Fusion issues - when does an exaggeration become deception? [And cringe, but I cite Elon Musk in support!]

I'm a bit surprised, but Sabine Hossenfelder seems to not want to give any encouragement to fusion power skepticism after the "net energy gain" breakthrough announcement from Lawrence Liverpool this week.  

And look, I know that I criticise amateur "armchair experts" on matters like climate change and vaccines, so I feel I am at great risk of being called a hypocrite when I now put my own version of amateur assessment on this topic.  

But, but:  I reckon anyone just has to read a bit more widely to understand that the problem is not just getting fusion to work - it's getting it to ever work in a way that makes economic sense for power generation.  I reckon that it's that aspect which no one is asking the pro-fusion researchers to properly discuss and justify. (Sure, the timeframe question comes up - more on that below - but I reckon there is plenty of reason to doubt that it will ever be economically viable.)

I mean (ugh, I know I shouldn't do this appeal to gut reaction, because it feels so much like the same tactics climate "skeptics" use) but look at this photo:

Does this look even vaguely like an easily deployable system for power generation?   It's the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore where they made the breakthrough, and of course, it just an experimental set up and it was never meant to be something that would generate useful power.  But still, a picture gives an idea of the complexity of this type of fusion set up, so I'm still running with it. 

And when you read about the set up, it almost seems that the question should be "how come it took so long to even get to the net energy gain"?  

‘Nif is the world’s largest, most energetic laser,’ she explains. ‘It’s 192 separate lasers, each one of which is close to the most energetic in the world. And it’s housed in a building that’s three American football fields wide and 10 storeys tall, which is needed for all the amplifying objects. In fact, it’s the world’s largest optical instrument.’ When it fires, the facility’s beams are amplified by 3070 sheets of phosphate glass doped with neodymium, each weighing 42kg and set at Brewster’s angle, which reduces reflective loss. ‘The idea is we take all of that energy, which comes to about 1.9 megajoules, and focus it down on a target the size of a small ball bearing, about 2mm in diameter.’

As for how long they have been trying to get it to make net energy (and only considering the laser power going in, not the energy needed to make the lasers) Science magazine explains:

The $3.5 billion NIF began its “ignition” campaign in 2010.  ...That self-sustaining burn is what defines ignition, and after more than a decade of effort NIF scientists declared they had achieved that milestone after a shot in August 2021 produced 70% of the input laser energy. But NIF’s funder, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, set NIF’s goal as an energy gain greater than one—the threshold it passed last week.

So, $3.5 billion and 12 years to get a single event in which the energy of the reaction was about "the equivalent of about three sticks of dynamite."  A small energy return on investment, if ever there were one.

The Science article does go on to explain a possible future direction for laser fusion (my bold):

The NIF scheme has another inefficiency, Betti says. It relies on “indirect drive,” in which the laser blasts the gold can to generate the x-rays that actually spark fusion. Only about 1% of the laser energy gets into the fuel, he says. He favors “direct drive,” an approach pursued by his lab, where laser beams fire directly onto a fuel capsule and deposit 5% of their energy. But DOE has never funded a program to develop inertial fusion for power generation. In 2020, the agency’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee recommended it should, in a report co-authored by Betti and White. “We need a new paradigm,” Betti says, but “there is no clear path how to do it.”

Now that NIF has cracked the nut, researchers hope laser fusion will gain credibility and more funding may flow. 

[Betti, by the way, is from another research lab.]

About that funding - as everyone who has read anything about this knows, a lot more money is going into tokamak fusion research, in the form of the gigantic and hugely expensive ITER plant being built in France:

However, the leading tokamak device, the ITER reactor under construction in France, is anything but simple. It is vastly over budget, long overdue, and will not reach breakeven until the late 2030s at the earliest. With NIF’s new success, proponents of such laser-based “inertial fusion energy” will be pushing for funding to see whether they can compete with the tokamaks.

As for the cost - it seems a matter of much dispute as to how to actually cost it, which is a little odd, but the range (shared by many nations) seems to be from $22 billion to $65 billion.

All that money for possible breakeven by the late 2030's.

Also, the article I first linked to in this post is from Chemistry World, which explains one of the fundamental issues on the economic development of fusion power - the development of suitable materials needed around a fusion reactor:

The greatest problem faced in fusion isn’t achieving the incredible temperatures required – it’s the materials science required to maintain that environment long-term. It’s why Jet couldn’t go past a few seconds, explains Rimini. ‘Jet is based on fairly old copper coils for the magnetic fields, and the tokamak walls are not actively water-cooled, so the high fusion period is only designed to run for 10–15 seconds at most.’

UKAEA has built a new materials research facility at Culham Science Centre to tackle such problems. One of the staff searching for solutions is Greg Bailey, a computational nuclear physicist. ‘The copper magnets get too hot,’ he says. ‘So, in the future, we’re using superconducting magnets. And hopefully we’ll learn more.’ These material changes have already happened in the past. ‘Jet actually changed the material of its walls,’ Bailey says. ‘Initially we’d made the walls out of carbon, because that made life easier for the experiments. It should have been perfect, but, actually, it was terrible! We were getting a lot of tritium retention – we were losing our fuel into the wall, the hydrogen was drifting inside. So we had to change it.’

The design challenges discovered and solved by Jet are already being fed into Iter, explains Bailey. ‘What does a material for a reactor need to be? Resistant to damage [from radiation], it needs to be able to take the temperatures and extreme environments, and maintain its mechanical properties during its lifetime. So, in terms of a fusion reactor, the vast majority is probably going to be steel. The really interesting bits come inside the vacuum vessels, your housing, because they’re going to be facing extremes. They need armour, obviously.’

This has resulted in plans for Iter to be covered by 440 ‘blanket’ modules, weighing up to 4.6 tonnes, which cover the steel of the tokamak’s structure. Neutrons discharged during the reaction the enter the blanket can be slowed, and their kinetic energy transferred to a coolant system for another form of power. It’s hoped the blanket can also be used to solve another issue for reactors: their feedstock.

‘There’s plenty of deuterium on Earth,’ Bailey says, ‘but deuterium fusion produces much lower energy neutrons; it’s not really a viable source to make a power plant. And tritium is not naturally occurring.’ To obtain their tritium, the team plans to use lithium with an enhanced level of lithium-6, which can break apart under neutron irradiation to produce tritium. Although this is naturally occurring, the problem is that lithium is already in high demand for its use in lithium-ion batteries. ‘Frankly, when lithium comes into our reactor, we’re going to destroy it,’ Bailey says. ‘The fuel is not the problem; it’s how you produce it.’

This is where the blanket could come in, explains Bailey. ‘A lot of designs right now are mixing lithium with lead, or lithium with ceramic and some beryllium in there. The idea is that you get deuterium and tritium, the fusion reactor turns on, and neutrons produced in the fusion reactions smash into the blanket and tritium breeding reactions can occur. We can then extract that tritium to refuel the reactor. And, obviously, the neutron radiation into the blanket will cause a huge amount of heating.’ It’s still not perfected yet, but Bailey is confident the experiments done at Culham will show the way, potentially in collaboration with the private sector; fusion is already attracting major investors, including Amazon’s multibillionaire founder Jeff Bezos. ‘If we want to do fusion on an industrial scale we need to start building that supply chain now,’ says Rimini. ‘We need to start evolving the industry.’

Obvious questions I have:  how long will the "blanket" modules last?   How long will a fusion power plant need to be down while they are replaced?   At 4.6 tonnes each, and presumably all getting radioactive at the same rate - it's going to be a huge maintenance job, and it's something they are only now trying to work out. 

There's a complicated 2017 paper here about the materials science challenges for testing and developing suitable materials:

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of the materials challenges presented by the
conceptual design [1] for a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) to bridge the development gap between ITER and a demonstration power plant (DEMO). Here the FNSF specifically denotes the concept that has been studied in the recent Fusion Energy System Studies (FESS) supported by the US Department of Energy, also called the FESS–FNSF, which is examining a  conventional aspect ratio tokamak. The FNSF is an experimental machine designed to establish the reliable performance of the critical fusion system technologies required in DEMO and power plants. The FNSF horizontal maintenance system [2] allows for periodic removal, examination, and replacement of full power core sectors.

As far as I can tell, this Facility does not exist yet, and won't for some time.   This presentation from 2014 seems to indicate that it wouldn't really get going until ITER is up and running - in the 2030's - and the 2017 paper says this:

A minimum 20-year timeframe will be required to accommodate the development of the advanced materials to commercialization and code qualification, development of blanket fabrication technologies, evaluation in non-nuclear integrated test programs, and 14 MeV neutron testing in DONES/A-FNS/IFMIF to validate irradiation performance.

So piecing this together, we're getting the "best hope" for tokamak fusion not likely getting to break even until the late 2030's, during which decade a materials research stage which will take a minimum of 20 years will have started.   

Does this sound like commercialisation of fusion power within 20 years?   No it doesn't - sounds more like 40 to 50 - if it is possible at all.  Because isn't this complicated materials science issue likely to be a key one in the question of whether fusion will ever be economically viable?  And we won't even know the answer to that for another 20 to 30 years.

AND YET:   this morning on Radio National, we heard Kim Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (home of the "breakthrough") say this at the 12.40 mark:

"So not 50 years away anymore, I would say probably 2 decades of concerted effort and it's plausible we have power plants in development"

To her credit, Patricia Karvelis, sounds skeptical "Wow - really - in 2 decades?"

And Ma says "I think so"

I'm sorry, but ever allowing for the qualifiers of "probably" and "plausible", I reckon that that answer is so practically unrealistic as to be deceptive.  

I'll come back and add a bit more to this post later...

Update:   I had a look at Youtube videos about it, and quickly found one in which a former Secretary of Energy (and nuclear physicist) makes an outlandish claim the he "think[s] we can demonstrate and maybe initially deploy some power plants on the grid within the next decade or so".  [!]

Gee, if anyone invests money in the company he's on the board of, based on this type of spruiking, I reckon it would come close to fraud:

 

More realistically (much, much more realistically) we have an actual former fusion scientist who thinks it's worth pursuing, but he explains in this video from a year ago the huge engineering issues yet to be overcome.  He says there is no way we will have fusion by 2040, and everything I have listed above indicates that is correct: 

 

Finally, and I didn't see this coming or realise it until now, but I'm on the side of Elon Musk!  Here's a short clip in which he says that sure, fusion will be achievable, but it's just not going to be economically viable as a power source, citing the tritium issue mainly.   [I can't embed it, as it's a Youtube short.]   

How embarrassing is that, given that he seems to have driven himself nuts by blowing many billions on Twitter?  Quite - but hey, if the facts are actually on his side on this issue, so be it.

