Colebatch is back

Past was a blast so now it's back to the future

My favourite economics journalist of late is back, making reassuring sounds about the economy.

Hope he's right...

Lighter than air - then and now

Hindenburg mystery solved after 76 years - Science - News - The Independent

Speaking of lighter than air things, I noticed somewhere last week that the management of the US helium supply is still a vexed issue.

But how much is there left in the world?  According to the Chairman of the Balloon Council (what a job!) in a piece he wrote for CNN, there's enough for 300 years at current rates of use.  Of course, I suppose there is a question about how much you can trust the front man from the party balloon industry. 

Celibacy reconsidered, any decade now...

I thought that the article by Frank Bruni reprinted in Fairfax today put the case against celibacy in the Catholic priesthood very well.

And looking at the Guardian, I read for the first time the background of the allegations made by a few priests (and an ex priest) against the Scottish Cardinal O'Brien.  It is pretty sordid, but most remarkably, it appears the timing is a complete co-incidence with the Pope's resignation, which is not I had assumed:

The four complainants made their statements to the papal nuncio, Archbishop Mennini, around 8 or 9 February. On 11 February the pope resigned. The first response the complainants received from the nuncio said O'Brien should continue to go to Rome because "that will make it easier to arrange his retirement to be one of prayer and seclusion like the pope". The complainants recognised church subtext. In a message to me one wrote: "This is saying, 'leave it to us to sweep it under the carpet and you can forget about it. It will fade away as if we have dealt with it.' Not acceptable."

On 22 February, the cardinal gave an interview to the BBC about going to the conclave. He also said that church rules on celibacy should be reviewed. Informally, the men heard that the church was unhappy about that interview. Action would be taken. The cardinal would not go to Rome.

So did the church act because it was shocked by the claims against the cardinal or were they were angry he had broken ranks on celibacy? Two days later, the Observer published the story.

The other regrettable thing, of course, is how unfortunate it is that a Cardinal caught in scandal about his own sexual behaviour should be one who breaches solidarity on celibacy.  This gives the perfect out for the old boys network to dismiss his call on character grounds and claim him as part of the homosexual element that has caused the problem of child abuse.  (It would appear one of the major blind spots of Benedict that he was right on board with this theory, despite lots of evidence against it.)  But in reality, one could say that (assuming the allegations are true) it is quite legitimate of someone who has failed at celibacy to be the one to make the point that it is a road too hard (and unnecessary) for priests to follow.

One thing for sure:  the simplest thing the new Pope could do to indicate to the world that the Church is open to realistic reform and change would be for the celibacy rules to be relaxed.

It is, probably, too soon for the whole Humanae Vitae question to be revisited, but I would guess that would be a job for the next Pope.  Catholics will just have to continue ignoring that teaching until it is overturned.

Looking forward to this

(The first movie was very funny.  You ought to see it, with kids or not.)

I predict it won't happen

Mars mission poses greater risk to human life than Nasa would allow | Science | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian lists all of the technical and other problems that this proposed slingshot missions would face. 

Yet still, it seems not to have made the key point (and I can't say any other report I have noticed has either):   there is no point in sending people on a dangerous mission with untested life support equipment in a tiny can just to spin around a planet, take some photos, and come back.   

This article says the capsule would have a about 7 cubic meters space.  But some articles say the inflatable living quarters part would have a volume of 17 m3.  The pressurised volume of the International Space Station is 837m3.  Skylab, with a crew of 3, had a volume of 368m3.

Spending more than 500 days in a volume of 17 m3 is, in itself, nuts.

Is there a reliable medication available for the sudden development of claustrophobia?

Especially if the inflatable module develops a leak and has to be evacuated?

I read somewhere that the mission won't take pressure suits.  No EVA then to get away from each other for a while.

This is not going to happen...

Putting baby outside

For some reason, the BBC Magazine had a look recently  at the peculiarly Nordic habit of putting babies outside during the day for a nap - including in the middle of winter.  They value fresh air highly, apparently, regardless of the bitter cold, and manage to bundle the kids up enough that they don't freeze to death.  

If you have a look at this follow up, you can also see a Dutch "baby house", looking all the world like a rabbit hutch in the back yard, being used in the 1970s.  Really, you ought to watch the video:  it looks very, very strange to Australian eyes.  

Maybe its our residual fear of dingos, or something; but doing either of these in Australia would cause uproar if it appeared on Today Tonight, or some other tabloid TV show.

End times discussed

Could the Higgs mass determine the end of the universe?

 According to quantum theory, it’s possible that the lowest energy state of our universe – when there’s nothing but space and time – isn’t the lowest possible state of all.

In this picture, there exists an even lower energy state, one that our universe could transition to. That might not sound too ominous until you learn that in the lower energy state, all the protons in all the matter in the universe decay, with the unfortunate side effect that we cease to exist.

Worse still, the transition could happen at any time, anywhere in the universe, and expand at light speed from a tiny bubble until it annihilates the entire universe as we know it, which would be, you know, bad.

Recently, this idea was re-examined within the context of the Standard Model of Particle Physics – the modern quantum theory of subatomic particles and their interactions. Precise calculations dictate that the stability of our universe is intimately connected to the mass of the Higgs boson (and the top quark), a parameter which – thanks to the efforts of Large Hadron Collider – is now known to be about 125 GeV.

It is the conclusions of this re-examination that have raised a furore in the media: the Standard Model predicts that for our universe to be stable, the Higgs mass needs to be larger than 129.4 ± 5.6 GeV, so it only just fits within the uncertainties.

Ergo the end is nigh, at least in the units of time that cosmologists work with. But don’t stock your matter-collapsing-proof shelter just yet – those time scales are billions to trillions of years.

 The article goes on to note that, as the Standard Model doesn't cover everything, there may well be an "out."

The other person who had a lot hanging on the mass of the Higgs was Frank Tipler, who had predicted a Higgs mass way of 220 or so for his Omega Point theory to work.

Sadly, I have not seen any comment by him since the LHC announcement of its measurement last year.

That seems fast...

'Nearby' supermassive black hole rotates at close to the speed of light | Science | guardian.co.uk

Phil Plait at Slate gives a bit more detail:

As the material swirls around the black hole, it emits X-rays at a very specific energy—think of it as a color. But as it orbits that color gets smeared out due to the Doppler effect. The amount of smearing indicates how fast the material is moving, and that in turn can tell astronomers how fast the black hole is spinning. This can be complicated by the presence of dense clouds of material farther out from the black hole that absorb X-rays and mess up our observations. The new data from NuSTAR allowed astronomers to show that the smearing seen is definitely due to rotation and not obscuration, unambiguously revealing the black hole's tremendous spin: just a hair below the speed of light!

Most black holes spin far slower than that, so something ramped this hole’s spin way up. One possibility, as I mentioned above, is material falling in over time. Another is that it ate one or more other black holes, which is creepy but possible. Galaxies collide, and when they do their central black holes can merge, growing larger. If the geometry is just right, this can create a single black hole with more spin. Due this a few times, and you can spin one up to fantastic speeds.

I’ll note that NGC 1365 is a massive galaxy, easily twice as large as the Milky Way (an we’re one of the biggest galaxies in the Universe). That’s exactly what you’d expect from a galaxy that’s spent a lifetime eating other ones. Cosmic cannibals grow fat when the hunting’s good.

The movie finance business still hard to understand

DreamWorks Animation takes $87 million write-down on 'Rise of the Guardians' - latimes.com

I promise I'll stop talking about movies soon, but this report shows (apparently) that a $145 million movie that takes in $300 million globally can still be said to have lost $87 million.

And this at a time when I thought digital projection was meant to make a substantial saving by studios not having to get film prints made and distributed around cinemas.  Also, I thought with kids films there was often substantial profit from DVD releases, but would this Christmas movie even be released yet? The movie is well suited for an Easter release.

Very odd. 

No rehabilitation needed

Japan’s prisons: Eastern porridge | The Economist

A somewhat interesting look here at how Japanese prisons operate.  (Watch the video too.  The interior of the prison looks pretty decent, but no reading?  Wow.)

Spielberg considered (again)

Oscars 2013 and Spielberg: The storyteller is part of our cultural DNA - CSMonitor.com

A reasonable enough, lengthy article here on Spielberg's career and development as a director.

But to see how nutty some of the reaction against him is now, read the handful of comments that follow it.

One thing that bothers me - last time I checked, a couple of weeks ago, Spielberg has not made a decision on his next movie. 

Irony, humour, etc

Well, at the First Things blog of all places, there's a decent post complaining about the attempts at humour at the Oscars show last night.  It goes on to note that the overuse of irony is actually the death of humour:

Irony, and its near-cousin sarcasm, is the lingua franca of popular culture. The more deeply we tread into this part of our national consciousness, the more we realize the breathtaking vanity of its values. Irony is, in the end, self-referential, so once it becomes self-self-referential, it has created a hall of mirrors that ultimately implodes into meaningless parodies of itself that are, well, humorless even to those toward whom the jokes were originally aimed.

When everything is ironic, irony ceases to be ironic. It lapses into mere meanness, leaving an incredibly bitter aftertaste. Indeed, the life-root of bullying just may be irony. What struck me last night was the utter brutality of much of the attempts at humor. The writers were equal-opportunity offenders, but this is, to some extent, what we find in a worldview where nothing is worth defending or treating as precious. I have a vague recollection that Henri Bergson once said that humor is the first step toward acceptance; I wonder if the corollary is true: if everything is acceptable, is there anything that can be humorous? Do rules, in some rudimentary way, actually generate humor? If comedy is always transgressive and the world (in the interest of tolerance) no longer allows transgression, then have we lost the ability to laugh? Based on the evidence of last night’s show, I have to wonder.

Actually, I think I stop understanding the argument by the last two sentences, but I was sort of with it up to then...

Not everyone liked Argo

Argo **** yourself: Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage movie is the worst. - Slate Magazine

Am I to take it that there is a lot of swearing in this film? 

Doesn't seem right...

Want to emigrate to Australia? Be warned – it's not 'hot Britain' | Rae Earl | Comment is free | The Guardian

You get some pretty wacky takes on Australia from British migrants, but this one seems to describe a place that is barely recognisable as being drawn from reality. 

Good background on a harmful bug

Understanding the recent listeria-linked cheese recall