Victorian magicians and The Prestige

I finally got around to watching the 2006 Christopher Nolan movie The Prestige on the weekend - about warring stage magicians of Victorian England.

I found it quite entertaining, and would recommend it, but after reading a bit more about it, it's one of those movies where the plot definitely does not bear thinking about.   

SPOILER ALERTS:

The main issue is the involvement of Tesla - as the initial reaction (certainly my son thought so) was that the Christian Bale character had taken advantage of Tesla's clone machine first.   But no, apparently if you pay closer attention, he always had a twin brother, and the Tesla thing was just to send his rival off on a wild goose chase.  Seems a little crazy, then, doesn't it, that Tesla should be able to whip up a clone machine in short order?  

Wouldn't it have made more sense the Bale really had been cloned?

Secondly:  there has been a fair bit written on the net about the vanishing bird cage trick.   It would seem it was never done as portrayed in the movie, and although the trick was hazardous to the bird, it was not necessarily fatal.   I guess I would count this as fictionalisation that is (more or less) justified.  

In any event, here's a lengthy article that appeared in The Conversation last year about the history of magician-ship in Victorian England.

 

Olives appreciated

I wrote some years ago about liking green Sicilian olives. I still do, but they tend to be pretty expensive.

I'm now recording for posterity the fact that I probably like just as much  the small olives called Ligurian olives. 

I didn't know that was a place (the Italian Riviera), and the actual cultivar of olive is noted at one website:

Liguria has been renowned for the production of Taggiasche olives for more than 600 years. Benedictine monks from the town of Taggia developed the species many centuries ago. 

(Sicilian olives are apparently Castelvetrano olives.)  

 

There's a continental deli at West End in Brisbane that sells Ligurian olives and they seem pretty cheap.  I never notice them in supermarkets.  I don't know why they aren't better known, because the flavour is, I reckon, pretty distinctive and pleasing.

Bald men problem

With the absolutely pathetic alternative reality performance of Murdoch editor James Campbell on Insiders this morning, I realised that middle aged, chonky men who like to shave their head bald is a bad sign for political reliability.  Either that, or low intelligence!  (I can think of a couple of other examples.  And no, I don't think Peter Garrett is a good counter example.  First: not chonky.  And besides, I never trusted him much either. "Every song's a whinge", as someone said to me in the 1980's.)

Harder

I've not mentioned before that I have joined in with the Wordle playing crowd, and today sealed it for me:  I am definitely in the "it's become harder since the NYT took it over" camp.  

Quite the cycle, there

I've had posts before about the idea of toilets collecting urine separately so it can be turned into something useful.  In Nature, this description of a scheme planned for a Swedish island is bound to be easy material for joke writers:

 Starting in 2021, a team of researchers began collaborating with a local company that rents out portable toilets. The goal is to collect more than 70,000 litres of urine over 3 years from waterless urinals and specialized toilets at several locations during the booming summer tourist season. The team is from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, which has spun off a company called Sanitation360. Using a process that the researchers developed, they are drying the urine into concrete-like chunks that they hammer into a powder and press into fertilizer pellets that fit into standard farming equipment. A local farmer uses the fertilizer to grow barley that will go to a brewery to make ale — which, after consumption, could enter the cycle all over again.

The researchers aim to take urine reuse “beyond concept and into practice” on a large scale, says Prithvi Simha, a chemical-process engineer at the SLU and Sanitation360’s chief technology officer. The aim is to provide a model that regions around the world could follow. “The ambition is that everyone, everywhere, does this practice.”

What's wrong with people?

An unusual mistreatment of wildlife story out of Thailand:

BANGKOK: Dozens of live monkeys tied up in small sacks have been found in an abandoned building in central Thailand, national media reported on Thursday (Feb 17), in what authorities believe was a failed operation by illicit wildlife traffickers.

Footage from broadcaster Nation TV showed police and wildlife protection officers in the building in Saraburi province inspecting plastic crates containing sealed blue mesh bags with monkeys in each of them.

The video shows some monkeys trying to scamper away while still inside bags that were secured with string and plastic zip ties.

Wirom Wanalee, a resident, told Nation TV she and neighbours heard the monkeys' cries and found nearly 100 of them in the building.....

Thailand and the wider Southeast Asia is home to some of the world's most diverse flora and fauna, but the region has suffered from rampant poaching and trafficking of wildlife.

The pandemic halted much of the lucrative trade, but it is now picking back up as countries lift border restrictions, according to the United Nations.

Who is wanting poached monkeys from Thailand??

