Big solar in a spot of bother

BBC News - Solar storm as desert plan to power Europe falters

Desertec was set up in 2009 with a projected budget of 400bn euros to tap the enormous potential of solar and other renewables in North Africa. 

The hope was that by 2050, around 125 gigawatts of electric power could be generated. This would meet all the local needs and also allow huge amounts of power to be exported to Europe via high-voltage direct current cables under the Mediterranean sea. 

But three years later, the project has little to show for its efforts. Two large industrial partners, Siemens and Bosch, have decided they will no longer be part of the initiative. 

Recently, one or two large scale Australian solar plans failed to get government backed funding too.  A balance account of that can be found at Climate Spectator.

I wonder:  when some solar thermal plants go on line overseas, will their (I hope) success make it easier to get ones funded here.

Eruption coming

Eruption fears rise at 'Mount Doom' › News in Science (ABC Science)

In the story, there is mention of a disaster which I'm not sure I've heard about before:

The 2797-metre mountain last erupted in 2007, sending a lahar - a fast-moving stream of mud and debris - down the mountain but causing no injuries.

In 1953, a massive lahar from the mountain caused New Zealand's worst rail disaster when it washed away a bridge at Tangiwai and a passenger train plunged into the Whangaehu River, claiming 151 lives.

 That's real disaster movie stuff, isn't it?

Money to be made here

Fast and furious: intensity is the key to health and fitness

From the above article, worth reading in full:

Low-volume maximal HIIT sessions may provide a compromise between the previous two protocols.

This strategy involves eight to ten one-minute bouts performed at maximal aerobic exercise capacity, interspersed with 60-75 seconds of light recovery, therefore offering significant time advantages, with a single session taking around 20 minutes.

Therefore its lower intensity (compared to supra-maximal HIIT) and shorter session duration (compared to aerobic HIIT) may make it suitable for sedentary or obese people, and those with existing metabolic conditions.

This form of HIIT has already been trialled successfully in type 2 diabetes patients, who demonstrated markedly improved blood-sugar control in just two weeks.

How low can you go?

We still don’t really know the minimum amount of exercise required to induce significant health and fitness benefits. But a recent study has cut down the exercise time even further, showing that just six ten-second all-out sprints, spread throughout a week can improve aerobic fitness and blood-sugar control.

Much of this sounds too good (at least for those of us who find exercising a bore) to be true.  Someone will write a book about this and make a lot of money.  

Stormy weekend

On Saturday morning I was at the Kelvin Grove outdoor markets, with wife and son, which is normally a very pleasant place to be.  (I really like the mixed university/apartment/retail area that has been created in the unfortunately named Kelvin Grove Urban Village.)

The weather bureau had been warning for a day or two that Saturday would have some big storms, but I don't think anyone (certainly not I) was expecting it to happen at 10.30 am.  That is an unusual time of day for a severe storm in Brisbane.

Anyway, although you could see the storm coming,  there wasn't all that much thunder until it started pouring down with strong winds, and we shot off into the safety of a charity second hand book store that runs inside some unleased retail shop every Saturday.   We couldn't see the street from there.

On re-emering into the outside world about an hour later (after watching a stormwater pipe suspended from the ceiling vibrating madly), we found the poor stall holders had lost many of their shade awnings and stock.  I didn't have a camera, but this photo (apparently from Quest Newspapers)  sums it up well:

Driving around town, as we had to that afternoon, it because clear that the storm had been at its worst in the inner city. 

Last night there followed about 4 hours of pretty much continual rain, lightning and thunder.   No damaging winds or hail, though.

That held off until this afternoon, when after some thunder throughout the morning, a serious amount of hail and wind struck around where I live.   This was the largest hail I have ever seen: "Gawd, I hope the windows don't break" size stuff.  In fact, my next door neighbout did have a couple of broken windows, as did some other houses when I drove around after the storm.  Here's our yard (not a clear shot, but hey the lightning and thunder was still going on.) There used to be some skylight material in that pergola roof where you can now just see shards:

And here's some of hail, picked up from the back door well after the peak:

The damage to the pergola was better than having some upstairs windows broken.  The storm happened at 5.35 pm, which meant the evening news did not really have much video in of the  damage. I think there must be some completely beaten up cars, and damaged houses, around the place in significant numbers.

Ghosts validated

Did St. Thomas Aquinas Believe in Ghosts? | Dominicana Blog

I found this blogpost via First Things.  It notes that St Thomas Aquinas, apart from allegedly having a couple of personal encounters with ghosts, did specifically endorse the idea of ghosts as souls who are allowed to appear to living humans.

I don't think I knew that...

Drought wars

Global drought may have changed less than thought | Environment | Science News

A new paper in Nature says that it seems that, globally, drought has not increased much, contrary to previous studies saying it has.  The problem is to do with how you assess drought.  The matter appears to remain controversial:

Sheffield and colleagues calculated global drought trends from 1950 to 2008 using both equations on multiple datasets. Notably, they found a much smaller change in drought using the Penman-Monteith equation. The estimated yearly drought increase was only half as severe as that derived from the Thornthwaite equation. The weather records invariably contain some errors, but Sheffield says those errors don’t alter the conclusion that the simpler model overestimates rises in global drying. 

The finding comes in stark opposition to the results of several recent studies. “It presented a somewhat different view of the drying trend for the last 60 years,” says Aiguo Dai, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, whose own research suggests that the two equations yield very little difference in drought estimates. Dai says the new study fails to consider trends in soil moisture and other variables. He also claims that the new study relies on outdated weather records and questionable radiation data. However, Sheffield and colleagues attribute the disagreement to inconsistencies in the weather data used by Dai and others.

“I think the jury’s still out on why those groups looking at similar metrics come to different conclusions,” says paleoclimatologist Kevin Anchukaitis of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who was not involved in either study.

More successful than I knew

Kickstarter: the crowdfunding site that wants to spark a creative revolution in the UK | Technology | The Guardian

It seems that crowdsourced funding for creative work has been more successful than I thought it would be:

Since the site launched in April 2009, more than 2.5 million people have helped to successfully back more than 30,000 creative projects. It has helped fund Oscar-nominated short films and put new products on the market. Earlier this year, the creators of a watch that can wirelessly connect to a smartphone raised more than $10m (£6m) on the site after being turned down by traditional investors. The singer Amanda Palmer raised $1.2m (£745,000) to record her album and tour; this week, the film director David Fincher reached his goal to fund part of an animated film. In October, a role-playing game developer raised nearly $4m (£2.5m) from more than 73,000 backers. The site estimates that around 10% of the films accepted into the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals this year were funded by Kickstarter.

Hyper about inflation

I don't claim to understand economics all that well:  but then again, it's a field in which the alleged experts  can't agree, particularly when it comes to predicting the future, so I shouldn't feel so bad about it.

One thing that I don't get in particular is the inflation argument.

Paul Krugman, amongst others, has been arguing for some time that the US could do with more inflation.  He says:

First, about inflation obsession: For at least three years, right-wing economists, pundits and politicians have been warning that runaway inflation is just around the corner, and they keep being wrong.

And indeed, sites full of right wing economists such as Catallaxy have been taking about inflation as a major concern, both now and last year.   (Sinclair Davidson appeared on Andrew Bolt more than a year ago to warn of the risk of stagflation for Australia.  It hasn't come to pass, even with the carbon tax.)

To take it to even greater extremes, aging science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle's reaction to the re-election of Obama (which he really didn't see coming) has been to start talking about hyperinflation and the wisdom of people stocking non perishable food and following his old survivalist guides written during the 80's before the end of the Cold War!   He usefully notes:

Interesting times. They can be made a bit less interesting if one has a large stock of non-perishable food acquired quietly and without drawing attention. You do not want your neighbors to believe you are hoarding. Hoarding is evil. Being prepared means protecting yourself from having the reputation of being a hoarder.

 I see from this 2010 story, about a silly video warning of hyperinflation, as well as other right wing obsessions, that it is a favourite topic for goldbugs.

Again, I don't know much about goldbugs, except for the fact that Jonova and her husband David Evans are well and truly in that category.  Apart from being quasi professional climate change denialists, it seems to be how they make their living.  

So - the credibility connections here aren't looking good.

And given England's dismal economic recovery, which Krugman puts down to them not taking his Keynesian line, who am I to doubt him on this issue too?   (Actually, I suspect he is a bit too hard line in his own direction, but overall, seems to me he certainly has it over the right wing economists at the moment.) 

I don't think I am going to bother with the canned food hoarding just yet.

More about Fukushima fish

Ocean still suffering from Fukushima fallout 

Nature reports:

Whether originating from plankton or sediment, the contamination is finding its way into the food chain. Bottom-dwelling fish in the Fukushima area show radioactivity levels above the limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram set by the Japanese government. Greenlings, for example, have been found to have levels as high as 25,000 becquerels per kilogram. But the contamination varies widely between species. Octopuses and squid seem to have escaped contamination, whereas other fish such as red snapper and sea bass are only sometimes found to be contaminated. Overall, the levels of caesium in fish and marine life seem to have begun dropping slightly this autumn, says Tomowo Watanabe, an oceanographer with the Fisheries Research Agency in Yokohama.

The implications are serious for the fishing industry, which lost an estimated ¥100 billion to ¥200 billion (US$1.3 billion to $2.6 billion) in 2011 as a result of the accident. Many fisheries remain closed, and because of the persistent contamination "we can't answer the basic question of when these fisheries will be able to open", says Woods Hole oceanographer Ken Buesseler.

Elsewhere in Nature, the extraordinary cost of the clean up of the reactors is noted:

 On 7 November, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, announced that cleaning up the ruined reactors and surrounding countryside could cost ¥10 trillion (US$126 billion) — double the size of the clean-up fund set aside by the government.

Partial eclipse in Brisbane 2012

Taken just about 10 minutes ago from our balcony:

  

I just watched the total eclipse in Cairns on TV.  Very nice.

The Revenge of the Supa Nerds

On Sunday my son wanted to go to this year's Supanova (which bills itself as a Pop Culture Expo) at the RNA Showgrounds.   As this is the last year he would get in free, and some of his mates' Dads were taking them, it seemed worth a shot.  Actually, he really only wanted to go because he  thought it would have computer games on display, even though I warned him I thought it was more about nerds dressing up. I was right.

I didn't take too many photos, as I did not really know how to ask permission of people to take a photo without indicating that I was doing so to later mock them.  (I think a couple of blokes dressed up - non satirically as far as I could tell - as Japanese anime girls were the worst.)  But some people who put effort in were worthy of a pic:

Obviously, the family that nerds together, stays together.

There was quite a large contingent of the Star Wars Redback Garrison, which claims to have 100 members through Queensland. (!)

The Rebel Legion (the good guys) on the other hand appear to only have 94 Australia wide.  Truly, the dark side must have its appeal.




As you might expect, Doctor Who also made an appearance, with a Tardis courtesy of Hire A Tardis available.   "...very popular at Weddings, Corporate Events as a crowd gatherer or Childrens Parties" says the website.   Why have I never been invited to a Doctor Who themed wedding, I wonder...

And, of course, there was a Dalek, although its best feature was the "Dalek Parking Only" sign on the wall.



But for the really, really odd idea, you could hardly go past the life size (?) Zetan alien models, which you could buy on the spot for (if I recall correctly) $440.  A bargain if 1/10 the price:

More information available from the Zetan.net website.  If a rich person with too much money is reading this, if you buy me a set of 5, I'll quite happily use them for a Christmas Nativity scene in my front yard this year.

I'm sounding fairly cynical, I guess, but really, I wasn't quite prepared for the full extent of nerd-dom on display.   I found a couple of times that dress up funsters volunteering to run the show make for fairly cranky crowd Nazis, even when it's not very crowded.  I started to approach one stall (not knowing really what it was selling) from the wrong side, at a time when there was in fact no customers at the tables, only to have a young woman rush up and insert herself between me and the bored salespersons saying "Are you here to buy tokens?"    As tokens were only for people wanting to pay for (mostly B grade) actor autographs, I said "No".  "Well, this is only for the sale of tokens, so don't go there."  I expect that this was one of her rare moments in life of being able to exert authority, however unnecessary it was to do so at this particular time.

One part of the show which was of more interest was the artists area, where there were quite a few comic and graphic artists, with their comics and books.   There are more people around doing their own comics and graphic novels than I realised; although it also seemed a little depressing to see that it seems difficult it is in this country to make a living out of it.   I can only assume that Japan would be the ideal type of society for them, where the consumption and admiration for graphic art (via manga and animation) must be at least of an order of magnitude greater than it is here.   I have never seen any documentary about how many people are involved in that industry in Japan; it would be interesting to know more about how they manage to put out so much comic art so regularly.

I did have a chat to a young woman, Caitlan Major, who had studied animation, and made a short film after not being able to find work.  It's pretty good (and certainly looks great).  Maybe a bit too deep and meaningful for its own good, but you can watch it for yourself and decide:



 At the end of the visit, we went and saw a little bit of the official dress up competition, where the entries really did need to put a lot of effort into it:

It's not a great photo, but I was at the back, where a young female helper told me we couldn't stand there but had to go to the side.  While standing at the side, she re-appeared to tell me we weren't standing far enough up along the side.   She was slightly nicer about it than the first female who threw herself between me and a stall with no one around it, but still, I felt it best to retreat out of the auditorium altogether.

So, it was interesting.   The nearest thing it reminded me of was the Medieval Fair that is held yearly north of Brisbane.  (My post about visiting that for the first time is here.)  Even though I thought it odd that there are many clubs for people devoted to the hobby of dressing and living like people from centuries past,  I could understand how this was a hobby that could involve detailed research about historical matters, and involve developing skills that are not common and have their own fascination.

People at Supanova, however, who just want to copy the look of characters in fictional movies, anime or TV, appeared to me to have much more of a "look at me" neediness about them; as a group, I didn't think they seemed as happy as those camping out in medieval gear.

Still, worth a visit, once.  I got to see Billy West, the voice of Bender in Futurama.  No photos allowed, however.

Big furry butt of the week

Time for a new possum photo:

Surely the teenage possum (facing us) is going to get the hint to leave home soon....

A handy Krugman summary

Delusions of Reason - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman had a short post at his blog summarising the problem with the current Republican Party:

Brad likes to tell the (second-hand) tale of Larry Lindsey arriving at the Council of Economic Advisers in 2001 and declaring that the people who really understood economics had arrived. A lot of 1-percent Romney supporters believed that only the unwashed masses could actually believe that Obama was making more sense on economic policy. And so on.

What’s so strange about this is that everything — everything — that has happened for the past decade has demonstrated the opposite. Modern Republicans are devotees of faith-based analysis on every front. On economics, in particular, they are devoted to supply-side fantasies that keep being refuted by evidence — and their reaction is to try to suppress the evidence. They’ve spent pretty much the whole past four years issuing dire warnings about inflation and soaring interest rates that keep not coming true; they cling to the belief that if only a Republican were in office we’d have a 1982-style recovery even though economists who actually studied past financial crises predicted the slow recovery in advance.

And don’t even get me started on climate change.

The truth is that the modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment. Yet there are some wannabe intellectuals who delude themselves into believing that they have aligned themselves with the party of objective (as opposed to Objectivist) analysis.

You might think that the election debacle would force some reconsideration. But I doubt it; if the financial crisis didn’t do it, nothing will.

Well, "the rollback of the Enlighenment" might be taking it one step too far, but generally speaking, it's hard to disagree that on both science and economics, the Right in the US seems more devoted to ideology than evidence.

 

A bit of a breathing space?

Greenland ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise buffered by meltwater storage in firn : Nature 

This is quite an interesting abstract about what is happening to melt water in Greenland.   It's possibly not contributing much to sea level rise at the moment because a lot it may be sinking, filling in gaps in the partly compacted snow (know as "firn" - you learn something every day) and refreezing.

The article estimates that this process may go on for decades as a buffering effect to the contribution to sea level rise, although it also notes that " once the pore space is filled it cannot quickly be regenerated."

Small fungus: big change

UK unveils plan to fight deadly ash disease : Nature News 

It sounds like quite a  major forestry change is underway in England:

The UK government today announced an action plan to control the spread of “ash dieback”, a disease caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, but this will not stop the pathogen from killing up to 99% of the ash trees in the country, say scientists.

Diseased trees in nurseries — and those which have been newly-planted — will be identified and destroyed. Mature trees will be left standing, as the disease is not spread from tree to tree but via leaf litter. An import ban on ash trees, implemented at the end of October, will remain in place.

This however will not eradicate the disease from the United Kingdom. “There is absolutely no magic wand we can wave to make this disappear,” environment secretary Owen Paterson said at a press briefing in London this morning. Ash is the third most common tree in the UK, and with as many as 90 million ash trees at risk, the shape of the British countryside will be irreversibly changed.

 I thought that perhaps someone has pointed the finger at climate change for this fungus spreading, but my Googling around indicates this is not a connection that is really being made - yet. 

Save the mice

I had missed in my previous reading about the New York hurricane that there were actually thousands of lives lost - of mice and rats in the basement at New York University.

The BBC notes that this is bad news for research:

The genetically modified mice and rats were being used to study illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, autism and schizophrenia.

The animal colonies at the Smilow Research Center in Kips Bay were considered among the most important of their type in the US.

In shades of the inadequate planning for disasters reminiscent of Fukushima (well, they both involve ocean flooding,) the building the rodents were in was supposed to be designed to resist such problems:

The Smilow, which opened in 2006, can withstand a storm surge of about 3.7 metres — 20% higher than that expected from a once-per-century flood, according to the NYU. Now that Sandy has overtopped those defences, officials say that they will be assessing what they can do differently in the future.

 As pointed out in the Reuters report on this, lab animals appears to often be in the firing line when hurricanes strike America:

All told, said NYU spokeswoman Jessica Guenzel, the biomedical facility lost 7,660 cages of mice and 22 cages of rats. Each cage houses between one and seven animals, she said.

"This happens again and again and (research labs) never learn," said Fran Sharples, director of the Board on Life Sciences at the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences (NAS).  "Anybody with half a brain knows you do a site-specific analysis" to understand the risk of disasters, she said, "and it's really stupid to put your animals in the basement if you're in a flood zone."

It's not as if scientists didn't have recent lessons in the risk of natural disasters to biomedical research, she said. In 2001, tens of thousands of mice and scores of monkeys and dogs were lost when Hurricane Allison struck Houston; and in 2005, some 10,000 lab animals drowned when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

 I wonder if Queensland University, which I assume has its share of lab rats, did better than that last year during the Brisbane floods.

Simple mussels

How to cook perfect moules marinieres | Life and style | The Guardian

I now find myself enjoying Felicity Cloakes' Guardian blog which usually talks just a little too much about how to do some of the classic recipes.   Here she tackles the simplest recipe for mussels, and  actually does it with relative restraint.  One English cook apparently suggests using cider instead of wine.  Not sure how that would go, but I'm willing to try, if my wife approves.

Echo...echo......echo

The future of the Republican Party: What not to do | The Economist

I liked this paragraph in above short bit of commentary in The Economist:

 SEVERAL of my colleagues have written characteristically incisive pieces about what lessons the Republicans should take from losing an eminently winnable election. Over at the Corner, Michael Walsh and Mark Krikorian recommend a few lessons of their own. For Mr Walsh, the number one lesson learned from Tuesday's defeat is that "the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos." That's number one! "Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation," he writes, as if no such enterprises exist. The best-rated cable-news channel is Fox! Five of the top ten radio programmes (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Neal Boortz) are conservative! Messrs Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al have spent the last four years telling their listeners that Mr Obama is an incompetent Kenyan-Marxist-Muslim-Commie-Socialist doomed to defeat. Such sentiments soothe their listeners and are good for ratings, but the parts about incompetence and imminent defeat turned out to be false. The problem is not that conservatives lack media outlets; the problem comes when they fail to venture outside of them.

And words of wisdom from the Lexington blog at the same magazine:

Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.

It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.

Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.

Spielberg gets it right, apparently

Lincoln - Rotten Tomatoes

A bit to my surprise, given how dull and over-earnest Spielberg's last attempt at American costume history was (Amistad), there is strong consensus amongst the American critics that his Lincoln is very good.   Most reviews single out Daniel Day Lewis as being exceptionally good in the title role.  In fact, he sounds like a certainty for an Oscar nomination.

Given that the reviews also admit that it is a wordy film, you would have to wonder whether it will succeed at the box office.  And also, given the Obama victory, Spielberg's liberal reputation, and the film's concentration on compromise and deal making in politics, I suspect wingnutty types will give it a wide berth over fear of it being too "liberal."   (The slightest suggestion that Lincoln might have been attracted to men, which one gay guy writing in Slates thinks is in the film, will probably also annoy those on the far Right, perhaps.)   But again, I could be wrong.

Update:  the Slate articles on whether his wife was crazy, and what the real life characters in the film looked like, are well worth a look too. In particular, if you want a bit of a fright, have a look at the real life photo of Francis Preston Blair Snr.  Looks like proof that Lincoln had to fight zombies, if not vampires!

Update 2:  Ha!  As I predicted, the first really derisive review of the movie ("It’s a hopeless bore that, in an attempt to humanize an icon, turns him into a mere politician") is to be found on PJ Lifestyle - part of the Right wing PJ Media site.

I'll be on the look out for more sour grapes reviews of the movie from right wing reviewers.

Stewart enjoys the win

You can watch Jon Stewart on the Daily Show ripping into Fox News after the election win here:



After that, you might be a bit surprised and amused at just how derisive some at MSNBC felt they could be about the losers and their supporters:



Then I suggest that you read the list of "10 wrongest predictions" about the election outcome*, followed by how well uber wingnut Ted Nugent took the loss.  ("Not well" is the short answer.)

*  I used to think Peggy Noonan had relatively good judgement as a conservative-ish columnist, but her writing on how great Romney was going in the lead up to the election has convinced me otherwise.