An unlikely solution

Bright water proposal to cut global warming

Harvard University scientist Russel Seitz’s proposal is to use ships to pump tiny “microbubbles,” about 0.05 mm in diameter, into the sea as they travel, in a strategy he terms “Bright Water”. Seitz said the bubbles would, in effect, act as tiny mirrors containing air, and could be created by mixing water supercharged with compressed air with swirling jets of water. This would emulate and amplify a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Using computer modeling, Seitz discovered that a concentration of only one part per million of microbubbles can double the reflectivity of water, and could cool Earth by up to 3°C if the system could be deployed. Adding microbubbles to a square kilometer of ocean is feasible, but Seitz admitted that scaling it to cover an entire ocean would be technically difficult, not because of the energy requirement, which he said would be equivalent to about 1000 windmills, but because of the fact that the bubbles may not last long enough to effectively spread over large areas.

I'm not even sure I should have blogged this, the idea sounds so silly.

Gypsy stories

Four Corners - 29/03/2010: Gypsy Child Thieves

Four Corners had an interesting BBC documentary tonight about the urban gypsies of Europe. It's amazing that their situation seems to change so slowly over time.

The first section was about a Gypsy camp near Madrid, and the conditions were extremely third world, especially for the children. The ineffectiveness of the Spanish government social services in dealing with child thieves the police bring to them was almost laughable.

The fact that fathers get good money for marrying off their 13 year old daughters got a mention too.

I didn't really get to watch the rest of the show carefully, although I did catch some of the segment in Italy, where some charity was making a difference, but a right wing Italian noted that they deserved to killed, and seemingly felt it was a pity that that would be illegal now!

Firefox issue

For those of you using Firefox on an XP computer, have you noticed it slowing down? Over the weekend, I checked and the amount of CPU it is taking up was just continually fluctuating, often up to the 90% range.

It appears to be a problem with the latest version (3.6.2), although I also had the same problem in the 3.6 version before I updated it. I see that people have been complaining about it since 3.5 too.

The specific thread on Mozilla on the problem with 3.6.2 has been marked as "solved", but the answer it refers to is no such thing.

This page talks about the problem generally, but I am bit puzzled why it has only come to light on my computer now.

UPDATE: I seem to have solved the problem by updating both Flash and Java, as some website suggested.

I am tempted to try Chrome now though, as I understand it is starting to provide extensions.

Rare medical condition noted

Schizophrenia in Children: Families Grapple With Costs, Emotional and Financial - ABC News

Tonight I happened to see the ABC news magazine show 20/20 featuring 3 American families with children with schizophrenia.

I knew schizophrenia most commonly was a young adult onset disease; it had never really occurred to me before that there would be some cases of young children suffering with it.

What a horrible disease for parents to face in a child. Oddly, all three featured in this show were girls. I would have expected it to be more common in boys. (Certainly, the average onset age for men is considerably younger than for women.)

It certainly makes for a strong reminder, if one is needed, of the blessings of a routine domestic life.

Racking up the deaths

BBC News - China flooding 'traps 152 miners'

This is a very brief report of yet another coal mining accident in China.

The number of Chinese miners killed every year is simply amazing. In Australia or the US, an accident killing a dozen people is huge news and is viewed as a great tragedy for virtually all of the nation. In China, with (as this article notes) thousands of deaths in the mines every year, it's hard to imagine any but the largest incidents getting much coverage. Some years in the last decade have had close to 7,000 deaths.

Strange how a communist nation manages to do the least to protect its workers.

Yay for John

A Physics Maven’s Take on Skeptical Science - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

I've been a fan of Skeptical Science for quiet a while, and have wondered about its creator John Cook.

Now that his fame has spread world wide, it takes Andrew Revkin of the New York Times to publicise him.

He is not quite what you would expect: studied physics and astrophysics at University, has serious concerns about the environment and AGW, yet is a serious enough Christian to mention it in this interview. This is not exactly a common combination, I'm sure.

He also appears to been born earless, if the crook photo (which I assume he supplied) is anything to go by. I take it as a sign he does not suffer from vanity.

That's big of him

Cleric: Don’t cut too much female genital to avoid sexuality loss | The Jakarta Post

A Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) cleric said on Friday that circumcision on women was not supposed to cause the loss of their sexuality.

“Don’t cut too much. Just cut the small skin on the tip of the clitoris. Otherwise, a woman would lose her sexuality, and you males don’t like that to happen, do you?” prominent cleric Mohammad Masyhuri told a press conference.

Masyhuri, also a member of NU Suriah (lawmaking body), said that a proper female circumcision should not cause any damage to woman genitals. “No bleeding, if you do it properly.”

He suggested that circumcision was conducted on a female baby at the age
of 7 days.

Sort of good news

NASA Study Finds Atlantic 'Conveyor Belt' Not Slowing

Another study finds that the Atlantic conveyor (the current that keeps Europe warmer than it would otherwise be) is not slowing down.  I suppose it's good for North Atlantic bordering countries that there's no imminent ice age; but then again it's not so good that global warming in those regions won't be moderated by cooler ocean water.

Please make the movie

"Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" from Aaron Paul

Promising

How to Train Your Dragon Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

I see that How to Train Your Dragon is receiving very strong reviews. Good news for those of us who like good kids films.

Brave woman

BBC News - Saudi female poet whose verse inflames and inspires

An old debate

The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate | Cosmic Variance

It's an old topic, the question of the exact nature of morals. Cosmic Variance, which always takes an atheist/scientific take on things, nonetheless has an interesting post (and comments following) debating the issue of the subjectivity of morals and related topics.

Looks good, but a bit small?

Samsung Announces eReader Launch For The US Market

You can write notes on this one, and this feature sounds interesting:

Samsung eReader users will also be able to take advantage of breakthrough Barnes & Noble features, such as the industry-first LendMe technology which enables consumers to lend a wide selection of eBooks to friends free of charge for up to 14 days. Just choose the book you want to share and send it to your friend’s Samsung eReader or a host of other computer and mobile devices with free Barnes & Noble eReader software.

The boy Ellen

Constance McMillen case: proms as gay-rights battleground

So, the ACLU sued a school district to try to force it to re-instate a prom cancelled so as to avoid a lesbian bringing her girlfriend. Where exactly does the ACLU gets its funding for such crucial legal cases?

But the main point of the post is indicated in the title: I sometimes see bits of Ellen DeGeneres' show when channel surfing at night, and I had been meaning to note the fact that she has had a "makeover" which has moved her image unambiguously into the androgynous zone. (Yes, that's a pleasingly contradictory sentence, no?) You can see a photo of her interviewing the miffed Prom-less teenage lesbian at the link above.

I always used to think DeGeneres had a likeable sort of face, even though I pretty much can't stand her chat show for more than 5 minutes. As a figurehead for the gay and lesbian political movement, her image was at least non-confrontational, and her self-deprecating comedy routines perhaps helped too. She was bearable in small doses, unlike the other famous TV lesbian Rosie O'Donnell, who is (good Lord no) going to be back on TV soon.

But with this boyish haircut and even more manly dress than before, well, she's moved well out of the "girl next door who just happens to like girls" vibe that she used to represent. To me, she now looks kind of mean and humourless; but that's how I interpret nearly all short haired butch lesbianism. (Sorry, all you nice and sweet examples of the genre out there, somewhere.)

I wonder if it will hurt her crossover appeal somewhat with the heterosexual viewers. (Mind you, her audiences always appear to be simply adulatory, for reasons I don't grasp.)

Triumph of social networking

Internet casual sex is blamed for rise in syphilis

People using social networking sites for casual sex are to blame for a four-fold increase in syphilis, a director of public health said today.

Sensitive Singaporeans

Apology - Correction - NYTimes.com

Important date noted

Happy birthday, William Shatner | Hero Complex | Los Angeles Times

He's just turned 79.  When he finally dies, I hope he's prepared some bizarre video to be played at his funeral.  

Science news of note

* "cold fusion" still getting some research, including in China, it seems. When it will produce enough heat at reasonable cost to be useful, though, still seems anyone's guess.

* another book on the universe as giant quantum computer gets a good review. Not entirely sure what the implications of that are.

* The Economist's long article on climate science last week was very good, arguing that the uncertainties still existing are no reason not to take action. Hear hear.

* Don't worry, you may as well keep eating meat even as you argue against the coal being burned.

* One day, I expect to be able to catch a scramjet to space. Australians are still working on it.

Interesting reasoning

Minister calls anti-smoking edict ‘unwise’ | The Jakarta Post

Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali has criticized Indonesia’s
second-largest Muslim organization for its anti-tobacco edict, calling
on it to “act more wisely” and not “cause public restlessness”.

The organization, Muhammadiyah, which has around 30 million followers
across the country, last week declared smoking to be haram, or forbidden
under Islamic law.

The edict has sparked protests, particularly from the country’s tobacco industry and groups protesting the perceived meddling by religious groups in private affairs....

Suryadharma added he did not agree with Muhammadiyah’s branding of smoking as haram, saying he believed Islam’s original stance on tobacco was makruh (frowned upon) but not haram.

“Unless it poses a direct threat to human health, such as by causing heart disease, then smoking should not be haram,” he said.

Wish I was there

My stressful fortnight begins at work. Not sure how often I will post.

Meanwhile, I've been fiddling with 2 ways to blog better. One is Scribefire, a Firefox add on that would be good if it always worked properly. At first, it was adding unwanted tracker code (until I realised how to turn that feature off.) Then it started stuffing up the formatting of indented quotes, requiring me to log into Blogger and fix up the edits there. It did, however, allow me to post larger sized pictures than what appears when adding a photo with Blogger. (Hence the larger the normal photo of the dog and the roses last week.)

Getting sick of its recent formatting issues, today I've loaded Windows Writer, which also allows posts like this one to be prepared and then published. It seems to specialise in giving more options with photos, such being able to add the photo and then crop and adjust it quite a bit within the unpublished post.  That’s quite clever, I think, and lets me easily tart up an old photo on my hard drive like this:

It seems pretty clever software, but as often happens, I actually would like some combination of features from both Scribefire and Writer to be in the one software.  Oh well.