Unpopular vicars

So, there was a vicar in England with some anger management issues (spitting on a parishioner was probably not a good way to keep on good terms with the Bishop.) Who knew that this sketch on That Webb and Mitchell Look was based on fact?:



Incidentally, the ABC has replaced Webb & Mitchell with another couple of Brits on "The Armstrong & Miller Show". They are rather hit and miss, as were W&M I suppose, and the style of the humour is often similar. But I find Webb & Mitchell much more likeable and overall significantly funnier.

I also see that Channel 7 has had big ratings with repeats of the Vicar of Dibley, with episodes from 1994! Years after it was shown on the ABC. This must drive ABC programmers nuts: knowing that the 'plebs would like a show if only they watched it.

However, I should hasten to add that personally, I can't stand Vicar of Dibley. Dawn French can be funny, but I find her acting way too hammy in this show. And it's not just her: everything about the attempted humour of the show fails for me.

Lurid crime reports of Inida (continued)

Youth kills grandmother for denying porn

There's no need for a court when you have The Times of India on your case:

Denied his daily staple of porn and horror films on his personal computer, a youth from an affluent family decided to get rid of what he thought was the root cause of his misery.....

On April 3, Abhishek smashed Shantabai's head with a stone pestle, killing her instantly. He also stabbed Viren to make it look like an outside job. During interrogation, he tried to mislead the police by saying that Shantabai's head had been smashed by an intruder. He claimed that he had tried in vain to catch the intruder.

However, the police found discrepancies in the statements given by Abhishek and other family members. Abhishek was picked up on April 5 and subjected to questioning.

On Tuesday, he finally cracked and admitted that he killed his grandmother and stabbed his brother.

(This is not a report from a court sentence: it is simply the report of the alleged confession.)

Your next car might be a hybrid

Hybrid cars aren't just for smug yuppies anymore. - Slate Magazine

An interesting article on how successful Toyota has been with their hybrids, and how they are only likely to get more popular in the near future.

Slate has also recently done some debunking of the anti-Prius comparison between a Hummer and the hybrid.

And in other pro-Prius news, they are capable of very substantial mileage on initial batteries. (410,000 km according to this story.)

Big picture time again

Here's a couple of Arxiv papers of interest:

The first one: a paper from January pointing out that finding a Higgs boson of just the right mass at the LHC could in fact confirm that the universe won't expand forever, but will undergo a "big crunch" in the distant future. (I would much prefer the universe to have a big crunch than accelerate into nothing. A big crunch leaves open Tipler's Omega Point, for which I retain a fondness.)

The second one: a recent paper talking at great complicated length about black holes as "fuzzballs". The thing is, black holes could hardly be described as well understood. Although there are astronomical objects which have the right weight and behaviour which would be expected of black holes, some still argue that they aren't "true" black holes at all, and there are questions about the exact nature of the horizon, etc of any black hole. When you get down to Planck size, I think the uncertainty is worse.

Anyway, although the paper seems to indicate that they still expect "fuzzball" model black holes to radiate with something like Hawking Radiation, I am not clear as to how they think this solves the information loss issue. (I have only skimmed this paper quickly.)

As for the relevance to the LHC and micro black holes, I would like the CERN safety review to take into account alternative models for black holes, just to see if they raise any safety issues in terms of potential for no HR, or increased accretion rates, etc.

Reads like fiction

Man with suicide victim's heart kills self - Life- msnbc.com

This is one of those real life stories that might strain credibility if you read it as fiction. (More remarkable than the fact that the heart recipient shot himself, as did the donor, is that the donor's young wife married the recipient!)

A witty Katz column today

Praise be to the Lord our Jobs - Danny Katz - Opinion - theage.com.au

The daily carrot routine

Health - Life & Style Home - smh.com.au

See the link to a story about a new book on anorexia, and how difficult it can be on the families. The way it can manifest does sound truly bizarre:

It [the book] features Hannah, who would peel and steam one frozen carrot at a time, weigh it, have three mouthfuls, turn the plate 45 degrees and have another three mouthfuls. When the carrot was gone, she would repeat the same routine with the next carrot from the freezer.

"It nearly drive us bonkers," her mother said. "It would take her up to 2½ hours each night to eat … 200 calories. It was mind-blowingly annoying. And we'd have to have the exact products in the right part of the fridge or she'd throw a hysterical screaming fit."

Such behaviour was extraordinarily difficult for families to understand, Professor Halse said.

Yes, it's hard to overstate how annoying that would be for the parents. Honestly, the first time your teenager did that routine for dinner, wouldn't you want to shake her and yell "pull yourself together", or something similar. Not that it would help, of course.

It really is one of the strangest medical conditions, and why is it that (as far as I know) it is only a relatively modern illness? Did a teenager's inclination to obsessive/compulsive behaviour 50 years ago just get directed into some other aspect of life?

Skin derived stem cells showing some promise

Technology Review: Reprogrammed Stem Cells Work on Parkinson's

Further confirmation in this story that embryonic stem cells may be unnecessary for useful therapy after all. It also indicates that unwanted cancer as a result of stem cell therapy might be able to be avoided.

Can I order my brain rejuvenation upgrade for 2030 now?

Things that turn up in libraries

The Tablet reports that:

Six previously unknown sermons of St Augustine of Hippo have been discovered at Erfurt University in central Germany, a find that the head of the university's library department, Thomas Bouillon, has hailed as "most significant".

As St Augustine died in 430AD, these are pretty old records relating to a very important figure in religious history.

Augustine could be something of a spoilsport, though:

In another sermon about St Cyprian, who was martyred in 258, Augustine criticises the practice of holding drunken orgies on martyrs' feast days.

Dang.

Just how bad can a little nuclear war be?

Limited nuclear war would damage ozone layer

Pretty bad, it would seem:

Mills and colleagues found that a regional nuclear war in South Asia would deplete up to 40% of the ozone layer in the mid latitudes and up to 70% in the high northern latitudes.

"The models show this magnitude of ozone loss would persist for five years, and we would see substantial losses continuing for at least another five years," says Mills.

The scenario they looked at was for 100 Hiroshima size detonations between India and Pakistan. (Those two countries apparently have 110 warheads between them, so the figure is relatively realistic.)

On the other hand, it would cool global warming for quite a while. But those who sunbathe to get warm will all get skin cancer from no ozone.

On the whole, not a good idea. (Incidentally, what sort of early warning systems do both of these nations have? It wouldn't hurt to have international co-operation to make sure these countries can't launch by mistake.)

Screen your genes before lighting up?

Genetics and lung cancer | Smoking out the smoking gene | Economist.com

I'll step on Harry Clarke's territory now and link to an interesting article about genes and lung cancer. Two paragraphs give you the flavour:

Paul Brennan and Christopher Amos both agree that something significant is going on in the part of chromosome 15 studied by deCODE. But they have concluded that genetic variation there acts directly on a person's susceptibility to lung cancer, rather than acting indirectly by modifying his smoking behaviour. That does not mean the gene or genes in question actually cause lung cancer. Rather, it means that they amplify the effects of smoking instead of the amount of smoking....

DeCODE has already announced it will add rs1051730 to the standard screen it offers to those who wish to know their susceptibility to diseases. The day is not far off, therefore, when those who take the essentially irrational decision to start smoking tobacco will be able to find out in advance exactly how foolish they are being.

The Scientific American version of the story is here.

Hey, you! Pay attention!

On 3 April, I posted about an article in Nature which contained some strong criticism of the forecasts of the IPCC as being overly optimist in projections for the potential technological reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. (Nature quotes someone as calling it a "bombshell".) Nature followed up with commentary from several global warming figures, some criticising, some agreeing with, the original commentary. (To get to the articles now, go to the John Tierney link below and follow his links. News@Nature's way of stuffing around with certain links only being available for 3 days irritates me no end.)

So why hasn't anyone in the Australian blogosphere picked up on this? I would've thought it was of great interest to many bloggers I read regularly: Catallaxy, Harry Clarke, Quiggin, even Robert Merkel at LP. One would have thought it might even be of interest to Tim Blair or Andrew Bolt from a greenhouse skeptic's point of view. (I even emailed to Bolt about it, as I thought it a story deserving publicity.)

So why have precisely none of the above (as far as I can see) noted the story? (Not my post; the story itself.)

For those of you interested (such tiny number that there seems to be!) there is more about the article in John Tierney's column in the New York Times of 3 April.

A Google news search indicates that no Australian media outlet has reported the story either. What's wrong with you all?

More "Uh-oh"

Iran Begins Installing More Centrifuges - New York Times

Back, and dreaming

Last night I slept the deep sleep of the just-returned-from-camping. Nothing makes you appreciate your own bed more than a couple of nights sleeping in a sleeping bag on inflatable mattress. The other thing about camping sleep that I could do without is the disruption caused by the 30 meter walk to go to the toilet at 2.30 am. Nice to see the stars at that time of morning, though.

I also had a very protracted (or so it seems) dream last night in which I was trying to find a building in the city, and realised suddenly that I was in Melbourne, not Brisbane, yet I had no idea how I had gotten there. I rang my office and tried to explain as best I could, I think coming up with the theory that I must have slept-walked onto a plane. But the other odd thing about the dream was that I kept thinking "well, if nothing else, this will make for a really interesting blog post."

Maybe that is a sign I have been blogging too much?

I think it also occurred to me in the me in the dream that it seemed like a dream, except I was sure it wasn't. Those dreams are usually good to wake up from, except for the series of "proof of flying" dreams" I had some years ago.

I will leave you all now to analyse my subconscious, while I catch up on a day's work and attempt to post something of interest tonight.

Some decent stuff about mini black holes

Before I go away for the weekend, I thought I would point out these developments.

At last, at least one physicists' blog goes into a lot of detail about what they think would happen if mini black holes from the LHC did not evaporate via Hawking Radiation. This is well worth reading, although my feeling is still that it a pretty complex question and may yet be the subject of some uncertainty.

It seems to me, for example, that Bee's explanation of a mini black hole passing through the earth and hitting a subatomic particle does not coincide exactly with Greg Landsberg's explanation in 2006:

They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton. At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material....

Compare that to Backreaction:

Nobody knows exactly what will happen when a tiny black hole hits a nucleon. On the scale of the black hole, the nucleon is about 1000 times larger in diameter, and a very dilute cloud of a few quarks and gluons. It may be that the black hole hits one of these partons, as they are called, thus disrupting the nucleon and carrying away a fraction of its mass. There is no theory to describe this, and there are all kinds of problems involved, as to what happens to confinement, colour neutrality, and so on. But whatever happened, in the end, the black hole may have gained, in the most extreme case, the mass of a nucleon.

It may be that they are in complete agreement, if Landsberg's explanation was given in more detail. But it reads to me like there is some uncertainty.

That said, they both agree that very, very few mini black holes should have less than escape velocity. That's good, although again it appears to me that Backreaction's estimate and Landsberg are different.

Another physicist spends a lot of time pointing out that the very limited experience in physics of litigant Walter Wagner, and getting upset that the media does not report this clearly. But on the more important point of why Wagner is wrong (in detail), we haven't heard from Steinberg yet. (Maybe he will just agree with Backreaction's analysis.)

Really, if physicists are unhappy about Wagner getting publicity over this, why didn't they simply address the issue in detail when asked about it over the last couple of years by the likes of James Blodgett. Instead, the reaction was (by and large) very dismissive, especially once you asked "what if HR does not exist?" I know that Greg Landsberg did go into a fair amount of detail in answers to James Blodgett, but he was pretty much the exception, as far as I know. (And he eventually stopped taking questions anyway.)

Only now, it seems, are we getting the detail which indicates that it was never a completely stupid question.

Short holiday from saving the universe...

The longer Good King Kevin stays overseas, the more of a goose he looks. (The follow up video of how he reacted when questioned about it at a news conference suggested that he is simply not getting enough sleep.)

I'm not sure that any of his cabinet back here are a suitable Sheriff of Nottingham; perhaps Gillard could be the Sheriff of Altona, if she was actually game to say much without Kevin's minders' approval. (Gawd, can't she now afford a move down the road to Williamtown, at least.)

As I like to imagine that I look like a slightly older Jonas Armstrong (hahahahahaha), all of this Robin Hood talk is by way of explaining that my family (and another) is off to set up an outlaw campsite near the forests of Kilcoy over the weekend, from which we will seek to at least "rob" free wine from a few local wineries, and muck about in boats and tangle up fishing line, while figuring out ways to encourage Kevin to stay overseas.

I probably can't post until Monday. Come back here over the weekend anyway so my sitemeter doesn't get depressed.

Bob Ellis pines for low technology

Unleashed: The young and the restless

I don't know that Bob Ellis was being entirely serious in his latest "Unleashed" column. ("Unleashed", incidentally, seems to be a government run service where those ignored at their own websites can seek a larger audience.)

Anyhow, Bob thinks that youth today binge drink, do drugs and don't marry because - there jobs are all crap:

They have jobs that demean and shame them, jobs that offend their conscience and wound their pride, jobs out of which they have no clear hope in their lifetime of getting out of, into jobs that are any better.

Where once they might hope to get a university degree in Roman history or music composition or quantum physics and a job thereafter teaching it, they now find these things unavailable to them.

Well, I'm still waiting for Bob Ellis' definitive paper on quantum gravity to appear at Arxiv, but it has yet to appear. Too many red wine stains, I suspect.

When Bob was a youth:

....the jobs young people got in their teens were plentiful and most of them agreeable.

I would like to see people of Bob's age surveyed and see what they have to say about that. According to Bob:

Electronic robot slaves have taken over the nicer, unconflicted jobs, and all that are left for humans to do are the nasty, humiliating, shaming, lousy jobs.

Come on, I think Bob's having a lend of us, don't you think? How about this line:

And so it is and so it goes, with bad jobs everywhere, jobs from which you might be sacked at any point, and rents going through the roof and frequent foreign travel no longer an affordable option, that young people, yes, take drugs and hit the piss and go down on one another as if there's no tomorrow. I would too in their shoes.

Funny he should mention foreign travel: in Bob's youth that usually involved a one way sea trip to England to work and save up money for the return leg in 2 year's time. There was no way the average youth could afford return holiday travel to New Zealand, let alone the rest of the world.

Did Bob miss out on a seat at the 2020 Summit? What a pity!

The end of the earth, but at least there's less fermented shark

Melting ice caps may trigger more volcanic eruptions

The story is about Iceland. The speculation is that decreasing ice cover there will let some of the volcanoes on the island become more active. (The decreasing weight pressure of the ice cap lets more magna get closer to the surface is the idea.)

This may also happen in other parts of the world, including Antarctica.

As one of the comments following the story notes, this could arguably be somewhat of a mixed blessing. Just the right amount of extra volcanic activity would increase aerosols in the atmosphere which has a cooling effect that can last for years. On the other hand, too much volcanism and you can kill most life on earth.

If Iceland is at risk, at least it means less fermented shark in the world. While I am not a huge fan of his, I recently saw chef Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" episode in which he travelled to Iceland and described the food as the worst he has ever experienced: especially the fermented shark. Bourdain cannot be accused of not being adventurous in what he will eat on his travels. If he says fermented shark is vile, I would really take his word for it.

