"Change" going well so far

Ahmadinejad demands Obama apology - World - smh.com.au

In case you missed it: micro black holes are news again

I've been slack lately and not following closely the arXiv papers on black holes at the LHC.

As those who read Instapundit would already have seen, there is a new paper by some credible European physicists (original is here) in which they re-visited the question of how long a micro black hole created at the LHC may last. The previous perceived wisdom was that it would be a tiny, tiny fraction of second before they disappeared into a spray of decay particles, which (presumably) the LHC could detect.

As I understand it, the new paper suggests that for a certain model, the decay rate may in fact be many seconds, even minutes; time enough for a micro black to shoot off through the earth. But they still think there is no likely risk of accretion starting and overwhelming the much-slower-that-previously-thought-possible decay rate.

As some are commenting (see the second link above), this still seems a pretty big revision of what was considered possible from the LHC, even if the authors are still arguing that there is no danger.

I note that the authors of the paper acknowledge discussions with physicists Giddings and Plaga, who themselves still (as far as I know) are stuck in disagreement as to whether Plaga's warning last year that a micro black hole could be an explosive danger was fundamentally flawed or not. At the very least, it indicates that other physicists consider that Plaga is not to be dismissed as a nutter.

Also on the topic of danger from the LHC, New Scientist has an article about a paper looking at (if I can paraphrase it correctly) how to judge the probabilities of something going wrong when you are not entirely sure of what may you might create in the first place. The general gist seems to be that it is potentially riskier than you think.

The guy who runs the Physics arXiv blog is probably really getting up the nose of CERN now, as the effect of both of these recent papers is to make him start worrying about safety issues. Fox News's version of the story probably annoys them even more.

"Chris, want to know who I just spoke to?"

Obama and Rudd discuss financial crisis - Yahoo!7 News

So, Obama finally got around to ringing our PM. I like to imagine Kevin doing a little dance in his office in celebration and relief. Then a phone call to Chris Mitchell to tell him all about it.

The trouble in Egypt

Gaza crisis threatens outlook for Mubarak - International Herald Tribune

Egyptians and Arab countries complained that Mubarak kept the official border crossing between Egypt and Gaza closed before and during much of the war. The most populous Arab country - and the first to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979 - Egypt has been subject to scorn in Yemen and Lebanon, where mobs have marched on its embassies in the past few weeks. It has also been the target of criticism from the tiny Gulf oil state of Qatar, as well as Syria and Iran. All support Hamas.

At the same time, Israel complained that the Egyptian police turned a blind eye to arms smuggled though hundreds of tunnels beneath the Gaza border.

Surely this issue with the Egyptian control of the border is not an insurmountable problem.

This is modern art (Part 1)

Kulik confounds critics with multisensory Monteverdi in Paris | guardian.co.uk

This is a somewhat amusing report on a very avant garde reworking of classical concert material in Paris:

Behold, the classical concert is reborn! Its saviour? A man whose career high until now has been crawling naked on all fours barking like a dog. The Russian artist Oleg Kulik is notorious for biting critics when his canine alter ego occasionally breaks the leash in galleries — now he has taken a nip at the heels of an artform that has been getting a bit doddery on its feet....

The resulting two-and-a-half hour "trip" – think William Blake meets Jean-Michel Jarre, crossed with Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books – is either a flabbergasting reworking of one of the most sublime works in the classical repertoire, or what the dependably crusty French daily Le Figaro today called an "indigestible visual minestrone".

As for that dog act of Kulik, it sounds like he, um, role plays it to the extreme:

The critic accused Kulik of doing to Monteverdi what French police suspected the artist did to a dog in some of his "man-dog, couple of the future" photographs recently seized from a Paris art fair.

Ugh.

Synergy

Last night I read this story:

Seven diners fell ill, one critically, after eating "fugu" globefish at a restaurant whose owner was unlicensed to safely prepare the notorious winter delicacy, police said Tuesday.

The seven consumed sashimi and fish testes at Kibun-ya restaurant in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, at around 6:30 p.m. Monday and one of them, identified as Asakichi Sato, 68, fell ill on the spot and was taken to a hospital, where he was listed in critical condition, the police said.

Then this morning I learn that:

Taiwan has a smorgasboard of theme diners, including one modeled after a hospital ward, one that holds puppet shows and two that seat customers on toilet bowls.

Am I the only person in the world to see the potential for a fugu restaurant done up as a hospital ward? (Or cut out the middle man: just locate it in a real ward.)

Moral panic delayed

The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity - NYTimes.com

The general gist of the article is that the number of teenagers having sex in American (including oral sex) is not as high as some recent reports have indicated. In fact, some participation rates have dropped over the last 20 years or so. For example:

A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

This part of the report seemed particularly surprising:

The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

Damn. I hate it if a perfectly good moral panic is shown to be illusory.

The ever helpful drug

BBC NEWS - Aspirin 'could cut liver damage'

Yet another way in which aspirin may prove to have unexpected benefits:

A dose of aspirin may be able to prevent liver damage caused by paracetamol or heavy drinking, suggest researchers.

It only has been shown in mice so far, but still it sounds hopeful.

Here's a surprising figure from the report:

Rates of liver cirrhosis have risen in the UK in recent years as people drink more alcohol, and paracetamol overdose, both deliberate and accidental, accounts for well over 100 deaths per year.

That's more than I would have expected.

Have I mentioned here before that a nurse told me years ago that suicide by paracetamol overdose could be one of the most tragic ways to die, as the person (if not treated quickly enough) could wake up feeling relatively OK, realise what they have done and regret it, but may have irretrievably damaged their liver anyway. What may have been a "plea for help" type suicide attempt may therefore turn into the real thing, and the help they are offered won't make any difference. It's an awful scenario.

(Geoff can correct me if this is medically wrong.)

Bob Ellis to be with us for a while yet

Masturbation can be good for the over-50s - The Independent

He's a poet, but didn't know it

Praise song for the first day for the school year (Brisbane version)

Hooray, hooray, is the cry of a million parents, as we catch the joy in each other’s eyes.

The noise all about us at home for the last six weeks is finished, and a tidied house again may stay that way for more than one hour.

No more cinema queues to be endured for the latest movie about dogs.

No more cartoons every morning.

No more outings just to find time in airconditioning.

Say it plain: we love you kids, but jeez it’s good to get you out of the house again.

Learn well, and don’t expect us to do your homework for you. (Tell the teacher that too.)

Praise the day, that domestic peace rules again for 8 hours a day.

Nudge nudge, wink wink...

Grand Arabian nights Geert Jan van Gelder TLS

This is a long review on a new translation of 1,001 [Arabian] Nights, which I found of limited interest. However, being kind, I will extract for you the best bit:

Some readers will be delighted to learn some naughty Arabic, but surely English has a profusion of equally vulgar words for the sexual organs. It should be stressed, however, that obscenities, Arabic equivalents of English four-letter words, are few and far between in the original, where sexual intercourse is often simply expressed as “lying with” or more elaborately by means of metaphors martial (“storming the fortress”) or religious (“circumambulating the Kaaba”, “putting the imam into the prayer niche”), with the mildly shocking profanity that was common in pre-modern Arabic.

Naked science revisited

Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?: Scientific American

Interesting article here arguing that a growing body of physicists are now not so sure that black holes always have an event horizon hiding their core from view. Some may be genuine naked singularities, the exact behaviour of which remains very unclear.

In September 2007, I mentioned a paper on arXiv which said that the Large Hadron Collider may also produce tiny naked singularities. Although the author was not worried that they would be dangerous, the issue of how a stationary one on the earth could behave has not, as far as I know, ever been addressed in the LHC safety reviews. (The general argument that cosmic ray collisions of higher energies have been safe for the earth is the only argument I suppose you could use, given the lack of knowledge about their behaviour. It's not a bad argument, except that the issue of whether there is a difference between moving and stationary ones would have to be addressed, as it was for micro black holes.)

Call me overly cautious if you want, but I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of a European lab possibly creating something the behaviour of which can only be guessed.

Bad ocean forecast of the week

Dramatic expansion of dead zones in the oceans

From the above report at PhysOrg:

A team of Danish researchers have now shown that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.

The New Scientist version of the story adds this detail:

Under the worst-case scenario, average ocean oxygen levels will fall by up to 40%, and there will be a 20-fold expansion in the area of "dead zones", like those already discovered in the eastern Pacific and northern Indian Ocean, where there is too little oxygen for fish to survive. Even in the mid-range scenario, dead zones would expand by a factor of 3 or 4. Cold, deep waters will also be affected if warming stifles the currents that deliver oxygen to greater depths.

Shaffer's projections suggest that the oxygen content in surface layers will dip to its lowest levels during the 22nd century, and in deep water a thousand years later. Recovery to pre-industrial levels will be very slow: "Even after 100,000 years, oxygen levels will only have recovered by around 90%," he says.

Go to the links for more details. Not exactly encouraging, as it shows what is potentially at stake if the warming skeptics are wrong. (And it is an additional risk to that of ocean acidification, which of itself is a major concern for future ocean health.)

The problems on Broadway

BBC NEWS | Mary Poppins - a tale for our times

The article is all about the current woes of Broadway. Strangely, though, it doesn't mention the lack of likeable or memorable musicals written in the last 30 odd years.

Remarkable

How low can you go? : Nature News

This is pretty mind boggling, even if it is of no practical application (yet!):

The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world — the fording of electrons across a transistor, or hard drives reliant on electrons' intrinsic spin — are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set: no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron.

But now, researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have used another feature of the electron — its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states — to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces. By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron.

Warnings to my mother (a ramble about some movies)

Readers may recall that I have an active 85 year mother. One of her main forms of entertainment, when not spending a few hours every week on the internet following all of the Colin Firth fansites, (as well as admiring the large Colin Firth calendar on her wall just near the autographed photo of him: you getting the idea?) is to watch movies, either in the cinema or on DVD.

I see few adult movies these days, but I still like to read reviews and watch how successful some are. My mother doesn't follow the reviews much; she tends to go by what passes for star power these days. Hence, for example, she may well be the only 85 year old person in the country who ventured out to see the poorly received Colin Firth movie "St Trinians" last year. ("No girl or boy over the age of 12 would be attracted by anything so puerile" wrote the Financial Times. My mother agreed.)

This puts me in a position of having to warn her of the nature of certain movies which I can guess she may be planning on seeing.

Recently, for example, she brought a DVD of "The Departed". The reason: she quite likes Leonardo Di Caprio. But gritty, profanity-filled Scorsese gangsterfests are hardly my mother's favourite genre, and I could recall Margaret Pomeranz really disliking it. (She said "It's so violent, it's so vile in the language, you know, particularly the sexual language." That was enough to put me off seeing it too.)

I warned my mother; I think she was going to return it unopened.

Which brings me to another Di Caprio warning I have just issued to her. Revolutionary Road has received pretty good reviews, but I had to warn my Mum that, despite romantic looking scenes in the TV ads, it is a story entirely about a marriage break up.

Now I'll do my easily ridiculed trick of rubbishing a movie simply on the basis of reviews I feel are probably right. In the case of Revolutionary Road, about an apparently ideal 1950's middle class American marriage, and how stultifying the couple find it, it would seem that many reviewer's reactions are related to how "progressive" they are in their social views, particularly on the question of the importance of self fulfilment.

For example, Roger Ebert adores the movie, but writes:

Remember, this is the 1950s. A little after the time of this movie, Life magazine would run its famous story about the Beatniks, "The Only Rebellion Around." There was a photo of a Beatnik and his chick sitting on the floor and listening to an LP record of modern jazz that was cool and hip and I felt my own yearnings. I remember on the way back from Steak 'n Shake one night, my dad drove slow past the Turk's Head coffeehouse on campus. "That's where the Beatniks stand on tables and recite their poetry," he told my mom, and she said, "My, my," and I wanted to get out of that car and put on a black turtleneck and walk in there and stay.

Further down he says of the acting:

They are so good, they stop being actors and become the people I grew up around.

And he finishes with:

A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?

Comments such as this indicate that Ebert has residual disdain for conformism from his teenage years, and like many others, has fully absorbed the idea that happiness is reached via self-understanding and self-fulfilment. As such he is primed to admire movies on these sort of themes. Indeed, like most critics, he loved American Beauty, also directed by Sam Mendes. I found it terribly over-rated, theatrically directly, and far too contrived to be affecting.

The review of Road which sounds to me to likely be more correct is by Peter Rainer, the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, which opens with this:

What is it about the 1950s that brings out the worst in cultural historians? The received wisdom is that this era that gave us Mailer and Ginsberg and Kerouac and Brando and Dean was, in fact, a bastion of strait-laced – i.e., straitjacketed – conformity. People, suburbanites especially, lived lives of quiet desperation in their look-alike, ticky-tacky dwellings. Wives were obsessed with spotless kitchens. Commuter trains served up faceless men in gray flannel suits to the gaping maw of Manhattan and then back again, to the two-car garage and the 2.5 children.

The latest movie to plug into this cautionary myth is "Revolutionary Road," set in the mid-'50s and based, extremely faithfully, on the celebrated 1961 novel by Richard Yates. The director is Sam Mendes, who plumbed these shallows once before in "American Beauty," which, though contemporary, felt '50-ish. The new film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who previously appeared together in "Titanic." This is another kind of disaster movie, on dry land.

Rainer makes the point, as do other some other reviewers, that the well received TV show "Mad Men", dealing with men behaving badly in the same era, at least shows the characters as having some vitality. In my view, its even more instructive to watch some of the quality films or television made and set in the 1950s (rather than modern ones about the 1950's) to be reminded that people really did live then.

Although I am too young to know of the 1950's directly, this point about it being too easy to overlook the "vitality" of day to day life in earlier times is an important one to remember. Westerners today do feel greater freedom in all kinds of areas, such as sexual mores, career path, and preparedness to end a marriage. Yet such freedoms don't necessarily mean that there were huge numbers of people living in the 1950's sitting around in a blue funk all day because they didn't feel fulfilled. Sure, there were some people who felt unduly constrained then, but that will always be the case for some, no matter how many freedoms are allowed.

Apart from doubting that they accurately reflect the general zeitgeist of the pre-60's world, the other grounds upon which a more conservative soul dislikes such movies is that they show no skepticism of the modern mantra of the importance of self fulfilment and "self realisation". As I think I have written here before, most people today have forgotten that this 20th century Western attitude is a huge turnaround from historic views that developing good character was something to be worked at, not a matter of self-discovery, and to lead a good life involved large components of duty and respect for others which often necessarily involved self-sacrifice.

I do know something of the 1960's, and of course there are some ways in which society now is significantly better, but other good features of the period have sadly been lost and show little sign of returning. I won't go into detailing the particular rights and wrongs of the recent past right now, but suffice to say that I have an inherent cynicism of movies which paint too bleak a picture of the pre-1960's world, when as an era it featured growing populations, strong economies, the birth of modern technology, a greater sense of obligation and duty, and movies as enjoyable as those of Hitchcock at his peak.

Registering a complaint

Yesterday, January 24 2009, was remarkable even by Brisbane standards for its extremely unpleasant combination of high humidity, high temperature and near complete lack of breeze or air movement for most of the day (especially in the western suburbs). The air in the house felt as if it lacked oxygen. Unwisely, (but I was being social,) I had two mid-strength beers at lunch and that was enough to leave me with the slightly thick head that I usually suffer if I drink any alcohol in the middle of the day, especially in hot weather. I clearly don't have the constitution to be an all-day alcoholic.

The internet tells me that at least one other person felt yesterday was horrible too. Oddly, the weather bureau's record of observations for the day doesn't make it sound as bad as it was.

Still, it was not as bad as an week in (I think) either early 1997 or 1998. I believe it was in February of one of those years that there was a run of hot humid nights, with minimums of 27 or 28 degrees, and one evening I had to go and see a movie just to get into airconditioning. On leaving the cinema, after 11pm, my glasses immediately fogged up completely. That is not a common occurrence here, even with our routine high humidity.

Financial woes

Alan Wood gave a pretty good explanation of the international financial system problems in The Australian today.

I am told by a friend who returned from Taiwan recently that in China there is a new expression (which I can't recall, sorry) for the hundreds of thousands of suddenly unemployed people in the southern cities who are out of work but not yet returning to their rural homes (partly out of embarrassment, and partly out of hope they'll find a job somewhere in another factory.) They are just milling around the cities during the day, apparently. Transport for return home for Chinese New Year would usually be fully booked, but this year it is said to be not so crowded.

And worse times are coming, of course.

Conspiracy of the day

I think I spotted it in comments in Huffington Post yesterday, and the writer may have been joking. But it was to the effect that the fluffed Presidential oath was deliberate, so that the "real" oath taken in the White House could be secretly done with a Koran!

This has probably spread wildly through certain corners of the internet already, but I can't be bothered checking. It is pretty good as far as nutty conspiracy theories go, though. (I am waiting for 9/11 Troofers to start being disillusioned with Obama. It won't take long.)

(And Lefties have nothing to feel superior about. It was conspiracy all the way after the second Bush election.)

Tiltshifting toy

Found via Red Ferret, I've been fiddling at TiltShiftMaker.com with attempts at tiltshifting some photos. (Boing Boing had a fair few posts about it: the 'art' of manipulating normal photos to make them look as if they are really of models.) Here's my best result, which I think does have a bit of a model town appearance (it'll look better if you enlarge it):



The original photo appeared at an old post here.

Small things amuse small minds, hey. (Boom boom).