Cat amongst the physicists

Oh - Backreaction has a post up about Popper and particle physics and how it's all gone wrong.

Good read, even if she has an unreasonable dislike of phys.org as a website!

More thoughts random

*  I'm pretty busy this week, but I get the impression from Twitter and scanning the press that the Texas church shooting is not causing as much national grief in the US as from other mass shootings because:

a. American Conservatives have the idea that it's sort of holy to be shot during Church, and
b.American Progressives have the idea that it was probably a bunch of white folk who all supported the gun accessibility that led to their deaths,  so meh.

I could be wrong...

*  The Atlantic notes how Google publicises fake news and hoaxes after mass shootings.  Yes, finally, the world realises after the election of Trump, we have a misinformation problem.  

Honestly, I'm starting to feel at least half sympathetic to  the Chinese solution to misuse of the internet.   And if Alex Jones were locked up in jail until he promised to stop making absurd inflammatory claims - I for one would not shed a tear.   

*  I see that poor old Tom at Catallaxy thought it was a dead cert that the Texas killer was antifa.  Yet he thinks he knows so much more than the "leftard" media.  Gullible means never having to say you're stupid.

* I also see some pretty strong snark from Sinclair Davidson in a comment to a Steve Kates post about free trade and Trump.   It's time the whole blog was shut down, really. 

*  Oh, Tom at Catallaxy writes:  

JC, big slabs of the FBI are still Deep State never-Trumpers appointed under Obambi. FFS, Mueller as FBI director was the Clinton bagman who buried the investigation of Uranium One.
Everything I’ve seen in the past month tells me the FBI’s investigation of the Las Vegas shooter is a sham.

Uhuh.  Internet, paranoia, wingnuts.  It's a dangerous combination.  Good thing Tom keeps himself locked away in a shed and gets up at 3 am every day to find right wing cartoons for his fanclub.   What a life...

Random thoughts

*   Who invented crispbread, and it is old or new?   This crossed my mind as I enjoyed some from Germany on the weekend.   Wikipedia indicates that it's a Nordic thing, either 500 or 1500 years old (the article is confusing),  but the oddest thing is this:

It was made as round wafers with a hole in the middle so the bread could be stored on sticks under the roof.^[4]

Why under the roof??

*  Steven Kates is like the perfect example of my rule of thumb:  do not trust anyone's judgement if they used to be a rabid Left/Right winger and subsequently became a rabid Right/Left winger.   His cult membership of the Church of Trump now leads him to see nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all, with a President insisting that his Justice Department must prosecute his former political opponent (the chants of "lock her up" during the campaign - and after - presumably don't bother him at all).   He is completely gullible to anything he hears via Fox News or Breitbart, clearly does not look deeply into issues, and has no qualms if the US ends up a tinpot dictatorship, as long as it is Trump's.

*  Slate runs an opinion piece by someone arguing that the gay community condemning Spacey for using his "gay" disclosure when he apologised for what might have happened (OK - what almost certainly did happen) many years ago to the 14 years old who (unwisely) went alone to his party are actually feeding an unwarranted "gay pedophile" panic that used to just be confined to the heterosexual side.   That's a brave opinion, but I suspect it is more or less right, although complicated by the fact that further disclosures have indicated that Kevin has had appalling workplace gay sexual harassment history anyway, so he is far from deserving sympathy for anything.   But in the big picture, while there are probably figures out there somewhere, as I have said before, I suspect that the normalisation of the gay lifestyle in the West has probably lessened the amount of predatory behaviour towards youth, not increased it.   But, who knows, it could be a wrong guess.  (I mean, it sure could be argued that the sexual revolution obviously did nothing to decrease workplace sexual harassment in at least Hollywood through the 70's, 80's and 90's.   But is media a business especially prone to power plays in sex?)

*  Texas would probably be the State most likely to resist gun law changes regardless of the number of mass shootings that happen there.   It's sad and tragic, but I am sure there will be some sentiment around to the effect "well, what did you expect?"    And wingnuts will freak out about how insensitive it is to say such a thing.   The NRA will come out with a proposal for a new scheme for no sales tax for Churches buying guns for self protection, or some such thing...

Update:  what did I say about Texas?:

Asked by Fox News what can be done to stop the insanity and carnage that is happening time and time again in multiple shootings, Paxton  [Texas Attorney General] replied:

“This is going to happen again.”
I wish some law would fix all of this.”
“All I can say is in Texas at least we have the opportunity to have conceal carry,” he explained. “And so … there’s always the opportunity that gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many people.”

I see that it is reported that a local armed resident did fire at the guy - after he walked out of the Church leaving bodies everywhere.   Yeah, that helps:

Texas officials just held a press conference about the deadliest mass shooting in the state, and revealed that a local resident fired back at the shooter who killed 26 people at a small town church ... and then gave chase before the gunman was found dead.

A rep for the Texas Department of Public Safety gave a blow-by-blow account of what went down Sunday morning in Sutherland Springs, TX where a gunman opened fire at the First Baptist Church.

He says the gunman, reportedly ID'd as Devin Kelley, was dressed in all black tactical gear when he opened fire on the church -- using an AR assault-style rifle -- from the outside and then continued inside. When he walked out again, a local resident engaged him with his own rifle, causing the gunman to flee.

Thor viewed

Not being a fan of the more serious Marvel movies, I haven't seen the first two Thor movies.  (Well, I once  caught a bit of the first one on TV, and it seemed dull to me.) But Marvel comedy can be a lot of fun, and so it was off to see Thor: Ragnarok yesterday with my son.

We both liked it a lot.

The most surprising thing, really, is that the studio let director Taika Waititi have his way so completely in the use of his very distinctive voice, accent and humour in the character Korg.   I see from this article that Korg didn't actually have that much to do in the original script, but his role kept getting larger.  He is, without doubt, the funniest single thing in the movie.   (Funnier than the Goldblum role, actually.)

I liked the movie's visual style too.  It's not that I'm a fan of trippy fantasy art of the type sometimes found on surfer dudes vans in the 1970's (I think more than one review has referenced that style), but when it's done well in cinema, as it is here, it can be distinctive and memorable.  (The dreamy, short remembrance of the Valkyries on flying horses fighting Hela is perhaps a highlight of impressive CGI.)   And for all of the comedy, it did have some heart towards the end, rather in the same way the first Guardians of the Galaxy felt surprisingly serious in its opening with the death of Peter's mother.

So yes, a pleasing film that will be a major hit for all of the right reasons.

It also goes to show that you can film CGI heavy films anywhere - in this case,  the Gold Coast and Brisbane.  It is remarkable how little physical set needs to get built (see this article), but I  also wonder at the end of these movies about how much each special effects artist gets paid - hundreds scroll by, and even with a one or two hundred million dollar budget, it must get split up into pretty small fractions. 

As for the way Marvel has been not afraid to go into comedy, whereas DC Comics movies have such a dark reputation, I was amused by this in Christopher Orr's review:

...we now have Thor: Ragnarok, which is perfectly acceptable as an action movie but moderately inspired as a comedy. (This may well be the future of the entire superhero genre—see also: Spider-Man: Homecoming—which means that DC Comics and Warner Bros. will probably catch on in about five years.)

Having seen the shorts yesterday for the coming Justice League movie, it looks dour and only with the slightest laughs, as usual.   I have no interest in seeing it at all...

Trolleys and embryos

I see via And Then There's Physics, which led me to Michael Tobis's blog, which linked to another blog called Scary Mommy, which noted in a series of tweets in October by a science fiction writer called Patrick Tomlinson, that he had posed a trolley problem scenario with the alternatives being saving a 5 year old child or a vat of 1,000 frozen embryos.   (It's not exactly the same as the classic "trolley", since it just a question of which you save from the burning fertility clinic, given that you can't carry both.   It removes the issue of taking a positive action - throwing someone off the bridge, or hitting the switch to divert the train from one track to another - that will lead to the sure killing.)  The point is to show anti-abortionists that, at heart, they surely can't perceive embryos as every bit as worthy of "life" preservation as a person already living as an independent human.

I just mention this because I first thought "hey I came up with that idea maybe 4 or 5 years ago."  I noted here in 2015 that I had put the argument up at Catallaxy perhaps a couple of years previously.

But then I went back and noted that Tomlinson said he has been using the argument for about 10 years.  Oh well.  Another case of originality fail.

I still think it's a great argument.  

I don't like abortion, instinctively.  But I can clearly see that the religious argument that it is a case of life from fertilization that warrants the same protection as all human life makes no intuitive sense, too. 

Modern humans have been around a while

I don't find this topic all that interesting (it's a tad too complicated and rubbery, and I'm under no obligation to find every branch of science interesting, am I?), but a new paper in Science suggests an age range for modern humans that means they were stumbling around the place before building much for quite a long time:

Southern Africa is consistently placed as a potential region for the evolution of Homo sapiens. We present genome sequences, up to 13x coverage, from seven ancient individuals from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The remains of three Stone Age hunter-gatherers (about 2000 years old) were genetically similar to current-day southern San groups, and those of four Iron Age farmers (300 to 500 years old) were genetically similar to present-day Bantu-language speakers. We estimate that all modern-day Khoe-San groups have been influenced by 9 to 30% genetic admixture from East Africans/Eurasians. Using traditional and new approaches, we estimate the first modern human population divergence time to between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago. This estimate increases the deepest divergence among modern humans, coinciding with anatomical developments of archaic humans into modern humans, as represented in the local fossil record.

I see from various websites that the previous estimate was a mere 200,000 years, so this pushes it back somewhat. 

So, this is how the world ends?

Geez, I don't like sound of this:

Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA

Experts debate what amateur scientists could accomplish with the powerful DNA editing tool—and whether its ready availability is cause for concern

It's from Scientific American, and ends with an unknown number of DNA hacking scientists saying it's nothing to be to be too worried about: 

Finally, what about the nightmare scenario: Is CRISPR so easy to use that we need to worry about biohackers—either accidentally or intentionally—creating dangerous pathogens? Carroll and others think that the danger of putting CRISPR in the hands of the average person is relatively low. “People have imagined scenarios where scientists could use CRISPR to generate a virulent pathogen, ” he says. “How big is the risk? It’s not zero, but it’s fairly small.” Gersbach agrees. “Right now, it’s difficult to imagine how it’d be dangerous in a real way,” he explains, “If you want to do harm, there are much easier and simpler ways than using this highly sophisticated genetic editing technique.”

Scientists in fields like this have an incentive to downplay risk, so if they actually use words like "relatively low", it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence...

Won't be on the talk show circuit for a long, long time

Yet more details of workplace predatory harassment of (now former) talk show darling Kevin Spacey has come out:

Eight current and former employees of Kevin Spacey's show "House of Cards" have accused the actor of sexual harassment and, in one case, assault, CNN reports. A former production assistant alleges that Spacey sexually assaulted him during an early season of the show. Other accusers told CNN Spacey's behavior, including inappropriate comments and nonconsensual touching, was "predatory" and caused a "toxic" work environment.

I've never watched House of Cards, and I can't say that I have ever found Spacey an appealing screen presence (not just because he plays a bad character, either), so it's not as if this is shocking because I liked him before.   But he has been a popular figure with the audience whenever appearing on the likes of Colbert or other late night chat shows.  I expect it will be some years before we see him on one of those again.

But what does feel kind of shocking is that such behaviour, which has become so verboten in your average workplace for decades now, has not been addressed in such a high profile and (yes) largely liberal by reputation industry.   (Mind you, the culture around key figures at Fox News was clearly toxic as well, and so well tolerated that million dollar contracts were renewed.  Conservative media does not really have grounds to gloat.)   

It's just odd to think that, when young Ms Smith from accounts at a small company 30 years ago could (and often did) deal effectively with her predatory boss if she wanted to, entertainment industry folk have been putting up with it for many decades since then.

Gone, the revolution

I don't think there has been as much written in the media about the centenary of the October Revolution as I expected.

There wasn't a bad interview with a couple of experts on Radio National last night - but I am not sure who's show it was on.

There was one Guardian column about it a few days ago, but I can't quickly find it again.  I was sort of expecting that outlet to be overrun with quasi sympathetic articles , but it hasn't really happened.

I see that Henry Ergas has a column in The Australian:  I doubt it's all that interesting.  The Weekend OZ may well be full of conservatives decrying it:  we shall see.

So I'm down to noting a very lengthy review of Kotkin's two volume biography of Stalin in The New Yorker, which covers the Revolution succinctly, as well as Stalin's later actions, and it's a very good read.

One minor detail amuses, in the section which discusses signs early on that Stalin would become (shall we say) a problem:

They had had some intimations: they knew he could be rude, and they even knew he could be psychologically cruel. During his Siberian exile, he had briefly lived with Yakov (Yashka) Sverdlov, a fellow-Bolshevik and later the titular head of the Soviet government, but the two broke up house because Stalin refused to do the dishes and also because he had acquired a dog and started calling him Yashka. “Of course for Sverdlov that wasn’t pleasant,” Stalin later admitted. “He was Yashka and the dog was Yashka.”

 There are many bits of information in the review which I either didn't realise, or had forgotten when I last read a long review of a book on Russian history.   For example, after a brief summary of the Terror of the late 30's..:

The numbers are hard to fathom. According to the best current estimates, Stalin was responsible for between ten and twelve million peacetime deaths, including victims of the famine. But the most hands-on period of killing was the Terror of 1937 and 1938. At its height, fifteen hundred people were being shot every day. Most of the victims were ordinary citizens, caught up in a machine that was seeking to meet its quotas. But the Communist Party, too, was devastated—in many provinces, first secretaries, second secretaries, third secretaries all gone. Entire editorial staffs were erased. The officer corps of the Army was devastated. Five hundred of the top seven hundred and sixty-seven commanders were arrested or executed; thirteen of the top fifteen generals. “What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers?” Kotkin asks. “What regime, in doing so, could expect to survive?” Yet this one did.

there is this:

In addition to everything else the Terror did, it greatly weakened the country’s international position. Stalin’s justified fear of the coming war made this war only more likely. The French and the British, contemplating a stand against Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938, did not feel they could count on the now depleted Red Army. Worse still, the Terror made Stalin an unacceptable ally for the British in 1939. Kotkin shows that Stalin’s first choice in the months before the war was not Hitler but Chamberlain. He sent detailed terms to Britain for a military alliance. Chamberlain was not interested, and Kotkin, refusing the benefits of hindsight, doesn’t blame him. Stalin had just murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, staged show trials of his former comrades, and carried out purges of putative socialist allies in Spain. Hitler would eventually overtake him, but as of 1939 Stalin had killed more people by far. He was, as Kotkin says, “an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers.”

I didn't know about the approaches to Chamberlain.

The 20th century had a lot going on, to put it mildly...

Researching the vampire cure

Nature reports that a small study on infusing young blood into people with mild to moderate dementia has finished, and found some possible benefit, but it seems pretty slight.

The offspring remain safe from requests for blood, for now.  

Seriously...

Headline at Vox:

Rick Perry actually tried to argue that fossil fuels can help fight sexual assault

This is not the Onion.

Gay in Egypt

An interesting take on the matter of gay sex and gay identity in Egypt, and in Islam more generally, has appeared in The Spectator.  He starts by talking about the recent police arrest there of 60 allegedly gay men, found by scanning social media, and continues:

Obviously, that’s 60 too many. We should recall, though, that Egypt is a country of 95 million people, and those arrested mostly deny being gay. So either the police were not making much of an effort to round up the queers, or — more likely — there are in fact almost none in Egypt.

Of course, that’s not the same as saying that there are no Egyptian men who engage in gay sex.As someone who lived in the country for more a decade, is fluent in Egyptian Arabic and has written a book on the country that includes a chapter on male prostitution, I can testify quite emphatically that the exact opposite is true. And therein lies the rub, as it were.

Western correspondents filing dispatches about gay persecution in Egypt and the wider region are ignoring the more nuanced reality. Just as predictably, bigots determined to show how Islam restricts sexual freedom are also having a ball. But the latter especially are wide of the mark. The Koran singles out sex between men as a transgression, but uniquely in the Islamic holy book, proscribes no punishment. And there must be four independent witnesses to the act of anal intercourse (all other forms of gay sex seem to have escaped Allah’s attention). So it’s just a warning not to have sex in the middle of the street. Even then, for those caught, social rehabilitation is encouraged.  

Not sure if the author counts himself as bi or gay, but he certainly gives the impression that he thinks the far from unusual inclination of young arab men to want to bed attractive young guys (while simultaneously chasing women) is quite OK:

In Tunisia, two friends came round for dinner. A Justin Bieber special started on the cable TV channel, and I reached for the remote to turn it off. ‘What are you doing?’ one of them screamed. ‘Leave it on — that boy is so do-able.’

As with the Saudi, the Tunisians had not given any indication that they were ‘gay’. In fact, they spent the rest of the evening using my computer to chat with a French women one had hooked up with a few months earlier when she was holidaying there. Like most of the young, unmarried Arab men I befriended over the decades, they knew a gorgeous boy when they saw one, but would have considered it absurd to attach to such desire an all-consuming social identity symbolised by the rainbow flag.....

The commotion will blow over and Egyptian boys, like Arab boys everywhere, will get back to banging each other like rabbits as they have been doing for millennia. It would take more than the rantings of an MP to eradicate such a deeply entrenched tradition. The golden rule, though, will remain: discretion is the name of the game. And that’s the lesson the rainbow flag activists should now take on board.

 I'm sure that this pragmatic attitude (you can do gay stuff, but just keep it discrete) is considered appalling by Western gay activists who are all consumed with the importance of gay identity.  And I can understand the objection when gay identity can mean risking jail.    But I wonder if, in the long run, there will be a move back in the West towards the more ancient view that gay sex didn't have to equate with gay identity?

A late for Halloween story

At Catholic website Crux, the story of the Curse of St Peter.  Rather like an early, papal version of the Curse of Tutenkamun, actually.   

Opioids and libertarians, again

Jonah Goldberg in National Review makes some sense:

Think of the opioid crisis as the fruit of partial legalization. In the 1990s, for good reasons and bad, the medical profession, policymakers, and the pharmaceutical industry made it much easier to obtain opioids in order to confront an alleged pain epidemic. Doctors prescribed more opioids, and government subsidies made them more affordable. Because they were prescribed by doctors and came in pill form, the stigma reserved for heroin didn’t exist.

 

When you increase supply, lower costs, and reduce stigma, you increase use. And guess what? Increased use equals more addicts.

A survey by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one-third of the people who were prescribed opioids for more than two months became addicted. A Centers for Disease Control study found that a very small number of people exposed to opioids are likely to become addicted after a single use.

The overdose crisis is largely driven by the fact that once addicted to legal opioids, people seek out illegal ones — heroin, for example — to fend off the agony of withdrawal once they can’t get, or afford, any more pills. Last year, 64,000 Americans died from overdoses. Some 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War.

Kevin undone

Gee, if the account of Kevin Spacey's tactics for chatting up/groping men at news.com.au today is accurate, the long standing feeling from interviews that he is, well, creepy seems very justified. 

If he were to admit they are true, the only way I can see Spacey try to defend himself would be to argue that gay men have always been more blunt and direct when seeking sex (which would be true) - but it is refreshing to see that younger gay men are prepared to come out now and say that they don't welcome power plays in sex, just as women don't.   Acknowledging that gay men can be as sleazy as straight men is, in an odd way,  a good thing for normalising attitudes towards gay folk, as I can't help but feel that there has been an exaggeration implicit in the promotion of same sex marriage that everything is fine in the world of gay relationships apart from that issue.  For other human issues relating to relationships and decent behaviour to be acknowledged from the community is therefore a good thing.    

Convictions noted

That Western Australian case of the two nutty women who murdered an 18 year old Asperger's guy for a thrill kill has resulted in their conviction, as was entirely predictable.   Their attempts at blaming each other were exceptionally implausible. 

CCTV footage showed the teenager leaving the shops with the accused pair and security footage from their home showed the three entering the Broughton Way house around 10.30am.

"Mr Pajich did not ever emerge from that house alive," state prosecutor James McTaggart said in his opening address to the jury....

Mr Pajich's body was discovered around a week later buried in the pair's backyard garotted with multiple stab wounds to his chest and neck.

