Keeping it real

Warning: it's all about religion!

Readers interested in the topic have probably already noted that there currently seems to be a backlash underway in England against the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens anti-religion books. Here's a Comment is Free article by Alex Stein in today's Guardian that takes Hitchens to task. Madeleine Bunting also joined in last week, and in The Times we had John Humphreys explain why, even though he had become an agnostic, the militant atheists really irritate him. Bryan Appleyard had a short, pithy post too.

All of those are worth reading.

The general gist of them is that Dawkins and his followers attack the most unsophisticated, fundamentalist versions of religion, but fail to engage in debates with those who have a more sophisticated understandings of religion. To the extent that he does engage, I think Dawkins claims that what sophisticated theologians propose is not something that has any real meaning anyway.

This does bring up an issue that is a tricky one for those of faith, namely, the contest between realist and non-realist views of religion.

I don't think this is often clearly discussed in the popular press. I believe I first read about the realist/non-realist divide in a book by philosopher/theologian John Hicks in the 1980's. The idea is that the trend which started with historical scepticism of the Bible in the 19th century has been for those sympathetic to religious belief to move from a "realist" understanding of the Gospels (or Bible generally) to a "non-realist" interpretation. That is, the literal truth of matters such as the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Christ, or even the existence of an afterlife, is believed by non-realists to be unimportant, and the mythological or metaphorical "truth" or utility of matters of faith is seen as the key.

People who hold thoroughly non-realist views can claim to still be people of faith, but it is achieved by re-defining what was previously thought to be undoubtedly real to something which is either not real, or a something in which the literal reality is now considered unimportant. John Hicks has an article on his website which explains this view well.

This is really the crux of the issue for faith in the Christian churches at this time in history, and I do find it a matter of some difficulty personally. Catholics like me, taught in the 1960's, have never had a particularly fundamentalist view of the Old Testament forced on them. So I don't have a problem with a non-realist reading of much of the Old Testament.

When it comes to the New Testament, though, the non-realist attitudes seems to me to have significantly more problems.

My main objection perhaps comes to where non-realism goes so far as to deny something as basic as a belief that there is a supernatural realm, or an afterlife of any variety. At its heart, the teaching of Jesus had the importance of how you live your life on Earth because there will be an accounting for it in an afterlife. (Whether that was an immediate after-death judgement, or one at the end of the world, is rather moot to this point.) But if you start denying that an afterlife has any reality at all, surely you are denying not just "stories" like the Virgin Birth or even the resurrection (which can be seen as, say, rumours that got out of hand,) but something which was clearly fundamentally what the figure at the heart of your religion believed to be a reality about the universe.

On the other hand, it is clear that the founding fathers of Christianity had a fundamentalist understanding of how sin came into the world (via the actions of the first man Adam) and the role that Christ had in fixing the situation.

If you do believe in evolution, one can still (like CS Lewis) believe that there came a point at which the first man did evolve into existence, and did actually undergo a temptation of the kind described in Genesis. But this is a matter difficult for modern people to believe. The concept of how sin or evil originated is thus a difficult one for the Church if you believe thoroughly in evolution, and this also affects one's understanding of Christ.

So, the issue as to where to draw the realist/non-realist line is a tricky one, to say the least.

Should my acknowledgement of the difficulty mean that I should not criticise the likes of Cuppitt and Spong, who try to spread the word that the only way for Christianity to survive is to become completely non-realist? No, I don't think so. I may have trouble with deciding how to resolve the issues, but I think I can still make the call if I think others have gone completely too far into the non-realist camp.

The other matter to always remember that above all of this is the issue of how lives are actually lived. As we all know, fundamentalist faith in ideology of any kind can lead to devastatingly evil acts. The atheist can argue that evolutionary biology is what is behind the moral impulse in humans, and that is why you don't need religion to inform moral reasoning. But what they can't show (at least to my satisfaction) is the reasons why humans should always act as if there is a true universality to the moral law.

In any event, a willingness to act as if there is a universal moral law is, at its heart, more important than the theory on which the moral actions are based.

On bin Laden and the relativists

Comment is free: Backing the bombers

This article refers to another one by Martin Amis in which he hits out at those who are semi-apologists for Islamist terrorism.

I like this comment that follows it, on the hypocrisy of much of Europe. (Perhaps it's a little over-stated, but the sentiment seems right):

The US has coddled Europeans for 70 years now, which has helped produce a child-like mentality in Europeans, where there's little thought of consequences. So, for example, Europeans can pretend they're champions of human rights, when not a one of them has ever put their lives on the line or made any meaningful sacrifice for some other country's freedom or rights. They can pretend that running a foreign policy based primarily on giving their businesses access to the most horrendous regimes is somehow moral. Freud called this type of thinking 'magical' thinking, characteristic of childhood, when the child has the mother's breast 'magically' appear whenever it cries.

Camus called this European mentality 'Christianity for others, pagansim for oneself.'

When you're a child, you think Jesse James was really cool for robbing banks. When you get older, you realize that real people died in those bank robberies, so he wasn't really that cool at all.

A propos of nothing..

Comment is free: Nicks nixed

I have no idea why this comment piece appears in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian today. But it a bit surprising to hear that France only stopped using the guillotine in 1977.

Silly politics

Capitulation - Possums Pollytics

I just had a quick read of the post above, which goes into a lot of detail about what the Cosby-Textor analysis of the issues revealed.

Howard haters are taking so much joy at the moment at the likely looking defeat of the Liberal government that are not prone to be troubled by the obvious question: why has appearance of Rudd as leader even (apparently) turned several issues from one previously Liberal "owned" ones to Labor "owned" ones?

The difference that Rudd has made to the polling on issues is surely at the heart of the puzzlement of the journalistic commentators. The force of one personality is significant to politics (look at Mark Latham,) but there seems something a little weird about one person being able to convince everyone that his government would be best on a range of issues now.

Any reader who has long disliked Howard need not bother commenting here along the lines of "well, it's just that he has never really been popular", because that is not really addressing my point.

My personal theory is still that Rudd is in league with the Devil, or at the very least using Jedi mind tricks. He will probably look like Yoda when he gets older too. (He already speaks in a funny fashion, with that auto interviewing style.)

A documentary worth seeing

In the Shadow of the Moon - Rotten Tomatoes

It's about the Apollo program, and has received very good reviews.

Getting naked at LHC, and black hole bombs?

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure I have never seen CERN, or anyone else, mention the possibility of a naked singularity being created at the LHC rather than (or as well as) mini black holes. Yet it would appear that some credible physicist types think it is still an open question.

Here's an extract from the relevant paper, which is from 2002:

There is thus no compelling reason to discard the possibility that the collision of charged particles produces a naked singularity, an event which would probably be indistinguishable from ordinary particle production, with the naked singularity (possibly) behaving as an intermediate, highly unstable state. The phenomenology of naked singularities is probably rather different from that of black holes, as they are generally expected to explode in a very sudden event instead of evaporating via the Hawking process (at least in an early stage; see, e.g., [20] and Refs. therein).

We should however add that the present literature does not reliably cover the case of such tiny naked singularities and their actual phenomenology is an open question. A naked singularity is basically a failure in the causality structure of space-time mathematically admitted by the field equations of general relativity. Most studies have thus focused on their realization as the (classical) end-point of the gravitational collapse of compact objects (such as dust clouds) and on their stability by employing quantum field theory on the resulting background. However, one might need more than semiclassical tools to investigate both the formation by collison of particles
and the subsequent time evolution [20]. In particular, to our knowledge, no estimate of the life-time of a naked singularity of the sort of interest here is yet available.

I thought that naked singularities had been ruled out as a general concept a long time ago. (They are, as I understand it, the heart of the black hole without the cloaking event horizon.) It would seem from the above that no one has a clear idea how they would behave, or how long they would last. It seems to me something that the safety review for the LHC should address.

Another paper I recently found while trawling the 'net also raises issues I would like to see better explained. This is from someone at Princeton in 2002, and has the cheery title : "Explosive Black hole fission and fusion in large extra dimensions".

