More on solar disasters

Last August, I noted a Scientific American article about the great danger that a large solar storm of could cause to modern infrastructure. A big event of the kind that last happened in 1859 could cause massive disruption for weeks or months.

Now New Scientist visits the issue, as a result of a new NASA sponsored study that looks at the possible disaster.

The basic problem is the nature of the damage to the electrical system:

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America....

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

Within a month, then, the handful of spare transformers would be used up. The rest will have to be built to order, something that can take up to 12 months.

That's an amazing thought, isn't it?: a huge part of the world having a permanent black out for months. As the study notes, a blackout of that length affects everything; water supply, fuel supply, food supply. As least survivalists would finally feel their preparation was worth it.

The article notes that the main satellite which would give short warning of the coming storm (and perhaps allow some electricity utilities to take some action to limit damage) is aging and no replacement is planned. Sounds very obvious that this is one early warning system that should not be allowed to lapse.

She-devil?

The Vatican's harmful views about condoms | Sex and sensibility | The Economist

The Economist's article on the Pope's African comments on condoms is not very fair, but I don't particularly care to go into that debate here.

Instead, I'll pray for forgiveness for trivialising a serious issue by joining in the question already asked by some Economist commenters: who is that person with the mountainous red hair standing next to the Pope?

By the way, I wonder how Quentin Bryce's African sojourn is going. If she needs a visit to the hairdresser while there, the result could be interesting.

(You can see photos of her visit here. For a moment there, I thought I spotted a pic which did not feature the GG herself. But no, when you enlarge the thumbnail, there she is on the poster in the background.

Ah no! I stand corrected. There is a pic without her image in any form whatsoever. A breakthrough!)

UPDATE: It appears that the Amazon women with red hair was earlier identified at Tim Blair's, but that massive hat concealing that massive hair makes her look slightly different.

Obama's fresh start getting stale already

Venezuela's Chavez calls Obama ignoramus | U.S. | Reuters

More weekend viewing

Guardian Angels - Landline - ABC

Cute story on Landline yesterday about big white dogs that guard chickens and penguins in Victoria from foxes. It kept putting me in mind of the Looney Tunes sheepdog/coyote cartoons, except I didn't know that dogs were happy to guard birds too. (Actually, I see that it was sheepdog/wolf, just that the wolf looked almost exactly like Wile E Coyote.)

Cat lovers, show us what useful things they do, again?

Innovative insurance companies

Sunday Night Videos - Yahoo!7 TV

That Sunday night magazine program with the obvious name ("Sunday Night") actually had an interesting story yesterday on Vancouver's success with using "bait cars" to dramatically reduce car theft in the city.

The police and insurance companies work together to put highly favoured "bait cars" on the street; when they are stolen, a command centre monitors where it is and can disable the engine when the police are close enough to nab the driver.

Excellent idea.

There must be more innovative ways insurance companies can reduce claims or costs.

There was a lot of comment recently about the relatively low number of houses that were insured in the Victorian countryside, but what innovative means could be used to encourage taking up insurance? Gangs of masked men from the insurance companies wielding flaming torches appearing at random in front of houses they know are uninsured, maybe?

I guess the insurance companies could buy cheap houses, slap a fresh coat of paint on them, burn them down and then have the pretend owners bemoaning in the media how they didn't have insurance. Maybe a bit of an expensive exercise, though.

I'm sure there's a good idea lurking somewhere in the back of my mind, but it's not coming out yet.

Watch out for the snails the size of dogs, though

Look! Miniature Garden

The waterless way

Waterless urinals: Cheap. Green. But many think ‘gross’ | csmonitor.com

Here's an interesting article (honest!) about a device that's becoming more common. They are cleaner than regular urinals, apparently:

“In traditional urinals, the surfaces on the inside are wet much of the time, and you get biofilms of growing organisms,” says Prof. Charles Gerba, an Arizona State University microbiologist who has researched surface contamination in public restrooms.

Flushing further creates a spray that lands on the rim and floor, creating a breeding ground for microorganisms.

“If easily-maintainable, water-free urinals had been developed first, no one would use conventional urinals because of all the contamination they cause,” he adds.

Maybe. But they don't stop the problem of men who miss or drip onto the floor near the urinal itself.

[Speaking of which, for years now, I have been wondering who it is was who thought up the terrible design of metal urinals that extend down and below floor level, with a metal grid on which to stand. For any women reading this who haven't partied with Rugby League players, the idea is for the man to stand on the grid so that any drips fall through it and into the urinal tray which extends below your feet. These are, I think, a universally unpopular design, as the tray beneath the feet does not usually drain well and smells, and the grid itself gets urine soaked and grotty anyway, to the extent that some men - especially if wearing thongs or other insubstantial footwear - will stand back from grid anyway, ensuring that the point of the design is completely lost.]

But there's something else to be learned from this article. If you are a journalist who gets an invite to attend the next WTO meeting, make sure you go to the right one:

In rural regions of the third-world where sanitary infrastructure is nearly nonexistent, these urinals present the option of leapfrogging past systems that use up precious water, says Jack Sim, an advocate of compost toilets. In 2002, he launched the World Toilet Organization, a nonprofit group based in Singapore and committed to improving toilet facilities worldwide.

Election fizzer

The Queensland election has turned into a fizzer for the LNP, with a swing about half of what had been predicted and way too little to get close to winning government. So ends my alternative career as electoral pundit...

But, as I said in 2007:

People need to remember that the voters of Queensland are, shall we say, different. Look at how long Bjelke Petersen hung around, and Goss and Peter Beattie's respective electoral loss and win which neither of them deserved.

Save for one short hiccup, it seems like Queenslanders only like to change governments about once every 20 years or so. Maybe the heat makes the incompetence or corruption of governments take an unduly long time to reach the collective brain of the electorate, rather like a brontosaur's (alleged) slow reaction to feeling its backside was on fire. But essentially, it's all a bit of a mystery to your humble blogger.

Finally, I saw little of the election coverage on TV, but what I did see of Treasurer Andrew Fraser confirmed what I had heard on the radio. If you thought Kevin Rudd could be robotic, Fraser appears to be the perfect political android, but with less charm than Asimo. (He does have a wife and two kids at the age of 32, which I guess proves he is human, but you wouldn't guess it from his media manner.)

A funny Japanese cubby

Dezeen - Takasugi-an by Terunobu Fujimori

"Mum, Dad's up the tree again."

Talking up LEDs

The next generation of electric lights | A brilliant new approach | The Economist

This article from the Economist talks up the promise of cheaper LED lights in the future, with a new manufacturing method potentially makes the process about 10 times cheaper.

But here's a figure that's handy to keep in your head for the next lull in a conversation:

About 20% of the world’s electricity is used for lighting. America’s Department of Energy thinks that, with LEDs, this could be cut in half by 2025, saving more than 130 new power stations in America alone.

Ayn going nowhere

Thought Experiments : The Blog: Ayn Rand: Meditations on a Crock of ....

Good post from Bryan Appleyard succinctly critiquing Ayn Rand.

Against the wind

Wind energy blowing hot air - On Line Opinion - 20/3/2009

It's been quite a while since I've linked to a decent anti-wind power article, but this one is quite good.

Things we learned from last night's Q and A

No transcript is up yet, but should appear here.

1. Peter Kennedy is pro-choice on abortion. What a surprise.

2. Peter Kennedy acknowledges that St Mary's doesn't run like a normal parish catering to local Catholics. It caters to the disgruntled left leaning Catholics of Brisbane, which makes the claimed "vibrancy" of the parish (700 or so attending masses on a weekend) not so impressive.

3. Peter Kennedy could not answer why it is essential that the church he (barely) presides over could not be run from virtually any location in Brisbane. The union building he has already been offered for weekends is probably less than 100 meters from the physical church he presently uses.

4. As already noted in this blog, the charitable projects for which his parish claims much credit are in fact primarily outsourced government funded projects. (I think he said government funding is $10 million, local parish support is $40,000. Maybe some parishioners work for free for this as well, but if so I would like to know the details.)

5. Peter Kennedy wants the Catholic Church to become a democracy in which women play a large role, because he thinks that is the way to make a church more relevant and vibrant, etc. I guess that explains why the Anglicans are doing so well then.

6. Tony Abbott is surprisingly soft on liberal Catholics. George Pell needs to smack him around a bit and toughen him up.

As a final note, Kennedy really did seem old and inarticulate at the start, but warmed up and sounded more "with it" later. But he clearly isn't going to be around forever, and "his" parish is going to have a succession crisis sooner or later in any event.

I certainly can't see why he would be considered charismatic, though.

Gadget time

World's First Color E-Book Reader Goes on Sale | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Hey, I didn't even know that coloured e-paper displays were in the pipeline.

This new Fujistsu e-book reader sounds pretty sexy, if expensive. But in Australia, no one is even selling black and white e-paper devices such as the Sony Reader or the Kindle. What gives? I just want to be able to see one in a shop, not necessarily buy it.

I am surprised that the Greens do not push the adoption of technology such as this as a way of reducing paper production.

A festival best avoided

The New York Times has an article on the small but enthusiastic culinary following in parts of America for "mountain oysters":

The cooking of testicles — also known as calf fries or lamb fries — is a living tradition on ranches throughout rural Nevada and the Intermountain West down through Central Texas (the annual fry here is nicknamed the “testicle festival”). ...

Liz Chabot, 77, who grew up on a ranch near the fly-speck town of Paradise Valley, Nev., described the delicacy as “a taste like none other,” and recalled how the fries were thrown into the fire at branding time, pulled out with a stick and then peeled and eaten like a fresh fig.

But hey, there's an Australian connection!:

Seven teams of up to four chefs each had two hours to prepare dishes using 20 pounds of the jiggling raw ingredient (flown in from Australia this year).

Evidently our testicles are world class quality.

Even Ken prefers a carbon tax

A carbon tax is the way to cut emissions | theage.com.au

The very Green left Kenneth Davidson supports carbon tax over emissions trading. Will he support the Liberals blocking Rudd's ETS then?

Do this experiment

Plus, a large yellow orb in the sky burned me somehow - Daily Telegraph Tim Blair Blog

It's funny that Tim Blair should post about the travel complaints of the British.

Just the other day, after spending quite some time on Tripadviser reading hotel and resort reviews in various Australian and near Australian locations (just how much of Kevin Rudd's generosity is going to spent supporting the economy of Fiji, I wonder) I observed to my wife that it is a pretty confusing exercise. Often a resort or hotel will have many good visitor reviews, but suddenly someone will give it 1 star and complain that it was absolutely filthy and the most disgusting room they have ever been in. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of one star reviews (often the first one in the list) seem to be by someone from England.

Here's an of example: The Warwick Fiji: the first 20 reviews give it 5 or 4 stars. It clearly pleases many people. In the second set of reviews, there are two 1 star reviews: one from England, and the other (go on, guess): a New Zealander!

The Outrigger on the Lagoon: first page has 5 star reviews, one 2 star (by an Australian honeymooner), but the first 1 star review is from Norfolk (England, I assume.) She's even moved the bed to take photos of the dust bunnies beneath it. (Sad to say, I have to admit the bathroom photo doesn't look flash, though.)

Still, even if the bad review is not from England, I find the words often automatically play in my head with an English accent, for some reason.

UPDATE: I was just checking random Australian hotel reviews on Tripadviser, and I must say reviewers of all countries, when they have an unhappy experience at a hotel, really like to talk it up. For example, someone (an Australian, but maybe her parents were English) says of the mid-range SeaWorld Nara resort:

The website is very flashy, as is the foyer of the resort. That's where it ends. When you walk out past the reception and foyer you land in a block of flats out of a Dickens novel.

I haven't actually stayed there myself, but that comment has just a touch of exaggeration about it, I think.

Then there is the person from Sydney who had this experience at the Holiday Inn Surfer's Paradise:

We arrived in the room and had a quick sleep for an hour, when I woke, the eye which was touching my pillow could barely open, it was so swollen. My eye was perfectly normal before coming into contact with their bed and I don't suffer allergies to frangrances or lotions or anything, so it is unlikely to be a reaction to the laundry detergent.

Dangerous bed linen?

But maybe I should apologise to the English after reading these comments from someone in Redfern (Sydney) reviewing Brisbane's Sofitel:

The bathroom, similarly was five star standard but what is that poor suffering piece of ornamental bamboo in a vase about....doesn't clutter equal lack of clarity about customer service....

Oh diddums, that ornamental bamboo ruined your five star experience? He also takes exception to the (usually rhetorical) matter of being asked if he would like something fixed. This is what happened when he tried to get into the Club Lounge:

One needs to swipe ones room card, and mine didn't work. Imagine my pleasure as the staff stood inside looking out at me like fish in a bowl...while I signaled to them..then it became my problem that the card didn't work. 'Would Sir like me to fix the card?' 'You bet he would, immediately, and why do you need to ask?' Strike one.

"One needs to swipe one's room card." No, is still sounding English to me.

Teaching art

Olivia Cole writing in The Spectator (about her annoyance at the peculiar way Britain's big galleries now try to interest schoolchildren in art) has a witty line:

Online, the National Gallery’s kits for teachers show how very far they have come from the ‘visceral’. Monet’s ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ is an excuse for a lesson in engineering; ‘compare ornamental bridges with industrial ones’ is one teaching instruction. With this approach, presumably ‘The Raft of Medusa’ offers lessons in boat-building.

On bereavement and related matters

Dreaming of the dead. (1) - By Meghan O'Rourke - Slate Magazine

I've been meaning to mention the very insightful and well written essays appearing in Slate dealing with bereavement. The link above should take you to the first entry, in which O'Rourke writes:

Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me in the least. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. What makes it worse is that my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined having.

I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

That second paragraph rings very true. It is frustrating when undergoing grief to have a rational understanding of it, but still find that such knowledge doesn't seem to help at all with overcoming the emotional reaction.

I found a similar thing when, some months after my father's death, I began feeling a pain in the same location as where he first felt the effects of his cancer. It feels a little silly saying to a doctor "of course I know it is very, very likely this is a psychosomatic grief reaction, but the pain is still there."

O'Rourke's latest entry (number 5 in the series if that link stops working) talks about dreams of her late mother. Hers sound a bit different from mine. As far as I can recall now, most of mine were of the type where I found my father was alive, not dead after all, and that the news of his death had all been a terrible mistake. However, the effect of these on waking was mainly one of disappointment; not peaceful comfort. I suppose they are a little like the "visitation" sense that O'Rourke describes, but she also says that hers were comforting upon waking.

One thing they made me think about was whether such dreams were a plausible explanation for the origin of the belief in the resurrection of Christ. Did someone in his circle talk to a friend of being "visited" by Jesus during the night, and through a series of Chinese whispers it became a story of a physical occurrence?

It sounds plausible in an academic way, but it seemed to me after experiencing grief dreams to not be very likely. After all, people in Jesus' day presumably had more exposure to death in the family at a younger age, and therefore probably knew more of grief dreams than people do today. I suspect that this may have increased their skepticism of a report of physical visit of a deceased person, rather than making them more accepting of such a story.

I don't deny that it might have been a near universal belief then (as it still is for many people) that grief dreams are a real visit by the spirit of the departed. But the gospels spend a fair bit of time emphasising that it was not a purely spiritual body that was appearing. The conversion of a story of a spirit visit from Jesus during the night into a daytime bodily visit seems a rather improbable path to me.

This is not intended to convince any reader in any substantial sense, and of course I am aware of many of the other speculations on the origin of the resurrection accounts. It is just an explanation of my thoughts on the matter, perhaps of interest to a handful of readers.

Death in (or near) the bedroom

Some months ago, before leaving on a holiday, I bought one of those automated insect spray machines (like this example, although the brand is different) that squirt a bit of spray in the air every so often. (You can vary the timing: I set it for about every 30 minutes.)

This is supposed to kill all hapless insects within a considerable range of the machine. I bought it for the walk-in robe that separates the bedroom and the ensuite toilet. Silverfish like it in there, and they were the main target.

One problem I have found with the device is that it makes a bit of a whirring sound every time it goes off. It seems to know when to do it to maximise surprise, such as the other night as I was passing through the robe to make a mid-morning visit to the toilet. I know I can turn the thing off at night, but never think to. Besides, insects are active at night.

The other thing is, given the small amount of stuff it squirts out, I have been very sceptical that it can possibly be effective, unless the bug happens to be within a very small radius of the device. In fact, I was going to do a post about my suspicions that, as a class of product, they might be a great con job. Had any consumer organisation actually tested their effectiveness? (I still haven't looked up that point.)

But then this morning, I found a large, dead cockroach in the ensuite. I assume the spray was the cause of death.

This is enough to make me keep using it, although I still feel I am being unscientific, and it continues to enjoy making me jump at quiet times when I am near it.

That's all I wanted to say.*

* This is officially rated "APoLC." (A Post of Little Consequence).