India is...a bit of a worry

Spotted in Gulf News:

Malayalam actress and fashion designer Poornima Indrajith and award-winning music composer Shaan Rahman, who have been at the forefront of Kerala flood rescue efforts, on Monday slammed haters who were spreading bigotry and hate in the wake of mass destruction.

While the majority of civilians and officials have stepped up to help the rain-ravaged Kerala to return to normalcy, there is a section of people on social media who displayed bigotry by claiming that the South Indian state had invited the floods due to their beef-eating habits.

Another hate-spewing comment was that an Indian deity was showing its fury on the state, when a section of its residents demanded that women be allowed in the temple that housed the idol.

More broadly, from a recent editorial piece from the ANU based  East Asia Forum:

Modern Hindu nationalism is not mere traditionalism, says Arun Swamy. The Hindu nationalists seek not so much to preserve existing social hierarchies in Hindu cultures as they do to rewrite social orders fascistically to the benefit of Hindu populations. The Modi government appears to be actively pursuing ‘history rewriting’ and ‘historic romanticism’ agendas and has appointed what seems to be a historical revision committee to ‘prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth’. Other concerns include Modi’s pick for Uttar Pradesh chief minister, a Hindu priest who has incited violence against Muslims, and legislative developments in BJP-controlled states that presume guilt until proven innocent in cases of cow slaughter and urge the enforcement of archaic laws against cattle slaughter (even in Muslim-majority communities).

‘The Hindu nationalist rhetoric was played down (at least by Modi)’, as Adeney explains, ‘in favour of a development narrative. He put himself forward as a normal man, contrasting his humble origins with the “little princeling” Rahul Gandhi, presumed to be prime minister-designate of the Congress though never officially named as such’. The long-term electoral project of the BJP is rather to showcase right wing majoritarianism as the natural force synonymous with the welfare and development of India — hence perhaps that choice of chief minister in Uttar Pradesh.

Events since 2014 raise the question of whether the BJP is the new dominant party of Indian politics. It has captured a raft of state legislatures, and although it did not manage to win a majority in the recent state election in Karnataka, it did win the largest number of seats.

Mr Potato Head thinks he's PM material?

I am surprised that Dutton made a run for the Prime Ministership.   Surely was too early.   Surely was too presumptuous that any voters actually like him.   (A quick survey in my office confirms - no one does.  There was even little support at Ratbag Central - Catallaxy.)  The Murdoch press has adopted an "anyone but Turnbull" line - Bolt and Blair are so convinced that Malcolm is rotten - rotten I say - that they obviously set aside any concern about how the public really dislike the decade's old Prime Ministerial chocolate wheel selection system that the Federal democracy has become.  Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.

But that 35 Liberals went with Dutton??  As Annabel says:

I'll keep saying it - the Liberals need a split.    It can't stagger on for another decade with climate change denialism poisoning everything.  

What a decent human

As The Guardian writes:

The son of murdered New South Wale police accountant Curtis Cheng has called for an end to political “scapegoating” of Muslims in Australia following last week’s speech by senator Fraser Anning calling for a ban on Muslim immigration.

Alpha Cheng’s father was shot in cold blood by a 15-year-old Muslim boy, Farhard Jabar, outside the NSW police headquarters in Parramatta in 2015. Two others were jailed for planning the attack and supplying the weapon.

But he said that was no reason to victimise a community.

“I am tired of needing to explain to adults that the actions of these individuals cannot be attributed to an entire group of people. If I, of all people, can think this way, then sure as hell our ‘elected’ representatives can think this way too,” Cheng wrote in an opinion piece in Fairfax Media.

How not to legalise marijuana

Both The Atlantic and Vox have articles up talking about marijuana addiction, and explaining the concerns of experts that the method of legalisation of marijuana being followed in most American States is pretty much asking for trouble.  (Basically, just by letting capitalist interests promote and drive the market, and with next to no control over the strength or form of THC sold.)

I think the point made is obviously true.

A historical knowledge gap

Someone on Twitter linked to a 6 month old, very extensive critical article about Ben Shapiro, who I find pretty easy to ignore.   [He has said stupid things about climate change - my rule of thumb means he's unlikely to be reliable on any topic.]

But in the article there was a reference to the very big death toll from the expulsion of German speakers from Eastern Europe in the first couple of years after World War 2.   Here's what it says:

There is only one problem with the precedent cited by Shapiro: it is actually a forgotten historic atrocity, which was characterized by mass rape, torture, and murder, and left at least 400,000 people dead. Germans were interned in concentration camps and endured horrific journeys in which pregnant women froze to death. As Tara Zahra explains in a review of R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War:

This is indeed not a subject I was at all familiar with, and I have had a look at the book review linked to above.  Some extracts:

It was one of many ugly episodes in 1945. On a summer day in Horní Moštenice, a small town in central Czechoslovakia, 265 people, including 120 women and seventy-four children, were dragged from a train, shot in the neck, and buried in a mass grave that had been dug beside the local railway station. It was a common enough scene in Central and Eastern Europe during World War II, when Nazi extermination policies threatened entire ethnic groups. But despite the similarity of means and ends, the massacre in Horní Moštenice was different. For one thing, it occurred on June 18, after the war in Europe had officially ended. Moreover, the perpetrators were Czechoslovak troops, and their victims were Germans who had been a presence in the region for centuries....

After the Nazi defeat, the Volksdeutsche fled or were expelled to the West, and were stripped of their citizenship, homes and property in what R.M. Douglas calls “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Douglas amply demonstrates that these population transfers, which were to be carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner according to the language of the Allies’ 1945 Potsdam Agreement, counted as neither. Instead, he writes, they were nothing less than a “massive state-sponsored carnival of violence, resulting in a death toll that on the most conservative of estimates must have reached six figures.”  .....

The so-called “wild” or spontaneous expulsions in Czechoslovakia began almost immediately after liberation, in May to June of 1945. But there was nothing “wild” about this first wave of what Czech officials referred to as národní ocista (“national cleansing”). These expulsions, which resulted in the removal of up to 2 million Germans from Eastern Europe, were planned and executed by troops, police and militia, under orders from the highest authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the Allies. Eastern European and Allied observers alike remarked on the utter passivity of the victims, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly (most German men had been drafted during the war and either killed or interned in POW camps). But the “wild expulsions” were justified as self-defense on the basis of exaggerated or invented reports of ongoing resistance activity by Nazi “Werewolf” units. One of the most infamous postwar pogroms was sparked by the accidental explosion of an ammunition dump in Ústí nad Labem in northwestern Bohemia in July 1945. Most of the victims of the explosion were themselves German, but local workers, Czechoslovak Army units and Soviet troops wasted no time blaming Werewolf sabotage and taking revenge. Germans were beaten, shot and thrown into the Elbe River; many observers recall a baby carriage being thrown into the river with a baby inside. The massacre resulted in at least 100 deaths.

During the “wild” expulsions, lucky expellees were given a few hours’ notice and taken on foot by force to the closest border with only the clothes on their back. The unlucky were interned in concentration and forced labor camps organized explicitly on the Nazi model. At least 180,000 ethnic Germans were interned in Czechoslovakia as of November 1945; another 170,000 were interned in Yugoslavia. The internees included many women, children and even several thousand German-speaking Jews. In many cases, former Nazi concentration camps and detention centers like Terezín/Theresienstadt were converted overnight into camps for ethnic Germans. At Linzervorstadt, a camp administered by a former Czech internee of Dachau, the motto “Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth” replaced Arbeit macht frei on the camp gates. Inmates were stripped naked and shorn of their hair upon arrival at the camp, forced to run a gantlet while being beaten with rubber truncheons and then, during their stay in the camp, systematically flogged, tortured and made to stand at attention in all-night roll calls. Interned women throughout Czechoslovakia and Poland were subject to rampant sexual abuse, rape and torture. Germans were also forced to wear armbands or patches marked with the letter “N” for Nemec (German)—collective payback for the humiliation that the Nazis had inflicted on populations in the East. When they were finally transported west, the expellees traveled by cattle car, sometimes going with barely any food or water for up to two weeks. One victim recalled that each morning, “one or more dead bodies greeted us…they just had to be abandoned on the embankments.”

Update:   while I feel I should have known more about that, it did, after all, fall into that part of the world that I have long considered to be:

The necessary Party purge that never arrives

What's been clear for more than a decade is that the Coalition needs to purge itself of the climate change denying rump that cannot be reasoned with because they disbelieve the science underlying a really important policy area, and cannot be placated unless policy endorses their disbelief.

My impression is that the climate change denialists have lessened in number and overall influence,  but their dimwitted supporters in the Liberal base are feeling energised by the temporary political win of their nonsense in the US.   And besides, it's incredibly easy to cause destabilisation in a government with a wafer thin majority.

It's disappointing that Malcolm Turnbull cannot bring himself to instigate the necessary purge, at least for the Liberals. I'm a bit torn as to whether I would prefer to see him stagger on, or resign on principle.   Neither are satisfactory, and he will never be  viewed as a very significant Prime Minister unless he does come out swinging and tell the wrecking denialists (and their backers in the Murdoch press, talkback radio and the Rinehart front known as the IPA) that they are simply wrong and need to get out of the Party.      

Japanese population getting smaller in more ways than one

I didn't notice this story getting any attention in the media a couple of weeks ago after it appeared in Science - which is a bit surprising.  Because I, for one, did not know that it was well acknowledged that the Japanese have started getting shorter!:

Japan's obsession with slender women may harm unborn children and create long-term health problems for the Japanese population. Already, a high proportion of Japanese women is starting pregnancy underweight, and many scientists have criticized the country's official guidelines for weight gain during pregnancy as too strict. Now, a survey shows many pregnant women strive to keep their weight gain below even those targets. This combination of factors has led to an unusually high percentage of low-weight births, which is likely the reason that the height of the average Japanese adult has declined every year for those born after 1980....

The shortening of the Japanese is subtle, but unmistakable. An international study published in 2016 found that since the late 19th century, the average Japanese adult male height rose 14.5 centimeters, peaking at 171.5 centimeters for those born in 1978 and 1979. But by the 1996 birth cohort, it had dropped to 170.8 centimeters. Over the same period, average female height jumped 16 centimeters, topped out at 158.5 centimeters, then dropped by 0.2 centimeters. Some other countries have also experienced height declines, which the study variously linked to economic privation, an influx of shorter immigrants, or—in the United States—poor diet quality, which can impair growth both in the fetus and in newborn babies.

In Japan, experts say the evidence for a link with lower birth weights is strong. As the country recovered from World War II, the percentage of low–birth weight babies—those weighing 2.5 kilograms or less at delivery—declined from 7.3% in 1951 to 5.5% in 1978–79. As babies grew heavier, however, doctors worried about preeclampsia, a complication that can put the lives of both mother and baby at risk. In the late 1970s, some Japanese obstetricians suggested a low-calorie diet could lower that risk, a view incorporated into 1981 guidelines from the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Previously, mothers-to-be were told to ‘eat for two’; now, the ideal is to ‘give birth small but raise a big baby,’" says Hideoki Fukuoka, an obstetrician at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Don't normal politicians get into trouble for this sort of thing?

I mean, the jury is still deciding after a trial in which the judge appeared to be a cantankerous anti-prosecution interferer, and I saw somewhere on Twitter (and confirmed in the WAPO*) that the defence got to put up a type of chart which it seems is not uncommonly used in the US: 

That's really misleading if you ask me - it is clearly designed to suggest that it is only a tiny minority of prosecutions which can possibly be found to have been proved "beyond reasonable doubt".   I am surprised American courts allow it - but they do have the weirdest outcomes there.

There's no doubt that juries do struggle with the meaning of the phrase - see this report on the New South Wales Law Reform Commission view on this a few years ago.  But I would hope that all sensible people in Australia would see the potential for that visual "aid" to only confuse the matter more - and unfairly in favour of the defence.

*  The burden the prosecutors have to overcome, he explained with a thermometer-like chart, is not that Manafort “possibly,” “probably,” “likely” or “even highly likely guilty,” but that he is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Research fraud from Japan

Science seems to have the full article from its magazine available on line about the remarkably extensive fraudulent medical research of one Yoshihiro Sato in Japan.  (He has since committed suicide, as did another researcher found to have committed fraud in stem cell research.)    This is not a topic I normally follow, but the way other researchers detect problems in this field, and sometimes just accept improbably explanations initially, is interesting.   For example:

Avenell's own quest began in 2006, when she was combing through dozens of papers for a review evaluating whether vitamin D reduces the risk of bone fractures. In two papers by Sato, she stumbled on a weird coincidence. They described different trials—one in stroke victims, the other in Parkinson's disease patients—but the control and study groups in both studies had the exact same mean body mass index. Looking further, she quickly found several other anomalies. She decided not to include Sato's studies in her analysis.

She wasn't the first to notice something was off. In a 2005 Neurology paper, Sato claimed that a drug named risedronate reduces the risk of hip fractures in women who have had a stroke by a stunning 86%. In a polite letter to the journal, three researchers from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom noted that the study was "potentially of great importance," but marveled that the authors had managed to recruit 374 patients in just 4 months.

Two years later, a letter in what was then the Archives of Internal Medicine was less polite. A study of male stroke patients published by Sato had managed to enroll 280 patients in just 2 months; another one, of women with Alzheimer's disease, recruited a staggering 500 in an equally short period. Sato claimed to have diagnosed all of the Alzheimer's patients himself and done follow-up assessments of all 780 patients every 4 weeks for 18 months. Both studies had very few dropouts, and both showed risedronate, again, to be a resounding success. "We are deeply concerned whether the data provided by Sato et al are valid," Jutta Halbekath of Arznei-Telegramm, a Berlin-based bulletin about the drug industry, and her co-authors wrote. Sato apologized in a published response and claimed the study had been conducted at three hospitals, not one. "The authors did not describe this fact, the reason being that these hospitals were reluctant to have their names in the article," he wrote. He didn't name the other hospitals or explain why they wanted to remain anonymous. The journal apparently accepted the explanation.

The letter's authors also spotted a troubling pattern. In addition to the two papers in the Archives of Internal Medicine, they found 11 further studies by Sato, published elsewhere, that tested whether sunlight, vitamin D, vitamin K, folate, and other drugs could reduce the risk of hip fractures. All but two reported "extremely large effects with significant results," they noted. But the Archives of Internal Medicine didn't want to point fingers at other journals. "You may allude to your concern that other papers have similar concerns," its editors warned Halbekath, "but we cannot allow you to mention those other papers by journal name."

By now, several researchers had raised red flags and waved them for everyone to see—and then everybody moved on. "The trail just went cold," Avenell says.

Remarkably, the article goes onto note that Japan is an unusually popular country for bad medical research, and the culture of respect seems to be part of the problem:

Sato's fraudulent work has propelled him to No. 6 on Retraction Watch's list of researchers who have racked up the most retractions. At the top is Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, with 183 retractions; his frequent co-author Yuhji Saitoh, also from Japan, is at 10th place, while Japanese endocrinologist Shigeaki Kato is No. 8. Iwamoto is at No. 9. That means half of the top 10 are Japanese researchers. Yet only about 5% of published research comes from Japan. What explains the number of prolific Japanese fraudsters?

Michiie Sakamoto, who is leading another investigation at Keio University, into Iwamoto's studies in animals, says it has to do with respect. "In Japan, we don't usually doubt a professor," he says. "We basically believe people. We think we don't need strict rules to watch them carefully." As a result, researchers faking their results may be exposed only after they have racked up many publications.

Outside researchers may also be less likely to question anomalous results from Japan. Several early critics of Sato's work say they thought at first that his unusual results might be due to something uniquely Japanese. One case in point: In 2003, Sato published a study on data from 40 patients with a very rare affliction named neuroleptic malignant syndrome, collected over 3 years. In a letter to the journal, a U.K. neurologist said he and his colleagues "could only recall two such cases in living memory"—but instead of casting doubt on the study, they said it was interesting that the syndrome seemed so prevalent in Japan.

But none of that explains why Sato decided to embark on his fraud—and nobody seems to be able to shed much light on that question. "Given the number of papers he published, he must have spent a very large amount of time on them," Bolland says. "I don't understand what his gain was. … There must have been some reason to do it." The Keio University panel is just as puzzled. "We discussed this a lot in the committee," Saya says. It might have been like a hobby, he suggests. A thrill. Saya uses the word "otaku," a Japanese term often applied to people who read manga obsessively.

The article also explains how big a problem such bad research is - it has a real cascading effect on other studies and policies.

Pretty fascinating...

The speech Malcolm Turnbull needs to give

So, climate change denying conservative numbskulls like Bolt and Blair are getting excited about the prospect of Turnbull getting rolled in the leadership over his energy plan, and now Ray Hadley claims there will be a move against him "in the next two weeks".   [That sounds very implausible - moves on leadership these days aren't on a such a flexible, forewarned timetable.]

While I doubt there is much truth to this, especially given that Mr Potato-Head-Without-the-Charm Dutton seems very keen to distance himself from challenging, it would be a good opportunity for Malcolm to at least attempt to clean out the Party by making a speech that goes something like this:

"It would appear that those within the Coalition who do not accept either climate change, or the seriousness of it, are again trying to cause a political crisis over a matter which should have been resolved in this country, and indeed internationally, at least a decade ago.

Here's my message to those politicians, and their supporters:   you are wrong.  There's no beating about the bush on this - you're simply wrong.   You always have been:  taking your science not from the vast and detailed literature that has convinced beyond doubt all but a tiny handful of contrarian scientists - literally, you can count them on on one hand - that dangerous climate change is real, is happening, and is a very grave threat to the global environment and humanity.    

Your rejection of science has been based on culture war ideology and you are routinely conned by dishonest contrarians - more often than not amateurs with overinflated self regard  -  who cherry pick and repeat ludicrous arguments no matter how many time they are debunked by scientists.

I've had enough:   no political party can rationally support policies that deny the reality of climate change, and the Liberal Party does not.

My message to Tony, Barnaby and their small number of fellow travellers in the Coalition -get out of the Party or the Coalition if you can't get over the fact that climate change is real.   You have done enough damage to the credibility of our side of politics on this issue, and given the evidence of climate change harm we see daily on the TV, you are only to do worse harm to your party's credibility if you continue this wrong headed, spiteful path.

And I say the same to any media commentator - be they journalist, economist, or mining magnate, it doesn't matter - who thinks they know more than the scientific bodies and governments of all political stripes:  you are wrong.   You and your inspiration which comes only from a segment of the American Right are daily being proved wrong, and we can't wait another decade for you to admit it.   Shut up, get out of the way, or go form your own party on the basis of your eccentric, factually wrong, convictions.   

Thank you."

Yet more "Nazis were socialists"

So, the wingnutty Right is really getting into this "Nazis were socialists" meme - even extending it to "America defeated communist Japan" on Fox News, because, I suppose, every enemy ever has always been a socialist/communist.

But the latest local victim is Peter van Onselen, who, for some reason, decided to come to Paul Murray's defence for saying on his show that World War 2 was all about fighting socialism (and suggesting that the youth of today didn't know this like their forebears who fought the war did.).

Peter is widely considered a mild mannered political soft centrist out of place on Sky News, so it was with some surprise that people read:

This comment has received, unsurprisingly, a lot of pushback.  And, sad to say, I don't think Peter's response has been honest:

Yours is the only tweet I'm responding to, I said I'm no longer using twitter for more than posts bc the vile abuse I've received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That's all I was saying. Signing off

 As Ben Pobjie quite correctly says next:

No it’s not. What you we’re saying was “Nazism is considered a branch of socialism”. This is factually incorrect. You know this.

 Later, Andrew Wright says to Peter:

 Some pretty severe nuancing required here for ‘branch’: you can argue that European Fascism drew to a significant extent from socialism, especially given Mussolini’s pre-1918 career - but it’s ultimate trajectory was a complete negation of socialism

And Peter replies:

That's true

Well, if that's true, just admit your initial post was a blatant indefensible overstatement, and stop whinging about people correcting you on Twitter.

Update:   Ben Pobjie, no doubt frustrated at Van Onselen's refusal to just say his first tweet was wrong, goes with:

 

How to upset my daughter

She drove us nuts until we relented and got her a low-end iPhone, because, like, the iPhone/Android ratio amongst teenage girls in Australia is about 99.95/.05.   And she's still the most Apple phone conscious person I know - she can spot and tell which model someone is using from 30 m away, I swear.

So, the possibility of me acquiring a Motorola phone (now my favourite brand) that will look absolutely identical to a high end iPhone amuses me no end:

Here's the story:   Motorola phone 'brazen copy' of iPhone X

It was the 60's, man [see the last paragraph, if nothing else]

Back in 2014 I put up a post about an important physicist of the 20th century who I felt I should have known about:  Leo Szilard.   (He's credited with coming up with the idea of a nuclear reactor, as well as writing the letter that Einstein gave to Roosevelt to get the Manhattan Project going.)

I can now update that post with some amusing material about how eccentric he was:

Leo’s plan was to study engineering at the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, but engineering proved boring—“the routine application of established knowledge,” in his appraisal. At Willhelm, he attended lectures by Nobel physicist Max Planck, who sparked his interest in theoretical physics, and befriended Albert Einstein by walking him home from school. But even with Einstein’s guidance, Leo struggled to secure a job in his chosen discipline: undoubtedly brilliant, he was also, in the words of his friend Eugene Wigner, “an ass in some respects,” bored by teaching and lab work, distracted by his own quixotic ideas. Tellingly, he put the word “job” in scare quotes. By the end of the decade, he was broke, and Berlin was in crisis. On January 30th, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. A few months later, once Einstein secured him a last-ditch fellowship, Leo moved to London.

It was in London, on a street corner in Imperial Park, that Leo had an epiphany, motivated, characteristically, by irritation. He had just read an editorial by Ernest Rutherford declaring the Wellsian dream of atomic power a theoretical impossibility. It occurred to Leo that a nuclear chain reaction could be precipitated by the neutrons, then a recent discovery, in a “critical mass” of uranium. Vindicated, Leo filed his first patent. Five years later, he fled Nazi-occupied Europe for the United States.

In 1942, under the auspices of Roosevelt, Leo began work as Chief Physicist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab, where the Manhattan Project was first conceived. He collaborated with Enrico Fermi to create Chicago-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, partially devised from Leo’s 1934 patent.  Unsurprisingly, Leo was a frustrating colleague from the very beginning—a “peculiar man,” in the words of Fermi, with too many ideas and too few social graces, who “seemed to enjoy startling people.” Chiefly, he enjoyed startling “brass hats,” or the bureaucrats and government officials with whom he would be in conflict for most of his adult life.

As the Manhattan Project continued, the Met Lab came under the control of Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, the director of the Army Corps of Engineers and Leo’s eventual nemesis in life and death. Groves was a career soldier with a puny mustache, a pugilistic face, and a hearty American distrust of intellectuals; Leo was a Hungarian with a heavy accent, a jocular contempt for military authority, and an ecstatic, evangelizing confidence in his own ideas. The two were instant enemies, bound by a beautifully counterpoised hatred. 

You can read the article further for the conflict between Graves and Leo, but I'll skip to this paragraph about his rather unsettled life:

During the war, Leo never described himself as socialist or, for that matter, as a Jew. Instead, in a famous quip, he described himself as a Martian. Alien or not, he had always been a moony annoyance, bidden by odd, insistent habits. He didn’t marry until 1951, when he was fifty-three years old, and courted his wife, Trude, by mail over a period of decades—aware, perhaps, that he charmed in prose but chafed in person. Mostly left to his own devices, he seldom bothered with anything so terrestrial as labwork, or laundry, or living in houses. He felt most at home in hotel rooms, roosting anywhere with room service. Leo lived precariously, portably, with everything he owned—clothes, books, papers, patents—slopped into suitcases. His first real permanent address in America was in La Jolla, where he retired and where, in 1964, he died.

But here's the real reason I felt compelled to post further about him.  The article I'm quoting from deals with a book of science fiction stories Szilard wrote in the early 1960's.   Remembering that he had tried to persuade the US government to delay using the atomic bomb, the title story from his book is described thus:

...“The Voice of the Dolphins” takes place in the near future, and follows a cabal of messianic dolphins who take over the Vatican. Possessed of a frighteningly superior intelligence, the dolphins also demonstrate a preternatural understanding of nuclear warheads. To everyone’s relief, they crave only peace. They start a radio show, on which they predict the U.S.-Soviet nuclear crisis of the 1980s. They also resolve it, through a series of byzantine policy proposals. Then, under mysterious circumstances, they die, evoking either a political assassination or the death of Christ. 

 !!
 

The stupid use of "socialism"

What Paul Krugman says in this twitter thread makes perfect sense:   Republicans have been referring to the "social safety net" of other (typically European) countries as "socialism" for years.   [He doesn't go this far back, but what about that old Ronald Reagan ad from 1961 in which he was paid to warn about "socialised medicine" as the beginning of a slippery slope:  "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him."]

The thing is, of course, that for a lot of Americans, the conditions in many European countries actually do look really good compared to the problems of life at home.  As Paul says (he's just returned from Denmark):

Yes:  the ridiculous hand wringing from the Right over some Americans saying that "socialism" doesn't look bad at all is pretty much all due to the ridiculously exaggerated use of the word by Republicans themselves over many decades.  

Save the oyster

I don't eat that many oysters anymore - the general cost of most wild caught seafood has escalated so much that the good quality fish shops where I used to buy them have closed in the shopping malls of my part of Brisbane, and the supermarket fish counters don't routinely have them.   But I do prefer the Sydney rock oyster over the Pacific if I have a choice.

Anyway, some bad news in The Guardian about how ocean acidification (both from soil run off and the ocean's general increasing acidification) is apparently making Sydney Rock oysters smaller (they were already small enough) and fewer. 

I have posted before about oysters being affected by ocean acidification, including in 2014 in which I noted that research that indicated that the variety could adapt to increasing acidification.   I expressed a bit of skepticism about that at the time, and it looks like that may have been well justified.

Something to worry about

An opinion piece at the New York Times:

Worried About Turkey’s Economic Problems? China’s Could Be Worse 

Back to Nazis as Leftists

My dedicated reader Homer pointed out to my other dedicated reader Jason in comments recently an anonymous economics blogger pseudoerasmus who had some lengthy posts a couple of years back about how the Nazis are not appropriately, retrospectively, classified as Leftists.  

I've read the posts now - they are pretty good.

First one is here.   Follow up one is here.

The thing is, this "Nazis were really Leftists" argument was never tried until US conservative political thought started going off the rails over the last couple of decades and turned into the basket case it is now.   That alone should cause hesitation. 

A serious, underestimated, problem with climate change

From the Washington Post:

How climate change is making ‘red tide’ algal blooms even worse 

Once again I ask:  how did economists trying to model the economic effects of climate change factor this into their calculations?  

Energy storage by batteries - or compressed air?

I've been thinking about renewable energy storage using compressed air.  As you do.

I started looking at the topic because of a recent article in the normally techno optimist MIT Technology Review which talks about the limited role, due to expense, that massive lithium ion battery banks can play in providing large scale grid storage.   Sure, they have their place in providing short term power when needed - as in the South Australian Tesla battery case - and the article doesn't argue against their effectiveness in that role.  But it argues that for very large scale storage as you increase renewable energy generation, they are just going to be too expensive.

(It doesn't talk about the benefits of household lithium ion batteries, but that is a different issue, even if important in its own right.)

Bill Gates and many others are looking into alternative forms of grid batteries, and we hear of potential new flow batteries and such like, but it seems that there is some way to go in terms of cost.

Which made me think - how is the idea of compressed air storage holding up?

There seem to be various companies promoting their ideas for compressed air energy storage, but the fundamental issue appears to be - where to store the air?   Many companies are suggesting underground storage, perhaps in salt caverns or former natural gas wells.   But this seems a pretty limiting idea as far as siting is concerned.

However, one idea from Canada by a company called Hydrostor has caught my eye as a clever proposal:  store compressed air in deep enough water in bladders that take advantage of the surrounding water pressure:

The concept is simple enough: When the energy bag is anchored underwater—at least 25 meters deep and ideally 100 meters or more—the weight of the water naturally pressurizes the air, allowing more air, and thus energy, to be stored in a given volume. (The pressure increases roughly 1 atmosphere, or about 100,000 pascals, every 10 meters.) At depths greater than 500 meters, says Garvey, “the cost of the containment becomes negligible compared with the costs of the power-conversion machinery.”

In the Toronto system, the bags (or “flexible accumulators,” as Hydrostor calls them) will be deployed at a depth of 80 meters, and they should be able to supply about a megawatt of electricity for 3 hours or so. The company will also be testing fixed-wall accumulators, in which the compressed air will displace water inside the vessel. “This is the smallest size we would contemplate,” says VanWalleghem. A more typical capacity, he says, would be 20 to 30 megawatts that can be discharged over 10 to 20 hours. Eventually, the company will aim for an efficiency of about 60 to 70 percent. The technology easily scales up, he adds. “We just make the air cavity bigger, so there really is no upper limit.” By year’s end, the company plans to build a bigger and deeper underwater energy storage facility in Aruba.

In an interview, the President of the company goes into more detail about the depth at which this should work best (my bold):

Cameron Lewis: We have an interesting twist on it because we do underwater CAES. For the roundtrip that we do, we’ll take electricity and run it through a specialised compressor, and we capture and store the heat generated out of that compression. We’ll add that back in later and increase our efficiency. So we store the heat and then the air is sent underwater to depths of 80m, 100m, 200m and put into flexible accumulators. You could say that they look an awful lot like a hot air balloon – the balloon will expand and hold the air there. So just like traditional underground fixed-wall caverns do, we store the air at pressure, but the pressure is a result of the depth. Now, when we reverse the flow, the accumulator will collapse and it will push the air back to the surface at pressure, and we will then add back in the heat that we’ve stored. We then run it back through a generator and put the power back into the grid. We get about a 70% roundtrip efficiency on this, but without needing to use natural gas and with several benefits. You’re dealing with an underwater environment so it can be a bit tricky at depths like that, but the advantage is that you get a very low cost cavern in which to store the air. The other advantage is that unlike a fixed-wall cavern, you get out every drop of energy that you put in, because it’s not a ramp up power curve.

Matthew Wright: So is the material for the accumulator – a buoyant bag, or whatever – something special that needs to be able to handle pressure or is it just the water pressure that’s holding all the air in?

Cameron Lewis: It’s the water that’s doing it. When we pump the air down, it’s at the same pressure that you would find hydrostatically that you’re at. When you look at the fabric that the accumulator is made of, it doesn’t hold much pressure at all – maybe one or two psi.

Matthew Wright: I noted that on your website you’re talking about an example that’s at a depth of around 80m, I think that’s about 1 atm per 10 m. What is the minimum depth at which you can operate? Some of the bays around cities in Australia are not that deep.

Cameron Lewis: The minimum is about 60m, but the range is roughly between 60-500m in depth. In this case, what depth really affects is the cost. The deeper you go, the cheaper it becomes. The reason is that you hold more power per cubic meter at a higher pressure at a greater depth than you do at a lower depth. At a lower depth, you’ll need many more cubic meters to hold the same amount of energy as you do at a greater depth.

Well, there's a problem - how far off, say, Brisbane or Sydney do you need to go to get to water more than 60 m deep?   Let me Google that for you.  The images below from this website show depth contours of 20, 40, and 100 m:

It would seem that for both of these cities, there are points of land where it would be under 10 km to get to 100 m depth (and of course it would be less if working at 80 m).

I wonder - does having a compressed air pipe 10 km long possibly work, or introduce its own inefficiencies?   I don't know the answer to that, but it is the only way it would work unless you get wind turbines out to sea at such distance - which then has the issue of getting the power back to land across 10 km.  :(    (Incidentally, I see there is talk of using floating wind turbines that don't need to sunk into the sea bed, and could work out to sea scores of km from land.  But to use the benefit of compressed air storage, you need a regular turbine too.)

Anyway, apart from getting your spare renewable energy from wind turbines, there is always solar, as long as it is coastal.

It's not as simple as I would like, but still,  the idea of using water pressure to do a lot of the work is clever.  We just need deeper water nearby...

Took too long

The ABC will not renew the terrible, terrible Tonightly with Tom Ballard. 

Not a moment too soon.   It was awful in all respects, from the host to the very concept that they could produce quality, news based comedy material 4 or 5 nights a week without a big team of writers.  

And besides, I can't stand Tom Ballard.   Did I mention that?