A deeply unimpressive Metaverse

A reporter for the New York Times has an article up "This is Life in the Metaverse", and boy, it may not have been the intention of the writer, but for me, it only helps confirm all of the scepticism about what a bad idea it is.  I will gift the article so you can read in full.

The culinary workplace - does it have to be that way?

Because it has been getting favourable comments on Twitter, I decided to watch the first episode of The Bear, which is on Disney Plus in Australia.

It's a comedy drama (with, it would seem, a heavier concentration on the drama) about a talented chef who comes home to Chicago to try to keep his recently deceased brother's "Italian beef restaurant" going.

I guess I expected all of the Kitchen Confidential-esque, working-as-a-chef-in-a-restaurant-is-high-energy, high-conflict, sometimes-high-reward, stuff.   (Ratatouille and Gordon Ramsay's shows contributed to our understanding of what type of people it attracts, too!)   But my overall feeling remains:

*  gee, there seemed to be an awful lot of people needed to run that place with the limited menu options.  That felt a bit unrealistic.  Apparently, though, the show gets reasonable marks for accuracy from people in the business.

*  Given that we have had a couple of decades of public exposure to what it's like to work in these businesses, is it is really, absolutely, unavoidable that they have to be like that?   I mean, can a restaurant be started on the basis that respect and workplace harmony are prioritised, and can it possibly survive?  

Ronny Jackson was the warning

Ronny Jackson was the warning - any doctor who goes all in for support for Trumpy politicians has dubious judgement in everything, including medicine.

Hence, my initial reaction when reading that the Florida Surgeon General was promoting an unpublished analysis about the increased risk of cardiac arrest in young men from mRNA vaccines was that this was likely to be from a badly flawed analysis.  (The warning in his Tweet "FL will not be silent on the truth" pretty much seals it, that he's acting from biased political motives.)

Early commentary indicates my reaction was probably right - although we all await more detailed analysis.   But the (likely) damage has already been done in the politicised information bubble the Right has built for itself. 

No, they don't

 

Tablet time

After many years with only an old mid sized Samsung tablet, which still has a great looking screen, but a battery that will only last a couple of hours and then take 8 hours to charge again, I went and bought my self a new, larger tablet - a relatively cheap one from Lenovo.

I have to say, the way Lenovo names its models is pretty confusing - but a 10.6 inch model with 128Gb (and room for expansion) for $327 seems pretty good value.   It makes reading books much, much easier than trying to do so on phone.  In fact, I have a theory that it will turn out conclusively in the near future that the world overall has become 20% dumber due to the atomisation of information necessary to fit it on a phone screen. 

It's still a bit tricky doing blog posts, though.  Hence my last post with the dubious quality of the resized screenshot.  I'm working on it, though...

Wikipedia and physics

A twenty minute fire in the kitchen caused by a lightning strike is nothing, according to anti-Biden wingnuts

I still get absolutely dismayed at the way wingnuts self-gaslight via social media about Biden and dementia.   (And for the record, no, I don't think it was hugely embarrassing [or, put it this way - that big a deal] that he called on someone who had  died a couple of months before the event - he dwelt on it for all of about 8 seconds and moved on, possibly even realising his mistake at the time - and as was noted on Planet America, it is also possible that the name was accidentally left on the teleprompt.)

The guy has made verbal faux pas for decades - there are compilations on the net from well before the election.    It infuriates me that clips of minor matters, such as exiting a stage in the wrong direction, is snipped out and shown as if it is proof that he doesn't know where he is, or some such BS.   It's really malicious treatment of a public figure, feeding a gullible audience, if you ask me.   

Of course he's not as sharp as a younger man, but if you actually watch his performance in delivering speeches and off the cuff commentary, there is no way an honest person can say that any person well into a dementia decline could perform those tasks as competently as he does.   

Stop believing 10 second clips and watch his lengthy performances, morons.    

And on the question of honesty, look at this hyperbole:

So thousands of wingnuts stop there and believe whoever this Schwartz is.

You have to go to the thread to read:

 

As others point out:

So people are calling him a massive liar because a fire that (apparently) took 20 mins to control in the kitchen counts as a "small" fire, and it's wrong to call that "an awful lot" of his home.

I mean, this is just ridiculous criticism or what could, at the most, be described as mild exaggeration made in an attempt at showing empathy.

And nothing like the chronic "living in a fantasy world" type of lie that comes out of the mouth of Trump as an absolute matter of routine. 

I wish there were more people speaking aggressively about the maliciousness and gullible world bubble the Right has built for themselves, with the help of social media and money grubs like Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch. 

PS:   none of this means that I necessarily think Biden should run again.  In fact I think he shouldn't, and yes, because of his age;  but he needs to be replaced by someone sharper than his VP.

A shocking week for senseless and unexpected death

First, it was the Indonesia soccer stadium deaths, and now the Thailand preschool attack, the details of which are about as bad as they could possibly be:

The attacker, a former police officer, opened fire as children were sleeping at the centre in Na Klang district in Nong Bua Lamphu province at about noon on Thursday, police and witnesses said.

Police said most of the children killed at the centre were stabbed to death. As he left the nursery the attacker drove his car towards and shot at bystanders then returned home, where he shot himself, his wife and his child.

Police identified the attacker as Panya Khamrab, a 34-year-old former police lieutenant colonel who had been dismissed from the force last year for methamphetamine possession and had appeared in court earlier on Thursday on a drugs charge.

It's so easy it is to imagine the shock of being personally affected by that....

 

I'm willing to try this...

Here's the recipe, but it's very simple.

Curious ancient practices

From Smithsonian magazine:

Thousands of years ago—and thousands of miles apart—the people of what are now Britain and Japan both created elaborate stone circles set up to interact with the solstices and to house remains of the dead.

A new exhibition at Stonehenge highlights compelling parallels between English and Japanese cultures during the Neolithic and Jōmon eras. Though they never interacted with each other, the two cultures seemed to have shared a lot in common—from stone circles to elaborate pottery to rituals connected to the sun.

“Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan,” which opens today, explores those similarities through some 80 items from the Japanese Jōmon period, many of which have never before been on view outside Japan.

“To understand the significance of Stonehenge, we have to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world in prehistory,” Susan Greaney, a historian with English Heritage and a curator for the exhibition, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris. “Although there was obviously no contact between Japan and Britain at this time, there are surprising parallels.”

Consider, for example, the Japanese stone circles from Ōyu and Isedotai in northern Japan. While not the imposing monoliths of Stonehenge, the two circles, made of thousands of smooth river stones, line up with the sun during the summer and winter solstices, and they were both used in burial rites. And for both monuments, collecting materials and completing construction would have taken enormous community effort.

 Here's a photo of one of the Japanese circles from one of the above links:

Is tiny nuclear really much use?

This may be mainly all PR to help university funding, but there's a story on phys.org about a new-ish reactor design (which doesn't really explain if one has been built):

BYU professor and nuclear engineering expert Matthew Memmott and his colleagues have designed a new system for safer nuclear energy production: a molten salt micro-nuclear reactor that may solve all of these problems and more.

The standard nuclear reactor used in America is the Light-Water Reactor. Uranium atoms are split to create energy, and the products left over will radiate massive amounts of heat. They are kept in solid fuel rods, and water is run through the rods to keep everything cool enough. If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown. Memmott's solution is to store these radioactive elements in molten salt instead of fuel rods...

In Memmott's new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature—550°C—and it doesn't take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn't remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What's more, many of these products are valuable, and can be can be removed from the salt and sold.

But how small is this design?   Pretty small:

A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott's molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places. 

 I have my doubts this is useful.  Maybe good for somewhere like Antarctica, though?

Freshwater crabs considered

 CGTN shows how a lake in China is famous for its (freshwater) hairy crabs:

and I thought -that seems a useful thing to have in your country, why don't we have them here (in Australia)?

But it turns out there is an Australian inland freshwater crab - but it's small, only growing its carapace to about 5 cm, apparently.

The Chinese crab has in fact spread around the world:

This crab originates from the temperate waters between East Russia (Vladivostok) to South China, the Korean Peninsular, Japan and Taiwan Province of China. It has been transferred, probably in ballast waters to northern Europe in 1900s and appears to have established self-reproducing populations there. It has more recently been found in North America and Hawaii.

 Learning something new every day...

Quick takes

*  Elon Musk might be buying Twitter after all?   I hope someone is working on an alternative, because I can see a lot of people happy to leave it if Trump and endless lies and disinformation resumes on the platform.

*  Really, I find it puzzling that being CEO of an aussie rules football club is such a newsworthy thing.  

*  It certainly seems true that we are in for yet another cool, very wet, summer.   

*  This is a pretty boring post. 

*  Update:  famously great Christian husband defends another famously great Christian husband -

It's clear, by the way, that this is end result of - what? - 40 decades of increasing use of demagoguery (kicked off by Gingrich himself) as the Republicans' prime political tactic:  if you keep telling your followers that anyone to the Left of you is 100% evil and wants to destroy everything good, absolutely any loser with terrible personal morals can represent you by just saying "but I'm not evil like them." 

More mystery needed

About a week ago, Noah Smith tweeted a little nostalgically about this:

...and I am also sympathetic to the view that it's a little sad that there seems less mystery around lately.  Yes, I know, so much of it was silly, but as someone said in response, it was a bit of an early education in empiricism to read debunking books on the likes of von Daniken and the Bermuda Triangle.   With UFOs, though, I was never satisfied with the debunking efforts, and while Hynek may have been gullible about some cases, I always found his books pretty persuasive.   

On the definite downside in the current mystery Noosphere:  it seems that terrible, cheap and trashy American "ghost hunter" reality shows have really killed the credibility of ghosts and haunting stories.   (I know these shows have never been really popular in Australia, but I see bits of them on Youtube and elsewhere, and they are awful.  American cable TV still seems to have a lot more space to fill up with trash than we do in Australia.)  Same for bad shows about celebrity mediums.   I haven't seen a medium make a convincing looking "hit" with a reader for a long, long time.

And it's not just TV or Youtube:  it seems that I haven't even read a good first hand account of any ghost or mediumship story in an online newspaper or magazine for a very long time.   

This is a real pity.   I love a good story of that kind from a person who found it unexpected and hard to explain.   But you just get the feeling lately that the souls of the departed may be too depressed by all the fakery going on that they can't bother appearing to anyone anymore!

On the upside, of course, we have seen a real and major revival of UFO speculation, with the US Navy story which, I admit, is very cool and interesting.   Of course, drones and Starlink launches are making for many, many fake events, but there still is enough real mystery about the military related events to keep a good level of excitement there.  And revisiting some older cases is still pretty interesting.

I also somehow recently again came across this story from 2018, which I don't think I have mentioned before.   It's hard to believe, but it is seems it is still possible for a large white jet aircraft to be flying over California and Oregon and to have no one know where it ended up.  (It was tracked on radar, had no transponder working, was sighted by commercial pilots at some distance, and F 15s were sent up to try to identify it.)   I mean, really:  how is that possible that they lost track of it.  But it appears they did.  

One other persistent mystery, although again it is more of a technological than a paranormal one, is the Havana syndrome.  I don't think I have ever gotten around to commenting on it, but I saw a clip this weekend of a doctor explaining what happened to him when he visited Cuba, and again it's a case of a first hand account by a credible sounding person being surprisingly convincing.   I am inclined to think that there is a real phenomena there. 

Update:   I suppose the better heading for the post might be "Paranormal mystery down; technological mystery up".  

While I do like technological mystery, paranormal ones have always struck me as having potential to be truly revolutionary.   I mean, convincing proof of an afterlife, or even ESP, would blow the current state of scientific materialism out of the water; proof of observation by alien UFOs - not at all, really.  Hence I am a little disappointed if evidence for paranormal events seems to be fading. 

I think I would pass on being the first to try this...

Odd headline from Science magazine:

RoboCap: Robotic mucus-clearing capsule for enhanced drug delivery in the gastrointestinal tract 

The story:

Here, we describe the development of the RoboCap, an orally ingestible robotic drug delivery device that locally clears the mucus layer, enhances mixing, and topically deposits the drug payload to enhance drug absorption (Movie 1). The RoboCap’s rotational and churning movements are generated by surface features designed to interact directly with small intestinal (SI) plicae, villi, and mucus. We hypothesize that drug bioavailability will be significantly greater when delivered with the RoboCap compared with standard oral delivery. We test the efficacy of the RoboCap in delivering two model peptide drugs, vancomycin and insulin, through Franz cell diffusion and in vivo testing in swine.

There is a video embedded in the article which I can't copy, but the commentary to it sometimes strikes me as inadvertently funny.

Oh, another unhappy poet

Put this in the drawer marked "Reasons all parents of teenagers should be happy if their child says they don't have any interest in writing poetry":  a review of a new book about TS Eliot enlightens me about his unhappy personal life.   Sure, sure, there must have been happy famous poets - just that they seem to be in the serious minority:

In 1915 Eliot proposed to Vivien Haigh-Wood, partly out of desire for sexual experience, which he was too shy to seek in other ways. Following “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract,” the young poet found himself shackled to a needy, fragile woman he grew to dislike, then pity and finally loathe. He would turn for love and sympathetic understanding elsewhere....

This second half of Crawford’s biography begins with a brief account of Eliot’s short-lived, unsatisfactory affair with the rich, notoriously promiscuous Nancy Cunard. Soon, though, this unhappy husband found his thoughts returning to the girl he had left behind in America, Emily Hale. In due course, Eliot and Hale embarked on an intense correspondence that would continue for more than 20 years. Any guise of mere friendship was soon abandoned: “I would literally give my eyesight to be able to marry you. … If I ever am free I shall ask you to marry me.”  ...

His eventual commitment to an exceptionally austere Anglicanism revolutionized Eliot’s later life but ruined Hale’s. The bonds of matrimony, he repeatedly told her, were sacrosanct. There could be no divorce. Nonetheless, the two would meet occasionally during the interwar years — both in America and in England — for what seem to have been afternoons of decorous yearning. Hale would long cherish the remembrance of their few kisses ...

Both Vivien and Eliot almost continually suffered from an array of illnesses. Hers included intestinal inflammation, shortness of breath, influenza, shingles, emotional and mental instability, and drastic weight loss — at one point she was down to 80 pounds — while Eliot ran his wife a respectable second with recurrent colds, bronchial trouble, seriously decayed teeth (five were extracted on one dental visit), a hernia that required a truss, surgery on his finger and frequent periods of nervous exhaustion. He also drank impressively, as many as five gin drinks during dinner...

Crawford estimates that in 1925 alone the couple spent a third of their income on doctors, medicines, and stays in hospitals or sanatoria. During the ’30s, Eliot arranged for the increasingly troubled Vivien — at one point he wondered if she might be suffering from “demonic possession” — to be cared for in various rest homes, and in 1938 he signed papers committing her to an asylum. With typical Prufrockian cowardice, he did this by letter while out of the country. He never saw her again....

Then, get this!:

...in 1947, Vivien died. At this point the now-free Eliot suddenly recoiled at the prospect of actually marrying Hale, to whom he wrote, “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself (which means not merely one moment, but a perpetual adaptation for the rest of life) to any other person.” Hale was crushed but hoped he’d change his mind.

He went on, at age 68, to do this, after lodging with " wheelchair-bound bibliophile John Hayward."

Eliot’s bedroom was flamboyantly ascetic: a single bed, an ebony crucifix, a bare lightbulb hanging from a chain. Very early one morning in 1957, though, Hayward’s “lodger” announced — without warning, through a letter — that he wouldn’t be back the next day or, indeed, ever. The 68-year-old Eliot had proposed — via letter! — to his adoring 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and been accepted. In due course, Hale received her own letter, disclosing this ultimate betrayal. For the final years of his life Eliot was soppily besotted with his new young bride, and the two grew inseparable. He died in 1965 at age 76.

Sounds quite the cad.

How's the current Russian holy war going

Of course, it was utterly predictable:   Putin would have know that if he brought transexualism into his ranty "Russia will rise again against the evil and corrupt West" speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine, American and Australian Right wing culture war reactionaries would be impressed with that, and ignore broader matters like, you know, how wars of conquest should no longer be a thing.  And sure enough, the disgusting and madly ignorant (of anything other than arcane Catholic history) Currency Lad could not resist but repeat Putin's words with approval.

He might, if he had any credibility as a Catholic at all, question the issue of how a key figure of the Russian Orthodox Church has tried to turn it into a Holy War - promising that soldiers killed on the battlefield of Russian expansionism would automatically have their sins forgiven.    And I see there was a rally in Moscow (with a bussed in crowd, but still) which featured this rally cry:

I would have thought a Catholic should have concerns about this, but you know, as long as Putin joins in with the moral panic about transgenderism*, all is forgiven.  Or at least, not worth making a song and dance about.

 

[* an issue on which it is possible to believe - as I do - that there are nutty and unreasonable pro-trans activists, and conservatives who have taken up the issue in true "moral panic" style that sounds at times as if they think kids are at risk of being put under the knife even without consent.]

Confucius is (literally) big in China, again

As the dear reader may know, I like both big statues and watching clips from CGTN to keep on top of what is "in" with the  Chinese government at the moment, hence this recent clip of a Confucian centre at his birthplace caught my eye:

 

(And, seriously, once again I find myself wishing China had a more "normal" regime to which Westerners could feel safe visiting, because it's clear there are many, many awesome looking places to see. That library looks fantastic, although I doubt it caters to English readers.)

I thought that this video might have appeared because the statue, or accompanying centre, was new; but I see online that the statue (if not the whole centre) was opened 6 years ago.  I must have missed that.

CGTN has lots of videos up endorsing the philosopher, including a stream of the recent, annual, "Grand Ceremony of Worship of Confucius" featuring lots of costume and dance and a precision that makes you worry for the wellbeing of anyone who might make a mistake. 

Anyhow, this got me thinking that I was pretty sure Confucianism was on the outer for quite a while in China, but clearly the Party has revised its view of him.  I could watch a CGTN produced forum  discussion about this*, but instead, I went to extremely erudite Religion for Breakfast channel to watch his video the Confucian revival:

 Well worth watching, as is virtually  every single video he puts out.  My only complaint is that sometimes I think his delivery is so rapid and dense, I can tell I won't remember much of it, as it is too fast to process.

 

*  I haven't watched much of it, except I am amused to see it does say the worship ceremony has it origins from the 1980's! 

Their conspiracy paranoia makes them a danger

Update:  Sharlet later deleted the Tweet, explaining that he was being targeted by morons saying "if you're against capital punishment for pedophiles, you must be one."  

Makes the wingnut theory look rather improbable

Noted on Axios:

NATO formally labeled the mysterious leaks in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines detected earlier this week the result of deliberate sabotage and warned that such attacks would be met with a collective response from the organization.

Driving the news: "All currently available information indicates that this is the result of deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage," the North Atlantic Council said in a press release Thursday.

    "Any deliberate attack against Allies’ critical infrastructure would be met with a united and determined response," the statement added.

    "NATO is committed to deter and defend against hybrid attacks," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg tweeted, noting that the "sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines is of deep concern."

Would be most surprising if one or more members of the organisation actually hasn't admitted to the others that they did it.