The Catholics take over

The Times reports that Catholicism is becoming the most practised faith in England, due to European migration:

Average Sunday attendance of both churches stood even at nearly one million in 2005, according to the latest statistics available for England and Wales, but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar.

A Church of England spokesman said: “I don’t think you can talk in terms of decline in the Church of England. It is fairly clear that with small fluctuations the worshipping population of the Church of England is 1.7 million a month. That is actually a stable figure.”

But looking at the total numbers shows how very, very few Anglicans attend church:

Figures for 2005 show that there are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, under one fifth the 25 million baptised Anglicans and double the number of Muslims.

If it's anything like here, the migrants are going to have to bring their own priests with them. It will also be interesting to see if it means a more conservative Church, and a more conservative influence on politics. I certainly get the impression that the Tories have virtually given up on espousing anything much resembling social conservatism.

On a meta-blogging note...

I find it odd that those posts which I consider most worthwhile are often the ones that attract the least comment, and do not get linked to anywhere else. It would be good if there was a simple way for readers to just mark how interesting they find a post, rather than having to comment.

Anyway, a blog like one is just as much use to myself in terms of keeping track of articles and thoughts as it is a popularity exercise. But it would be nice to have a better idea about what sort of posts I make that have the most interest to most people.

I must go over to Catallaxy and read the recent reader's analysis post. I haven't got around to that yet...

Hitchens and Hillary

If you missed Christopher Hitchens' recent Slate article about Hillary Clinton and her credibility problems over Iraq, you should have a read.

Great moments in Council politics

If you thought soccer players could ham it up, you ain't seen nothing yet:

Some interesting energy stories

1. The anti-wind crusade of this blog continues with an article from American Spectator. (Mind you, one article there also positively welcomes global warming.) Apart from the important stuff about the difficulties of actually using the electricity they generate, here's a bit of information that surprised me:

The standard 1.5 MW structure is now 40 stories, taller than the statue of liberty. The 3 MW towers waiting in the wings are as tall as New York's Citicorp Center, the third tallest building in Manhattan.

That is big.

2. This story was in Newsweek in January, but I missed it 'til now:

The Kremlin has set about recasting Russia's once top-secret nuclear industry as the world's leading mass marketer of cheap, reliable reactors. As energy prices soar, nuclear power has been gaining in popularity, and Russia is the market leader in cut-price reactors....

"Our power stations are not a bit worse than anyone else's," says Sergei Shmatko, the president of Atomstroyexport, Russia's atomic-power-station construction company. "My dream," he adds, "is to make the export and construction of our nuclear stations as simple and as fast as putting IKEA furniture together."

3. My favourite underdog in the clean energy stakes, the Pebble Bed Reactor, continues to attract very little attention here, but in South Africa it is definitely going ahead after appeals against development approval were rejected. First demonstration plant due by 2010, and commercial modules may be available by 2013.

The cut that might sent you mad!

A very interesting article here suggesting that there may be a connection between vasectomies and certain types of dementia.

I wonder whether such a connection might only be noticed now due to (what I presume was) the relative infrequency of the operation until about the 1970's. Is the first big wave of men who had the operation only now reaching advanced ages?

(There is also the issue of how the operation is done. From what I read, sealing both ends was popular, but appears to be associated with increased risk of long term pain as a side effect. The new trend is therefore to leave the tap open, so to speak. This was the subject of my previous post here.)

More research needed, but personally I have never liked the idea of letting one's "boys" get out into the blood stream where they don't belong.

A new type of black hole to ask CERN about, as well as "bubbles of nothing"

New Scientist notes that a new type of black hole appears theoretically possible - a "black saturn":

Just like the central black hole, the ring would be defined by its event horizon, a boundary beyond which nothing can escape the object's gravity. The ring could be thin like a rubber band or fat like a doughnut, and the rotation would flatten it – "like a doughnut that you have squashed," says Elvang. The spinning ring would also drag space-time around with it, making the central black hole spin as well.

The black Saturn can only exist in a space with four dimensions, rather than the three we inhabit. In 3D, a black ring is impossible, so there are no big black Saturns out there for astronomers to spot – but at a microscopic level, they might really exist....

If extra dimensions exist, black Saturns might be produced in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Geneva, due to open at the end of 2007. Because there are so many ways to make a black Saturn, with different sizes of ring and different spins, they might even be produced in greater numbers than 'ordinary' black holes.

Actually, I had noticed the arxiv paper on this recently, but as it was not clear whether the authors thought they may be made by a particle accelerator, I did not post about it.

New Scientist notes that, as with any micro black hole, the physicists expect it will evaporate instantaneously into Hawking Radiation, but as long time readers are aware, a few credible scientists wonder whether HR really exists.

So, if a stable (non evaporating) "black saturn" is created, would its ability to absorb particles be greater that your "normal" micro black hole? How would a string of them created close together interact? Let a bunch of slow moving ones sink into the centre of the earth and what happens?

Of course, CERN's other big argument against there being any danger from micro black holes is that the moon and earth have been bombarded by cosmic rays with much higher energies for billions of years, so if they are still here any micro black holes that can be created are not planet eaters. However, as long time readers would know, there are arguments that question this analysis. (Basically, ones created at CERN may be slow moving and readily fall into the earth. Ones made by cosmic rays move fast and may zip right through most astronomical bodies)

(One day I will get around to tagging my old posts on micro black holes, but my first long article is here. For the others, a use the blog search on this page and they will all appear.)

My argument remains that CERN appears to have done a poor job at taking risk analysis seriously. They have very high expectation that HR is really the answer, even though this radiation has not been observed anywhere. (Yet it is possible that the decay debris could be observed in the Earth's atmosphere if evaporating micro black holes are being created there by cosmic ray collisions. It is just, I think, that not enough experimental work has been done yet to clearly answer the question of whether it is there.)

There is plenty of theoretical work coming out all the time that raises questions about the very nature of black holes and their decay process that should be taken into account in proper risk assessment. If CERN is actually looking at each case and coming up with good reasons why they are not a risk, even if HR does not exist, it would nice of them to tell us. Instead, it seems to just all be on a "trust us we know what we are doing" basis.

Here's one other thing I have been reading about lately: the idea of "bubbles of nothing" being created as part of black hole decay. Some of these, if I understand it correctly, could expand and be a danger. As noted in a recent arxiv paper:

Horowitz [20] has recently argued that a class of charged bubbles of nothing are a possible
decay product of black holes/strings/branes in quantum gravity. If true this would be a new,
unsuspected and disastrous endpoint of quantum black hole dynamics.

They don't explain exactly what they mean by "disastrous endpoint", but I would like to know more. (It may be that the authors of the paper think there is no danger anyway, but they do not write in anything resembling plain enough English for the layperson to understand their points.)

Has CERN looked at this work? Are there reasons to also question the "cosmic ray" analogy that I expect may also be used to argue against danger?

All question worth asking, I think, but getting answers is not easy.

Why 6 megapixels is all you'll need

While you are at the New York Times, have a look at this article explaining some tests done to see how much difference megapixels above 6 make to digital photo enlargement. Answer: most people can't tell the difference.

If a 6 megapixel camera is all that any amateur photographer really needs, and this is virtually the entry level size now, what features are the manufacturers going to come up with to entice us to keep upgrading?

Why England won't disappear under ice any time soon

An article in the New York Times explains why the Atlantic gulf stream current is not as significant as most people think. It is not solely responsible for keeping England warm, and so even if it weakens the glaciers would be some time coming. (I had read this elsewhere, but think I may have forgotten to post about it.)

Good to see such reporting in the NYT.

Obama reviewed

The Weekly Standard has a fairly detailed, and relatively sympathetic, review of Barack Obama's books, particularly his earlier autobiographical one.

The overall feeling you get, though, is that his life experiences so far mean that he is not exactly ready for the Presidency.

A Steyn recommendation

It's been a while since I recommended a Mark Steyn column, but this new one (from Macleans 12 Feb) is pretty good. (It's about D'Souza's controversial views on how much you can blame the Left for "causing" 9-11.)

Michael Ware - journalist?

I know that Tim Blair claims him as a friend, but the reporting style of Australian journalist Michael Ware has long irritated me.

To hear why, you should listen to his report on the state of Iraq on Radio National this morning. (You have to listen to it to get the full Steve Irwin-esque style of his delivery.)

He brings no sense of objectivity to his reporting, and in this he reminds me a lot of Robert Fisk.

Possibly encouraging news on glaciers

Two of Greenland's largest glaciers shrank dramatically and dumped twice as much ice into the sea during a period of less than a year between 2004 and 2005. And then, less than two years later, they returned to near their previous rates of discharge.

The variability over such a short time, reported online Feb. 9 on Science magazine's Science Express, underlines the problem in assuming that glacial melting and sea level rise will necessarily occur at a steady upward trajectory, according to lead author Ian Howat, a post-doctoral researcher with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The article is here.

I also see it appeared in the New York Times on 8 February. A Google news search indicates it has not been picked up in any Australian media. Typical.

Fat doctor

I saw a little of "Dr" Gillian McKeith on her TV show "You are what you eat" last year, I think.

When she insisted on checking some unfortunate woman's poo, and then gave it a very bad visual assessment, any vague credibility she had went out the window for me. After all, anyone can have a bad poo day, can't they? (Sorry, I won't go any further in explanation.)

There is a very long and detailed article attacking Gillian McKeith in The Guardian. She does indeed appear to have very dubious qualifications, but she aggressively attacks people who question her pearls of wisdom. Worth reading if you have ever seen her show.

About Obama

A column in The Times ridicules the prospect of Obama actually becoming President:

...Mr Obama is spectacularly underqualified to be President. He has been in the Senate for 25 months. There are probably craftsman repairing things in that building who have been there longer. The notion that being no more than an enthusiastic tourist in the American capital is the same thing as serving an apprenticeship to become the most powerful person on the planet is profoundly disturbing.

The United States once had a race problem in that black people were effectively excluded from the political process. Forty years on it has the reverse dilemma — those who would dismiss a white figure because he was unprepared for the most prominent national position will not do the same for a black one.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Howard & Obama

As usual, I agree with Gerard Henderson's analysis of this incident that is causing undue excitement on the anti-Howard side .

One point I want to make is about the use of parliamentary censure. It is, I reckon, one of the most overused tactics, as it seems to me to rarely make a difference to public perception of a matter. It is, instead, all about the atmosphere in Parliament itself, and about the confidence of both sides. Canberra journalists love it, because the theatre of Parliament is their bread and butter. But really, the question of who wins this type of debate, where the outcome of the vote is clear from the start and it will make no difference to public voting intentions, makes politicians appear far too absorbed in the game of politics, rather the serious issue of making and implementing good policy.

Just my opinion.

YouTube time

A search for David Byrne videos turned up this one today: his terrific version of "Don't Fence Me In".

Remember to sign that mortgage first

American Express charge cards are supposed to have no set limit on them, so I am told, but I don't ever expect to test it by using it for a Saturday night dinner like this one:

BANGKOK: A $29,000-a-head gourmet dinner in Bangkok is making some Thais feel a bit sick.

Fifteen international high-rollers from the world of real estate, casinos and shipping have already booked seats for the black-tie dinner Saturday, which comes with a price tag of 1 million baht, or $29,240, plus 17 percent service and tax...

The Mezzaluna manager, Deepak Ohri, defended the all-European menu and said it was impossible to start making price comparisons.

"We are not selling a meal — we are selling the whole experience," he said. "You cannot put a value on the experience."

Preparing for doom

The Norwegians really are preparing to build a "doomsday vault" to keep seed in? Very nice of them, but why would Norway in particular do this?

The decline of Christian Europe

Interesting article in The Times about the number of Christian churches closing, and mosques opening, in England:

Just one tenth of the nation’s Christians attends church, and churches are now closing faster than mosques are opening. Practising Muslims will, in a few decades, outnumber practising Christians if current trends continue.

Very "Mark Steyn" territory.