Now that's a trailer

I was recently dissing Nolan fanboys for their excitement over the mundane trailer for Interstellar.

Now this is a teaser trailer that really gives a thrill:


As Brad Bird is the director, I am really looking forward to this.

A pulsing mystery

Pulsar as bright as 10 million suns baffles astronomers

He probably doesn't know that it's mental health week on the ABC

My oh my.  Is it just me, or does Sinclair Davidson seem to be skirting close to sounding paranoid when he writes today about Media Watch?:

The thing is this: Media Watch – part of a government agency – exists to monitor and intimidate the private media. That is their sole function and they do it well. I suppose we should welcome the fact that in Australia the government does this in plain sight – many other countries would have a division within the secret police undertaking these functions.

Media Watch is part of the state apparatus that keeps tabs on journalists and journalism and so undermines the ability of the fourth estate to expose government misbehaviour and creeping statism. With some, very few, honourable exceptions within Fairfax, News Corp Australia is the only media organisation holding government to account and that is why Media Watch focusses on them.

And he writes this in a column in which it is acknowledged that Media Watch has criticised the government's national security legislation?  (I also see that the show has added a highlight to its website to note that Leyonhjelm did vote against the legislation.)

As it happens, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the potential effect of the legislation on journalists.  But the trouble with the IPA and Davidson being effective critics of it is that they were so over the top about the free speech consequences of both s18C of the Race Discrimination Act, and the Finkelstein report on beefing up media self regulation,  that they now sound like the Think Tank That Cries Wolf with respect to legislation that has actual serious free speech implications.  


As for the title of this post, I don't know if he is being entirely serious or not, but Davidson has for a long time claimed that he barely watches ABC, certainly not for its political journalism, and seems to get most of his political TV news from Sky News.   I've always found this a very surprising claim by someone who (presumably) wants to be taken seriously by politicians, as I expect few of them would deny that the ABC political coverage is detailed and serious, and if you want to be well informed, you don't ignore it.

Update:  if SD's complaint is that Media Watch has only criticised the Act now, after it has been legislated,  can he also please explain why he isn't outraged that one of Murdoch's strongest supporters of everything Abbott (especially his security and defence actions), Greg Sheridan, has only today come out with a column attacking the legislation?  

Peak "Mistress"

You may have noticed I have been a bit busy for much posting this last few days.

But, while you miss me, I trust you haven't missed this startlingly clear computer generated head:



This reminds me very much of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", in which the revolution's "leader" is a talking head generated by the moon colony's gigantic computer, which still has to stop doing other things to concentrate on the graphics.

Isn't it weird the unexpected ways technology evolves?    Just as with Heinlein's use of slide rules on spaceships, the idea that you would have an advanced lunar colony run by a computer which has gained consciousness but can barely cope with realistic graphics illustrates what a tough job it is for science fiction to be correct in the details.   (And another great example of anachronistic technology being used alongside futuristic stuff we are miles away from realising: the way the characters in Mote in God's Eye are using what we now take as routine - tablet like devices connected by wireless to the ship's mainframe - when they are on an interstellar planet.  Mind you, Pournelle has also been keen in his other science fiction on implants which allow direct communication with a computer, but as far as I know, there is still no idea at all about how you would do the neural connections for that to work. Well, OK, I guess cochlear implants give us some idea, but I still wonder whether this is a science fiction idea too far to ever be practical.)

Karen Armstrong on religion and war

Religion does not poison everything - everything poisons religion  - The Spectator

A sympathetic review here of Karen Armstrong's latest book "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence."

Climate sensitivity and what it means in practice

RealClimate: Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

The significance of a lowering of the transient climate response (which is what the recent paper from Nic Lewis and Judith Curry suggests) gets a run in this post at Real Climate, which are deals with criticisms of the choices Lewis and Curry made in their paper.

These seem to be the crucial paragraphs:

The median estimate of the TCR from Lewis and Curry (1.3K) is towards the lower end of the IPCC likelyrange and lower than the CMIP5 median value of around 1.8K. A simple
way to understand the importance of the exact TCR value for mitigation policy is via its impact on the cumulative carbon budget to avoid crossing a 2K threshold of global surface temperature warming. Using the Allen and Stocker relationship between TCR and TCRE (the transient climate response to cumulative emissions) we can scale the remaining carbon budget to reflect different values for the TCR. Taking the IPCC CO₂-only carbon budget of 1000 GtC (based on the CMIP5 median TCR of 1.8K) to have a better than 2 in 3 chance of restricting CO₂-induced warming to beneath 2K, means that emissions would have to fall on average at 2.4%/year from today onwards. If instead, we take the Lewis and Curry median estimate (1.3K), emissions would have to fall at 1.2%/year. If TCR is at the 5^th percentile or 95^th percentiles of the Lewis and Curry range, then emissions would need to fall at 0.6%/year and 7.1%/year respectively.

Non-CO₂ emissions also contribute to peak warming. The RCP scenarios have a non-CO₂ contribution to the 2K peak warming threshold of around 0.5K [IPCC AR5 WG1 – Summary
for Policymakers]. Therefore, to limit total warming to 2K, the CO₂-induced contribution to peak warming is restricted to around 1.5K. This restricts the remaining carbon budget further, meaning that emissions would have to fall at 4.5%/year assuming a TCR of 1.8K or 1.9%/year
taking TCR to be equal to the Lewis & Curry median estimate of 1.3K (assuming no mitigation of non-CO₂ emissions).

While of some scientific interest, the impact for real-world mitigation policy of the range of conceivable values for the TCR is small (see also this discussion in Sci. Am.). For targets like the 2 K guide-rail, a TCR on the lower end of the Lewis and Curry and IPCC ranges might
just be the difference between a achievable rate of emissions reduction and an impossible one…

 The take home points (which climate change lukewarmenists do not want to know) seem to be this:

1.      the lower sensitivity estimates that some recent studies suggest do not mean you can burn carbon and have no risk of breaching the nominal 2 degree limit;

2.      the lower estimates make achieving a "safe" limit significantly more do-able, but effort to achieve it is still necessary.

Burka-ed again. (Oh alright, it's the niqab this time)

The Guardian has had some lively comment to its Comment is Free piece by a woman of unspecified age and domocile (British, perhaps, even though she refers to the controversy in Australia, and presumably fairly young) who decided to start wearing the niqab, and talks up the quasi-feminist aspect of it.  The trouble is, she finds it liberating in pretty much the same "up yours" manner as do people who wear obviously offensive T shirt slogans:

I feel liberated by the fact that I choose what you see. We pass judgement on how a person looks before we know them. When you deal with me, you deal with my mind, my personality, my emotions and what I have to offer as a person – and that’s it.

Yes, and a personality that sounds pretty much stuck in the mindset of the teenager:

I don’t want to be controlled and told what I can and can not wear: that is oppression.

Anyhoo, I doubt anyone serious in Australia is going to try on a street ban on the burka or niqab. 

But as someone in comments says in response to her "you can't judge me" attitude:

 If you think wearing the now niqab stops you being judged based on your looks you're deluded.

The Bogan that was nearly in Star Wars

Readers may have noticed that I rarely use the word "bogan,"  even though I did a couple of posts back when referring to Senator Lambie.  (Seriously, resistance to class-ist forms of insult sometimes just has to crumble in response to overwhelming provocation.)

In any event, this last weekend I learnt something that is hilarious from an Australian point of view.  There's a very lengthy article at Salon about the early drafts of the very first Star Wars movie, and from this we learn something very important:

Their still very human leader is General Darth Vader, still just Sith Knight Valorum’s righthand man. Deak—one of the sons of the Starkiller—makes short work of the Stormtroopers. Deak, a Jedi, uses a blaster, while the Stormtroopers wield laser swords. Vader defeats Deak because he is “strong with the Bogan”—Lucas’s initial name for the Dark Side of the Force.

It gets even more explanation a bit further in:

After a dinner of “thanta sauce” and “bum-bum extract,” Luke embarks on a long-winded, jargon-filled explanation to his younger brothers about the Force of Others. Originally discovered by a holy man called the Skywalker, the Force is divided into the good half, “Ashla,” and the “paraforce,” called the Bogan. To prevent people with “less strength” from discovering the Bogan, the Skywalker only taught it to his children, who passed it on to theirs. And there you have it: as conceived for the first time, the Force was an exclusive, aristocratic cult.

Even better, there's some actual script extract, and I defy any Australian to read this and not laugh (my bold, incidentally):

As they start blasting their way out, Han is overcome by a mysterious attack of depression:

HAN: It’s no use. We’re lost.
LUKE: No, no, there’s a debris chute. It’s the Bogan force making you feel that way. Don’t give up hope. Fight it!
HAN: It’s no use, it’s no use.
LUKE: Well, we’re going anyway. Think of good things. Drive the Bogan from your mind.

It’s astonishing how much the word “Bogan” crops up in this draft: thirty-one times in total, versus ten mentions for the light-side Ashla Force. It’s not hard to picture the depressed writer whiling away the long hours at his door desks, trying to drive the Bogan from his mind.

Maybe Lucas got it right in this part:

 On the ship, it turns out Deak is badly injured. Threepio can’t do anything for him: “These are spiritual wounds,” he explains. “The Bogan arts often run contrary to the ways of science and logic.”

 Another draft and the Bogan started to fade:

 The Ashlan Force is gone in the new draft, but Lucas clung to the name of the evil Bogan force, eager to have us understand it. “Like Bogan weather or Bogan times,” Luke says when he learns about it from Ben Kenobi. “I thought that was just a saying.” The Bogan only crops up eight times in this draft, however.

 Now, to be fair, it would appear from this site that the use of the word in Australia only was becoming common from about the mid 1980's.  Wikipedia suggests it started in the late 70's, and Lucas was apparently writing his very first draft in about 1973.

I suppose it's even possible that the use of Bogan in the actual Star Wars movie may have prevented the rise of the Australian use of the insult.   If the multiverse is true, this is probably the case in an alternative reality.

Still, this reads as extremely amusing in our local universe...

Gratuitous insult time

Well, that's a bit weird

Fly Babies Inherit Traits From Semen of Mom's Past Lovers - D-brief | DiscoverMagazine.com

The explanation may be this:

Scientists believe this quirk in inheritance could be due to some unknown molecule in the males’ seminal fluid, which could be absorbed by the females’ immature eggs. The lingering molecule could affect offspring once another male fertilizes them.

The findings resurrect Aristotle’s theory of telegony, which posits that males leave a mark on a woman’s body that influences her children, even if another man sired them. That idea was discredited in the 20^th century as modern genetics emerged. However, in light of this study the
idea of telegony appears to warrant a revisiting, to see if it also might occur in other species.

Inheritance, it seems, can take lots of forms — a continuing complication of Mendel’s simple idea.

Burqa, burka, berko...

What with every politician and pundit in the land talking about it, I feel I have to have an opinion on this burqa/burka business.  It's all driving me a bit berko...

First of all, why has the ABC gone completely with the spelling as "burka" instead of "burqa" which I reckon most other media outlets are sticking with?  Odd.

Secondly, this morning, Waleed Aly complains that people are actually going on about the niqab, not the burqa/burka.  Yet a certain Senator to be mentioned in the next paragraph did post a picture of the burka in her bit of misleading, Islam baiting, PR about it.  In fact, I'm getting a bit peeved by people like Waleed who seem to claim you'll virtually never see a burka in Australia, when I'm certain I have, and I do not live in any particularly "muslim" part of town.

Thirdly, surely there is one - and probably only one - thing we can all agree on:   bogans attacking Muslim women in the street or on public transport for wearing a mere hair covering that leaves the face open (the hijab, for example) are offensive, dumb nuts.    OK, bogans attacking or yelling at women in the street for wearing a burka/niqab are offensive too, but the absolute height of stupidity and offensiveness is for those who are deeply upset by mere hair covering.  I mean, I would like to be able to yell at men or women on the street with horrendous tattoos every day, but in the interests of civil society, I keep my opinions to a blog, so that they can abuse me in return without causing a scene...

But once we get past that point, I have a bit of a problem:  even if one did generally support the idea of a ban on the burka/berka/niqab, how could one admit to it when the main proponents are the Senator from Bogan Central Casting (Lambie) and  Tea Party (anti abortion wing) wannabe Cory Bernardi?

But on the other hand, can I live with the embarrassment of finding myself in agreement with selfie superstar and classic liberal values bore Tim Wilson?  [I mean, if the European Court of Human Rights can uphold a wide ranging ban on Muslim face covering in France, surely to God that proves there is no conclusive "rights" argument one way or the other on this.]

And what's up with Andrew Bolt?  After running a full blown Muslim Panic Station campaign on his blog for a month or so, he can't bring himself to agreeing to a segregation of the burka clad in Parliament? 

Despite this confusion and worry about who I might be accidentally agreeing with, here are a few points I want to make:

1.    for those women who feel compelled by males to wear it, the feminist argument against this form of dress is obvious.  Even if the women don't feel compelled as such, as a symbol of male dominated religion's control and possession of women (as in Saudi Arabia, where the religions police once preferred to hinder girls escaping a fire rather than let them be seen on the street without the required gear) it is still, obviously, objectionable;

2.   I'm more interested in the quasi feminist justification for wearing it that we see being run a lot lately (the women who say they feel empowered by wearing it, as it means they don't have to meet anyone's standard for fashion, as well as protecting them from the gaze of strange men on the street).  I count this as a nice try, but it doesn't wash for two reasons:

a.   there is no credible need to cover the face to make a statement about freedom from societal standards of fashion - heaps of women go to the shops without makeup, and plenty of Western women - even rich ones - set a sterling example of being carefree from the tyranny of fashion.

b.  if the argument is out of genuine concern about the face being exposed makes a woman the potential object of lustful attention of men - this is sexist in the extreme (towards men) - and to be honest, it's close enough to the nuttiness of Andrea Dworkin (of "all heterosexual sex is rape" fame) to deserve derision.

3.   What of women who don't overthink it, but just feel it is a religious obligation or a matter of cultural solidarity, or whatever?   Well look, I think we're talking an extreme here - the example of (old style) Catholic nuns, or Buddhist monks, is not a valid comparison in the face covering stakes.   What's more, even in societies with  a religion that takes nudity seriously as a sign of religious asceticism (see the nude Hindu holy men in India, or Jainism), there is surely still a time and place for where their choice of religiously motivated (un)dress is acceptable.    And as much as it pains me, I have to come to a quasi defence of Tony Abbott here - talk of how his wearing speedos offends people is snide and silly.  He is not trying to address Parliament in one, and unless you want to start buying into Islamic arguments about how women should wear head to foot coverings on the beach,  you need to leave the question of modesty on the beach well alone.

No, my final decision is this:    Parliament, courts and other government bodies are part of a basically secular set of institutions (and please, let's replace the Lord's Prayer at the start of Parliament with something else to make that clearer) that should reflect the type of society that the nation aspires to be - one where the extremes of religious or social views do not interfere with some really fundamental things, such as the respect that men should have towards women to not control them in terms of appearance, and for women not to treat men as if they can't see a female face without thinking of sex.  Faces allow for proper and good communication - and to be open to good communication with all other people regardless of gender is a sign of respect for them.

People on the street can dress, modestly, as they like; and I would not see the need for the full extent of a French ban here.

But if coming to Parliament, or court, it is not security concerns that should motivate a "ban", but a question of respect for the society they are in.  Just as I expect no Westerner to kick up a stink about having to remove shoes if visiting a temple that requires it in a foreign land.

I would support a rule that all faces - male and female (remembering that a man who wants to wear a motorcycle helmet, or a nutty V for Vendetta face mask as a political statement, is not going to be allowed to do that either) - should be open in Parliament or within similar institutions.

But is it worth having that argument now?  Probably not, even though it is hard to say when it is the right time to do so.   

I think this means that I can declare - Everyone Else is Wrong.

Puzzling excitement

I am honestly not getting the geek boy (and girl) excitement about the final trailer for Nolan's "Interstellar" movie.

In terms of science fiction trailers which look awesome, it has nothing, nothing, on those for Gravity.

Depp spotting ahead

Fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film to be shot in Queensland | Film | theguardian.com

My family spends an inordinate amount of time re-watching the Pirate movies on DVD (even the much derided No 3), so it's pleasing in a way to see one will be made near by.

Mind you, the third Narnia film (the fake ship for which we were able to visit) was not so good, so here's hoping  for a better script for Depp.

Update:  I just heard that Depp is not yet "committed" to the movie.  Hard to imagine it without him...

The leaping dentures of France

Literary Review - John Brewer on the French Smile Revolution

Also from Literary Review, here's a piece about the change in smiling and dentistry in 18th century France.

I liked this paragraph, with its particularly amusing final image:

 The 18th-century cult of sensibility, spread through performances on the
Parisian stage and nurtured by novels of deep emotional intensity by
the likes of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, loosened the grip of the
costive, courtly smile. Charming and tender smiles - transparent
expressions of feeling intended to be shared by all men and women,
though, in practice, chiefly enjoyed by the Parisian cultural and social
elite - became fashionable. Teeth and smiles were chic - and so were
dentists. Practitioners like Pierre Fauchard made dental care a
profession: they abandoned the street (where teeth had been brutally
pulled by colourful showmen like 'Le Grand Thomas', who operated on the
Pont Neuf and was known as the 'Pearl of the Charlatans' and 'Terror of
the Human Jaw') and set up offices (upstairs so the patients' screams
could not be heard in the street below) in fashionable spots like the
Rue Saint-Honoré. They encouraged tooth conservation, not brutal
extraction, wrote treatises that established dentistry as a science, and
emphasised the importance of patient self-care, which helped them
peddle a succession of cleaners, whiteners, gargles, toothpicks and
breath sweeteners. Fauchard invented spring-loaded denture sets, which,
as Jones reminds us, 'had the unfortunate habit of leaping dramatically
out of the owner's mouth at unguarded moments'.

The highly eccentric English

Literary Review - Alexander Waugh on a truly uncommon family

Well, it's all rather trivial in a way, but this review of a biography, which covers some of the circles that Evelyn Waugh moved in, certainly paints a picture of an England with more than its fair share of highly strung, eccentric, sexually diverse, characters.  

2 degrees of confusion

Of course, Graham Lloyd, or whoever writes his headlines, has twisted the (admittedly rather confusingly argued) commentary that appeared in Nature about the 2 degree limit favoured by the IPCC to make it sound as if the limit is nothing to worry about.

Then the coal miners' economist of choice, Sinclair Davidson, goes on a self serving ramble about how this is climate scientists admitting the 2 degree target is a "failure", and (it would seem) reading the article to mean that because scientists now think that it is not going to be hit, or not going to be hit as soon as previously thought, they have to add other "fudge factors".

As I have already indicated, the Nature commentary piece is confusingly constructed, but one would have thought that even a libertarian could see that the part where they say the 2 degree limit is "unachievable" means that they are concerned that the world will easily surpass it.

But of course, in the multi headed beast that is climate change skepticism, anything is clutched at as reason not to do anything.  It's any or all of the following (amongst dozens of other reasons):  "the scientists are fraudulently fiddling the temperature record", "it's warming but who knows if it will be harmful?", "hey, maybe it's cooling!"  "the cost of doing anything would be worse than adapting" or "it's too late, the world will overshoot 2 degrees and we should only worry about adaptation."

There is no logical consistency - only ideology driven positions against governments taking serious action against planet changing, possibly very disastrous for huge numbers of our descendants, greenhouse gas emissions.

So - actual good articles on the 2 degree matter are at Stoat and Real Climate.

Read them if you want to make some sense of the situation.

As Real Climate notes, if anything, the worry amongst scientists has increasingly been that the 2 degree limit is set too high - but (I would add) this is no reason for defeatism: if (say) 1.8 degrees is more damagingly planet changing that first feared, then overshooting it by another .5 to 1 degree is also way worse than originally thought and still worthy of avoidance.

And as I understand it, even on the lowest estimates of climate sensitivity, if you keep burning carbon the way libertarians think we should, the planet will still exceed 2 degrees in a matter of decades, not centuries.

That's my take on it anyway...

A very bad year

Jacqueline Kennedy’s Struggle After J.F.K.’s Assassination: The Nightmares, Drinking, and Suicidal Thoughts | Vanity Fair

Anyone with even a passing interest in the Kennedy story should be interested in this lengthy article about how badly Jackie Kennedy suffered from what we would now call PTSD in the first year after his assassination.

Announcement of the death of black holes almost certainly premature

Backreaction: Black holes declared non-existent again.

Bee knows a fair bit about this stuff, and she thinks the recent paper arguing that black holes cannot form are mistaken.   

GM crops and herbicides - again

A report at Wired recently points out that there are quite a few science types who are saying that GM crops for increasing tolerance for herbicides is only going to lead to a continuation of the resistance wars which glyphosate has already (pretty much) won.

This view seems to involve much common sense, and (I assume) it is short term economic imperatives that are against it.   A bit like climate change really:  it'll come to bite the short sighted in the backside soon enough.

Open carry nut

What Happens When a White Man Parades Around Outside a School in a Bullet-Proof Vest With an AK-47? - Little Green Footballs