Big batteries, big future?

Although it essentially reads like an advertisement for one company's industrial batteries for deployment on the grid, it is still interesting to read this interview at Forbes on the topic.

It does seem increasingly likely that putting money into solving the energy storage problem with renewables may be a better use of money than building nuclear reactors.

As for those who moan about "what about Africa - its poor need coal!" - I would have thought that the media coverage of small towns suffering with the ebola outbreak last year would have given people an idea of the problems with electricity infrastructure in those countries.  Get out of the major cities and they look poor - very poor, with ramshackle infrastructure of all types.   It's not going to just be a question of building a coal burning power plant - there is huge work to be done with building and maintaining a grid.

The topic has been under discussion recently at Rabbett Run, where the good professor maintains that localised renewables are the best solution for a country where getting infrastructure built and maintained across large distances is a major issue.  Sounds very likely correct, to me...

Just silly....

Not long now and the atheists will be joining in too

Surge of radical Buddhism in South Asia

Bodu Bala Sena (BBS, the Buddhist Strength Force), a nationalist
Buddhist group with a notorious reputation, is being blamed for the
incident. Galagodaaththe Gnanasara Thera, the group's leader, gave a
speech around the time of the riots in which he claimed that the
Sinhalese Buddhist population was under serious threat from the Muslims.
This instigated further violence by large mobs, which attacked mosques
and burned down shops and houses in Muslim neighbourhoods.

I now will be distracted trying to think of a cool name for a group of radical armed atheists.  I mean if the Buddhists are now being thugs, the atheists can't be far behind...  

A good Krugman summary

Voodoo Time Machine - NYTimes.com

A nice list of the way the current Republicans have been wrong, but their ideological devotion prevents them admitting it.

Rising seas remembered?

Ancient Aboriginal stories preserve history of a rise in sea level

Why it's worth the trouble

Research affirms sexual reproduction avoids harmful mutations

The statute books not always a reliable guide

One of the interesting things in the story out of Egypt today about a bunch of men being acquitted after being arrested on national TV for being at a bathhouse is this:

Five of them - the owner of the bathhouse and four staff members - were tried for facilitating "parties of debauchery, orgies among male homosexuals" in exchange for money. The 21 others were charged with practising debauchery and "indecent public acts".

It is not illegal to be homosexual or engage in homosexual acts in Egypt. But the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) says the charge of "debauchery" is often used to crack down on homosexual activity in the country.

The charge is more often used in cases involving prostitution, but Egyptian legislation - specifically Law 10 of 1961, On the Combat of Prostitution - mentions "prostitution" and "debauchery" together.

The Collins English Dictionary defines the world as "an instance of extreme dissipation"; other descriptions relate to "sensual pleasures".

Homosexuality remains a social and religious taboo within Egypt. However, the country is not the only place where, while not illegal, it is punished or discouraged using other laws.

Goes to show that it's not always a simple matter of seeing what's on the books to know how laws are used in a country.

I also saw at the end of the LA Times report on the matter:

Other often-ostracized groups have been targeted as well; on Saturday, an Egyptian court sentenced a 21-year-old man to three years in prison after he declared on Facebook that he was an atheist.

 And this in a country where the President just got kudos for calling on Islam to reform itself.  He's got his work cut out.

Even more reason to not see a movie

I missed this lengthy commentary at the New York Review of Books in December which is an even stronger attack on The Imitation Game for inaccuracy than the one I had previously linked to.

It sounds to me very much like what happened with the Anthony Hopkins version of Shadowlands - the bones of a true life story but with the details changed enough "for dramatic purposes" that the movie ends up not being all that true to the spirit of the characters it portrays.

Tolstoy re-visited

Somewhere on the net tonight I saw brief mention of Tolstoy having had a venereal disease as a young man, and thought to myself "did I know that before?"  Googling around, I stumbled across a lengthy extract from Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, which I read around 20 years ago, and indeed, it did have a full chapter on the many - and I mean many - character flaws of Leo, including the bit about VD. 

Intellectuals remains the most amusingly appalling book about character flaws of the famous that I have ever read.  Even though I am clearly forgetting the details, I remember how much I liked it at the time.  Of course, later it came out that Johnson had engaged in a lengthy marital sexual indiscretion himself, which would not have been quite so hypocritical if he hadn't spent so much time in his columns criticising the British Royal family for not sucking it up and foregoing extra marital relationships as an example to the nation.

Anyway, back to Tolstoy.  Another website (PBS, so the tone is slightly less scurrilous) talks at length about Tolstoy's life-long, um, neuroticism? about women and sex.   It seems he would, in modern parlance, probably be classified as a sex addict, but seemingly spent his entire life not only   intellectually disgusted with it, but also blame shifting onto women. 

It's a wonder his wife went ahead with the wedding at all:

Leo Tolstoy waited until he was 34 years old to marry, but once he had settled on 17-year-old Sofia Behrs, "Sonya," as his bride, he saw that events moved very quickly. At his insistence, but a single week elapsed between his proposal and their wedding on September 23, 1862 -- and in the course of that week Tolstoy asked, really required, his fiancée to read the intimate diaries he had kept for much of his life.

Sonya, the middle daughter of the Tsar's court physician, had grown up in the sheltered, innocent circumstances typical of girls of her class and time, and she had scant knowledge of men, including the man she had agreed to marry, beyond mild flirtation and adolescent fantasy. But now, days before her wedding, she found herself plunged into the sexual autobiography of a vigorous man in early middle age -- page after unsparing page recounting his initiation by a whore when he was 14, the string of impulsive, guilt-ridden erotic adventures with parlor maids, gypsies, and married women, the repeated bouts with venereal disease, and finally, and most recently, the deeply satisfying love affair with a peasant woman, with whom he had fathered a son just a few months before proposing to Sonya.

"I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries when I was engaged to him," Sonya wrote nearly 30 years later. "I can still remember the agonizing pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

 This episode apparently features in fictional form in Anna Karenina.

The article gives a short chronicle of how their marriage deteriorated (and yes, I had remembered that it developed into a high conflict relationship - I wonder if that is made clear enough in that recent movie about the end of his life?).  But this detail shows his incredible insensitivity:

In Sonya's eyes the ultimate affront was "Kreutzer Sonata," a story Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a man driven by hatred, jealousy, and sexual disgust to murder his wife. Aside from the murder, it was an exact transcription of his feelings about her and the state of their marriage. At the heart of "Kreutzer Sonata" is a savage indictment of marriage as "legalized prostitution," of women as vengeful sirens bent on seducing and controlling men, and of human sexuality itself. For Sonya it was as if Tolstoy had hauled her naked onto a vast public stage and proceeded to sermonize about her moral and physical hideousness. And on top of everything, after railing against the act of love as "perfidious" and piglike, he continued to force himself on her sexually. To her, it was a betrayal worse than adultery. 

I really think he should have spent more time looking into her eyes.   (Ha.)
 

Causation very hard to believe

Circumcision doubles autism risk, study claims - Telegraph

There must be a hundred different ways to confirm or (much more likely) debunk the question of whether they have found anything indicating causation here, given the widely varying populations of males with and without a foreskin around the world.  Must be lots of researchers doing up grant applications on the topic as I write.

Falling in love made easy

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This - NYTimes.com

I had not heard of this study before, indicating a way to make a couple fall in love (or, at least, push them strongly in that direction?):

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck.  So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

Interesting.  I wonder if there is some connection with mutual eye staring as a common occurrence during or after sex?

More about free speech in France

I've been reading up about the anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'Bala at the New York Times, the New Republic and Wikipedia.

While convicted many times for anti-Semitism, and facing currently legally questionable bans on performing his shows, he apparently remains popular with the young, male Muslim population, as well as the National Front.   He ridicules the Holocaust, encourages disbelief that it happened, and is a 9/11 "truther". 

At a time when Jews have good reason to feel an increasing threat to their safety in that country, the example of this comedian perfectly illustrates the double edged sword of free speech, the subject of yesterday's post.  From a free speech purist's point of view, I suppose it may be argued that the laws that have been used against him have not succeeded in silencing him, and in fact may well have made him a martyr in the eyes of his fans, so why keep such laws anyway?  On the other hand, who can say what size following may he have developed if there had never been any attempts at legal hinderance to his views being expressed?

In any case, we can say as follows:  both the anti-Semitic comedian and the religion (including Islam) ridiculing magazine have been the subject of legal actions under French laws that do affect free speech.  Neither of them were actually silenced by the legal actions.  (The action against Charlie Hebdo was not successful.)   We can therefore say that the country has had both of their contributions to the "marketplace of ideas".

The problem is that in this marketplace, the ideas and facts we want all Muslims in France to believe are not spreading to enough of them fast enough.    

Update:   And here, from an Atlantic article by David Frum, is a list of the poisonous ideas far too many French Muslims have (including the anti-Semiticism promoted by Dieudonne):

A pair of Pew surveys in the mid-2000s, for example, found that substantial minorities of Muslims in every European country surveyed did not rule out violence against civilian targets perceived as anti-Islamic. Two-thirds of French Muslims said the use of violence in such a case was never justified, which is reassuring, but one-third felt that it was sometimes or rarely justified. Significant numbers—including an outright majority in Britain—refused to acknowledge that Arabs had carried out the 9/11 terror attacks. A plurality of French Muslims (46 percent) and a crushing majority of British Muslims (81 percent) considered themselves Muslims first, identifying with their respective European nations only to a secondary extent....

A survey of French Muslims in 2014 found a community seething with anti-Semitism. Sixty-seven percent said “yes” when asked whether Jews had too much power over France’s economy. Sixty-one percent believed Jews had too much power in France’s media. Forty-four percent endorsed the idea of a global Zionist conspiracy of the kind described by the Holocaust-denying French Muslim comedian Dieudonne. Thirteen percent agreed that Jews were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Tackling blasphemy

In Defense of Blasphemy - The Daily Beast

Michael Tomasky here makes a well reasoned case for the world's governments to get serious about removing (rarely used) blasphemy laws from their own legislation, and then to put pressure on those countries where it's use really is a major issue.

From the Pew Research article that he links to:

Nine of the 50 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (18%) had blasphemy laws in 2012, and in Europe such laws were found in seven out of 45 nations (16%). In November 2012, the Dutch parliament dissolved its blasphemy law, which was drafted in the 1930s and had not been used for half a century.

In the Americas, 11 out of 35 countries (31%) had blasphemy laws, including the Bahamas, where the publication or sale of blasphemous material can be punished with up to two years imprisonment. The U.S. does not have any federal blasphemy laws, but as of 2012, several U.S. states – including Massachusetts and Michigan – still had anti-blasphemy laws on the books. However, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would almost certainly prevent the enforcement of any such law.

In South America, Peru’s federal law does not formally prohibit blasphemy, but local government authorities have enforced penalties for it. In October 2012, a district mayor in Lima closed a public art exhibit that featured a naked statue of Christ after religious groups condemned it as blasphemy. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, representatives of the local art community “expressed concern over censorship and freedom of speech” after the incident.

Blasphemy laws are least common in sub-Saharan Africa (three of 48 countries), according to 2012 data. In April of 2012, anti-slavery activists in Mauritania were charged and imprisoned for blasphemy after publicly burning religious texts to denounce what the activists viewed as support for slavery in Islamic commentary and jurisprudence.

 

Riding the stream

British Airways Boeing 777 approaches supersonic speed

Well, good to get away from Islamism for a moment, and read about the way a strong jet stream speeds up some flights.  Didn't know they sort of deliberately use it.

Not helpful, Rupert

As tweeted a short time ago:

Rupert Murdoch @rupertmurdoch · 47m47 minutes ago

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

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