The unlucky lights

Finland: in search of the northern lights | Travel | The Observer

A nice bit of travelogue in The Observer about how difficult it can be to spot the Northern Lights even if you allow yourself plenty of opportunity to do so.

Watch the toads

New study suggests how toads might predict earthquakes

We've all heard of strange animal behaviour shortly before an earthquake, but it appears toads have an idea of what's going on quite far in advance:

Grant was studying the toads that lived in a pond near L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009 in the days just before a devastating earthquake struck. In those few days just before it happened, she noted that the toads began leaving. Their numbers dwindled from just under a hundred, to zero, causing her to write about her observations in the Journal of Zoology. That caught the attention of Freund, who was doing work for NASA in studying what happens to rocks when put under extreme stress, as in say, when an earthquake is in the making. He contacted Grant, and the two of them began investigating ways that such rock pressure could impact the environment where the toads lived.

After some experiments in the lab, the two write that when rocks underground come under pressure as a result of geological processes, they let off charged particles. Such particles can very quickly rise to and above the surface of the Earth, impacting such things as pond water and the biological material in it. In the case of the pond in Italy, it seems the toads may have been reacting to changes they felt in the water itself as ions interacting with it react to form minute amounts of hydrogen peroxide. Or it seems possible that ions interacting with organic material in the pond caused substances to be released that either were toxic or less ominously, simply irritating. Either way, it would explain their sudden exodus.

Of course, they are excluding the possibility that toads are psychic. Maybe they lick themselves and then can see the future...

Dire movie alert

Jack and Jill - Movie Reviews - Rotten Tomatoes

Adam Sandler's latest movie, which has just opened in Australia, has earned a spectacularly low 4% approval rating on Rottentomatoes.

Some review comments:

Picture "Tootsie" if everyone in the cast had a head injury....

Jack and Jill is mental destruction-a collision of half-baked comedy sketches, violent potty humor, shrouded racism, shotgun cameos and unapologetic product placement....

Unpleasant even by Sandler's usual standards, it's easily the star's worst film....

Movies like this should be stricken from film history and put in a closet never to be seen again. It's just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

The worst Adam Sandler film ever? That indeed sounds like a serious warning.

Barry is not impressed

Rustlings from Republican Environmentalists | Planet3.0

Barry Bickmore, who holds the very lonely position of being a Republican scientist who believes in AGW, is very unhappy about the Republican candidates.

He gets a bit personal - although your average "skeptic" can hardly fault him for that.

Bickmore's Youtube lecture "How to avoid the truth about climate change" is also on the post, and many have said it is very good, but I haven't got around to watching it yet.

This week's bad climate news

Abrupt permafrost thaw increases climate threat

Permafrost thaw will release approximately the same amount of carbon as deforestation, say the authors, but the effect on climate will be 2.5 times bigger because emissions include methane, which has a greater effect on warming than carbon dioxide.

Doesn't work the same way at Catallaxy...

Researches find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence

Feeling sleepy

Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anaesthesia - health - 29 November 2011 - New Scientist

I'm not sure how long New Scientists keeps its free articles available for now, but this one, about recent research into trying to work out how anaesthetics work, is pretty interesting.

Back to Schmittner

RealClimate: Ice age constraints on climate sensitivity

Real Climate has a long and fairly technical look at the Schmittner paper, and also concludes that there is reason to think its estimate of climate sensitivity, although within the ballpark of current "best estimate" anyway, may be on the low side.

But the bit I wanted to note here was about the poor reporting of the paper, which I think occurred just about everywhere. Even The Economist called its report "Good News at Last?", which is kind of a meaningless statement unless you are prepared to address the question "compared to what?"

Anyway, as Real Climate points out, part of the problem was really with the press release itself, and some fairly careless comments by some of the authors, who surely have to be more cautious about "sceptics" taking quotes out of context:

Unfortunately, the media coverage has not been very good. Partly, this is related to some ambiguous statements by the authors, and partly because media discussions of climate sensitivity have a history of being poorly done. The dominant frame was set by the press release which made a point of suggesting that this result made “extreme predictions” unlikely. This is fair enough, but had already been clear from the previous work discussed above. This was transformed into “Climate sensitivity was ‘overestimated’” by the BBC (not really a valid statement about the state of the science), compounded by the quote that Andreas Schmittner gave that “this implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. Who had previously thought what was left to the readers’ imagination. Indeed, the latter quote also prompted the predictably loony IBD editorial board to declare that this result proves that climate science is a fraud (though this is not Schmittner’s fault – they conclude the same thing every other Tuesday).

The Schmittner et al. analysis marks the insensitive end of the spectrum of climate sensitivity estimates based on LGM data, in large measure because it used a data set and a weighting that may well be biased toward insufficient cooling. Unfortunately, in reporting new scientific studies a common fallacy is to implicitly assume a new study is automatically “better” than previous work and supersedes this. In this case one can’t blame the media, since the authors’ press release cites Schmittner saying that “the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. It would have been more appropriate to say something like “our estimate of the effect is less than many previous estimates”.

Well, it's hard to see how that last suggestion would have made that much difference, but still, it seems to me the authors could have been more careful.

The Junior Justice League

Babies embrace punishment earlier than previously thought

"We find that, by eight months, babies have developed nuanced views of reciprocity and can conduct these complex social evaluations much earlier than previously thought," says lead author Prof. Kiley Hamlin, UBC Dept of Psychology.

"This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades," says Hamlin. "Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger and prefer to see antisocial behavior regulated."

For the study, researchers presented six scenarios to 100 babies using animal hand puppets. After watching puppets act negatively or positively towards other characters, the babies were shown puppets either giving or taking toys from these "good" or "bad" puppets. When prompted to choose their favorite characters, babies preferred puppets that punished the bad characters from the original scene compared to those that treated them nicely.

The researchers also examined how older infants would themselves treat good and bad puppets. They tested 64 babies aged 21 months, who were asked to give a treat to, or take a treat away from one of two puppets – one who had previously helped another puppet, and another who had harmed the other puppet. These older babies physically took treats away from the "bad" puppets, and gave treats to the "good" ones.

More physics

Four reasons why the quantum vacuum may explain dark matter

I'm pretty sure I had a post when the idea covered in this article first came up, but it's worth revisiting.

Super battery possible

Battery electrode's 40,000 charge cycles look promising for grid storage

Apparently, lithium ion batteries are only good for 1,000 recharge cycles, although surely that can't include partial recharges? Anyway, it would appear that batteries capable of a lot more are possible. Good.

About that climate sensitivity paper

Apart from the "Climategate 2" emails, about which it is really only climate change denying skeptics who are managing much excitement by taking out of context quotes to match their confirmation bias, the big news in climate science is the Schmittner paper which gives a new, lower range of climate sensitivity based on what happened during the last ice age.

Here are three sources of commentary that show why the paper is definitely not the end of concern about climate change.

* James Annan, whose own work also argues against the possibility of really high climate sensitivity, still suspects that the sensitivity indicated by this paper may be an underestimate.

* Skeptical Science has an excellent article on the paper, and notes (as have some others around the place) that the "glass half empty" way of looking at it is that even if it shows lower temperature sensitivity, it can be taken to mean that modest changes in CO2 seem to be capable of making dramatic climate changes on land:

...Schmittner et al. have assumed that the difference between a glacial maximum and interglacial temperature is a mere 2.6°C.  The global average surface temperature has already warmed 0.8°C over the past century.  During the LGM, the surface was covered with huge ice sheets, plant life was different, and sea levels were 120 meters lower. As Schmittner notes:

"Very small changes in temperature cause huge changes in certain regions, so even if we get a smaller temperature rise than we expected, the knock-on effects would still be severe."

*  One of the co-authors gives a detailed interview at Planet 3, and if very specific about saying that they do not feel they have "proved" that really high climate sensitivity outcomes are not possible. 

Yet more Waugh stories

My life as a Waugh | Life and style | The Guardian

The Waugh family seems to be a never ending source of anecdote about odd literary characters of the 20th century, and here we have another example, with an interesting interview with one of Evelyn Waugh's nephews.

It's mostly about Evelyn's older brother Alec, but we do get this snippet about the famously cranky uncle:

When he was nine, Peter was introduced to Evelyn. It is a vivid memory. His uncle sat behind an enormous desk in his library. "Bring him in," Evelyn called, and Peter was ushered into the room by Evelyn's wife, Laura. "Turn him round." Peter was spun round. "Take him away," Evelyn barked.

"Can you imagine an uncle saying that to you?" says Peter. "Talk about intimidation."

The terrified boy fell in love with his Aunt Laura. "I thought Evelyn Waugh was an ogre and I was going to rescue her," he says. "I did see him being very funny, but Evelyn was cruel. My sister once asked about the pre-Raphaelites and he said, 'Do you know anything about painting?' and she was only a young girl and didn't, and he said, 'Well, I won't bother then.'"

It's not as good as the eating all of the rationed bananas in front of his children, but still.

Tony Abbott...

is not having a good end of year celebration. See Dodopathy for details.

Gotta be careful

A report at the BBC notes that accidental 'slow' overdoses of paracetamol are not so uncommon.

An interesting medical issue

"The Walking Dead" characters mistakenly think the morning after pill causes abortion. Do the writers?

I wasn't aware that there was a debate about how the "morning after" pill works, but apparently there is:

Morning-after pills are not abortion. You can't even get abortion pills from a typical pharmacy, since RU-486, the actual abortion pill, is dispensed mainly at doctor's offices. Morning-after pills are contraception, and they work by stifling ovulation before any sperm can make their way toward the Fallopian tubes. Anti-choicers claim they work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting, but there is no scientific evidence for this claim, and strong evidence against it. But even if you mistakenly believe this is how emergency contraception works, that still has no bearing on pregnancies that have already begun and show up on pregnancy tests, as portrayed on this show. She might as well have been sucking down candy cigarettes in hopes of causing an abortion.

That link leads to this abstract:

A major barrier to the widespread acceptability and use of emergency contraception (EC) are concerns regarding the mechanisms of action of EC methods. Today, levonorgestrel (LNG) in a single dose of 1.5 mg taken within 120 h of an unprotected intercourse is the most widely used EC method worldwide. It has been demonstrated that LNG-EC acts through an effect on follicular development to delay or inhibit ovulation but has no effect once luteinizing hormone has started to increase. Thereafter, LNG-EC cannot prevent ovulation and it does not prevent fertilization or affect the human fallopian tube. LNG-EC has no effect on endometrial development or function. In an in vitro model, it was demonstrated that LNG did not interfere with blastocyst function or implantation.

Interesting...

A way to increase use of public transport

Gosh:  if only government or Councils would pay for such performances to take place on random trains each day, patronage could increase quite a bit.

While we're in a happy video mood, you should also go watch the one from last year featuring the Hallelujah Chorus as done in a small Alaskan village.  It's very charming, and gives a bit of an idea of what it's like living in that remote part of the world. 

Both of these came from Happy Catholic, who does indeed seem to always be happy.

A long history of inaction

The history of American health-care reform : The New Yorker

I was arguing yesterday at another blog about how the Tea Partiers calling health care reform in the US "socialism" really drove me nuts, and showed that they were stupidly tribalistic.

I didn't realise initially that the history of calling it socialism was so old in the US, and that attempts have been made for a century now to get \universal health insurance going. The above article provides some details, and people should also read the Wikipedia article on Ronald Reagan's 10 minute 1961 recording on the e-vils of socialised medicine.

That's odd

Weatherwatch: Puzzling phenomena of sky battles | News | The Guardian

I've long liked reading about historical mysteries, but I can't say I have heard of these before:

Perhaps the most puzzling of meteorological phenomena were the battles in the sky which were reported right up until the 19th century in many European countries, including England.

In September 1654, for example, soldiers in Hull witnessed a great battle between two armies of cavalry and infantry in the air. Formations of pikemen repeatedly charged each other; the battle ended when a third army appeared and scattered the others with cannon fire and musketry. Another such battle was seen in Hull in October 1658, and witnesses even reported the smell of gunpowder.

Sometimes whole villages or towns witnessed sky battles, including respectable citizens.

The article, which is rather short, then just says that most commentators believe these to be re-workings of storms, clouds or the northern lights. Sure sounds rather active imaginations in those days, though.

Past unhappiness

Very naughty boy

I see from this short interview with the seemingly calm and happy Alan Davies that he has had some difficult issues in his life. One hopes his current state of contentment continues.