Worrying about Ben

I had been meaning to write that Ben Pobjie worries me.   I first noticed him, as many people probably have, through his funny, satirical pieces on My Kitchen Rules at Fairfax.   He still writes them, now at that medium.com website, although I do think he has probably taken it as far as he can, and they are getting a bit repetitious now.  

But I also notice his tweets, and this year there have been lots of them about promoting his stand up comedy work, but seemingly with more than the occasional touch of desperation about the number of tickets being sold, and the lack of (as far as I could see) enthusiastic endorsements.   He will then sometimes tweet about how he feels a failure.   I see from one short Youtube clip from it, that he talks about feeling suicidal as part of the show.  (Another Youtube clip, at a different venue, and he seems to be struggling for laughs from the audience.)

Today, I see that he has written at length in Fairfax about his ongoing struggles with mental health issues, and being taken by the police to hospital when he was, presumably, threatening suicide - it sounds like his wife called the police.  He doesn't say when this happened - it could have been years ago.

But in any event, well, talk about your comedians who try comedy as a form of public self therapy. 

I find it difficult to understand this - I'm in whatever you would call the group of people (introverts?) who can't imagine that if  they developed serious mental health issue, it could possibly help to stand up in public and talk to strangers about it.   But it is such a common thing, it seems, that comedians want to talk about their unhappiness, to strangers,  and are often very troubled and unhappy people away from the stage anyway. 

I have a great deal of sympathy for people like Ben who do have ongoing issues, but I'm sorely tempted to suggest to them something like "mate, perhaps if you stop talking to every one about it all the time, you might improve.  Find just the one person who helps you when you talk to him or her about it, but stop talking to everyone about it."  This doesn't exactly align with Ben's approach, I think!

I could well be telling him to suck eggs here, but my guess would be that cognitive behaviour therapy would be the best style of therapy for someone like him to try.  

Apart from that, I would suggest he give up stand up comedy if he's not selling tickets.  There is no shame in that - and its record as a form of therapy, or a way to earn a steady dollar, is very, very poor, anyway.

Taleb re-tweets

I know that a re-tweet doesn't necessarily mean an endorsement, but most of the time it probably does.   And with his general very aggro attitude to anyone who disagrees or annoys him, I suspect that he is on board with the wingnutty use of "beta male" as an insult.  Still, I am somewhat surprised that Nassim Taleb would be retweeting Mike Cernovich:

Something's not quite right about Taleb's very peculiar range of views, I say...

Wood, weed and phones: a No Trump Friday

Yeah, posting about the decrepitude of POTUS and the Republicans gets a bit boring, so let's try to avoid that today and instead note:

*   Hey, did you know wood was actually a pretty good material with which to construct big buildings?  An article at Nature, about a revival of wood for large construction, notes this:

....wood has developed a bad reputation over the centuries, because of catastrophic blazes that levelled cities such as London, New York and Chicago before modern fire-suppression strategies emerged. In fact, in case of fire wood maintains its structurally integrity much better than the non-flammable alternatives favoured by modern building codes. It chars at a predictable rate, and doesn't melt like steel or weaken like concrete. “The fact that it actually can withstand fire better than steel took a long time for people to realize,” says Guido Wimmers, who chairs a master's programme in wood engineering at UNBC....

The science of safety and engineering has also advanced. Douglas fir — the exposed layer at the UNBC centre — chars at 39 millimetres per hour. The provincial building code requires that the structure be able to endure at least one hour of fire on any given storey, so Green's team opted for floors made of a 5-layer panel that could afford to sacrifice a portion without losing its structural integrity.

And it is pretty good in earthquake prone regions:

Asif Iqbal, a civil engineer who is working on the project, came to UNBC from New Zealand, where he saw the damage from the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch at first hand. Most of the steel-reinforced concrete buildings in the city remained standing, but around 1,800 were irreparably damaged owing to cracked concrete and warped steel. Iqbal says that many of the replacement buildings are being constructed from wood, precisely because it is more likely to survive another major earthquake and the steel connectors can be replaced relatively easily if damaged.

 Some large wood buildings have been built recently:

 Norway set a world height record in late 2015 with a 52.8-metre tower block; that was edged out in September 2016 by a 53-metre student dormitory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This year, Austria will take the lead with the 84-metre HoHo building in Vienna, comprising a hotel, apartments and offices. The United States saw its first tall wooden building go up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2016, and others are in the works in Portland, Oregon, and in New York City.

 And I had been meaning to post about this months ago - a tall wood office building is to be built in Brisbane - on the showgrounds which I hang around most Saturdays:

Standing at more than 52 metres, the 14,000 square metres of nine storeys of engineered timber on the A-grade site, with retail space at ground level, is targeting a 6 Green Star Design & As Built rating:

Neat.

*   Dementia wards might soon smell of marijuana?   (Well, probably not, but still, it's a funny idea):

Memory performance decreases with increasing age. Cannabis can reverse these ageing processes in the brain. This was shown in mice by scientists at the University of Bonn with their colleagues at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). Old animals were able to regress to the state of two-month-old mice with a prolonged low-dose treatment with a cannabis active ingredient. This opens up new options, for instance, when it comes to treating dementia.

*  The Samsung S8, the phone I would love to own, is selling very well, it seems:

It's been less than a month since the Galaxy S8 hit store shelves, but the curved flagship phone is apparently already a huge success. Samsung has already sold over 5 million units of the phones worldwide, according to the Korean site The Investor....

And the sales could keep on rolling in. The phone is expected to come to 120 countries by the end of the month including China, says The Investor.

According to the report, some analysts predict the S8 to reach 50 to 60 million in annual sales. Not bad at all for a comeback phone.

Douthat has had enough

I see that Ross Douthat has had enough of Trump and calls for his removal using the 25th Amendment.  In doing so, he makes a point which is crucial:

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration.

Yes, since virtually Day 1, the extraordinary level of leaks to the press has indicated something was very wrong.   Trump, and his gullible defenders, claim the leaks are invented.   It is an inversion of reality, coming from the man who rose on the back of internet fake news and years of birtherism and other stupid conspiracy theories.  

The real problem, though, may be the gutlessness of the anonymous sources.  If they really think he should be gone, all it might take is a good handful of close aides to resign, and then speak freely to the press about their doubts, from observing him close at hand, as to his intellectual suitability for the job. 

As for his defenders:   they fall into two main categories - the culture warriors who are quite stupidly blinded by the partisanship of Right wingnut media and will never be convinced he's unsuited to the task; and the culture warriors who know he's a joke but take the view "he may be an incompetent idiot,  but he's our incompetent idiot.  We'll just get what we want by leaving him in place and working around him."  

Both upset me, but perhaps the later are morally the worse of the two groups.

*  OK, to be more accurate, it's probably more like a spectrum with those at either end, and some crossover in the middle.

Another day, another recording in the news

From the Washington Post:

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.....

Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”

Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks...This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

The remarks remained secret for nearly a year.

It was all just a joke, they say now.   Yes - a joke that had to be kept within "the family".

The Putin mystery

OK, so someone else on the net will be musing about this already, but was Putin's intervention in the Trump leakgate [sorry] matter intended to help or hurt Trump?

Because surely Putin would realise that coming out to defend him, and by saying he has a transcript of the meeting, could create more harm than assistance for Trump.  And it is at least possible that the Russians have decided that Trump is just too unreliable for them - sure he looked easily manipulated before the election, but now they see the turmoil that surrounds him, maybe they want someone more predictable in the seat?

Or is Putin not as savvy to American political dynamics as we assume?  It's not as if he has to worry about handling hostile press in his country.

Update:   I see Andrew Bolt, one of the Australian Right wing media culture warriors who seems to have an exceptionally low interest in commenting on the patent turmoil in, and incompetence of, the Trump Whitehouse, briefly notes today that the Putin intervention will not help.   He then ends with this bit of blind stupidity:

 There is an unmistakable whiff of McCarthyism - mixed, of course, with an entirely insincere and self-interested outrage - to the anti-Russian hysteria now.

Yes, of course, Andrew.  If a Democrat President was refusing to disclose tax returns and financial information relevant to his or her ties to Russia, and had campaigners making suspicious trips to the country and later Russian sourced leaks were used to campaign advantage, you'd just shrug your shoulders about it and say "stop being hysterical".

Update 2:  Homer in comments refers me to a post about Putin at Econospeak.  It is interesting.

The dumb will rise up

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fan, exemplifies the sad, ideologically driven dumbing down of the American Right, such that they can't believe not only [climate] science, but also that Trump is the most dangerously inept, and patently unsuited by both character and intellect, person handed the task of being POTUS in living memory.   Here he is opining in a recent post (before the Comey memo news broke this morning):

Well, I’m still not sure exactly what’s going on — see Stephen’s post below for more — but what is clear is that they hope that if they gin up enough controversy, baseless or not, maybe it’ll give cover to an impeachment or 25 Amendment removal, or something. I don’t think it will happen and if it does — barring something a lot bigger and more uncontrovertible than anything they’ve come up with so far — you will have literal riots in the streets if Trump’s removed, far beyond anything you’ve seen from Democrat constituency groups like Black Lives Matter. Trump supporters have had it with the establishment, and are unlikely to go along quietly with a system they regard as deeply corrupt and devoted to their destruction. To the extent it’s interested in impeachment, the anti-Trump establishment, which likes to present itself as responsible and sensible, is playing with fire here, in a room full of gasoline that the establishment itself has pumped.

The wingnut Right used to muse about how they would rise up and "take back their country" under Obama.  They can't give up that fantasy, it seems.
 

Hey monty...

You need to talk to poor old Tom.   I really enjoy the way he has taken to running around crying "Take down their names! Take down their names!" whenever someone in comments does not toe the Kates line that Trump Is Magnificent And If You Disagree You Are a Socialist Enemy of the State; but it really does make him seem more of a paranoid loser operating from his backyard shed than he might actually be...

Trumpalooza continues...

I have a theory about Trump and what he told the Russians - McMaster might be right, that Trump wasn't even briefed that the source of the intel was the Israelis in this particular case, but Trump being vaguely aware that the US gets a lot of Middle East intel from there made the claim anyway.    Thereby causing panicky telephone calls to US intel agencies saying "we can't trust him to not stuff it up even if we don't tell him!"

Someone else on the internet has probably already come up with this, but it seems to me to fit the claims and counterclaims quite well....

Meanwhile, this morning's news that Comey wrote that Trump tried to call him off the Flynn investigation may help to explain Trump's tweet about how Comey had better hope that the meeting was not taped.   Because what may have happened here is that someone sitting in on the meeting may have said to Trump afterwards "you know, you can't really tell the FBI to call off investigations as a favour to a friend" and Trump may have said "I didn't say that...I didn't say that.  The tape will show me right."   Of course, being an idiot, the tape will probably show him wrong...

Here's what the NYT is reporting:

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of the memo to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

I really get the feeling that this may be the beginning of the end for President T.

Update:

Further to my prediction, found this via Hot Air:

They need to get on the phone to Steve Kates. 

The accelerating expansion explained?

Seems to me that a lot of Chinese are doing interesting physics now.   This sounds interesting:

A group of physicists believe they may have cracked one of nature’s codes and finally explained what causes the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Qingdi Wang, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), has comprised a theory to bridge some of the incompatibility issues between the theory of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity—two of the most successful theories that explain how the universe works.

Wang suggested that the universe is made of constantly fluctuating space and time.

“Space-time is not as static as it appears, it's constantly moving,” Wang said in a statement.

Astronomers discovered in 1998 that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, which implies that space is not empty but rather filled with dark energy—likely from vacuum energy—that pushes matter away.

However, when the theory of quantum mechanics is applied to vacuum energy, it would predict that there is an extremely large density of vacuum energy, more than the total energy of all the particles in the universe. Also, Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that the energy would have a strong gravitational effect, which would likely cause the universe to explode.

However, physicists agree that the universe is expanding very slowly and the UBC team have made calculations that show that space is fluctuating wildly and at each point it oscillates between expansion and contraction.

As the universe swings from expansion to contraction, the two actions nearly cancel each other out, resulting in a small net effect that drives the universe to expand slowly at an accelerating rate.

“This happens at very tiny scales, billions and billions times smaller even than an electron,” Wang said.

The abstract to the paper is here, and it puts it rather more technically:

We investigate the gravitational property of the quantum vacuum by treating its large energy density predicted by quantum field theory seriously and assuming that it does gravitate to obey the equivalence principle of general relativity. We find that the quantum vacuum would gravitate differently from what people previously thought. The consequence of this difference is an accelerating universe with a small Hubble expansion rate $H\propto \Lambda e^{-\beta \sqrt{G}\Lambda }\to 0$ instead of the previous prediction $H=\sqrt{8\pi G{\rho }^{\mathrm{vac}}/3}\propto \sqrt{G}{\Lambda }^2\to \infty$ which was unbounded, as the high energy cutoff $\Lambda$ is taken to infinity. In this sense, at least the “old” cosmological constant problem would be resolved. Moreover, it gives the observed slow rate of the accelerating expansion as $\Lambda$ is taken to be some large value of the order of Planck energy or higher. This result suggests that there is no necessity to introduce the cosmological constant, which is required to be fine tuned to an accuracy of ${10}^{-120}$, or other forms of dark energy, which are required to have peculiar negative pressure, to explain the observed accelerating expansion of the Universe.

Would not be surprising

Given his boastful character and inept regard for details, it would not be very surprising at all if Trump did disclose details he shouldn't have to Russians (or anyone he is trying to impress).   The only surprise would be that he had paid enough attention to recall the detail he shouldn't be sharing.  From Axios:

President Trump revealed highly classified information in an Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, potentially damaging relations with a key source of intelligence on ISIS, according to the Washington Post.

• A source told the Post Trump discussed material with the highest level of classification, and "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies."
• Trump seemed to be "boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat" before describing a specific ISIS plot and where it was detected, per the report. The intelligence-sharing system through which the U.S. learned of the plot is incredibly sensitive.

Update:  despite McMaster trying to throw cold water on the story, this detail at the end of the Wapo report seems to indicate there's something to it:

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

Update 2:   just another shouty evening in the White House:

7:24PM: Chief strategist Steve Bannon and top communications officials Mike Dubke, Sarah Sanders, and Sean Spicer walk into cabinet room, per reporters on Twitter who then hear yelling from the meeting.

 Update 3:  more on the shouting:

Twitter (and much of the media) is going berserk over this:   Trump is going to be very, very upset about it all....

XP rules the waves?

Would be hard to believe, if true:

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has refused to deny that Britain’s nuclear submarines use the outdated Windows XP program amid the ongoing WannaCry ransomware attack.

Instead he simply insisted the subs were “safe”, adding that they operated “in isolation” when out on patrol, which possibly suggests the vessels at sea were unaffected only because they were not connected to the internet.

Japanese thoughtfulness

Nice story at the BBC saying that the Japanese started "mindfulness", as part of Zen Bhuddism.  The opening paragraphs: 

As the sleek shinkansen bullet train glided noiselessly into the station, I watched a strange ritual begin. During the brief stop, the conductor in the last carriage began talking to himself. He proceeded to perform a series of tasks, commenting aloud on each one and vigorously gesticulating at various bits of the train all the while.

So what was he up to? You could say he’s practicing mindfulness. The Japanese call it shisa kanko (literally ‘checking and calling’), an error-prevention drill that railway employees here have been using for more than 100 years. Conductors point at the things they need to check and then name them out loud as they do them, a dialogue with themselves to ensure nothing gets overlooked.

And it seems to work. A 1994 study by Japan’s Railway Technical Research Institute, cited in The Japan Times, showed that when asked to perform a simple task workers typically make 2.38 mistakes per 100 actions. When using shisa kanko, this number reduced to just 0.38% – a massive 85% drop.

Backing up

Am I the only person who finds computer data backup a confusing issue?   I mean, I never quite seem to understand what exactly the software is doing, and whether, once I used one company's particular software, it means I'm dependent on that particular software still working in future if I were to do a recovery.  I know there's a Windows back up built in as well, but it seems particularly unclear as to what it is doing (and I think all tech people recommend using other software.)

I've had some improvement on my understanding of how back ups can be set up from this site, but after trying a freeware version of one company's software, I still feel a bit confused...

Straight to the point

It's hard to imagine a more damning take on Trump's personality than this article by David Roberts at Vox.  The key paragraph:

In short, what if Trump is exactly as he appears: a hopeless narcissist with the attention span of a fruit fly, unable to maintain consistent beliefs or commitments from moment to moment, acting on base instinct, entirely situationally, to bolster his terrifyingly fragile ego.

We’re not really prepared to deal with that.

Also at Vox, Matther Yglesias notes that Trump is still avoiding the key question about his connection with Russian money, and the lawyer's letter last week does not answer it.

At Axios, Mike Allen says there is talk of Trump sweeping a huge broom through his White House and Cabinet - but whether he will or not remains unclear.

And yet, despite the obvious turmoil of last week (a President openly taunting a sacked FBI director that he might have been taped being the ultimate low-light), it is stunning that the culture war grip remains as tight as ever on the judgement of those on the Right who supported him, so that they still cannot find significant fault with this patently awful and hopeless President. 

Look, Trump is no Hitler - but the wilful blindness and excuse making with which a scarily significant slab of people treat him gives at least a taste of how many Germans could engage in a similar exercise in self delusion.

Cary and LSD

It's not news that Cary Grant tried using LSD therapeutically to overcome some ongoing psychological issues that pursued him throughout his life, but still there are some details in this Guardian article that are surprising.   This for one:

Turned on to the treatment by his third wife, Betsy Drake, Grant submitted himself to weekly sessions with Dr Mortimer Hartman at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. The effects were startling. “In one LSD dream I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

Well, hard to know what to say about that without any impropriety.

Yet, despite the silliness of that hallucination, Grant was terribly enthusiastic about the drug as a psychological elixir, at least initially:

“He claimed he was saved by LSD,” explains Mark Kidel, the film’s director. “You have to remember that Cary was a private man. He rarely gave interviews. And yet, after taking acid, he personally contacted Good Housekeeping magazine and said: ‘I want to tell the world about this. It has changed my life. Everyone’s got to take it.’ I’ve also heard that Timothy Leary read this interview, or was told about it, and that his own interest in acid was essentially sparked by Cary Grant.”

The article says that his enthusiasm later dampened (after perhaps 100 sessions!), but that early reaction does sound typical of the false promise of mind altering drugs generally,  doesn't it?  Specifically, it reminds me of the enthusiasm for tripping on mescaline that was the basis of Huxley's The Doors of Perception.  (As I have explained before, I actually read that book as a teenager - I think from the high school library, of all places - and found it quite an exciting idea, that a drug could let you see a numinous world as it really is.  I was never tempted to actually seek out any hallucinogen, however, realising soon enough that the theory the book promoted was itself a hallucination.)

Anyway, it does seem that Grant was relatively happier late in life, which is pleasing to know for a person who gave so much enjoyment to the world.

Movie upgraded

I watched Inception with my son last night, the first time I have viewed it since seeing it at the cinema in 2010. I enjoyed rewatching it more than I expected, then decided to go back to read what I had said about it first time around.

Boy, I feel I was a bit harsh, in retrospect.   The film still looks great - really great, actually; and I found myself  enjoying its level of complexity and generally "cool" vibe.   I felt more admiration for DiCaprio's acting this time around, too.  In my earlier review, was I reacting a bit too much against some very high praise it received?   Possibly - I see it got 86% on Rottentomatoes - it's good but not that good. 

Furthermore, I still think it is indisputable that the final level of dream "inception" - the meant-to-be climatic snowy fortress sequence - was a really major mistake.   The movie just starts looking  like a complete James Bond rip off, and despite the (I still say rather poorly directed or edited) action happening around the mountains, it actually loses narrative momentum within a few minutes of them popping up in that location.    

A good, basically clever, movie, but one that could have been great, with some modifications.

Does this mean I would like Interstellar if I watch it again in 6 years time?

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. No.


PS:  my son - now 17 - liked it a lot; but then again, he knew it was by Christopher Nolan, and he knows he can annoy me by overpraising his work.  Especially Interstellar.

Maybe I am a Russian pawn

Hey this is a bit of a surprise.  Based on a computer tech's recommendation, I use Kaspersky anti virus on my computers, but NPR reports that the US government won't.   Not only that, it apparently paid money to sacked Flynn!  Read this:

The Kaspersky Conundrum

The cyber-frustrations of members of Congress and their witnesses are a frequent feature of Intelligence and Armed Services Committee hearings and other national security hearings on the Hill. They seldom, however, get more specific than broad statements and almost never involve the name of a specific problem or company. On Thursday, however, two senators mentioned one in particular: Kaspersky Labs.
The Russian company — which supports NPR and is a provider of security services for its IT systems — has been linked to work for Russia's intelligence agencies. The leaders of the House Oversight Committee released documents showing payments by Kaspersky to Flynn. Even so, millions of Americans use Kaspersky software, as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., pointed out to the witnesses — but, he asked, would they run it on their systems?
Here's how they answered:
McCabe, of the FBI: "A resounding no from me."
Pompeo, of the CIA: "No."
Coats, the director of national intelligence: "No, senator."
Rogers, of the NSA: "No, sir."
Stewart, of the Pentagon's DIA: "No, senator."
Cardillo, of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: "No, sir."
Later, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked the intelligence bosses about Kaspersky again. They repeated their own government systems were safe from any danger, but the DIA's Stewart said he couldn't be sure about all of his contractors. Intelligence and defense contractors have been the sources for huge leaks of secrets from the NSA, CIA and other agencies.

Update:   one of the reasons I wonder about this is because of the mysterious level of activity from Russia (or, sometimes other odd countries) that can appear when you check "stats" on Blogger.   The hits Blogger shows must include heaps of 'bot hits, or something, because if you have a separate company's hit counter embedded on the blog, you  get a much more realistic number.  For example, today Blogger stats says I got 2,800 hits yesterday, and by far mostly from Russia!:

My embedded statcounter shows a much more realistic 96 hits.

It makes me feel my blog is somehow being used, but I don't know how...

The inflation fight (cosmology, not economics)

I've always been a bit leery of post Big Bang inflation as an explanation - because the mechanism of how it happened had just been left hanging for decades, but everyone seemed to just accept it must have happened, anyway.   (Here I was, commenting briefly on it back in 2006.)

Well, I see from The Altantic that there has been a bit of a recent skirmish going on between cosmologists about whether it is really good science if it is not really testable:

In January, Steinhardt, and fellow Princeton physicist Anna Ijjas, and Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb published a feature in Scientific American criticizing inflation. They concluded by characterizing it as an idea outside of empirical science altogether. The myriad ways inflation could have played out would lead to so many possible outcomes that no astronomical observation can ever rule the general idea out, they say—and moreover, some advocates for inflation know it. This would go against a basic, popular framing of science suggested by philosopher Karl Popper, in which a theory becomes scientific when it takes the risk of making predictions that nature could then uphold or disprove.

“They really made the accusation that the inflationary community understands that the theory is not testable,” Guth, one of the idea’s founding fathers, says. “Those words angered me.” In response, Guth and his colleagues have taken the unusual step of replying with their own letter in Scientific American that insists they are doing science. They even went to the trouble of circulating their response, in order to collect signatures from many of the world’s most prominent cosmologists. “What’s the point of just making it look like it’s three people disagreeing with three people?” says David Kaiser, another author of the letter.

The 29-person list of other experts who signed on includes four Nobel Prize winners, a Fields Medal winner, Steven Hawking, and leading figures from the  cosmology experiments COBE, WMAP, and Planck. (Also, twenty-five members of the list are men.) In turn, Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb have published their own response-to-the-response.

For both sides, the core of the issue is whether inflation as a general approach makes specific predictions that can be checked against the sky, and the extent to which these comparisons count as empirical tests. If the universe did inflate, some kind of mysterious, short-lived field must have pushed everything apart. But theorists have wiggle room as to how exactly that field behaved, with a wide array of consequences that can both match and contradict reality, the critics note.

I still feel more-or-less vindicated in my suspicions about inflation being accepted too quickly.

Governors creeped out

The Govenor's Mansion in New York apparently creeps out governors who stay there.  (They worry it is haunted.)

Worth noting

It would seem that the ignorance highlighting interview that Trump gave with The Economist has been swamped for media attention somewhat by the Comey sacking.  But it really was a doozy.

Just to show I'm not a complete "lefty"...

...I will link with approval (it rarely happens these days) to a post at Tim Blair's, about a truly ridiculous case of "cultural appropriation" hysteria from Canada.

Is there possibly any more humilitating job than being "White House Spokesperson for PresidentTrump"?

Vox headline:

Trump himself just confirmed his White House’s story about Comey’s firing was a lie; 
It took less than 48 hours.

Update:   I like this last paragraph in a Slate article about Trump's anger problem:

The problem with a doctrine of wrath—in the presidency as in other walks of life—is that the rationale so clear to the boiling brain can appear ridiculous to the outside observer. The administration’s babbling excuses have a knee-jerk quality; it’s as if the president so desired to disappear his Putin problem that he was willing to embrace whatever absurd explanation came to hand (and then became surprised—and angry all over again—when we didn’t fall for it). Don’t look at Russia! our commander in chief shouts in fury, and of course our gaze stays fixed on Moscow. Such transparent terror is contagious: Republican senators this week tried to make the Trump–Russia hearings about the travel ban, leaks, and Clinton’s emails—anything but Trump and Russia. After a certain point, this is no longer strategy. It is reflex. It is a child covering his eyes to make the loathsome object in front of him vanish. Trump may be a politician, but he is also a man consumed with desperate, narcissistic rage. Easing that pain will always be his primary goal. 

Too stupid to understand how it would look

From the Washington Post, there's a recurring theme of "anger" in this story.  (These are various extracts from the report):

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists....

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate. FBI officials declined to comment on the statement, and a White House official refused to discuss conversations between Trump and Comey....

The media explosion was immediate and the political backlash was swift, with criticism pouring in not only from Democrats, but also from some Republicans. Trump and some of his advisers did not fully anticipate the ferocious reaction — in fact, some wrongly assumed many Democrats would support the move because they had been critical of Comey in the past — and were unprepared to contain the fallout.  ...

Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.

The president was irate, according to White House officials. Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare.

 And yes, I see there is a twitterstorm coming from Trump, which confirms that he is indeed indignant that he is copping so much criticism.

Am I missing something here?

I'm no medical researcher, but I've previously questioned how these studies of how long HIV positive patients can expect to live if they are being treated can be all that accurate.  Don't you have to wait 'til the (say) 20 year olds who have started on antiviral treatments in the last decade have lived on the drugs for 40 years before you can know of any long term consequences of such intense medication?

Here's news of another such statistical study, saying that if they get onto treatment early, they can expect to live near normal life expectancy.  The article says:

The researchers looked at 88,500 people with HIV from Europe and North America who had been involved in 18 studies.

They based their life-expectancy predictions on death rates during the first three years of follow-up after drug treatment was started.

They found that fewer people who started treatment between 2008 and 2010 died during this period compared with those who began treatment between 1996 and 2007.

The expected age at death of a 20-year-old patient starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) after 2008, with a low viral load and after the first year of treatment, was 78 years - similar to the general population.

Furthermore, publicity about this type of finding surely is (the major?) part of the reason for complacency in the at risk community about catching it in the first place.?  

Socks in space

Here's a thought:  when you wish upon a shooting star, it might turn out to be a load of astronauts' dirty socks and jocks* burning up:

Astronaut Don Pettit, a University of Arizona College of Engineering alumnus, wore the same pair of shorts for months at a time while living on the International Space Station. Doing laundry was not an option. When clothes got too dirty, he and his crewmates stored them onboard until they could be thrown out—launched with other debris on a spacecraft and incinerated upon entering Earth's atmosphere.

Anyway, you can read about attempts to work out a clothes cleaning system that would let them clean their pants occasionally, instead of throwing them out.  Silver embedded socks (I had written about silver space underwear before) washed in low concentration hydrogen peroxide looks promising.

*  Sexism alert - there's been a lot of female astronauts up there too.   In fact, only last week I noticed that Peggy Whitson had set the record for total hours in space.  I wonder how many change of clothes she's had in that time...

Poor Mexico

I had the impression that the drug wars and general rate of murder and mayhem had been improving recently in Mexico.  But not according to one report (which Mexico disputes).  Second most violent nation in the world, it says.  (Which, actually, does sound a stretch.)  

I've seen some travel shows through the country in the last year or so, and it always looks to me like an interesting place to visit. 

What is truth?

Certainly, as Matthew Yglesias convincingly shows, it's not what Trump and Republican speak.   Here's the opening section:

Unknowns always exist in politics, but in the case of the Trump administration, that’s severely compounded by his habit of constantly lying. That’s especially true because the lying disease seems to be catching.

High-ranking administration officials regularly stand before the public and say things that plainly aren’t true. Increasingly, so do many of their leading allies in Congress. Not just in the sense that they make exaggerated or contestable claims about the likely impact of their policies — though they do that too — but in the sense that they aren’t even correctly stating what their policies are.

On the campaign trail, for example, Trump promised time and again that his administration would build the Keystone XL pipeline and do it with American steel. His actual executive orders do not require this. But even after his administration clarified that he wasn’t requiring the pipeline to be built with American steel, Trump stood before the cameras at an Environmental Protection Agency event and said, “If you want to buy pipelines in this country, you’re going to buy your steel here and you’re going to have it fabricated here.”

There’s no sneaky verbiage here or technical explanation of some sense in which this is accurate. Trump is just claiming to have ordered something he never ordered — just as how in the alternative universe of Trumpland, he held the best-attended inauguration in history and had the most productive first 100 days since FDR.

There’s always been a certain amount of dishonesty in politics, but Trump has taken it to a new level — and seems to be making it work. His allies in Congress have adopted the same technique, and it’s the core of House Republicans’ health care sales job. 

 He then goes on to list examples of lies about the Obamacare repeal, and notes this:

It’s worth emphasizing that this kind of lying is different in character from what we are used to hearing in politics.

Politicians, for example, exaggerate routinely about the job-creating punch of whatever new initiative they’re touting, far beyond what most objective analysts would state. But typically, politicians select economic policies that they truly believe would boost economic growth and create jobs. There happens to be systematic ideological disagreement about whether tax cuts supercharge the economy or environmental regulations kill growth.

But what you don’t hear is politicians saying they are cutting taxes when they are actually raising them, or claiming to have put in place a rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they actually did the opposite. 

On the ACHA, in contrast, House Republicans just voted for a law that will let insurance companies charge patients with preexisting conditions arbitrarily high premiums to avoid covering them. And they are running around the country saying the opposite.

 It is a ridiculous situation that only self blinded culture warriors could defend.

Sacked for all the wrong reasons? (Maybe I'm wrong)

Bigger news than the Labor rebirth of Malcolm Turnbull is the Trump sacking of Comey.

The funny thing is, I see that the FBI has had to issue a letter correcting a lot of what Comey claimed  at his committee meeting last week - which exaggerated the seriousness of the renewed Clinton email investigation - and that certainly does hurt his credibility.

Yet (if I am reading it right) it seems as if Trump is sacking him for not having gone harder after Clinton, and hence it looks completely partisan and virtually corrupt.

I think this is going to hurt Trump bigly.   (I know, we stop copying his childish talk, but it's hard not to.)

Update:   oh, it seems I was reading it wrong.    At least Vox says the reason is (on the face of it) in support of Clinton.  

Update 2:   I'm not sure who is interpreting this right.   I can't really see how the Vox interpretation is correct....

Budge it

I'm pretty busy today, so not much time to comment.

But - the Federal Budget seems to be annoying all the right people, so it's probably OK, more or less.

It's about time Turnbull became the Labor-lite Prime Minister we all hoped him to be.  (Ha ha.)

I don't think Abbott has surfaced yet - what would be good would be for him to do a complete dummy spit, and leave with a few other Libs and Nationals to join Bernadi to forge a new dead end party that would attract votes only from Catallaxy readers and Andrew Bolt.

But he's probably not brave enough...

The jokes write themselves

Noticed in the Jakarta Post of all places:

Due to its yellowish color and strong odor, beer has oftentimes been likened in jest to urine.

However, one brewery in Denmark, has been taking the comparisons way too literally, as it is making beer using the said human waste.

According to CBS news, local corporation Norrebro Bryghus is using the unconventional liquid in their malting process by fertilizing the traditional barley grain with human urine.

The cleverly named “Pisner” pilsner, which comes from a wordplay between the type of beer and local slang, was made from contents of urinals at the largest music festival in Northern Europe.

All in all, over 50,000 liters of human urine  was used as an alternative to traditional animal manure or factory-made fertilizer products, the report said.

I hate to think what recreational drugs might be in urine sourced from music festive (I assume, of the doof doof type.)

Macron as "closest thing to libertarian"?

Jason Soon noted here yesterday that Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with, and while I see that while he is indeed credited with some economic liberalising ideas, he also has plenty of others which American or Australian libertarians would run a mile from.  Here are some of them, as chosen from a list at the BBC:

Would make public investments worth €50bn spread over five years for environmental measures, apprenticeships, digital innovation and public infrastructure

Foreign aid: Eager to increase spending in Africa but wants to help countries stand on their own two feet in defence terms

• In areas of special need - notably poor suburbs (banlieues) - would limit class sizes in primary schools to 12 pupils per teacher
• Would ban children's use of mobile phones at school
• At the age of 18 French teenagers would get a "Cultural Pass" worth €500 to spend on cultural pursuits such as the cinema, theatre, books

Energy and environment

• Calls for half of food provided in school and work canteens to be organic or locally produced
• Would promote France as a world leader in developing green technologies
• Advocates renovating one million poorly insulated homes

He is, of course, also pro EU, an institution which I don't notice many libertarians celebrating.

Anyway, Macron is fully on board with climate change - quite possibly the single biggest distinguishing thing between a libertarian and a sensible person.    

Rural men and city women both missing out on marriage

I'm talking about Japan:

Generally higher rates of unmarried men in eastern Japan prefectures and among women in prefectures home to major cities have led some analysts to say the trend of women moving to cities and men staying in rural areas to carry on family businesses in agriculture and other industries may explain the differences.

A National Institute of Population and Social Security Research report released last month showed a record 23.37 percent of men aged 50 nationwide in 2015 had never married, compared with a record 14.06 percent for women of the same age.

Among Tokyo and 46 other prefectures in the country, the highest for men was Okinawa in southwestern Japan at 26.20 percent and the lowest Nara in western Japan at 18.24 percent, while the highest for women was Tokyo at 19.20 and the lowest Fukui in central Japan at 8.66 percent.

An official of the northeastern Japan prefecture of Hokkaido, which logged the second-highest unmarried percentage of women at 17.22 percent, said a higher rate in the capital city of Sapporo has pushed up the average for the island prefecture.

"Hokkaido has long been said to have less social pressure for marriage. In Sapporo in particular, women may be feeling less pressed to marry, as there are many singles around them," the prefectural official involved in marriage promotion said.

Also included on the list of 10 prefectures with the highest rates of unmarried women are such major cities as Osaka, Fukuoka and Kyoto.

Still sounds unpleasant

A new, nonsurgical weight-loss procedure — which involves inserting a tube down a patient's throat and suturing the stomach — is safe and effective, a new study finds.

During the procedure, which is called endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty, doctors insert a long tube down a patient's esophagus to the stomach. Then, they sew "pleats" into the stomach, which makes it resemble an accordion.

The procedure reduces the volume of the stomach, so that patients feel fuller faster and therefore eat less, said lead study author Dr. Reem Sharaiha,

Link is here.

Let's drop in on the Ship of Fools as they watch the French election results

a.k.a. "Catallaxy":

All calm and under control, then.   (Can't wait for Steve Kates to turn up, too.)

Update:

 Update 2:  for a calm survey of the actual political landscape in France, this article from The Atlantic seems pretty good.

Update 3:  struth seems to broadening his critique of France, probably due to his losing his money:

Life in Pyongyang

NPR talks to an American back from a recent second visit to Pyongyang, who says that life seems relatively normal, at least in that city:

On what has changed since Lee's last trip to North Korea

I have to point out that I've only been in Pyongyang, which is the showcase capital. This is a city of elites, and so I'm only getting that side of the picture. It's like only going to Manhattan, rather than seeing the rest of the United States.

That said, it's surprising given what we hear about the sanctions how things have progressed. Everybody has a smartphone — sometimes two. Everybody is on their phones. They're all playing video games. They're doing what we do with our cellphones as well, they're checking the news, messaging their friends.

There's quite a bit more English, which is interesting. English is the main language that children learn here. There's certainly a lot more cars, which is surprising given the concern about fuel shortages.

I did some shopping today ... and it's just amazing the kinds of products that they have on the shelves. [That] certainly wasn't the case when I started coming to North Korea. So, in some ways, life has improved for the people of Pyongyang.

That said, I think that things are still incredibly difficult in the countryside. They have a chronic food shortage, and that's only going to get worse, of course, with the tightened sanctions.

I didn't expect that bit about English, either.

And even with state controlled media, it seems they are not being whipped into a frenzy (or if the attempt is being made, it's not working?):

It's amazingly calm. You would be surprised at how calm things are here, and I have to say that like most North Koreans, I've been largely cut off from the screaming headlines that we've been seeing. I didn't have Internet access for several days. And, as you probably know, most North Koreans don't have Internet access. They get their news from their own state media, so unless they read about it in their own state media, or see it on the evening news, they're not very aware of it.

To be honest, it's remarkable, we are not seeing people who are preparing for war. They've had a month, really, of some big anniversaries. They celebrated May Day. I did go to a May Day celebration in the park, where they were singing and dancing and drinking.
But they're getting ready now for a busy season of rice planting in May, so they're gearing up for that. They are completely unfazed, it seems, by all the rhetoric that we're hearing overseas.

Plain packaging win (it seems)

Are there tears in the Sinclair Davidson, Tim Wilson and John Roskam households this morning?

Because Sinclair may have to put his passport back in the draw after getting some international invites to talk at tobacco sympathiser meetings about how plain packaging doesn't really work (the signs are that governments just don't believe him);  Tim looks likely to have been proved completely and utterly wrong in every respect  about his warnings while he was on the tobacco funded IPA's payroll; and similarly John Roskam's institute might get less funding from tobacco and have to go asking for Gina for more.  

Because - it looks very likely that the WTO has decided that Australia (and any other country that wants to do it) can do plain packaging on tobacco and not be an illegal barrier to trade.

Yes, laugh out loud

It's not that often that I do laugh out loud at a short tweeted video, but the one here, which looks like it has been retweeted a huge number of times already,  really does look so bizarre I could not help it.

Self serving mush

Gee, Chris Kenny is a political commentator well worth ignoring, isn't he?   Here is the start of his excuse making ramble in The Australian today on the state of politics:

Wandering around the US last month I was reminded about the less than compelling place that partisan politics has in our daily lives. 

Even in the Democrat heartlands of California and Hawaii, whether in the big cities or the back blocks, Americans didn’t mention politics or their new President unless I raised the topic. They were — to use a phrase — relaxed and comfortable; just getting on with their lives.   [My note:  it's hardly common in any country, is it, to ask a tourist to discuss what they think about your country's politics?]

 This, of course, should be no surprise and it merely confirmed my instincts as I mulled over what we are told are tectonic shifts in the political mood in Western liberal democracies.

Brexit, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and even Pauline Hanson are often characterised as evidence of a far-right, populist upsurge. This analysis often veers into patronising or demeaning references to the voting public.   [Yes Chris - protestor bashing, redneck rallies for Trump spouting know lies were just typical examples of all political rallies from the last 50 years, hey?]

If this were true, what could be the trigger? Why would this be happening? And where will it take Australian politics? [Gee, what might Chris think is the reason - oh yeah, the Lefty political/media class has gone completely nuts and out of touch.  Like the significant majority of American voters for actually voted for Hillary, I suppose, you moron.]

Perhaps much of the political/media class has misjudged what is going on. Maybe this is less a case of the public mood shifting than voter realisation that the political/media class has shifted from a once centrist axis.

 And so on and so on.   A predictable worthless commentator if ever there was one.

Yet another post about the Guardians 2 movie I didn't care for much

Oddly, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 opened overseas a week ahead of the USA, and hence there are some reviews from there only coming out now.

I found myself just about in complete agreement with the very mixed review in the New York Times, and was happy to read this out to my son over breakfast, citing vindication for the comments I had made to him about the Yondu killing spree section of the film:

At times, Mr. Gunn’s ambitions badly backfire. Like the first movie, this one is jammed with action-driven sequences, some wildly bloated and most of them cartoonish. For one fight, though, he cranks the music and lets the screen bleed as the ostensible good guys kill one villain after another, the casualties falling to the sound of a head-bobbing song. Tonally, the episode feels unpleasantly sour and wrong for this young series, which is best when it goes light; it’s a bummer watching another director attempt the kind of smiling sadism that not even Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino can always pull off.

Interest piqued

I'm far, far from being a Christopher Nolan fanboy, but I have to admit, the new trailer for his forthcoming Dunkirk has a very pleasing look of realism about it.  (In reality, there probably will be plenty of CGI in it, but if you can't tell, it doesn't matter.)



Of course, it may look great but still have no emotional connection to the audience, and he did write it himself (which is a warning sign, given he and his brother did the God awful dialogue in Interstellar.)   But the claim is that Dunkirk is actually light on dialogue.

We shall see....

Nothing if not inconsistent

Are Republican congressmen (well, there was barely a female to be seen) just not that bright?   Because I thought the optics of them guffawing over their Obamacare repeal at the White House was clearly bad - especially when the long term consequences look certain to hurt the poor and give tax cuts to the rich.   There will be no excuse that they did it with some sort of regret, but it just had to be done as an economic necessity, as other Right wing policy sometimes sells itself.  No - the history books will show they celebrated, essentially just because they finally got enough on their own side to vote for an ideologically driven, but socially harmful, law.  Congrats, boys...

And as for Trump:  well, we know he's an narcissistic, immature idiot who just thinks a win's a win and that's all that matters.  But to go from celebrating with Ryan to praising the Australian health system??   Could he possibly be any more intellectually inconsistent?   Well, I guess it takes an intellect, first of all...

Adam throws a tantrum

Adam Creighton, being of a libertarian mind, cannot bring himself to support the idea that banks or investors should base decisions on taking the largest environmental issue the world has seen into account.   Libertarians are stupid this way - either they are greedy rich grubs who spend part of their squillions protecting their income by ridiculing the idea that there is any problem with CO2 at all (see Koch brothers), or even if they do believe that climate change is real and that the precautionary principle means there should be action against it, they can't be bothered being concerned about nothing much being done about it (because "big government", or "I hate Hillary Clinton," or something..see Nassim Taleb.)   And if it's a matter of it taking harm to a mining company to help ensure coal burning stops adding to CO2 - well of course that's offensive, because "you're stopping someone making money".

Hence Adam spends his time criticising Westpac today, because it said it won't finance Adani.

Given that it seems most economists think that Australian banks are relatively well placed financially, I am not at all confident that Adam's criticises are accurate or fair.   Some of his criticisms are obviously ideological, and I would need someone with a better understanding of banking systems and regulation to parse it before I trusted his assessment.

An entry exam too far

Last weekend, I posted about the rather extraordinary story of romantic deception that was in the SMH magazine.

Today, we have a more oddball tale of deception in what sounds more or less like a private pre-spy school in Washington DC.  (Who knew they existed?)

Long story short - a guy ingratiates himself with staff at such a school, and with retired spies more generally, with stories that he used to work in some agency or other, killing bad guys and so on.  Some young male students fall for his stories that he may be recruiting them for his still active covert group, but some of the training involves visits to his apartment.  (Uh-oh.)

Then, Levin began inviting his protege back to his Arlington apartment building to practice drawing a weapon — shirtless. Soon, the man said, Levin began fondling him and giving him prostate exams, telling him the inspections were key to his recruitment. Levin also washed him in the shower, according to the alleged victims’ lawsuit, which was filed by lawyers Tamara Miller, a former Justice Department deputy chief, and Peter Masciola, a retired brigadier general.

Although Levin told him that he was free to refuse, the Arlington man said he did not want to imperil his candidacy for the clandestine organization or risk losing out on government jobs.

About the same time, Levin had persuaded a second young student at the Institute of World Politics to get in the shower, under similar pretenses, the lawsuit says.

The whole story is interesting though, because of the way it suggests that retired spies don't really talk in detail to each other about places they worked for, and what they did.  Which makes it conveniently easy to concoct a past.

As someone in comments after the article says:

The general impression, from reading this story, is that there are a bunch of stupid people in the IC.

(I also how hope that the pun in the title to this post is now appreciated.)

Two other points about Guardians 2

*   The Washington Post has an article noting that the movie really doubles down on the use of retro pop music, and it did feel a tad excessive compared to the more restrained use in the first movie.  The article criticises this whole genre of movie as getting a bit lazy:

When needle drops have been curated carefully and deployed judiciously, they can enhance a film’s atmosphere and its characters’ unspoken feelings. Too often, though, they’re lazy ploys to earn the audience’s buy-in, or to signal the connoisseurship and impressively arcane tastes of the filmmaker. Music that should be used to convey added layers of environmental and emotional information is instead used simply for nostalgia appeal and self-congratulation.

Yes, I concur.

*  Has anyone else yet mentioned that Ego's origin story seems to draw on the idea of a Boltzmann Brain?  Let me Google it - yes, someone at IMDB has already commented on this.  (It is very hard to be first on the internet!)

Speaking of China

The BBC is reporting that morning in Beijing currently looks like this:

Makes me want to cough just looking at it.

And how bad is the air quality?  Spectacularly bad:

Beijing's environmental agency said that as of 11:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the PM2.5 reading - which measures pollution in the form of small breathable particles - was 500 micrograms per cubic metre.

The WHO says the maximum safe level should be 25 micrograms per cubic metre.

A good survey of the rise of China

This review of a book on Asia's rise contains an interesting summary of what has been going on with China.   Some things of note:

Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to 4.4 billion people. But its story is disproportionately about China’s economic growth. Beijing’s official statistics are notoriously unreliable, but by most reckonings, China became the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit rates every year for two decades....

Rachman links China’s newly aggressive policies to President Xi Jinping, noting that the month after he took office “Chinese military aircraft entered Japanese-controlled airspace for the first time since 1958,” and that in his first eighteen months Xi “paid more official visits to the People’s Liberation Army than his predecessor had done in a decade.” Xi has paid equal attention to building public support for his newly assertive policies, bolstering decades of Communist Party propaganda that China, at long last, is claiming its rightful place as a world power after more than a century of foreign humiliation.

This “aggrieved nationalism” coexists with an equally strong feeling of insecurity within the Chinese government—a dangerous mixture. The Communist Party’s legitimacy no longer rests on ideology but on economic growth, which is slowing. The Party is convinced that the West fomented the string of so-called color revolutions demanding democratic governance that took place during the 2000s—from Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and Iran. It fears and expects similar subversion in China. Outrage at elite corruption was a common feature of these movements, and corruption is rampant in China. So Xi has launched a vigorous campaign against it—conveniently jailing many of his political opponents. The difficulty, as Rachman points out, is that “arresting more than one hundred thousand people…risks creating political instability by another route.”

Scenic Norway

This photo appeared on Reddit recently, noting the unusual and spectacular setting for a soccer field in Norway.   (I am interested in what the buildings on the point beyond the field are, as well.  Looks like a lighthouse keepers house?)   No wonder there seems to be a surge of interest in Norway as a scenic wonderland.

Another rule of thumb

A politician (or political adviser) unduly obsessed with immigration and how it's wrecking the place (and allegedly so unfair on those already here) is never a good sign.

The case in point:  Steve Bannon.

The trouble with wisdom teeth

Forgot to post this last week: an article explaining why so many of us moderns need our wisdom teeth out:

Sarah Zhang: I’d like to begin with where your book ends, which is the modern scourge of impacted wisdom teeth. Our ancestors had wisdom teeth, they did not have dentists, and they did not have so many problems. Aside from possibly being over-diagnosed, why are impacted wisdom teeth a uniquely modern problem?

Peter Ungar: It’s a uniquely modern problem because we don’t grow our jaws long enough to accommodate our teeth. It turns out that nature has selected our jaw length on the basis of what it expects us to be doing during the period of time the jaw is growing. The more frequently you put force on the jaw, the longer the jaw grows. Nature has to guesstimate how long your jaw should be for teeth of a given size. Today we don't achieve that because we’re eating mush as kids.

I don't think my diet was particularly mushy, but these things are relative, I suppose...