Weekend update

*  Tried to make a cream and tomato pasta sauce, but using mostly low fat evaporated milk instead of cream.   (Hey, my wife fed me pork belly the previous two nights – there has to be the occasional attempt at low fat cooking while my middle age spread continues its winter growth.)  It didn’t work properly – the milk seemed to separate into solids or something, although the taste wasn’t bad.    More investigation into evaporated milk recipes needed.

*  Oh no!  Robin Hood series 3 ended on Saturday night, leading to tears not by the kids, but from the parents.   (I had actually shed a tear at the end of series 2 as well.)     It really was a quality family show – great production values, good acting,  action every episode, sometimes funny, all violence bloodless, and characters believable enough to upset you when they unexpectedly die.   (It was pretty good at the unexpected death.)   It will be missed.

* The debate between Gillard and Abbott on Sunday night (pretty much a draw I thought, although I was not sitting watching it every minute) has led to another surge in Gillard earlobe Googlers coming to this blog via my  my 2007 post-election night comment about it.  (Over a thousand a day.)   Even Channel 9 has noted that her earlobes, which looked particularly large during the debate,  had evidently become a distraction to many people on Twitter.  There is a facebook page about it (nothing to do with me), which seems also to have been created immediately after the 2007 election.   I’m not sure, but I think my mention might be a day or so earlier than the creation of the Facebook page.  Hence I am waiting for  Annabel Crabb to interview me about being the first blogger (I think) to be silly enough to note it.    

You've seen the photo; now see the video

The BBC has put up video of that remarkable incident of the whale that decided to have an on board tour of a passing yacht. As I can't embed BBC video directly, I'll put the Youtube version of it here. It's worth watching:

This week's hard to understand physics

Another week, another arXiv paper that seems important, if only I could follow it properly.

This one is about how to understand the quantum "delayed choice" experiments, which on one interpretation can be thought to show "backwards time influence".

This, according to the paper, is not the right way to think about collapsing wave functions. The crucial section of the paper seems to be this:

Although the above expressions are all very simple, the result is, upon second thought, very non-trivial. It shows that in general, the relative time ordering of measurements on separated (but possible entangled) particles A and B doesn’t matter at all....

This makes explicit that a measurement on one particle does not at all influence the other one. (I.e. the operator 1 acts trivially.) The only effect a measurement has, is changing probabilities of other measurements into conditional probabilities, as explained just above. More important, these conditional probabilities hold regardless of the moment at which you perform the measurement on the other particle. Whether it occurs later, earlier or at the same time - that doesn’t matter at all. This forces us to abandon the (popular, but incorrect) view on the wave function collapse as an event stretching out along a space-like slice. Even though this view is appealing, it creates a wrong intuition about the physics involved.

I understand the idea that he says is wrong; I don't understand the alternative way of looking at it that he is suggesting.

By the way, whatever happened to John Cramer's "backward causation" experiment? It's taking a long time for any results to come out.

She amuses me

Yet another great article by Annabel Crabb on the curious current state of the election campaign.

Pot head objections

Time magazine has a quite lengthy, quite balanced article summarizing recent research on the very complicated issue of the relationship between marijuana use and schizophrenia.

It could not be called a sensationalist or one sided article at all. Yet you can always guarantee, whenever anything in the media ever appears which looks at the issue, there'll be many comments by readers like this:

"This is the stupidest thing I have read. There own stats show no increase even though more people today are smoking pot. What kind of idiot even publishes garbage like this."

Or this:

Pot could replace something like 20% of pharmacueticals prescribed in the USA - do you know how much MONEY that would be? Doesn't take long to figure out where the propaganda is coming from when you follow the money.

It's the "it's the wonder drug of nature" crowd that really make me laugh.

White roof wonders

Climate Progress talks about the rather simple, but apparently very effective, plan to increase white roofs in America to help address warming.

Is this too complicated for Australian politicians to consider?

Pine nut alert

The LA Times mentions "pine mouth", an odd reaction which is "a bitter metallic taste in the mouth that develops after eating pine nuts and lasts for several days."

Given so much pesto is eaten nowadays, it's a wonder it doesn't happen more often.

On the menu in Vietnam

Oh. I knew there was a bar-b-q rat industry in Vietnam. I assumed that they probably ate dog. But I didn't know this:

While it is widely known that dog meat is eaten in Southeast Asia, Mr. Doan says some Vietnamese restaurants also offer cat on the menu. To keep thieves from catching an unsupervised cat to eat or sell to a restaurant, pet owners keep their felines close.

Eating cat is traditionally thought to bring good luck, according to Mai Pham Thi Tuyet, the director of the Asvelis veterinary clinic in Hanoi. But this practice is becoming less common, she says, because the improvement in the standard of living, particularly in the cities, has enabled more people to keep animals as pets.

Seems high

We're not talking America; we're talking England:

Almost one in five girls say they have been pregnant at least once by the age of 18, according to a Government survey published today.

Just under half (46 per cent) decided to keep their baby, while more than a third (36 per cent), had an abortion, the figures show. ...

The survey concluded there was a "noticeable trend" between the young women who fell pregnant by 18, and their GCSE results.

A third (33 per cent) of those who gained between one and four GCSEs at grades D-G had been pregnant at least once by the time they were 18, compared to just 6 per cent of those who scored eight or more GCSEs at Grades A*-C.

Time for some Colbert

This clip from a couple of weeks ago becomes particularly funny in the last part, regarding another egregious example of American fast food overkill:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Thought for Food - Kentucky Tuna & Grilled Cheese Burger Melt<a>
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

Maybe you won't notice how dirty it is

Boeing's new long-range jet: Dreamliner becomes reality - The Economist

The Economist notes that the Dreamliner has more internal height, bigger windows, cabin lighting that can change from blue to orange, and this peculiar feature:

The new plane also has noticeably bigger toilets with lighting adjustable for mood, which is bound to be useful in some situations.

Useful in what situations, exactly?

Climate change items of note

Nature has got three stories of interest about climate change at the moment:

1. a report summarising some of the complexities and uncertainties in studies about the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

2. the US National Research Council has put out a report which :

sets out the consequences — from streamflow and wildfires to crop productivity and sea level rise — of different greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios. It also concludes that once the global average temperature warms beyond a certain point, Earth and future generations will be stuck with significant impacts for centuries or millennia.

That seems quite a big ask. But they seem confident based on more recent work since the last IPCC reports:

Besides synthesizing data included in the Fourth Assessment Report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the NRC report includes new information. For example, carbon-dioxide-induced warming is expected to be nearly irreversible for at least 1,000 years, according to two studies published in 2008 and 2009 (refs ^2,3). "There is more certainty [in this report] than we've seen before," says Steve Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. "It is blunt, direct and clear. Unlike the IPCC reports you don't see any hedge words."

And what do they find?:

....the report shows that each 1 °C of warming will reduce rain in the southwest of North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa by 5–10%; cut yields of some crops, including maize (corn) and wheat, by 5–15%; and increase the area burned by wildfires in the western United States by 200–400%. The report also points out that even if the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is stabilized, the world will continue to warm for decades. If concentrations rose to 550 parts per million, for example, the world would see an initial warming of 1.6 °C — but even if concentrations stabilized at this level, further warming would leave the total temperature rise closer to 3 °C, and would persist for millennia.

Bad, bad predictions for our descendants, that's for sure. Which will be studiously ignored by most Australian politicians. Bah.

3. OK, so we'll geoengineer our way out of trouble? Not so fast. A study that has tried to model the effects of pumping lots of sulphate aerosols high into the atmosphere says it won't work uniformly across the globe:

In a paper published today in Nature Geoscience¹, Kate Ricke, a climate physicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and her colleagues show, by modelling, that not only could solar-radiation management lead to declines in rainfall in the long term, but its effects will also vary by region. Some places will be over-cooled by atmospheric changes that are too small to be effective for their neighbours....

The new study found that it is fairly easy to design sulphate-injection scenarios that keep the temperature stable until 2080. But, unfortunately, the change in sunlight alters other weather patterns. "It changes the distribution of energy in the troposphere so that it becomes more convectively stable," Ricke says. The result: decreasing precipitation.

Better to keep carbon down, then.

China Catholics

NPR has an interesting story on Catholicism in China, and how the "unofficial" and "official" branches of it seem to be in the process of reconciling.

In other NPR news, that gay prom kerfuffle ends up with the School District paying $35,000 to settle, plus attorney fees. Another triumph - for lawyers.

Disturbing advance in robotics

Self-sustaining robot has an artificial gut (w/ Video)

UK researchers have developed an autonomous robot with an artificial gut that enables it to fuel itself by eating and excreting. ...The robot eats meals of partially processed sewage, using the nutrients within the mash for fuel and excreting the remains. It also drinks water to maintain power generation.

Undigested matter passes via a gravity feed to a central trough from which it is pumped back into the feeder tanks to be reprocessed in order to extract as much of the available energy as possible. The waste is then purged every 24 hours by a peristaltic pump that works like the colon, using pressure waves to expel the waste from the tube into a litter tray.

Director of Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Chris Melhuish, said MFCs had been tried before but an artificial gut was needed to solve the problem of previous models, which was that humans had to clean up the waste left by bacterial digestion. Melhuish said the robot was called Ecobot III, but admitted “diarrhea-bot would be more appropriate, as it’s not exactly knocking out rabbit pellets.”

Astroboy used to eat, but had the good grace to empty his stomach himself.

Apple's going rotten

Apple's condescending iPhone 4 press conference. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I didn't really pay any attention to this press conference, apart from noting how unhealthy Jobs still looks. But Manjoo reckons that it can be summarised as follows:

....if you want to be a total jerk about it and keep insisting there's a problem with your magical iPhone, Jobs has an offer for you. "OK, great, let's give everybody a case," he said. Happy now, whiners?

Manjoo later continues:

He could have admitted a problem, offered a fix, and said, "We're sorry for any trouble we caused you." Instead, he sounded wounded and paranoid, as if we were all being ungrateful for not recognizing Apple's contributions to the world. "We love our users so much we've built 300 Apple retail stores for them," he claimed at one point. Wow, thanks, Steve—all this time, I thought you built those stores just to sell stuff! ...

Just lose the attitude, Steve. You screwed up. We know it. You know it. Just admit it.

Chris on Mel

Mel Gibson's tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of right-wing Catholic ideology. - By Christopher Hitchens

Well, as you might expect, Christopher Hitchens has no sympathy for Mel Gibson. So this article is really no surprise, but it does contain this entertaining example of Mel's father theology:

I have some of old man Gibson's books on my shelf, including his self-published classics Is the Pope Catholic? and The Enemy Is Still Here!, which essentially accuse the current papacy of doing the work of the Antichrist. My favorite sample of his prose style is the following: "Our 'civilization' tolerates open sodomy and condones murder of the unborn, but shrinks in horror from burning incorrigible heretics—essentially a charitable act." He attacks the late Pope John Paul II for having said, in one of his "outreaches" to the Jewish people, "You are our predilect brothers and, in a certain way, one could say our oldest brothers." Hutton Gibson's comment? "Abel had an older brother." I don't think that there's much ambiguity there, do you?

Crabb on Abbott

Oh good. Annabel Crabb is sufficiently off parental duties to start writing regularly about the coming election. Her explanation of Tony Abbott's relationship with the truth is both amusing and accurate.

Yesterday Tony Abbott looked so bad, it seems hardly worth his while continuing with campaigning. (Of course, I may live to regret that prediction; the weirdness of the Queensland electorate especially makes election prediction a risk.)

But still - with Newspoll already showing a handy Labor national lead, it's near impossible to imagine anything other than the Coalition going backwards in the next couple of polls. As I have written elsewhere, Tony Abbott is the perfect example of the Peter Principle in politics. He was reasonably competent as a Minister; he was prepared to do the "dirty work" at times under John Howard, and no doubt earned Howard's gratitude for it. But it has always been clear he was not Prime Minister material, and those who voted him leader on the basis of his opportunistic and new found climate skepticism are only going to get their just reward. I hope.

Growing up

I'm not going to turn this blog into a cute kid story sort of place, but here we go anyway. (The topic is not exactly cute in any event.)

As when I was his age, it seems fair to assume that my son is getting his first exposure to fictional sex by watching James Bond movies. Listening to his reactions during the recent string of Saturday night 007 movies has been interesting. Last week, it was "oh, so that's what adults do", but this was only when the girl-ish iceskater was trying (unsuccessfully) to get Roger Moore into her bed in For Your Eyes Only. So what his comment meant in terms of interpreting the scene: well, I didn't care to ask.

This last Saturday night, his comment was "oh no, not again" when an even older Roger Moore ended up in bed with some woman he just met in Octopussy. Maybe even he is recognizing that the aging Moore was not exactly a good catch for his younger partners. But with any luck, it might also mean that he already guesses that sleeping around a lot is not really what responsible adults do. I just kind of remember the Sean Connery Bond sexual elements as being a bit of a boring interruption until the next bit of fighting and explosions.

Then, on Sunday night, there was a somewhat interesting documentary on monitor lizards on the ABC. It seems to me that nature documentaries are much more graphic about sex now than they were when I was a child. Hence, on just about every nature show, there's some form of coupling which raises the question "what are they doing?!", which again I would just as soon not have to deal with yet, especially when it's a species that partakes in the equivalent of mass orgies.

Curiously, this one on Sunday started with a viewer warning that it contained scenes of animals hunting and devouring prey; viewers must have started complaining about this, I assume. Yet there was no warning of the graphic lizard love that was to come.

So when a couple of large Thai water monitors started at it, the boy's reaction was "what are they doing? Is that, um, sexual..... ?" to which I gave a tentative "yeess." His next comment - "oh no, it's just like lizard 007's! Yuck." This is either a derisive comment on Roger Moore again, or a simple sign of age appropriate aversion to the very idea of sex, which with any luck will continue until he's 25. (Hey, it's better than being a teen father.)

These events have led me to start looking around the internet for appropriate, um, educational material for this allegedly important discussion that fathers are supposed to have with sons. I know there are books out there, but really, shouldn't there be something available for free on the 'net? Why hasn't someone made an appropriate Powerpoint presentation available which a parent can start, then promptly leave the room for 15 minutes assured that the material will answer as much as a "tween" approaching puberty should know?

Well, as far as I can see, there isn't anything like this out there. It's struck me that it could be sort of amusing writing my own, especially if I use my pathetically drawn dodo's to illustrate it. My wife might have something to say about that, though.

As another father said to me last year, the problem with talking to your kids about this is that you don't want them to be completely ignorant (and, for example, be ridiculed for saying something silly in front of their mates), yet at the same time you don't exactly want them to be the most knowledgeable kid in the class either. Finding that right level of information to provide at what age is what makes it tricky. (Oh, I know, the books will say you take your kid's level of inquisitiveness as a guide, but really, some kids don't want to make their parent uncomfortable, and so it's no reliable guide if you ask me.)

Ah well. It'll be dealt with, some day. And I promise not to post about it.

An emotional story

I saw Toy Story 3 today with the kids. It was very good, I thought. I still think Toy Story 2 was forgettable, and they could’ve skipped straight to this one.

I knew from this article that the movie was said to make some men teary by the end, and I could see why, although I didn’t succumb myself.

At dinner, I asked my kids if they felt sad or teary at the end. Neither did, apparently, but I pressed further, saying that I found it odd that I had never seen either of them cry at any movie; not even classic tear inducing ones like ET.

My son then said only one movie had made him cry; it was a Robinson Crusoe one (which version I don’t know) when he had to farewell his dog which had to stay on the island alone. He then had to leave the table due to sudden teary eyed embarrassment!

All may be well in the emotional reaction stakes after all.

Time travel re-visited

There’s a new paper up on arXiv by a international group of  physicists which has an abstract starting with this:

This paper discusses the quantum mechanics of closed timelike curves (CTC) and of other potential methods for time travel. We analyze a specific proposal for such quantum time travel, the quantum description of CTCs based on post-selected teleportation (P-CTCs).

A middle section that includes this:

If it turns out that the linearity of quantum mechanics is only approximate, and that projection onto particular states does in fact occur – for example, at the singularities of black holes – then it might be possible to implement time travel even in the absence of a general-relativistic closed timelike curve. The formalism of P-CTCs shows that such quantum time travel can be thought of as a kind of quantum tunneling backwards in time, which can take place even in the absence of a classical path from future to past.

And a conclusion that ends with this:

In Sec. IV we have argued that, as Wheeler’s picture of positrons as electrons moving backwards in time suggests, P-CTCs might also allow time travel in spacetimes without general-relativistic closed timelike curves. If nature somehow provides the nonlinear dynamics afforded by final-state projection, then it is possible for particles (and, in principle, people) to tunnel from the future to the past.

Unfortunately, as I seem to be finding with some arXiv papers lately, it has a very layperson friendly introduction, but for the rest of the paper, it would help to be a physicist.  I don’t know why they don’t make the conclusion a lay reader friendly version of  what their paper means. 

Still, any arXiv paper that even mentions people tunnelling from the present to the past is noteworthy!