Crossing over

Neutrons escaping to a parallel world?

From the link:

Theoretical physicists Zurab Berezhiani and Fabrizio Nesti from the University of l'Aquila, Italy, reanalysed the experimental data obtained by the research group of Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin, France. It showed that the loss rate of very slow free neutrons appeared to depend on the direction and strength of the magnetic field applied. This anomaly could not be explained by known physics.

Berezhiani believes it could be interpreted in the light of a hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles. Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other. The probability of such a transition happening was predicted to be sensitive to the presence of magnetic fields, and could therefore be detected experimentally.

I have a soft spot for any physics talking about particles having a mirror particle in a parallel universe.  Seems a good way to get heaven, no?

The full paper is available for free here for some reason, although it's only worth it for the opening and end paragraphs.  Here's the last paragraph:



Neat.

Potentially interesting

Sneak peek: Tommy Lee Jones in 'Emperor' | Metromix New York

The biggest worry is the potential bloatware

Review: Microsoft Surface straddles divide

Everyone who held the new Microsoft tablet device seems to have liked it, and the thin, go everywhere keyboard does sound very good.

My biggest worry is whether Microsoft can keep down the bloatware-ish nature of their software, including the new Windows, to make a tablet not fill up so quick.

My Gina Theory

Why does Gina Rinehart like to buy into media companies?

I have a pet theory about Fairfax, at least.  It might be as revenge for a far from complimentary profile that ran earlier this year.

Amongst other things I probably read at the time but had forgotten (I don't pay much attention to billionaires, as it happens):

*  she has a reputation for penny-pinching. One former employee tells of being instructed to phone suppliers of office equipment to haggle over even the smallest bills. Another says he got the impression that Rinehart personally scrutinised staff expenses claims. "She had a thing in the back of her mind that everybody, and I mean everybody, was out to do her down, to take a dollar off her," he says. "She trusted nobody and assumed the worst of everybody."

* [Talking of her fractured relationship with some of her children] "I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a close observer of the family," Singleton says. "It's because the business comes first. Being a parent is secondary. It's just, 'Where do they fit into the dynasty? Are they iron or are they coal or are they uranium?' If they don't fit into the company, there's no role for them."

*  "School was just a nasty interlude to put up with," he said. "Then she tried a year doing economics at Sydney University but she found out it was basically communist ..."Rinehart told Robert Duffield, author of the Hancock biography Rogue Bull, that the university taught "the wrong things". Duffield noted that she parroted Hancock's political views, "mastering all his stock tracts, phrase by phrase". Singleton was aware of this, too: "I mean, a conversation with Gina was a conversation with Lang. They both had the same fanaticism ... If Lang paused, Gina could finish the sentence."

* Rinehart's next husband was an American tax attorney almost four decades her senior. Gina was 28 when the couple wed in Las Vegas in 1983. Frank Rinehart was 65. [This was, however, a happy marriage.]

* Newspapers reported in 1997 that Rinehart had reached a confidential out-of-court settlement with her former live-in security guard, Bob Thompson, who had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her. In a long article in Woman's Day, Thompson said Rinehart became infatuated with him and wanted to marry him, despite his being engaged to someone else. "I told her over and over I wasn't interested," he said, but "she wouldn't take no for an answer". Thompson made plain that in some ways he felt sorry for Rinehart: "She's just incredibly lonely and isolated."

Singleton tells me Rinehart has no interests besides mining. "There is no social life," he says. "It's just work."

There is much more in the article.

It really is not a picture of a likeable person.   If anything, it reads a bit like a real life version of Citizen Kane, with unhappy adult children thrown into the mix.   In terms of political views it sounds like they were formed while sitting on her Dad's lap and haven't moved on from there.

I see Alan Kohler, who I assume has met a fair few people who have met Gina, calls her today "Australia's strangest rich person".

I know nothing of how much personal responsibility she can take for growing her father's fortune, but her promotion of climate change skepticism by sponsoring Monckton out to Australia (and welcoming Ian Plimer to talk to visiting foreigners) does not speak well for her general judgement (to put it mildly.)   If she genuinely wanted to know about the science, she could fly in the top scientists from around the world for her own private briefing.  Instead, the voice of the loner contrarian appeals to her personality, I suppose.

Sure, her works mean a lot of employment and income for the country, but especially that she was the heiress to her father's ideas and fortunes, you can't give her high marks for exactly being "self made" either. 

Some billionaires genuinely should be admired for their extensive philanthropy for the good of humankind.   Bill Gates in particular seems to combine a happy family with extensive good works, many benefiting the poorest of the world.   It would appear that Gina does not spend much proportion of her fortune in any similar way.

So is Gina buying her way into control of Fairfax an act of revenge for (perhaps amongst other things) what might have been a hurtful profile?   Making it a real vanity project to slavishly promote her single minded (and, in some cases, rather simple minded) views would no doubt hurt the papers and kill them off completely.   

Who knows?   But it's as good a pet theory as any.

Update:    I don't know if anyone else using Blogger has found this, but ever since their new editing layout for posts came out, I have a hell of a lot of trouble getting breaks between paragraphs right.  What looks right in the "compose" window often isn't when you post, and then you can have a lot of trouble working out which bit of HTML is causing the problem.  This did not used to be the case.   Annoying.

Let there be Beer

BBC - Travel - The Holy Land of beer 

A surprising story here of how microbreweries are popular in Israel now, including a brand made by Palestinians in the West Bank.

I suppose it's too much to ask that peace be established in the Middle East via beer.

Insightful

The IVF lottery of joy and sorrow

This article from The Age on the weekend was well worth reading.   It tells the story of the poor success rate of IVF for over 40 year old women, yet the fact that it occasionally works on women even over 45 means that it keeps being tried:

In the assisted reproduction business, those who get older women pregnant achieve holy grail status. Which means there is great pressure on them to put over-40s women through as many cycles as possible to get the success rates up.

As it stands there is no limit to how many IVF cycles a woman can undergo in Australia, and hence no shortage of doctors willing to perform the procedure.

Yet what has really bothered me is that, as with so many of my girlfriends on IVF, no one seemed to be monitoring Louisa's mental health. And Blind Freddy could see she was not well in that department. At all.

''Counselling? What use was that?'' Louisa told me. ''I wasn't going to tell them anything was wrong in case they rejected me for treatment. I wasn't going to admit I cry all day, every day. Of course I was depressed. I wanted a baby and couldn't have one. I was there for them to give me hope, not point out the obvious.''

I realise that doctors must feel in a bit of bind in that they can't advise the patient that there is no hope whatsoever, and if it works it's the "cure" (I suppose) to their depression; but on the other hand, the reality is that the for great majority of patients above a certain age, it is only going to protract the disappointment and delay the process of getting over the inevitable accommodation to not being able to have your own baby.

Technical issues

I'm feeling vaguely technically competent after working out how to run Linux on an old laptop from a usb drive.  I used Puppy Linux, and it seems to be working fine, except upgrading the browser and other software that comes with it seems to be the issue that requires some more detailed knowledge of Linux.

[Well, actually, there is still an issue I don't understand.  I tried Linux because something in the old XP laptop when running Firefox would often cause the hard drive to start into continual activity, the fan would go into overdrive and everything would become laggy.  I could never work out what process was causing this - it seemed to be Firefox itself most of the time, but I quite like using it compared to Chrome.  So I thought, this may all be tied up with XP somehow.  But when running Linux from a USB, the hard drive light goes on and just stays on.  I can't really hear the hard drive working much, but I like hard drives to feel relaxed, so I am still disappointed that this happens.  The browser itself doesn't slow down, though.] 

Anyway, I had been wondering for a while what it was inside the iPad (or smartphone) that lets it know which way is up.  The answer is explained here:

A very sad loss

ABC radio personality Alan Saunders dies

What sad news.  Alan Saunders has done a great job for years and years at Radio National, covering everything from design and architecture, culinary pursuits, to philosophy, and probably some other topics I have now forgotten about.  His style was relaxed and knowledgeable, but he was engaging and accessible because you never felt he was assuming too much knowledge of his audience.  And he just always seemed a self-effacing, nice man.  I often forgot to deliberately tune in to his shows, but if I caught one by accident, I was nearly always glad that I had heard it.

I see dumb people

Rabett Run: Carrick finds a mirror

Eli Rabbet tells us how Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That note with disapproval some of the vile death threat emails sent to University of East Anglia (and Phil Jones in particular, it would seem) which have recently turned up via FOI.

Anthony Watts in his post about the emails  goes on to claim that in his former world of being a TV and radio weatherman, he's seen this all before.

Frankly, I do not believe him.   Upset that your weekend bar-b-q got rained out?   Writing a death threat to the weatherman is one of the less common reactions around, I'm sure.

Watts also goes on to tell the tragic tale of how he was upset with a David Appell reference to his dead mother (a completely over the top reaction to a reference to a post title that says more about Watts having "mother issues" if you ask me.)   Watts is not a mature individual in the way he reacts to criticism. He has just about the thinnest skin around the blogosphere.  

But the funnier thing is that WUWT comments on the story are chock full of people saying that they are sure these abusive emails are a "false flag" operation.

Amazing self delusion.

Modern lighting

Gov't aims to make all lighting LED-based by 2020 ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Doing it right

Blood pressure: Getting it right

Here's a very detailed article on how blood pressure should be measured.  I didn't know there was quite this much to it.

Should go do mine.  122/86.  That could be better.  I did 114/82 on the other arm once, though.  I need an article explaining how accurate home machines are.

Bioethicists up for anything

BBC News - Three-person IVF 'is ethical' to treat mitochondrial disease

Honestly.  Is there anything bioethicists or IVF doctors can't talk themselves into? 

Bound to go over well in the US

Cardinal Marx urges Europe to move ‘beyond capitalism’ | CatholicHerald.co.uk

Cardinal Reinhard Marx has called for a “social market economy” in the wake of the fiscal crisis that has gripped much of Europe over the past year.

In a talk delivered at Georgetown University in Washington, Cardinal Marx, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, said the economy needed to move “beyond capitalism” in order to be more fair.

He added that he was not calling for the abolition of capitalism, saying that capitalism was “an element” in the social market economy he has in mind. But Cardinal Marx suggested that it was the practice of “financial capitalism” in the era since the tearing down of the Iron Curtain that had brought Europe to its crisis point today....


Berkley Centre director Thomas Banchoff noted that some in the United States interpret the Catholic social teaching principle of subsidiarity – which holds that decisions or actions should not be made on a higher level when a lower level of competence would suffice – as meaning “keep the government out of it”.

Cardinal Marx replied: “The state is not a bad thing, as Aristotle told his disciples”, nor is the state “unfriendly”. Without the state, he said, “man does not come to the fullest possible life”, adding: “You cannot navigate the common good only with the assistance of families. It is not possible.”

The cardinal travelled from Washington to Chicago, where he was to lead a May 31-June 1 symposium called “Toward a Moral Economy”.

Seems an odd result

Top risk of stroke for normal-weight adults: Getting under 6 hours of sleep

The participants had no history of stroke, transient ischemic attack, stroke symptoms or high risk for OSA at the start of the study, being presented today at SLEEP 2012. Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham recorded the first stroke symptoms, along with demographic information, stroke risk factors, depression symptoms and various health behaviors.

After adjusting for body-mass index (BMI), they found a strong association with daily sleep periods of less than six hours and a greater incidence of stroke symptoms for middle-age to older adults, even beyond other risk factors. The study found no association between short sleep periods and stroke symptoms among overweight and obese participants.

"In employed middle-aged to older adults, relatively free of major risk factors for stroke such as obesity and sleep-disordered breathing, short sleep duration may exact its own negative influence on stroke development," said lead author Megan Ruiter, PhD. "We speculate that short sleep duration is a precursor to other traditional stroke risk factors, and once these traditional stroke risk factors are present, then perhaps they become stronger risk factors than sleep duration alone."

A three movie weekend

It's been a good weekend in Brisbane to be inside watching movies on TV, and I'm inspired to give mini reviews of a strange trio of viewing:

*  AI:  Artificial Intelligence - this is the first time I have seen it since at the cinema in  2001, where I distinctly remember a woman in the smallish audience saying loudly at the end "well, that was weird".   And let's face it, it is an odd movie:  certainly the most expensive and melancholic story about future robots ever made.  But it's a really remarkable looking film, and as with Minority Report, Spielberg manages a creepy vision of a half dystopian future that sticks in the mind for days after seeing it.   The acting is also really fine, I think, and the direction extremely pleasing in the way Spielberg routinely is.

Watching it this time, it occurred to me that it is pretty much a realisation of what I read was George Lucas' original idea for Star Wars - to tell a story from the robots' point of view.   While the film is not thematically novel (I think its most similar predecessor is actually Astroboy), it is the best treatment of the existential crisis  that embodied AI itself may suffer that has ever been made. 

Many people feel sure that the ending was Spielberg's idea tacked on to a story which probably originally ended with a robot suicide; certainly I can understand why people suspect this, as it has his familiar theme of "family" re-union.   But he has stated in interviews that the parts which people suspect are his (and he must be referring to the last 10 or 15 minutes) were always in the Kubrick treatment which he turned into a script.   Until someone else has seen Kubrick's treatment, I think we should just take his word for it, and so some of the criticisms about the movie are, in a sense, made on a false presumption.   In any event, I don't think the ending is overly sentimental; or at least, it's certainly a bitter-sweet type of sentimentality.  In fact, it is ambiguous as to exactly has happened with David - I have just read somewhere that John Williams says he dies at the end, and if the whole "resurrection" was designed to let him shut down in peace, that does make sense.  Yet the voice over is ambiguous on the point.  I guess ambiguity does not always hold back a science fiction film from greatness, but it tends not to help.   

Which leads me to the the major point that the movie can be faulted for - the lack of clarity about the spindly creatures at the end.  They are, everyone now accepts, meant to be advanced "robots"; but the cues by which one is meant to definitely understand that on first viewing are far from as clear as they should be.  I don't even like their design, and the quasi weightlessness they exhibit which also adds to the confusion over whether they are meant to be "otherworldly" or not.  There was, after all, one large spindly looking alien spied in the mists of the mother ship at the end of Close Encounters, and memory of that must surely have been in many viewers' minds.

But, having understood them as advanced, evolved "mechas", their apparent concern for David does raise a philosophical question of interest for transhumanism:    do we really have a solid basis for assuming that love and altruism would be the outcome of super-advanced AI?  Or would future intelligence, losing its connection to flesh and blood emotionalism, appear to us as just ruthless and cold?   Frank Tipler argued that game theory was reason to believe it would be altruistic, but I am not sure how convinced other futurists are about this.

In any event, despite its flaws, it is a highly original and interesting film, and more praise to Spielberg for even attempting such "difficult" material and nearly pulling it off.

* Lost Horizon (1973 version):    Oh Good Lord - I knew this film had a horrible reputation, but I attempted yesterday (mostly successfully) to plough through and check it out for myself.  (My kids kept walking in and out of the room saying "you said this was terrible, why are you still watching it?")

It is spectacularly bad in every conceivable respect - a cast completely unsuited to a quasi-romantic musical; horrendous, cringe-inducing acting by nearly everyone (Michael York and Sally Kellerman in particular); a bunch of truly terrible songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David with the only "memorable" one (The World is a Circle) working as an unpleasant ear worm that just won't stop; the rest of the music (melodramatic strings) sounding like it escaped from a 1940's film; an awful script; even sets which look cheap and tacky.

It's long; it's awful; it's a wonder anyone who appeared in it ever worked in film again.  Comes close to being recommended as "so bad its good", but like Ayn Rand, its length mitigates against that recommendation.

*Sunshine (2007):    I like space faring science fiction, generally, and while this one starts out in a sort of promising fashion, by the end it is a complete and utter mess.

The fault, I think, must be put down to the director Danny Boyle.   I just can't believe that an editor alone could be responsible for such a hash made in the last 30 minutes or so.  Sorry to keep bringing up Spielberg again, but Boyle here is like the anti-Spielberg in terms of making a film in which the action sequences become narratively nearly completely opaque.

As for science, we'll not dwell on the improbabilities of attempting to re-start the sun with all the fissile material on Earth.   That's just an improbability to accept, and without which there is no movie.  But it is remarkable that for a script which showed some vague concern for having a plausible looking massive spaceship, they get some science very wrong.  The super-fast freeze of a body in the vacuum of space is the main example, but the whole "everything that gets out of shield shadow instantly explodes in sparks" shtick was not very realistic either.  

