MIT needs a new writer

The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

What's this?  MIT Technology Review appears to have a  writer who is completely on board with the EmDrive being a real, new physics thing.

I remain deeply skeptical.  And someone in comments claims (not sure if it is right, though), that the EmDrive, if true and configured right, could generate its own power and zip around forever.  So you could build your own UFOs powered by perpetual motion, I guess.  Would be rather cool, but come on, how likely is that? 

I'll take it up when they can get it down to 45 seconds

The Case for the 1-Minute Workout Is Getting Stronger | TIME: In the latest study, published in PLOS One, exercise scientists led by Martin Gibala, chair of kinesiology at McMaster University, who has spent the last several years documenting the health benefits of interval training, found that as little as one minute of intensive exercise could have the same health benefits for the heart, respiratory fitness and muscles as 45 minutes of more typical continuous exercise over three months.

Granted, those 60 seconds have to be at a sprint-like pace, as if you’re being chased down by a tiger and fueled by adrenaline. But it’s just 60 seconds. “I think there is good evidence that shows you can see comparable benefits despite the fact that intervals require less total exercise and reduced time commitment,” says Gibala.

Stiglitz on economists

Joseph Stiglitz Talks About Inequality and the Economy - The Atlantic: 

Stiglitz: The prevalent ideology—when I say prevalent it’s not all economists— held that markets were basically efficient, that they were stable. You had people like Greenspan and Bernanke saying things like “markets don't generate bubbles.” They had precise models that were precisely wrong and gave them confidence in theories that led to the policies that were responsible for the crisis, and responsible for the growth in inequality. Alternative theories would have led to very different policies. For instance, the tax cut in 2001 and 2003 under President Bush. Economists that are very widely respected were cutting taxes at the top, increasing inequality in our society when what we needed was just the opposite. Most of the models used by economists ignored inequality. They pretended that macroeconomy was unaffected by inequality. I think that was totally wrong. The strange thing about the economics profession over the last 35 year is that there has been two strands: One very strongly focusing on the limitations of the market, and then another saying how wonderful markets were. Unfortunately too much attention was being paid to that second strand.

What can we do about it? We've had this very strong strand that is focused on the limitations and market imperfections. A very large fraction of the younger people, this is what they want to work on. It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.

Gut microbiome research, continued

Lifestyle has a strong impact on intestinal bacteria

This study of some healthy Dutch people still concludes that having a higher diversity bunch of bugs in your gut is healthier.  Not exactly an intuitive result, compared to what people probably would have thought until recently:

This DNA analysis made it possible to examine which factors impact the diversity of the microbiome (the intestinal bacterial community unique to each of us). And that appears to be many. Wijmenga says, "You see, for example, the effect of diet in the gut." People who regularly
consume yogurt or buttermilk have a greater diversity of gut bacteria. Coffee and wine can increase the diversity as well, while whole milk or a high-calorie diet can decrease it.


"In total we found 60 dietary factors that influence the diversity. What these mean exactly is still hard to say," explains UMCG researcher Alexandra Zhernakova, the first author of the Science article. "But there is a good correlation between diversity and health: greater diversity is better."

Clear writing on negative gearing

How negative gearing replaced the great Australian dream and distorted the economy | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian

An excellent, clear bit of explanation from Greg Jericho on the investment distorting effect of our current negative gearing/CGT system in Australia.

It's pretty appalling, really, that once again, political games prevents politicians (I'm looking at you, Malcolm Turnbull) speaking honestly about an economic issue.  (It's going to do the same to him on climate change policy, too.)  This is why people become cynical about politics.  

Disturbing food

The BBC has an article up about food photographers, and it includes this example:

I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be the only person who would be feel a tad queasy if served that dish in a restaurant.   Oh, sure, everyone with a phone would probably want to photograph it (although I personally have never done that in public), but that's not the point.

A pretty convincing analysis

The truth about gun ownership after Port Arthur - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

One thing that interested me in this is the explanation that the increase in gun numbers in Australia in the last decade or so has not been into more households - proportionally, about the same number of households have guns.  As the author notes, this is a similar phenomena as has occurred in America.

In America, I take it as pretty convincing evidence of the paranoid streak that runs in its right wing politics (especially in the last decade or two), and reading the gun nutters who comment at Catallaxy, I find it hard to deny there is a similar strain in Australia.

Those in Australia who buy one (or want to buy one) for self protection ignore the risk to themselves and their family that having a gun in the household creates.  (Nor the fact that there's a good chance the crim's gun they are worried about had a good chance of having originally come from a legal owner.)   But then again, scratch a gun obsessed nut, and you'll have a much better than even chance of finding a climate change denier, too.   They just aren't good at understanding the big picture.

The seriously immature Senator

Wicked Campers critics 'authoritarians disguised as hippies or feminists': Senator

Yes, it's Leyonhjelm, who says of the seriously sexist and routinely offensive Wicked Campers slogans:

"You need to be a particularly wowserish type of person to not find them funny."

Actually, Senator, you need to have a sense of humour of the kind found in immature 14 year boys, as you do, to find any of them funny.

Hot in Asia

Punishing Heat Wave Sets Records Across Asia

You really have to feel sorry for the poor people in these regions who do not have airconditioning.  This really sounds like heat that will kill:

And just how hot is it?

Titlagarh in the Indian state of Odisha sizzled at 48.5°C on April 24
— the highest reliably measured temperature for the country in any
April. Schools in Odisha were unexpectedly let out for the summer on
Tuesday. Classes will remain suspended until, at least, the third week
of July.

Cambodia saw a national all-time record high of 42.6°C set in Preah
Vihea province on April 15. That was two days after its neighbor to the
north, Laos, set its own national all-time high temperature of 42.3°C at
Seno.

Dozens of Thai weather stations have broken or tied their all-time record maximum temperatures this month.

The thermometer has been reaching 46.0°C in several towns in Myanmar,
still shy of the national record high of 47.2°C at Myinmu observed on
May 14, 2010.

A greener Earth with local droughts

Global Droughts: A Bad Year – Significant Figures by Peter Gleick

Peter Gleick lists the areas which have recently (over the past couple of years) had drought problems.

This seems to me a good thing to keep in mind when reading about the Earth becoming greener.  Not much benefit to be had if its greener (and slightly wetter) where no one's living.

Rudd chat

I haven't seen all that many episodes of The Weekly this year (I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I have MKR to blame), but I watched it last night, and was annoyed with the clearly increased amount of swearing on it.

Look, honestly, the writing is (generally) smart, it's only on at 8.30 pm (not like 11pm or later with the routinely sweary equivalent shows - such as John Oliver's - in the US), and the use of 4 or 5 "f...s" in a half hour really doesn't make it any funnier.   Get your act together, ABC, and resist the intrusion of language we don't really want to normalise amongst your teen viewers.  (As I tell my kids, swearing is partly wrong because it's boring when people develop it as a routine tic.  And so many people do.)

Anyhow, I post here mainly to note the "Hard Chat" interview with Kevin Rudd, which was pretty funny.   But I thought Rudd looked puffy faced, tired and not very well.  I really do suspect his health may not be up to any high powered job, and why on Earth do people like him keep trying to get into positions of power when they can easily retire early and develop other interests and hobbies.  (Or do charitable works, or whatever.)

As some dimwits used to say about Hitler...(Well, they did)

I hate Donald Trump's views. But his tenacity inspires me | Michael Arceneaux | Opinion | The Guardian

Eating in the news

It's seems it's either too much or too little:

*  The BBC reports about some amazing changes in obesity rates in China:

Researchers found 17% of boys and 9% of girls under the age of 19 were obese in 2014, up from 1% for each in 1985.
The 29-year study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, involved nearly 28,000 students in Shandong province.
The study used a stricter cut-off of the Body Mass Index (BMI) than the World Health Organization standard.
"It is the worst explosion of childhood and adolescent obesity that I have ever seen," Joep Perk from the European Society of Cardiology told AFP news agency.
The study said China's rapid socioeconomic and nutritional transition had led to an increase in energy intake and a decrease in physical activity.

*  In Japan, in the meantime, they apparently don't so well at dealing with anorexia and eating disorders.  Culturally, I'm not sure they generally handle mental health issues all that well, but I think they are improving.  Slowly.

*  In other eating disorder news, I was surprised to read about the search for the genetic role in anorexia nervosa.  (I just hadn't really thought of genes playing much of a role in it.) 

Given that the disease (often/always?) involves people developing a persistent ill founded reaction to their own body image (merely imagining that they are overweight), and transexualism can involve a not dissimilar distress at the look of their body, I wonder if anyone has looked for a genetic component to that?

In praise of an add-on

I use Firefox as my preferred Windows browser.  (It's not bad in Android too, but just a little bit slower than Chrome.)

But I just have an odd urge to praise its add-on Lightshot, a screenshot addition that I use frequently in blogging, but also quite often at work.   It is just one of the handiest things to have at hand, and I really appreciate its simplicity, reliability and utility.  Thank you, its creators.

And now back to your regular programming...

Much, much bigger on the inside

It's hard not to think of the Tardis when reading a paper like this one:  On the volume inside old black holes.   It talks about the mind boggling concept of the insides of evaporating black holes being much larger than the exterior surface indicates.  The abstract reads:

Black holes that have nearly evaporated are often thought of as small objects, due to their tiny exterior area. However, the horizon bounds large spacelike hypersurfaces. A compelling geometric perspective on the evolution of the interior geometry was recently shown to be provided by a generally covariant definition of the volume inside a black hole using maximal surfaces. In this article, we expand on previous results and show that finding the maximal surfaces in an arbitrary spherically symmetric spacetime is equivalent to a 1+1 geodesic problem. We then study the effect of Hawking radiation on the volume by computing the volume of maximal surfaces inside the apparent horizon of an evaporating black hole as a function of time at infinity: while the area is shrinking, the volume of these surfaces grows monotonically with advanced time, up to when the horizon has reached Planckian dimensions. The physical relevance of these results for the information paradox and the remnant scenarios are discussed. 

And then, from within the paper itself:

A few numbers
Before closing this section, let us put the above in perspective: when a solar mass (1030 kg) black hole becomes Planckian (it needs 1055 times the actual age of the universe), it will contain volumes equivalent to 105 times our observable universe, hidden behind a Planckian area (10−70 m2).

Perhaps more pertinent is to consider small primordial black holes with mass less than 1012 kg. Their initial horizon radius and volume are of the order of the proton charge radius (10−15m) and volume (10−45m3) respectively. They would be in the final stages of evaporation now, hiding volumes of about one litre (10−9m3).

 Impressive, to put it mildly.