About that Productivity Commission report on inequality

I wrote about Adam Creighton's biased take on it last week, and I see that Peter Whiteford has written on the topic, showing that my complaint was well justified. 

I don't really know how he manages to always be so polite.

A modern Gothic well worth watching

First off:  I think Gore Verbinski is pretty underrated as a director and visual stylist.   I'm a strong defender of all three initial instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean, even as the pace lagged in number 3: they all show real directorial and visual flare.    I then enjoyed Rango, his eccentric animated Western, as well as The Lone Ranger - not a perfect film by any means, but again, always watchable, great to look at, and amusing enough to keep me watching.    [I've never seen his version of The Ring, as it happens:  perhaps soon.]

This is by way of explaining why I was interested to see his last movie - A Cure for Wellness.   I caught up with it on Saturday via Google Play.

I knew that it had received mixed reviews - 47% on Metacritic - so I was expecting flaws.  And while I knew (before double checking) that it had been been a box office flop - I didn't realise it was a spectacular commercial failure - $8 million in the US, and only $26 million worldwide!

But it turns out to be one of those movies in which lowered expectations are well exceeded.

Best reason to watch it - looks absolutely fantastic, with great directorial flair.   Honestly, it's worth watching for that alone.

As for the story - I think it's best described as modern Gothic, and a pretty weird one at that.   In many respects, it reminded me of The Shining:  it's often ambiguous as to whether we are seeing reality or full or partial hallucination.   As such, it could in theory make for a lot of interesting on-line analysis (like Kubrick's move), except for the fact that no one saw it!  Also like Kubrick, the characters are not overly sympathetic or deeply drawn, but it doesn't matter much in this case.  And it does have a touch of redemption at the end.

I thought it was also interesting how unsympathetically Europeans are generally portrayed:  the village outside of the Alpine sanatorium looks like a dump full of punks with no jobs, and as for the  German speaking workers back in the spa - none of them are to be trusted.   I see that Verbinski was born in the US but had Polish grandparents.  He is also credited as co-story writer for this film.   I wonder if he intended that it have a "never trust a German" subtext, even though set in Switzerland?

It is obviously not going to be everyone's taste:  there are two scenes in particular that are somewhat over the top (one a torture scene that was short but so intense I had to look away.  That's not so common for me, although that's perhaps because I don't watch awful torture themed movies - like the Saw series - anyway.)   There is too much ambiguity in terms of where reality ends and hallucination begins.   And really, do movies with plots involving incest ever do all that well?   (OK, excepting Chinatown - which, incidentally, I consider over-praised.) 

But overall, I would strongly recommend that folk with a taste for dreamlike Gothic horror, and who want to see a stunningly good looking film made by a director who really knows what to do with a camera, go watch it.

Finally, here's an article that talks about where they filmed it - part of it was in a military hospital where Hitler was once treated!  Interesting.

Update:   I suppose I should have checked Reddit, but there is a fair bit of discussion there trying to get to the bottom of the story.   I would love to know whether there is a deliberate hidden explanation waiting to be found in it, or whether Gore deliberately kept things so ambiguous so as to make that a talking point.  (Same could be speculated about Kubrick and The Shining, too.)  

Saturday photos

You've all been waiting for an update on the wood and glass office building in King Street, haven't you? :

On the same street, a long awaited fancy deli and food shop is supposed to open soon.  I will be interested to see if the main entry ends up really looking like the faked up door:

King Street used to be part of the RNA showgrounds, which is now open to public access all year round.  I still can't quite get over how strange it feels to be able to walk into the empty old grandstands.  One imagines that if this was an American city, it would be full of the homeless camping out in them.  But this is Brisbane, and there is no sign it happens here:

Finally, a photo from late yesterday, showing how, for only the second in the 15 odd years I've lived in my current house, a kangaroo has been hopping up and down the street:

Sorry, I didn't have time to walk up closer...

