Blockchain skepticism in detail

When it comes to reading the stuff being put out by Berg, Davidson and Potts (key line - don't get too distracted by Bitcoin, the real revolution coming is glorious blockchain) I've never got over the feeling that it was pretty vacuous waffle that didn't make much sense.

Hence it gives me pleasure to read this great piece of blockchain skepticism by Roubini and Byrne in The Guardian today.   They make clear much of what I always thought was obvious, yet seems to never be addressed (or at least, in a way I can understand) in the RMIT conference machine material.

Strange choices

Have the Oscars become unimportant because the Academy has become more and more peculiar in its choices?   It would seem that the big winner (so far, I was just watching some of it during my lunch) is The Shape of Water, the "adult fairy tale" featuring a sexy love story between a woman and what looks like a slightly more human Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Being underwhelmed by the director's Pan's Labyrinth, and given the nature of the story, I am in no hurry to watch this movie at all.   As, I suspect, is most of the public.  I see now that it had a December release in the USA, and has made a relatively paltry $57 million.   (I'm surprised it made that much.)

I am particularly miffed that Shape took the award for best score, when I had predicted that Dunkirk should definitely get it.

Update: yes, it won best picture.   Ugh.

At some point, hopefully if it is free on a streaming service, I will watch it hoping to confirm my anticipatory dislike.

Update 2:  I hadn't really bothered to read reviews of it before, but I see that Rex Reed wrote one  with the pleasing title ‘The Shape of Water’ Is a Loopy, Lunkheaded Load of Drivel.'

Hero revisionism

Reading this story gives a good picture of how terrifying being involved in a US school shoot up must be for both students and teachers.

In brief - at least a couple of Florida students are saying that a teacher formerly called a hero in the media didn't seem very heroic to them when they were caught in the corridor and he (perhaps following procedure technically correctly?)  refused to let them back in the classroom.

I'm not sure who's right or wrong, to be honest, but you can imagine that causing some disruption in the school for some time afterwards.

Opioids can cause extra pain - huh

I didn't know this.  From the start of an article at NPR:

When patients arrive in the emergency room, nearly all but those with the most minor complaints get an IV.

To draw blood, give medications or administer fluids, the IV is the way doctors and nurses gain access to the body. Putting one in is quick and simple, and it's no more painful than a mild bee sting.

Yet for some patients, this routine procedure becomes excruciating. On my shifts as an emergency physician, I began to notice a strange pattern. These hypersensitive patients often had a history of using opioids.

Shouldn't these patients be less susceptible to pain, instead of more so?

As I looked into it, I found that I was far from the first to notice the paradox of heightened pain sensitivity with opioid use. An English physician in 1870 reported on morphine's tendency to "encourage the very pain it pretends to relieve." In 1880, a German doctor named Rossbach described a similar hypersensitivity to pain with opioid dependence.

A century passed before the phenomenon received serious scientific attention. 

Turns out it is still not well understood.  Read the whole thing.

Disliking Stephen King

My son wanted to watch the recent movie version of Stephen King's It. 

Now, as I may have mentioned before, I have found one - just one - adaptation of Stephen King material which I liked:  The Shining.   And I like that a lot.  But from what I have read, it's almost in spite of the novel that it turned out to be a great movie.  (King himself doesn't like it!)   But every other King inspired mini series or movie I've seen has not impressed.  I didn't even care for Stand by Me, his (only?) non horror work, when I saw it at the cinema decades ago.  (Too much overwrought acting, and characters that I don't recall being all that sympathetic.)

So, would this reasonably well received movie change my mind - especially since I had not watched the earlier adaptation of it, and was therefore coming to it without preconceptions.  

No.   A hundred times no.  

Look, I know you have to make allowances for certain conventions in ghost or horror stories - the most obvious being nervous people walking into darkened rooms/haunted houses/sewer systems that look more appropriate for New York than a country town, when every normal person would run away or at least go in prepared - but it can be pushed so far that it just becomes ridiculous, and so it is, repeatedly, in this movie.

Apart from that, was King himself bullied at school and dislike his parents, because now that I think of it, meanness of kids to other kids, and incompetent or nasty parents, seems to be a feature of a lot of his stories.  The kid on kid meanness is a very big component in this movie, but it doesn't seem to have any context.  It's just there.

The movie reminded me at times of the two other King movies mentioned above - but the use of gushing blood in this one was (sorry to use the word again) ridiculous, as to opposed to malevolent, as it was in The Shining.

Overall, I found it an unpleasant, silly and non-scary story - so very conventional in the way the scary music would start, and even managing jump scares which didn't scare.   

And it convinces more than ever that King is a puzzlingly over-rated creative force.

In nerdy construction news...

