What an appalling man, and President

This was really shockingly shallow and narcissistic:  

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

As I have said before, I can only assume that anyone who works in the American health system who knows the truth must be grinding their teeth daily.  It would have to mean that only the most dimwitted who work in that industry could vote for him.

Very deadpan, and funny

This one's for Jason, who hasn't made an appearance in comments for a long time.  From The Onion:

 

So, how's the debate going?

Which means his cult members will think he's doing fantastic, because he's confirming their "insider who thinks he/she knows what's really going on" status.  The rest of the country, though... 

Update:

Again, his cult members, who are all about punishing those who don't align with their politics, will see no problem.

Hugh Hewitt: Give me my tin-pot dictatorship and give it to me NOW!

What a laugh:

 Get this next bit:

It's too much for even the White House to take seriously?   

As always with Hewitt's columns at WAPO, the comments are about 99% mocking him.   This one is moderate in tone, but sums it up correctly, for anyone who isn't part of the Trump cult:

Just a minor detail

So I just had a look at the New York Post to see what is behind the pants wetting excitement on the low information Right about Tony Bobulinski.

Seems to be all about an email in which Hunter Biden makes (what Tony says is a) cryptic reference to Joe Biden getting a cut in a deal with a Chinese firm in 2017.

I had to read way down the article to get to this:

What is not clear yet is whether Joe Biden had secret stakes in any of Hunter’s other deals. As for this one, while the date on the May 2017 email would be nearly four months after Biden left the White House, it’s not known when discussions among the partners and with the Chinese first began. Certainly they started before the email.

And while such deals would be legal for Joe Biden when he left government service, the facts take on extra significance during a campaign where China policy is a frequent topic — and a big dispute between Trump and Biden.

So, when the Right sees sudden disclosure of a Trump company in China making money, it's all just shrug shoulders, legitimate business deals.   And they have no interest whatever in the fact that no one understands Trump's  true financial position because Trump has stonewalled on providing the information for at least 5 years.

But when its Joe Bodin, it's a matter of national security that he (possibly) had a cut in a deal in China.   

Right. 

Just a random thought...

....it's been rattling around my mind for a while that whiny, whiny Trump is like an unfunny version of Rodney Dangerfield.  He "don't get no respect", and no  laughs either.  I think his deliberately stupid dancing at rallies has re-kindled the thought.

Someone else somewhere would probably have made the comparison a while ago, but I personally haven't seen it.   Oh look, someone did a "deepfake" video last year that has Trump's face on Dangerfield's head.  Doesn't look all that different, though.

Yeah, thanks again, unfettered social media

In Berlin, there's been some vandalism of items in a museum, and while it seems they are not 100% certain, the media thinks there is probably a connection to this:

....the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit and public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, which broke the news together, were the first to draw a link between the vandalism and conspiracy theorists.

One of the conspiracy theorists who's gathered a large following of coronavirus deniers, Attila Hildmann, has claimed a number of times on his Telegram channel that the Pergamon Museum is the center of a 'global Satanism scene' which, his followers allege, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been using for 'human sacrifices,' noting that she lives opposite the Museum.

 

A most unusual election

A few observations:

*  Isn't it weird that while Republicans and their Right wing media have been on a blitz to emphasise Hunter Biden's drug problems, they haven't been able to stop the president's own son from making appearances in which he looks either coked up or mentally unwell?:

Yes, that’s a real clip of Donald Trump Jr. lying in bed with his head in such a position that his neck is completely obscured, nursing what appears to be a serious sunburn, and claiming that Instagram has been purposely hiding his posts from his legions of followers. “Hey guys, hope you’re doing well,” the president’s eldest son says, again, from his bed. “Just watching my algorithms getting crushed. I guess I did something to piss off the Instagram gods, so hopefully you’re seeing this stuff anyway. We’ll do what we can. Talk to you soon.”

From the outside, it’s extremely difficult to understand why Donny boy posted this clip, the only logical explanation being that he thinks he looks good.

*  Have we ever had an election before in which the issue of men masturbating has featured so prominently?

*  Just today, we have Republicans claiming that fake emails threatening Democrats to vote Trump are actually intended to hurt Trump.   Because they are too obviously fake?  Or they think they come from Iran, and of course they would not want to help Trump?   But John Ratcliffe is a completely unreliable pro-Trump appointee:

On Monday, Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to bolster an unconfirmed news report by The New York Post related to the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in the Ukraine. Mr. Ratcliffe suggested on Fox Business that the Obama-Biden administration had committed (unnamed) criminal abuses of power and that voters should take these supposed actions into account in the upcoming election.

Such personal political commentary for a sitting intelligence leader is virtually unprecedented. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, tweeted that Mr. Ratcliffe’s actions were “reprehensible” and worthy of a “tin-pot dictatorship.”

 Can he believed about the nation behind the emails?

Why is the intern hours problem so slow to be properly addressed??

So, last night I was at a high school awards night, and the guest speaker was a graduate from 2008 who now works as a doctor in the Queensland hospital system.

She explained that she initially studied for a science degree, but after a couple of years swapped to medicine.   This means she would have been an intern only about, what?, 5 years ago?

While she is very happy in her job now, she did say that the intern years were the worst - 70 hour weeks I think she said, and so stressed and tired she would cry when she got home.  And get this:  if she raised her exhaustion at work, the response from senior doctors was the old "well, that's what we had to go through, so suck it up."

That way of thinking has been driving me nuts for decades!   I saw it in an unrelated profession in my 20's, and it has offended me ever since.  (That's a story for another day.)

It's consistent with a Four Corners story on this problem in 2015 (and in fact, she would have been an intern around then.)

But 5 years later, what sign is there that the problem is being actually addressed?

Here's a report from last year:

Almost half of Queensland's junior doctors working in the public system are concerned they are so exhausted that they will make a clinical error, the state's peak doctors association has warned.

The Australian Medical Association Queensland's latest Resident Hospital Health Check report surveyed almost 900 of the state's junior doctors, of which 46 per cent reported concern about their long working hours burning them out.

The figure is unchanged from the year before....

Dr Abdeen said junior doctors worked long hours, with some going on call for 120 hours in a row.

"You're working day shifts, you're on call all night, getting called multiple times per day, and then going back to work the next day, of course you're going to be fatigued," Dr Abdeen said.

"All of these factors lead to a person who is going to be burnt out and ultimately prone to mistakes."

Dr Abdeen said he himself had just recently covered two other doctors on a single shift, forcing him to do the work of three doctors and treat all of their patients.

Here's a report from earlier this year:

The Black Dog Institute and UNSW Sydney have published Australian-first research examining the relationship between average working hours and the mental health of junior doctors.
 
And the results are stark.
 
A quarter of all junior doctors work unsafe hours, which researchers found doubles their risk of developing mental health issues and suicidal ideation.
 
Associate Professor Samuel Harvey, study co-author and Chief Psychiatrist at the Black Dog Institute said working long hours has been an accepted part of the culture of medical training for decades, but ongoing research is changing perceptions.

‘We’re now starting to understand the human cost behind these excessive workloads,’ he said.
 
‘Pressure on junior doctors to “earn their stripes” by taking on long work hours has always been common, but what we now know is that this can have profound mental health impacts, with concerning implications for both the individual doctors and our broader health system.’
 
A cohort of almost 43,000 randomly selected junior doctors in Australia were invited to participate in Beyond Blue’s National Mental Health Survey, with 12,252 providing data to form the research – the largest and most up-to-date national figures available on doctors’ mental health outcomes.
 
Junior doctors who worked over 55 hours a week were more than twice as likely to report common mental health disorders and suicide ideation, compared to those working 40–44 hours per week.  
 
The same results applied regardless of age, gender, level of training, location, marital status or whether the doctor was trained overseas or locally, confirming a link between long working hours and poorer mental health among junior doctors.

So it's pretty clear that the problem is still not being adequately addressed.

I presume it's a combination of inadequate hospital funding, variable intern numbers, and A PERSISTENTLY STUPID ATTITUDE OF [SOME] SENIOR DOCTORS IN HOSPITALS.

Because honestly, if it wasn't for the latter, you should have doctors at every election telling people to vote for governments that will do their utmost to address the problem.

 

Mud brick city

A story at the BBC says that a palace made of mud bricks in Yemen is in danger of collapse (due to poor maintenance and heavy rain.)

It's a big building, and you wouldn't guess it was mud bricks:

But even more interesting, further down in the story, is a photo of a large number of crumbling mud brick houses "in the Old City of Sanaa":

I had no idea there were such large mud brick buildings anywhere in the world.   

Another site has an interview discussing this place:

These are homes for Yemenis. I know some people had to leave because their homes were damaged. But what is life like in these buildings?

The house develops, as I said, in vertical. So you have the lower floor: storage, the kitchen and so on. And two or three rooms per floor where the family or the extended family lives. So, of course, now they have more modern services. The toilets and so on are more modern than the old ones, but still they live in the same way. 

I'm guessing there are no elevators. So if you have company over, they have to walk up nine stories if you're on the top floor.

Absolutely. And not only that, but you are at 2,200 meters high. It's one of the highest capitals in the world. So it is quite an effort, I would say.  

You're running out of breath by the time you get up to the ninth story. 

I would say so. But the inhabitants are used to that. 

I've been in mud brick structures before, some two stories high. But it's hard to imagine anything in mud brick taller than that. As an architect, what in your training prepared you to appreciate this construction? 

