Saturday stuff

* Richard Glover provides a somewhat refreshing list of good things about the today's Australia. It's good to reflect on such stuff from time to time.

* On the other hand, last night on TV there was a quick shot of a girl at her soldier Dad's funeral (in Brisbane, I think), and the way she started to cry after putting a message on his coffin broke me up suddenly too. Life's a funny balance between blessings and pain, isn't it.

* Back to the upbeat: there's a really long article from the New York Times magazine about William Shatner, and much of it is pretty funny. Such as this scene:

At 3 in the afternoon, we slid into a booth at Tony Roma’s restaurant in Lexington. I told Shatner I was exhausted from chasing him all over in the rain. “I was just trying to torment you,” he said. The waiter appeared. I said I wanted a salad for an appetizer, and Shatner interrupted: “No! He’ll have the ribs appetizer.” I said I didn’t want the ribs. “You’re having the ribs,” he said. “They’re delicious.” Liz said, “But honey, he doesn’t want the ribs.” Shatner said: “He’s. Having. The. Ribs.” Then, sharply, he added: “This is the man’s table. Go sit over there at the woman’s table.” Liz ignored him and began talking about the equestrian games. Shatner shrugged, as if defeated. When the ribs arrived, we all picked at them. “These are good,” I said. “I think I’ll have them as a main course, too.” But Shatner said: “No. Have something else.” I said, “But I want the ribs!” Shatner said: “Some. Thing. Else.” I ordered a sandwich. The waiter asked if I wanted coleslaw or fries. Shatner answered, “He’ll have the fries.” I said I wanted the coleslaw. Shatner said: “I. Want. The. Fries.” I pointed out that he was having a baked potato. He said: “All right. I’ll let you have some of my potato.”

The article brought to my attention that Shatner has done a long running series of TV ads in the States for Priceline (for discount travel.) Never having seen them here, I've watched many on Youtube now, and would say these are my favourite:





On a related matter, this clip from Big Bang Theory was pretty amusing.

Katz's Ring

This week's column by Danny Katz, about Melbourne staging Wagner's complete Ring cycle in a few years time, is amusing. I've never been to any opera, but this sounds right:

It's going to be a stupendous show, this four-ring Ring Circus, though there's just a couple of teeny near-negligible things that may put some audiences off. Like its length: it's going to be 16 hours long, and opera-hours are like dog-years, they're a ratio of one to seven, so this will feel more like 4½ days, but with only two toilet breaks. And it's going to be pricey: this is a $15 million production, so producers will need to charge high ticket prices to recoup their investment - and with a total of only nine Aussie fans on the ''I heart Wagner'' Facebook page, it may have to be $1.7 million for an A-reserve ticket, with a much cheaper $1.2 million obscured-view ticket, sitting behind the left side of Brunhilde's armoured hydraulic uber-boob.

Sick oceans news

The biggest political surprise this week was that Bob Katter, who I took to be a climate change skeptic, came out with this comment on radio in explaining why he didn't bother meeting Nicholas Stern & Garnaut:

"Just to indicate how stupid those people are, there is a very unassailable scientific case that there will be a problem arising in the oceans. They don't mention that."

What? I can only assume he means ocean acidification. He's about the last politician I would have expected to have concerns about that. But then why would he not meet leading economists who want to talk about the best way to reduce CO2? He's an enigma under an akubra wrapped in a banana skin.

Anyhow, onto other sick ocean news:

* a study of naturally low pH ocean waters near some CO2 vents in the Mediterranean indicates that it's very bad for the biodiversity of single celled organisms called Foraminifera:

The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the Geological Society, found that increasing CO₂ levels caused foram diversity to fall from 24 species to only 4.

'Previous studies have shown a reduction in diversity of 30%, but this is even bigger for forams', said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, one of the study's co-authors. 'A tipping point occurs at mean pH 7.8. This is the pH level predicted for the end of this century'.

...

'At a mean pH level of 7.8, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non calcifying ones take over. We are headed towards that being the case in this century. The big concern for me is that unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.'

Not exactly encouraging.

* Meanwhile, the krill in the Southern Ocean is being increasingly fished (to provide feed for acquaculture, it appears), and there is concern about its sustainability. Nature reports:

The total krill catch this season is expected to be 150,000–180,000 tonnes, exceeding last year's total by about 40%.

