Better than it used to be

Energy futures part 2: Hydro, ocean waves and wind - The Science Show - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

When a new technology starts to take off, even if it is the result of a government policy that sees it subsidised, I think its safe to assume that the technology will improve and may even reach a critical mass where its benefits are clear.

This episode of the Science Show, featuring people from the industry of course, indicates that this may be the case with wind power.  For example:

Nathan Steggel: The reality is that it's a relatively new industry; 20 years ago there was pretty much no wind energy installed around the world. But the costs have fallen dramatically, particularly with the increase in size of turbines. One of the interesting things with the wind resource is that as you go higher in the atmosphere, the level of wind gets higher, and so these larger turbines that reach up higher into the sky essentially and have bigger blades that can capture more of the energy are many times more efficient than the older generation of turbines.

Carl Smith:
Back at the Woodlawn wind farm, Miles George from Infigen Energy says not only are wind turbines able to tap into more of the wind resource, they're doing that more efficiently.

Miles George:
There's two factors that go into efficiency. One is the theoretical capture of the wind. A modern three-bladed turbine is very good at doing that, capturing close to the theoretical capacity to capture the wind. And the other factor is what is the energy capture relative to the maximum that could be achieved if the wind was blowing 100% all year? We call that the capacity factor. And in Australia, and including at this wind farm, it's around about 33% thereabouts would be typical for a wind farm. That is, the amount of energy that is generated is about 33% of what it would be if the machine was running flat-out all year. In Australia you can get significantly higher capacity factors than that.
In Western Australia we have over 40% capacity factors. There are others like that, particularly in Tasmania, very strong wind. So it depends very much on the location.

Miles George: It's both. So the technology has improved significantly over the last 15 years. The machines today are more than double the size of machines some time ago. The fact that they are bigger means that they are higher up and the wind speed is higher as you get above the land. That is a big factor. Then the other factor is the wind speed itself, which is very variable. You have people like us and others who go out looking for sites like this one that exhibit all the characteristics you want for a good wind farm, and they are obviously good wind, close proximity to the electricity grid so we can connect our power up, and also importantly community acceptance. It's really important we build assets that are going to last for 25, 30-plus years. We want to make sure we have a good relationship with the local community. So we've always treated that third criterion as just as important if not more important than the other two.

David Leyonhjelm, of course, seems to disagree that wind companies are interested in good community relationships.  But we know who he takes his advice from, and he makes no mention of the activities of the anti-wind activists in drumming up dubious science against wind.

But back to the improvements in wind energy, and how to make fair comparisons in cost:

Miles George: The cost of wind energy has come down dramatically with the increase in scale that has occurred over the last 15 years, to the point now where in some jurisdictions globally, wind is now competitive with other technologies like coal and gas. But it's important that we compare apples with apples. We are talking about comparing new-build technology, like a new wind farm, with a new coal-fired plant, for example, and in particular a coal-fired plant that has the appropriate emissions controls on it. If you are talking about that level, then wind is becoming competitive quite quickly.

The issue in Australian is that wind energy has to compete with 50 and 60-year-old coal-fired plants that are already fully depreciated and therefore is only paying its short-run marginal costs we call it, in other words just covering the costs of its fuel, all of the plant is already written off. So wind is competitive in new-build, not so competing against a 60-year-old plant. But I don't think anything would be competitive with a 60-year-old plant.

Interesting.

In the same show, the one anti-wind person quoted (who follows all of the Leyonhjelm lines about infrasound and seasickness, etc) ends up coming out with this, showing he is motivated by more than just concern for health effects and how they look:

Carl Smith: Do you see a place for them anywhere?

Tony Hodgson: Yes, as long as they are not subsidised, right? Of course.

 

The internet and the intensification of stupidity

Look, modern technology is truly wondrous.  I own a telephone that you can now buy for $59 and it will read the radio signal from a few satellites, do some calculations and pinpoint me on the face of the planet within about 10m, possibly less.   How awesome is that?  $59 to usefully access the signal from atomic clocks in orbit?   I could also be dictating this entire post into the phone, with pretty good accuracy, if only I could work out the weird and convoluted Google account system with sufficient certainty that I was still maintaining some skerrick of privacy.  

But for all of this, what price have we paid as a result of modern communications, including in major part the internet?

This came to mind yet again last night after watching the 1958 Gregory Peck movie "The Big Country".   I'm pretty sure I had seen it decades ago, as I remembered something about Peck navigating across the treeless plains with a compass.  But it was great to re-watch a classic style Western again.

Except, in retrospect, it wasn't all that "classic" at all, really.   It is very liberal thematically:  probably that accounts for Gregory Peck's involvement, as I see he co-produced the movie as well.

Without going into too much plot detail, the retired sea captain played by Mr Peck goes West to meet up with his fiancée and her family, not knowing that her father and the near neighbours ("white trash" she calls them - I didn't know the phrase had that lengthy a heritage) have been feuding for years over water access to a river.  (Although I may have missed it, I'm not sure the story is all that specific about how the feud started.)  Our hero in fact attempts to take on the role of peacemaker between these rather pointlessly fuelling clans,  and restrains himself from fighting for his own honour on more than one occasion.  The resolution of the matter is readily seen as an allegorical take on Cold War era mutually assured destruction, with both sides (sort of) losing.

Why does this all bring to mind the current bout* of American Right wing stupidity?  Because it struck me that George Clooney is the modern day equivalent in terms of politically motivated actors (although with more sex) and the recent example of the pre-emptive attack of the Drudge and Breitbart flying monkeys on his Tomorrowland movie shows the power of the internet to gather and cement political opinion against a commercial product.  (OK, many liberal critics were cool on the movie too, so I am not saying that Right wing nutters offended at a movie mentioning climate change is the only reason it was not a commercial success, but stay with me here...)

The thing is, here in the 1950's (and into the early 1960's, when Peck again trod into race relations with To Kill a Mockingbird) you have a huge Hollywood star making movies with liberal themes in a country with (as now) more than it's fair share of strident right wingers.  But did they have the power to band together and reassure each other that this guy was, like, the death of America and all that is great in the nation because he was a liberal?   No, they did not.

See,  people with idiosyncratic stupidity used to have put effort into finding each other and their favourite figureheads.  They had to buy a book, read a magazine, write a letter, go to a meeting on the other side of town, etc, to find the false re-assurance of shared, nutty, offensive and/or dangerous opinion and interpretation of the world.

Now, they just log on, and have virtually live interaction (or, failing that, daily updates) with their favourite polemicists and dis-informers.   They have a media mogul who can see how to make a megabuck from political opinion he doesn't actually always endorse, and so sets up a cable network that is designed to reinforce disaffection with the state of their culture and demonise the other side of politics.

The example of how Gregory Peck was a Hollywood liberal and how the Right ineffectively reacted to him just seems to me to be a great example of  The Great Unintended Consequence of the Internet and Cable TV - the intensification of stupidity.


* see my post yesterday on reaction to the Charleston killings. (Hey, it's right behind this one, but the link might be useful for someone.)

The American Right doing paranoia, again

Yesterday I posted that Drudge was going with "prescription drugs" as being the real issue behind the Charleston killings.   I see now from LGF that even Presidential hopeful Rick Perry thinks that's a useful diversion:

It’s stunning to watch the entire conservative movement line up to deflect the conversation about the Charleston church massacre away from the truly relevant issues — racism and guns — to ridiculous disconnected talking points like “religious freedom” and now, thanks to former Texas Governor Rick Perry (one of the many GOP presidential candidates): overuse of prescription drugs.

And that’s not even the worst thing Perry said; in the same interview with Steve Malzberg of Newsmax, he called the attack “an accident.” (One of Perry’s spokesmen quickly put out the word that he simply “misspoke,” of course.)

“This is the MO of this administration, any time there is an accident like this — the president is clear, he doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message,” Perry said.
Instead of talking about guns, Perry said, we should be talking about prescription drugs: “Also, I think there is a real issue to be talked about. It seems to me, again without having all the details about this, that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used.”

On the other hand, this is what I heard Obama saying on the radio this morning (my bold):

“We don’t know if it would have prevented what happened in Charleston. No reform can guarantee the elimination of violence. But we might still have some more Americans with us. We might have stopped one shooter. Some families might still be whole.  You all might have to attend fewer funerals.

“And we should be strong enough to acknowledge this. At the very least, we should be able to talk about this issue as citizens, without demonizing all gun owners who are overwhelmingly law-abiding, but also without suggesting that any debate about this involves a wild-eyed plot to take everybody’s guns away.”

Exactly.  It is the pre-emptive paranoia of the American gun loving Right - from even relatively "moderate" right wing sites like Hot Air, to NRA officials, right up to Republican Presidential candidates - which is sickening.

There's a psychological and cultural rot that has taken hold of the American Right in the last two to three decades, poisoning it on matters scientific (climate change), social (gun control) and economic (voodoo economics and libertarian obsession with reducing government), and the rest of the world is waiting for them to wake up to themselves.

A Bolt/Blair divide

Perhaps it's because Bolt holidays in relatively gun sane Europe, and Blair holidays in the US (and visits and hosts American right wing bloggers), but I can't recall that I have ever noticed Blair call out any American on any aspect of its gun culture.  (Sure, he condemns the Charleston killing, but that's a given.)

Bolt, on the other hand, deserves credit today for the post he wrote "The Ultimate Blame the Victim".

The Colbert wait

The New York Times alerts me to the fact that Stephen Colbert has been putting up some stuff on the internet to make sure people know he is still around and will, eventually, be hosting the Late Show.

This video is not geo-blocked, and is amusing enough in a Colbert way..

The Leyonhjelm hypocrisy

On Lateline last night, bemoaning that ill health from wind turbines should be taken seriously by a "wind commissioner":

STEVE CANNANE: Alright so David, why not have an energy Commissioner, someone who at coals and gas, someone who looks into wind turbines, someone who looks into coal?

DAVID LEYONHJELM: Well that argument is based on the proposition if you can't solve all of the problems, don't try and solve any of them or don't try and solve this one.

While on Leyonhjelm's twitter feed yesterday, he retweets a link to a an American libertarian site with "the facts you need to know about the Charleston shooting" which ends with this:

President Barack Obama and other activists have tried to make this case about gun rights, saying America needs to make it more difficult to obtain guns. Gun rights advocates have vehemently refuted this, accusing the left of politicizing the tragedy and saying there’s no way to ever fully eradicate violence.

Update:   more specifically on point, a later tweet by the Bald One:

Pope understands science better than libertarian Senator

I had been wondering for what diversionary excuse American gun nuts would come up with

See, when a school gets shot up, they want armed guards at schools, and for teachers to carry pistols.

But it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest (although they probably will) that Ministers or congregations should pack heat for a bible class or service in their own Church.

So instead, from Drudge we have:

Update:  And from Breitbart, yeah, shock horror, a black American president makes the observation that other countries don't tend to have the same number of nutters who have the access to guns for shooting up black people for being black

Oh, and yes, it wants Ministers to be armed.

Catholic conservatism in modern America

Last Time Conservatives Dismissed Major Encyclical, It Ended Terribly | The New Republic

I found this article looking at the way Catholic conservatism evolved in the US over the 50's and 60's to be very interesting.

In short, the argument runs that the American conservative intellectual movement (gee, from the perspective of the early 21st century, that's a phrase that's hard to credit) had a strong Catholic component to it, largely from the Church's strong anti-communist stance.    But it was those Catholic commentators who attacked a 1961 encyclical (which I must admit, I was not aware of) by Pope John XXIII which reaffirmed the church's support for the welfare state, help to the Third World, and a retreat from colonialism.

This was unintentionally the precedent for liberal Catholics rejecting Humanae Vitae  seven years later, leading virtually all Catholics in the US to be "cafeteria Catholics."

Interesting theory, but in the case of countries outside of America, the Church's rejection of an easy to use method of contraception which did not interfere with actual pregnancy was alone enough to make Catholics selective in their attention to Papal teachings.

That said, it has always been clear that the current American alignment of libertarianism with conservative Catholicism is an aberration:   yes, the Church was staunchly anti-Communist in the 20th century, but it was never against government's involvement by way of policy in reducing poverty and helping workers.   Quite the contrary.

Similarly, it is no surprise that Pope Francis has endorsed government and international action on climate change.   Good on him.

Shorten overkill

I posted just recently that I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about Bill Shorten's performance as Opposition Leader, but I do have to say that the reaction of the political commentators as to how disastrous the Royal Commission evidence is supposed to be for him strikes me as very overblown.

I've only noticed one journalist/commentator who shares that view - I gather from his tweets that Bernard Keane thinks the allegations against him are nebulous.

And in a further bit of "bizarro world" business - as far as I can make out, union obsessive right wingers like Judith Sloan, who wake up in a sweat of indignation every single day that unions have high involvement in some super funds and ask for minimum pay increases - are actually criticising Shorten for doing deals that (allegedly) benefited the companies more than the workers.   Weird political opportunism, and it would delight me if one day she faces a defamation action from her continuous uber bitchy output at Catallaxy.

It's coming...

New study shows Arctic Ocean rapidly becoming more corrosive to marine species | EurekAlert! Science News

New research by NOAA, University of Alaska, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Oceanography shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044.

"Our research shows that within 15 years, the chemistry of these waters may no longer be saturated with enough calcium carbonate for a number of animals from tiny sea snails to Alaska King crabs to construct and maintain their shells at certain times of the year," said Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and lead author. "This change due to ocean acidification would not only affect shell-building animals but could ripple through the marine ecosystem."

South Korea and the education obsession

Foreign Correspondent the other night was a fascinating look at the obsessively competitive education industry in South Korea, which is rather like the Japanese system (where getting into "top" universities is seen a matter of great importance for future careers, and private tuition is often used to ensure entry,) but on steroids.

This strikes me as a foolish way to run an education system and society, and places way, way too much emphasis on institutional elitism.

Mutant mice, depressed scientists, and don't eat that raw fish dish

*   Nature News explains the problems with reproducibility in experiments using genetically engineered mice, and how the problem will only get worse now that the CRISP is going to allow much easier genetic modifications.  And how's this for a great name for science bodies? (my bold):

...laboratories that can make genetically modified mice are often unable to maintain them. Progeny frequently carry pathogens, lose carefully designed mutations or have other characteristics that confound experiments. So the mice that a researcher might dutifully ship to a colleague can be very different from those described in a paper. In 2013, the Mutant Mouse Resource and Research Centers (MMRRCs), a consortium of the US National Institutes of Health, found that 32 of around 200 mouse lines deposited with them from individual labs did not match researchers' descriptions. It is no wonder that many preclinical studies performed using mice are not reproducible¹.

*  Bee Hossenfelder explains the difficult time physics postdocs can go through, given their short term contracts and frequent moves.  (Her own mental health issues get an airing too.)

And here I thought the biggest warning parents should give is for their kids not to get into acting.  Turns out going in science in a big way can be quite an issue too.  Sad.

* I never cared for raw fish, but especially in Thailand, it should be avoided due to the risk it will give you liver cancer.  (Googling the topic, I see that the liver fluke/cancer link has been known for some time, but this is the first I've heard of it.)  From the BBC:

A local delicacy in north-east Thailand, made from raw fish, has been found to be behind a high incidence of liver cancer in the area, and doctors are trying to educate people about the risk.

The Isaan plateau of north-eastern Thailand is poor, dry, and far from the sea. Home to around one third of the country's population, most of them ethnic Lao in origin, it is renowned for its spicy and inventive cuisine, using whatever ingredients are available.

Where there are rivers or lakes, they use the smaller fish they catch in a pungent dish called koi plaa.

The fish are chopped up finely, and mixed by hand with local herbs, lime juice and live red ants, and served up raw.

It is very popular, but also dangerous.

For decades, certain populations in the north-east have been known to have abnormally high levels of liver cancer.

In men it comprises more than half of all cancer cases, compared to an average of less than 10% worldwide.

The high prevalence has long been linked to infection by liver flukes, a kind of parasite, found in raw fish.

Call me a skeptic...

....but I find it hard to credit that the issue of aboriginal property rights, which exercises the IPA bred mind of Tim Wilson a great deal, is actually likely to make that much difference to their collective well being, especially in the parts of Australia where they are worst off.

Go to any small Australian town that has no local economy to speak of, and house prices will be very low, shops will be shut, and often the aging people who stay there won't be putting much into upgrading the appearance or utility of the residence they paid off 30 years ago. 

I expect pretty much the same thing for any remote aboriginal community that exists only so that the residents can feel connected to the land, regardless of whether they have freehold title to their house, or not.

The biggest "glass jaw" government in Australian history

I see the terminally boring Paul Kelly has now lined up with the rest of The Australian's columnists to attack Gillian Triggs.  

The uniformity and vitriol of attack from that paper is truly remarkable, and really makes one wonder how it operates.    It is incredible to watch the glass jaw this entire Abbott government (with the exception of Malcolm Turnbull) has shown towards Triggs.  

No one sensible can understand why they keep attacking her - the report which they continually misrepresent has had virtually no effect on public opinion of the government in any event.

Camping on the Moon

Habitat is designed to provide stay on the moon, sleeps two
Oddly enough, they might also be able to set up a solar still on the surface to collect drinking water:

The moon's gravity is so low and its atmosphere so tenuous that water molecules in the ground turn directly to vapour when heated. Free to bounce around at near the speed of sound, they condense again when they get cold, piling up as frost where temperatures are low. The greatest build-up is at the dawn terminator: the region where the sun is just rising.A lunar "day" is a full month long, so the water molecules have a lot of time to accumulate. Tim Livengood of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland wondered how much drinkable water you could collect if you set up a solar-powered distillery to catch the morning frost."When the sun rises – actually, when the surface rotates into sunlight – we just drop a clear plastic dome over our collecting surface and let the sun turn it back into vapour," Livengood says. The vapour then frosts up the inside of the surface, where it can be harvested.

Using hydrogen measurements taken between 2009 and 2011 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Livengood calculated that the frost build-up at the terminator would be just under a fifth of a millimetre thick – enough to yield about 190 millilitres of water per square metre per lunar day, with a suitable set-up. That could include a small sun-tracking shade to cast a permanent shadow, mimicking the terminator and allowing astronauts to collect frost all day long.

"The quantity of water is much less than what we could dig up at the lunar poles, but we get it with very little energy investment on our part," Livengood says. "We just need to be patient."

The Kevin Rudd disaster

Gee, watching the smarmy performance of Kevin Rudd on The Killing Season is reminding me all over again how amazing it was that he was ever popular with his party and the public.
I never liked the guy, and always considered him a shallow egocentric with a fake public persona.
His only saving grace is that he is not Tony Abbott, a more "normal" person by most psychological criteria, but a dimwit of a political windvane with a pathetic willingness to overthrow ethics and decency for the sake of political advantage, and a spectacularly bad Prime Minister as a result.
Update: Kevin is still bitter that Swan hadn't told him what had to change if he wanted to keep his job. The problem is, of course, that it's hard to tell someone they need a complete personality transplant.

On paying people smugglers

So it seems virtually certain now that it would have been an ASIS spy on board an Australian navy ship who was paying money at sea to people smugglers to turn back.

It's absolutely certain that both Coalition and Labor governments have used ASIS operatives on Indonesian land who would use cash to disrupt people smuggling operations (by paying for information, and perhaps even paying them not to leave?)

But rather than shrugging shoulders, I would have thought it is bleeding obvious that the use of payments to boats at sea is different from splashing around money on shore in disruptive operations.

The Indonesian government is not likely to be happy with either, but surely anyone with common sense, rather than the appalling excuse makers like Bolt, can see that tactically, paying smugglers who are at sea is a dumb idea, given it provides an incentive to start the journey (update:  and presumably ensures that the smugglers have received money both from the "customers" and then the Australian government.)

And why would it harm a government to admit that its operatives have gone too far in this instance, and will be directed not to use such a tactic again?

The Nazi style guide

Hitler as Art Director: What the Nazis' Style Guide Says About the "Power of Design" - CBS News

I'm not sure I was aware until recently that Hitler, being an arty type,  personally designed the Nazi flag back in 1920.

While googling the topic, I also found this interesting story about a book that was effectively the Nazi style guide. 

This is why ISIS will never take over the world:  not enough attention to good style.

The real story

Ian Fleming ensures no cliches about Japan go unexploited in his ethnocentric masterpiece 'You Only Live Twice' | The Japan Times

I've only ever read one Bond novel a very long time ago, so I knew that the movies took extremely little from the books and crammed it into completely new stories.

But this summary of the plot of You Only Live Twice is still so different from the movie, it seems the only similarity is that both had parts set on a Japanese island.

What a moral vacuum

Andrew Bolt's first comment on the paying money to people smugglers scandal was to say he didn't know that he cared.

His latest is to note something like this:   "Hey, what's the big deal?  The AFP under the last Coalition government might have been paying for boats to be scuttled.   Who cares what happens in Indonesia or at sea?"

I think he's working his way up to "We used to strafe Japanese boats in those waters.  What are they complaining about?"

Update:  more moronic "Who cares!  They've stopped the boats!  Accountable government?   Who friggin' cares?" commentary from Bolt.  

Trouble for Abbott

It's good to finally see Abbott and his government facing some political damage from the "whatever it takes" attitude to stopping boats of civilians getting to our shores.  And don't you love the government's "but you're corrupt too!" response to Indonesian complaints delivered by Abbott's personal lacky Greg Sheridan.  What fun it would be to get the metadata belonging to Sheridan's mobile phone.

As I have commented several times, it is not only scandalous high seas behaviour to be using our military and customs to be stopping boats of civilians, locking them up on ships for weeks at a time, before returning them to fates unknown in countries like Sri Lanka and Vietnam; it is the most outrageous and ludicrous affront to transparency in a democratic government that it should persistently refuse to tell the voters what it is doing.  (Ludicrous because its hard to see how publicity of the success of the schemes could hurt in Indonesia.)

It is, of course, extremely difficult for Labor to "score" on this issue, but here at last is one way it might.

But before the next election, it also needs to be talking to Indonesia very specifically about what is going to be done at a regional level to ensure there is no repeat of an escalation of the boats should it win the next election.  (And they have to do something novel about Nauru and Manus Island too.)

Slow internet in space

How Do Astronauts Connect to the Internet in Space? - The Atlantic

Interesting article here explained that the internet connection astronauts get to use on the ISS is not so fast.  But lasers will soon help.

Some Mary Beard observations

Mary Beard turned up briefly on SBS a few weeks ago, on what looked like a new series on Roman stuff (about Pompeii), but I haven't noticed it on again.  If I recall correctly, the Eurovision Song Contest intervened, so I'm not sure if the other episodes followed or not.

Must go looking.  I did record the first episode but not watched it yet.

Anyway, I forgot to note weeks ago that she had come back from a trip in Algeria, and visited the city of Constantine, which I had remarked upon recently when it turned up briefly on Griff Rhys Jones African train show.   Anyhow, it just goes to show that I'm not the only person who didn't know about this place (or rather, its geography).  Mary knew the city, but not what it looked like:

But I did get the biggest surprise when I went to the city of Constantine, ancient Cirta. I have often had cause to mention the place and to think about it. There is a famous record of the contents of an early Christian house-church from there, and in the last stages of my book I have just been mentioning Marcus Cornelius Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius who came from there.

Now I dont know the exact location of the ancient town in relation to the new. But what I hadn't realised was that the whole place is perched on the edge of a vast ravine (now spectacularly bridged with a series of modern bridges). I dont know what it made such a difference to how I started thinking the place, but it did. It was if you had read about Venice for years, and the penny only dropped about the canals when you visited decades later.

Have a look at this photo of the place:

and this one on the same Flickr stream:

Impressive, no?

Anyhow, another reason I wanted to post about Professor Beard is because she is not a "dumbing down" pessimist, at least in her field:

When I started out in this game, when you marked exams every summer, there really were some dreadful answers. There were students who had clearly done little or no work, and had spent more time on the sports field than the in the library. They blagged a bit, sometimes with a degree of style, and they got at best a 2.2. You would come across grossly irrelevant answers that wrote about the favourite subject of the student that had not actually come up.

Why marks have gone up is because no one knows nothing any longer. All the students, beyond some sad casualties, have worked hard and done enough to get a 2.1 at least, and they actually answer the question asked, with clear information. The 2.1s now are as good as they ever were in my 30 years, I promise.

Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.

 That's encouraging.

Help, I'm a martyr!

What else are you not allowed to hear? | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Oh dear.   Andrew Bolt apparently wants to correct something to do with some aboriginal activist, but tells us that "lawyers" won't let him.

I assume that the lawyers involved are not his personally, but those of his employer.   And they might be partly motivated by the fact that Bolt (I am guessing - but I think it a fair guess) didn't personally pay the legal costs in his failed defamation case defence in 2002 or for the representation in the 2011 hearing about "white is the new black".

Of course, it is in fact entirely possible that Andrew may be able to say what he wants to in such a manner that it is not at any risk of contravening the RDA.  It may be that his employer just can't be bothered helping him address this topic, given that his attitude has always been that he did nothing wrong in the first place.  

Certainly, if he is that cut up about the restraints of his employer, or the lawyers, he is entirely free to quit his current position, and run as an independent news blogger who can publish what he likes at his own risk.   Or he could directly engage new lawyers to review his columns to ensure he isn't at risk of a new action.

But no, he would rather play the martyr, and keep raking in the hundreds of thousands that I would expect is his News Ltd income annually now (I understand they pay for his TV show as well as his written output.)  My heart bleeds for him...

Drinking blackouts

My drinking years: ‘Everyone has blackouts, don’t they?’ | Society | The Guardian

I think its basically an ad for a book, but I still thought this was a pretty well written account of by a woman with a very dangerous drinking problem.  (In her past now, I gather.)

True confession time - I did have one, brief, example of a drinking blackout period in my 20's.  Apparently, I was being very annoying to an acquaintance on the bus that was taking a group of us back from a night in town.  I had no recollection at all the next day of what I had done on the bus, although I certainly had got off it unaided at the end of the trip and got back to my room by myself.  I was told I was lucky I didn't get a punch in the face.

This was enough to convince me that getting anywhere close to a blackout period is dangerous...

Not exactly ready to take over the world

The most amusing video I have seen this weekend.  I felt particularly sorry for the last one and its appearance of a nervous breakdown:

A test...OK, seems to work (about tiny data storage)

DNA Assembly Tech is Making The World’s Smallest Data Storage

http://flip.it/bMCwy

Not sure if the link works...

Oh yeah, it seems to.   Here it is, and here are some extracts from the article:

Researchers at France's Institut Charles Sadro and Aix-Marseille Universite have built binary data into a strand of synthetic polymer, a minuscule chain of chemical information about 60,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

This technology promises to take the future of data storage down to nanometers in coming years, says researcher Jean-Fraçois Lutz, deputy director of Institut Charles Sadron and researcher on the article published in Nature Communications.

Right now, storing one zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) takes roughly 1000 kilograms of cobalt alloy, the material used in hard drives. A zettabyte of Lutz's synthesized polymer would be about 10 grams.

El Nino news

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : El Nino Continues to Ramp Up | Weather Underground

Can humans directly detect quantum weirdness?

Quantum technology probes ultimate limits of vision : Nature News & Comment

I see that the minimum number of photons detectable by humans has been measured currently as three, but the experiments are going further:

Gisin has pioneered experiments¹ to see how the human eye responds to ‘quantum-weirdness’
effects. Although effects such as photons being in multiple places at once are well known, making humans part of the experiment “brings us closer to the quantum phenomenon”, he says.

Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who is also at Urbana-Champaign and who inspired Holmes’s work, says that quantum weirdness should disappear somewhere between the scale of atoms and that of human bodies. “We don’t know at what stage it’s going to break down — or how." Holmes's study will probably validate standard interpretations of quantum physics, he says, which assume that a photon that is in a ‘superposition’ of two states will essentially choose one option when it comes into contact with a detector — whether that is an artificial photon counter or a rod cell.

But in principle, says physicist Angelo Bassi at the University of Trieste in Italy, each of the photon's personas could hit a rod cell, and that superposition could persist up to the brain. If so, there could even be “something like a superposition of two different perceptions, even if just for an instant”.

 Fascinating...

Woo considered

I see that The Australian got a credible sounding academic to say maybe there is something to infrasound from wind farms affecting some (perhaps a small percent) of people, in the same way that some people are more sensitive to seasickness.

A few issues to come to mind:

*  have reliable studies ever been done to assess whether people who claim severe reactions to such infrasound can even "sense" it (for example, by getting them to sleep in a lab and see if they are disturbed when the sound is off or on.)   If they have false cues as to when it is on, does that affect their perception of effects?  You would probably need them to stay in the lab more than one night, I guess.  This single study, by people living at home, is not considered reliable.

*  given that a lot of science on this notes that the wind or waves (or industry) creates a lot of background infrasound, and that windfarms make more infrasound in stronger wind, you would have to do a lot of careful measurements, I presume, to distinguish the amount of infrasound being created by the wind turbine as against the infrasound  just coming from the stronger wind around the house.   Has that ever been done?

* doesn't everyone get used to the infrasound of the beach?  If you camp near a surf beach, the sound from the ocean can make for a disturbed first night's sleep, but virtually everyone gets used to it, no?

Certainly, with the descriptions of symptoms that some people give in that study at my last link, I think it is entirely understandable why most scientists are more inclined to consider the problem a psychological one than anything else.