The home's loungeroom had a large section of carpet cut out, concealed by a couch, and police found multiple blood stains and knifes at the property.

Both women denied murdering Mr Pajich and blamed each other.

Lilley claimed she was unaware Mr Pajich had been killed and that Lenon must have murdered him and concealed the crime while she was taking a three-hour nap in the next room.

Lenon however admitted witnessing Lilley stab Mr Pajich to death, claiming she helped conceal the crime out of fear.

Bear in mind this:

Both originally lied to police and told detectives they had not seen Mr Pajich the day he went missing but later admitted he had visited their home.

During the trial, the jury heard how Lilley was obsessed with serial killers and knives, and had told a friend she wanted to kill someone before she turned 25.

She often referred to herself as SOS, a serial killer character she created for a book she wrote as a teenager in 2007.... 

Lilley, who took the stand for five days during the trial, claimed messages between her and Lenon about killing someone were role-play for a new book she was writing.

She claimed she was in character when she wrote Lenon a long message 13 days before the murder.

"I feel as though I cannot rest until the blood or the flesh of a screaming, pleading victim is gushing out and pooling on the floor, until all the roads and streets are streamed red and abandoned, and the fear in the back of everyone's minds and on the tongue of each human that's left standing is SOS," it read.

"I cannot shift this belief that the world has become not only ready for me, it needs me to be ready."

Lenon replied: "It's definitely time. I am ready. You are ready".

They should stay in jail for a very long time.  Preferably til dead...

Yet more murder

Gruesome murder is back in the news again this week.

I don't think that a likely serial killer in Japan is getting quite as much publicity as I expected.   Seems to have been pushed out of the headlines a bit by the goings on in Washington.  

Update:  the details appear to involve a very (sad to say) Japanese set of circumstances, involving loneliness, social media, suicidal desire, the quasi romantic (well, to some people - women especially perhaps) idea of doing it with someone else, and even the suggestion of disturbing sex.  Just awful:

Police suspect Shiraishi found suicidal women on the Internet and pretended that he also wanted to kill himself, posting, “Let’s die together.”

After they showed up, he invited them to his apartment where he killed them and took about 500,000 yen ($4,390) in total from the bodies, according to police.

Further information on his “obscene purposes” was unavailable.

According to police, the first victims were an unmarried couple.

In August this year, Shiraishi had a meal with the couple with whom he had become acquainted through Twitter.

On a later day, he invited the woman to his apartment, where he killed her, according to police.

The woman’s male acquaintance, unable to contact her, asked Shiraishi if he knew where she was. Shiraishi also invited him to the apartment and killed him, police said.

Shiraishi told police he killed most of the nine people when he met them in person for the first time.
Some of the nine people had posted suicidal messages on the Internet, and Shiraishi promised to meet them directly after exchanging messages online.

The Black Death (or sickness, at least)

I don't mind licorice, but don't eat it often.   I had read before that eating large amounts was not good for your health, but Vox explains in more detail:

According to the Food and Drug Administration, if you eat 2 ounces of black licorice — the equivalent of about four Twizzler vines — daily for at least two weeks, you could wind up in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat or even heart failure. 

That’s a lot of licorice — maybe more than most licorice lovers eat in a day. But the FDA is onto something: Licorice root contains a medically active compound called glycyrrhizin acid, and researchers have been discussing its potential health complications for years. Glycyrrhizin can elevate a person’s blood pressure, leading some to experience abnormal heart rhythms, lethargy, even congestive heart failure. Glycyrrhizin can also interfere with other medications and supplements, the FDA warned.

“No matter what your age, don’t eat large amounts of black licorice at one time,” the agency said, adding that people over 40 with a history of heart disease or high blood pressure seem to be most at risk of black licorice-related health complications.

Speaking of other teams...

Time to let the other team try

I still find Malcolm Turnbull likeable as a person, with his steadfast cheerfulness while the evidence continues to pile up around him that he and his Ministers are, shall we say, basically incompetent at this thing called "governing".  

So, seriously, isn't it time for an umpire or someone (electorate of New England, hello?) to tell him and his team that it's really time to take a break and give the other team, who could hardly do any worse, a go?   I mean, it just gets embarrassing after a while, watching the flaying about.