Clean coal, Finkel, etc

To be honest, I've been busy and haven't heard enough about the Finkel review proposal regarding a clean energy target to know whether it's all good, or a bit fanciful.   (My suspicion is that the modelling is a bit fanciful.)   But it has the feeling of "a lot better than nothing" about it, nonetheless.

I am encouraged by the fact that it would seem that the Abbott objections are not getting all that much support from within the party room, and even Barnaby Joyce seems to be giving up the argument and just wants to get this divisive issue behind him.

Could it be that the Coalition is genuinely in a process of permanently sidelining the climate change fake skeptics, lukewarmers and conservative culture warriors for whom a matter of science has become, weirdly and corrosively, an emblematic issue?   I'm starting to get my hopes up...

In the meantime I remain completely skeptical about clean coal, and hope the Coalition does not fund it.

High rise fire

This tragic London apartment tower fire raises the question - what is it that burns so well in a tower block like that?   I reckon that the sight of a high rise almost entirely on fire internally is shocking because I would normally assume that it would mainly be only furnishing and curtains that can really burn well, so shouldn't any fire be readily contained to within one apartment, or at worst, one floor?  

But it obviously doesn't work like that...

I see that there is a Wikipedia entry up for the Grenfell Tower fire already, and it notes this:

In November 2016, a residents organisation, Grenfell Action Group, published online an article attacking KCTMO as an "evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia" and accusing the Borough Council of ignoring health and safety laws. The Group suggested that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of [KCTMO]". The group had also published articles criticising fire safety and maintenance practices at Grenfell Tower.^[12][13]

This is going to be in the news for quite a long time, by the sounds.

Magnetic eels

Hey, Norway gets a mention, too:

Now, researchers at the University of Miami and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research have shown that the eels use Earth's magnetic field to determine which direction to swim. In a Norwegian fjord, they placed locally caught glass eels in a mesh container that was suspended from a surface float. A camera recorded the behaviour of the eels and the team found that they tended to swim in a southerly direction at ebb tides. The same glass eels were then placed in a specially designed tank in which they are shielded from external stimuli such as daylight. Magnetic fields were applied to the tank, which effectively rotated the magnetic north–south axis by 90°. During periods of ebb tides, the team found that the eels oriented themselves in a southerly direction as defined by the applied magnetic field. This led them to conclude that the glass eels navigate using Earth's magnetic field in a manner that is linked to the local cycle of tides. This, they believe, could help the eels to use the tides to reach freshwater in rivers. "It is incredible that these small transparent glass eels can detect the Earth's magnetic field," says Miami's Alessandro Cresci. "The use of a magnetic compass could be a key component underlying the amazing migration of these animals," he adds. "It is also the first observation of glass eels keeping a compass as they swim in shelf waters, and that alone is an exciting discovery."

TV recommendations

*  the "invisible city" series showing on SBS on Sunday nights - where they go underneath various Italian ancient cities and map them in 3D detail with laser scanners - has been really interesting.   Last week's episode, about Rome itself, really surprised me as to the vast extent of ancient, empty quarries underneath it.   (As well the awesomeness of Roman engineering generally.)   You see some of the scanning results at this website, and I'm sure it would still be able to be viewed in the SBS on Demand.

*  Last night's Foreign Correspondent about the large Kerokbokan prison on Bali was pretty fascinating too.  A more or less self run (by the inmates) prison, it seems a remarkably happy and relaxed place, despite serious overcrowding.  (Apparently, the prisoners who never attempt breaking out despite the relatively low tech security arrangements.)   Perhaps it has a not so scary atmosphere because most of the prisoners are just unlucky drug users/couriers/dealers?    Or is it because there is pretty access to drugs within the prison - a point the show did not spend any time explaining?   (With the relaxed looking monthly family days, smuggling drugs in does not look like a problem at all.)

With shows like these, I always feel like chaining News Ltd columnists and whiny Catallaxy economists to a chair and make them watch such quality TV which is unmatched by commercial networks.   Do they want us to only watch fake reality TV contests and pathetic things like shows made about other people watching shows?  

How often do I get to put "lesbians" and "Nazis" in the one post title?

Researcher sheds light on life of lesbians in Nazi Germany

Long story short:  the Nazi's didn't get as worked up about lesbians as they did about gay men.

The systematic persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime has been well documented by historians. The regime's laws explicitly criminalized homosexual acts between men. About 50,000 men were convicted for being homosexuals and between 5,000 and 15,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps, where up to 60 percent of them died, according to scholars.

But how lesbians fared is less clear. Females were excluded from the law that made homosexual acts illegal. Aside from a few cases that have been uncovered by a handful of scholars in the United States and Germany, little documentation exists describing how the Nazis treated lesbians.

There were still some attempts at prosecutions, though, and the article notes 8 cases on the records where the women were not convicted.  One was particularly odd:

Liu née Holzmann, whose lesbian relationship was also documented in a recent German monograph, struck Huneke as particularly strange. Holzmann was a Jewish lesbian who lived in Nazi Berlin. In 1941, she married a Chinese waiter and received Chinese citizenship, which the police insisted shielded her from deportation to a concentration camp. Once Holzmann's husband became aware of her lesbian relationship, he filed for divorce and contacted the police.

Yet, as in the other three cases, the police opted not to intervene. "It is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship," Huneke wrote.

Magnetic brain rewiring for depression

They should make this available to the threadsters of Catallaxy:

The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA is one of a handful of hospitals and clinics nationwide that offer a treatment that works in a fundamentally different way than drugs. The technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation, beams targeted magnetic pulses deep inside patients' brains—an approach that has been likened to rewiring a computer.

TMS has been approved by the FDA for treating depression that doesn't respond to medications, and UCLA researchers say it has been underused. But new equipment being rolled out this summer promises to make the treatment available to more people.

"We are actually changing how the brain circuits are arranged, how they talk to each other," said Dr. Ian Cook, director of the UCLA Depression Research and Clinic Program. "The brain is an amazingly changeable organ. In fact, every time people learn something new, there are physical changes in the brain structure that can be detected."

To Norway, again

My interest in Norway is piqued again by an article in the NYT (with some photos too) about the Americans building a new radar on an isolated Norwegian island, and the Russians are not happy about it:

The joint American-Norwegian radar project, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and consume substantial amounts of electricity, has infuriated Moscow, which sees it as part of a Pentagon drive to encircle and contain Mr. Putin’s resurgent Russia. The Russian ambassador in Oslo, Norway’s capital, recently warned Norway that it should “not be naïve” about Russia’s readiness to respond.

“Norway has to understand that after becoming an outpost of NATO, it will have to face head-on Russia and Russian military might,” the ambassador, Teimuraz Ramishvili, told Norway’s state broadcaster, NRK. “Therefore, there will be no peaceful Arctic anymore.”

The new radar system at Vardo will merely upgrade an earlier American-built radar system and continue its mission, Morten Haga Lunde, the chief of Norway’s military intelligence agency, said in a cryptic statement last year. That mission, he added, is to track space debris like defunct satellites and to “monitor our national area of interest in the North.”

But Russia’s generals and many Norwegians have dismissed the space-trash story. They say they believe that the new Globus 3 radar is part of the Pentagon’s efforts to develop a global missile-defense system, making it a prime target for attack in the event of a conflict.

Send in the cows

How do you start a dairy industry overnight in a wealthy desert nation with its transport links blockaded? You buy 4,000 cows from Australia and the U.S. and put them on airplanes.

That is what Qatari businessman Moutaz Al Khayyat told Bloomberg he is doing. The airlift will require as many as 60 flights on Qatar Airways, but Al Khayyat said, "This is the time to work for Qatar."

Here's the link.

Putin on the risk (to the tune of...never mind)

There's a pretty decent article on why Putin is probably feeling pretty cheery about how things are going for Russian influence at the Interpreter, and one odd bit in particular I wanted to extract:

Taking into account all of the above, it seems remarkable that some foreign commentators still find it difficult to see that Putin has been engaged in an all-out attempt to bring his Western enemies down, by whatever means. If 'enemy' seems excessive, let us recall that the standard KGB expression for the US during the Cold War was 'chief adversary', and that until quite recently the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Patrushev, was claiming publicly that US hostility to Russia was 'systemic' and 'immanent' – that is, no matter who was president, the US would continue to seek to 'dismember' Russia.

As Robert Horvath noted in an unpublished address to the Pacific Institute in February (cited here with permission), the most lurid specimen of this propaganda is the allegation that Madeleine Albright once said it would be impossible to construct a just world while Siberia's vast natural resources were controlled by Russia alone. That allegation was first aired in an interview in the Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta with a former KGB general about an occult secret project to read the minds of Western leaders. This project was the source of the Albright-Siberia claim.

So one bit of notorious Russian fake news has started from their secret mind reading projects? Huh.  How more "fake news" can you get?

And for a tale of Putin and strong suspicions of his knowledge of hits on Russians who have crossed the interests of Russia:  there's a rather interesting report on Buzzfeed about a death in Britain in 2012 which everyone, apart from the British, think is highly suspicious.  The British investigation does sound rather, shall we say, oddly lacking in curiosity.

I see that I still haven't managed to fit the word "risk" into the post in order to justify the attempted musical pun in the title.  Well, here's a Bloomberg article from early 2016:  Putin is a Compulsive Risk Taker. Hey, it's the best I can do.

Unwanted movie review

In my never ending search to find more than one A grade movie on the Stan streaming service, I watched the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Nightcrawler last weekend.  It got a 95% rating on Rottentomatoes, which just goes to show how unreliable it can be.   (Metacritic gave it a much more reasonable 76%, but I would put it much lower than that.)

It's a very peculiar movie, seemingly made mainly to show off Jake's earnest ability to make himself look physically quite awful and act as really oddball sociopath.   A mix of Sheldon (Big Bang Theory) and Nathan (from Nathan for You - the somewhat amusing but disorientating comedy series also on Stan - you should try it), the role is very menacing and cringingly funny, but it doesn't ever really dramatically build up to much. 

Thematically,  it did keep reminding me of Network,  not that I particularly enjoyed that movie either. 

Good acting in search of a good story, I would say.   4.5/10.   

Addictions of the religiously conservative

For a socially conservative religion, it sure sometimes seems that Muslims have quite the problem with drug addiction.   Although, to be a little bit fair when I don't really want to be, I suppose you could have said the same thing about Catholic Ireland's reputation for overindulging in alcohol.  Which leads me to this extract from a paper talking about the Irish and their reputation for heavy drinking:

Mind you, I should be targetting the Scots instead, perhaps - look at this per capita consumption of spirits table from the same paper:

Gosh.

Batman, too considered

I have to say, prompted by all the commentary appearing with the passing of Adam West (who seemingly was a nice enough, self-effacing fellow), that the amount of words devoted to analysis of his 1960's lightweight show is rather excessive.   The show was mildly amusing for children and adults, but was not all that culturally significant.  You can stop talking about it now...

A mentally unhealthy blog

The threads of Catallaxy, which have become a self selecting support group for the perpetually angry conservative, culture warrior Right, have long made me suspect that many who cyber-live there have, at least, actual personality defects, if not more serious mental health issues.

Yesterday, one of their regulars spoke seriously about feeling depressed and angry to such an extent that he recognises he has a problem, but does not know how to address it.  (He is a teacher, and doesn't trust antidepressants, based on how he has seen them affect children.)

Well, the responses did indeed surprise me, to the extent that so many "regulars" did volunteer that  they have had serious issues with depression - with several mentions of suicidal thoughts and bouts on antidepressants.  (Most of whom indicate they have recovered, of course, although some made it clear it was a continuing battle to some extent.   One of the more unpleasant regulars said he had more or less been born depressed - I can believe that, and would add in "angry" - and was fanatical about exercise as a way of battling it.)

Now I am not wanting to mock those who have bouts of depression, however caused, and of course there be would abundant numbers of people on the Left who have suffered from it as well.

But it does strike me that living your mental life in a perpetually angry Right wing echo chamber, and one which is undoubtedly in denial on several major culture war issues (climate change, and that the younger generation accepts changing marriage to include gay relationships, to give the two clearest examples), is actually not a mentally healthy place to be in the long run, if you are inclined towards depression.

The relief they may feel that "I'm not the only one who thinks like this" has to be off set by the fact that it encourages them to continue denying reality, and thus leading to frustration that, if so many can (apparently) agree with them in this corner of cyberspace, what is wrong with the rest of society?   The site reinforces their sense of anger, ultimately, but based in large part on a denial of reality.

Thus I say that Sinclair Davidson's blog is not only a corrosive one for civil political discussion, it's probably mentally unhelpful for its own community, in the long run.   

Update:  just to show I am not making up the startling outpouring of admissions of past depressive illnesses, here's what the recent depression sufferer has noted today:

All completely normal..not

Much well deserved mockery of Trump's "you must pledge your allegiance to me and proclaim how brilliantly I am performing" public cabinet meeting.

Seriously, no amount of culture war warrior-ing, or just shrugging shoulders and saying "we can work around him to get policy we want"  can excuse defending this fragile, narcissistic ego as normal or nothing to worry about in a leader with the power of POTUS.  

And as for Newt Gingrich, who is credited with starting the Republicans decent into "let's win at all costs, who cares about evidence based policy" stupidity,  his reversal within a month just shows how incredibly shallow and untrustworthy he is.  Just like his President.

Bring back the old Conversation

Can I say, I don't care for the way The Conversation is going under its new leadership, with headline articles like this:

Not merely costume: the power and seduction of the Queen’s hats

Swimming with Lincoln

Also at NPR, a story about how the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is to be drained and cleaned to try to rid it of a parasite that's been killing ducks, and can irritate humans too.

Interestingly, the article then wanders into a discussion of how the pool has never had swimming allowed, but obviously this was not always strictly enforced, as this photo from the 1920's shows:

Where did they swim officially around Washington?:

According to the site Histories of the National Mall, the District of Columbia operated three small whites-only public pools near the Washington Monument in the mid-1920s and early '30s, which were demolished in 1935.

The site says that starting in the 1880s, there were segregated swimming areas near the Mall in the Tidal Basin: "In 1914, Congress voted to create an official beach on the Tidal Basin for white patrons. African Americans swam nearby in a segregated area that never received funding or buildings. Facing increased criticism from black leaders and concerns that the water was polluted, Congress voted to ban swimming in the Tidal Basin in 1925."

Considering that the Brisbane Spring Hill Baths, which I wrote about in detail in 2011, were opened in 1886, it would seem we were pretty advanced compared to other cities in providing that type of facility.

Still pretty dark in parts of Africa

A surprising story at NPR:

Authorities in Mozambique say bald men are being killed, allegedly because of the belief that their heads contain gold.

So far five bald men have been killed, all in central Mozambique: two in May in Milange district close to the border with Malawi and three this month in the district of Morrumbala.

Bald men across the country are afraid of exposing their scalps. Some stay indoors. Others hide their baldness with caps....

Dina accused traditional healers of conniving with the murderers of bald people because of the cultural belief that their heads contain gold. It is also possible that the goal is to obtain body parts to use in rituals aimed at bringing wealth — the reason that albinos have been targeted for their body parts in some countries.

Ready for her close up

There's been too many words here lately, and not enough cute.  Here's some:

And here's a prisma filtered shot:

Cockroaches, retrocausality, event horizons, and Titus-Bode is still a thing...

I've been scrolling through arXiv again, as you do on a rainy day, and suggest the following papers are worth a look:

* Can we Falsify the Consciousness-Causes-Collapse Hypothesis in Quantum Mechanics?
I see that it's co-authored  by someone from the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies from San Francisco State University - which sounds about the unlikeliest school on the planet to expect a groundbreaking paper in quantum physics to come from.

Sorry, perhaps that's too impolite, because I did like it.  As you may see, the paper discusses experiments that could use living creatures to test the hypothesis - with cockroaches being touted as a potential candidate.  (Cats who can walk through walls are one thing, but I hope cockroaches never manage that trick.)  Anyway, it ends up making the point that CCCH (see the title) is probably unfalsifiable, because to test it properly would require removing any arguably conscious thing (a cockroach brain, for example) out of the thermal effects that (apparently) can confound such an experiment.  In other words, whatever you use would have to be taken down to a temperature within a few degrees of absolute zero.  Since no one expects that anything arguably conscious can be conscious at that temperature, it's effectively unfalsifiable.   Neat argument - I wonder if it is right?

*   Did you know that there was a Centre for Time at the University of Sydney?  No, nor did I, but someone from there has written a short paper outlining the way that retrocausality can help sort out some of the perplexing problems in quantum mechanics.   (The only problem is, I thought that some experiments designed to show retrocausality hadn't come up with anything yet.  I have some posts about Cramer's experiment in the past, but here's a not so old media story about his failure.)

*  It's not quantum physics (although it involves it), but there is still some argument happening about whether event horizons really exist around black holes.  Because if they don't, it avoids the information loss paradox.   (I see one of the authors is from Macquarie University, by the way.)  

*  Hey, I didn't realise that scientists still puzzled about the Titus-Bode rule that applied to planetary orbits around the sun, but they do.  (I remember that in a Heinlein novel, the interstellar explorers find that other solar systems exhibited the same rule, and it was still being puzzled over.  I either hadn't heard, or had forgotten, that we already know that some other observed systems do eem to follow the rule.)   I learnt all of this from the intro to this paper, which is short but argues a physical cause for it.  It's not the clearest explanation I've ever read, but here's the abstract:

We consider the geometric Titius-Bode rule for the semimajor axes of planetary orbits. We derive an equivalent rule for the midpoints of the segments between consecutive orbits along the radial direction and we interpret it physically in terms of the work done in the gravitational field of the Sun by particles whose orbits are perturbed around each planetary orbit. On such energetic grounds, it is not surprising that some exoplanets in multiple-planet extrasolar systems obey the same relation. On the other hand, it is surprising that this simple interpretation of the Titius-Bode rule also amounts to a straightforward refutation of the celebrated theorem of Bertrand that has been in existence since 1873. 

A convenient memory

I just noticed from Twitter someone referring to Trump's own lawyers, back in 1992, saying that they always met him in pairs:

This was noted in a Buzzfeed report last year.

25 years later, and inane Trump fans think Trump is now the one you can always believe if it's his word against another person's?   It's just nuts how gullible they are.