Glueballs?

A particle purely made of nuclear force

For decades,scientists have been looking for so-called "glueballs". Now it seems
they have been found at last. A glueball is an exotic particle, made up
entirely of gluons – the "sticky" particles that keep nuclear particles
together. Glueballs are unstable and can only be detected indirectly, by
analysing their decay. This decay process, however, is not yet fully
understood.

Professor Anton Rebhan and Frederic Brünner from TU Wien (Vienna)
have now employed a new theoretical approach to calculate glueball
decay. Their results agree extremely well with data from particle
accelerator experiments. This is strong evidence that a resonance called
"f0(1710)", which has been found in various experiments, is in fact the
long-sought glueball. Further experimental results are to be expected
in the next few months.

The Standard Model is very messy....

What a difference

I was just watching a bit of Question Time of Federal Parliament under new PM Turnbull and Speaker Tony Smith.

What an incredible contrast it is to the embarrassment that it was under Bronwyn Bishop and failed PM Tony Abbott.   It's like its had an infusion of maturity that makes the former version look like a kindergarten. 

It's funny how Abbott's departure from the top job has made just about everyone in the Coalition look better (well, with the exception of the irredeemable Peter Dutton.)   They just seem all happier and more competent than before.   Perhaps it's having the yoke of Peta lifted from their shoulders that is helping, too.  Given Christopher Pyne's recent pointed comments about Turnbull being the kind of PM who actually considers questions and tries to answer them in detail (and how "refreshing" that is), I'm even feeling more kindly towards him!

And what about Hockey?  It's like people have forgotten he was ever there already.  Kind of humiliating, especially for a politician with famously thin skin.  (As for Abbott, I suspect he is too dumb to understand the depth of his own humiliation, although I was amused to read that he apparently is upset that John Howard wasn't supportive enough after his dumping.)

Of course, the public torment of Andrew Bolt* continues, as well as that of just about everyone at Catallaxy save for Sinclair Davidson.   I can't credit the Prof's judgement about Abbott needing to go too much, though; he was also the only commentator on the continent who thought Bronwyn was doing a  good job as speaker.  (Well, maybe ratbag Rowan Dean agreed.)  Anyway, seems Turnbull is reluctant to do any fiddling with s18C RDA, so we'll see how long the goodwill towards him continues. ...

*  Speaking of Bolt and his 3000 words a day of Muslim-ania since the teenage shooting a fortnight ago;  I think by far the best media coverage about the problem of youthful radicalisation in Australia has been on the ABC's 7.30.   Does Bolt give them credit for that?  I don't think so.  

Troublemaking cows

Why the humble cow is India's most polarising animal - BBC News

Gee.  I hadn't realised the trouble cow reverence causes in modern India:

More seriously, most states forbid cow slaughter, and the ban on beef has been criticised by many because the meat is cheaper than chicken and fish and is a staple for the poorer Muslim,
tribal and dalit (formerly untouchable) communities.

Last month, a 50-year-old man in northern Uttar Pradesh was killed in a mob lynching over rumours that his family had been storing and consuming beef at home. Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his silence over the killing nearly two weeks later, members of his party thrashed an independent lawmaker in Kashmir for hosting a beef party.

Earlier this month, Hindus and Muslims clashed over rumours, again, of cow slaughter in Uttar Pradesh. A row over banning beef is threatening to stoke religious tensions in restive Kashmir..

There are worrying reports that supporters of the BJP and right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in the state have launched a virulent campaign against
cow slaughter and beef.

Although the government's own animal census shows that the cow and buffalo population has grown - a 6.75% increase between 2007 and 2012 - and cow slaughter is banned in most states, there is hysteria being whipped up that the bovine is under threat.

Vigilante cow protection groups have mushroomed. They claim to have a strong network of informers and say they "feel empowered" because of the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP
government in Delhi. One of these groups actually managed to get a court order against a beef and pork festival at a Delhi university in 2012.

That's not all. The BJP-ruled state of Rajasthan has a cow minister. There are campaigns going on demanding that the cow should replace the tiger as the national animal - a minister in Haryana, also ruled by the BJP, promptly began an online poll.

All of this makes me wonder about what they serve in Indian McDonalds.  The BBC handily has a story from 2014 on that very topic.

Not too late, apparently

Antarctic ice sheets face catastrophic collapse without deep emissions cuts | Environment | The Guardian

Studies like this, which suggest that the Antarctic ice sheets will start to melt (unless deep cuts to CO2 start very quickly) but take centuries to do so can't really take into account possible geo-engineering approaches that may develop in the intervening period.  Still, seems that it's a lot "safer" to do the achievable - reduce CO2 - than bet on unproven techniques with unclear consequences.

Nasty virus

Ebola lingers in semen for nine months - BBC News

All quite unexpected, too, it seems.   Does any other virus do something similar?

Update:  just to make readers uncomfortable, here's an article about all the various types of virus that can be in semen, and the list is longer than I expected.   I was more interested, though, in the ones which it seems the body has defeated, but they linger on.

Yet more El Nino discussion

El Nino could soon rank as the strongest event since 1950

It seems to summarise things pretty well.

Yes, sometimes they do impress

If you believe the account of her contact with a medium given in this really fascinating first person article in Elle, you will understand why mediums sometimes can still make deep impressions that are hard to explain away.

And Ross Douthat, inspired by the article, writes interestingly on ghosts in the secular age.

Higher sensitivity still quite possible

Most of the talk over the last couple of years has been about observational studies indicating that climate sensitivity to CO2 was perhaps on the lower side, rather than the high side.  Yet I see that in a paper that has just come out, some NASA based researchers give reason to think the high side is more likely:   

The large spread of model equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is mainly caused by the differences in the simulated marine boundary layer cloud (MBLC) radiative feedback. We examine the variations of MBLC fraction in response to the changes of sea surface temperature (SST) at seasonal and centennial timescales for 27 climate models that participated in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 and Phase 5. We find that the inter-model spread in the seasonal variation of MBLC fraction with SST is strongly correlated with the inter-model spread in the centennial MBLC fraction change per degree of SST warming and that both are well correlated with ECS. Seven models that are consistent with the observed seasonal variation of MBLC fraction with SST at a rate −1.28±0.56 %/K all have ECS higher than the multi-model mean of 3.3 K yielding an ensemble-mean ECS of 3.9 K and a standard deviation of 0.45 K.

That seems important...

Birth order and consequences

This very long review of a couple of new books about the history of the Castrato contains a lot of information.  Here are a couple of paragraphs, noting which boys got to draw the short straw, so to speak:

It began, it seems, because women were not allowed to sing in church,
and, in the Papal States, were banned from singing at all. ‘It is
important to bear in mind,’ Feldman writes, ‘that castrations for
singing, beginning well before 1600, took place only in Italy,
geographic heartland of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.’
While London warmed to castrati, and paid them fortunes, the English did
not castrate their own. One contemporary of Handel’s commented on this:
‘You Englishmen complain that castrati are too costly, so that too much
money ends up in Italian lands, but if you want to make all this use of
them and [still] make savings, it’s amazing that for such a profit you
still can’t castrate there.’

Castrati, for Feldman, can be understood as the second sons of Italian families who, instead of goinginto the military or the church, took up singing, and in order to excel
had to make a sacrifice. She notes that castration arose at a time in
Italy when the eldest son got most or all of the inheritance. For one of
the others, getting castrated was a way to deal with the problem of
making a living. She writes rather well about this notion of sacrifice,
quoting Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, two late 19th-century writers on
the general subject of sacrifice. They wrote, according to Feldman, that
the victim ‘somehow has to be ravaged in a solemn but devastating way …
The end goal is to sanction the victim so as to authorise him for a
special purpose, removing him … from ordinary life … by radical
alteration that leads to a kind of rebirth. Thereafter the victim, now
improved, mediates between sacred and profane worlds.’

The start of an amusing series?

Beachcomber apparently intends to make this an occasional series - examples of "crazy couplings", being famous people who were wildly incompatible but nonetheless had sex.  The first - Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler.

[What a daggy haircut Arthur has in that photo, by the way.  And the one of Simone is in colour, which gives it that trick of making a scene look more contemporary than it really is.]

Re-visiting The Shining

I've no great interest in the Stephen King oeuvre - I've never read his books or watched the mini series based on them.  And as for the movies based on his novels - I am usually seriously underwhelmed, if I see them at all.

The one exception: The Shining, which I re-watched for the first time in 35 years last weekend.

I had forgotten how magnificently creepy and disturbing it could be.  I love the formalism and effectiveness of Kubrick's direction here - apart from following the cycling boy, the camera is often determinedly stationary, and the editing leisurely, in a way that itself feels otherworldly.  (Not sure if that was the intention - from memory, Kubrick did just like keeping the camera steady for long periods in whatever he was making.)  Jack Nicholson was at the peak of his career and simply couldn't have been better. 

I remember that the film did not win over everyone:  Pauline Kael was no great fan.   And it's true - I wouldn't call it a perfect film; but then again, I don't know that I ever categorise films that way.  In this case, sure I can understand criticism that Nicholson's descent into ghost addled madness and aggression started too quickly; and at some points the (largely) creepily effective score was being just too obvious.

But overall, I think it's a great film. 

Interestingly, I see that King never liked it, and didn't appreciate the underwriting of the wife's character (although I think Shelley Duvall does well with the material), as well as other substantial changes from the book.   But hey, if you had Kubrick writing and directing, you don't really expect warm, well-rounded characterisation on the screen; that's just a given.  But it is, I think, probably Kubrick's most accessible film, in the sense that it works at an emotional level, rather than being just coolly cerebral, like most of his other work. 

Tough days for the yakusa

Are Japan's crime clans going out of business? Tea with a yakuza. - CSMonitor.com

Lots of fascinating details in this report, but the key point is that legal actions are finally eating into the size and strength of the yakusa.  I found this bit rather amusing:

Japan's post-1980s economic swoon hasn't been all bad. Yakuza made
money from "cleaning up"  bad loans, distressed assets and bankrupt
companies. "Dispute resolution" remains a core activity, partly due to
Japan's notoriously slow and expensive legal system. "We can get things
done quicker," says Kumagai. 

"Dispute resolution"!  Ha.

Double slits and quantum gravity

Backreaction: A newly proposed table-top experiment might be able to demonstrate that gravity is quantized

This is one of Sabine Hossenfelder's more readily accessible posts about a major issue in quantum physics.

[Just this weekend, while driving, I was trying to give a verbal description of the twin slit experiment to my son, but this post reminds me that I stopped at photons, and didn't continue to make the important point about electrons doing the same.  No wonder he was underwhelmed.  Tonight over dinner, perhaps!]

A death noted

As much as I disliked, and puzzled over the popularity of, Sam de Brito's Fairfax career of over-sharing, I had noticed that he had started writing on topics other than himself, even though I had come to rarely read him.   But as it happens, I had read his last column about co-sleeping with his young daughter, and thought that he sounded like a very caring father.  So, of course it is sad for his family, and his daughter in particular, that he is gone.  (It's also been more than 4 years since I criticized him here, so I think it safe not to feel guilty about that.)

Oddly, the SMH report of his death specifically notes that it was not being treated as suicide or suspicious.    That seems an odd comment to make if there is to be a coroner's report, which I assume means they don't yet know the cause.

I see from another recent column (a lightweight one about on line dating - maybe he was still writing mainly about himself?)  that he referred to "swilling codeine and whiskey" at 2 am.   I wonder if that was serious, and will have anything to do with his death...*

Update:  the SMH says  "Sam de Brito was essentially a very private man."

Um, as far as I could make out, no.   It was exactly his lack of privacy which bothered me (at least in the context of making a living from it.  I once wrote if he wanted to be full of self disclosure, he could do it on Blogger - I couldn't understand why Fairfax would host it.)

*  just to be clear - I see that codeine and alcohol is definitely not a good idea.  Was it a joke, or a bit of confession that no one took seriously.

Uh oh

More Life, Less Death | MIT Technology Review

The article says the UN has revised its population growth projections to 10 billion in 2050, due to increased longevity outweighing reduced birthrates.  That's close to more than 3 billion extra compared to today.

Here's a bit more detail:

At the country level, much of the overall increase between now and 2050
is projected to occur either in high-fertility countries, mainly in
Africa, or in countries with large populations. During 2015-2050, half
of the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in nine
countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania, United States of America,
Indonesia and Uganda, listed according to the size of their contribution
to the total growth. 

 A bit of a worry...

Bald paranoia

Our bald, cat loving, infrasound fearing Senator appears to be right on side with stupid American Right wing paranoia about "gun control".   What an embarrassing twit to have fluked his way into the Australian Senate:

[People have been effectively disputing the "Nazis disarmed the populace" for well over a decade - see this 2004 paper  - but still it rolls on.]

Update:   a more quickly read summary of the history of the use of this claim by the NRA appears in this Mother Jones article.   This paragraph is particularly significant:

"But guns didn't play a particularly important part in any event," says Robert Spitzer, who chairs SUNY-Cortland's political science department and has extensively researched gun control politics. Gun ownership in Germany after World War I, even among Nazi Party members, was never widespread enough for a serious civilian resistance to the Nazis to have been anything more than a Tarantino revenge fantasy. If Jews had been better armed, Spitzer says, it would only have hastened their demise. Gun policy "wasn't the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group."

Yep.  A large part of the problem with the common libertarian take on gun control is not only that they are paranoid;  they are also prone to fantasies about how guns would empower them in their "if only I had been there with my gun, I could've been a hero!" imaginings.  (Look at the disgusting things that Right wingers have been saying after the recent Oregon attack.)

And isn't it curious that, following the fall of Soviet communism - the only genuine post War international threat to the future of America - the paranoia has only intensified, not been reduced.  Congratulations on your tactics, gun makers of America.

Update:  I wrote this post before seeing that David Frum had weighed in on it:

The claim that the Jews of Europe could have stopped the Nazi Holocaust if only they’d possessed more rifles and pistols is a claim based on almost perfect ignorance of the events of 1933 to 1945. The mass murder of European Jews could proceed only after the Nazis had defeated or seized territory from three of the mightiest aggregations of armed force on earth: the armies of France, Poland, and the Soviet Union. The opponents of the Nazis not only possessed rifles and pistols, but also tanks, aircraft, artillery, modern fortifications, and massed infantry. And yes, Jews bore those weapons too: nearly 200,000 in the Polish armed forces, for example.

From 1941 until the end of the war, armed bands of Jewish partisans roamed through Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, just as they roam through the imaginations of American gun enthusiasts. That didn’t stop the Holocaust either.

Even before the war started, in the 1930s, Jews sometimes attempted armed resistance to the Nazis. It was the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish refugee that provided Adolf Hitler with the pretext for the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews in 1938.

There’s really only one way in which gun control is at all relevant to the history of the Holocaust. As the late historian Henry Turner forcefully argued in Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, the last clear chance to prevent the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 would have been a military coup at the end of 1932, followed by mass arrests of members of Nazi and communist militias, and the confiscation of their weapons. You might even say that stricter control of guns and gun-carrying political groups could have prevented the Holocaust.

The failed Prime Minister was worse than suspected

Why Glenn Stevens is breathing easier since Tony Abbott got rolled | afr.com

It's not as if this piece is written with much objectivity, but it does make it clear that Abbott was a bit more of an ideologically motivated twit as PM than may have been obvious (given that he would waiver and not implement things he really wanted to do, apparently.)

More magic water needed

Facing the rain deadline, in a world over which we have diminishing control

I see that Paul Sheehan manages to write about El Nino and the potential for lack of rainfall in Australia to wipe a lot of money from the value of crops, all without mentioning climate change.

I guess someone who was impressed with Ian Plimer's wildly inaccurate Heaven and Earth may not know that climate scientists have been worried about climate change causing more intense "super El Nino" events.  

Into the detail of the "many worlds"

Anyone who reads about quantum physics would know that the rather improbable sounding "many worlds" interpretation of it has actually become quite popular amongst physicists.

But there's a review paper on arXiv from earlier this year that has a good explanation of the uncertainty and debate as to what the interpretation really means in terms of the "multiplicity" of universes.  Starting from Everett down, it's not actually obvious how it's meant to work.  

I don't think I had really appreciated the extent of the problem with the idea before.  The paper is not always easy to follow in every detail, but it is generally understandable and is well worth reading.  Here's the abstract:

Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics was proposed to avoid problems inherent in the prevailing interpretational frame. It assumes that quantum mechanics can be applied to any system and that the state vector always evolves unitarily. It then claims that whenever an observable is measured, all possible results of the measurement exist. This notion of multiplicity has been understood in different ways by proponents of Everett's theory. In fact the spectrum of opinions on various ontological questions raised by Everett's approach is rather large, as we attempt to document in this critical review. We conclude that much remains to be done to clarify and specify Everett's approach.

The old trolley problem

The Lifespan of a Thought Experiment: Do We Still Need the Trolley Problem? - The Atlantic

A nice article here looking at the history of the trolley problem in philosophy and ethics, and which notes it is getting a bit of a revival because of the prospect of driverless cars.  Cool.