Roger Moore's ghost

No, no:  I've had no spectral visitors offering Bondian double entendres.  But I just noticed this story, apparently told by Moore a long time ago, about a ghost he had visit him twice when staying at a hotel early in his career.

The story is interesting (if not a tall tale) for a couple of reasons.  First, it initially sounds like it might be a case of sleep paralysis, which often does involve the perception of a phantom figure in the room, sometimes near or on the bed, causing the paralysis.  But then he says he was sitting "bolt upright" in bed - and I don't think that's consistent with your normal "woke up and couldn't move" case of sleep paralysis.

Secondly, it is surely pretty rare to see the same apparition twice.

So, I wonder if it was true...

(And, by the way, isn't that a terribly designed website the story is on.)

Blockchain, cryptocurrency and unintended consequences

Yes, I think I count as an intuitive skeptic of Bitcoin and blockchain generally.  (If something's beloved of techno libertarians, it should be automatically suspect, in my books.)

But here's the sort of article that puts some justification into my intuition:

Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism

Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power. It could consolidate their control instead.

Of personal interest

I've been noticing certain unwanted age related changes to my skin in the last couple of years:  I'm getting small lumps and brownish patches that never used to be there and would just as soon do without.  So, who knows, a good all purpose aged skin repairing chemical might tempt me to use it:

New work from the University of Maryland suggests that a common, inexpensive and safe chemical could slow the aging of human skin. The researchers found evidence that the chemical—an antioxidant called methylene blue—could slow or reverse several well-known signs of aging when tested in cultured human skin cells and simulated skin tissue.

The study was published online in the journal Scientific Reports on May 30, 2017. "Our work suggests that methylene blue could be a powerful antioxidant for use in skin care products," said Kan Cao, senior author on the study and an associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at UMD. "The effects we are seeing are not temporary. Methylene blue appears to make fundamental, long-term changes to skin cells."

The Trumpian path

Matthew Yglesias, one of the most trenchant critics of Trump, has written a lengthy piece at Vox about Trump as "bullshitter" - an analysis that is not exactly news (to put it mildly), but he does go into it at more depth.  In particular, he notes how it fits in with how authoritarianism  works, and ends with this:

The upshot is a conservative movement and a Republican Party that, if Trump persists in office, will be remade along Trumpian lines with integrity deprecated and bullshit running rampant. It’s clear that the owners and top talent at commercial conservative media are perfectly content with that outcome, and the question facing the party’s politicians is whether they are, too. 

The common thread of the Trumposphere is that there doesn’t need to be any common thread. One day Comey went soft on Clinton; the next day he was fired for being too hard on her; the day after that, it wasn’t about Clinton at all. The loyalist is just supposed to go along with whatever the line of the day is. 

This is the authoritarian spirit in miniature, assembling a party and a movement that is bound to no principles and not even committed to following its own rhetoric from one day to the next. A “terrific” health plan that will “cover everyone” can transform into a bill to slash the Medicaid rolls by 14 million in the blink of an eye and nobody is supposed to notice or care. Anything could happen at any moment, all of it powered by bullshit.

Quite right, I think.   And funnily enough, we have people claiming to be libertarians who are excuse makers in chief for Trump, despite this creepy and obvious "truth means nothing" approach to governing.   The effects of the silly, post modernism movement (which similarly eroded the utility of "truth" in science and policy) still causes them offence,  but when it comes to Trump, it seems to be a case of "meh".

Update:  see this Salon article on libertarians and Trump, too.

Public transport and land value

There's an article up at The Conversation looking at the question of what effect the Gold Coast light rail had on land values.   It seems it's a tricky issue to work out and there could be quite a lot of "rubbery figures" involved.

The idea that public transport could be part paid for by greater taxes on surrounding land that benefits from it just strikes me as an idea too difficult to implement with enough certainty and fairness.  

As for whether people actually like the Gold Coast light rail system or not - some of the comments indicate that some are still dead set against it for more-or-less aesthetic reasons.   I find that rather odd.  I thought it looked modern and efficient last I saw it:  public transport just annoys some people, I reckon. 

Lab meat delayed

I've always been a skeptic of lab grown meat, and this update from Discover indicates that the idea of growing muscle cells into something resembling meat is in fact making slow progress.

I say that the enthusiastic reception of the (apparently) very meat like "impossible burger" (because it contains a blood taste resembling compound, but derived from plants) is going to do away with the interest in lab grown mince anyway.  And as for slabs of fake steak grown in a lab - I don't think they have any idea how to get it texturally like meat, yet.

