It's been 12 months of mostly unexpected, partly severe-seeming illnesses - everything but CoVID, so we will omit that in this blog entry, as well! - plus a job change within the last quarter of that dozen, so I have been silent. One reason was also the Ukraine invasion, which left a continuing feeling of incredulity & great sorrow. (Cf. below.)

A lot of pretty serious stuff has piled up, and I have gathered a few backward glances in developments important to me in "chapters" below, but the nearest in a sense have been the events around important - some positively historic! - people this last fortnight:

• End of August, Gorbachev & Ströbele died; one a Russian premier who basically sealed the "fall" of the Soviet union, at the same time making German reunification possible - the other the most famous normal parliamentarian of the Green party, the lawyer Ströbele (cf. an election poster within the last 2 decades, above), who single-handedly "saved" the German Greens from the supposed scandal of repeatedly not having any directly voted-for parliamentarians, as did every other party. He managed to do this from 2002 on, by standing on his particular, partly non-party-conformist manifest, in his Berlin district.

• Trump had to endure a razzia of his Florida resort/home, because as it turned out, he'd decided to keep secret & top secret documents, which weren't his, and may have been seen (illegally) by visiting third parties. Trump's dog star finally seems to be losing his bite, and is barking up against legal odds. But let's not forget, who put him there - Koch millions, & Christian nationalists; and voters who could know better, if they had learnt to consume a spectrum of news sources, instead of low-reputation news channels and a brownish tidewash of (a)social media. Also, I am waiting for the office of the president to be disempowered; Trump's "reign" has shown the world, if not U.S. citizens, apparently, that this concentration of power on one hopefully (!) honourable person has become a seriously bad idea!

• Finally, HRM Elisabeth II died after weeks of illness; the only queen of note I have ever known to any significant degree^ - except perhaps Holland's Beatrix - and so an astonishingly moving vacuum that has formed, inside. I think she could be very strict, but seemed also to be diligent, and truly concerned about keeping what has remained of the Empire together, not for political gain, but it seems to offer a modicum of solidarity in fast-changing, & lately trying, times!

Streaming

I have been a paying subscriber to Netflix since it first appeared in Germany. I sort of like, to this day, the global breadth of offerings this seemingly endless financial fountain for new film (& series) offers, but quite soon after starting got a bitter taste in the mouth when their CEO at the time said in an interview he aimed to destroy cinemas. Probably for this reason, I have never subscribed to another "streamer", since in the end, they all have this aim, it seems; cinemas are still closing down in Germany at an alarming rate (even if this is not quite as apparent here in the capital).

Since important Marvel stuff was in '22 only debuting on DisneyPlus ("D+" from here on in) I talked to a good friend who already had it in subscription, and asked if I could join him now and then to watch some of that stuff - having been a (paper) Marvelite since days of being a wide-eyed 10-year-old! - i.a. also due to the crazily formulated general Terms of Use of D+, much of it unclear. As a give-back, here is a list of worthwhile D+ movies I had promised him at the time:

° SPLASH
° ZOOTOPIA
* Almanya
* Birdman
* Brooklyn
* Color of Money
° Enemy Mine
* Far from the Madding Crowd
* Grand Budapest Hotel
* Hello, Dolly!
° John Carter
* Joy
° Ladyhawke
* Life of Pi
* Master & Commander
° Never let me go
° New Mutants
° Solaris
° Tron
* Westside Story
* Working Girl

These recommendations do not represent universal worth, mostly, but are personal hits, in terms of meaning - perhaps at the time they came out - and impact to/on me. Also having a worthwhile story to tell, something I often find sorely missing in current film fare.

Of the "oldies", Color of Money and Enemy Mine are favourites because they show plain old brilliant casting, and how a story, and the protagonists in it, can turn, and steer the conclusion toward unexpected depths. Apart from that, Color is also brilliantly shot, maybe one of the best "cinematic" films I have ever seen!

Hello, Dolly is the oldest oldie here, and it's to me just a brilliant homage to Barbra Streisand's singing, and introducing her major acting talent, too. (Also an inadvertent homage to Omar Sharif, to the way, in my mind, he really was, also outside the studios...)

Ukraine

Half a terrible year in, I don't know what to say about this, having seen so much atrocious video, heard the pain cried out just a few hundred km's away, read & thought so much about possible motivations... except these short epiphanous visions:

• Russians, as martially inclined and idiotically proud as they seem to be, are probably right to worry about their indefensible ground-level borders with their larger neighbours to the West.
• This does not explain why they have been acting like war criminals in Syria (via the air) and in basically every Ukrainian village & town they briefly occupied, leaving mauled & annihilated civilians in their wake. This they will not live down, for decades on!
• What fools Western nations were to underestimate the hold Russia and a disabled Ukraine have on certain major resources (gas, locally, and wheat, world-wide!). Diversify in future!
• May the people of Kyiv, which I know a little from 2 week-long visits some years ago, and all Ukrainians be allowed to return to some form of industrious normalcy. May both nations get rid of suicidal nationalist tendencies, and old feuds, which have partly fired this conflict.

Climate change ad extremis

(Warning: A "denier" holds forth!) I am aware that things have been pretty different this year and last - quite hot, mostly dry summers in Germany - but I have never said that current climate behaviour, at least Europe-wide and in Southern Africa, is not unusual. I have, several times over the past 15 years or so, also in this blog, doubted that climate change modelled as developing toward no-return-beyond-this-point scenarios is as certain as many - climatologists, politicians, Greenpeace - say. I don't believe CCC (the first C standing for "catastrophic") is inevitable, or even fully controllable; mainly because the planetary surface (above-ground for several km upward) is a huge and highly complex system, and because we haven't yet fully understood how the world's climate engines - esp. Antarctica - work and will react to temperature increase in the mid term.

I am writing this because I happened upon a pretty noteworthy (German!) YT clip, which sounded very credible, but again used statistically "smoothened" graphs about temperature development over the past centuries, where I am unsure, due to some of the (older) critical literature, whether that smoothing is "factual", and not just mathematical/statistical modelling. And predictions in increases in heat are predicted to a near-fatal-looking degree by a fearful world map going into deep red basically everywhere in the 2nd half of this century; this prediction said to be "just as reliable" as the 'hindcast' from the 80's till today, which I strongly doubt. (Here I'll just mention the mathematical method of Taylor series approximation, as a possible way to 'hindcast' a limited set of N measurements to produce a general temperature function f(t), where t is time; one that may however be totally wrong once N goes way up for future measurements.)

My main challenges are still: Show me how this scientific theory is falsifiable. (If you can't, reliably & in the mid term, it isn't really a hard scientific theory, but just a prediction. The previous climatological one - in the 70s, new ice age apparently imminent - was a major fail.) And once you have shown me, let's set down some 95%-sure or better probable values to be measured in future the way they are now, and see how your theory holds up at that future time. Predict/measure/repeat as is usual in hard science, even if it does take a decade or two; and, should the predictions fail more than 5% of the time, let's de-hype CCC a.s.a.p.!

Until then go easy on the equivalence of CCC and the Holocaust, please. (When applying the description "deniers" to both equivalently...)

YT mobbing

One of the things I really hate about Youtube is that people who mob celebrities get so much "air time" (i.e. appear in "personalised" search results). Until this day, old videos about how hated Brie Larson is "in Hollywood" still pop up regularly, even idiotic ones that predicted how badly her 1st MCU outing would fail.

Recently I thought Ms. Heard, re her U.S. trial versus Mr. Depp, was (and, yes, still is) being hit too hard, based on what little reliable evidence there is that Mr. D. was well-behaved after all. Perhaps it's that I liked Mr. D. more in his early films, and less from his "Pirates" phase onward; in the latter, part of his body & speech acting implies constant drunkenness - personality-changing drunkenness is one of the main challenges Ms. H. presented about where their relationship went (violently, she claims) awry. Perhaps it's that I quite liked her in AQUAMAN, and find it sad that she is now apparently being thrown out, there and in many other film projects.

We are probably not even close to 100% in the know about what really went on. But the reputation cooker in Hollywood and its louder orbits runs hot relentlessly. One reason to think about stepping off the celebrity fan train more often in future!

This is the 1-week late July entry...

Berlin cinemas are open, but I am somehow not getting to visit them; once I do, my photo series will continue, promise. There are good movies to be seen, but "catch-up" turn-around is so high, my logistic skills are trumped too often.

Also, I am very sad about what's happening in Afghanistan, esp. to Afghan women & girls. But I am too angry to be able to put it in words (below).

National Velvet

German general elections are coming up in about 7 weeks. These ones are apparently seen to be serious for once; even the typical dumb-U-down posters of the majority party, the CDU, are a little more particular. You can also tell it's all-or-nothing time by the way almost all major parties take part in (other) candidate bashing; whenever a party does that, it becomes non-electable for me. I worry about another demagogic-right party coming in, the "Basis", which is basically the new political arm of the "Anti-Thinkers" anti-vax anti-establishment movement, doing a lot of (maskless (= illegal, BTW)) demonstrating recently.

Stress-tested Berlin G.P.s

General practitioners in the capital are usually not that interested in patients that only have basic medical aid coverage, esp. in a big city where doctors almost always have more patients than they need to bring in a tidy income. And the CoVID phase since beginning of last year has stress-tested their occasionally disorganised practises to an unprecedented degree. My own g.p. has had some kind of hippy takeover in recent months, as note the enfevered statement on their WWW home page; I may just have to "left wing" my bod out of there some time soon. Sad.

An Apple for the Prof.?

Of course I'm a layman re filtering Big Data tactics employed by the big i.t. names (i.a. Facebook, Google) when they dig into uploaded content by their registered users, but when the legendary U.S. watchdog EFF rang the alarm bell on Apple's new "neuralMatch" initiative (which Apple plans to integrate in all its op. systems Real Soon Now, i.e. also on my company iPhone!), I paid attention. Apparently this little patch in your Apple experience allows relatively simple re-parametrisation to let governments into your stuff to filter e.g. for "terrorist" content. A reason to switch off iCloud uploads on your iPhone, i.a., and to look for alternatives to the phone in general, I'm afraid. To all-(better-)knowing giants like Apple I point to the mid-70s writings of a Berlin great, MIT Prof. Weizenbaum on too much "Computer Power", when he warned not to ever give software choosing power over the (further) lives of humans; I include in that neuralMatch's rapid comparison to some central pictorial database, then passing the "stamp this as undesirable" recommendatioon to an over-worked & probably partial committee somewhere, that just flips through the suspects. Digital stamping of "persons of interest" of any kind longer than a few days is as a rule draconian, and a 1st or (worse) 2nd step toward in-by-the-back-door fascism! X-.

CCC "icy math" 101

Catastrophic Climate Change doubters like me (not a "denier", thanks very much*) are of course in a bit of a bind at the moment, sticking to our "take care re the predictive quality of the data" guns - bad fires due to extensive droughts in Greece & the U.S., once-a-century deluges in West Germany (some weeks ago, well over a hundred folk dead) and Turkey (now), and now the mainly pessimistic new IPCC report). I haven't studied either the summary (often politicised in my experience) or the actual report yet, but already see 2 tropes once more wielded by journalists to emphasise the "catastrophic" part of the theory:

• Arctic ice cover dwindling at the moment, and adding to the rise in sea level - sorry, but it doesn't. Ice floating on water has already had its "raising" effect (try it out in a glass of water with ice cubes on a hot day, marking the water level before & after having melted). Ice melting off (e.g. Green)land into the sea is another matter, of course.
• Increase of heat-caused deaths - man, counting the dead is not a pleasant thing to engage in, but I didn't start it. The current reports in that direction in many media basically always ignore the decrease (!) in cold-caused deaths within a 1-year period around that heat high! When more people die of heat than are "saved" by less cold temperatures at other times, let us know! (Otherwise please stop quoting just the one extreme!)

No Friday partygoers for Future viral freedom

Currently the national R0 factor is shooting up & away from the 1.0 value (which means as a rule 1 infected person infects 1 other). It's now above 1.3, and just a few days ago, it was at 1.14. In my layman mind, this factor in essence measures well-behavedness of infected people, who, to give them credit, let's assume, don't yet know of their predicament. If this is true, and since at the moment most infected folk in Germany are twens and teenagers, it means, after seeing how wild similar-age people in i.a. England and the U.S. are currently behaving, usually at big (fun) gatherings, German youths decided to learn the lesson to plunge into the same punky disregard mode, and thus try the CoVID hospitalisation bungee jump. This (also lonely, GenZ'ers!) boomer be not happy, esp. about those of this sub-set that intersect with the other one of people, who used to frequent Friday for Future rallies...

Let's virtually link arms to get to a good Future together. Please.

After a hard downward section in the rollercoast ride of life, mainly due to the third CoVID wave in Germany, I am resurfacing now that normalcy is beginning to return in Berlin...

So perhaps this photo, following, has a second meaning: Flush all that strife and the dark thoughts of the last 6+ months away. All that incredulity & worry - & some anger - about the brainless deeds/words of the G.O.P. (yep, the party leadership as well as the big-baby-screamin' exiting Ex), how people I've known for a long time had turned increasingly petty, Berlin politics, the ugly growing power of streaming, the dissing/overpraising see-saw of "Justice League" movie directors...

(But do read the more optimistic P.S., too!)

CCC won

I want to start this further attempt at scepticism of Catastrophic Climate Change, which is - 15 years after good ol' Al kick-started it with his "Truth" video - seriously becoming en vogue now in all but high finance and crochetry news, with a story that begins quite small.

You see, I like my toilet to smell good & help cleaning efforts, by using a soapy freshener "brick" (yellow & blue on the photo) that gets slightly smaller with each flush - you know that stuff, right? (No need to explain how it works.)

Since a few years the manufacturer of this particular brand offers "refill" bricks for an emptied plastic holder; at first in all supermarkets, now in about 1 in 6. (Hey, no one is talking about plastic straws any more, right?)

Problem is, if you use the refills, your plastic holder has a weakness at its first bend point, where you "hang" it on the rim: After a few months of moving that holder 1-2 times a week (cleaning etc.) it broke at that bend point; 'tis not really designed to last as long as the refills, I warrant... :-P

So I pushed on through and tied the rest of the holder to a string. Now the brick still does what it should for non-solid events; for solid ones you need to remember to first take it out and let it hang free on the side, then put it back after flushing! :-P:-p

Aside from this let's-act-as-if-we-care attitude of the manufacturers, I am however trying to make another point here, entirely: I realised that the way the brick holder moves when doing the non-solid flush is a good example of how complex the physical world can be!

Because, you see, a toilet flushing is a daily example of turbulent flow (of water, in this case). Physicists understood long ago that there's two types of liquid or gas flow we experience - laminar (e.g. when you turn on your tap in a basin, and get a straight smooth jet of water) and turbulent (what happens to the incoming water when you flush your run-of-the-mill toilet). The former is well-described, i.e. predictable by a small set of formulae.

Describing turbulent flow accurately, however, is a no-no, until this day. Of course, we now live in a world where quantum physics tells us that certain data about particles are also always unpredictable; even worse, that an observer, just by looking, influences outcomes. However - as, once again, only a recent set of MCU movies has taught us ;-) - the "quantum world" merely starts at the very tiniest levels at 1/10**23 cm, or smaller. (That last bit was not in the movies...)

But even in the macro world there are physical processes that are so chaotic, that they cannot be precisely described. Getting turbulent flow right would be one of the great challenges still ahead, one of the greatest - incl. quantum - physicists once said, long ago.

I can see that every day! The way the plastic brick holder jumps to the left and the right during a flush is never exactly the same! How many times, how long it will stay on each "side"...

And this is one of the main peeves I have with climate change models. They do concentrate on the surface temperatures of our planet only, but that's still a hell of a large field of study. Are the models really up to simulating all that well enough, to predict interlocking systems behaviour in several decades' time?

Look at the short film provided by the Wikipedia entry on "Atmospheric Boundary Level", which describes the chaotic part of the atmosphere that starts from ground level up. (It's an OGG file you can download; you may have to install VLC player to actually play it.) See all those air flow arrows, with different speeds and temperatures, derived from measurements made in that single month in L.A.?

Complex interactions like this abound on our planet, not only on the surface, but higher up (cloud formation is another deep subject of study) and lower down, esp. in the ocean. (I got onto the latter, by currently incidentally reading HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER for the first time...)

Accurate predictions for complex systems are hard! You can usually measure the accuracy of your predictive theory in percent - for physics experiments, this accuracy needs to be 95% or higher for a thesis to be confirmed as supported by reality. Do you think the CCC models' predictions will ever reach this accuracy (well ahead of time of course, since that's what's being sold to us - our pallid future)?

I'm saying that there's a lot of grey below the CCC black edge, that I get told all CCC believers must remain at. Only the remaining ("few") deniers apparently attempt to handle the grey - or of course just propose it's all complete bullshit, which I for one find foolish.

The world is a wonderfully huge place. Let's dial down our self-hate for all the bad things we've done to it, and get to understanding it better, in every nook. And then act, without panic. Rather than keep repeating one element's name like a prayer in every debate, and ignoring everything else that needs to be done in the eco-system - locally (!) and globally - at the same time. (Like the current droughty days city trees in Germany are experiencing.*)

P.S.: Naturally many good things have also happened in recent months - early inoculation invites, rediscovery of an acqaintance from far Southern times, from decades (!) ago, letting ("ZOOMed") RPG back into my life after a very long hiatus...