The Guardian goes there...

I mean, if it was the Daily Mail, I would have more doubts, but when it's The Guardian deciding to run a series on this issue:

Australian universities accused of awarding degrees to students with no grasp of ‘basic’ English

I do pay attention.

Mind you, I also don't have any doubt that Universities can harbour right wingers on staff who may well exaggerate this problem.  (I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if UQ's pro-Trumper James Allen was one of the anonymous academics for the article.   But then again, he's in the law school, and I expect that not too many non English speaking overseas students pick that as their subject.)  

I think all of us suspect that there are cases of overseas students unfairly sailing through to a degree with very little useful english by relying on the myriad ways that technology (and capitalism) can help.  But the question is how often it happens and how seriously the universities treat the issue.

Hank says things I wish more people would say

The guy has always seemed basically likeable, but how I wish more people would be as blunt as this about crypto:

 

The old Olympics

An article like this probably gets published every modern Olympics, but this version had a couple of details I don't recall reading before:

...competing in the games could be dangerous.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 50 BC-c. 40 AD) describes how a father lost both sons in the “pancration”, a type of combat sport that was a violent mixture of boxing and wrestling:

A man trained his two sons as pancratists, and presented them to compete at the Olympic games. They were paired off to fight each other. The youths were both killed together and had divine honours decreed to them.

Gee - I wonder if the father ever got over that, or if he was satisfied with the "divine honours".

Also, venue facilities were not great for a long time:

As the contest was held in the middle of summer, it was usually extremely hot. According to Claudius Aelian, some people thought watching the Olympics under “the baking heat of the sun” was a “much more severe penalty” than having to do manual labour such as grinding grain.

The site at Olympia also had problems with freshwater supply. According to the writer Lucian of Samosata (2nd century AD), visitors to the games sometimes died of thirst. This problem was fixed when Herodes Atticus built an aqueduct to the site in the middle of the 2nd century AD.

And I didn't know "the famous story" about Plato attending: 

There is a famous story about what happened when the philosopher Plato (428/427-348/347 BC) stayed at Olympia for the games.

Plato lived there with others who did not realise he was the celebrated philosopher and he made a good impression on them, as the Roman writer Claudius Aelian (2nd/3rd century AD) recalled:

The strangers were delighted by their chance encounter […] he had behaved towards them with modesty and simplicity and had proved himself able to win the confidence of anyone in his company.

Later on, Plato invited his new friends to Athens and they were amazed to find out he was in fact the famous philosopher who was the student of Socrates.

It’s unclear how many people actually visited the ancient games each time they were held, although some modern scholars think the number could have been as high as 50,000 in some years.

Of course, there is also the minor point that it was a (nearly) all male audience watching male athletes compete in the nude, which I mainly find amusing by imagining how MAGA would deal with that scenario today.

 

The best doctors on Youtube

These two Canadian doctors (both orthopaedic surgeons, but they get guest specialists on to talk about other subjects) are easily the most likeable and reasonable sounding doctors who pump out content on Youtube.   Yet they have less than a million followers.  😕 They deserve more.

Anyway, I learnt a lot about "holes in the heart" by watching their last video.  I just didn't know any of this, which makes me feel a bit dumb: 

Musk and Twitter

If my experience of using Twitter is any guide, there's no doubt that Musk uses it to push unwanted Right wing, and Republican, views on the "For You" side.   That's how I know how so many Republican politicians, for example, freaked out about the Olympic opening ceremony, with the (admittedly oddball) queer Last Supper set up, featuring a near naked blue Smurf-y guy singing - something.  (I see now that he was meant to be Dionysus.  Huh.)

And then lots of American Evangelical types called the robot horse "Satanical", "straight out of Revelations", and how it was all out war on Christianity, etc etc.

Even Musk himself decided to join the chorus - yes, the guy whose personal life is about as Christian as Donald Trump's.   

I think it's all a storm in a teacup.  Sure, it perhaps stands as a warning to giving the top creative job of such an event to someone evangelically gay (so to speak) - but the bigger lesson to take from it is how dangerous the American Christian Right is, with their spurious religious claims and desire to force it on everyone.  

Update:  I see that the artist director (and others) have said it was inspired by another painting showing a Feast of Dionysus.  But the halo like thing around the central figure seems to counter that.  I think they were probably trying to have it both ways.    In any case, it didn't seem particularly French (even the Smurfs, if that was the look the singer was going for, were Belgian, not French), or Olympian.  

But as Adam said:

 

Fingers crossed for Paris

I'm getting the impression that there are people on both sides of politics who want to put the boot into Paris and its Olympics:   on the nutty Right, they think the city is full of dangerous Leftism, multiculturalism, Muslims and snooty cultural superiority, so they are lapping up (and sometimes inventing) stories of crimes and organisational failure on Twitter.

On the nutty Left, I haven't actually got evidence of this on Twitter, but if there was to be some outbreak of anti-Israel protest (even involving moderate levels of violence), they would almost certainly think it was warranted.   (I'm not suggesting they want it to be a repeat of Munich 1972, but I still bet they would welcome some form of disruption for the cause.)

 But the French military and police are out in force, and for a country that has had the unfortunate insult of "cheese eating surrender monkeys", I think everyone knows the men (and occasional woman) in the security services always look very serious and capable.  I really would not want to be a visitor who thinks they can make a "joke" threat in front of them.

Finally, I don't yet know where the Olympic flame is set up for the games, but if they get too tricky with the way it is to be lit (I'm thinking of the famous blazing arrow of Barcelona), wouldn't be it funny if they accidentally torch Notre Dame again?   :)  

It's something of a "good news" day

*  From the Washington Post:

A federal judge in Florida threw out a bankruptcy case filed by the Gateway Pundit, ruling that the site, which is known for spreading conspiracy theories, sought bankruptcy protection in “bad faith” to avoid having to pay potential damages in defamation suits related to the site’s reporting on the 2020 election.

The Thursday ruling from U.S. bankruptcy judge Mindy Mora in the Southern District of Florida means that defamation cases from two Georgia election workers, as well as one from a former Dominion Voting Systems executive, can proceed. The defamation cases had been held up while the bankruptcy case was ongoing.

Excellent - there is no way in the world that those two Georgia election workers are going to lose against him.  The most appalling thing is that in the US they have to spend years in litigation to get justice for the most blatant and dangerous lies.

 *  In a case of "it's about time", the NY Times reports:

Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered California state officials on Thursday to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments, the nation’s most sweeping response to a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets.

More than in any other state, homeless encampments have been a wrenching issue in California, where housing costs are among the nation’s highest, complicating the many other factors that contribute to homelessness. An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, and most of them were unsheltered. Unlike New York City, most jurisdictions in California do not guarantee a right to housing.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, called on state officials and local leaders to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces” and act “with urgency,” prioritizing those that most threaten health and safety.

This is an important move for changing the perception of Democrats being paralysed by good intentions that lead to bad outcomes for everyone.

 * And, of course, there is the substantial poll improvement for Harris.  I hope she appoints the astronaut over the smart gay guy as her running mate - it will make the ticket look more balanced.

 

Some good dementia news for a change

I'm getting to the age where dementia protection news grabs my attention.  From The Guardian:

Researchers have raised hopes for delaying dementia after finding that a recently approved shingles vaccine was linked to a substantial reduction in diagnoses of the condition in the six years after receiving the shot.

The discovery, based on US medical records, suggests that beyond the health benefits of preventing shingles, a painful and sometimes serious condition in elderly people, the vaccine may also delay the onset of dementia, the UK’s leading cause of death.

Dr Maxime Taquet at the University of Oxford, the first author on the study, said the results supported the idea that shingles vaccination may prevent dementia. “If validated in clinical trials, these findings could have significant implications for older adults, health services, and public health.”

Shingles is caused by the herpes zoster virus and can flare up in people who have previously had chickenpox. When a shingles vaccine, Zostavax, was first rolled out in 2006, a number of studies found hints that the risk of dementia seemed to be lower in those who got the shots.

The development of a new and more effective shingles vaccine, Shingrix, led to a rapid switch in the US in October 2017, meaning those who were vaccinated before that date received Zostavax, while those vaccinated after tended to have Shingrix.

The Oxford team studied the health records of more than 200,000 US citizens vaccinated for shingles, about half of whom received the new vaccine. Over the next six years, the risk of dementia was 17% lower in those who received Shingrix compared with Zostavax.

For those who went on to develop dementia, that amounts to an extra 164 days, or nearly six months, lived without the condition. The effect was stronger in women, at 22%, than in men at 13%.

Many years ago, I got a very mild case of shingles on my back.   So I was always planning on the getting the vaccine anyway.

 

Trump is giving me bad dreams

I've been waking up and remembering bits of a lot of dreams lately, and some have been very strange.

As I've said before, a little reflection usually turns up what I have read, seen or heard in recent days that would have inspired the content, but this morning I was having trouble working out why last night's dream featured me as a different person who bought a cooked human brain and was eating it (!)  (I really did not care for the texture or taste, and was wondering why I was even doing it.  It was also my brother's brain, which I thought was good because it probably reduced the risk of getting a prion disease from eating a random one.  Cooked brains were, by the way, commercially available in the dream - I wasn't boiling it at home).   

Other snippets of dream I could identify - going to an odd opera (I had been listening to an opera director on Radio National the other day), and being in a Singaporean grocery store (no mystery at all - I watch a lot of Singaporean content on Youtube.)  But eating a brain??  

Then it came to me this afternoon - it's almost certainly because of Donald Trump's ridiculous recent referrals to Hannibal Lector, and every time he does it, it turns up on Twitter.

So there - I don't need to worry that my true core identity has always been as a cannibal, and it's only surfacing now in later life.   It's just Trump eating my mind....

On the nature of the current autocracies

Over at NPR, there's a discussion of a new book by Anne Applebaum called Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World.  Sounds interesting:

Autocracy, Inc., is not a club. There are no meetings like SPECTRE in a James Bond movie, where villains give progress reports on their kleptocratic gains and attacks on democracy. Instead, Applebaum writes, it is a very loosely knit mix of regimes, ranging from theocracies to monarchies, that operate more like companies. What unites these dictators isn’t an ideology, but something simpler and more prosaic: a laser-focus on preserving their wealth, repressing their people and maintaining power at all costs.

These regimes can help each other in ways large and small, Applebaum writes.

Countries such as Zimbabwe, Belarus and Cuba voted in favor of Russia’s annexation of Crimea at the United Nations in 2014. Russia gave loans to Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, while Venezuelan police use Chinese-made water cannons, tear gas and surveillance equipment to attack and track street protesters.

Of course, U.S. companies have also supplied authoritarian regimes. When covering the crushing of the democracy movement in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, I rummaged through bins of empty rubber bullet canisters made by a company in Pennsylvania.

More recently and more alarming, though, have been China’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s June visit to North Korea, which the U.S. accuses of supplying weapons to Russia.

But Autocracy Inc., uses more than conventional arms to attack democracies. In order to retain power and build more wealth, autocrats also undermine the idea of democracy as a viable choice for their own people. Fearful of its former Soviet republics drifting further West – see Ukraine – Russia and its three main TV channels broadcast negative news about Europe an average of 18 times a day during one three-year stretch.

China extends its message through local media and helps other dictatorships. After satellite networks dropped Russia Today – RT – following the invasion of Ukraine, China’s StarTimes satellite picked up RT and put it back into African households, where it could spread Moscow’s anti-Western, anti-LGBTQ message, which resonates in many African nations.

The goal is not to persuade people that autocracy is the answer, but to encourage cynicism about the alternative. Applebaum says the message is this: You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided and dying. 

And of course, we know which side of politics is responding to this message - the reactionary MAGA Right and its admirers in other Western nations, because they often like the social conservatism of most autocracies when it comes to gay and other identity politics.  "Yeah sure, Putin may poison his critics and potential political rivals, but he does hate the gays and calls them pedophiles, so that's good enough me."

 

 

 

I'm no ballistics expert, but...

...I'm pretty sure that if even a tiny edge of an AR15 bullet hit your ear tip, it would do more damage than a mere scratch that doesn't need stitches.   Kinetic energy, and all that.   

I would bet money on it being shrapnel, especially as there are reports of others being hit by it too. 

I guess I should add that it doesn't matter much:  either way, he obviously did come close to being hit by an actual bullet.   (And then got an immediate narcissistic thrill that he had been missed, which he turned into political theatre instead of leaving in a hurry in case there was a second gunman somewhere.)   It is irksome for him (and his cult) to refer to an ear scratch, probably from shrapnel, as "taking a bullet", but of course he lies continually and everyone knows that, so just add it to the litany of self- aggrandisement that is Trump.

I thought it interesting at the convention that Trump also specifically praised the crowd for not "running for the exits".  Oh yeah - MAGA followers are so "brave" that they don't even all have the common sense to duck when there are bullets flying around.   (Some did, but many just stayed standing, and videoing it on their phones.)

It's good to be King

Well, does this mean the monarchy (sort of?) pays for itself?:

LONDON — The British royal family will be receiving a 53 percent raise, worth more than 45 million pounds ($58 million), thanks to a record increase in its estate’s annual profit, propelled in part by offshore wind farm leases on seabed plots owned by the monarchy.

The Crown Estate, the organization that manages the sprawling royal land and property portfolio, released a report Wednesday for the 2023-2024 financial year, the first to cover a full financial year with King Charles III on the throne.

It showed that the Crown Estate generated a “record net revenue profit” of 1.1 billion pounds ($1.4 billion) — 658.1 million pounds more than last year — and revealed the royal family’s plans for future purchases with its share of that money, including two new helicopters.

The Crown Estate is formally owned by the royal family but is controlled by the British government. Profits that the estate generates each year go to the state treasury, and the government returns a percentage to the royals under what is known as the “Sovereign Grant” to cover the operating costs of the royal household — including staff salaries, entertainment, property maintenance and travel....

In recent years, the royal family has received 86.3 million pounds ($111.4 million) from the government, and will again in 2024-2025. That figure will rise to 132 million pounds ($170 million) for 2025-2026.

The grant will support ongoing 10-year renovation projects at Buckingham Palace, British media reported, citing royal officials.

The program, whose total cost will be 369 million pounds ($476 million), is “making progress” according to a report published Monday by Britain’s National Audit Office, a public spending watchdog.

 

 

The "new technology vs redundancy before it's even deployed" issue in developing new energy sources

I see that Sabine Hossenfelder and others have videos out about the latest cost blowout, and delays, in the ITER project that is only a research project for fusion, with no prospect of it ever actually being an electricity generator.

For reasons I have outlined before, I am firmly on the sceptic side of fusion energy ever being a practical source of energy.   

But this latest problem did make me think about how it's odd that both high-tech ideas for future energy (fusion, or even new fission reactors) and a much more modest-tech idea (large scale deployment of renewable energy plants which already work, but still have practical problems in replacing old style generators) both share a similar issue:   they are hampered by continual changes in technology that make planning for their development (or deployment) very difficult.

I mentioned in a recent post about how, even over the (nearly) two decades of writing this blog, you can see how ideas for new renewable energy have been floated, sometimes partially developed, and abandoned:  in many cases surpassed by the steady increase in efficiency and manufacturing improvements in the "been around forever, but getting way better all the time" sources (mainly solar panels and wind generators).   And now we are at a point where we know we need renewable energy deployed very rapidly to drop CO2 before we bake the world even further, but the issue of energy storage is still seemingly at the stage "too many ideas", and no one really knows the best way to deploy it for maximum efficiency and best cost outcomes.   A large part of the problem is surely that some ideas (molten salts, hot rocks or sand, chemical flow batteries, etc) will be beaten out of contention by improvements in competing systems, as nearly all storage ideas are still undergoing a lot of development and research and technological improvement.   Hence, it may sound like a good idea to subsidise (say) Tesla powerwalls for domestic use on a massive scale - but I would presume that all battery storage is likely to be better, cheaper and safer in (say) five or ten years time, so just how much money is it wise to spend now on the current model?

On the fusion question, I have seen it said (I presume reliably) that a large part of ITER's problem is that it was designed on the basis of magnet technology current  (I think) a couple of decades ago, but that has been surpassed by big improvements in the field.    Hence it is in one sense already a white elephant, and becoming more white elephant-y every year a cost increase or repair delays its operation.

I would guess that the same could be a significant issue in the field of new fission reactor designs - what company wants to spend a ton of money on a design that might work but be soon out-competed by an alternative new design in terms of cost, efficiency or safety?

I guess there is likely a simple name for this in economics, or some management field - this race between technological development and its deployment on the one hand, and redundancy on the other - but I don't know what it is.   

I also don't really know the solution.

What I do think, though, is that surely the billions spent on a research reactor for a source of energy that may never be economically viable could have gone a very long way towards resolving the issue of the best way to store energy from renewables, and likely come up with some good answers on that a great many years before ITER is even switched on.

 

 

Against Peter Thiel

Oh my, Twitter (unfortunately) still throws up links worth reading - such as this 2022 essay on Substack  by John Ganz entitled "The Enigma of Peter Thiel - There is No Enigma - He's a Fascist".

Elon's on the copium train

 

So Elon is in the "I create my own reality" world of MAGA now.   I could have sworn that the reality is the opposite of what he claims here:   it was the mainstream media that was extremely keen to choose stories to promote (and even specifically editorialise) the take that "Biden should withdraw from re-election because of public concerns about his cognitive decline after the debate".

On the question of anyone "debating" Trump

I don't really know why it isn't the Democrats saying something like this: "We don't see any point in a further 'debate' with Donald Trump.  As demonstrated in the last attempt, he does not know how to 'debate' - he simply states lies, falsehood and misleading statements and if challenged, simply reiterates that 'its true', which in the world of MAGA is accepted as the final word.   As such, giving him a platform to repeat lies and never concede when they are demonstrably wrong simply worsens the epistemological crisis that the Right Wing has created over the last decade by making impossible any genuine debate based on certain facts being 'real' and needing to be conceded as such."   

She's such a nutter...

Things to wonder about

*  Not much news seems to come out regarding Russian progress in Ukraine, so I assume they aren't advancing much, if at all, despite it being summer and (presumably) the best season for them to do so?    

* I get that it certainly doesn't look like the Secret Service did a good job with the Trump protection, but I do wonder at the idea that the head of the organisation should be personally responsible for every single failure even if they have nothing to do with the particular job.    (I accept that it seems she is getting flack from both sides of politics, and she may not have performed well before the MAGA nuts, but still it seems odd that the MAGA types rushed to judgement that she was personally responsible before she even got there.  It paints a bleak image of how terrible government management would be under a new Trump administration.)

* Why are Elon Musk fanboys - or shareholders in Tesla - not worried about his full backing of the side of politics that is completely dismissive of the value and utility of electric vehicles?

* Why did I have a cinematic style dream the other day about a horse that sacrificed itself to protect its owner, and it was very moving?  

American politics

A few thoughts:

*   So the alien Mark Zuckerberg is the latest tech billionaire to suck up to Trump, calling his interference with the Secret Service effort to get him off stage "badass", while claiming to be declining to actually endorse him.  Uhuh.

Peter Theil - another person who gives the appearance of being barely human - apparently has the ultimate opportunist and Trump flip-flopper JD Vance in his pocket. 

As many are saying, the explanation appears simple - billionaires like both tax cuts (because, presumably, they think they are the smartest person to know what to do with their money, despite evidence to the contraray) and are happy to support someone they know is dumb but able to be manipulated.

And Trump doesn't even pretend to be not be open to being bought!   

*  I started writing this post yesterday, and was tempted to say "so, the predictions in many media outlets that Biden was going to resign Sunday seem to have been wrong."   Then I wake up this morning, and he has!   Can't say I am too surprised - and I think Biden's reputation in history will only be enhanced.   

*  Meanwhile, I am just continually flabbergasted at how Trump diehards are simply beyond reasoning with.   I mean, look at this patent cult post:

But even for Trumpists less emotionally unstable than Woods, how can they talk themselves into dismissing the scores of people who worked with Trump in his first term and who refuse to endorse him now - up to and including his own Vice President?   (I know the reasoning they commonly use - they were never "true" supporters, and he is just bad at picking people.  OK, that's cult reasoning - but why do they think he has overcome the inability to pick only "good" people?)

How do they think that it isn't pure opportunism that explains people who have condemned Trump in the strongest possible terms who now endorse him?  (Like Barr, Vance.)   I know the reasoning they use - it's like Woods - they fantasise that the US is the midst of the worst Presidency of all time (their cult leader told them) - but it is patently untrue on any metric you can pick.   Of course, they are also bolstered in their belief by RW media - but how can they not see that they are simple propaganda outfits for the purpose of making money?    

The short take is:  they cannot be reasoned with.   The Republicans have decided this is the way to power, so they are not going to encourage voters to ever listen to evidence and reason. It's appalling.

The search for a substitute for blood

There's an interesting article up at Science about developments in the search for a good blood substitute.  It starts with this bit of history that I think is new to me:

In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. Thomas was the most outspoken advocate of the practice.

At the time, severe bleeding was often a death sentence. Blood transfusion was practiced, but it was something of a crapshoot. Medical science was still 3 decades removed from discovering blood types. Patients who received mismatched blood suffered discolored urine, itching, and a sometimes-fatal complication: hemolytic shock, wherein their own immune systems attacked the transfused cells.

Doctors in the U.S. were looking for something less risky to stabilize a hemorrhaging patient. Thomas was sure milk was the answer. In 1875, he injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries. At first, he wrote, the patient “complained that her head felt like bursting.” She soon developed a high fever and an abnormally high heart rate, but recovered a week later. Thomas subsequently performed seven separate milk transfusions, publishing his results in several medical journals, and predicted their “brilliant and useful future.”

It was not to be: Saline solutions, still used today, were introduced the next decade as a much less dangerous, if imperfect, stopgap measure for emergency bleeding.

Gosh.  They really did try any old idea in the hope it might work.

Anyway, the other curious thing in the article is that a new experimental blood substitute has been developed by a doctor with the surname "Doctor".   Here's the reason why it could be useful:

Doctor is as fervent an advocate for hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs), as ErythroMer and its predecessors are more formally known, as Thomas was for lacteal transfusions. Donated blood has a shelf life of just 42 days. There’s also not enough, even in developed countries with well-organized blood donation systems: In January 2022, the American Red Cross, which distributes 40% of the country’s donor blood, declared the first-ever national blood crisis, as its supply—especially precious O-negative blood, the universal type—dipped dangerously low. Meanwhile, hemorrhagic shock caused by severe blood loss kills some 20,000 people in the U.S., and 2 million globally, every year.

An artificial “blood” could, perhaps, fill the void. In settings where fresh blood is hard to come by, such as battlefields and rural areas (where ambulance wait times are sometimes as high as 45 minutes), ErythroMer could be given on the fly to maintain the vital flow of oxygen to organs until someone reaches a hospital. It’s a freeze-dried powder that remains usable for years and can be reconstituted by simply mixing it with widely available saline. And ErythroMer should be safe for any blood type, because its membrane doesn’t include the red blood cell surface proteins that cause mismatches.

....

So far Doctor’s creation remains in animal testing, but it isn’t the only effort to package hemoglobin inside lipids to fashion a viable blood substitute. A rival product in Japan has already been tested in a few people and generally appears safe.

But the success of these new products is far from guaranteed. Barely 2 decades ago, earlier formulations of HBOCs were scuttled or sidelined after trial participants died. Subsequent attempts haven’t fared much better. The most advanced HBOC to date, approved for people in South Africa and Russia, has struggled amid concerns about side effects.

 All very interesting...