Birth order and consequences

This very long review of a couple of new books about the history of the Castrato contains a lot of information.  Here are a couple of paragraphs, noting which boys got to draw the short straw, so to speak:

It began, it seems, because women were not allowed to sing in church,
and, in the Papal States, were banned from singing at all. ‘It is
important to bear in mind,’ Feldman writes, ‘that castrations for
singing, beginning well before 1600, took place only in Italy,
geographic heartland of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.’
While London warmed to castrati, and paid them fortunes, the English did
not castrate their own. One contemporary of Handel’s commented on this:
‘You Englishmen complain that castrati are too costly, so that too much
money ends up in Italian lands, but if you want to make all this use of
them and [still] make savings, it’s amazing that for such a profit you
still can’t castrate there.’

Castrati, for Feldman, can be understood as the second sons of Italian families who, instead of goinginto the military or the church, took up singing, and in order to excel
had to make a sacrifice. She notes that castration arose at a time in
Italy when the eldest son got most or all of the inheritance. For one of
the others, getting castrated was a way to deal with the problem of
making a living. She writes rather well about this notion of sacrifice,
quoting Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, two late 19th-century writers on
the general subject of sacrifice. They wrote, according to Feldman, that
the victim ‘somehow has to be ravaged in a solemn but devastating way …
The end goal is to sanction the victim so as to authorise him for a
special purpose, removing him … from ordinary life … by radical
alteration that leads to a kind of rebirth. Thereafter the victim, now
improved, mediates between sacred and profane worlds.’

The start of an amusing series?

Beachcomber apparently intends to make this an occasional series - examples of "crazy couplings", being famous people who were wildly incompatible but nonetheless had sex.  The first - Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler.

[What a daggy haircut Arthur has in that photo, by the way.  And the one of Simone is in colour, which gives it that trick of making a scene look more contemporary than it really is.]

Re-visiting The Shining

I've no great interest in the Stephen King oeuvre - I've never read his books or watched the mini series based on them.  And as for the movies based on his novels - I am usually seriously underwhelmed, if I see them at all.

The one exception: The Shining, which I re-watched for the first time in 35 years last weekend.

I had forgotten how magnificently creepy and disturbing it could be.  I love the formalism and effectiveness of Kubrick's direction here - apart from following the cycling boy, the camera is often determinedly stationary, and the editing leisurely, in a way that itself feels otherworldly.  (Not sure if that was the intention - from memory, Kubrick did just like keeping the camera steady for long periods in whatever he was making.)  Jack Nicholson was at the peak of his career and simply couldn't have been better. 

I remember that the film did not win over everyone:  Pauline Kael was no great fan.   And it's true - I wouldn't call it a perfect film; but then again, I don't know that I ever categorise films that way.  In this case, sure I can understand criticism that Nicholson's descent into ghost addled madness and aggression started too quickly; and at some points the (largely) creepily effective score was being just too obvious.

But overall, I think it's a great film. 

Interestingly, I see that King never liked it, and didn't appreciate the underwriting of the wife's character (although I think Shelley Duvall does well with the material), as well as other substantial changes from the book.   But hey, if you had Kubrick writing and directing, you don't really expect warm, well-rounded characterisation on the screen; that's just a given.  But it is, I think, probably Kubrick's most accessible film, in the sense that it works at an emotional level, rather than being just coolly cerebral, like most of his other work. 

Tough days for the yakusa

Are Japan's crime clans going out of business? Tea with a yakuza. - CSMonitor.com

Lots of fascinating details in this report, but the key point is that legal actions are finally eating into the size and strength of the yakusa.  I found this bit rather amusing:

Japan's post-1980s economic swoon hasn't been all bad. Yakuza made
money from "cleaning up"  bad loans, distressed assets and bankrupt
companies. "Dispute resolution" remains a core activity, partly due to
Japan's notoriously slow and expensive legal system. "We can get things
done quicker," says Kumagai. 

"Dispute resolution"!  Ha.

Double slits and quantum gravity

Backreaction: A newly proposed table-top experiment might be able to demonstrate that gravity is quantized

This is one of Sabine Hossenfelder's more readily accessible posts about a major issue in quantum physics.

[Just this weekend, while driving, I was trying to give a verbal description of the twin slit experiment to my son, but this post reminds me that I stopped at photons, and didn't continue to make the important point about electrons doing the same.  No wonder he was underwhelmed.  Tonight over dinner, perhaps!]

A death noted

As much as I disliked, and puzzled over the popularity of, Sam de Brito's Fairfax career of over-sharing, I had noticed that he had started writing on topics other than himself, even though I had come to rarely read him.   But as it happens, I had read his last column about co-sleeping with his young daughter, and thought that he sounded like a very caring father.  So, of course it is sad for his family, and his daughter in particular, that he is gone.  (It's also been more than 4 years since I criticized him here, so I think it safe not to feel guilty about that.)

Oddly, the SMH report of his death specifically notes that it was not being treated as suicide or suspicious.    That seems an odd comment to make if there is to be a coroner's report, which I assume means they don't yet know the cause.

I see from another recent column (a lightweight one about on line dating - maybe he was still writing mainly about himself?)  that he referred to "swilling codeine and whiskey" at 2 am.   I wonder if that was serious, and will have anything to do with his death...*

Update:  the SMH says  "Sam de Brito was essentially a very private man."

Um, as far as I could make out, no.   It was exactly his lack of privacy which bothered me (at least in the context of making a living from it.  I once wrote if he wanted to be full of self disclosure, he could do it on Blogger - I couldn't understand why Fairfax would host it.)

*  just to be clear - I see that codeine and alcohol is definitely not a good idea.  Was it a joke, or a bit of confession that no one took seriously.

Uh oh

More Life, Less Death | MIT Technology Review

The article says the UN has revised its population growth projections to 10 billion in 2050, due to increased longevity outweighing reduced birthrates.  That's close to more than 3 billion extra compared to today.

Here's a bit more detail:

At the country level, much of the overall increase between now and 2050
is projected to occur either in high-fertility countries, mainly in
Africa, or in countries with large populations. During 2015-2050, half
of the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in nine
countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania, United States of America,
Indonesia and Uganda, listed according to the size of their contribution
to the total growth. 

 A bit of a worry...

Bald paranoia

Our bald, cat loving, infrasound fearing Senator appears to be right on side with stupid American Right wing paranoia about "gun control".   What an embarrassing twit to have fluked his way into the Australian Senate:

[People have been effectively disputing the "Nazis disarmed the populace" for well over a decade - see this 2004 paper  - but still it rolls on.]

Update:   a more quickly read summary of the history of the use of this claim by the NRA appears in this Mother Jones article.   This paragraph is particularly significant:

"But guns didn't play a particularly important part in any event," says Robert Spitzer, who chairs SUNY-Cortland's political science department and has extensively researched gun control politics. Gun ownership in Germany after World War I, even among Nazi Party members, was never widespread enough for a serious civilian resistance to the Nazis to have been anything more than a Tarantino revenge fantasy. If Jews had been better armed, Spitzer says, it would only have hastened their demise. Gun policy "wasn't the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group."

Yep.  A large part of the problem with the common libertarian take on gun control is not only that they are paranoid;  they are also prone to fantasies about how guns would empower them in their "if only I had been there with my gun, I could've been a hero!" imaginings.  (Look at the disgusting things that Right wingers have been saying after the recent Oregon attack.)

And isn't it curious that, following the fall of Soviet communism - the only genuine post War international threat to the future of America - the paranoia has only intensified, not been reduced.  Congratulations on your tactics, gun makers of America.

Update:  I wrote this post before seeing that David Frum had weighed in on it:

The claim that the Jews of Europe could have stopped the Nazi Holocaust if only they’d possessed more rifles and pistols is a claim based on almost perfect ignorance of the events of 1933 to 1945. The mass murder of European Jews could proceed only after the Nazis had defeated or seized territory from three of the mightiest aggregations of armed force on earth: the armies of France, Poland, and the Soviet Union. The opponents of the Nazis not only possessed rifles and pistols, but also tanks, aircraft, artillery, modern fortifications, and massed infantry. And yes, Jews bore those weapons too: nearly 200,000 in the Polish armed forces, for example.

From 1941 until the end of the war, armed bands of Jewish partisans roamed through Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, just as they roam through the imaginations of American gun enthusiasts. That didn’t stop the Holocaust either.

Even before the war started, in the 1930s, Jews sometimes attempted armed resistance to the Nazis. It was the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish refugee that provided Adolf Hitler with the pretext for the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews in 1938.

There’s really only one way in which gun control is at all relevant to the history of the Holocaust. As the late historian Henry Turner forcefully argued in Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, the last clear chance to prevent the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 would have been a military coup at the end of 1932, followed by mass arrests of members of Nazi and communist militias, and the confiscation of their weapons. You might even say that stricter control of guns and gun-carrying political groups could have prevented the Holocaust.

The failed Prime Minister was worse than suspected

Why Glenn Stevens is breathing easier since Tony Abbott got rolled | afr.com

It's not as if this piece is written with much objectivity, but it does make it clear that Abbott was a bit more of an ideologically motivated twit as PM than may have been obvious (given that he would waiver and not implement things he really wanted to do, apparently.)

More magic water needed

Facing the rain deadline, in a world over which we have diminishing control

I see that Paul Sheehan manages to write about El Nino and the potential for lack of rainfall in Australia to wipe a lot of money from the value of crops, all without mentioning climate change.

I guess someone who was impressed with Ian Plimer's wildly inaccurate Heaven and Earth may not know that climate scientists have been worried about climate change causing more intense "super El Nino" events.  

Into the detail of the "many worlds"

Anyone who reads about quantum physics would know that the rather improbable sounding "many worlds" interpretation of it has actually become quite popular amongst physicists.

But there's a review paper on arXiv from earlier this year that has a good explanation of the uncertainty and debate as to what the interpretation really means in terms of the "multiplicity" of universes.  Starting from Everett down, it's not actually obvious how it's meant to work.  

I don't think I had really appreciated the extent of the problem with the idea before.  The paper is not always easy to follow in every detail, but it is generally understandable and is well worth reading.  Here's the abstract:

Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics was proposed to avoid problems inherent in the prevailing interpretational frame. It assumes that quantum mechanics can be applied to any system and that the state vector always evolves unitarily. It then claims that whenever an observable is measured, all possible results of the measurement exist. This notion of multiplicity has been understood in different ways by proponents of Everett's theory. In fact the spectrum of opinions on various ontological questions raised by Everett's approach is rather large, as we attempt to document in this critical review. We conclude that much remains to be done to clarify and specify Everett's approach.

The old trolley problem

The Lifespan of a Thought Experiment: Do We Still Need the Trolley Problem? - The Atlantic

A nice article here looking at the history of the trolley problem in philosophy and ethics, and which notes it is getting a bit of a revival because of the prospect of driverless cars.  Cool.

Testing the medium

How Harry Houdini and Scientific American Fought the Fake Mediums of the 1920s

It's an extract from a book on the topic.   Sounds like a good read.

Can't last

These leaked records cast light on how ISIS makes its money - Vox

Interesting to note the long term frailty of the ISIS current financial "model".

What I want to know is - who's buying their oil, anyway?

How fathers pass on problems

Discovery of how environmental memories may be transmitted from a father to his grandchildren

It seems it's all in how certain proteins affect the DNA, not just the DNA itself.

Whiteford on tax and transfer

Who really benefits from Australia's tax and social security system?

I've always thought Peter Whiteford sounded very reasonable.  (I recall he has made occasional appearances over the years at Catallaxy in threads to challenge arguments put up by Sinclair Davidson.  He has seemingly given up on doing that, given the rabid threads as well as the evidence-resistant propaganda-ish nature of many of the posts.)  

The approach taken in this report is good and a necessary corrective to the over-simplified complaint of the "small government, less tax"  lobby:

A final issue that arises from this analysis relates to the question of whether people can be characterised as “lifters” or “leaners”and relates to the idea that it is only the rich that effectively pay (net) taxes. A lifecycle perspective shows that people whose lifetime annualised income is less than $25,000 actually pay more than 10% of their lifetime income in taxes (rather than near to zero), and this doesn’t include indirect taxes.

In contrast, middle income people over their lifetime receive far more in social security benefits than do people in these income brackets at a point in time. The implication is that a much wider range of people benefit from the welfare state and pay taxes to support it than is often acknowledged.

The war and wanton women

Sexually Active Women Were Quarantined During World War II - The Atlantic

Well, no, I hadn't heard about this before.  This bit in particular:

At first, health officials focused on sex workers who had been arrested
near military bases or factories. As the war progressed, however, the
focus widened from sex workers to “any women who were somehow viewed or
under suspicion as being delinquent,” Parascandola said. Some places
dispatched health workers to bars and dance halls to scout out women who
appeared too sexually forward; in other cases, officials would wait at
bus stops, questioning the women who came off the bus about their
reasons for traveling to the town.

Women who didn’t agree to submit to testing could still be quarantined
via court order if officials suspected her of having an STD—a caveat
that was interpreted liberally. “For example, they might arrest a woman
who they found hanging around the camps under vagrancy charges,” he
said, “and they might use some claim of suspicion for venereal disease
because this women was hanging around with all these men.”

Can't remember this aspect of the war being featured in a movie before...

The Cruz response

It was a bit slow coming, probably because people did not really like to been seen to be dissing the poorly performing Sierra Club guy who clearly wasn't expecting it, but here is Phil Plait's rebuttal (follow his many links) to the King of Fools Ted Cruz.

Cruz's performance has been greeted with acclaim by Right wing sites everywhere, from Andrew Bolt to Powerline.

As I have said recently, I think its time for gloves off as far as politicians, journalists (and scientists) who are properly informed on the matter of climate change - start calling out Cruz and his ilk as fools who are refusing to inform themselves on science.   By all means, they can still be pointed to the information to rebut their arguments, but call them fools for not reading or believing it.

It's really the arrogance mixed with ignorance that is getting to me - they genuinely believe that climate science, which has been becoming more certain and understood over the last couple of decades, is teetering on the edge of collapse, all because a mere handful of largely discredited scientists (4 or 5, tops) in the field lend support to the non-scientist advocates, politicians and conspiracy theorists such as Monckton, Watts, Steyn, Delingpole, Bolt, etc.  Guys, you're being fooled.   Your arrogance is entirely misplaced.   If you read more broadly, you might understand.  

Now having said that:  I will still make the observation that the last refuge of the denialists is the satellite temperature record, specifically honing in on the RSS one lately.   I am sure denialists do not know what the satellites are measuring, the history of the problems with this method and sometimes dramatic adjustments (see links I have previously provided), or that that one of the senior members of the RSS team wrote late last year:

A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!). 

However, the oft repeated line has been that the satellite method may be more sensitive to ENSO and the 1998 El Nino than the surface temperature record, in which case one would expect that the current El Nino may see a similar spike to that in 1998.

Such a spike is not yet appearing in the satellite figures.   If it does, and is of a similar magnitude to the the 1998 one, then the denialists will likely have a serious problem as to how they maintain their lines.
  
If it doesn't appear, then the matter of the method of how the satellite temperature is measured and the records compiled, and the issue of its comparison with radiosonde readings, will be in for some more consideration.

It would simpler for everyone if there is a spike.

But - whether there is or isn't a spike will not matter much to those enduring a temperature rise, and rainfall changes, on the surface.    That's where we live - not in the middle of the troposphere.

All a bit incestuous

Here's Why Samsung's Profits Are Up Nearly 80%

Samsung Electronics says its operating profits for the third quarter will hit $6.29 billion, up 80% year-over-year and smashing Wall Street expectations.

That forecast from the South Korean tech conglomerate exceeded analysts’ expectations of about $5.89 billion. It marks a surprise for a company that as recently as the previous quarter saw operating profits fall 4% from the same period last year.

What’s driving the comeback? It’s all about Samsung’s semiconductors division, the backbone of its third quarter success. And that’s partially thanks to smartphone rival Apple, which uses chips manufactured by Samsung in its latest iPhone 6 lineup (Samsung’s own phones also use Samsung-made chips). Samsung’s chip business saw revenues grow by around 24% to about $28 billion last year.

Aren't Samsung and South Korea generally  great examples of crony capitalism?    (Here's The Economist in 2010 briefly on the topic.) Doesn't their success send some sort of challenge to small government advocates that their approach isn't the only one that can succeed?

When the constitution stuffs it up

Umpqua: Is Jeb Bush right about 'stuff happens'? - CNN.com

Somewhat interesting to read about the way the interaction between State and Federal powers in the US makes creating an effective background check system in the US so difficult.

But never forget - the fundamental resistance to increased effectiveness of any such system is driven by a "they're coming to get our guns!" paranoia encouraged by the NRA and like bodies.