Nothing personal at all

Media Watch: Personal or policy? You be the judge (18/07/2011)

Media Watch last night was very good at pointing out the lengths to which right wing talk back radio in Australia has gone to make criticism of Julia Gillard (and anyone supporting carbon pricing) personal, extreme and offensive. Look at these extracts from callers who Chris Smith and Alan Jones have let go to air:

'Bonita': Look I can say this, but you can't: she's a menopausal monster, and she needs to resign.

Chris Smith: Ok. Good on you, Bonita. Thank you.

'Tony': The Australian taxpayer even pays for the toilet paper she uses.
Does she go down to the chemist to buy her tampons? Or is the Australian taxpayer paying for those as well? ...
In my opinion Julia Gillard is a piece of crap ...

Alan Jones: Ok, well you made a lot of valid points there. We've just got to avoid in our criticism the personal. We stick to the policy; we never deal with the personal.

The extracts that follow then go on to show how ridiculous is Jones' claim that he never gets "personal". He has used the "chaff bag" line more than once:

Alan Jones: Put her in the same chaff bag as Julia Gillard and throw them both out to sea.

I saw on Andrew Bolt's TV show on Sunday a passing comment by him that he doesn't approve of Alan Bond's personal attacks. Might be nice if he would actually do a post on his own blog about this; but then, that would involve acknowledging his own role in creating a hysterical atmosphere about the carbon tax debate in the country at the moment.

Speaking of poor taste, that's also how I found yesterday's post at Catallaxy by Sinclair Davidson headed "Roadkill", which featured a photo of the PM with a startled look, and talked about the bad, bad polls she is receiving at the moment.

That heading and attempt at humour really sounds to me like something you'd hear on a late night host on the Macquarie Network, rather than from a Professor of Economics.

Sometimes I get noticed

Recently, I have posted a couple of times about Texas State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, including about his Counterpoint interview.

Even allowing for the fact that he almost certainly only found my comments via Deltoid, it's pleasing to see that my observations are sometimes noted on the other side of the world.

It's worthwhile reading my comment and Dr John's response on the thread, too.

Unusual comparison of the week

Cold-blooded cunning | The Economist

This article suggests that no one has ever spent much time testing the intelligence of reptiles. Unfortunately, they are smarter than we knew:

In a paper published in Biology Letters Dr Leal and Dr Powell suggest that lizards are at least as intelligent as tits, a group of birds that has been well examined in this respect.

Ah well: I suppose that as I never feared being outsmarted by a tit, I shouldn't fear reptiles doing it either.

Cultural nuttiness

Last week's article in Slate "A Bad Case of the Brain Fags" by Jesse Bering, was a pretty interesting short survey of culture specific mental illnesses.

The first one he mentions, though, "old hag syndrome" he indicates as being specific to Newfoundland. I thought that it was common throughout the world as part of sleep paralysis that people could wake up with the sensation of being pressed down on the bed by a ghost or phantom figure. Maybe it is only in Newfoundland that folklore says it is specifically an ugly, witch like woman doing it?

I did recently see the famous physicist/author Paul Davies on Lawrence Leung's Unbelievable talking about he suffered from waking sleep paralysis as a child or teenager, and used to interpret the pressure on his chest as feeling like a cat walking on him. Unhelpfully, he didn't explain if there was actually a cat in the house at the time.

(I can also mention, as an aside, that while sleeping in an unusual location once as teenager, I also woke up with the feeling of pressure on my chest, which really did turn out to be a cat.)

Anyway, Bering also mentions koro (the fear of the penis disappearing into the body), and although I knew about that already from Fortean Times magazine, he does add some interesting details.

