Filters and UFOs

As David Roberts tweeted:

The news that there seem to suddenly be lots of things worth shooting at in the sky is certainly a bit surprising.

This explanation has been anonymously given to WAPO:

The incursions in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday, partly addressing a key question of why so many objects have recently surfaced.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.

“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary.

So, the suggestion seems to be that if something was moving slowly, like a balloon, it was filtered out deliberately.   Given the number of weather balloons that go up daily, I guess that makes sense.    

Was it with the knowledge that countries don't care, so to speak, about balloons that China decided that it was a good way to gather intelligence?

Anyway, this reminds me that I read somewhere, many years ago, perhaps in a UFO book on my shelf, that some guy claimed that the US radar systems ignored objects that were going too fast; and if radar tracks were re-examined to check on objects doing really weird fast things in the atmosphere, there might be actual proof of alien visits already.

This always sounded a bit dubious, given that ICBMs move very fast.   But, digging back in my memory, I think the point might also have been that the lines of radar that are the missile warning system are mainly looking outwards from the continental USA, and not over the mainland USA itself so much.   (It's too late once they are over Washington.)  So a visiting UFO that zooms down and over a 1000 km of mainland USA and back into space might be considered something that could be safely ignored.

I would love to know if there is any truth to that.  

But we do at least seem to now know, as I posted last week, that there are surprising gaps in what the USA knows is in its skies....

Update:   a valuable thread on Twitter:

 

 

A good column on depression

I think David Brooks writes insightfully and with compassion on what it is like to have a friend develop serious depression (which, sadly, ended in suicide), so I will gift link the article.

 

More cooking

I don't know that it took to photographing as well as my last meal: but it's pork belly (although a very lean cut of it) done in what is allegedly a Vietnamese way.   The sauce is a reduced sticky one, and interestingly, the main flavouring (apart from the obvious soy, vinegar, ginger, sugar) was from the juice and a bit of the rind of an orange, and a 1/3 of a cup of Angostura bitters.   The bottle sitting in the drinks cabinet had been there for years.    It might only ever be finished if I make this recipe again.

Here's the link to the recipe.

Not before time, the mainstream press gives some cautions on psychedelics for mental heath

I do get the feeling at times that there is likely to be a backlash in future due to the (shall we say) reputation rehabilitation that has been underway regarding psychedelics for the last decade or so.   I mean, I've just always been naturally very, very cautious about anything with psychoactive effects being a good idea to fiddle around with, and it seems such a hard thing to study properly.

This New York Times article (I'll gift link it) gives a list of possible health consequences of various psychedelics, and it's much wider than just those affecting mental health. 

Goodbye Burt

I'm not sure if it's free to read already, but I will gift link to the very lengthy and interesting New York Times obituary for Burt Bacharach.    A taste (it is a bit high falutin' in its description of his musical oeuvre, but a good read nonetheless):

 A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.

Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.

One thing I either didn't know, or had forgotten, was that as a very young man, Bacharach worked as musical director for Marlene Dietrich(!), and he talked about that a bit in this interview. 

A long and interesting life...

About that Cochrane review on face masks

Of course the Right wing commentariat was always going to leap on the recent Cochrane review that said they their meta analysis indicated that it seemed masking during respiratory pandemics didn't have significant effect, even though it ended on this note:

The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.

There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.

My gut reaction was always that the whole approach of Cochrane was dubious, and would pretty much invite misrepresentation of a complicated issue, and I see now that some people at the Conversation have given a detailed explanation of the problems with the review.   I count this as "gut reaction: vindicated".

   

A serious ecological consequence of global warming

Ocean acidification as a result of increasing CO2 doesn't get mentioned often lately, although it presumably continues to increase.   (There was, no doubt, some sloppily done lab based experimentation on this with fish and other creatures which I think has perhaps harmed its reputation amongst science journalists.  But the problem is still real.)  

The other big problem in the oceans from global warming is the increase in lack of oxygen as the water warms, and I have mention it from time to time over the years.  (You can search "ocean oxygen" in the search bar at the side, if you like.)

There was an article about it in Science recently, and yeah, maybe it will be a race between it and acidification as to which will cause the most serious ecological collapse within the next few decades.  Some extracts:

Climate change is leaching oxygen from the ocean by warming surface waters. Two other climate-related threats to the seas—ocean acidification and marine heat waves—get more attention from scientists and the public. But some researchers believe deoxygenation could ultimately pose a more significant threat, making vast swaths of ocean less hospitable to sea life, altering ecosystems, and pushing valuable fisheries into unfamiliar waters. As global warming continues, the problem is sure to get worse, with disturbing forecasts that by 2100 ocean oxygen could decline by as much as 20%. Sharks—fast-moving fish that burn lots of oxygen, sit at the top of food chains and crisscross huge ocean expanses—should be sensitive indicators of the effects....

SCIENTISTS FOR YEARS have documented oxygen-starved dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. There, pollution from nutrients running off the land, such as synthetic fertilizer, sparks algae blooms. Microbes feast on the rotting vegetation, consuming oxygen. A surge of low-oxygen water can flood an area so quickly that crabs, sea stars, and even fish suffocate before they escape. Low-oxygen zones also form naturally along the western edges of the Americas and Africa, where oxygen-depleted water that hasn’t seen daylight for decades wells up.

In the open ocean, currents and storms churn the water, keeping oxygen levels higher. Yet since the 1990s climate models have foretold that a warming climate would deplete oxygen there, too. Surface water warmed by rising air temperatures holds less oxygen, and the growing temperature contrast between surface layers and colder, deeper water slows the mixing that transports oxygen into the depths. At higher latitudes, melting ice can flood surface layers with fresh, low-density meltwater, strengthening the layering and reducing mixing.

In 2008, a paper in Science sounded the alarm. German and U.S. scientists found that the low-oxygen zones off Africa and the Americas were growing deeper and losing still more oxygen. Since the 1960s these areas had expanded by about 4.5 million square kilometers, close to the area of the European Union. In the waters frequented by Sims’s sharks off Africa’s northwest coast, the low-oxygen layer had nearly doubled in thickness over 5 decades, from 370 meters to 690 meters. By 2008 its top had risen to less than 150 meters below the surface. The global trend, the scientists warned, “may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies.”

In 2017, scientists delivered more troubling news in Nature. Overall, the world’s oceans had already lost some 2% of their oxygen since 1960, roughly double what climate models predicted.

For Andreas Oschlies, a biogeochemist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and a leading expert on modeling oxygen in the ocean, the implications were staggering. If the trend continues, it could mean a potential loss of 20% by 2100, he says. That’s equal to going from sea level to more than 2000 meters elevation on land. “I thought ‘Wow!’” Oschlies recalls. “That’s the biggest change and maybe the most worrying change that we see in the ocean. Immediately I thought of (past) major extinction events.” For example, at the end of the Permian period 256 million years ago, rising ocean temperatures and an 80% plunge in oxygen levels helped drive the largest extinction in Earth’s history. Up to 96% of all marine species disappeared.

By comparison, the 2% drop in oxygen levels seen so far might not sound like much. But global averages can be misleading, warns Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has studied the effects of low oxygen on ocean ecosystems for more than 30 years. “There are places in the ocean where there’s been much bigger declines,” Levin says. “These changes are probably very important.”

 

 

 

Biden the (not) demented

I didn't watch all of the State of the Union address, but did catch the widely circulated few minutes where he was going back and forth with booing, stupid Republicans.  As Axios notes:

President Biden previewed an optimistic re-election platform in his State of the Union speech Tuesday — but veered off script to take on rowdy Republicans in a series of confrontations that captured America's political chasm.

Why it matters: Biden used much of his speech to emphasize what Americans can do when they work together — while also baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security as Congress weighs budget cuts.

• Biden seemed to anticipate — and relish — the jeers from some Republicans when he questioned their commitment to Medicare and Social Security during upcoming budget talks.
• He dared them to "contact my office” for proof that some Republicans had discussed cutting the safety-net programs — and that if everyone agreed they shouldn't be cut, they should "stand up for seniors." House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans then joined Democrats in doing just that.
• "I enjoy conversion," Biden joked.

Everyone sensible I follow agreed that the "baiting" worked well.

But the thing that struck me most is, once again, how utterly stupid the Right wing commentariat looks for their years of claiming Biden is virtually a demented nursing home candidate, all based on brief video edits of no consequence.

As I have complained many times, anyone who has first hand experience of actual dementia decline in a parent, if they are honest, knows that someone with serious issues cannot handle themselves in public speaking in the manner that Biden does. 

But the mainstream media has let the nutjob Right repeat it to itself a million times, and rarely comments how this is pure, offensive, propaganda that, by rights, should remove all credibility on every issue.

A pretty remarkable man

To my mind, he's looking like a cool character from a Marvel movie now:

Hard to imagine the difficult life he has unnecessarily had to endure.

Big physics thoughts

I don't know who the creator is behind the channel this video comes from is, but as far as I can tell, the science content is accurate.   Today I watched this one, which starts an explanation of what it means to say that mass is energy (as in the famous Einstein equation): 

 

It gets into the matter of quarks and how they contribute to a proton's mass, and what mass means in a very "meta" sense. It's not simple, of course.  

And that aspect - the complexity of what it was explaining - got me thinking that this is a reason that the simulation hypothesis for the universe seems very improbable to me: why would you simulate to such level of tiny complexity?

I mean, when you think about the old particle/wave duality question, the simulation hypothesis  has some appeal, because it is easy to imagine the universe as being the equivalent of a computer game which only bothers rendering the part of the game's internal universe you're looking at or interacting with. But when you get to the vastly complicated question of quarks (or other really odd aspects of particle physics - like neutrinos that change as they travel along and zip through matter like it's not there), the whole idea that a simulation would go (or need to go?) to that level of complexity just seems very improbable. 

Oh, and speaking of neutrinos, I mention them because I recently re-watched this video, which I don't think I have posted before, about how it seems quite likely that every now and then, a human at night might notice a flash of blue light that is actually a neutrino hitting an atom in your eyeball.    Cool:

The potential for electric cars for domestic power storage

There's a detailed article here at the Washington Post (gift link) about how close we may be to electric cars becoming routinely part of domestic renewable energy storage.   

It's pretty impressive sounding, and it's easy to imagine it happening to a large scale in large parts of Australia, where the sun shines a lot.

Should we be surprised, or not...?

One of the oddest aspects of the "Chinese spy balloons over America" saga is this:

The top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command.

One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.

I mean, I would have thought that something as big as that balloon and its payload, moving with the wind, would make for a big radar target that would be readily identified (as a balloon at least, if not the country of origin.)   

But I would remind my feeble number of readers that there are some remarkable oddities about US airspace awareness where they can't identify a big aircraft even when they are visually identified by other pilots.   I think I have posted about this incident before:  a 2017 case where airliners saw another aircraft flying high over Oregon, it had no transponder turned on, and despite some F 15s being scrambled, it seems no one knows where it ended up.   (You can read even more detail about it in this follow up post.  I mean, it seems it was not a small aircraft, but was something like airliner size.  How can they lose track of that over the West coast?   Of course, if it really was a UFO, that could explain it!   But it apparently looked like a large, white aircraft, and was flying fast, but at airliner type speed.)

So, it would seem US identification of what's going on in its airspace is not as foolproof as you would expect.     

 

I've been cooking again...

Yes I know, ideally I would become a vegetarian, but beef does taste so, so good. And my daughter used to have low iron, so it's healthy, right?   (Any excuse is a good excuse.)

Anyway, beef brisket was on special yesterday and I've never cooked with it before. My wife has, but not me.  Decided to go with a recipe from Taste.com, Cantonese beef brisket noodle soup, and it really was a success. My bowl:

I worry about link rot, so I had better reproduce most of the recipe here:

So, trim the brisket of fat (the only painful exercise in this recipe), cut into big chunks and boil for 5 mins.  Skim the top, and take out the meat and fry in oil in a frying pan to brown the outside, then add the liquid (soy sauces, fish sauce, rice wine and the sugar) and just get it combined, then put it back in with the stock.

The spices - recipe says to put the cardamon, star anise and peppercorns in a muslin tie up and bash them a bit.  Instead, I crushed them a bit in a mortar and pestle then put then in a metal tea infuser - worked fine.

All of the other ingredients go in and simmer for 90 minutes.   Boil egg noodles and put in bowl and put soup on top (and the boiled vegetable.)   I guess anyone could guess the last bit.

Things that surprised me:  the two bits of orange peel really make a strong, fragrant contribution.  And the seasoning level with these ingredients was just right.

 

Free love, and assassination, 19th century style

It's funny, in a way, how 21st century Right wing Americans think that most of the West is on the highway to Hell due to sexual licentiousness and violence, when in fact there was some really weird stuff going down in their own country in the 19th century.

I'm pretty sure I have read something about it before, but I don't seem to have posted previously about the Oneida Community, which comes to my attention this morning due to a book review at the Washington Post.   It's about the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, and how the assassin was a former member of the (sex) utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York.

The review doesn't give many details, but puts it this way:

From the outside, the Oneida Community looked idyllic. Led by the preacher John Humphrey Noyes, it was the most successful utopian colony of the period, spanning more than 30 years. At its height, tourists flocked to what Wels describes as the “wild woodland” in Upstate New York, with orchards, livestock, “whizzing mills” and women with “queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts.” But behind the facade, Oneida’s free-love philosophies descended into pedophilia, incest and experiments in eugenics.

So, let's trip over to Wikipedia:

 The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven (a belief called perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), group marriage, male sexual continence, and mutual criticism. 

The male sexual continence thing seems a hard sell, if you ask me:

Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children ; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called "male continence" , in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control.

A different website explains:

You see, rather than using the withdrawal method, coitus interruptus, which was one of the most effective birth control methods historically, and is surprisingly just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy, even in real world practice, the community instead practiced coitus reservatus as their main method of birth control- where the man was not to orgasm at all. The idea was that this would simultaneously prevent pregnancy, ensure the man maintained his vitality (the belief at the time was that the loss of semen negatively impacted a man’s health), and made sure the woman was optimally pleasured for maximal spiritual benefit.

As to the question of the age of sexual partners, it gets creepier still;

Women over the age of 40 were to act as sexual "mentors" to adolescent boys, because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout.

Then there is the system for self improvement, which is like group therapy turned on its head into something like group psychological lynching:

Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting.^[15] The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits.

It's notable that the community was still going strong at the time of the Civil war - I can't see anything about whether any male members went off to fight, but I have my doubts that they would.  Hence, 100 years before free love hippies of the Vietnam era were having sex instead of going to war, free love (alleged) Christians were doing the same.

As utopian communities, free love or not, inevitably do, it all fell apart when leadership was attempted to be handed over, and oddly enough, most of us probably have seen the word "Oneida" because of this:

The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited.

Anyway, back to the assassination of Garfield, this is really a remarkable coincidence:

...Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was at the train station and saw Garfield’s shooting. It was the second presidential assassination he witnessed, having been at his father’s side as he died in 1865.

And as this website explains, he arrived in Buffalo years later on the same day President McKinley was shot! 

Presidential assassinations seemed to follow him around.   He did live to 83 though, so I guess he wasn't as unlucky as he could have been.   (He also attended the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 - there's a photo of that at the last link.)

The main prominent free love community I know of in  my lifetime is the Rajneesh movement - which of course all fell into a heap when the leader aged, too.   

Anyway, always good to remember that radical ideas about sexual utopianism have been around for a long time.

   

A stupid "scare word" tactic used for over 70 years

 

Maths and abstraction

There's a book review at Nature that is somewhat interesting - Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism, which apparently argues this:

The work of mathematicians from centuries or even millennia ago speaks to their living peers in ways that practitioners of other disciplines must find baffling. Euclid’s proof that the list of prime numbers never ends is just as elegant and clear now as it was in around 300 bc, when it appeared in his book Elements.

Yet mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Alma Steingart explains in Axiomatics.

A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States. Mathematicians’ push for abstraction was mirrored by — and often directly triggered — parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. Steingart quotes some scientists who saw their liberation from merely explaining the natural world as analogous to how abstract expressionism freed painting from the shackles of reality.

Further down it notes this:

To the mathematical-theory builder, abstraction is not a destination, but a journey. As Steingart puts it, ‘abstract’ is not an adjective but a verb: ‘to abstract’. In the 1930s, owing largely to the influence of German mathematician Emmy Noether, mathematicians began to construct axiomatic systems that were increasingly abstract and general. This revealed familiar objects such as numbers, card shuffles and geometrical symmetries to be special cases of the same concept.

The trend towards abstraction and generalization is often associated with a school of mathematics that blossomed in France after the Second World War. But, as Steingart shows, it took root in the 1930s in the United States and came to define the country’s mid-century mathematical culture. Steingart exemplifies the trend with the story of Foundations of Algebraic Topology, a 1952 book by US mathematicians Samuel Eilenberg and Norman Steenrod. It dealt with various calculation techniques to distinguish between geometric shapes, but the authors introduced the subject backwards, claiming that students should first familiarize themselves with highly technical algebraic tools and only later learn their relevance to shapes, or why the tools existed in the first place.

This reminds me of the argument Paul Johnson made in Modern Times (his history of most of the 20th century) - that the relativism in Einstein's physics introduced (or helped spread) moral relativism to the masses.   (I know many dispute that, but I think technology and science probably does have subtle, not always recognised, effects on the psychology of the masses.)   

The classic graph (updated to 2022)

 

This amused me

So while Twitter staggers on (everyone agrees that it isn't as good as it used to be, it's just that the alternatives aren't really there yet) I'm still looking at it and finding myself amused by the odd thread:

Red state crime

Seems not to be well known:

 

Speaking of crime, Noah Smith seems to have actually found something to praise Australia about:  the way we give lengthy training to police (compared to the trivial amount given in the US.)   From his free to read Substack post about this:

Compared to the number of deaths at the hands of police:

One of the reasons for obvious policing problems in the US which I think Noah could have touched upon, but didn't, is the way they have an absolute myriad of different police type forces at all different levels of government.   Now, with 50 states, and a big federal government, I would have said that there was always going to be at least (say) 70 or 90 different "policing" organisations across the nation.  But the true figure, according to Wikipedia, is astounding:

Policing in the United States is conducted by "around 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, all with their own rules". Every state has its own nomenclature for agencies, and their powers, responsibilities and funding vary from state to state.^[3] 2008 census data from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)^[4] revealed that this constitutes:

• 73 federal agencies
• 50 primary state law enforcement agencies
• 638 other state agencies
• 1,733 special jurisdiction agencies
• 3,063 sheriff's offices
• 12,501 municipal, county, tribal, and regional police departments

Well, that's crazy...

 

As expected, record rainfall causes disasters

The rainfall in Auckland that caused last weekend's flooding really was remarkable:

This marks an unprecedented rainfall event for Auckland and its surrounding areas, with some places getting a season's worth of rain in one day.

• Auckland has recorded more than 769% of its normal January monthly rainfall and over 38% of its "entire ANNUAL rainfall" as of Monday morning local time, according to New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
• Auckland Airport halted flights until Saturday after almost 11 inches of rain fell, flooding parts of the terminal and stranding hundreds of people over Friday night.

By the numbers: Kumeu, a suburb north of Auckland, observed 79% of its normal summer rainfall in just 15 hours, with more than 6.5 inches of rain, per NIWA.

When you see pictures not just of floods, but the landslides that follow, and you note that this is what is happening under just 1.1 degrees of temperature rise, you really have to wonder how climate change lukewarmers (the "it's real, but not as big a deal as they make out" types) can still get that to make sense in their heads.   

"Let's just wait and see how cities and town cope with the level on increased rainfall intensity at 2 degrees" just isn't a credible option.   (Not that it ever was.)