The paper seems to be mainly about "explosions" that could be caused by the evaporation process of micro black holes, including those that could be created at the LHC. What remains very unclear to the lay reader is whether the amount of energy involved in this is nothing to worry about, or not. But the paper does end with this curious section:

One cannot avoid considering bomb construction using either fission or fusion ignoring the problems of creating and handling small black holes. A black hole could be prepared close to its critical size ready to fuse and then activated by adding matter and reaching “critical mass”. Timing the fission process is more difficult, since the time for decay is determined by the Hawking radiation which cannot be hurried artificially, but perhaps it is possible to balance the Hawking radiation with incoming radiation until activation. However, these bombs have a big disadvantage, since if one is in possession of small black holes, one could collide them with very similar explosions occurring both in emitted energy and time scale (being a classical process), and since igniting the phase transition seems to be the more complicated process it would probably be disfavoured, and luckily not used for destructive ends.

Err, I wish physicists would be clear when they are using terms like "bomb" and "explosion" in papers which are discussing micro black holes whether they are presenting stuff which indicates possible danger.

This mention of a black hole bomb (and by the way there is another type I haven't mentioned yet) is completely unclear as to whether it is talking science fiction stuff centuries away, or something plausible anytime you can start creating mini black holes at an accelerator.

Some clarification is deserved, as with naked singularities.

(Oh, and the fact that micro black holes may be being created in the atmosphere 100 times a year is relevant to this too, I know. But I still worry about the "stationary" black hole or naked singularity as an issue at the LHC, as naturally occurring ones would normally have high velocity. Also, I am sure I have mentioned a paper recently which suggested that micro black holes may be harder to create than we think, even with large extra dimensions. Perhaps they are made by fluke in the atmosphere only very occasionally, causing events like Tungaska or some unaccounted for atomic blast signals detected by satellite? All possibilities should be addressed, I reckon.)

Good point

9/11 theories as factless as those of Bush - Opinion - theage.com.au

Christopher Scanlan makes a good point in his criticism of 9-11 conspiracy theorists:

The September 11 conspiracy theories are like a left-liberal version of intelligent design. Just as the adherents of intelligent design invoke a great designer whenever they come across some part of the natural world that they personally can't explain, the September 11 conspiracy theorists invoke the White House whenever they can't account for the events of that day....

In the world inhabited by conspiracy theorists, even the absence of evidence is itself turned into evidence of how large and how successful the cover-up has been.

In the same way that supporters of intelligent design lead away from an explanation of the natural world, the September 11 conspiracy theories lead us away from any deeper understanding of the attacks, into a fantasy world in which the US has no enemies — except its own leaders.

I am not stridently against all aspects of the intelligent design argument, by the way, as I have much interest in the anthropic principle when it comes to cosmology, but I still think the comparison is quite valid.

Howard's way

The Australian is suggesting a Federal election will be called this week for October, and that John Howard will stay on as Leader.

For all the poll driven speculation that Howard might resign before an election, I just can't really see what sense it would make in light of the polling not so long ago that had indicated that Peter Costello would lose votes for the Coalition rather than gain them. If the likes of Andrew Bolt and even Janet Albrechtsen are going to let the polls determine who should lead, shouldn't they at least be consistent and accept Costello's polling as relevant too?

And as was noted by Lenore on Insiders today, Costello would surely be 'tainted' by his past support for all major government policies, and you can't imagine him being leader for a month and coming up with any significant new direction.

I find Andrew Bolt's input into Coalition fortunes particularly galling. He has painted himself into a corner on greenhouse scepticism, and I would bet money that his columns on this have influenced some in the Liberal backbench to maintain scepticism, which in turn (as conservative Harry Clarke argues) has almost certainly harmed the government's attempted message to the electorate that it does take greenhouse seriously now. Thus having helped create one problem for the government, Bolt blames Howard for staying around too long.

For what it is worth, I think the arguments for Howard resigning just don't pass muster.

As I said a few posts ago, I reckon the Liberals have to come up with some surprising and new policy initiatives during the campaign to make up ground. I hope the policy boys & girls have been hard at it while Howard has been otherwise distracted by APEC (which, incidentally, I can't see giving the government any significant bounce. The security level is going to be seen as overkill, and the Federal government will probably get blamed even though it was the New South Wales Labor controlled police who were seen as being rough with a couple of protesters on the TV last night . I think John Howard probably just can't believe his run of bad luck lately.)

UPDATE: Tim Blair and Andrew Landeryou come out in support of Howard staying on. Yay.

International adultery

A couple of months ago, I briefly mentioned a book comparing different nations' cultural attitudes to adultery ("Lust in Translation".) Here's a link to a fairly long review of the book which provides many more interesting snippets of information. For example:

The figure that is often heard - that more than half of married men, and a quarter of married women will cheat on their spouses over their lifetime - turns out to be both highly problematic and overestimated. These later figures come from Alfred Kinsey's studies in the 1950's, and they are based upon badly unrepresentative samples (46). This was exacerbated by later studies by Shere Hite and Cosmopolitan magazine which placed adultery figures as high as 70% for both men and women. It turns out that in the U.S. only about 20% of men and 10% of women have extramarital sex over their lifetimes (50), although, as Druckerman notes, statistical evidence in this area is strangely hard to come by.

Yes indeed, adulterers should be wary of consoling themselves that "everyone does it" if such belief is based on statistics in Cosmopolitan.

As for America's love of therapy:

...while there were only 3000 marriage and family therapists in the U.S. in 1970 (98), that number had risen to 50,000 by 2004 (100), a staggering 1600% increase!

The review talks about how American therapy is heavily geared towards complete disclosure to the partner. Contrast this:

The French, who surprisingly commit adultery about as little as Americans do, view the situation quite differently. In order to protect their spouses from the pain of their adultery, French cheaters rarely reveal the truth of their affair to their spouse, even when the affair has come to light. And they rarely feel guilt over living their double life.

Russians, meanwhile, are apparently the most active adulterers around. Funny, I always find it hard to imagine a lot of sex going on in any country that is freezing for much of the year. Must be something to do with coming from Brisbane; it makes my mind concentrate simply on how cold I am whenever I visit somewhere with daytime temperatures below about 5 degrees.

On the home front

I've been too busy with domestic duties to blog. Here's what I have learned over the past few days:

* my 4 yr old daughter needed day surgery (for a dental procedure.) She charmed the nurses, which is entirely understandable (I am a biased father) and was a very good girl. I have no particular worries about relatively minor procedures like this, but I found it a bit more disconcerting than I expected to hold her hand and watch her fall asleep under the anaesthetic gas. It's too much like one's imagination of being with someone at death; that's the problem.

* Speaking of anaesthesia, I was talking to a doctor recently and the topic of suicide and anaesthetists came up. He said it was true that they had a higher rate, due to their familiarity with the ease with which the right drugs can end it all. I mentioned that, as far as stress goes, I would have imagined that their job was something like that old adage about war: mostly a lot of sitting around being bored, interrupted by the occasional period of absolute terror. I was told that it's not like that for them because many different types of surgery require blood pressure to be well controlled to limit bleeding, and the surgeons can be demanding throughout the procedure that the anaesthetist keep the pressure within a very tight range. That can be difficult, apparently. Interesting...

* I picked up the new (actually, second hand) car. It is amazing the stuff you get in cars these days for the price. I am not into cars in any significant way: the one I am replacing (which is the one I use for work) is 13 years old. Getting this new car has reinforced what I have said many times: why does anyone really need a car worth over, say, $50,000 these days? The one I got is 18 months old, cost barely over $20,000, yet has all the features that I can imagine ever really wanting. If I was benevolent dictator (and if government over regulation actually worked, which I know it doesn't) the law against manufacturers wasting time on building luxury cars would be high on my agenda.

* New, bigger cars, involve unwanted re-arrangements of garage junk.

Tell us what you really think of tattoos, Bryan

Thought Experiments : The Blog: Ponder Post 10: Tattoos?

Bryan Appleyard really doesn't like tattoos. It's a funny post.

The rise and rise of the fashionable modern tattoo is like watching Kevin Rudd's popularity in the polls: all logic suggests it must come to a stop sometime; indeed a reversal in fortune is long overdue, but for some mysterious reason it just keeps on going up. You'll all regret it in 20 years, you know!

Education Schmeducation

Why are the ideas of what makes for good teaching method, and a good education system overall, in such an ever-changing mess? Live for 40 years or more and it seems you will witness the educationists change their minds at least a dozen times, covering everything from cuisinaire rods (which seemed to fly in and out of fashion within barely a few years,) whole word versus phonetics or some sort of compromise position, how best to teach foreign languages, the culture wars that affect the teaching of history, whether homework is or isn't all that beneficial, and even what age is best for kids to start school in the first place.

Witness this article from The Times on this last issue. Apparently, kids can start in the English school system at a particularly young age compared to their European counterparts:

The latest government figures indicate that around 80 per cent of children enter school before their fifth birthday and last year there were almost 800,000 four-year-olds in our primary schools. By comparison, children in France, Portugal, Belgium, and Norway start school at 6, while the school starting age in many Scandinavian countries is 7.

The article quotes some personal experience:

Solvie Jorgensen moved to the UK from Norway when her daughter had just turned 4. She initially opted to defer school entry for a year: “It seemed much too early: in Norway Freya would have had two more years of nursery.” But Freya pleaded to be allowed to start, so they enrolled her in November. “I was pleasantly surprised, but still think there’s a far greater emphasis on numbers and letters from a young age in British schools than in those back home. There, formal teaching doesn’t start until 6, and even then teachers are more concerned about children being happy at school and making friends than whether they can write their name and count to ten.”

In Australia, meanwhile, it seems to be taken for granted now that "prep year" is important and should be put in place everywhere, even though it seems it is all play based and just a glorified kindy.

Oh, I'm sure there will be the studies that show how much better this is for children down the track, etc, etc; but the problem is it seems you only ever have to wait a few years before contradictory studies will be out on virtually any area of education. (Well, this is the impression one gets, anyway.) For example, from The Times article:

...a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development indicated that by the time they reach their teens, the gap between the achievements of students from professional and working-class backgrounds is wider in the UK than in most other countries. Caroline Sharp, of the National Foundation for Educational Research, sums it up thus: “There appears to be no compelling educational rationale for a school starting age of 5 or for the practice of admitting four-year-olds to reception classes.”

My particular grudge against educationalists at the moment is the way that maths is being taught to my 7 year old son.

I can't be the only parent out there who is irritated by the heavily verbal way in which basic maths concepts are taught now, surely? It's hard to explain here, but there are new terms which are used to try to get kids to understand the concepts. (I forget the sorts of phrases, but it includes "sharing numbers", or "friendly numbers" and ...oh god I can't remember them now, but the parents need a glossary to understand the new terms being used with 6 and 7 year olds to help them understand the concepts of addition and multiplication, etc.)

The problem is that, if your child, like mine, is behind the 8-ball on language, this really stuffs him up in understanding the highly verbal (there's probably a better word, but I can't think of it now) way they are trying to teach maths too. Simple rote learning of tables did not have this same problem. "Oh but it was so mechanical and they didn't have a deep understanding." Bah!

I have mentioned this (very politely) to my son's teachers, and they seem to quite agree with me that the way they have to teach it is problematic for someone like my son, but there is not much they can do about that, apart from giving him extra help in maths, although even that will be highly verbal too.

I find it very irritating that, even in maths at the level of grades one and two, phrases with a specific contextual meaning unknown to parents are being used. Sure, everyone is ready for high school maths to be difficult for the parents, but for them to not even understand the terms being used in homework at Grade 2? It probably looked good to some educational psychologist in some study or other, but in a few years they will probably pull back from it for the exact reason I am complaining about here.

I also trust that this is not something peculiar to the school my boy is attending. I hope I have also made it clear that this is not a complaint about the teachers in the classroom, about whom (at my son's school at any rate) I have no complaint at all. It's about the educational theoreticians, and the apparent sense in which either changes are made with no strong evidence as to effectiveness, or the evidence changes over time anyway.

Any reader who is a parent of primary school kids are welcome to share their views. (Although I suppose if your kid is writing mini novels and top of the class at maths, you probably wouldn't have even noticed the problem.)

The luck of the Adams

Scott Adams' analytical reaction to being the victim of a bird crap attack made me laugh quite a bit.

Aeronautic engineers not required after all

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god - Yahoo!7 News

Nuclear Japan

All cost bets off if Big One hits nuke plant | The Japan Times Online

This article talks about the nuclear industry in Japan, and notes this:

A year ago, the government revised its 1981 guidelines for nuclear safety, obliging operators to make plants sturdy enough for quakes above the previous standard of magnitude-6.5. Still no new higher magnitude minimum was specified, and individual utilities were left to determine appropriate levels themselves.

That is cold comfort for anybody seeking guarantees of safety should the Big One hit. Records show that at least one magnitude-7 or greater quake occurs almost yearly, while the Meteorological Agency forecasts a magnitude-8 quake will strike the Tokai region in central Japan "in the near future."

It does surprise me that a country as seismically unstable as Japan has gone into nuclear with such enthusiasm. Australia, on the other hand, should have no such worries at all.

The decline of romance

Both this week's Time magazine and The Guardian have articles which lament the current state of how romance is dealt with in the cinema. The Guardian article is particularly acerbic, ripping into the spate of recent films which are basically "male loser made good by the love of a good woman" films. I can't say that I have seen the films that Joe Queenan complains about, but I suspect I would share most of his reaction.

It is true when you think about it: Hollywood has become very bad at decent romance stories for quite a number of years now. The last really good romantic film with both male and female interest that I can think of would probably be Shakespeare in Love, and that is nearly a decade ago now. I saw it first on an airplane, and on the old projection screen set-up (not the new fangled seat-back LCD,) and still I felt affected by the ending.

In the Time magazine article, Richard Curtis, whose films I actually don't care for, does say something that sounds about right:

"If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind," he notes. "Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental."

There is also the point that some real life love stories really are so remarkable that you imagine if they were written up as fiction they wouldn't be believed. Case in point: this week's Australian Story episode.

Science and politicians

As both science and politics make regular appearances here, how many readers out there know who the current Science Minister is in the Federal government, and who Labor has for a shadow Science Minister?

I couldn't remember either without checking, which probably says something about the low priority that Science gets in the Federal government here. (It's Julie Bishop as the minister, and Senator Kim Carr as the Shadow. Both have science bundled up with other areas which almost certainly take up more of their time.)

Julie Bishop is an ex-lawyer, although a fairly high flying one by the sounds. (Who'd have guessed that you could be a partner of big law firm if you have a funny stare like that.)

Kim Carr is an ex teacher from a technical college. (At least he is not a union hack.)

But really, you get the feeling that science would be far, far down on their list of private interests.

I wonder when was the last time we had a science minister who really had a genuine, pre-existing deep interest in science?

Why can't I be science minister? It would be like Kim Beazley in Defence: the personal interest would make the job a pleasure. Except you have to deal with other politicians too, and I am sure that can ruin your day.

Micro black holes (continued)

This paper isn't new, and it may or may not have not great relevance to the issue of safety of micro black holes at the LHC. (Unfortunately, I am not an expert on gamma radiation.) But the paper is interesting for two reasons:

1. It suggests that if the LHC can produce micro black holes, then atmospheric collisions from cosmic rays may produce about 100 micro black holes a year for the entire surface of the earth. (Astute readers will recall, though, that these are different from accelerator created ones because they would have high velocity from the way they are made.)

2. It also says that even micro black holes (or, if I am reading it right, their remnants) could create high energy radiation. As this is hard to summarise, I'll just copy it here:

A charged particle being accelerated by a black hole can produce g -rays with energies in the multi-TeV range before the particle passes beyond the horizon radius provided that the curvature gradient of the space around the black hole is large enough. Such curvature gradients occur in quantum black holes, black holes whose masses are of the order the Planck mass. A calculation taking into account special relativity (but not general relativity) shows us that to produce g -ray energies in the 10 TeV range a single electronic charge would have to be accelerated by a black hole with a mass equal to five times that of the Planck mass.

The microscopic black holes needed to produce ultrahigh g -rays may be the remnants of primordial black holes. Such black holes can be produced by
• Inflationary horizon-scale fluctuations
• Density fluctuations at phase transitions and bubble formation and collapse
• Baryon isocurvature fluctuations on small scales.

Large-mass primordial black holes (M > 1015 gm) decaying via Hawking radiation [5] as described by the canonical ensemble in 4 space-time dimensions, (dM/dt)∼ −M−2, would have decayed to a Planck-size mass in the present epoch.Microscopic black holes produced in this manner could be stable if quantum gravity effects terminate the decay process.

Copious microscopic black hole production can also occur if large extra dimensions exist. In this scenario black hole production can occur as the result of the collision of particles with total center of mass energy above the effective Planck scale, which can be as low as the electroweak scale mew ∼ 1TeV. Black holes could thus be produced in collisions of high energy cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere. As we show in the next Section, such black holes may live long enough to create ultrahigh g -rays even without taking quantum gravity effects into account.

Seems possibly relevant to me to the issue of the safety of the LHC at CERN, if its going to be creating thousands of little black holes and black hole remnants, many of which are going to hang around rather than zipping off into space.

Today's science reading assignments

* Technology Review talks up hybrid and plug in cars, but isn't optimistic that American companies will be the ones to succeed in this field.

* Purdue University keeps talking up its hydrogen generating technology (and they keep using the same dorky student photo).

* A telescope in Hawaii gets a new digital camera that definitely won't fit in your pocket to look for small asteroids. (The Howard government would gain some science credibility if it would re-instate the tiny funding it took away for looking for asteroids from down here too.)

* Those Germans sure know how to make buying a beer easy:

A new system that scans customers' fingerprints and deducts the grocery bill from their bank accounts has taken supermarkets in southwestern Germany by storm and is being picked up by hardware stores, school canteens and even the country's ubiquitous beer gardens.

Cheers!

By the way...

I am probably not the first to say it, but I really think that Kath & Kim might have "jumped the shark" with last week's episode. The story thread which did it for me was the part about Kim and her "do it yourself" botox kit.

That it would have dire consequences for Sharon was entirely predictable, and although they have presented the results of cosmetic surgery in an over the top fashion in a previous series, the Sharon as Frankenstein schtick was really just pushing an old idea too far.

The fact that Workchoices got an unfavourable mention didn't worry me. In fact, I thought it may be a bit satirical from a conservative aspect to show it as a concern of Kath in an episode where she was played as especially gullible and dumb.

A half serious, half stupid, post

Further to my last post, there are two clear events which may be contributing to the latest Newpoll: the huge inconvenience to Sydney-siders of APEC, and the horse flu epidemic being seemingly blamed on government run quarantine deficiencies.

I've seen it said many times (especially at LP) that, rather than inconvenience all of Sydney, they should have held the meeting on some resort, with Hamilton Island most frequently suggested. However, a quick Google around the net seems to indicate that it can accommodate 5,000 (and how many of them would be in apartments which are normally families of 3 to 5 sharing?)

A news story from July says that originally there were 7,000 visitors expected, but it had dropped back to 5,000.

As Hamilton Island is about the biggest single, isolated resort I can think of in Australia, the point seems to be that it was simply not a realistic prospect to ever plan to hold it there.

As for horses: those with flu shown on TV never look particularly sick to me. Sure, some die, but horses seem to be fragile flowers who can die of the weirdest things. (The world is divided into two camps: those who believe horses are noble and magnificent creatures, and those who think they are stupid and inscrutable. Guess which camp I belong to?)

I have a theory that there is a horse conspiracy to feign sickness either because:

* they would just like to have a good rest from all that running around, or

* they are all secret Labor supporters, and they know how to create bad PR for John Howard.

As I don't trust horses at the best of times, I think they have all been organising in secret at the racetrack, deciding on a "Cough for Kevin" policy or some such.

Just a theory...

Just ridiculous

I just heard on Lateline that tomorrow's Newspoll gives Labor an 18% two party preferred lead, with the Liberals on 41% TPP!

The air of unreality about the prospect of a severe punishment being handed out to a government that economically has performed so well, and is (despite what The Australian said last week) still showing signs of being policy proactive, is close to solidifying into some grim real life Twilight Zone episode of 3 years duration.

I mean, are people really concentrating out there? Rudd's health policy might be impressing people because all they hear is $2 billion extra funding, without (one suspects) the average Joe also noticing that the regular budget is already $42 billion. And haven't people noticed the problem of the staffing of hospitals, no matter who runs them, which is hardly something that any government can fix overnight? As for a constitutional take over of hospitals if the States don't "perform", well just how likely does anyone think it is that this would be truly desired and achieved by Federal Labor?

With Industrial Relations, small business, which we are told employs so many in the economy, didn't seem to get anything out of all of Rudd's worrying about not offending the "big end" of town. There is still room for a union dominated government to fiddle the final legislation further to the union side.

Greenhouse gases: people hear Rudd say that Labor has made a target commitment; but it's for 2050 for God's sake! Do people think that targets that far out, in the absence of the interim targets and the clear practical steps as to how any targets are to be met is in any way actually meaningful? The Kevin 07 site (see last link) even has the hide to list under its "Climate Change and Water fresh thinking" heading a commitment to "put an end to Mr Howard’s plan for 25 nuclear reactors, coast to coast across Australia." Oh yes, that will help with greenhouse gases. What a "fresh idea" it is to encourage a 1970's era fear of safety of nuclear power.

It may well be too late (I am expecting that will be the general thrust of all commentary tomorrow), but Howard is going to have to truly pull something out the hat policy-wise to win this election. I would think something dramatic in the following areas is needed:

* the housing affordability issue must be addressed. Howard did not dismiss the recent tax concessions suggested by John Symons, and something like that would be very welcome by the younger generation just trying to break into the market now;

* I still think a full reversal on the long ago withdrawn dental treatment support for the elderly would be worthwhile;

* why should Rudd have all the advantage of platitudes over reality? The Liberals could do something that sounds dramatic for greenhouse gases but in reality does nothing much overall. Some form of huge support for hybrid or plug in cars perhaps?

I thought Matt Price's column in the Weekend Australian summed things up pretty well too.

And to go back a few posts: should I get used to answering my own questions all the time? Yes, I fear, I must get used to it for the next 3 years.

UPDATE: just to be clear: there would be no surprise being expressed here if Labor was currently on, say, a 5 to 8% lead, as any government (and leader) of 11 years duration has its work cut out when it seeks re-election. It's the size of the lead, and the seeming never-ending triumph of platitudes, promises on the never-never, and smarminess, that's causing offence.

Some economic history

There was a good interview on Counterpoint today with economist Gregory Clark talking up his book "A Farewell to Alms" about economic history.

This book seems to have something of a slow burn. Clark's website lists reviews, and although the New York Times covered it well in November 2006, there have been a spate of recent reviews, including a short one in The Economist, which opens with his most controversial idea:

WHY did the Industrial Revolution begin in the 18th century? Why did it start in Britain, a medium-sized island in north-west Europe? And, once the revolution had occurred, why did the gains accrue so disproportionately to countries in Europe and North America?

These are questions that have kept economists busy for decades. Gregory Clark, of the University of California, Davis, thinks the answers lie in the nature of European societies. “Millennia of living in stable societies, under tight Malthusian pressures that rewarded effort, accumulation and fertility limitation, encouraged the development of cultural forms—in terms of work inputs, time preference and family formation—which facilitated modern economic growth,” he contends.

This is not a fashionable thesis. Indeed, it may well get Mr Clark into trouble, given the implication that other societies are less “evolved”. His argument is that throughout the Middle Ages British society was slowly acquiring characteristics that made it a favourable agent for rapid economic change. The rich tended to have more children who survived than their poorer compatriots and this led to a kind of downward mobility as sons of merchants became small traders, sons of traders became craftsmen and so on. The result was that middle-class attributes such as patience, hard work and education spread through society.

As other reviews note, this is a big contract to Jared Diamond's idea in "Guns Germs and Steel" that Europe took off because it was just geographically lucky. (Oddly, I used to quite like Diamond as an essayist in Discover magazine in the 1980's - 90's, but I find him an un-engaging writer when he is at book length.)

Clark come across well in the Counterpoint interview, and it is well worth listening to.

First ever poll

Horses for Courses

Inspired by horse flu fever in Australia, it at least provides proof that horses look a little like cows to me.

Backtracking over the last week

Here's some stuff I would have posted about last week if I had been posting:

1. Foreign Correspondent had an interesting story on how the residents of Greenland are quite happy about global warming. It was full of nice scenery of a part of the world that rarely shows up anywhere on television. You can go watch it on broadband at the link. Did Tim Blair miss this?

2. Slate had a handy article that teaches you all of the things that men not looking for sex should not do while in a public toilet. (For all of the activity that is said to take place in public toilets, I can't say I have ever been in one where it came to my attention that someone was hanging around for that purpose.) Also in Slate, Christopher Hitchens had a particularly salacious article about the same topic. He did a (I think) Vanity Fair article about oral sex some time ago, and it provoked in me the same feeling that, when he deals with the details of sex, he becomes a bit too creepily enthusiastic for my liking.

3. Julia Gillard turned up on Lateline (can't find the link right now) and did her voice coach proud.

4. Horses. This deserves a separate post later today.

Back again

So, how did my little holiday from blogging go? Not too bad thanks. What did I achieve? Well let me list the things that I achieved:

1. Saw too many Kevin Rudd advertisements on TV;

2. Did some long outstanding tax stuff;

3. Realised as a result of #2 the true extent of current indebtedness;

4. Nonetheless got a bank to agree to give me money for a new car;

5. Chose new car, but have not yet taken delivery;

6. Discovered how little present car is now worth, and it only has 176,000 km on it;

7. Came down with something that made me feel crook for a couple of days, but apart from nausea and occasional shivering, it came with no overt signs of illness and hence led to little sympathy;

8. Continued to creep out my son (age 7) by watching scary Doctor Who episodes with him (we actually had to abandon this week's episode with the angel statues, as it was too much for him);

9. I decided to become a woman;

10. Went to a big Indian restaurant in South Brisbane for the first time (Punjabi Palace) and was very impressed with the food.

Is this list completely accurate, you could ask? When it comes to lists, I can say without fear of contradiction, that no it is not.

And when it comes to doing a half-arsed parody of Rudd-speak, is it much of a challenge? No, not at all.

Break

It's not just this blog that is distracting me from work lately, it's all the links from my blog to the other sites of the wonderful WWW that I love to visit. (Many of them daily or more frequently, particularly if I comment on some other blog and then want to follow the responses.)

Really, I love the internet. This blog continues its useful function for me as a record of the things I find interesting, but as for its other purpose of having my take on the world noticed, well that seems to have found its natural, very low, level. A good day here is about 50 hits, but perhaps half a dozen (or more) of those will be me using the links as my bookmarks.

Anyhow, this is all preamble to saying I need a week's break to concentrate on work, and this I mean it! I actually want to give up looking at the internet completely for a week, but I don't know if I can avoid visiting the news sites. Especially if that long wished for video of Kevin R and Julia G turns up.

You watch, something spectacular that I long to comment on will probably happen this week. But I want someone to promise to come and break my typing fingers if I breach this self imposed absence.

Remember to come back. Fifty visits a day is pretty pathetic, but coming back and finding its now stuck on a twenty or so for the week after I start posting; that's just depressing.

And could someone apart from Caz, TimT and Geoff add a comment that might give me general encouragement? I seem to have some regular visitors who never say "boo", and it would just be nice to know who at least one or two of them are.

Pilger's latest

A gentle kick in the fundamentals - Times Online

Here's an extract from the above amusing review of John Pilger's latest effort at documentary:

Pilger’s journalistic compass is set by the position of America: wherever that is, he swings the other way. So, based on the sound principle of my enemy’s enemy is my friend, he set about an obscenely embarrassing tongue-bath of Hugo Chavez, the megalomaniac president of Venezuela.

Pilger’s interview technique is not to have any technique visible. He listens to himself asking questions that include answers, then to little else. He picks through the wreckage of people’s misfortune, gleaning shards of proof to complement his mosaic ideology, while dismissing and discarding anything that could be a contradiction. This relentless film looked like Brezhnev-era Soviet propaganda.

All about Chavez

Reason Magazine - The Caudillo in His Labyrinth

This week's happy alcohol news

Alcohol may lower risk of kidney cancer | Health | Reuters

Drinking more than two glasses of red wine per week was associated with a 40-percent reduction in kidney cell cancer risk compared with drinking no red wine, the investigators observed, and there were similar trends for more than two glasses per week of white wine or strong beer.

Could be an interesting movie...

Ahead of 'September Dawn,' Mormon Church revisits dark period | csmonitor.com

The root of all evil

Comment is free: Springtime in the desert

Dana Moss has an interesting post talking about the very, very limited progression towards women's rights in Saudi Arabia. Bear in mind that they currently cannot vote, drive, own real estate, or show their face in public.

One thing that is planned to "help" women is this:

.....an all-female industrial zone employing roughly 10,000 women in more than 80 factories.

So, the right to be a factory worker is recognized. I wonder how they will get there?

Anyway, these two paragraphs show that there is just a tiny bit of conservatism to be overcome yet:

Characteristic of such hostility from the religious elite is the reaction of the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, to the mixing of men and women - conventional practice in international business terms. In 2004, after witnessing mingling during the Jeddah Economic Forum, he issued a furious reprimand: "I am pained by such shameful behaviour ... allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe."

Nor is resistance to women's economic empowerment limited to the clergy. Hardline factions within the royal family, such as the mercurial Prince Nayef, currently interior minister, remain powerful. When faced with demands to allow women to drive, he proclaimed: "I am astonished as to why this issue is being discussed."

Good luck reformers. See you at the ground-breaking inaugural Young Men and Women's Chaperoned Tea Party and Evening Dance to be held in the year 2250.

Guns and teens

The short, happy life of Rhys Jones - Times Online

I haven't been reading much til now about the shooting death (by teenagers, apparently) of an 11 year old boy in Liverpool. The story above, and this report here, give some background, and ends on this surprising note:

Last year, 48 under-18s were arrested for gun crime in Merseyside.

Confusing the brain for science

Scientists induce out-of-body experiences in the laboratory. Slate Magazine

This is an interesting article on recent research on inducing something a little (though not that much) like an out of body experience.

It makes mention of an illusion I hadn't heard of before:

The "rubber hand illusion," for example, can trick you into losing track of a single body part. Someone strokes a rubber hand in front of you while at the same time stroking your real hand out of view. After a while, you start to think the rubber hand is your own.

How odd. Pity I don't have any rubber hands around the house with which to try.

Of course, Kevin Rudd has probably already doing it with a John Howard rubber head. Boom boom.

What doesn't it cover?

Breathe Islam :: Protect your child :: June :: 2007

From this post:

The Prophet said, “If anyone of you, when having sexual intercourse with his wife, says: Bismillah, Allahumma jannibna-Sh-Shaitan wa jannib-ish-Shaitan ma razaqtana,
and if it is destined that they should have a child, then Satan will never be able to harm him.”

The meaning of this prayer is given in the following post:

‘With the name of Allah! O Allah! Save us from the evil of Shaytan and save whatever children You bestow us.’

A religion whose founder recommends praying during sex is a religion too far.

On Shelley

Avenging Angel: Books: The New Yorker

I love reading about radicals who think they know what's best for the world, reject religion and all traditional morality, and yet never recognize their own nastiness. Shelley is a very good example of this, and this review of a new book about him has plenty of examples of his unpleasantness.

I suppose his first wife (aged 16) didn't fully appreciate his attitude to marriage:

When Harriet Westbrook, in rebellion against her father and her school, begged Shelley to rescue her, it was the kind of cause that he found hard to resist. He agreed to elope with a girl he had never considered more than a friend. “If I know anything about love, I am not in love,” he had written just weeks before the marriage. He loved the idea of getting married even less: “A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter.” But he recognized that living together out of wedlock would hurt Harriet’s reputation much more than his own, and he agreed to go through with the ceremony.

A child or two later he subsequently fell in love with another 16 year old:

....in the summer of 1814, Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin. Mary was then sixteen, the same age that Harriet had been when Shelley married her, and she had intellectual gifts that Harriet could never match. Just as important was her intellectual pedigree: she was the daughter of William Godwin, a radical thinker whom Shelley worshipped, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the crusader for women’s rights. Add the fact that Mary was instantly smitten with Shelley—it seems that they had sex for the first time by her mother’s grave, to mark their spiritual union—and Harriet never really had a chance.

There is a lot more detail in the review.

I had read about his life somewhere before, but it's good to be reminded about this sort of stuff.

Just nuts

Home is where the booze is - Times Online

The trend for some parents to let their teenage kids know that they can have alcohol at a party, rather than just let it be brought in secretly, seems to be taken to an insane extreme by some in England. Have a read of this account of a party for a group of 14 year olds:

The invitation read: “Let my mum know if you can drink and if so bring some.”...

On the way to the party, I asked my son if he wanted to take a bottle of wine. He declined then retracted, saying he supposed he would if others were drinking. Reluctantly, I bought a bottle of white wine. I did not want him to be embarrassed and besides, I was looking forward to a drink at the party myself....

By 10.30pm the consequences of my friend’s drinks policy were all too obvious. Everywhere I looked there was someone vomiting. I wondered what their parents would be thinking if they knew their children were quite so drunk. They had, after all, supplied the booze.

I don't think this comment which follows the article is meant to be funny, but it made me laugh:

A whole bottle of wine for one 14 year old's personal use? What lunacy! When I was 14, my parents would not let me take more than four bottles of lager to a party. I'd inevitably scrounge another couple, but that was outside their control. My parents have continued to place (low) limits on what I can take to parties - but these days I am more often in pubs and clubs.

For Space Cadets

This month's Air & Space Magazine has a couple of interesting articles. One is about the ongoing work on hypersonic flight, which mentions the leading role played by research being done at the University of Queensland.

The other is about the design work for the new Orion capsule, that is expected to become the workhorse for getting around in space for quite a long time. Unfortunately, it still sounds awfully claustrophobic for the average punter.

What is wrong with Hedley Thomas?

Interview discredits claim by Andrews | The Australian

I am sorely tempted to say he's just an idiot, given the opening paragraphs in this morning's report about the Dr Haneef record of interview:

CLAIMS by Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews that his decision to cancel Mohamed Haneef's visa was based on much more than a mobile phone SIM card given to a second-cousin have been undermined by the release of the second police record of interview.

Police officer Adam Simms, who questioned Dr Haneef during the second interview last month, told him: "Tell me exactly. Now let's not forget, Mohamed, the reason you are sitting here and the reason you've been in police custody is because of this issue with the SIM card -- now it's causing you a lot of grief. We need to be clear as to what is happening with this SIM card. OK?"

How the hell does the fact that the police said that in the record of interview discredit Andrew's claim that there is significant other evidence that informed his decision?

Thomas is now just making no sense at all in his determination to criticise Andrews.

I downloaded the record of interview last night and had a quick read. (At 380 odd pages, with many of them on procedural matters, you really have to head to near the end to get to the interesting stuff.)

While Dr Haneef does answer all questions, I honestly don't think that anyone with an open mind who reads it will come away thinking that it represents some form of complete exoneration of him.

Tit for tat

No it's not another Kevin Rudd post, this time it's about China giving the US a bit of stick over the quality of its soybeans:

China's quality watchdog warns on U.S. soybeans

What's the bet that there is a political motive to this. You reject our lead toys, then don't expect us to like your soybeans.

A curious miracle

A night journey through Jerusalem -Times Online

This article explains the origin of the Muslim's need to pray 5 times a day:

Since the Koran does not provide specific detail of the Night Journey, historians have to draw on accounts by Islamic scholars versed in the Hadith, or prophetic traditions, for the specific details of what Armstong describes as “the most important mystical experience of Muhammad’s life”.

Alighting on the Temple Mount, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and other prophets, whom he led in prayer. Then Muhammad and Gabriel ascended the seven heavens to the Throne of God, who instructed Muhammad on the five daily prayers. According to tradition, God initially said Muslims should pray 50 times a day. But on his way down Muhammad met Moses, who told him to go back and get the number reduced. Moses kept sending Muhammad back to plead with God until the number of prescribed prayers was reduced to five.

As Armstrong points out: “This tradition shows that religion was not meant to be a crushing burden, but a moderate discipline which everybody could manage.”

Abu Sway agrees: “The amount decided on shows that God is merciful, and the intercession by Moses shows that there should be moderation in matters of faith.”

This idea of being caught as negotiator between Moses and God is a curious one.

As a story, it's close to the Genesis one about Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom, but at least there was something significant at stake there. Arguing the toss with God over the degree of inconvenience of your religion seems a little trite in comparison.

Clever trojan

BBC NEWS | Technology | Trojan holds PC files for ransom

So, this trojan (which downloads itself via IE - ha! - from certain websites) encrypts some files and then tells you to pay up to get them unencrypted.

But how would you pay? I mean, who would be mad enough to send a credit card or account number to the crooks anyway?

You lose anyway

Minister opts for easy path | The Australian

Setting a new definition for "pyrrhic victory" seems to be the main outcome from the Federal Court's decision in the Haneef case yesterday. Peter Faris' fierce criticism of the logic of the case seems very valid.

Both Peter Russo and Hedley Thomas (whose juvenile journalistic contempt for Minister Andrews is just ridiculously overblown) acknowledge that the Minister is probably capable of simply making a valid fresh decision that still removes the visa.

Andrews is appealing the court decision, and why wouldn't he? The government wants "association" to have as broad as possible interpretation, and another Federal Court judge had basically agreed with them. Judge Spender says he just thinks the other judge got it wrong, it can't mean that, otherwise the Minister would be capable of making all kinds of "unfair" decisions.

Why wouldn't the government want this issue settled by the courts once and for all? I strongly suspect the appeal will succeed, even at the Federal Court level.

Yet Hedley Thomas still finds a way of twisting this against Andrews (in the link above). He claims that the Minister is "talking tough but his actions point to a significant backdown".

Huh? I don't see why the Minister is not capable of reviewing the visa decision again even if he loses the eventual appeal.

Hedley Thomas is just one of those commentators to whom the Minister must be criticised, no matter what he does.

Mainly about social workers

Hi, I’m your biological son . . . - Times Online

This article, originally from the NYT, tells the story of a sperm donor's awkward first meeting with his adult biological son.

The story is of interest, and from my conservative view point, shows the uncomfortable weirdness of sperm donation generally, but especially for men who, like this guy, donated "30 or 40 times".

But the main reason I am posting about it is because of this incidental point. The writer is a family therapist, but describes his life as follows:

At 50, I have never married, never raised any children. And about a month before the call, I had reached a point where I was feeling anxious and socially disconnected, no longer relaxed with my friends and sensing there had to be something more meaningful in my life.

This is entirely consistent with my long standing suspicion that the majority of therapists and social workers do not come to the job with much resembling a normal, stable, happy domestic life. Social workers in particular seem drawn to the job because of an injustice they have suffered in their own life, whether it physical or emotional in nature, and this career is their way of helping others who may be also be suffering.

But this seems to me to be a good reason to exclude such a person from a career in which objectivity can be crucially important, especially when they are making decisions about children and their relationship with parents.

My knowledge of this is purely anecdotal, but I have had friends agree with me that all the social workers they knew were themselves a bit of a worry, to put it mildly. And it is certainly not unusual to read things from time to time, such as this story, which support my suspicions.

I wonder if anyone has ever done any research on this, and whether readers have also met social workers with "baggage".

Rudd, strippers, the media (continued)

Next Australian head of state found in topless bar with the New York Post's editor. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Mostly, this concentrates on the mysterious absence of any report about it in the New York Post.

By the way, who couldn't draw some enjoyment from watching Rudd's squirming performance on 7.30 Report last night? The fact that he can dissemble with the best of them can't exactly help the image he would like to portray of someone who is not "tricky" like John Howard.

Matt Price in The Australian has a funny line or two about it all this morning, such as these:

The Australian’s blogging system broke down yesterday under the volume of people from around the world who’ve tried to contact us to tell us nobody is interested in whether or not the alternative PM visited a strip joint four years ago.

Blanket coverage on television confirmed The Sketch’s inkling that this was a non-story, not least because most talkback callers on radio thought so too.

True, newspapers across four continents carried the non-story and every website in the land has a chat-room discussion or a poll on whether this sort of behaviour is acceptable for somebody who wants to run the country.

Kevin's reaction, and his ill-advised decision to just keep talking about it yesterday, is the true story now.

Mining disaster goes largely unnoticed

Chinese kin lash out as trapped miners' hopes dim | International | Reuters

I hadn't even heard of this massive coal mining disaster in China until I looked at Reuters this morning:

Anguished relatives of Chinese coal miners trapped in flooded shafts clashed with managers on Monday to demand information, but hopes for the 181 men faded after another day of efforts to pump the mines dry.

The disaster in the eastern coastal province of Shandong is the latest to strike China's coal mines, which -- with over 2,000 people killed in the first seven months of this year along -- are the world's deadliest.

The miners have been trapped since Friday when a burst river dyke sent water rushing into two shafts. Rescuers hold out little hope of survival for many, if not all, of the men who could not outpace the torrent -- 172 in a main shaft and nine in one nearby.

It is pretty amazing how a mining disaster on this scale can attract such little notice in the West, compared to the relatively minor scale of death (9) in the Utah incident.

Creepy

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: A New Use for Your Leftover Embryos

Surely it's not exclusively pro-lifers who find this an objectionable idea:

Couples who have had children via in vitro fertilization are often left with extra embryos--and the rather difficult decision of what to do with them. Embryos can be donated to research or to other couples, destroyed, or left languishing in frozen storage. But now a California-based biotech startup is offering a new option: to use these embryos to create personalized stem-cell lines for couples or their families.

About Shakespeare

I see that Bill Bryson has a new book out about Shakespeare. There's a fairly lengthy extract here from The Times.

Bryson makes this point about Will's personal attitudes:

Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty.

In fact it cannot be emphasised too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.

A recent Doctor Who episode (taking its cue from "Shakespeare in Love", no doubt) again portrayed Shakespeare as a rakish charmer, but it is entirely possible that he was the complete opposite. He may be the beneficiary of the most generously imagined personality ever. Just for a change, I would like some popular fictional work to portray him as intensely dislikeable.

Bryson does make it clear that knowing little of the playwrights of the day is just par for the course. The figures in this extract surprised me:

It cannot be overemphasised how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of 16th and early 17th century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwright survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately 3,000 plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80% are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the 38 by Shakespeare himself – about 15% of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.

There are bigger gaps in the records of history than I imagined.

UPDATE: I see that Germaine Greer has a Shakespeare book coming out too, and this extract indicates she is good at turning speculation into certainty, as Bryson complains.

The Rudd and the stripper post I had to have

It originally seemed that there was not much to add to the commentary swirling around this, but on second thoughts here's my take on it:

1. Doesn't it irritate anyone else that news websites (and, presumably, the papers) have today got photos of Rudd and his wife standing together with the "wife stands by Rudd" angle? He can't always help what photos newspapers choose to run, but still it seems to me Rudd milks this marriage for political advantage in a more directly cynical fashion than most politicians. It's also kind of pathetic that he should be talking of his wife's forgiveness for something that, on his version, he has little to apologise for.

2. Rudd again uses his "I expect to take a belting in the polls" as his magic formula for ensuring that he doesn't. He's either naive or cynical in the way he uses this mantra in circumstances where most people's immediate reaction is that it won't hurt much, if at all.

3. The fact that he rang his wife about it the next day seems to suggest that he thought she may find out pretty quickly. But how exactly does he think she would have found out at all if it were not for his call? Did he think Col Allen (who, seemingly, was the one who suggested the venue) was taking him there as a "set up" so that he could publish the story in the paper the next day?

OK, maybe it was not the main reason for the phone call at all, but the way Rudd seems to be running the story, that's the impression we are left with. I think most men in Rudd's situation would tell their wife as a precaution if they ended up, more or less by accident, in a strip club, and left as quickly as they politely could; most women in a secure marriage would laugh it off. But I don't think there would be any urgency to tell their wife, and I don't know that saying they had been "a goose" for going there is the terminology that many would use for what he alleges happened.

It seems to me that this part of Rudd's response actually should increase suspicion that something a bit untoward (by which I mean, a bit more than merely looking) happened at the club.

4. How did Downer or Foreign Affairs find out about this? Again, with just the three of them there for a quick drink and then departure, it seems a little peculiar that the story got out at all.

5. Snowden and Rudd both seem to be hedging their bets about recollection by talking about the amount of drinks. (Even this morning, I think Snowden on Radio National used the phrase "as far as I can recall" at least once, while still insisting that it is all a beat up and they left because feeling "uncomfortable".)

6. Col Allen's claim that Rudd "acted like a perfect gentleman" seems capable of having a double meaning when the venue is a club at which "gentlemen" may (I am guessing here) be expected to slip money into the g-string of the performer. Maybe the more bucks you pay, the more gentlemanly you can be deemed! Anyway, if News Ltd is hedging its bets over who is the next PM, Allen would say this, wouldn't he?

7. What's the bet that there are half a dozen Australian journalists doing their best to find someone who worked at the strip joint at the time who can remember if there was a red-cheeked round faced man with an unfashionable haircut asked to leave two years ago. It's very unlikely that further information will be forthcoming.

Although Caroline Overington says the original rumour that has been around for months included nothing about Rudd's behaviour while there, the points noted above all seem to me to suggest that there probably is something more to this story. Whether we will ever find out though seems unlikely.

But still, if this is the only damaging rumour around that journalists have about Rudd's character, I'm very disappointed. He should work on the assumption that he could be even more "humanised" by doing something obviously bad. I am arranging for a carton of K-Y to be delivered to his office, and updating his profile at Australian-Swingers.com, as I write. It's all for his electoral good, you know.

UPDATE: Here's the link to Rudd's interview on AM this morning where they attempted to probe the issue of whether he could actually recall what he did while at the club:

GILLIAN BRADFORD: You're now saying there you had a bit to drink, but yesterday you were saying you were too drunk to remember. That's quite a big difference.

KEVIN RUDD: Well, I've said repeatedly that I'd had too much to drink and I fully accept that and I was asked yesterday whether this had occurred at any stage before. I said, "Well, yeah, actually." 35… When I turned 35 I remember having a family birthday party at home and I'd had too much to drink. I certainly recall that. And on this occasion I had too much to drink as well. But I am not by habit or by reputation or by instinct, you know, a heavy drinker. People who know me around Parliament House would affirm that.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: So just clarifying that, are you relying on Col Allan and Warren Snowdon to tell you you didn't do anything inappropriate, or do you remember yourself that you didn't do anything inappropriate?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, a combination of the above. As I said, I have absolutely no recollection of that, and nor does Warren Snowdon.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: But were you too drunk to remember?

KEVIN RUDD: When you have had a few drinks obviously your complete recollection of events is not going to be perfect. I accept that, I think that just passes the commonsense test. But when I checked with Warren, that was certainly our recollection, and both our recollection is that we were out of there before much time had elapsed.

Ah well, at least reading such discomfit has given me some fun out of all this.

I think what he is trying to avoid saying is something like this: I had such a skinful that, even if I did misbehave in the club, I may not remember it. That's why I immediately rang Teresa the next day to apologise, just in case. But if my mates now say I didn't do anything wrong, well I guess I mustn't have, hey?

UPDATE 2: It's just occurred to me, after reading the AM interview, that now that Kevin claims at least a partial recall of the visit, why hasn't anyone asked him the detail of what he did there? Simply watch with some discomfit (who cares?); be on the receiving end of a lap dance (danger danger Will Robinson;) or shoving a $50 in a g-string (Kevin actually pays for the exploitation of women).

Of course, even if he did do the latter of those things (which are not "inappropriate" for customers to do, but still cast a very different light on the visit,) I suppose no one would expect an honest answer anyway.

But what fun it would be to ask.

UPDATE 3: I just realised that Laurie Oakes did ask Rudd yesterday "were there semi naked ladies there and what were they doing?" To which Kevin07 replies: "....we can't actually recall anything that you wouldn't see at most pubs across Australia..."

Not exactly full of detail. I want to see him squirm more, with direct questions on his activities there, whether they be "appropriate" or "inappropriate."

I am still betting that such details would influence the public perception of his character. I am not saying it would be necessarily fatal to his campaign, but my impression is that everyone is currently painting it as "he came, he saw, he left quickly". I still think the phone call to the wife and "explaining" to her what happened (in the interview he doesn't use the word "confess", even though other media does) is suspicious.

UPDATE 4: Over at Rudd's MySpace page, there are lots of comments of the "good on you mate" variety. Glad to see Kevin has gained the yobbo, stripjoints-are-all-a-bit-of-good-fun vote. (And hey, lefty bloggers, we are talking of a 46 year old bloke dropping in on the joint, not a silly single man in his 20's.)

UPDATE 5: Given that the media knew of this story years and years ago, why is every lefty so certain that it's timing is Liberal party smear campaign?

Even Kevin is not adamant that this is the case. From his AM interview today:

"I've seen reports in the paper today about interjections in Parliament by Mr Downer some months ago, but I make no particular allegations against him," he said.

UPDATE 6: With all the outrage about this at LP, there are few comments with which I can agree, but this one comes close (except for the part about "normally sensible") :

(Sigh) I wish the normally sensible commenters on here were not in such a rush to reassure everybody that of course strip clubs are just a normal part of blokedom, of course the women are all doing this stuff because they really prefer it and of course the pornulation of everything and the insistence of providing naked female flesh everywhere for male enjoyment is just fine and dandy.

UPDATE 7: (Gosh, I just can't stop): Crikey has some interesting background on how this became a story, and it doesn't jibe well with the Libs being behind it. I like this part about Col Allen (whose denial that Rudd did anything improper is being treated as gospel by all Kevvie defenders):

And, for goodness sake, Col Allen, who is variously described in today’s papers as “knockabout”, “larrikin”, “famously brash” and “pugnacious”. They are all euphemisms. There is a nice profile here in which Allen is described as a bully by Stuart Littlemore, and Allen himself admits to occasionally pissing in his office sink during news conferences.

One wonders by what standard Allen judged Rudd’s behaviour in order to pronounce it gentlemanly.

Woops

Biofuels switch a mistake, say researchers | Environment | The Guardian

From the report:

Increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more carbon gases over the next 30 years than fossil fuels, according to the first comprehensive analysis of emissions from biofuels...

Biofuels look good in climate change terms from a Western perspective, said Dr Spracklen, but globally they actually lead to higher carbon emissions. "Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia among others have huge deforestation programmes to supply the world biofuel market", he said.

The researchers say the emphasis should be placed on increasing the efficiency of fossil fuel use and moving to carbon-free alternatives such as renewable energy.

Black hole questions continue

The speculations as to the fate of black holes continue over at arxiv.org. Why should you care? Because it's possible that the LHC at CERN will start creating very tiny ones within a year or so, and they may have such low velocity that they end up hanging around (or in) the Earth. Would be nice if scientists had a real handle on how they were going to behave, don't you think?

The latest paper to be seen about this is here. The title: "Moduli Vacuum Bubbles Produced by Evaporating Black Holes". The main idea: black holes may have "vacuum bubbles" around them which will make their appearance somewhat different from what Hawking radiation would indicate. The article notes that:

Smaller mass black holes that have already evaporated away could have left vacuum bubbles behind that contribute to the dark matter.

To be fair, the article only talks about larger black holes, and "primordial" ones in particular, but I am curious to know if this is relevant to the evaporation of micro black holes of the type that may be created at CERN.

Another recent paper, which is again hard for the lay person to follow, suggests that maybe the LHC won't produce black holes whether or not large extra dimensions exist. This is due to the effect of what the article calls RG (renormalisation group.) The conclusions:

We have applied the RG to the black hole production scenario in the context of large extra dimensions. This has two surprising effects:
• First, the area of the black hole (which is of the same order as the production cross-section) does not only inherit the UV safety as it was observed for standard
scattering cross-section, but it even gets damped so strongly that it goes to zero.
• Second, the truncation parameter t, which does not play an important role in the
qualitative standard scattering cross-section picture, gets central importance for
the BH threshold. Even more, BH production could be completely forbidden3 for values of t ≤ 1, which according to [6] are perfectly possible.

In the light of such dramatic consequences of the application of RG to the simplest
picture of BH production, we conclude that more detailed studies have to be made
on both sides of the problem. It would be of great interest to see whether the straight forward statements, which were made here, would survive an improved formulation of the BH production threshold, of the RG solutions, and of the determination of the truncation parameter t. If the results persist and t can be determined to be ≤ 1, no black holes will be produced at the LHC whether large extra dimensions exist or not.

The paper notes that this RG stuff had previously been used to predict that the final outcome of black hole evaporation is a remnant which is a "mini black hole of Planckian size". The article which discusses this notes that:

It would be interesting to investigate the possible astrophysical implications of a population of stable Planck size mini-black holes produced in the Early Universe or by the interaction of cosmic rays with the interstellar medium

The suggestion being, I assume, that some of the dark matter in the universe may be very tiny black holes swarming around the place.

As far as black hole remnants are concerned, I noted in a post last year that an arxiv paper suggested they could be a useful source of energy:

If BHRs (Stable Remnants) are made available by the LHC or the
NLC and can be used to convert mass in energy, then the total 2050 yearly world energy consumption of roughly 1021 Joule can be covered by just ∼ 10 tons of arbitrary material, converted to radiation by the Hawking process via m = E/c2 = 1021J/(3·108m/s)2 = 10 4kg.

But how do you actually make it into an energy generator? Shot particles at it in an accelerator? Would it be easy to hit? And more importantly, what does it mean if you drop one, or thousands, into the centre of the earth? Here's some speculation: are some planet interiors already partially heated by captured black hole remnants? Would adding thousands of human made ones be a bad idea?

All questions I am waiting to see answers to.

A very nasty virus

HIV's punch brings on dementia | The Australian

It is a commonly held belief that rates of HIV infection are increasing in some communities because anti-viral therapy has made it seem that it is not a complete disaster to catch the disease, thereby inadvertently encouraging some risk taking behaviour.

I have suggested before that education about the disease ought to address this issue: show a few HIV positive people who are alive, but far from well, despite being on the best therapy available. (Who knows, maybe this line is already being followed in some advertising campaigns directed at the gay community?)

Anyway, this story today serves as a reminder of the seriousness of the infection:

THE reason many people with HIV-AIDS develop dementia has long baffled researchers, but scientists finally believe they have the answer - the virus hits the brain with a one-two punch.

First, a protein on the surface of the virus directly kills brain cells, or neurons. Then the same protein disrupts the formation of new neurons from adult stem cells.

In people, the dementia triggered by the virus, HIV-associated dementia (HAD), slows thinking, memory and even movement.

Perversely, although highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) helps HIV-infected people live longer and with less severe dementia, the prevalence of HAD has not declined.

Statistics from the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (NCHECR) at the University of NSW in Sydney reveal that almost 9800 Australians have HIV-AIDS.

According to Bruce Brew -- head of neurology at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney -- roughly 20 per cent of people with AIDS will develop HAD. Surprisingly, many will remain otherwise quite well.

In the BCC report on the same research, it is noted:

Keith Alcorn, senior editor of the HIV information service NAM, said: "The discovery that HIV affects stem cell proliferation in the brain is bound to add to concerns that people with HIV doing well on antiretroviral therapy may nevertheless face a higher risk of dementia in years to come.

"Antiretroviral drugs have lowered viral load so that HIV will not kill cells directly, but we don't know the consequences for brain functioning of a long-term low level of infection.

"It may be that low level infection is enough to interfere with the regeneration pathways in the way shown in this experiment."