Apologies for this meandering piece of …
from Wikipedia – ‘Lagrange points in the Sun-Earth system (not to scale). This view is from the north, such that Earth’s orbit is anti-clockwise’
Living in Australia is such a relief, for someone who can’t afford to choose where in the world he might live, and happily being far from the madding action. I virtually never look at Aussie politics, being strangely and unhealthily drawn to more dysfunctional (IMHO) regions, such as the USA, Putinland, China, the Middle East etc. From my safe perch I can lecture these dysfunctional and brutal regions without fear of any blowback, and yet I fear, somehow, that nobody’s listening…
Global politics is a bit of a mess these days, to state the bleeding obvious. The USA in particular has gotten what it deserves, in boasting that any citizen can become President. Of course it isn’t true, but it’s just another claim used to make those citizens feel superior, even if they’re living in a prison cell.
Lately I’ve been somewhat pre-occupied with the artificiality of nations – of the nation concept. We make things up, and then come to believe in them as real. There are many examples – back in my university days (I was a late-goer to university, commencing in my thirtieth year and hanging around almost to my fortieth) I had a conversation with a bright young friend who pointed out that human rights were a made-up thing, and so…. Of course this is true, but, as I didn’t point out to him, because I’m rather slow-witted – and that’s the advantage of writing, based on reflections in tranquility – the human world is full of made-up things, like groups of buildings we designate as forming a university, or like formations made of wood and other materials that we call tables and chairs and houses.
So what is real? The land beneath our feet. The planet that gravity pushes us into (so gravity is real, it seems). The sun, the moon and the stars, which we now know are also suns. The mysterious universe that we’ve just begun to explore. The world revealed to us by microscopes and so many other technologies – genes, neurons, hormones, an enormous variety of cells and sub-cellular organelles, and of course myriad bacteria and archaea never known to exist until relatively recently. The near-infinite number of simple and complex organisms we share the planet with, including huge numbers that had their heyday, or relatively brief period on earth, long ago, like the Ediacaran biota (first found here in South Australia – and not so brief, they flourished between 600 and 540 million years ago, while we have so far managed well under half a million years, and we surely won’t manage much longer).
And then there are things we’re not quite sure are real (though some are surely more sure than others), such as photons, which are apparently massless particles, surely a contradiction in terms. Let me see, light comes in wave and also particle forms? For mass and energy are related according to Einstein’s equation, which is godlike in its omnipotence. Waves have energy, doubtless, I’ve felt that energy while floating about in the sea. Energy is, apparently, mass multiplied by the constant c, which is the speed of light, multiplied by itself, though I’ve heard that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so…we can convert energy into mass only by means of an equation which is…. impossible, sort of? It would be a matter (bad choice of words) of a teeny-tiny mass being converted, who knows how, into a super-duper quantity of energy, and maybe even vice versa, and I’m not sure if knowing this, if we really do know it, helps us to understand – stuff. But everybody who’s very smart says that it helps us very much to understand stuff, like how space and time are intimately related, because… well, maybe because of that equation, which perhaps also explains how particles can get around without having any mass. And I don’t know if all this is very exciting or just mind-numbing or what. And then there are muons, gluons, colliding hadrons, quarks, neutrinos, bosons and maybe even god particles, for those who are still religious, for god knows what it’s all about. But I’m assured that it’s all more or less calculated so I should just shut up.
So, is all this real? Is dark matter really dark? Is dark energy a matter of expansion? Is the multiverse a bad joke? Is quantum tunnelling just a bore? Is theory just stringing us along?
But seriously, we really are clever – or okay, they, the clever ones – because they’ve landed people on the moon and roving machinery on Mars and placed other machinery at Lagrange points…
Now that’s a subject I want to get clear about. There are five Lagrange points created by the gravitational forces of the sun and our planet – the balance of those gravitational interactions. I’ll quote the clever ones from the European Space Agency to be clear:
There are five other locations around a planet’s orbit where the gravitational forces and the orbital motion of the spacecraft, Sun and planet interact to create a stable location from which to make observations.
But not-so-clever me, when he first conceptualised this, assumed there would be only one of those points, much closer to Earth than the Sun of course, due to the Sun’s bigness. How did they manage to locate/calculate five? The ESA’s description and explanation of these five points (L1 to L5) is intriguing, though it doesn’t answer my question. Here’s their description of L1:
The closer an object is to the Sun, the faster it will move. So, any spacecraft going around the Sun in an orbit smaller than Earth’s will soon overtake our planet. However, there is a loophole: if the spacecraft is placed directly between the Sun and Earth, Earth’s gravity pulls it in the opposite direction and cancels some of the Sun’s pull. With a weaker pull towards the Sun, the spacecraft needs less speed to maintain its orbit, so it can slow down.
I do actually get this, I think, but what about the other Lagrange points (named, by the way, after the Italian turned French astronomer, mathematician and physicist Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)? And also by the way, Lagrangian mechanics is a whole nother field worth exploring, or not).
So, in my own words (sort of), every two-body gravitational system like that of Earth and Sun has five of these points. L1, L2 and L3 are called unstable points, while L4 and L5 are stable. So, those first three are gravitationally unstable, and they align with the Earth and the Sun. L1, being between Earth and Sun, offers an unimpeded view for solar observations. L2, being behind the Earth vis-a-vis the Sun (by about 1.5 million kilometres), is good for viewing deep space, in a direction away from the Sun-Earth-Moon system. So that’s where the Just Wonderful Space Telescope (JWST) is, and where the Nancy Grace Roman will be. Plenty of space apparently (haha), and other probes are stationed there too.
So, onto L3, L4 and L5, and I’m simplifying everything massively here of course. L3 is behind the Sun, from our perspective, and its orbit is just a bit wider than Earth’s. Any probe in that position can observe the far side of the Sun… which makes me wonder, does the Sun spin? Well, according to AI (never lies) it most certainly does:
Yes, the sun rotates on its own axis.However, because it is a giant ball of plasma and not a solid object like Earth, it spins at different speeds depending on the latitude and depth.
- The Equator: Spins the fastest, taking about 24.5 Earth days to complete one rotation.
- The Poles: Spin the slowest, taking over 34 days to complete one rotation.
- The Core: Rotates as a solid body much faster, turning about once a week.
Also, Lagrange points have much to do with the three body problem, which I may or may not get into. I can guess at least what the three bodies would be, re Lagrange points that is, for our region – the Sun, the Earth, and, say, JWST….
Anyway, I think I’ve meandered long enough. Maybe next time I’ll discombobulate myself with further details.
References
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/What_are_Lagrange_points
https://www.space.com/does-the-sun-rotate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point#/media/File:Lagrange_points_simple.svg
How’s Burma/Myanmar doing?
Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh
As an impoverished elder I only get to travel though reading, and it’s also safer. Currently I’ve been re-reading Thant Myint-U’s The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, which I first read in 2021, and now I’m reading it again for the first time, if you know what I mean. I vaguely recall the place being something of a hot mess, with the very distinguished author ending on a hopeful ‘things can only get better’ note. It was all about generals ruling things – never a good sign – and a worry about China – always a bad sign. Still, the author was optimistic, because… why not?
I must say my renewed interest in the situation there is likely to do with the book Escape from Manus by the Burmese Rohingyan refugee Jaivet Ealom. I’m interested in finding out how thing are going, genocidally, for these Moslem people in the south-west coastal region of that predominantly Buddhist country. I’m not hopeful.
So, before we get to the Rohingyas, and the Arakanese (it’s quite confusing, and Arakan is now called Rakhine, bordered by the Arakan mountains to the east), Burma in general still seems a mess, and as far as I’m aware it’s quite an artificial country – but aren’t they all? Who created the borders of the sub-Saharan African countries? Of Afghanistan, with its Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and such? Or the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen of Iraq?
But getting back to the topic – Burma or Myanmar? They’re both quite ancient terms, used more or less interchangeably, perhaps within different contexts, but Myanmar recently has been associated with the stink of the military dictatorship, which has continually suppressed democratic movements, and even governments, so I prefer to follow Thant Myint-U’s lead in calling it Burma. Whatever, with a population around twice that of Australia, it continues to be the least developed country in the region. It was a British colony from the early-mid 19th century, and attained independence in 1948. I would say that, before British colonisation, it wasn’t so much a country, in our modern sense, as a region, containing many ethnic, language and religious cultures, as was Australia and the Americas before the arrival of the palefaces.
Anyway, since 1948, there has been very little in the way of peace and tranquility in the region/country, and the military under a series of blokes has been notoriously dominant in its politics. This no doubt has much to do with the near-impossibility of moulding together such a congeries of peoples without a firm, manly and generally oppressive hand – or so the military think. Which brings me to the ups and downs of its most well-known citizen, the now 80-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, currently serving an interminable sentence, apparently under house arrest for the time being, but things can always change at the whim of the military. Her global reputation has been tarnished in recent decades due to her attitude towards the Rohingya people, whom she refuses to recognise as Rohingya, or as a real Burmese ethnicity. It all seems to be about Buddhist-Islamic tensions. Sadly, her oddly inhumane response to this issue has lost her quite a few supporters in the west, but her treatment at the hands of the military, which continues to undermine democratic movements – the latest coup occurring in 2021 – has been unremittingly harsh. From Wikipedia:
According to reports published on Democratic Voice of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was moved to an undisclosed location from house arrest around October 2025. In December 2025, Aung San Suu Kyi’s son, Kim Aris, stated that nobody had heard from Aung directly since 2023, only being given second-hand information from the junta. As a result, he stated that he feared that she was dead.
On 17 April 2026, Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence was reduced to 22.5 years as part of a general wave of amnesties and commutations by Min Aung Hlaing’s Union Government of Myanmar during Thingyan [Burmese New Year]. On 30 April, the military government reduced her sentence by one-sixth and commuted it to house arrest; she will continue to serve the remaining 18 years and 9 months of her sentence at a designated residence. A photo of her was also broadcast by state media for the first time in years.
Not that a photo proves anything. However, a tiny commutation of such a ridiculous sentence for an 80-year-old winner of the Nobel Peace Prize proves a great deal about Burma’s current regime.
Burma is a country of serious and widespread poverty, and income inequality due to successive corrupt military governments, and going back to the days of the British Empire. You could, of course, say that it’s more a region than a country, largely created by the British, but then all countries are human inventions, something we forget, what with all the palaver about passports and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants, and sovereignty and the like.
Today, Burma is fake-democratic, as an election held earlier this year was won by the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a front for the all powerful and all corrupt military (heavily backed by China), which had seized power four years before, sending 3-4 million people packing, both within and outside its borders. It’s a terrible mess, in which scum has risen to the top and poverty and despair abounds.
And what about the Rohingyas? A huge proportion of them are now in Bangladeshi refugee camps, in flimsy makeshift dwellings subjected to powerful monsoon storms, though some half a million remain in Burma, where they have no status whatsoever. Many try to escape by sea, to parts unknown, to escape the violence visited upon them by the Buddhist majority. And in general the region – I mean the whole of Burma/Myanmar – has become so benighted and dangerous that many international aid organisations have given up on it.
References
Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-31/myanmar-election-won-by-military-backed-usdp-party/106290376
https://www.unrefugees.org/news/rohingya-refugee-crisis-explained/
Back to bonobos, and remembering Kanzi
Here’s looking at you, kid
So, back to bonobos, and the question, how/why did they become female dominant? My guess, which I think is a reasonable one, has always been that they managed, after their separation from chimps due to the formation of the Congo River a couple of million years ago, to find themselves in a region of abundance, in terms of fruit and nuts and small game, so that physical strength wasn’t such an advantage for basic survival (a situation that the WEIRD world finds itself in today, just saying). They seemed to huddle together more, which led to a discovery of erogenous zones, adding to a sense of fellow-feeling. Mmmm. A situation that the WEIRD world does not find itself in today, what with the boxes we live in and the clothes we wear. And our consequent sense of privacy. And all that religious indoctrination, re Sodom and Gomorrah, etc .
So, that fellow-feeling seems to have made bonobos less murderously violent – though they are violent, generally in a protective way, females ganging up against obstreperous males, since the males are still on average the weightiest gender, though that’s apparently reducing. And they’re pretty strong on rough-and-tumble play like chimps, and us, when we’re allowed to be.
A quick bit of research on the reasons for the differences chimes with what I’ve just written – abundance and closeness makes for less work and greater intimacy. And maybe there’s something about females being more of a sisterhood – and that may be because physical, genito-genital rubbing is more pleasurable between females than between males, or between males and females. I suspect that exploring this sexual side – this sexual explanation for the ultimate female supremacy of bonobos – has not been taken very far because of our own sexual coyness. We prefer to think of it as just a matter of hanging out, of females preferring each others’ company in a natural, non-sexual way, or because they share the joys and labours of motherhood….
But I’ve been neglecting my job, and ignoring research findings. From Medical News Today (strangely enough) way back in 2019:
Recently, researchers from various academic institutions — including the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Dummerstorf, Germany, Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, and the University of Zurich in Switzerland — have been looking into why female bonobos display same-sex sexual behaviors. The researchers’ interest in female bonobos in particular arose from the fact that in the wild, all adult females engage in genito-genital rubbing (rubbing the genitals together) on a frequent basis. Although males also engage in same-sex sexual behavior, they do so with less frequency, making the females’ behavior even more remarkable by contrast.
So, there you go, but I must say I don’t find the bonobos’ female-female stuff remarkable. Girl-girl frottage in humans is much more common than the male variety, surely? Or am I just fantasising?
But this above-quoted article has really got me hooked. A key to it all is oxytocin:
After sexual interactions with other females, female bonobos also displayed higher levels of oxytocin in the urine. The same, however, did not occur after they had mated with males. Female bonobos, it seems, derive more pleasure from sexual engagement with other females. This may also allow them to establish themselves as equal to the males in the community — by sticking together.
Not just equal, but superior through force of numbers. Sisterhood is powerful, and female humans take note – more of the genito-genital stuff! More sex and less offspring, surely not such a bad idea. But then, there’s so much non-sexual stuff to deal with – the precise rate of expansion of the universe, and is our universe the only one, and just why is there something rather than nothing, and are such questionings worthwhile, shouldn’t we just shut up and calculate?
All of which makes me wonder – does too much sex, re bonobos, make you stupid? Should we be proud of our ability to sublimate (in the Freudian sense)? Is knowledge more important than kindness? Hmmm. Here’s a quote from the abstract of a 2010 study entitled ‘Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees’:
We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
Hardly a surprising finding, though I’m not quite sure what ‘social causality’ means. And quite apart from these social findings, there’s a famous individual example – Kanzi, dubbed, rather ridiculously in my view, ‘the smartest ape that ever lived’ in a video referenced below. Whoever wrote that title seemed not to realise that humans are 100% ape, and also that many of the skills Kanzi learned from his human masters had little to do with the kind of intelligence required to survive and thrive in the bonobo world, not the human one.
Nevertheless, the Kanzi story is fascinating, and it’s unlikely that he was particularly exceptional, though the few bonobos that were also taught similar skills didn’t perform as well. Not only did he come to understand quite a lot of human language, but displayed a ‘theory of mind’, a recognition of others’ mental states as different from one’s own (though this concept seems a bit dicey – even a dog recognises when her master is angry or upset). His ability to chip away at rocks to make effective stone tools was particularly noteworthy and thought-provoking, though it’s likely that the spark for this would’ve come from human minders, and there’s an obvious question about whether he found such tools useful for his own survival, as he spent his life in captivity, without ever having to fend for himself.
Overall, though, Kanzi, who died last year in his mid-forties, has been something of a bridge-builder between human apes and our closest ape relatives. His ability to communicate effectively with humans raises lots of fascinating questions and hopes, especially as he was only a male, too stupid to lord it over the females of his own species. And writing this reminds me of a young, intelligent woman who I befriended at university back in the 90s. She, too, fell for the view that men were more naturally intelligent than women, on average. Such is the legacy of patriarchy.
References
https://www.bonobos.org/blog/bonobos-and-chimps-the-story-of-the-great-divide/
some meandering complaints about our world
It’s a well-known fact, though it should be better known, that being super-rich makes you indifferent to the financial struggles of others. Frump, for example, is very crookedly wealthy and takes advice, if he ever takes advice, from wealthy cronies and tries as best he can to place them in positions of power, and yet his impoverished MAGA fans still think he’s the greatest being in the multiverse. Yes, he’s looking bad percentage-wise, but I’m talking about hardcore MAGA fans who will go down with the ship.
This indifference, and selfishness, of the Elon Skums of the world should always be borne in mind when examining your own government and its advisors. Take note, as I have, of libertarian types, as they’re generally into ‘every bloke for himself’ (it’s a very blokey ‘philosophy’, pace Ayn Rand). And, just as an aside, one of the great joys of life consists of telling a libertarian, in no uncertain terms, that ‘free will’ is a myth, and then watching them boil over with rage.
The difficulty of course, with all governments, is that the powerful, aka the rich, are the ones whose voices are most heard. Their voices always rise ‘above the fray’ somehow, and their ‘magical’ wealth always suggests that they have something better to offer to government than any random street protestor.
So what happens when just about everyone in government is super-rich? This happens in Putinland of course, because he’s basically the only one in government, and the same goes for other bizarro ‘governments’ like Turkmenistan and North Korea.
And then there’s the USA…
It’s so hard to ignore that country, it casts its bleak shadow everywhere, especially in the WEIRD world. And of course it has plenty of billionaires, and the biggest rich-poor gap in the west. And considering its extreme jingoism, and ‘rugged individualism’, that’s never going to change. Its Presidential system is the best/worst example of that individualism. It’s basically an elected Kingship – I’m sure I’ll never see a Queen of the USA in my lifetime. And will they learn from the Frump disaster and develop a more distributed, inclusive political power system? Never never never. And I wouldn’t care but they interfere so much with other countries, pushing their weight around so that we have to sully ourselves by negotiating with them. Australia, at least, is at a safer distance than most. We need to keep minding our own business, but that’s hard, and it could be that their next King is reasonable enough to draw us in against our better judgment.
I’m meandering on with this, but it seems to me that the human world has become a more unpleasant place over the last few decades, at least politically. Crises will grow – climate change, the nuclear threat (Hiroshima-Nagasaki is fading in the public memory, and I recently heard someone suggesting nuking Putinland), the failing of internationalism, it all seems to be going the wrong way. I wish I had some decent, non-political focus to take me away from it all, to some calm, steady Lagrange point where I can indulge in purely autistic speculations.
Perhaps I should focus more on the local, Australian scene, but then I’m such a global citizen (sigh), and I suppose I’m too old and set in my income and circumstances (barring some sudden accident or disease, etc) to be too self-concerned. In Australia the arguments are about tax levels, and there is a concern about extreme right movements drawing their ‘inspiration’ from MAGA (I just now typed into Youtube ‘how do I get rid of Sky News from my Youtube feed’ and the result was a whole heap of Sky News videos. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but….). I do have concerns about Australia’s stance re the ridiculous but dangerous Frump declaration of war against Iran, and I worry about the government’s positioning on the David and Goliath Israel-Palestine conflict, with anti-semitism claims being tossed around like confetti. As to domestic politics I suppose I should be ashamed to say I’m mostly woefully ignorant, though the NDIS cuts have caused serious concern among friends with a severely mentally impaired son (a very rare trisomy), and I’m concerned, as I’ve written before, about funding going to private schools from our largely private school-educated MPs. And we also have a rise in MAGA-type noises from the rabid right, which will no doubt subside when Frump carks it.
Anyway, that’s enough meandering, I’ll try ro find something more substantial to write about next time.
See also
sovereign borders and all that
I’m reading Jaivet Elom’s book Escape from Manus with great interest as well as a kind of horror and shame, as a ‘naturalised’ Australian who knew about the treatment of asylum seekers or ‘boat people’ as they were often called, and their treatment at the hands of various Australian governments, beginning with that of Johnny Howard, and his more or less triumphant, ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. I compare this to a wounded or crippled individual who lies collapsed on my front lawn, and me going out and shushing her away, with ‘I will decide who enters my property and the state of health in which they do so.’
Nobody wants to be a refugee, obviously, but Palestinians, Kurds, Congolese, Hazaras, Uyghurs and Rohingyas, to name a few, often find themselves without other options. Jaivet Elom is a Rohingya, a Moslem ethnic group that has now moved, or been moved, more or less holus-bolus from north-western Burma to Bangladesh after decades of being treated like absolute shit by the predominantly Buddhist Burmese people and government, for reasons unknown to me. I first learned about their plight some years ago on reading Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma (the author rejected the name ‘Myanmar’, because of its association with the brutal military takeover of that multi-ethnic state), and Elom’s account only reinforces my sense of shock and outrage at their treatment.
So now I’ve read the whole of Elom’s unputdownable book, my book of the year so far, and I can hardly imagine any work that will inspire me more. It tells me that with enough intelligence, perseverance, support and luck, an occasional individual can survive and escape even the worst conditions a hostile state can impose on them. If only I could keep Johnny Howard, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, Scott ‘Skummo’ Morrison, Peter Dutton and other gate-keepers and their minions under lock and key until they have read, aloud, every word of this book.
So has Australia improved or softened its policies towards refugees in any way over the past few years? Have its decision-makers felt any embarrassment or shame about Elom’s revelations? Of course there are those who argue that the harsh policies of successive Australian governments have been effective in stopping the boats. Yes, this is true, treating people like lumps of shit that need to be flushed down the toilet will tend to make other people who hear about it want to avoid you. It’s hardly a great insight. But at least Elom’s book shows that he and many of his fellow Manus and Christmas Island prisoners have been decent people who deserved far better than the contemptuous treatment they received from my fellow Australians.
Anyway, the Australian government continues its pretentiously-titled ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ program, though the boat arrivals, or attempted arrivals, seem to have dropped to around the level of zero, but was such a draconian and essentially inhumane approach necessary? Yes, it seems to have been popular with Australians – I looked at a program discussing Ealom’s book from four years ago, and one brief comment pointed out that the policy of successive governments had been effective in stopping the boats. It garnered many more likes than posts about the cruelty and callousness of it all. But it surely doesn’t take much thought to realise that if every country treated escapees from genocide or ethnic cleansing this way, then…. what? How could they justify their humanity?
So with the continuation of this program (there have, according to AI, been successful ‘interventions’ this year, with ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ being sent to ‘regional processing centres’ in Nauru and elsewhere, and the Indonesian government has often voiced its displeasure. New Zealand has accepted hundreds of these refugees, and hundreds more are in Australia as ‘transitory persons’ on temporary arrangements – a kind of grudging acceptance, it seems).