Hey, look what I saw yesterday:

Why's this interesting?  Because it's the start of the 10 level office building being built in Brisbane using engineered wood.   (OK, well there's concrete involved at the bottom, obviously, but most of it is meant to be wood.)

I wrote about it in previous posts here and here.   Interesting, no?  (It just is, shut up.)

In more Trump tariff news...

*   Yes, another network confirms what Jonathan Swan told us the other day - that Trump was going off his nut on the night he decided to start a trade war.   (Maybe Kelly made sure the nuclear codes were kept out of the room for a few hours.):

According to two officials, Trump's decision to launch a potential trade war was born out of anger at other simmering issues and the result of a broken internal process that has failed to deliver him consensus views that represent the best advice of his team.
On Wednesday evening, the president became "unglued," in the words of one official familiar with the president's state of mind.

*  I am waiting for the Steve Kates, Trump sycophant extraordinaire,  to explain to the world why it's actually not a bad idea idea at all.   Or is that a challenge too far even for him?   (I'm suspecting he'll go with a "but every single other decision Trump has made has been so good, this one won't undo his tremendous legacy.") 

*  If you look up Scott Adams on twitter, you will see  that not only is he claiming that Trump making decisions irrationally is actually a good "negotiating" tactic (left unsaid is who he is actually "negotiating" with when it comes to tariff wars); he's now on board with the Seth Rich conspiracy.  Funny how Adams doesn't seem to realise that chatting into his webcam every day makes him look like a loser talking to himself.  (Yes, I know, he does have live viewers during these pieces, but it still makes him look like what he almost certainly is - an eccentric lonely looser with no real friends, even if he does have squillions.)      

That got old quick

Andrew Bolt, who thinks Gina "if only Australians would work for $2 a day" Rinehart is an economics genius, quotes her praising Trump to the high heavens:

The United States, under President Donald Trump’s leadership, is showing everyone they are open for business and investment, and truly on the way to making the USA great again.

Whereas Marketwatch notes, post the Trump tariff decision:

The broad-based nature of the tariffs—and the broad-based market reaction—indicate that “investors are not only concerned about this particular action, but also how that’s going to affect the economy in the U.S.,” said James Norman, president of QS Investors, in a phone interview....

Domestic U.S. steel prices were already up 20% since the beginning of the year in anticipation of possible tariffs, said Andrew Hunter, U.S. economist at Capital Economics, in a note. That’s a big potential drag on steel consumers in the machinery, motor vehicle and construction industries, he said, observing that the tariffs could, ironically, raise the incentive for those manufacturers to move production offshore to avoid the tariffs.

Giving thanks

A few things to be grateful for:

*  Mussels (they featured in a very nice pasta meal last night, thanks to wife)
*  Taylors wine (one of those wineries that I don't buy all that often, but when I do, they just never seem to put a foot wrong - and yes, I drank a glass last night with the mussels.)
*  Yeast.   Too many reasons to mention, apart from its role in last night's glass of wine, but here's one I didn't know til yesterday:

Both cocoa and coffee beans undergo a fermentation step after their harvest, where yeasts munch on sugars surrounding the beans. Bacteria also play a role in this process, and the yeast leaves behind flavor compounds that make it into the final coffee and chocolate. Researchers have found that cocoa beans in yeast-free fermentation are left with an acidic, off flavor, and that certain yeasts can lend coffee caramel notes.

A bit like a Philip K Dick story, with fewer androids

Some people have the strangest lives.   This story at BBC is about a woman who was the victim of what might be called a high functioning but delusional parent is pretty remarkable.

Not very surprising

When nuclear power goes wrong, it really goes wrong.   Local contamination around Fukushima is probably worse than first thought:

The team says that, for the first time, the fallout of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor fuel debris into the surrounding environment has been "explicitly revealed" by the study.

The scientists have been looking at extremely small pieces of debris, known as micro-particles, which were released into the environment during the initial disaster in 2011. The researchers discovered uranium from nuclear fuel embedded in or associated with caesium-rich micro particles that were emitted from the plant's reactors during the meltdowns. The particles found measure just five micrometres or less; approximately 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The size of the particles means humans could inhale them.

The reactor debris fragments were found inside the nuclear exclusion zone, in paddy soils and at an abandoned aquaculture centre, located several kilometres from the nuclear plant.

It was previously thought that only volatile, gaseous radionuclides such as caesium and iodine were released from the damaged reactors. Now it is becoming clear that small, solid particles were also emitted, and that some of these particles contain very long-lived radionuclides; for example, uranium has a half-life of billions of years.

Update:  more news along similar lines, from The Japan Times:

In the wake of the 2011 nuclear crisis, radiation levels at homes and areas nearby in a Fukushima village remain around three times higher than the government target despite cleanup work having been performed, an environmental group has said.

In some areas of the village of Iitate and the town of Namie, levels of radioactivity detected at some points among tens of thousands checked in surveys last September and October were higher than they had been the previous year, Greenpeace Japan said in a report released Thursday.

Most of the six houses surveyed in Iitate, located around 40 kilometers northwest of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 complex, logged radiation levels higher than the government-set target of 0.23 microsieverts per hour, ranging from 0.2 to 0.8 microsieverts per hour.

Some areas in the village had seen radiation levels rise from 2016, Greenpeace said. “There is a possibility (the environment) was contaminated again as radioactive materials that had accumulated in nearby forests may have moved around,” it said.

Is it just me, or...?

...does it seem that Nassim Taleb might have some decent ideas, but I can't be bothered working out what they are because: 

a. he seems incapable of putting anything succinctly, and
b. if twitter is any guide, he spends such a large part of every day angrily denouncing and ridiculing other people (in any field) as being idiots that he genuinely seems to have psychological problems.

Just luck

I haven't read the paper, which is on arXiv, but here's the abstract:

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.

 A sort of comforting thought, for people of modest means.  (Also likely to be disliked by the Ayn Rand/libertarian branch of politics.)

The very peculiar Newton

Yes, we all know Newton was a strange dude, with interests in alchemy and esoteric religion, but this review in TLS gives some further insights:

Newton tends to come across in popular biographies as a prickly and profoundly ornery recluse whose mind was more at home in the heavens than in conversation with his fellow men, let alone women. Some of this is not exactly wrong. Newton prickled all right. Even as a child, growing up at Woolsthorpe Manor in rural Lincolnshire during the English Civil War and the early years of the Commonwealth, he threatened to set his mother and stepfather on fire and “burn the house over them”.

He was not what you would call a science communicator. The Principia Mathematica, for all its importance as the foundational text of modern mechanics, is written in a fabulously dense and sprawling thicket of Latin that makes the Greek of Euclid’s Elements look positively vulgar. His lecturing style at Cambridge was so wilfully obscure that “ofttimes”, in the words of his early biographer David Brewster, “he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls”. For a man who professed to despise controversy, Newton feuded like a Homeric hero, dismantling the reputation of Robert Hooke and perhaps even having Hooke’s portrait at the Royal Society destroyed in a final damnatio memoriae....

The jottings in Newton’s copy of a Latin and Greek thesaurus give some impression of his fixations. Under the letter S, he added: Sluggard, Swearer, Sabbath-breaker, Shuhite, Sadducie, Sophister, Schismatick and Sodomite. Under P, he wrote: Pagan, Papist, Pharisie, Philistine, Pelagian and Priscillianist. He policed his own diet for signs of gluttony like a desert father. Another Trinity notebook lists under the heading Otiosa et frustra expensa (“vain and frivolous spending”): cherries, milk, butter, cheese, China ale, tarts and custards.

As for his specific religious theories:

It is not clear exactly how or at what point Newton slipped from the Presbyterianism of his Lincolnshire childhood into an idiosyncratic species of Arianism, an ancient school of thought that held Christ had been created by God and was therefore inferior to him. The transformation was certainly complete by the end of the 1670s, though, and there is no good reason to think that Newton had anyone other than himself to blame.

By the middle of the following decade, when he gave much of his energies over to alchemy and the decoding of apocalyptic prophecy, he had an even more remarkable idea. When mankind was still young, “before the first memory of things”, Newton surmised, Noah and his sons had come up with a pure and pristine form of worship that subsequent prophets – Christ among them – had contrived only to debase.

The original religion had found its expression in holy flames surrounded by vestal temples such as Stonehenge and St Bridget’s fire, a Christianized pagan observance that persists today in the grounds of Kildare Cathedral in Ireland. These shrines, Newton wrote, stood allegorically for the place of the Sun at the centre of God’s cosmos. Over time, the metaphors had gradually come to obscure the truths they depicted, and as the sacred learning was passed down by Moses and the ancient Egyptians, the prisca sapientia had degenerated into idolatry.

This sort of claim was unusual but not exceptional in Newton’s time. What was extraordinary was his belief that the Noachian faith had embodied a better and truer conception of the universe than anything that came after it. Modern philosophers could only hope to unravel its insights from the tangle of esoteric riddles in which they were preserved....

This conviction led Newton down some strange byways. At one point he defended the account of Egyptian theology in Aristophanes’ The Birds, where Night is said to have spread her black wings over the chaotic void and laid an egg containing Love, which eventually hatched and created all the gods and living things. Night, Newton explained, was the unseen deity, and Love the spirit that had moved over the face of the waters in Genesis 2. He also thought that Plato had ultimately inherited an understanding of universal gravitation from the same source, and that before him Pythagoras had hit on the inverse-square law by hanging hammers of different weights from taut sheep intestines.

I'm pretty sure that's the first time "taut sheep intestines" has appeared in this blog....

 Anyway, there is still more to read at the review.  

Man child strikes again

Trump's (dangerously?) bad mood seems partly/primarily to do with Jeff Sessions refusing to resign, and in fact starting to push back on his boss's childish insults:

Last Thursday, Mr. Trump began a meeting attended by Mr. Sessions by saying, “I also want to thank a really tremendous attorney general.” He turned to the person seated next to him and added: “That’s Pam Bondi, from Florida.” Ms. Bondi is Florida’s state attorney general.

Trump problems

Jonathan Swan from Axios, who seems very well connected with the White House, is tweeting that Trump is in a completely foul mood at the moment - to an exceptional degree.

The Entertainer, Part 3 (I think)

Ah, I enjoy reading some of the predictions of this 50-something year old Right wing catastrophist  who sings at RSL clubs and outback venues.    (Management really should do him a favour and start slipping anti-depressants into the water he sips between songs.)

When will the walk back begin

Everyone expects that there'll be phones calls made and Trump will walk back from his Democrat friendly ramble about guns made at this meeting:

In 2016, NRA-endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump won the presidency after many months of insisting that his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton was going to grab your guns.
In February 2018, President Trump publicly called for a subversion of due process, and for the government to “take the guns first.”

During a televised meeting with lawmakers at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, the president and assembled legislators spent the hour riffing on ideas for securing schools and curtailing gun violence in America. Trump ping-ponged between various policy positions and postures, invariably making unforced interjections that would make his staunchest pro-gun supporters cringe.

When Vice President Mike Pence talked about how those who are a “danger to themselves or others” should have their firearms taken away, but also afforded due process, the president jumped in to one-up Pence.

“Or, Mike, take the firearms first, and then go to court,” Trump said, breaking with his own vice president on live TV. “Because that's another system. Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court, to get the due process procedures.”

The president continued, sounding like the gun-grabbing Democrats he’d once warned against: “I like taking the guns early. Like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida… To go to court would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you're saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.”

Would love to hear some of the NRA calls being made to Republicans (or to Trump direct) to get him back under control.

Tiny thing makes big discovery

I was listening to Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning talking to the CSIRO guy who designed the tiny radio telescope that made this big discovery.   (It made up for having to listen to a full ten minutes an hour earlier on the wonders of women's team sports - Fran Kelly's personal interests surely results in the most disproportionate coverage of that topic on any radio station in the world.)   

Anyway, this is the story:

Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe — around 180 million years after the Big Bang.

The signal is a fingerprint left on background radiation by hydrogen that absorbed some of this primordial light. The evidence hints that the gas that made up the early Universe was colder than predicted. This, physicists say, is a possible sign of dark matter’s influence. If confirmed, the discovery could mark the first time that dark matter has been detected through anything other than its gravitational effects.

“This is the first time we’ve seen any signal from this early in the Universe, aside from the afterglow of the Big Bang,” says Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University in Tempe who led the work, which is published in Nature¹ on 28 February. “If it’s true, this is major news,” says Saleem Zaroubi, a cosmologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Other teams will need to confirm the signal but, so far, the finding seems to be robust, he says. “It’s very exciting stuff. This is a period in the Universe’s history we know very little about.”

And this is the tiny telescope:

Expect more of this

Just as Republicans in Florida started legislation for this:

The goal: 10 marshals (teachers trained to carry a gun) in every school, which would equate to 37,000 statewide. The state would cover the costs of background checks, drug testing, psychological exams and 132 hours of training. The bill does provide a one-time $500 stipend for those who volunteer to have a gun.

The bill also calls for spending $400 million to put a school resource officer in every school, improve mental health counseling and make public school buildings safer.

....over in Georgia,  this happened:

A social studies teacher barricaded himself inside a classroom at a Georgia high school on Wednesday and fired a handgun once in what may have been a warning shot, authorities said.
No students were in the classroom at the time, and the only injury reported was a student who hurt her ankle running when Dalton High School was evacuated.
The teacher, Jesse Randal Davidson, was taken into custody without incident after a 30- to 45-minute standoff with officers, Dalton police spokesman Bruce Frazier said. Davidson, 53, serves as the play-by-play announcer for the high school’s football team, police said in a tweet .

Actually, there is much skepticism on Twitter about the Florida plan because of the increase in teacher's liability cover it would guarantee.   Yes, covering a school/teacher for accidentally shooting a student is likely to increase premiums, I would expect...