A lightweight start to the week - what I've been watching on Netflix

For one reason or another, I still haven't managed to get to the cinema this summer.

But on Netflix, been enjoying the following:

Sacred Games - quality crime, corruption (and mysticism?) in Mumbai.   I only found this via a recommendation in some newspaper article, but it's really good, and I see from online review sites that it is well regarded by critics and viewers.  And the Indians are still doing the thing that amazed me so much in the much sillier Typewriter series - moving in and out of English (sometimes mid-sentence) so easily that it hurts and embarrasses my pathetic monolingual brain.

Dracula - the short series just released by the Moffat/Gattis team that brought us Sherlock.  Only saw the first episode last night, but it was very witty, and certainly interesting enough to continue watching.   I am not sure I am completely convinced by the wisecracking Dracula lead actor, and also questioned the deliberate use of very retro looking special effects sometimes; but as I say, a pretty high hit rate with amusing lines.   I did wonder early on whether vampirism was being played as an allegory for AIDS, which would be unusual given the very gay-friendly writers (Gattis is actually gay, I see), and I wonder if anyone else got that impression.

The Meg - yes, the 2018 megashark movie is indeed like a B or C Grade monster movie with hammy acting and script (and D grade science),  but done with an A grade budget and production design.  Gee, I enjoyed it, though.   The perfect movie to watch at home instead of the cinema so that you can make jokes out loud about who might be eaten next,  and the silliness of many of the decisions the characters are making.   I loved the mini "glider" subs; I would have killed for a toy version of one of them as a 9 year old:

Perhaps I liked it a lot because I could sense how even more intensely I would have liked it as a 10 year old?   Anyone, a lot of fun, very competently made.

Not enough environmental disaster for you yet?

In the SMH today:

The threat of mass fish kills is emerging across the Murray-Darling Basin as low river flows and the influx of soil and ash from bushfires reduce water quality.

In recent days, fish deaths have been reported in the Macquarie River near Dubbo and the Macleay River east of the Dividing Range in NSW, while a "wall of mud and ash" is moving down the Upper Murray.

"Fish are just rolling over dead everywhere, it's a double-pronged disaster," said Lee Baumgartner, a fisheries expert at Charles Sturt University.

Professor Baumgartner said a NSW Fisheries team arrived near Tumbarumba in southern NSW to rescue endangered perch, only to witness sludge moving down the river "with the consistency of cake mix".

"They didn't rescue a single fish," he said. "It's just horrible."

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority revealed the scale of the threats to the health of freshwater ecosystems on Wednesday, with the release of a map showing almost all the major river valleys faced problems.

These ranged from "almost certain" algal blooms and low dissolved oxygen levels to high salinity and bushfire contamination.

A touch of nudity

Oh, this should be interesting:

Since classical times the naked figure has impressed, titillated and offended viewers. In a new BBC Two series Mary Beard examines why nudity holds a key place in western art

It's called "The Shock of the Nude".

Which reminds me, as I always find the topic of the social nudism movement in the 20th century interwar years in Europe amusingly peculiar, I was a tad surprised to read recently that men in England were being arrested in the mid 1920's for sunbathing shirtless:  

 I did establish, in a photo in another post, that in Brisbane by 1935, at least some men were going "topless" at the suburban beaches, in front of women too.   So I suspect that a male torso being exposed in a park might not have been quite the scandal here that it apparently was in 1927 England.  
Or am I wrong?  Was the decade from 1925 to 1935 the period in which men's bare chests in public suddenly transitioned into being acceptable?  Actually, in England, yes it does seem the crucial decade:

The craze for sunbathing changed bathing costumes out of all recognition. It would simply not have been possible to get a tan wearing the cumbersome costumes of the Edwardian age. The classic male costume, a one piece affair in cotton with legs and sleeves, often decorated with horizontal stripes was laughed out of existence. Men's costumes now had shorter shorts and straps replaced sleeves, but the torso was still covered. In the 'twenties plain colours were generally preferred. Black, navy, maroon or royal blue were the norm. In the early 'thirties the top was often a different colour to the shorts and occasionally striped. Men in continental resorts in the 'twenties began to wear trunks and gradually the trunks became shorter, although still of the mini shorts style. By the 'thirties, trunks became acceptable in England, although some resorts still did not permit bare chests.

The "look at me" candidate

First, let's start with another good burn:

I see that when not suing Hilary Clinton as a way of pandering to the Tucker Carlson, Trump loving, Hilary hating audience,  Tulsi is advertising this:

Now, this may be an admirable policy in a Democrat candidate, but I don't see it sitting all that well with the Tucker Trump voters who love their gormless President going on a massive ramp up of  military spending, including on new nuclear weapons.

She is, in other words, just a chronic attention seeker who Republicans will love because of their shared hatred of Hilary Clinton, but for whom they will never vote.   And, of course, because she is pandering to Republicans in this way,  next to no self respecting Democrat is going to vote for her either.

Just a useless spoiler for the side she claims to belong to.

Update:  I was trying to think what Australian politician she reminds me of, but the best I could up with is that she's like a noxious amalgam of Tim Wilson, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd.

Quite the burn

Nuclear, again

Ah, Jason:  another day, another re-tweet of a wrong, Right wing take:

I agree with this response, and think Gray's response is so weak:

I have to run and do something - I will come back later to update this.

Update:   Connolly claims this -

I want him to quantify "many".   I mean, there's him and Jason Soon - and who else?

Another Tweeter makes the point about the current subsidies nuclear is needing (go and read the thread):

I suppose that attack is a little unfair, if you read Connolly's endorsement of a carbon tax for nuclear as an admission that nuclear does need subsidies.   But then, it does make his "I hate renewables because it needs subsidies" argument sound distinctly dubious. 

John Quiggin has been pushing this line recently - OK, conservatives, let's not rule out nuclear as long as you will agree to a carbon tax to make it work economically.   And you are getting some people like Connolly saying "OK".

But - are they going to live with the consequence that, with a carbon tax working as a "subsidy" for any form of clean energy (I mean, wasn't this is how a carbon tax was meant to work, free market conservatives?), no one thinks that energy investment is going to head into nuclear anyway?

As many on the Left correctly perceive, resistance to renewables is not as objective and reasonable as conservatives like Connolly like to pretend.

And when he can start pointing to even a substantial minority of Coalition politicians who are  endorsing an "economy crushing" (as they have argued for more than a decade) carbon tax, I might take him more seriously.


   

Tide turning, at last

It's about time, but it appears America is starting to finally move  back from the nutty airline pet free-for-all that is "emotional support animals" on planes.   Service animals are still allowed though, including for psychiatric issues, but at least they are proposing it be limited to dogs.   (Even though dogs have caused some of the biggest issues.)

If the comments to the article are anything to go by, Americans are well and truly sick of the ridiculous situations passengers there have had to deal with.  For example:

After Christmas I was waiting to board a flight after the people had deplaned.  While they were coming into the terminal, two dogs from two different owners got into a fight.  The owners got control of them, but not before the entire terminal was suddenly filled with the sound of various barking dogs.  The man next to me said:  "This is insanity."

Then, as we were boarding a young, strong man boarded first with a huge black German shepherd.  Neither the man nor the dog looked as though they needed emotional support, but the dog was pretty intimidating....

 I sat by a woman with Bernese Mountain dog support animal on a flight. He was almost as big as a small pony but very well behaved thankfully ....

I flew last year from DC to Chicago and ended up next to a woman with an "emotional support" dog. She let it out of the carrier and it was sitting next to her feet when I reached into my bag which was under the seat in front of me.  The dog yelped, snapped at me, and tried to bite me in the face. The woman corralled it, but it was terrifying. I asked the flight attendant for another seat and she said they could only accommodate me on a later flight. I asked about putting the dog back in the carrier and the woman yelled at me and the dog started growling. I needed to get to Chicago, so I squeezed up to the window and tried not to move for the two hour flight. It upsets me just to think about it now.

So whose "emotions" are we supporting here, anyway? ...

Yes it's totally free, that's the point. To take a pet on the plane is usually $125, but, if you have a letter that claims that it is "an emotional support animal," fees are waived. I have seen many people bragging on social media that it costs less to buy a bogus "emotional support animal" letter than the fee for one flight....

Most of these animals are "certified" by coughing up $50 on some therapists website who emails you a signed ESA letter. It is 100% a scam that makes it harder for people with real disabilities. Should fine these people, and if you show up with an animal certified by a blacklisted "therapist" your ESA iguana/pig/rabbit/parrot/whatever doesn't get to fly in the cabin....

In my neck of the woods, it only costs $25.  You're being overcharged for a phony certificate.  $25 should do it.

Another complete embarassment

Mark Latham follows Pauline Hanson into the depths of clueless Right wing alternative reality:

Andrew Bolt misses the White Australia policy, apparently

Of course I don't subscribe to any Murdoch rag that Andrew Bolt appears in, so I just get to see the start of a post on his "blog", which I will not link to:

I've said immigration is now more like colonisation. From last week: "More people from Nepal settled in Australia last year than from the United Kingdom...  Tara Gaire ... said he felt very at home in Melbourne’s multicultural environment. 'We catch up with community members, we go to the temple, it doesn’t feel like we’re overseas.'"  

What an appalling hypocrite:  

Bolt was born in Adelaide, his parents being newly-arrived Dutch migrants. 

His parents were the right colour though, hey?

I mean, he doesn't even have fear of Muslim terrorism from Nepal as a basis for his snide insult:

According to the 2011 census, 81.3% of the Nepalese population is Hindu, 9.0% are Buddhist, 4.4% are Muslim, 3.0% are Kiratist (indigenous ethnic religion), 1.4% are Christian, 0.1% are Sikhs, 0.1% are Jains and 0.7% follow other religions 

And, he's an agnostic himself, so he can hardly be concerned that Christianity is being displaced - what does it matter to him if it is?

It comes down to a creepy Pauline Hanson line - "they're different and I don't it."

He has become appalling stupid and a deep embarrassment to the Right side of politics.

I'll believe it when I see successful, commercial products

NPR reports on a "cell-based meat" start up that is building a pilot production facility.

It notes the big issue:

But Memphis Meats and its competitors face quite a few hurdles in bringing cell-based meats to market. For starters, the cost of production needs to come down. Back in 2018, Wired reported that a pound of Memphis Meats takes $2,400 to produce, in part because of the expensive growth mediums — or feed — needed to culture cells.

"Our costs have continued to come down significantly over the last three years," Valeti told us in an email Wednesday. "We have a clear path to bringing a cost competitive product to market as we scale our production and that's part of what our latest funding round will help us to unlock," Valeti said. He said the company will continue to work on developing low-cost feed for the cells, which is one significant piece of the puzzle.

And also notes the second issue - the one of texture:

I got the chance to sample Memphis Meats' chicken, which was pan-sautéed with some oil and served with greens. It tasted pretty close to chicken breast produced the traditional way — but without as much textural variation among bits of muscle, fat and connective tissue.

I think we can all agree that vegetable protein imitation chicken (or beef) also has the soft texture issue;  but in terms of copying flavour, they are also getting pretty close.   (I have taken to eating Rebel Whoppers from Hungry Jacks as my default fast food burger.  I had one last night in fact.  I am quite satisfied with it.)  But the difference is, of course, it's massively cheaper and quicker to make than growing cells in an expensive medium. 

So if both ways of making imitation meat leads to a soft-ish product that has similar flavour of real meat, why use the incredibly expensive and complicated way of making such a product??

The fact that billionaires are encouraging this product just indicates to me that billionaires can make wrong calls on things outside of their expertise, just like any of us can.

The future in fake meat is going to be in better vegetable protein imitation meats, and (eventually, I suspect) in microbial sourced protein as the base for imitation meats.

Disinformation warning

Just read this good opinion piece by a former US Ambassador to Russia that was in the Washington Post last week:

Be prepared to fight a dangerous new wave of disinformation during the Senate trial

I liked his summary of Russian disinformation tactics:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his proxies deploy several methods of disinformation to strengthen their power and influence. The first is to deny facts. For instance, Putin initially denied that Russian soldiers had seized control of Crimea in February 2014, denies Russian involvement in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, and denies any Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

A second tactic is to deflect attention from the facts, also known as “whataboutism.” When criticized about Crimean annexing Crimea, Putin’s media shoot back, what about Kosovo? Or New Mexico? When criticized about civilian casualties from Russian military intervention in Syria, Kremlin defenders retort, what about Iraq, Vietnam or Hiroshima? When confronted with evidence of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, the Russian standard refrain is, you do it all the time.

A third practice is the dissemination of lies. Russian state media once asserted that President Barack Obama and former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi embraced the same ideology. I may be more sensitive than most about this tactic, because when I was serving as U.S. ambassador to Russia, Kremlin media outlets accused me of fomenting revolution against Putin’s regime; perhaps most disgustingly of all, a video was circulated suggesting I was a pedophile. When Putin met with President Trump in July 2018 in Helsinki, the Russian president again lied about me, claiming I had broken Russian law while working in the White House.

A cumulative effect of all these tactics is nihilistic debasement of the very concept of truth. Putin is not trying to win the argument; instead, his propaganda machine aims to convince that there is no truth, no right and wrong, or no data or evidence, only relativism, point of view and biased opinion.

His summary of what Joe Biden did in Ukraine is also a good, succinct summary, one which my reality challenged reader from Catallaxy, JC, has never got through his thick head:

Former vice president Joe Biden was not freelancing on behalf of his son when implementing U.S. government policy — supported by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, Republican senators, and the Ukrainian anti-corruption nongovernmental-organization community — to seek the ouster of corrupt Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Indeed, because Shokin was not prosecuting corruption in Ukraine, his removal produced greater scrutiny, not less, of the now-infamous Burisma Holdings energy company on which Hunter Biden used to serve as a board member. As Shokin’s deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, reported, “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky [Burisma’s owner]. … It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.” Trump’s own political appointee, former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, confirmed, “The allegations against Vice President Biden are self-serving and non-credible.”

And you thought the Royal Commission into Aged Care disclosed bad treatment of old folk...

A story at the BBC (basically about the economics of looking after old people) starts with some extreme examples:

"I customarily killed old women. They all died, there by the big river. I didn't used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. The women were afraid of me."

No wonder. That's the account of a man from the Aché, an indigenous tribe in eastern Paraguay, as told to anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado.

He explained grandmothers helped with chores and babysitting but when they got too old to be useful, you couldn't be sentimental.

Brutally, the usual method was an axe to the head. For the old men, Aché custom dictated a different fate. They were sent away - and told never to return.  ....

As another anthropologist, Jared Diamond, points out, the Aché are hardly outliers. Among the Kualong, in Papua New Guinea, when a woman's husband died, it was her son's solemn duty to strangle her.

Update:  I see via Wikipedia that the practice is called "senicide", and it seems an entry that could have a lot more examples added to it, if the above story is anything to go by.  Most of their examples are from pretty ancient history, such as this one, notable again for its gruesomeness: 

The Heruli were a Germanic tribe during the Migration Period (about 400 to 800 CE). Procopius states in his work The Wars, that the Heruli placed the sick and elderly on a tall stack of wood and stabbed them to death before setting the pyre alight.^[7]

 Oh look, allegedly (there is no citation!) in Sardinia, the women got to be the "terminators":

An alleged custom was to throw incapable or ill elders off certain cliffs, a confirmed practice was the performing of euthanasia on ill, senile or suffering elders carried out by selected women named accabbadoras (lit. 'terminator' or 'ender') that after a blessing of the soon to be deceased would proceed to kill them through suffocation or blunt force to the back of the head by wooden mallet. 

Simon on nuclear in Australia

I thought Simon's tweet thread response to the column (which I am sure Jason Soon would be endorsing) by Parnell McGuiness was very reasonable:

Still terrible

Over at The Guardian:

Netflix said in a letter to shareholders its new show The Witcher is “tracking to be our biggest season one TV series ever”.

Seriously?  I reluctantly tried, at the prompting of my son, to watch the second episode a few days ago, and (although I have to confess to moving in and out of light sleep for much of it) thought it was terribly dull and worse than the first episode.  Told my son he can watch it by himself from now on.   I agree with this summary:

In the interest of professional obligation, Darren, I did sit through the second episode, which was notable for a few reasons. (Spoiler: None of those reasons include, “Because it was good.”) Henry Cavill gets far less screen time in the second hour — and he has to share his few scenes with a very, very annoying traveling bard (I would name the actor who plays him, but I’m fairly certain the writers didn’t even bother to name the character?). Anyhow, this very annoying traveling singer makes up tunes about abortion and says things like, “There I go again, just delivering exposition.”

Most of the second episode is devoted to the travails of a deformed young woman named Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), whose jerk of a father sells her off to a haughty witch named Tissaia de Vries (MyAnna Buring). It turns out Yennefer has some untapped magical abilities, and she finds herself enrolled in Tissaia’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or whatever she calls it. So now this show is The Magicians featuring special guest star Henry Cavill, I guess?

The Witcher is also packed with confusing conflicts and long-held rivalries that require a lot of explanation but still manage to make no sense.  he premiere sets up a princess-wizard showdown that is related to a curse (I think), while episode 2 introduces a budding war between Elves and humans. Apparently the Elves taught the humans how to turn something called “chaos” into magic, and then the humans unleashed a genocide on them. “I was once Filavandrel of the Silver Towers,” notes a majestic Elf (Tom Canton). “Now I’m Filavandrel of the edge of the world.” So yeah, this is some high-school level Dungeons & Dragons role play with a multi-million-dollar budget. Netflix canceled the far cheaper, far more entertaining The Good Cop for this?

3 degrees noted in WSJ

The WSJ has an article that starts:

Assessing the likely impact of climate change has grown as a concern for big companies making strategic decisions about future capital allocation and strategy. But the challenge of forecasting temperatures far out has made such assessments tough.

In recent months, estimates among climate scientists of how temperatures are likely to rise over the course of the century have narrowed somewhat. The most catastrophic predicted warming looks less likely, but milder impacts also are looking less probable. The current broad consensus is that the world could warm by roughly three degrees Celsius by 2100.

Zeke (whose recent paper is discussed in the report) notes:

 How much outright denialism does the WSJ run these days?  I don't subscribe...

Nigella's eggs

I am watching the annoying "my life is perfect, everyone loves me, it never rains in London and I can eat 5,000 cal a day and not put on weight" Nigella Lawson's latest cooking show, and am finding myself continously bothered not just by her too cheerful persona but also by the intense orange colour of the egg yolks.  It looks unnatural.  Are all British eggs like that?

At least she's not suggestively licking her fingers now, like she used to.  It was very obvious.

Update:  am I being too harsh on Nigella?  It'll probably turn out that she spends half her life running some decent charity, or something.  I have always thought her salacious style, which always seemed aimed towards titillating older men, was amusingly transparent.   But now that she's toned that down,  I just find myself more annoyed by the too intense cheerfulness, and the attempts at "I'm just like you, really" stuff (like looking into her messy cupboard) coming across as a bit fake.   It's not that I like really cranky cooks - I can't watch Gordon Ramsay, for example - but this British cooking show thing where it always ends with friends over eating the food and not getting into arguments over anything I find bothersome.

The case of the missing stars

I think I forgot to blog in December about this unusual story:

An international research group led by Beatriz Villarroel from the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden and the Institute for Astrophysics on the Canary Islands reports something strange in the current issue of The Astronomical Journal. They compared star maps from the 1950s with recent surveys, and discovered that 100 previously catalogued stars cannot be found anymore.

Sign of Dyson spheres or other advanced technological societies doing something to their stars?  Probably not, but you never know:

Perhaps the missing objects are signs of an advanced civilization. But they’re probably not Dyson spheres. First, it would be hard to explain why and how such a giant construction project, completely shading out the light of the host star, could be done within the short period of less than a century. But more importantly, Brooks Harrop and I showed nearly 10 years ago that “traditional” Dyson spheres are not gravitationally stable. Even if one could be built near a star like our Sun, it would require more total mass than is available in all our Solar System’s planets, moons, and asteroids.

But there are other interesting possibilities:

So what are the missing stars? A few might be explained as flaring stars whose brightness dropped below the detection limit, or stars that collapsed directly into a black hole. A large portion, however, might represent new stages in the life cycle of certain stars or new stellar phenomena that have not yet been seen. That by itself would be an exciting topic to investigate.

Another intriguing question: Where are the missing stars? Are they at the same location, just not emitting light anymore? Or perhaps they’ve moved to some other location. If the latter, could some of these represent huge starships, the size of moons or planets, that moved outside the field of view? This, of course, is a highly speculative suggestion. But it would address the hotly discussed Fermi Paradox, and would, in principle, be testable. If these “missing” light sources represent giant starships, some should appear in new star surveys in some other part of the sky. In an ideal case, we might even be able to track their trajectories through time. It would be challenging, no doubt, to pick out such motions against other background movements in space, like those of stars spinning around the center of their galaxy. Nevertheless, my suggestion to the authors is to focus their future work on light sources that suddenly appear in new star surveys, and see whether they can be correlated to the stars that vanished.

Odd food chains

I just noticed in Coles that I can buy a Coles branded foil pouch of cooked brown rice (150g worth)  that you re-heat in the microwave, for $1.50.  It was made in India from Spanish rice, and ended up in Brisbane.

That pathway to get here seems kinda wasteful, if you ask me.   And don't get me on the topic of fish processing in Thailand...

Sounds...optimistic

Sounds ambitious:

Subaru Corp set a target on Monday for all the vehicles it sells worldwide to be electric by the first half of the 2030s, in a move toward its long-term goal of a carbon-free society.

The news comes as Subaru has strengthened capital ties with Toyota Motor Corp, in a trend of global automakers joining forces to slash development and manufacturing costs of new technology.

"Subaru's strong commitment and dedication toward car-manufacturing that we have cultivated throughout our history remain unchanged," President Tomomi Nakamura said in a statement.

By 2030, the Japanese automaker added, at least 40% of all of its cars sold worldwide would comprise all-battery electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles.

When will climate change deniers realise they have been lied to?

Noted on Twitter today, from Matt Ridley's shonky outfit:

With the correction following:

Also notices on Twitter recently: