Nukes for the moon

NASA Developing Fission Surface Power Technology

It makes sense, and one wonders if any advances in this field will eventually have earth bound applications:

A nuclear reactor used in space is much different than Earth-based systems. There are no large concrete cooling towers, and the reactor is about the size of an office trash can.

Somewhere I might be popular...

The withered middle-aged guy becomes a hot item in Japan's dating market

The Japan Times makes me feel better about my mid-middle age:

If you happen to be an over-45 male, looking a little tired, inclined to decline party invitations because you can't stand the hassle, comfortable in your own company and not really caring what other people think — so, the news is ALL good, at least in urban Japan. You are, or are extremely close to, what is known as a kareta oyaji (枯れたオヤジ, withered middle-age guy) — currently the underground popular label on the dating market. These days, young women have shifted their preference from the wakai (若い, young), kakkoii (格好いい, good-looking) and okanemochi (お金持ち, rich) — extremely rare for all these traits to co-exist in one man anyway — to the genki nai ojisan (元気無いおじさん, middle-age guy with no energy).

Woo-hoo, I'm hot in Japan!

Truth spectacularly stranger than fiction

Sex offender, 30, posed as schoolboy | NEWS.com.au

From the report:

A 30-YEAR-old sex offender who posed as a 12-year-old boy to enrol at schools in the US for two years has pleaded guilty to child porn and other charges....

He shaved and wore pancake makeup to help him appear younger, convincing teachers, students and administrators that he was a young boy named Casey.

He was caught in January 2007 after spending a day in the seventh grade at a school after school officials became suspicious about his paperwork.

Rodreick was arrested with three other men, who were posing as his cousin, uncle and grandfather.

They at least gets top marks for bizarre determination in pursuing a perversion. Hopefully, they'll get a top sentence as a reward too. (By the way, if I understand the report correctly, the school kids were not the ones in the pornography he had, so I am not making light of anything that happened to them.)

Painting to save the planet

The Great Beyond: Whiter roofs for a cooler planet

The idea has been around for some years, yet seems slow to take off. I didn't know this:

California has required flat-topped, commercial buildings to go white since 2005, and will require new and retrofitted buildings to use cool-color roofing starting in 2009. These shingles and coatings look like their high-absorbing counterparts, but reflect more of the sun’s rays.

Higgs history

They're about to turn on the Large Hadron Collider. Don't expect the Higgs boson to show up.

This Slate article is an interesting review of how the idea of the Higgs boson came about. Whether or not the LHC will find it is the big question. (Assuming, of course, it doesn't blow up first.)

Silly Obama

The Associated Press: McCain camp angry over Obama's 'lipstick' comment

I bet his minders smiled through gritted teeth as soon as they heard Obama wing it with this:

"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin's joke. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

Not feeling entirely relaxed yet: LHC issues update

Well, what do you know. Rainer Plaga, who (unknown to most journalists) has given reasons as to why he thinks the CERN safety review was flawed, has answered my email.

I didn't ask for permission to reprint it, but he says he is preparing a response to the Giddings/Mangano rebuttal of his concerns. He says he "needs time" to finish this. Let's hope he doesn't take too long.

He also thinks they are ignoring another important point he made in his paper, but I have go back and re-read it before I can explain.

I have read criticism at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere that Plaga is definitely not an expert in the field of black hole radiance and we don't need to take him too seriously. Certainly, his "home page" has little detail, and it seems he is not actively working in astrophysics. Still, I am interested in independent physicists reviewing safety issues.

Good news from North Korea?

No-show at anniversary parade raises questions over Kim Jong-Il's health | World news | guardian.co.uk

I wonder if anyone has any idea who will follow him?

When smears go wrong

FactCheck.org: Sliming Palin

The very handy FactCheck website says there have been massive emailings spreading rumours about Sarah Palin. One which tries to make her appear particularly hypocritical says that she dramatically reduced the funding for "special needs" children in Alaska.

Funnily enough, the exact opposite is the case:

According to an April 2008 article in Education Week, Palin signed legislation in March 2008 that would increase public school funding considerably, including special needs funding. It would increase spending on what Alaska calls "intensive needs" students (students with high-cost special requirements) from $26,900 per student in 2008 to $73,840 per student in 2011. That almost triples the per-student spending in three fiscal years.

I suspect someone at Daily Kos will say she only did that because she knew her own baby had special needs. But as Factcheck points out:

According to Eddy Jeans at the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, funding for special needs and intensive needs students has increased every year since Palin entered office, from a total of $203 million in 2006 to a projected $276 million in 2009.

Try again Democrats. You probably just helped give her more good publicity.

This is why Truthers are dangerous

9/11 rumors that harden into conventional wisdom - International Herald Tribune

In short, they encourage conspiracy belief in the Middle East, and that cannot possibly help achieve peace there.

I've said before, there should be greater attention given to taking the fight to the truthers.

End of the world delayed (an LHC update)

US LHC Blog - Turning Back Time

I have already pointed this out last weekend, but it is worth repeating, as I am getting quite a few extra visitors who are Googling for information about the LHC and black holes.

The activity at the LHC tomorrow is only to try to get a single beam right around the ring for the first time. There will be no collisions with other particles (well, unless the beam goes off course and smashes into something by accident. That would be big news, due to the delays it would cause in repairs.)

As LHC physicist Peter Steinberg explains above, even when the LHC gets two counter-rotating beams colliding (within a month or two) the first collisions will be at the lower energies that older particle colliders have already dealt with.

According to Peter, it will be a few months before it is cranked up to the higher levels of energy that are novel and could possibly create micro black holes or other particles. As he says, the death threats can be put on ice for a few months at least.

So: the world is definitely not ending tomorrow. You still have to pay your taxes.

As to my earlier post about the Rainer Plaga paper, I still have not received an email response from Dr Plaga. Given the heightened level of interest at the moment, it would give many people relief if he did acknowledge an error. If he doesn't accept that he made an error, then having some more independent physicists weigh in would help.

And here's something new to read about what the LHC might find: maybe not micro black holes, but "string balls", which may evaporate in a similar way to black holes anyway. The paper is about how to tell the difference.

I am curious as to whether there is any potential safety issue for them, if they don't behave quite as predicted. (Yes, I know, the same argument about stars and planets surviving cosmic rays would apply, but the same counter argument about the LHC creating slow moving objects would need to be considered.)

I also see there is a paper from August called "On the stability of black holes at LHC". It's a little hard to follow, but it would seem that they are arguing that it certain possibilities as to higher dimensions are true, the "behaviour" of the black holes created there may be "stable". I assume they mean that they won't disappear in a flash of Hawking Radiation, which has always been the main assumption of those doing the safety assessments on the LHC.

It's good that the LHC is not getting up to high energies just yet: it may allow sufficient time to get answers to these last minute concerns.

UPDATE: I have got a physicist to put into plain english the point that Mangano/Giddings were making in their rebuttal of Plaga:

Plaga is considering a warped extra dimensional scenario. In such models, there is a regime in which one is allowed to use the four dimensional quantities and laws, and a regime in which the phenomenology is described by the five dimensional laws (I describe this a little, in a simpler model, here). In their rebuttal, Giddings and Mangano point out that Plaga is applying four-dimensional formulae where they don’t apply, obtaining an incorrectly high result. This is perhaps the main clear problem.

Mind you, Mark Trodden likes to call all people who raise safety issues "crackpots", which gets up my nose for reasons I have explained before, but he has performed a useful service here.

Now, if we can also deal with the LHC and naked singularities, string balls, and time loops, I would be feeling better.

Truthers: what evidence?

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Conspiracy Files | The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 - The Third Tower

Four Corners last night did their bit to annoy Australian Troofers (I rarely deliberately misspell for ridicule, but they deserve it) by showing this BBC documentary about the collapse of WTC 7. Unfortunately, it would seem only the preview is available, and (if it is like the first section of the whole show) it may give the impression that the makers think the conspiracists have some good points.

Overall, though, the show did a pretty good debunking job. If anything, they were too soft on the obviously problematic psychology of truthers. They have incredibly little evidence (well, none actually) to support their ideas, yet having decided that there is a hidden truth, absolutely anything is taken as confirmation of the secret.

I find the slightly premature reporting (by the BBC, following Reuters, who followed someone else) of the collapse a particularly odd piece of "evidence" for them to latch onto. Assuming a conspiracy for a moment, why on earth would the people running it need to announce the collapse to the media at all? It's not as if they were not going to notice. Many witnesses say the building was creaking and deteriorating before their eyes: it's not as if a collapse was actually unexpected at the time the BBC ran the story. It is far from surprising that someone standing near a reporter somewhere in the city (who may not have been actually been within sight of the building) may have used the word "collapse" before it happened, and that reporter passed it on believing the building had already collapsed. Didn't troofers ever play "chinese whispers" at a party when they were kids?

So the BBC reporter's explanation makes complete sense. But the psychology of the troofers means they just can't accept that a mistake is the obvious explanation.

The literary life

High-pitched buzzing from the booksy girls and boys | The Spectator

Paul Johnson talks about the literary scene in London in the 1950's and beyond, and it makes for an entertaining column.

Meanwhile, on the demonic front

Something clever?: Is your computer possessed by a demon?

An evangelical from the US apparently put forward these propositions in a book in 2000:

• Demons can possess anything with a brain, including a chicken, a human being, or a computer.

That would account for some evil chickens I have encountered in my life.

• "Any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit."

I suppose that means they can live in USB keys too.

Fascinating.

When wind turbines fail

Spinning to destruction: Michael Connellan on the dangers of unreliable wind turbines | Technology | The Guardian

Here's a good read on the engineering challenge of building wind turbines that don't fall apart, and how that challenge has sometimes not been met.

Novel writing all washed up

First Things - Revisiting the Novel

The post above, from the very readable First Things blog, is a complaint by someone about how he has lost interest in novels, and is finding it hard to get back into them. (He's doing that by reading Jane Austen, though, which certainly wouldn't be the approach I would try.) My weekend thoughts on To Kill a Mockingbird has also inspired me to get around to posting on this topic.

I too have developed something of a problem with finding engaging fiction in the last few years. I used to read a lot of science fiction up to about the end of the 1980's when, despite the apparent good news of the end of the Cold War in the real world, it seemed that science fiction went pretty deeply pessimistic and ugly. Old optimistic authors I used to like (Niven and Pournelle, for example) stopped producing really good work. Arthur C Clarke's prose style (never a strong point of his books anyway) became ever worse, and as for Heinlien's last rambling novels of the 1980's, the less said the better.

I still get a hankering to read science fiction from time to time, and not being aware of any current American authors to my taste, in the last couple of years I have tried a few British science fiction writers who seem to be well reviewed. Peter Hamilton can be good in parts, and I quite like his future technology ideas, but I feel he often badly needs more editing. Ken McLeod's underlying socialist politics is just too obvious. "Blindsight" by Peter Watts was another go at the "first contact"sub-genre that I felt pretty much went no where. (For some bizarre reason, he thought it a good idea to have a main character who is literally a vampire, which the novel treats as a real human sub-species.)

I am presently reading the first novel by Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives), and while it is passable so far, it immediately struck me as being like a novel length treatment of ideas found in Heinlein's novella "Magic Inc". This is, I suppose, the fundamental problem for new science fiction: all the major themes were done by great novels within the first 50 or so years of the genre. It surely is a challenge to re-visit the sub-genres in a way that is fresh and worthwhile.

The thing I find common in these authors is the lack of readily likeable characters. Perhaps Peter Hamilton comes closest in this regard, but as I say, I think he has other faults.

Away from science fiction, I find the themes of most recent novels don't appeal. Probably due to my interest in religion generally, examinations of characters' lives from a purely secular point of view just seem somewhat lacking in significance to me. (This is a major fault in Australian film too: religion as something important to the characters is rarely present, or if it is, it is only ever portrayed in a negative light.) That there would be consideration of the "bigger picture" could be expected of the famous Catholic authors of the 20th century, but as First Things commented in June, those days seem long gone. I tried Shirley Hazzard recently, who seemed to be reviewed as if she had many of the qualities of older, mid 20th century fiction, but (as I have posted before) I actually found her style woeful, despite the high praise she generally receives.

As for the famous Catholic writers, by the 1990's I had read all of Waugh. However, I have only recently just read my first Graham Greene novel. (The Bomb Party, a short, less well regarded work.) It was pretty good, and I liked his style. I think I will be trying more. But it is kind of depressing that I have to be dipping back 60 years to find fiction that appeals.

So the point of this ramble is that it has occurred to me that, just as nearly everyone in their 40's starts thinking that popular music has peaked and is in decline, it seems to me that almost no good fiction has been written since around 1990.

Pity really.

Target probably too low then?

Firms hint at accepting 10pc Garnaut emission reductions | The Australian

A great movie

"To Kill a Mockingbird" was on TV today, being played as part of a Father's Day themed set of movies.

Its semi-melancholic remembrance of parental love still gets to me emotionally. (This is the first time I have re-watched it since having children, but it has always moved me.) Its effectiveness is all the more remarkable in light of the simplicity and the economy with which it was made: black and white film; a studio backlot set; direction and storytelling that is measured in pace but never flashy. I have always thought the score is particularly effective. (It was by Elmer Bernstein, who had a ridiculously long career in movie music.)

It is, of course, also an excellent example of the discretion with which older movies (and books) could deal with adult themes. If the film were being made today, in the "need to see everything" modern style of most movie storytelling, there would likely be flashbacks to illustrate the rape /seduction scene, rather than a simple reliance on the trial testimony.

Watching it made me check again whether Harper Lee is still alive. She is, and the Wikipedia entry for the book shows a photo of her receiving 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom less than a year ago. She has always sounded very modest, but she deserves to be extremely proud of the legacy of her one novel.

Geo-engineering re-visited

Global warming | A changing climate of opinion? | Economist.com

What I didn't get for father's day

The Eclipse 400 - zoom zoom ZOOM - The Red Ferret Journal

...a very cool looking private jet.