Sony does the right thing - sort of

Sony opens up e-book Reader to other booksellers

As far as I know Sony have never released the Reader in Australia. God knows why; we're not exactly the end of the earth anymore.

But now with this opening it up to be able to buy books other than from Sony, it might be on its way. I hope.

Some updates

* Discover magazine answered my email and said that the mistake in the ocean acidification article was noted shortly after publication, and the error will be noted in the September magazine. Oddly, though, they just leave the web version of the article un-amended. Seems a peculiar way to run things.

* Brideshead Revisited has opened to (surprise!) generally good reviews in the States. There are some, though, who call it a travesty, and that's good enough for me. AO Scott gets amusingly personal with this comment on the lead actor:

Charles is a complicated character, who causes a lot of trouble in the Flyte-Marchmain family even as he pretends to be a detached observer of its internal drama. The role calls for a mix of diffidence and magnetism — Charles is a shy, stoical seducer — but Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons. The film can’t explain why Julia or Sebastian would conceive a risky, tempestuous passion for Charles other than that Waugh seemed to think they might.

* Anthony Lane reviews Mamma Mia! and has a good line or two:

The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate.

Sounds fun

Time Lord opens the Tardis to a new generation of Prom-goers - Times Online

Caitlin Moran reports on the Dr Who prom held at Albert Hall.

Dr Who continues to be silly fun, marred only occasionally by Russell T Davies slipping in his hints to impressionable youth that being a sexual libertine, across both gender and species borders, is oh-so-cool.

Has anyone else noticed how important the music is to each episode of the re-invented show? It's loud, often annoyingly so, but there is no doubt that it sells excitement. It's really like Star Wars, where so much its emotional hold came from the score.

Long investigations

While the Qantas incident is all very interesting, it would appear to be an accident that will be explained quickly.

The same can't be said for the British Airways crash in London in January. Since the Air Accident Investigations Branch issued its special bulletin in May, we have heard no more from them. The Wikipedia article notes that the investigators have found:

...cavitation damage to the high pressure fuel pumps of both engines, indicative of abnormally low pressure at the pump inlets. After ruling out fuel freezing or contamination, the investigation now focuses on what caused the low pressure at the pump inlets. "Restrictions in the fuel system between the aircraft fuel tanks and each of the engine HP pumps, resulting in reduced fuel flows, is suspected."

This seems a very peculiar scenario, given that it affected both engines at the same time. I am very curious to see the final explanation.

A question of qualifications

Sceptical global warming bloggers tend to rush to take encouragement when anyone with some scientific sounding qualification agrees with them. For example, Dr David Evans' recent article in The Australian made a big splash in sceptic circles, yet it seemed clear from the opening of his article that he was not even claiming to be a scientist with expertise in atmospheric modelling. (His own biography gives his qualifications as being in electrical engineering.) As Deltoid (far from a favourite blog of mine, but he has his moments) pointed out quickly, Evan's "killer" point about troposphere temperatures had been dealt with over at Real Climate half a year ago, and as far as I can tell, is not actually shaking the foundations of the IPCC to the ground in the way software writer David claims.

In a similar vein, Wikipedia notes that of the "30,000 scientists" who have signed the anti global warming Oregon Petition, those in the most relevant category of "atmospheric, environment and earth sciences" apparently number 3,697. There seems to be no easy way of assessing how many of them have actually worked on issues directly relevant to global warming or CO2. Also, as the Wikipedia article explains, it's hard to tell how many signatures are genuine, and indeed many who first signed in 1998 may well have changed their mind since then. The petition certainly has a murky past.

I don't see why I should be convinced by the opinions of your average physicist, doctor and engineer when it comes to questions of assessing global warming issues. After all, just because Edgar Mitchell has a Ph.D and been to the moon does not mean I give any particular credence to his claim that aliens have been here and the US government is hiding the fact. Perhaps a less extreme example to make the same point is the line up of 9/11 conspiracy believers that includes engineers, architects and physicists.

I am aware that there are warming sceptics that have all the specific qualifications and work experience to mean that they are very familiar with the topic. Fine, their opinion is definitely not to be dismissed without examination. However, I still say that the sceptics make their argument much weaker by cheering whenever anyone who can call themselves a scientist says they agree.

Break needed

No more posting for a week. Tax doom approaches.

A question

The answer to this is probably out there somewhere on the internet, but quick googling hasn't revealed it to me yet.

A few posts back, I mentioned a Nature opinion piece which argued strongly that America could not afford to wait to have an effective emissions trading scheme up and running in 10 or so years time. It argued that the urgency of action needed to limit CO2 to even 550 ppm meant that the US should concentrate on immediate deployment of current clean technology. R&D should be on the technology that needs to be deployed in 20 or 30 years time.

Assuming that the same argument applies equally well to Australia, a valid criticism of Labor's emission trading plans is that they do not place significant emphasis on immediate deployment of clean technology. (The Liberals can be criticised likewise, of course.)

But, my question is: what detailed schemes have been proposed by academics or others in Australia that concentrate on immediate large reductions of CO2. I read or heard about some paper a year or two ago, from which university I forget, which I think set out a rapid plan for significant reduction to CO2 emissions in Australia, and I seem to recall they placed a large emphasis on natural gas for electricity, at least as an intermediate step.

The Greens, of course, are running the argument that current technology can power Australia, but I don't know whether they are working to specific and detailed plans, or if they are just expressing the ideal. Their website seems light on details, so I suspect the latter.

Anyway, if anyone can point me to such detailed proposals, I would be interested.

Breaking rank

Miranda Sawyer wonders why female-friendly films are so bad

I like the way this starts:

We went to the theatre the other night, a desperate evening enlivened only by imagining just how much more fun we could have had with the hundred quid it cost us. The play was The Year of Magical Thinking, a monologue about death performed by Vanessa Redgrave (I know: what did we expect? Custard pies?).

Rampaging beavers

Beaver 'blight' is a warning to UK | Environment | The Observer

Last week, I noted that The Independent was full of praise for the beaver. This week, The Guardian (see above) has a cautionary tale of beavers causing havoc in South America:

'I have seen the impact of all sorts of animals introduced to new habitats, but I have never seen anything like the damage inflicted by these beavers,' said Josh Donlan, of the ACS. 'They move along rivers and lay waste to their banks. It looks as if bulldozers have been let loose. Millions of acres have been wrecked.'

Fifty North American beavers, Castor canadensis, were introduced to Tierra del Fuego, in southern South America, in the 1940s in order to establish a fur trade. It was a catastrophic mistake. Numbers multiplied dramatically and beavers spread across the archipelago, crossed the Magellan Strait and are now spreading through the mainland.

Damn. My plans for introducing them to Australia may have its opponents.

Told you

Malaria resistance gene ups HIV risk (ABC News in Science)

This story reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend in the late 1980's, in which I said maybe HIV had taken hold strongly in parts of Africa because of a genetic susceptibility in the black population. I could not remember for sure at the time when or where I might have read the suggestion, but in any event, it seemed plausible.

My friend dismissed the idea, thinking it was too close to racist.

Years later, we fell out in circumstances in which I do have to take some blame. Now I feel potentially vindicated.

The moral of the story is: you should try hard to keep friends, if you want to be able to laughingly claim vindication 20 years later. Or something like that, anyway...

Homeless, but with internet

Temporary arrangements | The Japan Times Online

Here's a good read about the working poor who are living in internet cafes:

Cyber@Cafe in Warabi, Saitama Prefecture, is home to around 25 people who "live" there. The cafe, located outside JR Warabi Station, occupies three floors of an office building and has a shower room, a washing machine and high-tech toilets for the convenience of its guests. Blankets can be borrowed for free. Guests paying ¥200 can spend 30 minutes in the cafe's comfortable 130 cm × 190 cm cubicles, which each have soft pads on the floor, a pair of black and red cushions, and a personal computer with a high-speed Internet connection.

The biggest attraction, however, is that guests who pay for a month's stay (¥57,600) in advance can register the cafe as their home and have mail sent there for an additional ¥3,000. At least four people have registered the cafe as their home with the local city government, according to Cyber@Cafe owner Akihiro Sato.

At current exchange rates, that's about $600 a month for your own little, tiny room with internet access. There are worse ways to live.

Discover magazine does ocean acidification in depth

There's a detailed article on ocean acidification just up at Discover magazine. (If you have read this article at Online Opinion, you may be surprised at how similar they are, but I have it on very strong authority that the Online Opinion piece was written without knowledge of the coming Discover article). Here's a lengthy section from Discover worth extracting:

Over the history of the planet, there have been many sudden peaks in CO2 related to volcanic eruptions, releases from hydrothermal vents, and other natural events. When the pH of the ocean dips as a result of absorbing this excess gas, bottom sediments rich in calcium carbonate begin to dissolve, countering the increase in acidity. This buffering process occurs over 20,000 years, roughly the time it takes for water to circulate along the bottom from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back up to the surface several times. Currently, however, we are pouring man-made CO2 into the atmosphere at 50 times the natural rate. “That overwhelms the natural buffering system for maintaining balance in ocean chemistry,” the Carnegie Institution’s Caldeira says. “To find any parallel in the earth’s history you would have to look to a sudden violent shock to the system far in the geologic past.”

One such event occurred 55 million years ago at the so-called Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when 4.5 million tons of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere. Just what triggered this enormous emission is not known, but scientists suspect volcanic activity may have begun the process. That may in turn have caused the planet to heat up enough to melt deposits of methane frozen in sediments on the ocean floor (something, incidentally, that could happen again), discharging even more potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and further heating the planet in an escalating feedback loop.

Whatever the exact cause of the CO2 release at the PETM, the earth warmed faster than at almost any other time in its history. The average temperature soared 9 degrees Fahrenheit, entire ecosystems shifted to higher latitudes, and massive extinctions occurred on land and, most telling, at sea. The abrupt rise of CO2 acidified the oceans. James Zachos, a paleo-oceanographer from the University of California at Santa Cruz, analyzed sediment cores obtained from deep drilling in the ocean and discovered that bottom-dwelling creatures with shells disappeared from the fossil record for a period of more than 40,000 years corresponding to the PETM. And once the oceans turned more acidic, Zachos says, they did not recover quickly: It took another 60,000 years before sediments again began to show a thick white streak indicative of fossilized shells.

Drastic as the PETM was, the event is tame compared with acidification today. “Back then,” Zachos says, “4.5 million tons of CO2 were released over a period of 1,000 to 10,000 years. Industrial activities will release the same amount in a mere 300 years—so quickly that the ocean’s buffering system doesn’t even come into play.”

I wonder when any global warming sceptic is going to come up with convincing reasons why ocean acidification is not something to worry about. In fact, when are they going to give it any attention at all.

UPDATE: I've noticed that the figure of 4.5 million tons of CO2 being released during PETM must be an error. If you follow the link in the article (about PETM,) it indicates it should be 4.5 Gt. Disappointing to see an error like that turn up at Discover, but I'll email them now!

Current movies

Once again, join me for some bagging of movies I do not intend to see.

Mamma Mia has already been mentioned here, and while the music of Abba alone is enough to ensure its avoidance, I thought this snippet from a negative review was pretty funny:

A scene in which the groom’s shirtless beach blanket buddies, who are throwing him a bachelor party, peel him away from his bride in order to force him to join their merry band as they goose-step along the dock, while wearing flippers, with maximal flapping of arms, suggests a re-enactment of the invasion of the Sudetenland conducted by the Village People during a weekend on Fire Island.

On to The Dark Knight. Ever since Heath Ledger died, and there were stories of how playing this role messed with his mind, I have wondered whether this would put audiences off, as it may seem too much like watching someone self destruct on screen. (OK, so the death may well have been an accident, but still he wasn't the happiest chap at the time.)

I haven't read too many reviews, but I get the impression that the question hasn't troubled critics as much as I thought it might. A notable exception is David Denby in The New Yorker, who writes:

....as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way.

This article notes that it was pretty daring of the studio to continue promoting the film by concentrating the attention on Hedger's ghoulish Joker appearance; I actually agree more with the line that it was in rather poor taste to do so and semi-exploitive.

In any event, the movie is being highly praised, with one of the notable exceptions (David Edelstein) being attacked by fanboys for failing to agree with them.

I just can't raise enthusiasm. Of all the superhero franchises, Batman has simply never held appeal. Maybe the childhood exposure to the camp television version (towards which I was also rather cool) means I can't take dark, brooding versions of the character seriously either. I really don't care how good the acting is in any version; the costume, the theatrical style of the villains, the whole concept just leaves me cold.

It seems particularly odd that the latest movie is being described as terribly bleak; a superhero concept that was surely never intended to be taken all that seriously by adults now finds that making any concessions to a child audience completely unnecessary.

I am not a fan of superhero stuff overall, but have found the Spiderman franchise enjoyable enough. Maybe it's the charm of Tobey Maguire that gets me past the costume in that case.

North Korean follies

In From the Cold: Resurrecting the “Hotel of Doom”

Somehow, the fact that Pyongyang has an unfinished 105 story pyramid-shaped hotel had escaped my attention, until now. Interesting.

Another little, tiny cause for optimism

Advance brings low-cost, bright LED lighting closer to reality

According to the article:

"When the cost of a white LED lamp comes down to about $5, LEDs will be in widespread use for general illumination," Sands said. "LEDs are still improving in efficiency, so they will surpass fluorescents. Everything looks favorable for LEDs, except for that initial cost, a problem that is likely to be solved soon."

He expects affordable LED lights to be on the market within two years.

A little, tiny bit of optimism

How the pope is saving Earth - Los Angeles Times

Despite the title, it is basically about the importance of (and relative ease) of saving rain forests to reduce CO2 emissions.

It even ends with this surprising claim:

Bush already has approved several significant tropical forest conservation projects in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere. With this deal, Bush could legitimately claim that he'd done far more, far sooner, for far less money to stop global warming than either the Kyoto Protocol or the failed congressional climate bill would have.

The Carbon Wars

I like to think that I might be the first blogger in the world to suggest limited global warfare as a cure for greenhouse gases, although I am probably wrong in that assumption. The suggestion is meant to be amusing, but all the same, if temperatures did go up suddenly in the next 30 years, and China was by then clearly the biggest emitter, is it entirely outside the realms of possibility? Seems to me that there's a half baked basis for some speculative fiction there.

So, this has got me thinking: what would it take to reduce CO2 if you were going to let warfare be part of the cure? Some immediate thoughts: submarines take out coal-exporting ships; cruise missiles for coal fired power stations; electro magnetic pulse weapons to take out power infrastructure. Encourage an insurgency by those hoards of young, sexually frustrated Chinese men who can't find a wife to overthrow the government. (They'll be so crazy they'll want to turn the country back into an agrarian society that does not have access to abortion or birth control, just so there can be women again!)

Of course, the other way of dealing with this is to let a mad ex-military character with a Captain Nemo complex run a private navy of nuclear submarines to do the West's dirty work for them. Just have to leave the gates of a nuclear submarine base open, with a little sign on the front "gone to lunch, please do not steal the submarines."

Ah, I'm amusing myself too much. Must go do some work before the tax office drags me away.

News Limited and global warming

Is Rupert Murdoch having doubts about greenhouse gas and global warming? Given his widely reported acknowledgement of the problem a couple of years ago, it seems surprising that News Limited papers here have been giving prominence to global warming sceptics recently, just at the time the government is seeking to convince everyone about its plans to reduce CO2.

I suppose it can be seen as confirmation that Rupert is more hands off than most people on the Left have previously assumed.

[Speaking of the Green Paper and the Left, it's been an odd sensation to be posting comments at Larvatus Prodeo on side with the lefty idealists in criticising Rudd for wimping out and not coming up with effective plans, instead of the political pragmatists who are simply happy that the fact that an ETS, any ETS, is coming. As I said at LP, the problem with schemes that are all spin and no substance is that they lull people into thinking a problem is being tackled, when in fact it continues to get worse, and the political cause of getting more serious action can be made all the more difficult.]

As for Brisbane, this winter has been quite damp and not terribly cold, and I note that quite a few spring flowering plants are starting their bloom already. (Azaleas, some peach tree the neighbour has.) The forecast temperature for the weekend is mid-20's, which is quite warm for July. Not sure how its going down south, but it seems an early spring here.

The Quiggin mystery

What happened to John Quiggin earlier this week? As the prominent centre Left economist with a big interest in environmentalism, I've been waiting for his view on the government's Green Paper. But on the day it was issued, his website mysteriously disappeared. It has now re-appeared, but no mention of the Green Paper.

I suspect that operatives for Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong have been holding him captive in a basement somewhere in a Commonwealth owned building in Brisbane, threatening to never let him grow a beard again unless he comes out strongly in support of their plans.

Just a theory.

Garden project of the future

Tardis Garden Sheds - outwitting snails one space warp continium at a time - The Red Ferret Journal

Geez, one of these would really impress my son. Pity it seems you can't buy them off the shelf.