It's coming...

New study shows Arctic Ocean rapidly becoming more corrosive to marine species | EurekAlert! Science News

New research by NOAA, University of Alaska, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Oceanography shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044.

"Our research shows that within 15 years, the chemistry of these waters may no longer be saturated with enough calcium carbonate for a number of animals from tiny sea snails to Alaska King crabs to construct and maintain their shells at certain times of the year," said Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and lead author. "This change due to ocean acidification would not only affect shell-building animals but could ripple through the marine ecosystem."

South Korea and the education obsession

Foreign Correspondent the other night was a fascinating look at the obsessively competitive education industry in South Korea, which is rather like the Japanese system (where getting into "top" universities is seen a matter of great importance for future careers, and private tuition is often used to ensure entry,) but on steroids.

This strikes me as a foolish way to run an education system and society, and places way, way too much emphasis on institutional elitism.

Mutant mice, depressed scientists, and don't eat that raw fish dish

*   Nature News explains the problems with reproducibility in experiments using genetically engineered mice, and how the problem will only get worse now that the CRISP is going to allow much easier genetic modifications.  And how's this for a great name for science bodies? (my bold):

...laboratories that can make genetically modified mice are often unable to maintain them. Progeny frequently carry pathogens, lose carefully designed mutations or have other characteristics that confound experiments. So the mice that a researcher might dutifully ship to a colleague can be very different from those described in a paper. In 2013, the Mutant Mouse Resource and Research Centers (MMRRCs), a consortium of the US National Institutes of Health, found that 32 of around 200 mouse lines deposited with them from individual labs did not match researchers' descriptions. It is no wonder that many preclinical studies performed using mice are not reproducible¹.

*  Bee Hossenfelder explains the difficult time physics postdocs can go through, given their short term contracts and frequent moves.  (Her own mental health issues get an airing too.)

And here I thought the biggest warning parents should give is for their kids not to get into acting.  Turns out going in science in a big way can be quite an issue too.  Sad.

* I never cared for raw fish, but especially in Thailand, it should be avoided due to the risk it will give you liver cancer.  (Googling the topic, I see that the liver fluke/cancer link has been known for some time, but this is the first I've heard of it.)  From the BBC:

A local delicacy in north-east Thailand, made from raw fish, has been found to be behind a high incidence of liver cancer in the area, and doctors are trying to educate people about the risk.

The Isaan plateau of north-eastern Thailand is poor, dry, and far from the sea. Home to around one third of the country's population, most of them ethnic Lao in origin, it is renowned for its spicy and inventive cuisine, using whatever ingredients are available.

Where there are rivers or lakes, they use the smaller fish they catch in a pungent dish called koi plaa.

The fish are chopped up finely, and mixed by hand with local herbs, lime juice and live red ants, and served up raw.

It is very popular, but also dangerous.

For decades, certain populations in the north-east have been known to have abnormally high levels of liver cancer.

In men it comprises more than half of all cancer cases, compared to an average of less than 10% worldwide.

The high prevalence has long been linked to infection by liver flukes, a kind of parasite, found in raw fish.

Call me a skeptic...

....but I find it hard to credit that the issue of aboriginal property rights, which exercises the IPA bred mind of Tim Wilson a great deal, is actually likely to make that much difference to their collective well being, especially in the parts of Australia where they are worst off.

Go to any small Australian town that has no local economy to speak of, and house prices will be very low, shops will be shut, and often the aging people who stay there won't be putting much into upgrading the appearance or utility of the residence they paid off 30 years ago. 

I expect pretty much the same thing for any remote aboriginal community that exists only so that the residents can feel connected to the land, regardless of whether they have freehold title to their house, or not.

The biggest "glass jaw" government in Australian history

I see the terminally boring Paul Kelly has now lined up with the rest of The Australian's columnists to attack Gillian Triggs.  

The uniformity and vitriol of attack from that paper is truly remarkable, and really makes one wonder how it operates.    It is incredible to watch the glass jaw this entire Abbott government (with the exception of Malcolm Turnbull) has shown towards Triggs.  

No one sensible can understand why they keep attacking her - the report which they continually misrepresent has had virtually no effect on public opinion of the government in any event.

Camping on the Moon

Habitat is designed to provide stay on the moon, sleeps two
Oddly enough, they might also be able to set up a solar still on the surface to collect drinking water:

The moon's gravity is so low and its atmosphere so tenuous that water molecules in the ground turn directly to vapour when heated. Free to bounce around at near the speed of sound, they condense again when they get cold, piling up as frost where temperatures are low. The greatest build-up is at the dawn terminator: the region where the sun is just rising.A lunar "day" is a full month long, so the water molecules have a lot of time to accumulate. Tim Livengood of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland wondered how much drinkable water you could collect if you set up a solar-powered distillery to catch the morning frost."When the sun rises – actually, when the surface rotates into sunlight – we just drop a clear plastic dome over our collecting surface and let the sun turn it back into vapour," Livengood says. The vapour then frosts up the inside of the surface, where it can be harvested.

Using hydrogen measurements taken between 2009 and 2011 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Livengood calculated that the frost build-up at the terminator would be just under a fifth of a millimetre thick – enough to yield about 190 millilitres of water per square metre per lunar day, with a suitable set-up. That could include a small sun-tracking shade to cast a permanent shadow, mimicking the terminator and allowing astronauts to collect frost all day long.

"The quantity of water is much less than what we could dig up at the lunar poles, but we get it with very little energy investment on our part," Livengood says. "We just need to be patient."

The Kevin Rudd disaster

Gee, watching the smarmy performance of Kevin Rudd on The Killing Season is reminding me all over again how amazing it was that he was ever popular with his party and the public.
I never liked the guy, and always considered him a shallow egocentric with a fake public persona.
His only saving grace is that he is not Tony Abbott, a more "normal" person by most psychological criteria, but a dimwit of a political windvane with a pathetic willingness to overthrow ethics and decency for the sake of political advantage, and a spectacularly bad Prime Minister as a result.
Update: Kevin is still bitter that Swan hadn't told him what had to change if he wanted to keep his job. The problem is, of course, that it's hard to tell someone they need a complete personality transplant.

On paying people smugglers

So it seems virtually certain now that it would have been an ASIS spy on board an Australian navy ship who was paying money at sea to people smugglers to turn back.

It's absolutely certain that both Coalition and Labor governments have used ASIS operatives on Indonesian land who would use cash to disrupt people smuggling operations (by paying for information, and perhaps even paying them not to leave?)

But rather than shrugging shoulders, I would have thought it is bleeding obvious that the use of payments to boats at sea is different from splashing around money on shore in disruptive operations.

The Indonesian government is not likely to be happy with either, but surely anyone with common sense, rather than the appalling excuse makers like Bolt, can see that tactically, paying smugglers who are at sea is a dumb idea, given it provides an incentive to start the journey (update:  and presumably ensures that the smugglers have received money both from the "customers" and then the Australian government.)

And why would it harm a government to admit that its operatives have gone too far in this instance, and will be directed not to use such a tactic again?

The Nazi style guide

Hitler as Art Director: What the Nazis' Style Guide Says About the "Power of Design" - CBS News

I'm not sure I was aware until recently that Hitler, being an arty type,  personally designed the Nazi flag back in 1920.

While googling the topic, I also found this interesting story about a book that was effectively the Nazi style guide. 

This is why ISIS will never take over the world:  not enough attention to good style.

The real story

Ian Fleming ensures no cliches about Japan go unexploited in his ethnocentric masterpiece 'You Only Live Twice' | The Japan Times

I've only ever read one Bond novel a very long time ago, so I knew that the movies took extremely little from the books and crammed it into completely new stories.

But this summary of the plot of You Only Live Twice is still so different from the movie, it seems the only similarity is that both had parts set on a Japanese island.

What a moral vacuum

Andrew Bolt's first comment on the paying money to people smugglers scandal was to say he didn't know that he cared.

His latest is to note something like this:   "Hey, what's the big deal?  The AFP under the last Coalition government might have been paying for boats to be scuttled.   Who cares what happens in Indonesia or at sea?"

I think he's working his way up to "We used to strafe Japanese boats in those waters.  What are they complaining about?"

Update:  more moronic "Who cares!  They've stopped the boats!  Accountable government?   Who friggin' cares?" commentary from Bolt.  

Trouble for Abbott

It's good to finally see Abbott and his government facing some political damage from the "whatever it takes" attitude to stopping boats of civilians getting to our shores.  And don't you love the government's "but you're corrupt too!" response to Indonesian complaints delivered by Abbott's personal lacky Greg Sheridan.  What fun it would be to get the metadata belonging to Sheridan's mobile phone.

As I have commented several times, it is not only scandalous high seas behaviour to be using our military and customs to be stopping boats of civilians, locking them up on ships for weeks at a time, before returning them to fates unknown in countries like Sri Lanka and Vietnam; it is the most outrageous and ludicrous affront to transparency in a democratic government that it should persistently refuse to tell the voters what it is doing.  (Ludicrous because its hard to see how publicity of the success of the schemes could hurt in Indonesia.)

It is, of course, extremely difficult for Labor to "score" on this issue, but here at last is one way it might.

But before the next election, it also needs to be talking to Indonesia very specifically about what is going to be done at a regional level to ensure there is no repeat of an escalation of the boats should it win the next election.  (And they have to do something novel about Nauru and Manus Island too.)

Slow internet in space

How Do Astronauts Connect to the Internet in Space? - The Atlantic

Interesting article here explained that the internet connection astronauts get to use on the ISS is not so fast.  But lasers will soon help.

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...