 

 

The self serving dishonesty of Republicans

We saw the same tactic deployed in the past on climate change:  after actively promoting the mere handful of contrarians, you would see them pointing to polls and saying "but the public just isn't convinced enough that climate change is real or serious or deserves government action, it would be wrong for us to move on this now."

Now it's used by Republicans regarding the completely unjustified claims of widespread voter fraud in the Trump election, and pointing to polls as to the number of Republicans who believe it meaning that voter laws just have to be reformed.

While fighting off professional sanctions for her legal career, Powell noted in a filing, “Millions of Americans believe the central contentions of the complaint to be true.” Then the filing added — tellingly when it comes to Powell’s lack of actual proof — “and perhaps they are.”

The same filing also alludes to another arena in which this widespread belief has been used to justify certain actions. It states that “dozens of laws have been enacted by state legislatures in response to concerns similar to those raised in the complaint.”

And it’s right. GOP leaders in key swing states across the country have repeatedly cited the perception of fraud — rather than actual widespread fraud — as legitimizing their efforts to add new voting restrictions. One Iowa state senator went so far as to say, “The ultimate voter suppression is a very large swath of the electorate not having faith in our election systems.”....

It’s not difficult to see where this kind of justification can go awry. It incentivizes creating a pretext for something you already wanted to do, as long as you can find enough people to embrace it.

Powell wanted to overturn the election, so she cited all kinds of dodgy supposed evidence for that, and she earned credulous media coverage from others who wanted to believe (or at least allow other people to believe) the election had been stolen from their side. Likewise, Republicans writ large haven’t generally subscribed to Trump’s most far-reaching claims of fraud, but they’ve done virtually nothing to rebut them, allowing the situation to fester.

What results is a bunch of legislators and extreme actors in the effort to overturn the election citing the very perception they’ve fomented as somehow legitimizing their original argument — and justifying the particular bandage they had already wanted to apply to the perceived wound. If a lie makes its way into the mainstream, is it really a lie? Or just a difference of valid opinions? Who can know? And how can you impose sanctions on someone or block a voting restriction if both were predicated on a sincere belief held by so many people?

 

Catholic technicalities

God's quite the stickler for precise words, it turns out:

Thousands of baptisms at a Catholic church in Arizona have been invalidated because a priest used the wrong words in performing the ceremony.

Father Andres Arango resigned from the St Gregory parish church in Phoenix earlier this month after diocese leaders discovered he had mistakenly used the phrase “we baptize you” instead of “I baptize you” for years.

His error means that countless baptisms – an irrevocable requirement for salvation in Catholic theology – will have to be performed again. And some churchgoers could find their marriages are not recognized....

The fount of knowledge on the matter is the Vatican’s 2020 congregation for the doctrine of the faith, which along with declaring Covid-19 vaccines “morally acceptable” also spelled out the correct words that needed to be used during baptisms.

The congregation “affirms that baptisms administered with modified formulas are invalid, including: ‘We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’,” the Vatican announced.

The declaration was deemed necessary following questions over whether such phrasing meant that three separate holy entities were involved in the baptisms, or only one.

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted wrote in a message posted to the Diocese of Phoenix website.

I wonder if there is an Arizona lawyer looking at offering to sue for clerical negligence, citing emotional harm over concern that the client's deceased child didn't make it into heaven because of this?

 

A consumer observation

I recently consumed a Kelloggs product for the first time in years, just because it was on special.  It was - not great.

Why do Kelloggs products seem to so uniformly be so dull and overpriced?  I wouldn't say "bad quality" as such; just really uninteresting and expensive for what they are.  I've felt this about them for perhaps 40 now, and nothing changes.   I presume this is not a assessment too widely shared, given the survival of the company, but I feel very certain of my opinion on this anyway.  

PS:  I've eaten a lot of breakfast cereal over those 40 years.  I love a good breakfast cereal.  Uncle Toby's or some Sanitarium have had much better cereals, although they didn't up their game when I was a child, and it probably was mostly Kelloggs I ate back then.   Now, I'm into the cheaper toasted muesli style products (Heritage Mill, sold in Coles and made in Australia, goes ridiculously cheap on about a 4 or 5 week cycle and has been my favourite for a year or two.  Just so you know.)  

  

 

As I've been saying...

John Quiggin brought this to my attention:

 And the opinion piece itself is very annoying - a journalist who says he's independent and generally thinks Biden is doing pretty good and who says he knows the Republican anti-democracy campaign is  worse than identity politics in the Democrats nonetheless writes that the identity politics issue is so big it's completely understandable that people won't vote against Republicans and their wannabe Christofacism.   He thinks it's time for the rise of an independent Presidential candidate - fat chance of that, and as if they would get reason out of the current Republicans.

Anyway, encouragingly, the comments following the article are mostly full of ridicule of his both-siderism.  For example:

Excuse me.

One party’s mob violently attacked the capital, beating police officers with flags, smearing feces everywhere and threatening to lynch a VP that wouldn’t bend to their will. Hint - it wasn’t the Democrats. A Republican Congressman said it was just another tourist group and the RNC declared that this was merely “legitimate political discourse”.

Today’s GOP wants to ban books, censor teachers and overturn elections. They are far more dangerous than a party that says racism is bad, let’s address it.

I am so weary of writers comparing “wokism” with the anti democracy scourge that is today’s GOP. No -Democrats are not perfect. But their excesses in no way compare to the disturbing trends in today’s GOP.

 More succinctly:

How about we stop fascism from taking over America, and then we can address the stifling oppression of being nice to minorities on the internet?

Sheesh, this isn’t rocket science.

And this:

I swear to God, it's the extremist centrists that are going to end this democracy by letting the GOP complete the coup they started last year.

 

A comforting bit of information for the next time you're flying with a mad person

From the Washington Post:

In two high-profile incidents since Friday, airline passengers terrified fellow travelers when they tried to open a plane door during their flight. It has been a repeated move by unruly passengers in the past year.

Both passengers were arrested in the most recent incidents. Even if flight attendants and passengers hadn’t intervened, neither passenger would have been able to wrestle the door open.

“People are not strong enough,” said Doug Moss, a retired airline pilot and instructor in the aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering.

That is because no human is a match for the tremendous pressure holding the door in place.

Airplane cabins are pressurized, which lets people breathe normally even when flying at about 35,000 feet in the air. At typical cruising altitude, Ask a Pilot writer Patrick Smith notes on his website, as much as eight pounds of pressure push against every square inch of the plane’s interior — or more than 1,100 pounds against each square foot of the door.

“Just by pure pressure alone, the force required to open the door would be astronomical,” said Bob Thomas, an assistant professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Moss said the pressurization would have the same effect on any door on a plane, including the emergency exits, which are designed to be used in the event of an evacuation when the plane is no longer in the air.

That’s the door a Delta passenger tried to open during a flight from Salt Lake City to Portland, Ore., on Friday. The 32-year-old man allegedly removed the plastic covering over the handle of the emergency exit and pulled the handle; he later told police that he wanted to be recorded so he could share his thoughts about the coronavirus vaccine.

I guess the caveat to this is that if a mad person leaps out of their seat (or is sitting right next to an over wing exit) and tries this immediately on take off, they might succeed?  

 

A relatively simple explanation of superdeterminism

I barely look at Discover magazine's site anymore, but I'm glad I did today because of this pretty easy to follow explanation of superdeterminism.  (I reckon this idea is catching attention because the popular Sabine Hossenfelder likes it.)  

All about present day Russia

Some Twitter threads by people who seem to know their subject well are really good to read.

I liked this one today that explains a lot about present day Russia, mainly from a geographic and population point of view.  (It's more interesting than it sounds).

 

The Right wing and hysteria

With the Right wing hysterical reaction to Trudeau's moderate and targeted use of emergency powers to rid Ottawa (and other cities) of useless and unjustifiable blockades (according to "my employer says no one should take me seriously" Tucker Carlson, it's martial law and the end of democracy), I am reminded once again how the tide has turned.

When I were a lad (well, at least into my 20's), Monty Python used to ridicule Left wing political hyperbole:

Man:      (laughingly) Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords

is no basis for a system of government!  Supreme executive power

derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical

aquatic ceremony!

Arthur:              (yelling) BE QUIET!

Man:      You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some

watery tart threw a sword at you!!

Arthur:              (coming forward and grabbing the man) Shut *UP*!

Man:      I mean, if I went 'round, saying I was an emperor, just because some

moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

Arthur:              (throwing the man around) Shut up, will you, SHUT UP!

Man:      Aha!  Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Arthur:              SHUT UP!

Man:      (yelling to all the other workers) Come and see the violence inherent

in the system!    HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!

I think "what have the Romans ever done for us" could similarly be said to be mocking the Left for wanting victim status all the time.   

And that was because political over the top hyperbole used to be a thing more of the Left than the Right.

Now, it's the speciality of the wingnut Right, and is amplified by its media that makes money out of spreading fear and misinformation.

 

Chris Uhlmann: Australia's own JD Vance

Look at the highly sympathetic treatment Chris Uhlmann gives the Canberra protesters in today's piece in the Sydney Morning Herald:   they're just like Trump's followers, mostly ordinary working class people who have faced hard times who are frustrated that they're not being heard: exactly the same analysis as given by JD Vance.

Uhlmann has always had crap judgement, and it would have to be at least an even odds bet that he will go increasingly wingnut, like Vance, once he leaves Channel 9 and (hopefully) gets out of media for good.  Did he actually give media appearance advice to some of the protesters, as one of them claimed last week?  Has he answered that claim?

I'm on the side of those who have no time for the sympathetic treatment of wingnuts - they are victims of malicious and greedy Right wing media, both institutional and social, and talked themselves into ridiculous, dangerous and often pro-fascist positions.  They need to be told loudly and clearly that they are wrong and been conned on multiple issues and because they are too gullible.

I will be very glad to see the back of Uhlmann.

Hot head

I thought I could tell by the writing style of an article by Vinad Prasad that Jason Soon finds convincing that this guy seemed unduly hyperbolic in his criticisms of the CDC. 

Googling him, I see that he is indeed a ridiculous hot head, and I would not trust his assessments at all without looking at calm and detailed commentary by others:

Prasad, an oncologist and associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, likes a good Twitter fight. He has incited brawls over FDA’s accelerated approval of cancer drugs, efficacy of checkpoint inhibitors, usefulness of next-gen sequencing, and—in recent months—the restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.

In an Oct. 2 Substack blog post, Prasad argues that public health measures may have laid the groundwork for the onset of fascism in the U.S. 

The comparison set off a deluge of Twitter controversy, including accusations of anti-Semitism and ignorance of the circumstances that led to the rise of German fascism.

In the blog post and an accompanying video titled “How Democracy Ends,” Prasad speculates that in the name of public health and safety, an unscrupulous U.S. government could turn dictatorial and fascist.

“When democratically elected systems transform into totalitarian regimes, the transition is subtle, stepwise, and involves a combination of pre-planned as well as serendipitous events,” Prasad wrote. “Indeed, this was the case with Germany in the years 1929-1939, where Hitler was given a chance at governing, the president subsequently died, a key general resigned after a scandal and the pathway to the Fuhrer was inevitable.”

Also on Oct. 2, Prasad posted a link to his blog post and video on Twitter, sharing it again the next day. The Twitterverse exploded, with Prasad’s detractors battling his defenders while Prasad stood by his original point. Prasad didn’t respond to questions from The Cancer Letter, and at this writing, the post is still up.

He's a goose.

He's all too willing to allege bad motives on the part of other researchers rather than just accept that on the very complicated matter of this pandemic there can be a range of justifiable policy recommendations, based on research that's imperfect but might nonetheless be somewhat indicative of appropriate policy.

 

 

The departure of PJ O'Rourke

I wasn't his biggest fan, but PJ O'Rourke could be amusing in his contrarianism, and I had wondered what he thought of Trump, as I hadn't noticed him writing much in recent years.

So, Googling it up now, I am pleased to see that he had anti-Trump and anti-Brexit views, meaning he was more sensible than most conservative/libertarians in his own country (and those in Australia, like Tim Blair).  From an article in New Statesman in 2020:

O’Rourke sprang back into the national spotlight during the 2016 presidential election by announcing that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

He puts the decision down to his natural conservatism. “Politics is a matter of least worst,” he told me when I recently stayed at his farm. “She was the devil I knew – she was going to be another eight years of Obama, which we had endured. Donald Trump? I knew people who knew him. Nobody liked him. I just thought he was unstable…dangerous. I still do.”...

he hasn’t changed his mind about Trump. “In fairness, his administration has not been as bad as I thought it might be,” he reflected. “But there have been moments when one has gone: ‘Whoah!’” What he described as Trump’s “group hug” with the North Koreans, and “stirring things up with Iran” are just two examples.

O’Rourke believes that the Founding Fathers made the presidency too powerful by giving it control of foreign policy – something he recently discovered Benjamin Franklin had opposed. “He thought it should have been a committee,” he said.

“Trump certainly is not a conservative in the sense of conserving the status quo. Arguably Clinton was more so. He is a radical, a populist one, and I don’t like populism anyway. Populism is, like, ‘The government should give me things I like or get rid of the things I don’t like’… The Nazis were populist, Mussolini was populist.”

For similar reasons, the perennial sceptic says he would have taken the Remain side in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. “I would have been against Brexit strictly on practical grounds – Britain and Europe had become too thoroughly integrated to do something as radical as Brexit.”

Though sympathetic to the Leave cause over European meddling, and happy to give Europe “a kick up the pants”, it was his conservatism that said “stay”.

 

 

 

So if Global Times said Trump was a pathetic dumb narcissist, that wouldn't be true?

First, the opinion piece (with its highly accurate summary of Morrison) is by Bruce Haigh, who (AFAIK) hardly counts as the official spokesperson of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Secondly:  as many in tweets following have said, isn't it rather more "Awks" that the coalition signed off on the long term lease of the Darwin port to a Chinese company barely 7 years ago, and is now wringing its hands as to whether it was a good idea after all.?

Thirdly:   I reckon the only way a hypocritical China scare campaign can "work" for Morrison, would be if there is an actual invasion of Taiwan before the election.   So let's send out positive vibes to Xi to calm down and not even think about that until next year, at least.  
 

Social media is strangling democracy

I agree entirely with Max Boot's Washington Post column "Social media is destroying democracy".  Some bits:

Freedom House reports that democracy has been on the decline around the world for the past 15 years — the same period that has seen the rise of social media. In her best-selling new book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” political scientist Barbara F. Walter argues that this is no coincidence. Social media, she writes, has become “the vehicle that launches outsiders with autocratic impulses to power, riding a popular wave of support.” Examples include Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil — and, of course, Donald Trump.

All of these demagogues are masters of a medium whose algorithms are designed to give users the content they crave. “It turns out,” Walter notes, “that what people like the most is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy.” That explains why Breitbart is more popular on Facebook than the New York Times and why Ben Shapiro’s the Daily Wire is more popular than the BBC.

That, in turn, explains, why so many Americans believe that the FBI masterminded the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that Trump won the 2020 election and that coronavirus vaccines are unnecessary or even harmful. That explains, also, why last year a crowd of QAnon believers gathered in Dallas expecting John F. Kennedy Jr. to return from the dead. Social media is full of useful, accurate information, but what most users really respond to is fear, falsehood and flakiness.

It is not clear to me that democracy can survive so much disinformation, and yet Republicans are bashing Big Tech because they are so mad that Trump and a few other political arsonists have been banned from major social media sites. The GOP position seems to be that there should be no gatekeepers at all, aside from those algorithms that feed collective outrage.

This is a deeply destructive and profoundly anti-conservative position.

 Of course, the comments following are mostly "But who are the gatekeepers going to be, you wannabe communist".   It's a good question, but refuse to solve the problem, and you're guaranteeing a worsening society.  

 

 

Speaking of animal death and cruelty...

...Elon Musk's Neuralink brain tinkering project is copping some bad PR:

Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink has become the subject of a US federal complaint and lawsuit after “invasive and deadly brain experiments” were reportedly carried out on 23 monkeys – leaving 15 of them dead.

The Tesla billionaire’s firm - which aims to help paralysed individuals “by giving them the ability to control computers and mobile devices directly with their brains” – partnered with the University of California, Davis on the research, with $1.4 million allegedly given to the institution in funding.

However, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) claims the university has violated the Animal Welfare Act and has complained to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

And I note that atheist blogger PZ Myers really puts the boot into the whole project in his post "Neuralink is feeling the heat".   I'm no expert, but my sense is that his scepticism is well justified:

The goals of Neuralink are sci-fi nonsense and hype about mundane technological developments. They’ve got a chip with more channels than previous efforts…but that’s not where the questions lie. Just throwing more needles into the brain does nothing if you don’t understand the interactions, or the long term consequences of healing, repair, and response to exogenous signals. It’s really a brute force approach to physically interacting with a mammalian brain, and it’s going to be increasingly disastrous as these people fumble about crudely under the directives of an incompetent narcissist.

I don’t want to hear what paid employees say. This is a case where an independent review is necessary by people who don’t get a paycheck from Elon Musk. I’d still like to know why UC Davis no longer supports Neuralink’s animal research. Is it under an NDA? That wouldn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I bet all those employees have a threatening NDA stapled to their backs.

If you want to see something really sad, though, check out Tanaka’s YouTube channel. Read the comments on this video, for example, but they all sound alike. They’re full of desperate people looking for hope. ‘Please sir, cure my seizures/paraplegia/tinnitis/depression/autism/Parkinson’s/multiple sclerosis/schizophrenia. Will it let me talk to animals?’ That’s where the fervor comes from. Musk is the messiah who will heal everything.