Not exactly comforting

Strangely enough, it was via the religious blog First Things that I found this video in which a bunch of physicists answer questions. Given that we are all supposed to trust physicists to judge that the LHC is not actually dangerous to the planet, I find it somewhat disconcerting that they don't know how to answer the question "what would happen if someone put their hand in the particle beam at the LHC":



Interesting viewing, and there are several other "big physics" questions dealt with too.

In other LHC news, I see that they may have found some unexpected behaviour already, even though it must (if memory serves me correctly) still be operating at substantially less than its highest power. The glass half full way of looking at this is that it's good that spending all that money has turned up something. The half empty perspective is along the lines: are their safety calculations reliable when they are turning up unpredicted stuff already?

Are we there yet?

Some fascinating stuff in this report of studies on the time slowing effects of relativity, which starts with the subheading:

As Einstein predicted, a slow drive or a step up a ladder is enough to warp time.

I think this might explain the common kid’s question while on a drive.

Moving extremely sensitive clocks is how it was tested:

Chou and his team used an optical clock invented in 2005. This uses laser light, which has a frequency some 100,000 times higher than microwaves. Optical clocks are thus tens or hundreds of times more accurate than microwave clocks — NIST's loses less than one second in three billion years.

And here I thought my Pulsar Kinetic (for which I haven't had to replaced the rechargeable battery since I got it about 9 or 10 years) was good. Anyway, this is what they did:

General relativity states that time speeds up for objects as gravity weakens. To demonstrate this, Chou and his colleagues raised one optical clock 33 centimetres above another. The slightly lower gravity at that height meant that compared with the reference clock, the raised clock ticked with a fractional boost in frequency of 4 × 10–17, equivalent to a gain of 90 billionths of a second over 79 years.

To demonstrate special relativity, which says that time slows down for moving objects, the researchers jolted the single atom in their optical clock so that it oscillated at relative speeds of less than 10 metres per second, or 36 kilometres per hour. This time, the clock's ticks seemed to drop by a fractional frequency of almost 6 × 10–16.

Cool.

Death by vampire

Wow.  Vampires (of the bat variety) really can be dangerous:

A fifth child has died in Peru in an outbreak of rabies spread by vampire bats, say health officials.

The death in the northern Amazon region brings the total number of people killed in the outbreak to 20.

A local health official said 3,500 people had been bitten by the bloodsucking bats.

Well, technically, if I remember some old David Attenborough show correctly, I think they are more blood licking than blood sucking, but still...

Suicide and rationality

I think I've posted before about how, in Japan, suicide pacts have been arranged with strangers via the internet. This appalling use of modern technology seems to have caught on in England, where a man and woman in their 30's, whose families did not know were depressed or particularly unhappy, met and killed themselves after arranging it all via a suicide newsgroup:

The fatal pact began on 13 September when Lee, using the username Heavens Little Girl, posted: "I'm desperately seeking a pact in the UK. I'm 34, female, and live in the Essex area."

She then explained her preferred method was gas and asked for a partner with a car who could pick her up. "My time frame is As Soon As Possible," she said. "If you are very serious, please email me."

The previous month she had posted about planning to kill herself in a cupboard or bathroom and other users shared tips about how to overcome practical problems she had encountered.

By 9 September she reported she was "looking into partners right now, hopefully I have found the right one," and last Sunday afternoon, Lumb, using the username Endthis, wrote: "I'm just saying goodbye … and to all you people suffering I hope you find what your looking for."

Eight fellow forum members wished him luck and bade him farewell, but none tried to dissuade him.

People who participate in such groups clearly think that suicide is a "rational" response to either their own problems, or even worse, the problems of strangers. And indeed, we know that many people don't oppose euthanasia for those close to death anyway, seeing it as a reasonable and rational response to suffering.

But for the depressed but otherwise healthy, like this English pair, there is a perfectly rational argument against suicide - namely that millions of people over the centuries have wanted, or tried, to commit suicide, failed and then later led happy lives.

I can understand why the non religious might reject a call to give up on suicide if it comes from a religious perspective about the inherent value of life and what God wants. But the real evil in these anonymous people instructing others about how to do suicide right is that they are not encouraging rationality at all, and it's not even their own families who will be affected. Yet they will think they can justify their role philosophically, I bet.

So that’s why they do it

I didn’t realise that frequent flyer programs could be a good little earner:

WHEN Qantas announced profit results last month, it revealed it had earned $328 million, before tax, from its frequent-flyer program.

How so?:

Reichlin says frequent-flyer programs are hugely profitable for airlines due to a combination of "enormous demand" and having control over supply.

"They get cash for the points [from banks] and then they control the supply of seats," he says.

Oh, I see.

Ocean acidification – the past, present and future clam

Time for more ocean acidification bad news. This report describes the results of a novel study that looked at what happens when you raise two different species of “commercially important” – I think that means we eat them - bivalves not only in water with predicted future levels of pH, but also in a tank with pre-industrial levels of CO2.

The surprise is not so much that the clams and scallops did worse under future conditions, but they did considerably better in the past conditions than they do today:

At the 750ppm level, basic shell structures like the hinge were severely malformed, while the surface of the shell had holes that were apparent when it was examined via scanning electron microscopy. There was also a significant drop in the viability of the larvae, and those that did survive were developmentally delayed compared to those raised at today’s concentrations. Matters got worse at the higher levels.

The interesting twist in the new work is that the authors also run the experiment under preindustrial CO₂ levels of about 250ppm (actual levels were closer to 280ppm). For both species of shellfish, the mortality was much lower and development proceded more quickly. For the quahog, viability doubled (from 20 percent to 40 percent), while for the bay scallop, viability went from 43 percent to 74 percent. The animals made major developmental milestones more quickly—metamorphosis at day 14 occurred in half the animals at preindustrial CO₂ levels, but that dropped to less than seven percent at modern levels.

In other words, it may be that even the current decrease in pH may be adversely affecting bivalves.

Overall, they suggest that population crashes in bivalves have been ascribed to a number of stresses, like overfishing and pollution, but it’s possible that ocean acidification has also been at work in these cases. Given that the Earth has experienced higher CO₂ levels in the past, why are they being hit so hard now? According to the paper, it’s actually been over 24 million years since levels are likely to have been this high, and many shellfish have diversified more recently than that; any changes in CO₂ in the intervening time have also been far more gradual than the current pace.

Not great news.

Why mice

Last week I mentioned a study on the importance of lab mice being handled nicely.  This week it’s a more fundamental question:  why are there so many lab mice anyway?

Neuroskeptic provides the answer.  Rats used to rule the roost, but then they worked out how to knock out single mouse genes.  A bit of bad luck for the mice of the world. 

Hello possum

The kids have noticed a possum has made a nest of sorts under the deck at home:

Cute, very.

Drug policy considered

There’s a good and sensible opinion piece on the appropriate response to illicit drug use in the Sydney Morning Herald today, arguing that a combination of both prohibition and treatment of it as a health issue is the correct approach. The arguments are set out clearly, and fully take into account the unintended consequences of often suggested reforms.

I certainly have complained for a long time that, at least in the Australian context, those who talk of major drug law reform often leave the impression that the “health problem”approach has been ignored. Yet, as far back as about 1980, I knew first hand that heroin users in Queensland were able to get on the methodone program and visited pharmacies to get their daily dose.

In fact, reader Geoff should be able to enlighten me here. If anyone turns up at a GP practice in Queensland today and says they want help to stop using heroin, speed, cannabis or alcohol, are they able to be readily referred to a free or cheap health program relevant to them? (Not just the alcoholics/drugs anonymous type that have been around forever, and are done in a group context that (I expect) may put some people off.)

I get the impression that methodone programs might not always have been as readily embraced in all Australian States, but also that access to at least some type of health programs to help drug addiction has been readily available for some time, regardless of whether people are in the criminal justice system or not.

Moral revolutions reviewed

Slate has a review of “The Honor Code”, which looks at how significant social moral changes have happened. The abolition of slavery, Chinese footbinding and English duelling all get a mention, and while the reviewer does not entirely agree with the author’s idea that it was changes in the sense of honour that led to reform, it still sounds like an interesting read.

The author has no clothes?

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom has been highly praised ("the novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale" said Slate), yet descriptions of its themes have made me very suspicious that it is really a novel about nothing terribly important - like most current literature. Here's how someone at NPR sums it up:

Franzen tells the story of a deteriorating middle class family in Minnesota. The mom, Patty, is a former college athlete, a sort of basketball Emma Bovary who suffers from deep depression and a long unrequited longing for her husbands best friend from college, a successful rock 'n' roller named Rick Katz.

The husband, Walter, is a naive corporate do-gooder, oblivious to his wifes pain and his own. Their son Joey finds life more appealing in the house next door and he moves in with the neighbors, beginning an affair with their teenage daughter that extends throughout the entire novel.

Franzen tells this story in a form thats rather odd, marked by long sequences of exposition and a long middle section written by Patty for her therapist, which she composes in the third person.*

So it's good to see that my suspicions may well be right: there's a very negative review of the book (and Franzen's writing style) in The Atlantic. It certainly sounds like the sort of book I would dislike, and it seems extremely likely I should not bother following this writer.

* That reviewer finds the writing often "brilliant", but still finds the book unappealing. The pretty savage conclusion:

...every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didnt want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to.

A depressing (and depressed) Monbiot

George Monbiot writes about the complete failure of the Kyoto protocol and the unlikelihood that there will be anything effective to replace it. Any claimed national reductions, he says, are in fact illusory.

What depressing reading. Fortunately, 2010 global temperatures don't seem to be dropping nearly as quickly as skeptics expected. Seriously, the world needs some more really bad weather that is consistent with AGW to change the international politics of this. (Particularly American politics, where climate skepticism on the Tea Party/Republican side is likely to get more power soon.)

Don't mention the M word

There's an interesting post (and comments following) at The Economist about Christine O'Donnell and her "laughable Catholicism". (I'm taking that from the title.) Take this, for example, talking about her claim that she wouldn't even lie to a Nazi to protect the life of a hiding Jew:

Is this the Catholic line on lying? I didn't think so, leading me to believe for about 20 minutes that Ms O'Donnell might be a devotee of the great Prussian moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant. (Compare their views on lying to murderers and "wanton self-abuse".) However, further Googling led me to conclude that Ms O'Donnell's take on lying does indeed conform to the teachings of the Catholic Church. One Catholic encyclopedia reports:

The chief argument from reason [against the permissibility of lying] which St. Thomas and other theologians have used to prove their doctrine is drawn from the nature of truth. Lying is opposed to the virtue of truth or veracity. Truth consists in a correspondence between the thing signified and the signification of it. Man has the power as a reasonable and social being of manifesting his thoughts to his fellow-men. Right order demands that in doing this he should be truthful. If the external manifestation is at variance with the inward thought, the result is a want of right order, a monstrosity in nature, a machine which is out of gear, whose parts do not work together harmoniously.

Sounds like Ms O'Donnell paid attention in confirmation class!

There are many amusing comments too, including one that is just this quote:

"Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell."

- H.L. Mencken

The article notes that, with respect to masturbation, she is only speaking the Church's line:

Could it be that Catholic doctrine is a risible barrier to office only if one is willing, as Ms O'Donnell clearly is, frankly to defend it in public without a hint of embarrassment?

The answer does seem "yes", but then again you do have to take into account that this is the consequence of having church teaching that is not sufficiently informed by nature. As for masturbation as a political topic, one commenter has it right:

How can we reconcile the idea that Ms. O'Donnell's views on masturbation are risible, with the fate of Joycelyn Elders who was fired for airing the opposite views?

Is it just political suicide to mention masturbation at all, whatever you say about it?

For those with toddlers

Children swallowing a “disc battery” face more risk of injury than you might think:

"A disc battery is an increasingly common foreign body ingested by children," the authors write as background information in the article. The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported a total of 2,063 disc battery ingestions in 1998; the number increased 80 percent during the next eight years. When the battery is lodged in the esophagus, its alkaline contents can leak, causing tissue death and burns from electrical discharge.

Ancient germs

From New Scientist:

WITH a hibernation period of up to 100 million years, bacteria discovered on the Arctic sea floor may have longest life cycle of any known organism.

Casey Hubert from the Geosciences Group at Newcastle University, UK, and colleagues came across the bacteria while studying biological activity in sediment samples from the sea floor off the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

There might be another explanation for what he found, but I like this one.

China moon

The Guardian reports:

China could put an astronaut on the moon in 2025 and launch probes to explore Mars and Venus within five years, according to the boss of a Chinese space programme.

Ye Peijian said China could make its first manned moon landing in 15 years, send a probe to Mars by 2013 and to Venus by 2015.

"China has the full capacity to accomplish Mars exploration by 2013," he added.

It's entirely possible they could get there before Americans return. I suppose that if they open a takeaway, it won't be such a bad thing.

Questioning masculinity

Slate has an interesting, if somewhat rambling, essay on the history of political "gay baiting" in American politics. It's interesting to see how long this sort of stuff has gone on:

In the 1840s, supporters of Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison described incumbent Democratic president Martin Van Buren as "luxury-loving." Boston's pro-Whig Atlas described Van Buren as a "dandy" in "nicely plaited ruffles," who was "leading off a minuet" while Harrison fought the War of 1812. The Harrison slogan "Van Van, you're a used-up man," suggested squandered masculinity—whether on frivolous pursuits or fellow men was left to the imagination. ...

The newspapers of the late 1700s were filled with verse mocking bachelors' supposed moral degeneracy. But mentioning a politician's single status didn't necessarily suggest that he slept with men, says historian John Gilbert McCurdy. The implication was slightly more pronounced in the 19^th century. When James Buchanan, the only bachelor president in American history, ran for office in 1850, the press alleged that his unmarried status made him an unfit executive. "He had no taste for matrimony, which plainly implies a lack of some essential quality," declared the New York Herald. "If he is elected, he will be the first President who shall carry into the White House, the crude and possibly the gross tastes and experiences of a bachelor." It's not clear to historians whether "gross tastes" meant sodomy or just loose women.

I don't believe I had heard of this particular incident from the 1950's before:

The early 1950s were consumed by not just the Red Scare but what scholar David K. Johnson refers to as the "Lavender Scare." In 1950, the State Department fired 91 "peculiars" solely on the basis of their suspected homosexuality. The Republican Party distributed a letter to thousands of members informing them, "sexual perverts … have infiltrated our government," and were "perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists." The equation of homosexuality with communist sympathy was a favorite refrain of Joseph McCarthy, who said in a speech he gave in 1950 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "Communists and queers … have American people in a hypnotic trance." According to Johnson, amid the fear mongering of the 50s, this correlation seemed plausible to the public. Both communism and homosexuality, Johnson writes, "seemed to comprise hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty."

But given the prominence of gay intellectual traitors in Britain at the time, I find it hard to fault other nations' intelligence services for being (at the very least) extremely wary of homosexuality in sensitive work areas at the height of the Cold War.

Lately, Rob Oakeshott has been getting the same masculinity questioning name calling from the likes of the right wing commenters at Catallaxy. (Admittedly, Oakeshott has been behaving in an irritating fashion ever since his "dance of the seven veils" speech when he announced he would support Labor. He is clearly unsuited to be Speaker of the House of Reps.) Yet, on the other side of politics, Labor's (and Gillard's) quite recent "mincing poodle" jibe at Christopher Pyne was equally schoolboy-ish.

Issues of propriety in one's private sex life can have a genuine relevance to political life, and it can be difficult to draw a line. If it had come out while he was Police Minister, for example, that the married David Campbell was secretly frequenting gay saunas, it would have been hard to argue that he wasn't placing himself in an eminently blackmail-able position in a foolishly public way. (If, on the other hand, he was having a very discrete affair with one man - or woman - he would probably just have been following the conduct of numerous other Police Ministers.) The fact that he was in the less sensitive Transport Ministry at the time led to more public sympathy than one might have expected.

But carrying on about a politician, straight or gay, because he doesn't sound manly enough, is just childish in my opinion.

Rail gun to space - cool

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

....a group of NASA engineers is seriously studying the possibility of using a rail gun as a potential launch system to the stars, and they are looking for a system that turns a host of existing cutting-edge technologies into the next giant leap spaceward. Stan Starr, branch chief of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center said that nothing in the design calls for brand-new technology to be developed, but counts on a number of existing technologies to be pushed forward. He said developing such a system would be a “major technology revolution.”

Monday’s list

1. Good work if you could get it:

The restored grave of the last known "sin-eater" in England has been at the centre of a special service in a Shropshire village churchyard.

Campaigners raised £1,000 to restore the grave of Richard Munslow, who was buried in Ratlinghope in 1906.

Sin-eaters were generally poor people paid to eat bread and drink beer or wine over a corpse, in the belief they would take on the sins of the deceased.

Frowned upon by the church, the custom mainly died out in the 19th Century.

2. I do wish this Bieber watching would just go away. If ever there was a safe bet, it's that young Justin will have a troubled adulthood; it has the inevitability of train approaching a blown up bridge, while the whole world sits on their folding camp chairs watching and videotaping. But meanwhile, I suppose there is some fun to be had imagining how bad an idea this is:

Justin Bieber plays a "criminal mastermind" in his acting debut. The Baby singer started having acting lessons earlier this year to prepare for his debut in US TV series CSI, in which he plays a criminal called Jason McCann. Explaining the role to Teen Vogue magazine, Bieber said: "It seems like I'm this sweet and innocent kid, and then it turns out I'm the mastermind behind everything.

3. Australians: buy those books and CDs you want from the US right now, it seems.

4. Bet the Tea Party didn’t know about the videos under the control of natural enemy Bill Maher. Ha.

5. The Pope’s visit seemed to go very well. Geoffrey Robertson and Richard Dawkins can’t be all that happy about leading a bunch of condom obsessed, play time dress up demonstrators, can they?

6. Last night I had a dream in which the character of Ted from Scrubs was in the cast of ER. Pity I woke up during it.

Taking “marriage of convenience” to new heights

Islam can be a very odd religion, and a very, very convenient one for men, if this report from Saudi Arabia is anything to go by:

With the end of summer — a time when many weddings take place in Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries — the local media is rife with reports announcing religious edicts surrounding marriages.

Under new forms of marriage including Misyar, Misfar (travel), Misyaaf (summer), Siyahi (tourist), friendship and lastly Wanasa (conversation), many Saudi and Arab Gulf tourists — who spend their summer holidays abroad — are reportedly engaging in temporary marriages with young girls and divorcing them before returning home. All of these new forms have stirred religious, ethical and social controversies.

Shaikh Saleh Al Sadlan, a member of the Saudi Supreme Council of Senior Scholars and professors of higher religious studies at the Imam Mohammad Bin Saudi Islamic University, stirred a controversy by approving the Wanasa form of marriage, which does not include sexual relations between a man and his wife.

Al Sadlan said that scholars of the past had approved such a form of marriage, which focuses only on talking, without having sex.

This, he said, used to happen between old men, who needed attention, and young women who didn't mind giving it in return for the status and security associated with marriage.

I think we’ve all heard of the  short term "away from home" Islamic marriages before, but not "summer" and "tourist" categories.  (How does a “tourist” marriage differ from a “travelling away from home on business” marriage, I wonder.)  And isn't it funny how the article concentrates on whether the sexless marriage is legitimate or not. The ones in which the women is treated as a mere short term sex outlet are those which I would have thought should draw a little bit more attention.