For those desperately missing possum photos…

Testing still....

The Secret of Our Non-Success - NYTimes.com
More testing of blog entries from android tablet....

A test from an android tablet

Here we go:

Away to climb a mountain of books

Here's some of the backlog of books I've got waiting to be read, by description if not title:
a Charles Sheffield science fiction novel; the first volume of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene; three Graham Greene novels (I'll have to space them out, as too much "Greeneland" in one go is almost certainly depressing); "The First Blitz" about Zepplin bombing raids in WW1;  "The Third Man Factor" about the experience people in crisis or isolation often have of some other presence;  a book from the 1960's by some German author about religion in ancient Israel; "Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis; a memoir about growing up in Ireland in the 50's and 60's; "Johnno" by David Malouf (actually, I haven't spotted that for a while, but it will turn up somewhere); "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" by Simon Winchester; an early Michael Crichton medical thriller I had never heard of until my wife found it;  two books of World War 2 memoirs (one about the air force, the other POW experiences); and a James Glieck book about information.

And I haven't even mentioned the 3 or 4 I have somewhere on the iPad (two about paranormal stuff, and one fairly academic tome about Thugee in India).

Most of these have come from second hand book purchases or were free downloads.

I need to take a couple of weeks off from blogging, and start reading of an evening instead.

I should do something stupid for Dodopathy again too.  

Remember to come back!

The uncertain Abbott

It was interesting to read yesterday that Tony Abbott, in letters to BA Santamaria before he moved into politics, did not really seem clear about the side in which he should seek a home:

But which of the major parties was the more suitable?

Labor's previous 30 years of hostility to Santamaria weighed against it but Abbott wrote, "our roots and the origins of our political culture are there". But if the ALP was not "dominated" by Santamaria-style ideas, it would succumb to "the grip of the Left or of soulless pragmatists". This was intolerable.

However, the Liberal Party was just as problematic. It was "without soul, direction or inspiring leadership", while its members were divided between "surviving trendies and the more or less simple-minded advocates of the free market".

The Liberal Party's mixture of "hand-wringing indecision or inappropriate economic Ramboism and perhaps their lack of political professionalism" struck Abbott as a fatal combination.

The choice on offer was bleak. "To join either existing party involves holding one's nose," he wrote. "Either way would upset some. But to do nothing dooms us to extinction." For a while, the choice for Abbott seemed to be the ALP. The NSW Labor government led by right-wing stalwart Barrie Unsworth was due to fight an election in March 1988 and this was surely "a window of opportunity" to be exploited.

In a careful but forceful reply, Santamaria rejected the suggestion of the NCC "going back to our Labor origins in an organised way, as our central strategy".

Santamaria noted that Catholics had largely run the NSW ALP since the 1950s but that the only result of Catholic influence in Labor governments, both in NSW and federally, had been "jobs for the boys".

Santamaria also was dismissive of "the reptilian Liberals", who lacked the capacity to win or wield power.

So perhaps Abbott was not so wrong after all. Santamaria did not doubt that, in the person of young Tony, there was an opportunity for "a real apostolate in Labor ranks".

I find the "the Party no longer knows what it stands for" analysis of either Labor or Liberals rather boring, and this story of Abbott's uncertainty as to where to jump just goes to confirm how the lines between both were pretty blurred since the 1980's.

I also am reminded that Bob Carr had a very clever come back at Lindsay Tanner's "Labor has lost its purpose" burst of publicity a few weeks ago.  He's what Bob noted on 7.30:

I just think there've been so many books on the subject "What's wrong with Labor?," it's become like other - it's just become another genre, it's like vampire fiction. I've dug out a quote because I knew you were going to raise Lindsay's book with me. The earliest book written analysing the experience of Labor in government is called How Labor Governs, by Vere Gordon Childe. It came out in 1923. And here's one sentence from it: quote: "The Labor Party, starting with a band of inspired socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use that power when attained except for the profit of individuals," unquote. Now, this line of indictment has been used against every Labor government, against Ben Chifley's government, against John Curtin's, against Gough Whitlam's, against Hawke and Keating, until years after the government has passed, it's seen as being a champion of Labor values. The tradition of writing books lamenting the decline of real Labor is almost as old as the party itself.

 Clever Carr.

Choice at whose cost?

New singers, old songs: alcohol bans in Aboriginal communities

Here's an interesting article by a researcher in the area about the Liberal governments in Queensland and the NT plans to ease restrictions on alcohol in aboriginal communities.  

The issue is complicated, and but the writer thinks there is much danger in relaxing the restrictions.  I wasn't aware of this:

Another favoured policy response has been to urge remote communities to establish licensed clubs (as the Bjelke-Petersen government did in Cape York in the 1980s), in the belief that communities with clubs will export fewer drinkers to towns. The limited evidence available to test this proposition does not support it, but its plausibility to urban voters is obvious. The real problem for NT governments, however, has been that most communities have repeatedly made it clear that they do not want clubs. Out of more than 100 Aboriginal communities in the NT, just seven currently operate licensed clubs, and one has a licensed store. All of these are located in the Top End.

A few other communities have run clubs in the past, only to abandon them as too much trouble. In two or three other communities, discussions are currently under way that may or may not lead to those communities applying to the NT Licensing Commission for club licenses.

I think the Liberal Party's approach on this is quite cynical, and more about capturing the aboriginal vote than caring about the cost.

A simulating idea

Is it real? Physicists propose method to determine if the universe is a simulation

The report contains the abstract, which I think is (sort of) clear:

Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

Update:  here's a more detailed explanation, from the arXiv blog.

Still growing up...

A photo this morning of mother and child, who looks like a teenage possum now:

Romney tax still does not work...

The 6 Studies Paul Ryan Cited Prove Mitt Romney's Tax Plan Is Impossible - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic

Isn't it a bit puzzling that all Romney and Ryan do is keep repeating that their tax plan can work, and it would seem enough swinging voters are starting to believe them?   Mind you, unless voters go reading elsewhere, all they are getting in the debates seems to be "your plan can't work mathematically" versus "yes it can".

But as the article explains above, the main factor for arguing that maybe Romney's plan can work would be by factoring in strong growth.   Yet here is what the (key defender) Rosen paper (you can find it via the main link) actually says on what can be expected regarding growth (click on it to make it bigger):

That's it?    "No one knows for sure".    And all it seems that Rosen was out to show was that Romney's claim (of being able to knock out enough deductions in a way that won't hurt the middle class yet reduce everyone's tax) was not mathematically impossible.

Let's put it this way:  the best Romney and Ryan can really claim is - we have someone who says our plan might not be impossible - but even then, he doesn't know for sure.

(And, by the way, Rosen's assessment is strongly criticised as flawed for other assumptions too.)

Backing that Rosen's "no one knows for sure" statement was the recent release of a Congressional research paper concluding there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth at all.   This article notes that as early as late 1980's, Reagan's own economics adviser had acknowledged academically that he had no evidence that cuts to personal income tax had had any effect on growth.  I like the way the last mentioned article ends:

At some point, when observed reality keeps differing from predicted reality, it makes sense to examine your predictions. That is not what’s happening. This particular Republican argument continues to rest on a prediction—and because the test of any prediction lies somewhere out there in the awesome future, it can never be refuted. Lower income taxes and the economy will grow: It’s a unicorn of an idea, always feeding in the next meadow.

And if you want more loads of links to economists who have said there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth (or, at the very least, you have to look at what tax cuts achieved in the context of everything else that was going on economically at the time) have a look at this lengthy post at MediaMatters. 

There seems no doubt to me at all that the Republican's economic policy should simply be re-titled "The Return of Voodoo Economics". 

I am no economist, but I can read.   I just can't see how the criticisms of the Romney/Ryan tax plan are wrong.  American voters need to read a bit more, too.

Primitive mating rituals*

The Swingers’ Guide To Islam | The Global Mail

This is really a very surprising article on a way to get ahead in Java.  The key point is to be found in the middle of the second paragraph:

 Like the of thousands of pilgrims that have turned up this night to Gunung Kemukus, Sarimah is here to seek her fortune. According to local belief, the ritual here can guarantee success in business, usually for those at or near the bottom of the ladder – bus drivers, rice farmers, market stall traders and the like. Pilgrims mostly come from Indonesia’s Javanese-speaking core, but some travel days across the massive archipelago to get here.

But the ritual needs to be done right. First, prayers and offerings must be made at the grave of Pangeran Samodro and Nyai Ontrowulan. At some stage, pilgrims must wash themselves at either one or two of the sacred springs on the hill. Then they must find a sex partner who meets two conditions. First, your mate for the night must be of the opposite sex; and second, they cannot be your spouse. Many people believe the ritual only works if you return at seven consecutive, 35-day intervals, either the night before Friday intersects with Pon, or when it crosses with another Javanese day, Kliwon.

Read the whole thing; if you are like me, you had no idea that animism/Islam/Hindu/whatever mix had such practices.

*  from, if I recall correctly, the failed seduction scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Still writing

Paul Johnson’s Darwin, Portrait of a Genius: Conservatives smear Darwin by blaming him for Holocaust. - Slate Magazine

I was only talking about Paul Johnson's work and life on another site last night.  Well into his 80's now, I was aware that he was still writing, but his recent books don't seem to attract much attention, and I haven't read him for many years.   I really think his reputation suffered somewhat from the disclosure of his long standing affair near the end of the 1990's, after he had spent years being critical of the Royal family for not sticking to their marriages. 

Anyway, this Slate review says his latest book, on Charles Darwin, is really quite good, until it starts (allegedly) blaming his work on for most of the ills of the 20th century.

In fact, if I recall correctly, early in his book Modern Times, he partially blamed the Theory of Relativity as promoting belief in moral relativity in 20th century society, or at least the Left-ist side of it.

So, yes; Paul is usually very happy to point the finger at science as having detrimental effects on society.   Mind you, Bryan Appleyard's book Understanding the Present, which I enjoyed a lot, could be said to have a similar thesis, but goes way back further into the matter of the development of science since the enlightenment.  Appleyard's take on the matter is more convincing, I expect.

Tiny message from space

CubeSats launched from the space station

Phys.org alerts me to the fact that 3 tiny Japanese cube satellites, looking for all of the world like escapees from a recent Dr Who episode, were recently released from the International Space Station.  Here's a photo:

They seem more of a novelty device than anything else, but one of them is full of LED's which will flash a simple morse code message which should be visible with binoculars, or perhaps the naked eye.   The story links to this Japanese site which shows one of them in more detail.

I'm not exactly sure how to check when they will be visible from Australia.  Will they just stay close to the ISS?

I'm surprised that LCDs from a small cube in orbit might be visible with the naked eye.  I will go looking for more information about sightings.  I can't see anything from Google blog search yet.

Where's the nerdy satellite watching community when you need them?

No green light

HPV vaccination does not lead to an increase in sex

A study in England found this amongst a group of teenage girls with a mean age of 17.

I suppose it is consistent with other, somewhat counter-intuitive, facts regarding how teenagers approach sex; such as the extremely open and detailed sex education in Holland not leading to earlier commencement of sex and teenage pregnancy compared to other countries. The issue is a bit complicated, though.

Space news Part 2

Testing Mars and Moon soil for sheltering astronauts from radiation

About time they got around to testing simulated Moon and Mars dirt for its radiation protection capacities.

The fact is, the long term living there is going to be underground.   We should know how deep the first astronauts will have to bury themselves.

I'm impressed...

BBC News - Sarah Brightman to travel to space station

This will be the first truly well known celebrity to become a space tourist, and I am sure her trip will attract a lot of attention.

Quite a surprise...

Offensive no matter male or female

How much is a man's virginity worth?

This is just a really weird story of a deeply offensive documentary.  

How it's (sometimes) made

Birth of ball lightning

I found this via a climate change site, or all places.  It sounds like an interesting paper on the still not well understood phenomena of ball lighting.  The abstract:

 Many observations of ball lightning report a ball of light, about 10 cm in diameter, moving at about walking speed, lasting up to 20 s and frequently existing inside of houses and even aeroplanes. The present paper reports detailed observations of the initiation or birth of ball lightning. In two cases, navigation crew of aircraft saw ball lightning form at the windscreen inside the cockpit of their planes. In the first case, the ball lightning occurred during a thunderstorm, with much lightning activity outside of the plane. In the second case, large “horns” of electrical corona were seen outside of the plane at the surface of the radome, just prior to the formation of the ball lightning. A third case reports ball lightning formed inside of a house, during a thunderstorm, at a closed glass window. It is proposed, based on two-dimensional calculations of electron and ion transport, that ball lightning in these cases is driven and formed by atmospheric ions impinging and collecting on the insulating surface of the glass or Perspex windows. This surface charge can produce electric fields inside of the cockpit or room sufficient to sustain an electric discharge. Charges of opposite sign to those outside of the window accumulate on the inside surface of the glass, leaving a ball of net charge moving inside of the cockpit or room to produce a pulsed discharge on a microsecond time scale.

Ruining a good story

DNA has a 521-year half-life : Nature News

Quite an interesting story on working out exactly how quickly DNA degrades:

Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process.

But palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions including a temperature of 13.1 ºC. The findings are published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B¹.

By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.

“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.

 I guess mammoths and Tasmanian tigers are still in with a chance, though.

Foreign policy Mitt

Mitt Romney foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute was the most dishonest one he has delivered yet. - Slate Magazine

Fred Kaplan really serves up the criticism of Romney for his recent speech on foreign policy.

I certainly get the feeling that Romney is way, way too simplisitic and Tea Party populist in what he will say on foreign policy.   Whether that translates into action if he were president is another matter - in the same way that many Democrats are disappointed that Obama went way more "gung ho" on military matters as president that his earlier rhetoric might have indicated.

But that's the worry with Romney - a former moderate Republican who has had to swing Tea Party right to get the nomination, and now is making (some) vague swings a bit back towards the middle (re his tax promises), but all without detail.   Where he would end up as president seems to be anyone's guess.

Slipper slipping away

It suited the Right to act appalled at the "misogyny" of Peter Slippers' stupid and deeply embarrassing text messages to a staffer, and of course, it was not practically possible for Lefty politicians to defend the texts as acceptable.

But in truth, there is quite a lot of puffed up fakery in this:   as if there aren't thousands of things said every year by male (and female) politicians of a lewd, crude or ribald nature which would be deeply embarrassing if revealed to the public or other politicians. 

As far as I am concerned, the text message causing the most outrage is not an example of misogyny (a hatred of women) per se:  seriously, how often have drunk young women in a ribald mood talked to each other about how they think men's bits are not inherently attractive to them, and do we call them men haters?

However, there is also no doubt that the whole series of texts between Slipper and Ashby do show a character of great immaturity and poor judgement. It reminds me most of the Troy Buswell chair sniffing incident.  Even if he had done the act to an audience of men only after the woman concerned had left the room, surely people hearing it would think "what sort of mental 15 year old have we got doing this job?" 

Given Ashby's frequent ribald responses to Slipper's text, and his entire highly suspect and self serving way he has handled the matter, I think it's a very hard call to say whether it should be found to be sexual harassment by Slipper.   Certainly, if it is, Ashby deserves virtually nothing in compensation.

But regardless of the outcome, Slipper's character as exposed by the texts did render him as too embarrassingly immature a figure to be Speaker in the long run.   I think Labor would have moved to encourage him to resign anyway, but caught yesterday by Abbott's early move, they were in a difficult situation.

At least Abbot got to also shoot himself in the foot by, stupidly, using a similar refrain as Alan Jones.  What poor taste political judgement was that?   The Right in Australian politics at the moment is, to a large extent, very embarrassing in the way it is treating women politicians in Labor.