Here's the video you always knew you wanted to see - explaining the loose Japanese zoning laws that allow for a very highly mixed use of land in very small spaces:
This guy's videos are always good and interesting. He does make the interesting point at the end that the Japanese system seems both very capitalistic (allowing lots of freedom within a certain moderate set of restraints) but also sort of socialistic in the living spaces it develops (cars are not king; shops and facilities within walking distance - and neighbours living very close by - giving a sense of community).
I think the key thing he perhaps misses here is that Japanese communitarian cultural values came first; its not as if the zoning laws created them. And the Japanese are perhaps also inclined to just put up with certain inconveniences because of those values - such as people in apartments and houses living with loud talking drunks coming out of the pub or restaurant downstairs at 11.30pm every night to catch the last train.
So, it's probably a mistake to think that such zoning would work as well in Western countries.
I like using laundry detergent in pod form. They are convenient and not at all messy to use (well, subject to what I am about to say); it's easy to take a couple if you are going away for a few days and might need to wash clothes during the break; and they don't run any risk of gunking up pipes in the way the usual method of getting the detergent into a front load washing machine apparently can. They're also very clear in terms of working out value, as there is a simple and direct cost per wash on the price ticket on the supermarket, given they have to show unit price. (And by the way, they are a product on which supermarkets do this rotating specials thing continually - there always seems to be one brand which is on special for about 32 cent per pod, whereas the full price of the more expensive brands is close to $1. I only buy them on the cheaper pricing.)
But, I have found with the new front loading washer in my house that they can sometimes get squished against the window/door and fall into the rubber seal crease at the bottom, and take too long to get properly dissolved. This is because the way to use them in a front loader is said to be to put them in the drum and then load clothes on top of them. But, front loaders add water slowly, so they can be stuck spinning around for a while before everything gets wet enough for it to burst, and in the meantime can they move into the worst location for water contact.
My life hint, after trying worse methods (such as cutting them with scissors, or squeezing them with a cloth in the machine 'til they burst) is to briefly rinse the pod you are about to use under cold water and then put it in the machine. This seems to give the dissolving process a head start, and I have noticed that the detergent seems to be released quite quickly this way.
I do actually like watching the start of the cycle in our front loading machine to tell when the detergent seems to be released. Family members do think it rather odd when I do this, but we all have our special interests. :)
You can thank me for this important life advice, and I look forward to being the new Jordan Peterson.
I only noticed this commentator because someone I more or less trust (I forget who now!) linked to one of his tweets, which sounded sensible.
But man, I don't think I follow anyone else who swings so wildly between sounding more or less sensible, to just ridiculous.
He is, I gather, a small government libertarian type, and as such takes a "a pox upon both your houses" attitude towards the political parties in the US. But (I am reminded very much of Jason Soon) the thing that really seems to agitate him the most is Left wing identity politics. Which, as I have been saying for years, is a bit nuts in terms of how to prioritise serious problems.
Anyway, to illustrate my point of how wildly he swings, have a look at these examples. Is he always serious? I think so, but it's hard to tell.
I would pretty much bet a $1,000 that he is single, though!
Remember the early, quite funny, "Uncle Roger" video in which he took orders at a well regarded Singaporean food takeaway cafe at a market in London run by a young, blond, part Asian woman? I didn't remember her name, but it's Elizabeth Haigh, and her reputation has just taken a serious nosedive after a cookbook she published has some pretty extensive plagiarism from another Asian woman's cookbook from 2012.
It really does appear very blatant - and I would guess that the only way she could retain some credibility would be if it turns out it was largely ghost written, and the ghost writer is the one who did the copying. I mean, that's not good, when you claim to telling personal anecdote; but it's still a bit better than being the person doing the cutting and pasting with full knowledge.
I hadn't heard about this before: the important role cadaver smell detecting dogs (and one dog in particular) have played in some American murder convictions - yet based on some very dubious science.
A Sydney primary school has asked parents to make sure their children do not watch the popular Netflix series Squid Game, which depicts “extreme violence and gore”, because students are mimicking the games in the playground.
On what should I blame the modern parental de-sensitisation to violence being viewed by kids? The parents themselves being de-sensitised by ever increasing violence in movies, TV and video games, I expect.
As someone who remembers as a child in the 1960's seeing some relatively B grade movie in the cinema (I forget what it was now) which featured a guy getting shot with a harpoon in his stomach, and feeling that was really kind of disturbingly violent, it is completely surprising to me that parents do not think that kids can imagine the effect of violence to a more visceral degree than adults.
I haven't watched Squid Games. I saw some of the violent first game while my daughter was watching it and thought it didn't look like my sort of thing. I have seen commentary saying that it is worth watching even if it makes you uncomfortable, but I am not so sure. I have never been one for the dystopia "games played to the death" scenarios. Always seemed a bit silly to me. Unless we're talking gladiator era stories, I guess.
I do hope Gina is feeling isolated though. I would expect she's been on the phone to Barnaby a lot lately. He is giving the impression of feeling under pressure - and as I said in my last post, is this just because the government is being told bluntly by its top public servants that it just has to start being credible on the issue?
I also assume, though, that part of the government's problem may be that there are absolutely no public servant heads prepared to advise them there is any plausible way to deny climate change is real and that Australia can go it alone in ignoring it. Mind you, that has probably been the gist of the advice for years, but are they at the point of saying "Look, pretending to do something effective has become untenable"?
It was a colourful and unusual High Court hearing
involving the mining magnate, running over several days instead of the
usual one.
Mr Palmer's companies were represented
by senior barristers but he represented himself, breaking down as he
told the court he'd been personally targeted as a Queenslander.
The
case harks back to decisions made by an earlier Liberal government
about Mr Palmers's Pilbara Balmoral South iron ore project.
The project has never gained the necessary approvals, despite mediation.
Controversial Queensland academic Peter Ridd has lost a High Court
battle over his sacking for disparaging remarks about colleagues working
on the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef.
...why isn't anyone commenting on how the comic book artwork in that panel looks...bad:
I mean, what's with that jawline and cheek on the left? Looks like it's made of metal instead of flesh.
Anyway, Allahpundit explains that Josh Mandel, who sees the End of America because of a comic book only a handful of adult fanboys will read, is a Republican Ohio Senate primary candidate.
Allahpundit goes onto explain that the conservative performative uproar is due to Superman being the ideal American (or alien identifying as American), and:
He’s great because he’s good, the personification of our idealized past.
It’s no wonder then that Mandel and other nationalists would take
special offense to the character now displaying a trait that was
forbidden in the era when Superman became an icon. It’s a cultural
affront insofar as it signals that the America of today is fundamentally
different from the America of the “glory days” of the mid-20th century.
That core grievance is the whole reason Trump and Trumpism became a
thing, notwithstanding Trump’s own tolerant views of gays.
True, except its overlooking somewhat that the character is Superman's son, not Superman himself.
This comment appears at one of the offspring blogs of dead Catallaxy after a fairly ordinary (that is, by Rafe standards) post whinging about renewable energy:
Meanwhile, the rest of us are agog at how the Murdoch press has turned on a dime, no doubt confusing/dismaying its rusted on readers:
I haven't seen much on Twitter about how Sky News is covering this, only this, also from Kevin:
So, Murdoch is trying the tactic of populist anti-climate change advocacy on Sky News, while trying to convince readers in the most populist titles of print that its real and the government just has to act.
How's that meant to make sense? When can we expect the Sky News hosts to start attacking the editorial line taken by their companies print editors?
Keith Pitt, the resources minister, made headlines this week when he opened the boondoggle bidding on net zero. Pitt told
Phil Coorey at the Australian Financial Review if Scott Morrison wanted
agreement from the Nationals on a net zero target ahead of the Glasgow
climate conference, he should put $250bn on the table.
Yes, that’s “b” for billion.
According
to Pitt, if this transition was actually on, Australians taxpayers
should bear the risks. Pitt floated a cartoonishly bad idea where
taxpayers would underwrite the financing and insurance of fossil fuels –
including for overseas-owned companies – all because naughty Australian
banks weren’t inclined to make bad bets.
If
you’ve missed Pitt’s parable of the bad banks, let’s recap that quickly:
bad banks are now more interested in virtue signalling to their
obnoxiously woke inner-city clientele than backing salt-of-the-earth
fossil fuel projects in the regions.....
But before anyone could say Venezuela, Pitt’s
Queensland Nationals colleague Matt Canavan – a former Productivity
Commission economist now apparently estranged from capitalism – was out
and about with a different parable.
Canavan
told a mildly startled Kieran Gilbert on Sky News that Australians
should be prepared to pay higher interest rates in order to stare down
international financiers managing carbon risk in global markets.
Canavan’s Big Idea™ was actually wilder than Pitt’s, but it attracted
significantly less attention.
I don't know how people find the time to consider themselves thoroughly expert in their opinions on matters of interstate politics. I find I can barely know enough about the politics of my own state, let alone others.
Having said that, and speaking with only fleeing glimpses of his performance on the news: that Dominic Perrottet strikes me as physically and vocally uncharismatic. He keeps reminding me a bit of an aged version of how David Byrne looked in his old Once in a Lifetime video, and with a similar awkwardness.
I tried making lamb rogan josh (a recipe name that keeps making me wonder if I mixing it up with Rogan the broadcaster), and it was considered successful.
Given the variation in recipes on line, I will note that it was this one I followed, although in somewhat simplified form (I couldn't find the cloves in the cupboard for example). I also didn't bother blitzing the onion to a paste, and just used jar ginger and garlic, which makes for a much quicker prep. Also - some passata instead of tomato paste plus a tomato. And just a bit of sunflower oil instead of ghee - that's probably much healthier, too. [Oh, wait a minute: it was some other recipe that insisted on it being ghee, not this one.]
But - this spice mix worked well for 600 g of lamb:
1tsp fennel seeds
1tsp cumin seeds
3 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp garam masala
2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp red chili powder
(The seeds were toasted and ground.) It's not a hot curry, just one with lots of flavour. Cardamom is important - I like the burst of flavour when you bite into a cardamom pod. Use more than 4...
Update: I'll just add the rest here too, because link cancer may mean I lose it:
Onion Paste:
1 large red or brown onion, roughly chopped
Water
Ginger Garlic Paste:
4cm piece ginger, peeled and chopped
5 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
Water
4 tbsp oil
4 green cardamom pods
5 cloves
2 dried bay leaves
1 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp canned diced tomatoes or 1 tomato, diced
600g lamb, cut into small bite sized pieces
1 1/2 tbsp natural yogurt
Salt to taste
To cook:
Heat oil in a large casserole over medium-high heat. Stir fry cardamom, cloves and bay leaves for 1-2 minutes.
Add
onion paste. Cook, stirring, for 1-2 minutes or until the raw smell
disappears. Add ginger garlic paste. Cook, stirring, for 2 minutes or
until fragrant.
Stir in spice mix. Cook
for 1 minute or until aromatic. Add tomato paste and canned tomatoes.
Cook, stirring often, for 1-2 minutes.
Add
lamb. Season with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.
Stir yogurt into the curry. Cover lamb with 250 ml hot water. Bring to
the boil.
Reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer, covered and stirring occasionally, for 30-40 minutes or until lamb is cooked through.
One of the few advantages of the anonymous chat room participation on the net is that it can alert you to the fact there are people in certain fields who you would not want to be dealing with. Given this comment at one of the new Catallaxies...:
...if I were a patient in the SA hospital system, I would take it as a warning to ask for reassurance that the anaesthetist or surgeon is COVID vaccinated.
I missed watching this video put out by Sabine Hossenfelder some months ago:
It deals with, although too briefly, the question of whether it is possible to consider the 4 dimensional spacetime universe as being embedded in a higher dimensional universe. I mean, the idea of extra dimensional objects (or beings) being able to pass through our lowly 3 (spatial dimension) universe was very popular for a while in 20th century science fiction, but I don't think it ever got a mention much in real physics, and I never understood why. (And yes, I know that string theory was about compacted extra dimensions, but that's different.)
She said (with no further explanation, and starting at about the 6 min 30 second mark) that yes, you could consider our universe to be embedded in higher dimensions and to be expanding into them, but it (generally) takes 10 dimensions to make this work, and as they are understood (or "constructed"?) to be non observable, it is not scientific to think they are real.
Well, now I need to know why it takes 10 dimensions...
Update: OK, so according to this explanation in AEON, the 10 dimensions that Sabine mentions is about the extra compacted dimensions that are relevant to string theory - but as I said before, I didn't think compacted dimensions were relevant to the idea of our universe being embedded in extra dimensions that it can expand into. Anyhow, here is the explanation:
If moving into four dimensions helps to explain gravity, then might thinking in five dimensions have any scientific advantage? Why not give it a go?
a young Polish mathematician named Theodor Kaluza asked in 1919,
thinking that if Einstein had absorbed gravity into spacetime, then
perhaps a further dimension might similarly account for the force of
electromagnetism as an artifact of spacetime’s geometry. So Kaluza added
another dimension to Einstein’s equations, and to his delight found
that in five dimensions both forces fell out nicely as artifacts of the
geometric model.
The mathematics fit like magic, but the problem in this case was that
the additional dimension didn’t seem to correlate with any particular
physical quality. In general relativity, the fourth dimension was time; in Kaluza’s theory, it wasn’t anything you could point to, see, or feel: it was just there in the mathematics. Even Einstein balked at such an ethereal innovation. What is it? he asked. Where is it?
In 1926, the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein answered this question in a
way that reads like something straight out of Wonderland. Imagine, he
said, you are an ant living on a long, very thin length of hose. You
could run along the hose backward and forward without ever being aware
of the tiny circle-dimension under your feet. Only your ant-physicists
with their powerful ant-microscopes can see this tiny dimension.
According to Klein, every point in our four-dimensional
spacetime has a little extra circle of space like this that’s too tiny
for us to see. Since it is many orders of magnitude smaller than an
atom, it’s no wonder we’ve missed it so far. Only physicists with
super-powerful particle accelerators can hope to see down to such a
minuscule scale.
Once physicists got over their initial shock, they became enchanted
by Klein’s idea, and during the 1940s the theory was elaborated in great
mathematical detail and set into a quantum context. Unfortunately, the
infinitesimal scale of the new dimension made it impossible to imagine
how it could be experimentally verified...
It goes on to explain that the idea got revived in the 1960's to help explain the weak and strong nuclear forces:
Kaluza’s and Klein’s ideas bubbled back into awareness, and theorists
gradually began to wonder if the two subatomic forces could also be described in terms of spacetime geometry.
It turns out that in order to encompass both of these two forces, we have to add another five dimensions to our mathematical description. There’s no a priori
reason it should be five; and, again, none of these additional
dimensions relates directly to our sensory experience. They are just
there in the mathematics. So this gets us to the 10 dimensions of string
theory. Here there are the four large-scale dimensions of
spacetime (described by general relativity), plus an extra six ‘compact’
dimensions (one for electromagnetism and five for the nuclear forces),
all curled up in some fiendishly complex, scrunched-up, geometric
structure.
And there's more explanation that Witten came up with 11 dimensions:
There are many versions of string-theory equations describing
10-dimensional space, but in the 1990s the mathematician Edward Witten,
at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Einstein’s old haunt),
showed that things could be somewhat simplified if we took an
11-dimensional perspective. He called his new theory M-Theory, and
enigmatically declined to say what the ‘M’ stood for. Usually it is said
to be ‘membrane’, but ‘matrix’, ‘master’, ‘mystery’ and ‘monster’ have
also been proposed.
So, what about the type of extra "large" dimensions that was the subject of Flatland and science fiction? Well, it might be there, as AEON explains:
In 1999, Lisa Randall (the first woman to get tenure at Harvard as a
theoretical physicist) and Raman Sundrum (an Indian-American particle
theorist) proposed
that there might be an additional dimension on the cosmological scale,
the scale described by general relativity. According to their ‘brane’
theory – ‘brane’ being short for ‘membrane’ – what we normally call our Universe
might be embedded in a vastly bigger five-dimensional space, a kind of
super-universe. Within this super-space, ours might be just one of a
whole array of co-existing universes, each a separate 4D bubble within a
wider arena of 5D space.
OK, that's more like it.
Update: I realised on the weekend (because Youtube pointed it out to me) that Sabine Hossenfelder had done earlier videos on the extra dimensions idea, explaining the stuff that appeared in the AEON article above. I didn't previously realise that the idea of compacted extra dimension had been around for so long, with string theory really just reviving it.
Wilson points out that having rejected traditional religion, Lawrence
more or less designed his own, though his understanding of just what
this meant never seemed entirely clear. “For all his claims to prophetic
vision,” Wilson writes, “Lawrence had little idea what was going on in
the room let alone in the world,” she observes.
I've never especially followed what Rod Dreher might be saying: he's quite popular with people at Catallaxy, which is a good sign he is a wrong headed and probably offensive conservative. But I had noticed that he had become one of the Right's fanboys of Hungary and Orban - and this marks him as "conservative willing to discard democracy if it means propping up his losing side in the culture wars" and therefore not worthy of serious consideration.
However, I can't resist noting the well deserved ridicule he has received on Twitter and elsewhere for his lack of a self filter when discussing circumcision. It's also hard to believe he couldn't see the reaction he would get. Is he just dumb, or did he run with "let's just see how much Twitter chatter I can provoke"?
Update: One of the ideas of Dreher's that is lately often mentioned favourably at Catallaxy is his "Benedict Option":
There was a time when Christian thinkers like Dreher, who writes for The American Conservative,
might have prepared to fight for cultural and political control.
Dreher, however, sees this as futile. “Could it be that the best way to
fight the flood is to … stop fighting the flood?” he asks. “Rather than
wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we
should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks
of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the
occupation.” This strategic withdrawal from public life is what he calls
the Benedict option.
I find it a pretty laughable idea, but here's Melbourne's sometime depression sufferer Arky speculating on the same thing, more or less:
Human’s require each other for economic, social and procreation
reasons. In order to enjoy all the benefits of human society you have to
move in proximity to other people. However, as these times of raving
covidity prove that more and more of our fellow humans are complete
douche nozzles of the lowest order, the question sneaks into our
consciousness: Is it really worth hanging around with these complete
penises?
If in order to work you need an, at this point, open ended series of
jabs with weird concoctions; if schooling means sending your child to a
progressive indoctrination centre where they might also require an open
ended series of those weird concoction stabs for zero net benefit to
themselves; when socializing means being harangued by cultists; if being
entertained requires also to be lectured; if indeed, the entire
structure of the society you live within is riddled with that which you
find repugnant; is the warmth worth the pain anymore?
Mind you, here he is in comments in a different thread:
I have said in other places that it feels mean to criticise a guy who writes posts explaining that he has suffered depression, but he now spends all his time catastrophising about how Australian government response to COVID has all been about e-vil control over the population, and despairing that people were not rebelling against it. He is, of course, against COVID vaccination.
I am sorry, but I have little sympathy for a person, whether prone to depression or not, if he does not have enough sense to contemplate that he might be the one who is wrong and being led up the garden path by bad faith, blind culture war warriors. He also sounds like he has serious anger issues.
Anyway - my message to all the Benedict Option fans at Catallaxy (and libertarians anywhere longing to set up their new utopia in the middle of no-where): please, go ahead and do it. You're a danger to the rest of us.
