Another very late review

Finally caught up with The Talented Mr Ripley on Netflix last night.  I was just married when this came out, and there was soon a baby on the way, so I had other things on my mind.

I thought it good but not great.   A large part of the problem is that I routinely don't care for Matt Damon's acting.  He doesn't put me off quite to the same degree that Matthew McConaughey does, but I would be very happy if he would just retire so I don't have to keep on wondering why I never find him convincing.

Anyway, on reflection, the story is a bit odd for the complete lack of a sympathetic male character.  (OK, maybe there is one, but even he appears pretty dumb by the end and doesn't survive.)  I think that the 3 key male actors all seemed a bit too, um, trying too hard?   Or perhaps that is more the problem I found with Jude Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances:  Damon's acting was more controlled, but still not super convincing.   

The women, on the other hand, are likeable enough, and there's no denying Gwyneth Paltrow in her day had a charming screen presence.   But the one who stood out for me was Cate Blanchett - she was 30 when this movie came out and probably at the peak of her attractiveness, and does rich elegance so, so well.   It's a pity her role doesn't get more screen time.

I had a read on Reddit about it afterwards, and find it hard to believe some people were still saying after viewing it "was Tom Ripley meant to be gay or bisexual"?   Well, duh, it's an unavoidable conclusion from the movie.  However, I see from an online article that the book highlights more than the movie does a conflicted sexuality, and in fact an aversion to sex:

Tom’s aversion to all things sexual is central to his characterisation in the novel. He feels secure in his friendship with Cleo because ‘she never wanted or expected him to make a pass at her’, and dismisses Dickie kissing Marge as ‘cheap, obvious, easy’.

At the same time, Tom’s adoration of Dickie is painted in clearly romantic terms; he is drawn to Dickie’s ‘handsome’ looks and ‘the proud way he [carries] himself’, and fantasises about killing his girlfriend Marge for ‘interfering’ with ‘the bond between them’. In a moment of vulnerability with Peter towards the end of the novel, he briefly wonders whether ‘the same thing that had happened with Dickie could happen with Peter’. Tom’s asexuality and the fact that he is romantically attracted to men are given equal weight in the novel, but adaptations of the novel exaggerate the latter and ignore the former entirely.

So, he might not be cinema's first bisexual (or repressed gay?) psychopathic murderer and liar, but it's first asexual one who none the less feels romantic attraction (and is repulsed by it).  Interesting concept.  In retrospect, I can see how that is reflected to some degree in the film (there is never an indication that he gets physical with anyone, on or off screen), but it could have been made clearer and perhaps made for a more interesting explanation of his psychological problems.

I also see that the character went on to appear in another 4(!) novels.   So there was quite a following for this anti-hero.  Personally, I'm glad there have no more movies about him.   I'm not a fan of the bad guy winning.  

Update:  I did think during the movie about how it had themes very common in Hitchcock films, and see today that Patricia Highsmith, about whom I could recall little apart from knowing she had lesbian relationships, wrote Strangers on a Train.   This New Yorker article about her is pretty interesting.

Oh, so I can blame English royalty

As this BBC article explains, tattooing is pretty much normalised in most of the West now, and there is a push to get it recognised as a worthy artform, but you still can't convince me that 95% of what I see on "sleeves", legs, faces or backs of necks isn't trashy art. 

I don't think I knew this before:

"Western tattooing has been a commodity-based art form for only about 140 years," he explains, suggesting that one of the key drivers behind its commercialisation in the UK was King George V, who got a "desirable" tattoo of a dragon on his arm during a trip to Japan as a teenager in 1881.

Is it just me, or is there genuinely a lot of flash flooding happening around the entire globe now?

Of course, Google via Youtube is pushing a lot of this content to me lately, and maybe it's not above global averages:  but I suspect something genuinely novel is going on at the moment.  

Flash flooding stories are coming from all over the place:   Death Valley,  Afghanistan, France, China.   And that's only the past few days.  A couple of weeks ago it was Kentucky.   

It could all be confirmation bias, but sometimes I reckon the lay person can notice genuinely unusual sudden trends (or flips to a "new normal") that scientists do later confirm.

Update:   how convenient!  Just after I posted this, I see very credible climate scientist Andrew Dessler has a twitter thread on non-linearity in climate change, which is the sophisticated way of explaining what I am worrying about.

And, I might add, surely this has always been reason to doubt the credibility of economic forecasts on the long term effects of climate change - a topic I have posted about many, many times over the years.

Sand in the eyes

For what it's worth, I tried the first episode of The Sandman on Netflix and found it rather tedious and unengaging.

This type of fantasy is really not my thing.  I'm feeling happy that I've (mostly) avoided Neil Gaiman in written form.   The only thing I've read that had anything to do with him was the co-authored Good Omens, which everyone likes, but I presume the humour and light tone of it came from Terry Pratchett.

I have my doubts too

 Anyway, I'm betting on Trump is not going to be the GOP candidate.   He's in too much trouble...

Something we knew, but in more depressing detail now...

In Science magazine:

A nuclear war would disrupt the global climate so badly that billions of people could starve to death, according to what experts are calling the most expansive modeling to date of so-called nuclear winter. Although the exact effects remain uncertain, the findings underscore the dangers of nuclear war and offer vital insights about how to prepare for other global disasters, researchers say....

Scientists have long known massive explosions can throw enough dust, ash, and soot into the air to affect the global climate. In 1815, Mount Tambora in what’s now Indonesia unleashed the largest known volcanic eruption in history. In the following months, its ash rose and spread worldwide, blocking enough sunlight to produce “the year without a summer”—a cold spell in 1816 that resulted in massive crop failures and famine across the globe.

For decades, scientists have warned a similar catastrophe could follow a nuclear war, as fires ignited by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and inducing global environmental effects. Worries about climate effects of nuclear warfare emerged soon after World War II, and studies took off during the Cold War.

Over the past decade, two pioneers of nuclear winter studies, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, have assembled a cross-disciplinary team of scientists to take the calculations further. They turned to the same climate models that underlie global warming studies—but used the models to simulate global cooling instead. “Now, we have the computational capacity to simulate these kinds of things in a sophisticated way,” says Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate change scientist, crop modeler, and team member at NASA and Columbia University.

So, how bad could it be?  Pretty bad! 

A few years after a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, the global average calories produced would drop by about 90%—leaving an estimated 5 billion dead from the famine, the researchers report. A worst-case war between India and Pakistan could drop calorie production to 50% and cause 2 billion deaths. The team tried to simulate the impact of food-saving emergency strategies, such as converting livestock feed and household waste to food. But in the larger war scenarios, those efforts did little to save lives.

Baum urges caution in interpreting the estimates. Although the climate models are “excellent,” he says, there’s too much uncertainty in how humanity would react to such a global catastrophe to get an accurate read on the death toll. Still, the study “makes a very worthy contribution” to envisioning these scenarios, he adds.

It's interesting that some people are putting effort into envisaging how emergency food production might work, though:

The nightmarish prospects have already inspired others to look for ways to fight the hypothetical famine. David Denkenberger, who co-founded the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, is exploring ideas including scaling up “resilient foods” such as seaweed, repurposing paper factories to produce sugar, converting natural gas into protein with bacteria, and relocating crops to account for an altered climate. He and his research associate Morgan Rivers think those approaches could dramatically increase the amount of food available to humans. “Even if [a substitute] doesn’t taste as good as sweet corn, it’s better than starving,” he says.

I don't know - maybe Soylent Green would actually happen in these circumstances?  All very unpleasant to contemplate.

 

 

 

Amusing tweet of the day

I don't know:  I'm pretty sure Morrison has managed to firmly take the title from Abbott for weirdest Prime Ministerial behaviour since Federation.

There are many, many jokes swirling around on Twitter about this, and I might add more later.

I reckon the GG should go in embarrassment too.
 

Stars get closer than I realised

Phil Plait writes that the evidence suggests some stars have cruised near our sun at surprisingly close distances, and will do so again:

A few years ago, research using Gaia data indicated that the last such close encounter was about 70,000 years ago, when the star WISE J072003.20-084651.2 — also called Scholz’s Star, after the discoverer — passed just 0.8 light-years from the Sun.

But that was then. Every few years the folks with Gaia release updated data from the mission, with newer numbers. This generally improves the accuracy of the motion measurements, because the longer you look at a star the more it moves and the easier that motion is to see. The third such data release occurred in 2022, and a team of astronomers used it to review the data on Scholz’s Star [link to paper].

Things changed with the revised numbers. They found the encounter occurred more like 80,000 years ago, and the distance was more like 1.08 light-years, with a small uncertainty of just 0.026 light-years.

But there's more:

The astronomers then asked, has there been another star that passed even closer with a high degree of statistical confidence?

The answer is yes! They found that the star UCAC4 237-008148 also once swung past the Sun. In this case it passed us at 0.844 ± 0.02 light years about 1.158 million years ago. Even within the uncertainty that’s closer than Scholz’s Star, breaking the record.

I’ll note that today, UCAC4 237-008148 is about 318 light-years away — a million years is a long time for it to move off — and Scholz’s Star is only 22 light years distant. 

The astronomers also looked at a third star, HD 7977, about 246 light-years from us now. They found that about 2.77 million years ago it gave us the incredibly close shave of just 0.49 light-years! That’s definitely violating our personal space.

 And if humanity can manage to last another million years, it sounds like it won't be too much of a stretch to hop over to this one:

So those are stars that zipped by us in the past. What about the future? The astronomers in this new work didn’t look into that, but with the new Gaia data I imagine that will be done soon. As of now, using older and less-accurate data from the Hipparcos satellite, the next star to come close is Gliese 710, a red dwarf that will slide past us at a hair-raising 0.163 light-years about 1.3 million years from now. I’d love to see how this might change with the new Gaia data.

As Plait writes, the problems of close encounters of these types is the danger of them disturbing the Oort cloud enough to send a lot of comets into the inner solar system.

All very interesting. 

The Republican walk back has started, but has a long way to go

Several lawmakers pushed back on Sunday against Republican criticism of the FBI’s court-authorized seizure of documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, with even some in the GOP warning that the violent rhetoric was “dangerous” and “absurd.”

Still, many Republicans continued to defend the former president, casting doubt on whether the FBI search of Trump’s Florida home earlier this week was justified — and whether the documents seized were actually top secret.

That's from the Washington Post (free link here.) 

As usual, I found Allahpundit at Hot Air has a decent take on the matter (the "he" here is, obviously, Trump):

If he truly wanted to turn down the political heat in America, I can think of a few things he might have done differently.

1. He could have returned all of the documents the first time the National Archives asked for them back.

2. He could have returned them later when the DOJ subpoenaed them.

3. Having failed to return them, he could have kept the search of Mar-a-Lago a secret. Remember, it wasn’t the feds who announced it. Trump announced it on Truth Social because he recognized that the incident would benefit him politically. The FBI even carried out the search dressed in civilian clothing so as not to alert bystanders as to what was happening. Trump alerted the country because he wanted to raise “the heat.”

4. He could now call on his followers to chill out before one of them kills someone, as nearly happened a few days ago in Cincinnati.

5. He could, at the very, very least, refrain from further inflaming the situation:...

Of course, the best way to have turned down the heat would have been to not remove classified material from the White House in the first place, thereby risking this sort of standoff over recovering the documents.

 

Weekend update

*   This remains the coldest Brisbane winter I can remember for years.   Pity the rest of the world is burning up (literally, in the case of Europe.)

*   I didn't realise before how much blood pressure jumps around.   I've been taking it three times a day, and have learnt the benefit of doing two readings within a few minutes.   Overall, it would seem my recently concerning BP is dropping down, presumably as a result of the modest increase in physical activity and/or the addition of flaxseed (and natto) to the diet.   I've not really started with walking every day yet, but I get the feeling it will be properly licked if I can get to doing that.   Somewhat warmer mornings will help.  

*  Flaxseed, especially ground flaxseed, really gums up your morning cereal or porridge, if you add a couple of tablespoons to it.   It has no great effect on taste, though, which is good. 

*  I didn't realise that the immediate effect of alcohol can be to decrease blood pressure.  Because it raises heart rate, I would have guessed the opposite.   So I guess one way to permanently decrease BP is to always be under the influence of 2 glasses of wine.  (Just kidding.)

 

That's interesting

As Ben on Urban Rescue Ranch would say:  "Well, well, well, well, well."   (It really is worth watching his eccentric act.)

I had wondering about the long term Fox strategy on the question of support for Trump as victim of the "raid".  They have clearly been edging away from him, but they felt they had to rush in to offer support again because, I don't know, it's what their audience would want, or something.

But clearly, a "higher up" (one of the Murdochs probably) has decided that someone on the network has to run a line that will give it plausible deniability on the question of how much they toed the Trump line if it turns out really bad for the Yellow One.  And Doocy drew the short straw:

As

 

 

Wish I had thought of this...

 

He must be getting close to revealing that Democrats authorised those alien anal probes

This is real:

 Update:  Seeing I've already used "anal" in the post, I suppose I may as well mention it again, in a much more serious context:   

Women in the UK are suffering injuries and other health problems as a result of the growing popularity of anal sex among straight couples, two NHS surgeons have warned.

The consequences include incontinence and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as well as pain and bleeding because they have experienced bodily trauma while engaging in the practice, the doctors write in an article in the British Medical Journal.

 And apparently, the fact that some men have it without apparent long term harm is down to anatomy:

...women who engage in anal sex are at greater risk from it than men. “Increased rates of faecal incontinence and anal sphincter injury have been reported in women who have anal intercourse,” the report said.

“Women are at a higher risk of incontinence than men because of their different anatomy and the effects of hormones, pregnancy and childbirth on the pelvic floor.

“Women have less robust anal sphincters and lower anal canal pressures than men, and damage caused by anal penetration is therefore more consequential.

“The pain and bleeding women report after anal sex is indicative of trauma, and risks may be increased if anal sex is coerced,” they said.

 I think the awful Sex and the City has a lot to answer for.

 

Nutty aggressive woman who likes to scare elderly men on the street foresees the end of America

She lives in such a permanent state of hyperventilation, I think it would be in her (and the public's) interest if someone would volunteer to shoot a tranquilliser dart at her in the street:

 

 

 

I'm outraged that there's not more outrage...

...from mainstream media about the vile "let's throw petrol on the fire" reaction of Fox News (and the even nuttier media outlets) when everyone knows Trump idiots are already bouncing off the walls with ridiculous calls for violence and revenge against anyone involved in investigative action against their stupid yellow leader.  A series of tweets from yesterday:

 

As I said yesterday, it's like the Murdochs want the country to burn, as long as there's a buck to made in the process.

UPDATE:   Oh look, seems like this is the first person killed with the assistance of Fox News.   Wouldn't be surprised if there are more.

An armed man who tried to break into the FBI building in Cincinnati on Thursday leading to a lockdown in the nearby area has been shot and killed by police.

 

UPDATE 2:   let's hope this magistrate sues Fox News for a lot of money:

 

It's dry in Europe

Axios reports:

Drought conditions are affecting about 60% of the EU and the U.K., exacerbated by climate-change driven record heat across Europe this summer, according to new research from the European Drought Observatory.

Why it matters: France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are facing water shortages and riverbeds are drying out across Europe. Dry conditions are severely affecting energy production, agriculture and river transportation.....

What they're saying: "Droughts have become our summer reality," tweeted Virginijus Sinkevičius, the European Commission's commissioner for environment, oceans and fisheries, on Tuesday.

• 100 municipalities in France have no running water, the Rhine River's levels in Germany and France are so low the transportation of goods is under threat, and the Netherlands "faces an official water shortage," Sinkevičius noted.
• "Restoring Nature is the best solution to change this," he added.

What to watch: Another searing heat wave was forecast to hit parts of western and central Europe this week into next week.

• The Met Office has issued an amber heat warning for much of southern England and parts of Wales for Thursday through Sunday, on the heels of its first ever extreme heat warning last month. Heat alerts are also in effect across France.
• London is forecast to see temperatures of 90°F (33°C) or above for four straight days starting Thursday, and temperatures will

And in France, nuclear power is affected:

After a major heatwave in 2003, France's nuclear safety agency set temperature limits at 28 degrees Celsius for rivers, beyond which power plants were required to reduce their production in order not to make the water even warmer and preserve the environment.

Temporary exceptions allow some plants to raise this limit by a few degrees during "exceptional situations".

 

 

Social media outrages in context

OK, so in another Washington Post column which I will gift my readers, Megan McArdle writes about the recent on line controversy over an American chain restaurant offering plant based meat (as well as their regular meat menu),  and some MAGA types reacted on social media that this was outrageously "woke" and they wouldn't eat there again.

McArdle argues that the problem is that social media amplifies crank voices - what used to be a stupid opinion never used to have such a public profile, and we could all ignore easily:

Before social media, these people mostly had to share their crankery in person, unless they could get a local newspaper column or a segment on “60 Minutes.” And Americans knew how to deal with it: We nodded and smiled while Uncle Walter explained that he was never going back to Second Federal Bank because the new bank manager was German, and he hadn’t fought World War II to do his banking with a Nazi.

Then we turned to Aunt Irma and complimented her on how pretty her Jell-O mold looked.

We ignored these explosions because when we had to endure these tirades in person, we had a sense of proportion. Yes, Uncle Walter had crazy opinions. But everyone else we knew chose their bank based on where it was located, or who was offering the best interest rate on savings accounts.

Social media concentrates all the Uncle Walters in one place, where they start to seem like an army. But in fact, their numbers are still insignificant, relative to the 325 million people in the country.

This is true, and something worth remembering.

But I reckon her "calm down everyone" attitude leaves out a couple of things:

*   it's a pity she pitches it towards encouraging people to just ignore some extreme MAGA types, as if it is only liberals who over-estimate the number of nuts on the other side of politics.   For example, Right wingers get off on "Libs of Tik Tok" as if every gay teacher on there is representative of teachers as a whole.  Also, as someone said in a comment following the article:

Ok, so if a few dozen students protest a speaker at their college campus, then Megan will exercise the same sense of proportion and won’t claim that these people are threatening the very foundations of democracy. Right?

I think we know the answer to that.

*  More importantly, I reckon she's ignoring the effect of social media in the reinforcement of extreme views, because people who hold them readily a community of the like minded.   And they probably do what McArdle warns about - overestimate the size of that community - but that hardly matters, and they are not likely to be convinced of their overestimate anyway.   What's important is the mutual support in their nutty views, which help entrench them.   That's the bigger danger of social media free speech, especially in the USA, where you also have a media universe devoted to perpetual demonisation of Democrats and liberals.  This was also noted in a comment:

What happens when the cranks are on major media sites like Fox News, OANN, and they are accusing the president and the DoJ with a conspiracy to get Trump? We have a problem in this country of people who can't think in anything but in terms that the opposition is pure evil and their side is purity and light. Meanwhile, that "side" thinks of itself as purity and light is spreading lies and misinformation 24/7.

Indeed.       

The history of Trump disparaging the FBI

Philip Bump in the Washington Post (I'll gift the article) summarises the history of Trump attacking the FBI for patently political purposes. 

You know what's really sickening:  that most of the GOP politicians (even Pence, the pathetic figure still following the lead of the former boss who thought it was understandable that people wanted him to hang) see this as a good tactic too.  That's what 30 odd years of paranoid conspiracy mongering does to your judgement.  

And what about Fox News?   The Murdoch family never misses an opportunity to encourage the country to burn, presumably because there's money to be made that way.  (What other excuse is there?   Mental illness?)

As Bump writes:

Of course, there’s no reason that any Republican would need to weigh in immediately on Monday’s Mar-a-Lago search. They could simply wait and see, wait to learn why the search was executed and offer an assessment at that point.

But that’s not the culture of the modern Republican Party. Instead, there are rewards to be earned from moving quickly in casting the probe as suspect. Following an example set in part by Trump himself, GOP officials rushed to offer up products in the robust marketplace of social media commentary. The most outrageous denunciation of the search could earn more attention and more followers — and perhaps more clout. A number of people hustled to raise money off the news, including GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who suggested that angry donors contribute to the party’s Senate nominee in Georgia; J.D. Vance, a Senate candidate in Ohio; and Trump himself.

One reason that the Mar-a-Lago search might “unite [the] different factions in the party,” as a Trump aide told Politico, is that it isn’t pro-Trump but anti-FBI. Republicans from both the pro- and less-pro-Trump segments of the GOP get to express outrage at a group that Republicans are primed to distrust. Outrage at a government department that can be cast as the swamp or the Deep State or even the Elites, depending on who’s doing the casting.

Update:  Look at this.  Utterly disgraceful, how Murdoch and Fox News are basically begging the country to become ungovernable because half of it is consumed by conspiracy belief and complete demonisation of the other main political party:

Update 2:  Ah yes - the poisonous feedback loop between Murdochian media and the Republicans, who has resulted in the American Right turning into wannabe totalitarian conspiracy mongers:

 

 

 

An unexpected lead in eggs story

Gee, I would never have guessed that this was a potential issue for home gardeners in our big cities:

Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs, research finds

Our newly published research found backyard hens’ eggs contain, on average, more than 40 times the lead levels of commercially produced eggs. Almost one in two hens in our Sydney study had significant lead levels in their blood. Similarly, about half the eggs analysed contained lead at levels that may pose a health concern for consumers.

So how do you know whether this is a likely problem in the eggs you’re getting from backyard hens? It depends on lead levels in your soil, which vary across our cities. We mapped the areas of high and low risk for hens and their eggs in our biggest cities – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – and present these maps here.

Our research details lead poisoning of backyard chickens and explains what this means for urban gardening and food production. In older homes close to city centres, contaminated soils can greatly increase people’s exposure to lead through eating eggs from backyard hens.

Tim, I thought you might be interested in particular...

Short notes

* Olivia Newton John's singing and movie career was hardly something I personally found terribly exciting, but there never seemed any doubt that she was a likeable and decent person in real life, given how well people who knew her spoke about her.  (She also came across very well in interviews, and celebrities who do a lot of charity work get a big tick from me too.)    So yeah, sad that she didn't get to live longer.

* Ron Howard's dramatisation of the Thai cave rescuse - Thirteen Lives - has got good reviews.  Hope I can deal with the claustrophobia aspect though.  Watching people in tiny caves can actually make me feel very uncomfortable.  

* Schrodinger believed there was only "one mind" in the universe?  I think I had probably read that before, but I'm not sure:

In 1925, just a few months before Schrödinger discovered the most basic equation of quantum mechanics, he wrote down the first sketches of the ideas that he would later develop more thoroughly in “Mind and Matter”. Already then, his thoughts on technical matters were inspired by what he took to be greater metaphysical (religious) questions. Early on, Schrödinger expressed the conviction that metaphysics does not come after physics, but inevitably precedes it. Metaphysics is not a deductive affair but a speculative one.

Inspired by Indian philosophy, Schrödinger had a mind-first, not matter-first, view of the universe. But he was a non-materialist of a rather special kind. He believed that there is only one mind in the universe; our individual minds are like the scattered light from prisms:

A metaphor that Schrödinger liked to invoke to illustrate this idea is the one of a crystal that creates a multitude of colors (individual selves) by refracting light (standing for the cosmic self that is equal to the essence of the universe). We are all but aspects of one single mind that forms the essence of reality. He also referred to this as the doctrine of identity. Accordingly, a non-dual form of consciousness, which must not be conflated with any of its single aspects, grounds the refutation of the (merely apparent) distinction into separate selves that inhabit a single world.