For once, I prefer The Australian over Fairfax...

Goodness me.   Newspoll has Labor at 54% TPP over the Coalition.  That's quite a welcome corrective to the gushing coverage over the new Fairfax poll saying Abbott has become vastly more popular, and giving a "only just ahead" TPP of 51% to Labor.

The best thing about the poll is the drop in the primary vote for the Coalition:  down from 45.6 at the election to 38% now.  Labor's primary is also showing a bit of a jump from the figure its been stuck on for some time (up to 36 from 34%.)  

Other welcome poll news this week:  the unpopularity of the Coalition's deregulation of Uni fees.  As I expected, this seems to be unpopular widely, probably because not just uni students don't like the idea, but nor do their parents.

Sensitive about their beards...

Another gob smacking story of life in Saudi Arabia from Gulf News:

A Saudi activist who has been reportedly arrested for a tweet she posted last year told investigators her words should be understood within their context and not misinterpreted.

Squad Al Shammari was apprehended on Tuesday in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah following formal complaints by religious figures over a tweet they found offensive to Islam and Prophet Mohammad (PBuH).

However, Suad said she was not targeting Islam claiming earlier tweets supported her argument, local daily Makkah reported on Sunday, citing ‘a well-informed’ source.

The activist waded into controversy last year when she said on the microblog that the Islamic saying that men should have beards to distinguish them from non-believers did not make sense.

“Several atheists, Jews and Communists in the past had, and in the present have, beards, and even Abu Jahl [a polytheist pagan leader] had a beard that was longer than that of Prophet Mohammad (PBuH),” she reportedly said.

Several senior religious figures in the Saudi kingdom condemned her tweet, accusing her of denigrating Islam and targeting the Prophet, and calling for severe action against her, including putting her on trial.

According to local news site Sabq, a commission to support Prophet Mohammad (PBuH) had repeatedly requested Suad to put an end to her ‘misleading and misinformed’ tweets that were offensive to Islam. The commission had also called the telecommunication authorities in the Saudi kingdom to shut down her accounts on social networks.

Richard's rocket problems

As I have written before, it will likely only take one fatal crash (perhaps of a passenger, if not a test pilot) of Richard Branson's rocket planes and that will be it for his business model.  

I had forgotten until I was searching for my past posts about this that I had written in 2007:  How to Make Space Tourists Nervous.    The late pilot is not the first person to die in Branson's project:

Three people have been killed in an explosion, during a test of rocket systems to be used in Richard Branson's proposed space tourism ventures. 

I remain of the view that this is a vanity project that is not worth the effort.

If tourists want to see the edge of space, a high altitude balloon would surely be a safer way of achieving it (see the first link above).   And a "vomit comet" can give a good enough sensation of weightlessness.

Update:   seems to me it is starting to look like this fatality may indeed kill off Virgin Galactic.  The British press is full of bad PR:

Sir Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic has been accused of ignoring a series of warnings that its $500 million rocket was unsafe for flight.

A number of senior aerospace engineers repeatedly voiced fears over the design of Sir Richard’s SpaceShipTwo and the safety protocols surrounding its testing.

The Telegraph has seen emails and other documents in the public domain — dating back several years, and as recently as last year — in which the engineers warned of the dangers of Virgin Galactic’s rocket engine system.

It also emerged on Saturday that three senior Virgin Galactic executives — the vice-president in charge of propulsion, the vice-president in charge of safety, and the chief aerodynamics engineer — had all quit the company in recent months.

Update 2:  David Walker at Club Troppo has a rather good post about the problem of getting into space.   (Very, very rarely does science of this kind get a run there, but it sure beats the chess posts!)

Update 3:  apart from the rocket engines, the thing about the Virgin rocket that I always thought looked ridiculously dangerous was the "feathering" wing.   (See how it moves on this video.)   As a design, my common sense suggested that this looked like an accident waiting to happen, and I was expecting that this would be the cause of the first crash. But I have never noticed any expert make this comment, so what do I know?  (Apart from the fact that I wouldn't fly in it.)

