I try to be polite, but really...

Sinclair Davidson turned up in comments here recently:  whether that means he reads this blog regularly, semi-regularly or only when he gets a mention, I don't know.   (Actually, he gets a mention here pretty often, so the last two categories are pretty close.)

Now, this may not be quite on a par with the gobsmacking, how-could-he-possibly-ask-that-question, reputational harm of asking why calling an aboriginal man an ape was (or even, could be) racist; but for a person obsessed with free speech, it comes very close.

I'm talking about his post today in which he pretty much defends Trump repeatedly calling the media "the enemy of the people".   OK, let's be generous to Trump and note that after his daughter said they weren't, he tweeted that he didn't mean all,  just a "large percentage" of the media that spreads "fake news".

Davidson notes in comments to his post that this is what he understood Trump to mean - "just CNN and some others."

Some others, hey?

Cue his mate Andrew Bolt - who will soon be dying his hair red so as to feel ever closer to the very soul of  Pauline Hanson after his "I hate the way immigrants cluster together - it makes me feel yucky and uncomfortable and I don't like it" column yesterday - has attempted a similar, pathetic defence of Trump as not condemning all media as "enemy of the people" - just the media that criticises him.

I mean, honestly, Bolt's post itself notes that Trump has specifically cited and attacked as "fake news purveyors" the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, Associated Press, MSNBC, "and so on".   That's all three of the big broadcast media networks in the US!   We all know what Trump means - any media which has criticised him and his administration, and in particular, reported on Russian collusion, is peddling "fake news", is not to be believed, and is "the enemy of the people".

 It's a serious joke that Davidson cannot see, or excuses, the authoritarianism inherent in any President labelling the professional establishment media (we're not talking some internet bozo like Alex Jones or Jim Hoft) as "an enemy of the people" -  and I would say that regardless of the size of the media element that is so labelled.   In Trump's case, it's virtually all of  the media save for Fox News, Breitbart and the Washington Times - all of which, while privately owned, are so close in allegiance to Trump that they are effectively the same output as State media.

You thought a man who hails from South Africa might have a better idea about racism than he did, and a better nose for authoritarian rhetoric?

You thought a frequent defender of free speech might have qualms about a President who wants his followers to completely ignore, and worse - consider their enemy, all media free speech which has reporting and opinion said President doesn't like?

Well you would be wrong.

But illustrating again the embarrassing intellectual and moral joke that the Right, whether conservative or libertarian, has become in Australia?   You would be right.

PS:   it's clear what this is about - it's in the extracted commentary in Sinclair's post explaining that CNN has to realise that the rage of the Trumpkins is just them finally having their chance to let the media finally hear their frustration with their product.    

Yes, it's the media's own fault for not respecting enough the views of the Right - or the Trump right, or whatever.   It's the "but you don't take me seriously enough" cry of the people who believe that climate change is a massive conspiracy, Obama was a Muslim born in Africa and the Worst President in History, that Hillary is a murderous harpy, etc, etc.

In Sinclair's case, I think he may be having trouble coping with not getting enough respect from the media, even though he campaigned for years in his own way against climate change,  made a big and wrong warning on Keynesian spending after the GFC leading to stagflation in Australia, and completely voluntarily opened himself to ridicule on the matter of the use of "ape" in a racist context.

Maybe if he owned up to errors instead of blustering past them,  he might get more media respect and be less inclined to want defend dangerous authoritarian sentiment?   Just a suggestion.

Update:  for those who seem to need educating, or reminding:  in the Guardian this morning:   'Enemy of the people': Trump's phrase and its echoes of totalitarianism

Another medical study to believe in

Both long term abstinence and heavy drinking may increase dementia risk 

People who abstain from alcohol or consume more than 14 units a week during middle age (midlife) are at increased risk of developing dementia, finds a study in The BMJ today.

Good to know I am hitting a happy medium.

David Murray, goose

It seems to me from reading this article in the AFR, regarding AMP wannabe saviour David Murray, that he typifies the rule of thumb I've been pointing out for years: if someone, no matter what success they may have achieved in life thus far, does not believe the science of climate change, then their judgement about everything (even their claimed area of expertise) is not to be trusted.  

I'm sorry:  that's just the way it is.

So much for nuclear power being the saviour for climate change

Quite surprising, this:

Shut reactor: Ringhals, Sweden. Reuters reports that the water is too warm for reactor cooling in the sea off Sweden and Finland, and the River Rhone is too warm in France.

“Utility Vattenfall, which operates seven reactors in Sweden, shut a 900 megawatt (MW) PWR unit – one of the four located at its Ringhals plant – this week as water temperatures exceeded 25 degrees Celsius.”

“France, like much of Europe, is experiencing scorching weather in its southern regions, and forecasts show temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius (104°F) in the Rhone valley area. EDF’s nuclear plants along the Rhone use the river’s waters to regulate the temperature of their reactors, discharging warm water back into the waterway.”

National trends to avoid

*  The BBC says that South Korea is having a spy cam porn epidemic.  Sorry to say it, but wouldn't most people have guessed that Japan might be more prone to that?  Maybe politeness wins out there.

*  I hesitate to post this, and mean no disrespect to Indians generally, but it's not every day that you read about a social media outcry related to the gang rape of a pregnant goat.

*  Claims from Japan that a university dealt with the "problem" of gender balance amongst doctors by marking down entrance exam results from females. 

*  Back to India, and I don't think I have posted before about the reports that fake rumour spreading on WhatsApp in particular is being blamed for stupid lynchings and riots:

For several days, messages warning about child-lifters on the prowl had pinged on smartphones in Rainpada, a tribal hamlet in Dhule district, 400 km northwest of Mumbai. Then, on July 1, the villagers saw a group of seven tribal nomads from the Davri Gosavi community speaking to a child. A group of around 20 locals, certain these were the child-lifters the WhatsApp video had warned of, pounced on them and began beating them before locking them up in the local gram panchayat office. Two men managed to flee.

Soon after, a mob numbering in the hundreds- most had converged on Rainpada from adjacent villages for the weekly market- broke into the office and beat up Bharat Bhosale, Dadarao Bhosale, Bharat Malve, Appa Ingole and Raju Bhosale using whatever they could find- rods, sticks, stones and logs of wood. Two police officers who arrived on the scene and tried to intervene were also attacked. Bharat, Raju and Dadarao died on the spot. Malve and Appa succumbed to their injuries en route to the hospital.

The Dhule incident was only the latest in the series of WhatsApp-transmitted lynchings across the country this year leading to the deaths of 30 people. If technology is a double-edged sword, India felt its sharp edge, the high-speed network's ability to misinform and inflame. Sixteen such cases have been reported since May 10, from Maharashtra to Tripura.

Netflix news

*  Finished Lost in Space a few weeks ago.   I didn't mind the last episode, which moved faster than some in the series, and I would say that the show has just enough going for it for me to look at the second series, whenever it comes out.   I have a fear that the science is only going to get worse, but I'll give it a try.

*  Finished Babylon Berlin last night.   What a satisfying, high class potboiler of a show that has been.   Some characters did seem ridiculously hard to kill,  and the close call of one of them in the second last episode was upsetting.   I'm betting on the nephew becoming an enthusiastic member of Nazi Youth, by the way.    It really deserves all the praise it has received.   A third series is on the way, apparently, and I hope it can keep up the standards, with more Nazis this time.

*  Tried Dark, another German series, for a couple of episodes, but it seemed a bit too Stranger Things except with time travel.  My son and I both felt it wasn't really worth continuing with.

*  Will finish the first and only (on Netflix) series of Frankenstein Chronicles soon.   Quite enjoyable and a clever idea behind the series, I think.  Like I said before, good to see syphilis finally get a prime role in a TV series, given how many people it did affect in real life.   And one thing I was always noticing:  how cold it seemed for the actors throughout the series.   Even in indoor scenes, there were so many times they characters were puffing steam as they spoke.  I would have assumed that film lighting would have heated the place up, but maybe they were doing it with less lights than normal, and during a really cold winter.

*  Need more recommendations for series.   The Alienist, perhaps? 

Update:  I see that The Alienist has less than enthusiastic reviews.  The oddly named Peaky Blinders, (could they have possibly picked a name - and images - more likely to obscure what the series is about?)  though, seems very well reviewed.   I think it has been on ABC but I've never watched it.   Seems that should be the next thing to try.

A TV confession

There's much high minded horror from folk both Left and Right being expressed at the idea of an ALF re-boot.  But I have a confession:  I found the original series quite likeable.   I thought the exasperated acting of both the father and mother was pretty amusing, and ALF himself had some funny lines.

Am I the only person who didn't find it cringeworthy?  (And I say this as a person who, as a child, could never bear to watch family bland comedy like The Brady Bunch, or even worse, The Partridge Family.  Or later, the horrible Full House, or the terrible Good Times.   But ALF, it was harmless and amusing.)

A life of Graves

I only had a vague idea about the life of Robert Graves - I knew he had been through World War 1, and did poetry and novels.   Literary Review has open access (for a while) to a review of a new biography of him, and I'm a little amused to see that he fits into two of my favourite stereotypes:

a.  English literary figures of the early 20th century who had at least some degree of homosexual experience as a young man (don't you get the impression it was virtually compulsory for that line of work?); and

b.  famous literary figures of any nation having extremely messy and complicated love lives, full of adultery and what not.   (Again, appears compulsory.)

Some extracts:

Graves finished his school career a precociously published poet and Charterhouse’s welterweight boxing champion, his broken nose recording that feat all his broken life.

He enrolled on the call to arms, weeks after leaving school, putting off Oxford for a short while, or so he thought. One in three Carthusians who joined up with him never heard the armistice bells – those bells which, as literary legend has it, were ringing when the telegram announcing Wilfred Owen’s death was delivered....

Having been timidly homosexual for twenty years, Graves rushed into postwar matrimony and Abrahamic fatherhood. He was ‘clumsy’ in physical love, his first wife, the artist Nancy Nicolson, discovered. She declined to accept his surname. But the paths that family, guardians and class had laid down for him before the war were resolutely not taken. He dickered with Oxford. For a while he made do as a village shopkeeper. He mainly survived on scroungings from his family and fellow writers – John Masefield, Sassoon, T E Lawrence. Prose potboilers, he discovered in the mid-1920s, kept the wolf from the door so he could get on with what mattered: poetry. Good-bye to All That, like the later Claudius saga, was devised with the same aim in mind.

It was also in the 1920s that Graves embarked on a second union, this time with the American poet Laura Riding. The result was not division but enlargement – a sexual ‘trinity’. ‘Sick Love’ is one of Graves’s finest meditations on guiltless sexual promiscuity: ‘O Love, be fed with apples while you may,/And feel the sun and go in royal array,/A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway’.
It wilfully echoes the biblical Song of Solomon: ‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.’ Solomon reputedly had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Polyamory, Graves believed, on his own, less Solomonic scale, was helpful to the poet. Dutiful monogamy, another of his poems asserts, is a double death sentence:

Call it a good marriage:
They never fought in public,
They acted circumspectly
And faced the world with pride;
Thus the hazards of their love-bed
Were none of our damned business –
Till as jurymen we sat on
Two deaths by suicide.

The polygamous love bed, Graves later discovered, leads to different dead ends. But there was more stimulus for singing along the way.

Graves’s life was, in every sense, chaotic, but purposely so. He believed that ‘tranquillity’ (the Wordsworthian recipe) narcotises true poetry. The poet, like the kettle, must boil to produce. A few weeks before Graves started on Good-bye to All That, Riding enlarged the ménage to quatre with an Irish literary adventurer. It went all wrong and she jumped out of a fourth-floor window in Hammersmith. Graves followed suit. Both survived.

And you know what?  The short extracts of his poetry that appear in the article do absolutely nothing to dispel my life long instinct that poetry is bunk...

(Sorry Tim, Jason et al.  I must be the equivalent of tone death to that particular literary form.)  

This is appalling

Good thing I had already shifted Andrew Bolt's link on my blogroll to it's special category "Gone completely stupid and offensive".

This is truly appalling stuff, harking back to the Asian immigration scare claims of Hanson in the 1990's.   And look at the editorial cartoon with it - the foreign hoard coming here to devour our land.   Pathetic.

Turnbull should be on the news tonight calling this out - Bolt personally, and the pathetic paper:

Maybe when I'm retired?

A tweet about someone's nice looking home baked sourdough loaf led me to a site with a post called "Beginner's Sourdough Bread".

The process just looks ridiculously fiddly and time consuming, when I can go buy a very nice loaf from a specialist bakery for $6 or $7.  Mind you, I don't have a specialist bakery near me, but who knows, that may change.

I think getting into home sourdough making must be something only the retired (or the house-spouse) can have the time to do.

Ocean acidification is not going away

Ocean acidification only pops its head up occasionally in the media now as a dire threat from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere:  probably because it is such an incremental change that it doesn't have the ring of immediate alarm about climate change as do heat waves, floods or fires. 

But it's not going away, even if it is pretty difficult to study.    (Replicating the effect in laboratory settings turned out to be a lot trickier than initially realised.)

There's a new study out on how it affects ocean areas with naturally venting CO2.  I'm sure we've seen similar studies in other places, but it confirms that the future of the coastal areas under high CO2 is more likely green and slimy with less biodiversity:

To assess the likely ecological effects of ocean acidification we compared intertidal and subtidal marine communities at increasing levels of pCO₂ at recently discovered volcanic seeps off the Pacific coast of Japan (34° N). This study region is of particular interest for ocean acidification research as it has naturally low levels of surface seawater pCO₂ (280–320 µatm) and is located at a transition zone between temperate and sub-tropical communities. We provide the first assessment of ocean acidification effects at a biogeographic boundary. Marine communities exposed to mean levels of pCO₂ predicted by 2050 experienced periods of low aragonite saturation and high dissolved inorganic carbon. These two factors combined to cause marked community shifts and a major decline in biodiversity, including the loss of key habitat-forming species, with even more extreme community changes expected by 2100. Our results provide empirical evidence that near-future levels of pCO₂ shift sub-tropical ecosystems from carbonate to fleshy algal dominated systems, accompanied by biodiversity loss and major simplification of the ecosystem.

 A report on the study explains:

They found that while a few plant species benefitted from the changing conditions, they tended to be smaller weeds and algae that blanket the seabed, choking corals and lowering overall marine diversity.

These species, and some smaller marine animals, are thriving because they are more tolerant to the stress posed by rising levels of CO₂.

Jason Hall-Spencer, Professor of Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth, said: "Our research site is like a time machine. In areas with pre-Industrial levels of CO₂ the coast has an impressive amount of calcified organisms such as corals and oysters. But in areas with present-day average levels of surface seawater CO₂ we found far fewer corals and other calcified life, and so there was less biodiversity. It shows the extensive damage caused by humans due to CO₂ emissions over the past 300 years and unless we can get a grip on reducing CO₂ emissions we will undoubtedly see major degradation of coastal systems worldwide."

Jim Holt looks at the Greeks

The Jim Holt whose science and other articles and essays I've praised since I started this blog?  Yes, it would seem that that Jim Holt, who I have not noticed on line for quite a while, has written an entertaining review of a new translation of an old book by Diogenes Laertius, a third century (CE) writer through whom, apparently, we know some details about the famous (and not so famous) Greek philosophers of yore.   

DL (no, I was not familiar with him either) apparently has been much ridiculed by later philosophers for his writing skills and choices.   Holt starts:

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

His style of biography is summarised this way:

In all, over eighty individual figures get entries—including one apparently rather clever “lady-philosopher,” Hipparchia the Cynic. (A couple of female students of Plato are also mentioned, one of whom is reported “to have worn men’s clothes.”) The author typically says something about the philosopher’s family origins and his teachers, then moves on to anecdotes about his life and apothegms expressing his opinions. We are furnished with details of his sex life, the more scandalous the better. Letters (some spurious) and wills are quoted, and the philosopher’s written works are listed. These stacks of titles, sometimes extending over several pages, are extremely valuable, since the works in question (like the aforementioned dialogues of Aristotle) have generally vanished. Finally, we are given an account, or several alternative accounts, of the philosopher’s death, often with an ironizing comment by the author in what he calls “my own playful verses.”

The principle of selection for these biographical materials is simple: cram in everything, without regard to plausibility or philosophical relevance. Physical details are abundant, if not always consistent. We are told of Zeno the Stoic, for example, that “he was lean, longish, and swarthy,” but also that he was “thick-legged, flabby, and weak”; also that “he delighted…in green figs and sunbathing.” Plato is “weak-voiced” but mocked for his “long-windedness.” Aristotle had thin calves and small eyes, wore fine clothes and lots of rings, and “spoke with a lisp.”

Holt then explains that Hegel and the philosopher I love to malign, Nietzsche, disagreed about the matter of the importance of how philosophers live their lives:

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel judged the work of Diogenes Laertius harshly. “A philosophic spirit cannot be ascribed to it,” he declared; “it rambles about amongst bad anecdotes extraneous to the matter in hand.” What is important, Hegel argued, is not that a philosopher lived in such-and-such a way and said this or that; rather, it is how the philosopher fits into the evolution of human consciousness toward truth.

After Hegel, the reputation of Diogenes Laertius suffered a sharp decline among both classicists and historians of philosophy—as witness the abusive quotations I opened with. Yet one abuser, Nietzsche, later turned into a passionate (if ambivalent) defender. As a philologist, Nietzsche had contempt for the sloppy scholarship that went into Lives. But as a philosophical subversive, he had two motives for championing the work. The first was his hatred of Socrates’s moral optimism—a precursor, he thought, to slavish Christian morality—and his preference for what he saw as the darkly “tragic” worldview of the pre-Socratics. From the materials that Diogenes Laertius had preserved on figures like haughty Heraclitus and Etna-leaping Empedocles, Nietzsche hoped to recapture a sense of pre-Socratic tragic grandeur in Greek culture. His second motive for championing Lives was a more general one. Whereas Hegel insisted that the biography of a philosopher was irrelevant to his conceptual contribution, Nietzsche took the opposite view: bios is the ultimate test of logos. He wrote:

The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves anything, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.

Now, one is loath to put oneself in the position of adjudicating between Hegel and Nietzsche. In this case, however, I think it is safe to render a verdict, if a disappointingly bland one: they are both partly right.

That's probably enough cutting and pasting, go read it all.

Some flying optimism

The Air & Space mag asks: 

Is Green Aviation Really Coming? 

and answers in its usual upbeat manner - yeah, it really is.

Further on Gadsby

So, further to my previous post, I went back and finished watching the much acclaimed Hannah Gadsby Netflix special Nanette.   Spoilers will follow.

Let me just say this:  for a lesbian comedian who started this special with what sounded like a bit of criticism of  lesbian identity politics (as a result of a lesbian telling her she was not putting enough lesbian material in one of her shows),  the primary theme still comes back to the difficulties of growing up lesbian (or at least, different.)   I don't wish her ill at all - but her show did the opposite of dispelling the impression that Gadsby herself mildly mocked at the start - that lesbians as a group have a bit of a reputation are angry, overly serious people really upset with men.  

It's presumably true that she has had a hard life in key respects, and that she is right to think that telling her story in a straight forward manner may be a better service to humanity than having used comedy with its inherent self-deprecation.  But is she partly angry with herself for taking quite a long time to realise that?

Sorry, again, I don't wish her ill:  in fact she seems a person who deserves a bit of psychic peace.   But I still don't care for her show...

Update:  I feel I need to explain more as to why I felt unmoved by some of the revelations in the show - that a guy in the street bashed her badly for looking lesbian, or that she was sexually abused as a child, and raped by two men as a young adult.   The problem is, for me, that these statements are made too briefly and (except for the bashing story, I suppose, with no context) to have impact.  While some people may be completely un-inclined to question such self reported history, I tend more towards wanting to know at least some of the details before feeling confident that the teller's claims are likely true and the reaction is warranted.    I'm sorry, but not every story of sexual wrongdoing is exactly as claimed.  Now, it's not that I think she should be telling us more as part of some self explanatory public exercise:  it's just that I don't really know how to react to such a scant revelation by an angry person on stage...

So, this Brexit idea is working out well...

From The Times:

Ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.

Blueprints for the armed forces to assist the civilian authorities, usually used only in civil emergencies, have been dusted down as part of the “no deal” planning.

Helicopters and army trucks would be used to ferry supplies to vulnerable people outside the southeast who were struggling to obtain the medicines they needed.

Fast food corrections

*   A few months back, I dissed the popular Mexican food chain (originated by an Australian, no less) Guzman y Gomez based on my first, very uninspiring, meal there.    My daughter re-assured me that I should try them again, but stick to the nachos with grilled chicken.   I did, and yes, they make for a very tasty, good value and relatively healthy meal.   I still don't know that their other menu items are worth ever eating, but yes, those nacho meals are really good.

*   MacDonalds has been on a losing path for my allegiance.   I was very keen on their "create your own" burger system going back a few years ago, but yeah, as anyone could have guessed, it was likely too labour intensive and not worth it, so they have retreated into permanent menu of just a few special burgers.  But even so, it seems they can't stop fiddling with them, so that one which I had settled on as my favourite has now disappeared.   You can still modify the ingredients on the screen, but the options are reduced and it seems hardly worth the effort.   My daughter is over the company, and I think it needs some renewed shake up, too.   [At least on my recent visit, the irritation with the never ending change on the menu screen while I was trying to decide what to eat had stopped.   That only took a year or more.]   

*  Are MacDonalds suffering at the hands of Grill'd and other high end burger chains?   I guess so.  I think Grill'd is pretty good and the price point about right.  

*  In not strictly fast food news, I had a meal at a sort of SE Asian casual outdoor food place at South Brisbane a few weeks ago.   The corn fritters were delicious (sort of a round ball thai style, not anything American.)   I must attempt making something similar at home...

New battery technology needed

There's a commentary piece at Nature about how it would be a good idea to get going with alternative battery designs, due to the limitations on minerals for current lithium batteries.   They cite not a supply problem with lithium itself, but cobalt and nickel.  (I thought nickel was pretty common stuff, but apparently not.)

As it happens, it seems Australia is a pretty good source of all three current materials:

Cobalt-rich minerals are found in just a few places⁶. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) supplied more than half (56%) of the 148,000 tonnes of the metal mined worldwide in 2015 (ref. ⁶). Most of this goes to China, which holds stockpiles of 200,000 to 400,000 tonnes⁶. Australia hosts 14% of the world’s cobalt reserves but has yet to exploit them fully. Cobalt has been extracted from the deep sea floor, but mining here would be too expensive, ecologically and economically.

Likewise, nickel production is dominated by a dozen nations. In 2017, Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada, New Caledonia, Russia and Australia together supplied 72% of the 2.1 million tonnes mined globally. Of this, less than one-tenth went to batteries; the rest was used mainly in steel and electronics. Nickel is cheaper to extract than cobalt, through a series of reactions with hydrogen and carbon monoxide⁷. Nonetheless, rising demand has boosted nickel prices by about 50% since 2015, from $9 to $14 per kg.

Both cobalt and nickel have suffered sudden price hikes and crashes. For example, disrupted Australian supplies, increased demand from China for steel and speculation by hedge-fund managers led to a five-fold surge in the price of nickel and a tripling of that for cobalt in 2008–09.

Projected shortfalls

If nothing changes, demand will outstrip production within 20 years. We expect this to occur for cobalt by 2030 and for nickel by 2037 or sooner.

Soft denialism

Hmm.  Which of my readers has expressed the view that Alex Steffen attacks here?  If only I could remember...

A fishy post

When I really want to bore readers, I like to talk canned seafood.

For canned fish of any kind, I generally avoid the John West brand as being unnecessarily expensive, even though it does seem to be generally of high quality.  (Or am I just a pushover for their advertising line which has been the same for what seems like decades?)  However, in my search for  canned mussels which are not from China, I saw a couple of months ago that JW are now doing 2 types of canned Spanish mussels, and this one (despite it being pretty costly at $4 a can) is really very nice:

Then today, I was looking for sardines for lunch, noticed that these were on special for $1.95, and found (a bit to my surprise, as I never thought of rosemary as a flavour that would go with sardines) that they were quite delicate and delicious:

If only I were an "influencer" and thereby make money boring people...

Good news if you're thinking about a time travel story...

...as I have been.  Here:

How Quantum Computers Could Kill the Arrow of Time

Here are some extracts:

Very orderly and very random systems are easy to predict. (Think of a pendulum — ordered — or a cloud of gas filling a room — disordered.) In this paper, the researchers looked at physical systems that had a goldilocks' level of disorder and randomness — not too little, and not too much. (So, something like a developing weather system.) These are very difficult for computers to understand, said study co-author Jayne Thompson, a complexity theorist and physicist studying quantum information at the National University of Singapore. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Next, they tried to figure out those systems' pasts and futures using theoretical quantum computers (no physical computers involved). Not only did these models of quantum computers use less memory than the classical computer models, she said, they were able to run in either direction through time without using up extra memory. In other words, the quantum models had no causal asymmetry.

"While classically, it might be impossible for the process to go in one of the directions [through time]," Thompson told Live Science, "our results show that 'quantum mechanically,' the process can go in either direction using very little memory."

And if that's true inside a quantum computer, that's true in the universe, she said.

Quantum physics is the study of the strange probabilistic behaviors of very small particles — all the very small particles in the universe. And if quantum physics is true for all the pieces that make up the universe, it's true for the universe itself, even if some of its weirder effects aren't always obvious to us. So if a quantum computer can operate without causal asymmetry, then so can the universe.

Of course, seeing a series of proofs about how quantum computers will one day work isn't the same thing as seeing the effect in the real world. But we're still a long way off from quantum computers advanced enough to run the kind of models this paper describes, they said.

What's more, Thompson said, this research doesn't prove that there isn't any causal asymmetry anywhere in the universe. She and her colleagues showed there is no asymmetry in a handful of systems. But it's possible, she said, that there are some very bare-bones quantum models where some causal asymmetry emerges.