I’m of many minds about this…

I’ve been meaning to refer to a new round of multiverse talk on the internet that arose a few weeks ago, mainly due to a new book by string theory promoter Brian Greene. (The book is getting good reviews.) Somewhere, out there in the multiverse, I guess I already have.

This was all kicked off for me by a post by Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong. He noted that had recently seen Lee Smolin give a talk at a New York museum in which (from what Woit could remember):

….he said that discussions of a multiverse containing infinite numbers of copies of ourselves behaving slightly differently made him uneasy for moral reasons. The worry is that one might be led to stop caring that much about the implications of one’s actions. After all, whatever mistake you make, in some other infinite number of universes, you didn’t do it.

Now, before I get to talking about that issue, I should mention that Woit (who certainly hates the string theory version of the multiverse for its untestability, but seems more open minded about other theories that lead to them) also links to a sceptical review of Greene’s book (“The Hidden Reality.”) This review is one of the best short summaries of the problem of string theory, and how those problems evolved, I have read. It’s well worth a visit.

And, again, before I get onto the multiverse and morality, Peter Woit’s post has a very good series of comments in which there is some discussion of whether the widely accepted theory of early universe inflation leads to enough multiple universes as a possibility anyway. In fact, one of the whole issues in Woit’s thread is that he complains how physicists do mix up the different theories that lead to multiple universes and act as if there is some connection between them all.

This is a good point. I would have thought that the type of multiverse with the real moral issue is the one arising from Everett’s many worlds interpretation of quantum theory. But string theory allows for so many universes that it seems you can get to multiple versions of yourself that way too (in fact, I’m not sure of this, but with more versions of yourself than Everett’s version alone?)

So, back to morality:

I’ve run out of time. Will continue later.

Continued:

Meanwhile, more detail of the issue of the multiverse and morality came up at Cosmic Variance, where physicist Sean Carroll noted a post at Huffington Post by Clay Naff (who I am unfamiliar with.) Naff argues that the multiverse violates the "Moral Principle" which he explains as follows:

It states that we should resist accepting any proposition that tends to disable moral reasoning, unless and until the scientifically interpreted evidence compels us.

I honed this principle in the context of my critique of religion, but it applies, for example, to the secular idea of the philosopher's zombie. The Moral Principle prevents us from accepting the idea that anyone else is a zombie who appears to be just like any other person, except that there's no real consciousness inside. If we were to accept that idea, there would be no moral barrier to torturing or murdering "zombies." In fact, it would be much like Hitler's dehumanization of the Jews.

Now, Naff doesn't actually spend any time explaining how the multiverse would corrupt moral reasoning, but Sean Carroll has a go at what his argument seems to be:

What he seems to be concerned about — although he never quite comes out and says it, so a bit of interpretation is required, and I could always be misreading — is the possibility that our moral intuitions could be undermined by the idea that there are an infinite number of copies of ourselves out there in the multiverse, some of them exactly like us and many of them slightly different, e.g. worlds where Hitler was victorious, etc. In such a setup, should we be concerned that morality is pointless, because every good thing and every bad thing eventually occurs elsewhere in the cosmos?

That seemed a fair guess. But Naff then turns up in comments and disagrees. His example of why the idea is dangerous is:

suppose that you truly believe that there are infinite copies of yourself “out there,” including every possible variation of your life history. Now, suppose I offer you a million dollars to play Russian Roulette with a gun that has five of six chambers loaded. Would it not be rational to take the bet? And so, would it not be rational to abandon “this” life at every frustration or mistake?

Carroll, before Naff's comment, argued that this should have no effect on morality at all:

The job of morality is to figure out what we think we human beings should be doing, which, as we’ve been discussing, does not reduce to looking at what actually happens in the universe....

I don’t think we should be concerned about that (even if it’s true, which it may very well be). An idea like this doesn’t “disable our moral reasoning” — in fact, it might be extremely helpful to our moral reasoning. If your version of morality depends on the assumption that what happens here on Earth is unique in the universe, then it’s time to update your morality, not to put your hands over your ears when people start talking about the multiverse.

Naff has to point out something important to his view in another comment:

The argument I am making has everything to do with the premature adoption of a conjecture as scientific fact in the popular consciousness. Can this do harm? History demonstrates it. Leave aside “Social Darwinism.” I presume that none of you would deliberately torture a sick child. Yet, early in the 20th century, the premature adoption of the scientific hypothesis that *starvation* could cure juvenile diabetes led to horrific maltreatment of already suffering children. You may scoff at the notion that MW as a worldview (rather than as a scientific hypothesis) can have terrible consequences, but I can only say that it shows a poor understanding of history, moral reasoning and/or the social impact of ideas.

What to make of all this? Some points:

First: it's surprising that in all of the threads, no one has mentioned that Everett himself believed that many-worlds theory implied a type of personal immortality, and it is possible that this even influenced his daughter who committed suicide.

It seems to me to be a little hard to argue against belief in the multiverse having no implications on morality, even though they are ambiguous. Score one for Naff.

Two: We've already heard some of the possible negative implications, but you can try and spin it in a positive sense. As someone says in the Cosmic Variance thread:

I for one, if given the option, would prefer to live in the most moral of all multiverses, and will make my choices to promote that end result… It’s like saying that because there are bad neighborhoods, everyone should stop trying to build good ones.

Also, as I noted here some time ago, Christian physicist Don Page is un-fazed by a multiverse, but in his paper "Does God so Love the Multiverse" (I still like that title) it seems he does not address the type of multiverse which sees multiple versions of the same person and what that implies for moral decision making.

Here's another idea: the idea of re-incarnation has some intuitive appeal if it is seen as a learning cycle, leading ultimately to the soul being incorporated (or re-incorporated) into the Divine. How does a multiverse tie in with that idea? Like parallel computing, does it mean a faster process of God becoming God?

But getting back to the negative: as someone else notes in the Cosmic Variance thread:

What I decide now will irrevocably select a branch for this universe from now on. Which branch would I like to be on?

How is that not a workable basis for a workable morality, albeit an openly selfish one?

This leads to my next point.

Three: When talking about morality and the effect of scientific and religious beliefs, there is an important distinction to be made between the general and personal. The thing about systems of morality or ethics that has always interested me is the motivation to personally act in accordance with the rules that everyone can agree theoretically should be followed.

A religion that believes in an afterlife with real consequences for how you have acted in life does provide a motivation to act morally, whether or not you can "get away" with it during life.

Similarly, belief in a multiverse may be unlikely to affect how everyone agrees we should ideally behave towards each other, but it is conceivable that it may (as in the last quote above) provide an incentive to act in accordance with whatever you can get away with now; or it may (as with Everett's daughter, or the Russian roulette example of Naff) make you careless as to whether or not you continue to live in this world.

On the other hand, does this really change anything from the moral reasoning that can already exist in an non-theistic vision of a single universe? It seems on reflection that a non-theistic multiverse or single universe both really contain the same lack of motivation for not getting away with what you can. The multiverse, may, however, have an additional incentive for the suicidally inclined (let's end this pained, hopeless version of me, and let the happy ones continue.)

Four: It always has to be remembered that over-certainty of anything, both scientific or metaphysical, can be the enemy of good moral decisions.

We would all agree that the world would be (or would have been) a better place if there were some less certainty of things like a heavenly reward in the minds of suicidal terrorists; or that witches with Satanic powers can wreck havoc in tribal community; or that the eradication of Jews was eugenically in the long term interests of humanity.

Yet, given that most versions of the multiverse are not really expected to be experimentally verifiable, this should be one belief on which it is easy to convince people to not bet even a small amount of money.

Five: As Bee Hossenfelder notes in the Cosmic Variance thread, there is one other scientific viewpoint that is here already, and which (in my view) is a much greater problem:

The “moral argument” would forbid you to accept any fundamental theory with fully deterministic evolution. If you have no free will, you’re arguably not responsible for your actions in any meaningful sense. Instead, it’s the initial conditions of the universe that are responsible. (Or the final conditions for that matter.) So. What now? Cut funding for everybody who dares to believe time evolution is fundamentally deterministic because the philosophical implications are sociologically difficult?

Good point, and I think there is little doubt that, apart from fundamental physics which implies no free will, the neuroscience and popular science articles that argue that we are not really in control of our decisions is deathly harmful to moral reasoning.

What's more, I have long thought, from various examples too numerous to list now, that the absence of free will is an idea that, although counter-intuitive enough to not think about consciously most of the time, has already seeped far into the collective unconscious of society, and for many people is affecting everything from half-conscious rationalisation of immoral behaviour, to depression.

I think this is the far more important issue regarding science and morality, and should be better addressed in education and popular philosophy.

The multiverse,meanwhile, remains a mere speculation, but one which allows for wild speculation which, I have to admit, I've always enjoyed.

The wisdom of the Bieber

A very amusing sarcastic column in the Guardian ridiculing a magazine profile of one J Bieber. I like this part:

...interest was piqued to levels of feverish enthusiasm, nay fanaticism, by a quote from Bieber's mother, who is apparently convinced she and her son were personally selected by God "to bring light and inspiration to the world". This may seem to amount to a certain scaling-down of ambition on the part of God, who previously opted to bring light and inspiration to the world by sending His only son to minister among us, heal lepers, walk on water, raise the dead etc, rather than, say, performing tepid R&B-influenced pop and having a "trademark haircut", but you've got to move with the times: it's Cowell's world now! You start bringing everybody down with the whole leprosy thing, you're asking to get buzzed off. And besides, Bieber has an array of miraculous powers entirely of his own, enthusiastically detailed by the writer: "He can break dance and do 'the Dougie' . . . he can solve a Rubik's Cube in less than two minutes . . . this is not your typical teen idol." The Dougie and the Rubik's Cube, you say? It's a sign! A sign! Stitch that, Dawkins! No wonder they call them Beliebers! Count Lost in Showbiz in!

But then, there's also this:

But he saves his greatest wisdom for the subject of politics. "I'm not sure about parties, but whatever they have in Korea, that's bad," he offers, coming down at a stroke against both a Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship and a fully functioning democracy. Perhaps he's a Chomskyan anarcho-syndicalist, which would certainly explain his hit single One Less Lonely Girl Under a Federated, Decentralised System of Free Associations Incorporating Economic as Well as Other Socialist Institutions.

More about the rain

Further to the post below about a couple of Nature papers on the connection between an increase in Northern Hemisphere precipitation and global warming, I can't say that I have seen any substantial Australian media reporting on this yet. (OK, there are short reports, but they certainly haven't been front and centre on websites.) I would have thought they would have attracted more attention here, given our wet, wet summer. (Darwin has just posted a record 24 hour rainfall, which seems pretty remarkable for such a famously wet place.)

But I also see that Andy Revkin is complaining that the Nature abstract, and media reporting, is overselling the papers and overlooking the caveats that appear in the studies themselves. Revkin's post contains much by way of explanation from climate scientists, though, as to how this happens. Real Climate's post on the topic certainly does not oversell it.

Roger Pielke Jnr, meanwhile, continues his "nothing to see here until I say you can see it - in about 30 years time" routine on climate change, by emphasising that, just because it rains more under a warmer climate, it doesn't mean you can say this is connected to worse flooding. As someone in comments notes:

Also I think it will eventually strike many observers as, well, hairsplitting, to argue that a trend of increasing intensity of rainfall events cannot be connected to human well-being unless and until we can show that flood damage unquestionably rises even controlling for all other contributing factors. All analogies are flawed at some level, but its a bit like seeing sparks from a distant fire settle onto one's rooftop, and not worry about them because, watch as you may, they just keep going out. Rain events and major snowmelt events cause floods when they get intense enough, this is like saying a driver who has many close calls is likely to have a serious accident eventually. Even though other things (previously saturated soil for example) certainly help set the stage.

And why just focus on flood? What about the other harms almost surely associated with intense precipitation (rain or snow) events, like traffic fatalities during the events themselves? And for intense rain specifically (but also large snow melt events), how about soil erosion on hill sides (even gently sloping), and sewage overflows into harbors and streams, and leaching of nutrients from lawns and farm fields, and deer kills in deep snow?

Well, the last point about deer kills in snow is an example too far, but I agree generally.

Furry exhibitionists

An odd report at Physorg about prairie dogs – a species so cute it’s always a toss up in my mind as to whether it’s them or meerkats I would rather see illegally released into Australia:

Researchers in the US studying the behavior of black-tailed prairie dogs at a local zoo have discovered they behave differently, kissing and cuddling each other more when people are watching than when they are unobserved.

As I link to Physorg all the time, I’m sure they won’t mind my copying the photo that accompanies the article:

More from the report:

Dr Eltorai said their study showed that like humans, the prairie dogs often behaved differently when they were being watched, and many seemed to enjoy the attention, becoming more relaxed and spending less time watching for potential dangers as the numbers of visitors increased.

Just don't teach them how to use video cameras, OK?

Nature articles on floods, snow and global warming

Well, that's good timing. The Guardian points me towards two Nature articles that argue for the connection between floods in the last decade or so and global warming.

First, to England:

Global warming made the floods that devastated England and Wales in the autumn of 2000, costing £3.5bn, between two and three times more likely to happen, new research has found. This is the first time scientists have quantified the role of human-induced climate change in increasing the risk of a serious flood and represents a major development in climate science.

"It shows climate change is acting here and now to load the dice towards more extreme weather," said Myles Allen of Oxford University, who led the work, which he started after his own home was nearly flooded in 2000. It will also have wider consequences, say experts, by making lawsuits for compensation against energy companies more likely to succeed.

Well, I don't know about that last point, given that it is, in theory, possible for everyone to stop using electricity from coal burning power stations and burn candles instead, but it suits us to continue using their dirty power.

The Guardian article points us to a more general Nature paper about precipitation. From the abstract:

Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas. These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique. Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming.

Well, that's encouraging, isn't it.

I know one of one regular reader here who, at another blog where climate science goes to die, or at least be beaten up and sent to the corner so it doesn't interfere with the vital goal of never, ever increasing taxes, likes to argue that if global warming means some people have to move, well, so be it. He suspects the more directly concerning effect of CO2 production will be ocean acidification leading to less sushi-mi available at reasonable prices.

Yet, surely if these studies are right, the effect of major floods over large areas in Queensland this summer show that the "just move"argument is badly flawed, even in Australia. As I have said before, the area flooded enormous, and major towns and cities such as Rockhampton, Bundaberg and Brisbane that can more-or- less live with major floods (say) every 50 - 100 years are not going to economically cope so well with huge floods (say) every 20 years. Not to mention the vast length of connecting roads, bridges and other infrastructure that need to be repaired and rebuilt after every flood.

People (quite rightly) talk about massive disruption if poor, low lying countries like Bangladesh have more major flooding under global warming.

But from where I'm standing, and especially if furthers studies like the two mentioned here are coming, it seems to me Australians should be very worried about more frequent flooding of the scale we just had in Queensland (and Victoria for that matter.)

And on a political note: the use of a levy to raise money to repair flood damage is probably a good idea from the point of view of reminding people that there is a specific cost to events that are linked to climate change.

UPDATE: Climate Progress has a long post on the topic, which includes a list of previous studies which did indeed predict greater extremes in precipitation under global warming. It's not a new suggestion.

Pharmaceutical companies say "phew"

It's been suspected for some time that the large number of women on the contraceptive pill, and the levels of estrogen in their urine, has been causing a large increase in estrogen in rivers and our water supply. However, a new study says this is not true:

Amber Wise, Kacie O'Brien and Tracey Woodruff note ongoing concern about possible links between chronic exposure to estrogens in the water supply and fertility problems and other adverse human health effects. Almost 12 million women of reproductive age in the United States take the pill, and their urine contains the hormone. Hence, the belief that oral contraceptives are the major source of estrogen in lakes, rivers, and streams. Knowing that sewage treatment plants remove virtually all of the main estrogen -- 17 alpha-ethinylestradiol (EE2) -- in oral contraceptives, the scientists decided to pin down the main sources of estrogens in water supplies.

Their analysis found that EE2 has a lower predicted concentration in U.S. drinking water than natural estrogens from soy and dairy products and animal waste used untreated as a farm fertilizer....

Some research cited in the report suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of estrogens in the environment. Other research estimates that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise 15 percent of the estrogens in the world's water supply.

Interesting, although this still sounds to me likely a surprisingly uncertain area of knowledge.

Why the world wanders

Nouriel Roubini writes about why the world seems to be so lacking in leadership in key areas at the moment (including global warming).  The whole article seems a pretty good summary of the international power vacuum that, I suppose, shows no sign of ending any time soon.  His last paragraph:

In short, for the first time since the end of World War II, there is no nation—or strong alliance of nations—with the political will and economic leverage to secure its goals on the global stage. As in previous historical periods, this vacuum may favor the ambitious and the aggressive as they seek their own advantage. In such a world, the absence of a high-level agreement on creating a new collective-security system—focused on economics rather than military power—is not merely irresponsible, but dangerous. A G-Zero world without leadership and multilateral cooperation is an unstable equilibrium for global economic prosperity and security.

Reefer madness denied

Chris Middendorp, who has some experience has a community worker, writes how he is not surprised about the recent large study that confirmed (again) the relationship between marijuana use, particularly by teenagers, and psychosis:

I've always assumed this connection to be credible. Working for community agencies, I have seen again and again cannabis users develop paranoia, antisocial behaviour and psychosis. In many instances, the symptoms and behaviour cease when the cannabis use stops.

I also think it is revealing that among my circle of friends, of the five who were heavy cannabis users in the 1990s, four developed psychotic illnesses. Years later they are all still regularly hospitalised for psychiatric treatment.

I won't argue that cannabis causes schizophrenia or any other mental disorder, but it seems fairly apparent that cannabis can let the psychotic genie, as it were, out of the bottle.

I've said before that, my (much more limited observations) have also led me to the same suspicion. Yet, as Middenthorp says in the rest of his article, casual marijuana users who have no history of mental illness are loathe to admit that such studies are right. They will argue about other things too:

At a friend's party last month, I fell into conversation with Peter, a 30-year-old man who vociferously complained about Victoria Police's random saliva testing of drivers. It was futile to catch cannabis users, Peter said. "Cannabis doesn't affect your driving," he explained emphatically. I spent 30 minutes listening to Peter and two women discussing the benefits of daily pot smoking and deriding the police as "fascists" for spoiling the good times. These were tertiary educated, employed, middle-class adults.

They were daily pot smokers?

Here's another thing about illicit drug users: they like to claim that they are normal functioning members of society and are harming no one. This is, I bet, wrong in 90% of cases. At the very least, such frequent marijuana users are known technically as crashing bores: like those who spend half an hour arguing that marijuana doesn't affect driving, or disputing the fact that a significant number of young users will end up with a crippling mental illness.

Mars needs women (fertile women)

The Independent notes that future astronauts to Mars, or their kids, may well end up with fertility problems at the end:

According to a review by three scientists looking into the feasibility of colonising Mars, astronauts would be well advised to avoid getting pregnant along the way because of the high levels of radiation that would bombard their bodies as they travelled through space.

Without effective shielding on spaceships, high-energy proton particles would probably sterilise any female foetus conceived in deep space and could have a profound effect on male fertility. "The present shielding capabilities would probably preclude having a pregnancy transited to Mars," said radiation biophysicist Tore Straume of Nasa's Ames Research Center in an essay for the Journal of Cosmology.

The DNA which guides the development of all the cells in the body is easily damaged by the kind of radiation that would assail astronauts as they journeyed through space. Studies on non-human primates have shown that exposure to ionising radiation kills egg cells in a female foetus during the second half of pregnancy. "One would have to be very protective of those cells during gestation, during pregnancy, to make sure that the female didn't become sterile so they could continue the colony," Dr Straume said.

Big numbers

Someone's done some figures about the amount of information humans are now pushing around and storing. Here are some interesting bits (very pun-y):

Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (Yes, that's a number with 20 zeroes in it.)

Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that's a galaxy of information for every person in the world. That's 315 times the number of grains of sand in the world. But it's still less than one percent of the information that is stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.

and:

"These numbers are impressive, but still miniscule compared to the order of magnitude at which nature handles information" Hilbert said. "Compared to nature, we are but humble apprentices. However, while the natural world is mind-boggling in its size, it remains fairly constant. In contrast, the world's technological information processing capacities are growing at exponential rates."

Strange timing

As soon as the Brisbane flood occurred, there began some claims that the Wivenhoe Dam should have been maintained at lower levels given that the forecast was for a particularly wet la Nina summer.

Of course, given that only a couple of years ago the dam had reached 17%, common sense suggested you would not lightly reduce the levels below the full level for drinking water. (Everyone knows by now that it can hold double that amount for flood mitigation.) In fact, as the Australian reminds us again today, the State Opposition between October and December last year were calling for the dam to hold more than its "normal" drinking water capacity to help off set the next drought. (How the Opposition can make political mileage out of what happened in January remains something of a mystery, then.)

Yet now that there are insurance companies circling and trying to find ways to avoid payments, and an enquiry has just started to look into the whole question, the State government has already decided to empty the dam by 25% as a precaution.

This just seems strangely premature to me. Who, apart from Dr Dragun (who seemed to be the first off the cab to criticise the dam being kept at 100%), has been advising the government about this? Are hydrologists as fractious a group as geologists (the latter seemingly containing a disproportionate number of climate change sceptics?) Is the weather bureau fully confident of further torrential rain in the next few months that could not be handled by faster water release once a bad weather system is on its way? Otherwise, why not wait for the full enquiry, which has just started?

Well, that's ruined the simulation

The Guardian has another story on the fake Mars mission being conducted in Russia, as they are about to "land" on the fake Mars surface.

The absolutely fundamental thing that makes this simulation psychologically different to the real thing is the fact that all of them know, in the back (and probably from time to time, the front) of their minds that they can walk out on it at any time if they are really fed up.

The other simulation ruining thing I noticed is this:

In their spare time the crew do their best to keep boredom at bay with books, DVDs and video games like Guitar Hero. A few months ago the French crew member, Romain Charles, gave juggling lessons with a set of balls improvised from linseed and balloons.

I'm sorry: there is no juggling to be done in space. This simulation just keeps getting less and less credible all the time...

Over-dedication to a career path

Well, I don't think I had heard before that the Captain of the whaling ship which was sunk by a sperm whale (and inspired Moby Dick) then went on to float around the Pacific with some other survivors for 3 harrowing months, ate his cousin to survive, was rescued, got taken back to Nantucket, then went back to sea as captain of the rescuing ship. Only to have it sink too.

The New York Times adds some further details.

Three Science Stories

1. Comforting, probably almost:

Apophis asteroid will probably almost certainly not smash into Earth, say scientists

2. Australian scientist working on a "thinking cap". (Probably more correctly called a "creativity cap".) I heard this guy being interviewed on the radio, and it certainly sounds interesting. This report is a bit light on details, so I must look around for more.

3. The US has been bit hit by a lot of snow lately, but was the January just gone any record for it being a cold month? Nope, apparently not:

Last month was the coolest January since 1994, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. Across the contiguous United States, the average January temperature was 30.0 F, which is 0.8 F below the 1901-2000 average. And despite several large winter storms across the country, last month was the ninth driest January on record, much drier than normal.

Something I already knew from reading blogs

Extra testosterone reduces your empathy

Spider lost

Wow. That Spider-man stage show really sounds very, very strange. Full details at Slate.

More links to bad reviews at Salon.

Maybe they were going for the Springtime for Hitler effect?

Greene on film

I see there's a new film version of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, but it's apparently had so-so reviews. (It also changes the setting of the film to the 1960's.)

I think I've noted here before that I found the novel very psychologically unconvincing in its portrayal of Pinkie, the amoral protagonist. The woman who tracks him down (I forget her name now) was written much better.

In any event, the reason for the post is to note that I'm currently reading The Quiet American, and it certainly seems to show him as a better, more mature writer. However, a couple of weeks ago the film version of the novel (the recent one with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser in the lead roles) was on TV and I decided to at least watch the start and see how well it reflected my mental image of the novel.

My immediate impression was that the Michael Caine character look far too cheery and not world weary, jaded and cynical enough. It's virtually impossible to act too glum to reflect a Greene main character, and Cain looked far too contented. Brendan Fraser looked better in his role. The movie also looked a tad too "pretty" compared to images I had of the settings in the novel. But I only watched the first 15 minutes or so, so perhaps it became more appropriately sordid later.

It's been a long time since I saw The Third Man, but I remember being rather under-whelmed by that too, despite its reputation. I just doubt that Greene translates well to the screen, probably because it's hard to get all that internal mental anguish up there for everyone to see.

The other thing about reading Greene that I've realised is that, being the subject of extensive biographies which have covered his, shall we say, bad habits in extensive detail*, and the fact that his autobiography explains how he had a compulsion to try new experiences (even playing to the extent of playing Russian roulette) to make himself feel "alive," whenever a character in his novels is doing something seedy, one immediately has the impression that Greene must be talking about it from personal experience. Thus, in one novel where a character goes to an African prostitute, or (in The Quiet American) uses opium, you can't help but feel you're reading a vignette from Greene's own life.

Maybe that's not always right, but he certainly was a complicated character (caused no doubt at least partly by bipolar disorder.) Not sure that I would ever embark on a biography about him though.

* I trust no one has forgotten this extract from a review of a book about him I posted a few years ago:

Greene as sex addict does not figure strongly in these letters. But in his exhaustive (and, at 2251 pages, exhausting) authorised biography of Greene, Norman Sherry annexes a list of 47 favourite prostitutes scribbled down by Greene in 1948 when his mistress Catherine Walston challenged him about rumours that he paid women for sex.

What I've been doing

Work and money continues to be a major distraction, but I wanted to note:

* Bad weather, part 1: It's a pretty "good" season for extreme weather that may encourage belief in climate change and political action on carbon emissions. So much so that Andrew Bolt seemed to have a fleeting moment of doubt last Friday (hinting that the heavy storms in Melbourne and Victoria, on top of the already unusual slow moving Victorian floods, really are "freaky"), but then he obviously had the strong urge to crush any hint of self doubt by a flurry of anti climate change posts over the weekend. I'm not going to link to them; he's an unthinking promoter of every bad argument against sensible precaution, and it's the political influence I'm sure he wields on the grass roots of the Coalition that makes him not a joke on the issue.

* Bad weather, part 2: Watching Cyclone Yasi coverage last week really made me a little sorry for journalists who were in the wrong spot (Cairns) for any interesting footage of the approaching storm. It is, in any event, impossible to get good footage of a really bad cyclone, given that no one sensible should be on the street, or even close to the windows, but the media seems not to have realised this yet. Skynew's coverage on the night of the storm was particularly ludicrous, with what seemed an hour of live footage of some smallish palm trees and shrubs being blown about in a motel room courtyard in Bowen being the best they could come up with.

Then, in the morning, it felt a bit anti climatic, given that the media still couldn't get into the worst affected areas.

But I thought the best cyclone damage footage to come out a couple of days later was from the Dunk Island resort. It's hard to imagine how long it will take to look good again, and you don't often see that many denuded trees in one place.



Oddly enough, you'll also find that the first comment following this on Youtube is by a guy who says the resort deserved it because the owner tried to hit on his 17 year old daughter during a recent bad holiday! Just a tad defamatory, I would have thought, and doesn't Youtube exercise any control over its comments section?

* Bad weather, part 3: I've had a couple of interesting conversations with people affected by the Brisbane flood. One was with the manager of a nice, new block of apartments facing the river on Coronation Drive. These are obviously built with an awareness that the underground car park can flood in a 1 in 100 flood, but the units are above the flood level. The problem is, they still put the electrical power for these buildings in the car park levels too, meaning the block was without power for 2 weeks, and even now that it is back on, the lifts are still awaiting repair! Given that it is about 8 to 10 stories high, (as are many on that stretch of Coronation Drive), this seems an issue which one would have thought the designers (and Council) should think about more carefully.

The second conversation was with a woman who has (or had) a nice house on the Brisbane river. She has lost retaining walls and is worried about pool subsidence, as well as the issue of what to do with a metre or so of mud in her backyard which might be (temporarily) helping to keep the pool in place. Apparently, the Council is suggesting she has to get rid of the mud, but they don't want it back in the river either. This remains an unresolved issue.

* In praise of animation: I saw Tangled, the Disney animated flick (and said to be the last of their "Princess" movies) and was very impressed. There is one sequence which plays so beautifully, I am not ashamed to say it brought a tear to my eye.

I am not alone in this, even amongst males. (I read - but have lost the link to - some blog review by an American father who said the same; but of course, he might be a big girlie man too.) It is, in a way, surprising that animation can move anyone to tears. But David Byrne had something interesting to say about this a few years ago:

Malu and I went to see The Incredibles, the new Pixar film about disgruntled retired superheroes. I laughed and cried, as I do at lots of animated movies. I wonder if I get more emotionally involved in animated characters than in films using real actors? Other than Spielberg movies that deliberately work the sentimental buttons it's much easier to identify with drawings than with real people.

Maybe this isn't strange. Maybe the fact that they're drawings makes them more ambiguous, more universal, and easier to identify with. Well, it's true with lots of other things — things that use metaphor, allegory and poetic ambiguity are generally more powerful emotionally than straight narrative.

I find myself increasingly in awe of animation lately, and the creativity that goes behind it. This comes from watching the "making of" documentaries that come on DVD's. I re-watched two severely under-rated and under-performing recent animated movies over Christmas (Astroboy, and The Tale of Despereaux,) and watching the documentaries after it just made me appreciate how much thought goes into creating animated worlds.

I suppose you could argue that art direction in any fantasy live action movie also plays a key role that is not often thought about by your average viewer; but with animation, the page is blank and is unaffected by the availability of locations that need to be dressed up. It is, in that sense, arguably the most artistically creative movie medium of all.

But not all animated movies grab me. Despicable Me seems to have done very well at the box office, but when I finally caught up with it on DVD, I found it very flat and not engaging at all.

* Avoiding the discussion: In a move sure to attract some amused comment, I've been busy creating a short, age appropriate, slide show movie with a sex education theme for my son. This is really very time consuming, as all the drawings are being done on my iPad and then transferred to the desktop for compilation. Use a bit of Midi music as the soundtrack, and occasional bits of computer generated voice, and it should all be finished in a week.

My wife knows of the project, and like (I'm sure) everyone else who will hear about it, considers this somewhat eccentric. However, as it is "men's work", she seems not so interested to see it.

This is really the result of not being able to find anything I consider appropriate in tone or content on the internet - which seems to me to be quite surprising, given what you can find on it. [There is a Victorian kid's sex education site, that is clearly designed for kids of about my son's age, but if every link is followed, it's really a case of more information than I feel he needs now. Also, the cartoony look is pretty ugly, and some of the illustrations are of outright questionable merit - one page shows a bunch of cartoon girls using mirrors to check themselves out.(!) I think The Vagina Monologues have got a lot answer for.]

The basic idea is for a short "what to expect from your body within the next year or two", and that does involve some discussion of internal plumbing and understanding of the basics of sexual reproduction. I've thrown in a bit of evolution too; why plants and animals share bits of each other in reproductions seems a sort of basic point to me. But all the issues of when to have sex, etc; that can wait til a bit older, if you ask me. I had better start on that Part 2 soon, though.

As a friend said to me on the weekend, "why not just talk about it?" Well yes, of course, I'll invite questions at the end of the show. Whether or not I'll be in the room to answer them, though, is a different matter. :)

Things to do

It's hard lately to both concentrate on work and survey the web for stuff that interests me and is "blogworthy." Also, the tax department, oddly, does not seem to appreciate the need to be the most reasonable person to comment at a certain "centre right" blog as a reason for delaying payments.

So I have to abandon it all for a week at least, until I can spot where money is coming from again.

My faithful readers can tell me what I have missed in comments section. As I know from when I have been on holidays, it only takes a relatively short time to catch up on favourite blogs when one has been away for a couple of weeks in any event.

This time, I mean it. Away from the web for me.

Watching the war

SBS has, for a long time, been the place to go to watch documentaries about World War 2, particularly on Friday nights.

As it happens, I don't really care for the current series "Apocalypse - The Second World War" because it's one of those with a hysterical sounding narration*, and a gruesomely high body count that makes it unsuitable to watch with my son. (He really likes history, inspired by the Horrible History series of books, and probably already retains more knowledge about certain periods of British history than I can recall. He is usually happy to watch any documentary about war that's on.)

But the reason for mentioning this is to note that SBS2 has also been showing a lot of WWII documentaries. They are not new, and may well have been on SBS1 years ago, but I've been happy to catch up with them anyway.

This week, there was one that was just about the Japanese surrender at the end of the war, and featured as its most lengthy section footage of MacArthur and the other Allies signing the surrender instrument with the Japanese on the USS Missouri. It was a fascinating minor detail of history to learn about the mistake made by the Canadian representative (who signed on the wrong line, which meant those below him also did.) There was then a bit of a agitated discussion with the Japanese as to whether they would accept the document signed this way. It was amended by hand and initialled. The Wikipedia entry about the document is here.

Another recent SBS2 doco from a few years ago was about the Nazi's attempt to get heavy water to Germany to conduct research into an atomic bomb. It included an expedition to retrieve a barrel from the boat (which had been sunk by the allied operatives) to double check whether the Nazis had actually sent a decoy barrel. (Turns out they didn't.)

Anyhow, this is just a pointer to anyone in Australia looking for interesting stuff on TV. Don't overlook SBS2.


* yes, I know, hysteria may be an appropriate response to certain things that happened then, but it still puts me off in narration. But they do show many scenes of death which are disturbing to say the least. Last week, they dealt briefly with Jews being killed in Russia, and showed some film of this incident:

The most notorious one – perhaps one of the single most infamous events of World War II – was the execution of more than 33,000 Jews from Ukraine’s capital Kiev, at the ravine of Babi Yar on 29-30 November 1941.

Such stuff still has the capacity to make me feel sick.

Getting your fears in correct priority

According to this Scientific American blog, in an 8 year recent period in the United States, more spiders killed people than snakes. I wouldn’t have picked that.

But then, 9 people died of alligator or crocodile attack. Who knew cleaning New York stormwater drains could be so dangerous.*

But amongst deadly venomous animals, bees and wasps come out as far the most important: 71% of such deaths.

Which raises an interesting point: when I was a kid, we used to get clover (the type with the white flowers) growing in the yard or on the footpath, and it was very attractive to bees when it was in bloom. This meant that walking barefoot on it was a pretty easy way to get a bee sting, and I certainly had a few as a youngster. (Although I’m pretty sure one was from trying to catch a bee in a jar.)

These days, though, it seems kids are much, much less likely to get a bee sting as an ordinary part of growing up. (I just don't notice clover around much anymore, and even if it is in someone's yard, the kids are probably inside on the computer.) This, I am guessing, makes it much more of a worry that any allergy to bees may not be known until they are much older.

I suppose that, ideally, you never find out you have the allergy. But somehow it seems to me to be safer to know you have it when you’re younger, rather than having a sudden unexpected medical crisis as an adult.

* I may have invented that detail.

Climate stuff noted

First, the New York Times has a good, balanced article on the question of the cold European and American winters this year and last, and whether it can reliably said to be all part of global warming. (The answer is: a definite maybe, but we need to do more research.)

In case you haven't heard, as with last winter, the far north of Canada has been remarkably warm:

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

It's interesting to see scientists openly acknowledging that they need to be cautious in what they say:

In interviews, several scientists recalled that in the decade ending in the mid-1990s, the polar vortex seemed to be strengthening, not weakening, producing mild winters in the eastern United States and western Europe.

At the time, some climate scientists wrote papers attributing that change to global warming. Newspapers, including this one, printed laments for winter lost. But soon after, the apparent trend went away, an experience that has made many researchers more cautious.

John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, wrote some of the earlier papers. This time around, he said, it will take a lot of evidence to convince him that a few harsh winters in London or Washington have anything to do with global warming.

This is fair enough, but given the way climate change skeptics will use any cold snap to bolster their case, it's important that articles at least talk about the possible mechanisms by which the winter weather may indeed be consistent with AGW.

Second: there are a few climate change blogs I've started reading more regularly lately, and I've added them to the blogroll. AGW Observer, being run by a Ari in Finland, seems a particularly useful collection of just published papers on climate change. I hope he keeps it going.

I've also been enjoying Michael Tobis, even though he seems to be getting pretty desperately pessimistic, and Tamino is always good to check on despite his not too frequent posts.

Funny, I can't find any climate change skeptic blog worth adding. Watts Up With That can be trusted to bring any new skeptic claim to light, anyway.

Third: early figures comparing Brisbane's last two floods show that 1974 Brisbane floods were indeed based on a lot of rain:

But weather experts suggested "peak rainfalls from the 1974 event were substantially heavier than those in 2011".

Brisbane's three-days and one-day totals were 600mm and 314mm in 1974, compared with 166mm and 110mm in 2011.

"However, in 1974 the heaviest rains were closer to the coast whereas in 2011 heavy rains spread further inland," the bureau said.

The bureau is still crunching the numbers, and it will be interesting to see if the widespread nature of the 2010/11 floods is unusual in Queensland history. Certainly, I don't recall flooding all the way from Brisbane to Rockhampton and far inland in such a short period before; but I don't exactly keep precipitation charts on my bedroom wall.

Of minor blogworthiness

Nothing much around that makes me feel like posting at length today, although people might be curious enough to read these:

* the odd problem of "fake" love hotels in Japan. Funny, I thought town planning was a concept unknown to the Japanese, but they do actually stop love hotels from being less than 200 m from a school.

* Real Climate has a good post updating the comparisons of climate models with actual observations. Result: there is no great crisis in climate science according to these comparisons, although of course it remains a complicated field.

* I missed this from December: the Billfish Foundation (great name) and NOAA say that these big fish (including tuna) are having less ocean to stay in because of increasing hypoxic areas:

While these hypoxic zones occur naturally in many areas of the world’s tropical and equatorial oceans, scientists are concerned because these zones are expanding and occurring closer to the sea surface, and are expected to continue to grow as sea temperatures rise.

“The hypoxic zone off West Africa, which covers virtually all the equatorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean, is roughly the size of the continental United States, and it’s growing,” said Dr. Eric D. Prince, NOAA’s Fisheries Service research fishery biologist. “With the current cycle of climate change and accelerated global warming, we expect the size of this zone to increase, further reducing the available habitat for these fish.”

* You probably already heard, but I'll note it here anyway: one paper last week says that climate modelling has underestimated the effect of loss of ice and snow on future temperature rises. Great...

* Did I mention this before? I don't think so, I think I intended to: it's a steam bath, but not as you know it.

There you go. Not all of that of what "minor blogworthiness" after all.

Now I should work today, as it's a holiday tomorrow.

All summer in a day*

Yesterday was a lovely summer's day in Brisbane; the first in 3 months it seems. So, being the last day of the school holidays, we went down to the Gold Coast and had a nice time at the beach. Water temperature was warm; no bluebottles; the sun was out but the air did not feel too hot. Lovely.

As for recent Queensland weather generally, I note that Andrew Bolt had quoted another blogger claiming that a report by Queensland's Office of Climate Change barely mentioned "floods". It turns out that this relates to merely one chapter of the report, and as Tim Lambert says, it's another case of climate change skeptic gullibility.

In terms of the climate change debate, I have never paid all that much attention to the particular regional rainfall changes for Australia forecast by CSIRO and the like. I just always assumed that regional forecasts under climate models were going to be more rubbery than the general effect of increased heat waves, which I consider a big enough worry. This explains why I wasn't really aware that there had been predictions of both extended droughts and intense rainfall under AGW. But as Tim Lambert notes, the report Bolt tries to slur as being warmenist propaganda that puts the emphasis all on drought, has this:

Climate change is also likely to affect extreme rainfall in south-east Queensland (Abbs et al. 2007). Projections indicate an increase in two-hour, 24-hour and 72-hour extreme rainfall events for large areas of south-east Queensland, especially in the McPherson and Great Dividing ranges, west of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. For example, Abbs et al. (2007) found that under the A2 emissions scenario, extreme rainfall intensity averaged over the Gold Coast sub-region is projected to increase by 48 per cent for a two-hour event, 16 per cent for a 24-hour event and 14 per cent for a 72-hour event by 2070. Therefore despite a projected decrease in rainfall across most of Queensland, the projected increase in rainfall intensity could result in more flooding events.

Very prescient, as it turns out. (Not to say that you can directly attribute any particular extreme weather event to AGW yet.)

Last week, I pointed out a different paper which indicated the same thing (modelling indicates longer droughts but broken by intense rain) at Catallaxy, a.k.a the "centre right" blog where climate science goes to die. This was followed by the glib "so, everything's consistent with AGW" response that shows that even though a weather event may (after all) be consistent with climate modelling of some years ago, they will insist on claiming that it either isn't, or that it doesn't matter.

I think that Tim Flannery's role as a populariser of AGW has something to do with this, in that he seemed to love making statements that gave the impression that Australian cities were facing pretty much continual drought since the last one started about a decade ago. But again, I simply haven't paid him much attention, and skeptics who harp on about him are in one sense fighting a straw man.

Meanwhile, a fight has broken out at Judith Curry's blog about attributing extreme weather to AGW, and the Queensland floods get a particular going over. (Read from here down). Curry did do one thing useful, and linked to this site, which has a lot of links to papers over the years looking at extreme rainfall over the decades in Australia.

Andrew Bolt's also been an enthusiastic promoter of the idea that poor management of the water flows out of the Wivenhoe dam was the real cause of this flood. He is following the lead of The Australian's Hedley Thomas, who has been running a story kicked off by an engineer with no experience in hydrology, although others (not directly involved in Wivenhoe) have come out offering some sort of support. Of course, now that an enquiry is underway, the proper thing to do is to give it a rest. I personally expect that there will ultimately be no blame put on the Wivenhoe dam managers at all, nor on any politician. One media report noted last week that the dam inflows that led to the floods were enough to fill it in a day (something I would not have thought possible.) I simply find it very hard to believe that in those circumstances it is at all likely that the outflow decisions could have done anything other than make a very minor difference to the flood height.

However, if I worked for SEQ Water, I would consider both Hedley Thomas journalistic campaign, and Bolt's anti climate change politicisation of it, to both be offensive smear campaigns. No, wait: I don't need to work for SEQ Water to be very annoyed with Bolt's line of argument. (Sure, you can say that I've already admitted that I didn't have knowledge of the drought and flood AGW papers either, but then I'm not the one running an anti climate science campaign in a national newspaper, and being completely careless of informing myself about facts.) Bolt is running not just with the line that the dam operators were at fault, but it was the insidious effects of "warmenism" that led them to not let out enough water in case we were left without enough drinking water. Oddly enough, while Bolt was saying this, John Quiggin quickly shot from the hip and suggested that maybe the dam should be operated at 75% capacity when a wet summer is forecast. While I expect Quiggin may well change his mind, it certainly shows there is at least one "warmenist" who takes a line contrary to what Bolt would suggest.

I bet the reality turns out to be this: the dam has always been intended to run at 100% supply for drinking water if possible, and population increases since it started operating in 1985, and a recent drought which led to the dam getting dangerously low meant the policy continued to make a lot of sense. "Warmenism" will have nothing to do with the policy existing to this day.

We'll see if I am right or wrong.



* I knew the title was from a science fiction story, but I couldn't remember anything about it. Turns out it was particularly apt:

The story is about a class of school children on Venus, which in this tale is a jungle world of constant torrential rainstorms, where the sun is only visible for only two hours every seven years. Such an occurrence is imminent.

Meanwhile, in a cylinder in Russia…

How easy it is to forget about the international team of Claustrophobics Anonymous which has been living in a can near Moscow for 6 months already on a pretend mission to Mars.  But they are approaching “landing”:

 The six men are due to "land" on Mars on Feb. 12 and spend two days researching the planet. They then begin the months-long return flight to Earth, expected to be the most challenging part of the mission.

How do you explore Mars for two days?  I’m glad you asked:

In an effort to reproduce the conditions of space travel, with exception of weightlessness, the crew has living quarters the size of a bus connected with several other modules for experiments and exercise. A separate built-in imitator of the Red Planet's surface is attached for the mock landing.

Well, two days may well be enough after all.

Does this project have its own website?  Indeed it does, although for me it loads at about 1979 internet speeds, but hey, it is Russia.  It would also appear that wood veneer is very popular in Russian Mars spaceships, from the one photo I can see.   There is also a link to a blog that seems to only be in Russian.  But it does contain a photo of the simulated Mars surface.  Yes, I think they will cover all the sights well within 2 days.  I hope they are not disappointed.

Lessons for my daughter

Oh good. An article in the Japan Times that covers my interest in both Japanese toilets and theology: Paying respect to the Japanese toilet god.

Amongst other things, it notes that there was a popular folky song in Japan last year - "The Toilet God":

The lyrics were inspired by the singer's grandmother, who held that women should clean toilets in order to honor the beautiful female deity presiding there. My own grandmother used to say that daughters who cleaned the family toilet were destined to become beautiful, and would in turn bear beautiful daughters.

I must admit, my daughter already finds cleaning a toilet an entertaining past time. My son - not so much.

The article also notes Japanese toilet folklore:

Anyone who has been through the school system here has the old stand-by: toire no Hanako-san (トイレの花子さん, Hanako in the toilet stall), the ghost of a girl who died mysteriously — usually bullied by classmates and locked into a smelly toilet — who has come back to haunt her old grade school.

The older generation, who grew up in rural Japan, may come out with some pretty macabre stuff. One that's practically legend is the story of the village brute who crawled into the compost tank of the local girls' school and mired himself there for weeks, only to be discovered when an inquisitive student peered into the creepy darkness of the washiki benki (和式便器, Japanese crouch-style toilet bowl) and saw a pair of eyes looking up at her.

A bit more impressive than redbacks on the toilet seat.

A whole bunch of physics (expanded from yesterday edition)

Just when I was thinking "gee, there hasn't been much speculative physics stories around for a while", I find a whole bunch of blogworthy material in one session:

* a couple of University of Queensland guys talk about how quantum entanglement can not just be across space, but across time as well. The crux of what this means is summed up here ( I hope accurately):

Olson and Ralph's teleportation provides a shortcut into the future. What they're saying is that it's possible to travel into the future without being present during the time in between.

Cool. Not dissimilar to a really good night's sleep, though.

* Physics World has a good article looking the LHC after a year, and what it has shown so far, and may yet show. It includes this bit about mini black holes:

CMS scientists have also found no evidence for micro black holes in their 12,500 tonne detector (arXiv:1012.3375). This result, reported just before Christmas, will not have come as a shock to anyone who thinks such black holes will destroy the planet. (For them, it's only a matter of time...) But it has not surprised many physicists either, given that miniature black holes could only appear at the LHC if space has more than three dimensions. So what does CMS's black-hole blank mean for such outlandish pictures of space–time? Can we now simply start ruling them out?

"The fascinating science of black-hole production and evaporation still stands," insists Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who a decade ago co-proposed the possibility that the LHC might create black holes. "The CMS results begin to rule out the most extreme configurations of extra dimensions, although it is true that such configurations are believed unlikely by many. It's still a possibility that black holes will be made at the LHC, but it's not a prediction unless you know the configuration of the extra dimensions!"

The rest of the article, which mentions string theory and whether or not it can in any respect be bolstered by future findings, is worth reading.

* Physics World has another good article up: a review of a book of essays called Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics. Who can resist that?

As the title suggests, the essays get to theology eventually:

The problem, of course, is that once we leave the scientific domain, it becomes rather easy to make unfounded speculations about the connections between information and various other religious concepts. For instance, in the last chapter of this book we encounter suggestions that the Christian Gospel of John could be interpreted in information-theoretic terms. Similar parallels are drawn in the essay by Michael Welker, who discusses the information content in the resurrection of the Christ. Carelessly extrapolated, this sort of exposition might lead to arguments similar to Frank Tipler's nonsensical "proofs" of various Christian dogmas in his two books The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity. Amusing as such parallels might be, it is doubtful that they will ever lead to any greater enlightenment as to the nature of reality itself.

Speaking of information and the gospels, I remember a conversation I once had with a Catholic quasi-girlfriend (I'm not sure we ever quite agreed on her status) in which I complained that, if God wanted Jesus to be seen as convincingly divine 2000 years after he trod the Earth, it would have been handy to have some bits of science thrown in the Gospels, like this: "Consider the water. Little do you know that the air you breath has the essential parts that, when joined together, two parts to one, make the water that will quench your thirst." Of course, the possibility is that Jesus did make references to science all the time, but the Gospel writers found them so silly or incomprehensible that they refused to commit them to paper. Or it may be that something like advanced games theory means it's really quite important for humanity not to have the certainty of God or an afterlife staring them in the face all the time. The temptation to keep killing others for perceived wrongs and let God sort it out on the other side might be too much. There are no doubt other theories around.

* Don Page, a Christian physicist who I have mentioned before, has a new article out arguing against the universe we find ourselves in being fine tuned for life. As Bee Hossenfelder notes, Don uses this argument as support for his fondness for a multiverse, ending his paper this way:

"It could be taken as negative evidence for theists who expect God to fine tune the constants of physics optimally for life. However, for other theists, such as myself, it may simply support the hypothesis that God might prefer a multiverse as the most elegant way to create life and the other purposes He has for His Creation."

By the way, physicist Bee's own universe has expanded lately by the birth of twins. Congratulations are in order.

We think we've found the problem

In Australia, a news story about the how often the population is having sex will more than likely be based on some women's or men's magazine unreliable reader survey.

In Japan, however, the government appears interested enough in its citizens to conduct the research itself. (Presumably, because of its soon to be rapidly declining population.)

So, what does the latest survey reveal?:

One-third of Japanese men aged 16 to 19 were uninterested in or even averse to sex as of last year, double the number from 2008, a government survey showed Wednesday.

Well, one suspects that this is misleading, unless the survey specified that "sex" means "with another person."

Anyhow, the interpretation of this is given as follows:

‘‘The survey result confirmed that young men have become ‘herbivorous’,’’ said Kunio Kitamura, head of the Clinic of the Japan Family Planning Association who took part in the survey, using the term used increasingly in Japan to describe young males who are shy and passive in relationships with women.

According to the ministry, 35.1% of men aged 16 to 19 said they are uninterested in or averse to sex, surging from 17.5% in the previous poll in 2008.

The percentage climbed to 21.5% among men aged 20 to 24 from 11.8% two years earlier, and among women of any age group, the survey showed.

Those married men and women who said they had no sex in the past month totaled 40.8%, up from 36.5% in the previous survey and 31.9% in a 2004 study.

As for the broader relevance of this: I read recently that Japan, Korea and Taiwan were amongst the lowest birthrate countries in the world. I'm pretty sure they all have very fast and pretty cheap internet access. Has anyone done the research into fast internet access and birthrates across the world??*

Any proper evaluation into Australia's National Broadband Network clearly should consider its population effects in 25 years time.

* I guess fast internet is unlikely to be the explanation for Russia's birthrate, but fast vodka may well have something to do with it.

Victorian murder

As noted in Arts & Letters Daily, there's an amusing review in the Spectator of a book about Victorian England's cultural enthusiasm for murder as a virtual entertainment. It puts our current TV obsession with all things criminal and forensic into perspective. I liked this bit about journalism of that period:

Anyone who thinks the 21st-century tabloid represents some sort of journalistic nadir, for instance, will find this book a bracing corrective. On the contrary, we live, it turns out, in a hitherto unexampled golden age of truthfulness and integrity.

Even proper 19th-century newspapers seethed with class bigotry, and routinely printed rumour as fact without thought to prejudicing a trial. What are now called ‘backgrounders’ would report that the accused robbed corpses in battle, spent his childhood torturing dogs, or had ‘been known to twist a whipcord round a horse’s tongue, and tear it out by the root’.

If facts weren’t available, they’d be invented. The Morning Chronicle, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, John Bull and the Bristol Mercury all reported solemnly that Mary Ann Milner had ‘conducted herself with much composure’ at her execution. This stretched plausibility, considering she’d committed suicide in her cell the night before. Even the illustrations were, more often than not, stock images appended at random: the purported likeness of one murderer, it was pointed out, was actually a portrait of William IV.

In terms of modern journalism, I would say that the Times of India has not entirely shaken off the Victorian template. Detailed background of a death or crime (such as the family dispute that led to it) are frequently reported in a way that is not common in Australia now. Let's see if I can find a current example. Here we go: look at the amount of detail that goes into this (alleged) rape report. The accused getting a fair trial after such publicity seemingly is of no concern in the country.

A good thing to avoid

Just file this under "things I didn't know" (or perhaps more likely, "something I had once read but forgotten"):

Women who have had chlamydia are at greater risk of an ectopic pregnancy because of a lasting effect of the infection. A new study provides evidence for the first time of how chlamydia can increase the risk of an ectopic pregnancy .

And just how "popular" is this disease? According to a report just a few days ago, quite:

Sexual health experts are demanding the Federal Government urgently fund a national screening program for chlamydia after figures showing infection rates have more than tripled in 10 years.

More than 61,000 people were diagnosed last year, up from about 17,000 in 2000. About 14,500 were diagnosed in NSW alone, the second highest rate in Australia.

More than half those infected were aged 20 to 29 and a quarter were aged under 19.

Not a flood post

A few things that have come to my attention:

* Richard Ayoade (Moss in the IT Crowd) seems to genuinely be a self-effacing, likeable person in real life. With a funny voice.

* Falling pregnant in zero gravity may well be difficult, and not good for the embryo if achieved, reports New Scientist:

What does seem clear is that space travel affects reproduction. Joseph Tash, a reproductive biologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, examined 16 female mice that travelled aboard NASA's STS-131 mission last year. He found that the mice had shrunken ovaries, dying ovarian follicles and down-regulated oestrogen genes. Their reproductive systems "had shut down", he says.

This is dangerous news: I can see that space based teenage boys will use this as an excuse with their space based girlfriends not to use condoms.

* In other vital space news, it turns out that radishes, and even lettuce, do very well even after being exposed to near vacuum for 30 minutes:

After the team returned the pressure to normal, all the plants continued to grow until being harvested a week later. The plants appeared to be just as healthy as another set of plants never exposed to low pressure, with no significant difference in weight

If only Dave had a radish that could turn off HAL, 2001 could have ended very differently.

* I've started watching American sitcom The Middle. It's quite likeable, I think, even if not necessarily a laugh a minute.

Around the flood

This is how the week developed since my last post on Wednesday morning. (Feels longer ago than that, but experiencing novel events has that effect.)

There were plenty of warnings on Tuesday evening that the Brisbane flood could be very big – equal to, or even slightly higher, than the 1974 flood. However, since I had been told by long term residents that the group of shops in which my office is located had only taken water up to the car park (which rises about 1 – 2 meters above the street level) in 1974, I wasn’t too anxious. Indeed, the Council flood maps on the internet that evening indicated that the local knowledge was right.

However, on Wednesday morning, Lord Mayor Campbell Newman said on TV that they had revised the maps overnight, and people should check again if their homes or businesses could be affected. And yes, when I checked, the flood line had been moved just enough to indicate that my office/shop area were in danger.

I was not much encouraged when, getting to the office at about 8.15 am, the artificial lake within about 30 metres of my shops (and which had not been there in 1974) had already flooded across the road as far as the eye could see, and this was still 12 – 18 hours before the predicted peak. One house on the far side of the lake already looked to have a couple of meters of water over its ground floor.

It seemed prudent to remove the computers and take them home. This didn’t take too long, but then nearby residents mentioned that the road between me and my home, which I already knew was cut in one direction I could take, was now getting inundated (via the backflowing stormwater drains) in the other direction. If I waited too long I might not be able to get home at all.

I therefore left in a hurry with a lot of things left on the office floor. In any event I had to go pick up my mother from her retirement village, which I had been told was going to be evacuated as a precaution as well.

As I drove away from the office, there was quite a lot of activity in some lakeside houses to get furniture onto vehicles. Further along, I could see water over the road at the top of a side street which I knew led down closer to the lake. Many expensive houses down there would clearly already be inundated, and it was only about 9 am.

The main road just a little further along did indeed have a foot or so of water over it, but only for a short distance. I went and collected my mother, noticing the water was already down the far end of her street.

I got her home, which was already hosting another family (friends of ours with children) who had left their home in another flood prone suburb across the river and stayed with us on Tuesday night.

At about 11.30am, I drove back to see if I could get to the office, but the road was now covered with about 2 – 3 feet of water and the police were there, really only wanting to let residents through. It was not worth the risk.

So by midday I was back home, watching TV and wondering why coverage seemed very centred on inner city suburbs (such as Milton and Rosalie) and then leapt over to Ipswich and Goodna. I did feel slightly indignant that my already well flooded suburban area was not rating much of a mention.

Around 2 pm the power went off and stayed off for about 24 hours. I had telephone calls from friends near the office who said water had started coming up out of the stormwater drains in front of the carpark.

As Australian readers would know, the flood peak overnight on Wednesday was about 1 to 1.5 m less than they had predicated. In fact, I think by Wednesday afternoon, they knew that the river at Ipswich had peaked well under the forecast, so I did relax a little. Still, I was very glad to be able to get to the office on Thursday morning to see that, as in 1974, the flood water stopped in the car park driveway. If the peak had been as forecast, it would have been a very close call as to whether water would have entered the building.

The number of houses around my area which were flooded has surprised me, particularly around the lake, and in another area around a golf course. I’m not sure when they started selling lakeside land, and it may well have been before the Council restricted building homes on levels below the 1974 flood. But certainly, this would have been the first time since then that they faced a major flood, and I expect that many were surprised that the lake was capable of such a rise. There are certain other streets in the suburbs near mine which I am sure would only contain houses built since 1980, yet have dozens of houses flooded. I am sure there will be some questioning of the Council flood level advisory maps after this.

On Thursday afternoon, when the water had already dropped by a meter or so, I was able to get around a bit and take some photos. The quality may not be great, but clicking might make them a bit bigger:

One of the main local roads; houses down the street on both sides had plenty of water through them.

The road along my Mum’s retirement village. I was told houses down the far end had at least a meter of water through them. (You can also see the "high water"mud mark nearly half way up on the row of bushes on the left.) The retirement village was spared, again with water just reaching the car park entrance.

On the left, well under the water, is the entrance to a boat ramp, playground and picnic area, none of which (including the roof of the toilet block, on the higher part of picnic area) could be seen. I think that’s the rear wheels of a car floating upside down near one of the light poles.

Next, my inner anti-sporting grump was not too shocked to see the Little Athletics club house and grounds, which I have been a reluctant attendee with my daughter on Friday nights last term, has had a make over:

Now for the best big flood scenes near me:

Highway in foreground, with shops in the distance. Closer detail to be seen in the next photo (remember, the water had already dropped by this stage):

And for last, the difference a day makes in a flood. Here’s a photo from roughly the same position late this afternoon:

I know the flood effects for me was nothing compared to all those who did have homes and businesses under water, and who may remain without power for days yet. Still, one brush with a flood this size is enough to satisfy any curiosity about what it’s like to be near a natural disaster.

Floods

Brisbane's floods will not directly affect my house, but certainly I live and work in suburbs which will have houses inundated. (There would seem to be a chance my office may be cut off, although it did not quite go under in 1974.)

This has been a strange disaster. For those who have seen the footage of the Toowoomba flash flood: this is not a town, sitting as it does on top of a range, that is known for such flooding.

As for the Lockyer Valley disaster - yes, people know it has creek and river flooding, but again, nothing like what has been seen on TV yesterday. It is amazing to think that the death toll may climb into the dozens.

The rain has stopped since yesterday afternoon, which is one thing at least. But it does feel odd, knowing that a large volume of water is still headed to the city. At least people will probably start to feel easier that the Wivenhoe dam will not be breached. At 190% capacity (for a dam built to go to 225%), some people were definitely wondering about that yesterday.

There will be many people who cannot work today. I may be distracted for a little while.

I may be a man, but I’m not taking any chances

WOMEN who habitually take strenuous exercise might be at risk of damaging their cognitive function later in life.

Steve's stupid but brilliant idea of the day

Brisbane and much of Queensland has been incredibly wet this summer, with thousands of homes flooded, and hundreds of thousands of parents with school children depressed that the kids have inside continuously for the last 4 weeks.

Now we get news that:

The Australian Building Codes Board is preparing the first technical standards for construction in areas liable to flooding.

Excellent. My plans for all flood prone houses to be Queenslander style built on pontoons may get a run yet.

Child-like drawings to come, as well as a photo of the really weird slug found on a tree yesterday at Mt Glorious during a break in the torrential rain. Yes, my wife was that desperate to get out of the house.

Update: here's the slug. (Easily 6 - 8 cm long):


As for the floods generally: amazing and pretty horrifying scenes of flash flooding in Toowoomba was on the news tonight. Two people were killed in a car swept away (I assume, not one of the cars in this video). Here's an amateur video from the town:



I see that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is saying that it is only the Wivenhoe Dam, which is full and letting go of a lot of water, that is preventing Brisbane from having the equivalent of a 1974 flood. There is actually some talk now of it being the biggest floods Queensland has ever seen, but exactly how you compare these things I'm not sure.

Make friends and influence people the Anglican way

There was a short story in the Courier Mail this morning about how the Anglican Church in Brisbane is looking for more, younger recruits to the priesthood. Apparently there is a shortage. I thought, last I heard, that they actually had quite a lot of women priests to spread around their increasingly dwindling congregation, but maybe not.

Anyway, the main point of the post is to note that this comment:

Executive director of Brisbane's ministry education commission, Reverend Steven Ogden, said the priesthood was desperately in need of educated men and women.

"We need university students with sharp minds, not the stereotypical, eccentric weirdos," he said.

I can only assume Rev Steve must have missed the sensitivity training day at theological college (or whatever it is Anglican clergy in training attend.)

UPDATE: I should have noted that the other possible explanation (in fact, probably the most likely one) would be an out of context quote by the Courier Mail. See comment below.

Graph noted

This graph appeared recently on a Scienceblog and has evidently been around for a long time. (Original source is Global Warming Art.) It is good, though, don’tcha think?:

New York Times finally gets ESP

The NYT website, at least, is featuring prominently the story of soon to be published ESP experiments of Daryl Bem.

You read about them at this very blog back in October. It takes a while for international journalism to catch up with me.

One small aspect of the experiments is a little amusing:

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

Every politician should have one

Romania is planning on taxing its witches, according to The Guardian. But they are fighting back:

Queen witch Bratara Buzea said she will lead a chorus of witches in casting a spell using a concoction of cat excrement and a dead dog.

Interestingly, the report goes on to note:

Such spiritualism has long been tolerated by the Orthodox Church in Romania. The late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, had their own personal witch.

Well, at last I understand the best role for this woman in the Australian parliament.

From the "only in Saudi Arabia" files

In the Gulf News:

Riyadh: A squad from the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has raided the house of a Saudi man following a tip off that he is practising sorcery.

It was reported that the suspect has bewitched a girl and married her without the knowledge of her family.

Following investigation, the suspect was put in jail, awaiting trial. Saudi Arabia applies capital punishment for sorcery.

The incident, which took place in Riyadh, came to light when a security guard, working for a private company, accused a fellow citizen of bewitching his daughter and his other family members and used magic to marry the girl without a marriage contract.

And the report ends:

The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice [gosh, that's an appealing name for a a government department, isn't it?] said it is conducting awareness programmes against the practice of withcraft.

Now there's a lecture that would be interesting to see.

The other funny thing is that, in the same edition of Gulf News, we can also read:

Saudi Arabia confirmed on Tuesday it plans to buy more F-15 fighter jets as part of a massive arms deal which the US State Department said in September could be worth up to $60 billion.

This is a tad odd, isn't it? If the government believes in sorcery enough to be giving public education programs and killing people for it, why do they need 20th century jet fighter technology to protect themselves? Can't they train up a crack elite squad of good sorcerers who will, I don't know, stand at the border and make the enemy forget that Saudi Arabia is there?

Now, although it's no fun to be fair when poking fun at Saudi Arabia, I suppose I should acknowledge that England was prosecuting Helen Duncan under the Witchcraft Act in 1944. However, as Wikipedia explains, this for the offence of fraudulently claiming to be procuring spirits. Still, it would appear that you could say England officially believed in witches until that act was repealed in 1951.

So, maybe I'm being unfair about Saudi paranoia. Let's see: what else is there in Gulf News today?:

Saudi nationals have seized a vulture wearing a Tel Aviv University tag and a transmitter, prompting speculations that it was used by Mossad, the Israeli spying agency, to gather intelligence on the area....

The vulture was handed over to the Saudi security.

According to Israeli media, the tags indicated that the six-year-old bird was part of a long-term research project into migration patterns.

No, clearly this is just a country that has been left out in the hot sun for too long.