Cannabis mothers

In the New York Times:

Children of women who use marijuana during or soon after pregnancy are twice as likely as other kids to become anxious, aggressive or hyperactive, according to a new study. The findings add weight to a growing body of evidence linking cannabis use during pregnancy to psychiatric problems in children. The behavioral issues may be driven in part by changes in the activity of genes found in the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the growing fetus.

For pregnant women, cannabis isn’t just a means of getting high. Some women use it to ease severe morning sickness and anxiety, and they may not be aware that it can pose risks.

Women “tend to think smoking and drinking during pregnancy need to be avoided at all costs, but not cannabis,” said Yoko Nomura, a behavioral neuroscientist at Queens College, City University of New York, and a co-author of the new study. “We have a long way to go to educate pregnant women, policymakers and even OB-GYN doctors on this issue.”

Research suggests that a growing number of women are using cannabis during pregnancy: One study found that in 2016, nearly twice as many women in California reported using cannabis while pregnant than in 2009.

Yet for more than 40 years, research has been raising concerns about the effects of marijuana use during pregnancy. A longitudinal study that began in 1978 linked maternal cannabis use with children’s behavioral problems as well as deficits in language comprehension, visual perception, attention and memory. More recent research has linked cannabis use in pregnancy to low birth weight, reduced IQ, autism, delusional thoughts and attention problems, although some other studies have not identified such associations.

Of concern, too, is that cannabis today is nothing like the cannabis of years past. Levels of THC, the compound responsible for most of marijuana’s psychological effects, have increased significantly in recent years. “One joint today is like 17 joints in the 1970s,” said Dr. Darine El-Chaâr, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at The Ottawa Hospital in Canada who studies the health risks of marijuana use during pregnancy and was not involved in the new study.

That's quite some list of potential poor outcomes for the child!

I still suspect the US is going to regret the normalisation of marijuana use.

 

 

I am super determined to write this post

The topic:  superdeterminism as a "solution" to the quantum measurement problem.

The reason I am writing it:  possibly, because my future self is causing me to do so; but more clearly, because I see that everyone's favourite Youtube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder appears as co-author on a paper up at Arxiv with the title The Quantum Eraser Paradox. 

She made a recent Youtube video in which she downplayed the retro-causality interpretation of the experiment.  Let me post it:  here we go -

 

Now, she has previously come out as suggesting that superdeterminism is probably going to turn out to be the best explanation of quantum measurement issues, and she has also gone on about how free will in humans does not exist.   

In this new Arxiv paper, if I understand it correctly (and I have only had a quick read), it would seem that she and her fellow authors propose a new quantum experiment the results of which may show a difference between retrocausation as the explanation, and superdeterminism.  

Sounds like an important experiment to me!

But what does superdeterminism mean?   The Wikipedia explanation seems not very good, but this essay by Tim Anderson on Medium Superdeterminism may have solved the quantum measurement problem is a pretty good read.

Interestingly, it seems there is some potential cross over between both explanations (the future causing the past, and the now being predetermined.)   On the Wiki page, for example, it notes:

Some authors consider retrocausality in quantum mechanics to be an example of superdeterminism, whereas other authors treat the two cases as distinct. No agreed-upon definition for distinguishing them exists. 

But is that what Sabine addressing in her proposed experiment:  a way of distinguishing the two, empirically?

In Anderson's article, he writes:

Although there is no information transfer from future to past, so you can’t remember the future, there can be causal effects at the quantum level and relativity is not violated provided cause and effect are within light speed of one another. In that sense, you cannot know the future yet it can cause the present and the past. It can change reality itself, switching the electron spin orientation for example, or changing what reality was before you became aware of it.

This is why a better term for superdeterminism is “Future Input Dependency”. Thus, my actions in the future might, counter-intuitively, be determining my actions now rather than the reverse. Moreover, my future actions might even determine reality itself in the present. Thus, how I set up an experiment years in the future might determine the state of an electron emitted now.

Well, still count me as confused, then.

But, I don't know - if what I do in the future in some sense influences a decision I made in the past, is that a backdoor way to let a kind of free will in?   Because if it's myself doing the retrocausation, it has at least a whiff of free will about it.  

But how much I trust my future self to make the best retrocausative decisions?   Being good now seems a sound way to ensure your future self is not a complete jerk - hence retrocausation might fit in well with your classic way of thinking about ethics.  It's just that it's all circular (perhaps with a Mobius strip twist) instead of straight line running in one direction.

It's funny, too, isn't it, how we feel it's comforting to think our love relationships were meant to be - we give free will a hall pass to wander off when it comes to something like that, but want it back if it also means we're destined to die an early death (or end up in Hell forever.)

Anyway, I've written posts about retrocausation before on this blog.   I find it appealing, and I'm just here trying to work out why.

Metaphysics Friday

This article at Philosophy Now about Buddhist metaphysics seems a nice, succinct overview.   A couple of extracts:

Buddhism is often described as the philosophy of the ‘middle way’, in that the Buddha is alleged to have always urged his devotees to avoid ‘extremes’ in the quest for enlightenment – initially, the extremes of asceticism or self-indulgence.

Many scholars, like Sangharakshita, have emphasized that Buddhism is a form of ‘atheistic spirituality’ – a religion without a god – in that it attempts to steer a middle way between the theistic spirituality of the Hindu Vedanta tradition and the atheistic materialism of the Samkhya and Lokayata philosophies. But given the focal emphasis that Buddhism places upon the mind, its complete denial of a self, and the extreme idealist tendencies that developed within the Buddhist tradition, it is doubtful if Buddhism as a spiritual tradition ever took the middle way doctrinally. Indeed, many later Mahayana Buddhists, including such well-known figures as Daisetz Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa, may best be described as advocating not a middle way between spirituality and materialism, but a form of mystical idealism. ....

Aware of the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist concept of ‘no self’ (anatta), and the Buddha’s apparent ethical emphasis on the human subject as an embodied self with moral agency, some early Buddhists came out as phenomenalists. They had the notion of two realms of being, that of everyday life (laukika), and of a transcendental realm (lokuttara), which in turn was linked to the idea of two truths; the conventional truths of everyday life (our common-sense realism) (samvrti satya), and the absolute truths (paramartta satya). The latter truths are alleged to give us knowledge and experience of things ‘as they really are’. Under the latter perspective, not only are human beings in an absolute sense now alleged to be ‘unreal’ or as ultimately having no real (mind-independent) existence, so are all the material things and organisms that humans acknowledge and interact with in their everyday lives. We are thus informed by these Buddhists in accordance with this ‘phenomenalism’, that ultimately speaking, the substantive objects and enduring persons of everyday life do not exist: they are ‘fictions’ or ‘illusions’, or more specifically, merely constructs of the human mind. All material things are in this way mind-dependent, hence the label ‘phenomenalism’ (‘phenomena’ is Greek for ‘the things/experiences of the senses’). Buddhist phenomenalism is therefore a completely anti-realist metaphysic. What exists and has reality according to it are only fleeting mental events or moments of experience – described in the Abhidhamma as dhammas. This metaphysic is invariably linked by contemporary Western Buddhist scholars to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, or to the anti-realist subjectivism of postmodernist philosophy.

And further down:

  It is doubtful if the Buddha expressed any real interest in epistemology, nor was he really         interested in understanding the material world and its rich diversity of life-forms in any sort of scientific sense. His concern – as he continually emphasized – was ethical: the understanding and alleviation of suffering.

It is however clear that the Buddha’s emphasis on ‘right views’ and on the cultivation of wisdom (prajna) has two very different interpretations. On the one hand it has an empirically-sourced meaning: wisdom is a result of understanding the impermanence of human life, and the fact that all things arise and cease to exist according to specific causes and conditions. For the Buddha, greed, hatred, and egoism invariably give rise to suffering. As with Aristotle, wisdom involves the application of empirical knowledge – about impermanence and conditionality – to ethics, thereby (for Aristotle) enhancing human flourishing and well-being, or (for the Buddha) enabling the alleviation of suffering with respect to sentient beings. There is, therefore, no alienation between empirical knowledge and practical wisdom. (It is also worth noting that what really ‘expands the mind’ is not the ingesting of psychedelic drugs, nor inducing some transcendental or mystical state through deep meditation, but empirical knowledge – contrary to even what most Buddhists think.) On the other hand, the ‘transcendental’ interpretation of wisdom has less to do with empirical knowledge and ethics than with the cultivation of a spiritual or mystical intuition, and the realization, through deep meditative states, that the world – reality – is pure empty consciousness or absolute all-mind.

 I'm going to push my luck and extract more than I usually would, and press on:

It follows that both the experience and understanding of enlightenment within the Buddhist tradition has two very different kinds of meaning; either ethical (this-worldly) or metaphysical (other-worldly). Similarly, although Buddhist scholars invariably equate the concept of awareness or awakening (bodhi) with the experience of non-dual consciousness or emptiness (nirvana), awareness and emptiness imply two very different conceptions of enlightenment. Enlightenment as awareness suggests a common-sense realism. It posits that things in the world are transient and continually undergoing change, and that nothing is self-existent, in that all things are subject to specific causes and conditions. The human person as an ‘existing being’, to employ the Buddha’s own phrase, is no exception. The person as an embodied self is continually changing, and embedded in a complex web of relationships with both the natural world and with other people. Enlightenment as awareness thus entails a theory of knowledge that is historical, dialectical (that is, relational and dynamic) and this-worldly. Enlightenment in this sense occurs when an embodied self becomes fully aware of the truth that everything changes and that all things are subject to causes and conditions. Ethical conduct is here based on empirical knowledge, of the world as experienced in everyday life. It requires us to realize that suffering, along with sorrow and despair, arises from the three ‘poisons’, namely, greed, hatred and delusion – all egocentric strivings. And, as indicated, enlightenment as awareness also suggests a concept of wisdom akin to that of Aristotle; namely the application of empirical knowledge to the question of how to alleviate suffering, through the cultivation of wholesome mental states such as compassion, non-violence, generosity, and loving kindness.

In contrast, it appears that for many Buddhists – Daisetz Suzuki is a prime example – enlightenment as nibbana or emptiness implies a quite different worldview – that of mystical idealism. This involves the attainment of a state of mind that transcends the experiences of everyday life. This is a state of mind characterised as being unconditioned, eternal (or timeless), and empty (or disembodied). So here enlightenment is described as a form of non-dual consciousness that transcends both time and the material world of things. It leads to the understanding that ‘physical reality is created out of consciousness’ as one well-known scholar puts it (Bringing Home the Darma, Jack Cornfield, 2012, p.241). Enlightenment as nibbana therefore implies that ‘things as they really are’ are ‘mind-only’, as the ‘absolute all-mind’ or as the ‘cosmic consciousness’ beyond both the subjective mind and the body. For Suzuki, as for Nietzsche, it is a consciousness even beyond good and evil. This idea, however, appears to be completely at odds with the Buddha’s ethical philosophy.

And a point I haven't really heard made before:

Many contemporary Buddhists are dissatisfied with what they see as the overemphasis on meditation and the attainment of individual enlightenment. They have instead stressed the crucial need for a socially engaged Buddhism. This implies being directly involved in contemporary issues, specifically those relating to the ecological crisis and to social justice. It is also worth noting in passing that concepts of ‘no self’ and the ‘unconditioned’ were for the Buddha ethical concepts rather than metaphysical ones. They implied a rejection of egoism, not of the embodied self, and of seeking freedom from the unwholesome emotions of greed, hatred, and the craving for a permanent self.

I think it fair to say that the general approach taken by the writer aligns with a view of Buddhism taken by Karen Armstrong in her biography of Buddha which I am (very slowly) reading.  She keeps emphasising that his approach was actually very pragmatic - working out by his own experience what "worked" to solve his spiritual concerns.   

Update:  I wanted to further add that this analysis provides some justification for my long held feeling that the religion is too concerned with the self - even though it also believes there's no self there!   And I like religions that are heavily into charitable works, but one that has an "anti-realist metaphysic" is hardly likely to be motivated to do that.   I am happy to read that there are some Buddhists who want it to be more socially engaged.

 

More likely the wet market, after all

The New York Times has a lengthy version of a story in Science (which I also subscribe to - $66 US a year - bargain!) about a scientist who thinks the WHO made a mistake in attributing the first case of COVID in Wuhan.  He thinks it was a woman from the wet market, as were most of the other early cases.

The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections.

Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there.

“In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Dr. Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”

Several experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the W.H.O., said that Dr. Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor.

