Article title says it all

Reviving Wind Turbine Syndrome is just what you'd expect from a PM without a Science Minister

John Quiggin rips into this too.

Weighty issues

For the first time ever, the slow upwards creep of weight has inspired me to try actual dieting. The very popular (in England in particular, it seems) 5:2 diet will be given a go, and today was the first "fast" day.

To keep within the 600cal limit for such a day does take a fair bit of planning and calculating, but I seem to have done quite OK in terms of volume of food and hunger. The old diet stand bys do help - low fat cottage cheese (I like it anyway), puffed rice cakes (about half the calories of bread), beans, salad and low fat salad dressing. For what it's worth, here's how they assembled today for my 600cal menu:

 Breakfast - 2 rice cakes topped with a mashed up boiled egg and a small tomato. (I mean small: one of those mini roma tomato ones.) Coffee (using almond milk instead of normal milk) and a stevia based sweetener.

Lunch - 2 rice cakes with 100g cottage cheese, small tomato. (OK, so I like tomato when dieting.) A can of Pepsi Max.

Dinner - salad with small (95g) can of tuna in brine, 75 g of 4 bean mix, 50 g of lettuce (that was all that was left - I could've gone to double that and been OK), 100 g of celery, a couple of the mini roma tomatoes. 20ml of low fat dressing. A cup of coffee (decaf this time) as in the morning.

I've done the calculations and think this came in at 590 cal. I'm not exactly feeling full; nor am I feeling particularly hungry. It is meant to be a fasting day, after all, but as far as fasts go, that was a pretty satisfactory one. All very simple, obviously.

Normal food tomorrow. Calculating calories again Thursday. This could well provide a whole new bunch of material with which to bore readers!

Warm up north

The Alaskan Winter That Never Was? – Greg Laden's Blog

Greg Laden has a good post up noting how extraordinarily warm the winter has been in Alaska, as the cold polar air has by passed it on the way to the rest of mainland America.   Remarkable.

The trouble is, "skeptics" only believe Roy Spencer's chart

RealClimate: Global temperature 2013

Real Climate notes at the link above:

The global temperature data for 2013 are now published. 2010 and 2005
remain the warmest years since records began in the 19th Century. 1998
ranks third in two records, and in the analysis of Cowtan & Way,
which interpolates the data-poor region in the Arctic with a better
method, 2013 is warmer than 1998 (even though 1998 was a record El Nino
year, and 2013 was neutral)....

In all four data series of the global near-surface air temperature, the linear trend even from the extreme El Niño year 1998 is positive, i.e. shows continued warming, despite the choice of a warm outlier as the initial year.

In all four data series of the global near-surface air temperature, 2010 was the warmest year on record, followed by 2005.

 

The year 1998 is, at best, rank 3 – in the currently best data set of Cowtan & Way, 1998 is actually only ranked 7th. Even 2013 is – without El Niño – warmer there than 1998.

 
The German news site Spiegel Online presents these facts under the headline Warming of the air paused for 16 years (my translation). The headline of the NASA news release, NASA Finds 2013 Sustained Long-Term Climate Warming trend, is thus completely turned on its head.This will not surprise anyone who has followed climate reporting of Der Spiegel in recent years. To the contrary – colleagues express their surprise publicly when a sensible article on the subject appears there. For years, Der Spiegel has acted as a gateway for dubious “climate skeptics” claims into the German media whilst trying to discredit top climate scientists (we’ve covered at least one example here).

As I say at the title to the post, the problem with this is that "skeptics" still cling to Roy Spencer's satellite temperature chart as "proving" that 1998 was the hottest year ever.

Until Spencer's figures show a peak above 1998, (likely in the next El Nino), they will not change their belief.

To Canberra and back, Part 3

So by late morning we were heading out of Coonabarabran and down the Newell to Gilgandra and onto the outskirts of Dubbo.   (Lunch at Subway, where the young girl microwaved the steak pieces before putting them on the roll and then toasting it with the cheese on top.  In my local Brisbane one, they don't do that - just put the cheese on top and toast it.   Well done, Dubbo Subway.)

Continue onto Parkes, where we did a right left turn out towards Orange and the tiny town of Manildra, where we turned south to Canberra.  See the Bing map:

  

According to Bing it's 615 km and 6 hours 44 min driving, but it sure seems longer than that.  The countryside has some geography to it, but not a lot.   The driving is easy enough, but rolling hillsides stretching off into the distance for scores of kilometres do get a bit same-y.  (This is particularly true of the stretch from Cowra south to Canberra.)   

It was also tricky knowing exactly the right route out of Parkes, especially as I had missed printing out the Google map for that section.We worked it out eventually, but a proper touring map would have helped.

The real reason for taking this slightly indirect route to Canberra was to drop in on the Parkes radio telescope.   It has a nice new-ish visitor centre, paid for from money made from the movie The Dish (which I have never fully seen, seeing it got luke warm reviews.)  It's a very photogenic piece of science kit:

Here's another photo showing an old bit off the telescope, which everyone must assume looks like a mock lunar lander:

But here's the explanation as to what it really is (click to enlarge and you should be able to read it):

The telescope was built in 1961, but it has been upgraded many times.  The CSIRO explains how actively it is still used:

The telescope operates twenty four hours per day, through rain and cloud. About 85 per cent of all time each year is scheduled for observing. Less than five per cent of that is lost because of high winds or equipment problems. Most of the rest of the time each year is used for maintenance and testing. Around 300 researchers use the telescope each year, and more than 40 per cent of these users are from overseas.

The moving part of the dish is not fixed to the top of the tower but just sits on it. Because the large surface catches the wind like a sail, the telescope must be 'stowed' (pointed directly up) when the wind exceeds 35 km an hour.

There is a folder in the visitor centre explaining what listening programs are currently underway.  I noted that they are still listening to pulsars, but I don't think the reason why was really explained.  (I also wondered how often they continuously listen to any individual pulsar.  If, as I suspect, it is only a matter of minutes, not hours, one hopes they haven't ever missed out on one suddenly doing the equivalent of chiming at midnight - or playing Jingle Bells.) 

We did see the dish rotating around too - yay.  See - it was pointing in a different direction when we first arrived:

So there you go.  The visitor centre does the best it can, perhaps, on a kinda difficult area of astronomy to explain quickly to the public or the kiddies.   And another odd thing about the place - they have lots of warning signs about snakes being around the gardens and lawns as you walk out of the building.  I assume they are a particular problem there, although given it's pretty much in the middle of ordinary farming land, it's hard to see why.



From there it was out to buy some roadside cherries (from "down the road" at Young) - they were delicious when we ate them later in Canberra.  And then out through the never ending, rolling brown hills that surround Canberra for a long way out.

(We passed through Cowra, but only stopped for petrol.  It looks a nice enough town too.)

I think we got into Canberra around 7.30 or 8 pm.  More about that in Part 4.

Right wing fruit loopery of the highest order - courtesy of Catallaxy and Sinclair Davidson

Only a few days ago, I had several thousand visitors from Mark Steyn's blog because I made the simple claim that climate change denialists seem too silly to know when they are losing a legal case. 

(Why did Steyn's blog bother linking to me, I wonder...)

Now, over at Catallaxy, Steven "why oh why am I the only economist in the world to understand Say's Law" Kates has a post up re-quoting Steyn's latest whine about the American legal system, and swallows whole heartedly Steyn's approach that it's a crucial matter of free speech that he be allowed to defame a climate scientist.  (I believe I paraphrase only slightly.)

Anyhow, that's not the dangerously nutty part.  It's this comment from fruitiest of Catallaxy fruitloops, Mk50, following the post:

Simply put, the alternatives in the USA to facing up to the leftists are becoming binary. Either you do not do it, or you literally kill them from ambush.

Their legal system is broken and skewed to ‘weaponise’ one side of the political spectrum (notice I did not say ‘Justice’ System). Once that becomes obvious to all, then the only recourse is to take responsibility back from the state into private hands. Steyn would have been better off in terms of money, convenience and even stress if he had shot Mann from a distance than to go through the ghastly and incredibly expensive legal idiocy he is currently experiencing. He would also have a very high chance of getting away with it, given his intelligence. Probably 99% plus.

This character - an ex Australian military gun lover who grandiosely calls himself an "Imperialist" (and who was caught red handed plagiarising great swathes of a guest post or two Sinclair Davidson published at the blog) -  has expressed fantasies before about the armed Right wing "citizen militias" having to have a second American revolution because of the Obama presidency.  I can't remember what sparked this last time - it could have been Obama merely talking up tighter gun control after the school shooting, or it might have been some other issue the Tea Party obsesses over.

But surely this takes the cake.   Because a journalist is being sued by a climate scientist for defamation, and said journalist has been losing important procedural steps in the case, this Australian character is telling his mates in the US that it's becoming clear that the only answer is to shoot climate scientists!  (Well, OK, actually "leftists" - that makes his counsel worse rather than better.)

Hey, Sinclair Davidson - tell me how else to interpret this comment being hosted at your blog?  You seem pretty keen on Mk50's contributions to the blog - he only had one of his trite and stupidly exaggerating guest posts published there last week.  (And as far as I know you've never removed his plagiarised content in the previous posts.) 

Hey, Andrew Bolt, seeing you're the publicist in chief of this Right wing blog, tell me if you approve of MK50's musings?   Is there some wafer thin grounds on which you don't see it as an endorsement of generic violence against "leftists" in the US?

And anyone else - can you explain why Sinclair Davidson is not pilloried across our country for hosting a right wing nut job who appears to endorse political violence in the US on the slightest of pretexts?  Why instead does he turn up on the ABC several times a year?

That is one of the biggest mysteries for me...

To Canberra and back Part 2 - Coonabarabran

Coonabarabran is the closest town to what now appears to be called the Australian Astronomical Observatory at Siding Spring.  I also see that it is run by Australian Department of Industry (?), which is a bit of a worry given that the Abbott government's anti-science minions are scrapping around looking for cost cutting exercises.

The 30 odd km drive up to the observatory from town is very pleasant, but the whole area suffered a major bush fire a year ago.  Here's one business that survived, apparently, although there is a distinct lack of the product on display:

If you click to enlarge, you can see the burnt trees on the hills in the distance.  There is a vast area that looks like that.

On upwards to the observatory:

It was unharmed in the fire, although some staff accommodation was burnt.  The fire clearly came right up close to it, though, when you see some of the photos below taken from the base of the main observatory building.

I have been here once before, around 1990 or 1991 I think, and to be honest, I don't think the visitor centre has really changed at all.

It could well do with a revamp, although I must say that one of the simplest things, a large photographic negative of an immensely packed star field in the Milky Way with which you had to use a magnifying glass to see the thousands of stars, impressed them quite a bit.  

The viewing level inside the dome allows for some pretty good shots of the telescope itself:

 
But even if you have little interest in what they do there, the view from the base over the observatory over the Warrumbungles National Park is pretty good.  (If you don't like the scroll effect, just click on it for the whole, stitched panorama):

Notice how the burnt trees are often re-growing leaves along all of their trunks?  It's an odd look.

Here's a simpler shot, which only looks good if you click on it.

So, the place is well worth visiting, and the National Park looks as if it would be good too, but perhaps not in the middle of summer, and not this trip.

By about 11.30 we were back on the the road to Parkes, and the next science-y installment.

To Canberra and back - Part1

So, the plan this year was to drive down to Canberra during the Christmas - New Year break.  I haven't driving along the inland Newell highway for more than 20 years, but I used to like the drive through some vast open country.  Could do with more geography along parts of it, but no route is perfect.

I used Google maps for directions, which take you through Warwick:

and I've just realised now that if you use Bing maps (or Yahoo maps - neither of these I realised existed til this morning) they take you via Toowoomba, and shows the distance as 692.6 km instead of 699km.  Who makes these decisions, and why did Google Maps make me travel 6.4 km extra?   I am also not so keen on how you have to zoom in very close on the Google Map before you can see the names of all the towns you are going to be travelling through.   The Bing version looks better in that regard.

(And by the way, I have never used GPS and still am fond of old folding paper maps.  This is the first trip where I have used on line maps, and it did prove a bit problematic at one point.)




Anyhow, here's the roughly equivalent Bing map:

So, we left Brisbane on Boxing Day at 9.30, and headed out through Warwick and out through Inglewood to the border town of Goondiwindi.

Inglewood is bigger than I remembered, and I was vaguely aware from farmer's markets in Brisbane that they grow olives out that way.  In fact, I was very surprised at the huge size of one particular olive orchard on your left as you drive west.   It seems to go on forever, and I see from a tourist guide that they are indeed taking olive cultivation very, very seriously:

 Inglewood intends to be the Olive Capital of Australia with some 350,000 olive trees planted; a major olive oil processing plant has been established in Inglewood and this is expected to become the largest in the Southern Hemisphere; with a unique olive themed centre, featuring many olive products and olive businesses and an annual Olive Festival in the olive harvest season, between March and May.

Well, I think we'll have to go back there during olive festival.

The drive from Inglewood to Goondiwindi is the start of the long, flat and pretty dull stretches on the Newell.  But the traffic was light, and we were soon enough at the border town, which now (like most towns along the Newell now) has a McDonald's.  A recurring theme of this trip was going to the golden arches to at least get coffee for me and my wife.  The Goondiwindi staff seemed particularly glum, for some reason.  In fact, rural McDonald's staff never seemed very happy to me this trip.  Perhaps because they were working during the holidays?

Off  down the road, finally heading south, through Moree (a town with lots of shuttered shopfronts, which is usually a sign of an unhappy local aboriginal population in New South Wales country towns.)  Then down to Narrabri.

It was this stretch that I first learnt the fun of cruise control.  Yes, my Toyota Camry has really only ever done short, coastal holiday trips before this, and I had never bothered to learn how to turn on cruise control.  With my wife reading out instructions, I soon learnt how good it can be on long flat stretches, and for this purpose, the Newell is perfect.  I wonder if it is the most cruise control friendly highway in Australia.

I like the way you can learn that the car in front of you is also using it, as you can maintain pretty exact separation for tens of kilometres if you are lucky. 

At Narrabri, a fairly non-descript town, I think we stopped again at a McD for coffee, because my notes indicate the staff were again glum.

The drive from there to Coonabarabran is through a lot of forest reserve, and you do get a bit of up and down.  Scores of dead 'roos too - in some stretches, it seemed lucky to go 200 m without seeing one.

Finally (it is easily an 8 hour trip, with breaks) it was into Coonabarabran.  This is the nicest town on the Newell so far.   And the reason we are staying there (apart from it being about the comfortable limit for one day's driving) is  this:

Well, not really.  That's the remarkably authentic 70's era tiling in the shower in the motel we stayed in.

(And before I continue, for those interested in the fast food details of the Newell Highway towns, Coonabarabran does not feature a McDonald's, but does have Dominos pizza and very large Subway.)

No, the best reason for going to Coonabarabran is because it's the "astronomy capital of Australia."

More on that in Part 2.

Hawking: apparently, no event horizons?

In April last year, I pointed readers to a Nature story about some new confusion regarding the physics of black holes.   Specifically, it's to do with the nature of the event horizon, and whether they have a "firewall" of searing energy.

Now Stephen Hawking has weighed in, questioning whether black holes have an event horizon at all which can create a "firewall".  It's all a tad complicated to summarise, so here are some relevant extracts:

Quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause space-time to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist.

In place of the event horizon, Hawking invokes an “apparent horizon”, a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended. In general relativity, for an unchanging black hole, these two horizons are identical, because light trying to escape from inside a black hole can reach only as far as the event horizon and will be held there, as though stuck on a treadmill. However, the two horizons can, in principle, be distinguished. If more matter gets swallowed by the black hole, its event horizon will swell and grow larger than the apparent horizon.

Conversely, in the 1970s, Hawking also showed that black holes can slowly shrink, spewing out 'Hawking radiation'. In that case, the event horizon would, in theory, become smaller than the apparent horizon. Hawking’s new suggestion is that the apparent horizon is the real boundary. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” Hawking writes.

“The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable,” says Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who collaborated with Hawking in the 1970s. “You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon. But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”

 Don Page then goes on to express some reservations that Hawking's idea really helps, but you can go read that yourself.  As for what happens to information inside a black hole:

If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter would be only temporarily held behind the apparent horizon, which would gradually move inward owing to the pull of the black hole, but would never quite crunch down to the centre. Information about this matter would not destroyed, but would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form, making it almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were.

 As I wrote last April, it's really remarkable that there is so much uncertainty about the nature of objects which are really important in cosmological and other contexts.  

Former Libertarian explains

From Salon, a short account from an ex Libertarian as to what he used to believe and how he used to argue:

...while I supported compassion in the form of assistance to those in need, I opposed the clumsy government mechanisms we relied on for it, not to mention the veiled coercion behind them — where did anyone get the right to enforce their values at the barrel of a gun (meaning taxes), no matter how noble those values might be?

Pretty by-the-books stuff. Libertarianism represented to me a matrix of freedom that could be collapsed onto any particular set of individual values. It was a simple formula to live by: If enough people value X, those people will pay for X, whether or not X = someone else’s interest. Government intervention was at best superfluous to this outcome and at worst distorting of the collective will (measured as the aggregate economy).

When my friend offered the natural response, What if people fail to provide enough for those in need?, I resorted to the tried-and-true strategy of telling him the problem wasn’t a problem. The real problem was taxation or regulation or minimum wage or a failed incentive structure. If people were in need it was because government was preventing the market from providing for them.

What’s interesting to me now is not why this kind of thinking is wrong but why it was once so attractive to me.

I found my way to libertarianism in my teen years when I began reading some of its introductory texts and was attracted to the internal consistency of its policies. If you accepted that the individual was sacrosanct and the government’s only role was to protect the individual, everything else pretty much followed. Unlike mainstream liberalism and conservatism, which were constantly engaged in negotiations between social and economic freedoms, libertarianism was systematically clean and neat. So much so that I quickly stopped concerning myself with how ideas played out in the world. The ideas themselves were enough.

 Sounds like a pretty accurate summary as to the way Libertarians think.

The bumbling authorities mistake me and Cary Grant for someone else

Last night I was watching North by Northwest, the classic tale of a man mistaken by authorities for someone else.

I see that Brian at Catallaxy, a police officer from Victoria, was busy doing the same thing with me yesterday.   Don't put this bit of deduction on your resume to become a detective, Brian, because I have nothing to do with the Twitter account Catallaxy Comments.

Mind you, the aim of the account, to highlight some of the extreme content of threads at Catallaxy, seems quite worthy.  It annoys me that Andrew Bolt, for example, would not tolerate a huge number of comments at Catallaxy on his own blog, but is more than happy to continually refer his readers there where they can get their fill of what they can't say at his own place.   Yet he continually only points in his posts to nasty Left wing comments, never the nasty right wing ones from Catallaxy.  Hypocrite. 

But I don't think Catallaxy Comments is being implemented all that well.   The bar as to what makes it in the account is set too low, so that the most spectacularly stupid or offensive is just being overwhelmed  by the routine ratbaggery that appears there daily. 

If it were me running it, I would cut down the daily content.  I remember some of the classic offensive comments, perhaps the account holder should contact me for some of those to add...

Back to North by Northwest:   I was having an after dinner sip or 10 of some dessert wine while watching it last night when the kids said (as they usually do if I have more than 2 glasses of dinner at night) "don't get drunk!"  I said "hey, everyone in this film is drinking all the time; it's a good film to drink while watching it."

And this morning, I thought, yeah, it actually is the perfect movie for a drinking game with the simplest of rules - drink what Cary (or the other characters) are drinking - or are about to drink? - on screen.  (You can reduce the bourbon to just one nip, however, or you won't survive the night.)

From memory, here is how it would go:  I think he nearly has a cocktail in the bar where he is first mistaken for Kaplan, but is kidnapped before he drinks it.   Has at least a large glass of bourbon forced into him at the Townsend house.  Orders a Gibson on the train when meeting Eve Kendell.  A scotch and water (no ice) with her in the hotel in Chicago.  Has a cup of coffee before being fake shot at Mt Rushmore.  Asks the professor to get him a drink before he escapes from hospital in rapid city.  Eve has champagne "on the rocks" while waiting for the plane to arrive.

Yes, I can see you can get at least 4 pretty potent drinks into you over the course of the movie, with a break towards the end with a cup of coffee.  I think I might have missed some other drinking in the movie.  Next time I watch it (I have never listened to the Ernest Lehman commentary) I'll take notes.

Why do our anti-Keynesian economists ignore the value of the Australian dollar?

A genuine question here for any reader who knows economics.

I've noticed that journalist Adam Creighton at The Australian has become the darling of the "small government, must-cut-spending, Keynesian-policies-will-be-the-death-of-us" set of economists at Catallaxy.  (Julie Novak called him the best economics journalist in Australia.  She means he agrees with her.   Actually, I see that he has been around for some time, being a contributor to the IPA-lite think tank the CIS, and writing many articles that align with the views of Australia's Tea Party-lite economists.)

Anyhow, Creighton has a column in the Australian today in which he attempts to talk up the down side of a slide in the value of the Australian dollar.   He goes as far as to write this:

But officials, politicians and even businesses should be careful what they wish for.

By eroding businesses' and workers' purchasing power, a weaker currency harms far more Australians than it helps. Meanwhile, trying to shift the value of the dollar is even more difficult than knowing what its correct value is.

He starts with the rather extreme example:

Andrew Lilley, 25, an inner-western Sydney professional with an economics degree, says he spends about 70 per cent of his discretionary income online at foreign vendors.

"I pretty much only buy groceries in Australia. I buy all my clothes, music, books and instruments from foreign providers," Lilley tells The Weekend Australian, suggesting the savings are huge.

I suspect Andrew Lilley might read Catallaxy, because I have noticed over recent years that it attracts readers who are proud to crush Australian retail under foot as far as possible by shopping overseas on line. 

People who buy clothes and shoes on line particularly annoy me - I think it is the lowest form of consumer misbehaviour possible to try something on in a shop (as is especially essential in shoes, surely) and then go home and buy it on line.   Yeah fine, pay nothing for the service you just got by a real person in a shop.  Make it harder for the rest of us who like to have shoe shops as part of the retail mix to find a good one near home.

But I digress - Creighton scratches around to find economists who think the reduced value of the dollar isn't really that good a thing, and does not provide a very convincing case.   (I would have thought that in economics, a change in anything can always be found to have a negative impact on someone.)  

His article reminded me of something I have noted here before - in the last few years since the Australian dollar climbed higher and higher, the economists at Catallaxy (and, as far as I have noticed, the right wing economics commentators in The Australian) have shown next to no interest in the effect of the high Australian dollar on the economy.  True, Judith Sloan had one column in The Oz and at the blog on the topic in December 2012, but she didn't even spend much time on its effects, just whether it was possible for the RBA to do anything about it.  She decided not, and then no one at the blog ever mentioned it again.  (Well, as far as I have noticed.)

Now, with Creighton's column,  I get the suspicion that they perhaps are not only not interested in the topic, but kind of like the dollar being high. 

Is it their ideological commitment to fighting government spending, size and regulation that leads then to (nearly) never talk about other factors that have a major effect on the economy?

Or is there something in their whole attitude to currency that means the Australian anti-Keynesians just don't want to talk about it?

Certainly, the Tea Party Right in the US is known for its obsession with the return to the gold standard;  as far as I know, the Australian anti-Keynesians won't go there, but I don't really know why when it includes Steve Kates, who is as emphatically "Tea Party" as they come.

Some possible insight into Sinclair Davidson's views about money turned up in this post this week, and while I am no economist, this statement to my ear had a ring of eccentricity about it:

 Now I’m happy to believe that fiat money will result in inflation, and I’m happy to believe that economies can and will shrink or grow, and I’m happy to believe that goods and services can become more or less valuable as relative prices change.  I’m not convinced that fiat money can result in deflation – paper money becoming more valuable? 

What I half expect is that Davidson and Kates have some views about currency that they just don't like to talk about.

But if anyone has any other theories about their lack of acknowledgement of the detrimental effect of the high Australian dollar, let me know.

Update:   an anonymous comment below reminds me that Sinclair Davidson did talk about the Australian dollar in a 2009 WSJ column.  I am pretty sure I have read it before, but had forgotten it.

Reading it with the benefit of hindsight, the article highlights the deficiencies with his permanently ideological driven analysis.

At the time of writing, the Australian dollar was on the way up, and it is noted that "It is possible that the Australian dollar could eventually reach parity or even beyond."   Indeed, this possibility came true: 

Davidson's main point in the column is that the Australian approach to not taking steps to try to intervene with the dollar's rise was the right one to take.   Now, it seems to me that at that time of the early rise, he may have been right, as (so I understand) intervention in currency markets is not without risks and problems, but his reasoning is purely ideologically driven.  For example:

 A depreciating U.S. dollar is a market signal that the U.S. needs to export more and save more. It is a symptom of extremely loose monetary policy and high government spending in Washington. It is also a warning about inflation, given a dollar today buys fewer goods than it did a year ago. U.S. policy makers are reinforcing this cycle by refusing to reform America's "too-big-to-fail" financial system and avoiding tough decisions on spending priorities. In a sense, the falling dollar is a signal that the U.S. needs reform at home.

Central banks abroad that buy dollars to control the dollar's fall are both ignoring and subverting these market signals.

The assumption is that "market signals" on currency always point the way to what is good for every nation on earth - the currency market always knows what is best.   Kinda naive, no?  

And what if the US government completely contradicts the so called "market signal", as Davidson would argue it has, over the next four years?   Well, from the chart above, you can see exactly what happens, but because he is ideologically driven, I would bet my last dollar that he would never change his prescription from what it was in 2009.

And what about the attitude here:  " If the prices of Australian goods and services are rising on world markets, this provides a clear incentive for Australian firms to either reduce their costs or to improve the quality of their offerings."  

Yeah sure, just how much, and how quickly, does he think quality can improve to compensate for most of a decade under US80c followed by an extremely rapid rise, and 3 year pause, at above parity?  And how far does he think wages should drop to compensate for such a rapid 25c rise?

The other thing about the chart above is the reminder of just remarkably low the Australian dollar was during the entire Howard government, versus how remarkably high it was during the entire Gillard government.  The effects of this on the performance of the Australian economy under Labor is virtually never acknowledged at Catallaxy.

Interesting asteroid news

Massive asteroid seen steaming off : Nature News & Comment

Ceres seems to intermittently vent water vapour.  Lots of water might make it a particularly human friendly place to visit or live.  But then again, if the water boils because of internal radioactivity, maybe not.

We'll soon know more about it:

Also mysterious is why Ceres has a substantially greater abundance of
water than Vesta, an asteroid that orbits the sun at approximately the
same distance, Campins writes in a related News & Views article.
If Vesta and Ceres started out with different amounts of water, that
suggests that the asteroids may have originally formed in different
parts of the solar system. The same sort of cosmic migrations, Campins
notes, could have brought asteroids and comets deep into the solar
system, seeding the Earth with water as well as a variety of organic
chemicals — and thereby playing a considerable role in the origin and
evolution of life.

NASA’s Dawn probe — launched in September 2007 and due to arrive at Ceres early in 2015
— could offer answers to such mysteries. “We don’t really have to
guess: in a year we’ll be there,” says Christopher Russell, a planetary
scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead
investigator for the mission. As well as taking high-resolution images
of Ceres, Dawn’s sensors will help to map various minerals on its
surface.

If only he was really still in Opposition

Tony Abbott uses global stage to take a swipe at Labor over financial crisis

As quite a few people have been saying, it's like Tony Abbott can't make the mental shift from being Opposition Leader to PM:

According to the Prime Minister, the Howard government had helped the economy but Labor had undone all the good work.

''In the decade prior to the crisis, consistent surpluses
and a preference for business helped my country, Australia, to become
one of the world's best-performing economies,'' he told the high level
group containing many of the world's top business and political leaders.

''Then a subsequent government decided that the crisis had changed the rules and that we should spend our way to prosperity.''

The comments seem to suggest Australia did not need to
stimulate the economy through 2008-09 under Labor, despite the
near-unanimous advice of economists and Treasury to do just that.

The stimulus program has been accused of waste, such as the
pink batts scheme, elements of the school halls program, and cheques
sent to the deceased or to people living permanently overseas.

However, the Australian government also received widespreadpraise and recognition from around the world for its aggressive response to the global challenge with swift policies credited with avoiding the recession from which virtually all comparable economies are yet to fully recover.

The highlighted line in particular indicates that Abbott has been soaking up the exaggerated and simplistic catch phrases of the likes of the IPA.

He really needs to be a one term PM.

[Blogger really has some formatting issues which are hard to sort out lately.  Sorry.]

The problem with nuclear

I've been meaning to note that John Quiggin's recent post about why nuclear power is not likely to be any sort of fast magic bullet in terms of getting the world off carbon based energy is an interesting read.

I wasn't aware that there had really been any discussion of small modular nuclear as a future option for Australia, but it appears there has.   JQ is very skeptical, given that they are being developed slowly in the US, let alone anywhere else.  

I would question why it has to be this way, though.   When nations need to, the US in particular, they are capable of incredibly rapid and large scale development of new technologies (the Manhattan Project being the obvious example.)

For years I've been saying that with nuclear, it seems that what's been lacking is a serious attempt at national or international scale to decide on which new nuclear options are best for passive safety, rapid development and deployment, and then diverting all effort down that pathway.  One suspects that the smaller scale nuclear would have to be capable of more rapid deployment, if only because the infrastructure around them does not have to be so massive.

But JQ might be right - it may be best in the short and long run to try to by pass nuclear altogether.  I can't really tell...

The Australian and Indonesia

When I posted in December that The Australian's attempt to justify Rudd era telephone tapping of the Indonesian President's wife seemed a bizarrely harmful thing to do while Australia was trying to smooth over the relationship with that country, I had a hard time noticing anyone else making the same observation.

But I felt vindicated when I noticed a few days later that the Lowy Institute blog seemed to agree, although the focus on its story was more criticising the intelligence community for running with that "defence". 

Now the same commentator (Stephen Grenville) from Lowy has targetted The Australian specifically:

The national broadsheet, The Australian, has taken a leading role on the current tensions with Indonesia. Based on a 'well-connected insider who asked not to be named', the paper made the case that the phone tapping of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's wife was just a normal part of commonly accepted practice. SBY shouldn't feel insulted by the justification given: we had to do it because she is the power behind the throne.

More recently, The Australian gave prime space to the argument that the 'boats policy (is) a boon for Jakarta as well.' 

How can we make any sense of this? Are naval intrusions into Indonesia’s territorial waters actually helpful for SBY? Is his palpable anger at this and the phone-tapping just part of the usual shadow-play?

 And the reason Grenville thinks The Australian runs with these unhelpful Indonesian stories may well be in the ill considered attitude of its Chief Editor Chris Mitchell, who Grenville shows has made exaggerated anti Indonesian claims before.

It really seems clear to me to be a case of the Right in Australian media and politics going out of its way to hurt Indonesian relationships for domestic political benefit (being seen to be tough on boat arrivals.)

By the way, the Lowy Institute blog and website really seems pretty good.  Onto the roll it goes.

Blog(roll)worthy

There are a few sites worth adding to the blogroll, and I'll introduce them here:

*  Climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon has long been worth reading, even if I think he tends to be too conservative in terms of staying out of the debate on what response to climate change is appropriate.  (He is rather like James Annan in that respect.)    I see that he is one of the key players in establishing and posting at a new group climate science blog Climate Change National Forum.  This effort looks well worth following. 

*  Sou at Hotwhopper is not a climate scientist as such, but she really does an excellent job at shooting down claims made at Watts Up With That.   Really puts the effort in, she does.

* Homer Paxton comments here pretty frequently and I've been mean and not added his blog to the roll til now.  His Friday links are pretty comprehensive and worthwhile, and he's banned from Catallaxy, so that adds to his credibility (on most issues, at least...)

*  Someone, somewhere I was reading today, recommended Ed Yong as one of his favourite science story aggregators.  Yes, his blog (now at National Geographic) does look pretty interesting.   I liked his story at Nature, too, about how that pest stomach bug Helicobacter pylori seems to be behind unusual outbreaks of stomach cancer.

Deniers losing

An insider's story of the global attack on climate science

An interesting account here of the New Zealand legal action which spectacularly failed to show that temperature adjustments by their weather bureau were wrong or fraudulent.

I also saw recently that Mark Steyn's lawyers have withdrawn in his defence of defamation action by Michael Mann.

Climate change denialists are too silly to realise when they are on the losing side of legal action.

Update:   Hello, Steyn-iacs.   There certainly seem to be a lot of you out there....

You need to take a leaf from the likes of Roger Scruton (conservative philosopher), Kerry Emmanuel, Barry Bickmore (Republican climate scientists), Katheryn Hayhoe (evangelical Christian climate scientist):   believing scientists is not an intrinsically anti-conservative thing to do. 

Your ideological commitment to not believing a well established consensus of scientific opinion is a scandal on the Right of politics in the US and Australia.  Just because Al Gore did a documentary (which I never watched, incidentally), you're never going to believe the science? 

The Fat Controller strikes again

Middle East Potato Scandal

Kuwait launches probe into allegations over Israeli potatoes | GulfNews.com

Manama: Kuwait’s commerce ministry has launched an investigation into
reports that Israeli potatoes were being sold in cooperative societies.

“The ministry is currently coordinating with several parties to reach a
conclusion about the allegations and ensure that they are not
malicious,” ministry sources told local daily Al Kuwaitiya.

“The ministry has a zero-tolerance policy towards the import and sale
of Israeli products and if there are Israeli potatoes in the stores,
there will be stringent action against those involved,” the sources
said.

Cheese, subs and fresh air

BBC News - USS Nautilus: A record-breaking sub

I like the quirkiness of some of the anecdotes here from a guy who was on the first crew of the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus.  For example:

"I hated cottage cheese, but one time we stayed submerged for a long
time and when the ship surfaced I began to crave cottage cheese. I think
breathing the recycled air changed my metabolism."

When they surfaced and began to pump fresh air back into the Nautilus "it was so clean and so sweet it made you light-headed"...

"For every 100 feet in depth, there's 44 pounds of pressure per square
inch of the vessel. So when we went deep in the ocean, the hull would
compress and the locker doors would pop open."...

"The US Navy sent psychologists on board the Nautilus because they
were concerned about the effects on the personalities and mental health
of the men who would be confined in such a small amount of space for
long periods."

They found no impact, he says, but some submariners would talk gibberish and pretend to be crazy.

Quantum consciousness on the cards again?

Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' corroborates theory of consciousness | e! Science News

Penrose & Hameroff's much derided theory that quantum effects in brain cell microtubules are key to animal and human consciousness seems to still be a possibility.

It works for the guys

Confronting a Sexual Rite of Passage in Malawi - Beenish Ahmed - The Atlantic

We all know that some tribal societies have had the oddest ideas about how to mark the transition of puberty, but I don't recall reading before about how they deal with it in Malawi.  (People who think the Dutch take sex education too far too early just should not read it.)

The main thing that struck me while reading the article is that teenage boys must consider it a fantastic system.    The adverse consequences in terms of health seem to primarily fall on the girls/young women, although of course some guys run the risk of getting HIV too. It's remarkable how the emphasis seems to be entirely on teaching girls how to please men.

It seems amazing that it has not earlier come under attack.

Rhodes scholarships don't seem to have great results...

Tony Abbott wants Syrian 'goodies' to help and end the civil unrest | News.com.au

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott arrived at the World Economic Forum
repeating his line that the Syrian situation was "baddies vs. baddies." ...

“The difficulty in Syria is that - as I famously, perhaps infamously
said during the election campaign - it often seems like a case that
involves baddies versus baddies,” he said.

“I guess the best way for all of them to demonstrate that at least
some of them are goodies is to lay down their arms and try to ensure
that the conflict… starts to subside.”

Judith Curry: credibility in freefall

Rabett Run: Curry vs. Curry


More proof, if it was needed, that Judith Curry has no credibility in the way she approaches the overall question of climate change.

Quite serious if correct

Frequency of extreme El Ninos to double as globe warms : Nature News & Comment


And here's another report from ABC: Extreme El Nino events set to double

An inconsistency unexplained (yes, he's still talking about kid's movies)

I realised today that I seem to have inconsistent views on animation.

In my negative comments about Frozen, I said that computer animation that is close to photorealistic but which portrays humans with a cartoonish aspect (consider the enormous eyes in Frozen, for example) is distracting, as it makes the characters look like moving dolls.

Yet in my positive review of ParaNorman and Coraline, I made it clear that I can get a very particular kind of enjoyment from well done stop motion animation, where the characters really are "moving dolls".

This does seem odd, and I am not sure of the explanation.

I suppose I should say that it is not as if stop motion per se makes for a pleasing film - God knows there was a lot of stop motion dross made in the 60's and 70's for kids' TV (Christmas themed specials in particular) and I was never a fan.    But then again, the quality of the animation in those films compared to the output of Laika or Aardman movies at their best just bears no comparison.

(Speaking of Aardman, I enjoyed Rex the Runt on TV a great deal, and like the wry humour of Wallace and Grommit, but their last movie "The Pirates" was a serious "miss".)

So, to enjoy a stop motion film, it has to still have a good script.  But when it does, the appreciation of all the manual, hand crafted work that has gone into creating them somehow makes them very special.

As to why I don't like computer animation when it has the same sort of visual effect - I am still not sure.

I was partly inspired to think about this while listening to a repeat of The Uncanny Life of Puppets on Radio National.  I have good reason to be thinking about puppets over the last year - I did, after all, see one of the most spectacularly successful stage shows featuring a giant puppet only 6 months ago.

I think that this comment on why puppets can be effective is perhaps relevant to stop motion animation:

Amanda Smith:  In playing around with scale - puppets are often smaller or larger than life size - in that playing around with scale, and in looking lifelike but not too lifelike - as puppets also often are - is this something to do with their kind of strange compelling power? In looking sort of human but not entirely?

Neville Tranter: It’s very strange because what happens to the audience is: the audience know it’s a puppet. Everything is transparent. You can see right through it and it’s all in the imagination. It’s pure suggestion. But at the same time the fact that you can see how it’s being done makes it  even - strangely enough - it makes it even more magical.

Oddly, last week I also heard a bit of Phillip Adams talking to stage actor/director Robyn Nevin, and they mentioned how the very artificiality of stage productions is sometimes what makes them  particularly memorable. 

All very complicated, our perceptions of representations of life, isn't it?

 

Marriage and divorce

A couple of odd stories about marriage, divorce and religion:

*  Utah polling indicates that in the space of a mere 10 years the State has gone from aggressively against same sex marriage to a 50/50 "meh" attitude.   

While I am still completely unconvinced about gay marriage, it is polling like this in Western countries which makes me think it is inevitable and not worth fretting about.   I suspect it will come in and be an option taken up by fewer and fewer couples over time anyway.

*  An American study indicates it's not good for your marriage to even live near a bunch of conservative Protestants:

Divorce is higher among religiously conservative Protestants – and even drives up divorce rates for other people living around them, a new study finds.

Paranomal & ParaNorman

A couple of nights ago I feel asleep on the sofa while the TV was on, but woke up in time to see the last half or so of Paranormal Activity, the faux reality movie very much in the vein of Blair Witch Project.  It made a lot of money, at least compared to the cost to make it.  (Box Office Mojo says $193 million on a - wait for it - $15,000 budget.)  So there have been several sequels, not that they seem to attract much critical attention now.

I thought it was crap.   Sure, watching it late at night while everyone else in the house is asleep made it feel a bit creepy at times (it's really the silence that is effective), but by the time it got to the climax, it was just silly.   Bizarrely, it got an 83% approval score on Rottentomatoes, although I see David Stratton found it "extremely unthrilling, very obvious, very clichéd. We've seen it all before."   Hear hear.

The second movie I watched this weekend with "para" in the title was last years ParaNorman.   I bought it on DVD for my daughter as a Christmas gift (not the only one, I hasten to add) and this was the second time we watched it together.

It is a terrific film.

Made by the same company (Laika) that made the very impressive, if somewhat narratively unclear, Coraline, it uses the same beautiful and engaging stop motion animation to great effect.   If you liked the look and feel of Coraline, you will also love this movie.

Apart from its look, the script combines humour that is sometimes slapstick, sometimes beautifully subtle; scares and (honestly) emotional depth that may get to the adults watching more than the kids.

I'm happy to see I am not alone in enjoying it - there's an 87% approval rating at RT, and it got an Oscar nomination last year (but losing out to Brave - what an absolute travesty of a decision that was!)

It didn't make much money at the box office - $107 million on a $60 million budget; and even Coraline was only marginally more financially successful. (I am also disturbed to see that the very enjoyable Wes Anderson stop motion version of Fantastic Mr Fox was pretty much a financial disaster that barely recovered its budget.  Why don't more people go to see these films at the cinema?   Done well, they have a "hand made" warmth and charm that is just a pleasure to watch in every frame. And there sure doesn't seem to be a lot of justice in the world when the cheapo Paranormal Activity makes so much money for so little craft.)     But it seems at least that Laika is successful enough that they have another film coming out in 2014, and this very charming teaser trailer gives you an idea as to why their films cost so much:



I see there is also a great short video from the studio about the making of ParaNorman:



May this company continue to have critical success, and make more money in the future too.

A likely explanation for some ball lightning

Natural ball lightning probed for the first time - environment - 16 January 2014 - New Scientist

I don't think it can possibly explain all ball lightning - such as the well attested cases where small balls have appeared inside houses and even an airplane - but it appears there is a good explanation for one type:

In 2012, Jianyong Cen and his colleagues at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, were observing a thunderstorm in Qinghai, China with video cameras and spectrographs. Purely by chance, they recorded a ball lightning event. When a bolt struck the ground, a glowing ball about 5 metres wide rose up and travelled about 15 metres, disappearing after 1.6 seconds.

The spectrograph revealed that the main elements in the ball were the same as those found in the soil: silicon, iron and calcium. The observations support a theory for making ball lightning put forth in 2000 by John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Abrahamson surmised that when lightning hits the ground, the sudden, intense heat can vaporise silicon oxide in the dirt, and a shockwave blows the gas up into the air. If there's also carbon in the soil, perhaps from dead leaves or tree roots, it will steal oxygen from the silicon oxide, leaving a bundle of pure silicon vapour. But the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere rapidly re-oxidises the hot ball of gas, and this reaction makes the orb glow briefly.

The theory garnered support in 2006, when scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel were able to create ball lightning in the lab by firing mock lightning at sheets of silicon oxide. The event in China marks the first time such an orb has been captured in nature with scientific instruments.

Movies really could be much shorter...

Neuroscientists find the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds

Not such a great idea

Privatising Australia Post � Harry Clarke

I like it when Harry Clarke gets in a narky mood, and the second line in this post about privatising Australia Post is a great example:

Its a weak argument from a posturing bunch of low-intellect phonies who are promoting self-interest, neo-con ideology and third-rate economics.

The reasons why are set out succinctly in the post, and I find them pretty convincing.

Heinlein taken down

Libertarian types like to quote Robert Heinlein's comment that "an armed society is a polite society", yet anyone who has been to the United States can't see much evidence for that.  (I am surprised that I can Google up no evidence of a sociologist ever doing study of this: comparing States which have the most lax concealed carry laws with those with much tighter restrictions.)

Of course libertarians are not much interested in evidence anyway, they just have an ideological agenda to run; but it seems pretty obvious to normal folk that an armed society is not primarily a more polite society (if it is more polite at all) - it's primarily a more dangerous society for getting shot.

And the thing that really strikes me about the last year or two of shooting tragedies in the US is how readily it's glossed over that it was legally purchased weapons that were involved the killing.  I mean, doesn't that make it obvious that it doesn't matter that the buyer appears to be a "good guy" at the time of purchase:  what matters is how the gun eventually comes to be used.   In other words, the problem is the guns being everywhere.

A good article in The Guardian puts this all in perspective.  Here are the crucial paragraphs:

The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.

To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.

Stunning figures that for any sane person means we are very glad to live under Australian gun laws rather than American.   Here's the final paragraph from the article:

 You keep a gun out of the argument, you will save lives. This is not hypothetical. A person may be intent on killing someone else, but it is simply harder to do with anything else. That's why forms of homicide other than guns account for only about a third of all homicides. Someone gets angry at someone else, they may reach for a weapon. If we make guns harder to get, by requiring a test for the license, or by banning handguns more broadly, the one at hand might be far less deadly. Like, say, popcorn.

Another fake crisis considered

Economists dispute audit commission's federal government growth claims

This time on the size of government.  Some of these figures are from the ACTU, which means they should be approached with some caution, but still, here it is:

It says the commission should also be aware the size of government has not ''expanded significantly'' if it is measured by reference to government employment.

''In June 1996, the Commonwealth employed 354,800 people in the general government sector. As at June 2012, the number stood at just 250,000.

''Commonwealth government employment is lower now, as a share of the population or total employment, than it has ever been before. ABS statistics show that the number of people employed in the general government sector [across all levels of government] fell in 2011-12 for the first time since 1998-99.''

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows Australia has one of the lowest-taxing, lowest-spending governments in the OECD.

According to the most recent figures, Australian government spending accounts for 35 per cent of nominal GDP. In the euro area, it is 49.5 per cent. In the US it is 38 per cent

And Andrew Leigh weighs in:

''It's recognised by all serious commentators that the size of government in Australia is pretty close to Korea and the United States, and far smaller than Sweden and Finland,'' Mr Leigh said.

''Australia is a low-taxing country and the tax-to-GDP share fell by about one percentage point under the previous government.''

Sounds pretty convincing to me. 

Already prepared for next Halloween

Found here.  And no, I would not wear speedos with it. 

Physics worth doing

Backreaction: Why quantize gravity?

Poor Bee Hossenfelder isn't having much luck in finding funding for her field of quantum gravity, but she makes an elegant argument in this post as to why this is a subject worth research dollars.  

Fake crisis already averted

Australia ranked one of the three best countries to do business in

Interesting to note that it was a conservative think tank claiming this - before there was any talk of an Abbott "repeal day".   Apparently, our nightmarish over regulation looks different from the US.  

Missing heat in some detail

Climate change: The case of the missing heat : Nature News

Here's a pretty lengthy and interesting discussion on the "missing heat" issue, mainly concentrating on what goes on in the Pacific Ocean.   You know, PDO, El Nino, etc.

It notes that there is a minority view that AGW might be driving the lengthy La Nina conditions which, if true, might provide a long term mechanism for some cooling.   (It would mean models need adjusting down.)   However, many modelling attempts apparently indicate the opposite, that longer term AGW will drive more El Nino's.

The article ends on this note:

Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

It sounds a bit peculiar, doesn't it, talking of the Pacific as if it is one dish of water that "shloshes" about from one side to the other.  

A Quiggin post where Spielberg gets a mention

John Quiggin - The Repubs won’t Douthat (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

This Quiggin post is of interest because he again notes the movement ("defection") of several formerly Republican intellectuals to the left in the US, and predicts that Douthat may have to do the same if he is intellectually honest.

Sounds plausible.

But also - Steven Spielberg as a Democrat funder gets mentioned in comments a couple of times.  Seems some people think he would oppose tax increases on the top 20% percent,  but how dare they pre judge him on that!

In other Spielberg observations (by me):   I have been meaning to note for some time that 2013 was kind of depressing on the upcoming movie front because no one knows what Spielberg will next direct.   It seems he has been uncommitted to anything for about a year now, and I have no idea what he has been doing with himself.

I suppose he's entitled to a break, but please, Steven, come back!  I have a few ideas if you are short of them.

(Update:  In other Spielbergian news, I noticed somewhere recently that Poltergeist is to be remade.  Why?  In a sign of the bankruptcy of novel ideas in Hollywood, it seems a hell of a lot of 1980's films are now slated for remake.  None of them as good as Poltergeist, though.)

More from the "only in America" files

*  12 year old boy carries sawn off shot gun to school and shoots two students.   Yeah, Heinlein, an armed society is a polite society, is it?   (I thought about that yesterday too about the story where an argument in a cinema turned into a fatal shooting by at 71 year old.)

*  Neo nazis try to take over a town. 

Evil Twins

BBC News - Twin DNA test: Why identical criminals may no longer be safe

I didn't realise there have been a number of cases around the world where prosecutions have been thwarted by the police being unable to be sure which identical twin committed the offence.

Evil president sounds pretty normal to me

What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic

Nothing special about this report about what's its like to be in a cafe when Obama turns up for a staged media event, except that it makes the President sound rather normal.

I suspect Rush Limbaugh will still find something sinister about it.   (Limbaugh is the subject of another Atlantic article today, which notes his recent explanation that he intuitively knows true Conservatives are right about everything, and never sexually harass people.  Republicans who have strayed from the "true Conservative" line on anything - such as Chritie - don't get the same treatment though.)

Surprising coral

Coral reefs in Palau surprisingly resistant to naturally acidified waters

Scientists have found corals in one place with surprisingly highly "acidified" water which are doing surprisingly well.   They hasten to point out this goes against a lot of other examples in the world, but the reason why this bunch are fine remains very unclear.

Biology is very complicated...

Fun research

Reflections in the eye contain identifiable faces

Has this already been used in a crime or science fiction show?   I feel pretty sure it has, but can't remember where.

Scientific explanation for beer goggles

New study shows alcohol impacts vision by 30 per cent

Proof that Second Amendment nutters are vindictive nutters

Target: Me - Dick Metcalf - POLITICO Magazine

Read what happens when a gun loving, life long, career shooter and journalist makes a legal observation deemed to be heresy amongst his kin:

“Way too many gun owners seem to believe any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement,” I wrote. “The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”

It's a miracle...sorta

Miracle fruit brings a change in taste › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (ABC Science)

While in Canberra on holiday we went to Questacon, the gigantic kids' science centre, and in its shop I found "miracle fruit" tablets.  We gave them a try last night at home.

This red berry fruit has featured on some TV programs in the last few years, and an interesting account of what they do (make sour acid things like a lemon taste sweet) is at the link above.  The thing you buy at the shop is a biggish tablet made from the dried pulp of the fruit.

The effect really is interesting to experience, not just because it makes lemon taste entirely palatable (to the detriment of your tooth enamel no doubt),  but because (as Karl says) it makes it taste really intensely sweet, rather as if you have popped a few saccharine tablets on your tongue at once.  And the effect seemed to last quite a long time.   Normal sweet things aren't much changed in flavour.

I was interested to read in Karl's account that in the early 1970's, it was hoped that it may be used as an artificial sweetener of sorts:

It took until 1968 for two separate groups of scientists to isolate the active ingredient. It turned out to be a chemical that was mostly protein with about 191 amino acids, and about 14 per cent carbohydrate (sugars such as mannose, galactose and fucose). The active ingredient was given the name 'miraculin'.

Soon after miraculin was isolated, Robert Harvey, an American biomedical postgraduate student, became aware of its wonderful property. 

At the time, the artificial sweeteners (which have sweetness, and virtually zero kilojoules) had a slightly noticeable after-taste. 

But Robert Harvey realised that miraculin did not. He tried mightily to market it as an alternative sweetener, one that was based entirely upon a natural product. 

But in 1974, just as he was about to launch it, the US Food and Drugs Administration refused to classify it as 'generally recognised as safe', despite the West Africans having eaten miraculin for centuries with no problems. 

Robert Harvey could not afford the several years of testing needed, so miraculin never made it into the marketplace.

All rather interesting...

Just get Bolt on board and be done with

Ha!  The intellectual, um, bogan-isation? of the Catallaxy blog is nearly complete, with "come back and fight, you Lefties, there's still a culture war I want to win"  Nick Cater now becoming a regular poster there, apparently.

The blog has gone into a tail spin of intellectual credibility over the last couple of years - for any post that actually contains something useful in terms of economic analysis (it happens about once every three or four months now) there will be scores of posts of the kind where Judith Sloan tosses her hair and complains about all the tosh from teachers and Greenies she had to put up with over the years;  Steve Kates doing his excruciatingly simplistic Tea Party/Fox News analysis of US politics (when he's not explaining again how he's the only economist who really understands Say's Law);  and Sinclair Davidson hyperventilating about how anyone (including Jews) who dares question the wisdom of repealing s18 of the Racial Discrimination Act is an enemy of All Things Good.  (The IPA campaign on freedom of speech has been the most hyperbolic think tank campaign I can ever recall.)

What I don't understand is how these people do not see that the way they talk on this blog harms their credibility generally.  The blog is certainly, to my mind, a thriving advertisement against any economics student even contemplating going to RMIT. 

Libertarians think a society where this can happen is a good idea

Man shot dead at movies after texting | World news | theguardian.com

A retired Florida policeman has been charged with murder after allegedly shooting a man who texted during a film.

Authorities said Curtis Reeves, 71, and Chad Oulson, 43, got into an argument before the screening of the film Lone Survivor when Reeves asked Oulson to stop texting.

“Somebody throws popcorn. I’m not sure who threw the popcorn,” said witness Charles Cummings. “And then bang, he was shot.”

Who knows until they are visited

BBC News - Few asteroids are worth mining, suggests Harvard study

There's an enormous amount of uncertainty, it seems, as to the number of asteroids which may be of the metallic iron-nickel variety which is presumably the main type worth mining.

A pro space mining source also claims this in the article, and count me as surprised:

"We have only discovered 1% of the asteroids in the Solar System - and we are discovering them at a larger and larger rate. We discover two or three asteroids a day. If we get from 1% to 10%, then the 650,000 asteroids we have discovered jumps to 6.5 million."

Some startling figures

Quark Soup by David Appell: Climate Change: The Next 10,000 Years

David Appell has been reading up on how long human induced climate change is likely to last.  The answer seems to be - at least 10,000 years.  (!)

Time to look at fertilizing the oceans again, perhaps, as the only large-ish scale means of reducing CO2 that seems vaguely possible.