Comparing infinities

The somewhat mind boggling issue of comparing the size of different infinities is dealt with in more-or-less clear fashion in this Quanta article.  (It's about a recent mathematical discovery in this field.)

For the paranoid

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers -- breaking a long-held barrier and potentially enabling a vast array of interconnected devices.

Quite interesting, actually.  From Science Daily.

Movie noted

Hey, back in the 1980's I read a biographical book about Tesla (I'm not sure which one now, there have been so many), but I do remember thinking that the great AC/DC current wars between him and Edison could make for a pretty fascinating movie.

Today, I see that it has been done - with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Edison.

Of course, this is just the sort of movie that is likely to send me into great reveries about whether its historical inaccuracies are justifiable or not, but still, I hope it's good.

Something to look forward to

Alcohol Abuse Is Rising Among Older Adults

New word needed

I think there needs to be a specific word for the unpleasant feeling of half waking up from a dream in which you have missed an important deadline,  and not being sure if it was a dream or something from work a dream has alerted you to.  

Tim, I think this is up your alley.   Perhaps a German word combination?

Some Cold War history for a Sunday

I didn't know this:  the BBC ran a radio show up to 1974 (not sure when it started) in which they would read out letters from unidentified people in East Germany, detailing their life and suffering there.  This sent the East German secret police nuts, who went to extraordinary lengths to track down the writers:

The Stasi not only viewed the BBC as an enemy broadcaster, they specifically saw this programme as a form of psychological warfare aimed to destabilise the regime and incite resistance. They were convinced Harrison was an undercover spy, wooing agents in East Germany.

In the end it was the letter writers they really knuckled down on, and the Stasi were extraordinarily fastidious in their pursuit.

They took saliva samples from the licked envelopes to identify blood groups which they cross-checked with doctor's records. They traced fingerprints on the paper, sourced the ink and collated an extensive archive of handwriting samples. 

It was his handwriting that caught out Borchardt.

"It just seemed like an ordinary piece of homework," he says, when the pupils in his class were asked to write an essay describing themselves and their later goals in life.

"The thing is, my father thought I had such terrible handwriting he wanted my sister to write it up for me. He nearly got his way."

As ordered, the school passed the essays on to a Stasi agent. Documents show a painstaking analysis of every curve and stroke of Borchardt's pen, comparing it to the intercepted letters from the anonymous schoolboy.

Good news about our coming overlords

Clear your browser history and go read the Washington Post's lengthy story about the apparent turnaround in China getting most of its transplants from "volunteer" prisoners:

Thousands of organs were being harvested from executed prisoners every year, but over the course of a decade, Huang has garnered support at the highest levels of government and succeeded in pushing China’s medical establishment into dropping the often-lucrative practice.

Since 2010, Huang has slowly built the register of voluntary donors, who now meet the needs of patients who require transplants. Such a register is a breakthrough for China....

In true modern Chinese fashion, donors can sign up through a link and app available through the ubiquitous Alipay online payment system. More than 230,000 people have done so, and a computerized database matches donors with compatible potential recipients, alerting doctors by text message as soon as organs become available. 

Catholicism, but not as we know it

Oh look, an interesting post from Club Troppo.  (Doesn't happen often enough, these days.)

Paul Frijters looks at the demographic health of the Catholic Church, noting the decline in Europe and Australia, but the surprising growth in Asia and Africa.

According to the Catholic Church itself (which measures things partially on the basis of baptisms), its followers numbered 1.3 billion adherents by 2014 making Catholicism the largest religion on the planet and the largest branch on the tree of Christianity that holds about 2.2 billion adherents. Its strongholds in Latin America and Southern Africa are looking rock-solid, and conversion rates in the new centers of Asia (China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.) are looking very healthy indeed. Catholicism is by far the biggest and probably fastest growing of the Christian faiths.

This is all rather interesting for what it means about the future of the character of the Church.   I think African priests, coming from societies where belief in supernatural influence in daily life has not become foreign as it has in the West, are nearly always very conservative and very "by the book", in the way the Church used to be here prior to the 60's.  

What I am not sure about is the likely doctrinal character of Asian priests, particularly Chinese.   I don't think they are likely to be quite in the same ballpark as African ones, but I could be wrong.

Paul notes this about them:

It is, speaking as a pure outsider to these religious games, very interesting to see how successful the Catholic\Christian message is amongst the Chinese in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even in China itself. In Singapore, the proportion of Christians went up from 10% in 1990 to around 20% now, and a little under half of them are Roman Catholic.

 The multicultural aspect of Catholic congregations in many parts of Australia is something that I personally find very appealing about it.   But the cultural conflict between the doctrinally conservative and more liberal wings in Western countries is only likely to be exacerbated by the use of Africa (and possibly some Asian) priests here.

Suffer wingnuts

NPR on the big, big confusion and dismay from the wingnut Trumpsters as to whether Trump is really on their side or not.

Kind of a fun show, if he weren't already irredeemably the worst President the country has ever had.

Bad news

North Korea is ramping up the anti-Japan rhetoric while sending another missile over it.

South Korea is thinking about assassination - but the big mystery I guess is whether Kim's underlings would fight back hard in revenge, or give a sigh of relief that they have a chance at a less nutty leadership.

I'm very fond of both Japan and Samsung products.  We need to find a way to keep both.  

Ridiculously open to manipulation

According to the media, quite a few people are saying that they have received multiple same sex survey forms from ABS, because of previous residents who have failed to update their address on the electoral roll.   A fairly obvious problem with this ridiculously flawed idea.

Does anyone doubt that the greatest enthusiasm for participation in this exercise is from the "yes" side?   Hence I would expect that any potential to exploit flaws is more likely to be come from that side too, and for the results to be skewed "yes" for that reason.

That said, I do expect a properly done survey - like the government could have got Newspoll to do at a tiny fraction of the cost - would also come up with a Yes win - and probably by clear 5 to 10% margin.   (That's my guess, anyway.)

But honestly, there is really zero reason to think that this postal survey idea is going to be accurate, and no one will have any idea as to how accurate it is (apart from comparing it to existing polls - making the exercise completely wasteful.)

Peak pansy

Yes, we've all heard elements of this story before - drag queen balls in New York, gay nightclubs in Berlin and Paris - in the 1920's and into the 30's.   But this account of what the media (and participants) called "the pansy craze" is still pretty interesting.

I don't think I had heard of this particular song before:

Like New York, Berlin’s regular drag balls made it a popular destination for LGBT tourists. Yet many regarded this tolerance as a sign of the country’s decadence, and Hitler’s rise to power saw countless bars, clubs and cafes closed. Nazi stormtroopers tore the heart out of Berlin’s cabaret scene, arresting anyone deemed entartete: degenerate. Max Hansen, who recorded War’n Sie Schon Mal In Mich Verliebt? (Weren’t You Ever In Love With Me?), in which a drunk Hitler made passes at a Jewish man, had to make a quick exit from Germany, and other cabaret stars either followed or went back into the closet.

(American) Doctors and their dubious drugs

Interesting article at Business Insider:

The most respected medical journal in the US just eviscerated a drug that's cost taxpayers over $1 billion

I hate everyone

This same sex marriage issue, it continues to have the perverse effect of making me dislike everyone.  The latest:

*  I was calling the kerfuffle about the Safe Schools anti bullying program a moral panic from the Right last year, before Benjamin Law got around to writing his essay on the same theme and being treated like a rock star on Twitter for doing so.

* Despite it being a moral panic, that Roz Ward exaggerates massively on the issue and is a bit of a Marxist nutter who just helps feed the equally stupid Right wing conspiracists who think Marxists are the ones who have brainwashed everyone under 30 into no longer fearing or deriding homosexuals, as all right thinking people used to do.  (There's sarcasm in there.)   Does Law cover the exaggerations of Ward in his essay?  (Maybe he does.  If so, sorry.)

* I don't like the way people like Law make polite language and argument in one forum, then on Twitter or elsewhere on the net use use language or make poor taste jokes that, if you're going to use them at all (and it doesn't speak well of you if you do) should be kept private - because they should be seen as embarrassing.  

* I still think Law is way over rated as a writer of his TV show.  It's just not that good.

* I think both Pauline Hanson and Penny Wong are making massively self serving exaggerations in this report.  Pauline's just an annoying, dumb twit;   Wong is trying to shut down any argument from conservatives that, yes, they do rather think that its preferable for kids to know both of their genetic parents - and much of their objection to same sex marriage is motivated by the normalisation of the deliberate use of reproductive technology by gay couples that will in many cases involve the disconnect between kids and one of their biological parents.  That's not to say that Wong's kids will turn out bad - they have well off, smart middle class parents, they'll almost certainly be OK - and for that matter, it may well be that the fathers are in contact with the kids - but laws are about society wide preferences, not just those of individuals.    

Sounds a bit harsh

From The Japan Times, an article headed Nagoya: The most boring city in Japan sounds a bit harsh.  I'm not sure the writer has ever been to Akita, for example.  (I'm just teasing - sure, it's remote and has a very ageing population, but my wife and I also each ate an oyster the size of my fist at the fish market, as well as a big scallop grilled in butter and soy, and I liked the central park and giant mural, so I don't regret a day trip there.)

I've never stopped at Nagoya, but I work on the theory that any town or city (well, above a certain population threshold - perhaps 20,000?) is interesting at least for a day.

The energy issue

The fact that Steve Kates (and Sinclair Davidson) work at RMIT makes me deeply suspicious about the entire staff at that institution, but this other guy who is a "Senior Industry Fellow" (?) there is about 180 degrees from them when it comes to energy policy, and he makes this reasonable sounding point today in The Conversation:

Solar power is driving down daytime prices – which used to provide much of the income that coal plants needed to make a profit. Energy storage will further reduce the scope to profit from high and volatile electricity prices, previously driven by high demand and supply shortages in hot weather, or when a large coal-fired generator failed or was shut down for maintenance at a crucial time.

There is now plenty of evidence that the diverse mix of energy efficiency, demand response, energy storage, renewable generation and smart management can ensure reliable and affordable electricity to cope with daily and seasonal variable electricity loads. New traditional baseload generators will not be financially viable, as they simply won’t capture the profits they need during the daytime.

The government is now focused on AGL and how it will deliver 1,000 megawatts of new dispatchable supply. In practice, appropriate policy action would facilitate the provision of plenty of supply, storage, demand response and energy efficiency to ensure reliable supply. But the government is unable to deliver policy because of its internal squabbles, and AGL looks like a convenient scapegoat.

Some Florida Keys photos, at last

Finally, we're starting to get more photos of damage to the Florida Keys area.  Seems to have taken a while.

Bannon as wannabe fascist

I haven't watched the Bannon 60 Minutes interview, but I reckon Slate's William Saletan has got his measure:

Bannon fancies himself a teacher of history, policy, and strategy. But what he really teaches, by example, is the psychology of the fascist intellectual.

The term “fascism” is thrown around too casually by the left, as “socialism” is by the right. But fascism has a genuine meaning based on past cases, and you can see its themes in Bannon’s interview. Fascism’s core idea is allegiance to a leader in the name of national greatness. What distinguishes fascism from republicanism is how he responds to conflicts between the leader and countervailing principles or institutions. A republican welcomes such conflicts as ways to challenge and check the power of the executive. A fascist, perceiving these conflicts as obstacles to national unity, seeks to obliterate them and to consolidate power.

Bannon takes the latter approach.

Also at Slate, I reckon Jamelle Bouie is also right:

Steve Bannon’s Intellectual Reputation Is a Charade

His erudite-sounding arguments ignore facts and revise history to coincide with his nationalist worldview.

Jerry Pournelle noted

So, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle died a few days ago.  

By way of The Mote in God's Eye, which (unusually) my mother bought for me as a birthday gift when I was 16 or 17 on the recommendation of someone in a bookshop, I got back into reading science fiction as a young adult and that continued for a good decade or so.  I did follow Jerry Pournelle in that period, and think I have A Step Further Out, his collection of science fact articles, on my shelf.   It was a good example of relatively realistic techno optimism of the period. 

That said, I think his fiction really did reach an early peak with Mote, and unfortunately (at least after Inferno, which I also enjoyed)  I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with his collaborations with Niven, even the ones which were commercially successful (Lucifer's Hammer, for example.)   I forget the last one I tried, but I have never picked up the sequel to Mote, out of a fair degree of certainty that there were no grounds to be optimistic that they were suddenly good again.  His own novels were rather staid and not memorable.   Some of his anthology collections he edited were OK, though.  I remember enjoying one on black holes, when they were all new and the talk of science fiction.

As for his politics:   they were right wing, although where he fell on the libertarian/conservative spectrum was always a bit unclear.   He was a practising Catholic, I believe, but there was never any softening towards the Left as he aged.   Unfortunately, he did show clear signs of culture warrior sclerosis of judgement, as in the last decade he was easily persuaded by the pseudo skeptics of climate change, and seemed to me to be very soft on Trump.  Still, he contributed to quite a few years of science fiction enjoyment when I was a young man, and I thank him for that.

Yeah, thanks Putin

An article  at The Atlantic here, explaining the economic ties between Russia and North Korea, and Putin's reason why he's soft on the country.   (Basically just a "You try to push me around, and I'll stuff up your attempts to push them around.")