Meanwhile, in one of the most ridiculous nations on the planet

Teacher suspended after playing violin for young women | GulfNews.com

A university in Saudi Arabia has suspended a foreign teacher after he played the violin in front of a class of young women.
Dr Eisa Al Ansari, the rector of Prince Mohammed University (PMU), one of the largest private universities in Saudi Arabia, said that an investigation had been launched into the incident.

The rector said that the teacher was new at the university and that he was recruited two months ago.

The incident was a personal behaviour by the teacher and violated the formal policy of the university aligned with the systems and regulations of the Ministry of Education that are endorsed and applied by all universities in Saudi Arabia, he added, Saudi news site Sabq reported on Thursday.

Good grief.   Was he doing it nude?  (No.)   Is it meant to be seductive?  (Ha.)   Does a bow carry some sort of phallic symbolism?  Who knows?

In other news from that country where the heat seems to addle minds:

A huge family dispute erupted in Saudi Arabia after a man’s wife kissed a camel.

The man’s mother accused her daughter-in-law of breaking religious and social traditions and pressured her son to divorce his wife.

The wife insisted that the kiss was innocent and spontaneous.

She also accused her mother-in-law of using the kiss as an excuse to attack her because she had not yet given birth to a baby.

Mind you, this story is not sourced, and sounds the equivalent of tabloid gossip, but still...

My new found respect for the sea monkey

BBC - Earth - The animal that lives for 10,000 years

Perhaps that should be "lives" (in inverted commas) because what they are talking about is the larva cysts, which can dry out yet appear to be viable for 10,000 years.  (They know this because they got some to hatch from old salt layers of that age.)

Still, that is very impressive.  It sounds as if it won't be cockroaches that inherit the earth, after all.

What about the Pelagians??

Would you believe it? A selection of ancient faiths ripe for revival � The Spectator

As far as heresies go, the Pelagian one seemed pretty inoffensive, and, indeed, somewhat more attuned to modern thinking.

A topical slur

Steve to young monty, looking over at Catallaxy Files:

"You will never find a more wretched hive of dumb and villainy."

Another global warming problem in the making

Climate change rapidly warming world's lakes

Algal blooms, which can ultimately rob water of oxygen, are projected to increase 20 percent in lakes over the next century as warming rates increase. Algal blooms that are toxic to fish and animals would increase by 5 percent. If these rates continue, emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide on 100-year time scales, will increase 4 percent over the next decade.

Another article at phys.org indicates this is a real problem even for North American cities:

By the latter half of this century, toxic algal blooms like the one that cut off drinking water to the city of Toledo in 2014 will no longer be the exception, but the norm, a study suggests.

Wondering about Lawrence

I wonder how much credit for the apparent success of the new Star Wars is due to Lawrence Kasdan's involvement with the script?   I always thought he was largely credited with the good script for Empire Strikes Back.  (Then again, he also worked on Return of the Jedi, which I thought was a very weak script and story in comparison.) 

A particle for Christmas - or not

Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle - The New York Times

Warm up north

Record US temperatures are work of El Nino and polar vortex, experts say | US news | The Guardian

It can't be helping the Republican PR cause, having some cherry blossoms in December....

German coco nut

Death By Coconut: A Story Of Food Obsession Gone Too Far : The Salt : NPR

Born in Nuremberg in 1875, August Engelhardt was among the disaffected youngsters drawn to the back-to-nature Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement sweeping through Germany and Switzerland at the time. Its proponents yearned after an unspoiled Eden where people ate
vegetables and raw food.

Engelhardt was especially taken by Gustav Schlickeysen's 1877 dietary treatise, Fruit and Bread: A Scientific Diet. Influenced by Darwinism, the book claimed that since the natural food of apes was uncooked food and grain, that was also "the proper food for man."

Engelhardt  took it even further: For him, even bread and fruit were tainted. In his mind, the only immaculate and mystical fleshpot was the coconut, with its snowy white meat and translucent water.

In 1898, he and fellow vegetarian August Bethmann laid out their vision in a pamphlet called A Carefree Future: The New Gospel. As the pamphlet's grandiose subtitle makes plain, Engelhardt's ambitions of a Coconut Camelot, with himself as a nude King Arthur, were driven by much more than dietary compulsions: His was a spiritual quest.

"He believed that since the coconut grew high up in the tree, closest to God and closest to the sun, it was godlike," says Kracht. "And since it had hair and looked like a human head, he thought it came closest to being a man. According to his rather crackpot theory, to be a  cocovore was to be a theophage — or eater of God."

 So he goes to an island in New Guinea with a coconut plantation, 15 young Germans join him, they die or catch malaria (which Engelhart claimed wouldn't happen because of the power of the coconut) and his cult ends.   Engelhardt himself dies at 44 as a skinny and very unhealthy man.

Now if only it had been parsnips, on the other hand....

Fundamental mistake

What???  I, as a Spielberg nerd, and no doubt thousands of Star Wars nerds, am shocked at the caption beneath this report on The Australian:

Kate's looking nice, in an Annie Hall kind of way, but Spielberg has never been "an original director" of anything Star Wars.  

Whichever wet behind the ears journalist who wrote that deserves the sack.

How did the Right get so stupid and nasty, Part 2

For no particular reason, via Tim Blairs blog (which still lists me in the blogroll, as it appears not to have been updated for 8 years or so), I dropped in on the long running American right wing comic Day By Day.  A couple of recent entries:

Yeah, the first one is meant to be (I think) from a DVD the characters are watching.  Cos, you know, there's  nothing the paranoid gun owners of America would like more to watch than a black president (is he meant to be a zombie too?) being blown away over gun rights.

The second one again shows the "don't worry, if he tries that he'll be shot" philosophy of the cartoonist.

This cartoon is still linked to by the half respectable Hot Air conservative site (which seems to have a lot of Catholics amongst its columnists).   Perhaps they don't read it, too. 

How did the Right become so stupid and nasty?

The nastiness is not confined to one side of politics:  if anything, the Left used to pretty much have the market in asinine, ridiculously over-simplistic yet rudely and aggressively stated views to itself.

But why did the American Right decide to go that way too?  Seems to me to be a major socio-cultural question that I really haven't seen properly explained, yet.

This was brought to mind by noting on the weekend the American Right blogosphere (and their Australian numbskull followers) high-fiving themselves over convicted criminal and Obama hyperventilator Dinesh D'Souza  getting nasty with a college student in America (while simultaneously not listening to him.)

To paraphrase the exchange down to its key parts:

Privileged white college student:    Don't you think you should acknowledge that black disadvantage is ongoing not only as a result of the slavery era, but even from the well documented modern financial discrimination such as how veterans after WW2 were treated?

D'Souza:   well, why don't you give up your rich white-ass seat at this college to a black person?

PWCS:  hey, I didn't say I supported Affirmative Action..

D'Souza:  well if you're serious you would

PWCS:  hey, if you're saying I'm a hypocrite - we're all a bit hypocritical in the way we don't all do the maximum thing that our concerns indicate we could, in theory, do; but you know, I've tried to help in some ways....

D'Souza:   so you support Affirmative Action.

PWCS:   I just told you I didn't.  I'm talking about effective social security - 

D'Souza:   You massive hypocrite - you make me sick - yes, you personally.  We can deal with the historical injustices either by ending discrimination (which we did in the civil rights movement) or you can be a Leftist thieving scumbag, like you, who wants to steal from others to give it to the underprivileged, but won't give up your own seat in this college.   

......

I don't think I'm exaggerating much...

Now, I've left out the bits about D'Souza saying how if you want to look far enough back in history, lots of people confiscated lots of stuff from lots of other people, so rectifying all historical injustices could be a never ending exercise (true).  But he ends up in such an over the top position of his own that is only defensible if he's a "all tax is theft" twit. 

I see that The Atlantic took a look at his decline from relatively credible conservative commentator to over-the-top, irrationally Obama hating darling of the Tea Party.   (The article notes that critics say he likes to attack straw men - a tactic used in abundance in the video above.   Surely people can see that?   Oh, that's right, these are the same people who can't believe thermometers, either.)  For a more acerbic attack on D'Souza, you can't go past Bill Maher interviewing him in 2012. 

I hadn't paid attention to him much til this weekend, but it seems he may well be emblematic of the decline of American Right.

Update:   I meant to add that D'Souza's story seems similar to Niall Ferguson - formerly somewhat interesting conservative writer capable of making decent argument becomes mere hyperbolic shadow of his former self in playing up to the Tea Party wing of the Right.   Both are divorced too, in what I think were unhappy ends to their first marriage.   Niall Ferguson got much publicity a couple of years ago by arguing Keynes didn't really care about the future (and the effect of his economics on it) because he was gay.  Perhaps  conservative extremism in academics is exacerbated by adultery and divorce, hey Niall?

Another good Marvel comedy

As readers will recall, the genre of science fiction comedy is one that I particularly enjoy, and while I regret the huge amount of Hollywood time now devoted to comic book material (in the form of Marvel or DC Comics characters) played seriously, I can enjoy it if it is used primarily for humour.

Hence I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, and this weekend, very much enjoyed Ant-man, too.

It's a terribly witty script with (of course) very silly and inconsistent physics.  But it is funny, fast, nicely acted, and features the best role for Thomas the Tank Engine ever written.

I suppose I should say something about Paris...

For a short, sharp take on the outcome of Paris, I think James at his Empty Blog is probably as good as any - as long as you read the comments too.

As I try to be a "glass half full" type of person, generally speaking, I find myself somewhat encouraged to read about the shocking pollution in China last week (and, perhaps, the incredible smoke problem stemming from Indonesia that blights neighbouring countries too) as giving reason for at least those countries to get serious about not burning carbon for reasons other than mere temperature rises and climate change.  But then again, maybe I am being too optimistic (see The Economist's short take on the Chinese air pollution problem.)

I see that Lomborg has been The Australian's go-to boy for commentary on how the Paris meeting was all for nought.   I see that Senator for Guns, Soccer Fans (but not Bicycle Helmets)  Leyonhjelm tweet-cites him, which is a bit odd, given that Lomborg actually advocates a $100 billion to be spent on clean energy research.  I thought small government types didn't trust governments to back winners.   

By the way, Lomborg's website seems to contain even more selfies than Tim Wilson's twitter account, if that's possible.   Wilson:  "Oh look, here I am, in one of the crucial historical and cultural centres of the world, so let's take up half of this shot with my beaming face!":

And what the heck is he doing there at a meeting with the Palestinians and Bronwyn Bishop and Christopher Pyne??   See his twitter account, if his visage doesn't give you hives.

Update: John Quiggin's cautious optimism seems about right, too.

I'm quantum walking backwards for Christmas*

I didn't care all that much for Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker piece talking about science, and in particular, "spooky action at a distance", but I did like the end of this paragraph:

What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact. Musser takes us into the lab of the Colgate professor Enrique Galvez, who has constructed a simple apparatus that allows him to entangle photons and then show that “the photons are behaving like a pair of magic coins. . . .They are not in contact, and no known force links them, yet they act as one.” With near-quantum serendipity, the publication of Musser’s book has coincided with news of another breakthrough experiment, in which scientists at Delft University measured two hundred and forty-five pairs of entangled electrons and confirmed the phenomenon with greater rigor than before. The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.

A clever way to put it!

Speaking of spooky action, I also noticed this week on arXiv another paper (he has many) by Australian philosopher Huw Price (and Ken Wharton) entitled "A Live Alternative to Quantum Spooks"  about how retrocausality could an explanation. even though this possibility is pretty routinely overlooked.  Here's the crucial page:

If I understand him correctly, Price argues that this type of retrocausality preserves free will - it's just that the consequences of it can work both forwards and backwards.  (!)

He also says that this couldn't be used for potentially paradox causing signalling to the past: 

It couldn’t be used to signal for much the same reason that entanglement itself can't be used to signal

Well, he's convinced me of the possibility.  Now if only the physicists will get on board...

*  for the young reader:  a topical reference to a song from the Goon Show.

Satellites vs Thermometers

Sometimes you have to wonder why someone on the science reality side hasn't graphed something earlier.

For the last couple of years, I guess, the climate change denialists have moved from following Roy Spencer's UAH satellite temperature graph to the one by RSS, because of the lower trend it now gives for recent atmospheric warming.   As can be seen from the Skeptical Science trend calculator, this is what your get for RSS for the last 18 years:

This is what you get when you use UAH for the same period:

So you can guess which one is now Andrew Bolt's favourite (even though he used to post only UAH every month.)

But, as people who read other than denialist propaganda know, the satellite method of determining temperatures is inherently complicated, and is about the temperature at different levels of the atmosphere.   Hence, they do compare what they are doing with the balloon based thermometer readings to see if the methods they are using for the satellites seem right.

So, given that RSS is now the denier's outlier, Tamino has graphed it against the balloon thermometer record known as RATPAC, and shows this:

 As Tamino says:

They’re in excellent agreement until recently. Lately there’s a strong divergence, one which seems to be growing, after about 2012. It’s hard to believe that the problem is with balloon data; yes there are important calibration issues with them, but thermometers are still thermometers, and there are just as many serious issues if not more with the satellites’ microwave sounding units, including merging over a dozen different instruments, disentangling the signal from different levels of the atmosphere, and changing orbital drift and timing — issues about which different teams do not agree.....

 The RSS data simply fail to show the recent warming which is plain to see in the balloon data — the data from actual thermometers.

Now, as we know from Andrew Bolt's recent whiny post about being called out by Waleed Aly, Carl Mears from RSS is no AGW skeptic.  So I am curious as to why this discrepancy hasn't been brought up earlier.

Unless Tamino has made some sort of mistake, this graph of his absolutely blows away the "satellite temperatures are the gold standard that NOAA is ignoring"  in a way that is so plain to see, even to denialists. (And that's before the likely spike from the El Nino shows up early next year.)

Update:  this recent article in Forbes gave some of the technical details of how satellite measurements work.

Took me a while...

...to work out who the departing Oz editor (and disgrace to the whatever good name journalism might sometimes be capable of) Chris Mitchell:

 reminded me of, but I'm pretty sure it's the young Les Patterson:

OK, maybe  not that much of a physical resemblance, but the swept up hair and plain features just makes them both look old fashioned and not the brightest, to my mind.

Caution urged

I'm getting rather concerned that the new Star Wars film may be being burdened by the extraordinarily high expectations of the public.   Can it live up to its hype?

I'm not really the Star Wars nerd that some other middle aged men (and women) seem to be.   The first movie was good and ground breaking in several ways;  the second was terrific; unfortunately the promise was squibbed in the third.   The prequels are notable for many things, but none of them positive:   Lucas' tin ear for dialogue; his tin ear for mythology after all, with the strange quasi-demolition of the mysticism of the Force via the "midi chlorian" explanation ( I am betting the new movie tries to forget completely about that - and Jar Jar Binks); and of course the un-engaging results of making adventure movies with way too much CGI.

But yes, I am relatively keen to see the new movie, although I think my expectations are realistically lower than those of many.   (I am not convinced that JJ Abrams is that good a director - but everyone's so relieved it's not George, it may hardly matter.)

Anyhow, I was thinking this morning:  what things would really disappoint me in the new film?  Here are a few ideas:

*  if it ends with an X Wing attack on a new and deadly space based weapon, I'll scream.  That's what made Return of the Jedi a dull re-write of the first film:  it must not happen again.

* any mention of midi chlorians (see above);

* a CG  army of Yoda clones (although I would be slightly amused if some sort of long lost loser son of his turned up and had to learn the way of the Force from aging Luke - as long as the son is a puppet, not pixels);

*  a set of Chewbacca pups could be funny too, as long as they make a brief appearance only;

*  no ewoks, please.

The shrill cries of denialism failing

Seems to me that the climate change denialism movement is getting rather shrill and hysterical.

They are, after all, having an embarrassing failure of a time in attempting to counter the negotiations in Paris.  What do they expect if the likes of loon faced conspiracist Monckton is one of their stars:

"I'm quite sure that without Turnbull and his own faction, the UN would have found it harder [to topple Mr Abbott]," he said. "But I think it's also naive to assume that [Mr Turnbull] has not been in contact with the UN and that they have not provided him with whatever assistance he required to achieve his objective.

"I talked to [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon a few months ago. They know perfectly well that the climate is just a side issue; it's an excuse, a pretext. It's pseudo-moral cover to give the UN a form of supra-national, indeed global, governing power from which there will be no escape."

It seems that, in an odd turn, the Heartland Institute decided to go to Paris primarily to just talk to each other. Strange. 

Someone paid Alan Moran to go to Paris too - since he apparently no longer works at the IPA, perhaps it's Gina paying for him personally?   (Or some coal company or other, I expect.)  Anyway, his reports back are full of his complaints about climate change "factoids", which is pretty funny if he thinks people don't  recognise him as a routine deployer of denialism factoids.   Are his reports appearing in the Murdoch press, or just at denier central (aka "Catallaxy Files")?   Anyway, seems to me he's getting no traction with anyone important;  I don't really know why he's there.

And Andrew Bolt is having a hissy fit over Waleed Aly calling him out over using just the RSS satellite record to "prove" global warming is still paused.    Does Bolt read enough to realise that there is an excellent chance that the satellite graphs are about to turn against him?   Because that could explain his shrill tone in that piece.

I don't even think that Ted Cruz's calling Mark Steyn to give evidence at his repetitious Congressional committee denial-a-palooza has worked out well.    Is this what the denial movement is reduced to - relying on testimony from experts on Broadway and popular music of the 20th century?  Because, you know, the actual scientist who is on the side of the 97% of other climate scientists pretty much wiped the floor at the hearing:

After Senator Cruz pushed Titley to answer a question about the satellite records, which he claimed “the global warming alarmists don’t want to talk about,” Titley let loose. “Let’s talk about the satellite measurements,” Titley said. “Let’s talk about orbital decay. Let’s talk about overlapping satellite records. Let’s talk about stratospheric temperature contamination. I think Dr. Christy and Dr. [Roy] Spencer, when they’ve put this out, they have been wrong, I think, at least four consecutive times. Each time the data record has had to be adjusted upward. There have been several sign errors. So, with all due respect, sir, I don’t know which data, exactly, your staff has, whether it’s the first or second or third or fourth correction to Dr. Christy’s data. We used to have a negative trend, and then we had no trend, and now we begrudgingly have an upward trend.”

As someone writes, Cruz, Steyn and other denialists are trying to claim they are "victims" now.  This tactic has been around for a while, but perhaps its exacerbated by the sense coming from watching Paris that they really are sidelined and being ignored by the serious people in the world.

Things to post about

There's actually quite a lot I would like to post about:   the awfulness of Donald Trump and the gutlessness of the Republican Party (he'll be dumped, eventually - I can't really see any other outcome);  the ridiculousness and lack of insight on the part of Tony Abbott (he is Kevin Rudd circa 2010 - but with the addition of testosterone, unpopularity with the Australian public, and fewer brain cells);  the outright smug ignorance of Ted Cruz on climate change;  but I am rather busy.

So instead, I will just post this trailer for Steven Spielberg's next film.  I am presumably not in the prime demographic for this type of film, but the trailer is extremely pleasing, as it highlights everything that's fantastic  about a good Spielberg film:   the lush and enveloping John Williams score (so sorely missed in Bridge of Spies); beautiful cinematography; the use of suspense, even in comedy or lighter movies; graceful and engaging camera movement; pleasing composition of shots; good acting; and story material with themes that are never degrading or violent for its own sake.   Can you tell I like him?: