There just doesn’t seem to be enough of the Solar System. Beyond
Neptune’s orbit lie thousands of small icy objects in the Kuiper belt,
with Pluto its most famous resident. But after 50 astronomical units
(AU)—50 times the distance between Earth and the Sun—the belt ends
suddenly and the number of objects drops to zero. Meanwhile, in other
solar systems, similar belts stretch outward across hundreds of AU. It’s
disquieting, says Wesley Fraser, an astronomer at the National Research
Council Canada. “One odd thing about the known Solar System is just how
bloody small we are.”
A new discovery is challenging that picture. While using ground-based
telescopes to hunt for fresh targets for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft,
now past Pluto on a course out of the Solar System, Fraser and his
colleagues have made a tantalizing, though preliminary, discovery: about a dozen objects
that lie beyond 60 AU—nearly as far from Pluto as Pluto is from the
Sun. The finding, if real, could suggest that the Kuiper belt either
extends much farther than once thought or—given the seeming 10-AU gap
between these bodies and the known Kuiper belt—that a “second” belt
exists.
I like this bit of added mystery:
Just as intriguing as the new objects is the apparent gap between 50 and
60 AU, says Mihály Horányi, a space physicist at the University of
Colorado Boulder who oversees New Horizons’s dust counter. “One way or
another, something is responsible for maintaining that gap.” In other
solar systems, planets orbiting within a dusty disk carve gaps by
hoovering up material. But no large planet has been seen in the gap. The
gap could also be a relic from the Solar System’s infancy, caused by
waves of pressure in the disk.
Hey, I still like the idea that a very small, primordial black hole is rambling around the edge of the solar system.
There are currently 110 advisory
committees or groups that "develop policies and provide advice on
specific issues" registered on the federal government website.
Some
of them you might have never heard of, or even noticed were advising
the government, such as The National Blood Borne Virus and Sexually
Transmissible Infections Surveillance Subcommittee or the Foods for
Early Childhood Reference Group.
Each
group holds a number of experts in their field, such as the 31 medical
professionals who work for the aforementioned subcommittee on sexually
transmitted diseases.
The Voice is expected to work in the same way in that it would be set up to give advice to the government
Question: is the expectation that "advisory committees" would in future not just be approaching Government directly with recommendations, but also (or alternatively?) having to urge the Voice to take up the issue? Is the Voice going to be a "filter" for all, or most, or none, of the current groups on recommendations to government?
The Voice group itself is said to likely be something like this:
The government hopes the Voice
would be the first body designed with gender balance in mind and the
members peer elected on a national scale.
According
to a current proposal of the body, which is subject to consultative
change, something else that differentiates the Voice from any other
Indigenous advisory group is its geographical spread, of the proposed 24
members.
Two from each state
and territory — 16 all up, five from remote communities, two from the
Torres Strait and one representing Torres Strait Islanders on the
mainland.
Individuals would
serve four-year terms and would only be allowed to serve twice and two
full-time co-chairs would be elected by the members themselves.
Now, for this group to be effective, and to potentially be on the receiving end of submissions from more than 100 current groups, there is no doubt at all that it is going to have to have a substantial staff. What's the likely staffing ratio, and the travel costs? I see that in 2004, an ATSIC commissioner got $136,000 or so in total remuneration. Bringing that up to date, I would guess that $200,000 would be in the ballpark? Times 24, that's less than $5 million, but does it include travel expenses, which I assume will be substantial. But how many staff does it need? The total cost might not be huge, in terms of government expenditure overall, but it's still a diversion of funds.
All of which is to achieve - what exactly? Essentially a "feel good" exercise in empowerment.
The fundamental reason for seriously considering a "no" vote is that such an organisation would be, essentially, an expensive duplication of advocacy that is already happening - and at least in some cases - already achieving results.
The reason such bodies might work fine in some countries, but the same is likely to be an ongoing source of friction in ours, is because of the size of Australia, which results in the vast number of "first nations" competing for attention for very differing issues in different parts of the country.
In short - there are a lot of racist and bad reasons for arguing against it. There are also solid practical reasons for at least considering a "No" vote...
Update: May God forgive me for what I am about to do: cite a Quadrant article with approval -
As NPR reports, the disease is ridiculously widespread in parts of Africa:
For example, in Burkina Faso in West Africa, pretty much everyone
gets malaria. Last year, out of a population of 20-some million, about
half got sick. Halidou Tinto was one of
them. He leads the Clinical Research Unit of Nanaro in the country. His
six-year-old twins also fell ill with malaria this year.
"As
soon as [the children] are febrile or they complain about headache,"
Tinto says, "you have to think about malaria and treat them immediately.
