Private school problem

Brisbane readers in particular are likely noting with amazement the evidence to the Royal Commission into child abuse regarding what went on at Brisbane Grammar School in the 70's and 80's, including the former deputy headmaster denying he ever had any knowledge of anything amiss.  (Not only are former students saying this is wrong, but so are parents - a fact which seems to have been under-reported on the television summaries of the commission I have noticed.  UPDATE:sorry, I've confused evidence against the late headmaster with that against this deputy - but against him there was still evidence that he had questioned a student about his inappropriate relationship with Lynch.)

It seems the evidence of some ex-students is that, amongst the boys, knowledge of what the school's counsellor was doing in his locked door (hello, common sense warning sign) sessions with boys was pretty widespread.   But, somewhat oddly, there have been snippets on the radio of some ex students saying that (at the time) they appreciated his "caring" interest in them.  (I assume the fact that they are at the enquiry means they later appreciated that it was an incredible abuse of trust and authority.)

As with what went on at Knox Grammar in Sydney, it seems to me somewhat ironic that this sort of thing went on at a school where parents were paying extraordinary sums for the best of care and education for their kids.   Given that I was at a (rather working class area) state high school in the 1970's, it's extremely difficult to imagine that the same sort of thing could have happened there - for one thing, the State system never had any money for intensive on site counselling, and for another, it's kind of hard imagining the kind of guys going to a mixed gender State school thinking that what Lynch was doing was above board.   It seems to me that going to a top private school probably gave some of these boys a more ready acceptance of authority and belief that everyone there was really acting in their best interests.

I was sure I had made similar comments about abuse allegations at Knox, but can't find that post now.  In any event, it sort of goes to show an upside to State schools not being able to afford to pay staff to have too much time with students...

Update:  found my Knox post from earlier this year - only by scrolling through my blog.  Proof again that for some mysterious reason, Google is really bad at searching for keywords through its own hosted blogs.  (I had tried advanced search, and all...)

Update 2:   just noticed at the lunchtime news:  more terrible evidence at the royal commission, with the former deputy headmaster giving exactly the wrong response to an invitation to apologise to the former students.    Also, another student gave evidence that a teacher who is still at the school utterly rejected his approach for help when he was dazed and confused about getting abused by the counsellor for help with bullying and homesickness.   What spectacularly poor PR for the school.  

Sardines noted, again

As I wrote earlier this year, after a long break, I've started eating canned sardines again.   (Dieter's tip:  a whole can is surprisingly modest in calories, too.   A can on a couple of those corn or rice disk things can come in at about 200 calories - or one meal if you are doing the 5/2 diet and spread your 600 calories evenly over 3 meals.)

But I am upset with Aldi.   After languishing in the cupboard for many months, last week I found a can of "sardine sprats" from Germany via Aldi, and they were smoked and extremely delicious.  (Unlike your more routine sardines in oil, or tomato sauce.  Actually today I had a can from Portugal in a chilli sauce which was quite nice.  I generally don't care for the tomato sauce versions, though.) 

But, as with their smoked mussels from Germany, Aldi no longer stocks these sprats.   In fact, there are no German produced canned seafood there at all.  The nearest I found was something from Poland.  (Herring, I think.)  But most of their stuff is now either Thailand or from the extremely dubious food processing standards of China.  (I refuse to buy such Chinese products.)

I don't know where I could find smoked sprats like the German ones again.   Perhaps I need to visit a few more Mediterranean delis around South Brisbane/West End.    Perhaps a reader from Melbourne might locate some, and could arrange a parcel to Brisbane?  

Update:  hey, someone has already written "The Sardine Diet".  Dang.

Some surprising figures

According to the CSIRO, there are actually more Liberal voters who think climate change is natural than National Party voters:

That's odd - I would have guessed the percentages between those two parties would be reversed.  Maybe being on the land does help convince people climate change is real?   Or maybe not - I see that 18% of Nationals think it isn't happening at all, compared to 13% of Liberals.

But I'm not sure this should be taken too much to heart.  First, the weather people experience affects how they think about climate change, so level of concern fluctuates all the time.  And as the report notes, people's responses don't always make sense:

The CSIRO survey found some confusion among respondents. For instance, even those who thought global warming was not happening still attributed just over a third of climate change to human activity.
Those who thought there was no climate change counted friends and family as their most trusted source of information on the issue. University scientists were the most trusted source of respondents saying humans are to blame for global warming.
"Politicians were also rarely nominated as a basis for opinions, despite the strong associations that opinions had with voting behaviour," the report noted. "This aligns with recent research suggesting politicians and political parties might be more influential than [people] think."

Still, there's no doubt about it:  on the major scientific and political issue of the century, Green voters are by far the most sensible in recognizing the problem, followed by Labor.  And it would seem about half of the Liberals and Nationals are caught up in the culture/ideology war that prevents them making sensible judgement about this.  Sad.

Illicit drug history

I've long been skeptical of the simplified version of how and why some drugs became illegal that is given by some pro-drug reform advocates, especially when it comes from a libertarian perspective that broader society really has no right or interest in trying to modify private behaviour.   So it is with interest that I have stumbled across Points:  The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

I haven't gotten too far into it, so I am not sure whether I will end up skeptical of some of its writers' positions too, but it at least seems to indicate that they deal with the problem as a complex one.   Here is a brief extract from one post:

Ironically, when one digs into the history of marijuana and its connection to the jazz world in the early 20th century, it appears white men were primarily responsible for introducing black musicians and Harlemites to weed (or in the parlance of their day, gage, tea, muggles or reefer, among many other names). Italian-American Leon Roppolo, the clarinetist for the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, was said to have introduced marijuana to the Chicago jazz scene, in particular to Jewish saxophonist Mezz Mezzrow, who later became weed dealer to Louis Armstrong and much of Harlem. “Mezz” became another nickname for pot, according to the saxophonist, who also considered himself an “honorary Negro.”

Notably, Mezzrow’s autobiography, Really the Blues – which is so peppered with terminology from jazz and African American cultures that it includes a lengthy glossary – exemplifies Becker’s theory of how one becomes a marijuana user (or in 1930s slang, a viper). Becker argues that one must learn “how to be high” and is usually coached into weed usage through friends who are already active users. The first time Mezzrow smoked, he didn’t feel a thing, and was reprimanded. “You ain’t even smokin’ it right,” he was told. “You got to hold that muggle so that it barely touches your lips, see, then draw in air around it. Say tfff, tfff, only breathe in when you say it. Then don’t blow it out right away, you got to give the stuff a chance.”
After receiving this instruction and finishing his first joint correctly, Mezzrow returned to his bandstand. He recalled that “the first thing I noticed was I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head…then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip, and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker…I felt I could go on playing for years without running out of ideas and energy…The people were going crazy over the subtle changes in our playing.” Mezz argued that “tea puts a musician in a real masterly sphere, and that’s why so many jazzmen have used it.”

Despite Mezz’s positive experiences with the drug, 1930s critics increasingly associated weed with black musical subcultures and pathological behavior.

Pteropods in the news, again

Abrupt onset and prolongation of aragonite undersaturation events in the Southern Ocean : Nature Climate Change : Nature Publishing Group: Ocean acidification may lead to seasonal aragonite undersaturation in surface waters of the Southern Ocean as early as 2030 (ref. 1). These conditions are harmful to key organisms such as pteropods, which contribute significantly to the pelagic foodweb and carbon export fluxes in this region. Although the severity of ocean acidification impacts is mainly determined by the duration, intensity and spatial extent of aragonite undersaturation events, little is known about the nature of these events, their evolving attributes and the timing of their onset in the Southern Ocean. Using an ensemble of ten Earth system models, we show that starting around 2030, aragonite undersaturation events will spread rapidly, affecting ~30% of Southern Ocean surface waters by 2060 and & greater than 70% by 2100, including the Patagonian Shelf. On their onset, the duration of these events will increase abruptly from 1 month to 6 months per year in less than 20 years in & greater than 75% of the area affected by end-of-century aragonite undersaturation. This is likely to decrease the ability of organisms to adapt to a quickly evolving environment. The rapid equatorward progression of surface aragonite undersaturation can be explained by the uptake of anthropogenic CO2, whereas climate-driven physical or biological changes will play a minor role.

 The Sydney Morning Herald report on this notes:

"What surprised us was really the abruptness at which this
under-saturation [of calcium carbonate-based aragonite] occurs in large
areas of the Southern Ocean," Axel Timmermann​, a co-author of the study
and oceanography professor at the University of Hawaii told Fairfax
Media. "It's actually quite scary."

Since the Southern Ocean is already close to the threshold for shell-formation, relatively
small changes in acidity levels will likely show up there first, Professor Timmermann said: "The background state is already very close to corrosiveness."

And of course, the "let's burn coal to make poor people rich and airconditioned into safety" crowd never address the point that their tactic will only accelerate potential food chain collapse in the oceans.

Sounds pretty reasonable, even if next to impossible given the nutty American political climate

Joseph Stiglitz on Fixing Economic Inequality - The Atlantic

Yeti tales from Bhutan

Why don't people see the yeti any more? - BBC News

I see that belief in the yeti is given as an explanation for low doorways into houses.  (Yeti can't bend down to get in, apparently.)

As always, I'm most fascinated by the foul smell said to be associated with all yeti/bigfoot creatures, especially as I knew a guy who got frightened by loud bush trampling sounds and a foul smell when he was camping once in state forest north of Brisbane.

The American white male mid-life crisis

Prospect has a lengthy article about a new paper showing a significant rise in white male (usually with low level of education) deaths in the US in the period 1999 - 2013.  Yeah, it is startling when you see this graph:

As Prospect says:

To conservatives, the white midlife mortality reversal in the United States may initially seem to confirm Murray’s argument about moral decay caused by the welfare state. But that interpretation runs into an obvious objection: Similar trends are not evident in the European countries that have even more generous systems of social protection than the United States does.

Although Case and Deaton are cautious about interpreting the data, they single out two possible causes of the mortality reversal. The first relates specifically to the timing of increased drug-related deaths: the introduction and ready availability of opioid prescription painkillers (such as Oxycontin) beginning in the late 1990s, followed by a shift to heroin, both directly linked to rising death rates among whites over the 1999-2013 period. But it is not clear, Case and Deaton point out, whether rising drug use is a response to an “epidemic of pain,” or whether the introduction and distribution of new prescription painkillers played an independent, causal role. One way or the other, however, Case and Deaton’s study puts in bold relief the sheer magnitude of the consequences of today’s drug plague.

A second potential cause highlighted by Case and Deaton (and possibly related to the first) is stress from economic change resulting from slower economic growth and rising inequality. “Many of the baby-boom generation,” they note, “are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education.” But they also observe that some other rich countries have seen “even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience.”

 It seems so very clear that the American experience with prescription painkillers and addiction has been a real disaster, yet it still seems one that attracts inadequate attention.

The magazine thinks this says a lot about the American welfare system:

Here is where the stronger systems of social protection in other countries may play a role in both reducing inequality and cushioning people from the adverse social psychological consequences of wage stagnation. One key difference potentially affecting people in midlife, as Case and Deaton point out, is that the other rich countries have maintained defined-benefit pensions, while employers in the United States have shifted increasingly to defined-contribution pensions (such as 401(k) plans) that do not provide the same degree of security. As a result, many Americans with only a high-school education not only lack the skills in midlife to find good jobs or even to stay employed but also face the likelihood of destitution in old age.

These trends put new light on current debates about disability insurance and retirement policy. Contrary to those like Murray who attribute the growth in Social Security Disability Insurance to a decline in the work ethic, Case and Deaton’s data suggest that the increased number of beneficiaries reflects a real deterioration of health in middle age. Raising the Social Security retirement age may seem to be no problem for the educated and affluent who are in good health and do little physical labor, but delaying retirement poses a much bigger problem for workers who are experiencing increased burdens of pain and disability in midlife.

We'll be reading a lot more about this study, I bet...

And by the way:   I reckon it indicates nothing good for the practical consequences of more libertarian views on social and economic issues.

Forgotten proto-hippies

I for one had never heard of a English arty-hippy-magical youth movement from the 1920's called the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (makes me think of "kibble"),  but The Guardian has remedied that.

It's a good read, with some amusing photos too.  (George Orwell dismissal of them as sex maniacs gets a mention, too, and I can't help but wonder if they somehow had a role in his idea for the Anti Sex League in 1984.)

Speaking of Orwell, I just found this from The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell:

Don't think I knew of the CIA involvement before....

An Antarctic surprise

For an organisation that climate change deniers have claimed is part of the self serving conspiracy to convince the world that it is heating up probelmatically, NASA sure doesn't know how to hide research that they know said deniers are going to leap on with joy.

So the Antarctic land ice sheet might (for now) still be putting on weight overall, not loosing it?   As a researcher says, though, this does raise an interesting question about the tricky field of sea level rise:

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

Anyhow, I'd be sure that there is more to come from Real Climate and others about this.  

Update:  here's a post at Hotwhopper that puts some perspective on this (including how it is a quite different different result from some other, recent work.)   It's all to do with the complexities of using satellites that measure different things, over different periods.  I would have guessed that the GRACE satellite that measures mass via changes in the gravity field would be the most reliable for working out the ice sheet balance, but this latest study (I think) doesn't use it. 

More about that passing Halloween asteroid

Radar images from those observations revealed asteroid 2015 TB145 true size (it's a bit larger than previously thought) and its speed. The asteroid is hurtling through space at a whopping 78,293 mph (126,000 km/h).

"This would generate a 6-mile-wide crater if it were to the Earth, something of this size and speed," asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in the Slooh webcast. He was also impressed by the early radar images of the 2015 TB145.

And it was only found a few weeks before its close fly by.  Link.

The modern blight of smoking

Meet the Melbourne oncologist now at the centre of Big Tobacco’s dartboard

Simon Chapman (the mortal enemy of Sinclair Davidson, incidentally - I suspect they are both in comic book costumes chasing each other around the city at night, such is the depth of their mutual disdain) has an interesting post up which references the way lung cancer really took off in the 20th century.  I remember Paul Johnson wrote about how the modern cigarette really sent smoking rates through the roof in the early 20th century, but I am curious as to the smoking rate in the earlier centuries.

Stick a fork in it

Well, it's amusing watching the hair pulling and shirt (and blouse) rending that is still going on at Catallaxy over the replacement of Tony Abbott with the popular (to normal people) Malcolm Turnbull.   I see that now that the obnoxious Jim Allen has joined in  with a post that spends a great deal of time complaining about the fact that a pro Turnbull challenge post was written by an anonymous contributor.  (Seriously, who cares?)  Earlier, Sinclair had called the Abbott whiners "unmanly" (?, given most male Abbott supporters there are ones who deride homosexuality routinely), leading to a complaint or 20 from some of his long standing supporters.   He in turn complained about getting sick of the criticism that he was stifling free speech on the topic, etc etc.

All highly amusing to see a site which, as far as I can tell, is unified only in its refusal to accept AGW, finding nothing else they can agree upon. 

The incredibly hard to please Kenny

Two decades of Media Watch abstinence | The Australian

I saw Media Watch last week and thought its position on Kenny was probably more than fair.   But according to Kenny, a media show cannot report on a media controversy (an allegation about Kenny which the show noted was hotly denied by Kenny) because it repeats an allegation.

The funny thing is, because of the Australian's paywall, a lot of people (like me) know nothing about what he wrote as a result of his visit to Nauru.

And his extremely politically partisan performance in commentary over the last decade would make every reasonable person question whether his reporting on this white hot issue was balanced, and give it a miss for that reason alone.

That said, I had forgotten that he had been a key figure in the Hindmarsh Island affair, which really was a left wing scandal.  But did he give up journalism for mere commentary and now wants to be seen as a journalist again?

Update:  Media Watch under Paul Barry also fully took Kenny's side in his big defamation complaint against the ABC, too.   (Even though I thought it wasn't really defamatory - just an unfunny joke in very poor taste.)  

Always had a soft spot for ELO

Jeff Lynne launches into new orbit with ELO's 'Alone in the Universe' - LA Times

I noticed an ELO video clip up on Vimeo yesterday, but didn't watch it all due to a stuttering connection.  So, the master of overproduction, Jeff Lynne, is still making music.   I suspect that even if one is not keen on his style, it's hard to positively dislike his music.  

Even Nature got into the Halloween spirit

Zombie physics: 6 baffling results that just won't die : Nature News & Comment

Don't look! - the most disturbing Halloween photo ever published...

(OK, that joke has probably already been done 200 times on twitter and the web before me, but still...)

The comments in The Guardian following this story (Rupert and Jerry Hall now "out" about their dating) are pretty funny.

For Halloween

I recently talked about re-discovering the greatness of The Shining (movie, not the book), and now I see via Open Culture a fascinating half hour documentary on its making.   (Not sure, but I think I have seen this years ago, perhaps on TV.)  It is extraordinary to be reminded that the interior of the hotel is in fact a gigantic set in England.  (And even the exterior in most shots is a mere facade.) 

I wonder if Kubrick, if he were making movies today, could ever warm to the remarkably life like digital sets that are now just standard fare.  I like those videos that show all the green screen use in film and TV. Here's the one for The Martian:



But I digress. Here's the doco on The Shining:

VIEW FROM THE OVERLOOK: Crafting The Shining (30 min) Directed by Gary Leva from Gary Leva on Vimeo.

Not a great idea

Labor promises to lower voting age to 16 or 17 if it wins next election | Australia news | The Guardian

Alan loves Putin

Vladimir Putin: Global Warming 'A Fraud' | The Daily Caller

Ha.  The former IPA anti-renewables mouthpiece Alan Moran turns up at Catallaxy again noting that Putin "appears to be one world statesman willing to call the scam [global warming] for what it is".  (See link above.)

Yes, of course, Alan.  The one world stateman most noted for conducting himself with so much self interest that he makes excuses for local invasions and passenger planes being shot out of the sky and who has a lot of fossil fuels to sell would be the one I would expect to be on your side.   No big surprise, and great company you keep.

More about that annoying company

Apple Doesn't Sell All the Phones. But It Makes All the Money | WIRED

Yes, people keep forgetting that Samsung usually sells many more phones than Apple.  But, with my $59 cheapo Sony Android in my pocket, I guess I am part of the reason why making monies from smartphones is so hard for Android using companies.  (I am thinking of upgrading to a Samsung, but not paying more than $180.)

Cod don't care for warmer water

Warming waters a major factor in the collapse of New England cod, study finds

When not to trust scientists

Forensic DNA evidence is not infallible : Nature News & Comment

Given that it infuriates me that a substantial slab of people do not believe that those who work in the physical sciences are competent when working out things like a temperature record, or the effects of a gas in an atmosphere, I suppose I give the impression much of the time that I never question scientists of any stripe.

But when it comes to the biomedical sciences:  yes, there are many examples of scientists leaping in when they should be more cautious.

And when they get caught up in a court case, they are particularly prone to giving up caution, presumably  because they think they are promoting a good outcome.

This article in Nature shows the danger:

The term 'touch DNA' conveys to a courtroom that biological material
found on an object is the result of direct contact. In fact, forensic
scientists have no way of knowing whether the DNA was left behind
through such primary, direct transfer. It could also have been deposited
by secondary transfer, through an intermediary. (If I shake your hand
then I could pass some of your skin cells onto something that I touch
next.)

Contamination from secondary DNA transfer was raised as a possible problem in Nature in 1997 (R. A. H. van Oorschot and M. K. Jones Nature 387, 767; 1997).
It is known to happen, but has largely been dismissed by legal experts
as being rare outside the conditions of a laboratory. Experiments done
in real-world conditions seemed to support this, and concluded that
secondary DNA transfer would have little impact on interpretation of the
genetic profile.

It is important to recognize that DNA amplification kits have become
much more sensitive than they were in the past. As a result, the types
of samples being analysed have expanded. Investigators no longer need to
identify and request analysis of body fluids such as blood, semen and
saliva. They can swab surfaces for otherwise invisible cells left
behind, on the handle of a weapon or on a windowsill, perhaps, and ask
labs to generate a DNA profile from them. The new kits can generate a
full genetic profile of a suspect from as little as 100 picograms
(trillionths of a gram) of DNA.

These subtleties are not usually explained in court. Instead, a jury is told
that there is a one-in-a-quadrillion chance that the evidence retrieved
from the crime scene did not come from a defendant. Naturally, the
jurors assume that the defendant must have been there.

Given  the power of modern forensic techniques to pull a DNA profile from a
smudge of cells, secondary DNA transfer is no longer a purely
theoretical risk. In California in 2013, a man called Lukis Anderson was
arrested, held for four months and charged with murder after his DNA
was found under the fingernails of a homicide victim.

Anderson had never met the victim and was severely intoxicated and in hospital
when the man was killed. The same paramedics who took Anderson to
hospital responded to the murder. Most likely, the paramedics were
covered in Anderson's DNA, which they then inadvertently transferred.
The charges were dropped.

Experiments in our labs, under the supervision of forensic anthropologist Krista Latham,
show how easily DNA can be transferred to an object.

We asked pairs of people to shake hands for two minutes and then each
individual handled a separate knife. In 85% of cases, the DNA of the
other person was transferred to the knife and profiled. In one-fifth of
the samples, the DNA analysis identified this other person as the main
or only contributor of DNA to the 'weapon' (C. M. Cale et al. J. Forensic Sci. http://doi.org/8j2; 2015).

How significant is the result of a single study? Other analyses have shown
that DNA transfer can be unpredictable and can depend on environmental
conditions. We need more research on when and how secondary transfer can
occur.

Republican hopelessness

So, Ohio Governor John Kasich recognizes the complete policy nuttiness of Trump and Carson:

"I've about had it with these people," Kasich said at the rally in Westerville, Ohio. "We got one candidate that says we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard of anything so crazy as that? Telling our people in this country who are seniors, who are about to be seniors that we're going to abolish Medicaid and Medicare?"
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has acknowledged that he would like to gut Medicare.
Kasich went on, saying, "We got one person saying we ought to have a 10 percent flat tax that will drive up the deficit in this country by trillions of dollars" and there's another challenger in the field who "says we ought to take 10 or 11 [million] people and pick them up — I don't know where we're going to go, their homes, their apartments — we're going to pick them up and scream at them to get out of our country. That's crazy. That is just crazy."
Donald Trump has expressed support for deporting immigrants living in the country illegally.
"We got people proposing health care reform that's going to leave, I believe, millions of people without adequate health insurance," Kasich says. "What has happened to our party? What has happened the conservative movement?"

But his own plans for tax and finances?  (my bold):

Mr. Kasich’s tax plan -- which would cut the top individual income-tax rate to 28% from 39.6% and provide more relief for lower-income people through the Earned Income Tax Credit -- is the latest offering in an array of tax cuts proposed by Republican presidential candidates.
Mr. Kasich’s proposal isn’t the largest or most radical reduction on the GOP table, but it is being offered as part of one of the most specific plans to eliminate the deficit. It is still short on many details about how the budget would be balanced but calls for drastic policy changes such as transferring responsibility for Medicaid, welfare and highway-construction funding to the states.

The old "we must cut taxes on the rich to make the budget balance" line, hey?  (And let other governments work out how to raise money for services and infrastructure.)

Sorry, he may be less nuts than the populist leaders (who no one expects to last), but his views still show all the deficiencies that have been plaguing the Republican Party for years.

And how's that Laffer endorsed Kansas going:

“These things take some time,” Brownback said not long ago when asked whether his king-size income tax cuts have had the desired effect.
The key, he said, is patience.
Arthur Laffer wants more time too. He’s the philosophical architect of the Kansas income tax cuts.
“You have to view this over 10 years,” Laffer said. “It will work in Kansas.”
But that’s one point of view. As Kansas struggles with higher sales taxes and slashed budgets, I wondered what economists who focus on this stuff would say.
It’s been nearly three years since the state slashed income tax rates and took scores of businesses off the tax rolls. To be exact, it’s been two years, nine months and 23 days.
How much time do we have to wait for the promised “shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy” that Brownback promised?
I randomly called half a dozen economists from around the country. They’re at major think tanks and major universities far from Kansas, and they don’t have any dog in the Kansas dispute. I asked this: Have the tax cuts had enough time to work?
Economists don’t agree on much, but they agreed on this, and they were unanimous: Yes, the tax cuts have had plenty of time. No question about it.

Ha!   Will Laffer still be around in 10 years to claim victory?

Update:  just noticed this from a live blog of the 3rd GOP presidential candidate debate:

Nobody is doing better on the debate stage tonight than Ted Cruz. He won the biggest applause of the night with his attack on the press, and now he gets an appeal to Ron Paul libertarian voters by professing himself in favor of a return to the gold standard and a call to audit the Federal Reserve.

 As I said, how utterly hopeless...

Update 2:  Vox has a good piece about Ted Cruz's attack.  The key points:

Cruz's attack on the moderators was smart politics — but it was almost precisely backwards. The questions in the CNBC debate, though relentlessly tough, were easily the most substantive of the debates so far. And the problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks — but that's because the policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually unfair.

The Republican primary has thus far been a festival of outlandish policy. The candidates seem to be competing to craft the tax plan that gives the largest tax cut to the rich while blowing the biggest hole in the deficit (a competition that, as of tonight, Ted Cruz appears to be winning). And the problem is when you ask about those plans, simply stating the facts of the policies sounds like you're leveling a devastating attack....

 Cruz's strategy was smart, and he was arguably the debate's big winner. But it bespoke a deeper weakness. Republicans have boxed themselves into some truly bizarre policies — including a set of tax cuts that give so much money to the rich, and blow such huge holes in the deficit, that simply asking about them in any serious way seems like a vicious attack. Assailing the media is a good way to try to dodge those questions for a little while, but it won't work over the course of a long campaign.

When is a proof a proof?

The biggest mystery in mathematics: Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof 

I don't often post about mathematics, but Peter Woit's blog had a link to this article in Nature about a lengthy proof that hardly anyone in the field can understand:

But almost everyone who tackled Mochizuki's proof found themselves floored. Some were bemused by the sweeping — almost messianic — language with which Mochizuki described some of his new theoretical instructions: he even called the field that he had created 'inter-universal geometry'. “Generally, mathematicians are very humble, not claiming that what they are doing is a revolution of the whole Universe,” says Oesterlé, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who made little headway in checking the proof.

The reason is that Mochizuki's work is so far removed from anything that had gone before. He is attempting to reform mathematics from the ground up, starting from its foundations in the theory of sets (familiar to many as Venn diagrams). And most mathematicians have been reluctant to invest the time necessary to understand the work because they see no clear reward: it is not obvious how the theoretical machinery that Mochizuki has invented could be used to do calculations. “I tried to read some of them and then, at some stage, I gave up. I don't understand what he's doing,” says Faltings.

Fesenko has studied Mochizuki's work in detail over the past year, visited him at RIMS again in the autumn of 2014 and says that he has now verified the proof. (The other three  mathematicians who say they have corroborated it have also spent considerable time working alongside Mochizuki in Japan.) The overarching theme of inter-universal geometry, as Fesenko describes it, is that one must look at whole numbers in a different
light — leaving addition aside and seeing the multiplication structure as something malleable and deformable. Standard multiplication would then be just one particular case of a family of structures, just as a circle is a special case of an ellipse. Fesenko says that Mochizuki compares himself to the mathematical giant Grothendieck — and it is no
immodest claim. “We had mathematics before Mochizuki's work — and now we have mathematics after Mochizuki's work,” Fesenko says.

But so far, the few who have understood the work have struggled to explain it to anyone else. “Everybody who I'm aware of who's come close to this stuff is quite reasonable, but afterwards they become incapable of communicating it,” says one mathematician who did not want his name to be mentioned. The situation, he says, reminds him of the Monty Python skit about a writer who jots down the world's funniest joke. Anyone who reads it dies from laughing and can never relate it to anyone else.

 All rather odd.

A sad McDonalds story

The night time 'McRefugees' of Hong Kong - BBC News

Management never asks the sleeping customers to leave?

Ridley wrong

Countering libertarian arguments against science funding | Science | The Guardian

Matt Ridley ran a bank into the ground, chose to blame "regulation", and now is a major player in the lukewarmer field, associating with wrongologist economist Richard Tol.

His latest book is not a hit with the reviewer from (of course) The Guardian, but also not even the one at The Spectator.

He is, generally speaking, a bit of a pillock who is best ignored.  

Dumb and on the wrong side of morality

I see that the IPA, Sinclair Davidson and his blog are promoting heavily a new book by the zero credibility Ian Plimer that insists the only way to help the global poor is to burn more coal - lots more coal:

Catallaxy is full of hilarious hyperbole from its conservative cohort about how this communist Pope is trying to kill millions by arguing that increased CO2 is not the way to go.

But in all honesty - if an economist can't see through the complete and utter bulldust that an aging geologist has been specialising in for some years now, there's no reason to trust his or her judgement on anything.

Floods and climate change, continued

Just noticed a recent paper:

Severe flooding occurred in Thailand during the 2011 summer season, which resulted in more than 800 deaths and affected 13.6 million people. The unprecedented nature of this flood in the Chao Phraya River Basin (CPRB) was examined and compared with historical flood years. Climate diagnostics were conducted to understand the meteorological conditions and climate forcing that lead to the magnitude and duration of this flood. Neither the monsoon rainfall nor the tropical cyclone frequency anomalies alone was sufficient to cause the 2011 flooding event. Instead, a series of abnormal conditions collectively contributed to the intensity of the 2011 flood: anomalously high rainfall in the pre-monsoon season especially during March; record-high soil moisture content thorough the year; elevated sea level height in the Gulf of Thailand which constrained drainage, as well as other water management factors. In the context of climate change, the substantially increased pre-monsoon rainfall in CPRB after 1980 and the continual sea level rise in the river outlet have both played a role. The rainfall increase is associated with a strengthening of the pre-monsoon northeasterly winds that come from East Asia. Attribution analysis using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 historical experiments pointed to the anthropogenic greenhouse gases as the main external climate forcing leading to the rainfall increase. Together, these findings suggest increasing odds for potential flooding similar to the 2011 flood intensity.

Not a cent from me

Apple is a ridiculously successful company:

Apple has more than $205bn of cash in the bank, the company revealed on Tuesday as its chief executive Tim Cook said the firm had made more than $234bn in 2015, making it its “most successful year ever”.
The California company now has more money in the bank than the Czech Republic, Peru and New Zealand make in gross domestic product (GDP) a year, according to World Bank statistics. Apple’s cash balances increased by $2.8bn in the last three months alone.

I'm not sure their doing anything really useful with their money, though, apart from throwing it in the air and letting it fall on their head, McDuck style.  I suggest establishing a private air force with which to blow up coal mines or their train lines. (Useful and would annoy Bill Gates, too!)

I trust he dressed appropriately for his big speech...

Diamonds in the sky

Climate scientists ponder spraying diamond dust in the sky to cool planet : Nature News & Comment

The diamonds part sounds a bit wacky.  

Hmmm.

The AFR is being openly gossipy about Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin:

This is going to be pretty hard for some of you to get your heads around, so I guess I better just tell it to you straight:
So, about that Margaret Thatcher lecture that Tony Abbott is delivering in London on Tuesday night – you know, the privately funded trip which, according to the former PM's office, he's being accompanied on with his wife, Margie Abbott?
If only the travelling party was really so conventional. See, there's also a villa in France, where, following the big speech, Abbott will be retiring  for a period of convalescence with his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, his C-bombing advancer, Richard Dowdy, (aptly named) and his mysterious press office veteran, Nicole Chant.

And you thought Credlin joining the then PM (sans wife Margie, but avec daughter Frances Abbott) skiing at Perisher in July was a little unusual!

We wonder if Margie will be joining the French party or steering well clear? If we're all still talking about Ainsley Gotto nearly 50 years after she ran John Gorton's PMO, Abbott's Last Tango Near Paris will certainly be one for the history books.

I remarked at the time that the publicity given in an Abbott friendly News Ltd paper to Abbott and Credlin skiing together was rather unusual.   Now Fairfax is joining in.

Surely this latest piece should be the cause of some complaint if there is nothing to the Abbott/Credlin relationship?

Update:  I see that on Twitter, The Australian has tweeted that Credlin "became more like a first lady" (as noted in its linked story on the Abbott downfall.)  The full quote in the article:

If there was one overarching, final loyalty from the prime minister, it was to his chief of staff. She had become almost a first lady, accompanying Abbott to everything from private dinners at the New York home of Rupert Murdoch to private snow-skiing holidays with Abbott and his daughter Frances. The chief of staff was the one introduced to foreign leaders. She interrupted to answer questions others put to Abbott, ruled the strategy, and used her power and intellect to barricade his office against the outside. His colleagues came to see their relationship as impenetrable and toxic for the government. But Abbott had empowered Credlin and, in the end, it was Abbott’s call. He gave her free rein. He called his colleagues sexist for challenging her.

Sounds to me like subtle innuendo?  

I can't work out what is  going on here.   Is it that they are emboldened that Abbott or Credlin will not address the innuendo directly, because there is something to it?   And what about the spouses?   If this is just scurrilous gossip, why aren't they making their displeasure known?

I have said before, if something is going to be revealed about the Abbott Credlin relationship that has been known by journalists for years, people should be furious if it is only done now, after the "family man" campaign Abbott ran for years against Gillard (and, in a sense, Rudd, in the last election).  
 

Unliveable desert countries

I'm told by a relative that Doha is already an unbearable place to live for any length of time, but researchers are saying that the Arabian Gulf is going to get much worse and perhaps become virtually unliveable*:

A human body may be able to adapt to extremes of dry-bulb temperature (commonly referred to as simply temperature) through perspiration and associated evaporative cooling provided that the wet-bulb temperature (a combined measure of temperature and humidity or degree of ‘mugginess’) remains below a threshold of 35 °C. (ref. 1). This threshold defines a limit of survivability for a fit human under well-ventilated outdoor conditions and is lower for most people. We project using an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this critical threshold under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas concentrations. Our results expose a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.

*  OK, without airconditioning.  Although, it's actually pretty incredible to me that people lived there at all before airconditioning.  Here's the summary from phys.org:

It would still be rare, and cities such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha wouldn't quite be uninhabitable, thanks to air conditioning. But for people living and working outside or those with no air conditioning, it would be intolerable, said Eltahir and Pal. While Mecca won't be quite as hot, the heat will likely still cause many deaths during the annual hajj pilgrimage, Eltahir said.

Furry Hannibal Lecters

The case against otters: necrophiliac, serial-killing fur monsters of the sea - Vox

Wow.  This article really makes the case for otters having some very surprising, and horrible, behaviours.

Nasty virus tricks

HIV latency: a high-stakes game of hide and seek

It's interesting to read about the devious way HIV, even when people are on treatment, hides itself:

In latent infection, HIV integrates its genetic material into the DNA of the patient and becomes “silent”.

A brilliant added tool is the use of a long-lived critical cell of the immune system, the resting T cell, as its preferred hiding site. These latently infected resting T cells can slowly divide and, given HIV is now part of the patient’s DNA, the HIV is passed down to the daughter cells too.

HIV usually replicates in activated T cells and can efficiently kill those cells in several ways. First, the virus directly damages the outer membrane of the cell. This membrane usually keeps the cell intact.

Following infection of a cell, bits of the virus are quickly revealed to the immune system which, once activated, can zoom in and eliminate the infected cell.

However, if the virus manages to get inside a resting cell, in contrast to an activated T cell, all the machinery needed to produce new viruses is not available and the virus life cycle essentially shuts down.

If things shut down after the virus has already entered the patient’s DNA it gets stuck there – forever.

As the article also notes, people who go off the antiviral drugs quickly get high viral counts - within weeks.


What a nasty virus it remains.

Yet more on climate policy

Here's a very worthy bit of commentary about the Vox article I posted about on Sunday - pointing out that one has to be on the lookout for fatalism in the way the problem is described.   (It's by Michael Tobis, who is doing guest posts at ATTP lately.)

Movie economics

Turns out that Greg Jericho knows a lot about the matter of government subsidy for the movie business. 

I suspect that the benefits of this sort of government support are a bit stronger than Jericho thinks.  I reckon that of the type of industries government can be seen to be helping,  this one has a certain high profile, confidence building factor that others don't share.   All the publicity surrounding a major star staying for protracted periods on the Gold Coast or in Sydney (and saying nice things about these places) must count for something, no?  (Unless, of course, you are Barnaby Joyce and manage to turn a national image of relative youth and vigour into something more resembling a patronising fogey-ness.)

About Gary

I've been reading up a little about Gary Powers, the key figure in Bridge of Spies.

The Smithsonian.com has a short article about him, which contains a couple of surprises (he was allowed a conjugal visit with his wife, but she was an unfaithful alcoholic; and he kept a journal while in prison that indicates he may have had a touch of Stockholm syndrome.) 

His son has a website up, which doesn't have a lot of content, but some of it is interesting.

As for the old poison needle in the coin trick:  yes, this was true and the poison used was saxitoxin, derived from shellfish.  

You can even read an account of his accident on the CIA website, where we get a good description of his dangerous exit from the U2:

The young pilot had been flying for almost four hours when he heard a dull thump, the aircraft lurched forward, and there was a bright orange flash from a nearby surface-to-air missile. The plane’s right wing began to droop and the nose started to go down. Powers tried to correct it, but the plane continued its downward trajectory. Powers was uncertain if the control cable had been severed or if the tail was gone. He was certain, however, that he no longer had control of the plane.

Powers initial reaction was to pull the destruct switches, but he decided he’d better secure an exit plan for himself first. This, however, was proving difficult as the g forces had hurled him to the nose of the plane, which was spinning tail first towards the earth. Powers thought of ejecting but realized, in his current position, he likely would have had both off his legs cut off while trying to escape the plane.  

On the verge of panic, Powers decided he would climb out of the plane. The whirling aircraft had passed thirty-four thousand feet when he removed the canopy. He took off his seat-belt, which sent him flying halfway out of the aircraft. His face plate frosted over rendering him visionless. Powers tried to get to the destruct switches twice but, realizing time was running out, he began kicking frantically and miraculously the oxygen hoses that were holding him hostage in the U-2 broke and freed him from the spiraling plane.

Suddenly, all was silent, except for the rustling of material as the chute opened and settled in the wind. Powers hung in the air desperately trying to comprehend what had just happened and trying to assess his current situation. He was fifteen thousand feet above the Soviet Union and the ground was growing ever closer. As he clutched the straps of his chute, he saw a piece of the plane float down past him.

Maybe not exactly as portrayed in the movie, but pretty close.

Bridge spied

Hmmm.   This is an odd situation.  For once, I think a Spielberg film has been a tad overpraised, collectively, rather than my usual feeling that there are too many critics too cynical about him.

It's not that there's anything wrong with Bridge of Spies:  the acting is fine; the script has witticisms at times; and I don't think anyone now does history with finer and more authentic feel in the art direction than  Spielberg.  

It's just that I missed an element of tension, and had been expecting a bit more, I guess, intrigue in the story.   Out of Spielberg's last few films, I admit, this impressed me less than both War Horse or Lincoln.  (And Lincoln was a bit similar in that we already knew the ending - the interest is in how the movie gets there.)

I am also a little surprised that it hasn't had a wingnut backlash in the US, as it can be read as impliedly criticising the handling of those captured by the US in the war on terror, yet Breitbart gave it a glowing review too. 

Anyway, it's worth seeing, as Spielberg always is.  I just wish I could have been more gushing in praise.

Climate change economic modelling questionned

David Roberts at Vox has a good article up explaining the doubts about how valid any of the long term economic modelling of climate change can really be.

Given that I had noticed those doubts being expressed in some of the quieter corners of the 'net for a year or two now, it's good to see this is  finally getting some broader attention.

I did raise this issue in a thread at John Quiggin's blog recently too, noting Pindyck's criticism of the whole IAM exercise, but he didn't comment on it.

More about that Berkeley study...

The Economist has a good article up giving some more of the background of the Berkeley study that looked at the economic effects of global warming in a new way.  Here's part of it:

A paper published this week in Nature challenges this finding. The authors—Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang and Edward Miguel—suspected that economists had been looking for the wrong thing: a linear relationship between temperature and growth. Instead, they looked for an optimal temperature, on the assumption that excessive cold could harm growth as much as punishing heat. That is exactly what they found: hotter-than-usual years benefit countries, rich and poor alike, up to an average annual temperature of 13°C, after which hotter weather begins to sear growth. That allowed them to draw inferences about the likely effect of climate change: for Brazil, for example, an increase in temperature of 3°C will lead to a fall in output of 3% (see chart).

The apparent heat resistance of rich countries, it turns out, is simply because some of them, such as Germany and France, lie on the colder side of the optimum, so grow faster in hotter years, whereas others, such as America and Australia, lie on the hotter side, and so wilt as temperatures rise. Within individual counties in America, for instance, every hot day (with an average temperature over 24 hours of 24-27°C) lowers the average income per person that day by 20%, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Mr Hsiang and Tatyana Deryugina. Very hot days (over 30°C) lower income per person by 28%. Looking at the average impact of rising temperatures in rich countries as a group had obscured such strong responses.

 David Appel shares my skepticism of (as he puts it) an economic model atop a climate model, but his post extracting some of the material from the paper is worth reading too.  (I added a comment to his post along the lines of what I said here.) 

Much mirth caused

'Offers over $40,000': Tony Abbott joins the international speakers circuit

According to article:

Mr Abbott's preferred topics include advice on leadership, negotiation, election forecast and analysis, current events and Asia.

The disappearance of Mussolini

Seems to be the day for updating previous pop culture posts.

In July, I wrote about seeing the musical Anything Goes.  (One of those posts I like a lot, but no one comments on.)  Today, I see that Beachcomber has a post about the mysterious appearance and disappearance of a reference to Mussolini as a "top" in the song "You're the Top."  

Seems Wodehouse was responsible, although the matter is not without uncertainty.

Not entirely sure it was worth the update, but still....

Well argued

Hockey the fantasy economist may as well have farewelled Middle-earth | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian

I liked this piece from Greg Jericho that really showed up Joe Hockey as not up to the job of Treasurer.

Seems a nice enough guy in real life, but a bit of a hypocrite in politics and just all over the shop on matters of economics.  

You don't see that every day

Remember earlier this year that I had a bit of fun reading up on the nudist panic of the early 1930's in the US and Australia? 

Well, upon stumbling upon a new resource of scanned materials from museums and what not, it's always tempting to just search "nudist" and see what pops up.   That's how I found out (via the Digital Public Library of America) that the Smithsonian has in a box somewhere this photo from 1930:

The description is: Staged nudist wedding on a parade float with a mechanical dinosaur.

I have a suspicion that these particular nudists were trying to really annoy the anti-evolutionists in the South, but I could be wrong...

Your new word for today: phantosmia

It sounds a little like the phenomena of the phantom limb, that often hangs around when people lose their real one; but I hadn't heard of phantom smells before:

It occurs in people who lose the sense of smell. People with phantosmia imagine smells which can be odd, unnatural, unpleasant or even euphoric. It is a rare condition which can occur in relation to brain injuries, strokes, seizures, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. 

From a recent episode of the Science Show.  You can read more in the transcript that is at the link on this page.

UnEnglish and Unmanly

That's the title of a .pdf paper  I've stumbled across from 1982 about Anglo-Catholicism in England and its appeal to homosexual men.  It's by Adelaide historian David Hilliard, who (I think) has been on the ABC from time to time.

I vaguely knew about this topic, but didn't realise how "hot" an issue it was at the time of Newman and his followers.  Haven't read all of it yet, but it's an interesting read.   (I also wonder whether this aspect of the Anglican Church put off a figure like CS Lewis from moving towards the Catholic Church.)

Spectre arrives

I see from Rottentomatoes that the first British reviews for Spectre are pretty strong.  (Mind you, they still seem to be classifying one dubious review as a good one.)   That's pleasing.

But of course, all right thinking people will be off to see Bridge of Spies this weekend, to bask in the magnificence of a well made Spielberg. 

Another go at the economics of climate change

Expect to hear a lot about this study just out from some Berkeley researchers.  The headline from the Washington Post:

Sweeping study claims that rising temperatures will sharply cut economic productivity 

The claim is simple, but interesting:

Culling together economic and temperature data for over 100 wealthy
and poorer countries alike over 50 years, the researchers assert that
the optimum temperature for human productivity is seems to be around 13
degrees Celsius or roughly 55 degrees Fahrenheit, as an annual average
for a particular place. Once things get a lot hotter than that, the
researchers add, economic productivity declines “strongly.”

“The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and
apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and
poor countries,” write the authors, led by Marshall Burke of Stanford’s
Department of Earth System Science, who call their study “the first
evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global
climate.” Burke published the study with Solomon Hsiang and Edward
Miguel, economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

If the findings are correct, they add, that means that unmitigated
global warming could lead to a more than 20 percent decline in incomes
around the world, compared with a world that does not feature climate
change. And this would also mean growing global inequality, since poorer
countries will be hit by worse temperature increases — simply because
“hot, poor countries will probably suffer the largest reduction in
growth.” Indeed, some already wealthier countries with cold weather,
like Canada or Sweden, will benefit greatly based on the study, moving
closer to the climatic optimum.

 But things start to sound a bit more shaky here:

Assuming this relationship between temperature and productivity is
correct, that naturally leads to deep questions about its cause. The
researchers locate them in two chief places: agriculture and people. In
relation to rising temperature, Burke says, “We see that agricultural
productivity declines, labor productivity declines, kids do worse on
tests, and we see more violence.”

Yes, not sure I'd be entirely confident of the heat and violence connection, but if we go over to the university press release on this study, there is more reason to question the accuracy of the new study:

Unmitigated climate change is likely to reduce the income of an average
person on Earth by roughly 23 percent in 2100, according to estimates
contained in research published today in the journal Nature that is co-authored by two University of California, Berkeley professors.

 So far, so disastrous.  But look:

The Nature paper focuses on effects of climate change via
temperature, and does not include impacts via other consequences of
climate change such as hurricanes or sea level rise. Detailed results
and figures for each country are available for download online.

Or, I might add, rainfall pattern changes, or ocean acidification and potential large scale changes to the food cycle there.  How the heck can you be confident of projections if you cannot be certain how many poor countries may be destined to longer droughts and/or more frequent ones, followed by larger floods?    And what about poor coastal countries where local fish is an important food source?

So, I think there are grounds to argue that this study is another example that accurate predictions of the economic consequences of global warming decades into the future are pretty much guesswork. But at least it notes that the uncertainty is no grounds for complacency, as techo-optimist libertarian types seem to think.

And it does support one thing that I reckon common sense suggests:     the poor nations will suffer disproportionately from climate change; and even if some pro-development-at-any-climate-cost proponents had their way and we had every poor country building coal burning power plants as fast as they could, they are not going to develop their way economically fast enough to outpace the damage from climate change.   They're not going to be able to aircondition their agricultural sectors, after all; nor are they all going to be manufacturing centres, or financial hubs making a living from mobile money.

Back to how bad some of the study's projections are (from the University link above):

They find climate change is likely to have global costs generally
2.5-100 times larger than predicted by current leading models. The
team’s best estimate is that climate change will reduce global economic
production by 23 percent in 2100.

“Historically, people have considered a 20 percent decline in global
Gross Domestic Product to be a black swan: a low-probability
catastrophe,” Hsiang warned. “We’re finding it’s more like the
middle-of-the-road forecast.”

Half of the simulation projections suggest larger losses. The hottest
countries in the world are hardest hit: in less optimistic scenarios,
the authors estimate that 43 percent of countries are likely to be
poorer in 2100 than today due to climate change, despite incorporating
standard projections of technological progress and other advances.

 Richard Tol is already bleating about this, I see.  Given that I consider him a discredited jerk, I'm not surprised, but it will still be interesting to read more coverage about this.

Update:  here's the abstract from Nature in full:

Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies^{1, 2}, but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries^{3, 4}. In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries is reported not to respond to temperature⁵, while poor countries respond only linearly^{5, 6}. Resolving this conflict between micro and macro observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems^{7, 8} and to anticipating the global impact of climate change^{9, 10}. Here we unify these seemingly contradictory results by accounting for non-linearity at the macro scale. We show that overall economic productivity is non-linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 °C and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries. These results provide the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global climate and establish a new empirical foundation for modelling economic loss in response to climate change^{11, 12}, with important implications. If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change. In contrast to prior estimates, expected global losses are approximately linear in global mean temperature, with median losses many times larger than leading models indicate.

Paranoia, probably

The average gun owner now owns 8 guns — double what it used to be - The Washington Post

The Right wing paranoia that's been on the rise in the US would have to play a significant part in this, surely.

Well, he does appear a lot on Fox News, so what do you expect?

Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu stirs trouble by linking Muslim leader to Holocaust

I can't even see any Right wing blog cite defending Netanyahu's history claims.  Not yet, anyway.

Something Back to the Future missed

Westmead Hospital to offer life-saving, stomach-churning, poo transplant cure

Yes, poo transplants are going mainstream.

It's pretty amazing, really, how no one seemed to see the importance of our gut microbiota until recently.

And for all you fans of a what's basically a new field of medicine, I see there is a website up with the great name Gut Microbiota Worldwatch, run by a bunch of European gastroenterologists, it seems.  (Which, come to think of it, is probably appropriate, since I think Germans have been a bit ahead of the field in having a keen interest in observing poop for health reasons.  Whether they truly have a national interest in all things poop related seems up for debate, however.)

Are you in a superposition?

Hey, I didn't know that we had a "Department of Quantum Science" in ANU.  But I do now, after reading this paper (.pdf link) from last month which deals with the following:

In this paper we address the question of whether it is possible to obtain evidence that we are in a superposition of different ‘worlds’, as suggested by the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. We find that it is impossible to find definitive proof, and that if one wishes to retain reliable memories of which ‘world’ one was in, no evidence at all can be found. We then show that even for completely linear quantum state evolution, there is a test that can be done to tell if you can be placed in a superposition.

Ok, so I don't quite understand their test, even if it sounds pretty simple.  I'm surprised Googling the author's names doesn't bring up any media press release from the university.

There is a report about the paper here, which also has a link to a rather odd website where people swear they are remembering alternative histories, rather than just having bad, malleable memories.

All rather odd.

Oh, diddums

Funny how the IPA thinks that governments shouldn't be funding research, but are convinced it's a matter of "censorship" when it backs out of funding research on which research should be funded.  (Well, that's how I interpret some of Lomborg's "consensus" wonkery.)

Anyway, it's obviously all because they see a useful delaying tactic ally in the 'Borg, as far as climate change is concerned. 

Krugman considers Denmark

Something Not Rotten in Denmark - The New York Times

As Krugman writes:

Describe these policies to any American conservative, and he would predict ruin.  Surely those generous benefits must destroy the incentive to work, while those high taxes drive job creators into hiding or exile.

Strange to say, however, Denmark doesn’t look like a set from “Mad Max.” On the
contrary, it’s a prosperous nation that does quite well on job creation. In fact, adults in their prime working years are substantially more likely to be employed in Denmark than they are in America. Labor productivity in Denmark is roughly the same as it is here, although G.D.P. per capita is lower, mainly because the Danes take a lot more vacation.

Nor are the Danes melancholy: Denmark ranks at or near the top on international comparisons of “life satisfaction.”

It’s hard to imagine a better refutation of anti-tax, anti-government economic doctrine, which insists that a system like Denmark’s would be completely unworkable.

It does make you wonder how some economists and politicians become obsessed with the idea that "anti-tax, anti-government" is the only  possible way to run a successful modern nation.

Early life, mistreated coral, the unhealthy rich, and the dubious figures of climate change damage

Phys.org is full of interesting stories today.  Here's one, saying that the start of life on Earth can (perhaps) be pushed back to 4.1 billion years ago. 

Given that the planet only formed at about the 4.5 billion mark, that's pretty quick.

And here's another, this one about how humans, with their use of sunscreens, may be loving some coral reefs to death. 

Then what about this - rich, urban medieval folk were arguably less healthy than those slaving away on farms, all because of lead glazing (and lead roof tiles.)

Finally:  the dubious methods of "normalising" economic damage from climate change (that is, the long running shtick of Roger Pielke Jnr) is probably a crock.   I always suspected that, and I think the lesson is: don't let economists get too involved in climate change policy - they can be a menace to good policy.

Lots of universe left to run

Most earth-like worlds have yet to be born, according to theoretical study

Earth came early to the party in the evolving universe. According to a new theoretical study,
when our solar system was born 4.6 billion years ago only eight percent of the potentially habitable planets that will ever form in the universe existed. And, the party won't be over when the sun burns out in another 6 billion years. The bulk of those planets—92 percent—have yet to be born.

The same story claims this:

The data show that the universe was making stars at a fast rate 10 billion years ago, but
the fraction of the universe's hydrogen and helium gas that was involved was very low. Today, star birth is happening at a much slower rate than long ago, but there is so much leftover gas available that the universe will keep cooking up stars and planets for a very long time to come.

"There is enough remaining material [after the big bang] to produce even more planets in the future, in the Milky Way and beyond," added co-investigator Molly Peeples of STScI.

Kepler's planet survey indicates that Earth-sized planets in a star's habitable zone, the perfect distance that could allow water to pool on the surface, are ubiquitous in our galaxy. Based on the survey, scientists predict that there should be 1 billion Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way galaxy at present, a good portion of them presumed to be rocky. That estimate skyrockets when you include the other 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

This leaves plenty of opportunity for untold more Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone to arise in the future. The last star isn't expected to burn out until 100 trillion years from now. That's plenty of time for literally anything to happen on the planet landscape.

Yes, Happy Back to the Future Day

The Back to the Future trilogy serves the surprising function of providing something upon which Sinclair Davidson, long term stuck-in-the-1950's-and-he-wasn't-even-born-then uber Catholic and Catallaxy fixture CL, and I, can agree.

I have a Coen brothers style fantasy vision of meeting them in a bar, and all nodding in agreement about the worthiness of the Future trilogy (yes, even the second one); then simultaneously saying  "But, jeez you're an idiot on every other topic" and a fistfight breaks out.   Jason Soon then makes an appearance, utilizing his boxing skills to stage an intervention.

Philippa Martyr can make a late entry, doing her Julia Flyte redeemed impersonation, tending to our wounds in her volunteer nurses uniform...

He's already on the backbench, but now it's time to....

Harsh, but it's the best "m" word I could come up with in the circumstances...

Not the sort of surprise I'm keen on...

From the report Asteroid making surprise flyby at an 'unusually high' velocity (my bold):

 A newly discovered asteroid (not pictured) will make Halloween more thrilling by passing within 1.3 lunar distances (310,000 miles) of Earth. The object, which measures between 300 and 600 meters (1,000 and 2,000 feet) across, was discovered last week by the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii, according to NASA. It'll streak by on October 31st at an "unusually" high encounter velocity of 35 km/s, or around 78,000 mph. By contrast, the Russian meteorite caught by vehicle cameras in 2013 was 17 meters (55 feet) across and traveled at a top speed of 19 km/s, while the one that flattened a Russian forest in 1908 measured 40 meters (130 feet).

There's no danger of a collision, but the asteroid would pack an enormous punch if it did hit the Earth, given its size and especially its velocity. It's also a bit alarming that astronomers only found it nine days ago, considering how close it already is to our planet.

Well, this would suggest that it's still quite on the cards that one day, NASA will announce that a substantial disaster will be taking place somewhere on the Earth with (perhaps) all of 10 days notice for people to head for the hills, or dig a bunker, or whatever.

All a bit of a worry....

Dealing with the big issues

When is it socially acceptable to wear black tights? | Fashion | The Guardian

One of the best things about The Guardian is that when you see an article that is surely just a bit of space filling, inconsequential fluff,  the comments thread following is full of amusingly rabid attack on just those grounds.