Worker's paradise

Shopping in Paris: Worker protections are good for employees, bad for business.

Wow.  Everyone knows the French are not like America when it comes to welfare (to put it mildly), but I was very surprised at the extent of worker's benefits as explained in this fascinating article by an American who lives in Paris.

It's like a small government advocate's nightmare.   

Space eye

I'll do a reverse Jason Soon (he quite often seems to get his tweeted material from here), and note that he has linked to a good article in the New York Times talking about health problems astronauts suffer in zero G, particularly relating to their eyes (about which I didn't know much before.)

Quantum strangeness: a reminder

It doesn't hurt to remind oneself every now and then about quantum strangeness, and I quite like the way this article in Aeon (which seems a pretty good on line magazine, incidentally) explains it. 

Here's the key part:

Here’s the basic problem. While the mathematics of quantum theory works very well in telling us what to expect at the end of an experiment, it seems peculiarly conceptually confusing when we try to understand what was happening during the experiment. To calculate what outcomes we might expect when we fire protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider, we need to analyse what – at first sight – look like many different stories. The same final set of particles detected after a collision might have been generated by lots of different possible sequences of energy exchanges involving lots of different possible collections of particles. We can’t tell which particles were involved from the final set of detected particles.

Now, if the trouble was only that we have a list of possible ways that things could have gone in a given experiment and we can’t tell which way they actually went just by looking at the results, that wouldn’t be so puzzling. If you find some flowers at your front door and you’re not sure which of your friends left them there, you don’t start worrying that there are inconsistencies in your understanding of physical reality. You just reason that, of all the people who could have brought them, one of them presumably did. You don’t have a logical or conceptual problem, just a patchy record of events.

Quantum theory isn’t like this, as far as we presently understand it. We don’t get a list of possible explanations for what happened, of which one (although we don’t know which) must be the correct one. We get a mathematical recipe that tells us to combine, in an elegant but conceptually mysterious way, numbers attached to each possible explanation. Then we use the result of this calculation to work out the likelihood of any given final result. But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other. This means that the net chance of an outcome arising from several possible stories can be more or less than the sum of the chances associated with each.

To get a sense of the conceptual mystery we face here, imagine you have three friends, John, Mary and Jo, who absolutely never talk to each other or interact in any other way. If any one of them is in town, there’s a one-in-four chance that this person will bring you flowers on any given day. (They’re generous and affectionate friends. They’re also entirely random and spontaneous – nothing about the particular choice of day affects the chance they might bring you flowers.) But if John and Mary are both in town, you know there’s no chance you’ll get any flowers that day – even though they never interact, so neither of them should have any idea whether the other one is around. And if Mary and Jo are both in town, you’ll certainly get exactly one bunch of flowers – again, even though Mary and Jo never interact either, and you’d have thought that if they’re acting independently, your chance of getting any flowers is a bit less than a half, while once in a while you should get two bunches.

If you think this doesn’t make any sense, that there has to be something missing from this flower delivery fable, well, that’s how many thoughtful physicists feel about quantum theory and our understanding of nature. Pretty precisely analogous things happen in quantum experiments.

You should read the whole thing...

Dumb politics, again...

Nothing illustrates the Republican culture war going off the rails better than their obsession with the contraceptive mandate part of "Obamacare".

Mike Huckabee made a spectacle of himself and tried to pretend it was all the media's fault; then Sean Hannity turned up defending the stance with sarcasm, and complaining about why "the government" should pay for birth control when it was so cheap at Walmart.

As Amanda Marcotte notes (and I have seen this repeated endlessly at a certain Tea Party lite blog in Australia), the claim that it is all about the government paying for it is simply not true:

Hannity's boo-boo here was the result of a larger lie, perpetuated by Mike Huckabee and the folks at Fox News and other right wing media outlets: That the contraception mandate is about the "government" or "Uncle Sugar" buying women's birth control. In reality, the contraception mandate is closer to a consumer protection law. It's really part of a larger program in the Affordable Care Act to set minimum standards about what your insurance plan must cover. It's really no different than a law requiring a car to have four wheels and two headlights to be considered a street legal vehicle. It's telling that Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Bill O'Reilly, and company feel the need to simply lie about this and claim that there's some kind of taxpayer program directly providing free birth control to women (ironically, they largely ignore actual, long-standing, politically popular programs that do this), because objecting to the real program—women buy insurance, that insurance covers contraception—sounds an awful lot like you are unduly obsessed with what other people get up to in bed.

A similar contraceptive mandate had been in place in many States for years; often being brought in under Republican leadership.

It is a sign of their appalling lack of political common sense that the Republicans now want to make to make it a big issue.

A Krugman particularly worth reading

Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression, AFF Edition - NYTimes.com

Deserves a documentary

Strange events lead Ind. family to resort to exorcism

Well, you don't often hear of an alleged demonic possession case involving levitation, walking backwards up walls, horse flies in the house, and so on.  And with independent witnesses to at least some of the key events.

This sounds like it would be well worth an hour long documentary to get a better idea of what was going on.

Article title says it all

Reviving Wind Turbine Syndrome is just what you'd expect from a PM without a Science Minister

John Quiggin rips into this too.

Weighty issues

For the first time ever, the slow upwards creep of weight has inspired me to try actual dieting. The very popular (in England in particular, it seems) 5:2 diet will be given a go, and today was the first "fast" day.

To keep within the 600cal limit for such a day does take a fair bit of planning and calculating, but I seem to have done quite OK in terms of volume of food and hunger. The old diet stand bys do help - low fat cottage cheese (I like it anyway), puffed rice cakes (about half the calories of bread), beans, salad and low fat salad dressing. For what it's worth, here's how they assembled today for my 600cal menu:

 Breakfast - 2 rice cakes topped with a mashed up boiled egg and a small tomato. (I mean small: one of those mini roma tomato ones.) Coffee (using almond milk instead of normal milk) and a stevia based sweetener.

Lunch - 2 rice cakes with 100g cottage cheese, small tomato. (OK, so I like tomato when dieting.) A can of Pepsi Max.

Dinner - salad with small (95g) can of tuna in brine, 75 g of 4 bean mix, 50 g of lettuce (that was all that was left - I could've gone to double that and been OK), 100 g of celery, a couple of the mini roma tomatoes. 20ml of low fat dressing. A cup of coffee (decaf this time) as in the morning.

I've done the calculations and think this came in at 590 cal. I'm not exactly feeling full; nor am I feeling particularly hungry. It is meant to be a fasting day, after all, but as far as fasts go, that was a pretty satisfactory one. All very simple, obviously.

Normal food tomorrow. Calculating calories again Thursday. This could well provide a whole new bunch of material with which to bore readers!

Warm up north

The Alaskan Winter That Never Was? – Greg Laden's Blog

Greg Laden has a good post up noting how extraordinarily warm the winter has been in Alaska, as the cold polar air has by passed it on the way to the rest of mainland America.   Remarkable.

The trouble is, "skeptics" only believe Roy Spencer's chart

RealClimate: Global temperature 2013

Real Climate notes at the link above:

The global temperature data for 2013 are now published. 2010 and 2005
remain the warmest years since records began in the 19th Century. 1998
ranks third in two records, and in the analysis of Cowtan & Way,
which interpolates the data-poor region in the Arctic with a better
method, 2013 is warmer than 1998 (even though 1998 was a record El Nino
year, and 2013 was neutral)....

In all four data series of the global near-surface air temperature, the linear trend even from the extreme El Niño year 1998 is positive, i.e. shows continued warming, despite the choice of a warm outlier as the initial year.

In all four data series of the global near-surface air temperature, 2010 was the warmest year on record, followed by 2005.

 

The year 1998 is, at best, rank 3 – in the currently best data set of Cowtan & Way, 1998 is actually only ranked 7th. Even 2013 is – without El Niño – warmer there than 1998.

 
The German news site Spiegel Online presents these facts under the headline Warming of the air paused for 16 years (my translation). The headline of the NASA news release, NASA Finds 2013 Sustained Long-Term Climate Warming trend, is thus completely turned on its head.This will not surprise anyone who has followed climate reporting of Der Spiegel in recent years. To the contrary – colleagues express their surprise publicly when a sensible article on the subject appears there. For years, Der Spiegel has acted as a gateway for dubious “climate skeptics” claims into the German media whilst trying to discredit top climate scientists (we’ve covered at least one example here).

As I say at the title to the post, the problem with this is that "skeptics" still cling to Roy Spencer's satellite temperature chart as "proving" that 1998 was the hottest year ever.

Until Spencer's figures show a peak above 1998, (likely in the next El Nino), they will not change their belief.

To Canberra and back, Part 3

So by late morning we were heading out of Coonabarabran and down the Newell to Gilgandra and onto the outskirts of Dubbo.   (Lunch at Subway, where the young girl microwaved the steak pieces before putting them on the roll and then toasting it with the cheese on top.  In my local Brisbane one, they don't do that - just put the cheese on top and toast it.   Well done, Dubbo Subway.)

Continue onto Parkes, where we did a right left turn out towards Orange and the tiny town of Manildra, where we turned south to Canberra.  See the Bing map:

  

According to Bing it's 615 km and 6 hours 44 min driving, but it sure seems longer than that.  The countryside has some geography to it, but not a lot.   The driving is easy enough, but rolling hillsides stretching off into the distance for scores of kilometres do get a bit same-y.  (This is particularly true of the stretch from Cowra south to Canberra.)   

It was also tricky knowing exactly the right route out of Parkes, especially as I had missed printing out the Google map for that section.We worked it out eventually, but a proper touring map would have helped.

The real reason for taking this slightly indirect route to Canberra was to drop in on the Parkes radio telescope.   It has a nice new-ish visitor centre, paid for from money made from the movie The Dish (which I have never fully seen, seeing it got luke warm reviews.)  It's a very photogenic piece of science kit:

Here's another photo showing an old bit off the telescope, which everyone must assume looks like a mock lunar lander:

But here's the explanation as to what it really is (click to enlarge and you should be able to read it):

The telescope was built in 1961, but it has been upgraded many times.  The CSIRO explains how actively it is still used:

The telescope operates twenty four hours per day, through rain and cloud. About 85 per cent of all time each year is scheduled for observing. Less than five per cent of that is lost because of high winds or equipment problems. Most of the rest of the time each year is used for maintenance and testing. Around 300 researchers use the telescope each year, and more than 40 per cent of these users are from overseas.

The moving part of the dish is not fixed to the top of the tower but just sits on it. Because the large surface catches the wind like a sail, the telescope must be 'stowed' (pointed directly up) when the wind exceeds 35 km an hour.

There is a folder in the visitor centre explaining what listening programs are currently underway.  I noted that they are still listening to pulsars, but I don't think the reason why was really explained.  (I also wondered how often they continuously listen to any individual pulsar.  If, as I suspect, it is only a matter of minutes, not hours, one hopes they haven't ever missed out on one suddenly doing the equivalent of chiming at midnight - or playing Jingle Bells.) 

We did see the dish rotating around too - yay.  See - it was pointing in a different direction when we first arrived:

So there you go.  The visitor centre does the best it can, perhaps, on a kinda difficult area of astronomy to explain quickly to the public or the kiddies.   And another odd thing about the place - they have lots of warning signs about snakes being around the gardens and lawns as you walk out of the building.  I assume they are a particular problem there, although given it's pretty much in the middle of ordinary farming land, it's hard to see why.



From there it was out to buy some roadside cherries (from "down the road" at Young) - they were delicious when we ate them later in Canberra.  And then out through the never ending, rolling brown hills that surround Canberra for a long way out.

(We passed through Cowra, but only stopped for petrol.  It looks a nice enough town too.)

I think we got into Canberra around 7.30 or 8 pm.  More about that in Part 4.

Right wing fruit loopery of the highest order - courtesy of Catallaxy and Sinclair Davidson

Only a few days ago, I had several thousand visitors from Mark Steyn's blog because I made the simple claim that climate change denialists seem too silly to know when they are losing a legal case. 

(Why did Steyn's blog bother linking to me, I wonder...)

Now, over at Catallaxy, Steven "why oh why am I the only economist in the world to understand Say's Law" Kates has a post up re-quoting Steyn's latest whine about the American legal system, and swallows whole heartedly Steyn's approach that it's a crucial matter of free speech that he be allowed to defame a climate scientist.  (I believe I paraphrase only slightly.)

Anyhow, that's not the dangerously nutty part.  It's this comment from fruitiest of Catallaxy fruitloops, Mk50, following the post:

Simply put, the alternatives in the USA to facing up to the leftists are becoming binary. Either you do not do it, or you literally kill them from ambush.

Their legal system is broken and skewed to ‘weaponise’ one side of the political spectrum (notice I did not say ‘Justice’ System). Once that becomes obvious to all, then the only recourse is to take responsibility back from the state into private hands. Steyn would have been better off in terms of money, convenience and even stress if he had shot Mann from a distance than to go through the ghastly and incredibly expensive legal idiocy he is currently experiencing. He would also have a very high chance of getting away with it, given his intelligence. Probably 99% plus.

This character - an ex Australian military gun lover who grandiosely calls himself an "Imperialist" (and who was caught red handed plagiarising great swathes of a guest post or two Sinclair Davidson published at the blog) -  has expressed fantasies before about the armed Right wing "citizen militias" having to have a second American revolution because of the Obama presidency.  I can't remember what sparked this last time - it could have been Obama merely talking up tighter gun control after the school shooting, or it might have been some other issue the Tea Party obsesses over.

But surely this takes the cake.   Because a journalist is being sued by a climate scientist for defamation, and said journalist has been losing important procedural steps in the case, this Australian character is telling his mates in the US that it's becoming clear that the only answer is to shoot climate scientists!  (Well, OK, actually "leftists" - that makes his counsel worse rather than better.)

Hey, Sinclair Davidson - tell me how else to interpret this comment being hosted at your blog?  You seem pretty keen on Mk50's contributions to the blog - he only had one of his trite and stupidly exaggerating guest posts published there last week.  (And as far as I know you've never removed his plagiarised content in the previous posts.) 

Hey, Andrew Bolt, seeing you're the publicist in chief of this Right wing blog, tell me if you approve of MK50's musings?   Is there some wafer thin grounds on which you don't see it as an endorsement of generic violence against "leftists" in the US?

And anyone else - can you explain why Sinclair Davidson is not pilloried across our country for hosting a right wing nut job who appears to endorse political violence in the US on the slightest of pretexts?  Why instead does he turn up on the ABC several times a year?

That is one of the biggest mysteries for me...

To Canberra and back Part 2 - Coonabarabran

Coonabarabran is the closest town to what now appears to be called the Australian Astronomical Observatory at Siding Spring.  I also see that it is run by Australian Department of Industry (?), which is a bit of a worry given that the Abbott government's anti-science minions are scrapping around looking for cost cutting exercises.

The 30 odd km drive up to the observatory from town is very pleasant, but the whole area suffered a major bush fire a year ago.  Here's one business that survived, apparently, although there is a distinct lack of the product on display:

If you click to enlarge, you can see the burnt trees on the hills in the distance.  There is a vast area that looks like that.

On upwards to the observatory:

It was unharmed in the fire, although some staff accommodation was burnt.  The fire clearly came right up close to it, though, when you see some of the photos below taken from the base of the main observatory building.

I have been here once before, around 1990 or 1991 I think, and to be honest, I don't think the visitor centre has really changed at all.

It could well do with a revamp, although I must say that one of the simplest things, a large photographic negative of an immensely packed star field in the Milky Way with which you had to use a magnifying glass to see the thousands of stars, impressed them quite a bit.  

The viewing level inside the dome allows for some pretty good shots of the telescope itself:

 
But even if you have little interest in what they do there, the view from the base over the observatory over the Warrumbungles National Park is pretty good.  (If you don't like the scroll effect, just click on it for the whole, stitched panorama):

Notice how the burnt trees are often re-growing leaves along all of their trunks?  It's an odd look.

Here's a simpler shot, which only looks good if you click on it.

So, the place is well worth visiting, and the National Park looks as if it would be good too, but perhaps not in the middle of summer, and not this trip.

By about 11.30 we were back on the the road to Parkes, and the next science-y installment.

To Canberra and back - Part1

So, the plan this year was to drive down to Canberra during the Christmas - New Year break.  I haven't driving along the inland Newell highway for more than 20 years, but I used to like the drive through some vast open country.  Could do with more geography along parts of it, but no route is perfect.

I used Google maps for directions, which take you through Warwick:

and I've just realised now that if you use Bing maps (or Yahoo maps - neither of these I realised existed til this morning) they take you via Toowoomba, and shows the distance as 692.6 km instead of 699km.  Who makes these decisions, and why did Google Maps make me travel 6.4 km extra?   I am also not so keen on how you have to zoom in very close on the Google Map before you can see the names of all the towns you are going to be travelling through.   The Bing version looks better in that regard.

(And by the way, I have never used GPS and still am fond of old folding paper maps.  This is the first trip where I have used on line maps, and it did prove a bit problematic at one point.)




Anyhow, here's the roughly equivalent Bing map:

So, we left Brisbane on Boxing Day at 9.30, and headed out through Warwick and out through Inglewood to the border town of Goondiwindi.

Inglewood is bigger than I remembered, and I was vaguely aware from farmer's markets in Brisbane that they grow olives out that way.  In fact, I was very surprised at the huge size of one particular olive orchard on your left as you drive west.   It seems to go on forever, and I see from a tourist guide that they are indeed taking olive cultivation very, very seriously:

 Inglewood intends to be the Olive Capital of Australia with some 350,000 olive trees planted; a major olive oil processing plant has been established in Inglewood and this is expected to become the largest in the Southern Hemisphere; with a unique olive themed centre, featuring many olive products and olive businesses and an annual Olive Festival in the olive harvest season, between March and May.

Well, I think we'll have to go back there during olive festival.

The drive from Inglewood to Goondiwindi is the start of the long, flat and pretty dull stretches on the Newell.  But the traffic was light, and we were soon enough at the border town, which now (like most towns along the Newell now) has a McDonald's.  A recurring theme of this trip was going to the golden arches to at least get coffee for me and my wife.  The Goondiwindi staff seemed particularly glum, for some reason.  In fact, rural McDonald's staff never seemed very happy to me this trip.  Perhaps because they were working during the holidays?

Off  down the road, finally heading south, through Moree (a town with lots of shuttered shopfronts, which is usually a sign of an unhappy local aboriginal population in New South Wales country towns.)  Then down to Narrabri.

It was this stretch that I first learnt the fun of cruise control.  Yes, my Toyota Camry has really only ever done short, coastal holiday trips before this, and I had never bothered to learn how to turn on cruise control.  With my wife reading out instructions, I soon learnt how good it can be on long flat stretches, and for this purpose, the Newell is perfect.  I wonder if it is the most cruise control friendly highway in Australia.

I like the way you can learn that the car in front of you is also using it, as you can maintain pretty exact separation for tens of kilometres if you are lucky. 

At Narrabri, a fairly non-descript town, I think we stopped again at a McD for coffee, because my notes indicate the staff were again glum.

The drive from there to Coonabarabran is through a lot of forest reserve, and you do get a bit of up and down.  Scores of dead 'roos too - in some stretches, it seemed lucky to go 200 m without seeing one.

Finally (it is easily an 8 hour trip, with breaks) it was into Coonabarabran.  This is the nicest town on the Newell so far.   And the reason we are staying there (apart from it being about the comfortable limit for one day's driving) is  this:

Well, not really.  That's the remarkably authentic 70's era tiling in the shower in the motel we stayed in.

(And before I continue, for those interested in the fast food details of the Newell Highway towns, Coonabarabran does not feature a McDonald's, but does have Dominos pizza and very large Subway.)

No, the best reason for going to Coonabarabran is because it's the "astronomy capital of Australia."

More on that in Part 2.

Hawking: apparently, no event horizons?

In April last year, I pointed readers to a Nature story about some new confusion regarding the physics of black holes.   Specifically, it's to do with the nature of the event horizon, and whether they have a "firewall" of searing energy.

Now Stephen Hawking has weighed in, questioning whether black holes have an event horizon at all which can create a "firewall".  It's all a tad complicated to summarise, so here are some relevant extracts:

Quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause space-time to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist.

In place of the event horizon, Hawking invokes an “apparent horizon”, a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended. In general relativity, for an unchanging black hole, these two horizons are identical, because light trying to escape from inside a black hole can reach only as far as the event horizon and will be held there, as though stuck on a treadmill. However, the two horizons can, in principle, be distinguished. If more matter gets swallowed by the black hole, its event horizon will swell and grow larger than the apparent horizon.

Conversely, in the 1970s, Hawking also showed that black holes can slowly shrink, spewing out 'Hawking radiation'. In that case, the event horizon would, in theory, become smaller than the apparent horizon. Hawking’s new suggestion is that the apparent horizon is the real boundary. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” Hawking writes.

“The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable,” says Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who collaborated with Hawking in the 1970s. “You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon. But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”

 Don Page then goes on to express some reservations that Hawking's idea really helps, but you can go read that yourself.  As for what happens to information inside a black hole:

If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter would be only temporarily held behind the apparent horizon, which would gradually move inward owing to the pull of the black hole, but would never quite crunch down to the centre. Information about this matter would not destroyed, but would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form, making it almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were.

 As I wrote last April, it's really remarkable that there is so much uncertainty about the nature of objects which are really important in cosmological and other contexts.