A common experience

David Roberts tweets:

Haunted movies

I don't mind a good ghost story, so I tried The Conjuring on Saturday.

It's OK - rather derivative in parts, although I did like the creepiness of the clapping game - but it was not, for me, at all lingering.   (A really good ghost story should creep you out a bit as you get ready for bed.)  

I knew nothing of the Warrens, the paranormal investigators whose "true story" featured in it.  The wife is still alive and had a cameo in the movie.   Skeptics don't find them convincing, and I must admit, the whole idea that they would keep a room of their house for cursed objects is a pretty good indication of huckster-ism.   I get the distinct feeling that the way the characters were played in the film was much more "rational" than they were/are in real life.

Back to Copenhagen

There's a lengthy but relatively comprehensible paper at arXiv called "To the rescue of the Copenhagen interpretation" which talks at length about the particular thought experiment "Wigner's friend".

Of course, I don't follow every word, but it's an interesting read as far as these sort of papers go. 

I also got the feeling that there were parts of it which could be argued as supporting a case for God (probably of the Omega Point variety) being behind all wave function collapse. 

Self regulation fail

I wonder what libertarians and their love of low regulation have to say about this:

The series of deadly explosions and fires that tore through suburban Boston on Thursday has thrown a spotlight on proposed upgrades to safety standards for natural-gas pipelines, something that has languished amid opposition from utilities.

“We have been pushing for more regulations for years and there has been some huge regulations in the works but for some reason they have been stalled,” Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust in Bellingham, Washington, said in a telephone interview. “The industry does a whole lot to slow these things down.”

At least one person died and dozens were injured Thursday after a series of explosions and fires along NiSource Inc.’s natural gas network in Massachusetts. Investigators say it’s too soon to say what the cause is, but past incidents have led safety advocates to issue proposals for tighter rules or closer oversight that have gone unheeded.

Federal filings show NiSource, which owns seven local gas distribution companies from Ohio to Virginia, has joined the broader pipeline industry in opposing rules on when certain pipelines need to be inspected, frequency of corrosion monitoring, and reporting leaks.

The enormous scale of the Boston incident outright killed only one person.  I didn't even remember this deadly gas pipeline problem from 2010:

U.S. oil and gas pipeline-related deaths jumped to the highest level in seven years in 2017. The 20 fatalities were the most since 2010, when a natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, leveled a neighborhood and killed eight people. 

Another article ends by saying that "serious consequences" from natural gas distribution aren't all that common, but then gives some figures that make that sound a dubious proposition:

Even though natural-gas leaks are fairly common, serious consequences aren’t. From 1998 to 2017, 15 people a year, on average, died in incidents related to gas distribution in the U.S. “Significant incidents”—those that do things such as cause an injury or death, result in at least $50,000 of damage, or lead to a fire or explosion—happen about 286 times a year.

That might sound like a lot. But then again, the streets of Boston carry an average of four gas leaks a mile.
 

Myer-Briggs discussed

I've never done a Myer-Briggs test, and really only knew that it had some foundations in Jungian ideas and seemed to be a bit of a fad in the 1980's.

So, it's interesting to see it discussed in more detail due to a new book about its origins.   Turns out Myer and Briggs were women (a mother and daughter as it happens).  From the Nature review:

Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1980) was an autodidact who eschewed formal psychological methods of test development and validation. She became interested in personology, as she called it, largely as a result of an obsession her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs (1875–1968), had with the ideas of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Emre charts the women’s competitive relationship and expanding ambitions with sensitivity and skill.

Initially Cook Briggs wanted to make a landmark contribution to the practice of child-rearing. In popular-magazine articles, she presented Isabel as a triumph of an “obedience-creativity” regime. In this model, kindness, warmth and play were won only after authoritarian orders to study and work had been complied with. Before reading Briggs Myers bedtime stories, Cook Briggs required her to complete a demanding programme of study. By her early 30s, Briggs Myers was an accomplished polymath and award-winning writer of formulaic but engaging detective fiction.

These ventures paved the way for both women’s fervent interest in personality. Cook Briggs hoped to make Jung’s obscure writings accessible to the world by cataloguing the character of everyone she met on index cards. Briggs Myers formalized her mother’s project into the MBTI, after losing the proceeds of her novels in the 1930s economic crash.

The Guardian has an interview with the author, and is also well worth reading. I thought that this was a particularly interesting observation:

Attitudes towards the Myers-Briggs indicator have varied over the years. In its early incarnation, especially the 1950s and 1960s, it was deemed more desirable to be an introvert. “There was something very suspicious about the extrovert,” Emre notes. “The extrovert is the people-pleaser, the social man, the superficial one. And the introvert is the serious, creative intellectual who commands respect because he or she will not change herself to meet the demands of others.”

This flipped in the 1970s, Emre thinks, and since then we’ve lived in “the age of the extroverts”. She says: “Despite the fact that introverts are being summoned by someone like Susan Cain [in her book Quiet], there still is a really strong bias towards extroversion. Towards a person who is incredibly flexible with their personality and who can change themselves to meet the demands of any given situation. In some ways it is because that’s what is utterly necessary to succeed in today’s economy, right? You have to be a kind of constantly flexible labourer.”

There are clearly problems, though, with reading too much into a Myers-Briggs score. Peer-reviewed scientific papers on the effectiveness of the indicator are hard to find. It is criticised for giving binary outcomes – you’re either extrovert or introvert – and human personality is often more slippery and changeable. Moreover, one of the central tenets of the instrument is that you can’t change your type: it is innate, fixed from birth. Yet the company that now publishes the MBTI concedes that half of subjects change at least one of their four types when they answer the questions a second time.

Then, to my surprise, I see that David Roberts had a tweet thread in which he explains that he thinks the critics of it go a bit overboard. You can read his take on it here. 

Sort of all makes me want to do the test now....

Beer gets more ancient

Not sure that I am entirely convinced by the evidence as explained in this report, but this is what they say:

A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports suggests beer brewing practices existed in the Eastern Mediterranean over five millennia before the earliest known evidence, discovered in northern China. In an archaeological collaboration project between Stanford University in the United States, and University of Haifa, Israel, archeologists analyzed three stone mortars from a 13,000-year old Natufian burial cave site in Israel. Their analysis confirmed that these mortars were used for brewing of wheat/barley, as well as for food storage.

Sardines in history

Must be time for me to re-visit the topic of sardines.   (I had a can of John West lemon, chilli and garlic yesterday.  They were OK.  I think I prefer the rosemary and sea salt ones, though.)

Anyway, from a 2007 article in The Atlantic.  I didn't realise that Cannery Row was about canning sardines:

Sardines have had a surprising and important revival in the Pacific. For decades in the 20th century their abundance gave birth to an industry that fed millions of soldiers fighting both world wars and sustained thousands of Sicilians, Asians, and other foreign-born workers—the fishermen and packers of Cannery Row, in Monterey, California—during the worst years of the Depression. Visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium can see photographs and machines from the cannery that originally occupied the building, and promotional films from the 1930s and ’40s showing the factory life that was the backdrop of John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row. (You can also watch the films at www.mbayaq.org.) The California sardine fishery was the largest in the Western hemisphere, and in its peak season, 1936–37, fishermen took 726,000 tons of sardines. 

But even as Steinbeck wrote the novel, which was published in 1945, the sardine population was mysteriously declining, and by the early ’50s the industry had collapsed. By the middle of the decade, Cannery Row was practically deserted. The easy explanation was overfishing: In the ’30s, “reduction” operations were grinding sardines into meal for animal feed and oil for paint, glue, and industrial purposes. But decades of close study of sardines after the collapse revealed that Cannery Row might have turned into Skid Row even without the voracious reduction plants. For 2,000 years the Pacific coastline had seen roughly 60-year cycles of sardines and anchovies (their cousins), following temperature cycles: Sardines prefer warmer water, anchovies prefer cooler, and their populations fluctuate in similar cycles around the world. After severe restrictions and moratoriums on sardine fishing that lasted from 1967 to 1986, the fish began coming back in numbers that made commercial fishing thinkable again.

But the canneries were gone for good. Pacific sardines caught today are frozen and sent to tuna-fattening farms in the waters off, for example, Australia

Dead government walking

Has Canberra ever seen a clearer case of a dead government walking than it has in the Morrison led coalition government?   OK, well, alright - it probably did with the second coming of Kevin Rudd.  But the signs are still very, very bad at the moment:  that embarrassing "let's get cool with the kids" video on Twitter;  the refusal to deal with doubts over Dutton's eligibility to be in Parliament; the women in the team suddenly all agreeing that the Party has done a crap job of getting women into seats; Morrison not being able to stamp his authority on the Turnbull replacement preselection.  Not to mention bad, bad polling.

It's one of those situations where the public pretty much just wants to see the government put out of its misery, I reckon, and can't wait for the electoral opportunity.

News on TV

As much as I love the ABC, I have to say that they still do one thing pretty badly - breakfast news television.

I've tried watching it for a few days this week, as I didn't have to do school morning drives.   Then today, after watching it from about 6.20 to 7am, I switched over to Channel 7.  The level of detail in both local and international news put the ABC show to shame.  

On the downside, I then had to sit through uber-prat Mark Latham as a guest commentator with Jeff Kennet for a segment, and the show has been absolutely key in successfully promoting populist bad politicians from Pauline Hanson to Kevin Rudd.  It has a lot to answer for in Australian politics.

While the hosts on the ABC show are pleasant enough, it just seems that despite having a 24 hour news channel, the ABC lets whoever it is who compiles their normal news not get into work until 9 am or something, because they really have poor coverage of actual news on the breakfast show. 

I think Channel 9's breakfast TV is pretty bad too, but that's largely because I have never liked Karl Stefanovic (and never cared for Lisa Wilkinson either.)   David Koch is pretty harmless, I think, although with him absent today, possibly I enjoy Sunrise more without him. 

In other TV news news:   sometimes I get to see the PBS Newshour on SBS at 1pm - it is really high quality news commentary, made cheaply but effectively.  

Stan Grant on his evening show:  the guy really bores me.   A good voice, but he just tends to waffle on to fill up time.  

I seem to have left no natural way to end this post.   Let's try this:

Fin

Has anyone done this before? (Hope it wasn't me)

I've done a lot of Tim Wilson posts over the years, pointing out his remarkable fondness for...himself.    So:

Stupid whining losers

You know the big picture - the Trump Right has already lost the culture war and the youth vote and barely won the Presidency by virtue of where the votes fell, not how many the nation gave them;  they got their narrow win in significant part by using social media owned by people who are always going to be more Left than sclerotic Trump voters, and which also gave inadvertent platform to Russian mischief makers.

Yet the wingnut Right is speculating on government control of Google because its management was upset with the Trump win!

What a bunch of morons.   John Hinderaker at the Powerline blog:

 The question is what to do about the left-wing tech monopolies of Silicon Valley. Start conservative companies and platforms to compete with them? Break them up under the Sherman Act? Turn them into regulated public utilities, with public employee-level salaries and no stock options? Those are all possibilities. After watching the video, you no doubt will be ready to take action.

When nothing is stopping them from taking that first option - trying to set up their 100% guaranteed conservative controlled competition in the search engine and social media fields - why are they even speculating about forcing a government intervention into the existing players?  


I would tempted if I were a Democrat politician over there to say:  "OK, Republicans, we'll have a hearing about your paranoia about how Google allegedly tweaks its search results against you, provided we also have a hearing as to how exactly Fox News manages to have 98% of its content with an intensely pro Trump take on all issues.   Both private companies - why should one get away with complete and patent bias while you want to micromanage the other?"

Revisiting Australian volcanoes

There was a recent article at The Conversation about the active volcano field that runs across Victoria and South Australia.   ("Active" in the sense that the last eruption was only 5,000 years ago, at Mt Gambier, and we could apparently get another any time.)

One of the authors had an earlier post in 2016 on much the same topic, in which he explains:

So what can we expect the next volcanic eruption to be like? It depends where it happens.

If the next eruption occurs in the northern areas of the Newer Volcanics Provinces (around Bendigo, Ballarat or Hamilton), we can expect lots of lava flows and fire fountains.

But if it occurs in the southern part (Colac, Camperdown, Warrnambool or Mt Gambier), the presence of groundwater could make it much more explosive.

We could be up for an eruption just like the 2010 Iceland eruption where a big plume of ash was sent high in the atmosphere. In this case disruption will occur in Eastern Australia and New Zealand.

Will it happen any time soon? Well, the Newer Volcanics Province has been active for more than 4.5 million years, with eruptions occurring at least once every 10,000 years.

It could happen in our lifetime, but more likely it will happen after that.

Oh, another outcome of the research was that the first warning signs with Mt Gambier would have been noticed only by the most sensitive equipment up to two days in advance.

Such equipment is not present in the area at the moment.

I see that in 2011 I had a post on the same topic, with a Professor suggesting it might be a good idea for local governments to think about what to do if a volcano suddenly emerges.

But gee - with only a couple of days notice, what could they do anyway?

More creating their own reality

Seriously, Andrew Bolt thinks this?:

For three weeks the ABC obsessively pushed fake news: claims that the federal Liberals had a culture of bullying, particularly of female MPs.

So how about an apology, now that this fake news has gone splat?

The rest of the column explaining how, against the evidence of my eyes and ears, it has "gone splat" is behind a paywall.  But this just appears to be a case of the current Right wing quasi post-modernistic "I interpret evidence in the manner that best creates my own chosen reality".  

It's all of a kind with Trump's "we did a fantastic job on Puerto Rico - A Plus!".


Who exactly do they think they are fooling?  It's weird.

Not just my age

BBC Culture has a sympathetic story on the rise of the "acid house" clubbing scene in London in the 1990's:  "The 30-year-ol soundtrack to hedonism".

I am completely unconvinced, and not just because of my age.

Any hedonistic movement based largely on the consumption of illicit drugs specifically designed to hone into the brain's pleasure centres, and protracted periods of being off your face with no sleep, does not warrant endorsement of any kind.   Unhealthy both physically and mentally, it was and remains a bad thing.

And I have always felt that way...

Birthdays

Hey, it was my birthday a couple of days ago, and now I see that it was apparently David Roberts' birthday yesterday.   It's a bit funny, isn't it, how we tend to think a shared or close birth date might partly account for why we like someone?   Feels like a hangover from astrology even though it overall has much less hold on the public imagination than it did (say) 40 years ago.*

Speaking of people getting older, Youtube yesterday popped up this new Dial-a-Song from They Might be Giants:  two guys who are my age - late 50's - who just keep pumping out songs which are witty, dark, eccentric and upbeat - all at the same time, in most cases:



[Look, I know there is a case to be made that their sound and song construction hasn't changed much since 1986 - but for me it's a case of "if I liked it then, why wouldn't I like it now?"]

*  Checking who else is born on my day:  Harry Connick Jr, TV vet Chris Brown - check, check - both nice enough guys.   Moby - don't know enough about him.  Oh wait:  Bashar al-Assad.   Hmm...

The hypocrisy is off the scale

From WAPO: 

House Republicans bracing for November's midterm elections unveiled a second round of tax cuts on Monday that could add more than $2 trillion to the federal deficit over a decade, aiming to cement the steep cuts they passed last fall despite criticisms of fiscal profligacy and tailoring their policies to help the rich.

Yeah, but wingnuts trust his instincts...

I read this in the AFR yesterday.   Remarkable:

The exchange is one of several detailed in the book showing how many of Mr Trump's now-former staffers spent the first year of the administration attempting to deflect the President on trade, with him quoted repeatedly saying he didn't want to "hear that" and that "it's all bullshit".

Mr Woodward describes an episode in which Mr Cohn enlists the help of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis to conduct a kind of "off-site corporate retreat" for the President, at a venue known as "The Tank" within the Pentagon.

They hoped to draw links between a healthy economy, and the strength of intelligence partnerships with foreign allies, writes Mr Woodward.

"Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world.

"Mattis and Cohn organised the presentations as part history lesson and part geo-strategic showdown.

"Maps depicting American commitments around the world – military deployments, troops, nuclear weapons, diplomatic posts, ports, intelligence assets, treaties and even trade deals – filled two large wall screens, telling the story of the United States in the world."

"The great gift of the greatest generation to us," Mr Mattis opened, according to Mr Woodward, "is the rules-based, international democratic order."

Mr Woodward observed: "This global architecture brought security, stability and prosperity to the world."

The book describes how the pitch fell on deaf ears, as Trump pressed his cabinet, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to declare China a currency manipulator.

"Mnuchin explained that China had, years ago, been a currency manipulator, but it no longer was.

"What do you mean?" Mr Trump asked. "Make the case. Just do it. Declare it."

Next Mr Trump railed against the cost of maintaining troops in South Korea, dismissing their role in guaranteeing security in the region.

"So, Mr President," Mr Cohn said, "what would you need in the region to sleep well at night," Mr Woodward writes.

"I wouldn't need a f---ing thing," the President said. "And I'd sleep like a baby."

The meeting ended, after the President walked out of the room, with former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying: "He's a f---ing moron."

Hurricanes in the news

With all of the attention on the American East coast, it's easily overlooked that a big typhoon is off the Philippines too:

Superstorm expected to make landfall with speeds of up to 260km/h; 1.2m hectares of rice farms could face severe damage.

(Typhoons seem so routine to that country, they seem to only make the international news if they are a mega disaster, not just an average disaster.) 

So, how's that Brexit going?

Well, it's certainly not helping with the remarkable understaffing of the NHS:

The NHS was short of 41,722 nurses – 11.8% of the entire nursing workforce. That is the highest number yet and a big rise on the 35,794 vacancies seen at the end of March.

Similarly, there were 11,576 vacancies for doctors across all types of NHS services inside and outside of hospitals. That was again a record and a significant increase on the 9,982 posts that were vacant three months before. Across England, 9.3% of posts were vacant.

Experts warned that NHS understaffing was so widespread that it was becoming a “national emergency”.

Siva Anandaciva, the chief analyst at the King’s Fund thinktank, said: “After a punishing summer of heatwaves and ever-increasing demands on services, today’s report shows that the NHS is heading for another tough winter.

‘Widespread and growing nursing shortages now risk becoming a national emergency and are symptomatic of a long-term failure in workforce planning, which has been exacerbated by the impact of Brexit and short-sighted immigration policies.”

Bit of an irony going on there if some anti-immigration pro Brexit voter has to wait months longer for their operation because foreign doctors and nurses are reluctant to go there now...

A bit of a twit after all

English philosopher John Gray has got a mention here a couple of times over the years, including recently where I noted an "interesting" article he wrote, but I don't know much about him. 

I think the evidence of this latest piece of his is that he is a bit of twit after all.   Obviously, he hates "illiberal liberalism", but if you're going to start calling out liberals as being the paranoid ones when it comes to comparisons with the state of the American Right at the moment, you need your head read:

Visiting New York a few weeks after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, I found myself immersed in a mass psychosis. The city’s intelligentsia was possessed by visions of conspiracy. No one showed any interest in the reasons Trump supporters may have had for voting as they did. Quite a few cited the low intelligence, poor education and retrograde values of the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him. What was most striking was how many of those with whom I talked flatly rejected the result. The election, they were convinced, had been engineered by a hostile power. It was this malignant influence, not any default of American society, that had upended the political order.

Conspiracy theory has long been associated with the irrational extremes of politics. The notion that political events can be explained by the workings of hidden forces has always been seen by liberals as a sign of delusional thinking. A celebrated study by the political scientist Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), linked the idea with the far Right. Yet in New York in December 2016, many of the brightest liberal minds exhibited the same derangement. Nearly two years later, they continue to reach to conspiracy theory as an explanation for their defeat....

For those who embrace it, a paranoid style of liberalism has some advantages. Relieved from any responsibility for the debacles they have presided over, the liberal elites that have been in power in many western countries for much of the past 30 years can enjoy the sensation of being victims of forces beyond their control. Conspiracy theory implies there is nothing fundamentally wrong with liberal societies, and places the causes of their disorder outside them. No one can reasonably doubt that the Russian state has been intervening in western politics. Yet only minds unhinged from reality can imagine that the decline of liberalism is being masterminded by Vladimir Putin. The principal causes of disorder in liberal societies are in those societies themselves.

There are problems on the Left, but seriously, the greatest and most dangerous paranoid conspiracy belief in the world is that held almost exclusively by the American Right - that climate change is a UN hatched socialist plan to bankrupt Western civilisation with no basis at all in science.

Call out the identitarian Left  as illiberal and annoying by all means - and even somewhat "post truth" in its revisionism -  but I can't take anyone seriously if they pretend it represents the same level of real, physical, humanitarian and environmental danger as the American Right's desire to ignore climate change with their myriad excuses for not believing that it either doesn't exist, or that it is worth addressing.