A random post

It's a little surprising, isn't it, that scientists are still working on ways to quickly generate genuinely random numbers.   Here's the start of an article at Science:

Human-made physical random number generators (RNGs) can be traced back 5000 years or more. Early examples such as knucklebones, two-sided throwsticks, or dice have been found in the Middle East, India, and China. RNGs were used for fortune telling and games of chance, with the oldest known board games of similar age as those of the number generators. Today, RNGs are vital for services and state-of-the-art technologies such as cryptographically secured communication, blockchain technologies, and quantum key distribution. Moreover, RNGs are needed in machine learning and scientific applications such as Monte Carlo numerical methods. On page 948 of this issue, Kim et al. (1) demonstrate an ultrafast RNG based on a broad-area laser with a multispot beam that is analogous to generating random numbers by using many dice at once.

Random numbers are often generated by using a software algorithm running on a computer, called “pseudo”-random because the sequence eventually repeats. Moreover, relations among the numbers can exist that reveal that the numbers are not uniformly random. Hence, true RNGs (TRNGs) are of great interest, providing random numbers based on physical measurements that involve some noisy or stochastic process. All TRNGs have some nonidealities, such as generating zeroes more frequently than ones for a binary-output device, which must be mitigated by carefully engineering the device and postprocessing the data to improve the randomness quality.

Some applications require generating random numbers at very high rates, such as encrypting data in cloud-computing data centers, high-speed communication networks, or massive simulations. Photonic devices are a natural fit for these applications because of their potential for high-speed operation, compact size for chip-scale devices, and low power consumption.

Recently, Marangon et al. (3) developed a TRNG that is based on interfering two different lasers on a beam splitter and detecting the resulting powers that emanate from its two output ports. The randomness comes about from quantum fluctuations in a laser due to a process known as spontaneous emission of photons.

I wonder if fortune telling is improved by using the very best form of random number generator - one involving quantum effects, for example.

 

We had a storm

A very tall gum tree fell over in the park near my house.  Honestly, the local birds sounded sad after it.

How long before an attempted repair to this hopeless attempt at political management?

Scott Morrison, and the entire Morrison government, just seem incredibly hopeless at dealing with serious rape and sexual assault claims which have the potential to be politically damaging.   It's like we are watching incompetence in management circa 1980:   I mean, seriously - my job in the second half of the 1980's saw some examples of workplace freak out over how to handle sexual misbehaviour, and I reckon the people I saw responding way back then had more of a clue than this government:

The Prime Minister received an anonymous letter last week penned by friends of a woman who told police she was raped in 1988 by a man who is now a minister in Mr Morrison’s cabinet. The woman has since taken her own life.

Mr Morrison told reporters on Monday he had spoken to the minister in question and he “absolutely” denied the allegations.

Mr Morrison said he had discussed the correspondence with the AFP commissioner, as well as Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary and deputy secretary.

“I had a discussion with the individual, as I said, who absolutely rejects these allegations,” Mr Morrison said.

“And so after having … spoken to the commissioner and to the secretary and deputy secretary at this stage, there are no matters that require attention.”

When asked if he believed the minister’s denial, Mr Morrison said it was a “matter for the police”.

“I’m not the commissioner of police,” he said.

“Allegations of criminal conduct should be dealt with by competent and authorised agencies.”

When asked whether he had read the evidence submitted with the letter, Mr Morrison said he was “aware of the contents”.

“I’ve been briefed on the contents of them. And it was appropriate, as the commissioner himself advised the parliament to refer any allegations to the properly authorities,” the PM said.

“That is the way in our country under the rule of law things like this are dealt with. It is important to ensure that we uphold that. That is the way our society operates.

“Now, these are very distressing issues that have been raised, as there are other issues that have been raised in relation to other members in other cases.

“But the proper place for that to be dealt is by the authorities, which are the police.

“That’s how our country operates. That systems protects all Australians.”

There is no conceivable way a sensible boss would think he could deal with it like this.

I reckon within a week we'll have an inquiry set up, and the cabinet minister standing aside.

It's bleeding obvious you can't tough this one out.

Update:  Chris Uhlmann, an idiot, thinks it would be outrageously unfair for the cabinet member to face any inquiry, because it would "reverse the onus of proof".    Pathetic.

Nostradamus never foresaw this one

Namely, international diplomatic friction over one country wanting to take anal swabs of other nations' citizens:

TOKYO: Tokyo has requested Beijing to stop taking anal swab tests for COVID-19 on Japanese citizens as the procedure causes psychological pain, a government spokesman said on Monday (Mar 1).

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said the government has not received a response that Beijing would change the testing procedure, so Japan would continue to ask China to alter the way of testing....

China's foreign ministry denied last month that US diplomats in the country had been required to take anal swab tests for COVID-19, following media reports that some had complained about the procedure.

 

Weekend stuff

*  Like 95% of young women, my daughter thinks Apple is the only company to consider for phones and laptops, and so I found myself with her in the Brisbane Apple store on Saturday.   

Is it just me, or does the whole Apple store vibe strike other people as way too much like visiting a creepy Scientology outlet?   The uniform; the young, way-too-enthusiastic-for-just-doing-retail attitude; (dare I say) the invitation to part with more money than what more modest religions invite. 

I bet I am not the first to make the comparison, but it really struck me on Saturday.

*  Barramundi:   against my better judgement, tried cooking with it again on Saturday night.   It is a mushy, unpleasantly coloured, wildly over-rated fish, and I don't know why they bother farming it.

*  Watched The Green Book on Saturday.   It's enjoyable enough, and I think the two lead actors are both very good (Viggo Mortensen is ridiculously versatile), but I have criticisms.

I felt the screenplay gave very inadequate basis for understanding how Don Shirley (who I knew nothing about) came to be the way he was.  I mean, we already understand how an American Italian who grew up in the Bronx is the way he is; it's much rarer to find an upper class Black guy in the 1960's who disdains most of Black culture, so isn't that worth some detailed explanation?   

I also thought that it was a bit dramatically flat - I expected some greater racial insult to be the dramatic peak of the film than the refusal of service at the venue's restaurant.   And there was the YMCA incident which I felt was sort of inexplicably glossed over by Viggo's character:  it just seemed a bit implausible to me that an American Italian like that would (more or less) just shrug it off, and later share a hotel room with the guy.    

But it is, of course, well intentioned and handsomely made, so I wouldn't want to put off anyone from seeing it.   

But it you want to be concerned again about the liberties Hollywood routinely takes on true life stories, you can read this Time article which gives an explanation as to why some people who knew Shirley complain about the film, and others think it OK.    (They are many similar article around on other sites.)

COVID's odd effect in Japan

This article at the BBC notes that COVID in Japan seems to have caused an increase in suicide, but only amongst women, which is odd:

Professor Michiko Ueda is one of Japan's leading experts on suicide. She tells me how shocking it has been to witness the sharp reverse in the last few months.

"This pattern of female suicides is very, very unusual," she tells me.

"I have never seen this much [of an] increase in my career as a researcher on this topic. The thing about the coronavirus pandemic is the industries hit most are industries staffed by women, such as tourism and retail and the food industries."

Japan has seen a large rise in single women living alone, many of them choosing that over marriage which entails quite traditional gender roles still. Prof Ueda says young women are also far more likely to be in so-called precarious employment.

On a cheerier note, I hadn't realised that suicide rates had been improving as much as they have over the last 12 years:

In a country notoriously reserved about people talking about their mental health, the article does not explain what is behind this.   
  

An accurate forecast

It surprises me, watching my favourite vloggers, how much time they sometimes say it takes them to edit their videos.  But I also wonder, do so many of them have to follow that jumpy style of editting that is so common.  Less edits would cut down edit time. [To be clear - I know this Tik Tok works  because of the editing, and the Tik Tok format is often based on quick edits.   I am talking more about the way so many vloggers use the constant little edits on longer Youtube videos  when it's just a talk to camera.  Sure, some are cutting out mistakes, but I am sure it is used just as a stylistic device too.] 

I'm also getting a depressing B Ark vision of the future of humanity where in 200 years a tiny outpost of people survive in the Arctic circle, trying to grow crops and editing videos about it.  (And some intellectual will discover that ubiquitous masturbation is about to lead to extinction.)

 

[Having said that, I did like that guy's Tik Tok.  I don't have the app, but I think you can watch it via the Tweet here.]

Yeah, that'll work

In China:

So far, 2021 has been cruel to unhappy Chinese couples. The first blow came on Jan. 1, when a new law went into effect mandating a 30-day cooling-off period for those seeking a divorce. Then, in February, couples that were still seeking to split up found themselves struggling to find online appointments. In parts of Shanghai and Shenzhen, the calendar was backed up for weeks. In Guangzhou, appointments were so scarce that scalpers sold them.

China’s government isn’t apologizing. For years, it took a hands-off approach to marriage and divorce. But steep recent declines in the country’s birth rate are changing minds at the top. A government that once sought to discourage childbearing is now resurrecting traditional and often sexist notions of family and gender to promote it.

The article explains the history of government intervention there into marriage laws.  The concern with the birthrate has led to government badgering of women:

...the end of the one-child policy in 2016 had no meaningful impact on the country’s birth rate. In 2019, the number of births fell 4%, to 10.6 million, China’s lowest level since 1961.

That has left the government eager to find scapegoats as it abandons decades of anti-natalism for an increasingly coercive pro-natalism. Last week, the National Health Commission outlined the factors that, in its view, are impacting fertility in China’s economically depressed northeast region: “economic burdens, infant and child care, and female career development.” The commission is no outlier. About a decade ago, Chinese media began referring to working, unmarried women over the age of 27 by the derogatory term “leftover women,” expressing an anti-feminist (and pro-natalist) attitude that has persisted ever since.

I wonder how popular abortion is now in that country?   I mean, we know it was used to help enforce the one child policy, but now that they want more kids, wouldn't they just consider it making it harder to obtain?

Reports say that they are being, shall we say, unsubtle about its use for the Uighurs:

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

 It's pretty incredible, their attitude to controlling society.

The continuing uncertainty over Planet 9

I didn't think it would be so hard to work our whether there really is Planet Nine - but it obviously is. 

Planet Nine is dead; long live Planet Nine? For some years, scientists have debated the existence of an unseen planet at least five times the mass of Earth in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Now, the hypothesis has been dealt a blow by a new analysis of distant, icy objects, which questions the evidence that they are under the gravitational pull of a huge planet.

The findings do not rule out the possibility of a ninth planet orbiting the Sun, and astronomers say more data will be needed to put the debate to rest.

 I would like it to turn out to be a captured black hole, actually.   That would allow for some good science fiction ideas.

A fairly complicated story about some possible new physics

It's not the simplest explanation, but it's worth reading:  How the Universe Remembers Information.

(I think they really should put "Possibly" at the end of that title.)

Still counting

I see via Twitter that Gallup has a new figure out for its survey results on American sexual identification, and the headline story is the (so to speak) rise of the bi:

More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%.

Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

The other big thing is the increase in bi identification being mainly in the young, and mainly with women:

Women are more likely to identify as bisexual -- 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

I'm not sure that there is really anything too surprising about this - it's been pretty clear for some time that there it's been increasingly "cool" amongst the youth to identify as being something other than boring old straight, and we already knew young women were ahead of the curve in claiming sexual/gender diversity.  Identity politics itself has been on the up and up.  

But there are some interesting things said about the results on Twitter.  For example, I had never thought of this before, but I read a tweet (that I can't find again right now) that argued that the large number of deaths from AIDS in the 80's and 90's can partly account for why substantially fewer older men identify as gay.

The most dubious result in the survey is probably the transgender identification amongst the younger group, especially "Gen Z":

I'm with the middle comment:  it's a result that really raises questions about how young people are thinking about these categories when they answer the survey.   

Anyway, it all reminded me of a post I wrote in 2013 about estimates at that time of the number of men  who could likely be called gay or bisexual.    (See the comments too.)  At that time, I guesstimated that, if you looked at CDC survey evidence of men who said they had sexual experiences with men, you could probably get to 4 to 5% who could be identified as gay or bisexual, in America at least.*

The Gallup results would now back that up:

 Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

So, I think my guesstimate still looks good.

 

 

* The figure increases to 20% if you are talking about England.**

** A joke.  Although I am still pretty sure it's the gayest country on the planet.  

   

Cancelled Will is not letting it get him down

I really respect Will Wilkinson.   Arguably, he was the recent victim of one of the stupidest examples of "cancel culture" being mis-used by a boss against a quality, (now) pretty much mainstream liberal writer, but Wilkinson did not moan about it at all, and just went on to set up his own corner of the internet to pump out his great writing.

A recent example:  On the Defensive Prickliness of Anti-Woke Patriotism.  

It's about this:

Why is it so bothersome to admit that there are shameful chapters of cruel injustice in our nation’s history? Why is it so hard to simply accept that the historical record and publicly available comparative evidence suggests that the United States of America is pretty great in a lot of ways and really awful in a lot of ways?

He ends with this explanations of how conservatives "cope" with the dissonance that there is a lot to criticise in the history of the country, while it is also pretty great in many ways:

The easiest way to cope with the story that credible American historians tend to tell is to outsource your expertise identification needs to conservative commentators (they’re expert experts!) who say that you shouldn’t trust them — who say that these out-of-touch woke egghead elites sneering down on all of us from their ivory towers are intentionally spreading misinformation because they hate America, want to tear down what makes it great, and replace it with something bad, foreign and dystopian, like …. I dunno, functional democratic institutions or an adequate social insurance state?

However, dismissing inconvenient truths by impugning the messenger doesn’t fully meet the challenge of keeping on the sunny side. It remains that America has a lot of profound problems that simply cannot be denied. So the next step is to blame all our undeniable problems on the evil and incompetence of your cultural/political rivals while pretending that the places where most Americans live don’t really count as part of the country. This leaves conservatives in a position where they can say that America is unambiguously great … except for all the ways in which the left and “elites” have turned it into a tyrannizing garbage fire.  

This is how you end up with the truly baffling Calvinball of conservative national assessment. America is the greatest country in the history of the world! It is also “not great,” “crippled,” and the victim of “carnage” roughly in proportion to the extent that Republicans don’t control things. A meaty majority of the American population dwells in large metro areas, which are all run by Democrats. These places are thus unmitigated disasters. You might think that an ambiguous “part good, part bad” mixed judgment of America’s merits would be logically inescapable once you’ve committed yourself to the idea that half the country lives in one or another crumbling, corrupt, crowded, crime-infested hellhole. Indeed, it is logically inescapable.

But this isn’t logic; this is a coping mechanism. That’s why the problems that beset America’s cities, whether real or imagined, don’t exactly count against America because they count first against Democrats and Democrats aren’t really American. Or maybe it’s that multicultural Democratic-majority cities don’t count as part of “real” America, so the horrendous problems they are imagined to have can’t drag down America’s greatness score. Either way. 

At the end of all these intellectual and emotional gymnastics is relief. Really, there’s nothing to not be proud of. Because if American history makes you feel bad, it’s a lie. If the places where most Americans live are terrible it doesn’t count because those aren’t real American places that count. If there’s anything about our country that is seriously and undeniably bad, it’s because disloyal fake Americans are preventing us from being the greatest country on Earth by scandalously denying that we are.

I find that analysis completely convincing.

More connected but less...connected

So it seems Noah Smith just noticed an article from 2018 in The Atlantic that noted that young Americans were having less sex than before:

 which led to a couple of Tweets by a guy explaining it:

That sounds (a little depressingly) plausible.  Someone else throws this in:

This all sounds bad from an evolutionary perspective!

A disappointing summer

I suspected as much.  As this article notes, Queensland was (more or less) promised a wet summer due to La Nina, but apart from parts of the far North, it's been pretty dry.

This have been very noticeable around Brisbane, where it seems to me to be quite a few years now since we had a lot of summer rainfall.  Storms have brought just enough intermittent rain to keeps the grass green-ish, but we really haven't had the days of deep, drenching rain that used to be a regular feature of our summers.

It's still possible we may get a very wet autumn, I guess.  I certainly hope we are not heading into a protracted period of low rainfall again, though.   

Illiberal Left noted

Further to my post yesterday, I agree with this sentiment:

I also found via Twitter today this Jonathan Chait article about some of the silliness about "cancelling" people for using words when they are clearly just being quoted, rather than endorsed:  Describing a slur is not the same as using it.

It seems pretty surprising that such a thing needs to be explained in detail, but that's where some of the worst of "cancel culture" has taken us.  

 

A repeat problem

I watched Four Corners last night on management problems in Kakadu National Park.  

Jointly managed by traditional owners and Canberra based (I think) Parks Australia, apparently there has been a lot of argument from the locals that the latter is not listening to them enough.  One example they gave, and a major one for the tourism operators, was the closing down of a walkway to get to the top of a formerly very popular waterfall.   Apparently, traditional owners claimed it came too close to a sacred site, and they had warned Parks Australia.

The show, I have to say, as a piece of journalism, was completely unbalanced.  They did point out that a trio of Parks Australia managers had resigned, but there was no attempt at all to have any of them, or anyone else from Parks Australia, to respond to various claims of the local traditional owners.

You see, I find it hard to believe that Parks Australia would have built the stairway against clear and specific protest from the traditional owners about impact on a sacred site.  I strongly suspect there is more to it than that - unclear input from traditional owners; a expansion of a sacred site from what they had previously considered sacred; or a simple miscommunication.   

The problem seems to be a repeat one - that it is really hard working with aboriginal representative bodies, and I very much doubt that the problem is all (as aboriginal activists claim) on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.

There seems a very good chance that traditional owner expectations as to their opinion always winning on every management issue is going to lead to their own economic loss due to permanently reduced tourism.   One aboriginal community member last night was saying that in fact they shouldn't be putting all their economic eggs into tourism anyway - but he was completely and utterly non specific as to what other enterprises anyone had in mind:  

JOHN CHRISTOPHERSEN, SENIOR COMMUNITY MEMBER: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation are looking at developing tourism in Jabiru, there are a whole range of different options that Jabiru could become used for, rather than tourism. I would not be putting all my eggs in the tourism basket, I can tell you that. A lot more effort needs to be put into the health of our people. The education of our people, employment of our people. There is potential for economic growth in establishing enterprises for our people in the Park. But you have to see beyond the blinkers. Look outside the box, mate. What might be a potential. Tourism is not the be all and end all.     

I always worry that I am sounding too Right wing unsympathetic on aboriginal issues - but it's just that anyone my age has seen decades of claims that if only politicians and non indigenous Australians would listen more to what traditional owners want and need it will all improve.

But it doesn't.  Or not much, anyway.

Maybe I am getting old, but I don't understand this...

 What's it mean to be tribally Right wing but not very Right ideologically?   

I mean, particularly in the American context - to be tribally Right at the moment means you are more than likely living in an evidence free conspiracy world where only election fraud won the election for Biden, Trump remains the saviour of the common man, and Democrats want to destroy civil society.  Not to mention disbelief in climate change, wearing masks for COVID, and not wanting to take a vaccine that would return the world to something more normal.

Who wants to be any part of how wrong that tribalism has gone?

And if you go to Britain - the populist Right led to Brexit, and who really thinks that is still looking a good idea?

I keep saying, but apparently cannot convince Jason Soon - the excesses of the Left in illiberal views on identity politics is pretty minor stuff compared to the crapfest the tribal Right has delivered.

Waving the bloody shirt

There's a very interesting thread by David Neiwert on Twitter about the Right's use of rhetorical tactics that originated post (American) civil war. Here's a link to the Threadreader version, because it's long.

 

 

Barbarian history examined

So, last night we finished watching the Netflix series Barbarians, and it was quite a bloody spectacle.  It no doubt was the cause of a dream in which I was about to be beheaded by some black clad executioner at, of all places, Disneyland.  (I had also seen a news story about Hong Kong Disneyland during the day, so there is a reason.)  It started with me glumly accepting my fate, only to start worrying that it was really going to hurt a lot before I lost consciousness because his axe didn't look sharp, and arguing that I would prefer to be shot. (Finally, I realised that I hadn't been convicted of a crime, only accused of one, so I didn't deserve execution at all.  I think I successfully convinced him as I woke up.)

Anyway:  I went into watching the series only seeing that it had quite good reviews.  I had a vague idea that it was based loosely on real events, but did not bother, until now, to check that out.  (It's always best to leave reading the real story until after a movie or series is finished, as the degree of invention is often a tad disappointing - especially if the events are  particularly well documented.)   

I did like the show overall - and part of the fun of watching it was trying to work out whether it was pandering to German nationalism, or not.   I mean, it did paint the Romans as being pretty terrible and ruthless in their local rule, but on the other hand, it made the Germanic tribes look very technologically inferior, unpleasantly fractious, and much more into religious "woo" than the Romans.   But the whole story is about a successful underdog attack on the Romans, so put that into the "pro-German" column.   

Now that I have gone looking for historical commentary, at the top of the Google list is this fantastically detailed assessment on a blog by a young American Midwest university history student who seemingly really knows his stuff.   If you have finished the series, I strongly recommend reading Spencer McDaniel's post.

To my surprise, the series is basically much more accurate than I expected.   Sure, it has added fictional details (including ones about a couple of key relationships); but overall, I am quite delighted to read that the show's producers have obviously taken way more care than is common in adding historically accurate details - or when inventing details, at least making them possible and not entirely implausible.

I also had no idea of the nationalistic importance of the story of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest,  but Spencer explains all of that as well.  His blog Tales of Times Forgotten, seems to have quite a lot of interesting content, actually.

I see that a lot of people have discussed the show's accuracy.  Another nerdy guy has made a Youtube video about it, and he seems overall to be quite impressed as well.

So, well done, everyone.   

And all the Wodan talk in the show makes me keener to see The Ring Cycle at the end of this year.  (It was COVID delayed last year.)

McConnell and others have more work to do if they want the cult to fade

I think that the "establishment" Republicans - those with brains enough to know that it's bad for the party to continue to under the sway of Trump and   his family - has been hoping that one-off denunciations and then just not talking about him anymore might work.   And I guess it might, eventually, if Trump starts getting entangled in too many legal actions.

But polling is indicating that the cult isn't fading fast enough, despite 6 January:

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump's support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Half of those polled say the GOP should become "more loyal to Trump," even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans. 

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone last Monday through Friday. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.