Does this sound like such a good idea?

Transgenic grass skirts regulators : Nature News

GM plants have been in the news lately, what with Greenpeace (literally) cutting down CSIRO work on GM wheat.

While I certainly don't support this Greenpeace action, I've always had reservations about GM technology, for many of the reasons you would no doubt find on a Greenpeace website. (Is it necessary in the first place, will genes inadvertently spread into the wild, it's not a precise science at all, is it putting too much control over farming into profit driven corporations, etc. Yes, I sound a regular Lefty, but I can see the reason people worry about it, and there are real life examples of how the technology has not worked out well.)

But GM proponents have often argued that the work is really important for helping the world feed itself in future. I'm yet to be convinced of that, but in any event one of the big GM controversies has been about GM cotton in India; hardly a crop with a vital importance for humanity's well being. (Well, a world only of polyester clothes would be a disaster of a kind, I suppose.)

Today I see from the link above that GM to do with herbicide resistence is also being done for lawn grass. You see, it'll just let you spray the weeds in your lawn instead of having to bend over and pull them up.

Is this something that is really in humanity's interest to develop? Do we really need to run the risk of transferring resistance to herbicides to other grasses?

What's more, there seems to be less regulatory control of this due to the way it's being made:

The grass can evade control because the regulations for GM plants derive from the Federal Plant Pest Act, a decades-old law intended to safeguard against plant pathogens from overseas. Previous types of GM plants are covered because they they were made using plant pathogens. The bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens — which can cause tumours on plants — shuttled foreign genes into plant genomes. Developers then used genetic control elements derived from pathogenic plant viruses such as the cauliflower mosaic virus to switch on the genes.

By revealing similar elements in plants' DNA, genome sequencing has liberated developers from having to borrow the viral sequences. And Agrobacterium is not essential either; foreign genes can be fired into plant cells on metal particles shot from a 'gene gun'. Scotts took advantage of both techniques to construct the herbicide-resistant Kentucky bluegrass that put the USDA's regulatory powers to the test.

"The Plant Pest Act was completely inappropriate for regulating biotech crops, but the USDA jury-rigged it," says Bill Freese, science-policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety in Washington DC. "Now we can foresee this loophole getting wider and wider as companies turn more to plants and away from bacteria and other plant-pest organisms." The USDA has not made public any plans to close the loophole and has also indicated that it will not broaden its definition of noxious weeds, a class of plants that falls under its regulatory purview, to facilitate the regulation of GM crops.

Let me just say: this does nothing to reduce my cynicism towards GM work on plants.

Life imitates art

Some journalist has already noted the Murdoch double act before the committee the other day as having a bit of a Montgomery Burns/Smithers vibe about it, but the connection I kept thinking about was this:

To this:

It’s the hair. I find it very off putting.

UPDATE: Thank goodness: I'm not alone in wondering why on earth she has such an in-your-face 'do.

And this man is the preferred Prime Minister

'Weathervane' Abbott targeted over support for price on carbon | The Australian

From the Tony Abbott "Just Say Anything" tour of Australia (it has the asterisked subtitle "Consistency and logic are for mugs") we get the following story:

The Opposition Leader made the claim on Gippsland's Star FM yesterday, saying: “I've never been in favour of a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.”

But in October 2009 Mr Abbott, under then-opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, publicly backed an emissions trading scheme in an interview on the ABC's Lateline program.

“We don't want to play games with the planet. So we are taking this issue seriously and we would like to see an ETS,” he said at the time.

He made a similar comment on radio 2UE in November that year. “You can't have a climate change policy without supporting this ETS at this time,” he said.

Earlier this week, Mr Abbott criticised a proposed 5 per cent carbon emissions cut as “crazy”, even though the Coalition supports the target.

UPDATE: Tony Abbott says he forgot to add "as leader" to the end of his claim that he has never supported an ETS. I'm sure he'll allow Julia to explain that she forgot to add "no majority Labor government I lead will have a carbon tax".

