A new type of controversy at the LHC

Physicist working at CERN arrested : Nature News

This news broke last week, but I wasn't sure if the guy arrested was working on the LHC or not. Seems he was:

He is believed to be a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) who, since 2003, has been performing data analysis on one of four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

French antiterrorism police arrested the 32-year-old researcher together with his 25-year-old brother. The duo is suspected of passing along information about possible terrorism targets inside France to members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — the North African wing of al-Qaeda.

There is no evidence that his work at CERN is connected to terrorism, according to laboratory spokesman James Gillies. All work at the laboratory is published in the open domain and is not military in nature, said a CERN statement.

Hey, maybe some al-Qaeda operative reads my blog and thinks mini black holes from the LHC have potential as a terrorist weapon. (Well, I did refer once or twice to the fact that some physicists talk of evaporating black holes having similar power to atomic bombs.)

It is also possible that my fretting about mini black holes contributed to a premature loss of virginity (this even happened in my own home town!).

Of course, given the number of readers this blog maintains, it's just as likely that I caused the election of Pope Benedict.

Pipe dreams

Technology Review: Carbon Capture Remains Elusive

Technology Review usually seems a wildly optimistic magazine, so when it has an article expressing doubts about CO2 sequestration, we should take note. Here are some reasons why government plans to rely heavily on this technology should be taken with a bucket of salt:

One of the geological challenges faced by Duke Energy and others investigating in CCS is ensuring that the pressure inside reservoirs deep beneath the surface of the earth doesn't climb too high as carbon dioxide is injected. "There are only certain safe levels that you can raise the pressure to before you get into issues of seismicity," Herzog says....

As I suspected, finding the right places to pump it in is the biggest problem, even in geologically diverse North America:

...one of the biggest remaining questions is whether sufficient reservoirs exist to store all of the carbon dioxide that may be captured.

The best-studied storage deposits are former oil and gas reservoirs capped by layers of nonporous rock that kept the petrochemicals locked deep underground for millions of years. Yet of an estimated 3,947 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide storage capacity under the U.S., only 1 percent consists of depleted natural gas and oil reservoirs. The vast majority of capacity--3,630 gigatonnes--consists of deep saline formations that have received less scrutiny.

"We're at the place where there is no problem doing millions of tonnes a year, but to solve the climate problem we need to do billons of tonnes or gigatonnes a year, and at that scale, storage becomes a real issue," Herzog says.

The Greens Senator Christine Milne was on Radio National this morning complaining that the Rudd government's plan relies almost exclusively on CO2 sequestration coming on line in (I think) 2030, and it providing the actual reduction in greenhouse gases that Australia makes. Before that, it's all overseas permits.

Her criticism is very valid, but on the other hand the Green's solution (that Australia is capable of making a rapid changeover to run purely on renewable energy) seems wildly off the mark too. (Especially if you read Barry Brook's blog.)

Why is it impossible at the moment to find any political party in Australia that actually makes sense on CO2?

Encouraging

Better to be fat at 40 than thin: study | The Japan Times Online

Good news if you are slightly overweight. (Emphasis on slightly.)

Some secret

Two dead at James Arthur Ray The Secret sweat lodge retreat

Mr Ray appears to know everything except the fact that overheating can kill.

An Anthony Lane moment

“The Invention of Lying” movie review : The New Yorker

The Anthony Lane review of Ricky Gervais' "The Invention of Lying", a high concept comedy based on the idea that religion is simply a lie, contains this final, somewhat biting, comment:

Audiences here should be reminded, at this point, that Gervais found his fame on the BBC, with “The Office” and “Extras,” and that the execration of religious faith, specifically Christianity—plus a reflex sneer at the fools who fall for it—has, in the past decade, become the default mode of British cultural life. It makes sense, I suppose, for Gervais to use his film to air such mockery, if spiritual belief genuinely strikes him as a lie like any other; the plan would carry more weight, however, if he didn’t use the rest of the film to air his transcendent belief in Ricky Gervais.

Why doesn't every Miss World win, then?

As the BBC says:

In awarding President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian committee is honouring his intentions more than his achievements.

If he really wants to impress the world, Obama will decline to accept this, and tell the committee that he appreciates the thought, but he won't deserve it until he actually has some achievement to show for his efforts.

Lunar attack

Only an hour to go as I write this for the NASA LCROSS mission to smash into the moon. If it's lucky, the plume will show water or something else of interest under the lunar surface. Neat.

I'll be watching on NASA tv on the internet, unless I find a news show on cable is taking it live too.

Meanwhile, crashing a rocket into the moon is enough to bring out some, well, lunacy, in the form of blogs like "Do not bomb the moon". Amongst the comments by those who fear this is a bad, bad idea, I perhaps like this one best:

It’s a plot to destroy earth! A big enough chunk, like several tons of material, will be broken loose and since it’s between the moon and earth, it will eventually be caught up in earths’ gravity and flung into us much like a large astroid that wiped out all life on earth mellinium ago!

FInd a large deep cave to hide in and take enough food and for 4 years if you want to survive.

When I was bducted by aliens a few years ago, they warned me of this but nobody would listen. Now maybe they will.

UPDATE: well, that's it, and there wasn't a flash or anything to see visually. Funnily enough, on NASA TV after it, some guy admitted it wasn't clear what they had just seen - maybe the gain wasn't high enough. (In other words, he sounded as if he had expected to see something too.) Anyhow, information from other orbiting satellites will be sending back their observations soon.

Nuclear decay in your pocket?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Tiny 'nuclear batteries' unveiled

Remarkable.

The depths of racism

The discussion of racism and "blackface" that has been going on today reminded me of a BBC documentary I recently stumbled across and started watching.

I've only seen the first 15 minutes or so, but in that part (starting around the 7 or 8 minute mark) there is a pretty extraordinary section about lynch mobs in the United States in the 20th century. This is a topic of which I know little, so I had always imagined lynch mobs as comprising of maybe a few dozen men, most of them in KKK get up, getting their murders over and done with by stealth. But as the video shows, there were lynchings in which hundred or thousands of well dressed town folk turned up to view the spectacle, with many of them posing with glee in front of the corpses. Then photographs of the event were often later sold around town as postcards:



It's interesting to note that the person talking about this, James Allen, says that this aspect of American history is not one that the southern States are all that keen on being reminded of. (The introduction at this website indicates the same thing.) If you want to, you can see a flash movie of many of the lynching postcards which Allen has collected. (Although I must admit his narration is, in places, too self reflective.)

A general history of lynching in the US is also to be found on Wikipedia here.

It's remarkable to think that there could well be people in their old age today who, as a child in the first half of the 20th century, may have been taken to see the aftermath of a lynching.

It's worth being reminded as to why current American society is still getting over the legacy of this period in their history.

A proposal

Let's just save time, money and effort now, shall we, and do a deal with Kevin Rudd that he doesn't have to bother with the next election if will accept the status quo for another term? The Liberals can say that that money can be used to pay down our debt, and as such they are doing something good for the nation.

There would not be a half-interested voter in the nation who thinks that there is even the remotest possibility that the present rabble of a Coalition could win the next election.

As Alexander Downer was saying on the radio today, a change of leadership is not going to make one bit of difference. In fact, it will likely make matters worse, yet that is what the likes of brilliant mind Wilson Tuckey wants.

Andrew Bolt is again playing a disingenuous role in this: he writes well and is surely regularly read by most on the conservative side, but is encouraging the cultural divide within the party between those (who knows how many? - it seems damned few most of the time) who will accept there is a need to do something serious about CO2 and those who don't. I feel sure that, regardless of his promotion of all things skeptic about AGW, he is not convincing younger to middle age voters, and as such there is a political need to deal with the issue seriously regardless of what individual doubters about the science believe. He is naturally inclined towards conservatism, but is doing them no favours by encouraging this hopeless division.

Something in the water at Channel 9?

Hey Hey it's controversy | Herald Sun

The strangest thing about the Hey Hey show last night (apart from the evident lack of post- 1980's hair stylists in whichever part of Queensland Jackie McDonald now lives) was definitely the "is this meant to be blackface or not?" skit.

The make up did not include the 'traditional' white mouth and eyes, yet was so thickly black it was impossible to avoid the impression that it was the blackface you use when you can't quite bring yourself to do classic blackface. And then, to further add confusion, it was revealed that they were all doctors, this morning we hear two are Indian, and a clip from when they first did the skit 20 years ago indicated that at that time, their face makeup looked less "blackface" than this time.

What on earth were they thinking then? And what was Channel 9 (or the Hey Hey production staff) thinking? In the paper this morning a doctor from the group says:

"All six of us discussed this at length whether or not we should put this on because we realised it may be controversial," he said. "We did go to the trouble of checking with the production staff and they seemed to OK it."

So was there an ironic intent then - an element of "look at what we could away with 20 years ago"? Was the risk of offence to any visiting (or viewing) American completely overlooked by Channel 9, and a bunch of adult doctors? Did they only consider that it might be too soon after Jackson's death?

This is all very strange if you ask me.

I actually found Sam Newman's performance last month worse in that there was absolutely no other way to interpret it other than as 100% racism with intent. Yet that appears to have attracted much less condemnation. Let's show Harry Connick a clip of that event and see what he says.

In any event, there is something very peculiar about management in Channel 9 and their inability to see racist offence coming, if you ask me.

UPDATE: Also, is it only me, or did Daryl Somers suddenly look older last night compared to last week? Maybe it was Jackie McDonald's hair that somehow unbalanced the show into an unwelcome time warp, compared to last week's nostalgic one. All very odd.

Your bad ocean acidification news for the week

Poor Malcolm Turnbull. He sounds half reasonable to me on the topic of CO2 emissions but is caught in a bind. Even though the Rudd ETS is probably an extravagant waste of time from a scientific point of view, as is probably about 95% of all nations' approaches to greenhouse gases, people like the idea of doing something better than the idea of doing nothing. Politically something has to be done, but a divided Coalition is giving every reason for the public to think they can't be trusted to do a damn thing.

Why do no politicians talk of ocean acidification as an independent reason for taking action? Here's some more depressing news from the ocean acidification blog:

* two studies indicating bad news for corals due to effects on important symbiotic relationships

* some reef fish don't seem to like it either

* another study showing a couple of bivalves (clams and scallops) don't take lower pH well.

I saw Malcolm Turnbull on Insiders last Sunday arguing that action on AGW was the prudent thing to do given the weight of science. Quite right; but why not also mention ocean acidification, given that it appears increasingly well founded that future changes to ocean chemistry are a gigantic ecological crapshoot.

Delicious

Fries with your Mona Lisa? Big Macs move on Louvre

They'll be protesters in the streets of Paris threateningly waving french sticks around over this one. But as the story notes:

The French seem to love McDonald's. While business in brasseries and bistros is in free fall, the fast food group opened 30 outlets last year in France and welcomed 450 million customers.

As for my current opinion of McD in Australia, I note:

* the Angus beef burgers are surprisingly bland. Neither my wife nor I were particularly impressed. I would stick to the McFeast if I were you.

* the deluxe cheeseburger is good for a quick lunch

* the hot coffee from the machine is pretty good, but the new iced coffee is just a premix from a bottle and is not so good

* some of the crispy chicken burgers are pretty good.

By the way, it would seem that the Australian menu is significantly more extensive than the one in France, especially when it comes to chicken choices.

In praise of cities

The Green Case for Cities - The Atlantic (October 2009)

Evolving goodness (and yes, back to God again)

Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy. - Slate Magazine

Further to today's lengthy post on the ultimate value of emotions, it's worthwhile reading this article on the increasing research into the animal predecessors to the "good" human emotions.

(You should at least read it to see how empathy is not evenly spread around the primate world. Baboons are apparently not very nice.)

Such "bottom up" arguments for the evolution of a human sense of morality are used to attack the "top down" (god derived) arguments for our sense of morality, of which CS Lewis was a notable proponent. In Mere Christianity, Chapter 2, Lewis tried to answer "objections" that morality is really all about instinct by arguing that if you have competing instincts in facing a particular situation, there is a third bit of your mind by which you judge one of those instincts as more worthy than the other. He has various ways of proposing why it is not merely a case of the strongest instinct always winning, but I don't really have time to set them out here.

