Best commentary on the San Bernardino shooting

I think this one is awkward for the gun nuts of America (and Australia.)   Seems likely that it is a case of Islam inspired domestic terrorism, but with high powered weaponry legally purchased.  This removes the "we must identity and treat the mentally ill better" argument, presumably.   And even the desperate, movie fantasy land "if only someone there had their own pistol on them, they could have taken them down" when it sounds like most people were shoot in a initial spray of rapid fire.   (Oh, the gun nuts will still run the argument, no matter the improbability.)    Even our own resident gun obsessive, fantasy prone, Senator hasn't been running any of the usual NRA guff about guns in the light of this one:  his main tweet after it suggests something like this:  "well, yeah, America has lots of mass shootings, but other countries with quite a few guns don't.  Maybe if we let more guns be owned, we'll luck out and be more like those countries."   Yeah, right. In a country where the number of mass shootings took a dramatic drop after tightening gun control, why should we take that risk, other than to give him the thrill of being able "to pat" semi automatics from his attic again.   (I am not making that up.)     

In light of the commentary following, I guess the appropriate response is to feel somewhat sorry for the (probably relatively high proportion) of Americans who fully understand why other countries think their attitude to gun control  is absurd. 

Here's the best piece I have read:

The Most Dangerous Belief is not Believing in Gun Control

Here's an extract:

I actually think that there was some rhetoric that contributed to the shooting. Rhetoric like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Did you know that less than a month before the Planned Parenthood shooting, there was another mass killing in the town of Colorado Springs? One woman was witness to both, by the way, and her boyfriend said she cried the first time but not this time because quote, “She’s a veteran now.”

Well in that first shooting the shooter was walking down the street with his rifle—an AR-15, in fact. Concerned citizens saw him and called the authorities and said, “There’s a man walking down the street with a rifle.” And the dispatcher told these citizens, “Well there’s nothing we can do about that because Colorado is an open carry state and the only thing that’s going to stop a bad guy with a gun is—” Oh too late, three innocent people are now dead.

That was Halloween day. In between that mass shooting and the Planned Parenthood Black Friday mass shooting, the website Shooting Tracker chronicled 31 additional mass shootings. Forty-seven dead and scores more wounded. Now these were just the mass shootings. These were not the one-off accidents, the suicides, the targeted slayings, the gangland beefs. No presidential candidates of either party were called on to make statements decrying the Ohio man who killed his neighbors and their 7-year-old son; the quadruple murderer in Kentucky who shot a family then burned their house; the Texas man who shot six at a campsite; the Jacksonville, Florida, man who made the mother of his 5-month-old twins hold their babies as he shot her, and them, and then himself.

Guns. A lot of people have a lot of terrible ideas: Sometimes it’s getting revenge on an ideology, sometimes it’s getting revenge on the police, sometimes it’s getting revenge on people you personally know. But without guns, the death toll would be much lower. I’m not saying that all the hateful rhetoric around Planned Parenthood didn’t unfairly nudge them closer to the crosshairs. But it’s not just bad ideas and angry men that lead to these obscene death tolls. It’s that the ill heads with these twisted ideas can so easily access a means of lethality uncommon in the civilized world. We are an aggrieved, worked up, angry people. But an American who is aggrieved or enraged or unmoored is more deadly that an Englishman or an Australian not because of the extremes of our discourse, or the extent of our aggrievement. The bad idea that people are most dying from is not an anti-abortion idea or an anti-cop idea or anti-Western, anti-Christian. It’s anti–gun control. That’s the deadliest and most ignorant idea of all.

Obvious, but a large slab of Americans need to be reminded.  (Depressingly, they'll also ignore it.)

In other commentary, James Fallows writes touchingly of how saddened he is by this latest shooting.

And from an article that appeared just before the shooting, here's an article ripping into the deliberately intimidating tactics of many "open carry" advocates:   Gun Nuts Are a Threat to Democracy.

Seems pretty important...

Physicists confirm thermodynamic irreversibility in a quantum system

A reminder

I wonder, was yesterday's better than expected GDP figure a good enough reason to remind the world that a certain anti-Keynesian economist was warning about Australian stagflation in 2011? 

Yes; yes.  I think it is.

For the sardine obsessive

I'm still eating a lot of sardines lately (well, twice a week), and on a hunt to find the nicest available in Brisbane.

As I've noted before, the Canadian ones are a major disappointment;  those from Portugal (for which I have to go to a deli in West End) were pretty nice; but the best were the heavily smoked German ones from Aldi, which have tragically disappeared off their shelf.   The old "King Oscar" brand, which are now canned in Poland (I had forgotten 'til I checked a map that Poland actually had ocean frontage), are said to be "lightly smoked", but it's barely detectable.  Still, they are pleasant enough in a small sardine way.  Aldi's sardines are now also from Poland, and one suspects from the same factory as King Oscar's.  They are OK, but I'm leaning towards King Oscar still.

But if you think I've become a bit obsessive about sardines, you ought to read this extensive blog (actually, just consisting of one enormous post - but comments are still active!) by a couple of women from Melbourne, rating not only cans available in Australia, but those they have sampled on international trips.   (I have to say, based on those brands they review which I have also tried, their taste seems fairly closely aligned to mine.)

Yes, if you are truly interested in sardine taste comparisons, you should read The Sardinistas - A Comparative Study of Tinned Sardines.

 And if you still aren't sick of sardines by then, go and have a look at this page - Journeys in Canned Fish History.  (Honestly, what would you do without my blog.)   You'll find there many photos of how canned Norwegian sardines used to look in Australia, with this odd example of graphic art from a 100 or so years ago at the top:

And what about this crook looking Kooka, who I suspect not only has a mohawk, but is hooked on ice:

Anyhow, I'll hopefully try another European deli this weekend, to see if I can extend my personal tasting range.

Gay indulgence

The Danger in Comparing the HIV-Prevention Pill to Condoms - The Atlantic

The writer of this article, about the rather vexing issue of gay men going on permanent (and expensive) medication so they can sleep around with as many (possibly) HIV positive guys they want without a condom, has not done his cause any favours:

As a gay man who has receptive sex—and who lives in Miami and Washington, D.C., the cities with the first- and fifth-highest HIV rates in the U.S.—I knew how high my risk was, and for the most part, I wasn’t willing to chance it....

How often do you have sex without a condom? this new doctor asked.

I explained my situation: I was there because I don’t like sex with condoms. I knew it put me at risk, so I rarely had sex. I knew it wasn’t the right reason to ask for PrEP, and I knew it wasn’t 100-percent effective, but I knew asking for it was the right thing to do.....

I swiped my credit card. On the way back to my apartment, I popped a pill in the street.

I took the pill for 30 days. I had sex once. I couldn’t afford to refill the prescription, so I didn’t.

Over the next few months, I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a steady partner so that I could have a condomless sex life without fear. That seemed like my only option: I literally couldn’t afford sex with multiple partners. The truth is, though, even that option seemed suspect: Several of my HIV-positive friends had acquired the virus from boyfriends who’d cheated on them.

Well, this is extraordinarily self indulgent, if you ask me.   Instead of the cheap, simple option that he doesn't even have to put on his own sensitive bit, he prefers to take risks and then use an expensive medication to keep him virus free.  (But won't stop a wide variety of other STDs.)

And people in comments following note the same:

It would seem disingenuous to file this under 'Health' rather than 'Lifestyle', given that at almost every opportunity the author states that medical/scientific experts were wrong, without explaining why, and all to justify his personal (and understandable) preference for condomless sex without feeling bad for the negative externalities it engenders. A study earlier this year already showed resistance mutations in a clinical study. Cavalier usage of prep as a lifestyle drug will only shorten it's efficacy, not to mention increased STI rates in all other areas.

In short, it's a selfish personal essay to excuse and justify behaviour that the author knows deep down is wrong.

 And this:

This article sounds like it was written by a Reagan-era conservative to destroy any sympathy for AIDS patients by portraying them as irresponsible, selfish, and greedy.

On the other hand, some argue that it makes sense to issue this expensive drug because preventing contracting HIV outweighs the lifelong cost of the drugs that keep it from killing those who contract it.

Yet, the point is, if people could have monogamous relationships, and only with those who don't have the disease, it costs nothing to stay healthy, and doesn't even involve a condom.   This works for billions of heterosexual couples on the planet.   And lots and lots of straight people have trouble finding "intimacy" and long term relationships for a period in their lives, too.   Hard to see why so many gay men find their lives need expensive financial medical assistance and worthy of special sympathy.

Wingnut obsessions

I have to say, it has taken the death of one Maurice Strong for me to even notice the guy, and that's only  because of the way wingnuts have obviously been obsessing about him for the last decade as some sort of e-vil overlord of the UN role in seeking to limit global warming. 

Fortunately for them, most "climate change is a complete crock and scam that is about to collapse" believers are old codgers and women who'll be dead before their grandchildren can curse them for their stupidity.   Although the grandkids of Andrew Bolt will probably be so happy with their inheritance that they won't care how Grandad made money by pandering to the gullible.  

Oh, and once Jason Soon has paid for the Chinese gene editting uplift to sentience of the descendants of David Leyonhjelm's cats, they'll probably think he was a moron too.

OK, back to the old topic

Global - How to Save the World - Foreign Correspondent - ABC

This special last night on the ABC was well worth watching.   Things I liked in particular - the German farmers who make money from their many wind turbines and don't fantasise about infrasound;  the way the average age at the Heartland Skeptics conference looked to be about 65-70; the Kenyan villages getting into solar power electricity because you don't need heaps of infrastructure to get it there.  Good work.

New topic wanted

I'm feeling oddly bereft of posting topics today.   I was going to note Peter Hartcher's story that even Liberals were questioning Abbott as to whether a (widely rumoured) affair with Peta explained his refusal to dump her, and how this seems to have attracted little attention from the rest of the media today.   (I find that odd.   But I find it even odder that both News Ltd and Fairfax outlets have taken to innuendo about Abbott and Credlin - going skiing together, staying in France together, Tony sleeping on her couch instead of spending his allowance on an actual hotel room - and neither of them, nor their spouses, come out to complain about it.  If I were the subject of such innuendo, and if I had not slept with my staffer, I think I could at least muster a press release of denial and then say I was not going to dignify it by addressing it again.  But just remaining silent despite the increasing openness of the innuendo?   Strange...)

But there, now that I have done that, I am waiting for other inspiration...

A good explanation of the Paris conference

The Paris climate talks won't solve global warming. Here's what they'll do instead. - Vox

Debunking the debunking

We're in the middle of Brisbane's spring/early summer storm season, and I was impressed by this photo  from the Fairfax website because of the accuracy with which it shows the green-ish tinge that most people here freak out about as a strong indication that someone, somewhere is going to get hail:

(Indeed, yesterday afternoon my daughter pointed out the green colour of the threatening sky, and it was followed by some - thankfully only pea-sized - hail.)

So I was a bit surprised to Google the topic and see that Accuweather in 2007 had an article with the title "Debunked:  the Green Sky Hail Myth." 

Which is a bit odd, in that it refers to a Scientific American article which only "kind of" debunks it. 

Apparently, Americans often take the green tinge as an indication of a tornado - although many also argue the hail connection.  The research (by just one person in America) that the article cites sounds distinctly unconvincing - he apparently agrees that green storm clouds do indeed happen and are an indication of a severe storm (well, duh), but seems to dispute its predictive nature for hail (or tornadoes). 

Well, this is one case where I reckon life experience counts for more than a paper by one dude in America.

Because I would say that in the vast majority of cases for storms in Brisbane, the distinctive green tinge is an accurate sign that hail is happening (or will happen) somewhere in the storm's path.  

In the latest facile and clownish libertarian Senator news ...

I don't know what to make of Dastyari - a Labor Senator on side with the Bald One in the pointless "nanny State" enquiry that is seeking to end the scourge of Australians having to wear bicycle helmets on their way to get a drink in Kings Cross at 2.45am seems to me to have some very suspect priorities.  But at least he is showing some sense on climate change, I suppose...

Some plankton doing well, for now...

Published Thursday in the journal Science, the study details a tenfold increase in the abundance of single-cell coccolithophores between 1965 and 2010, and a particularly sharp spike since the late 1990s in the population of these pale-shelled floating phytoplankton.

"Something strange is happening here, and it's happening much more quickly than we thought it should," said Anand Gnanadesikan, associate professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins and one of the study's five authors.

Gnanadesikan said the Science report certainly is good news for creatures that eat coccolithophores, but it's not clear what those are. "What is worrisome," he said, "is that our result points out how little we know about how complex ecosystems function." The result highlights the possibility of rapid ecosystem change, suggesting that prevalent models of how these systems respond to climate change may be too conservative, he said.

The team's analysis of Continuous Plankton Recorder survey data from the North Atlantic Ocean and North Sea since the mid-1960s suggests rising carbon dioxide in the ocean is causing the coccolithophore population spike, said Sara Rivero-Calle, a Johns Hopkins doctoral student and lead author of the study.

Link to the story here.

This is interesting, given that coccolithophores have been the subject of some intensive study to work out whether they are very sensitive to ocean acidification, or not.  (The results of lab tests have been contradictory and it's been difficult to work out why.)    The concern is (I expect) that at a certain threshold of CO2, this type of plankton suddenly goes into reverse because of the acidification effect. 

Matt Ridley is wrong

If wishes were horses | …and Then There's Physics

Ridley's got another short "what's the problem?  AGW won't get dangerous for another century" article which will only convince the ignorant, like Adam Creighton, but he got to run it in Scientific American.

The explanation of why he is a wrong-headed dissembler is given at the link above.

I've never enjoyed Scientific American much, but really, publishing failed banker and coal miner Ridley on climate change?

Some good (and bad) climate change commentary

*  And Then There's Physics has a crack at the "we can't stay under 2C now" pessimism, and I generally agree with him.  (See the comments too, where he says it seems to be a case of climate scientists not being able to "win" either way.)

* Lenore Taylor has an excellent explanation of how Australian policy got to where it is today.   The details of this are hard to keep in memory, so it's really good to see such a clear account.

*  And now for the bad:  the very bad.  Adam Creighton writes with so many errors in his take on climate change, it's hard to know where to begin.  Take this paragraph:

But even more problematic, the link between carbon dioxide and global average temperatures is highly uncertain. Sure, it is probably positive, but the degree of the relationship is vague, as sober analysts of the climate change debate will readily point out. Moreover, splicing the effect out from temperature changes that would have happened anyway is next to impossible.

"Sober analysis" - ha!

This paragraph in particular shows his complete ignorance on the topic:

The other problem with these models is they assume the impact of global warming is unambiguously bad. It might not be. For example, the 44,000 more than expected people who died in the British winter last year — in part because of the cold — might have had a different view.

Absolute unadulterated rubbish, and proof he simply does not read the IPCC reports or any other material - where the cross over between any net benefits to net harm has been a matter of hotly contested dipute.  (Lukewarmer Richard Tol's error prone work being very significant on this.)

But how surprising is it really, that a small government, anti tax, libertarian inclined economics writer knows stuff all about climate change. 

But the basic problem with his argument is the common (and discredited one) - that uncertainty is our friend.   It isn't, Adam.  Read. 

An extraordinary first world problem

I guess we've all seen or heard of the problem of excess skin on formerly obese people, but the SMH has a remarkable story about it this morning.  I didn't realise how lengthy, risky and expensive the surgery to correct it could be.   You would think that if more people knew about this they might stop their weight gain before growing or stretching all that excess surface area, but I guess human nature isn't like that.

The profession says "good riddance"

Philip Nitschke burns medical certificate and says he will promote euthanasia | Australia news | The Guardian

The infinite information universe?

So, I was in bed last night scrolling through the arXiv papers (I recommend the Android app for this, by the way - it's really good) when I found this relatively recent one:  No Return to Classical Reality.

Here's the abstract, with the important bit highlighted by me:

At a fundamental level, the classical picture of the world is dead, and has been dead now for almost a century. Pinning down exactly which quantum phenomena are responsible for this has proved to be a tricky and controversial question, but a lot of progress has been made in the past few decades. We now have a range of precise statements showing that whatever the ultimate laws of Nature are, they cannot be classical. In this article, we review results on the fundamental phenomena of quantum theory that cannot be understood in classical terms. We proceed by first granting quite a broad notion of classicality, describe a range of quantum phenomena (such as randomness, discreteness, the indistinguishability of states, measurement-uncertainty, measurement-disturbance, complementarity, noncommutativity, interference, the no-cloning theorem, and the collapse of the wave-packet) that do fall under its liberal scope, and then finally describe some aspects of quantum physics that can never admit a classical understanding -- the intrinsically quantum mechanical aspects of Nature. The most famous of these is Bell's theorem, but we also review two more recent results in this area. Firstly, Hardy's theorem shows that even a finite dimensional quantum system must contain an infinite amount of information, and secondly, the Pusey--Barrett--Rudolph theorem shows that the wave-function must be an objective property of an individual quantum system. Besides being of foundational interest, results of this sort now find surprising practical applications in areas such as quantum information science and the simulation of quantum systems.

Here's some more detail from within the paper:

At the heart of classical information theory is the idea of a classical bit – the information revealed by a single yes-no question. Our ability to quantify, encode and transform information has revolutionised the world in countless ways (telecommunications, the internet, computers, etc.), and its study has shed light on the foundations of physics. Central to this is the idea that information does not care how we choose to encode it – we can encode information on paper, in electronic pulses or carve it into stone. For almost all of history our encoding of information has been into classical degrees of freedom. However, Nature is quantum-mechanical and, in recent years, we have begun to use quantum degrees of freedom to encode information. A central question therefore arises: does information in quantum mechanics have the same properties as in classical mechanics?

Now, the state of even the simplest quantum system – a qubit – is specified by continuous  parameters. This means that it requires an infinite amount of information to specify the state exactly. For example, the amplitude α of |0i in the superposition α|0i + β|1i could encode the decimal expansion of π. Thus, at first glance, it seems that that quantum systems can carry vastly more information than classical systems. However, Holevo [22, 42, 43] showed only a single bit of classical information can ever be extracted from a qubit system via measurement. Further, in spite having a continuous infinity of pure states, quantum computation do not suffer from the the problems that rule out analog classical computers [22]. Powerful theorems on the discretization of errors [22] tell us that we do not need to correct a continuum of errors, but only particular discrete types. These surprising characteristics present a basic conundrum: how is it that qubits behave as if they are discrete systems when their state space forms a continuum?

As already discussed, in classical statistical mechanics we can consider the allowed macrostates: the set of probability distributions over some state space Λ of microstates. It is easy to see that these distributions also form a continuum – even if there is only a discrete finite set of microstates. As an example, consider the case of DNA bases, which can be in one of 4 microstates A, T, C or G. The macrostate for a single base is therefore a probability distribution p = (pA, pT , pC, pG), obeying Pj pj = 1 and 0 ≤ pj ≤ 1 for all j = A, T, C, G. The set of such distributions therefore forms a solid tetrahedron (a simplex) in 3-dimensional space, and there is a continuum of macrostates (see Figure 7).

The fact that qubits behave in many ways like discrete, finite systems would be easily explained  if perhaps there were only a finite number of more fundamental states – like the finite number  of DNA bases – and if the continuum of quantum states only represented our uncertainty about which one of them is occupied – like the continuum of DNA macrostates. Surprisingly, in spite of Holevo’s bound and the discretization of errors, this cannot be the case: any future physical
theory that reproduces the physics of finite-dimensional quantum systems must have an infinite number of fundamental states.

The paper then goes onto to explain Hardy's proof of this.  It's math-y, and the interested reader (hello?) can go read it in the paper itself.

"Hardy" is Lucien Hardy, who seems to have made quite a name for himself in quantum theory, and is said to have devised a pretty simple proof back in 1992 that quantum physics must be non local.


But the "theorem" referred to about infinite information seems to come from a 2004 paper, which does not seem to be on arXiv.

But there is a 2010 paper by someone (from where, I do not see - another paper just gives a hotmail address for him!) disputing that Hardy is right on this.  He argues that "infinite excess baggage also occurs in classical theories".

Well, what to make of this?

Am I wrong, or I am right, in suspecting that the idea of infinite information being necessary in a quantum universe to be pretty significant for a philosophical understanding of the nature of the universe? 

It seems that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem gets all the attention from a philosophical implication point of view, but perhaps there is another theorem here that deserves similar thought.

Certainly, for the religious, the idea of infinite information tends to be associated with God, so if Hardy is right, does it suggest more of a Spinoza view of God rather than the Catholic view?

Bit deep for a Friday, hey?

Update:   see, when the question is asked at Quora "is there an infinite amount of information in the Universe", most people answer "no".

As you do...

Man stole brains from former insane asylum and put them on eBay | US news | The Guardian

Let's play "climate change whiplash"!

Only In It For The Gold: Have We Missed the 2C Target Already?

As I have noted before, there's a real "whiplash" problem going on in the lead up to Paris, with some apparent experts pointing out things like how much could be achieved in CO2 reductions even with current technology; how coal may have already peaked in China; how batteries could revolutionise the use of clean energy, etc.

On the other hand, you have posts like the one linked above complaining that by pretending that the 2C limit is achievable when it most likely isn't, scientists are giving false optimism to nations, which leads to them not committing to the degree of effort that really would be needed. 

On the third hand, surely it has to be realised that the long standing enemies of effective policy towards reducing CO2 (the small government/anti regulation/anti tax conservative/libertarians of America) can seize on discussion that 2C is effectively inachievable to argue that there is no point in seeking to limit CO2, and promote instead a foolhardy "aircondition the planet" strategy (that is, the idea to push economic growth as the priority, including by burning more fossil fuels, because it is only by getting richer that the planet can be airconditioned - or geoengineered - fast enough to survive any temperature rise.)

It is a very tricky business, but I would have thought the appropriate response just has to include the following:

a. likely overshooting of 2C doesn't mean you don't seek to limit it as low as possible above 2C;

b. no one has any clear idea how well geoengineering may work and how it may hurt some countries for the benefit of others.  It will only be worth trying once things really are dire, and cannot address ocean acidification in any realistic scenario;

c. don't let pessimism become self fulfilling defeatism.   When strong commitment to environmental action is made, the results are often faster and better than expected. 

The very reasonable Jericho

Cut company tax rate to grow revenue? That's magical thinking | Greg Jericho | Australia news | The Guardian