And you can avoid any bad outcome of the disease."
The worst
outcome is death. Tinto says 4,000 people died of malaria last year in
Burkina Faso alone. In 2021, across Africa, it's estimated that 619,000
died of the mosquito-borne disease, most of them children.
"People are living with the disease," says Tinto. "But of course, we are not happy and we are not proud of this."
But on the "up" side:
They're the first vaccines designed to work against a human parasite.
The
first, called RTS,S, was unveiled almost two years ago. The second one,
recommended by the World Health Organization this week, is called
R21/Matrix-M and is intended for children between 5 and 36 months, who
are among the most vulnerable to the disease....
This is what makes WHO's approval of the second malaria vaccine such
welcome news. Tinto ran the clinical trials in Burkina Faso that led to
its recommendation. Across four African countries, these trials showed a
75% reduction in malaria cases in the year following vaccination of
young children.
"I am very, very happy," says Tinto, "and we are pretty sure this vaccine will have a big impact in term[s] of public health."
An increase in the cost of house insurance has been in the news lately, and this year, yes, I was surprised that my RACQ Insurance home and contents cover went up from about $2,000 last year to $2,400. (I have not made a claim on it for perhaps 8 years?)
I rang them and asked if there was a way to trim the policy cost (for example, flood cover was automatically in it, and my house is far, far above any conceivable flood line.) No, I was told, this is just standard, and (I didn't bother checking if this is true) they define flood to include all water entry, including from an overflowing roof, for example.
I did some online quote searching, and quickly found a company that would do the same cover (using the same cost of rebuilding, and the same contents cover as in the RACQ renewal.) It was about $1,800.
I then did another search, and found cover at $1,700.
RACQ Insurance cover my family's cars as well, and I recently had to put a claim through them, and they are very easy to deal with. Once, in the past, I even had to ring them on Christmas morning for some reason (I forget why - I think it might have been to do with whether my son was listed as an authorised driver for a car) and they were there, and able to deal with it immediately. So, generally, I like dealing with them.
But when it comes to house and contents, something seems to have gone seriously wrong with their financial exposure if they are $700 more expensive than some of their competitors....
* Elon's plaything is still kind of amusing because of the way my version of it has been chock full of the more nutty kind of UFO content in the last week. I'm not sure whether this is happening to everyone who uses "X", or just me because I do click on some of those tweets.
* Given Musk's boosterism to Right wing and Trumpian politics, there must be many, many users who would love to drop it, but the alternative app has still not appeared. What is the problem??
* The Republicans in Congress look, and are, a complete shambles. Newt Gingrich says creepy Gaetz must go. Gaetz leaves open the prospect of someone outside of Congress could be speaker. (The only thing stopping him suggesting Trump is presumably the amount of time Trump has to spend in court - but as if lazy Trump would take on a job that requires long hours and understanding stuff.) Even Fox News doesn't seem to know how to handle it.
Once again, I give credit to the ABC in telling a story that shows how government programs have been working with aboriginal communities for health improvement (as I showed last week has also been happening with rheumatoid heart disease.) This time it's improvement in trachoma rates.
On the pro-Voice side, it's being held as an example of why 'listening' works, and the implication being that the Voice will increase the amount of listening.
On the 'the Voice is completely unnecessary' side, we have the fact that, well, we didn't need the Voice to get these improvements. Now, I really do think Warren Mundine is a flaky guy, but his point on this story is pretty valid, even if he goes over the top in the claim as to how much money a Voice organisation is likely to cost:
Warren Mundine, one of leaders of
the No Campaign, said the success of trachoma demonstrated that
Indigenous people already had a voice and what was really needed was
better coordination of services.
"Through
the Voice process, we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars
when that money can be better spent actually doing similar things that
this health project did," he said.
He
said the problems of housing, health and education were largely state
government responsibilities that would not be solved with a federal
voice to parliament.
While I would agree that the "no" side has the nuttiest people on it, I also am somewhat amused as to how on the "yes" side you have so many on the arts and entertainment industry showing themselves as stereotypically completely captured by emotional arguments that are full of hyperbole. I forget who I saw this morning saying "if you vote no, you want the indigenous gap to get worse". It's like they refuse to think more deeply about matters beyond sloganeering.
I'll be kind and first list the good points: yes, I think the acting is fine, and Cillian Murphy is aged very realistically in the multiple periods in which he appears. I like the fact that an incredible scientific and engineering undertaking is given attention in a widely watched movie, and that (as far as I can tell, in checking up on various websites since seeing it) the movie is mostly historically accurate. As a rider to that last point, though, it is a tad annoying to find out that a really important - virtually the pivotal - scene is an invention*. Still, it seems the truth is almost never palatable enough for dramatic re-creation if it's a bio-pic instead of a documentary.
OK, so for the bad points. And the first is really bad. I realised after perhaps 30 or 45 minutes that the orchestral soundtrack was always there, far from subtle, and would simply never shut up so we could have some dialogue experienced as in real life - in silence, or with just some ambient sound. It felt like there was barely 5 minutes of audio calm (specifically, no orchestra, or the various "jump booms" which happen every now and then) in the entire movie. At the half way point, I had already decided that it felt like the composer was using a hammer to try to beat me into submission.
Now, I know, lots of people on line have praised the score. But there are some on line who agree (and who complain that the audio mixing generally sometimes made dialogue a strain to hear. Even my son agreed with that.) Some examples of commentary I agree with:
Everyone talked like they knew they were in an Important Historical
Drama and the music was constantly insisting on emotions the film wasn’t
doing anything to earn....
The draining score was there to artificially inject superficial tension....
For me the sound was so unnecessarily loud that I literally facepalmed
during the movie. The sound mix was so brazen that it made me wish I’d
watched this on streaming with subtitles, it’s borderline disrespectful
to the audience to make a movie so loud. I’m amazed that Nolan gets away
with it. Surprising that the score doesn’t get an acting credit, it’s
so blatantly front and centre in so many scenes
And, by the way, given that I am something of a Nolan sceptic (while liking some of his films), I didn't realise that loud and peculiar audio mix that interferes with hearing dialogue has been a repeat feature of many of his films. There's an entire article about that here, from before Oppenheimer opened. This film has only confirmed the problem.
On a bigger point, and why I think the movie is interesting but far from great, is it felt more like an exercise in Nolan showing us how clever he is with his complicated and dense screenplay, rather than making something that could have been much more emotionally affecting. And from a dramatic structure point of view, while I understand that the back and forth can make for a more interesting way to tell a story, I still didn't understand why it needed to feel exhaustingly frenetic from the start, and to have a sense of urgency during parts of the story that, well, didn't need it. Arguably, I suppose, you could say that it does become less urgent in the last third - which is the opposite of normal dramatic structure, and does have the odd effect of making you wonder why the narrative has always been about a different character we don't really have any reason to be interested in.
In short, I don't think the dramatic structure works, and the movie would have been much better if it had some breathing spaces ever now and then, and let tension and urgency build more naturally. The climatic explosion, by the way, felt somewhat "flat" to me, and I was disappointed that one true detail that has fascinated a lot of people (Fermi throwing pieces of paper into the air to see how the blast wave affected them, and using this to come up with a reasonable estimate of the blast yield) didn't make it into the movie.
I see that of the major movie critics in America, Richard Brody in the New Yorker was about the only one who didn't like the film, pretty much on similar grounds that I've outlined:
Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details
that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random
peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience,
whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be
solved rather than lived.
Brody adds some interesting detail about the real Oppenheimer in this section:
...the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted
conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He
was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students
would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy
name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The
“overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in
evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along
with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food
supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing
Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even
while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays
Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of
experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his
circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an
abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be,
in essence, a History Channel movie.
That very last line is probably unfair - there's no way a History Channel movie would make the telling so complicated and with visual flair - but in terms of how it deals with character, I get his point.
I'll wrap this up tomorrow...
Update:
* well, as far as I can tell, it's invented. I'm talking about the "Stauss introduces Oppenheimer to Einstein" scene. It is clear that the content of the conversation is invented - Oppenheimer had never asked Einstein to check if the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire - but it has been harder to find any site which explains specifically whether or not the meeting with Einstein (while Strauss watched) happened at all.
OK, to finish up a couple of things which provide some interesting context -
b. a pretty good Youtube video showing what modern day Los Alamos is like, including the slightly surprising detail about the way radioactive waste has been buried all around the place:
Update 2: I'm pleased to see there are quite a few people on Reddit prepared to criticise the film as being underwhelming for them, for similar reasons I outlined. I haven't even mentioned the oddball scene that was tweeted about (in response to someone who said "see, no one is talking about Oppenheimer any more") as follows:
Ha. :)
(Quite a few people think the female characters are a bit unfairly treated - there was a lot more to both of them than their flaws, which are pretty much the only aspect that make it into the story.)
Eggplants are very cheap at the moment, and I don't know why, but I seem to be enjoying them more and more lately, especially as baking them with a light oil coating has solved the "oil sponge" problem that used to be a bit a pain if frying them.
I made this curry last night, in which they are the key ingredient, and it came out very well. The technique was just to chop up a big eggplant into 2.5 cm cubes, coat in a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and bake at about 200 degrees for 30 min.
The curry is made in the usual way - fry onion, add garlic and ginger, then the curry spices; add stock, tomatoes, chickpeas and coconut milk and simmer for 20 minutes. Add the baked eggplant and simmer another 10 minutes. Garam masala is supposed to go in at the end, but I forgot.
To stop link rot losing this, here are the ingredients:
1¼pound (20 ounces)eggplantabout 1 very large or two small (+ 1½ tbsp olive oil, ½ tsp salt, ¼ tsp black pepper for roasting)
1tablespoonolive oil
1mediumonionchopped
2 clovesgarlicgrated
1teaspoongingergrated
2teaspooncurry powder
1teaspooncuminseeds or ground
¼teaspoonred pepper flakes
1teaspoonturmeric powder
½teaspoonground coriander
½teaspoonblack pepper
1teaspoonsalt
2– 3 cupsvegetable brothbased on desired consistency
1can (15 ounces)chickpeasor 1½ cups of cooked chickpeas
1can (15 ounces)crushed tomatoes
1can (14 ounces)coconut milk
1teaspoongaram masala
Now, I did increase the curry powder to three teaspoons, and the red pepper flakes to about a teaspoon. Instead of a whole can of coconut milk I used about 2/3 one of coconut cream.
The eggplant was the only fresh ingredient I used, but it was still great. I guess I could try using fresh tomatoes next time, and perhaps add red capsicum too would be good.
The (rather dull, but harmless I guess) nerd Lex Fridman was all super excited earlier today about this:
My reaction, which only took about 5 seconds to occur to my sub-genius level brain: "Oh, so you mean, you experienced something exactly the same as a high quality video call, but using - what? - twenty times the computer power?? Big advance...."
But: I have scrolled quite a way down in the fanboy comments after this post, and still haven't found anyone making this point. Instead we get many variations on this:
Excuse the shouting, but:
HOW?? YOU CAN ALREADY DO THIS OVER VIDEO! IS NOT HAVING TO SHAVE OR COMB YOUR HAIR OR GET OUT OF YOUR PJ'S REALLY THAT BIG AN ADVANCE TO ONLINE MEETINGS?
Two somewhat surprising videos from Youtube today:
The first - I don't recall seeing this surprising ceremony from Madagascar before - where a huge number of people turn up to carry around the 7 year dead body of a beloved relative, in a very celebratory fashion. (Although one child in it finds it pretty upsetting).
And secondly - turns out that the bite of a spider in South America known as a "banana spider" was well known for causing priapism, and now the molecule derived from it is well on the way to being used in a ointment for erectile dysfunction (!):
Government ministers have spoken about the
voice’s potential to bring together advice on complex,
multi-disciplinary problems such as rheumatic heart disease, a
little-known condition that the health minister, Mark Butler, described as “a disease of grinding poverty, poor environmental conditions, and not something the health portfolio can manage alone”.
Pearson called it “a problem only a voice can overcome”.
“It is a disease of the unlistened to. It is the disease of a people who have spoken, but have not been heard,” he said.
“No gets us nowhere when it comes to confronting rheumatic heart disease. Yes makes it possible.”
A Google search shows in fact a plethora of articles in medical journals and websites discussing the problem. There are many recent articles, and to take one example from 2021:
And by refining the Google search, you can see how much the problem was discussed, say, a decade ago.
Here's a screenshot of the first page when the topic is restricted to 2010 to 2012 search results:
OK, so you might say "well, you are just proving that the problem was known, but the government wasn't listening to the aboriginal community about it."
The problem with that line is that Googling up the evidence of active government engagement to address the problem is also easy. For example, here's a 32 page booklet from the Queensland government n 2018 with the title:
Here's some material from the Federal government National Indigenous Australians Agency (not sure the date, but it's after 2018):
The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2021–2031 (the Health Plan),
released in December 2021, includes priority 5: Early Intervention;
which emphasises place-based approaches that are locally determined such
as preventing ARF from becoming RHD where needed, and promotes
enhancing access to culturally safe and responsive, best practice early
intervention (Objective 5.3). The Health Plan also supports community
driven housing and infrastructure solutions (Objective 7.2) to consider
targeted primordial intervention for housing-related medical conditions
that are common to Indigenous Australian households, such as ARF and
RHD, trachoma, and otitis media.
The Champions4Change Program has worked in partnership with RHD Australia
since 2018 to meet a clear need for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander-specific program that had self-determination and culture at its
heart. The program is supported by nearly 60 Indigenous Australians
with lived experience of ARF and RHD from 27 communities across
Australia. The program was designed to privilege and promote the voices
of its champions, to support them in their lives and work, and to put
culture, Country and community at the centre of responses to RHD.
Gee, the bit in bold sounds quite a lot like "listening" to me.
The Australian Government is committed to ending RHD as a public
health issue by 2030. To achieve this, the Australian Government is
making significant investments to address ARF and RHD through:
state-based register and control programs in the NT, WA, SA and
QLD, to improve detection, monitoring and management of ARF and RHD
developing clinical guidelines to prevent, diagnose and manage ARF and RHD
developing resources and providing education and training for
healthcare professionals, communities, and for individuals with these
conditions and their carers
piloting activities in high-risk communities to help prevent new cases of ARF
national analysis and reporting on the data from state-based registers.
I could go on.
The point is, of course, that Pearson is engaging in pure rhetorical hyperbole when he says this is one example of a problem that "only a voice can overcome" because the indigenous are not being "listened to".
The truth, which it really doesn't suit him to acknowledge, is that the problem has been well recognized for well over a decade, governments have been actively working on programs to deal with it, and have been engaging directly with aboriginal organisations and advocates.
There is really no reason to believe that having another layer of indigenous representatives who say "you're not doing enough!" is going to achieve anything better.
In science fiction, antiparticles provide
the power for warp drives. Some physicists have speculated that
antiparticles are being repelled by gravity or even traveling backward
in time.
A new experiment at CERN, the
European Center for Nuclear Research, brings some of that speculation
back down to Earth. In a gravitational field, it turns out,
antiparticles fall just like the rest of us. “The bottom line is that
there’s no free lunch, and we’re not going to be able to levitate using
antimatter,” said Joel Fajans of the University of California, Berkeley.
And:
Few physicists were surprised by the
result. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, all forms
of matter and energy respond equally to gravity.
“If
you walk down the halls of this department and ask the physicists, they
would all say that this result is not the least bit surprising,” Jonathan Wurtele,
a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an
announcement issued by the university. It was he who first suggested the
experiment to Dr. Fajans a decade ago. “That’s the reality,” Dr.
Wurtele said.
“But most of them will
also say that the experiment had to be done because you never can be
sure,” he added. “The opposite result would have had big implications.”
A bit of a pity, really. Anomalous results are more fun.
There's not much worth reading at Scientific American, I reckon, but I did enjoy this column about a recent meeting of science-y types debating panpsychism:
As it happens, I agree that the basic criticisms are pretty strong:
Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of
consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities.
Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,”
amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The
combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist
position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”
Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You,
neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism
are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to
testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed
by the hard problem.”
Perhaps I find these ideas more appealing:
Other ideas were batted around. The idea of cosmopsychism
was floated—roughly, the notion that the universe itself is conscious.
And Paul Draper, a philosopher at Purdue University who participated via
Zoom, talked about a subtly different idea known as “psychological ether theory”—essentially that brains don’t produce consciousness but rather make use of
consciousness. In this view, consciousness was already there before
brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. If the idea is correct, he
writes, “then (in all likelihood) God exists.”
First, Dan Andrews resigns. The guy drove Right wingers absolutely nuts - maybe it was his air of general unflappability - but it was kind of funny reading some of the conspiracies spun about him. For my part, I don't generally spend much time thinking about politics at State level, and don't really have any strong opinion about Andrews as a person one way or another. But it's hard to deny that he has been electorally (perhaps culturally?) very successful, and a significant part of turning his State around from a Liberal stronghold to a Labor one.
Secondly: it's rare to read a news story of aberrant behaviour so appalling that it makes you feel queasy contemplating that there are people in the world who do this. But this is one of those stories.
I admit, I did google to learn some more background of the guy, who I hadn't heard of before. I thought maybe he was a damaged incel all his life, but no, he has (had?) a wife. No mention of children on line, though, which is undoubtedly a blessing, given that it is impossible to imagine how damaging it would be to learn this about your father.
I don't really know this person - seems to be a relatively centrist farmer and rural advocate? Seems to have put many tweets against the Voice on basically these grounds - lots of rural/remote Aboriginal people don't think a Canberra level Voice is actually the right way to get their concerns heard.
Given that I have noted at least three ABC stories where the reporter has talked to rural/remote Aboriginal groups and found this same distrust and lack of support for the Voice, it seems to be true, and something simply not addressed by the creators of the Uluru statement, who just insist that it was the result of years of consultation, etc.
I'm pretty sure Australia pioneered this mosquito control technique, and Singapore has taken it on board in a major way. Their mosquito breeding and release program is shown in this video from CNA, and it's more interesting than you might think.
Once again, Singapore looks so - competent - in the way they operate:
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