The bumbling authorities mistake me and Cary Grant for someone else

Last night I was watching North by Northwest, the classic tale of a man mistaken by authorities for someone else.

I see that Brian at Catallaxy, a police officer from Victoria, was busy doing the same thing with me yesterday.   Don't put this bit of deduction on your resume to become a detective, Brian, because I have nothing to do with the Twitter account Catallaxy Comments.

Mind you, the aim of the account, to highlight some of the extreme content of threads at Catallaxy, seems quite worthy.  It annoys me that Andrew Bolt, for example, would not tolerate a huge number of comments at Catallaxy on his own blog, but is more than happy to continually refer his readers there where they can get their fill of what they can't say at his own place.   Yet he continually only points in his posts to nasty Left wing comments, never the nasty right wing ones from Catallaxy.  Hypocrite. 

But I don't think Catallaxy Comments is being implemented all that well.   The bar as to what makes it in the account is set too low, so that the most spectacularly stupid or offensive is just being overwhelmed  by the routine ratbaggery that appears there daily. 

If it were me running it, I would cut down the daily content.  I remember some of the classic offensive comments, perhaps the account holder should contact me for some of those to add...

Back to North by Northwest:   I was having an after dinner sip or 10 of some dessert wine while watching it last night when the kids said (as they usually do if I have more than 2 glasses of dinner at night) "don't get drunk!"  I said "hey, everyone in this film is drinking all the time; it's a good film to drink while watching it."

And this morning, I thought, yeah, it actually is the perfect movie for a drinking game with the simplest of rules - drink what Cary (or the other characters) are drinking - or are about to drink? - on screen.  (You can reduce the bourbon to just one nip, however, or you won't survive the night.)

From memory, here is how it would go:  I think he nearly has a cocktail in the bar where he is first mistaken for Kaplan, but is kidnapped before he drinks it.   Has at least a large glass of bourbon forced into him at the Townsend house.  Orders a Gibson on the train when meeting Eve Kendell.  A scotch and water (no ice) with her in the hotel in Chicago.  Has a cup of coffee before being fake shot at Mt Rushmore.  Asks the professor to get him a drink before he escapes from hospital in rapid city.  Eve has champagne "on the rocks" while waiting for the plane to arrive.

Yes, I can see you can get at least 4 pretty potent drinks into you over the course of the movie, with a break towards the end with a cup of coffee.  I think I might have missed some other drinking in the movie.  Next time I watch it (I have never listened to the Ernest Lehman commentary) I'll take notes.

Why do our anti-Keynesian economists ignore the value of the Australian dollar?

A genuine question here for any reader who knows economics.

I've noticed that journalist Adam Creighton at The Australian has become the darling of the "small government, must-cut-spending, Keynesian-policies-will-be-the-death-of-us" set of economists at Catallaxy.  (Julie Novak called him the best economics journalist in Australia.  She means he agrees with her.   Actually, I see that he has been around for some time, being a contributor to the IPA-lite think tank the CIS, and writing many articles that align with the views of Australia's Tea Party-lite economists.)

Anyhow, Creighton has a column in the Australian today in which he attempts to talk up the down side of a slide in the value of the Australian dollar.   He goes as far as to write this:

But officials, politicians and even businesses should be careful what they wish for.

By eroding businesses' and workers' purchasing power, a weaker currency harms far more Australians than it helps. Meanwhile, trying to shift the value of the dollar is even more difficult than knowing what its correct value is.

He starts with the rather extreme example:

Andrew Lilley, 25, an inner-western Sydney professional with an economics degree, says he spends about 70 per cent of his discretionary income online at foreign vendors.

"I pretty much only buy groceries in Australia. I buy all my clothes, music, books and instruments from foreign providers," Lilley tells The Weekend Australian, suggesting the savings are huge.

I suspect Andrew Lilley might read Catallaxy, because I have noticed over recent years that it attracts readers who are proud to crush Australian retail under foot as far as possible by shopping overseas on line. 

