On bin Laden and the relativists

Comment is free: Backing the bombers

This article refers to another one by Martin Amis in which he hits out at those who are semi-apologists for Islamist terrorism.

I like this comment that follows it, on the hypocrisy of much of Europe. (Perhaps it's a little over-stated, but the sentiment seems right):

The US has coddled Europeans for 70 years now, which has helped produce a child-like mentality in Europeans, where there's little thought of consequences. So, for example, Europeans can pretend they're champions of human rights, when not a one of them has ever put their lives on the line or made any meaningful sacrifice for some other country's freedom or rights. They can pretend that running a foreign policy based primarily on giving their businesses access to the most horrendous regimes is somehow moral. Freud called this type of thinking 'magical' thinking, characteristic of childhood, when the child has the mother's breast 'magically' appear whenever it cries.

Camus called this European mentality 'Christianity for others, pagansim for oneself.'

When you're a child, you think Jesse James was really cool for robbing banks. When you get older, you realize that real people died in those bank robberies, so he wasn't really that cool at all.

A propos of nothing..

Comment is free: Nicks nixed

I have no idea why this comment piece appears in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian today. But it a bit surprising to hear that France only stopped using the guillotine in 1977.

Silly politics

Capitulation - Possums Pollytics

I just had a quick read of the post above, which goes into a lot of detail about what the Cosby-Textor analysis of the issues revealed.

Howard haters are taking so much joy at the moment at the likely looking defeat of the Liberal government that are not prone to be troubled by the obvious question: why has appearance of Rudd as leader even (apparently) turned several issues from one previously Liberal "owned" ones to Labor "owned" ones?

The difference that Rudd has made to the polling on issues is surely at the heart of the puzzlement of the journalistic commentators. The force of one personality is significant to politics (look at Mark Latham,) but there seems something a little weird about one person being able to convince everyone that his government would be best on a range of issues now.

Any reader who has long disliked Howard need not bother commenting here along the lines of "well, it's just that he has never really been popular", because that is not really addressing my point.

My personal theory is still that Rudd is in league with the Devil, or at the very least using Jedi mind tricks. He will probably look like Yoda when he gets older too. (He already speaks in a funny fashion, with that auto interviewing style.)

A documentary worth seeing

In the Shadow of the Moon - Rotten Tomatoes

It's about the Apollo program, and has received very good reviews.

Getting naked at LHC, and black hole bombs?

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure I have never seen CERN, or anyone else, mention the possibility of a naked singularity being created at the LHC rather than (or as well as) mini black holes. Yet it would appear that some credible physicist types think it is still an open question.

Here's an extract from the relevant paper, which is from 2002:

There is thus no compelling reason to discard the possibility that the collision of charged particles produces a naked singularity, an event which would probably be indistinguishable from ordinary particle production, with the naked singularity (possibly) behaving as an intermediate, highly unstable state. The phenomenology of naked singularities is probably rather different from that of black holes, as they are generally expected to explode in a very sudden event instead of evaporating via the Hawking process (at least in an early stage; see, e.g., [20] and Refs. therein).

We should however add that the present literature does not reliably cover the case of such tiny naked singularities and their actual phenomenology is an open question. A naked singularity is basically a failure in the causality structure of space-time mathematically admitted by the field equations of general relativity. Most studies have thus focused on their realization as the (classical) end-point of the gravitational collapse of compact objects (such as dust clouds) and on their stability by employing quantum field theory on the resulting background. However, one might need more than semiclassical tools to investigate both the formation by collison of particles
and the subsequent time evolution [20]. In particular, to our knowledge, no estimate of the life-time of a naked singularity of the sort of interest here is yet available.

I thought that naked singularities had been ruled out as a general concept a long time ago. (They are, as I understand it, the heart of the black hole without the cloaking event horizon.) It would seem from the above that no one has a clear idea how they would behave, or how long they would last. It seems to me something that the safety review for the LHC should address.

Another paper I recently found while trawling the 'net also raises issues I would like to see better explained. This is from someone at Princeton in 2002, and has the cheery title : "Explosive Black hole fission and fusion in large extra dimensions".

The paper seems to be mainly about "explosions" that could be caused by the evaporation process of micro black holes, including those that could be created at the LHC. What remains very unclear to the lay reader is whether the amount of energy involved in this is nothing to worry about, or not. But the paper does end with this curious section:

One cannot avoid considering bomb construction using either fission or fusion ignoring the problems of creating and handling small black holes. A black hole could be prepared close to its critical size ready to fuse and then activated by adding matter and reaching “critical mass”. Timing the fission process is more difficult, since the time for decay is determined by the Hawking radiation which cannot be hurried artificially, but perhaps it is possible to balance the Hawking radiation with incoming radiation until activation. However, these bombs have a big disadvantage, since if one is in possession of small black holes, one could collide them with very similar explosions occurring both in emitted energy and time scale (being a classical process), and since igniting the phase transition seems to be the more complicated process it would probably be disfavoured, and luckily not used for destructive ends.

Err, I wish physicists would be clear when they are using terms like "bomb" and "explosion" in papers which are discussing micro black holes whether they are presenting stuff which indicates possible danger.

This mention of a black hole bomb (and by the way there is another type I haven't mentioned yet) is completely unclear as to whether it is talking science fiction stuff centuries away, or something plausible anytime you can start creating mini black holes at an accelerator.

Some clarification is deserved, as with naked singularities.

(Oh, and the fact that micro black holes may be being created in the atmosphere 100 times a year is relevant to this too, I know. But I still worry about the "stationary" black hole or naked singularity as an issue at the LHC, as naturally occurring ones would normally have high velocity. Also, I am sure I have mentioned a paper recently which suggested that micro black holes may be harder to create than we think, even with large extra dimensions. Perhaps they are made by fluke in the atmosphere only very occasionally, causing events like Tungaska or some unaccounted for atomic blast signals detected by satellite? All possibilities should be addressed, I reckon.)

Good point

9/11 theories as factless as those of Bush - Opinion - theage.com.au

Christopher Scanlan makes a good point in his criticism of 9-11 conspiracy theorists:

The September 11 conspiracy theories are like a left-liberal version of intelligent design. Just as the adherents of intelligent design invoke a great designer whenever they come across some part of the natural world that they personally can't explain, the September 11 conspiracy theorists invoke the White House whenever they can't account for the events of that day....

In the world inhabited by conspiracy theorists, even the absence of evidence is itself turned into evidence of how large and how successful the cover-up has been.

In the same way that supporters of intelligent design lead away from an explanation of the natural world, the September 11 conspiracy theories lead us away from any deeper understanding of the attacks, into a fantasy world in which the US has no enemies — except its own leaders.

I am not stridently against all aspects of the intelligent design argument, by the way, as I have much interest in the anthropic principle when it comes to cosmology, but I still think the comparison is quite valid.

Howard's way

The Australian is suggesting a Federal election will be called this week for October, and that John Howard will stay on as Leader.

For all the poll driven speculation that Howard might resign before an election, I just can't really see what sense it would make in light of the polling not so long ago that had indicated that Peter Costello would lose votes for the Coalition rather than gain them. If the likes of Andrew Bolt and even Janet Albrechtsen are going to let the polls determine who should lead, shouldn't they at least be consistent and accept Costello's polling as relevant too?

And as was noted by Lenore on Insiders today, Costello would surely be 'tainted' by his past support for all major government policies, and you can't imagine him being leader for a month and coming up with any significant new direction.

I find Andrew Bolt's input into Coalition fortunes particularly galling. He has painted himself into a corner on greenhouse scepticism, and I would bet money that his columns on this have influenced some in the Liberal backbench to maintain scepticism, which in turn (as conservative Harry Clarke argues) has almost certainly harmed the government's attempted message to the electorate that it does take greenhouse seriously now. Thus having helped create one problem for the government, Bolt blames Howard for staying around too long.

For what it is worth, I think the arguments for Howard resigning just don't pass muster.

As I said a few posts ago, I reckon the Liberals have to come up with some surprising and new policy initiatives during the campaign to make up ground. I hope the policy boys & girls have been hard at it while Howard has been otherwise distracted by APEC (which, incidentally, I can't see giving the government any significant bounce. The security level is going to be seen as overkill, and the Federal government will probably get blamed even though it was the New South Wales Labor controlled police who were seen as being rough with a couple of protesters on the TV last night . I think John Howard probably just can't believe his run of bad luck lately.)

UPDATE: Tim Blair and Andrew Landeryou come out in support of Howard staying on. Yay.

International adultery

A couple of months ago, I briefly mentioned a book comparing different nations' cultural attitudes to adultery ("Lust in Translation".) Here's a link to a fairly long review of the book which provides many more interesting snippets of information. For example:

The figure that is often heard - that more than half of married men, and a quarter of married women will cheat on their spouses over their lifetime - turns out to be both highly problematic and overestimated. These later figures come from Alfred Kinsey's studies in the 1950's, and they are based upon badly unrepresentative samples (46). This was exacerbated by later studies by Shere Hite and Cosmopolitan magazine which placed adultery figures as high as 70% for both men and women. It turns out that in the U.S. only about 20% of men and 10% of women have extramarital sex over their lifetimes (50), although, as Druckerman notes, statistical evidence in this area is strangely hard to come by.

Yes indeed, adulterers should be wary of consoling themselves that "everyone does it" if such belief is based on statistics in Cosmopolitan.

As for America's love of therapy:

...while there were only 3000 marriage and family therapists in the U.S. in 1970 (98), that number had risen to 50,000 by 2004 (100), a staggering 1600% increase!

The review talks about how American therapy is heavily geared towards complete disclosure to the partner. Contrast this:

The French, who surprisingly commit adultery about as little as Americans do, view the situation quite differently. In order to protect their spouses from the pain of their adultery, French cheaters rarely reveal the truth of their affair to their spouse, even when the affair has come to light. And they rarely feel guilt over living their double life.

Russians, meanwhile, are apparently the most active adulterers around. Funny, I always find it hard to imagine a lot of sex going on in any country that is freezing for much of the year. Must be something to do with coming from Brisbane; it makes my mind concentrate simply on how cold I am whenever I visit somewhere with daytime temperatures below about 5 degrees.

On the home front

I've been too busy with domestic duties to blog. Here's what I have learned over the past few days:

* my 4 yr old daughter needed day surgery (for a dental procedure.) She charmed the nurses, which is entirely understandable (I am a biased father) and was a very good girl. I have no particular worries about relatively minor procedures like this, but I found it a bit more disconcerting than I expected to hold her hand and watch her fall asleep under the anaesthetic gas. It's too much like one's imagination of being with someone at death; that's the problem.

* Speaking of anaesthesia, I was talking to a doctor recently and the topic of suicide and anaesthetists came up. He said it was true that they had a higher rate, due to their familiarity with the ease with which the right drugs can end it all. I mentioned that, as far as stress goes, I would have imagined that their job was something like that old adage about war: mostly a lot of sitting around being bored, interrupted by the occasional period of absolute terror. I was told that it's not like that for them because many different types of surgery require blood pressure to be well controlled to limit bleeding, and the surgeons can be demanding throughout the procedure that the anaesthetist keep the pressure within a very tight range. That can be difficult, apparently. Interesting...

* I picked up the new (actually, second hand) car. It is amazing the stuff you get in cars these days for the price. I am not into cars in any significant way: the one I am replacing (which is the one I use for work) is 13 years old. Getting this new car has reinforced what I have said many times: why does anyone really need a car worth over, say, $50,000 these days? The one I got is 18 months old, cost barely over $20,000, yet has all the features that I can imagine ever really wanting. If I was benevolent dictator (and if government over regulation actually worked, which I know it doesn't) the law against manufacturers wasting time on building luxury cars would be high on my agenda.

* New, bigger cars, involve unwanted re-arrangements of garage junk.

Tell us what you really think of tattoos, Bryan

Thought Experiments : The Blog: Ponder Post 10: Tattoos?

Bryan Appleyard really doesn't like tattoos. It's a funny post.

The rise and rise of the fashionable modern tattoo is like watching Kevin Rudd's popularity in the polls: all logic suggests it must come to a stop sometime; indeed a reversal in fortune is long overdue, but for some mysterious reason it just keeps on going up. You'll all regret it in 20 years, you know!

Education Schmeducation

Why are the ideas of what makes for good teaching method, and a good education system overall, in such an ever-changing mess? Live for 40 years or more and it seems you will witness the educationists change their minds at least a dozen times, covering everything from cuisinaire rods (which seemed to fly in and out of fashion within barely a few years,) whole word versus phonetics or some sort of compromise position, how best to teach foreign languages, the culture wars that affect the teaching of history, whether homework is or isn't all that beneficial, and even what age is best for kids to start school in the first place.

Witness this article from The Times on this last issue. Apparently, kids can start in the English school system at a particularly young age compared to their European counterparts:

The latest government figures indicate that around 80 per cent of children enter school before their fifth birthday and last year there were almost 800,000 four-year-olds in our primary schools. By comparison, children in France, Portugal, Belgium, and Norway start school at 6, while the school starting age in many Scandinavian countries is 7.

The article quotes some personal experience:

Solvie Jorgensen moved to the UK from Norway when her daughter had just turned 4. She initially opted to defer school entry for a year: “It seemed much too early: in Norway Freya would have had two more years of nursery.” But Freya pleaded to be allowed to start, so they enrolled her in November. “I was pleasantly surprised, but still think there’s a far greater emphasis on numbers and letters from a young age in British schools than in those back home. There, formal teaching doesn’t start until 6, and even then teachers are more concerned about children being happy at school and making friends than whether they can write their name and count to ten.”

In Australia, meanwhile, it seems to be taken for granted now that "prep year" is important and should be put in place everywhere, even though it seems it is all play based and just a glorified kindy.

Oh, I'm sure there will be the studies that show how much better this is for children down the track, etc, etc; but the problem is it seems you only ever have to wait a few years before contradictory studies will be out on virtually any area of education. (Well, this is the impression one gets, anyway.) For example, from The Times article:

...a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development indicated that by the time they reach their teens, the gap between the achievements of students from professional and working-class backgrounds is wider in the UK than in most other countries. Caroline Sharp, of the National Foundation for Educational Research, sums it up thus: “There appears to be no compelling educational rationale for a school starting age of 5 or for the practice of admitting four-year-olds to reception classes.”

My particular grudge against educationalists at the moment is the way that maths is being taught to my 7 year old son.

I can't be the only parent out there who is irritated by the heavily verbal way in which basic maths concepts are taught now, surely? It's hard to explain here, but there are new terms which are used to try to get kids to understand the concepts. (I forget the sorts of phrases, but it includes "sharing numbers", or "friendly numbers" and ...oh god I can't remember them now, but the parents need a glossary to understand the new terms being used with 6 and 7 year olds to help them understand the concepts of addition and multiplication, etc.)

The problem is that, if your child, like mine, is behind the 8-ball on language, this really stuffs him up in understanding the highly verbal (there's probably a better word, but I can't think of it now) way they are trying to teach maths too. Simple rote learning of tables did not have this same problem. "Oh but it was so mechanical and they didn't have a deep understanding." Bah!

I have mentioned this (very politely) to my son's teachers, and they seem to quite agree with me that the way they have to teach it is problematic for someone like my son, but there is not much they can do about that, apart from giving him extra help in maths, although even that will be highly verbal too.

I find it very irritating that, even in maths at the level of grades one and two, phrases with a specific contextual meaning unknown to parents are being used. Sure, everyone is ready for high school maths to be difficult for the parents, but for them to not even understand the terms being used in homework at Grade 2? It probably looked good to some educational psychologist in some study or other, but in a few years they will probably pull back from it for the exact reason I am complaining about here.

I also trust that this is not something peculiar to the school my boy is attending. I hope I have also made it clear that this is not a complaint about the teachers in the classroom, about whom (at my son's school at any rate) I have no complaint at all. It's about the educational theoreticians, and the apparent sense in which either changes are made with no strong evidence as to effectiveness, or the evidence changes over time anyway.

Any reader who is a parent of primary school kids are welcome to share their views. (Although I suppose if your kid is writing mini novels and top of the class at maths, you probably wouldn't have even noticed the problem.)

The luck of the Adams

Scott Adams' analytical reaction to being the victim of a bird crap attack made me laugh quite a bit.

Aeronautic engineers not required after all

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god - Yahoo!7 News

Nuclear Japan

All cost bets off if Big One hits nuke plant | The Japan Times Online

This article talks about the nuclear industry in Japan, and notes this:

A year ago, the government revised its 1981 guidelines for nuclear safety, obliging operators to make plants sturdy enough for quakes above the previous standard of magnitude-6.5. Still no new higher magnitude minimum was specified, and individual utilities were left to determine appropriate levels themselves.

That is cold comfort for anybody seeking guarantees of safety should the Big One hit. Records show that at least one magnitude-7 or greater quake occurs almost yearly, while the Meteorological Agency forecasts a magnitude-8 quake will strike the Tokai region in central Japan "in the near future."

It does surprise me that a country as seismically unstable as Japan has gone into nuclear with such enthusiasm. Australia, on the other hand, should have no such worries at all.

The decline of romance

Both this week's Time magazine and The Guardian have articles which lament the current state of how romance is dealt with in the cinema. The Guardian article is particularly acerbic, ripping into the spate of recent films which are basically "male loser made good by the love of a good woman" films. I can't say that I have seen the films that Joe Queenan complains about, but I suspect I would share most of his reaction.

It is true when you think about it: Hollywood has become very bad at decent romance stories for quite a number of years now. The last really good romantic film with both male and female interest that I can think of would probably be Shakespeare in Love, and that is nearly a decade ago now. I saw it first on an airplane, and on the old projection screen set-up (not the new fangled seat-back LCD,) and still I felt affected by the ending.

In the Time magazine article, Richard Curtis, whose films I actually don't care for, does say something that sounds about right:

"If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind," he notes. "Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental."

There is also the point that some real life love stories really are so remarkable that you imagine if they were written up as fiction they wouldn't be believed. Case in point: this week's Australian Story episode.

Science and politicians

As both science and politics make regular appearances here, how many readers out there know who the current Science Minister is in the Federal government, and who Labor has for a shadow Science Minister?

I couldn't remember either without checking, which probably says something about the low priority that Science gets in the Federal government here. (It's Julie Bishop as the minister, and Senator Kim Carr as the Shadow. Both have science bundled up with other areas which almost certainly take up more of their time.)

Julie Bishop is an ex-lawyer, although a fairly high flying one by the sounds. (Who'd have guessed that you could be a partner of big law firm if you have a funny stare like that.)

Kim Carr is an ex teacher from a technical college. (At least he is not a union hack.)

But really, you get the feeling that science would be far, far down on their list of private interests.

I wonder when was the last time we had a science minister who really had a genuine, pre-existing deep interest in science?

Why can't I be science minister? It would be like Kim Beazley in Defence: the personal interest would make the job a pleasure. Except you have to deal with other politicians too, and I am sure that can ruin your day.

Micro black holes (continued)

This paper isn't new, and it may or may not have not great relevance to the issue of safety of micro black holes at the LHC. (Unfortunately, I am not an expert on gamma radiation.) But the paper is interesting for two reasons:

1. It suggests that if the LHC can produce micro black holes, then atmospheric collisions from cosmic rays may produce about 100 micro black holes a year for the entire surface of the earth. (Astute readers will recall, though, that these are different from accelerator created ones because they would have high velocity from the way they are made.)

2. It also says that even micro black holes (or, if I am reading it right, their remnants) could create high energy radiation. As this is hard to summarise, I'll just copy it here:

A charged particle being accelerated by a black hole can produce g -rays with energies in the multi-TeV range before the particle passes beyond the horizon radius provided that the curvature gradient of the space around the black hole is large enough. Such curvature gradients occur in quantum black holes, black holes whose masses are of the order the Planck mass. A calculation taking into account special relativity (but not general relativity) shows us that to produce g -ray energies in the 10 TeV range a single electronic charge would have to be accelerated by a black hole with a mass equal to five times that of the Planck mass.

The microscopic black holes needed to produce ultrahigh g -rays may be the remnants of primordial black holes. Such black holes can be produced by
• Inflationary horizon-scale fluctuations
• Density fluctuations at phase transitions and bubble formation and collapse
• Baryon isocurvature fluctuations on small scales.

Large-mass primordial black holes (M > 1015 gm) decaying via Hawking radiation [5] as described by the canonical ensemble in 4 space-time dimensions, (dM/dt)∼ −M−2, would have decayed to a Planck-size mass in the present epoch.Microscopic black holes produced in this manner could be stable if quantum gravity effects terminate the decay process.

Copious microscopic black hole production can also occur if large extra dimensions exist. In this scenario black hole production can occur as the result of the collision of particles with total center of mass energy above the effective Planck scale, which can be as low as the electroweak scale mew ∼ 1TeV. Black holes could thus be produced in collisions of high energy cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere. As we show in the next Section, such black holes may live long enough to create ultrahigh g -rays even without taking quantum gravity effects into account.

Seems possibly relevant to me to the issue of the safety of the LHC at CERN, if its going to be creating thousands of little black holes and black hole remnants, many of which are going to hang around rather than zipping off into space.

Today's science reading assignments

* Technology Review talks up hybrid and plug in cars, but isn't optimistic that American companies will be the ones to succeed in this field.

* Purdue University keeps talking up its hydrogen generating technology (and they keep using the same dorky student photo).

* A telescope in Hawaii gets a new digital camera that definitely won't fit in your pocket to look for small asteroids. (The Howard government would gain some science credibility if it would re-instate the tiny funding it took away for looking for asteroids from down here too.)

* Those Germans sure know how to make buying a beer easy:

A new system that scans customers' fingerprints and deducts the grocery bill from their bank accounts has taken supermarkets in southwestern Germany by storm and is being picked up by hardware stores, school canteens and even the country's ubiquitous beer gardens.

Cheers!

By the way...

I am probably not the first to say it, but I really think that Kath & Kim might have "jumped the shark" with last week's episode. The story thread which did it for me was the part about Kim and her "do it yourself" botox kit.

That it would have dire consequences for Sharon was entirely predictable, and although they have presented the results of cosmetic surgery in an over the top fashion in a previous series, the Sharon as Frankenstein schtick was really just pushing an old idea too far.

The fact that Workchoices got an unfavourable mention didn't worry me. In fact, I thought it may be a bit satirical from a conservative aspect to show it as a concern of Kath in an episode where she was played as especially gullible and dumb.

A half serious, half stupid, post

Further to my last post, there are two clear events which may be contributing to the latest Newpoll: the huge inconvenience to Sydney-siders of APEC, and the horse flu epidemic being seemingly blamed on government run quarantine deficiencies.

I've seen it said many times (especially at LP) that, rather than inconvenience all of Sydney, they should have held the meeting on some resort, with Hamilton Island most frequently suggested. However, a quick Google around the net seems to indicate that it can accommodate 5,000 (and how many of them would be in apartments which are normally families of 3 to 5 sharing?)

A news story from July says that originally there were 7,000 visitors expected, but it had dropped back to 5,000.

As Hamilton Island is about the biggest single, isolated resort I can think of in Australia, the point seems to be that it was simply not a realistic prospect to ever plan to hold it there.

As for horses: those with flu shown on TV never look particularly sick to me. Sure, some die, but horses seem to be fragile flowers who can die of the weirdest things. (The world is divided into two camps: those who believe horses are noble and magnificent creatures, and those who think they are stupid and inscrutable. Guess which camp I belong to?)

I have a theory that there is a horse conspiracy to feign sickness either because:

* they would just like to have a good rest from all that running around, or

* they are all secret Labor supporters, and they know how to create bad PR for John Howard.

As I don't trust horses at the best of times, I think they have all been organising in secret at the racetrack, deciding on a "Cough for Kevin" policy or some such.

Just a theory...