Electric jet engine of the future?

For Low-Emission Planes, Try Superconductivity: Scientific American

A very cool idea. (There's a pun in there, if you know anything about superconductivity.)

China takes the lead

China tops CO2 emissions - Developing nation overtakes America, and is set to rise.

The news@nature links never work for long, but here is the crucial part:

But how fast are Chinese emissions rising?

Fast, because the standard of living is rising too. The country is building about 2 power stations a week. Its emissions from fossil fuels went up 8% from 2005 to 2006, contributing heavily to the overall global rise of 2.6%.

Can anything be done about that?

China unveiled its first national plan on climate change earlier this month. The scheme outlines the country's aim to reduce 'energy intensity' — the amount of energy needed per unit of GDP — by 20% by 2010. But the Chinese economy is, today, growing at 10% a year. If it were to keep that up, then in 2020 its economy would be 3.5 times larger than it is today. That would mean far greater carbon dioxide emissions even if the energy intensity goals were met.

China also aims to increase renewable energy sources and re-forest the countryside. But what it really needs to keep emissions in check are clean coal technologies. "It can't do much about cement except use less in its construction," says Olivier.

Egypt and Gaza

Analysis: Calling Egypt's bluff on Gaza | Jerusalem Post

I noted a few posts ago the suggestion that getting Egypt into Gaza to sought out the mess would be an ideal solution, as far as the West is concerned. But I speculated that such involvement would probably risk the stability of the Egyptian government.

This seems to have been a good guess. From the Jerusalem Post, the article above discusses why Egypt does not do enough to stop the flow of smuggled arms into Gaza:

The Mubarak administration has its own delicate balancing act to maintain between the calls for democracy and the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the secular government. The last thing it needs is to get sucked into the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians and between Fatah and Hamas.

Egypt faces an Islamist terrorist threat, with bombings usually targeted at the tourism industry on the southern Red Sea coast of Sinai. So far, North Sinai, which is also close to Cairo and the Nile Delta, has been quiet and that is something they want to maintain at all costs. Allowing Hamas to smuggle arms in to Gaza through their territory is a reasonable price as long as none of it remains behind in Egypt and the Palestinians go about it with discretion...

The policy remains not to risk even one Egyptian for the Palestinians' sake. If the US and Israel are to realize their hopes of a greater Egyptian involvement in dealing with the Hamas mini-state that has sprung up overnight in Gaza, it will only be achieved by a considerable package of incentives, or a serious threat to other interests of the Mubarak regime.

One for the "enjoyable bad reviews" folder

Lord of the Rings doomed to epic defeat | Uk News | News | Telegraph

Charles Spencer did not like the West End musical version of LoR:

I took my 14-year-old son along, who enjoyed Peter Jackson's epic Lord of the Rings films and is, I would guess, exactly the age and sex this show needs to attract in order to survive.

Unfortunately he hated it even more than I did, sitting with his head in his hands in those moments when he wasn't tittering at the ponderous inanities of the script and the triteness of the lyrics....

Warchus's claim that the show is a cross between Shakespeare and Cirque du Soleil is risible. The language is flat, portentous or twee, and there is barely a moment that makes you gasp.

Indeed most of the special effects seem highly derivative, from old-hat bungee jumping to the Louise Bourgeois inspired giant spider. Nor does this story of epic battles run to a single decent sword-fight, a truly astonishing omission....

Repeatedly during this show you feel its creators have more money than either sense or imagination.

Kid's problems

Comment is free: Searching for the antidote

This commentary from The Guardian makes some sensible points about concern for modern children:

Is there a danger that the glow of a mythical golden yesteryear is making this the most scrutinised younger generation ever, while leading only to a partial and highly selective understanding of what's really happening? Cause and effect; nurture and nature are notoriously difficult to disentangle. ....

.....adults have wrongly taught (some) children that what they feel is much more important than what they achieve. "Self-control or the ability to persevere and keep going is a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem. Research tells us that children high in self-control make better grades and finish more years of education ... Self-control predicts all of those things researchers had hoped self-esteem would [deliver] but hasn't."

In Scandinavia, concern is also growing about a parenting style known as "curling", after the sport that became a surprise Olympic hit. Professional middle-class parents, both working long hours, insist on sweeping away all difficulties for their child: interfering with teachers and friends; spoiling them rotten and expecting nothing - neither good manners, nor chores, nor endeavour - in return. Again, on contact with adversity, the child instead of learning from failure and a modicum of stress, mentally collapses.

The analysis of why some children are so highly distressed needs to include both ends of the spectrum - those who have too little and those who appear to have too much. While somewhere in this whole process, against the grain of consumption and celebrity and success as defined by the workplace, we could somehow try to restore the value of ordinariness and the pleasures it can bring.

Typical

Taipei Times - archives

Of course it would be an engineer who wants to do this:

A robot will be master of ceremonies for a South Korean wedding this weekend in what its creators yesterday claimed as a world first.

Hanool Robotics said Tiro the robot will assist at the civil wedding ceremony of Seok Gyeong-jae, one of the engineers who designed it, and his bride tomorrow in Daejeon, 130km south of Seoul.

As the bride and groom leave the ceremony, the guests will throw little nuts and bolts at them, I suppose.

Don't forget the paella pans

Australia to buy Spanish warships - National - smh.com.au

Now, if you shut your eyes and count to 20, when you open them, there will be new commentary somewhere on the 'net criticising this decision. I could be exaggerating, but not by much.

You see, it is a rule of Australian defence acquisitions decisions, no matter how long they are pondered over, sent to another inter-departmental committee, analysed via 56 different matrices, etc, etc, will always be the subject of criticism by armchair experts, real experts, retired admirals, generals & air vice marshals, and assorted others.

For all the criticism it generates, I really wonder why Defence just doesn't save money and time by narrowing the choices down to three vaguely credible ones, and then throwing darts at a board to pick the winner.

Living in a can for science

Wanted: Space pioneers (or agoraphobes) for 520-day Mars experiment

From the article:

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Tuesday called for applications for one of the most demanding human experiments in space history: a simulated trip to Mars in which six "astronauts" will spend 17 months in an isolation tank on Earth.

Their spaceship will comprise a series of interlocked modules in an research institute in Moscow, and once the doors are closed tight, the volunteers will be cut off from all contact with the outside world except by a delayed radio link.

They will face simulated emergencies, daily work routines and experiments, as well as boredom and, no doubt, personal friction from confinement in just 550 cubic metres (19,250 cubic feet), the equivalent of nine truck containers.

Communications with the simulated mission control and loved-ones will take up to 40 minutes, the time that a radio signal takes to cross the void between Earth and a spaceship on Mars. Food will comprise mainly the packaged stuff of the kind eaten aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The goal is to gain experience about the psychological challenges that a crew will face on a trip to Mars. ...

Viktor Baranov of Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems, where the experiment will take place, said his organisation had received about 150 applications, only 19 of which came from women.

"The problem is that it is very difficult to find healthy people for this kind of experiment," he said.

Well, that's understandable! Apart from the interest in the physical environmental of such sealed tank experiments, especially if recycling systems are involved, I remain a little skeptical that there is much more to be learned from them from a psychological perspective.

I mean, the fundamental difference is that the participants in the can know it is only an experiment. They don't have the consolation of a forthcoming walk on a new world to help them endure the isolation. Wouldn't that make all the difference in the real life trip to Mars?

The first trip to Mars is going to have take a vat full of antidepressants and other medication with them to deal with the distinct possibility of one of the astronauts breaking down. But surely that has happened on a nuclear submarine before. Can't they just extrapolate from that?

Gaza mess, continued

Comment is free: Nothing in moderation

A very bleak assessment of the future for the Palestinian movement and Israel in this column in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, I note that Antony Lowenstein's blog appears to be a particularly inactive place for comments at the moment, when one would have thought it might have been the place for some "interesting" contributions about the Gaza crisis. Looks like he's a bit of a dud as a blogger.

Trivia time

Guinness: Miyazaki man is oldest male | The Japan Times Online

He's 111. Born in 1895, and looks pretty good for his age if the photo is anything to go by.

Japan also has the oldest woman in the world - at 114!

Unusual

BBC NEWS | Health | Coffee 'could prevent eye tremor'

While reading this story my left eyelid twitched a couple of times. Really.

Talking to the cultural luvvies

End the culture wars and make way for a renaissance - Opinion - smh.com.au

Julia Gillard gave an address to someone last night (the SMH doesn't say who,) but the edited version of it reported above certainly indicates it was a vacuous effort at reminding the cultural luvvies (as if they needed it) that Labor is the one who really loves and supports them. Some extracts:

We need to get a real conversation going between our cultural producers and the public. This isn't just about elites; it involves all of us. It's time to end the culture wars.

Within TV what examples does she give? Not exactly hard to guess:

Another good start would be for our TV networks to take seriously their commitment to providing quality Australian content. Recent dramas such as Curtin and Bastard Boys show what can be achieved...

Presumably, it's the Whitlam career, the Hawke ascendency and a TV version of Keating: The Musical that she is hanging out for. (Personally, I would prefer to see a musical interpretation of the Latham Diaries, but I am not sure even Julia wants to see that.)

More pap follows:

This great Australian cultural renaissance could be one of the most important national investments we could make, because Australian culture is ideally suited to the challenges of today.

Kissy kissy arts/cultural community. We will give you more money; remember Keating?

Now to cover the aboriginal cultural lobby:

We should never forget Australia's indigenous culture is one of the longest-surviving cultures in the world and we should never forget to be proud of that fact. We can also learn from it. Climate change is giving us an urgent interest in doing so.

We need to develop a new respect for the reality of our harsh physical environment and adapt to its changes. Aborigines were never passive occupiers of the land. As we have, they moulded the land as it moulded them. But we're leaving far too big an ecological footprint and have much to learn from indigenous land management and ecological knowledge.

We should be proud, Kimosabe? Seems a bit of unwarranted cultural appropriation going on here.

As for what we can learn from Aboriginal land management, the lesson I take is: yes go ahead and mold the land, it's there to be turned from forest into grassland by regular CO2 producing burning, but if that is what you need to survive comfortably, then go ahead.

It's a feature of her side of politics that soft-headed thinking attempts to give moral credit to a pre-industrial society for only modifying the landscape to the extent that they could without bulldozers and dynamite. Oh, and for making it "sustainable" for 40,000 years. I trust that the extinct megafauna probably don't see it the same way as Julia.

Of course, some local Aboriginal knowledge may be ecologically useful, just like the knowledge of any non aboriginal who has had a family living in an area for, say, 100 years. It's just the suggestion that indigenous land management is "special" or more moral than what modern society does that irritates.

Julian ends by talking about the movie Happy Feet:

You might think I'm pulling a long bow in drawing conclusions from an animated film about a dancing penguin named Mumble. But Mumble is a man - or should I say, a penguin - for our times. He won't conform. Instead of singing like everyone else, he dances. And along the way he uncovers some important truths about the need to change our ways.

Australians are a bit like Mumble. In terms of world culture, we're unique: young, unusual, at times exotic and usually undermining authority. We can choose our path. We shouldn't feel we have to sing along in harmony with the rest of the world to have a positive effect on it. But we can dance like no one else. The last thing we need is culture warriors trying to force us to conform.

How exactly have the "cultural warriors" been trying to force conformity?? By suggesting the arts community should be more self sustaining and able to produce products that the public wants to see and read ? By pointing out that the bureaucratic systems for funding arts have in fact been producing material that conforms to a soft left view of the world ever since the cultural revival of the 1970's? By noting that historians who are directly relevant to things like High Court cases have made (at best) careless claims in some of their arguments?

Julia doesn't really dislike cultural conformity; she just wants it to conform to her view of the world.

Silly Julia.

Paint your way to a cooler planet

White Is the New Green - Science - RedOrbit

I think I may have seen this mentioned somewhere else; I am not sure. In any event, this article claims that, due to the cost of solar panels, you can do substantially more for global warming in the short term by painting your roof white. Here's the key paragraphs:

If, instead of a black solar panel absorbing light and producing electricity, you simply painted that square meter white, it would reflect back into outer space perhaps 50 of the 300 watts incident from the sun. So it would take about 25 days for the solar panel to catch up with the more efficient reflection of sunlight that the white-painted panel would provide in a single day.

This seems counterintuitive, of course, as solar panels are net-positive in reducing global warming. And, in many cases, you could install the black solar panel on an existing black building roof, so you wouldn't be "adding" yet another black, heat-absorbing surface [another "albedo-decreaser"] to the earth.

Except for the small issue of money. A 20%-efficient, 1-square-meter solar panel costs about $1,000. For $1,000, you can buy 40 cans of good quality white paint. Each can covers 2,000 square meters with a nice bright reflecting film. So for the same $1,000 investment you could buy one square meter of photovoltaic cells, or cover 2,000 square meters with white paint. It would take more than 2,000 times 25 days, or about a century, for the CO mitigation from $1,000 of solar panels to catch up with the albedo increase of a large painted roof!

So what's a conscientious environmentalist to do? Unquestionably, we need solar panels for electricity. You can't run a washing machine on white paint. But, for every dollar spent on solar panels, we should spend at least a dime on white paint for every roof, parking lot, and road in the country.

There is a mistake in the sentence between the highlighted ones. (The total area that can be covered with $1000 worth of paint is surely 2,000 m2, not 2,000 m2 per can.)

However, it is an interesting argument, to say the least.

There is almost certainly a Satanist amongst them too

The Corner on National Review Online

A very bizarre and amusing story via Mark Steyn at the link above. (Short version: an Episcopalian priest - female by the way - claims she is now a Muslim and a Christian. It appears not to be satire.)

This reminds me of a Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch which had its young, groovy, very non-judgemental vicar talking about how the church shouldn't have a "get behind me" attitude to Satanists, but more of a "come in old mate, let's sit down for a cup of tea and chat" approach. (I wonder how well I am remembering this after 25 years. Sadly, I can't find it on Youtube or elsewhere on the net.)

Kevin Rudd in death spiral

Heh heh heh. Just wanted to see someone write that headline, even if it's only a John Howard tragic like me.

But seriously folks, I have always thought Newspoll had the greatest credibility. I also seem to recall it has been said over the years that a major party has to be looking at getting over 40% of primary vote to have any chance of winning an election.

On this basis, Newspoll's results from earlier this year showing the Coalition at 35% primary vote were bad, as even allowing for a margin of error meant they would still be well below the magical 40%.

As today's results are back to 39%, and the effects of the budget are still kicking in, there is reason for guarded optimism about the coalition's prospects. Headed in the right direction again, at least.

I am also finding it a little amusing to hear Labor complaining when Howard adopts the essence of some of their policies. It's happening today with the broadband issue.

This is one of the neat things about democracy; everyone is allowed to take policy ideas and run with them. The public will let you know if it is good idea of not. No use complaining that the government is only adopting a policy for electoral benefit, or some such. That's what all parties do, and let's face it, it's better than a government refusing to adopt a good idea just because someone else thought of it.

Cereal humour

An amusing post from Bryan Appleyard about breakfast cereal.

For those readers with an intense interest in the details of my private life (hello, anyone there?) I have been perfectly happy with Uncle Toby's Sports Plus for a number of years now. Strangely enough, the Uncle Toby's website seems to be just one page with an email address, probably related to the business being taken over by Nestle last year. (That explains the change in packaging, I guess.)

I am sure you all feel better for knowing this.

This is funny

Wastes of ink

This weekend's Australian press seems to have reached some craptacular heights in wastes of space in 3 columns:

* Phillip Adams in the Australian tries satire of Howard yet again. (You can really, really tell some weeks that he dictates columns while driving between the Hunter Valley and Sydney. At least I think that's his excuse.) Does anyone at all find this funny, or even vaguely witty?

* Alan Ramsey in the SMH does a cut and paste that must rival in word count some of his previous personal bests at how to write a weekly column with an absolute minimum of your own words or thoughts. Has he no shame as to how much effort one must put in to get paid?

* And over at The Age, Tracee Hutchison tries being clever, or satiric, or something, about how the Left isn't loved anymore, and fails spectacularly at whatever her aim was.

It's goal, goal, goal for self inflicted injury to reputation for all three. Congratulations!

When 42 inches just isn't enough

Samsung launches 70 inch LCD TV

In the Al Gore mould - literally

I am probably not the first person to say this, but isn't it somewhat ironic that Michael Moore, in taking the US health system to task, is himself setting an extremely poor example of how to make a bad system even worse (namely, by not taking his obesity seriously.) Maybe it is the unshaved face, but to me he is looking more blimp-like than ever.

Of course, he can afford to pay for his quadruple by-pass, and his diabetes medication, but the fact remains if the American public as a whole took their own weight problems seriously, they would greatly lighten the load (now there's a pun) on the existing medical services.

Al Gore has also packed the pounds on in the last few years too. I would like to know if he is a big beef eater, 'cos some of his greenie supporters might have an issue with that.