Driverless cars and bad behaviour

I can't say that I have noticed one potential issue about driverless cars being discussed - how will they stop users doing unsavoury things in them whilst going for the ride?

Come on, everyone has heard stories about airline passengers trying to get away with sex under blankets, or in the toilet; and that's in a place with the obvious potential for detection.  I predict it will be barely a week from when the first driverless car fleet comes into service that someone will have a video on the net of "what my girlfriend and I got up to when we didn't have to drive".   Or there'll be some solo act on show.   Maybe big windows will be a daytime deterrent from this.  Not sure about nighttime, though.

How will they stop it?   Photos taken inside every 30 seconds?  Random video monitoring?   Apart from the likely privacy uproar, how hard would it be to cover the camera, anyway?

For that matter, there might also be issues with littering in them; or late night drunks' vomit.   (I suppose if one is too much of a mess, the person being picked up may just report it and wait for the next.  But it would be much better not to have them messed up in the first place.)

I trust Google is working on this...

Just retire, part 3

Good to hear that even Abbott Ministers are now talking about their inglorious leader getting the boot. 

Andrew Bolt doesn't seem to be on the case yet, but surely he'll be out with fear and loathing of a Turnbull leadership any minute now....

Update:   I wonder how Catallaxy threadsters are taking this?

Pretty much as expected, then.

[But honestly, where else but on Australia's "leading Libertarian and Centre-Right blog" can one get such a scintillating mix of quasi homophobic insult and "blame the woman" analysis.]

Update 2:  and how are Catallaxy threadster's coping with political reaction to two women being killed in public by their ex partners in Queensland last week?   And the news that there are about 12,000 breaches of domestic violence orders in Queensland each year?:

Help for the aging gut

Delaying Age Related Diseases by Keeping Gut Bacteria in Balance | Neuroscience News

Interesting research here, showing that fiddling with the gut bacteria of fruit flies as they age can significantly increase their life expectancy.  It would be pretty amazing if they could squeeze an extra 10 years or so of average healthy human life by adjustments to our own gut microbes, too.

As as aside:  I wonder if some scientist is out there gathering the poop of particularly healthy 80 or 90 year olds, and checking the composition of its microbes.  Given the massive interest in this area of research now, I wouldn't be surprised...

Abbott's Canadian inspiration is on his way out

Why David Frum Is Wrong About Stephen Harper and Canada's Conservative Party - The Atlantic

The tactics of Stephen Harper are not identical to those of Tony Abbott, but reading this article, there are certainly many similarities.  I get the impression that Harper may be nastier and much more assertive in private than Abbott, who is probably more just an ambitious dill out of his depth who doesn't know who to listen to.

From this morning's AFR

Explaining the Abbott pathology, one of his senior colleagues said it is rooted in a biblical belief of good and evil, hence his frustrations with a nuanced Obama administration. "Abbott would have us do things in the Middle East that would have had your hair stand up on end," said this individual without going into details.

Link.

He writes well

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show – both a beginning and the end? | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more

Gee.  Guy Rundle's dissection of American late night talk shows is pretty good.  He writes well, even if you can't always agree on every point.

I haven't watched my recordings of Colbert yet.  Maybe tonight.

In Australian political nonsense news...

I see that, apparently, David Leyonhjelm's look-at-me "Nanny State" enquiry  has received most of its submissions on bicycle helmet laws    Not only are Leyonhjelm's findings on this (and any other "nanny State" issue) utterly predictable, so is the fact that experts will disagree with him, and more importantly - it's a State responsibility, not a Commonwealth one.

I see Chris Berg will also turn up and bleat about lock out laws, amongst other things  - again, entirely a State responsibility, and one which the Commonwealth has utterly no power to intervene in.   OK, tobacco plain packaging laws will get a mention too - as if any party except Leyonhjelm's one man show is going to seriously propose undoing those while the smoking figures continue to drop.

This inquiry is a complete and utter waste of time.   I would much prefer that Leyonhjelm pleasure himself in private. 

The fractured Australian Right

OK, it's not (quite) the same level of disaster as the US political situation, but it appears that there are many unhappy campers in the Coalition at the moment.  I wonder how many of them are secretly hoping for a bad result in the Canning by-election, so that a move on Abbott's leadership can be convincingly mounted.

PS:  on the populist Right, Andrew Bolt is in a frenzy of Muslim-mania again, and is virtually unreadable. 

PPS:   according to Phil Coorey, even frontbenchers are saying there'll be another leadership challenge. 

The fractured American Right

Oh look, George Will not only disses Trump, but finds big hypocrisy in the GOP on the matter of gay marriage and the law:

Some, who loudly lament how illegal immigrants damage the rule of law, have found a heroine in Kentucky. A county clerk, whose devotion to her faith is not stronger than her desire to keep her paycheck, chose jail rather than resignation when confronted with having to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitution regarding same-sex marriage.

Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker think her religious freedom is being trampled. So does Ted Cruz, who surely knows better. He clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and must remember the 1892 case in which a Massachusetts policeman claimed that rules restricting political activity by police violated his constitutional rights. Rejecting this claim, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote that the officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

Meanwhile, armed paranoid Right wing nutters claim they will "defend" said clerk, and what's the bet that followers of gormless Gateway Pundit will clap their hands in excitement and approval.  (There are only 2 comments there so far, but I'll check back later.)

The American Right is truly in a crisis of disunity and nonsense. 

A very strange ruse

US politicians face sack for gay sex ruse - BBC News

Tea party Republicans Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat concocted a false
story that Mr Courser had solicited a male sex worker, to make the story
of their affair less credible....

The allegations stem from a spurious email that Mr Courser asked an
aide to send, that claimed he was caught with a male prostitute.

The email was sent to party activists in the hope it would make allegations of his and Ms Gamrat's affair sound less credible.

The report doesn't explain how a Republican politician could think he faced less trouble by spreading a rumour that he used male prostitutes than he could from knowledge of an affair with a woman...

Japanese floods - worldwide floods

The remarkable sight of the Japanese floods on television last night was "old news" by this morning, but yet again, I make the point that flash flooding from increased extreme rainfall is an underacknowledged immediate consequence of global warming.

So I was a bit surprised to read this at the end of one report about yesterday's flood:

Kei Yoshimura, a hydrologist at the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, said the magnitude of the Kinugawa River flooding on Thursday was “something that takes place only once in 100 years.”
He added that it was too early to conclude the flooding was linked to climate change, saying the heavy rainfall happened to occur along that river.
“It’s my view that the effect of climate change on this particular incident is zero, or unknown at this point,” he said.

This is one of those cases of over-caution on the matter of attribution to individual events.  If Kei had wanted to paint the "bigger picture" he might of cited this 2007 paper about increased rainfall intensity in his country:

This paper explores features of long-term changes in precipitation in Japan based on recent studies using daily data from 51 stations since 1901, partly updated for the present article. We show that heavy daily precipitation ( 200 mm and 100 mm) has significantly increased during the last century as weak to moderate precipitation ( 1 mm to 10 mm) has decreased.  New analysis using hourly precipitation records at over 600 stations on the AMeDAS network has shown an increase in very intense hourly and six-hourly precipitations ( 100 mm/h and 300 mm/6h) during the last 28 years.

Or he might have referred to the worldwide trend, as discussed here in a 2012 paper:

Based on the discussions above, we can make the following conclusions. First, the large increase in global average precipitation intensity increase derived from the GPCP data, with the top 10% heavy precipitation increased by about 108% for each degree Kelvin increase in global mean temperature and the bottom 30%–60% bins decreased by about 20% K 1, is credible. Increases in heavy precipitation can lead to more and worse floods and mudslides, while decreases of light and moderate precipitation can increase the risk of droughts. The 100-year linear trend (1906–2005) of global temperature is 0.74 C 0.18 C, and is expected to increase even faster [Solomon et al., 2007].  This implies that the global top 10% heavy precipitation had already increased by about 80% and will continue increase at a faster rate. Meanwhile there are corresponding increases in the risk of droughts. It follows that the increasing occurrence and severity of floods, mudslides, as well as shortage of water resources has been and would increasingly be one of the worst hazards to the global ecosystem as the result of global warming.

The lesson:  this key damaging aspect of climate change is already happening.

And, second lesson:   ANDREW BOLT - YOU ARE WRONG AND A FOOL FOR NOT ACKNOWLEDGING CLIMATE CHANGE HAS LONG BEEN PREDICTED TO INCREASE BOTH FLOOD AND DROUGHT.   

 

When Americans Loved Taxes

Interesting short history here about how Americans used to be enthusiastic about taxes (in the form of tariffs).

All connected

Ocean life triggers ice formation in clouds

This would suggest to me further reason to worry about the unknown, global effects of ocean acidification.

Seeing things

Here's part of the latest close up of the bright spot on Ceres:

Sure, the centre bit is now looking like an ice volcano, if you ask me, but I am more concerned about the odd shaped outline to the upper right that seems to be pointing to it.  Could a rude 14 year old boy already have been there?

Cryptosystems and quantum computers

Online security braces for quantum revolution : Nature News & Comment

What a cool word - "cryptosystems" - which gets used repeatedly in this article about how mathematicians and computer security specialists are trying to keep ahead of the anticipated arrival of quantum computing in 10 or so years time:

“I’m genuinely worried we’re not going to be ready in time,” says Michele Mosca, co-founder of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo in Canada and chief executive of evolutionQ, a cyber-security consulting company.

It will take years for governments and industry to settle on quantum-safe replacements for today’s encryption methods. Any proposed replacement — even if it seems impregnable at first — must withstand multitudes of real and theoretical challenges before it is considered reliable enough to protect the transfer of intellectual property, financial data and state secrets.

“To trust a cryptosystem, you need a lot of people to scrutinize it and try to devise attacks on it
and see if it has any flaws,” says Stephen Jordan, a physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “That takes a long time.”

And how about this science fiction sounding explanation of one of the potential replacements for current public key encryption methods:

One such system is lattice-based cryptography, in which the public key is a grid-like collection of points in a high-dimensional mathematical space. One way to send a secret message is to hide it some distance from a point in the lattice. Working out how far the encrypted message is to a lattice point is a difficult problem for any computer, conventional or quantum. But the secret key provides a simple way to determine how close the encrypted message is to a lattice point.

The only movie I can recall which was specifically about modern encryption was Sneakers, which I found rather dull and completely forgettable.

Seems to me there must be a good speculative but plausible story to do with quantum computing and security failure, but I doubt that it's been written.

Colbert begins

Well, I'm pleasantly surprised to note that Stephen Colbert's much anticipated Late Show is going to be shown in Australia at 11.30pm on the free to air channel that normally just specialises in re-runs of the Simpsons, Futurama and the like.  (Channel 11).

Let's hope they can stick to the timeslot, to make recording easy.

They're taking it well

Following today's bipartisan statement on Australia taking 12,000 Syrian refugees, a comment appeared in Catallaxy:

Now I can not only wonder how the blog owner avoids defamation action, but how he avoids contact from the Federal Police too.

Hard times

The TLS blog: The death of Louis XIV

I recently posted about Louis and invention of modern fashion, and now have spotted a post at TLS that summarises some aspects of his times:

“L’État louis-quatorzien” was above all dedicated to military glory,
on land and at sea. France was, it seems, in perpetual conflict during
his reign: the Fronde, or civil uprisings of 1648 and 1651–3, the Dutch
Wars of the 1670s. In the War of Spanish Succession between 1701 and
1714 nearly 650,000 Frenchmen were mobilized, out of a total population
of 20 million. Cornette calls the French state at the time an
“insatiable Leviathan”. Yet, the defeats multiplied: Ramillies (1706),
Oudenarde (1708), a costly victory at Malplaquet (1709). Added to which
were the terrible winters such as that of 1693–4, during which 1.6
million French citizens perished. A further punishing winter in 1709–10
(average temperatures of –20 degrees C in the Ile-de-France in January
and February, rivers froze over and birds fell out of the sky) carried
off another 630,000 citizens – the death toll less great this time
partly as a consequence of "l'intervention de l'État" (which sounds like
a slightly anachronistic phrase).

Religion: in his lifetime Louis heard 2,000 sermons, attended Mass
30,000 times, i.e. one a day, touched some 200,000 people afflicted with
scrofula (“le roi te touche, Dieu te guérisse”). His detestation of
Protestantism, meanwhile, grew with the years. The revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in 1685 resulted in some 200,000 Huguenot Protestants
choosing exile to England, Holland, or Germany, depriving his country of
a valuable skilled workforce. Jansenists fared little better, being
viewed as dangerous heretics; their headquarters at the abbey of
Port-Royal were closed in 1710, the buildings razed to the ground.


Louis acknowledged at least twenty-two children, of whom six were
legitimate. Cornette writes that there were also “all those, numerous no
doubt, of whose existence we’re unaware”. His affair with Louise de La
Vallière produced five children; only two survived into adulthood. Six
of the nine children borne by the beautiful, spirited Marquise de
Montespan, Louis’s mistress in the 1670s, went past the age of seven. In
Cornette’s nice phrase, after the death of the last of his mistresses,
Mme de Fontanges, in 1681, the King “resolved to think about his
salvation”.

And here he is, showing a bit of leg:

The biggest unresolved historical mystery is how this look ever because fashionable.

Update:  an extract from an old book (I think) about those wigs:

The King himself, absolute as his authority was, was compelled to submit, in some things, to the exigencies of fashion. He continued to wear his enormous wigs when the dimension and the shape of wigs changed. This almost universal change was brought about by the perfumed starch powder which men used for their false hair. In this instance, it was the old who set the fashion instead of the young, and only powdered wigs were worn for the future, whether the hair of which they were made was dark or light. Louis XIV. at first denounced the use of powder very vigorously, but he was assured that it modified the effects of age and softened the expression of the face to which the black wig imparted a hard and forbidding air. He allowed himself to be persuaded into the use of powder, but he would not alter the shape of his wigs, though the gentlemen of the Court had brought into fashion several new kinds: the cavalière for the country, the financière for the town, the square wig, the Spanish wig, etc. People even wore horse-hair wigs, which did not uncurl when exposed to the air. But powder was the special attribute of the dandies, who never appeared in public without being powdered down even to their justaucorps. Everybody rejoiced in a white head, and one courtier ventured to remark to Louis XIV.: "We all wish to appear old, so as to be taken for wise." Powder led the way to the reduction in the size of wigs, from beneath which gradually emerged the natural hair, powdered and pomaded, gathered up at the back of the neck with a piece of black ribbon, and enclosed in a net which fell upon the coat collar.

For a proper understanding of drugs policy in Portugal, read this

I've complained for years that praise for the Portuguese drugs policy has always seemed simplistic and overblown, especially when coming from libertarians. 

Well, I've found a paper (.pdf available here) from a credible sounding source that supports my take on this, and explains why so many of the claims about the Portuguese reform do not reflect the full story.

Here's the abstract:

 In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the acquisition, possession, and use of small
quantities of all psychoactive drugs. The significance of this legislation has been misunderstood. Decriminalization did not trigger dramatic changes in drug-related behavior because, as an analysis of Portugal’s predecriminalization laws and practices reveals, the reforms were more modest than suggested by the media attention they received. Portugal illustrates the shortcomings of before-and-after analysis because, as is often the case, the de jure legal change largely codified de facto practices. In the years before the law’s passage, less than 1 percent of those incarcerated for a drug offense had been convicted of use. Surprisingly, the change in law regarding use appears associated with a marked reduction in drug trafficker sanctioning. While the number of arrests for trafficking changed little, the number of individuals convicted and imprisoned for trafficking since 2001 has fallen nearly 50 percent.  

One key point is that even before the drug reform, it was not as if they were jailing huge numbers of drug users in that country:

In 2000, for example, the year before the decriminalization law went into effect, there were only twenty-five individuals in prison for crimes involving drug use. Another 121 individuals, roughly 3 percent of the incarcerated drug offender population, had traffic-consumption convictions. In other words, before decriminalization, the courts could, but rarely did, impose prison sentences on convicted drug users; after passage of the Decriminalization Act, incarceration was no longer an option.18

The paper, near the end, notes this (my bold): 

Despite the Cato Institute’s celebration of Portugal’s drug reforms, the reforms were not a move toward liberty, but a shift from one arena of government involvement to another. Portugal’s Decriminalization Act is not based on a principle of an individual’s right to consume drugs free from state intrusion. The Act still prohibits drug use subject to citation, and cultivation for personal use remains criminally prohibited. 

Before that, it notes the high number of people who are getting treatment for drug use (with increased drug treatment services being a key change of the reform): 

Data indicate that the number of treatment centers and number of individuals receiving treatment increased with the implementation of decriminalization, although data on the country’s financial investment pre- and postreform are not available. In 1998, the first year of data collection on drug treatment centers, 23,654 drug users received some form of drug treatment. The number rose to 29,204 in 2000, the year before implementation of the Decriminalization Act; by 2008, the total number in treatment reached 38,532 (IDT 2009).37 These numbers included both clients in day-treatment programs and individuals in opioid substitution treatment, the latter of which accounted for roughly three-quarters of the total treatment population count. Consistent with the explicit intention of the drug reforms to increase treatment availability, the number of reporting outpatient treatment centers grew from fifty-three in 1998 to seventy-nine in 2010.

It also makes the point that drug seizures have not changed much since the change in the law (well, heroin did peak in the 1990's, but cocaine and hashish seizures show no big reduced trend).  Furthermore, while the number of people incarcerated for drug offences has dropped from a late 90's peak, it is still at about the same level as the mid 1990's.   These figures suggest that there has not been any massive drop off in policing of drug laws, as drug trafficking is indeed still unlawful.   This also suggests that the funding for increased drug rehabilitation services has not come from massive savings on policing.  (This being the claimed benefit of following the Portuguese policy in Australia in this article yesterday.)

So what about the Commissions which drug users can face?   They can order that addicted drug users get treatment, but it's not as if even casual cannabis users are given a cheery "on your way" by the police:

Since 2001, the Commissions processed between 3,500 to 5,500 cases per year, and resolved 85 to 90 percent of them with provisional suspensions.21 Estimates indicate that 60 percent to 70 percent of the suspensions involved nonaddicted consumers (IDT Annual Reports, 2002–2010). As discussed previously, a concern regarding the growing population of heroin users was the primary motivation for the decriminalization initiative. Despite this impetus, in practice, most of the individuals who appeared before the Commissions have not been problem drug users. Instead, the majority of the issued citations for drug use have been to increasingly younger, nonaddicted, cannabis users. The proportion of cases involving cannabis has steadily grown, from approximately 50 percent of the cases during the Commission’s first eighteen months of operation to 76 percent of the cases in 2009 (IDT 2002; IDT 2010).22 The composition of the Commission’s caseload raises questions concerning the efficacy and efficiency of a system developed, in principle, to treat problem drug use but that, in practice, spends most of its time and resources processing nonaddicted marijuana users.

Obviously, I'm not arguing that the Portuguese policy is a disaster, and I think everyone can agree that the American system has placed way too much emphasis on incarceration in its drugs policy.

But while I suspect libertarians are sniggering (or horrified) by Jacqui Lambie trying to get up some system by which ice addicts can be ordered into rehabilitation, her proposal is not a million miles away from the Portguese system, which they have uncritically embraced time and time again.

One of the key lessons of the Portuguese system seems to be for governments to fund  serious increase in drug addiction treatment services.  How many "libertarian/small government" types do you hear pushing for that?

 

Fantastic television

Tonight's Foreign Correspondent was Tashi and the Monk, and it was extraordinarily good.

Touching, humane and beautiful in all senses, I also have no idea how it could be made with such naturalism - no one (and we are talking mainly children) ever seems aware of the camera or appears self conscious.  It looks like it was outsourced, being made by whoever Pilgrim Films is, but if this doesn't win some sort of award, I'd be very surprised.

It's the best 30 minutes of television you're likely to see all year...