Local ghosts

I was talking to someone last week who works in a building in Brisbane which she feels certain is haunted.   I don't want to identify the building, just in case the story gets around, but let's just say it has a Catholic heritage.  Her office is at the quiet side of the building (in fact, near a part which is unoccupied now) and soon after taking up the job there, early in the evening while fully engaged in work at her desk, she heard a clear voice say "excuse me!" to which she responded.  The problem was, there was no one else in the room, or anywhere near it.  I think it was on another occasion, she felt something flick or brush against her ear, again while alone in her office.   She also hears sounds from the empty floor above her, as well as footstep-like sounds in the corridor, with (as you guessed) no one there when she checks.

Now, when it is night time and people are open to suggestion, innocent animal sounds can be mistaken for something else.   (She mentioned herself, though I don't think she believes it as the explanation, that maybe loud rats have something to do with the upstairs sound.)   But a clear voice that sounds close to you in your otherwise empty office - that is a little different and would, no doubt, be a tad disturbing.  She does not work in her office of an evening anymore. 

She indicated briefly some other stories of ghostly happenings in the building, but I don't have enough detail to pass them on.  I suspect that, if I wanted to, I could walk through the unoccupied part of the building, but she said her husband had done it and he came back pale and reporting it creeped him out.  I don't think I should bother...

Anyway, this led to me Googling around for stories of Catholic related ghosts of Brisbane, and I turned up this odd letter written by a nun in a pamphlet about Mary MacKillop:




This isn't, by the way, the same place I am talking about, but it still is an odd letter, I thought.  The first thing that occurred to me was "I hope these nuns were familiar with possum noises in the night"; but I think there were all Australian nuns being discussed, so one would hope the explanation was not so mundane.

The only other religious place in Brisbane which I have heard people claim is haunted is  All Saints at Wickham Terrace (which I see is Anglican Church, but one of the Anglo-Catholic type.)  I don't have any details to hand, though.  

There are some websites around talking about ghost stories of Brisbane, but to be honest, you couldn't exactly claim that it has much of a reputation for hauntings generally speaking.  In reading around, I was surprised to see a story in Brisbane Times a couple of years ago claiming the current Supreme Court building has had its share of odd experiences.  The building (or one part of it) is not very old, yet it is being replaced soon by a new court building.   These parts of the article sounded appropriately spooky:

Speaking to brisbanetimes.com.au, a female security guard at the court complex said she was certain ghosts roamed the building.  During night shift she often sees the chair in Court 21 slowly spinning as if someone was sitting in it.  "There's no draught in there, no way that any breeze is causing that," she said....

One guard tells how two years ago two painters were in a sealed-off room in the building's basement doing maintenance work when, they claimed, a gust of icy cold wind "whooshed" past them.
"They were quick out of there and never came back," said a court source.

"They were convinced there was something freaky going on down there."

One night as one security officer manned the front desk, he heard a nearby elevator 'ding' and then the doors open as if someone was about to get out on to the ground floor.

No one was in the lift, but moments later heard the hand dryer go off in the nearby public bathroom. Again, no one there.

"Then about a minute after that the exit doors just started to rattle rattle rattle, as if someone had grabbed the handles and was desperately trying to get out," he said.

"It got me worked up all right. It was the strangest thing I've ever seen."

The security guards are perhaps very happy to be moving into a new building soon.

I guess it shows you don't have to have an old building for it to have a certain reputation.  It would seem that the intensity of feelings experienced in a place are enough.  Yet if that were a reliable guide to hauntings, wouldn't nearly all hospitals have ghosts? 

Anyway, a bit of mystery adds spice to life.

Saturday night recipe

As red capsicum are unusually cheap in Brisbane at the moment, I was inspired to try roast capsicum and tomato soup last night.

The recipe at the link is really pretty simple, and it tasted pretty good, but I thought it needed a bit of creaminess.  Not having any cream on hand, I added a bit of evaporated milk.  Maybe only 100 ml or so.  It worked well.

Also, I sliced a chorizo sausage, fried it, and added a half dozen crispy sliced to the soup when serving.  Nice.

Lemons overload

Collected from the tree in our yard today (there are a couple of limes in there too):

Lemon curd, lemon and lime marmalade, and a lemon tart are being made as I type, but I think mainly from lemons picked before this bunch.

I should try making preserved lemon again, I suppose, and see if I can avoid the mould this time.

More movie reviews you don't need

I  watched an odd combination of DVD last night:

*  Clash of the Titans (2010):   this movie copped a lot of bad review when it came out, and I recall some of them were about about how bad the 3-D was during the rapid action sequences.   (Eyes and brain need more time to construct the 3-D, apparently).   But hey, as a 2-D experience at home, I can't really see what was wrong with it.  Oddly, the somewhat campy and out-of-date stop motion animation of the 1981 version seems to have more fans than this one, which makes little sense.

What did I actually like about this version?  Well, who can dislike a movie featuring a giant scorpion caravan ride across the desert?  But seriously, for such an over the top fantasy story, I thought the acting and script was fine.  In fact, I'm so used to Liam Neeson in God roles that I now find any movie in which he is just a husband has plausibility issues.   And on the other side of the coin, Ralph Fiennes seems to be the go-to man for evil supernatural roles; but you know, he does them well.  (I particularly liked his entrances in this movie.)  The special effects are fine and somehow didn't bother me for their computer generated fakery in the way they do in many movies now.   (In fact, I have a bit of trouble working out why this happens - why in some movies I resent how they are being used, and in others I don't.)    

Anyway, I thought it was all rather fun.

This morning I was curious to check just how many liberties the movie took with Greek mythology, and found this rather funny post which gives the answer as "heaps".  Ah well, real Greek myths are (in many cases) too grotesque for modern tastes, surely.   (As a child, I always felt sorry for the guy - Prometheus - who had his liver constantly eaten out by a bird.  And there's far too much sex with Gods disguised as animals - erk.)

*  Match Point (2005):   Supposedly a return to form by Woody Allen (at least for his skills with serious subject matter), but I just couldn't see it myself.

I hold Crimes and Misdeamours in high regard, but the basic theme of this movie is very similar, while being much duller and plodding.

Let's face it, you could see that the lead dude was going to do something bad, and one had an expectation of suspence, especially given the initial tennis club background which would have reminded many people of Strangers on a Train.   So it's rather a pity that you have to wait about 3/4 of the way through the story before there is any real tension and the deed is done.    I found it hard to see why so many people liked the main character before then, anyway.

And I have to say that I agreed with some of the English reviews:  Allen just doesn't seem to have an ear for real life conversation as it is spoken by anyone in England.  Everyone sounds stilted and scripted.

So, count me as unimpressed.

A handy summary

Christy Exaggerates the Model-Data Discrepancy

Nothing much new here; just a handy summary post from Skeptical Science about the modal/observation discrepancies in AGW.

Fork tales

The history of the fork: When we started using forks and how their design changed over time. - Slate Magazine

A rather interesting short history of the fork here, telling me lots of things I never knew before.

(There were seen as very disgustingly feminine and unmanly for some time, apparently.)

Ancient yoghurt

Pottery shards put a date on Africa’s dairying

Yoghurt may have made it on to the menu for North Africans around 7,000 years ago, according to an analysis of pottery shards published today in Nature¹.  The fermented dairy product left tell-tale traces of fat on the ceramic fragments, suggesting a way that the region’s inhabitants may have evolved to tolerate milk as adults.

As expected...

Back in 2009 alone (go on, search "carbon capture" in the search bar over on the right), I had six posts about why CO2 sequestration seemed very, very unlikely to work.  One of them ended:

That CCS is being promoted so heavily seems simply to be a triumph of an industry's self preservation instinct over common sense.

Proving again that my sound judgement deserves reward with, I don't know, the leadership of a small principality if not the entire country, we had this story last weekend about how government money put into the idea by former PM Rudd has pretty much led to nothing. 

And now an article in PNAS that (naturally) Andrew Bolt highlights, argues that it's unlikely to be a long term solution anyway:

We argue here that there is a high probability that earthquakes will be triggered by injection of large volumes of CO₂ into the brittle rocks commonly found in continental interiors. Because even small- to moderate-sized earthquakes threaten the seal integrity of CO₂ repositories, in this context, large-scale CCS is a risky, and likely unsuccessful, strategy for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Mind you, there had been an article also in PNAS earlier in the year estimated that sequestration could work for the US.   Clearly, this is an area of some disagreement, but are you going to spend billions of dollars on an idea when no one really knows if it's a proper solution? 

I don't think so.   My advice is to drop it.   Put all this money into other clean energy research.   Let me organise an international conference about that and get a scientific and engineering consensus as to which forms of nuclear or other energy to best pursue for both fast deployment now, and future development.   I'd probably do a better job than what's being done internationally now anyway.

Crossing over

Neutrons escaping to a parallel world?

From the link:

Theoretical physicists Zurab Berezhiani and Fabrizio Nesti from the University of l'Aquila, Italy, reanalysed the experimental data obtained by the research group of Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin, France. It showed that the loss rate of very slow free neutrons appeared to depend on the direction and strength of the magnetic field applied. This anomaly could not be explained by known physics.

Berezhiani believes it could be interpreted in the light of a hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles. Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other. The probability of such a transition happening was predicted to be sensitive to the presence of magnetic fields, and could therefore be detected experimentally.

I have a soft spot for any physics talking about particles having a mirror particle in a parallel universe.  Seems a good way to get heaven, no?

The full paper is available for free here for some reason, although it's only worth it for the opening and end paragraphs.  Here's the last paragraph:



Neat.