Comparing disasters

The photos of destruction coming out after the terrible Californian fires are quite something.  

I was curious as to how it compared to the harm caused by the Victorian Black Saturday fires, which sort of set the modern Australian image of how bad our bushfires can be.

A quick Google would indicate that 2,029 homes were destroyed in our home-grown disaster (but apparently another 1,000 or so buildings too.)    Number of people killed: 173.

The Californian fire is being reported as having destroyed about 12,000 homes, and while the death toll is still currently below 100, there's another 700 missing.  (Which really seems an extraordinary number after this time.)

So yeah, at least in property destruction, the Californian fires are already on a much larger scale, and may well end up having killed many more people too.

Elver abuse

You can congratulate me later for the title to the post, after you've  read all about what's possibly the oddest criminal activity in the world:

Billions of euros worth of critically endangered eels are being trafficked each year from Europe, ending up on tables in China and Japan in what campaigners say is "the largest wildlife crime on Earth."

Stocks of European eel (anguilla anguilla) have plummeted 90 percent in three decades as mankind has developed the wetlands and dammed the rivers it needs to grow and feed in, and experts fear criminal gangs smuggling the lucrative fish are pushing it towards oblivion.

The problem, according to Michel Vignaud, head of fishing regulation at France's National Biodiversity Agency, is exploding Asian demand for a product viewed as both a delicacy and an aphrodisiac.

"We cannot legally export eels outside the EU, but the prices are different in Asia. There is a real Asian demand for eel," he told AFP.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization said that in 2016 China produced close to a quarter of a million tonnes of eel for consumption, far ahead of Japan—where eating eel is seen as bringing good luck and fertility—and the EU.

The bloc's law enforcement agency EUROPOL estimates as many as 100 tonnes of baby eels—known as glass eels for their translucent skin—are trafficked abroad each year: equivalent to around 350 million fish.

 PS:  if I have to explain - an elver is a young eel.

Nudism not gone quite as planned

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story about how residents at Byron Bay, which has a (not very easy to get to, by the sounds) official nudist beach, are pretty sick of the creepy men engaging in offensive and harassing behaviour of a sexual nature.

I had also noticed, perhaps a year ago?, that an unofficial nudist beach at Noosa had attracted police attention and resulted in arrests and convictions.   

I find it interesting that public attitudes to the practice of nudism, in at least the English speaking West, have not really gone as someone in the 1960's might have expected.    Robert Heinlein, who I think was himself a nudist (and apparently sexually adventurous before it was quite the thing), used to write books in which appearing nude in public was not such a big deal in the future;  and given the hippy free love movement and nude mud baths happening at festivals in the 60's, it would have seemed a fair prediction at the time.

As society morphed on from there, you would get claims from time to time about how nudist tourism was booming, which seems a journalist trope that just never goes away.   Yet, it seems clear that, by and large, the nudist movement in America, England and Australia has gone backwards, both in terms of clubs and even use of nudist beaches.   

Why is it that, at a time of (relative) sexual liberation and less panic about nudity on television and media, actual nudity in public in the West has declined?   And why do nude beaches attract an increasing number of creepy men?    One would have thought the internet and porn would give them more reason to stay indoors.   Is there a line being crossed between internet porn being a diversion from acting out in public, and it working as encouragement to get out to commit offensive and worrying behaviour?

I mean, I guess nudism's connection with sexuality was never going to go away (despite high minded insistence by naturists that there is no essential connection), but I still didn't really expect its public practice to go backwards.   

Update:  Here's a theory:   while the internet means a lot more people see a lot more nude bodies than ever before, there is pretty good evidence from the rise in plastic surgery for breasts and labia that it has made (at least some) women more anxious and self conscious about perceived imperfections in their normally unexposed areas.   That, of course, is not the sort of attitude which makes public beach nudity appealing.   (And the rise of pubic hair removal has exacerbated this concern for women too.)   

Roubini on digital currency

Nouriel Roubini - probably cryptocurrency's and blockchain's biggest critic - discusses what the future of digital currency might be.   

Interesting.

I haven't noticed Chris Berg or Sinclair Davidson giving one of their vapourware quality chats on the potential of blockchain for a while.  I suspect that the topic has been mined for all its worth (ha, a bit of a crypto pun there) and it's time for them to move on.   

A not-as-late-as-usual movie review

A Quiet Place:   In summary:  nasty (and kinda generic looking in a modern-movie, big-toothed, weird-headed, way) aliens spend all their time running around the countryside slashing humans (or racoons) who are too loud.  A family holes up in their farm trying to get by, very quietly, in such a world.

On the upside:   there are quite a few scares, but to be honest, they are mostly the relatively cheap jump-scare variety.   Acting is pretty good.

On the downside:  [lots of spoilers ahead] a lot does not bear too much thinking about.   For one thing:  I was puzzled as to how the corn fields got planted, since the time line indicated that they must have been planted well after the aliens arrived.   [OK, I'll be generous here, and allow that maybe the aliens were busy devastating the towns and cities before they headed into the countryside.  But even then, would seem a tad odd that the farmers just got on with planting as if there were no alien invasion going on.]

For a second thing:  these aliens don't look too smart, and don't seem to eat their human and animal victims:  just slash them open and run.  That's sort of odd behaviour, even for an alien, isn't it?   What is the motivation for killing all noisy humans?*

A third thing:  corn in silos is like quicksand?   I suspected not, and the comments by several (apparent) farmers on this Reddit thread indicate that my scepticism was justified.

There are many other points I found myself doubting:  sure, being a new mother can be tiring, but sleeping through a basement flood that big?  Especially as she would presumably have become used to sleeping in total silence for a year or more.

The film overall reminded me too much of the woeful (and even sillier) Signs with Mel Gibson:   it also had a lot of corn and aliens, a Christian family, and aliens weirdly unprepared for human resistance by use of something pretty foreseeable.   (Actually, blindingly obvious, in the case of Signs.)   OK, again, being generous, maybe these latest aliens are just like the equivalent of hungry pet wolves let loose on the planet by their smart owners we never see.   (Again, why is the obvious question.)

I don't regret watching it, and I can see how it was pitched successfully as a high concept alien invasion story:   but it didn't deserve the very strong critical reception.   It pushed the plausibility boundaries way too often for that.



*  I have just now read an article that says it's clear by the end that the aliens are killing because they just need a silent planet on which to live.   If they are that sensitive to any and all sound - how do they put up with rain?   Did they cross light years to get here without inventing earplugs or noise reducing headphones?   I mean, they have huge ear holes, to be sure, but this still seems a bit silly.

Learning languages

Quite a helpful article here discussing the pros and cons (mainly the cons) of using the popular "learn a foreign language" app Duolingo. 

I've been tempted to try it, but never have.

In praise of spaghetti carbonara

I hadn't made my own spaghetti carbonara for a long time 'til last Saturday, but I thought this recipe worked pretty well and was similar to the last I had used from an old cookbook.   (Cookbook publishers must be hating the internet and its effect on sourcing recipes.)

I tend to like to a drier carbonara - some people prefer a wetter version.  It does seem to me that people can get very snooty about the right way to do this dish, a bit like those people who insist that country X's food here is nothing like the real thing when you actually go there.   (I usually find this is a greatly exaggerated claim.)

In any event, isn't it the case that Italians don't eat pasta as a main meal in quite the way we do?  I wouldn't mind betting that this may have changed in recent years too.

I like the way you can be non-trad with the recipe - adding some fresh asparagus and small sized bits of broccoli worked well on Saturday, and using just bacon was fine.   Many people like to add mushrooms too, it seems, and I would have if there were any in the refrigerator.

Left over reheats surprisingly well in the microwave too.

So yeah, I should make it more often.

William Goldman

Famous screenwriter/novelist William Goldman has died.   You know, I don't recall knowing what he looked like until now, despite having read a few of his books.

I had forgotten that he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - a film which, incidently, I felt was vastly over-rated when I saw it as a child.  (My mother was a big Robert Redford fan - I think I was tagging along with her when I saw it.  Not sure if my father was there too.)   I wonder if I would feel differently about it as an adult?   I still have this gut feeling that it was very lightweight and trivial. 

Anyway, Goldman interested me more for his books about the industry, and I suspect that he might have become slightly dismayed that, despite "nobody knowing anything" in Hollywood, studios have become pretty good at knowing what franchise material will make a killing in the first week or two, regardless of critical reception.   (Although, I guess, that Solo movie's failure almost certainly came as a surprise.)

As spotted on Twitter

A fair few anti Taleb comments follow the tweet, too.

Death by social media

The BBC has been trying to tally up how many people in India have died as a result of social media spreading false rumours.  And one appalling story is told in detail:

Across India mob attacks are on the rise, fuelled by false rumours on WhatsApp and social media. According to the BBC's analysis of incidents between February 2014 and July 2018, at least 31 people have been killed and dozens more injured. These are the incidents the BBC was able to verify, many more have been reported.

Many of the false rumours warn people that there are child abductors in their towns, driving locals to target innocent men who are not known to the community. A total of 25 men, 4 women, and two people of unknown gender have died. Here is a timeline of those incidents the BBC has verified.

In one striking example, a video clip shared on WhatsApp went viral in India in June 2018, with tragic consequences. In the clip, a man on a motorbike appears to be kidnapping a child from the street. The messages that accompanied the video as it was shared from phone to phone alleged that the incident had occurred in Bangalore and warned the community to be on the lookout for “potential child-lifters”. Vigilante mobs formed and killed an estimated 10 people.

But the outrage overshadowed the true story.

The clip was in fact part of a safety video produced by a child welfare group in Pakistan. At the end of the original video, the supposed “kidnapper” returns the child to his friends and holds up a sign that reads “It takes only a moment to kidnap a child from the streets of Karachi.” This was edited out in the viral version.

Another bad, high profile, Netflix movie?

The Guardian reviewer really dislikes a new Netflix movie with some big star power in it.  [Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Jacki Weaver (!)]

Seems to me that, for a company that plans on being such a major player in movie content, they have to do something about quality control, fast.

Dutch tradition considered

I didn't know about the Dutch "Black Pete" controversy.  An interesting article at The Guardian.

Freud, Jung, sex

Quite a nice summary in this Aeon essay about how Jung and Freud's professional and personal relationship started and broke up.

Jung is deservedly the more interesting character and theorist.  And yeah, it's true:  Freud went off the rails over sex. 

Washington intrigue

So, articles are being written about Trump's foul mood on the trip to Europe (he was very aggro with poor old Theresa May on the phone before he even landed - and it would seem that the only person he was really happy to see was Putin).   Only the most foolish cult followers could think that the trip was a success for Trump in any respect.   Hello, Steve Kates?

The other big issue is his chronic staff in-fighting, with Politico noting that, apart from the Homeland Security Secretary about to get the chop for not being rabid enough, economic and trade advisers  Kudlow and Navarro are fighting:

And earlier in the day, Trump’s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, lashed out at White House trade adviser Peter Navarro after Navarro, a trade protectionist, took aim at Wall Street and corporate influencers pushing a less aggressive stance against China. Navarro did Trump a “great disservice,” Kudlow told CNBC.

...not to mention the oddity of Melania choosing to go public in order to ensure someone is sacked. 

As Politico says:

“It’s like an episode of ‘Maury,’” one former Trump aide observed to POLITICO as the spectacle unfolded. “The only thing that’s missing is a paternity test.”

Ha. 

I think I overlooked mentioning before that it had been noticed, but not widely reported, last week that Rupert Murdoch had a meeting Mitch McConnell:

SPOTTED BY NYT’S NICK FANDOS (@npfandos): “An empty Capitol, but Mitch McConnell is receiving visitors. Rupert Murdoch in this case.” A photo of Murdoch walking into McConnell’s Capitol office … Also in the shot: Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp. (h/t Bill Grueskin)

Given that Murdoch appeared in Australia just before Turnbull was dumped, it's easy to read this a possible message being delivered to the GOP that Rupert was not going to let his companies (or at least, all of them) promote or protect Trump any more.  (And as I noted last weekend, the WSJ did run an important anti-Trump article - I think after the McConnell meeting?) 

Perhaps there is a connection between the Murdoch meeting and Trump's foul weekend mood?   Did he get word of Murdoch telling his editors it's time to put pressure on Trump to go?   I hope so!

It's a wonder that the Murdoch visit didn't attract more speculation in the press along those lines - sure there were people on Twitter wondering out loud, like me,  but I'm not sure the mainstream media has touched it.

Only in Japan...No, wait - Taiwan

Taiwan grandpa catches 'em all playing Pokemon Go on 15 cell phones

A photo of him and his set up:

I wonder what eccentric interest I might indulge in after retirement.   Suggestions welcome...

Why on Earth would Morrison think being mini-Trump is a good idea?

In case you hadn't noticed, flaky PM Scott Morrison spent last week on a high profile, campaign style tour of Queensland, wore a lot of caps, tried to look as "blokey" as possible, and sounded off about Muslim community and terrorism.  All very mini-Trump in appearance (although, actually, probably putting more effort to mix with the public than Trump - who just flies into a rally and flies out again.)

And his Newpoll numbers are just getting worse - on Monday, had blown out to 55/45 TPP.

Why would Morrison think that appearing or sounding like Trump is a good idea?   He seems to have no sense of what goes over well in the Australian public.  

Social media paradox

A study in which some young folk were required to limit social media (and others weren't) showed that those that were in the "limit" group were feeling less lonely and depressed:

Each of 143 participants completed a survey to determine mood and well-being at the study's start, plus shared shots of their iPhone battery screens to offer a week's worth of baseline social-media data. Participants were then randomly assigned to a control group, which had users maintain their typical social-media behavior, or an experimental group that limited time on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to 10 minutes per platform per day.

For the next three weeks, participants shared iPhone battery screenshots to give the researchers weekly tallies for each individual. With those data in hand, Hunt then looked at seven outcome measures including fear of missing out, anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

"Here's the bottom line," she says. "Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness. These effects are particularly pronounced for folks who were more depressed when they came into the study."

Hunt stresses that the findings do not suggest that 18- to 22-year-olds should stop using social media altogether. In fact, she built the study as she did to stay away from what she considers an unrealistic goal. The work does, however, speak to the idea that limiting screen time on these apps couldn't hurt.

"It is a little ironic that reducing your use of social media actually makes you feel less lonely," she says. But when she digs a little deeper, the findings make sense. "Some of the existing literature on social media suggests there's an enormous amount of social comparison that happens. When you look at other people's lives, particularly on Instagram, it's easy to conclude that everyone else's life is cooler or better than yours."

It's not a huge study, and given the state of psychology at the moment, I half expect no one else will be able to replicate it!   But, I want it to be true.

Ooh...pilot sighted UFOs

I'm pretty sure it will turn out to be a misperception of a breaking up meteor or space junk, but I could be wrong...

The Irish Aviation Authority is investigating reports of bright lights and UFOs off the south-west coast of Ireland.

It began at 06:47 local time on Friday 9 November when a British Airways pilot contacted Shannon air traffic control.

She wanted to know if there were military exercises in the area because there was something "moving so fast".

The air traffic controller said there were no such exercises.

The pilot, flying from the Canadian city of Montreal to Heathrow, said there was a "very bright light" and the object had come up along the left side of the aircraft before it "rapidly veered to the north"....

The pilot said he saw "two bright lights" over to the right which climbed away at speed.

Fox News propaganda

Amazing story at WAPO:

A father of a Parkland school shooting victim appeared on “Fox & Friends” over the weekend and suggested, without evidence, that Democrats registered the accused shooter to vote from jail as part of an effort to steal Florida’s election.

“It just shows you how despicable these Democrats are that they’ll stoop that low to go into the prison, the jail, and register these criminals,” said Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of 17 people Nikolas Cruz allegedly shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February. “It’s never been done in 20 years.”

Citing a “tip from deputies at the jail,” Pollack said the plan failed because Broward County — which is now involved in a recount battle that could swing Florida’s Senate and gubernatorial elections — failed to send the inmates their ballots in time to vote.

“They probably shouldn’t be voting anyway,” Fox’s Katie Pavlich remarked after listening to Pollack’s accusations, which neither she nor her two co-hosts challenged at any point, although they contradicted all public evidence.

There was a kernel of truth at the heart of the segment and the spiraling social media outrage that accompanied it: Nikolas Jacob Cruz really did register to vote in July, listing his home address as the county jail where he awaits trial after police say he confessed to the mass shooting.

He registered as a Republican, which “Fox & Friends” didn’t mention.

There is nothing suspicious or mysterious about what Cruz did from his cell. In general, jail inmates are constitutionally entitled to register and vote before their trials, assuming no prior convictions or legal disqualifications. Broward County records show that in 2016 and previous elections, several inmates did exactly that from the same jail where Cruz now sits.

Funny..sort of

Rep. Steve King dared a conservative outlet to release audio of him calling immigrants ‘dirt.’ It did.

The Weekly Standard released the recording at the center of an article describing King’s comments after a Twitter fight with the newly reelected Iowa Republican, who had accused the magazine of lying and fabricating the story.