Oh dear...

Once again, Helen Dale is attracting attention, and not in a good way: An Award Winning Novelist Is Lifting Viral Tweets.

(She apparently doesn't like Twitter*, so instead of retweets, she just lifts them and puts them on her Facebook page, with no acknowledgement of the source.   But I guess if they are viral, people would often be recognizing the main part as being from elsewhere - and it's not as if people would think she drew a professional cartoon or graphic.    The problem is more the words or caption in a lifted Tweet:  they make it look awfully like her either desiring, or not caring, that some people will think they were her creation too.)

* I was quoting her from the article, though I now see that she is pretty regularly using Twitter - so it seems a very odd explanation.

Update:  I had forgotten, until I re-read her Wikipedia entry, that she had been sacked from writing for the Courier Mail for not acknowledging someone else's jokes she used in a column.    And I'm pretty sure she left Catallaxy after putting up a viral giant pig photo, claiming it was genuine and from people she knew, and then people called her out about that.   It is strange behaviour, and the book tour for her next novel is likely to present more oddities, I expect...

Increasing acceptance

With legalisation of same sex marriage in Australia in the news again, it's interesting to see NPR reports on a new Pew survey result showing that, in the US, public approval of legalising it is still on the rise:

And even Republicans have weakened in opposition:

I guess it's a factor of former opponents not seeing the world change much around them after it's legalised.   There's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen similarly in Australia.

That said, a defensible conservative position remains to have civil unions for those who want the equivalent rights as heterosexual marriage,  but which leave millennial long understandings of the meaning of "marriage" alone.

Sea level rise and climate change

Seems there's a significant new paper on the increasing rate of sea level rise at Nature Climate Change.  I'm waiting for some better explanation of its significance, though.

It is, of course, important to remember how "lumpy" sea level rise will be across the globe.

Hail and climate change

It usually crosses my mind at least once every summer, particularly if hail is falling outside, what effect a warming atmosphere might have on its frequency and size.

Well, some scientists have looked at this for the United States, where it is expected to make a difference:

Anthropogenic climate change is anticipated to increase severe thunderstorm potential in North America, but the resulting changes in associated convective hazards are not well known. Here, using a novel modelling approach, we investigate the spatiotemporal changes in hail frequency and size between the present (1971–2000) and future (2041–2070). Although fewer hail days are expected over most areas in the future, an increase in the mean hail size is projected, with fewer small hail events and a shift toward a more frequent occurrence of larger hail. This leads to an anticipated increase in hail damage potential over most southern regions in spring, retreating to the higher latitudes (that is, north of 50° N) and the Rocky Mountains in the summer. In contrast, a dramatic decrease in hail frequency and damage potential is predicted over eastern and southeastern regions in spring and summer due to a significant increase in melting that mitigates gains in hail size from increased buoyancy.

Reminds me a bit of the complexity of rainfall changes under climate change - with rainfall intensification, but increased drying on hotter days, you might end up with roughly the same amount of rainfall over (say) a year, but more damage caused by the intensity when it does fall.

A Liberal split?

Is it too much to hope for that the Liberals could rid itself of the climate change denying Right in a major party split that was actually initiated over Pyne's not particularly shocking comments that he favours gay marriage coming in soon?   I doubt it will happen - there are too many of them who would need to leave, I think.   But I can't see the conservative forces getting the upper hand in the party room for a leadership spill either - surely they could not contemplate an Rudd-like Abbott rerun, and Dutton has not the slightest hint of any charm that a leader needs.   Who else is there that conservatives could be happy with?

Mind you, it's sort of fun watching the culture warrior Right gnashing their teeth over the centrists in the Liberals having the upper hand.

Wow apology

I've been a bit remiss, because it's been a few weeks since I read this article in Discover magazine on 8 June pretty much debunking the claimed identification of the Wow radio signal as coming from comets.  (Which I had posted about on 6 June.)

