"Hating" Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ death: David Corn on sharing a tiny office with Hitchens. - Slate Magazine

Nearly everyone is sad to see the loss of Christopher Hitchens. He was a great essayist even if you did not agree with him on everything (and, frankly, there are probably very few who could do that.)

This account by David Corn about what it was like working with him in a tiny office in the early 1980's is quite amusing and affectionate.

Resigning the top job

Pope Heads Into Busy Christmas Season Tired, Weak - NYTimes.com

Interesting report in the New York Times that quotes a few close observers who say that Pope Benedict seems to be getting frailer lately.  It also notes that he has been open in the past about his view that a Pope should resign if he feels not physically up to the job.

There is not a lot of precedent for such resignations, however, as the article notes the last one happened about 600 years ago.

It would be an interesting thing to happen again; if anything, I think people would acknowledge a resignation as very reasonable and preferable to watching a slow decline.

Unsporting rodent based entertainment

I was looking around the net for rat related stuff when I stumbled onto this bit of history I hadn’t heard of before: in Victorian England, “rat baiting” in rat pits around the city was a popular form of betting entertainment. Wikipedia notes an account from a participant:

A hundred rats were put in it, large wagers went back and forth on whose dog could kill the most rats within a minute. The dogs worked in exemplary fashion, a grip, a toss and it was all over for the rat. With especially skilful dogs, two dead rats flew through the air at the same time...

The Wikipedia article has lots of illustrates of the set up at these disreputable venues, like this one:

This must have been the toff’s night at the rat pit. Other venues seemed to have looked rather rougher:

Anyway, the last rat pit was close in 1912.  

I did not know that this was a Victorian form of entertainment.

Update: Here's a blog post about the last rat pit in New York, shut down in 1870 by the SPCA. I can't see anything about rat pits in Australia on Google, though.

A bunch of old interests

Well, looking around the net this morning, there are a bunch of stories about some of my long term interests, as previously mentioned on this blog:
1.    Methane apocalypse soon?    A Russian scientists tells the Independent that he hasn’t seen such large methane plumes in the Arctic Ocean before:

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said.
"I was most impressed by the shear scale and the high density of the plumes.  Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them," he said….

Another scientist doing the research says:

"Methane released from the Arctic shelf deposits contributes to global increase and the best evidence for that is the higher concentration of atmospheric methane above the Arctic Ocean," she said.
"The concentration of atmospheric methane increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm, and in the Arctic to 1.9ppm. That's a huge increase, between two and three times, and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.

Well, that’s far from encouraging.
Update:  both Revkin and James Annan say this was a beat up.  I hope so.

2.  Small nuclear shows some promise.   Another study indicates that making small, modular nuclear power may be a better way of deploying nuclear quickly, rather than building the expensive mega plants of old.
This is what I suspected on a hunch.   Why aren’t I running the world? 
If the world was serious about greenhouse gases, there ought to be a scientific and technological commission either run by the US, or preferably, internationally, to identify the most promising path to rapid deployment of nuclear with systems that have as a primary feature passive safety.  But a lot of things have to be considered:  sources of uranium and efficiency of uranium use, the type of waste they make and its recycling and disposal, new nuclear designs and how far off testing and certifying they are; ease of export of the technology, etc.   This is the sort of leadership needed:  not just leaving it up to the hopeless mishmash of competing ideas around at the moment.
3.  Marijuana does hurt the brain.   Some pretty interesting research from Melbourne, in which 12 year olds had brain scans, and then they were re-scanned at 16, after some of them had started using marijuana.
The most surprising thing is that the size of part of the brain at 12 seemed gave an indication as to whether they would try it:

“What we found is that only the OFC predicted later cannabis use, suggesting that this particular part of the frontal lobe increases an adolescent’s vulnerability to cannabis use. However, we also found no differences in brain volume in other parts of the brain that we have shown to be abnormal in long-term heavy cannabis users, confirming for the first time, that cannabis use is neurotoxic to these brain areas in humans.”

The OFC plays a primary role in inhibitory control and reward-based decision making; previous studies of adolescent cannabis users have demonstrated subtle deficits in problem-solving, attention, memory and executive functions.

“In adult cannabis users, decreased activation of the OFC has been associated with faulty decision-making, suggesting that a reduced ability to weigh the pros and costs of one’s actions might render certain individuals more prone to drug problems,” Professor Lubman said.

