Not much charm

It might just be me - it's not like I watch sport to any significant degree (although last week's State of Origin was very good) to assess the degree of charm of individual sporting champions.  But after watching Cameron Smith's bit of media after winning the British Open, it occurred to me that golf seems to have trouble attracting champions who have any particular charm.   Perhaps people used to think that about Tiger Woods, but then his personal life became a mess and I don't think people like him much anymore?

I wondered if this is more the case with individual sports than team ones?  Maybe - but while there have always been jerk tennis champions, it seems a sport which has always had a reasonable number of seemingly likeable personalities.

Golf, though...

(People used to like Greg Norman, I guess, but he became increasingly weird as he aged.  He is perhaps a symbol of the Right wing character of the sport.  I mean, it is considered a rich person's game in many countries, I guess - although not as much in Australia, perhaps.)  

A familiar refrain, but this time it's deserved: waiting for the next new, cool thing to replace the stale old thing

I'm talking movies and TV.   And yeah, every year or two there's a journalistic burst of "Everything at the cinema/on the streaming service is a sequel and/or a superhero movie.  Where's the mature cinema/TV for adults we used to enjoy?  Why can't Hollywood give us more original stories? etc etc"  Perhaps the Covid break from cinema going cooled down that talk for a while, but now that we are out of that, I get the feeling we genuinely are in a particularly clear "stale idea" crisis.

I don't write this out of particular disappointment with current movies - I still haven't even seen the Top Gun movie, or the new Thor.   The latter is definitely suffering a bit of a Marvel fan backlash (it's too jokey for many, apparently, and feels more like a parody.)  

But more generally, based on watching quite a few Youtube reviewers, it's safe to say that:

a.   it's clear that Disney has milked the Star Wars universe dry. The critical reception to their series is just getting worse and worse, and as I didn't even care for the Mandalorian, it's not like I'm hanging out for anything new from that world.  The universe, as I have written before, has a fatal flaw:  no consistent view of the Force, which was the key appeal of the first couple of movies.  The TV shows are not fixing that.  It's incapable of retrospective correction, probably.

b.  Similarly, the same can be said of their Marvel content, with general dissatisfaction growing with the way the movies and series are messily dealing with a multiverse.   (I also watched a long Youtube video by someone very keen to explain that the Endgame movie, and subsequent stuff, has dealt with time travel inconsistently.  I never did like the Endgame explanation.)

c.  The Jurassic franchise is dead - there are so many terrible reviews for the current one.  

d.  Hard to believe the (not Spielberg directed) Indiana Jones movie will be good. Due out next summer.

e.  Honestly, who cares that there are at least two Avatar movies coming out.   Had no interest in the first movie, less in any sequel.

f.  People went to see (yet another) dark Batman.  But I don't get the feeling it re-started any particular new enthusiasm for the character.  DC based movies, few of which interest me, have a very high "miss" rate.

g.   Has their ever been more knives sharpened to attack a series than those waiting for the Amazon Tolkien prequel-ly show to start?   

It just truly feels that everything has been sucked dry, and everyone can see it.

Sure, there will always be a couple of exceptions such as the surprise quality, apparently, of the Top Gun sequel - although it is not like that is going to be a franchise as such.   There's a good chance the next Mission Impossible will still be good, too.  (Although I found the last one underwhelming.)

But overall, at no time have I have felt that the complaints about lack of creativity from Hollywood were ever more deserved.  

Is it the fault of the culture wars, perhaps?   It probably does have something to do with it, as even allowing for Disney and other studios being super keen to have "representation" of women and gay or trans, it is hard to imagine stories now that are unifyingly appealing to the extremes of politics now.  The world views have become so divergent.   

Heat waves and death in India, reconsidered

Here's a lengthy article looking at the question of why this year's pre-monsoonal heat waves in India and Pakistan did not seem to kill many at all - a bit contrary to expectations, actually.

I've always puzzled at how (many of) the poor in India manage to survive their incredible sounding heatwaves.  The answers are a bit complicated...

Makes Brisbane look cool

These Pub Choir videos, I'm talking about.  The latest is a version of Running Up That Hill, a song I don't particularly care for, but again, it's just the fact that it makes Brisbane look like its full of cool, community minded, and talented, people:

 

(I also believe that Camarata - the ensemble playing strings - is extremely good at what they do.)

The old folding handkerchief trick

Noticed this on Twitter not so long ago, with the handkerchiefs on display in some police museum or other in Malaysia:

 

I can tell you, Googling the topic "folding porn handkerchiefs" or "vintage porn on handkerchiefs Malaysia" has really thrown up a lot of results I didn't want, and nothing useful!

This reminded me of the old Mad Magazine fold in cartoons.   Wikipedia tells me they started in 1964, and were done by the same cartoonist - Al Jaffee - til 2020!  (Jaffee is now 101!  Talk about a long career.)

Anyway, I'm not sure that it took much imagination, looking at the drawings on those handkerchiefs, to see how the right fold could make it look like sex.   But I wonder how common this means of distribution was - just a South East Asia thing, or were they all over the West too?   Can't say I have heard of them before...

Wingnut regrets

Interesting story at the New York Times (gift link for you) about a Trump supporter who has had to go into hiding due to wingnut news sites, and Tucker Carlson, spreading a rumour that he was really at the Jan 6 riot as an FBI provocateur.  

He seems to have regrets, but the article avoids asking him if he still thinks the election was stolen...

When "being yourself" isn't all that it's cracked up to be

Of course, I am broadly sympathetic with the views expressed by Brian Rosner in his recent article

Is it good advice to “be yourself”? Why looking inward is not necessarily the answer 

Common wisdom today has it that there is only one place to look to find yourself, and that is inward. Personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. All forms of external authority are to be rejected, or at least questioned, and everyone’s quest for self-expression should be celebrated — personal happiness is the ultimate goal. Self-determination, once a principle for nations emerging from the First World War, is now the responsibility of every individual. A novelty in the history of ideas, this strategy of identity formation is sometimes labelled “expressive individualism”.

Clearly, there is nothing wrong with looking inward. There are many gains to living an examined life. And the alternative is far from attractive. As the philosopher Charles Taylor explains, the movement of expressive individualism is, in part, a reaction against a 1950s culture of conformity, which is believed to have “crushed individuality and creativity”.

Authenticity is also desirable. It is much better for a person to inhabit an identity that they own and can fully appropriate for themselves; there is something to be said for feeling comfortable in your own skin. Psychologists generally regard authenticity as a basic requirement of mental health.

So, are there any downsides to looking inward and being yourself? I can think of three pretty big ones: it seems to produce fragile selves; it’s failing in terms of outcomes for individuals and society; and it is faulty in its assumptions about human nature. Let me briefly discuss these in turn.

This is how it ends (and I think that second last paragraph needed some editing to make its meaning clearer, when it mention Nietzsche:

There is, in fact, a fourth direction to which you can look to find yourself — a direction that many believe offers a better story. They insist that personal identity requires looking up. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes: “Without the transcendent we shall find ourselves unable, sooner or later, to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness”. On the other side of the ledger, some have argued that Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes described as the first real atheist because of his fearless pursuit of the consequences of his antitheist stance, has no place for the notion of personal identity. Does looking up have a role to play in identity formation?

The key to an authentic, stable, and satisfying sense of self is to inhabit a narrative identity that is worth living. One that deals well with life’s joys and sorrows, triumphs, and disappointments, and responds well to injustice.

We can re-build him

I mentioned recently having listened to one of the episodes of the CBC podcast Brainwashed, about the CIA and psychiatrists' attempts to learn how to control peoples minds, in the 50's and 60's.

I went back to listen to another episode, and it was a very incredible reminder about how top psychiatrists got away with just ridiculously unethical experiments on the basis of fanciful theories of how they might work.

Those of us of a certain age (as the idea has been dead for quite a long time) might remember cheesy ads for pillow speakers that would play (say) a foreign language while you slept, and hey presto, it would help you learn with no effort at all.   I didn't know that this basis idea - which even as a child I thought sounded dubious - was in fact given a serious workout by at least one highly regarded psychiatrist working in Canada in the 1950's.  His name: Donald Ewen Cameron, and the experiments he did were called "psychic driving".  Wikipedia explains:

His "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many suffered permanent debilitation after these treatments.^[27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.^[28] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the intelligence services and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.^[29]

The Brainwashed episode indicated that the patients slept 23 hours a day, and although awoken to go to the toilet, the ideal result was considered a reversion to early childhood incontinence, as that indicated their mind had reverted to a childlike malleable state, into which positive messages on the tape would be absorbed by the subconscious, and replace those bad thoughts.

The podcast episode paints a much worse picture of how the experiments were done - if I recall correctly, Cameron first tried just playing the tape in the undrugged patient's bed 24 hours a day, which the patient found absolutely unbearable, so it was drugged sleep for weeks at a time, to get around that problem! 

There's a very good and lengthy article about Cameron here, which explains that for many people, Cameron exuded much charm, and his obituaries in 1967 were full of praise.  He apparently was very fond of gadgets and technology, and loved science fiction.   There is a detailed description of "psychic driving", although I would say inadequate attention given to this obvious problem (the failure of successful "rebuilds"):

Cameron reported that once the patient’s resistance had been conquered, the result was therapeutic. Depatterning then proceeded to a final level of “disorganzation” in which the patient experienced utter “loss of orientation as to space and time,” near-total amnesia for his or her identity, often double incontinence, and (relatedly) childlike dependency on care staff. 56 The goal now was to rebuild, to retrain the patient to pursue healthy behaviors and leave behind the unhealthy behavior patterns that had previously vexed him or her. Despite the labor-intensive tasks it generated for nursing staff, the method at its core served to put the whole process at a distance by automating it: “this method of activating psychotherapeutic mechanisms not only created a great deal of time saving for the therapist but also appears to operate much more rapidly than ordinary psychotherapeutic procedures and hence constitutes a time-saving for the patient,” Cameron and his assistant asserted.57 Cameron’s method was at heart an efficient device.

It all turned out after his death that money had flowed to him from the CIA, although it is not clear whether he knew that was the true source.  Somehow, it would seem, he managed to convince himself this was a genuinely successful treatment enough of the time to take the risk of ruining other patients who were permanently broken by it.  In fact, I haven't yet read about that aspect - I mean, it's kind of hard to be believe it was ever a clear success, in anyone.  

The article I linked to talks a lot about the connection of his ideas to behavourism, which has generally fallen from grace. I must admit, I have long found it frustrating that the present popular thoughts on psychology and personality are rarely seen in light of how previous "fashions" for how we think of ourselves have come and gone.   The idea that every person's true goal and only way to happiness is to be "true to yourself"* that now completely dominates much of the western world makes it is well worth reading about other ideas that have come and gone.

 

* What is the best term for that?  Personality - or identity - essentialism?  Someone has probably named it, I should go looking...

Cue Arnold "It's not a tumour"

So, how's my Covid going, asked no one.  Coming up to a week since I first thought I was coming down with something.  I'm still feeling like the tail end of a cold now - still a little bit of post nasal drip, but not much, but twinges of sinus pain, and an actually throbbing head if I have to cough (which I don't need to, often.)  I'm still putting down the head throbs to sinus pain, and I have actually had this at other times over perhaps the last year (periods where I have no blocked nose, but mild pains at various points around the face where I assume my sinuses are, but if I cough, forehead throbs badly.)

 I've actually looked up on the web recently, and I see that headache relating to coughing is described as follows:

Cough headaches are fairly uncommon. There are two types: primary cough headaches and secondary cough headaches. Primary cough headaches are usually harmless, are caused only by coughing and get better quickly without treatment. A primary cough headache is diagnosed only when a provider has ruled out possible causes other than coughing.

A secondary cough headache may be triggered by a cough, but it is caused by problems with the brain or structures near the brain and spine. Secondary cough headaches can be more serious and may require treatment with surgery.       

Primary cough headaches

The cause of primary cough headaches is unknown.

Secondary cough headaches

Secondary cough headaches may be caused by:

• A defect in the shape of the skull.
• A defect in the part of the brain that controls balance (cerebellum). This can happen when part of the brain is forced through the opening at the base of the skull (foramen magnum), where only the spinal cord should be. Some of these types of defects are called Chiari malformations.
• A weakness in one of the blood vessels in the brain (cerebral aneurysm).
• A brain tumor.
• A spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak.

So, this sounds like a condition ripe for hypochondria!  And one where a GP is likely to be uninterested, especially if the pain I am complaining about only lasts - I don't know, 30 to 60 seconds?

Sinuses (which I would say are still my most likely issue) are a real example of one of the body bits which are poorly designed and fixing them becomes guesswork.  Like backs when they go bad.

Anyway, all pretty minor, and I can't say I am feeling any "brain fog" from Covid, which is something I would find annoying.  Am sleeping very well at night, and kind of enjoying that aspect, actually.

 

 

Simple, but amusing

It's probably Covid...

 

Covid at home, continued

Yeah, I didn't even need to sleep during the day yesterday (Sunday).  Throat feels pretty normal again, but a bout this morning of serious cleaning of my bedroom (not physically demanding, just moving around a lot more than I have for several days) made me feel briefly unwell.  Still, the progress is generally in the right direction.   

I saw that Samantha Maiden tweeted yesterday:

and it was interesting to read the comments following, of some noting a similar very mild effect, and others how it was much worse for them, and some with lingering serious issues.   

As I have been saying virtually from the start, it seems a disease that's perfect for making life extremely complicated for public health officials and government:   the wide variety of responses mean that people will extrapolate from their own experience in a way that they shouldn't.  The unvaxed getting a mild response are particularly likely to feel vindicated, ignoring all detailed research on the benefits of vaccination at the community level.   And on the side of "panic", some people can point to legit studies indicating that even an apparently mild case might be causing lingering harm that is so not immediately apparent. But the seriousness of the harm is still up in the air.

It may not have made me very sick, but it's still a terrible disease...

Seems true, and yet...

....I didn't have the impression that Bertrand Russell himself was "full of doubt":

Oh, now that I check again, he actually labelled himself agnostic, not atheist.  Interesting article at The Guardian about the finer details of his thoughts on religion here.

Covid day 4 - and back to Graham Greene

Happy to report that very sore throat has abated considerably.  Was still bad last evening, but after a few hours sleep I medicated at midnight with a couple of old cold and flu tablets I found lying on the bedside table, then started one of the dusty novels* near them, followed by a good sleep, and woke up with throat feeling much better.

Nose still not blocked, just annoying post nasal drip continuing, but I have had worse cases of that from a normal cold.  

Speaking of sleeping habits, this seems an enforced way of getting into a biphasic nighttime sleep pattern.  I currently don't mind it, too, and the midnight reading seemed pleasantly free of distraction.  But I still think it's an anti-social pattern, suitable mainly for hermits.

* Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory.  I was admiring again, in the first chapter, how good he is at scene setting, and wondering how authors get the knack for doing it well.  Because it seems to me quite a talent as to how to slip in details of the physical environment intermittently, at just the right level of detail, so as to not find it intrusive to narrative, but instead letting it build up the mind's picture in a gradual but convincing way.

I see that, as I would have expected, Greene did visit Mexico before writing the novel (and hated it), so  the physical details of locality are not all invented.  Science fiction writers have a harder time, I guess, since they first need to make up something to describe, and it's not as if they can look at anyone else's photos to help. 

Abe reviewed

It's always a shock when a nutter in Japan kills someone, and yesterday's death of Shinzo Abe was a particularly dire example.

To be honest, I had not been certain of his political legacy, but Noah Smith's very positive assessment of him is well worth reading.  

Covid update

This is day 3 of not feeling well, although day one was very mild.  

The worst effect by far is a very sore throat that is only relieved by aspirin or paracetamol every 5 or 6 hours.  I always find aspirin more effective, but I am a bit reluctant to take it for too long.  Mind you, with most illnesses I'm rarely taking anything for more than a day.

But yeah, I don't remember the last time I had a sore throat that meant I had to take something in the middle of the night.  It's been a long, long time.

Apart from that, post nasal drip is a bit worse, but at least I can breathe through my nose.   It's affecting my digestion too: lots of gas and a bit crampy.  

Still don't think I have been running a temperature, but body is a bit achy sometimes.   Or that might just be from lying down so much?   

Anyway, could be worse, but could be better too.  😬

She is awful

I mean, nearly every word that comes out of her mouth is offensive, but this takes some beating...

Feeling positive

The bars, the bars...

I don't feel so bad, though.  Sore throat this morning, nose runs sometimes.  Not running any fever.

Maybe I can post more often!

Feeling unwell

I see that it was July last year that I had a cold, or something, which didn't turn out to be COVID.   Same thing happening now, perhaps: mainly just a thick head with a bit of post nasal drip; throat feels a little sore but not dire; coughing really can hurt the sinuses in the forehead, but fortunately, I don't have to cough often.  Oh, and I did feel not warm enough in bed on a night of sufficient covers that I should have been OK, but I don't think I have felt feverish today.   Lets see how I feel tomorrow...

The tritium problem

I saw mention of this somewhere else - perhaps on a Youtube video I never linked to? - but there's an article in Science which makes it clear that it is a very serious problem for the prospects of fusion as a viable energy source:

A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank

 Fusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. That is certainly true for deuterium: Roughly one in every 5000 hydrogen atoms in the oceans is deuterium, and it sells for about $13 per gram. But tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment. Nuclear reactors also produce tiny amounts, but few harvest it.

Most fusion scientists shrug off the problem, arguing that future reactors can breed the tritium they need. The high-energy neutrons released in fusion reactions can split lithium into helium and tritium if the reactor wall is lined with the metal. Despite demand for it in electric car batteries, lithium is relatively plentiful.

But there’s a catch: In order to breed tritium you need a working fusion reactor, and there may not be enough tritium to jump-start the first generation of power plants. The world’s only commercial sources are the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors, which each produce about 0.5 kilograms a year as a waste product, and half are due to retire this decade. The available tritium stockpile—thought to be about 25 kilograms today—will peak before the end of the decade and begin a steady decline as it is sold off and decays, according to projections in ITER’s 2018 research plan.

The article does mention that there are other fusion fuels theoretically possible, but require something like ten (ok, seven) times the heat to work:

TAE Technologies, a California startup, plans to use plain hydrogen and boron, whereas Washington state startup Helion will fuse deuterium and helium-3, a rare helium isotope. These reactions require higher temperatures than D-T, but the companies think that’s a price worth paying to avoid tritium hassles. “Our company’s existence owes itself to the fact that tritium is scarce and a nuisance,” says TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer.

The alternative fusion reactions have the added appeal of producing fewer or even no neutrons, which avoids the material damage and radioactivity that the D-T approach threatens. Binderbauer says the absence of neutrons should allow TAE’s reactors—which stabilize spinning rings of plasma with particle beams—to last 40 years. The challenge is temperature: Whereas D-T will fuse at 150 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen and boron require 1 billion degrees.

I know it is risky to ever bet against technological advances - but on the other hand, someone in the 1940's who pooh-poohed a science fiction magazine's cover showing flying car highways in the sky in the 21st century  would be looking prescient.  

Hence, I'm strongly tempted to bet against fusion ever being a viable energy source, in any century.