A bit of a worry

BBC News - Big Tokyo earthquake likely 'within the next few years'

A big earthquake is much more likely to hit the Japanese capital, Tokyo, in the next few years than the government has predicted, researchers say.

The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude 7 quake would strike the region in the next four years....

Researchers at the University of Tokyo's earthquake research institute based their figures on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since the 11 March 2011 quake.

They say that compared with normal years, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of quakes in the Tokyo metropolitan area since the March disaster.

The Dotcom life

'I have a different attitude towards money than those who rather hoard it': inside the lavish life of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom

This article is most remarkable for the photos it contains of the larger than life (or at least, larger than normal) Mr Dotcom. Quite an effort put in by the journalist to make him look funny, I think. Not that I mind in this case.

For future reference

The Republicans’ new voodoo economics - The Washington Post

I was asked over the weekend why I had started saying that it seemed to me that the Right in America had re-adopted a form of "voodoo economics".

I don't think I knew that an economics editor from The Economist had written an article in August with this very title, and I link it here for future reference.

Update:  Slate looks at how Gingrich's tax reform proposals are marginally different from those of the other Republicans.  But it points out:

 Every single candidate from the wacky Herman Cain to nice guy John Huntsman is running on the premise that taxes should be reduced relative to current policy, especially on high-incomes and on investment income. Gingrich is no exception to that rule as this chart based on Tax Policy Center analysis will show:

One respect in which Newt stands out from the pack somewhat is that essentially everyone's taxes go down at least a little under the Gingrich Plan. Most of the Republican contenders are currently preparing to raise taxes on a large number of lower income families who benefit from what are called refundable tax credits.

But as the first comment following the article notes:

I don't think anyone really believes that Gingrich et al are even pretending to look after "the 99%". How can someone simultaneously shriek about the deficit, openly plot a bloody, senseless, and expensive war, and propose steep tax cuts for everyone? You would think that someone who wanted to shrink the deficit or take a bite out of the debt would keep both massive spending cuts and tax hikes on the table.

Ocean acidification, continued...

Unprecedented, man-made trends in ocean's acidity

You can see why climate change skeptics think they have won...

Actually, no; no you can't.

(It's true, the rate of increase over the last little while has not been at the rate expected by some models.  It's not true that, in the big picture, it looks like warming is all over.)

Why there is no point in my going to literary festivals

Michael Hayworth, a publisher, complains in a column in The Age today that Australian "classic"novels are forgotten all too quickly by both academia and the public, and many are out of print.  But he starts with this observation:

We live in the world of the home-grown literary bestseller, the world of The Slap and The Secret River. We love our new stars, and celebrate the success of Favel Parrett or Toni Jordan or Craig Silvey. Our writers have careers both at home and abroad. We no longer expect our life-changing books to be written in isolation and despair, against the odds, fulfilling what Henry Lawson came to believe was the destiny of the Australian writer.

OK, well, I've heard of The Slap because it became a TV series last year that didn't sound all that interesting, and I therefore didn't watch.  I have heard the title "The Secret River".  I think.  

But, sorry, call me completely out of touch with Australia literature if you want, I have not heard of Favel, Toni or Craig.  And I even watch First Tuesday Book Club about half the time its on.  [Now that I think of it, I can't remember the name of any Australian author who I saw on it last year, except for potboiler thriller writer Matthew O'Reilly (who I also haven't read.)  Maybe I only watch the show because I like it when they strongly disagree on the merits of something I'm never going to read anyway.]

Back to Hayworth:

Our universities have failed for more than a century to create any kind of enduring tradition for the teaching of Australian literature. We are so familiar with this failure we hardly notice. And our publishing has always been dominated by British houses, which have not always felt the need, simply because a book is part of our national heritage, to keep it available.

In 2011, in not a single course in the whole country were students asked to read Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. This is the equivalent of not one Russian university teaching Anna Karenina, of Madame Bovary going untaught in France.

There you go:  another Australian author and book, this one a "classic" apparently, which I haven't heard of.

But hang on a minute:  "failed for more than a century to create any ...enduring tradition..." is a bit rich isn't it?   By 1900, the country had only been around in any substantial form for a few decades.  (Have a look at this chart, which indicates the white population in 1843 was barely 250,000.)  Sure, Sydney University was founded in 1850 (presumably with very small class sizes,) but people coming here were hardly motivated by the weather making it a nice place in which to write books, and it's hard to imagine University courses of the early 20th century being designed around the works of Henry Lawson (or some such.)

In any event, I'm not entirely sure why Universities need to "teach" modern literature at all, but that's just me a being a not-very-arty philistine, I suppose; even though readers of this blog may think I am more "arts" inclined that I really am due to my reports on the latest weird installations at Brisbane's GOMA.   I can see the value in studying (as opposed to merely experiencing) literature from the point of view of what it tells us about societies'  and individual's attitudes in the past, and the arc of their development over time; this applies especially to really old literature.   But the study of modern literature when there is plenty of other material around about the society it was written in; well, after the first 5 years of analysis of a particularly complex book, I am not entirely sure what more there is to be said or taught, and you could probably now find most of that analysis for free on the net instead of going to university.

Anyhow, Hayworth's complaint about good Australian books being out of print would, one expects, be answered by the increasing use of e-readers.   Surely it can't be very expensive to put them out in electronic  format, and even develop a specialised field of advertising for formerly acclaimed books which have been out of print for some years.

If the publishing industry can't work out how to do that, Andrew, I'd say it's pretty much their own fault, and I wouldn't blame it on Universities at all. 

Tourism and politics

Egyptian frustration as tourists stay away | World news | The Guardian

The dramatic drop in tourism to Egypt (at least 32%, possibly 50%) raises an interesting question: can the need for Western tourism be a moderating force on State enforced religious conservatism?

Not for the first time, I will again suggest: much of the Middle East should be managed by Disney. They may have to give up their "gay days," though.

A bit embarrassing (OK, very embarrassing)

The anti-fornication, anti-abortion wife of Rick Santorum lived very differently in her 20s.

I know very little about Rick Santorum, so was this already known in the States? In any event, I was surprised to read about the very less than ideal Catholic life his wife led in her 20's.

About that fridge...

George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits - NYTimes.com

This New York Times article is largely about a new George Lucas produced film "Red Tails," which (to his chagrin) he had to finance personally. It sounds potentially good - an old fashioned patriotic film about the (black) Tuskegee Airmen, featuring a lot of aerial footage. And, importantly, it's not actually directed or written by Lucas.

The article also spends a lot of time reviewing Lucas' career, and the enemies he has made with fanboys who hate him fiddling with his Star Wars films gets much coverage.

But the other great controversy of his movie making career - the much derided "nuking the fridge" segment from the much derided Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - is what I want to note.

I cannot believe how much venom is directed at that film. It was mentioned in at least half of the Tintin reviews I read, usually reading something like "this is a much better Spielberg action film than that last embarrassment of an Indiana Jones film." Well, I beg to differ.

I didn't think IJKCS was wonderful: I thought the script could have been much better, and, yes, OK, it was the silliest Indiana Jones film with some of the fake stunts, but there were enough well done sequences and images that I still ranked it as being enjoyable enough.

So, how did "nuking the fridge" manage to not offend me? I mean, sometimes really stupid science puts me off an entire movie. (The villain needing a satellite dish the size of Arecibo radio observatory to get a message to an orbiting satellite weapon in Golden Eye is the example I remember most frequently.) So what about the fridge? My reaction was that it was extremely unlikely and therefore a bit silly, but not fundamentally impossible. I now have information to back up that view.

The NYT notes (and I had heard this before) that Steven Spielberg claimed in one interview that it was his "silly idea". However, Lucas tells the paper that this was just Spielberg trying to be nice:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

I wonder who those scientists are?

Anyway, that's enough for me. My gut reaction was about right, and Crystal Skull haters will just have to concentrate on the vine swinging scene instead. (Hey, that wasn't fundamentally impossible, either.)

The big computer in the sky

I haven't been spending much time checking new paper on arXiv lately, but here's a new one that talks about the idea of the Universe as a program being run on a giant quantum computer. 

I liked these parts:

And this part near the end:

Whatever happened to Spielbergian aliens?

The two big science fiction-ish hits of Steven Spielberg's early career, Close Encouters and ET, were notable for the niceness of the aliens:  little squishy botanist ET wouldn't harm a fly; and although the CE3K aliens appeared to have no concept of how disorientating it may be for humans to be sucked up into a mother ship and returned to their families 60 years later, they were touchy feely nice guys in the end.  No alien's perfect, I guess:  ET may well have turned rapidly into an alcoholic if he could have tolerated family absence better.

So, while watching Cowboys and Aliens on DVD last night, which Spielberg executive produced, I wondered why he now only seems to be involved with films showing aliens that want to squash humans like so many bugs.

His own War of the Worlds showed physically weak looking aliens who nonetheless thought humans were the most convenient source of blood and bone fertiliser for the lawn; last year's exec produced Super 8  had an alien that was (if I recall correctly) being treated unfairly, but nonetheless was ultra violent in response;  and now Cowboys and Aliens had another set of grotesque designed aliens who, despite having the technology to come to Earth in a pretty cool looking spaceship, thought the best way to dispose of interfering mammals is to bite their neck out or stab and slash them with their built in dagger fingers.

Doesn't anyone write science fiction with nice aliens any more?

As for Cowboys and Aliens as a movie:  the critical response was about right - not great, not horrendous, but had a bit of a feel of a lost opportunity to do a cool genre mash up better.

Now they tell us...

According to this article, people with a shipping industry background have been getting worried for a number of years about the safety of mega cruise ships.

Great mistranslations in history

Actually, the post is about Original Sin again.

Now, it is quite possible that I have read about this particular translation issue before, but have forgotten it.   Nonetheless, this translation issue was noted in a book I picked up at the Lifeline Bookfest yesterday (yes, Brisbane people - you have until next weekend to load up on books you probably won't finish before the next one comes around), but a simpler explanation is to be found via Google books, which turned up this extract from Hans Kung book "Great Christian Thinkers":

One other thing occurred to me about this - and I presume this is not an original thought - until Catholic scientist priest Spallanzani, who I mentioned here several posts back - did his 18th century work, mammalian reproduction as requiring both ovum and sperm was not well understood, and the idea that semen alone contained a tiny human just waiting to be planted and grow up was one way of understanding it.  Logically, then, there was a sense in which one man's seed also contained all the future babies as well as his own.

Would such thinking contribute to the way in which Augustine might have thought all humans were "in" Adam, and (in a sense) were quasi-participants in the original sin?

Update:  Another book (Augustine of Hippo - a life" by Henry Chadwick ) notes the following, which seems relevant to my speculation:
 

Update 2:  It may not have been Augustine's idea, but we do find in the Wikipedia entry for homunculus that some later thinkers thought that "preformationism" was relevant to original sin:

It was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with a chain of homunculi "all the way down". This was not necessarily considered by spermists a fatal objection however, as it neatly explained how it was that "in Adam" all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.

Actually, the Wiki entry on preformationism is worth looking at too, for a more detailed look at its development in philosophy and its lasting influence.  It all starts with Pythagoras, apparently.  When microscopes came along, the dutch inventors gave preformationism a boost by claiming to see (in a fashion which reminds me of how, much later, Martian canals would be imagined via telescopes) things in semen that simply aren't there:

Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to observe spermatozoa. He described the spermatozoa of about 30 species, and thought he saw in semen, "all manner of great and small vessels, so various and so numerous that I do not doubt that they be nerves, arteries and veins...And when I saw them, I felt convinced that, in no full grown body, are there any vessels which may not be found likewise in semen." (Friedman 76-7)^[7]

But, going back to Augustine, it would seem that he does not really count as a preformationist:

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both held that hominization, or the coming into being of the human, occurs only gradually. Quickening was thought to occur around 40 days, and to be the point at which the merely animal mix of material fluids was ensouled. Until 1859, when Pope Pius IX decreed that life begins at “conception,” the Church was epigenetic along with the Aristotelians [see Maienschein 2003].

Put down the can

Study finds caffeine poisoning on the rise

I suppose it's no surprise that the highly caffeinated soft drink market should cause a spike in the number of cases of apparent caffeine poisoning. Is this part of the report right, though?:

Caffeine toxicity can mimic amphetamine poisoning, cause seizures, psychosis, cardiac arrhythmias and rarely even death, but the most common symptoms reported include irregular heart rate, tremors, stomach upsets and dizziness.

Well, Google knows everything, and links me to this blog post, containing the following extract from a toxicologist's book:

“Caffeine-induced psychosis, whether it be delirium, manic depression, schizophrenia, or merely an anxiety syndrome, in most cases will be hard to differentiate from organic or non-organic psychoses….

The treatment for caffeine-induced psychosis is to withhold further caffeine.”

In fact, the entire website ("The Caffeine Web") describes itself as having the following purpose:

At CaffeineWeb.com, psychiatrists, allergists and toxicologists address caffeine's potential to induce symptoms of mental illness in healthy people.

But it appears to have been a short lived affair. Maybe the author had a relapse after a particularly hard night on the Starbucks.

The lucky tilt

Here's an interesting story from Physorg about the possible importance of planetary tilt for the emergence of life:

But take away the Earth's axial slant, and the place might become a lot less inviting.

With an obliquity of less than five degrees or so, an Earth-like planet's broader equatorial regions bear the full brunt of a sun's radiance. The polar regions also receive far less sunlight than they do with seasonal ebbs and flows. The result: extreme temperature gradients based on latitude. "Your equator is heated enormously while the poles freeze," said Heller.

In theory, bands of habitability in temperate, mid-latitude zones could persist. In a worst-case scenario, however, the entire atmosphere of a zero-obliquity planet could collapse, Heller said. Gases might evaporate into space around the planet's blazing middle and freeze to the ground in the bleak north and south.

Life, had it ever emerged, would be stopped dead in its tracks.

And the problem is, for life on other planets, that red dwarf stars may well erase planetary tilt relatively quickly.

It sounds like it may be an important reason as to why you can have billions of planets, but not many suitable for life.