Japanese thoughtfulness

Nice story at the BBC saying that the Japanese started "mindfulness", as part of Zen Bhuddism.  The opening paragraphs: 

As the sleek shinkansen bullet train glided noiselessly into the station, I watched a strange ritual begin. During the brief stop, the conductor in the last carriage began talking to himself. He proceeded to perform a series of tasks, commenting aloud on each one and vigorously gesticulating at various bits of the train all the while.

So what was he up to? You could say he’s practicing mindfulness. The Japanese call it shisa kanko (literally ‘checking and calling’), an error-prevention drill that railway employees here have been using for more than 100 years. Conductors point at the things they need to check and then name them out loud as they do them, a dialogue with themselves to ensure nothing gets overlooked.

And it seems to work. A 1994 study by Japan’s Railway Technical Research Institute, cited in The Japan Times, showed that when asked to perform a simple task workers typically make 2.38 mistakes per 100 actions. When using shisa kanko, this number reduced to just 0.38% – a massive 85% drop.

Backing up

Am I the only person who finds computer data backup a confusing issue?   I mean, I never quite seem to understand what exactly the software is doing, and whether, once I used one company's particular software, it means I'm dependent on that particular software still working in future if I were to do a recovery.  I know there's a Windows back up built in as well, but it seems particularly unclear as to what it is doing (and I think all tech people recommend using other software.)

I've had some improvement on my understanding of how back ups can be set up from this site, but after trying a freeware version of one company's software, I still feel a bit confused...

Straight to the point

It's hard to imagine a more damning take on Trump's personality than this article by David Roberts at Vox.  The key paragraph:

In short, what if Trump is exactly as he appears: a hopeless narcissist with the attention span of a fruit fly, unable to maintain consistent beliefs or commitments from moment to moment, acting on base instinct, entirely situationally, to bolster his terrifyingly fragile ego.

We’re not really prepared to deal with that.

Also at Vox, Matther Yglesias notes that Trump is still avoiding the key question about his connection with Russian money, and the lawyer's letter last week does not answer it.

At Axios, Mike Allen says there is talk of Trump sweeping a huge broom through his White House and Cabinet - but whether he will or not remains unclear.

And yet, despite the obvious turmoil of last week (a President openly taunting a sacked FBI director that he might have been taped being the ultimate low-light), it is stunning that the culture war grip remains as tight as ever on the judgement of those on the Right who supported him, so that they still cannot find significant fault with this patently awful and hopeless President. 

Look, Trump is no Hitler - but the wilful blindness and excuse making with which a scarily significant slab of people treat him gives at least a taste of how many Germans could engage in a similar exercise in self delusion.

Cary and LSD

It's not news that Cary Grant tried using LSD therapeutically to overcome some ongoing psychological issues that pursued him throughout his life, but still there are some details in this Guardian article that are surprising.   This for one:

Turned on to the treatment by his third wife, Betsy Drake, Grant submitted himself to weekly sessions with Dr Mortimer Hartman at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. The effects were startling. “In one LSD dream I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

Well, hard to know what to say about that without any impropriety.

Yet, despite the silliness of that hallucination, Grant was terribly enthusiastic about the drug as a psychological elixir, at least initially:

“He claimed he was saved by LSD,” explains Mark Kidel, the film’s director. “You have to remember that Cary was a private man. He rarely gave interviews. And yet, after taking acid, he personally contacted Good Housekeeping magazine and said: ‘I want to tell the world about this. It has changed my life. Everyone’s got to take it.’ I’ve also heard that Timothy Leary read this interview, or was told about it, and that his own interest in acid was essentially sparked by Cary Grant.”

The article says that his enthusiasm later dampened (after perhaps 100 sessions!), but that early reaction does sound typical of the false promise of mind altering drugs generally,  doesn't it?  Specifically, it reminds me of the enthusiasm for tripping on mescaline that was the basis of Huxley's The Doors of Perception.  (As I have explained before, I actually read that book as a teenager - I think from the high school library, of all places - and found it quite an exciting idea, that a drug could let you see a numinous world as it really is.  I was never tempted to actually seek out any hallucinogen, however, realising soon enough that the theory the book promoted was itself a hallucination.)

Anyway, it does seem that Grant was relatively happier late in life, which is pleasing to know for a person who gave so much enjoyment to the world.

Movie upgraded

I watched Inception with my son last night, the first time I have viewed it since seeing it at the cinema in 2010. I enjoyed rewatching it more than I expected, then decided to go back to read what I had said about it first time around.

Boy, I feel I was a bit harsh, in retrospect.   The film still looks great - really great, actually; and I found myself  enjoying its level of complexity and generally "cool" vibe.   I felt more admiration for DiCaprio's acting this time around, too.  In my earlier review, was I reacting a bit too much against some very high praise it received?   Possibly - I see it got 86% on Rottentomatoes - it's good but not that good. 

Furthermore, I still think it is indisputable that the final level of dream "inception" - the meant-to-be climatic snowy fortress sequence - was a really major mistake.   The movie just starts looking  like a complete James Bond rip off, and despite the (I still say rather poorly directed or edited) action happening around the mountains, it actually loses narrative momentum within a few minutes of them popping up in that location.    

A good, basically clever, movie, but one that could have been great, with some modifications.

Does this mean I would like Interstellar if I watch it again in 6 years time?

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. No.


PS:  my son - now 17 - liked it a lot; but then again, he knew it was by Christopher Nolan, and he knows he can annoy me by overpraising his work.  Especially Interstellar.

Maybe I am a Russian pawn

Hey this is a bit of a surprise.  Based on a computer tech's recommendation, I use Kaspersky anti virus on my computers, but NPR reports that the US government won't.   Not only that, it apparently paid money to sacked Flynn!  Read this:

The Kaspersky Conundrum

The cyber-frustrations of members of Congress and their witnesses are a frequent feature of Intelligence and Armed Services Committee hearings and other national security hearings on the Hill. They seldom, however, get more specific than broad statements and almost never involve the name of a specific problem or company. On Thursday, however, two senators mentioned one in particular: Kaspersky Labs.
The Russian company — which supports NPR and is a provider of security services for its IT systems — has been linked to work for Russia's intelligence agencies. The leaders of the House Oversight Committee released documents showing payments by Kaspersky to Flynn. Even so, millions of Americans use Kaspersky software, as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., pointed out to the witnesses — but, he asked, would they run it on their systems?
Here's how they answered:
McCabe, of the FBI: "A resounding no from me."
Pompeo, of the CIA: "No."
Coats, the director of national intelligence: "No, senator."
Rogers, of the NSA: "No, sir."
Stewart, of the Pentagon's DIA: "No, senator."
Cardillo, of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: "No, sir."
Later, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked the intelligence bosses about Kaspersky again. They repeated their own government systems were safe from any danger, but the DIA's Stewart said he couldn't be sure about all of his contractors. Intelligence and defense contractors have been the sources for huge leaks of secrets from the NSA, CIA and other agencies.

Update:   one of the reasons I wonder about this is because of the mysterious level of activity from Russia (or, sometimes other odd countries) that can appear when you check "stats" on Blogger.   The hits Blogger shows must include heaps of 'bot hits, or something, because if you have a separate company's hit counter embedded on the blog, you  get a much more realistic number.  For example, today Blogger stats says I got 2,800 hits yesterday, and by far mostly from Russia!:

My embedded statcounter shows a much more realistic 96 hits.

It makes me feel my blog is somehow being used, but I don't know how...

The inflation fight (cosmology, not economics)

I've always been a bit leery of post Big Bang inflation as an explanation - because the mechanism of how it happened had just been left hanging for decades, but everyone seemed to just accept it must have happened, anyway.   (Here I was, commenting briefly on it back in 2006.)

Well, I see from The Altantic that there has been a bit of a recent skirmish going on between cosmologists about whether it is really good science if it is not really testable:

In January, Steinhardt, and fellow Princeton physicist Anna Ijjas, and Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb published a feature in Scientific American criticizing inflation. They concluded by characterizing it as an idea outside of empirical science altogether. The myriad ways inflation could have played out would lead to so many possible outcomes that no astronomical observation can ever rule the general idea out, they say—and moreover, some advocates for inflation know it. This would go against a basic, popular framing of science suggested by philosopher Karl Popper, in which a theory becomes scientific when it takes the risk of making predictions that nature could then uphold or disprove.

“They really made the accusation that the inflationary community understands that the theory is not testable,” Guth, one of the idea’s founding fathers, says. “Those words angered me.” In response, Guth and his colleagues have taken the unusual step of replying with their own letter in Scientific American that insists they are doing science. They even went to the trouble of circulating their response, in order to collect signatures from many of the world’s most prominent cosmologists. “What’s the point of just making it look like it’s three people disagreeing with three people?” says David Kaiser, another author of the letter.

The 29-person list of other experts who signed on includes four Nobel Prize winners, a Fields Medal winner, Steven Hawking, and leading figures from the  cosmology experiments COBE, WMAP, and Planck. (Also, twenty-five members of the list are men.) In turn, Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb have published their own response-to-the-response.

For both sides, the core of the issue is whether inflation as a general approach makes specific predictions that can be checked against the sky, and the extent to which these comparisons count as empirical tests. If the universe did inflate, some kind of mysterious, short-lived field must have pushed everything apart. But theorists have wiggle room as to how exactly that field behaved, with a wide array of consequences that can both match and contradict reality, the critics note.

I still feel more-or-less vindicated in my suspicions about inflation being accepted too quickly.

Governors creeped out

The Govenor's Mansion in New York apparently creeps out governors who stay there.  (They worry it is haunted.)

Worth noting

It would seem that the ignorance highlighting interview that Trump gave with The Economist has been swamped for media attention somewhat by the Comey sacking.  But it really was a doozy.

Just to show I'm not a complete "lefty"...

...I will link with approval (it rarely happens these days) to a post at Tim Blair's, about a truly ridiculous case of "cultural appropriation" hysteria from Canada.

Is there possibly any more humilitating job than being "White House Spokesperson for PresidentTrump"?

Vox headline:

Trump himself just confirmed his White House’s story about Comey’s firing was a lie; 
It took less than 48 hours.

Update:   I like this last paragraph in a Slate article about Trump's anger problem:

The problem with a doctrine of wrath—in the presidency as in other walks of life—is that the rationale so clear to the boiling brain can appear ridiculous to the outside observer. The administration’s babbling excuses have a knee-jerk quality; it’s as if the president so desired to disappear his Putin problem that he was willing to embrace whatever absurd explanation came to hand (and then became surprised—and angry all over again—when we didn’t fall for it). Don’t look at Russia! our commander in chief shouts in fury, and of course our gaze stays fixed on Moscow. Such transparent terror is contagious: Republican senators this week tried to make the Trump–Russia hearings about the travel ban, leaks, and Clinton’s emails—anything but Trump and Russia. After a certain point, this is no longer strategy. It is reflex. It is a child covering his eyes to make the loathsome object in front of him vanish. Trump may be a politician, but he is also a man consumed with desperate, narcissistic rage. Easing that pain will always be his primary goal. 

Too stupid to understand how it would look

From the Washington Post, there's a recurring theme of "anger" in this story.  (These are various extracts from the report):

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists....

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate. FBI officials declined to comment on the statement, and a White House official refused to discuss conversations between Trump and Comey....

The media explosion was immediate and the political backlash was swift, with criticism pouring in not only from Democrats, but also from some Republicans. Trump and some of his advisers did not fully anticipate the ferocious reaction — in fact, some wrongly assumed many Democrats would support the move because they had been critical of Comey in the past — and were unprepared to contain the fallout.  ...

Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.

The president was irate, according to White House officials. Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare.

 And yes, I see there is a twitterstorm coming from Trump, which confirms that he is indeed indignant that he is copping so much criticism.

Am I missing something here?

I'm no medical researcher, but I've previously questioned how these studies of how long HIV positive patients can expect to live if they are being treated can be all that accurate.  Don't you have to wait 'til the (say) 20 year olds who have started on antiviral treatments in the last decade have lived on the drugs for 40 years before you can know of any long term consequences of such intense medication?

Here's news of another such statistical study, saying that if they get onto treatment early, they can expect to live near normal life expectancy.  The article says:

The researchers looked at 88,500 people with HIV from Europe and North America who had been involved in 18 studies.

They based their life-expectancy predictions on death rates during the first three years of follow-up after drug treatment was started.

They found that fewer people who started treatment between 2008 and 2010 died during this period compared with those who began treatment between 1996 and 2007.

The expected age at death of a 20-year-old patient starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) after 2008, with a low viral load and after the first year of treatment, was 78 years - similar to the general population.

Furthermore, publicity about this type of finding surely is (the major?) part of the reason for complacency in the at risk community about catching it in the first place.?  

Socks in space

Here's a thought:  when you wish upon a shooting star, it might turn out to be a load of astronauts' dirty socks and jocks* burning up:

Astronaut Don Pettit, a University of Arizona College of Engineering alumnus, wore the same pair of shorts for months at a time while living on the International Space Station. Doing laundry was not an option. When clothes got too dirty, he and his crewmates stored them onboard until they could be thrown out—launched with other debris on a spacecraft and incinerated upon entering Earth's atmosphere.

Anyway, you can read about attempts to work out a clothes cleaning system that would let them clean their pants occasionally, instead of throwing them out.  Silver embedded socks (I had written about silver space underwear before) washed in low concentration hydrogen peroxide looks promising.

*  Sexism alert - there's been a lot of female astronauts up there too.   In fact, only last week I noticed that Peggy Whitson had set the record for total hours in space.  I wonder how many change of clothes she's had in that time...

Poor Mexico

I had the impression that the drug wars and general rate of murder and mayhem had been improving recently in Mexico.  But not according to one report (which Mexico disputes).  Second most violent nation in the world, it says.  (Which, actually, does sound a stretch.)  

I've seen some travel shows through the country in the last year or so, and it always looks to me like an interesting place to visit. 

What is truth?

Certainly, as Matthew Yglesias convincingly shows, it's not what Trump and Republican speak.   Here's the opening section:

Unknowns always exist in politics, but in the case of the Trump administration, that’s severely compounded by his habit of constantly lying. That’s especially true because the lying disease seems to be catching.

High-ranking administration officials regularly stand before the public and say things that plainly aren’t true. Increasingly, so do many of their leading allies in Congress. Not just in the sense that they make exaggerated or contestable claims about the likely impact of their policies — though they do that too — but in the sense that they aren’t even correctly stating what their policies are.

On the campaign trail, for example, Trump promised time and again that his administration would build the Keystone XL pipeline and do it with American steel. His actual executive orders do not require this. But even after his administration clarified that he wasn’t requiring the pipeline to be built with American steel, Trump stood before the cameras at an Environmental Protection Agency event and said, “If you want to buy pipelines in this country, you’re going to buy your steel here and you’re going to have it fabricated here.”

There’s no sneaky verbiage here or technical explanation of some sense in which this is accurate. Trump is just claiming to have ordered something he never ordered — just as how in the alternative universe of Trumpland, he held the best-attended inauguration in history and had the most productive first 100 days since FDR.

There’s always been a certain amount of dishonesty in politics, but Trump has taken it to a new level — and seems to be making it work. His allies in Congress have adopted the same technique, and it’s the core of House Republicans’ health care sales job. 

 He then goes on to list examples of lies about the Obamacare repeal, and notes this:

It’s worth emphasizing that this kind of lying is different in character from what we are used to hearing in politics.

Politicians, for example, exaggerate routinely about the job-creating punch of whatever new initiative they’re touting, far beyond what most objective analysts would state. But typically, politicians select economic policies that they truly believe would boost economic growth and create jobs. There happens to be systematic ideological disagreement about whether tax cuts supercharge the economy or environmental regulations kill growth.

But what you don’t hear is politicians saying they are cutting taxes when they are actually raising them, or claiming to have put in place a rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they actually did the opposite. 

On the ACHA, in contrast, House Republicans just voted for a law that will let insurance companies charge patients with preexisting conditions arbitrarily high premiums to avoid covering them. And they are running around the country saying the opposite.

 It is a ridiculous situation that only self blinded culture warriors could defend.

Sacked for all the wrong reasons? (Maybe I'm wrong)

Bigger news than the Labor rebirth of Malcolm Turnbull is the Trump sacking of Comey.

The funny thing is, I see that the FBI has had to issue a letter correcting a lot of what Comey claimed  at his committee meeting last week - which exaggerated the seriousness of the renewed Clinton email investigation - and that certainly does hurt his credibility.

Yet (if I am reading it right) it seems as if Trump is sacking him for not having gone harder after Clinton, and hence it looks completely partisan and virtually corrupt.

I think this is going to hurt Trump bigly.   (I know, we stop copying his childish talk, but it's hard not to.)

Update:   oh, it seems I was reading it wrong.    At least Vox says the reason is (on the face of it) in support of Clinton.  

Update 2:   I'm not sure who is interpreting this right.   I can't really see how the Vox interpretation is correct....

Budge it

I'm pretty busy today, so not much time to comment.

But - the Federal Budget seems to be annoying all the right people, so it's probably OK, more or less.

It's about time Turnbull became the Labor-lite Prime Minister we all hoped him to be.  (Ha ha.)

I don't think Abbott has surfaced yet - what would be good would be for him to do a complete dummy spit, and leave with a few other Libs and Nationals to join Bernadi to forge a new dead end party that would attract votes only from Catallaxy readers and Andrew Bolt.

But he's probably not brave enough...

The jokes write themselves

Noticed in the Jakarta Post of all places:

Due to its yellowish color and strong odor, beer has oftentimes been likened in jest to urine.

However, one brewery in Denmark, has been taking the comparisons way too literally, as it is making beer using the said human waste.

According to CBS news, local corporation Norrebro Bryghus is using the unconventional liquid in their malting process by fertilizing the traditional barley grain with human urine.

The cleverly named “Pisner” pilsner, which comes from a wordplay between the type of beer and local slang, was made from contents of urinals at the largest music festival in Northern Europe.

All in all, over 50,000 liters of human urine  was used as an alternative to traditional animal manure or factory-made fertilizer products, the report said.

I hate to think what recreational drugs might be in urine sourced from music festive (I assume, of the doof doof type.)

Macron as "closest thing to libertarian"?

Jason Soon noted here yesterday that Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with, and while I see that while he is indeed credited with some economic liberalising ideas, he also has plenty of others which American or Australian libertarians would run a mile from.  Here are some of them, as chosen from a list at the BBC:

Would make public investments worth €50bn spread over five years for environmental measures, apprenticeships, digital innovation and public infrastructure

Foreign aid: Eager to increase spending in Africa but wants to help countries stand on their own two feet in defence terms

• In areas of special need - notably poor suburbs (banlieues) - would limit class sizes in primary schools to 12 pupils per teacher
• Would ban children's use of mobile phones at school
• At the age of 18 French teenagers would get a "Cultural Pass" worth €500 to spend on cultural pursuits such as the cinema, theatre, books

Energy and environment

• Calls for half of food provided in school and work canteens to be organic or locally produced
• Would promote France as a world leader in developing green technologies
• Advocates renovating one million poorly insulated homes

He is, of course, also pro EU, an institution which I don't notice many libertarians celebrating.

Anyway, Macron is fully on board with climate change - quite possibly the single biggest distinguishing thing between a libertarian and a sensible person.