But some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “patient zero” sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to spread widely at the market. Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Dr. Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-November 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick.

By the way, whatever happened to the story, which the Chinese media was keen to spread, that an Italian had COVID months before it showed up in Wuhan?   Here's the story, at Reuters.   But here's a much later report on why some suspect it wasn't an accurate study.   All very complicated. 

 

Cheap subscription

Hey, the New York Times just offered me a basic subscription for a year at 50c a week.  Yeah, $2 (Australian dollars, too) a month for a year.   That got me in as a first time subscriber.   (Been paying for the Washington Post for quite a while - I just had to check, but it seems to only be $8.37 a month.  $6 US.)

In Australia, I can get a subscription to the SMH for $3.50 a week; same for the Australian (as if). The Washington Post is substantially cheaper.  Even after the end of my first year on NYT for small change, it says it will go up to $20 a month (AUD).

American newspaper subs are much better value.   

The only other page I miss having free access to is The Japan Times - I always liked it, although the print version was getting extremely thin in my last visit there, quite a few years ago now.   It's USD$15 a month on the cheapest plan, though.   

What other paper would I like full access to?  I thought the Straits Times was a very substantial paper when last in Singapore a couple of years ago - and I see I can get it for .99c a month for three months, thereafter $14.90 (SGD) a month thereafter.  Tempting...

Gee, I see you can get the New Yorker for 12 weeks for $12 (US, of course).  A full year at half price - $50, but full price is $100.  Still, for a weekly publication, that is pretty cheap.

My problem is, though, that I still don't like reading lengthy articles on a phone, and I don't spend much time in front of the computer at home anymore.   I have a very old tablet, which still has a good screen, but the battery is only lasting a few hours, and then takes overnight to re-charge.   Maybe I should just get used to using it with a external charging battery in it all the time.

The transition to clean energy - time for specifics, isn't it??

I've been meaning to say this out loud - that is, here! - for a couple of months now.

With all of the talk of CO2 emissions targets needing to be set and met, now on quite short time frames, it still seems to have the feeling of mere wishful thinking for any nation until they start to specify exactly how it will happen.   

And why is it we still don't seem to be at the stage that nations can start to do that? What is the hold up?  Is it because we  let the private sector have too much independence in sorting out clean energy generation?

I know you hear of papers written with assurances that renewable energy can do it all - but there are lots of choices in the implementation of renewable energy, and when is any government going to get very specific about it?

Current power plants have know useful life spans:  why can't we yet say how and when the replacement will be built and start operating?

I know grid scale storage is going to be important, and I also know flow batteries are looking promising - can't government agree to intensive research in which form of flow battery is best and will be installed with the next big (say) solar farm.   

I'm just spitballing here, but in a country like Australia, here are what seem to me to be some obvious steps:

a.    work out how much further we can get with domestic rooftop solar and domestic battery storage -  presumably there is still plenty of room to reduce large power plant output by more of it;

b.   work out the clear incentives for maximising rooftop solar.   As I have said several time, I can't see why it should not be mandated on new house construction, for one.  

c.    engage in the flow battery question - work out the most promising contenders and get them to trial them here, if necessary;

f.    work out where solar farms can go that are going to service the large cities - floating solar on dams or bays if you want to reduce transmission distance, and combined solar and agriculture on useful farmland.   If necessary - work out where solar in the desert can go and if the HVDC cable is going to run to get it to where the population is;

g.   work out what can be done with more wind, especially in the southern parts which have less sun in winter;

h.   work out the national grid that's make it all work.

It seems to me that if ever there is a country that should be able to get by on full solar/wind combination with enough storage, it's Australia.   But I want to see the specific plans as to how we are going to get there.

The danger of being pregnant in the US

Yeah, this seems kinda surprising:

Pregnant women in the United States die by homicide more often than they die of pregnancy-related causes — and they’re frequently killed by a partner, according to a study published last month in Obstetrics & Gynecology¹. Researchers revealed this grim statistic by using death certificates to compare homicides and pregnancy-related deaths across the entire country for the first time....

The researchers found that US women who are pregnant or were pregnant in the past 42 days (the post-partum period) die by homicide at more than twice the rate that they die of bleeding or placental disorders — the leading causes of what are usually classified as pregnancy-related deaths. Also, becoming pregnant increases the risk of death by homicide: between the ages of 10 and 44 years, women who are pregnant or had their pregnancy end in the past year are killed at a rate 16% higher than are women who are not pregnant.

I guess to take the "glass half full" approach - does this at least indicate that the medical care of pregnant women there is a better than expected?

Climate change, Obama, Trump, and then COVID has broken (a large part of) the Right

So this is broadly how it has gone:    

a.    climate change denial acclimatised the Right into believing grand conspiracy theories (even though it was not explicitly called such, but what else could it be when scientific body after scientific body, from all nations, continued year after year to not only acknowledge the science was right, but became more certain about it?)

b.  Obama triggered underlying American racism and Hilary Clinton became a hate figure over feminism;

c.  Trump came along as a leader endorsing the open statement of populist racism, anti-feminism and climate change denial, as well as making explicit a long simmering Manichean view of politics that all opposition to Right wing views is inherently evil and works undercover to destroy the God fearing people with their (ridiculous) figurehead Trump.  Conspiracy belief is thus elevated to new heights. 

d.  COVID response is completely politicised primarily due to Right wing conspiracy belief, which transcends even the views of their idiot leader (Trump) when he recommended vaccination.  [I suspect people will quibble about this, and say that libertarian opposition to lockdown is not a nutty as anti-vax conspiracy - I would say that ideological blinkers of libertarianism are only marginally less dire than anti-vax conspiracy - they are still virtually impossible to argue with.]

e.   All of this has been able to fester and spread like never before because of both social media and the greed and power hunger of Rupert Murdoch and a cast of smaller broadcasters.     

 

I just thought I would put this summary down again, after reading the absolute rubbish circulating on the post - Catallaxy blogs.   (I hesitate to link to it, but this one today by the increasingly obnoxious Arky is typical.)   They are in a particular period of pain at the moment because of the Scott Morrison turn around on climate change, with the dis-ingenous endorsement of the Murdoch press. 

It never occurs to them that they simply made the wrong call on climate change, and instead of acknowledging that, they choose to double down on grand conspiracy.  You know, the education system is just liberal/Marxist indoctrination, etc.  And this is readily extended to their approach to COVID - the previously long standing institutional sources of expertise are not to be trusted, just like they cannot be on climate change, and amateurs in their sheds (mostly men) are capable of just a good an analysis as anyone else.    And most stupidly, they think it is all about people wanting power over them, when it is they who are supporting authoritarian regimes around the world, as long as they share their conservative world view.    

A ship of (mostly) old fools, and with a strong streak of religious conservatism thrown in now as well.

Completely unable to be engaged in reasoned argument.

Not sure I trust the Poles with the care of turkeys

I see that England is doing so well under Brexit that they can't even raise enough turkeys for Christmas:

 

A news item from last month explains:

Millions of British Christmas dinners are to be saved by turkeys imported from Poland and France after UK farmers were forced to slash production because of fears of labour shortages. UK supermarkets and restaurants will have to import hundreds of thousands of the birds from the EU for Christmas after British farmers reared at least 1m fewer birds, the poultry industry has warned. 

Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said big turkey producers belonging to the group had slashed production by about a fifth this year after Brexit cut off their supply of cheap labour. These producers normally rear about 5.5m of 8m to 9m turkeys consumed at Christmas annually, he said.

Imported turkeys would likely come from Poland and France, said Paul Kelly of the KellyBronze free range turkey farm in Essex. “The supermarkets have supported British turkey over the past 15 years and we have been able to supply 100 per cent [of the demand],” he said. “Now we will be forced into buying turkeys from the EU.”

But also - it doesn't look from the video that the Poles are particularly good at raising turkeys in humane conditions.   Maybe they are only temporarily crammed to virtually standing room only?   I hope so...

French men and their testicles

This is pretty amusingly oddball (ha, a bit of a pun):  this video from France 24 starts with a collective of young-ish, French men who meet to sew harnesses to, um, make their testicles ride high and hot as a means of male contraception.  (!)

It does go on to note that French men (and I presume, their doctors) are remarkably reluctant to have vasectomies - the rate is apparently 20% in Britain, and 1% in France.   (Can't remember if that is age related - men over 40 perhaps?  I see the figures in Australia are apparently 25% of men over 40.)

The national cultural differences relating to contraception are pretty remarkable.  In Japan, it seems it is still only 1.3% of women who are on the pill - compared to about 15 % in America (according to the top story on my Google search.)  Oddly, I can't easily see figures for the number of Japanese men who have vasectomy.  I did find a recent study of its effects in Chinese men, though.  Seems that physically, they were fine, but had more psychological issues.  Complicated!

 

Good news noted

The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was found liable on Monday for damages in lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, over Jones’s claim the massacre was a hoax.... 

Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for relatives of eight victims who sued Jones in Connecticut, said: “What’s clear from Judge Bellis’s ruling is that Alex Jones and the Jones defendants have engaged in a long, continuous course of misconduct in this case designed to prevent the plaintiffs from getting evidence about Mr Jones’ business and about his motives for publishing lies about them and their families.”

A Texas judge recently issued similar rulings against Jones in three defamation lawsuits, finding Jones liable for damages after defaulting him and his companies for not turning over documents.

Good.

And a hobo with a podcast is being done for contempt:  

Steve Bannon has surrendered to US federal authorities to face contempt charges after defying a subpoena from a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

There's not much good news around these days, so you have to take what crumbs there are and celebrate them.

Squid ink

I'm three episodes into Squid Games, and having my doubts about continuing.

I don't know - I've just always found a serious credibility gap with dystopian-ish stories in which large numbers of people are involved in despicable behaviour.  That may sound like an odd thing to say in light of the evidence of the 20th century - or even the absolute nuttiness of wingnut America at the moment.   But at least people in those real life examples thought (or think) they have reason on their side.  It seems hard to see how you fit any kind of moral reasoning into the behaviour of both players and masked staff in this show.  

And masks - put a mask on an evil (or good) character and I start to find its credibility wanes.   I don't think it matters who - Batman, the murderer in the last season of Babylon Berlin, the bad guy in V for Vendetta (which I have never watched, mind you):  mask wearing stops me taking the story very seriously.  Why?   Maybe it's because it never happens in real life? 

Some possible exceptions people might want to bring up:  Darth Vader?  Well, it always sounded like a ventilator, and helmets in space are OK, so I'm not sure it counts.   Zorro?  He wasn't really that serious a character in the first place.  Same with Spiderman - the movies are never really meant to be that serious, especially in the Tom Holland incarnation.  I can forgive a lot if a movie is light in tone, or largely comedic [Deadpool]; but that hardly describes SG.

To be honest, I am a little uncertain about the acting in this show, too.  Sometimes it seems a bit over the top.  The acting in Kingdom, by far the best Korean Netflix series I have seen, was better and didn't seem pushed too far, despite the zombie content.

I  might go another episode (or more), but I am more inclined to just read about how it goes from here.

   

This is nuts

 

Who's more prominent in Australia - conservative, conspiracy mongering, Catholics; or conservative, conspiracy mongering Protestants?  

I preferred Big Trouble in Little China

I wonder how that John Carpenter movie would hold up on re-viewing?

Anyhow, I'm talking about having watched the surprisingly well-reviewed (92% on Rottentomatoes, and 71% on Metacritic) Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.    (It's now streaming for free on Disney, after only being on the cinema starting maybe 6 weeks ago?)

I'm glad I didn't make my first trip to the cinema for nearly 2 years to see it, as I was seriously underwhelmed.

It's not exactly bad - it's just that it's not very good.  I don't think the script, which was meant to be heavy with family drama, was particularly good.  And the action continually suffered from the Marvel issue of not always being able to do heavily CGI action in such a way to make it feel it carries any sense of danger, or at least, pleasing movement.  (It's funny, but it's hard to work out sometimes why for me some obviously CGI action works well enough, and other times it doesn't.)

As with Black Panther, the climatic battle I found an uninteresting, badly edited visual mess,  and going all in with Chinese mythology and dragons seems a bit of stretch for me, even in a movie series where the multiverse is a thing.   

I ended up wondering why I like Dr Strange a lot, but didn't care for this.  Maybe I'm more into Asian mysticism than Asian mythology, and the Dr S movie was very eye-catching with its innovative looking visual effects.   (I still like seeing the sparky portal - it's charming.)   

I hope I have a better reaction to the James Bond film - I hope to see that by this time next week.

  

 

Danger and humour

They still Might be Giants

Gosh:  it's been years since they appeared in one of their music videos (unfortunately - it's nice to see them acting peculiarly on video again!)   But here they are, with an immediately likeable song:

It's hard to explain how significant this band is to people who have never heard of them - I mean, clearly, they are well known amongst the creative types in Hollywood, given the number of things they have been asked to do in TV and the elsewhere. But it is so pleasantly intriguing: it's almost like the John's and their fan base both like them being a modest success forever, rather than hitting an early peak and flaming out.  In fact, they pretty much explained this is a correct take on them in a recent interview with PBS: 

Cannibal chickens (and more) considered

In an article about whether free range chickens are as cheery as we might imagine them to be, there's this:

Feather pecking is when chickens peck and pull out other hens' feathers.

This can lead to cannibalism, where chickens eat the wounded flesh of the injured hen.

These three factors kill a lot of free-range hens. One Australian study found cannibalism was a major cause of death in free-range hens, second-only to being eaten by predators.

Dr Hartcher, who researched feather pecking for her PhD, says death by cannibalism is an "awful way to go".

"We understand more about it than we did a few decades ago but we still don't fully understand how to control the problem," she says.

I would have guessed that keeping too many chickens in too small a space may be a reason behind it, and  I see from another website that is one trigger, but there are many others:

These stressors include crowding, bright light intensity, high room temperature, poor ventilation, high humidity, low salt, trace nutrient deficiency, insufficient feeding or drinking space, nervous and excitable birds (hereditary), external parasites, access to sick or injured birds, stress from moving, boredom and idleness, housing birds of different appearance together and birds prolapsing during egg-laying.

 How do you cure "boredom and idleness" in a chicken, I wonder.   I would have thought letting them scratch around free range on grass would go a long way to curing that, but maybe it's more the lack of good quality chicken cinema and poetry readings?   

They're an odd animal. 

Update:  OK, let's just have a whole gross out afternoon, by reading this list of 10 cute animals you didn't know were cannibalistic.   I did know of hamsters, and had heard of pigs too.  But rabbits and red squirrels?   It's a particularly cute bunny they have chosen to picture, too.   Most of the examples are of babies being the victim of mothers, though, and I guess we tend to feel that crazy hormonal stuff maybe gives those individual Mums some sort of excuse.  Males (or females) who go killing other mother's offspring, though - harder to like them!   

As for primates and cannibalism - chimps seem to be the nastiest of all. 

I'm almost starting to wonder why we don't have cases of modern humans feeling evolutionarily compelled to do something similar.  

Calling out lies

I am finding it refreshing, this new found confidence in Labor, and much of the media, to call Scott Morrison a liar:

 

The armed Right wing in the USA

I find the argument in this article pretty convincing:

Prepare for the Shock Troops

What happens when gun culture merges with a nationalist personality cult?

A key extract from the end:

There was a time when few Americans would have supported racist vigilantes—a time when most gun owners would have used Kyle Rittenhouse as a way to scare young people into being responsible with firearms. But there was also a time—not long ago—when self-appointed militiamen who believed in QAnon conspiracies were the stuff of fiction. Today they’re running for office.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the normalization of early-stage authoritarianism.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently bragged about developing more than 20,000 “shock troops” for the next election. We’ve been seeing these troops in action, in isolated incidents for four years. We saw them collectively on January 6. We’ve read the reports from their think tanks planning for violence. They’re asking, right now, “When can we use the guns?”

After four years of chaos, Americans would rather get back to their lives believing that the crisis has passed. But it hasn’t.

The lights are still flashing red.

 

 

Scientists taking it personally

In Science magazine, there's an article about disagreement amongst physicists about whether one particular experiment really did show interactions with dark matter.   The problem is, it hasn't been replicated elsewhere, and it seems that the "no it didn't" group think they may have worked out what the first group did wrong.

You can read all about that at the article, but I wanted to note the very personal way the leader of the "yes it did" camp takes criticism:

Rita Bernabei, a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and DAMA’s leader, declined to be interviewed. But she dismissed the new explanation in an email: “We have already demonstrated that the assumptions there reported are untenable and the conclusions are worthless.”