No wonder she got on the plane at the end of Casablanca

BBC News - Morocco: Should pre-marital sex be legal?

I didn't know things were quite this regulated in Morocco:

The editor of Morocco's Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribia daily newspaper, Moktar el-Ghzioui, is living in fear for his life after he expressed support for pre-marital sex during a local television debate. 

"The next thing there was a cleric from Oujda releasing a fatwa that I should die," he says.
"I am very scared for myself and my family. It's a real blow to all the modernists who thought Morocco was moving forward."

According to article 490 of the penal code, Moroccans can be jailed for having sexual relations outside marriage. This is based on Islamic law, which bans unmarried people from engaging in sexual activity....

An unmarried man and woman were recently jailed for six weeks after they were caught having sexual relations.

If you thought slippery slope arguments about gay marriage were bad, you've heard nothing yet:

Imam Hassan Ait Belaid who preaches at a mosque in the commercial capital Casablanca says article 490 is part of the culture of a non-Western society.

"If the code is removed, we will become wild savages. Our society will become a disaster," he says.

 Politicians like to get in on the act too:

But Morocco's Justice Minister Mustapha Ramid, from the newly elected Islamist government, has made it clear that he will not change the law.

 "Legalising sex outside marriage is an initiative to promote debauchery," he said recently.

 However, some of these traditional ways of thinking can have some awful consequences:

...last year, a judge ordered a 16-year-old girl, Amina Filali, to marry the man who had raped her, in order to preserve her family's honour.

She committed suicide in March after she was severely beaten by her husband.

Anyway, this raises the question - when was fornication in the West illegal?  Wikipedia provides a partial answer:

In England in 1650, during the ascendency of the Puritans, fornication was made a felony. At the Restoration in 1660, this statute was not renewed, and prosecution of the mere act of fornication itself was abandoned. However, notorious and open lewdness, when carried to the extent of exciting public scandal, continued to be an indictable offence at common law .

 I was more surprised to read of the American situation.  I thought they had only fretted about which orifices were involved, but apparently not:

 ...some jurisdictions, a total of 16 in the southern and eastern United States, as well as the states of Wisconsin^[8] and Utah^[9] passed statutes creating the offense of "fornication" that prohibited (vaginal) sexual intercourse between two unmarried people of the opposite sex. Most of these laws either were repealed, were not enforced, or were struck down by the courts in several states as being odious to their state constitutions. See also State v. Saunders, 381 A.2d 333 (N.J. 1977), Martin v. Ziherl, 607 S.E.2d 367 (Va. 2005).

What the heck?   Ordinary fornication was a crime in Virginia until 2005!?  (Mind you, the footnotes to the article about the Martin v Ziherl  case indicate that it only attracted a $250 fine (sounds like it could have been handled as an on the spot ticket) and had not been enforced against consenting adults since the mid 19th century.

Still...I have to be more careful before I mock Muslims. 

Not sure if this is a good idea...

QA: Michael Nesmith on His Surprising Return to the Monkees | Music News | Rolling Stone

One thing I do know:  having Michael Nesmith looking like a grandpa makes me feel rather old.

Complicated evolution

BBC News - Many human 'prototypes' coexisted in Africa

The story of the evolution of humans seems to always be getting more complicated.  For whatever reason, though, I just don't find it all that interesting.  

In defence of renewable targets

Here's a defence of government enforced renewable energy targets even when you have carbon pricing.

Sounds relatively convincing to me.

One other energy fact that I have heard a couple of time this week in the discussion about Australian electricity cost is that demand for electricity is falling quite significantly.   Climate Spectator has run some articles about this, but I hadn't been paying attention. 

Gender mix up kids

What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? - NYTimes.com

This magazine length article looks at the issue of kids, particularly boys, who from a young age are attracted to feminine dress and interests.   Not a problem in my household, but you can see how it must be a difficult issue for parents to know how to react to.

A look at the Mormons

Adam Gopnik: Mormonism’s History and Meanings : The New Yorker

Gopnik has a good article here about the history of Mormonism.  I don't think it contains many surprises, but I just note these paragraphs about some of the religion's more curious ideas:

 Smith held (especially in the sermons he preached toward the end of his life) that God and angels and men were all members of the same species. “God that sits enthroned is a man like one of you” and “God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man” were two of his most emphatic aphorisms on the subject. (People who were “exalted,” in Smith’s language, were men moving toward godhood, as God himself had once been a man who achieved it.) Although in many other respects, as Fluhman and Bowman point out, Mormonism was orthodox in its outlook—Jesus is the sole Messiah, and his history as told in the Gospels is taken to be true, if incomplete—the doctrine of God-as-Man divided Smith’s cult from the others, and scared the pants off even charismatic Protestantism: the Protestants were willing to accept that we are made in his image, but not that we are made of the same flesh.

This doctrine led in turn to various theological niceties, which seem to have risen and receded in the faith’s theology over the years: one is that the birth of Jesus had to have been the consequence of a “natural action”—i.e., that God the Father knew Mary in a carnal way, in order to produce the Messiah. (This doctrine is currently in disfavor, but it had a long life.) Another is that God, being an exalted man, must have a wife, or several wives, as men do; she is known as the Heavenly Mother, and is a being distinct from Mary. (Smith’s belief in exaltation evolved into the belief that other planets were inhabited by men even more exalted than we are; Smith taught that the truly exalted will get not just entry into Heaven but a planet of their own to run. This is now taken, or taught, metaphorically, the way conventional Christians often think of Hell, but it was part of the story.)

Libet re-considered, again

Brain might not stand in the way of free will - life - 06 August 2012 - New Scientist

An interesting report here on a new experiment revisiting the matter of the brain's "readiness potential" and whether it really means free will is an illusion.

Lovely planet

Found via Bad Astronomy, have a look at this pretty picture of Earth from a new weather satellite.  There doesn't seem to be all much green in Africa, does there?

Site meter mystery

Site Meter has been acting crazy for a week or more;  all due to a server move apparently.   Now it doesn't seem to be working at all, and I can't tell where visitors are coming from.   (Well, not from my longstanding favourite visit counter, anyway.   Google Stats works, but it presents too much information, almost.)

Last week, some Spiegel Online blog mentioned my mocking of James Cameron.  A couple of weeks ago, a Finnish magazine blog mentioned my Olympics orgy post.  I need to know whether my new found popularity in European language websites is going to continue.  I am still also waiting for the Revolver map counter thingee to show when I have had a visit from Iceland and Madagascar.   But obviously, I am gradually (very gradually) taking over the world, so it will happen one day.

What a record

Found via Planet 3.0, this Media Matters post about the pattern that the Wall Street Journal always seems to have followed on environmental issues is very revealing.

New blogs noted

The kerfuffle over Watts and Muller last week has led me to find two Australian climate skeptic watching blogs - Watching the Deniers is back and looks nicer than it did before.   Then there is also a newcomer uknowispeaksense, which looks pretty promising.   On the international side, it's about time I added Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

An American blog about various things apart from climate change gets a look in too.

Real Climate finally talks about the Watts/Muller war too, but in a way that doesn't add much.

Anyway, must get around to adding the new ones to the roll...

Watts down with that - Part the Second

I really think Anthony Watts might be starting to crack up.  This post from a couple of days ago, begins with:

I’ve been sitting on this little gem for a year now, and it is finally time to point it out since nobody seems to have caught it.

It's about the BEST temperature analysis.  Watts complains that, following a 1 to 5 scale of how well weather stations are sited, the enemy Muller's BEST analysis has put the mid range class 3 in with the high quality classes 1 to 2.  And this is just wrong, so wrong, according to Watts.  He's been waiting to see if they would correct this for a year.

But the nutty thing is - he then goes on to point out that the BEST papers acknowledgement they have done it, and explain that they think it is the right thing to do.  In fact, as the temperature trend was lowest in class 3 (for whatever reason), adding it to the worst two categories (4 and 5) would make them seem not as bad as they would otherwise be.  (Remembering that the Wattsonian theory is that poor siting of stations leads to a warming bias in the temperature record.)  

So what the hell is Watts complaining about?  

And yet, being the Watts worshipping automatons that they are, quite a few comments to the thread are along the line: "ho, ho, ho, you really caught them out this time, Tony."  (Thankfully, there are some comments saying - are you really sure this is significant, Tony?)

Really, I don't know what he's going to come out next.   I wouldn't be surprised if it was something to do with how the density of his moustache is significantly better than Richard Muller's.

A big, new, thing discovered

The headline in the LA Times is: Oh, come on! It's a salamander...sort of, but the first line gives you an idea of what to expect from the photo:

Biologists studying a drained river in Brazil have discovered a new species of amphibian that looks disconcertingly like a male organ.

Researchers have called the eyeless creature, known formally as Atretochoana eiselti, a "floppy snake," but it is not a reptile. Rather, it is an amphibian more closely related to salamanders and frogs.

It is a disconcerting looking creature, and it's surprising that new things like this can still be discovered these days.

Talking to Michael

The dark knight rises: Perhaps Michael Palin isn’t the nicest chap in Britain after all… - Profiles - People - The Independent

Don't be put off by the title:  there are no revelations of a "dark side" to Mr Palin.  It's a very long and quite interesting interview with him.

Fasting for life

BBC News - The power of intermittent fasting

This article, about a BBC show that looks at whether fasting is a good way to extend life in humans, talks in particular about Alternative Day fasting.  You can also do it for just two days a week:

I decided I couldn't manage ADF, it was just too impractical. Instead I did an easier version, the so-called 5:2 diet. As the name implies you eat normally 5 days a week, then two days a week you eat 500 calories if you are a woman, or 600 calories, if you are a man.

There are no firm rules because so far there have been few proper human trials. I found that I could get through my fast days best if I had a light breakfast (scrambled eggs, thin slice of ham, lots of black tea, adding up to about 300 calories), lots of water and herbal tea during the day, then a light dinner (grilled fish with lots of vegetables) at night.

On my feed days I ate what I normally do and felt no need to gorge. 

I stuck to this diet for 5 weeks, during which time I lost nearly a stone and my blood markers, like IGF-1, glucose and cholesterol, improved. If I can sustain that, it will greatly reduce my risk of contracting age-related diseases like cancer and diabetes.

Current medical opinion is that the benefits of fasting are unproven and until there are more human studies it's better to eat at least 2000 calories a day. If you really want to fast then you should do it in a proper clinic or under medical supervision, because there are many people, such as pregnant women or diabetics on medication, for whom it could be dangerous.

I was closely monitored throughout and found the 5:2 surprisingly easy. I will almost certainly continue doing it, albeit less often. Fasting, like eating, is best done in moderation.

It does sound relatively do-able,  I guess.

Whether it's good for you still seems up in the air, though.

Recommended TV

There's a new series of Horrible Histories being shown on ABC3, and I just watched this Darwin song, done as a style parody of David Bowie, and "ch-ch-changes" in particular.   Very clever.



And hey, I see it's not just me who finds this show good viewing.  Here's the Guardian TV blog earlier this year:

 CBBC's Horrible Histories is a wonderfully curious thing: wildly praised, yet woefully undersold as really funny … for a kids' show. But Horrible Histories isn't just the best show on children's television – it's one of the smartest comedies on TV.

That's a bold claim, admittedly. But with the fourth series – broadcasting every afternoon this week – it's time to stop patting Horrible Histories on the head for not being rubbish, and accept that it's a genuinely brilliant comedy in its own right. There are few British comedies that can touch it for ideas, writing and performance

Rude bits

Over the last week, three stories caught my attention:

1.  Avoiding pregnancy.   Teenage pregnancy rates have dropped pretty sharply in the US, and this Slate article asks how and why.

The first partial explanation is a bit of a surprise:    teenage virginity is on the rise.

According to federal surveys of teenage girls, 49 percent reported they were virgins in 1995, but 57 percent said they were in 2010. (The trend was even more pronounced among black teens, whose rate of abstinence rose from 40 percent to 54 percent.) However, these modest changes don’t fully explain the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy.

So the main explanation:

...the key to lower pregnancy rates has been a shift from condom use alone to more effective hormonal methods like the pill. It turns out that not all contraception is the same. No matter how well-educated they are, teens who do use birth control can’t reliably use condoms every time. To be sure, condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases and are an important public health tool. But we now realize they should never, ever be the sole method of birth control for teens. They find condoms too much of hassle to use time after time—so they don’t.

 However, the article then goes on to point out that the pill is far from perfect:

Earlier this year, Washington University researchers led by Jeff Peipert reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that 5 percent of women in a study who were on the pill got pregnant within a year. Among those under 21 years of age, almost twice as many did. Take a moment to reflect on that. Imagine you are a concerned parent who accepts that your high school senior has sex. You take her to the doctor and she starts taking the pill. The data show that this is much better than just telling her to use a condom during intercourse. However, before graduation, 1 in 10 such girls will be headed for the delivery room or abortion clinic. That is a breathtaking failure rate.

Well, this just supports one of Steve's Rules For Life:   hey, if you're not prepared for a possible pregnancy, don't get into a sexual relationship.   

Of course, the Slate article then ruins my rule by pointing out that modern IUDs are a really effective way to avoid pregnancy:  

 ...the risk of contraceptive failure was 22 times higher with the pill than with IUDs in adult women, and double that for teens.

 I didn't realise IUDs were so effective.  Don't tell the kids.  Just stick to my Rule instead.

2.   The circumcision wars continue, this time with a push from a couple of Australian medical figures saying that the medical profession's solid turn against it in the 2000's was not really evidence based.   I always suspected this was the case.   It seemed to me that, for whatever reason, there was a turn against it going back to about the 1980's that was more cultural than anything else, and now the health benefits side is making a comeback.   We'll see how this develops.

Speaking of circumcision and culture, while Googling the topic, I stumbled across stories about how, in the Philippines, some cities put on "circumcision parties" to provide the operation safely for pre-teen boys.  As a government news agency explains:

Hornido attributed this phenomenon to the preference of the boys to have their circumcision done during the long summer vacation.

Circumcision is being done in the Philippines mainly for cultural reasons and not so much because of its health concerns. Among the Filipinos, the practice symbolizes the rite of passage into manhood.

However, Hornido urged parents to have their boys undergo safe medical circumcision by health professionals instead of the crude method of circumcision practiced in the Philippines known as ‘pukpok,’ performed mostly in rural villages by a local surgeon called "manunuli (one who circumcises)."

Well, I didn't know that.   Actually, like most Australians, there is very little I know about the Philippines culturally, which is odd considering its proximity to us.

3.  What's that doing there?    It turns out that human papilloma  virus is in a lot of prostate cancer.   (Mind you, it's in a lot of healthy ones too.)   But still:

“Recent unpublished experimental evidence by other researchers suggests that HPV and EBV can collaborate to promote the survival and proliferation of cancer cells, so our findings may well have important implications for understanding and preventing prostate cancer,” said Professor Whitaker.

“Significantly, in our prostate samples we found a high-risk strain known as HPV 18, which is known to be associated with other human cancers.

“HPV 18 is a common high-risk strain in Australia and is a specific target of the Gardasil vaccine now offered free to teenage girls to protect against cervical cancer.

“We note recent proposals to offer Gardasil to Australian teenage boys as well, with the aim of preventing the spread of the virus to women through sexual contact. 

“If HPV 18 is also associated with prostate cancers, as our research suggests, vaccinating boys may yet prove to have an unexpected direct benefit for them as well.”

It does sound a decent reason to extend the vaccine to boys.

Spoilt salade

How to make the perfect salade nicoise | Life and style | The Guardian

Hey, here's another one of these Guardian blog articles that go into far more detail than seems strictly necessary as to the possible variations of a common-ish dish.   The last one I noted was about pasta  carbonara; this time it's another favourite of mine - salade nicoise.

But it starts to go off the rails straight away, with the writer (Felicity) saying she really doesn't like canned tuna, and just prefers it with anchovies alone (ugh); also, apparently some people insist that boiled potato in it is an absolute abomination.

Well, this is all rather silly.   Chunks of a good quality canned tuna (in olive oil) are essential, and some modest amount of boiled potato make it a filling meal.   As for the other vegetables, I usually - um , julienne is the word I think I need - carrots and cut up some green beans and steam them just for a minute or two, then poor cold water on them to stop the cooking and leave them crisp but with the rawness taken off a bit.   That and lettuce are the main ingredients; well, if you aren't counting the olives, tuna, potato, salad onion, capers and boiled egg.   Not sure if always add tomatoes or not - my son won't eat them, which I find odd.   I think the vinaigrette I use is usually just lemon and olive oil, with garlic and a little bit of sugar. 

Anyhow, as I say, these articles in the Guardian do get a bit carried away.  As someone in comments says:

This kind of article is testament to the levels of debauchery now prevalent in the food porn industry. What utter, utter toss.

Well, maybe that's going too far.

But the biggest spoilsport of all in the thread is George Monbiot (!) who writes:

 I love what you do Felicity, but "the issue of fish" isn't just a matter of taste and money. It's also a matter of conservation, especially when it comes to species like tuna. Could we not make a decision that some species should be off-limits in recipes? And that if they are to be discussed, we can remind readers that this is a moral choice as well as a gastronomic one?

Oh dear.  I can't even enjoy canned tuna in oil once a week?

Actually, I was under the impression that some headway had been made in protecting tuna, and I also thought that your common canned varieties were not the most endangered.   Now I have to check this again, otherwise I will be thinking of George the next few times I make my salade nicoise.

Do not trust The Australian

Another piece of misleading and rubbish reporting on climate change at The Australian, with Graham Lloyd (and whoever came up with a snide headline "Data on global warming 'adjusted'" spending about 80% of an article about Watts and Muller  on Watts' draft "paper", without mentioning that Watts himself (and "co-author" McIntyre) have acknowledged at least one serious problem with it.

This  is just dishonest reporting with an agenda.  Lloyd refers to the online controversy about the matter, but simply chooses not to tell us that as between Watts and Muller it is definitely, without doubt, Watts who is in the most embarrassing position.

More detailed criticism of Watts' work is up at Skeptical Science.

Modern Judaism

Alive and well | The Economist

This Economist piece has a (sort of) upbeat take on modern Judaism.  Of interest.

Bond fun

Skyfall trailer: what it reveals about the new Bond | Film | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian has a bit of fun analysing the new, longer trailer for the next Bond film.  Some of the comments are pretty witty too, although the main gist seems to be that, well, there really does seem to be a limit to number of Bond plot devices in the universe.

Watts down with that

There's quite an effective takedown of Anthony Watts and his claim to be the one who started the ball rolling with concern about weather station siting issues at Revkin's blog.  I think I have read something similar before, but this explanation is nice and pithy:

Watts has promoted himself as the only person who really cares about siting issues, and that he basically introduced the issue in 2009 ("until I came along ..."). In fact, back at least as far as 1999, a program was created to develop stations specifically for climate research, and to site them very, very carefully. They exceed the Leroy 2010 siting criteria. This is the US CRN http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/. These stations were set up beginning in '04. Even Watts could tell you that 2004 occurred before 2009. The Menne 2010 paper makes an explicit comparison between the USHCN "good" and "poor" sites, and vs the CRN sites. See Menne's figure 7. There is no significant difference. The idea that Watts is the lone ranger who has brought siting issues to the fore is false, although Watts would like you to believe it. This was a very well-known issue in the research community for a couple decades, at least (see Karl et al, 1995 for example). Watts has relentlessly blogged on the issue, but that doesn't mean he was a) original, or b) right. It is emphatically not Watts who brought this up. It's just that Watts has refused to accept answers he doesn't like. His latest draft is a scientific mess, and is far more illuminating about how tightly held preconceived notions can drive a "result" than it is about climate.

The unravelling begins

That didn't take long.

Steve McIntyre has realised there's a serious issue overlooked in Anthony Watts' "paper", and is scolding himself for doing a rushed look at the statistics as a favour for Watts (who was, quite openly, only motivated out of spite for Muller getting PR for his own conclusions.)

Eli Rabett has a post about the work too, with contributions from others, and the future ain't looking so bright for Mr Watts.

I liked Rabett's general take on this:

The take home, of course, beyond confirmation bias, is the same one that Eli discovered a long time ago when Tony, Monckton, Steve and the rest of the crew were all agog at the stamp collection of early CO2 measurements assembled by Ernst Beck

What amateurs lack as a group is perspective, an understanding of how everything fits together and a sense of proportion. Graduate training is designed to pass lore from advisors to students. You learn much about things that didn't work and therefore were never published [hey Prof. I have a great idea!...Well actually son, we did that back in 06 and wasted two years on it], whose papers to trust, and which to be suspicious of [Hey Prof. here's a great new paper!... Son, don't trust that clown.] In short the kind of local knowledge that allows one to cut through the published literature thicket.

But this lack makes amateurs prone to get caught in the traps that entangled the professionals' grandfathers, and it can be difficult to disabuse them of their discoveries. Especially problematical are those who want science to validate preconceived political notions, and those willing to believe they are Einstein and the professionals are fools. Put these two types together and you get a witches brew of ignorance and attitude.

Unfortunately climate science is as sugar to flies for those types. 

We shall see how this unfolds.

Will it affect climate fake skeptics if Watts comes out with egg on his face?  Nope.  All that matters for them is the first press release claiming victory.

Children: do not trust that candy bar you found in the boarding gate waiting area

Man Accused of Smuggling Meth Disguised as Candy Bars - ktla.com

LOS ANGELES -- A Long Beach man is charged with attempting to smuggle more than four pounds of methamphetamine out of the U.S. in packages designed to resemble a well-known brand of candy bar....

Harris was was searched after baggage inspectors became suspicious of what appeared to be a large box of candy bars inside his checked luggage.

Upon closer inspection, CBP officers discovered the 45 individually wrapped, full-sized “candy bars” which contained a white substance that was subsequently determined to be methamphetamine.

According to the criminal complaint, each bar “was coated in a chocolate-like substance to make the contents of the package appear to be a real candy bar.”

Good to know

BBC News - Apollo Moon flags still standing, images show

Not that I care .....

....but this just sounds greedy, doesn't it?:

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit to be extended to three films | Film | guardian.co.uk

Maybe it will cause people to cast a cynical eye towards Jackson himself, who seems a nice enough fellow, but I can't see how he rates as a director.

Fake meat news

Beyond Meat: Fake chicken that tastes so real it will freak you out. - Slate Magazine

The only thing is, you can't get this fake chicken yet.

As it happens, on the weekend, I make spaghetti bolognese using Quorn (which gets a mention in the article) in its "minced meat" version.   The result was not bad, and certainly it looks exactly like the "real" dish.  The Quorn itself is, however, soft on the tooth and feels less "weighty"  than meet, as well as not really having much flavour of itself.   But, following a Quorn recipe using quite a bit of vegetables (small diced carrot, celery and mushroom) the result was still pretty pleasing.

In looking at the packet, I think I saw that the Quorn was about 11grams of protein per 100 grams.  That doesn't sound much, but then again I had to go find out how much protein you get in a piece of steak.   Looking at this site, it appears to be 20 gram per 100 grams, which is a bit less than I would have guessed.   I see that chicken breast is actually a bit higher in protein than steak.  I wouldn't have guessed that either.

Quorn sure isn't cheap ($6 for the 300 gram bag at Coles), but as a substitute just when it feels like you've been eating too much meat lately, it's not bad.

For future reference

I haven't read this paper yet, but the topic looks interesting:

Is the individuality interpretation of quantum theory wrong ?

Watts over the top

I have this strong suspicion that this is not going to end well for the chronically immature Anthony Watts.  (I mean, who else would speculate that his critics just aren't patriotic enough, or that a passing reference to his mother - dead as it turned out - was beyond the pale.)

His latest spat in his traumatic falling out with Richard Muller, whose temperature record re-appraisal  project Watts said he would trust, until, of course, it basically reaffirmed the existing temperature records, has been on display over the weekend.

Muller got a piece in the NYT on Sunday, confirming that his latest analysis still says the temperature record is OK; when the rumours about this column were floating around late last week, Watts went all "drama queen" by announcing a controversial something of international significance would be announced on Sunday.

The announcement turned out to be that he and a bunch of AGW skeptic mates had an un-reviewed paper that showed the US temperature record did suffer from siting problems after all.    Yay Anthony!  All those fans who spent their holidays taking photos of weather stations for you instead of doing something actually enjoyable with their family will feel vindicated after all.

But wait - even taking it at its best - doesn't it still show US warming at the pretty much the same rate as the satellite record shows globally?  

Not only that, David Appel writes that the satellite record for the US alone is in fact quite a bit higher than what Watts now thinks the surface temperature record indicates, yet weren't skeptics always putting their faith in the satellite record as being the one which was likely to be more reliable?  And John Christy (who works on the satellite record) is a co-author of this new (unreviewed) Watts work.   Explain yourself, Sir.*  AGW skepticism has always been a hydra-headed opportunistic thing against which science has been playing a 10 year game of Wack-a-Mole,  but it seems it's getting particularly schizophrenic (in the colloquial sense) lately.

Here's the Appel quote:

 First of all, it's exactly the kind of paper that most needs peer review: based on a lot of judgements and classifications and nitty gritty details that only siting wonks can evaluate. (So does a paper like BEST's -- but their conclusion is nothing surprising.)

And it just doesn't compete with the narrative -- record US heat, the US drought, BEST -- that is quickly sweeping by. It smells a little desperate. If it withstands peer review, then it's worth a good look. Until then it looks like PR, which is, of course, exactly how it's being delivered.

(Can I just say that delivering science as PR, or PR as science, is off-putting and worrisome, whether it comes from private groups or professional journals like Nature.)

Then there are the inconvenient facts that

(1) USA48 is 1.6% of the Earth's surface area, and

(2) the trend of the USA48 lower troposphere, as measured by satellites as calculated by UAH, is 0.23 ± 0.08 °C from 1979 to present (95% confidence limit, no correction for autocorrelation). Satellite measurements almost completely avoid the urban heat island problem.

Stoat is similarly unimpressed, and his take on the self aggrandising Muller is worth reading too.

The other fascinating thing about this is that it appears that Steve McIntyre, another co-author of the new paper, appears to have had no idea that Watts was putting out a press release about the unreviewed paper.  I wonder if he has a problem with that.

Update:     I like Ben's take on this:

 Anthony’s been hiding behind a fence, nursing his snowball-with-a-stone-in-it waiting for Muller to walk past. Hell hath no fury like a betrayed denialist.

Update 2:  I see that in the paper itself, it's claimed that the satellite temperatures can be expected to be higher than the surface temperature, and that's why the Watts claimed trend is right.  Yet, I have read at least one comment around the place that this only applied to the tropics.  So let's wait and see what comes of this.

Making it "relevant"

Gary Younge had a column in The Guardian last week noting the rise of specifically "gay-friendly" high schools in the US.  Such schooling is not exactly welcomed by conservatives, but some gay advocates think it's a bad idea too, for basically letting normal schools off the hook for not dealing with bullying more effectively. 

I hadn't heard things had gone quite this far before:

  "Kids are definitely coming out earlier, and middle school is definitely the worst time for bullying, whether you're straight or gay," says Savin-Williams. There are several summer camps around the country, that cater to transgender children as young as eight.

But the paragraph I found most ready for parody was this:

....Chad Weiden, who led efforts to set up a gay-friendly school in Chicago, says that part of the skill in teaching is making sometimes abstract issues accessible to students. "It's all about making it relevant to kids. If you're doing probability in math, you could illustrate it by looking at GLBT suicides or stop-and-frisk or unemployment. A good curriculum would also deal with issues of sexual orientation when covering things like evolution, biodiversity, anthropology, history and literature. That should be true of any school, not just one that considers itself gay-friendly."

Gosh.  What a cheery class Chad must run.

South for Cameron

The New York Times notes that James Cameron has bought a large farm in New Zealand and plans on living there for half of every year.  

I hope he likes sauvignon blanc.

The locals are not all convinced this is a good thing:

Some of Mr. Cameron’s new neighbors seem to have an open mind. But most worry about his ability to inhabit this paradise without becoming the kind of disrupter he pilloried in “Avatar.” Will the millions he plunked down for the property increase everyone’s taxes? What about continued access to Lake Pounui for the eel researchers at Victoria University of Wellington? Mr. Cameron has already closed a little hall on his land that had been used for wedding receptions, thus severing the public from what locals now refer to as “his lake.” 

There is also the question of what Mr. Cameron farms. To obtain governmental approval to buy the land, he had to agree to keep at least part of it as a working farm. But the current operation — built mostly around cows — poses a problem for Mr. Cameron, who said his wife, Suzy Amis, had pushed him and their children toward a plant-based diet. “So we’re looking for something more crop based,” Mr. Cameron explained. “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

Yes, the famously shouty and aggressive on set Mr Cameron appears to be a vegetarian.  Huh.

Samsung un-sung

I guess I've been vaguely aware of how well Samsung has been doing, but I didn't really it was to this extent:

Samsung, the world's largest technology company by revenue, reported another record-high quarterly profit as customers flocked to Galaxy smartphones, helping it outdo rivals at a challenging time for the global tech industry.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday its net profit swelled to 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in the April-June quarter, a 48 percent jump from a year earlier.

The earnings were lower than a median forecast of 5.6 trillion won in a poll of seven analysts by Yonhap Infomax. But Samsung shares jumped 5.2 percent to close at one-month high in Seoul as investors expect its earnings to continue growing strongly.

Samsung, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, televisions and memory chips, benefited from runaway demand for its Android-powered smartphones as rivals including Apple Inc. were yet to release new models.

Clearly, this is a company doing something right, yet we don't seem to hear much about how it built its success.  Not like Apple, with its hero worship of Jobs.

Not just me

I watched Source Code on DVD tonight.  This one, in the ongoing series "movies-from-the-last-decade-which-I-am-catching-up-with-now-that-the-kids-are-older", is only from last year in fact, but it was surprisingly terrific.  Well, OK,maybe not terrific; but good, solid, entertaining science fiction with vague plausibility and some emotional depth and pleasing direction.

It's the second film by Duncan Jones, and I haven't even seen Moon yet, even though it received very high praise.

I only had a vague recollection of Source Code coming out last year, yet I see now it did get very good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  So, it's not just me who found it to be high quality.

I do wish there was an attempt to explain what happened to guy whose body Jake kept turning up in, though.  

So, this is 21st century life....

When I was 10, and reading about and watching the Apollo program with much enthusiasm, I imagined headlines around now to be something like this:

Lunar Tourist Discovers Alien Artefact

Instead, what do I get this morning?:

Gay Dad and Obese Mum in Battle Over Kids

I want to do this...

At Space Center, a Launch Pad Tour - NYTimes.com

 For the first time in the 50-year history of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, visitors can now venture almost a quarter-mile inside the security fence and have a close look at Launch Pad 39-A, the starting point for most of the space shuttle flights and all six Apollo missions that landed on the moon.

“Visitors will travel the same route as astronauts to the launch pad,” said Bill Moore, the chief operating officer of Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, in a statement.

The “KSC Up-Close: Launch Pad Tour” will include visits to structures that supported and protected the space shuttle, water tanks that fed a noise suppression system, and the flame trench that deflected fire and smoke from the engines.

Let's not politicise this now...

I can't stand the way gun loving Republicans bemoan how it is "political grandstanding" that is happening "too soon" after a shooting tragedy when people question gun laws and suggest practical changes to help reduce mass shooting.  As noted at Huffington Post:

It's a trick. When people tell you that you shouldn't politicize a tragedy like the shooting in Aurora, Colorado they are unwittingly helping to spread NRA propaganda. After a tragedy like that, it is the most logical thing in the world to ask what went wrong and how we can fix it. When you ask that question, the obvious answer is our gun laws. It's awfully hard to stab 70 people and kill 12 of them in a short period of time like that. It's very easy to murder those same people if you have an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and two glocks.

This is the obvious conclusion that the NRA desperately wants you to avoid. So, they do a brilliant trick where they tell you that you are not allowed to talk about the problem in the immediate aftermath of the violence and death their guns caused -- that would be politicizing the tragedy.

 He calls it "a trick", but I think people can increasingly see that it is a very, very transparent one.

The military gay wedding that wasn't

As First Things notes, the recent "military wedding" of a US Air Force guy with another guy attracted a lot of news attention; only thing is, it was a civil union, and isn't the definition of "wedding" the start of a marriage?

I read about the "same sex wedding" (its headline) in a long article at Slate.   Sure, within the body of the article they note it was a civil union ceremony, but it takes a while to get to the point.

What's more interesting about the Slate article is the detail of the background of these guys.  Both come from conservative religious backgrounds; both have been married (to women, one of them twice) and have 2 children.   They fell in love via meeting at church, while was of them was still married; the discovery of the relationship (I don't think it is clear whether it was physical at that stage) sounds like it was pretty traumatic for his wife.   

But, of course, the general tenor of the article is that everything is fine and wonderful now because two guy have finally found their love match.

This type of treatment of this type of story shows the sort of bias that the media treats sexuality with these days; although to be honest, many people go along with it.

Of course, what I mean is that if this were a heterosexual story, would the media see much there to celebrate?   People falling out of love with their wives, particularly while they have children, and falling in love with someone else is rightly seen as kind of sad, no matter how happy the new couple are.   And given statistics of divorce and remarriage, most cool headed people know that no matter how brightly the new relationship seems to be burning at the start, there is a very good chance it will not last.  

But finding a dude who you really like and gets you going in bed is supposed to change this equation entirely?   Yes indeed.  The national media will give you lots and lots and lots of attention, because imitation marriage by same sex couples are just meant to be so heartwarming. 

Update:  having a look at the slide show of the "wedding" at the Slate site, I have a modest request:  can gay couples do us marriage conservatives* a favour and stop appropriating heterosexual marriage imagery (down to slow dances on the reception floor, what looks like jokes about a garter on a leg, etc) for their wedding/commitment ceremonies/whatever?      

Do it in the nude maybe; or put the ring on the tubular organ that wasn't available for the purpose at the last wedding; I really don't care.   But do something original for God's sake to show that what you've come up with is an original idea that is new to the entire human race.

* by which I mean:  those who think a cultural and religious phenomena that everyone understood and accepted was heterosexual and about reproductive potential for the last 10,000 years shouldn't be changed on the whim of modern sexual identity politics of the last 20 years.  

A handy headline

Gorillas filmed performing amazing feat of intellectual ability

Please feel free to use this to make your own jokes of the "So, I see the [insert political party/profession/other class of person] conference is getting some publicity this year" variety.

Smith on the Murdoch game

Rupert Murdoch's tolerance of climate change skepticism in his media outlets, when he claims to be convinced it is a legitimate thing to be concerned about, has long been a puzzle. 

I think Dick Smith gets it right:

In his letter, Mr Smith, who is a vocal supporter of the need to act on climate change, said it was in News's commercial interests to oppose the idea that people were responsible for the rise in global temperatures.

''And I'm on to you. When friends ask me why your organisation runs such opposing views on climate change - from Fox News's claims that it's all bunkum to The Australian newspaper occasionally claiming it's accepted science - I am able to say: 'It's simple'.

''It's all about making more money. They have worked out they will get more advertising and make more money on Fox News if climate change is debunked using sensationalism while they are likely to get greater circulation and more advertising dollars if The Australian shows a different view, so staff are directed accordingly.''

Really, the only alternative explanation is that Murdoch has stopped believing its true, but thinks there is some value in not "coming out" with his change of heart.

Update:   I should say that Dick may be getting it wrong when he says "staff are directed accordingly", as Bruce Guthrie has suggested that Murdoch operates in a more subtle way.   It may just be that he makes it known that he feels "all sides of the debate should be covered", but as he never objects to Fox News one sided take on the matter, they understand that to have his approval.

US and guns, revisited

Well, I didn't know that.  It appears that there is good evidence that gun ownership (well, at least in the sense of the number of households with guns) in the US has actually been declining in line with the reduction in the homicide and violent crime rate since the early 1990's.

In the comments thread that follows that post, some people point out that gun sales are such that this ownership survey must be wrong.  Others then give the potential explanation:

A growing number of homes have NO guns, while an increasingly smaller number have more and more and more.

Given the paranoid stylings of many on the Tea Party side of the nutty Right in the US at the moment, I suspect this is probably right.

Theology talk

While stumbling around the net recently, I found the blog of an Australian Catholic theology lecturer Ben Myers called Faith and Theology.  It seems to be active, moderate, and pretty good.  His links have led me to some interesting sites as well, including a group blog by a bunch of American theological academics called Catholic Moral Theology.

I don't know why I haven't really searched for moderate theology blogs before, but there you go.

Guns and movies

There has some interesting commentary at the New Yorker about the cinema shooting in Colorado last Friday.   Anthony Lane made the point that movies don't make people kill; but at the same time, does suggest that if ever there was a movie franchise that suffered from fanboy zeal that was kinda disturbing, it was this one:

 The fuss surrounding this movie did, and does, have something fevered and intemperate about it, something out of proportion to its nature; it is, after all, just a motion picture. Rottentomatoes.com suspended its user comments, this week, ahead of the film’s release, because the pitch of resentment, directed at critics who had dared to find the movie less than wonderful, had tipped into fury; Marshall Fine, of Hollywood and Fine, was told by readers that he should “die in a fire” or be beaten into a coma with a rubber hose. Such aggression was issuing, it should be noted, from those who, by definition, could not yet have seen the film.

David Denby then has a piece that is much less sanguine about how violence in movies is now received, and as I have never been a fan of overly violent films,  I find his commentary pretty insightful.   This, I think, is the crucial part:

There was a second element in the old critical defense of violence: audiences know that it isn’t real. Well, some audiences. I’ve sat next to people—often, but not exclusively, elderly people—who squirm with discomfort when vicious or cruel things happen onscreen. They react as if the violence were happening to an actual person—or, at least, their sense of identification is strong enough to make them miserable. But this discomfort has become a minority response. Most audiences, especially young ones, accept violence as illusion, artifice, spectacle—they relish it as play. We are all pop-culture ironists: we know that we’re being entertained by people making pictures and that none of it is real; we enjoy it and forget it the next day. In particular, horror movies with their ghoulish excesses are attended in a carnival spirit. Teen-age girls especially love horror—year after year, they keep it going as box-office phenomenon. The grosser the outrages, the greater the fun. Surviving the movie becomes a kind of rite of passage. They laugh it off and go again.

This willing dissociation of response from violent spectacle has a downside, as many people have said: we become inured to actual violence when it excites us on; we forget that that there’s pain and death, we become connoisseurs of spectacle. This kind of connoisseurship showed up in the response to 9/11, which many people, with obvious relish as well as awe, said resembled a movie, a remark that left anyone with half a brain feeling queasy, if not furious.

He's quite right about the "pop-culture ironists" bit, I think:  it's really the only way to understand how a movie franchise like "Saw" (which I understand to be entirely based on sadistic and gruesomely detailed horror scenarios) can make money.   I accept that the young-ish audience for that series, for example, is not a bunch of wannabe sadistic torturers.   But what I don't understand is this:  why does anyone want to be sufficiently distanced from a movie experience such that realistically detailed gruesome violence washes off them?    This is why I have never been a fan of cinema violence, and can count the number of R rated movies I have seen on one hand: I do not usually have a ready sense of detachment from what's on the screen.   If the movie is not affecting me, it has in a sense failed.    And it bothers me that movie studios, and critics to a large extent, play up to this ironic detachment by making over-the-top films with only rare critical complaint that de-sensitisation to realistic violence is perhaps not really all that good an idea for society.

Denby then goes on to really rip into The Dark Knight.     I had forgotten, but I presume he was one of the critics who first earned virtual death threats from Nolan fanboys for failing to follow the near universal praise for the film.  While I don't have any real grounds for suspecting that I would be bothered by its violence per se, I guess I am always a bit bothered by movies that make bad characters "cool".   (Pulp Fiction is the stand out example where I had a big, big problem with a movie for that reason.)

I don't know if Denby's criticism of the movie is valid or not:  I haven't seen the current Batman series  because, as I have made clear before, I have trouble engaging with the superhero genre at the best of times.   And given that my impression from reviews is that Nolan rarely leavens the bleak atmosphere with any humour or lightness: well, that just gives me all the more reason to suspect I won't like them.  Sorry fanboys, but men (or women) dressing in costumes to fight crime is basically a silly concept;  if you aren't going to have some light hearted fun with it, it's not likely to win me over.

In fact, going back to Anthony Lane, his review of The Dark Knight Rises wittily describes this over-seriousness as follows:

 Be honest. How badly would you not want Bruce—or Batman—to show up at one of your parties? He has no small talk (and Bale, as an actor, has charisma but no charm), although ask him about fear, anger, and other large abstract nouns, especially as they relate to him, and he’ll keep you in the corner all night. He doesn’t eat or drink, besides toying with a flute of champagne. Basic human tasks are beyond his reach; direct Batman to the bathroom, and it would take him twenty minutes of hydraulic shunting simply to unzip. On the rare occasions when Bruce, fresh from his helicopter or his Lamborghini, enters a reception with a girl or two on his arm, he looks deeply uncomfortable, and Nolan, as if sharing that unease, tends to hurry him through the moment. The point—and, after three installments, it seems a fatal one—is that the two halves of our hero form not a beguiling contrast but a dreary, perfect match. Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people, and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun.

Finally, Adam Gopnik writes with outrage about how Americans will likely take no major action regarding any aspect of gun control as a result of the numerous and repeated massacres of this kind:

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

By far the most appalling response to incidents like this is argument from the gun crazy that maybe this wouldn't have happened if the cinema didn't have a "no guns" policy for the audience.  That's right, there are a large number of gun loving Americans who would prefer not to think about, say, the wisdom of letting just anyone buy oversized magazines that let scores of bullets be shot off before reloading (as did this madman,)  but instead propose that if there were a dozen armed amateurs firing towards gunflashes in a darkened crowded cinema filled with smoke, well, maybe that would have been a good outcome.   

Just appalling.

No comment from Frank?

This Particular God, at Least, Appears to Be Dead at Steven Landsburg 

Until today, I had been forgetting to check, but it kept crossing my mind that Frank Tipler had predicted ages ago that his Omega Point theory meant that the Higgs boson should fall within a certainly energy range.

Has the recent LHC announcement indicated he was right?   As the post above explains, it appears "no".  Mind you, it was written at the start of the year before the announcement, but double checking around it appears that the Higgs has an energy of about 126 GeV, a fair bit less than his initial prediction of around 220.  (Although I think somone in comments at the top link says he later had revised it downwards to 190 GeV.)

On the other hand, the current candidate may turn out to be an imposter.

I wonder what Frank say about this.

The traditional Olympic orgy story

It's party time for Olympic athletes - Yahoo!7 Sport

Isn't everyone getting a bit tired of these articles every 4 years about how much sex takes place in Olympic villages?   Or maybe everyone would be happier if they did away with the sports and just ran the 10 or so days as a giant version of Big Brother* with a camera in every building?

I can't remember if the ancient Greek Olympics were known for debauchery too.   Let's see - yes, it appears they were: 

It was the sheer spectacle of it. Sports [were] one part of a grand, all-consuming extravaganza. It was first and foremost a religious event, held on the most sacred spot in the ancient world. It had this incredible aura of tradition and sanctity.

Today's Olympics is a vast, secular event, but it doesn't have the religious element of the ancient Olympics, where sacrifices and rituals would take up as much time as the sports. And there were all these peripheral things that came with the festival: the artistic happenings, new writers, new painters, new sculptors. There were fire-eaters, palm readers, and prostitutes.

This was the total pagan entertainment package.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.  (Although it sounds as if the ancient version may have had more attraction for me.)

Update:   I see the WSJ recently had a brief article on the old Olympics too:

...the menfolk left their respectable women at home and headed off for the festival with fathers, brothers, sons, friends, neighbors and (male) lovers. Fringe events might include philosophy lectures, poetry readings and sundry charlatans and cranks offering to predict the future, but the real added attraction of the games wasn't the cultural Olympiad but the sexual one. At the Olympics, parties went on through the wee hours, and hundreds of prostitutes, both women and boys, touted their services until dawn.

*  this reminds me, I see that Big Brother has switched networks and is due to return to Australian television later this year.  The traditional response is appropriate:   nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

More on Jim Holt's big question book

No Small Talk: Jim Holt on Why the World Exists - NYTimes.com

Amongst other parts of the email interview, I liked this:

Q.

After talking with Richard Swinburne, a British philosopher who believes in God, you wandered down a street “engulfed by a diffuse sense of contentment.” Might it make sense to believe in God for the possible contentment it offers when other answers may be equally unprovable, no matter how scientific their basis?

A.

That sense of contentment, as I suggested in the book, probably had more to do with the bottle of Shiraz I downed in the Oxford brasserie after leaving Swinburne. But Swinburne’s own religiosity, while it may offer him contentment, is based on rigorous intellectual foundations. You could question or reject his premises — I certainly did — but they weren’t a matter of wishful thinking or wallowing in cheap contentment.

 I also was interested in this, because while writing a long rambling piece on sex and sexuality, soon to be posted, I started talking about the question of personal existence too:

Q.

There’s a chapter about your mother’s death that I found incredibly moving. What impact, if any, did it have on you with regard to the big questions asked by your book?

A.

The question “Why does the world exist?” rhymes with the question “Why do I exist?” Both cosmic and personal existence are precarious in the extreme. This was borne in upon me when, just as I was writing the last chapters of the book, about the self and death, my mother unexpectedly died. I was alone with her in the hospice room at the last moment. To see a self flicker into nothingness — the very self that engendered your own being, no less — is to feel the weirdness of existence anew.

A slow argument

Dumping iron at sea does sink carbon : Nature News

It seems odd that Nature is reporting a paper just published that appears to confirm that a 2004 iron ocean fertilization experiment did seem to work to sink carbon to the bottom of the ocean.

I agree with the basic conclusion:  this is a technology that deserves further investigation, despite serious misgivings about how it may hurt those parts of the ocean where it is done.

A promising approach to reducing malaria

Fighting Malaria Inside a Mosquito's Guts - Technology Review

They haven't tried it in the field yet, but feeding mosquitoes with a bacteria that fights the malaria parasite in their gut sounds a promising tactic.   

Earthquake advice for the Tokyo visitor

Urbanites urged to head up, not down, to survive tsunami | The Japan Times Online

Here's an interesting article, suggesting that when (not if, it seems) Tokyo gets its next big earthquake, you may be best off heading up, rather than anywhere else:
 

Should, as government agencies are predicting, a major earthquake occur within 100-150 km of Tokyo Bay in the Tokai area or Ibaraki's Oki region, Hiroshi Takagi, an associate professor of engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, believes the resultant tsunami would be similar to or greater in height than the Tohoku tsunami.

"The southwestward opening of Tokyo Bay makes it particularly vulnerable to tsunami from the Tokai region," said Takagi.

Takagi, who coauthored "Behavior of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami and Resultant Damage in Tokyo Bay," reported that major quake-induced tsunami have struck Tokyo Bay in 1703, 1854, 1923 and 1960 as well as on March 11, 2011. The largest tsunami to hit Tokyo Bay is thought to have been the result of the 1703 Great Genroku Earthquake, which flooded areas of Miura 6-8 meters above sea level in the south, parts of Yokohama at 3-4 meters elevation and, as far north as Funabashi, areas at 2 meters elevation.

 So, what to do?: 

"The only safe way to escape a tsunami," said Tossani, "is up." Our restaurant, in fact, was 11 meters above sea level, or four meters shy of the minimum 15-meter clearance he believes is required to avoid an advancing tidal wave, should it resemble the Tohoku tsunami of 3/11.

Although counterintuitive, if a tsunami was to strike Tokyo, you might well be safer on the top floors of a Tokyo skyscraper than anywhere else. Tossani should know: He is an architect, master planner and urban designer who researched the actions of those who survived and perished in Tohoku last year for the newly published "Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan" (Routledge).

 I didn't know this about last year's Tohoku earthquake, either:

"What we discovered in Tohoku was that many of the maps published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation distributed to local municipalities indicated areas as low risk that were in fact death zones," said Tossani. "Because many of the municipalities had distributed maps that showed only the four-meter zones, many people made a beeline for them, only to be overwhelmed."

Twelve evacuation sites out of 25 designated by the Onagawa government as safety zones were swept away. In Minamisanriku, also in Miyagi Prefecture, 31 of 80 sites were washed away. In total the tsunami swept away more than 100 evacuation sites along the Tohoku coast. "That contributed to the direct loss of thousands of lives," said Tossani.

 How unfortunate.

A quick review

From Time, talking about The Dark Knight Rises:

For once a melodrama with pulp origins convinces viewers that it can be the modern equivalent to Greek myths or a Jonathan Swift satire. TDKR is that big, that bitter -- a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement.

I can be pithier than that:

It's a man, dressed in a bat costume.

Update:  I've got my review for The Hobbit worked out already:

Some men, pretending to be short, and a fake dragon.

As you may expect...

...news about how much money Jeremy Clarkson makes from Top Gear and the BBC does not please Guardian readers in the comments that follow:
Top Gear bonus lifts Jeremy Clarkson's pay above 3m | Media | guardian.com

I find him pretty annoying too.  James May, on the other hand, is likeable, although how much more mature is (I suppose) debateable.

The inconvenient Earth

Growth of Earth's core may hint at magnetic reversal - environment - 13 July 2012 - New Scientist

 Lopsided growth of the Earth's core could explain why its magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years. If it happened now, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of knocking out global communications and power grids.

One side of Earth's solid inner core grows slightly while the other half melts. Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, used numerical modelling to establish that the axis of Earth's magnetic field lies in the growing hemisphere – a finding that suggests shifts in the field are connected to growth of the inner core.

There are signs that the next switch may be under way: rapid movements of the field's axis to the east in the last few hundred years may be a precursor to the north and south poles trading places, the researchers speculate.

"What we found that is interesting in our models is a correlation between these transient [shifts] and reversals [of Earth's magnetic field]," says Olson. "We kind of speculate there is that connection but the chaos in the core is going to prevent us from making accurate predictions for a long time."

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.