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...

Latest libertarian obsession

I'm not entirely sure why libertarians seem so enamored of the charter school idea.   I see the CIS is pushing it, as is Rupert Murdoch*, and of course Catallaxy has the CIS Youtube up which (perhaps unluckily) gives the impression from the frozen initial image that it's all about training young men to be the paramilitary libertarians of the future.   (Libertarians who got there via Starship Troopers tend to get excited by the idea of a righteous military dispensing justice throughout the universe, I reckon.)

I thought that the achievements of this movement was decidedly mixed;  it anything, I thought the initial enthusiasm for them had become somewhat  tempered.

But as I'm sure I've said before, modern education seems a field particularly prone to fadish ideas as to what works and what doesn't.   I tend to think that the silliest ideas did come from the Left side in the 70's, but have been debunked and are no longer  influential. 

I guess the libertarian/small government obsession with market competition alone makes them love the idea of charter schools just on principle, I think.  (That and a hatred of State school teachers more often than not leaning Left.)   Yet a recent story on 7.30 indicated that there is scope for very different approaches within the public school system.

I would have thought that society is better served by improving all schools via such discretion within the public system.  I doubt you need a charter school system at all. (I don't think they played any role in Finland's much lauded school system, did they?)

*  who tweets this morning:  "School choice vastly improves education, thus liberating all families and forever eliminates "victim" excuse. Only one enemy teacher unions"

Wearables and snooping

What could derail the wearables revolution? : Nature News & Comment

I can't work out whether people are going to worry about this much in the future or not.  I figure Google already knows where about a third of the global population slept last night.

Incoherent Molan

Was just listening to retired Army Major General Jim Molan talking on Radio National about the European/Syrian refugee issue.

His performance was utterly incoherent.  He's very keen on endearing himself to the Coalition government, however. 

Retire already, Part 2

Come on, Tony.  You've failed in your attempt to gain political brownie points by suggesting that Europe could, with a land and ocean connection to probably 10 or 20 times the number of refugees who were seeking to get to Australia, follow your high seas quasi piracy and bribing technique.

Still 54/46 to Labor, even with a so-so leader.

Just retire.

Retire already

I see that Thomas Sowell, the black conservative/libertarian economist, has another book out.  He's 85, which is well into the danger zone where public intellectuals are usually best advised to just stop talking, but actually it sounds like he's been pretty foolish for quite a long time:

It’s a funny line—and an instance of what sets Mr. Sowell apart: candor and independence of mind. No one can suggest that he doesn’t say what he thinks. In 1987, while testifying in favor of Judge Robert Bork’s ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, he told Joe Biden, a senator at the time, that he wouldn’t have a problem with literacy tests for voting or with $1.50 poll taxes, so long as they were evenly and fairly applied. When I ask whether he remembers this exchange, Mr. Sowell quips, “No, Joe Biden is forgettable.”

In our interview he maintains that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have stuck to desegregating buses and government services, and let market forces take care of integrating lunch counters. Mr. Sowell says that the precedent set by imposing integration on people like Lester Maddox, a segregationist governor of Georgia who also owned a chicken restaurant, has opened a Pandora’s box. “If you say that Lester Maddox has to serve his chicken to blacks, you’re saying that the Boy Scouts have to have gay scout masters. You’re saying—ultimately—that the Catholic Church has to perform same-sex marriages.”

She drives (some) men nuts

I don't know that it was a good idea having Rosie Batty Australian of the Year, and certainly I have sometimes found her hard to "read" in the few TV appearances on which I have seen her.   But then, so did the public with Lindy Chamberlain, and she paid for that with an unwarranted jail term.  Following that terrible incident, I would have thought that sensible people should take the lesson that, for people who have gone through the horror of a child lost through murder or violence,  it never pays to think you understand them from a handful of media appearances.

Having said that, it is clear that she drives some on the Right absolutely nuts.

I cannot see the offensiveness of the on-line survey she promoted for Father's Day.  What I can see is the repetition of offensive, defamatory and ill founded slurring of the woman that has been commonplace at that blog since her son's death. 

An industry by Royal decree

King of Couture: How Louis XIV Invented Fashion as We Know It - The Atlantic

Even though caring little about fashion, this article about how the Sun King pretty much invented it for France (and the world) is interesting.  Here are a couple of key bits:

When Louis came to the throne in 1643, the fashion capital of the world
wasn’t Paris, but Madrid. Taste tends to follow power, and for the past
two centuries or so Spain had been enjoying its Golden Age, amassing a
vast global empire that fueled a booming domestic economy. Spanish style
was tight and rigid—both physically and figuratively—and predominantly
black. Not only was black considered to be sober and dignified by the
staunchly Catholic Habsburg monarchy, but high-quality black dye was
extremely expensive, and the Spanish flaunted their wealth by using as
much of it as possible. They advertised their imperial ambitions, as
well, for Spain imported logwood—a key dyestuff—from its colonies in
modern-day Mexico. While Spain’s explorers and armies conquered the New
World, her fashions conquered the old one, and Spanish style was adopted
at courts throughout Europe...

Now, how Louis changed this:

Luxury was Louis’s New Deal: The furniture, textile, clothing, and
jewelry industries he established not only provided jobs for his
subjects, but made France the world’s leader in taste and technology.
His shrewd finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously said that
“fashions were to France what the mines of Peru were to Spain”—in other
words, the source of an extremely lucrative domestic and export
commodity. Louis’s reign saw about one-third of Parisian wage earners
gain employment in the clothing and textile trades; Colbert organized
these workers into highly specialized and strictly regulated
professional guilds, ensuring quality control and helping them compete
against foreign imports while effectively preventing them from competing
with each other. Nothing that could be made in France was allowed to be
imported; Louis once ordered his own son to burn his coat because it
was made of foreign cloth. It was an unbeatable economic stimulus plan.

As he waged a never-ending series of expensive wars across Europe, the
French luxury goods industry replenished his war chest and enhanced the
king’s reputation at home and abroad. Louis transformed Versailles—a
dilapidated royal hunting lodge buried in the countryside 12 miles from
Paris—into a showplace for the best of French culture and industry; not
just fashion but art, music, theater, landscape gardening, and cuisine. A
strict code of court dress and etiquette ensured a steady market for
French-made clothing and jewelry. Louis has been accused of trying to
control his nobles by forcing them to bankrupt themselves on French
fashions, but, in fact, he often underwrote these expenses, believing
that luxury was necessary not only to the economic health of the country
but to the prestige and very survival of the monarchy. 

Double down

BBC - Future - The disturbing consequences of seeing your doppelganger

A good read here, relevant to the matter of out-of-body experiences, as well as perception generally.

One of the lengthier stories told also has a "message from the dead" paranormal element too, although the message was a pretty routine one, as far as these things go.  

An interesting disorder

Depersonalisation disorder: the condition you’ve never heard of that affects millions | Society | The Guardian

I haven't heard of it before, but I also wonder whether publicising it may help it spread.  (I am reminded of the Mind Hacks post about the glass body delusion that was once "popular" centuries ago, but no longer is.  I wonder if depersonalisation disorder - while not a delusion as such, I guess - can be contributed to by modern loss of faith in the soul.  The idea that we are all essentially robots for whom consciousness is an illusion would seem to me to be a good precursor to developing  "a sense of complete detachment, a life lived as an automaton or on autopilot, characterised by an absence of emotions, either good or bad.")

I never thought much of him from the start

Alex Gibney's 'The Man in the Machine': Is it Time to Rethink Steve Jobs? - The Atlantic

This may sound silly, but I resist buying into the world of Apple for two reasons:  the way they retain complete control of what's going on under the hood, so to speak; and the disdain with which I view Steve Jobs.

Happy Father's Day (ha!)

Wealthy sperm donor fears contact from more than two dozen offspring

Degree of sympathy I have for this man - approaching zero.

Yet more about "What? Our base are nuts?"

The GOP's Problem Is Not Donald Trump | Mother Jones

It's very hard to feel sorry for those Republicans (and Right wing journalists) who are shocked at the continuing popularity of Trump, when they did nothing for years to tell their nutty base that they are nuts.

As David Corn says, it's not as if the evidence for the nuttiness has been hidden:

Republicans are pissed off. (In polls, they express far more dissatisfaction with the nation's present course than Democrats.) And they believe the nation has been hijacked by President Barack Obama, whose legitimacy most Rs still reject. A recent Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus participants found that 35 percent of Republicans
believe Obama was not born in the United States. A quarter said they were not sure. (Nine out of ten Democrats said the president was born in the United States.) So nearly 60 percent of Rs believe there is cause to suspect Obama has hornswoggled the nation. Meanwhile, according to
another poll, 54 percent of Republican voters say Obama is a Muslim. A third were not
sure. Only 14 percent identified the president as a Christian.


These findings—which echo a long string of surveys conducted during the Obama years—would seem to indicate that at least half of the GOP is unhinged and living in its own fact-free and perhaps Fox-fed reality. To top it off, many Republican voters have expected the GOPers in control of Congress to kill Obamacare, shut down the government and slash the
budget, prevent Obama from issuing executive orders, and impeach the pretender who inhabits the White House. Oh, and there's this: Benghazi! So they are mighty ticked off and seriously disappointed. The Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll found that half of GOP caucus-goers said they were unsatisfied with the US government and 38 percent were "mad as hell" at it. Slightly more than half were unsatisfied with Republicans in Congress; a fifth were mad as hell at them.

 

More black hole speculation

New law implies thermodynamic time runs backwards inside black holes

Maybe all black holes feed back into the big bang?  That's just my speculation: not sure if this article supports it. But it's an idea that appeals, no?

The blog of fools continues...

Steve Kates, who is in perpetual competition with Judith Sloan in the category of "most startlingly ignorant yet arrogant contributor to Catallaxy on climate change", now complains incessantly that the media is useless because they refuse to challenge politicians who believe what scientists say.

But his post yesterday that Obama was "Ignorant and stupid" for talking about projected temperature increases in Alaska if CO2 keeps rising reached some sort of new height for dumb and utter lack of self awareness, even for him.

Obama's comments, if taken to be in Fahrenheit (and why wouldn't they, given the country he leads) are entirely within the range in the National Climate Assessment issued by the US in 2014.

I see that Bolt has seemingly read Kates, and does a Steyn, calling it fraud.

Right wing politics will not be fully respectable again until these fools are called out by Right wing politicians as utter fools on this topic.

One party drug helps another?

Alcohol sales get higher after weed legalization contrary to industry fears | US news | The Guardian

"Weed" is a bit quaint in the headline, but still it's interesting that in Colorado, legal cannabis has not hurt alcohol sales at all.  In fact, they've increased.

So much for drug reform advocates who like to argue that cannabis is a much less harmful drug than alcohol, if it turns out legal cannabis increases alcohol consumption anyway...*


* mind you, given my post about how drug use varies extremely widely from one place to the next, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be a purely local effect.

The unhappy Kant

I'm sure I've read before that he was considered good dinner table company, but according to this interesting article, Kant did suffer from depression:

That Kant suffered from depression may come as a surprise, especially given the ambition of his philosophical books and the enthusiasm of his wide-ranging intellectual interests (his lecture courses cover everything from philosophical logic to anthropology to chemistry to predictions about the end of the world). But in 1798, in a letter to a colleague on the topic of “the art of prolonging human life,” Kant commented on his own struggle with depression. The comments are rare for Kant, both in the sense of being personal and in the way they serve as a confession of weakness. In typical fashion, Kant first defines depression as “the weakness of abandoning oneself despondently to general morbid feelings that have no definite object (and so making no attempt to master them by reason).” A thought without an object is a troubling thing in Kant’s philosophy; it can lead to endless train of fickle thoughts without any ground, similar to the speculative debates in Kant’s time over the existence of God, the origin of the universe, or the existence of a soul. Reason becomes employed for no reason – or at least, for no good reason. At issue for Kant is not just the employment of reason over faith or imagination, but the instrumental use of reason – reason mastering itself, including its own limitations. This was as much the case for everyday thought as it was for philosophical thinking: “The opposite of the mind’s self-mastery… is fainthearted brooding about the ills that could befall one, and that one would not be able to withstand if they should come.”

And as for my nearly forgotten plan to write a movie in which the apparently virginal, intellectual, reserved deep thinker was actually a proto James Bond by night:  well, I may have to be careful with casting:

A little later on, Kant offers this strange confession: “I myself have a natural disposition to hypochrondria because of my flat and narrow chest, which leaves little room for the movement of the heart and lungs; and in my earlier years this disposition made me almost weary of life.”

A trilogy without a face

I hadn't heard before that Iran was making a serious movie trilogy about Mohammad.  

Sounds like the first one is finished*, but don't expect it to look like a Hollywood "Jesus" movie:

The movie focuses on Prophet Mohammad’s childhood. His face is not shown on screen, and the camera shows the boy actor playing him only from behind, or only his shadow.

Seems that a lot of Sunnis from other countries still think it should be banned:

Raza Academy’s joint secretary Mohammad Arif Rizvi said that the movie hurts the “sentiments of Indian Muslims” by showing a person playing the Prophet.

Perhaps use a robot, or puppet, then?

Given that Saudi Arabia barely has movie screenings at all, there's little risk it can cause much public outrage there.

But it would be a odd bit of history if Sunni/Shite fighting escalated over a film that doesn't even show the face of Mo.

* it is, and here's a recent, actually positive, review from The Guardian.

Don't try to point score on such a mess

I'm finding it very distasteful, the way Andrew Bolt is acting as if the humanitarian immigration crisis in Europe is somehow the fault of the Left being soft.   I would have thought that anyone on the Right should be  reticent to make any political mileage out of it, given that it's:

a.  hardly a long bow to draw between instability in Iraq post invasion with the eventual rise of ISIS; and

b.  an appalling multinational problem for which no side of politics could possibly claim to have simple solutions.

Glum about the candidates

The Joe Biden Delusion - The New York Times

I see that Frank Bruni is also glum about the lack of Democrat choice for the candidates for the Presidential election.   Of course, it's not as dire as the Republican situation, but still...

Sounds about right...

Economics Has a Math Problem - Bloomberg View

Noah Smith writes:

Personally, I think that what’s odd about econ isn’t that it uses lots of math -- it’s the way
it uses math. In most applied math disciplines -- computational biology, fluid dynamics, quantitative finance -- mathematical theories are always tied to the evidence. If a theory hasn’t been tested, it’s treated as pure conjecture.

Not so in econ. Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed if they don’t make sense in the context of leading theories. This isn’t a problem with math -- it was just as true back when economics theories were written out in long literary volumes. Econ developed as a form of philosophy and then added math later, becoming basically a form of mathematical philosophy.

I also recently mentioned this problem in economics - there is always "something else going on":

 Basically, Athey and Imbens look at the problem of how to identify treatment effects. A treatment effect is the difference between what would happen if you administer some “treatment” -- say, raising the minimum wage -- and what would happen without the treatment. This can be very complicated, because there are lots of other factors that affect the outcome, besides just the treatment. It is also complicated by the fact that the treatment may work differently on different people at different times and places. A final problem is that the data economists have to answer the question is usually very limited -- a big impediment for traditional econometrics, which generally assumes that the amount of data is comfortably large. Athey and Imbens deal with these issues by importing a method from data science, called a regression tree. Statistically literate readers can peruse their slides here. 

 So my previous guess, that it's the "there's always something else going on" aspect that lets the ideologically motivated economist get away with never having to revise their prescriptions, even when they haven't worked*, seems about right.

* See Laffer and Kansas;  as well as Noah Smith's other recent column Growth Fantasy of Tax Cuts and Small Government.

Future oceans a worry

Climate Change Plus Irreversible Evolution Will Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive – Greg Laden's Blog

Read about this paper, showing the great uncertainty (and great potential problem) that increasing ocean acidification represents to the ecology of the future oceans.

Decent money for good quality

One man's poop is another's medicine - CNN.com

Amusing to read that poo donors in the US make can make some decent money (well, decent pocket money, I guess):

To donate, Eric had to pass a 109-point clinical assessment. There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn't have any infections.

After all that screening, only 3% of prospective donors are healthy enough to give. "I had no idea," he says about his poop. "It turns out that it's fairly close to perfect."

And that, unlike most people's poop, makes Eric's worth money. OpenBiome pays its 22 active donors $40 per sample. They're encouraged to donate often, every day if they can. Eric has earned about $1,000.

More "What? Our base are idiots?"

The Coming Conservative Crackup? | The Daily Caller

As I wrote last month, the shock caused by Trump to many of those on the American Right is the realisation that many of their "base" must be idiots.

More along that line can be read at the above link, which concludes that if Trump really succeeds, it could be the end of the "reasonable" Republicans :

Over at The Federalist, Ben Domenech penned a terrific post the other week, asking “Are Republicans For Freedom Or White Identity Politics?” When I asked him how this might personally impact us, he responded: “Sometimes parties die. Not there yet.”

Maybe not — but it’s probably not too soon to have our exit strategy mapped out. Will we be forced to make a binary choice between belonging to a political philosophy on the Right that is openly nationalistic and xenophobic — or one on the Left that supports (among other evils)
infanticide?

It’s been a trope forever, but we could really have a “stupid” party and an “evil” party on our hands.

Last night's Foreign Correspondent on the Trump campaign was good viewing, too.

Music observations

*  I was playing parental chauffeur all weekend, it seemed (though, thankfully, not to anything sporting - that would be beyond the pale) and after tiring of channel surfing FM Radio, deliberately tried 4KQ, the "anything except from the last 25 years" classic hits AM station for Brisbane.   Which led me to hearing "Bus Stop" by the Hollies for the first time in (probably) several decades. 

Has there been a song with a greater disparity between melancholic melody and happy lyric?   It's a "love found" song that sounds exactly like a "love lost" song.   Or did I miss something before the end where she leaves him for a man with a raincoat instead?   Then again, perhaps I'm the only person in the world who finds the melody depressing?  Weird. 

* I heard Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 for the first time in a while on Saturday night, too.  (Not on 4KQ, but at my daughter's concert.)   The way it has two very disparate bits merged into one made me think of Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime.  Probably someone else somewhere has compared these two bits of music.  Or maybe this is a first. 

*  The choral version of Let the River Run by Carly Simon (the theme from Working Girl) is very good.  (Heard this at son's concert.)   In fact, I think I should compile a list of songs that work better in choral version than the original.   On it so far:  that song from Wicked "For Good";  "Every Step you Take" is great sung by a choir too, but the original remains terribly catchy;  I also have a bit of a soft spot for the kid's version of Flame Trees, but I haven't heard it for a while.

As you were....

Movie biz talk

'Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation' Should Gross Massive $250 Million In China - Forbes

I was curious as to how MI5 has been doing at the box office.  $479 million I see (total world wide).  Good but not fantastic.  (Four years ago, MI4 made nearly $700 million in total.)

Then I checked whether it had opened in China.  It hasn't yet.  But this article shows how important the Chinese movie market has become. 

Krugman on "tech types"

Fear of Asymmetry - The New York Times

Sounds about right to me,  although perhaps he should have mentioned that nerdy types are sometimes unduly attracted to libertarianism, too, and that can be poison to good public policy.

The hard to understand world of quantum computing

Quantum computer that 'computes without running' sets efficiency record

Of course, everyone loves the idea of a computer that works without turning it on.  (It would make some good science fiction comedy in a Douglas Adams novel, one assumes.)  But it's not that easy to follow the theory.

Clueless

Judith Sloan being profoundly dumb to her favourite audience of the wilfully ignorant*, again, all because her local winter was colder than recent ones.  Not even record breakingly cold; just a bit colder.

You'd think she sharpen up on the fence sitting skills, just in case, you know, people who she would like to influence notice that on climate she's the equivalent of an anti-vaxxer - impervious to facts, ideologically committed to an extreme minority view, and a nuisance to good public policy.

And economics is bit math-y and a bit science-y (sort of), so you'd like to think she has a clue on those subjects.

But no, because she has a self selecting audience of the dumb-as-she-is on climate, she flaunts it for all to see.

* Not Q&A, it's just that this was the best photo in which to make her sing.

Heydon explains...

Update:  many amusing tweets to be seen about the Commissioner's techno fail.  Such as this:

Update 2:

It all puts me in mind of this Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, too:

McDonalds and the Power of the Wood Platter

I had been making the observation to my family for about 8 months now:   this idea of serving food on wood platters actually works by making everything taste better.  I don't know how - it seems like some form of culinary Deep Magic - but it works at home as well as at eating establishments.  (We bought a large one for those Saturday nights where we make a meal of a large antipasto style platter.  I swear they taste better since we stopped using the ceramic platter.)

So I have been interested to test this out at McDonalds, where even half alert viewers of commercial television may have realised that they are serving their "Your Creation" burgers on wooden platters - brought right to your table, no less.

I was cynical about this idea - suddenly the joint known for compiling a burger in about 12 seconds flat is going to carefully produce a particularly tasty and attractive one?   Would people go for the extra price (which remains very unclear in all advertising)?

Well, I'm happy to report that yesterday I had my first creation, and it was delicious.   (Cost $10.55 for the burger alone - I stole the kids' chips to make it more economical.)  

The ingredients, for those who are still reading:  brioche bun, one beef patty, swiss cheese, crispy bacon, grilled mushrooms,  caramelised onion, tomato, lettuce, chipotle mayo.    What's more, it was fairly late at night, and I could see the guy compiling my burger.  He really did seem to take care.

During the meal, I mentioned the power of the wood platter several times, as well as the fact that it now simplifies where to eat out for wedding anniversaries. 

I do hope this works out for the company....



    

New kid in town

You know, once you reach your mid fifties, there's a really good way to depress yourself about your advancing years:  work out how old you'll be if the new pup you've just brought home lives as long as the previous dog you had since a pup who died a few months ago. 

Anyway, here she is:

Neat. Fits right in with the "proto-fascist government" meme I've been using...

Border Force to check people's visas on Melbourne's streets this weekend - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

How can anyone think this is going to look like a "positive" to the public?

And why did Lefties over-use "fascist" as an insult to the Howard government, but have under-used it (til now, I'm guessing) against the actual proto-fascist actions of the Abbott government?

Update:

Tony Abbott joins with Border Force, being helpful in Melbourne:

Update 2:  this is, quite possibly, the most spectacularly inept and amusing PR disaster ever orchestrated by a government body.  (The summary misses the instantaneous street protests in Melbourne, but still):


 

Bruni's right...

...it is disconcerting that the American evangelicals are liking Trump:

Let me get this straight. If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Seems to work for Donald Trump.

Polls show him to be the preferred candidate among not just all Republican voters but also the party’s vocal evangelical subset.

He’s more beloved than Mike Huckabee, a former evangelical pastor, or Ted Cruz, an evangelical pastor’s son, or Scott Walker, who said during the recent Republican debate: “It’s only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I’ve been redeemed.”

When Trump mentions blood, it’s less biblical, as Megyn Kelly can well attest.

No matter. The holy rollers are smiling upon the high roller. And they’re proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.

Not sure if this is just a little bit scary...

How a Computer Predicts Schizophrenia and Psychosis - The Atlantic

Most of the time, people don’t actively track the way one thought
flows into the next. But in psychiatry, much attention is paid to such
intricacies of thinking. For instance, disorganized thought, evidenced
by disjointed patterns in speech, is considered a hallmark
characteristic of schizophrenia. Several studies of at-risk youths have
found that doctors are able to guess with impressive accuracy—the best
predictive models hover around 79 percent—whether a person will develop
psychosis based on tracking that person’s speech patterns in interviews.

A computer, it seems, can do better.

 That’s according to a study published Wednesday
by researchers at Columbia University, the New York State Psychiatric
Institute, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in the Nature
Publishing Group journal Schizophrenia. They used an automated
speech-analysis program to correctly differentiate—with 100-percent
accuracy—between at-risk young people who developed psychosis over a
two-and-a-half year period and those who did not. The computer model
also outperformed other advanced screening technologies, like biomarkers
from neuroimaging and EEG recordings of brain activity.

Actually, having recently re-watched the first part of it, this also puts me in mind of the interview technique with the replicants in Blade Runner.

Quantum spookiness confirmed, again?

Spotted in Sabine Hossenfelder's tweets, an article about a new, loophole closing (so it seems) test of quantum spookiness.

Sabine also has a lengthy go at explaining what the physicists are getting at when they talk about the universe being hologram.  I haven't read it carefully, yet, but it seems more-or-less comprehensible.

Checking in on Dyson

At least a metre by end of the century?

Global sea levels have risen 8cm since 1992, Nasa research shows | Environment | The Guardian

Nuts, guns and race

This black nutter killing a couple of white people is going to send the American nutty Right completely over the edge in nonsense and offensive claims.  (I see that it seems they have no hesitation in posting the video, too.)   Let's face it, as countless threads on American Right wing sites attest,  a significant part of those on that side of politics have never gotten over having a black President.

In fact, even Andrew Bolt - not the greatest Australian exemplar for reasonable analysis of race relations, to put it mildly - seems to be endorsing some utterly nonsensical gut reaction from John Hinderaker.

As for gun control, it does seem to me that this is the type of killing that most upsets people:  the senseless type by a person who, while not insane for criminal liability purposes,  clearly has mental issues and nutty obsessions and uses a legally obtained gun.   The less legal guns in circulation in a country, the less of this type of killing happens, no?  Seems a formula pretty clear to most of the world, except Americans.   (OK, unfair - some Americans get it.) 

Somewhere in Sydney, crucial decisions are being made...

Ice mountain?

NASA's latest Ceres photo shows a strange, conical mountain

The sides look like ice.  Or glass. And on the right hand side, looks like a cliff.  Odd.

Physics conference report from a physicist

Backreaction: Hawking proposes new idea for how information might escape from black holes

This provides a "live" insight into the reports of Stephen Hawking thinking they've solved the black hole information problem.

More in the series "Deep Thoughts while Wandering Sydney"

Dyson has a message

PS:  Labor still leading 54/46 in Newspoll?   Shorten improves in net satisfaction?

I think it's official: the Royal Commission is a politically backfiring blunderbuss. 

Fundamentalist idiots with explosives

Palmyra's Baalshamin temple 'blown up by IS' - BBC News

Some background as to why they do this can be found in this article.   Here's a crucial section:

Saudi authorities destroyed this mausoleum, part of the al-Baqi cemetery in Medina, in early 1926, shortly after taking power in the city in the prior year. In fact, they flattened the entire site, which dated back to the seventh century and is thought to have contained the bodies of some of the prophet Mohammed's early compatriots.

The act "shocked the international Muslim community," Dr. James Noyes, author of The Politics of Iconoclasm, told me.


The Saudis didn't just do this on a whim. They were, and still are, aligned with a religious faction called the Wahhabis — a group of Sunni fundamentalists who, like some Christian denominations, reject any form of worship through religious shrines and icons.

"The attacks on shrines and tombs are a rejection of 'shirk' (the worship of God through shrines)," Noyes explained.

Theologically, Wahhabis and other Islamists trace this back to the story of the golden calf that appears in the Koran and the Bible, in which the Israelites build and pray to an idol, sparking God’s fury. A number of Muslims see the story as a blanket prohibition against the worship of images and shrines altogether.

As the Wahhabis and Saudis consolidated control over what's now Saudi Arabia, they destroyed anything that even hinted at idol worship. "The Arabian peninsula used to have Jewish communities, pagan pre-Islamic tribes, shrines favoured by Shiite and Sufi pilgrims on the Hajj to Mecca and Medina, Ottoman and Egyptian influences, and the Hashemite kingdom," Noyes wrote via email.  "All of that is gone."

 

Perhaps more than you needed to know about Gore Vidal

Life out loud | The Economist

This review of a biography of Vidal notes this:

“NEVER lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television” is a
familiar Gore Vidal quip—and, as Jay Parini notes in a marvellous new
biography, Vidal enthusiastically followed his own advice. The sex was
almost always homosexual; invariably “on top”; and usually in the
afternoon, to allow for disciplined writing in the morning and
extravagant socialising in the evening. For Vidal, television meant a
show of eloquent punditry projected on both sides of the Atlantic, but
most memorably—as any trawl through YouTube will confirm—in the form of
confrontations on American chat shows with William Buckley, editor of
the conservative National Review, and with a pugnacious fellow writer, Norman Mailer. ...

Vidal, knowing everyone who was anyone (from Princess Margaret to
Rudolf Nureyev), was certainly a snob. He was also delighted to be rich,
having as a young man not known “where the next bottle of champagne
might come from,” Mr Parini writes. It mattered immensely to Vidal that
he could live well, whether in huge homes in America and Italy or in
comfortable suites at the best hotels in London, Paris and Bangkok.

Yet Mr Parini’s Gore Vidal is a man hiding his shyness with a mask of
suave sophistication and with viper-like scorn for his enemies (he
called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” in one TV clash, and said Truman Capote’s
death was “a wise career move”). Though Vidal accused Buckley of being a
“closet queen”, this was not the retort of a militant homosexual:
Vidal, a “pansexual”, always saw “homosexual” and “heterosexual” as
adjectives, not nouns.

Update:  some far more extreme details of the Gore-ian sex life may be found in this article.   Mind you, I'm mildly dubious about some of the actors he claimed to have slept with.    Gives the impression it was hard to find an actor in the 50's who was not bisexual.