As a growing body of research reveals,
Black people in the United States suffer the hallucinations and
delusions of psychosis — the voices that seem to emanate from outside a
person’s head, the visions, the paranoias, the breaks with common
reality — at a rate roughly twice that of white people. In Europe,
racial disparities regarding psychosis are yet wider. Even after
researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address issues of
diagnosis, the alarming racial gaps remain.
Studies
suggesting a link between minority or outsider status and psychosis run
back about a century. A 1932 study looked at hospital admissions for
psychosis in Minnesota. It found that Norwegian immigrants were admitted
at twice the rate of native Minnesotans or Norwegians in their home
country. By the 1970s, researchers were turning specifically to racial
divides in psychiatric disorders, and by the 2000s, the relationship
between race and psychosis (which appears to outstrip any correlation
between race and more common conditions like depression) was becoming
well studied in both the United States and Europe. Yet despite the
mounting data, in the United States, until recently, the issue was
relegated to the edges of mainstream psychiatry — or perhaps beyond the
edges.
The whole thing is pretty odd, as explained in this part (with my bold):
In the United States, Black-white ratios
are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite
Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall,
Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In
England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs
between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for
Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three
to one.
Among the immigrant groups,
one plausible factor is the dislocation and stress that can come with
the immigrant journey itself. But while such trauma may seem an obvious
trigger, given that many immigrants arrive in their new nations after
dangerous journeys and unable to speak the language that surrounds them,
researchers have found repeatedly that second-generation immigrants to
the United States and Europe develop psychosis at rates at least as high
as their parents. Something is happening in the new country.
Compared to some people, I suppose I have pretty small exposure to social media, given that Twitter (and now Bluesky) was my only real social media app (if you don't count blogs with active threads - now a rarity - or YouTube). And one of the problems of Bluesky now being pretty good is that I am finding it too easy to just keep...on...scrolling...scrolling (and often avoiding reading the in depth articles sometimes linked.)
Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist and world expert on divided attention, warned in 2022 that we are now living in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023.
But we’re not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley’s dirtiest design feature – which is everywhere once you spot it – is the infinite scroll, likened to the “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly “refills” manipulates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless “seeking” can become addictive.
What will happen if we don’t get a handle on our declining cognitive health? The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris told US Congress in 2019 that billions of people – “a psychological footprint about the size of Christianity” – now receive their information from platforms whose business model “links their profit to how much attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ to extract attention by hacking lower into our lizard brains – into dopamine, fear, outrage – to win”.
His warnings are about as stark as they come. “Persuasive technology is a massively underestimated and powerful force shaping the world,” he said. “It has taken control of the pen of human history, and will drive us to catastrophe if we don’t take it back.”
The worst thing about it (internet brain rot) is likely the loss of book reading amongst everyone, especially the young.
I have been meaning to say for some time, but as I get older, I am surprised that I am still drawing connections between my life experience and some incidents in novels that have stuck in my head from what I might have read 30 or 40 (or more!) years ago. What I mean is - I have just recognised the truth or insight in the writing that long after reading it. It's quite surprising, and I just can't see people who have grown up in social media (with ruined attention spans for reading novels) being able to have the same experience, and it does feel like a real loss, but they won't realise it....
In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5K above the
pre-industrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17K.
Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers including anthropogenic
warming and the El Niño onset fall short by about 0.2K in explaining the
temperature rise. Utilizing satellite and reanalysis data, we identify a
record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap.
The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in
the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a
multi-annual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and
understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced
aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will
be crucial for assessing the current and expected future warming.
Of course, how to work out the net effect of clouds has been one of the main bugbears of climate modelling. The skeptic hope was that higher temperatures would mean more cloud and more albedo to keep the earth from getting too hot. (I thought that was how the late Richard Lindzen's iris effect idea worked, but now that I double check, it was more that cirrus clouds would reduce and allow more IR to escape - so I'm not sure if an increase of lower, brighter clouds was actually part of that theory or not.)
Anyhow - it remains a major worry that it is unclear whether the modelling has got the cloud effects underestimated, so that global temperature increases could be more rapid than expected.
Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a brief commentary on the paper here. There is quite a bit of talk in the comments following about whether to credit reduced sulphur emissions from shipping as causing the albedo decrease, too.
The story over the last week or so about people claiming there is a lot of unusual large drone activity in the night skies of New Jersey is pretty intriguing.
I get the feeling that there is something to it - some of the descriptions of a line of drones one after the other seem unusual. But - if it is a company trying out some new tech, it's hard to imagine why they (or the authorities wouldn't be open to it. That's why it's intriguing.
I have mentioned once before though - it does seem at times that the airspace over parts of the US is not as well monitored as one might assume. Maybe too many things going on to keep track of all of it?
I see that the Bluesky user counter shows a considerable slowdown in the rate of sign ups since it hit 24 million. It will take quite a while at this rate to hit 25 million.
That's a pity, because it really has already become a good Twitter replacement. The only thing I kind of miss is a "trending" list - but half the time those was false alarms anyway. "Why is this person suddenly trending - has he/she died?"
I would also like to see more local accounts so that I could search for comments on breaking local news.
Speaking of comedians, Ronny Chieng has been on a roll hosting the Daily Show this week. This day's clip was particularly good I think - every joke seemed to hit:
The Junkyard, managers of Australian comedians like Aaron Chen and Sam Campbell, goes into administration
Let it be known that, of the younger Australian comedy set, I've always enjoyed Aaron Chen's comedy persona. That Sam Campbell - well I first saw him recently on an episode of Would I Lie to You (english version) and it was a few years old, but he seemed amusing in a similar eccentric persona to Chen. But then I think I watched some other clip of him on Youtube and didn't like it, so I dunno.
Anyway, back to the point: about the only fictional portrayal of a talent agent I can remember is from that Matt Berry series - Toast of London. And it fitted in with what is probably a widely shared assumption that actor's agents sit around doing nothing much all day other than reading the occasional casting call news and ringing up people on their list and saying "why don't you try this, I think it suits you". It seems like such a flaky way to make a living - even if, in the case of top Hollywood agencies, it's a very lucrative one.
But is it really like that? Does no one do a realistic portrayal of this line of work because it's hard to make "networking" interesting?
Update: Maybe there was an agent or two featured to a little extent in Bill Hader's dramedy Barry. But I think that shows attack was more against the incredible flakiness of cable television executives. In fact, I found it kind of amazing that the executives at (I think) HBO let such a damning portrayal of their job be part of the story! I presume they thought - it's not our network's execs he's attacking - it's the one down the road.
Gee, this has become a pretty familiar story - a small start up company manufacturing a clean, green energy product that just doesn't stack up in quality and reliability, then goes broke and tarnishes the reputation of clean energy overall:
A similar story happened in 2009 with some Stirling engine solar power plant that might have looked cool, but never worked well. (I see now that even the webpages for the long defunct American Stirling engine solar power company Infinia are gone! I always liked the look of their dishes. There's a photo on one of my posts from 2008.)
Not to mention failure to develop geothermal power in Australia: see this story, and this one.
[Oh, and I nearly forgot - the failure of various wave energy schemes. Frankly, this idea has always seemed to me to be extremely dubious - my gut feeling was always that there is too little movement in any single device riding waves to generate significant enough power to be worth the expense and maintenance.]
The common theme seems to be that they are not crank schemes per se (in that they are systems obviously capable of making energy) - but they need a lot of finesse to make them reliable and economical. Small companies grab the idea but don't have the resources to make it work like it should - and unfortunately, can start to sell the systems before they are proven.
Seems to me that what it all lacks is big companies with the resources to build and test properly the systems before selling them.
Following last weekend's flash flooding around parts of Brisbane, the ABC has this article up:
More wild weather forecast for Queensland raises questions about how Brisbane drains handle intense rainfall
with one guy saying:
"With the bureau forecasting more frequent events, the storm drains across the city simply aren't designed to take in flows of run-off and intense rain," Mr Winders said.
Rather than being flood-resilient, Mr Winders suggests residents need to become "storm-resilient".
"The local council can't do anything about the network, the drains are already in place and there's too much existing development," he said.
"All these things impede the ability of the council to provide any relief from local flooding."
And I suspect he's right.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the article, and that I'm pretty sure would be true, is that Brisbane's drainage system does seems to often handle much higher total rainfall events without flooding, compared to cities such as Melbourne, and probably Sydney too?
I mean, over the years, I have seen many news reports of flash flooding from storms in other cities, and the rainfall totals that caused it often seem to be well under the rainfall we hear about in Brisbane storms or rain events.
So I have always suspected that our drainage system has been engineered to expect higher surges than those of drier cities. (Melbourne in particular seems to get most of its rain in far less intense events than Brisbane - it's just spread out over drizzly days rather than in 10 or 15 minute bursts like here!)
* A month or so ago, I posted about whether or not I should go see a performance of Beethoven's 9th (for the first time.) I was encouraged to do so, but delayed buying tickets. I checked about 9 days ago if seats were available, and some were, but I still didn't book. Then, on Sunday, I thought I should check again - then thought "whoops - it's December!". I had become so busy with one work matter that I had completely forgotten the concerts were on last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. :(
When the seated choir (Brisbane Chamber
Choir Collective) rose to their feet, we were in for a surprise.
Unexpectedly, around the concert hall – in the stalls and side balconies
– other choir members also stood with opened books. Undercover,
plain-clothes, choral operatives had been inserted into the midst of the
unsuspecting audience.
As the instrumental and vocal volume
swells, Clerici is conducting a 360-degree enterprise. The sound is
heavenly, harmonious. Beethoven has played his trump card. The pitch
rises as the beautiful voice of the soprano soloist soars above the
music and the choir.
The performance earns the orchestra and
conductor a standing ovation. Orchestral sections are individually
applauded. Clerici shakes hands warmly with the concertmaster, Natsuko
Yoshimoto. As the soloists exit, Umberto bows graciously to the two
women before giving the baritone a hearty high-five. A tremendous
performance by our state orchestra and a triumphant conclusion to the
2024 season.
Ugh...
* There was flash flooding yet again in Brisbane last Sunday, yet oddly enough, in my corner of the city, it got dark and a bit thundery, but virtually no rain at all. Only 15 km down the road, people went to a well know pub car park, only to get their cars inundated:
This spring and early summer in Brisbane, and the south east generally, has been so wet that it is making me worried that Brisbane is in for yet another flood this summer. I checked the SEQ Water dam levels, and virtually all are full or overflowing, except for Somerset and Wivenhoe (the ones that protect the Brisbane River from flooding) and they are at 80%. (The last time I checked, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, they were 80% then, too. I'm guessing water is being released enough to keep it there.)
But, gee, I don't know. Seems to me it wouldn't take too much more torrential rain in the right spot to cause another major flood.
* So, Biden pardoned his son. I can't get too excited about it, especially with the absolute nutjobs who Trump wants to appoint who seemingly want to spend another 4 years of wasted effort on trying to pin corruption on him. Jon Stewart isn't happy - but his takes are only right about 75% of the time, it seems...
I saw a video on the "Megabuild" channel on the weekend about how Singapore is massively expanding its port facilities, from the seabed up. It's - kind of amazing:
But - if you don't have time to watch that, you can view instead a good multimedia graphics explanation that appeared a couple of years ago at the Straits Times website here.
It also explains something I was curious about - wouldn't the steel reinforcement that is throughout the giant concrete caisson corrode quickly when its in seawater? Would the whole box be a crumbling mess in 20 years?
Apparently, it's solved by spraying a sealant on the sea exposed parts. Huh.
I have now seen 3 Youtube reviews of the movie version of Wicked, all by male reviewers who are not the most "bro" reviewers around, but still feel like their tastes skew towards the Rightwing-ish views on "woke" as a cultural issue. And they all enjoyed the movie quite a lot - saying they went in with no or low expectations, and two I think said they had never seen the stage play (nor have I), so they were surprised about how good they found it.
I think this is particularly surprising given that (as the Critical Drinker said in a video about the lead actress going a bit nuts about changes to the movie poster), the musical could be said to have started something of a "woke-ish" cycle of movies about a misunderstood villain (often female) who we would have some sympathy for if only we understood the backstory and her perspective.
In the medieval past, people would routinely employ "cunning folk" or "service magicians" to help them. They were much more effective, rational, and ethical than many spiritual practices today.
This part, about love magic, I found pretty amusing:
Before there was Tinder, there was seduction magic. It was deemed so powerful that a thirteenth century Christian theologian named William de Montibus felt it necessary to warn his fellow believers about the perils of consuming food prepared with a love spell, infused with the essence of a courting woman in, well, rather unique ways.
The first worry was that one might consume a loaf of bread kneaded not by hand, but by buttocks. Bread, a staple of a medieval diet also used in religious rites, could be a vector for an irresistibly magical feminine essence embedded in the dough, particularly if the cunning woman had sat on it and wriggled around in her natural state to prepare the loaf.
With mainstream religion in the west in long-term decline, something else is emerging. Not quite religion, not quite self-help – but a tantalising mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookshops once contained straightforward advice on dating, dieting or getting rich quick, now they ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.
You see it, for example, in the astonishing popularity of astrology
among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope
is an embarrassing secret, this can be jarring. At a recent party, I was
surprised to stumble into an earnest astrology conversation between
people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were
Capricorns, and analysing their moon signs in great detail.
Really, of course, it was a jumping off point to open up about their lives, relate to each other, and explore how they tended to deal with problems. No wonder generation Z seems to find it therapeutic. The global market for astrology was valued at $12.8bn in 2021 and was projected to nearly double in the following decade.
Then there is tarot, which is also on the rise, driven mostly by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method for calming down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See, for example, the huge success of The Power of Now, a book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness has meanwhile fused with a set of anti-science beliefs, including the idea – dangerously championed by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, via your “inner sense” of what will cure you.
This sits alongside a cabal of celebrities on the right – Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson – who are tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as a route to the answer. The market is growing: the largest segment of buyers of self-help books is now men aged 25 to 34. They are sold a rebranded and cherry-picked system of faith, drawn from various religions and packaged to fit their needs.
The bit about astrology is interesting. I thought it was long dead and buried; or at least, now a very fringe interest with much less popular following than in what seems to have been its heyday from the 1960's to the 1980's. But then again, I was surprised recently to see the most generic type of astrological weekly forecast pap being put up near the end of one of the commercial TV news services on (I think) a Sunday.
And, of course, as I don't use TikTok, I have no idea what things are gaining popularity there with the youth.
Anyway, Gill ends with a bit of overreach, I think:
Mystic self-help may largely be harmless but we should ask what its popularity says about us and where we are going. After all, we owe nearly all modern progress to the fight against religion, allowing rational deductions to hold sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now seeing the dawn of a post-information age?
Still, it's a topic that always interests me - how people find meaning and how much religion or other metaphysical beliefs really have to do with it.
Surely I am not alone in thinking this: never has my opinion of billionaires been lower, in light of recent events.
The prime example, although there are so many to chose from, is (of course) Elon Musk. A peculiar man seeking to exercise immense power by proxy, having succeeded in helping get said proxy elected via his social media empire, dwindling though it may now be.
Yet if questioned, he would claim it is all in the interest of "making humanity multiplanetary", his perceived vital long term goal.
What is irking me at the moment, with the "gee whiz" factor of the recent Starship test flights (the most recent one featuring a gormless Trump in tow), is that the future technical challenges to doing anything especially useful with this rocket system seem so far below the public radar.
I mean, relying on both a booster and the enormous manned vehicle to land safely via retrorocket and guidance that are to work perfectly each time? The deadstick landing of the space shuttle had a worrying enough component of "everything has to go right", but at least if they got close to the ground but not near a runway, there was some chance of exit of the horizontally moving machine. Seems to me that there are going to no similar systems possible on Starship, because if there is going to be a major problem, it is more likely to be at the very last minute, with the rocket having no opportunity to align itself to allow a slower descent or an attitude to allow easy crew escape.
Sure, the landing system looks cool, and it's not great disaster if it doesn't work each time with the booster - although there is a very good chance of huge and expensive destruction of the landing pad and facilities. But the manned rocket? I reckon it will only take a couple of fatal accidents and people will leap from "that's so cool" to "you know, this is just inherently dangerous and can you really ever use such a system reliably enough for humans?"
And how many people are really following the development story close enough to realise that it's going to be an enormous problem getting the thing to the Moon, or Mars, because of the need for in-orbit refuelling?
Have a read of this lengthy article from earlier this year, pointing out that it seems already the system is heavier than expected, and noting the huge difference it makes to the whole re-fuelling idea:
“Currently, Flight 3 would be around 40-50 tons to orbit.”
To understand the significance of this statement, one only needs to review prior statements about Starship’s performance. Ever since Musk’s 2017 presentation, Starship’s estimated payload capacity has ranged between 100 and 150 tons to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). SpaceX’s official Starship Payload Users Guide clearly states that “At the baseline reusable design, Starship can deliver over 100 metric tons to LEO” [3]. For the past six years, Starship’s diameter, height, and propellant mixture have remained constant. The most straightforward interpretation of Musk’s comment is that the rocket is suffering from a 50% underperformance.....
The success or failure of the Human Landing System program will be decided by Starship’s payload capacity. Due to its high dry (unfueled) mass, Starship HLS cannot reach the Moon without first refueling in LEO. To complete the Artemis 3 mission, SpaceX must therefore implement orbital refueling on an unprecedented scale. Even on Earth, loading cryogenic propellants into a launch vehicle is no easy feat; if anything, this will be more difficult in space. Prior to every Artemis mission, a flotilla of reusable Starship tankers will transfer liquid oxygen and liquid methane to an orbiting propellant depot. The lunar lander will then launch, receive a full load of fuel and oxidizer from the depot, and continue onwards to the Moon.
The number of tanker flights which will be required to complete Artemis 3 is hotly debated. Estimates range from four [5] to nineteen [6] launches of propellant per lunar landing. Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin recently noted that the probability of mission success is directly correlated with the number of launches in each refueling campaign [7]. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that each individual Starship launch, plus the subsequent propellant transfer operation, will have a 98% probability of success once the procedure is refined. If five tanker flights are required, the mission as a whole will succeed in 90% of scenarios. In contrast, if twenty launches are needed, that probability drops to just 67%.
The precise number of tanker flights depends on several variables,
including the Starship launch rate and the rate at which cryogenic
propellant boils off to space while the depot is in orbit. However, no
parameter is more important than the vehicle’s payload capacity. If
Starship’s payload mass grows, the number of tanker flights required to
complete an Artemis mission will decrease. Conversely, a reduction in
payload capacity will increase the number of propellant launches.
The current iteration of Starship can store 1,200 tons of liquid
methane and liquid oxygen in its propellant tanks. Recent renderings
suggest that the lunar lander will be slightly taller,
with a propellant load of approximately 1,500 tons. If each tanker can
deliver 100 tons of fuel to orbit as advertised, then it will take 15
flights to complete an Artemis mission. This number is large, but given
SpaceX’s demonstrated ability to scale up to a high cadence of
missions, it is not insurmountable in medium- to long-term timeframes.
However, if SpaceX is only able to launch 50 tons of propellant to orbit
inside each Starship tanker, then it will need to launch the world’s
largest rocket a staggering 30 times to refuel a single lunar
lander. Two additional launches will be required to place the Starship
HLS and the propellant depot into orbit. To make matters worse, this
hypothetical manifest does not take boiloff into account. Even if NASA
and SpaceX achieve their stated goal of a 6-day turnaround between
Starship launches, it will take over half a year to stage all of the
propellant in orbit. Several additional flights might be required to
replace the oxygen and methane which are lost during this time period.
I know there has been some publicity about the extraordinary complicated system NASA has been planning all these years for a return to the Moon, but it seems to me not enough.
And it's all because making a large rocket land vertically looks cool.
Another irony about Musk - I mean, beyond the one where he thinks everyone should have lots of kids, yet seems like the most absent father possible to his own - is the recent discussion on Sabine Hossenfelder's channel about concerns that we are getting much closer to a making low earth orbit unuseable due to a Kessler syndrome disaster.
Given that Muck Musk is already cluttering up the orbits with Starlink (another example of something with a "cool" factor but on deeper consideration, we might be better off not using), the ultimate irony would be an exploding Starship in orbit, combined with his hundreds of his other satellites, making low Earth orbit pretty much impossible to safely traverse to get to Mars.
Here's the video:
I think there is a better than even chance that Musk will go down in history as leading humanity to disaster and/or expensive dead ends, rather than being the saviour he thinks he will be.
You can see I'm still looking at Twitter for laughs and giggles - seriously though, if Noah Smith ever abandons it for Bluesky, I'll probably only be back there once a week or so.
But have a look at this for an absurd claim:
Such shameless stupid gaslighting. He would be insta-blocked by so many at Bluesky if ever he shows up there.
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