A balanced take on a complicated issue

Oh, Science has a good balanced article on the difficult question of whether young people should continue getting COVID boosters, over the issue of possible heart damage from mRNA vaccines.   The basic problem is the great difficulty in getting accurate risk/benefit analysis for a problem that may or may not cause symptoms in both the vaccinated and people who get COVID.  

Now, I know I criticised that Florida Surgeon General for this last week - and a case could be made from this article that maybe his conclusion was correct - or at least one that has a lot more support than I knew. But nonetheless, he obviously approached the problem from a highly politicised, grandstanding, point of view, and with evidence that was not properly detailed.  This was damaging the interests of public health in the long run.    

Wasteful competition

So there is a fair amount of talk about Joe Biden taking an aggressive approach to stopping China getting ahead with its technology, particularly chip manufacturing:

U.S. officials pushed to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology after internal debates and tough negotiations with allies.

Noah Smith also has a long post about it, and even the (far too Right wing) guy who has taken over from Allahpundit at Hot Air finds he has to reluctantly praise Biden for this.

I guess my feeling is not that this is a mistake - just that it's a great pity that at a time you really want the globe to be working together towards significant goals, it's instead being set up now for time-and-resource-wasting duplication of technological effort for a decade or two until there is some new  realignment of mutual Western and Chinese interests.    

I noticed when shopping for a tablet in Singapore recently that Huawei still seemingly has (or is trying to maintain) a significant market there, with tablets, phones and (I think) small laptop-ish things (like Microsoft Surface.)   They all had brilliant screens, I know that much.  But no Google apps - the special Huawei ecosystem instead. (Interestingly, recent surprise survey results indicated that Singapore has weirdly - for a very capitalist country - positive feelings towards China and Xi.  I wonder if that makes them particularly inclined to give Huawei products a go, more so than everywhere else.   I do have lingering doubts, just based on a hunch, really, that the Huawei 5G ban was not well justified.) 

As far as I can tell, China has done well with high speed trains;  they are (with very little attention from the West) building a smallish but significant space station.  (According to this article, it's about 20% as massive as the ISS, and is expected to be used for at least a decade.)   They are perhaps catching up somewhat in aviation, with their first significant home grown passenger jet just getting off the ground now.

So overall, they do some pretty remarkable stuff with some pretty sophisticated technology, and it seems such a pity that instead of a global market for all technology, we seem destined to a prolonged period of two global hubs of competing technology, with little cross over.

I guess it means industrial espionage is going to be bigger than ever before, too.   At least that provides some drama and good movie plots, though.  (Trying to find the upside here.  Well, apart from the obvious one that it should presumably make their weaponry less effective?   But I want the other good stuff they can do, too.)

 

Bourdain considered

There's an article at Slate talking about the new biography, somewhat controversial for its "warts and all" approach, of the late Anthony Bourdain.   This section sounds to me like an accurate take on his appeal:

It reads as if it were written in 1999, the year that Bourdain’s life changed as a result of the publication of “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” the sensational New Yorker article that became the basis for his bestselling book, 2000’s Kitchen Confidential.

Leerhsen likes to hover over this turning point, a time when Bourdain, 43, was living with his first wife, Nancy, in a shabby Manhattan apartment where they once left a Christmas tree lying on its side for nine months. Bourdain worked as a middling chef at a middling restaurant, and Nancy spent most of her time watching Court TV. The pair were recognizable New York types, stunned remnants of the bohemian heyday of the East Village, former junkies clinging to the fringes of a city that was rapidly shedding its grit. The haut-bourgeois exaltation of chefs and restaurants was both a symptom of this transformation and the condition that made Bourdain’s midlife success possible. He was a funny, earthy iconoclast, dishing the dirt on what went on behind the scenes at the eateries that were increasingly central to New York’s culture. Most gifted chefs are meticulous and imperious, not qualities that make for charismatic personalities. Bourdain, however, was more like a musician, specifically the kind of downtown rock ’n’ roller who once played CBGB. He wanted to become “the culinary equivalent of the Ramones.”

Bourdain’s old-timey hipness is a primary source of fascination for Leerhsen, who compares him to Frank Sinatra in an extended passage in the book’s prelude: Each is “the epitome of cool, a sad-smiling Jersey boy who combined supremely high standards with the under-appreciated art of not giving a shit in ways that seemed to excite both sexes. You wanted either to be him or to do him, especially if you’d heard the gossip about his gargantuan member.” (OK, that last line is pretty lurid, but the subject never comes up again!) Leerhsen’s Bourdain was a swashbuckling “renegade” drawn to the piratical culture of restaurant kitchens and sworn to a code of authenticity that, despite his age, seems quintessentially Gen X. His drinking and smoking and his past history of drug use were badges of this street cred. “When traveling for his show,” Leerhsen writes, Bourdain “never dealt with official tourist agencies because he disdained the authorized version of things; he balked at the word ‘brand.’ ” As a kid, Bourdain rebelled against what he once described as “the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house,” which, along with the bland comforts of his suburban upbringing, irked him simply because they were bland and suburban and therefore phony.

Nothing a well aimed torpedo wouldn't cure

I'm joking, of course:  I wouldn't want the staff, nearly all of whom would be nicer people from the Philippines, to suffer.

Anyway, this is a despatch from long time Catallaxy character:

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare says:

October 17, 2022 at 11:22 am

There are a lot of Republicans on this cruise, not surprising due to the demographic of older and spending it, and when we start talking to people the anger at what is happening in the US is palpable.

One woman today said to me she didn’t like Donald Trump ‘as a person’ but she sure as hell developed a liking now for ‘his polices and the way he got things done’. She and her husband both thought the 2020 election was rigged. However that’s just one demographic, and people express plenty of concern for the hand-out mentality of many younger Americans now. There’s a terrible sadness in these older generations about it and the decline of their country.

Rather as many of us in Australia also feel, we told them.

Discussion started with this woman and her husband when Hairy mentioned we’d had two years in Australia with no immigrants. We can give you a few, the woman dourly commented.

I used to toy with the idea of going on cruise for the experience, and I have watched a lot of Youtube videos from people who now make a living by reviewing their cruises.  But thinking about the politics of most of the people on board, at least on a US passenger heavy cruise, is kind of off putting. 

I have commented to friends before:  if there was a cruise line which specialised in catering to men (OK, OK - people - but let's be honest, it's going to be many more nerdy men than women who would like this) with a technical interest in how the massive operations are run, I would be all in on that.  Like, being able to wander up to the bridge anytime you want, and get explanations of their navigation systems, or guided tours of the engine room, kitchens, and all other "hidden" workspaces - that would be interesting.  

But just stuffing yourself full of food and drink all the time with the occasional brief shore excursion - not sure anymore how much fun I would get out of it.    

 

A very small element of truth, but too much excuse making

Megan McArdle, who I count as a far from reliable commentator, writes in the Washington Post (I'll gift the link) about why she thinks attacks on Trump tend to (somewhat counter-intuitively) only boost his support in his base.

I mean, one might say something like "that's how cults work", and "hey, Megan, perhaps you should consider the effect of nightly brainwashing sessions by Fox News", but she writes this:

It’s such a fascinating moment, and not just because it so neatly encapsulates the evolution of Republican politics in the Trump era. It also suggests a reason for why that politics is so effective — and why mainstream Washington’s frantic attempts to anathematize the Trumpian style might paradoxically have increased its appeal.

I was part of those mainstream efforts; I spent years arguing that Trump’s impulsivity and his savage attacks on everyone from Gold Star parents to those with physical disabilities ought to have disqualified him from high office. Like most of my colleagues in the media, I was astonished to find that this only made his voters love him more. Many observers concluded that this must be because Trump’s voters were simply awful bigots who loved meanness for its own sake. (“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018 for the Atlantic.)

Presumably, they’re right in some cases; there are bad apples in any large political movement. But as I’ve watched Trumpy candidates and spoken to Trumpy voters, I’ve begun to wonder whether there isn’t another point that we’ve been missing.

Trump voters are famously convinced that establishment Republicans sold them out — and there is a grain of truth to their belief. As political consultant David Shor noted in March, the median voter is center-left on entitlements but right-wing on immigration, yet for years an “ideological cartel” of educated journalists and political professionals kept that combination off the table for either party.

Trump got elected by promising to break up the cartel. But many politicians make such promises — almost all of them, in fact. Then they get to Washington and turn into boringly normal politicians.

There are structural reasons for that — Washington is too big and complicated for any one person to reform, so delivering for your voters inevitably means accommodating yourself to dysfunctional bureaucracy and uninspiring compromise. But to the voters, it looked as though their fiery outsiders had been seduced into betraying their promises by the infamous lure of the Georgetown cocktail-party circuit.

Though Trump voters had grown cynical about such promises, they trusted Trump to follow through. In part that’s because he was a billionaire, which meant, they thought, that he didn’t need to sell out for a plush lobbying job. But looking back, it seems that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric was also serving as a kind of insurance policy for those voters: Having made himself a pariah with the establishment, Trump couldn’t sell out even if he had wanted to.

Trump’s norm violations functioned as what game theorists call a “credible commitment,” enabling voters to trust him even if he wasn’t particularly trustworthy. And ironically, the establishment boosted that signal by proving that we considered him utterly anathema, absolutely beyond the pale. We thought we were helping to minimize the threats Trump posed to the system, but the very vehemence of our rejection might actually have increased his power.

The problem with this type of analysis is that it takes us further down the "normalisation of anti-democractic fascism" path.  And it avoids what is really the heart of the problem - the cowardice and lust for power of pathetic Republican leadership who have let Trump walk all over them, and will not tell the truth to the voters who they know believe any old BS that comes out of Trump's mouth.

It's like Meagan is insisting "you just can't tell the truth to these people.  You just have to live with that".  

 

 

White voter problem

 It's surprising to see the racial voting divide set out so clearly, from a piece in Wapo:

A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.

Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.

If you unite both sides, you're doing it wrong

Unfortunately, not a good point being made by normally sensible David. 

He seems to have stopped ageing about 35 years ago

He's 82:

 Had some "work" I would guess.  Still looks remarkably good for his age.

This was ridiculous

I don't think this got the amount of ridicule it deserved:

 

 I mean, of course stories about AI development are interesting, but this was a silly stunt.   

In a groundbreaking hearing, a robot “gave evidence” to a House of Lords committee on Tuesday – where it read typos from its pre-written script, struggled to hear questions, and needed to be rebooted halfway through the session.

“Ai-Da”, described by its creator, Aiden Meller, as “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist”, appeared in front of the Lords communications and digital committee as part of its inquiry into the future of the creative industries in the UK.

The chair of the committee, Tina Stowell, emphasised at the outset that it was “a serious inquiry”, before explaining to Meller that “the robot is providing evidence but it is not a witness in its own right, and it does not occupy the same status as a human. You as its creator are ultimately responsible for its statements”.

A relatively close black hole

This was in Science last month:

Unless they’re belching up stars or rippling spacetime in a partnered dance, light-trapping black holes are notoriously difficult to spot. But a new proposed discovery of a dormant black hole may help unveil a population lurking in the darkness, New Scientist reports. Because the object emits no light, astronomers detected it by studying the warped orbit and spectrum of a nearby Sun-like star using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and multiple ground-based observatories. The black hole candidate (artist’s impression of a different black hole, above), dubbed Gaia BH1, is 10 times the mass of the Sun and a mere 1500 light-years away—three times closer to Earth than the next known neighbor, researchers report on the arXiv preprint server last week. The long orbital period and proximity make this black hole a prime target to study the physics of these invisible enigmas, which could help scientists identify many more examples in the two remaining data releases from Gaia.

Update:  Oh, just a minute.  In 2020 I posted about a black hole that might only be 1000 light years away.

A meme made me laugh

It was in response to this:

 This:

Weird science

From Nature, a story about which I am unsure how to react:

Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish coated with electrodes have been taught to play a version of the classic computer game Pong¹.

In doing so, the cells join a growing pantheon of Pong players, including pigs taught to manipulate joysticks with their snout² and monkeys wired to control the game with their minds. (Google’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms mastered Pong many years ago³ and have moved on to more-sophisticated computer games such as StarCraft II⁴.)

The gamer cells respond not to visual cues on a screen but to electrical signals from the electrodes in the dish. These electrodes both stimulate the cells and record changes in neuronal activity. Researchers then converted the stimulation signals and the cellular responses into a visual depiction of the game. The results are reported today in Neuron.

Intelligence in a dish

The work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence, says lead author Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “In current textbooks, neurons are thought of predominantly in terms of their implication for human or animal biology,” he says. “They’re not thought about as an information processor, but a neuron is this amazing system that can process information in real time with very low power consumption.”

I'm betting the cells in a dish would also be easily persuaded to vote for Trump.   

 

Catholic disgrace, continued

Why would this upset him?:

What, his clear discomfit with Putin actually losing the war isn't enough to mark him as a disgrace?    

Update:  he admires Right wing trolls:

Old time commenter JC likes to mouth off in public, and chose db's "new catallaxy" as the forum in which to continue.   But if he had any real moral character, he would tell db (who he increasingly disagrees with) that his views are disgusting:

 

Stand up, JC, you coward...
 

Update 2:

 Dover beach also linked to the Revolver news story, with the title:

Love Him or Hate Him, the War Against Alex Jones Is a War Against Us All

Conspiracy believing paranoid conservatives just hate to see any conspiracy promoting and defaming  moron being punished, economically or legally.   

Dover beach and Currency Lad just illustrate daily how detached from reality and morality conservative Catholics have become.   True disgraces to their religion. 

Update 3:   Well, I guess that makes all OK, then:

He's quite the moron...

Ross sees a problem (but has no solutions)

I don't think there is too much to disagree with in Ross Douthat's column about the unresolved conflict within the Catholic Church that kicked in post Vatican II.

Except - I would say that I get the feeling his inclination is to blame Vatican II, whereas I think the current internal conflict is an inevitable result of the effect of the science revolutions starting from Darwin  making there way slowly through society.   (Vatican II was barely 100 years after The Origin of the Species, after all.)

A coherent president

Further to my wish that American journalists should stop ignoring the Right wingnut meme that Biden is a babbling, dementia riddled puppet - yes this interview was pre-recorded, but Biden comes across as smart and reasonable:  

 

In comments following, there are still some wingnuts claiming "he probably has an earpiece and is repeating words fed to him". They have become detached from reality. This needs to be pointed out by the mainstream press, often.  

Doesn't fit the Trumpy narrative

Yeah, I've read something like this quite a few times recently:

 If MAGA leaders are truly concerned about violent crime, they might look inward. Earlier this year, the centrist Democratic group Third Way crunched the 2020 homicide figures and found that per capita homicide rates were on average 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities.

Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural. The findings were broadly consistent with other rankings of states (and counties) by violent crime.

This isn’t the fault of Republican leaders, of course, any more than Democratic leaders are to blame for crime in blue states. The South, for reasons sociologists debate, has been more violent than the rest of the country for centuries. But those who are truly worried about violent crime should consider decamping to blue America. Living in a Republican state is much more likely to get you killed.

Sometimes I wonder if dedication to hyperbole causes permanent brain damage

 

Quite a few people make the following point in response: 

Update:  oh look, gullible Adam is impressed too:

Yet, as calmer people are pointing out (my God, this comes from one of the new Catallaxy blogs):

And yeah, the link is to a Nature story from Feb 21 pointing out that:

As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are under way to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people.

Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.

As some comments note in the thread after Adam's tweet:

Noah tries to counter

Right wingnuts are 100% committed to a belief that Black Lives Matter led to several cities being laid to waste, and that Democrats endorsed the destruction.  As with the "Obama was a disastrous President" narrative, it's difficult to not see underlying racism in the fanciful exaggeration they have convinced themselves is obviously true.  Anyway, I agree with Noah, as I do on many things:

So, how bad was that dinosaur killing asteroid?

Probably even worse than you imagined, according to a pair of stories on Science Daily.  First, wouldn't it shake your confidence to feel the planet quaking for weeks after the impact?:

66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs. New evidence suggests that the Chicxulub impact also triggered an earthquake so massive that it shook the planet for weeks to months after the collision. The amount of energy released in this "mega-earthquake" is estimated at 1023 joules, which is about 50,000 times more energy than was released in the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004. ...

The rocks exposed on the coast of Gorgonilla Island tell a story from the bottom of the ocean -- roughly 2 km down. There, about 3,000-km southwest from the site of the impact, sand, mud, and small ocean creatures were accumulating on the ocean floor when the asteroid hit. Layers of mud and sandstone as far as 10-15 meters below the sea floor experienced soft-sediment deformation that is preserved in the outcrops today, which Bermúdez attributes to the shaking from the impact. Faults and deformation due to shaking continue up through the spherule-rich layer that was deposited post-impact, indicating that the shaking must have continued for the weeks and months it took for these finer-grained deposits to reach the ocean floor. Just above those spherule deposits, preserved fern spores signal the first recovery of plant-life after the impact.

As for the tsunami, another story notes:

"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore....

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating -- began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation...

According to the team's simulation:

• One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.

• Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.

• Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.

• By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.

For the current study, the researchers did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.

 

 

What a nightmare for the parents

Noted in The Guardian:

A nurse murdered seven babies and attempted to kill 10 others by poisoning them on a hospital neonatal unit where she was a “constant malevolent presence”, a court has heard.

Lucy Letby, 32, fatally injected newborns with insulin, air or milk during night shifts when she knew their parents would not be present, a jury was told.

One of the babies was just 24 hours old when Letby allegedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. The nurse tried to kill his twin sister the next day, it is alleged.

The court was told that Letby, who was trained to care for the most seriously ill babies, developed an “unusual interest” in the parents of some of her 17 alleged victims and in some cases tracked them on Facebook.

Sounds like something you would read in fiction, but I don't want to see Netflix making money off it either.