These are the highest buildings in mud brick in the world. The fact that they are one adjacent to the others, of course, helps with the height. But they are all individual houses with different plans and layout, built around a staircase — a stone staircase that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor. And the rooms open around this staircase. So people move all the time from one floor to another and some floors are dedicated to the kitchen, some other to women. And as you move up, you know, there are more open space and the public space for the house and the community. 

Oh well.  A fair chance that climate change might wash away this city over the next century, perhaps?

Catholics for Trump are fine with this, because it's better than Obama making a Catholic hospital provide for its staff to be able to get contraception under their health insurance

Maybe that's the longest post title ever, but the sickening state of conservative Catholicism and American politics makes it worth it.  Here's the story:

 

 

Not sure what it means

Rabbit obsessed Noah Smith has a thread on twitter about how the Middle East is now "a big mess of proxy wars", starting and ending with these:

For all of the claims that the US meddling in the Middle East was more trouble that it was worth, I am not sure that this alternative makes for a better situation for the West, or the globe generally.  

The salad is made

I finally made the chickpea salad recipe which I had seen in the Washington Post earlier this year:

(Their photo, not mine.)

It took me some months to find I had actually gathered all of the relevant ingredients and all were still OK to use.  (We don't routinely have mango chutney in the house, nor plain Greek yoghurt.  We also tend to use curry spices more than curry paste.  But I did use Japanese mayo, and we always have a large bottle of that delicious stuff in the fridge.) 

As I expected, it is very nice as a side dish, and when layered thick as a sandwich filling.    

Chickpeas are just the best legume. 

Update:  because I am sure there is a large audience out there as interested in them as I am, I found a list of "10 interesting facts about chickpeas", compiled by an Australian snack making company.  (On the Sunshine Coast, so not so far from me, too.)

Actually, most of the facts aren't that interesting, except for these two:

Ground chickpeas have been used as a coffee substitute since the 18th century and are still commonly used as a caffeine-free alternative today. Widely available, the taste is said to be delicious – why not give it a go!

[Never heard of that before.]

India is the world’s number one leader in chickpea production, with a staggering 8,832,500 metric tons reportedly produced in 2013. Interestingly, the country coming in second place was Australia! With 813,300 tons produced in the same year. “Production of chickpea by countries” UN Food & Agriculture Organisation 2014.

 And yes, more recent figures still show Australia was the second biggest producer in 2018 (figures are for 1,000 metric tons):

I cannot wait to enhance dinner conversation with my kids with this fact.   

But there's more!

I didn't realise that it's a variety of chickpea that is made into split peas, and ultimately dhal:

 

The larger variety that is canned and favoured in Mediterranean cooking are the kabuli variety.

This is setting me up for some great dinner time imparting of knowledge to my offspring!

 

Back to tiny black holes

It's been ages since I searched arXiv for black hole papers.  But I did one today and found another paper on a favourite topic - micro black holes and whether they evaporate, and are a good candidate for dark matter.  The abstract:

The nature of dark matter is still an open problem. The simplest assumption is that gravity is the only force coupled certainly to dark matter and thus the micro blackholes could be a viable candidate. We investigated the possibility of direct detection of microblack holes with masses around and upward the Planck scale (10−5g), ensuring classical gravitational treatment of these objects in the next generation of huge LAr detectors. We show that the signals (ionization and scintillations) produced in LAr enable the discrimination between micro black holes or other particles. It is expected that the trajectories of these microblack holes will appear as crossing the whole active medium, in any direction, producing uniform ionization and scintillation on all the path.

I had to look up LAr - it's liquid argon.

The introduction section of the paper gives a good summary of the questions around evaporating black holes:

An important issue is to show that black holes do not radiate in some conditions and which are their characteristics, as an argument to explain that these relics objects can survive from early Universe. We would need to detect the black holes or to have strong indirect evidence of their existence, as well as to show that they do not radiate. At present we are far from doing this.

In a classical paper, Hawking [2] suggested that unidentified tracks in the photographs taken in old bubble chamber detectors could be explained as signals of gravitationally collapsed objects (μBH). The mechanism of black hole formation is well known. As a result of fluctuations in the early Universe, a large number of gravitationally collapsed objects can be formed with characteristics determined by the gravity and quantum behaviour. For masses above the Planck mass limit of10−5g quantum behaviour is prevented.The small black holes are expected to be unstable due to Hawking radiation, but the evaporation is not well-understood at masses of order of the Planck scale. Helfer [3] has shown that none of the derivations that have been given for the prediction of radiation from black holes is convincing. It argued that all involve, at some point, speculations on the physics at scales which are not merely orders of magnitude beyond any investigated experimentally(∼103GeV), but at scales increasing beyond the Planck scale (∼1019GeV), where essentially  quantum-gravitational effects are expected to be dominant and various derivations that havebeen put forward, not all are mutually consistent. 

Given the profound nature of the issues addressed, some disagreement and controversy exists over exactly what has been achieved. Balbinot [4] demonstrated that when a blackhole becomes more and more charged, the Hawking radiation decreases and in the limit of maximum charge containment there is no radiation. Certain inflation models naturally assume the formation of a large number of small black hole [5] and the GUP may indeed prevent total evaporation of small black holes by dynamics and not by symmetry, just like the prevention of hydrogen atom from collapse by the standard uncertainty principle [6].Chavda and Chavda [7] introduced a different idea: gravitationally bound black holes will not have Hawking radiation. They examine the range10−24kg≤MBH≤10−12kg where quantum aspects must be considered. These limits of masses are controversial regarding the stability of the black holes, see for example [8].

And we can't have that, can we?

 

The very definition of precocious

NPR has a story about a 12 year old (black) American boy in college:

Caleb's mother, Claire Anderson, says it didn't take long to see that her son was ahead of the typical baby milestones. When he was just 3 weeks old, she says, he started copying her motions. She got certified in sign language so she could teach it to him.

"Because I thought though that he wanted to communicate, but he didn't have a [means] or a way to do that. Then he started picking up sign language really fast," she says. "When he was about 6 months old, he started reading. And by 9 months old he was already signing over 250 words."

Anderson says Caleb was doing fractions when he was 2. He passed the first grade when he was 3. When time came for middle school, she says, he could have skipped it altogether. "But we still decided to put Caleb into the seventh grade to build social skills and just think about the well-rounded child."

Those years were not easy for Caleb.

"They looked down on me because I was younger than them. And not only that, the curriculum was boring to me because I learn really, really fast. One day I came to my mom and she asked me, 'Are you happy here?' and I said, 'No, I'm really bored. This isn't challenging me,' " he says.

Now Caleb is in a dual program at Chattahoochee Technical College in Marietta working toward an associate degree while getting his high school credits. It gives him a chance to dream of NASA, SpaceX and flying cars.

Gee.  I wonder if there are other brilliant 6 month olds who get handed an iPad and start having their intelligence sucked out of them by the internet.

 

I like this

An advertisement for South Korean tourism caught my eye on Youtube this morning: 

 Cool.

Speaking of nuts

I called out this ex-SAS dude (Riccardo Bosi) as a nutter some years ago, when he used to comment at Catallaxy.  (Many there liked him.)   He now spends his days running pointlessly as an independent (most recently, in the upcoming Queensland elections):

ISIS metastasized

Interesting article at Washington Post arguing that recent ISIS activities in Africa show how the problem has not gone away under Trump, and that Trump's woeful inability to be credible and consistent has make an international response more difficult.

Oh my - someone agreeing with me on the excessive use of "shock value" on TV?

Someone at Wired seems to both sort of like and sort of hate The Boys - a show whose second series has been notable for a number of exploding heads, apparently.  (I saw the first episode of the first season and did not want to watch any more of it.  I explained why at the time.)

Boy oh Boys. It’s easily the best and worst of the bunch. If there’s a way to push superheroes any further than this—full-on rapey murderers whose villainy is covered up by the pharmaceutical giant that not-so-secretly made them—the culture would have to combust. It’s not even postmodern, at this point. Deadpool was postmodern. Guardians and Thor were postmodern. The Boys is some pure metamodernist BS, so committed to sharpening its edge on the whetstone of canon it forgets to cut anything with its trenchant blade.

The show wants you to talk about it, but what more is there to say? There’s a racist supe with a Nazi past who radicalizes sad male fans through memes; there’s a lesbian supe with a drug problem and a redemption arc; there’s a sexually predatious supe who’s involved in a scene with a boat and a whale that—computer-generated though the whale may be—should nonetheless have violated sundry animal rights laws. These social-justice shocks the show seems forced to administer, in an effort to make you feel more alive than you are, sinking into your couch, losing your head. When the evil-Superman Homelander, played with such disgusting magnificence by Anthony Starr that the patriotic suit and cape should be permanently retired, masturbates on the roof of a skyscraper, he is The Boys itself, naked and shameless.

This is the crisis so-called “prestige TV” finds itself in (if it was ever prestige to begin with). There’s not just an expectation of quality but of seeing something new, like a whale-murdering boat, or lightning Nazis. So shows proceed as episodically as ever, but they have to keep getting bigger, badder, uglier, realer, even if there’s no reason for it. One head explodes early in the season, so 10 must explode later on. In this, television mirrors real life. Or real life as it’s been, After Corona: a series of escalations. When you sit down to a new TV show at the end of your day, you’re not distracting yourself or escaping. You’re reinforcing the escalating, episodic tension of your everyday existence. The jolts of recognition might feel nice, but they’re not at all healthy. They’re destructive, and they’re the reason you feel deader after a binge.

It's the sort of thing I have been complaining about recently when re-watching old movies.