Yoof movies noted

Exhibit 1:   I hired it with low expectations, which were pretty much confirmed, but watching Fast & Furious 7 on DVD made me wonder how this series manages to be internationally hugely successful.  (The only other one I have seen much of, however, is Tokyo Drift.  Maybe I saw a bit of the first one, too.  They're not exactly memorable.)

The key seems to be that they are aimed squarely at the interests of males aged 14-18, which means there is considerable overlap with those up to the age of 30, too.   But then there is also the obvious marketing to the girlfriends of said primary audience, what with the hunky, good hearted lead actor; the continual emphasis on family and relationships; and the physical toughness and competency of the female leads.

This does make for some oddly mixed messages - the soft porn objectification of the women incidental to the story sits uncomfortably alongside the kick ass "girls can do anything" feminism and interest in relationships of the female leads.   I get the feeling that a large part of the international success might be simply from the producers knowing exactly how much female skin they can get away without ratings interfering with the male teenage audience in key markets.   (The ethnic mix of the cast doesn't hurt, too.)

Anyhow, parts of FF7 reminded me a lot of Mission Impossible, except that their stunts really are, well, impossible.

I don't find the movies offensive, but they are very, very silly and really don't deserve to do as well as they do.

Exhibit 2:    My son has read the Maze Runner books, and the first movie was OK in a young adult way, so it was off to see Scorch Trials, the second in the series, last night.

Turns out it's a mish mash of the post apocalyptic and zombie genres: a bit Mad Max, a bit World War Z, making it less interesting than the first movie, which I still don't really understand.  (My son assures me that, although the books are increasingly different from the films, it all makes sense by the end.  I have my doubts.)

Look, it's very well executed in a visual effects sort of way - green screens and computer graphics can create really convincing looking vistas of devastated cities these days; but even some of the physical sets looked great.   (Although, again, perhaps I am being fooled as to how much of what I am seeing of the cavernous interior of a decrepit shopping mall is real.)

There is one particularly odd scene, though, where they seem to stumble upon a still functioning equivalent of Studio 54 (under gay management, for some reason) in the midst of the rubble of a metropolis.  A roughly equivalent scene is apparently in the book - I think it was in the movie so as to let in a drug addled kiss from the lead actor - but it was a bit weird.*

Back to the positive - the action is competently handled. 

But they need to wind this series up soon - I was surprised how much older the actors looked in this film compared to the first, especially the young female lead.

And this morning, while shaving, I suddenly realised - "hey, unless I'm mistaken, those dudes wandering the deserts and dilapidated cities for a week or two never seemed to grown a hint of stubble."   Maybe they are truly mutants.

* Update:  I have only seen a little of the Hunger Games movies (the basic premise has no appeal) - but did Scorch Trials throw in a touch of camp weirdness inspired by them?   Certainly, though, it would seem to be a common thread of these young adult series that it's a case of "The oldies - they're just using us!  We have to fight back!"


Update 2:   Oh look, you can learn about the digital rendering of the post apocalypse in this video.  It's pretty incredible how actors now just have to imagine what they are looking at in movies like this:




Update 3:   my son complains that I sound too critical of Scorch Trials.  Let me be clear:  I officially declare it "o-kaaay", provided you say that with the correct inflection that indicates you have reservations...

Some American gun history

Slavery, the Second Amendment, and the Origins of Public-Carry Jurisprudence - The Atlantic

From the article:

As early as 1840, antebellum historian Richard Hildreth observed that
violence was frequently employed in the South both to subordinate slaves
and to intimidate abolitionists. In the South, violence also was an
approved way to avenge perceived insults to manhood and personal status.
According to Hildreth, duels “appear but once an age” in the North, but
“are of frequent and almost daily occurrence at the [S]outh.” Southern
men thus carried weapons both “as a protection against the slaves” and
also to be prepared for “quarrels between freemen.” Two of the most
feared public-carry weapons in pre-Civil War America, the “Arkansas
toothpick” and “Bowie knife,” were forged from this Southern heritage.

The slave South’s enthusiasm for public carry influenced its legal
culture. During the antebellum years, many viewed carrying a concealed
weapon as dastardly and dishonorable—a striking contrast with the values
of the modern gun-rights movement. In an 1850 opinion, the Louisiana
Supreme Court explained that carrying a concealed weapon gave men
“secret advantages” and led to “unmanly assassinations,” while open
carry “place[d] men upon an equality” and “incite[d] men to a manly and
noble defence of themselves.” Some Southern legislatures, accordingly,
passed laws permitting open carry but punishing concealment.  ...

In the North, publicly carrying concealable weapons was much less
popular than in the South. In 1845, New York jurist William Jay
contrasted “those portions of our country where it is supposed essential
to personal safety to go armed with pistols and bowie-knives” with the
“north and east, where we are unprovided with such facilities for taking
life.” Indeed, public-carry restrictions were embraced across the
region. In 1836, the respected Massachusetts jurist Peter Oxenbridge
Thacher instructed a jury that in Massachusetts “no person may go armed
with a dirk, dagger, sword, pistol, or other offensive and dangerous
weapon, without reasonable cause to apprehend an assault or violence to
his person, family, or property.” Judge Thacher’s charge was celebrated
in the contemporary press as “sensible,” “practical,” and “sage.”
Massachusetts was not unusual in broadly restricting public carry.
Wisconsin, Maine, Michigan, Virginia, Minnesota, Oregon, and
Pennsylvania passed laws modeled on the public-carry restriction in
Massachusetts.

Games they play

UK global warming policy foundation (GWPF) not interested in my slanted questions

There's been some silliness going on about a "review" of the temperature record that the "no, no, we're the reasonable climate skeptic" group GWPF  announced earlier this year.  Read VV's account, and follow some of his links, to know more...

Education can help motivated reasoning

As several articles over the last few years have explained:

It should be no surprise that the voters and politicians opposed to climate change tend to be of a conservative bent, keen to support free-market ideology. This is part of a phenomenon known as motivated reasoning, where instead of evidence being evaluated critically, it is deliberately interpreted in such a way as to reaffirm a pre-existing belief, demanding impossibly stringent examination of unwelcome evidence while accepting uncritically even the flimsiest information that suits one's needs.

And today I'm reading about some New Hampshire survey results which show that a good education can help with successful self delusion.  It's from a post at And Then There's Physics, where the following table appears:

Yep, if you're a Republican, a better education can actually make you less likely to believe in AGW.

And here is the explanation from the post:

After politics, education is the second-strongest predictor of views on climate. But politics can neutralize or even reverse the effects of education. College-educated respondents more actively assimilate information in accord with their prejudices, whether these prejudices incline them toward scientific or ideological sources. Figure 3 depicts the probability of a now/human response as a function of education and politics (details here). The pattern is reproduced with remarkable consistency across 34 surveys. Among Democrats and Independents, agreement with the scientific consensus rises with education. Among Republicans, agreement with the scientific consensus does not rise with education, and sometimes even falls. This fall becomes steeper if we separate Tea Party supporters into their own group.

 The "motivated reasoning" blog par excellence in Australia is, of course, one beginning with the letter "C"....

Krugman's not impressed

And Then There Were None - The New York Times
He wrties:

I do want to weigh infor a minute on Donald Trump’s tax plan — which would, surprise, lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit. That’s in contrast to Jeb Bush’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit, and Marco Rubio’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.

At this point there are no Republican candidates deviating at all from the usual pattern.
Why, it’s almost as if nobody in the party ever cared about deficits except as an excuse to slash social spending, and is totally committed to redistributing income upward.

And there is, of course, no evidence — zero, nada, zilch — that cutting taxes on the rich will yield large economic benefits.

What we’re seeing here is a party completely incapable of reforming

The Possibilist Transactional Interpretation

Quantum Physics And The Need For A New Paradigm : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

Well, I think I've mentioned the transactional interpretation of quantum physics before, but maybe not the Possibilist TI idea?   I would have to check...

Sounds a good theory for ensuring even more quasi mystical explanations of the universe than ordinary quantum physics did in the 1970's and 80's.

Update:   my post about the tranactional interpretation was in 2009, and the paper referenced does seem to start talking about the "possibilist" bit towards the end.    (Hey, I think I'm doing reasonably well to remember the transactional interpretation at all, given that it seems to get little publicity.)

Please indulge me - it's for society's own good

The battle against inequality will continue until we change our attitudes towards parenting

I don't want to go all Mark Latham on her or anything, but  it is irritating to read this navel-gazing, oh-child-birth-and-baby-rearing-are,-like,-the-hardest-thing-ever,  and all government policy must be geared to allow women like me to get back into the workforce the minute they want to, attitude of Jessica Irvine.  

Public transport win

Exclusive figures show Gold Coast light rail’s first year a success | Gold Coast Bulletin

I haven't taken a drive down to the Gold Coast since the light rail opened, so I was curious if it was working as planned.

As the report linked above says, the first year's figures show it has well exceeded predicted usage.

Good to see that something failed Prime Minister Abbott (that has such a satisfying ring to it) didn't have time for (public transport) can work. 

Libertarians and gullibility

So, Sinclair Davidson can still feel it in his bones, or something, that the Bureau of Meteorology uses a "flawed" method for how it makes adjustments for the temperature record.  

I've dealt with the matter of the intense gullibility of anyone swayed by Jennifer Marohasy or "Jonova" before - no need to repeat it.  

But it seems a good time to note out that, no matter what (some) Catholics may believe about a flying, miracle performing monk, the last couple of Popes have at least accepted scientific advice and been promoting government action to address global warming, making them far less of a danger to the future of the planet and humanity than libertarians.

Some gullibility doesn't really matter all that much - other gullibility does.  

Bilocation and gullibility

Last week, after I mentioned quantum teleporting, I was reminded that it was the feast day for the recently canonised Padre Pio, and one of the things claimed about him during his life was his ability to bilocate.  Some further reading was called for.

I've never paid much attention to the Padre Pio story.  I had read years and years ago that it was suspected that his stigmata were caused, or at least maintained by, the secret application of carbolic acid, and that many in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at the time tried to dampen down what they saw as a dangerous cult-ish devotion to him.  That's not a good start for someone on the path to sainthood, yet John Paul II, the Pope who canonised so many saints that even conservative publications were asking whether it was too many, had met him (in 1948) and was happy to add him to the list in 2002.

There are, of course, many websites that discuss Padre Pio, most of them pious Catholic ones that simply repeat the litany of the claimed miracles.  He was what one might call a paranormal star, with the alleged ability to read minds, emit a flowery odor of sanctity (one of the easiest saintly things to fake, of course), but also there are many claims of  miraculous cures up to and including raising the dead (!).   But when it comes to stretching the limits of credibility, even the revival of the (apparently) dead and the bilocation stories are small change.  (And none of them, incidentally, appear particularly convincingly evidenced beyond anecdote.)   The "best" story about Pio by far is that he could not only levitate, but actually flew into the sky above his monastery and diverted Allied bombers in World War 2.  This weird story is discussed in detail at Beachcomber's blog here.  [Ok, maybe it was more a case of his bilocated image only appearing above his monastery, not his body.  But still....]

As for more skeptical short takes on Padre Pio, the best I have read so far is the one by Alexander Stille called The strange victory of Padre Pio.   It's a review of a book, actually, and it puts some particularly interesting political and social context to the rise of the saint (ha, a bit of a pun there...)

This passage, about a fraudster who attached himself to the local star is particularly odd:

 “A dozen years after the stigmata first appeared on the Capuchin friar’s body his cult looked ready to burn out,” Luzzatto writes. “But there was something that Padre Pio’s enemies had not taken into account.” That something or someone was Emanuele Brunatto, whom Luzzatto describes as “a con man of great talent, infinite imagination, and world-class enterprise…a chronic liar, a ruthless extortionist, and an incorrigible double-dealer.”

Brunatto, who had been convicted of fraud, had found his way to San Giovanni Rotondo in the early 1920s and attached himself to Padre Pio—perhaps to escape from the law, perhaps out of genuine religious devotion, perhaps because of his remarkable instinct for opportunity, and perhaps through some combination of the three. Brunatto wrote one of the first biographies of the future saint (which the Church promptly banned) and skimmed money from the flow of cash arriving from around the world to Padre Pio, according to one Church report. When Padre Pio found himself reduced almost to a condition of house arrest, Brunatto fought back with the methods he had acquired in his earlier life. He assembled a dossier of the alleged misdeeds and sexual misconduct of the Puglese clergy and, at a high-level meeting at the Vatican, threatened to publish it as a book. Not long after, the Church decided to lighten most of the restrictions on Padre Pio’s ministry.

In the early 1930s, this imaginative man cooked up an investment scheme for the followers of Padre Pio, putting himself at the head of a company that would sell locomotive patents. With Padre Pio’s backing, Brunatto raised millions of dollars, set himself up in Paris, and traveled the continent living grandly and supposedly selling patents to the governments of Europe. The one attempt to build a locomotive based on one of the patents proved a fiasco, but Brunatto succeeded in keeping the scheme going for several years while insisting that the company was inches away from a major bonanza.

Padre Pio does not appear to have profited from the scheme. The investors, of course, lost all their money and Brunatto moved on to other dangerous games, among them spying for the Fascist police. During World War II, Brunatto made a fortune as a black marketer and collaborationist, selling rationed foodstuffs and keeping the German army supplied with French wines and champagne. With extraordinary foresight, he placed a portion of his stratospheric profits into a charitable fund to help Padre Pio build a hospital in San Giovanni Rotondo. Certainly, this charitable act proved helpful when Brunatto sought (and managed) to avoid a lengthy prison sentence for collaboration with the Nazis.

It is an incredible story, but not quite in the way the hierarchy of the Church now wants to promote.

Another review of the same book is here, extracting a few more details, including that the very lifelike face of the deceased saint (who Pope Francis will have displayed at Saint Peter's Basilica next year) is a silicon mask made by a London wax museum.  (Not that this is a big secret, exactly:  I see it mentioned on several Catholic sites and in the media reports about when the body first went on display.  But I wonder how clearly this is specified at his tomb, which one site says is the second most visited Catholic shrine in the world.)

Of course, while it may be accurate to say his canonization does not necessarily mean the Church believes all of  the very folkloric stories of his living miracles (the couple of post mortem medical recoveries relied on  are detailed here), it's worrying evidence for the gullible mindset of some adherents to the Faith that this Saint carries so much "baggage", so to speak.

But Googling around, I found some even stranger bilocation discussion, this time from a book with the intriguing title of The Quantum Vision of Simon Kimbangu.  (Just Google it and bilocation to find the pages I am referring to below.)   Kimbangu was a controversial Congolese  religious figure of the same vintage as Padre Pio (first half of the 20th century),  who apparently still has a church named after him.

As for the book, it makes some unverified claims (including a repeat of the airborne Pio story):

 The amusing thing is, the story of the appearance of Kimbangu to Ekutu Camile is described on the previous page in the book, but the bilocated visitor claiming to be Kimbangu was a white European (not black, as the "original" Kimbangu most certainly was.)  No problem-o:

When it comes to bilocation, anything seems possible.

Dubious about hyperloops

How two L.A. start-ups are racing to develop transportation more amazing than self-driving cars - LA Times

Well, it's interesting to read about two different groups now investigating hyperloop transport ideas, but I remain skeptical about them for a few main reasons:

a.   as passenger transport, it looks like it could readily induce claustrophobia in anyone even vaguely susceptible to it;

b.  why would you build one in such a major earthquake zone such as California?  Seems to me to be rather like inviting trouble in exactly the same way that common sense would have suggested that building many nuclear power plants in Japan may not be the best idea;

c.  even if it works out cheaper than road or rail transport for goods, how many years will it take to recover its high capital costs if you are relying on goods transport as a key source of profit?

Still, I'm not opposed to people working on it.  I wonder if it might work out better as a transport feeder system on a smaller scale than that originally proposed.  

Andrew's love letter

Andrew Bolt is getting much ridicule on twitter for his embarrassing love letter to Tony Abbott which takes the approach that he was too good a man to be Prime Minister:

This is a rather strange take on the matter of a politician who admitted lying to journalists and specifically warned them never to trust anything he said off the cuff.  Also odd when you consider that Abbott dumped his promise to fix up the Racial Discrimination Act so that something like the action against Bolt couldn't happen again.

Perhaps Andrew is suffering from the same sort of syndrome that stops abused spouses from leaving their partner?

Update:   Steve Kates, the nutty economist, joins in the mourning: 

 The media and the left are among the people least capable of seeing goodness in others. And it’s not as if these qualities were invisible even to those of us who were not among his friends. If you are part of the anti-Abbott collective of this country, you are part of the problem and in no way part of the kind of humane solutions Tony Abbott tried to bring to political decision making in this country. We are all the worse for his departure. There are some who do not know this because they are so shrivelled inside that they incapable of knowing this. But there are some, thankfully, who understood what a great Prime Minister we had and know exactly what we have lost.

On the "That's ludicrous!" scale of 1 to 10, that opening sentence scores a 12.   It seems to come from a man who never reads the threads at the blog he posts at. 

Silly but funny

Conan O'Brien has always done silly comedy very well, and this is a great example:

Spring garden scenes, 2015

I usually post garden flower photos in Spring each year, and here are a selection from this morning:

And OK, this may not be from the garden, but it's the pup doing her Ewok impersonation that makes my daughter squeal about cuteness:

Just getting it ready in case he disappoints

Malcolm, whatever you do, don't be that man.....OK?

Big smoke in Singapore

Singapore closes schools and slams Indonesia over its hazardous-level smoke haze response - ABC News 

Singapore, as well as neighbouring Malaysia, has been cloaked in
smoke blown-in from tinder-dry Sumatra island for about three weeks —
the worst such episode since mid-2013 in a crisis that grips the region
annually during the burning-off season.

The closure of primary and
secondary schools, as well as government-run kindergartens, is
unprecedented, the Straits Times said as the air quality index hovered
above 300.

Makes one feel a bit pessimistic about CO2 reduction when parts of the world can't even their act together over visible pollution.

Not much love for Peta or Tone

When both Barry Cassidy and Janet Albrechtsen agree that Peta Credlin was a massive failure as a PM's  Chief of Staff, I don't think any reasonable person can think otherwise.

Janet's not even showing much love for Abbott in this paragraph:

To be sure, history will record Abbott as the master of his own tragic demise. As prime minister, he bears the responsibility for failures over the first budget, the poor sales pitch, the broken promises, the failure to court independents in the Senate, the search for excuses rather than for a way forward, the belated dumping of the Medicare co-payment and the paid parental leave scheme, the crazy knighthood, and the wrongheaded reaction to Bronwyn Bishop’s greedy use of taxpayer money. And more.

Is she still Michael Kroger's partner?   I don't recall what he used to think of Abbott.

Honestly, apart from the likes of the nutty Steve Kates, and frustrated commentators who have lost their perceived control of the party (Bolt, Jones, Hadley), the amount of sympathy being shown for Abbott is remarkably small.   This must feel pretty humiliating.  (And no, I am not inviting sympathy even for that.) 

First World tragedy played out for all to see

Why I'm ditching my Android phone and going back to iPhone (for now)

To my friends who said I was making a mistake by switching to Android —
Nick, Cory, Brent, James, Chris, Jordan, and just about every single
other friend I have, all of whom seem to have iPhones — I'm sorry. You
were right. I hate being known as "green text message guy"; I want to be
blue iMessage man. Can we still be friends?

I feel like smacking him across the face with my Samsung TabS for being so annoyingly First World, Apple Fanboy, whiny.  Except it might hurt my tablet.

That's all it takes?

Stampede caused by breakdown in pilgrims’ flow | GulfNews.com

“As we were walking towards Al Jamarat, the flow suddenly stopped with
an apparent reason,” Mohammad, a pilgrim, told Sabq. “A few minutes
later, a large group of people came from the back and pushed us, causing
the stampede. Women started to cry and several old people fell on the
ground. Only the intervention of the security and medical authorities
saved us from a bigger tragedy,” said Mohammad who was still being
treated for his injuries.

Um, I don't get why a "stop in the flow" is enough to cause a "stampede".   The ones who push from behind may cause some concern among those who cannot move forward, but why do they keep pushing if it's achieving nothing?   I think there must be some strange laws of crowd behaviour I don't understand here.

Update:  this explanation at the ABC suggests it might be more of a case of a "crowd crush" than a "stampede".  Which would make a bit more sense.   Still, it seems a bit odd to me that crowds, when not worried about escaping from a danger, simply can't stop when it's obvious no one is moving...

Update 2:  some more detailed discussion of how crowd crushes happen is at Wired.

PJ is not impressed

P.J. O’Rourke on why Trump will collapse, Ann Coulter’s a fraud, and how National Lampoon created modern comedy - Salon.com

I think it fair to say that, as a sort of libertarian-lite, PJ O"Rourke has been unhappy with the fuddy-duddy, old man establishment Republicans for a long time; but it appears he thinks even less of the current state of the party, as reflected in its Presidential candidates.  Fair enough.