A nervous stop

Shinkansen makes emergency stop in Hokkaido's subsea tunnel | The Japan Times

I see that the underground tunnel that runs between the islands of Hokkaido and Honshu has been opened for decades (since 1988), but the Shinkansen service using it is new.

I don't know:  being in a tunnel 54 km long and under the ocean in that earthquake prone part of the world - it would certainly make me nervous to undergo an emergency stop.

Update:  the Wikipedia entry on the tunnel explains that it is well below the ocean floor - about 100 m or so.   But with the massive shift in the ocean bed during that last earthquake, it may not get wet, but I really wonder if it would withstand the worst.

Also interesting to read that 34 people died in its construction.

If I ruled the world...

....there would be an immediate and permanent ban on "relationship" "reality" TV shows.   Australian night time television is being absolutely overrun by this woeful category of "entertainment" at the moment, which I strongly suspect is primarily watched by women (and the occasional boyfriend or young husband trying to feign interest.) 

And while I'm at it:  the producers of Gogglebox would be jailed, and anyone who had agreed to be part of the show deported.

You know it makes sense...

In Catallaxy watch

I am amused to note how, presumably under the onslaught of Steven Kates's frequent endorsements of (far from libertarian) Donald Trump, the subtitle of Catallaxy has removed all reference to libertarianism and is now merely "Diverse and Independent Media is here".  Poor Sinclair has well and truly lost all control of the place, with the great majority of commenters continually deriding his endorsement of Malcolm Turnbull.  The conservative Boltians (well, when they aren't criticising Bolt for being too soft on the gays) have well and truly taken over.  The only meeting of minds is when SD makes a comment that is at the intersection of libertarianism and nutty conservatism, such as deriding Australian gun control,  tobacco plain packaging, or sex education (of any kind, apparently.)

It would be incredible if it maintains any political influence at all.   But I guess until the Coalition is purged of its ratbag Right elements, it might...

Update:   oh, I see that the change in the subtitle is meant to be a mocking joke about Fairfax.  I don't know that anyone who reads the site got it, though.

The WSJ does not talk for all of business?

Fox Business Pushes 3 Minimum Wage Myths In Just 90 Seconds | Blog | Media Matters for America

I was pleasantly surprised to read this:

Right-wing media have repeatedly pushed the myth that businesses are opposed to raising the minimum wage while spreading debunked claims  that raising the minimum wage leads to job losses. Contrary to Fox Business' claims that business oppose raising the minimum wage, The Washington Post reported on April 4 that a leaked poll conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz found "80 percent of respondents [business executives] said they supported raising their state's minimum wage, while only eight percent opposed it." The advocacy organization Small Business Majority found that 60 percent of small-business owners supported raising the minimum wage to at least $12 per hour.

Ant attack

Folklore has it that a surge in ants coming into a house is a sign of rain.   If that's right, and our house is a fair indicator of what in store for Brisbane, I should have been expecting a deluge of Biblical proportions for the last 3 months, at least.

We've had an extraordinarily persistent attempt at permanent settlement inside our house by slow moving, small black ants recently.   They've also seemingly taken a permanent interest in a couple of citrus trees, which is a pest because of the disease they bring with them to the fruit.  (Well, think they farm them, don't they?)

Now, they're even staging a serious attack on my work office (which is not at home) desk.   I rarely eat at this desk - I don't know what they hope for.

I'm off to get a can of spray...

Dark matter experimental mystery

Controversial dark-matter claim faces ultimate test : Nature News & Comment

Good article here about some experimental results which may - or may not - have already found dark matter.

Here's part of it:

Scientists have substantial evidence that dark matter exists and is at least five times as abundant as ordinary matter. But its nature remains a mystery. The leading hypothesis is that at least some of its mass is composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which on Earth should occasionally bump into an atomic nucleus.

DAMA’s sodium iodide crystals should produce a flash of light if this happens in the detector. And although natural radioactivity also produces such flashes, DAMA’s claim to have detected WIMPs, first made in 1998, rests on the fact that the number of flashes produced per day has varied with the seasons.

This, they say, is exactly whatis expected if the signal is produced by WIMPs that rain down on Earth as the Solar System moves through the Milky Way’s dark-matter halo². In this scenario, the number of particles crossing Earth should peak when the planet’s orbital motion lines up with that of the Sun, in early June, and should hit a low when its motion works against the Sun’s, in early December.

There is one big problem. “If it’s really dark matter, many other experiments should have seen it
already,” says Thomas Schwetz-Mangold, a theoretical physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany — and none has. But at the same time, all attempts to find weaknesses in the DAMA experiment, such as environmental effects that the researchers had not taken into
account, have failed. “The modulation signal is there,” says Kaixuan Ni at the University of California, San Diego, who works on a dark-matter experiment called XENON1T. “But how to interpret that signal — whether it’s from dark matter or something else — is not clear.”

The key to working this out is a number of other detectors that are about to go on line - one in Australia, too, apparently, "t the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory, which is being built in a gold mine in Victoria, Australia."

Gee.  Hope that survives the science unfriendly Coalition government.*

If these experiments do confirm dark matter as WIMPS, I reckon this will be a more momentous discovery than the detection of gravity waves.  I still think that the excitement about that was a tad overblown...

* Updated:  I see that, while being skeptical of global warming, the last Abbott budget at least funded this research.  

Movie biz talk

It seems to me that Disney is probably in for a great year with its movies, both critically and financially.

Item 1:  Zootopia (which I haven't seen yet) has already made $800 million internationally (with $231 million of that from China!)   This movie seemed to come with not much publicity build up, but I guess its uniformly strong reviews (except from the Nutty Economist - now there's a movie title for you - Steve Kates) means there has also been strong word of mouth and it's just taken off.

Item 2:  to my surprise, as I wasn't very impressed with any trailer I saw, and the source material also holds no interest,The Jungle Book is also getting strong reviews.   Not sure that I would see it, but presumably it will make money.

Item 3:  a new trailer for The BFG is out and gaining a lot of attention (deservedly - it does look like a very visually pleasing film).  Spielberg doesn't always have great outcomes with kids films (see Hook, which was barely passable), but I reckon everyone will be getting a very good feeling about this one.

[And for the adults reading who want to watch something from overseas, I will remind them to check out the extensive list of movies that SBS's on line service seems to make permanently available.   The quality of their free streaming video always seems good to me on mere ADSL; why can't the ABC on line service meet the same standards?  I watched a Dutch WW2 movie last weekend on the SBS service - Winter in Wartime - and it's pretty good.   The eccentric Big Man Japan, on the other hand - not so great, despite the rottentomato reviews.]

The Northern Hemisphere weather see-saw

Record Cold Temperatures Sweep Into Northeast; Another Arctic Blast on the Way (FORECAST) | The Weather Channel

I see that the Arctic jet stream has taken one of its southern wanders over North America leading to some record April cold temperatures.  This after the Arctic was exceptionally warm recently.

Seems a fair chance of a connection, I would guess.

Sloanian economics

Now, I'll admit I know next to nothing about the Australian trucking industry, but I would have thought it obvious that there is a distinct possibility that the large supermarket chains (amongst other corporate customers) could easily squeeze down remuneration for owner drivers to the point that they have the incentive to work dangerous hours just to make ends meet.

Labor's response was to set up an industry specific remuneration tribunal that has come up with something like an award which sees owner drivers get higher remuneration.  According to the government, (and even at least some owner driver bodies*) this is causing anguish amongst owner drivers, who say they won't get work at those rates.  (And who might be telling them that, I wonder?   Their corporate customers, no doubt.)

Riding into the midst of this is Judith Sloan, whose column in the Australian this morning is worth parsing::

But here’s the rub: the highly paid members of the RSRT contracted out the work of determining these rates to KPMG, which used a one-size-fits-all model to work out the hourly rate based on an assumption of annual hours.

But as this hired-gun outfit notes: “The annual hours worked assumption is used to convert annual fixed cost estimates into an hourly payment. Note, the use of this assumption means if a road transport contractor driver works more hours than assumed, they will be overcompensated for fixed costs incurred. Conversely, if the driver works fewer hours than assumed, they will be under-compensated for fixed costs.”

First:  I like the way KPMG becomes a "hired gun" when it comes to making a determination she doesn't like.   I wouldn't mind betting she's more sympathetic to their findings when they've commissioned by someone she's politically on side with.

Second:  does the dismissal of a "one size fits all" approach seems mean she's arguing for remuneration to more accurately reflect worker's needs?  I sure hope so, because that would indicate the rich can afford to have their tax rate increased.  Who knew Judith would be philosophically onside with John Quiggin on that point?

Third, and here's the funniest bit, from her next paragraph:

In other words, KPMG is not making any claim that minimum hourly payments will influence hours and, by inference, road safety. Indeed, there is an argument that if owner-drivers can get higher payments by dint of regulation, they may actually drive longer hours to make more money. (Economics 101: income and substitution effects.)  

Obviously, then, you just can't trust people who might be motivated to make more money than they need to cover their minimum needs.  Seems to me that this suggests companies should cap director remunerations they're prepared to offer:  pay too much and you just attract the greedy and untalented. I didn't realise that was her position.

This seems to be from the Sloanian "heads I win, tails you lose" school of minimal restraint, free market economics.  Minimum wages that no person could survive on (as per the US):  they're great for workers, who should just appreciate that they have a job.  Pay them too much and there'll be businesses sacking workers all over the place.  Pay owner drivers enough that they don't have to work dangerous hours to merely pay their truck loan:  but they'll get greedy.  Can't have that.

It's obvious (but I don't bother calling it Economics 101) that big businesses can use private contractors to screw down costs way beyond what is reasonable - we see it in the courier business too, and (in a similar vein) we get entire business models more or less based on it (Google "7-11 Franchises".)  Whether this approach is the only way to tackle that may be a moot point, but I'm not convinced that this Labor approach is entirely wrong because "unions!"

Having said that,  I guess I have to allow the possibility that the remuneration rates KPMG came up with are unrealistic - but if the corporate customers won't use owner drivers any more because they can do it more cheaply, I would hope that at least some of the owner drivers could off load their truck and get regular employment as a paid employee drivers (and dob in their boss if they are forced to drive for dangerous hours.)

In any event, I still find the arguments put up by Sloan to be self serving and hypocritical.

* although I note that the union guy on the radio this morning said they represent (I think) 20,000 owner drivers.  Seems a lot, and I assume many of them are on side with the union position on this.

Warm water summer

This summer's sea temperatures were the hottest on record for Australia: here’s why

Seems no one's entirely sure what this may mean for the weather for the next year.  (Usually means wetter weather, but the North did just have a weak Monsoon season, apparently.)   It seems unusual because the high water temperatures were behind the Brisbane (and Australian) widespread floods of 2011, but that was a La Nina year.   Anyway, luckily, Brisbane doesn't flood in winter.

An important, overlooked role of the Moon in evolution?

The Moon may play a major role in maintaining Earth's magnetic field -- ScienceDaily

The article doesn't talk about this aspect of the research, but, presumably life could have evolved very differently if there was no Moon, and the Earth's magnetic field had dwindled faster than it has.

Perhaps this is also reason to be pessimist about advance life on other planets?

People were more suspicious than I realised

I spend a very small amount of time thinking about comic book superheroes, especially on the silly matter of how "gay" the relationship between Batman and Robin seemed to be;  but I admit that there is a rather amusing article at Slate all about this particular topic.

I used to assume that it was only through our present sensibilities, and obsessions with gay identity, that people would be seeing any gay "subtext" to the Batman and Robin relationship.  So, sure, by the 1970's when gay rights were starting to become a mainstream issue people were probably sniggering about it, but back in the 1950's?    I wouldn't have thought so.

But I was very wrong.

In particular, the guy behind the comic books moral panic of the 50's (an episode that I was really only made aware of from watching the best of the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis movies , "Artists and Models") was specifically offended by it:

People noticed. One person, in particular: Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist convinced that comic books were directly responsible for the scourge of juvenile delinquency, led a nationwide anti-comics crusade that proved hugely effective. He published his “research” (read: testimonials from his juvenile psychiatric patients strung together with anti-comics rhetoric) in a book called Seduction of the Innocent in the spring of 1954, just as he testified before Sen. Estes Kefauver’s Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

Wertham devoted a scant four pages of his book to Batman and Robin; he had bigger fish to fry, attacking the luridly violent, sexist, and racist imagery found in many crime comics of the day. (About which: Dude had a point.) He did call Superman out as a fascist, and he noted that Wonder Woman’s whole shtick seemed unapologetically Sapphic. When it came to the Dynamic Duo, he seemed to relish drawing the reader’s attention to Wayne Manor’s “beautiful flowers in large vases” and the fact that Bruce was given to swanning about the estate in a dressing gown.

“It is like a wish-dream,” he famously wrote, “of two homosexuals living together.”

 Dr Wertham strikes me as the Cory Bernardi of his day, then!

Into the 60's, and the writers were more aware of the issue than ever:

The shadow of Wertham lingered long into the ’60s, and Batman editors resolved to do what they could to dispel it, even if doing so came with a body count: When asked why Alfred the butler was killed off—briefly—in 1964 to be replaced by the dithering Aunt Harriet, editor Julius Schwartz averred, “There was a lot of discussion in those days about three males living in Wayne Manor.”

 The writer makes it clear that he doesn't think the "gay subtext" readings is a particularly valid exercise:

This is the issue with gay readings. Any given bond between males can be homosocial without being homoerotic, and even the most explicitly homoerotic bond can exist without ever rubbing up against homosexual desire. To willfully and sneeringly misinterpret what was clearly intended as a familial connection as a romantic one—as Wertham did in 1954 and as so many Tumblr feeds do today— seems ungenerous at best and snide at worst, no?

And that seems right to me, too.  He's also right about the "camp yet [perhaps oddly, in retrospect] not gay" reading of the 60's TV show:

 Although the show became inextricably associated with the notion of camp, its pop-art sensibility never came off as particularly gay despite the presence of guest villains played by such fierce divas as Tallulah Bankhead and Liberace.

So, there you go.  The "gay subtext in comics" issue has been around a long time, then.

It also presents a challenge.  I had been thinking of making a joke post about what it could possibly take to make Jason Soon dislike a Batman/Superman story, given that he appears to be amongst the rather small proportion of viewers of the current movie who would call it "fantastic".   Turning it into a superhero version of Brokeback Mountain?  (And don't ask what happens when Lois meets Wonder Woman, either.)

But, as I say, these gay worries about the superheros are old news now.

No, I think it may take something more dire.  Let me try:  Batman finally gets the grief management therapy he's so badly needed for years.  Newly invigorated with a love for all of life, and while taking the Batmobile on a run to have a picnic in the country, he accidentally runs over a chicken which he discovers has escaped from a cruelly overpopulated farm run by a mad, bald ex-politician who wears a cat for a toupee.  Batman commits his future energies into releasing farm animals into the wild under cover of dark.  Meanwhile, Superman makes a mistake and discovers that a bound man at an S&M club (revealed as Alfred) is not actually wanting rescue.  Embarrassed, Alfred scams Superman into blowing up a truck trailer full of chickens which Batman was actually driving towards asylum in Canada.   CGI mayhem follows....

The article with a heading that possibly has never been said before...

BBC - Future - Why we need a better way to measure farts

Actually, it's interesting, but sadly doesn't have a photo of the prototype internal sniffer that may be swallowed by unfortunate patients in future.

Don't tell your calculator about this surprising result - it'll get depressed

How many digits of pi do we really need? Eh, not that many, says NASA. - Vox

Marc Rayman, the director and chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, recently made this clear  in response to a question on Facebook. NASA, he explained, certainly doesn't need trillions of digits for itscalculations. In fact, they get by with using just fifteen — 3.141592653589793. It's not perfect, but it's close enough:

The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles.

We don't need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by
1.5 inches.

Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps  less than the length of your little finger.

Going further, if you used 40 digits of pi, Rayman says, you could calculate the circumference of the entire visible universe — an area with the radius of about 46 billion light years — "to an
accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom." That'll do!

Deserves to be a scandal

I like to spend my one free article a week from the Saturday Paper on Richard Ackland's Gadfly column, in large part because I can always rely on him to pass on with high sarcasm and contempt any gossip about "Freedom Boy" (Tim Wilson).

But really today, while the Boy gets a mention, the best part is about the robotic Abetz, and it  sounds like this deserves to be a scandal:

The story had been around Tassie for a while, but it is nice that others can now share it. In 2000 Abetz paid $100,000 for almost four hectares of government land adjacent to his weatherboard house in the Hobart suburb of Kingston. Five years later the land was rezoned from residential to business and civic. Four months after that, Otto sold both his house block and the rezoned land to a property developer named Rockefeller for nearly $2 million. Rockefeller paid $400,000 for the large block of vacant land and for the Abetz house and land of about half a hectare, $1.5 million – more than five times the government valuation. In other words, Otto avoided a lot of capital gains tax which would have been payable on the unoccupied land, but was exempt on the family home. Otto insists that his old house, which has been demolished, had more road frontage, so the deal was entirely kosher. Tasmanian Times columnist John Hawkins, who has studied the transaction in searing detail, was onto him: “Erich’s throwaway line on road frontage as being the key to the increase in value of the house block and the decrease in value of the internal block is complete and absolute rubbish. The adjoining block – also with a house and with virtually the same street frontage to the Channel Highway – sold for a million dollars less than that owned by Uncle Erich, to the same purchaser at the same time. Erich, it was a way to transfer the profit on the ten acres to your home in order to avoid payment of capital gains tax. You know it, I know it, in fact we all know it. The question now is, has the tax man laid off collecting the tax as a result of your former exalted position? “If I am wrong sue me and we can investigate the matter in more detail.”

Friday freaky fysics

Is the black hole at our galaxy’s centre a quantum computer? | Aeon Essays

Uh-oh, it's not just Hansen

Sea-level projections may be vastly underestimated, say scientists - CSMonitor.com

Long story short:  modelling work on Antarctic ice (and comparisons to previous periods of similar global warmth as we soon expect) indicate that sea level rise over the next century could be closer to the 2 metre mark, rather than the 2 foot mark as was previously favoured.

This should get attention.

And by the way, why do climate change denialists think that history won't repeat?  In the big picture, as I understand it, the question is more "how quickly will we get disastrous-for-our-cities, multi meter sea level rises - one century, or two or three?"  not "will we get disastrous sea level rise".

Maybe some astronomers have too much spare time on their hands...

Laser cloaking device could help us hide from aliens

The two authors of the new study suggest that transits could be masked by controlled laser
emission, with the beam directed at the star where the aliens might live. When the transit takes place, the laser would be switched on to compensate for the dip in light.

According to the authors, emitting a continuous 30 MW laser for about 10 hours, once a year, would be enough to eliminate the transit signal, at least in visible light. The energy needed is comparable to that collected by the International Space Station in a year. A chromatic
cloak, effective at all wavelengths, is more challenging, and would need a large array of tuneable lasers with a total power of 250 MW.

"Alternatively, we could cloak only the atmospheric signatures associated with biological activity, such as oxygen, which is achievable with a peak laser power of just 160 kW per transit. To another civilisation, this should make the Earth appear as if life never took
hold on our world", said Alex.

Yet more States and taxes

As I expected, the public reception of Turnbull's State tax musings seems underwhelming, given that on Sunrise this morning we had the spectacle of both Jeff Kennett and Mark Latham opposing it.   (And David Koch was cynical from the start too.)

The reception to this idea gives good examples of political opportunism, too.  While Labor might claim credit for being the side to recognize (and say openly) that there is both a revenue and a spending issue with Australian governments at the moment, Shorten is more than happy to note as one objection to Turnbull's plan that it probably means "more taxes".   And, of course, on the Coalition side you have the spectacle of the PM and Treasurer seemingly not getting their lines straight. 

As for "middle of the road" economics writers who are for it, I see that Tim Colebatch has joined Martin in basic support.  But he dismisses my "race to the bottom" concern:

Wouldn’t it mean a “race to the bottom” in which states compete to cut tax rates, forcing them to cut services as well?
Only if state governments think they will win more political support from lower taxes than they would lose from lower services. It is no more likely than the opposite fear, that states will keep raising taxes so they can expand services.

That seems a tad naive, given the history noted in Creighton's column yesterday.

But generally, Malcolm Turnbull remains a bit of a puzzle:   smart, urbane, compassionate, says all the right things before getting the top job;   but then as a leader it seems his political skills go all wonky 

Nasty virus news

So, scientists are pretty certain that the zika virus does cause microcephaly.    And even the Wall Street Journal is reporting about how the range of the mosquito that carries it can extend much further into America than previously thought.  (Of course, being the WSJ, they don't mention that scientists have been warning for years of the increasing range of this mosquito due to climate change.)  

In other unwelcome virus news, I see that ebola may be causing blindness in survivors of the disease.  Great...