Lost saint

An odd story at a Catholic news site:

ROME — The remains of St. Peter may have been and possibly still could be buried in catacombs under the Mausoleum of St. Helena after being moved from the Vatican hillside during anti-Christian persecutions in the third century, according to a paper published recently by three Italian researchers.

Labeling their conclusions as “conjecture,” the researchers suggested archaeologists could “validate” their findings with “excavation campaigns”; however, a leading expert in Christian archaeology and a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology told Vatican News that the researchers’ hypothesis was “unacceptable.”

Emperor Constantine would never have gone through so much logistical trouble building St. Peter’s Basilica in the early fourth century “if it had not been contingent upon the presence of the venerated remains” below, where the saint’s tomb had been venerated since early Christian times, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai told Vatican News May 30.

“It is clear,” he said, “that Peter’s remains were found in the place of the original burial site on the Vatican hill when the formidable Constantinian basilica was built, the biggest basilica ever established in the city,” he said, adding that if later the remains had been moved “ad catacumbasto,” then that refers to a cemetery on the Appian Way, later called, the catacombs of St. Sebastian.

A previous Pope thought the saint's bones had already been discovered, but the means of identification sounds dubious:

While scholars are certain St. Peter’s ancient tomb was located on the Vatican hill where he had died a martyr and where Constantine ordered a basilica be built, his remains have been a source of much controversy and mystery.

St. Paul VI announced in 1968 that the “relics” of St. Peter had been “identified in a way which we can hold to be convincing,” after bones were discovered following excavations of the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica, which began in the 1940s near a monument erected in the fourth century to honor St. Peter.

The pope had cases of the relics placed beneath the basilica’s main altar and in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace. Scientists have confirmed the remains are those of a 60- to 70-year-old robust male, according to Vatican News.

 

The giggling cure

I am surprised to read this:

A new study at the University of Chicago Medicine and Washington University found that a single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects. The study, published June 9 in Science Translational Medicine, also found that the effects lasted much longer than previously suspected, with some participants experiencing improvements for upwards of two weeks.  ...

Often called "laughing gas," nitrous oxide is frequently used as an anesthetic that provides short-term pain relief in dentistry and surgery.

In a prior study, the investigators tested the effects of a one-hour inhalation session with 50% nitrous oxide gas in 20 patients, finding that it led to rapid improvements in patient's depressive symptoms that lasted for at least 24 hours when compared to placebo. However, several patients experienced negative side effects, including nausea, vomiting and headaches....

In the new study, the investigators repeated a similar protocol with 20 patients, this time adding an additional inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide. They found that even with only half the concentration of nitrous oxide, the treatment was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide, but this time with just one quarter of the negative side effects.

Furthermore, the investigators looked at patients' clinical depression scores after treatment over a longer time course; while the last study only evaluated depression symptoms up to 24 hours after treatment, this new study conducted additional evaluations over two weeks. To their surprise, after just a single administration, some patients' improvements in their depression symptoms lasted for the entire evaluation period. 

Many years ago, a friendly dentist offered to give me nitrous oxide when I didn't really need it, just to see what it was like.   I did, indeed, giggle a lot at anything said.

Foucault the neo-liberal

I don't know that it's worth dwelling as much on Foucault as some academics like to do, but I was nonetheless interested to learn that there is a stream of criticism that he was too much of a neo-liberal.  That's news to me:

More recently, leftist thinkers have cast Foucault as a neoliberal, arguing that the kind of politics incipient in his thought paved the way to the hollowing out of the welfare state that took place under the signs of Reaganomics and Third Way liberalism. This counterintuitive assertion is the principal argument of The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution. The collaborative work of Mitchell Dean, a scholar at Copenhagen Business School, and Daniel Zamora, a sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a version of the book was first published in French in 2019 before being adapted into English this year.

Appearing with the radical publisher Verso, it offers a generous consideration of Foucault’s dalliance with neoliberal thought, coming to the conclusion that the French philosopher used the work of the so-called “New Philosophers” and American neoliberal thinkers in order to question what he perceived as the sclerotic totems of the welfare state. In so doing, they bring together a growing scholarship on the topic, including Foucault and Neoliberalism, a 2016 volume coedited by Zamora to which Dean contributed. Ultimately, though, The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault’s work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state.

Stupid, stupid blowhard watch

 He's such a lightweight, wingnut troll now...

Feeling vindicated

David Roberts notes:

 Here's a link to the study, and here is the abstract:

The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed. Research has focused on beliefs about narrow sets of claims never intended to capture the richness of the political information environment. Furthermore, factors contributing to this performance gap remain unclear. We generated an unique longitudinal dataset combining social media engagement data and a 12-wave panel study of Americans’ political knowledge about high-profile news over 6 months. Results confirm that conservatives have lower sensitivity than liberals, performing worse at distinguishing truths and falsehoods. This is partially explained by the fact that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals. The problem is exacerbated by liberals’ tendency to experience bigger improvements in sensitivity than conservatives as the proportion of partisan news increases. These results underscore the importance of reducing the supply of right-leaning misinformation.

Psychiatric reversals noted

In a journal article about transgenderism* which I don't particularly recommend, I was nonetheless surprised to find this account of how the psychiatric establishment, over the course of a mere 30 years, swung from one extreme to another in its classifications regarding homosexuality:

The story of how disorders are first classified and reclassified within, and then eventually expunged from, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is telling. Homosexuality, for example, was included in the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, as a sexual deviation classified under the rubric “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance.”2 In the second edition (DSM-II) published in 1968 it became a sexual deviation classified as a nonpsychotic mental disorder along with pedophilia and exhibitionism.3 It was then declassified as a disorder altogether when DSM-II was revised in 1973. The DSM-III, published in 1980, was such a strong reversal of position from its predecessor that it actually classified any homosexual who wanted to be heterosexual as having a psychosexual disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality.”4 This was then dropped when the DSM-III was revised in 1987 (DSM-III-R).5

Why was I reading about transgenderism?  Because of this tweet yesterday, which told (to my mind) an improbable story:

Jessica's twitter feed is full of photos of herself, many with the needy "don't you agree I'm looking hot" kind of vibe that young transgender male to female folk seem to often yearn for.  It's not enough that they change their bodies to suit their own mental state - they insist that others join in giving positive comments on their new looks.   Which can be a rather, um, reality challenging call and a significant part of why transgenderism can be such a socially awkward thing for the rest of us.  

As one person on Twitter said:

 
 

*   Here it is.

Against the lab leak theory

There's quite a strong push back against the "the liberal media got the lab leak theory all wrong" in a column in the LA Times, which I got to via Twitter (and not paywalled.)   Some parts:

What’s missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory. There’s even less for the wildest version of the claim, which is that the virus was deliberately engineered. There never has been, and there isn’t now.  ...

No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But “zoonotic” transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway.

That’s why the virological community believes that it’s vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans.

That was the conclusion reached in a seminal paper on COVID-19’s origins published in Nature in February 2020 by American, British and Australian virologists. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” they wrote.

“We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak,” the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. 

“However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely,” Andersen said. “Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence.”

Coauthor Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: “Our conclusion that it didn’t leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper.”

As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, “the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal.”

What remains of the lab-leak theory is half-truths, misrepresentations, and tendentious conjecture. ...

 

Let’s take a look at the science underlying the search for COVID’s origins. One important fact is that we may never get a definitive answer. The animal source of the Ebola virus, which was first identified 45 years ago, is still unknown, Maxmen reported in Nature.

Maxmen noted that it took researchers 14 years to trace the 2002-2004 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to a virus that leapt from bats to humans. ...

 

The lab-leak theory gains from a superficial plausibility — especially to laypersons. The Wuhan lab had a collection of bat viruses, including some that appear to be similar to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

But some virologists say they’re not similar enough to mutate into SARS-CoV-2, even through deliberate manipulation, Garry says. “That’s a point that’s not going to resonate very strongly with people who haven’t studied viruses for a long, long time.”

 

 

 

 

More Right wing nonsense watch

 

Another quick movie review no one was waiting for

I saw the 2015 Jonny Depp film Black Mass last week, on Netflix, and was surprised how good it was.

I see that it was better rated on Rotten Tomatoes than I thought (73%), but it didn't make much money at the box office.  (Just under a $100 million world wide).  

It's true:  it is very much Martin Scorsese territory, and I think some people may have thought it was too much a repeat of Goodfellas and the rest of his oeuvre.  But I thought of it more as Scorsese material but done with a better and more satisfying story arc.   It is nicely directed, and Depp and all of the actors are very good.

The other film it's unavoidably close to is Scorsese's The Departed, which I thought was really awful and couldn't stick with, and even my son didn't seem to care for it.   It is a much, much better movie than that.    

Right wing hero watch

First, Milo:

 Second, Naomi Wolfe: 

Adam Creighton has been busy being upset about her banning:

 

Each of these characters have been mentioned favourably recently at Catallaxy. 

Update:  speaking of Catallaxy, I see that Steve Kates is now sharing Gateway Pundit fantasies of Fauci (and others) being on trial for...well, you can see.

Man with no problem with women blames them for...everything

It's one of the great mysteries of life that Sinclair Davidson seems to think he's performing a service to the world by keeping a forum running where his mates regularly show themselves off as, well, ridiculous idiots.  His former RMIT buddy Steve Kates is currently endorsing COVID as being a vast conspiracy to bring down Trump and hence Western civilisation.   But we've seen that before.  

 Today's entry,  rather, for going "straight to the pool room" comes from Man Who Loves Women (Just as Long as They are Exactly Like my Catholic Mum circa 1955), with this:

Seriously...

What the West needs

It's better than having a trade or other war.   The West needs to infiltrate Chinese social media and continue spreading this idea: 

Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by "lying flat".

The new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts.

China has a shrinking labour market and young people often work more hours.

The term "tang ping" is believed to have originated in a post on a popular Chinese social media site.

"Lying flat is my wise movement," a user wrote in a since-deleted post on the discussion forum Tieba, adding: "Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things."

The comments were later discussed on Sina Weibo, another popular Chinese microblogging site, and the term soon became a buzzword.

The idea behind "tang ping" - not overworking, being content with more attainable achievements and allowing time to unwind - has been praised by many and inspired numerous memes. It has been described as a spiritual movement.

 

Theories

Orwell was wrong...

...in that the future was not the cynical Two Minute Hate, forced on a populace by authoritarian government, but a whole 180 Minute Hate every evening brought by an ageing billionaire for profit and influence:  

 

I mean, the Right in America (and any Australian sympathisers to it) have become just too stupid to engage with, and their obsession with attacking individual public figures like Fauci is just absurd.   

As with climate change, they think they can pluck any statement made by a perceived enemy out of context and think that it proves their point.   They think they're the smart ones, when they are just nasty and dumb and tribal to the point of preferring self harm to listening to expertise.   

 

Quantum computing on Youtube

I recently watched two videos of interest regarding quantum computing.

As you might expect, Google is going into it in a big way, and while the comedy in this does not really work, it's still interesting:

And Bee Hossenfelder had an informative video on the various approaches to creating quantum computing. I didn't realise there were so many: 

Update:   I have been meaning to say, since I first posted a photo of these early quantum computer set ups, that I like the lacy, intricate design of the Google quantum computer, which is all about the need for extreme cooling. Which has made me wonder - how do you cool something down to below the temperature of space? This article gives some indication, although I still don't understand exactly how it works: 

 “Quantum chips have to operate at very low temperatures in order to maintain the quantum information,” Clarke said. To do this, Intel uses cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems from specialist Blufors.

The refrigerator features several stages, getting colder as you go down - all the way "down to temperatures just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero - that is really cold. In fact, it's 250 times colder than deep space,” Clarke said. “We use a mixture of helium isotopes as our refrigerant to get down to these very cold temperatures, in the tens of millikelvin.”

While the refrigeration system can bring temperatures down to extremes, it can't remove heat very quickly - so if you have a chip in there that's creating a lot of heat, you're going to have a problem.

"You're probably familiar with the power dissipation of an FPGA," Clarke said. "This would overwhelm the refrigeration cooling capacity. At the lowest level of a fridge, you typically have about a milliwatt of cooling power. At the four Kelvin stage [higher up in the fridge], you have a few watts."

Future fridge designs are expected to improve things, but it's unlikely to massively increase the temperature envelope. "That imposes limitations on the power dissipation of your control chips."

 

A Trump world mystery

It is distinctly odd, the way the Trump blog has been abruptly discontinued.  The Guardian explains. 

Is there a connection with the widely discussed report that Trump is telling people he will be "re-instated" in August?   Did he write a blog post all about that, and people around him have thought it was going to hurt him if posted?   

A significant bit of commentary on the Porter case

This article at the Financial Review, and not behind a paywall, describes the issues in the case and argues the settlement definitely was a capitulation by Porter.    

I would also comment that the world of defamation lawyers seems particularly incestuous, even taking into account that the world of barristers and judges is routinely kinda incestuous.  

I think that everyone now is curious about the additional redacted evidence that Porter wanted to keep out of the trial.  Particularly from the guy who said he had a relevant conversation with Porter about his time with the deceased. 

A credibility issue?

Oh, so just as I thought from the look and manner of the guy, there is apparently reason to suspect the credibility of Luis Elizondo:

 

 

The Guardian writes:

A Pentagon whistleblower known for speaking out about UFOs is accusing his former agency of waging a disinformation campaign against him, a report says.

Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other offenses at the agency, according to Politico.

and Jazz Shaw, the right wing blogger at Hot Air who is a firm believer in UFOs has a story about emails apparently deleted in the Pentagon, which he thinks is a Big Deal.   I wonder if it'll turn out to be more incompetence than anything else.  

China's building problems

According to some China critical Youtube channel I subscribe to, the Shenzhen SEG Plaza is still shaking from time to time, and remains closed and under investigation.

I see now that Bloomberg ran an informative story on the building, and the general problems with China's high rise industry:

In 1996, the company went public and rolled some of the proceeds into SEG Plaza. Last week, Chinese media unearthed a report on the building’s construction authored by a (then) graduate student. She noted that “Shenzhen speed” wasn’t speedy enough for SEG Plaza: The tower was raised at a rate of one floor every 2.7 days. She also found that the building’s construction began before the design and review process was even complete, and that updated plans were delivered throughout the project, meaning that completed sections would often have to be reworked.

SEG Plaza wasn’t the only project to cut such corners. For years, Shenzhen’s contractors made cement with sea sand. It’s far cheaper than river sand, and for good reason: It corrodes the structural steel that holds up buildings. In 2013, the city identified 31 companies that had used sea sand in construction and suspended eight of them for a year — but it never identified any at-risk buildings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, building collapses are a regular, recurring tragedy in China.

The writer says the plaza has long been home to shody electronics sales:

A few years after opening, for example, SEG Plaza became a global hub for trading cheap, used electronic components — rather than the new ones that the company had hoped to drive. Chinese traders in, say, New York might buy 5,000 used desktops from a Wall Street bank and ship them to south China. Within a couple of months, their semiconductors would be on sale in an SEG stall.

It wasn’t the kind of business that Shenzhen wanted to advertise to the world (when dignitaries were in town, the government would actually shut the plaza down). Its mere existence hinted at the city’s relatively flexible attitude to intellectual property. But over the years, the neighborhood surrounding SEG Plaza filled with malls also marketing used components to up-and-coming manufacturers who weren’t exactly scrupulous about patents and trademarks.

In recent years, it became obvious that SEG Plaza’s best days were behind it. Chinese consumers who once sought out the largely disposable electronics built from SEG’s inventories were moving up to better devices. When I first visited the tower in the mid-2000s, the dim 10-story mall at its base was a crowded and relentless warren of stalls, all packed with chips and computers for sale. In the last half-decade, the stalls have become increasingly populated with beauty products, electronic cigarettes and crypto-mining rigs. Shenzhen’s freewheeling days as an unaccountable manufacturer of low-cost goods are over. 

 

Sure...

France 24 has a story about UFOs being treated seriously now, and includes this very improbable story:

What officials and scientists aren’t saying is that these are aliens coming from another planet to visit us. They simply don’t know what these objects are, they say. The discussion is still largely couched in distinctly concrete terms and centers around the concern that these craft may represent a threat from enemies here on earth.

At least one official has been willing to go further, though. In December 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the space directorate of the Israeli Defence Ministry, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that humans have been in contact with extraterrestrials and have signed a co-operation accord with them. 

“There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens,” he told the newspaper. "They signed a contract with us to do experiments here."

Former president Donald Trump was in on the secret, he said, and had been “on the verge of revealing” it but was asked not to due to fears of “mass hysteria”.

Eshed’s assertion doesn’t seem to represent the consensus view in Israel. The chairman of the country’s Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel, told the Times of Israel that while the scientific community thinks the chances that there is life in outer space is “considerable, not small,” he doesn’t believe “there were any physical encounters between us and aliens".

I said ages ago that if some government agency had proof of alien presence on Earth that they thought should be kept secret, there is no way they would have told Trump, as he would blurted it out at his next rally and tried to take narcissistic credit for being the person to tell the world.

Update:   Eshed has made other claims:

Eshed makes implausible claims that include stories of how aliens prevented potential nuclear disasters, including an unspecified nuclear incident during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.^[24][25]