Sounds reasonable

Faster, NASA, Faster - NYTimes.com

The concluding paragraphs:

There is no reason American companies could not build a similar, but modernized, medium-sized, economical workhorse of a rocket that is simple enough to sustain frequent launching. If NASA were to promise to buy one such rocket a week, the manufacturers could also profitably sell copies for launching commercial spacecraft and satellites — at much lower than current prices — and this would spur the development of space-based industries in fields like telecommunications, earth imaging and even space tourism.

To maintain a vibrant, innovative program, NASA needs to step up the rate of rocket launchings. It should set a requirement that any new launching system fly once a week, then put out contracts for private companies to design and build rockets that can operate this frequently. By launching early and launching often, NASA could get back in the business of exploring space.

Dawkins' limits

Elders with Andrew Denton - episode 6: Richard Dawkins (21/12/2009)

Last night's Andrew Denton interview of Richard Dawkins was pretty fascinating. It seemed to me that Dawkins was quite defensive and almost ludicrously cautious; seemingly worrying all the time that Denton was setting him up for some sort of trap. For example, this exchange:

ANDREW DENTON: What's your definition of success?

RICHARD DAWKINS: ...Oh dear, I don't really answer that kind of question...

ANDREW DENTON: Why not?

RICHARD DAWKINS: ...I'm just trying, well, because I just think of it as a dictionary word, which has a dictionary definition and you can go and look it up. I don't have a personal...

ANDREW DENTON: Well, you don't have a marker in your life for what would be achievement?

RICHARD DAWKINS: No, it's cause it's either you just give a dictionary definition or it becomes very complicated and personal. No, I don't really think I've got a got a good answer to that.

And then this part where he seems unwilling to talk about emotions:

ANDREW DENTON: Is it possible to explain love?

RICHARD DAWKINS: I think it in principle can be explained but I don't actually have the internal wherewithal to explain it. I just experience it.

And this:

ANDREW DENTON: When do you laugh at yourself?

RICHARD DAWKINS: ...Are all the questions going to be like this?

ANDREW DENTON: Not all... do you find these very difficult?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: Well, why is that?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Um ... because they're about me, I suppose.

ANDREW DENTON: Some of the questions are about you and some are about your observation of other people.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes...

I found this avoidance of the personal and emotional a strange contrast with his aggressiveness and apparent confidence in attacking belief in God.

More entertainment than expected

Taking the kids to a Christmas season bit of theatre seems to be a riskier exercise than it used to be. First, you have to hope that Amy Winehouse is not in the audience:

During a production of Cinderella at Milton Keynes theater in Bucks, Winehouse, who was in the audience with parents and children, heckled the cast and kept shouting, “He’s f…ing behind you”, The Sun reported.

Winehouse allegedly refused to be seated as she blocked the view of families by standing up in the stalls and walking along rows.

She called out for more than half an hour in the first act, yelling: "F… Cinders, Prince Charming, marry me" and branding the ugly stepsisters characters "bitches", sources said.

She refused to be ushered to a box after the interval and allegedly launched herself at front-of-house manager Richard Pound - allegedly pulling his hair, punching him and kicking him between the legs.

And even in New Zealand the kids might get more of an education that you expected:

About 130 foster children went along to see a performance of An Adagio Christmas put on specially for the young group.

Most of the children in the group were under 10, and some were as young as six.

But the government service that arranged the free Christmas play had not seen the script, which contained swearing and sexual references.

One character in the show swore: "He called me fat. You can talk you fat f**k."

Then another character talked about losing her virginity and pretended to have an orgasm.

"She loses her virginity! She shuddered and he lifted her higher, higher!"

The deputy chief executive of the Child, Youth and Family service, Ray Smith, has released a statement saying the play was a generous gift from a Wellington theatre.

He says he is disappointed the event has been tarnished by what he calls less-than-fair media coverage.

He said while small sections took everyone a little by surprise, they did not detract from what was an amazing show.

One way correspondence

Dear God, you've got mail

Well, I didn't know that this went on. I'm starting my 30 page opus now.

Lowering expectations

I forgot to link last week to this post at the First Things blog, about how low an author's expectations should be. It quotes a publisher, and then adds its own comment at the end:

"Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime."

Alternative: Start a blog. You’re likely to reach more readers in a year you will with your book

Well, that makes me feel better about being a low-ranking blogger.

A fair summary

Phillip Coorey in theSydney Morning Herald gives a fair enough summary of the political mess that Australia (and indeed the world) is in regarding a response to AGW.

Christmas consciousness in the Many Worlds

Here's an interesting paper I found on arXiv: "Quantum features of consciousness, computers and brain".

I haven't heard of author Michael Mensky and his ideas before, and it remains unclear what his science qualifications are. Here's his home page.

He calls his idea the Extended Everett's Concept (EEC). (That's referring to Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.)

This paper is rather frustrating. His explanation of the background debate of the role of consciousness in quantum physics, and Hugh Everett's many worlds theory, seems all quite reasonable and (as far as I can tell) accurate. But his own EEC idea seems poorly explained. For example, we get this:

Although consciousness in EEC is directly connected with quantum features of our world, no structure in brain of the type of quantum computer is suggested. Rather the whole quantum world is a sort of quantum computer supporting the phenomenon of consciousness and superconsciousness.

I need more meat on those bones. Here is another interesting line, apparently the crucial feature of EEC:

It is accepted in EEC that not only consciousness separate the alternatives but consciousness is nothing else than the separation of alternatives.

I should note that this paper is not the first he has written on his EEC idea; he came up with it in 2000, apparently. So I am not suggesting that this paper is inadequate for not explaining it well enough.

But when he gets to the consequences of the idea, it starts to sound a bit New Age flaky:

....the separation of alternatives disappears in the unconscious regime so that one obtains access to all alternatives. Therefore, in unconscious regime one obtains super-consciousness having access to all classical alternatives. This not only predicts ‘supernatural’ capabilities of consciousness but also explains why these capabilities reveal themself when (explicit) consciousness is turned off or weakened, for example in dream or meditation (the fact well known in all strong psychological practices).

This explains not only parapsychology but such well known phenomena as intuitive guesses including great scientific insights. In fact superconsciousness is a mechanism of direct vision of truth.

Hmm. Mensky has been published in the grandiosely titled journal "NeuroQuantology." (I wish I had come up with that name.) I see now that he has had an earlier paper up on arXiv, but I don't have time to read tonight. The abstract notes that:

The brain serves as an interface between the body and consciousness, but the most profound level of consciousness is not a function of brain.

So our individual consciousness is all just a subset of the the universal super-consciousness that is accessed via the brain? I'm not sure if that's what he means, but I am interested enough to read some more. (It also sounds consistent with some Eastern religious beliefs, too.)

Anyhow, this is just the sort of stuff that I find pretty intriguing. I may be enjoying the coming Christmas not just in this world, but in many others too, and while I sleep I may catch a glimpse of them. It's a good thing I don't have many nightmares.

On a final note: given that "many worlds" is pretty popular amongst scientists now, has any theologian considered its implications for Christianity? (I know Frank Tipler believes in it, and is a Christian, but I am not sure he has much dwelt on the theological implications.)

I mean, Christianity can live with the idea that God may have had incarnations in alien species in the universe we can see, but can you expand that to include his necessary incarnation in all of a spectacular number of branching universes? Just wondering...

Update: here's a recent internet forum in which the question about Christian theology and Many Worlds was asked, and some useful contributions follow. I also see that there was a 1998 seminar on the whole topic, with the likes of Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, a Vatican scientist and even Richard Dawkins attending! I'm betting nothing was resolved.

Mad or not?

James Cameron appeared on Conan O'Brien's show last week and did not appear particularly mad at all. Here's part one of the interview, which has its amusing bits:



Part 2 can be seen here.

The Daily Mail recently ran a story about him and Avatar, suggesting that there was enormous fear in the studio that it would be a box office failure. (That prediction seems way off the mark. The movie has been so well received, even I will probably see it.) The article describes Cameron's reputation as a horrible person to work with (or marry, apparently), which I noted here before, but also adds a little bit more biographical detail, such as his boyhood obsessive with Kubrick's 2001 inspiring his career.

Maybe Cameron should meet Kevin Rudd; they both seem to have a well deserved reputation for being two-faced. And it would be kind of amusing to see one of those Hollywood plagiarism cases against Cameron; I imagine James would turn up on the plaintiff's doorstep at midnight in mega gun-toting space marine mode, suggesting it be dropped.

Much to do about very little

RealClimate: Are the CRU data “suspect”? An objective assessment.

Climate change skeptics are still happily misrepresenting "hide the decline" and so busy trying to track down site adjustments that they think look suspicious (all the better to smear climate scientists with "smell likes fraud" comments) that they forget to see the wood for the trees. (Briffa pun unintended.)

This useful post at Real Climate shows a random check of raw data against the much maligned (by skeptics) adjusted data indicates no great disparity with the warming trends worked out from either.

I particularly liked one of the comments following the post, responding to a commenter suggesting that he was still concerned about researcher bias in what is chosen to be published. Here's the response:

JSC, frankly, the likelihood that this analysis could have come out differently is basically nil, because their are multiple research groups analyzing such climate data, so there is no way that one group could be “cooking the books” in some way without a discrepancy showing up. For that reason, an analysis like this is almost certainly unpublishable–it is hard to a publication for belaboring the obvious. I don’t think the point of this post was to convince the deniers, anyway. Anybody who believes that CRU, GISS, etc. are all engaged in a grand conspiracy has doubtless already dismissed RealClimate as co-conspirators, so why would they believe that the raw data randomly sampled just because RealClimate says so?

The key point here is that the data is readily available for anybody who is genuinely interested in temperature trends or who is concerned about the possibility of temperature adjustments introducing bias, and it provides an example of how to go about it. This is not sophisticated science, just random sampling that anybody who has taken a basic statistics course would understand. The remarkable thing, really, is the apparent total lack of interest of climate science critics/auditors in doing this kind of basic analysis. One cannot help but suspect the motives of those who focus on criticisms of cherry-picked individual stations, or who insist that the validity of the enterprise cannot be evaluated without analysis to every scrap of data and code used by climate scientists for their own analyses, but who cannot be bothered to do this kind of analysis using unbiased sampling techniques. Or perhaps they have done it, but have chosen not to report it?

Toddler Hamlet

Here's a very charming video found via Scienceblogs:

Now I can write that novel

johncwright: Writing in One Lesson

Science fiction writer talks about the "one trick" in writing, which I assume I am allowed to pass on here:

There is, when you right down to it, only one trick in writing, which she here calls "the trick." It consists of raising the readers expectations, but satisfying those expectations in a logical yet unexpected way. The trick is that anything has more effect if the reader things the opposite is about to happen.

If you only learn one thing about writing, learning the trick the one thing you should learn.

The trick when applied to plots is called plot twist; when applied to character, is called three-dimensionality; when applied to theme, is called wisdom; when applied to word-choice is called contrast.

I'm not sure how useful this is for my tiny brain. When I was single and had more idle time to think, I would sometimes try to think of ideas for stories or movies (or even plays, since they seem the simplest form of writing for publication possible!) But my mind would invariably float to books/movies/plays/characters I already knew or liked. I guess that other people sharing this problem explains fan fiction. It's so much easier to work in a world already created by someone else than to start in your own.

And on the rare occasion I have tried to write something, I realised that simply reading fiction gives you absolutely no idea how to write it. Just to write the simplest exchange of dialogue seemed suddenly awkward and daunting.

Actually, on this dialogue point, I have just tried to read Tim Winton's "Breath", and found it dull. His approach to setting out dialogue was to simply indent it, avoid inverted commas and strip it of surrounding "I said" "she said" stuff. I found this quite unsatisfactory. After about 25 pages, I decided the book was uninteresting thematically, and skimmed the rest. It turns out that erotic asphyxiation - sometimes auto-erotic, sometimes not - was a key plot element, although I couldn't really see the point of the whole novel really. I had thought I might like Winton, given that he is reviewed so favourably (he won the Miles Franklin Award for this book, for crying out loud) but it turns out he is a JAOAA (Just Another Overrated Australian Arthur.)

(Yay, I just listened to the BBC Saturday Review in which one person on the panel reckons the book's a bore too.)

Anyway, I'll just sit around and wait for a breakthrough idea, write it as a play set to the music of ELO, and make millions.

A Christmas suggestion for your local GP

GIANTmicrobes

I find the line "Swine Flu (H1N1) now available" particularly amusing.

CO2 news from the AGU

AGU Day 2: The role of CO2 in the earth’s history | Serendipity

This is a good, lengthy summary of a talk given at the current American Geophysical Union conference on the important role of CO2 in prehistory.

There is also a very noteworthy report of a talk given by the people who run AIRS, an infrared instrument, on NASA's Aqua satellite.

Here are some key parts:

researchers told reporters that AIRS, containing no moving parts, has proved remarkably robust, measuring carbon dioxide, ozone, water vapor, and carbon monoxide in the mid-troposphere, five to 12 km above Earth’s surface, with far greater precision than anticipated prior to launch in 2002.

In particular, said Moustafa Chahine of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “AIRS provides the highest accuracy and yield of any global carbon dioxide data set available to the scientific community.” Seven years of these data were made available to researchers worldwide in conjunction with the AGU meeting. NASA said it was the first ever release of daily CO2 data based solely on observations.

AIRS researchers have learned over the past seven years that CO2 does not mix well in the troposphere, but is what Chahine called “lumpy,” concentrated more in some places than in others, driven by the jet stream. AIRS has tracked the dispersion of CO2 from Indonesian forest fires, which accounts for a staggering 20% of global anthropogenic CO2. Where does it go? Along with the northern hemisphere’s other CO2 emissions, much of it winds up over the southern hemisphere, according to AIRS measurements, as reported here....

Bloody hell! How hard can it be to devise a way to stop Indonesians from burning so much forest?

This part is important:

Another member of the AIRS team, Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University, reported on the unique view the instrument is providing of water vapor distribution in the atmosphere, and in particular the feedback of water vapor that he says amplifies warming due to CO2. He warned that warming of a few degrees Celsius is “essentially guaranteed” over the next century, unless there exists a “presently unknown offsetting feedback (e.g., clouds).”

Dessler took issue with a statement, attributed to Lowell Wood, in the recently published book, Superfreakonomics, that current climate models “do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds….I hope we’ll have good numbers on water vapor by 2020 or thereabouts.” Dessler told reporters that AIRS, using the infrared spectrum, sees right through clouds and is providing accurate water vapor data today. Current models do a good job of simulating the water vapor feedback effect, he said.

A worthy post

An ambitious social experiment: the Harlem Children's zone - Life Matters - 11 December 2009

I happened to hear part of this radio documentary on the Harlem Children's Zone, a project designed to make a difference to the socially disadvantaged kids of that area.

It was really quite interesting, explaining how adult work training programs don't generally work, yet some relatively simple interventions in very early childhood show clear and lasting benefits for the kids.

I've always felt a bit suspicious of some of the claims of the early childhood intervention academics. It just sounded like a field of study which wanted to carve out a new niche industry of toddler teachers.

But this documentary sounded very convincing, at least if you talking of the advantages early intervention shows in really poor/disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

It's well worth a listen, which is your only choice as there is no transcript.

The Economist on Copenhagen

The Copenhagen climate talks: Filthy lucre fouls the air | The Economist

This article is a pretty good explanation of the arguments over money at Copenhagen.

As I have said elsewhere, it does seem that African and other developing nations seem to have gone to Copenhagen with a "shake down the rich guys" attitude. Here's a crucial paragraph:

Everyone agrees that poorer countries, including India and China, need cash for climate “mitigation”—adopting green technology and new approaches to land use and forest conservation—and for “adaptation”: coping with the anticipated effects of climate change, some of which (like a degree of sea level rise) look unavoidable. America has joined the list of countries accepting such transfers, saying it will pay its “fair share”. Rich countries have talked of a “quick start” fund. The leaked Danish text has it starting in 2010-12 at a value to be determined; the UN has suggested $10 billion. To poor countries, this sounds paltry: responses range from “bribery” to “it will not even pay for the coffins”. Instead, the G77 has asked for 0.5% to 1% of the rich countries’ GDPs. That implies hundreds of billions of dollars on top of existing development aid. The idea that rich countries will hand over 1.2% to 1.7% of their wealth in perpetuity is not going to fly.

May be worse

Sea level rise may exceed worst expectations : Nature News

Sounds pretty convincing explanation that there may be worse sea level rises than previously expected.

Cardboard houses

Shigeru Ban, the architecture of paper - latimes.com

An interesting series of photos here of an architect who really likes cardboard.

Things that make me happy, No 2

Time for an another instalment of this absolutely fascinating series.*

It's....Tasmanian smoked salmon. Tassal or Huon brands, available at all good supermarkets. (It shames the imported stuff.)

But, it is a pleasure that has a small amount of guilt associated with it. See the recent story about how environmentally questionable Tasmanian salmon farming is. Still, they'll have to take my 100 g two serve packet out of my cold, dead, somewhat fishy smelling, hands.

* Perhaps a slight exaggeration.

One of the more interesting planets found

Waterworld planet is more Earth-like than any discovered before | Science | guardian.co.uk

This makes me think: has there ever been a science fiction novel based on the exploration of a entire water planet? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Agreed

ABC The Drum Unleashed - Evidence-based policy? Not on this filter!

I still don't quite understand all the details of the Labor government's internet filter, but I understand enough to be able to tell, as noted in this article, that it is going to be completely ineffective for the "normal" types of pornography sites that probably represent 99.999999% of the concern about children accessing the internet.