Heinlein taken down

Libertarian types like to quote Robert Heinlein's comment that "an armed society is a polite society", yet anyone who has been to the United States can't see much evidence for that.  (I am surprised that I can Google up no evidence of a sociologist ever doing study of this: comparing States which have the most lax concealed carry laws with those with much tighter restrictions.)

Of course libertarians are not much interested in evidence anyway, they just have an ideological agenda to run; but it seems pretty obvious to normal folk that an armed society is not primarily a more polite society (if it is more polite at all) - it's primarily a more dangerous society for getting shot.

And the thing that really strikes me about the last year or two of shooting tragedies in the US is how readily it's glossed over that it was legally purchased weapons that were involved the killing.  I mean, doesn't that make it obvious that it doesn't matter that the buyer appears to be a "good guy" at the time of purchase:  what matters is how the gun eventually comes to be used.   In other words, the problem is the guns being everywhere.

A good article in The Guardian puts this all in perspective.  Here are the crucial paragraphs:

The National Rifle Association likes to argue that criminals, or people intent on committing a crime, will obtain guns no matter what the law says. Among the 5,417 gun homicides in 2012 that the FBI assigns a circumstance to (3,438 are "unknown circumstances"), a mere 1,324 were committed in conjunction with another felony. Three times that (3,980) were committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Of that, over half (1,968) were the result of an argument that escalated fatally out of control.

To put it another way: otherwise unpremeditated murders, where people kill out of momentary rage, are the single most common type of gun homicide in America. More than gangland killings (822); more than murders committed during robberies (505) and drug deals (311) combined.

Stunning figures that for any sane person means we are very glad to live under Australian gun laws rather than American.   Here's the final paragraph from the article:

 You keep a gun out of the argument, you will save lives. This is not hypothetical. A person may be intent on killing someone else, but it is simply harder to do with anything else. That's why forms of homicide other than guns account for only about a third of all homicides. Someone gets angry at someone else, they may reach for a weapon. If we make guns harder to get, by requiring a test for the license, or by banning handguns more broadly, the one at hand might be far less deadly. Like, say, popcorn.

Another fake crisis considered

Economists dispute audit commission's federal government growth claims

This time on the size of government.  Some of these figures are from the ACTU, which means they should be approached with some caution, but still, here it is:

It says the commission should also be aware the size of government has not ''expanded significantly'' if it is measured by reference to government employment.

''In June 1996, the Commonwealth employed 354,800 people in the general government sector. As at June 2012, the number stood at just 250,000.

''Commonwealth government employment is lower now, as a share of the population or total employment, than it has ever been before. ABS statistics show that the number of people employed in the general government sector [across all levels of government] fell in 2011-12 for the first time since 1998-99.''

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows Australia has one of the lowest-taxing, lowest-spending governments in the OECD.

According to the most recent figures, Australian government spending accounts for 35 per cent of nominal GDP. In the euro area, it is 49.5 per cent. In the US it is 38 per cent

And Andrew Leigh weighs in:

''It's recognised by all serious commentators that the size of government in Australia is pretty close to Korea and the United States, and far smaller than Sweden and Finland,'' Mr Leigh said.

''Australia is a low-taxing country and the tax-to-GDP share fell by about one percentage point under the previous government.''

Sounds pretty convincing to me. 

Already prepared for next Halloween

Found here.  And no, I would not wear speedos with it. 

Physics worth doing

Backreaction: Why quantize gravity?

Poor Bee Hossenfelder isn't having much luck in finding funding for her field of quantum gravity, but she makes an elegant argument in this post as to why this is a subject worth research dollars.  

Fake crisis already averted

Australia ranked one of the three best countries to do business in

Interesting to note that it was a conservative think tank claiming this - before there was any talk of an Abbott "repeal day".   Apparently, our nightmarish over regulation looks different from the US.  

Missing heat in some detail

Climate change: The case of the missing heat : Nature News

Here's a pretty lengthy and interesting discussion on the "missing heat" issue, mainly concentrating on what goes on in the Pacific Ocean.   You know, PDO, El Nino, etc.

It notes that there is a minority view that AGW might be driving the lengthy La Nina conditions which, if true, might provide a long term mechanism for some cooling.   (It would mean models need adjusting down.)   However, many modelling attempts apparently indicate the opposite, that longer term AGW will drive more El Nino's.

The article ends on this note:

Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

It sounds a bit peculiar, doesn't it, talking of the Pacific as if it is one dish of water that "shloshes" about from one side to the other.  

A Quiggin post where Spielberg gets a mention

John Quiggin - The Repubs won’t Douthat (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

This Quiggin post is of interest because he again notes the movement ("defection") of several formerly Republican intellectuals to the left in the US, and predicts that Douthat may have to do the same if he is intellectually honest.

Sounds plausible.

But also - Steven Spielberg as a Democrat funder gets mentioned in comments a couple of times.  Seems some people think he would oppose tax increases on the top 20% percent,  but how dare they pre judge him on that!

In other Spielberg observations (by me):   I have been meaning to note for some time that 2013 was kind of depressing on the upcoming movie front because no one knows what Spielberg will next direct.   It seems he has been uncommitted to anything for about a year now, and I have no idea what he has been doing with himself.

I suppose he's entitled to a break, but please, Steven, come back!  I have a few ideas if you are short of them.

(Update:  In other Spielbergian news, I noticed somewhere recently that Poltergeist is to be remade.  Why?  In a sign of the bankruptcy of novel ideas in Hollywood, it seems a hell of a lot of 1980's films are now slated for remake.  None of them as good as Poltergeist, though.)

More from the "only in America" files

*  12 year old boy carries sawn off shot gun to school and shoots two students.   Yeah, Heinlein, an armed society is a polite society, is it?   (I thought about that yesterday too about the story where an argument in a cinema turned into a fatal shooting by at 71 year old.)

*  Neo nazis try to take over a town. 

Evil Twins

BBC News - Twin DNA test: Why identical criminals may no longer be safe

I didn't realise there have been a number of cases around the world where prosecutions have been thwarted by the police being unable to be sure which identical twin committed the offence.

Evil president sounds pretty normal to me

What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic

Nothing special about this report about what's its like to be in a cafe when Obama turns up for a staged media event, except that it makes the President sound rather normal.

I suspect Rush Limbaugh will still find something sinister about it.   (Limbaugh is the subject of another Atlantic article today, which notes his recent explanation that he intuitively knows true Conservatives are right about everything, and never sexually harass people.  Republicans who have strayed from the "true Conservative" line on anything - such as Chritie - don't get the same treatment though.)

Surprising coral

Coral reefs in Palau surprisingly resistant to naturally acidified waters

Scientists have found corals in one place with surprisingly highly "acidified" water which are doing surprisingly well.   They hasten to point out this goes against a lot of other examples in the world, but the reason why this bunch are fine remains very unclear.

Biology is very complicated...

Fun research

Reflections in the eye contain identifiable faces

Has this already been used in a crime or science fiction show?   I feel pretty sure it has, but can't remember where.

Scientific explanation for beer goggles

New study shows alcohol impacts vision by 30 per cent

Proof that Second Amendment nutters are vindictive nutters

Target: Me - Dick Metcalf - POLITICO Magazine

Read what happens when a gun loving, life long, career shooter and journalist makes a legal observation deemed to be heresy amongst his kin:

“Way too many gun owners seem to believe any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement,” I wrote. “The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”

It's a miracle...sorta

Miracle fruit brings a change in taste › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (ABC Science)

While in Canberra on holiday we went to Questacon, the gigantic kids' science centre, and in its shop I found "miracle fruit" tablets.  We gave them a try last night at home.

This red berry fruit has featured on some TV programs in the last few years, and an interesting account of what they do (make sour acid things like a lemon taste sweet) is at the link above.  The thing you buy at the shop is a biggish tablet made from the dried pulp of the fruit.

The effect really is interesting to experience, not just because it makes lemon taste entirely palatable (to the detriment of your tooth enamel no doubt),  but because (as Karl says) it makes it taste really intensely sweet, rather as if you have popped a few saccharine tablets on your tongue at once.  And the effect seemed to last quite a long time.   Normal sweet things aren't much changed in flavour.

I was interested to read in Karl's account that in the early 1970's, it was hoped that it may be used as an artificial sweetener of sorts:

It took until 1968 for two separate groups of scientists to isolate the active ingredient. It turned out to be a chemical that was mostly protein with about 191 amino acids, and about 14 per cent carbohydrate (sugars such as mannose, galactose and fucose). The active ingredient was given the name 'miraculin'.

Soon after miraculin was isolated, Robert Harvey, an American biomedical postgraduate student, became aware of its wonderful property. 

At the time, the artificial sweeteners (which have sweetness, and virtually zero kilojoules) had a slightly noticeable after-taste. 

But Robert Harvey realised that miraculin did not. He tried mightily to market it as an alternative sweetener, one that was based entirely upon a natural product. 

But in 1974, just as he was about to launch it, the US Food and Drugs Administration refused to classify it as 'generally recognised as safe', despite the West Africans having eaten miraculin for centuries with no problems. 

Robert Harvey could not afford the several years of testing needed, so miraculin never made it into the marketplace.

All rather interesting...

Just get Bolt on board and be done with

Ha!  The intellectual, um, bogan-isation? of the Catallaxy blog is nearly complete, with "come back and fight, you Lefties, there's still a culture war I want to win"  Nick Cater now becoming a regular poster there, apparently.

The blog has gone into a tail spin of intellectual credibility over the last couple of years - for any post that actually contains something useful in terms of economic analysis (it happens about once every three or four months now) there will be scores of posts of the kind where Judith Sloan tosses her hair and complains about all the tosh from teachers and Greenies she had to put up with over the years;  Steve Kates doing his excruciatingly simplistic Tea Party/Fox News analysis of US politics (when he's not explaining again how he's the only economist who really understands Say's Law);  and Sinclair Davidson hyperventilating about how anyone (including Jews) who dares question the wisdom of repealing s18 of the Racial Discrimination Act is an enemy of All Things Good.  (The IPA campaign on freedom of speech has been the most hyperbolic think tank campaign I can ever recall.)

What I don't understand is how these people do not see that the way they talk on this blog harms their credibility generally.  The blog is certainly, to my mind, a thriving advertisement against any economics student even contemplating going to RMIT. 

Libertarians think a society where this can happen is a good idea

Man shot dead at movies after texting | World news | theguardian.com

A retired Florida policeman has been charged with murder after allegedly shooting a man who texted during a film.

Authorities said Curtis Reeves, 71, and Chad Oulson, 43, got into an argument before the screening of the film Lone Survivor when Reeves asked Oulson to stop texting.

“Somebody throws popcorn. I’m not sure who threw the popcorn,” said witness Charles Cummings. “And then bang, he was shot.”

Who knows until they are visited

BBC News - Few asteroids are worth mining, suggests Harvard study

There's an enormous amount of uncertainty, it seems, as to the number of asteroids which may be of the metallic iron-nickel variety which is presumably the main type worth mining.

A pro space mining source also claims this in the article, and count me as surprised:

"We have only discovered 1% of the asteroids in the Solar System - and we are discovering them at a larger and larger rate. We discover two or three asteroids a day. If we get from 1% to 10%, then the 650,000 asteroids we have discovered jumps to 6.5 million."

Some startling figures

Quark Soup by David Appell: Climate Change: The Next 10,000 Years

David Appell has been reading up on how long human induced climate change is likely to last.  The answer seems to be - at least 10,000 years.  (!)

Time to look at fertilizing the oceans again, perhaps, as the only large-ish scale means of reducing CO2 that seems vaguely possible.

Bad news for gym owners

Do fast workouts really work?

The article is light on detail, but it does seem that the idea of short, sharp workouts being as good as long, tedious exercise has really caught on in the US.

Good news for people like me, who have always found lengthy exercise a boring waste of time.  Harry Clarke recently linked to this article, from which I have cut the example set of exercises:

 

Interesting.   Perhaps I should now spend two years evaluating which set of exercises is best for me.