A fun new past time

We should scour the moon for ancient traces of aliens, say scientists | Science | The Guardian

Paul Davies makes a fun suggestion:

Prof Paul Davies and Robert Wagner at Arizona State University argue that images of the moon and other information collected by scientists for their research should be scoured for signs of alien intervention. The proposal aims to complement other hunts for alien life, such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), which draws on data from radiotelescopes to scour the heavens for messages beamed into space by alien civilisations.

"Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artefact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close, and of preserving traces for an immense duration," the scientists write in a paper published online in the journal Acta Astronautica.

The only thing is, they doubt there is much point in using crowd-sourced examination of the photos due to the potential for disagreement over what is or isn't significant. There is also going to be a lot of material to look through:

The scientists focus their attention on Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has mapped a quarter of the moon's surface in high resolution since mid-2009. Among these images, scientists have already spotted the Apollo landing sites and all of the Nasa and Soviet unmanned probes, some of which were revealed only by their odd-looking shadows.

Nasa has made more than 340,000 LRO images public, but that figure is expected to reach one million by the time the orbiting probe has mapped the whole lunar surface. "From these numbers, it is obvious that a manual search by a small team is hopeless," the scientists write.

Christmas greetings

All jobs can be stressful

Tintin cartoonist Herge: Georges Remi is the subject of two new biographies. - Slate Magazine

The Slate article above gives a very brief outline of Tintin creator Herge's life.

One likes to imagine that making a career out of comics would be good work - doing something you love, in your own studio, that sort of thing.

But it didn't work out that way for Herge, apparently:

As the strain of producing the Tintin strip, as well as other assorted other projects, took its toll on him, Remi suffered an array of psychosomatic symptoms, including outbreaks of eczema and boils, and was plagued by recurring nightmares of whiteness. (Evidently there was nothing more terrifying than a blank page.) Remi seems to have retained an unhealthy distance from his own life, disappearing into his work until the work itself became the problem.

Ah well, being untalented at art has its up side after all.

The short back and sides Son of God

Was Jesus Christ’s hairstyle normal for his time? - Slate Magazine

Well, I don't recall reading about this topic before - what hair length was common for Jewish men in Jesus' time? Seems short hair was more common, hence the popular depiction of Jesus with long flowing locks is thought to have more to do with emulating the image of the old top Roman gods.

Interesting.

Mad scientist update

While everyone is getting slightly worried that scientists have been busy creating killer bird flu, I note on a smaller scale that this photo appears in Nature's slideshow of striking images from 2011:

 And the explanation:

Rats don’t deserve their bad name, but this ball of fury won’t win over many murophobes. Russian scientists bred this aggressive rat strain to compare it with more docile creatures in a study on domestication that has teased out several genetic regions linked to tame traits.

Great.  All we need now is for them to escape and be capable of carrying killer bird flu, and we've got bio-apocalypse for Christmas.

Not exactly Christmas-y

I can't stop talking about movies this week.

Most nerd excitement is directed at the Hobbit trailer, a movie in which I have no interest whatsoever.   At least, I assume, this is the last bit of Tolkien anyone will be putting on screen.

On the other hand, I am kind of interested in Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien, even though it would seem it's a movie very unlikely to have much in the way of a happy ending.  It looks as if it may be visually very impressive, though:

Busier than ever

Christopher Plummer Gets Oscar Buzz - NYTimes.com

Here's a nice interview with Christopher Plummer, whose movie career seems to have really taken off since he turned 70.

I remember his 2008 memoir, mentioned in the interview, got good reviews; and while I am rarely interested in celebrity autobiography, his life sounds interesting.

Shared tastes

A Christmas movie story: from merriest to muckiest | Sarah Hughes | Film | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian film blog notes the best, and worst, Christmas films, and in the process shows I am not alone in certain tastes.

First, it opens with "You already know to avoid CGI Tom Hanks when selecting a Christmas movie..." referring to The Polar Express. I was half watching it the other night when the kids had it on, and it seems from my blog search that I might have previously overlooked commenting on my puzzlement with that movie.

My big, big issue with it, apart from the waxwork manikin look of the people, is the creepy, empty, sort of rococo Stalinist design of the elf city at the North Pole, complete with massed, brainwashed looking elf-dom in the main square that is so reminiscent of a "dear Leader" rally in North Korea.

Who on earth came up with that art design? Is it copying the book, but done on such a vast scale that it changes into unsettling? It doesn't seem to bother children, I admit, but I just can't over the emotionally cold feeling that this gives the movie.

Anyway, back to the Guardian: I tend to agree with those that I have seen of the "best list", although I have to admit to having never seen It's a Wonderful Life. I don't know how this has happened, but it doesn't seem to be repeated all that often in this country.

In the "worst" category, the problem is that everyone (including me) knows to avoid bad Christmas movies, and most never made much money. But it does start with this view of Richard Curtis:

I toyed with including Love Actually but decided that my near-pathological hatred of Richard Curtis counted as bias

Well, there you go, I am indeed not alone.

In fact, the biggest worry by far about Spielberg's War Horse movie is that Curtis is a co-writer! This movie is getting to be classic example of intensely mixed feelings: Spielberg adapting a successful book and play - but it's about a horse and has Richard Curtis. The old joke about a mother-in-law driving a husband's Mercedes over a cliff has nothing on this.

Final destinies

Hitchens and Hell - NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat (gee, I can never remember how he spells his surname) takes the death of Christopher Hitchens as an opportunity to talk about the mysteries and divisions in Christianity regarding "salvation theory". I've always been partial to the "hell as purgatory for most people" theory of CS Lewis.

Duty fulfilled

An Interview With Steven Spielberg - NYTimes.com

I consider it my duty to note interviews with Steven Spielberg, especially when it is another unusual year when there are two of his products out at the same time*. (To be honest, he doesn't say anything all that interesting, though.)

War Horse is getting pretty good reviews, but not universally so. This may be a good sign: some Spielberg films have been over-praised, most notably Saving Private Ryan, and that can lead to a sense of disappointment.

But it will be an achievement if Spielberg can get me to cry at a horse movie. Ugh.

In other movie news: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is great. Brad Bird does turn out to be a good action director, as I had predicted. The movie has a lighter tone than all of the earlier ones, but it works. My wife (and even my son) felt it was a bit tiringly over-frenetic, but I really just found myself wanting to watch it again to note the action more carefully. And I probably will.


* it is reminiscent of the grand year of 1982, when both ET and Poltergeist (OK, he only produced and co-wrote that one, but it was rumoured he may have done a bit of directing on set too) were both at the Forum twin cinema in Albert Street in Brisbane. I told friends that I was going to go there in a robe and with a censer (the incense burning thing in a Catholic church) to give honour to the significance of this event. (I am inordinately fond of Poltergeist as well as ET.) My failing to do so resulted in the cinema closing down and being turned into a very nice Borders store, which now sits empty.

Roger is Green

Bryan Appleyard - Scruton: the Right Wing Green

Bryan Appleyard talks to and about Roger Scruton, who turns out to be rather Green.

Unfortunately, this brand of conservatism (you know, the responsible type) is still far from the current shores of the US, and even Australia.

Bye bye Kim

Changing of the guard is no relief for long-suffering North Koreans

Hamish MacDonald's summary of how North Korea has operated seemed worthwhile to me.

Referral

A very jolly Julia Gillard Christmas greeting may be found at Dodopathy.

"Hating" Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ death: David Corn on sharing a tiny office with Hitchens. - Slate Magazine

Nearly everyone is sad to see the loss of Christopher Hitchens. He was a great essayist even if you did not agree with him on everything (and, frankly, there are probably very few who could do that.)

This account by David Corn about what it was like working with him in a tiny office in the early 1980's is quite amusing and affectionate.

Resigning the top job

Pope Heads Into Busy Christmas Season Tired, Weak - NYTimes.com

Interesting report in the New York Times that quotes a few close observers who say that Pope Benedict seems to be getting frailer lately.  It also notes that he has been open in the past about his view that a Pope should resign if he feels not physically up to the job.

There is not a lot of precedent for such resignations, however, as the article notes the last one happened about 600 years ago.

It would be an interesting thing to happen again; if anything, I think people would acknowledge a resignation as very reasonable and preferable to watching a slow decline.

Unsporting rodent based entertainment

I was looking around the net for rat related stuff when I stumbled onto this bit of history I hadn’t heard of before: in Victorian England, “rat baiting” in rat pits around the city was a popular form of betting entertainment. Wikipedia notes an account from a participant:

A hundred rats were put in it, large wagers went back and forth on whose dog could kill the most rats within a minute. The dogs worked in exemplary fashion, a grip, a toss and it was all over for the rat. With especially skilful dogs, two dead rats flew through the air at the same time...

The Wikipedia article has lots of illustrates of the set up at these disreputable venues, like this one:

This must have been the toff’s night at the rat pit. Other venues seemed to have looked rather rougher:

Anyway, the last rat pit was close in 1912.  

I did not know that this was a Victorian form of entertainment.

Update: Here's a blog post about the last rat pit in New York, shut down in 1870 by the SPCA. I can't see anything about rat pits in Australia on Google, though.

A bunch of old interests

Well, looking around the net this morning, there are a bunch of stories about some of my long term interests, as previously mentioned on this blog:
1.    Methane apocalypse soon?    A Russian scientists tells the Independent that he hasn’t seen such large methane plumes in the Arctic Ocean before:

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said.
"I was most impressed by the shear scale and the high density of the plumes.  Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them," he said….

Another scientist doing the research says:

"Methane released from the Arctic shelf deposits contributes to global increase and the best evidence for that is the higher concentration of atmospheric methane above the Arctic Ocean," she said.
"The concentration of atmospheric methane increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm, and in the Arctic to 1.9ppm. That's a huge increase, between two and three times, and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.

Well, that’s far from encouraging.
Update:  both Revkin and James Annan say this was a beat up.  I hope so.

2.  Small nuclear shows some promise.   Another study indicates that making small, modular nuclear power may be a better way of deploying nuclear quickly, rather than building the expensive mega plants of old.
This is what I suspected on a hunch.   Why aren’t I running the world? 
If the world was serious about greenhouse gases, there ought to be a scientific and technological commission either run by the US, or preferably, internationally, to identify the most promising path to rapid deployment of nuclear with systems that have as a primary feature passive safety.  But a lot of things have to be considered:  sources of uranium and efficiency of uranium use, the type of waste they make and its recycling and disposal, new nuclear designs and how far off testing and certifying they are; ease of export of the technology, etc.   This is the sort of leadership needed:  not just leaving it up to the hopeless mishmash of competing ideas around at the moment.
3.  Marijuana does hurt the brain.   Some pretty interesting research from Melbourne, in which 12 year olds had brain scans, and then they were re-scanned at 16, after some of them had started using marijuana.
The most surprising thing is that the size of part of the brain at 12 seemed gave an indication as to whether they would try it:

“What we found is that only the OFC predicted later cannabis use, suggesting that this particular part of the frontal lobe increases an adolescent’s vulnerability to cannabis use. However, we also found no differences in brain volume in other parts of the brain that we have shown to be abnormal in long-term heavy cannabis users, confirming for the first time, that cannabis use is neurotoxic to these brain areas in humans.”

The OFC plays a primary role in inhibitory control and reward-based decision making; previous studies of adolescent cannabis users have demonstrated subtle deficits in problem-solving, attention, memory and executive functions.

“In adult cannabis users, decreased activation of the OFC has been associated with faulty decision-making, suggesting that a reduced ability to weigh the pros and costs of one’s actions might render certain individuals more prone to drug problems,” Professor Lubman said.

I guess in a hundred years time, school career counsellors will just be examining scans and assigning kids to jobs.
4.   Primordial black hole search.   Some scientists are looking at Kepler satellite data to see if they can pick out small, primordial black holes as a possible source of missing dark matter.  I kind of hope they don’t find it, as I don’t want the Earth to bump into one.
5.  Ocean acidification and the Bering Sea:  Skeptical Science looks at ocean acidification and its apparent (or potential) effects in one part of the world.  Not good.

Another AGW is bad for fish study

Expansion of oxygen minimum zones may reduce available habitat for tropical pelagic fishes

The abstract:

Climate model predictions^{1, 2} and observations^{3, 4} reveal regional declines in oceanic dissolved oxygen, which are probably influenced by global warming⁵. Studies indicate ongoing dissolved oxygen depletion and vertical expansion of the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) in the tropical northeast Atlantic Ocean^{6, 7}. OMZ shoaling may restrict the usable habitat of billfishes and tunas to a narrow surface layer^{8, 9}. We report a decrease in the upper ocean layer exceeding 3.5 ml l⁻¹ dissolved oxygen at a rate of ≤1 m yr⁻¹ in the tropical northeast Atlantic (0–25° N, 12–30° W), amounting to an annual habitat loss of ~5.95×10¹³ m³, or 15% for the period 1960–2010. Habitat compression and associated potential habitat loss was validated using electronic tagging data from 47 blue marlin. This phenomenon increases vulnerability to surface fishing gear for billfishes and tunas^{8, 9}, and may be associated with a 10–50% worldwide decline of pelagic predator diversity¹⁰. Further expansion of the Atlantic OMZ along with overfishing may threaten the sustainability of these valuable pelagic fisheries and marine ecosystems.

Big ideas by Newt

Apocalypse Newt

So, Newt Gingrich is known for having hi-tec dreams of everything from lunar colonies to space based missile defence to geo-engineering. I remember reading on his (Pournelle's) blog that Jerry Pournelle used to be have some association with him (as an advisor, perhaps) and that would probably explain Gingrich's fondness for all things "space".

In fact, after taking climate change seriously, Gingrich has now flipped to being a skeptic, just as Pournelle always has been. But Jerry Pournelle is getting on (age 78): it seems to be built into the natural psychology of aging males that believing in AGW gets harder and harder for them over the age of 65. How old is Gingrich, by the way? 68, I see. Well, that explains that.

But even Romney is 64: he probably will start genuinely stop believing in AGW next year.

(And just why do Republicans so often go with the old dudes as presidential candidates? OK, so George Bush was an exception, but Reagan, Dole, McCain, Bush Snr?)

Anyway, as a fan of the return to the moon myself, this should make me feel more generous than I do towards Gingrich. But I find the guy hard to like. Seems far too flip floppy on everything (not just climate change), and doesn't really have the right image of a leader, especially against a more youthful Democrat.

Honestly, if the Republicans want to look dynamic, they should chose Huntsman. But he's poison to the doomed idiot wing of the Republicans known as the Tea Party, due to having done terrible things like genuinely believe in AGW (before having to semi-recant for political purposes) and being sophisticated in his knowledge of foreign affairs.

The Republicans are a lost cause, for now.

Update:

This New Yorker article notes that he has written quite a lot in the alternative history genre too.

It also argues that this is what's behind his sudden popularity:

Gingrich’s sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of “the base,” one suspects, stem less from his vaunted “big ideas” than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt. In 1990, when he was not yet Speaker, he pressed a memo on Republican candidates for office, instructing them to use certain words when talking about the Democratic enemy: “betray,” “bizarre,” “decay,” “anti-flag,” “anti-family,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “cheat,” “radical,” “sick,” “traitors,” and more. His own vocabulary of contempt has grown only more poisonously flowery. President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.” In this campaign, Gingrich’s performances in televised debates have been widely deemed effective. But what has won him his most visceral cheers from the audiences in the halls—audiences shaped and coarsened by years of listening to talk radio and watching Fox News—is his sneering attacks on moderators, especially those representing the hated “liberal” media.

In March, at the Cornerstone Church, in San Antonio, Gingrich declared, “I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America,” his grandchildren will live “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” Last spring, this was a kind of right-wing performance art. Now it is the language of the man leading in the Republican polls, a man who—in the real world, not the alt-world—could, not inconceivably, become President of the United States. Imagine that.

What a country...

How Do You Prove Someone's a Witch in Saudi Arabia? - By Uri Friedman | Foreign Policy

An amazing article about the ongoing prosecution and punishment of witchcraft in Saudi Arabia. Some highlights:

....the Saudi Interior Ministry announced on Monday that it had beheaded a woman named Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser for practicing "witchcraft and sorcery." The London-based al-Hayat newspaper, citing the chief of the religious police who arrested the woman after a report from a female investigator, claims Nasser was tricking people into paying $800 per session to have their illnesses cured.

So, how did Saudi authorities prove Nasser was a witch? The government hasn't gone into detail, but a look at the kingdom's past witchcraft cases suggests the bar for proving someone guilty isn't very high. Witch hunting is fairly institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, with the country's religious police running an Anti-Witchcraft Unit and a sorcery hotline to combat practices like astrology and fortune telling that are considered un-Islamic.

Huh. A country with a sorcery hotline. Just how often do people use this for mere revenge against someone who annoys them? The article does note that foreigners need to be particularly careful:

A Human Rights Watch researcher tells The Media Line that foreigners in particular are often the targets of sorcery accusations because of their traditional practices or, occasionally, because Saudi men facing charges of sexual harassment by domestic workers want to discredit their accusers.

The evidence arrayed against witchcraft suspects typically revolves around statements from accusers and suspicious personal belongings that suggest the supernatural, in a country where superstition is still widespread. In 2006, for example, an Eritrean national was imprisoned and lashed hundreds of times for "charlatanry" after prosecutors argued that his leather-bound personal phone booklet with writings in the Tigrinya alphabet was a "talisman."

A year later, Saudi authorities beheaded an Egyptian pharmacist who had been accused by neighbors of casting spells to separate a man from his wife and placing Korans in mosque bathrooms.

What a great country to avoid.