Update 4:   Oh look, maybe my common sense was not far off the mark after all:

In September 2011, the safety of SpaceShipTwo's feathered reentry system was tested when the crew briefly lost control of the craft during a gliding test flight. Control was reestablished after the spaceplane entered its feathered configuration, and it landed safely after a 7-minute flight.^[24]

I don't recall hearing about that at the time.  

Update 5:  cynicism from earlier this year on the poor performance of Spaceship Two.

Update 6:   I am reminded by this accident that Burt Rutan was the designer of SpaceShipTwo, and although he is now retired, he is notable for being a climate change denier.  He writes:

 Specifically, the theory of CAGW is not supported by any of the climate data and none of the predictions of IPCC since their first report in 1991 have been supported by measured data. The scare is merely a computer modeled theory that has been flawed from the beginning, and in spite of its failure to predict, many of the climate scientists cling to it.

My rule of thumb for trusting experts in any field still applies:   if they don't believe in CO2 causing potentially dangerous climate change, be very careful of  what they say or do on any topic. 

Romanticising the microbiome

There's a really good Ed Yong piece at the New York Times which argues convincingly that there is a lot of premature excitement about the possibilities of influencing health by deliberately altering the gut microbiome.  Sure, fecal transplants work for one particular problem, but the fact that  gut bacteria are changing rapidly all the time anyway means it's no simple task to fix other problems.

You should read the whole thing, but I found this section particularly interesting:

Take the Hadza. Their microbial roll call is longer than a Western one, with both omissions and additions. They are the only adult humans thus far sequenced who are devoid of Bifidobacteria — a supposedly “healthy” group that accounts for up to 10 percent of the microbes in Western guts. But they do carry unexpectedly high levels of Treponema, a group that includes the cause of syphilis.

Is this menagerie worse than a Western one? Better? I suspect the answer is neither. It is simply theirs. It is adapted to the food they eat, the dirt they walk upon, the parasites that plague them. Our lifestyles are very different, and our microbes have probably adapted accordingly. Generations of bacteria can be measured in minutes; our genomes have had little time to adapt to modern life, but our microbiomes have had plenty.

It may be that a Hadza microbiome would work equally well in an American gut, but incompatibilities are also possible. The conquistadors proved as much. As they colonized South America, they brought with them European strains of Helicobacter pylori, a stomach bacterium that infrequently causes ulcers and stomach cancer, and these European strains also displaced native American ones. This legacy persists in Colombia, where some communities face a 25-fold higher risk of stomach cancer, most likely due to mismatches between their ancestral genomes and their H. pylori strains.

 Yong mentions earlier in the article who the Hadza are:

In September, the archaeology writer Jeff Leach used a turkey baster to infuse his guts with the feces of a Hadza tribesman from Tanzania.....

 He experimented on himself because he views the Western microbiome as “a hot microbial mess,” he wrote on his blog. Poor diets, antibiotics and overly sanitized environments have gentrified the Western gut, he wrote, “potentially dragging us closer to ill health.” The Hadza, with their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, carry diverse microbial communities that are presumably closer to a healthier and disappearing ideal. Hence the stunt with the turkey baster. Mr. Leach billed it as “(re)becoming human.”

This reasoning is faulty. It romanticizes our relationships with our microbes, painting them as happy partnerships that were better off in the good old days.

Yong's a fine science writer.

The Seat of the Antipope to come

Andrew Brown wrote in the Guardian this week:

Until this weekend, I had largely believed in the liberal narrative which holds that Pope Francis’s reforms of the Catholic church are unstoppable. But the conservative backlash has been so fierce and so far-reaching that for the first time a split looks a real, if distant, possibility.

One leading conservative, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, published over the weekend a homily he had prepared for the traditional Latin mass at which he started ruminating on papal authority. Pope Francis, he said, was the 266th pope, “and history has seen 37 false or antipopes”.
 
Why mention them, except to raise the possibility that Francis might turn out to be the 38th false pope, rather than the 266th real one?

Wow.  I only read that after I made my comment in my previous post about the coming schism, and Tim mentioned his desire to be an Antipope in comments.   I didn't realise Pell had been "thinking out loud" about it.

Brown's column continues:

This is a fascinating nudge in the direction of an established strain of conservative fringe belief: that liberalising popes are not in fact real popes, but imposters, sent by the devil. The explanation has an attractively deranged logic: if the pope is always right, as traditionalists would like to believe, and if this particular pope is clearly wrong, as traditionalists also believe, then obviously this pope is not the real pope. Splinter groups have held this view ever since the liberalising papacy of Pope John XXIII at the start of the 1960s. I don’t think that’s what Pell meant, but it was odd and threatening to bring the subject up at all.

You should go read the rest of Brown, too, where he attacks Douthat's take on Henry VIII.

So, all this Antipopery is something I have to start paying attention to.  

I haven't read anything about them for a long time, and the Wikipedia entry indicates that there have been a lot more Antipopes than I remembered.   In fact, about the only thing about Antipopery that had stuck in my mind was how Avignon was the centre of it for quite some time. 

This always sounded like a lovely place for an Antipope.  I've never been there (sadly, only ever Paris, for me) but my goodness, it does look lovely:

Anyhow, it's far too Eurocentric for a new Antipope to take up as his (or her) seat of power.  Given Pope Francis' concern about poverty and social justice (and the conservatives' embrace of cut throat free markets, destroying the planet, bugger the poor, they've always been with us, and as long as the divorced can't take communion everything will OK), clearly the new Antipope will need a location that reflects the First World/Third World divide.

After giving it much thought last night, in the shower, I think the obvious answer is:

Copacabana!

Philippa condemns scary dress ups

I see that Philippa Martyr, the Latin mass loving, contraception condemning, uber Catholic writer for Quadrant (the "conservative" magazine that is now unsuited for service even in an ablution block) has low regard for the increasingly locally popular day:

I’m going to Mass tonight, so I look forward to the church being attacked with eggs.

Not that Halloween is anti-Christian or nuffink. I mean just because it’s now a Pagan and Wiccan festival, and just because it’s an opportunity for people to celebrate everything that is connected with darkness and evil in human legend and myth (and occasionally reality), shouldn’t upset anyone.

The only 40 something year old Catholic man alive today who still thinks it's 1954 joins in:

It has always surprised me that the supposedly churched and conservative Americans ‘celebrate’ evil once a year. It’s no good for children, any of it. And let’s be honest – it’s not about Da Children anyway. It’s for creepy adults who like dressing up.

It's a very precious little group of Catholics that they evidently believe have the right way of thinking about this.

I'm starting to think the Catholic schism is too slow coming... 

Interesting detail easy to miss

Catcalling video: Hollaback's look at street harassment in NYC edited out the white guys.

I was pretty surprised by the video - I really thought male conduct of this kind had reduced since (say) the 70's and 80's.  Obviously, not so much, at least in New York.

I wonder what conservatives have been saying about it. Here's Hot Air:

Well, two minutes of catcalls over 10 hours. Still, you get the point —
in America’s biggest city, a young woman is never without unwanted
attention for very long. Most of this is boorish but seemingly benign,
just loudmouths shouting “smile” or “damn” etc. as they pass, but watch
for the creep who sidles up next to her and walks along, saying nothing,
for five full minutes. Two words, ladies: Concealed carry. (Which, by
the way, is basically illegal in NYC.)

Um, yeah.  Seems the the problem is not cast as "how do we get men to respect women" but rather, "every woman should be ready to kill - men are just like that."  

The American Right remains as nutty as ever.

China getting hot - good

I didn't notice any media reports earlier this month about this study in Nature Climate Change indicating that Eastern China has had a very clear increase in temperature since the 1950's.   This is good, if it means that anyone in the Chinese government is left with little room for climate change denial.  (Mind you, the article talks about adaptation at the end, not reducing CO2.  Still....)

Here's the synopsis:

The summer of 2013 was the hottest on record in Eastern China. Severe extended heatwaves affected the most populous and economically developed part of China and caused substantial economic and societal impacts¹. The estimated direct economic losses from the accompanying drought alone total 59 billion RMB (ref. 2). Summer (June–August) mean temperature in the region has increased by 0.82 °C since reliable observations were established in the 1950s, with the five hottest summers all occurring in the twenty-first century. It is challenging to attribute extreme events to causes^{3, 4, 5, 6}. Nevertheless, quantifying the causes of such extreme summer heat and projecting its future likelihood is necessary to develop climate adaptation strategies⁷. We estimate that anthropogenic influence has caused a more than 60-fold increase in the likelihood of the extreme warm 2013 summer since the early 1950s, and project that similarly hot summers will become even more frequent in the future, with fully 50% of summers being hotter than the 2013 summer in two decades even under the moderate RCP4.5 emissions scenario. Without adaptation to reduce vulnerability to the effects of extreme heat, this would imply a rapid increase in risks from extreme summer heat to Eastern China.

Splitting wave functions

For once, here's a pretty clear report of an experiment about quantum mechanics which remains  understandable all the way through.  The implications, though, remain unclear.

It appears that shooting electrons into helium gives rise to bubbles, some of which (so it is argued) are just partial bits of a wavefunction:

In the case of electrons and helium, it works like this: When an electron hits the surface of the liquid helium, there's some chance that it will cross into the liquid, and some chance that it will bounce off and carom away. In quantum mechanics, those possibilities are expressed as part of the wave function crossing the barrier, and part of it being reflected. Perhaps the small electron bubbles are formed by the portion of the wave function that goes through the surface. The size of the bubble depends on how much wave function goes through, which would explain the continuous distribution of small electron bubble sizes detected in the experiments.

The idea that part of the wave function is reflected at a barrier is standard quantum mechanics, Cooper said. "I don't think anyone would argue with that," he said. "The non-standard part is that the piece of the wave function that goes through can have a physical effect by influencing the size of the bubble. That is what is radically new here."

The background is well explained in further detail in the article.  As for the odd implications:

But it does raise some interesting questions that sit on the border of science and philosophy. For example, it's necessary to assume that the helium does not make a measurement of the actual position of the electron. If it did, any bubble found not to contain the electron would, in theory, simply disappear. And that, Maris says, points to one of the deepest mysteries of quantum theory.

"No one is sure what actually constitutes a measurement. Perhaps physicists can agree that someone with a Ph.D. wearing a white coat sitting in the lab of a famous university can make measurements. But what about somebody who really isn't sure what they are doing? Is consciousness required? We don't really know."

A general call out for emails

So now that a News Ltd paper has started a "tit for tat" story going on about Nova Peris, here's some politicians whose private emails I would be particularly keen to read:

Those between Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin
Christopher Pyne (and especially those to James Ashby or anyone concerned with the Slipper affair)
Anything from Mal Brough at the same time
Anything at all from Kevin Rudd with excessive sweary bits (just for fun)

Come on, people with access to politician's email accounts - give us better stuff than this piffle.

As for Andrew Bolt - what a drama queen when it suits him.   Feels "queasy" after reading Peris's emails. 


Didn't notice him mentioning any "queasiness" after reading Spurr's "she should have her mouth sewn shut" commentary on a rape story.  

If Coalition politicians are sensible, they'll leave this story well alone.   Athletics Australia was "thrilled" with Boldon's trip - it clearly was a success as far as they were concerned.  

And as if people like Peris haven't sought funding before for something in which there was personal benefit as part of the mix.  

So, if Coalition politicians are going to thrill to what's in Peris' emails, they had better watch their step for some further embarrassing leaks against them.  

And suddenly, magic happens!

You know a Coalition idea is fanciful when it is immediately ridiculed in readers' comments in The Australian.   I mean, seriously?:

UNEMPLOYED ­Aborigines in remote communities will be forced into work for the dole five days a week, with tough new sanctions for failing to participate, under changes that have in-principle cabinet agreement.
Under the new policy, un­employed people with full work capacity would be forced into 25 hours of “work-like” dole activities spread over the week. Sources said there would not be any activities that allowed people to spend their time “painting rocks”. Instead the activities would replicate real work to ensure unemployed Aborigines were “work ready”.
The scheme will force all ­remote Aborigines into work for the dole but there will be people who will be allowed to do less than 25 hours a week based on their ­“assessed capacity”, which will ­acknowledge that some ­people who are on the general ­unemployment benefit, Newstart Allowance, are parents or disabled.
Sources said the joint cabinet submission by Employment Minister Eric Abetz, Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews and Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion greatly increased the sanctions placed on unemployed Aborigines in remote areas who failed to meet their new mutual obligations.
The larger package, including new spending to pay for the massively expanded scheme, must still go back to cabinet for final endorsement.

The big question is:  why does this government think it can make such a scheme work when it sounds like exactly the same thing that has been tried with but minor variations for decades?  Wave a magic wand?   

Someone in comments notes this from the NSW Aboriginal Board in 1941:

‘Self-help. For many years the aborigines have been regarded as people needing protection and not capable of meeting successfully the economic stress of our more civilised daily life, and a system has grown up whereby aborigines have been provided with the necessities of life at the hand of the Government .The free distribution of benefits, however, has resulted in a tendency by a section of the aboriginal community to lean almost entirely upon the Government, without making any serious attempt to provide for themselves.The Board will continue to supply needy aborgines with sustenance and other social benefits, but those who are capable of working are, and will be, urged to become proficient and to obtain employment, thus enabling them to support themselves and their families.’

 But suddenly, 73 years later, the Abbott government can make it happen?  Colour me unconvinced.

By the way: one thing I don't quite understand about issues with remote aboriginal communities is this.  In old footage we see of mission settlements back in the mid 20th century, it seems that some (or many, or all, I don't know) had community farms which grew at least some of the food they relied on.   One gets the impression that this doesn't happen now.   If the impression is right, why isn't there more emphasis on local employment and training based around local self sufficiency in food and meat?   It would seem obvious that it would be a useful, meaningful thing for locals to be engaged in. I guess water supply is in an issue in some places, but not all, surely.

A rather odd idea for a quantum internet

Why Quantum "Clippers" Will Distribute Entanglement Across The Oceans | MIT Technology Review

I sense a one term government

The AFR is saying this:

An international competition will be staged to buy new submarines for Australia with the fleet to be largely built offshore confirming a blow to South Australian jobs.

This is (apparently) what the defence minister said before the election:

“We will deliver those submarines from right here at ASC in South Australia. The Coalition today is committed to building 12 new submarines here in Adelaide.”

Senator Johnston, Press Conference, 8 May 2013.

Given the departure of other manufacturing in South Australia, I would like to know what industries the Abbott government thinks are likely to fill the void in an already financially moribund State; given they are doing their best to also kill renewable energy.   

Rupert instructs the world

Well, I'm sure someone will be out soon with a more detailed take on this than I have time to do, but Rupert's message to the G20 is quite a shermozzle, isn't it?

First of all, credit for acknowledging the issue of rising inequality and calling it bad.  You'll have to get on the phone and convince your libertarian mates about that, though.  Same with your criticism of global companies which pay inadequate tax too, although I'm not sure how your own companies look in that regard...

But no credit for adopting the libertarian/dumb American Right  "solution".   Yes, I can just see how labour market deregulation (which, for the most part, wants lower wages, certainly low minimum wages) will help out with the inequality issues, especially in the States.   Oh yeah, and your faith in lower taxes is touching too.  Care to explain to Kansas how that works?  

And of course, lower energy costs, with no care as to carbon.  'Cos nothing helps global inequality like having entire, poor nations hit hardest by global warming in 30 years time.   (If it takes that long...)

Update:  OK, here's Alan Kohler, giving the sort of commentary on this that I was looking for.

New movie review

Hey, I see that the first reviews of Interstellar are out, and it's not convincing everyone. 

Given it's a Matthew McConaughy vehicle, I'm primed to dislike it; and I suspect that Nolan is like a more intellectually upmarket Tarantino - a director with a following whose enthusiasm is so excessive it makes me just way more inclined to see an emperor with few clothes*; but maybe I will see it so I can confirm my prejudgement.

On Nolan, I see that in the comments following this very so-so review in The Guardian, quite a few people are coming out to diss Nolan to a greater or lesser extent.   A lot of people didn't care for Dark Knight Rises, apparently...

* OK, in the case of Tarantino, an outright ugly nude dude.**

**  with a micropenis, if there is any justice...