Electric optimism

Electric Cars Are Doing Better Than Hybrids Did in Their First Three Years | MIT Technology Review

There's much to learn in the infographic at the above link.

Improbable idea for a webcam

Last night,  for no particular reason (other than a generic interest in krill,) I thought that I should post an image of the Southern crustacean.

It turns out I can do better than that.  For some reason known only to someone in Hobart, the Australian Antarctic Division of the Australian government's environment department has, since 2008, run a regularly updating video of its krill aquarium.  Yes, every 15 minutes, you can see a new short video of krill being krill. 

There might be odder webcams of bits of nature in captivity out there, but this one would have to rank pretty high in the peculiar stakes.

They do have big eyes, by the way.

Update:  for those readers who can't be bothered clicking on the link, here's a shot of what they were up to 10 minutes ago:

 

In slightly more interesting webcams from the Australian Antarctic Division, here's a shot from Macquarie Island this morning:

Gee.  It seems not very high above the high water mark, in a ocean known for rough weather, doesn't it?  If you look at the 48 hour time lapse video they make from the webcam, it looks even worse.

 

Good memories

Dolphins remember each other for decades 

I didn't know this about dolphin "names":

Between the ages of about 4 months and a year, every bottlenose dolphin settles on a whistle of its own that stays the same for the rest of the dolphin's life. In another recent study, published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences², Stephanie King and Vincent Janik, two marine-mammal biologists at the University of St Andrews, UK, have shown that dolphins use these whistles in the same way as humans use names: they voice their own whistles to identify themselves to others, and they mimic others’ whistles to call to them.

Tony had a dream

OK, maybe I have to confirm to readers that it's Gina*, and who knows, maybe it's her dream too...

* Gina is joining the club of rich Australians who are losing in court.  I thought this might cheer her up...

Why do it?

Sam Rockwell in talks for Poltergeist remake | Film | theguardian.com

It's always a puzzle as to why people want to do remakes of films which were critical and commercial successes at the time.  (At least if they are not based on earlier, "classic" stories or novels.)

So this seems a very strange proposal.

"Poltergeist" was an enormously enjoyable and witty fright flick; well directed, written and cast.   It played as emotionally real as well (remember the scene where the spirit of the girl passes through the mother, and her reaction?)

Why remake it?

What? Is Abbott doing the full Romney?

It was just mentioned on Lateline, as breaking news, that the ABC understands the Coalition will tomorrow announce a tax cut for companies, worth $5 billion (I think) over an unspecified period.

Well, if true, those Liberal Party operative trips to learn how to do politics with the Tea Party influenced GOP is going to backfire.

Because everyone knows, the way to deal with an ongoing government revenue problem (and government debt dis-arrs-ter)  is for it to, um, cut revenue.

Update:  So, I see the justification is expected to be:

a.   that it compensates big companies for the parental leave plan levy. (Responses noted in some comments at The Guardian:  "yeah, big companies like the banks are doing it so tough we must be very careful they never hurt"; and "so Abbott is effectively having the public fund it after all".)  

b.  part of the Henry Tax review proposed cutting the company tax rate.  But,  um, didn't he also expect a mining tax to usefully increase revenue for the government?

Update 2:  to be honest, to do the full Romney, a politician or economist has to have read Ayn Rand and say things that indicates he's thinking in terms of Moochers and Looters.   Abbott is (note dear readers:  I am giving him a compliment) almost certainly not silly enough to have read Rand, and his Australian variety of Catholicism helps ensure that he is happily free of the weird Randian influence that we see in US Catholic/libertarian Republicans.   Still, there's always a slim hope that at some point in the campaign he might make some comment about what a bunch of losers some of the electorate are, and then we award him "the full Romney". 

Update 3:  well, even with all the normal reservations (online polls are hardly scientific and can be scammed easily by partisan players, particularly during a campaign, and this is a Fairfax poll after all, etc etc) I would still guess that the response shown here on the issue indicates most people aren't overly impressed with the policy:

Update 4: so, the "we never saw a tax cut we didn't like - it helps ensure the teeny, tiny government we believe in on ideological grounds" crowd are noting Labor's not so long ago support of lowering the rate of company tax. But Wong handled this pretty well on radio this morning - Labor was saying they were "aiming for" this when they were also saying they could be back in surplus in a couple of years. That hasn't happened, and won't for a while yet, so they put off the company tax reductions too.

Isn't the problem for the Coalition that, as they like to run with simplistic economics arguments that governments have to control their budgets like households do, then that approach is going to come back to bite them when they try to go with Laffer curve, trickle down arguments for lowering taxes at a time when they are simultaneously saying there is a government debt crisis.

More evidence I'm not alone...

Slate has a article entitled Clint Eastwood made Mitt Romney's strategist vomit, and other tales. with some short extracts from a book about the 2012 US Presidential campaign. Given that I was scathing at the time of wingnutty people who thought that the Clint Eastwood "empty chair" performance was brilliant, I am happy to see that even as it was happening, it was freaking out Romney people (or, at least, one of them):

Stuart Stevens, watching in another room in the hall, was literally sickened. He walked out of the room and threw up.

- Balz on how Romney's ad guru watched the RNC Clint Eastwood speech.

Heh.

No one cares? Excellent...

Avatar sequels? Three? No one cares. Here's why.

I have seen about 10 minutes of Avatar while the kids were watching it on DVD.  The blue characters looked a bit cartoonish to me.  I had no interest in the story, which is just about a guy who goes blue, and  native, isn't it?  James Cameron is personally bizarrely brave (even thinking about sinking for hours into the black, crushing abyss in a one man submarine makes me feel claustrophobic) but I have never cared much for his films. 

So I was pleased to read this article which explains that the film hasn't had the same cultural longevity as its box office might suggest.  Good. 

It certainly gets around...

HPV linked to oesophageal cancer

The human papillomavirus (HPV) triples the risk of the most common form of oesophageal cancer, a study by researchers at the University of New South Wales has found.

There was other HPV and throat cancer news around recently that I didn't note.  Here it is:

One third of people diagnosed with throat cancer are infected with a form of the HPV virus, a study suggests.

HPV (human papillomavirus) is the major cause of cervical cancer, and the virus is known to spread through genital or oral contact....

Experts said this study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which quantifies the link, showed "striking" results.

There are more than 100 types of HPV. Most people will be infected with HPV at some point, but in most the immune system will offer protection.

There are two HPV strains which are most likely to cause cancer - HPV-16 and HPV-18. 

HPV-16 is thought to be responsible for around 60% of cervical cancers, 80% of cancers in the anus and 60% of oral cancers.

Fake meat made to vaguely taste like meat

BBC News - What does a stem cell burger taste like?

Yes, well.  Regular readers would know I have a considerable degree of skepticism about fake meat grown from stem cells.   This article should indicate why.

I mean, how many other reports noted this:

The breadcrumbs, egg powder and seasoning that were added for flavour must certainly have helped with its taste. It was also coloured with beetroot and saffron - as the stem cell strands on their own are an unappetising pasty colour. 

And it was fried in a heap of butter.  That might have helped a bit with the flavour, don't you think?

The point is, because a slab of steak is a lot more than just muscle cells, I reckon the most you're ever going to get from it is going to be mince meat style products. They might be marginally better than other imitation versions of mince meat, but in terms of environmental and cost comparisons with other ways of making protein, you would really have to compare it to what you can make from the likes of soy or fungus.

I strongly suspect that it is always going to be cheaper and environmentally friendlier to extract protein from fungus (Quorn is the product that currently does this) and made it into imitation meat rather growing muscle cells and convert them into imitation meat.   (Basically, because I expect the growing medium for the former to be cheaper than what you would have to grown stem cells in.) 

I could be wrong, but this is my hunch.

A paralysed life

This is a really remarkable story, about a Brazilian man (and woman) who have only known life in hospital (with rather occasional outings.)  

You have to admire the resilience of some people.

"Let's be reasonable" Vs "It's a dis-arrs-ter!"

The media divide on economics commentary is shown in hilarious contrast in Fairfax Vs News Ltd papers today.

From Fairfax:  Tim Colebatch reinforces Michael Pascoe's line from yesterday with this:

We could try to put the budget back into surplus now, but to do so we would have to make at least $30 billion a year of spending cuts and/or tax rises. That amounts to taking 2 per cent out of an economy in which growth is running at only 2.25 per cent to start with.

What would happen if we did that? Very likely, Australia would go into recession. Unemployment would rise rapidly, output would fall. Welfare spending would rise, and revenue would fall, so we would be back in deficit, and would have to make even steeper budget cuts to get back into surplus. Europe provides plenty of examples of the consequences of this policy error.

Which would you choose? To get the budget back into surplus even if the economy goes backwards, or to keep the economy growing, even if the budget goes backwards?

It's important to get our priorities right. The budget deficit is the result of a weak economy, not the cause of it. One of Wayne Swan's worst mistakes as Treasurer was to lock himself into a commitment to deliver a surplus in 2012-13, and treat it as a test of good economic management - a test he then failed.

(Interestingly, further down, he says the carbon price is estimated by Toyota to only put $115 on the cost of a new car made here.)

And Peter Hartcher talks about Ken Henry's view that government is simply not facing up to the need to increase revenue in light of the future needs of an ageing population.

Meanwhile, at Murdoch's "The Australian"  (new masthead features the sub-heading "Labor - It's a dis-arrs-ter", some anonymous economist tells us we're heading into a recession we don't have to have, and cites all the usual Right wing suspects - we need a budget surplus, less regulation, more flexible IR laws, etc.  He complains that Treasury hasn't been giving independent and fearless advice about the problem:  presumably he hasn't caught up with what Ken Henry has been saying for some time.  And funny how he can be talking about Australia's cost competitiveness problems without mentioning the unexpectedly persistent high Australian dollar for the last few years.

Then Judith Sloan regales us with a tabloid "it's so unfair to hit the poor with higher tobacco taxes" (what's the bet Sloan was a smoker at one point in her life?  It's virtually a requirement to any participant at Catallaxy.)  And speaking of Catallaxy, Sinclair Davidson gets quoted in a lengthy article featuring a line up of economists, but only ones who are small government/less regulation advocates from way back, about how bad spending and unnecessary regulation under Labor has become.  

The disappearance of Fairfax would be a disaster for political discussion in Australia.

Pascoe on the economic situation

Joe Hockey's 'please explain' moment

Michael Pascoe really puts the boot into "Hockeynomics", with an analysis that will warm the heart of Labor:

The Hockeynomics contradictions were front and centre on Friday. You can either be appalled by the forecast rise in unemployment and give the impression you would reduce it, or you can be appalled by the larger deficit and give the impression you would reduce it – but you can't do both at the same time.

If you accept that the economy will grow more slowly this financial year, that there's a bit of a gap in the transition from the resources construction boom to the rest of the economy lifting its game, the very good news in Friday's economic statement was that the deficit is indeed being allowed to grow. After heading in opposite directions over the past year, fiscal and monetary policy are now aligned, both providing stimulus for a year when growth will be softer.

Just as the politics overshadowed the most important economics in the May budget, the higher deficit and unemployment rate grabbed the economic statement's headlines – they're the two simple issues that dominate the political screaming match.

Lost was the admission that the record fiscal contraction was even worse than published in May. The budget papers estimated 2012-13's public final demand (net state and federal government spending) would shrink by 0.5 per cent. The economic statement says it actually contracted by 1.5 per cent. The budget intended to keep public final demand flat this year. After the revised shortfall in revenue, the government is letting the “automatic stabilisers” do their stuff and public final demand is forecast to rise by 0.75 per cent this year and by 0.5 per cent next year before efforts to reduce the deficit kick in.

The new deficit forecast of $30.1 billion represents 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with the May prediction of an $18 billion deficit worth 1.1 per cent. Any business doing it tough should be grateful for that extra 0.8 percentage points, given that the economy is only expected to grow by 2.5 per cent. Yes, if a lunatic took control and immediately cut spending by $30 billion to balance the budget, GDP would theoretically grow by just 0.6 per cent at best – and actually by considerably less due to knock-on impact.
So if the forecast 6.25 per cent unemployment rate is displeasing, there's no point demanding an immediately smaller deficit.

Tony Abbott: "Everyone knows I'm a crook negotiator and I promise I won't try it again."

Abbott Won't Lead Minority Government

Kind of an odd way for Tony Abbott to kick off an election campaign, isn't it?, given that a hung parliament is certainly not out of the question given current polling.  Does he mean he would not join with a nut or two from Katter's party to form a minority government?  Probably not, is my guess.  

I also just saw Abbott on Sunrise.  He looked tired and a bit lethargic already, after about 15 hours of the  campaign.   He might be attempting to copy Kevin Rudds "no sleep is necessary" approach to life, but it doesn't suit him.

Update:  here's a shot from Sunrise, which is typical of how he looked during the interview:

 "Tired and worried" written all over it, if you ask me...

First election visual comment...

Nice view

The cheapo Samsung Tab 2 was never sold for great specifications on its camera, but it does make taking panorama shots easy, and it was a lovely afternoon at Mt Cootha today:

(Clicking it should enlarge it.)

I think there was an election called while I was in the sun.  This calls for some more photo app play... 

Taming the possum

(There's a new, smaller, shy possum visiting us now.)   

Europe was built on...milk

Nature has a lengthy, fascinating article up about archaeology and milk.  Apart from being a potential reality check for 10 year olds dreaming of that job after watching Indiana Jones movies, it explains  the importance of how (some) humans developed the ability to digest lactose, then spread out to Europe.  Here are some highlights:

During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

This two-step milk revolution may have been a prime factor in allowing bands of farmers and herders from the south to sweep through Europe and displace the hunter-gatherer cultures that had lived there for millennia. “They spread really rapidly into northern Europe from an archaeological point of view,” says Mark Thomas, a population geneticist at University College London. That wave of emigration left an enduring imprint on Europe, where, unlike in many regions of the world, most people can now tolerate milk. “It could be that a large proportion of Europeans are descended from the first lactase-persistent dairy farmers in Europe,” says Thomas.

This figure sounds surprisingly low:

Only 35% of the human population can digest lactose beyond the age of about seven or eight (ref. 2).

The effect of the genetic mutation which I happily share was possibly profound:

Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide in which the DNA base cytosine changed to thymine in a genomic region not far from the lactase gene. There are other pockets of lactase persistence in West Africa (see Nature 444, 994–996; 2006), the Middle East and south Asia that seem to be linked to separate mutations³ (see 'Lactase hotspots').

The single-nucleotide switch in Europe happened relatively recently. Thomas and his colleagues estimated the timing by looking at genetic variations in modern populations and running computer simulations of how the related genetic mutation might have spread through ancient populations⁴. They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary.

Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. In a 2004 study⁵, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”

Compounded over several hundred generations, that advantage could help a population to take over a continent. But only if “the population has a supply of fresh milk and is dairying”, says Thomas. “It's gene–culture co-evolution. They feed off of each other.”

I suggest everyone have a strawberry shake in honour of this research.  Unless you're lactose intolerant, of course...

Hydrogen and solar

Here's a comment I made for another blog, but I wanted it here so I have the links:

I have speculated for some time that using some capacity of solar thermal to split water into hydrogen might be helpful (although I gather it's not efficient to then use the hydrogen to heat the salts on a cloudy day.)  I see just now that a new technique is proposed for hydrogen production using solar thermal.  Unfortunately, moving hydrogen around is not so easy, I think, but using it in house scale fuel cells might be one way of helping with intermittent direct supply from the grid. 

Sunny Greenland

It's been warm in Greenland recently:

The Danish Meteorological Institute is reporting that on Tuesday, July 30, the mercury rose to 25.9 C (78.6 F) at a station in Greenland, the highest temperature measured in the Arctic country since records began in 1958.

The balmy reading was logged at the observing station Maniitsoq / Sugar Loaf, which is on Greenland’s southwest coast, the DMI reports. It exceeded the 25.5 C (77.9 F) reading taken at  Kangerlussuaq on July 27, 1990, in the same general area. Mantiitsoq is Greenland’s sixth-largest town, with a 2010 population of 2,784.

Mantiisoq doesn't look too bad, for a small town in Greenland.