I guess in a hundred years time, school career counsellors will just be examining scans and assigning kids to jobs.
4.   Primordial black hole search.   Some scientists are looking at Kepler satellite data to see if they can pick out small, primordial black holes as a possible source of missing dark matter.  I kind of hope they don’t find it, as I don’t want the Earth to bump into one.
5.  Ocean acidification and the Bering Sea:  Skeptical Science looks at ocean acidification and its apparent (or potential) effects in one part of the world.  Not good.

Another AGW is bad for fish study

Expansion of oxygen minimum zones may reduce available habitat for tropical pelagic fishes

The abstract:

Climate model predictions^{1, 2} and observations^{3, 4} reveal regional declines in oceanic dissolved oxygen, which are probably influenced by global warming⁵. Studies indicate ongoing dissolved oxygen depletion and vertical expansion of the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) in the tropical northeast Atlantic Ocean^{6, 7}. OMZ shoaling may restrict the usable habitat of billfishes and tunas to a narrow surface layer^{8, 9}. We report a decrease in the upper ocean layer exceeding 3.5 ml l⁻¹ dissolved oxygen at a rate of ≤1 m yr⁻¹ in the tropical northeast Atlantic (0–25° N, 12–30° W), amounting to an annual habitat loss of ~5.95×10¹³ m³, or 15% for the period 1960–2010. Habitat compression and associated potential habitat loss was validated using electronic tagging data from 47 blue marlin. This phenomenon increases vulnerability to surface fishing gear for billfishes and tunas^{8, 9}, and may be associated with a 10–50% worldwide decline of pelagic predator diversity¹⁰. Further expansion of the Atlantic OMZ along with overfishing may threaten the sustainability of these valuable pelagic fisheries and marine ecosystems.

Big ideas by Newt

Apocalypse Newt

So, Newt Gingrich is known for having hi-tec dreams of everything from lunar colonies to space based missile defence to geo-engineering. I remember reading on his (Pournelle's) blog that Jerry Pournelle used to be have some association with him (as an advisor, perhaps) and that would probably explain Gingrich's fondness for all things "space".

In fact, after taking climate change seriously, Gingrich has now flipped to being a skeptic, just as Pournelle always has been. But Jerry Pournelle is getting on (age 78): it seems to be built into the natural psychology of aging males that believing in AGW gets harder and harder for them over the age of 65. How old is Gingrich, by the way? 68, I see. Well, that explains that.

But even Romney is 64: he probably will start genuinely stop believing in AGW next year.

(And just why do Republicans so often go with the old dudes as presidential candidates? OK, so George Bush was an exception, but Reagan, Dole, McCain, Bush Snr?)

Anyway, as a fan of the return to the moon myself, this should make me feel more generous than I do towards Gingrich. But I find the guy hard to like. Seems far too flip floppy on everything (not just climate change), and doesn't really have the right image of a leader, especially against a more youthful Democrat.

Honestly, if the Republicans want to look dynamic, they should chose Huntsman. But he's poison to the doomed idiot wing of the Republicans known as the Tea Party, due to having done terrible things like genuinely believe in AGW (before having to semi-recant for political purposes) and being sophisticated in his knowledge of foreign affairs.

The Republicans are a lost cause, for now.

Update:

This New Yorker article notes that he has written quite a lot in the alternative history genre too.

It also argues that this is what's behind his sudden popularity:

Gingrich’s sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of “the base,” one suspects, stem less from his vaunted “big ideas” than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt. In 1990, when he was not yet Speaker, he pressed a memo on Republican candidates for office, instructing them to use certain words when talking about the Democratic enemy: “betray,” “bizarre,” “decay,” “anti-flag,” “anti-family,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “cheat,” “radical,” “sick,” “traitors,” and more. His own vocabulary of contempt has grown only more poisonously flowery. President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.” In this campaign, Gingrich’s performances in televised debates have been widely deemed effective. But what has won him his most visceral cheers from the audiences in the halls—audiences shaped and coarsened by years of listening to talk radio and watching Fox News—is his sneering attacks on moderators, especially those representing the hated “liberal” media.

In March, at the Cornerstone Church, in San Antonio, Gingrich declared, “I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America,” his grandchildren will live “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” Last spring, this was a kind of right-wing performance art. Now it is the language of the man leading in the Republican polls, a man who—in the real world, not the alt-world—could, not inconceivably, become President of the United States. Imagine that.

What a country...

How Do You Prove Someone's a Witch in Saudi Arabia? - By Uri Friedman | Foreign Policy

An amazing article about the ongoing prosecution and punishment of witchcraft in Saudi Arabia. Some highlights:

....the Saudi Interior Ministry announced on Monday that it had beheaded a woman named Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser for practicing "witchcraft and sorcery." The London-based al-Hayat newspaper, citing the chief of the religious police who arrested the woman after a report from a female investigator, claims Nasser was tricking people into paying $800 per session to have their illnesses cured.

So, how did Saudi authorities prove Nasser was a witch? The government hasn't gone into detail, but a look at the kingdom's past witchcraft cases suggests the bar for proving someone guilty isn't very high. Witch hunting is fairly institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, with the country's religious police running an Anti-Witchcraft Unit and a sorcery hotline to combat practices like astrology and fortune telling that are considered un-Islamic.

Huh. A country with a sorcery hotline. Just how often do people use this for mere revenge against someone who annoys them? The article does note that foreigners need to be particularly careful:

A Human Rights Watch researcher tells The Media Line that foreigners in particular are often the targets of sorcery accusations because of their traditional practices or, occasionally, because Saudi men facing charges of sexual harassment by domestic workers want to discredit their accusers.

The evidence arrayed against witchcraft suspects typically revolves around statements from accusers and suspicious personal belongings that suggest the supernatural, in a country where superstition is still widespread. In 2006, for example, an Eritrean national was imprisoned and lashed hundreds of times for "charlatanry" after prosecutors argued that his leather-bound personal phone booklet with writings in the Tigrinya alphabet was a "talisman."

A year later, Saudi authorities beheaded an Egyptian pharmacist who had been accused by neighbors of casting spells to separate a man from his wife and placing Korans in mosque bathrooms.

What a great country to avoid.

Don't plan on this solution

Chemically scrubbing CO2 from the air too expensive

From the link:

Someday the world may be in a position to lower the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by chemically removing it from the air.

But not soon; the process is simply too expensive, say scientists from Stanford and MIT.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by Stanford energy and environmental researcher Jennifer Wilcox, concludes that if air-capture of carbon dioxide with chemicals is ever used, it will be far in the future.

For now, it is much more economically efficient to capture the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere from the smokestacks of large centralized sources such as power plants, cement plants, fertilizer plants and refineries.

After a detailed comparison, the research team concluded that the cost of removal from air is likely to be on the order of $1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide, compared with $50 to $100 per ton for current power-plant scrubbers.

More on rat thoughts

What do animals 'know'? More than you may think

Rats are getting some unusually good PR lately. Last week, it was studies that indicate empathy for other rats, this week, their thinking seems deeper than we, um, thought:

"Rats often make judgments and behave as if they're rational creatures," said UCLA associate professor of psychology Aaron Blaisdell, a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute and senior author of a new study published in the December issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

"To make a decision in the face of uncertainty, rats call on prior history and reasoning," Blaisdell said. "They apply what they know to a situation where they are uncertain. The rats are not necessarily thinking like little humans, but they have learned through experience. A lot of animal behavior seems to be rational. Their behavior follows logical inferences."

You can read about the studies suggesting this at the link.

These studies took their time

Acidic oceans threaten fish : Nature News & Comment

I've become slack about posting items concerning ocean acidification. This is partly because a lot of the studies being reported at the Ocean Acidification blog have become very technical in nature - examining in minute detail the biochemistry of marine organisms and trying to tell exactly how ocean chemistry affects it - and also because there doesn't seem to have been much reported lately on the rate of acidification.

But still, I should go back and catch some of the stories that I have missed.

Anyway, today there is a Nature report (see above) about a couple of studies indicating that young larvae of a couple of fish do not do well under acidification.

Skeptics will no doubt have a couple of objections: firstly, some coastal waters where fish breed already have a really high range of natural pH. I doubt that this is a valid objection, as an increase in acidification from the atmosphere just means that the range is going to shift its mean and peaks to the high end, so it still may be a problem. The second issue will be whether natural selection will mean fish will be able to evolve quickly to adapt to the new acidification regime.

Quick adaptation to warmer sea warmers was indicated in a recent Australian study, but whether this will apply to acidification is anyone's guess.

On the downside of the warmer water story, another study recently indicated that fish parasites can do better in warmer water, which just shows how complicated it is trying to work out the net effect of warming oceans and increasing acidification.

Still, it surprises me somewhat that it took this long for a studies on fish larvae mortality under increased acidification took this long to be done.

Big rain

John Nielsen-Gammon has had a series of posts up about material he has found interesting at the AGU conference last week.

As the the extensive floods in Queensland last year made me consider the impact of floods as a major issue with AGW, I will reproduce Dr J's post from Climate Abyss about possible record heavy rains to come:

Probable maximum precipitation (PMP) is a commonly-used design input value for water projects such as dams for which failure is not an option. It’s estimated, in effect, by assuming that all possible factors contributing to heavy rain (upstart speed, moisture content, duration) come together at the same time and place to produce the flood to end all floods.

Ken Kunkel noted that in a warming climate, one of these is expected to change more than all the others: the moisture content of the air. What about the worst case scenario: the peak moisture content of the air at any given location? Kunkel showed evidence that the peak has indeed increased over time across most of the United States, though there are data quality issues that need to be worked out (historical weather balloon water vapor measurements are pretty dodgy). More importantly, the climate models are consistent in showing increases in the future.

We’re talking about increases of 10% every few decades. This would correspond directly to 10% increases in PMP. And increases much greater than 10% in the cost of new projects. And even greater expenses for retrofitting. That’s unless we decide that we are willing to tolerate a greater risk of man-made catastrophe from dam failure than before.

Dateless in Kyoto

The Japanese government takes its dwindling birth rate seriously enough to conduct surveys on how its people are feeling about relationship.  The latest one indicates the population issue is not going to solve itself any time soon:

According to the poll in June this year by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, a record high 61.4 percent of unmarried men between 18 and 34 reported having no girlfriend, up 9.2 percentage points since 2005. Unmarried women with no boyfriend in the same age group hit a record 49.5 percent, up 4.8 percentage points. The very idea of having girlfriends and boyfriends seems to be on the way out.

Shopping underground

Salon, of all websites, has an article about renewed interest in the recreational and commercial use of underground spaces in the US.  I like this paragraph:

Historically, developers have spent a lot of time trying to make underground spaces feel like they’re not underground. But the weirdness of an underground park is exactly why we like it. It’s intriguing and strange and a little bit spooky. “The underground can be claustrophobic, but it can also be this cozy, Fantastic Mr. Fox layer of reality,” says Barasch. So, rather than turn underground spaces into sterile retail or prefab food courts, ablaze with primary colors and piped-in pop music, developers could instead embrace the natural state of these spaces — their “undergroundness” — when designing for them. This doesn’t mean making them cheerless, it simply means respecting their subterranean identity, much like the High Line kept in place some of the former railroad’s industrial decay.

Movies to see

After a year of not too much to get excited about, it's surprising to see that there are at least 3 movies of interest which are about to be released in Australia and are getting strong reviews:

1.  early reviews of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol are very good, and as I anticipated, Brad Bird has apparently made an excellent live action director.  A couple of reviewers are actually calling this the most enjoyable MI movie,  so I am keen to see it.

The NYT has an interesting article about Mr Bird in which it's noted that Tom Cruise contacted him after The Incredibles and asked, if ever he wanted to do live action, to direct him.  There you go - Tom has good intuition about some things, at least. 

2.  Tintin starts on Boxing Day, and it's likely my family will be there to see it at the earliest opportunity.  The reviews remain mostly strong, and I see it has already made a couple of hundred million dollars in Europe.  (It seems particularly popular in France - I am a little surprised at the weakness in the English box office.  Maybe some people did pay attention to the relentless and bizarre Guardian obsession against the film?

3.  Spielberg's War Horse also gets released on Boxing Day, and although it seems to me to be getting very little in the way of pre-publicity,  some preview audiences have been pretty impressed.  I am pretty sure I will have to overcome my horse aversion as see it.

Saturday night cooking report

Why did it take me so many years to get around to cooking a version of paella?  I've like the idea of this dish for a long time.  I think I have rarely eaten it, but I have always like watching how it's made on cooking shows.

Finally, I was prompted by a Slate article headline I saw this week: 

Paella Is a Party! Stop wasting your time with risotto.

So, last night I finally got around to making a relatively straight forward chicken and prawn paella, and it came out pretty good. The recipe was based on one from from taste.com.au (which had many, many versions to try), but I did vary it a bit:

Ingredients (serves 6)

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 6 chicken thigh fillets, halved
• 12 medium green king prawns, peeled leaving tails intact, deveined
• 2 chorizo sausages, coarsely chopped
• 1 brown onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 red capsicum, seeded, coarsely chopped
• 2 cups arborio rice
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tsp ground smoked paprika
• 1/2 tsp saffron threads
• 400g can diced tomatoes
• 1 litre chicken stock
• 1 cup water
• Fresh continental parsley leaves, to serve

The chicken is cooked in the olive oil first (and set aside), then the prawns (also set aside) and finally the chorizo.   Leave the chorizo in and add the onion and capsicum and cook til softened.  (Actually, I think next time I would just add the choriso, onion and capsicum at the same time.)  Add the rice, garlic, paprika and saffron (personally, I don't think the absence of saffron is going to be noticeable) and stir for a minute, then add the tomato and stock.  Leave to cook under low heat for 15 minutes (no stirring is important) Add the chicken gently and let cook for another 10 minutes.  

Now, the recipe then calls for the cup of water, add the prawns on top, cover and cook for 5 minutes.  This reheats the prawns, but I think you would always have to leave the cover off again to let all the additional water be aborbed/steam off.

I changed the water to half a cup of white wine and water, but even then, I think next time I would try a bit less liquid at this stage. 

This receipe is also devoid of green (well, save for the parsley, which I didn't have.)  So we added a cup of frozen peas that had been unfrozen in boiling water, and stirred it in at the last minute.

Some recipes note that it is important to let paella rest for 5 or 10 minutes after cooking, and I think there is  something to that.

I'm not sure that arborio rice is really the best for this too; next time I would be inclined just to try any old medium grain rice; but don't get me wrong, it tasted pretty good even with arborio.

Anyway, even the kids found it acceptable, and my wife liked it too, although we both agreed a little bit of chilli flake would be nice too if we were cooking it just for ourselves.  In any event, it was another happy Saturday night when a new recipe is successful.

The kind rat

Helping your fellow rat: Rodents show empathy-driven behavior

Rats will try to free trapped fellow rats, it seems. How nice of them.

Higgs interrupts my busyness

Is the Higgs boson real? | Ian Sample | Science | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian reports on rumours of a significant Higgs announcement, and helpfully provides some physicists' commentary.

Climate change not in retreat

Three-quarters of climate change is man-made : Nature News & Comment

Interesting new study with some interesting conclusions, using a new method:

Knutti and Huber found that greenhouse gases contributed 0.6–1.1 °C to the warming observed since the mid-twentieth century, with the most statistically likely value being a contribution of about 0.85 °C. Around half of that contribution from greenhouse gases — 0.45 °C — was offset by the cooling effects of aerosols. These directly influence Earth's climate by scattering light; they also have indirect climate effects through their interactions with clouds.
The authors calculated a net warming value of around 0.5 °C since the 1950s, which is very close to the actual temperature rise of 0.55 °C observed over that period. Changes in solar radiation — a hypothesis for global warming proffered by many climate sceptics — contributed no more than around 0.07 °C to the recent warming, the study finds.
To test whether recent warming might just be down to a random swing in Earth’s unstable climate — another theory favoured by sceptics — Knutti and Huber conducted a series of control runs of different climate models without including the effects of the energy-budget parameters. But even if climate variability were three times greater than that estimated by state-of-the-art models, it is extremely unlikely to have produced a warming trend as pronounced as that observed in the real world, they found.

The Kevin problem

Julia Gillard rallies as Tony Abbott's rating falls, while Kevin Rudd blasts Labor conference | News.com.au

Is it just me, or does News Ltd seem especially keen to talk up "Kevin Rudd is bound to challenge" stories i the last few weeks?

I would assume he was upset at not being mentioned by Gillard at her conference speech, but surely the point is that no commentator seems to think that Rudd has more than a handful of rusted on supporters within the Parliament. Maybe he is also smarting over not being recognized for priming Slipper to take over the speaker role: but then again, he denied he was directly involved in a plot.

Anyhow, I would have thought that most Australians at this time of year were not playing too close attention to the Labor conference, and for those that did, it seems to me that they probably got the impression of Gillard coming out of it pretty well.

Sure, the party now supports gay marriage, but no expects that it will pass on a conscience vote. There - those that want it can now blame the Coalition for not doing a similar thing, as I wouldn't mind betting that the few Labor people who would not vote for it might be matched by the few Coalition that would cross the floor. A conscience vote on this seems to me the right thing to do on a matter that a large section of the community does think relates to a very ancient tradition and matter relating to morality.

Uranium to India was a clear Gillard win, and the endorsement of a disability insurance scheme is a real Labor style reform that might go over with the electorate as very worthwhile.

But what to do about Kevin if he maintains his unhappiness in the new year? I mean, until the pokies reform is bedded down (probably by a compromise of some sort), I can't see Gillard's approval, or Labor's primary vote, climbing too high just yet. So Kevin will still have something to agitate over.

Yet with a hung parliament, he can't afford to resign and have a by-election, even if a plum UN job was beckoning him.

He is, basically, the unsolvable problem, at least for the next 6 to 12 months.