Lewis' arguments still seem to me to be quite clever, but given the mystery of the workings of the inner mind, I can certainly see how they are also far from conclusive.

In any event, I'm not sure that increasing evidence of animal instinctive kindness is necessarily threatening to Catholic style belief in God, which by and large has accommodated evolution. Why should it surprise us that what we value in our feelings should be shared in some instinctively understood way by our closest animal relatives? The real issue (and here I guess I am more or less following the Lewis line) is how our human rationality deals with those instincts, and whether there is reason to believe that there is God who cares about those choices.

Against the silence

It's pretty quiet around here lately. Sure, Tim still comments sometimes, but Geoff and Caz haven't for a while, and I don't know what's happened to MCB. I get the occasional new commenter, which I don't always respond to. Is that impolite? Maybe I should start replying to the spam comments that turn up. WOW Gold, indeed.

Just feels a bit like rattling around an empty house on a Sunday afternoon here sometimes. (I never got the hang of Sunday afternoons. They still strike me as unsatisfactory.)

In praise of Stop Making Sense

Talking Heads: 'Stop Making Sense' 25th anniversary Blu-ray release: How well does the concert film age?

Extremely well, says this article, and I am sure I would agree. Anyone care to buy me a Blu Ray device and the disc in return for a review? No, thought not.

The difficulty of preserving forests

UN's forest protection scheme at risk from organised crime, experts warn | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Worth reading.

More God talk, sorry about that

'The Case for God,' by Karen Armstrong - Review - NYTimes.com

Well well. I had my own extended comments on Karen Armstrong's latest book back in July, in which I doubted her characterisation of early Christianity.

I think its fair to say that this review in the New York Times, while not entirely unsympathetic to Armstrong, pretty much supports my take. First, remember that her key argument (as summarised in the review) was that the Christian Church fathers:

...understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine.

The reviewer notes that this claim needs to be highly qualified:

Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was grounded in shared doctrines and constrained by shared assumptions. Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’ resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if he hadn’t.

Which is to say that it’s considerably more difficult than Armstrong allows to separate thought from action, teaching from conduct, and dogma from practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and vice versa. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion without believing that all its dogmas are literally true: a spiritually inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But the Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs.

I quite agree.

Divine thoughts. (Warning: God talk and stuff)

Did God give me the hiccups? The Guardian

A pretty amusing anecdote from an atheist here. I like to think the answer to the question is "yes". It's just the right level of divine action towards an atheist about to go out proselytising: enough to make them wonder a little, even though no harm was done.

While we're on the topic of God and atheists, I finally finished Julian Barnes' "Nothing to be Frightened of". It is, by and large, a pretty enjoyable rambling bit of self-analysis and family memoir dealing with why he's always dreaded death. Most reviews note that it starts with the unusual line "I don't believe in God, but I miss him". (Well, maybe not so unusual. I see from another recently read book that a similar line of thought is expressed by one of the characters in Catch 22.)

Barnes has never been a believer, but he can understand the attraction of faith. He moved from youthful atheism to middle aged agnosticism. I suppose on that trajectory, he might end up a believer by the time he dies, even though he would not see that as at all likely.

I quite liked this passage about a commonly repeated theme in modern atheism:

Atheists in morally superior Category One (no God, no fear of death) like to tell us that the lack of a deity should not in any way diminish our sense of wonder in the universe. It may have all seemed both miraculous and user friendly when we imagined God had laid it on especially for us, from the harmony of the snowflake and the complex allusiveness of the passion flower to the spectacular showmanship of a solar eclipse. But if everything still moves without a Prime Mover, why should it be less wonderful? Why should we be children needing the teacher to show us things? The Antarctic penguin, for instance, is just as regal and comic, just as graceful and awkward, whether pre- or post-Darwin. Grow up, and let's examine together the allure of the double helix, the darkling glimmer of deep space, the infinite adjustments of plumage which demonstrate the laws of evolution, and the packed, elusive mechanism of the human brain. Why do we need some God to help us marvel at such things?

We don't. Not really. And yet. If what is out there comes from nothing, if all is unrolling mechanically according to a programme laid down by nobody, and if our perceptions of it are mere micro-movements of biochemical activity, the mere snap and crackle of a few synapses, then what does this sense of wonder amount to? Should we not be a little more suspicious of it? A dung beetle might well have a primitive sense of awe at the size of the mighty dung ball it is rolling. Is this wonder of ours merely a posher version?

You can, of course, extend this line of scepticism about the sense of wonder to every thought or emotion any human ever has, and argue that atheists, if consistent, should really all end up being nihilists. (Wikipedia says "Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.") Most modern atheists don't take this line: they deny that their lack of belief is any detriment to the enjoyment of life; indeed, many argue that lack of belief in God is liberation to really enjoy all that life has to offer. The idea is that they are better off both intellectually and emotionally.

But if you take a merely naturalistic view of the universe, what intrinsic value does any emotion really have? Not much, when you get down to it. In a 1995 Richard Dawkins' interview for a Christian publication, he pretty much acknowledges this:

You would say that love is a spurious purpose?

Well, love is not a purpose, love is an emotion (which I certainly feel) which is another of those properties of brains.

A by-product?

Well, it's probably more than just a by-product. It's probably a very important product for gene survival. Certainly, sexual love would be, and so would parental love and various other sorts of love.

But to say that love is the purpose of life doesn't in any way chime in with the understanding of life which I feel we have achieved.

I will dip my toe into the dangerous world of theodicy now (and before doing so again offer my usual silent prayer that I not be personally tested by any intense experience of tragedy.)

It seems to me that atheists should really all intellectually be Zen Buddhists when it comes to the question of suffering. (Indeed, Susan Blackmore, the UK psychologist pretty popular in skeptic circles, follows Zen philosophy while not signing up fully with the religion.) That is, life is suffering, but it is ultimately all an illusion caused by desire which can be overcome by understanding the true nature of the universe.

But when they get into arguments on Christian style theodicy, it seems few atheists can avoid arguing as if the emotional power of suffering is itself the knock out blow against the idea of a good God. In doing so, aren't they elevating the emotional far above what their beliefs about the nature of the universe mean intellectually?

You could say that when it comes to Christians who suffer a crisis of faith due to (say) the death or suffering of a child, they also are experiencing a disjoint between their previous intellectual understanding of the universe (which accepts that a good God can allow suffering) against the intense pain and sense of injustice suddenly experienced in their own life. But at least in their case, the crisis has started from a belief that the love they have for the child is subset of the true, universal Love that is more than a passing emotion caused as by-product of the selfish gene. The Christian cannot undervalue love, hence the interference with the experience of it now is all the greater challenge.

Both atheists and believers having a faith crisis may feel that some forms of theodicy are like an insult, in that in attempting to intellectually explain their pain, it seems to be excusing or devaluing the depth of their emotional experience. But, without intending any insult or demeaning of their emotions, isn't it true that atheists have an intellectual understanding that downplays the significance of emotion in the big scheme of things anyway?

Maybe the argument is that, by religion giving people hope that love does triumph, it is setting them up for greater sense of loss when the world doesn't seem to pan out that way. I can understand the point, except that it is also starts from the assumption that their atheism is clearly true, and that all sensible people, like children who give up belief in Santa Clause, will ultimately end up at that position. I don't accept that assumption and consider that, at most, if you are not going to believe in God, agnosticism is the only really intellectually defensible alternative. Agnostics tend to let believers be, and some, like Julian Barnes, seem to even allow for a degree of envy.

Ultimately, I agree with the view that few atheists are rigorous in following their beliefs where they should intellectually take them, yet they are not inclined to admit it.

And finally, I see that soon after his book about death was published last year, Julian Barne's wife died. Presumably, this was a sudden and unexpected event, as he gives no indication in his book or in interviews that his wife's health had anything to do with his writing about death. I have to admit to an intrusive, and some would say, morbid interest in how Barnes has coped with this, and whether it has changed his attitudes in any way. As with other examples I can think of (CS Lewis having a shot at theodicy in The Problem of Pain, and then suffering badly when he finally fell in love and his wife promptly died), it certainly encourages the superstition that it is bad luck to talk about such things at all, and hence I should stop right now.