Talking apples

Slate notes this about popular apple varieties in America:

The Red Delicious is no longer the dominant apple in American orchards, the U.S. Apple Association said last week, after lasting five decades in the top spot. The Gala apple is now first; Red Delicious second; Granny Smith third. By 2020, the Honeycrisp, which so prized by consumers that they’ll pay higher prices for the privilege of eating one, may crack the growers’ top three.

It then goes on to spend the rest of the article dumping on the Red Delicious - and I am inclined to agree.  The reason I dislike them is because I think they more commonly have a softer flesh, and I really want my apples to be crisp.   But there's also not a hint of tartness in them.

I have long held the Pink Lady in the highest esteem - looks beautiful, usually crisp, and adds a certain sharpness in flavour that the mushy Red Delicious never has.

The Jazz apple, when I have had them, have been pretty good too.   They don't seem to have taken off quite in the way I thought they might, however, when I first had one years ago.

Interestingly, the Slate article mentions neither of these varieties.   What's the Honeycrisp, too?

[Update:  I just noticed in my local Coles that there are a lot of apples for sale at the moment - including two I have never tried - Eve and Modi.   Jazz are there, but much more expensive than Pink Ladies.  The inadequate Red Delicious is there too, as well as Royal Gala, which I don't find much different.   Anyway, it does seem to me that in Australia, the inadequacies of the Red Delicious have already been acknowledged by the public.]

And speaking of apples, I had a particularly nice cider on the weekend - from Tasmania, of course, which seems to now be brimming over with small scale, independent cider manufacturers.   (Was it last year that I had some delicious cherry pear cider?  I have forgotten the brand but I think I posted about it - yes I did, it was Franks.)   The one I had on the weekend was on tap, and there were two names on it - perhaps it was Willie Smiths?   It was called (I think) "wild fermented", which I suppose (if accurate) would indicate that it was relying on airborne natural yeast? - which must be a risky way of making cider if doing it commercially?   [Good and faithful reader Tim, who seems to know everything there is to know about fermentation, I certainly expect to weigh in on this in comments.]   Anyway, it was nicer than your average cider.

The bar staff suggested I also try Pagan Cider.   I should look out for it.

Why aren't we floating solar?

David Roberts has a good piece at Vox talking about where the action is, so to speak, on solar power; and one of the things that he thinks is going to be "big" soon is more floating solar farms on lakes and (possibly) at sea.

The big problem I can foresee with solar panels over salt water is the heightened need to keep them clean from salt crust - surely you would need to be washing them down almost daily.  But then again, some of the spare power could perhaps be used to desalinate some sea water so you don't have to waste expensive chlorinated potable water doing it. 

If the problems could be overcome, Moreton Bay off Brisbane seems a pretty ideal place for it - large parts are very shallow and even smaller boats have to avoid those parts at low tide, and Moreton Island provides a lot of wind shelter.   

The big picture from Robert's article is interesting though - he quotes people saying that the dramatic drop in price of old fashioned silicon panels means that all the new technology solar panels with their incremental improvements in efficiency just aren't really worth using.    That makes sense, but it's sort of depressing if you work in research, isn't it? - spend most of your career on developing the world's most efficient solar cell technology only to find that no one wants it because it's hardly worth retooling factories for the efficiency increase you've achieved. 

Anyway, remember my previous ideas:   the new Snowy Mountains plan to increase its use as power storage by hydro should have its water pumps powered by floating solar cells on the storage lakes.  

And Wivenhoe Dam should be half covered in floating solar power too for South East Queensland's power needs.

While we're talking reproduction...

...there's quite a long article at Aeon called "The macho sperm myth" which you might dismiss as sounding too doctrinally feminist in approach, but you shouldn't.  It mentions some things about what sperm cells get up to inside of women which I don't think I had heard of before.  For example:

The entrenched notion that human sperm, once ejaculated, engage in a frantic race to reach the egg has completely overshadowed the real story of reproduction, including evidence that many sperm do not dash towards the egg but are instead stored for many days before proceeding. It was long accepted as established fact that human sperm survive for only two days in a woman’s genital tract. However, from the mid-1970s on, mounting evidence revealed that human sperm can survive intact for at least five days. An extended period of sperm survival is now widely accepted, and it could be as long as 10 days or more.

Other myths abound. Much has been written about mucus produced by the human cervix. In so-called ‘natural’ methods of birth control, the consistency of mucus exuding from the cervix has been used as a key indicator. Close to ovulation, cervical mucus is thin and has a watery, slippery texture. But precious little has been reported regarding the association between mucus and storage of sperm in the cervix. It has been clearly established that sperm are stored in the crypts from which the mucus flows. But our knowledge of the process involved is regrettably restricted to a single study reported in 1980 by the gynaecologist Vaclav Insler and colleagues of Tel Aviv University in Israel.

In this study, 25 women bravely volunteered to be artificially inseminated on the day before scheduled surgical removal of the womb (hysterectomy). Then, Insler and his team microscopically examined sperm stored in the crypts in serial sections of the cervix. Within two hours after insemination, sperm colonised the entire length of the cervix. Crypt size was very variable, and sperm were stored mainly in the larger ones. Insler and colleagues calculated the number of crypts containing sperm and sperm density per crypt. In some women, up to 200,000 sperm were stored in the cervical crypts.

Insler and colleagues also reported that live sperm had actually been found in cervical mucus up to the ninth day after insemination. Summarising available evidence, they suggested that after insemination the cervix serves as a sperm reservoir from which viable sperm are gradually released to make their way up the oviduct. This dramatic finding has been widely cited yet largely ignored, and there has never been a follow-up study.

Not a simple Pill

At the risk of encouraging a bunch of conservative Catholics (and Philippa Martyr in particular) going "See!  The Church was always right to oppose this harmful product!", I will link to this article at the BBC which explains that the hormones and hormone combinations used in the contraceptive pill are much more complicated in their source and effects than I would have guessed.

That chicken or egg question is unanswerable?

Hey, has anyone else noticed how often physicists from Brisbane seem to get mentioned in despatches, so to speak, about quantum experiments?   It makes me feel like I'm living in a smarter city than southerners like to give it credit for. 

This time its the University of Queensland being mentioned in a somewhat complicated explanation about a quantum experiment that seems to indicate that causation becomes very confusing in quantum systems:

Over many trials, the physicists implement different combinations of shape changes in the two paths, like choosing among a handful of setting for two different knobs. If each photon definitely takes one path or the other first, the correlations between the knob setting and the photon’s final polarization must obey certain limits. However, if both take both paths first, the correlations will exceed those limits, which is exactly what the physicists observe in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters.

As it stands, the experimenters chose the operations in the two paths independently. However, in principle the experiment shows that quantum mechanics allows for the possibility that the two processes could trigger each other, says Cyril Branciard, a physicist at the NÉEL Institute in Grenoble, France, who worked on the experiment. “One may have situations where some event A causes another event B, while at the same time B causes A.”

I suppose it's appropriate that I mention another recent report, this one about how a quantum entanglement experiment  used light from distant quasars to help rule out "freedom of choice" loopholes.

Don't worry, I'll explain later.  Or not.

Taleb - smart idiot

Nassim Taleb is always a good reminder that being technically smart is no guarantee of having common sense in political judgment, and can certainly be accompanied by an obnoxious personality.   Here's a tweet today indicating he is sympathetic to the ridiculous White House bleating about tech company "censorship" of the internet:

AI modelling of religious belief

I forgot to link to this interesting article in The Atlantic from July, about using computer programs to model the social effect of religious beliefs.  It starts:

Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest in the refugees’ education; another says providing jobs is the key; yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do?

Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens, you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a different policy. But of course, you can’t experiment like that, not with real people.

You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.

Curious about Right wing reaction to this...

From NPR:

British Prime Minister Theresa May said she will make major investments in Africa. While on a three-day tour of the continent, May pledged 4 billion pounds ($5.1 billion) of support for African markets. May's goal of deepening trade ties with Africa, the world's second most populous continent, comes ahead of Britain's departure from the European Union next year.

I just can't imagine this being particularly well received by the British Brexiteers who were either populist nationalists, or small government types who are always leery of foreign aid and assistance. 

STD talk, again

Vox has an article about the worrying rise of STDs in the US, including the one that keeps making appearances in this blog - syphilis.

They have a map showing the different rates for that disease across America, and it's pretty hard to make sense of it.   While one might think that the number of gay men (amongst whom unsafe sex has been rising) in California accounts for the high rate in that state (and, perhaps, Florida), there are some very Red states with very high rates too:

And I presume that the lesson of Alaska might be that cold weather means less illicit sex?

Anyway, readers who have not been following my fascination with a particular STD might find this previous post useful - because it shows that even at the higher rates shown above, they are still only roughly 1/5 the rate of what they were in the 1940s.   The extraordinary historical rate of the disease (and its social effect) is still something that I say does not appear in fiction as often as you would expect...

To Berlin

Did you see last night's Foreign Correspondent about young Jewish folk migrating to Berlin to get away from the atmosphere of stifling perpetual conflict in Israel?   It was fascinating, and yet another example of the type of excellent and informative program making that only the ABC does.  

The Murdoch/IPA led right wing campaign against the national broadcaster makes me sick. 

Should never read Adam Creighton in isolation

I managed to find Adam Creighton's "ha ha, Labor is wrong about income inequality" piece in The Australian which takes the "glass is half full" analysis approach to a Productivity Commission report on inequality in Australia.   (I wonder, if Creighton's so sure about this, why does he campaign on abandoning compulsory superannuation as being the only way to let low income workers get ahead?)

Then I read The Guardian's report on the same matter, and came away with a much more balanced view of what the Commission's report said.

Update:  it just occurred to me that there is another bit of opportunistic hypocrisy in Creighton's reporting on this - he's been one to complain about how much tax is paid by the top end of town, compared to how none is paid by the bottom end.  Yet Creighton quotes this:

Launching the report in Canberra yesterday, Productivity Commission chairman Peter Harris said 27 years of economic growth had led to “significantly improved living standards” for people at every income level, while the nation’s “highly targeted” welfare system had reduced inequality — as typically defined — by 30 per cent.

Creighton:  always best ignored.

An alert for Barrie Cassidy

Deep forehead wrinkles may signal a higher risk for cardiovascular mortality 

Or maybe he was just born with a mightily crinkled forehead?   (I shouldn't be mean - he's a very likeable journalist/commentator.)

Where did the immigration panic come from?

I don't understand why or how the Australian wingnutty Right seemingly decided overnight that immigration levels to Australia were at (what they think) is a crisis level.

I mean, I know Judith Sloan has been doing a NIMBY, pearly clutching exercise about how her Melbourne suburb is changing with too many apartments being built for too many immigrants for quite a while now, but it just seems to have been taken up in an almost unified way amongst all Right wingers in a concerted panic attack on the issue. 

Is there an explanation?   Is it a matter of the Sydney wingnut broadcasters getting really annoyed at the George Street light rail delay disrupting their drive to work and them deciding to blame it all on TOO MANY IMMIGRANTS?   But what's going on in Melbourne (apart from the African gangs issue) that led Bolt and Sloan to ramp up their attack on immigration more generally?

Fruity news

*  Am I the only person who has noticed how cheap, big (and good quality) pineapples are at the moment?    I don't normally notice them, but this year they have caught my attention and we've bought a few since my daughter has decided they are just about her favourite fruit.   A $3 gigantic one does last a long time, cut up in the fridge.

* Radio National this morning was talking about some Queensland strawberry farmers going out of business because of the ridiculous oversupply which is seeing them sold for $1 a punnet (less than the cost of production.)    While farmers not having the business sense to see an oversupply coming is part of the problem, they did talk about the big supermarket contracts with set prices as being relevant too.  I guess it's sort of obvious that something goes wrong in situations like this, but is doing anything other than letting the market sort itself out worse than the disease?     I don't entirely trust the distorting power of the big supermarket contracts, though. 

Too soon

I thought Four Corners and Media Watch last night on the Liberal leadership changeover last week were both pretty dull with nothing interesting to add. I think the basic problem with the Four Corners show was that it was made too soon - you need more time before more politicians will talk about it in the detail necessary to give some new information we don't already know.

Media Watch seemed pretty bland and cautious on the question of media commentators involvement - particularly given this morning that Alan Jones was on 7.30 (apparently - I didn't see it) saying that he was ringing government members privately about the need to dump Turnbull.  And he says that it was to do with the energy policy, which is, at its heart, about emissions and climate change.   I continue to feel that the media is not emphasising enough the fact that this changeover was at its heart about climate change denialists in the media insisting that Turnbull be dumped because he wants to reduce emissions.

(It's true that Turnbull hurt his credibility by seeking to placate the denialists in his party,  but it was absurd hypocrisy that it was Abbott - a man with a kama sutra history of positions on climate change - who was the one criticising Malcolm for not being consistent on the matter.)

But the extracts that Media Watch played of Bolt, Jones, Credlin and Murray criticising Trunbull, do show how nasty and ridiculously over the top their criticism of a politician can be.  This Fox News-ification of right wing commentary in Australia is very unfortunate, and is destined to poison political discourse here just as it has in the US.  

Says it all

Pretty remarkable, isn't it?   Goes to show that at least previous leadership change plotters were right to think hat a new PM would be at least a bit more popular than the current one. 

Those involved in this one - nope, just wanted Turnbull gone because he had an energy policy that, despite being pretty useless, climate change denialism still couldn't accept. 

Back to physics and the universe

In all of the political intrigue of last week, I overlooked the news that Roger Penrose thinks he may have found some observational evidence for his pet cyclical universe alternative theory to the normal Big Bang with inflation.

Phys.org wrote about it, but then Sabine Hossenfelder expresses some mild to moderate skepticism of the whole theory at Backreaction.

The worst news I am likely to read all day

So, Kevin Rudd has a big spray on the political power of Rupert Murdoch today.

While what he says sounds very true, it would feel more appropriate if it wasn't coming from someone who had sucked up so much to the media - including News Corp - for his own political gain.

I had forgotten until I read the other piece in Fairfax about Kevin's piece that he was personally close to Chris Mitchell:

Mr Rudd courted News Corp editors during his time in politics and was the godfather to the son of Chris Mitchell, former editor-in-chief of The Australian.

I have my doubts they send each other Christmas cards any more.

But here's the worst thing about the Nick O'Malley piece:   I don't follow international media intrigues all that closely, but I had always assumed that the Murdoch kids were likely more liberal and had more morals than Rupert, who looks physically frail and can't be with us for too much longer, surely.  But it seems that may be wrong:

Political and News Corp sources have also told Fairfax Media that they believe that News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch has a particular dislike for Mr Turnbull. They also believe that over the years Lachlan Murdoch has become even more conservative in his world view than his father, and far more conservative than Mr Turnbull. They also confirmed that Lachlan is known to be close to both Ms Credlin and Mr Abbott.

Still, if the Packer family is any guide, things still won't be the same when the Dad dies and the rich kids get to make all decisions.

I'm getting a bit frustrated

While lots of commentators on the Liberal leadership mention climate change denial as a key factor in why Liberal conservatives could never tolerate Turnbull, I still feel that there is inadequate emphasis on this as the reason why the Liberals cannot continue to be an attempted coalition between climate change denialist/conspiracists and the moderates who believe science and the need for a policy to reduce emissions.

You see, this is typical of what Trump loving, alternative reality so-called Australian conservatives believe about climate change and energy policy:

We've all read the continual stream of climate change denialism from Bolt, Blair, Ackerman, lots of guest writers in the Australian, and in the posts and comments at Catallaxy for more than a decade, and one thing is clear:   nothing  will change their minds.    They are convinced by ageing fools who will never concede error, and argue in various combinations of bad faith, ideological blindness, and self interest.   

It has become a core belief aligned with nearly all social conservatives (and with most libertarians) that climate change is not real and/or is nothing to worry about.

Here's the thing:  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE NEGOTIATIONS IN MUTUAL GOOD FAITH ON ENERGY POLICY WITH A SIDE WHICH DENIES THERE IS ANY NEED TO REDUCE EMISSIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE.  


It's that simple.


Remember in 2012 that show on the ABC where a young global warming advocate travelled around with Nick Minchin trying to convince him that his climate change "skepticism" was wrong?  I posted about it at the time.   At the end, there was a fake resolution in which Minchin said he would agree that it wasn't a bad thing to encourage renewables because fossil fuels were not going to last forever.

This was a disingenuous attempt to come up with some sort of "we can work this out" happy ending, but which didn't make sense for a denialist or realist - Australia could easily burn coal for hundreds of years if it kept it to itself and had no concerns about emissions.   And no climate change denying "conservatives" has ever agreed with Minchin, then or now.

So, yeah - as I say, it is that simple.

The Liberals are never going to be come up with an energy policy which will keep a significant chunk of their Federal members (and I do mean "members") or their apparently increasingly right wing "base" happy.

The party will be stuck in internal conflict about this forever, or at least - I would guess - another 10 to 20 years, while we wait for Rupert Murdoch and all of the handful of ageing contrarian scientists who keep the denialism alive to literally die off.

It needs to split, or it is going to be hobbled by that internal conflict for that long

Update:  On Insiders this morning, I saw an extract from Malcolm Turnbull's farewell press conference in which he said word to the effect that it seemed that for the Liberals there were some with ideological reasons preventing agreement on energy policy.

True, but it is not enough to just mildly say that on the way out.  They need to be called out as  simply wrong in their climate change denial and they need to get out of the party!

Quantum computer sighted

It occurred to me this afternoon that I had no idea what a quantum computer physically looked like.

So I Google it, and found this photo from an Engadget article earlier this year, showing the innards of an IBM 50 qubit quantum computer:

Cool.

Actually, it does literally need to be very cool - but the article does a very poor job of explaining how exactly it is cooled down to liquid helium temperatures.   Does the whole thing sit in a liquid helium bath?