About the last cold Chicago winter

From the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society:

The winter of 2013/2014 had unusual weather in many parts of the world. Here we analyse the cold extremes that were widely reported in North America and the lack of cold extremes in western Europe. We perform a statistical analysis of cold extremes at two representative stations in these areas: Chicago, Illinois and De Bilt, the Netherlands. This shows that the lowest minimum temperature of the winter was not very unusual in Chicago, even in the current warmer climate. Around 1950 it would have been completely normal. The same holds for multi-day cold periods. Only the whole winter temperature was unusual, with a return time larger than 25 years. In the Netherlands the opposite holds: the absence of any cold waves was highly unusual even now, and would have been extremely improbable half-way through the previous century. These results are representative of other stations in the regions. The difference is due to the skewness of the temperature distribution. In both locations, cold extremes are more likely than equally large warm extremes in winter. Severe cold outbreaks and cold winters, like the winter of 2013/2014 in the Great Lakes area, are therefore not evidence against global warming: they will keep on occurring, even if they become less frequent. The absence of cold weather as observed in the Netherlands is a strong signal of a warming trend, as this would have been statistically extremely improbable in the 1950s.

Capsule summary: The winter of 2013/2014 was notable in central North America for its persistent cold, the cold waves were not unusual. The absence of cold waves in Europe was statistically more extreme.

Catching up with Kruggers

Paul Krugman has been writing good stuff recently, including his one on Reaganolatory; how the anti-Keynesians keep making claims about inflation and Keynesianism that are wrong; his nominated most important chart of 2014 (although it's not that easy to understand that one);  and the interview in which he discusses some science fiction-y ideas as well as economics.

From that last link, I liked this discussion about whether super AI is really a threat, or not:

Ezra Klein: But let’s assume it does emerge. A lot of smart people right now seem terrified by it. You've got Elon Musk tweeting, "Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable." Google's Larry Page is reading Nick Bostrom’s new book Superintelligence. I wonder, reading this stuff, whether people are overestimating the value of analytical intelligence. It’s just never been my experience that the higher you go up the IQ scale, the better people are at achieving their goals.

Our intelligence is really lashed to a lot of things that aren’t about intelligence, like endless generations of social competition in the evolutionary fight for the best mates. I don’t even know how to think about what a genuinely new, artifical intelligence would believe is important and what it would find interesting. It often seems to me that one of the reasons people get so afraid of AI is you have people who themselves are really bought into intelligence as being the most important of all traits and they underestimate importance of other motivations and aptitudes. But it seems as likely as not that a superintelligence would be completely hopeless at anything beyond the analysis of really abstract intellectual problems.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, or one thing we might find out if we produce something that is vastly analytically superior is it ends up going all solipsistic and spending all its time solving extremely difficult and pointless math problems. We just don't know. I feel like I was suckered again into getting all excited about self-driving cars, and so on, and now I hear it's actually a lot further from really happening that we thought. Producing artificial intelligence that can cope with the real world is still a much harder problem than people realize.

Speaking of movies...

Just before Christmas, I found in a remainder store a book by Australian director Bruce Beresford "Josh Hartnett DEFINITELY wants to do this.."  [Subtitle - True Stories From A Life in the Screen Trade.]

Published in 2007, it's simply his diary notes from 2003 to 2005, when he seemed to be caught in a period of "development hell" on several projects.   Ironically, the only movie he actually directs in this period is one which went straight to DVD in the US, despite its big name stars (John Cusack and Morgan Freeman).  (He really did not want to do it at all, but it's the one he ends up committed to.)

I have a vague recollection of reading some reviews of the book at the time it came out, but I'm glad I stumble across it.  It's a really fascinating, amusing, almost disturbing, insight into this bizarre business.


You have to wonder how anything good ever manages to get out of such a horrendous system, which really does seems extraordinarily full of chronic liars, exaggerators, the intensely libidinous, vanity filled stars, and producers who delegate artistic decision making to mere college graduates.  About the only thing he doesn't seem to mention is recreational drug taking in the industry - perhaps that really is a bit 1970's - 80's now.

I'm not all that fussed with Beresford's own output, which ranges wildly in style ("Adventures of Barry Mackenzie", "Puberty Blues" - yuck - "Breaker Morant" - pretty good -  "Tender Mercies" - haven't seen it, and "Driving Miss Daisy" - way over-rated -  to name a few) but he's had such a long career on all continents that his extremely frank comments on the industry  sound very convincing.   He also, surprisingly, is apparently regarded by some as right wing.  (Well, he certainly is a long term friend of conservative-ish Barry Humphries, but it seems clear he is left sympathetic, just not as invested in it as many on the Left in the arts are.  He is also sensible and dismissive of those on the Left who do things like semi defend the Castro - or worse - communist regimes.)

Amongst other snippets from the book:

* an American producer asked him to change the name "Singapore" in war drama Paradise Road because it "sounded silly." 
* Harrison Ford did not say a word to him - just a few grunts - during a lunchtime meeting.  (I had heard that one before.)
*  Makes the observation that a director barely has to know what he is doing, but if the technicians around him do, a film will still be made.
*  Directors have to have a medical examination - often a few - to satisfy the insurers before they are hired for a movie these days.
*  Recently retired Australian movie critic Evan Williams had 3 (or 4?) daughters who all got caught up in an Indian cult.

Perhaps the thing best illustrated by the book is the line by  famous screenwriter William Goldman that in Hollywood "nobody knows anything."   I mean, Beresford himself admits he's made totally wrong calls on movies which turned out to be smash hits.  He also spends a lot of effort during the period of the diaries trying to get made his own adaptation of a historical Australian novel I certainly have never heard about and which ends with the central character going insane.  Don't see much box office potential in that, myself...

On the other hand, a lot of what he says does strike a cord of common sense.

What he doesn't address is the one thing I still puzzle about - how the move to digital technology in both filming and projection has (apparently) completely failed to made movie making a cheaper, quicker, more economical business.

 It's clear that anyone who manages to get their screenplay made into a film with significant exposure to the market is extraordinarily lucky.   Which, like the hundreds of budding actors each year who never get beyond being wait-persons in LA restaurants, is a little depressing.

Still, a surprising enjoyable read.

Animation reviews

I've seen 3 animated films over the last week or two, and here are my thoughts on each:

*  Big Hero 6:   a very pleasing and exciting mashup of Marvel movie style action (which, to my mind, plays better in animation than with real life actors on obviously CGI filled screens) and revenge themes; Pixar style superb animation; and eye moistening Disney style (when they get it right) emotionalism.   

To elaborate a bit further:  the action sequences reminded me a bit of The Incredibles - it may be completely unrealistic, but with animation, you can avoid worrying about that but just be pleased by the visual excitement.  (Contrast some of the ridiculously big falls that characters are meant to walk or run away from in some big budget live action films these days.) 

The animated world it's set in is delightful and (as I read in someone's review) like an upbeat version of the setting of Blade Runner.  And the emotionalism - I think they get it just right. 

Both my kids said immediately after it finished that they wanted to see it again - not such a common reaction these days - and that speaks for itself.

*  Penguins of Madagascar:  sure, there are laughs to be had from some of the funniest support characters from the Madagascar movies; but really, with the villain being an evil octopus that manages to pass itself off as human (happens all the time), the movie is too obviously pitched at too young an audience.  

Somewhat disappointing for this reason.  Sure keeps a lot of Indian animators in work, though.

[I see that the less than expected box office has renewed discussion of whether Dreamworks animation is - sorta - in trouble.   They do have a fair bit of trouble with story strength, if you ask me.]

*  The Wind Rises:   finally caught up with Miyazake's semi-historical film about the famous (in Japan) lead designer of the Zero fighter.

Lavishly animated in the very pleasing Miyazake painterly style, I found it always engaging, and continually raising the question "I wonder how accurate that part of the story is?"

I see from articles like this one that it is more accurate in tone than in many details, and sort of merges two sources (one fictional) together.  I don't think it matters much, as the fairly extensive dream sequences make it clear that the details are often coming from the mind of Miyazake.

I find the narrative in his films often starts petering out in interest in the last third, but this one really was good to the end.   This makes it one of his strongest films, and well worth seeing.

As always, if your DVD or Blu-ray copy has a press conference with Miyazake as a special feature, do try to watch it.  He's again a cranky about certain questions, but it makes him pretty endearing.  (For example, he's really unhappy about being asked persistently about crying when seeing the completed movie.)

Yay for Free Will

Although it appears that Daniel Dennett has been making this argument for some years now, I haven't followed him closely.

In any event, the way he explains his position regarding free will in this interview extract that recently appeared on Salon is, in my opinion, very convincing.

It's good to see a professional philosopher type explaining well a line of argument that, I always felt  during idle showertime thoughts on the topic, made a lot of common sense.  Here are some key sections:

NW: The classic description of the problem is this: ‘If we can explain every action through a series of causal precedents, there is no space for free will.’ What’s wrong with that description?

DD: It’s completely wrong. There’s plenty of space for free will: determinism and free will are not incompatible at all.

The problem is that philosophers have a very simplistic idea of causation. They think that if you give the lowest-level atomic explanation, then you have given a complete account of the causation: that’s all the causation there is. In fact, that isn’t even causation in an interesting sense.

NW: How is that simplistic? After all , at the level of billiard balls on a table, one ball hits another one and it causes the second one to move. Neither ball has any choice about whether it moved; their paths were determined physically.

DD: The problem with that is that it ignores all of the higher-level forms of causation which are just as real and just as important. Suppose you had a complete atom-by-atom history of every giraffe that ever lived, and every giraffe ancestor that ever lived. You wouldn’t have an answer to the question of why they have long necks. There is indeed a causal explanation, but it’s lost in those details. You have to go to a different level in order to explain why the giraffe developed its long neck. That’s the notion of causation that matters for free will.
 ....

 NW: So that’s an evolutionary hypothesis about giraffes’ necks. H ow does it shed any light on the free will debate?

DD: If I want to know why you pulled the trigger, I won’t learn that by having an atom-by-atom account of what went on in your brain. I’d have to go to a higher level: I’d have to go to the intentional stance in psychology Here’s a very simple analogy: you’ve got a hand calculator and you put in a number, and it gives the answer 3.333333E. Why did it do that? Well, if you tap in ten divided by three, and the answer is an infinite continuing decimal, the calculator gives an ‘E’.

Now, if you want to understand which cases this will happen to, don’t examine each and every individual transistor: use arithmetic. Arithmetic tells you which set of cases will give you an ‘E’. Don’t think that you can answer that question by electronics. That’s the wrong level. The same is true with playing computer chess. Why did the computer move its bishop? Because otherwise its queen would have been captured. That’s the level at which you answer that question.

Happy New Year, possums

Guess what?  Possums have returned to the under-the-balcony hidey spot after a full year's absence.

Have I mentioned this story here before?  In December 2013, we had a contractor come in to replace a retaining wall in the back yard, and this involved laying down a concrete base.  He put the (inherently loud) concrete mixer - you know, this type of thing:

- in the front yard, close to the balcony, within a few metres of the spot where we would often find and feed a possum or two in the daytime.

Clearly, possums hate loud mechanic devices in close proximity, and they disappeared from that spot, although we still hear them walking on the roof and making that awful call some nights.

But lo and behold, a furry tail was spotted out the window of 31 December, and here is what we found:

and:

Close observers of my possum pics over the years may note that the mother possum here is not the one who used to regularly feature:  she had a distinctive notch out of her right ear.  So this may be a new generation of possums, but its nice that they do return - eventually.  And they still like to be fed.

Christmas Greetings

Not sure how Christmas-y that really is, but there sure is a lot to look at

Update:  for the person who asked in comments, the painting is Salvador Dali's Madonna of Port Lligat, which is discussed at Wikipedia here.  It gets a lengthier analysis at this site.  

The remaining mystery of "what does"

Income management doesn't work, so let's look at what does

So some research has reported that income management for aborigines in the Northern Territory is not really working.  But, as many people in comments after this piece say, the author does not address what does work, other than in the type of general platitudes that are always floating around these issues. 

Don't panic

The world is not falling apart: The trend lines reveal an increasingly peaceful period in history.

Steven Pinker sets out to prove that the world is not, despite current impressions, going to rack and ruin with violence.  He does a pretty good job, too.

As for Tony Abbott's "Merry Christmas" warning that terrorism was "likely" - I'm not sure that anyone believes anything he says about anything anyway.   Certainly, historically, it seems Islamic terrorists have chosen never to stage massive attacks during the Christmas season.  But now that I Google the topic, I see that the UK and US media gave some coverage at the start of December to concerns that al-Qaida was planning airline attacks before Christmas.  I don't recall reading that in the Australian media, which is odd, seeing Rupert has developed a large Islamic bee in his bonnet. 

Hey, I seem to have strayed somewhat from the cheery tone that I was aiming for.  Oh well, there's probably an asteroid with Canberra's name on it that Abbott's cuts to science means won't be detected, anyway.

And for the astute observer of this blog, perhaps you can tell from my Marvin-tinged tone, as well as the title, that I recently found that the BCC TV version of Hitchhikers Guide is on Youtube.  You can thank me later.

Cartoonist makes good

Probably it's because I wish I had talent with a pen, but this story of a young guy taking a risk and succeeding in (what I assume is) a very competitive field was really pleasing to watch on 7.30 recently.  

Bad advice, and a nice graphic

Hey, I haven't derided Senator Leyonhjelm for at least 4 hours, so it's time to do so again.  A sign of good politician is that he has a good sense of from whom to take advice.  Leyonhjelm doesn't display that talent:

Leyonhjelm, a self-described “libertarian”, is being advised Max Rheese – the former long-serving executive director of the Australian Environment Foundation – a spin off of the ultra-conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.
The AEF describes itself as an “environmental NGO”, but it disputes the science of climate change. And it hates wind energy, urging all its supporters to attend the anti-wind rallies held last year in Canberra, which were hosted by conservative shock jock Alan Jones, the man who elicited the “wind farms are utterly offensive” comments from Treasurer Joe Hockey.
For a taste of what this environmental group thinks about climate science, see this speech in 2010 by then chairman Alex Stuart. One quote: “There is no link between man-made trace greenhouse gases and scenarios of climate catastrophe.” He labels such theories as “catastrophist” and are aimed at “reining in mankind.”

While we're on the topic of global warming, he's a nice graphic from Greg Laden:

But as Senator Leyonhjelm would say:

Good, detailed article on Antarctic sea ice

RealClimate: Clarity on Antarctic sea ice.

Of course, the people who most need educating on this probably won't read it.  

More about a book I didn't care for

My Brother Jack at 50 – the novel of a man whose whole life led up to it | Books | The Guardian

I recently mentioned this book in my post about David Malouf's Johnno.  It was a high school English assigned novel, if I recall correctly, and I didn't much care for it.  (I think the version produced for high school in the 1970's had one or two rude bits excised.) 

Nonetheless, it is somewhat interesting to read about the background of the author, and I didn't recall that the book was only published in 1964.  George Johnston and his wife had moved to the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950's, but certainly did not have a great life despite the book's success:

The wind-whipped Hydra winters are harsh, however. Johnston and Clift had
little money, often living on credit from local shopkeepers. By the time My Brother Jack was published, their marriage was deeply strained; tuberculosis and subsequent medical treatment had rendered Johnston impotent and infidelity was a constant undercurrent of their
relationship. Johnston left Hydra in 1964, a physical shadow of the strapping man who’d departed Australia in 1951. Despite his reputation as a journalist, and the moderate success he’d enjoyed as a novelist, MyBrother Jack was his make or break moment.

He knew that he didn’t have many writing years left. But the success, Johnston’s due, did finally come with the publication of My Brother Jack.

The Johnston-Clifts settled in Mosman, Sydney. Both continued to drink heavily, Clift especially so, although she managed to produce a popular newspaper column while Johnston wrote his famous sequel. This time he wrote no less evocatively about island life in Greece in Clean
Straw for Nothing, in the same way he’d conjured suburban Melbourne from Greece in My Brother Jack.

Clift died of a barbiturate overdose at 45 in 1969, just as Clean Straw for Nothing was about to be published and before it, too, won the Miles Franklin Award.

Johnston died a year later, at 58, before he could finish the third instalment of the Meredith trilogy, A Cartload of Clay. It was published posthumously in 1971.

The postscript was no happier. Shane Johnston committed suicide in 1974. In 1988 Johnston’s daughter by his first marriage, Gae, died of a drug overdose. Then Martin Johnston, an acclaimed poet, died of alcoholism at 42 in 1990. Only Hydra-born Jason Johnston survives.

Self defence

David Leyonhjelm's fall back position from every person being able to carry a pistol will help reduce gun violence (yeah, well, he's still in mourning about not being pat his guns for comfort) is that Australian should at least be able to carry items for self defence.

In this regard, the Wikipedia article on pepper spray is interesting.  I see that it has long been controversial in the States for its likely contribution to scores of deaths, and on the international scene, it is has very variable regulation.  It's not at all uncommon for it to be banned entirely, while other countries may allow it under licence, or for use only in protection against animals.

Tasers are of course controversial for their potential lethality too.  Wikipedia indicates that they are illegal for the public to have just about everywhere, except the Czech republic, and of course, many parts of the United States.

As for knives:  well, they can do a pretty good job at mass killing too, and I am not surprised that they are regulated and that police have concerns about certain groups having one in their possession.  I'm not entirely sure how one regulates so that the police can take one off a bunch of drunken youths in a nightclub area, but leave it with the young woman coming home from the office who thinks it will be useful in self defence.

And really, the dubious utility of allowing people to arm themselves is the big problem for all self defence.   First, the chances of involvement with violent crime for most people, in the course of a lifetime, in a country like Australia, is very very small. Worrying about being armed against attack in a normal day is, I would say, a touch paranoid for nearly all men.  (It's less so for women who are out at night, unfortunately, but statistically I would be sure the reality is far different from the perception.)  But for those who do have exposure to danger,  there is no certainty at all that having a non lethal form of self defence is going to be accessible or useful in the event of attack. 

And, of course, the number of cases in which self defence items are successfully deployed has to be considered in light of the number of times criminals may successful use them aggressively for their own purposes.  And that certainly happens with non lethal items as well as with guns - see these articles from the States in 1995 and just this year about the criminal use of pepper spray, for example.

In the big picture of what's better for society overall, I think most Australians are comfortable with what's illegal from a potential weapon point of view. 

Update:  even nice old Canada can have criminal problems with  pepper spray - where it appears popular for protection against bears - as appears from this report from earlier this year.  There are some surprising figures:

 CALGARY – Police say there’s an alarming increase in the use of pepper spray by local criminals.
In 2011, police recorded 88 incidents where pepper spray was used. A year later that number almost doubled to 161. Then, in 2013 there were 147 incident in the first nine months, which suggests an upward trend
The latest pepper spray incident was during a robbery at the Bay location at Market Mall on Wednesday.

Christmas physics

[1209.0881] A Potential Foundation for Emergent Space-Time

The abstract:

We present a novel derivation of both the Minkowski metric and Lorentz
transformations from the consistent quantification of a causally ordered set of
events with respect to an embedded observer. Unlike past derivations, which
have relied on assumptions such as the existence of a 4-dimensional manifold,
symmetries of space-time, or the constant speed of light, we demonstrate that
these now familiar mathematics can be derived as the unique means to
consistently quantify a network of events. This suggests that space-time need
not be physical, but instead the mathematics of space and time emerges as the
unique way in which an observer can consistently quantify events and their
relationships to one another. The result is a potential foundation for emergent
space-time. 

 But the introduction of the paper itself makes the point a bit clearer:

We demonstrate that concepts of space and time, and their precise relation to one another, can emerge as a representation of relations among causally-related events. While we take causality as a postulate, we have demonstrated in other work [22][23] that it is of benefit to push back further and consider the idea that directed particle particle interactions enable one to define a causal ordering among related events. The basic idea is that everything that is detected or measured is the direct result of something influencing something else. We focus on an intentionally simplistic, but fundamental, picture of  influence where we consider the process of influence to connect and order the act of influencing and the act of being influenced. We refer to each of these two acts with the generic term event, so that the event associated with the act of influencing causes the event associated with the act of being influenced.

Rather sounds like physicists working on a way of supporting Aquinas (or Sound of Music theology - "nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could".)  And - guess what - I see that the work was supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation.

All rather interesting, anyway.

 

Maybe I should change hangover medicine this holiday season

Ibuprofen boosts some organisms’ life spans | Science/AAAS | News

I like the warning given at the end of the report:

 So far, researchers haven’t shown that any drug extends human life span.
To folks who are impatient, Miller cautions against extrapolating the
study’s results, especially because the side effects of long-term
ibuprofen use can include fatal stomach bleeding. “I think any person
who says, ‘Anything that works in yeast is something I want to take,’ is
asking for trouble.”

A good haircut today? Jawohl!

It was only a few months ago that I told the story of an incident at a post office in Brisbane in about 1979 in which the European man serving me was very sure, from the way I spoke, that I was from Europe, rather than from a house 300 metres down the road.  This happened just after I had returned from staying in youth hostels in New Zealand, where nearly no one picked that I was from Australia.

Fast forward 35 years, and yesterday I went to a new barber about 300 m from my house.  He had a European accent, and after my explanation of what was desired of the hair cut, he said "Are you from Munich?" 

As with the post office incident, the following conversation went something like this:
"Um, no, I'm from Brisbane."
"Really!  I could have sworn you were from Europe. The way you speak English.."
"Er, no.  Born in Brisbane.  Never even been to Germany."
"It just sounds like you learned English in Europe as a second language - I thought German, maybe French.."

And then I told him the post office story from 1979.

The barber, incidentally, was from Spain, and has only been living in Brisbane for a year or so, escaping the terrible economy of that country. So it certainly seems that to at least some European men, I sound very much like English is my second language.

I am not entirely sure what to make of that, but it is at least amusingly odd.  I told my family that it perhaps gives me a certain air of mystery and intrigue.  They aren't convinced.

Old and new (part 2)

OK, I know people will make the comparison about how ageing male singers don't cop the same style of assessment that comes the way of ageing females ones.  But, even while feeling a tad guilty posting this, I still think viewers should be cautious watching this second video.  It's not encouraging for those of us well on the path towards old age.  But few of us, at least, have the heights of youthful gorgeousness from which to descend that Debbie had:


Careful now:

Old and new (part 1)

So, last night I spent a bit of time with the Chromecast looking at music videos, and found that Barenaked Ladies had a new song out last year with an amusing clip.  The comparison of the band members in their younger and older versions is pretty remarkable, but they haven't done too bad in the ageing gracefully stakes:

First, the old:


Then the new:



They always seemed a very cheery bunch.

I'll never look at mince the same way again

Hey, I missed this very amusingly made video from They Might be Giants last year.  Better late than never: