The Medium is the message

I've been forgetting to recommend the documentary series on SBS that was started last Monday - Derren Brown Investigates.  I am unfamiliar with Brown, but he appears to be a well known illusionist in England who specialises in faking psychic abilities.

This first episode was devoted to his following around a medium in Liverpool -  Joe Power - a middle aged man who seems to have a reasonable business at the local level in giving private readings and the occasional group show in smallish venues.

It was all pretty fascinating, as Derren dealt with the issue of whether Power was a fake or not in a polite but insistent way.   The show contained a great summary in the middle of the various techniques used in "cold readings". 

As the flakiness of Power became clearer and clearer through the show,  I almost started to feel sorry for him for not being bright enough to not put himself at risk of exposure.   You have to watch to the very last to find out the explanation as to how Power did his apparently successful reading at the start of the show.  (OK, there is no 100% proof against him; just an obvious way that he could have obtained the information.)

You can still see it on SBS on Demand for another week or so, if this is of interest, but the whole thing is also on Youtube.

The show also reminded of John Edward, who has obviously made a squillion from his mediumship shows, and how he is obviously open to the charge that he uses "cold reading" techniques, yet similarly seems to occasionally pull surprisingly relevant detail out of the air.

Given that he is such a "rich" target, and that his show obviously has so many people involved in its production, it is a wonder that there has never been anyone associated with it who has (to my knowledge) come out with explanations of how he has sometimes had convincing sounding "hits" on his TV or stage shows.

I remember reading somewhere that his Australian tours produced some pretty unconvincing shows.  I think he even claimed the problem was he often couldn't fully understand spirits with Australian accents! 

But as far as mediums go, I do find him a bit unusually likeable in demeanour.   Joe Power seemed a bit of a sad, arrogant type who lived alone. 

Re-visiting Titus-Bode

Spacewatch: The Titius-Bode Law | Science | The Guardian

I haven't thought about the Titus-Bode law for some time, but the above post gives a good summary of it:

Nasa's Dawn probe has now left Vesta, its ion thrusters accelerating it gently towards the dwarf planet Ceres. It was back on the first day of the 19th century that Ceres became the first object to be discovered in what we now know as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

That something was orbiting in that gap was suspected because of a numerical curiosity noticed a few years before. Known as the Titius-Bode Law, it begins with the sequence 0, 3, 6, 12 etc, where each number after the 3 is double its predecessor Add 4 to each and divide by 10 to arrive at 0.4, 0.7, 1.0, 1.6, 2.8, 5.2, 10.0, etc. To within 5% or so, these correspond with the distances of the known planets at the time when expressed in astronomical units (AU), the unit of the Earth's average distance from the Sun. Mars sits at almost 1.6AU and Jupiter at 5.2AU, but nothing was known at 2.8AU. Belief in the law was boosted, though, when Uranus was discovered in 1781 very close to the next-predicted distance of 19.6AU.

Ceres fitted the 2.8AU slot almost exactly and when other bodies began to be found at similar distances the idea grew that these are the debris from a single shattered planet. We now realise that Jupiter's powerful gravity has never allowed the material there to coalesce into a single object. Whether the Titius-Bode Law is anything more than a coincidence is still debated, but its prediction of 38.8AU fails for the outermost planet, Neptune, which orbits at close to 30AU.

For a co-incidence, it seems a fairly curious one.  If God, or the alien solar system builders, were trying to tell humans something, it turned out to be just a touch too subtle.  Or maybe, now that I think about it, along the lines of 2001 A Space Odyssey, is the missing planet spot where Neptune should be where humans are expected to go to see what's waiting for us there?   Has someone else suggested this before?  (My vague hopes of having an important original thought continue unabated.)

Southern ice

unknowispeaksense has an excellent post explaining that what's going on in Antarctic sea ice is not inconsistent with AGW.  

Antarctica was never expected to react in the same way to AGW as the Arctic.  Fake skeptics need to be reminded of that, even though they will ignore it again within the next 10 minutes.  They have short attention spans.

How's that slushy pole going?

Like this:

Improbable sounding reason for going to the Moon

 Build a supercomputer on the moon

NASA currently controls its deep space missions through a network of huge satellite dishes in California, Spain and Australia known as the Deep Space Network (DSN). Even the Voyager 1 probe relies on these channels to beam data back to Earth as it careers away into space. 

But traffic on the network is growing fast, at a rate that the current set-up can't handle. Two new dishes are being built in Australia at the moment to cope with the extra data, but a researcher from University of Southern California has proposed a slightly more radical solution to the problem. 

In a presentation to the AIAA Space conference in Pasadena, California, last Thursday, Ouliang Chang suggested that one way to ease the strain would be to build a supercomputer and accompanying radio dishes on the moon. This lunar supercomputer would not only ease the load on terrestrial mission control infrastructure, it would also provide computational power for the "first phase of lunar industrial and settlement development".

Chang suggests that a lunar supercomputer ought to be built on the far side of the moon, set in a deep crater near a pole. This would protect it somewhat from the moon's extreme temperature swings, and might let it tap polar water ice for cooling.

 Well, I have suggested before that the Moon be used as a biological and information lifeboat for the Earth, so I guess the supercomputer could fulfil part of that task. 

The Gaffe-tastic Mr Romney

I didn't really think much about Mr Romney before this election campaign.  As a moderate Republican governor who reformed health care and seemed to say the right things about climate change, I thought he might be OK in a head to head with a President who has, basically, had to learn on the job.

But really, who knew he could be so incredibly gaffe-tastic?  Not just when talking to the media (dissing England, sounding silly on Russia, jumping in too early on Muslim ) but put him behind closed doors and what the insults to half the US population fly.

There's so much commentary on how stupid his comments make him sound, it's hard to pick a favourite.  David Brooks in the NYT with "Thurston Howell Romney" was pretty good.  His concluding paragraphs are generous:

 Sure, there are some government programs that cultivate patterns of dependency in some people. I’d put federal disability payments and unemployment insurance in this category. But, as a description of America today, Romney’s comment is a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney.

Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?

And I guess this is consistent with a piece in Bloomberg yesterday.  The problem might not be Romney per se, but the way his Party has become entrenched in simplistic ideology to the extent they have stopped making sense and don't care about things like (as Bill Clinton said) arithmetic or (as I say) other evidence on something like climate change:

Most of Romney's troubles stem from his inability to shed a broad range of toxic Republican dogmas. The rhetorical and policy workarounds required for him to be both a loyal Republican and a viable candidate for the presidency have stretched him thin and pretzelly.

Why is Romney unable to discuss health care policy -- his most significant government success -- with any coherence or conviction? Because Republicans told their base that Obamacare was the devil's spawn and Romney (who originated the role of the devil in this theater of the absurd) must maintain the fiction.

Why is the most salient aspect of Romney's budget the gaping hole at its center? Because contemporary Republicans like to play fantasy league politics, in which vast swaths of government are magically excised by a legion of Randian Harry Potters. Voters, however, lack a similar imagination. If they saw real numbers signifying real cuts, they would punish Romney. So the numbers stay hidden and Romney's rhetoric and budget documents appear untrustworthy.

Why must Romney, a multimillionaire, push for highly unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy in an era of guilded inequality? Because his base demands it. If such cuts are bad economics (see the Bush administration, 2001-2009), bad fiscal policy (ditto) and unpopular with the broad electorate, so what? The Republican nominee must support tax cuts for the wealthiest -- no matter how much it costs him in credibility or votes.

The list goes on and on. Indeed, Romney's ill-fated foreign policy attack this week may be derived from the same impulse to appease the fantasies that have taken root in the Republican base, which clings to its belief that Obama is anti-American and vaguely in cahoots with terrorists (though presumably not the ones he has had assassinated).

Romney was a fairly successful governor who made a valuable breakthrough in an extremely complex policy arena: health care. His particular brand of business success would probably not be an unmitigated political boon under any circumstances. But any positive political effects have been buried amid Republican protests that the very wealthiest require additional tax breaks and the poorest need more "skin in the game."

But then again, maybe it is Romney after all.

Eating London rat

BBC News - Cane rat meat 'sold to public' in Ridley Road Market

Well, I didn't expect this.  There's quite a problem with illegal meats being sold in London: 

Cane rats and "shocking" quantities of illegal and "potentially unsafe" meat have been sold to the public in east London, a BBC London undercover investigation has found.

Secret filming in one of the capital's busiest food markets has revealed butchers and food stores prepared to sell large quantities of meat that breaks food safety laws. 

West African and environmental health officer sources told the BBC the Ridley Road Market, in Dalston, was a known hotbed of illicit meat activity, including sales of illegal "smokies", a delicacy made by charring sheep or goat with a blow torch.

 What's this about "smokies"?  The background is even stranger than eating a cane rat:

The practice of creating "smokies" is outlawed under UK and European food laws amid fears about public safety and animal welfare. 

It has also been linked to mafia-style gangs in Wales who steal sheep and goats, slaughtering them in unlicensed abattoirs. 

Dr Yunes Teinaz, a chartered environmental health practitioner, said: "Behind the underground trade in smokies are criminals who don't observe the law and are just after financial gain.

Gosh.  Why hasn't Scorsese  made a mafia movie about the sheep stealing (and burning) gangs of Wales? 

They grow up so fast...

Taken this morning, when possum and child suddenly re-appeared:

Neighbourhood Flying Foxes

For a year or more, at the edge of a golf course in my local area, a fairly large flying fox colony has taken up residence in some trees which are clearly visible from a road I drive along nearly every day.

I've been meaning to tax some photos, which I finally got around to doing on Sunday.  First a few zooming in on the colony:

And now a short bit of video:

One thing I don't understand about flying foxes is this:  they are black winged and dark furred, yet they are happy to roost in these trees which don't provide shade.  In Brisbane, if I wore a black leather coat and hung in the sun for the entire daylight hours, I would expect to be way too hot for about 90% of the year.   Why don't these animals find shade? 

I see from a bit of Googling this book section about their thermoregulation (and other matters):

Somewhat interesting, but instead of all that wing fanning and (according to another website, body licking) that they do to keep cool, why not just find more shade?

Modern weapons woes

Microwave weapons: Wasted energy : Nature News & Comment

This article in Nature, of all places, notes how the US has been looking into High Powered Microwave weapons for some time (including EMP "e-bombs") but apparently with limited success.

That seems a pity.  I would have assumed that the e-bombs to fit inside a cruise missile would be working well by now.   

Commentary as approved and disapproved by me

I liked William Saletan's piece explaining to Muslims that the internet means there are always going to idiots seeking to bait them into rioting, and doing so only satisfies the provocateurs. 

Waleed Aly was pretty good in The Age this morning too, with a very similar line.

But not good enough for Andrew Bolt:

That’s the usual Aly stuff. Unrepresentative minority. Understand the anger. See what you’ve done to provoke it. Let’s not question the faith itself. Yada yada yada.

I think this is a completely unfair reading of the Aly piece, but Andrew has to throw some meat to his readers. 

The wingnutty side of the Right is upset that this particular provocateur is questioned with much publicity about a technical way in which he may have broken the law.  Big deal.  As I noted before, the guy has possibly put the lives of a bunch of naive actors at risk too, and it would seem the LA sheriffs let him hide his own identity, which was kind of them.  I find it extremely hard to be upset with this.

As to the other Right wing commentary that is blaming all of this on Obama for being too soft on Islam, it was vaguely encouraging to read that George Will  rejected such simplistic claims over the weekend, in response to a Romney adviser's claim that a President Romney would have prevented this:

 Referring to the unrest over the last week, Williamson said, "[t]here's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation."

"Is there?" Tapper asked Will.

“No,” Will told Tapper. “The great superstition of American politics concerns presidential power, and during a presidential year that reaches an apogee and it becomes national narcissism. Everything that happens anywhere in the world, we caused or we could cure with a tweak of presidential rhetoric.”

But Will was also critical of the White House, noting that Jay Carney, Obama's press secretary, also misunderstood the situation in the Middle East when he said the riots weren't about U.S. policy, but an anti-Islam video. 

"Actually, they're about neither," Will said. "If the video hadn't been the pretext, another one would have been found."

He added: “There are sectarian tribal civil wars raging across the region that we neither understand nor can measurably mitigate."

 Sounds about right to me.  Just as anyone who thought Obama could magically resolve all of Muslim World's problem by simply being nicer than George W was surely deluded,  the idea of a President Romney equally being able to settle everything down in the Middle East by talking, um, tougher, is equally stupid.

You do better, then...

Crying out for a speech bubble

Unhelpful

Slate has a report on tracking down the creator of the stupid video which has led to riots in the Middle East. 

The worrying part of the video for the actors involved is how it appears the most offensive lines were dubbed over their actual taped lines later.  As someone in the comments thread at Slate says, can't these actors sue this guy for putting their lives at risk?

If idiots want to put American lives at risk, I wish they would at least do it via their putting own face to their material and take the consequences personally.

Downton discussed

Since I never got around to watching Downton Abbey (series 1 or 2), I won't bother embedding the David Mitchell gripe about what happened to show.  It did amuse me, though.  I wonder if he right when he says the second series went nuts.

As found on coffee tables in Poland

Exorcism boom in Poland sees magazine launch – The Express Tribune

WARSAW: With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests here have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world’s first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.

“The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.

 Gee.  I wonder if it's available on Zinio for iPad yet?  More from the article:

According to both exorcists, depictions of demonic possession in horror films are largely accurate.

“It manifests itself in the form of screams, shouting, anger, rage – threats are common,” Posacki said.
“Manifestation in the form or levitation is less common, but does occur and we must speak about it — I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” he added.

With its 62-page first issue including articles titled “New Age — the spiritual vacuum cleaner” and “Satan is real”, the Egzorcysta monthly with a print-run of 15,000 by the Polwen publishers is selling for 10 zloty (2.34 euros, 3.10 dollars) per copy.

My personal views on exorcism are tentative and cautious, but I will leave the explanation for another day.  I'm still amused that there should be a magazine devoted to it.

Talking about the Arctic Ice

Ice loss shifts Arctic cycles : Nature News

 A good article here about the loss of Arctic ice.  The uncertainties in the modelling are noted:

Computer models that simulate how the ice will respond to a warming climate project that the Arctic will be seasonally ‘ice free’ (definitions of this vary) some time between 2040 and the end of the century. But the observed downward trend in sea-ice cover suggests that summer sea ice could disappear completely as early as 2030, something that none of the models used for the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes close to forecasting¹.

“There’s a tremendous spread between observations and model projections,” says Serreze. “It might be that natural variability is larger than assumed, or perhaps models don’t get the change in ice thickness right.” Uncertainty also remains over the strength of various natural ‘feedbacks’. For example, an exposed ocean is darker than an ice-covered surface and so absorbs more solar heat, causing yet more warming and melting.

A lack of fine detail about circulation patterns in the Arctic Ocean could also be throwing off the models. For example, a survey carried out in 2008 revealed 20 formerly unobserved eddies, each some 15 to 20 kilometres in diameter, in waters north of Canada. “Whether these are new features, and what role they might play for ocean-mixing processes, we don’t know yet,” says Yves Gratton, an oceanographer and Arctic researcher at the National Institute of Scientific Research in Montreal, Canada.

 Ice loss could also accelerate if the ice pack’s underlying waters warm up. Unlike in most of the world’s oceans, the coldest water in the Arctic, at −1 °C to −2 °C, is at the surface; below a depth of 200–300 metres, saltier and warmer water of about 1 °C flows in from the Atlantic. The cold surface layer — called the halocline — isolates the sea ice from the warmer water below.

But the halocline is vulnerable to warming from above, says Henning Bauch, a marine geologist at the GEOMAR research centre in Kiel, Germany. A thinning halocline — something that has not yet been observed — would not only jeopardize the sea ice but could also melt the carbon-rich permafrost beneath shallow coastal waters², releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

 The article also notes that it may well mean a lot of snow this winter in the US or Europe.

This and that

Really interesting stuff seems a bit hard to find lately, so I'm going for a handful of moderately interesting things today:

*   Bryan Appleyard had an interview with poor old Clive James in August which I missed (being in the Sunday Times and all), but it is available via Appleyard's website.

Clive says (amongst various other health problems) that he had a complete stoppage of the waterworks.  How often does that happen to men who keep putting off prostate operations, I wonder.   Sounds extremely unpleasant, but surely you have plenty of warning?

Everyone seems to like his "Cultural Amnesia" book.   Maybe I should try it?

*  Can't say I know much about the Texas "bone wars" of the 19th century.  Physorg has an article about some historical letters which shed a bit of light on the intrigue, described as follows::

Jacobs describes the late 1800s as a period of intense fossil collecting. The Bone Wars were financed and driven by Cope and his archenemy, Othniel Charles Marsh. The two were giants of paleontology whose public feud brought the discovery of dinosaur fossils to the forefront of the American psyche.

Cope, from Philadelphia, and Marsh, from Yale University, began their scientific quests as a friendly endeavor to discover fossils. They each prospected the American frontier and also hired collectors to supply them with specimens. Cope and Marsh identified and named hundreds of discoveries, publishing their results in scientific journals. Over the course of nearly three decades, however, their competition evolved into a costly, self-destructive, vicious all-out war to see who could outdo the other. Despite their aggressive and sometimes unethical tactics to outwit one another and steal each other's hired collectors, Cope and Marsh made major contributions to the field of paleontology, Jacobs said.

 There's no doubt a book out there somewhere about this.

*   In climate change news, Murray Salby last year got some notoriety by giving a lecture to a skeptic friendly crowd (most of whom, I am sure, could not really make head nor tail of the detail of his argument) about how he had shown that CO2 had little to do with increasing temperatures.  He promised a paper was going to be published about it, but it has not appeared.  From what I can gather, a paper just published from some other scientists runs pretty much the same argument.  Real Climate looks at it and finds the obvious flaws (similar to those that had been pointed out after Salby outlined his idea last year.)

Back to the drawing board, skeptics.

*  The transparently misleading spin put on climate change by The Australian continues, with a subheading to a report about Kurt Lambeck winning a prize for his work in the field as follows:

CLIMATE change moves at a glacial pace, according to an Australian researcher whose work has been recognised with one of the world's richest science prizes.

 Given that Lambeck has had opinion pieces saying things like this:

The independent messages from the four academies and the geological society are consistent and urgent....

Recognising that the consequences of climate change are potentially global, serious and irreversible on human time scales, the Australian Academy of Science has published such an assessment, The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers.

I expect he might be a tad annoyed at the spin put on his cautious words about uncertainties regarding the future rate of sea level rises.

Krugman notes

Paul Krugman has a nice, clear writing style, doesn't he?   I note this passage today regarding Republicans not making sense:

Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs! 

This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.

What about the argument, which I hear all the time, that Mr. Obama should have fixed the economy long ago? The claim goes like this: during his first two years in office Mr. Obama had a majority in Congress that would have let him do anything he wanted, so he’s had his chance.

The short answer is, you’ve got to be kidding.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

It's all connected

Climate extremes and climate change: The Russian heat wave and other climate extremes of 2010

This recent paper by Trenberth and Fasullo notes the combination of ENSO and AGW led to high sea surface temperatures which led to floods and heat waves, at least in part.   The abstract provides more detail:

Natural variability, especially ENSO, and global warming from human influences together resulted in very high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in several places that played a vital role in subsequent developments. Record high SSTs in the Northern Indian Ocean in May 2010, the Gulf of Mexico in August 2010, the Caribbean in September 2010, and north of Australia in December 2010 provided a source of unusually abundant atmospheric moisture for nearby monsoon rains and flooding in Pakistan, Colombia, and Queensland. The resulting anomalous diabatic heating in the northern Indian and tropical Atlantic Oceans altered the atmospheric circulation by forcing quasi-stationary Rossby waves and altering monsoons. The anomalous monsoonal circulations had direct links to higher latitudes: from Southeast Asia to southern Russia, and from Colombia to Brazil. Strong convection in the tropical Atlantic in northern summer 2010 was associated with a Rossby wave train that extended into Europe creating anomalous cyclonic conditions over the Mediterranean area while normal anticyclonic conditions shifted downstream where they likely interacted with an anomalously strong monsoon circulation, helping to support the persistent atmospheric anticyclonic regime over Russia. This set the stage for the “blocking” anticyclone and associated Russian heat wave and wild fires.

 But nonetheless, the last line is:

Attribution is limited by shortcomings in models in replicating monsoons, teleconnections and blocking. 

The expectation is that 2013 will be hot.  It will be "interesting" to see what knock on effects it has for the climate.