I wondered recently if biologist and writer E.O. Wilson was still with us (I spotted an unread book of his at home, above my sock draw), and I see from this interview at Vox that he is. Looks pretty sharp for 92, too.
Tuesday, December 07, 2021
Still with us
Positive reviews noted
It's not that I hold West Side Story in any particular high regard as a musical (although, truth be told, I have never watched all of the original movie - in fact, maybe only 15 mins or so?), but I am still thrilled when Spielberg gets a lot of love, and proves again that he worth 20 (at least) Tarantino's.
His movie, which doesn't start here until Boxing Day, is getting very good reviews from both American and British critics (even The Guardian, usually a bit Lefty cynical of him, I reckon). A score of 95 on Rottentomatoes, and 86 on the more reliable Metacritic.
In anticipation of my liking it too, I would say that the USO dance hall sequence in the much (and unfairly) maligned 1941 made me think as far back as 1979 that he would be fantastic at making a dance heavy musical. Here it is on Youtube:
It's not a great quality upload (don't try to watch it full screen), but it still gives you an idea of how it was put together. Apart from the camera movement and composition of shots, I like how it's not over-editted to the point where you can't admire the choreography and timing as an extended event - the main fault of most modern dance movies being in the choppy, rapid fire editing which ends up making a dance look like a hundred individual 1 second scenes stuck together in the cutting room.
(Triva point: I think I might have seen 1941 twice at the cinema - I liked it that much. It remains a guilty pleasure.)
The longest wait
Bad news for my planned first opera outing (taken with an over-the-top, take-no-prisoners approach) to the Ring Cycle in Brisbane.
It's been delayed to - the end of 2023!
It was supposed to be at the end of 2020. That's time enough for a whole new pandemic to start!
Still busy, but Morrison has appalling judgement
Labor’s Chris Bowen made a very pertinent contribution on Monday to the debate over whether the Liberals should run Gladys Berejiklian, the subject of an ICAC investigation, in the Sydney seat of Warringah.
What would the Liberals and the media be saying if it were a Labor figure in a similar position? Bowen asked.
Of course we know the answer. They’d be outraged and they’d be justified.
The push within the Liberal party, backed by Scott Morrison, for Berejiklian to stand is a case of the “whatever it takes” brand of politics....
Morrison said Berejiklian was “put in a position of actually having to stand down and there was no finding of anything. Now I don’t call that justice.”
Without saying it explicitly he creates the impression the ICAC forced her to quit her job. In fact, she chose to resign, judging that just standing aside while the inquiry was on was politically untenable.
Steggall on Monday pushed back strongly against Morrison, saying the words he’d used in parliament were “outrageous”. “We should be seeing leadership to raise trust, call for more accountability, not undermine accountability.”....
Does Morrison really think it was okay for Berejiklian not to disclose her closeness to Maguire, who was well known as an urger of the first degree?
That certainly wasn’t the view of former NSW premier Mike Baird, a good friend of Berejiklian, who said in evidence at the ICAC “certainly I think [the relationship] should have been disclosed”. Baird is another high profile figure the Liberals have pursued to stand in Warringah, but without success.
If the Liberals fielded Berejiklian ahead of the ICAC report, they would be adding insult to injury in their performance on integrity issues.
Update: and this:
Monday, December 06, 2021
Too much work
I got too much work on my hands at the moment.
Maybe should only post after work? I always say stuff like this then find something during the day that demands a post.
Sunday, December 05, 2021
How do you govern the Dunning-Kruger set who think experts are out to kill them and their children?
Yes, the stupid have always been with us, but outside of individual cults, never have the self certain holders of bad takes (not technically just "stupid", even though I am far past caring that they deserve any respect - I know these people make a living and are not dumb as such) had the ability to so easily reinforce their views in a community of the like minded. Some reactions today at Cathollaxy, on the matter of Covid vaccination for children:
Tom says:
This is what happens when you insert politics into science. It’s pure evil.
Our politicians think they can ride public fear of Kung Flu all the way to re-election whatever the cost — especially to the most vulnerable, our children.areff says:
The last time and place the young were sacrificed for the alleged benefit of the old was at the altar atop an Aztec pyramid.
Arky says:
STOP: DO NOT FLICK BACK TO THE OPEN THREAD JUST BECAUSE YOU SEE A GRAPH DOWN PAGE.
..
Eventually you’re going to conclude, like me, that most people are too stupid to comment.
This, sadly, now applies to the cat readership too.
I think those vaccines are eating people’s brains. The deterioration in
the quality of commentary since the vaxx rollout is marked.
It’s like being the only person staying sober at a party and watching as
the night goes on as the rest of the company starts slurring their
words, and then finally decide to skinny dip in the dam opposite the
ammonia plant.
We could be experiencing the moment the vaccines make people too damn
stupid to read the graphs showing that the vaccines are making people
too damn stupid to read the graphs.
Fat Tony says:
Health Minister Greg Hunt says subject to final checks from the vaccination experts on the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, the federal government will start rolling out the Pfizer vaccine to 5- to 11-year-olds from January 10.
This is why the protests must continue and escalate. There is a war to be fought and, hopefully, won.These arseholes are not going to relax, or stop for a Christmas break, or to go fishing on the weekend. They want us all dead.
Fat Tony featured on another thread, making a protest trip for nothing:
Fat Tony says:
Just a thought regarding protests…
Do the people thinking we should hold off for a while think the
politicians/government/WEF scum are going to have a break for a while
too?
We have only a very short time before all resistance in Australia is crushed – we can worry about our weekend shit next year if we prevail.
The protests should be constant, on-going and escalating – our enemies are relentless and will crush us as quickly as possible. We have very little time before this turns very ugly.
I spent 3 hours today travelling from home to Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens and back home on the off-chance there would be a protest march today – there wasn’t.
Heh. Loser.
Physicist gets up other physicist's noses, again
The particle physicists who spend much of their time lobbying governments for ever bigger particle accelerators must really dislike Sabine Hossenfelder's take on things. She's at it again in today's video on the question of why there's more matter than anti-matter in the universe:
Saturday, December 04, 2021
Australian far Right muttering about violence
dover beach's Cathollaxy continues to attract those wishing for a violent uprising against Australian governments. Today, the protest in Melbourne was apparently smaller, according to "Behind Enemy Lines":
It’s a much smaller crowd than the last two weeks. Still a decent crowd, given that people have responsibilities that don’t end on weekends. Plenty of familiar faces and flags. Am still seeing some newbies, too (welcome, Japan!).
So, here we are.
None of the federation’s checks-and-balances safeguards have protected what was left of our already much-diminished rights. And the normies’ attempts at a People Power approach hasn’t achieved what they hoped for (because of course People Power is just another example of the left’s perpetual money-go-round).
Granted, I’ve been happy to turn out for protests because it shows the government’s lack of legitimacy. Plus, ordinary people need to know they aren’t alone.
Well, now they know.
Yet Victoria now lives under a dictatorial enabling act while the federal government, courts and major political parties sit on their collective thumb.
Barring any surprise relief, the ‘normal’ political process has just ended.
A new stage begins.
Oh and earlier this week, dover beach, a fool, leaves up a post featuring a string of images, ending with one of Dan Andrews in the Obama "Hope" poster format, but substituted with "Rope". A real knee slapper, that one.
Update: for some reason, I couldn't upload it last night, but here it is:
Where's that National Security Hotline - here it is 1800 000 634.
Blunt humour
I saw this pop up on Twitter, and James Blunt endorsing it. Very funny, and you know, I don't recall seeing the video for the song before, which was pretty remarkable.
Friday, December 03, 2021
Judith Sloan wrong (what a surprise)
Hey, have a look at this article from Judith Sloan in the rubbish Australian Spectator from July 2021, whining about how she can't read the Economist now because it's too "woke/green".
Quite the compendium of bad right wing takes, such as:
Brexit – OK, anti-Brexit – has been another pet topic for the magazine. Its previous measured tone on matters European was no more. The Economist tried to fight the will of the British people to be free of the shackles of the European Union. ‘This deal must never be done’ was its motto.
Just think of the impact on the British economy. London’s financial hub would be decimated; living standards would slump; and pharmaceutical and other necessary goods would no longer be available.
Funny, but the "will of the British people" has now dropped to about 37% thinking it was right to leave Europe. (A YouGov poll has it bouncing around the same figure, so it seems accurate.)
What about this curious statement:
Sensing perhaps that readers were tiring of the incessant Covid fearmongering, in recent issues, the Economist has been trying to change its tune. It has acknowledged the risk that media companies face in the near future of an ‘attention recession’.
It has actually put out some very useful comparative figures showing excess death rates over the past eighteen months for a large number of countries. These figures are not contaminated by inaccuracies of reporting in relation to cause of death.
What they show is that, apart from some countries in South America mainly, most countries have not experienced excess death rates – or have done so for a month or so. In fact, many countries have experienced negative excess death rates – below what would have been expected.
I don't subscribe to the magazine, but Googling the topic, I have the strongest suspicion that this misrepresents (or misreads) whatever she was reading.
Update: amusingly, I see that some people think the Economist has gone right wing, at least on trans/identity issues:
Coorey goes right
I'm sure that it's been noted on Twitter that Phil Coorey has moved to the right in his current gig at the AFR. Today's column has this quasi sympathetic take on Porter losing his job:
Porter’s life and career were destroyed by the publication of historic rape allegations which could never be proven and which he has vehemently denied. There is a degree of sympathy towards him from colleagues, mindful that the new standard is that allegation is enough to end a career.
“If he did it, then fair enough, if he didn’t, then he’s been treated like shit,” opined one senior Liberal. “We’ll never know.”
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Politics is ruthless and this election campaign is shaping up to be especially so. The numbers are tight, both sides expect a close result and, more than ever, every seat matters. Including Pearce.
There's no consideration in those paragraphs that the biggest problem was the Morrison method of trying to push through this - regardless of Porter's denials.
As I am sure many people would agree, if Porter, as the nations top law officer under a serious allegation of past crime, had immediately offered to stand aside while there was an enquiry which examined the matter and gave him a "balance of probabilities" clearance, I reckon he could have survived. But he (and Morrison) chose to fight it with all guns blazing and it didn't wash with the public.
There is no reason for sympathy at all.
Just the worst
Greg Sargent goes to town on Trump and his family over their stupidly political decision to refuse to mask up even after he had tested positive:
The operating principle for the Trump family is impunity from rules, laws and accountability at all costs. Indeed, soon after it became known that Trump had covid, the Commission on Presidential Debates complained that his family had violated all protocols by attending the debate maskless.
Needless to say, nothing was done about this at the time, even as they brashly flouted those protocols before a national audience of millions.
In retrospect, now that we know Trump — and likely those around him as well — knew that he’d tested positive for covid, this stands as yet another example of our total underestimation of this clan’s depraved disregard for rules, norms, and any sense of basic decency and responsibility to those around them.
Quite simply, you have to be stupid, or a jerk, or a combination of those two factors in varying degrees, to defend Trump as a person.
Update: Allahpundit notes that Meadows, ridiculously, is now trying to agree with Trump that the mainstream media is reporting "fake news." Which has lead to one theory:
Did he think he was … doing Trump a favor? Tim Miller has a theory:
The timeline as laid out by Meadows indicates that Trump tested positive for COVID three days before that debate, then followed up with a second negative test, then quit taking tests altogether so that he wouldn’t be prevented from debating.
Trump has kinda sorta disputed this version of events via fax, though it’s unclear why his own former chief of staff, a toadying supplicant, would be peddling fake news. It seems much more likely that Trump is using weasel words and Meadows is such a moron that he thought relaying this story made his old boss look like a Strong Fighting Man for all the poorly endowed super fans in need of a big daddy. Trump is so alpha that he beat Sleepy Joe in a debate while he had COVID!
Excellent news
Take him down:
Two Georgia election workers targeted by former U.S. President Donald Trump in a vote-rigging conspiracy theory have sued a far-right website that trumpeted the false story, alleging it incited months of death threats and harassment against them.
The defamation suit against The Gateway Pundit was filed Thursday by Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a voter registration officer in the Fulton County elections office, and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who was a temp worker for the 2020 election. The women were featured in a Reuters report published Wednesday on their ordeal.
As I have said before, it bothers me that it was absolutely obvious, watching social media, that these women would be being insanely harassed and death threatened by Trumpian wingnuts - but the mainstream media seemed to take no strong interest in following their story and doing what it could to counter the insanity as it directly related to them.
Reuters should not be the only media that was actively pursuing this story, although their belated account is pretty good.
Thursday, December 02, 2021
"Metagut"
Over at Science, an article about how hippos crapping prodigiously in their ponds means they share a lot of gut microbiome, as well as creating some fetid, deadly pools of water:
Hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius) already have a reputation for modifying their environment. At night, they head to shore to fill up on grass, then they return to the water to digest and excrete the leftovers, basically fertilizing the water. Gut bacteria help them digest these meals, and some escape in the dung excreted into the water. “Much of this dung is alive—microbially speaking,” says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the work.
Suspecting that gut microbes might survive outside the gut, researchers led by Christopher Dutton, an ecologist at the University of Florida, collected water from hippo pools along the Mara River, which flows through the Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania. During the dry season, some of these pools—which can be up to the size of an ice hockey rink and can support a few to scores of hippos—get cut off from the river’s flow. The team sequenced RNA from hippo dung and the pools, choosing ones with moderate flow, low flow, or no flow to assess the impact of ever-more concentrated dung.
The more stagnant the pool, the more hippo gut microbes survived in the water, the team concludes today in Scientific Reports. The bacteria represented a “metagut,” in which one animal’s microbes could easily infect other hippos, the scientists say, possibly boosting the digestive capabilities and immune defenses of all the hippos in the pond. (There might be more pathogens as well, however).
"Metagut". Lulz.
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Very James Bond
Well, this sounds somewhat creepy, and reminds me of the nanobot menace that featured in No Time to Die:
“There’s nothing theoretical that would stop us from making these out of human cells,” said Sam Kriegman, an author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “They could perform useful work inside of human bodies in places were traditional robots can’t go because our bodies detest even the smallest amount of metal.”
Foul Georgians of London
Back to a matter of long standing intrigue - how people before the 20th century put up with the risk of extremely serious venereal disease (most notably, syphilis) and just went about having risky sex anyway.
I think I had missed this study from 2020:
250 years ago, over one-fifth of Londoners had contracted syphilis by their 35th birthday, historians have calculated.
The same study shows that Georgian Londoners were over twice as likely to be treated for the disease as people living in the much smaller city of Chester at the same time (c.1775), and about 25 times more likely than those living in parts of rural Cheshire and north-east Wales....
The researchers are confident that one-fifth represents a reliable minimum estimate, consistent with the rigorously conservative methodological assumptions they made at every stage. They also point out that a far greater number of Londoners would have contracted gonorrhea (or, indeed, chlamydia) than contracted syphilis in this period.
"Our findings suggest that Boswell's London fully deserves its historical reputation," Szreter said. "The city had an astonishingly high incidence of STIs at that time. It no longer seems unreasonable to suggest that a majority of those living in London while young adults in this period contracted an STI at some point in their lives."
"In an age before prophylaxis or effective treatments, here was a fast-growing city with a continuous influx of young adults, many struggling financially. Georgian London was extremely vulnerable to epidemic STI infection rates on this scale."
Although I knew about the mercury treatment for syphilis, I didn't know this level of detail:
Mercury salivation treatment was considered a reliable and permanent cure for syphilis but it was debilitating and required at least five weeks of residential care. This was provided, for free, by London's largest hospitals, at least two specialist hospitals, and many poor law infirmaries, as well as privately for those who could afford it.
To maximise the accuracy of their estimates, Szreter and Siena drew on large quantities of data from hospital admission registers and inspection reports, and other sources to make numerous conservative estimates including for bed occupancy rates and duration of hospital stays. Along the way, they excluded many patients to avoid counting the false positives that arise from syphilis's notoriously tricky diagnosis.
Of particular value to the researchers were surviving admissions registers from the late 1760s through to the 1780s for St Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals which consistently housed 20-30 per cent of their patients in 'foul' wards reserved for residential treatment for the pox. But the researchers also drew on evidence for St Bartholomew's hospital; workhouse infirmaries; and two subscription hospitals, the Lock and the Misericordia, which also cared for 'Foul' men and women.
Patients in London's foul wards often battled their diseases for six months or more before seeking hospitalization.
Here's a link to the full article, which towards the end, makes some other remarkable comments about sex in the period:
Historians of eighteenth-century sexuality have long relied on birth rates, especially those out of wedlock, as an empirical foundation block on which assertions about sexuality can rest. As is well known, rates of illegitimate births and prenuptial pregnancy rose substantially during the long eighteenth century, such that by the early nineteenth century a quarter of all first births were delivered by unmarried women and almost 40 per cent of brides had conceived before their wedding day.83 Demographic historians view this as mainly a predictable corollary of earlier and more frequent marriage in a more dynamic labour market.84 Others have argued this must signal a changing sexual culture, one that historians like Porter or Dabhoiwalla present as sexual liberation, but which scholars like Trumbach and Hitchcock cast in the darker shades of male predation and assault.85 If there was such a new sexual regime manifest during the second half of the eighteenth century, it is typically presented as developing in London first. Wilson argued that this new sexual culture is borne out by London's illegitimacy ratio, which was considerably higher than the national average. However, Levene has revised Wilson's figures downward from 12 per cent to 7 per cent of London baptisms, from three times to slightly less than twice the national average of 4 per cent, noting that while London's rate was higher, the capital was not a ‘sink of illegitimacy’.8The article goes on to consider what their STI rate findings might mean in relation to this, but it's too much to post here. All pretty interesting, though.
Who could have seen this coming?
Thomas Friedman writes in the NYT:
The judges have voted and the results are in: President Donald Trump’s decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 — a decision urged on by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — was one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive U.S. national security decisions of the post-Cold War era.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Moshe Ya’alon was the Israeli defense minister when the nuclear agreement was signed, and he strongly opposed it. But at a conference last week, he said, according to a summary by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, “as bad as that deal was, Trump’s decision to withdraw from it — with Netanyahu’s encouragement — was even worse.” Ya’alon called it “the main mistake of the last decade” in Iran policy.
Two days later, Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s top military commander when Trump withdrew from the deal, offered a similar sentiment, which Haaretz reported as “a net negative for Israel: It released Iran from all restrictions, and brought its nuclear program to a much more advanced position.”
It sure has. The International Atomic Energy Agency recently reported that Iran has amassed a stock of enriched uranium hexafluoride that independent nuclear experts calculate is sufficient to produce weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear bomb in as little as three weeks.
On historical cycles -the Fremen mirage
I saw this on Twitter, in response to a Noah Smith tweet, but haven't had time to read it yet. Seems good and interesting, though.
On unique combinations
I must admit, if ever I had heard this before, it did not stick in my mind. But I'm finding it so remarkable, I'm inclined to think it is new to me:
The chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards (fairly) in the same way twice in the history of the world, or ever will again, are infinitesimally small. The number of possible ways to order a pack of 52 cards is ’52!’ (“52 factorial”) which means multiplying 52 by 51 by 50… all the way down to 1. The number you get at the end is 8×10^67 (8 with 67 ‘0’s after it), essentially meaning that a randomly shuffled deck has never been seen before and will never be seen again. So next time you shuffle a deck, you should feel pretty special for holding something so unique! Try for yourself – if you make friends with every person on earth and each person shuffles one deck of cards each second, for the age of the Universe, there will be a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion chance of two decks matching.
Oh - I see now that I search for it on Youtube that this fact turned up on Stephen Fry's QI, too. So maybe I did hear it there, but it just didn't sink in? Anyway, expanding the point to the uniqueness of each human is a pleasing humanist one that makes it feel more cosmically relevant.
Cinema is starting to look up
So, this Christmas brings me adult science fiction (Dune) and Steven Spielberg directing his first musical (West Side Story) which seems to be getting pretty positive comment from the first screening in New York.
Speaking of Spielberg, I watched Austin Powers in Goldmember for the first time last weekend. I had not known of the Spielberg participation - showing that he (and Tom Cruise) are very good sports.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)