The lab grown meat challenge

Vox has an article about regulatory issues with lab grown meat, about which I am very sceptical as ever being a large scale and economical substitute for real meat, and it contains a handy explanation of the challenges:

Depending on the type of cells and the medium ingredients, you can grow different kinds of tissue. Muscle cells grow more muscle cells, fat cells grow more fat cells; both are in meat as we know it. Stem cells can be coaxed into growing different kinds of tissue. 

There’s one more element beyond cells and soup: scaffolding. The cells need something to grow on. If the scaffolding is going to be part of the eventual product (as it would if you’re growing a whole muscle meat like a steak or a chicken breast), then it obviously has to be edible. If the meat gets removed from the scaffold, as it would if the product was more like ground meat, then it just has to be safe. 

That’s the simplified version of a process that, in practice, is complex and tightly controlled. It all takes place in what’s called a bioreactor — a tank where you can control the temperature, pH, oxygen levels, and a host of other factors. Right now, Santo is working with 2-liter tanks, and one of the big questions of clean meat is how scalable the process is. 

According to Ben Wurgaft, a historian working on a book about lab-grown meat, there are some significant challenges involved. First is sourcing the proteins, vitamins, sugars, and hormones that go into that medium without using serum from the blood of those actual animals, which would at least partially defeat the purpose of lab-grown meat and would certainly be cost-prohibitive. Second is creating bioreactors that are “vascularized,” or have the infrastructure to deliver serum to cells at the center of a piece of meat, as blood vessels do to animal cells. Without that, you can’t grow the thick tissue necessary for steak or chicken breast (although you can still grow the equivalent of ground meats).

“If those don’t turn out to be easier nuts to crack than they seem to be so far, we will not see cultured meat emerging at the time scale of companies and venture capitalists,” Wurgaft says — which is to say, soon.

 I say again:  all the money being poured into this would be better off put into research for making vegetable or fungal or microbial protein more similar in taste and texture to real meat.   

The Producers: Chinese version

For something more lightweight:  the BBC explains that some Chinese producers and investment companies have worked out that if they fake box office success for a movie they've invested in, the rise in the company's stock value can make just as much (or more?) money for them as a genuinely popular movie:

So a film might be on in the cinema and one of the companies which paid for it might buy out entire late night screenings. These will register as full houses when they are, in reality, entirely empty theatres.

Regulators have been catching onto this so producers have allegedly started just buying all the bad seats across many hours of screenings.

Yet the authorities have now worked out that if a showing is somewhat empty in the middle and for some reason all the seats around the walls have been purchased something must be amiss.

It's not exactly the same as The Producers, but not million miles away either...

Tim Blair - immature, dumb disgrace

As I have noted previously, Tim Blair makes jokes about real life suicides and then tries to justify it by arguing you stop suicide contagion by laughing at it.    

The latest - he responds to an ABC report, citing concerns by health professionals who have worked extensively on Nauru regarding depressed, self harming kids on the island, and tries to make a joke about it.

I guess the authorities on Nauru should be sending over copies of his post because of the public good it will do in preventing those kids from working out ways to try to kill themselves?

Or, more truthfully, Tim Blair should realise he's an immature disgrace who should give up his day job and do something useful for a change.  

Real life effects of "enemy of the people"

Eric Wemple at WAPO details how Trump's fascist friendly language affected a nutter.

Trump is a dangerous disgrace.

Sounds about right

The glasses that make money disappear, magically

I had read one or two other less than enthusiatic reviews of a new attempt by a company to do augmented reality glasses in a way that people might want to use, unlike the response to Google Glass.   But boy, this write up from the Washington Post is really negative, and starts with this startling fact:

Magic Leap, a Florida start-up, has raised $2.3 billion (yes, billion) from investors on the promise it can mix computer-generated images into regular human sight.

It is really hard to understand what they were thinking - it sounds wildly unlikely, after the failure of Google Glass, that there is going to be a market for such a clumsy looking device.   

Quite right

A science blogger from The Guardian (sorry, but their far from ideal website design meant that I rarely ended up there, despite my big interest in science, and now I see it is closing down anyway) writes about her conclusion that she wrong to ever think that science blogging could ever beat fake news:

I believe, like many, that we are living through a dangerous era of untruth, one that will be recognised in the history books as a dark blight on our civilisation. Fascists, charlatans and propagandists are as old as time, but never before have they been mobilised with today’s powerful tools, which can coalesce forces globally and amplify messages in a flash. Ne’er-do-wells formerly had their village pub, their back-alley rendezvous, their circus stall – an influence confined by geography to a small canker. Newspapers reached more widely, but still they were binned each evening to yellow with irrelevance. Even the terrible dictators of the past who managed large-scale atrocities were constrained by the limitations of an internet-free world.

Now, it’s a free-for-all, and we’ve all witnessed the shocking spread of lies and the way their sheer frequency has numbed us into impotence. Any one of Donald Trump’s dodgy dealings would have brought down any other president, but the creeping paralysis of untruth-overload has de-sensitised the population to his many scandals as effectively as “aversion therapy”– as when an arachnophobe is thrown into a pit with a thousand spiders and soon cured. Even definitive proof that the Russians have been meddling in the elections of Western states and sowing general discontent via social media has met with a collective shrug from the inured populace – while individuals might get riled up, each bit of fake news is just another defused spider to the collected whole.

I think writers like me, who specialise in evidence-based communication, have been deluded as to the power of our pens in the face of this inexorable tide. We write our polite pieces in mainstream outlets and expect to change the world. We brace ourselves for the inevitable trolls in the comments sections and on social media, but we feel cheered and bolstered by the praise and support from like-minded members of the audience. We convince ourselves we are doing good, that we are shining a light – no matter how dimly – on an accumulation of evil disinformation. We feel smug when we get a thousand retweets – until we notice that the anti-vaxxers, the racists and the nutters are getting hundreds of thousands more.

I am now starting to think that none of this makes much difference. When does any of our evidence, no matter how carefully and widely presented, actually sway the opinion of someone whose viewpoint has been long since been seduced by the propagandists?

Yeah, I've been saying the same thing for some time, as well as noting how remarkable it is that it wasn't foreseen by anyone how successful the internet would be in promoting propaganda, conspiracy and falsehood.  

Talking apples

Slate notes this about popular apple varieties in America:

The Red Delicious is no longer the dominant apple in American orchards, the U.S. Apple Association said last week, after lasting five decades in the top spot. The Gala apple is now first; Red Delicious second; Granny Smith third. By 2020, the Honeycrisp, which so prized by consumers that they’ll pay higher prices for the privilege of eating one, may crack the growers’ top three.

It then goes on to spend the rest of the article dumping on the Red Delicious - and I am inclined to agree.  The reason I dislike them is because I think they more commonly have a softer flesh, and I really want my apples to be crisp.   But there's also not a hint of tartness in them.

I have long held the Pink Lady in the highest esteem - looks beautiful, usually crisp, and adds a certain sharpness in flavour that the mushy Red Delicious never has.

The Jazz apple, when I have had them, have been pretty good too.   They don't seem to have taken off quite in the way I thought they might, however, when I first had one years ago.

Interestingly, the Slate article mentions neither of these varieties.   What's the Honeycrisp, too?

[Update:  I just noticed in my local Coles that there are a lot of apples for sale at the moment - including two I have never tried - Eve and Modi.   Jazz are there, but much more expensive than Pink Ladies.  The inadequate Red Delicious is there too, as well as Royal Gala, which I don't find much different.   Anyway, it does seem to me that in Australia, the inadequacies of the Red Delicious have already been acknowledged by the public.]

