Time for a new phone

Oh dear.  I had been thinking it was time for a phone upgrade, even though the almost completely unknown Vivo model I bought in 2020 was still showing great battery life and had been very reliable (as I said to my daughter only last week, prompting her warning "Don't say that - it will stop working now!").  Yes, it has today developed a troublesome major problem.    My daughter, the soothsayer.  (I did drop it on a hard floor recently - but I've done that before, so I don't know if there is any connection with its current problem.)

Sadly Vivo, a brand name which festoons many a shop in Singapore and Malaysia, has apparently abandoned the Australian market, and the only models to be found here seem to be the very cheap ones probably left over from bulk buys a couple of years ago.

In fact, I like the look of a new Vivo model (mid range - I am still unconvinced of the benefits of expensive models) just released in Asia. But short of buying it from an Ebay seller based in Malaysia, or another trip to Singapore, I am unable to get it here.

I am very unsure of what to buy in its place.  I am been tempted to go with Xiaomi - I like to keep with Chinese brands as I figure they will help me when forced to welcome My New Asia Overlords on the streets sometime in the next decade. "Look!" I will exclaim while waving my phone at them "I've been using your nation's phones for years!  And I have the CGTN app." 

But the mid range Google Pixels get very strong reviews.  They just look a little bland to me.   

I know Oppo is made by the same company that does Vivo, but when I see their screens in the stores, they just don't seem as good as on my lovely, apparently dying, Vivo.

I was pretty happy with my Motorola cheapo - in fact, I can't remember why I stopped using it.  I think it was just the battery?   Motorola has kept strong in the market and has a good range of phones now, but I'm just not sure how they are in the camera game, which really has become the important thing for me.

I've even considered going back to a Samsung mid ranger - quite a lot of people seem to like the A55 which is pretty new, but gee, you don't even get a charger in a Samsung box now.

I see that the Xiaomi Redmi phones have eSim - something I think will save a lot of fuss when travelling overseas.  That and a camera with a whopping 200MP sensor probably means it's a done deal.

We'll see....

 

Not an age thing: it's a Hollywood thing?

I finally caught up with the 2020 science fiction movie on Amazon "The Vast of Night" on the weekend.   As it got good reviews, and I'm generally a sucker for a decent UFO movie (not that there are that many around), I had reasonably high hopes.

Unfortunately, they weren't exactly met.   Sure, the film looks good and is technically accomplished (with its long tracking shots, primarily) and is very atmospheric in its 1950's remote small town America at night setting; but there are a couple of choices by the writer/director that are very odd and just jarring:

a.  the whole framing devise as if we are watching a remade Twilight Zone style show.  Why??  This made no sense to me.  I had the feeling it was going to be explained by the end in some meta context, but no.

b.  the pace of dialogue - I'm not sure who can most be blamed amongst modern directors for thinking it makes a film realistic if you have the characters always talking at (and often over) each other at a furious rate, but this film certainly has it to excess.   It just did not feel authentic to the way people you would expect small town Americans in that era to interact.  

On a more depressing note, this film did make me realise - gee, it seems a good few years now since I felt really blown away by a film - or even just "pleasantly surprised that this is so much better than I was expecting."   I mean, I've seen films which were OK, or enjoyable enough, or interesting in their way, but I would have to search to find the last one I just really thought blew me away and that I had no issues with.    

And this also made me think - weren't my parents, in their 50's and early 60's, similarly dismissive of films coming out at that time?   Am I just suffering the age related "films/music/culture generally? was/ were so much better back when I was younger" effect.

Somehow, I don't think it's a case of age related disappointment - there seems to be enough general unhappiness with the state of Hollywood to soothe my concerns.

But gee, it's hard to feel certain...

Sounds pretty appalling

Who would want to live there?:

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023....

Court records released in April showed that in the weeks leading up to the murder, Perry sent racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating outside his house. In a 76-page filing containing Perry’s private and public communications, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit”.

Abbott’s demand for a review of Perry’s case followed pressure from the far-right former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who on national television had urged the Republican governor to intervene after the former sergeant was convicted at trial in April 2022. While Carlson was still a top-rated host at the network, he dedicated a segment to directly challenging Abbott to appear on the show and discuss pardoning Perry – calling the case a “legal atrocity” that he blamed on progressive prosecutors. Abbott announced he was directing a review of Perry’s conviction the next day.

