Star hopping

Alien life could thrive in ancient star clusters : Nature News & Comment

Until now, scientists have largely discounted the idea of finding
extraterrestrial civilizations in globular clusters, which each contain
thousands to millions of stars. Out of the thousands of known extrasolar planets,
only one has been found in such a cluster, and many astronomers think
that the gravitational interactions among tightly packed stars would
have long ago hurled any accompanying planets into deep space.

But the proximity of all those stars may actually be an advantage for
supporting life, says Rosanne Di Stefano, a theoretical astrophysicist
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Lots of closely packed stars could also mean lots of
planetary systems within easy travelling distance. “If there is an
advanced society in an environment like that, it could set up outposts
relatively easily, because we’re dealing with distances that are so much
shorter,” she says.

With such networking, civilizations in a globular cluster might endure
for billions of years, and thus be around for humans to communicate with
today or in the future.

Teargate

Blog: Obama's fake tears?

The stupid thing is, after reading this latest evidence of, what? some sort of deranging brain damage afflicting the Right of American politics?, I actually re-watched the video to see if some of the "analysis" had the details right.  They don't.  (Surprise, hey?)

Krugman forgets to mention light bulbs - energy saving light bulbs - drives them nuts

Deadly Snits - The New York Times

Market breaks, and the coming crisis (allegedly)

Interesting bit of history here on the market of built in stock market trading breaks.

I see that Soros is going on about a potential financial crisis again, even though it would seem that it would not be based on anything too closely resembling what happened in 2008.  I get the feeling Soros is crying "crisis" too often now.   How old is he?  85?

I'm sorry, but this is pretty much the age at which my rule of thumb about being able to safely ignore the warnings of older men kicks in. Look at Rupert Murdoch's (84) peculiar recent tweet:

Mind you, this rule can be subject to modifications:   if libertarian, subtract at least 45 years, for example. 

Good point

Why the opioid epidemic is making a libertarian rethink drug legalization - Vox

Haven't I made the same point last year?  Yes; yes I have.

See, sometimes even a libertarian moves closer to my (always reasonable) opinion!

Rand doesn't do "chat" well

Gee.  Rand Paul has appeared on Colbert, and doesn't he come across (for the most part) as uncomfortable and awkward in that format?   I don't know that any of his attempts at humour work, although (as usual) Colbert has some good moments.

However, Rand's point about the lack of knowledge and gravitas on the part of Trump on minor matters such as, you know, potentially being in charge of the world's second largest thermonuclear stockpile, is well made.  

And it's also interesting to note that it appears Paul thinks it is trivialising him if interviewers always  want to talk to him about marijuana.  He appears genuinely annoyed that the topic has been broached, apparently breaking a pre-appearance deal.

I also learn that I am not the only person who think his hair is odd.

Watch the whole thing:

At last, the critics are catching up with me

While still getting not so bad aggregate scores on the likes of Metacritic, I have read enough mainstream critics' poor reviews of Tarantino's Hateful Eight to consider that they are (finally) really starting to turn against him and his oeuvre.   For example, Anthony Lane ends on this note:

Above all, we get confirmation of the director’s preëminent perversity: patient and elaborate in his racking up of tension, he knows only one way to resolve it, and that is through carnage, displayed in unmerciful detail.To be fair, the more blood is spilled, the more some people lap it up; the audience at my screening howled with glee as Daisy’s face was showered with the contents of someone else’s head. Chacun à son goût. By the end of “The Hateful Eight,” its status as a tale of mystery and its deference to classic Westerns have all but disappeared, worn down by the grind of its sadistic vision. That is the Tarantino deal: by blowing out folks’ brains, he wants to blow our minds.

David Edelstein:

You wonder what he has up his sleeve in The Hateful Eight, but gorgeous as that sleeve might be, what’s up it is crap. The movie is a lot of gore over a lot of nothing.

Dana Stevens in Slate:

What is Quentin Tarantino’s game these days? Who is he making movies for? Is it only my fun-hating prudishness that makes me regard this historical-revenge-fantasy bender he’s been on since Inglourious Basterds as ineffably evil?

Cool design, even if ridiculously risky.

Chinese drone maker unveils human-carrying drone

Just in case you needed reminding..

here's Sabine Hossenfelder (sounding very serious and, well, very German) explaining the correct answer to whether light is a particle or a wave:



Readers might also be interested in her speculating on how a lightsaber might work.  Or should that be "lightsabre"?

Colbert too smart for the times

Stephen Colbert is fantastically talented at comedy acting: energetic, sharp as a tack, probably the only chat show host in the history of television who also happens to be serious enough about religion to teach Sunday School at his Catholic Church, and he has a crack team of writers behind him.

He's also moderately liberal, which means a large slab of the American public (the part that thinks Obama really is a Muslim, and that Trump is the best thing to happen to politics) cannot stand him.

So it doesn't really surprise me that after a strong start, his chat show is now running third in the ratings.

But get this:  the lightweight, dumb comedy of Jimmy Fallon is number one.  I don't find Fallon offensive, but I fail to see that he has any great talent; and I just don't think his writers come up with great lines.  He is, at least, slightly hip with da kids in a way the daggy Jay Leno never was.  (I mean, who could believe that he routinely out-rated David Letterman, even when DL was at his peak.)

Yes, it's not just Colbert:  late night America doesn't tend to like its chat show hosts to be too smart.  But especially at this extremely peculiar time of distressing, spreading stupidity amongst much of the American public, Colbert was always going to have a hard time being the ratings leader.

So that's all by way of preamble to a couple of recent clips from his show that I found amusing:



 

Peter Martin on how the net didn't quite change things as expected

Why the blockbuster is far from dead

I liked this column from Peter Martin.

On the subject to the net and movies, as I have written before, I also find it curious that the change to digital projection, and therefore digital distribution, of movies has not seemed to have had the cost cutting benefits to movie making that would have seemed to be a natural consequence.  (Or maybe it has, but just other movie making costs have increased anyway to "compensate".)   

By way of comparison

1.  David Leyonhjelm, in 2016, when it is a matter of female journalists being made to feel uncomfortable at work:

2.  David Leyonhjelm, in 2014, when the issue was how he felt about John Howard's gun laws:

"All the people at [Sale that day] were the same as me," Leyonhjelm tells me, his light-blue eyes blazing. "Everyone of those people in that audience hated [Howard's] guts. Every one of them would have agreed he deserved to be shot. But not one of them would have shot him. Not one." He found it offensive, he adds, that Howard "genuinely thought he couldn't tell the difference between people who use guns for criminal purposes, and people like me".

Why around 3 degrees is still likely

I see that in the pre-Christmas rush, I overlooked the significance of a recent paper that showed why it was very likely that the "observational constraint" based studies (like the work of Nic Lewis) that had recently been suggesting that climate sensitivity was as low as 1.3 or 1.5 degrees are biased too low.

The explanation is at two posts at Real Climate. 

Conservatives and solar subsidies

As you might suspect, I quite liked this article in the New York Times:  The Conservative Case for Solar Subsidies.  

It's particularly worth following the link therein to the report from the Congressional Research Service that tallies up the government R&D funding for oil, gas and nuclear over the years. 

I'm also presuming that Judith Sloan, if she could tear herself away from reading the Wall Street Journal over her tea and scones, would splutter while reading this:

And there’s nothing in free-market economic theory that precludes government support. Markets tend to underproduce what economists call positive externalities — that is, the broad social benefits, like a cleaner environment, that aren’t captured on a company’s balance sheet.

Solar panels, and the companies that make them, are replete with such benefits: They eliminate redundant power plants that otherwise lie idle, empower consumer choice and have fewer negative consequences than most other forms of energy. But markets don’t always reflect these, which is why it makes sense for subsidies to enter the picture.

The kerfuffle over the Solyndra collapse aside, many conservatives already agree, and have for years. When I was at the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, we believed that an across-the-board energy policy was by far the best approach — and that included solar. From both a market and an environmental point of view, supporting the solar industry should make sense, no matter which side of the aisle you come from.

America's paranoid, nutty militia

Two pieces about the nut based militia movements of America - one at Vox, looking at their history since the 1990's (and pointing out how they re-emerged when it appeared that a black man may become President.  What a co-incidence, hey?)   The other is from LGF, and you should watch the video of one of the guys now in Oregon and his recreational interest in shooting arrows into effigies of politicians he considers "traitors".  Not that he's advocating violence or anything, although he does share with us that he'd like to line up and shoot them all in the back of the head. 

The only support in Australia that I've seen for the armed nutters like him currently holed up in the Oregon Wildlife Refuge building:  from some in the threads of (you guessed it) Catallaxy Files, which should just be renamed Right Wing Ratbag Central and be done with.  (Trump's pretty popular there too because - Muslims.)

Yay for free will

It indeed seems that those who interpreted the original Libet experiments as having effectively rendered all humans (and animals) into deterministically driven, quasi automatons were doing some unwarranted extrapolation.   (The Wiki article on Libet says that he himself did not discount the "veto" role of consciousness.)  But here's the latest experiment:

Using state-of-the-art measurement techniques, the researchers tested whether people are able to stop planned movements once the readiness potential for a movement has been triggered.

"The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that further decision-making is automatic and not under conscious control, or whether the person can still cancel the decision, i.e. use a 'veto'," explains Prof. Haynes. As part of this study, researchers asked study participants to enter into a 'duel' with a computer, and then monitored their brain waves throughout the duration of the game using electroencephalography (EEG). A specially-trained computer was then tasked with using these EEG data to predict when a subject would move, the aim being to out-maneuver the player. This was achieved by manipulating the game in favor of the computer as soon as brain wave measurements indicated that the player was about to move.

If subjects are able to evade being predicted based on their own brain processes this would be evidence that control over their actions can be retained for much longer than previously thought, which is exactly what the researchers were able to demonstrate. "A person's decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement," says Prof. Haynes. "Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought. However, there is a 'point of no return' in the decision-making process, after which cancellation of movement is no longer possible." Further studies are planned in which the researchers will investigate more complex decision-making

The questionable utility of "born this way"

A bit of an interesting take on the matter of sexuality and being "born this way" in this research:

Patrick Grzanka and Joe Miles, both UT assistant professors of psychology, recently published a study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology challenging the notion that the belief that people are born with their sexual orientation—a belief that has proliferated in the past 20 to 30 years, particularly among social and biological scientists—is the key to improving attitudes toward lesbian, gay and bisexual people....

For the study, Grzanka, Miles and co-author Katharine Zeiders of the University of Missouri surveyed two groups of college students. They used their previously developed sexual orientation beliefs scale, which attempts to capture a wide variety of beliefs such as the idea that sexual minorities are fundamentally different from straight people or that sexuality is based in biology. Most respondents believed sexual orientation is inborn and unchangeable, but it's what else they believed about sexual orientation that distinguishes them.

For example, the researchers looked more closely at respondents who had negative attitudes about gay men. Even among those who believed gay men are "born that way," those who also believed gay men are "all the same and act the same way" were more likely to hold prejudicial attitudes toward gay men, Grzanka said.

"We suggest that this demonstrates the limited capacity of 'born this way' arguments to reduce homophobia," he said.

Kind of makes sense.  And, perhaps counterintuitively in that "born this way and this is who I am" has helped in some legal fights, suggests that not insisting that their sexual orientation defines them as a person could be helpful in its own way.

Important science news of 2015

I have to thank Jason Soon for the link to this long, long list of (mostly) famous scientists and commentators talking at Edge about the big science stories of 2015.

Unfortunately, the format makes reading it a bit of a slog, so I'll just link to the ones that I think are particularly interesting:

1.   Frank Tipler:   I haven't read anything from him for a good few years, I reckon.  I had assumed he had retired, and perhaps he has; but here he is, still holding out in his somewhat peculiar reasoning style on the matter of what problems associated with black holes would be solved if the universe will stop expanding and head back into a Big Crunch (an essential part of his long standing "Omega Point" theory, which few people pay attention to anymore ever since it appeared the expansion of the universe is accelerating.)    Frank has always had trouble convincing other physicists he was onto something; probably because he always seems to be working backwards from the end result he wants, rather than the more routine way of dealing with evidence.   But it is true, some physicists have argued that the poorly understood dark energy might do a switch around in future.  (I'm sure I've posted to some arxiv papers along those lines, years ago, for those who can search this blog successfully.)   It's hard to know who's right until the nature of dark energy is understood, I guess....

2.  Jim Holt:  a good science writer whose books I have always intended to buy but keep forgetting to.   Here's he's writing about the somewhat amusing matter of a Japanese mathematician who thinks he has come up with a profound proof of something important, but hardly any other mathematician in the world can work out whether he really has, or not.  Lectures on the topic apparently mystify most of the mathematician audiences.  (I posted about this before, but it's such an odd and amusing story it's worth noting again.)

3.  Richard Muller:   the grandstanding physicist who said he was skeptical about global warming, but then did his own BEST re-analysis of temperature records and decided climate scientists were right after all, is here again hedging a bit by not saying that the risk of AGW is the reason why coal burning has to stop, but rather arguing that the millions of Chinese and Indians already dying from air pollution gives an immediate incentive to move to gas or nuclear.   I think he sounds unduly "down" on renewables, but the figures he cites for the health effects of current pollution are startling, if accurate.

4.  Joel Gold:  never heard of this psychiatrist before, but he talks here about how Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (which I knew was considered good for mood disorders and depression) actually works rather well for psychosis too.   That's a counterintuitive idea, and the first I have heard of it, but very interesting.

5.  Michael McCullough:  again, someone I haven't heard of, and talking of social research I haven't much heard of.  Apparently, religion is mostly "below the belt".   I'm not entirely convinced, but its worth more reading, I guess.

In other articles, lots of things I have written about over recent years get a mention:  fecal transplants (yay), gut microbiome (poo related again); but yes, the single weirdest entry in the post is the one by a South Korean guy fancifully suggesting an economy based on powdered poo.

Perhaps he trips out after eating kimchi?

Not abominable at all

Watched via Stan last night the one off Sherlock special episode The Abominable Bride, and, as much as I intensely dislike Steven Moffat's work on Doctor Who, I have to say I thought it was pretty terrific.

The episode is copping much criticism, and I don't really understand why.  Even a significant proportion of commenters at The Guardian (home for all Moffat fanboys and girls) had trouble with it, yet I think part of the problem may be that some did not think hard enough about what the episode was doing.   (Which is a little odd, because some of the criticism is along the lines that it was being "too clever by half".)   Maybe it is just attracting  too much over-analysis:  can't people simply enjoy it for its fast and witty dialogue, effective spooky scenes, and fine direction?  Or - another theory - it rated very highly in England (unlike the badly declining Dr Who ratings) and some might have been viewing the show for the first time, in which case, yes, it would make little sense.

But if you are going to go the "analyse it to bits" route, I think one person at The Guardian probably had it right.  I'll link to his or her post once I can find it again!

First post

And a Happy New Year to all.  Except anyone in ISIS.  Speaking of which, does anyone really have a good idea what the final outcome of the current diplomatic spat between Iran and Saudi Arabia will be?  From the point of view of the West, I suppose that any intensification of the centuries old dispute between branches of Islam that involves keeping it within the boundaries of a few countries in the Middle East is not entirely a bad thing, working on the principle that while they're busy killing each other over there, they're not plotting new ways to kill the innocent in our countries.  But it is, of course, even better if no one is killing anyone anywhere, especially over religion.

I've been on another beach holiday to our favourite seaside area.  More about that later. 

In the meantime, I didn't mind this article about the idea that all stories are the same.   (Even if you have heard this discussed before, and you probably have, you should read it for the somewhat startling quote by director Guillermo Del Toro.)

Lately I've been feeling mildly interested in trying to be creative again.  This is usually prompted by the fact that I can't find science fiction that interests me much anymore, or when I feel that movies are stuck in a bit of a creative rut, even while I enjoy them.   (By the way, Christopher Orr   notes that some critics - including him - have been revising their initial enthusiasm for Force Awakens.)

But, as always, whenever I start vaguely thinking of stories I would like to attempt to write up, my mind drifts back to what other books or movies they resemble.   As the article about stories says, there are a million books out there explaining how to write a novel (or script), but I am not sure that there is any that can stop this defeatist feeling before I even properly start getting ideas down.  Dreams often feel novel, but it is rare that one makes a compelling idea for a lengthy story.

Anyway, sadly, it's off to work...