Renewable woes

As green power investments rise, a fear they are being misguided - International Herald Tribune

Be careful if you are planning to invest in renewable energy is the message of this article. This claim is of interest:

Other experts say pouring money into newfangled renewable technologies could prove less cost-effective than relatively straightforward improvements in energy efficiency. Efficiency measures could cut growth in energy demand in half by 2020 and earn investors double-digit rates of return, said Diana Farrell, the director of the McKinsey Global Institute.

"Too much of the energy debate has focused on simply boosting supplies that are destined to be wasted," she said.

Somewhere I read some American analyst claiming that government subsidies for solar cells is economically a big waste of effort. I can't find it now. Such skepticism does not seem to float to the top of the Google pool.

One thing of which I remain very skeptical is solar cell subsidies in England. Could there be a cloudier country less suitable to PV power than that one?

Idiot

Opposition dumps nuclear power policy

It's going to be a tedious 12 to 18 months while those of us with conservative inclinations wait for Brendan "say anything" Nelson to be replaced, and for the Coalition to work out something that distinguishes it from Labor under Rudd.

One would have thought that Ross Garnaut's proposal for 90% emissions reduction by mid century would be the perfect opportunity to point to the wisdom of John Howard's statement 12 months ago:

Mr Howard said the [IPCC] report was the latest and strongest confirmation that greenhouse gas emissions were damaging the earth and Australia must continue moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"We must be open-minded and courageous enough to look at all of the options, including nuclear power," Mr Howard told reporters at his Sydney residence, Kirribilli House.

"There is no point, in the face of such a comprehensive challenge, of ruling out consideration of something which may, over time, provide part of the solution to the problem."

But no, Nelson says "no nuclear" and Nick Minchin takes the opportunity to express climate change skepticism.

Enjoy Opposition, boys.

Hurry up and die

Surgeon Accused of Speeding a Death to Get Organs - New York Times

An interesting story about transplant donation protocols in the States.

Meanwhile, in Bangalore...

Six monitor lizards seized, two held

Both the strange content and the breathless writing style of the city reports in The Times of India continues to impress:

Three weeks after the CID forest cell busted the monitor lizard meat trade in dhabas in Chikkaballapur, two Hakki Pikki tribe members were arrested trying to sell the lizards in Bidadi on Tuesday evening.

Based on a tip-off, the sleuths of CID forest cell arrested Mettingal, (50) and Sagar (24), residents of Hakki Pikki colony in Bhadrapura near Bidadi, and recovered six live monitor lizards.

Unexpected ways to die

Man admits to beheading Hollywood screenwriter, killing doctor in 2004 - Los Angeles Times

A gruesome story of death in Hollywood, which would seem very unlikely if it was depicted in a Hollywood movie. (I mean, just how many people are confronted in their house by a drug crazed madman carrying their neighbour's head?):

Prosecutors alleged that Graff beheaded Lees, a co-writer of the 1948 comedy classic "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" who also worked on the TV show " Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Graff carried the head from Lees' home, in the 1600 block of Courtney Avenue, over a back fence to Engelson's home on Stanley Avenue, between Hollywood and Sunset boulevards, police said. The suspect then fatally stabbed the doctor, likely using kitchen knives from the victims' homes, police said. Engelson had been on the telephone making airline reservations for a business trip to San Jose. The agent reported hearing a commotion before the line went dead.

The story is also blog-worthy because of the words "comedy classic" and "Abbot and Costello" appearing in the same sentence.

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.