Floods in the future

I've been muttering ever since the enormous floods in Australia in 2011 that I wasn't sure how well anyone could anticipate how much increased floods due to climate change could cause damage to the economies of countries so affected.

I've been poking around a bit and see that there certainly have been a lot of attempts to try to quantify this, but I guess I am just worried that predicting changed rainfall in regions is one of the less clear aspects giving current climate modelling, and while this may mean that current estimates may be overly pessimistic, they might also not be pessimistic enough.

I note this as an example of one estimate, from one IPCC page:

The impact of climate change on flood damages can be estimated from modelled changes in the recurrence interval of present-day 20- or 100-year floods, and estimates of the damages of present-day floods as determined from stage-discharge relations (between gauge height (stage) and volume of water per unit of time (discharge)), and detailed property data. With such a methodology, the average annual direct flood damage for three Australian drainage basins was projected to increase by a factor of four to ten under conditions of doubled atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (Schreider et al., 2000). 

That does sound serious.   I know nothing more of the paper; I should go looking for it.

Would prefer robot ones myself...

Soldier who lost four limbs has double-arm transplant (Update)

This guy has had some bad luck, to put it mildly:

Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been living with his older brother in a handicapped-accessible home on New York's Staten Island built with the help of several charities. The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

The weather report

Brisbane is having the cyclone you have when not having a cyclone.
It is currently very windy in the part of Brisbane where I live, which is not near the coast.   Funnily enough, on the evening news, all the reporters on the coast seemed to standing in calmer conditions.  

I hope it calms down in the suburbs soon...

Update:   It's gone 11.30pm and it's still a bit worryingly windy.   I see it's been gusting up to 90 kph earlier this evening, so its not just my imagination. Here are the BOM weather observations:

Update: Apart from a couple of leaks around windows which haven't happened before, everything was OK at home. Haven't even lost power.

As a child in the 60's and 70's, small-ish cyclones heading down the Queensland coast towards Brisbane were more common than these days, but my recollection is that they tended to peter out as a cyclone usually around the Sunshine Coast. Sure, they could turn into a rain depression, but I don't recall much in the way of wind in the suburbs. That's what made this ex cyclone unusual - the widespread wind across the city that started late yesterday and didn't end until late this morning.

The most remarkable video from this event which I saw on a News Ltd website this morning has turned up in several Youtube accounts. If you haven't seen "Surprise car", you ought to. (I think this happened up at the Sunshine Coast.)

As to how bad the flooding will get in Brisbane tomorrow - it seems all very much guesswork.  It seems that one small area near me might be affected again, but I am hoping the modelling is erring on the pessimistic side.  We will see.

Of course, there are parts of Queensland doing it much, much worse (especially Bundaberg, which appears to be facing an all time record flood.)

Interestingly, until this rainfall started in Brisbane, the city was having an exceptionally dry January.  Not sure how the figures will look now.  It did seem to be illustrating what a climate change paradigm of swings from one extreme to another might look like, and it's not pretty.   As I suggested after the 2011 flood, if climate change means one in a 100 year floods start happening (say) once a decade, it's going to be a change of big economic consequence.  

Cheese with an unwanted extra

Poisoning toll rises, 100 foods recalled

So, there's been a major outbreak of listeria from soft cheeses made by the Jindi Cheese company:

 In NSW, a further three cases of the bacterial illness have been identified, bringing the national total to 21. A 34-year-old woman in NSW has miscarried and two men - an 84-year-old Victorian, and a 44-year-old Tasmanian - have died. Each of the new cases have been in people aged over 65, and one of them is in a serious condition.

What I didn't realise before this was how long it can be between eating the contaminated food and getting symptoms - it has a 70 day incubation period!   

I am curious on another point - when you open a soft cheese but forget to finish it for a couple of weeks, you can get some pretty powerful stinky growths on it.  I always worry a bit about how safe it is to eat it, or eat the bits around it the worst bits which I cut off.  I am trusting that it can't develop into anything too dangerous.  After all, Francis Lam at Salon did tell us a couple of years ago about some extraordinarily strong French cheese that seemed it was trying to kill him:

Fromage fort translates as “strong cheese,” and is a bit of a Frankenstein — a potted mash of old bits and pieces, the Parliament-funky rinds of leftover cheeses, and left to molder together for a bit. There’s usually some kind of booze in there for extra kick (and extra protection from bacteria). Whether it’s a food or a dare is largely up to interpretation. You can only imagine what earns the title of “strong cheese” in the homeland of stinky cheese.

Hmm.  Maybe I should try mushing up the old soft cheese with a bit of wine or brandy and see what that comes out like...

Absurd Apple

Apple trademarks "distinctive design" of stores

DNA trying to tell us something

Synthetic double-helix faithfully stores Shakespeare's sonnets 

This was a surprising story:

A team of scientists has produced a truly concise anthology of verse by encoding all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in DNA. The researchers say that their technique could easily be scaled up to store all of the data in the world.

Along with the sonnets, the team encoded a 26-second audio clip from Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream" speech, a copy of James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper on the structure of DNA, a photo of the researchers' institute and a file that describes how the data were converted. The researchers report their results today on Nature’s website¹.

The project, led by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, marks another step towards using nucleic acids as a practical way of storing information — one that is more compact and durable than current media such as hard disks or magnetic tape.

Here's the  most amazing part:

DNA packs information into much less space than other media. For example, CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data on some 100 tape drives. Goldman’s method could fit all of those data into 41 grams of DNA.

 Lots more detail of how it is done is in the article.  As to its potential long term value:

Goldman adds that DNA storage should be apocalypse-proof. After a hypothetical global disaster, future generations might eventually find the stores and be able to read them. “They’d quickly notice that this isn’t DNA like anything they’ve seen,” says Goldman. “There are no repeats, and everything is the same length. It’s obviously not from a bacterium or a human. Maybe it’s worth investigating.”

I wonder if this means there might be a short to medium length message put there by my Creator for use at about this time in history.  "Don't buy Betamax" maybe*.
 
Has science fiction ever covered this?  The nearest I can think of is the ending of Carl Sagan's "Contact", where a message is found hidden inside of Pi.

*  A joke stolen from Good Omens.

Maybe built that way?

Chameleon pulsar baffles astronomers

An international team has made a tantalizing discovery about the way pulsars emit radiation. The emission of X-rays and radio waves by these pulsating neutron stars is able to change dramatically in seconds, simultaneously, in a way that cannot be explained with current theory. It suggests a quick change of the entire magnetosphere....

Pulsars are small spinning stars that are about the size of a city, around 20 km in diameter. They emit oppositely directed beams of radiation from their magnetic poles. Just like a lighthouse, as the star spins and the beam sweeps repeatedly past the Earth we see a brief flash.

Some pulsars produce radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including at X-ray and radio wavelengths. Despite being discovered more than 45 years ago the exact mechanism by which pulsars shine is still unknown.

It has been known for some time that some radio-emitting pulsars flip their behaviour between two (or even more) states, changing the pattern and intensity of their radio pulses. The moment of flip is both unpredictable and sudden. It is also known from satellite-borne telescopes that a handful of radio pulsars can also be detected at X-ray frequencies. However, the X-ray signal is so weak that nothing is known of its variability.

To find out if the X-rays could also flip the scientists studied a particular pulsar called PSR B0943+10, one of the first to be discovered. It has radio pulses which change in form and brightness every few hours with some of the changes happening within about a second.

Dr Ben Stappers from The University of Manchester's School of Physics and Astronomy said: "The behaviour of this pulsar is quite startling, it's as if it has two distinct personalities. As PSR B0943+10 is one of the few pulsars also known to emit X-rays, finding out how this higher energy radiation behaves as the radio changes could provide new insight into the nature of the emission process."...

Geoff Wright from the University of Sussex adds: "Our observations strongly suggest that a temporary "hotspot" appears close to the pulsar's magnetic pole which switches on and off with the change of state. But why a pulsar should undergo such dramatic and unpredictable changes is completely unknown."

Bat family life

Bats split on family living

An odd report here on how one species of bat has different family arrangements depending on where they live.  That seems unusual.

This part suggests that bat bachelors are unlike human ones:

"But it is also possible that the males choose not to roost with the females. When you look at the nursery colony in Ilkley, mothers and pups often have a lot of ectoparasites like ticks and mites. In a warm, crowded nursery, parasites can thrive, especially if there's less time for good personal hygiene. Parasites not only make life uncomfortable but can affect a bat's health. The males that live by themselves are usually very clean in their bachelor pads, so you can understand why they might not want to move in," he added.

I continue to be amazed at how black flying foxes in the colony I pass every day still hang around in the summer sun instead of going for shadier trees.

When the American Right used to be sensible

7 uncovered quotes that reveal just how crazy the NRA’s become - Salon.com

I like this one in particular:

“There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,” said California Gov. Ronald Reagan in May 1967, after two dozen Black Panther Party members walked into the California Statehouse carrying rifles to protest a gun-control bill. Reagan said guns were “a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”

 This article notes that Reagan then swung around to be very pro-gun rights in 1975 in "his column"  in Guns and Ammo magazine, but post presidency he swung again:

The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 will be remembered as an important piece of legislation for gun rights. However, Reagan also cast his support behind the two most controversial pieces of gun control legislation of the past 30 years. His support of the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994 may have directly led to the ban winning the approval of Congress. Congress passed the ban by a vote of 216-214. In addition to Klug voting for the ban after Reagan’s last minute plea, Rep. Dick Swett, D-N.H., also credited Reagan’s support of the bill for helping him decide to cast a favorable vote.

Does the NRA blame Alzheimer's Disease for his later support of gun control, I wonder?  I see from this article that he was not formally diagnosed with it until 2004, even though many suspect he started to suffer from it during his second term.  (That linked article makes out a pretty convincing sounding case that he was, actually.) 

A spot of good news

With group effort, Japan suicides fall to 15-year low - CSMonitor.com

Of minor interest:

“As they keep blaming themselves for business failure, saying, ‘I’ve done wrong’ or ‘I’ve caused trouble to society,’ that totally impairs their judgment,” says Hisao Sato who started a suicide prevention program in 2002 in Akita city, some 720 miles north of Tokyo. The region is notorious for being home to the highest suicide rates.

I've been within 80 km or so of Akita quite a few times but never visited it.   I am told there is not much there, but it is such a lonely looking corner of the country I've always felt it would welcome my presence as an international tourist.  It is also close to a Marian apparition, complete with weeping statue.  (Mind you, we briefly had one of those in a Brisbane suburb a few years ago, and I went and had a look.  I think I have mentioned that before.)

A look at Hare Krishna

My years as a Hare Krishna

This is an interesting account of a woman who got into Hare Krishna but who has now moved away from it.  She's still sympathetic to the religion, though.

I note that she was obviously no stranger to recreational drug taking before she got into it.  I have a family member who is (last I heard) still in the religion, who came to it with some recreational drug experience (of a worrying degree, apparently.  I don't know the full details, though.)

I guess this is of no great surprise:  I tend to think anyone who tries anything more psychoactive than, say, marijuana, is showing signs of spiritual aimlessness which a strong communitarian religious practice like Hare Krishna is able to address.  (Gee, I still don't like using the word "spiritual".)  

Anyhow, one of the comments that follow the article is cruel, but funny:

I used to live over the back fence from a Hare Krisna house in Brisbane - 24 hour cycle chanting hare krisna, hare krisna, hare rama, rama rama etc. - so I got to know the words.

My take was it suited wimpy directionless people attracted to traditional conservative roles with an appearance of something special and different

Just when you thought nuclear holocaust had gone away...

Nuclear war accidents: Minutemen missiles in silos should be abolished. - Slate Magazine

Ros Rosenbaum argues that the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange is still high, particularly from the land based Minuteman missiles.   Computers are now a large part of the problem:

The silo-based missiles have been "detargeted," we've been told, but can easily be retargeted in seconds with a burst of code containing—say, Moscow's GPS coordinates. They've been detargeted but not de-alerted (something I called for back 2008 in Slate). They're still ready to go, at a moment's notice, vulnerable to hackers despite the claims by some security experts they're "air gapped from the internet"—but think USB sticks.

Nobody has yet explained the incident in late 2010 when 50 nuclear missiles in Wyoming stopped responding to the C3I system for a frightening period of time. The Pentagon hastened to say, hey, no problem, don’t worry that our computer system isn't capable of error-proof command and control of 50 nuclear missiles for just a little while. The episode was not confidence-inducing, and it reminded us how much world-destroying power is entrusted to glitch-prone computer architecture. The fact that this sensational story was virtually ignored is further evidence of head-in-the sand consciousness we have about nuclear power. 

When I discussed the matter of our "launch posture" with a Pentagon general who specialized in nuclear affairs, he refused to say whether these missiles could still be launched on the basis of "dual phenomenology." This obfuscatory euphemism means that once we receive signals from two electronic tracking systems—radar and satellite—that something on the screens looks like an attack, we'd face the "use it or lose it" choice. We'd have to "launch on warning" before we knew that the warnings were not "false positives" like the flock of geese. Fortunately, it's unlikely there could be two simultaneous false positives in our dual phenomenology, but a statistician's analysis has argued that eventually it would happen. One prominent statistics expert, Martin Hellman, one of the inventors of the "trap door" and "public key" methods of encryption for the Internet, calculated a 1-in-10 chance of a nuclear exchange in the next decade, and Scientific American put it at a not-so-reassuring 1-in-30 for the same period.

Bad news from the Andes

Unprecedented glacier melting in the Andes blamed on climate change

While judging what's going on with glaciers in the Himalayas seems to be quite tricky, it has always seemed that the fate of South American glaciers has been clearer.  And it does have serious implications for water supply:

The Santa River valley in Peru will be most affected, as its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants heavily rely on glacier water for agriculture, domestic consumption, and hydropower. Large cities, such as La Paz in Bolivia, could also face shortages. "Glaciers provide about 15% of the La Paz water supply throughout the year, increasing to about 27% during the dry season," says Alvaro Soruco, a Bolivian researcher who took part in the study.

I should also mention that this is one reason I liked Quantum of Solace:  the writers seemed to be well aware of climate change causing problems in that part of the world, and hence the evil scheme to store desperately needed water underground kinda made sense.

An interesting list

What doctors won't do | Life and style | The Guardian

I don't know how came up with the idea for this, but it's interesting to read a list of medical things doctors would not do.

PSA testing gets a mention more than once...

The cold up there explained

Stratospheric Phenomenon Is Bringing Frigid Cold to U.S | Climate Central