Some Mary Beard observations

Mary Beard turned up briefly on SBS a few weeks ago, on what looked like a new series on Roman stuff (about Pompeii), but I haven't noticed it on again.  If I recall correctly, the Eurovision Song Contest intervened, so I'm not sure if the other episodes followed or not.

Must go looking.  I did record the first episode but not watched it yet.

Anyway, I forgot to note weeks ago that she had come back from a trip in Algeria, and visited the city of Constantine, which I had remarked upon recently when it turned up briefly on Griff Rhys Jones African train show.   Anyhow, it just goes to show that I'm not the only person who didn't know about this place (or rather, its geography).  Mary knew the city, but not what it looked like:

But I did get the biggest surprise when I went to the city of Constantine, ancient Cirta. I have often had cause to mention the place and to think about it. There is a famous record of the contents of an early Christian house-church from there, and in the last stages of my book I have just been mentioning Marcus Cornelius Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius who came from there.

Now I dont know the exact location of the ancient town in relation to the new. But what I hadn't realised was that the whole place is perched on the edge of a vast ravine (now spectacularly bridged with a series of modern bridges). I dont know what it made such a difference to how I started thinking the place, but it did. It was if you had read about Venice for years, and the penny only dropped about the canals when you visited decades later.

Have a look at this photo of the place:

and this one on the same Flickr stream:

Impressive, no?

Anyhow, another reason I wanted to post about Professor Beard is because she is not a "dumbing down" pessimist, at least in her field:

When I started out in this game, when you marked exams every summer, there really were some dreadful answers. There were students who had clearly done little or no work, and had spent more time on the sports field than the in the library. They blagged a bit, sometimes with a degree of style, and they got at best a 2.2. You would come across grossly irrelevant answers that wrote about the favourite subject of the student that had not actually come up.

Why marks have gone up is because no one knows nothing any longer. All the students, beyond some sad casualties, have worked hard and done enough to get a 2.1 at least, and they actually answer the question asked, with clear information. The 2.1s now are as good as they ever were in my 30 years, I promise.

Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.

 That's encouraging.

Help, I'm a martyr!

What else are you not allowed to hear? | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Oh dear.   Andrew Bolt apparently wants to correct something to do with some aboriginal activist, but tells us that "lawyers" won't let him.

I assume that the lawyers involved are not his personally, but those of his employer.   And they might be partly motivated by the fact that Bolt (I am guessing - but I think it a fair guess) didn't personally pay the legal costs in his failed defamation case defence in 2002 or for the representation in the 2011 hearing about "white is the new black".

Of course, it is in fact entirely possible that Andrew may be able to say what he wants to in such a manner that it is not at any risk of contravening the RDA.  It may be that his employer just can't be bothered helping him address this topic, given that his attitude has always been that he did nothing wrong in the first place.  

Certainly, if he is that cut up about the restraints of his employer, or the lawyers, he is entirely free to quit his current position, and run as an independent news blogger who can publish what he likes at his own risk.   Or he could directly engage new lawyers to review his columns to ensure he isn't at risk of a new action.

But no, he would rather play the martyr, and keep raking in the hundreds of thousands that I would expect is his News Ltd income annually now (I understand they pay for his TV show as well as his written output.)  My heart bleeds for him...

Drinking blackouts

My drinking years: ‘Everyone has blackouts, don’t they?’ | Society | The Guardian

I think its basically an ad for a book, but I still thought this was a pretty well written account of by a woman with a very dangerous drinking problem.  (In her past now, I gather.)

True confession time - I did have one, brief, example of a drinking blackout period in my 20's.  Apparently, I was being very annoying to an acquaintance on the bus that was taking a group of us back from a night in town.  I had no recollection at all the next day of what I had done on the bus, although I certainly had got off it unaided at the end of the trip and got back to my room by myself.  I was told I was lucky I didn't get a punch in the face.

This was enough to convince me that getting anywhere close to a blackout period is dangerous...

Not exactly ready to take over the world

The most amusing video I have seen this weekend.  I felt particularly sorry for the last one and its appearance of a nervous breakdown:

A test...OK, seems to work (about tiny data storage)

DNA Assembly Tech is Making The World’s Smallest Data Storage

http://flip.it/bMCwy

Not sure if the link works...

Oh yeah, it seems to.   Here it is, and here are some extracts from the article:

Researchers at France's Institut Charles Sadro and Aix-Marseille Universite have built binary data into a strand of synthetic polymer, a minuscule chain of chemical information about 60,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

This technology promises to take the future of data storage down to nanometers in coming years, says researcher Jean-Fraçois Lutz, deputy director of Institut Charles Sadron and researcher on the article published in Nature Communications.

Right now, storing one zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) takes roughly 1000 kilograms of cobalt alloy, the material used in hard drives. A zettabyte of Lutz's synthesized polymer would be about 10 grams.

El Nino news

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : El Nino Continues to Ramp Up | Weather Underground

Can humans directly detect quantum weirdness?

Quantum technology probes ultimate limits of vision : Nature News & Comment

I see that the minimum number of photons detectable by humans has been measured currently as three, but the experiments are going further:

Gisin has pioneered experiments¹ to see how the human eye responds to ‘quantum-weirdness’
effects. Although effects such as photons being in multiple places at once are well known, making humans part of the experiment “brings us closer to the quantum phenomenon”, he says.

Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who is also at Urbana-Champaign and who inspired Holmes’s work, says that quantum weirdness should disappear somewhere between the scale of atoms and that of human bodies. “We don’t know at what stage it’s going to break down — or how." Holmes's study will probably validate standard interpretations of quantum physics, he says, which assume that a photon that is in a ‘superposition’ of two states will essentially choose one option when it comes into contact with a detector — whether that is an artificial photon counter or a rod cell.

But in principle, says physicist Angelo Bassi at the University of Trieste in Italy, each of the photon's personas could hit a rod cell, and that superposition could persist up to the brain. If so, there could even be “something like a superposition of two different perceptions, even if just for an instant”.

 Fascinating...

Woo considered

I see that The Australian got a credible sounding academic to say maybe there is something to infrasound from wind farms affecting some (perhaps a small percent) of people, in the same way that some people are more sensitive to seasickness.

A few issues to come to mind:

*  have reliable studies ever been done to assess whether people who claim severe reactions to such infrasound can even "sense" it (for example, by getting them to sleep in a lab and see if they are disturbed when the sound is off or on.)   If they have false cues as to when it is on, does that affect their perception of effects?  You would probably need them to stay in the lab more than one night, I guess.  This single study, by people living at home, is not considered reliable.

*  given that a lot of science on this notes that the wind or waves (or industry) creates a lot of background infrasound, and that windfarms make more infrasound in stronger wind, you would have to do a lot of careful measurements, I presume, to distinguish the amount of infrasound being created by the wind turbine as against the infrasound  just coming from the stronger wind around the house.   Has that ever been done?

* doesn't everyone get used to the infrasound of the beach?  If you camp near a surf beach, the sound from the ocean can make for a disturbed first night's sleep, but virtually everyone gets used to it, no?

Certainly, with the descriptions of symptoms that some people give in that study at my last link, I think it is entirely understandable why most scientists are more inclined to consider the problem a psychological one than anything else.  

I can't believe I'm posting a vegan recipe suggestion

Aquafaba: Baking with chickpea liquid for vegan meringues.

 Well, I do really like canned chickpeas (especially blitzing them with the few other ingredients you need to make houmos to get that ridiculously easy, cheap and tasty dip that I sometimes eat thickly on toast for lunch), and I would have wasted quite a few cans of chickpea liquid in my day.

But apparently, it whips into something that is very similar to meringue.

This sounds a bit science-y too, so I am keen to try...

Wind farms and politicians

I see that Alan Jones also hates wind turbines, and gets the always-wanting-to-please-whoever-he-is-talking-to PM to say he think's they're awful too.   And David Leyonhjelm got a run in The Australian (what a surprise it would be that paper) to crap on about how there really, really might be sickness caused by turbines.

A few comments I have about this, given that in the past I have expressed some cynicism about the value of them myself:

*  Joe Hockey's enormous offence taking at the Lake George turbines near Canberra was just ludicrous, given how far off they are in the distance and the unremarkable landscape that they are in.  If he is genuinely that sensitive to their appearance, it's more of an issue for psychological counselling than anything else.

*  That said, in some locations, particularly where they are closely grouped, I wouldn't ridicule the regret that some people feel about the change in the natural view.   But even in the "worst" cases, it's not going to be something that deserves the mental disturbance that some claim at their mere appearance.

*  I also wouldn't be surprised if some turbines, in some locations, cause audible noise issues which some people find annoying.   But then, people in cities have new roads and freeways (or ventilation outlets from new tunnels) built near them sometimes to, and regret the increase in background noise.   It's not a national disaster that people sometimes regret development near them.

* As far as the invisible infrasound "woo" of David Leyonhjelm:   he is the last person to have credibility on the issue, given his taking advice from an anti wind power advocate who is part of a astroturf spinoff group from the IPA and as such is full of members and advisers who have a complete non belief in climate change and have been fighting clean energy for ideological (and in all likelihood, funding) reasons  for a decade or more.

What's more, it is utterly disingenuous of anti turbine politicians to not note the active anti windfarm advocacy that is, from a scientific point of view, the likely cause of most psychological suffering of people who claim their local windfarm is ruining their lives.

*  Also, savor the irony, and/or hypocrisy, of Leyonhjelm, saying that the wind farm companies are like "big tobacco" in denying there is any evidence of detriment from their product.  Leyonhjelm happily takes donations from tobacco companies, who are still contenders for the most scurrilous corporate citizens on the globe.   (See the John Oliver report on their tactics.)

In any case, I think the public is paying little attention to Leyonhjelm's attention seeking enquiry, and I think most people rightly consider him to be an eccentric twit that he truly is.

Update:  I forgot to mention the way Leyonhjelm invokes a precautionary principle when it comes to wind farms and health effects (which, apparently, about 120 individuals in Australia have complained about out of about 20,000 living within a few km of windfarms), here in The Oz:

By the time further studies are published in recognised journals following peer review, many more people will have suffered. The fact we are not yet at that stage is no excuse for inaction and will not absolve the wind industry from liability for its negligent refusal to mitigate the harm it causes.

Yet he presumably finds the same precautionary principle not appropriate to consider for global climate change that could detrimentally affect, what, just a few billion people?  

What libertarian foolery....

Money making dinosaurs

Critic Reviews for Jurassic World - Metacritic

There are sufficient positive reviews for Jurassic World to be confident it will make a lot of money.  Which is nice for (executive producer) Steven Spielberg.

I see a few reviews mention Chris Pratt favourably.  It seems to me that if Spielberg wants one last Indiana Jones outing, it might be best to do a "James Bond" and just have Pratt doing the role as if he were the original character.   Alternatively, Pratt is only 35, certainly of an age where he could be 72 year old (!) Harrison Ford's son, but Jones was still being played as much younger than Ford's age, so I am not sure about that...Or perhaps, Pratt could turn up as Jones' other, completely unknown, son.  However it's done, it would surely be commercially very, very appealing to have Pratt take a large role in an Indiana Jones movie.
The obvious symbolism of Shia LaBeouf picking up his "father's" hat at the end of Crystal Skull simply has to be ignored, given poor old Shia's descent into complete loopiness.    

A net to connect your brain to the net?

Science fiction which involves future humans having a permanent neural connection to the future internet has always been a bit vague about how that connection would be made. 

Seems to me that this story in Nature might be the first hint of the technology that could do it:

A diverse team of physicists, neuroscientists and chemists has implanted mouse brains with a rolled-up, silky mesh studded with tiny electronic devices, and shown that it unfurls to spy on and stimulate individual neurons.

 The implant has the potential to unravel the workings of the mammalian brain in unprecedented detail. “I think it’s great, a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain,” says Rafael Yuste, director of the Neuro­technology Center at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the work.

If eventually shown to be safe, the soft mesh might even be used in humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, says Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University on Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the team. The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology on 8 June¹.

The Harvard team solved these problems by using a mesh of conductive polymer threads with either nanoscale electrodes or transistors attached at their intersections. Each strand is as soft as silk and as flexible as brain tissue itself. Free space makes up 95% of the mesh, allowing cells to arrange themselves around it.

In 2012, the team showed² that living cells grown in a dish can be coaxed to grow around these flexible scaffolds and meld with them, but this ‘cyborg’ tissue was created outside a living body. “The problem is, how do you get that into an existing brain?” says Lieber.

 Update:  someone comments after the Nature News article that it's like the "neural lace" used by Iain Banks in his Culture books.  Never read him myself,  but yes, it does sound as if it might be physically similar.   Quite interesting that this is the first time I've really heard of work on something that could have widespread neural connections.

Japanese men's problems

No wonder their population is shrinking:

Takashi Sakai is a healthy 41-year-old heterosexual man with a good job and a charming smile. But he’s never had sex, one of a growing number of middle-aged Japanese men who are still virgins.

Sakai has never even had any kind of relationship with a woman, and says he has no idea how he might get to know one.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend. It’s never happened,” he said. “It’s not like I’m not interested. I admire women. But I just cannot get on the right track.”....

A 2010 survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research found that around a quarter of unmarried Japanese men in their 30s were still virgins—even leading to the coining of a specific term, “yaramiso”, to describe them.

The figure was up around three percentage points from a similar survey in 1992.

An amusing protest

David Leyonhjelm swears at satirical protest group outside windfarm inquiry | World news | The Guardian

I like protesters who put a bit of creativity into it.

And incidentally - as Senator Madigan's "submarines are the spaceships of the seas" comment gets a mention in the article - I always thought he was unfairly maligned for that.   Especially in light of the fact that I remember reading of a science fiction novel that had a submarine adapted for use as a spaceship.   (I haven't read it, just I remember reading about it in a science fiction encyclopedia decades ago.  Looks like it was Harry Harrison's In our Hands, the Stars.)   Interesting what bits of trivia a mind can retain...

Smelling ants

Yes, that ant does smell like blue cheese

Apparently, there are ants in North America that smell like blue cheese.

I have always hated the acrid smell of any Australian crushed ants.  I might prefer blue cheese ones, actually.

Increase in flash flooding not in your imagination

Flash flood risks increase as storm peak downpours intensify

Good to see some clear study showing that rainfall intensity in storms is increasing, as most people in Australia have probably been guessing anyway:

Civil engineers from the UNSW Water Research Centre have analysed close to 40,000 storms across Australia spanning 30 years and have found warming temperatures are dramatically disrupting rainfall patterns, even within storm events.

Essentially, the most intense downpours are getting more extreme at warmer temperatures, dumping larger volumes of water over less time, while the least intense periods of precipitation are getting weaker. If this trend continues with future warming, the risk of flooding due to short-term extreme bursts of rainfall could increase even if the overall volume of rain during storms remains the same. The findings were published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Mind you, not sure why the authors are even talking about the effect under a future 5 degrees of warming.  Rainfall intensity in that case is probably the least of anyone's worries.

Try reading

If there is one topic* related to climate change that the likes of Andrew Bolt and England's lost village idiot Nick Cater can't get their head around, it's polar ice.

Cater's column today is full of bulldust, but the best example is his obvious complete lack of understanding of the difference between sea ice around Antarctica (on the rise lately) and ice from glaciers on the continent (clearly melting in parts, at least.)

Similarly, you would think that but a moment's thought would make them realise that massive Arctic ice loss in summer (lots of sun, lots of dark land around the ocean) is not offset in effect by an increase in Antarctic sea ice that is happening when it is winter there (little sun.)  But no, this seems never to have occurred to Bolt.

Too dumb and smug to read, that's their problem.  

*  actually, the other topic I could have nominated for this is the persistent refusal to understand the long standing prediction that global warming can make both droughts and floods worse.

Update:  well I was wrong, Bolt does read - primarily Watts Up With That, where 90 year old Fred Singer is airing again his view that maybe global warming is all an illusion. 

Seriously,  when will Bolt ever read anything that isn't telling him what he already has decided is true.   When will he ever admit that Anthony Watts made a big call to his face, which was shown to be wrong by Watts' own paper a short time later.  Never noted by Bolt, who is willingly fooled by an eccentric bunch of aging twits. 

Anthony Watts and his big mouth

HotWhopper: The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

I've said for years that Anthony Watts is a twit who craves approval and respect yet can't understand why he doesn't get it when:

a.  his own pet project comes up a dud (his years' long campaign to show that poor siting of thermometers was behind the increase in temperatures in all long term records) and
b. he is happy to have those whose respect he seeks trashed every single day by his band of gullible, dumb, conspiracy believing, followers.

This latest example shows up his personality defect quite clearly, in a case where his own dumb, insulting claims against scientists just doing their job is given some publicity.

Update:  I should have also linked to Sou's later post, noting that Watt's has been tweeting that he's the one who has been "slimed".   He's just an idiot. With weird insecurities.

Go get them, Michelle

Brandis and Dutton play some dirty pool in their fight with Gillian Triggs

Michelle Grattan is unusually forthright in her condemnation of the Brandis/Dutton attack on Gillian Triggs.

The only thing I would add is this - even if Triggs had specifically said that the Abbott government boat turnback policy made it extremely unlikely that the Indonesian government would be inclined to grant Abbott a diplomatic "win" regarding the death sentence on  Chan and Sukumaran, she would have been right.  (Sure, Indonesia had granted no favours to any country in this regard, but common sense suggests that the Australian policy would have made us about the least likely government on the globe to expect a sympathetic hearing.    I can't see the big deal about admitting that.)

Changing Britain

From The Tablet:

The British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of British adults describing themselves as Anglican has fallen from 21 per cent in 2012 to 17 per cent in 2014, a loss of around 1.7 million. That brings the number of Anglicans in Britain to 8.6 million people.

The proportion of Catholics remained roughly stable at 8 per cent, or just over 4 million, as did that of “other” Christians, including Methodists, Presbyterians and non-denominational Christians.

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain. Its population has grown ten times since 1983, to account for around 5 per cent of the total population in 2014.

Almost half – 49 per cent – of the population described themselves as being affiliated to no religion. That proportion is up from 31 per cent in 1983.

I am surprised that the number of Muslims is that close to the number of Catholics.