 

What attention are wingnuts (and certain journalists and billionairies) giving to their Paul Pelosi conspiracy being blown away?

The New York Times reports:

It was as quick as it was brutal — captured in just a few seconds of grainy video from a police body camera. Arriving at the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, two officers find an intruder and Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, standing calmly, each with a hand on a hammer that the police demand they drop. Just then, the video shows, the intruder takes control, wields the weapon over his head and slams it with full force.

“Mr. Pelosi was face down on the ground, a pool of blood by his head,” said Kyle Cagney, one of the two San Francisco police officers who were first to arrive in the early hours of Oct. 28, during a court hearing on Wednesday.

As for the mangled initial reporting that Pelosi knew the name of his attacker:

The hearing began with prosecutors playing a recording of a call that Mr. Pelosi made to 911 shortly after the intruder woke him up. During the call, Mr. Pelosi speaks calmly but emphatically, seemingly trying to convey to the operator that he is in danger but without alarming the intruder threatening his life.

Mr. Pelosi said on the call that there was “a gentleman here waiting for my wife to come back.” He told the operator who his wife was, and at one point the intruder in the background could be heard saying, “The name is David.”

Chait on transgender reporting

I see nothing at all to disagree with in Jonathan Chait's column in New York Magazine, complaining about the progressives' debate tactics when it comes to the issue of transgender treatment of children/young adults.   

And it's disappointing when someone like David Roberts, who is sensible on most things, joins in with a snide attack on the bona fides of Chait.

Hoping for a save

It would appear that the screen testing rumours for Indiana Jones 5 (people hated the ending) are probably true?  John Williams said there is a new ending being filmed.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think some famous films (or at least a couple) have been "saved" by a late change to the ending?   

And it still means that I get to hope this happens:

END INDIANA JONES BY SHOWING HIM GOING ON BOARD THE MOTHERSHIP AT THE END OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

 

Pretty good reason to believe this means we'll never hear from him again

RMIT really seems to operate as a sheltered workshop for IPA types.  I was amused to read this on Crikey a day or two ago, in an article about what some recent ex-politicians are doing now:

Tim Wilson

Following his loss in Goldstein to Zoe Daniel, Wilson did the only appropriate thing for someone who occupies his place in public life combining trendy finance and debatable climate change action. He’s doing a PhD at RMIT University’s Blockchain Innovation Hub, studying “alternative models for carbon markets through tokenisation and the development of derivatives markets”. Well, indeed.

Extremism on both sides is pretty depressing

While it's still early days in knowing fully what happened in the ambush of police in (what I think I can call) outback Queensland, it does seem already established that the perpetrators were all Right wing, anti-government conspiracy believers, who (perhaps most bizarrely of all) had each worked in significant roles in the government education system, despite that workplace having (pretty fairly, I would say) a reputation as being the home of Left leaning staff.   This was the type of murder that is more expected from the backwoods of rural America than Australia, but it does show the harm that the internet causes in easing the spread of conspiracy belief, and the reinforcement effect of people finding forums on line where others listen to them, and offer support (or at least, fail to condemn.)

I'm also feeling somewhat depressed about the state of Twitter, and in particular, damaged-manboy-who- just-wants-to-be-liked, it-doesn't-matter-by-who Elon Musk giving endorsement to Right wing conspiracy and extremism, and ruining people's lives.   It is absolutely appalling, in my books, that Right wing commentary in the US and here ignores the matter of death threats that are guaranteed to be made on the basis of Right wing conspiracy - the election workers who get harassed for just doing their job; anyone caught up in the "maybe he's a pedo" moral panic which is deployed freely by Musk personally.

On the other side of politics, there is also an extremism that is bothering me, and even though it is not as patently dangerous as Right wing conspiracy, it is annoying me that it is not being called out.   Take this as an example:

Kilroy is a bit of a lawyer celebrity:  she did time in jail for drug dealing as a young woman, got herself educated, and went from social work to a law degree and finally got admitted as a lawyer in Queensland despite her troubled past.   She is well known as an advocate for improving conditions for women in prison.   She has featured on "Australian Story" on the ABC.

Yet this comment, which I suspect she was inspired to make because a Victorian commission into child protection has been full of claims that it's just obvious that too many aboriginal children are being removed from families, is just patently extreme and silly.   It's of a class of the increasingly radical young aboriginal activist line that Australia just needs to be handed over to First Nations people and that will fix all of history's wrongs.  

It seems to be, reading the Tweets of First Nations academia (which I have been doing via one particular person always coming to my attention there), that the women in that field (as it is mostly women) live in an intellectual space that allows them to repeat to each other statements of escalating extremism, and they simply have no incentive to talk each other down.

This is bad in its own way, and I wish that the mainstream of politics - and reporting - would stop letting this happen with no pushback.  

If someone says something on line that is ridiculous and extreme, whether it is from the Left or Right, and they are being interviewed on the ABC or where ever, they should be challenged about it.  

I don't see that any good comes from pretending that the extremism doesn't exist, on either side.   

Update:  another couple of recent tweets from Ms Kilroy:

  

The fine print (that's continually overlooked)

Obviously, while she is getting quite well known, not enough people have seen Sabine Hosenfelder's video from last year about the huge amounts of energy that are needed to drive the systems needed to get "net energy gain" in experimental fusion.  Here's a link to it again.

Oh, and look, the Washington Post story about the "big breakthrough" at one facility, has this fine print, which really, honestly, should be reflected more in the headlines:

“If it’s what we’re expecting, it’s like the Kitty Hawk moment for the Wright brothers,” said Melanie Windridge, a plasma physicist and the CEO of Fusion Energy Insights. “It’s like the plane taking off.”

Does this mean fusion energy is ready for prime time?

No. Scientists refer to the current breakthrough as “scientific net energy gain” — meaning that more energy has come out of the reaction than was inputted by the laser. That’s a huge milestone that has never before been achieved.

But it’s only a net energy gain at the micro level. The lasers used at the Livermore lab are only about 1 percent efficient, according to Troy Carter, a plasma physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. That means that it takes about 100 times more energy to run the lasers than they are ultimately able to deliver to the hydrogen atoms.

So researchers will still have to reach “engineering net energy gain,” or the point at which the entire process takes less energy than is outputted by the reaction. They will also have to figure out how to turn the outputted energy — currently in the form of kinetic energy from the helium nucleus and the neutron — into a form that is usable for electricity. They could do that by converting it to heat, then heating steam to turn a turbine and run a generator. That process also has efficiency limitations.

All that means that the energy gain will probably need to be pushed much, much higher for fusion to actually be commercially viable.

At the moment, researchers can also only do the fusion reaction about once a day. In between, they have to allow the lasers to cool down and replace the fusion fuel target. A commercially viable plant would need to be able to do it several times per second, says Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT. “Once you’ve got scientific viability,” he said, “you’ve got to figure out engineering viability.”

And yet the article still ends on a rather misleading note:

Current fusion experts argue that it’s not a matter of time, but a matter of will — if governments and private donors finance fusion aggressively, they say, a prototype fusion power plant could be available in the 2030s.

“The timeline is not really a question of time,” Carter said. “It’s a question of innovating and putting the effort in.”

The article didn't even mention the other well known problems of practical fusion power:  how to deal with the physical container getting radioactive from neutrons (or at least, at a slow enough rate that it doesn't become prohibitively expensive), the supply of tritium issue, and other matters which are detailed at links in my post of 2019.

It just seems that people are having a hard time believing that scientists involved in this type of research are prone to exaggerated optimism.  Why are there so few articles exploring this in depth in the mainstream media?? 

 

 

 

 

Fantasy world noted

I'm wondering what happens if a very rich man with a Messiah complex gets a brain implant that allows external control by others, only to have the input to it hacked by his "woke" critics.

I can imagine some very operatic endings for Musk too - like jumping in a Starship before it's properly certified, and blowing himself up.   

Speaking of the thrill that the conspiracy rattled brains of the planet are getting from Musk's continued descent into inanity:

 

How much longer can liberals keep using Twitter?

There are increasing numbers of the liberal types which I follow on Twitter saying "that's it, if Elon Musk wants this to be a Right wing conspiracy nuthouse, full of abuse, he can have it" and saying they are leaving.

This is, I should add, fully deserved.  His slimy "maybe he's a pedo" innuendo against his former employee, and ridiculous tweet on Fauci are more than enough reason.   It seems he doesn't care if the platform becomes pretty much the same as its Right wing rivals;  and he tweets with the obvious intention of getting attention from everyone, and the approval of the worst of the Right.   

The problem is that the alternatives are still not ready.   Maybe it's hard raising the money on the promise that a substantial chunk of Twitter users will flock to the liberal Twitter alternative?

Anyway, I hope it happens soon.

Lamb recipe noted

I don't know what it is about Irish stew that I don't find appealing, but part of it may be that it is often made with lamb neck chops, and the fact that they make it a little too obvious that you're eating vertebrae chopped up is a bit unattractive.   I don't mind osso bucco and the way it makes it clear you're eating a cross section of leg bone, but vertebrae and that bit of spinal cord in the middle - it's getting more "personal" or something!

Anyway, I still bought some neck chops on the weekend, as they were (relatively) cheap [for future historians reading this - $19.95 a kilo] and I decided that there must be a more interesting way to eat them than boring old Irish stew.

So I tried this recipe:  Italian lamb neck chop stew, and the result was pretty pleasing.  (I fiddled a bit with it - a chopped up fennel bulb went in too, and used chicken stock instead of vegetable, and a bit of red wine.  I also used panko crumbs for the topping [fried with a little bit of chilli flakes in the oil, then add lemon zest and minced garlic right at the end so the garlic doesn't burn.]  Worked well.)   Technically, I'm not sure it's a stew, which I would have thought is normally done on a stove top.  I would think it is more likely a braise, since it's done in the oven.

Somewhat mysteriously, although the recipe says to scoop off some of the oil at the top while its cooking, very little appeared, and it couldn't really be done.  The chops did have a fair bit of unremoveable marbling in them, so I was expecting it to be heavy in the oil department, but somehow it wasn't.  It was eaten with some thick sourdough toast, and microwaved asparagus. 

So, success all round.  

 

"You may now urinate"

I am somewhat amused by the earnestness of this report by Singapore's CNA about an automated urine testing system (for drug offenders who are monitored) which they say is a "world's first": 

 

You just know that any other network on the planet would not have been able to resist a pun or some attempt at humour. But not CNA.

Young fascist, 1950's style, remembered

I think I have one book by Colin Wilson on my shelf - a pretty readable one from perhaps the 1980's about the paranormal, which was a topic that he spent a fair bit of time on in his later career.

I had read that he had hit fame early for writing an angsty British quasi-existential book as a young man - The Outsider.   But I never really looked much into how controversial some of his views were (or had become).   

I see from this essay in Aeon that his controversial status was well deserved.  Here's some background:

Why was The Outsider such a critical hit? In the late 1950s, Britain’s intelligentsia was worried about cultural decline and the lack of postwar movements to rival modernism, or homegrown ideas to rival French existentialism. Here was a 24-year-old working-class autodidact bringing news of the New Thing. And the New Thing turned out to be… recycled modernism. This was reassuring for modernist mandarins in charge of book reviews. His fame was helped by being grouped together with other provincial and working-class writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, who were dubbed the Angry Young Men. As with existentialism and punk, having a group of people doing more or less the same thing made it easier to write about. Wilson, though a one-off, was part of the zeitgeist.

In addition, Wilson was catnip for the popular press. He told one newspaper he’d written The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, and obligingly recreated the scene for their photographer. He helped to model the image of the young bohemian, in his polo neck and horn-rimmed glasses.

And then, just as suddenly, the London intelligentsia decided the provincial outsider should stay outside, that his fame was a bubble, that he was a ridiculous and even dangerous figure. His constant declarations of his own genius didn’t help – he was ‘the most important writer of the 20th century’, he said, a ‘turning point in culture’. Nor did his denigration of more established writers – he said Shakespeare was ‘a thoroughly second-rate mind’.

And his worst views:

It’s true that Wilson was a big fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that humans could ascend the evolutionary ladder and become supermen through sheer will. In practice, only a tiny minority could do this – the ‘dominant 5 per cent’ – and of them, only 0.05 per cent actually would. Like Nietzsche, he had little time for everyone else. Human beings, he wrote in his journal, ‘are pretty trivial insects … No wonder most of them are so mediocre.’

Growing up surrounded by ‘morons’, Wilson felt different and better: ‘I would sit on a bus with the Bhagavad Gita on my lap, and look at the other people, and think: my life is totally different from yours … I know that man can become a superman or God if he makes a hard enough effort.’ He wrote a short story when he was 18, in which Jesus decides ‘these miserable idiots were really not worth dying for, and it had been a mistake to be taken in by pity when they needed a good kicking.’ Like Nietzsche, Wilson thought it would really be a mercy if some of these lesser humans didn’t exist. He wrote in his journal in 1961:

‘the little people’ have sunk so deep into pettiness that it would be an agony for them to cure themselves; like invalids crouching over a fire, the outside world makes them cringe. Without knowing it, they want to die.

This sort of Nietzschean supercilious elitism is typical of modernism, one can find similar passages in H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, W B Yeats or D H Lawrence. The difference is, Wilson was coming out with it after the Second World War, in 1950s Britain, when spirituality was out of fashion and the cult of the Nietzschean superman even more so.

Wilson’s friend Hopkins, with whom he lived in Notting Hill Gate in the late 1950s, confirmed critics’ fears that the Wilson clique embodied what Allsop called ‘a new mystical absolutism of the extreme Right wing’. Hopkins’s first novel, The Divine and the Decay (1957), was about a fascist leader who murders an opponent. It was clear that Hopkins admired his hero, and in 1958 he started his own far-Right political movement called the Spartacans. They had only one meeting, according to Holroyd, at which Wilson gave a speech insisting that ‘effective political power ought to be in the hands of the 5 per cent minority who were equipped to use it.’

To make matters worse, the British fascist and Nazi apologist Oswald Mosley, seeking to rehabilitate his reputation after the war, wooed the Wilson group, and wrote a glowing 15-page review of The Outsider in his magazine, The European. Flattered, Wilson called him ‘far and away the most intelligent politician I have ever met’ (he was the only politician he had ever met). When Mosley attended the opening night of Holroyd’s first play at the Royal Court, Left-wing critics stormed out, and Wilson was involved in a fracas with them in the pub next door.

It's funny, but I don't recall detecting any problematic politics or philosophy in the book I read.    But yeah, he was, generally speaking, a much more unreliable guide to life than I knew.

 

Oh, a stand up show I liked

One of my recurring themes here is how I don't like stand up comedy much as an art form, even if it is by someone who I find funny and likeable in other formats.

So, I was not at all sure that I would like the Wil Anderson stage show on the ABC last night - Wilogical.  I think I have seen bits of some of his previous shows and not liked it much.

But I actually sat through all of this one, and thought it was pretty good.   The reason has a lot to do with the fact that a major theme was his adventures as a science believer living during Covid on the New South Wales North Coast in one of the nation's biggest anti-vaccination, alternative medicine regions.   

His jokes were therefore often about people who "do their own research" and believing ridiculous things.   This is a rich source of material on which I could feel I was definitely on his ideological side (not something that is all that common for me with stand up material, especially if it is "edgy".)    

Not only that, though, but Anderson comes across as not spiteful in his humour - there was actually a genuine plea at the end that we need people who believe nonsense to come back into the fold of reason, not be cast out forever.    Again, this is not the sort of theme you seem to get in stand up very often.

So, yeah, good on you Wil.

Just too dumb to argue with

This absolute feeble joke of a blogger has not mentioned the "terminate the constitution" tweet of Trump:

And at the post Catallaxy blog of dumbos, reactionaries and wannabe fascists, it's a conspiracy that needs to be corrected by a military takeover:

 

One disappointing aspect

The last line:

 

Did I just win an argument with ChatGPT?

Please explain why so many young people now think that they are transexual

The issue of gender identity and transgenderism is complex and multifaceted, and there are many reasons why a person may identify as transgender. In recent years, there has been increased awareness and acceptance of transgender people, which may have led more young people to feel comfortable expressing their gender identity and coming out as transgender. Additionally, advances in medical technology have made it possible for transgender people to access hormone therapy and other treatments that can help them transition and live more authentically as their true gender.

 

Is there any scientific evidence that "true gender" is fixed by the brain?

There is some scientific evidence that suggests that a person's gender identity may be determined by the structure and function of their brain. Research has shown that there are differences in the brain structure and function of transgender individuals compared to cisgender individuals (people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth). For example, studies have found that the brain structures of transgender individuals are more similar to those of their gender identity than to those of their assigned gender at birth. However, it is important to note that this research is still in its early stages, and more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between brain structure and gender identity.

 

But how different are male and female brains?

The differences between male and female brains are not as great as many people think. While there are some structural and functional differences between the brains of men and women, the vast majority of these differences are very small and have little or no impact on an individual's behavior or abilities. In fact, research has shown that most people have a mix of "male" and "female" brain characteristics, and that there is a great deal of overlap between the brains of men and women. This means that it is not accurate to say that men and women have "different" brains, and that any attempt to make generalizations about the abilities or characteristics of men and women based on their brain structure is likely to be misguided.

 

Hey, doesn't this last answer you gave suggest that "true gender" is not fixed in the brain, after all?

The issue of gender identity and transgenderism is complex and multifaceted, and there is still much that we do not understand about the factors that influence a person's gender identity. While there is some scientific evidence that suggests that a person's gender identity may be influenced by the structure and function of their brain, it is important to note that this research is still in its early stages, and more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between brain structure and gender identity. Additionally, it is important to recognize that gender identity is a deeply personal and individual experience, and that each person's gender identity is unique to them. As such, it is not accurate to say that there is one "true" gender that is fixed in the brain, and that any attempt to make generalizations about gender identity based on limited scientific evidence is likely to be misguided.

 

Things I find very, very easy to ignore (and can't understand why other people cannot do the same)

1.   Harry and Meghan

2.   Drag queens

3.   So-called "reality TV"

Speaking of drag queens, and the ridiculous spectacle in the culture war riven USA of armed men turning up at libraries to dissuade drag queen story hours which, in turn, are pretty silly in that it seems a good bet that few 4 or 5 year olds have ever begged their parent to be taken to such a show:  the question did occur to me yesterday - has any gay or trans adult ever claim to have been inspired to become gay due to seeing a drag performance?   I mean, men in drag has been a Christmas pantomime thing in England for a long time, so the possibility is out there.  But I can't say that I can ever recall any gay person claim that early viewing of a man as a caricature of a woman set them on the path of gay or trans identity.   And if that's true as a general rule, what exactly do the armed men fear from a relatively few liberal parents' kids being dragged (ha) to a show?

But to be clear, I don't get the point of drag at all - so I Googled the topic yesterday, and found this paper from 2017 makes an argument about them from an evolutionary psychology perspective.  Here's the abstract:

The drag queen cultural phenomenon has been described at length. However, the depiction of outlandish and hyperbolic womanhood and taunting and formidable behavior at the core of drag queens’ public persona has still to be fully accounted for. We argue that these aspects of the drag queen’s public appearance could best be understood in a signaling framework. Publicly donning extravagant woman’s costumes attracts harassment and brings financial, mating, and opportunity costs, generating the conditions for the transmission of honest signals. By successfully withstanding those odds, drag queen impersonators signal strategic qualities to members of the gay community. Data collected among gay and straight participants support a costly signaling reading of the drag queen cultural phenomenon. Participants generally agree that successful drag queens typically incur costs, while gaining specific social benefits.

And a bit more in the introduction:

In a landmark publication on the life of drag queens, Newton (1972) emphasized the conspicuous, confrontational, territorial, and effeminate behavior of drag queens and the discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization that impersonators regularly had to face from both gay community members and outsiders. Most people, including the impersonators themselves, seemed to view the drag queen attitude as extreme and particular (Newton, 1972, p. 6). Despite this stigmatization, participation in the drag subculture appeared to have afforded jobless, young, and poor gays some opportunity to distinguish themselves from lower status individuals such as hustlers or “freaks,” and, for the most successful drag queens, a chance to develop celebrity-like status and social might in the gay community (Newton, 1972, p. 6).

Signaling theory has provided a theoretical framework for better explaining evolutionarily puzzling human behaviors (Bird, Smith, & Bird, 2001; Sosis & Bressler, 2003). We propose to analyze the phenomenon of drag queen behavior in light of signaling theory. Despite the costs involved in publicly endorsing a drag queen persona, marginalized individuals might find it attractive, given the benefits they stand to gain such as an enhanced reputation and increased social capital (e.g., Newton, 1972; Hopkins, 2004). The drag queen phenomenon provides an interesting case study where particular behavioral signals enhance individuals’ reputation and welfare, while being entirely decoupled from any reproductive payoff. The phenomenon can be understood as the partial output of universal cognitive mechanisms for status seeking and partner seeking. Typical organizational features of the gay community also play a role in the emergence of the drag queen cultural practice.

 Sounds kind of plausible?   

Trump took advice from this man

 

By the way, Trump is finished, I reckon.  His candidacy has been strangled by his own hands.   Even before the legal cases have their effect.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday denied he wanted to “‘terminate’ the Constitution,” two days after suggesting “the termination of all rules ... even those found in the Constitution.”

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES,” Trump said on Monday on his own social media platform, Truth Social.

The post seemed to be a complete denial of his post from Saturday, which remained online as of Monday afternoon: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote over the weekend, once again falsely asserting that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Several of Trump’s fellow Republicans were critical of the post, but few condemned Trump himself or said it would be disqualifying for him to earn their vote — a lack of repudiation that has drawn criticism from Democrats. The post came less than a month after Trump officially declared his plans to run for president again in 2024, and he remains the only major Republican candidate to announce a campaign.

Once again, witness the stunning cowardice of many Republicans, too scared to take on a cult because they benefit from it too. 

Update:   When Marc Thiessen, one of the suckiest of suck ups to Trump, writes a column like this one in the Washington Post, you know he's gone.

 

Lightning rods for park shelters?

As it happens, a couple of weeks ago I was taking cover under a recently built, metal roofed (but otherwise open) dog park shelter from heavy rain, which I feared might include a bit of lightning.  (Fortunately, it didn't, as I hate being outside during storms.)

So it's of interest to note in this article about lightning at The Conversation ends with this:

A lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 is basically a thick fencing wire attached to the top of a building and connected to the ground. It is designed to attract lightning and earth the electric charge. By directing the flow through the wire, it saves the building from being damaged.

These Franklin rods are required for tall buildings and churches today, but the uncertain factor is how many are needed on each structure.

Furthermore, hundreds of structures are not protected, including shelter sheds in parks. These structures are often made from highly conductive galvanized iron, which itself attracts lightning, and supported by wooden posts.

The new version of Standards Australia for lightning protection recommends such shelters be earthed.

Next weekend, I shall check to see if I can tell if "my" new shelter incorporates this.  

Pithy

This is also why I had to remove the words "conservative leaning" from my blog title quite a few years ago.   It's a shame it went nuts.

Such a deliberately blind, or dumb, or both, take

Monty, it is impossible to reason with someone who completely ignores screeds of evidence compiled by bipartisan political committee.  Either that or he's just dumb behind his veil of arrogance.  Who can tell?

Musk in the service of stupid right wing talking points

 It seems clear that the Musk promised bombshell of the "Twitter files" regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story is a big fizzer:

But we know what hyperbolic and disconnected from reality reactions we will get from the right:

Why kill or threaten someone when they are busy shooting themselves in the foot?

More generally:

Update:  more summary - 

And this:

The "hard times" meme for the ages

I reckon I must have been a teenager when I first saw some current affairs show or other featuring a pensioner opening a can of dog food to chow down on because he couldn't afford "real" food.  And here we are, 40 years later with this crap again:

It's always annoyed me, because it's so obviously a case of either:

a.    pure media stunt; or

b.    a really stupid person who refuses to buy cheaper human food if their first preference is (usually temporarily) more expensive.

Oh my - Gingrich says something (partly) true

Axios reports that Newt Gingrich has written a column which tells Republicans to stop underestimating Joe Biden:

Republicans must learn to quit underestimating President Joe Biden....

The clarity of winning and losing creates a clarity of analysis about who is doing well and who isn’t.

If you apply that simple model to Biden, you realize how well he is doing by his own definition of success....

...conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms. He has only built upon and fortified the left-wing Big Government Socialist woke culture system.

We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats....

....Biden and his team executed a strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump supporters.

Of course, Gingrich would never admit, or perhaps see?, his own key role in the nutty polarisation on the Right (as shown in his own language repeated here - about the "Big Government Socialist(s)" that he wants his followers to believe all Democrats are) which has led to Donald Trump, and the inability to reason with his cult supporters.   And it's a bit rich that he's now suggesting that maybe people should stop saying that Biden is suffering dementia - if he hasn't suggested it himself before on Fox News (I don't know if he has, as I did find one link to an article from 2019 where he said media should stop baselessly speculating on politicians' health) he knows that it is his favourite media outlet which has repeated this endlessly during the Biden administration. 

 

 

 

A complicated life

I always had the feeling that AN Wilson is a somewhat interesting character, and not your typical conservative.   

This review of his new memoir (which only covers half of his life) indicates my hunch was correct.   How's this for a start:

“Confessions” opens with a sorrowful portrait of Wilson’s ex-wife, Oxford don Katherine Duncan-Jones, as she gradually descends into dementia: “It is hard to see how you can still believe in a soul when you have seen unraveling on that pitiless scale.” As an undergraduate, the 20-year-old Wilson wed the decade-older Elizabethan scholar because a baby — the future translator of Homer — was on the way. Each was actually in love with someone else. “In the first two years we were married we spent hours and hours weeping, and wishing we had not married.” Nonetheless, the couple stayed unhappily together until Wilson reached his late 30s, when this memoir ends.

During his Oxford days, Wilson began wearing his hallmark uniform — a three-piece suit, which he wryly refers to as his “A.N. Wilson outfit.” It was Duncan-Jones, he writes, “who urged me always to wear a suit, all those years ago, citing [classicist Maurice] Bowra, his eye darting up and down the gray flannels and sports coat of a Wadham Fellow, barking, ‘Why are you dressed as an undergraduate?’” Consequently, throughout the 1970s and ’80s Wilson was viewed as a Tory, a young fogy. That he was exceptionally thin — for a period he suffered from anorexia because of stress and “marital sadness” — only contributed to this conservative image. Yet he was hardly a fan of Margaret Thatcher:

“The paradoxes of political upheaval make the Muse of History appear to be the eternal satirist. … The so-called Conservatives, far from conserving, carved up Britain with motorways, polluted its farmland with dangerous chemicals and, in their avarice, destroyed all that had made up Britain’s wealth in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution, namely technical skills, exercised in innumerable fields.”

Let me do a bit of "both sides-ing"

First, a spectacularly embarrassing look for the top Fox News/MAGA crowd:

And now for the other side of the culture wars.  I have mentioned Prof Sandy O'Sullivan before, who I don't follow on Twitter, but someone else I follow does, hence I keep seeing their tweets.  And Twitter keeps suggesting I should follow "them".

"Them" because this is the byline:

Challenging gender binaries is anti-colonial work. Aboriginal trans/non-binary/queer/kin & Professor of Indigenous Studies @Macquarie_U   ARC Future Fellow  

Now, I like to think I'm pretty tolerant of universities having humanities schools which can have characters stuck in esoteric areas of research that interest few.   I mean, I'm pretty interested in philosophy as a field, and a lot of that has been spinning its wheels and going nowhere for some time. 

But boy (or "non binary"), I'm pretty sure that if ever you want feelings of "what an extraordinary sheltered workshop and mutual admiration society of academia these people have built for themselves" to feel fully justified, I strongly recommend reading their twitter feed.   

This week, for example, Sandy keep posting tweets about the "Digital Intimacies" conference being held at Macquarie.  I can give you a taste:

 

You get the idea?   Sorry, I found it hard to stop, because nearly every tweet seemed to be asking for ridicule for being such obvious examples of the type of academic endeavour that seems so - what's the word? - introverted? and self serving, mainly in the interests of just providing jobs for the boys (and girls and non binaries.)  

And, I should add, it's not that there aren't areas of interest to them that are worth studying, if you want to see some practical changes, like the safety of indigenous sex workers, or something.  But it's the invention of the terminology which really grates, and gives the strong suspicion that mostly, it's just about writing papers for each other to swoon over.  (Or in some cases, bitch about for not including the "non binary" adequately.)   A bit like blockchain advocates at RMIT!

Update:  another subject covered at the mini conference - 

 

I have no problem with this trailer...

 

I see that one of the main anti-woke movie and TV critics of Youtube (with whom, I have to reluctantly say, I actually kinda/sorta agree.  At least sometimes.  And maybe only broadly, if not always specifically.  While holding my nose at the idea he probably supports Trump and believes BS about Biden) - The Critical Drinker - has complained that there seems to be time travel in the story, as if that is going to ruin it.   Many of his followers seem to agree.

But seriously - if your fictional universe includes the reality of God and (apparently) other gods, supernatural entities in the service of God, eternal life, and aliens as universe artefact collectors, it seems a case of straining at a gnat to then have a big problem with time travel.   (And come to think of it, one other successful franchise, Men in Black, incorporated it perfectly well.) 

Vat sushi

Hmmm:

 

Although I remain very skeptical of how beef or chicken meat grown from cells in a vat can be converted into something with the same texture as the muscle fibres we eat from those animals,  I can imagine how it should be easier to copy the simpler texture of raw fish with vat grown cells. 

This company is still just doing it experimentally.  I don't know if the nutrient broth the cells need to grow in is simpler than that needed for mammalian meat - but I presume it would be.   But I still have my doubts that it is ever likely to be a cheaper or better way of doing it than aquaculture.

Controlling weevils must be harder than I knew

My goodness, I learn some unusual things by watching CNA.   I had no idea at all about the fumigation of rice being a thing, and especially that they have to keep re-fumigating it while it's in storage:

Singapore's largest rice stockpile contractor is using its own patented tech to defend against bugs. Rice sacks had to be fumigated every five weeks previously, but they can now be kept for up to a year. Singapore Storage & Warehouse houses its grains in these boxes that can keep oxygen levels inside low. This is crucial because insects like weevils need oxygen to survive. Currently, only half of the pallets in the company's rice storage warehouse are enclosed in these boxes. The firm plans to scale up and cover its entire inventory.

Here's the short video about it (and man, what a clean looking facility for rice storage):

Here's an Australia site that talks about using the poison gas phosphine to fumigate all grains.

Guess I had no idea that one of our basic foodstuffs needed so much exposure to poisons.    

Seems to be sort of thing that might attract rumours of danger to health from time to time.   And yes, it does -  here's a story from the Bangkok Post in 2013 about how rumours spread on the net about over-fumigated rice being unsafe to eat.   

Kind of makes me wonder why I haven't spotted a weevil in any foodstuff for many a year.  They are obviously pretty hard to control. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I still doubt that the reasons for the speed of the change are really well understood, but it was fast:

Compared to the decades and decades it took to dismantle Jim Crow laws or secure women's right to vote, America's about-face on same-sex marriage happened in the blink of an eye.

The big picture: Just 27% of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 1996, the year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal recognition to same-sex marriages.

• That's flipped on its head: 71% now tell Gallup that same-sex and opposite-sex marriages should have the same legal recognition.

Driving the news: The Senate voted 61-36 on Tuesday to codify the rights to same-sex marriage and interracial marriage into federal law. The House is expected to quickly follow.

• Twelve Senate Republicans voted for the bill. All 36 no votes came from Republicans.