Another worry is the number of fishing vessels being deployed in the Southern Ocean. Norway is now operating three ships, for example, and China is expected to rapidly increase its krill fishing after sending its first vessel this year. "If China starts fishing in a big way, catch will expand rapidly, outstripping our ability to orderly manage it," says Steve Nicol, a marine ecologist with the Australian Antarctic Division in Kingston, Tasmania, who advises the Australian government on krill fisheries.

But more generally, climate change may well be an issue with them too:

Researchers suspect that Antarctic krill are also feeling the effect of climate change. Krill larvae feed on algae living on the bottom of sea ice, which is rapidly dwindling around the Antarctic Peninsula. According to one estimate, the number of krill in the Southern Ocean may have dropped by 80% since the 1970s. But "there is no definite answer as to how the krill responds to warming", says Nicol. It is also unclear whether krill stocks are transient or fixed to given areas, and how many live deeper than 200 metres, below the most heavily fished and studied region of the ocean.

So keep your concerns about the oceans going, Bob.

UPDATE: Curious as to how big 180,000 tonnes of krill really is, in terms of the total amount of fish caught in the sea? I turned up this from 2005:

AFTER DECADES OF GROWTH, the reported global wild fish catch peaked in 2000 at 96,000,000 tons, then fell to 90,000,000 tons by 2003, the last year for which worldwide data are available. The catch per person dropped from an average of 17 kilograms in the late 1980s to 14 kilograms in 2003--the lowest figure since 1965.

As fishing fleets expanded through the late 1980s and fish-finding and harvesting technologies became more efficient, the world's fishers systematically have gone after their catch at greater depths and in more remote waters. Over the past 50 years, the number of large predatory fish in the oceans has dropped by a startling 90%. Catches of many popular food fish such as cod, tuna, flounder, and hake have been cut in half despite a tripling in fishing effort.

Thinner by the week

In the newsagent today, I picked up a Time magazine and noted how very thin it seemed to be. I had noticed this a couple of weeks ago too. Newsweek has undergone the same process, and we know how that has ended up.

The cover story was also about organic Vs regular food, which seems a rather insipid topic for a news magazine. (I suppose they are worrying about their eggs at the moment, but still.)

Add it to the list of worries

Not sure that I’ve heard this before:

Recent work by UTS researchers shows that future scarcity of the element phosphorus (P) will be a major threat to food security and a potential source of conflict.

…Professor Stuart White, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS, said that unless further attention is paid to the issue of P scarcity, we risk a global 'hard landing' as demand outstrips production in less than 25 years.

……the world resources of phosphate rock, concentrated in Western Sahara and in China, will not be sufficient to keep up with growing demand as a result of changing diets, increasing population and increasing biofuels production.

"We will need to dramatically improve the efficiency of use of P if we are to have a 'soft landing' to avoid significant fertiliser and food price volatility," Professor White said.

Oddly enough, the article ends with mentioning “P” of a different nature:

"In cities, capturing and reusing human waste, especially urine, can help in completing the nutrient cycle."

Sex, murder, mayhem, bees

All of the cinematography on Life is great, and last Sunday I particularly liked this story of Australian desert bees where life is brutal, especially if you're a male:



They look a bit like the blue banded bees which the kids found in our garden last year, and the females of which also live in burrows. I wonder if their mating is such a disaster zone too.

Slow on science

So, Andrew Bolt picks up a story of a potential asteroid threat, but misses that it this was discounted by NASA 8 years ago after closer observation of its orbit.

If this is an indication of the attention as he pays to science reporting, I'm expecting he'll be a global warming convert by 2018.

Bring on the entrails

Seems to me that if you're going to say that a WA National who says he could never support a mining tax, but doesn't want to absolutely support the, um, national Nationals, is going to be counted as part of the Coalition seat count, you may as well count the Green who has already pledged he couldn't work with the Coalition as part of the Labor count.

So that leaves us with effectively 73 seats all, with 4 Independents trying to decide what to do.

Wilkie and Oakeshott seem dead keen on a carbon price. Windsor supports it too, but had big reservations about the ETS. (Colebatch's column this morning explains.) He also likes the soil carbon ideas of Abbott, even though no one really seems to know how to properly account for it in your CO2 abatement figures. Katter will do anything that he thinks will support farmers or the general population in his electorate, but a carbon price doesn't seem to help there.

Gillard ruled out a carbon tax before the election, but Bandt would presumably be pushing for it again rather than a revised ETS.

Abbott claims that he'll never have a carbon price of any form. I would have thought that this would factor large in the minds of Wilkie and Oakeshott, but maybe they are figuring that with Gillard's silly "peoples convention" on the topic, Labor is not planning on getting anything going during the current term anyway, so maybe it's really more of an issue for the next election.

So, this is all rather complicated.

I personally am leaning towards more traditional methods for selecting the leader. The Governor General in a white priestess gown slaughtering a duck on the forecourt of Parliament House and studying its entrails sounds a good start. Then Julia and Tony have to do a Masterchef cook off with the body to be judged by a team comprising Clive Palmer, Graham Richardson and a third independent person with absolutely no interest in the outcome. Perhaps a Chilean miner. (Sorry.)

One other factor should be taken into account: if you want stability, I think I know which leader is less likely to die of an accidental death during the next term of government, and it's not the one who was nearly wiped out by a semi trailer a few months ago, swims with the sharks, and goes bicycle riding nearly every day*. On the other hand, I think we can be pretty sure there won't be any repeat mystery Prime Ministerial disappearances at sea with Julia.

* I see cycling takes out around 30 -40 Australians a year. I don't know how many it leaves with brain injury.

Today’s miscellany

* It’s looks rather like a cross between George Jetson’s digs and a Bond eco-villain’s lair, but it is in fact a German house that generates five times the electricity it consumes. At least while the sun is out. Looks kind of cool, even if ridiculously expensive. But do they have a law against curtains in that country?

* Several English papers are mentioning the high death toll in northern Italy caused by picking mushrooms. Not poison mushrooms, just ill prepared people who keep falling off hillsides and tumbling down ravines. As the Guardian explains:

…this year most of the deaths have been caused by falls. In many cases, the victims had been trying to outwit rival gatherers by going into remote and steeply inclined woods before dawn.

"It's a problem of mentality, unfortunately," said Gino Cornelli, head of alpine rescue in the Fassa valley in the Dolomites. "Many arrive in the dark. They set off with lights on their heads, even though it is banned. They dress in grey or brown to disguise themselves from the others."

He told La Repubblica newspaper: "They do the opposite of what they should. Too many cock a snook at the rules, and unfortunately this is the result."

Dying in the unsuccessful pursuit of an inanimate fungus does seem a fairly ignoble way to go. But then again, I suppose there aren’t all that many noble choices around.

* There’s a long article by PJ O’Rourke in the Weekly Standard about a trip to Afghanistan that seems quite full of interesting observations in the O’Rourkian style, but I haven’t finished reading it yet. One assumes he has recovered fully from his embarrassing variety of cancer. Hat tip to JF Beck.

* Finally, who can resist a series of photos of a monkey and its pet /captive cat? I predict the cat will be out of there as soon as it realises this primate can’t operate a can opener.

Biggest Christian country of the future

The BBC ran a story recently about how the Chinese government (or some subsets of it at least) has decided it quite likes Christianity after all.  This comment piece from the Guardian discusses the report, and adds some more details.   It ends with this:

On its current trajectory and with state backing, as the former Time magazine Beijing chief David Aikman notes, within three decades there may be nearly 400 million Christians in China. The future of Christianity may well lie in the east.

Knock yourselves out, libertarians

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.

The numbers game

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?

Hello, readers?

Well, after a large amount of visitors during the election campaign who came here looking for Julia Gillard's earlobes, the completion of the election itself seems to have caused a sudden precipitous drop in such hits, and indeed in any visitors at all.

What's wrong, y'all internet-ed out after watching it intensely during the election campaign? (I know I did.)

I gotta stop spending so much time on the net - I know I say that every couple of months, but this time I mean it. Sorta.

The intersection of physics, philosophy and religion

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.

Drug house update

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.

Interpretation provided

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.

Lizards good for something

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.

More details here.

Japan & Korea revisited

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:

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.

 

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.

Careful with the crayfish

Another story about (possible) dangerous food in China:

....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.

Inconstant universe

It seems that there is new evidence that the fundamental constants of the universe are not so constant:

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.

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.

If the work holds up, this is big news.