Should I be surprised? - I can't decide

From phys.org:

“We present a novel twist present in quantum mechanics, absent in its classical counterpart: We are able to show that very natural, reasonable questions about quantum measurement are, intriguingly, undecidable,” Eisert told Phys.org. “At the same time, the corresponding classical problem is decidable.”

The problem in question involves a measurement device that generates any one of multiple outputs depending on the outcome of the measurement. The output state is then fed back into the device as the input, leading to a new output, and the process repeats. The question is whether there exist any finite sequences of measurement outcomes that never occur.

“The problem as such is simple - merely asking whether certain outcomes can occur in quantum measurements,” Eisert said.

When using a classical measurement device, the physicists show that they can always find an algorithm that can answer whether or not any outputs with zero probability exist. So in a classical context, the problem is decidable.

However, when using a quantum measurement device, the physicists show that there cannot be an algorithm that always provides the correct answer, and so the problem becomes undecidable. The scientists explain that the undecidability arises from interference in the quantum device, implying that, at least in this scenario, undecidability appears to be a genuine quantum property.

 An early thought:  assuming quantum involvement in brain cells, does this have relevance to the question of free will?

Japan for the better, or worse?

Youth of the ice age - FT.com

Speaking of Japan, this long Financial Times Magazine article looks at the question of whether Japan's increased casualisation of its workforce, and general increase in concern for the quality of life amongst its younger generation, is actually a good thing.

It's very detailed and looks at all of the contradictory evidence, including decreasing interest in relationships and a high suicide rate, yet quite high levels of life satisfaction found in a government survey.  

There were a couple of points made in passing that I hadn't realised:

Japan’s economy has not performed as wretchedly as is sometimes believed, especially when measured in per capita terms. The unemployment rate, now 4.6 per cent, has never scaled the dreadful heights of the US or Britain, let alone Spain.

and:

Although it has risen slightly in recent years, Japan’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.4, well below 2, which is the rate needed to maintain a population. That is higher than South Korea’s 1.23 or Singapore’s 0.78, though – unlike Japan – Singapore supplements its dwindling native population with a steady inflow of immigrants.

 What the heck is going on with Singapore's birthrate?

From the Japan Times

Three articles of interest from the Japan Times:

*  Japan is the sort of place where dislike of tattoos is out and proud, so to speak:

The weekly magazine Aera recently discussed tattoos, which became a contentious issue in Osaka after Mayor Toru Hashimoto not only prohibited city employees from gettting them but suggested that any who already had tattoos resign. Hashimoto believes that Osaka citizens are offended by tattoos, which tend to be associated with gangsters and other lowlifes. Many young people get tattoos for reasons having to do with fashion, but the majority of citizens don’t make such a distinction. Public baths and onsen (hot springs) tend to prohibit patrons with tattoos, even if it’s just a tiny reproduction of a butterfly.

I'd vote for him...

* Can't say I've heard much before about a couple of oddball religions that arose in postwar Japan, but they are the subject of new book being reviewed:

Jikoson (nee Nagako Nagaoka) of Jiu ruled her small band of followers through divine oracles, while calling for a renewal of Japan and, by extension, the world, under the leadership of the emperor (who would presumably receive his marching orders from her). Cloistered from the public eye, Jikoson might have remained yet another in the long procession of obscure postwar religious cranks if her teachings had not been taken up by go master Go Seigen and sumo grand champion Futabayama.

When the latter physically defended Jikosan from a police raid of her Kanazawa headquarters in January of 1947 (a photo of him grappling with an arresting officer is thoughtfully included in the book), the media uproar was enormous and the resulting fallout, which included Futabayama's hasty departure from the group, was fatally damaging to Jiu.

Sayo Kitamura, the feisty farmer's wife who became the leader of Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo, proved to be a savvier manipulator of the authorities and the media, though she repeatedly clashed with both, as well as with representatives of established religions, which she derided as empty vessels.

Though tirelessly denouncing what she called the "maggot world" in her sermons, Kitamura had a magnetic personality that attracted the very "maggots" she was attacking, bolstered by her claims to faith healing powers, as well as by the singing and dancing featured in her services.

"Maggot world" has a certain ring to it, I think.

Googling "Jikoson" produces few leads on her story.   Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo seems to be more famous, and I have a feeling I have heard about the "dancing religion" before.  Encylopedia Britannica has an entry that explains:

She had a revelation in 1945 that she was possessed by a Shintō deity, Tenshō-Kōtaijin (another name for the Shintō sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami). She traveled widely and won followers in Europe and the Americas. Her eccentric behaviour and forthright condemnation of organized institutions of religion and government, whom she characteristically referred to as “maggot beggars,” won her an enthusiastic following, estimated at about 300,000 a few years after her death.

 They appear to still operate in Seattle, as well as other places, yet Googling for video for the dancing doesn't come up with anything.

*  Another review of a  book about the effect of defeat on Japan sexual politics and practices contains this curious line:

 Mark McClelland's excellent and intriguing appraisal of how Japanese responded to a new climate of sexuality under the American occupation draws on several years of research that began auspiciously enough at the Museum of Perverts in Kagurazaka.

 Is this the world's only Museum of Perverts, I wonder?

This week's flying robot video

The way it stands itself up, it looks a bit creepily spider-like, but it's impressive:

Back to the 1930's

With all the heat wave news coming out of the US at the moment, I have been curious about checking out the comparison with the 1930's "dust bowl" situation.   For climate change skeptics, or the "lukewarmers" amongst them, it is important to claim that this present heat wave may all just be part of a natural cycle that the country last saw in the 1930's, so let's just not assume that it is something to do with CO2.

Well, I think it's important to note a few things:

a.   Yes, the temperatures were very hot, and drought conditions very bad, in the 1930's in the US.  The EPA says so,  and James Hansen and colleagues wrote a 1999 NASA entry which starts:

What's happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?

Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s "Dust Bowl" that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature?

b.   The US mainland is not the globe.  Continuing on with the above quote, Hansen writes:

Part of the "answer" is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years. The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years.

 c.    A 2004 paper by Schubert and others looking at the causes of the drought side of the 1930's starts off by noting that there is long on-going cycle of drought in the mid West:

Drought in the Great Plains is not unique to the last century. A number of proxy climate records indicate that multiyear droughts comparable to those of the 1930s and 1950s are, in fact, a regular feature of the Great Plains climate, having occurred approximately once or twice a century over the last 400 years (Woodhouse and Overpeck 1998). Looking still further backin time, there is evidence for multidecadal droughts during the late thirteenth and sixteenth centuries that were of much greater severity and duration than those of the twentieth century (Woodhouse and Overpeck 1998). For example, tree-ring analyses in Nebraska suggest that the drought that began in 1276 lasted 38 years (Bark 1978)!

In retrospect, it seems a bit of a silly place to build large cities.  Anyway, the Schubert paper looked at sea temperatures and circulation models, and I think paints it as a bit of natural variation.  However, there are possibly more factors involved.  James Hansen's recent 2011 "New Climate Dice" paper refers to the 1930's as follows:

Some researchers have suggested that the high summer temperatures and drought in the United States in the 1930s can be accounted for by sea surface temperature patterns plus natural variability (10, 11). Other researchers (12-14), have presented evidence that agricultural changes and crop failure in the 1930s contributed to changed surface albedo, aerosol (dust) production, high temperatures, and drying conditions. Furthermore, both empirical evidence and climate simulations (14, 15) indicate that agricultural irrigation has a significant regional cooling effect. Thus increasing amounts of irrigation over the second half of the 20th century may have contributed a summer cooling tendency in the United States that partially offset greenhouse warming. Such regionally-varying effects may be partly responsible for differences between observed regional temperature trends and the global trend.

d.  I think it is important to note that there is certainly no avoidance of discussing the 1930's US temperature record by Hansen at all, as this section from his paper (actually preceeding the above quote) shows:

Jun-Jul-Aug data on a longer time scale, 1900-present, including results averaged over the conterminous United States, are shown in Fig. 7. The longer time scale is useful for examining changes in the United States, because of well-known extreme heat and droughts of the 1930s. The small area of the contiguous 48 states (less than 1.6% of the globe) causes temperature anomalies for the United States to be very "noisy". Nevertheless, it is apparent that the long-term trend toward hot summers is not as pronounced in the United States as it is in hemispheric land as a whole. Also note that the extreme summer heat of the 1930s, especially 1934 and 1936, is comparable to the most extreme recent years.

Year-to-year variability, which is mainly unforced weather variability, is so large for an area the size of the United States that it is perhaps unessential to find an "explanation" for either the large 1930s anomalies or the relatively slow upturn in hot anomalies during the past few decades. However, this matter warrants discussion, because, if the absence of a stronger warming in recent years is a statistical fluke, the United States may have in store a relatively rapid trend toward more extreme anomalies.

 I might add more to this post later, but at the very least, I wanted to make the point that it is not being ignored, and climate researchers acknowledge how bad the 1930's were in terms of both drought and heat in the US. I think you can get the impression from climate skeptic blogs that they do.

Solo ouija

Short Sharp Science: Ouija board helps psychologists probe the subconscious

Do teenagers still play with ouija set ups?   In my family, we never owned the board that was marketed as a sort of game, but once or twice someone (I think my sister) set up an upturned glass and letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper on a table and we tried it with no memorable result.   It was also set up in high school by girls a couple of times, if I remember correctly.   The feeling of how the glass moves is odd:  you usually cannot quite tell whether anyone else is deliberating pushing it, and you feel certain that you are not doing it yourself.   The sort of hesitant way it can initially move, before zooming off with some (apparent) determination to an answer is all part of the illusion that something otherworldly might be happening.

The question of whether it is really being subconsciously moved by one or more participants should have been researched before by now, I would have thought (well, maybe it is such an obvious explanation - especially given the rubbish information that ouija sessions usually deliver - that no one has ever bothered before); but in any event I liked this elegant experiment that does appear to confirm the subconscious is tricking the conscious:

Gauchou's approach is to turn to the Ouija board. To keep things simple her team has just one person with their finger on the planchette at a time. But the ideomotor effect is maximised if you believe you are not responsible for any movements - that's why Ouija board sessions are most successful when used by a group. So the subject is told they will be using the board with a partner. The subject is blindfolded and what they don't know is that their so-called partner removes their hands from the planchette when the experiment begins.

The technique worked, at least with 21 out of 27 volunteers tested, reports Gauchou. "The planchette does not move randomly around the board; it moves to yes or no. It seems to move almost magically. None of them felt responsible for the movement." In fact some subjects suspected that their partner was really an actor - but they thought the actor was deliberately moving the planchette, never suspecting they themselves were the only ones touching it.

Goucher's team has not yet used the technique to get new information about the unconscious, but they have established that it seems to work, in principle. They asked subjects to answer 'yes' or 'no' to general knowledge questions using the Ouija board, and also asked them to answer the same questions using the more orthodox method of typing on a computer (unblindfolded). Participants were also asked whether they knew the answer or were just guessing.

When using the computer, if the subjects said they didn't know the answer to a question, they got it right about half the time, as would be expected by chance. But when using the Ouija, they got those questions right 65 per cent of the time - suggesting they had a subconscious inkling of the right answer and the Ouija allowed that hunch to be expressed (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.016).

 What a clever bit of research.

Post war laughs

Where does all the best comedy come from?  Death and war | Andrew Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian

Reflecting on the death of Eric Sykes, this article notes the importance of the experience of World War 2 on Britain's post war comedy.  I think it is quite insightful.  Here's a sample:

A friend of mine is David Secombe, writer, photographer, and son of Harry, and he told me: "After the war, Spike and my father couldn't quite believe they weren't dead." They felt justified by what they'd been through. According to David, "They'd earned the right to be satirists, or just to be silly." The thing about the Goons was that it was both, and a whole generation subscribed to their take on the war as something horrific, but also absurd.

As a student of those comics I have developed a form of snobbery that says there's something missing from all subsequent comedy, and what is missing is a war. To refine the position: yes, there has been very good comedy since then, but the best of it – Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, Chris Morris – was directly influenced by the Goons, which arose from the war.

Eric Sykes rated Izzard highly, but he told me he found much modern comedy smug or, as he put it, "fireproof". I think he meant he was against the "high status" comedian: the patter merchant who points out the foibles of everyone else from some Olympian height. This fireproof character is well in with the broadcasting executives, and is not a comedian due to some life event, but because he chose to become one while at university. We know who they are.

A short wine note

I've been meaning to note, for the minuscule number of readers who might be interested in what I occasionally say about wine, that my wife and I both find shiraz viognier blends a very pleasing way to drink red wine.  We first tasted this in the Barossa Valley on our Adelaide holiday a couple of years ago.   I'm not sure if it is popular (this 2008 link says it is "becoming popular") but it is good.

Bread and butter

I've developed the argument elsewhere that libertarians are against carbohydrates, and for heavily meat based diets, on more-or-less political grounds (they believe a magical theory that everyone got fat in the last 30 years because of government sponsored food pyramids - as if people weren't just eating more junky and sugary food now because it's cheap and available within no more than 300m of everyone's house or office.)  So it amuses me to see Atkins and similar diets rubbished a bit, as in this  video:

Yet another recommended Higgs Boson article

How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics | Wired Science | Wired.com

This one is about the lack of evidence for supersymmetry,  which was supposed to help sort out some problems with the Standard Model.

Good spidey point (and a few suggestions)

Slate's and Salon's movie critics are complaining that the Amazing Spiderman movie is a very unnecessary re-boot of the story (yes, it starts at the beginning again) when the Sam Raimi movie is only a decade old.   Marty Beckerman deals with it best:

Whoa, I just had the craziest dream – a nightmare, really – in which no one responsible for creating our mass entertainment ever had an original idea again!...

Why not replace Tobey and Kirsten with Andrew and Emma, and just make “Spider-Man 4″ – with a new tone, a new costume, a new production design, whatever – instead of forcing us to sit through Uncle Ben’s murder again?...

 For God’s sake, Warner Bros. is reportedly planning to reboot Batman again after “The Dark Knight Rises,” because why leave the property alone for five minutes? Why leave any property alone? (When is Hollywood going to make a gritty reboot of “Schindler’s List”? You know, darker and edgier.)

He has a point...

Long, long time readers may know that every now and then I come up with movie ideas that never get made.   Given Hollywood's dire originality crisis, I should list some that I can remember off the top of my head, hoping that some screenwriter somewhere will work on these:

*  The Secret Life of Immanuel Kant:   reputedly he died a virgin who never travelled far from his home town of Konisberg, but few people realise during his 'silent decade', he led a double life as a ladykilling spy for the king of Prussia.  

*  Tesla:  a very eccentric inventor who may, but probably didn't, invent a death ray, and had all sorts of odd ideas as well as inventing some useful stuff.  Maybe he heard alien voices on the radio.   Lots of material to work with here:  I think his actual meeting with aliens might work, or some intrigue with government concern over what he was actually inventing.   He has appeared in a couple of films, but they aren't well know and probably are not improbable enough.

*  the Wittgenstein family were all as mad as cut snakes, with an unusual number of homosexual siblings, although two of them committed suicide.  I don't know:  maybe a comedic "neighbours from hell" movie could be made about a family who lives next door to them.

*  World War 2 untold stories:  well, there are just thousands of intriguing stories that turn up on SBS on Friday nights and indicate that we are never going to run out of source material.   Has the early life of Hitler ever been dealt with in a movie?    Was it Wittgenstein in school who turned him against Jews, or a Jewish prostitute from whom he caught a venereal disease?   Could be dangerous ground to cover, I guess.    What about the accidental sinking of the Cap Arcona (killing about 5,000 prisoners from concentration camps) at the end of the war as a basis for a movie?  

*  Spiritualism:  I don't think the originators of modern spiritualism (the Fox sisters) has ever been the subject of a movie, nor the general topic of its widespread popularity in the late 19th and early 20th century.   Maybe hard to come up with a happy ending, but it's an odd story.

What the heck?  All these ideas are for movies set in the past.     Don't I have any ideas for movies set now or in the future?

Well, in science fiction terms, there has never been a movie about the exploration of the Moon.  Yet the place almost certainly has old lava tubes, icy parts, and a certain amount of gas filled chambers which cause the occasional eruption as seen from Earth.   I'm not sure what the main point of such movie could be - finding an alien artefact is so 2001 - but surely there is some good material that should be based there. (Now that I think of it - although it's been a long time since I read it - Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his more readily filmed novels, but it's never been attempted.  Mind you, for some reason, most movies made from his source material don't work, or are barely recognizable.)

Supernatural agents (or humans under their instruction) who work to prevent the scientific discovery of an afterlife or proof of God seems potentially promising as well, and I don't want  M. Night Shyamalan going anywhere near the idea either.

And what the forthcoming Climate Wars?  Is having an admiral turn into a modern Captain Nemo with a nuclear sub or two being used to take out large coal fuelled power plants in both China and the US just a little too James Bond?  Ships carrying coal could be sunk by torpedoes too.  Maybe this has already been done in some novel I have never noticed...

That's it for now.   Someone just send me a cheque when you sell the script. 

Talking about Higgs

Lawrence Krauss has a reasonable article in Slate talking about the Higgs boson announcement.  He's quite chuffed, as you might expect:

The discovery announced today in Geneva represents a quantum leap (literally) in our understanding of nature at its fundamental scale, and the culmination of a half-century of dedicated work by tens of thousands of scientists using technology that has been invented for the task, and it should be celebrated on these accounts alone.

 His explanation of how it works uses a simple analogy:

 The idea of the Higgs particle was proposed nearly 50 years ago. (Incidentally, it has never been called the “God particle” by the physics community. That moniker has been picked up by the media, and I hope it goes away.) It was discussed almost as a curiosity, to get around some inconsistencies between predictions and theory at the time in particle physics, that if an otherwise invisible background field exists permeating empty space throughout the universe, then elementary particles can interact with this field. Even if they initially have no mass, they will encounter resistance to their motion through their interactions with this field, and they will slow down. They will then act like they have mass. It is like trying to push your car off the road if it has run out of gas. You and a friend can roll it along as long as it is on the road, but once it goes off and the wheels encounter mud, you and a whole gang of friends who may have been sitting in the back seat cannot get it moving. The car acts heavier.....

 All of the predictions based on these ideas have turned out to be in accord with experiment. But there was one major thing missing: What about the invisible field? How could we tell if it really exists? It turns out that in particle physics, for every field in nature, like the electromagnetic field, there must exist an elementary particle that can be produced if one has sufficient energy to create it. So, the background field, known as a Higgs field, must be associated with a Higgs particle.

But Bee Hossenfelder is feeling a bit glum already:

 And so, strangely, on this sunny day for high energy particle physics, I feel somewhat blue about the prospects. It's been almost two decades since the last discovery of a particle that we presently believe is elementary, the top quark in 1995, which was the year I finished high school. It's been a long way and an enormous effort to that little bump in the above plot. There isn't so much more we can do with hadron colliders. If we try really hard, we can ramp up the energy a little and improve the luminosity a little. Of course what we want next is a lepton collider like the ILC that will complete the picture that the LHC delivers.

But we have a diminishing return on investment. Not so surprisingly - it's the consequence of our increasingly better understanding that it takes more effort to find something new. And to make that effort of blue sky fundamental research, we need societies who can afford it. There's an economic question here, about the way mankind will develop, it's the question whether or not we'll be able to take care of our survival needs, and still continue to have enough resources to push the boundary of nature's secrets back further.

Small nuclear discussed (again)

Small(ish) is beautiful  - BraveNewClimate

Barry Brook talks up small nuclear as a sensible way to go nuclear in Australia.  Sounds about right to me.

Future eggs

I was reading a short report on the future of fake meat that contained this:

"The use of animals as a protein delivery mechanism is not sustainable," said Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Savage River Farms, Inc., which recently introduced a chicken substitute made from plant products.

"Through the careful replication of texture, taste, and 'mouthfeel,' food science is advancing the degree to which chicken, beef, and other meats no longer require an animal origin but can instead be entirely plant-based," said Brown.

Joshua Tetrick, founder and CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, also is using plants to replicate the nutrition and other characteristics of eggs -- for baking and more -- through the company's Beyond Eggs™ product.

Tetrick said the demand for eggs continues to rise globally, while feed and regulatory costs soar.

There are a couple of things I like about that:  calling animals a "protein delivery mechanism" strikes me as amusingly cold; it's as if an Artificial Intelligence which finds the whole idea of eating to be disgusting spoke the line.  But I also like the self explanatory branding of imitation eggs as "Beyond Eggs"(TM).

So, let's go looking at Beyond Eggs. 

Well, the English language certainly continues to get a technocrat workout at its site, where the product is described as:

A healthier and safer ingredient for your egg based applications.

I had a slice of egg based application with a cup of tea after dinner tonight, as it happens.

How was Beyond Eggs created?:

Our team of food science professionals, culinary scientists, and professional chefs brought their best to the table to create something extraordinary. We meticulously dissected the egg, looking deeply at its molecular makeup and nutritional profile. Then, we matched the functionally relevant components with plant-based ingredients....It all comes down to the functional properties. Does it emulsify? Coagulate? Replicating the functional properties of eggs required deep knowledge of biology, food science, and culinary science. Our team and product development partners have achieved something extraordinary.

It sounds almost as big an achievement as going to the Moon.

And, sad to say, I can't find a photo of what the product looks like.  Yellow goo in a plastic bag, I'm guessing, but I could be wrong.

I await the arrival of Beyond Eggs in my local supermarket.  Alternatively, I just might finally get around to having a couple of chickens in the yard.  Seems a tad less complicated.

Eagleton on Rousseau

What would Rousseau make of our selfish age? 

Terry Eagleton writes here about Rousseau.   It seems a good, short summary:

Above all, Rousseau is the explorer of that dark continent, the modern self. It is no surprise that he wrote one of the most magnificent autobiographies of all time, his Confessions. Personal experience starts to take on a significance it never had for Plato or Descartes. What matters now is less objective truth than truth-to-self – a passionate conviction that one's identity is uniquely precious, and that expressing it as freely and richly as possible is a sacred duty. In this belief, Rousseau is a forerunner not only of the Romantics, but of the liberals, existentialists and spiritual individualists of modern times.

It is true that he seems to have held the view that no identity was more uniquely precious than his own. For all his cult of tenderness and affection, Rousseau was not the kind of man with whom one would share one's picnic. He was the worst kind of hypochondriac – one who really is always ill – and that most dangerous of paranoiacs – one who really is persecuted. Even so, at the heart of an 18th-century Enlightenment devoted to reason and civilisation, this maverick intellectual spoke up for sentiment and nature. He was not, to be sure, as besotted by the notion of the noble savage as some have considered. But he was certainly a scourge of the idea of civilisation, which struck him for the most part as exploitative and corrupt.

 I liked this line too:

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom.

A promising building battery?

Explainer: storing renewable energy

This article talks about storing energy from renewable power, but as it is written by a Professor involved in a particular project, and so it ends up being mostly about them - being flow batteries.  Can't say I've heard about them before.

There's also a link to RedFlow, an company which is developing and deploying these batteries.  When I can hook one up to a bunch of solar cells on the roof so I can off grid most of the time remains unclear.  (Well, maybe not.  They do seem to have products that appear designed for use at home, but I don't really understand how much power you can get out of them, say, overnight.)

Speaking of solar power, if you really could develop systems that can get people more or less off the grid, at some psychologically important figure like, say, under $10,000, would the psychology of carbon pricing be such that people would happily pay for this, regardless of its true economic sense?   I mean, the psychological value of being able to say to people at work whinging about the latest increase in their power bill "I don't pay for my electricity at all now" must count for something.

What an odd concept

BBC News - Vertical ship marks 50 years at sea

Have a look at the video - I have never heard of this weird ship before.

Colebatch on carbon pricing

The economists got it right, that's the truth

Last year the Economic Society of Australia surveyed its members on 46 policy issues. On some, it found economists evenly divided: on the merits of the NBN, for example, or whether Australia should promote nuclear power, whether patients should pay more of their health bills, and whether the GST should be lifted so income tax and company tax can be reduced.

But on other issues economic opinion is clear cut. Top of the list is whether taxpayers' money should be spent on big infrastructure projects without an independent publicly released cost-benefit analysis first to check the project stacks up. The survey found 85 per cent of economists want cost-benefit studies to be mandatory. (Who doesn't? Politicians.)

 

Surprisingly, the second most clear-cut response was on climate change: 79 per cent of economists agreed that price-based mechanisms - a carbon tax, subsidies or an emissions trading scheme - are a better way to tackle climate change than using direct regulation.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

The brain infecting parasite returns

Women infected with Toxoplasma gondii have increased risk of attempting suicide: study

This seems particularly bad news about this widespread parasite:

 The study found that women infected with T. gondii were one and a half times more likely to attempt suicide compared to those who were not infected, and the risk seemed to rise with increasing levels of the T. gondii antibodies. Previous mental illness did not appear to significantly alter these findings. The relative risk was even higher for violent suicide attempts. In contrast to the number of women who attempted suicide using any method (517) or violent methods (78), the number of fatalities through suicides in the cohort (18, with eight in Toxoplasma-positive mothers) was still too small to be conclusively analyzed statistically.

The researchers stress that there is more work to be done on the topic, but it stills seem bad news to me.

In other toxoplasma news, I'm sure I read somewhere about work being done in Australia on it.  Yes, here we go

A CAIRNS molecular biologist is working with an international research team to develop a vaccine to prevent cats from infecting humans with a potentially fatal parasite.

James Cook University scientist Rob Walker is focusing his research on Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that is dangerous to pregnant women because it can cause miscarriage or congenital defects to the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.....

Dr Walker, based at the Queensland Tropical Health Alliance at JCU Smithfield, is collaborating with scientists at the University of Zurich and at the National Institute of Health in the US on the pioneer research project.

It is a challenging field of research because scientists cannot replicate, in the lab, the fertilisation process which happens inside the gut of a cat, Dr Walker said.

Dr Walker’s research will focus on how to prevent the cyst-like embryo from forming its protective shell, which may be key to stopping the transmission process. His goal would be to create a vaccine for cats to stop the parasite from being transmitted to humans.

Good luck.

UPDATE:  it's a top week for media discussion of this intriguing brain parasite!   In Slate, it's noted that just as toxoplasma in rats makes them actually kinda like cat pee smell, it might have a bit of a similar effect on people:

In a recent study, Czech scientists gave men and women towels scented with the urine of various animals—horses, lions, hyenas, cats, dogs—which they rated for “pleasantness.” Turns out, men who tested positive for Toxo found the smell of cat urine more pleasant than men without Toxo. For Toxo researchers like me, this was a shock but not entirely surprising. Why? Toxo does approximately the same thing to rats.

 Hmm.  I seem to have missed that til now.  The Slate article is generally about perfumes and their use of animal scents, and it's all of interest.

It's all in the lifestyle

Naked mole rat may hold the secret to long life

I didn't know this, or if I have read it before, I'd forgotten:

Compared to the average three year life span of a common rat, the 10 to 30 year life of the naked mole rat, a subterranean rodent native to East Africa, is impressive. And compared to the human body, the body of this rodent shows little decline due to aging, maintaining high activity, bone health, reproductive capacity, and cognitive ability throughout its lifetime. Now a collaborative of researchers in Israel and the United States is working to uncover the secret to the small mammal's long — and active — lifespan.

If the secret turns out to be be "live naked and be a rat", I expect many men would find that acceptable.  The living underground in the dark might be the killer, though.