife and I saw the Julie Andrews directed revival of My Fair Lady last night.

I had gone in with relatively low expectations - I said to my wife it was not really a favourite musical of mine - so I can say I enjoyed it more than I expected.    It is a pretty lavish looking production; all of the actors do very well; the orchestra seemed good, and has quite a lot of work (OK, maybe not as much as the poor musicians who have to do Les Mis); and while the lead actress does sound exactly like Julie Andrews, it didn't come across to me as a studied imitation.

That said, the first (very lengthy) half is more enjoyable than the angsty second half.

And the main issue anyone probably has with the show is one which is not really its fault - as with Pygmalion, its ending is not really satisfying, and it arrives rather abruptly.

If my memory of the play from high school is correct, Shaw added an explanation at the end that Eliza went on to marry dumb Freddy - but it is not part of the play.  Nor is it part of the musical.

Viewed through the modern eye, the ending has the feeling of a return to an abusive relationship - a problem I think we are more sensitised to now than when the play and musical were created.  Which had me thinking, how would a theatre playwright end this sort of story today?

Here's the best I could come up with, so far:  Henry Higgins turns out to be gay, and ends up marrying Colonial Pickering; perhaps with Eliza as the celebrant (her new found career.)    I mean, come on - this is hardly a stretch from all of the talk from Henry about great men are.  :)  And, in fact, thematically, it fits quite well into Shaw's point about morality having nothing to do with divinity, but is, rather, a mere social construct.

If Julie Andrews wants to create real waves with this production, she now knows how to do it.  (I have read that she is in fact in Brisbane, and I think will be at the official opening of the show on Sunday night.  Cool, we are blessed with royalty.)

Update:  interested readers might care to look at this article from The Telegraph, that discusses the issue of the ending of the play, and musical, in some detail.

Day 7, and The Australian's art department is ready for tomorrow's eulogy (number 49 in a series) on Bill Leak...

 

Controversy about the Pope, again (and I missed a conservative Catholic disclosure)

Pope Francis Sneaks Leftovers To False God Moloch At Back Door Of St. Peter’s Basilica

VATICAN CITY—Quickly scanning the alley to make sure no one would see him with the scraps he had placed on a spare offering plate, Pope Francis reportedly stepped out the back door of St. Peter’s Basilica late Wednesday night and slipped leftovers to the false god Moloch. “I know I should be forsaking him, but what am I supposed to do, let the poor thing starve?” said the pontiff, cooing in Aramaic as he fed uneaten portions of chicken casserole to the bull-headed Canaanite god of child sacrifice. “Maybe it’s heretical of me, but just look at the guy—he’s nothing but skin and bones and horns. If I don’t take care of him, who will?” Reached for comment, the heathen idol Moloch expressed appreciation for the leftovers, but confirmed he could only be fully satiated by consuming the flesh of a living man-child set forth in offering upon a burning pyre.

 From The Onion, but they might have lifted it from Church Militant.

Hey, speaking of Church Militant - I haven't looked at what the man with the hair, Michael Voris, had been up to for quite a while, but I just went and had a look at a Wikipedia page about him.  Turns out that nearly a year ago,  he declared he had lived with  gay guys during his 30's - and slept with women too.  But he's celibate now (he's never married), and he's devoted his chastity to the Blessed Virgin or something, so he's free to condemn homosexuality. 

I wonder if that disclosure has affected his subscriptions...

Update:   I had forgotten how strongly I had criticised Voris and his ilk back in 2013.   I always thought his "never married" status was a bit suspect - especially for a man with a Robert Redford hairstyle, but I was too polite to mention it back then.  

Move to Brisbane

The problem with government getting too involved in trying to push people to where government thinks they should live is that it rarely seems to work.   Decentralisation of government departments just irritates people, for example, despite a fondness for the idea by both Whitlam and (now) Barnaby Joyce.

But with all the talk of the extraordinarily high housing prices in Sydney and Melbourne, and the impossibility of young adults to get into the real estate market there without family help, it does seem to me that governments, or someone, should be putting more effort into emphasising the very high affordability of housing and units within a 45 min commute of Brisbane.   (Such a commute being nothing in the larger cities.)

Here is a photo of Raby Bay marina, at Cleveland, which is on Moreton Bay:

It has a string of decent restaurants, a bar or two, and is at the end of the train line which, admittedly, does seem to take a long time (1 hour 25 min) to get into the city compared to the car commute which Google puts down as low as 40 min.

But look, you can buy a two bedroom, two bathroom, one car apartment in this block for $319,000.  (!)

Or in Cleveland (the suburb Raby Bay is really part of) for $595,000 (list price) a four bedroom, modern airconditioned house:

Over on the west side of the city, and now near a rail line as well, at Forest Lake for "offers over $439,000":

Commute time to city:  25 minutes (outside of peak hour) and 24 km away.  The train commute from the train station at nearby Richlands - 30 min.

I mean, really:  do people from Sydney know how cheaply they can buy in Brisbane compared to Sydney?

Maybe the Queensland government and Brisbane City Council should run advertisements down there:  "Sure, you might be lowering your expectations, but you'll also be lowering your mortgage by up to 500%."...

That tax return

John Cassidy at the New Yorker looks at the matter of the Trump tax return (partial) leak. 

It is a curious thing - the leak has largely worked in Trump's immediate favour, raising suspicion that he was in fact behind it.  It lets him claim that he has been a good tax paying citizen (once, 12 years ago, at least), and to huff and puff about illegal leaks used by the press.

But in the longer term, it raises questions about the sense of Republican policies to remove the very tax that led to Trump paying a realistic amount:

According to the return, which Johnston also posted on his Web site, Trump and his wife, Melania, had taxable income of about a hundred and fifty-three million dollars in 2005, and he paid about $36.5 million in federal income tax. That’s an effective tax rate of about 23.9 per cent, which is a long way from the zero per cent that many people, myself included, had speculated about last year.

Almost as noteworthy was the fact that most of the tax Trump paid was captured by the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is a backup tax designed to insure that people with a lot of deductions don’t entirely escape taxes. Because Trump took a write-down of more than a hundred million dollars in 2005, his initial tax liability was just $5.3 million. If not for the Alternative Minimum Tax, which he and other Republicans want to get rid of, his effective tax rate would have been about 3.5 per cent. Because he was liable to the A.M.T., he was forced to pay an additional thirty-one or so million dollars.

And, it also raises suspicions as to why only one return is leaked - do the rest of them since then look much, much worse for the Trump image? 

Ethics, Monsanto style

From NPR:

Two years ago, a U.N.-sponsored scientific agency declared that the popular weedkiller glyphosate probably causes cancer. That finding from the International Agency for Research on Cancer caused an international uproar. Monsanto, the company that invented glyphosate and still sells most of it, unleashed a fierce campaign to discredit the IARC's conclusions.

New details of the company's counterattack came to light this week. Internal company emails, released as part of a lawsuit against the company, show how Monsanto recruited outside scientists to co-author reports defending the safety of glyphosate, sold under the brand name Roundup. Monsanto executive William Heydens proposed that the company "ghost-write" one paper. In an email, Heydens wrote that "we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak." Heydens wrote that this is how Monsanto had "handled" an earlier paper on glyphosate's safety....

The emails also offer hints of a friendly relationship between Monsanto and a senior regulator at the Environmental Protection Agency, Jess Rowland. The EPA was already doing its own assessment of glyphosate's health risks, but after the U.N. report appeared, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention apparently was considering launching its own study.

In late April, 2015, Rowland called a regulatory expert at Monsanto, Daniel Jenkins, to ask who at the CDC was working on the glyphosate study. Jenkins reported on the conversation in an email to his colleagues. He wrote that Rowland "told me no coordination is going on and he wanted to establish some saying 'If I can kill this I should get a medal."

Trouble in Steyn-land

Even if you only casually follow what Mark Steyn is up to now, you might be aware that he tried to make a mark in American Right wing cable TV, only to have his show ended very abruptly, with consequent litigation.

Given that every Right wing commentator in this wide brown land thinks he's terrific, they should be reading this vicious attack on his behaviour by those who had to work with him on the set.

If you think he's a complete jerk for his behaviour towards climate scientists, as I do, you'll find plenty to indicate that his jerk-like behaviour appears to extend well beyond climate science attacks: 

Steyn generally went out of his way to avoid dealing with the crew at all, they say. “We only one time had a meeting with the staff and Mark,” Kullman recalls. “There are many staff members who never even spoke to him.”

Crew members say Steyn often refused to rehearse segments, showed up at the studio minutes before filming was scheduled to begin, and occasionally declined to show up at all, leaving crew members, some of whom had commuted hours to the studio, in the lurch.

Kullman remembers driving two hours through blizzard conditions only to discover that Steyn had canceled the day’s shoot. In a sworn statement, another crew member recalled Steyn emailing employees late at night telling them to come to the studio the next morning for an unscheduled shoot. “When we showed up, Mark Steyn canceled the shoot.”

 Sounds rather like Kevin Rudd, no?   There's more:

“Mark Steyn was incredibly disorganized, often did not show up on scheduled production days, and snuck out of the studio so that nobody would know his whereabouts,” another declaration recalls. “Because of this conduct, it would take a week to shoot an episode instead of the designated day.”

The crew was never given a production schedule, they say. They often didn’t know what they would be shooting until the day of the shoot. Because Steyn would frequently show up last-minute, they were forced to figure out content on the fly. When the inevitable hiccups in production occurred, Steyn would berate crew members who say they simply did not know what he wanted.

On two occasions, those tirades ended with Steyn firing an employee on the spot, according to Kullman’s sworn statement. “Anyone at any moment felt like they could have been fired by him,” he added in his interview.

And this is the funniest part:

When cameras weren’t rolling, crew members say Steyn was almost entirely inaccessible. His offices were on the second floor of the studio facility, and they say Howes, who is Steyn’s publisher in addition to being his spokesperson and an executive on the show, instructed crew members not to approach him there—and, when he entered the studio, not to make eye contact.

Gas explainer

I thought this fairly lengthy explanation of what has happened with Australian gas (and why we don't seem to have enough here - or enough at a good price) was pretty good.  A key paragraph:

It seems that, in gas as in electricity, over-cooked forecasts for demand have justified excessive spending and therefore ensured higher prices. This is precisely what the gas cartel wants: the spectre of shortages whipping up prices. They have been doing it for years.

Culture wars noted

*  Talk about your over-compensation.   Days after his death, News Ltd folk are still singing the praises of  the outstanding work and character of Bill Leak, and how terrible it is that some Lefties have been calling him a racist and celebrating his death.   (True, some Lefties have been behaving badly:  but I still say that News Ltd rush to praise him in every respect smacks of a guilty conscience.  I find it hard to believe that Paul Kelly, for example, wasn't cringing at some of Leak's output in the last few years.)

*  Coopers Beer says sorry:   I still don't really understand the connection between the brewery and the Bible Society - but the company says it didn't approve (or know about?) the video which not only seemed to associate the company with the Society and conservative views on gay marriage, but with the Liberal Party.   One comment from a pub noted the Party connection in particular - and it is a peculiar thing for a brewer to find itself apparently being aligned with a political party.

But curiously, I had noticed even before Coopers was in the news that a current ad for Bundaberg Rum on TV seemed heavy on showing support for the gay community, and (I think) gay marriage.   Bundaberg Rum - from a Queensland farming town not too far from Queensland's Bible Belt (around Gympie), an area not exactly known for its progressive attitudes.  And rum I always thought of a blokey, man's man type drink - not a spirit that would be big in gay pubs.   But, not having ventured into a gay pub recently (not that I can ever recall being in one) perhaps I'm wrong about that?  Or is it just an advertising executive's idea of how to expand its base?   Anyway, I thought it odd.

Perhaps this will all balance itself out in the alcohol drinking community as a whole - some Bundy drinkers might be a bit put off buying a "gay" drink? 

Anyway,  don't these product boycotts have a way of not working, when the conservatives/Lefties go out of their way to buy the product to annoy the SJWs/conservatives?  I wouldn't sweat about it too much if I were Coopers.

And personally, I don't mind most Cooper's beers, and gay pubs refusing to stock it is hardly going to affect my attitude to drinking it.

All this will pass...

Update:  let's go to the threadsters of Catallaxy to note their reasonable and balanced approach to the Coopers storm in a stubbie.   First, DB, who lives in New York, happily (as far as I know), with a wife who he has said works in the fashion industry and therefore knows lot of gay folk:  facts all of which, one would have thought, may have made him realise that legal gay marriage does not cause the end of civilisation.    But, here he is, commenting on the (somewhat stilted) apology video put out by Coopers:

OMG. The Coopers hostage video is unbearable to watch. I could just imagine a cage and a can of Ronson just to the side, off-camera. The Waffen-SSM is just like the Terminator, it cannot be reasoned with, but unlike the Terminator, it is a creampuff, that can be smashed if you simply stand up against it. Which is why they opposed a plebiscite that would involve organised opposition against it and a free vote of the people. And they must be smashed.

 And CL, the other uber Catholic of Catallaxy:

Not sure if he's endorsing stoning or just jail...

But I'll end with the usual disclaimer:  I actually don't support gay marriage either; it's just that I'm not going to panic about it.

Pepsi endorsed

I really like the new Pepsi Max Vanilla.  

That is all...

Alien conjecture

A planet sized radio source to power a light sail is causing mysterious fast radio bursts? 

I'm finding that a bit of a stretch...

A quick Spielberg

I think this is good news:

Just last week, it was announced that 20th Century Fox and Amblin Entertainment were quickly rounding up talent for director Steven Spielberg’s The Post, a film about the Pentagon Papers controversy which will star two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump, Captain Phillips) and three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, Florence Foster Jenkins). Now, Deadline is reporting that the timely film about the importance of a free press is being fast-tracked for a May start date in order to complete the picture for an Oscar-qualifying release, likely in late December of 2017.

The Post is clearly looking to capitalize on the story’s zeitgeist-tapping potential amid the current administration’s attacks on the press, and may even signal a whole wave of socially-relevant films from major studios. The May start date gives the film only eight months from cameras rolling to release, though the speedy Spielberg previously completed his 2005 Best Picture-nominee Munich in a mere six months. This also means that the director’s sci-fi flick Ready Player One will have the honor of being released three or four months AFTER The Post in March of 2018, despite having finished filming months ago. Spielberg will finish work on both films this year while also continuing his meticulous search for a child actor to star in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara with Mark Rylance and Oscar Isaac. He also has the fifth Indiana Jones movie starring Harrison Ford for Disney, which has a July 19, 2019 release date.

At the rate Harrison Ford seems to get into accidents these days, I hope he makes it to the studio.

I also repeat my call for the perfect ending to the Indiana Jones films: an aging Indy is added as one of the astronauts taken on board the mother ship at the end of Close Encounters.

I will accept very modest reimbursement for the idea, as well as meeting Steven Spielberg at the Premiere.

Call me, Steven...

More on Catholic in-fighting

Is Pope Francis really facing a coup? Or just ‘fake news’?

The article leans more to the "fake news" view:

Several curial officials, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, readily admitted they see what they described as “concern” among some in the Vatican, and perhaps more than the usual amount of bureaucratic resistance to the structural overhaul Francis is pursuing.

But as for serious, organized opposition, as one senior Vatican official put it, “I think it’s just wishful thinking by some people, to be honest.”

Even some Catholic conservatives are growing impatient with the narrative of unprecedented crisis that is swirling around.

“A lot of this is pure or impure speculation,” said Robert Royal, head of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington and a regular visitor to the Vatican. Royal cautioned that “there is a lot of turbulence in Rome these days.”

But, he said, “some Catholic conservatives assume there is a coordinated network of liberals waiting to take over the church. I don’t, but I think (Francis) has given an awful lot of fuel to critics who want to see some bad things.”

Indeed, the claims are hard to ignore. Traditionalist websites and canon lawyers are openly debating whether the pope is a heretic - and what can be done if he is - while others wonder whether Francis is leading the church into schism, or if such a split has already happened.

Many of these conservative opponents have rallied around American Cardinal Raymond Burke, an outspoken critic of the pope who was a senior Vatican official until Francis moved him into a largely ceremonial role at the Rome-based charitable Order of Malta - where he recently was involved in another uproar over the ousting of a top leader there.

Could help explain something

Bill Leak obviously had a lot of friends, on the Left and Right, and but even so there has been a somewhat extraordinary amount of column space in the News Ltd press lauding him.

I see that Chris Mitchell, former editor from when the paper went full blown Tea Party lite, has written this about Leak's post accident period:

Bill knew that fall could have, should have, killed him. He was in a coma, had severe brain damage and a 15cm hole in his head as wide as his thumb.

He suffered debilitating headaches for the first few years back in the cartoonist’s chair. He struggled through the fog of heavy pain relief to get his thoughts together each morning for the day’s cartoon.

After starting back a couple of days a week, in time he came back to full- time work. 

Someone on line, in the last year or two, made the observation that the problem with post accident Leak was not just that he was being "controversial", but that his work had stopped being funny.

Mitchell provides evidence that the lingering effects of the head injury had a role in that.   (Although, it has to be said, that his moving house out of concern for radical Muslim death threats in 2015 could be good reason for loss of sense of humour, too.)

Mitchell claims that Leak didn't change politics, as people claimed - but looking back over some of his old work, as people have been posting since his death, I reckon that is rubbish.

Update:  another person writing in the Australian notes:

He rose most days at 5am, went downstairs to his office, and, ­fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, scanned the overnight news while waiting for his friends to wake up so he could engage them in vigorous, often ribald phone calls and email exchanges.

Sounds like quite a big tobacco habit.  As some others have noted, in response to the hysterical "the HRC hounded him to death!" claims from some on the Right, the smoking no doubt had a major  hand in causing Leak's death.  

Sinclair Davidson, in his semi-routinely hyperbolic way, went so far as to have his post on Leak's death entitled "The Australian Human Rights Commission has blood on its hands".    Yet, ironically, he spends much of his time deriding tobacco plain packaging; work which undoubtedly the tobacco industry is happy to see.   Say no more...

Update:   two more things about Leak I heard today:  I caught a bit of a replay of a Richard Fidler interview with him in 2009 (post accident) in which Leak spoke about now being off alcohol, giving the distinct impression he had been a very heavy drinker before.  Then Guy Rundle, in an obit which I presume will upset some, claims Leak had 30 plus years of high functioning alcoholism (and drug use - although he doesn't say illicit drug use.)   I don't even know if Rundle knew Leak, of course.  But still - it would seem that Leak had a very far from healthy lifestyle for much, or most, of his adult life.  

Developments in the afterlife

Peter Whiteford tweeted a link to a review of an interesting sounding book review in New Humanist (a journal I'm not in the habit of noting.)   Here's an extract, which I hope is not too long:

In his latest book, The Ransom of the Soul, Brown offers an exhilarating survey of attitudes towards death, mourning and the afterlife in late antiquity, and their connections to money, politics and social justice. He reminds us that the Christians of the third century were still an insurgent minority, inspired by what he calls a “countercultural longing for a religious community” – a form of community at loggerheads with the blatant inequalities of wealth and status that prevailed in the world around them. They also believed that Christ was going to return to earth in a matter of weeks or months or at most a few years, and that he would then preside over an earthly paradise in which the faithful dead would join the rest of his followers in endless celebrations of their victory over paganism, sin and death itself.

Two centuries later, Christian certainties were in disarray. Believers had to recognise that their messiah was taking far longer to return to earth than any of them had imagined. (If you are a socialist with a sense of history, you will know how they must have felt.) They could not carry on assuming that the dead were going to rise from their graves like sleepers waking from a nap: they realised that the bodies of the waiting dead were not in any condition to resume their former functions, and they also started to face up to the question of what activities the souls of the dead could engage in while waiting for their bodies to be resurrected.

To complicate matters further, the church was running into problems of worldly success. Christianity was on its way to encompassing Roman society as a whole, and its followers now included hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who were not “altogether good”, but not “altogether bad” either. Christians began to suppose that the souls of the departed spent their time trying to make amends for their sins, and they started to draw up graduated schemes of reward and punishment – systems of moral taxation, in effect, designed to account for different grades and qualities of guilt. Augustine tried to turn back the tide of speculation by arguing that the living could never understand the world of the dead; but he went along with the idea that the afterlife is fraught with dangers, and that the faithful here on earth should do everything in their power to support the souls of the deceased in their quest for salvation.

On top of that there were difficulties about the sort of existence that could be attributed to the soul. Paradise was starting to be seen as heavenly rather than earthly, and, as Brown puts it, “the distance between heaven and earth seemed to yawn more widely”. Augustine went so far as to ask his fellow Christians to give up their attachment to the earthly body, maintaining that the soul was a spiritual entity, completely distinct from matter. But that theory was closer to the pagan philosophy of the Greeks than to anything in the Bible or the gospels, and most Christians were unwilling to accept it: they could not see how a soul without a body could have an individual identity, or any real connection with a life that had been lived on earth.

Despite Augustine, therefore, they persisted in taking an unplatonic interest in the fate of dead bodies, and they aspired to have their corpses enclosed in stout coffins, inscribed with their names to prevent confusion, and buried in the vicinity of the mortal remains of saints, or at least in a sanctified building or consecrated ground.
Unfortunately these burial practices were in obvious conflict with the teachings of Jesus: instead of favouring the meek and the poor, they gave enormous spiritual advantages to rich grandees. To make matters worse, the recommended technique for interceding on behalf of the dead – repeated prayers asking God to have mercy on their souls – offered the rich further opportunities to jump the queue: they could pay for prayers on behalf of their friends and family, and endow colleges, chapels or religious houses on condition that they say prayers for their benefactors in perpetuity.

Augustine did his best to block the plutocratic path to salvation, telling the rich that if they wanted to be saved, they would have to give large sums to the church, not for their own sakes but to fund the relief of poverty together with prayers for the souls of the poor. This was a novel idea, and as Brown points out it involved a far-reaching revolution in “the social imagination”. Early Christianity, like Judaism, was a tribal religion, and social obligations were not seen as extending beyond the limits of the tribe. In the same way, the civilisations of Greece and Rome rested on loyalty to individual cities, and acts of civic generosity – gifts of public buildings or circuses, games or races – were designed not to assist the poor but to enhance the magnificence of the city, and no doubt the donor as well. But the new Christian doctrine of death and charity involved a move from what Brown calls a “closed” moral universe to an “open” one, throwing down an implicit challenge to the social assumptions of both Jerusalem and Rome. From now on, he says, the rich would be expected to spend their money not on themselves or their cities, but on the “faceless mass of the poor”. Some teachers advocated a total renunciation of wealth, but Augustine advised the rich to retain their capital so that they could carry on giving to the poor, year after year, world without end. Either way, they could be assured that they were making a sound investment, building up “treasure in heaven” by directing their generosity not to particular people or groups, but simply to the wretched of the earth.

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.