2023-06-24
(covers two weeks, due to travel last weekend)
Readings
- Bees learn to dance socially -
- Mechanisms of temperature-driven turtle sex-determination: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-temperatures-sex-turtles.html
- Efforts to understand why and how water flows strangely quickly on carbon surfaces: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-carbon-surface-quantum-friction.html
- The adaptation into dogs was not necessary for wolves to recognise individual humans: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-dogs-wolves-familiar-human-voices.html
- Towards 3d printing medicine tablets: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-06-closer-3d-medicines.html
Thoughts
- I find the language of “core concerns” that China uses here to be not ideal - not ideal becausee rather than talking in terms of principles that can be understood in the long term and applied to many circumstances, it just speaks to power. International relations should ideally not just be about raw power - power sits beneath all societies, but if it never evolves beyond that, then it is at its heart brutal. It’s fair to argue that China (and its interests) often is - it clearly wants to invade Taiwan. It clearly has very thin skin and doesn’t want to accept criticism like civilised nations do. It clearly wants some freedom from economic competition. But these are all unreasonable wants. And “core concerns” is the kind of empty wording that could justify anything. The world should demand something better than that, just as it should demand something better than physical spheres of influence where nations can do whatever they want. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/14/chinas-qin-gang-airs-concerns-in-call-with-uss-antony-blinken
- Fragile reasoning - One of the annoying things I see in depiction of intelligent people is the near-absolute tendency to treat all advanced reasoning as if it’s black-and-white deductive, rather than (at most) probabilistic approximation of deduction. Reason isn’t functional if it has that strong of a belief in single answers and that strong a funnel towards the most probable cause of something. Given existing probability spreads,
- Juneteenth is here and past again, and I again use it as a reminder that my general instincts towards activist-led social change occasionally need balance. Before I read about it, I was puzzled by the holiday, and it being pushed the hardest by activists I tend not to like got me to a default hostility towards it. But then I read about it and it’s actually not some Kendi-esque bit of stupid, a celebration of rotten culture, or something that pulls society away from procedural fairness. It’s a simple recognition of the end of slavery in the US. And that’s a solidly good thing. I won’t promise to smile on everything done under a Juneteenth banner, but I think it deserves a holiday (and maybe a better name). Probably moreso than a lot of other holidays. Slavery really was that much an abuse.
- Delicacy around Operation Fox Hunt - China has a legitimate interest in hunting corruption (and people with American ties should not be able to flee overseas if corrupt), but not in silencing criticism. And corruption should not be maskable with a moment’s critique that will see a strong protect-criticism response. But likewise, usually-ignored-universal-corruption should not be suddenly criminal if paired with a critique. Finding ways to make these intuitions practical is difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt
Current Events
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, with Ukraine’s slow and expensive counterattack underway, as well as a strange fracturing in the Russian military between its official forces and its state-funded mercenary group Wagner Group over control over some occupied Ukrainian land (with it briefly grabbing some land in Russia and approaching Moscow before turning back)
- Sudan fighting resumes after end of ceasefire, with the capital still controlled by RSF special forces. This article from the BBC goes into details of the family-economic-historical recruiting differences between Sudan’s RSF and regular army that partly caused this conflict: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-65962771
- The apartheid system in Israel has the country sitting on the fence between being western and being an ethnostate, leading the west to a lot of soul-serarching over these principles and its own history over treatment of jews, once victims, now (in Israel) oppressors. Settlers, ever the worst in Israeli society (at least since the initial terrorists like Lehi that preceded the state were dismantlled, and with the exception of individual government thugs like Ze’evi, thankfully no longer in power), are yet again making waves with an uptick in violent efforts to push Palestinians out of “occupied” territories. This will likely lead to more cycles of events with mutual justifications for both sides to grab onto to fan the flames for more conflict.
Polls
- Pew Polls: BLM org support has dropped to about 50 percent. My thoughts: I’ve never liked the slogan and I’m lightly hostile to the central org (its organisers are awful), although the local orgs are fine and the movement as a whole has a fair mix of people; generally better folk than extinction rebellion people, for example. I prefer to stress unity and colurblind approaches to race - liberal approaces - over progressive ones. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/06/14/support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-dropped-considerably-from-its-peak-in-2020/
- Pew: Only 21% think the US is doing a good job at handing the US-Mexico border well. I’m neutral on this; I don’t see the border per se as an important issue, but I see immigration enforcement as being more important - I don’t want to normalise illegal immigration but I don’t think that’s so much about borders as it is about how we handle refugees, illegal immigrants, and overstayers who are already here. That said, I think our asylum practices should be overhauled and that, like Canada, we should adopt “first harbor”, default to no, and not release people into the general population pending acceptance. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/21/americans-remain-critical-of-governments-handling-of-situation-at-us-mexico-border/
Policy Focus
- I generally think “first harbor” provisions in immigration are sensible - refugee provisions are often treated as standalone part of immigration policy and they shouldn’t be - they should trigger firm, harsh sanctions (at least) of countries producing refugees if it’s not part of a natural disaster or war or something. Canada’s STCA immigration deal is a step towards sensibility, although just a small one. Countries need to show more vision in these things - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/16/canada-top-court-upholds-scta-that-sends-asylum-seekers-to-us
- IBM has been a poor steward of RedHat in the same way Hasbro has been of D&D, attempting to hold too tightly onto things profit streams that involve engagement with a vibrant community and some level of voluntary recognition of leadership. They handle poorly the constant temptation to grip things tighter, and worse (like Hasbro) they lie when justifying the tighter grip, in this case taking policy steps that threaten shadow projects like RockyLinux that actually help them, in search of short-term profits while lying about their motives. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
Reviewlets
- Shadows of Adam (video game, tile RPG) - Dipped my toes into this a bit so far. Engine is promising but a bit on the ugly/blocky side. Very mild puzzle elements. Will come back to it after I finish replaying Crosscode. Probably. Easy to set aside. Interesting enough to not delete while doing so.
- Crosscode (video game, action RPG) - Replaying this way later because the DLC came out far after I had stopped playing and I never went back to play it. The game is still charming, with a cool plot, really neat worldbuilding, and a strange lack of commitment in what kind of gameplay it’s aiming for. The puzzles are either the best or worst part of the game, and depending on my mood I either like or hate them. The timing on them can be frustratingly tight. I’m about halfway back though and I’m glad it’s been long enough that I only remember the rough story - curious what the DLC will add to the end of the story. The NewGamePlus decided to just add some mild modifiers that made the replay pretty good - an XP and drop boost is respectful of my time (and other games to play and things to read and so on).
- The Long Utopia (Long Earth sci-fi series) - Was pretty decent, but the series is starting to drag a bit; the ideas are still solid but I think neither author is great at writing large numbers of interesting characters of this sort and the series demands that. The fourth-and-last book is next, and that’s probably how long it should be given the limitations. A few neat ideas, although the hook for this one was resolved in a bit of a yawn.
- Shantae: The Half-Genie Hero: Costume Pack (video game DLC) - I missed this DLC years ago - there was a disappointing sequel to Shantae afterwards. The costume pack itself was fairly meh. The Risky Boots DLC was the one really good DLC for the game, and the base game was fantastic (played through that again). Still, happy to revisit.
Amusements
- Danny Elfman gives a good interview about music he’s done for films (after his Oingo Boingo days) -
- Both sad and a little funny that Malaysia is trying to use Interpol to go after a comic for a joke made in New York City over an airline, and that some people from that part of the line are (predictably) just pushing her to apologise - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/14/malaysia-police-to-seek-interpol-help-over-controversial-comedian
- I get some amusement out of the fact that Remedy Entertainment (which makes games that I generally enjoy that often don’t sell as well as I think they deserve) has a creative director that’s the face (but not the voice) for a game series that was sold to Microsoft many years ago and he still likes playing the character:
- Paradox is the wrong term, but this is a fun exploration of the physics around spools and forces:
Recent Music
- Despacito - Luis Fonsi - A huge Latin pop hit, and while it’s childish in the way most huge pop hits are, it has a kind of mathematical simplicity in it it, like meditation on the Pythagorean Theorem. Or perhaps why the relationship between a number squared is one off from the (number plus 1) multiplied by the (number minus 1). Funny story about that - I noticed it when I was young while looking at multiplication tables and asked my dad about it, and he showed me the proof in algebra, but I wasn’t quite old enough to understand algebra yet, but he kinda dragged me through it anyway and said it was a preview of things to come.
- How Can I Live - ill niño - Simple three-part progression with metal that feels good. Not complex, kind of like attractive beads on a string.
- Dilruba - Niyaz - I’ve sometimes talked about Niyaz’s music with Iranian acquaintances I’ve made over the years, but I’ve rarely built associations for individual songs, preferring to leave the songs as things I can close my eyes to and just visualise as I will. For this song, I like to imagine dust blowing throw a valley