Not sure what the implications of this might be...

...but it sounds an important finding:

Sweeping testing of the entire crew of the coronavirus-stricken U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say.

The possibility that the coronavirus spreads in a mostly stealthy mode among a population of largely young, healthy people showing no symptoms could have major implications for U.S. policy-makers, who are considering how and when to reopen the economy.

It also renews questions about the extent to which U.S. testing of just the people suspected of being infected is actually capturing the spread of the virus in the United States and around the world.

The Navy’s testing of the entire 4,800-member crew of the aircraft carrier - which is about 94% complete - was an extraordinary move in a headline-grabbing case that has already led to the firing of the carrier’s captain and the resignation of the Navy’s top civilian official.

Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.

“With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.

More tweets of note

Here:

And in response:

Not sure about season 3...

...of Babylon Berlin.  It's still very watchable, but the storyline just seems much more about a few murders than about the hotbed of politics around them, which was what made the first two seasons so intriguing.  And the crimes themselves (and now the occult connection, not to mention how Rath didn't recognise his brother was his, what?,  psychoanalyst/hypnotist?) all seem a tad implausibly theatrical.  

Overall, the first two seasons seemed to have a grander scale, both thematically and visually, and a greater sense of realism.  

Does anyone disagree?

As they say - "wut??"

From the network that spent years denying Russian interference.   Will the breakfast team try to walk back from this slip of the truthful tongue, or just hope Dear Leader didn't notice?

Seems true

Back to COVID-19

*  The SMH/Age European correspondent, the normally fit 34 Bevan Shields, has written a compelling account of how unpleasantly ill he was with (what was almost certainly) COVID-19 in London earlier this month.

Remarkably, he wasn't tested for it, as they are only testing those admitted to hospital.   He came very close to that, but the nearest hospital (the one where Boris Johnson was treated) was at capacity.

If only someone with this disease could have a coughing fit in the offices of the IPA so we could see if a similar experience would make any of its spivs change their minds about re-opening everything quickly...

*  Singapore's early success has not been able to be sustained all that well, with a surge in new cases, mostly from the foreign worker hostels:

SINGAPORE: Singapore reported a record 447 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday (Apr 15), taking the national total to 3,699.

Of the new cases, 68 per cent are linked to previously identified clusters, while contact tracing is ongoing for the remaining cases, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) in its daily update.

A total of 404 new cases are from foreign worker dormitories. Five are work permit holders living outside the dormitories.

As for local cases in the community, 38 cases were reported on Wednesday, and there were no new imported cases.

* Japan is also getting very panicky, and is about to go with a nationwide state of emergency (going towards a more strenuous lockdown, by the sounds of it.)   If Toyko goes for a New York style lockdown, it would make for a once in a lifetime experience of empty streets.

*  It's hard to imagine international travel and tourism getting back to anywhere near "normal" within a year with all of these problems.   It will be interesting to see just how big an economic impact it will have - a real life test for the type of ball park guesstimates you sometimes hear about how a certain tourist friendly event with bring X amount of dollars to a city or region.  

Legal pot in trouble in California

The Washington Post explains that the legal marijuana business was struggling in California already, and the COVID-19 situation is making it worse. 

I'm not sure what State in the US is considered to have got this right, because as this report notes, State regulations and taxes on the business mean that the black market doesn't just disappear:

With the drug legalized, underground dealers felt emboldened to expand their operations, setting up expansive delivery networks, undercutting the prices of legal pot and depriving the state of marijuana revenue. California initially expected about $1 billion in new tax revenue in 2018. It took in $342 million. Untaxed and unpoliced, black-market pot is estimated to be much larger than the legal trade in California.

Bee promotes Superdeterminism

In the recent swirl of pandemic news, I had missed a post by Sabine Hossenfelder last month linking to a co-authored essay in Nautilus in which she argues that Superdeterminism needs to be properly investigated as an explanation for the quantum measurement problem.  

I think the argument is set out in a relatively comprehensible matter, and is rather interesting...

It's a mystery

I'm hardly a person with extensive experience of the Australian outback, but I am wrong to think that just about every image I see from Mystery Road seems kinda fake - like an ersatz version of what people look like there?

Naval hobbies of the 18th century (Part 2)

An article over that Notches blog which I recently posted about notes that Jane Austen in Mansfield Park made a joke referencing sexual misbehaviour in the Navy, and explains that she likely knew a lot about these matters due to having two brothers with successful naval careers who sat on several courts martial for sodomy offences.  It was a serious matter:

In practice, Royal Navy courts martial rarely tried any sexual crimes except for male homoerotic offenses. At this time all same-sex erotic contact was, in theory, illegal. Penetrative anal sex was a felony carrying a mandatory capital punishment. Any other contact constituted a misdemeanor, and could result in corporal punishment and other harsh sanctions.

The main point of the article is to explain just how common these trials were, and how they were followed with salacious interest by the public:

These naval sodomy trials were far more common and publicly visible than modern observers have realized. Between 1690 and 1900, the force prosecuted over 490 cases, many involving more than one defendant. The Regency era was the historical high point for cases in both absolute and per capita terms. Between 1795 to 1837 the navy held over 180 trials for same-sex contact.

The navy’s relative rate of prosecution was also high. At periods through the eighteenth century it tried more men for same-sex crimes than did the London criminal courts. The navy was one of the most active sites for the legal repression of sodomy not only in the English-speaking world, but also in western Europe....

Britons back on land took an avid interest in these cases as well. They could follow them in the periodical press, which turned out thousands of items on maritime sodomy. The press covered the 1807 prosecution of Lieutenant William Berry of the Hazard sloop, for instance, in close detail, with dozens of pieces tracking events from allegation to execution.

A defendant in one of the cases Charles Austen tried referred explicitly to the frequency of such coverage, lamenting in his defense that “officers in the Navy are too frequently accused of acts tending to the commission of unnatural offenses… [H]ow frequent are the reports we are doomed at the present day, with grief, to peruse in the public prints.”

 The world has changed, quite dramatically.

Naval hobbies of the 18th century (part 1)

There's a review at the Spectator of a book about Lord Byron's nutty ancestors.   Apart from the incest and all round excess, I thought this particular hobby (noted in the second paragraph) sounds particularly eccentric:

When the Wicked Lord inherited Newstead in 1743 he returned it to its former decay, building a creepy gun tower and a stone battery with crenellations and parapets. Lazy, cowardly and incompetent, he was described by Gertrude Savile as having a ‘sad caricter in everything’, and by Horace Walpole as ‘an obscure lord’ and a ‘worthless man’. Having stalked and abducted an Irish actress called George Anne Bellamy, he ran a sword through the stomach of his neighbour, the much loved William Chaworth, over a row about estate boundaries. After incarceration in the Tower of London, he was found guilty of manslaughter and given a small fine.

By now he had dismantled his wife’s considerable estates and spent his way through her fortune, buying whatever he felt like: Titians, Raphaels, Holbeins and a model navy for his lakes. It’s hard to imagine what this navy must have looked like, but it appears to have been life-size. Twenty-five-ton ships were pulled up to Newstead by armies of horses, and a sailor and his boy were hired to maintain and crew the vessels. No Byron marriage lasted for long, and after parting from his wife the Wicked Lord made ends meet by pawning Newstead’s brass locks and floorboards.

From the Onion, a Boris joke..

Seems just a tad inappropriately opportunistic

Well, this would have to be one of the weirder news stories to come out of COVID-19:

Mental health organisations in Australia are groaning under the latest wave of stress and anxiety triggered by COVID-19, a surge which was already compounded by the recent bushfires and drought.

Beyond Blue reported an all-time high in activity on its online forums with its "Coping during the coronavirus outbreak" chatroom attracting seven times the amount of conversation than its bushfire forum did earlier this year.

While Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt last week established coronavirus mental wellbeing support services, including a new digital and phone support services, a former colleague of his was pushing for medicinal use of psychedelics.

Former Coalition MP Andrew Robb, now a board member of Mind Medicine Australia (MMA), is driving a fresh campaign to introduce drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin — found in magic mushrooms — as a treatment option.

Andrew Robb!!   The depressed politician who arose from his sickbed especially to defeat Malcolm Turnbull because he didn't like his support of climate change action??  I do not trust this man's judgement, to put it mildly. 

Back to the story:

The not-for-profit, which aims to "establish safe and effective psychedelics treatments", is urging the Government to establish a mental health taskforce for COVID-19 and wants these treatments to be on the table when it happens.

Mr Robb did not advocate for it to be used recreationally, but said psychedelic-assisted therapy should be available as a medical treatment in the same way cannabis is.

Yeah, yeah.

What I would like politicians and commentators to stop doing is talking about how likely it is that people will be getting depressed and suicidal due to social isolation.  It carries with it too much of a touch of self fulfilling prophecy about it...

A night of madness

There's a very interesting story up at AEON about the writer recalling one day of psychosis he experienced as a young adult, many years ago.  Fortunately, it was a one off episode, perhaps caused by exhaustion and a mild illness, and the discussion which follows with a psychiatrist is good too.

Science, religion, folklore and behaviour

So, I've been reading a bit about Buddhism and science lately, and on the off chance something interesting would pop up, did a search for the religion on the arXiv pre-print site.

This rather odd paper turned up: 

On how religions could accidentally incite lies and violence: Folktales as a cultural transmitter 

The abstract:

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (\b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23; \b{eta}C_and_Lie_O= 1.47; \b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (\b{eta}B_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices-violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument. 

I think this group of Vietnamese researchers might have too much time on their hands, but it's still a bit interesting.   Here is a peculiar Vietnames folktale which they discuss in the introduction:

Folklore materials offer one of the most imaginative windows into the livelihood and psychology of people from different walks of life at a certain time. These colorful narratives bring to life the identities, practices, values, and norms of a culture from a bygone era that may provide insights on speech play and tongue-twisters (Nikolić & Bakarić, 2016), habitat quality of farmers (Møller, Morelli, & Tryjanowski, 2017), treatments for jaundice (Thenmozhi et al., 2018), and contemporary attitudes and beliefs (Michalopoulos & Xue, 2019). While the stories tend to honor the value of hard work, honesty, benevolence, and many other desirable virtues, many of such messages are undercut by actions that seem outlandish, morally questionable, or brutally violent (Alcantud-Diaz, 2010, 2014; Chima & Helen, 2015; Haar, 2005; Meehan, 1994; Victor, 1990). In a popular Vietnamese folktale known as “Story of a bird named bìm bịp (coucal),” a robber who repents on his killing and cuts open his chest to offer his heart to the Buddha gets a better ending than a Buddhist monk who has been religiously chaste for his whole life but fails to honor his promise to the robber—i.e. bringing the robber’s heart to the Buddha. In his quest for the robber’s missing heart, not only does the monk never reach enlightenment, but he also turns into a coucal, a bird in the cuckoo family (Figure 1)

On the one hand, the gory details of this story likely serve to highlight the literal determination and commitment of the robber to repentance, which is in line with the Buddhist teaching of turning around regardless of whichever wrong directions one has taken. On the other hand, it is puzzling how oral storytelling and later handwriting traditions have kept alive the graphic details—the images of the robber killing himself in the name of Buddhism, a religion largely known for its non-violence and compassion. Aiming to make sense of these apparent contradictions, this study looks at the behavior of Vietnamese folk characters as influenced by long-standing cultural and religious factors. The focus on the folkloristic realm facilitates the discovery of behavioral patterns that may otherwise escape our usual intuitions.  

 The next part of the paper - about a literature review of studies of the effect of religion on behaviour (usually in a Christian context) is pretty interesting, though:

To make sense of the relationship between religiosity and deviant behaviors, scholars from as far back as the 1960s have sought to measure how church membership or religious commitment could deter delinquent activities, though pieces of empirical evidence over the years remain inconclusive (Albrecht, Chadwick, & Alcorn, 1977; Hirschi & Stark, 1969; Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 1975; Tittle & Welch, 1983). In their influential study, Hirschi and Stark (1969) ask if the Christian punishment of hellfire for sinners can deter delinquent acts among the firm believers, and surprisingly find no connection between religiosity and juvenile delinquency. Subsequent studies tend to fall along two lines, either confirming the irrelevance of religion and deviance (Cochran & Akers, 1989; Tittle & Welch, 1983; Welch, Tittle, & Grasmick, 2006), or pointing out certain inhibiting effect of religiosity depending on the types of religious contexts (Benda, 2002; Corcoran, Pettinicchio, & Robbins, 2012; Evans, Cullen, Dunaway, & Burton Jr, 1995; Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 2017). Additional studies have looked at religious contexts beyond the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries
such as in South Korea and China but also reached inconsistent results on the religiosity–deviance relationship (Wang & Jang, 2018; Yun & Lee, 2016).

 Anyway, pretty interesting.

As I was saying...

I've been bagging Adam Creighton as an unreliable commentator on matters economic for years now - and in a column at The Australian today (which I presume will be making Jason Soon grind his teeth) Adam has gone into bat for the "this has all been an over-reaction" crowd.

In fact, Jason:  you seem to be having an all out crisis of confidence as to who on the conservative-ish side of commentary you can possibly trust now.   You hate "glibertarians" (fair enough) now but conservatives keep coming up short.

I think you should just give up and just accept my lines:   the soft (and harder) Left may be annoying on identity politics, but they don't jeopardise entire planetary populations' safety by denying/downplaying climate change or pandemics because of culture wars and conspiracy ideation.  They may (if you can count Democrats as "soft Left" at all) try to play at Middle East interventions in a way that does not always work out, but the entire Muslim world there is a a geo-political nightmare and you can't expect great outcomes.   International co-operation on trade and all matters is way, way better than populist nationalism:  the fact that a cynical dictator thug like Putin is encouraging the West to break up into nationalist enclaves shows it is obviously the wrong path.   And Trump is an absolute idiot of a damaged man and any commentator who defends him in any respect at all deserves to be completely ignored.  

Well, that was a bit dull...

A long weekend with nice, warm sunny weather, and no where to go for a drink, or a meal.  Even the dog parks are chained up.  We did a bit of yard work, and washed a ceiling to get rid of some yellow spotiness that doesn't look like mould, exactly.   It's a good question as to what it is - it hasn't  appeared in any bathroom, and is worst in the dining room where we sometimes do cooking at the table, but has started to spread into the adjacent living room. Yet I don't think it is happening in the kitchen, which should have the biggest effect from cooking steam or fumes.   The spots can be washed off the cornices very well, but not so well off the flat ceiling, although they can be made much fainter.   Actually, I see from the internet that you can get yellow mould.   It's an annoying problem.

Some other observations:

*  Brisbane is feeling as if it has gone into winter dryness already.  After a relatively dry summer, this is not a good thing;

*  this COVID virus seems to work in really complicated ways, doesn't it?  Lots of different effects on the body, and lots of collaboration and note comparing needed still to understand how it usually works.   I was reading an ICU doctor's comments about this on twitter yesterday, but didn't save it. 

*  I continue to think that doctors and nurses who work in hospitals in the US must be the most ropeable people on the planet when they hear conservative scepticism of the seriousness of the issue from the likes of Fox News.   If the New York ones could organise a posse to firebomb the Fox News studios, they would only be doing the world a favour.

*  I think low rates of new cases in at least Brisbane is starting to make people feel very careless about social distancing at the supermarket.   I wore a mask at one on the weekend or the first time, though, but as I was a Vietnamese heavy suburb, lots of other people were too.   I didn't find it much of an issue, although not scratching an itchy nose through the outside surface was a challenge. 

Short movie review: BlacKkKlansman

I don't normally pay any attention to Spike Lee films, but his recent comedy/drama BlacKkKlansman, now on Netflix, is really good.

Based on a true story, I see that it adds one key plot element for drama. (Look it up after you have watched it:  there are several articles on the net discussing what's true and what is invented.)  But I forgive that:  it's just really well made, and I liked the mix of tension as well as humour; and the serious message at the end too.

It's Easter, so let's talk about...Buddhist emptiness, physics etc

Back in January, you may recall, a robot in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto got me into considering the Heart Sutra, which was the subject of a separate post (which had some interesting comments from my handful of regular readers.)

You might also recall that I had stumbled onto a translation of a book by DT Suzuki about the Swedish 18th century oddball Swedenborg. 

So, the connection:  the Heart Sutra in English translation has a lot of emphasis on "emptiness", with this key part -

Form is emptiness
and emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness
and emptiness is not other than form.
So is the same for feeling,
perception, mental formation,
and consciousness.

In the afterword to the Suzuki book, by David Loy (who I see is a pretty widely know author on Buddhism), I thought this commentary on "emptiness" was interesting:

OK  That clears up everything.* 

I see that Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on Nagarjuna (the philosopher, not the Bollywood star), and it talks about how a lot of his philosophising was on "emptiness".  This, apparently, is a key saying:

All is possible when emptiness is possible.
Nothing is possible when emptiness is impossible.

Which does, a Loy indicates, sound like it is putting a more positive spin on "emptiness" than one's initial reaction.


In another interesting bit from Wikipedia, Nagarjuna is considered by some to be neo-Kantian:

Nāgārjuna was also instrumental in the development of the two truths doctrine, which claims that there are two levels of truth in Buddhist teaching, the ultimate truth (paramārtha satya) and the conventional or superficial truth (saṃvṛtisatya). The ultimate truth to Nāgārjuna is the truth that everything is empty of essence,^[43] this includes emptiness itself ('the emptiness of emptiness'). While some (Murti, 1955) have interpreted this by positing Nāgārjuna as a neo-Kantian and thus making ultimate truth a metaphysical noumenon or an "ineffable ultimate that transcends the capacities of discursive reason",^[44] others such as Mark Siderits and Jay L. Garfield have argued that Nāgārjuna's view is that "the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth" (Siderits) and that Nāgārjuna is a "semantic anti-dualist" who posits that there are only conventional truths.^[44]

As I am fond of Kant, I think it's pretty cool to find debate about whether a Buddhist philosopher from 150CE got to his ideas before Immanuel did.  (That's Kant, not Swedenborg).

The other thing that the Swedenborg book has got me thinking about is Buddhism and non-locality in modern quantum physics.   I keep getting the feeling that these might be pretty compatible.

First, a reminder about nonlocality can be found in this pretty good 12 minute explanation of quantum physics, which Youtube conveniently suggested I should watch:



So, how's this tie in with Buddhism?   I don't know yet, but there is a very lengthy discussion of it on this page (The Physics of Peace: Quantum Nonlocality and Emptiness) from what looks like a very lengthy website called the Chinese Encyclopaedia of Buddhism.  That website seems to be a project started by an Estonian Buddhist who has connections with Australia.  How odd.

Anyhow, I'll read it and report back.

Maybe I can factor the emptiness of the tomb and Easter eggs into the story, too.   I seem to be turning all EM Foster - "Only connect!" 

* Narrator voice:  no, it didn't.

Unusual protection from COVID-19

From Atlas Obscura, a tale from Japan newly relevant to current circumstances:

In the first half of 1846, a kawaraban, or cheaply printed broadside, recorded a strange account in Japan’s old Higo Province on Kyūshū island. A local government official had spotted a curious creature in the water one evening: a scaly, three-legged figure with long hair and a beak. Even more curious, it had warned him of a forthcoming illness and instructed him to draw and distribute its image for protection. A sketch was printed next to this account, and as the kawaraban spread, so did tales of this mysterious half-merperson, half-bird, from Kyūshū all the way to Edo.

Known as Amabie, this yōkai, or spirit, has become associated with refuge from epidemics. It makes sense, then, that it has resurfaced during the global COVID-19 pandemic, only this time on social media. Illustrations of Amabie are circulating on Twitter and Instagram under the hashtags #amabie and #アマビエ; artists around the world are drawing and sharing Amabie in hopes of repelling disease, or at the very least honing their talents and finding community while social distancing....

Scholars believe that Amabie is a local variation of Amabiko, a similar Japanese creature that appears from the sea and prophesies good harvests and outbreaks of disease. “In accounts of Amabiko, it is sometimes said that the image itself can ward off the epidemic,” says Jack Stoneman, a professor of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. “This is not unusual in Japanese cultural history—images as talismans.”

Here's an old school version of the critter, indicating that Japanese art is not always that impressive  (Wikipedia says this is a woodblock print from the Edo era.  Really?)

Here's another version, which I think is modern but looking more "old-school vibe":

And here's a recent government poster using that old woodblock image, it seems:

I feel safer already...