Uneven temperatures

This seems to be happening each year now:  while parts of the US are having some record cold temperatures this winter, other parts (this time, the West coast - I should check how Alaska is faring too) are having record warmth:

SEATTLE — Flowers are blossoming. Bees are buzzing. The sky is blue. Sunsets have been stunning. Temperatures have crept north of 60 degrees, and joggers are going shirtless.
This isn’t a typical February in the Pacific Northwest.
While the Northeast is buried under snow, the opposite corner of the country has been hosting the opposite of the winter weather spectrum. The Northwest has had a record-breaking winter, but for warm temperatures.
On Monday, record highs hit parts of Washington and Oregon as one of the mildest winters continues in the Northwest.
The National Weather Service reported record highs of 59 at Sea-Tac Airport, 60 at Olympia, 62 at Hoquiam, 62 at Vancouver, 61 in Portland, 62 at Hillsboro, Ore., and 66 at Salem, Ore.

Oh, and as for Alaska - yes, this article from the end of January suggests it was a relatively mild winter, at least up to then.

This all perhaps suggests why the average global temperature for January was not low at all:

George Will writes a sensible column

Curb your pessimism - The Washington Post

Quite a shock, this is...

News media is such a sucker for PR

I am rather puzzled by the fact that the news media keeps treating Mars One stories seriously.  Last night, it was about a first selection of 100 potential astronauts willing to go live in a can on a cold, airless red planet until they die within a few months.   (Well,that's the estimate I have seen somewhere.)

I have never taken this project seriously:  without even bothering to read up on it in any great detail, anyone could tell that the proposed timing of the mission and funding sounded fanciful in the extreme.   It always sounded like a PR hack's fantasy that had everything going for it  except the following:  the money, the rockets, the capsules, the spacesuits, the habitat, the long term life support system, the credibility.

It is simply a marketing exercise which, if anything, is about attracting smart people who are into playing pretends.   They apparently have done pretty well in that regard;  but that is where the story will end.

See here for a lengthy, critical article about the project.

The other reason I wanted to post about it is because at my daughter's school, where I had to go the other night, there were at least a couple of Mars One posters in classrooms.  It may be that one of the teachers applied - I think that seemed to be the story circulating.   Bit of a pity the school is pretending it's real too - I would rather they spent time using it an example of media manipulation or the scientific difficulties in long distance space flight.   Maybe there is hope for that yet...

IPA twerp joins in Triggs attack

Triggs criticism well-deserved | FreedomWatch

I am amused by Simon Breheny's final paragraph:

The content and timing of The Forgotten Children report is
merely a symptom of a much more serious disease – the agenda of the
Australian Human Rights Commission has been distorted by an unrelenting
bias against individual liberty.

The Australian Human Rights Commission is beyond salvation. The
Abbott government was right to criticise the commission and it should
now move to abolish the commission in favour of civil society
organisations that actually defend our human rights.

I wonder what "civil society organisations" he refers to.  The IPA?   lol

Update on droughts

The New York Times has an update on the Brazilian drought:

As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

Behind closed doors, the views are grimmer. In a meeting recorded secretly and leaked to the local news media, Paulo Massato, a senior official at São Paulo’s water utility, said that residents might have to be warned to flee because “there’s not enough water, there won’t be water to bathe, to clean” homes.

“We’re witnessing an unprecedented water crisis in one of the world’s great industrial cities,” said Marússia Whately, a water specialist at Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian environmental group. “Because of environmental degradation and political cowardice, millions of people in São Paulo are now wondering when the water will run out.”

For some in this traffic-choked megacity of futuristic skyscrapers, gated communities and sprawling slums, the slow-burning crisis has already meant no running water for days on end.

“Imagine going three days without any water and trying to run a business in a basic sanitary way,” said Maria da Fátima Ribeiro, 51, who owns a bar in Parque Alexandra, a gritty neighborhood on the edge of São Paulo’s metropolitan area. “This is Brazil, where human beings are treated worse than dogs by our own politicians.”

 In other drought news, there has been much publicity given to a study that says climate change is very likely to lead to multi-decadal megadroughts across a huge slab of America.   (The country has actually suffered severe droughts in the mid West in the middle ages, but with higher temperatures the equivalent drought would only be worse.)

I wonder how the economists can factor in 30 - 40 years of agriculture destroying drought in America in the second half of the century to their estimates of GDP harm under climate change?

Changing Asia

I was catching up on the (always good) Interpreter blog and noticed that the biggest gay dating app is now apparently one based in China.  If Chinese society develops high tolerance for gay relationships, it will be quite a global change.   (I always suspected that the government and parent induced gender imbalance in China would likely contribute to changing attitudes to other-than-traditional relationships.  May be happening faster than previously envisaged.) 

Update:   just out of interest, here is a section from a 2006 paper talking about the possible effects of gender imbalances of the type in China and India:

There is also evidence that, when single young men congregate, the potential for more organized aggression is likely to increase substantially (45, 53). Hudson and Den Boer, in their provocative writings on this subject (45, 46), go further, predicting that these men are likely to be attracted to military or military-type organizations, with the potential to be a trigger for large-scale domestic and international violence. With 40% of the world's population living in China and India, the authors argue that the sex imbalance could impact regional and global security, especially because the surrounding countries of Pakistan, Taiwan, Nepal, and Bangladesh also have high sex ratios. 

A number of other consequences of an excess of men have been described, but there is very little evidence for causation. It is intuitive that if sexual needs are to be met this will lead to a large expansion of the sex industry, including its more unacceptable practices such as coercion and trafficking. The sex industry has expanded in both India and China in the last decade (55, 56); however, there are a number of reasons for this expansion, and the part played by a high sex ratio is impossible to isolate without specific research addressing this question. Indeed, in China the highest numbers of sex workers are in areas where the sex ratio is least distorted, for example in the border areas of Yunnan Province (57). The recent rise in numbers of sex workers in China has been attributed more to greater mobility, increased socioeconomic inequality, and a relaxation in sexual attitudes, than to an increase in the sex ratio (57, 58). 

There is much anecdotal evidence regarding increases in trafficking of women, both for the sex industry and marriage, in both India and China (59, 60), although it is impossible to say whether gender imbalance is a contributory factor in this rise. Reports would suggest that trafficking is more common in parts of Africa and Eastern Europe where the sex ratio is normal (61). It has also been suggested that a shortage of women may lead to a rise in homosexual behavior (31), not implying that the shortage of women will produce homosexuals, but rather that an increasing tolerance toward homosexuality, together with the surplus of males, may lead to large numbers of covert homosexuals openly expressing their sexuality.

Another backyard scene

Just taken now, I believe they are corellas:

They've been visiting a lot lately.

He's just showing off now...

Overwintering, again

How to Survive Winter in Antarctica - The Atlantic

There's not too much new in this article about the staff at the US South Pole station who stay 9 months over winter - all 50 of them.  Some corrections appear in comments, too.   I did like a couple of other points in comments:

During my winter-over at Pole 6 out of 47 Polies were women. Women in
Antarctica have a saying: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." :)

I have to laugh when people talk about living on Mars. We can barely
live on Antarctica with water, oxygen and a plane flight away!

Thanks for coming in, Malcolm..

I agree with Michelle Grattan (as does every other sensible person in the country):  Malcolm Turnbull's job application interview last night went pretty well.

Andrew Bolt is spitting chips, of course. Tim Blair hates him too, and sees something that I can't say is all that obvious except to Tim. 

This is all about da climate change:  that is all it is about.

Shifty maids of "Hey?!"

Well, you try to come up with a worthy pun for a movie that I really wish people would stop writing about.

As far as I can tell, about 90% of people reckon the book was a poorly written heap of bollocks that nonetheless showed us something about women and eroticism and sex and money and power and gender relationships and feminism, or something.   About 80% of people reckon the movie is a mild improvement (by cutting out some of the more ludicrously written lines in the book) but nonetheless is still a filmed heap of bollocks that shows us something about women and eroticism and sex and ...etc.

However, given that few women in their 20's are ever going to be seduced by handsome young billionaires with fetishes and an even bigger obsession with contract law, I find it very difficult to conclude that the film really reliably tells us much at all.

And one of the more over-wrought bits of writing about it seems to have come from Ross Douthat, who takes the opportunity to propose that the sexual revolution:

...looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children ... and so on down a long, depressing list.   At times, as the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently suggested, this side of sexual revolution looks more like “sexual reaction,” a step way back toward a libertinism more like that of pre-Christian Rome — anti-egalitarian and hierarchical, privileging men over women, adults over children, the upper class over the lower orders.

I'm distinctly unconvinced.

Look, the "sexual revolution" (a thing of unclear definition in itself) is tied up with changes in technology, economies, and feminism, and making it easier for men to have sex with a quite low risk of pregnancy is of obvious "benefit" to them - just that that benefit is surely spread around all classes, not just the rich, who I don't think have ever had that much of a problem finding lovers.

Sure, I'm sympathetic to the view that prostitution is inherently exploitative, and undesirable, and I dislike quasi-feminist justification of it as empowering; but I would have thought the sexual revolution has lowered its prevalence in most countries, rather than increased it.

And as for the young being exploited:  while there is no doubt more parent tolerated, open sex amongst teenagers today than 50 years ago, I can't say that I have noticed any big cultural move towards approving of guys in their 20's (or older) having sex with girls under 16. (Some changes which have been mooted to age of consent laws - making the age difference a key issue, rather than mere age of one partner - is actually  sensible in terms of what is deservedly criminalised.)

There are, no doubt, winners and losers in the recent changes in Western attitudes to sex.   I think culturally, there are clearly matters to regret, particularly on the issue of commitment in a relationship and the downgrading of marriage.

But to suggest it's turned back into pre-Christian Rome, where men could sleep with a slave (be it male or female) as part of his ownership rights:  I don't think so.....  

Bad neighbourhood

Drug abuse in Iran rising despite executions | GulfNews.com

This article says that drug addiction is a major, and increasing, problem in Iran:

Anti-narcotics and medical officials say more than 2.2 million of Iran’s
80 million citizens already are addicted to illegal drugs, including
1.3 million on registered treatment programmes. They say the numbers
keep rising annually, even though use of the death penalty against
convicted smugglers has increased, too, and now accounts for more than
nine of every 10 executions.

Living in a bad neighbourhood doesn't help:

Officials say Iran’s taste for illegal narcotics is certain to expand into greater abuse of heroin, simply because next door is Afghanistan, maker of three-fourths of the world
supply.

Abbas Deilamzadeh, whose Rebirth Society organisation runs dozens of rehabilitation centres, predicts that more people currently experimenting with meth soon will be
using heroin, simply because Iran is the main route for Afghan heroin dealers to export the drug worldwide.

The United Nations drug agency said the total area under opium poppy cultivation in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2014 was estimated at 224,000 hectares, a 17 per cent
increase from 2013, producing about 6,400 tonnes of opium. Most is grown
in the often-lawless Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south.

Regardless of what people think about "the war on drugs", surely everyone can agree that the world  would be better off if Afghanistan, well, didn't exist.   (Nothing personal, all nice Afghanis out there.  It's just that your country has been exporting trouble for a very, very long time.)

Much mirth ensued

I trust no one missed Chris Kenny's column in The Australian on the weekend which caused much mirth around the nation by opening thus:

FOR all the Coalition’s failings and missteps it is surely incontestable that Tony Abbott has provided the best 16 months of government Australia has seen in more than seven years.

So how is it that he seems to be on borrowed time?

Triggs sounding reasonable

Oh look - Gillian Triggs is in Fairfax sounding reasonable and making the point about numbers of children in detention that I always said would be relevant:

The year 2013 saw a peak in the number of asylum seekers globally – largely as a result of the unrest of the Arab Spring. This impacted on Australia, with asylum seeker numbers rising to a record high in July 2013. There were 1992 children in detention in that month. By October 2013, efforts to move children into the community had reduced this number to 1045.

In stark contrast, over the six months after the new government took office, it became clear that children were being held for significant periods and were not being released. While the boats were stopping, the children were being detained for lengthening periods of time. When the inquiry was announced in February, 2014 children had been held on average for seven months and 1006 remained in closed indefinite detention.

Of course, amongst her fiercest critics are pea-brained climate change "skpetics" who have never been able to get their head around understanding how changes in intensity in the water cycle can mean both bigger precipitation events and worse droughts. 

Richest company ever has trouble with work hours

Apple factories slip in enforcing work hour limits during iPhone blitz

Apple sold more iPhones last year than anyone could have imagined.
But the company found that a lower percentage of factories assembling
its products complied with a policy preventing excessive work hours.

The company's policy limits factory workers to a 60-hour workweek. Apple
said it had found that 92 per cent of the more than 1.1 million workers
in its supply chain worked no more than 60 hours a week last year,
compared with 95 per cent in 2013.

I assume that most of this work would also be of the highly repetitive, assembly line type; and as such, limited work hours of even 60 hours a week seems to be pushing the limits of reasonable.

I do not care for the Apple company...

Unstoppable Stoppard

Nature has a review up of a new play by the cleverest playwright of the last, gosh, 50 odd years - Tom Stoppard - about the "hard problem" of consciousness. 

Hey wait a minute - I see from his Wikipedia entry that Stoppard did uncredited work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  (!)   I hope he was uncredited because he thought the final product was not much chop.  I hold the film in very low regard indeed.  Yes - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was better!

Quantum time puzzle

The Future Affects The Past? Welcome To The Quantum Universe

This sounds quite a significant experiment, but it hasn't shown up on the internet much (yet).

It also reminds me of the experiments of John Cramer which I posted about years ago, but I don't recall reading how they turned out.  I have been meaning to check up on this for some time..  

It seems I missed a paper by Cramer last year (see the first link on this page, which also has links to other media coverage of his work) indicating that his experiments did not show a "nonlocal" signal, and he has now concluded that quantum nonlocal (and retrocausal) signalling is not possible after all.

How disappointing.  

Perhaps I haven't read it carefully enough, but I am not sure whether Cramer thinks this is reason to give up on his "transactional interpretation" of quantum physics, or not.

Hair removal discussed

Depilation: Hair-erasing | The Economist

Gee, it's a short review of a book about the history of hair removal, but there is a fair bit in there that I didn't realise before.  For example:

There is no finer example of this than the reaction of the
bearded Europeans to the smooth skin of the male and female native
Americans they saw when they arrived on their shores. George Catlin’s
portrait of the eldest son of Black Hawk in 1832 (right) reveals the
preoccupation that many colonists had with hairlessness. Hair was
political, too, and formed part of a debate about Indian racial
characteristics and whether natives were capable of being civilised.
William Robertson, a Scottish historian, said hairlessness provided
evidence of a “feebleness of constitution”.

Attitudes shifted after Charles Darwin published “The
Descent of Man” in 1871 and perspectives on the relationship between
humans and other animals changed. Although American theologians ignored
or rejected Darwin’s ideas, the notion of a connection between man and
ape had a great cultural impact on how hairiness was viewed. Freak shows
and circuses displayed “dog-faced men” and “bearded ladies”, and
unusual hair growth was even tied to various pathologies. By the start
of the 20th century, plentiful hair had been linked to signs of sexual,
mental and criminal deviance.

Hadn't heard this before, either:

Aversion to body hair spread rapidly, fuelled by the racially tinged
hygiene movement and less restrictive dress codes. Advertisements for
hair-removal products sprouted everywhere, and by the start of the
second world war body hair had become disgusting to middle-class
American women. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1938 was partly
provoked by a rash of injuries from depilatory creams. One of the most
popular creams contained thallium. Women were maimed by muscular
atrophy, blindness or limb damage after using it; some even died.

Get your act together, media

I reckon the Australian media has run oddly cold on some of the more outrageous behaviour of the Abbott government.

Sure, Fairfax, The Guardian and then The Australian ran the story of Brandis sending over a big wig to invite the President of the Human Rights Commission to resign - because they didn't like a report she has written.   No one in the government has denied it - it is clearly true.

But by today - it gets barely a mention on Insiders, and I haven't seen any TV doorstops with a journalist calling out to Abbott - "Do you really think this is appropriate?  How is it different to workplace bullying?  Why do it in secrecy - was the message that if she didn't go quietly you would rubbish her in Parliament?"

The behaviour towards her is, in my reckoning, a major scandal that the media seems not all that interested in pursuing.

Which puts in mind of the continuing scandal of the secrecy with which the whole "Operation Sovereign Borders" was untaken, including the imprisonment at sea of people for weeks at a time, and the lack of challenge to the weak justification given for it.

By the way, going back to the HRC - Tim Wilson played a "straight bat" on the matter in his Sky News brief interview on Friday.  Yet the hosts deliberately did not invite him to comment on the politics of the government asking his boss to resign.  

Weird.

A billion years to re-locate

The sun won't die for 5 billion years, so why do humans have only 1 billion years left on Earth?

Apparently, the sun will be hot enough in a billion years to boil off the Earth's oceans.  (And a few billion after that, it becomes a red giant that will expand out to the orbit of Mars.)

This reminds me, I was reading somewhere recently about how you could start moving the Earth's orbit outwards.  (You swing a lot of things past it, if I recall correctly.)   Can't remember where that article was, now.

I don't think it was this article from New Scientist in 2008, but it covers similar territory.

Excuse me while I have a fantasy

So, Abbott has dumped Philip Ruddock, and some Liberals are not impressed.

Is anyone running a book on how long Abbott has got left?   I mean, I would have guessed a few months; but after this week, I'm looking more at weeks I can count on one hand.  Days I can count on hands and feet.  You get the idea...

But I'm a bit impatient for this.   Can't we try a bit of Thai or Fijian style change of government for the good of the country?   I mean, Angus Houston is getting a knighthood, and seems a very restrained and well liked fellow on all sides of politics.   Who would really complain if he convinced the Governor General, who I am sure he knows well, to let him lead a delegation of soldiers to imprison Abbott until we can have an election.  It would be doing Abbott a favour, really; earning him more public sympathy for the way he lost the job than what he is going to get by waiting for the MPs to attack again.

Pity Canberra doesn't have something like a Tower of London for such purposes.

Wait - I know - lock him up inside the National Carillon.  It's on a island, although escape from it would hardly be the same as from Alcatraz.  Look - there is plenty of room inside - there is even a function room on the top with a kitchen.  (! - I had no idea.)   No sign of a toilet that I can see, however.  He can tip a bucket over the side.

Here is an illustration:

See - you get to enter into a Steve-grade fantasy, but still learn something in the process!