Trump watch

What a baby.

And here he is trying to suck up to the police unions, again, as authoritarians are want to do; as well as making inappropriate pre-trial comments on what will be a high profile case with the potential to cause further rioting: 

 He has no idea how to be a responsible President.

Branch stacking

Is it just me, or is my sense correct that most of the public find branch stacking scandals to be pretty uninteresting and less important than most journalists find them?

How to respond to racism

In the case of Sinclair Davidson, you leave it up on the blog you can moderate.

Why?

And why does RMIT tolerate staff who moderate a blog leaving it up?

Update:  If I am not mistaken, it has been removed - but with no explanation.

While that is good, I remain somewhat puzzled as to why he doesn't make it clear that such clear racism is not to be posted in comments.

Update 2:  wait:  although the original comment is gone, it had been copied into another person's comment, in full, so it is still in the thread!

Sinclair, Sinclair:   if you are (and I assume you are) the one who deleted the original comment - why not make a clear statement on the blog that it was unacceptable and such blatant racism is not to be repeated?? 

Set some standards and be clear about it, for God's sake.

Update 3:  the reposting of the comment is now deleted.  Again, no comment from Sinclair on the blog as to why, though.

Meanwhile, in movie making land

I like those visual effects videos which have long showed how much green screens have taken over TV and movie production;  but  this video showing the next level - virtual sets using massive LED screens - is even more fascinating: 

Some quantum stuff to consider

This paper (or article) at arXiv is written at a relatively non-technical level.  I have only skimmed it at the moment, but will come back to read it later:

Bell's Theorem, Quantum Probabilities, and Superdeterminism

Things not going well in Alabama

A report in the Montgomery Advertiser about the local council considering making mask wearing in public compulsory (my bolds):

Jackson Hospital pulmonologist William Saliski cleared his throat as he started describing the dire situation created by the coronavirus pandemic in Montgomery to its City Council before they voted on a mandatory mask ordinance. "It's been a long day, I apologize," he said.

"The units are full with critically-ill COVID patients," Saliski said. About 90% of them are Black. He said hospitals are able to manage for now, but it's not sustainable. "This mask slows that down, 95% protection from something as easy as cloth. ... If this continues the way it's going, we will be overrun."

More doctors followed him to the microphone, describing the dead being carried out within 30 minutes of each other, and doctors being disturbed when people on the street ask them if the media is lying about the pandemic as part of a political ploy.

After they spoke, and before the council voted on a proposal by Councilman C.C. Calhoun to mandate mask-wearing in public in Montgomery, Councilman Brantley Lyons questioned whether masks and six-foot distancing really helps. They do, the doctors replied. Lyons was unmoved. "At the end of the day, if an illness or a pandemic comes through we do not throw our constitutional rights out the window," Lyons said.

From the crowd, doctors called for him to visit the hospital sometime.

Instead, the council killed the ordinance after it failed to pass in a 4-4 tie, mostly along racial lines, with Councilman Tracy Larkin absent. Councilman Clay McInnis voted with three Black council members — Calhoun, Oronde Mitchell and Audrey Graham — in favor of the ordinance. Lyons, Charles Jinright, Richard Bollinger and Glen Pruitt voted against it.

Bad news for the Fox News audience, then

An odd study:

In the study of people aged over 55, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, researchers found 'repetitive negative thinking' (RNT) is linked to subsequent cognitive decline as well as the deposition of harmful brain proteins linked to Alzheimer's.

The researchers say RNT should now be further investigated as a potential risk factor for dementia, and psychological tools, such as mindfulness or meditation, should be studied to see if these could reduce dementia risk.

Lead author Dr Natalie Marchant (UCL Psychiatry) said: "Depression and anxiety in mid-life and old age are already known to be risk factors for dementia. Here, we found that certain thinking patterns implicated in depression and anxiety could be an underlying reason why people with those disorders are more likely to develop dementia.

"Taken alongside other studies, which link depression and anxiety with dementia risk, we expect that chronic negative thinking patterns over a long period of time could increase the risk of dementia. We do not think the evidence suggests that short-term setbacks would increase one's risk of dementia.

Adam Creighton re-confirms his foolishness

Look, as I have said before, I have never held Creighton in high regard; but with today's column in The Australian:  Coronavirus: Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts, he re-confirms  himself as the most ignorant fool.

He decided early on to go with one take on the COVID-19 problem and he is sticking to it, obviously in such a way that no evidence is going to change his mind.

Most of the column is devoted to the COVID pandemic, but when it gets to climate change, he only quotes this:

Climate modelling was struggling even before the pandemic, given the planet has warmed about half as much as forecast by the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in back 1990.

“Almost the entire alarm about global warming is based on model predictions. If you just look at the last 30 to 40 years of data, nothing spectacular has happened, there’s no sign temperature increase is accelerating,” says Benny Peiser, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.

This claim has been debunked years ago - Creighton reads only what he wants to on the topic, obviously.  As for quoting Benny Peiser - his qualifications:

Peiser studied political science, English, and sports science. 

Yeah, the man to trust.   

The rule of thumb should apply - if anyone is running with "climate change is no problem" line after all this time, they are not to be trusted on any topic, even one they are supposedly an expert on, such as economics.   It's a solid marker for foolishness, not knowing how to tell a genuine expert from a charlatan, and an inability to admit to past error.   

Movie scene debunked

I guess if you haven't seen Da 5 Bloods yet, but you think you will give it a try, you won't want to read this article that debunks a key scene in the movie.

But if you have seen it, you will be interested.

I see that the movie continues to get many more realistic reviews from audiences than from professional critics.  

Where does my Himalayan rock salt come from?

I've lately been using Himalayan rock salt (crushed pretty fine) in cooking (Coles own brand), and I like it.  It flows easily, and is sort of easier to see where you have applied it compared to your common white cooking stuff.   I didn't buy it, but I assume it must have dropped in price in order for Coles to be doing their own in-house branded version.

It's from Pakistan, apparently, and that made me curious as to what the salt mines there might look like.   NPR reports:

The salt is mined from rolling red-brick hills that rise from marshes in Khewra, about two hours from the capital, Islamabad. They are hundreds of miles from the iconic snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and the area shimmers with heat. The hills — known as the salt range — are distant tendrils of the Himalayas and are a remnant of a lagoon that existed some 600 million years ago, said Shahid Iqbal, a lecturer in the department of earth sciences at Quaid-i-Azam University.

Mining here was once a small-time industry that attracted little attention. Some 400,000 tons of salt are exported a year, largely as crude rock, according to Nadeem Babar, the adviser to Pakistan's prime minister on petroleum and natural resources. About a quarter of those exports were shipped at around $40 a ton to India — Pakistan's neighbor, with which it has fought four wars. The salt was literally blown out of mines, hauled in trucks and dispatched some 160 miles to the border.

Here's a France 24 video about the salt mining enterprise there, including tour into a pink salt mine cave:



I posted recently about the Indus valley civilisation, and noted that Harappa has a big archaeological site that looks as if it would be good to visit.   But it's in Pakistan too.

It's a pity that it is considered a very unsafe place to travel, as it looks as if it could have a decent tourist industry if it could get its act together.
 

Foreign viewing

My son's starting to complain that I only ever want to watch foreign made shows on Netflix now, and he might have a point.  It's starting to get hard to remember the last English speaking series we watched - probably Haunting of Hill House.  [Update:  how could I forget - it was Lost in Space, season 2.]

But this has been a great thing about Netflix, the variety of high quality foreign shows.   I guess I could always have watched Nordic noir crime on SBS, but dark crime is a genre that doesn't hold much interest to me, generally speaking.  And don't go pointing to my fondness of Babylon Berlin as hypocrisy - while lots of bad crimes happen, often in seedy settings, it also has Weimar politics, young Nazis, prostitution, drug addiction, cults, gay bars, military spying, lots of scenes confirming that German food has always been pretty crap, a rich sooky son with a haircut that really annoys me, and a nutty hypnotist whose radio show (my son said, wittily) is like an early successful podcast (for the alt.right of the day, I would add).

We finished watching the third season of BB last night, and I ended up enjoying it a lot, even though I still think it was not quite as satisfying as the first two seasons.   Did anyone else notice how much Gereon seemed to get beaten up and injured in this season?   It's a wonder he sticks with the job, really.

I am still dissatisfied with the unexplained mystery about his brother (or is he?) Anno.   Actually, I think this Reddit theory about him might have something going for it.

Anyway, it seems they planned on season 4 to start being made later this year.  I hope COVID-19 doesn't stuff that up.

When Lefties turn on their own

Well, as things go, this is all storm in a teacup, but I'll explain why I'm posting it.

Back in 2014 I wrote a mildly worded post about the surprising fact that, although a lot of people (including me) assumed Josh Thomas had picked up an accent from somewhere in England, he is from Brisbane.  I think it fair to say he sounds nothing like someone raised in the western suburbs of my fair city (although I noted at the end of the post that I have had some odd comments about my own way of speaking too, years ago), and this has been the source of much puzzled speculation. 

For some completely inexplicable reason, over the last few years when I look at Google stats on Blogger, this post is nearly always one of the top "most viewed" posts on the entire blog.  (The other one is called "Lucky Snakes".)  It would seem some mystery of the Google search algorithms as to why this happens.   Maybe there are lots of comedians that people around the world think are using affected accents?   But it seems a very odd topic to keep getting, I dunno, a hundred odd hits a day for.

Anyway, with Josh having been noted as making some (at least) insensitive comments on diversity in TV writing and casting back in 2016, I see that this has given people of the Left (as I assume most people who call out "racist!" on Twitter) permission to come out and say "And by the way, his ambiguous accent really annoys me".  For example:

If you want to see some much more critical commentary on him, search Twitter for his name, or "Josh Thomas accent".

For what it's worth, I think the "racist!" attack on him is way overblown, and I say that as someone who doesn't find him funny and didn't like his show that Lefties generally swooned over.

But the mystery of his accent, and how Google directs people to my post about it, remains.


  

Important issue of the day

The Washington Post notes:

The proof is in the pancakes: Adding lemon juice or vinegar to milk is a bad buttermilk substitute

A couple of points I would add - in the article, the writer compares pancakes she makes by adding vinegar to milk.  I have done that too, but the slight smell of vinegar in milk is annoying.   I only ever use lemon juice for this reason.

Secondly, she says that the vinegar added did not make her milk change consistency.  As I think I have noted here before, I have found that the temperature of the milk seems to affect its ease of curdling with lemon juice.  As I want it to thicken a bit, I warm the milk slightly in the microwave first, then add the lemon juice.   This usually works.

Sure, using store bought buttermilk might be the ideal, but who remembers to do that?

My Starship scepticism

I see that, after the success of Elon Musk's rocket and capsule delivering a couple of astronauts to the ISS, Musk told his company that he wants to put "top priority" on the Starship development.

While congratulations are due to Musk and his engineers for the cool aspects of his Falcon rockets (especially the self landing boosters), I tend to have low trust in engineers who smoke pot during interviews, pick stupid names for their baby, and accuse blokes of being pedophiles just because they didn't want his useless assistance.  And besides - that Starship looks so 50's science fiction retro, I've always had my suspicions that artwork has played too much role in its design.

For these reasons, I haven't been paying much attention to the whole Starship idea.  I have noticed its test engines blowing up, of course.  But I just had a look at the whole concept, via the Wiki page (which I assume Musk fan boys keep as accurate as possible.)

So here's my entirely amateur prediction - the Starship is going to have a very difficult time getting credibility.  Why?:

*  the Falcon rockets he's currently having success with are all using the very conventional kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel.  Starship is based on using a new, never used in spaceflight before, liquid methane and oxygen fuel mix.   So, that's why the engines keep blowing up.  (It also explains why methane features so much in Netflix's Lost In Space, I guess.)   Here's a Wired article explaining the advantages of a methane engine, and the difficulties in making ones which are meant to be re-useable at an unheard of rate compared to (say) shuttle engines.   Also the nutty manufacturing rate Musk thinks he can reach:

“Since they’re using so many of them on the Super Heavy vehicle, they’re going to have to be ramping up manufacturing to an absolutely insane pace,” says Dodd. “Elon’s talked about making one in 12 hours, which would be unheard of in the industry. Even if they make one a week that’s pretty impressive.”

*  the re-entry shield:  the Wiki page says they are still probably going to be ceramic tiles.  Sounds familiar?  The same type of technology that NASA had so much trouble with?   The spaceship part is then due to land vertically like a Falcon.  The space shuttle landing as a glider seemed risky enough:  humans trusting the retrorocket landing system to work perfectly every time is going to take a lot of trust in technology that is new, and is going to be a disaster waiting at every landing (compared to the relative simplicity of capsules descending by parachute).

* for the flights to Mars (and even the Moon), there is apparently no planning for radiation shielding.  Musk thinks people will just take the risk and that's it.
 
 I therefore reckon that there are going to be some spectacular failures in developing this pet project.

And his ideas as to how quickly Mars could be colonised are just nuts.   He wants to get there but it will be more like a suicide mission if he gets his way.

Only the best speechwriters

Seems to me that, although they are obviously hitting his super fragile ego with their tweeting about his ramp walking abilities (honestly, it was not that bad), anti-Trumpers should be making more of a point of this embarrassing reference in his actual speech:

Update:  Fred Kaplan at Slate gives a review of the terrible speech, which seems pretty obviously only held at all for Trump to be able to use in election ads.

Google continues to educate me - this time about the ISS

I was aware that the International Space Station used gyros to adjust its position in orbit, but I never understood how complex maintaining the space station is.   You certainly don't get to put one in orbit and just let it continue on its way without lots of monitoring.    

This video gives a good explanation:



I also liked this little detail about the computer that monitors it:

The attitude control computer (GNC MDM) contains the software that does all of the necessary calculations for attitude control. It takes in the actual attitude and subtracts the commanded attitude to determine the error it needs to correct. It knows the rates of the ISS. That is very sensitive, so sensitive that we can tell when the crew wake up by watching the behavior of the CMGs as the crew start to move around the vehicle. The software also needs a set of user provided parameters such as the vehicle mass properties and inertia tensors. These are located in data slots called CCDBs (controller configuration databases). We have a stockpile of these CCDBs for different vehicle configurations. For example, if a Progress cargo vehicle arrives and docks to the Russian Segment, we will have a CCDB slot designed for that configuration. When it leaves, we will swap to another one.

Recipe tried

Yes, this recipe which I posted about before for future reference:

is really nice.  Not exactly a main evening meal on its own [what vegan recipe ever is :)], but I liked it a lot.  I even bought  a $4.50 pomegranate and felt that the dish really did need its sharpness.   (My wife grumbled about the fruit's cost, but with sweet potatoes at only $2.50 a kg at the moment, we could afford it.)  I also reheated half a potato in the microwave today for lunch [power level 7 for 2 minutes] and it came out nice, again.

I wish my family all liked it as much as I did.  It's one of those dishes where they go "yeah, it's OK", but with insufficient enthusiasm that indicates they would not welcome it being made again any time soon.

Bad blood(s)

I recently posted a favourable review of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, so I was pretty keen to watch his Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, especially seeing it seemed to be getting very strong reviews.

It doesn't deserve them.

A four word description kept coming to mind while watching it - way too heavy handed.  Practically everything in the movie can be so categorised:  the history lessons (although no doubt worthy); the score (you'd swear it was a Spielberg-esque John Williams one at times); the amount of blood spray any bullet wound seems to cause (I still suspect gaming culture has caused Hollywood to go over the top in blood sprays); the other bits of violent dismembering (hard to speak more of that without being a bit of a spoiler); the dialogue which often feels less than naturalistic.  Even the portrayal of the Vietnamese (and French!) felt a bit off to me.

It also feels as if the movie has been made 10 or 20 years too late.   As one reviewer has noted, it would have made a lot more sense (in terms of how hard the guys must have expected their task to be) if they were doing it as younger men than the 70-odd year olds that they must be to have the movie set in the present day.  Is it a screenplay that has been around 20 years waiting to be produced?  That could explain it.

Having said it all this, it's one of those movies that is obviously so well intentioned that it feels mean giving it a strongly negative review.   And I can say it never bored me;  it is well filmed and looks like it had a significant budget; and I liked the aspect ratio changes to reflect different eras.  But I just kept thinking - this is so heavy handed.   And imitative in ways that seemed unnecessary and more distracting than useful.  

It's very clear to me that the movie is getting strong reviews more for its (extremely) topical politics than its intrinsic success as a movie.   And (even allowing for racists and contrarians giving it a zero), the audience reviews on websites I have seen are reflecting this, as they are on average well below the marks given by professional reviewers.  I expect that this will continue, as more viewers rate the film on line.  I've noted on Rotten Tomatoes that one reviewer predicts that it will not age well, and I strongly suspect that's right.

I don't agree with this bad review's complaint about how slow it is - as I have indicated, that didn't bother me - but overall, it still rings closer to my perceptions than the glowing reviews.

And you know why I have some confidence in my assessment - my son seemed to agree with any critical comment I made while watching it.   

One final point - I often complain about violence in movies, but it isn't really at the heart of my dissatisfaction here, partly because I often felt it looked so overdone as to not be realistic.  I do wish, however, that Lee did not put in the full clip of that famous Saigon street execution at the start of the film.   He initially cuts away from it, but then goes back to show the full aftermath.  My son seems to think that if that can be used in a movie or documentary, then no one ever has any reason to complain about movie violence of any kind.   In a way he is almost right - but the answer is, no, it should not be used in movies.



   

Another unfortunate English childhood

I was reading a review of a new book about Charles Dickens by the (extremely prolific) writer AN Wilson, and was struck by this part near the end:

In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”. The teacher who introduced him to Dickens was himself utterly sinister and Dickensian, the skill with which he impersonated Fagin and Squeers “all too convincing”. The shards of Dickens sustained his spirits among the privations and abuse visited on him by the paedophile headmaster and his monstrous wife, uninhibited sadists in Wilson’s vivid, detailed account.

Wilson is 10 years older than me, so we are talking of a dire schooling situation in the 1950's, not from earlier in the 20th century.

I see that Wilson wrote a column in 2011 in the Guardian about what the headmaster and his wife did, and how he escaped.  It was appalling treatment, but it sounds as if he was not one of the boys sexually touched, even if tormented in other ways.

As Wilson came out of the experience to have a very successful life, is it OK to say that I find it blackly amusing to hear, once again, of the terrible reputation of what went on in British private schooling in the first half 20th century.   I am reminded of the startling passage in Evelyn Waugh's autobiography about the brazen teacher who made an open statement of what he did with a student, only to leave the school shortly thereafter to continue a career of bouncing from school to school with sudden departures after preying on boys.    (That's one thing the internet has, to its credit, help prevent.)

Why was this such a British thing?   And one which the well-to-do were seemingly prepared to risk exposing their kids to by packing them off to boarding school?   Well look here, it seems someone has written a whole book about that:  Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class.   The Google preview of the book (I found it by googling Evelyn Waugh and pedophile teacher) contains this provocative explanation by his son Auberon written in the Spectator in 1977 (and one which I suspect his editor would not let him write today):

Well, good for Auberon, I guess.   But I'm rather glad I was born here and not in an English family wealthy enough to consider boarding school.

Update:  because I feel a bit guilty about this post, I'll add a link to another article at The Guardian about some anti-boarding school campaigning (not only for its poor reputation for sexual assault, but its general psychological harm to do with a feeling of parental abandonment) from 2014.

In other American cult news (apart from the Trump one)

This sex and nudity cult is called "Carbon Nation"??  And what's this about "refraining from bathing"?  Even nudists like to shower, don't they?

This happened in Hawaii:

Police have arrested 21 individuals in a pair of sweeps in Puna subdivisions related to Gov. Ige’s COVID-19 emergency proclamation....

Social media posts have claimed that members of the “Carbon Nation” are on the Big Island. The group is referred to in numerous media accounts as a cult that has been kicked out of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama.

Police confirmed the group’s leader, Eligio Lee Bishop, a 38-year-old self-professed cult leader known as “Nature Boy,” was among those arrested Thursday in HPP, but didn’t give the Tribune-Herald the names of the others arrested on the second day.

According to a Dec. 6, 2019, story in the Costa Rica Star, Bishop refers to himself as “God,” and the group “believes in nudism, polygamy, and refraining from bathing.”

The Costa Rica news outlet’s story also said Bishop “allegedly requires cult members to surrender all their money, credit cards, bank accounts, and pin numbers, in order to worship with the group.”

Googling more about "Nature Boy", I see from a 2017 article that his move into cult-dom was a relatively late career choice:

In 2009, he was arrested for forcible entry in Georgia. Two years later, he faced charges of theft and was arrested for aggravated battery. No charges were laid in the latter incident, he said. He was a model and an exotic entertainer, confessing in a Facebook video to having sex for money.

Attempting to avoid furthering a life of crime, Bishop attended school to become a barber. He filed for a business licence in 2014, opening his own shop in Georgia.

He also claims to have worked on the Mo'Nique Show — a talk show hosted by the Atlanta comedian of the same name.

In a Facebook post from June 2016, Bishop posed with a backpack, writing "the Ascension journey has begun." He was heading for Honduras, urging commenters on the post to let him be their "guide out of the hell realm."

His following grew over time. Now, he has more than 17,000 on Facebook.

Another site called "Cult News" goes into a lot of detail about this nutter and his beliefs:

Nature Boy preaches that the “end times” are near, and that he is the messiah. His rhetoric includes a theory about people of color living close to the equator. According to him, this is imperative for maintaining health and peace of mind. One must leave what he calls “Babylon” (America) and live a natural lifestyle in the Tropics. There, people must eat his version of a B6 diet, and defecate at the base of trees. There will be no need for a doctor or medication. In the world of Nature Boy, all disease is psychological. 

There's more, but it still seems that he into cult leadership mainly for the sex.  As are most of the women followers, I assume.  Although they do have to put up with men who don't wash.  

Update:  good grief, he has had a surprisingly big presence on Youtube as well as Facebook for years.  An absolute rambling nut.