Local hero

Maybe he’s had some media attention here before – but if so I’ve missed it.

In any event,  here’s the great story (in the Christian Science Monitor) of an old guy who has almost certainly saved a great many people from committing suicide at The Gap in Sydney. 

Even when he has failed, it hasn’t deterred him from continuing to approach people he fears are about  to jump and invite them in for a cup of tea.   He’s a real hero for many, many families, I am sure.

Give up, climate change skeptics! Kirk is against you.

Important news from Climate Progress.  (Even more important than 2010 being the hottest year on record so far, and the long list of countries that last link provides which have broken high temperature records this year.)

William Shatner is an environmentalist!  And he does ads for Sierra Club which sound rational and credible.

You know your on the losing side when Cap’n Kirk is against you.

Stellar mysteries

Two unusual stories of stars were in the news last week:

1.  a pulsar discovered that doesn’t seem to have the right type of surface magnetic field for the way pulsars are normally meant to work.   This means there is a bit of work to be done to see how this type of pulsar gets its power.  (My comment:  first alien artefact found?)

2. the Milky Way seems to have kinks in its arms, making it a bit more like a pinwheel than your usual Andromeda galaxy, curvy armed, classic shape.  Other galaxies that look like this have been seen before, so this is not considered completely weird, apparently.

But – how does any galaxy get angles in arms like that?  I would have thought that nature (and gravity in particular) loves circles and curves.   Odd.

New nuclear designs considered

There’s a really good article in Physics World from 1 October that discusses the “next generation”designs for nuclear reactors in a pretty straight forward fashion.

There are several paragraphs devoted to the pebble bed, noting this in relation to the recently ended South African program:

Opinion is divided on the significance of the South African project's termination. Stephen Thomas, an energy-industry expert at the University of Greenwich in London, calls it a "major setback" for the development of very-high-temperature reactors, since, he says, South Africa's efforts appeared to be more advanced than research being carried out elsewhere. However, Bill Stacey, a nuclear engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, disagrees with this assessment, adding that South Africa was "just one of many players and not one of the major ones". China, Japan, France and South Korea are also developing technology for high-temperature reactors, some of which is also designed to use pebbles.

For its part, the US is pursuing a variant of the pebble-bed design known as the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). Intended to reach temperatures of 750–800 °C, the NGNP will allow for different fuel configurations, with the coated fuel kernels held either in pebbles or hexagonal graphite blocks. According to Harold McFarlane, technical director of GIF and a researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory, the US Congress approved the construction of a prototype NGNP in 2005 but has so far awarded funding only for preliminary research and development.

Spring sprung

It’s traditional at this blog at this time of year for some photos to appear from the garden.  This has taken longer than usual to happen in 2010, due to the very unseasonably wet and grey weather Brisbane has had for the last 6 weeks or so.

But, today is sunny and nice, the grass has already  been mowed, and here are some photos from this morning:

 

Open access to climate change material!

I'm not sure if I have made the point before here, or only on other blogs, but...

I see from the Nature website that Martin Weitzman has a review of Lomborg's latest book. Yet it is behind a paywall and would cost $32 (!) to get the article. There are also a couple of studies reported about the role of CO2 as the key greenhouse gas. One is in Science, behind a paywall (but available here via a skeptic site!), the other "companion" study one will be coming out in a different journal, and will almost certainly also be paywalled.

Routinely, important new papers on climate change (and ocean acidification) are behind paywalls. If you're lucky, sometimes bloggers or others made a .pdf of the article available.

Look, if those who edit and own the major scientific journals feel that climate change is a serious forthcoming threat for the whole of humanity which is capable of a political response now to modify the threat, why don't they adopt a policy of making such material in their journals available for free? It would be a modest but important attempt to make important material available to the public, who are, after all, pretty damn important in the political process.

If they say they can't do it financially, ask governments, or Bill Gates, or Google, to cover the (surely modest in the big scheme of things) cost of doing this.

I'm sick of this current system on the biggest scientific/political issue that we've ever seen.

Space underwear to the rescue

The Japan Times reports on this important contribution to the Chilean mine rescue:

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency sent high-tech "space underwear" last month to the 33 trapped miners in northern Chile, who on Tuesday local time started to emerge after 69 days underground, officials said Wednesday.

Developed by JAXA and fabric manufacturers, the underwear is effective at absorbing moisture and odors. Temperatures in the mine are reported to be around 35 degrees, the officials said.

The underwear is made of the same high-tech material as was worn by astronaut Naoko Yamazaki during a two-week mission in April aboard the space shuttle Discovery to and from the International Space Station, they said.

I have mentioned another Japanese astronaut and his long lasting silver impregnated Japanese space underwear before. (He said he wore the same pair for 2 months on the space station!) I wonder if you can buy them yet? ** People would be able to arrive at the office each morning and announce things like "day 35 and counting."

Lately, I've also taken to wondering about what they use for toilet paper in the ISS. I mean, according to this story at NASA, they get to change their "normal" underwear maybe every 3 to 4 days.

Given that frequency (especially if you're using Japanese underwear), one would imagine the need for a pretty good clean after using the toilet might be fairly important. And given the way the toilet works (air suction is meant to draw it away from your backside,) I'm assuming things might sometimes take a detour on the way "down", so to speak.*

So does mere paper do the job, or moist towelettes, or what? I think I may have found the answer. An astronaut talks about what he used for some seed sprouting experiment:

Lacking soil, you need some sort of substrate that will retain both seeds and water. I considered using an old shirt or sock but decided the Russian supplied toilet paper was best. This toilet paper is not like what you normally think of as toilet paper. It consisted of two layers of coarsely woven gauze, 4 by 6 inches in dimension sewn together at the edges with a layer of brown tissue sandwiched in-between. It works very well for its intended purpose.

This is the only reference to space toilet paper that I have found. So it's Russian. (So's the toilet.) And I presume it comes back to Earth:

Liquid waste is collected in 20 litre containers. Solid waste is collected in individual micro-perforated bags which are stored in an aluminum container. Full containers are transferred to Progress for disposal.

Your education has been enhanced.

* Updates: apparent confirmation in this description by an astronaut:

For number two, the seat lifts up, revealing a small hole. You’ve really got to get to know yourself, and get good at lining things up for this operation! The system again uses airflow to collect and hold things down where they’re supposed to go. After you’re finished, the bag is tied off and pushed down into the replaceable silver can.

Accidents do happen, and by international agreement, you clean up your own mess!

Is it worth it? One of my crewmates on Space Shuttle once told me that he wished that we could land every morning, so that he could take care of business there, before launching back into orbit. Yeah, it’s not pleasant, but you get used to the hassle of doing these hygiene tasks.

** Yes you can! A mere US$115, and with the AUD at parity, what a bargain.

Considering krill

The ABC is carrying a short report as follows:

Tasmanian scientists have released ground-breaking research which shows increasing ocean acidification is deadly for Antarctica's main food source.

The team at the Antarctic Division has studied the impacts of increased levels of carbon dioxide on the shrimp-like krill.

Scientists exposed the laboratory krill embryos to varying levels of carbon dioxide; from as little as 380 parts per million which is the current surface level, to 2,000 parts per million.

The embryos exposed to the highest level did not survive.

Krill Biologist Rob King says with carbon dioxide levels predicted to double by the end of the century, the next step is to find the exact tipping point.

Well, given that 2000ppm is (I think) never likely to be reached, I'm not exactly panicked about effects at that level. But, even if the effect at around the 500 - 800 ppm mean less successful reproduction, it could be a worry.

The hostile witness

Barrie Cassidy gives his forthcoming book on Rudd a bit of promotion, and tells the story of Rudd trying to make an early strike.

I expect we’ll hear more about extracts from the book, and it will be entertaining.

All mine

Danny Katz has a very amusing story of plagiarism on the internet in The Age today.

Am I supposed to have explicitly claimed some form of copyright on my own blog?  I’ve sometimes idly wondered.

Missing George and the happy medium

There's a brief commentary piece in New Scientist making the same point I was thinking to myself yesterday. Namely, if the science community thought George W Bush's administration was anti-science, just wait til the Tea Party movement starts to exert more influence:

On the surface, the movement seems impelled by the economic pain Americans are feeling. But look more closely and it's hard to miss what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" in US politics, marked by "exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy". An essential strand of that is anti-intellectualism and disdain for science.

Nearly every Senate candidate with Tea Party backing rejects the established reality of human-caused global warming, usually with gusto. "I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change. It's not proved by any stretch of the imagination," Wisconsin candidate Ron Johnson has said. "I think it's far more likely that it's just sunspot activity, or something just in the geological aeons of time."

I think a lot of the complaints from lefty scientists about the Bush administration were concerning his attitudes to biology and stem cell research, informed by his pro-life position.

But in fact, while I am consider myself strongly pro-science (yes, despite the fact that I thought physicists were not taking the potential for danger from the LHC seriously enough), the field of biological research is exactly the one about which I think reasonable conservatives (like me!) have a right to be concerned. I'm not comfortable with the virtual routine use of IVF fertility treatments, let alone extracting stem cells from embryos. It's the philosophical and practical implications of the commodification of human life, (or proto-life, if you want,) that I think should concern more people than it does. For IVF, the strong desire to have one's own baby overcomes all such broader social and philosophical issues. I am similarly somewhat sympathic to the concerns of genetic engineering in plants and animals, and have my doubts that patents for genes is a good idea.

Yet it is, as with many areas of politics at the moment, just about impossible to find anyone who strikes the happy medium in the field of science policy. You either have a choice of pro-lifers who share my concerns about stem cells and all forms of fiddling with embryos, but they are almost certainly going to be climate change disbelievers who are happy to completely ignore scientific warnings of global scale dangers. Their opponents tend to be led by gung-ho culture warrior types whose attitude to the environment I can share, but little else. They are often arrogant about, and completely dismissive of, religious impulses, although they will live with a kind of woolly headed environmental spiritualism . And those with the strongest environmental concerns are often very uninterested in space exploration, yet in my view a truly long term view for those who would like to see humanity survive suggests it would be a good idea not to leave all of life's eggs in the Earth basket.

By and large, I guess I do agree with most Catholic sentiment regarding science, yet Catholic politicians in Australia and the US do not seem to feel particularly impelled to do anything about following such idea legislatively. And while the Church is often unfairly criticised for arguing that reliance on condoms is not the magic answer to HIV anywhere, it's much harder to justify from a logical point of view why it should teach that contraception that prevents fertilisation at all should be treated as being morally defective, at least if all other aspects of the sex are licit (like the couple being married.) So even within the Church you have this "all or nothing" kind of attitude that infects teaching with a scientific aspect.

Yes, it has become very hard to find the happy medium in the world at the moment. My installation as the dictatorial but benevolent political and religious leader of the Earth by alien invaders seems to be the only solution. It's a long shot, I know, but hope remains.

The Light on the Dill

Seriously, Tony Abbott’s capacity for cringe inducing rhetoric just never fails him. Yesterday, encouraged by Alan Jones, he tried to make political points by commenting on the controversial decision to prosecute some Australian soldiers for their actions in Afghanistan. This is dangerous territory for a politician to tread into, but no doubt his sense of opportunism again outweighed caution, and hey the soldiers let him shoot a Steyr over in Afghanistan last week, so I guess he owed them.

But the most cringe-worthy bit of the interview was about the allegedly appalling treatment he got from Gillard*, which somehow compelled him to make the lamest excuse since the dog ate his homework. The SMH reports it this way:

The clash came as Mr Abbott continued to claim that Julia Gillard had set him up by leaking that he had declined her offer to accompany him to Afghanistan.

This, he contended, had lulled him into making his infamous excuse that he rejected the offer because he did not want to arrive for a conference in London suffering jet lag.

While Ms Gillard said yesterday she no longer intended to comment on the saga and thus fuel it, Mr Abbott said he needed to keep defending himself because he was the gatekeeper of the nation's values.

''One of the things that so disappoints me about the election result is that I am the standard bearer for values and ideals which matter and which are important and … as the leader of the Coalition, millions and millions of people invest their hopes in me and it's very important that I don't let them down.

''When I am unfairly attacked, I've got to respond and I've got to respond in a tough way.''

Tony Abbott, standard bearer for politicians everywhere who can't think on their feet, and then whine about it.

* That is, inviting him to come with her on a visit to Afghanistan instead of making his own trip, and then not leaking about the invitation.

A commercial break

Time for some colour and movement:



Found via First Things. (While this parody is amusing, I remain a bit puzzled as to why the original was so popular, though. I didn't think it so exceptional.)

Might work

The BBC notes that there is some talk of using the International Space Station for something more than whatever it is they currently use it for:

The possibility of using the space station as a launching point to fly a manned mission around the Moon is to be studied by the station partners.

Letters discussing the concept have been exchanged between the Russian, European and US space agencies.

The Moon flight would be reminiscent of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission which snapped the famous "Earthrise" photograph.

The agencies want the station to become more than just a high-flying platform for doing experiments in microgravity.

They would like also to see it become a testbed for the technologies and techniques that will be needed by humans when they push out beyond low-Earth orbit to explore destinations such as asteroids and Mars.

Using the station as the spaceport, or base-camp, from where the astronauts set off on their journey is part of the new philosophy being considered.

Sounds expensive, though.

A special link for armchair pilots

That's amusing. My recent post mentioning JAL and flight simulator has somehow been linked to from this site. For any men who like Flight Simulator and who have wives who like to participate enthusiastically in their interests, you might care to have a look.

(Which reminds me, last time I was there some years ago, you could get fake Singapore Airlines flight attendant uniforms at some Changi Airport shops. I offered to buy one for my wife, but she declined.)

Chance to see Last Chance

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Stephen Fry (people tend to be somewhat gushy in their praise of him,)  but he is an amiable enough host of documentaries.

On Sunday night, ABC started “Last Chance to See”, and it was very enjoyable. Set mainly on and around the Amazon, you didn’t really get to see all that much wildlife, but it served as a pretty good travelogue experience of the area.  It also had what might be called a surprise ending.

It can still be seen at iView, although I wouldn’t know for how long.

Cushiest parish around

The Catholic Herald reports:

On Wednesday September 22, at Westminster Cathedral, the Apostleship of the Sea (AoS) organised an awareness day to promote its cruise chaplaincy programme.

Seven priests who will be undertaking cruise chaplaincy over Christmas on P&O cruise ships met to discuss the benefits of their work and the possible difficulties they will experience at sea, especially over the Christmas period, which can be very lonely for seafarers away from family and loved ones.

This'll be interesting

If Coorey is telling us the truth (and why wouldn't he?) it seems that Tony "Putin" Abbott will remain the one to come out worst of this episode.

As The Age reports:

However, the reporter who broke the story of Ms Gillard's offer to Mr Abbott said that the disclosure did not come from the Prime Minister or her office.

"I did not learn about it from the government," The Sydney Morning Herald's Phillip Coorey said yesterday, implying that Mr Abbott was making a serious charge against Ms Gillard based on a misunderstanding.

So, Coorey finds out that Abbott had been invited. If this led to other journalists asking the PM's office to confirm, so what if they answered honestly?

Next, Abbott is asked about the invitation, giving what he now calls a "lame" excuse, and this is met with universal condemnation. He assumes (right from the start, it seems) that it was Gillard's office who initiated the leak and was trying to score political points out of it.

Well, of course, this then gave her the opportunity to make her mild crack at Abbott's excuse; but really, this was handed to her on a platter, and who can blame her for not coming to his rescue?

Then Hockey attempted to cover for his boss' lame brain by giving out hints that Putin (sorry, Abbott) was about to make his own trip. (Apparently, Abbott cannot think fast enough to say something like " I will explain in detail when I return to Australia why I declined the PM's offer, and I am sure the Australian public will understand.")

I can understand now why Abbott did not say "It is not advisable for security reasons that the PM and Opposition Leader travel together": that would look lame given that we now know how indifferent he is to safety in that he wanted to be "embedded" with Australian forces. This request speaks more of Abbott's self-aggrandizement and poor judgment.* We just had nearly two hours of a journalist on the front line on Four Corners: I hope Defence Chief's just told him to just go and watch that rather than bother them with the worry of not getting himself killed.

Gillard also denied clearly that Abbott's trip had a set date at the time she offered the trip. Given that politicians don't usually make outright lies when they know there are many people out there who know the truth and call them out on it, I expect there will be almost certainly be enough "wriggle room" in Gillard's statement so that it cannot be an outright bit of dishonesty.

So I expect more interesting exchanges in the media about this during the week. As I say, it'll be interesting.

* Indeed, Abbott's statement that he received plenty of admiration for his electoral performance from his British visit again sounded vain. And remember his "why can't Australia have an Iron Man PM" style comment after his completed that race before the election?

The Doctor's timetable noted

The BBC carries news of next year's season of Doctor Who:

It has been announced previously that series six has been split into two blocks, with the first airing on BBC One in spring 2011 and the second block showing in autumn 2011.

The first season of the Matt Smith doctor was quite a mixed bag, but Smith himself and Karen Gillen did have a certain charisma which came through. Hopefully, it may yet have episodes as good as some in Tennant's reign.

Arabian embarrassment

The Gulf News reports:

Saudi police raided a secret Catholic mass in Riyadh last week and arrested a dozen Filipinos and a Catholic priest, charging them with prosyletising, a local daily reported on Wednesday.

The raid took place as some 150 Filipinos were attending the mass in a Riyadh rest house on Friday, the second day of the weekend in Saudi Arabia, Arab News said.

The twelve Filipino men and the priest, whose nationality was not specified, were "charged with prosyletising," the daily quoted an official from the Philippine embassy in Riyadh as saying.

They were all released Sunday on guarantees by sponsors or embassies, the report said.

Saudi Arabia bans the practice of any religion aside from Islam. However, small, low-key prayer services inside expatriate compounds and in Filipino gatherings are tolerated by officials.

With more than one million workers in Saudi Arabia, Filipinos comprise the bulk of the Christian community inside the kingdom.

Look, I suppose they know what they are getting into when they take work there, but it is pretty galling that the terms upon which Saudi Arabia will let in people to be their maids, servants and labourers excludes their freedom of religious practice for one hour a week.