Cheaper way to make hydrogen

Technology Review: Cheap Hydrogen

This report is about promising new technology to make hydrogen from water via the sun. (The only current method of using solar power to generate electricity to electrolyse water is inefficient, the article says.)

This new method works directly on the water, and holds the promise of making hydrogen at the same cost as stripping it out of natural gas, which I think is the currently the cheapest option.

As the article notes, the big advantage of this technology could also be as a energy storage method for solar power stations. I assume this would be by using part of the plant to make electricity directly, and another part to make hydrogen to store for later burning if the sun goes behind clouds for days at a time.

Gittins on the surplus

Labor brings a fresh eye to the economy — and pre-election baggage

The link is to Ross Gittins' column on the Labor government's plan to build up a bigger surplus as a way of helping curb inflation. (Yes, just as you need more money to pay for your mortgage, you may be about to have less of it if you are employed by the Commonwealth, or rely on some of its benefits.)

I think I can take quite a lot of support for my skepticism of the value of this exercise from Gittins piece. His message is that it really could be politically damaging to Rudd, as he is taking on more direct responsibility for inflation, yet the budget cuts that are politically palatable are hardly likely to make any significant difference anyway. In other words, those who suffer from the budget cuts won't really be able to see the point of them in either the short or long term. Here's the crucial paragraphs from Gittins' column:

The most recent estimates say we'll end the present financial year with an underlying cash surplus of 1.3% of GDP. So for Mr Swan to say he's raised the target surplus for next financial year from 1% to 1.5% is to promise a change in the stance of fiscal policy of negligible proportions.

My guess is that, to produce a change capable of being taken seriously by the Reserve, Mr Swan will need to budget for a surplus of at least 2.3%. That is, one expected to be at least $10 billion higher than last year's.

The spending cuts needed to jump that hurdle would require much hard work, toughness and bravery on the Government's part.

But even if it can rise to the challenge, the political reward is uncertain. For one thing, a contribution from fiscal policy of this size is unlikely to substitute for more than one 0.25 percentage point rise in the official interest rate, and there are likely to be a few more this year beyond the one expected tomorrow.

If I read that right, Gittins is saying that even a budget surplus of 2.3% would save the equivalent of one .25% interest rise? Well, I'm sure those who are directly hurt by the budget cuts will appreciate the vast difference their loss will make. Ha.

Why bother with the exercise at all?

Weak

Nelson welcomes 2020 Summit - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This morning I heard both Brendan Nelson and Tony Abbot say that the Rudd 1,000 person weekend gabfest was a good idea. They obviously are nervous about not appearing overly cynical, as they haven't had time yet to gauge pubic reaction.

Prime Minister Rudd (argg, I'm still not used to that as a concept, and I was able to pretend over the Christmas break that it was all perhaps a dream) was on Sunrise this morning gabbling on about it, with David Koch indicating only the mildest criticism (that it is likely to be too short.) Michelle Grattan on Radio National thought it a good idea too.

Come on people! If John Howard had come up with this idea in the last 12 months, Rudd would have (rightly) said that it indicates a bankruptcy of ideas; a worn out government that needed replacing.

This is nothing like the Accord process that Hawke successfully used. I can't see anything other than things we already knew come out of this process. Someone start calling a spade a spade, please.

For what it's worth, here's my top ten ideas that I hope come out of it:

1. Kevin Rudd should never grow sideburns again;

2. Julia Gillard to settle on one hairstyle for the next 12 months, so as to cool down the over-heated haircutting industry;

3. Horses have become too politicised, and a Royal Commission into their faking illness should be held immediately;

4. Paul Keating's ex Prime Ministerial benefits should be made conditional on his undertaking anger management therapy;

5. The government should pay for a lifetime supply of baggy swimming trunks to Bob Hawke;

6. Tracee Hutchison to be tied to a marine buoy in the middle of Port Phillip Bay for 3 months if this is the only way she can stop dredging;

7. Melbourne to adopt the tourist slogan "Flake capital of the World";

8. Malcolm Fraser's pants to receive apology for being stolen too;

9. All imported Chinese food products to be licked by Chinese Consular Official in Canberra as a safety check before being sold on Australian market;

10. To cement our place in the new Chinese dominated world, Kevin Rudd to use an unlicked Chinese dumpling to kill wife, then marry a young girl from a well connected Chinese political family. Their first born son to sign unification treaty in 2060.

UPDATE: did you know it is hard to find the notorious pic of Hawke in his speedos via Google image search? I haven't succeeded yet. Did he buy the copyright of that photo and have it destroyed?

UPDATE 2: Gosh. I find that the harshest criticism of the gabfest so far has come from Larvatus Prodeo, and what's more I find myself in complete agreement with Mark Bahnisch! (TimT also makes the valid comparison with a weekend long episode of Insight.) Ooh, I feel old certainties crumbling under my feet, as I start preferring Bahnisch commentary over The Australian's. The End Days may be fast approaching. Kevin Rudd as the Antichrist has some plausibility, after all.

Not even a naughty boy?

Hicks not a terrorism supporter: Dick Smith - smh.com.au

Oh my Lord, Tim Blair will have a field day with this. In fact, I fear for the integrity of his stitches.

Dick Smith is quoted as follows:

"I was going to Adelaide so I rang David and said, 'Can I come talk to you because you're looking for a job and I'm happy to help with that but I'd want to get some answers to some questions'," Mr Smith told ABC radio in Sydney.

"I believe he is basically a decent Australian like his father, that we know well, and I don't believe he's ever been a supporter of terrorism.

"I asked him why he was in Afghanistan and it was quite different to what we've heard about ... (it was) all about trying to help independence movements.

"One of my views has changed completely and that is ... he shouldn't earn any money from this.

"But I've changed my view completely now because he's said he's never supported terrorism...

Well, any slight credibility I used to give to Dick when he goes on about air safety issues in Australia has just evaporated completely. (Actually, even as far back as the 1980's, I knew Air Traffic Controllers who said he didn't know what he was talking about, so I always took anything he said with a grain of salt. Turns out a barrel would have been more appropriate.)

UPDATE: Welcome Blair-ites. Come again some time.

Nice one, Phil

Euthanasia campaign row - National - theage.com.au

This would appear to be confirmation again that Philip Nitschke is happy to help a person with no terminal illness commit suicide. They just have to be bored with life, and (if the allegations here are true,) suffering from depression is not enough to deter his involvement.

Dr Nitschke told the newspaper it was "arrogant and paternalistic" to review someone else's decision about when to die.

"You're not in her shoes. She obviously made an assessment and decided her life was not worth living any more. You can't simply look at the medical records."

However, he admitted most people found euthanasia more palatable for severely ill patients. "I don't doubt if we had prevented her to have access to do what she did, she would have gone and done it in a far more common way."

What a creep.

Ballard reviewed

The intensely lived life of J G Ballard - Telegraph

This is a positive review of Ballard's newly released autobiography. Sounds well worth reading. Even though I am not generally a fan of his dark fiction, I think he writes well.

Batteries vs Capacitors

Electricity storage | Ne plus ultra | Economist.com

Will capacitors ever be able to replace batteries for electric cars? Maybe not, but they may have their role. Interesting article in The Economist.

Muslim revisionism, continued

A Better Place: Books: The New Yorker

Here's another long, well written and enlightening New Yorker book review: this time about a book that seeks to cast the Islamic invasion of Europe in the best possible light. ("God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215" by David Levering Lewis.)

The reviewer (Joan Acocella) casts a somewhat cynical eye over Lewis' approach, noting that Lewis' view is as follows:

The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as “the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior” to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.” It was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.” This is a bold hypothesis.

Don't you love Joan's wry understatement at the end?

It's a really good review, dealing with the general issue of the the motives of historians in a way that I generally agree with. Have a look at her last two paragraphs in particular. I'll extract the key points here:

If, as Edward Said wrote, the old history books were covertly ideological, the current ones tend to be overtly ideological, as each new generation of scholars rides in to rescue supposedly worthy peoples who were wronged by earlier scholarship and, in their time, by axe-wielding conquerors. But all these peoples, or all the ones in Lewis’s book, were conquerors. If the Christians took Spain from the Muslims, the Muslims had taken it from the Visigoths, who had appropriated it from the Romans, who had seized it from the Carthaginians, who had thrown out the Phoenicians. Lewis does not pretend that the Muslims were not conquerors; he simply justifies their conquest on the ground of their belief in convivencia, a pressing matter today.....

Each new problem in our history engenders a revision of past history. Many of today’s historians acknowledge this, and argue that their books, if politicized, are simply more honest about that than the politicized books of the past. This pessimism about the possibility of finding a stable truth may be realistic, but it seems to sanction, even encourage, special pleading—of which “God’s Crucible,” for all its virtues, is an example. ♦

Now for the silly, human bits I learned from the review:

The Vikings did not care to have palace schools. “They are the filthiest race that God ever created,” a Muslim ambassador wrote. “They do not wipe themselves after going to stool, nor wash themselves . . . any more than if they were wild asses.”

I am not entirely sure how certain one could be of the toileting habits of all Vikings; and maybe it was so cold in their homeland you could never smell them anyway.

The Muslims, both then and now, have quite the "thing" about personal hygiene:

Prosperity had softened the Arab élite. They liked the good life; they had little taste for war, where you couldn’t get a decent meal or a bath. (The Iberian Muslims felt strongly about personal hygiene. They had toothpaste and underarm deodorant.)

Well, now I am curious as to what 8th century underarm deodorant was made of.

Lewis also notes that, during the conquest of Spain, the Arabs were quite the exporters:

He inventories the great sacks of gold and silver and precious stones that, together with vast numbers of slaves and young women (harem-bound), they sent back to their caliph in Damascus, the capital of the empire. Included in the shipments were the heads, pickled in brine, that they had removed from Visigoth grandees.

Customs and quarantine declarations at shipping ports those days must have made for interesting reading.

Anyway, it's a great read for a Sunday.

Water problem

Green revolution could still blow up in our face - Opinion - theage.com.au

I wouldn't normally give much time to an apologist for Paul Ehrlich's predictions of disaster, but this article does deal with an interesting issue: the lack of detailed understanding about the underground water that is crucial for towns, villages and farms in many parts of the world.

The argument over the source of water in Australia's Great Artesian Basin is covered in this article. It would seem that the majority of scientists think it is being replenished, at least to some degree, as opposed to Professor Endersbee, who thinks it is being sucked dry and is incapable of replenishment. (I wonder how much the recent great floods of Central Queensland help contribute to replenishment?)

More general facts about the Basin and its water (the oldest of which has been dated at 2,000,000 years!) is on this factsheet.

I don't know that India would be devoting as much time to understanding and managing its underground water, but I could be wrong.

Black holes already here?

It's been a while since I posted anything from Arxiv about mini black holes. There just hasn't been much there lately, apart from papers doing more work on the issue of the expected signal they would leave via Hawking Radiation if they are created at the LHC.

However, this paper is of general interest, talking as it does about how you could detect a primordial (and by now pretty tiny ) black hole as it passes through the earth.

Being physicists, they don't like to describe in plain language what their figures mean. But, as far as I can tell, the black hole's passage would release less energy than an atomic bomb, but it would be spread over the course of its path through the earth, and a lot of it would go into sound waves.

In other words, it would seem not to be a disaster.

The size is interesting: if I can do the conversion correctly, they seem to be saying that primordial black holes should now weigh about 500,000,000 tonnes, yet have a radius of around .0000000000001 cm. (Hence their ability to pass through the earth.)

The idea that there may already be small black holes inside stars and planets is discussed here, in an article from 6 months ago that I appear to have missed. D'oh!

Ye olde psychiatrist

Have a read of this old, literally surprising, way of administering psychiatric "treatment", as noted over at the always interesting Mind Hacks.

For Tim Blair

A lifestyle altering cancer operation has not changed Tim Blair's wit, as he writes amusingly today of the pain physiotherapists put him through after his operation.

Well, Tim's just lucky that this device is not used by physios - yet:




My lower back feels sore just watching this.

Opinion Dominion Solves Modern Relationships

Where have all the men gone? - Times Online

If you enjoy reading articles by women about how hard it is for them to find a man for a relationship and procreation, this one is not bad. It has a few funny lines, like this complaining about women who argue that it is women's fault:

What do they think we are doing? Take India Knight’s attack, in The Sunday Times, on what she called “the sweetly retro notion of mooching around pining for Mr Right as the (biological) clock ticks away”. “My advice to all my girlfriends is, just do it,” she announces. “Get pregnant. Don’t wait. Mr Right can turn into Mr Wrong overnight: there are no certainties.”

And we wonder why men are afraid to commit, when women like me are depicted as hormonally charged sperm-bandits interested in nothing beyond the urge to have a child.

The writer complains that she is finding that men change as they age, with over 30 year olds turning into commitment avoiding "man-boys". One of them puts it this way:

“In theory I’d like a family,” says one. “But it doesn’t feel urgent and in the meantime I have a great life with plenty of sex – all on my own terms. Love has sort of disappeared from the menu. And yes, now I’ve learnt that I can, I mess women around in ways I’d never have done in my twenties.”

Horror stories from friends abound, too. “I spent most of last year with a guy who used to weigh me every day and refused to sleep with me if I got too heavy,” admits a colleague. “How bonkers was that? But the awful thing is that once you pass 36, you find it’s single men rather than single women who are the prize commodity.”

How bonkers indeed that any women would let her boyfriend insist even once that he had to know if she was currently gaining or losing weight.

But here's the crucial part where I think women do go wrong:

I don’t know of any woman my age (35) who hasn’t spent several years in love with a boyfriend, only to have to give up on the relationship after realising that children and commitment were not going to happen for ages, if at all.

It seems to me sad but true that many men will avoid long term commitment as long as possible, and enjoy the sexual and social benefits of a girlfriend while taking on none of the responsibilities. But - why the hell do the girlfriends in question let this go on for so long?

Even if they don't co-habit, anyone who on a regular basis has been sharing meals and their bed with a friend, and has been taking short holidays together as well as socialising with each others friends, must surely have a pretty good idea of the character and intentions of their partner within (let's say) 12 months. Actually, 12 months is being generous, and would think 6 months would keep men more on their toes.

But if a women lets this type of "full privileges" relationship go on for years at a time, she is simply encouraging that man, and others who know that this happens, to do the same and never commit. Why should they when there is a plentiful market of women who let them sleep with them for years before forcing a decision.

Advances in contraception have no doubt helped this situation develop, yet as was noted earlier this week, unplanned pregnancies still happen. I would have thought that the possibility of contraceptive failure increasing (as it surely must) over time, is another reason for women to set short and realistic time limits for when a relationship involving sex must stop.

Where am I wrong?

Clearly good news for Iraq

Iraq's revival boosted as oil production rises to 2.4m barrels a day - Times Online:

Oil production in Iraq is at its highest level since the US-led invasion of 2003, reaching 2.4 million barrels a day, thanks largely to improved security measures in the north.

The country’s Oil Ministry will shortly invite international oil companies to bid for contracts to help Iraq to boost output at its investment-starved “super-giant” oilfields. Production is expected to pass the prewar level of 2.6 million barrels by the end of the year, and Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi Oil Minister, told The Times that he expected production to reach six million barrels a day within four years.

The International Monetary Fund predicts that Iraq’s economy, boosted by rising oil revenues, will grow by more than 7 per cent this year, compared with 1.3 per cent last year.

Good news for the dolphins - possibly

Fears of mercury poisoning cast a pall on dolphin hunt in Japan - International Herald Tribune

Finally, it would appear that publicity about the high mercury levels in the meat of slaughtered Japanese dolphins might be causing some local reaction against the dolphin hunt.

It's interesting to note that the recent "mercury in tuna sushi" story from New York said that the FDA "action level" for mercury in fish is 1 part per million, and the highest level found in the New York samples was 1.4 ppm.

In the dolphin meat, one sample was 100 ppm, and the Japanese "safe" level for fish generally is .4 ppm, yet for some reason it says that this does not apply to dolphin meat! Pilot whale meat has come in at 11 ppm.

Extraordinary figures, hey?

Harmless fun drug (sarcasm)

BBC NEWS | Health | Warning over cannabis lung harm

The report notes that a couple of small studies appear to confirm the suspicion that cannabis use on a regular basis is dangerous for the lungs. It notes:

[a] study of 10 patients who were treated for chronic respiratory problems at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

All admitted intense cannabis use for at least a year. They had developed bullous lung disease, a condition where air becomes trapped in the lungs, at an average age of 41, compared to 65 for tobacco smoking patients.

While we are talking drugs, I note that the rumours of Heath Ledger being a significant drug user are appearing more and more likely to be true. I had forgotten how oddly he had acted in some interviews in recent years, but somewhere since he died I saw a snippet of the studio interview in Australia throughout which he peeled an orange. I have heard mention again, too, of how he turned up to some media things in the States dressed looking like he had been living rough on the streets.

All this supports my scepticism of the often repeated claim that many regular illicit drug users have a well hidden habit which would surprise their co-workers and friends.

It is, I reckon, more often the case their friends and family certainly notice strange behaviour, and do suspect drug use, but are too polite to bring it up.

Send in the psychologists

China suffers food shortages as snowfall continues | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Have a look at the video in the above story. China without trains in the run up to the holidays looks like hell.

Oddly, some parts of the government respond with this:

The municipal government of Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang, set up a team of 16 psychologists as tempers frayed among workers anxious to get home before new year celebrations begin next week.

Zhao Guogiu, the in charge, was urging passengers not to cry and encouraged them to find other transport home.

Yes that will help. Somehow, I don't expect much subtlety from a Chinese trained psychologist.

The report also notes that the snow has brought big disruption to food supplies, including to Beijing.

It seems a pretty fragile place, China.

The U shaped life

Stephen Moss: It's official: happiness resumes at 50

It's a short article suggesting why a recent survey indicates that happiness peaks "when we are 20 and 70, but slumps in the middle":

In your 20s and 30s, you think there is some big secret that is being withheld from you. But there is no secret. No one has a clue what they're doing or why. By 44 you are distressed to discover there is no secret and that life's glittering prizes are made of tin. But then comes the getting of wisdom. As Oswald observes, "When you get older, you've learned to accept yourself."

Well, that's something to look forward to, then.

Still skeptical

Aerogenerator could help UK meet wind energy target | Technology | guardian.co.uk

This article talks about a new proposed wind turbine that is vertically mounted like a rotary clothes line; rather than horizontally like the current type. It does seem that there is a good case for changing the design, but I still wonder how the structure will go in a strong gale in the North Sea.

How to build windfarms at sea

Use ships on legs, of course. (Article contains photo worth viewing.)