Actually, sounds pretty true to the original...

So, the New York Times reports that Alan Alda asked ChatGPT to write a scene from MASH for him and former co-star Mike Farrell to perform.   

I think MASH was only really good for the first few seasons, and sort of blanded out for the rest of its run, with increasingly uninteresting characters gradually replacing the sharp and memorable original cast.   I still mostly watched it, but cared less and less if I missed an episode as time went on.

So, the banter that the AI has made between the characters strikes me as about as bland as many of the exchanges that were written for the show.

You can read it here, at a gift link.   

By the way, I have said little about the hype surrounding ChatGPT and its ilk, because I just don't really see the "threat" they yet represent.  Seems to me a bit like the "self driving cars are just around the corner, and will change everything!" hype of about 4 or 5 years ago:  too much overestimation of the importance of a modest technological improvement.

Major lifestyle change news...

For the first time in my life, I have bought a pair of (leather) loafer style shoes, and wore them to work.

Feels oddly like wearing slippers.  Quite comfortable.

As you were...

A good question

Why hasn't some Pentagon official been asked this at some congressional hearing?   Or have they?  

I mean, my general impression from the Trump years is that the top levels of military are (with rare exception) too smart to go along with Trump MAGA-isms, including that the last election had any significant fraud.  So why would they allow the lower ranks to be potentially influenced by politically dangerous rhetoric known to be wrong?:

The hunt for transgender nuance

I am still finding it pretty incredible how, when it comes to transgender issues, there are two extreme polarised views that both really have it in for anything ever vaguely resembling nuance.   I don't  know that I can think of any other subject on which the polarisation has reached such weird extremes.  

Perhaps unwisely, for example, I currently follow on Twitter the well known (former) sitcom writer Graham Lineham, who seems to now spend every waking moment coming up with attack tweets on pro-transgender extremists, and often giving the impression he is doing so while drinking.   (Lots of pro-transgenderists love to taunt him about losing his marriage and career over this issue, and to be honest, such obsessive, single minded tweeting on one issue does not seem to indicate a healthy state of mind.)

On the other hand, he does love to tweet photos of transgender folk (older men as women, mainly) who do the very common transgender social media thing of posting selfies for which the motivation is clearly seeking endorsement or praise for their new look and identity, sometimes complete with wildly masculine themed tattoos and a general air of, well, how should I put this:  not in touch with reality if they think anyone is objectively going to think they make an attractive additional to the feminine world.  (But, of course, more than likely, no matter how weirdly anyone looks or poses in these, some other transgender person will offer a bit of "you go girl" encouragement.)    So you know, he does have a point about such self delusion, sometimes.   Rarely will a woman encounter in a female public  toilet an obvious burly man dressed as a woman with a huge penis and testicles tattoo on his chest (as one of Graham's tweets showed recently), but honestly, if it happened, who could blame her for being nervous?

On the third hand, he (Graham) can be so extreme as to (as he did recently), call Jon Stewart a "groomer" simply due to his pointing out in his recent confrontation with a Republican that it's wildly hypocritical for them to be obsessed with kids seeing a drag show as being a "danger" to them worth legislating about, when thousands are indisputably actually killed by guns each year, and the Republicans refuse to do anything substantial about that.  I think that even most of Graham's strongest defenders could see that this was a nonsense insult.

When it comes to the Australian blogosphere, you can see 100% full blown Right wing moral panic on display at the New Catallaxy blog, where old Cassie preached to the choir of other ageing Right wingers about how it's shameful and horrifying that it's mostly women who are seen in any of the video clips of drag performances with kids in the audience.  Here she is, in her standard style (like Lineham, if you assumed she a substance abuse problem, it would help explain how easily she turns the dial to "11"):

No good mother takes a child to watch drag queens perform. But what is more worrying is how our society, if it is not at the stage where it actively celebrates and applauds such deviancy, is just happy to shrug its shoulders and says, “what harm can drag queens do”.  It is this rank stupidity and apathy in the face of such obvious deviancy and degeneracy that proves that it is no longer only children and parents who are being groomed, our whole culture is being groomed, and we are willing participants in modern day child sacrifice. If this doesn’t ring alarm bells, we are doomed.

But hey, if you ask me, the fact that anyone finds drag, in this generation or previous, as an amusing performance style is something I don't get.  I've said before, as a young person I never understood why anyone would watch Danny La Rue, or go to Les Girls in Kings Cross.  That said, as for the recent clip that has been doing the rounds of a mother's show where babies - not even toddlers -  are watching (barely, when not distracted by anything else in the room, as babies are want to be) some luridly dressed drag/caberat performers:   well, I think it kind of weird that the mothers find this entertaining; but come on, be serious moral panickers:  there's no way those babies are going to have memories of this.  I reckon the performers could be completely nude and it still wouldn't be a thing that would register in, or influence, the minds of babies that age.   Get real.

So, this post is just a (no doubt) pointless attempt to ask, can't we all just agree on some simple things, all of which might be true at the same time?:

a.  some transgender folk, especially late in life transitioners, are just never going to look like attractive members of the gender they think they are.  It's a bit cringe to see transgender people to whom this is an important aspect of their transition, though.  

b.  Some transgender folk are going to engage in behaviour that is attention seeking and basically nutty.  (Obvious example - Canadian fake boob teacher.)   It's doing no service to, um, "mainstream" transgender people to pretend that using that label means any behaviour is acceptable and must be tolerated or accepted.   (Incidentally, is there still a possibility that this guy was trolling the transgender rights lobby?  It seems not - and it also seems to have been such a prolonged incident that you have to wonder about the extremism of anyone who troll for so long in such a ridiculous way.)

c.   Similarly, if you still have a penis (and, especially, a history of sexual violence against women), of course there can be a legitimate concern about being a potential threat within traditional women's only spaces.   It's just a nonsense to claim that self labelling of a person's mental space should be the be-all and end-all of assessing whether sexual danger is a risk, or not. 

d.   Drag shows are a specialised form of entertainment that some people find entertaining, and some can't see the appeal of at all.  But claiming that, say, a two year old seeing one is in moral danger, or that all drag performers are pedophile groomers, is just ludicrous.    Similarly, carrying on as if this isn't a self limiting, currently largely social media driven, obsession that will eventually find some social equilibrium (in the case of the USA, probably after litigation!), and is the same as a sacrifice of kids to Moloch, or whatever, is just nuts in its own way.

Apart from those propositions, there is a wide space for issues which should allow for nuanced argument, especially with respect to the issue of how young people who want to be the other gender should be most wisely treated.  But if you aren't going to pull back from some basic extreme hyperbole, there is zero hope of even getting to the same ballpark area to allow for any nuance debate.   It's really like  neither side wants to allow for nuance to be possible, on any aspect.  

Who writes the headlines for The Conversation?

This seems really odd, and more like something you would expect from a News Corpse editor:

That's the "headline" for a post by Adrian Beaumont about a Newspoll that showed a one percent drop in Federal Labor polling (both on primary and TPP).

It's a ridiculous way to summarise the article.

An entertaining book on a little known invasion

Last year, when I took a short holiday to Singapore, I bought at Kinokuniya (the terrific bookstore in the Takashimaya building in Orchard Road) this book, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java: 

That's how, as I was recently flying over Indonesia on my way to Hanoi, I was reading about the invasion of one of the islands below, a little over two hundred years ago.  

While I haven't yet finished it, I am finding it a very enjoyable read, mainly due to the wittiness of the author when dealing with an era which now seems so foreign to modern sensibilities.   As it turns out, the story is full of over-the-top, self made and often eccentric men who rose to success on the back of the capitalistic (and nationalistic) turmoil of those days.

I haven't read about Stamford Raffles before, but the author offers this period in his life (administratively heading, at remarkably young age, a sizeable but short-lived military invasion of Java to take it from the Dutch, who were nominally French, due to Napoleon's adventurism in Europe) as something of a counterpoint to the view of him as the wise and high achieving subsequent founder of Singapore.   Apparently, there is strong divide in the historical record between those contemporaries who thought he was great, and those who couldn't stand him.   

It's not written as "dry" history, and sometimes there are flourishes which are perhaps more for putting a picture in your mind, than knowing if they are literally true.   But the surprising thing is that some of the quasi-absurd details do, on further reading, turn out to be clearly true.  (Or, at least, based on historical records, while allowing for autobiographical details to sometimes be invented.)

One of the key things from the book which I had never thought about before was how unhealthy and disease ridden the far flung parts of the empires were for Europeans.  Tim Hannigan notes that this meant that it was a common view that you had to be a pretty desperate type of character to want to voluntarily work there, which explained some of their bad behaviour.   

Anyway, based on what I've read thus far, I recommend it. 

As I expected

Samantha Maiden writes about the government's modest superannuation change:

A majority of voters have backed Anthony Albanese’s controversial plan to slug millionaires with super balances worth over $3 million a year into paying more tax.

Newspoll has found that a whopping 70 per cent of voters under the age of 50 give the plan the tick of approval.

Despite claims it represents a super-sized broken promise, The Australian’s respected pollster suggests voters think otherwise and backed the move.

A large majority – 64 per cent – approved of the policy.

Almost two-thirds of voters ­across all age groups approved of the plan to double the concessional tax rate.

Voters aged over 50s were more likely to be worried about it, but even among the oldies a clear majority – 60 per cent – approved.

By comparison, less than one in three Australian voters polled – 29 per cent – had a bee in their bonnet about the changes that are expected to raise $2 billion from 80,000 millionaires.

A whopping 80 per cent of Labor voters approved of the policy.

Even a majority of Coalition voters backed the policy, despite the fact opposition leader Peter Dutton is vowing to repeal it if he wins the next election.

It must be bothering those on the payroll to Murdoch as permanent attack dogs against the Left as to how to maintain a credible way to criticise the policy.  

Queensland drug law surprise

What, I go away for a week or so, and when I return my home state has gone all Euro tolerant on drug use?  

Well, not exactly, according to this Vice article looking at the changes, although it does seem to me that the number of chances given to users found with a small amount is one too many.   

It's a bit weird to be seeing this when I have just returned from a trip which went via Singapore on a Singaporean airline, as on arrival at Hanoi, the pilot actually reminded people that under Singaporean law, it's an offence to consume drugs in other countries.   I guess the point is, if they test someone for drug use back at Changi, a Singaporean cannot use the excuse that they hadn't actually taken the drug within Singaporean jurisdiction.

Given my fondness for the Asian countries that have no illicit drug problem to speak of (Singapore, Japan), I have my usual misgivings about being too tolerant of personal use, while at the same time, agreeing that American criminalisation approaches have been at the cost of useful harm reduction  approaches.  

I wonder, incidentally:  has any jurisdiction ever legislated that users who dob in their dealer get a mandatory reduction in sentence (or complete removal of prosecution) for personal use?    I mean, I'm sure that being helpful to the police in that regard is routinely given in sentencing as a reason for leniency, but if you actually legislated that you won't even be prosecuted would seem to be a major incentive for dobbing.

 

A video test

Blogspot allows the upload of videos directly into a post (rather than embedding a Youtube).  But years ago, when I last tried, the compression used to give terrible looking results.  Let's see if it has improved any:

 Update:  maybe it's a little better than it used to be?   Still works far better to upload to Youtube and embed that...

Religious evolution

Ross Douthat's latest column, which I will gift link, is an interesting one, entitled "Why you can't predict the future of religion".  It starts with this observation, from history:

In an 1822 letter to the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, Thomas Jefferson expressed his confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ. “I trust,” he wrote, “that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”

Less than a year earlier, on “a Sabbath evening in the autumn of 1821” in upstate New York, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney began a multiday interplay of prayer and mystical experience that ‌‌led to a moment when, he wrote later, “it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face … He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.”

This experience set Finney on a path that would help bury Jefferson’s confident hypothesis — toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride 19th-century America and also encouraged a proliferation of novel sects with supernatural beliefs entirely distant from Jefferson’s Enlightenment religion.

That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific reason is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the internet and even drawn the attention of The New York Times.

Yes, I have long been aware of Thomas Jefferson's belief in a de-deified Christ, as I think it is mentioned at his old home Monticello, which I visited around 1989.   He went to the effort of making his own de-miracle-ised version of the Gospels:

The 86-page book, now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, is bound in red Morocco leather and ornamented with gilt tooling. It was crafted in the fall and winter months of 1819 and 1820 when the 77-year-old Jefferson used a razor to cut passages from six copies of the New Testament—two in Greek and Latin, two in French and two in English—and rearranged and pasted together the selected verses, shorn of any sign of the miraculous or supernatural in order to leave just the life and teachings of Jesus behind. Jefferson, who had suffered great criticism for his religious beliefs, once said that the care he had taken to reduce the Gospels to their core message should prove that he was in fact, a “real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

It is a little surprising that the Unitarian movement was well underway even before Darwin, evolution and a radical change in understanding the age and size of the universe would come to shake up things.  And a Unitarian of the early 19th century who could foresee those knowledge changes would surely expect that his or her approach to religion was destined to be widespread and successful.

But Unitarianism as a movement is so small now that it is almost like a footnote to mainstream Christianity.

Douthat concludes, in a somewhat surprisingly open fashion, given his own allegiance to traditional Catholicism:

When it comes to the religious future, you should follow the social trends, but also always expect the unexpected — recognizing that every organized faith could disappear tomorrow and some spiritual encounter would resurrect religion soon enough.

If you’re trying to discern what a post-Christian spirituality might become, then what post-Christian seekers are experiencing and what (or whom) they claim to be encountering matters as much as any specific religious label they might claim.

And if you’re imagining a renewal for American Christianity, all the best laid plans — the pastoral strategies, theological debates and long-term trendlines — may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an entirely unexpected future might be taking shape.

Mental health, discussed

*    I saw some of Four Corners this Monday about the very troubling issue of eating disorders, primarily anorexia nervosa, and primarily about how it mainly affects young women.   I thought the show was OK, and felt terribly sorry for the people suffering from it (including, or perhaps especially, for the mothers who felt hopeless.  I mean, it's not easy for me to imagine myself not enjoying food, but I can imagine a parent feeling helpless in the face of an adult child who is not responding to treatment for a mental illness.)   But the way the show was put together also gave me a bit of an uncomfortable feeling that one participant was - how to put this in an inoffensive way - a tad performative in her participation?   This may be completely unfair, as it may well be the producers who encouraged this look, but it still gave me the sort of misgivings that most reality TV causes.   In any case, it would seem that there is a crying need for the public health system to step up much, much more with the availability of specialised treatment to help deal with it, as people do sometimes recover...

*   Speaking of reality TV, I find I can't warm to even the well intentioned versions, such as Love on the Spectrum, or more recently, Better Date Than Never.   I mean, these shows (about non average people still going out to try to find love and relationships) are clearly meant to be uplifting and positive, which puts them way, way above trash reality TV.   But ever since (God, this is going back a long way) Sylvania Waters,  I just can't stop thinking while watching them that "fly on the wall" documentary is intrusive and (to some degree) unavoidably fake.   How can people truly ignore being videoed and not have it influence them?

*  This column is free at New York Magazine for a limited time - so rush now to read it!   It's a fairly long pushback on the argument that American rates of depression and suicide have recently become worse because the world really is getting to be a worse place.   Here are parts:

Among online progressives, there is sometimes a tendency to view any acknowledgment of progress as an apology for the status quo. But I think this has more to do with social media’s negativity bias (i.e., negative information tends to be more physiologically stimulating and thus viral) than any objective truth about the political implications of touting positive developments. The fact that Americans enjoy higher incomes than virtually ever before makes our failure to abolish child poverty, invest adequately in social goods like child and elder care, and provide robust mental-health services to our suffering adolescent population all the more damning. At the same time, the fact that we have managed to expand social welfare and reduce myriad forms of social inequity over the past few decades gives us reason to believe in the possibility of progressive change.

Human existence has never been easy. And in some respects, life in 2023 may be more challenging than in the past. Contemporary teens are more likely than their predecessors to lack the existential comfort offered by religious faith or the sense of communal solidarity provided by in-person civic groups. But it simply is not the case that Zoomers’ material prospects are much worse than previous generations’ (or, for that matter, that a human being’s level of depression reliably reflects their objective economic well-being).

In a great many respects, the world has been getting better. But kids have been getting sadder. Even as life has improved in a wide variety of ways since the 1950s, the teen suicide rate has risen substantially since that era. Explaining that requires more than reciting the millennial left’s (generally well founded) complaints about contemporary American society.

By itself, the fact that a Washington Post columnist engaged in hyperbole on Twitter may not warrant comment. But I think Lorenz’s tweets reflect a broader tendency within the discourse to view novel social crises through a lens of ideological self-congratulation rather than intellectual curiosity. Among commentators, there is a strong incentive to abruptly enlist any new sign of social dysfunction into whatever fight you are already waging. I’ve surely done this myself, but it’s an impulse that should be resisted. We owe it to those suffering from any given social calamity to maintain curiosity about its causes. In failing to do so, we risk wielding tragedies as political props and seeing victims as metaphors instead of people.

I found this article via a Noah Smith post, and it is an argument that is very much in line with his views. His substack post on the same theme ("Don't be a Doomer") seems free to read.

Going back to the New York article, I thought this comment interesting and probably right:

The difference between male and female teenager's response to social media as reflected in depression and suicide is, IMHO, fairly obvious.

When they feel socially afflicted/marginalized, males on average tend to blame other people, and if they act out to do so against others, while females on average tend to blame themselves and harm themselves.

Whether this is learned behavior or not is an open question.

But note the overwhelming predominance of males as perpetrators of violent physical aggression.

Update:  Oh, I see via a rare, not objectionable, Hot Air post that Matthew Yglesias has also written on the topic, and it seems freely available.   

Update 2:  well, this is depressing news (for those of us with extremely limited interest in exercising, ha ha):   Exercise is even more effective than counselling or medication for depression. But how much do you need?

Superannuation changes, noted

I don't normally see the Nine Network's breakfast program, but it was on this morning when I got up, and I was interested to see that before a "serious" discussion of the government's modest superannuation change, they handled it in a mocking "this only affects people who can obviously afford it" way by having an outside reporter going around Double Bay and talking to people who were saying silly things like "I will have to sell my third boat to deal with this.  It's my daughter's favourite, she'll be upset."

This indicates that breakfast TV is endorsing the change, and knows that it will go over pretty well with the public.    

I would add - it does irritate me a bit when even places like the ABC interview someone (be it a rich retiree or a superannuation adviser) who talks only about it being a "tax on superannuation", because such shorthand makes it sound as if their superannuation in total is actually being taxed (and not just the income on their superannuation balance).

He's back!

...and with a distressingly large email inbox at work....:(

Anyway, Vietnam was great, and I have many thoughts, that I must commit to here before I start forgetting any of them.

But first, have to transfer a large number of photos to the laptop, as that makes for easier posting of them.

Some random thoughts in the meantime:

*  happy to see Lidia Thorpe hurt her image further by her "look at me" protest on Saturday night.  Could never stand her, and the Greens are far better off without her. 

*  I saw about 5 minutes of the start of the ABC coverage of the Mardi Gras parade in Sydney, with the few hosts all dressed up in gay glitter outfits and make up for the occasion.  Also noticed how Kylie Minogue was the big attraction the night before.   Made me think:  do younger gay folk think their older cohort is "trying too hard", and have daggy taste?    But when I think about it, the non enthusiasts for the event have always puzzled over the hyperbolic commentary and thought it might tone down, eventually.   But nah: same old, same old.

*  It has seemed to me that hospital systems in many, many countries have really struggled over the last few months, despite the Covid slow down.  I've read about problems in France, (I think) Germany, and Britain, although the later can blame itself for making it a less appealing place for Europeans to work in.  But I think the cake may be taken by Malaysia, where things are very bad in the public health sector, despite a new government:

Last month, a Twitter account of a group championing the rights of contract doctors that goes by the handle @HKontrak shared a photo of a packed emergency department at Hospital Kuala Lumpur.

The post claimed that patients had to wait for more than 24 hours before being admitted to the hospital. It added that there were also about 100 patients waiting to be seen at the emergency department.

The Star also reported that some emergency departments in other parts of the country were facing overcapacity, with patients having to wait for at least two days to get a hospital bed.

It reported that in a government hospital in Sabah, the wait time could go up to two days or even beyond four to five days.

Most recently, a psychiatric patient became agitated and stabbed an elderly man at Selayang Hospital in Selangor on Tuesday, after being left at the hospital’s accident and emergency department while waiting for a bed to become available.

Yes, getting stabbed by another patient while waiting for a hospital bed is about as bad as it can get.

*   I wonder if there will eventually be a Netflix series based on this gruesome, cooked body murder in Hong Kong, involving multiple family members and money?

 

  

Travelling somewhere new

Ah, it's good to be travelling to somewhere I haven't been to before, even if it's a short visit.   Tomorrow I head off to Vietnam, and found an  8 minute video that filled in an enormous gap in knowledge about its history. 

I feel I have to justify not formerly having a clue about its history going back any further than the French teaching them how to make nice bread.  But honestly, there are too many countries in the world to keep details of their history in your head.   I made the decision many years ago to never care about the wild historical mess of what could broadly be called Eastern Europe - all of the countries in colour below, except for Russia:

OK, the Ukraine situation has made me a bit more curious about them.   But everywhere else:  too much information, and if your cuisine doesn't interest me, I'm not too interested.

Anyway, back to Vietnam in eight minutes:

How does he keep his job?

I've wondered about this before - how does someone like this, in the upper echelons of the Canberra public service, manage to keep being appointed by both parties when they are in government?:

Ok, well he doesn't use the word "lie", but clearly he is saying his department specifically misinformed the Minister 7 times (!).   So much for competence.

Hasn't Bernard Keane complained for years that Pezzullo is bad news?   Is his corporate knowledge that invincible?   Sounds like completely fresh blood at the top of the department would do wonders.

Tic outbreack receding, apparently

I will gift this lengthy New York Times feature talking about the Tik Tok tic outbreak, which fortunately, seems to be receding.   

It talks about past outbreaks of psychogenic illness, including examples I hadn't heard of before:

Historians looking back thousands of years have come across stories of patients — most often women — with tremors, seizures, paralysis and even blindness that could not be explained. The ancient Greeks called it “hysteria” and blamed a wandering uterus. Sigmund Freud deemed the condition “conversion” and theorized that it was caused by suppressed traumatic experiences.

In more recent decades, scientists have gained a greater understanding of how anxiety, trauma and social stress can spur the brain to produce very real physical symptoms, even if body scans or blood tests show no trace of them. When these illnesses interfere with day-to-day life, they are now called “functional disorders.”

“We all recognize that the mind can make the body do things,” said Dr. Isobel Heyman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London, who published the first report on the pandemic tics. Most people, after all, have experienced fear that makes their heart race or anxiety that ties their stomach in knots.

“But when the symptoms are quite bizarre and quite intense — like a seizure, or not being able to walk, or ticlike movements — we think, ‘How on earth can the brain generate symptoms like this?’” Dr. Heyman said. “It just can.”

These sudden symptoms can also spread in clusters, reflecting the shared pressures on a group. In the Middle Ages, a period when many Europeans feared being possessed by the devil, nuns living in a French convent began meowing like cats. In the 2000s, hundreds of children of asylum seekers in Sweden became mute and bedridden for months to years.

It makes repeated reference to how this is something that spread much more commonly amongst females than males;  and it also notes how folk claiming to be transgender issues are disproportionately represented in the current outbreak too.  (I'm willing to bet there are thousands of indignant transgender activists tweeting as I write, upset at the obvious conclusion many will draw that believing you are transgender can itself be largely due to a social contagion.)   

 In one key paragraph:

Eighty-seven percent of the patients were female, a sex skew that was also found in previous outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness. No one knows why girls are more susceptible to this kind of social influence. One theory is that women may seek out belonging more than men do, and may empathize more strongly with others’ suffering. Women also experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and sexual trauma than men.

And as for the connection with transgender issues:

At a conference on tic disorders last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, doctors from several countries shared another observation: A surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary. But without hard data in hand, multiple attendees said, the doctors worried about publicly linking transgender identity and mental illness.

“These kids have a tough enough life already, and we don’t want to inadvertently somehow make things even worse for them,” said Dr. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, whose adult daughter is transgender.

All interesting....

Filters and UFOs

As David Roberts tweeted:

The news that there seem to suddenly be lots of things worth shooting at in the sky is certainly a bit surprising.

This explanation has been anonymously given to WAPO:

The incursions in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday, partly addressing a key question of why so many objects have recently surfaced.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.

“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary.

So, the suggestion seems to be that if something was moving slowly, like a balloon, it was filtered out deliberately.   Given the number of weather balloons that go up daily, I guess that makes sense.    

Was it with the knowledge that countries don't care, so to speak, about balloons that China decided that it was a good way to gather intelligence?

Anyway, this reminds me that I read somewhere, many years ago, perhaps in a UFO book on my shelf, that some guy claimed that the US radar systems ignored objects that were going too fast; and if radar tracks were re-examined to check on objects doing really weird fast things in the atmosphere, there might be actual proof of alien visits already.

This always sounded a bit dubious, given that ICBMs move very fast.   But, digging back in my memory, I think the point might also have been that the lines of radar that are the missile warning system are mainly looking outwards from the continental USA, and not over the mainland USA itself so much.   (It's too late once they are over Washington.)  So a visiting UFO that zooms down and over a 1000 km of mainland USA and back into space might be considered something that could be safely ignored.

I would love to know if there is any truth to that.  

But we do at least seem to now know, as I posted last week, that there are surprising gaps in what the USA knows is in its skies....

Update:   a valuable thread on Twitter:

 

 

A good column on depression

I think David Brooks writes insightfully and with compassion on what it is like to have a friend develop serious depression (which, sadly, ended in suicide), so I will gift link the article.

 

More cooking

I don't know that it took to photographing as well as my last meal: but it's pork belly (although a very lean cut of it) done in what is allegedly a Vietnamese way.   The sauce is a reduced sticky one, and interestingly, the main flavouring (apart from the obvious soy, vinegar, ginger, sugar) was from the juice and a bit of the rind of an orange, and a 1/3 of a cup of Angostura bitters.   The bottle sitting in the drinks cabinet had been there for years.    It might only ever be finished if I make this recipe again.

Here's the link to the recipe.

Not before time, the mainstream press gives some cautions on psychedelics for mental heath

I do get the feeling at times that there is likely to be a backlash in future due to the (shall we say) reputation rehabilitation that has been underway regarding psychedelics for the last decade or so.   I mean, I've just always been naturally very, very cautious about anything with psychoactive effects being a good idea to fiddle around with, and it seems such a hard thing to study properly.

This New York Times article (I'll gift link it) gives a list of possible health consequences of various psychedelics, and it's much wider than just those affecting mental health. 

Goodbye Burt

I'm not sure if it's free to read already, but I will gift link to the very lengthy and interesting New York Times obituary for Burt Bacharach.    A taste (it is a bit high falutin' in its description of his musical oeuvre, but a good read nonetheless):

 A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.

Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.

One thing I either didn't know, or had forgotten, was that as a very young man, Bacharach worked as musical director for Marlene Dietrich(!), and he talked about that a bit in this interview. 

A long and interesting life...

About that Cochrane review on face masks

Of course the Right wing commentariat was always going to leap on the recent Cochrane review that said they their meta analysis indicated that it seemed masking during respiratory pandemics didn't have significant effect, even though it ended on this note:

The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.

There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.

My gut reaction was always that the whole approach of Cochrane was dubious, and would pretty much invite misrepresentation of a complicated issue, and I see now that some people at the Conversation have given a detailed explanation of the problems with the review.   I count this as "gut reaction: vindicated".

   

A serious ecological consequence of global warming

Ocean acidification as a result of increasing CO2 doesn't get mentioned often lately, although it presumably continues to increase.   (There was, no doubt, some sloppily done lab based experimentation on this with fish and other creatures which I think has perhaps harmed its reputation amongst science journalists.  But the problem is still real.)  

The other big problem in the oceans from global warming is the increase in lack of oxygen as the water warms, and I have mention it from time to time over the years.  (You can search "ocean oxygen" in the search bar at the side, if you like.)

There was an article about it in Science recently, and yeah, maybe it will be a race between it and acidification as to which will cause the most serious ecological collapse within the next few decades.  Some extracts:

Climate change is leaching oxygen from the ocean by warming surface waters. Two other climate-related threats to the seas—ocean acidification and marine heat waves—get more attention from scientists and the public. But some researchers believe deoxygenation could ultimately pose a more significant threat, making vast swaths of ocean less hospitable to sea life, altering ecosystems, and pushing valuable fisheries into unfamiliar waters. As global warming continues, the problem is sure to get worse, with disturbing forecasts that by 2100 ocean oxygen could decline by as much as 20%. Sharks—fast-moving fish that burn lots of oxygen, sit at the top of food chains and crisscross huge ocean expanses—should be sensitive indicators of the effects....

SCIENTISTS FOR YEARS have documented oxygen-starved dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. There, pollution from nutrients running off the land, such as synthetic fertilizer, sparks algae blooms. Microbes feast on the rotting vegetation, consuming oxygen. A surge of low-oxygen water can flood an area so quickly that crabs, sea stars, and even fish suffocate before they escape. Low-oxygen zones also form naturally along the western edges of the Americas and Africa, where oxygen-depleted water that hasn’t seen daylight for decades wells up.

In the open ocean, currents and storms churn the water, keeping oxygen levels higher. Yet since the 1990s climate models have foretold that a warming climate would deplete oxygen there, too. Surface water warmed by rising air temperatures holds less oxygen, and the growing temperature contrast between surface layers and colder, deeper water slows the mixing that transports oxygen into the depths. At higher latitudes, melting ice can flood surface layers with fresh, low-density meltwater, strengthening the layering and reducing mixing.

In 2008, a paper in Science sounded the alarm. German and U.S. scientists found that the low-oxygen zones off Africa and the Americas were growing deeper and losing still more oxygen. Since the 1960s these areas had expanded by about 4.5 million square kilometers, close to the area of the European Union. In the waters frequented by Sims’s sharks off Africa’s northwest coast, the low-oxygen layer had nearly doubled in thickness over 5 decades, from 370 meters to 690 meters. By 2008 its top had risen to less than 150 meters below the surface. The global trend, the scientists warned, “may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies.”

In 2017, scientists delivered more troubling news in Nature. Overall, the world’s oceans had already lost some 2% of their oxygen since 1960, roughly double what climate models predicted.

For Andreas Oschlies, a biogeochemist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and a leading expert on modeling oxygen in the ocean, the implications were staggering. If the trend continues, it could mean a potential loss of 20% by 2100, he says. That’s equal to going from sea level to more than 2000 meters elevation on land. “I thought ‘Wow!’” Oschlies recalls. “That’s the biggest change and maybe the most worrying change that we see in the ocean. Immediately I thought of (past) major extinction events.” For example, at the end of the Permian period 256 million years ago, rising ocean temperatures and an 80% plunge in oxygen levels helped drive the largest extinction in Earth’s history. Up to 96% of all marine species disappeared.

By comparison, the 2% drop in oxygen levels seen so far might not sound like much. But global averages can be misleading, warns Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has studied the effects of low oxygen on ocean ecosystems for more than 30 years. “There are places in the ocean where there’s been much bigger declines,” Levin says. “These changes are probably very important.”

 

 

 

Biden the (not) demented

I didn't watch all of the State of the Union address, but did catch the widely circulated few minutes where he was going back and forth with booing, stupid Republicans.  As Axios notes:

President Biden previewed an optimistic re-election platform in his State of the Union speech Tuesday — but veered off script to take on rowdy Republicans in a series of confrontations that captured America's political chasm.

Why it matters: Biden used much of his speech to emphasize what Americans can do when they work together — while also baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security as Congress weighs budget cuts.

• Biden seemed to anticipate — and relish — the jeers from some Republicans when he questioned their commitment to Medicare and Social Security during upcoming budget talks.
• He dared them to "contact my office” for proof that some Republicans had discussed cutting the safety-net programs — and that if everyone agreed they shouldn't be cut, they should "stand up for seniors." House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans then joined Democrats in doing just that.
• "I enjoy conversion," Biden joked.

Everyone sensible I follow agreed that the "baiting" worked well.

But the thing that struck me most is, once again, how utterly stupid the Right wing commentariat looks for their years of claiming Biden is virtually a demented nursing home candidate, all based on brief video edits of no consequence.

As I have complained many times, anyone who has first hand experience of actual dementia decline in a parent, if they are honest, knows that someone with serious issues cannot handle themselves in public speaking in the manner that Biden does. 

But the mainstream media has let the nutjob Right repeat it to itself a million times, and rarely comments how this is pure, offensive, propaganda that, by rights, should remove all credibility on every issue.

A pretty remarkable man

To my mind, he's looking like a cool character from a Marvel movie now:

Hard to imagine the difficult life he has unnecessarily had to endure.

Big physics thoughts

I don't know who the creator is behind the channel this video comes from is, but as far as I can tell, the science content is accurate.   Today I watched this one, which starts an explanation of what it means to say that mass is energy (as in the famous Einstein equation): 

 

It gets into the matter of quarks and how they contribute to a proton's mass, and what mass means in a very "meta" sense. It's not simple, of course.  

And that aspect - the complexity of what it was explaining - got me thinking that this is a reason that the simulation hypothesis for the universe seems very improbable to me: why would you simulate to such level of tiny complexity?

I mean, when you think about the old particle/wave duality question, the simulation hypothesis  has some appeal, because it is easy to imagine the universe as being the equivalent of a computer game which only bothers rendering the part of the game's internal universe you're looking at or interacting with. But when you get to the vastly complicated question of quarks (or other really odd aspects of particle physics - like neutrinos that change as they travel along and zip through matter like it's not there), the whole idea that a simulation would go (or need to go?) to that level of complexity just seems very improbable. 

Oh, and speaking of neutrinos, I mention them because I recently re-watched this video, which I don't think I have posted before, about how it seems quite likely that every now and then, a human at night might notice a flash of blue light that is actually a neutrino hitting an atom in your eyeball.    Cool:

The potential for electric cars for domestic power storage

There's a detailed article here at the Washington Post (gift link) about how close we may be to electric cars becoming routinely part of domestic renewable energy storage.   

It's pretty impressive sounding, and it's easy to imagine it happening to a large scale in large parts of Australia, where the sun shines a lot.

Should we be surprised, or not...?

One of the oddest aspects of the "Chinese spy balloons over America" saga is this:

The top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command.

One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.

I mean, I would have thought that something as big as that balloon and its payload, moving with the wind, would make for a big radar target that would be readily identified (as a balloon at least, if not the country of origin.)   

But I would remind my feeble number of readers that there are some remarkable oddities about US airspace awareness where they can't identify a big aircraft even when they are visually identified by other pilots.   I think I have posted about this incident before:  a 2017 case where airliners saw another aircraft flying high over Oregon, it had no transponder turned on, and despite some F 15s being scrambled, it seems no one knows where it ended up.   (You can read even more detail about it in this follow up post.  I mean, it seems it was not a small aircraft, but was something like airliner size.  How can they lose track of that over the West coast?   Of course, if it really was a UFO, that could explain it!   But it apparently looked like a large, white aircraft, and was flying fast, but at airliner type speed.)

So, it would seem US identification of what's going on in its airspace is not as foolproof as you would expect.     

 

I've been cooking again...

Yes I know, ideally I would become a vegetarian, but beef does taste so, so good. And my daughter used to have low iron, so it's healthy, right?   (Any excuse is a good excuse.)

Anyway, beef brisket was on special yesterday and I've never cooked with it before. My wife has, but not me.  Decided to go with a recipe from Taste.com, Cantonese beef brisket noodle soup, and it really was a success. My bowl:

I worry about link rot, so I had better reproduce most of the recipe here:

So, trim the brisket of fat (the only painful exercise in this recipe), cut into big chunks and boil for 5 mins.  Skim the top, and take out the meat and fry in oil in a frying pan to brown the outside, then add the liquid (soy sauces, fish sauce, rice wine and the sugar) and just get it combined, then put it back in with the stock.

The spices - recipe says to put the cardamon, star anise and peppercorns in a muslin tie up and bash them a bit.  Instead, I crushed them a bit in a mortar and pestle then put then in a metal tea infuser - worked fine.

All of the other ingredients go in and simmer for 90 minutes.   Boil egg noodles and put in bowl and put soup on top (and the boiled vegetable.)   I guess anyone could guess the last bit.

Things that surprised me:  the two bits of orange peel really make a strong, fragrant contribution.  And the seasoning level with these ingredients was just right.

 

Free love, and assassination, 19th century style

It's funny, in a way, how 21st century Right wing Americans think that most of the West is on the highway to Hell due to sexual licentiousness and violence, when in fact there was some really weird stuff going down in their own country in the 19th century.

I'm pretty sure I have read something about it before, but I don't seem to have posted previously about the Oneida Community, which comes to my attention this morning due to a book review at the Washington Post.   It's about the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, and how the assassin was a former member of the (sex) utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York.

The review doesn't give many details, but puts it this way:

From the outside, the Oneida Community looked idyllic. Led by the preacher John Humphrey Noyes, it was the most successful utopian colony of the period, spanning more than 30 years. At its height, tourists flocked to what Wels describes as the “wild woodland” in Upstate New York, with orchards, livestock, “whizzing mills” and women with “queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts.” But behind the facade, Oneida’s free-love philosophies descended into pedophilia, incest and experiments in eugenics.

So, let's trip over to Wikipedia:

 The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven (a belief called perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), group marriage, male sexual continence, and mutual criticism. 

The male sexual continence thing seems a hard sell, if you ask me:

Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children ; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called "male continence" , in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control.

A different website explains:

You see, rather than using the withdrawal method, coitus interruptus, which was one of the most effective birth control methods historically, and is surprisingly just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy, even in real world practice, the community instead practiced coitus reservatus as their main method of birth control- where the man was not to orgasm at all. The idea was that this would simultaneously prevent pregnancy, ensure the man maintained his vitality (the belief at the time was that the loss of semen negatively impacted a man’s health), and made sure the woman was optimally pleasured for maximal spiritual benefit.

As to the question of the age of sexual partners, it gets creepier still;

Women over the age of 40 were to act as sexual "mentors" to adolescent boys, because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout.

Then there is the system for self improvement, which is like group therapy turned on its head into something like group psychological lynching:

Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting.^[15] The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits.

It's notable that the community was still going strong at the time of the Civil war - I can't see anything about whether any male members went off to fight, but I have my doubts that they would.  Hence, 100 years before free love hippies of the Vietnam era were having sex instead of going to war, free love (alleged) Christians were doing the same.

As utopian communities, free love or not, inevitably do, it all fell apart when leadership was attempted to be handed over, and oddly enough, most of us probably have seen the word "Oneida" because of this:

The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited.

Anyway, back to the assassination of Garfield, this is really a remarkable coincidence:

...Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was at the train station and saw Garfield’s shooting. It was the second presidential assassination he witnessed, having been at his father’s side as he died in 1865.

And as this website explains, he arrived in Buffalo years later on the same day President McKinley was shot! 

Presidential assassinations seemed to follow him around.   He did live to 83 though, so I guess he wasn't as unlucky as he could have been.   (He also attended the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 - there's a photo of that at the last link.)

The main prominent free love community I know of in  my lifetime is the Rajneesh movement - which of course all fell into a heap when the leader aged, too.   

Anyway, always good to remember that radical ideas about sexual utopianism have been around for a long time.

   

A stupid "scare word" tactic used for over 70 years

 

Maths and abstraction

There's a book review at Nature that is somewhat interesting - Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism, which apparently argues this:

The work of mathematicians from centuries or even millennia ago speaks to their living peers in ways that practitioners of other disciplines must find baffling. Euclid’s proof that the list of prime numbers never ends is just as elegant and clear now as it was in around 300 bc, when it appeared in his book Elements.

Yet mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Alma Steingart explains in Axiomatics.

A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States. Mathematicians’ push for abstraction was mirrored by — and often directly triggered — parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. Steingart quotes some scientists who saw their liberation from merely explaining the natural world as analogous to how abstract expressionism freed painting from the shackles of reality.

Further down it notes this:

To the mathematical-theory builder, abstraction is not a destination, but a journey. As Steingart puts it, ‘abstract’ is not an adjective but a verb: ‘to abstract’. In the 1930s, owing largely to the influence of German mathematician Emmy Noether, mathematicians began to construct axiomatic systems that were increasingly abstract and general. This revealed familiar objects such as numbers, card shuffles and geometrical symmetries to be special cases of the same concept.

The trend towards abstraction and generalization is often associated with a school of mathematics that blossomed in France after the Second World War. But, as Steingart shows, it took root in the 1930s in the United States and came to define the country’s mid-century mathematical culture. Steingart exemplifies the trend with the story of Foundations of Algebraic Topology, a 1952 book by US mathematicians Samuel Eilenberg and Norman Steenrod. It dealt with various calculation techniques to distinguish between geometric shapes, but the authors introduced the subject backwards, claiming that students should first familiarize themselves with highly technical algebraic tools and only later learn their relevance to shapes, or why the tools existed in the first place.

This reminds me of the argument Paul Johnson made in Modern Times (his history of most of the 20th century) - that the relativism in Einstein's physics introduced (or helped spread) moral relativism to the masses.   (I know many dispute that, but I think technology and science probably does have subtle, not always recognised, effects on the psychology of the masses.)   

The classic graph (updated to 2022)

 

This amused me

So while Twitter staggers on (everyone agrees that it isn't as good as it used to be, it's just that the alternatives aren't really there yet) I'm still looking at it and finding myself amused by the odd thread: