I can safely predict there will be argument about this amongst the sweary, teenage boy libertarians over at Catallaxy:
TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.
The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.
It’s quite surprising, isn’t it, that the purpose of Russian “numbers stations” is still not known for sure. According to Gizmodo, the numbers have changed recently. As I imagine a lot fewer people now spend time listening to the shortwave band than when I was a youngster, perhaps fewer people know about them?
Discover magazine has just put online an article from April about quantum experiments that some physicists take as confirming the idea that the future influences the past, and it’s a great read.
I was particularly interested in the discussion of what this means for free will, to be found on the second page of the article. I’m not sure that reading this extract will make complete sense without reading what precedes it, but here goes:
The Rochester experiments seem to demonstrate that actions carried out in the future—in the final, postselection step—ripple back in time to influence and amplify the results measured in the earlier, intermediate step. Does this mean that when the intermediate step is carried out, the future is set and the experimenter has no choice but to perform the later, postselection measurement? It seems not. Even in instances where the final step is abandoned, Tollaksen has found, the intermediate weak measurement remains amplified, though now with no future cause to explain its magnitude at all.
I put it to Tollaksen straight: This finding seems to make a mockery of everything we have discussed so far.
Tollaksen is smiling; this is clearly an argument he has been through many times. The result of that single experiment may be the same, he explains, but remember, the power of weak measurements lies in their repetition. No single measurement can ever be taken alone to convey any meaning about the state of reality. Their inherent error is too large. “Your pointer will still read an amplified result, but now you cannot interpret it as having been caused by anything other than noise or a blip in the apparatus,” he says.
…
The error range in single intermediate weak measurements that are not followed up by the required postselection will always be just enough to dismiss the bizarre result as a mistake.
Tollaksen sums up this confounding argument with one of his favorite quotes, from the ancient Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva: “All is foreseen; but freedom of choice is given.” Or as Tollaksen puts it, “I can have my cake and eat it too.” He laughs.
Here, finally, is the answer to Aharonov’s opening question: What does God gain by playing dice with the universe? Why must the quantum world always retain a degree of fuzziness when we try to look at it through the time slice of the present? That loophole is needed so that the future can exert an overall pull on the present, without ever being caught in the act of doing it in any particular instance.
“The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake,” Aharonov says.
I can’t think right now if there is a word for it theologically, but doesn’t this sound a lot like the idea that God does indeed influence the world, but only in ways that can never be clearly identified as such? This was what God said at the end of my favourite episode of Futurama. I suppose it’s like saying that the God of the gaps will always have a gap in which He can be concealed; it’s inherent in the nature of the universe.
Atheists will say “what a cop out”, but the quantum world seems so weird, I don’t think they’re really in a position to rule anything out.
The idea of backward causation is also relevant to Tipler’s Omega Point, in that the end state of the universe (essentially, eternal God) determines the beginning and what goes on in between. That Tipler manages to cram the miracles of Jesus into that as a necessary element is the stretch that nearly no one can swallow, but the big picture an eternal superintelligence pulling the universe towards it retains a deep appeal.
UPDATE: There was another recent paper on arXiv about quantum entanglement as a measure free will; but I find it rather hard to follow, even in this explanation of the paper.
In May, I posted extracts from Discover magazine about the surprisingly big problem of cleaning up American houses that had been used for illegal methamphetamine production.
It seems the problem is cropping up closer to home, as these comments from an Australian group indicate:
“In New Zealand, they have recently torn down several houses where drugs were made because they were so polluted it would be hazardous for anyone to live there afterwards.
“So this is also a serious issue for landlords, who can find themselves facing legal action, clean-up costs of $150,000 or more, a huge drop in property values or even their building being razed to the ground, as a result of an activity which they knew nothing about.”“Individuals who are exposed to drug lab contamination may experience dizziness, headaches and reactions, chemical burns, lung damage, and nerve damage,” he adds.
The most at-risk populations are drug ‘cooks’, and subsequent residents or neighbours of labs – but police, fire fighters, environmental inspectors and other public servants may also be exposed.
I recently noted a new paper on arXiv that had an intriguing title, and Max Tegmark as co-author, but I didn’t really know what it was about.
Now, New Scientist has an article explaining it. Pretty interesting.
More details here.A trial is underway at University College London Hospitals in UK to establish whether the drug 'Exenatide' could be used to treat patients with the progressive neurological condition.
A synthetic version of this drug, originally found in the saliva of the Gila monster, is already an approved treatment for patients with diabetes.
However, laboratory evidence suggests it could also arrest the neurodegenerative process that causes Parkinson’s disease - potentially leading to a cure. Four independent groups around the world (including colleagues at the School of Pharmacy, London), have shown that this drug can improve symptoms of Parkinson’s and rescue dying cells in five different rodent models of the disease.
Recently, I referred to the interesting Foreign Correspondent episode that looked at ethnic Koreans living in Japan, and the tensions that continue between the two countries.
Now, there’s a good article in The Japan Times about the relationship, looking at recent apologies from Japan (there have been more than I realised) and why it is they don’t seem to be making much difference. Here are some interesting points:
The article does make the point that it doesn't help that apologies are often criticised by nutty Japanese nationalists, but also other politicians who seem to just be acting opportunistically.It is 65 years since colonial rule ended, but the scars of the past have not healed and bilateral relations remain vexed by history. Numerous apologies by Japanese politicians, and one by Emperor Akihito in 1990, have been undone by discordant voices of denial and unrepentant justification. These mixed messages reflect a lack of consensus in Japan about its colonial era. They also help explain why Koreans remain seething and indignant, unconvinced by Japan's sincerity and unwilling to extend a hand to the perpetrator…
Christian Caryl, contributing editor to the journal Foreign Policy, argues that, ". . . part of the problem is a Korean nationalism that is built around a deep-seated notion of Korean victimhood. Koreans need to get over this if they're ever going to have a healthy relationship with their neighbors."…
As the victims, the Korean governments are in a position to decide how to deal with the colonial past, and they see few incentives in reconciliation. Given that apologies are offered, but shunned, and gestures of contrition never quite measure up, the odds against reconciliation are high…
The perception gap remains a chasm, with a recent NHK/KBS poll indicating that 62 percent of Japanese have positive attitudes toward South Korea, while 70 percent of South Koreans have negative attitudes toward Japan. It is revealing that Japanese associate South Korea with a now-popular soap-opera actor, while South Koreans cite Hirobumi Ito when they think of Japan; light-hearted pop versus heavy history.
....dozens of people in Nanjing were hospitalized with strange symptoms of unbearable muscle pains after eating crayfish since July. The doctor’s diagnosis was rhabdomyolysis (the destruction or degeneration of muscle tissue) serious cases even cause kidney damage. The speculation was that the “shrimp washing powder” (洗虾粉) which was popularly used by the sellers to make the crayfish look spanky fresh and clean could be the root cause.
Today, John Webb at the University of South Wales, one of the leading proponents of the varying constant idea, and a few cobbers say they have new evidence from the Very Large Telescope in Chile that the fine structure constant was different when the universe was younger.If the work holds up, this is big news.But get this. While data from the Keck telescope indicate the fine structure constant was once smaller, the data from the Very Large Telescope indicates the opposite, that the fine structure constant was once larger. That's significant because Keck looks out into the northern hemsiphere, while the VLT looks south
This means that in one direction, the fine structure constant was once smaller and in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. And here we are in the middle, where the constant as it is (about 1/137.03599...)...
The implication from Webb and co's data is that the fine structure constant is continuously varying throughout space and is merely fine-tuned for life in this corner of the cosmos: the universe's habitable zone. Elsewhere, presumably well beyond the universe we can see, this constant is entirely different.
That's likely to put the cat among the pigeons.
Toub's parents .... actively brought their Jungian practice into their parenting technique. There was a lot of dream analysis in the Toub household, of course, and also exercises in the Jungian technique of "active imagination," which Toub explains is "deliberately exploring one's imagination and fantasies by … acting them out verbally or physically to read the message that one's unconscious is trying to communicate." In one memorable scene, Toub's mother encouraged him to "be" an erection in order to help him get over a bout of teenage impotence. To accomplish this, she took young Micah to a local park and had him pretend to be his own boner. "Your name is not Micah, you are not a human being," she told him. "You are an erection. What words come into your head?" He visualized himself as a "victorious penis," running around the park triumphantly.[*] Laugh away, but the treatment worked: Micah is no longer plagued by an uncooperative member.Apart from the therapy, I am surprised by two things: a. a teenager can suffer impotence? and b. a teenager would tell his parents he is suffering impotence.
So, back to Per’s lab. He has various engineering models set up to test movement of TRISO pebble fuel through a fluoride salt coolant, whereby the pebbles are inserted in the inlet pipes and rise up through the reactor module over time, and then are put back through 5 or 6 times. This allows for very high burnup — exceeding 50 %, high power density due to the heat capacity of the liquid salt, and high temperatures thanks to the durability of the pebbles. This is a big (potential) advantage over the current Pebble Bed Modular Reactor technology (PBMR), because in that design, the gas coolant has a very low power density. He’s flipped the problem on its head. The reactor also has various inherent safety design features, such as control rods that sink naturally in response to elevated coolant temperature, thereby passively regulating reactivity. Very safe!Of course, this does not sound as modular as the South African design was intended to be, but it is still being explored as means of making cheaper nuclear designs than the current designs. (The article explains that the cost of new nuclear is still providing prohibitive for its expansion in the US.)
The most serious cyber attack on the US military's networks came from a tainted flash drive in 2008, forcing the Pentagon to review its digital security, a top US defense official said Wednesday.The thumb drive, which was inserted in a military laptop in the Mideast, contained malicious code that "spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.
The code was placed on the drive by "a foreign intelligence agency," Lynn wrote.
"It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary."
Previous media reports speculated that the attack may have originated from Russia.
Shaikh Mohammad Al Munjed, a Syrian scholar living in Saudi Arabia, said that Mickey Mouse should be killed because he is a mouse and mice are considered unclean in Islam.I take it that Disney Riyadh won't be opening any time soon.
Wednesday 23 August 1944 began like any other day in the sleepy Lancashire village of Freckleton. Situated on the banks of the River Ribble, once the traditional haunt of smugglers, during the Second World War it played host to a large contingent of American airmen, based mostly at the neighbouring Warton aerodrome.
At its heart lay Holy Trinity primary school where 176 children, many of them evacuees, were in their second day of a new term....
At 10.30am, an American Liberator Bomber 42-50291 took off from Warton on a routine test flight. Eleven minutes in, a huge explosion, thought to have been sparked by a bolt of lightning, tore the huge plane apart. Large parts of the fuselage rained down on the village, hitting the school and a neighbouring snack bar. In the ensuing inferno, 61 people were killed, including 38 members of that infant class; it was the greatest loss of civilian life outside London during the Second World War.
A disturbing article is here at Slate about how popular the use of surrogacy in India has become as a way for poor, often illiterate, women to make a large amount of money:
It is not uncommon for surrogates to authorize contracts with a thumbprint as opposed to a signature because they are illiterate. Even those who are literate often aren't able to read the contracts, which tend to be written in English. Lack of technological understanding among rural Indians also breeds misconceptions about surrogacy. Many, for example, thought that it would be necessary to sleep with another man in order to conceive. Even the pricing structure of surrogacy perpetuates social inequality: Many religious Indian surrogacy clients would prefer for their child to be birthed by an upper-caste brahmin, so high-born surrogates can get paid up to double.
And how about this as an example of the appalling excuse making that some in the reproductive technology business undertake:
Going back a few months, I never got around to posting about the Melbourne woman who was off to Thailand to have sex selecting IVF to get a girl. I doubt she had much public sympathy: oh, except probably from some in the IVF industry. As was noted in Eureka Street in April, before that Melbourne mother's case was publicized:The country is romanced by the idea of selling human capital as its next great commodity. So surrogacy resonates not as an old problem of exploiting the poor but as an inevitable part of the "new India," where the locals provide much needed services for the new global economy. This kind of forward-thinking economic liberation dovetails with an ideology of personal freedom. "I think women should be free to choose what they do with their bodies," says Dr. Aniruddha Malpani, a fertility specialist in Mumbai. "We shouldn't treat them as stupid just because they are poor."
In recent weeks, several reports have appeared in the media that Australia's ban on couples using IVF to choose the sex of their children for social reasons or to balance their families might soon be lifted.Most stories quoted 'IVF pioneer' Professor Gab Kovacs, who is said to be 'leading the charge' or 'leading the lobby'. A number of other fertility doctors are also involved.
This seems to be a pre-emptive attempt to sway public opinion. The inquiry has not yet commenced. And supporters of this view know that many of us are not comfortable about parents choosing the sex of their children. So ahead of time, they're trying to change our minds.
