Dark matter, cancer, dinosaurs and galaxies

Dark Matter’s Deep Reach - NYTimes.com

I had missed Bee Hossenfelder's suggestion, referred to in the open of this decent article on dark matter, that weakly interacting dark matter passing through humans might be capable of causing cancer.   (But the effect would be way less than the risk from cosmic rays.)  Another suggestion is that it may contribute to volcanism.


Both rather interesting suggestions.   As is the one I read elsewhere today, that perhaps there is evidence for dark matter interacting with itself via a force only it feels. 

This would not be good...

Weather: Bangkok may set heat record today; relief by Thursday. | Bangkok Post: learning

 Parts of Bangkok may be hit with temperatures of up to 41 degrees
Celsius today. High humidity could create additional problems for those
without access to air-conditioning. By Thursday, it will be much cooler,
however.

Can't be healthy for those in slums.....

Somewhat depressing

Permafrost feedback update 2015: is it good or bad news?

Here's a good article summarising the present state of understanding of the risk from carbon leaking out of melting permafrost.  Long story short - catastrophic bursts of methane are still considered unlikely (despite craters found in Siberia), but the long term issue of carbon leaking as permafrost melts is still serious - like adding another United States' worth of emissions.

Scenarios like this make me wonder whether research should be more about carbon sequestration - not from carbon capture from burning fossil fuels, which should stop anyway, but capture and sequestration from the atmosphere.  The only serious method proposed for that is ocean fertilization, as far as I know.  I'm not sure that it has been looked into in enough detail...

An extraordinarily dubious exercise

Asylum seekers returned to Vietnam by Australian Navy had claims assessed at sea, UNHCR says 

That headline doesn't quite gel with the body of the story, as it sounds as if the UNHCR does not know the details of the "screening" at all.

I also consider it rather likely that a boatload of Vietnamese on a boat may have better reason to be leaving their country than the average Muslim Middle Eastern refugee leaving Indonesia or Malaysia to get to Australia.

And I still think it is a scandalous matter the way this government uses "operational matters" to refuse to disclose details of what they have just done.

Why is the lazy media just shrugging their shoulders about that?

A complex matter

Serving All Your Heroin Needs - NYTimes.com

This was an interesting article about the new sales mechanism for heroin in the United States, and its relationship with the apparent over-prescription of opioid painkillers in that nation.

The opening paragraph sets the scene:

FATAL heroin overdoses in America have almost tripled in three years.
More than 8,250 people a year now die from heroin. At the same time,
roughly double that number are dying from prescription opioid
painkillers, which are molecularly similar. Heroin has become the
fallback dope when an addict can’t afford, or find, pills. Total
overdose deaths, most often from pills and heroin, now surpass traffic
fatalities. 

As I have commented before, this startling fact about the number of people who die in America via prescription opioids surely should make people somewhat skeptical of one of the key arguments for drug decriminalisation at least with regard to heroin - that it is not so much the drug that kills, but the poor and variable quality of the black market version that people are forced to buy.

If people can't even safely self administer a high quality legal opioid, what do reformers suggest as an the answer to that problem if you allowed them to be legalised?   A massive expansion of the type of supervised drug taking that is inherent in the methodone program?   (In Australia, at least, the addict attends the pharmacy and has to drink their dose in front of staff.)     Yet drug legalisation proponents are often libertarians who hate the nanny statism that would be part of that.  And besides, not everyone can fit a daily visit to a clinic discretely into their work or domestic life... 

Something useful out of the muck

It's extraordinary how the ratbaggery of marginalised Right wing opinion know as Catallaxy is intensifying over the years.   Alan Moran too much of an anti-Islamic extremist for the IPA?  No problem - let him continue his clean energy jihad at Catallaxy; and by the way, he's now an expert on Darling River water flows too - one of the most intensely scrutinised Australian environmental issues in which I thought there was a consensus amongst virtually every interested party in the land, except for shrill, climate change denial funded, independent researcher Jennifer Marohasy; oh, and Moran too.  (Actually, if I recall correctly, Judith Sloan has commented on it dismissively in the past too.  "Climate change - as if" is her considered position on anything related to the issue.)

Sinclair Davidson, quite possibly the only academic in the land who couldn't see how calling an aboriginal man an ape could be racist, also can't see the tackiness problem with Woolworths alluding to their advertising slogan in an ANZAC poster.  Even Andrew Bolt could see that one.

Judith Sloan discovered the bold function about a year ago and now can't stop shouting at everyone in every post.  She's an expert on caesarean birth rates too, apparently.

And yet, shouting, sarcastic Judith  has done some useful - shown in comments that Catallaxy favourite (well, except when it comes to gay marriage and the conservatives) David Leyonhjelm made up a policy suggestion in ignorance of the background.  Who could be surprised - it was about clean energy, something the Bald One thinks is completely unnecessary. 

The details are here:   Leyonhjelm had a suggestion published in the AFR as to how to "fix" the RET:

With this problem looming and negotiations between the Government and Opposition stalled, late last year I developed a detailed reform package for the RET. Since most opposition to reform is based on cuts to the 41,000 GWh large scale target, my plan is to maintain this but to recognise established hydro generation in the calculations – essentially Snowy Hydro and Hydro Tasmania – which together produce about 15,000 GWh.

But as Judith notes in comments:

David, I don’t think this is going to work. Hydro is defined as renewable (see Section 17 of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 and is already counted in the 16 to 17K of MWh being produced from renewables currently. It is already being counted.

 And then Leyonhjelm admits:

After this was published I was informed that “old” hydro had been counted when the original target was established under Labor. I was told the total electricity market was estimated at 300,000 GWh in 2020, of which 20% is 60,000. Deduct 15,000 for existing hydro leaves the target of 45,000. Of this, 4,000 was allowed for small scale solar (ie roof top panels) and 41,000 for large scale (mainly wind). It is reduction in the latter target that is now the subject of dispute.

Adding back old hydro (without attracting Renewable Energy Certificates) would bring us close to 20% renewable anyway (as we won’t be anywhere near 300,000 by 2020) so the case is still arguable, but I acknowledge it would be double counting.

Quite a "whoopsie".

So thanks Judith!   Can you give me a big, bold, shouty call out?   

The weddings

Well, that's twice now that I've been to a Vietnamese wedding, and what fun they are.  Lots of people (about 420 at last night's!), lots of food, lots of karaoke singing (not of the jokey kind), lots of cute kids, and quite a lot of beer, but no obvious drunkenness that I could see.   They are very happy events enthusiastically, but not raucously, celebrated.  Don't ever knock back an invitation to one...

It's just natural

'Shallow, Selfish, and Self-Absorbed' Details Why Women Aren't Having Children — The Atlantic

Given the number of comments following this article, there certainly is a lot of interest in the question of why more women are choosing not to have children.  "Education" is given as the main answer, but then it dwells on the question of whether or not it is fair or right to call the decision selfish.

While I am fully supportive of the use of contraception to limit family size, I always took the view that having at least one child is just a natural part of most permanent sexual relationships, and is educational in itself.   I tend to be cautious about calling the decision "selfish", but I have always questioned why normal, basically happy, people would want to keep themselves out of this part of the natural aspect of  life, and not want to learn more about themselves and others by going through the experience directly.  In this way, I think I have viewed it in an intellectual way, just that I have come to a different conclusion to the educated who do not want kids.

I think the latter are misguided when they argue that they just never felt like they wanted kids - that's an appeal to emotion, and lots of people find their emotional response changes once they have a child.  In a similar way, I have repeatedly argued that couples who say they are emotionally crushed if they cannot have fall pregnant (and therefore demand experimental procedures such as "3 parent babies" just so they can have their own) are putting emotion at an far undeserved premium.

That's how I see it, anyway.   

All Stanned up

I've been trying the one of the on-line streaming media services - Stan (what an odd name) - because it has a free 30 day trial.  

The main reason for doing this was to see the more recent Sherlock episodes, and last night we watched the Watson wedding one.   I thought it was terrible - meandering, quite dull for most of its length, and with the stupidest "locked room murder" resolution possible.   [Spoiler]:  Apparently, you can put a skewer through a standing person's back and if you do it in the right  spot, they won't notice.  It looks like a show on its last legs.

More successful has been re-watching The IT Crowd from the beginning.   My mental chronology of when TV shows were on has gone rather wonky - I actually thought it was older than it is.   But re-watching (through the first two seasons anyway) has been a pleasure; it was often a very funny, if silly, show.   I never cared for Lineham's Father Ted at all; I just found the comedy in it too simple, and the characters completely unconvincing in any sense.   I could watch an episode and not laugh once.  It reminded me of the cringeworthy nature of Australian sitcoms.

While I can see how someone could make an argument that the IT Crowd style of humour is very similar, and therefore it's odd that I can dislike one and laugh madly at the other, that's just how it is for me.   I think I could make a case that the nerds of IT are at least recognizeably real, if exaggerated, whereas the Father Ted crew bear no resemblance to any priest I've ever met; but perhaps I haven't really tried watching FT long enough to properly put my finger on it.

I also seem to recall that one of the series of IT - perhaps the third, which I haven't re-watched yet - was going downhill.  But it happens with most shows. 

As for the Stan service, it seems to work well and has a pretty good back library of TV and movies.   Still not sure if I will stick with it after the first month, though...
 
 

A good Quiggin piece

Gambling on Climate Change - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

I have one quibble - I can't see on-line shopping meaning the complete death of shopping malls.  It's a bit like the predictions that TV, or cable TV, would spell the end of cinema.   They are different experiences.

The three reasons the new Star Wars trailer is creating buzz (to put it mildly)

1.  the music
2.  the fact that when on the ground, it doesn't look like one or two real people acting in front of a gigantic green screen (which is what made the prequels and the LOTR movies uninvolving - that and the fact George Lucas can't write a good screenplay to save himself and I am completely uninterested in Tolkien-lore)
3.  Harrison Ford looks better than expected as a aged Han Solo

A scandalous use of Commonwealth money

Abbott government gives $4m to help climate contrarian set up Australian centre | Environment | The Guardian

Lomborg has next to no credibility amongst climate change scientists and policy analysts who take climate change seriously.

And all you really need to know is this:

The Institute of Public Affairs responded to Lomborg’s new Australian operation by saying, “Bjørn, it’s great to have you!”

Quite an omission

It's rather surprising to find the academic author of a an article about how fatal shootings are reducing in several different Western countries says this in response to a comment about whether improved medical treatment is behind the dropping numbers:

Good question about medical treatment. That could certainly be one of the contributors to falling death rates. I’ve also seen a suggestion that mobile phones have made a difference, because they mean medical help can be called out more quickly. It would be interesting to look more closely at these possibilities.

If she had read this article before, I would have thought she would have answered more along the lines of "yes, there are certainly some experts in America who believe that is the case."

And I just noticed, further down in the comments thread Simon Chapman turns up with a pointed question to the author as follows:

Samara, in your declaration you say you "hold memberships with, and volunteer for, a range of not-for-profit firearm-related organisations." Could you please list these for the sake of transparency, and tell us whether any of these organisations or you personally are an advocate for watering down Australia's firearms laws in areas like ending gun registration, opposing restrictions on semi-automatic hand guns, allowing self defense as a reason to own a firearm, and introducing "right to carry" legislation in Australia of the sort supported by the US NRA and law in many US states. Do any of the organisations you are affiliated with have mutually supportive relationships with the NRA.

 She hasn't answered yet....

Who doesn't like futuristic weapons systems?

US Navy develops cannon-launched 'swarming' drones - BBC News

Cheese hackers

Interesting to read that some DIY work is being done by science/computer nerds on fiddling with DNA in yeast to get it to make milk, and thereafter Real Vegan Cheese.

Seems much more plausible to me than lab grown meat ever being particularly tasty, or texturally as good as, or economically viable compared to,  the real thing from a cow.

The only environmental concern, I suppose, would be if there was ever a chance that escaped milk producing yeast could interfere with the alcohol producing "natural" variety used in wine and beer making.  A great scientific dystopia it would be if in a 1,000 years beer brewing had to be abandoned because it kept going half milky! 

From Slate today

Still, the evidence suggests that America’s wealthiest faced a significantly higher tax burden during the country’s years of midcentury prosperity. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, for instance, find that, once corporate and estate taxes are added into the mix, the top 0.1 percent of earners paid 71.4 percent of their income to the IRS in 1960, compared to 34.7 percent in 2004. Reaching further back and using slightly different methodology, the Congressional Research Service finds that 0.1 percenters paid an average effective personal income tax rate of 55 percent in 1945, compared to around 25 percent during the late 2000s. The tax code really was more progressive back in the day—and more aggressive.

Here's the link.

Not sure about this...

Why a 'Google tax' is not the answer to corporate tax avoidance

It's from the Lowy Institute blog, but it covers the issue pretty well.

Worrying about glaciers

A short video here showing why experts in the field of Antarctic glaciers think the situation is likely worse than thought only a decade or so ago:

Boys and Girls! You too can make something travel faster than light!

Can't say I had realised this before, but physicist Bee has a fascinating post that starts:

If you sweep a laser pointer across the moon, will the spot move faster than the speed of light? Every physics major encounters this question at some point, and the answer is yes, it will. If you sweep the laser pointer it in an arc, the velocity of the spot increases with the distance to the surface you point at. On Earth, you only have to rotate the laser in a full arc within a few seconds, then it will move faster than the speed of light on the moon!

Now a bit more explanation:

This faster-than-light motion is not in conflict with special relativity because the continuous movement of the spot is an illusion. What actually moves are the photons in the laser beam, and they move at the always same speed of light. But different photons illuminate different parts of the surface in a pattern synchronized by the photon’s collective origin, which appears like a continuous movement that can happen at arbitrary speed. It isn’t possible in this way to exchange information faster than the speed of light because information can only be sent from the source to the surface, not between the illuminated parts on the surface. 

Oh, and your average laser pointer won't still be visible on the moon, and I have my doubts a laser strong enough to be visible is available from scientific supplies shops.

But, it's still fascinating.

(And it's posts like this that I sometimes re-read years later and think "Geez, I do run a great blog!")

Sort of disappointing

Search for advanced civilizations beyond Earth finds nothing obvious in 100,000 galaxies

From the link:

"Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its
galaxy's stars to power computers, space flight, communication, or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the mid-infrared wavelengths," Wright said. "This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on."

Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposed in the 1960s that advanced alien civilizations
beyond Earth could be detected by the telltale evidence of their mid-infrared emissions. It was not until space-based telescopes like the WISE satellite that it became possible to make sensitive measurements of this radiation emitted by objects in space.

Roger Griffith, a postbaccalaureate researcher at Penn State and the lead author of the paper, scoured almost the entire catalog of the WISE satellite's detections—nearly 100 million entries—for objects consistent with galaxies emitting too much mid-infrared radiation. He then individually examined  and categorized around 100,000 of the most promising galaxy images.
Wright reports, "We found about 50 galaxies that have unusually high levels of mid-infrared radiation. Our follow-up studies of those galaxies may reveal if the origin of their radiation results from natural astronomical processes, or if it could indicate the presence of a highly advanced civilization."

In any case, Wright said, the team's non-detection of any obvious alien-filled galaxies is an interesting and new scientific result. "Our results mean that, out of the 100,000 galaxies that WISE could see in sufficient detail, none of them is widely populated by an alien civilization using most of the starlight in its galaxy for its own purposes. That's interesting because these galaxies are billions of years old, which should have been plenty of time for them to have beenlled with alien civilizations, if they exist. Either they don't exist, or they don't yet use enough energy for us to recognize them," Wright said.