What is it used for?

BBC - Future - Technology - X-37B: Secrets of the US military spaceplane

A good article here on the funny looking mini shuttle thing that the US is about to launch again.

Pebble bed - it lives again

Catalyst: Next Generation Nuclear Power - ABC TV Science

I used to comment on pebble bed reactors as a new nuclear design with impressive sounding passive safety.   But the South African plans to build one ran out of money, and was deemed to be too ambitious in design, and we don't hear much about them any more.  (Apart from the fact that China had built at least one; I'm not sure that it has ever been more than a research reactor, though.)

So, I was surprised to see on Catalyst a few weeks ago as story about continuing research into them in California.

This one is to use molten salts as a coolant (instead of helium as per the defunct South African plan.)  The advantages:

 Dr Graham Phillips
This reactor doesn't use water to flow through the fuel elements and extract the heat - it uses melted salt. Now not table salt, sodium chloride, but the related substances lithium and beryllium fluoride. Heat these guys to about 450 degrees Celsius and they turn into a clear liquid.

Mike Laufer
One of the big advantages of the salt is that it's very effective in moving heat around, but it's at low pressure.

NARRATION
Low pressure means a less accident-prone reactor. Today's generation IIIs run at a staggering 70 times atmospheric pressure.

Prof Per Peterson
If we switch to liquid coolants, like these fluoride salts that we're using, then we can build much more compact, high power density systems that operate at atmospheric pressure, and that gives us a system which is intrinsically safe, because there's no source of pressure to disperse radioactive material.

 Sounds good to me.

Archbishop humour

Unthinkable? Rowan decides to write | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

The Guardian has a bit of fun with this mock column by Rowan Williams, about the top 10 things he found "tricky" as Archbishop of Canterbury.  I liked number 3 in particular:

3) Critics saying that I can't compose a sentence without wandering off into some ontological reflection, although we need not human words that will decisively capture what the word of God has done but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the word's light has been made manifest. 

Possum survival

Possum fans may be interested to know that last Sunday, the day of the very big hail, the possums were not in their under-the-deck home.  (They are not there every day; they can be away for days at a time, but recently they have been here more often.)  So, we were a bit worried about how they had fared in a tree during the storm, and they had been away all of this week.

But today, they are back, looking as happy as ever:

I hope it is a good sign that their ability to be away for days at a time means they are not dependant on our fruit.

Crypto search

Bigfoot search from blimp: Cryptic species are real but Bigfoot, Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, Jersey Devil are not. - Slate Magazine

Here's a good article in Slate discussing why it is wildly unlikely that Bigfoot (or yowies, or any of the big man-ape-ish things around the world) are really there, due to matters such as the complete lack of relevant body remains.

At least the article does a rare thing by discussing the topic of cryptozoology seriously.

On the other hand, it doesn't even mention the Bigfoot as alien or paranormal theory, which seems a bit of an oversight.  As noted in Wikipedia:

One fringe theory, supported by paranormal investigator Jon-Erik Beckjord, theorizes that the lack of hard evidence supporting Bigfoot's existence may be due to the creature being an interdimensional being that slips in and out of dimensions. Many Bigfoot advocates distance themselves from the paranormal position and regard it as an embarrassment.^[69]

 Yet it deals with the lack of bodily remains quite handily.    I find the theory oddly appealing.  Apemen as a cross over from an alternatively evolved Earth?   

And I have  mentioned before, one of the more puzzling things about yowie sightings is the awful smell that is said to accompany them in a number of cases.   You can read an odd paper here about the bad smells sometimes associated with Bigfoot.  (Strangely, it seems some people associate the smell with smegma (!) - an odour with which I am happily unfamiliar.)

Especially in the Australian context, there really is no animal I can think of which could be emitting foul smells while crashing through branches.  While smells do suggest the "it's an unidentified man/ape" theory,  there are cases of hauntings, and even UFO sightings, that have a smell element.  (I can't find a very credible link for UFOs and smells.  It is one of the major disappointments of the internet that UFOs, as a topic that you would have thought would gain credibility by allowing more serious analysis be widely seen, has instead suffered badly by being smothered in internet dross. I still don't know of a very reliable website on the topic.)  

Anyhow, it's all part of life's fun to have some mysteries around.

A big bunch of nothing

This year long smear campaign against Julia Gillard is getting ridiculous.

Last night, a lawyer who used to work in Slater and Gordon  who obviously didn't care for Gillard at the time (the firm is said to have had some partnership tensions) said he noticed evidence that Julia Gillard knew of solicitor's finance arranged for her boyfriend.

When asked by her firm in 1995 she said:

Mr Gordon: ''Were you aware at any time that the balance of the funds to make up the capital was to be provided by contributory mortgage of which Jonathan Rothfield [a Slater & Gordon partner] was trustee?''

Julia Gillard: ''I don't, I don't think I knew that at the time, where the source of funds was. It's subsequently been raised with me that that was done through the Slater & Gordon mortgage register but I didn't have any recollection of that.''

Now there is a  one bit of paper on file which indicates she might have known, or asked for, a Certificate of Insurance needed for such finance in 1993.

There are 2 obvious points here which the media, and public just does not get:

1.    It is certainly no proof that she was involved to any detailed extent in arranging the mortgage.  In fact, if that is the only thing they have got on the file that connects Gillard to the mortgage, it suggests that probably had peripheral involvement in it.  [Update:  I have since read the conveyancing file and, yes, the mortgage correspondence is from another solicitor or paralegal in the firm.]

2.   More importantly, even if she been completely involved in the provision of finance sourced through her firm (a practice common in those days; not very common at all now)  there is nothing illegal about that and would show nothing at all about her knowledge of the source of the other funds Wilson used.

This is the worst smear campaign against a politician that I have ever seen:  trawling over details from nearly 20 years ago without actually alleging that the person has done anything illegal - in fact when pressed the mainstream media says "not that we're alleging anything illegal".  But the obvious point of the campaign is to operate as a dogwhistle - to make people think she has done something wrong while denying that is what you are alleging.

There is also now an element of misreporting to this - I could swear that I heard on Sunrise this morning at the 7 am news bulletin that last night's 7.30 interview alleged that she had knowledge of the use of the slush fund money to buy the property.

If I heard that right (the reporting was changed by the 7.30 bulletin) that is completely wrong.

The supply of the solicitors finance says nothing about the use of the "slush fund".

If I were Gillard, I would be on the phone to Channel 7 demanding a formal retraction of the 7 am report. 

Update:   even if I misheard Sunrise at 7am, here is an example of completely wrong reporting on the matter:

 Julia Gillard has dismissed suggestions by a former work colleague that she knew of the purchase of a house with misappropriated money years earlier than she first said.

Important Mars news

Mars is safe from radiation – but the trip there isn't - space - 21 November 2012 - New Scientist

I've never been 100% sure on this point - just how safe would the Martian surface be for astronauts from a radiation point of view?   Now it seems the answer is a bit clearer:

You needn't fry on Mars. Readings from NASA's Curiosity rover suggest radiation levels on the Red Planet are about the same as those in low Earth orbit, where astronauts hang out for months on the International Space Station. A Mars visit would still be dangerous though, due to the years-long return trip.

Unlike Earth, Mars has no magnetosphere shielding it from solar and galactic radiation. But it does have a thin atmosphere, and readings from two of Curiosity's instruments suggest this provides some protection.

"This is the first ever measurement of the radiation environment on any planet other than Earth," Curiosity team member Don Hassler said at a press briefing on 15 November. "Astronauts can live in this environment."

The overall picture is still not rosy, though:

The biggest threat to Mars voyagers would be the cumulative radiation exposure during the long trip. NASA estimates that a return human mission to Mars would take three years. During that time astronauts might receive more than seven times the radiation dose they get during six months on the ISS.

And:

Solar flares would also be a problem. On Earth these eruptions of charged particles from the sun are largely deflected by the magnetosphere. But Mars enjoys no such protection, and since Curiosity has yet to see a flare, it is unclear how much shielding the thin atmosphere would provide. '

Dartnell suggests that a base or colony on Mars could be built underground to avoid surface radiation. Or, with enough advance warning, astronauts could retreat to protective shelters during a flare. But is all that trouble worth it just to send humans where robots already thrive?

 As I have argued before, if you're going to have to live underground on Mars, in an atmosphere that is barely there, why would you bother travelling so far when you could do the same on the Moon, and always be just two days away from seeing a Broadway show?

I think water is the key difference, and if it is on the Moon in any useful quantities, I'm just not sure that Mars is worth it.

The writing life

Give Philip Roth the Nobel Prize as a retirement present - Telegraph

I've never read Roth, and don't feel particularly inclined to.  But I was a bit amused to read how being an author can have its own distinct downside, even though us readers might admire their achievement:

 “My autobiography,” he said as long ago as 1981, “would consist almost entirely of chapters about me sitting alone in a room looking at a typewriter. The uneventfulness … would make Beckett’s The Unnamable read like Dickens.” 

And, as it turns out, he wasn’t joking. When his relationship with Claire Bloom was in its first romantic flush, he invited her to spend three weeks at his home in rural Connecticut. According to one of the many slightly bewildered sections in her autobiography Leaving A Doll’s House, he then spent every day writing in his study — and every evening reading Conrad, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. When the Berlin Wall fell, he warned fellow novelist Ivan Klíma of the dangers now posed to Czech literature by commercial television — which “almost everybody watches all the time because it is entertaining [his, presumably scornful, italics].”

Makes me sound like an action man, in comparison.  

The Madness of King Clive

Clive's giant vision unveiled as Jeff the dinosaur on loose | Sunshine Coast Daily

LOVE it or hate it, Clive Palmer's dinosaur collection is going to leave quite a footprint in the Mt Coolum area.
The mining magnate quietly unveiled his T-Rex, the first of more than 150 replica dinosaurs set to "roam" the grounds and fairways of his resort.

And it is enormous. The tyrannosaurus rex Mr Palmer has christened Jeff is 8.5m high, 20m long, and weighs 1.7 tonnes.

The giant creature towers over golfers using the resort's famous course, and with the possibility of another 149 prehistoric giants joining him, the effect will be stunning...

Mr Palmer has spoken of importing 150 replica dinosaurs to create the largest dinosaur park in the world but is waiting to hear if he will need council permission.

I just heard on the radio this morning:  Council says "yes, he does need permission for more than 4."  And it was noted that this would be a bizarre transformation for a resort (formerly a Hyatt Regency) that had a reputation for being a high class golf/health spa-ish place.   (Never stayed there myself.)

Here's the photo from the Sunshine Coast Daily as to what Clive thinks looks good:

I didn't realise that so many boys aged 10 and under played golf....

The 1950's and the rich

This section of Paul Krugman's recent column contained some things about the 1950's of which I was not aware:

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.  ....

Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live,” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat. 

The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?

Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America. 

Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.

OK:  I knew about the high tax rate.  I didn't know about the relative modesty of lifestyle that a drop in income meant.  And yet, as Krugman notes, this is the period often thought by people as being the best of times for conservatives.  

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.