Not sure that they should always be listened to...

Architects back restoration of earthquake-hit New Zealand cathedral

I see that there is a bit of fight going on as to what Christchurch should do regarding the restoration of its Anglican cathedral, which currently looks like this:
 




(My own photo of how it used to look, a year or so before the earthquake, is here.)

The proposals are basically either to rebuild it to look something like it used to, or to go with something completely different, like this:

Call me an architectural heathen if you will, but I think that looks quite nice.  Here's how it is imagined to look inside:

I still can't see a problem.  It is, according to the Cathedral's website, where you can read more about the design, " a lightweight engineered timber structure reinterprets the gothic architectural tradition."

A timber cathedral in New Zealand seems quite reasonable to me.

Follow up to Simon Crean interview

Sounds encouraging...

Emissions from power sector drop to decade-low: study

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have fallen to a 10-year low as coal-fired power slumped to its lowest level in a decade, a new report says. 

At the same time, the share of renewable energy in the National Electricity Market (NEM) has soared beyond 12 per cent and looks set to continue rising.

In its latest quarterly emissions outlook, energy and carbon research firm RepuTex found coal power made up 74.8 per cent of the NEM in the three months ended in March - its lowest point in 10 years.
Coal was at more than 85 per cent of the NEM four years ago, when wind made up just half a per cent of the overall mix.

Today, wind generation is at 3.8 per cent, hydro 8.7 per cent and gas at 12.7 per cent of the NEM.
"Renewables are basically cancelling out coal," RepuTex executive director Hugh Grossman told AAP on Thursday.

But, hey, where is solar?

Things in Space

Three space related stories:

*  that video that's been around for a week or so showing the gloopy way tears would hang around an astronaut's face is worth watching:



*  that story about an experiment on board the International Space Station which might, or might not, finally solve what dark matter is about is given a pretty good treatment in New Scientist.  A key part:

Since May 2011, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has been sitting on the International Space Station, sifting through billions of charged cosmic rays for evidence of those annihilations. If it sees an excessive number of positrons relative to electrons at a certain energy, that might just be a compelling sign of dark matter.

On 3 April, AMS designer Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported an expected rise in the ratio of positrons to electrons at energies between 10 and 350 gigaelectronvolts. Frustratingly though, the upturn is not yet sharp enough to attribute to dark matter collisions since the extra positrons could still come from more mundane sources like pulsars. "It's an indication, but by no means is it a proof," Ting says.

In the meantime, a further quirk in the results suggests that if the particles are dark matter, they may not be vanilla WIMPs.

The simplest models predict there should be only a certain amount of dark matter hanging around, and that WIMPs should rarely meet. But AMS has spotted too many positrons for that – so what could make WIMPs collide in space more often than expected?

In 2008, when the PAMELA satellite found a similar excess of positrons, Neal Weiner of New York University and colleagues suggested that WIMPs are drawn together under a force of their own. This new force increases their collision rate but would have escaped our gaze until now because it ignores ordinary matter entirely.

 But perhaps the biggest surprise is:  who knew there was valuable science being done on the space station?

*   I'm sure why the story of the escaped poo during the Apollo 10 mission turned up on the internet s this week, but it is very hard not to laugh while imaging the crisis on board:

"Oh -- Who did it?" Tom Stafford asks at one point. Confused, Young and Cernan reply, "Who did what?"
Cernan: "Where did that come from?"
Stafford: "Get me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air."
Young: "I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine."
Cernan: "I don't think it's one of mine."
Stafford: "Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away."
Young: "God Almighty"
(laughter)

 See - an unmanned satellite has never made you laugh, has it?   

I wonder what Krugman says about this...

IMF ponders missing inflation mystery - Business - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Paul Krugman loves to point out that economists aligned with the Right have been Wrong in their warnings about dangerous inflation  being just around the corner for years.  So, it's interesting to hear the IMF saying they're not sure why inflation has gone away, too.

An amusing story found while looking for something else

A former Canberra journalist, writing about an incident in Canberra in the 1960's:

One of the more spectacular drunken performances of the 1960s was in the Senate chamber, when Labor Senator from Western Australia Harry Cant found himself seriously drunk and trapped by a division. The doors were locked and the division required Labor senators to cross to the other side of the chamber, sitting in the places of the government senators for the count, while the government senator moved to the opposition benches. Cant was overcome by an urgent need to vomit. Looking around desperately, he came to a decision. Opening the desk drawer of the government senator’s desk where he was seated, he was violently and noisily sick into it.

When the division was over and the senators resumed their normal places, the government senator in whose place Harry had sat was understandably disgusted. The stench created by this extraordinary happening filled the chamber. He did not draw the President of the Senate’s attention to the outrage or make a fuss. Urgent action was required. All this had taken place in the full view of the journalists in the Senate press gallery and those in the public gallery. News of the outrage was soon all over Parliament House and journalists rushed to get the story. Medical practitioner Dr Felix Dittmer, a Queensland Labor Senator, had the answer. He denied Cant was drunk and ordered that an ambulance be urgently called to take Cant to the Royal Canberra Hospital, just across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge in Acton. Dittmer stated that Cant was suffering from an acute case of ‘renal colic’.

The ambulance arrived and a Labor colleague suggested to Dittmer that it would be discreet for Harry, now prone on a stretcher, to be taken through the back exit of Parliament via the kitchen. Labor Deputy Senate Leader, Pat Kennelly, rejected this. So the little procession of the two ambulance officers carrying the stretcher with Cant prone, and Dittmer leading, made its way through the Senate opposition lobby, across King’s Hall where visitors gaped, and down the front steps to the waiting ambulance. In hospital, Cant made a speedy recovery and was discharged the next day. From then on, if an MP entered either the house or the Senate looking a little confused, the interjection would go out: ‘Renal colic.’

More reason to believe the importance of heat in oceans

New Study: When You Account For The Oceans, Global Warming Continues Apace | ThinkProgress

The abstract of the paper itself:

 Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period¹. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer^{2, 3} has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage. Contributions have also been suggested from the deep prolonged solar minimum⁴, the stratospheric water vapour⁵, the stratospheric⁶ and tropospheric aerosols⁷. However, a robust attribution of this warming slowdown has not been achievable up to now. Here we show successful retrospective predictions of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead, the analysis of which allows us to attribute the onset of this slowdown to an increase in ocean heat uptake. Sensitivity experiments accounting only for the external radiative forcings do not reproduce the slowdown. The top-of-atmosphere net energy input remained in the [0.5–1] W m⁻² interval during the past decade, which is successfully captured by our predictions. Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 m of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65% of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown. The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.

The important  conclusion:  a "pause" in average surface temperatures does not mean the planet is not warming.

Laser weapons, yay...

Navy deploys laser weapon to shoot down drones. (video)

The video's not that exciting, but it was interesting to read this: 

On Monday, the Navy announced that it plans to deploy its first shipboard laser in the Persian Gulf next year, for use against Iranian attack speedboats and drones. The laser isn't powerful enough to shoot down a missile, but as the video below shows, it can burn right through a small unmanned aircraft.

Less-powerful settings give it the option to "dazzle" a drone's sensors without taking it down.

The laser system is still in development, but so far it has successfully destroyed all 12 of the small boats and drones that the Navy has tested it on, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The system is far from perfect. It doesn't work in bad weather, and it fires only in a straight line, so it can't aim around obstacles, limiting its usefulness on land.

The upside is that it's cheap and easy to use. A nonpartisan study for Congress puts the cost of a sustained pulse at less than a dollar, compared to some $1.4 million for a short-range interceptor missile.

 I didn't think they would be so cheap to run...

That odd 1960's event re-visited

UFO returns to park

I had a post in 2010 about this peculiar UFO incident in Melbourne in 1966.  (Something odd was definitely seen, and it seems the military knew about it, but what it was remains very obscure.)

Nice to see that they local area is to get a UFO playground to commemorate it!

More than you probably needed to know

Passing gas: A modern scientific history - Salon.com

This is a really long extract about flatulence, and other related intestinal facts.  There is quite a bit to be amused by, such as this about early research into smells:

I ask Levitt whether it was difficult to recruit volunteers for the flatus studies. It wasn’t, partly because the subjects were paid for their contributions. People who sell their flatus are more or less the same crowd who turn up to sell their blood.

“What was hard,” Levitt says, “was finding the judges.” Levitt needed a pair of odor judges to take “several sniffs” and rate the noxiousness — from “no odor” to “very offensive” — of each of the sixteen people’s flatal contributions. The hypothesis was that noxiousness would correlate with the combined concentrations of the three sulfur gases. And it did.

Curious as to which olfactory notes the different sulfur gases contributed to the overall bouquet of flatus, Levitt purchased samples of the three gases from a chemical supply house. The judges agreed on the following descriptors: “rotten eggs” for hydrogen sulfide, the gas with the strongest correlation to stink; “decomposing vegetables” for methanethiol; and “sweet” for dimethyl sulfide. Though lesser players like methylmercaptan contribute as well, it is for the most part these three notes, in subtly shifting combinations and percentages, that create the infinite olfactory variety of human flatus. To quote Alan Kligerman, “A gas smell is as characteristic of a person as a fingerprint is.” But harder to dust for.

But I did learn things I didn't know:  there is a tablet that is available that is very effective at removing the smell - Devrom.  But even in America - home of the TV advertisement for douching, for goodness sake - no one likes to see or hear advertisements for curing smelly farts.   Hard to believe:

Bismuth pills, on the other hand — and Levitt has tested these, too — reduce 100 percent of sulfur gas odor. Bismuth is the “bism” in Pepto-Bismol. Daily doses of Pepto-Bismol can irritate the gut, but not bismuth subgallate, the active ingredient in Devrom “internal deodorant” pills.

I had never before heard of Devrom. This may be because mainstream magazines often refuse to run the company’s ads. Devrom’s president, Jason Mihalopoulos, e-mailed me a full-page ad he had hoped to run in Reader’s Digest and AARP magazine. A smiling gray-haired couple stand arm in arm below the boldface headline “Smelly Flatulence? Not since we started using Devrom!” Mihalopoulos was told he could not use the phrases “smelly flatulence” and “stinky odor,” or the word “stool.” One of the magazines suggested changing the copy to say that the product “eliminates intestinal gas,” but that’s not what Devrom does. That’s what Beano does. So unless you read the Journal of Wound Ostomy & Continence Nursing or the International Journal of Obesity Surgery, you won’t see the happy, internally deodorized Devrom couple.

 And as for the hydrogen sulfide component, we get this useful bit of information, showing that the worst flatulence won't kill you:

The concentration of hydrogen sulfide in offensive human flatus is around 1 to 3 parts per million. Harmless. Ramp it up to 1,000 parts per million — as can exist in manure pits and sewage tanks — and a few breaths can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation. Workers die this way often enough that a pair of physicians, writing in a medical journal, coined a name for it: dung lung. Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus. ...

It is fitting that the Devil is said to smell of sulfur. Hydrogen sulfide is a diabolical killer. Its telltale rotten-egg smell, screamingly obvious at 10 parts per million, disappears at concentrations above 150 parts per million; the olfactory nerves become paralyzed.

 What a sneaky gas...

Personal hygiene from far away

I've just noticed that the new deodorant I bought on the weekend (novel because it contains silver ions, which readers will recall work for Japanese space underwear, and therefore hopefully will also work under my armpits) is made in Thailand.   (Mind you, it still contains aluminium, so perhaps the amount of silver ions is inconsequential.  How would you know?)

The toothpaste I am about to start using is from Germany.   So are my preferred toothbrushes.  (Guess which supermarket chain sell them.)   I have noticed razors that come from Greece and France.  I think I tried Korean ones from Aldi once, and they were terrible.   

A lot of soaps and detergents seem to come from New Zealand now.

I am worried that with such globalisation, come the collapse of civilisation, personal hygiene will be one of the first crises.  

Anyhow, the successful meal of the weekend was a beef and beer casserole, based on this recipe.  Next time I would add perhaps half of the sugar, and twice as much Worcestershire sauce.   (I also added a diced carrot and stick of celery too.)  The dumplings came out nice.  I had been wanting to try cooking with beer in a casserole instead of wine for some time.  Can scratch that off the list now.

Black holes and firewalls

Astrophysics: Fire in the hole! : Nature News

Here's a lengthy and interesting article about some relatively new ideas and problems with the physics of black holes.

It's pretty remarkable that working out the physics on the boundary of a black hole is still the subject of such controversy, so many decades after physicists started to think about it.  Still, I guess it's not as if they have one nearby to actually toy with.  In fact, now that I think about it, how close is the nearest likely black hole to Earth?  Seems it might be 1,500 light years - not so far if you're considering the galaxy as a whole.  From a 2012 article:

This beautiful photo from the Hubble Legacy Archive offers a striking look at the Trapezium, four closely packed stars found inside the Orion nebula, some 1,500 light-years away. Lurking inside that image might be our nearest black hole neighbor.

The question of which black hole is the closest to Earth is surprisingly tricky to answer. V4641 Sgr might be just 1,600 light-years away, or it might equally possibly be more like 24,000 light-years away. We've got a better sense of the location of V404 Cygni, which is just 7,800 light-years away. Considering we're a little under 30,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, those black holes are certainly in the cosmic vicinity, but they're not exactly super close.

That's why the Trapezium is so intriguing. Something about the stars' movements just isn't right, and the most likely explanation is a hidden black hole.

 Anyway, back to the Nature article.  It's mainly about the idea that the boundary of a black hole might, or might not, have a particularly dangerous aspect to it:

Hawking had shown that the quantum state of any one particle escaping from the black hole is random, so the particle cannot be carrying any useful information. But in the mid-1990s, Susskind and others realized that information could be encoded in the quantum state of the radiation as a whole if the particles could somehow have their states ‘entangled’ — intertwined in such a way that measurements carried out on one will immediately influence its partner, no matter how far apart they are.

But how could that be, wondered the Polchinski’s team? For a particle to be emitted at all, it has to be entangled with the twin that is sacrificed to the black hole. And if Susskind and others were right, it also had to be entangled with all the Hawking radiation emitted before it. Yet a rigorous result of quantum mechanics dubbed ‘the monogamy of entanglement’ says that one quantum system cannot be fully entangled with two independent systems at once.

To escape this paradox, Polchinski and his co-workers realized, one of the entanglement relationships had to be severed. Reluctant to abandon the one required to encode information in the Hawking radiation, they decided to snip the link binding an escaping Hawking particle to its infalling twin. But there was a cost. “It’s a violent process, like breaking the bonds of a molecule, and it releases energy,” says Polchinski. The energy generated by severing lots of twins would be enormous. “The event horizon would literally be a ring of fire that burns anyone falling through,” he says. And that, in turn, violates the equivalence principle and its assertion that free-fall should feel the same as floating in empty space — impossible when the former ends in incineration. So they posted a paper on the preprint server, arXiv, presenting physicists with a stark choice: either accept that firewalls exist and that general relativity breaks down, or accept that information is lost in black holes and quantum mechanics is wrong¹. “For us, firewalls seem like the least crazy option, given that choice,” says Marolf.

 There's lots more, and it is well worth reading.

As seen at the IPA dinner

When scientists think about morals

Backreaction: Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us

Sabine Hossenfelder has been thinking about philosophy, and now morals, in light of science.

It's both interesting and, um, a bit of a worry. 

Writing to formula

Everything you ever needed to know about screenwriting (but were afraid to ask) 

This article about what one is supposed to know about screenwriting doesn't add all that much to the world's knowledge, but I did find it interesting that "how to write a movie"books have been around for a long time:

 The rules that govern screenwriting are the fundamentals of narrative and there's a whole history of structural analysis preceeding the advent of film. What screenwriters now call Inciting Incidents (the explosion in a characters life that kick starts a story) were articulated as long ago as 1808 by AW Schlegel. The rise of film was inevitably accompanied by a rise in screenwriting gurus pedalling "how to" manuals – and Epes Winthrop Sargent has some claim to being the first. His The Technique of the Photoplay, written in 1912, is not only hugely entertaining, it has the virtue of being refreshingly honest. Much wisdom can be found in Sargent's book, but it's here that the drive to understand structure has become no longer an intellectual pursuit, but a profit-driven enterprise.

But where's your paper, Salby?

Last summer was not actually angrier than other summers | The Australian

So, renegade climate scientist Murry Salby has attacked the Climate Commission claim about the last summer being anomalously hot by referring to the satellite record.   Yet I thought I read elsewhere that the satellite average temperature did not include Tasmania, which did have an unusually hot summer.  No mention of that in Murry's article.

And more importantly, Salby became a temporary star in the Right wing denial-o-sphere in 2011 by giving a talk in the Sydney Institute which was difficult to follow, but came down to his believing that CO2 was "way down the back of the line" in driving climate change.  

I remember  John Nielsen-Gammon said he saw Salby give a summary of his theory at a conference in Melbourne, and it certainly didn't convince him nor (so the impression was given) any other scientist in the room.

Yet Salby was indicating that his theory was going to be published.

I'm sure if it had been, we would have heard about it.

Salby's talk made it clear that he was pretty much a Judith Curry figure, taking an intense personal dislike to "the Team" of mainstream climate scientists for their influence and claims.  He sounded politically motivated.  The only problem,  his claim to have found the crucial flaw has come to nothing. 

Next.

Useful eunuchs

The Modern Female Eunuch - The Atlantic

Back in 2010 I noted a story from the Science Show about how valuable eunuchs have been in history for helping run governments.

This topic gets a run again in the above article in The Atlantic.  (There's a photo of some unhappy looking palace eunuchs from China too.)  It also talks about what it is about testosterone that makes it, um, sometimes problematic:

Both historical accounts and contemporary research on how testosterone affects personality reveal that eunuchs had traits that made them different from intact males, and in some ways more like females. Their astuteness and objectivity in assessing others' strengths and weaknesses made them particularly effective as bureaucrats, diplomats and tacticians -- quite the opposite of what most people now think of when they hear the word "eunuch."  

When researchers examine how males and females differ in personality, one of the most consistently documented differences has been in agreeableness. 

Women in the maternal role, who have multiple offspring, need to be good negotiators in order to resolve conflict among their children in a way that maximizes their number of surviving descendants. It is thus not surprising that many studies show that agreeability is higher in women than men. That alone could lead natural selection to favor females to be low in testosterone. Indeed recent data from our own and our colleagues' labs on the effect of testosterone deprivation on adult males indicates that castration increases agreeableness and tends to push male behavior towards that of the female end of the spectrum.

High testosterone males are more disagreeable -- rather than only being more aggressive -- than females or low-testosterone males. In his book about testosterone and behavior, Heros, Rogues, and Lovers, James McBride Dabbs said that if there was one word that characterized an excessively high testosteronic individual, it was "obnoxious."

Gee, what Australian political/economic blog have I been saying for years obviously suffers from an excess of testosterone?   I didn't realise the research supported my hunch so strongly.   

Up in a balloon

Joseph and the Giant Balloon: The First Aeronaut of the American West - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic

The story of the first manned balloon flight in California in 1853 makes for a good read.

Rational suicide discussed

Yesterday The Age ran with the story of a relatively healthy 83 year old who committed suicide despite having no terminal illness, but felt she had lived long enough. I'm not entirely sure why this was in the paper, and it worries me a bit that such stories encourage the idea of rational suicide; on the other hand, it is the type of story that probably makes politicians more nervous about legislatively addressing euthanasia as it makes it clear that activists in the field are often sympathetic to suicide to anyone who wants it. (Philip Nietschke is so nuttily obsessed with helping anyone who wants to die achieve their goal painlessly that he has taken to driving a van with nitrogen gas for sale.)

So it is interesting to see an article by a doctor who notes the difficulties with the idea of having a legal framework to allow for assisted rational suicide.  Here are some key points:

Much of the research from the palliative care field such as this study on patients with motor neuron disease, this one on a patient with locked-in syndrome and this review of life satisfaction in tetraplegic people tend to support the view that social factors affect quality of life much more than health-related ones. Among survivors of failed suicide attempts, many are subsequently glad they made it, and would not attempt it again. Impulsive or crisis-related suicidality would have to be strenuously screened for. Do we have those tools yet? Are they reliable enough to be ethically justifiable to use in practice?

It seems reasonable to conceive that the more physically disabled a person is, the more dissatisfied they must be with their life. The problem is that the research largely doesn’t support this view, at least not in the most highly disabled groups. It seems that you can’t make generalisations about a person’s quality of life just by looking at their medical records. This is why I begin to feel uneasy when cases like Beverley Broadbent’s are discussed....


How could we reliably distinguish between a case like Beverley Broadbent, who is clearly making a long-considered decision with rational forethought free from mental illness or social coercion, and another who hasn’t been through the same emotional and mental journey, or who may be getting a nudge along? And what about younger people who have survived into their 40s and 50s with conditions like cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury? They are experiencing similar physical and social disadvantage to the elderly, but at a much earlier age. Would they be allowed to apply as well?

Much, much more research is needed about any proposal for voluntary ending of a life in the absence of terminal disease. As a humanist, I support the right to choose an early and dignified exit from intolerable circumstances. As a doctor, and a pragmatist, I have a lot of trouble thinking my way towards a legal and social framework in which this could be ethically brought about.

He ends on a point that I don't agree with, though:

We need to have a mature conversation about this. A conversation which respects shocking and awkward points of view.

 Why?

Those inclined to rational suicide have been around for ever.  Why is special accommodation for them needed now?

About that cold Northern Spring

Rabett Run has a translation of a blog post by Stefan Rahmstorf that appeared recently.  It looks at the recent papers arguing the loss of polar ice is causing air pressure and circulation changes that are leading to events like this, and makes a pretty convincing sounding case that this is indeed likely.

But the most remarkable thing was, I think, the first image, which shows that the unusual cold is almost matched  by large areas having unusual warmth:

As Rahmstorf notes, taken over the whole Northern hemisphere, it is actually close to the long term average.

You won't be reading that in The Australian anytime soon.