End times discussed

Could the Higgs mass determine the end of the universe?

 According to quantum theory, it’s possible that the lowest energy state of our universe – when there’s nothing but space and time – isn’t the lowest possible state of all.

In this picture, there exists an even lower energy state, one that our universe could transition to. That might not sound too ominous until you learn that in the lower energy state, all the protons in all the matter in the universe decay, with the unfortunate side effect that we cease to exist.

Worse still, the transition could happen at any time, anywhere in the universe, and expand at light speed from a tiny bubble until it annihilates the entire universe as we know it, which would be, you know, bad.

Recently, this idea was re-examined within the context of the Standard Model of Particle Physics – the modern quantum theory of subatomic particles and their interactions. Precise calculations dictate that the stability of our universe is intimately connected to the mass of the Higgs boson (and the top quark), a parameter which – thanks to the efforts of Large Hadron Collider – is now known to be about 125 GeV.

It is the conclusions of this re-examination that have raised a furore in the media: the Standard Model predicts that for our universe to be stable, the Higgs mass needs to be larger than 129.4 ± 5.6 GeV, so it only just fits within the uncertainties.

Ergo the end is nigh, at least in the units of time that cosmologists work with. But don’t stock your matter-collapsing-proof shelter just yet – those time scales are billions to trillions of years.

 The article goes on to note that, as the Standard Model doesn't cover everything, there may well be an "out."

The other person who had a lot hanging on the mass of the Higgs was Frank Tipler, who had predicted a Higgs mass way of 220 or so for his Omega Point theory to work.

Sadly, I have not seen any comment by him since the LHC announcement of its measurement last year.

That seems fast...

'Nearby' supermassive black hole rotates at close to the speed of light | Science | guardian.co.uk

Phil Plait at Slate gives a bit more detail:

As the material swirls around the black hole, it emits X-rays at a very specific energy—think of it as a color. But as it orbits that color gets smeared out due to the Doppler effect. The amount of smearing indicates how fast the material is moving, and that in turn can tell astronomers how fast the black hole is spinning. This can be complicated by the presence of dense clouds of material farther out from the black hole that absorb X-rays and mess up our observations. The new data from NuSTAR allowed astronomers to show that the smearing seen is definitely due to rotation and not obscuration, unambiguously revealing the black hole's tremendous spin: just a hair below the speed of light!

Most black holes spin far slower than that, so something ramped this hole’s spin way up. One possibility, as I mentioned above, is material falling in over time. Another is that it ate one or more other black holes, which is creepy but possible. Galaxies collide, and when they do their central black holes can merge, growing larger. If the geometry is just right, this can create a single black hole with more spin. Due this a few times, and you can spin one up to fantastic speeds.

I’ll note that NGC 1365 is a massive galaxy, easily twice as large as the Milky Way (an we’re one of the biggest galaxies in the Universe). That’s exactly what you’d expect from a galaxy that’s spent a lifetime eating other ones. Cosmic cannibals grow fat when the hunting’s good.

The movie finance business still hard to understand

DreamWorks Animation takes $87 million write-down on 'Rise of the Guardians' - latimes.com

I promise I'll stop talking about movies soon, but this report shows (apparently) that a $145 million movie that takes in $300 million globally can still be said to have lost $87 million.

And this at a time when I thought digital projection was meant to make a substantial saving by studios not having to get film prints made and distributed around cinemas.  Also, I thought with kids films there was often substantial profit from DVD releases, but would this Christmas movie even be released yet? The movie is well suited for an Easter release.

Very odd. 

No rehabilitation needed

Japan’s prisons: Eastern porridge | The Economist

A somewhat interesting look here at how Japanese prisons operate.  (Watch the video too.  The interior of the prison looks pretty decent, but no reading?  Wow.)

Spielberg considered (again)

Oscars 2013 and Spielberg: The storyteller is part of our cultural DNA - CSMonitor.com

A reasonable enough, lengthy article here on Spielberg's career and development as a director.

But to see how nutty some of the reaction against him is now, read the handful of comments that follow it.

One thing that bothers me - last time I checked, a couple of weeks ago, Spielberg has not made a decision on his next movie. 

Irony, humour, etc

Well, at the First Things blog of all places, there's a decent post complaining about the attempts at humour at the Oscars show last night.  It goes on to note that the overuse of irony is actually the death of humour:

Irony, and its near-cousin sarcasm, is the lingua franca of popular culture. The more deeply we tread into this part of our national consciousness, the more we realize the breathtaking vanity of its values. Irony is, in the end, self-referential, so once it becomes self-self-referential, it has created a hall of mirrors that ultimately implodes into meaningless parodies of itself that are, well, humorless even to those toward whom the jokes were originally aimed.

When everything is ironic, irony ceases to be ironic. It lapses into mere meanness, leaving an incredibly bitter aftertaste. Indeed, the life-root of bullying just may be irony. What struck me last night was the utter brutality of much of the attempts at humor. The writers were equal-opportunity offenders, but this is, to some extent, what we find in a worldview where nothing is worth defending or treating as precious. I have a vague recollection that Henri Bergson once said that humor is the first step toward acceptance; I wonder if the corollary is true: if everything is acceptable, is there anything that can be humorous? Do rules, in some rudimentary way, actually generate humor? If comedy is always transgressive and the world (in the interest of tolerance) no longer allows transgression, then have we lost the ability to laugh? Based on the evidence of last night’s show, I have to wonder.

Actually, I think I stop understanding the argument by the last two sentences, but I was sort of with it up to then...

Not everyone liked Argo

Argo **** yourself: Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage movie is the worst. - Slate Magazine

Am I to take it that there is a lot of swearing in this film? 

Doesn't seem right...

Want to emigrate to Australia? Be warned – it's not 'hot Britain' | Rae Earl | Comment is free | The Guardian

You get some pretty wacky takes on Australia from British migrants, but this one seems to describe a place that is barely recognisable as being drawn from reality. 

Good background on a harmful bug

Understanding the recent listeria-linked cheese recall

Climate change working in ways not quite expected

Weather extremes provoked by trapping of giant waves in atmosphere

"An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions. So when they swing up, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US, and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic," explains lead author Vladimir Petoukhov.

"What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks. So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays. In fact, we observe a strong amplification of the usually weak, slowly moving component of these waves," says Petoukhov.

The report ends on a note of caution:

...the 32-year period studied in the project provides a good indication of the mechanism involved, yet is too short for definite conclusions.

but it still sounds like an important study.

Zach for the Oscars

Re the Oscar show last night, which I tried to speed up with much use of fast forward on the digital recorder, but still couldn't compress to an hour and a half I was aiming for.

Seth MacFarlane:  He can sing! He can dance!  He can't mature beyond the age of 18!

OK, there were a couple of funny bits - the seduction of Sally Field was OK, and having William Shatner appear was amusing, but should have been funnier.

Seriously, MacFarlane is too smugly amused by himself, and his whole brand of humour is built on the sort of self aware political incorrectness that most people grow out of by their twenties.

So, I was thinking - what has gone wrong with finding an amusing host for the Oscar shows?  It easily feels like 15 years or more since I've seen a host who I thought was doing a good job.  Steve Martin used to be good, but not the last time he co-hosted.  Same with Billy Crystal.   Hollywood outsiders - like Lettermen - crash and burn.  Some people liked Hugh Jackman, but I don't care for him in anything he ever does.

What the show needs is amiable LA insiders who can do a bit of comedy.  Hosts don't need to sing and dance - let the professionals do that.  It doesn't need "edgy" or ironic comedy, but it does need someone who appeals to a younger demographic.

So who fits this bill?   It came to me last night. This guy:

Well, that's his latest role, as helpful flying monkey in the heavily promoted OZ film, but this is the man himself:

I mean, who doesn't like Zach Braff?    Who didn't like Scrubs?   In fact, he could do the whole hosting job as if it is a dream sequence from that show.    (You could surely do worse than hand over the entire comedy writing job for the Oscars to that creative team.)

Who knows, if I had a readership, I think this could be a campaign that would take off.  

Instead, we'll probably get Whoopi Goldberg for yet another attempt at a return to form.

Lincoln seen (and analysed)

In a minor triumph of parental pressure to have a 12 (nearly 13) year old boy see an educational movie that he may well not like, I convinced my son to see Lincoln with me yesterday.  He likes history a lot, and maybe has read some Horrible History stuff about the Civil War (he knew about the shooting in the theatre, definitely) so I did have at least something to work on.  Be warned, I said, the movie is mainly about politics, so there is a lot of talking; and you will almost certainly be the youngest person in the audience. (I was right on that count.)

On the drive to the cinema, I gave him a bit of background on Republicans and Democrats in the US, and tried to be helpful by suggesting that he could almost certainly impress his teacher if he could just somehow casually mention to her that he had been to see it.  He could even pretend that he really liked it, even if he didn't.  (He wouldn't be in on this subterfuge.  Kids these days - I don't know.)

So, how did he like it?

Well, I had warned him that I wanted absolutely no complaint during the movie that it was boring, but we did have an argument just before going into the cinema that $5.60 for a regular Slushie was just too expensive. This primed him to be a bit cranky for the first 20 minutes.

But at the end of the day - no, I don't think he found it boring.  Sure, he complained about how a lot of the talk was hard for him to understand, but I could tell that he was always paying attention, if not always for the right reason.  (Tommy Lee Jones, who my kids like a lot from the Men in Black movies, amused him by wearing a bad wig and playing a typically gruff character.)   If it wasn't for the Slushie argument, he might even have admitted to finding it, almost kinda, worthwhile seeing.

So how about me?   It's a thumbs up for being a really fine, intelligent and engaging movie.  I suspect that most people who find it boring may only do so from a point of view that they might have been expecting a more traditional biopic that spans more than the events of the last few months of Abe's life.   

As everyone says, you just can't keep your eyes off Daniel Day Lewis when he is on screen.  In that way it is like the other (to use a hackneyed bit of praise) absolutely mesmerising example of acting in a Spielberg film -  Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. 

I deliberately did not read too many reviews or articles about the movie before seeing it, and I'm glad I took that approach.  You really don't want to know how nitpicking some people have been about its historical accuracy; and furthermore, I have read articles which have complained that some little detail was wrong, yet this has been contradicted in other articles.  Some of the criticism is of the kind "well, that just doesn't seem likely," but surely there are some matters of speculation involved here that no one can really be confident about.   (Even on a matter such as one prominent appearance of the "f" word, some have said this is unlikely; yet my own recent post on when it came into use indicates to me that you could not be certain that no man would use it that way at the time of the Civil War.)   It seems the movie had made everyone an expert on the Lincoln era. 

Overall, I would have to say that, having now read the relevant articles, it impresses me what a serious job Kushner did in trying to convey a movie that is essentially accurate, for a historical drama that has to fill in some details that aren't known.  I believe that Bob Carr, who seems to be a bit of a Lincoln nerd, praises it in this way as well.

One of the best overviews about its basic accuracy was at Slate.  Another short assessment from a historian who knows a lot about one of the key characters (Seward) says that there were plenty of minor points he thought wrong (the shift in some of the chronology is particularly puzzling, I think) but he still praises the movie overall:

All these points, however, are quibbles. Spielberg has made a great movie about Lincoln, Seward, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil War. With very few exceptions, the actors look like and act like the characters they portray; David Strathairn has Seward completely captured.

Even more persuasive are the relationships between the characters. We experience the interplay between Lincoln and Seward, how Seward could disagree with Lincoln yet serve as his most effective instrument. We see how the two men pursued their great goals, ending the Civil War and ending slavery, and how they were prepared to cut some corners to reach their goals. Spielberg and the actors make history alive in a way in which no author, however gifted, could with mere words.

I liked many of the details of the Lincoln household:  the young son Tad absolutely having the run of the house appears to be completely true.  I didn't know that the Lincolns were famously permissive parents, and Lincoln apparently took joy in playing with them.

Some people have complained a bit about the last ten minutes of the film, which I think is nonsense.  Many are simply hypersensitive above how Spielberg deals with emotion and always label it as sentimentalism.   As with Schindlers List, the ending caught me with an emotional wallop that I wasn't really expecting, and I sensed there were others in the audience suppressing a sniffle too.  (Overall, I feel confident that the audience was not finding the movie disappointing.)

So, all praise again to Spielberg.   And go see it.

Update:  Harold Holzer, one of the historical consultants to the movie, says that some of his suggestions were not followed.  But again, quite a lot of his points are of the "I don't think that's likely" character - not that it is known for sure that it could not have happened.  (Tad looking at the photographic plates, for example.  I thought it was suggested at one point that he was not supposed to be looking at them, and we know that the Lincoln were indulgent of his younger son, so how big a stretch is it really?)

Also - now he says this:

Lincoln may have given short, unmemorable speeches at countless flag-raising ceremonies in Washington, but never was he ever seen, as he is in the movie, fetching his manuscript from the lining of his top hat...

Yet in 2009 he said:

Yes, Lincoln did keep scraps of paper in the inside lining of his top hats — probably more often in the days he rode the legal circuit alone than when he was president and had clerks to help him file things.

 So it seems nitpicky why would he even mention the scene in the movie, then.

Anyway, Holzer still praises the movie overall.

Also - as I noted earlier, the main criticism of the movie has really come from right wing nutters who hate Lincoln even though he was Republican (and they also hate Spielberg too for being a liberal.)  Have a look at the start of the second comment following Holzer's article, for example:

The entire Lincoln Edifice Complex is a sham, a lie and a massive coverup of a tyrant who should have been shot the day before his inauguration.Spielberg adds yet another massive load of Bullshit on top the already Mt Rushmore high pile already extant about this singular mass murderer.

And in Australia, the only criticism of the film as "whitewashing" Lincoln that I have seen is from, you guessed it, the Right, in the form of Chris Berg of the IPA.  (Bolt had a bit of whine as well.)   Typical.

Update 2:  Daniel Day Lewis wins the Oscar, and makes what surely must be the funniest  joke of the evening.

Update 3:  I've stumbled across a very good, detailed article that says that Spielberg and Kushner have actually come up with some of their own legitimate historical arguments regarding motivation.   

Update 4:  A Washington Post article complaining about the lack of depiction of Fredrick Douglas in the movie.  Someone in the comment thread points out that he wasn't in Washington much in the couple of months the movie covers.   I have never seen so many people wanting to re-write a historical drama because of it not taking quite the route they wanted it to take.  Also, its worth some of the Lincoln defending comments there, regarding his attitude to slavery and freedom, like this one.

Possum update

We think this is the baby possum which featured with its mother here last year.  He or she now turns up alone:

And in other possum news:  the mother re-appeared yesterday after an absence of some weeks, with a new possum baby which is just starting to come out of the pouch.  No photo of new baby yet.

MASSIVE LABOR LOSS COMING IN 6 MONTHS TIME

Sorry about that shouty heading, but seriously, just how many repetitions do Australian political journalists and commentators think they can wring from that theme in the space of a fortnight?

It is tedious in the extreme.

It's periods like this that political journalism becomes a big bore, and the self fulfilling prophesy of "can the leadership survive another poor poll?" shows up journalists as participants in a big game, not just sideline reporters.

I have to admit, though, that Peter Hartcher does something unusual this morning:  he finds some public servants who used to work with Tony Abbott who say he was thoughtful, courteous and good to work with.

I don't have a problem with accepting that - I have said before that I did not mind him as a Howard government minister.

However, his virtues evaporated once he wanted the leadership.  A policy he formerly didn't really care about and couldn't really see any great harm in (an ETS) suddenly became the Worst Policy in the World (with a nod of gratitude to Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones for showing him how to become a populist.)   Suddenly a Labor parental leave plan became not generous enough (a thought which seems to have occurred to no one else in Parliament, let alone his own party.)   Massive exaggerations of the effect of government policies (mining tax and carbon pricing) fell routinely from his lips.  Flaky ideas like a "Green Army" appeared, and he forced the government into  a version of his own asylum seeker "solution" that is bound to collapse again sooner or later under the weight of its poor treatment of people on crappy island accommodation.

Nope:  whatever his past merits, Abbott was promoted above his level of competency and he doesn't deserve the leadership.  Being in charge of everything doesn't suit him.

Pig in the dock

Medieval animal trials: Why they’re not quite as crazy as they sound. - Slate Magazine

A sample from this interesting article:

Such a case might seem bizarre to modern observers, but animal trials were commonplace public events in medieval and early modern Europe. Pigs, cows, goats, horses, and dogs that allegedly broke the law were routinely subjected to the same legal proceedings as humans. In a court of law, they were treated as persons. These somber affairs, which always adhered to the strictest legal procedures, reveal a bygone mentality according to which some animals possessed moral agency.

Scholars who have explored animals on trial generally avoid addressing this mentality. Instead, they’ve situated animal trials in several sensible (and academically safer) frameworks. The dominant explanation from legal scholars and historians is that, in a society of people who believed deeply in a divinely determined order of being, with humans at the top, any disruption of God’s hierarchy had to be visibly restored with a formal event. Another hypothesis is that animal trials may have provided authorities an opportunity to intimidate the owners of animals—especially pigs—who ran roughshod through the commons. A sow hanging from the gallows was, in essence, a public service announcement saying, Control your pigs or they’ll die sooner than you hoped.  

Particle men

So, it was arguing with someone on the 'net who seems to have missed the last 300 years of philosophy and science about Thomas Aquinas and God being  the "Unmoved Mover" that led me to Google up some sites about virtual particles and quantum physics.  (My point having been that particles popping into existence from the quantum foam paints a completely different type of universe from that of Aristotle and Aquinas, where giant spheres are all rotating around the Earth, and everything is assumed to just sit there until pushed.)

The first site I read on virtual particles was this one,by Fermi lab physicist Don Lincoln, which gives what I recall as the usual kind of explanation for them.  His blog seems to only be updated once a month, but the posts look pretty interesting and I will go back to it.

But the bigger find was a link to an alternative explanation of virtual particles on a blog by physicist Matt Strassler.   Now his explanation of virtual particles is really worth reading.  For example, here is his key point:

 The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you ever saw the word “particle” in the term. A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle. A particle is a nice, regular ripple in a field, one that can travel smoothly and effortlessly through space, like a clear tone of a bell moving through the air.  A “virtual particle”, generally, is a disturbance in a field that will never be found on its own, but instead is something that is caused by the presence of other particles, often of other fields.

You have to read the whole post to understand the point, but it is clear that Strassler puts a lot of effort in explaining things in a way that lay people can get a grip on.   His other articles and blog entries look very interesting and clearly written too.  (Well, as clear as you can get on some complicated topics.)

I must add these to the blogroll...

Modern homicide

It's interesting to note that the homicide rate in Australia continues to fall, as it is apparently is internationally.  But the comparison with the US is still remarkable:

The Australian Institute of Criminology has released a report examining the 510 homicides across the country over 24 months between July 2008 and June 2010.

It found that the rate of homicide in Australia remains at a historic low of 1.2 deaths per 100,000 people.

The NSW rate was just below that at 1.1 per cent per 100,000, Victoria recorded the lowest while the Northern Territory rate was more than four times the national average.

Indigenous Australians were over-represented as victims of homicide, with the homicide rate four times higher than the equivalent rate for non-indigenous Australians.

Gun-related homicide dropped to a historic low of 13 per cent but the frequency of people dying from stab wounds jumped from 30 per cent to 41 per cent over the previous decade.

In the US, in the meantime:

 The national homicide rate for 2011 was 4.8 per 100,000 citizens — less than half of what it was in the early years of the Great Depression, when it peaked before falling precipitously before World War II. The peak in modern times of 10.2 was in 1980, as recorded by national criminal statistics.

“We’re at as low a place as we’ve been in the past 100 years,” says Randolph Roth, professor of history at Ohio State University and author of this year’s “American Homicide,” a landmark study of the history of killing in the United States. “The rate oscillates between about 5 and 9 [per 100,000], sometimes a little higher or lower, and we’re right at the bottom end of that oscillation.”

Well, isn't that fascinating:  the US is (so to speak) doing cartwheels over a historically low murder rate which is still 4 times higher than ours.   And this would seemingly mean that you can't blame all of America's current rate on the drug trade (or, in the past, on prohibition) - there have been decades in which neither of these factors were significant, the country still had a relatively high murder rate.

So, what's the theory of Roth, who is quoted above.   Here's the summary of his book on Amazon:

 In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

I see that the book has just been was released a year ago.  Sounds like it could be a good read.

Noted in African tabloid news

A sixty year old woman who neighbours allege is a witch is reported to have given birth to a rat at Ekumfi Eku Mpoano in the Central Region.

The woman whose name has been withheld for safety reasons is said to have challenged a pastor who told her she was possessed by an evil spirit.

The Head Pastor of the 12 Apostles Church in the Central Region, Madam Akua Nyaneba tells Adom News when the woman was brought to her she was not pregnant but upon praying for her the woman confessed she was a witch and was carrying the rat for onward transfer into her sister’s womb.

To be fair, the article (which I had missed last year - despite my efforts to keep abreast of interesting rat news) is followed by several comments indicating that the readers do not believe it.

I sort of like the odd detail about carrying the rat "for onward transfer into her sister's womb", though.

An attempt to fix European carbon trading

Carbon trading: The first hurdle | The Economist

EUROPE’S emissions-trading system, the world’s largest carbon cap-and-trade scheme, survived a near-death experience on February 19th. The environment committee of the European Parliament voted to support a plan proposed by the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, to take 900m tonnes of carbon allowances off the market for up to five years. Had it rejected the plan, the market might have collapsed.

The proposal would reduce some of the massive overcapacity in the ETS, which has driven the price of carbon down from almost €30 a tonne in 2008 to about €5 this year. As this article argues, the overcapacity has come about as a result of two things: recession (which has pushed down industrial demand for carbon, even though the volume of carbon allowances is fixed for 2013-20) and one-off factors such as an increase in the number of carbon auctions. By taking allowances off the market now, when prices are low, and reintroducing them later, when (the proposers hope) prices will be higher, the designers of the scheme hope to limit the price decline. In the first instance, that hope was not fulfilled. Prices fell to €4 a tonne after the vote.

A recovery in the price may well help the Gillard government sell its scheme.

Roman festival noted

This is late, given that Valentines Day was last week, but it sounds so odd it's worth noting anyway:

For centuries before Christianity came on the scene, the Romans celebrated a mid-February fertility festival called Lupercalia. (It continued to be honored until the 4th century A.D.) This odd ritual involved a cadre of nearly naked male runners, who roamed the city, lightly whipping every nubile female in sight with bloody strips of goathide. Sounds suspiciously like S&M, but it was a purification ritual. The floggings cleansed the city and chased off evil spirits, making Rome’s women receptive in the most basic sense for procreative sex.