The Fat Controller strikes again

Middle East Potato Scandal

Kuwait launches probe into allegations over Israeli potatoes | GulfNews.com

Manama: Kuwait’s commerce ministry has launched an investigation into
reports that Israeli potatoes were being sold in cooperative societies.

“The ministry is currently coordinating with several parties to reach a
conclusion about the allegations and ensure that they are not
malicious,” ministry sources told local daily Al Kuwaitiya.

“The ministry has a zero-tolerance policy towards the import and sale
of Israeli products and if there are Israeli potatoes in the stores,
there will be stringent action against those involved,” the sources
said.

Cheese, subs and fresh air

BBC News - USS Nautilus: A record-breaking sub

I like the quirkiness of some of the anecdotes here from a guy who was on the first crew of the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus.  For example:

"I hated cottage cheese, but one time we stayed submerged for a long
time and when the ship surfaced I began to crave cottage cheese. I think
breathing the recycled air changed my metabolism."

When they surfaced and began to pump fresh air back into the Nautilus "it was so clean and so sweet it made you light-headed"...

"For every 100 feet in depth, there's 44 pounds of pressure per square
inch of the vessel. So when we went deep in the ocean, the hull would
compress and the locker doors would pop open."...

"The US Navy sent psychologists on board the Nautilus because they
were concerned about the effects on the personalities and mental health
of the men who would be confined in such a small amount of space for
long periods."

They found no impact, he says, but some submariners would talk gibberish and pretend to be crazy.

Quantum consciousness on the cards again?

Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' corroborates theory of consciousness | e! Science News

Penrose & Hameroff's much derided theory that quantum effects in brain cell microtubules are key to animal and human consciousness seems to still be a possibility.

It works for the guys

Confronting a Sexual Rite of Passage in Malawi - Beenish Ahmed - The Atlantic

We all know that some tribal societies have had the oddest ideas about how to mark the transition of puberty, but I don't recall reading before about how they deal with it in Malawi.  (People who think the Dutch take sex education too far too early just should not read it.)

The main thing that struck me while reading the article is that teenage boys must consider it a fantastic system.    The adverse consequences in terms of health seem to primarily fall on the girls/young women, although of course some guys run the risk of getting HIV too. It's remarkable how the emphasis seems to be entirely on teaching girls how to please men.

It seems amazing that it has not earlier come under attack.

Rhodes scholarships don't seem to have great results...

Tony Abbott wants Syrian 'goodies' to help and end the civil unrest | News.com.au

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott arrived at the World Economic Forum
repeating his line that the Syrian situation was "baddies vs. baddies." ...

“The difficulty in Syria is that - as I famously, perhaps infamously
said during the election campaign - it often seems like a case that
involves baddies versus baddies,” he said.

“I guess the best way for all of them to demonstrate that at least
some of them are goodies is to lay down their arms and try to ensure
that the conflict… starts to subside.”

Judith Curry: credibility in freefall

Rabett Run: Curry vs. Curry


More proof, if it was needed, that Judith Curry has no credibility in the way she approaches the overall question of climate change.

Quite serious if correct

Frequency of extreme El Ninos to double as globe warms : Nature News & Comment


And here's another report from ABC: Extreme El Nino events set to double

An inconsistency unexplained (yes, he's still talking about kid's movies)

I realised today that I seem to have inconsistent views on animation.

In my negative comments about Frozen, I said that computer animation that is close to photorealistic but which portrays humans with a cartoonish aspect (consider the enormous eyes in Frozen, for example) is distracting, as it makes the characters look like moving dolls.

Yet in my positive review of ParaNorman and Coraline, I made it clear that I can get a very particular kind of enjoyment from well done stop motion animation, where the characters really are "moving dolls".

This does seem odd, and I am not sure of the explanation.

I suppose I should say that it is not as if stop motion per se makes for a pleasing film - God knows there was a lot of stop motion dross made in the 60's and 70's for kids' TV (Christmas themed specials in particular) and I was never a fan.    But then again, the quality of the animation in those films compared to the output of Laika or Aardman movies at their best just bears no comparison.

(Speaking of Aardman, I enjoyed Rex the Runt on TV a great deal, and like the wry humour of Wallace and Grommit, but their last movie "The Pirates" was a serious "miss".)

So, to enjoy a stop motion film, it has to still have a good script.  But when it does, the appreciation of all the manual, hand crafted work that has gone into creating them somehow makes them very special.

As to why I don't like computer animation when it has the same sort of visual effect - I am still not sure.

I was partly inspired to think about this while listening to a repeat of The Uncanny Life of Puppets on Radio National.  I have good reason to be thinking about puppets over the last year - I did, after all, see one of the most spectacularly successful stage shows featuring a giant puppet only 6 months ago.

I think that this comment on why puppets can be effective is perhaps relevant to stop motion animation:

Amanda Smith:  In playing around with scale - puppets are often smaller or larger than life size - in that playing around with scale, and in looking lifelike but not too lifelike - as puppets also often are - is this something to do with their kind of strange compelling power? In looking sort of human but not entirely?

Neville Tranter: It’s very strange because what happens to the audience is: the audience know it’s a puppet. Everything is transparent. You can see right through it and it’s all in the imagination. It’s pure suggestion. But at the same time the fact that you can see how it’s being done makes it  even - strangely enough - it makes it even more magical.

Oddly, last week I also heard a bit of Phillip Adams talking to stage actor/director Robyn Nevin, and they mentioned how the very artificiality of stage productions is sometimes what makes them  particularly memorable. 

All very complicated, our perceptions of representations of life, isn't it?

 

Marriage and divorce

A couple of odd stories about marriage, divorce and religion:

*  Utah polling indicates that in the space of a mere 10 years the State has gone from aggressively against same sex marriage to a 50/50 "meh" attitude.   

While I am still completely unconvinced about gay marriage, it is polling like this in Western countries which makes me think it is inevitable and not worth fretting about.   I suspect it will come in and be an option taken up by fewer and fewer couples over time anyway.

*  An American study indicates it's not good for your marriage to even live near a bunch of conservative Protestants:

Divorce is higher among religiously conservative Protestants – and even drives up divorce rates for other people living around them, a new study finds.

Paranomal & ParaNorman

A couple of nights ago I feel asleep on the sofa while the TV was on, but woke up in time to see the last half or so of Paranormal Activity, the faux reality movie very much in the vein of Blair Witch Project.  It made a lot of money, at least compared to the cost to make it.  (Box Office Mojo says $193 million on a - wait for it - $15,000 budget.)  So there have been several sequels, not that they seem to attract much critical attention now.

I thought it was crap.   Sure, watching it late at night while everyone else in the house is asleep made it feel a bit creepy at times (it's really the silence that is effective), but by the time it got to the climax, it was just silly.   Bizarrely, it got an 83% approval score on Rottentomatoes, although I see David Stratton found it "extremely unthrilling, very obvious, very clichéd. We've seen it all before."   Hear hear.

The second movie I watched this weekend with "para" in the title was last years ParaNorman.   I bought it on DVD for my daughter as a Christmas gift (not the only one, I hasten to add) and this was the second time we watched it together.

It is a terrific film.

Made by the same company (Laika) that made the very impressive, if somewhat narratively unclear, Coraline, it uses the same beautiful and engaging stop motion animation to great effect.   If you liked the look and feel of Coraline, you will also love this movie.

Apart from its look, the script combines humour that is sometimes slapstick, sometimes beautifully subtle; scares and (honestly) emotional depth that may get to the adults watching more than the kids.

I'm happy to see I am not alone in enjoying it - there's an 87% approval rating at RT, and it got an Oscar nomination last year (but losing out to Brave - what an absolute travesty of a decision that was!)

It didn't make much money at the box office - $107 million on a $60 million budget; and even Coraline was only marginally more financially successful. (I am also disturbed to see that the very enjoyable Wes Anderson stop motion version of Fantastic Mr Fox was pretty much a financial disaster that barely recovered its budget.  Why don't more people go to see these films at the cinema?   Done well, they have a "hand made" warmth and charm that is just a pleasure to watch in every frame. And there sure doesn't seem to be a lot of justice in the world when the cheapo Paranormal Activity makes so much money for so little craft.)     But it seems at least that Laika is successful enough that they have another film coming out in 2014, and this very charming teaser trailer gives you an idea as to why their films cost so much:



I see there is also a great short video from the studio about the making of ParaNorman:



May this company continue to have critical success, and make more money in the future too.

A likely explanation for some ball lightning

Natural ball lightning probed for the first time - environment - 16 January 2014 - New Scientist

I don't think it can possibly explain all ball lightning - such as the well attested cases where small balls have appeared inside houses and even an airplane - but it appears there is a good explanation for one type:

In 2012, Jianyong Cen and his colleagues at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, were observing a thunderstorm in Qinghai, China with video cameras and spectrographs. Purely by chance, they recorded a ball lightning event. When a bolt struck the ground, a glowing ball about 5 metres wide rose up and travelled about 15 metres, disappearing after 1.6 seconds.

The spectrograph revealed that the main elements in the ball were the same as those found in the soil: silicon, iron and calcium. The observations support a theory for making ball lightning put forth in 2000 by John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Abrahamson surmised that when lightning hits the ground, the sudden, intense heat can vaporise silicon oxide in the dirt, and a shockwave blows the gas up into the air. If there's also carbon in the soil, perhaps from dead leaves or tree roots, it will steal oxygen from the silicon oxide, leaving a bundle of pure silicon vapour. But the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere rapidly re-oxidises the hot ball of gas, and this reaction makes the orb glow briefly.

The theory garnered support in 2006, when scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel were able to create ball lightning in the lab by firing mock lightning at sheets of silicon oxide. The event in China marks the first time such an orb has been captured in nature with scientific instruments.

Movies really could be much shorter...

Neuroscientists find the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds

Not such a great idea

Privatising Australia Post � Harry Clarke

I like it when Harry Clarke gets in a narky mood, and the second line in this post about privatising Australia Post is a great example:

Its a weak argument from a posturing bunch of low-intellect phonies who are promoting self-interest, neo-con ideology and third-rate economics.

The reasons why are set out succinctly in the post, and I find them pretty convincing.

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.