Turns out I had very good reason to be skeptical that comets would make a radio signal  of sufficient strength to be mistaken for the Wow signal (or, indeed, that they make radio signals at all.)

So, it's back to the drawing board, I reckon.

Frum on the Republicans

I think David Frum's lengthy article on what has happened with the Republicans sounds pretty convincing.   Worth a read. [Oh wait - it's an old article, just it is popular at the moment in the sidebar at the Atlantic.  I might even have recommended it before!]

Upset at Obama's response to what didn't happen?

It seems to me that there is less outrage in the liberal media than I would have expected with Trump tweeting blame at Obama for not taking more action against the Russians for election interference that Trump has always insisted was "fake news".

Perhaps it's just because no one's surprised anymore by any ridiculous turnaround by this ridiculous President, and how his support base - at the moment - don't care how ridiculous he is.  (Will Steve Kates, the most ridiculous politically commentating economist in Australia, and that's saying something, comment on the turnaround?  I would love to see how he spins it.) 

It's going to take some spectacularly awful stuff to shake his base awake, it would seem.   (Or maybe, just enough incrementally awful stuff - but it's still too soon after the election to see that happen yet.)

Photos from Science

These just caught my eye:

I didn't realise that giraffe skulls looked so much like a dino skull.  Don't you think?

But real dinos were really big: 

 

And numbats are remarkably attractive:

Failure unforeseen (and an excuse to talk about Tom Cruise)

We get Graham Norton's UK chat show about 3 or 4 weeks after it screens there, and it's often very funny.  (It is just about the most relaxed celebrity chat show ever made, I reckon - is it because of the alcohol served?)

Anyway, last night's episode featured Tom Cruise promoting The Mummy (along with his female co-star whose name I don't recall), and Zac Efron, appearing to promote Baywatch.

Both movies were - shortly after that show was taped - pretty much panned by most critics and are already considered box office failures.  (Although, I see that The Mummy has made $300 million internationally in a few weeks of release, so at a claimed production cost of $120 million, it's not a complete disaster - even allowing for the rule of thumb that a movie has to make about 3 times its production costs before it becomes profitable.  Baywatch is doing considerably worse.  But for a complete, it won't even make its production cost disaster, look at Guy Ritchies' King Arthur movie.  Why does anyone employ him?)

However, on last night's appearance on Norton, both Cruise and Efron seemed very genuinely positive about their respective movies.   Either they are really good at faking it; really unable to see defects in their own movies; or the movies are better than what most critics and audiences seem to think.  (I seriously doubt that with respect to Baywatch, where even Zafron was talking about its high quotient of  penis jokes.)

Anyway, somehow while browsing the net after the show, I stumbled across a Simon Pegg twitter account, and he was talking about being in Queenstown, New Zealand, shooting for Mission Impossible 6.  Indeed, it has been in the New Zealand media.  I wonder if NZ is standing in for some other country? 

 

More reason for disliking Monsanto

You may know my position:  I think the Monsanto tactic of genetic modification of food crops to tolerate weed killing chemicals is a bad idea.  (I think the reason is kind of obvious, but see the links at this previous post, and this one too.)

Here's another story of where this agricultural technique is going wrong:

Arkansas's pesticide regulators have stepped into the middle of an epic battle between weeds and chemicals, which has now morphed into a battle between farmers. Hundreds of farmers say their crops have been damaged by a weedkiller that was sprayed on neighboring fields. Today, the Arkansas Plant Board voted to impose an unprecedented ban on that chemical.

"It's fracturing the agricultural community. You either have to choose to be on the side of using the product, or on the side of being damaged by the product," says David Hundley, who manages grain production for Ozark Mountain Poultry in Bay, Arkansas.

The tension — which even led to a farmer's murder — is over a weedkiller called dicamba. The chemical only became a practical option for farmers a few years ago, when Monsanto created soybean and cotton plants that were genetically modified to survive it. Farmers who planted these new seeds could use dicamba to kill weeds without harming their crops.

Farmers, especially in the South, have been desperate for new weapons against a devastating weed called pigweed, or Palmer amaranth. And some farmers even jumped the gun and started spraying dicamba on their crops before they were legally allowed to do so. (Dicamba has long been used in other ways, such as for clearing vegetation from fields before planting.)

The problem is, dicamba is a menace to other crops nearby. It drifts easily in the wind, and traditional soybeans are incredibly sensitive to it. "Nobody was quite prepared, despite extensive training, for just how sensitive beans were to dicamba," says Bob Scott, a specialist on weeds with the University of Arkansas's agricultural extension service.

Nuts have been with us, always

I am on the email list for Literary Review, but they mostly now just contain links to old reviews from their archive.  This one, though, by the late John Mortimer in 1997, talking about a sensational defamation trial in England in 1918, is very amusing.  Not sure that I have heard of the Pemberton Billing trial before.  Some extracts:

Reference was made throughout the proceedings to a mysterious German ‘Black Book’, which was said to contain the names of 47,000 prominent British homosexuals, lesbians and secret agents working for the enemy. The names included, it was said, Asquith, Margot Asquith, Lord Haldane and many others of the great and good. When a Mrs Villiers-Stuart (later imprisoned for bigamy) shouted, from the witness box, that the judge’s name was in the book, the proceedings reached a level of insanity beyond anything achieved by Mr Justice Cocklecarrot....

....Decadence, however that pejorative word is defined, is by no means synonymous with homosexuality.

Noel Pemberton Billing MP, of course, was sure that it was. He had been an actor, a barrister, the inventor of a ‘self-calculating pencil’ and a ‘flying boat’ which failed to take off. He had founded the Vigilante Society with an Admiral’s son called Henry Hamilton Beamish who believed that Britain was ruined by ‘Jewalisation’ and that the Jews were responsible for a quarter of the casualties in the war. The Vigilantes published a paper called the Imperialist, which announced ‘the existence in the “Cabinet Noir” of a certain German prince, a book which contains reports from the agents ‘who have infested this country for over twenty years’, agents spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute’.

Billing was anxious to spread his beliefs, not only to Parliament and the Press, but in the Courts of Law. His opportunity came when a private production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, a play banned from the public by the Lord Chamberlain, was proposed. The Vigilante carried a paragraph mysteriously worded ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ and went on: ‘To be a member of Maud Allan’s performances of Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta of 9, Duke Street, Adelphi, WC. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of members, I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000 [in the Black Book].’ Maud Allan charged Billing with criminal libel and he decided to defend himself at the Old Bailey.

Mr Justice Darling, a small, dandified figure, much given to flippant little jokes at which the Court was expected to laugh heartily, was caricatured by Max Beerbohm wearing a black cap with bells on it. He allowed the loud-voiced Billing, who stood with his monocle fixed in his eye and his arms crossed, to dominate the proceedings. Hours were spent discussing the contents of the Black Book which probably only existed in the fertile imaginations of Billing, his mistress Mrs Villiers-Stuart, and some other dubious witnesses....

The tone of the trial was further lowered by the evidence of the loathsome Lord Alfred Douglas, who attacked Wilde in general and Salome in particular. He also said that prime ministers, judges and ‘greasy advocates’ all conspired to ‘support perverts’. The judge and lawyers seemed too innocent for any such task. They had great difficulty in understanding the word ‘clitoris’ and the QC for the dancer-actress Maud Allan, apparently hearing the word ‘orgasm’ for the first time, asked if it meant some sort of unnatural vice.

I am reminded somewhat of one Graeme Bird, too.  

Update:  Something else has occurred to me:   our current nutty Right wing conspiracists are decidedly lacking in numerical specificity, compared to their predecessors.  Joe McCarthy's list of subversives was either 57 or 205, but it was a very specific either way.  These days, we just have to wonder how many are in Washington's Deep State: wingnuts don't cite a number, as far as I know.  Disappointing.

