Something happier for Christmas

There's a new full length and very recent concert recording of The Messiah up on Youtube, and although I haven't listened with headphones yet, the quality sounds very good.   I haven't seen this live for a couple of decades:

 

 

What a difference a State makes

 

Oh no - another month of indoor masking and staying away from crowds too much for handle for the libertarian/conservative set?

Noted on Twitter:

If Gray suffers a coronary, or Jason falls off his bike, they might appreciate not being "ramped" at a hospital in the ambulance, and having staff actually able to deal with them promptly.  Not to mention people needing on going care and treatment for cancers, etc.

Or do they think that because everyone's going to get it, the (generally young and relatively fit) nurses and doctors that catch it but have a mild dose should just continue coughing on patients for the good of the nation?  Even if they think "the patient will catch it eventually anyway", don't they think it would be better to catch in the future, after the patient has got over their current illness?   Do they think making staff who cough or sneeze and test positive stay at home for the 1 to 2 weeks to test negative is unreasonable? 

I can see a very plausible case as to why virtually every nation on the planet, regardless of vaccination rates, is temporarily, at least, tightening restrictions in light of Omicron, even though it looks increasingly clear that it will kill a much smaller percentage of patients than Delta.

And yes, it may well represent the beginning of the end of the severe effects of the pandemic.

But I see no problem at all with not wanting all of the Omicron cases to pile up at too fast a rate because of the obvious potential to cause the heathcare system to be severely understaffed (and possibly, not enough ICU beds) in the near term. 

I wonder how rich Steve Kates is

What does Steve Kates, the ageing crank Trump cultist and only economist in the world who truly understands where economics all went wrong (just ask him), think of how his bete noire (Keynes) made heaps of money from good investment strategy?

An article at The Conversation talks about it, and concludes he would not have invested in Bitcoin.  I certainly would hope not!

A simple question

Why would Putin be worried about Ukraine from a security point of view anyway?:

Russia doesn't want conflict with Ukraine but Western powers must provide Moscow with "unconditional security guarantees", President Vladimir Putin has said.

Speaking at his annual news conference, Mr Putin said the US has missiles at "Russia's doorstep" and the "ball is in the West's court" in relation to security in the region.

Which country in the West would actually want Russia?   For what?  Their gas?  As if that would be worth the trouble of war.    

Update:  the Guardian offers some kind of analysis.   And the gas supply issue is complicated - but I still don't really see the security aspect well explained anywhere.

A reason for caution

An article at Nature today indicates that if a "high risk" person gets very sick from the Omicron version of Covid, it may well be harder to treat:

Strained hospitals bracing for a COVID-19 surge caused by the quickly spreading Omicron variant could face another grim possibility: preliminary experiments suggest that most of the antibody treatments for the disease are powerless against Omicron^1,2,3,4.

Doctors use artificial versions of natural antibodies to stave off severe COVID-19 in high-risk people who are infected with the coronavirus. But a slew of publications posted on preprint servers report laboratory evidence that Omicron is totally or partially resistant to all currently available treatments based on these monoclonal antibodies. The publications have not yet been peer reviewed, but some of the companies that manufacture antibody therapies already concede that their products have lower potency against Omicron than against other variants.

I guess the question still is - how many high risk people are going to get seriously sick from it in the first place. 

Update:  this seems a really good Twitter thread on the good news/bad news about Covid which (as the doctors says) is enough to make your head spin.  It includes more detail about the antibody therapies above, as well as the supply issues for other new treatments which seem pretty insurmountable. 

The deep irony (and/or stupidity)

Those of a libertarian/conservative bent who are carrying on most about the "totalitarianism" of public health decisions regarding Covid (see the awful Richard Hanania, for example - I think I have to unsubscibe from his Twitter feed because he seems to tweet about 200 times a day and every second or third one is appalling) are also likely to be Trump apologists and not concerned at all about the detailed revelations of a  plan to actually fraudulently get reinstated as President in what would have been a stunning totalitarian overturn of democracy normally associated with some lawless tinpot regime.

Which, I should add, is not to say that governments are above criticism for some of their Covid decisions.

Proteins are pretty incredible

I guess this aligns with my recent post about card shuffling and the mind boggling mathematics of the number of possible outcomes.  

