Depends from where you are looking

BBC NEWS | Business | Globalisation splits rich and poor

A funny result from this survey:

Half of all people polled across 34 countries say that the pace of globalisation is too fast, while 35% say globalisation is going too slowly.

But concern about globalisation is strongest among the world's richest countries, where it is closely correlated with a belief that the fruits of economic growth have been unfairly shared.

In many of the world's poorest countries, however, where large majorities say that the benefits and burdens of economic development have not been shared fairly, people are more likely to say that globalisation is proceeding too slowly.

Re-thinking global warming responses

Global-Warming Jujitsu - TierneyLab - Science - New York Times Blog

The Cato Institute has issued a report that disputes the Kyoto approach of cutting emissions as the most appropriate thing to do in response to global warming, even if you assume that the worst estimates of the amount of warming.

This will be, to put it mildly, somewhat controversial.

Still a worry

Iran's nuclear programme | As the enrichment machines spin on | Economist.com

In case you missed it, The Economist last week had a long, detailed article criticising the way the US intelligence agencies have stuffed up diplomatic efforts to deal with what is still a genuine problem. As the article says:

Unchanged is the suspicion hanging over Iran's nuclear intentions. Mr Ahmadinejad has never been able to explain convincingly why Iran is the first country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant without having a single civilian nuclear-power reactor that could burn its output (the ones Russia has all but completed at Bushehr will operate only on Russian-made fuel).

Reuters today has a fairly long article about it too.

Trouble coming, I fear.

UPDATE: Even Russia doesn't like Iran's recent long range rocket test.

The big, big picture

Don Page is a physicist who has worked with Stephen Hawking on issues in quantum cosmology. He is also a Christian, and some recent talks he has given on issue of God and the multiverse have popped up on Arxiv.

If you like thinking about the Big Picture, this article by Page is well worth reading. As The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy said:

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Well, just start taking the idea of the multiverse seriously, and even "space" starts to look puny. As the abstract of Page's talk puts it:

Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (1081) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space is vastly larger. Quantum theory suggests that there are very many different copies of space of the same basic kind as ours (same laws of physics). String theory further suggests that there may be many different kinds of space. This whole collection of googolplexes of galaxies within each of googolplexes of different spaces within each of googols of kinds of space makes up an enormously vast universe or multiverse. Human beings seem to be an incredibly small part of this universe in terms of physical size.

Page gives a potted history of the increasingly successful efforts of humans to measure the universe. Here is one blackly humorous episode:

Many countries cooperated in sending expeditions to distant parts of the earth to take these measurements of the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus. Wars and bad weather hampered many attempts, such as the one made by the unfortunate Guillaume Le Gentil of France [3]. In 1761 he could not land at Pondicherry, a French colony in India, because the British had seized it, and he could not make his measurements from his ship that was tossing about at sea. He stayed eight years to make measurements of the 1769 transit (the last transit before 1874) and this time was able to set up his equipment on Pondicherry, which was restored to France by then. But after a month of clear weather, the sky turned cloudy on the morning of the transit, and he again saw nothing. He nearly went insane but gained enough strength to return to France, which took another two years. After being away for nearly twelve years in his fruitless mission to help measure the size of the solar system, Le Gentil finally got back home to find that his “widowed” wife had remarried and his possessions had gone to his heirs.

Of course, there are still a lot of scientists around who think all talk of multiverses and the string theory Landscape barely counts as science, but this hasn't stopped the religiously inclined from starting to see if it can be incorporated into their world view. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong notes that even the Mormons are talking about this. (But then again this is perhaps to be expected, as their idiosyncratic idea of gods who have children who create worlds to further populate may make it easier for them to incorporate the multiverse into their theology.)

Don Page has a similar go at the topic, in his talk entitled "Does God so Love the Multiverse". (As you may guess, he expects the answer is "yes".) This paper is heavier going that the one about the scale of the universe, but I will again make the redundant statement that, if you like this sort of thing, you will like it.

Go away

'Jihad Sheilas' speak out - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I watched Jihad Sheilas last night.

If ever there was a show that could make you feel like reaching through the TV screen and slapping the interviewees, this was it.

I found the younger one the most irritating. Eight children to 5 husbands, and now many of them left in Australia while she lives in Africa with her latest husband and their 2 kids. (It was never explained who they live with, and she is only in her 30's.)

If Muslim husbands are generally as erratic as her life would indicate, it is hardly a good advertisement for the faith. It would have been good to hear specific questions about who she blamed for the failure of so many marriages.

The older one (Rabiah Hutchison) came across as capable of great evil, and I expect most viewers would have mixed feelings about the government refusing to give her a passport. (She would happily leave the country permanently if she could.) Still, I suppose it is best to keep watch on her here rather than let her try to hook up with her former Taliban mates.

That said, the show was done in a more tabloid style than your usual ABC fare. There were many points at which answers by the interviewees were cut off before they had finished, and indeed the reason as to why they found Islam attractive in the first place was skated over completely. (The women complain that they thought that was to be the focus of the show, but it must have become clear during the interview that it was about their lives generally.)

It was good television nonetheless, but I would have preferred more of a "Four Corners" style rather than "A Current Affair".

Hitchens' mistake

Christopher Hitchens and the racist Jewish court | Jerusalem Post

It's interesting to read criticism of Christopher Hitchens for promoting an urban myth of sorts: that Orthodox Jews would refuse to help a non Jewish person in need of medical treatment on the Sabbath. (Hitchens also claimed rabbinical court rulings had upheld this.)

It appears that this is completely untrue.

Libertarian against euthanasia

Forget a new euthanasia law | Mick Hume - Times Online

What a strange week. First, I find myself agreeing more with Mark Bahnisch than News Ltd; now I find a column by "Britain's only self-confessed libertarian Marxist newspaper columnist" against euthanasia law reform.

Let it be noted that it is not only conservative-ish Catholics who are leery of euthanasia.

Forearm lust

Female Muslim medics 'disobey hygiene rules' - Telegraph

Interesting story about concern in several English hospitals that female Muslim staff are refusing to expose their forearms for the purposes of a good handwashing. Which is a bit of a problem because medical authorities there have decided that, in the interest of reducing drug resistant bugs being spread by staff, hospital doctors and nurses are now to go "bare below the elbow". (The topic was the subject of a recent post here.)

From the article:

Dr Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said: "To wash your hands properly, and reduce the risks of MRSA and C.difficile, you have to be able to wash the whole area around the wrist.

"I don't think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally."

The Muslim medical association has different ideas:

"No practising Muslim woman - doctor, medical student, nurse or patient - should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow," it said.

Dr Majid Katme, the association spokesman, said: "Exposed arms can pick up germs and there is a lot of evidence to suggest skin is safer to the patient if covered. One idea might be to produce long, sterile, disposable gloves which go up to the elbows."

Oh come on. Surely with the fractious nature of teaching authority in Islam, they can round up at least a few religious leaders who will issue a fatwa to the effect that bare forearms, in the context of being in a hospital and not wanting to kill your patients, is a Good Thing. If your patients are sick enough, they are hardly going to get hot and bothered by the sight of a forearm, are they? (I can vaguely understand why a shapely calf was once considered sexy enough to hide; but just how much sex appeal can a forearm manage?)

As a conservative politician says:

"Perhaps these women should not be choosing medicine as a career if they feel unable to abide by the guidelines that everyone else has to follow."

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.