The carnival is over

Michael Jackson faces forced sale of Neverland | Entertainment | Reuters

According to the story, the place has been "shuttered"since 2006 and all animals removed. And how's this for understatement:

Jackson... has since seen his fame as an entertainer eclipsed by the sometimes bizarre details of his personal life.

How to win an Oscar for your documentary

Aust lacks opportunities, Oscar winner Orner says - ABC News
You must have the requisite degree of loathing of the Bush administration, as Australian Oscar winner Eva Orner evidently does:

She says people need to be informed about the actions of the US Government in the war on terrorism since 9/11.

"The current administration are a bunch of war criminals and they need to be stopped and people need to know what's been going on."

Maybe Michael Moore's "Sicko" wasn't anti American enough to win?

High Fashion Farce

L.A. Now : Los Angeles Times : The face of a new runway trend?

Maybe it's covering an axe or something?

Backwards causation and the LHC

Well, this is one of the strangest things I've seen on arXiv for some time. (And that's saying something: there was recently a paper talking about science and poltergeists!)

The article I refer to is called Test of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider.

This is a follow up to an article from the middle of 2007, which I missed, called Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider.

These guys take seriously the concept of backward causation, and suggest that (for reasons I can't really follow) the potential creation of large amounts of Higgs particles by the LHC might be a good way to test possible influence from the future. But the means of testing is very surprising:

The experiment proposed in the present article is to give “foresight”, a chance of avoiding forced closure of LHC due to lack of funding or other form of bad luck,as happened to SSC.

We imagine a big stack of cards on which are written various restrictions concerning the operation of LHC, for example “allow the production of only 10 Higgs particles”. On most of the cards there should just be written “use LHC freely” so that they cause no restrictions. However, on a very small fraction of cards, there should be restrictions on luminosity or beam energy or some combination of them. One card may even have “close (shut down) LHC”.

The crucial idea of this proposal is that if our model were true, then the most likely development sol with the P(sol) ≃ e−2SI (sol) factor included would be a development involving one of the cards which strongly restricts on the Higgs particle production at LHC.

It almost sounds like an April Fool article, but neither paper bears any relationship to that date, and these guys aren't nutters. (They thank the CERN Theory Group and Neils Bohr Institute in their papers.) This is how they conclude their earlier paper:

In the present article, we have proposed an experiment at LHC for determining
the effect of an influence from the future as proposed in our own model. The best description may be achieved by introducing an imaginary part SI of the action S.The experiment is very primitive in as far as it consists simply of a card-drawing game arranged so that some severe restriction on the running of LHC - essentially closure - is imposed with a probability p of the order of 5 × 10−6. If indeed a restriction card which has such a low probability as p ∼ 5×10−6 were to be drawn, it would essentially mean that our model must be true!

If, however, just a normal card that gives no restriction is drawn, our theory would be falsified unless a seemingly accidental stopping of LHC occurs!It must be warned that if our model were true and no such game about strongly restricting LHC were played, or if the probability p in the game for restricting were too small, then a “normal” (seemingly accidental) closure should occur. This could be potentially more damaging than just the loss of LHC itself. Therefore not
performing (or not performing with sufficiently big p) our proposed card game could- if our model were correct - cause considerable danger.

Sounds crazy but it just might work. Alternatively, it may just be crazy.

Backwards causation is an interesting topic of paranormal research too.

I find the idea inherently appealing, but I have to think more about why that is.

A brief Oscar comment

Am I the only person to find it surprising that Jon Stewart's opening monologue seemed to target only Hollywood liberals and pretty much leave conservatives alone?

I saw the first 45 minutes only, and had to go out when the movies I didn't care about started dominating. But, I actually didn't mind the pared back feeling of what I did see.

A few updates

Here are some articles relevant to a couple of recent posts:

* An anthropologist supports my point that, even if a tribal culture has some practice of adult/child sexual contact as a part of initiation, how can a white man who grew up in Sydney claim this as mitigation for his having sex with a boy in his care? (In any event, the anthropologist suggests that that there is no evidence of such practices in Torres Strait.)

* On the issue of whether or not Muslim incursions into Europe were that bad a thing (David Levering Lewis has argued they more or less did Europe a favour,) here's a piece summarising the worst aspects of Muslim expansionism.

* Theodore Dalrymple has a go at Archbishop Rowan William's opaque use of language in his recent talk about Sharia law. Very true. I wonder what his theological writing is like: one suspects he seeks to overcome controversy in the ranks of believers simply by force of mystifying language.

Volcanoes don't help

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean

It seems some Antarctic glaciers have sped up, but no one seems certain why. It's not due to higher air temperature, and there is suspicion that a buried volcano may be to blame:

Much higher up the course of the glacier there is evidence of a volcano that erupted through the ice about 2,000 years ago and the whole region could be volcanically active, releasing geothermal heat to melt the base of the ice and help its slide towards the sea.

The consequence of a sudden increase in such activity could be pretty big, but it would take a while:

If the glacier does continue to surge and discharge most of it ice into the sea, say the researchers, the Pine Island Glacier alone could raise global sea level by 25cm.

That might take decades or a century, but neighbouring glaciers are accelerating too and if the entire region were to lose its ice, the sea would rise by 1.5m worldwide.

The story also talks about the difficulties of working there:

It is a very remote and inhospitable region. It was visited briefly in 1961 by American scientists but no one had returned until this season when Julian Scott and Rob Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic survey spent 97 days camping on the flat, white ice.

At times, the temperature got down to minus 30C and strong winds made work impossible.

At one point, the scientists were confined to their tent continuously for eight days.

"The wind really makes the way you feel incredibly colder, so just motivating yourself to go out in the wind is a really big deal," Rob Bingham told BBC News.

Just as people love to ask astronauts about toilets in space, I wonder how they deal with this in a freezing tent in Antarctica.

American politics

Found via Slate:

The club scene

Men who take Viagra 'put their fertility at risk' | Science | The Observer

The article notes concern that Viagra may affect men's sperm in such a way that it makes it harder for them to fertilise an egg. Of course, I would have thought most men who need it are of an age where they don't want kids, and those men who use it recreationally are probably not having sex for procreative purposes anyway.

Speaking of it recreational use, this I find surprising:

...Viagra has become a widely used recreational drug. It is mixed with cocaine, for example, and is sold in clubs.

I see from a quick Google that this has been going on for years, at least in Britain and Scotland. (I assume the same holds for Australia.)

This is debauchery of a very special kind: not just simply giving in to an appetite for pleasure, but deliberately seeking to increase the appetite itself. Screwtape would be delighted with modern pharmacology.

Fall of Singapore stories

Angels under fire - Telegraph

Go to the link to read a long article on some of the stories of incredible cruelty and survival from nurses who were unlucky enough to endure the fall of Singapore.

I recall some controversy some years ago about the Australian air force deliberately strafing Japanese lifeboats (from warships) in the later part of WWII. As this article shows, and people should recall, the Japanese had started the process of indiscriminate targeting of lifeboats and the killing of civilians right from the start.

Psi in history

Earlier this week I mentioned the vexed issue of paranormal powers, and today I want to talk about Uri Geller.

There's a lot of stuff on Youtube about him, mostly of a debunking nature. One thing I haven't found (yet) is video of what I seem to recall as a spoon bending appearance on British TV in the early 70's. From my memory, the way in which he bent the spoons seemed more authentic than his later demonstrations (or those by James Randi too.) However, it may well be my memory is faulty, and it may look unimpressive to me now. Famously, Geller was a complete flop on the Johnny Carson show, when the producers took particular care to make sure he couldn't cheat.

However, people may recall that part of Geller's fame was due to his convincing a couple of scientists at Stanford Research Institute (Targ and Puthoff) hat he did indeed have some sort of psi power. James Randi claimed they simply didn't have enough controls to ensure no cheating; but then I have also read some debunking of Randi's debunking. The Wikipedia article above lists some of the criticisms of the SRI team's procedures, but as I say there have also been some counterclaims. I am no fan of Randi; he exaggerates when it suits him to.

Anyway, Youtube has got a 4 part film from 1972 made by the SRI fellows about their tests with Geller. (The first part is an introduction that is hardly worth watching, except for it being pretty hokey.) The parts 2 to 4, however, are very interesting stuff. It shows they were not particularly impressed by the spoon bending or magnet moving (a low level stage trick Geller continues to this day), but they did think he had some sort of telepathy and perhaps a degree of telekinesis.

Geller performed very strongly on the sealed envelope image tests, and the suspicion is that he was able to see the targets before the test. Also, as I have seen TV magicians do equally impressive tricks, I don't put much faith in that, even though I have no idea how the trick is done.

It is also hard to see how he did the "guess which container has something in it" trick. The films show two of these. One does not impress me so much: the metal container had water in it, and it seems possible that condensation on the outside of the tin might have been a possible give away there. The other objects he found were metal, and I have read that Randi has claimed he probably located them by bumping the table and hearing or seeing which container moved differently. It would seem from the film, however, that he didn't do that, although his hands come suspiciously close to the containers at times. Also, if his cheating on the sealed envelope tests was based on his being able to see or find out what was going on in the other room, that may also explain how he was able to know which container had the object.

But the test that puzzles me most is his dice number guessing. The film does not make it perfectly clear how often he was tested on this, but to my mind, this was by far the hardest thing for Geller to have faked. (A tin with a die which SRI supplied is shaken, Geller has to guess the number on the top before anyone in the room sees it.)

These films have been on Youtube for a while, but I only just found them. As with many issues to do with the paranormal, I remain somewhat conflicted about what to make of it all. The "sensible" approach is to say that if he cheated most times, he has almost certainly cheated in every case. But I honestly don't know that Randi or his magician mates have ever reproduced exactly the same tricks as Geller as shown here.

UPDATE: I see from Wikipedia that Puthoff is a scientologist. Credibility warning!

Bad Jumper

Beamed Down: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

There have been many bad reviews for "Jumper", and I have been waiting for Anthony Lane's acerbic wit to get around to it. He doesn't disappoint, with this description of Hayden Christensen:

“Star Wars” fans will remember Hayden Christensen as the young Anakin Skywalker, or, to be accurate, as a kind of handsome void where Anakin was supposed to be.... One day, I feel sure, the rich mantle of charisma will descend upon him, but “Jumper” is not that occasion.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times also was pretty funny:

Snow white and close cropped, Mr. Jackson’s hair in this film dominates its every scene (it’s louder than the predictably voluble actor), rising out of the visual and narrative clutter like a beacon. It glows. It shouts. It entertains. (It earns its keep.)

Not so speedy post 3

1. Faith Restored: All this talk of Castro this week reminded me that I had read somewhere ages ago on the 'net conservative criticism of Steven Spielberg for saying that his meeting with Fidel in 2002 had been "the most important eight hours of my life." Indeed, The Telegraph and The Guardian both repeat the story this year.

Spielberg is a well known liberal, but that really did sound over the top and offensive. Well, it turns out Googling skills are not that strong in English journalism, as it is clear that Spielberg has long denied that he ever said it, and the original quote apparently came from the Cuban press.

The Guardian did post a retraction, as have other journals.

No, good people of earth, like me, you can still have faith in the Spielberg.

2. Adult themes. I like this week's Danny Katz column in The Age.

3. A disturbing night. Last night I dreamt that I was having lunch with Kevin Rudd after his election, but he was wearing a Muslim woman's style half face veil that covered his mouth, except that he would remove it when he was talking. I told a friend afterwards that I still didn't trust him.

Am I suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the election? I hope my trauma insurance covers it.

Never trust a chaise lounge

There are, of course, many esoteric and essentially useless things studied in the Humanities. While I have a soft spot for philosophy, one of the biggest wastes of time seems to be the academic over-analysis of eroticism in literature.

This review of a new two volume "Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature" illustrates the point. The reviewer writes:

The thematic subjects have been intelligently chosen. They include articles on syphilis as a literary muse, the rhetoric of seduction, confession and guilt, fairy tales, science fiction, slash fiction, grisettes, somatopia and furniture. The (very interesting) article on furniture concludes as follows: “In the fin-de-siècle, eros crosses over into sickness, and the furniture is caught up in the epidemic: the chaise lounge [sic] itself is sick with desire and pleasure. As the dominant notions of pleasure changed over time, so did the furniture”.

Uhuh.

Although the reviewer indicates there are many quality entries, he remains somewhat cynical of the overall effect:

I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed. Even thinking about sex has become difficult and it is being made more difficult year by year. For example, the American writer Pat Califia’s work “promotes lust in all its forms and her work contributes to the growing theoretical complexity about sexuality, both in relation to queer studies and the pornography debates”. The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s “works narrate a desire for an impossible plenitude beyond the binary oppositions and hollow conventions which structure mundane bourgeois reality”.

Social conservatives like me think people should take sex seriously, in the sense that it shouldn't be viewed merely as a recreational activity. But isn't there also something wrong with taking it too seriously, as do writers who portray it as an irresistible obsessive force, and the academics who then follow in their wake with arcane analysis?

Big numbers

Cosmic coincidence spotted : Nature News

The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10¹²². Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number — which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined¹. This ‘coincidence’, he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.

Seems odd that someone from a military college is making a name for himself in pointing out some big number co-incidences. Still, it's a good read.