Yet more renewables optimism

The recent (and relatively abrupt) rise in optimism about renewable energy being able to pretty quickly make a big difference to CO2 production continues with stories like these.

I think I had seen some mention of this before, but strangely enough, Texas is leading America in the production of wind power.   This story last week at Slate noted that its peculiar electricity marketing system means that wind farm owners at times offer their electricity at "negative prices", but an article from earlier this year talks more generally about the Texan story:

In 2014, wind generated 10.6 percent of Texas electricity, up from 9.9 percent the previous year and 6.2 percent in 2009, according to the U.S Energy Information Administration. Wind energy generation that falls under the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the grid for 24 million Texans, nearly doubled from 2009 to 2014. Currently, Texas has more than 12 gigawatts of wind power capacity installed across the state — equivalent to six Hoover Dams. That figure could jump to 20 gigawatts in a few years with upgrades to the current transmission system, according to Ross Baldick, an engineering professor at University of Texas at Austin.

And the explanation:

So how has the Lone Star state done it? Strong government incentives, sizeable investments in infrastructure, and innovative policies have played an important role. So has the backing of governors of all political persuasions, from liberal Democrat Ann Richards to conservative Republican Rick Perry. But at heart the profit motive has driven the state’s wind energy boom, with ranchers and landowners seeing gold in the spinning turbines on the Texas plains.

I wonder why Texas isn't also the centre of infrasound complaint, then?  I think David Leyonhjelm should be sent over there on a 3 year mission to find out.

In other optimistic assessments about how much you can achieve (and how quickly), I spotted this story Greening the Electric Grid with Gas about a study out of Harvard:

Much of the nation's energy policy is premised on the assumption that clean renewable sources like wind and solar will require huge quantities of storage before they can make a significant dent in the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. A new Harvard study pokes holes in that conventional wisdom. The analysis published today in the journal Energy & Environmental Science finds that the supply of wind and solar power could be increased tenfold without additional storage....

"We're trying to knock out a salient policy meme that says that you can't grow variable renewables without a proportionate increase in storage," Keith said. "We could cut electric-sector carbon emissions to less than a third their current levels using variable renewables with natural gas to manage the intermittency, but this will requires us to keep growing the electricity transmission infrastructure." Keith added, "There is a saw-off between transmission and storage, if siting battles stop new transmission then we must increase storage."

Story prompt that probably isn't original

I occasionally look at Reddit and see "story prompt" postings.  Given last week's story of a physics experiment that will attempt to put a microbe in "two places at once" in a quantum experiment, I thought of my own, but I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't already been the subject of at least a short story.  Here goes:

Future teleporting won't be about destroying one version of yourself and recreating it elsewhere (as used to be speculated in Star Trek) - it will be about quantum splitting of yourself into two places, with one of you branching off into the (very similar) multiverse, never to be met again.   Quantum computers will make this cheap and simple - so much so that nearly everyone in a country with a modern economy will teleport daily to get to work, the shops, etc.   It'll replace public transport, cars, airlines, etc.  The biggest problem will be limiting the numbers wanting to get to popular destinations.   You just have a home portal, and all major buildings will have there's at the entrance.

One day, however, the Google controlled Universal Teleporting System breaks down (possibly via interference from another universe.)   The quantum duplicates and the original stay in the same universe, every time a person teleports.   Given that (say) a quarter of the world's population teleports at least once daily (many several times a day), within the space of a few hours, the world's population has doubled, with some people finding multiple copies of themselves turning up at their front door, not expecting to find themselves already home.

How does the world deal with this? 

Update:   here's a thread that talks about how "teleportation ethics" has been raised in both Star Trek and other science fiction stories and novels.  But it's based on the problem being that the original person being destroyed or disassembled in the process of being re-constituted somewhere else.  

My prompt isn't worried about that - as the explanation for teleporting will be that the other "you" has gone on to live in another universe - one nearly identical to your own, and the universe if quantum branching all the time anyway, so what's the harm in that?

Monday Wormholes

I've been forgetting to browse the arXiv abstracts for odd physics lately, but here are a few recent ones that have caught my attention:

1.  Can extra dimensional effects allow wormholes without exotic matter?

We explore the existence of Lorentzian wormholes in the context of an effective on-brane, scalar-tensor theory of gravity. In such theories, the timelike convergence condition, which is always violated for wormholes, has contributions, via the field equations,from on-brane matter as well as from an effective geometric stress energy generated by a bulk-induced radion field. It is shown that, for a class of wormholes, the required on-brane matter, as seen by an on-brane observer in the Jordan frame, is not exotic and does not violate the Weak Energy Condition. The presence of the effective geometric stress energy in addition to on-brane matter, is largely responsible for creating this intriguing possibility. Thus, if such wormholes are ever found to exist in the Universe, they would clearly provide pointers towards the existence of a warped extra dimension as proposed in the two-brane model of Randall and Sundrum.

2. Possible existence of wormholes in the central regions of halos 

An earlier study [Rahaman et al. (2014) & Kuhfittig (2014)] has demonstrated the possible existence of wormholes in the outer regions of the galactic halo, based on the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) density profile. This paper uses the Universal Rotation Curve (URC) dark matter model to obtain analogous results for the central parts of the halo. This result is an important compliment to the earlier result, thereby confirming the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies. 

3. Analytic self-gravitating Skyrmions, cosmological bounces and wormholes 

We present a self-gravitating Skyrmion, an analytic and globally regular solution of the Einstein- Skyrme system in presence of a cosmological constant with winding number w = 1. The static spacetime metric is the direct product R x S3 and the Skyrmion is the self-gravitating generalization of the static hedgehog solution of Manton and Ruback with unit topological charge. This solution can be promoted to a dynamical one in which the spacetime is a cosmology of the Bianchi type-IX with time-dependent scale and squashing coefficients. Remarkably, the Skyrme equations are still identically satisfied for all values of these parameters. Thus, the complete set of field equations for the Einstein-Skyrme-Lambda system in the topological sector reduces to a pair of coupled, autonomous, nonlinear differential equations for the scale factor and a squashing coefficient. These equations admit analytic bouncing cosmological solutions in which the universe contracts to a mini- mum non-vanishing size, and then expands. A non-trivial byproduct of this solution is that a minor modification of the construction gives rise to a family of stationary, regular configurations in General Relativity with negative cosmological constant supported by an SU(2) nonlinear sigma model. These solutions represent traversable wormholes with NUT parameter in which the only "exotic matter" required for their construction is a negative cosmological constant. 

 Thinking about wormholes seems to be very big in theoretic physics at the moment.

The Leyonhjelm Effect?

Gee, I dunno.  Perhaps the Senator for Guns, Tobacco, Infrasound and Things That Annoy Him But Are Not Within Commonwealth Control Anyway (David Leyonhjelm) should ease up on the frequent media appearances and attention seeking tactics.

Because it doesn't seem to be helping his party's candidates, if this weekend's Canning by-election is any guide. Despite being number two on the ballot paper, at the time of writing, the LDP has polled about 5 times less than the Palmer United Party or Australian Christians;  under half of the votes of the Animal Justice Party; about 10 times less than the Greens; and even less than the Pirate Party.

Maybe the more he's exposed, the less his party's vote?   Embarrassing.

Microbes to the rescue

Feeding the world with plant microbiomes | The Saturday Paper

A short but quite interesting report here on how research into newly discovered plant microbiomes may help increase agricultural output.  For example:

Meanwhile, other bacteria can boost agricultural output. Pseudomonas,
which live in the soil around a plant, make hormones goading roots to
grow. In one trial, inoculating wheat with a cocktail of these bugs over
two years increased yields by more than 30 per cent. Another bacteria, Burkholderia,
has been shown to ramp up rice production. O’Sullivan wants to use
these plant steroids to inspire crops to grow during drought. “There is a
lot of potential here,” she says.

Is it too much to hope for the start of an anti-pandering movement?

Donald Trump doesn’t correct birthers, but how is that any worse than the GOP’s standard climate change pandering?

Yes, this is exactly what I want the the sensible Right in Australia (hopefully, in the form of Malcolm Turnbull) to do - to start telling those on their side the truth about how wrong they are (and how stupid, in most cases) on matters such as climate change, and certain economic tropes (such as "reducing taxes always works"; "Keynesian economics is a crock".)

Update:  here's Krugman's acerbic take on the second GOP debate. 

Awesome hyprocrisy of the Abbott mourners

I was expecting one eyed amnesia to some extent from the Right wing commentariat  (a word, incidentally, that I've just realised I've been misspelling frequently - probably because even the correct spelling is not in my brower's dictionary), but the completely hypocritical "a good man undone by the media and the rabid hatred of the Left" mourning of Abbott from the likes of Bolt and his dunderhead followers is still a stunning example of how ridiculous they have become.  Especially in light of the white hot hatred and rumour mongering they encouraged over Gillard - up to and including cheering a royal commission and police investigation looking into whether she got some free work done on her house 22 years ago.

There simply has been no media treatment of a Prime Minister as openly disrespectful and bitterly personal as that by the Right wing schlock jocks and Murdoch tabloid press towards Gillard. 

It's as absurd to argue otherwise as it is to deny climate change is real and deserves a strong political response.  [You can take the "Oh, wait a minute..."  joke as too easy.]

Dangerous drinking

It's a little hard to credit that the person handing over this drink did not realise it was dangerous to consume:

It was an 18th-birthday celebration - and the birthday girl was given a free cocktail to celebrate.

But just seconds after Gaby Scanlon, now 20, drank the Nitro-Jägermeister shot, smoke started billowing from her nose and mouth.

"Immediately she was taken violently ill, retching and vomiting and smoking from her nose and mouth," prosecutor Barry Berlin told an English court.

The liquid nitrogen in the drink, which was used to create a smoking effect, pierced her stomach and killed internal tissue.

The court heard that Ms Scanlon experienced "agonising pain" and required surgery to have her stomach removed and her oesophagus connected to her small bowel...

The bar's director Andrew Dunn had seen cocktails containing liquid nitrogen being served a hotel in London and decided to introduce a range at his newly opened bistro, the court heard.

I think the topic for discussion with the children over dinner this weekend will be "Using your own common sense when at a bar or nightclub". 

Marr on Abbott

Vale, Tony Abbott – both a unique man and a unique failure | David Marr | Australia news | The Guardian

It may be a bit flowery in the Marr fashion, but I don't think he treats Abbott unfairly.

Their base is nuts 'cos they're led by nuts

I've been enjoying the Trump angst sweeping through Republican establishment circles, who can't understand how their "base" can be applauding some politically ridiculous lines coming out of an egotistical, shallow, dill.

But now it's producing something even better - the potential start of a realisation that the base is nuts because the entire party has been led by anti-science dills, more interested in ideology than evidence, for the last decade or so.

As Jonathan Chait writes in his summary entitled At Second Presidential Debate, Republicans Try to Out-Crazy Trump, and Succeed:

The most revealing pair of exchanges came at the end. First, Jake Tapper asked Rubio about former Reagan secretary of State George Shultz’s argument that it would be prudent to take out an insurance policy against the effects of carbon emissions in case scientists are right. The question was designed to cut off every possible escape route. Tapper did not ask Rubio to accept climate science, merely the possibility that it might not be wrong. Nor did he ask him to endorse a specific program. Rubio swatted away the premise of the question, insisting, “We’re not going to destroy our economy.” It was telling that Rubio defined literally any policy response to the theory of anthropogenic global warming as economy-destroying.

Tapper then asked Trump about his statements linking vaccine use to autism, a dangerous conspiracy theory that has been conclusively debunked. Trump cited anecdotal evidence to support his crackpot beliefs. Worse, the two doctors on the stage, Ben Carson and Rand Paul, had chances to correct Trump, and both instead gave him tepid support. It is depressing that a presidential field with two doctors cannot even produce sensible views on medicine, let alone anything else. The party’s decades-long flight from empiricism and reason shows no sign of abating. Alas, from Trump to Rubio to Carly Fiorina, it is filled with talented demagogues well suited to pitch America on nonsense.

What a hide!

Spotted in Gulf News:

Green leafy goodness

Take that kale! Watercress is number one powerhouse vegetable - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Avert your eyes, Jason Soon - an article all about the good things in green leafy vegetables.

I see that kale is said not to be that great a "superfood" anyway.  I'm relieved to hear it - there are few vegetables I actually ask my wife not to buy, but kale is one of them.   Its tough, rough leaves have never impressed me in the slightest - in fact, I positively dislike it - and I always suspected its popularity was a passing fad.

This report talks up watercress, which is one of my favourite bases for a salad.  It can be bought cheaply from some street markets around Brisbane, at some times of the year, but seems to rarely appear in mainstream fruit and vegetable shops.   There should be more of it.

Maybe cold water is the key?

BBC - Future - The secrets of living to 200 years old

I didn't know bowhead whales are believed to live somewhere between 150 and 210 years.

Update:  I just remembered to check again on the lifespan of the orange roughy (what a great bit of PR it was to rename it from "slimehead") that lives in the deep, cold ocean - 150 years!

Disturbing

Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit: China’s laws have encouraged the hit to kill phenomenon.

I meant to earlier link to this disturbing article about Chinese society and the (to say the least) problematic way they deal with compensation.

I can only assume there is no compulsory third party insurance as there is Australia (and, I presume, nearly all Western countries?)   Certainly shows the value of it.  

Real men used to cry

Is there anything wrong with men who cry? – Sandra Newman – Aeon

A fun article here looking at the way it seems there used to be no shame in men crying, in most societies at least (Scandinavia excepted, it seems.)   But then something changed, and the reasons proposed are curious:

The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes
that took place as we moved from a feudal, agrarian society to one that
was urban and industrial. In the Middle Ages, most people spent their
lives among those they had known since birth. A typical village had only
50-300 inhabitants, most of them related by blood or marriage; a
situation like an extended family stuck in an eternal reunion in the
middle of nowhere. Medieval courts were also environments of extreme
intimacy, where courtiers spent entire days in each other’s company,
year after year. Kings routinely conducted business from their beds, at
the foot of which their favourite servants slept at night. We can see
this familiarity also in odd details of royal life, such as the nobleman
in the courts of many European kings whose coveted privilege it was to
assist the king in defecation.

But from the 18th through the 20th centuries, the population became
increasingly urbanised; soon, people were living in the midst of
thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men
to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression
and even private conversation were discouraged as time-wasting. As Tom
Lutz writes in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears
(1999), factory managers deliberately trained their workers to suppress
emotion with the aim of boosting productivity: ‘You don’t want emotions
interfering with the smooth running of things.’

Hard to believe...

...that Ridley Scott has made a good science fiction film again.   But it appears he has.  

I guess I'll miss doing things like this....

Standard hypocrisy from a politician, I guess

I can't say I recall Tony Abbott ever complaining about the media's hand in publishing anonymous and self serving leaks when they were doing it in the Rudd/Gillard years.  Did he not use them as the basis for attack in Parliament?

But now, suffering the same fate, he can see the problem...

Update:  oh, and then there is this point too -

I had no idea...

Saudi Arabia squandered its groundwater and agriculture collapsed. California, take note. - Vox

I was just speculating the other day that the Arabian peninsula countries must grow next to nothing of the food they need.  I had no idea that Saudia Arabia in fact had gone on a ridiculous exercise in my lifetime:

Over at Reveal News, Nathan Halverson has a terrific piece
on how Saudi Arabia squandered its groundwater supplies in just a few
short decades. Back in the 1970s, the government allowed landowners to
dig as many wells as they desired, in order to transform the desert into
lush farmland. An agricultural boom followed, and Saudi Arabia
improbably became the world's sixth-largest exporter of wheat.

"By the 1990s, farmers were pumping an average of 5 trillion gallons a
year," Halverson writes. "At that rate, it would take just 25 years to
completely drain Lake Erie." The problem was that Saudi Arabia doesn't
get nearly enough annual rainfall to replace those withdrawals. Its
aquifers had built up over tens of thousands of years and were now being
drained all at once.

Not surprisingly, the party didn't last. By the 2000s, the aquifers
had become dangerously depleted. Wells dried up. Oases that had
persisted since biblical times were now gone. The country will need to
build costly desalination plants for drinking water. Most important,
Saudi Arabia's agricultural output declined sharply, with the amount of
farmland now less than half of what it was in the 1990s. In an attempt
to conserve what water remains, the country has announced that the 2016 wheat harvest will be its last. An entire industry, gone.

 Why do I get the feeling that libertarian types at the time would have been ridiculing environmentalist's warnings that this was a bad idea.  Let the market decide, etc.

Very witty

A few more post Abbott observations...

*  I am somewhat in agreement with those saying that Abbott not making a statement to the media yet makes it look like he's not "manning up" to his loss, in contrast to Gillard.   But is that too sexist in its own way? :)  Does it mean he is white hot angry about it all?   Would make me laugh if he is.   It would be all very karmic in it's own way, no?

*  It must be hurting the egos of Bolt and Jones that they can't convince their side of politics to follow their direction on leadership.   Particularly when they were instrumental on getting Abbott the leadership based on their promotion of climate change denial, which was always utterly foolish.  The tide's turning, guys.   Are you capable of admitting error?

[Update:  I had forgotten this:

Just over a year ago, Jones, the Sydney broadcaster, told Malcolm Turnbull he “had no hope of ever being the leader, you have got to get that into your head”.]

*  I like Turnbull - intelligent, articulate, humane - but he has a very difficult job dealing with those in his Party (and the Nationals) poisoned by too much influence from the American Right (and the likes of the IPA.)  I would like him to be ruthless in his approach to climate denialists in the party - tell them straight up that they have always been wrong and have been conned by populist fools in the media, and ideological driven economists who don't understand a thing about what actual science and scientific bodies all agree on. Someone has to tell them someday, it will do them good.

[Update:  even better, Turnbull could go on Bolt's show and tell him the same thing to his face - that he's been completed fooled and conned by non-scientists and it's about time he grew up and recognised facts.]

*  Has Steve Kates had to up his blood pressure medication yet?   This nuttily obsessed economist hates Turnbull irrationally and with the same vigour with which he thinks Obama and "damaged women" are causing the end of civilisation:

Malcolm is almost the perfect reflection of media opinion. He is like blotting paper, soaking up every conventional opinion without any actual apparent ability to think for himself. He is a non-entity in the Barack Obama mould, filled with vapid thoughts and a high opinion of his own abilities and intellect that is never at any stage reflected in anything he says or any action he takes.

He apparently won on the promise that he would not change any of the more contentious compromises Abbott had been able to meld, which is to say, he won promising not to do the very things that he wants to do, and which the media will look to him to do. The Great Communicator he is not. He is a shallow and pompous blowhard.

 *  I'll be livid if a few, persistent and potentially damaging rumours about Abbott's private life are only now exposed as true by journalists.

Bird love

Birds reveal the evolutionary importance of love

Sort of a cute study here.  

Was Abbott too ideologically driven, or not ideologically driven enough?

For those on the libertarian/small government right, such as Chris Berg, Abbott was not ideological enough.   And I think it is true that Abbott's ideas seemed to not follow any consistent line.  His overly generous parental leave plan, for example, won applause only from a handful of feminists who would normally align with Labor; his approach to climate change attempted (unsuccessfully) to straddle the divide between those who accept and those who reject science in his party; similarly, he seemed awkwardly positioned on manufacturing policy - not willing to completely abandon shipbuilding in Australia as a rigorously "dry" economic approach may suggest, but not doing enough to make the current industry feel viable, either.

But from my point of view, over allegiance to ideology is bad in politics anyway.  Successful government  responds to situations in a practical matter, without getting too concerned as to whether it fits in with preconceived theories or world views.

The problem with Abbott came down to the opportunism and the lack of practical sense in the contradictory nature of so many of his policies.  

Not being consistently ideologically driven can indeed lead to good, sensible government.  It didn't work that way for Abbott, though.   He needed a set of policies that made sense in a practical and global sense, but not necessarily from a purely ideologically consistent sense.  He failed.

An under-reported effect of an El Nino

I  hadn't even realised, until some recent reports out of the mainstream news media came to my attention, that New Guinea suffered a severe drought in 1997, and is in the midst of El Nino related drought again.

And recall that only last year, a paper predicted a doubling of severe El Nino as a result of global warming.

In light of the dire effect these have on our poor neighbours, you'd think the media might report the tropical droughts more prominently....

Worst PM gone

Quite a few people are noting that Abbott was PM for less time than either Rudd or Gillard.  Couldn't happen to more deserving embodiment of the Peter Principle. 

Let's not forget, Abbott got his party's leadership by waving his finger in the breeze and going with the climate change denying populists of the Right:  Bolt, Jones and a host of Murdoch writers.   He in fact had never been particularly interested in science, or economics, and his sloganeering tactics ever since he took the top job discredits the idea that he's more than a political opportunist with no idea who to take advice from.   He has spent his Prime Ministership with no sense of consistency or principle - the "say anything" PM adjusting his message according to the audience in front of him.  

What's worse, he sought legitimacy through the creepy upscaling  of the role of the military and paramilitary in day to day government.   He shows no remorse or misgivings over the plainly cruel permanent warehousing of men, women and children to deter others from attempting sea entry into Australia; his refusal to support Gillard in attempting the relatively humane Malaysian solution, while now seeking to send people to dirt poor Cambodia, is a stunning case of cynical political opportunism that deserves condemnation.   The swathe of secrecy that he has legislated, or co-opted from pliant military figures, regarding the tactics being deployed on the high seas and in his detention centres  is an absolute low for open, democratic government in this country.  His highly personal attacks on Gillian Triggs and the ABC also showed a somewhat eccentric  political thin skin that wasn't so  obvious until he became PM.

Going back further in time, don't forget his hidden role in funding action that lead to the jailing of a political problem, Pauline Hanson.   People seem too willing to overlook how dirty he has been prepared to get as a political operative.

He may have done some worthy work when a Minister under Howard, but his elevation to leadership has proved to be the long term disaster that even half of his party suspected it may be when he got the job.

I can only say that there was one good thing resulting from his election as PM - the resignation of Kevin Rudd from politics and his poisonous destructive role within Labor.   Yeah, thanks for that, Tony.  Pity you then had to hang around to prove yourself to be the PM with the least worthy legacy of any in my lifetime.  

Seems I may as well be writing this now

Gillard legacies:    some serious education reform (NAPLAN, widespread acknowledgement  of increased funding needed), wide-ranging and permanent change to improve disability services;  world leading public health measures (plain packaging); a carbon pricing scheme that showed it could work. 

Abbott's legacies of value:   [insert cricket sounds]

Spill

While I was thinking about the future of sex in cars, I see that a challenge to Abbott's leadership by Turnbull is definitely on.



Good news - I think.

I actually wonder whether much of the incentive for this was Abbott's disastrously poor interview on 7.30 last week.  The thing that struck me most about it was his apparent genuineness when he was claiming that  he was leading a good government that had achieved a lot.  I can just imagine cabinet members rolling their eyes and thinking "He really doesn't have a clue.  It's time..."

Driverless cars and bad behaviour

I can't say that I have noticed one potential issue about driverless cars being discussed - how will they stop users doing unsavoury things in them whilst going for the ride?

Come on, everyone has heard stories about airline passengers trying to get away with sex under blankets, or in the toilet; and that's in a place with the obvious potential for detection.  I predict it will be barely a week from when the first driverless car fleet comes into service that someone will have a video on the net of "what my girlfriend and I got up to when we didn't have to drive".   Or there'll be some solo act on show.   Maybe big windows will be a daytime deterrent from this.  Not sure about nighttime, though.

How will they stop it?   Photos taken inside every 30 seconds?  Random video monitoring?   Apart from the likely privacy uproar, how hard would it be to cover the camera, anyway?

For that matter, there might also be issues with littering in them; or late night drunks' vomit.   (I suppose if one is too much of a mess, the person being picked up may just report it and wait for the next.  But it would be much better not to have them messed up in the first place.)

I trust Google is working on this...

Just retire, part 3

Good to hear that even Abbott Ministers are now talking about their inglorious leader getting the boot. 

Andrew Bolt doesn't seem to be on the case yet, but surely he'll be out with fear and loathing of a Turnbull leadership any minute now....

Update:   I wonder how Catallaxy threadsters are taking this?

Pretty much as expected, then.

[But honestly, where else but on Australia's "leading Libertarian and Centre-Right blog" can one get such a scintillating mix of quasi homophobic insult and "blame the woman" analysis.]

Update 2:  and how are Catallaxy threadster's coping with political reaction to two women being killed in public by their ex partners in Queensland last week?   And the news that there are about 12,000 breaches of domestic violence orders in Queensland each year?:

Help for the aging gut

Delaying Age Related Diseases by Keeping Gut Bacteria in Balance | Neuroscience News

Interesting research here, showing that fiddling with the gut bacteria of fruit flies as they age can significantly increase their life expectancy.  It would be pretty amazing if they could squeeze an extra 10 years or so of average healthy human life by adjustments to our own gut microbes, too.

As as aside:  I wonder if some scientist is out there gathering the poop of particularly healthy 80 or 90 year olds, and checking the composition of its microbes.  Given the massive interest in this area of research now, I wouldn't be surprised...

Abbott's Canadian inspiration is on his way out

Why David Frum Is Wrong About Stephen Harper and Canada's Conservative Party - The Atlantic

The tactics of Stephen Harper are not identical to those of Tony Abbott, but reading this article, there are certainly many similarities.  I get the impression that Harper may be nastier and much more assertive in private than Abbott, who is probably more just an ambitious dill out of his depth who doesn't know who to listen to.

From this morning's AFR

Explaining the Abbott pathology, one of his senior colleagues said it is rooted in a biblical belief of good and evil, hence his frustrations with a nuanced Obama administration. "Abbott would have us do things in the Middle East that would have had your hair stand up on end," said this individual without going into details.

Link.

He writes well

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show – both a beginning and the end? | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more

Gee.  Guy Rundle's dissection of American late night talk shows is pretty good.  He writes well, even if you can't always agree on every point.

I haven't watched my recordings of Colbert yet.  Maybe tonight.

In Australian political nonsense news...

I see that, apparently, David Leyonhjelm's look-at-me "Nanny State" enquiry  has received most of its submissions on bicycle helmet laws    Not only are Leyonhjelm's findings on this (and any other "nanny State" issue) utterly predictable, so is the fact that experts will disagree with him, and more importantly - it's a State responsibility, not a Commonwealth one.

I see Chris Berg will also turn up and bleat about lock out laws, amongst other things  - again, entirely a State responsibility, and one which the Commonwealth has utterly no power to intervene in.   OK, tobacco plain packaging laws will get a mention too - as if any party except Leyonhjelm's one man show is going to seriously propose undoing those while the smoking figures continue to drop.

This inquiry is a complete and utter waste of time.   I would much prefer that Leyonhjelm pleasure himself in private. 

The fractured Australian Right

OK, it's not (quite) the same level of disaster as the US political situation, but it appears that there are many unhappy campers in the Coalition at the moment.  I wonder how many of them are secretly hoping for a bad result in the Canning by-election, so that a move on Abbott's leadership can be convincingly mounted.

PS:  on the populist Right, Andrew Bolt is in a frenzy of Muslim-mania again, and is virtually unreadable. 

PPS:   according to Phil Coorey, even frontbenchers are saying there'll be another leadership challenge. 

The fractured American Right

Oh look, George Will not only disses Trump, but finds big hypocrisy in the GOP on the matter of gay marriage and the law:

Some, who loudly lament how illegal immigrants damage the rule of law, have found a heroine in Kentucky. A county clerk, whose devotion to her faith is not stronger than her desire to keep her paycheck, chose jail rather than resignation when confronted with having to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitution regarding same-sex marriage.

Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker think her religious freedom is being trampled. So does Ted Cruz, who surely knows better. He clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and must remember the 1892 case in which a Massachusetts policeman claimed that rules restricting political activity by police violated his constitutional rights. Rejecting this claim, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote that the officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

Meanwhile, armed paranoid Right wing nutters claim they will "defend" said clerk, and what's the bet that followers of gormless Gateway Pundit will clap their hands in excitement and approval.  (There are only 2 comments there so far, but I'll check back later.)

The American Right is truly in a crisis of disunity and nonsense. 

A very strange ruse

US politicians face sack for gay sex ruse - BBC News

Tea party Republicans Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat concocted a false
story that Mr Courser had solicited a male sex worker, to make the story
of their affair less credible....

The allegations stem from a spurious email that Mr Courser asked an
aide to send, that claimed he was caught with a male prostitute.

The email was sent to party activists in the hope it would make allegations of his and Ms Gamrat's affair sound less credible.

The report doesn't explain how a Republican politician could think he faced less trouble by spreading a rumour that he used male prostitutes than he could from knowledge of an affair with a woman...

Japanese floods - worldwide floods

The remarkable sight of the Japanese floods on television last night was "old news" by this morning, but yet again, I make the point that flash flooding from increased extreme rainfall is an underacknowledged immediate consequence of global warming.

So I was a bit surprised to read this at the end of one report about yesterday's flood:

Kei Yoshimura, a hydrologist at the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, said the magnitude of the Kinugawa River flooding on Thursday was “something that takes place only once in 100 years.”
He added that it was too early to conclude the flooding was linked to climate change, saying the heavy rainfall happened to occur along that river.
“It’s my view that the effect of climate change on this particular incident is zero, or unknown at this point,” he said.

This is one of those cases of over-caution on the matter of attribution to individual events.  If Kei had wanted to paint the "bigger picture" he might of cited this 2007 paper about increased rainfall intensity in his country:

This paper explores features of long-term changes in precipitation in Japan based on recent studies using daily data from 51 stations since 1901, partly updated for the present article. We show that heavy daily precipitation ( 200 mm and 100 mm) has significantly increased during the last century as weak to moderate precipitation ( 1 mm to 10 mm) has decreased.  New analysis using hourly precipitation records at over 600 stations on the AMeDAS network has shown an increase in very intense hourly and six-hourly precipitations ( 100 mm/h and 300 mm/6h) during the last 28 years.

Or he might have referred to the worldwide trend, as discussed here in a 2012 paper:

Based on the discussions above, we can make the following conclusions. First, the large increase in global average precipitation intensity increase derived from the GPCP data, with the top 10% heavy precipitation increased by about 108% for each degree Kelvin increase in global mean temperature and the bottom 30%–60% bins decreased by about 20% K 1, is credible. Increases in heavy precipitation can lead to more and worse floods and mudslides, while decreases of light and moderate precipitation can increase the risk of droughts. The 100-year linear trend (1906–2005) of global temperature is 0.74 C 0.18 C, and is expected to increase even faster [Solomon et al., 2007].  This implies that the global top 10% heavy precipitation had already increased by about 80% and will continue increase at a faster rate. Meanwhile there are corresponding increases in the risk of droughts. It follows that the increasing occurrence and severity of floods, mudslides, as well as shortage of water resources has been and would increasingly be one of the worst hazards to the global ecosystem as the result of global warming.

The lesson:  this key damaging aspect of climate change is already happening.

And, second lesson:   ANDREW BOLT - YOU ARE WRONG AND A FOOL FOR NOT ACKNOWLEDGING CLIMATE CHANGE HAS LONG BEEN PREDICTED TO INCREASE BOTH FLOOD AND DROUGHT.   

 

When Americans Loved Taxes

Interesting short history here about how Americans used to be enthusiastic about taxes (in the form of tariffs).

All connected

Ocean life triggers ice formation in clouds

This would suggest to me further reason to worry about the unknown, global effects of ocean acidification.

Seeing things

Here's part of the latest close up of the bright spot on Ceres:

Sure, the centre bit is now looking like an ice volcano, if you ask me, but I am more concerned about the odd shaped outline to the upper right that seems to be pointing to it.  Could a rude 14 year old boy already have been there?