Proteins have the same feature.  From a Science magazine article, nominating AI work on working out protein structures as the breakthrough of 2021:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses. They contract our muscles, convert food into cellular energy, ferry oxygen in our blood, and fight microbial invaders. Yet despite their varied talents, all proteins start out with the same basic form: a linear chain of up to 20 different kinds of amino acids, strung together in a sequence encoded in our DNA. After being assembled in cellular factories called ribosomes, each chain folds into a unique, exquisitely complex 3D shape. Those shapes, which determine how proteins interact with other molecules, define their roles in the cell.

Work by Anfinsen and others suggested interactions between amino acids pull proteins into their final shapes. But given the sheer number of possible interactions between each individual link in the chain and all the others, even modest-size proteins could assume an astronomical number of possible shapes. In 1969, American molecular biologist Cyrus Levinthal calculated that it would take longer than the age of a universe for a protein chain to cycle through them one by one—even at a furious pace. But in nature, each protein reliably folds up into just one distinctive shape, usually in the blink of an eye.

All about Mary

Oh, here's a summary of Christian (mainly Catholic and Orthodox) beliefs regarding Mary.

I knew all of it, but not in the precise detail given here.    For example:

The early centuries of the Christian tradition were silent on the death of Mary. But by the seventh and eighth centuries, the belief in the bodily ascension of Mary into heaven, had taken a firm hold in both the Western and Eastern Churches.

The Eastern Orthodox Greek Church held to the dormition of Mary. According to this, Mary had a natural death, and her soul was then received by Christ. Her body arose on the third day after her death. She was then taken up bodily into heaven.

For a long time, the Catholic Church was ambiguous on whether Mary rose from the dead after a brief period of repose in death and then ascended into heaven or was “assumed” bodily into heaven before she died.

Belief in the ascension of Mary into heaven became Catholic doctrine in 1950. Pope Pius XII then declared that Mary

was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.

I am curious as to how Pope Pius XII could be so certain of this detail.   How exactly does the Holy Spirit whisper this level of detail?

Anyway, does it mean that she didn't die at all?   Apparently, that remained an open question, but a more recent Pope said:

On 25 June 1997 Pope John Paul II said that Mary experienced natural death prior to her assumption into Heaven. 

OK, well still seems to me there is room for speculation on how soon after the death the rise into the sky happened.  I mean, it could have quite the surprise for those preparing the body for burial.

Or does "ascend into heaven" have to mean a sky ascension  such as that of Christ?   Could it be done by the body just disappearing into the higher dimension of heaven?  I know that art has favoured the former, but a more subtle form of "ascension" might be easier for the relatives to handle.

I didn't know this, too:

Indeed, Mary is mentioned more often in the Qur'an than in the New Testament.

 Huh.

Update:   OK, so this (Catholic) University of Dayton site (also called "All about Mary") cites one of the earliest writings (perhaps back to 5th century) about what is supposed to have happened, and it went into a lot of detail:

This text, more commonly known as Transitus (passing on, crossing over) Mariae, and attributed to Melito of Sardes tells of Mary's homegoing in detail:

In the presence of the apostles gathered around her bed, also in the presence of her divine Son and many angels, Mary died and her soul, rose to heaven, accompanied by Christ and the angels. Her body was buried by the disciples. Difficulties developed among certain of the Jews who wished to dispose of her body. Various types of miracles occurred to convince them to honor Mary's body. On the third day, Christ returned. At the request of the apostles the soul of Mary is reunited with her body. Accompanied by singing angels, Christ brought Mary to paradise.

So, that's where the Eastern Church's "dormition of Mary" comes from.   

And I see from reading this article that I was getting confused in my post - that the doctrine is definitely the assumption of Mary, not the ascension:  although I still think it fair to say that artist representations make it look like an physical rising into the sky:

It is essential and significant to note the distinction between the resurrection and ascension of Christ, who rose up, in contrast to Mary who is assumed or taken into heaven. The early poetry on the Assumption of Mary, which originated and circulated widely in the Eastern Church, expresses this difference and parallelism.

Anyway, the Transitus was pooh-poohed, for some reason, by a Pope soon after:

In the early sixth century, a papal decree, Decretum Gelasianum, classified the Transitus Mariae writings as apocryphal, but this did not hinder the wide distribution of well over thirteen-hundred manuscripts throughout the West. In England, it was known well before the thirteenth century and is one of the first poetic texts written in early English. There are many versions among the hand copied manuscripts. The Transitus Mariae was incorporated into the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It is also incorporated into a text known as Vita BVM et salvatoris rhythmica (The rhythmic life of the BVM and redeemer), written in the mid-thirteenth century. These later texts add many embellishments to describe Mary's entry into heaven. All the saints and angels come to greet her and do her homage as her Son crowns her queen. These texts are gathered uncritically from various sources, but they nevertheless express faith-filled devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On the question of how, nearly 1,900 years later, it could be declared as dogma, is explained as follows:

The proclamation of the dogma was part of a plan of Pope Pius XII to honor Mary. He appealed to the faith of the Church as partial basis for the definition. As O'Carroll writes:

"The faith of the Church had been manifest in different ways. Between 1849 and 1950, numerous petitions for the dogma arrived in Rome. They came from One hundred and thirteen Cardinals, eighteen Patriarchs, twenty-five-hundred-five archbishops and bishops, thirty-two-thousand priests and men religious, fifty-thousand religious women, eight million lay people. On May 1, 1946 the Pope had sent to the bishops of the world the Encyclical Deiparae Virginis, putting this question to them: 'More especially we wish to know if you, Venerable Brethren, with your learning and prudence consider that the bodily Assumption of the Immaculate Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith and whether in addition to your own wishes this is desired by your clergy and people.' When the replies were collated, it was found that twenty-two residential bishops out of 1181 dissented, but only six doubted that the Assumption was revealed truth--the others questioned the opportuneness." (p. 56)

Pius XII considered this response as a "certain and firm proof" that the Assumption is a truth revealed by God.

So this paints it as if it was more or less by popular demand - but the "8 million lay people" is surely a tiny fraction of the overall number.  Look at these counts of the global Catholic population over a century:

 

This graph doesn't give us the totals for 1950, but adding them up, it looks like it might have been around 400 - 500 million?:

Well, this puts the significance of the number of laity petitioning for the doctrine - and it seems it was 8 million over the course of a century - making the total at any one time a tiny fraction of the actual laity.

If dogmatic doctrine can be made by popular demand of a small fraction of the most conservative laity (and a bigger group of bishops and priests), can they be reversed by a more overwhelming popular vote in future?  But these are the knots that the Church has tied itself into unnecessarily.

 

Indoor mask wearing

 I agree.   Seems to me that at this highly uncertain stage as to the effect on our health system of an incredibly transmissible disease, it's just common sense to adopt even marginally beneficial practices which carry no huge burden - such as making mask wearing in shops and public transport mandatory.   (And I mean, it doesn't even raise the trickier issue of mask wearing in schools at the moment - school's not in for another month, by which time Omicron will be better understood.)

Update:  two articles explaining the idea that used to be considered mainstream common sense, until paranoid conservatives more interested in culture warring than living decided it wasn't.   

Update 2:  Katharine Murphy on the Morrison spin politics of mask mandates is very good.   I cannot wait to see the back of him as PM. 

Update 3:

He doesn't hold the hose, you know.

Ancient Christian bling

This ring looks like it would have been expensive:

Quantum needs imaginary numbers

I hadn't realised this was a contentious issue before:

Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. 

In fact, even the founders of quantum mechanics themselves thought that the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting. In a letter to his friend Hendrik Lorentz, physicist Erwin Schrödinger — the first person to introduce complex numbers into quantum theory, with his quantum wave function (ψ) — wrote, "What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of complex numbers. Ψ is surely fundamentally a real function."

Schrödinger did find ways to express his equation with only real numbers alongside an additional set of rules for how to use the equation, and later physicists have done the same with other parts of quantum theory. But in the absence of hard experimental evidence to rule upon the predictions of these "all real" equations, a question has lingered: Are imaginary numbers an optional simplification, or does trying to work without them rob quantum theory of its ability to describe reality?

Now, two studies, published Dec. 15 in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, have proved Schrödinger wrong. By a relatively simple experiment, they show that if quantum mechanics is correct, imaginary numbers are a necessary part of the mathematics of our universe.

 

 

A simple problem with Covid

I've been meaning to note that I read a thread on Twitter recently, perhaps from an overseas doctor, which made the somewhat under-appreciated point that a big problem COVID presents, especially with the wildly transmissible Omicron, for hospital managers is the lengthy period positive testing staff have to be away from work.  Hence, even with modest increases in actual COVID patients in a hospital, it may still be really suffering from inadequate staff for all of their patients.

Certified

I've mentioned before the frenetic Twitter commentator Richard Hanania, who got recommended by a couple of well known internet intellectuals and seems to have thereby picked up a heap of followers.

But, seriously, the guy is a certifiable creepy libertarian sociopath, if you ask me.  And look, it might be a cheap shot, but he has a face that would fit so well with being a Batman villain - he's got a Joker vibe going even without makeup.

The latest evidence:

This take completely ignores that Right Wing media (Fox News particularly) has combined undying support of Trump with vaccine/Covid scepticism for a year or more now.   There is no reason to think they are going to start believing Trump on this issue - they are going to put it down to "something Donald likes to bullshit about, but we like him anyway."  They know they still have "and just like that, Covid will go away" Trump from 2 years ago.

Worse:  

He is, like so many at Catallaxy, sure that there is a masculinity crisis ruining the world.   It's a view often held by incels, of which it would hardly be surprising Richard is a member.  There is also considerable irony in him calling others "twitter dorks".

 

Yeah, just being a smug jerk. 

OK, so this doctor's recommendation sounds over the top and ripe for ridicule.  Problem is, Richard's reaction sounds like he wants to blow up her apartment and practice and would think he is doing the world a good.

Sociopath who thinks we understand Omicron enough to know it's safe to spread.  We do not.   In a month or two, we will know how dangerous it is.  But it's foolish in the extreme to be like him.

 

He doesn't have to manage hospitals and health systems - so all good!   Richard's happy that people want to avoid him - a very reasonable reaction, given he doesn't care if he gives someone else a disease that might kill them.   

Comment that made me laugh:

Japanese content

First, France 24, of all channels, has a short but good report on the decline of the Yakuza in Japan:

 

And secondly, quite a charming short video by young Japanese guy Shunchan, in which he surprises his grandparents with a visit after quitting his salaryman job. (He's not your typical Japanese!) My daughter keeps saying "is he gay?" based on his often somewhat Korean boy band-ish fashion sense, but he has clearly indicated in previous videos that he isn't.  I always feel a bit sorry for him, as a guy who can't really work out what he wants to do in his life, but he has a very likeable Youtube persona. 

This isn't very Christmassy, but: an exorcism co-incidence

Well isn't that odd - American funny man (I don't really know what his main job is) "JonTron" finally put out another video, and it's a review of a fairly recent (and terribly, terribly amateurish and unconvincing) documentary by the original director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin, about a real life exorcism in Rome.   The guy swears a bit, but he's pretty funny:

 

And then, today, I see this article in The Guardian, which seems just a co-incidence: 

Boy whose case inspired The Exorcist is named by US magazine 

The article gives some details of the case, which dates back to 1949.   If they are correct (a big "if"), and comparing it to the Rome in Friedkin's flaky documentary, it would indicate that demonic possessions is not what it used to be.

Long time readers would know I am not totally averse to "woo"; I think I even count as more than merely "woo curious".   But I've never been all that sold on demonic possession.  And, as it happens, I've only ever seen little bits of The Exorcist, and feel very confident that it would not be at all unsettling for me.   I think it looks very dated and ludicrous, and find it hard to believe that it did convincingly scare people back in the day.

True, that

 

Why?

I assume from the photo that the article is talking about commercial rent hikes?   If so, why would this be the case?   Companies have just spent 2 years learning they can operate pretty well with half the staff on any one day working from home.  My expectation would be that city commercial renters will only take half the space when they renew, leading to a glut of cheaper space available in the city.

Where is that expectation wrong?