It would be great if we could have some binding international laws to protect people escaping from nightmare scenarios from being subjected to further nightmare scenarios in another country, but, looking at the current international scene, we’re about as far from that kind of maturity as we’ve ever been.
References
Jaivet Ealom, Escape from Manus: the untold true story, 2021
Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019
DNA, Aboriginal Australians, dating and voyaging
Speculated migratory routes in the days of Sahul – no dates given, probably wisely
I watched a documentary this morning that was more confusing than enlightening, about the travels and wanderings of ancient humans including those who arrived in the land we now call Australia, perhaps as far back as 60,000 years ago. So I write this to try to clarify things for myself. Wikipedia presents the study on all this as ongoing, which is in accord with the documentary. Years ago, the story went that claims of a 60,000 year history here were exaggerated, and a figure close to 40,000 years was presented. But here’s a Wikipedia update:
While there have been genomic studies placing arrival as late as 43,000 years ago, a 2025 study suggests that the peopling of Australia happened around 60,000 years ago, via two distinct routes.
In those early days there was a continent we’ve called Sahul, with Australia being joined to New Guinea and other islands, including perhaps Tasmania in the south, so it was via a mixture of island-hopping and crossing land bridges that these people arrived from South-East Asia. With sea levels rising at the start of the Holocene, around 12,000 years ago, these people became more isolated on the mainland.
But DNA studies are muchly complicating the picture, and even the most basic research into this (by me) shows that there’s plenty of nastiness in the air about the first Aboriginal arrivals in this land – especially from white Aussies, whoda thunkit. For me, of course, it isn’t a life-and-death matter as to whether the first human arrivals occurred 50,000 or 65,000 years ago, or earlier, or later. What’s most interesting is that DNA is showing that our ancestors were on the move earlier and more regularly than was previously thought. A research article published in Science Advances in late November last year (2025), with some 26 authors named, has this to say in its abstract:
Here, we exhaustively analyze an unprecedentedly large mitogenome dataset (n = 2456) encompassing the full range of diversity from the indigenous populations of Australia, New Guinea, and Oceania, including a lineage related to those of New Guinea in an archaeological sample from Wallacea. We assess these lineages in the context of variation from Southeast Asia and a reevaluation of the mitogenome mutation rate, alongside genome-wide and Y-chromosome variation, and archaeological and climatological evidence. In contrast to recent recombinational dating approaches, we find support for the long chronology, suggesting settlement by ~60 ka via at least two distinct routes into Sahul.
So, a mitogenome dataset looks at large mitochondrial DNA sequences, and Wallacea relates to the Wallace line through central Indonesia, and it’s ‘defined by deep-water straits and high biodiversity endemism, acting as a “living laboratory” of evolution’ (Wikipedia). I’m obviously no expert, but even a little reading tells me that mutation rates are both key and highly contested. The article is long and highly technical and will undoubtedly be controversial, but it seems there has for a while been a mismatch between archaeological and fossil records and what has been understood from the genomics, and this study has found a way to combine them more or less satisfactorily. How this will eventually play out is of course another story. What it also suggests, I think, is that there has been more than one long-ago movement into Sahel from different points north, and that humans have been effective voyagers for longer than we previously thought possible. And right now I’m pondering over how I can get my head around it all….
Anyway, this is just an intro, I’ll explore this further in future posts
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians
https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/home/the-myth-of-65-thousand-years-the-genetic-dna-of-aboriginals (a strange mixture of science and racism)
kleptocracies galore
Just an image what I stole from the net
So a little discussion between Anne Applebaum and other public intellectuals on the rise of kleptocracy, which I’ve been aware of for some time (it’s nothing if not obvious), has made me think I should know more, as always.
The USA has, supposedly (I don’t trust the process) elected a long-term capitalist criminal to be its elected monarch for another four years. No other WEIRD country would allow a person with his criminal record to hold such a position. Not only that, no other WEIRD country has such a quasi-monarchical position on offer.
But I’ve pointed out the massive failings of the USA’s federal political system many times, and I won’t go over it again. In this piece I want to home in on finance, something I know very little about, poor me. And I won’t write about Frump, because enough is enough.
So, it’s my very educated guess that the world’s biggest kleptocracy is Putinland, a nation that has never known democracy, and is as far from that seemingly ‘best of a bad lot’ political system as it’s ever been. Putin’s wealth is so poorly known that it can easily be claimed that he’s the wealthiest despot on Earth, and I’m inclined to believe it, but proving it is well-nigh impossible. Elon Skum is usually described as the world’s richest, and he certainly wants to be, but Putin – though he also wants that reputation, has good reason to need to be thought of as the ultimate servant of his nation, rather than a robber baron. So he’s in something of a bind, poor thing. Anyway, his net worth (I’m talking about money here, not any other kind of worth, haha) is one of the planet’s less interesting mysteries. Or as one news agency put it, ‘Tracking his exact wealth is described as one of the most difficult challenges in wealth management’. The late Karen Dawisha wrote a book, Putin’s Kleptocracy, published in 2018, but I won’t be reading it. I just hope we’ll be rid of him soon.
And then there’s Xi Xinping. the ‘anti-corruption’ President, apparently for life, of China. Corruption has for decades been endemic in China’s elites, as is to be expected in closed societies, but Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is about much more than wealth accumulation, it’s about what might be called ‘ideological’ corruption, deviation from the Party line – which is presumably whatever Xi says or thinks it is. There has long been, however, a disciplinary body called the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), which, presumably, Xi, as President, controls. This quote from an article from the Hudson Institute summarises it:
The CCDI investigates and issues verdicts on potential corruption cases before matters go to the courts (which are also branches of the Communist Party). For the CCDI, corruption encompasses a far broader range of activities than what the term usually refers to in the West. The anti-corruption campaign is more like a “party discipline drive” in which the party often punishes ideological deviance and managerial incompetence equally alongside conventional acquisitive crimes. Therefore, observers often cannot know whether China is prosecuting someone because of genuine corruption, or whether corruption charges are supplementary to the more substantive crime of having infringed party discipline—a term that, uncoincidentally, has become increasingly synonymous with fealty to Xi and his political agenda.
So, corruption and kleptocracy aren’t quite the same things, but – well, yes, they are. And of course it’s more likely to happen in closed societies like Russia, China and the USA’s gazillionnaire society, which now rules that country. Even when a US media organisation tried to publicise the Xi family wealth, the threats issued were so serious that they had to back off. What we do know, though, is vomit-inducing enough. After all, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’, as Britain’s Lord Acton put it. It is this unlimited, un-scrutinised power that is the problem, more than the individuals themselves. So, if you want to know more about the Xi family luxury and corruption, read the relevant article in the references.
The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is another front-runner in the kleptocracy and corruption race. He’s just coming up to 12 years in power, which is itself an unacceptably long period in a supposed democracy, IMHO. His government repeatedly discriminates against Muslims, and has followed a neoliberal agenda, creating a much larger rich-poor gap, a rise in unemployment, a decline in public health spending etc etc. His government also bungled its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a second wave of infections that was more deadly than the first. His government has refused to accept the WHO’s estimate of deaths from COVID-19 (almost ten times that of the Modi government).
But back to kleptocracy. Modi hobnobs with the filthy rich, and I do mean filthy. And it’s not just Indian wealth moguls that have benefitted. It’s complicated, as this excerpt from a November 2025 article in The Wire shows:
Take India’s purchase of Russian crude oil. Consequent on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and precipitate fall in its crude prices due to sanctions, India ramped up Russian oil imports from 0.2% to 35-40% of its total imports. This resulted in huge savings of up to US $17 billion through discounted purchases. But the price paid for cocking a snook at international disapprobation was US President Donald Trump slapping an extra 25% tariff on Indian exports, seriously crippling our textiles, gems, carpets and pharmaceutical exports and rendering thousands of workers unemployed….
To put it plainly, the decision to import Russian crude oil has richly benefitted oligarchs but it has seriously damaged the interests of exporters and tens of thousands of workers who’ve lost their jobs. A textbook example of an oligarchic kleptocracy at work – but there’s no outrage.
One could go and on about this. In every country that prides itself on being capitalist – and even some, like China, who don’t – the rich are getting far richer and the rest are getting nowhere. I’ve focussed on some of the most obvious examples, but there are plenty more, known and, I’m sure, unknown to me. For the sake of our humanity, and the many who are exploited, ethnically disadvantaged and oppressed, we need to and we can do so much better…
References
https://www.hudson.org/corruption/six-myths-about-china-anti-corruption-campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Modi
https://thewire.in/government/corruption-festers-in-india-but-no-outrage-in-modi-raj
stuff about the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope
Roman in the purple haze
So I’m at a loss to find anything to write about, as often happens, as there’s nothing I’m really knowledgeable about, and global politics is generally too awful to take seriously, but I must needs keep writing, for what else am I good for?
This morning I’ve been listening to people at NASA or is it Goddard talking to informed members of the public about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, aka Roman, which I’ve vaguely heard about before, but this was all very exciting talk about it being launched around September, way ahead of schedule and under budget. So look out, dark matter, dark energy and the multiverse, here we come.
I’ve recently heard people I know – not the most sciencey people on the planet – going on about the Artemis missions as ‘been, there, done that’ and a money-wasting ‘nothingburger’, but given some of the shite happening here on Earth, one can’t help indulging the fantasy of getting away from it all. And I couldn’t help feeling a pang of envy for the Goddard people in their happy bubble of space enterprise. Beam me up, I say – or is it down?…
But the Roman really does seem a fantastical piece of machinery, worth exploring. First, though, who was Nancy Grace Roman? Well, sadly she died on Christmas Day, 2018 – a bit of a downer for the family, but then she was 93. She was an astronomer, and NASA’s chief of astronomy in the 70s, an important figure in planning the Hubble Space telescope, an educator, and an advocate for sciencey women, so, what with the Vera Rubin and the Just Wonderful Space Telescope (didn’t catch on, sadly), women are creeping closer to space dominance. The news conference I listened to was full of optimistic excitement and pride. The launch is set for September, for a Sun-Earth orbit at Lagrange point 2.
So, onto Lagrange points, which I used to understand, I think. They’re points of gravitational equilibrium between two massive orbiting bodies, in this case the earth and the sun. They’re a place of balanced forces, perfect for a relatively small body such as a spaceship, or a space telescope, to make a stable home. There are five Lagrange points in the orbital plane of the earth-sun system, which is standard for any such large body system. So, getting out of the earth’s atmosphere has obvious advantages for clear viewing, what with Rayleigh scattering, ozone absorbing UV light, and other problems.
The Roman is particularly an advance on the Hubble, as they’re similar types, with the Roman having a much wider field of view. And then there’s the Vera Rubin, which I’m sure I’ll get round to (this is all just a self-education vid).
But now for the coronagraph. From Wikipedia:
A coronagraph is a telescopic attachment designed to block out the direct light from a star or other bright object so that nearby objects – which otherwise would be hidden in the object’s bright glare – can be resolved.
I’m listening to/watching a video from three years ago featuring a Dr Vanessa Bailey, who is clearly very excited and also very knowledgeable about the Roman and its coronagraph – doubtless even more excited now as the launch date has been put forward to September this year, instead of 2017. It gets very technical for a know-nothing like me, but I intend to watch it more than once as well as reading up on coronagraphs and the Roman on Wikipedia etc. I feel something coming on as I try to process this stuff, a real sense of excitement, not so much about weird physics, massless particles, strangeness and charm, and the multiverse, but habitable planets, and exoplanets in general. No doubt Roman will be charged with duties other than exploring exoplanets, but the expansion of our exoplanet discoveries since the nineties has excited me more than anything else in astronomy.
So I’ve given Wiki’s brief description of a coronagraph above, and it’s clear from that description that coronagraphs will be key to locating and exploring exoplanets (6,273 confirmed as of April 23 2026, and many more yet to be confirmed, and AI never lies). Apparently the Roman will be equipped with a ‘next generation’ coronagraph – essentially there are two types, solar and stellar – and with the Roman it’s about stellar coronagraphs, which are intended to block or reduce light from all stars or bright objects other than the sun. The telescope itself is similar in size to Hubble, but Dr Bailey points out that Roman’s field of view will be such that it will be able to do ‘in one shot’ what would require dozens of shots from Hubble, and this wide field will help with exploring dark matter and dark energy. The coronagraph will have a one hundred-fold greater sensitivity than that of Hubble.
We get into heavy detail at this point, Fraser Cain, the interviewer, being way more nerdy – I mean expert – about this stuff than me, what with F-numbers (reference below), which have much to do with field-of-view and clarity, and gravitational lensing and its possible connection with dark matter, and other distortions.
So, the coronagraph. The whole purpose of this one is as a ‘technology demonstrator’. To quote Dr Bailey:
by the 2040s, NASA wants to be imaging Earth-like planets around nearby Sun-like stars to search for life – I mean, we’re talking single-pixel, very fuzzy images, we’re not talking continents and clouds, but even to be able to detect Earth-like planets at all, you’re trying to find something that’s ten billion times fainter than its host star – incredibly close at least in terms of its angular separation. What Hubble can do, in terms of its coronagraph, is on the order of a million times fainter – which is phenomenal, it lets us see young hot glowing Jupiters, that are still emitting plenty of light from the heat of their formation process, but that’s nowhere near what we need for those ‘exo-Earths’. So the Roman coronagraph is going to be an intermediate generation of instrumentation – we hope we’ll definitely achieve at least 10 million to one detection limits for a planet that’s 10 million times fainter than its star – our goal is to do 100 million to one, closer to a billion to one…
All of which sounds pretty exciting to me, except that I’ll be turning 90 around the middle of the 2040s – gotta get that little cough under control. Dr Bailey continued to detail aspects of the coronagraph which go way beyond my comprehension, having only looked through a basic little telescope once or twice in my life, a most pleasant memory. Apparently the Roman coronagraph will have around a hundred times the sensitivity of Hubble, which will presumably lead to far more habitable zone planets being detected and surveyed for any interesting anomalies or signs of – I dare not speak its name. and of course there will be other possibilities relating to dark matter and other mysteries. For example measuring the shapes and perhaps the more detailed activities of galaxies may throw more light onto dark matter, so to speak.
And of course I remember those first exoplanet discoveries in the 1990s, and the sudden knowledge, for me at least, that every one of the zillions of stars out there was a solar system. I’m not sure if Hubble was essential to those first discoveries, but it’s probable. A NASA website on Hubble is fascinating on this, so I’ll just quote:
For a long time, scientists thought that other planetary systems were likely to resemble our own. But humanity was in for an eye-opening revelation about what constituted a run-of-the-mill planetary system. The first exoplanet discovered was a “hot Jupiter,” or a Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting astoundingly close to its star ― only 5 million miles (8 million km). That’s closer than Mercury is to our Sun.
The variety of new types of planets that poured in were astounding. In addition to many hot Jupiters, astronomers found:
- Super-Earths: Rocky planets more massive than Earth, but lighter than Neptune
- Hot Neptunes: Neptune-size planets in tight orbits around their stars
- Mini-Neptunes (or sub-Neptunes): Roughly Neptune-size planets thought to have solid inner cores and dense helium-hydrogen atmospheres
- Ultra-hot Jupiters: Jupiter-like gas giant planets orbiting so close to their stars that their temperatures exceed 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot to vaporize most metals
- Super Puffs: Young planets with the density of cotton candy. Their hydrogen/helium atmospheres are so bloated they are nearly the size of Jupiter, but their mass is only several times that of Earth
So, that’s enough excitement for now, and it’s only the beginning. This is something I hope to follow, if health allows.
References
NASA News Conference: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is Complete
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope
How Nancy Grace Roman’s Coronagraph Will Revolutionise Planet Hunting (Fraser Cain interview with Dr Vanessa Bailey)
Who are the Palestinians?
There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state?
Golda Meir, President of Israel, 1969
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank, 1944
As I’ve pointed out a few times before on this blog, nations are a human invention, and quite a recent one. Here in Australia, we became a ‘state’ in 1901, when the British government decided they’d had enough of governing our land by proxy from the other side of the world. France and Germany’s borders were obviously still under question during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, and Germany was two nations from 1949 to 1990. Italy became a nation-state in 1861, Switzerland in 1848, Austria in 1804 (as a central part of the Austrian Empire – it didn’t become a sovereign state in its current form until 1955). The borders of the Chinese and Russian ‘states’ have changed regularly over the centuries, more or less entirely due to warfare and pillage.
I should also point out that humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for some 99.9% of that time – or is it more? – have done quite well without the need for nations. And the land has existed for some 4 billion years, in different shapes and sizes, without being ‘owned’ by anything resembling a human.
The remarks by Golda Meir quoted above (and often repeated by her) were obviously made without a trace of irony, considering that there had never been an Israeli or Jewish state before it was imposed on the people of the region after massive dispossession and bloodshed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In any case there is no doubt that Palestine is a place. As such, it is mentioned by Herodotus in his 5th century BCE histories. Before that, the region was called Philistia, the land of the Philistines, dating back another 7 centuries, and even before that, the land of Canaan. People lived there, as they did in Australia some 40 to 50 thousand years ago, and made it their own. Of course, they didn’t have a state. Such a concept didn’t exist before the modern era.
Years ago, I had a friend who wrote about and essentially complained about what he called ‘heavy culture’. I was inclined to agree, and that was some years before I joined a humanist organisation, as a kind of statement to myself that I considered common humanity to be more important, far more important, than nation or ethnicity.
Of course, that kind of thinking raises the question – what do we do with culture? What is culture, exactly? Think of unique cultural products, like kimonos or didgeridoos, which, over time, and sometimes grudgingly, get to be shared with cultural ‘outsiders’. And think of language, perhaps the most central cultural product. Nobody really knows how many there have been, but it’s in the tens of thousands, at least. Is it a tragedy that most of them are no longer spoken? Is it a tragedy that most of the gods we’ve invented are no longer worshipped? Is the movement away from religion, particularly in the WEIRD world, a form of evolution?
But I digress. The Palestinian people have suffered death, destruction and humiliation through the latest settler colonialist venture, just when we thought we were done with all that shite. And to be honest I’m not quite sure that when people talk of the state of Israel they’re not talking about the 51st state of the USA. That country has poured billions of dollars into Israel’s settler movement, especially its military, and has long been a profoundly biased negotiator in Palestinian-Israeli disputes.
Palestinians have had their villages erased, their leaders murdered – along with quite a few Israeli leaders, it must be said – and their lives continually threatened, for a long time now. They fight back against enormous odds, they reach out desperately for allies in the region, some have even become suicide bombers. Being mostly Moslem, like all their Arabic neighbours, they get little in the way of help, or even sympathy, from the WEIRD world. That world, where it exists in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of Africa, had a more or less ‘successful’ settler-colonial history, which it now tries to come to terms with, more or less successfully. Of course we know that recent Jewish history has been traumatic to say the least. I’ve read books and watched TV programs on the Holocaust. The diary of Ann Frank was a set text at school when I was only twelve or thirteen, and I still get emotional just hearing her name. But there have been other examples of mass-murder, far less publicised, because those slaughtered belonged to cultures and ethnicities that have never gained prominence in the West. This is the case with the Palestinians, whose voices have gone largely unheard, first by the British, then by United Staters (I rather enjoy calling them that).
So, who are the Palestinians? They are the long-term residents of the region, who can trace their ancestry there for generations. They’re also people who have left the region for a better life or at least some kind of life after their homes have been destroyed, family members killed, their lives threatened and so forth. They’re a hurt and angry people, but many are stubborn and resolute about their homeland and their need to protect and preserve it. Of course many first people everywhere – here in Australia, in New Zealand, in all the Americas and much of Asia – have had what they thought were their lands taken away from them by more powerful new arrivals, but now we know – history tells us – that much of what those new arrivals did to the established populations was cruel and inhumane. The Palestinian people, like all those other first populations, deserve better.
References
Olfat Mahmoud, Tears for Tarshiha: A Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, 2018
Ramzy Baroud, The Last Earth: A Palestinian story, 2018
Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and loathing in Greater Israel, 2014
Rashid Khalidi, The hundred years’ war on Palestine, a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance, 2024
How bizarre is Homo naledi?
The ‘Leti skull’, an infant H naledi found in the Rising Star cave system
I’ve listened here and there, now and then, to the Homo naledi story without ever fully taking it in – and maybe nobody can. A species based on specimens that are only found deep in a near-inaccessible underground cave-thing, specimens suggesting a rather primitive species considering the time-span – about 335,000 to 235,000 years ago (Middle Pleistocene, I must remember). Were they the last of a species that dates back quite a bit further, and WTF happened for their remains to be found in such a bizarre underground space (15 specimens, of all ages, were found in the Dinaledi cave of the complex Rising Star system, and two or three more in the nearby Lesedi cave)? No specimens of the same type appear to have been found above ground – what’s the story there? Did they fall or were they pushed? Were they already dead?
Of course the story of our ancestors and ancient cousins has become more complex and intriguing in recent times, with H floresiensis, and the H longi-Denisovan discovery or question or whatever, and the Jebel Irhoud fossils. Is it a great time to be a palaeontologist, or just too headache-inducing? There are certainly lots of whats and wheres, so I’ll try to confine myself to the title topic.
No H naledi specimens have been found elsewhere. Were the caves just an excellent preservation site? And the number of specimens does seem to suggest deliberate placement or disposal after death. Anyway, this species was designated Homo in spite of a cranial capacity less than half that of H sapiens, size not being everything (H floresiensis, and crows). I’m going through the lengthy Wikipedia article and still finding more questions than answers. The claim in the first published accounts of some kind of deliberate burial or at least placement of bodies into the main cavern (Dinaledi) appears to have been debunked, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of alternative explanations either. Lots of the same species falling down this narrow shaft at different times? Was the topography of the area – if that’s the word – quite different a couple of hundred thousand years ago?
What’s most interesting – and frustrating – is that this diminutive yet relatively modern species – not subject to island dwarfism – was wandering around among other human types at that time. Or was it? The oldest H sapiens remains were found in Morocco, a world away from the Rising Star cave system. There is the ‘Florisbad skull’, found near Bloemfontein, the dating of which puts it in the same time-frame as H naledi, and which Chris Stringer considers to be early H sapiens, so… it seems there are tantalising, fragmentary finds. The whole picture of early humans, what with new fossil discoveries, new dating techniques, and the argy-bargy of lumpers and splitters, continues to fascinate and complexify. It’s all good fun.
References
https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/homo-naledi/