Yes, ban it

Interesting article at The Conversation asks the question whether pro-anorexia web sites should be banned or criminalised.

Not sure 100% sure whether criminalisation is the best response to removing them off the net, which should be the first priority, but can't say that I would have a moment's concern about an attempt to criminalise them. 

The article doesn't agree, and runs the odd argument that many women (well, it is much more common with women) end up at these sites because they already have an eating disorder and are looking for support.   But, of course, it's exactly the wrong sort of "support" that these people will get from a "pro" site.

Free speech ninnies can get lost, as far as I'm concerned:  Western society is not going to collapse because of legal interference with some websites (or their owners) who are clearly encouraging self harm of otherwise healthy people which is likely to end in death.   

A dreamy post

NPR has a post up talking about the scientific understanding of dreams, and it opens noting that Freud is not doing well in science circles:

"For 100 years, we got stuck into that Freudian perspective on dreams, which turned out to be not scientifically very accurate," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "So it's only been in the last 15 to 20 years that we've really started making progress."

Yet further down, it has a peculiar claim:

A number of Freud's observations about dreams are still relevant, even if his interpretations of them are less than scientific.

For example, he observed that certain dream elements are common, if not universal. Teeth, for example.

"A particularly remarkable dream symbol is that of having one's teeth fall out, or having them pulled," Freud wrote in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. He goes on to say that's usually a symbol for castration "as a punishment for onanism." The castration explanation may be off base, Baird says. But problems with teeth are, indeed, something many people report in their dreams. "It's weird," he says. "What has that got to do with anything?" Baird suspects we share many dreams like this because we share the same nervous system design, and many of the same anxieties.

I say peculiar, because I don't recall ever having an odd tooth related dream.

I would have thought that the more useful common dreams to mention would have been:   being accidentally nude, or somehow exposed, in public;  the "what - I have no idea how to answer these exam questions"  dream; and the "I can levitate if I really concentrate" dream.   All of which I think are common.  (OK - not certain about the last one - I think flying dreams are pretty common, but I have found that some people claim never to have had one.   The run of odd levitation dreams I was having really ran for a long time - and oddly, some involved trying to prove to other people that I was not dreaming.  Hence, waking up from them was particularly annoying, because in the dream I thought I had the video proof that would satisfy everyone, including myself, that it was real.)

Anyway, I like how the article notes this:

Dreams may be so hard to pin down scientifically because they are so closely related to consciousness, a concept that has bedeviled scientists and philosophers for centuries.

We all somehow know we are conscious. But it's been difficult to define precisely what consciousness is, let alone determine how it is generated by the brain.

Pleb who can't handle the truth

I don't usually bother much with reading Andrew Bolt's persistent foolishness on climate change, whereby other mere polemicists (Delingpole, Monckton) and a handful of contrarian science types are taken as knowing the Truth that All Other Scientists, Their Professional Bodies, and 90 Something Percent of Governments Just Won't Admit.

But I did today, and noticed this in comment with some amusement:

Heh.

Peter, Peter.  If you knew not to listen to Bolt, you wouldn't need correcting.

Back to McArdle

I see Megan McArdle's "let's not blame governments for the Grenfell fire - they were just acting as libertarians like them to act " column at Bloomberg has now reached nearly 2000 comments, with probably 95% of them ridiculing her.

As I noted in my previous post, it was pretty disingenuous of her to concentrate only on the issue of the cost of retrofitting fire sprinklers, when the more obvious problem was regulations regarding the cladding.   Does she really have to be reminded that if the cladding didn't burn, the entire building might not have gone up and the issue of sprinklers could have been much less important?

In any event, even her argument about sprinklers is looking shaky for two reasons:

a.   it is starting to look like the cost of retrofitting them is actually not as high as I would have guessed:

The British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association (BAFSA), the trade body for the fire sprinkler industry, said retrofitting Grenfell Tower with sprinklers might have cost £200,000. This is the figure for installing a sprinkler system but does not include potential maintenance fees or costs associated with the wider redevelopment of a building.

