Ancient yoghurt

Pottery shards put a date on Africa’s dairying

Yoghurt may have made it on to the menu for North Africans around 7,000 years ago, according to an analysis of pottery shards published today in Nature¹.  The fermented dairy product left tell-tale traces of fat on the ceramic fragments, suggesting a way that the region’s inhabitants may have evolved to tolerate milk as adults.

As expected...

Back in 2009 alone (go on, search "carbon capture" in the search bar over on the right), I had six posts about why CO2 sequestration seemed very, very unlikely to work.  One of them ended:

That CCS is being promoted so heavily seems simply to be a triumph of an industry's self preservation instinct over common sense.

Proving again that my sound judgement deserves reward with, I don't know, the leadership of a small principality if not the entire country, we had this story last weekend about how government money put into the idea by former PM Rudd has pretty much led to nothing. 

And now an article in PNAS that (naturally) Andrew Bolt highlights, argues that it's unlikely to be a long term solution anyway:

We argue here that there is a high probability that earthquakes will be triggered by injection of large volumes of CO₂ into the brittle rocks commonly found in continental interiors. Because even small- to moderate-sized earthquakes threaten the seal integrity of CO₂ repositories, in this context, large-scale CCS is a risky, and likely unsuccessful, strategy for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Mind you, there had been an article also in PNAS earlier in the year estimated that sequestration could work for the US.   Clearly, this is an area of some disagreement, but are you going to spend billions of dollars on an idea when no one really knows if it's a proper solution? 

I don't think so.   My advice is to drop it.   Put all this money into other clean energy research.   Let me organise an international conference about that and get a scientific and engineering consensus as to which forms of nuclear or other energy to best pursue for both fast deployment now, and future development.   I'd probably do a better job than what's being done internationally now anyway.

Crossing over

Neutrons escaping to a parallel world?

From the link:

Theoretical physicists Zurab Berezhiani and Fabrizio Nesti from the University of l'Aquila, Italy, reanalysed the experimental data obtained by the research group of Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin, France. It showed that the loss rate of very slow free neutrons appeared to depend on the direction and strength of the magnetic field applied. This anomaly could not be explained by known physics.

Berezhiani believes it could be interpreted in the light of a hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles. Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other. The probability of such a transition happening was predicted to be sensitive to the presence of magnetic fields, and could therefore be detected experimentally.

I have a soft spot for any physics talking about particles having a mirror particle in a parallel universe.  Seems a good way to get heaven, no?

The full paper is available for free here for some reason, although it's only worth it for the opening and end paragraphs.  Here's the last paragraph:



Neat.

Potentially interesting

Sneak peek: Tommy Lee Jones in 'Emperor' | Metromix New York

The biggest worry is the potential bloatware

Review: Microsoft Surface straddles divide

Everyone who held the new Microsoft tablet device seems to have liked it, and the thin, go everywhere keyboard does sound very good.

My biggest worry is whether Microsoft can keep down the bloatware-ish nature of their software, including the new Windows, to make a tablet not fill up so quick.

My Gina Theory

Why does Gina Rinehart like to buy into media companies?

I have a pet theory about Fairfax, at least.  It might be as revenge for a far from complimentary profile that ran earlier this year.

Amongst other things I probably read at the time but had forgotten (I don't pay much attention to billionaires, as it happens):

*  she has a reputation for penny-pinching. One former employee tells of being instructed to phone suppliers of office equipment to haggle over even the smallest bills. Another says he got the impression that Rinehart personally scrutinised staff expenses claims. "She had a thing in the back of her mind that everybody, and I mean everybody, was out to do her down, to take a dollar off her," he says. "She trusted nobody and assumed the worst of everybody."

* [Talking of her fractured relationship with some of her children] "I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a close observer of the family," Singleton says. "It's because the business comes first. Being a parent is secondary. It's just, 'Where do they fit into the dynasty? Are they iron or are they coal or are they uranium?' If they don't fit into the company, there's no role for them."

*  "School was just a nasty interlude to put up with," he said. "Then she tried a year doing economics at Sydney University but she found out it was basically communist ..."Rinehart told Robert Duffield, author of the Hancock biography Rogue Bull, that the university taught "the wrong things". Duffield noted that she parroted Hancock's political views, "mastering all his stock tracts, phrase by phrase". Singleton was aware of this, too: "I mean, a conversation with Gina was a conversation with Lang. They both had the same fanaticism ... If Lang paused, Gina could finish the sentence."

* Rinehart's next husband was an American tax attorney almost four decades her senior. Gina was 28 when the couple wed in Las Vegas in 1983. Frank Rinehart was 65. [This was, however, a happy marriage.]

* Newspapers reported in 1997 that Rinehart had reached a confidential out-of-court settlement with her former live-in security guard, Bob Thompson, who had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her. In a long article in Woman's Day, Thompson said Rinehart became infatuated with him and wanted to marry him, despite his being engaged to someone else. "I told her over and over I wasn't interested," he said, but "she wouldn't take no for an answer". Thompson made plain that in some ways he felt sorry for Rinehart: "She's just incredibly lonely and isolated."

Singleton tells me Rinehart has no interests besides mining. "There is no social life," he says. "It's just work."

There is much more in the article.

It really is not a picture of a likeable person.   If anything, it reads a bit like a real life version of Citizen Kane, with unhappy adult children thrown into the mix.   In terms of political views it sounds like they were formed while sitting on her Dad's lap and haven't moved on from there.

I see Alan Kohler, who I assume has met a fair few people who have met Gina, calls her today "Australia's strangest rich person".

I know nothing of how much personal responsibility she can take for growing her father's fortune, but her promotion of climate change skepticism by sponsoring Monckton out to Australia (and welcoming Ian Plimer to talk to visiting foreigners) does not speak well for her general judgement (to put it mildly.)   If she genuinely wanted to know about the science, she could fly in the top scientists from around the world for her own private briefing.  Instead, the voice of the loner contrarian appeals to her personality, I suppose.

Sure, her works mean a lot of employment and income for the country, but especially that she was the heiress to her father's ideas and fortunes, you can't give her high marks for exactly being "self made" either. 

Some billionaires genuinely should be admired for their extensive philanthropy for the good of humankind.   Bill Gates in particular seems to combine a happy family with extensive good works, many benefiting the poorest of the world.   It would appear that Gina does not spend much proportion of her fortune in any similar way.

So is Gina buying her way into control of Fairfax an act of revenge for (perhaps amongst other things) what might have been a hurtful profile?   Making it a real vanity project to slavishly promote her single minded (and, in some cases, rather simple minded) views would no doubt hurt the papers and kill them off completely.   

Who knows?   But it's as good a pet theory as any.

Update:    I don't know if anyone else using Blogger has found this, but ever since their new editing layout for posts came out, I have a hell of a lot of trouble getting breaks between paragraphs right.  What looks right in the "compose" window often isn't when you post, and then you can have a lot of trouble working out which bit of HTML is causing the problem.  This did not used to be the case.   Annoying.

Let there be Beer

BBC - Travel - The Holy Land of beer 

A surprising story here of how microbreweries are popular in Israel now, including a brand made by Palestinians in the West Bank.

I suppose it's too much to ask that peace be established in the Middle East via beer.

Insightful

The IVF lottery of joy and sorrow

This article from The Age on the weekend was well worth reading.   It tells the story of the poor success rate of IVF for over 40 year old women, yet the fact that it occasionally works on women even over 45 means that it keeps being tried:

In the assisted reproduction business, those who get older women pregnant achieve holy grail status. Which means there is great pressure on them to put over-40s women through as many cycles as possible to get the success rates up.

As it stands there is no limit to how many IVF cycles a woman can undergo in Australia, and hence no shortage of doctors willing to perform the procedure.

Yet what has really bothered me is that, as with so many of my girlfriends on IVF, no one seemed to be monitoring Louisa's mental health. And Blind Freddy could see she was not well in that department. At all.

''Counselling? What use was that?'' Louisa told me. ''I wasn't going to tell them anything was wrong in case they rejected me for treatment. I wasn't going to admit I cry all day, every day. Of course I was depressed. I wanted a baby and couldn't have one. I was there for them to give me hope, not point out the obvious.''

I realise that doctors must feel in a bit of bind in that they can't advise the patient that there is no hope whatsoever, and if it works it's the "cure" (I suppose) to their depression; but on the other hand, the reality is that the for great majority of patients above a certain age, it is only going to protract the disappointment and delay the process of getting over the inevitable accommodation to not being able to have your own baby.

Technical issues

I'm feeling vaguely technically competent after working out how to run Linux on an old laptop from a usb drive.  I used Puppy Linux, and it seems to be working fine, except upgrading the browser and other software that comes with it seems to be the issue that requires some more detailed knowledge of Linux.

[Well, actually, there is still an issue I don't understand.  I tried Linux because something in the old XP laptop when running Firefox would often cause the hard drive to start into continual activity, the fan would go into overdrive and everything would become laggy.  I could never work out what process was causing this - it seemed to be Firefox itself most of the time, but I quite like using it compared to Chrome.  So I thought, this may all be tied up with XP somehow.  But when running Linux from a USB, the hard drive light goes on and just stays on.  I can't really hear the hard drive working much, but I like hard drives to feel relaxed, so I am still disappointed that this happens.  The browser itself doesn't slow down, though.] 

Anyway, I had been wondering for a while what it was inside the iPad (or smartphone) that lets it know which way is up.  The answer is explained here:

A very sad loss

ABC radio personality Alan Saunders dies

What sad news.  Alan Saunders has done a great job for years and years at Radio National, covering everything from design and architecture, culinary pursuits, to philosophy, and probably some other topics I have now forgotten about.  His style was relaxed and knowledgeable, but he was engaging and accessible because you never felt he was assuming too much knowledge of his audience.  And he just always seemed a self-effacing, nice man.  I often forgot to deliberately tune in to his shows, but if I caught one by accident, I was nearly always glad that I had heard it.

I see dumb people

Rabett Run: Carrick finds a mirror

Eli Rabbet tells us how Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That note with disapproval some of the vile death threat emails sent to University of East Anglia (and Phil Jones in particular, it would seem) which have recently turned up via FOI.

Anthony Watts in his post about the emails  goes on to claim that in his former world of being a TV and radio weatherman, he's seen this all before.

Frankly, I do not believe him.   Upset that your weekend bar-b-q got rained out?   Writing a death threat to the weatherman is one of the less common reactions around, I'm sure.

Watts also goes on to tell the tragic tale of how he was upset with a David Appell reference to his dead mother (a completely over the top reaction to a reference to a post title that says more about Watts having "mother issues" if you ask me.)   Watts is not a mature individual in the way he reacts to criticism. He has just about the thinnest skin around the blogosphere.  

But the funnier thing is that WUWT comments on the story are chock full of people saying that they are sure these abusive emails are a "false flag" operation.

Amazing self delusion.