2024-04-13
This covers the last 2 weeks, as I missed last weekend due to eclipse-and-family related travel
Readings
Complex gravitational dynamics in black hole systems: https://news.mit.edu/2024/persistent-hiccups-draws-astronomers-new-black-hole-behavior-0327
Cell-type based targeting for mRNA-based therapies: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-coating-method-mrna-advanced-therapies.amp
Mapping of the human centriole: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-scientists-reconstruct-human-centriole-image.amp
Better control of carbon bonding: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-simple-inexpensive-carbon-atoms.amp
Better in-cell staining for microscopy: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-advanced-microscopy-technique-cells.amp
It’s comedy and a bit cringe, but this YT video of Conan and Jordan Schlansky working with a pair of relationship counselors offers material for reflection on how people relate to others; we’re (of course) free to disagree with the counselors on specific points, but it’s easy to take some learning away:
How most animals can handle unfiltered water (not the answer I expected):
A step in taking advantage of quantum effects to produce resistance-free current transmission: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-technique-scientists-resistance-free-electron.amp
The substrata beneath sand on beaches:
I think it’s healthy that one of NPR’s editors reflected on how NPR’s getting too on board with progressive social ideas damaged public trust in it and distracted from its mission: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity
Thinking about this is probably premature, but NASA is exploring the idea of a time zone for Luna (why not just use UTC for now?): https://www.space.com/white-house-nasa-time-zone-moon
With the opposite problem, the idea of moving the celebration of Easter between Orthodox Christians and Catholics/Protestants to a common date is probably far too late: https://www.ncregister.com/cna/orthodox-patriarch-bartholomew-hopes-for-unified-date-for-easter-in-east-and-west?amp
A (possible) advance in prime number prediction: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-breakthrough-prime-theory-primes.html
Thoughts
I’ve been thinking about a weird-but-probably common quirk of how humans perceive each other; often I see certain body shapes - motifs - resembling some other species. It’s not racially linked as far as I can tell ; body shapes vary pretty consistently within what we call races. Usually it’s more of a family resemblance, enhanced by personal health/weight. Sometimes I see a face and it reminds me of a hawk or a pig or something. I rarely talk about this; it’s likely to offend or at least weird people out.
A societal commitment to extrajudicality on certain power grabs - narrow focus - principle that a politician should not be able to benefit in office from expansions of their powers or salaries, and that anyone trying risks their health and life
I wonder if it’s possible that we’ll eventually be able to bioengineer (pills, bacteria, genetic eng) humans to break down Xylose and/or Cellulose
Thinking back on the 1998 movie adaptation of Lost in Space, I’m still annoyed at what they did with the character of Dr Smith; the movie felt like a bad fanfic (admittedly a criticism I often lay) because of its desire to greatly simplify characters and to have a big bad with sneer-at-the-heroes moments. That never was Dr Smith, and films generally don’t need that particular kind of villain or that kind of villain behaviour. It’d take a lot of reworking to make it into a genuinely good film, but these kinds of faults are common enough that people should not get behind a camera without knowing of them.
Current Events
The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, with small land gains by Russia in Donetsk; slow delivery of ammunition from the West, significantly from American political issues, has hampered Ukraine’s defense.
Israel has temporarily withdrawn some forces from Gaza, but is still planning its assault on Rafah as the world sours over its invasion. US Pressure on Israel to stop blocking aid to civilians has resulted in some shifts. Meanwhile, Israel’s attacks on neighbouring countries continue, with Israel having attacked an Iranian consulate in Syria in breach of longstanding international norms; this undermines the principle of immunity for diplomats and diplomatic facilities and marks Israel’s versions of the same as fair game for the world. Iran has predictably launched drone attacks against Israel in response.
Similarly, Ecuador conducted a raid on a Mexican embassy on its territory, violating a similar set of norms and leading Mexico (and Nicaragua) to cut diplomatic relations with Ecuador and starting a broader international process to discuss penalties; many Latin American countries have loudly condemned the raid
Turkey’s fundamentalist ruling party lost a number of local elections, suggesting it may lose the presidency in future national elections
China met with Taiwan’s former President and used the event to push China’s you-will-submit-or-be-invaded approach to Taiwan; it’s surprising and disappointing to see Taiwan’s former leader participating
The illegitimate government of Burma lost control of another town to rebel forces (which are a mix of officials of the deposed government and others)
Slovakia held an election, with center-left (former PM) Peter Pellegrini becoming president-elect, to replace Progressive Party leader Caputova
South Korea held an election, with the Democratic Party of Korea (centrist) having lost 14 seats but retaining control over the National Assembly, and the People Power (center-right) gaining 2 seats but remaining far behind its main rival
North/Central America saw a total solar eclipse
The Republic of Taiwan saw a major earthquake
Polls
American support of Bibi’s invasion of Gaza is disappearing, according to a Gallup poll ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx ); my view on it is that some response was justified, but Bibi has gone way too far and this will leave Gaza significantly demolished. Intentionally or not, it resembles an attempt to push Palestinians out of Gaza, with some settler activists explicitly advocating that.
Gallup finds Americans feel we’re not helping Ukraine enough (https://news.gallup.com/poll/643601/americans-say-not-helping-ukraine-enough.aspx); I agree with this, but I’m willing to go to war with Russia (or China) to keep the norm of “you don’t get to swallow other countries”; this norm, upheld, makes war less frequent in the world. I’d even like to make this explicit; the international community should establish rules for war and, with certainty, enforce them.
Policy Focus
Not governmental policy, but the overwillingness to censor in the name of good PR has unfortunately left a lot of marketplace space for far-right groups to go their own way in the economy; in my view institutions that should be politically neutral have listened too much to activists pushing them to block nonprogressives from their platform, creating some understandable pushback; there are times when such blocks are appropriate, but they’re overused; payment systems, DNS providers, and web hosting at least should be as neutral as the electric company. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1240778608/anti-vaccine-activists-far-right-freedom-economy-gab-gabpay
I’m not always critical of DeSantis’s bills (there are a few needed reforms that Florida’s led on) despite being highly critical of him as a politician; it’s important to weigh these on a case-by-case basis. Florida HB601, which weakens civilian oversight of the police, is in my view a mistake; I recognise the possibility of activist-stacked boards that will critique everything police must do (and if it were demonstrated to me that enough police abolitionists are on those boards I may change my mind on this overall judgement), but taking away the process of civilian review could lead to carte blanche; ideally we’d have a productive tension between reasonable people. https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/desantis-signs-bill-targeting-civilian-review-boards-that-investigate-police/3283619/?amp=1
Interesting to see where I live experiment with public delivery lockers to deal with package theft; package theft is indeed a big problem here and it’s unfortunate that this isn’t solved by just going after the thieves somehow, but making it harder to do still will get the job done; I will likely either keep getting things delivered to my office or give this LockerNYC thing a try: https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-opens-public-lockers-to-stop-daily-theft-of-90000-packages
Interesting to see the US create a (very modest) framework for privacy on the internet (I haven’t yet read the bill; CNN’s summary makes it look like it doesn’t go too far): https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/08/tech/online-privacy-bill
The Wall of Shame
More (alleged) details on how Boeing pared back important internal critique of how it was building planes: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/12/1244147895/boeing-whistleblower-retaliation-shortcuts-787-dreamliner
The MPAA is looking to try to force ISPs to block websites relating to piracy (expansion of IP enforcement is a bad idea - it’s gone too far already, and technologically this’d be a mess): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/movie-industry-demands-us-law-requiring-isps-to-block-piracy-websites/
And in this case, an inverted wall of shame entry; I am impressed that one of our congressmen went back to college, in his old age, to get a degree in machine learning so he’d understand how it works and might be regulated correctly; Kol HaKavod to Don Beyer: https://apnews.com/article/ai-congress-artificial-intelligence-tiktok-meta-27ba6bcfd2ee7a19c0fd7343bfee6e62
Reviewlets
Thai Thai (Cleveland Area Thai restaurant) - My first attempt at getting good Thai food on the recent Cleveland trip; the best I can say for them is that the restaurant is cute. We did take-out, and the food was awful enough that we threw most of it out after a brief taste. It wasn’t inedible, it was just not at all good. I had red curry tofu, my mum had seafood.
Thai Elephant (thai restaurant, cleveland area) - Try number two, by contrast, was good. Not great, but it was an enjoyable meal and I’ll probably order from them again the next time I visit Cleveland. Similar meal to above.
Chronicles of Amber (book series) - I reread this every few years; I have them in a bound-in-a-single-book form as “The Great Book of Amber”, which is a terrible idea (it’s softcover and huge and the binding is not strong enough to hold it together for more than a few reads; this is the third time I’ve purchased the item. The contents? Still a classic; the series is split into two parts with distinct protagonists, with some similar themes woven through both parts (but not everyone who was an antagonist to the first voice is one to the second). It’s a genre of fantasy that’s “urban-aware” meaning the modern world exists within it somewhere, it’s just not a particularly important place. It takes some work for that to be feasible.
Werewolf and the Wormlord (Chronicles book 8) - This late in the series, Cook decides to dip into a mix of the exploration of the concept of diplomacy alongside some more classic fantasy elements. It works well, and one can see the start of what Cook had hoped to be a larger arc of transitioning fantasy into a rebuilding-of-high-society story (that never finished because of poor sales).
Amusements
April fools in astronomy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19937
Beautiful dog-related content in Korea:
There are video clips I return to every so often because they have a clever concept, a good point, good acting, or similar; this (long) scene from the film “Amadeus” is one of them (Mozart could use some of the relationship counseling thing I mentioned up above):
The noble Penguin knight:
An art gallery employee using unorthodox ways to promote his own art: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/german-art-gallery-employee-hangs-own-art-police-involved/
Recent Music
Ojos Asi - Shakira - A fusion Latin/Arabic song that really uses Shakira’s voice well; her yodel thing somehow matches the Arabic stylings well
Red Wing - Spike Jones - Written far before video games were a thing, the instrumental bits of these accidentally came to capture the feel of a certain era of theirs.
Peace - Anything Box - Many years ago someone often played this song to me making a gesture I didn’t understand then; I’ve wondered ever since I figured it out what might’ve been
Freddie’s Tune - Eden MacAdam Somer and Larry Unger - A good tune for calming over regrets; I like to think that the song acknowledges regret but smoothes it out somehow