World War 1 (and a gripe about education)

I find myself full of admiration for the people who put together these witty, all age friendly, largely accurate, summaries of history.  I encourage you to view these two videos summarising (in barely 15 minutes, combined!) the rather notoriously hard to simplify history of World War 1, and hopefully you will agree they are both dense with information and give an overview that is so often lacking in education:





It also makes me feel that schooling in my life time, and probably before it, is not so great at the Big Picture when it comes to history and historical developments.    I guess you could say, if you are a conservative, that the move away from teaching the Western canon is a key example of failure to give an overview:  but I guess there are overviews, and then there are narrowly biased overviews which modern educationalists think are important to avoid.

It is a tricky area, but as I say, I am very impressed by those people who are trying to make learning more about complicated history more digestible.  

I had been wondering the same thing

World's greatest democracy still can't get democracy right

What the hell do Americans find so hard about having polling stations stay open until all of those who arrived before closing get a chance to vote??   Why do we see so regularly this theatre of urgent applications to judges to get the polling station to stay open to let long delayed voters vote? 

I would be really embarrassed about this if I were an American:

So long to the Segway (and my plans for electric scooters to help save the world)

Well, this is really going to date people in the future:  grandparents will be able to tell kids about the start of the 21st century when you could see sometimes see police (or mall cops, or tourists) riding a dangerous standing electric thingee:

Segway, which boldly claimed its two-wheeled personal transporter would revolutionize the way people get around, is ending production of its namesake vehicle.

The Segway PT, popular with tourists and police officers but perhaps better known for its high-profile crashes, will be retired on 15 July, the company said in a statement.

The funniest thing, of course, was all the build up to its disclosure as a "revolutionary" device that will change our cities.  And then the vastly underwhelmed TV host with her (justifiably) dismissive  "is that all?".  Is that clip on Youtube?    

As for what is effectively its successor - the electric scooter - I still haven't tried one, but it keeps occurring to me that in my not-so-radical-but-why-does-no-one-else-think-of-this plans to reduce carbon emissions, the government could probably do a lot worse than give every student who graduates from high school an $800 electric scooter as a personal transport device to tide them over until they can afford to buy an electric car.  Segway makes a good one, but so does Xiaomi, and it is important to please our coming Chinese overlords, so I would go for one of those. 

(I still think three wheel electric scooters would be safer, but seems that few are made.)

Just what we needed...more satellites

I seem to have not noticed this development:

China on Tuesday launched the final satellite in its homegrown geolocation system designed to rival the US GPS network, marking a major step in its race for market share in the lucrative sector....

Beidou – named after the Chinese term for the plow or “Big Dipper” constellation – is intended to rival the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo.

“I think the Beidou-3 system being operational is a big event,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“This is a big investment from China and makes China independent of US and European systems.”
China started building its global navigation system in the early 1990s to help cars, fishing boats and military tankers navigate using mapping data from the country’s own satellites.

It's been operating at some level since 2018.   I'm not sure how they make money from these services - I presume GPS chip manufacturers pay for access to their particular network.  I notice mobile phone specs do often list the GPS network they can use, but I haven't notice "Beidou" before.   What if I check Huawei phones:

Currently, Huawei mobile devices support the following navigation systems: GPS/AGPS/Glonass/BeiDou/Galileo.

 And this:

On December 27 last year, Ran Chengqi, director of China Satellite Navigation System Management Office and spokesperson of BeiDou Satellite Navigation System, said that 70% of China's smart phones use Beidou system.

So yeah, coming soon to your next mobile phone.

And OK, next question:  if a phone can use any of the different services, how does it pick one to use at any particular time?    Does it look for the first signal from any of the systems it can use and then go with that system?   I just Googled the question, but the answer is not yet clear.

Would be impressive, in an evil overlord sort of way, if the Chinese system allowed them to track anyone whose phone chose to use their network.   Is there already a conspiracy theory based on this? 

Update:  by coincidence, Axios has a short article up about "the looming threats posed by space junk".   It's one of those issues that seems constantly talked about, but with little effective action being taken.  

Director death noted

You know, I don't believe I have ever watched more than 30 minutes of any movie by the late Joel Schumacher, and that was probably Flatliners, which I thought very silly.

He was openly gay, and from what I have read and seen, it is easy to see a gay sensibility in some of his comic book movies at least.  He was no ordinary gay dude:  he claimed to have slept with "up to" 20,000 men.  Let's see - at age 80 and assuming 60 years of highly active sex life, that works out to 333 men a year.   If you allow for some slowing down in his 70's, the maths could easily indicate more than 365 in a year, or a new partner every day.

Of course, he could have been lying.  And the actual quote is "10,000 to 20,000".  I'm just looking at the extreme.   But seriously, whether straight or gay, and whether 10 or 20 thousand, numbers in that range indicate something more like pathological compulsion than anything healthy.    

Topical Nazi killings

With all the talk of Black Lives Mattering, it's topical that France 24 should point out something I hadn't heard of before - the appalling treatment by the Nazis of black soldiers fighting for France in World War 2:

“It started at the end of May 1940, in the Somme region,” Fargettas explained. “There was no order from high up saying that colonial prisoners of war should be killed or even ill-treated. It was impulsive, but the German military hierarchy did nothing to even try to stop it.”

This hatred of black soldiers goes back to the First World War, Fargettas continued: “The Germans used them to accuse the Allies of savagery on the battlefield. The German army had itself been rightly accused of atrocities against civilians, especially in Belgium. Consequently, in response they used the image of the African sharpshooter as a propaganda weapon.”

The peace settlement adumbrated in the Treaty of Versailles meant that the Ruhr and Rhineland, along Germany’s western border, were occupied by France. Many troops from French colonies were stationed there. “In Germany there was a very intensive, mendacious propaganda campaign accusing African soldiers of mass rape and kidnapping. This is what the Germans called the “black horror on the Rhine”; slander which the Nazis would reuse.”

When many Wehrmacht soldiers entered France in May 1940, they had memories of this propaganda. African soldiers were abused by the invaders throughout the country. “These troops often fought very well, while of course the Germans sustained many losses despite their success in the Battle of France, so that produced anger which added to all the resentment already stored up,” said Fargettas.

On June 19, 1940, the violence culminated in the Chasselay massacre. This was two days after Marshal Philippe Pétain’s notorious announcement that he would seek an armistice with the Nazis. The 25^th regiment of Senegalese riflemen was posted to the northwest of Lyon, to delay the enemy’s entry into France’s third largest city.

“The Germans expected to seize Lyon quite easily,” Fargettas recounted. “But on the morning of June 19, they faced very strong resistance, in battles lasting for several hours. After the Wehrmacht won the first battles in the afternoon, they executed French as well as African prisoners. But on the next day – after the last pockets of resistance were defeated – they divided the prisoners into two: The French on one side, the Africans on the other. They led the latter down an isolated road. They were sent to a field and machine-gunned.” During these massacres, some French soldiers were also executed or wounded for trying to intervene.

More Trump watch

I hope this is true (the bit about him not wanting to go out on stage)...

...because I did watch some of the speech being live streamed, and I did think at the time that he seemed to be taking a long, long time to come out on stage, and wondered whether it was because he was backstage throwing a fit over the empty seats.

Man in denial

OK, maybe there is a bit too much gloating and laughing going on about how Trump's campaign didn't even half fill its stadium; but on the other hand, there seems to be people in denial at Catallaxy:

I wonder how the Steve Kates brain is processing the estimate of only 6,200 at the stadium; and the absolute lack of evidence of protesters causing any significant problem around it?  Cult members watching the decline of their cult can take quite a while to process it...

Low on my list of travel priorities

A few weeks ago I noted how Bangladesh was upset at its portrayal in the Netflix action movie Extraction, which was meant to be set in an extremely grim looking Dhaka, although none of it was filmed there. 

So, on the weekend I was looking at the back catalogue of Youtube videos by one of the travel vlogging couples I don't mind mind watching, Kara & Nate.  They were in Dhaka a year or so ago, and put out several videos.   As always, they try to find the most positive things to say (not sure whether there are sponsorship reasons for some of that).  But gee, it would take a lot more than their "this is crazy!" amusement to make me want to go to Dhaka:





They seemed to be the only Westerners in the entire city, but I am not exactly surprised that it is low on people's "must see" list.

So then, seeing I seemed vaguely interested in Bangaldesh, Google threw at me the next day a 30 minute story by Al Jazeera news  from 2017 called "Bangladesh's biggest brothel", about an appalling shanty town in the Bangladeshi countryside that has about 1,500 prostitutes, many of whom spoke openly about their lives and problems.



It was awful.

Whoever works in the Bangladesh Tourist Board (and they do have one) has their work cut out for them.

Unmasked

I was in the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane on Saturday, and it was a cool, showery day.  I thought, seeing I had some left in the car, I would wear a mask, given that I usually associate such weather with catching a cold.   I also wasn't sure how crowded it would be.

Turned out it was pretty busy, and that nearly no one was wearing a mask.  I was paying close attention once I realised I seemed to be alone, and I spotted exactly two people wearing them - both Asian.   There are always plenty of young Asian people in the city, and even most of them were not wearing them.

It's true, with days going by with no new cases in Queensland, let alone Brisbane, there should be little to fear.   But I still would feel more comfortable if wearing them was treated as standard for a few months yet.  

By the way, I presume that we ought to be seeing very little transmission of ordinary colds and flu this winter season due to the hygiene care that shops and other places are still taking.  Is anyone trying to keep of that through our GPs, I wonder?

Ha!

Yes, this is amusing:

Referencing the half full stadium that Trump and his campaign was claiming had issued one million tickets to his cult members.

Update:  liked this, too:

Most postmodernism from Republicans

It's been pretty funny reading Twitter about this today:

Rep. Matt Gaetz created a social media frenzy Thursday when he revealed he had a teenage son named Nestor and later introduced the young man during an appearance on Fox News.

Gaetz (R-Fla.) shared that he has a Cuban-born son to explain why he became so irate when Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), who is black, said the white lawmakers in the room couldn’t understand what it was like to father a black child.

Many raised doubts about Gaetz’s claim of a secret son. He never mentioned his son in his biographical data or elsewhere. An old photo surfaced online of Gaetz with Nestor in which the congressman refers to him as a “local student.”

He also appeared as an intern in one photo.  Which explains this tweet:

The appalling Tucker Carlson had Gaetz and his "son" on his show, yet never asked the obvious question:  how did a (then) 31 year old single man manage to adopt a 12 year old Cuban "son".

The answer appears to be as simple as this:    

Gaetz told People Magazine in an interview that he never formally adopted 19-year-old Nestor but that Nestor has lived with him since immigrating from Cuba at age 12.

 So he's not a son, biologically (of course) or legally.   I saw someone sympathetic to Gaetz said that Nester was mainly raised by Gaetz's parents, which would make more sense.

So, for a Republican, "son" means just whatever they want it to mean:  a young dude he's "raised", probably more like "been in the same family house with", but that's close enough for fake outrage when arguing with a black man.

Gaetz is also single, leading many to speculate on whether this is a gay relationship.   I expect not, as this would be the weirdest way ever to come out.

The unifying President

Trump is so appallingly un-Presidential in language and sentiment that this has become normalised, but it shouldn't be.   This thread is correct:

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.