Why I haven't blogged about the reactionless drive

Don't Get Too Excited About NASA's New Miracle Engine

I had a hunch that the write ups of the NASA apparent confirmation of a reactionless drive were being a bit too enthusiastic.  This article indicates my skepticism may be well founded.

And one other point:  the thrust the test measured was absolutely tiny.  Even if a totally new effect is at play, I wouldn't get too excited unless it was clearly scale-able to something useful.   Weird (but tiny) force effects of the quantum world already exist - see the Casimir effect - but as far as I know there is no proposal to ever make use of that for colonising the universe.

About time the doctors started talking

Australia's detention regime sets out to make asylum seekers suffer, says chief immigration psychiatrist | World | The Guardian

Good, detailed report by David Marr [and some other journalist who hasn't been on Insiders so I don't know him] on the harm indefinite detention in offshore camps is causing.

The situation is clearly much worse in a humanitarian sense than it was under Howard - where a considerable number of the detained at least had a fair hope of ending up in Australia (or New Zealand, if I recall correctly) if they waited long enough.

The current people there can see no resolution on the horizon at all.

I still believe that the public is simply "living with" this because the government has kept details of conditions under such tight wraps.  There needs to be more exposure and humanising of the detainees.

A mile wide but an inch deep

Noted from The Australian today:

ACCORDING to Gina Rinehart, most journalists have room to improve. Australia’s richest person has nominated Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones as two of the finest journalists in the country.

In an interview with The Australian’s editor Clive Mathieson on the state of the mining industry and her own plans in the sector, Rinehart was less forthcoming about her investments in the media industry, where she is the biggest individual shareholders of Ten and Fairfax Media.

She did say she has an issue with the quality of journalism in Australia, telling Mathieson: “I would like to see journalism restore itself to take more pride in ­accuracy and fairness.”

The exception to the miserable media standards are Bolt and Jones. “I’m a great admirer of both Andrew and Alan,” she said. “They are courageous individuals and great patriots, genuinely concerned for Australia’s future.”

What a laugh.

Evil comet cat detected

We've all become rather blasé about photos of moons and planets and stuff, I think, reflecting little on the remarkably successful extent of the unmanned exploration of the solar system.

Even so, the Rosetta mission, designed to orbit and plant a probe on a comet is one of the more remarkable missions of recent years.   I know there have been photos taken of comet cores before, but I don't think anything as interesting as this:

And here's another to give the scale:

And by the way, did you notice the clear-ish alien grinning cat artifact in the first picture?   I'll highlight it here:

 

 

Actually, it might be Yoda, but he didn't smile that much.  But now that it's been pointed out to you, you will find it hard to un-see.

[This post strikes me as good geeky Reddit fodder, but while I read it sometimes, I don't post anything there.  Then again, it wouldn't be surprising if something similar has not already appeared.  Anyway, anyone who posts there, feel free to link here...]

A First World War human interest story

Inside the brothels that served the Western Front: How one First World War soldier found love in the arms of a French sweetheart - The Independent

I see that officers tended to visit their own, somewhat higher class, brothels when in France during the First World War.  I thought two things were of particular note in this article:

1.  Mirrored ceilings in bedrooms expecting a lot of "action" have been around for longer than I imagined. I would have guessed they were only thought of in the 1970's, but no.  In fact, this room sounds altogether over-mirrored:

Of the brothels themselves, another British officer recalled: "The
Madame took me to an eight-sided room, the walls and ceilings of which
were entirely covered with mirrors. The only furniture in it was a low
divan on which a pretty little blonde was displaying her charms. She
welcomed me most pleasantly and later we breakfasted off an omelette,
melon and champagne."

2.   Some avoided returning to England on leave because of the jarring attitude to the war:

Captain Harry Siepmann, writing in the 1950s, offered another reason why
he and his fellow officers had chosen to visit the brothels of Paris
rather than spend a few days of precious leave in Blighty: by the end of
the war, he said, the "out-of-touch atmosphere" of jingoism and
unthinking patriotism in Britain "jarred badly with the grim realities
of France".

 It's a good article worth reading in full.

A blood test with big implications

A blood test for suicide?

A fascinating article here on the apparent success of a study looking into a blood test for detecting those who have been feeling suicidal, although if I understand it right, only amongst those people who have a "common" genetic mutation in the first place:

In another part of the study, the researchers tested three different sets of blood samples, the largest one involving 325 participants in the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention Research Study found similar methylation increases at SKA2 in individuals with suicidal thoughts or
attempts. They then designed a model analysis that predicted which of the participants were experiencing suicidal thoughts or had attempted suicide with 80 percent certainty. Those with more severe risk of suicide were predicted with 90 percent accuracy. In the youngest data
set, they were able to identify with 96 percent accuracy whether or not a participant had attempted suicide, based on blood test results. 

The implications sound a little bit like science fiction:

Kaminsky says a test based on these findings might best be used to predict future suicide attempts in those who are ill, to restrict lethal means or methods among those a risk, or to make decisions regarding the intensity of intervention approaches.

He says that it might make sense for use in the military to test whether members have the gene mutation that makes them more vulnerable. Those at risk could be more closely monitored when they returned home after deployment. A test could also be useful in a psychiatric emergency room, he says, as part of a suicide risk assessment when doctors try to assess level of suicide risk.

The test could be used in all sorts of safety assessment decisions like the need for hospitalization and closeness of monitoring. Kaminsky says another possible use that needs more study could be to inform treatment decisions, such as whether or not to give certain medications that have been linked with suicidal thoughts.

The meth puzzle

Of all the dangerous drugs that people try, I've always had the greatest difficulty in understanding why they would use crystal meth.  Surely there has been enough media exposure about the psychosis and vile bodily effects an addiction to it can have.

In the Saturday Paper, there's one guy's story of how he started using it, starting getting psychotic, but managed to get out of the scene.  The details are very common to what we've seen on current affairs programs over the years, and this was an apparently smart enough guy who thought he could try it safely.

I would assume there is research on the topic, and perhaps I should go looking for it.  But my guess would be that two factors are probably important:  first, he "gateway effect" of using other drugs such as marijuana and (I would guess) ecstasy, for which there is much less risk of addiction but pleasant enough experiences which lead people to believe they can upgrade to the next experience and also deal with it safely.  (I find articles such as this one which dismiss a gateway effect as illusory to be unconvincing and too pedantic.  To say a drug is a "gateway" is not necessarily an argument that is directly causative of further drug experimentation, but rather that its use sets the scene for experimentation with reputedly dangerous drugs by encouraging the rationalisation of their potential for safe use  I guess that the illegal status of the softer drug may help that rationalisation - by developing skepticism that illegality is motivated by the dangerous effect of drugs.)

Secondly, the social encouragement of other experimenters that they have not been hurt by its casual use, and can control how often they use it, must surely be important.  But given the clear, dire effects that it does have on so many people, how do so many first timers manage to not know of people in the same circles who have been sent over the edge by it?  As the author of the Saturday Paper article writes:

I was plainly ignorant about the drug before I succumbed. I’d considered myself a drug-savvy streetwise person before the autumn of 2014. However, my quick and doe-eyed plunge into addiction suggested otherwise. I had a number of key misconceptions about the drug: that meth didn’t kill you, that there was a safe level of use, and that meth didn’t do permanent damage.

What I find hard to credit is that any half reasonably educated person doesn't know of its dangers.  (Or can still rationalise experimentation despite knowing of them, I guess.)

Update:  OK, there have been a series of articles at The Conversation about meth use, and one claims this:

However, the majority of people who use illicit drugs do not use regularly or in large quantities. A relatively small proportion (for methamphetamine, around 10-15%) of users go on to become dependent and need treatment.

On the other hand, another article by the same author links to this study, which notes:

The estimated number of regular methamphetamine users in Australia was 102,600, or 10.3 per 1000 persons aged 15 to 49 years. Of these regular methamphetamine users, it was estimated that there were 72,700 dependent methamphetamine users, or 7.3 per 1000 population aged 15-49 years. The bulk of regular and dependent methamphetamine users were located outside of Sydney (83% and 80% respectively).

So that indicates that about 70% of "regular" users are dependent?

That puts the addiction picture in a much stronger light than saying that "a relatively small proportion" of meth users go on to be dependent*, but I suppose it could also means that relatively large number of people could only try it once or twice and not get further into its use?

*  can you imagine the situation if the number of regular alcohol users said to be dependent on it was 70%?

An Asperger story

It was particularly interesting to read the "Two of Us" section in the SMH this morning, about Kathy Lette (Mrs Geoffrey Robertson) and their 23 year old son Julian, who has Asperger syndrome.  (Given that one half of it is written by him, you'll see what I mean...)

I only like my own apocalypse

Snowpiercer and These Final Hours continue apocalyptic film tradition - The Final Cut - ABC Radio National 

 I've noticed some ad or something for These Final Hours, which is an Australian "we've only got hours til the end of the world" film, but I knew nothing of its story.  In the article above, we get a description, and the mechanism for the end of the world sounds unscientific.  (The film sounds violent and unpleasant too.)

Why can't global disaster movies get the disaster scientifically plausible?   The only one which I think really did try fairly hard in that respect was Deep Impact (and I thought it a pretty good film generally.)

But so many are just utter rubbish with the science - that shlock German director's The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (hey, we're still here),  the (awful other) "asteroid hits Earth" movie Armageddon; even World War Z, although I was surprised to enjoy its video game similarities, had a ridiculously brief viral zombification scenario.  [And, I might add, it annoyed me continually that the wife kept making satellite phone calls from the inside of the navy ship she was on.  Surely you'd have to be near or on the deck for that?]

In fact, generally speaking, I can't say I like apocalypse films as a genre much at all.  I'm not sure why I'm supposed to enjoy ones with bleak, hopeless endings, even if they do manage to get the science vaguely right.

Which is all a bit odd, perhaps, given that I was recently talking about my own apocalyptic thoughts whenever I'm driving out in the Lockyer Valley.  (And, incidentally, I wrote that post before hearing about These Final Hours.) The thing is, I like my own apocalypses, but rarely anyone else's.

Damn it - I missed the "stagflation" birthday

I see I just missed the 3 year anniversary of Sinclair Davidson appearing in The Drum (and on Andrew Bolt's show) warning that Australia  had a "looming" stagflation problem.  

It is (stagflation), after all, "the consequence of pursuing Keynesian economic policy."   And this was "an economy facing a stagflation problem."

Yet this utterly failed prediction (and despite his likely hedging that he used the word "could" once or twice, I'm calling this out as a predication based on his wrong headed, ideologically driven theory that low taxes and low government spending is always the cure for what ails an economy), he has the hide to claim US economists are wrong in their view that the Obama stimulus helped reduced joblessness.

The graph he uses to support the argument can, of course, simply be said to show that the effects of the GFC on unemployment in the country was worse than initially expected.   What matters on the question of whether the stimulus helped is the question of where the actual unemployment graph line would be running if the stimulus had not happened.   Merely showing that the initial predictions of where unemployment would go with and without stimulus doesn't answer that. 

Of course, in the fixed ideology of "low government spending at any cost", they will argue that any worsing in an economy is the result of higher government spending. 

Starting from a fixed ideological position is no way to argue economics with any credibility.

Jericho making sense, again

Business leaders should stop whingeing about Australia’s competitiveness | Business | theguardian.com

Greg Jericho is in fine form having a go at big business and its complaints, particularly the odious way Gina Rinehart pines for low wages for her mines and funds climate change disbelief.

Speaking of miners, what's with the ridiculous excuse for a newspaper The Australian and its thorough tongue bathing of Andrew Forrest and his welfare ideas this week?   Sure, Forrest has a  reputation for being genuinely concerned about poverty (unlike Rinehart, who gives the impression she's been envious since childhood of Uncle Scrooge being able to actually swim in his money,) but even so, why has the paper been so busy promoting his welfare report?   And then, it seems today that Shanahan's job has become to explain to the public why the Abbott government won't adopt it.

It would be intriguing indeed to see the emails (or listen in to telephone calls) that go into and out of the head office of The Australian at the moment.  

Update:   I see that Andrew Bolt tries to be helpful [/sarc] today, by criticising Forrest for saying aborigines are "economically jailed" (an oversimplification, I would agree), but then goes on to say it's not the fault of white people - it's the entire dysfunctional aboriginal culture that's at fault.  (!)

Well, that'll earn him points in the aboriginal reconciliation stakes.   It's entirely their fault they're stuck in poverty and a cycle of drug dependence, hey?

And here I thought my take on the matter (that in large part it is to do with aboriginal communities being often stuck in areas with extremely limited opportunities to do anything of economic value, and a reluctance to have policies encouraging them to move to areas where their children may have a future job) was an oversimplication.

Stimulus and austerity

I've been reading a few things on the matter of great economic debate of stimulus versus austerity.

First, Justin Wolfers says that survey results show that top flying American economists are nutty outliers (my wording, not Wolfer's) if they hold the position that the Obama stimulus of 2009 didn't help the economy.  They are more divided on whether it was worth the cost, but even then it runs more than two to one in favour of "yes, it was worth it."

Secondly, I stumbled across this article by Florian Schui which I thought gives a nice succinct summary of the intersection of politics and economics on this issue:

This is an evolutionary argument familiar from radical liberal thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Hayek. Crucially, their perspective does not give great prominence to questions of economic efficiency. Indeed, free societies a likely to experience periods of economic waste: periods of low growth may leave labour, capital and other resources underused. But free societies do better in the long run because they are better at evolving and adapting. The political aim must therefore be to contain the size of the state in order to leave space for the creative forces of society. That remains true even if cutting back the state hurts growth and economic efficiency in the short term. If you accept this view, it makes no sense to adapt the size of the state to the cyclical fluctuations of the economy. Rather, what is needed is a permanently smaller state to unleash the creative powers of society.

This argument has its merits but from an economic perspective there are some substantial problems associated with the Olympian perspective adopted by thinkers like Humboldt and Hayek. Mainly, they do not say how long the long run is. Other approaches to economic policy allow the public to verify concrete results after a few quarters or after a couple of years at the latest and decide whether to continue with a specific set of policies or not. But it is not clear when we can undertake a similar evaluation of the results of this kind of radical laissez faire. Every crisis no matter how long or deep may be interpreted as an unpleasant but necessary stretch on a superior evolutionary path. In practice, this means that economic results become irrelevant as a yardstick against which to judge economic policy. This is exactly what is happening in the case of austerity. There simply is no economic outcome that can convince proponents of austerity that they are on the wrong track. Their cause is not about economic efficiency but about a political goal: the preservation of liberty.

There are also social problems associated with the Olympian perspective of the likes of Humboldt and Hayek. Prussian aristocrats and tenured professors are in a position to look at economic crises, even if they lasts a decade or longer, as a mere transitory phase of hardship that is part of a superior evolutionary trajectory. More ordinary citizens may not be able to afford this kind of detached perspective on the economy. A longer crisis can ruin the life plans of individuals and lead to the collapse of social and political systems. That is why Keynes warned that the ‘long run is a misleading guide to current affairs’.

One may object that there is nothing wrong with giving priority to political values over the pursuit of economic maximisation and social welfare. Why should the defence of freedom not trump economic and social considerations? After all maximising growth and maximising human happiness can be two rather different things and most people would agree that the latter is more important. The preservation of liberty may very well warrant austerity policies that cut the state to size, even if they hurt economically.

While this is a valid argument it is questionable whether the trade-off between the size of the state and individual liberty really exists. The historical experience of Humboldt and Hayek certainly gave them reason to think of states as the enemies of individual freedom. In Humboldt’s time, towards the end of the 18^th century, absolutist states such as his native Prussia and republican states such as France were extremely ambitious in expanding their sphere of action, often at the expense of individual liberty. The same is true of the authoritarian states in Europe that Hayek witnessed in the 1920s and 30s.

However, a more complete vision of history also reveals the shortcomings of the simple equation of a larger state with greater oppression. Hayek predicted in the 1940s that planned economies would set mankind on a road to serfdom. In actual fact, the vast expansion of states across the western world in the post war decades coincided with an equally substantial increase of liberty for many contemporaries. Women and black people acquired more freedom than ever before and despite evident lapses western countries did rather well at protecting the individual rights of their citizens.

I think this sounds quite convincing, and goes along with my increasing feeling over the last few years that it is the small government ideologues who are truly ignoring history.   

And finally, this article in The Economist, which I've possibly linked to before, seems to give a very fair and balanced take on the matter.

History repeats - kinda

Why Did ISIS Destroy the Tomb of Jonah? | Mark Movsesian | First Things

From the post, a brief summary of the branch of Islam that ISIS represents:

ISIS is part of the Salafi movement, a branch of Sunni Islam that seeks to return to the practices of the earliest Muslims – the salaf—who lived at the time of the Prophet Mohammed and just after. The movement rejects the centuries of subsequent developments in Islam as
unjustified innovations–pagan accretions that adulterated the faith. In particular, the movement opposes the veneration of the graves of Islamic prophets and holy men. Salafis see this practice, which is associated most frequently with Sufi Islam, as a kind of idolatry, or shirk, that detracts from the absolute transcendence of God.

Salafi Islam prevails in Saudi Arabia, where it enjoys the patronage of the royal family. On the Arabian Peninsula, as now in Iraq, Salafis have destroyed the tombs of Islamic holy men. Indeed, when the Saudi royal family captured the city of Medina in the 19th century, Salafis
systematically destroyed the tombs of several of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions and family members, leaving only the Prophet’s tomb itself unmolested. There is some thought that the Saudi government plans on dismantling even that tomb, but hesitates to do so because of the uproar that would result in other Muslim communities.

In short, one should see ISIS’s destruction of the tomb of Jonah as an act principally directed at other Muslims, not Christians.

As someone says in comments following:

Can we just get this over with and acknowledge that ISIS is a 21st century version of Cromwell's army?

I initially thought that, given the images of heads on stakes in the media today, this may be being a bit harsh on Cromwell.  But I see that he was in fact ruthless, particularly in Ireland:

The first major town Cromwell and his army encountered when they landed in Ireland was Drogheda. He summoned the royalist commander and invited him to surrender. When he refused, Cromwell's model army seized the town and put the entire garrison of 2,500 officers and men to the sword. It was an act of ruthlessness which sent shockwaves of fear through the rest of Ireland. Other towns surrendered as soon as Cromwell's army approached, and their inmates were spared.

Only Wexford refused. During the siege there Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2,000 soldiers and 1,500 townspeople and burning much of the town.

 If one is desperate to find an optimistic take on this, I can try this:   Cromwell was operating pretty close to 1,600 years after the death of the founder of his religion.  ISIS is operating 1,400 years after the death of their's.   On this trajectory, Islam is perhaps 200 years ahead of Christianity's timetable towards becoming "mostly harmless", and everything should be looking good by 2200*.

*  Climate change will have given the world something else to fight over by then, anyway.

Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it...

I really think the sub editor coming up with the headlines at Slate is just trolling its readership with a title like this: 

Look Out Democrats.  The GOP's 2016 presidential hopefuls may be the best field in generations

I'll link to the article itself, not the headline.  The article seems to talk only about possible candidates we already know.  The headline is completely misleading...

Cell work not as careful as it should be

Contamination hits cell work

The article is all about the problem of mycoplasma contamination in laboratory cell cultures.

In fact, the problem is widespread. Hogenesch, a genome biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleague Anthony Olarerin-George have found that more than one-tenth of gene-expression studies, many published in leading journals, show evidence of Mycoplasma contamination¹. The infestations are undermining research findings and wasting huge amounts of money, Hogenesch says.

He should know. His lab quickly overcame an infestation last year, but a previous plague cost it some US$100,000 and a year of research. Mycoplasma takes hold quickly, he says. “All it takes is one person not to check, and — bam — you have it.” The bacterium often comes from lab workers, and is not killed by the antibiotics typically used to rid cell cultures of  contaminants. And unlike many other microorganisms, which turn the growth medium turbid, Mycoplasma leaves no visible signs of its presence.

I somehow thought they would already be more careful than this, but bacteria are hard to see, I guess.

Movie industry news, continued

I've had a few posts lately about how the international (especially Chinese) market is affecting Hollywood.

I'm surprised to read this morning that, within America itself, which is having a rather glum summer season in box office terms, the Hispanic market is really strong for cinema attendance.

You'd never know it from their presence in films, would you? 

For what it's worth, I'll repeat my criticisms of where the movie industry is at the moment:

*  Way too many comic derived superhero films.  Far, far too many.

*  A lack of particularly appealing young actors with clear star quality.

*  Comedy which has become too crude, made by men in permanent adolescent mode.

*  Too many sequels for films which barely deserve it.  More originality, please.

Why fly a stupid idea?

I heard Tony Abbott on the radio this morning saying that the "dole bludgers will have to apply for 40 jobs a month" was not firm policy - it was just a proposal and a "consultative" government does this to take on board public input before it decides, etc etc.

Oh sure.  This was the "consultative government" that gave us an enormous change in tertiary education, Medicare co-payments, and told the States that they're on their own to cover the increasing costs of health care, all without any consultation that I noticed.

This policy was a silly, over the top idea from the start, and it was stupid tactics of someone in this inept government to fly the kite just to watch it being shot down.

It again shows that the Coalition is, in large part, in a time warp when it comes to policy prescriptions.  (Mind you, any new ideas they do have are not that good either.)

What's the free marketeers' answer to this?

One problem with the world economy as noted by one Australian born OECD economist:

Another factor which Dr Blundell-Wignall says is holding back the recovery from the GFC is bank earnings.

"If you go back to 1980 the earnings of the financial sector of the S&P 500 companies was less than 10 per cent."

He says the proportion of Wall Street earnings by finance stocks is now more than 30 per cent, having risen above its share when the GFC hit.

"The financial sector is supposed to be the sector that intermediates between real savers and real investors. That's what greases the wheels of capitalism," he said.

"Where do we get of thinking that the financial sector can just rip one third of the earnings for themselves?

That does sound like a legitimate concern, and apart from letting banks and financial institutions fall when a crisis happens (and impoverishing millions of their customers in the process), I wonder what the small government, let business work itself out, types think about this.... 

An odd duck

Hans Christian Andersen’s painful fairy-tale life | TLS

I've never read much about HCA, but this review of a new biography of him is interesting.  I think I have heard of his disastrous meeting with Charles Dickens before, probably when reading a review of one of the latter's biographies:

Charles Dickens provides the best-known example of Andersen’s startling
capacity to misread the rules of social engagement (Sebastian Barry made the
awkwardness between the two men the subject of a thoughtful play in 2010).
Dickens and Andersen had much in common, both having worked their way from
unpromising beginnings to immense literary success. Dickens’s sympathy with
the underdog made him a natural ally for Andersen, and at first all went
well between them. But in 1857 Andersen went to stay with the Dickens
family, and failed to notice polite hints when several weeks passed, and it
was time to leave. Dickens was exasperated, while Kate Dickens called him a
“bony bore”. Binding passes over the embarrassment hastily, but he does
point out that Andersen must have found Dickens’s boisterous heartiness
baffling. Perhaps he was simply incapable of extricating himself from the
difficulties of the situation. He was an experienced house guest – in fact,
he never had a home of his own – but he was new to the rituals of
middle-class domesticity in England, and his grasp of English was never
strong. Andersen’s visit coincided with the final stages of Dickens’s dying
marriage, and Binding notes that Andersen’s unwelcome presence in the tense
household at Gad’s Hill may have influenced the preoccupations with class
and concealment in Great Expectations (1860), a novel crowded with
examples of people who can never quite fit in.

About the New York Times legalisation stance

The Injustice of Marijuana Arrests - NYTimes.com

This editorial piece in the New York Times promoting marijuana legalisation indicates what I have long thought is right - the overkill in drug criminalisation in that country (with severe compulsory sentences being one of the big culprits) is what is giving weight to the overly simplistic counter swing to the other "extreme" of complete legalisation.

The odd thing is, it seems that both of these two extremes spring from the two strands of the political Right - the conservatives are fond of the severe and disproportionate sentencing legislation, and the libertarian wing is only too happy to promote legalisation.

I remain highly skeptical that either of these approaches is right, and in particular, given the cultural climate in the country, find it hard to believe that legalisation will be good for the nation socially or economically in the long run.