I am really surprised that the movie scores 75% on Rottentomatoes, and am inclined, even without worrying about the science, to go along with this (spoiler containing) summary:

The crew seemed like a bunch of college dorm dwellers thrown into a really bad camping trip.  The crew seemed… unprofessional.  And far less trained and together than you would have expected.  They also make sure one, and only one, person can do any job on the ship.  For a crew replicating a previous failed mission, I might think they’d want to have multiple redundancies. And the worst part: I thought this was just an sci-fi thriller.  No, it’s a slasher film.  The director uses some stupid tricks (e.g., 1 to 2 frame still picture inserts to create a sense of foreboding) to goose the story, and the final bit with a psycho, 3rd degree burned astronaut from the first failed mission stalking the crew and slashing/stabbing them was just too much.  

I'm very glad I didn't spend money to see it.

Much warmer

US spring warming off the charts

The United States, excluding Alaska, Hawaii and overseas territories, had an average temperature of 57.1 degrees Fahrenheit (13.9 Celsius) from March through May, 5.2 degrees (2.9 Celsius) above the average from 1901 to 2000, the data showed.

"Spring 2012 marked the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record for the contiguous United States," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement.

This year's spring was up 2.0 degrees (1.1 Celsius) from the previous warmest spring in the United States which was recorded in 1910, the agency said.

In other news from Physorg, a study suggests that increased CO2 may make it much easier for wide varieties of rice (and other food crops) to exchange genes with farmed crops, which is not a good thing for agriculture.

A great writer departs

BBC News - Author Ray Bradbury dies, aged 91

At his best, Bradbury was a fantastically gifted writer, although I think his style was probably best shown in short stories rather than novels.  That said, I hold "Something Wicked This Way Comes" in very high regard.

Increased realism

Indigenous 'solutions' just disempower us further - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I think it says a lot about public attitudes towards the old, left wing, arguments about aboriginal issues that this article run at the ABC Drum website by an aboriginal activist bemoaning the lack of "empowerment" (amongst other platitudes we've heard many times before) being at the core of aboriginal problems in the Northern Territory is met (for the most part) with strong cynicism in the comments.

Fortunately, I think it is fair to say that the Labor Party is just not as captured by this rhetoric as it used to be.  But of course, they remain the party most likely to be hampered somewhat by internal conflict over how much weight to give to ideology to the detriment of outcomes.

Walter Shaw might also be impliedly giving permission for politicians to drop something that I am sure many people find annoyingly political correct:

Politicians and bureaucrats love to open speeches with: "I would like to pay respect to the traditional owners of the land in which we are meeting here today, both past and present."

But these are just words, and they are tokenistic words at that. They do not reflect the real actions of government. The 'present' they refer to is no different to the past.

It seems to me that many people would welcome a politician who at least modified the policy as to when this should be said to something like this:  "If I know a local aboriginal community leader of some note is present, I'll say it.  But if I am addressing general group of people, and the function has no connection whatsoever with issues of aboriginality or entitlement to land, I'm not going to continue mouthing a tokenistic formula of no import to the occasion."

Happy transit day

I might take my binoculars to work so I can try projecting the sun and see the small dot of Venus myself.  But if that doesn't work, there are many links of webcams to be found via Astroblogger's page.

As for the history of past transits and their significance, this article has an interesting summary.

Update:  as taken from my balcony, about 20 minutes ago:

The problems with immortality

Do You Really Want to Live Forever? - Reason.com

It's rare that I recommend something from Reason.com (as far as I can tell, everything is always a government's fault), but this lengthy review of a book talking about the technical and philosophical problems with imagining how immortality would work is very good.   

Crazy Mel

Heaven and Mel review: Joe Eszterhas's e-book makes the anti-Semitic star sound worse than ever.

Slate looks at a whole book Joe Eszterhas has written about the breakdown of his working relationship with Gibson, which was recently detailed when he (Joe) released a recording of Mel going berserk about why he hadn't finished a movie script yet.  

Apart from some further details about how dangerous Gibson sounds when he is upset (Eszterhas says he has a "pornographic snuff film" that plays inside his head), here's one novel theory that Mel's Dad apparently believes:

“Did you know that Cardinal Ottaviani sat on Pope John Paul I’s face and suffocated him so they could get the Pope they wanted, Pope John Paul II?” the elder Gibson asks Ezsterhas during a visit to a church built with the profits from The Passion.

I wonder if Mel believes that too...

Have my doubts

Science fiction review: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. - Slate Magazine

Go to the link for a gushing review of a new book by a pretty well known science fiction writer.  Personally, I didn't find the first novel in his Mars trilogy to be all that great, although there are parts of it which have stuck in my memory.  I didn't go on to try the next two books.

The review gives enough plot details to make me think the new book suffers at least one of the problems I had with the Mars novel - he seems wildly optimist about the speed of technological change in a way that just feels rather improbable.   It always seems safer to me for science fiction writers to not be so specific about their future chronology, and leave the reader guessing a bit as to how far in the future we are talking.

The Great Soda Crisis of 2012

Here's The Colbert Reports funny take on the Bloomberg restriction on the sale of huge size sweetened soda:

Great criminal trials of Dubai

gulfnews : Businessman and sister-in-law in court over alleged public indecency

A businessman and his sister-in-law were in court for allegedly exchanging kisses in public while the man taught the woman how to use chopsticks in a restaurant.

They were later acquitted.

Prosecutors had charged the 35-year-old Egyptian businessman and the 39-year-old Emirati woman of committing a lewd act in public when they allegedly kissed on the cheeks and lips in a Chinese restaurant.

An Emirati, who was dining with his family at the same restaurant, reported to police that he had spotted the businessman moving from one side of the bench to the other. He sat beside the woman and kissed her while teaching her how to use chopsticks.

The suspects, 35-year-old M.M. and 39-year-old L.H., denied the accusations before the Dubai Misdemeanour Court. They said the charges were ridiculous and impossibile because they are related.
“It is impossible for me to kiss my sister-in-law and especially in front of my wife [L.H.’s sister]. I am innocent,” said M.M.

L.H. also said she could not have kissed her brother-in-law in public and in front of her sister.
The claimant testified that the incident happened when he was dining along with his wife and mother-in-law. “He started teaching her how to eat with chopsticks. He hugged her and kissed her neck. Then he kissed her cheeks and to my surprise he kissed her lips in front of all the diners. My wife informed the restaurant management, who said he could not do anything. My wife then called the police. They were seated just four metres from us and nothing was blocking our vision. They hugged and kissed in front of everyone,” said the claimant.

 All very odd.

I'm on a roll with bad news this week...

Climate change: Arctic passes 400 parts per million milestone - CSMonitor.com

More depressing news

Global economic crisis: China, India, Brazil are slowing down, plunging world into possible recession. - Slate Magazine

ABC viewing recommendations

Two TV stories that I recently found well worth watching on the ABC:

*  Foreign Correspondent did the story of the real Great Escape.   (That is, the true story that was behind the famous movie.)

*  Catalyst last a long science story on the earthquake devastation in Christchurch.  

As usual, top quality product from these shows.

Big solar thermal

In Pictures: The World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Plant - Technology Review

Have a look here for some interesting photos showing the construction of a large solar thermal power plant near Las Vegas.

They do require an enormous, flat area.   Australia  does have quite a lot of those, but not always near where most people live.

Safe for the moment

Volcanic super-eruptions may have surprisingly short fuses

While the article's heading may sound like a bit of a worry, the story indicates that there might be at hundreds of years warning of a truly massive super-eruption:

These eruptions are known as super-eruptions because they are more than 100 times the size of ordinary volcanic eruptions like Mount St. Helens. They spew out tremendous flows of super-heated gas, ash and rock capable of blanketing entire continents and inject enough particulate into the stratosphere to throw the global climate into decade-long volcanic winters. In fact, there is evidence that one super-eruption, which took place in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, may have come remarkably close to wiping out the entire human species.

Geologists generally believe that a super-eruption is produced by a giant pool of magma that forms a couple of miles below the surface and then simmers for 100,000 to 200,000 years before erupting. But a new study suggests that once they form, these giant magma bodies may only exist for a few thousand years, perhaps only a few hundred years, before erupting.

But the better news:

As far as geologists can tell, no such giant crystal-poor magma body currently exists that is capable of producing a super-eruption. The research team believes this may be because these magma bodies exist for a relatively short time rather than persisting for hundreds of thousands of years as previously thought.

Depressed about coal

EPA Coal Rule: Why the fuel won’t be replaced anytime soon. - Slate Magazine

A really quite depressing read about the international increase in the use of coal:

Coal use is soaring because demand for electricity is soaring. Between 1990 and 2010, global electricity production increased by about 450 terawatt-hours per year. That’s the equivalent of adding one Brazil (which used 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2010) to the electricity sector every year. And the International Energy Agency expects global electricity use to continue growing by about one Brazil per year through 2035.

Perhaps the best example of growing electricity demand can be seen in Vietnam. Between 2001 and 2010, electricity use and coal use in the country increased by 227 percent and 175 percent, respectively. And more coal is on the way. Last September, Virginia-based AES Corp. finalized a deal to build a $1.5 billion, 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Vietnam’s Quang Ninh province.

Or consider China, which uses more than three times as much coal as the United States. About 70,000 megawatts of new coal-fired electric generation capacity will likely come online in China over the next two years. And the world’s most populous country has plans to build another 270,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity. Over the next two decades, India will likely add another 72,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity. For comparison, the total of all U.S. coal-fired electric capacity is about 317,000 megawatts, and that capacity is declining as generators switch to natural gas, which, in some regions of the country, is now cheaper than coal.

But we needn’t look only at developing countries. Germany may lead the world in solar-photovoltaic capacity with some 25,000 megawatts of installed panels, but RWE, the German utility, will soon begin operating the world’s largest lignite-burning power plant, a new 2,100-megawatt facility located south of Dusseldorf. Over the next two years or so, Germany will add 8,400 megawatts of new coal-fired generation capacity. And another 5,500 megawatts of coal-fired capacity is awaiting approval.

In fact, thanks to the slumping European economy, electricity producers in the region are already ramping up their use of coal. On May 8, Reuters reported that German utilities are likely to produce about 12 percent more electricity from coal this year than they did in 2011 thanks to abundance of cheap permits issued under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

Colebatch on bonds and debt

Here's the key passage from Tim Colebatch's column today, again attacking the idea that Australia is in trouble because of too much debt:

Since 1998, our bond yields have usually ranged between 5 and 6 per cent. But in recent days, the Office of Financial Management issued a new 10-year bond at a yield of just 3.15 per cent, a five-year bond at 2.65 per cent, and a three-year bond at just 2.52 per cent. Yields have fallen by half in a year.

Why? Because global investors have flocked in to buy Australian government debt. Their concern is not that we have too much debt, but too little. IMF figures show that of the 34 advanced economies, Australia has the third smallest ratio of gross debt to GDP: including state and municipal debt, it's just 24 per cent of GDP. By comparison, Germany has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 79 per cent, the United States 110 per cent, and Japan 241 per cent.

The Coalition and its allies are like a broken record warning that Australia is swimming in debt and putting itself in danger. That is simply untrue. Ask yourself: if Labor's borrowing has put us in danger, why is Australia one of only eight countries rated AAA by all three global ratings agencies? Sure, ratings agencies make mistakes, as we all do, but are they that incompetent?

He really is Labor's best friend - he has a dispassionate way of writing that I always find pretty convincing.

Weekend reviews

*  Men in Black 3:   it's pretty good, but to be honest does not contain all that many laughs.  It really is more of an science fiction action adventure movie (where the science is unimportant, like on Dr Who), and as such it works well.  I did not see the twist coming near the end that many reviewers noted is surprisingly moving.  (It is, and a great idea for the plot.  In fact, what is also surprising is that the movie was reported to have started filming without a finished script.  You would never guess it from the final product.) 

*  The McDonald's Sydney Stack burger:  features pineapple, tomato, bacon and (I think) beetroot.   I liked it a lot.  Another damned "limited time only" burger though, d'oh.

*  Picked up a flea market for $1 a dvd set of the complete second season of Scrubs (now 10 years old!).   Was very amused listening to some of the audio commentary (they don't do it for every episode, but still).  The creator Bill Lawrence and actors involved in the show come across as very down to earth types, and as they were doing commentary for shows they had made a couple of years previously, it was funny listening to them laughing at some stuff they had half forgotten.  And talking about trivia like their previous haircuts, etc.

Apparently, Neil Flynn (as Janitor) after the first season just improvised as huge number of his lines. 

It remains an enormously likeable show.

More on Australia's changing climate

Droughts & flooding rains: what is due to climate change?

This is the second article by Karl Braganza from the BOM on the topic.  It's good and clear. 

Influencing quantum

Entangled Minds: Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern

Go to the link and have a look at the very detailed and interesting paper by Dean Radin and others about experiments in which subjects were trying to influence twin slit experiment interference patterns.

I wonder when some journalist is going to notice this.

Odd ideas

Quasi-Transhumanist Charismatic Christians

I can't remember where I read something recently that suggested that Christians who believed in a resurrected body were not really that different from transhumanists.

This seemed an novel idea, but I see from Googling that there is a bit of discussion around on the topic.

I also spotted the review of a book above which sounded kind of interesting:  about Christians of the charismatic variety who seek out techniques (not drug based) to achieve visions (or hallucinations) that they think is putting them in close communication with God.

Yeti watch

BBC News - DNA to shed light on yeti claims

Explaining climate change in Australia

A land of (more extreme) droughts and flooding rains?

Karl Braganza from the Bureau of Meteorology has a good explanation here about changes to rainfall expected (and likely already happening) in Australia as a result of AGW. 

To be honest, I didn't realise that the fate of the Northern part of Australia was rather uncertain:

The models cannot agree on rainfall changes across northern Australia, with some models suggesting wetter conditions, and others drier conditions, on average. This actually tells us something about the physical predictability of future rainfall in this part of the world. The models show that a range of different, predominant atmosphere and ocean circulation patterns are equally plausible for this region as the planet warms.

 On the other hand, the predictions for Southern Australia are clearer:

 The models are in much better agreement over southern Australia, which is expected to dry, on average, as the planet warms. This indicates that something more coherent happens to the atmospheric circulation in this part of the world, as you heat up the entire climate system.

But in any event:

 The models also agree that individual rainfall events will be heavier over most of the continent. This includes over regions that are expected to dry.

It's a good article, and the first in a series apparently.

For my future reference

Easy Homemade Mayonnaise - NYTimes.com

I've only tried making my own mayonnaise a couple of times, and failed on each occasion.  This article might help.

Not just my imagination

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. - The Washington Post

I had missed this article from April, in which, once again, it's pointed out that the Right has gone nutty in the US. 

A few things to keep you going

I'm busy with assorted stuff, but note the following:

*  Exactly as I guessed, it seems more scientist types are saying that making crops RoundUp resistant was and is a bad long term strategy.   It is short term gain for long term pain.  Common sense also suggests that making crops more and more resistant to more and more herbicides is not the healthiest thing for the environment.

*  Some talk about why universes might live inside black holes.

*  Real Climate talks about the paper I already noted regarding climate change and an increase in the water cycle.

*  Real Climate also talks about the Australian temperature reconstruction that shows an Australian "hockey stick"-ish rise in temperatures since about 1950.    

*  Media Watch on the appalling reporting of the "climate scientist death threats" story by the Australia was very good.  Andrew Bolt's attempted response was embarrassing. 

*  One thing that might have been thought to do better with more CO2 in the air, and oceans, was sea grass.  However, those in the Mediterranean are apparently sensitive to increasing warm water, and it might already be dying off in places because of that.   Another loser in the game of winners and losers.

"Summer" movie time

Hey, it's not just me who feels completely "over" superhero films.  Not that I was ever really into them, I suppose.    I unexpected enjoyed Spiderman 3, ever though most people seemed to think emo Parker just meant they couldn't take it seriously.  But really, comic book superheros on screen, from Batman to Superman to Captain America - just call me underwhelmed, generally.

As Charlie Brooker's acerbic column, written after seeing Avengers, notes:

Despite being almost completely incoherent, it's enjoyable bibble, and as good as superhero films are ever likely to get, which is excellent news because it means they can stop making them now. Seriously, they needn't bother releasing Batman Bum Attack or whatever the next one's called, because it won't be as good as Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D. Finally we can move on, as a species. 

Charlie even joins me in blaming spectacle done in the computer as part of the reason:

Finally – and this is an odd accusation to level at a superhero film – it didn't feel very real. I reckon only about 8% of what was on screen was actually there. The rest was imagined by computers. And please, leery tragi-men, don't dribble on about "Scarlett Johansson's arse in 3D" being "worth the price of admission". The film was shot in 2D and converted to 3D using software, which means you're actually drooling over a 2D image of Scarlett Johansson's arse wrapped around a wireframe model of an arse that isn't there.

So, I won't be off to see it.

But, I will be off to see Men in Black 3 next weekend (OK, I know it is originally based on a comic too, but the leads are not superheroes.)  Early reviews are not too bad:  most seem to think it better than 2, which really was not that bad when I watched it again on DVD recently.

I would also hope that Prometheus is good.  The David the Android promo clip is pretty creepily brilliant.

No Spielberg this summer, but you can't have everything.

Very late movie review

I think it was sometime in the last 12 months that I bought and re-watched the original The Day The Earth Stood Still.  It was, to be honest, rather slower than I remembered.  Certainly its most spectacularly anachronistic feature says more about us than aliens:  it was the way the widowed Mum immediately trusts a single male stranger who turns up at home to take her son on an outing in the city.   (Today, she would be arrested by social services for the alien failing to have a Blue Card.)    But still, it's a good film and a classic in serious 1950's moralistic science fiction.

Last night I caught up with the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves.   As I think some reviewers noted at the time, Keanu does "alien" pretty well.   The film looks pretty good for the most part, and the switch to the aliens being concerned about the planet for environmental reasons rather than nuclear war is a good idea conceptually.    But I have 4 problems with it, which I will put in increasing order of severity:

1.  Kathy Bates as Secretary of Defence?   She just wasn't right for the role.  I kept expecting her to take a sledgehammer to Keanu's ankles for the sake of the planet.

2.  The black stepchild who wanted to blow up the aliens instead of befriending them.  This is rather against the tenor of modern children, isn't it, whether or not they have a dead father who in the military?   Besides, he wasn't a very good actor.

3.  Did it make any sense at all at the start that the government pulls a team of experts together to deal with a mystery, potentially destructive, object heading towards New York, only to put them in helicopters hovering above Manhattan while the unknown object hurtled towards Central Park?  That's a rhetorical question:  no, it made no sense at all.

4.  What happened at the end?   How did Keanu stop the nanobots?  Turned out to be pretty easy for him.  What did the alien clean up team think about this?   Was the Earth going to start again?  (Maybe it did - I was getting sleepy towards the end.)  Did the "ark" spheres still take the critters collected off the planet?  Why? 


It was the worst science fiction ending, in terms of ambiguity, I can remember, at least at the moment.  Just terrible.  This was, by far, the biggest downfall of the movie.

A fat cat amongst the pigeons

HDL ‘Good Cholesterol’ Found Not to Cut Heart Risk - NYTimes.com

This would upset the apple cart a bit.  Particularly given this:

Researchers not associated with the study, published online Wednesday in The Lancet, found the results compelling and disturbing. Companies are actively developing and testing drugs that raise HDL, although three recent studies of such treatments have failed.

Queensland floods: now with added warming

Soon after the Queensland floods of 2010/11, skeptics were quick to rush out and deny there could be any connection to global warming.

At the time, I thought "That's odd.  I'm sure I read that record sea temperatures - which, call me crazy, but just might have some connection with global warming - was one of the key reasons that led to the weather bureau giving a specific warning to the Queensland government in late 2010 that it was looking like a very high probability of big summer floods."

But there were some voices making a cautious connection between global warming possibly being responsible for making hot La Nina water temperatures even worse than they would otherwise be:

Professor Matthew England, co-director of University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, is reluctant to explicitly apportion any of the flood crisis to climate change. But he stressed that “to exclude climate change would be premature”.

Earlier this week, he told Reuters news agency: “I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change. The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon.”

Professor England explained to me the waters to the north of Australia have warmed by about 0.5C over the last 50 years. Those waters are currently about 1.5C warmer than average, he said, so it’s likely that about a third of this warming is due to long-term ocean temperature increases, the remainder due to the normal La Nina cycle.

 (For anyone doubting the extent of the floods that came, and the high sea temperatures around Northern Australia that preceded it, you should have a look through the slides the BOM used at the flood enquiry earlier this year.)

And now, we have the first paper that does some detailed analysis.  The bottom line, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald is this estimate:

 A Sydney researcher, Jason Evans, ran a series of climate models and found above average sea surface temperatures throughout December 2010 increased the amount of rainfall across the state by 25 per cent on average....

Between December 23 and 28 many places experienced up to 400 millimetres of rain in a few days. "That [means] 100 millimetres of rain was attributable to sea surface temperatures," said Dr Evans, a future fellow at the University of NSW's Climate Change Research Centre.

While the flooding occurred during one of the strongest La Nina events on record it was insufficient to produce the extreme rainfall recorded, he said.

The effect of the high sea surface temperatures coupled with the impact of a La Nina, both of which are associated with above average rainfall over eastern Australia, plus tropical cyclone Tasha, combined to create an extreme weather event, he said.

The resulting floods stretched across 1.3 million square kilometres all the way to Brisbane, caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 35 people.

Now, the study does not actually look at what caused the high temperatures, and as such you can't really call it an attribution study relating specifically to the role of AGW.   (I suppose it's like the first half an attribution study - first look at whether warmer waters did contribute to increased flooding, then look at how the water got warmer.)    Still, surely it's reasonable to strongly suspect, seeing the gradual rise in the relevant sea surface temperatures over the last 30 years, that AGW might just have something to do with it.  From the university press release:

And this:

Sea-surface temperatures off northern Australia in the Indian Ocean, Arafura Sea and Coral Sea  were unusually warm at the time, in places as much as 2 degrees C, the study notes: analysing 30 years of historic measurements, the study identified a general warming trend there of at least 0.2 degrees C per decade.

“If the observed warming trend in the sea-surface temperatures continues, this result suggests that future La Niña events are more likely to produce extreme precipitation and flooding than is present in the historical record,” says Dr Jason Evans, of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre. Dr Evans led the study, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, with a French co-author, Dr Irène Boyer-Souchet.

A few posts back, I noted that some studies indicate a substantial warming of nearly 3 degrees in parts of the Pacific by the end of the Century.

Here's the thing:  if sea temperature rises that are already being observed can make floods substantially worse, what's the situation going to be like in 50 - 100 years with another 2 - 3 degree increase?

And what's the best the climate "fake skeptic" world can come up with in response to this?  Well, seeing the study doesn't look at what caused the high temperature water:

"abnormally high ocean temperatures" may have simply been natural variability at work. But according to England, climate change "could not be excluded". Similarly, therefore, we cannot exclude the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was behind it, sneakily raising sea temperatures with his noodly appendage…

It's a really pathetic and lame attempt to turn around (what I would say) is an overly cautious choice of words into an attempted bit of logical ridicule.  

As for those who argue for adaptation to climate change as opposed to seeking serious reduction to greenhouse gases:  tell me how well you think Queensland can adapt to a potential increased severity (and frequency?) of floods affecting a million or so square kilometres? 

My hunch formed during 2010 - 2011 that increased intensity of floods was soon going to be recognised as one of the most serious aspects of AGW is still probably right, I reckon.

Wes returns

I wouldn't say I'm the world's biggest Wes Anderson fan, but I really liked Fantastic Mr Fox.  I see that he has a new film out soon, with Bill Murray (again), Bruce Willis (!) and Tilda Swinton (!!), and it looks very eccentric indeed:

 

UPDATE: Surprise! It's getting good reviews.

Cat attack on your eyes

New funding for research on parasitic eye disease

People who read about science over the last few years would have heard about toxoplasma gondii (which you can catch from your cat's litter box, amongst other places) and its odd behavioural effects on rats and (possibly) humans.  I don't recall reading about this before, though:

Brooke Anderson-White, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in pathology, has received a grant from the Knights Templar Eye Foundation Inc. for research to develop vitally needed new treatments for severe eye infections caused by the Toxoplasma gondii parasite.

The parasite infects as many as a billion people worldwide, many of whom have no symptoms. However, it can cause severe problems in those with weakened immune systems or in infants infected during pregnancy, leading to the condition toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis. Infected children can develop severe vision impairment and blindness as a result of retinal scarring caused by the disease. Toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis is a major source of visual impairment in the United States.

Not sure what it means

Once again, there is talk from scientists about whether a quantum wave function is itself  "real".

I'm not sure of the importance of the debate.   The brief discussion of it at the link above suggests it helps solve the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, and as we all like our pets to be either dead or alive (not in a fuzzy in between state) that could be a useful outcome.

Anyway, I need some better explanation of this...

Carbonara considered (more than you thought possible)

How to cook the perfect spaghetti carbonara | Life and style | The Guardian

I'm quite partial to a good pasta carbonara myself, and perfecting it is a bit tricky.

Little did I know that there are many different approaches to this recipe, and this l-l-long blog post about the variations certainly goes into a lot of detail.

Steganography appears again

Al Qaeda suspect's porn film found to contain treasure trove of secret documents

Once again, the topic of steganogaphy (software that secretly hides information within what appears to be ordinary media files) being used by real life terrorists is in the news.  My interest in this is just an adult version of an interest in invisible ink, I guess, but we can all have our fun imagining being a spy (not so much a terrorist):

The researchers from the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA), spent many weeks examining the hidden pornographic video* found on suspected Al Qaeda member, the Austrian Maqsood Lodin, when he was arrested in Berlin after returning from Pakistan. The video, called “Kick Ass,” was stored in a password-protected folder and within the video they found a file called “Sexy Tanja.” Further analysis of this file eventually revealed that it contained more than 100 concealed unencrypted documents describing Al Qaeda plans and operations.

A video file has ample room for concealing documents, and would be relatively easy to distribute. In Maqsood Lodin’s memory stick, the porn video contained hidden terrorist training manuals in pdf form in English, German and Arabic, along with numerous documents detailing planned future Al Qaeda attacks, and lessons learned from previous operations.

*  the comedy sketch writes itself.

Minimizing grid use

Novel battery system could reduce buildings' electric bills

I don't know what to make of this, but in some places (like all of Australia from about Sydney up), it's easy to imagine that domestic large scale batteries to store excess electricity generated by solar panels during the day could mean a house uses very little electricity off the grid.  If, say, an extra $10,000 on a new house build could give a very large saving on electricity use both during the day and night, would it make more sense to do that rather than having solar panels that feed back into the grid?  It would at least avoid the problems to the grid that feed in solar panels can cause.