And speaking of apples, I had a particularly nice cider on the weekend - from Tasmania, of course, which seems to now be brimming over with small scale, independent cider manufacturers.   (Was it last year that I had some delicious cherry pear cider?  I have forgotten the brand but I think I posted about it - yes I did, it was Franks.)   The one I had on the weekend was on tap, and there were two names on it - perhaps it was Willie Smiths?   It was called (I think) "wild fermented", which I suppose (if accurate) would indicate that it was relying on airborne natural yeast? - which must be a risky way of making cider if doing it commercially?   [Good and faithful reader Tim, who seems to know everything there is to know about fermentation, I certainly expect to weigh in on this in comments.]   Anyway, it was nicer than your average cider.

The bar staff suggested I also try Pagan Cider.   I should look out for it.

Why aren't we floating solar?

David Roberts has a good piece at Vox talking about where the action is, so to speak, on solar power; and one of the things that he thinks is going to be "big" soon is more floating solar farms on lakes and (possibly) at sea.

The big problem I can foresee with solar panels over salt water is the heightened need to keep them clean from salt crust - surely you would need to be washing them down almost daily.  But then again, some of the spare power could perhaps be used to desalinate some sea water so you don't have to waste expensive chlorinated potable water doing it. 

If the problems could be overcome, Moreton Bay off Brisbane seems a pretty ideal place for it - large parts are very shallow and even smaller boats have to avoid those parts at low tide, and Moreton Island provides a lot of wind shelter.   

The big picture from Robert's article is interesting though - he quotes people saying that the dramatic drop in price of old fashioned silicon panels means that all the new technology solar panels with their incremental improvements in efficiency just aren't really worth using.    That makes sense, but it's sort of depressing if you work in research, isn't it? - spend most of your career on developing the world's most efficient solar cell technology only to find that no one wants it because it's hardly worth retooling factories for the efficiency increase you've achieved. 

Anyway, remember my previous ideas:   the new Snowy Mountains plan to increase its use as power storage by hydro should have its water pumps powered by floating solar cells on the storage lakes.  

And Wivenhoe Dam should be half covered in floating solar power too for South East Queensland's power needs.

While we're talking reproduction...

...there's quite a long article at Aeon called "The macho sperm myth" which you might dismiss as sounding too doctrinally feminist in approach, but you shouldn't.  It mentions some things about what sperm cells get up to inside of women which I don't think I had heard of before.  For example:

The entrenched notion that human sperm, once ejaculated, engage in a frantic race to reach the egg has completely overshadowed the real story of reproduction, including evidence that many sperm do not dash towards the egg but are instead stored for many days before proceeding. It was long accepted as established fact that human sperm survive for only two days in a woman’s genital tract. However, from the mid-1970s on, mounting evidence revealed that human sperm can survive intact for at least five days. An extended period of sperm survival is now widely accepted, and it could be as long as 10 days or more.

Other myths abound. Much has been written about mucus produced by the human cervix. In so-called ‘natural’ methods of birth control, the consistency of mucus exuding from the cervix has been used as a key indicator. Close to ovulation, cervical mucus is thin and has a watery, slippery texture. But precious little has been reported regarding the association between mucus and storage of sperm in the cervix. It has been clearly established that sperm are stored in the crypts from which the mucus flows. But our knowledge of the process involved is regrettably restricted to a single study reported in 1980 by the gynaecologist Vaclav Insler and colleagues of Tel Aviv University in Israel.

In this study, 25 women bravely volunteered to be artificially inseminated on the day before scheduled surgical removal of the womb (hysterectomy). Then, Insler and his team microscopically examined sperm stored in the crypts in serial sections of the cervix. Within two hours after insemination, sperm colonised the entire length of the cervix. Crypt size was very variable, and sperm were stored mainly in the larger ones. Insler and colleagues calculated the number of crypts containing sperm and sperm density per crypt. In some women, up to 200,000 sperm were stored in the cervical crypts.

Insler and colleagues also reported that live sperm had actually been found in cervical mucus up to the ninth day after insemination. Summarising available evidence, they suggested that after insemination the cervix serves as a sperm reservoir from which viable sperm are gradually released to make their way up the oviduct. This dramatic finding has been widely cited yet largely ignored, and there has never been a follow-up study.

Not a simple Pill

At the risk of encouraging a bunch of conservative Catholics (and Philippa Martyr in particular) going "See!  The Church was always right to oppose this harmful product!", I will link to this article at the BBC which explains that the hormones and hormone combinations used in the contraceptive pill are much more complicated in their source and effects than I would have guessed.

That chicken or egg question is unanswerable?

Hey, has anyone else noticed how often physicists from Brisbane seem to get mentioned in despatches, so to speak, about quantum experiments?   It makes me feel like I'm living in a smarter city than southerners like to give it credit for. 

This time its the University of Queensland being mentioned in a somewhat complicated explanation about a quantum experiment that seems to indicate that causation becomes very confusing in quantum systems:

Over many trials, the physicists implement different combinations of shape changes in the two paths, like choosing among a handful of setting for two different knobs. If each photon definitely takes one path or the other first, the correlations between the knob setting and the photon’s final polarization must obey certain limits. However, if both take both paths first, the correlations will exceed those limits, which is exactly what the physicists observe in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters.

As it stands, the experimenters chose the operations in the two paths independently. However, in principle the experiment shows that quantum mechanics allows for the possibility that the two processes could trigger each other, says Cyril Branciard, a physicist at the NÉEL Institute in Grenoble, France, who worked on the experiment. “One may have situations where some event A causes another event B, while at the same time B causes A.”

I suppose it's appropriate that I mention another recent report, this one about how a quantum entanglement experiment  used light from distant quasars to help rule out "freedom of choice" loopholes.

Don't worry, I'll explain later.  Or not.

Taleb - smart idiot

Nassim Taleb is always a good reminder that being technically smart is no guarantee of having common sense in political judgment, and can certainly be accompanied by an obnoxious personality.   Here's a tweet today indicating he is sympathetic to the ridiculous White House bleating about tech company "censorship" of the internet:

AI modelling of religious belief

I forgot to link to this interesting article in The Atlantic from July, about using computer programs to model the social effect of religious beliefs.  It starts:

Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest in the refugees’ education; another says providing jobs is the key; yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do?

Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens, you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a different policy. But of course, you can’t experiment like that, not with real people.

You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.

Curious about Right wing reaction to this...

From NPR:

British Prime Minister Theresa May said she will make major investments in Africa. While on a three-day tour of the continent, May pledged 4 billion pounds ($5.1 billion) of support for African markets. May's goal of deepening trade ties with Africa, the world's second most populous continent, comes ahead of Britain's departure from the European Union next year.

I just can't imagine this being particularly well received by the British Brexiteers who were either populist nationalists, or small government types who are always leery of foreign aid and assistance. 

STD talk, again

Vox has an article about the worrying rise of STDs in the US, including the one that keeps making appearances in this blog - syphilis.

They have a map showing the different rates for that disease across America, and it's pretty hard to make sense of it.   While one might think that the number of gay men (amongst whom unsafe sex has been rising) in California accounts for the high rate in that state (and, perhaps, Florida), there are some very Red states with very high rates too:

And I presume that the lesson of Alaska might be that cold weather means less illicit sex?

Anyway, readers who have not been following my fascination with a particular STD might find this previous post useful - because it shows that even at the higher rates shown above, they are still only roughly 1/5 the rate of what they were in the 1940s.   The extraordinary historical rate of the disease (and its social effect) is still something that I say does not appear in fiction as often as you would expect...

To Berlin

Did you see last night's Foreign Correspondent about young Jewish folk migrating to Berlin to get away from the atmosphere of stifling perpetual conflict in Israel?   It was fascinating, and yet another example of the type of excellent and informative program making that only the ABC does.  

The Murdoch/IPA led right wing campaign against the national broadcaster makes me sick.