The Lindt Cafe seige

I watched some of the Four Corners report on the outcome of the Lindt seige inquest last night, and have a few observations:

*  it is clear that there were some inexcusable mistakes made by the police in terms of lines of communication.  I found it gobsmacking that a hostage could ring the negotiator direct number and have it ring out 4 times, because of  a slow changeover happening, for example, or that a text message passed on by a relative did not make it to the upper level of the police operation.

*  the police inability to get things done quickly - getting lights turned out in the mall, which was agitating Monis - seemed kind of incompetent of either the police, or the Council.

* the reason Manis executed the manager remained unclear.  It seemed Manis was reassuring the remaining hostages that they would be OK if they just co-operated, but he made Troy kneel in an "execution" position anyway, then waited and shot him anyway.  Did he want to precipitate the police finally storming the cafe?

*  that said, and not taking away any of the grief of the families of the victims, it is still surely the case that a very early police storming of the cafe would probably have resulted in more accidental deaths from stray bullet fragments than what occurred (one.)   In a broad sense, waiting was responsible.  Once he fired a shot towards escaping hostages, it probably wasn't, and the police seem to accept that now.   But it remains quite on the cards that even entry then might have accidentally killed more.  

Australian Right wing civility crisis, continues

Now that Roger Franklin's long term incivility problem in his job at Quadrant has been opened up for wider public scrutiny by not only the ABC, but also (apparently) The Australian, and Right wing commentators (Paul Murray, Chris Kenny, Nick Cater) are putting a lot of distance between themselves and him, that long term exemplar of Right wing incivility, the Catallaxy blog, continues to be in uproar in defence of Franklin, save for about 1% of commenters.  

Sinclair Davidson, who seems to be a close friend of Franklin (and people at Catallaxy sometimes comment on the incestuous world of Labor politics!) is making a (pretty typical for him) hash of the defence of Franklin's comment:

Roger asked, what I thought, a perfectly good question:

What if that blast had detonated in an Ultimo TV studio? Unlike those young girls in Manchester, their lives snuffed out before they could begin, none of the panel’s likely casualties would have represented the slightest reduction in humanity’s intelligence, decency, empathy or honesty.

True – an early version, quickly retracted, was a bit more intemperate but the question remains valid.

This is just an inane line to take on the matter:   there was no "valid question" - it was a rhetorical device which Franklin answers himself - by saying explicitly that the world would have been better for it. 

Look, the simple fact of the matter is that Davidson is just about the last person to show sensible judgement when it comes to matters of civility, as he has been at the very forefront of providing for Australian Right wing reactionary "conservatives" a outlet for their voice, and he doesn't care what offence they cause, even on a blog in which he can delete offensiveness.

He rarely exercises that power, plays favourites, and is willing to continually ignore plainly defamatory or offensive material - with the Left being its main target.   

I complained about this here, back in early 2013, and stopped my commenting there because of his ridiculous and partisan tolerance of incivility, defamation*, and outright plagiarism (for which he accepted the poster's apology, and then left the patently plagiarised post - from an American site - up on the blog.)

In the current kerfuffle, he has noted that people have (I don't know how recently) tried to get him into trouble at RMIT because of the blog.   That wasn't me, but I do find it pretty remarkable that RMIT would not be concerned about their reputation when one of its key staff has the power to police defamation and offensiveness on a blog, and routinely chooses not to exercise it. 

It would not concern me at all if there were media exposure to the blog and its threads - he used to get his head on the ABC as an economic and quasi political commentator quite often, I think viewers deserve to know that he runs a blog that positively hurts the cause of civil political debate in the country.

It's an echo chamber of the worst kind, reinforcing culture warriors and climate change deniers that they are not alone and can be as obnoxious as they like, thus coarsening public political discourse.   You can actually see the place dumbing down and coarsening thread participants over the years, as those who expect civility in argument and would put up counter views have all abandoned the place.   

Franklin deserves to lose his job at Quadrant;  I reckon more might be achieved if Catallaxy enforced civility on its own pages, but that would require a change of its hopeless leadership.

* unless it's a friend

Blasphemy and Islam

Hey, if you can get past the "please register to read" pester screen (I did, eventually), there's a really good article up at Foreign Policy "The Islamic World Has a Blasphemy Problem". 

