I don't know...

Can scientists know that they do not know?

Imagine you knew everything about the current universe – the state of every single
particle – and all the laws governing the universe's evolution. Endowed
with such knowledge, you could then predict the future, right? French
mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace thought so.

Not so, according to an analysis by SFI Professor David Wolpert – not even for the non-chaotic, non-quantum-mechanical universe that Laplace assumed.

The explanation in the article is not at all clear, but it seems an interesting argument worth following up.

UPDATE:   here's a short .pdf report from Nature in 2008 on Wolpert's idea.     

Are people comfortable with this?

Australia spied on Indonesia talks with US law firm in 2013 | World news | theguardian.com

Look, I've always assumed that mobile telephone systems were not super secure, even when they moved from analogue to digital.

So I've always assumed that politicians who talked about sensitive stuff on their mobile phones were being careless.

But even so, I am surprised at the purpose for which intelligence is being used by Australia and the US, according to the Snowden leaks. This, for example:

Australia listened in on the communications of an unnamed American
law firm which was representing Indonesia in the discussions and passed
the information to the National Security Agency, according to a document
obtained by the New York Times.

It is unclear what the discussions were about - but two trade disputes
around that time were about the importation of clove cigarettes and
shrimp, says the paper.

A monthly bulletin from the NSA’s liaison office in Canberra said the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) was monitoring the talks and offered to share any information with the US. It offered up that “information covered by attorney-client privilege may be included”.

I am also a bit puzzled that the issue is getting a bit of a soft run in the media here.

I mean, the bugging of the East Timor government operations when commercial matters were underway seems to be half forgotten by the public already.

Now evidence of bugging legal advice on the vital issue of clove cigarettes and shrimp?

I expected that certain industries might carry on their own intelligence gathering, but to have governments so fully involved in matters of commercial benefit - this seems to me to be something the public should be talking about, but it isn't. 

UPDATE:   an article in the Christian Science Monitor accuses the NYT of over dramatising the story, and points out that in the fact the US could have told Australia to not provide them with the advice the US lawyers were giving.

But but but:   what the article doesn't address is whether anyone should be surprised or question that Australia was collecting intelligence on Indonesia trade talks and offering to hand that to the US. 

The article says that the NYT times story, if stripped of  "spin, drama and adjectives" is this:

A 2013 memo leaked by Edward Snowden shows that Australia's version of the NSA, while engaged in electronic surveillance of an Indonesian trade delegation, came across communications between the Indonesian officials and a US law firm the country had hired for help with trade talks.  

Isn't that controversial enough??

Gut bacteria and milk

How Breast Milk Engineers a Baby’s Gut (and Gut Microbes) 

It seems quite a complicated story that is being sorted out - how mother's milk both encourages some of the right bacteria for the gut, and inhibits others.  In fact, it appears it passes on microbes within the milk itself, too:

And, of course, their study highlights yet another benefit to
breastfeeding. It’s unique in isolating the effect of a single (major)
ingredient of milk, but Kaetzel notes that breastfed infants also get a
wide spectrum of other helpful substances.

For example, it contains its own microbes. Lisa Funkhouser and Seth Bordenstein have speculated that the lymphatic system conveys bacteria from a mother’s guts into her mammary glands, where they can be taken up by suckling infants.

If pups that don’t get SIgA from their mothers have weird bacteria in
their lymph nodes, could they then pass on different microbes to their own offspring,
when the time comes for them to produce milk? “There could be some
really exciting transgenerational consequences from not ingesting sIgA
in mother’s milk,” says Hinde.

Typical

Climate sceptic to head Abbott review into renewable energy target

The Abbott government has launched a formal review of Australia's 20 per
cent renewable energy target, choosing senior business figure Dick
Warburton – who has been sceptical about mainstream climate change
science in the past – to head it.

More pathetically poor judgement from this lousy PM.

More bodily functions

The Lowy Institute blog notes a Youtube video that is part of a UNICEF campaign to encourage the good people of India not to do their business outdoors.  "Poo2Loo" is the catchy theme.

I see that there is in fact an entire Youtube channel devoted to this campaign.  Amongst a dozen or so videos, it features one with a musician  (presumably well known in India?) who has signed "the pledge against Open Defecation".  (Yes, they put in the capital letters there, not me.)

Sadly, although these videos appear relatively new, they don't have high view numbers yet. 

Here, I'll do my bit - this is a short one involving an apparently common occurrence in Indian parks:




It's all a bit odd, in that the campaign seems to suggest that it is a matter of personal responsibility as to where they go; whereas I thought it was mainly a matter of poor people not having toilets to go to in the first place.

In any event, they make the country sound like such an enticing place for the Western tourist.

Out of the way, stupid

I see that Judith Sloan, whose living now seems to comprise of:

a.  putting a veneer of polite reason on her right wing economic and political views when writing in the Australian and appearing on ABC TV, while

b. mouthing off at a blog that everyone who disagrees with her is pretty much a socialist idiot

wrote over the weekend in reference to Christine Lagarde (head of the IMF):

Honestly.  Surely the times of insisting that the IMF top job goes to some European socialist should end? 

Now I don't follow European politics closely, but as far as I can tell, Lagarde, a former conservative politician, is a socialist in Sloan's eyes because she takes climate change, and its future effects on economies, seriously. 

Yet she faced criticism in The Guardian for doing things of which one would think Sloan would approve:

It is, indeed, astonishing that one the major architects of the punitive and ineffective bailouts in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, should now found herself at the helm of the IMF. The European Union has proved incapable of designing a proper anti-crisis policy for the eurozone. Both the US administration and the IMF had to intervene to prompt a Franco-German led eurozone to take steps to prevent an impending catastrophe. In May 2010, the EU eventually launched the €700bn Financial Stability Mechanism. Not only did the funds prove insufficient to reach their stabilising objective, but a lack of leadership was also blatantly exposed. While Germany urged more austerity measures on Greece, Ireland and Portugal, Christine Lagarde warned Greece that it was at risk of default if "it didn't do more to bring its public finances into order". No doubt that the quasi-bankrupt Greek government will have found it helpful.

First, Lagarde sided with the European Central Bank in opposing any form of restructuring of the Greek debt. Then, she softened her stance and agreed to a new bailout along the same austerity lines that made the previous bailout fail. In true neoliberal fashion, the candidate to the IMF directorship supported the idea that Greece should privatise state assets, to be sold to Chinese buyers. These failed policies have inflicted nothing but unnecessary suffering on European peoples, and have largely contributed to boosting a resurgent far right across Europe. Lagarde was one of their main instigators.

 And I also note it was the Socialists in France who got her into a bit of legal trouble regarding a claimed financial scandal. 

Funny old socialist she is, then.

But apart from Lagarde believing in that well known socialist conspiracy, climate change;  Sloan probably finds outrageously outrageous Lagarde's recent comments on inequality:

“Business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum should remember that in far too many countries the benefits of growth are being enjoyed by far too few people. This is not a recipe for stability and sustainability,” she told the Financial Times. 

We'll have to see what other things come from Sloan World in the next few months.

Flatulence noted

As Jason's twitter account might be the only one in the world that pretty regularly mentions this blog, it's time for another bit of cross referencing.  It was via his re-tweet that I learnt about the amazing Edo scroll of a Japanese fart battle.   Not exactly the Bayeux tapestry, but funnier.

Harmless recreational drug news

James Delingpole, the science commentator who freely admits knowing nothing about science, wrote about the recreational use of drugs, particularly cocaine, last Christmas:

It makes people happy; by and large it doesn’t do anyone any serious physical or mental harm.

(To be fair, as much he doesn't deserve it, he did also list the negatives of cocaine snorting too - but they had nothing to do with health, apart from noting that it "ruined sex".)

Recent news from the US:

In the 24 hours after using cocaine, a young adult's risk of a stroke increases almost sevenfold, according to a new study.

The risk for stroke associated with cocaine use is much higher than with other stroke risk factors, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking, said the researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

"Cocaine is not only addictive, but it can also lead to disability or death from stroke," said lead researcher Yu-Ching Cheng, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

And yes, I am aware that 7 times a small number is still a small number, but it's not insignificant:

It is estimated that about 13,000 Americans aged 15 to 44 suffer a stroke each year, Cheng said.  "Based on the data in our study, we estimated that about 300 young stroke cases are associated with acute cocaine use each year, but the estimate may vary depending on the prevalence of cocaine use in different sub-populations," she said....

 "Cocaine comes up over and over as being implicated in stroke in people of all ages," said Dr. Richard Libman, vice chairman of neurology at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

The peculiar matter of decreasing psi

Looking back at parapsychology over my lifetime, in the late 60's and the whole of the 70's there was  a pretty popular idea that scientific proof of things such as ESP or other psi powers would be soon established, and likely understood as a part of nature that had just not been properly recognised before.  (And/or, a part of human evolutionary progress.)  Science fiction by Larry Niven, and to a degree, Arthur C Clarke, incorporated this theme, as did some TV shows.  And I doubt that non fiction books on the paranormal have ever sold as well as they did in the 1970's, and perhaps into the early 80's. 

In reality, though, the investigation of psi seemed to progress in haphazard fashion, with promising early experiments and studies fizzling out.   Ganzfeld experiments for ESP testing seemed to be finally be a potential repeatable demonstration of ESP, but there is now doubt about that.

Given the slipperiness of the evidence in the field, I have often wondered whether anyone had written science fiction in which alien or supernatural operatives actively interfered with parapsychology research in order to keep humans in the dark about the true nature of reality.  I suspect its already been done (you could say it's been done for UFO's with the Men in Black.)

But I didn't realise until this weekend when I read this essay "The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi"that in fact there had been a a lot of pondering within parapsychological circles over the last couple of decades about the mysterious way psi has often seemed to dissipate after early successes.

The .pdf article at the link, which appeared in the Journal of Parapsychology ten years ago (I found it via comments at Michael Prescott's blog) is a good read.   The author (James Kennedy, who I had not heard of before) did some work in parapsychology himself, and some autobiographical detail appears in this other paper.

He fully acknowledges that many people will go to the obvious explanation - that declining positive results are simply because of of improved experimental rigour - but notes (if briefly) that there are circumstances where this cannot really explain it.  This example seems odd:

Targ described another case:
[W]e did a series of trials some time ago where we had nine successes in a row forecasting silver futures changes, and then I triedto replicate that . . . and got eight out of nine hits. . . . I then sought for replication to take advantage of this mechanical psi machine we had created and I got eight out of nine failures. That has really stopped my personal psi investigation for a couple of years while I have tried to meditate on what the problem is here.  (Targ, Braud, Stanford, Schlitz, & Honorton, 1991, pp. 76–77)

Kennedy seems to be sympathetic to the view that something very personal goes on with psi, and it sounds as if believes in some type of external higher consciousness being involved.

While this may sound too "spiritual" for hard nosed skeptics to take him seriously, he nonetheless seems to write well on the topic, and to be an interesting character. There are links to many of his papers here.  

Modern Japanese ghosts

 Ghosts of the Tsunami 
The link is to a lengthy essay in the London Review of Books about the Japanese experience of ghosts and possession in the aftermath of the tsunami.

It gives a pretty good description of the Japanese attitude towards religion and spiritual beliefs, I think, and I had never read before about how they came to the fore in some people after the disaster.

Made me happy

Last weekend, I caught a bit of Rage on Saturday morning, and once again was surprised that so much effort goes into making good quality video clips to go with songs that are today's pop music. 

As I think I have written here before, it really feels as if  there should be an audience for music video clip shows again, but I assume it's the audience fragmentation of the music market that prevents this.  A bit sad in a way - I remember it as sort of fun watching such shows with other people when they were big in the 1980's.  (Not Countdown though - it was, of course,  routinely cringeworthy.) 

Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the pleasing video for a song that I would otherwise just consider a bit of an annoying earworm after a while:

Made me laugh

(Found on Boing Boing.)

Oh, diddums

Ha!  [Some of] the freeloading libertarians of Catallaxy threads, who believe in property rights and are pretty big on laws enforcement (but only if it doesn't stop them doing what they like - see their attitude to speeding tickets and random breath testing) are a bit upset that George Brandis is indicating a crack down on illegal downloading of TV and media.

They are the same people who want to put physical retail out of business by only buying on line from overseas.

What a bunch of selfish gits who want expensive stuff to be made for them for free, or next to nothing.

Silkworms to the rescue

Scientists create powerful flu vaccines from silkworm DNA

Researchers said they have developed a new method of creating large
amounts of flu vaccine by using the genetic code of silkworms.

They said the new procedure is quicker and less costly than conventional methods.

The major component of flu vaccines is a special protein that exists on the surface of flu viruses.

Led by Kuniaki Nerome, director of a biological resources center in Nago, the team of researchers synthesized DNA that helps enable the protein based on the genetic information of a flu virus. The scientists then introduced the synthesized DNA into the genetic code of
silkworms.

After the silkworms turned into chrysalides, Nerome and his colleagues crushed the insect pupae and purified the resulting powder. They then found the special proteins with exceptional high purity on the surface of the powder particles.

It's surprising that anyone would come up with this idea for silkworms, isn't it?

And the Award this year for outstanding hypocrisy goes to....

Former Howard minister Nick Minchin to replace former Labor premier Steve Bracks as Consul General to New York Oddly, this was mentioned by Michelle Grattan and Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning without either of them remarking on the breathtaking hypocrisy of this act by a government that was indicating it was sick of these "jobs for the boys" appointments. If I recall correctly, even some of the numbskulls on Catallaxy threads were saying when Bracks was sacked that it would be a bad look to put Minchin in his place. What an annoying government.