Not a RRR fan

So, that Indian Netflix movie RRR has attracted a lot of positive reviews in the USA and elsewhere, and I thought I would give it a go, given my general fondness for good foreign content.

I knew it was not going to be realistic; I knew it was going to be over-the-top and rather silly in a Bollywood way at times.   And I thought for the first 30 minutes or so that maybe I would enjoy it.

But it wore me down and I gave up at the half way mark.  I wasn't expecting the intense cartoonishness of so much of it;  the extremities of anti-colonialism in the English characters' acting and dialogue that made the cringe aspects of the Titanic screenplay sound like Shakespeare; or the unexplained motivations of the lead character, who I presume redeems himself by the end, but in the giant action sequence in the middle (the one where scores of CGI animals are running rampant in the colonial mansion) is prepared to beat his former friend to a pulp in order to gain a promotion.   Another thing  that continually bothered me was how the locations felt so inauthentic - it looked far too much like it was mostly filmed in a giant studio set, and now that I check, a lot of it was actually filmed in bits of Europe.     

So no, it didn't get my seal of approval, and I am a bit puzzled as to why so many people do like it.   If you are into film for OTT action, I think any good kung fu film has more "authentic" feeling. 

A balanced take on a complicated issue

Oh, Science has a good balanced article on the difficult question of whether young people should continue getting COVID boosters, over the issue of possible heart damage from mRNA vaccines.   The basic problem is the great difficulty in getting accurate risk/benefit analysis for a problem that may or may not cause symptoms in both the vaccinated and people who get COVID.  

Now, I know I criticised that Florida Surgeon General for this last week - and a case could be made from this article that maybe his conclusion was correct - or at least one that has a lot more support than I knew. But nonetheless, he obviously approached the problem from a highly politicised, grandstanding, point of view, and with evidence that was not properly detailed.  This was damaging the interests of public health in the long run.    

Wasteful competition

So there is a fair amount of talk about Joe Biden taking an aggressive approach to stopping China getting ahead with its technology, particularly chip manufacturing:

U.S. officials pushed to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology after internal debates and tough negotiations with allies.

Noah Smith also has a long post about it, and even the (far too Right wing) guy who has taken over from Allahpundit at Hot Air finds he has to reluctantly praise Biden for this.

I guess my feeling is not that this is a mistake - just that it's a great pity that at a time you really want the globe to be working together towards significant goals, it's instead being set up now for time-and-resource-wasting duplication of technological effort for a decade or two until there is some new  realignment of mutual Western and Chinese interests.    

I noticed when shopping for a tablet in Singapore recently that Huawei still seemingly has (or is trying to maintain) a significant market there, with tablets, phones and (I think) small laptop-ish things (like Microsoft Surface.)   They all had brilliant screens, I know that much.  But no Google apps - the special Huawei ecosystem instead. (Interestingly, recent surprise survey results indicated that Singapore has weirdly - for a very capitalist country - positive feelings towards China and Xi.  I wonder if that makes them particularly inclined to give Huawei products a go, more so than everywhere else.   I do have lingering doubts, just based on a hunch, really, that the Huawei 5G ban was not well justified.) 

As far as I can tell, China has done well with high speed trains;  they are (with very little attention from the West) building a smallish but significant space station.  (According to this article, it's about 20% as massive as the ISS, and is expected to be used for at least a decade.)   They are perhaps catching up somewhat in aviation, with their first significant home grown passenger jet just getting off the ground now.

So overall, they do some pretty remarkable stuff with some pretty sophisticated technology, and it seems such a pity that instead of a global market for all technology, we seem destined to a prolonged period of two global hubs of competing technology, with little cross over.

I guess it means industrial espionage is going to be bigger than ever before, too.   At least that provides some drama and good movie plots, though.  (Trying to find the upside here.  Well, apart from the obvious one that it should presumably make their weaponry less effective?   But I want the other good stuff they can do, too.)

 

Bourdain considered

There's an article at Slate talking about the new biography, somewhat controversial for its "warts and all" approach, of the late Anthony Bourdain.   This section sounds to me like an accurate take on his appeal:

It reads as if it were written in 1999, the year that Bourdain’s life changed as a result of the publication of “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” the sensational New Yorker article that became the basis for his bestselling book, 2000’s Kitchen Confidential.

Leerhsen likes to hover over this turning point, a time when Bourdain, 43, was living with his first wife, Nancy, in a shabby Manhattan apartment where they once left a Christmas tree lying on its side for nine months. Bourdain worked as a middling chef at a middling restaurant, and Nancy spent most of her time watching Court TV. The pair were recognizable New York types, stunned remnants of the bohemian heyday of the East Village, former junkies clinging to the fringes of a city that was rapidly shedding its grit. The haut-bourgeois exaltation of chefs and restaurants was both a symptom of this transformation and the condition that made Bourdain’s midlife success possible. He was a funny, earthy iconoclast, dishing the dirt on what went on behind the scenes at the eateries that were increasingly central to New York’s culture. Most gifted chefs are meticulous and imperious, not qualities that make for charismatic personalities. Bourdain, however, was more like a musician, specifically the kind of downtown rock ’n’ roller who once played CBGB. He wanted to become “the culinary equivalent of the Ramones.”

Bourdain’s old-timey hipness is a primary source of fascination for Leerhsen, who compares him to Frank Sinatra in an extended passage in the book’s prelude: Each is “the epitome of cool, a sad-smiling Jersey boy who combined supremely high standards with the under-appreciated art of not giving a shit in ways that seemed to excite both sexes. You wanted either to be him or to do him, especially if you’d heard the gossip about his gargantuan member.” (OK, that last line is pretty lurid, but the subject never comes up again!) Leerhsen’s Bourdain was a swashbuckling “renegade” drawn to the piratical culture of restaurant kitchens and sworn to a code of authenticity that, despite his age, seems quintessentially Gen X. His drinking and smoking and his past history of drug use were badges of this street cred. “When traveling for his show,” Leerhsen writes, Bourdain “never dealt with official tourist agencies because he disdained the authorized version of things; he balked at the word ‘brand.’ ” As a kid, Bourdain rebelled against what he once described as “the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house,” which, along with the bland comforts of his suburban upbringing, irked him simply because they were bland and suburban and therefore phony.

Nothing a well aimed torpedo wouldn't cure

I'm joking, of course:  I wouldn't want the staff, nearly all of whom would be nicer people from the Philippines, to suffer.

Anyway, this is a despatch from long time Catallaxy character:

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare says:

October 17, 2022 at 11:22 am

There are a lot of Republicans on this cruise, not surprising due to the demographic of older and spending it, and when we start talking to people the anger at what is happening in the US is palpable.

One woman today said to me she didn’t like Donald Trump ‘as a person’ but she sure as hell developed a liking now for ‘his polices and the way he got things done’. She and her husband both thought the 2020 election was rigged. However that’s just one demographic, and people express plenty of concern for the hand-out mentality of many younger Americans now. There’s a terrible sadness in these older generations about it and the decline of their country.

Rather as many of us in Australia also feel, we told them.

Discussion started with this woman and her husband when Hairy mentioned we’d had two years in Australia with no immigrants. We can give you a few, the woman dourly commented.

I used to toy with the idea of going on cruise for the experience, and I have watched a lot of Youtube videos from people who now make a living by reviewing their cruises.  But thinking about the politics of most of the people on board, at least on a US passenger heavy cruise, is kind of off putting. 

I have commented to friends before:  if there was a cruise line which specialised in catering to men (OK, OK - people - but let's be honest, it's going to be many more nerdy men than women who would like this) with a technical interest in how the massive operations are run, I would be all in on that.  Like, being able to wander up to the bridge anytime you want, and get explanations of their navigation systems, or guided tours of the engine room, kitchens, and all other "hidden" workspaces - that would be interesting.  

But just stuffing yourself full of food and drink all the time with the occasional brief shore excursion - not sure anymore how much fun I would get out of it.    

 

A very small element of truth, but too much excuse making

Megan McArdle, who I count as a far from reliable commentator, writes in the Washington Post (I'll gift the link) about why she thinks attacks on Trump tend to (somewhat counter-intuitively) only boost his support in his base.

I mean, one might say something like "that's how cults work", and "hey, Megan, perhaps you should consider the effect of nightly brainwashing sessions by Fox News", but she writes this:

It’s such a fascinating moment, and not just because it so neatly encapsulates the evolution of Republican politics in the Trump era. It also suggests a reason for why that politics is so effective — and why mainstream Washington’s frantic attempts to anathematize the Trumpian style might paradoxically have increased its appeal.

I was part of those mainstream efforts; I spent years arguing that Trump’s impulsivity and his savage attacks on everyone from Gold Star parents to those with physical disabilities ought to have disqualified him from high office. Like most of my colleagues in the media, I was astonished to find that this only made his voters love him more. Many observers concluded that this must be because Trump’s voters were simply awful bigots who loved meanness for its own sake. (“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018 for the Atlantic.)

Presumably, they’re right in some cases; there are bad apples in any large political movement. But as I’ve watched Trumpy candidates and spoken to Trumpy voters, I’ve begun to wonder whether there isn’t another point that we’ve been missing.

Trump voters are famously convinced that establishment Republicans sold them out — and there is a grain of truth to their belief. As political consultant David Shor noted in March, the median voter is center-left on entitlements but right-wing on immigration, yet for years an “ideological cartel” of educated journalists and political professionals kept that combination off the table for either party.

Trump got elected by promising to break up the cartel. But many politicians make such promises — almost all of them, in fact. Then they get to Washington and turn into boringly normal politicians.

There are structural reasons for that — Washington is too big and complicated for any one person to reform, so delivering for your voters inevitably means accommodating yourself to dysfunctional bureaucracy and uninspiring compromise. But to the voters, it looked as though their fiery outsiders had been seduced into betraying their promises by the infamous lure of the Georgetown cocktail-party circuit.

Though Trump voters had grown cynical about such promises, they trusted Trump to follow through. In part that’s because he was a billionaire, which meant, they thought, that he didn’t need to sell out for a plush lobbying job. But looking back, it seems that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric was also serving as a kind of insurance policy for those voters: Having made himself a pariah with the establishment, Trump couldn’t sell out even if he had wanted to.

Trump’s norm violations functioned as what game theorists call a “credible commitment,” enabling voters to trust him even if he wasn’t particularly trustworthy. And ironically, the establishment boosted that signal by proving that we considered him utterly anathema, absolutely beyond the pale. We thought we were helping to minimize the threats Trump posed to the system, but the very vehemence of our rejection might actually have increased his power.

The problem with this type of analysis is that it takes us further down the "normalisation of anti-democractic fascism" path.  And it avoids what is really the heart of the problem - the cowardice and lust for power of pathetic Republican leadership who have let Trump walk all over them, and will not tell the truth to the voters who they know believe any old BS that comes out of Trump's mouth.

It's like Meagan is insisting "you just can't tell the truth to these people.  You just have to live with that".  

 

 

White voter problem

 It's surprising to see the racial voting divide set out so clearly, from a piece in Wapo:

A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.

Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.

If you unite both sides, you're doing it wrong

Unfortunately, not a good point being made by normally sensible David. 

He seems to have stopped ageing about 35 years ago

He's 82:

 Had some "work" I would guess.  Still looks remarkably good for his age.

This was ridiculous

I don't think this got the amount of ridicule it deserved:

 

 I mean, of course stories about AI development are interesting, but this was a silly stunt.   

In a groundbreaking hearing, a robot “gave evidence” to a House of Lords committee on Tuesday – where it read typos from its pre-written script, struggled to hear questions, and needed to be rebooted halfway through the session.

“Ai-Da”, described by its creator, Aiden Meller, as “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist”, appeared in front of the Lords communications and digital committee as part of its inquiry into the future of the creative industries in the UK.

The chair of the committee, Tina Stowell, emphasised at the outset that it was “a serious inquiry”, before explaining to Meller that “the robot is providing evidence but it is not a witness in its own right, and it does not occupy the same status as a human. You as its creator are ultimately responsible for its statements”.

A relatively close black hole

This was in Science last month:

Unless they’re belching up stars or rippling spacetime in a partnered dance, light-trapping black holes are notoriously difficult to spot. But a new proposed discovery of a dormant black hole may help unveil a population lurking in the darkness, New Scientist reports. Because the object emits no light, astronomers detected it by studying the warped orbit and spectrum of a nearby Sun-like star using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and multiple ground-based observatories. The black hole candidate (artist’s impression of a different black hole, above), dubbed Gaia BH1, is 10 times the mass of the Sun and a mere 1500 light-years away—three times closer to Earth than the next known neighbor, researchers report on the arXiv preprint server last week. The long orbital period and proximity make this black hole a prime target to study the physics of these invisible enigmas, which could help scientists identify many more examples in the two remaining data releases from Gaia.

Update:  Oh, just a minute.  In 2020 I posted about a black hole that might only be 1000 light years away.

A meme made me laugh

It was in response to this:

 This:

Weird science

From Nature, a story about which I am unsure how to react:

Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish coated with electrodes have been taught to play a version of the classic computer game Pong¹.

In doing so, the cells join a growing pantheon of Pong players, including pigs taught to manipulate joysticks with their snout² and monkeys wired to control the game with their minds. (Google’s DeepMind artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms mastered Pong many years ago³ and have moved on to more-sophisticated computer games such as StarCraft II⁴.)

The gamer cells respond not to visual cues on a screen but to electrical signals from the electrodes in the dish. These electrodes both stimulate the cells and record changes in neuronal activity. Researchers then converted the stimulation signals and the cellular responses into a visual depiction of the game. The results are reported today in Neuron.

Intelligence in a dish

The work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence, says lead author Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “In current textbooks, neurons are thought of predominantly in terms of their implication for human or animal biology,” he says. “They’re not thought about as an information processor, but a neuron is this amazing system that can process information in real time with very low power consumption.”

I'm betting the cells in a dish would also be easily persuaded to vote for Trump.   

 

Catholic disgrace, continued

Why would this upset him?:

What, his clear discomfit with Putin actually losing the war isn't enough to mark him as a disgrace?    

Update:  he admires Right wing trolls:

Old time commenter JC likes to mouth off in public, and chose db's "new catallaxy" as the forum in which to continue.   But if he had any real moral character, he would tell db (who he increasingly disagrees with) that his views are disgusting:

 

Stand up, JC, you coward...
 

Update 2:

 Dover beach also linked to the Revolver news story, with the title:

Love Him or Hate Him, the War Against Alex Jones Is a War Against Us All

Conspiracy believing paranoid conservatives just hate to see any conspiracy promoting and defaming  moron being punished, economically or legally.   

Dover beach and Currency Lad just illustrate daily how detached from reality and morality conservative Catholics have become.   True disgraces to their religion. 

Update 3:   Well, I guess that makes all OK, then:

He's quite the moron...

Ross sees a problem (but has no solutions)

I don't think there is too much to disagree with in Ross Douthat's column about the unresolved conflict within the Catholic Church that kicked in post Vatican II.

Except - I would say that I get the feeling his inclination is to blame Vatican II, whereas I think the current internal conflict is an inevitable result of the effect of the science revolutions starting from Darwin  making there way slowly through society.   (Vatican II was barely 100 years after The Origin of the Species, after all.)

A coherent president

Further to my wish that American journalists should stop ignoring the Right wingnut meme that Biden is a babbling, dementia riddled puppet - yes this interview was pre-recorded, but Biden comes across as smart and reasonable:  

 

In comments following, there are still some wingnuts claiming "he probably has an earpiece and is repeating words fed to him". They have become detached from reality. This needs to be pointed out by the mainstream press, often.  

Doesn't fit the Trumpy narrative

Yeah, I've read something like this quite a few times recently:

 If MAGA leaders are truly concerned about violent crime, they might look inward. Earlier this year, the centrist Democratic group Third Way crunched the 2020 homicide figures and found that per capita homicide rates were on average 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates have been reliably red states for the past two decades. Republican-led cities weren’t any safer than Democratic-led cities.

Among the 10 states with the highest per capita homicide rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee — most were in the South and relatively rural. The findings were broadly consistent with other rankings of states (and counties) by violent crime.

This isn’t the fault of Republican leaders, of course, any more than Democratic leaders are to blame for crime in blue states. The South, for reasons sociologists debate, has been more violent than the rest of the country for centuries. But those who are truly worried about violent crime should consider decamping to blue America. Living in a Republican state is much more likely to get you killed.

Sometimes I wonder if dedication to hyperbole causes permanent brain damage

 

Quite a few people make the following point in response: 

Update:  oh look, gullible Adam is impressed too:

Yet, as calmer people are pointing out (my God, this comes from one of the new Catallaxy blogs):

And yeah, the link is to a Nature story from Feb 21 pointing out that:

As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are under way to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people.

Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.

As some comments note in the thread after Adam's tweet:

Noah tries to counter

Right wingnuts are 100% committed to a belief that Black Lives Matter led to several cities being laid to waste, and that Democrats endorsed the destruction.  As with the "Obama was a disastrous President" narrative, it's difficult to not see underlying racism in the fanciful exaggeration they have convinced themselves is obviously true.  Anyway, I agree with Noah, as I do on many things:

So, how bad was that dinosaur killing asteroid?

Probably even worse than you imagined, according to a pair of stories on Science Daily.  First, wouldn't it shake your confidence to feel the planet quaking for weeks after the impact?:

66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs. New evidence suggests that the Chicxulub impact also triggered an earthquake so massive that it shook the planet for weeks to months after the collision. The amount of energy released in this "mega-earthquake" is estimated at 1023 joules, which is about 50,000 times more energy than was released in the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004. ...

The rocks exposed on the coast of Gorgonilla Island tell a story from the bottom of the ocean -- roughly 2 km down. There, about 3,000-km southwest from the site of the impact, sand, mud, and small ocean creatures were accumulating on the ocean floor when the asteroid hit. Layers of mud and sandstone as far as 10-15 meters below the sea floor experienced soft-sediment deformation that is preserved in the outcrops today, which Bermúdez attributes to the shaking from the impact. Faults and deformation due to shaking continue up through the spherule-rich layer that was deposited post-impact, indicating that the shaking must have continued for the weeks and months it took for these finer-grained deposits to reach the ocean floor. Just above those spherule deposits, preserved fern spores signal the first recovery of plant-life after the impact.

As for the tsunami, another story notes:

"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore....

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating -- began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation...

According to the team's simulation:

• One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.

• Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.

• Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.

• By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.

For the current study, the researchers did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.

 

 

What a nightmare for the parents

Noted in The Guardian:

A nurse murdered seven babies and attempted to kill 10 others by poisoning them on a hospital neonatal unit where she was a “constant malevolent presence”, a court has heard.

Lucy Letby, 32, fatally injected newborns with insulin, air or milk during night shifts when she knew their parents would not be present, a jury was told.

One of the babies was just 24 hours old when Letby allegedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. The nurse tried to kill his twin sister the next day, it is alleged.

The court was told that Letby, who was trained to care for the most seriously ill babies, developed an “unusual interest” in the parents of some of her 17 alleged victims and in some cases tracked them on Facebook.

Sounds like something you would read in fiction, but I don't want to see Netflix making money off it either.   

About that Florida advice

As I expected, plenty of valid sounding criticism is coming out about that Florida Surgeon General's "study" about mRNA vaccines and cardiac arrest.

Here's one article.  Here's another.  I didn't realise the Surgeon General was always a contrarian on virtually everything to do with COVID.   

But as I said before - in the Right wing information bubble world, the damage is already done.

AI as your friend, and doctor?

Odd, but I'll give it a go:

A new chatbot start-up from two top artificial intelligence talents lets anyone strike up a conversation with impersonations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. Registered users type in messages and get responses. They can also create a chatbot of their own on Character.ai, which has logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing.

“There were reports of possible voter fraud and I wanted an investigation,” the Trump bot said. Character.ai features a disclaimer at the top of every chat: “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!”

Character.ai’s willingness to let users experiment with the latest in language AI is a departure from Big Tech — and that’s by design. The start-up’s two founders helped create Google’s artificial intelligence project LaMDA, which Google keeps closely guarded while it develops safeguards against social risks.

In interviews with The Washington Post, Character.ai’s co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas said they left Google to get this technology into as many hands as possible. They opened Character.ai’s beta version to the public in September for anyone to try.

“I thought, ‘Let’s build a product now that can that can help millions and billions of people,’” Shazeer said. “Especially in the age of covid, there are just millions of people who are feeling isolated or lonely or need someone to talk to.”

In other AI news, which I'm not sure I like the sounds of (a pun there, actually): 

The National Institutes of Health is funding a massive research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech.

Everything from your vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says laryngologist Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida's Health Voice Center and a leader on the study.

"We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?" Bensoussan says. "And that's where we got all our information."

Someone who speaks low and slowly might have Parkinson's disease. Slurring is a sign of a stroke. Scientists could even diagnose depression or cancer. The team will start by collecting the voices of people with conditions in five areas: neurological disorders, voice disorders, mood disorders, respiratory disorders and pediatric disorders like autism and speech delays.

I wonder how far this will go in future - visit the AI doctor online with a frog in the throat, and end up admitted to a psych ward?

A deeply unimpressive Metaverse

A reporter for the New York Times has an article up "This is Life in the Metaverse", and boy, it may not have been the intention of the writer, but for me, it only helps confirm all of the scepticism about what a bad idea it is.  I will gift the article so you can read in full.

The culinary workplace - does it have to be that way?

Because it has been getting favourable comments on Twitter, I decided to watch the first episode of The Bear, which is on Disney Plus in Australia.

It's a comedy drama (with, it would seem, a heavier concentration on the drama) about a talented chef who comes home to Chicago to try to keep his recently deceased brother's "Italian beef restaurant" going.

I guess I expected all of the Kitchen Confidential-esque, working-as-a-chef-in-a-restaurant-is-high-energy, high-conflict, sometimes-high-reward, stuff.   (Ratatouille and Gordon Ramsay's shows contributed to our understanding of what type of people it attracts, too!)   But my overall feeling remains:

*  gee, there seemed to be an awful lot of people needed to run that place with the limited menu options.  That felt a bit unrealistic.  Apparently, though, the show gets reasonable marks for accuracy from people in the business.

*  Given that we have had a couple of decades of public exposure to what it's like to work in these businesses, is it is really, absolutely, unavoidable that they have to be like that?   I mean, can a restaurant be started on the basis that respect and workplace harmony are prioritised, and can it possibly survive?  

Ronny Jackson was the warning

Ronny Jackson was the warning - any doctor who goes all in for support for Trumpy politicians has dubious judgement in everything, including medicine.

Hence, my initial reaction when reading that the Florida Surgeon General was promoting an unpublished analysis about the increased risk of cardiac arrest in young men from mRNA vaccines was that this was likely to be from a badly flawed analysis.  (The warning in his Tweet "FL will not be silent on the truth" pretty much seals it, that he's acting from biased political motives.)

Early commentary indicates my reaction was probably right - although we all await more detailed analysis.   But the (likely) damage has already been done in the politicised information bubble the Right has built for itself. 

No, they don't

 

Tablet time

After many years with only an old mid sized Samsung tablet, which still has a great looking screen, but a battery that will only last a couple of hours and then take 8 hours to charge again, I went and bought my self a new, larger tablet - a relatively cheap one from Lenovo.

I have to say, the way Lenovo names its models is pretty confusing - but a 10.6 inch model with 128Gb (and room for expansion) for $327 seems pretty good value.   It makes reading books much, much easier than trying to do so on phone.  In fact, I have a theory that it will turn out conclusively in the near future that the world overall has become 20% dumber due to the atomisation of information necessary to fit it on a phone screen. 

It's still a bit tricky doing blog posts, though.  Hence my last post with the dubious quality of the resized screenshot.  I'm working on it, though...

Wikipedia and physics

A twenty minute fire in the kitchen caused by a lightning strike is nothing, according to anti-Biden wingnuts

I still get absolutely dismayed at the way wingnuts self-gaslight via social media about Biden and dementia.   (And for the record, no, I don't think it was hugely embarrassing [or, put it this way - that big a deal] that he called on someone who had  died a couple of months before the event - he dwelt on it for all of about 8 seconds and moved on, possibly even realising his mistake at the time - and as was noted on Planet America, it is also possible that the name was accidentally left on the teleprompt.)

The guy has made verbal faux pas for decades - there are compilations on the net from well before the election.    It infuriates me that clips of minor matters, such as exiting a stage in the wrong direction, is snipped out and shown as if it is proof that he doesn't know where he is, or some such BS.   It's really malicious treatment of a public figure, feeding a gullible audience, if you ask me.   

Of course he's not as sharp as a younger man, but if you actually watch his performance in delivering speeches and off the cuff commentary, there is no way an honest person can say that any person well into a dementia decline could perform those tasks as competently as he does.   

Stop believing 10 second clips and watch his lengthy performances, morons.    

And on the question of honesty, look at this hyperbole:

So thousands of wingnuts stop there and believe whoever this Schwartz is.

You have to go to the thread to read:

 

As others point out:

So people are calling him a massive liar because a fire that (apparently) took 20 mins to control in the kitchen counts as a "small" fire, and it's wrong to call that "an awful lot" of his home.

I mean, this is just ridiculous criticism or what could, at the most, be described as mild exaggeration made in an attempt at showing empathy.

And nothing like the chronic "living in a fantasy world" type of lie that comes out of the mouth of Trump as an absolute matter of routine. 

I wish there were more people speaking aggressively about the maliciousness and gullible world bubble the Right has built for themselves, with the help of social media and money grubs like Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch. 

PS:   none of this means that I necessarily think Biden should run again.  In fact I think he shouldn't, and yes, because of his age;  but he needs to be replaced by someone sharper than his VP.

A shocking week for senseless and unexpected death

First, it was the Indonesia soccer stadium deaths, and now the Thailand preschool attack, the details of which are about as bad as they could possibly be:

The attacker, a former police officer, opened fire as children were sleeping at the centre in Na Klang district in Nong Bua Lamphu province at about noon on Thursday, police and witnesses said.

Police said most of the children killed at the centre were stabbed to death. As he left the nursery the attacker drove his car towards and shot at bystanders then returned home, where he shot himself, his wife and his child.

Police identified the attacker as Panya Khamrab, a 34-year-old former police lieutenant colonel who had been dismissed from the force last year for methamphetamine possession and had appeared in court earlier on Thursday on a drugs charge.

It's so easy it is to imagine the shock of being personally affected by that....

 

I'm willing to try this...

Here's the recipe, but it's very simple.

Curious ancient practices

From Smithsonian magazine:

Thousands of years ago—and thousands of miles apart—the people of what are now Britain and Japan both created elaborate stone circles set up to interact with the solstices and to house remains of the dead.

A new exhibition at Stonehenge highlights compelling parallels between English and Japanese cultures during the Neolithic and Jōmon eras. Though they never interacted with each other, the two cultures seemed to have shared a lot in common—from stone circles to elaborate pottery to rituals connected to the sun.

“Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan,” which opens today, explores those similarities through some 80 items from the Japanese Jōmon period, many of which have never before been on view outside Japan.

“To understand the significance of Stonehenge, we have to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world in prehistory,” Susan Greaney, a historian with English Heritage and a curator for the exhibition, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris. “Although there was obviously no contact between Japan and Britain at this time, there are surprising parallels.”

Consider, for example, the Japanese stone circles from Ōyu and Isedotai in northern Japan. While not the imposing monoliths of Stonehenge, the two circles, made of thousands of smooth river stones, line up with the sun during the summer and winter solstices, and they were both used in burial rites. And for both monuments, collecting materials and completing construction would have taken enormous community effort.

 Here's a photo of one of the Japanese circles from one of the above links:

Is tiny nuclear really much use?

This may be mainly all PR to help university funding, but there's a story on phys.org about a new-ish reactor design (which doesn't really explain if one has been built):

BYU professor and nuclear engineering expert Matthew Memmott and his colleagues have designed a new system for safer nuclear energy production: a molten salt micro-nuclear reactor that may solve all of these problems and more.

The standard nuclear reactor used in America is the Light-Water Reactor. Uranium atoms are split to create energy, and the products left over will radiate massive amounts of heat. They are kept in solid fuel rods, and water is run through the rods to keep everything cool enough. If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown. Memmott's solution is to store these radioactive elements in molten salt instead of fuel rods...

In Memmott's new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature—550°C—and it doesn't take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn't remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What's more, many of these products are valuable, and can be can be removed from the salt and sold.

But how small is this design?   Pretty small:

A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott's molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places. 

 I have my doubts this is useful.  Maybe good for somewhere like Antarctica, though?

Freshwater crabs considered

 CGTN shows how a lake in China is famous for its (freshwater) hairy crabs:

and I thought -that seems a useful thing to have in your country, why don't we have them here (in Australia)?

But it turns out there is an Australian inland freshwater crab - but it's small, only growing its carapace to about 5 cm, apparently.

The Chinese crab has in fact spread around the world:

This crab originates from the temperate waters between East Russia (Vladivostok) to South China, the Korean Peninsular, Japan and Taiwan Province of China. It has been transferred, probably in ballast waters to northern Europe in 1900s and appears to have established self-reproducing populations there. It has more recently been found in North America and Hawaii.

 Learning something new every day...

Quick takes

*  Elon Musk might be buying Twitter after all?   I hope someone is working on an alternative, because I can see a lot of people happy to leave it if Trump and endless lies and disinformation resumes on the platform.

*  Really, I find it puzzling that being CEO of an aussie rules football club is such a newsworthy thing.  

*  It certainly seems true that we are in for yet another cool, very wet, summer.   

*  This is a pretty boring post. 

*  Update:  famously great Christian husband defends another famously great Christian husband -

It's clear, by the way, that this is end result of - what? - 40 decades of increasing use of demagoguery (kicked off by Gingrich himself) as the Republicans' prime political tactic:  if you keep telling your followers that anyone to the Left of you is 100% evil and wants to destroy everything good, absolutely any loser with terrible personal morals can represent you by just saying "but I'm not evil like them." 

More mystery needed

About a week ago, Noah Smith tweeted a little nostalgically about this:

...and I am also sympathetic to the view that it's a little sad that there seems less mystery around lately.  Yes, I know, so much of it was silly, but as someone said in response, it was a bit of an early education in empiricism to read debunking books on the likes of von Daniken and the Bermuda Triangle.   With UFOs, though, I was never satisfied with the debunking efforts, and while Hynek may have been gullible about some cases, I always found his books pretty persuasive.   

On the definite downside in the current mystery Noosphere:  it seems that terrible, cheap and trashy American "ghost hunter" reality shows have really killed the credibility of ghosts and haunting stories.   (I know these shows have never been really popular in Australia, but I see bits of them on Youtube and elsewhere, and they are awful.  American cable TV still seems to have a lot more space to fill up with trash than we do in Australia.)  Same for bad shows about celebrity mediums.   I haven't seen a medium make a convincing looking "hit" with a reader for a long, long time.

And it's not just TV or Youtube:  it seems that I haven't even read a good first hand account of any ghost or mediumship story in an online newspaper or magazine for a very long time.   

This is a real pity.   I love a good story of that kind from a person who found it unexpected and hard to explain.   But you just get the feeling lately that the souls of the departed may be too depressed by all the fakery going on that they can't bother appearing to anyone anymore!

On the upside, of course, we have seen a real and major revival of UFO speculation, with the US Navy story which, I admit, is very cool and interesting.   Of course, drones and Starlink launches are making for many, many fake events, but there still is enough real mystery about the military related events to keep a good level of excitement there.  And revisiting some older cases is still pretty interesting.

I also somehow recently again came across this story from 2018, which I don't think I have mentioned before.   It's hard to believe, but it is seems it is still possible for a large white jet aircraft to be flying over California and Oregon and to have no one know where it ended up.  (It was tracked on radar, had no transponder working, was sighted by commercial pilots at some distance, and F 15s were sent up to try to identify it.)   I mean, really:  how is that possible that they lost track of it.  But it appears they did.  

One other persistent mystery, although again it is more of a technological than a paranormal one, is the Havana syndrome.  I don't think I have ever gotten around to commenting on it, but I saw a clip this weekend of a doctor explaining what happened to him when he visited Cuba, and again it's a case of a first hand account by a credible sounding person being surprisingly convincing.   I am inclined to think that there is a real phenomena there. 

Update:   I suppose the better heading for the post might be "Paranormal mystery down; technological mystery up".  

While I do like technological mystery, paranormal ones have always struck me as having potential to be truly revolutionary.   I mean, convincing proof of an afterlife, or even ESP, would blow the current state of scientific materialism out of the water; proof of observation by alien UFOs - not at all, really.  Hence I am a little disappointed if evidence for paranormal events seems to be fading. 

I think I would pass on being the first to try this...

Odd headline from Science magazine:

RoboCap: Robotic mucus-clearing capsule for enhanced drug delivery in the gastrointestinal tract 

The story:

Here, we describe the development of the RoboCap, an orally ingestible robotic drug delivery device that locally clears the mucus layer, enhances mixing, and topically deposits the drug payload to enhance drug absorption (Movie 1). The RoboCap’s rotational and churning movements are generated by surface features designed to interact directly with small intestinal (SI) plicae, villi, and mucus. We hypothesize that drug bioavailability will be significantly greater when delivered with the RoboCap compared with standard oral delivery. We test the efficacy of the RoboCap in delivering two model peptide drugs, vancomycin and insulin, through Franz cell diffusion and in vivo testing in swine.

There is a video embedded in the article which I can't copy, but the commentary to it sometimes strikes me as inadvertently funny.

Oh, another unhappy poet

Put this in the drawer marked "Reasons all parents of teenagers should be happy if their child says they don't have any interest in writing poetry":  a review of a new book about TS Eliot enlightens me about his unhappy personal life.   Sure, sure, there must have been happy famous poets - just that they seem to be in the serious minority:

In 1915 Eliot proposed to Vivien Haigh-Wood, partly out of desire for sexual experience, which he was too shy to seek in other ways. Following “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract,” the young poet found himself shackled to a needy, fragile woman he grew to dislike, then pity and finally loathe. He would turn for love and sympathetic understanding elsewhere....

This second half of Crawford’s biography begins with a brief account of Eliot’s short-lived, unsatisfactory affair with the rich, notoriously promiscuous Nancy Cunard. Soon, though, this unhappy husband found his thoughts returning to the girl he had left behind in America, Emily Hale. In due course, Eliot and Hale embarked on an intense correspondence that would continue for more than 20 years. Any guise of mere friendship was soon abandoned: “I would literally give my eyesight to be able to marry you. … If I ever am free I shall ask you to marry me.”  ...

His eventual commitment to an exceptionally austere Anglicanism revolutionized Eliot’s later life but ruined Hale’s. The bonds of matrimony, he repeatedly told her, were sacrosanct. There could be no divorce. Nonetheless, the two would meet occasionally during the interwar years — both in America and in England — for what seem to have been afternoons of decorous yearning. Hale would long cherish the remembrance of their few kisses ...

Both Vivien and Eliot almost continually suffered from an array of illnesses. Hers included intestinal inflammation, shortness of breath, influenza, shingles, emotional and mental instability, and drastic weight loss — at one point she was down to 80 pounds — while Eliot ran his wife a respectable second with recurrent colds, bronchial trouble, seriously decayed teeth (five were extracted on one dental visit), a hernia that required a truss, surgery on his finger and frequent periods of nervous exhaustion. He also drank impressively, as many as five gin drinks during dinner...

Crawford estimates that in 1925 alone the couple spent a third of their income on doctors, medicines, and stays in hospitals or sanatoria. During the ’30s, Eliot arranged for the increasingly troubled Vivien — at one point he wondered if she might be suffering from “demonic possession” — to be cared for in various rest homes, and in 1938 he signed papers committing her to an asylum. With typical Prufrockian cowardice, he did this by letter while out of the country. He never saw her again....

Then, get this!:

...in 1947, Vivien died. At this point the now-free Eliot suddenly recoiled at the prospect of actually marrying Hale, to whom he wrote, “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself (which means not merely one moment, but a perpetual adaptation for the rest of life) to any other person.” Hale was crushed but hoped he’d change his mind.

He went on, at age 68, to do this, after lodging with " wheelchair-bound bibliophile John Hayward."

Eliot’s bedroom was flamboyantly ascetic: a single bed, an ebony crucifix, a bare lightbulb hanging from a chain. Very early one morning in 1957, though, Hayward’s “lodger” announced — without warning, through a letter — that he wouldn’t be back the next day or, indeed, ever. The 68-year-old Eliot had proposed — via letter! — to his adoring 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and been accepted. In due course, Hale received her own letter, disclosing this ultimate betrayal. For the final years of his life Eliot was soppily besotted with his new young bride, and the two grew inseparable. He died in 1965 at age 76.

Sounds quite the cad.

How's the current Russian holy war going

Of course, it was utterly predictable:   Putin would have know that if he brought transexualism into his ranty "Russia will rise again against the evil and corrupt West" speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine, American and Australian Right wing culture war reactionaries would be impressed with that, and ignore broader matters like, you know, how wars of conquest should no longer be a thing.  And sure enough, the disgusting and madly ignorant (of anything other than arcane Catholic history) Currency Lad could not resist but repeat Putin's words with approval.

He might, if he had any credibility as a Catholic at all, question the issue of how a key figure of the Russian Orthodox Church has tried to turn it into a Holy War - promising that soldiers killed on the battlefield of Russian expansionism would automatically have their sins forgiven.    And I see there was a rally in Moscow (with a bussed in crowd, but still) which featured this rally cry:

I would have thought a Catholic should have concerns about this, but you know, as long as Putin joins in with the moral panic about transgenderism*, all is forgiven.  Or at least, not worth making a song and dance about.

 

[* an issue on which it is possible to believe - as I do - that there are nutty and unreasonable pro-trans activists, and conservatives who have taken up the issue in true "moral panic" style that sounds at times as if they think kids are at risk of being put under the knife even without consent.]

Confucius is (literally) big in China, again

As the dear reader may know, I like both big statues and watching clips from CGTN to keep on top of what is "in" with the  Chinese government at the moment, hence this recent clip of a Confucian centre at his birthplace caught my eye:

 

(And, seriously, once again I find myself wishing China had a more "normal" regime to which Westerners could feel safe visiting, because it's clear there are many, many awesome looking places to see. That library looks fantastic, although I doubt it caters to English readers.)

I thought that this video might have appeared because the statue, or accompanying centre, was new; but I see online that the statue (if not the whole centre) was opened 6 years ago.  I must have missed that.

CGTN has lots of videos up endorsing the philosopher, including a stream of the recent, annual, "Grand Ceremony of Worship of Confucius" featuring lots of costume and dance and a precision that makes you worry for the wellbeing of anyone who might make a mistake. 

Anyhow, this got me thinking that I was pretty sure Confucianism was on the outer for quite a while in China, but clearly the Party has revised its view of him.  I could watch a CGTN produced forum  discussion about this*, but instead, I went to extremely erudite Religion for Breakfast channel to watch his video the Confucian revival:

 Well worth watching, as is virtually  every single video he puts out.  My only complaint is that sometimes I think his delivery is so rapid and dense, I can tell I won't remember much of it, as it is too fast to process.

 

*  I haven't watched much of it, except I am amused to see it does say the worship ceremony has it origins from the 1980's! 

Their conspiracy paranoia makes them a danger

Update:  Sharlet later deleted the Tweet, explaining that he was being targeted by morons saying "if you're against capital punishment for pedophiles, you must be one."