In the garden today…

My wife grouped some flowers together in pots a couple of  months ago, and they look very nice now:

"Overshare" (The correct name for Facebook)

Facebook Ticker: Mark Zuckerberg's terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I saw something on TV about his last night, and thought it looked terrible.

Manjoo actually hates the whole devaluation of privacy that Facebook imposes much less than me, but his point is still good: if Facebook makes it easier to share any old rubbish, it is killing taste and the exercise of good judgement.

About Ebert

Life Itself - A Memoir - By Roger Ebert - Book Review - NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd wrote this review of movie critic Roger Ebert's new memoir.

I am not the world's greatest fan of Ebert's reviews. I tend to find him inconsistent; sometimes too forgiving, sometimes far too nitpicking. He doesn't write with the depth and wit of Pauline Kael, but still, I am usually curious to see what he thought of a movie if I have seen it and have my own strong reaction for or against.

Sometimes he really despairs of modern tastes in movies, and I understand the sentiment. He really hated Kick-Ass, for example, and called it morally reprehensible. This half tempts me to see it, because I don't really like morally reprehensible things to pass without enough condemnation.

I knew almost nothing of his personal life, except that his writing sometimes gave me the feeling that he may be gay. Turns out he's married (well, I think I did read that some time ago) to an African American (I didn't know that), but he did marry late due to the influence of a very domineering mother. Dowd writes:

Ebert writes about his own alcoholism — his last drink was in 1979 — and that of his mother, who wielded a ’50s Catholic sexual repression that retarded Roger’s ability to “make free” with girls and produced a few scenes with a whiff of ­“Psycho.”

His mother’s recriminations about his girlfriends, as well as his drinking, caused him to live vicariously through movies and kept him “unmarried for an unnatural length of time. Did I know drinking made me unmarriageable, or did I simply put drinking ahead of marriage?”

Well, certainly sounds like the conditions were right for my suspicion.

The review spends a fair bit of time on Ebert's illness (jaw and related cancers which have led to massive facial surgery which failed, and he's now unable to speak and has to eat through a gastric feeding tube.) Poor guy. As Dowd notes, though, he's remarkably upbeat about the fact that he is still alive.

Don't hold your breath

Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

As I hoped, Cosmic Variance has the best commentary on the faster than light neutrino story I've seen. I liked this in comments too:

a nicely nuanced and non-dismissive interpretation of a nicely nuanced and non-hyperbolic announcement that has, predictably but unfortunately, resulted in a comically un-nuanced (perhaps even anti-nuanced) avalanche of headlines.

Seems about right.

Violence down

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker - review | Books | The Guardian

This review contains a detailed summary of Pinker's book long argument that humanity has become much less violent over the centuries. It sounds like a fascinating read. Here are some extracts (of the review, not the book):

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. ...

At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend.

Heartwarming

Forgotten Japanese War Diary Returns Home - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This was a lovely story on 7.30 last night, about the return of a war diary to the daughter of a Japanese naval officer who died on New Guinea during the World War 2.

Getting closer

London fashion week finale: menswear - in pictures | Fashion | guardian.co.uk

Have a look at some of the photos half way through this slide show from fashion week, and see if you agree that we seem to be coming close to actually having the Urban Sombrero.

If you want more to worry about re methane...

Try reading this post: Idiot Tracker: More methane madness

An interesting situation

Paul Sheehan, who really hates this Federal Labor government, nonetheless starts his column this morning with the observation that he doesn't actually disagree with an assessment that Tony Abbott has " a streak of bogan" in him.

Sheehan, of course, then paints this as meaning he cuts through to the electorate. I take it as meaning that, despite being a Rhodes scholar (Sheehan notes he has degrees in law, economics and philosophy) Abbott does not sound very smart.

I mean, honestly, no one (even his admirers in the commentariate) can accuse him of approaching his current job from some grand and consistent intellectual position.

Yet the most interesting thing about Sheehan's article is that he goes on to explain that Abbott refusing to concede to amendments the government wants to let the "Malaysian solution" proceed is a mistake, and will be recognized as such by the "bogans" who admire him.

This is, I think, potentially important. Sheehan is always a conservative populist at heart, and despite the waffling Paul Kelly and the inconsistent Greg Sheridan in The Australian both strongly expressing the same view, I suspect Abbott and his supporters in Parliament are much more likely to be influenced by Sheehan's opinion.

Of course, the opinion they probably value most, Andrew Bolt's, is strangely ambiguous at the moment. Sure he wrote a column saying Labor should just go with Nauru, but I suspect he probably sees potential danger to Abbott too if the government doesn't follow his suggestion, but is unwilling to say so. Bolt is obsessed with Gillard being replaced, and the unprincipled games he has played over the last couple of months to see this achieved mean he opinion on anything political at the moment has to filtered through this lens.

Liquid something

The day I saw a saint’s blood become liquid

Apropos of nothing, the Catholic Herald has a description by a priest of his witnessing a decade ago the "marvel" (the Church does not formally acknowledge it as a miracle) of the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius in Naples.

There is also a link to a helpful Wikipedia article on the saint, which gives some details of the research that has been conducted on the "blood". (The most popular scientific explanation is that it is a thixotropic substance - a gel that liquefies when agitated.) The simple matter of extracting a small amount and putting it in a mass spectrometer is not on the cards, apparently, but I was surprised to learn that a light spectroscope has been used a couple of times, including as recently as 1989. These results are said to be consistent with the vial containing hemoglobin.

Wikipedia also mentions that there are a couple of other saints' blood relics around Italy which liquefy, and apparently it doesn't happen in other countries. This does suggest that the answer lies in an Italian who came up with a neat thixotropic compound, and put it to innovative use in the 1300's, but it is unusual that this type of compound is not mentioned in science until 1863 (this is mentioned in the update following).

UPDATE: I see this morning that there is a really good, detailed report by what looks like an Italian skeptic group (although the tone of article is moderate). It details how there have been attempts, going back to last century, to make mixtures which behave like the relic. The "marvel" has been the subject of skepticism for a long time.

Did everyone remember to bring their electrodes to school this morning?

BBC News - Stimulating brain with electricity aids learning speed

Uh-oh (for methane)

Contribution of oceanic gas hydrate dissociation to the formation of Arctic Ocean methane plumes

The abstract:

Vast quantities of methane are trapped in oceanic hydrate deposits, and there is concern that a rise in the ocean temperature will induce dissociation of these hydrate accumulations, potentially releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, such a release could have dramatic climatic consequences. The recent discovery of active methane gas venting along the landward limit of the gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) on the shallow continental slope (150 m to 400 m) west of Svalbard suggests that this process may already have begun, but the source of the methane has not yet been determined. This study performs 2-D simulations of hydrate dissociation in conditions representative of the Arctic Ocean margin to assess whether such hydrates could contribute to the observed gas release. The results show that shallow, low-saturation hydrate deposits, if subjected to recently observed or future predicted temperature changes at the seafloor, can release quantities of methane at magnitudes similar to what has been observed, and that the releases will be localized near the landward limit of the GHSZ. Both gradual and rapid warming is simulated, along with a parametric sensitivity analysis, and localized gas release is observed for most of the cases. These results resemble the recently published observations and strongly suggest that hydrate dissociation and methane release as a result of climate change may be a real phenomenon, that it could occur on decadal timescales, and that it already may be occurring.

Dam ideas

Why damn northern Australia? - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

OK, so the author is from the Wilderness Society. He still goes on to fill in some of the background as to why North Queensland (and the Ord River project) is not the new agricultural nirvana that one might hope.

I had been wondering what happened to the Ord River dam - I had a vague idea that it had never lived up to its promise. It is a long way from anywhere, but it would appear there are other problems too.

Thoughts on watching 7.30 last night

Let play pretends

Burning Man: Why would anyone go? - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine

I do find this event hard to fathom, but I think someone in comments comes close:

I love how today's version of "Hippies" are upper-middle-class white people with plenty of money to take some time off from work, pay hundreds of dollars to get to/in an event where they can pretend they're "Counter-Culture" for a weekend.

Appalling stuff

More Cherry Ice from Joe D’Aleo | Open Mind

Read this, and the earlier post it links to at the beginning, to see the appalling examples of dishonest misinformation that get posted at Watts Up With That as part of climate change "skepticism".

A strange case of celebrity

gulfnews : Yemeni enjoys drinking motor oil and radiator water:

Riyadh: A Yemeni resident of Makkah who is employed at a vehicle maintenance workshop has been stunning viewers by drinking engine oil, radiator and battery water.

The Saudi Akaz newspaper said on Thursday that the Yemeni, Mohammad Omar, nicknamed "Bin Omar", drinks two to four cans of all motor oil daily.

He told the newspaper that "I enjoy drinking radiator, battery and brake water, and eat daily 2.5kg of grease used for cars. I have been doing that for quite a long time".

Omar added that he has been doing that as he spends 900 Saudi Rials per month to buy oil, grease and their derivatives as meals. "Praise Allah, my health is good", he said.

Uh huh.

Malaysian solution not the end of the world

Toxic Policy Helps No One | Asylum Seekers

It's interesting to note that in this article in which onshore compulsory detention for processing asylum seekers is strongly criticised, the writer still ends on this note:

That said, it is also prudent for Australia to pursue a regional agreement to handle the huge flow of refugees from strife-torn nations such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and Sri Lanka. No single country can cope with this massive movement of people - not Australia, not Malaysia, Thailand or India.

On paper at least, the deal with Malaysia, which also provides for community-based processing, appears to be a balanced alternative to Nauru and Manus Island, where people would be detained in cultural and geographic isolation while their claims were assessed.

As I have noted before, the local UNHRC was also not appalled at the Malaysian idea, and Coalition supporters who have been acting as if it was the worst idea in the world have been ignoring the psychological suffering of the Nauru system which had originally led those who voted for Rudd to have some sympathy towards relaxing the whole system.

My belief is that voters don't know what they want for the asylum seeker issue. This is reflected in the polls which have actually indicated a majority support on shore processing, yet a large number also think the Coalition does a better job on the issue than Labor. This contradiction makes no sense at all, if you ask me. If the explanation is that people hate asylum seekers arriving by boat, and expect a government to stop that, how do they reconcile that with support for on shore processing which is surely going to do nothing to discourage boats from arriving?

I feel sorry for the Labor government trying to work out how to keep the very confused public happy on this issue.

More complicated that you thought?

We need to talk about HPV vaccination – seriously - opinion - 16 September 2011 - New Scientist

It's a bit surprising to see New Scientist running an opinion piece that questions whether the grounds for universal vaccination of girls with the HPV vaccine are really well enough established.

A possible explanation

Deep oceans can mask global warming for decade-long periods

Here's a good, succinct report on modelling that indicates the deep oceans indeed may be absorbing the "missing heat" that Trenberth wrote about famously in his "Climategate" email.

To track where the heat was going, Meehl and colleagues used a powerful software tool known as the Community Climate System Model, which was developed by scientists at NCAR and the Department of Energy with colleagues at other organizations. Using the model's ability to portray complex interactions between the atmosphere, land, oceans, and sea ice, they performed five simulations of global temperatures.

The simulations, which were based on projections of future greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, indicated that temperatures would rise by several degrees during this century. But each simulation also showed periods in which temperatures would stabilize for about a decade before climbing again. For example, one simulation showed the global average rising by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) between 2000 and 2100, but with two decade-long hiatus periods during the century.

During these hiatus periods, simulations showed that extra energy entered the oceans, with deeper layers absorbing a disproportionate amount of heat due to changes in oceanic circulation. The vast area of ocean below about 1,000 feet (300 meters) warmed by 18% to 19% more during hiatus periods than at other times. In contrast, the shallower global ocean above 1,000 feet warmed by 60% less than during non-hiatus periods in the simulation.

"This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean," Trenberth says. "The heat has not disappeared, and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences."

I wonder if work is being done on measurements to confirm it?