Inconstant universe

It seems that there is new evidence that the fundamental constants of the universe are not so constant:

Today, John Webb at the University of South Wales, one of the leading proponents of the varying constant idea, and a few cobbers say they have new evidence from the Very Large Telescope in Chile that the fine structure constant was different when the universe was younger.

But get this. While data from the Keck telescope indicate the fine structure constant was once smaller, the data from the Very Large Telescope indicates the opposite, that the fine structure constant was once larger. That's significant because Keck looks out into the northern hemsiphere, while the VLT looks south

This means that in one direction, the fine structure constant was once smaller and in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. And here we are in the middle, where the constant as it is (about 1/137.03599...)...

The implication from Webb and co's data is that the fine structure constant is continuously varying throughout space and is merely fine-tuned for life in this corner of the cosmos: the universe's habitable zone. Elsewhere, presumably well beyond the universe we can see, this constant is entirely different.

That's likely to put the cat among the pigeons.

If the work holds up, this is big news.

Heightened reality

The 100 year old colour photos of pre-revolution Russia which Tim Blair linked to yesterday really are worth looking at. It's amazing how seeing history in crisp colour makes the past feel not such a distant country after all.

Unusual help

Slate has an article about a book written by a guy who grew up with parents who were both Jungian psychotherapists. Apparently, most people who hear this assume he will have been driven mad by his parents psychoanalyzing everything, and when you read this bit of parental help the author received, I don't really wonder why:

Toub's parents .... actively brought their Jungian practice into their parenting technique. There was a lot of dream analysis in the Toub household, of course, and also exercises in the Jungian technique of "active imagination," which Toub explains is "deliberately exploring one's imagination and fantasies by … acting them out verbally or physically to read the message that one's unconscious is trying to communicate." In one memorable scene, Toub's mother encouraged him to "be" an erection in order to help him get over a bout of teenage impotence. To accomplish this, she took young Micah to a local park and had him pretend to be his own boner. "Your name is not Micah, you are not a human being," she told him. "You are an erection. What words come into your head?" He visualized himself as a "victorious penis," running around the park triumphantly.[*] Laugh away, but the treatment worked: Micah is no longer plagued by an uncooperative member.

Apart from the therapy, I am surprised by two things: a. a teenager can suffer impotence? and b. a teenager would tell his parents he is suffering impotence.

Update: * I also get the feeling the exact same visualization was being used by Tony Abbott to try and win the election.

Meaning unclear

For no reason I can think of, this morning, while walking to the car, the theme music for Gigantor came to mind. I am hoping that this later proves to be a meaningful co-incidence; but preferably not by a giant Japanese remote controlled robot appearing in my city.

Pebble Bed returns?

Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor at UC Berkeley – low cost nuclear?

Well, I haven't heard anything about the South African pebble bed reactor development lately. (Probably, I learn right now, because it has definitely gone belly up.)

Yet a new type of pebble bed reactor is discussed at Brave New Climate: one that uses molten salts as a coolant. Reporting on a visit to UC Berkeley:

So, back to Per’s lab. He has various engineering models set up to test movement of TRISO pebble fuel through a fluoride salt coolant, whereby the pebbles are inserted in the inlet pipes and rise up through the reactor module over time, and then are put back through 5 or 6 times. This allows for very high burnup — exceeding 50 %, high power density due to the heat capacity of the liquid salt, and high temperatures thanks to the durability of the pebbles. This is a big (potential) advantage over the current Pebble Bed Modular Reactor technology (PBMR), because in that design, the gas coolant has a very low power density. He’s flipped the problem on its head. The reactor also has various inherent safety design features, such as control rods that sink naturally in response to elevated coolant temperature, thereby passively regulating reactivity. Very safe!

Of course, this does not sound as modular as the South African design was intended to be, but it is still being explored as means of making cheaper nuclear designs than the current designs. (The article explains that the cost of new nuclear is still providing prohibitive for its expansion in the US.)

So it's a case of the pebble bed is dead...long live the pebble bed!

At least it's amusing

I've said this on another blog, but repeat it here.

Regardless of who ultimately forms government, I'm finding it very amusing to watch Tony Abbott, whose promoters loved him for his aggressive approach to Opposition (he brought down Kevin Rudd! He united his party! He didn't bite a Labor opponent during the election campaign, like everyone thought he might!) having to present a new face - conciliatory Tony - due to having to deal with independents to gain government.

So in recent days it's all "yes, Parliament is unnecessarily confrontational, isn't it" and "sorry Andrew for the way the last government I was in said you were nuts". Looks distinctly unlike the "real Tony" to me, but we haven't heard any of that from the "how many Julia's are there" crowd yet.

Some time ago I jokingly noted that Tony might do better as a eunuch, as some academic had suggested they had historically (in many societies) been able to play an important role in government by not being so distracted by testosterone. Seems the joke had more truth in it than I realised at the time.

Attack of the flash drive

This is pretty interesting. An enemy attack could be bound up in something as simple as a USB flash drive inserted in a laptop on the other side of the world:

The most serious cyber attack on the US military's networks came from a tainted flash drive in 2008, forcing the Pentagon to review its digital security, a top US defense official said Wednesday.

The thumb drive, which was inserted in a military laptop in the Mideast, contained malicious code that "spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.

The code was placed on the drive by "a foreign intelligence agency," Lynn wrote.

"It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary."

Previous media reports speculated that the attack may have originated from Russia.

Mouse guard needed

Saudi Arabia is seeking to stop just any old mufti from issuing "absurd fatwas" by decreeing that they can only be issued by the Council of Senior Religious Scholars.

An example of an absurd fatwa:

Shaikh Mohammad Al Munjed, a Syrian scholar living in Saudi Arabia, said that Mickey Mouse should be killed because he is a mouse and mice are considered unclean in Islam.

I take it that Disney Riyadh won't be opening any time soon.

Wartime disaster noted

World War II was so chock full of dramatic death and disaster, there are still examples of it which I haven't heard of before. From The Independent, noting in a obituary the death of one of the survivors:

Wednesday 23 August 1944 began like any other day in the sleepy Lancashire village of Freckleton. Situated on the banks of the River Ribble, once the traditional haunt of smugglers, during the Second World War it played host to a large contingent of American airmen, based mostly at the neighbouring Warton aerodrome.

At its heart lay Holy Trinity primary school where 176 children, many of them evacuees, were in their second day of a new term....

At 10.30am, an American Liberator Bomber 42-50291 took off from Warton on a routine test flight. Eleven minutes in, a huge explosion, thought to have been sparked by a bolt of lightning, tore the huge plane apart. Large parts of the fuselage rained down on the village, hitting the school and a neighbouring snack bar. In the ensuing inferno, 61 people were killed, including 38 members of that infant class; it was the greatest loss of civilian life outside London during the Second World War.

Science additions

I've added two science blogs to the roll: Erin, who is doing science communication but has much better hair than Bernie Hobbs, has started "Buzzing Universe", at which she hopes to concentrate on controversy in cosmology. What a good person to know.

I've also added Backreaction, the long running blog of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. She's always been good to read, and seems a lot less of a culture warrior than many physicist bloggers (like those at Cosmic Varience, who just love getting upset with religion all the time.)

Rent a poor womb

A disturbing article is here at Slate about how popular the use of surrogacy in India has become as a way for poor, often illiterate, women to make a large amount of money:

It is not uncommon for surrogates to authorize contracts with a thumbprint as opposed to a signature because they are illiterate. Even those who are literate often aren't able to read the contracts, which tend to be written in English. Lack of technological understanding among rural Indians also breeds misconceptions about surrogacy. Many, for example, thought that it would be necessary to sleep with another man in order to conceive. Even the pricing structure of surrogacy perpetuates social inequality: Many religious Indian surrogacy clients would prefer for their child to be birthed by an upper-caste brahmin, so high-born surrogates can get paid up to double.

And how about this as an example of the appalling excuse making that some in the reproductive technology business undertake:

The country is romanced by the idea of selling human capital as its next great commodity. So surrogacy resonates not as an old problem of exploiting the poor but as an inevitable part of the "new India," where the locals provide much needed services for the new global economy. This kind of forward-thinking economic liberation dovetails with an ideology of personal freedom. "I think women should be free to choose what they do with their bodies," says Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, a fertility specialist in Mumbai. "We shouldn't treat them as stupid just because they are poor."

Going back a few months, I never got around to posting about the Melbourne woman who was off to Thailand to have sex selecting IVF to get a girl. I doubt she had much public sympathy: oh, except probably from some in the IVF industry. As was noted in Eureka Street in April, before that Melbourne mother's case was publicized:

In recent weeks, several reports have appeared in the media that Australia's ban on couples using IVF to choose the sex of their children for social reasons or to balance their families might soon be lifted.

Most stories quoted 'IVF pioneer' Professor Gab Kovacs, who is said to be 'leading the charge' or 'leading the lobby'. A number of other fertility doctors are also involved.

This seems to be a pre-emptive attempt to sway public opinion. The inquiry has not yet commenced. And supporters of this view know that many of us are not comfortable about parents choosing the sex of their children. So ahead of time, they're trying to change our minds.

Your urine powered future

Lots of jokes to be made at the expense of this article about research into using urine to generate useful amounts of electricity.

The problem with helium

The Independent explains how the world's helium is running out:

Scientists have warned that the world's most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle.

The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas – by far the biggest store of helium in the world – must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price.

The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky.

Further down, though, the article says all the helium may be gone within 100 years.

So how much should a helium balloon cost?:

Professor Richardson believes the price for helium should rise by between 20- and 50-fold to make recycling more worthwhile. Nasa, for instance, makes no attempt to recycle the helium used to clean is rocket fuel tanks, one of the single biggest uses of the gas.

Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about $100 (£75) to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain.

Soon it'll be hydrogen balloons for the kiddies, but only if their parents don't smoke.

Back to science

Here’s a good article on the very surprising (apparent) finding that solar neutrinos – or another mystery particle from the sun - affect radioactive decay on Earth.  (I’m sure I mentioned this here before a long time ago.)  Much work remains to be done, though.

Contrainception

I went and saw Inception yesterday, partly for the rare treat of seeing a well reviewed adult movie, and partly to see whether my hunch was right that the weekend election was a dream within a dream. I'm leaning to the theory that soon Malcolm Turnbull will wake up and resume his rightful place as Prime Minister.

Anyhow, I have to say I was pretty disappointed.

Christopher Nolan's career has coincided with my young child raising years, so I still haven't seen his well regarded Momento or even The Dark Knight. But if Inception is any guide, it certainly appears he doesn't do ordinary human emotion very well. It's flashy film making with money and CGI effects galore, but its over-riding fault is how very cold [update: probably more accurate to say "unengaging", as did the WSJ review] it feels at an emotional level. In that respect, it seemed rather like a Kubrick effort, but lacking that director's more careful pacing and powerful set piece imagery which usually more than compensated for the artificial quality of much of the acting.

There was one element that came close to feeling emotionally real and being an interesting plot point - the DiCaprio character's unresolved guilt over the fate of his wife - but the details of it were revealed far too late in the film, and not resolved in any especially memorable way.

Here's a list of other problems I had with it:

* no wonder it's said to have taken 10 years to write. It's supposed to be an adage of good filming making that it is better to show character and story rather than have protagonists explaining it, yet this would have to be the most "explained" cinema event since An Inconvenient Truth.

* talk about your cursory attempts to portray a new technology. Group dreaming involved a briefcase sized device with what seemed to be intravenous lines into the wrist, although even that was not so clear. The drugs involved seemed to come from a backyard operation. Come on, if the participants had a least a electronic mind wave reading skull cap on, it would have had some vague plausibility, but just linking up via the wrist?

* the action scenes were, by and large, just poorly directed, with editing that was too choppy to tell what was really going on, and who was in danger. And because a lot of the figures being shot or crushed were merely dream characters, there was not the same sense of danger that you get from "real life" action.

* the near climatic action around a snow bound fortress looked extremely similar to the snow chases and gunfights we've seen many times in James Bond films. Why did Nolan think this would look particularly interesting? It was actually hard to tell who was who during parts of this segment.

I would guess that Nolan was heavily influenced by Jungian ideas on the subconscious and dreaming, which makes his lack of emotional involvement all the more puzzling, given my impression that Jung was a "warmer" character with less of the cool intellectual approach of Freud.

This is a film that would have been better served by a lighter touch, a shorter length, and director better with emotion. People like to complain about Spielberg's sentimentality, but the way he dealt with adult emotional material in the very serious science fiction of AI and Minority Report left you feeling something at least, unlike this effort.

It also reminded me of another film dealing with fights inside dreams - Dreamscape from the 1980s. I remember very little of its plot now, but do recall enjoying it as a bit of a romp, and that's about as much as you should expect from this implausible type of science fiction. (Amusingly, on the question of originality of Inception, I have just read the Wikipedia entry I linked to above, which notes that the central idea is very similar to the plot of an Uncle Scrooge comic! I see the Kubrick similarity has been noted by others too.)

Gee, now that I have put down my issues with it, it sounds like I really hated it. That's not quite true either, but as you can see I spent a fair bit of time thinking about why it wasn't working for me. I also tend to react more strongly against a very big budget film that I consider a failure than a more modestly scaled one, for the obvious reason that it feels more of a waste when it has sucked money away from (say) 3 smaller scale examples of science fiction which could well have been more enjoyable.

So maybe that's it for my adult movie viewing for another year. I'm half tempted by "Salt," but it's hard to believe I could really like an Angelina Jolie film.

Update:   It's me, from the future, finding that I enjoyed it more on the second viewing.  Huh.

Election comment

Sad accident

As far as horrible hospital accidents go, this one is spectacularly bad:

Grace Wang's spinal canal was injected with powerful antiseptic instead of anaesthetic, in what should have been a routine epidural to ease the pain of her first child's birth.

The Herald understand the two substances had been transferred to separate metal dishes on the sterile table, contravening the standard practice of drawing them directly from their packaging into a syringe to avoid confusion.

The devastating medical mistake - inconceivable in its magnitude - has poisoned her nervous system, leaving the 32-year-old distressed, confused, in shocking pain and unable to walk or even sit.

How inconvenient

Nature reports:

The capacity of plants to act as a carbon sink could be on the decline.

As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, the amount of atmospheric carbon being converted into plant biomass has increased in step. However, in a paper published today in Science, ecologists Maosheng Zhao and Steve Running at the University of Montana in Missoula report a surprising reversal of this trend over the last decade, despite its having been the warmest on record.

The reason appears to be drier conditions in the Southern Hemisphere.

Limited responsibility

Well that's good. Due to a change in my electorate's boundaries, I am now living in what appears to be one of the safest Labor seats in Brisbane. Previously, I was in a seat that swung from side to side, and my vote actually mattered. Given the appalling choices this election, I kind of like the sensation of irrelevancy, at least for the moment.

The Senate remains a problem. The Greens have exactly one policy I support, but it's an important one - a carbon tax.

Both Labor and Liberal say there will be no carbon tax. Brown thinks he can force one through, and he supports a mining tax, but wants to increase the amount that can be gained from it. I generally support the mining profits tax, but don't really trust Brown's fiddle with it.

The Coalition really can't be trusted on environmental issues while there are under the sway of Abbott and his supporters.

The likely line up of independents seems very up in the air, except I think everyone expects the slightly loopy Fielding to go. I don't know anything about independents running in Queensland.

I think it is looking like, in the mix, I would probably be best off supporting Labor in the Senate, while at the same time hoping Brown wins eventually on the carbon tax.

UPDATE: courtesy of Antony Green's election site, I now have a good idea of what's going on in the Senate at Queensland level. Hey, Barnaby Joyce is up for re-election. As well as George Brandis.

Joe Ludwig is also on the card for Labor.

The game of who to put last is always a challenge. This time, it looks like a contest between both of them in the Climate Sceptics Party and the perpetual protester Sam Watson of the Socialist Alliance.

What do you know: the Australian Democrats still exist! I expect they hold their conferences in one of the meeting rooms at the local Council library.

Well, this is going to take some studying.

Rat dad research

The Brains of Our Fathers: Does Parenting Rewire Dads?: Scientific American

Just in time for Father's Day, here's talk about some research into rat fathers which might indicate why human fathers are important too:

While it appears the seed of the father-child bond is planted by supplemental neurons in a new dad, it seems a child, on the other hand, may be born with a brain that expects this bond to form in the first place.

To prove this, a few recent studies turned to a rodent that employs a remarkably familiar nest structure. Degu rats are biparental animals, which means parenting duties are split between the mothers and father. Degu fathers behave just like human fathers. They spend the early days of their pups’ lives helping with basic care, like warming and grooming. And as the pups get older, the degu fathers begin actively playing with their toddler offspring.

Researchers reasoned that absent fathers in the degu nests would create a true social and emotional void for the offspring, just as a missing dad would impact the dynamic of a human family. They found that if a rodent father remained in the nest with his pups – presumably due to the newfound bond with his offspring – his babies’ brains developed normally. But if the father was removed from the nest shortly after the birth of his pups, his newborns’ brains started to break down at the level of synapses, which are short chemical junctions in the brain that allow brain cells to communicate with each other.

All quite interesting. And you can also expect people who don't give a toss about who gets to make babies via reproductive technology to have a problem with it.

How does it smell?

Garlic good for blood pressure

Research trials by Dr Karin Ried and her colleagues from the University of Adelaide's Discipline of General Practice show that garlic could be used as an adjunct to conventional drugs for hypertension.

However, raw or cooked garlic, and garlic powder are not as effective in treating high blood pressure as aged garlic extract.

In a 12-week trial involving 50 people, Dr Karin Ried's team found that those with systolic blood pressure above 140 who took aged garlic extract capsules experienced an average systolic blood pressure 10.2mmHg lower than the control group, who took a placebo.

Sounds like a pretty good result. But how does aged garlic extract make me smell?

Cheer up, doc

A study on mental health issues shows suicide and depression are more prevalent in the medical profession than in the general public.

Research commissioned by the national depression initiative Beyond Blue has found women in the profession are two-and-a-half times more likely to commit suicide.

The study - to be presented in Adelaide today - also suggests rates of suicide for men in the medical professional are 25 per cent higher than the general public.

Story here.

Dangerous days

While in Sydney last week, we visited the Maritime Museum for the first time, and paid the extra to go on board the replica Endeavour. The photo a few posts back was of one of the windows into the (relatively large and well appointed) "Great cabin".

This proved to very interesting, and what I found most remarkable about it was the lack of headroom in the rear midshipmen mess/officers cabins. This leaflet from the museum doesn't make it clear how low it is, although it does mention that one area the marines slept in was 1.2 m high. I think the area I am talking about is a little higher, but believe me it's cramped, especially given my aversion to spending time in areas where I can't stand up straight. It was due to the ship having an extra deck built into it to accommodate the large crew to be taken on his expedition.

I was also surprised to be reminded of the large body count that Cook's most famous voyage racked up. Looking over the Wikipedia entry, we find:

* a sailor dragged overboard when he got entangled in the anchor chain

* two of Bank's servants freeze to death while trying to return to the ship in a snowstorm after rounding Cape Horn

* after stopping in Batavia, 30 (in a crew of 94) died from dysentery or malaria (including the ship's surgeon, and his brother)

* the museum leaflet linked above also mentions a marine who committed suicide by jumping overboard

Life was quite different in the 18 th century, hey? A wife saying goodbye to her husband at the dock when he set off on a long expedition seemingly had a pretty good chance of never seeing him again.

Torture not required

Reading terrorists minds about imminent attack: Brain waves correlate to guilty knowledge in mock terrorism scenarios

Yeah, the story's been out for a couple of weeks and maybe you've already read it, but I want to note it here for my own records.

It was pretty fascinating, if you missed it.

Both sides of the fence

I didn't get to see Four Corners last night, but I see from this report that Abbott is still trying to walk both sides of the fence, by making statements that will appeal to climate skeptics, but still making out that he is satisfied enough to spend money on reducing carbon.

If you ask me, as with his "I'm not a tech head" attitude to selling his broadband policy, Abbott comes across as lazy on detail. He'll grab a "big idea" of his own, such as his parental leave plan, and run with that as far as he can, but when it comes to anything with science content, it's all a shrug of the shoulders and admissions that he hasn't read much about it. (He said he started Plimer's disreputable book but didn't finish it. That in fact might be a good thing, but there is no indication that he has read material on the other side of the fence.)

Out there physics

Here's a paper on arXiv that I haven't had time to try and read yet, but I like the title:

Born in an Infinite Universe: a Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Max Tegmark is one of the authors, and I certainly recognize his name.

Why I like the Tiger

Last week's trip to Sydney was taken on Tiger Airways again. This is at least the third time I've flown them: once to Adelaide, Melbourne and now Sydney.

The reason I fly them is, of course, the incredibly cheap fares you can find by subscribing to their email sale notifications. Apart from that, their generally bad reputation for reliability and service gives me a perverse thrill every time I take a successful trip on them.

I don't think any other airline in Australia is as ruthless with weight limits for both check-in baggage and carry on. What's more, the explanation of their rules in this regard on the internet is incredibly complicated. In some respects it seems to me that their website is positively misleading (referring to having to check baggage in 2 hours before the flight. In fact, no one will be at the counter in many of their terminals until 2 hours before the flight.) Telephoning them seems to end up putting you in contact with an overseas call centre, and the "telephone tree" didn't seem to recognize my number selections. Checking my reservation on line to make sure that I had paid for 15 kg of luggage when I booked the trip 9 months ago did not make it clear whether I had or not. (Hence the need for the lengthy call to the call centre.)

When you check in, there is normally some passengers at the desk having to do a rushed re-arrangement of the contents of their check in luggage to keep within the weight limits, or arguing over the fees they have paid.

Yet, all this means that when one successfully manages to book, pay for, and get on board a flight without drama (well, my wife had to give me some books from her carry on luggage to keep hers under 7 kg) there is the pleasant sensation of triumph over adversity, having dodged a bullet yet again, and flown this bus in the sky for a ridiculously cheap price.

Yes, I quite like Tiger Airways.

Photos from down south

More details to come.

Home

I've been away again, and now have to work to pay for it. Trip report to come.

One thing I always notice when I get back from a holiday is that going through one's regular internet haunts to catch up over a week or so only takes up a small fraction of the time that one can waste on checking the same sites every day. Perhaps if the World Wide Web was open only on Sundays, work efficiency globally would increase sufficiently that a double dip recession could be avoided.

As for politics:

* Tony Abbott gave a very crook interview on Radio National this morning, sounding particularly evasive and devious about the company levy to pay for his Swedish parental leave plan. Labor should use parts of it for last minute advertising.

* I had been contemplating making an informal vote this election*, but now that Mark Latham has endorsed that idea, even that has become unappealing. Now I need to arrange to be bedridden with some 24 hour illness so that I can not vote without appearing to be taking a lead from a walking spleen vent. (By the way, I reckon Latham looks meaner and scarier now that he doesn't wear glasses. Must be the Superman effect that previously softened his appearance somewhat.)

* at least for the House of Representatives. For the Senate, the temptation to vote all over the enormous paper just to make life difficult for the vote counter may be too much.

Things to do

I'm going to be pretty busy this week.

Here are some things to do while I'm busy and (probably) not posting:

* watch a chemo affected Christopher Hitchens talk about his illness and God stuff here. (He doesn't get upset with people praying for his recovery, by the way.)

* read about Astana, the brand spanking new capital city of Kazakhstan. As the article says "it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia. " As it happens, I really like planned-from-scratch cities. I just wish some country would let Disney do their capital. Then again, when you look at this photo gallery of Astana, it does look quite a lot like that already. Cool.

* Contemplate my mistake in thinking that competitive eating was as silly as competitions get. Little did I know that Finland was out-stupiding America by hosting the Sauna World Championships, which has just killed one "competitor" and sent another to hospital. Funny what can happen when the test is to see who can last longest in a 110 degree C heat:

Ladyzhenskiy and Kaukonen had made it through to the final ahead of more than 130 other participants, but six minutes into the contest, judges noticed something was wrong with the Russian, and dragged both competitors from the sauna.

Both middle-aged men were seen to have severe burns on their bodies and were given first aid after they collapsed.

* watch some video of the aftermath of a huge mudslip/flood in a part of China.

* put in an offer for a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pasadena. The price has already been reduced 35%; you might just get a bargain.

* be charmed by the twitching nose and rapid pace of the Rufous elephant shrew in this excerpt from the great documentary series Life currently showing on ABC on Sunday nights:

Concern from the other side of the world

The Independent runs a story about some evidence given to a Northern Territory inquiry about the pretty hopeless state of child welfare in aboriginal communities there.

It certainly does seem that resources are remarkably smaller than what I would have expected:

Claims that children are starving, or "failing to thrive", were contained in a submission to the inquiry in Darwin by child protection staff from the Northern Territory. They said resources allocated to indigenous communities were "grossly inadequate" and the spectacle of children who were failing to thrive was, to them, familiar.

The Darwin-based team covers a vast area and looks after 14,000 people, but has to make do with four welfare workers and four Aboriginal community workers. That level of staffing, combined with a "fly-in, fly-out approach", allows for "little more than superficial child protection responses", the inquiry submission said.

Staff also complained about the "incredible" volume of paperwork they had to plough through, saying: "We spend more time sitting at a computer than we do with our clients and their families."...

Meanwhile, Alice Springs Hospital has told the inquiry it is used by child protection workers as a "storehouse" for children awaiting foster placement. "[We are] an acute care facility, we are not able to provide appropriate supervision of children and their families," the hospital's submission said.

Dan Baschiera, a veteran social worker, told the inquiry he had seen child protection staff fresh from years of study and training "burn up" after a few months working in Aboriginal welfare. He accused the Northern Territory government of starving the child protection system of funds.

So, what's going on?

I didn't stay at the office yesterday, fearing the local clouds of wattle pollen. But then, the day before I felt generally ill, perhaps with a chill in the evening and feeling particularly tired. Is it in fact a virus, or was the tiredness from the (according to the woman in the pharmacy and the outside of the box) a non-drowsy antihistamine tablet that I took in the morning? (Strangely, the leaflet inside the box warned that for some people, it might make them sleepy anyway.)

Anyway, the nose didn't run much at home yesterday, and I generally felt not so bad while doing some work on my laptop on the dining room table. From that position, I got to watch the birds that come to the seed we leave outside (and to use the birdbath.) We now seem to have three regular types - a couple of bossy lorikeets, a pair of spotted doves, and now some top notch pigeons too. The lorikeets can't stand sharing the seed with the doves, and spend a lot of time trying to chase them away by hopping aggressively towards them. We've tried putting two plates of seeds out, then watched the lorikeets chasing pigeons away from both of them. [And now, as I type this, a spotted dove and top notch pigeon are having it out over a plate as well.] It's hard to make different species realise there's enough for everyone.

I've also noticed that spotted doves seem a particularly amorous breed. Doesn't matter what time of year it is, they seem up for it. But as far as nest building goes, they have extremely rudimentary ideas of what might be adequate. Lorikeets seem to be very private about their love life; we've never seen them do anything in or near the backyard. Maybe it's the mile high club only for them. Pigeons will try it anywhere.

I know getting wild birds too used to feeding is not supposed to be that good an idea, but we're only talking 6 regulars here, so I can't see we are going to cause any crisis to the local ecology.

So that's yesterday went; watching the local bird wars and amorous activities. Oh yeah, and peering into the computer as well. There are worse ways to pass the day.

The dreaded yellow flower

Near my office there are a few wattle trees. Every year, around this time, I either get sinus pain, or (as in this year) a full blown case of hayfever. It's then that I notice the wattles are in flower. They are evil.

Silly Brits

"Wild swimming" is apparently becoming popular in cold, polluted British waterways.  I did notice that Griff Rhys Jones seemed unusually keen on swimming in any murky brown stuff in his recent TV series about British rivers.  Odd people.

Short answer: no

The Christian Science Monitor asks the question "is the moon really a 'been there done that' world?"

The answer, of course, is "no". There was a forum at NASA last month which went into the details of why, and you can read about it at the link.

Powered by the sun

A solar salamander : Nature News

It turns out that a particular salamander incorporates photosynthetic algae in its cells:

Kerney reported that these algae are, in fact, commonly located inside cells all over the spotted salamander's body. Moreover, there are signs that intracellular algae may be directly providing the products of photosynthesis — oxygen and carbohydrate — to the salamander cells that encapsulate them.

This reminds me of the greenish, genetically engineered super bodies that were given to the aging soldiers in John Scalzi's "Old Man's War". If you're going to get into transhumanism, then incorporating chlorophyll would seem to be a good idea.

Babies at risk

Killing babies

Mary Beard discusses here on the practice in the Greco-Roman world of exposing unwanted babies. It's an unpleasant topic, but interesting.

Space airconditioning issue

I know very little about how the International Space Station works, despite my interest in all things spacey, but they have a cooling system that has gone on the blink:

The crew of the International Space Station have been forced to reduce power after half the cooling system suddenly shut down over the weekend.

Nasa officials insisted the three Americans and three Russians aboard were not in danger.

Urgent spacewalk repairs are being discussed for this week…

Flight controllers tried to restart the disabled ammonia pump early on Sunday but the circuit breaker tripped again.

Any repairs later this week almost certainly will involve replacing the faulty ammonia pump, a difficult job that would require two spacewalks, AP adds.

Two spare pumps are stored on the outside of the station.

Politics

A noteworthy addition

China Hush is a good quality blog that seems to have a new post almost every day about some odd or unusual story from China, so I’ll add it to the blogroll.

Two recent examples of its content: the proposed “straddling bus”concept which, if ever implemented, would make the morning drive alone its route pretty disconcerting; and the jarringly cutesy animated abortion ad that shows that China and huge slabs of the West are, at least in certain aspects, still culturally very far apart.

Get it while it’s hot

In Japan, eel is seen as an energy reviving summer food. This Japan Times blog post notes that no one is sure how this idea developed, although one rather mundane theory is that it was an early marketing ploy by the fishmongers of the Edo period who were having trouble “moving” their eel catch. I hope the true reason is at least a little more romantic.

Anyhow, the other reason the article is blogworthy is because it discusses eel farming . (Most eel sold in Japan is farmed.) It had never occurred to me before that the odd life cycle of the eel does not make it an ideal candidate for farming:

It’s impossible to grow unagi from eggs because despite the fact that unagi is designated as a fresh water fish, it lays its eggs in the ocean. (Anago, another eel species that is a popular dish in Japan, live in seawater their whole lives.) Their life cycle is the opposite of salmon, which lay eggs in freshwater but live their lives in the sea. In fact, no one knows precisely where unagi lay their eggs, though the most common theory is some place in the vicinity of the Marianas. After hatching the fry make their way back to Japan waterways and are caught in nets. These fry are then sold to unagi farms where they are raised to adulthood.

So that's how they do it. But it would be having a significant impact on eel numbers in the natural waterways of Japan, wouldn't it?

Germs and smarts

I missed this story when it came out in May, but I heard it being discussed on the radio today.

In mice at least, eating a common soil bacteria seems to make them learn faster.  From the Science Daily report:

"Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature," says Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks.

Previous research studies on M. vaccae showed that heat-killed bacteria injected into mice stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety.

"Since serotonin plays a role in learning we wondered if live M. vaccae could improve learning in mice," says Matthews.

Matthews and Jenks fed live bacteria to mice and assessed their ability to navigate a maze compared to control mice that were not fed the bacteria.

"We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice," says Matthews.

In the radio interview today, the researcher said they really have no idea whether the same thing happens in humans.  But all the same, it's an intriguing idea that being too hygienic may not only be bad for allergies, but might make learning slower too.

Add this to the “things I didn’t know were possible”list

Simon Dexter, a consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Meeta's surgeon, said that although it was a major operation it was possible to live without a stomach.

That’s from a BBC story about a couple of sisters in England who, due to their genetic susceptibility to stomach cancer, had theirs removed as a precaution.  Unpleasant.

Greatest scandal of 20th century revealed

Plastic Bertrand was more plastic that you knew. (Strangely, he's also morphed into Ellen DeGeneres.)

Behaviour modification required?

Last year I bought a cheap blood pressure machine from the pharmacy. I think I was a bit worried about the number of headaches my wife was having at the time, and as we don't often get our blood pressure checked, it seemed a sensible thing to do.

It indicated no big problem for either of us.

But due to a couple of mornings of dizziness on getting out of bed this week, I checked my own blood pressure again, and if this little machine is correct, it's up considerably since last year. But the readings it's giving for my wife are much worse, even first thing in the morning.

She's off to the doctor today to see if their machine agrees.

I should probably see my doctor too. There are several issues I can see that may need correcting in my current lifestyle:

1. Tony Abbott should stop improving his polling.

2. What? I can't spend a decade not bothering to get any particular exercise at all? I shake my fist at you fate. (Perhaps I shouldn't, that just made me dizzy.)

3. It's the evil influence of cheese. But is life with low fat cheese really worth living?

4. Salt. If, like me, your diet has a substantial Asian influence, salt is something that often comes in heavy doses. My impression is that nearly all men in Japan men go on blood pressure tablets from about the age of 42. (Their obligatory after work drinking sessions don't help too.)

5. Why am I cursed with a wife who is a talented baker, but with children who don't care for her cheesecakes, key lime pies (curse you, overly productive lime tree in the back yard), pecan pies, rhubarb cinnamon cakes, chocolate horns, etc? Hence, it becomes my duty to finish these desserts over 4 or 5 nights. (Neither my wife nor I actually consider ourselves to be fans of sugar or lots of cream; in fact if following an Australian recipe she often reduces the sugar by about one third and they still come out fine.) Seriously, I have asked my wife to stop making so many desserts, but she enjoys baking and resists my calls. It's a nightmare.

6. Blogging / the Internet. You mean I might be healthier by getting up and doing something, anything, physical, and going to bed a bit earlier. As well as avoiding irritants like the aggro commenters at Catallaxy? Well I'll be...

7. Lose weight. I'm pretty sure my calorie intake hasn't substantially increased over the last decade, but the kilograms surreptitiously increase anyway. We're not talking huge amounts, but photos catching me with a relaxed stomach now do embarrass me, and I know losing 5 - 6 kilos would put me in the normal BMI weight range. Maybe I should take up watching late night commercial TV for the latest exercise machine that I can pay off over four easy installments. Technology in them has improved over the last 10 years, hasn't it? In fact, the last time I lost weight was from a lingering stomach virus that reduced appetite for a good two or three weeks. Why can't that be an annual event?

8. Vitamin D. Yes, yes I am sure this is it. I get very little sun now. Happily, I see from an article in the New York Times that this is thought to be related to high blood pressure. I should be off to the pharmacy to see if vitamin D supplements will allow me to continue my sedate, sunless, salt, cheese and cheesecake eating lifestyle to continue.

Any other suggestions are welcome. Of course, we can also always hope the blood pressure machine is malfunctioning. That would be the best outcome of all.

Optimism in pigs

Can you ask a pig if his glass is half full?

Quite a charming bit of research here:

In an experiment reminiscent of Pavlov's dogs, the Newcastle team taught the pigs to associate a note on a glockenspiel with a treat -- an apple -- and a dog training 'clicker' with something unpleasant -- in this case rustling a plastic bag.

The next step was to place half the pigs in an enriched environment -- more space, freedom to roam in straw and play with 'pig' toys -- while the other half were placed in a smaller, boring environment- no straw and only one non-interactive toy.

The team then played an ambiguous noise -- a squeak -- and studied how the pigs responded. Dr Douglas said the results were compelling.

"We found that almost without exception, the pigs in the enriched environment were optimistic about what this new noise could mean and approached expecting to get the treat," she said. "In contrast, the pigs in the boring environment were pessimistic about this new strange noise and, fearing it might be the mildly unpleasant plastic bag, did not approach for a treat.

Crabb on those leaks

Annabel Crabb on those Labor leaks looks at the suspects in her own amusing way. I agree with her that the most plausible source seems Rudd. Or, I would add, persons close to Rudd who he would have the ability to call off.

Rudd's only response yesterday was via a statement from a spokesperson.

Would he not be capable of making a media appearance, not to answer questions, but simply to deny in person that he is the source of the leaks, and deny knowledge of the source, and to publicly call on the leaker to desist and get behind the re-election of a Labor government?

In any event, such anonymous leaks may perversely work (to a degree) in Gillard's favour, at least if their content is as ultimately unimportant as yesterday's. Everyone (even Laurie Oakes, I heard somewhere, although I don't know how to track down his articles on line) seems to agree that Gillard's come out fighting approach worked for her yesterday.

Real prediction vindicated

Real Climate has been running hot lately with:

a. a lengthy guest post by "Tamino" reviewing a book on the hockey stick controversy, and explaining in great detail why McIntyre is wrong. In comments, there is a full blown fisking of the Judith Curry's quasi-defence of the book and McIntyre, and she does not come out of it well.

b. a post noting the surprisingly accurate predictions of global warming from the mid 1970's by Wally Broecker, who even coined the term "global warming". The article notes:

To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable, the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later (when Jim Hansen in 1988 famously stated that “global warming is here”).

He wasn't the first to predict warming from CO2, though:

Broecker was not the first to predict CO₂-induced warming. In 1965, an expert report to US President Lyndon B. Johnson had warned: “By the year 2000, the increase in carbon dioxide will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate.” And in 1972, a more specific prediction similar to Broecker’s was published by the eminent atmospheric scientist J.S. Sawyer in Nature (for a history in a nutshell, see my newspaper column here).

The innovation of Broecker’s article – apart from introducing the term “global warming” – was in combining estimates of CO₂ warming with natural variability. His main thesis was that a natural climatic cooling

has, over the last three decades, more than compensated for the warming effect produced by the CO₂ [....] The present natural cooling will, however, bottom out during the next decade or so. Once this happens, the CO₂ effect will tend to become a significant factor and by the first decade of the next century we may experience global temperatures warmer than any in the last 1000 years.

The latter turned out to be correct.

For all the skeptics who thought it was only global cooling being considered in the mid 70's, this is well worth reading.

Past ocean acidification considered

Yet another study looking at what happened in a previous big event of volcano driven ocean acidification 120,000,000 years ago. Yes, shell making plankton survived, morphing into smaller sizes, but at the same time the rate of acidification, and the way it changed at depth, is very different to what's happening now:

It took at least 25,000 years for the new acidity levels reached in the surface waters to transfer to deeper waters, according to the research—and the ocean took 75,000 years to reach its peak acidity for that episode, as well as at least 160,000 years to recover. The length of this episode derives "most probably because several CO2 pulses [volcanic eruptions] contributed to ocean acidification," Erba says. Further, she plans to examine other high CO2 events in the geologic record to see "if the same causes—excess CO2, global warming, ocean acidification—trigger similar effects on marine calcifiers at different times."

But the 25,000-year time lag between acidification of the surface waters and deeper waters is mysterious, points out geoscientist Timothy Bralower of The Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in this study. "In the modern ocean, a similar input of carbon would involve a lag on the order of centuries," he notes. "So something is very different." And the nannoconids begin to disappear even before the fossil record indicates lighter volcanic carbon isotopes—in other words, presumably before the actual acidification.

Here's the crux:

"The current rate of ocean acidification is about a hundred times faster than the most rapid events" in the geologic past, notes marine geologist William Howard of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center in Hobart, Tasmania. Plus, the direct impacts of global warming may complicate the picture—just as modern coral suffer from increased bleaching thanks to warmer ocean temperatures as well as the reduced carbonate exoskeleton–building capacity brought on by ocean acidification. Bralower adds: "The big question is whether modern species will be able to adapt to what I expect will be much more rapid pH reduction in coming centuries."

Phytoplankton worry

Green wet stuff continues to make the news. A new study in Nature indicates a large decline in the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans over the last century:

Phytoplankton activity fluctuates widely according to season and location, making long-term monitoring of trends difficult. An earlier study², based on satellite observations of ocean colour, suggested a link between climate variability and ocean productivity, but this was limited to observations from 1997 to 2006. Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and his team have now combined satellite-derived observations of phytoplankton with historical shipboard measurements stretching back to the pioneering days of oceanography.

The research reveals an unsettling centennial downwards trend, superimposed on shorter-term variability. The scientists found that the average global phytoplankton concentration in the upper ocean currently declines by around 1% per year. Since 1950 alone, algal biomass decreased by around 40%, probably in response to ocean warming — and the decline has gathered pace in recent years.

"Clearly, 40% is a huge number," says Paul Falkowski, an oceanographer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "This implies that the entire ocean system is out of steady state, slowing down.

Something to worry about? Well, yes:

"This is severely disquieting," adds Victor Smetacek, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. "One must really digest the very magnitude of this decline and its possible implications."

The culprit is believed to be ocean warming:

In most regions tested, the phytoplankton decline seems to be the result of a 0.5–1.0 °C warming of the upper ocean over the past century. The warming leads to enhanced vertical 'stratification' of ocean layers, thus limiting the supply of nutrients from deeper waters to the surface.

But ocean warming does not explain reduced productivity in regions, including the Arctic Ocean, where algal growth is mainly constrained by sunlight. So scientists must try to find out what other drivers, such as changes in wind and ocean circulation, might force the decline, says Falkowski.

No one is pointing the finger at ocean acidification yet, and (from memory) experiments with bubbling CO2 through phytoplankton have had mixed results. But there was this story recently that increased acidification may affect the availability of iron, which phytoplankton need to grow well. (There is more detail on that study at my earlier post.) So, I wonder if acidification over the last century is part of the explanation.

Fiddling with algae

The New York Times reports on a lot of work being done to genetically alter algae to make it better as a potential large scale source of biofuel.  This is being taken very seriously:

“There are probably well over 100 academic efforts to use genetic engineering to optimize biofuel production from algae,” said Matthew C. Posewitz, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines, who has written a review of the field. “There’s just intense interest globally.”

Algae are attracting attention because the strains can potentially produce 10 or more times more fuel per acre than the corn used to make ethanol or the soybeans used to make biodiesel. Moreover, algae might be grown on arid land and brackish water, so that fuel production would not compete with food production. And algae are voracious consumers of carbon dioxide, potentially helping to keep some of this greenhouse gas from contributing to global warming.

But some people are a little concerned:

At a meeting this month of President Obama’s new bioethics commission, Allison A. Snow, an ecologist at Ohio State University, testified that a “worst-case hypothetical scenario” would be that algae engineered to be extremely hardy might escape into the environment, displace other species and cause algal overgrowths that deprive waters of oxygen, killing fish.

And I guess I didn’t realise how important the humble green scum really is:

“About 40 percent of the oxygen that you and I are breathing right now comes from the algae in the oceans,” the genetic scientist J. Craig Venter said at a Congressional hearing in May. “We don’t want to mess up that process.”

 

Corals feel the heat (and the weed)

Sea surface temperatures in the Red Sea are routinely very high, I believe, but there are corals there that cope nonetheless.  There’s a convincing sounding study in Science that indicates their tolerance is approaching its limits:

Sea surface temperature (SST) across much of the tropics has increased by 0.4° to 1°C since the mid-1970s. A parallel increase in the frequency and extent of coral bleaching and mortality has fueled concern that climate change poses a major threat to the survival of coral reef ecosystems worldwide. Here we show that steadily rising SSTs, not ocean acidification, are already driving dramatic changes in the growth of an important reef-building coral in the central Red Sea. Three-dimensional computed tomography analyses of the massive coral Diploastrea heliopora reveal that skeletal growth of apparently healthy colonies has declined by 30% since 1998. The same corals responded to a short-lived warm event in 1941/1942, but recovered within 3 years as the ocean cooled. Combining our data with climate model simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we predict that should the current warming trend continue, this coral could cease growing altogether by 2070.

In other coral news, it's reported today that seaweed is encroaching on a significant number of reefs in the Great Barrier Reef, but the reason is said to be poor water quality. However,  I think it’s also worth noting that ocean acidification would be likely to increase that problem.

Her weddings must be interesting

As reported in the Geelong Advertiser:

A "witch" told a traffic cop she was above the law because she was "from another world" before dragging him at high speed down a busy street.

"Your laws and penalties don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you," Eilish De Avalon said, before driving off with Sen-Constable Andrew Logan’s arm caught in her driver's side door, the Geelong Advertiser reports.

The officer was left seriously injured in the incident after being dragged nearly 200m.

De Avalon, who also told police she "had a universal name that is not recognised here", pleaded guilty in the Geelong Magistrates’ Court

And what does this local witch from another world do in her spare time?:

De Avalon, 40, a marriage celebrant who is also a self-confessed witch from the Geelong suburb of Highton

Free will, Kant, the New York Times

There’s a pretty good essay in the NYT about how whether it is right to give up on free will as a result of the experiments which show that an outsider who can read a brain state correctly can know a person’s decision before the person knows it.

Kant gets invoked to argue that free will is still there, and that the free will conundrum basically arises from not realising the limits of reason.  (I think that’s a fair summary, anyway.)

All very interesting.

More details please

Phys.org has a short report up about a new proposed method for removing CO2 from the air, but its very short on details and says nothing about cost.

I did some lengthy posts looking at CO2 removal technology over the last couple of years; I'll link to them here when I have time.

The “pox on both their houses” election continues

Tim Colebatch provides does a good summary of why a large number of voters feel very disappointed by all parties this election.

I also see that  Tony Abbott has gone into “dog whistle” mode well and truly on the Julia as a single woman issue.   I can’t see this working for him.  

Dangerous nuts

According to this report, a prominent anti-vaccination group in New South Wales is not only spreading their mis-information via the Web; they are actively pursuing those who have suffered a tragedy:

When their four-week-old baby daughter Dana died from whooping cough Toni and David McCaffery sought love and healing to ease their grief.

Instead, they say they were subjected to a campaign of harassment and abuse at the hands of anti-vaccination campaigners, a group who were yesterday labelled a serious threat to the public's health and safety….

Its investigation was sparked by two complaints, one from Toni and David McCaffery, whose four-week-old daughter Dana died from whooping cough last year.

The couple, from Lennox Head, allege they were subjected to months of harassment and abuse by Ms Dorey and anti-vaccination campaigners, accusing them of lying about the cause of their daughter's death. They received anonymous letters and emails that said whooping cough was not fatal and vaccinations were not needed.

Mrs McCaffery, whose daughter was too young to be vaccinated when she caught whooping cough, said Ms Dorey also tried to get her baby's medical records from the hospital without permission. ''Instead of love and healing in the weeks after Dana's death, we got ugliness … it has been terrible,'' she said.

It doesn’t explain why the parents were in contact with the group in the first place, but still this sounds like an appalling story.

I mentioned this anti-vaccination group late last year after they appeared on the 7.30 Report under a post headed “Immunisation Dills”.  It deserves the upgrade to “Dangerous Nuts”. 

Important advance (we hope)

There’s  a pretty big story out about how Australian based researchers have made some fundamental advances in understanding Alzheimer disease, and have been able to treat it in mice.  (Yes, I know, stories like this about potential new treatments for various diseases in humans come out all the time, but this one does sound distinctly more important, it seems to me.)

Bring on the cure, please.

Weekend update

*  Tried to make a cream and tomato pasta sauce, but using mostly low fat evaporated milk instead of cream.   (Hey, my wife fed me pork belly the previous two nights – there has to be the occasional attempt at low fat cooking while my middle age spread continues its winter growth.)  It didn’t work properly – the milk seemed to separate into solids or something, although the taste wasn’t bad.    More investigation into evaporated milk recipes needed.

*  Oh no!  Robin Hood series 3 ended on Saturday night, leading to tears not by the kids, but from the parents.   (I had actually shed a tear at the end of series 2 as well.)     It really was a quality family show – great production values, good acting,  action every episode, sometimes funny, all violence bloodless, and characters believable enough to upset you when they unexpectedly die.   (It was pretty good at the unexpected death.)   It will be missed.

* The debate between Gillard and Abbott on Sunday night (pretty much a draw I thought, although I was not sitting watching it every minute) has led to another surge in Gillard earlobe Googlers coming to this blog via my  my 2007 post-election night comment about it.  (Over a thousand a day.)   Even Channel 9 has noted that her earlobes, which looked particularly large during the debate,  had evidently become a distraction to many people on Twitter.  There is a facebook page about it (nothing to do with me), which seems also to have been created immediately after the 2007 election.   I’m not sure, but I think my mention might be a day or so earlier than the creation of the Facebook page.  Hence I am waiting for  Annabel Crabb to interview me about being the first blogger (I think) to be silly enough to note it.    

You've seen the photo; now see the video

The BBC has put up video of that remarkable incident of the whale that decided to have an on board tour of a passing yacht. As I can't embed BBC video directly, I'll put the Youtube version of it here. It's worth watching:

This week's hard to understand physics

Another week, another arXiv paper that seems important, if only I could follow it properly.

This one is about how to understand the quantum "delayed choice" experiments, which on one interpretation can be thought to show "backwards time influence".

This, according to the paper, is not the right way to think about collapsing wave functions. The crucial section of the paper seems to be this:

Although the above expressions are all very simple, the result is, upon second thought, very non-trivial. It shows that in general, the relative time ordering of measurements on separated (but possible entangled) particles A and B doesn’t matter at all....

This makes explicit that a measurement on one particle does not at all influence the other one. (I.e. the operator 1 acts trivially.) The only effect a measurement has, is changing probabilities of other measurements into conditional probabilities, as explained just above. More important, these conditional probabilities hold regardless of the moment at which you perform the measurement on the other particle. Whether it occurs later, earlier or at the same time - that doesn’t matter at all. This forces us to abandon the (popular, but incorrect) view on the wave function collapse as an event stretching out along a space-like slice. Even though this view is appealing, it creates a wrong intuition about the physics involved.

I understand the idea that he says is wrong; I don't understand the alternative way of looking at it that he is suggesting.

By the way, whatever happened to John Cramer's "backward causation" experiment? It's taking a long time for any results to come out.

She amuses me

Yet another great article by Annabel Crabb on the curious current state of the election campaign.

Pot head objections

Time magazine has a quite lengthy, quite balanced article summarizing recent research on the very complicated issue of the relationship between marijuana use and schizophrenia.

It could not be called a sensationalist or one sided article at all. Yet you can always guarantee, whenever anything in the media ever appears which looks at the issue, there'll be many comments by readers like this:

"This is the stupidest thing I have read. There own stats show no increase even though more people today are smoking pot. What kind of idiot even publishes garbage like this."

Or this:

Pot could replace something like 20% of pharmacueticals prescribed in the USA - do you know how much MONEY that would be? Doesn't take long to figure out where the propaganda is coming from when you follow the money.

It's the "it's the wonder drug of nature" crowd that really make me laugh.

White roof wonders

Climate Progress talks about the rather simple, but apparently very effective, plan to increase white roofs in America to help address warming.

Is this too complicated for Australian politicians to consider?

Pine nut alert

The LA Times mentions "pine mouth", an odd reaction which is "a bitter metallic taste in the mouth that develops after eating pine nuts and lasts for several days."

Given so much pesto is eaten nowadays, it's a wonder it doesn't happen more often.

On the menu in Vietnam

Oh. I knew there was a bar-b-q rat industry in Vietnam. I assumed that they probably ate dog. But I didn't know this:

While it is widely known that dog meat is eaten in Southeast Asia, Mr. Doan says some Vietnamese restaurants also offer cat on the menu. To keep thieves from catching an unsupervised cat to eat or sell to a restaurant, pet owners keep their felines close.

Eating cat is traditionally thought to bring good luck, according to Mai Pham Thi Tuyet, the director of the Asvelis veterinary clinic in Hanoi. But this practice is becoming less common, she says, because the improvement in the standard of living, particularly in the cities, has enabled more people to keep animals as pets.

Seems high

We're not talking America; we're talking England:

Almost one in five girls say they have been pregnant at least once by the age of 18, according to a Government survey published today.

Just under half (46 per cent) decided to keep their baby, while more than a third (36 per cent), had an abortion, the figures show. ...

The survey concluded there was a "noticeable trend" between the young women who fell pregnant by 18, and their GCSE results.

A third (33 per cent) of those who gained between one and four GCSEs at grades D-G had been pregnant at least once by the time they were 18, compared to just 6 per cent of those who scored eight or more GCSEs at Grades A*-C.

Time for some Colbert

This clip from a couple of weeks ago becomes particularly funny in the last part, regarding another egregious example of American fast food overkill:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Thought for Food - Kentucky Tuna & Grilled Cheese Burger Melt<a>
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

Maybe you won't notice how dirty it is

Boeing's new long-range jet: Dreamliner becomes reality - The Economist

The Economist notes that the Dreamliner has more internal height, bigger windows, cabin lighting that can change from blue to orange, and this peculiar feature:

The new plane also has noticeably bigger toilets with lighting adjustable for mood, which is bound to be useful in some situations.

Useful in what situations, exactly?

Climate change items of note

Nature has got three stories of interest about climate change at the moment:

1. a report summarising some of the complexities and uncertainties in studies about the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

2. the US National Research Council has put out a report which :

sets out the consequences — from streamflow and wildfires to crop productivity and sea level rise — of different greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios. It also concludes that once the global average temperature warms beyond a certain point, Earth and future generations will be stuck with significant impacts for centuries or millennia.

That seems quite a big ask. But they seem confident based on more recent work since the last IPCC reports:

Besides synthesizing data included in the Fourth Assessment Report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the NRC report includes new information. For example, carbon-dioxide-induced warming is expected to be nearly irreversible for at least 1,000 years, according to two studies published in 2008 and 2009 (refs ^2,3). "There is more certainty [in this report] than we've seen before," says Steve Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. "It is blunt, direct and clear. Unlike the IPCC reports you don't see any hedge words."

And what do they find?:

....the report shows that each 1 °C of warming will reduce rain in the southwest of North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa by 5–10%; cut yields of some crops, including maize (corn) and wheat, by 5–15%; and increase the area burned by wildfires in the western United States by 200–400%. The report also points out that even if the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is stabilized, the world will continue to warm for decades. If concentrations rose to 550 parts per million, for example, the world would see an initial warming of 1.6 °C — but even if concentrations stabilized at this level, further warming would leave the total temperature rise closer to 3 °C, and would persist for millennia.

Bad, bad predictions for our descendants, that's for sure. Which will be studiously ignored by most Australian politicians. Bah.

3. OK, so we'll geoengineer our way out of trouble? Not so fast. A study that has tried to model the effects of pumping lots of sulphate aerosols high into the atmosphere says it won't work uniformly across the globe:

In a paper published today in Nature Geoscience¹, Kate Ricke, a climate physicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and her colleagues show, by modelling, that not only could solar-radiation management lead to declines in rainfall in the long term, but its effects will also vary by region. Some places will be over-cooled by atmospheric changes that are too small to be effective for their neighbours....

The new study found that it is fairly easy to design sulphate-injection scenarios that keep the temperature stable until 2080. But, unfortunately, the change in sunlight alters other weather patterns. "It changes the distribution of energy in the troposphere so that it becomes more convectively stable," Ricke says. The result: decreasing precipitation.

Better to keep carbon down, then.