To Canberra and Back - Part 6

After a week in Canberra, it was time to start heading north, and I wanted to show the family the Jenolan Caves.  I had first visited them on a day trip when I was about 9, and the place left a strong impression.  I would have been in my 20's when I went there again, and this time stayed overnight, enjoying a trout dinner in the old art deco dining room.  It's a great spot at which I could  happily spend days.

The route from Canberra takes you past Lake George (currently empty, I think, but some big wind turbines are to be seen on the other side.)   The most interesting part of the drive is the rather lonely road from Goulburn north.   As you can see from the map, it really only has one, small town on the way, Taralga:

We stopped there for lunch and had some quite delicious store made pies (chicken and leek for me and my son; I forget what the "girls" had.)   Here's the shop (on the right as you head north):

The buildings on the other side of the road (and this is pretty much the centre of town) look like this:

That's a bed and breakfast on the left.  There is an old pub nearby with accommodation, and another one further up the road.  The general store is pretty small, and the cafes probably only do lunch, but there are meals at the pubs.  The Wikipedia entry says it has a population of 312, which is perhaps smaller than I expected, and they do well to have what they do in the town, then. 

The somewhat remote feeling about the place, and unexpected collection of old but relatively well kept buildings, were quite appealing to me.  It would seem my favourable impressions were well founded:

Taralga differs from many towns in that a large proportion of its existing buildings date from the 1860s to 90s (although now subject to later uses) and because most of them are of stone construction - built from the vast number of stones and rocks which litter the volcanic soils for miles around.

These two combined to produce an architectural style which is unique to Taralga - not quite Georgian, not quite Victorian - with a tendency to larger windows and quite substantial construction even for modest dwellings. It also means that the town retains a special heritage of particular interest to the traveller.

I am not sure what one would do if you stayed there, but it was the sort of place I felt I should hang around for a couple of days.  It sometimes gets snow in winter, apparently, which would make it look particularly pretty. 

But on northward, through more pretty empty country, til we got to the famous Jenolan Caves.  I like everything about the place, except (I suppose) how busy it can be during holidays.   I like the setting:

the old accommodation 

the blue water (caused by dissolved limestone) in the pond outside:

even the skinks are a pleasing, golden, colour:

And of course the caves themselves.  We only had time for one, and it was the Lucas Cave, the one I first went into when I was a child:

(No, you don't use the ladder, but the maintenance people who do use to change lightbulbs are pretty brave.) It's hard to do justice to the caves with your basic digital camera, but you get the idea:

They say there are still parts of this extensive network of caves still being newly explored, which is quite amazing given how long these have been a tourist attraction (since the 1860's.)

Unfortunately, the day visit was a bit tarnished by a night spent in some bush cabins beside some extremely rowdy young folk from some overseas place - I suspected Iranians.  The setting was nice - full of kangaroos and a wide open field, but these young pests were chasing each other around spraying soft drink on each other before it was dark, then the music came on and it was party time til we (actually, my wife) shouted at them at 12.30 am.  It would have been better if they were religious Muslims.

Then the trip continued the next day....

Tiny, tiny black holes, again

I haven't spent much time browsing through arXiv lately, which is a pity, because here are a couple of papers of interest spotted today:

*  here's one suggesting that the early universe could have led to the creation of lots of tiny black hole "atoms", which have the unusual feature of having electrons within them, and no charge, and therefore to be very weakly interacting with anything else.  They are therefore suggested as a candidate for dark matter.  (I'm pretty sure black hole remnants have been suggested as a dark matter candidate before, just not this type of micro black hole.)  Interesting.

*  here's another paper, much harder to follow, but it is about the blocking of Hawking radiation if a black is inside of a neutron star.  This is of interest because I thought that the safety of the potential micro black holes created in the LHC was based on studies looking at the long term existence of neutron stars.  I am not sure whether those studies considered the potential for the blocking of Hawking Radiation inside of a neutron star which might not exist inside of a planet.  Someone smarter than me would have to look into this.

More bad PR for India

BBC News - India's invisible widows, divorcees and single women

Another way for the Omega Point?

Physics - Cosmological Constant Redefined

I need an article that explains this better for me, but as my preferences lie towards a universe that will collapse rather than just end in a run away expansion, I am encouraged that there is a way that it might still happen:

The cosmological constant refers to a uniform energy density that presumably could explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe. However, a straightforward calculation of this constant gives an impossibly large value. A new approach to this problem, detailed in Physical Review Letters, involves a slight reformulation of general relativity, in which the cosmological constant ends up being a historical average of the matter energy density in the Universe. Besides predicting a small cosmological constant, the theory foresees an eventual collapse of our Universe in a big crunch.

Because the cosmological constant is, by definition, constant throughout time and space, it’s natural to associate it with the energy of the vacuum. Unfortunately, if one calculates the vacuum energy density from quantum zero-point fluctuations (i.e., when particles pop in and out of existence), the result is a factor of 10120 higher than the value deduced from astronomical observations.

Theorists have tried to “tune” the cosmological constant by assuming that the quantum vacuum energy is cancelled out by some additional energy (for example, coming from a Higgs-like particle). But these solutions have proven to be unstable. Nemanja Kaloper of the University of California, Davis, and Antonio Padilla of the University of Nottingham, UK, have devised a new strategy, in which they rewrite Einstein’s general relativity equations. The new equations effectively cancel out the input from quantum fluctuations, by treating the cosmological constant as an average of the matter contribution over all of space and time. This produces a relatively small cosmological constant, but it also predicts that our current accelerated expansion will somehow stop in the future and reverse direction. – Michael Schirber

I wonder if Frank Tipler feels encouraged too for his Omega Point idea? I haven't read anything about him for a while. He still seems to be on the Faculty at Tulane University.

Beautiful science

Found via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, here's a spectacular bit of film making by a young guy who works on salmon research at the University of Washington.   It certainly shows you don't need a huge budget to get great nature footage these days.  Watch it in High Definition, full screen.

Salmon Research at Iliamna Lake, Alaska 2013 from Jason Ching on Vimeo.

What a repulsive bunch

So, Republican Mitch McConnell tries to up his popularity with the conservative, gun loving, climate change denying CPAC crowd by walking on with an (antique) gun held aloft.  What a revolting image for a  nation with regular gun massacres.  As this video shows, it didn't actually work when it came to his speech.

Also, have a look at this good commentary on the speech by vile NRA head Wayne LaPierre.

Norton's very funny episode

I don't watch Graham Norton's chat show all that often:  it's sometimes pretty good, sometimes just so-so. 

But last night, while looking for something to watch, I settled on a Norton episode which turned out to be pretty recent.  Featuring Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and the English actor from Downton Abbey (they were all in that Monuments Men movie, which seems to have been a bit of a critical and box office fizzer), it was genuinely very funny and felt very spontaneous. 

I see that my opinion is shared by others.

It is, at least for the moment, able to be watched in full here:

Dubious tax claims

I did note during the week, via Jason Soon's twitter feed, Adam Creighton's claim that the "rich" are obviously paying enough tax because it is only the top 25% of households that pay "net" tax.

I thought this smelt like more right wing, small government economist spinalysis* which is all about dissuading politicians from ever talking about raising high end tax rates ever again; in fact, its motivation is to suggest the rich should be taxed less.  (See IPA, CIS, right wing American economists.  Adam Creighton used to do CIS articles.)

John Quiggin has a short, sharp response. 

*   (I thought analysis which is really all about ideological spin deserved its own word)

Wages non disaster

As Koukoulas says: hardly the wages blowout of an inflexible market.

I would guess that the reduced number of restaurants doing Sunday trade means most people assume that penalty rates in hospitality should come down a bit.   That's probably about the only change to current wages arrangements for which there is any public sympathy.

Today's Rage choice

Well, there are a lot of uninteresting songs and clips still being put out, but I still didn't this mind one, by a new-ish Liverpool band.  It seems a while since I've noticed a band made up of young guys who don't look overly angst-y, and you can certainly imagine them going over big in the young female market, which deserves a break from the female domination of pop at the moment:

Roger lying down with dogs, again

I give Roger Scruton credit for being the rarest of things:  a clearly right wing intellectual who takes a precautionary approach to climate change, and advocates taxation as a means to address it.  (According to this review of one of his books - by Peter Singer no less - Scruton advocates a carbon consumption tax, even though it appears rather impractical to put an accurate figure for such on imported goods.)

So what's Roger doing coming out here and being the headline act, so to speak, of yet another IPA "Western Civilisation Symposium" in May this year?   Unless these symposiums are a bit of a money spinner for the far from poor IPA, it's hard to see why they are running another one.   You can tell from the comments at Catallaxy that the attendees are all more than likely already members of the IPA who are simply attending - and paying - to get the warm inner glow of hearing what they already believe, and to have drinks with people who think Labor and Unions are appalling people, darling, (and causing the downfall of the once great glorious West).

It keeps them off the street for a weekend, I suppose, and from making inane comments at Catallaxy.

But, does Roger know of the IPA's starring role within Australian politics at promoting not only skepticism over political responses to climate change, but disbelief in climate change per se?  

If he is genuine in his concern about a political need to take action about it (as he obviously is if he is promoting a tax as the answer), why would his lend his support to this organisation?

Unfortunately, there is a precedent for this behaviour.  Scruton was caught out as a handsomely paid shill for tobacco companies just over a decade ago.   What an embarrassment that turned out to be, and one would have thought that he might be more careful about his associations in future.  But then, the Institute of Paid Advocacy and him obviously have something in common.

Now, I assume the symposium will not touch climate change, but even so - if there is any prospect that this event is a money spinner for the IPA, or even if he is just helping raise its public profile, he's helping support an organisation that deserves his disrespect and complete disdain if he is genuine about climate change.

I see that Scruton is also doing a Quadrant event.  Similar comments apply.

Not sure if I approve

Flipboard buys rival news reader Zite from CNN

I've been meaning to comment for some time that I enjoy using both Zite and Flipboard on my Samsung tablet, and recommend them to my vast international readership. 

Now that they are going to merge, I hope I still approve.

On Qantas

Everyone has an opinion on Qantas, regardless of prior knowledge of the aviation industry, so why shouldn't I?   A few points:

*  Someone, I forget who, was saying that Qantas has been looking for an airline to partially buy into it for about a decade, and has had no success.   Is that really because of the ownership level restrictions, or because most airlines don't see it as a good buy?

*  Maybe it was the same person, maybe someone else, was saying that removing foreign ownership restrictions was no guarantee that Qantas would soon find a large foreign airline that wanted to buy into it;

*  Coalition politicians have been saying that if, say, China Southern wanted to buy a large chunk, it would still need Foreign Investment Review Board approval, which is not assured.

Why then, in light of these points, should anyone assume that the Coalition's priority - removing ownership restrictions - is going to do anything to solve Qantas problems either in the short term, or ever?   The general impression one gets is that its problems need addressing on a pretty quick time scale (within a couple of years, anyway.)

Some more observations:

*  There is no doubt at all that Joyce has done a terrible job on the politics of the help the airline needs.   This was covered on Radio National this morning.   Apparently,  few months ago he was talking as if the business was going to go under any minute, now he says it won't;  there is a heap of confusion over whether the airline does or doesn't recover carbon tax by adding a few dollars to each fare (and I note - people get hit with large fees for paying for a discount ticket with a credit card with Jetstar which dwarfs the extra few dollars of a carbon tax); he apparently asked for an unsecured loan of $3 billion (!) originally, which is just ludicrous in anyone's books.   Everyone recognises that the Asian expansion was ill considered, and it seems quite a few think the airline has made some poor choices with its fleet, although whether or not some of that predates Joyce, I have no idea.

Also, regardless of whether the unions really "deserved" Joyce's grounding a couple of years back, there is no doubt that such action hurts the public image of the airline for at least a couple of years.   (Anyone who misses a wedding or important function for this reason can probably be written off from ever flying the airline again.)

And, with my shallowest hat on - Joyce just looks and sounds like someone not smart enough to run an airline.  James Strong dressed and sounded like a toff, but actually, at a time when  people are looking at the stability of an airline for their long term business, image counts; and Strong's image was a hell of lot more reassuring than Joyce's.  

So, as much as I hate to say that I agree with a position that is being run hot at Catallaxy - yes, I think Joyce really needs to go.   He needs to take responsibility and give the job to someone new who seems to know what's going on and can keep his story straight.  (No pun intended.)

Update:   try as I might, I can't outdo the shallowness of Judith Sloan's Qantas analysis, which now includes "Oh My God - they let their off duty pilots fly in Business Class.  That just gives the public the wrong impression!"   

She also makes a claim about ex-staff entitlements which I am pretty damned sure, having a close relative who is ex-staff, is not true.  This has been pointed out by 2 people in comments already, and Judith has retreated to "well, maybe that just applies to some categories of ex-staff."   How about clarifying your claim in the actual post, you careless ideological warrior?

Update 2:  Good Lord.  About half a dozen people on the thread have now told Judith she's wrong about the hotels, and that having staff sitting in spare business class seats is routine across the industry, costs the airline nothing, and on long distance lets them catch a bit of sleep, which most people think is a good idea for pilots and even cabin crew   But she's insisting this is a bad look.  It's about time The Australian updated her pic:

Update 3:  It has occurred to me that in her post, JS did not make it clear whether, on the Qantas trip in which she say a pilot in uniform in business class, she was travelling business class or not.  If in fact she only spied this outrage while passing through the aircraft to her modest economy seat, then the word balloon should be modified to this, perhaps"  "Get to the back of the plane, who do you think you are, taking the seat that I might have been upgraded to?  Hmph." 

Update 4:

The Joyce spin on the carbon tax, which allows one person in Qantas to say it is not a factor, and then for the boss to contradict it, is explained here.   Basically,  Joyce is  being slippery with the truth, if not dishonest.   Even with his reduced fares, they still incorporate a carbon tax surcharge, so it is not right to claim the tax is unrecovered.

Innocent this time?

My dislike of Kevin Rudd and the awful disruptive power he wielded within Labor is well known, but it seems there is a very good chance he's being treated unfairly over his trip to Russia:

But a spokeswoman said the visit was linked to Mr Rudd’s new role as a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy school and a related research project on China.

“Mr Rudd is meeting with think tanks and other officials in Europe including the UK and Russia on this and broader foreign policy interests,” she said.

“This travel was planned more than a month ago and is not connected with recent developments in the Ukraine.”

Krugman on inflation obsessives

The Inflation Obsession - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman writes, after noting that inflation worrying was dominating the Federal Reserve just before the crisis hit, writes:

The point, however, is that inflation obsession has persisted, year after year, even as events have refuted its supposed justifications. And this tells us that something more than bad analysis is at work. At a fundamental level, it’s political.

This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are.While a few conservatives believe that the Fed should be doing more, not less, they have little if any real influence. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative.

Why is this the case? In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best. Back in the 1930s, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter inveighed against any effort to fight the depression with easy money; to do so, warned Schumpeter, would be to
leave “the work of depressions undone.” Modern conservatives are generally less open about the harshness of their view, but it’s pretty much the same.

The flip side of this antigovernment attitude is the conviction that any attempt to boost the economy, whether fiscal or monetary, must produce disastrous results — Zimbabwe, here we come! And this conviction is so strong that it persists no matter how wrong it has been, year after year.

Finally, all this ties in with a predilection for acting tough and inflicting punishment whatever the economic conditions. The British journalist William Keegan once described this as “sado-monetarism,” and it’s very much alive today.

Soldier problems

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Researchers reported Monday that most American soldiers who attempt suicide had preexisting mental health issues before enlisting in the armed forces, raising new questions about how to address sky-high suicide rates in the US military.

The research, published as three papers in JAMA Psychiatry, found that more than a quarter of current soldiers have at least one mental disorder, a rate about twice that for the general public. More than three-quarters of soldiers with mental illness say that their disorders preceded their enlistment in the armed forces, and some 60 percent of solider suicide attempts can be traced to those preenlistment mental troubles, the report said.

I guess we shouldn't be too surprised about this.   The all encompassing aspect of a soldier's life (and the chance to play out aggression for real) might well appeal to those who are somewhat troubled about some aspect of their life and want a big change.

I think this means I should keep dieting...

Study results confirm BMI is a direct cause of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure

The last bastion

Spotted in the thread following Hysterical Steve (Kate's) post about the Ukraine at Catallaxy:

Face it guys, we lost. All that remains of western civilisation and the glory that was the spread of the anglosphere is a few sites like diplomad and catallaxyfiles. Abbott and Brandis are shirking the repeal of 18C. The ABC is sacred. The paternalists are in charge. The ALP are in the lead in opinion polls. The USA is a mess. The UK is a worse one, and Oz is well down the same path.

I suppose its good that they have somewhere in cyberspace to gather and console themselves, and give the rest of us a chance to laugh at their delusions of grandeur. 

The manly man diet not so good

Animal protein-rich diets could be as harmful to health as smoking | Science | The Guardian


I think this means there will be less libertarians around in 20 years time.  (I have made the observation before that high protein diets are big with their side of politics:  it appeals to their "strong man" fetish and insistence that progressive politics is for girls and limp wristed men.   Did Ayn Rand's male characters eat half a cow for dinner before forcefully having their way with the strong willed heroine who just wants to be taken?  I certainly expect so.)

It's an interesting study, though, as it says that high protein may be good for you once you get older. But before then, not so good at all for your longevity.

Jericho on disability pensions

Those scary DSP numbers aren't so scary after all - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Greg Jericho brings a bit of his cool, calm and collected analytical style to the issue of disability pensions in this column.

Which also reminds me - Judith Sloan briefly, ever so briefly, flew the flag a year or two ago that raising the  Newstart allowance would probably be a good thing.  How often has she talked about that since then?  Has she repeated it in the hallowed halls of Catallaxy, ever? (I don't believe she has.)  

As Jericho indicates, the government is suggesting possibly merging DSP and Newstart into one allowance.  Maybe that would mean the former would drop and the latter rise a bit?   Who knows how Judith would react to that...