But Tony Abbott's career of just making it up as he goes along continues with this:

TONY Abbott now says he does not want any of Victoria's brown-coal-fired power stations to close or switch to cleaner fuels, despite the Coalition having repeatedly said it expects to pay for one of the generators to shut and convert to gas under its $10.5 billion Direct Action policy.

''I know that burning brown coal is a high emissions form of energy production, but I think the smart way forward is not to fail to use brown coal. It's not to close down these power stations, it's to try to ensure that we use technology better to reduce the emissions,'' Mr Abbott said yesterday as he prepared to visit the Hazelwood brown coal plant....

But as recently as Tuesday, Coalition Finance spokesman Andrew Robb had claimed Labor's proposal to pay to close a brown coal generator had been stolen from the Coalition.

''Despite all the fevered claims that Direct Action won't work, the single biggest abatement measure in the Government's scheme happens to be a Direct Action proposal - namely, the closure of Hazelwood power station.''

And after last year's election, the Coalition climate spokesman Greg Hunt said: ''One of the ironies of the election is that if the Coalition had formed government, we would be negotiating with the owners of Hazelwood and Yallourn power stations about converting either or both from brown coal to gas.''

But yesterday Mr Abbott said: ''There will be no act of policy from the next Coalition government or from any Coalition government that I'm associated with that artificially foreshortens the life of these power stations.''

A taxing success?

Calls for new tax on alcohol after success of alcopop tax stopping teen drinking | News.com.au

I haven't read the study reported here, and it is written by bodies who want to push a strong public health barrow, but still:

Research by the groups found that the alcopops tax, introduced in 2008, pushed the sale of the popular drinks down by more than 30 per cent in a year.

While sales of other spirits rose in the same period, the increase accounted for less than half the fall in alcopop sales.

The groups also pointed to the 2008 alcohol and drug survey of teenagers which showed that while the tax had not changed their preference for alcopops, the number of teen drinkers fell 27 per cent in three years.

Why hasn't the Gillard government pointed to this as a public health policy success story? Too caught up in the carbon pricing war? Or maybe it's because the same bodies praising the success want alcohol to be more expensive for everyone, and that's not a palatable message to be passing on to a hysterical public at the moment.

Never trust a teenage insect

Asexual ants are actually having sex: study

The BBC sums it up

BBC News - Murdochs hearing: A day of high drama and farce:

Murdoch Sr had got off to a shaky start. We knew he was 80, but he seemed more frail - and certainly more human - than the figure of legend.

Not so much a titan before whom all must tremble, as an elderly man on a day trip to the coast, mistakenly arrested for shoplifting.

Of course, Murdoch employed columnists are having a hard time seeing it this way. Can Andrew Bolt really say this with a straight face?:

The incident [the pie in the face] was a reminder to the committee that bad things can happen - like lax security - to the most august of institutions.

The Murdochs’ testimony was reassuringly impressive, after so many stumbles in dealing with this scandal...

A dignified refusal to comment might have been wiser, Andrew.

Sort of like a spoon full of sugar

Molasses help lose weight (Science Alert)

Molasses usually end up as a waste-product of sugar refining. However, they are rich in polyphenols, says Dr Weisinger, chemicals found in plants known for their antioxidant properties....

Researchers supplemented the high-fat diet of a group of laboratory mice with molasses for 12 weeks. They found that these mice had lower body weight, reduced body fat and decreased blood levels of leptin – a hormone involved in energy regulation, appetite and metabolism – than the control group.

Further analyses, says Dr Weisinger, revealed that molasses supplements led to increased energy excretion, i.e, more calories were lost in faeces. They also found increased gene expression for several liver and fat cell biomarkers of energy metabolism....

Clinical trials are scheduled to begin next year to evaluate the molasses extract for weight control in humans.

Nothing personal at all

Media Watch: Personal or policy? You be the judge (18/07/2011)

Media Watch last night was very good at pointing out the lengths to which right wing talk back radio in Australia has gone to make criticism of Julia Gillard (and anyone supporting carbon pricing) personal, extreme and offensive. Look at these extracts from callers who Chris Smith and Alan Jones have let go to air:

'Bonita': Look I can say this, but you can't: she's a menopausal monster, and she needs to resign.

Chris Smith: Ok. Good on you, Bonita. Thank you.

'Tony': The Australian taxpayer even pays for the toilet paper she uses.
Does she go down to the chemist to buy her tampons? Or is the Australian taxpayer paying for those as well? ...
In my opinion Julia Gillard is a piece of crap ...

Alan Jones: Ok, well you made a lot of valid points there. We've just got to avoid in our criticism the personal. We stick to the policy; we never deal with the personal.

The extracts that follow then go on to show how ridiculous is Jones' claim that he never gets "personal". He has used the "chaff bag" line more than once:

Alan Jones: Put her in the same chaff bag as Julia Gillard and throw them both out to sea.

I saw on Andrew Bolt's TV show on Sunday a passing comment by him that he doesn't approve of Alan Bond's personal attacks. Might be nice if he would actually do a post on his own blog about this; but then, that would involve acknowledging his own role in creating a hysterical atmosphere about the carbon tax debate in the country at the moment.

Speaking of poor taste, that's also how I found yesterday's post at Catallaxy by Sinclair Davidson headed "Roadkill", which featured a photo of the PM with a startled look, and talked about the bad, bad polls she is receiving at the moment.

That heading and attempt at humour really sounds to me like something you'd hear on a late night host on the Macquarie Network, rather than from a Professor of Economics.

Sometimes I get noticed

Recently, I have posted a couple of times about Texas State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, including about his Counterpoint interview.

Even allowing for the fact that he almost certainly only found my comments via Deltoid, it's pleasing to see that my observations are sometimes noted on the other side of the world.

It's worthwhile reading my comment and Dr John's response on the thread, too.

Unusual comparison of the week

Cold-blooded cunning | The Economist

This article suggests that no one has ever spent much time testing the intelligence of reptiles. Unfortunately, they are smarter than we knew:

In a paper published in Biology Letters Dr Leal and Dr Powell suggest that lizards are at least as intelligent as tits, a group of birds that has been well examined in this respect.

Ah well: I suppose that as I never feared being outsmarted by a tit, I shouldn't fear reptiles doing it either.

Cultural nuttiness

Last week's article in Slate "A Bad Case of the Brain Fags" by Jesse Bering, was a pretty interesting short survey of culture specific mental illnesses.

The first one he mentions, though, "old hag syndrome" he indicates as being specific to Newfoundland. I thought that it was common throughout the world as part of sleep paralysis that people could wake up with the sensation of being pressed down on the bed by a ghost or phantom figure. Maybe it is only in Newfoundland that folklore says it is specifically an ugly, witch like woman doing it?

I did recently see the famous physicist/author Paul Davies on Lawrence Leung's Unbelievable talking about he suffered from waking sleep paralysis as a child or teenager, and used to interpret the pressure on his chest as feeling like a cat walking on him. Unhelpfully, he didn't explain if there was actually a cat in the house at the time.

(I can also mention, as an aside, that while sleeping in an unusual location once as teenager, I also woke up with the feeling of pressure on my chest, which really did turn out to be a cat.)

Anyway, Bering also mentions koro (the fear of the penis disappearing into the body), and although I knew about that already from Fortean Times magazine, he does add some interesting details.

As I have usually avoided gyms, I didn't really know this about body builders:

One that's not in the manual but could be, argue psychiatrists Gen Kanayama and Harrison Pope in a short paper published earlier this year in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, is "muscle dysmorphia." The condition is limited to Western males, who suffer the delusion that they are insufficiently ripped. "As a result," write the authors, "they may lift weights compulsively in the gym, often gain large amounts of muscle mass, yet still perceive themselves as too small." Within body-building circles, in fact, muscle dysmorphia has long been recognized as a sort of reverse anorexia nervosa. But it's almost entirely unheard of among Asian men. Unlike hypermasculine Western heroes such as Hercules, Thor, and the chiseled Arnold of yesteryear, the Japanese and Chinese have tended to prefer their heroes fully clothed, mentally acute, and lithe, argue Kanayama and Pope. In fact, they say anabolic steroid use is virtually nonexistent in Asian countries, even though the drugs are considerably easier to obtain, being available without a prescription at most neighborhood drugstores.

I'm in no danger of needing treatment for this condition.

All your bases

As I’ve been reading about Antarctica lately, I’ve been browsing around looking at information on the current bases down there.

There are more than I expected; some from rather unexpected countries. (With the relatively recent arrival of India, I suppose you can get a curry on any night, as well as shop at a discount variety store if you left something at home.) I was curious to see what they look like, as I was hoping national architectural flare might show up, even on the icy continent.

Well, it was an interesting exercise.

At the South Pole itself, the base was formerly noteworthy for its geodesic dome. Very space age looking in its day, I was a little sad to see that it has recently been dismantled. (As far as I can tell, its disadvantage was that it was too easily covered with snow.) Here’s a photo of it at the start of its disassembly:

In the background, you can see the new, somewhat boring in comparison, building. A better picture is here:

It’s built on legs that can be raised to keep it above the increasing snow. This is a common feature of most new bases on the higher parts of the continent.

So, what about other stations? The French-Italian one has a bit more space age flair:

The German one looks like the top part of a ship on stilts:

Norway’s Troll Station (great name) is disappointingly boring by comparison – it looks like a collection of shipping containers, no?:

A Bulgarian base on the South Shetland Islands (this counts as an Antarctic base, apparently) has all the architectural flair and impressive scale of a scout den:

They do, however, have an Eastern Orthodox chapel, which from the outside looks very much like a fruit shop cold room with a cross on top:

Inside it still looks like a refrigerator, but I guess it's nice that it's there at all.

The Chapel has its own Wikipedia entry, which also leads me to the more remarkable in style Russian Orthodox Trinity Church on King George Island:

I wonder if for much of the year if you can to the door through the snow. I see that there are chapels further south (including specifically Catholic ones) on the main continent itself. You can see nice photos of them here.

The Argentineans, on the Antarctic Peninsula, have gone for a homier, village style:

Mind you, Australia does not do Antarctic stations with any architectural value at all. Davis Station looks a complete, multi-coloured mess:

And Mawson is not much better:

OK, this is getting boring now, but not before my favourite station, Belgium's Princess Elizabeth base:

So that’s where the Jupiter 2 ended up.

Break

I have a lot of work to catch up on.

The right wing blogs are also going to be unbearable for quite a while on the carbon tax, and there will be no point in commenting at them.

I therefore should try to avoid the blogs for a week or so.

I am tempted to shift any stupid doodling or videos I do to a separate blog, and I'll note that here if I do.

Of gods and men (and women too)

On rock worship and the Shinto gods | The Japan Times Online

I was interested to read this article by Japan Times columnist Amy Chavez, concerning how Shinto works.

It's basically an animistic religion, with particular places said to have their local god. But I wasn't really aware of this aspect of it:

Part yamabushi and part spiritual healer, Man-chan is 84 years old and considered the person most in touch with the Shinto spirits (kami), on our island. He alerted me to a couple of yorishiro or spiritual antennas to the gods. These days the kami probably have handheld GPSs made in China, but in ancient times you still had to send them a spiritual sign. So special rocks or trees were designated as antennas to invite the kami to descend there. No batteries necessary.

The most famous rocks of this sort in Japan are perhaps Meoto Iwa, the "husband and wife rocks" off the coast of Mie Prefecture. These rocks invite the kami to descend on them from above. You often see these two rocks in photos, a special shimenawa rope connecting them across the water. Let's hope they never divorce.

Man-chan told me that Shinmei Shrine was considered sacred because of the small cave there. But the two other places he told me about, Myoken and Hachiman, were given their status by a Shinto priest. In other words, the priest invited the kami to descend there. When a priest calls to the kami to descend, he must feel the kami enter his body. He must feel the spirit of the kami in his heart. He may even prostrate himself before the kami. If he does not feel the kami inside him, they have not descended and the spot is not made sacred.

Various shamanistic and animistic religions appear to have this idea: that the priest or holy man takes the nature god or spirit into his body in a useful form of spirit possession. I remember David Byrne talking about a South American religion that was like this. He made a documentary about it that I haven't seen, but as I recall, there is a lot of trance inducing rhythm and singing, all while waiting for a nature god, like the chicken spirit (I actually do think he mentioned such a poultry spirit - that is what made me remember it) possesses the shaman/priest for a while.

I don't know whether the Shinto priest would say he is "possessed" by the kami, but I didn't know that having it in his body was part of their religion at all.

Of course, the idea of incorporating the spirit of God is a feature of Christianity too. A Christian apologist can argue that the animistic systems which believed in the importance of this were pre-figuring the true religion that was revealed through Christ. But of course, it still leaves the question: what is it that a shaman or priest is sensing when they believe they are possessed by a god or nature spirit?

A fundamentalist Christian, I suppose, might argue that it could be a true supernatural entity being sensed: just not a holy one. (I certainly don't expect that fundamentalists think God sends angels to act as if they were the Great Chicken Spirit, in the hope of guiding shamans towards Christianity.)

But really, what these religions which incorporate possession as a holy ritual must show is the human susceptibility to misinterpreting a generic "high," or a passing emotional feeling, with communion with the gods. And this, in turn, doesn't say much for those who rely on emotional responses in Christian services as proof of their religion, or a source of sound guidance.

I find the whole question of the sense of feeling God's presence or guidance a vexed issue. On the one hand, if God is capable of raising from the dead, amongst other miracles, the possibility of simply bumping the right neurons in the brain so as to make a person understand what God thinks he should do seems a relative breeze. I mean, it just seems wrong to argue that the Christian God is incapable of such subtleties, and can only work on a big dramatic canvas.

On the other hand, it seems that people are continually thinking that God or the spirits are guiding them: from Mormons who like to argue that if a person prays sincerely, they will "know" that this is the true church; to shamans who think they are being possessed by a nature spirit for a night.

They can't all be right.

Anyway, this is generally why I am very cautious on the whole issue of the importance or what a believer feels in any religion.

Of course, an over-intellectualisation of moral or religious belief runs its own dangers too. Certainly, I don't dismiss the importance of the intuitions or emotions in their guidance for the moral life. I continually find myself amazed, for example, when thinking about the Holocaust, that the intellectual justification for treating Jews as so much cattle to be slaughtered managed to triumph over what must have surely been a instinctive reaction against cruelty to fellow humans; particularly children. (The "girl in the red dress" sequence was particularly good in Schindler's List, I thought, for showing a man whose empathy with an innocent child would not let him accept the intellectually justified horror going on around him.)

I similarly find it difficult to fathom that some people have no problem with late term abortion, when the fetus has but the slightest genetic problem. (Although attitudes to killing even new born children have been extremely different in the past to what they are now, and I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that modern people can be comfortable killing viable babies by late term abortion.)

And then, on the fourth hand (I'm starting to lose count), appeals to the primacy of emotionalism and an inner sensation for guidance (which is fundamentally what I think a lot of people mean when they say they are interested in spirituality in their religion) leads to some pretty soft headed ideas in the modern world. Gay marriage is one of these; it being tied up with the triumph of gay identity politics over what I think is a more common sense view as to what marriage is fundamentally about - the possibility of procreation.

I think most people would tend to see spirituality as a more feminine aspect of religion, and intellectual interest in defining rules and logic as a male pursuit. For that reason, people think greater female input into Catholicism would make it more humane in areas such as teaching on sexuality. And to an extent, women can be more practical than men, and are better at not following logic and reason to conclusions that are nonsensical, which is how I view something like the Catholic teaching that a condom used by a loving husband and wife converts the sex into something sinful, whereas timing sex to avoid pregnancy does not. Yet Anglicanism and other Protestant denominations which have become very "feminized," for want of a better word, lose following because a generic sense of feel good spirituality does not particularly need any Christianity to keep it going. (The "feel good" soft rock churches like Hill Song don't seem particularly feminised; I'm not quite sure how to explain how they fit into this outline I'm sketching.) It also seems to me that women can be the worst at reading (or imagining) too much into their fleeting emotional feelings - hence the predominance of women into spiritualism or New Age ideas. (What about shamans, then? I see that some sites claim that a lot of them are homosexual, as indeed in the West they seem to be over-represented amongst spiritualist mediums.*)

So, where does this leave us? A religion which incorporates nothing by way of ceremony or practice with which to uplift the heart is not appealing at all: it seems hard to argue Biblically that these things are not a legitimate concern of God. But the Protestant churches who treat every Sunday service as a soft rock concert that is only designed to hit the heart seems equally wrong. A rule bound over-intellectualised Church can indeed be inhumane; but go too far the other direction and it becomes redundant.

It is perhaps the straddling of the two aspects that is what I find appealing about the Catholic Church, but as I say, we still have the problem of how even a Catholic should understand the sense of God moving in them personally.

It could, of course, be taken all as reason to believe that all religious feeling is delusion, as is all internal sensation that God is influencing a person in any particular way or direction. But what is the fun in that? Thinking about the various mixed messages and ways of interpreting religion and religious sensation seems a rather more interesting past time than many other pursuits; at least to me.

* Isn't it funny how native cultures might elevate a homosexual man by making him the shaman; today Western society has similarly decided to treat them as special and able to do no harm, such as in the way the magazines will gush over Elton or Ricky Martin using the magical powers of egg donation and renting a womb to conceive a child without sex!

An insider view

Former NOTW executive recounts phone hacking - ABC News

I found this a pretty remarkable interview from a News of the World insider about the phone hacking scandal.

It surprises me that he still seems to have no problem with phone hacking by journalists per se, as long as the target is a "deserving" one: like a politician that a journalist thinks might be doing something wrong, or a celebrity (just because they are a celebrity, is the impression he gives). Although it seems he has blown the whistle on the paper generally, how come he still doesn't get the idea of privacy?

Heaven located (maybe)

New mathematical or scientific ideas often provide material wihich believers in life after death can adapt to provide quasi explanations for the supernatural world. Spiritualism for a long time clung to the idea of "higher vibrations" as being the context in which souls lived. This always sounded a rather silly idea to me, but I'm sure you can still find lots of allegedly channelled books in New Age outlets which talk of spirits having to lower their vibrations to talk to mediums.

I was always keener on the idea of higher dimensions. Ever since mathematicians started thinking about them, the religiously inclined have wondered whether this is a good explanation of a physical location for Heaven, or other (formerly supernatural) realms. Science fiction writers liked the idea too: Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House" comes to mind as a fun short story. Other dimensional worlds feature often in his novels too, now that I think of it.

I see from Googling that a physicist priest (William Pollard) as late as 1961 was writing a book explaining higher dimensions as an important religious idea. From a review of his book in Time:

"The key to this approach," he writes, "lies in conceiving the whole space-time continuum of our human intuition as being immersed in a space of higher dimensions." The reality of a higher dimension than the three of space and one of time may seem somewhat elusive to ordinary human beings, but modern scientific minds can see it as mathematically just as sound.

A higher dimension is the result of a lower one moved perpendicular to itself. Writes Pollard: "Heaven, instead of being above us in ordinary space, is perpendicular to ordinary space, and the eternal is perpendicular to the temporal dimension. The transcendent and the supernatural, instead of being pushed farther and farther away from us with each new advance in astronomy, are again everywhere in immediate contact with us, just as the dimension perpendicular to a plane surface is everywhere in contact with it, though transcendent to it."

It's a appealing idea, and it always seems a pity to me that modern science seems to have no use for it. Of course, we hear about extra dimensions in string theory all the time, but mostly in terms of the extra dimensions being bound up so small that they are virtually undetectable. The related idea of branes suggest that there might be another dimensional world just a fraction of a millimetre around us all the time, but while branes can affect each other, as far as I know they don't suggest any way for life from one brane to correspond, or transfer, to another "nearby" brane.

But today I happened to buy last month's Discover magazine, and in the article on black holes, they had an extract from Brian Greene's recent book "The Hidden Reality." This was talking about whether our universe is like a holograph of information processing happening elsewhere.

The phrase "holographic universe" has been around for quite a while; I think I have on my shelf the popular book of the same title by Michael Talbot. (I see now that he died in 1992.) But this was mainly about the ideas of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, and the physical detail of how this type of universe arises was left vague, as I recall. An article by Talbot which explains his books themes can be found here.

I have heard before of black holes and holography, but I think the Brian Greene extract explains it in a relatively clear fashion. Here are some of the relevant parts (typed by me, as I can find no link):

Plato likened our view of the world to that of an ancient forebear watching shadows meander across a simly lit cave wall. He imagined our perceptions to be but a faint inkling of a far richer reality that flickers beyond reach. Two millenia later, Plato's cave may be more than a metaphor. To turn his suggestion on its head, reality - not its mere shadow - may take place on a distant boundary surface, while everything we witness in the three common spatial dimensions is a projection of that faraway unfolding. Reality, that is, may be akin to a hologram. Or really, a holographic movie.....

For black holes, we've found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard't Hooft stressed that the lesson should be general: Since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggest, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes.

If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much as a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here and that distant reality there would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds.

Well, the thing that struck me when reading this was that the idea might, with a bit of pushing around, provide possible ways for arguing:

a. we all are embedded in a "higher" realm which we cannot see (even if the "bigger" reality might be a two dimensional surface rather than a 4 spatial dimension universe);

b. the information processing taking place on the distant surface (presumably of the big black hole the universe is enclosed in) could provide a way for individual minds to survive death. I mean, does the information processing happening on the distant surface have to produce a holographic "image" of a body and its incorporated mind in our world? If a body dies, can the information that effectively produced the mind continue working on the two dimensional surface?

In other words, this seems to provide a location for Heaven, of a kind.

Mind you, if we're talking the surface of a black hole, this is not a permanent place, if Hawking radiation would see it slowly evaporate. (But then, it still remains to be seen if Hawking Radiation really exists. There are still some legitimate doubts.)

OK, so it's not a perfect explanation, but I like any idea that gets us away from mere materialism and lets the information that is our minds have an "out of body" aspect to them.

Remarkable medical news

Surgeons carry out first synthetic windpipe transplant

Surgeons in Sweden have carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant.

Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.

Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

The 36-year-old cancer patient is doing well a month after the operation.

Nessie resurfaces

Inverness Courier | News | Loch Ness Monster sighting reported by locals

Fundamental Fysiks revealed

Book Review: How the Hippies Saved Physics - WSJ.com

Well, this looks like a rather fun book:

Among the many people in San Francisco taking drugs in the early 1970s were members of a maverick group of Berkeley physicists who called themselves the Fundamental Fysiks Group. The young scientists dabbled in mind-altering drugs as they searched for a quantum-physics-based explanation for such phenomena as telepathy and extrasensory perception. The scientific basis for this quest was the experimental confirmation that once two quantum entities (such as electrons) have interacted with one another, they remain connected by what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." The connection is technically known as entanglement; if one of the entities is prodded, the other one jumps.

As David Kaiser deftly spells out in "How the Hippies Saved Physics," these physicists based their work on good science, however drug-fogged were their aims.

You must follow the link to see their photo too.

Solar issues part 2

Lacklustre results from the Colorado Integrated Solar Project � BraveNewClimate

A few posts back, I noted how PV power investment seems less risky than solar thermal, but I also noted that even with cool looking stirling engine style solar power, the output going up and down rapidly on an intermittently cloudy day was something I was unsure about.

It would seem from the above post that this is indeed a serious issue for large scale PV power (and, presumably, stirling engine solar power.)

Of course, you could always orbit them in space and get constant light that way. Now if only NASA still had rockets...

Nothing is dead simply in alternative energy.

(By the way, is this a convincing argument for highly distributed PV on houses and commercial sites as the simplest way to go? You overcome the problem if the solar panels are spread far and wide, then the supplementary power you need from the grid just getting switched between the areas under cloud for 5 minutes. But if everyone has some solar power, presumably your grid has to supply not all that much supplementary power.

Has anyone in the world ever proposed that it be a law that all new houses have to have a certain amount of PV installed?)