Hossenfelder tries to explain superdeterminism

Well, I knew she would have to be doing this soon, given the recent arXiv paper in which she was a co-author.  Here's Sabine Hossenfelder trying to explain superdeterminism and her expectation that it
solves all quantum oddities:

 

I don't understand the issues fully, but my impression is that Sabine underplays the philosophical significance of it. I wonder what other physicists think.  (To give more detail:  she seems to make an argument that it has no "real" implication at the macro level - but I am not sure that's right...) 

Update:   from comments following the video on Youtube, I pick out a couple that deal with the retro-causality interpretation, which she never mentions:

Before measurement of the particle in the double slit experiment, it is non-localised in time, it literally occupies all possible positions starting when it was emitted up to the point it is observed. This is how a single particle can go through both slits and interfere with itself. After it is observed, it becomes localised in time and acts like a single particle, not a wave. This is why observing before the slits eliminates interference, and does not if you observe afterwards. The crazy part is that the act of observation retroactively affects the past. If you observe before the slit, you do not get interference. If you observe afterwards, you get interference. This is because the wave collapse propagates backwards to the point the particle was emitted. Particles moving forwards and backwards through time acting like a wave, until the point they are observed at which point they never moved forwards and backwards through time in the first place and were always single particles, explains all the 'spookiness' and also explains that the hidden variables are hidden in time and as entities moving linearly through time we will never be able to observe them. Once you get your head around this concept, the weird behaviour of particles in quantum mechanics becomes obvious and logical.

 Mind you, the commenter was "Microdoser", so I'm not sure I should trust him (or her) given my skepticism about that practice.

Another one:

I would add that many physicists assume entaglement can only propagate forward in time. Basic time invariance says that entanglement must be able to propagate backward in time just as well as forward.

And:

So Is Superdeterminism described more by the future affecting the past, or by particles/ wave functions reacting differently depending on what is around them and what they interact with? thank you for the video

Last one:

If the detectors are far apart, and they do influence the measurement, then there is fast-than-light effects happening. (aka "spooky action at a distance"). And maybe this is the misunderstanding in communications with Bell or Zeilinger. As far I understand, they assumed superdeterminism to be a loophole to remove non-locality, in the sense to say the detector isn't actually choosing the angle of measurement, randomly, but is deterministic as well, and the particles kind of "know" this. Bell even got so far as to take a photon from the cosmic background radiation to determine which angle to measure at, which would leave the entanglement of the detector all the way back to the big bang.. and thats what I think they called absurd in "no free will". Thus SD and keeping non-locality, yeah why not. No issue with it, it is supposed to fix non-locality, I really would like to see a backdown how it should work, without making the universe holistic (and thats where I said in effect destryoing non-locality all together). Honestly, I don't have an issue with real faster-than-light effects as long the "cosmic censorship" is somehow in affect that it doesn't allow information communication. So maybe the wave form is physically real (the so called particle is really smeared out) and maybe the collapse is really faster than light. And maybe in case of entangled particles the waves are really connected far apart until collapse. So what. If this is reality, I don't care if Einstein wouldn't consider it beautiful ;)

Another bit of "yeah, but apart from that, what did the Romans ever do for us?"

New research suggests that the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate is the one that built the Biar Aqueduct, the most sophisticated ancient aqueduct of the Jerusalem area. The study also uncovered the way the unique aqueduct was constructed.

The aqueduct is part of the ancient water system serving Jerusalem. Biar, the shortest of the aqueducts, brought water from a point south of Bethlehem to Solomon’s Pools. Other aqueducts carried the water from there to Jerusalem. The five-kilometer aqueduct includes the Biar Spring, an underground shaft tunnel running about three kilometers, a surface channel and dozens of piers used for its construction and maintenance....

Archaeologists exploring Jerusalem have known of the aqueduct for a good 150 years. It has been dated from the Hasmonean period, in the second century B.C.E., through Herod to the late Roman period of the second century C.E. Yechezkel’s team used carbon dating of plaster to suggest that the aqueduct was built in the mid-first century C.E., before the destruction of the Second Temple. They believe Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect from 26/27 C.E. to 36/37 C.E., known for condemning Jesus to death, ordered its construction.

It's from a Haaretz article, which is quite interesting.