Christmas Greetings 2017

Policing the internet

Japan takes trying to intervene in suicide talk online pretty seriously:

In the wake of the recent high-profile killings and dismemberment of people who expressed a desire to commit suicide, the government announced measures on Dec. 19 to help those posting such thoughts on social networking services.

The Internet Hotline Center Japan (IHC), which is under contract with the National Police Agency, is expected to monitor such comments related to suicide beginning in January 2018 at the earliest.

Currently, the IHC monitors illegal data publicized on the Internet including obscene images, child sexual abuse images and advertisements on controlled substances and reports them to police.

Comments from those who express a desire to die will be included in the items reported to law enforcement.

Furthermore, the government will entrust other private organizations to keep close tabs on such postings on the Internet.

When such comments are posted and specific information including the date, time and place of the suicide attempt is learned through such measures, police will contact the poster and encourage them to talk with staffers who can provide support.

What's going on?

I see that Last Jedi criticism seems to be coming disproportionately from Right wing sites - even Ross Douthat is having a go at it!   Is the "fan backlash" influenced by the current culture wars?

But because I don't know when I can get to see the movie, I can't read into this yet.  I'm just looking at the start of articles...

In today's conspiracy news

Poor old CL:   he used to write well crafted conservative commentary at his blogs (since deleted).   Then he started living only in Catallaxy threads, the mutual support network for increasing stupidity, which has eaten into his brain, and lets him say what is really rattling around in his conspiracy laden head:

I've noticed this yearning evident in the conservative Catholic commentary lately for an actual violent physical fight over what is essentially a culture war.   Or at least, as evidenced in the recent writings of Philippa Martyr, a desire that "true" Catholics will soon start to be physically persecuted, so they can show their real mettle and die (or spend their time in jail?) defending the Catholic teachings that most Catholics have in fact moved on from.

It's a very strange time.

Didn't expect this...

MANILA – Firebrand President Rodrigo Duterte has said he wants same-sex marriage legalized in the Philippines, a move that would bring him into conflict with the dominant Roman Catholic Church.

Duterte, a longtime critic of the church which counts about 80 percent of Filipinos as followers, made the remarks in a speech before the LGBT community in his southern home city of Davao late Sunday.

“I want same-sex marriage. The problem is we’ll have to change the law. But we can change the law,” he said to wide applause.

“The law says marriage is a union between a man and a woman. I don’t have any problems making it marrying a man, marrying a woman or whatever is the predilection of the human being,” he added.
Divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage are still illegal in the Philippines due largely to the influence of the Catholic Church.

But Duterte, who took office in mid-2016, has actively attacked the church, accusing the clergy of sexual abuses and hypocrisy.

Spotted in The Japan Times.

Just another day in a Republican household

Truck dispute, handgun: throw in an unwanted pregnancy and you'd have the perfect cliche for a high profile redneck fight:

The elder son of former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been charged with assault and burglary in a violent confrontation with his father in which the two men struggled over a handgun at his parents’ Alaska home, court records showed on Monday. 

According to the criminal complaint and supporting documents, Track Palin, 28, broke through a window of the house in Wasilla, Alaska, and scuffled with his father, Todd Palin, on Saturday night in a clash that stemmed from a family dispute over a truck.

This is annoying

So many people have already seen The Last Jedi that lots of websites are opening up spoiler discussion threads.   And I see there are some articles saying that some fans are reacting against the film.  But I don't know why.

I can't read any of this yet, for fear of spoilers.  I'm not even going to look at Reddit until I have seen the movie.  

What's a President to do when his top two advisers are in conflict?

That's from the Washington Post, by the way.

Impulse control

And you thought people getting gastric band operations was a pretty extreme way to fight obesity:

Picture this: While reaching for the cookie jar — or cigarette or bottle of booze or other temptation — a sudden slap denies your outstretched hand. When the urge returns, out comes another slap.

Now imagine those "slaps" occurring inside the brain, protecting you in moments of weakness.

In a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford neuroscientists say they've achieved this sort of mind-reading in binge-eating mice. They found a telltale pattern of brain activity that comes up seconds before the animals start to pig out — and delivering a quick zap to that part of the brain kept the mice from overindulging.

Whether this strategy could block harmful impulses in people remains unclear. For now the path seems promising. The current study used a brain stimulation device already approved for hard-to-treat epilepsy. And based on the new findings, a clinical trial testing this off-the-shelf system for some forms of obesity could start as early as next summer, says Casey Halpern, the study's leader and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. He thinks the approach could also work for eating disorders and a range of other addictive or potentially life-threatening urges.

Look, if the only way this could work is putting electrodes into the brain, it's not going to be a common operation.

More detail on a credible UFO sighting

On the weekend, when I posted about the Pentagon UFO research story, I should have linked to this associated report at the New York Times in which a former Navy pilot explains the very strange UFO sighting in 2004.   It appears that it was visual and radar - just about the most interesting UFO encounters there are, as well as the pilots thinking it was affecting the water beneath it.   The video of the aircraft camera is not as impressive as one might hope, though, in that the object looks a bit fuzzy edged.  But then right at the end, it seems to zip off at high speed.  

I see some people are saying that the sighting was over the Pacific but not so far from a "Skunk Works" base, meaning they suspect it is advanced, human made, propulsion technology.   Could be, I suppose, but very fascinating even if that is the explanation.

I had thought when I posted initially that the two videos had been released before, but seems I was wrong about that.   I really want to know more about them.   Why does the second video in the article, this one:



end so abruptly?   In fact, I'm not even clear what year this one was.

A hoax of some kind remains a possibility, but the pilot speaking to the NYT and having his photo in the article makes that seems pretty unlikely.
  

I could have danced all night...

Cadavers in the ballroom

That's a headline you don't see every day.

It's at Reuters, and it is a rather surprising story:

Big names in hospitality, from Disney to Hilton and Hyatt, have a little-known sideline: They rent space to physicians who train on cadavers and body parts. There is scant regulation, and some public-health specialists warn of biosafety risks. 

More detail in the opening paragraphs:

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida – Just outside the operating theater, the organizers of a medical conference wore Minnie Mouse ears.

Inside, as doctors practiced on three cadavers, blood from one of the human specimens seeped through a layer of wrapping.

“They leak,” a lab technician said of the bodies.

The sessions, held last month and attended by a Reuters reporter, weren’t at a hospital or medical school. They were part of a so-called cadaver lab – and the setting was a Florida resort. It was one of scores of such events over the past six years that have been held at a hotel or its convention center.

In this case, doctors practiced nerve root blocks and other procedures on cadavers in one of the Grand Harbor ballroom’s salons at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts convention center. Online, Disney refers to its ballrooms as “regal and resplendent.” They’re often used for wedding receptions. 

Disney did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Mickey has blood on his shoes?

Easily thrilled

From an Australian perspective, this is a very odd headline and story at Gulf News:

Hailstorm thrills children in Dubai

Students of GEMS Our Own Indian School in Al Quoz were thrilled to see pellets of hailstones falling down all over their campus, the school’s principal Lalitha Suresh confirmed to Gulf News.

"Yes. The kids were really enjoying the hailstorm," she said.

 Many children were out in the school ground for the sports day selection procedures when it started raining.

"We were having our shotput finals. It was drizzling. Suddenly hailstones started pouring down. We were so excited. I was able to collect some hailstones in my hands. Then we were told to disperse and rush to class," said Julie Francis, a grade eight student.

Suresh said the sports day selection was postponed due to the rains.

"Kids started playing in the water also. You know they never get to play in water. We really had to manage the children. Anyway, we didn’t have any damage in the school."

I guess a tornado would thrill them even more...

Douthat trying too hard

Ross Douthat really tries too hard sometimes to find something like what he thinks is "balance" - such as today's column saying the defeat of ISIS is a Trump "win", and then criticising mainstream media for not acknowledging this.

The flaws in the argument are within the column itself - and many comments ridicule Ross:

And yet, there are a few comments from Trumpkins who think that Donald really won the war by unleashing the power of the American military, or some such guff.   They live in a world created purely by their own bubble of right wing punditry.

Long term problem for Bitcoin and blockchain

I wondered over the weekend whether the development of quantum computing was going to be a problem in the long term for Bitcoin, and the answer seems to be "yes".   See this recent article at MIT Technology Review, but there are others.  (They do suggest that changes can be made to make it "resistant" to quantum computing, but I wonder if quantum computing is going to win the race in the long run.  Which would make all the energy being used on current mining a true waste.)

Speaking of Bitcoin and blockchain, I noticed this amusing tweet on the weekend:

Galactic empires discussed

Via Peter Whiteford's fantastic twitter feed, a link to a review (a few month's old, but still) of a John Scalzi book, which is most interesting for its opening description of the common theme of galactic empire science fiction:

ACCORDING TO Donald A. Wollheim, Golden Age science fiction typically imagined the future would unfold according to a certain pattern:

1. humans explore and colonize the solar system;
2. humans explore and colonize extrasolar planets;
3. a Galactic Federation/Republic/Empire emerges;
4. the Empire enjoys a peak period characterized by a stable metropole in the galactic center (however constituted) and ongoing exploration at “the Rim”;
5. this peak period is followed by decadence and collapse;
6. the collapse is followed by a Dark Age (of whatever length);
7. a second Empire is established that is imagined to be perfected and permanent;
8. and, finally, the people of the future undertake The Challenge to God: sometimes this literally culminates in overthrowing some sort of malevolent God Thing, while at other times it involves innovating some way to survive the heat death of the universe (or evolving into energy beings of pure light, et cetera).

From Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas (and on and on), one discovers this basic narrative recurring over and over again in science fictional narratives about the human “destiny” to inherit the stars. 

[Speaking of reviews and science fiction-y writing, I also saw that The Australian yesterday put on its twitter feed a link that actually worked to a review of Helen Dale's Kingdom of the Wicked: the first mainstream media review I have seen.   (At Amazon, women who writes at The Spectator sometimes, as does Dale, complains that reviewers are deliberately ignoring the book because they are all Lefties still wanting to punish her for the Hand That Signed the Paper hoax.)    Anyway, the review is not good.
 Update:  I see now that a short, negative, review has also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.  I found that via a tweet on Dale's own twitter feed.  She also indirectly referenced The Australian's review.  Yet I am sure she said somewhere that she doesn't read mainstream reviews, after her experience with HTSTP.] 

Listening in from a distance

Readers probably have already seen the various reports that some scientists decided to turn a radio receiver towards that elongated asteroid now heading out of the solar system, just in case it was a spaceship or something artificial.

I meant to post this part of that story, because it says a lot about the sensitivity of radio telescopes:

Breakthrough Listen announced Monday that the program will start checking ‘Oumuamua this week for signs of radio signals using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The interstellar asteroid is now about twice the distance between the Earth and the sun from our planet, moving at a brisk clip of 38.3 kilometers per second. At this close distance, Green Bank can detect the faintest frequencies. It would take the telescope less than a minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a cellphone. If ‘Oumuamua is sending signals, we’ll hear them.

And here's a report on the first results:

The first batch of four observations ran from 8.45pm UK time on Wednesday until 2.45am on Thursday morning and spanned a frequency range from 1 to 12 GHz. While the search for alien signals has so far found nothing in the 1.7 to 2.6GHz range, the rest of the data is still being processed.

Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley Seti Research Center, told the Guardian that a review of all four bands observed Wednesday night had come up blank. “We don’t see anything continuously emitting from ‘Oumuamua,” he said. “We’re now digging into some of the intermittent candidates, and trying some new machine learning-based techniques we have been working on. We expect our next observation window to be scheduled for Friday or Saturday, when we should get a view of additional phases of ‘Oumuamua as it rotates.”

A very UFO Christmas

Just when we all thought all genuine UFO research had been made redundant by the plague of floating fire lanterns, flares, rocket launches/re-entries, meteors and (now especially) cheap LED drones which have probably been behind 99% or more of claimed sightings over the last 20 years, the New York Times reports that the Pentagon says it funded new research into them from 2007 to 2012.

The big catch:  it seems it was mainly a subcontract with Robert Bigelow, who came to the project already with complete belief that we have alien visitors.   As someone in comments to the story says:

A billionaire with a secret govt. contract does not help the credibility of this program

And it's true, part of what they were doing is what I've long considered the least credible line of UFO research, as it has followed dead ends so many times I didn't think anyone took it seriously:

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.

Also, Harold Puthoff got involved.  I really don't think it helps Bigelow to be taken seriously when he gets on board the guy who had convinced himself Uri Gellar was psychic.  (Mind you, I still find some things reported about early Gellar puzzling.) 

And yet - some of the details in the story are still surprising.   First - why don't I remember the video in the article showing something with clear edges (although with an apparent glow around it) rotating and puzzling the military pilots?

Secondly, what about this?:

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

But the ending doesn't all that inspiring.  The one guy in the Pentagon who used to look after such research (I hope his office looked like Mulder's in X Filers) has resigned, but it now talking up a commercial venture:

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.  In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

I find this all rather puzzling.   If some modern military video/radar cases are truly inexplicable, why wouldn't the top end of the Pentagon and government admit it?   God knows, if Trump had been told UFOs were real, we would have heard about it on his Twitter feed by now.  Maybe childish hints along the lines "I've just been told the biggest secret ever by someone - I can't say who, but he wore a uniform - and it's huge.  Really huge."  

Is it a case that if something is inexplicable, someone just files it away as "interesting" and it doesn't really get followed up?  And Presidents who ask are told "we don't think it's anything to worry about, Mr President"?

China and the libertarians

One of the reasons I am reluctant to go onto Twitter is because it often drives me nuts not understanding clearly what people think when they link to something with scant comment about it.  If I was able to respond tweet, I would have the urge to frequently try to clarify the degree to which they approve of the material, or challenge support which appears inconsistent with other views, or out of character, or whatever.

Case in point:  yes, it's J Soon time again.   Having linked to an interesting article about how the Chinese are actively taking Africans to teach them about the Chinese system of government and development,  I know from other tweets that Jason is not exactly a fan of Chinese influence in other countries.   Yet he also is supportive of the moderate libertarian position of less US involvement internationally, at least militarily.  As a generic fan of smaller government, I don't imagine he is all that impressed with government supplied international aid to poor countries.   International effort to reach agreements on CO2 decrease seems to carry little interest, too:   I don't think he cares at all about the Trumpian withdrawal from that (quite vital) field of international effort.

(Sorry to speak of you in the third person, Jason.  Please correct anything in comments.)

And yet - isn't following those views an actual, active encouragement for a liberty challenged superpower like China to fill in the voluntarily created void by Trump and his libertarians quasi supporters in international influence in the developing world?

I'm not exactly a fan of China's political, legal or social system either - except that I think that it is an example of  development which actually shows up how economists like the woeful bunch at Catallaxy are wrong - there is not one way for making rapid economic advancement, and the (even quite heavy) hand of government involvement is not always a poisonous path to socialist collapse.   (I would think a similar thing can be said about South Korea; and to a lesser extent, perhaps, the Scandinavian countries.) 

I was reading Science magazine this morning (go on, subscribe for just $55 a year) and noted how there are pages and pages of advertisements encouraging scientists to come work in Chinese universities and technical institutions.   Again - a nation taking science and development really seriously, while America reverts to nonsense culture war refusal to believe in it, and the libertarians there just shrug their shoulders and go "well, what can ya do?" 

So yeah, I would like to know how Jason squares the circle around this.   The way I see it, if you're a small government libertarian, you're part of the problem of letting China take the place of Western influence.

I think there may need to be a category above "First World problem" for this...

At NPR:

Avocado Hand Injuries Are Real. Is A Seedless Fruit The Answer?

The flesh of the seedless avocado in the photo looks as pale and unappealing as a cucumber.   Seriously, Western people who can't cut an avocado without lobbing off a hand:  are you actually growing so useless that the idea of living in a Matrix-like wet pod while you have your nutrition pumped into you seems like a good idea?

The story the world was [not] waiting for...

Wow.   Talk about The Guardian scraping the bottom of the music journalism barrel to come up with this:

Can't stand the song; couldn't stand the group.