And another Council has already decided to retrofit 25 high rise blocks at a cost of ten million pounds.

b.   McArdle's argument - that every dollar governments spend on sprinklers would divert it from other life preserving things like hospitals - conveniently, and in a very libertarian/small government way, ignores government's ability to raise extra money for worthwhile things by raising extra taxes.  Oh noes - we can't have that.

Now, this is not to deny that there might still be a legitimate argument to be had, by appropriate experts, about cost benefit analysis of retrofitting sprinklers to certain buildings.  

But clearly, McArdle's position was to start from a presumption not only that it's always best to leave it to the market to decide (a silly thing to be talking about when these residents did not have market power - and also, to the extent that you could say the market, in the sense of builders quoting for a job, came up with a disastrous result on the cladding in this case); but that you should never be too tough on government for making decisions on a cost benefit basis, even when there is no evidence around that cost benefit was considered in this case.   (And, that in fact, money saved on public housing and other Council functions was given back to the well off in the Council!)

 

Skeptic win?

Back in 2010, and again in 2014, I posted about the very interesting parapsychology experiments of Daryl Bem, and it's time to look at how the work is viewed now.

Not all that well, apparently.  Slate ran a lengthy article about it a couple of weeks ago, but I think this commentary on it (taking a quite sympathetic approach to Bem personally) is better reading.

The argument is that it was all a problem with statistical analysis, and that it really set off the reproducibility crisis in the whole field of experimental psychology.  

The lack of replication is, obviously, a concern; but I wish I understood statistics a bit better to understand some of the arguments that rage about their appropriate use.

Brisbane's wooden high rise

I posted about this plan to build a 52 m high wood office building in Brisbane recently, and now The Guardian has a lengthy report about it.  (Probably prompted by renewed interest in how easily buildings can burn.)

While I think it's a very interesting project, there's one issue I have my doubts about - the claim that this type of wood building is definitely healthier for the workers.   The reason - the wood product used is actually a cross laminated material - timber sheets glued together - and I am curious as to whether the glue used slowly leaks any chemical into the air over time.

I could well be being overly cautious here - but it just seems to me that its likely to emit some smell, at least early in its life.

When Presidents tweet

Several American sites are noting that Trump's tweet re North Korea:

While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!

 is dangerously ambiguous.  As New York Magazine writes:

But if Trump’s tweet is just mindless bluster, that hardly makes it less unnerving. In their joint military exercises, the United States and South Korea have rehearsed preemptive strikes against North Korea, ones designed to kill Kim Jong-un before he has a chance to press the proverbial button. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis has warned that the implication of these exercises aren’t lost on Pyongyang: Kim knows “he has to go first, if he is to go at all.”

Just because savvy news consumers in the United States are comfortable assuming that Trump is merely talking trash doesn’t mean that North Korea is. In April, the president suggested that the day Beijing’s efforts to rein in Pyongyang failed would be the day that America took action against Kim Jong-un’s regime.

“Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you,” Trump told the Financial Times.

The fact that the American president is an emotionally volatile reality star — who publishes his foreign-policy musings directly to the internet — has always been dangerous. In the context of a military standoff with a nuclear-weapons state, it may prove fatally so.

They are right - and you would have to be completely foolish (as Trump supporters are) not to see the impropriety and danger in this idiot President tweeting to the world.

A happy Hollywood story

Here's a long interview with all-grown-up (and rather plumper and hairier) actor Haley Joel Osment.   As the interview makes clear, he had really good experiences in making a couple of very high profile movies as a child - and it sounds like sensible parents were an enormous part of that.

Of course, the fact that he worked with Spielberg on AI - a movie Osment and the interviewer both love (I think it is very under rated) - makes me particularly interested in him.