A promising approach to reducing malaria

Fighting Malaria Inside a Mosquito's Guts - Technology Review

They haven't tried it in the field yet, but feeding mosquitoes with a bacteria that fights the malaria parasite in their gut sounds a promising tactic.   

Earthquake advice for the Tokyo visitor

Urbanites urged to head up, not down, to survive tsunami | The Japan Times Online

Here's an interesting article, suggesting that when (not if, it seems) Tokyo gets its next big earthquake, you may be best off heading up, rather than anywhere else:
 

Should, as government agencies are predicting, a major earthquake occur within 100-150 km of Tokyo Bay in the Tokai area or Ibaraki's Oki region, Hiroshi Takagi, an associate professor of engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, believes the resultant tsunami would be similar to or greater in height than the Tohoku tsunami.

"The southwestward opening of Tokyo Bay makes it particularly vulnerable to tsunami from the Tokai region," said Takagi.

Takagi, who coauthored "Behavior of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami and Resultant Damage in Tokyo Bay," reported that major quake-induced tsunami have struck Tokyo Bay in 1703, 1854, 1923 and 1960 as well as on March 11, 2011. The largest tsunami to hit Tokyo Bay is thought to have been the result of the 1703 Great Genroku Earthquake, which flooded areas of Miura 6-8 meters above sea level in the south, parts of Yokohama at 3-4 meters elevation and, as far north as Funabashi, areas at 2 meters elevation.

 So, what to do?: 

"The only safe way to escape a tsunami," said Tossani, "is up." Our restaurant, in fact, was 11 meters above sea level, or four meters shy of the minimum 15-meter clearance he believes is required to avoid an advancing tidal wave, should it resemble the Tohoku tsunami of 3/11.

Although counterintuitive, if a tsunami was to strike Tokyo, you might well be safer on the top floors of a Tokyo skyscraper than anywhere else. Tossani should know: He is an architect, master planner and urban designer who researched the actions of those who survived and perished in Tohoku last year for the newly published "Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan" (Routledge).

 I didn't know this about last year's Tohoku earthquake, either:

"What we discovered in Tohoku was that many of the maps published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation distributed to local municipalities indicated areas as low risk that were in fact death zones," said Tossani. "Because many of the municipalities had distributed maps that showed only the four-meter zones, many people made a beeline for them, only to be overwhelmed."

Twelve evacuation sites out of 25 designated by the Onagawa government as safety zones were swept away. In Minamisanriku, also in Miyagi Prefecture, 31 of 80 sites were washed away. In total the tsunami swept away more than 100 evacuation sites along the Tohoku coast. "That contributed to the direct loss of thousands of lives," said Tossani.

 How unfortunate.

A quick review

From Time, talking about The Dark Knight Rises:

For once a melodrama with pulp origins convinces viewers that it can be the modern equivalent to Greek myths or a Jonathan Swift satire. TDKR is that big, that bitter -- a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement.

I can be pithier than that:

It's a man, dressed in a bat costume.

Update:  I've got my review for The Hobbit worked out already:

Some men, pretending to be short, and a fake dragon.

As you may expect...

...news about how much money Jeremy Clarkson makes from Top Gear and the BBC does not please Guardian readers in the comments that follow:
Top Gear bonus lifts Jeremy Clarkson's pay above 3m | Media | guardian.com

I find him pretty annoying too.  James May, on the other hand, is likeable, although how much more mature is (I suppose) debateable.

The inconvenient Earth

Growth of Earth's core may hint at magnetic reversal - environment - 13 July 2012 - New Scientist

 Lopsided growth of the Earth's core could explain why its magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years. If it happened now, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of knocking out global communications and power grids.

One side of Earth's solid inner core grows slightly while the other half melts. Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, used numerical modelling to establish that the axis of Earth's magnetic field lies in the growing hemisphere – a finding that suggests shifts in the field are connected to growth of the inner core.

There are signs that the next switch may be under way: rapid movements of the field's axis to the east in the last few hundred years may be a precursor to the north and south poles trading places, the researchers speculate.

"What we found that is interesting in our models is a correlation between these transient [shifts] and reversals [of Earth's magnetic field]," says Olson. "We kind of speculate there is that connection but the chaos in the core is going to prevent us from making accurate predictions for a long time."

The Big Mistake

I've been reading John Nielsen-Gammon's posts detailing a lengthy exchange he had with "Catastrophic climate change skeptic" physicist Robert Brown over at Climate Abyss.   The series of posts starts here.

As I have said before, I find Nielsen-Gammon a bit of a puzzle.  He is no climate change skeptic, and clearly finds some of what he see on anti-AGW sites annoying, yet he is oddly inclined to keep engaged with them despite the lack of good faith that is in abundance at blogs likes of Watts Up With That.   He is also very uncommitted on the question of action regardling limiting greenhouse gases, to the point of (what as I interpret as) being politically opposed to any EPA involvement in the matter. 

Despite all of the this, or perhaps partly because of it (that is, you get no sense that he approaching the topic from the Left of politics) he is always an interesting read, and he did make me aware of what I think is the single biggest mistake that climate change skeptics make.

That is:  thier belief you have to understand everything about how climate works (and has worked in history and pre-history) before you can decide that CO2 being emitted at current levels is likely to cause substantial global warming with profound changes to the planet.

This mistake appears at a few different points of  the Climate Abyss exchanges, I think, but it gets its simplest analogy here:

6. We don’t understand what determines the baseline temperature of the Earth or whether those forces are presently causing a trend.
N-G: I don’t understand what lack of understanding you’re referring to, but in any event a lack of understanding of how exactly my car was painted blue does not prevent me from predicting what would happen if I took a red paintbrush to it.

The rest of that post (No 5 in the series) talks about the difficulty of modelling the ice sheet changes from glacial to interglacial.  John NG believes that the difficulty is no reason to doubt the effects of increased CO2 on the present, relatively ice free, world.   He's right.

I can think of at least one topical further analogy:   physicists don't fully understand the Standard Model for subatomic particles, and the Higgs Boson might have just been discovered (with much work to be done on it yet,) but that doesn't stop us buidling and using nuclear reactors.  

You can see this argument played out often in skeptic circles.   The escapees from Andrew Bolt's blog use this line all the time at Catallaxy.  Just this weekend, for example, one of them repeated yet again (he's been doing it for years) the fact that you had glaciation occurring 400 million years ago when CO2 was at a few thousand (or more) ppm must mean that current models are wrong.    As it happens, the contintents were also stuck all together at that time, the sun was a little bit dimmer, and the work has been done suggesting that this configuration of the planet can be modelled such that glaciation at those CO2 levels can occur.   Here's a summary:

Ordovician glaciation
Geological evidence exists for a late Ordovician (~440 Ma) glaciation. This short-lived (~1 million year) glaciation (Brenchley et al., 1995, 2003) was remarkable because atmospheric CO2 levels were high (14 6 PAL) during the late Ordovician (Yapp and Poths, 1992). Numerical climate models of increasing complexity have been used to determine the conditions permitting glaciation at high CO2 levels. Early studies using 2-D EBMs focused on the role of the late Ordovician paleogeography (Crowley et al., 1987; Crowley and Baum, 1991a), and specifically the orientation of Gondwanaland relative to the South Pole. With an edge of Gondwanaland near the South Pole, the thermal inertia of the ocean prevented continental summer temperatures from rising above freezing, thus allowing permanent snow cover (Crowley et al., 1987; Crowley and Baum, 1991a). Subsequent GCM experiments have confirmed the EBM result (Gibbs et al., 2000), but have also shown that the continental configuration of Gondwanaland is not a sufficient condition for glaciation. The influences of additional climatic factors on Ordovician glaciation have since been tested, including atmospheric CO2, topography, ocean heat transport, orbital parameters, and snow/ ice albedo (Crowley and Baum, 1995; Gibbs et al., 1997; Poussart et al., 1999; Herrmann et al., 2003). These studies generally conclude that glaciation is possible with high (8–14 PAL) atmospheric CO2 levels given favorable orbital parameters (i.e., a cold Southern Hemisphere summer configuration) and continental topography. With orbital forcing varying from cold-summer to warm-summer configurations, ice-sheet model calculations indicate that CO2 levels must fall to 8 PAL to grow a permanent ice sheet (Herrman et al., 2003).

Sure, the precise answer is hard to work out given we don't have perfect knowledge of conditions back then; but - we are not talking Gondwanaland any more.   (By the way, PAL is Present day Atmospheric Levels - so I guess 8 PAL could be anything from about 2400 to 3200 ppm.   I learned this from another paper which believes plants moving onto Gondwanaland is what drove cooling to allow glaciation.)

John N-G's first post (which I have referred to before) about why AGW skeptics are wrong to persist with this "but we need complete understanding before we can do anything" argument is here:   it is well worth reading if you haven't done so.

The corollary to this Big Mistake is, of course, this:   at the current rate of CO2 emissions, the time scale at which climate change occurs, and given the life span of large electrical power plants, by the time you fill in the gaps as to precise climate sensitivity, you are likely making it too late for any effective CO2 reductions to be made at all.

But as I say, this is really just a follow on from the fundamental Big Mistake.

Badly priced Apples

Apple profit margins: You’re paying way, way too much to get a little more space on your iPad and iPhone. - Slate Magazine

It's rather worse than I suspected:

 Once you decide to move beyond the entry-level iPad, the company’s profits soar. According to iSuppli, it costs Apple about $316 to make the low-end 16GB iPad, which the company sells for $499—a margin of about 37 percent, not including non-manufacturing costs. Doubling the storage space to 32GB costs Apple $17 more, but it charges you $599 for that model, boosting its margin to 45 percent. On the high-end Wi-Fi model, which offers you 64GB of space for $699, Apple’s non-manufacturing profit margin shoots up to 48 percent. But that’s not all! If you get an iPad with 4G cellular connectivity, you’re really in for it. The very top-end iPad, a 64GB model with 4G, will set you back $829 for a device that costs Apple $408 to make—a margin of 51 percent, or twice what Apple makes on the cheapest iPad. There may be other popular products that carry such a breathtaking markup, but I bet most of them are monitored by the DEA.

My suspicion that I am better off in future buying a basic 16 GB Android tablet with a slot for additional SD memory seems justified.

Some Chinese at the end of the universe

There seem to be a fair number of Chinese physics papers on arXiv now, and this one about the variety of possible "rip" ends of the universe is quite interesting. They come up with their own - the "Quasi Rip", but I'll paste this from the introduction (clicking on it may, or may not, make it more readable):

Anyway, The paper then goes on to suggest a "quasi rip" is a possibility, from which the universe may rebuild. It also acknowledges that all of these ideas are currently up for grabs, in terms of being consistent with observations of the universe. I wonder for how long that will be the case.

Preparing for the worst

What happened when I had a heart attack | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The variety of ways the pain and discomfort of a heart attack can manifest itself is a somewhat interesting topic:  especially to a person like me who gets nearly no exercise and sits all day, which the doctors like to tell us is a bad thing.  So reading Brown's well written description about what his heart attack felt like serves a useful cautionary purpose.

Getting up earlier and going for a walk ever second day would be even better, I suppose.  (On the other hand, Brown did start his heart attack while cycling.   If this is something he does regularly, maybe he thought he was too fit to be having such a problem.  See, this is one good thing about not exercising -  I will be under no such illusion if crushing pain starts anywhere near  my torso.) 

Must get those long delayed blood tests too ...

Socks in space

Design for a long duration, deep space mission habitat

I like the way this article starts:

There are all sorts of details to take into consideration when traveling in deep space, such as where to go, what to do, and how to get back. Since starry-eyed dreamers often don’t take into account the practical realities of putting a human into such an environment, steely-eyed engineers are left to decide the gritty details of such a mission, such as how many pairs of socks are needed.

Well, it's good to see that NASA is putting serious work into how much sock drawer room is needed in space.  (That sounds sarcastic, but it's not really meant to be.   I would love to have my childhood doodling of spaceship designs as a real job.)

Anyway, NASA is coming up with estimates for spaceship size for long missions (this one to an asteroid.)  Apart from the summary at the link, you can see the whole paper here.   This is what they think a deep space mission may look like:




















And here's the inside:






Those ceilings look very low and claustrophobic; but then again, I suppose in weightlessness you're  not standing up often.

This also gives me the opportunity to again note that, as anyone who has ever stayed at a cheap Japanese hotel and been in one of their ultra compact bathrooms would know, the nation with the most Earth based experience for long distance space travel is clearly the Japanese.  They have space underwear too.   (Search my blog at the side if you are interested.)

A bunch of dates

gulfnews : Liwa Date Festival begins

It can be argued that the Liwa Date Festival is one of the truest experiences of all things date-related and the Emirati culture as a whole.

 It kind of makes me miss the days of HG & Roy on ZZZ.   (For Australian readers only.)

The NH cooling trend is not new...Grrr

I just Googled "long term cooling trend" and saw that many media and blog commentary about the Esper tree proxy study have headings like this:   "New Tree Ring Study Shows 2000 years of COOLING on Earth".  Obviously, they think that the existence of some long term cooling is a new finding.

This just shows how easily people are misled.

As this Skeptical Science post (last updated in 2010) shows via a few graphs - knowledge of a long term cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere (up to last century) is nothing new.

The point is also made in the Real Climate commentary on the Esper paper.  The Esper cooling trend, based on its Lapland trees, is just a bit higher than other proxy studies conclude.

This really is frustrating.

A wetter world? [Continued]

11 dead, 18 missing in record deluge | The Japan Times Online

Eleven people were killed, at least 18 others were missing and tens of thousands were ordered evacuated Thursday as downpours lashed Kyushu and other areas in the southwest, police and firefighters said.

The Meteorological Agency said rainfall in parts of Kumamoto and Oita prefectures reached levels that have "never been experienced before."

The agency meanwhile forecast heavy rain and landslides in other areas of Japan, including the west and northeast.

 The photos of the damage at this site show it to be quite severe.

A bunch of hypocritical twits

Over at Catallaxy, I see that Sinclair Davidson's tedious "broken promise" campaign entry for day 13 of carbon pricing put up a video of David Murray (an ex banker who headed our Future Fund) criticising the policy as bad economically.   Never mind that he (Murray) has long said he doesn't even believe CO2 can cause AGW.  That wouldn't make his views on the economic effects of the policy suspect now, would it?  Wayne Swan appears on the video making this point, and ABC host Emma is the other person who makes an appearance.

Anyway, in the comments following, in the middle of the night, we get this contribution from mareeS:



Last I looked, there were about 16 or so comments after Maree's, by Catallaxy regulars, none of whom make any comment about her contribution.

For a group of people who scoff at the idea that climate scientists have been at the receiving end of torrid and disgusting email campaigns  from skeptics who wish them dead, and quite a few of whom have spent time this week talking about how they wouldn't be surprised if  Gillard suspended the next election due to some drummed up, climate change related "state of emergency", they are a really a bunch of unselfaware and stupid people.

Public confusion via press release

As soon as I read the comments by Jan Esper last week on his team's Lapland tree study I knew that  climate change "skeptics" would exaggerate its significance.   The study indicates a long term cooling trend greater than previously expected, and that the previous warm periods of the last couple of thousand years were a bit warmer than earlier estimates.

That's quite a lot to get from one set of trees in one tiny part of the Northern Hemisphere, I thought.

True to form, climate change skeptics who only get their information from Watts Up With That were thrilled with the paper.  Strangely, it has only turned up on Tim Blair's site in Australia, not Andrew Bolt's yet, but give it another day.

You can bet your last dollar that no more than a few percent of those who note this would read the commentary on the paper at Real Climate, which deals with it as scientists in the field would - pointing out some of its strengths, but also its weakenesses and the reasons to be somewhat cautious about its authors' broader suggestions about the significance of their study.  Here's the important section:

Orbital forcing is indeed substantial on the millennial timescale for high-latitudes during the summer season, and the theoretically expected cooling trend is seen in proxy reconstructions of Arctic summer temperature trends (Kaufman et al, 2009). But insolation forcing is near zero at tropical latitudes, and long-term cooling trends are not seen in non-tree ring, tropical terrestrial proxy records such as the Lake Tanganyika (tropical East Africa) (Tierney et al, 2010) (see below).

Long-term orbital forcing over the past 1-2 millennia is also minimal for annual, global or hemispheric insolation changes, and other natural forcings such as volcanic and solar radiative forcing have been shown to be adequate in explaining past long-term pre-industrial temperature trends in this case (e.g. Hegerl et al, 2007). Esper et al’s speculation that the potential bias they identify with high-latitude, summer-temperature TRW tree-ring data carry over to a bias in hemispheric temperature reconstructions based on multiple types of proxy records spanning tropics and extratropics, ocean and land, and which reflect a range of seasons, not just summer (e.g. Hegerl et al, 2006; Mann et al, 1999;2008) is therefore a stretch.

Indeed, there are a number of lines of evidence that contradict that more speculative claim. For example, if one eliminates tree-ring data entirely from the Mann et al (2008) “EIV” temperature reconstruction (see below; blue curve corresponds to the case where all tree-ring data have been withheld from the multiproxy network), one finds not only that the resulting reconstruction is broadly similar to that obtained with tree-ring data, but in fact the pre-industrial long-term cooling trend in hemispheric mean temperature is actually lessened when the tree-ring data are eliminated—precisely the opposite of what is predicted by the Esper et al hypothesis.

As for the way the study is being mis-reported, one comment in the Real Climate thread does note that a significant part of the blame can be put down to Esper's comments in a press release:

Journalists should only be partially blamed for the bad coverage of the latest Jan Esper paper. Some of them wrote stories without interviewing the authors, which is wrong, but the press release issued by JG University in Mainz helps the denialist fringe by including a couple of odd quotes from Esper himself. Take a look at what he says:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php
“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Esper. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.”

 And some of the Real Climate team do get stuck into that:

I wonder if you guys could please comment on this press release, because it’s very hard for journalists to deal with such vague statements. Do you really think Esper is advocating lowering the tone of the IPCC reports?

[Response: I have no idea. I'd say it was more related to emphasizing the potential implications of one's own work over anyone else's - a frequent occurrence in press releases. I generally find it prudent to wait for the work on the implications to be done (for instance). - gavin]

[Response: Gavin is again quite generous. It would appear that Esper's misleading statements and overstatement of larger implications directly fed the sort of denialist frame represented in the Daily Mail article. It is of course impossible, and unwise, to guess at whether or not that was his intent. -mike]

 Interestingly, John Nielsen-Gammon a couple of weeks ago had a long and useful post in which he looked at how a paper on one particular bit of one Antarctic ice shelve had its significance over-inflated by the skeptic press too.   He also noted at one point that the press release for that study did what seemed to be some exaggeration of the significance of the findings.

If climate scientists don't want the public to be so easily confused (and for their results to not be so readily twisted by "skeptics" who are motivated to twist it), they really need to be careful with how their work is explained in their own press releases.

Holt returns

Back in 2006 and 2007, I recommended articles by Jim Holt.  In fact, I see that my enjoyment of his science eriting (usually looking at the big, big questions of life, the universe, and everything) extends at least back to articles in Slate in 2004.  

So it's good to see he has a book out on the basic question Why Does the World Exist? and it's getting some very good reviews.  I like this extract from that last link:

... the very intractability of the problem turns out to have a salutary (and fun) side effect: All the ordinary kinds of answers being impossible, one begins to think in earnest about the extraordinary ones. This is a book that gets us to take seriously, at least for a few pages, the proposition that the universe was brought into being by the abstract idea of Goodness. (Hey, Plato thought so.) Elsewhere, we get a probabilistic, Bayesian case for the existence of God. We hear Heidegger speculate that nothingness is an agent, that noth-ing is a verb (“Das Nichts nichtet,” or “Nothing noths”: shades of Hopkins, for whom the self “selves”); perhaps, then, nothing nothed itself, thereby creating Being. We contemplate panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental property, irreducible to physical components and pervasive throughout the universe: that, in the words of the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

The weirdness goes on. We learn—and I am quoting here because my powers to intelligently paraphrase this are limited—that “a tiny bit of energy-filled vacuum could spontaneously ‘tunnel’ into existence,” and then, bang, expand to become the universe. We learn that a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter would suffice to generate a universe like ours, which means it’s conceivable that we were created by some extraterrestrial nerd in an extra-universal lab. We entertain the possibility, favored by some physicists, that “nothingness is unstable,” which means something was bound to happen. And we entertain the possibility that everything was bound to happen. That is the principle of fecundity: the idea that all possible worlds are real. Muse on the implications of that one for your personal life—or lives—on your next subway ride home.

Big (-ish) brother in your pocket

Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ Review | | Independent Editor's choice Blogs

From this review of the new Android operating system (made by Google), we get this description of the very futuristic sounding (and privacy damaging, I assume) Google Now:

With Android 4.1 Google have introduced a major new feature called “Google Now’. It is a kind of self aware personal organiser/assistant, designed to serve up useful information based on your location and behaviour. It sounds pretty ominous, but it’s actually quite brilliant. By analysing your search terms and cross-referencing them with your calendar and current location, Google Now provides an array of useful information without any effort on your part.

It provides public transport information when you’re near a bus stop or train station, it suggests places to eat and visit when you’re away travelling, as well as up-to-date weather, sports results for your favourite teams and routes back to your home when you’re out and about. It even takes real-time traffic data into consideration when suggesting your route home, then estimates your arrival time accordingly.

All of this is achieved without the user entering in any information. It intelligently guesses where you live and work, what teams you support, even which flights you might be taking, all with surprising accuracy. This is all thanks to the insight it gains from the location and use of your smartphone within the Google ecosystem. The results are elegantly displayed in a series of informative and well-designed cards, which you can simply swipe away with your finger if they are no longer needed.

This might sound a little ‘Big Brother-esque’ on paper, but Google Now manages to present the information it interprets in a very user-friendly and unobtrusive way. Rather than feeling like an invasion of privacy, it feels more like an essential addition to the modern mobile experience.

Nice house

It's been a while since I've looked through Dezeen for some nice architecture, but I do like this Japanese house, especially the bathroom on the top that has an unusual outlook.  (I would be nervous using it during a summer storm though.)  Here it is:

Banks discussed

The LIBOR scandal: The rotten heart of finance | The Economist

The Economist considers that that LIBOR scandal is a very serious matter, with international implications.

A libertarian inclined free market economist from Melbourne, who repeatedly at his blog notes that he doesn't watch the ABC and spends all of his time lately promoting political stuff (and cherry picked graphs with inadequate explanation) of benefit to the Coalition, taking his cue from one bit of Wall Street Journal commentary says (my paraphrase) "oh pooh, this is all boring and about nothing important."   I wonder if he has read another piece from the WSJ which seems to me to argue "of course the banks may have been manipulating this for profit, and we need to fix the system and move on because we just can't afford massive litigation about this."

Who to believe...?

NASA gets dramatic

The New York Times mentioned this NASA video as being slick and popular on Youtube, and a cut above their usual bland stuff.   All quite true.  And it does seems a very optimistic way to try to land a rover on Mars next month: