Recent deaths noted

*   Clive Robertson, the cranky persona-ed news reader and broadcaster, died last week.   I hadn't thought about him for years, but his death reminded me how much I used to enjoy his late night news show.   His droll, dry wit was very amusing, and I miss that we have nothing similar today.

 *  Australian author John Marsden has also just died (at only 74 - as I age, I long to read only about deaths that are at older ages than that!).  I only read his famous first book in the "Tomorrow - When the War Began" and thought it was OK, but I knew he had been very influential in the youth fiction market, and in youth education generally.   I didn't recall this:

John’s youth was harrowing in different ways, and he never hid the fact that he was a bit bruised by life. He became suicidal as a university student and was institutionalised; he once wrote that the world of the psychiatric hospital was in some ways “more real than the one outside. In here the masks are off, people don’t pretend so much. [They] don’t have the energy or strength.” Perhaps that’s why he was able to inhabit his characters so fully. It is extraordinary for a man of his generation to write teenage girls so convincingly and with such empathy.

Update: yes, as Tim points out below, now Michael Leunig has died, aged 79.  (Again, fellas, for my long term planning, I only want to see people start to leave this mortal coil from about 85!)   I guess like most people I didn't mind Leunig at his peak, but his brand of idiosyncratic eccentric takes did start to wear thin in the long term. 

 

Elon Musk - Martian snake oil salesman

I see that Sabina Hossenfelder has a video up about her scepticism of Musk's Mars colonisation plans.

If anything, I reckon it was way, way too gentle on Musk, even though she doesn't think his plans will happen any time soon.

She spends too much time on the long term difficulties of permanently colonising Mars (the issue of it not being to retain an atmosphere due to solar wind is covered, for example) without talking enough about the short term wild implausibility of Musk's fantasy - the huge number of rocket builds and launches needed, the totally tricky orbital re-fueling that has not been tried and is (I reckon) always going to be a high risk manoeuvre - probably with the potential to create a huge mess of orbital debris - and the routinely overlooked matter of how difficult it will be to build a biologically self supporting colony on Mars.  

I think this latter issue is just common sense - look at the problems the Biosphere experiment went through, and that was on a planet where all the organic material needed could just be driven in on the back of a truck.* 

At least I saw some support in the video comments for my view that if you want a "lifeboat" for planet Earth, why not build it on the Moon?    (The only plausible reason against it that I can think of is that no one knows what effect low gravity pregnancy will have on the babies - but then, the same might turn out to be an issue in Mars gravity too.   Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out it's really, really difficult to carry a baby to term in low gravity, for some reason we have no idea about at the moment.   That would ruin Musk's "longtermism" pretty rapidly.)   

I remain very confident that Musk will face a downfall sooner or later, and people will wonder why more experts didn't speak out about his wild overconfidence earlier...

*  Have a look at the website for a long on-going research project of the European Space Agency to develop a closed system for life support, including food, called Melissa.   As far as I tell, they might be up to trying it out on a small rat colony.   And I liked this part from their FAQ page:

Why after 30 years the project is not finish yet ?

The proper answer to this one is probably:  

Why man has no try to duplicate the Earth functions earlier ? In other words, although humans are fully depending of the Earth ecosystem functions (e.g. oxygen, water, food, ...), we have today no back-up. Anyone who looks a bit more carefully to the challenges of artificial ecology will rapidly perceive the enormous difficulties. We have seen over the years many similar projects : CELSS, CEEF, CERES, BIOSPHERE 2… almost all of them had to stop due to incorrect evaluation of the challenges, and necessary amplitude and duration of the efforts.

Reading the Journey (continued)

Yeah, I've slowed down a bit in my reading of the abridged version of Journey to the West, and I note as follows:

a.    it takes to about the half way point of the book before the journey actually begins;

b.    I am now 55% percent in, and we still haven't met the 4th travel companion (Sandy in the TV series);

c.    I was rather surprised that in Chapter 17, the Heart Sutra suddenly appears in full.   I had just watched       one of the Doug's Dharma videos on Youtube in which he spoke about it.

The Heart Sutra has had my attention before.   I think I am now closer to understanding its point, though....

Connected

Stancil, who it seems annoys a lot of people for reasons unclear to me, has (along with David Roberts) been one of the most consistent messengers about how that the Left needs to start paying much more attention to the inherent damage the information environment (including its speed and ease of manipulation) has caused.

I always expected this take to arrive

My prediction if Trump's luck runs out...

So, we're getting a fair bit of handwringing over much of the public reaction to that US health fund executive being murdered:

While I agree that it's not good to celebrate vigilante actions, I'm also on the side of those on the Left who think that the Right complaining about bad taste is too often used to sustain a bad status quo.

And it has made me finally post a thought I've had about Trump for years.

I predict - if ever he is successfully assassinated, I reckon the reaction of about 60% of Americans (and 90 of the rest of the globe) will be exactly like the end of the Seinfeld episode in which George (accidentally) kills his fiancée Susan:   a couple of awkward exchanges and half sincere mutterings of "that's so bad", and within 60 seconds, "so, wanna get some coffee?"   

 

   

Race madness [ :-) ]

The New York Times has an article about this:

Black Americans experience schizophrenia and related disorders at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s a disparity that has parallels in other cultures.

Here's a bit:

As a growing body of research reveals, Black people in the United States suffer the hallucinations and delusions of psychosis — the voices that seem to emanate from outside a person’s head, the visions, the paranoias, the breaks with common reality — at a rate roughly twice that of white people. In Europe, racial disparities regarding psychosis are yet wider. Even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address issues of diagnosis, the alarming racial gaps remain.

Studies suggesting a link between minority or outsider status and psychosis run back about a century. A 1932 study looked at hospital admissions for psychosis in Minnesota. It found that Norwegian immigrants were admitted at twice the rate of native Minnesotans or Norwegians in their home country. By the 1970s, researchers were turning specifically to racial divides in psychiatric disorders, and by the 2000s, the relationship between race and psychosis (which appears to outstrip any correlation between race and more common conditions like depression) was becoming well studied in both the United States and Europe. Yet despite the mounting data, in the United States, until recently, the issue was relegated to the edges of mainstream psychiatry — or perhaps beyond the edges.

 The whole thing is pretty odd, as explained in this part (with my bold):

In the United States, Black-white ratios are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall, Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three to one.

Among the immigrant groups, one plausible factor is the dislocation and stress that can come with the immigrant journey itself. But while such trauma may seem an obvious trigger, given that many immigrants arrive in their new nations after dangerous journeys and unable to speak the language that surrounds them, researchers have found repeatedly that second-generation immigrants to the United States and Europe develop psychosis at rates at least as high as their parents. Something is happening in the new country.

 

Family ruin by AI

I know the feeling

Compared to some people, I suppose I have pretty small exposure to social media, given that Twitter (and now Bluesky) was my only real social media app (if you don't count blogs with active threads - now a rarity - or YouTube).   And one of the problems of Bluesky now being pretty good is that I am finding it too easy to just keep...on...scrolling...scrolling (and often avoiding reading the in depth articles sometimes linked.)

There was this doomster column today in The Guardian about the loss of attention span:

Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist and world expert on divided attention, warned in 2022 that we are now living in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023.

But we’re not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley’s dirtiest design feature – which is everywhere once you spot it – is the infinite scroll, likened to the “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly “refills” manipulates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless “seeking” can become addictive.

What will happen if we don’t get a handle on our declining cognitive health? The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris told US Congress in 2019 that billions of people – “a psychological footprint about the size of Christianity” – now receive their information from platforms whose business model “links their profit to how much attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ to extract attention by hacking lower into our lizard brains – into dopamine, fear, outrage – to win”.

His warnings are about as stark as they come. “Persuasive technology is a massively underestimated and powerful force shaping the world,” he said. “It has taken control of the pen of human history, and will drive us to catastrophe if we don’t take it back.”

The worst thing about it (internet brain rot) is likely the loss of book reading amongst everyone, especially the young.

I have been meaning to say for some time, but as I get older, I am surprised that I am still drawing connections between my life experience and some incidents in novels that have stuck in my head from what I might have read 30 or 40 (or more!) years ago.  What I mean is - I have just recognised the truth or insight in the writing that long after reading it.   It's quite surprising, and I just can't see people who have grown up in social media (with ruined attention spans for reading novels) being able to have the same experience, and it does feel like a real loss, but they won't realise it....

Albedo worry

In Science magazine, this abstract:

In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5K above the pre-industrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17K. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers including anthropogenic warming and the El Niño onset fall short by about 0.2K in explaining the temperature rise. Utilizing satellite and reanalysis data, we identify a record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap. The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a multi-annual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will be crucial for assessing the current and expected future warming.

Of course, how to work out the net effect of clouds has been one of the main bugbears of climate modelling.  The skeptic hope was that higher temperatures would mean more cloud and more albedo to keep the earth from getting too hot.  (I thought that was how the late Richard Lindzen's iris effect idea worked, but now that I double check, it was more that cirrus clouds would reduce and allow more IR to escape - so I'm not sure if an increase of lower, brighter clouds was actually part of that theory or not.)  

Anyhow - it remains a major worry that it is unclear whether the modelling has got the cloud effects underestimated, so that global temperature increases could be more rapid than expected.

Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a brief commentary on the paper here.  There is quite a bit of talk in the comments following about whether to credit reduced sulphur emissions from shipping as causing the albedo decrease, too.  

Drones over New Jersey

The story over the last week or so about people claiming there is a lot of unusual large drone activity in the night skies of New Jersey is pretty intriguing.

It made the New York Times on the weekend, but then there is a somewhat skeptical take at this website.

I get the feeling that there is something to it - some of the descriptions of a line of drones one after the other seem unusual.   But - if it is a company trying out some new tech, it's hard to imagine why they (or the authorities wouldn't be open to it.   That's why it's intriguing.  

I have mentioned once before though - it does seem at times that the airspace over parts of the US is not as well monitored as one might assume.   Maybe too many things going on to keep track of all of it?

Please, come over to Bluesky

I see that the Bluesky user counter shows a considerable slowdown in the rate of sign ups since it hit 24 million.  It will take quite a while at this rate to hit 25 million.

That's a pity, because it really has already become a good Twitter replacement.   The only thing I kind of miss is a "trending" list - but half the time those was false alarms anyway.   "Why is this person suddenly trending - has he/she died?"

I would also like to see more local accounts so that I could search for comments on breaking local news. 

But I really recommend people look at it.

Ronny's on a roll

 Speaking of comedians, Ronny Chieng has been on a roll hosting the Daily Show this week.  This day's clip was particularly good I think - every joke seemed to hit:

 

Never really understood talent agents

This has always felt sort of mysterious to me - what agents for actors and comedians actually do on a day to day basis.   

I'm talking about this because of this news:

The Junkyard, managers of Australian comedians like Aaron Chen and Sam Campbell, goes into administration

 Let it be known that, of the younger Australian comedy set, I've always enjoyed Aaron Chen's comedy persona.   That Sam Campbell - well I first saw him recently on an episode of Would I Lie to You (english version) and it was a few years old, but he seemed amusing in a similar eccentric persona to Chen.   But then I think I watched some other clip of him on Youtube and didn't like it, so I dunno.

Anyway, back to the point:   about the only fictional portrayal of a talent agent I can remember is from that Matt Berry series - Toast of London.  And it fitted in with what is probably a widely shared assumption that actor's agents sit around doing nothing much all day other than reading the occasional casting call news and ringing up people on their list and saying "why don't you try this, I think it suits you".   It seems like such a flaky way to make a living - even if, in the case of top Hollywood agencies, it's a very lucrative one.  

But is it really like that?   Does no one do a realistic portrayal of this line of work because it's hard to make "networking" interesting?

Update:   Maybe there was an agent or two featured to a little extent in Bill Hader's dramedy Barry. But I think that shows attack was more against the incredible flakiness of cable television executives.  In fact, I found it kind of amazing that the executives at (I think) HBO let such a damning portrayal of their job be part of the story!  I presume they thought - it's not our network's execs he's attacking - it's the one down the road.

Bigger companies needed when it comes to new, green technology

Gee, this has become a pretty familiar story - a small start up company manufacturing a clean, green energy product that just doesn't stack up in quality and reliability, then goes broke and tarnishes the reputation of clean energy overall:

Redflow was the great hope of Australian manufacturing. Its collapse left customers with broken batteries 

A similar story happened in 2009 with some Stirling engine solar power plant that might have looked cool, but never worked well.   (I see now that even the webpages for the long defunct American Stirling engine solar power company Infinia are gone!   I always liked the look of their dishes.  There's a photo on one of my posts from 2008.)

Not to mention failure to develop geothermal power in Australia:  see this story, and this one.  

[Oh, and I nearly forgot - the failure of various wave energy schemes.  Frankly, this idea has always seemed to me to be extremely dubious - my gut feeling was always that there is too little movement in any single device riding waves to generate significant enough power to be worth the expense and maintenance.] 

The common theme seems to be that they are not crank schemes per se (in that they are systems obviously capable of making energy) - but they need a lot of finesse to make them reliable and economical.   Small companies grab the idea but don't have the resources to make it work like it should - and unfortunately, can start to sell the systems before they are proven.

Seems to me that what it all lacks is big companies with the resources to build and test properly the systems before selling them. 

A drainage issue

Following last weekend's flash flooding around parts of Brisbane, the ABC has this article up:

More wild weather forecast for Queensland raises questions about how Brisbane drains handle intense rainfall

with one guy saying:

"With the bureau forecasting more frequent events, the storm drains across the city simply aren't designed to take in flows of run-off and intense rain," Mr Winders said.

Rather than being flood-resilient, Mr Winders suggests residents need to become "storm-resilient".

"The local council can't do anything about the network, the drains are already in place and there's too much existing development," he said.

"All these things impede the ability of the council to provide any relief from local flooding."

And I suspect he's right.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the article, and that I'm pretty sure would be true, is that Brisbane's drainage system does seems to often handle much higher total rainfall events without flooding, compared to cities such as Melbourne, and probably Sydney too?

I mean, over the years, I have seen many news reports of flash flooding from storms in other cities, and the rainfall totals that caused it often seem to be well under the rainfall we hear about in Brisbane storms or rain events.

So I have always suspected that our drainage system has been engineered to expect higher surges than those of drier cities.   (Melbourne in particular seems to get most of its rain in far less intense events than Brisbane - it's just spread out over drizzly days rather than in 10 or 15 minute bursts like here!)

 But I have never heard an expert confirm that.    

Some quick thoughts (and a regret)

*  A month or so ago, I posted about whether or not I should go see a performance of Beethoven's 9th (for the first time.)   I was encouraged to do so, but delayed buying tickets.  I checked about 9 days ago if seats were available, and some were, but I still didn't book.  Then, on Sunday, I thought I should check again - then thought "whoops - it's December!".   I had become so busy with one work matter that I had completely forgotten the concerts were on last Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  :(   

Maybe I didn't miss much?   Actually, seems I did:  

When the seated choir (Brisbane Chamber Choir Collective) rose to their feet, we were in for a surprise. Unexpectedly, around the concert hall – in the stalls and side balconies – other choir members also stood with opened books. Undercover, plain-clothes, choral operatives had been inserted into the midst of the unsuspecting audience.

As the instrumental and vocal volume swells, Clerici is conducting a 360-degree enterprise. The sound is heavenly, harmonious. Beethoven has played his trump card. The pitch rises as the beautiful voice of the soprano soloist soars above the music and the choir.

The performance earns the orchestra and conductor a standing ovation. Orchestral sections are individually applauded. Clerici shakes hands warmly with the concertmaster, Natsuko Yoshimoto. As the soloists exit, Umberto bows graciously to the two women before giving the baritone a hearty high-five. A tremendous performance by our state orchestra and a triumphant conclusion to the 2024 season.

 Ugh...

*   There was flash flooding yet again in Brisbane last Sunday, yet oddly enough, in my corner of the city, it got dark and a bit thundery, but virtually no rain at all.  Only 15 km down the road, people went to a well know pub car park, only to get their cars inundated:

 

This spring and early summer in Brisbane, and the south east generally, has been so wet that it is making me worried that Brisbane is in for yet another flood this summer. I checked the SEQ Water dam levels, and virtually all are full or overflowing, except for Somerset and Wivenhoe (the ones that protect the Brisbane River from flooding) and they are at 80%.    (The last time I checked, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, they were 80% then, too.  I'm guessing water is being released enough to keep it there.)

But, gee, I don't know.   Seems to me it wouldn't take too much more torrential rain in the right spot to cause another major flood.

*  So, Biden pardoned his son.  I can't get too excited about it, especially with the absolute nutjobs who Trump wants to appoint who seemingly want to spend another 4 years of wasted effort on trying to pin corruption on him.  Jon Stewart isn't happy - but his takes are only right about 75% of the time, it seems...

Your engineering fix for the month

I saw a video on the "Megabuild" channel on the weekend about how Singapore is massively expanding its port facilities, from the seabed up.   It's - kind of amazing:

 

But - if you don't have time to watch that, you can view instead a good multimedia graphics explanation that appeared a couple of years ago at the Straits Times website here.

It also explains something I was curious about - wouldn't the steel reinforcement that is throughout the giant concrete caisson corrode quickly when its in seawater?  Would the whole box be a crumbling mess in 20 years?   

Apparently, it's solved by spraying a sealant on the sea exposed parts.  Huh.

Still here, just busy...

 See above.

Low birthrate

Here's something I didn't know: