Money for nothing?

Why the rumored discovery of the Higgs boson is bad news for particle physics.

So, maybe the Higgs boson has been discovered already before the Europeans even get to turn on the Large Hadron Collider. That would be funny; sort of.

Reality TV run its course?

Bryan Appleyard hates reality TV about as much as I do. He makes this excellent point about those who think criticising Big Brother and its ilk is elitist criticism of popular taste:

...the pop-elitist defence is always the same – we’re giving the people what they want. This is, of course, ridiculous. It implies that, before Big Brother, viewers were sitting around thinking, “Hmmm, now what I’d really like is a show about a bunch of dysfunctional freaks stuck in a house for three months.”

The truth is that the show and its popularity are an invention of its makers. They choose to make it, they are not compliant servants of popular taste. They don’t like to hear this because it jerks them out of their cool, postmodern amoral-ity by dropping the moral buck right back on their desks. But let’s get real: you did it, you’re responsible.

From what little I notice of its coverage, the current Australian series of Big Brother is being seen as terribly dull. I would guess that it may have one last season to go before even its fans tire of the format completely.

The God will let it rain on South East Queensland again. (That is just my private theory.)

Tipler and his scientific Christianity

I mentioned in March that mathematical physicist Frank Tipler had a new book coming out called "The Physics of Christianity".

It's now published, and, as predicted, it comes in for some severe rubbishing from other scientist types. You can read about it on a post at Cosmic Variance here.

Some commenters still have some sympathy for Tipler, which is nice to see.

The love-in continues

Phillip Adams writes another love letter to Paul Keating today. A new addition to Keating: The Musical (which, according to Adams, ".. is a phenomenon, packing every venue it has played") should be it ending by Adams in drag playing the fat lady singing to Keating waving from a balcony, Evita style.

Does Keating actually ask for this? I heard Adams say on his radio show last week that Keating had rung him that day, not happy with the comparisons being made between him in 1996 and Howard today.

Barely a week later, and Adams has a column complaining on Keating's behalf how the great Paul is still adored by the public, yet not given the respect he deserves.

If Howard does win another election, I would hardly be surprised if Keating were found dead alone in his study, by the use of some antique French pistol, with his scrapbook of his achievements open in front of him on the last page. Not that I wish him ill; he just seems unhealthily obsessed with his place in history.

Yes, but how much will they cost?

40% efficient solar cells to be used for solar electricity

Sounds good, but as Wikipedia notes:

Solar cell efficiencies vary from 6% for amorphous silicon-based solar cells to 40.7% with multiple-junction research lab cells.^[2] Solar cell energy conversion efficiencies for commercially available mc-Si solar cells are around 14-16%. The highest efficiency cells have not always been the most economical — for example a 30% efficient multijunction cell based on exotic materials such as gallium arsenide or indium selenide and produced in low volume might well cost one hundred times as much as an 8% efficient amorphous silicon cell in mass production, while only delivering about four times the electrical power.

The reporting on new developments should therefore concentrate on the cost of new types of solar cells, not just energy conversion efficiencies.

Bad news in Iraq

14 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq Over Weekend - New York Times

The range of the type of killings described in this report is what interests me:

In Mosul, a Christian priest was gunned down as he left his church after finishing Sunday services. In Baghdad, a director of the Iraqi Central Bank and his brother were shot to death in the dangerous neighborhood of Amel. Thirty-one corpses were found scattered about the capital, where sectarian murders have once again been on the rise.

Insurgents struck repeatedly in Diyala, the militant-dominated province that borders Baghdad, Iran and Kurdistan. A suicide car bomber parked at a crowded marketplace killed nine people in Balad Ruz. Insurgents set up a fake checkpoint near Baquba, the provincial capital, and raked a bus with gunfire, killing three. And south of Baquba, nine corpses were found handcuffed and shot.

It is hard to see why such sectarian killings would not escalate spectacularly in the event of rapid departure. But it is also easy to understand how US patience with the with the country cannot last for ever.

There's more pessimism in another NYT article by Edward Wong, and it is worth reading too. Interestingly, he notes that some Shia see the problem as follows:

The belief of the Shiites that they must consolidate power through force of arms is tethered to ever-present suspicions of an impending betrayal by the Americans. Though the Americans have helped institute the representative system of government that the Shiites now dominate, they have failed to eliminate memories of how the first President Bush allowed Saddam Hussein to slaughter rebelling Shiites in 1991. Shiite leaders are all too aware, as well, of America’s hostility toward Iran, the seat of Shiite power, and of its close alliances with Sunni Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia.

Clooney and Grant considered

Is George Clooney the new Cary Grant? - Film - Entertainment - theage.com.au

While on the topic of Hollywood, this Age article (reprinted from The Guardian) is an interesting comparison between Clooney and Cary Grant. (And it looks cynically at what passes for Hollywood stardom these days.)

I can't say I have spent much time considering Grant's appeal before, but this seems true:

You see, North By Northwest is the kind of vehicle that enabled stars to exist. By the standards that function today - by the standards of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck - it is a great film, an entertainment that turns into a moral tale.

Time and again, the apparently "easy-going" Grant found himself in stories in which his character had to make up or to change his mind. That was hardly accidental. It was the self-awareness of a man who was himself a constant worrier - and who had "lost" his mother in a quite remarkable way. One day she was there in Bristol; the next she was gone. It was more than 20 years before he learned the awful truth.

The article doesn't tell us what happened. Wikipedia to the rescue again:

An only child, he had a confused and unhappy childhood. His mother Elsie (who had apparently never overcome her depression after the death of a previous child in infancy), was placed by his father in a mental institution when Archie was ten. His father (who had a son with another woman) told him that she had gone away on a "long holiday", and it was only in his thirties that he found out she was still alive, and institutionalized.

Sad, hey. The whole Wikipedia entry about Grant is interesting. He had issues of all sorts, it seems.

Pirates III

I recently wrote about watching the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie at home, and being reasonably impressed. This inspired me to see "At World's End" last night at the cinema.

Unfortunately, while not a complete waste of time, it is the weakest of the three movies.

As many reviewers have complained, its main problem is with clumsy plot exposition. Books about screen writing invariably mention at some point how cinema is primarily a visual medium which should show the plot, not have the characters standing around explaining it. It's as if the screen writers for Pirates have just completely forgotten this by the third film. I find it puzzling that they could not see the deficiencies of the screenplay in this respect.

The whole Davy Jones/Calypso background seems a complete waste of time, and I would have thought that the use of flashback would have been much better. (And surely it is not hard to fit in flashback by use of some magical device in this type of movie.)

It's also ironic how in my post about the second movie, I noted the impressive naturalism of the special effects. I specifically mentioned my dislike of scenes where is clear that the number of things in a shot (ships, people, whatever) have just been multiplied by effects.

Well, "At World's End" does this several times, and also has what I complained about in the last Star Wars films: backgrounds which are clearly all one special effect.

Now, some of the effects are still often very impressive for their type. It struck me that it took some chutzpah for all involved (the screenwriters, the movie producers, director and special effects team) to even decide at the start that they could make the climatic battle work. (The sequence involves two ships fighting each other while both swirling around the mouth of a gigantic maelstrom, and it really is a triumph for a realistic rendering of such a fantasy ocean sequence.)

Like I said, it's not a complete waste of time, but it continues the tradition of the last few years of my wife and I going to see only about one movie a year at the cinema, and being a bit disappointed with it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention three other things about the movie:

1. the way they get out of Davy Jones locker (which is sort of like purgatory, I suppose) seemed quite appropriate, and it was an impressive sequence.

2. The talk of the green flash interested me, because I am not sure that many people would have heard of it as a real phenomena. (It appears in astronomy and other books, but I doubt it gets a mention in anyone's school education.) It is the type of thing that I imagine would seem mystical to sailors of old, so I thought that was an intelligent bit of writing.

3. Keith Richard's face looks easily 50 years older than the rest of his body.

Suspicions correct

Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment

Further evidence that a lot of what Europe is doing about global warming is being fraudulently handled.

Interesting...

Global warming | A stairway to heaven? | Economist.com

This article reports on a recent, and completely novel, suggestion for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. It involves lasers and radio waves beamed into the sky, and sounds highly speculative as to whether it would work.

Good to see new thinking, all the same.

Mark up one for global warming

Warmer world gets wetter �-�Satellite observations suggest climate models are wrong on rainfall.

From the above article:

Global warming will increase worldwide precipitation by three times the amount predicted by current climate models, according to a study based on two decades' worth of satellite observations.

The discrepancy between the models and the data might mean that the models are wrong. Or it might be that two decades is not long enough to test their predictions. But researchers believe that the work is a step towards understanding the thorny issue of how global temperatures affect rainfall.

Warmer air holds more water. Satellite observations and climate models agree that each rise of 1 °C in global temperatures increases the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere by about 6.5%.

But climate models project that global warming will also bring weaker winds, leading to less water evaporating from the ocean and counteracting the effect of warming. Models predict that worldwide precipitation — which must match the amount of evaporation — will increase by only 1-3% for each degree of future global warming.

The CSIRO predicts more drought for Australia as a result of global warming, but according to these researchers:

It is currently impossible to predict where additional precipitation will fall, says Wentz. Wet areas may get wetter, but drought-plagued regions might also get some relief.

While I am not a global warming sceptic, my hunch has long been that the CSIRO climatologists are over-confident of their models, and also appear to be amongst the most pessimistic in this field.

Any suggestion that Brisbane might get more rain as a result of global warming is very welcome at the moment.

Verily, the chicken will lie with the pig..and eat it

Food safety fears over animals fed to animals-Life & Style-Health-TimesOnline

The outbreak of mad cow disease convinced most people that it is not a good idea to grind up one normally vegetarian animal to feed it to another, but the Europeans are wanting to try it again, it seems:

Tests to allow the remains of animals to be reintroduced into farm feed for the first time since the BSE crisis are being carried out by European scientists, The Times has learnt.

The EU is spending €1.7 million (£1.15 million) on research which would allow the remains of pigs and chickens to be used as fodder...

The proposal comes from the European Economic and Social Committee, a statutory advisory committee to the EU. It follows pressure from farmers and food manufacturers concerned at the high cost of disposing of carcasses.

A minute from the committee says that pig meal should be allowed for chickens and that chicken remains should be fed to pigs.

Seems to me the problem could be solved by Europe having more carnivores to eat the carcasses. To buy a steak, a German should have to prove ownership of a dog, cat or (even better,) a lion.

China's problems, continued

Will Hutton: Calm down, the rise of China's power is being exaggerated

It's been a bit of a slow week for interesting stuff to post about.

This morning's article in The Australian gives some more reasons to worry about China.

I get the impression that there is one group of economists who are a bullish about China being able to handle its problems, and a smaller group who are much more pessimistic. The pessimists' case sound much more convincing to me.

Sex lives of the young and religious

Slate has an interesting article on a new book looking in detail on how religious belief affects sexual behaviour in young Americans.

Evangelical teenagers like to talk celibacy, but aren't good at doing it:

Teenagers who identify as "evangelical" or "born again" are highly likely to sound like the girl at the bar; 80 percent think sex should be saved for marriage. But thinking is not the same as doing. Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17: Regnerus reports that 13.7 percent of evangelicals have, compared with 8.9 percent for mainline Protestants.

One of the reasons that this group has more sex is given as this:

It also includes African-American Protestant teenagers, who are vastly more likely to be sexually active.

In the Economist article I mentioned yesterday, the incredibly high rate of children to black single mothers was discussed in some detail. I meant to mention then that this is something I don't really understand in light of the quasi-religiosity of the black community. (Even the single black mother with several children to different fathers quoted in The Economist mentioned how she hoped God would give her a partner. Maybe he would help more if she didn't sleep with every boyfriend she met.)

I just find the question of how black American culture got to where it is today very puzzling. (Not just on the issue of sex, but the whole hip hop and drug scene, and the attitude the men take towards women generally. I guess the Italian mafia were good at going to Catholic Church too, and that was another example of hypocritical behaviour I have never understood.)

But back to generic teenagers and sex. I don't really see what is wrong with pointing out from a very early age that if you have enough sex, even while trying to use contraception, the chances are that (sooner or later) you will end up with a baby. (Or at least a pregnancy to ruin your day.) If you don't want a baby yet, don't have sex. At least not with another person.

I should have been a sex education nun.

Marriage in America

Marriage in America | The frayed knot | Economist.com

This is a really interesting article about modern American marriage. Here's a key section that surprised me:

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

I for one did not realise that middle class divorce had gone down so much. The article also mentions this:

...those who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce.

Many people will find this surprising. A survey of teenagers by the University of Michigan found that 64% of boys and 57% of girls agreed that “it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married in order to find out whether they really get along.” Research suggests otherwise. Two-thirds of American children born to co-habiting parents who later marry will see their parents split up by the time they are ten. Those born within wedlock face only half that risk.

I think that the higher divorce rate for couples who live together before marriage is also not well known in Australia. I strongly suspect you would get similar survey results in Australia, with most younger people seeing it as a worthwhile step to see if the couple really is "compatible". Sounds like a plausible theory; it's just that reality goes and does its own thing.

All of the article is well worth reading.

Bye bye Cindy

Sheehan 'resigns' as protest leader

I like this line:

She said the most devastating conclusion she had reached "was that Casey did indeed die for nothing ... killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think."

Err, yes, time to retire with tin foil hat firmly in place, Cindy.

She does have her followers though. The SFGate site asked a bunch of people what they thought of Sheehan's leadership. From Oakland, one woman responds:

Sheehan inspired people by speaking straight from the heart. Unfortunately, speaking truth to power didn't work against power gained and maintained through calculated deceit, aided by a spineless press. America's redemption, like 1930-40s Germany, may now require counter-propoganda as adept as the Bushies', or intervention from outside powers.

Wow. There are people so against against wars that they would prefer to, um, see one being fought on their own soil. Just nuts.

I also see that one Michael Ponce of Oakland says this about Cindy:

She brought the issue to our coward president. It's disgusting how the president of this country never met with her, especially when her son died for his war.

I assume he believes the plastic turkey too, as he clearly believes the hype over the reality. From Wikipedia (such a hard source to find):

Sheehan and other military families met with President George W. Bush in June of 2004 at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington, nearly three months after her son's death. In a June 24, 2004 interview with the Vacaville Reporter published soon after the meeting, she stated, "We haven't been happy with the way the war has been handled. The President has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached." She also stated that President Bush was ". . .sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis … I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."^[4]

Yes, Cindy ran a 3 year campaign complaining how unfair it was that she couldn't meet the President....again.

Sounds fun, as long as it doesn't kill you

New Attraction Simulates Shuttle Launch at 17,500 MPH

Rudd's secret put to the test

As I more or less expected, the Mrs Kevin incident appears to have no detrimental effect on Kevin's popularity; quite the opposite it would appear.

One reason for this is, I suspect, that people are thinking that any criticism of Rudd's family is not nice, and they decide to punish the Liberals for it, despite the fact that it is the media coming up with the stories, not the government.

Secondly, surely everyone has noticed that when Rudd says "we'll take a battering in the polls" or "this is embarrassing", it doesn't hurt his polling at all. I think he has recognised and will keep using the magic formula. Maybe it is some sort of Jedi mind trick, or a pact with the devil, and the way for the public to be reassured that it isn't supernatural forces at work is to see it deliberately put to the test.

My challenge to Kevin is therefore to demonstrate that he can be unpopular by doing something really wrong. How about being caught on camera having sex one night with Julia Gillard on the grass under the flagpole on top of Parliament House? If all he does, while brushing grass off his suit, is to look sheepish and say "well I have to acknowledge this is very embarrassing, it will put a strain on my marriage and I expect to take a battering in the polls" and next week there's another 5% increase, then we will know there is something sinister about him.

Update: I wrote this before I read Matt Price in The Australian this morning. He makes a similar point:

At this rate, Rudd could be captured on video wearing leather bondage gear while snorting ice - and the punters would still find some excuse to look kindly on the Labor leader.

I bet in his heart Price wanted to use sex with Gillard as an example, but he has to get on with Rudd and his minders.

Waking up to a surprise

Man catches leopard in his bedroom | Jerusalem Post

A resident of the Ben Gurion Field School in the Negev caught a leopard on Monday morning after he woke up to find it chasing after his pet cat in his bedroom.

The man, Arthur Du Mosch, pounced on the leopard, holding it in a head lock before it was taken away.

Clad only in underwear and a T-shirt, he lunged at the leopard, grabbed it around the neck, then pinned it down for 20 minutes - until park rangers arrived on the scene.

Some points:

1. I didn't know they had leopards in Israel.

2. I didn't know they had people called "Arthur" in Israel.

3. Why would you bother pinning down an errant leopard in your bedroom for 20 minutes?

4. Who rang the park rangers, and didn't that person say to Arthur "Man, what are you doing, put it outside and let it go"? Or was Arthur clever enough to hold a leopard in a headlock and make a phone call at the same time?

Deep

Alex Byrne: Knowing Right and Wrong

Found via Arts & Letters Daily, above is a lengthy but (mostly) comprehensible discussion of meta-ethics. It's quite good, if that's the type of thing that interests you.

While I would like there to be a clearly logical and unassailable way to argue that all humans have an obligation to observe the application of a basic morality to their behaviour, I can't see that there is any way to get there via rationality alone, without the leap of faith into the belief that one's actions in life have consequences after life.