I thought I remembered once seeing a YouTube video that showed, using excellent graphics, how violence actually declined over the centuries.
And indeed I did: but the video focused primarily on the death toll of World War II. Even so, in the final one third of the presentation, Neil Halloran, the video’s creator, does explore how, when adjusted for the size of the population, wars actually became less devastating over time.
This is also the view if Steven Pinker, who often discussed the “decline in violence” in his work and his talks.
Others, however, are less sure. And indeed, when I explore it myself using raw data from ourworldindata.org [chart 48], courtesy of Max Roser, the picture is decidedly less rosy.
Looking at this logscale plot showing death rates per 100,000 in conflicts since he middle ages actually shows an increase. And while indeed, the past 80 years can be described as the “long peace”, it’s more an anomaly than a trend.
In fact, looking at this chart I can comprehend the optimism of those who greeted the previous turn of the century, 1900 that is, as the start of the “century of reason”. If only…
This morning, I was confronted with examples of both racism and virtue signaling in unexpected ways.
The morning local news told me that Middle Eastern drivers are 2.9 times more likely to be stopped by police, even though it is white drivers who are the most likely to be charged. Unsaid but implied, cops are supposedly racists.
But if you know how people drive in some Middle Eastern locales, perhaps there is a different explanation. Especially considering that when you are driving a police cruiser, chances are you have absolutely no idea who the driver is until they stop, you walk over, and they roll down the driver side window. Imagine you are a cop, stopping someone because he drives like they do in places like Cairo or Baghdad. You walk over, they roll down the window. “Oh damn, another Middle Eastern driver on my record,” you think, and you let them go with a verbal warning, lest you end up being accused of racism.
So which is more likely? That cops have magic eyes and can tell the ethnicity of a driver even from a sillhoutte as their cruiser follows another vehicle, or that perhaps, just perhaps, Middle Eastern drivers who grew up in a very different driving culture have some trouble, at least initially, to adjust their driving habits, so they do in fact end up being stopped more often but that cops also tend to be more lenient in their case?
Or perhaps none of the above. My speculation is not any better than anyone else’s: It’s still speculation. What matters are the data. Just make sure that the sampling and statistical analysis are free of hidden biases.
It is surprisingly hard to convince image generation AI to produce images on this topic without running into dumb (keyword-based) blocks against “harmful” content. This one is from Midjourney.
I was still pondering this when I received an e-mail. Someone asked if, as a scientist, I believe in things like genetic differences between races or policies that take such differences into account. After some thought, I responded with a question myself. I asked if they meant the genetic differences between blondes and brunettes. Or maybe the genetic differences between people with big vs. small noses. After all, we “know” that blondes are supposed to be dumb and people with big, hooked noses are consumed with greed and are disloyal…
I had to update my server systems, both “on-premises” (meaning my home office) and “in the cloud” (my small cloud VM hosted by Amazon). They’ve been running CentOS 7 since 2016, and CentOS 7 reached its end-of-life. Back then, I of course anticipated that by this time, I’d have long ago upgraded my systems to CentOS 8. But that was before Red Hat decided to play hardball with all of us, turning CentOS from a robust open version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux into a bleeding edge, more or less experimental/test version.
So I had to switch. And it wasn’t easy.
I eventually opted for Oracle Linux (itself an RHEL derivative), after seriously considering both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. It seemed like the best compromise. I wanted an RHEL-compatible distribution to minimize the pain of the upgrade, and I wanted to pick the distribution that was the most likely to have robust long term support. Considering how Red Hat continues to play hardball with others, Oracle seemed the safest choice: They have the requisite in-house resources to “go it alone” if needed, and their cloud infrastructure alone appears to guarantee a long-term commitment. We shall see if I chose wisely.
And yes, it’s OL8 for now, though this time around, I plan an upgrade long before this product line reaches EOL. But first, stability.
I think everything works on my servers, and things are settling down nicely. But some other machines that I am responsible for still need some gentle care and feeding. It was an educational experience. I dare not share my detailed notes here as they contain information that probably should not be publicly disclosed about details of my configuration, but I have dozens of pages of notes detailing the quirks that I encountered.
All is well that ends well. But why do I have the feeling that this forced upgrade represents many days of my life that were lost for no good reason, days that I’ll never get back? Oh well.
In case anyone wonders what we are up against. What Ukraine is defending, beyond their own territorial integrity. Why a compromise peace deal today would be aptly described by words uttered by Winston Churchill in 1938, criticizing Chamberlain’s “peace for our times”: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” Well, just in case anyone has any doubt, take a look at this map from Wikipedia:
Countries in dark blue are the countries that signed the June 2024 joint communiqué of the Ukraine peace summit held in Switzerland. Countries in light blue participated but didn’t sign. The rest were absent, including the ayatollahs’ famous axis of resistance.
Notably, despite their pro-Russian stance, despite their reservations, Orban’s Hungary signed the communiqué. As did Ergodan’s Türkiye, despite their comparatively warm relationship with Moscow.
Yes, this is really shaping itself into a new world order. A struggle between Western democracies vs. authoritarianism. A flawed, but fundamentally decent, mostly peaceful, rules-based world order against a world characterized by territorial conquest and oppression.
The rhetoric is annoyingly familiar. Ukronazis? Well, in 1956, when Hungarians rose up against a totalitarian communist government, Soviet propaganda called them “fascists”. Soviet propaganda blamed American “imperialists” and the “CIA”, their relentless attempt to oppress freedom-loving socialist nations led by governments representing workers and peasants.
Where this will take us, I don’t know. I am not the only one worrying about WW3. Could it be that this time around, we are going to be a tad smarter than in the past? Maybe… but I don’t hold my breath. And when push comes to shove, I know what we are defending. Sigh.
Here, I picked a few countries for comparison on the Migration Policy Institute’s Web site. Specifically, to compare the ratio of migrant population (i.e., ratio of foreign-born residents) in these select lands.Immigration, of course, is a hot-button issue in the United States, but also in Hungary. Not sure about the UK but here in Canada, despite the fact that immigration represents an extra burden when it comes to, e.g., public health or affordable housing, we here comparatively less.
So how come a populist politician can exploit the immigration issue, never mind in border states of the United States, but also in Hungary where the relative immigrant population is still much lower? How come that the same topic has not become populist fodder here in Canada?
Well, perhaps I am looking at the wrong numbers. Yes, the share of immigrants in Canada is much higher than either in the US or Hungary. In fact, the share of the immigrant population here was already higher in Canada back in the 1960s than it is today in the United States. But look at the growth rate!
In Canada, the numbers went from about 16% back in 1990 to 21% in 2020. That represents a modest 30% increase. In other words, the immigrant situation in Canada today is not that different from the immigrant situation 30 years ago. In contrast, in the United States it went from about 9% to 15%. That is an almost 70% increase! Such an increase in the number of immigrants is certainly noticeable, and that is especially true if the immigrant population is not uniformly distributed across the country but is concentrated at specific locations (e.g., border states, major cities).
And Hungary? The figure went from 3% to 6%. So the relative share of the immigration population doubled in 30 years, in a country that is not used to having many immigrants in the first place. No wonder Mr. Orban can easily exploit the concerns and fears of his country’s citizens, presenting himself as the populist savior of the nation against Brussel’s bureaucrats who, hand-in-hand with the Jew Soros, are engaged in some sinister plan to flood the country with “migrants”.
I am not what you would call a Trekkie, but I always enjoyed Star Trek. The original series remains my favorite, but TNG had its moments, as did Voyager, even Enterprise, for all its flaws. Picard was good, and Strange New Worlds has a chance of being on par with the original series.
But Discovery? I am presently about two thirds of the way through its penultimate episode and it’s… just painful. The tension is artificial, the writing feels shallow and preachy and… what’s this with, “We’re on a clandestine, dangerous mission, one misstep and we’re dead quite possibly along with the entire Federation, so why don’t we just stop and talk about our emotions?”
Seriously, I can only watch this abomination in five-minute chunks. I’ll suffer through the end now that barely more than an episode remains but… Oh well. I know, I know, another first-world problem.
Perhaps the least unsuccessful attempt by ChatGPT/DALL-E to illustrate the divisiveness of forced wokeness on television
And then there’s Dr. Who. I find that I actually like the latest season. Ruby Sunday is a delightful Companion, and Ncuti Gatwa has a chance to be ranked among the best Doctors. That is… if the series’ writers let him? Take the latest episode, Rogue. Within minutes, the Doctor falls in love. Same-sex love. The Doctor! The same Doctor who, in the past history of the series, almost never engaged in romantic relationships. Romantic teases, maybe… But not much more, except perhaps with River Song. But now? Instant infatuation, which, sadly, felt like little more than a cheap excuse for the writers to engage in dutiful woke virtue signaling, you know, same-sex kiss and all. To their credit, in the end they somewhat redeemed themselves, as Rogue’s (the love interest’s) feelings towards the Doctor and respect for the Doctor’s humanity led him to sacrifice himself… And save the episode from self-inflicted doom.
Even so, I wish television writers dropped the urge to outdo one another when it comes to virtue signaling. It’s just too painful to watch at times, even if I assume that it is about more than just ticking some boxes in a checklist, meeting a quota somewhere; that their intentions are the purest and their hearts are in the right place. Not to mention that it is grossly counterproductive: the only thing such blatant wokeness accomplishes is a knee-jerk trigger response by those on the political right, who are already convinced (in the words of someone I know) that “these are not normal times” anymore.
And you know where that leads. If these are not normal times, that means extraordinary means are justified. The autocrat wins in the end, presenting himself as the sole savior of all that is good and decent, in these abnormal times.
So let’s please just stop the forced, virtue-signaling wokeness. It’s not helping to make the world a better, more tolerant place. If it accomplishes anything, it’s the exact opposite.
Say what you want, industrial design today is but a pale imitation of the extravagant design concepts that appeared back in the 1960s.
Here is one example. A Kuba Komet entertainment center from West Germany, manufactured between 1957-1962:
And here is its close cousin, known as the Arkay “Fantasia”, from the United States:
These things were obviously large, obnoxious even. Probably not terribly practical (300 pounds!) Yet they stand out in ways few, if any, modern devices do. We may be surrounded by gadgets that were not even imagined yet back in the early 1960s, we may be having delightful conversations with AI or have video chats with distant friends on other continents, but without the bold, science-fiction inspired visual appearance, our devices appear almost mundane in comparison with these design marvels.
I just finished watching the first season of a remarkable television series on Apple TV: Silo.
I say remarkable because it achieved for me the near-impossible: From the very beginning of the very first episode, I cared about the protagonists. I could identify with them, root for them. Including those who didn’t make it.
I shall try very hard not to spoil the show for those who have not seen all ten episodes yet, but…
It’s like Fallout, except that it’s even better. Fallout is great. I loved the games, I love the TV show. It captures Fallout‘s quirky cynicism and it truly feels like part of the same game universe.
Like Fallout, Silo also depicts a post-apocalyptic world. There is plenty of mystery. Unlike Fallout, there is no quirky humor in Silo. It’s more serious, and also more mysterious. In Fallout, we know right from the onset what caused the devastation. In Silo… let’s just say we know a lot less, and we may not even know what we don’t know.
I can’t wait for season 2 now. If they can maintain the quality of the show, the storytelling, the characters, the visuals… Damn, I sound like some stupid know-it-all TV critic, so let me just say that I liked the show. I wonder if Silo ever gets turned into a (preferably open-world) computer game.
I had a very busy day today. Or make that yesterday, since it’s almost 3 AM already.
I wanted write something about D-day. Eighty years. It’s been eighty years since Americans, Canadians, Britons and others of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy, opening a much-awaited second front in the global struggle against fascist totalitarianism.
The result: An imperfect, yet enduring world order, Pax Americana, which brought historically unprecedented peace, prosperity, and security to the majority of humans living on this planet.
Perfect it was not. Totalitarianism never vanished. Even after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its empire prevailed for another 36 years. Some of the worst excesses of communism were yet to come. And there were wars, big wars: I thought I’d list a few but there were too many. Even so, this was a period of global peace, a rules-based system that endured, beyond expectations I should say: When I was growing up, no sane adult existed anywhere I think who expected the world to survive beyond the year 2000 without a major nuclear war, yet here we are in 2024, and there are still no nuclear wastelands.
But eventually, all good things come to an end. This world order is crumbling. Will we survive without a civilizational catastrophe? I don’t know. I worry. Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan… who knows what else. The retreat of democracy and the rise authoritarianism. The storm is brewing.
Anyhow, enough about D-day. There were some good news. Boeing’s Starliner, though limping a little, made it to the International Space Station. Those astronauts were brave souls. Considering recent news from Boeing, their newfangled attitude towards quality control and safety, I expected, feared rather, a disaster. I am relieved that it has not happened, but NASA should still dump that overpriced, unsafe contraption.
Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX had a major success: Starship completed a full test, involving successful launch and “landing” (onto the ocean for now) of both its first stage and Starship itself. The re-entry was not without challenges, but they made it. This is a big milestone, a very big one. The promise of Starship is basically the holy grail of space travel: Fully reusable, rapidly refurnished vehicles. The fiery reentry was perhaps a bit more dramatic than planned, but the spacecraft made it, and that means that they can learn from the issues and improve both the vehicle and its landing procedure.
And I was only marginally paying attention because I am still struggling with forced upgrades: CentOS 7, the Linux version that I’ve been using since 2016, is coming up EOL (end-of-life) which means I must upgrade. But I cannot upgrade to CentOS because Red Hat turned CentOS into a bleeding edge version of Linux with a short support cycle. Joy. Anyhow, today I managed to complete another milestone of my transition plan, so I may still be able to get everything done in time.