People who buy clothes and shoes on line particularly annoy me - I think it is the lowest form of consumer misbehaviour possible to try something on in a shop (as is especially essential in shoes, surely) and then go home and buy it on line.   Yeah fine, pay nothing for the service you just got by a real person in a shop.  Make it harder for the rest of us who like to have shoe shops as part of the retail mix to find a good one near home.

But I digress - Creighton scratches around to find economists who think the reduced value of the dollar isn't really that good a thing, and does not provide a very convincing case.   (I would have thought that in economics, a change in anything can always be found to have a negative impact on someone.)  

His article reminded me of something I have noted here before - in the last few years since the Australian dollar climbed higher and higher, the economists at Catallaxy (and, as far as I have noticed, the right wing economics commentators in The Australian) have shown next to no interest in the effect of the high Australian dollar on the economy.  True, Judith Sloan had one column in The Oz and at the blog on the topic in December 2012, but she didn't even spend much time on its effects, just whether it was possible for the RBA to do anything about it.  She decided not, and then no one at the blog ever mentioned it again.  (Well, as far as I have noticed.)

Now, with Creighton's column,  I get the suspicion that they perhaps are not only not interested in the topic, but kind of like the dollar being high. 

Is it their ideological commitment to fighting government spending, size and regulation that leads then to (nearly) never talk about other factors that have a major effect on the economy?

Or is there something in their whole attitude to currency that means the Australian anti-Keynesians just don't want to talk about it?

Certainly, the Tea Party Right in the US is known for its obsession with the return to the gold standard;  as far as I know, the Australian anti-Keynesians won't go there, but I don't really know why when it includes Steve Kates, who is as emphatically "Tea Party" as they come.

Some possible insight into Sinclair Davidson's views about money turned up in this post this week, and while I am no economist, this statement to my ear had a ring of eccentricity about it:

 Now I’m happy to believe that fiat money will result in inflation, and I’m happy to believe that economies can and will shrink or grow, and I’m happy to believe that goods and services can become more or less valuable as relative prices change.  I’m not convinced that fiat money can result in deflation – paper money becoming more valuable? 

What I half expect is that Davidson and Kates have some views about currency that they just don't like to talk about.

But if anyone has any other theories about their lack of acknowledgement of the detrimental effect of the high Australian dollar, let me know.

Update:   an anonymous comment below reminds me that Sinclair Davidson did talk about the Australian dollar in a 2009 WSJ column.  I am pretty sure I have read it before, but had forgotten it.

Reading it with the benefit of hindsight, the article highlights the deficiencies with his permanently ideological driven analysis.

At the time of writing, the Australian dollar was on the way up, and it is noted that "It is possible that the Australian dollar could eventually reach parity or even beyond."   Indeed, this possibility came true: 

Davidson's main point in the column is that the Australian approach to not taking steps to try to intervene with the dollar's rise was the right one to take.   Now, it seems to me that at that time of the early rise, he may have been right, as (so I understand) intervention in currency markets is not without risks and problems, but his reasoning is purely ideologically driven.  For example:

 A depreciating U.S. dollar is a market signal that the U.S. needs to export more and save more. It is a symptom of extremely loose monetary policy and high government spending in Washington. It is also a warning about inflation, given a dollar today buys fewer goods than it did a year ago. U.S. policy makers are reinforcing this cycle by refusing to reform America's "too-big-to-fail" financial system and avoiding tough decisions on spending priorities. In a sense, the falling dollar is a signal that the U.S. needs reform at home.

Central banks abroad that buy dollars to control the dollar's fall are both ignoring and subverting these market signals.

The assumption is that "market signals" on currency always point the way to what is good for every nation on earth - the currency market always knows what is best.   Kinda naive, no?  

And what if the US government completely contradicts the so called "market signal", as Davidson would argue it has, over the next four years?   Well, from the chart above, you can see exactly what happens, but because he is ideologically driven, I would bet my last dollar that he would never change his prescription from what it was in 2009.

And what about the attitude here:  " If the prices of Australian goods and services are rising on world markets, this provides a clear incentive for Australian firms to either reduce their costs or to improve the quality of their offerings."  

Yeah sure, just how much, and how quickly, does he think quality can improve to compensate for most of a decade under US80c followed by an extremely rapid rise, and 3 year pause, at above parity?  And how far does he think wages should drop to compensate for such a rapid 25c rise?

The other thing about the chart above is the reminder of just remarkably low the Australian dollar was during the entire Howard government, versus how remarkably high it was during the entire Gillard government.  The effects of this on the performance of the Australian economy under Labor is virtually never acknowledged at Catallaxy.

Interesting asteroid news

Massive asteroid seen steaming off : Nature News & Comment

Ceres seems to intermittently vent water vapour.  Lots of water might make it a particularly human friendly place to visit or live.  But then again, if the water boils because of internal radioactivity, maybe not.

We'll soon know more about it:

Also mysterious is why Ceres has a substantially greater abundance of
water than Vesta, an asteroid that orbits the sun at approximately the
same distance, Campins writes in a related News & Views article.
If Vesta and Ceres started out with different amounts of water, that
suggests that the asteroids may have originally formed in different
parts of the solar system. The same sort of cosmic migrations, Campins
notes, could have brought asteroids and comets deep into the solar
system, seeding the Earth with water as well as a variety of organic
chemicals — and thereby playing a considerable role in the origin and
evolution of life.

NASA’s Dawn probe — launched in September 2007 and due to arrive at Ceres early in 2015
— could offer answers to such mysteries. “We don’t really have to
guess: in a year we’ll be there,” says Christopher Russell, a planetary
scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead
investigator for the mission. As well as taking high-resolution images
of Ceres, Dawn’s sensors will help to map various minerals on its
surface.

If only he was really still in Opposition

Tony Abbott uses global stage to take a swipe at Labor over financial crisis

As quite a few people have been saying, it's like Tony Abbott can't make the mental shift from being Opposition Leader to PM:

According to the Prime Minister, the Howard government had helped the economy but Labor had undone all the good work.

''In the decade prior to the crisis, consistent surpluses
and a preference for business helped my country, Australia, to become
one of the world's best-performing economies,'' he told the high level
group containing many of the world's top business and political leaders.

''Then a subsequent government decided that the crisis had changed the rules and that we should spend our way to prosperity.''

The comments seem to suggest Australia did not need to
stimulate the economy through 2008-09 under Labor, despite the
near-unanimous advice of economists and Treasury to do just that.

The stimulus program has been accused of waste, such as the
pink batts scheme, elements of the school halls program, and cheques
sent to the deceased or to people living permanently overseas.

However, the Australian government also received widespreadpraise and recognition from around the world for its aggressive response to the global challenge with swift policies credited with avoiding the recession from which virtually all comparable economies are yet to fully recover.

The highlighted line in particular indicates that Abbott has been soaking up the exaggerated and simplistic catch phrases of the likes of the IPA.

He really needs to be a one term PM.

[Blogger really has some formatting issues which are hard to sort out lately.  Sorry.]

The problem with nuclear

I've been meaning to note that John Quiggin's recent post about why nuclear power is not likely to be any sort of fast magic bullet in terms of getting the world off carbon based energy is an interesting read.

I wasn't aware that there had really been any discussion of small modular nuclear as a future option for Australia, but it appears there has.   JQ is very skeptical, given that they are being developed slowly in the US, let alone anywhere else.  

I would question why it has to be this way, though.   When nations need to, the US in particular, they are capable of incredibly rapid and large scale development of new technologies (the Manhattan Project being the obvious example.)

For years I've been saying that with nuclear, it seems that what's been lacking is a serious attempt at national or international scale to decide on which new nuclear options are best for passive safety, rapid development and deployment, and then diverting all effort down that pathway.  One suspects that the smaller scale nuclear would have to be capable of more rapid deployment, if only because the infrastructure around them does not have to be so massive.

But JQ might be right - it may be best in the short and long run to try to by pass nuclear altogether.  I can't really tell...

The Australian and Indonesia

When I posted in December that The Australian's attempt to justify Rudd era telephone tapping of the Indonesian President's wife seemed a bizarrely harmful thing to do while Australia was trying to smooth over the relationship with that country, I had a hard time noticing anyone else making the same observation.

But I felt vindicated when I noticed a few days later that the Lowy Institute blog seemed to agree, although the focus on its story was more criticising the intelligence community for running with that "defence". 

Now the same commentator (Stephen Grenville) from Lowy has targetted The Australian specifically:

The national broadsheet, The Australian, has taken a leading role on the current tensions with Indonesia. Based on a 'well-connected insider who asked not to be named', the paper made the case that the phone tapping of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's wife was just a normal part of commonly accepted practice. SBY shouldn't feel insulted by the justification given: we had to do it because she is the power behind the throne.

More recently, The Australian gave prime space to the argument that the 'boats policy (is) a boon for Jakarta as well.' 

How can we make any sense of this? Are naval intrusions into Indonesia’s territorial waters actually helpful for SBY? Is his palpable anger at this and the phone-tapping just part of the usual shadow-play?

 And the reason Grenville thinks The Australian runs with these unhelpful Indonesian stories may well be in the ill considered attitude of its Chief Editor Chris Mitchell, who Grenville shows has made exaggerated anti Indonesian claims before.

It really seems clear to me to be a case of the Right in Australian media and politics going out of its way to hurt Indonesian relationships for domestic political benefit (being seen to be tough on boat arrivals.)

By the way, the Lowy Institute blog and website really seems pretty good.  Onto the roll it goes.

Blog(roll)worthy

There are a few sites worth adding to the blogroll, and I'll introduce them here:

*  Climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon has long been worth reading, even if I think he tends to be too conservative in terms of staying out of the debate on what response to climate change is appropriate.  (He is rather like James Annan in that respect.)    I see that he is one of the key players in establishing and posting at a new group climate science blog Climate Change National Forum.  This effort looks well worth following. 

*  Sou at Hotwhopper is not a climate scientist as such, but she really does an excellent job at shooting down claims made at Watts Up With That.   Really puts the effort in, she does.

* Homer Paxton comments here pretty frequently and I've been mean and not added his blog to the roll til now.  His Friday links are pretty comprehensive and worthwhile, and he's banned from Catallaxy, so that adds to his credibility (on most issues, at least...)

*  Someone, somewhere I was reading today, recommended Ed Yong as one of his favourite science story aggregators.  Yes, his blog (now at National Geographic) does look pretty interesting.   I liked his story at Nature, too, about how that pest stomach bug Helicobacter pylori seems to be behind unusual outbreaks of stomach cancer.

Deniers losing

An insider's story of the global attack on climate science

An interesting account here of the New Zealand legal action which spectacularly failed to show that temperature adjustments by their weather bureau were wrong or fraudulent.

I also saw recently that Mark Steyn's lawyers have withdrawn in his defence of defamation action by Michael Mann.

Climate change denialists are too silly to realise when they are on the losing side of legal action.

Update:   Hello, Steyn-iacs.   There certainly seem to be a lot of you out there....

You need to take a leaf from the likes of Roger Scruton (conservative philosopher), Kerry Emmanuel, Barry Bickmore (Republican climate scientists), Katheryn Hayhoe (evangelical Christian climate scientist):   believing scientists is not an intrinsically anti-conservative thing to do. 

Your ideological commitment to not believing a well established consensus of scientific opinion is a scandal on the Right of politics in the US and Australia.  Just because Al Gore did a documentary (which I never watched, incidentally), you're never going to believe the science? 

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.