Slow blogging

Work, and a need for deep meditation in my underground bunker in preparation for the forthcoming release of a couple of unusually highly anticipated movies, is likely to keep me from posting much for a week.

Also, for whatever reason, I have been finding it harder to find particularly "blog worthy" stuff on the internet in the past few weeks. (Hence my need to post on the rather mundane topic of rating the Indiana Jones movies. Last night, I watched another vaguely remembered Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie - Sailor Beware - with my son, and enjoyed it a lot. I am tempted to try to explain here why, but I'm not particularly good at that style of writing anyway.)

Anyway, there is likely to be something in the Budget that I will write about, so don't go away for too long.

Moving CO2

Carbon Dioxide Capture And Storage: Grasping At Straws In The Climate Debate?

This short article argues that there is strong reason to be skeptical of CO2 storage being able to be done at the scale really required to be effective:

The Climate Panel sees CCS as offering great potential. In various scenarios it accounts for between 15 and 55 percent of the reduction of greenhouse gases by 2100...

The problem is, according to Anders Hansson, that CCS is still a relatively untested method.

“There are a number of small facilities, in Norway, for instance, where they capture and store a million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Swedish Vattenfall is starting a pilot facility in eastern German this summer.”

Globally, a total of some millions of tons per year is being stored today within the framework of CCS. But to live up to the hopes placed on CCS requires the storage of several billion tons. In other words, this involves gargantuan volumes. In fact, carbon dioxide would be the world’s largest transported good.

“In full scale this technology only exists in the imaginations of the people developing it,” says Anders Hansson. “It’s overly optimistic to place such great faith in it, considering all the uncertainties found in the scientific literature.”

Back to the egg

Another year, another column from Tracee Hutchison about childlessness, and her resentment that politicians tend to concentrate spending on supporting families.

Last year, Tracee said this (in reference to Bill Heffernan's famous "barren" comment about Julia Gillard):

Despite John Howard's and Peter Costello's attempts to distance themselves from their wayward senator's latest spray, they are the culprits of turning the family values mantra into political paydirt and their imminent budget sweeteners to families will reinforce it.

Forget about the clever country we once aspired to be, we've become the conception country.

Exactly as I predicted, the Labor Party attitude is not pleasing her either. From today's column:

Why should single, childless people, many of whom are struggling to find relevance in a kids-and-couple dominant culture, be forced to pay for other people's children through a combination of taxes and imposed maternity leave levies? Isn't that a bit like rubbing our noses in it? Very inconsiderate if you ask me, especially when there's nothing in either budget for us.

The first part of today's column is all about how she has ended up accidentally childless.

I'm not unsympathetic to the sorrow that a single woman in her early middle age may feel at the realisation that they probably are not going to ever have a kid. (Although, as I have said before, I don't know why many modern women who know they want children will still waste years and years sleeping with partners who won't commit to the idea.)

That said, I don't know that Tracee exactly gives credibility to her argument that single people are "ignored" by government by explaining first that she walks this emotional precipice when someone just tries to make small talk with her:

And then, at some point, the mere thought of being asked one more time if you have children makes you want to shriek like a madwoman or slap the nearest person to you very hard indeed. You opt, of course, for a dignified silence for fear of being whispered about in unbecoming sentences such as "no wonder she can't find a fella …"

With such a sound and rational grounding in the issue, she should run for the Greens for Parliament.

A slight overstatement, perhaps

Danger of infection in surgery preparation - National - smh.com.au

There's an orthopedic surgeon upset about idiosyncratic rules in Sydney hospitals:

Dr Robert Molnar has for the past six months unsuccessfully sought an explanation from the Health Department as to why he is not permitted to use alcoholic surgical preparation solution on his patients at Westmead Hospital, yet he is able to at St George and Sutherland public hospitals.

The rules vary across hospitals: alcoholic solution can be used at Fairfield, Concord, Prince of Wales, Royal Women's and Royal Prince Alfred hospitals but is barred at Liverpool, Nepean, Gosford, Canterbury or Royal North Shore.

And why does this matter? Apparently, the alcohol based ones are known to offer better protection against post operative infection:

A Sydney orthopedic surgeon, Doron Sher, said that if the surgeon was appropriately educated the risk of fire was minimal.

"There is evidence in the literature showing that infection rates are lower using alcoholic Betadine," he said. "I use the alcoholic solution when I get the option because I believe that you get a lower infection rate."

But I like this line in the report best, as I assume this conclusion hasn't been verified in studies:

Dr Molnar had used an aqueous antiseptic to prepare the skin.

"You may as well spit on the wound...." he said, noting that alcoholic solution could be used at most private NSW hospitals.

Overdose?

Will changed a week before overdose death - National - smh.com.au

Isn't it an odd choice to be calling a death by Nembutal an "overdose". According to Wikipedia, there are very few things Nembutal can be used for in humans, and of course its fame now is mainly as euthanasia groups' preferred suicide drug.

Seems a bit like saying someone died of a rat poison overdose.

Ridiculous

This bud's for you, and you, and you too - Los Angeles Times

Go and read this piece by Joel Stein that shows how unbelievably farcical "medical marijuana" is in California.

(I always assumed such a system was a joke, but it's a much bigger joke than I ever imagined.)

Pilot shortage

Somehow, I seem to have missed reports about the international pilot shortage. Yesterday, I heard someone on the ABC putting figures on it, and I can't find a link. However, there's already an estimated shortfall of several thousand.

The plight of pilots in China seems particularly harsh. From The Economist in April:

The state is being so heavy-handed because it fears a mass walkout. It maintains an iron grip on pilots through lifetime contracts, enshrined in state law, which they must sign in return for receiving pilot training. With growing demand from the 20 private airlines that have started up in the past four years, these contracts seem like handcuffs. The CAAC requires pilots to pay 700,000-2.1m yuan to break their contracts. This week Shanghai Airlines filed a lawsuit against nine of its pilots demanding even more (35m yuan) if they continue with their plans to leave the company.

The CAAC's figures show a shortage of 5,000 pilots and predict that 6,500 more will be needed by 2010. The lack of local facilities is prompting Chinese airlines to send groups of students to Canada, Australia and Spain for training.

MSNBC had a story about the international shortage mid last year:

Figures released by International Air Transport Association show that global air travel will likely grow 4-5 percent a year over the next decade, though the aviation boom in India and China is expected to exceed 7 percent....

India and China alone will need about 4,000 new pilots a year to cope with their growth.

By comparison, Germany's Lufthansa — one of the world's largest airlines — employs a total of just over 4,000 pilots.

On average, airlines need 30 highly trained pilots available for each long-haul aircraft in their inventory. For short-haul planes they need less, between 10-18 flyers.

Those figures for the number of pilots an airline needs for each aircraft seem surprisingly high, but what would I know about running an airline.

Anyhow, maybe it is all the more reason to build airships. (I figure pilots don't have as much to do on them, and they could get more sleep on the flight.) Or, there is always this solution:


Yes, a small company in Mexico wants to build you a strap on rocket helicopter. (Mexico? Well, I guess they would come in handy for border crossings.) But before you place your order, read the rocket helicopter designer's personal history (from the "About us" heading on the company website):

At the school I was a trouble kid and I ended psychoanalyzed in the Conduct Clinic for abnormal behavior because I didn't liked the school, because they try to teach me things that I didn't want to learn and they don't teach me what I wanted to learn!, it was just a communication problem!.
The only two subjects I liked too much was physics and chemistry unfortunately this classes was only two times per week, I hated the rest of the subjects and the school was a boring place for me.

This was a constant fight with my teachers because I considered that my brain has a finite capacity to keep formulas and data that are important for me and not the name of the horse that was rode by El Quijote or the dates and places of the Napoleon fights and another stupid things that I don't care and never used in my life.

I skipped the school (play hockey) many times and went to work as a helper at a speed garage that prepared racing cars, there I learned a lot of mechanics, to weld, to paint, to work the fiberglass, to modify engines for racing, to port and polish the race car heads, etc., this was the things I wanted to learn and not all the garbage that the teachers wanted me to remember.

Sounds like a young Speed Racer, really.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has an article today about shortages in all jobs to do with the airline industry, and the safety concerns that this is causing. (Some estimate a shortage of pilots in the order of 42,000 worldwide by 2020.) The most surprising snippet:

In Brazil, pilots at TAM Linhas Aéreas SA last year overshot a São Paulo runway and smashed a new Airbus jet into a building during stormy weather, killing more than 190 people. The pilots were apparently confused about how to reduce engine power and apply reverse thrust.

For those of you who can't get enough of Indiana Jones talk

Indiana Jones Returns, to Steven Spielberg’s Delight - New York Times

Getting tired yet of my linking to material on the new Indiana Jones movie? If so, just skip this.

The article above discusses the series generally, and makes some good points about the Spielberg action style. He has, fortunately, never been into the frenetic cutting of action scenes, an annoying feature of nearly all action movies now. (The same can be said of nearly all dance movies of the last few decades too.) Spielberg is nice enough not to diss all action movies that take that approach, but he's being too kind. It rarely works for me, as it reduces the realism and impact of action when you can tell you are watching a stunt that was repeated umpteen times to allow for all those edits from different angles.

The article also notes this about what remains one of my all time favourite movie sequences:

The perilously long and complicated opening sequence of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” for example — in which a song-and-dance number (“Anything Goes,” sung in Mandarin) turns into a wild slapstick action scene involving a diamond, a poisoned drink and an elusive vial of antidote, and ends with Indy and his companions jumping out of a plane in a rubber raft — delivers that sort of giddy, mildly deranging stimulation. The staging and the cutting have the “can you top this?” audacity of a silent comedy, and the timing is slyly impeccable: it’s about the length of a Keaton two-reeler.

"Temple of Doom" remains my favourite of the series. For me, it struck exactly the right tone of wit and slapstick humour to offset the action and any violence. Ripping the heart out of a chest never bothered me; it always seems to have been intended to have been revealed as a magic trick anyway. (On the other hand, I always felt that Raider's more serious tone made the impalings and other violence too intense for much of the potential audience of under 9 year olds.)

As for "Last Crusade", it has always struck me as a particularly uninspired in terms of both script and direction. As with the 3rd Star Wars, many of the action sequences were so obviously re-hashes from the first movie of the series, it was very disappointing. I have re-watched it recently, and it remains quite a dull experience.

I always have felt that it was odd that both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series peaked in the middle, yet friends and critics at the time were a little disappointed with the second instalment. Later, it seems opinions were revised of Empire Strikes Back, so that virtually everyone now agrees it was the best of the the lot. Temple of Doom may also be a bit better appreciated now too, I suspect.

So it's fingers crossed for the new movie, but expectations may yet be dashed.

Lane goes racing

I've never been convinced that the Wachowski brothers deserve respect, and the idea that they could make what I recall as the least interesting Japanese anime of the 1960's into a good movie seemed a particularly unlikely proposition.

So, it's with pleasure that I read Anthony Lane's amusing review of Speed Racer. He writes:

A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls? I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of “Speed Racer” to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.”

Or, as Stephen Colbert put it "it's the classic story of boy meets seizure inducing lights".

Just resign

Buswell made 'sexual noises': woman | The Australian

So, today we get all the detail of the "chair sniffing" incident. While I have no doubt there are other politicians who are just as crass and immature, a leader can't maintain credibility with a highly publicised incident like this. He should just do everyone a favour and resign. Have another cry and get it over with, Troy; there's probably a place waiting for you on Melbourne's Footy Show anyway.

And at the national level, I would be close to recommending the same to Brendan Nelson. Let's face it:

a. he was voted in by a narrow margin when a couple of eligible voters were absent;
b. his "listening tour" was ill-conceived and is most memorable for the repeated image of him playing with kids on a monkey bar;
c. most journalists rightly view his habit of having a heart breaking anecdote ready for every occasion as being just a tad bizarre and unconvincing. Glenn Milne says today "Nelson, bless his sincerity, is like a piece of emotional blotting paper."

At 9% preferred PM he has no credibility to be leader.

The most surprising thing to me about today's Newpoll was the 4% swing toward the Coalition, which I can only put down to the electorate being more cynical about the 2020 Summit than most media journalists expected (Yay!)

Surely Nelson himself is helping shave a few points off the Coalition's popularity. If so, it may be that the Coalitions "true" primary vote is currently very close to 40%, which seems to me to be not too bad at this stage of the electoral cycle.

So, is there any point to Brendan hanging on any longer? I can't really see it.

Monbiot catches up with me

George Monbiot: If there is a God, he's not green. Otherwise airships would take off | Comment is free | The Guardian

Hey, I first mentioned the return of airships as a possible way to reduce CO2 emissions back in August 2006! (The topic got more space in my post of November 2006.) What's more, hydrogen filled ones were mentioned in my March 2008 list of brilliant ideas for the 2020 Summit.

Now Monbiot is promoting the idea of hydrogen airships (see above). Well, actually he mentions one which would use both hydrogen and helium, which may well be a good idea.

I'm tempted to refer to myself as a blogging prophet who is not being adequately recognised in the blogosphere, and to take up wearing sackcloth and eating locusts in the desert. (Which, incidentally, may just mean a move into the backyard, as Brisbane's normal winter dry spell has already kicked in with a vengeance, it seems.)

Nuclear notes

Alternative dares not speak | The Australian

Alan Moran writes about Garnaut's interim report, noting that it doesn't mention the "N" word.

He mentions a bit of history of interest:

Now there's a rich irony. ALP ministers, many of whom have spent their lives demonising nuclear power, may soon have to start promoting it. Actually, that's a U-turn not without precedent, as nuclear power was once strongly advocated by the ALP: in the mid-1970s, the Dunstan government in South Australia even claimed that a nuclear industry in the state would create 500,000 jobs.

That would be one way Kevin Rudd's reputation would soar in my eyes: if he could actually lead his party into accepting nuclear. (Go have a look at Pebble Beds, Kevin.)

Speaking of nuclear, and energy generally, the Mother Jones current issue is all about the topic. In the article about nuclear, it notes:

To be useful as nuclear fuel, uranium ore has to be refined into uranium oxide (the yellowcake of Niger fame) and then enriched—turned into pellets of 4 percent U-235. The sole U.S. plant that enriches uranium for civilian power reactors, located in Paducah, Kentucky, accomplishes this via an energy-hogging process that consumes 15 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. Even so, carbon emissions for the entire nuclear fuel cycle come to no more than 55 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour—roughly even with solar. By 2010, when the U.S. Enrichment Corporation is slated to switch to the more efficient method used in Europe, that number should come down closer to 12 grams per kilowatt-hour—on par with wind.

Naked singularities again

Here's a recent paper from arXiv that proposes how naked singularities may form instead of black holes. (My earlier post about naked singularities possibly being created at the LHC is here.)

The more recent paper does not mention the LHC, but the mechanism it describes still seems relevant (correct me if I am wrong, anyone.)

As this paper says:

Spacetime singularities belong naturally to the realm of quantum gravity. We believe that only a complete quantum gravity theory will be able to describe naked singularities properly, dissecting them conclusively or even restoring the WCCC in a more fundamental level.

So: no one knows exactly what a naked singularity would be like, yet (according to some) they may be created in the LHC. (There's a short note on a CERN publication about naked singularities.)

OK, the argument against worrying about them will be the same as that for mini black holes: the earth and all astronomical bodies are constantly bombarded by higher energy particles, and if that hasn't created a naked singularity danger, then nor will the LHC.

And the reason for questioning this might be same as the argument regarding mini black holes: namely, cosmic naked singularities would presumably shoot off at near relativistic speeds , whereas those at the LHC would sometimes have low speed. Maybe ones that hang around a something more to worry about? Also, I am a little curious about what would happen if two of them meet, as would seem more of a possibility in the LHC than in nature.

Meanwhile, we sit around twiddling our thumbs while CERN takes its sweet time to publish the delayed safety paper.

Local electricity storage

A few posts back, I indicated I would do some Googling about household electrical storage, so that my future solar Stirling engine powered house would still let me watch TV at night.

Seems there's not many choices around. Of course, the truly dedicated can buy a huge number of lead acid batteries already, but they have a pretty short life. One site claims that nanotechnology will let us build superbatteries, but as to how realistic this proposal is, I have no idea:

Today, using lead-acid storage batteries, such a unit for a typical house to store 100 kilowatt hours of electrical energy would take up a small room and cost more than $10,000. Through revolutionary advances in nanotechnology, it may be possible to shrink an equivalent unit to the size of a washing machine and drop the cost to less than $1,000. With these advances the electrical grid can become exceedingly robust, because local storage protects customers from power fluctuations and outages. Most importantly, it permits some or all of the primary electrical power on the grid to come from solar and wind.

Still, there does exist one form of battery which allows a lot of electricity to be stored. Futurepundit talked about them last year: sodium sulphur batteries. He links to a USAToday story about them, which includes a photo.

They are big and expensive and used for a many houses, not just one. They appear to be largely a Japanese idea. The New York Times reported last year that one company in America is looking at using them for storing windpower. (The article also notes that they operate at more than 800 degrees F, which makes it sound like you wouldn't want even a small one in your backyard.)

So, OK, they won't fit in my backyard, but they sound a fairly promising idea if used on neighbourhood scale.

Of course, another Japanese idea may help in any plan to live off the grid: house sized fuel cells, which I have mentioned before. I wonder: can you turn these on and off easily, as required, and not affect their efficiency in the process? And can you get away with using bottled natural gas for them, instead of mains gas?

Funny how many of these energy ideas are coming from Japan, hey?

Houses as art

Dezeen’s top ten: houses

Oddly, I found this link via Posthuman Blues.

In another life, I would have liked to have been an architect. (Must be all that time I spent designing houses with Lego. I don't think they even make the roof blocks any more.)

That said, you do have to laugh at the impracticality of some architect ideas for residences. Those that irritate me in particular are the ones that have enormous slabs of glass for walls, as if there is no human desire for privacy. (They also make no sense as far as energy efficiency is concerned.)

However, regular readers would recall my fondness for canvas, in the form of tents and upmarket yurts. Well, I learn from the story above that some architects from Chile have come up with a house which is sort of part normal wall and part tent, and you can readily buy plans off them.

Yes, it's probably got problems in terms of how long you could expect it to last, but the photographs make it look very appealing.

That Austrian case...

Dungeons & Austrians - New York Times

See the link for an opinion piece that points out that the basement incest case is not the first horror basement story from Austria.

Actually, when I saw what the article was about, I thought it might delve into the whole question of whether European horror fairy tales actually do spring from something twisted in the collective unconscious of the area. It doesn't go there, but there'll be an academic somewhere who does.

Meanwhile, it's curious that in Australia, the city that has the general reputation for the most vile and twisted murders is Adelaide, which is seen as having both strong English and (in the hills at least) German influence.

Boris wins; exile threatened

Mayoral election results: Live | Politics | Guardian Unlimited

Of course, with Boris Johnson winning the London mayoral race, over at The Guardian there's an amusing outpouring of name calling of Boris voters (who are obviously just too stupid to vote for Ken), and empty threats of self exile from the city/country.

What is it about lefties and this precious "if the majority don't vote like I do, I cannot live here" attitude? People used to say that conservatives had a "born to rule" attitude, but it's clear that such a belief in entitlement (based on their superior intellect and morality, of course) has long since passed over to the followers of the other side of politics.

PS: Surely even those who hate him would have to agree that Boris made a very gracious acceptance speech. Maybe he will end up like Schwarzenegger: a somewhat unexpected great success when put in the right position.

PPS: Tigerhawk has a good post about the adolescent nature of this "if my candidate loses I will leave politics/the country" attitude.

PPPS: Or, to put it as Nige does at Bryan Appleyard's blog:

What has struck me in all the interviews with those on the losing side - Ken of course included - is the unspoken assumption that a Tory advance represents a reft in the very fabric of space-time, a fundamental anomaly, that can only be the result of 'mistakes', of 'not listening', of a failure to get the message across. I've often noticed this mindset in leftists, the assumption that their project is not only right but self-evidently right, and those who don't buy into it either haven't understood it or are outside the pale of rational discourse, irredeemable and best ignored or sneered at .....

Ocean issues again

Growing ocean dead zones leave fish gasping - earth - 01 May 2008 - New Scientist Environment

It's all inconclusive as to what will happen in future, but it's consistent with my position that the effect of CO2 and possible warming on the oceans is the clearest reason to do something about greenhouse gases.

Well deserved snark

By far the most annoying, bitter, nasty, know-it-all blogger on the left in the last few years is Ken Lovell at Road to Surfdom. His post this week about Iran and most of the world's (not just America's) concern about its nuclear program is his typical schtick: informed by his reflexive anti-Americanism and his apparent confidence that he can tell more about the true state of the world from Adelaide [correction: Tweed Coast?] and his selective reading on the 'net than the governments of the Northern Hemisphere. (Anyone who thinks he has a good point on Iran should read this Economist article first.)

No one bothers any more trying to engage him in debate; he was always snide and insulting in response, and presumably just enjoys the company of the regular sycophantic, and even crazier, commenters. Yet other blogs of the more moderate left refer to some of his posts every now and again with approval. I guess the left loves company, no matter how unpleasant.

I simply can't stand him.

Ah, that feels better.

UPDATE: I see that Ken has psychoanalysed my intense dislike of his blogging style as being due to my not having a regular half dozen commenters who chime in after nearly every post with stuff along the lines of "oh, that's so right, but it's even worse than that."

I don't intend making snark attacks a regular feature here. The post was inspired by the fact that I have noticed more moderate lefties linking to him lately, and my knowledge from past experience that there is absolutely no point in challenging his views at his own blog.

UPDATE 2: Good grief. Someone at Club Troppo's Missing Link today has compared me to JF Beck . It would seem they just believed Ken's characterisation of this blog, rather than actually read it. (Nothing against JF, but somehow I don't think I count as a right wing death beast.)

Also, I don't think Ken realised how few hits there normally are here. His pointing out to the world that I had a snark attack against him has probably trebled my normal weekend hit rate.

A stirling engine for the backyard

I mentioned the Infinia Corporation a year ago, and with all this talk of solar power, I thought it would checking if this alternative idea (of small scale solar thermal using stirling engines) is still around.

It is, and it seems as if they have recent significant funding and (presumably) may be selling the product soon. Their main product of interest should look something like this:

It is, apparently, a 3kW stirling engine that provides electicity, and the website claims that it has a 24 % energy conversion efficiency, low maintenance, and will be(I think they say somewhere) cheaper than solar cells.

I want one for my backyard, simply because they look cool and you can (presumably) also roast a chicken in the focal point of that dish. (Any passing crow that wants a rest on that engine part might be in for a shock, too.)

Now, if only there were economical and small electricity storage systems big enough to get your average house through the night. This calls for another round of Googling!