Her weddings must be interesting

As reported in the Geelong Advertiser:

A "witch" told a traffic cop she was above the law because she was "from another world" before dragging him at high speed down a busy street.

"Your laws and penalties don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you," Eilish De Avalon said, before driving off with Sen-Constable Andrew Logan’s arm caught in her driver's side door, the Geelong Advertiser reports.

The officer was left seriously injured in the incident after being dragged nearly 200m.

De Avalon, who also told police she "had a universal name that is not recognised here", pleaded guilty in the Geelong Magistrates’ Court

And what does this local witch from another world do in her spare time?:

De Avalon, 40, a marriage celebrant who is also a self-confessed witch from the Geelong suburb of Highton

Free will, Kant, the New York Times

There’s a pretty good essay in the NYT about how whether it is right to give up on free will as a result of the experiments which show that an outsider who can read a brain state correctly can know a person’s decision before the person knows it.

Kant gets invoked to argue that free will is still there, and that the free will conundrum basically arises from not realising the limits of reason.  (I think that’s a fair summary, anyway.)

All very interesting.

More details please

Phys.org has a short report up about a new proposed method for removing CO2 from the air, but its very short on details and says nothing about cost.

I did some lengthy posts looking at CO2 removal technology over the last couple of years; I'll link to them here when I have time.

The “pox on both their houses” election continues

Tim Colebatch provides does a good summary of why a large number of voters feel very disappointed by all parties this election.

I also see that  Tony Abbott has gone into “dog whistle” mode well and truly on the Julia as a single woman issue.   I can’t see this working for him.  

Dangerous nuts

According to this report, a prominent anti-vaccination group in New South Wales is not only spreading their mis-information via the Web; they are actively pursuing those who have suffered a tragedy:

When their four-week-old baby daughter Dana died from whooping cough Toni and David McCaffery sought love and healing to ease their grief.

Instead, they say they were subjected to a campaign of harassment and abuse at the hands of anti-vaccination campaigners, a group who were yesterday labelled a serious threat to the public's health and safety….

Its investigation was sparked by two complaints, one from Toni and David McCaffery, whose four-week-old daughter Dana died from whooping cough last year.

The couple, from Lennox Head, allege they were subjected to months of harassment and abuse by Ms Dorey and anti-vaccination campaigners, accusing them of lying about the cause of their daughter's death. They received anonymous letters and emails that said whooping cough was not fatal and vaccinations were not needed.

Mrs McCaffery, whose daughter was too young to be vaccinated when she caught whooping cough, said Ms Dorey also tried to get her baby's medical records from the hospital without permission. ''Instead of love and healing in the weeks after Dana's death, we got ugliness … it has been terrible,'' she said.

It doesn’t explain why the parents were in contact with the group in the first place, but still this sounds like an appalling story.

I mentioned this anti-vaccination group late last year after they appeared on the 7.30 Report under a post headed “Immunisation Dills”.  It deserves the upgrade to “Dangerous Nuts”. 

Important advance (we hope)

There’s  a pretty big story out about how Australian based researchers have made some fundamental advances in understanding Alzheimer disease, and have been able to treat it in mice.  (Yes, I know, stories like this about potential new treatments for various diseases in humans come out all the time, but this one does sound distinctly more important, it seems to me.)

Bring on the cure, please.

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.