The Beauty Queen of Leenane

We went to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane last weekend. Things Unseen Theatre put it on at The Church in the Middle of the Block, and will perform it again next weekend. Several of my theatre friends are involved at Things Unseen. I lost my program, but Russell Stiles directed, Tom Liszka probably built the set, and Valerie Stratton played Mag Folan – a tiresome old woman. I don’t know the rest of the cast personally, but Alyssa Baker played Mag’s spinster daughter Maureen, Bill Benson played Maureen’s love interest Pato Dooley, and Luke Archey played Pato’s younger brother Ray.

I found out afterwards that Martin McDonagh released this play in 1996. During the play it was hard to place Leenane in time. We didn’t pick up on clues about Australian soap operas and popular songs that would have meant something to Irish audiences. The kitchen appliances in the dingy rural cottage could have dated from the seventies, but the single lever faucet and compact telly seemed much more recent.

I was tempted to interpret Mag as a symbol of the old Ireland (A Terrible Beauty) and Maureen a symbol of some newer, but still flawed Republic. Expat Pato was visiting from England on his way to taking a job in the US. He had to work elsewhere, so the setting was likely before the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger years (1995 – 2000). The pre-Tiger Ireland would have discarded old traditions and mores (like Maureen), and would have been struggling to modernize (like Maureen), but would have still been hoping for something better to happen (like Maureen).

I toured Ireland in 1983, and a local bragged, “We have poor in Ireland, but we have no poverty.” He meant that a lot of people without steady jobs nevertheless had nice houses thanks to government assistance. From the vantage of the early nineties it may well have seemed that the current Ireland was just as bleak and confused as the older rural one had been, and certain parallels between Mag and Maureen are made very clear by the end of the play.

We watched a youtube clip of a few scenes from an Irish production afterwards, and could hardly understand a word of dialogue. At Things Unseen, the cast sounded Irish enough that I had to listen carefully and my non-Irish wife was flummoxed at first. Valerie’s Mag veered between needy and despicable. Ms Baker’s Maureen was very attractive, much younger than forty, and wasn’t aged by makeup, but she managed to be the frustrated spinster anyway. Mr Benson’s Pato was the well-meaning, lonely guy and you could believe him wanting Maureen despite her history. Mr Archey’s Ray was responsible for making us notice several key props and kept us in suspense with the second one admirably.

This is no convoluted mystery. The writing of the play usually makes it Waterford clear what is going to happen next and who is going to do it. We just watch aghast while the characters actually do those things to each other … and themselves. There is one big twist, though. So go see it if you get a chance. And bring your mother.

Ass Trays

I knew that too much sitting was bad for office dwellers, but I just heard the saying:

Sitting is the new Smoking

So it occurs to me that we should now refer to chairs as Ass Trays.

Lava It or Leave It

Near rural Pahoa Village on the big island Hawaii, Kilauea’s slowly advancing lava has crossed Apaa Street and is closing on Pahoa Village Road itself, which goes straight through downtown. We interviewed Apaa Street resident Imelda and Pahoa Village Road resident Duke.

Imelda and her husband are prepared to leave when and if officials give the word. “We are still praying,” she said. “I hope our home will be spared.”

Duke does not appear outwardly concerned, and has no plans to evacuate or even change his routine. “I don’t see this lava flow as statistically significant. Lava has flowed thousands of times before, and has never reached my house. Why should I worry about it now?”

Low Gasoline Prices: Good or Bad?

The price of crude oil has dropped lately, and the gap between Brent and West Texas Intermediate prices has narrowed as well. Around here the price of gasoline at the pump has dipped to $3.05 per gallon – down from $3.33 a year ago.

So naturally there must be a conspiracy.

The first theory is that in addition to economic sanctions, the US is trying to punish Russia with lower crude prices. If so it isn’t working. Thanks to those sanctions the ruble is lower, too. Russia earns dollars selling oil abroad but spends rubles at home, so as long as they can exchange currency they are doing OK.

A second theory is that the market as a whole is purposely allowing deflation so as to convince the Federal Reserve to continue Quantitative Easing (Free Investment Money) past the stated expiration date. Usually speculators are accused of raising oil prices, but now they are accused of lowering them, too.

A third theory is that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is trying to punish Obama for his inaction in Syria and overtures to Iran and Qatar. Because it is always Obama’s fault.

A fourth theory is that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as swing producer against America’s oil-fracking boomlet. I doubt KSA are gullible enough to believe that the fracking bubble will last much longer.

A fifth theory is that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is tired of losing money by keeping the rest of OPEC in line. While it is in OPEC’s interest to keep prices high, it is in each member’s interest to lower prices a bit and sell more crude. As swing producer, KSA can increase or decrease production to maintain prices – but that also means they have to forego some profits here and there.

The fifth theory makes some sense to me, but I also think that deflation is really happening in that usually unmentioned sector of the economy that is still out of work. Yes some folk are buying Porsches and Teslas and iPads like times are good, but more and more families are making meth in the basement, too.

So while admit that I like paying less for gasoline, I suspect the human cost is quite high.

Con + Fusion

Opening Science Blogs, my eye jumped to, Go away, cold fusion, by PZ Myers, who writes his Pharyngula blog in the Life Science section. Myers is no physicist, but on basic scientific caution questioned the latest E-Cat demonstration reported in Extreme Tech:

Again with my childlike understanding of these kinds of processes – if I were in a room with something burning with a million times the intensity of gasoline, even if it was a tiny quantity, I’d be worried about containment. Why aren’t these guys? They all seem to be assuming that there is 100% efficiency in the conversion of hydrogen plus nickel into electricity – but where does that happen in the real world?

Despite an earlier article in which Extreme Tech’s Sebastian Anthony claimed to want to finally see results for either hot or cold fusion, he nevertheless dutifully publicized the latest E-Cat claims, though he equivocates:

The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy – and they conclude that fusion is the only answer – but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”

Anthony fails to note that the “unknown reaction” might be a heavy electrical cord that is never unplugged. Also even cold fusion believer Stephen Krivit observed that the experiment was flawed because Rossi himself inserted and removed the reactant samples.

Following up the Myers post, impressively-bearded Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang recalled his smackdown of the E-Cat test from a few years ago .. and then some:

The E-cat: cold fusion or scientific fraud? (Synopsis)

Throwback Thursday: The Foolish Fallacy of Cold Fusion (Synopsis)

Comments of the Week #32: From black hole death to cold fusion crackpots

Among his commenter/tormenters is Alain, who probably hasn’t forgiven me for deleting the magnum opus of links he attempted to insert in my comments section.

Writing about hot fusion, Siegel notes that we have managed Inertial Confinement, Magnetic Confinement and Magnetized Target Fusion here on Earth. Though none of them have produced more energy than they consume, he urges us to invest in nuclear fusion and in traveling to Mars – presumably by means other than John Carter’s astral projection.

We need to invest in the long-term future like it’s our only hope, while simultaneously stepping forward in the present to bring that future to reality. Whether we invest in nuclear fusion or not, we should be sending human beings to Mars. Whether we send human beings to Mars or not, we should be investing in nuclear fusion. And if-and-when we do develop and control nuclear fusion, it won’t be a quicker trip to Mars that we set our sights on, but ever farther and more remote targets. There’s a whole Universe out there, and shame on us if we choose not to explore it.

I do wonder, though, if hot fusion will ever yield dividends. Lockheed-Martin’s vaunted Skunk Works shop supposedly claimed that they would have a truck-sized fusion reactor in three to ten years. MIT Technology Review asks, Does Lockheed Martin Really Have a Breakthrough Fusion Machine?

… many scientists are unconvinced. Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the principal investigators at the MIT fusion research reactor, says the type of confinement described by Lockheed had long been studied without much success.

Hutchinson says he was only able to comment on what Lockheed has released—some pictures, diagrams, and commentary, which can be found here. “Based on that, as far as I can tell, they aren’t paying attention to the basic physics of magnetic-confinement fusion energy. And so I’m highly skeptical that they have anything interesting to offer,” he says. “It seems purely speculative, as if someone has drawn a cartoon and said they are going to fly to Mars with it.”

Others wonder where they will get the tritium required, and Business Insider pours some cold heavy water on any claim that Skunk Works’ ideas are more than theoretical.

Outrunning the Red Death

I recently mentioned the old joke about outrunning the bear, and noted that changing the bear to a pack of wolves probably makes the joke a lot less funny for the smug libertarian or survivalist prepper. Changing the bear to a community of infected people is even less funny. While I was scrambling to learn a bit about Ebola, I ran across the the concept of herd immunity. Briefly, doctors and nurses inoculate most members of the population against a virus or bacterium to protect weaker members.

This may not make sense to libertarians, who may ask, Why not just inoculate the weaker members, and leave the strong alone? In some cases the answer is simple: weaker members may not survive the inoculation. In other cases though, as with pertussis, or whooping cough, herd vaccination is attempted even when vaccination of infants is possible.

I say attempted because there is indeed a backlash against vaccination. Many science-oriented blogs chronicle the exploits of Jenny McCarthy and other minor celebrities who still campaign against some vaccination based on the claim that it leads to autism. Other parents object to all vaccination on religious grounds. Some people have simply given up trusting doctors, the medical establishment and the government. Given the efficacy and cost of US medical care I can’t blame them for that, but I’m not sure that abstaining from vaccination is the best way to protest.

There has been a local backlash against vaccination in Pakistan after the CIA used a vaccination program as a cover to collect DNA while searching for Osama bin Laden. (Some 911 truthers claim that the government already knew bin Laden was long dead, but perhaps no one told the CIA.) One result has been that in 2014 so far, 61 of the 77 documented cases of polio worldwide were in Pakistan.

In many places the medical community complains about the return of diseases that were thought to have been eradicated. I ran across a NY Times book review of On Immunity written by Eula Biss:

In “On Immunity,” [Biss] is especially exacting on the topic of what she calls “people like me,” those blazingly hygienic parents, many of them upper-middle-class, for whom organized personal purity (air filters, water filters, “natural” foods) substitutes for organized religion.

She understands this impulse toward immaculateness. She also deplores it. She observes that purity is the “innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century”: eugenics movements, forced sterilizations, miscegenation and sodomy laws, and the slaughter of millions. “Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed,” she says, “in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity.”

Human solidarity is, in a way, her great subject in “On Immunity.” Our children need their shots not merely for their own sake, but also for the sake of others. “Immunity,” she declares, “is a public space.”

Biss is decrying obsessive personal hygiene as a sort of go-it-alone individualist response to a herd problem. And Ebola is a perfect case whereby a lack of investment in general sanitation and medical care could be bringing the Masque of disease and death to everyone’s door, whether rich or poor.

In Buffalo Wind, the latest of his Dark Age America series on the vulnerability of the wealthy elites during a time of slow collapse, John Michael Greer has veered into discussing Ebola, but it makes general sense to me that upholding the middle class social contract was also a sort of herd immunity that ultimately protected the wealthiest. If we still had a thriving middle class, we wouldn’t have had Occupy Wall Street, and we probably wouldn’t see the Tea Party movement still affecting primary politics. If we treated our returning veterans fairly, we would have fewer people vaulting the White House fences. If we still had a growing economy, rich guys wouldn’t be writing OpEds about poor people with pitchforks. We’d also probably have fewer zombie shows on the tube.

Unfortunately we aren’t upholding that contract and I suspect the the plutocracy knows we can’t afford it anymore. Today I’m supposed to receive a copy of Laurie Garrett’s Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health and a copy of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Instead of investing in infrastructure that might protect the middle class, it seems to me that our government has invested in spying on the middle class.