Someone has put the show up on Youtube. You can see the segment with the vilest Icelandic food here:

About the LHC

As I predicted, the great majority of commentary on the legal action concerning the Large Hadron Collider is snarky. Phil at Bad Astronomy, a prominient Skeptic, had an initial post which was fairly restrained, but then followed it with a post linking to others which definitely fall within the "snark" category. Daily Galaxy severely ridiculed the topic, but in the process misrepresented the case completely. Most of the "big" physics sites I visit regularly seem to have taken a view of "the less said the better". I suspect that they probably figure that the less publicity they to anything that could delay the start up, the better.

For a good natured humorous take on it, see Scott Adams' post about it at his Dilbert Blog.

One thing is perfectly clear: most of those who are ridiculing the issue, especially in comments sections, have not read the main websites which have been discussing the issue for the last couple of years.

As I said in my original post on this, I liked James Blodgett's work because he was willing to be shown that there clearly is no risk, taking into account all possibilities (including the failure of the never observed Hawking Radiation to actually exist.) It's true that very, very few physicists doubt Hawking Radiation, but a few reputable ones have speculated that maybe it doesn't. When the CERN risk assessment paper is based heavily on the assumption that it does exist, that's where a legitimate criticism lies.

Much is being made of the background of Walter Wagner, one of the litigants. To be honest, I have no idea about his general credibility; I note that he certainly does seem to have had a very varied career, and the fact that his website was inviting donations was always something that gave me some concern. However, in his posts on the web he generally has come across as pretty rational, and the ad hominem attacks do nothing to address the key issue.

In the New Scientist version of the story, the case is "complete nonsense" according to CERN spokesman James Gillies. He appears to be much more circumspect in the report of the New York Times. In fact, the NYT report emphasizes that CERN physicists have taken the question seriously, and have been looking at safety issues again since last year. One of the most curious parts of the report is that most of the members of the Safety Assessment Group are said to prefer to remain anonymous "for various reasons". I am curious as to why that would be. It doesn't fit entirely comfortably with their insistence that they are being completely open about all of the possibilities they are considering.

I expect that the revised safety assessment will still give the project a clean bill of health, and I hope it does it on the basis of a convincing explanation that under no foreseeable circumstances could thousands of non-evaporating mini black holes floating in and around the earth absorb atoms fast enough to ever be a problem.

I hope the strangelet issue can similarly be dealt with as well.

We will see.

As I suspected...

Climate challenge underestimated? : Nature News

This looks like a really important story on the economics of climate change. My suspicion has long been that the optimistic talk of countries being able to achieve huge changes in CO2 emissions with lots of "green" technologies and without too much economic pain was bunkum, and this report indicates my hunch may be right:

Climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr, climatologist Tom Wigley, and economist Christopher Green lay out in a commentary article published in Nature ¹ today why they think that the emission scenarios the IPCC produced nearly a decade ago, which are still widely used, are overly optimistic. They note that most of the IPCC’s 'business as usual' emission scenarios assume a certain amount of 'spontaneous' technological change. The size of this assumed change is unrealistic, they argue, and deceives policy-makers and the public about the crucial role policy must have in encouraging the development of technologies to prevent dangerous climate change.

Such a large chunk of the needed energy-efficiency improvements is built in to these 'business as usual' scenarios that the degree of change requiring special effort seems artificially small, they argue. According to the authors' own calculations, IPCC scenarios make it seem as if the technical challenge of stabilizing greenhouse-gas emissions at around 500 parts per million — a concentration which scientists think will prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 2 °C — is a quarter of its true size.

Richard Tol, an energy and environmental economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, also says that the IPCC has underestimated the cost of technology, and notes that the cost of mitigating against climate change increases as time goes on. If Pielke and colleagues are correct, the cost of controlling global warming could go up by a factor of 16, argues Tol.

I trust Professor Garnaut is reading this with interest.