A bit too close for comfort

BBC News - Asteroid to make near-miss fly-by

An asteroid will pass by the Earth on Friday in something of a cosmic near-miss, making its closest approach at about 1600 GMT.

The asteroid, estimated to be about 11m (36ft) in diameter, was first detected on Wednesday.
At its closest, the space rock - named 2012 BX34 - will pass within about 60,000km of Earth - less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon.....

Earlier estimates put the asteroid's closest distance at as little as 20,000km, near the distance at which geostationary satellites reside, but observations by observatories overnight showed it will pass at a more comfortable distance.

Just goes to show what I noted in 2010 - small, city killing asteroids may turn up suddenly and there isn't much we can do about it.

Update:  from a 2008 Scientific American article:

Improved telescopes would identify an estimated one million near-Earth objects over the next decade to 15 years, and 8,000 to 10,000 of them will have some probability of hitting the planet, Schweickart says. A hit by even one of the smaller rocks, say the size of a convenience store, would have the impact of 400,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs exploding at once, he says.

Isn't it odd how little publicity such a close passing potential disaster attracts in the media?

Tents and aborigines

Tim Blair summaries the Australia Day incident with the PM accurately, although with more light heartedness than I might have expected.   Andrew Bolt takes the more serious route, but I personally think his previous deliberate snideness in dealing with the difficult issue of who can or should claim aboriginality has forever weakened his credibility as a public commentator on the issue.  (Of course, the relatively pale skin of many involved yesterday will be taken by many as vindication of his criticisms.  The point is, however, that Bolt could have made the criticism without any legal trouble if he had been more careful and didn't throw in attempts at personal ridicule.) 

In any event, there is no doubt at all that, by my reckoning, 95% of the population will rightly see it as a disgraceful incident and it will harden a huge number against any further symbolic or legal steps towards greater recognition of aborigines. 

Anyone on the Left who tries to argue it was all the police fault, or even Tony Abbott's fault, deserve ridicule.

A serve of chips, please

BBC News - Fried food 'fine for heart' if cooked with olive oil

Eating fried food may not be bad for the heart, as long as you use olive or sunflower oil to make it, experts say.

They found no heightened risk of heart disease or premature death linked to food that had been cooked in this way....

In an accompanying editorial, Professor Michael Leitzmann from the University of Regensburg in Germany said: "Taken together, the myth that frying food is generally bad for the heart is not supported by available evidence.

"However, this does not mean that frequent meals of fish and chips will have no health consequences.

"The study suggests that specific aspects of frying food are relevant, such as the oil used, together with other aspects of the diet."

This is all well and good, but I still get a bit sick of chips being the universal accompaniment to most cheaper cafe/pub meals.

A trio of climate change

Three papers that caught my eye:

* Injecting sulfate particles into stratosphere won't fully offset climate change According to the study, injecting sulfate into the atmosphere may cool the tropics and keep them cooler, but it wouldn't have so much effect on the polar regions. Hence sea level rise continues, I suppose. But they also point out that there could well be "surprises" from the whole enterprise. The key point is that it is no panacea to climate change:

"There is no way to keep the climate the way it is now. Later this century, you would not be able to recreate present-day Earth just by adding sulfate aerosols to the atmosphere," McCusker said. 

*  Cosmic rays not looking convincing:    A decade long study of solar related galactic cosmic ray flux indicates no co-relation with clouds:

We identify no statistically significant correlations between cloud anomalies and TSI/GCR variations, and conclude that solar related variability is not a primary driver of monthly to annual MODIS cloud variability. We observe a net increase in cloud detected by MODIS over the past decade of ~0.58 %, arising from a combination of a reduction in high – middle level cloud (−0.31 %) and an increase in low level cloud (of 0.89%); these long term changes may be largely attributed to ENSO induced cloud variability.

Skeptics who dream about cosmic rays being the secret influence which hasn't yet been credited in climate change seem to be losing an argument, yet again.

*  "Missing energy" not really missing at all?    A new study indicates that there's enough uncertainty in ocean heat measurements that the energy that Trenberth said was "missing" may not be missing at all:

Here we present a revised analysis of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere from satellite data, and we estimate ocean heat content, based on three independent sources. We find that the difference between the heat balance at the top of the atmosphere and upper-ocean heat content change is not statistically significant when accounting for observational uncertainties in ocean measurements³, given transitions in instrumentation and sampling. Furthermore, variability in Earth’s energy imbalance relating to El Niño-Southern Oscillation is found to be consistent within observational uncertainties among the satellite measurements, a reanalysis model simulation and one of the ocean heat content records. We combine satellite data with ocean measurements to depths of 1,800 m, and show that between January 2001 and December 2010, Earth has been steadily accumulating energy at a rate of 0.50±0.43 Wm⁻² (uncertainties at the 90% confidence level). We conclude that energy storage is continuing to increase in the sub-surface ocean.

Judith Curry, the Uncertainty Queen of climate change scientists, thinks comments made by Trenberth about this are some sort of quasi vindication of her "ooh, it's all so uncertain we shouldn't be doing anything yet" stance, and there is a long thread that starts with her snark as follows:

If Kevin Trenberth is concerned about the uncertainties then he should stop ranting about deniers.

Exaggerating uncertainty to defend your own scientific papers from criticism, and then turning around to denigrate as a “denier” anyone who is uncertain and questions the IPCC’s overconfident assertions, is hypocritical IMO.

 And Chris Colose comments further down about Curry:

She doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that large uncertainties in some area do not preclude high confidence in others, or may not even be relevant to others. She continues on her philosophical rants about ‘uncertainty’ while not publishing a specific scientific example that has withstood criticism (e.g., Hegerl et al’s response to her “monster” paper). Nor does she seem to realize that just making stuff and saying “things are uncertain!” is not useful contribution, and coupled with many other scientific sins is the reason for the label “denier,” not the observations that science isn’t perfect. You can’t throw 100 darts against the wall, hope one sticks, and say “see, told you!”

Andrew wrong a year ago: still wrong today

It was almost exactly a year ago, after the Queensland floods,  that Andrew Bolt had a post up alleging that a 2009 report by the Queensland Office of Climate Change had only mentioned drought, not floods.  He was following the lead of another blogger who had originally made the claim.

As Tim Lambert pointed out (as I previously noted here) this was simply wrong:  the claim related to one chapter of the report only.   In fact, the report said that intensification of individual rainfall events in South East Queensland was predicted in at least one paper, even if overall there may be less rainfall in future over most of Queensland :

Climate change is also likely to affect extreme rainfall in south-east Queensland (Abbs et al. 2007). Projections indicate an increase in two-hour, 24-hour and 72-hour extreme rainfall events for large areas of south-east Queensland, especially in the McPherson and Great Dividing ranges, west of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. For example, Abbs et al. (2007) found that under the A2 emissions scenario, extreme rainfall intensity averaged over the Gold Coast sub-region is projected to increase by 48 per cent for a two-hour event, 16 per cent for a 24-hour event and 14 per cent for a 72-hour event by 2070. Therefore despite a projected decrease in rainfall across most of Queensland, the projected increase in rainfall intensity could result in more flooding events.

Did Andrew ever acknowledge such an error in his post?  Not as far as I can see.  In fact, he posts and moves on; just in the same way he never acknowledged at his blog that Anthony Watts' own paper proved his claims about the US temperature record being largely due to bad siting of weather stations.

So, today, after a couple of days of intense rainfall in South East Queensland, what do we find Andrew Bolt posting about again today?  Yes - "warmists" never predicted heavy rain and floods as a part of global warming.

No Andrew, this is not right.  Here is another paper from 2007, at the height of the drought (which, incidentally, was likely itself record breaking - there was a paper about this I have linked to before, and I'll track it down later) which concluded that all models showed:

Australia shows a shift towards warming of temperature extremes, particularly a significant increase in the number of warm nights and heat waves with much longer dry spells interspersed with periods of increased extreme precipitation, irrespective of the scenario used.

It is hard to credit Bolt as having any honesty at all in this debate when he never corrects his claims.

Late comedy break

I see this has been around since 2010, and has had millions of views, as well as being mentioned at the Gulliver blog on the Economist in 2011.  I expect it has been very big in public servant emails.  In any event, I only saw it yesterday, and did find it funny:

Warning:  contains fake swearing.

Let's hear it for the state (sort of)

The visible hand | The Economist

This will go over well at Catallaxy. The Economist has a quasi sympathetic look at the success of "state capitalism," as demonstrated by China, Brazil and elsewhere:

This special report will cast a sceptical eye on state capitalism. It will raise doubts about the system’s ability to capitalise on its successes when it wants to innovate rather than just catch up, and to correct itself if it takes a wrong turn. Managing the system’s contradictions when the economy is growing rapidly is one thing; doing so when it hits a rough patch quite another. And state capitalism is plagued by cronyism and corruption.

But the report will also argue that state capitalism is the most formidable foe that liberal capitalism has faced so far. State capitalists are wrong to claim that they combine the best of both worlds, but they have learned how to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier state-sponsored growth. And they are flourishing in the dynamic markets of the emerging world, which have been growing at an average of 5.5% a year against the rich world’s 1.6% over the past few years and are likely to account for half the world’s GDP by 2020.

State capitalism increasingly looks like the coming trend. The Brazilian government has forced the departure of the boss of Vale, a mining giant, for being too independent-minded. The French government has set up a sovereign-wealth fund. The South African government is talking openly about nationalising companies and creating national champions. And young economists in the World Bank and other multilateral institutions have begun to discuss embracing a new industrial policy.

The Economist comments are often worth reading too, and this one caught my eye:

The problem is that the Western liberal capitalism, that developed our society, has transformed paradoxically into communism. The welfare state is really a form of communism that prune and obstruct the tradicional liberalism that became western contries leaders of the world.

If you create a huge free public health system, a three years unemployment coverage, a free educational system, a grants culture or compel successful workers to pay 56% income tax, you really has establish a communism regime where talented people have to support others without any merit more than to be human beings.

Yes, what a tragedy that is!

A bit of a worry

BBC News - Big Tokyo earthquake likely 'within the next few years'

A big earthquake is much more likely to hit the Japanese capital, Tokyo, in the next few years than the government has predicted, researchers say.

The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude 7 quake would strike the region in the next four years....

Researchers at the University of Tokyo's earthquake research institute based their figures on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since the 11 March 2011 quake.

They say that compared with normal years, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of quakes in the Tokyo metropolitan area since the March disaster.

The Dotcom life

'I have a different attitude towards money than those who rather hoard it': inside the lavish life of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom

This article is most remarkable for the photos it contains of the larger than life (or at least, larger than normal) Mr Dotcom. Quite an effort put in by the journalist to make him look funny, I think. Not that I mind in this case.

For future reference

The Republicans’ new voodoo economics - The Washington Post

I was asked over the weekend why I had started saying that it seemed to me that the Right in America had re-adopted a form of "voodoo economics".

I don't think I knew that an economics editor from The Economist had written an article in August with this very title, and I link it here for future reference.

Update:  Slate looks at how Gingrich's tax reform proposals are marginally different from those of the other Republicans.  But it points out:

 Every single candidate from the wacky Herman Cain to nice guy John Huntsman is running on the premise that taxes should be reduced relative to current policy, especially on high-incomes and on investment income. Gingrich is no exception to that rule as this chart based on Tax Policy Center analysis will show:

One respect in which Newt stands out from the pack somewhat is that essentially everyone's taxes go down at least a little under the Gingrich Plan. Most of the Republican contenders are currently preparing to raise taxes on a large number of lower income families who benefit from what are called refundable tax credits.

But as the first comment following the article notes:

I don't think anyone really believes that Gingrich et al are even pretending to look after "the 99%". How can someone simultaneously shriek about the deficit, openly plot a bloody, senseless, and expensive war, and propose steep tax cuts for everyone? You would think that someone who wanted to shrink the deficit or take a bite out of the debt would keep both massive spending cuts and tax hikes on the table.

Ocean acidification, continued...

Unprecedented, man-made trends in ocean's acidity

You can see why climate change skeptics think they have won...

Actually, no; no you can't.

(It's true, the rate of increase over the last little while has not been at the rate expected by some models.  It's not true that, in the big picture, it looks like warming is all over.)

Why there is no point in my going to literary festivals

Michael Hayworth, a publisher, complains in a column in The Age today that Australian "classic"novels are forgotten all too quickly by both academia and the public, and many are out of print.  But he starts with this observation:

We live in the world of the home-grown literary bestseller, the world of The Slap and The Secret River. We love our new stars, and celebrate the success of Favel Parrett or Toni Jordan or Craig Silvey. Our writers have careers both at home and abroad. We no longer expect our life-changing books to be written in isolation and despair, against the odds, fulfilling what Henry Lawson came to believe was the destiny of the Australian writer.

OK, well, I've heard of The Slap because it became a TV series last year that didn't sound all that interesting, and I therefore didn't watch.  I have heard the title "The Secret River".  I think.  

But, sorry, call me completely out of touch with Australia literature if you want, I have not heard of Favel, Toni or Craig.  And I even watch First Tuesday Book Club about half the time its on.  [Now that I think of it, I can't remember the name of any Australian author who I saw on it last year, except for potboiler thriller writer Matthew O'Reilly (who I also haven't read.)  Maybe I only watch the show because I like it when they strongly disagree on the merits of something I'm never going to read anyway.]

Back to Hayworth:

Our universities have failed for more than a century to create any kind of enduring tradition for the teaching of Australian literature. We are so familiar with this failure we hardly notice. And our publishing has always been dominated by British houses, which have not always felt the need, simply because a book is part of our national heritage, to keep it available.

In 2011, in not a single course in the whole country were students asked to read Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. This is the equivalent of not one Russian university teaching Anna Karenina, of Madame Bovary going untaught in France.

There you go:  another Australian author and book, this one a "classic" apparently, which I haven't heard of.

But hang on a minute:  "failed for more than a century to create any ...enduring tradition..." is a bit rich isn't it?   By 1900, the country had only been around in any substantial form for a few decades.  (Have a look at this chart, which indicates the white population in 1843 was barely 250,000.)  Sure, Sydney University was founded in 1850 (presumably with very small class sizes,) but people coming here were hardly motivated by the weather making it a nice place in which to write books, and it's hard to imagine University courses of the early 20th century being designed around the works of Henry Lawson (or some such.)

In any event, I'm not entirely sure why Universities need to "teach" modern literature at all, but that's just me a being a not-very-arty philistine, I suppose; even though readers of this blog may think I am more "arts" inclined that I really am due to my reports on the latest weird installations at Brisbane's GOMA.   I can see the value in studying (as opposed to merely experiencing) literature from the point of view of what it tells us about societies'  and individual's attitudes in the past, and the arc of their development over time; this applies especially to really old literature.   But the study of modern literature when there is plenty of other material around about the society it was written in; well, after the first 5 years of analysis of a particularly complex book, I am not entirely sure what more there is to be said or taught, and you could probably now find most of that analysis for free on the net instead of going to university.

Anyhow, Hayworth's complaint about good Australian books being out of print would, one expects, be answered by the increasing use of e-readers.   Surely it can't be very expensive to put them out in electronic  format, and even develop a specialised field of advertising for formerly acclaimed books which have been out of print for some years.

If the publishing industry can't work out how to do that, Andrew, I'd say it's pretty much their own fault, and I wouldn't blame it on Universities at all. 

Tourism and politics

Egyptian frustration as tourists stay away | World news | The Guardian

The dramatic drop in tourism to Egypt (at least 32%, possibly 50%) raises an interesting question: can the need for Western tourism be a moderating force on State enforced religious conservatism?

Not for the first time, I will again suggest: much of the Middle East should be managed by Disney. They may have to give up their "gay days," though.

A bit embarrassing (OK, very embarrassing)

The anti-fornication, anti-abortion wife of Rick Santorum lived very differently in her 20s.

I know very little about Rick Santorum, so was this already known in the States? In any event, I was surprised to read about the very less than ideal Catholic life his wife led in her 20's.

About that fridge...

George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits - NYTimes.com

This New York Times article is largely about a new George Lucas produced film "Red Tails," which (to his chagrin) he had to finance personally. It sounds potentially good - an old fashioned patriotic film about the (black) Tuskegee Airmen, featuring a lot of aerial footage. And, importantly, it's not actually directed or written by Lucas.

The article also spends a lot of time reviewing Lucas' career, and the enemies he has made with fanboys who hate him fiddling with his Star Wars films gets much coverage.

But the other great controversy of his movie making career - the much derided "nuking the fridge" segment from the much derided Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - is what I want to note.

I cannot believe how much venom is directed at that film. It was mentioned in at least half of the Tintin reviews I read, usually reading something like "this is a much better Spielberg action film than that last embarrassment of an Indiana Jones film." Well, I beg to differ.

I didn't think IJKCS was wonderful: I thought the script could have been much better, and, yes, OK, it was the silliest Indiana Jones film with some of the fake stunts, but there were enough well done sequences and images that I still ranked it as being enjoyable enough.

So, how did "nuking the fridge" manage to not offend me? I mean, sometimes really stupid science puts me off an entire movie. (The villain needing a satellite dish the size of Arecibo radio observatory to get a message to an orbiting satellite weapon in Golden Eye is the example I remember most frequently.) So what about the fridge? My reaction was that it was extremely unlikely and therefore a bit silly, but not fundamentally impossible. I now have information to back up that view.

The NYT notes (and I had heard this before) that Steven Spielberg claimed in one interview that it was his "silly idea". However, Lucas tells the paper that this was just Spielberg trying to be nice:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

I wonder who those scientists are?

Anyway, that's enough for me. My gut reaction was about right, and Crystal Skull haters will just have to concentrate on the vine swinging scene instead. (Hey, that wasn't fundamentally impossible, either.)

The big computer in the sky

I haven't been spending much time checking new paper on arXiv lately, but here's a new one that talks about the idea of the Universe as a program being run on a giant quantum computer. 

I liked these parts:

And this part near the end:

Whatever happened to Spielbergian aliens?

The two big science fiction-ish hits of Steven Spielberg's early career, Close Encouters and ET, were notable for the niceness of the aliens:  little squishy botanist ET wouldn't harm a fly; and although the CE3K aliens appeared to have no concept of how disorientating it may be for humans to be sucked up into a mother ship and returned to their families 60 years later, they were touchy feely nice guys in the end.  No alien's perfect, I guess:  ET may well have turned rapidly into an alcoholic if he could have tolerated family absence better.

So, while watching Cowboys and Aliens on DVD last night, which Spielberg executive produced, I wondered why he now only seems to be involved with films showing aliens that want to squash humans like so many bugs.

His own War of the Worlds showed physically weak looking aliens who nonetheless thought humans were the most convenient source of blood and bone fertiliser for the lawn; last year's exec produced Super 8  had an alien that was (if I recall correctly) being treated unfairly, but nonetheless was ultra violent in response;  and now Cowboys and Aliens had another set of grotesque designed aliens who, despite having the technology to come to Earth in a pretty cool looking spaceship, thought the best way to dispose of interfering mammals is to bite their neck out or stab and slash them with their built in dagger fingers.

Doesn't anyone write science fiction with nice aliens any more?

As for Cowboys and Aliens as a movie:  the critical response was about right - not great, not horrendous, but had a bit of a feel of a lost opportunity to do a cool genre mash up better.

Now they tell us...

According to this article, people with a shipping industry background have been getting worried for a number of years about the safety of mega cruise ships.

Great mistranslations in history

Actually, the post is about Original Sin again.

Now, it is quite possible that I have read about this particular translation issue before, but have forgotten it.   Nonetheless, this translation issue was noted in a book I picked up at the Lifeline Bookfest yesterday (yes, Brisbane people - you have until next weekend to load up on books you probably won't finish before the next one comes around), but a simpler explanation is to be found via Google books, which turned up this extract from Hans Kung book "Great Christian Thinkers":

One other thing occurred to me about this - and I presume this is not an original thought - until Catholic scientist priest Spallanzani, who I mentioned here several posts back - did his 18th century work, mammalian reproduction as requiring both ovum and sperm was not well understood, and the idea that semen alone contained a tiny human just waiting to be planted and grow up was one way of understanding it.  Logically, then, there was a sense in which one man's seed also contained all the future babies as well as his own.

Would such thinking contribute to the way in which Augustine might have thought all humans were "in" Adam, and (in a sense) were quasi-participants in the original sin?

Update:  Another book (Augustine of Hippo - a life" by Henry Chadwick ) notes the following, which seems relevant to my speculation:
 

Update 2:  It may not have been Augustine's idea, but we do find in the Wikipedia entry for homunculus that some later thinkers thought that "preformationism" was relevant to original sin:

It was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with a chain of homunculi "all the way down". This was not necessarily considered by spermists a fatal objection however, as it neatly explained how it was that "in Adam" all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.

Actually, the Wiki entry on preformationism is worth looking at too, for a more detailed look at its development in philosophy and its lasting influence.  It all starts with Pythagoras, apparently.  When microscopes came along, the dutch inventors gave preformationism a boost by claiming to see (in a fashion which reminds me of how, much later, Martian canals would be imagined via telescopes) things in semen that simply aren't there:

Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to observe spermatozoa. He described the spermatozoa of about 30 species, and thought he saw in semen, "all manner of great and small vessels, so various and so numerous that I do not doubt that they be nerves, arteries and veins...And when I saw them, I felt convinced that, in no full grown body, are there any vessels which may not be found likewise in semen." (Friedman 76-7)^[7]

But, going back to Augustine, it would seem that he does not really count as a preformationist:

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both held that hominization, or the coming into being of the human, occurs only gradually. Quickening was thought to occur around 40 days, and to be the point at which the merely animal mix of material fluids was ensouled. Until 1859, when Pope Pius IX decreed that life begins at “conception,” the Church was epigenetic along with the Aristotelians [see Maienschein 2003].