In glass half full news...

...Paul Waldman in the Washington Post notes what I have read elsewhere - despite Democrat jerks Manchin and Sinema defending the filibuster, what's more remarkable is that every other Democrat in the Senate has turned against it.   Apparently, this was not the uniform opinion even relatively recently.

A recovery story

It's not that I visit the Jezebel website out of habit, but someone on Twitter linked to this article: 

I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life.

and I thought it was a pretty good piece about someone recovering from too much alcohol and drugs, and depression.

Chonky Junkers

More in the series "What Google wanted me to learn about last night."   It was quite interesting, and this guy's channel is full of esoteric historical aircraft information, by the looks: 

Encouraging news

Back to the perennial favourite - the Death of God

Hey, I quite liked this essay at Aeon:  How to Pray to a dead God.  

There are a lot of familiar names in it, and some new-ish stuff I don't recall reading before.   This section, for example:

Challenges to uncomplicated faith – or uncomplicated lack of faith – have always been within religion. It is a dialectic at the heart of spiritual experience. Perhaps the greatest scandal of disenchantment is that the answer of how to pray to a dead God precedes God’s death. Within Christianity there is a tradition known as ‘apophatic theology’, often associated with Greek Orthodoxy. Apophatic theology emphasises that God – the divine, the sacred, the transcendent, the noumenal – can’t be expressed in language. God is not something – God is the very ground of being. Those who practised apophatic theology – 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. ‘We do not know what God is,’ the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. ‘God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not’ [my emphasis].

 How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche’s infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a ‘dead God’: by understanding that neither the word ‘dead’ nor ‘God’ means anything at all.

 Well, that's one way to deal with a problem.  

[Update insert:  oddly, it reminds me of the opening lyrics of Birdhouse in Your Soul:

I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am

 

I didn't realise they were summarising mystical/radical theology.]

I've always found the question of religion's response to the scientific changes in the understanding of the age of the planet, the size of the universe, and human nature, to be terribly interesting; and as I have written before, the older you get, the greater perspective you have on how it is not so long ago that these radical changes in understanding happened.   We're still living within the lifetime of people who were young when Einstein revolutionised physics and an understanding of the scale of the universe was found at the end of telescope.  It was only 50 or so years before that that evolution was being hotly debated as a new idea.   Is it any wonder this is still having repercussions on religions going back a couple of thousand years before these changes in understanding?

Yet, it seems to me that quite a lot of people never think of this perspective - that the (seemingly newly invigorated) war within the Churches between conservatives and liberals are connected to this problem that is actually pretty new and still being worked through.

The true death toll of COVID

Two articles I have noticed about this:   one in Nature that starts:

On 1 November, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passed 5 million, official data suggested. It has now reached 5.5 million. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show many more people than this have died in the pandemic.

Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as simple as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.

And after explaining the complexities, concludes with this:

Amid the search for ways to count deaths, Andrew Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine, says the pandemic and the increased demand for real-time mortality figures highlight a demographic shortcoming that goes back decades: many countries simply don’t collect good data on births, deaths and other vital statistics. “Demographers have been part of the problem, because we have helped to put band-aids on this for 60 years. We’ve developed all sorts of techniques to estimate demographic rates in the absence of hard data,” he says.

That means the true death toll of COVID-19 might always be disputed. “We still don’t know how many people died in the 1918 [flu] pandemic, but I always figured we would know pretty well how many people would die in the next one, because we live in the modern world,” Noymer says. “But we don’t actually, and that’s kind of sad for me as a demographer.”

Over at Science, the particular difficulties of counting deaths in India is discussed in detail in a paper.  (I have always said that I would not be surprised if the true death rate effect of heat waves in that country was not clear at all.)   Here's the abstract:

India’s national COVID death totals remain undetermined. Using an independent nationally representative survey of 0.14 million (M) adults, we compared COVID mortality during the 2020 and 2021 viral waves to expected all-cause mortality. COVID constituted 29% (95%CI 28-31%) of deaths from June 2020-July 2021, corresponding to 3.2M (3.1-3.4) deaths, of which 2.7M (2.6-2.9) occurred in April-July 2021 (when COVID doubled all-cause mortality). A sub-survey of 57,000 adults showed similar temporal increases in mortality with COVID and non-COVID deaths peaking similarly. Two government data sources found that, when compared to pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27% (23-32%) higher in 0.2M health facilities and 26% (21-31%) higher in civil registration deaths in ten states; both increases occurred mostly in 2021. The analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.

 

This is making "King Kong" island more believable

I'm still really surprised at how long it is taking to get a good idea of the amount of damage in Tonga.   It has reminded me of the start of King Kong, with an island that is unobservable.   If ever we have a significant meteor strike causing tsunamis all over the Pacific, it's obviously going to take ages to learn the full extent of what has happened.

The ABC notes:

Tonga's internet could be down for more than two weeks after a violent volcanic eruption cut the kingdom's only undersea communications cable, isolating the country from contact with the outside world.

Surely Elon Musk ought to be promoting Starlink private internet services as a solution to this problem?  

Another thing that had escaped my attention, until now

I don't have much interest in language as a topic, which probably explains why it had escaped my attention (until Google wanted me to learn it - yes I am talking recommendations on Youtube again) that it is widely held that the Koreans have the easiest writing system (alphabet) ever invented. 

   

Huh.  I just thought it looked weird, but as I say, languages are not my "thing". 

 

The big bang in Tonga

I'm kind of surprised, in this modern day of communications, that Tonga could apparently be so easily cut off from the rest of the world.   What about satellite phones?   Do all governments keep a bunch of them on hand in case cables are cut?   But then, I thought, maybe satellite phones don't do well under a giant cloud of volcanic ash?   Anyway, some communications have taken place, apparently, but using what system?

 It also would not be at all surprising to see some global cooling as a result of this:

 

Further evidence that all smart, likeable people like They Might be Giants

(I don't care for the Pixies, though.)

Steamy, boring personal news

I bought a new steam iron and it's good to be ironing with steam again.  [Oh my.  I just checked  and it would appear that I have been putting up with using a water spray bottle while ironing, instead of using a continuous stream of steam, for just over 5 years!  How did I last so long?]

Gone with Tefal this time - this one:

The company makes a song and dance about having "anti-calc" systems which involve openings into the iron and the ability to remove scale (or bits of it.)   I was thinking of just using distilled water in it (as I happen to have some in the garage), but they actually recommend against using it!   

I am a tad sceptical, but we will see. 

People won't freeze to death in their Tesla

I had been wondering about this:  in frigid climates, if people drive electric cars, how long can the battery keep the interior warm if they are stuck in traffic for a very long time, as was the case recently in Virginia?

It turns out a guy on Youtube ran a test on two Tesla models, at least, and the results were pretty impressive.   Starting at a 90% charge, and keeping the inside at a nice 21 degrees C (70F), and without any human body warmth to help maintain the interior temperature, the test indicated the batteries should last well over a day, perhaps 36 hours.   (And in reality, people might turn the heater down to under 20 degrees if they have concerns about how much power was left.)    This is better than I would have expected, to be honest.

Here's the video:

Biden being punished for things beyond his control

I have no doubt at all that Biden is the one who is getting punished in public opinion polls for things not  within his control:

* the intransigence of two conservative Democrat Senators.   Manchin (who tells lies about the filibuster) and Sinema do appear to be just awful people who, if they had principles, would get out of their party;

* a COVID variant which the behaviour of the Right has made much worse;

* inflation which is thought to be at a temporary high.

I think I have to stop following moron Creighton

 Also:

 It's pretty simple:  it takes a jerk to like a jerk.

Rogan tactics noted

So Joe Rogan, who I have never cared to listen to, got very publicly corrected on a COVID/vaccination risk point, and didn't like it, as explained in these tweets:

 

Filibuster commentary

The COVID messaging wars - shouldn't the message be "the importance of consensus"?

Man, I'm sick of the COVID messaging/expertise wars.   I read the article yesterday in the AFR (which I can't link to now as paywall is up), about the fight between Nick Coatesworth and "Ozsage", which started:

A year ago, when he was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth told colleagues to watch out for a group of doctors and academics who, he felt, were so concerned by SARS-CoV-2 they would advocate for excessive measures against the virus.

Yet Coatesworth himself was partially wrong in his pooh-poohing of 25,000 a day from Omicron:

University of NSW modelling has suggested NSW could have up to 25,000 new cases a day by February - eight times higher than the current number. 

However, Dr Coatsworth slammed that figure as ­not 'accurate', challenging claims by clinical immunologist Dr Dan Suan that the state was 'sleepwalking into an Omicron disaster'.

Sure, you might say he turned out to be right "in the big picture" on his very early guess (because, really, that's all it could have been) that Omicron would result in much lower hospitalisation and might, maybe, be (kind of?) the end of COVID.   (Although, as far as I can tell, it is still completely unknown how much protection an Omicron infection might give against future variants.)  

I've complained from the start of the pandemic, pretty much, that people on all sides seemed to be overconfident of their positions on the basis of very clearly complicated and early information that would be very hard to sort out and take years in some cases to understand well.    

If anything, it has made me think of the importance of consensus in science and policy matters - you will always get a range of opinion even from normally credible experts, and there will always be the influence of personal and social political philosophy on expert's views as to how to respond.  But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as valid expertise on which to draw reasonable policy responses.

The important thing, I think, should be is to look at a science and policy consensus position, and always have sufficient regard to the uncertainties of novel and evolving events.   

Pyramid scheme that also wastes huge amounts of energy

 

Has Boris Johnson given all Conservatives permission to look ridiculous?

 

Cost of weather and climate disasters in USA

The report by NOAA has some good analysis of the cost of weather/climate disasters in the US over recent years.  I took this screenshot from it:

A reminder:  conservative wingnuts obsess over the cost of BLM rioting - which was widely reported last year as probably ending up costing insurance between $1 to $2 billion.