It would seem that the jury thought the guy was not acting in self defence, but the board of pardons just decided "we don't care what the jury thought":

Prosecutors argued at trial that Perry could have driven away without opening fire and witnesses testified that they never saw Foster raise his gun. The sergeant’s defense attorneys argued Foster, who was white, did raise the rifle and that Perry had no choice but to shoot. Perry, who is also white, did not take the witness stand and jurors deliberated for two days before finding him guilty.

More appalling Republican stuff:

 

 

Max leaves me cold (and puzzled)

I can't for the life of me understand the critical approval George Miller gets for movies set in a dystopian world with (as far as I know) no particular explanation as to how it got that way, characters for whom there is nothing to emotional invest in, and no real thematic coherence:  just an excuse for car chases combined with circus acts and a general heavy metal vibe.   I mean, if the only approval it got was from recreational drug taking revheads and heavy metal freaks, I could understand it - they might think it a kind of world they would enjoy living in.  But no, lots and lots of otherwise credible, mature age critics thought Fury Road was the bee's knees, including Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian, whose byline photo makes him look like the last person on Earth who would be caught owning a V8.

I mean, I don't "get" Tolkien either - but I can kind of see why some might take enjoyment from him.  I just put it down to "a difference in genre tastes".   But with Mad Max, I am at a complete loss as to understand why it doesn't have the smallest audience, and (perhaps more importantly) why more proper critics don't agree with me!

Anyway, that's by way of background to noting that (thank God) the new Mad Max film which is soon in cinemas is getting "not quite as good as Fury Road" reviews, but still reviews that are (no doubt) far too good.  (Again, see Peter Bradshaw).   

I hope it is a box office disappointment, but it will probably be me who is upset. 

Update:  I just went back and re-read my 2016 opinion of Fury Road.  It was even more savage than I remembered.:)

 

 

   

Just when you think you couldn't think any less of Scotty from Marketing

 Also - it seems like Trump's makeup was applied with a boot brush.

Update:  This is funny, but the reason why will be forgotten for the casual reader in 30 years time:

A depressing story

The underfunding of psychiatric care in virtually all Western countries seems just standard practice nowadays, but it's depressing to read about its effects in your own locality:

Three people have taken their own lives inside a locked mental health unit at The Prince Charles Hospital in the past 16 months, triggering an independent review.

Two other patients were able to severely self-harm inside the 60-bed unit during the same period, the last one being in April.

Families of the patients and unit staff have this week been advised of the review, which will begin later this month and is expected to be finished by late July.

Mental health support organisation SANE said families "have an expectation" that their loved ones were "going to be safe" when they were in hospital.

"Families and carers often express significant relief having gotten someone to hospital, that's often a very difficult thing to do to actually get someone admitted," chief executive Rachel Green said.

Further down, look at these figures:

Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed 18 people died by suicide in an acute psychiatric unit in 2020-21, up from 15 the year before. 

Adjunct Professor Hancock said the five incidents inside The Prince Charles Hospital mental health unit involved both men and women across different age ranges and under the care of different psychiatrists.

Incidents had occurred inside both wards of the mental health unit....

Professor Emmerson, a member of the Queensland Mental Health Commission advisory council, said the state was about 3000 mental health staff and 370 beds short of what was needed in the public sector.

"Our mental health units are full all the time," Professor Emmerson said.

"Psychiatrists are faced every day with having to make decisions of discharging people early who should be in hospital, but because you've got sicker people, and riskier people, sitting in the emergency department, we're forced to discharge people from hospital prematurely.

"We don't yet have the capacity in the community mental health teams to provide the follow up these people need."

 

This decade's high colonic, I guess

"High colonics" must have started as an American, middle-class-to-rich person's health fad in the late 1980's, I would say, given that it was well known enough to feature as a joke in Steve Martin's amusing 1991 movie LA Story.

You don't hear much about them anymore, and I see from this article in the New York Times that the new thing for the person with too much money is IV drip therapy.   (Maybe its been around for a while and it's just me who hasn't noticed.)   From the article:

IV drip therapy was first popularized about a decade ago as a novelty reserved for vacations and bachelorette parties, but it has since become embedded in the wellness sphere. The 30-to-45-minute treatments cost anywhere from $100 to $1,000, depending on the concoction and provider, and have been embraced by the Hollywood elite — Gwyneth Paltrow, Chrissy Teigen and Harry Styles have all partaken. Today, IV drip therapy is a staple at medical spas, resort hotels and strip malls. Some companies even make house calls.

And over the last several months, a handful of high-end residential buildings in Los Angeles, Miami and Manhattan began offering the treatments in house, allowing tenants to make them a core feature of their personal wellness routine.

At the Park, which started offering the service at the end of 2023, tenants can schedule an IV drip in their apartment or in a treatment room where they can also book massages, Botox or fillers.

“If you are a healthy person, you really can’t do it too often, unless you’re doing it three or four times a day,” said Danielle Remington, director of events and partnerships at Drip Hydration, the service provider for the Park.

Drip Hydration and other providers market their formulas as elixirs that can improve sleep and mental clarity, brighten your skin and boost your athletic performance. However, there is scant scientific research to bolster these claims. Critics argue that at best, IV drips are a wildly overpriced alternative to drinking a glass of water, and at worst, they could harm people with underlying health conditions like kidney disease or hypertension. In 2018, Kendall Jenner was hospitalized after a bad reaction to an IV drip. And last year, a woman died after receiving IV drip therapy at Luxe Med Spa in Wortham, Texas; its medical director’s license was later temporarily restricted by the state’s medical board.

Not good.

 

 

Oh my Gawd...

In The Guardian:

So Russell Brand was baptised in the Thames, and all his sins were washed away. Cheaper than a lawyer, I suppose

And Bear Grills, who I have also disliked for a long time, was part of the show.

As some paragraphs at the end explain:

Both are prone to emanating a certain sense that the rules that apply to lesser mortals are an affront to themselves. Discussing his financial affairs, Grylls once told an interviewer: “I find it demoralising to pay income tax at 40 per cent when I work really hard and spend a lot of time away from my family.” Mm. Can’t help feeling he should toughen up a bit.

There’s not a whole lot less appealing than someone now worth an estimated £20m whining about paying his fair share like everyone else from nurses to teachers. That said, I’m a huge fan of people who talk about making extremely lucrative TV shows like it’s a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Appallingly, Bear’s only got an OBE. Where’s his George Cross for taking down Una from the Saturdays in the Central American jungle? 

Concluding with Brand, his spiritual journey has been what you might expect of a bog-standard sex-case-turned-wingnut. He was previously a Buddhist, then earlier this year began endorsing a Roman Catholic prayer app called Hallow, and seems to have settled for now on whichever branch of the Anglican faith permits telly survivalists to rebirth you. “Week one as a Christian has been amazing,” Brand said the other day, adding that he felt “changed, transitioned”. Onlookers are unlikely to spot the difference. He still has a conspiracist TV portal in which viewers are treated to material on the deep state/Bill Gates/the plandemic – in short, all the usual suspects of the usual suspects. It’s hard to know how long his conversion will last. But you can’t help thinking there will only be room for one messiah in that relationship – and unfortunately, it won’t be Jesus.

 

Feeling sorry for Noumea - and me!

Just when I was contemplating a possible trip to Noumea later this year, this news:

New Caledonia has announced a curfew from 6pm to 6am following overnight riots that saw vehicles torched and roads blocked in the South Pacific French territory, following proposed constitutional reforms.

In addition, the country's main airport, La Tontouta International, has been closed.

Protests and violence broke out ahead of a vote in the French National Assembly on changes to the New Caledonian constitution.

The French High Commission in New Caledonia said in a statement overnight on Monday that there had been further significant and ongoing disturbances in the capital, Noumea and surrounding townships.

It added that security forces had been mobilised.

All gatherings had been banned in the greater Noumea area, and a curfew and liquor ban had been put in place.

 The place has a personal significance, as it's where I met my wife...

Cass talks about the American situation

Interesting interview with that Hilary Cass about her report on transgender youth treatment in the UK, and comparing it to attitudes in the US.

(At one point she makes the obvious point that the aggressive political response by Republicans probably means you get the medical groups being overly defensive in reaction.)  

Continued polling panic

So, lots of people I follow on Twitter are feeling a bit panicky about the latest NYT poll which shows Trump winning in most of the six "key swing states".   

Here, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post looks at the figures more closely, and it does indicate some really odd dynamics currently playing out in US politics.  For example:

Particularly remarkable is how much better the Democratic brand does than Biden.

While Biden trails by six points in the six states combined, a generic Democratic Senate candidate leads by four points among likely voters — a 10-point gap, on the margins.

While Biden is close to tied among young and Hispanic voters, that Democratic Senate candidate leads among them by 19 and 16 points, respectively. That generic Democrat also leads by 59 points among Black voters, compared to Biden’s 40-point edge.

As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, the biggest gulf in performance between Biden and other Democrats is in Nevada, where Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) takes 28 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of young voters who are otherwise voting for Trump.

All of which suggests that many of these voters aren’t balking at Democrats — just Biden.

Overall, I would say the strength of Trump in Arizona doesn't make much sense - I had the impression that his permanently soft focus, chronic Trump suck up Kari Lake was floundering quite a lot.   

And it seems wildly strange that primary voting Republicans are still registering protest votes against Trump in pretty substantial numbers, yet this doesn't seem to show up in polls.

(I also find it hard to believe that Trump is gaining popularity from his court room appearances.  His recent rallies are playing as duds, too.)   

It's a very weird situation.   Given all of the factors (including reports of Republicans far behind in getting organised for the election), I still don't think the polling can be an accurate prediction of what will happen in November.

Update:  Sure, I agree that the nutty Left is very nutty at the moment - the ones who say they will punish Biden for not being tough on Israel by helping ensure a rabid pro-Israel supporter like Trump gets the job instead.   And this is bad optics for Biden.   But as many have been saying, it's not exactly like the same crisis as the anti-Vietnamese war era, and I doubt it will be as electorally important come November as it now seems.

 

On a technical note - oddities of Google Chromecast

I don't know how many people use these, as I only use one because my (now getting old) Samsung TV's operating system would not allow the app for one of the newer streaming services to be added, but I use a Google Chromecast dongle plugged into the TV.

So now I have the choice to watch Youtube either on the old app already on the Samsung (which works fine), or to watch it using the version of the app that came loaded already on the Chromecast.   I usually use the Chromecast version, as the Chromecast provides quick access to Netflix as well.

Within Youtube, I have two accounts - but I mainly use one. 

For some reason, on the weekend, videos watched through the usual account started playing in really low quality.   It was obvious, and I knew something was wrong.   

I initially suspected a very low internet speed, as on one recent check, it had been abnormally slow.   But the speed wasn't too bad (by Australia's low standards), so I checked for fault within the TV, and spent much time checking settings, rebooting it, etc.  Then I tried rebooting the Chromecast, checking its settings, and considered re-setting the app.   

I then realised that videos watched via the Samsung Youtube app (using the same account as on the Chromecast) worked fine.  And then I discovered that videos on my second Youtube account on the Chromecast app were normal resolution too.   Why would that be?   It was making little sense.

I finally discovered that within the main account, on the Chromecast Youtube app, if I went to the information screen for an individual video, I could check resolution, and found it was set as 720p.

Changing the resolution on just one video (from the access to settings within the video info screen) to 1080p changed it for all videos on the main Youtube account.

This is pretty odd - I have no idea how the resolution setting from that part of the app would have got changed to 720p - I never have normal cause to be looking at Youtube settings at all.

 And why such a settings change, if it arose spontaneously within the app, would affect only one account, and not the secondary account, I have no idea.

This may be a boring post, but it just serves as an example of weird things that can happen with Google apps, and take a long time to resolve.   (I Googled the issue asking in many different ways, but it was such an odd problem to explain to get useful suggestions.)     

Monday catch up

I've been very work busy lately.   Still am.

Here's a catch up of things that have caught my attention:

American infrastructure really does sound crap:

From the Washington Post, a description of the very decrepit sounding courthouse where Trump is being tried in Manhattan:

When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”

He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.

The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.

Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much irritation to the defendant). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.

Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.

Jealous that I'm not in Tasmania:

More about Buddhist influence only Greeks and others

Remember how three four years ago I posted about my surprise that Buddhists had probably travelled as far West as Egypt well before the time of Christ, and how Greeks had seemingly had some interaction with them?  No?  Well, you just don't pay enough attention.

Anyhow, instead of reading, you can now view a video from the wonderful Religion for Breakfast pretty much on the same topic.  (Lots of people in the comments that follow say things like "yeah, this really is not common knowledge, and perhaps it should be."  So it's not just me.)

 

Climate change and extreme weather

It seems that every few days lately there is another extreme flood from some part of the world, as well as temperature records being broken.  (South East Asia has been dangerously hot for the last couple of months.)

It's kind of interesting how people who decided a decade or two ago that climate change was all an imaginary crock (not that they will admit it, but their implicit view is that it's a grand conspiracy theory by thousands of scientists) can look at the news and just think "meh, the weather hasn't been too exceptional outside my front door lately, so there's still nothing to it."

The old cranks at the remnants of Catallaxy blog will never change their mind - there's too much face to lose by admitting they picked the "crank" side of the debate long ago.  I wonder if Sinclair Davidson has recanted?   We don't hear much from him anywhere any more.

Jail and alternatives

Since I recently posted that we don't hear enough from criminologists, I should post here about the article that appeared a couple of days ago at the ABC:

There are fresh calls to put more domestic violence offenders in prison. But mounting evidence suggests that 'jailing is failing'

With articles like this, I tend not to have trouble with the analysis of the problem (broadly, how our current implementation of custodial punishment is not working well from a rehabilitation point of view), but have more concerns about the vagueness of how alternative programs could be expected to work on a large enough scale.   

To be fair, I don't have this attitude from an extensive reading on the topic - but it just seems an obvious problem that there seem to be so few successful example of programs that they can point to within Australia, and that overseas examples are often specific to those countries settings and may not be easily translatable to here.

For example, in this article:

In fact, alternatives to incarceration have been shown to be radically more effective at reducing reoffending rates. Instead of one-in-two going back to jail, a recidivism rate of as low as 13.6 per cent has been achieved in Spain by emphasising and supporting healthy lifestyle choices, connections with family and emotional development.

The Productivity Commission recommended Australia pursue policies like those in Norway by paying more attention to "the underlying causes of offending" to achieve "better long-term recidivism outcomes" and lowering the cost of crime to the community. Doing so, it said, "would move Australian prison systems towards a stronger emphasis on rehabilitation and have the potential for better long-term outcomes".

 OK, because I have trouble imagining that the social environment from which criminality arise in Norway translates at all well to that from which a large part of ours comes (indigenous population, often in rural and remote areas), let's look at the link to the Spanish story.

Hmmm.   It reads rather like strong self promotion by an organisation (Diagrama Foundation) that claims large success in Spain, but these are the groups they are largely helping there:

We work with some of the most disadvantaged children in society. In our centres we work
with boys and girls aged 14-23 3 , typically convicted for violent offences. They face a full range of challenges – disengagement from education, from different types of family background, and with a wide range of health, social and other challenges, including learning difficulties, substance misuse and mental health issues. Many of our centres include therapeutic units for those with significant mental health conditions and we also run specific centres solely for young people in the justice system who have mental health issues.

When our centres were first established, more than 85% of those we worked with came from Roma communities, marginalised by society. We continue to work with children and young people from diverse backgrounds across all our services. We run over 75 residential shelters for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children as well as integration programmes to address the challenges faced by people socially excluded by race or religion. We also manage medical and educational programmes for vulnerable communities in Senegal and Kenya.

We are commissioned by 15 of the 17 counties in Spain to run either custodial or non-
secure facilities. Each region of Spain is different in terms of culture, language, climate and
geography. We run centres in the middle of cities, and in distant parts of the countryside. 

While I don't doubt that Roma communities are far from ideal for children being raised within them, I also find it hard to believe that the social background is anything much like the social dysfunction in the Northern Territory towns the report is looking at. 

Also - I'm a tad sceptical about the section of the report which says they achieve this in Spain with about half the staffing of current detention facilities in the NT.

And here's the thing - many of the facilities in Spain are in towns and cities, where it is surely going to be much, much easier to attract the type of worker you need in the very "hands on" rehabilitation centres, compared to trying to fill such jobs in places like Katherine or Alice Springs:

Social educators - Qualified to degree level and guided by the Technical Team, they support young people throughout every aspect of their day, from getting up in the morning to when they go to bed and including in classes, vocational training and leisure activities. They are at the heart of our approach and genuinely care about the young people they work with.

Technical Team - formed of qualified psychologists, social workers and reintegration workers (who support planning for release - housing, education, jobs), working alongside healthcare staff. They plan and deliver assessments, integrated case management, interventions and reintegration programmes.

Security staff – who act as a last resort in incident management. 

So yeah, I am far from convinced about how readily you can make that work here.   

Not that I know what the alternative is, really....

The brainworm candidate

Wow:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who has marketed himself to voters as a younger, healthier alternative to the two major contenders, contracted a parasitic worm that got into his brain years ago and ate a portion of it before dying, his campaign said Wednesday.

The 70-year-old scion of the powerful political family revealed in a 2012 deposition during divorce proceedings from his second wife, which the New York Times obtained and first reported Wednesday, that he had short- and long-term memory loss and described himself as having “cognitive problems, clearly.” Around the time of the discovery of the parasite, Kennedy was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning that he attributed to his diet, he said in the deposition, a condition that can also cause memory loss. Kennedy told the Times that he has since recovered from his fogginess.

Down at the bottom of the report, there's even more discussion of his far from stella health record:

Kennedy has previously disclosed other health issues. He has said his strained, sometimes hoarse voice is caused by spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the muscles of the voice box. He also has told others he became infected with hepatitis C, which was treated, from intravenous drug use in his youth.

In 2001, Kennedy was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat caused by a common heart abnormality that can cause strokes, according to news reports at the time. Kennedy said in the 2012 deposition he was hospitalized three other times for that condition, which he told the Times has not caused any other incidents in a decade.

Bryan Appleyard lives

While searching for something on this blog recently, I realised how often in its early days I used to link to articles by Bryan Appleyard.  (In fact, he turned up in comments once!)

I had last year searched around for more recent material from him, and found that his website had gone, and although I could see he had written another book in 2022, I thought he must not be very active anymore.

I don't know why, but I didn't look for him on Twitter, and now I see that he is there, posting infrequently, but providing links for pieces he writes in various places still, including the Spectator (which I only occasionally view now, due to the terrible quality of the Australian edition.   Yes, the UK version is still worth a look, but I just don't think to look often.)

Anyway, I see that he has some articles posted at a place I have never heard of before - Engelberg Ideas - including this recent one skeptical about Musk and his brain fiddling desires.   

In terms of books, a recent-ish one I did not know about is one he co-authored with James Lovelock shortly before he died.  From the Wiki description:

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence is a 2019 non-fiction book by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. It has been published by Penguin Books/Allen Lane in the UK,^[2] and republished by the MIT Press.^[3] The book was co-authored by journalist Bryan Appleyard.^[4] It predicts that a benevolent eco-friendly artificial superintelligence will someday become the dominant lifeform on the planet and argues humanity is on the brink of a new era: the Novacene.

This sounds worth a read!

I wonder if Bryan still Googles his name and might turn up here again.

If he does, I ask that he read at least this recent post.   And calls me brilliant, or something.   :)

 

Bluetooth for tooths

I'm a pretty late adopter of electric toothbrushes.   I started using one, the base Oral B model, maybe 3 or 4 years ago?, and that was only because my daughter didn't like using it at that time.  

That one's battery performance finally deteriorated enough to get a new one on the weekend, and I was surprised to learn that for only $99 I could buy an Oral B model with Bluetooth connectivity.  It apparently tells an app on your phone about how well you are brushing.

This seems faintly ridiculous to me.   (As indeed does that way Oral B seems to flood the market - which I assume it already dominates - with seemingly 12 different models, many with very small differences.  It's a bit like how some mobile phone companies operate.)  I don't want my brush reporting on me to my phone, or indeed, the head office.   

Anyway, I went with what's probably only one model up in sophistication from the very base model.  Now I not only have a 2 minute timer (which had stopped working on the old one), but every 30 seconds it stutters to tell me that I have spent enough time on that quadrant of my teeth, and I need to move onto the next quadrant.  I actually like the 30 second feature.

Electric toothbrushes do feel like they have given teeth a thorough clean, and I see that research into the comparison with manual teeth-brushing backs up the impression.  

I would prefer that the brush heads were cheaper, but can't have everything...

 

Boot on the university protests

Yet more Washington Post content for you:  I find it very hard to find any fault in Max Boot's criticism  of the  pro-Palestinian university protests.   I'll extract some parts:

In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”

 So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.

Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.

I particularly liked this part, about the stupid "settler" rhetoric that we also see gushing from dubious academics in Australia who couldn't find anything useful to do apart from organising tiny conferences for themselves and writing the next application for funding from the ARC:

The protesters’ agenda does not end in the Middle East; indeed, the movement’s ideologues see Israel as merely an “imperial outpost in the Arab world,” even though Jews have lived in the area since antiquity. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto proclaims: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.”

Reading this politically correct claptrap, I was left with many questions, beginning with: What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was a name used by some indigenous groups for Central America and North America, but that only raises another question: Who do the students want to liberate “Turtle Island” from? Assuming that most of them aren’t Native Americans, aren’t they occupiers, too? Many of the other territories listed are just as puzzling — who, exactly, is occupying Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Haiti, Cuba or Korea (either North or South)? I can guess who is supposedly oppressing Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but I’m at a loss to say what this oppression consists of. Too much tourism?

Just as notable are the omissions — there is no call to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation, the Uyghurs from Chinese imperialism, Syria from Bashar al-Assad’s bloody reign or North Korea from Kim Jong Un’s Stalinist police state. This is not an objective list of global injustices; it is a grab bag of far-left grievances that includes trendy but vacuous calls for “creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization.”

An eye-catching headline, or two

You know, I prefer the Washington Post to the New York Times.   Here are a couple of eye-catching stories from the former, this morning:

 

Gift link here.   It does make me think better of this Pope, but there is no doubt that his Pontificate shows up all of the internal tensions of the Catholic Church that he somewhat clumsily tries to reconcile (or paper over); but I fear it is a doomed project, for any Pope.    

And on a somewhat amusing note, this article about a former US Navy Admiral who went to jail over a major corruption scandal reads like fodder for a Coen brothers movie:

Well worth the read.  (Gift linked.)

Update:  By the way, reading that article about the way the US Navy worked made me think that navies the world over seem to attract officers who are there for a good time, so to speak.

Based on my own military service, I always thought that navy officers I met were good humoured and the most relaxed to be around.  Army officers were the most likely to be very serious, very certain of their worth, full of bad management decisions, and often unpleasant company.  The air force, being dominated by pilots and those who support pilots, was more a haven for individuality and not being bothered with all the trad military stuff.   As such, many are not outgoing like navy officers tend to be, but it's a much more relaxed, and sensible, service than the Army.

At least one new thing

I don't post on weekends very often anymore.  Largely, that's because I don't have a decent desktop at home, and usually leave my laptop at work, and doing any significant amount of typing on a tablet isn't much fun.  I should probably buy a decent bluetooth keyboard for the Lenovo and see how that is for ease of tablet posting.  In fact, my wife has one, I think?  Further investigation is warranted.

What I have found lately is that, unless I have posted about something new or interesting, it doesn't feel as if I have had much in the way of new thoughts.  (And I don't like to go any length of time without feeling like I have some new thought.)  This becomes especially noticeable towards the end of a long weekend, like the one about to expire in about 30 minutes.  

I mean, I may have watched a large number of Youtube videos on various topics and surely learnt something new, read a thousand tweets, scanned some news stories, listened to some ABC podcasts, had a beer with friends, cooked a nice meal or two, and so on, but unless I get around to posting about any of that here, it doesn't feel they are adequately committed to memory or as appreciated as they should be.

Is that a downside, perhaps, of writing a blog that's pretty much an open diary for 19 years?  Maybe.

There's also the way the constant flow of new snippets of information in front of your face makes it very hard to concentrate on one topic in a way that used to come with starting a book - and finishing it.  Yes, damn you, internet for being both wonderful and concentration eroding at the same time.

Anyhow, this is a long winded way of saying that it seems I had a pleasant enough, relatively uneventful weekend, but it feels as if something is missing.  

Alright, I will post one Youtube video consumed this weekend which had a not particularly promising title but, after the first 5 minutes or so of covering old ground I certainly was aware of before, did indeed teach me something about cosmology that I hadn't realised before.  (It's to do with the size of the universe.)   That's worth committing to searchable memory.   Here it is: