Keeping up with the designers

Libertarian types, being interested in preserving people's right to do themselves harm in any innovative way possible, seem to have a problem with governments making new designer drugs illegal, such as the recent fate of the "legal high" cannabis substitute Kronic. (Well, correct me if I wrong, libertarian inclined readers.) Never mind that no one knows quite what they are getting when they buy this product, and that we get statements from people who know such as this:

Professor Jon Currie, who directs the Department of Addiction Medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, says he is now seeing one or two cases each week in emergency from people seeking help because of Kronic.

Presumably, libertarian types think it reasonable that food manufacturers have to list ingredients and thereby warn of possible side effects, particularly for those unfortunate enough to have peanut allergies. If so, I wonder what grounds they use to justify a legal recreational drug manufacturer being able to sell its mystery ingredient product that seemingly has a good chance of sending a fair few of its users to the emergency department of the hospital.

The other argument I am guessing they would run against banning is to argue for legalisation for all recreational drugs that it is a substitute for, and then the market for Kronic would fall apart anyway. However, given that I have read somewhere that Kronic and its ilk are popular with outback miners, one has to bear in mind that there is a significant group of employers who have legitimate reason not to have their employees doing things like turn up for work to drive their (I'm guessing) 30 tonne trucks while still having last night's THC at high levels in their bloodstream. In other words, there is reason to suspect that there would still be a market for a legal alternative to cannabis, at least for one which would not test positive for cannabinoids.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a preamble to an interesting short article at Nature by a UK forensic scientist arguing that other designer drugs - ones related to amphetamines - also deserve legal banning, simply because they are too dangerous.

He acknowledges that this is not without complications. As he notes, making a drug illegal often makes it more dangerous, because illegal drug manufacturers tend not to worry too much about quality control (to put it mildly.)

Of course, you could argue that the market for new dangerous drugs eventually sorts itself out. If enough users end up in hospital, eventually it will become unpopular within the drug taking community anyway. But do we really want such Darwinian free market methods be the guide for such matters? Certainly, the parents or other close relatives of victims of a new drug would find it hard to accept, unless they are libertarian purists.

What bothers me most about libertarian arguments along these lines (including their attitude to tobacco) is not so much their defence of people to self harm, but that they blithely also condone the effective exploitation of such people by manufacturers of dangerous products for profit. This is particularly objectionable when the product carries a high degree of addictivity, such as tobacco, and is one that is known to be particularly attractive to teenagers, who tend not to have the best developed set of skills for anything, let along starting addictions.

I mean, if the argument was only ever about, say, the wisdom of making illegal the consumption of a magic mushroom that everyone could pick out of their garden, then this aspect of the libertarian argument would not be such an issue. You could say the same about the right of people to grown their own marijuana, I suppose. Yet I bet that in those places that do have very relaxed attitudes to small amount of cultivation for personal use, the illegal trade of larger quantities does not magically fall away.

So the argument about relaxing drug laws is never simply about what people want to do for themselves; it's about the broader questions of how it affects society overall, including safety at work, on the roads and economic productivity generally, and how do you treat the manufacturers of dangerous compounds who are happy to take money with no regard for the health consequences of consuming their product.*


* What about alcohol, I hear you say. Well, it certainly has no parallel with Kronic manufacturers: you know exactly what you are getting and at what strength when you buy any legally sold alcohol. Alcohol is tightly regulated, and governments do discourage its overuse. But you always have the argument that is a product capable of safe consumption. Yes, so is cannabis for most people, I know; yet the evidence of the danger it does represent even for moderate use at some strengths, particularly for young users, continues to accumulate.

Clear and convincing

Speaking science to climate policy

There's been a lot of talk around about The Conversation's effort to bring calm science to the climate change debate. The article above is from there, and is very good.

I see the rest of The Conversation website looks very good too.

The never ending crisis

News Ltd papers, and Andrew Bolt in particular, have been in quite a frenzy over bad opinion polls for the Gillard government for some months. It's like it's a veritable crisis every day in terrible mismanagement by this the Federal government.

Except that, well, I haven't noticed many immediate crises to be mismanaged. As I've suggested before, the problem is one of stasis, not crisis. That is, there are various important policy initiatives waiting to be finalised and knocked into final shape with a Parliament that is more like a herd of cats than any other Parliament in living memory. But these are mainly longer term initiatives - climate change and mineral taxes most particularly - and even the social ones of plain packaging for tobacco and poker machine regulation have longer term effects. My point being that it is more than a tad hyperbolic to be talking up a daily sense of immediate crisis due to the slow negotiation and implementation of these policies.

It's no surprise that polling is bad for the government until they actually get something implemented.

I am particularly amused at Janet Albrechtsen's column this morning, also extracted by Andrew Bolt, with this key section:

Her public positions lack private convictions. From opposing a big Australia, gay marriage and a republic to supporting the flag and the importance of religion, Gillard so obviously echoes voters for no other reason than political gain. Her statements on everything from immigration to population are knee-jerk populism, aimed at dominating the media cycle and putting out potential policy bushfires, rather than presenting a genuine narrative about her political beliefs. Gillard darts all over the place depending on what she wants...

Funnily enough, Janet and Bolt don't seem to realise that this description works even better for Tony Abbott. OK, I'll concede, we all knew he would never be for gay marriage. But consistency with his own party's (theoretical) principles and his past views, as opposed to populism:

* "direct action" on climate change as better than a tax or an ETS? He has to pretend this works as a market, but we all know it is simply a case of him needing product differentiation after holding half a dozen or so different positions on an ETS before his rise to leadership. About half of Coalition supporters don't believe he is being honest about believing there is a need to take action on CO2 at all.

* a nasty big tax scare campaign on a carbon tax. No populism in that, no sir-ee.

* a parental leave plan more generous and expensive than the Labor one. Let's unnecessarily out-Labor at their own game, hey Tony?

* a promise of not touching IR laws, even though this used to be an item of clear product differentiation between Coalition and Labor.

* Back to Nauru; the place where you house boat people for 2 - 3 years and let them build a full case of depression before letting them into Australia anyway. No, that doesn't have a touch of populism about it at all!

Let's face it, Janet and Andrew, if you want inconsistency and leaps to populism, there is no better example in the Australian polity at the moment that Mr T Abbott.

Bee on extra dimensions

Backreaction: Extra Dimensions at the LHC: Status Update

It's rather technical in detail, but Bee Hossenfelder has a look at the early results from the LHC and what they mean for black hole production and theories involving large extra dimensions. The conclusion:

While it is in many cases not possible to falsify a model, but just to implausify it, large extra dimensions are becoming less plausible by the day. Nevertheless, one should exert scientific caution and not jump to conclusions. The relevance of CMS constraints on multi-jets depends partly on assumptions about the black holes' final decay that are not theoretically justified.

The last bit seems to be about her earlier comment that any LHC black hole would be "a quantum gravitational object and it is not correctly described by Hawking's semi-classical calculation. How to correctly describe it, nobody really knows."

Good to know they don't know what to look for, then!

This'll really make your cake rise...

Baking powder for environmentally friendly hydrogen storage

Boom tish.

Handy figures to keep in mind

Beyond Condoms: The Long Quest for a Better Male Contraceptive: Scientific American

This article gives a pretty comprehensive coverage of the never ending quest to find a decent male contraceptive. I was most impressed with this line, though:

Compared with the one-egg-per-month output of the female reproductive system, the roughly 1,000-sperm-per-heartbeat output of the male reproductive system is "a quantitatively challenging problem" for contraceptive research, Amory says.

Young single men: feel free to incorporate this factoid during your next venture in a singles bar. Married men: impress your wife by offering this new found knowledge during a dinner party with that nice new couple you recently met.

There's one other quote that I thought interesting from the article:

In animal models the compound bisdichloroacetyldiamine safely and reversibly induces infertility by inhibiting an enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 1a2, required for retinoic acid synthesis in the testes. Unfortunately, bisdichloroacetyldiamine also inhibits a similar enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, required for alcohol metabolism in the liver—meaning that animals on bisdichloroacetyldiamine were unable to process alcohol. "And some would say that if it weren't for alcohol no one would need a contraceptive anyway," jokes Amory

What happens if you "can't process alcohol"? Would five drinks keep you drunk for a week? (I guess it takes a while to for it to get out of you via the lungs.) Would 12 drinks in a day pickle your insides?

Things achieved on a long weekend

* Unblocked the Vacumaid via the application of the old (normal) vacuum cleaner to the inlet that was not sucking. My handyman (handyperson?) credentials have soared, but from a very low base.

* Went to Lifeline Bookfest, and about the first thing I spotted, sitting in a face up position, was volume 1 of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry. Purchased for $3, I doubt I will venture past this volume, but having read Greene's short autobiography of the first part of his life last year, I'm curious to see what he left out. See, I told you that the Bookfest was great.

* Saw Super 8. I'm surely not the first to say it, but it's "ET with teeth and a bad temper." I thought it was not bad, but not likely to linger long in memory; still, it's probably the best JJ Abrams movie I have seen. You see, long time readers know I have a problem with him, and dammit, he's still doing it.

He's the Director of the Giant Faces, who seems to think you need to be able to see skin pores to understand the emotion of a scene.

I get tired of pointing this out. Someone - Spielberg, his wife, his dog - I don't care who it is - tell him to frame a shot and then pull back half way and re-compose it. It is just the Abrams rule of thumb that will never let you down - "you are too close."

Anyway, as many reviewers noted, the young teenage(?) actors are really good, and the script as a homage to early Spielberg is quite good too. I liked the ideas better than the execution; but that always seems to be my fate with JJ Abrams.

* Taught the children how to play poker, as well as Pig. (I only found Pig as an adult in a Hoyles book, but it is a remarkably good party game for kids and adults.)

By nuclear power to the Pole

Last night, quite by accident, I saw the second half of Charlie Bird Explores the Arctic, in which the Irish journalist joins a Soviet nuclear powered icebreaker that takes passengers to the North Pole every summer.

The fact that this is now a quite routine tourist event that has been running for years had escaped my attention.

It costs about $20,000 per person, and the ship is quite well appointed, as far as nuclear powered icebreakers go. Once at the pole, everyone gets off and stands around a temporary North Pole pole stuck in the ice, a bar-b-q takes place on the ice, and several made people go for a dip in the water that is exposed around the ship.

Unfortunately, I can find no Youtube clip of this, but you can currently watch the show on the SBS TV website. The first half is spent with some Inuit, and there is a fair bit of discussion about how they definitely know the climate is changing.

I see that there is an old Youtube of an English woman making this trip in 2001, which gives you the general idea.

I must try and keep up more with fantasy ways to spend spare money I don't have.

Barr explains

Roseanne Barr: 'Fame's a bitch. It's hard to handle and drives you nuts' | Culture | The Guardian

I really did like Roseanne for the first 3 or 4 seasons. Like most sitcoms, it grew tired and was pretty much unwatchable (and unwatched) in its last season, but the first few years were pretty innovative in the way Barr describes in the article above.

In fact, in the first few paragraphs, Ms Barr sounds quite sensible, but then we get a long recount of how and why she felt abused soon after her famous sitcom started. I have read much of this before; it certainly sounds like it must have been a nightmare on the set for the rest of the cast while Roseanne and the producers/writers fought bitterly and openly. And who really know who's right here? Barr can swing wildly from sounding credible, to sounding half nutty.

But towards the end, she criticises Hollywood for tolerating the likes of Charlie Sheen, and here she is on the money again:

Based on Two And A Half Men's success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world's most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife – sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn't make it right. People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the "culture".

But when it comes to his abusing his producers, she does relate:

Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that's expected of him on his own time.

Well, it seems to me Sheen has a lot less to complain about, given that (unlike Barr) he didn't get a comedy show by developing a character in years of tough stand up comedy. It seems he only had to lead a dissolute life, and a comedy based on that fell into his lap. (I'm assuming that's how it happened anyway.)

Finally, I note that The Middle - a very solid, enjoyable sitcom that is underappreciated - is a pretty clear successor to Roseanne. Maybe it's my own working class family background that makes me like these comedies.

A free plug

Brisbane Bookfest | Lifeline Community Care Queensland

Any South East Queensland reader is reminded that the Lifeline Bookfest is on at the Southbank Convention Centre this long weekend.

As their January one had to be cancelled because of the floods, I assume they will have a lot of books to sell.

You really should go; it's great.

And turning now to international hamster news...

France caught in a legal trap over rare rodent

The story feature as very good portrait of a hamster too.

Today's bit of curious medical research

Magnetic fields reduce blood viscosity - physicsworld.com

In their experiment, Tao and Huang showed that applying a 1.3 T magnetic pulse to a small sample of blood can significantly reduce it's viscosity. About 8 ml of blood with a viscosity of 7 centipoises (cp) – above healthy limits – was contained at body temperature (37 °C) in a test tube. The tube formed part of a device called a capillary viscometer used to measure viscosities. The sample was then exposed to a magnetic field applied parallel to the direction of flow of blood via a coil around the edge of the test tube. After one minute of exposure to the field, the blood's viscosity had been reduced by 33% to 4.75 cp. With no further exposure to the field, the viscosity had only risen slightly to 5.4 cp after 200 min, which is still within healthy limits.

I guess it would be good to know how long the effect does usefully last for. Still, it's all very interesting.

Not exactly a night at the opera

Spat at by a naked dancer: St-Pierre's Un Peu de Tendresse

A Guardian reviewer gets more than he bargained for during a night at the dance theatre.

Really, it's just a case of the avant garde dance movement, such that it is, running out of ways to shock its audience. Pretty pathetic, really.

Finding dark matter in the dark

The Dark Matter Data Bonanza - Technology Review

An interesting account here of some (apparently) successful attempts to detect dark matter via experiments at the bottom of mines.

If confirmed, this would be a major step towards understanding the universe. I think.

Julia has a cow

Julia Gillard can't take a trick at the moment, that's for sure. The latest one being on the Indonesian cattle issue. Of course no one was happy seeing the conditions in some Indonesian slaughterhouses, but stopping the whole export industry for six months when thousands of cattle are about to get on ships?

This was also a rare occasion when Bob Katter also came close to making sense. On Lateline last night, he made the point that I have not seen much of in the media reporting: how the hell did the Australians involved in setting up that box system that is designed to get cattle on their side in about the clumsiest way possible ever think that was going to look good to Australian animal rights people?

As Katter said:

I mean, when I saw that box I just couldn't believe that anyone could have been so stupid as to design that thing. ...

This person tonight admitted that they knew what was going on, that they'd sent people in to have look at this, they knew what was going on and they've known for years and years and years about it and they've done absolutely nothing about it except to provide a stupid box.

If you're going to but the animal in a box anyway, why not make it one which properly holds the beast while you have access to slit its throat while thus constrained? Surely this is possible.

There was also a decent bit of commentary about the issue in an article in the Australian this morning too.

Speaking of Hitler...

Hitler's first draft of the Holocaust: unique letter goes on show | World news | The Guardian

Hitler apparently was writing of his anti-Semitic plans in a letter in 1919:

... Hitler spouted an antisemitic diatribe, in which he said Jews were "pure materialists in thought and aspirations" and that their effect was "racial tuberculosis on the nation".

Crucially, he went on to set out his vision for a calculated antisemitism that would operate through strong governments rather than the emotion of the people. Emotional antisemitism, he wrote, merely ended in pogroms.

"The antisemitism of reason must lead to a struggle for the legal battle to abrogate laws giving [Jews] favoured positions, differentiating the Jew from other foreigners. The final goal must be the uncompromising removal of Jews altogether. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable, and never a government of national weakness."

Sort of encouraging

Older age does not cause testosterone levels to decline in healthy men

A bit of a surprise finding from this study:

"Some researchers believe that an age-related testosterone deficiency contributes to the deteriorating health of older men and causes nonspecific symptoms, such as tiredness and loss of libido," he said.

Handelsman and his team, however, found that serum (blood) testosterone levels did not decline with increasing age in older men who reported being in excellent health with no symptoms to complain of.

"We had originally expected age to have an effect on serum testosterone, so the findings were a bit of a surprise," Handelsman said....

"The modest decline in blood testosterone among older men, usually coupled with nonspecific symptoms, such as easy fatigue and low sexual desire, may be due to symptomatic disorders that accumulate during aging, including obesity and heart disease," he said. "It does not appear to be a hormone deficiency state."

The message for patients and their doctors, Handelsman said, is "older men with low testosterone levels do not need testosterone therapy unless they have diseases of their pituitary or testes."

Quick, send this information to Strauss-Kahn's defence team: maybe they can make some use of it. (Actually, it may be worth their while getting his testosterone levels checked; if they are ridiculously high, it might be useful in the plea in mitigation.)

Jung the spy?

Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis | Mark Vernon

This is interesting.

The Guardian is running a series on Jung, as a way of noting the 50th anniversary of his death.

In this second part, I knew about the conflict with Freud before (from Jung's autobiography), but I didn't know about his WWII activities:

Jung is also accused of complying with the Nazi authorities, in particular with Matthias Göring, the man who became the leader of organised psychotherapy in Germany, not least because he was the cousin of Hermann Göring. In fact, Matthias put Jung's name to pro-Nazi statements without Jung's knowledge.

Jung was furious, not least because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals. And that was not all. Bair reveals that Jung was involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.

It has also come to light that Jung operated as a spy for the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA). He was called "Agent 488" and his handler, Allen W. Dulles, later remarked: "Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war."

This could well form the basis of some fanciful fictionalised movie, I think. (It'd be good to see a fictional psychotherapy session between Jung and Hitler!) I like that genre of film.

How very generous...

Iran court quashes death sentence in 'porn' case | World news | The Guardian

A pretty amazing story of how dangerous a place Iran is:

Iran's supreme court has quashed the death sentence for Saeed Malekpour, a web programmer who was facing execution on charges of developing and promoting porn websites.

The 35-year-old was convicted of designing and moderating adult materials online although his family said he was a web programmer whose photo uploading software was used by a porn website without his knowledge.

Defence lawyers said the conviction was quashed after they provided the court with expert evidence. Malekpour, a Canadian resident who was arrested in October 2008 on arrival in Tehran, will remain in jail while a judicial review into his case is held.

Speaking from Toronto, his wife, Fatima Eftekhari, said: "This a sigh of relief for me, I'm very pleased that his life is finally saved.

"It's unbelievable that someone in this world has spent three years of his life in jail for merely designing software and was until now facing execution for that."

Beautiful light

Here's a new video by a guy who seems to be getting a fair bit of attention for his time lapse videos; and it's from Norway, my current dream holiday destination. It's very beautiful:

The Arctic Light from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

You too can hear music that's not there

Caffeine brings hallucinations (Science Alert)

A somewhat interesting study suggests that drinking a lot of coffee will make you more susceptible to auditory hallucinations.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure that's a safe conclusion, when you read how the experiment was done:

Five coffees a day or more was found to be enough to increase the participant’s tendency to hallucinate says Professor Crowe.

‘High caffeine levels in association with high levels of stressful life events interacted to produce higher levels of ‘hallucination’ in non-clinical participants, indication that further caution needs to be exercised with the use of this overtly “safe” drug,’ he says.

The participants were assigned to either a high or a low stress condition and a high or a low caffeine condition on the basis of self-report. The participants were then asked to listen to white noise and to report each time they heard Bing Crosby’s rendition of “White Christmas” during the white noise.

The song was never played. The results indicated that the interaction of stress and caffeine had a significant effect on the reported frequency of hearing “White Christmas”. The participants with high levels of stress or consumed high levels of caffeine were more likely to hear the song.

Does a tendency to think you can detect a pattern like a song mean that you're actually hallucinating it? Debatable, I would have thought.

Poor IPA

I see that the IPA and its pet blog Catallaxy celebrated World Environment Day with a flurry of posts, like this one, to continue its argument against carbon pricing via posts encouraging disbelief in the existence of climate change requiring any response at all.

It's therefore encouraging to see that the IPA is disappointed that it can't find a politician who wants to meet Vaclav Klaus, the Czech President who likes to make profound, Lubos Motl approved, statements like this:

Global warming is a myth and I think that every serious person and scientist says so.

Julie Bishop says that Julia Gillard should not refuse to meet him just because he is a AGW sceptic. (I don't think "sceptic" is quite the right word for someone who makes silly statements such as the one I just quoted.) But the trip to Australia would seem not to be an official visit. It sounds as if he is coming here specifically for the seminars. Certainly the cost of attending one of the seminars ($235 for the general public!) makes it seem like the IPA has paid his first class ticket and have a lot of money to recoup. Presumably the host, Alan Jones (the IPA and Alan Jones - what a team) is donating his time.

What a pity it would be if the IPA makes a loss on this.

The thing is, they have ruled themselves out of participating in any serious discussion of the details of a carbon pricing, because everyone knows they are simply climate change denying polemicists.

The rate matters

New study indicates carbon release to atmosphere ten times faster than in the past

I think we already knew this, but this latest study estimates that the rate of CO2 release now is about ten times faster than the big release during the PETM event of 60 odd million years ago.

This is particularly important for the issue of ocean acidification, as the natural chemical buffering of the additional acid in the ocean from dissolved CO2 takes time.

Detecting primordial black holes

If A Primordial Black Hole Hits The Sun...� - Technology Review

Apparently, primordial black holes would pass through the sun and just cause it to wobble a bit; this may be detectable.

I think I have previously mentioned somewhere in this blog what might happen if a small black hole passed through the Earth.

Pirates, etc

I took the kids to see On Stranger Tides today. I would say it's a very solid "quite OK", but I don't really mean that to sound disparaging. The kids enjoyed it; I enjoyed it with them - it's one of the pleasures of parenthood to enjoy a film together with growing kids and be able to talk about it afterwards.

A few quibbles: too much of it is set at night or in gloom - I was missing the brightness of (I think) the second movie. I am also not sure that I prefer the direction of Rob Marshall over Gore Verbinski during action sequences. (I always find myself thinking "that's not how Spielberg would do it" during chases and action sequences that not done quite as well as they should.) But on the other hand, the script is pretty witty throughout - it certainly had more laughs in it than At World's End - and Penelope Cruz is good in her role.

I see from Wikipedia that a script for a 5th movie has already been finished. It did occur to me today, though, that as with the Indiana Jones movies, this series is fast running out of mythological ideas suitable to its period to be incorporated in the plot. The Flying Dutchman, kraken, voodoo, sea goddesses, zombies, mermaids and the fountain of youth have now all been covered. Oh well, I guess I'll find out in a couple of years time if there is something else mythological that has thus far been overlooked.

Speaking of the Flying Dutchman, I see that the Wikipedia entry about it is quite informative, and includes this interesting item which I think I may read years ago, but forgotten about:

There have been many reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries. One was by Prince George of Wales (b. 1865) (later King George V). During his late adolescence, in 1880, with his elder brother Prince Albert Victor of Wales (b. 1864) (sons of the future King Edward VII), he was on a three-year voyage with their tutor Dalton aboard the 4,000-tonne corvette Bacchante. Off the coast of Australia, between Melbourne and Sydney, Dalton records:

At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her ... At 10.45 a.m. the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms.^[6]

Cool story, though not for the ordinary seaman.

For adults only - very silly adults

Californian porn industry's 'perfect storm' of troubles

A BBC report on the troubled porn industry in California notes:

Like the music industry, pornographers are struggling to persuade their audience to pay for what they watch.

DVD sales have collapsed. Online, a great deal of porn can be accessed for free.

And the economic downturn does not help.

"What with the recession and piracy, we call it the perfect storm," one leading producer observed wistfully

Yet, otherwise sensible, educated people still get into the business:

A college graduate, a former national standard swimmer and professional oboist, she seems to have packed a lot into her 27 years.

She turned to porn, she said, out of a sense of sexual adventure.

"It's just fun," she said, "and when everyone around you is having fun too, what's not to love?"

But what's really amazing is her attitude to the unprotected sex that is still the industry norm, despite government attempts to stop it due to HIV:

"And what about the health risks," I asked. "Have you had many infections?"

"Well, just chlamydia a couple of times, gonorrhoea - nothing much. Anyway, we test each month so, when you're diagnosed, you just take your medication and you're good to go. No problem."

In fact, the article goes on to note that some in the industry are attempting to argue that the right not to use a condom in the industry is a matter of free speech protected by the First Amendment!

"How can I express myself as an artist," one producer said to me, "if you're going to clothe my performers in rubber?"

Good grief. What a shame the industry is having hard times, hey?

Economic guesswork

'Discounting' The Future Cost Of Climate Change - Science News

Given that the economics of climate change are hot in the news again, I thought this explanation of discount rates was pretty good.

But still, my general attitude to all this is that it seems an absurd idea that economic modelling of the effects of climate change out to a century or so is anything other than pure guesswork.

The obvious reason is because of the uncertainties within climate science, even allowing that is basically right in its current estimate of likely global temperature increases. As the disruptive weather of the last 18 months is showing, it's not just heat waves to worry about, but floods, droughts, and possibly even unusually snowy winters at lower levels of the Northern Hemisphere. Everyone agrees that predicting regional effects is much less certain than the big picture, but this means we don't really know which population centres of particular economic importance are likely to be hit hard, and which get off relatively easily.

One of the largest consequences which I would have thought could be most important economically - sea level rise - is still very uncertain. If rate of sea level rise increases and it becomes clear that it will be at the top of the worst scenario forecasts, and thereby cause abandonment of major land areas and parts of some cities, how do you factor that into your economic forecasts now?

I guess this economic modelling is worth the exercise (and only attempted at all) as a way of trying to politically justify a certain level of current economic pain to offset future problems; but really, I find it hard to believe it can really be taken seriously as prediction if the actual effects of climate change are so difficult to predict.

It seems to me that using economics to work out the least costly method of getting to lower emissions is another matter, as that's comparing something that is relatively "here and now" and has aims which are in a more realistic time scale.

But the key point is, I think, average citizens wanting to see action on climate change should just be interested in serious movement to lower emissions done in a way that does not cripple the economy. Serious leadership on technological innovation that seems to be needed to achieve this will need to come as well.

All it took was an earthquake

LEDs make it cheaper to blind family and friends | Yen for Living

The price of LED bulbs has come down in Japan, just in time for the lower electricity use the government wants to see happen as a result of Fukushima.

What did you expect?

BBC News - Global war on drugs has 'failed' say former leaders

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

Why not throw in Keith Richards for good measure?

Speaking of Branson, I quite like the new Virgin Australia ads where the flight crew are just walking around purposefully to a groovy beat. Maybe because it reminds me of the end credits of Buckaroo Banzai.

Great moments in engineering

Fukushima was certified tsunami-proof

TEPCO, the plant's operator, ruled out the possibility of tsunami damage in a one-page memo filed to the Japanese regulator a decade ago, the Associated Press has discovered.

What a way to treat women

Egyptians protest over 'virginity tests' on Tahrir Square women

From the report in The Guardian:

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had previously denied claims by Amnesty International that 18 women detained in March were subjected to virginity checks and threatened with prostitution charges.

But an Egyptian general told an American television network on Monday that tests were in fact conducted, and defended the practice.

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general, who requested anonymity, told CNN. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found … molotov cocktails and [drugs]."

He said the tests were conducted so that the women would not be able to claim that they had been sexually abused while in custody.

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were [virgins]."

The far, far future

Cycles of Time � Not Even Wrong

Last year, I mentioned Roger Penrose's new book about how the end of the universe might become the start of a universe (sort of a cycling universe but not caused by the now pretty much discarded idea of a Big Crunch.)

Peter Woit now has a review of it out, and he discusses the whole idea in his blog. As someone who does not like wildly speculative physics, it is to be expected he may make an observation like this:

Attempts to get a Big Bang in our future as well as our past generally strike me as motivated by a very human desire to see in the global structure of the universe the same cyclic pattern of death and rebirth that govern human existence. To me though, deeper understanding of the universe leads to unexpected structures, fascinating precisely because of how alien they are to human concerns and experience. Just because we might find a cold, empty universe an unappealing future doesn’t mean that that’s not where things are headed.

People should remember that Tipler thinks advanced intelligence will make the universe contract, although I forget exactly how, and don't have time to check again right now.

Licence to print money

I find it hard to believe, but Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides has already taken $623,000,000 world wide, in 10 days of release.

The last one ended up at $963,000,000.

Regardless of the quality of this latest instalment (and I haven't seen it yet), we can rest assured another one is in the making.

An Indian on ice

IBNLive : Bahar Dutt's Blog : On the road to the Arctic

Further to my recent interest in Tromsø, Norway (donations to fund my expedition there would be gratefully received - I'll blog all about it, I promise), I note the blog entry (linked above) by an Indian conservationist.

Yes, she likes the place very much, but I wanted to highlight the following comments she made about how Indians behave while travelling in their own country:

Its not easy getting to the Arctic, even though it may seem made easy by modern day travel. But even most sophisticated airjets get hit by volcanic ash. It has thrown flights at most European airports in a tizzy. But I am amazed by the almost zen like attitude with which the Europeans face such disasters even as their summer plans go for a toss. I can just imagine the pandemonium which would break out if flights were cancelled at any of our Indian airports. As Indians strangely we are the worst behaved in our own land. Passengers would be shouting at helpless airline staff, dropping names, threatening to call up some minister or VIP if they are not put on the plane. I was witness to a similar scene at Raipur airport. A rotund man walked up to the Kingfisher airlines counter and demanded: "I am retired DGP Punjab. Please give me the front seat, and give it fast else I will report you to the police." The poor girl asked him politely to wait, but he continued shouting. And this with a retired police office. Imagine the hell that would break if he was still in service! And hats off the our airline staff who have to put up with such tantrums!

Now that an actual Indian has raised the issue of misbehaviour of Indians while travelling, it might be safe for me to note that on my last two holidays (in Australia and New Zealand last year,) I have encountered Indian tourists who, while not being spectacularly rude as they may be on the subcontinent, were clearly being very inconsiderate and showing a very selfish attitude.

How widespread do other travellers find this, I wonder? I had read before that there is nothing quite the dog eat dog nature of a queue to a travel counter in India, but I would have thought that when they were overseas they could live more to the standard of the country they find themselves in.

To be fair, while I'm not sure if it still exists, aggression in queues (blatant pushing in, really) also could be experienced in Paris amongst those from Eastern Europe. But it's been a long, long time since I was there, so maybe that has changed.

Where does the strong Indian sense of entitlement come from, I wonder. I thought all Eastern religions were philosophically inclined towards encouraging acceptance of your lot in life. Maybe that only works for those too poor to travel.

More carbon tax thoughts

Gillard needs to sell a strong climate plan

Kenneth Davidson sounds pretty reasonable in this column. There is one major weakness in what he says, I reckon, but readers can work that out for themselves!

Andrew Bolt and the 1 m sea level rise

Andrew Bolt on his TV show today noted a map of Sydney Harbour showing minor changes to the coast line with a 1 metre sea level rise. Does that look so serious? he said.

It would seem unlikely that he would recall there was a lengthy assessment done a couple of years ago on the effect on the coast line of Australia of 1 m rise. From the executive summary:

Of the 711,000 existing residential buildings close to the water, between 157,000–247,600 properties are identified as potentially exposed to inundation with a sea-level rise scenario of 1.1 metres.

Nearly 39,000 buildings are located within 110 metres of ‘soft’ shorelines and at risk from accelerated - erosion due to sea-level rise and changing climate conditions.

The current value of existing residential buildings at risk from inundation ranges from $41 billion to $63 billion (2008 replacement value).

I presume replacement value does not include the loss of value of the land itself.

Anyway, what's $50 billion dollars in lost buildings between friends, Andrew?

It's about time he was more serious about the consequences of being wrong.

The amazing turnaround Curry

Judith Curry 2007: We should not ignore the risks of global warming � My view on climate change

Bart Verheggen notes the amazing turnaround that Judith Curry made in the space of 3 years from being strongly against doing nothing re CO2, to being her current bleat of uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty.

It's astounding to read her Washington Post article of 2007 and compare it to her blog of today.

A Saturday night observation

Spiderman 3 was a better film than Spiderman 2, in my opinion.

Please resume your normal activities....

What an odd man

Male lactation: Can a 33-year-old guy learn to breast-feed? - By Michael Thomsen

Just a weird story of a man who really needs a wife, and a baby.

Watching the spinning top wobble

Readers are no doubt aware that the question of whether or not the unusually large number of tornadoes in the US at the moment can be (partly?) attributed to climate change is the subject of much discussion in the media and blog-o-sphere.

Of course, "lukewarmenists" are on one side of the fence, as demonstrated by Judith Curry, who ends a post which notes two sides of the argument this way:

Cumulative catastrophic weather events are being used to support the case for global warming action. Sorry Bill and Joe, but we need to look at each type of extreme event, in different regional locations, and then interpret them in the context of the local historical records, and then cumulatively in context with the teleconnection weather regimes and multi-decadal oscillations. Once we’ve done that and then find an upward trend in frequency and/or intensity that cannot be explained by problems with the data record or natural climate variability or weather roulette, THEN lets talk about the potential impact of global warming.

Even for a scientist who loves to talk up uncertainty, I think this is being very disingenuous. She may as well say: we'll have to wait for another 30 or 40 years to see if tornado rate really is increasing, and can understand long term patterns in tornado rate, before we could call this one.

Both sides acknowledge the difficulty of assessing the long term tornado record, because of issues with reliability of reporting, population and housing changes which make simple "death rate" comparisons pretty meaningless, and technology issues to do with radar, etc.

My hunch is that there is quite a bit of record keeping uncertainty for other extreme events too. For example, after the recent Queensland floods, skeptics liked to point out that the 1893 Brisbane River flood was much higher (and there were a series of floods that year.) However, what struck many here about this year's floods was their vast and protracted extent - from Rockhampton in the North, many hundreds of kilometers inland, then right down to the coast. My guess is that a really detailed comparison of the extent of rainfall in the whole of south Queensland between 1893 and now might be a bit tricky, given what I presume would be much more widely spaced rainfall records in 1893 compared to what we have now. (That may not be a correct assumption, and I guess river heights may be a good way of comparing the two years as a proxy for the total rainfall and its extent; but on the other hand you have modern dams which complicate that comparison. I would like to know what meteorologists think about this.)

Of course, the other point to note about Australian weather records is that you have none at all going back more than a couple of hundred years. I would guess that you only have widespread, reliable records going back 150 years.

Apart from the record keeping issue, I am sure Judith Curry would argue that there is a lot of uncertainty with understanding multi-decadal oscillations, yet she wants them fully understood before we can even start looking at the AGW attribution question. Curry's approach is just another of her ways of suggesting no political action on climate is appropriate for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, Michael Tobis has had a series of posts about the whole attribution question, and his take makes much more sense. In his first post about this, he ended with:

I think that we are seeing another instance of excessive attention to "attribution" in a statistical sense. The climate is changing with increasing rapidity. Some of the changes will be anticipated, some not. We shouldn't presume that changes will be locally monotonic. They won't be. Under the circumstances, we'll get extraordinary runs of just-the-sort-of-awfulness-we-get-around-here in various places as the system wobbles about. I mean, what did you expect?

In a follow up post, he addressed this more broadly, using an analogy I like:

Now, this sort of outbreak event is not entirely unprecedented either, though it seems to be emerging as the single most severe instance in the satellite era.

But it's a, forgive me, black swan of a sort. One thing about really really severe events is that you can't do statistics on them. They are too rare to form a large enough collection to draw conclusions.

But you may have a flock of shouldn't-be-black stuff. Black doves. Black, um, pelicans. Black seagulls. Black other stuff. I'm not much on this bird business, but the thing is, although you know these things exist, and you know they are too rare to extract a trend, you shouldn't be seeing any of them very much.

Hot summers in Moscow. Year after year of flooding on the Mississippi. Huge tornado outbreaks. At what point do we get to look at the collection of weird events and say something is going on?

Let me admit, first of all, that there are all sorts of statistical warning signs associated with this question. Selection bias, observer bias, post hoc definitions. Our intuitions may well be misleading us.

On the other hand, there is the question of rolling a thirteen. The more we disturb the climate, the more excursions it will make into unfamiliar territory. As we perturb the climate, as it wobbles around more and more, it will more and more often hit these weird peaks.

Perhaps local events like tornados will show no trend, but tornado outbreaks, when they happen, will be more severe. The ocean, after all, is further from equilibrated with the atmosphere and with space. Air masses will encounter each other in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps strange things will happen. Perhaps (and I am not being Eli-style coy here, perhaps not) they already are happening.

As I say, I find this intuitively pretty compelling, and very appropriate to keep in mind when you read something from some climate organisation (like NOAA, which has been doing a lot of this lately) that says "climates scientists say there is no attributing .......insert latest wild climate event....to global warming."

Everyone knows that precise attribution is complicated and difficult - there have only been a couple of papers (one about the English floods, and I forget the other) which did dare to claim attribution of a couple of extreme events to global warming.

But that doesn't mean that it's not right to suspect that there is something to do with climate change if a number of extreme weather events start piling on top of each other, as they have in 2010 and (seemingly) 2011.

I don't know who first used the analogy, but while the long term predictions of climate change may be right about a warmer atmosphere having less tornadoes rather than more, the climate moving from one state to another may well be like a spinning top that has been given a big kick and wobbles back and forth for quite a while before eventually settling down into a new period of long term stability.

(Michael Tobis refers to that idea in his post, although he also makes the claim that people think of AGW and climate change in the wrong order, but I do find he gets a little confusing on that point.)

Anyway, while I don't wish death and mayhem on anyone, as far as I am concerned, if outbreaks of unusual extreme weather events continue for the next year or two, I would be happy to see them start to convince the public (and politicians) of the need to address CO2 production seriously and with urgency.

Update: I have been thinking how to summarise their respective positions. Is this fair?:

Curry: there's so much uncertainty about this, it's wrong for anyone to be referring to it having anything to do with AGW or climate change at all.

Tobis: the uncertainty as to how exactly climate change will play out means that the rapid accumulation of extreme weather events in the shorter term, even if they were not predicted as likely outcomes of global warming in the longer term, is consistent with climate change, even if you can't individually attribute events to climate change.

Me: Curry and all lukewarmenists like to play up uncertainty and must know that this is used for political purposes. As John Nielsen-Gammon's recent post (which I referred to recently) suggests, uncertainty as to being able to work out everything about past and current weather and climate is no killer reason for disputing AGW, which is likely to have major effects.

Strange bedfellows

Anthony Watts' "long awaited surfacestations paper" had as one of its co-authors John Nielsen-Gammon. I hadn't heard of him before, but some commenters around the place noted that he was no skeptic, and said he ran a pretty good blog (Climate Abyss) on climate change. (Some said they couldn't understand why he would get involved in any project with Watts.)

At Deltoid and Rabett Run, the biggest climate change blogs so far which have spent time pointing out how Watts' paper had disproved his own claims about warming bias for the US mean temperatures, Nielsen-Gammon made some comments which seemed to be attempts to protect Watts from too much criticism. Some at Deltoid had a go at him about this: why shouldn't Watts be strongly criticised for the way he pre-empted (inaccurately, and for skeptic propaganda purposes) the results of his own project for years.

Anyway, I see that Nielsen-Gammon has a new post up at his own blog which does show how much of a non-skeptic he really is. It really does confirm that he and Watts make very strange bedfellows on any climate research paper.

So, here are the best parts from Nielsen-Gammon's post:

“If carbon dioxide supposedly causes global warming, then what caused the Roman Warm Period?”

This question just floors me. I have a hard time figuring out why I’m supposed to fully understand the energy balance of the Earth 2,000 years ago, prior to the first thermometer or the second satellite,* before I’m allowed to examine data from comprehensive global observing systems to figure out what’s happening right here and now.

I’m pretty sure that what’s really being asked is the following: “The Earth’s climate has had warm and cold periods before. Why can’t this be the same old thing again?” This is a little easier to address, but still there’s the unspoken expectation that all possible natural explanations need to be understood and excluded before we should accept an anthropogenic explanation.

This does sound like a cautious choice, seemingly consistent with Sherlock Holmes the climate scientist, who would say that you should exclude all the plausible explanations before concluding that the remaining explanation, however implausible, is the correct one. The problem, though, is that the anthropogenic explanation is not the implausible one, it’s the obvious one.....

...at least one of the primary causes of the relatively warm decade of the 2000s is obvious: WE’VE MUCKED WITH THE ATMOSPHERE SO MUCH THAT IT HAD TO GET WARMER. Even just the direct effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be enough for a few tenths of a degree of warming, and the odds are overwhelming that climate feedbacks would further enhance the warming. Heck, we’ve probably done so much to the atmosphere that some of the natural processes are no longer in play. My guess is that we’ve fairly successfully prevented the next glacial period, for example....

In my previous post, I discussed some of the things that affect the Earth’s climate. I need to know more about them to see how they affected the Roman Warm Period. How much brighter was the Sun during that time? Was there a lull in volcanic activity? How much did the Romans clear forests and alter the local climate? I need to know how the climate forcings changed before I can say which one (or which combination) caused the Roman Warm Period.

After all, the only reason we know that greenhouse gases have been a major contributor to the current warming is that we’ve got decent global measurements of them, we’ve got observations from space that show the reduced infrared emissions because of those gases, and we can calculate (with simple or complex models, it doesn’t matter) that the expected rise in temperature is in the right ballpark to be greenhouse-gas induced. Oh, and we can measure the other forcings, such as solar output and aerosols from volcanoes, and they’re nowhere near large enough. Many of them, in fact, would cause cooling!

And no, I’m not impressed by how much the Earth has cooled over the past decade.

Wow.

I see that Anthony Watts has re-posted Nielsen-Gammon's post about the surfacestations.org results on diurnal temperature range (the significance of which remains unclear, but at least Watts can claim it as a useful result). I would not however, hold my breath waiting for Dr John's strongly pro-AGW post to turn up at Watts Up With That.

Noooooooo.....

gulfnews : Rosie to take over Oprah's show

They must be getting desperate for talk show host talent in the United States.

Today's news from Tromsø

Mobile phone coverage in Finland and Norway is interfering with a type of radar used to research the Northern Lights:

The scientific organisation operates five Aurora borealis radars in the Nordic region, two of which are stationed beyond the reach of mobile phone networks in the remote Svalbard Islands that belong to Norway. The Kiruna scatter radar, in turn, is experiencing problems similar to those in Sodankylä.

An EISCAT radar situated in Tromsø, Norway, keeps sending a powerful radio signal into the upper atmosphere, less than a thousandth of which is then scattered back to the surface. These soft whispers are then caught by using 300-tonne, house-sized dish antennae of the scatter radars.

These “whispers” will provide scientists with information, for example, about the Northern Lights, as the upper atmosphere contains electrically charged particles, from which the radio signal scatters.

“These days, at times the mobile phone traffic blots out the quiet scattering”, explains Professor Markku Lehtinen from the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, which is an independent department of the University of Oulu.

Well, I guess I'm a bit surprised that research into the Northern Lights is still active. They should just ban mobile phones.

Gittens on Abbott

I like this summary by Ross Gittens of how Tony Abbott is running the carbon tax argument:

I don't like using the L-word, but Tony Abbott is setting new lows in the lightness with which he plays with the truth. He blatantly works both sides of the street, nodding happily in the company of climate-change deniers, but in more intellectually respectable company professing belief in human-caused global warming, his commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and the efficacy of his no-offence policies to achieve it.

He grossly exaggerates the costs involved in a carbon tax, telling business audiences they will have to pay the lot and be destroyed by it, while telling the punters business will pass all the costs on to them. He forgets to mention that most of the proceeds from the tax will be returned as compensation.

He repeats the half-truth that nothing we could do by ourselves would reduce global emissions, while failing to correct the punters' ignorant belief that Australia is the only country contemplating action. Last week's news that Britain's Conservative-led coalition government has pledged to cut emissions by half within 15 years is ignored. Economists call this mentality ''free-riding''; the old Australian word for it is ''bludging''.

Today's comment to Andrew Bolt

Andrew Bolt keeps tediously repeating Robyn Williams' carelessly worded comment re 100 m of sea level rise, prompting me to comment at his blog today:

Andrew, you're big on pointing out carelessly worded statements by any "warmenist", yet won't dare mention that Anthony Watts, the person who runs the world's largest skeptic blog, recently disproved his own claim that the US mean temperature record had been inflated by weather station siting issues.

Be honest and admit your own fellow traveller made a major false claim for years, and you swallowed it all; helped promote it, in fact.

We'll see if that makes it through his thread minders.

UPDATE: comment was let through. That's good. Someone asked for a link, I have tried to reply to provide it.

Keith, who seems to have been here and thinks I'm a nasty person, says Andrew did acknowledge the Watts result on his radio show. I would be curious to know when so I could listen. Is it too much to ask Bolt to acknowledge it on his blog too, given that he has previously given surfacestations.org lots of skeptic publicity? I don't think so...

Cannabis madness - yet again

ABC The Drum - High risks: cannabis and psychosis

I always like to read comments by psychiatrists condemning the use of marijuana due to its mental health risks. There's a heap of such material it to be found in this article by journalist Quentin Dempster reporting on a symposium on cannabis and mental illness held last week.

Here are some examples:

Both the Mental Health Review Tribunal in NSW and the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre have said publicly that if cannabis was removed from the chemistry of young brains, the incidence of schizophrenia in this country would be dramatically reduced. Adolescents who start to use cannabis at any time are considered particularly vulnerable because the human brain does not complete its development until the early to mid 20s....

Professor Jan Copeland, director of the NCPIC (www.ncpic.org.au) a government-backed preventative agency, told 7.30 NSW that if cannabis was taken out of the picture the incidence of schizophrenia in Australia could be reduced by 8 to 14 per cent. She could not be more specific. That guesstimate was based on overseas studies. There have been no studies in Australia. This is revealing....

The pharmaceutical and pain relief benefits of CBD (cannabidiols) in cannabis have been studied internationally but one experienced psychiatrist, Dr Andrew Campbell, told the symposium paracetamol would have just as beneficial analgesic effects.

The comments are worth reading too, with, I think, many more people coming out than in years past to condemn marijuana for the mental health problems they have seen develop in someone they know.

The point is once again made that the problem seems to be higher concentration of THC in hydroponically grown cannabis. Some cannabis can be grown with more of the 'protective' component CBD, and the suggestion is made this "milder' form of cannabis could be legalised.

However, if it is the THC that many users like (for the quality of the high it gives them), and there is already a well established industry providing for that, is legalisation really going to have much effect on the illegal industry?

I have my doubts.

Multiversal

Multiverse = Many Worlds, Say Physicists - Technology Review

An interesting post on the suggestion by Susskind & Bousso that "the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent." But this only holds if we are in a "supersymmetric multiverse with vanishing cosmological constant":

If the universe takes this form, then it is possible to carry out an infinite number of experiments within the causal horizon of each other.

Now here's the key point: this is exactly what happens in the many worlds interpretation. At each instant in time, an infinite (or very large) number of experiments take place within the causal horizon of each other. As observers, we are capable of seeing the outcome of any of these experiments but we actually follow only one.

Bousso and Susskind argue that since the many worlds interpretation is possible only in their supersymmetric multiverse, they must be equivalent. "We argue that the global multiverse is a representation of the many-worlds in a single geometry," they say.

They call this new idea the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Clear? Well, no of course not, and its untestable. But still, of interest.

UPDATE: Mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong says that even he can't really make sense of this and other papers that try to draw similar multiverse/quantum theory connections, so don't feel so bad!

Interesting

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States: What do 500 years reveal about gays in America? - By Johann Hari - Slate Magazine

Quite a few things I didn't know about homosexuality in modern history are mentioned in this review.

Speculative physics, again

Small bangs and white holes

The article suggests that maybe some gamma ray bursts are from white holes.

Well, if anything is up for grabs, how about naked singularities, I wonder?

Northern view

Further to my new found interest in Tromsø, Norway, here is a nice webcam feed from the university there. Even now, midnight has quite a lot of brightness.

I should work out how such feeds are embedded.

Colebatch on carbon tax

Let consumers carry the can on carbon

My favourite economics writer has a good explanation of the Carmody suggestion to tax consumption of carbon instead of production.

I think his explanation of the problems with the idea is particularly worthwhile noting. As Colebatch himself has had a change of heart about this, it is clearly is not a case where it is obviously better than the alternative; just arguably better.

UPDATE: Alan Kohler's column about what Australia needs to do is also well worth reading, and makes considerable sense to me.

Arctic dreams

I mentioned recently that I'm reading a biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy, the Australian Antarctic explorer (well, he was on the Mawson expedition) who seems to have led an unusual life.

Before he was off to the Antarctic, he had several whaling and other trips through Arctic waters. No doubt, it's reading about this that has caused me to have dreams lately about visiting towns in spectacular Arctic settings.

Which has led me to releasing while awake that I know next to nothing about what's in the Arctic circle, and whether it does have any decent towns or cities in scenic locations.

So, first stop, to refresh my memory of how the Arctic Circle is even defined, it's off to Wikipedia. It's more complicated that I thought:

The Arctic Circle marks the southern extremity of the polar day (24-hour sunlit day, often referred to as the "midnight sun") and polar night (24-hour sunless night). North of the Arctic Circle, the sun is above the horizon for 24 continuous hours at least once per year and below the horizon for 24 continuous hours at least once per year. On the Arctic Circle those events occur, in principle, exactly once per year, at the June and December solstices, respectively....

The position of the Arctic Circle is not fixed, but directly depends on the Earth's axial tilt, which fluctuates within a margin of 2° over a 40,000 year period,^[2] notably due to tidal forces resulting from the orbit of the Moon. The Arctic Circle is currently drifting northwards at a speed of about 15 m (49 ft) per year, see Circle of latitude for more information.

It's creeping away from me as I write.

Anyhow, there is lot more land within the Arctic Circle than I would have guessed:


I didn't realise so much of Greenland was within it, or quite that much of Russia either.

So, how do I find a nice town inside the Arctic Circle? Googling around led me first to the Canadian town of Inuvik. However, this photo from the town's home page, indicates that it hardly counts as Paris of the North:


(And make sure you don't miss the Inuvik Petroleum Show that's on in June.)

What other towns or cities are up there? Yahoo Answers indicates that the three biggest cities inside the circle are Russian, and the largest is Murmansk. Yes, I've heard of it, but what's it look like?:


Well, no one holds high hopes for Russian cities looking good, do they? But maybe I am being unfair. That glossy magazine Monocle, which I've occasionally looked at in the newsagency and wondered who on Earth it is aimed at, has a short slideshow and commentary about the city, which is kind of interesting. A little sadly, you will also see that new shopping centres in far flung Arctic Circle Russia look exactly like what's been built down the road from you:



So, what about Norway? Yahoo Answers says Tromsø is pretty big - 62,000 people. And look - it's where Joanna Lumley went to see the Northern Lights in that nice documentary she made a couple of years ago. So, some photos please:





Wow. It looks a little bit like Hobart, but with more mountains, snow and wackier architecture. (OK, maybe it's just the bridge that reminds me of Hobart.)

According to Wikipedia:

In the 19th century, Tromsø was known as the "Paris of the North", probably because people in Tromsø appeared as far more civilized than expected to foreign tourists.

Mind you, it's a very chilly Paris of the North. According to a table on the Wikipedia page, the average maximum temperatures in December, January, February and March are all below freezing. (-2.2 in January.) Despite this, the main street, when you can see not under snow, looks quite normal in a quaint European way:



But, once again, this post proves, if nothing else, that new shopping centres, even in the Arctic Circle, look like every other new shopping centre in the world:


(I am distressed to see that they suffer from Giant Face Poster syndrome, as do some of our shopping centres, as I have noted in the past.)

Well, that's it. I'd say for towns in the Arctic Circle, Norway, and Tromsø in particular, is the place to go. Especially in September this year, when Roxette will be touring there. (Isn't the internet grand? There's not much else to be found by Googling for blogs about Tromsø, except to learn that there was an Italian uni student who went there to study* in 2007, made 6 posts about the women, the nightclubs, the drinking, and the free condoms everywhere, and that's it for his blog. I wonder if ever left.)

Of course, winning Lotto is the only foreseeable way of actual making the trip within the next 8 years. Either that or sudden exotic benevolence of a secret billionaire from my vast readership. (OK, it's Lotto or nothing, I know.)

So, that's it for my Arctic dreams. I should go finish the book.

* This strikes me as a particularly unusual place to go to university, but indeed, it does have a large university:

The University of Tromsø with 6.500 students and 1.700 staff members is the northernmost university in the world and one of 6 universities in Norway. It offers a broad range of subject fields in six faculties/schools with studies in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences/mathematics/statistics/informatics, law, medical sciences and fisheries science. All the main subject areas are offered at Bachelor's, Master's and PhD level. The prioritised research subject fields are mainly related to the Arctic and subarctic regions; Northern Light and space research, fisheries research, biotechnology, multicultural societies, indigenous studies, community medicine, theoretical linguistics, among others.

Friday night observations

* Just Like Heaven is a very charming movie. Probably drives hospital doctors crazy; but very charming.

* There is no better dinner in winter than ox tail stew, with mashed potato and beans, and a glass of red. (It is also the reason you just have to have a pressure cooker, even if you never cook anything else in it.)

* Tony Martin really is very funny. Why have I forgotten to bookmark The Scriveners Fancy, even though I did read it once before? I enjoyed this recent article, particularly given that I have been reading through Andrew Bolt's blog threads lately.

* Watching Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End on TV last weekend, I decided it's not so hard to follow after three viewings. Sure, it's bloated, but it's still a fantastic looking film, with some clever ideas and impressive sequences. The new movie - On Stranger Tides, has critics pretty divided whether it works as a "re-boot" of the series or not, but I'm not put off.

* I wouldn't mind seeing Thor, too. It has made a lot of money despite quite a few poor US reviews. Not sure what explains that (the bad reviews, when it is clearly a popular success - the takings did not drop off quickly, which indicates it does have good word of mouth.)

* This post is a lot like using Twitter, I suppose, but I refuse to get into social media beyond blogs. Twitter is the Fantales of social media, and barely worth the effort.

* Speaking of movies: oh dear, the first teaser trailer for Spielberg's Tin Tin movie is out; and I remain very uncertain as to whether the creepy "is that living mannequins doing the acting?" quality of motion capture movies has been overcome. Why do smart people, like Robert Zemeckis and Spielberg, think this is a good technology. I have never seen it used in a way in which I can get over the "uncanny valley", at least when it is humans being depicted. Still, I might be wrong, who knows.

* Why is there still not so much publicity about Anthony Watts being wrong about the key part of his pet project?

Look up this fact, Andrew

Andrew Bolt has a post this morning in which he complains that scientists should just explain the facts, instead of making humorous videos which target him. (As it happens, I don't think that either video is all that good or funny.)

Anyway, I have been posting comments at his blog this week about Anthony Watts' failure to come up with the goods, and about the specific estimate of warming bias that he made to Bolt's face only last June. I don't think yesterday's comment got through on his "tips" page, although maybe I just didn't click "submit" or something.

So here is my attempt today, posted as a comment to his video post:

Andrew, you seem to be showing a distinct lack of interest in the fact that Anthony Watts' own co-authored paper has shown he was completely wrong when you interviewed him in June last year.

Are you having trouble remembering? He estimated that warming bias due to poor weather station siting in the US could account for .5 degree C of increase in the US temperature record.

You said that meant that 2/3 of the increase of .7 degree could be from this. Watts did not disagree.

His actual paper shows what 2 other studies had predicted - cooling biases had balanced warming biases and the US mean temperature record was accurate.

This is the second major, major claim on which Watts has been shown wrong - the other being that international weather station "drop out" was removing cooler stations and biasing the world temperature record.

This was quickly shown to be wrong, and not even "lukewarmenist" Lucia of Lucia's Blackboard believes it. Watts, as far as I know, has never retracted or apologised.

Andrew, why do you show no skepticism towards Watts? He made a wildly inaccurate estimate to your face, disproved by his own paper which he said was days away from being completed.

Do the right thing - get him back on the radio and ask him how specifically how he was so wrong, and to retract his earlier estimate made to you 12 months ago.

End of the Tour

Tamar dreaming

Here’s another photo from the recent trip to Tasmania – looking at the ridiculously pretty Tamar River north of Launceston. Good wine, good views; a very nice part of the world.

I’m going to have to post more slowly here for a while – a series of family things are happening soon which will no doubt distract me, and I really need to stop worrying about how many people are wrong on the internet (there are so, so many) and concentrate more on finishing work.

One thing I will be looking out for, though, is Anthony Watts’ spin on his surfacestation.org paper. He has promised a post about it, and I can’t wait to hear his explanation as to why, a year ago, he was telling Andrew Bolt that bad siting warming bias could account for .5 degree C of warming in the US. There is also no excuse for Andrew Bolt to ignore Watts’ (and others) actual paper.

If you have time, drop over to Bolt’s blog and ask for him to look into this, until he does.

Anyhow, see you around.

UPDATE: I just realised that, when using Mercury browser on my iPad, it treats surfacestation.org as an address and you can link to one of those empty domain search pages. Maybe there's a setting I need to change on Mercury? Anyway, it doesn't seem to happen on Firefox on my PC, or even Safari. Rest assured it wasn't intended.

Mini black holes re-appear

Mini black holes that look like atoms could pass through Earth daily

It's been a while since I've read anything new about mini black holes, but the paper above suggesting the type that may comprise a large part of dark matter in the universe was interesting. They argue that maybe they don't evaporate in Hawking Radiation, but have matter orbiting them sort of in the way that atoms have electrons around them. They do not consider that they would be dangerous at all.

I also saw recently that Adam Helfer, who wrote a paper years ago in which he questioned whether Hawking Radiation really existed (thereby gaining some prominence in sites concerned about whether potential mini black holes from the LHC could be dangerous) has another paper out called Black Holes Reconsidered. He still questions our understanding of Hawking Radiation, and also notes that, while they seem possible in certain scenarios, no one really knows what a naked singularity would look like.

Uncertainties continue in physics, then.