Galaxy positioning system

Oh my - seems like only a year or so ago that I was posting about pulsars being proposed as a sort of GPS system for spaceships in the solar system or beyond - but it was 2012!

Last week, in Nature, it was reported that they can indeed be used that way:

From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space. Spacecraft could triangulate their location, in a sort of celestial Global Positioning System (GPS), using clockwork-like signals from distant dead stars.

Last November, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) spent a day and a half looking at a handful of pulsars — rapidly spinning stellar remnants that give off beams of powerful radiation as they rotate. By measuring tiny changes in the arrival time of the pulses, NICER could pinpoint its location to within 5 kilometres.

It is the first demonstration in space of the long-sought technology known as pulsar navigation. One day, the method could help spacecraft steer themselves without regular instructions from Earth.....The team plans to repeat the experiment in the coming months, hoping to reduce the margin of error to one kilometre or less.

My favourite recent anti-Trump reading

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks in Trump conversation in the media.  

Here are some recent passages and links that I thought rang very true:

*  Mike Allen at Axios made the case that, even though Fire and Fury is a book very high on "truthiness" rather than pinned down journalistic accuracy (and fellow Axios writer Jonathon Swan has complained long and hard about that aspect of the book), it does paint a big picture which Allen and other journalists fully accept as accurate.   How could it not be so when so many people in the White House were leaking against Trump to the press right from the start of this woeful presidency?:

...there are two things he gets absolutely right, even in the eyes of White House officials who think some of the book's scenes are fiction: his spot-on portrait of Trump as an emotionally erratic president, and the low opinion of him among some of those serving him.

But read the whole thing, if you missed it.

 * David Frum's summary of why Trump has supporters at all is spot on:

In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.

What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative-media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the culture wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.

*  Also in the NYT, Nicholas Kristof summarises Trump's threat to democracy, which has always been clear to those not blinded by culture war point scoring and conspiracy think:

Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.

“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.

“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”

We tend to assume that the threat to democracies comes from coups or violent revolutions, but the authors say that in modern times, democracies are more likely to wither at the hands of insiders who gain power initially through elections. That’s what happened, to one degree or another, in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Poland and Peru.

Kristof says he is not saying that he thinks American institutions won't successfully thwart Trump's anti democratic tendencies, but he does worry:

It matters when Trump denounces the “deep state Justice Department,” calls Hillary Clinton a “criminal” and urges “jail” for Huma Abedin, denounces journalists as the “enemy of the American people” and promises to pay the legal fees of supporters who “beat the crap” out of protesters. With such bombast, Trump is beating the crap out of American norms. 

True.

And the most distressing thing about Trump is the demonstration of how many people for selfish and often shallow reasons (Ha! look at how he sticks it to Leftists) will happily live - and even endorse - such anti-democratic rhetoric and behaviour in the so-called leader of the free world.  

*   I was surprised about the extent of some of the relatively moderate commentator push back arising from the deficiencies as journalism of  Michael Wolff's book:  in particular David Brooks in the New York Times actually coming to Trump's quasi-defence, noting that many people have had meetings with him where he at least came across as something less than a drooling madman.   Great!   Jonathan Chait makes a somewhat snarky, but accurate, response:

Four days ago, David Brooks broke the news in the New York Times that President Trump is actually a sober-minded and competent public servant. “People who go into the White House to have a meeting with President Trump usually leave pleasantly surprised,” he reported. “They find that Trump is not the raving madman they expected from his tweetstorms or the media coverage. They generally say that he is affable, if repetitive. He runs a normal, good meeting and seems well-informed enough to get by.”

It is safe to say that this column has not aged well in the short time since its publication.

Chait goes back over the remarkable story of how Trump demonstrated with certainly how he takes his lead on issues from Fox News, when he tweeted against his own administration's policy when someone on Fox News breakfast encouraged him to do so.  

How absurd and dangerous is this?   The only good thing to be said about Trump's tweeting habit, I suppose, is how the public knows directly what an empty headed, easily manipulated, narcissist person he is.  No need for historians to tell us.
 
 Chait also notes the many bizarre claims in Trump's WSJ interview of last week, including claims of treason for an FBI agent having political views.  Chait concludes:

It is obviously true that, in a large country, a broad spectrum of opinion will inevitably produce excesses on every side. Even a president as deranged and racist as Trump will be talked about, by somebody, in excessively harsh terms. Yet Brooks’s conclusion that Trump critics have on the whole exaggerated his flaws, that Trump is in fact reasonably well informed, affable, and sane, does not seem to be a reasonable conclusion at all. Instead it is an expression of Brooks’s unavoidable tendency to impose a sheen of normality on a political party that is anything but.

*  William Saletan made the obvious point in Slate about Trump's boasting of his intelligence:

 What Trump doesn’t understand is you don’t convey intelligence by asserting it. You convey it by demonstrating it. The more you talk about it, the more suspicious people become. They wonder why you’re vouching for yourself instead of doing your job and letting others vouch for you. And they wonder why you feel the need to keep talking about it. The real message of your constant boasting isn’t that you’re smart. It’s that you’re insecure.

*  Saletan is pretty good on Trump being a bigoted racist, too.  Lots of other writers have written a similar sort of piece, citing many examples from Trump's life.  But Saletan does it with many more links and in greater detail than most. 

An invention worth noting

I just found a link I had saved but, it would seem, never posted.  From 2013, in Slate, a short history of airconditioning.   It's a pretty hot weekend where I am in Brisbane, so it's topical.

The first modern, properly air conditioned building was apparently this:

It was introduced to the public on Memorial Day weekend, 1925, when it debuted at the Rivoli Theater in Times Square. For years afterward, people piled into air-conditioned movie theaters on hot summer days, giving rise to the summer blockbuster.   

So modern aircon is less than 100 years old.  Huh.

A holiday 23 million years in the making...

Well, perhaps not a holiday exactly:  more a short break over Christmas for 5 days to Mount Tamborine, barely an hour from where I live, and up behind the Gold Coast, so usually 2 to 4 degrees cooler than Brisbane or the coast.  We never stayed up there before, but I couldn't be away from work for too long this year, so we went there instead of a beach holiday.

We stayed at a holiday rental house in the streets behind the very touristy (and not that interesting, really) Gallery Walk at Eagle Heights.   I had never driven in the residential streets behind Gallery Walk before, and what a pleasant surprise they are.   The houses are a mix of old and new, but many are are in a cottage style, and cooler weather gardens are very common, as well as tree lined streets, some with spectacular views to the coast.  Some examples:

This isn't actually the house we stayed in, but just an example of a charmingly done cottage style house and cottage garden of a type you virtually never see in Brisbane, but of which there are many up at Tamborine.

This is the inside of the one we stayed at, and it was  the nicest holiday rental house we have ever been in.  Heaps of good cooking equipment in the kitchen (handy if you are doing a Christmas dinner), plenty of money spent on furniture, fully ducted airconditioning, beautiful bathrooms (I should have taken a photo), and for winter, a big central fireplace.   It's called The Maple and The Nest (booked through Stayz, not Airbnb), and I recommend it.



 
These doors:

which featured in my Christmas greeting post,  led to this wisteria covered courtyard - can you imagine how this would look when the wisteria is in flower?

Anyway, Mt Tamborine is sort of a plateau area, with a population of around 7,000, I think I read, with residential development around some small but still pretty national parks.   General photos of the area:

 A house with a view to the coast.

 The view to the west.

And some typical national park scenery:

 Strangler figs:  lots of strangler figs.

The other things Mt Tamborine does well:   craft beer, pizza with beer, cheese, avocados, and bread.

I think the Fortitude Brewing Company (which is big enough that some bars in Brisbane have it on tap - including my favourite bar, the Paddock Bar at Rydges next to the Brisbane showgrounds) is just the most consistently pleasing SE Queensland craft brewery, and its home is at Mt Tamborine.  The bar there does great pizza too, and the local cheese place (which is really high quality as well) is in the same complex.  We bought a "growler" and took some hoppy IPA home - it was great.

Around the corner from where we staying there was a small bakery, but it make some distinctive and fantastic sourdoughs, and was open every day over Christmas.  It's in a group of local shops that is off the main road, and hardly anyone seemed to ever be there, but it was a very pleasant surprise to find such high quality bread - try the German beer bread, you'll like it.

There are many small farms on the plateau, and avocados are plentiful, and they are often left on "honesty system" road side stalls.  We had some very good quality ones,  and some great red rhubarb and cucumber, but I suspect in other seasons the range of veges would be higher.   Stuff left out on the roadside in the middle of summer probably has a limited life.

There are tourist attractions based on tree top walks and flying foxes and the like, but they do seem pretty expensive and we didn't bother trying them.  Just lazing around instead, and the kids had their bikes to get around a bit, but it was still pretty hot and the ducted aircon was always attractive.   It was a pretty pleasant stay.

So, why the title to the post?

Well, the small Tamborine Heritage Centre (worth a quick visit, to learn a bit of local history) had this picture which caught my attention:

If you can read it, towards the right, they have marked a plateau area as "Tamborine Mountain".   What I didn't realise before was that this entire area had, 23 million odd years ago, all been under a huge shield volcano, the central remnants of which are the present Mount Warning in the Tweed Valley area, about 55 or so kilometres to the south as the crow flies.

Now, I could have guessed from the shape of Mt Warning, which looks very similar to the Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane, that it was, like them, the central core of an eroded volcano.  (I think most people from Brisbane with vague geological interest know that about the Glasshouse Mountains?   I mean, one in particular - Crookneck:

 ...looks very much like a central volcanic plug.)

But I had no idea that Mt Warning was the centre of such a huge volcano in height and extent.   And that, if you look at the geography of the area now, the eroded caldera is clear:

And here's a NASA image of the same area:

As the NASA website says:

Australia, the only continent with no current volcanic activity, is home to one of the world's largest extinct volcanoes: Tweed Volcano, shown in this 3-D stereo image pair. Eruptions here ended about 20 million years ago. Twenty million years of erosion have left this landform deeply eroded yet very recognizable as a caldera with a central peak--the erosional stub of the central pipe that carried magma upward to Earth's surface.

I feel I should have know this before, even if I didn't do geography or geology in high school.





And what was Australia like 23 - 20 million years ago?

Well, it seems it had broken off from Antarctica by then and was still heading north.   (Antarctica was cooling because of its new surrounding southern ocean, although the ice sheets had not yet formed - that was only about 14 millions years ago.)

According to the Australian Museum website, the early Miocene (23 to 16 million years ago) featured this:

Vegetation

• Northern Australia was covered in lush rainforest.
• The Miocene was a time of enormous richness and variety of plant and animal life in Australia, equal to that found today in the rainforests of Borneo and the Amazon.

Animals

• In Australia the early relatives of many of familiar present-day animals had evolved including possums, kangaroos, koalas, bats, crocodiles, snakes, lizards, frogs, millipedes, beetles and many kinds of birds.
• Many less familiar animals also lived in Australia during the Miocene such as, marsupial lions, flesh-eating kangaroos, cleaver-headed crocodiles, thunder birds, horned turtles and strange 'thingodontans'.

Land of the flesh eating kangaroos, and a giant shield volcano not far from where I live now.  How interesting!

Speaking of ancient living things, a public park at Tamborine has a few bunya pine trees planted, which are a magnificent tree except for this problem:

That's a pretty good reason for their relative lack of use as a park tree.  I really only recall seeing some in their natural habitat up in Bunya Mountains National Park, when I was a teenager.












Here's one the cones at Tamborine, with my pale looking foot (and starting to look old) ankle for scale:

And how long have they been around?   Well, relatives like it has been around since the Jurassic (175 million years ago), apparently, so I presume it is likely that they were here pretty much in their current form when the Tweed volcano was spewing lava a mere 20 million years ago.

So there you:   I went on a holiday and learnt something about prehistory I didn't realise before.

Remarkably few in my family (read - none) find this as fascinating as I have....

A minor observation...

I've been meaning to opine on this all summer - and last summer too, when I think he also had the job.

Hamish Macdonald, the young-ish journalist who sits in for Fran Kelly as host of Radio National Breakfast over summer, is actually better at the job than Fran.   I don't dislike her, but Macdonald is often more direct and blunt with interviewees, and the show just feels, I don't know,  livelier?

Gradually building up to activity...

Not convinced this is a good mannequin look

As spotted in Sydney,  last year.   Don't think I ever posted about that weekend trip..

More mildlife

This summer's possum lodger is a very laid back customer.   Last year's would hiss and resent offers of fruit; this one takes it gently from the hand.   Nice...

Yet another holding post

Still busy

I didn't intend a blogging halt lasting this long, but I've just been exceptionally busy at work, and to a degree, at home.   And what a lot there is to link to at the moment re Trump, climate change, aliens (or lack of them), volcanoes, beer, cheese, bread and avocados.   (The last 5 topics will be dealt with in my first proper return post - there is a connection.)   But back to work again for the moment...

... and a Happy New Year

I'll be posting again soon,  but for now:

Christmas Greetings 2017

Policing the internet

Japan takes trying to intervene in suicide talk online pretty seriously:

In the wake of the recent high-profile killings and dismemberment of people who expressed a desire to commit suicide, the government announced measures on Dec. 19 to help those posting such thoughts on social networking services.

The Internet Hotline Center Japan (IHC), which is under contract with the National Police Agency, is expected to monitor such comments related to suicide beginning in January 2018 at the earliest.

Currently, the IHC monitors illegal data publicized on the Internet including obscene images, child sexual abuse images and advertisements on controlled substances and reports them to police.

Comments from those who express a desire to die will be included in the items reported to law enforcement.

Furthermore, the government will entrust other private organizations to keep close tabs on such postings on the Internet.

When such comments are posted and specific information including the date, time and place of the suicide attempt is learned through such measures, police will contact the poster and encourage them to talk with staffers who can provide support.

What's going on?

I see that Last Jedi criticism seems to be coming disproportionately from Right wing sites - even Ross Douthat is having a go at it!   Is the "fan backlash" influenced by the current culture wars?

But because I don't know when I can get to see the movie, I can't read into this yet.  I'm just looking at the start of articles...

In today's conspiracy news

Poor old CL:   he used to write well crafted conservative commentary at his blogs (since deleted).   Then he started living only in Catallaxy threads, the mutual support network for increasing stupidity, which has eaten into his brain, and lets him say what is really rattling around in his conspiracy laden head:

I've noticed this yearning evident in the conservative Catholic commentary lately for an actual violent physical fight over what is essentially a culture war.   Or at least, as evidenced in the recent writings of Philippa Martyr, a desire that "true" Catholics will soon start to be physically persecuted, so they can show their real mettle and die (or spend their time in jail?) defending the Catholic teachings that most Catholics have in fact moved on from.

It's a very strange time.

Didn't expect this...

MANILA – Firebrand President Rodrigo Duterte has said he wants same-sex marriage legalized in the Philippines, a move that would bring him into conflict with the dominant Roman Catholic Church.

Duterte, a longtime critic of the church which counts about 80 percent of Filipinos as followers, made the remarks in a speech before the LGBT community in his southern home city of Davao late Sunday.

“I want same-sex marriage. The problem is we’ll have to change the law. But we can change the law,” he said to wide applause.

“The law says marriage is a union between a man and a woman. I don’t have any problems making it marrying a man, marrying a woman or whatever is the predilection of the human being,” he added.
Divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage are still illegal in the Philippines due largely to the influence of the Catholic Church.

But Duterte, who took office in mid-2016, has actively attacked the church, accusing the clergy of sexual abuses and hypocrisy.

Spotted in The Japan Times.

Just another day in a Republican household

Truck dispute, handgun: throw in an unwanted pregnancy and you'd have the perfect cliche for a high profile redneck fight:

The elder son of former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been charged with assault and burglary in a violent confrontation with his father in which the two men struggled over a handgun at his parents’ Alaska home, court records showed on Monday. 

According to the criminal complaint and supporting documents, Track Palin, 28, broke through a window of the house in Wasilla, Alaska, and scuffled with his father, Todd Palin, on Saturday night in a clash that stemmed from a family dispute over a truck.

This is annoying

So many people have already seen The Last Jedi that lots of websites are opening up spoiler discussion threads.   And I see there are some articles saying that some fans are reacting against the film.  But I don't know why.

I can't read any of this yet, for fear of spoilers.  I'm not even going to look at Reddit until I have seen the movie.  

What's a President to do when his top two advisers are in conflict?

That's from the Washington Post, by the way.

Impulse control

And you thought people getting gastric band operations was a pretty extreme way to fight obesity:

Picture this: While reaching for the cookie jar — or cigarette or bottle of booze or other temptation — a sudden slap denies your outstretched hand. When the urge returns, out comes another slap.

Now imagine those "slaps" occurring inside the brain, protecting you in moments of weakness.

In a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford neuroscientists say they've achieved this sort of mind-reading in binge-eating mice. They found a telltale pattern of brain activity that comes up seconds before the animals start to pig out — and delivering a quick zap to that part of the brain kept the mice from overindulging.

Whether this strategy could block harmful impulses in people remains unclear. For now the path seems promising. The current study used a brain stimulation device already approved for hard-to-treat epilepsy. And based on the new findings, a clinical trial testing this off-the-shelf system for some forms of obesity could start as early as next summer, says Casey Halpern, the study's leader and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. He thinks the approach could also work for eating disorders and a range of other addictive or potentially life-threatening urges.

Look, if the only way this could work is putting electrodes into the brain, it's not going to be a common operation.

More detail on a credible UFO sighting

On the weekend, when I posted about the Pentagon UFO research story, I should have linked to this associated report at the New York Times in which a former Navy pilot explains the very strange UFO sighting in 2004.   It appears that it was visual and radar - just about the most interesting UFO encounters there are, as well as the pilots thinking it was affecting the water beneath it.   The video of the aircraft camera is not as impressive as one might hope, though, in that the object looks a bit fuzzy edged.  But then right at the end, it seems to zip off at high speed.  

I see some people are saying that the sighting was over the Pacific but not so far from a "Skunk Works" base, meaning they suspect it is advanced, human made, propulsion technology.   Could be, I suppose, but very fascinating even if that is the explanation.

I had thought when I posted initially that the two videos had been released before, but seems I was wrong about that.   I really want to know more about them.   Why does the second video in the article, this one:



end so abruptly?   In fact, I'm not even clear what year this one was.

A hoax of some kind remains a possibility, but the pilot speaking to the NYT and having his photo in the article makes that seems pretty unlikely.
  

I could have danced all night...

Cadavers in the ballroom

That's a headline you don't see every day.

It's at Reuters, and it is a rather surprising story:

Big names in hospitality, from Disney to Hilton and Hyatt, have a little-known sideline: They rent space to physicians who train on cadavers and body parts. There is scant regulation, and some public-health specialists warn of biosafety risks. 

More detail in the opening paragraphs:

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida – Just outside the operating theater, the organizers of a medical conference wore Minnie Mouse ears.

Inside, as doctors practiced on three cadavers, blood from one of the human specimens seeped through a layer of wrapping.

“They leak,” a lab technician said of the bodies.

The sessions, held last month and attended by a Reuters reporter, weren’t at a hospital or medical school. They were part of a so-called cadaver lab – and the setting was a Florida resort. It was one of scores of such events over the past six years that have been held at a hotel or its convention center.

In this case, doctors practiced nerve root blocks and other procedures on cadavers in one of the Grand Harbor ballroom’s salons at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts convention center. Online, Disney refers to its ballrooms as “regal and resplendent.” They’re often used for wedding receptions. 

Disney did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Mickey has blood on his shoes?

Easily thrilled

From an Australian perspective, this is a very odd headline and story at Gulf News:

Hailstorm thrills children in Dubai

Students of GEMS Our Own Indian School in Al Quoz were thrilled to see pellets of hailstones falling down all over their campus, the school’s principal Lalitha Suresh confirmed to Gulf News.

"Yes. The kids were really enjoying the hailstorm," she said.

 Many children were out in the school ground for the sports day selection procedures when it started raining.

"We were having our shotput finals. It was drizzling. Suddenly hailstones started pouring down. We were so excited. I was able to collect some hailstones in my hands. Then we were told to disperse and rush to class," said Julie Francis, a grade eight student.

Suresh said the sports day selection was postponed due to the rains.

"Kids started playing in the water also. You know they never get to play in water. We really had to manage the children. Anyway, we didn’t have any damage in the school."

I guess a tornado would thrill them even more...

Douthat trying too hard

Ross Douthat really tries too hard sometimes to find something like what he thinks is "balance" - such as today's column saying the defeat of ISIS is a Trump "win", and then criticising mainstream media for not acknowledging this.

The flaws in the argument are within the column itself - and many comments ridicule Ross:

And yet, there are a few comments from Trumpkins who think that Donald really won the war by unleashing the power of the American military, or some such guff.   They live in a world created purely by their own bubble of right wing punditry.

Long term problem for Bitcoin and blockchain

I wondered over the weekend whether the development of quantum computing was going to be a problem in the long term for Bitcoin, and the answer seems to be "yes".   See this recent article at MIT Technology Review, but there are others.  (They do suggest that changes can be made to make it "resistant" to quantum computing, but I wonder if quantum computing is going to win the race in the long run.  Which would make all the energy being used on current mining a true waste.)

Speaking of Bitcoin and blockchain, I noticed this amusing tweet on the weekend:

Galactic empires discussed

Via Peter Whiteford's fantastic twitter feed, a link to a review (a few month's old, but still) of a John Scalzi book, which is most interesting for its opening description of the common theme of galactic empire science fiction:

ACCORDING TO Donald A. Wollheim, Golden Age science fiction typically imagined the future would unfold according to a certain pattern:

1. humans explore and colonize the solar system;
2. humans explore and colonize extrasolar planets;
3. a Galactic Federation/Republic/Empire emerges;
4. the Empire enjoys a peak period characterized by a stable metropole in the galactic center (however constituted) and ongoing exploration at “the Rim”;
5. this peak period is followed by decadence and collapse;
6. the collapse is followed by a Dark Age (of whatever length);
7. a second Empire is established that is imagined to be perfected and permanent;
8. and, finally, the people of the future undertake The Challenge to God: sometimes this literally culminates in overthrowing some sort of malevolent God Thing, while at other times it involves innovating some way to survive the heat death of the universe (or evolving into energy beings of pure light, et cetera).

From Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas (and on and on), one discovers this basic narrative recurring over and over again in science fictional narratives about the human “destiny” to inherit the stars. 

[Speaking of reviews and science fiction-y writing, I also saw that The Australian yesterday put on its twitter feed a link that actually worked to a review of Helen Dale's Kingdom of the Wicked: the first mainstream media review I have seen.   (At Amazon, women who writes at The Spectator sometimes, as does Dale, complains that reviewers are deliberately ignoring the book because they are all Lefties still wanting to punish her for the Hand That Signed the Paper hoax.)    Anyway, the review is not good.
 Update:  I see now that a short, negative, review has also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.  I found that via a tweet on Dale's own twitter feed.  She also indirectly referenced The Australian's review.  Yet I am sure she said somewhere that she doesn't read mainstream reviews, after her experience with HTSTP.] 

Listening in from a distance

Readers probably have already seen the various reports that some scientists decided to turn a radio receiver towards that elongated asteroid now heading out of the solar system, just in case it was a spaceship or something artificial.

I meant to post this part of that story, because it says a lot about the sensitivity of radio telescopes:

Breakthrough Listen announced Monday that the program will start checking ‘Oumuamua this week for signs of radio signals using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The interstellar asteroid is now about twice the distance between the Earth and the sun from our planet, moving at a brisk clip of 38.3 kilometers per second. At this close distance, Green Bank can detect the faintest frequencies. It would take the telescope less than a minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a cellphone. If ‘Oumuamua is sending signals, we’ll hear them.

And here's a report on the first results:

The first batch of four observations ran from 8.45pm UK time on Wednesday until 2.45am on Thursday morning and spanned a frequency range from 1 to 12 GHz. While the search for alien signals has so far found nothing in the 1.7 to 2.6GHz range, the rest of the data is still being processed.

Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley Seti Research Center, told the Guardian that a review of all four bands observed Wednesday night had come up blank. “We don’t see anything continuously emitting from ‘Oumuamua,” he said. “We’re now digging into some of the intermittent candidates, and trying some new machine learning-based techniques we have been working on. We expect our next observation window to be scheduled for Friday or Saturday, when we should get a view of additional phases of ‘Oumuamua as it rotates.”

A very UFO Christmas

Just when we all thought all genuine UFO research had been made redundant by the plague of floating fire lanterns, flares, rocket launches/re-entries, meteors and (now especially) cheap LED drones which have probably been behind 99% or more of claimed sightings over the last 20 years, the New York Times reports that the Pentagon says it funded new research into them from 2007 to 2012.

The big catch:  it seems it was mainly a subcontract with Robert Bigelow, who came to the project already with complete belief that we have alien visitors.   As someone in comments to the story says:

A billionaire with a secret govt. contract does not help the credibility of this program

And it's true, part of what they were doing is what I've long considered the least credible line of UFO research, as it has followed dead ends so many times I didn't think anyone took it seriously:

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.

Also, Harold Puthoff got involved.  I really don't think it helps Bigelow to be taken seriously when he gets on board the guy who had convinced himself Uri Gellar was psychic.  (Mind you, I still find some things reported about early Gellar puzzling.) 

And yet - some of the details in the story are still surprising.   First - why don't I remember the video in the article showing something with clear edges (although with an apparent glow around it) rotating and puzzling the military pilots?

Secondly, what about this?:

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

But the ending doesn't all that inspiring.  The one guy in the Pentagon who used to look after such research (I hope his office looked like Mulder's in X Filers) has resigned, but it now talking up a commercial venture:

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.  In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

I find this all rather puzzling.   If some modern military video/radar cases are truly inexplicable, why wouldn't the top end of the Pentagon and government admit it?   God knows, if Trump had been told UFOs were real, we would have heard about it on his Twitter feed by now.  Maybe childish hints along the lines "I've just been told the biggest secret ever by someone - I can't say who, but he wore a uniform - and it's huge.  Really huge."  

Is it a case that if something is inexplicable, someone just files it away as "interesting" and it doesn't really get followed up?  And Presidents who ask are told "we don't think it's anything to worry about, Mr President"?

China and the libertarians

One of the reasons I am reluctant to go onto Twitter is because it often drives me nuts not understanding clearly what people think when they link to something with scant comment about it.  If I was able to respond tweet, I would have the urge to frequently try to clarify the degree to which they approve of the material, or challenge support which appears inconsistent with other views, or out of character, or whatever.

Case in point:  yes, it's J Soon time again.   Having linked to an interesting article about how the Chinese are actively taking Africans to teach them about the Chinese system of government and development,  I know from other tweets that Jason is not exactly a fan of Chinese influence in other countries.   Yet he also is supportive of the moderate libertarian position of less US involvement internationally, at least militarily.  As a generic fan of smaller government, I don't imagine he is all that impressed with government supplied international aid to poor countries.   International effort to reach agreements on CO2 decrease seems to carry little interest, too:   I don't think he cares at all about the Trumpian withdrawal from that (quite vital) field of international effort.

(Sorry to speak of you in the third person, Jason.  Please correct anything in comments.)

And yet - isn't following those views an actual, active encouragement for a liberty challenged superpower like China to fill in the voluntarily created void by Trump and his libertarians quasi supporters in international influence in the developing world?

I'm not exactly a fan of China's political, legal or social system either - except that I think that it is an example of  development which actually shows up how economists like the woeful bunch at Catallaxy are wrong - there is not one way for making rapid economic advancement, and the (even quite heavy) hand of government involvement is not always a poisonous path to socialist collapse.   (I would think a similar thing can be said about South Korea; and to a lesser extent, perhaps, the Scandinavian countries.) 

I was reading Science magazine this morning (go on, subscribe for just $55 a year) and noted how there are pages and pages of advertisements encouraging scientists to come work in Chinese universities and technical institutions.   Again - a nation taking science and development really seriously, while America reverts to nonsense culture war refusal to believe in it, and the libertarians there just shrug their shoulders and go "well, what can ya do?" 

So yeah, I would like to know how Jason squares the circle around this.   The way I see it, if you're a small government libertarian, you're part of the problem of letting China take the place of Western influence.

I think there may need to be a category above "First World problem" for this...

At NPR:

Avocado Hand Injuries Are Real. Is A Seedless Fruit The Answer?

The flesh of the seedless avocado in the photo looks as pale and unappealing as a cucumber.   Seriously, Western people who can't cut an avocado without lobbing off a hand:  are you actually growing so useless that the idea of living in a Matrix-like wet pod while you have your nutrition pumped into you seems like a good idea?

The story the world was [not] waiting for...

Wow.   Talk about The Guardian scraping the bottom of the music journalism barrel to come up with this:

Can't stand the song; couldn't stand the group. 

Deep salt

I happened to be watching Michael Portillo wandering around England on trains again on SBS last night, and was surprised to learn about an extensive underground rock salt mine that still operates at Winsford.  Here's a BBC article about it, as well as the mine's own website.

Started in the 19th century, it's about 150 m underground and huge - 160 miles of tunnels, and vast open spaces supported by pillars of salt left in place.  (I'm a bit puzzled how they know, structurally, how wide a space they can leave unsupported):

A part of it is now also used to store archive materials!

This rock salt was all laid down 220 million years ago, when England had salty inland seas.  

This is something I found completely unexpected and very interesting...

Too much of anything is bad for the environment

Surely I'll find a happier story soon, but in the meantime - this article at The Atlantic indicates that we should think not only about Bitcoin chewing up electricity, but the explosion in internet porn, too.

The entertainer: the only problem with the world is the 50% of it that doesn't share my genitalia

Lower end of the range looking increasingly unlikely

ATTP notes that there is increasing confidence that the Nic Lewis/Matt Ridley promoted "lower end of climate sensitivity is more likely" argument is wrong.

There was also an interesting recent post at Carbon Brief noting how closely the rise in CO2 follows the general slope of temperature increase:

Well, that's depressing

From an NPR article  about how American schools have to include "lock down" drills:

On average, there's nearly one school shooting a week in the United States, according to Everytown Research, a non-profit organization which advocates for gun control. Just in the past month, six people, including the shooter, died in a school shooting in Rancho Tehama, Calif. Three people, including the shooter, were killed in a shooting at Aztec High School in New Mexico.

But guns everywhere makes gun lovers feel better, and that's what's really important.

Worst tagger ever

(LONDON) — A British surgeon has admitted assaulting two patients by burning his initials into their livers during transplant operations.

Simon Bramhall pleaded guilty Wednesday to two counts of assault, in a case a prosecutor called “without legal precedent in criminal law.”

Bramhall used an argon beam coagulator, which seals bleeding blood vessels with an electric beam, to mark his initials on the organs.

Here's the link.

The entertainer is back

Sometimes, the reaction to events involving sexual and "normal" politics at Catallaxy is so ridiculously, stupidly, extreme it makes me laugh out loud.   One of my "favourite" commentators makes this observation post the Roy Moore non-election:

A series of minor observations

*  This seems to be a good season for big, tasty, and cheap mangoes.  Stone fruit:  not so much.  Still waiting to see how the lychees pan out.

*  Summer in Brisbane so far has been rather pleasant - days not too hot or humid; nights still cooling down considerably.   Very little need for airconditioning, so far.

*  Perhaps it's due to Brisbane's mild winters, which don't really require any night time heating, but we got our most recent electricity bill, and it was just under $300 for the quarter.   This is for a family of four - two adults, two teenagers - with solar hot water but no solar panels.  We actually currently have three refrigerators running, all quite large.  (One is kept on the minimum setting and is not often opened, but we are finding unlimited fridge space quite a pleasure at the moment.)  

Anyway, for all the talk of high electricity costs in Australia, doesn't this seem remarkably cheap?   The key may well be in the solar hot water system - people north of Sydney who don't have one are crazy.

* My daughter has a completely unreasonable fixation on owing an iPhone - she doesn't care what size or model, as long as it is an iPhone.  It would appear that she does not know a single female friend (and she seems to have a lot) who uses an Android phone, as she is forced to.  When walking down the street, she looks at every phone other people are using, and if it is an iPhone, she knows which model.   (It's like walking around with an annoying car obsessed guy who comments on every single car passing on the street, regardless of what you may be talking about.)  

My wife objects to any 15 year old being gifted a $500 (minimum!) phone which is eminently lose-able or broken, yet it would appear that the vast majority of other parents of teenage girls don't care.  Maybe many are hand-me-downs from parents who upgrade?

I am very happy with my $350 Android (Moto G5 Plus, in case you had forgotten), and my wife is happy enough with hers.   The complete domination of Apple with teenage girls is something of a puzzle to me. 

Curb your enthusiasm

It's cheering that Alabama has shown that the South is not completely mad;  on the other hand, it's a little depressing to see the racial divide in the voting pattern*:

Well, how depressing it must have been for Obama to get just 15% of the white vote there!   While today's result is much more encouraging, 70% of white voters preferred Moore?  

It's still a worry.

* that's from the Washington Post exit poll analysis, which cuts the results up in many interesting ways.

It's Christmas soon, so let's talk - Nazis

Vox talks about a new study that suggests it was economic austerity policy that helped lead to the rise of Hitler:

The standard explanation is that German voters flocked to the party in Germany in 1932 and 1933 in response to the pain of the Great Depression, which conventional parties proved unable to end. But others have sought to explain Hitler’s coup, in whole or in part, by reference to German culture’s obsession with order and authority, to centuries of virulent German anti-Semitism, and to the popularity of local clubs like veteran associations, chess clubs, and choirs that the Nazis used to help recruit.

A new paper by a team of economic historians focuses on another culprit: austerity, and specifically the package of harsh spending cuts and tax hikes that Germany's conservative Chancellor Heinrich Brüning enacted from 1930 to 1932.

In the paper, released through the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gregori Galofré-Vilà of Bocconi University, Christopher M. Meissner of UC Davis, Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and David Stuckler at Bocconi are clear that they don’t think austerity tells the whole story. It’s one factor among many. But they think austerity helps fill in some gaps in the conventional, Great Depression-focused narrative of the rise of the Nazis.

Over to you, Homer!

Goodbye, Sam

Labor's looking more credible with the resignation of Sam Dastyari.   If he ends up being replaced by Kristina Keneally (if she fails to take Bennelong), it's all upside as far as most people would be concerned.

Now if only Malcolm Turnbull could get Tony Abbott to resign, things would be looking even better in Parliament.  

Free market triumph

An NPR story:

Why A Pill That's 4 Cents In Tanzania Costs Up To $400 In The U.S.

The further adventures of Margot & Robert

Someone should be running a contest for sequel storylines for both Margot and Robert (with an emphasis on the American setting):

For Margot, all of the alternatives I've thought of so far is that she:

a.   buys a pistol and get a concealed carry licence;
b.   calls Gloria Allred;
c.   finds religion and marries a Republican 5 years older than Robert;
d.   organises the next campus Slut Walk;
e.   experiments with lesbianism;
f.    re-locates to Minneapolis to take up job as assistant producer in small television news room.  (Modern twist:  soon hit on by bald boss.) 

For Robert:

a.   finally gets around to taking the dead cats out of the freezer and to the taxidermist;
b.   buys a simple bed base for his mattress and finds women will now actually stay until morning;
c.   buys the AR 15 he's always wanted and shoots up the cinema (sorry - so plausible in America it's not even vaguely witty);
d.   goes to a doctor for his sore back caused by the sexual encounter, becomes addicted to opioids (see previous rider);
e.   changes voter registration from Independent to Republican. 
f.    takes up sheriff job and finds mysterious 11 year old girl in the woods with psychokinetic powers.

A public service post, for those outside of North America

This is what Red Vines are:

Well, now that I understand that, I can see more clearly how flawed Margot's judgement was right from the second sentence.

A complicated life

A few months back, I posted about the fight that took place between Max Eastman and Ernest Hemingway, caused by the latter not caring for a book review by the former.

I knew little about Eastman, but I see there's a review of a biography about him at Reason, which begins:

"It doesn't cheapen the aims of this biography or the ambitions of its subject," writes Christoph Irmscher, "to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism." What follows is the life of Max Eastman—poet, nudist, women's suffragist, war resister, socialist editor, and finally a self-described "libertarian conservative."

He makes today's "libertarian conservatives" seem rather boring.  

But then again, boring is sometimes more praiseworthy than "incident filled."   I see from another review of the same book that his sex life was ridiculously active:

When he was young these affairs could be sexy and glamorous. As he aged, they came to seem sad and compulsive. “My love, I would give my soul to lie in your arms tonight,” he wrote to the 24-year-old Florence Deshon in 1917, when he was 34. Twelve years later, at the age of 46, he was making a version of the same speech to the 17-year-old painter Ione Robinson, a protégé of his second wife. A decade later, now 56, he wrote to the 18-year-old Creigh Collins: “I want to sit all day in the big arm chair with your head warm between my knees, and poetry, poetry floating around me on your young voice as though thrushes carried its meaning to my ear.” A year later he impregnated his secretary, the 25-year-old Florence Norton. When she asked for his help in getting an abortion, “Max provided a doctor’s address but otherwise became ‘hysterical’ and essentially abandoned her.” While she was getting a “painful, nauseating abortion,” Eastman was at his house in Croton-on-Hudson, safely back in the orbit of his wife.  

But here is why he is remembered from his early, pro-Communist days:

The list of things Eastman did that mattered on the left, from about 1910 to 1940, is staggering. He published John Reed on the Bolshevik Revolution and Randolph Bourne against the war. He smuggled Lenin’s last testament out of Russia, and translated Trotsky into English. He stood up to the U.S. government, and won, when they tried to imprison him for spreading sedition in The Masses. He was one of the earliest American Trotskyists, and then one of the most important skeptics and rejecters of Trotskyism. He was also, in everything he did, an important symbol to many of a certain way of being and acting.

Then he swung around:

After breaking with the socialist left, Eastman didn’t cease to be good-looking or charismatic, but the easy alignment between his persona and his politics broke down. He began writing for Reader’s Digest, perhaps the least revolutionary of American publications. He articulated a more conservative politics, in defense of the un-romantic virtues of liberal democracy against the revolutionary claims of socialism. He became a cautious defender of Joseph McCarthy, and a scourge of left-wing and liberal intellectuals whom he believed were wrong on communism and the Soviet Union.

A bit like Steve Kates, who says he went from youthful hippy Lefty to intensely uncritical Trump lover, but about 10 times more interesting.

That story

Well, noticing one of the first recommendations on Twitter of the short story "Cat Person" in the New Yorker, I did read it yesterday. And yes, it does show how memorable and good a short story can be.

There's an interview with the writer, who is probably stunned at how suddenly famous her story is, at the magazine too.   She sounds pretty sensible.  Read it after the story.

I probably found the young woman more annoying and blameworthy for her post coital predicament than the author intended.  But yeah, the last word is a killer as far as the guy is concerned.

Must limit reading

I see that tweets after the first screening of The Last Jedi are extremely positive.  However, I am reluctant to look too much into comments anywhere about this film in case of spoilers.  Unfortunately, I think it was on a Reddit thread that I learned the fate of Han before I saw Force Awakens.

Official reviews in the mainstream press are usually safe.  I will just scan them as they become available.

Less rubbish please

NPR reports that China has played a huge role in recycling American rubbish, but its coming to an abrupt end:

The U.S. exports about one-third of its recycling, and nearly half goes to China. For decades, China has used recyclables from around the world to supply its manufacturing boom. But this summer it declared that this "foreign waste" includes too many other nonrecyclable materials that are "dirty," even "hazardous." In a filing with the World Trade Organization the country listed 24 kinds of solid wastes it would ban "to protect China's environmental interests and people's health."

The complete ban takes effect Jan. 1, but already some Chinese importers have not had their licenses renewed. That is leaving U.S. recycling companies scrambling to adapt.

I think most people my age sense that the increase we've seen in the use of plastics in food and beverage containers since we were kids seems excessive, but we've figured that a large recycling industry was taking care of it.   But now it seems the recycling industry is in crisis, and perhaps its time for a big return to less use of plastic, in particular.

Touchy feely

Here's a column on what I think is an interesting topic:   men touching men (nonsexually, Jason:  nonsexually.)

I can't say that I've ever regretted the matter of not hugging another male since - well, since forever - but the way in which things changed culturally in America over a 100 years or so (not sure about Australia) is at least interesting.  And I have thought that the fear of homosexuality from casual contact of any kind - a pat on the shoulder even - was ridiculous:

...many men self-police their hands around each other. In younger men this manifests in the ubiquitous “No homo!” response if they accidentally touch another guy, and in older men it translates into the same awkward discomfort (read: fear) that I, and many men, experience when faced with reaching out to another male, even an intimate. Yet these reactions are a relatively modern phenomena. Men shared the same bed with strangers in early American taverns, and scholarship is unearthing letters — including ones from Abraham Lincoln — revealing how men sometimes nurtured same-sex friendships that were more emotionally and physically intimate in nonsexual ways than the relationships they shared with women. Some 19th-century tintypes, such as those collected in the book “Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection,” illustrate this.

I thought the way it's put in this paragraph is funny:

The psychologist Ofer Zur notes that for most 20^th- and 21st-century American men, physical contact is restricted to violence or sex. As the sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies masculinity, said in an email, touch between straight men can occur only when physical contact “magically loses its association with homosexuality” — as happens in sports.

As for contact with children, some claim it is very significant:

The fear that girds the lack of platonic touch among American men also fuels the destructive force of their hands, a 2002 study in the journal Adolescence found. Dr. Field was the lead author of the study, which looked at 49 cultures. “The cultures that exhibited minimal physical affection toward their young children had significantly higher rates of adult violence,” she said. But “those cultures that showed significant amounts of physical affection toward their young children had virtually no adult violence.”

 I wonder how Japan figures into that.  It's a country famous for not kissing children, but perhaps there is a lot of physical intimacy made up in the much more likely scenario of sleeping in the same room with parents until a quite advanced age.

Mind you, if that study was accurate, you would imagine that some European countries - perhaps Italy in particular? - where parents seem very affectionate to children and even men seem much more physically affectionate with other men, should be the least violent places on the planet.  But I'm not sure that holds true.

Update:  speaking of the situation with male friendship in the 19th century, I think I failed to note at the time the somewhat interesting article by Frank Moorhouse a month or so ago in which he discussed the intense male friendship that Henry Lawson had, and also his somewhat effeminate characteristics which were commented on at the time.   A bit of a surprise, given the physical look of the guy and the content of his fiction, I think.  But Moorhouse (himself gay or at least bisexual?)   seems to make a decent argument that Lawson's alcoholism was to do with unresolved sexuality.  Or is it a case of overenthusiastic claiming of someone to the gay clubhouse, as modern gays are sometimes inclined to do?