The Big Mistake

I've been reading John Nielsen-Gammon's posts detailing a lengthy exchange he had with "Catastrophic climate change skeptic" physicist Robert Brown over at Climate Abyss.   The series of posts starts here.

As I have said before, I find Nielsen-Gammon a bit of a puzzle.  He is no climate change skeptic, and clearly finds some of what he see on anti-AGW sites annoying, yet he is oddly inclined to keep engaged with them despite the lack of good faith that is in abundance at blogs likes of Watts Up With That.   He is also very uncommitted on the question of action regardling limiting greenhouse gases, to the point of (what as I interpret as) being politically opposed to any EPA involvement in the matter. 

Despite all of the this, or perhaps partly because of it (that is, you get no sense that he approaching the topic from the Left of politics) he is always an interesting read, and he did make me aware of what I think is the single biggest mistake that climate change skeptics make.

That is:  thier belief you have to understand everything about how climate works (and has worked in history and pre-history) before you can decide that CO2 being emitted at current levels is likely to cause substantial global warming with profound changes to the planet.

This mistake appears at a few different points of  the Climate Abyss exchanges, I think, but it gets its simplest analogy here:

6. We don’t understand what determines the baseline temperature of the Earth or whether those forces are presently causing a trend.
N-G: I don’t understand what lack of understanding you’re referring to, but in any event a lack of understanding of how exactly my car was painted blue does not prevent me from predicting what would happen if I took a red paintbrush to it.

The rest of that post (No 5 in the series) talks about the difficulty of modelling the ice sheet changes from glacial to interglacial.  John NG believes that the difficulty is no reason to doubt the effects of increased CO2 on the present, relatively ice free, world.   He's right.

I can think of at least one topical further analogy:   physicists don't fully understand the Standard Model for subatomic particles, and the Higgs Boson might have just been discovered (with much work to be done on it yet,) but that doesn't stop us buidling and using nuclear reactors.  

You can see this argument played out often in skeptic circles.   The escapees from Andrew Bolt's blog use this line all the time at Catallaxy.  Just this weekend, for example, one of them repeated yet again (he's been doing it for years) the fact that you had glaciation occurring 400 million years ago when CO2 was at a few thousand (or more) ppm must mean that current models are wrong.    As it happens, the contintents were also stuck all together at that time, the sun was a little bit dimmer, and the work has been done suggesting that this configuration of the planet can be modelled such that glaciation at those CO2 levels can occur.   Here's a summary:

Ordovician glaciation
Geological evidence exists for a late Ordovician (~440 Ma) glaciation. This short-lived (~1 million year) glaciation (Brenchley et al., 1995, 2003) was remarkable because atmospheric CO2 levels were high (14 6 PAL) during the late Ordovician (Yapp and Poths, 1992). Numerical climate models of increasing complexity have been used to determine the conditions permitting glaciation at high CO2 levels. Early studies using 2-D EBMs focused on the role of the late Ordovician paleogeography (Crowley et al., 1987; Crowley and Baum, 1991a), and specifically the orientation of Gondwanaland relative to the South Pole. With an edge of Gondwanaland near the South Pole, the thermal inertia of the ocean prevented continental summer temperatures from rising above freezing, thus allowing permanent snow cover (Crowley et al., 1987; Crowley and Baum, 1991a). Subsequent GCM experiments have confirmed the EBM result (Gibbs et al., 2000), but have also shown that the continental configuration of Gondwanaland is not a sufficient condition for glaciation. The influences of additional climatic factors on Ordovician glaciation have since been tested, including atmospheric CO2, topography, ocean heat transport, orbital parameters, and snow/ ice albedo (Crowley and Baum, 1995; Gibbs et al., 1997; Poussart et al., 1999; Herrmann et al., 2003). These studies generally conclude that glaciation is possible with high (8–14 PAL) atmospheric CO2 levels given favorable orbital parameters (i.e., a cold Southern Hemisphere summer configuration) and continental topography. With orbital forcing varying from cold-summer to warm-summer configurations, ice-sheet model calculations indicate that CO2 levels must fall to 8 PAL to grow a permanent ice sheet (Herrman et al., 2003).

Sure, the precise answer is hard to work out given we don't have perfect knowledge of conditions back then; but - we are not talking Gondwanaland any more.   (By the way, PAL is Present day Atmospheric Levels - so I guess 8 PAL could be anything from about 2400 to 3200 ppm.   I learned this from another paper which believes plants moving onto Gondwanaland is what drove cooling to allow glaciation.)

John N-G's first post (which I have referred to before) about why AGW skeptics are wrong to persist with this "but we need complete understanding before we can do anything" argument is here:   it is well worth reading if you haven't done so.

The corollary to this Big Mistake is, of course, this:   at the current rate of CO2 emissions, the time scale at which climate change occurs, and given the life span of large electrical power plants, by the time you fill in the gaps as to precise climate sensitivity, you are likely making it too late for any effective CO2 reductions to be made at all.

But as I say, this is really just a follow on from the fundamental Big Mistake.

Badly priced Apples

Apple profit margins: You’re paying way, way too much to get a little more space on your iPad and iPhone. - Slate Magazine

It's rather worse than I suspected:

 Once you decide to move beyond the entry-level iPad, the company’s profits soar. According to iSuppli, it costs Apple about $316 to make the low-end 16GB iPad, which the company sells for $499—a margin of about 37 percent, not including non-manufacturing costs. Doubling the storage space to 32GB costs Apple $17 more, but it charges you $599 for that model, boosting its margin to 45 percent. On the high-end Wi-Fi model, which offers you 64GB of space for $699, Apple’s non-manufacturing profit margin shoots up to 48 percent. But that’s not all! If you get an iPad with 4G cellular connectivity, you’re really in for it. The very top-end iPad, a 64GB model with 4G, will set you back $829 for a device that costs Apple $408 to make—a margin of 51 percent, or twice what Apple makes on the cheapest iPad. There may be other popular products that carry such a breathtaking markup, but I bet most of them are monitored by the DEA.

My suspicion that I am better off in future buying a basic 16 GB Android tablet with a slot for additional SD memory seems justified.

Some Chinese at the end of the universe

There seem to be a fair number of Chinese physics papers on arXiv now, and this one about the variety of possible "rip" ends of the universe is quite interesting. They come up with their own - the "Quasi Rip", but I'll paste this from the introduction (clicking on it may, or may not, make it more readable):

Anyway, The paper then goes on to suggest a "quasi rip" is a possibility, from which the universe may rebuild. It also acknowledges that all of these ideas are currently up for grabs, in terms of being consistent with observations of the universe. I wonder for how long that will be the case.

Preparing for the worst

What happened when I had a heart attack | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The variety of ways the pain and discomfort of a heart attack can manifest itself is a somewhat interesting topic:  especially to a person like me who gets nearly no exercise and sits all day, which the doctors like to tell us is a bad thing.  So reading Brown's well written description about what his heart attack felt like serves a useful cautionary purpose.

Getting up earlier and going for a walk ever second day would be even better, I suppose.  (On the other hand, Brown did start his heart attack while cycling.   If this is something he does regularly, maybe he thought he was too fit to be having such a problem.  See, this is one good thing about not exercising -  I will be under no such illusion if crushing pain starts anywhere near  my torso.) 

Must get those long delayed blood tests too ...

Socks in space

Design for a long duration, deep space mission habitat

I like the way this article starts:

There are all sorts of details to take into consideration when traveling in deep space, such as where to go, what to do, and how to get back. Since starry-eyed dreamers often don’t take into account the practical realities of putting a human into such an environment, steely-eyed engineers are left to decide the gritty details of such a mission, such as how many pairs of socks are needed.

Well, it's good to see that NASA is putting serious work into how much sock drawer room is needed in space.  (That sounds sarcastic, but it's not really meant to be.   I would love to have my childhood doodling of spaceship designs as a real job.)

Anyway, NASA is coming up with estimates for spaceship size for long missions (this one to an asteroid.)  Apart from the summary at the link, you can see the whole paper here.   This is what they think a deep space mission may look like:




















And here's the inside:






Those ceilings look very low and claustrophobic; but then again, I suppose in weightlessness you're  not standing up often.

This also gives me the opportunity to again note that, as anyone who has ever stayed at a cheap Japanese hotel and been in one of their ultra compact bathrooms would know, the nation with the most Earth based experience for long distance space travel is clearly the Japanese.  They have space underwear too.   (Search my blog at the side if you are interested.)

A bunch of dates

gulfnews : Liwa Date Festival begins

It can be argued that the Liwa Date Festival is one of the truest experiences of all things date-related and the Emirati culture as a whole.

 It kind of makes me miss the days of HG & Roy on ZZZ.   (For Australian readers only.)

The NH cooling trend is not new...Grrr

I just Googled "long term cooling trend" and saw that many media and blog commentary about the Esper tree proxy study have headings like this:   "New Tree Ring Study Shows 2000 years of COOLING on Earth".  Obviously, they think that the existence of some long term cooling is a new finding.

This just shows how easily people are misled.

As this Skeptical Science post (last updated in 2010) shows via a few graphs - knowledge of a long term cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere (up to last century) is nothing new.

The point is also made in the Real Climate commentary on the Esper paper.  The Esper cooling trend, based on its Lapland trees, is just a bit higher than other proxy studies conclude.

This really is frustrating.

A wetter world? [Continued]

11 dead, 18 missing in record deluge | The Japan Times Online

Eleven people were killed, at least 18 others were missing and tens of thousands were ordered evacuated Thursday as downpours lashed Kyushu and other areas in the southwest, police and firefighters said.

The Meteorological Agency said rainfall in parts of Kumamoto and Oita prefectures reached levels that have "never been experienced before."

The agency meanwhile forecast heavy rain and landslides in other areas of Japan, including the west and northeast.

 The photos of the damage at this site show it to be quite severe.

A bunch of hypocritical twits

Over at Catallaxy, I see that Sinclair Davidson's tedious "broken promise" campaign entry for day 13 of carbon pricing put up a video of David Murray (an ex banker who headed our Future Fund) criticising the policy as bad economically.   Never mind that he (Murray) has long said he doesn't even believe CO2 can cause AGW.  That wouldn't make his views on the economic effects of the policy suspect now, would it?  Wayne Swan appears on the video making this point, and ABC host Emma is the other person who makes an appearance.

Anyway, in the comments following, in the middle of the night, we get this contribution from mareeS:



Last I looked, there were about 16 or so comments after Maree's, by Catallaxy regulars, none of whom make any comment about her contribution.

For a group of people who scoff at the idea that climate scientists have been at the receiving end of torrid and disgusting email campaigns  from skeptics who wish them dead, and quite a few of whom have spent time this week talking about how they wouldn't be surprised if  Gillard suspended the next election due to some drummed up, climate change related "state of emergency", they are a really a bunch of unselfaware and stupid people.

Public confusion via press release

As soon as I read the comments by Jan Esper last week on his team's Lapland tree study I knew that  climate change "skeptics" would exaggerate its significance.   The study indicates a long term cooling trend greater than previously expected, and that the previous warm periods of the last couple of thousand years were a bit warmer than earlier estimates.

That's quite a lot to get from one set of trees in one tiny part of the Northern Hemisphere, I thought.

True to form, climate change skeptics who only get their information from Watts Up With That were thrilled with the paper.  Strangely, it has only turned up on Tim Blair's site in Australia, not Andrew Bolt's yet, but give it another day.

You can bet your last dollar that no more than a few percent of those who note this would read the commentary on the paper at Real Climate, which deals with it as scientists in the field would - pointing out some of its strengths, but also its weakenesses and the reasons to be somewhat cautious about its authors' broader suggestions about the significance of their study.  Here's the important section:

Orbital forcing is indeed substantial on the millennial timescale for high-latitudes during the summer season, and the theoretically expected cooling trend is seen in proxy reconstructions of Arctic summer temperature trends (Kaufman et al, 2009). But insolation forcing is near zero at tropical latitudes, and long-term cooling trends are not seen in non-tree ring, tropical terrestrial proxy records such as the Lake Tanganyika (tropical East Africa) (Tierney et al, 2010) (see below).

Long-term orbital forcing over the past 1-2 millennia is also minimal for annual, global or hemispheric insolation changes, and other natural forcings such as volcanic and solar radiative forcing have been shown to be adequate in explaining past long-term pre-industrial temperature trends in this case (e.g. Hegerl et al, 2007). Esper et al’s speculation that the potential bias they identify with high-latitude, summer-temperature TRW tree-ring data carry over to a bias in hemispheric temperature reconstructions based on multiple types of proxy records spanning tropics and extratropics, ocean and land, and which reflect a range of seasons, not just summer (e.g. Hegerl et al, 2006; Mann et al, 1999;2008) is therefore a stretch.

Indeed, there are a number of lines of evidence that contradict that more speculative claim. For example, if one eliminates tree-ring data entirely from the Mann et al (2008) “EIV” temperature reconstruction (see below; blue curve corresponds to the case where all tree-ring data have been withheld from the multiproxy network), one finds not only that the resulting reconstruction is broadly similar to that obtained with tree-ring data, but in fact the pre-industrial long-term cooling trend in hemispheric mean temperature is actually lessened when the tree-ring data are eliminated—precisely the opposite of what is predicted by the Esper et al hypothesis.

As for the way the study is being mis-reported, one comment in the Real Climate thread does note that a significant part of the blame can be put down to Esper's comments in a press release:

Journalists should only be partially blamed for the bad coverage of the latest Jan Esper paper. Some of them wrote stories without interviewing the authors, which is wrong, but the press release issued by JG University in Mainz helps the denialist fringe by including a couple of odd quotes from Esper himself. Take a look at what he says:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php
“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Esper. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.”

 And some of the Real Climate team do get stuck into that:

I wonder if you guys could please comment on this press release, because it’s very hard for journalists to deal with such vague statements. Do you really think Esper is advocating lowering the tone of the IPCC reports?

[Response: I have no idea. I'd say it was more related to emphasizing the potential implications of one's own work over anyone else's - a frequent occurrence in press releases. I generally find it prudent to wait for the work on the implications to be done (for instance). - gavin]

[Response: Gavin is again quite generous. It would appear that Esper's misleading statements and overstatement of larger implications directly fed the sort of denialist frame represented in the Daily Mail article. It is of course impossible, and unwise, to guess at whether or not that was his intent. -mike]

 Interestingly, John Nielsen-Gammon a couple of weeks ago had a long and useful post in which he looked at how a paper on one particular bit of one Antarctic ice shelve had its significance over-inflated by the skeptic press too.   He also noted at one point that the press release for that study did what seemed to be some exaggeration of the significance of the findings.

If climate scientists don't want the public to be so easily confused (and for their results to not be so readily twisted by "skeptics" who are motivated to twist it), they really need to be careful with how their work is explained in their own press releases.

Holt returns

Back in 2006 and 2007, I recommended articles by Jim Holt.  In fact, I see that my enjoyment of his science eriting (usually looking at the big, big questions of life, the universe, and everything) extends at least back to articles in Slate in 2004.  

So it's good to see he has a book out on the basic question Why Does the World Exist? and it's getting some very good reviews.  I like this extract from that last link:

... the very intractability of the problem turns out to have a salutary (and fun) side effect: All the ordinary kinds of answers being impossible, one begins to think in earnest about the extraordinary ones. This is a book that gets us to take seriously, at least for a few pages, the proposition that the universe was brought into being by the abstract idea of Goodness. (Hey, Plato thought so.) Elsewhere, we get a probabilistic, Bayesian case for the existence of God. We hear Heidegger speculate that nothingness is an agent, that noth-ing is a verb (“Das Nichts nichtet,” or “Nothing noths”: shades of Hopkins, for whom the self “selves”); perhaps, then, nothing nothed itself, thereby creating Being. We contemplate panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental property, irreducible to physical components and pervasive throughout the universe: that, in the words of the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

The weirdness goes on. We learn—and I am quoting here because my powers to intelligently paraphrase this are limited—that “a tiny bit of energy-filled vacuum could spontaneously ‘tunnel’ into existence,” and then, bang, expand to become the universe. We learn that a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter would suffice to generate a universe like ours, which means it’s conceivable that we were created by some extraterrestrial nerd in an extra-universal lab. We entertain the possibility, favored by some physicists, that “nothingness is unstable,” which means something was bound to happen. And we entertain the possibility that everything was bound to happen. That is the principle of fecundity: the idea that all possible worlds are real. Muse on the implications of that one for your personal life—or lives—on your next subway ride home.

Big (-ish) brother in your pocket

Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ Review | | Independent Editor's choice Blogs

From this review of the new Android operating system (made by Google), we get this description of the very futuristic sounding (and privacy damaging, I assume) Google Now:

With Android 4.1 Google have introduced a major new feature called “Google Now’. It is a kind of self aware personal organiser/assistant, designed to serve up useful information based on your location and behaviour. It sounds pretty ominous, but it’s actually quite brilliant. By analysing your search terms and cross-referencing them with your calendar and current location, Google Now provides an array of useful information without any effort on your part.

It provides public transport information when you’re near a bus stop or train station, it suggests places to eat and visit when you’re away travelling, as well as up-to-date weather, sports results for your favourite teams and routes back to your home when you’re out and about. It even takes real-time traffic data into consideration when suggesting your route home, then estimates your arrival time accordingly.

All of this is achieved without the user entering in any information. It intelligently guesses where you live and work, what teams you support, even which flights you might be taking, all with surprising accuracy. This is all thanks to the insight it gains from the location and use of your smartphone within the Google ecosystem. The results are elegantly displayed in a series of informative and well-designed cards, which you can simply swipe away with your finger if they are no longer needed.

This might sound a little ‘Big Brother-esque’ on paper, but Google Now manages to present the information it interprets in a very user-friendly and unobtrusive way. Rather than feeling like an invasion of privacy, it feels more like an essential addition to the modern mobile experience.

Nice house

It's been a while since I've looked through Dezeen for some nice architecture, but I do like this Japanese house, especially the bathroom on the top that has an unusual outlook.  (I would be nervous using it during a summer storm though.)  Here it is:

Banks discussed

The LIBOR scandal: The rotten heart of finance | The Economist

The Economist considers that that LIBOR scandal is a very serious matter, with international implications.

A libertarian inclined free market economist from Melbourne, who repeatedly at his blog notes that he doesn't watch the ABC and spends all of his time lately promoting political stuff (and cherry picked graphs with inadequate explanation) of benefit to the Coalition, taking his cue from one bit of Wall Street Journal commentary says (my paraphrase) "oh pooh, this is all boring and about nothing important."   I wonder if he has read another piece from the WSJ which seems to me to argue "of course the banks may have been manipulating this for profit, and we need to fix the system and move on because we just can't afford massive litigation about this."

Who to believe...?

NASA gets dramatic

The New York Times mentioned this NASA video as being slick and popular on Youtube, and a cut above their usual bland stuff.   All quite true.  And it does seems a very optimistic way to try to land a rover on Mars next month:

Tube problem

Getting your tubes tied: Why do young women have a hard time getting sterilized? - Slate Magazine

I would be pretty sure the same thing happens in Australia:  doctors being very, very reluctant to do tubal ligation at the request of young-ish women who simply say they never want to have children.

The article notes that there are figures on the number of women who actually go on to regret having this done:

According to analyses of the CREST data, there is a cumulative 12.7 percent probability that any woman would express regret within 14 years of sterilization. But for women under the age of 30 at the time of the procedure, there is a 20.3 percent cumulative probability that they would eventually want to take it all back (compared to only 5.9 percent in the older cohort). Of course, there are other factors that may predict regret, including partner/doctor pressure and disagreement among partners about the procedure. However, the CREST research shows that sterilization at a young age is the strongest predictor of regret. (Incidentally, this trend holds true with young men getting vasectomies.)

I was also surprised at the failure rate for the operation:

 According to the Collaborative Review of Sterilization (CREST) study, the 10-year probability of pregnancy following a ligation is 18.5 per 1,000 procedures, about seven of which could be ectopic, depending on surgical method and age.

 I guess I just assumed it could be done in such a way as to virtually assure success.   (I know vasectomies can also fail - let me check the rate - around 1 in a 1000 according to this site.  I guess that makes sense.)

Anyway, I fully understand doctors' reluctance to use tubal ligation on young women.  

Rain and the jet stream

BBC News - Why, oh why, does it keep raining?

Here's an article noting that the change in the jet stream position is the main reason for Britain's wet summer.  The possible relationship between this and climate change is not discussed much.

The oxtail noted (or ox tail, if you prefer)

Before I forget, and primarily for my own future reference, I followed this recipe for oxtail cooked in the pressure cooker on Saturday night.   Quite successful, although I did just use a can of tomatoes instead of fresh ones, added some celery and bits of left over fennel, and next time I would drain off some of the oil before frying the vegetables.  Still, the sauce was tasty and rich, and the cooking time was right.

I see now that the guy (Steffen) who put up this recipe is (or was in 2007) ""a Ph.D physicist, primarily working on data acquisition and computing at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory." !

I'm even more impressed now.

I love a good oxtail stew.  What the heck: just in case his website goes down, I'll copy the recipe here:
.

Doing my bit

Because I am fan of Wordperfect, I will now embed their (kinda dull) promo for version X6, which was released earlier this year:



It's not just me who likes it.   And here's another person.  In fact, given that it probably picks up virtually no new users, it may be a fair assumption that nearly all Wordperfect users have been dedicated to it for years and years and love it in a way that is a tad unnatural in the scheme of how people should feel about  word processing software.   

As for the X6 version I like the idea of the eBook publisher.  I would probably never use it, but take comfort in knowing it was there. 

Hunting down the museum

Well, this is slightly amusing.   In last night's post, I noted a reference in The Japan Times to a "Museum of Perverts" in Kagurazaka.   Oddly, Googling this place is drawing a blank, as far as I can see.   (Well, there is no obvious link, anyway.)   So I'm a bit puzzled about this.

But looking at my Sitemeter tonight, I see that it was not only me, but someone from UNESCO in Paris was Googling for it too:

Good to see a UN body putting in the effort to list all culturally significant museums of the world...

I'm sure the answer is "no"

Is crude Ted really a family film?

I won't be seeing "Ted":  I don't even care much for Family Guy, so I can hardly be called a Seth MacFarlane fan.  I don't appreciate much in the way of crude humour - but it seems the world can't get enough of it.   I sort of thought that most limits had been reached with the big bodily fluid joke in Something About Mary (which didn't even make sense, really) but how wrong I was.  (Apparently, because I don't go to see the movies which are reviewed as being adult raunchy movies anyway.)

What was formerly humour that was mainly between men in a private setting is now up on the screen for women and young teenagers to see as well.   The moviemakers who specialise in this might argue that it is really just being open about a level of humour that was always there, but I'm far from convinced that universalizing such stuff is a good thing.

And people really are pretty stupid when it comes to what they will take their kids to see.  That's a given.

A wetter world?

Of course, it may only be an impression given by better reporting, but I can't help but think that the world still seems to be a wetter place in the last 6 to 12 months, despite the easing of the la nina.

Locally, Brisbane has had an unusually grey and damp winter, and it seems that all of Queensland is affected, even as we are being warned that a el nino seems to be developing:

Unseasonable downpours have hit north and central west Queensland, sparking flood warnings, as the Townsville region recorded its wettest July day in more than 60 years. SINCE 9am (AEST) on Monday, the region has had between 80 and 100 millimetres of rain - well beyond the previous July record of 51mm in a day set in 1950, the ABC reported.

There has been lots of news of the wet summer in England:

Speaking in Yealmpton, Richard Cresswell from the Environment Agency says the "fifth flood event" of the 2012 summer is "unprecedented".

 and floods in Russia have killed scores.  Now that I Google the topic, I see that there have been floods in India, although the article notes that the total monsoon rainfall is currently "running at 31% below annual average."   As the monsoon season can last til September, I wonder what the figure will end up at. 

It may end up bolstering my hunch, developed over the last couple of years, that increased intensity of flooding may be the first really problematic aspect of global warming that is widely recognised.

Should I be surprised? - I can't decide

From phys.org:

“We present a novel twist present in quantum mechanics, absent in its classical counterpart: We are able to show that very natural, reasonable questions about quantum measurement are, intriguingly, undecidable,” Eisert told Phys.org. “At the same time, the corresponding classical problem is decidable.”

The problem in question involves a measurement device that generates any one of multiple outputs depending on the outcome of the measurement. The output state is then fed back into the device as the input, leading to a new output, and the process repeats. The question is whether there exist any finite sequences of measurement outcomes that never occur.

“The problem as such is simple - merely asking whether certain outcomes can occur in quantum measurements,” Eisert said.

When using a classical measurement device, the physicists show that they can always find an algorithm that can answer whether or not any outputs with zero probability exist. So in a classical context, the problem is decidable.

However, when using a quantum measurement device, the physicists show that there cannot be an algorithm that always provides the correct answer, and so the problem becomes undecidable. The scientists explain that the undecidability arises from interference in the quantum device, implying that, at least in this scenario, undecidability appears to be a genuine quantum property.

 An early thought:  assuming quantum involvement in brain cells, does this have relevance to the question of free will?

Japan for the better, or worse?

Youth of the ice age - FT.com

Speaking of Japan, this long Financial Times Magazine article looks at the question of whether Japan's increased casualisation of its workforce, and general increase in concern for the quality of life amongst its younger generation, is actually a good thing.

It's very detailed and looks at all of the contradictory evidence, including decreasing interest in relationships and a high suicide rate, yet quite high levels of life satisfaction found in a government survey.  

There were a couple of points made in passing that I hadn't realised:

Japan’s economy has not performed as wretchedly as is sometimes believed, especially when measured in per capita terms. The unemployment rate, now 4.6 per cent, has never scaled the dreadful heights of the US or Britain, let alone Spain.

and:

Although it has risen slightly in recent years, Japan’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.4, well below 2, which is the rate needed to maintain a population. That is higher than South Korea’s 1.23 or Singapore’s 0.78, though – unlike Japan – Singapore supplements its dwindling native population with a steady inflow of immigrants.

 What the heck is going on with Singapore's birthrate?

From the Japan Times

Three articles of interest from the Japan Times:

*  Japan is the sort of place where dislike of tattoos is out and proud, so to speak:

The weekly magazine Aera recently discussed tattoos, which became a contentious issue in Osaka after Mayor Toru Hashimoto not only prohibited city employees from gettting them but suggested that any who already had tattoos resign. Hashimoto believes that Osaka citizens are offended by tattoos, which tend to be associated with gangsters and other lowlifes. Many young people get tattoos for reasons having to do with fashion, but the majority of citizens don’t make such a distinction. Public baths and onsen (hot springs) tend to prohibit patrons with tattoos, even if it’s just a tiny reproduction of a butterfly.

I'd vote for him...

* Can't say I've heard much before about a couple of oddball religions that arose in postwar Japan, but they are the subject of new book being reviewed:

Jikoson (nee Nagako Nagaoka) of Jiu ruled her small band of followers through divine oracles, while calling for a renewal of Japan and, by extension, the world, under the leadership of the emperor (who would presumably receive his marching orders from her). Cloistered from the public eye, Jikoson might have remained yet another in the long procession of obscure postwar religious cranks if her teachings had not been taken up by go master Go Seigen and sumo grand champion Futabayama.

When the latter physically defended Jikosan from a police raid of her Kanazawa headquarters in January of 1947 (a photo of him grappling with an arresting officer is thoughtfully included in the book), the media uproar was enormous and the resulting fallout, which included Futabayama's hasty departure from the group, was fatally damaging to Jiu.

Sayo Kitamura, the feisty farmer's wife who became the leader of Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo, proved to be a savvier manipulator of the authorities and the media, though she repeatedly clashed with both, as well as with representatives of established religions, which she derided as empty vessels.

Though tirelessly denouncing what she called the "maggot world" in her sermons, Kitamura had a magnetic personality that attracted the very "maggots" she was attacking, bolstered by her claims to faith healing powers, as well as by the singing and dancing featured in her services.

"Maggot world" has a certain ring to it, I think.

Googling "Jikoson" produces few leads on her story.   Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo seems to be more famous, and I have a feeling I have heard about the "dancing religion" before.  Encylopedia Britannica has an entry that explains:

She had a revelation in 1945 that she was possessed by a Shintō deity, Tenshō-Kōtaijin (another name for the Shintō sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami). She traveled widely and won followers in Europe and the Americas. Her eccentric behaviour and forthright condemnation of organized institutions of religion and government, whom she characteristically referred to as “maggot beggars,” won her an enthusiastic following, estimated at about 300,000 a few years after her death.

 They appear to still operate in Seattle, as well as other places, yet Googling for video for the dancing doesn't come up with anything.

*  Another review of a  book about the effect of defeat on Japan sexual politics and practices contains this curious line:

 Mark McClelland's excellent and intriguing appraisal of how Japanese responded to a new climate of sexuality under the American occupation draws on several years of research that began auspiciously enough at the Museum of Perverts in Kagurazaka.

 Is this the world's only Museum of Perverts, I wonder?

This week's flying robot video

The way it stands itself up, it looks a bit creepily spider-like, but it's impressive:

Back to the 1930's

With all the heat wave news coming out of the US at the moment, I have been curious about checking out the comparison with the 1930's "dust bowl" situation.   For climate change skeptics, or the "lukewarmers" amongst them, it is important to claim that this present heat wave may all just be part of a natural cycle that the country last saw in the 1930's, so let's just not assume that it is something to do with CO2.

Well, I think it's important to note a few things:

a.   Yes, the temperatures were very hot, and drought conditions very bad, in the 1930's in the US.  The EPA says so,  and James Hansen and colleagues wrote a 1999 NASA entry which starts:

What's happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s "Dust Bowl" that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature?

b.   The US mainland is not the globe.  Continuing on with the above quote, Hansen writes:

Part of the "answer" is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years. The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years.

 c.    A 2004 paper by Schubert and others looking at the causes of the drought side of the 1930's starts off by noting that there is long on-going cycle of drought in the mid West:

Drought in the Great Plains is not unique to the last century. A number of proxy climate records indicate that multiyear droughts comparable to those of the 1930s and 1950s are, in fact, a regular feature of the Great Plains climate, having occurred approximately once or twice a century over the last 400 years (Woodhouse and Overpeck 1998). Looking still further backin time, there is evidence for multidecadal droughts during the late thirteenth and sixteenth centuries that were of much greater severity and duration than those of the twentieth century (Woodhouse and Overpeck 1998). For example, tree-ring analyses in Nebraska suggest that the drought that began in 1276 lasted 38 years (Bark 1978)!

In retrospect, it seems a bit of a silly place to build large cities.  Anyway, the Schubert paper looked at sea temperatures and circulation models, and I think paints it as a bit of natural variation.  However, there are possibly more factors involved.  James Hansen's recent 2011 "New Climate Dice" paper refers to the 1930's as follows:

Some researchers have suggested that the high summer temperatures and drought in the United States in the 1930s can be accounted for by sea surface temperature patterns plus natural variability (10, 11). Other researchers (12-14), have presented evidence that agricultural changes and crop failure in the 1930s contributed to changed surface albedo, aerosol (dust) production, high temperatures, and drying conditions. Furthermore, both empirical evidence and climate simulations (14, 15) indicate that agricultural irrigation has a significant regional cooling effect. Thus increasing amounts of irrigation over the second half of the 20th century may have contributed a summer cooling tendency in the United States that partially offset greenhouse warming. Such regionally-varying effects may be partly responsible for differences between observed regional temperature trends and the global trend.

d.  I think it is important to note that there is certainly no avoidance of discussing the 1930's US temperature record by Hansen at all, as this section from his paper (actually preceeding the above quote) shows:

Jun-Jul-Aug data on a longer time scale, 1900-present, including results averaged over the conterminous United States, are shown in Fig. 7. The longer time scale is useful for examining changes in the United States, because of well-known extreme heat and droughts of the 1930s. The small area of the contiguous 48 states (less than 1.6% of the globe) causes temperature anomalies for the United States to be very "noisy". Nevertheless, it is apparent that the long-term trend toward hot summers is not as pronounced in the United States as it is in hemispheric land as a whole. Also note that the extreme summer heat of the 1930s, especially 1934 and 1936, is comparable to the most extreme recent years.

Year-to-year variability, which is mainly unforced weather variability, is so large for an area the size of the United States that it is perhaps unessential to find an "explanation" for either the large 1930s anomalies or the relatively slow upturn in hot anomalies during the past few decades. However, this matter warrants discussion, because, if the absence of a stronger warming in recent years is a statistical fluke, the United States may have in store a relatively rapid trend toward more extreme anomalies.

 I might add more to this post later, but at the very least, I wanted to make the point that it is not being ignored, and climate researchers acknowledge how bad the 1930's were in terms of both drought and heat in the US. I think you can get the impression from climate skeptic blogs that they do.

Solo ouija

Short Sharp Science: Ouija board helps psychologists probe the subconscious

Do teenagers still play with ouija set ups?   In my family, we never owned the board that was marketed as a sort of game, but once or twice someone (I think my sister) set up an upturned glass and letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper on a table and we tried it with no memorable result.   It was also set up in high school by girls a couple of times, if I remember correctly.   The feeling of how the glass moves is odd:  you usually cannot quite tell whether anyone else is deliberating pushing it, and you feel certain that you are not doing it yourself.   The sort of hesitant way it can initially move, before zooming off with some (apparent) determination to an answer is all part of the illusion that something otherworldly might be happening.

The question of whether it is really being subconsciously moved by one or more participants should have been researched before by now, I would have thought (well, maybe it is such an obvious explanation - especially given the rubbish information that ouija sessions usually deliver - that no one has ever bothered before); but in any event I liked this elegant experiment that does appear to confirm the subconscious is tricking the conscious:

Gauchou's approach is to turn to the Ouija board. To keep things simple her team has just one person with their finger on the planchette at a time. But the ideomotor effect is maximised if you believe you are not responsible for any movements - that's why Ouija board sessions are most successful when used by a group. So the subject is told they will be using the board with a partner. The subject is blindfolded and what they don't know is that their so-called partner removes their hands from the planchette when the experiment begins.

The technique worked, at least with 21 out of 27 volunteers tested, reports Gauchou. "The planchette does not move randomly around the board; it moves to yes or no. It seems to move almost magically. None of them felt responsible for the movement." In fact some subjects suspected that their partner was really an actor - but they thought the actor was deliberately moving the planchette, never suspecting they themselves were the only ones touching it.

Goucher's team has not yet used the technique to get new information about the unconscious, but they have established that it seems to work, in principle. They asked subjects to answer 'yes' or 'no' to general knowledge questions using the Ouija board, and also asked them to answer the same questions using the more orthodox method of typing on a computer (unblindfolded). Participants were also asked whether they knew the answer or were just guessing.

When using the computer, if the subjects said they didn't know the answer to a question, they got it right about half the time, as would be expected by chance. But when using the Ouija, they got those questions right 65 per cent of the time - suggesting they had a subconscious inkling of the right answer and the Ouija allowed that hunch to be expressed (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.016).

 What a clever bit of research.

Post war laughs

Where does all the best comedy come from?  Death and war | Andrew Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian

Reflecting on the death of Eric Sykes, this article notes the importance of the experience of World War 2 on Britain's post war comedy.  I think it is quite insightful.  Here's a sample:

A friend of mine is David Secombe, writer, photographer, and son of Harry, and he told me: "After the war, Spike and my father couldn't quite believe they weren't dead." They felt justified by what they'd been through. According to David, "They'd earned the right to be satirists, or just to be silly." The thing about the Goons was that it was both, and a whole generation subscribed to their take on the war as something horrific, but also absurd.

As a student of those comics I have developed a form of snobbery that says there's something missing from all subsequent comedy, and what is missing is a war. To refine the position: yes, there has been very good comedy since then, but the best of it – Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, Chris Morris – was directly influenced by the Goons, which arose from the war.

Eric Sykes rated Izzard highly, but he told me he found much modern comedy smug or, as he put it, "fireproof". I think he meant he was against the "high status" comedian: the patter merchant who points out the foibles of everyone else from some Olympian height. This fireproof character is well in with the broadcasting executives, and is not a comedian due to some life event, but because he chose to become one while at university. We know who they are.

A short wine note

I've been meaning to note, for the minuscule number of readers who might be interested in what I occasionally say about wine, that my wife and I both find shiraz viognier blends a very pleasing way to drink red wine.  We first tasted this in the Barossa Valley on our Adelaide holiday a couple of years ago.   I'm not sure if it is popular (this 2008 link says it is "becoming popular") but it is good.

Bread and butter

I've developed the argument elsewhere that libertarians are against carbohydrates, and for heavily meat based diets, on more-or-less political grounds (they believe a magical theory that everyone got fat in the last 30 years because of government sponsored food pyramids - as if people weren't just eating more junky and sugary food now because it's cheap and available within no more than 300m of everyone's house or office.)  So it amuses me to see Atkins and similar diets rubbished a bit, as in this  video:

Yet another recommended Higgs Boson article

How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics | Wired Science | Wired.com

This one is about the lack of evidence for supersymmetry,  which was supposed to help sort out some problems with the Standard Model.

Good spidey point (and a few suggestions)

Slate's and Salon's movie critics are complaining that the Amazing Spiderman movie is a very unnecessary re-boot of the story (yes, it starts at the beginning again) when the Sam Raimi movie is only a decade old.   Marty Beckerman deals with it best:

Whoa, I just had the craziest dream – a nightmare, really – in which no one responsible for creating our mass entertainment ever had an original idea again!...

Why not replace Tobey and Kirsten with Andrew and Emma, and just make “Spider-Man 4″ – with a new tone, a new costume, a new production design, whatever – instead of forcing us to sit through Uncle Ben’s murder again?...

 For God’s sake, Warner Bros. is reportedly planning to reboot Batman again after “The Dark Knight Rises,” because why leave the property alone for five minutes? Why leave any property alone? (When is Hollywood going to make a gritty reboot of “Schindler’s List”? You know, darker and edgier.)

He has a point...

Long, long time readers may know that every now and then I come up with movie ideas that never get made.   Given Hollywood's dire originality crisis, I should list some that I can remember off the top of my head, hoping that some screenwriter somewhere will work on these:

*  The Secret Life of Immanuel Kant:   reputedly he died a virgin who never travelled far from his home town of Konisberg, but few people realise during his 'silent decade', he led a double life as a ladykilling spy for the king of Prussia.  

*  Tesla:  a very eccentric inventor who may, but probably didn't, invent a death ray, and had all sorts of odd ideas as well as inventing some useful stuff.  Maybe he heard alien voices on the radio.   Lots of material to work with here:  I think his actual meeting with aliens might work, or some intrigue with government concern over what he was actually inventing.   He has appeared in a couple of films, but they aren't well know and probably are not improbable enough.

*  the Wittgenstein family were all as mad as cut snakes, with an unusual number of homosexual siblings, although two of them committed suicide.  I don't know:  maybe a comedic "neighbours from hell" movie could be made about a family who lives next door to them.

*  World War 2 untold stories:  well, there are just thousands of intriguing stories that turn up on SBS on Friday nights and indicate that we are never going to run out of source material.   Has the early life of Hitler ever been dealt with in a movie?    Was it Wittgenstein in school who turned him against Jews, or a Jewish prostitute from whom he caught a venereal disease?   Could be dangerous ground to cover, I guess.    What about the accidental sinking of the Cap Arcona (killing about 5,000 prisoners from concentration camps) at the end of the war as a basis for a movie?  

*  Spiritualism:  I don't think the originators of modern spiritualism (the Fox sisters) has ever been the subject of a movie, nor the general topic of its widespread popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century.   Maybe hard to come up with a happy ending, but it's an odd story.

What the heck?  All these ideas are for movies set in the past.     Don't I have any ideas for movies set now or in the future?

Well, in science fiction terms, there has never been a movie about the exploration of the Moon.  Yet the place almost certainly has old lava tubes, icy parts, and a certain amount of gas filled chambers which cause the occasional eruption as seen from Earth.   I'm not sure what the main point of such movie could be - finding an alien artefact is so 2001 - but surely there is some good material that should be based there. (Now that I think of it - although it's been a long time since I read it - Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his more readily filmed novels, but it's never been attempted.  Mind you, for some reason, most movies made from his source material don't work, or are barely recognizable.)

Supernatural agents (or humans under their instruction) who work to prevent the scientific discovery of an afterlife or proof of God seems potentially promising as well, and I don't want  M. Night Shyamalan going anywhere near the idea either.

And what the forthcoming Climate Wars?  Is having an admiral turn into a modern Captain Nemo with a nuclear sub or two being used to take out large coal fuelled power plants in both China and the US just a little too James Bond?  Ships carrying coal could be sunk by torpedoes too.  Maybe this has already been done in some novel I have never noticed...

That's it for now.   Someone just send me a cheque when you sell the script. 

Talking about Higgs

Lawrence Krauss has a reasonable article in Slate talking about the Higgs boson announcement.  He's quite chuffed, as you might expect:

The discovery announced today in Geneva represents a quantum leap (literally) in our understanding of nature at its fundamental scale, and the culmination of a half-century of dedicated work by tens of thousands of scientists using technology that has been invented for the task, and it should be celebrated on these accounts alone.

 His explanation of how it works uses a simple analogy:

 The idea of the Higgs particle was proposed nearly 50 years ago. (Incidentally, it has never been called the “God particle” by the physics community. That moniker has been picked up by the media, and I hope it goes away.) It was discussed almost as a curiosity, to get around some inconsistencies between predictions and theory at the time in particle physics, that if an otherwise invisible background field exists permeating empty space throughout the universe, then elementary particles can interact with this field. Even if they initially have no mass, they will encounter resistance to their motion through their interactions with this field, and they will slow down. They will then act like they have mass. It is like trying to push your car off the road if it has run out of gas. You and a friend can roll it along as long as it is on the road, but once it goes off and the wheels encounter mud, you and a whole gang of friends who may have been sitting in the back seat cannot get it moving. The car acts heavier.....

 All of the predictions based on these ideas have turned out to be in accord with experiment. But there was one major thing missing: What about the invisible field? How could we tell if it really exists? It turns out that in particle physics, for every field in nature, like the electromagnetic field, there must exist an elementary particle that can be produced if one has sufficient energy to create it. So, the background field, known as a Higgs field, must be associated with a Higgs particle.

But Bee Hossenfelder is feeling a bit glum already:

 And so, strangely, on this sunny day for high energy particle physics, I feel somewhat blue about the prospects. It's been almost two decades since the last discovery of a particle that we presently believe is elementary, the top quark in 1995, which was the year I finished high school. It's been a long way and an enormous effort to that little bump in the above plot. There isn't so much more we can do with hadron colliders. If we try really hard, we can ramp up the energy a little and improve the luminosity a little. Of course what we want next is a lepton collider like the ILC that will complete the picture that the LHC delivers.

But we have a diminishing return on investment. Not so surprisingly - it's the consequence of our increasingly better understanding that it takes more effort to find something new. And to make that effort of blue sky fundamental research, we need societies who can afford it. There's an economic question here, about the way mankind will develop, it's the question whether or not we'll be able to take care of our survival needs, and still continue to have enough resources to push the boundary of nature's secrets back further.

Small nuclear discussed (again)

Small(ish) is beautiful  - BraveNewClimate

Barry Brook talks up small nuclear as a sensible way to go nuclear in Australia.  Sounds about right to me.

Future eggs

I was reading a short report on the future of fake meat that contained this:

"The use of animals as a protein delivery mechanism is not sustainable," said Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Savage River Farms, Inc., which recently introduced a chicken substitute made from plant products.

"Through the careful replication of texture, taste, and 'mouthfeel,' food science is advancing the degree to which chicken, beef, and other meats no longer require an animal origin but can instead be entirely plant-based," said Brown.

Joshua Tetrick, founder and CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, also is using plants to replicate the nutrition and other characteristics of eggs -- for baking and more -- through the company's Beyond Eggs™ product.

Tetrick said the demand for eggs continues to rise globally, while feed and regulatory costs soar.

There are a couple of things I like about that:  calling animals a "protein delivery mechanism" strikes me as amusingly cold; it's as if an Artificial Intelligence which finds the whole idea of eating to be disgusting spoke the line.  But I also like the self explanatory branding of imitation eggs as "Beyond Eggs"(TM).

So, let's go looking at Beyond Eggs. 

Well, the English language certainly continues to get a technocrat workout at its site, where the product is described as:

A healthier and safer ingredient for your egg based applications.

I had a slice of egg based application with a cup of tea after dinner tonight, as it happens.

How was Beyond Eggs created?:

Our team of food science professionals, culinary scientists, and professional chefs brought their best to the table to create something extraordinary. We meticulously dissected the egg, looking deeply at its molecular makeup and nutritional profile. Then, we matched the functionally relevant components with plant-based ingredients....It all comes down to the functional properties. Does it emulsify? Coagulate? Replicating the functional properties of eggs required deep knowledge of biology, food science, and culinary science. Our team and product development partners have achieved something extraordinary.

It sounds almost as big an achievement as going to the Moon.

And, sad to say, I can't find a photo of what the product looks like.  Yellow goo in a plastic bag, I'm guessing, but I could be wrong.

I await the arrival of Beyond Eggs in my local supermarket.  Alternatively, I just might finally get around to having a couple of chickens in the yard.  Seems a tad less complicated.

Eagleton on Rousseau

What would Rousseau make of our selfish age? 

Terry Eagleton writes here about Rousseau.   It seems a good, short summary:

Above all, Rousseau is the explorer of that dark continent, the modern self. It is no surprise that he wrote one of the most magnificent autobiographies of all time, his Confessions. Personal experience starts to take on a significance it never had for Plato or Descartes. What matters now is less objective truth than truth-to-self – a passionate conviction that one's identity is uniquely precious, and that expressing it as freely and richly as possible is a sacred duty. In this belief, Rousseau is a forerunner not only of the Romantics, but of the liberals, existentialists and spiritual individualists of modern times.

It is true that he seems to have held the view that no identity was more uniquely precious than his own. For all his cult of tenderness and affection, Rousseau was not the kind of man with whom one would share one's picnic. He was the worst kind of hypochondriac – one who really is always ill – and that most dangerous of paranoiacs – one who really is persecuted. Even so, at the heart of an 18th-century Enlightenment devoted to reason and civilisation, this maverick intellectual spoke up for sentiment and nature. He was not, to be sure, as besotted by the notion of the noble savage as some have considered. But he was certainly a scourge of the idea of civilisation, which struck him for the most part as exploitative and corrupt.

 I liked this line too:

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom.

A promising building battery?

Explainer: storing renewable energy

This article talks about storing energy from renewable power, but as it is written by a Professor involved in a particular project, and so it ends up being mostly about them - being flow batteries.  Can't say I've heard about them before.

There's also a link to RedFlow, an company which is developing and deploying these batteries.  When I can hook one up to a bunch of solar cells on the roof so I can off grid most of the time remains unclear.  (Well, maybe not.  They do seem to have products that appear designed for use at home, but I don't really understand how much power you can get out of them, say, overnight.)

Speaking of solar power, if you really could develop systems that can get people more or less off the grid, at some psychologically important figure like, say, under $10,000, would the psychology of carbon pricing be such that people would happily pay for this, regardless of its true economic sense?   I mean, the psychological value of being able to say to people at work whinging about the latest increase in their power bill "I don't pay for my electricity at all now" must count for something.

What an odd concept

BBC News - Vertical ship marks 50 years at sea

Have a look at the video - I have never heard of this weird ship before.