As the article notes (various extracts follow):

Blasphemy charges have steadily risen in the last decade in Indonesia and have a near 100 percent conviction rate. Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, there has been an uptick in blasphemy charges and prosecutions in recent years. Blasphemy has been spiritedly revived in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. In 2001, there was only one blasphemy trial in Pakistan, but now there are dozens each year. There has been a steady drip of attacks and murders of bloggers and writers in Bangladesh in the last five years, along with a deadly mass protest in 2013 demanding the death penalty for blasphemy....

The use of the charge ranges from the nominal to the horrifying. Since 2016, the Egyptian poet Fatima Naoot has been serving a three-year prison sentence for criticizing the slaughter of animals during Eid al-Fitr on Facebook. A Malaysian man was charged with blasphemy for posing questions to his religion teachers. Even the mere accusation of blasphemy poses the threat of violence: In 2015, an Afghan woman was beaten and murdered by a mob in Kabul after arguing with a mullah, and last month, a Pakistani university student was killed by a mob over allegations, later discredited, of posting blasphemous content on social media....

“As far back as the 1750s, the Saudi polity really was based on religion and specifically Wahhabism [the puritanical, literalist strain of Islam founded in 18th-century Arabia],” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior analyst at Geopolitical Futures. Due to a pact between the Saudi royal family and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1744, Wahhabism is effectively the state religion of Saudi Arabia. “Wahhabism is, truly, all about blasphemy. What is true Islam and what is not,” Bokhari said. “Really, to them, most Muslims who don’t subscribe to their exacting views are committing blasphemy in some way or another.”

Modern Islamic countries, meanwhile, have accrued their blasphemy laws not as a medieval inheritance but through one of two major routes: as leftovers of European colonialism or as products of the 20th-century “Arabization” of the Muslim world in the model of the Gulf states.

It goes on to point out that, ironically, British colonialism introduced blasphemy laws in India and Malaysia to help with interfaith stability. 

Anyway, it's a good read, if somewhat depressing for the lack of any grounds for optimism that its political use will not stop in Muslim countries any time soon.

Weekend update

*  Watched the recent M Night Shyamalan written and directed movie Split.   Like nearly every review said, James McAvoy is very good in his multiple personality role, and the movie is pretty pleasingly directed for the first 2/3 at least.   Not much of it feels very real, though.   (The psychiatrist/psychologist acts well, but the way her character behaves seemed sort of naive for a smart woman.)

But the main conceit of the film that comes to the fore in the last third is pretty silly and vaguely explained - probably because it is impossible to make it highly plausible.   (It seems a bit X Men, a bit Altered States.)   I'm not convinced it's really a return to form for this much criticised director - perhaps because I wasn't actually that impressed with his first couple of hits anyway.

For a more terrifying experience of claustrophobia and characters going mad, I would recommend 10 Cloverfield Lane over this.

*  Cooked a recipe for Indian Butter Prawns that I found on the net.   It involves a lot of butter and cream, and has probably taken 6 months off my life, but it was pretty tasty and basically quick (once you finish de-heading and de-veining 800 g of prawns, anyway.)

*  Had a family issue to deal with - may make posting slow for a day...

All perfectly normal, in Bizzaro World

Come on, Trump supporters, or even quasi apologists.   How does this sound in any way, well, not weird?   Was it because they were already worried that the authorities were investigating links and communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians?   Maybe - but then what did they want to discuss with the Russians in such secrecy that they didn't want any other part of the US government to possibly learn about it?  And Kushner is supposed to be one of the liberal advisers around Trump:

Jared Kushner and Russia's ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Donald Trump's transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to US officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Ambassador Sergei Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on December 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by US officials.

 Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.

The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser.

OK, so is this a lie from the Russians to try to hurt Trump?   Seems unlikely, given the White House is declining to comment.  Is it just unbridled paranoia about the "deep state" trying to stop Trump getting on better with the Russians?  There might be something to that if it were just Flynn asking the Russians to do it - he's as mad as a cut snake.  But again, Kushner is tied up with the proposal? 

It's just very, very strange...

And as for pathetic attempts at false equivalence go, there's a spectacularly silly one from poor old perpetual hand waver CL at Catallaxy:

Last I knew, the US was not supposed to be under permanent threat of full out nuclear attack by a crazy Russian leader who had promised that he would bury capitalism...

I tried to have a Trump free Friday, but I give up...

I can't resist posting these GIFs which are doing the rounds.  What a great impression Donald has been making:

So Macron actually had to try to fight off the Trump handshake?  Talk about Trump making himself look like a weird, old bully.     

Arab science, again

 I'm sure I've said here before that Saudi Arabia, which should have had squillions to spend on good science or technology research, seems to have universities which instead spend an inordinate amount of time investigating arcane matters such as the wonders of camel milk, all because"Islam". 

Here's a story in a similar vein -  an article from Arab News commending the use of sticks for cleaning your teeth:

RIYADH: Using miswak, the twig used by a majority of people in Muslim countries to brush their teeth, is alien to most people in the West. Although it might sound outdated to use twigs from different trees to clean one’s mouth and teeth, studies conducted on miswak have proved otherwise, inferring that the miswak is better than toothpaste for preventing mouth and dental diseases.

The miswak, referred to at times as a chewing stick, is also an alternative form of medicine, according to some research findings. The twig’s usage has been highly recommended in Islam, and Muslims across the world practice it. In Saudi Arabia, the use of sticks or twigs from the Salvadora persica trees, known as arak in Arabic, are common....

 According to research conducted by the Riyadh-based King Saud University (KSU), a total of 19 natural substances were found in miswak that benefit dental health. According to research, the miswak contains a number of natural antiseptics that kill harmful micro-organisms in the mouth, tannic acids that protect gums from disease, and aromatic oils that increase salivation.

I don't know if Mo ever mentioned teeth cleaning, but the religion has specific views on all sort of hygiene matters, so who knows.   Mind you, they were ahead of the trend when it comes to hair shaving in regions Westerners never used to worry about.

Not a happy thought, but useful

This article about what people can expect to experience when with a dying person makes not for the happiest reading, but it is worth knowing anyway.

A couple of points:  have I told this story before?  My late mother used to say she had her own experience of the dying still hearing conversations, even if they seem unconscious.  Her first husband was killed in a military accident (crushed under an aircraft's wheels, I believe.)   She was with him in hospital, when he was apparently unconscious, and a doctor in the room told her he thought her husband was not going to make it.   Her poor husband then opened his eyes, looked shocked, and went downhill from there pretty fast. 

Secondly;  the article refers to the "death bed lucidity" stories about those who have dementia.  I have read about this before, and it is, surely, a rather odd thing to explain....

Mind beyond physics?

Here's some physics for your Friday:

Scientists Are About to Perform an Experiment to See if The Human Mind Is Bound by Physics

This is a bit hard to follow, and it involves quantum nonlocality and a Bell's Test - the exact implications of which are still being hotly contested, when you read arXiv.  Anyway, this is the key part:

Now, Lucien Hardy, a theoretical physicist from the Perimeter Institute in Canada, is suggesting that the measurements between A and B could be controlled by something that may potentially be separate from the material world: the human mind.

His idea is derived from what French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes called the mind-matter duality, "[where] the mind is outside of regular physics and intervenes on the physical world," as Hardy explained.

To do this, Hardy proposed a version of the Bell test involving 100 humans, each hooked up to EEG headsets that would read their brain activity. These devices would be used to switch the settings on the measuring devices for A and B, set at 100 kilometres apart.
"The radical possibility we wish to investigate is that, when humans are used to decide the settings (rather than various types of random number generators), we might then expect to see a violation of quantum theory in agreement with the relevant Bell inequality," Hardy wrote in a paper published online earlier this month.

If the correlation between the measurements don't match previous Bell tests, then there could be a violation of quantum theory that suggests A and B are being controlled by factors outside the realm of standard physics.

"[If] you only saw a violation of quantum theory when you had systems that might be regarded as conscious, humans or other animals, that would certainly be exciting. I can't imagine a more striking experimental result in physics than that," Hardy said.

While we're on a theme

I seem to be having a very "gay" Friday, so here's another homosexual snippet.

Turns out that Peter Ackroyd, the prolific British author who I don't think I've ever got around to reading, is gay and has written a gay history of London.   He claims it has always been a queer city:

I don't think I learned that much new from reading an article about it in The Guardian, but I do note this:

Unlike many chroniclers of gay culture, Ackroyd doesn’t neglect lesbianism: we are gleefully taken on a tour of the dildo shops of the Georgian city – it’s said that one establishment in Leicester Fields sold nothing else – and behind the closed doors of cigarillo smoke-filled Edwardian clubs such as the Cave of Harmony and the Orange Tree.

In 2017, 50 years after some forms of homosexuality were tentatively legalised, it’s hard to think of anything that has undergone greater upheavals than gay culture. But in Ackroyd’s view, things haven’t really changed that much.

“The manifestations alter, but the essence remains the same. There are still drag bars, there are still travesti acts, there are still pick-up places in parks, there are still men-only clubs. As a percentage of the population, there were as many gay bars in 18th-century London as there are today.”

Policing homosexuality in Indonesia

This article, in the Jakarta Post, notes that there is a lot more going on in regional parts of Indonesia regarding policing of homosexuality than we hear about here:

Behind the protests and actions and debate on blasphemy law, the wars on homosexuality and/or LGBT still continues. Indonesian police raided a “gay sex party” in Surabaya, East Java, arrested 14 men, and forced them to undergo HIV tests, which violated their rights to privacy. They face charges of infringing the 2008 Pornography Law and the 2008 Electronic Information and Transaction Law (ITE), prohibiting the distribution of pornographic and/or indecent material. The police found and confiscated condoms, mobile phones, and a flash drive containing porn videos, reports said....

While homosexuality remains illegal here, the loose, malleable, and subjective definition of pornography of the 2008 Pornography Law so far has been a powerful weapon to outlaw homosexuality practices and interfere in individual private spaces. Last year a male couple in Manado, North Sulawesi, was arrested after a photo of them kissing was uploaded on Facebook and went viral. Similar with the recent gay arrests in Surabaya, this couple was at risk of being charged under the Pornography Law and the cyberlaw.

The writer notes that the problem is how too much decentralised democracy has played out in the nation with patches of fundamentalist Islam:

Daily power dynamics and contestations among political actors mark constant ideological struggles to define the contours of the regime. Indonesia’s transition to democracy has also led the previously suppressed fundamentalist Islamic political groups to flourish openly and exert their power, with many cities and regencies adopting “moral-based regulations” or sharia-inspired bylaws.

The scholar Kathryn Robinson in Masculinity, Sexuality, and Islam ( 2015 ) asserts that political Islam actors exploit decentralization to enact sharia-based regulations. With their greater political   power, politicians of any hue see them as potential supporters and constituents for their own interests. Hence, this shift has also changed the way of regulating and policing people, particularly those who do not conform to the formal norms of the state and of the majority. If in the previous regime, state-centered power and surveillance was inevitable, the current regime of controls are deployed and reverberates throughout dispersed policies, creating new modes of policing.

Damn...

It's increasingly looking like direct-current stimulation isn't all that it's early proponents thought it would be:

Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) -- a non-invasive technique for applying electric current to areas of the brain -- may be growing in popularity, but new research suggests that it probably does not add any meaningful benefit to cognitive training.

It does sound like a fairly limited experiment, though...

Same sex marriage in Asia

The Japan Times has an article about the unexpected court ruling from Taiwan regarding same sex marriage.    In looking at how it may affect other Asian nations, I was surprised to read this:

In Vietnam, which is seen as socially progressive on LGBT issues and where a vibrant gay scene flourishes online and in some big cities, hopes for marriage reform have stalled.

Why would Vietnam be "socially progressive" on this?

As far as mainland China is concerned, the report notes: 

Homosexuality was officially decriminalised in 1997 but only taken off the list of psychiatric disorders four years later.

“Taiwan and mainland China have the same roots and culture so it suggests that Chinese society could also accept the idea of gay marriage,” said Li Yinhe, a renowned Chinese sexologist who has pressed Beijing policymakers on the issue.

There have been small signs of progress. While a Chinese court last year ruled against two men seeking to marry, the fact the case even made it into the judicial system was seen by many as an achievement.

I still say that the gender imbalance in China is likely to influence attitudes, in the long term, towards gay relationships. 

Update:  here's a 2015 article from the ABC noting the surprising tolerance to gay rights activities being shown by the government in Vietnam.  I hadn't noticed this at the time. 

Magic poop

Amused to read this in the Japan Times:

Learning more than 1,000 kanji during six years of grade school isn’t an easy task. But it can be fun if all the characters are associated with a word they love — poop.

A workbook series that features a heavy dose of the word “unko,” poop in Japanese, has quickly sold over a million copies since its release in March. The series’ main selling point is that it engages children by using the word “poop” in every single example on how a kanji is used in a sentence.

“Adults would raise their eyebrows, but for children, the word ‘poop’ is magical and makes things fun,” said Yusaku Furuya, 40, the author of the books.

You need to see the picture to understand more: