Russia, Putin and how we got here

Tom Switzer (a bit to my surprise) has a go at Putin/Russian apologetics in Fairfax today.   They're not so bad, he argues, just making sure their borders are well protected by things like, well, being prepared to annex neighbours on the other side of the border.  (I think that's how the argument goes.)  Colour me skeptical of the effort.

For a bigger picture of what Putin wants Russia to be, in future geo-political terms, the end of year article at The Interpreter has some good links, several arguing he wants a kind of return to the past.  The pre-revolution past. 

But the best thing I have read is this lengthy article at Foreign Policy by someone well on the inside of the Obama approach to Russia, who argues how things went well for a while, but fell apart, with a fair bit of Russian paranoia being the cause.  A very convincing read, it seems to me...

I've been thinking...

...about free will, determinism, etc, as you do when you want a good intellectual headache. 

One thing that occurred to me is that, if your allegiance is with the libertarian strand of politics, and as such left wing identity politics gets up your nose, (I'm looking at you, J Soon), you don't really have much to complain about if you're also happy with "there is no such thing as free will" arguments being run by your scientist atheist pals (who, incidentally, are quite likely very liberal politically) all the time.  Because it sure seems you're endorsing the key thought behind most of it, namely the immutability of "identity".

Secondly, I see that there is a (former?) astronomer (Bob Doyle) who has spent years pondering the question, and created a very extensive website that seems well worth reading - The Information Philosopher.   He's also published a book about it (although I think self published, which is not usually a good sign.)  I suppose he counts as a very enthusiastic amateur philosopher, but doesn't present as a nutty one.  I like some of his historical perspective on the whole question, too.  Jerry Coyne doesn't like Doyle's solution to the issue, but Coyne reads as a bit of a jerk to me, so I'm not sure I should worry.

I see that a professional philosopher last year published a book  How Physics Makes Us Free, which is a good title.   A guy at Forbes reckons it's the science book of the year, and a very detailed (and largely positive) review appears here.

I think the author may be onto something...

It's physics/philosophy time!

*  A fairly lengthy essay by Steven Weinberg is at the New York Review of Books, with the alluring title "The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics".   Not bad.

*  I see, via Jason Soon, that there is a long collection of short science pieces by various science-y people, many famous, at Edge.org.   A couple of them bring up some topics long of interest:  David Christian writes about the Noosphere (a great word, and concept, I think);  and the old "is he is crazy, or not?"  Omega Point physicist  Frank Tipler (who supports Trump and is a climate change skeptic, so the "crazy" verdict is starting to look pretty convincing) gets to write again about parallel universes of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics and free will.  Here's the argument:

The free will question arises because the equations of physics are deterministic. Everything that you do today was determined by the initial state of all the universes at the beginning of time. But the equations of quantum mechanics say that although the future behavior of all the universes are determined exactly, it is also determined that in the various universes, the identical yous will make different choices at each instant, and thus the universes will differentiate over time. Say you are in an ice cream shop, trying to choose between vanilla and strawberry. What is determined is that in one world you will choose vanilla and in another you will choose strawberry. But before the two yous make the choice, you two are exactly identical. The laws of physics assert it makes no sense to say which one of you will choose vanilla and which strawberry. So before the choice is made, which universe you will be in after the choice is unknowable in the sense that it is meaningless to ask.

To me, this analysis shows that we indeed have free will, even though the evolution of the universe is totally deterministic. Even if you think my analysis has been too facile—entire books can and have been written on the free will problem—nevertheless, my simple analysis shows that these books are themselves too facile, because they never consider the implications of the existence of the parallel universes for the free will question.

He's less sure what the Everett scenario of ever branching universes means for the problem of evil, but he does say:

No analysis of why evil exists can be considered reasonable unless it takes into account the existence of the parallel universes of quantum mechanics. 

 I also liked Jim Holt's short entry on the mistake Einstein made in not calling his theory of relativity "invariant theory" instead.

OK, seeing Tipler brought up free will, I also can't go past commenting on the problem with  Jerry Coyne's article asserting that there is no free will (and which physicist Bee endorses without reservation).  The consequence, he says, is (my bold):

Now this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t punish criminals. We should—in order to remove them from society when they’re dangerous, reform them so they can rejoin us, and deter others from apeing bad behavior. But we shouldn’t imprison people as retribution—for making a “bad choice.” 

Um, in what sense can their be "reform" of criminals if it is not involving the idea of them using free will to not re-offend?  Lobotomy?  Operant conditioning?  

See, if you don't believe in free will being behind personal responsibility, it logically opens the way for the State to seek to exert control over criminals/dissents via direct biological methods - the Clockwork Orange scenario - because that's the way the universe operates.   You can't rely on logic and persuasion to work - indeed, if think they do work, aren't you re-opening the very question of free will that you deny?  

CS Lewis wrote an essay about this back in (I think) the 1950's, and I still fail to see how the "no free will" atheists seriously address the issue.   The essay contains a line which many conservative/libertarians love to quote (and rather irk me when they do so) - this one:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

The problem is, they cite it for trivial matters - a complaint about restrictive smoking laws, for example;  they use it as if there is no valid Christian interest in governments making laws for the common good.

But despite that gripe of mine, it makes the argument against treating punishment as only being about reform or deterrence as relevantly today as it did when it was written.

Some optimism for Friday

*  From the CSM:

Gigafactory begins battery production: Start of something big for Tesla?...

Tesla has said the Gigafactory, said to cost $5 billion and expected to be one of the largest buildings in the world once it is complete, will significantly lower the cost of its products. The start of production there, then, marks progress for the ambitious goals of the company and its chief executive, Elon Musk, to revolutionize energy use....

The Gigafactory is currently operating at 30 percent, but is forecast to eventually transform battery production on a global scale. When it is expected to reach peak production capacity in 2018, the Gigifactory plans to produce 35 gigawatt hours per year of lithium-ion battery cells, nearly as much as the rest of the entire world’s battery production combined, the company notes. Put in other terms, this scale of production could power New York City for about three years, Tesla has previously said.

 *  At least some newspapers are bucking the trend?:

The Washington Post expects to hire more than 60 journalists in the coming months — a sign of remarkable growth for a newspaper in the digital age.

After a year of record traffic and digital advertising revenue, the Post newsroom will grow by more than 8 percent, to more than 750 people. The extent of the newsroom expansion was first reported by Politico. The Post will add a "rapid-response" investigative team, expand its video journalism and breaking news staff, and make additional investments in podcasts and photography.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Post in October 2013 and reportedly invested $50 million in the company last year. That investment is paying off, according to a memo from publisher Fred Ryan that said the Post is now "a profitable and growing company." Ryan said the Post's online traffic had increased by nearly 50 percent in the past year, and new subscriptions have grown by 75 percent, more than doubling digital subscription revenue.

Meanwhile, subscriptions at The New York Times have also surged. Times CEO Mark Thompson said on CNBC that the paper added 132,000 new subscribers in the 18 days after the election, a tenfold increase over the same period a year ago. The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal also reported record growth in subscriptions.

*  Cancer death rates (in the US, but I'm sure in most Western countries) are way down:

Cancer death rate has dropped 25 percent since 1991 peak

The drop is the result of steady reductions in smoking and advances in early detection and treatment, and is driven by decreasing death rates for the four major cancer sites: lung (- 43% between 1990 and 2014 among males and -17% between 2002 and 2014 among females), breast (-38% from 1989 to 2014), prostate (-51% from 1993 to 2014), and colorectal (-51% from 1976 to 2014).

 *  Bizarrely, my long time preferred priority for a space program - a lunar base - may end up getting traction under a Trump presidency.   (He'll still be a disaster, though.)

An underestimate of an important effect of climate change?

Oh my.  Until relatively recently, it seemed that there wasn't that much concern in the climate change science community about increased temperatures and glacial melt causing (at least any time soon) a major slowdown in the Atlantic overturning currents that help keep England and Northern Europe relatively warm.  But last year, it was noted that the current is already slowing down, which did raise some eyebrows as to whether it was part of a temporary cycle, or a sign of something worse.

Now, from Real Climate, looks like some detailed analysis shows the risk of a major shutdown has been underestimated.

What's not explained is how serious for parts of Europe the cooling (in winter?) may be. 

A chemical problem I hadn't heard of...

Quite a fascinating article appeared at the Atlantic recently, explaining the dire health effects of carbon disulphide, an important chemical in some industrial processes, but which I had never heard of.

As usual, the poor workers of 19th century factories which first started using it (in rubber manufacture) were the ones worst hit.  In 1887, for example:

Peterson had heard of carbon-disulfide insanity in Europe, so he alerted his colleagues in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now known as The New England Journal of Medicine) that the problem had come to America. In England, the new term “gassed” had arisen, defined in the Liverpool Daily Post as “the term used in the India rubber business, and it meant dazed.” The British physician Thomas Oliver had recalled watching as people working in rubber factories left after their shifts and “simply staggered home,” apart from themselves. The effect could be deadly. “Some of them have become the victims of acute insanity,” Oliver wrote, “and in their frenzy have precipitated themselves from the top rooms of the factory to the ground.”

Obviously, occupational health and safety wasn't a thing that travelled fast in the 19th century, since the  dangers of the chemical had been known about in Europe for over 20 years:

Evidence piled on in 1856, when a professor of medicine at the University of Paris named Auguste Delpech reported several cases of carbon disulfide poisoning to the French Academy of Medicine. The symptoms ranged from disturbing dreams to compromised memory to mania. The cases were so fascinating that he turned the focus of his career to carbon disulfide. In a medical newspaper, he told of a 27-year-old who, after just three months of working with carbon disulfide in the rubber industry, appeared prematurely aged and whose “sexual desire and erections were abolished.”

By 1863, Delpech had accrued enough case studies to write a 100-plus-page paper on the dangers of carbon disulfide, particularly among workers in balloon and condom factories. He observed two distinct phases of intoxication: a period of mental disturbance followed by disruptions of the distal nerves, causing weakness and numbness in the extremities. Hypersexuality gave way to impotence, bypassing the middle ground. Chronicling these effects put Delpech at the front of the emerging discipline of the science of the mind.

Mitochondria replacement risks

No, it's not just conservative reservations about fiddling with genetics that makes me annoyed that this line of work is being pushed by some scientists.

Plenty of scientists worry that it is risky to the potential child.

I can't for the life of me understand why people don't see the problem with this:   when did the interests of  adults who know they have a inheritable major health problem to nonetheless have a child with their own genes start over-riding the obvious moral problem of experimenting in a way that runs a serious risk of creating a child with serious health problems as a result of the experiment? 

The moral thing to do, surely, is for that very small part of the population to not insist on propagating their own (or, particularly, the mother's) genes:  adopt or use egg donation.   With the latter, the mother still gets all the experience of pregnancy, even. 


 

More bad jellyfish news

We're up to 10 Fraser Island area irukandji stings (all requiring hospitalisation, I think) this summer holiday.

As I said a few posts back, if this keeps spreading south, it's a real worry for summer tourism.

If I were the State government, I would be putting plenty of money into research on the matter. As the Guardian's report on the 9th sting indicated, it is difficult to be 100% certain that it is irukandji or a jellyfish in the same family.  More needs to be known before any hit further south and the really busy beach areas.

Another underwhelming dystopia

For some reason (he must have read somewhere that it was good, but I don't know where) my son has been pestering me to rent the 2006 dystopia movie Children of Men.   I vaguely recalled that it had been well reviewed, even if a box office dud, so despite my general dislike of the dystopia genre, we watched it last night.

It is, by my reckoning, a deeply unpleasant film with nothing to recommend it.  Well made, sure, but with no character to particularly care about, a pretty silly premise (it's 18 years since the last baby was born, and the world still doesn't have a clue as to what's going on?   Come on - give science some credit.   It's a scenario that could readily have a scientific explanation - after all, they have been working on the idea of genetically engineering viruses to make pest mammals infertile for some time.  But apparently the director doesn't like  movies that explain too much - hence virtually nothing in this film is explained properly.)

It did, though, confirm in my mind why it is that I can't take to the dystopia genre - with 1984 being my prime precedent.   It's because they routinely fail to make how the world got there in any way plausible. 

Sure, small individual countries with the breakdown of government and a reversion to tribalism (but armed with modern weaponry), or fanciful social experiment, can fall into dystopia for a time.  But global dystopias where everything has collapsed, and/or all government has become authoritarian, and/or all happiness has been sucked out of the world, on an apparently permanent basis - now that takes some explaining.  There's no true historical precedent, and, so often, these scenarios just show too many humans acting with no humanity.   Dystopia novels or movies never get me over that plausibility line.

A fan of the genre could argue, I suppose, that plausibility is not their main point:  it's the warnings they give about human nature, or the nature of power, or some such.   But sorry, for me, that just doesn't cut it.  Set your lesson in some example of a real temporary dystopia, if you will (I'm thinking The Last King of Scotland, for example), but why create a fake, implausible world?

Unimportant news

I did not care for the season opener for Sherlock.  And, from reading the lengthy comments at The Guardian, it seems many other people agree with my assessment that the episode was an underwhelming mess, with busy-ness substituting for quality.   It did have some of the the worrying hallmarks of the fate of post-Tennant Dr Who, which became unwatchable.

Also, as with many at The Guardian, I had no concern over the fate of a certain character, whose "secret life" subplot had never been convincing.  

Blending in

This is really bad news...

From The Guardian:

Swimmers are being urged to take extra care in waters off Queensland amid warnings the deadly irukandji jellyfish is moving further south.

Four people have been taken to hospital since Wednesday after suffering suspected irukandji stings off Queensland’s Fraser coast.

The irukandji – the world’s smallest and most venomous box jellyfish – is usually found in waters north of Mackay, about 700km further up the coast.

The James Cook University associate professor Jamie Seymour said it was clear the species was following warming sea temperatures south.

“We’ve got good data now that shows quite nicely that irukandji has been spreading down the east coast of Australia, moving slowly but surely southwards,” he told ABC radio.

“It’s only a matter of time before they get to the southern end of Fraser Island down to the Sunny coast.”

If irukandji become an annual problem at my favourite Australian beach area - beautiful Noosa - I suspect it could mean a big hit to its tourism industry.

As for the number of people stung around the Fraser Island area - I see that a few years ago, there were 6 people hospitalised for it, so the numbers are staying pretty constant recently.

I've only ever had one decent bluebottle sting in my life, on my forearm, and the welts and pain from that were pretty excruciating.  I hate to imagine how painful and distressing a sting from a jelly fish that routinely puts people in hospital must be.  And, according to that last link, the sting effects can be somewhat delayed:

...the irukandji can take days before its effects are fully felt.

The initial sting is typically mild, followed by vomiting, profuse sweating, headache, agitation, rapid heart rate and high blood pressure. 

The increase in blood pressure may be life-threatening and can be associated with abnormal heart beat and heart failure.

Actually, according to Wikipedia, it is more commonly only about 30 minutes before the pain and distress hits in.  And note the unusual psychological effect it seems to have:

 Because the jellyfish is very small, and the venom is only injected through the tips of the nematocysts (the cnidocysts) rather than the entire lengths, the sting may barely be noticed at first. It has been described as feeling like little more than a mosquito bite. The symptoms, however, gradually become apparent and then more and more intense in the subsequent five to 120 minutes (30 minutes on average). Irukandji syndrome includes an array of systemic symptoms, including severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, tachycardia and pulmonary edema.^[4][11][12] One unusual symptom associated with the syndrome is a feeling of "impending doom".^[13] Patients have been reported as being so certain they are going to die, they beg their doctors to kill them to get it over with.^[14] Symptoms generally abate in four to 30 hours, but may take up to two weeks to resolve completely.^[6]

A creature best avoided, that's for sure.

A few movies noted

We still haven't been to the cinema since Christmas, but I've watched at home:

*  the 2016 Ghostbusters.    Pretty harmless, pretty dumb, comedy;  in other words, pretty much like the first one.  I think the climatic fight in this one was better, actually.  Being surprised by the number of cameos from the original cast was fun, too.  Still, nothing to get excited about either way, just like the first one.  As was entirely to be expected, the alt.right, 4chan twerps were getting their testicles in a twist for no good reason.

*  The Secret Life of Pets.   Going by the credits, much of the animation for Illumination is still done by the French, and they really have an impressive Pixar/Disney quality look about their product now.  The story is very charming and cute, especially if you like dogs.  Enjoyable.  (Also, it's the first rental I've done using the Google Play app on the smart TV.  It worked a treat, with high definition looking great.)

*  Moon.  Found on Google Play, I've been wanting to watch this 2009 film by Duncan Jones (famously, son of David Bowie) for quite a while, given its mostly good reviews.  (Also, I had been very impressed with Jones' second feature, Source Code, which I commented on in 2012.)  Well, sad to say, I was pretty underwhelmed.

Complete spoiler!  Avoid if you don't want to know      Unlike Source Code, the basic explanation of what is going on is just stretches credibility too far, and in a broad sense, the concept had been much more interestingly dealt with in Bladerunner.    (It doesn't hurt that visually, if not narratively, Bladerunner looks like it is happening in a much more distant future, when the improbable technology behind both films seems more vaguely plausible.    The other film with which it invites comparison, Oblivion, also had the advantage of it being aliens who had the "clones with implanted memories" technology available.  Again, it was a much more enjoyable film.)  

It just doesn't pass my sniff test to think that it would ever be worthwhile to use this type of technology to caretake a moon mine, when Earth is so close by and rocket technology is clearly meant to be very advanced.  

I want Spielberg taken to a secure location until 1 January

So, the 2016 terrible run of relatively early deaths of entertainers who a lot of people liked continues, with Carrie Fisher dying today.   She was, apparently, very likeable in person; but to be honest, I didn't follow her post Star Wars career all that closely.  (Didn't read any of her autobiographic books, or see the movie based on the first one, for example.)

There is much speculation on Reddit and the like that she may well have had heart trouble due to her earlier years of cocaine and alcohol abuse.   Seems a reasonable guess.  Google shows me that she was a smoker, too, both when young and even quite recently.  I also see she said she started smoking marijuana at 13 - probably well before it was so well recognised that using it at such a young age is the most dangerous time for developing serious mental health issues.   Again, one of those cases where it's hard to know whether the drug use led to the problems for which she later "self medicated" with more drugs.

As for her later disclosures of drug use - I assume she didn't seek to glamorise it at all, but there is always the worry that any reformed drug abuser who talks too much about their past use inadvertently signals to some people that it's OK to overuse it for a while because they will be able to recover, after having their youthful fun.  However, given that I don't really know how she wrote or talked about it, I don't know whether she ever had that effect or not.

I see this morning that there is increasing speculation that George Michael had gotten back into serious drugs (heroin) in the last year.

And although it seems his death was accidental, pain killing drugs were behind Prince's death too.

So, while all of this deaths have saddened many, many fans, I hope at least that some people, particularly the young, are taking some lessons about drug abuse from them.

Celebrity and unhappiness

I've written on this general topic before, but anyway...

I noted a couple of posts back that I knew little of George Michael's private life, but obviously, those gaps are being filled in now by the media attention following his death.

He really seems a prime example of how celebrity and happiness are so often strangers to each other, and how hard it is to know which way the causation flows in any individual case.  Does the personality type that makes public performance in any field an attractive career mean they are already primed for future depression?  (That seems an especially likely scenario for modern comedians who base their act - as so many do now - on "confessional" comedy about their problematic personal lives.   Older style comedians, who didn't rely on milking their own family or failed relationships, don't give the impression of having been so prone to being unhappy in real life.)

Or is it that financial success and celebrity attention exacerbates any dissatisfaction in relationships and life to such an extent that someone who otherwise might not have developed depression gets it anyway?  One obvious contributing factor to that is the ease with which money gives access to drugs (and the popularity of their use within the entertainment industry.)   Michael apparently had a very big marijuana habit, and also took "party drugs"; but as a means of "self medication" for depression, it seems even pro-cannabis websites are very cautious about it being a good idea. 

As for relationships and sex:  of course, The Guardian's gay writer Owen Jones thinks he shouldn't be criticised for only "coming out" after an arrest made it more or less inevitable, and also notes the rather shameful media reaction to it, which just shows how far England has changed; and this is fair enough.   Yet Jones also seems to think there is something admirable about Michael subsequently reacting by wearing anonymous sex and having open relationships on his sleeve as a honest advertisement for gay people being able to chose to live however they want.

Yet, oddly, Jones doesn't mention perhaps the most problematic thing Michael even said about his sex life, namely that had given up being tested for HIV because he was afraid of the results.  This was in 2007 in an interview that Stephen Fry was going to use in a documentary, but which Michael subsequently asked not to be used.  (It got into the media anyway.)

Now, he apparently said he had stopped being tested since "at least 2004", and his gay partner had died of AIDS long before that, so it appears he did not catch HIV from him.   It would indicate that he had a fear of catching HIV from his promiscuous sex life after that boyfriend's death.

Of course, this seems a very irresponsible attitude, but there are a couple of ways of mitigating it, I suppose:  first, he did have depression for a long time, it seems, and that alone can affect judgement.  Secondly, although I think this is pulling a long bow:  a person who is scrupulous about safe sex might feel their status is irrelevant if they are always going to only engage in the safest sex activities.  But really, how likely is it a drug taking depressive is going to be that careful during every sexual encounter?

And more generally:  Michael's defiant attitude to gay promiscuity is very close to the view expressed by Freddie Mercury, who nonetheless made sad comments towards the end of his life that being surrounded by people all the time does not mean you can't be lonely.  I always found it hard to read that as anything other than an admission that throwing yourself completely into sexual hedonism is not a reliable path to happiness, but it seems a particularly hard lesson for some gay men to accept.

And no, I am not convinced of this attitude being a case of "straight" hypocrisy - you know, the sort of argument that people think a man who sleeps with scores of women over a few years is just a "lad" having fun, whereas the same thing in a gay man is disgusting irresponsibility.   First, I think many people do draw a mental line as to how responsible it is for straight men to bed a different woman every week or two.  But also, in many cases, I think there is a bias, but one which is hypocritical in the other direction - that people don't criticise cases of gay promiscuity when they would if it were straight encounters.   It's the attitude of "well, that must be what's good about being gay - men know men can have casual encounters with no emotional baggage, so why wouldn't they have lots and lots of sex?  I would."

But don't cases like Michael and Mercury indicate the dubious credibility of that?   Sure, it is understandable that gay men think differently about casual sex, but let's be real and admit that excessive hedonism of any kind is probably not good for the emotional life of anyone, and is nothing to be admired....

Update:  of course, to be fair, it appears he was pretty generous with charitable donations, and there are many people speaking well of him.   I'm not trying to paint him as a bad man, but he was certainly a troubled one who openly admitted to having a "self destructive" impulse.

The silly, simple capitalist

The election of Donald Trump has brought out a burst of "ain't capitalism grand?" commentary by certain economists, and amongst them is the always annoyingly simplistic Deidre McCloskey.

Her recent column in the NYT carries the message of "don't worry about inequality in the US, you can never fix it, and trying to do so only makes things worse" is chock full of over-generalisations of the most irritating kind.

She doesn't address criticism of inequality by economists such as Stiglitz and Piketty, she just ignores them outright, and goes on to talk as if any attempt to address inequality is akin to the full blown Socialism of Russia and China in the 20th century:

 Another problem is that the cutting reduces the size of the crop. We need to allow for rewards that tell the economy to increase the activity earning them. If a brain surgeon and a taxi driver earn the same amount, we won’t have enough brain surgeons. Why bother? An all-wise central plan could force the right people into the right jobs. But such a solution, like much of the case for a compelled equality, is violent and magical. The magic has been tried, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. So has the violence. 

 McCloskey distinguishes herself amongst Right wing straw man loving economics writers only by seeming to accept that climate change is real (oh, and perhaps by accepting that it is appropriate for the State to pay for education to year 12).  So why does she not devote any time to criticising the abject failure of the American Right to accept the need for capitalist friendly policies (obviously, a price on carbon) for the problem that is bound to have vast economic consequences and affect the growth she loves?  Instead, let's just write a swooning love letter to capitalism.

Yes we know, Deidre, capitalism has done a great job in many respects and outlived the doomed to fail examples of Russia and nearly every other communist state.  And free trade has helped drop poverty levels globally - even Krugman is a fan of it.

But stop pretending that inequality critics are Communists, and that inequality counts for naught in nations like the US, where examples of the working poor are legion, in comparison to other successful capitalist nations that manage to reduce inequality by policies that haven't killed their economy and don't stop the rich being rich.

Failed conversions

Ross Douthat's Christmas column, about his interest in "secular moderns" who have supernatural seeming experiences, but who don't come out of it with any particular conversion to belief in the supernatural, is  interesting.  I like reading about those sort of experiences too.  

He links to a recent article by The Exorcist director William Freidkin, who visited (out of curiosity, really) the Vatican exorcist to see how accurately his film reflected real life exorcisms.   I don't find the case he follows particularly convincing of anything, but one of the stories a New York psychiatrist tells him is more interesting:

LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis. “Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.

As for The Exorcist itself:  I think I have mentioned before that I have never watched more than perhaps 10 minutes of it on TV, and found it too over the top to be scary or convincing.   It's a pity, in a way, that the book/movie did this; from what I have read (a long time ago, now) cases of possession with much more subtle aspects could be much more persuasive of the supernatural.

An unshared enthusiasm

No disrespect intended for the value of the life of George Michael as a fellow human, but I do have an odd urge to express my unfashionable opinion that most of his musical output was either gratingly bland (Last Christmas - a "straight to Muzak" song if ever there was one - I actively dislike) or annoying (have people forgotten "I want your sex"? I know I had, until I just read his obituary.)   And, while I'm speaking inappropriately of the deceased (again, I'm not dissing him as a person - I know very little about him - just expressing an opinion of his work that I know few agree with), I may as well spread the disrespect and admit that, amongst other signs, I always thought that Princess Diana's fondness for Wham! to be a pretty good indication that Prince Charles really had made a mistake in marrying her....
His voice was OK, I suppose, but I just found the material it was used for was usually not to my taste.  But then again, in music, my taste is very limited...

Continuing the Christmas theme

There's a good read to be found at The Japan Times on the "first" Japanese Christmas. 

Those missionaries really made converts work for their salvation:

The Christmas of 1552 could hardly have been more different from the Christmases we know today. Familiar Yuletide iconography — Christmas trees, reindeers, mistletoe and the like — was not yet established anywhere in the world (and, naturally, there was not a whiff of the commercialism that marks modern-day Christmas festivities.) The setting for this Christmas was the abandoned Daido-ji Buddhist temple, converted into the Jesuits’ house of worship and living quarters. It would be among the first of Japan’s nanban-dera, or southern barbarian temples, the name given to the makeshift Christian churches housed in Buddhist buildings, with shoji and engawa (a type of terrace) and, often the sole exterior visual difference, a cross erected upon the kawara roof tiles.

On Christmas Eve, Japanese believers were invited to spend the night in the Jesuit living quarters, cramming the venue as they embarked upon an all-nighter of hymns, sermons, scripture readings and Masses. For today’s readers, at least, de Alcacova’s account comes across as a rather gruelling experience, although there’s no reason to doubt the missionary’s numerous references to the “great joy” of the Japanese converts. From dusk until dawn, the new converts were treated to sermons and readings about “Deus” — the Portuguese word for God. The entire celebration contained no fewer than six Masses.

Father Juan Fernandez, an important Jesuit who wrote the West’s first lexicon of Japanese, opened the midnight scripture sessions. When his voice grew weary, he was relieved by “a Japanese youth with knowledge of our language,” de Alcacova writes. At the crack of dawn, Cosme de Torres — leader of the Jesuit mission after Xavier’s departure for India — led a new Mass, while another priest read passages from the gospels and the Epistles. After this night of Christian immersion, the faithful were allowed to go home, likely exchanging greetings of “Natala” — the Portuguese word for Christmas, meaning “birth.”

 There is much more of interest in this lengthy article, which you can read here.

Re-working the classics

For my 2016 Christmas graphic, I thought I would run some classics through Prismsa.
I wonder what da Vinci would have thought of this.   Here's the original, with the most Italian looking Christ child ever:

And here's part of it, turned a bit Japanesque via Prisma:

You know what I find interesting: I reckon this filter makes the Christ child look very much like a photo that's been filtered, not a painting.

I tried others through Prisma too, but I liked this the best.

As for your more classic Nativity scenes, how's this one for bright colours and an amazing amount of peculiar detail to analyse:

 

I find it very odd. Merry Christmas, anyway!

Update:  I've added a bit...