Seems pretty important...

Physicists confirm thermodynamic irreversibility in a quantum system

A reminder

I wonder, was yesterday's better than expected GDP figure a good enough reason to remind the world that a certain anti-Keynesian economist was warning about Australian stagflation in 2011? 

Yes; yes.  I think it is.

For the sardine obsessive

I'm still eating a lot of sardines lately (well, twice a week), and on a hunt to find the nicest available in Brisbane.

As I've noted before, the Canadian ones are a major disappointment;  those from Portugal (for which I have to go to a deli in West End) were pretty nice; but the best were the heavily smoked German ones from Aldi, which have tragically disappeared off their shelf.   The old "King Oscar" brand, which are now canned in Poland (I had forgotten 'til I checked a map that Poland actually had ocean frontage), are said to be "lightly smoked", but it's barely detectable.  Still, they are pleasant enough in a small sardine way.  Aldi's sardines are now also from Poland, and one suspects from the same factory as King Oscar's.  They are OK, but I'm leaning towards King Oscar still.

But if you think I've become a bit obsessive about sardines, you ought to read this extensive blog (actually, just consisting of one enormous post - but comments are still active!) by a couple of women from Melbourne, rating not only cans available in Australia, but those they have sampled on international trips.   (I have to say, based on those brands they review which I have also tried, their taste seems fairly closely aligned to mine.)

Yes, if you are truly interested in sardine taste comparisons, you should read The Sardinistas - A Comparative Study of Tinned Sardines.

 And if you still aren't sick of sardines by then, go and have a look at this page - Journeys in Canned Fish History.  (Honestly, what would you do without my blog.)   You'll find there many photos of how canned Norwegian sardines used to look in Australia, with this odd example of graphic art from a 100 or so years ago at the top:

And what about this crook looking Kooka, who I suspect not only has a mohawk, but is hooked on ice:

Anyhow, I'll hopefully try another European deli this weekend, to see if I can extend my personal tasting range.

Gay indulgence

The Danger in Comparing the HIV-Prevention Pill to Condoms - The Atlantic

The writer of this article, about the rather vexing issue of gay men going on permanent (and expensive) medication so they can sleep around with as many (possibly) HIV positive guys they want without a condom, has not done his cause any favours:

As a gay man who has receptive sex—and who lives in Miami and Washington, D.C., the cities with the first- and fifth-highest HIV rates in the U.S.—I knew how high my risk was, and for the most part, I wasn’t willing to chance it....

How often do you have sex without a condom? this new doctor asked.

I explained my situation: I was there because I don’t like sex with condoms. I knew it put me at risk, so I rarely had sex. I knew it wasn’t the right reason to ask for PrEP, and I knew it wasn’t 100-percent effective, but I knew asking for it was the right thing to do.....

I swiped my credit card. On the way back to my apartment, I popped a pill in the street.

I took the pill for 30 days. I had sex once. I couldn’t afford to refill the prescription, so I didn’t.

Over the next few months, I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a steady partner so that I could have a condomless sex life without fear. That seemed like my only option: I literally couldn’t afford sex with multiple partners. The truth is, though, even that option seemed suspect: Several of my HIV-positive friends had acquired the virus from boyfriends who’d cheated on them.

Well, this is extraordinarily self indulgent, if you ask me.   Instead of the cheap, simple option that he doesn't even have to put on his own sensitive bit, he prefers to take risks and then use an expensive medication to keep him virus free.  (But won't stop a wide variety of other STDs.)

And people in comments following note the same:

It would seem disingenuous to file this under 'Health' rather than 'Lifestyle', given that at almost every opportunity the author states that medical/scientific experts were wrong, without explaining why, and all to justify his personal (and understandable) preference for condomless sex without feeling bad for the negative externalities it engenders. A study earlier this year already showed resistance mutations in a clinical study. Cavalier usage of prep as a lifestyle drug will only shorten it's efficacy, not to mention increased STI rates in all other areas.

In short, it's a selfish personal essay to excuse and justify behaviour that the author knows deep down is wrong.

 And this:

This article sounds like it was written by a Reagan-era conservative to destroy any sympathy for AIDS patients by portraying them as irresponsible, selfish, and greedy.

On the other hand, some argue that it makes sense to issue this expensive drug because preventing contracting HIV outweighs the lifelong cost of the drugs that keep it from killing those who contract it.

Yet, the point is, if people could have monogamous relationships, and only with those who don't have the disease, it costs nothing to stay healthy, and doesn't even involve a condom.   This works for billions of heterosexual couples on the planet.   And lots and lots of straight people have trouble finding "intimacy" and long term relationships for a period in their lives, too.   Hard to see why so many gay men find their lives need expensive financial medical assistance and worthy of special sympathy.

Wingnut obsessions

I have to say, it has taken the death of one Maurice Strong for me to even notice the guy, and that's only  because of the way wingnuts have obviously been obsessing about him for the last decade as some sort of e-vil overlord of the UN role in seeking to limit global warming. 

Fortunately for them, most "climate change is a complete crock and scam that is about to collapse" believers are old codgers and women who'll be dead before their grandchildren can curse them for their stupidity.   Although the grandkids of Andrew Bolt will probably be so happy with their inheritance that they won't care how Grandad made money by pandering to the gullible.  

Oh, and once Jason Soon has paid for the Chinese gene editting uplift to sentience of the descendants of David Leyonhjelm's cats, they'll probably think he was a moron too.

OK, back to the old topic

Global - How to Save the World - Foreign Correspondent - ABC

This special last night on the ABC was well worth watching.   Things I liked in particular - the German farmers who make money from their many wind turbines and don't fantasise about infrasound;  the way the average age at the Heartland Skeptics conference looked to be about 65-70; the Kenyan villages getting into solar power electricity because you don't need heaps of infrastructure to get it there.  Good work.

New topic wanted

I'm feeling oddly bereft of posting topics today.   I was going to note Peter Hartcher's story that even Liberals were questioning Abbott as to whether a (widely rumoured) affair with Peta explained his refusal to dump her, and how this seems to have attracted little attention from the rest of the media today.   (I find that odd.   But I find it even odder that both News Ltd and Fairfax outlets have taken to innuendo about Abbott and Credlin - going skiing together, staying in France together, Tony sleeping on her couch instead of spending his allowance on an actual hotel room - and neither of them, nor their spouses, come out to complain about it.  If I were the subject of such innuendo, and if I had not slept with my staffer, I think I could at least muster a press release of denial and then say I was not going to dignify it by addressing it again.  But just remaining silent despite the increasing openness of the innuendo?   Strange...)

But there, now that I have done that, I am waiting for other inspiration...

A good explanation of the Paris conference

The Paris climate talks won't solve global warming. Here's what they'll do instead. - Vox

Debunking the debunking

We're in the middle of Brisbane's spring/early summer storm season, and I was impressed by this photo  from the Fairfax website because of the accuracy with which it shows the green-ish tinge that most people here freak out about as a strong indication that someone, somewhere is going to get hail:

(Indeed, yesterday afternoon my daughter pointed out the green colour of the threatening sky, and it was followed by some - thankfully only pea-sized - hail.)

So I was a bit surprised to Google the topic and see that Accuweather in 2007 had an article with the title "Debunked:  the Green Sky Hail Myth." 

Which is a bit odd, in that it refers to a Scientific American article which only "kind of" debunks it. 

Apparently, Americans often take the green tinge as an indication of a tornado - although many also argue the hail connection.  The research (by just one person in America) that the article cites sounds distinctly unconvincing - he apparently agrees that green storm clouds do indeed happen and are an indication of a severe storm (well, duh), but seems to dispute its predictive nature for hail (or tornadoes). 

Well, this is one case where I reckon life experience counts for more than a paper by one dude in America.

Because I would say that in the vast majority of cases for storms in Brisbane, the distinctive green tinge is an accurate sign that hail is happening (or will happen) somewhere in the storm's path.  

In the latest facile and clownish libertarian Senator news ...

I don't know what to make of Dastyari - a Labor Senator on side with the Bald One in the pointless "nanny State" enquiry that is seeking to end the scourge of Australians having to wear bicycle helmets on their way to get a drink in Kings Cross at 2.45am seems to me to have some very suspect priorities.  But at least he is showing some sense on climate change, I suppose...

Some plankton doing well, for now...

Published Thursday in the journal Science, the study details a tenfold increase in the abundance of single-cell coccolithophores between 1965 and 2010, and a particularly sharp spike since the late 1990s in the population of these pale-shelled floating phytoplankton.

"Something strange is happening here, and it's happening much more quickly than we thought it should," said Anand Gnanadesikan, associate professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins and one of the study's five authors.

Gnanadesikan said the Science report certainly is good news for creatures that eat coccolithophores, but it's not clear what those are. "What is worrisome," he said, "is that our result points out how little we know about how complex ecosystems function." The result highlights the possibility of rapid ecosystem change, suggesting that prevalent models of how these systems respond to climate change may be too conservative, he said.

The team's analysis of Continuous Plankton Recorder survey data from the North Atlantic Ocean and North Sea since the mid-1960s suggests rising carbon dioxide in the ocean is causing the coccolithophore population spike, said Sara Rivero-Calle, a Johns Hopkins doctoral student and lead author of the study.

Link to the story here.

This is interesting, given that coccolithophores have been the subject of some intensive study to work out whether they are very sensitive to ocean acidification, or not.  (The results of lab tests have been contradictory and it's been difficult to work out why.)    The concern is (I expect) that at a certain threshold of CO2, this type of plankton suddenly goes into reverse because of the acidification effect. 

Matt Ridley is wrong

If wishes were horses | …and Then There's Physics

Ridley's got another short "what's the problem?  AGW won't get dangerous for another century" article which will only convince the ignorant, like Adam Creighton, but he got to run it in Scientific American.

The explanation of why he is a wrong-headed dissembler is given at the link above.

I've never enjoyed Scientific American much, but really, publishing failed banker and coal miner Ridley on climate change?

Some good (and bad) climate change commentary

*  And Then There's Physics has a crack at the "we can't stay under 2C now" pessimism, and I generally agree with him.  (See the comments too, where he says it seems to be a case of climate scientists not being able to "win" either way.)

* Lenore Taylor has an excellent explanation of how Australian policy got to where it is today.   The details of this are hard to keep in memory, so it's really good to see such a clear account.

*  And now for the bad:  the very bad.  Adam Creighton writes with so many errors in his take on climate change, it's hard to know where to begin.  Take this paragraph:

But even more problematic, the link between carbon dioxide and global average temperatures is highly uncertain. Sure, it is probably positive, but the degree of the relationship is vague, as sober analysts of the climate change debate will readily point out. Moreover, splicing the effect out from temperature changes that would have happened anyway is next to impossible.

"Sober analysis" - ha!

This paragraph in particular shows his complete ignorance on the topic:

The other problem with these models is they assume the impact of global warming is unambiguously bad. It might not be. For example, the 44,000 more than expected people who died in the British winter last year — in part because of the cold — might have had a different view.

Absolute unadulterated rubbish, and proof he simply does not read the IPCC reports or any other material - where the cross over between any net benefits to net harm has been a matter of hotly contested dipute.  (Lukewarmer Richard Tol's error prone work being very significant on this.)

But how surprising is it really, that a small government, anti tax, libertarian inclined economics writer knows stuff all about climate change. 

But the basic problem with his argument is the common (and discredited one) - that uncertainty is our friend.   It isn't, Adam.  Read. 

An extraordinary first world problem

I guess we've all seen or heard of the problem of excess skin on formerly obese people, but the SMH has a remarkable story about it this morning.  I didn't realise how lengthy, risky and expensive the surgery to correct it could be.   You would think that if more people knew about this they might stop their weight gain before growing or stretching all that excess surface area, but I guess human nature isn't like that.

The profession says "good riddance"

Philip Nitschke burns medical certificate and says he will promote euthanasia | Australia news | The Guardian