As I have usually avoided gyms, I didn't really know this about body builders:

One that's not in the manual but could be, argue psychiatrists Gen Kanayama and Harrison Pope in a short paper published earlier this year in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, is "muscle dysmorphia." The condition is limited to Western males, who suffer the delusion that they are insufficiently ripped. "As a result," write the authors, "they may lift weights compulsively in the gym, often gain large amounts of muscle mass, yet still perceive themselves as too small." Within body-building circles, in fact, muscle dysmorphia has long been recognized as a sort of reverse anorexia nervosa. But it's almost entirely unheard of among Asian men. Unlike hypermasculine Western heroes such as Hercules, Thor, and the chiseled Arnold of yesteryear, the Japanese and Chinese have tended to prefer their heroes fully clothed, mentally acute, and lithe, argue Kanayama and Pope. In fact, they say anabolic steroid use is virtually nonexistent in Asian countries, even though the drugs are considerably easier to obtain, being available without a prescription at most neighborhood drugstores.

I'm in no danger of needing treatment for this condition.

All your bases

As I’ve been reading about Antarctica lately, I’ve been browsing around looking at information on the current bases down there.

There are more than I expected; some from rather unexpected countries. (With the relatively recent arrival of India, I suppose you can get a curry on any night, as well as shop at a discount variety store if you left something at home.) I was curious to see what they look like, as I was hoping national architectural flare might show up, even on the icy continent.

Well, it was an interesting exercise.

At the South Pole itself, the base was formerly noteworthy for its geodesic dome. Very space age looking in its day, I was a little sad to see that it has recently been dismantled. (As far as I can tell, its disadvantage was that it was too easily covered with snow.) Here’s a photo of it at the start of its disassembly:

In the background, you can see the new, somewhat boring in comparison, building. A better picture is here:

It’s built on legs that can be raised to keep it above the increasing snow. This is a common feature of most new bases on the higher parts of the continent.

So, what about other stations? The French-Italian one has a bit more space age flair:

The German one looks like the top part of a ship on stilts:

Norway’s Troll Station (great name) is disappointingly boring by comparison – it looks like a collection of shipping containers, no?:

A Bulgarian base on the South Shetland Islands (this counts as an Antarctic base, apparently) has all the architectural flair and impressive scale of a scout den:

They do, however, have an Eastern Orthodox chapel, which from the outside looks very much like a fruit shop cold room with a cross on top:

Inside it still looks like a refrigerator, but I guess it's nice that it's there at all.

The Chapel has its own Wikipedia entry, which also leads me to the more remarkable in style Russian Orthodox Trinity Church on King George Island:

I wonder if for much of the year if you can to the door through the snow. I see that there are chapels further south (including specifically Catholic ones) on the main continent itself. You can see nice photos of them here.

The Argentineans, on the Antarctic Peninsula, have gone for a homier, village style:

Mind you, Australia does not do Antarctic stations with any architectural value at all. Davis Station looks a complete, multi-coloured mess:

And Mawson is not much better:

OK, this is getting boring now, but not before my favourite station, Belgium's Princess Elizabeth base:

So that’s where the Jupiter 2 ended up.

Break

I have a lot of work to catch up on.

The right wing blogs are also going to be unbearable for quite a while on the carbon tax, and there will be no point in commenting at them.

I therefore should try to avoid the blogs for a week or so.

I am tempted to shift any stupid doodling or videos I do to a separate blog, and I'll note that here if I do.

Of gods and men (and women too)

On rock worship and the Shinto gods | The Japan Times Online

I was interested to read this article by Japan Times columnist Amy Chavez, concerning how Shinto works.

It's basically an animistic religion, with particular places said to have their local god. But I wasn't really aware of this aspect of it:

Part yamabushi and part spiritual healer, Man-chan is 84 years old and considered the person most in touch with the Shinto spirits (kami), on our island. He alerted me to a couple of yorishiro or spiritual antennas to the gods. These days the kami probably have handheld GPSs made in China, but in ancient times you still had to send them a spiritual sign. So special rocks or trees were designated as antennas to invite the kami to descend there. No batteries necessary.

The most famous rocks of this sort in Japan are perhaps Meoto Iwa, the "husband and wife rocks" off the coast of Mie Prefecture. These rocks invite the kami to descend on them from above. You often see these two rocks in photos, a special shimenawa rope connecting them across the water. Let's hope they never divorce.

Man-chan told me that Shinmei Shrine was considered sacred because of the small cave there. But the two other places he told me about, Myoken and Hachiman, were given their status by a Shinto priest. In other words, the priest invited the kami to descend there. When a priest calls to the kami to descend, he must feel the kami enter his body. He must feel the spirit of the kami in his heart. He may even prostrate himself before the kami. If he does not feel the kami inside him, they have not descended and the spot is not made sacred.

Various shamanistic and animistic religions appear to have this idea: that the priest or holy man takes the nature god or spirit into his body in a useful form of spirit possession. I remember David Byrne talking about a South American religion that was like this. He made a documentary about it that I haven't seen, but as I recall, there is a lot of trance inducing rhythm and singing, all while waiting for a nature god, like the chicken spirit (I actually do think he mentioned such a poultry spirit - that is what made me remember it) possesses the shaman/priest for a while.

I don't know whether the Shinto priest would say he is "possessed" by the kami, but I didn't know that having it in his body was part of their religion at all.

Of course, the idea of incorporating the spirit of God is a feature of Christianity too. A Christian apologist can argue that the animistic systems which believed in the importance of this were pre-figuring the true religion that was revealed through Christ. But of course, it still leaves the question: what is it that a shaman or priest is sensing when they believe they are possessed by a god or nature spirit?

A fundamentalist Christian, I suppose, might argue that it could be a true supernatural entity being sensed: just not a holy one. (I certainly don't expect that fundamentalists think God sends angels to act as if they were the Great Chicken Spirit, in the hope of guiding shamans towards Christianity.)

But really, what these religions which incorporate possession as a holy ritual must show is the human susceptibility to misinterpreting a generic "high," or a passing emotional feeling, with communion with the gods. And this, in turn, doesn't say much for those who rely on emotional responses in Christian services as proof of their religion, or a source of sound guidance.

I find the whole question of the sense of feeling God's presence or guidance a vexed issue. On the one hand, if God is capable of raising from the dead, amongst other miracles, the possibility of simply bumping the right neurons in the brain so as to make a person understand what God thinks he should do seems a relative breeze. I mean, it just seems wrong to argue that the Christian God is incapable of such subtleties, and can only work on a big dramatic canvas.

On the other hand, it seems that people are continually thinking that God or the spirits are guiding them: from Mormons who like to argue that if a person prays sincerely, they will "know" that this is the true church; to shamans who think they are being possessed by a nature spirit for a night.

They can't all be right.

Anyway, this is generally why I am very cautious on the whole issue of the importance or what a believer feels in any religion.

Of course, an over-intellectualisation of moral or religious belief runs its own dangers too. Certainly, I don't dismiss the importance of the intuitions or emotions in their guidance for the moral life. I continually find myself amazed, for example, when thinking about the Holocaust, that the intellectual justification for treating Jews as so much cattle to be slaughtered managed to triumph over what must have surely been a instinctive reaction against cruelty to fellow humans; particularly children. (The "girl in the red dress" sequence was particularly good in Schindler's List, I thought, for showing a man whose empathy with an innocent child would not let him accept the intellectually justified horror going on around him.)

I similarly find it difficult to fathom that some people have no problem with late term abortion, when the fetus has but the slightest genetic problem. (Although attitudes to killing even new born children have been extremely different in the past to what they are now, and I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that modern people can be comfortable killing viable babies by late term abortion.)

And then, on the fourth hand (I'm starting to lose count), appeals to the primacy of emotionalism and an inner sensation for guidance (which is fundamentally what I think a lot of people mean when they say they are interested in spirituality in their religion) leads to some pretty soft headed ideas in the modern world. Gay marriage is one of these; it being tied up with the triumph of gay identity politics over what I think is a more common sense view as to what marriage is fundamentally about - the possibility of procreation.

I think most people would tend to see spirituality as a more feminine aspect of religion, and intellectual interest in defining rules and logic as a male pursuit. For that reason, people think greater female input into Catholicism would make it more humane in areas such as teaching on sexuality. And to an extent, women can be more practical than men, and are better at not following logic and reason to conclusions that are nonsensical, which is how I view something like the Catholic teaching that a condom used by a loving husband and wife converts the sex into something sinful, whereas timing sex to avoid pregnancy does not. Yet Anglicanism and other Protestant denominations which have become very "feminized," for want of a better word, lose following because a generic sense of feel good spirituality does not particularly need any Christianity to keep it going. (The "feel good" soft rock churches like Hill Song don't seem particularly feminised; I'm not quite sure how to explain how they fit into this outline I'm sketching.) It also seems to me that women can be the worst at reading (or imagining) too much into their fleeting emotional feelings - hence the predominance of women into spiritualism or New Age ideas. (What about shamans, then? I see that some sites claim that a lot of them are homosexual, as indeed in the West they seem to be over-represented amongst spiritualist mediums.*)

So, where does this leave us? A religion which incorporates nothing by way of ceremony or practice with which to uplift the heart is not appealing at all: it seems hard to argue Biblically that these things are not a legitimate concern of God. But the Protestant churches who treat every Sunday service as a soft rock concert that is only designed to hit the heart seems equally wrong. A rule bound over-intellectualised Church can indeed be inhumane; but go too far the other direction and it becomes redundant.

It is perhaps the straddling of the two aspects that is what I find appealing about the Catholic Church, but as I say, we still have the problem of how even a Catholic should understand the sense of God moving in them personally.

It could, of course, be taken all as reason to believe that all religious feeling is delusion, as is all internal sensation that God is influencing a person in any particular way or direction. But what is the fun in that? Thinking about the various mixed messages and ways of interpreting religion and religious sensation seems a rather more interesting past time than many other pursuits; at least to me.

* Isn't it funny how native cultures might elevate a homosexual man by making him the shaman; today Western society has similarly decided to treat them as special and able to do no harm, such as in the way the magazines will gush over Elton or Ricky Martin using the magical powers of egg donation and renting a womb to conceive a child without sex!

An insider view

Former NOTW executive recounts phone hacking - ABC News

I found this a pretty remarkable interview from a News of the World insider about the phone hacking scandal.

It surprises me that he still seems to have no problem with phone hacking by journalists per se, as long as the target is a "deserving" one: like a politician that a journalist thinks might be doing something wrong, or a celebrity (just because they are a celebrity, is the impression he gives). Although it seems he has blown the whistle on the paper generally, how come he still doesn't get the idea of privacy?

Heaven located (maybe)

New mathematical or scientific ideas often provide material wihich believers in life after death can adapt to provide quasi explanations for the supernatural world. Spiritualism for a long time clung to the idea of "higher vibrations" as being the context in which souls lived. This always sounded a rather silly idea to me, but I'm sure you can still find lots of allegedly channelled books in New Age outlets which talk of spirits having to lower their vibrations to talk to mediums.

I was always keener on the idea of higher dimensions. Ever since mathematicians started thinking about them, the religiously inclined have wondered whether this is a good explanation of a physical location for Heaven, or other (formerly supernatural) realms. Science fiction writers liked the idea too: Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House" comes to mind as a fun short story. Other dimensional worlds feature often in his novels too, now that I think of it.

I see from Googling that a physicist priest (William Pollard) as late as 1961 was writing a book explaining higher dimensions as an important religious idea. From a review of his book in Time:

"The key to this approach," he writes, "lies in conceiving the whole space-time continuum of our human intuition as being immersed in a space of higher dimensions." The reality of a higher dimension than the three of space and one of time may seem somewhat elusive to ordinary human beings, but modern scientific minds can see it as mathematically just as sound.

A higher dimension is the result of a lower one moved perpendicular to itself. Writes Pollard: "Heaven, instead of being above us in ordinary space, is perpendicular to ordinary space, and the eternal is perpendicular to the temporal dimension. The transcendent and the supernatural, instead of being pushed farther and farther away from us with each new advance in astronomy, are again everywhere in immediate contact with us, just as the dimension perpendicular to a plane surface is everywhere in contact with it, though transcendent to it."

It's a appealing idea, and it always seems a pity to me that modern science seems to have no use for it. Of course, we hear about extra dimensions in string theory all the time, but mostly in terms of the extra dimensions being bound up so small that they are virtually undetectable. The related idea of branes suggest that there might be another dimensional world just a fraction of a millimetre around us all the time, but while branes can affect each other, as far as I know they don't suggest any way for life from one brane to correspond, or transfer, to another "nearby" brane.

But today I happened to buy last month's Discover magazine, and in the article on black holes, they had an extract from Brian Greene's recent book "The Hidden Reality." This was talking about whether our universe is like a holograph of information processing happening elsewhere.

The phrase "holographic universe" has been around for quite a while; I think I have on my shelf the popular book of the same title by Michael Talbot. (I see now that he died in 1992.) But this was mainly about the ideas of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, and the physical detail of how this type of universe arises was left vague, as I recall. An article by Talbot which explains his books themes can be found here.

I have heard before of black holes and holography, but I think the Brian Greene extract explains it in a relatively clear fashion. Here are some of the relevant parts (typed by me, as I can find no link):

Plato likened our view of the world to that of an ancient forebear watching shadows meander across a simly lit cave wall. He imagined our perceptions to be but a faint inkling of a far richer reality that flickers beyond reach. Two millenia later, Plato's cave may be more than a metaphor. To turn his suggestion on its head, reality - not its mere shadow - may take place on a distant boundary surface, while everything we witness in the three common spatial dimensions is a projection of that faraway unfolding. Reality, that is, may be akin to a hologram. Or really, a holographic movie.....

For black holes, we've found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard't Hooft stressed that the lesson should be general: Since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggest, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes.

If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much as a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here and that distant reality there would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds.

Well, the thing that struck me when reading this was that the idea might, with a bit of pushing around, provide possible ways for arguing:

a. we all are embedded in a "higher" realm which we cannot see (even if the "bigger" reality might be a two dimensional surface rather than a 4 spatial dimension universe);

b. the information processing taking place on the distant surface (presumably of the big black hole the universe is enclosed in) could provide a way for individual minds to survive death. I mean, does the information processing happening on the distant surface have to produce a holographic "image" of a body and its incorporated mind in our world? If a body dies, can the information that effectively produced the mind continue working on the two dimensional surface?

In other words, this seems to provide a location for Heaven, of a kind.

Mind you, if we're talking the surface of a black hole, this is not a permanent place, if Hawking radiation would see it slowly evaporate. (But then, it still remains to be seen if Hawking Radiation really exists. There are still some legitimate doubts.)

OK, so it's not a perfect explanation, but I like any idea that gets us away from mere materialism and lets the information that is our minds have an "out of body" aspect to them.

Remarkable medical news

Surgeons carry out first synthetic windpipe transplant

Surgeons in Sweden have carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant.

Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.

Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

The 36-year-old cancer patient is doing well a month after the operation.

Nessie resurfaces

Inverness Courier | News | Loch Ness Monster sighting reported by locals

Fundamental Fysiks revealed

Book Review: How the Hippies Saved Physics - WSJ.com

Well, this looks like a rather fun book:

Among the many people in San Francisco taking drugs in the early 1970s were members of a maverick group of Berkeley physicists who called themselves the Fundamental Fysiks Group. The young scientists dabbled in mind-altering drugs as they searched for a quantum-physics-based explanation for such phenomena as telepathy and extrasensory perception. The scientific basis for this quest was the experimental confirmation that once two quantum entities (such as electrons) have interacted with one another, they remain connected by what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." The connection is technically known as entanglement; if one of the entities is prodded, the other one jumps.

As David Kaiser deftly spells out in "How the Hippies Saved Physics," these physicists based their work on good science, however drug-fogged were their aims.

You must follow the link to see their photo too.

Solar issues part 2

Lacklustre results from the Colorado Integrated Solar Project � BraveNewClimate

A few posts back, I noted how PV power investment seems less risky than solar thermal, but I also noted that even with cool looking stirling engine style solar power, the output going up and down rapidly on an intermittently cloudy day was something I was unsure about.

It would seem from the above post that this is indeed a serious issue for large scale PV power (and, presumably, stirling engine solar power.)

Of course, you could always orbit them in space and get constant light that way. Now if only NASA still had rockets...

Nothing is dead simply in alternative energy.

(By the way, is this a convincing argument for highly distributed PV on houses and commercial sites as the simplest way to go? You overcome the problem if the solar panels are spread far and wide, then the supplementary power you need from the grid just getting switched between the areas under cloud for 5 minutes. But if everyone has some solar power, presumably your grid has to supply not all that much supplementary power.

Has anyone in the world ever proposed that it be a law that all new houses have to have a certain amount of PV installed?)

LED bulbs coming

Switch Lighting: Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb. - By Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo shares the same obsessive hatred of compact fluro lights that you tend to see a lot of in right wing blogs (how dare a government force them into much more efficient lighting!), but he is deeply impressed by a new LED bulb by an American company.

Seems no doubt they'll get cheaper and start to replace CFL.

Hobbies: reading science fiction

Is living forever in the future?

Is it possible that your child could live to see 150 years of age? What about your grandchild living to see their 1000th birthday? According to a British biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Foundation Aubrey De Grey, that is a definite possibility.

De Grey believes that we are within 25 years of finding the medical technology to essentially bring a ‘cure’ to aging. He says the first person to live to see 150 is already alive and that the individual who will first live to see 1,000 years could be born within the next two decades.

He believes that with the advancement of medical treatments in areas such as gene therapy, stem cells, therapy, immune stimulation and a variety of other medical techniques, people will soon be able to just visit their physician for regular maintenance checkups and cures for diseases that are a part of aging will no longer be an issue.

While De Grey’s predictions may seem a bit extreme, life expectancy is growing by three months every year and many experts are predicting over a million centenarians by 2030. In 2010, Japan alone had over 44,000 residents who had passed the 100 year mark.

Secrets in the desert

The (very) secret history of Area 51 - Americas, World - The Independent

Here's a somewhat interesting article on Area 51, which includes the claim that Presidents aren't always in the loop as to what is being done there.

I also like this claim of a simple but effective security measure:

According to Bill Sweetman, editor-in-chief of defence technology for Aviation Week, simply "pulling out the plug" and "supergluing USB ports" has also helped to keep these black programmes disconnected from our interconnected world.

"Along with the traditional black techniques of the need to know and using a small number of slightly frightened people, these programmes have either now been disconnected from the internet or have never been connected to it in the first place, and the resulting 'air gap system' has prevented them from being compromised by Chinese hackers, like so many other programmes have been."

Getting in first

BBC News - UK faces more harsh winters in solar activity dip

Has this appeared on Watts Up With That and its virtual sister blog Andrew Bolt yet? Because it is bound to, so I may as well get in first.

It's about a new paper saying that decreased solar activity may well mean the UK and Europe have some very cold winters on the way. But it's by Mike Lockwood, who I have already quoted on the topic from an article in Physics World.

But he is no global warming skeptic, and makes the following key point:

The Maunder Minimum, a period of extremely low solar activity that lasted for about half a century from the late 17th Century, has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age because Europe experienced an increase in harsh winters, resulting in rivers - such as the Thames - freezing over completely.

Professor Lockwood said it was a "pejorative name" because what happened during the Maunder Minimum "was actually nothing like an ice age at all".

"There were colder winters in Europe. That almost certainly means, from what we understand about the blocking mechanisms that cause them, that there were warmer winters in Greenland," he observed.

"So it was a regional redistribution and not a global phenomenon like an ice age. It was nothing like as cold as a real ice age - either in its global extent or in the temperatures reached.

"The summers were probably warmer if anything, rather than colder as they would be in an ice age."

He added that the Maunder Minimum period was not an uninterrupted series of cold, harsh winters.

Data from the CET showed that the coldest winter since records began was 1683/84 "yet just two year later, right in the middle of the Maunder Minimum, is the fifth warmest winter in the whole record, so this idea that Maunder Minimum winters were unrelentingly cold is wrong".

He explained that a similar pattern could be observed in recent events: "Looking at satellite data, we found that when solar activity was low, there was an increase in the number of blocking events of the jetstream over the Atlantic.

"That led to us getting colder weather in Europe. The same events brought warm air from the tropics to Greenland, so it was getting warmer.

I do wonder, however, whether this issue is important for European decisions about its energy mix. Wind farms perform poorly on colder, relatively still, snowy days, don't they?

UPDATE: WUWT did beat me to this, anyway. C'est la vie.

Up where they belong

iPads Replacing Pilots’ Paper Manuals - NYTimes.com

I was wondering the other day whether an iPad had ever been on a space shuttle trip. I expect that tablets with flash memory could handle the vibration of launch quite well.

A bit of Googling has not answered my question, but I see from the above New York Times article that they are starting to make an impact on commercial aviation:

The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized a handful of commercial and charter carriers to use the tablet computer as a so-called electronic flight bag. Private pilots, too, are now carrying iPads, which support hundreds of general aviation apps that simplify preflight planning and assist with in-flight operations.

“The iPad allows pilots to quickly and nimbly access information,” said Jim Freeman, a pilot and director of flight standards at Alaska Airlines, which has given iPads to all its pilots. “When you need to a make a decision in the cockpit, three to four minutes fumbling with paper is an eternity.”

Neat.

Solar issues

Solar Thermal Plants Losing out to Photovoltaics - Technology Review

The article notes that big solar thermal plants are still (mostly) semi-experimental and therefore hard to finance, and also the "power tower" types that use large arrays of carefully aligned mirrors to concentrate the sun onto one point tend to involve bulldozing a lot of animal habitat. With PV, you can build above the critters.

Someone in comments notes, though, that the article doesn't consider another solar option: arrays of tracking dishes which power their individual stirling engines. Here's one such array with 60 dishes in Arizona. (Yeah, that's still not so big at 1.5 MW, and I'm not sure how they deal with cloudy days when the sun keeps coming and going.)

I used to follow Inifinia Corporation in the US, because I thought it had the coolest looking design for a stirling engine solar power dish. I see they are still around, and have added a website for their "Powerdish" which claims 24% peak conversion efficiency. They still aren't into the domestic market (and the dish is kinda large for your average house yard anyway,) but with a 25 year life, and claiming to be cheaper than other solar alternatives, they look like a good option for rural properties (and even in arrays.)

In the firing line

Australian volcano eruptions overdue, new study confirms

Using the latest dating techniques, scientists from the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences and the Melbourne School of Engineering have calculated the ages of the small volcanoes in the regions and established the recurrence rate for eruptions as 2,000 years.

With the last volcano eruption at Mt Gambier occurring over 5,000 years ago, scientists say the areas are overdue...

“Although the volcanos in the region don’t erupt on a regular sequence, the likelihood of an eruption is high given the average gap in the past has been 2,000 years,” Professor Joyce said.

“These are small eruptions and very localised but depending on the type of eruption, they could cause devastation to thousands of people,” he said.

The regions of Western Victoria and adjacent south-eastern South Australia demonstrate a history of activity by young monogenetic (single short-lived activity) volcanoes. Similar young monogenetic provinces are found in northeast Queensland.

Professor Joyce suggests it might be a good idea to local governments to think about what to do if an eruption takes place, as they do in Auckland.

Which reminds me, I recently heard on the Science Show a brief mention of Auckland's Rangitoto Island, which only formed in an eruption 600 years ago. (I've been there once, many years ago, but I remember it as very pretty.) As this New Zealand site explains, it's an area absolutely ripe for a new volcano that could come through anywhere:

All of Auckland’s volcanoes come from one magma source. Underlying Auckland is a diffuse pool of magma that occasionally finds its way to the surface. Unlike a ‘classic’ volcano – such as Mt Taranaki or Mt Ngāuruhoe with a single vent through the crust – in Auckland, the magma finds different routes through the crust and erupts in a different place each time.

Each volcanic cone in Auckland stems from a separate eruption from the pool of magma that lies under the city. It’s unlikely that the magma will push through in the same place twice, so each volcano that can be seen on today’s landscape can be thought of as dormant. However, the underlying magma is still active – it may come through at a new place and form a new cone next week, next year or next century.

Obviously, the town planners who let the city be built there have a lot to answer for! :)