Smith on the Murdoch game

Rupert Murdoch's tolerance of climate change skepticism in his media outlets, when he claims to be convinced it is a legitimate thing to be concerned about, has long been a puzzle. 

I think Dick Smith gets it right:

In his letter, Mr Smith, who is a vocal supporter of the need to act on climate change, said it was in News's commercial interests to oppose the idea that people were responsible for the rise in global temperatures.

''And I'm on to you. When friends ask me why your organisation runs such opposing views on climate change - from Fox News's claims that it's all bunkum to The Australian newspaper occasionally claiming it's accepted science - I am able to say: 'It's simple'.

''It's all about making more money. They have worked out they will get more advertising and make more money on Fox News if climate change is debunked using sensationalism while they are likely to get greater circulation and more advertising dollars if The Australian shows a different view, so staff are directed accordingly.''

Really, the only alternative explanation is that Murdoch has stopped believing its true, but thinks there is some value in not "coming out" with his change of heart.

Update:   I should say that Dick may be getting it wrong when he says "staff are directed accordingly", as Bruce Guthrie has suggested that Murdoch operates in a more subtle way.   It may just be that he makes it known that he feels "all sides of the debate should be covered", but as he never objects to Fox News one sided take on the matter, they understand that to have his approval.

US and guns, revisited

Well, I didn't know that.  It appears that there is good evidence that gun ownership (well, at least in the sense of the number of households with guns) in the US has actually been declining in line with the reduction in the homicide and violent crime rate since the early 1990's.

In the comments thread that follows that post, some people point out that gun sales are such that this ownership survey must be wrong.  Others then give the potential explanation:

A growing number of homes have NO guns, while an increasingly smaller number have more and more and more.

Given the paranoid stylings of many on the Tea Party side of the nutty Right in the US at the moment, I suspect this is probably right.

Theology talk

While stumbling around the net recently, I found the blog of an Australian Catholic theology lecturer Ben Myers called Faith and Theology.  It seems to be active, moderate, and pretty good.  His links have led me to some interesting sites as well, including a group blog by a bunch of American theological academics called Catholic Moral Theology.

I don't know why I haven't really searched for moderate theology blogs before, but there you go.

Guns and movies

There has some interesting commentary at the New Yorker about the cinema shooting in Colorado last Friday.   Anthony Lane made the point that movies don't make people kill; but at the same time, does suggest that if ever there was a movie franchise that suffered from fanboy zeal that was kinda disturbing, it was this one:

 The fuss surrounding this movie did, and does, have something fevered and intemperate about it, something out of proportion to its nature; it is, after all, just a motion picture. Rottentomatoes.com suspended its user comments, this week, ahead of the film’s release, because the pitch of resentment, directed at critics who had dared to find the movie less than wonderful, had tipped into fury; Marshall Fine, of Hollywood and Fine, was told by readers that he should “die in a fire” or be beaten into a coma with a rubber hose. Such aggression was issuing, it should be noted, from those who, by definition, could not yet have seen the film.

David Denby then has a piece that is much less sanguine about how violence in movies is now received, and as I have never been a fan of overly violent films,  I find his commentary pretty insightful.   This, I think, is the crucial part:

There was a second element in the old critical defense of violence: audiences know that it isn’t real. Well, some audiences. I’ve sat next to people—often, but not exclusively, elderly people—who squirm with discomfort when vicious or cruel things happen onscreen. They react as if the violence were happening to an actual person—or, at least, their sense of identification is strong enough to make them miserable. But this discomfort has become a minority response. Most audiences, especially young ones, accept violence as illusion, artifice, spectacle—they relish it as play. We are all pop-culture ironists: we know that we’re being entertained by people making pictures and that none of it is real; we enjoy it and forget it the next day. In particular, horror movies with their ghoulish excesses are attended in a carnival spirit. Teen-age girls especially love horror—year after year, they keep it going as box-office phenomenon. The grosser the outrages, the greater the fun. Surviving the movie becomes a kind of rite of passage. They laugh it off and go again.

This willing dissociation of response from violent spectacle has a downside, as many people have said: we become inured to actual violence when it excites us on; we forget that that there’s pain and death, we become connoisseurs of spectacle. This kind of connoisseurship showed up in the response to 9/11, which many people, with obvious relish as well as awe, said resembled a movie, a remark that left anyone with half a brain feeling queasy, if not furious.

He's quite right about the "pop-culture ironists" bit, I think:  it's really the only way to understand how a movie franchise like "Saw" (which I understand to be entirely based on sadistic and gruesomely detailed horror scenarios) can make money.   I accept that the young-ish audience for that series, for example, is not a bunch of wannabe sadistic torturers.   But what I don't understand is this:  why does anyone want to be sufficiently distanced from a movie experience such that realistically detailed gruesome violence washes off them?    This is why I have never been a fan of cinema violence, and can count the number of R rated movies I have seen on one hand: I do not usually have a ready sense of detachment from what's on the screen.   If the movie is not affecting me, it has in a sense failed.    And it bothers me that movie studios, and critics to a large extent, play up to this ironic detachment by making over-the-top films with only rare critical complaint that de-sensitisation to realistic violence is perhaps not really all that good an idea for society.

Denby then goes on to really rip into The Dark Knight.     I had forgotten, but I presume he was one of the critics who first earned virtual death threats from Nolan fanboys for failing to follow the near universal praise for the film.  While I don't have any real grounds for suspecting that I would be bothered by its violence per se, I guess I am always a bit bothered by movies that make bad characters "cool".   (Pulp Fiction is the stand out example where I had a big, big problem with a movie for that reason.)

I don't know if Denby's criticism of the movie is valid or not:  I haven't seen the current Batman series  because, as I have made clear before, I have trouble engaging with the superhero genre at the best of times.   And given that my impression from reviews is that Nolan rarely leavens the bleak atmosphere with any humour or lightness: well, that just gives me all the more reason to suspect I won't like them.  Sorry fanboys, but men (or women) dressing in costumes to fight crime is basically a silly concept;  if you aren't going to have some light hearted fun with it, it's not likely to win me over.

In fact, going back to Anthony Lane, his review of The Dark Knight Rises wittily describes this over-seriousness as follows:

 Be honest. How badly would you not want Bruce—or Batman—to show up at one of your parties? He has no small talk (and Bale, as an actor, has charisma but no charm), although ask him about fear, anger, and other large abstract nouns, especially as they relate to him, and he’ll keep you in the corner all night. He doesn’t eat or drink, besides toying with a flute of champagne. Basic human tasks are beyond his reach; direct Batman to the bathroom, and it would take him twenty minutes of hydraulic shunting simply to unzip. On the rare occasions when Bruce, fresh from his helicopter or his Lamborghini, enters a reception with a girl or two on his arm, he looks deeply uncomfortable, and Nolan, as if sharing that unease, tends to hurry him through the moment. The point—and, after three installments, it seems a fatal one—is that the two halves of our hero form not a beguiling contrast but a dreary, perfect match. Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people, and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun.

Finally, Adam Gopnik writes with outrage about how Americans will likely take no major action regarding any aspect of gun control as a result of the numerous and repeated massacres of this kind:

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

By far the most appalling response to incidents like this is argument from the gun crazy that maybe this wouldn't have happened if the cinema didn't have a "no guns" policy for the audience.  That's right, there are a large number of gun loving Americans who would prefer not to think about, say, the wisdom of letting just anyone buy oversized magazines that let scores of bullets be shot off before reloading (as did this madman,)  but instead propose that if there were a dozen armed amateurs firing towards gunflashes in a darkened crowded cinema filled with smoke, well, maybe that would have been a good outcome.   

Just appalling.

No comment from Frank?

This Particular God, at Least, Appears to Be Dead at Steven Landsburg 

Until today, I had been forgetting to check, but it kept crossing my mind that Frank Tipler had predicted ages ago that his Omega Point theory meant that the Higgs boson should fall within a certainly energy range.

Has the recent LHC announcement indicated he was right?   As the post above explains, it appears "no".  Mind you, it was written at the start of the year before the announcement, but double checking around it appears that the Higgs has an energy of about 126 GeV, a fair bit less than his initial prediction of around 220.  (Although I think somone in comments at the top link says he later had revised it downwards to 190 GeV.)

On the other hand, the current candidate may turn out to be an imposter.

I wonder what Frank say about this.

The traditional Olympic orgy story

It's party time for Olympic athletes - Yahoo!7 Sport

Isn't everyone getting a bit tired of these articles every 4 years about how much sex takes place in Olympic villages?   Or maybe everyone would be happier if they did away with the sports and just ran the 10 or so days as a giant version of Big Brother* with a camera in every building?

I can't remember if the ancient Greek Olympics were known for debauchery too.   Let's see - yes, it appears they were: 

It was the sheer spectacle of it. Sports [were] one part of a grand, all-consuming extravaganza. It was first and foremost a religious event, held on the most sacred spot in the ancient world. It had this incredible aura of tradition and sanctity.

Today's Olympics is a vast, secular event, but it doesn't have the religious element of the ancient Olympics, where sacrifices and rituals would take up as much time as the sports. And there were all these peripheral things that came with the festival: the artistic happenings, new writers, new painters, new sculptors. There were fire-eaters, palm readers, and prostitutes.

This was the total pagan entertainment package.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.  (Although it sounds as if the ancient version may have had more attraction for me.)

Update:   I see the WSJ recently had a brief article on the old Olympics too:

...the menfolk left their respectable women at home and headed off for the festival with fathers, brothers, sons, friends, neighbors and (male) lovers. Fringe events might include philosophy lectures, poetry readings and sundry charlatans and cranks offering to predict the future, but the real added attraction of the games wasn't the cultural Olympiad but the sexual one. At the Olympics, parties went on through the wee hours, and hundreds of prostitutes, both women and boys, touted their services until dawn.

*  this reminds me, I see that Big Brother has switched networks and is due to return to Australian television later this year.  The traditional response is appropriate:   nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

More on Jim Holt's big question book

No Small Talk: Jim Holt on Why the World Exists - NYTimes.com

Amongst other parts of the email interview, I liked this:

Q.

After talking with Richard Swinburne, a British philosopher who believes in God, you wandered down a street “engulfed by a diffuse sense of contentment.” Might it make sense to believe in God for the possible contentment it offers when other answers may be equally unprovable, no matter how scientific their basis?

A.

That sense of contentment, as I suggested in the book, probably had more to do with the bottle of Shiraz I downed in the Oxford brasserie after leaving Swinburne. But Swinburne’s own religiosity, while it may offer him contentment, is based on rigorous intellectual foundations. You could question or reject his premises — I certainly did — but they weren’t a matter of wishful thinking or wallowing in cheap contentment.

 I also was interested in this, because while writing a long rambling piece on sex and sexuality, soon to be posted, I started talking about the question of personal existence too:

Q.

There’s a chapter about your mother’s death that I found incredibly moving. What impact, if any, did it have on you with regard to the big questions asked by your book?

A.

The question “Why does the world exist?” rhymes with the question “Why do I exist?” Both cosmic and personal existence are precarious in the extreme. This was borne in upon me when, just as I was writing the last chapters of the book, about the self and death, my mother unexpectedly died. I was alone with her in the hospice room at the last moment. To see a self flicker into nothingness — the very self that engendered your own being, no less — is to feel the weirdness of existence anew.

A slow argument

Dumping iron at sea does sink carbon : Nature News

It seems odd that Nature is reporting a paper just published that appears to confirm that a 2004 iron ocean fertilization experiment did seem to work to sink carbon to the bottom of the ocean.

I agree with the basic conclusion:  this is a technology that deserves further investigation, despite serious misgivings about how it may hurt those parts of the ocean where it is done.

A promising approach to reducing malaria

Fighting Malaria Inside a Mosquito's Guts - Technology Review

They haven't tried it in the field yet, but feeding mosquitoes with a bacteria that fights the malaria parasite in their gut sounds a promising tactic.   

Earthquake advice for the Tokyo visitor

Urbanites urged to head up, not down, to survive tsunami | The Japan Times Online

Here's an interesting article, suggesting that when (not if, it seems) Tokyo gets its next big earthquake, you may be best off heading up, rather than anywhere else:
 

Should, as government agencies are predicting, a major earthquake occur within 100-150 km of Tokyo Bay in the Tokai area or Ibaraki's Oki region, Hiroshi Takagi, an associate professor of engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, believes the resultant tsunami would be similar to or greater in height than the Tohoku tsunami.

"The southwestward opening of Tokyo Bay makes it particularly vulnerable to tsunami from the Tokai region," said Takagi.

Takagi, who coauthored "Behavior of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami and Resultant Damage in Tokyo Bay," reported that major quake-induced tsunami have struck Tokyo Bay in 1703, 1854, 1923 and 1960 as well as on March 11, 2011. The largest tsunami to hit Tokyo Bay is thought to have been the result of the 1703 Great Genroku Earthquake, which flooded areas of Miura 6-8 meters above sea level in the south, parts of Yokohama at 3-4 meters elevation and, as far north as Funabashi, areas at 2 meters elevation.

 So, what to do?: 

"The only safe way to escape a tsunami," said Tossani, "is up." Our restaurant, in fact, was 11 meters above sea level, or four meters shy of the minimum 15-meter clearance he believes is required to avoid an advancing tidal wave, should it resemble the Tohoku tsunami of 3/11.

Although counterintuitive, if a tsunami was to strike Tokyo, you might well be safer on the top floors of a Tokyo skyscraper than anywhere else. Tossani should know: He is an architect, master planner and urban designer who researched the actions of those who survived and perished in Tohoku last year for the newly published "Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan" (Routledge).

 I didn't know this about last year's Tohoku earthquake, either:

"What we discovered in Tohoku was that many of the maps published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation distributed to local municipalities indicated areas as low risk that were in fact death zones," said Tossani. "Because many of the municipalities had distributed maps that showed only the four-meter zones, many people made a beeline for them, only to be overwhelmed."

Twelve evacuation sites out of 25 designated by the Onagawa government as safety zones were swept away. In Minamisanriku, also in Miyagi Prefecture, 31 of 80 sites were washed away. In total the tsunami swept away more than 100 evacuation sites along the Tohoku coast. "That contributed to the direct loss of thousands of lives," said Tossani.

 How unfortunate.

A quick review

From Time, talking about The Dark Knight Rises:

For once a melodrama with pulp origins convinces viewers that it can be the modern equivalent to Greek myths or a Jonathan Swift satire. TDKR is that big, that bitter -- a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement.

I can be pithier than that:

It's a man, dressed in a bat costume.

Update:  I've got my review for The Hobbit worked out already:

Some men, pretending to be short, and a fake dragon.

As you may expect...

...news about how much money Jeremy Clarkson makes from Top Gear and the BBC does not please Guardian readers in the comments that follow:
Top Gear bonus lifts Jeremy Clarkson's pay above 3m | Media | guardian.com

I find him pretty annoying too.  James May, on the other hand, is likeable, although how much more mature is (I suppose) debateable.

The inconvenient Earth

Growth of Earth's core may hint at magnetic reversal - environment - 13 July 2012 - New Scientist

 Lopsided growth of the Earth's core could explain why its magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years. If it happened now, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of knocking out global communications and power grids.

One side of Earth's solid inner core grows slightly while the other half melts. Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, used numerical modelling to establish that the axis of Earth's magnetic field lies in the growing hemisphere – a finding that suggests shifts in the field are connected to growth of the inner core.

There are signs that the next switch may be under way: rapid movements of the field's axis to the east in the last few hundred years may be a precursor to the north and south poles trading places, the researchers speculate.

"What we found that is interesting in our models is a correlation between these transient [shifts] and reversals [of Earth's magnetic field]," says Olson. "We kind of speculate there is that connection but the chaos in the core is going to prevent us from making accurate predictions for a long time."

The Big Mistake

I've been reading John Nielsen-Gammon's posts detailing a lengthy exchange he had with "Catastrophic climate change skeptic" physicist Robert Brown over at Climate Abyss.   The series of posts starts here.

As I have said before, I find Nielsen-Gammon a bit of a puzzle.  He is no climate change skeptic, and clearly finds some of what he see on anti-AGW sites annoying, yet he is oddly inclined to keep engaged with them despite the lack of good faith that is in abundance at blogs likes of Watts Up With That.   He is also very uncommitted on the question of action regardling limiting greenhouse gases, to the point of (what as I interpret as) being politically opposed to any EPA involvement in the matter. 

Despite all of the this, or perhaps partly because of it (that is, you get no sense that he approaching the topic from the Left of politics) he is always an interesting read, and he did make me aware of what I think is the single biggest mistake that climate change skeptics make.

That is:  thier belief you have to understand everything about how climate works (and has worked in history and pre-history) before you can decide that CO2 being emitted at current levels is likely to cause substantial global warming with profound changes to the planet.

This mistake appears at a few different points of  the Climate Abyss exchanges, I think, but it gets its simplest analogy here:

6. We don’t understand what determines the baseline temperature of the Earth or whether those forces are presently causing a trend.
N-G: I don’t understand what lack of understanding you’re referring to, but in any event a lack of understanding of how exactly my car was painted blue does not prevent me from predicting what would happen if I took a red paintbrush to it.

The rest of that post (No 5 in the series) talks about the difficulty of modelling the ice sheet changes from glacial to interglacial.  John NG believes that the difficulty is no reason to doubt the effects of increased CO2 on the present, relatively ice free, world.   He's right.

I can think of at least one topical further analogy:   physicists don't fully understand the Standard Model for subatomic particles, and the Higgs Boson might have just been discovered (with much work to be done on it yet,) but that doesn't stop us buidling and using nuclear reactors.  

You can see this argument played out often in skeptic circles.   The escapees from Andrew Bolt's blog use this line all the time at Catallaxy.  Just this weekend, for example, one of them repeated yet again (he's been doing it for years) the fact that you had glaciation occurring 400 million years ago when CO2 was at a few thousand (or more) ppm must mean that current models are wrong.    As it happens, the contintents were also stuck all together at that time, the sun was a little bit dimmer, and the work has been done suggesting that this configuration of the planet can be modelled such that glaciation at those CO2 levels can occur.   Here's a summary:

Ordovician glaciation
Geological evidence exists for a late Ordovician (~440 Ma) glaciation. This short-lived (~1 million year) glaciation (Brenchley et al., 1995, 2003) was remarkable because atmospheric CO2 levels were high (14 6 PAL) during the late Ordovician (Yapp and Poths, 1992). Numerical climate models of increasing complexity have been used to determine the conditions permitting glaciation at high CO2 levels. Early studies using 2-D EBMs focused on the role of the late Ordovician paleogeography (Crowley et al., 1987; Crowley and Baum, 1991a), and specifically the orientation of Gondwanaland relative to the South Pole. With an edge of Gondwanaland near the South Pole, the thermal inertia of the ocean prevented continental summer temperatures from rising above freezing, thus allowing permanent snow cover (Crowley et al., 1987; Crowley and Baum, 1991a). Subsequent GCM experiments have confirmed the EBM result (Gibbs et al., 2000), but have also shown that the continental configuration of Gondwanaland is not a sufficient condition for glaciation. The influences of additional climatic factors on Ordovician glaciation have since been tested, including atmospheric CO2, topography, ocean heat transport, orbital parameters, and snow/ ice albedo (Crowley and Baum, 1995; Gibbs et al., 1997; Poussart et al., 1999; Herrmann et al., 2003). These studies generally conclude that glaciation is possible with high (8–14 PAL) atmospheric CO2 levels given favorable orbital parameters (i.e., a cold Southern Hemisphere summer configuration) and continental topography. With orbital forcing varying from cold-summer to warm-summer configurations, ice-sheet model calculations indicate that CO2 levels must fall to 8 PAL to grow a permanent ice sheet (Herrman et al., 2003).

Sure, the precise answer is hard to work out given we don't have perfect knowledge of conditions back then; but - we are not talking Gondwanaland any more.   (By the way, PAL is Present day Atmospheric Levels - so I guess 8 PAL could be anything from about 2400 to 3200 ppm.   I learned this from another paper which believes plants moving onto Gondwanaland is what drove cooling to allow glaciation.)

John N-G's first post (which I have referred to before) about why AGW skeptics are wrong to persist with this "but we need complete understanding before we can do anything" argument is here:   it is well worth reading if you haven't done so.

The corollary to this Big Mistake is, of course, this:   at the current rate of CO2 emissions, the time scale at which climate change occurs, and given the life span of large electrical power plants, by the time you fill in the gaps as to precise climate sensitivity, you are likely making it too late for any effective CO2 reductions to be made at all.

But as I say, this is really just a follow on from the fundamental Big Mistake.

Badly priced Apples

Apple profit margins: You’re paying way, way too much to get a little more space on your iPad and iPhone. - Slate Magazine

It's rather worse than I suspected:

 Once you decide to move beyond the entry-level iPad, the company’s profits soar. According to iSuppli, it costs Apple about $316 to make the low-end 16GB iPad, which the company sells for $499—a margin of about 37 percent, not including non-manufacturing costs. Doubling the storage space to 32GB costs Apple $17 more, but it charges you $599 for that model, boosting its margin to 45 percent. On the high-end Wi-Fi model, which offers you 64GB of space for $699, Apple’s non-manufacturing profit margin shoots up to 48 percent. But that’s not all! If you get an iPad with 4G cellular connectivity, you’re really in for it. The very top-end iPad, a 64GB model with 4G, will set you back $829 for a device that costs Apple $408 to make—a margin of 51 percent, or twice what Apple makes on the cheapest iPad. There may be other popular products that carry such a breathtaking markup, but I bet most of them are monitored by the DEA.

My suspicion that I am better off in future buying a basic 16 GB Android tablet with a slot for additional SD memory seems justified.

Some Chinese at the end of the universe

There seem to be a fair number of Chinese physics papers on arXiv now, and this one about the variety of possible "rip" ends of the universe is quite interesting. They come up with their own - the "Quasi Rip", but I'll paste this from the introduction (clicking on it may, or may not, make it more readable):

Anyway, The paper then goes on to suggest a "quasi rip" is a possibility, from which the universe may rebuild. It also acknowledges that all of these ideas are currently up for grabs, in terms of being consistent with observations of the universe. I wonder for how long that will be the case.

Preparing for the worst

What happened when I had a heart attack | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The variety of ways the pain and discomfort of a heart attack can manifest itself is a somewhat interesting topic:  especially to a person like me who gets nearly no exercise and sits all day, which the doctors like to tell us is a bad thing.  So reading Brown's well written description about what his heart attack felt like serves a useful cautionary purpose.

Getting up earlier and going for a walk ever second day would be even better, I suppose.  (On the other hand, Brown did start his heart attack while cycling.   If this is something he does regularly, maybe he thought he was too fit to be having such a problem.  See, this is one good thing about not exercising -  I will be under no such illusion if crushing pain starts anywhere near  my torso.) 

Must get those long delayed blood tests too ...

Socks in space

Design for a long duration, deep space mission habitat

I like the way this article starts:

There are all sorts of details to take into consideration when traveling in deep space, such as where to go, what to do, and how to get back. Since starry-eyed dreamers often don’t take into account the practical realities of putting a human into such an environment, steely-eyed engineers are left to decide the gritty details of such a mission, such as how many pairs of socks are needed.

Well, it's good to see that NASA is putting serious work into how much sock drawer room is needed in space.  (That sounds sarcastic, but it's not really meant to be.   I would love to have my childhood doodling of spaceship designs as a real job.)

Anyway, NASA is coming up with estimates for spaceship size for long missions (this one to an asteroid.)  Apart from the summary at the link, you can see the whole paper here.   This is what they think a deep space mission may look like:




















And here's the inside:






Those ceilings look very low and claustrophobic; but then again, I suppose in weightlessness you're  not standing up often.

This also gives me the opportunity to again note that, as anyone who has ever stayed at a cheap Japanese hotel and been in one of their ultra compact bathrooms would know, the nation with the most Earth based experience for long distance space travel is clearly the Japanese.  They have space underwear too.   (Search my blog at the side if you are interested.)

A bunch of dates

gulfnews : Liwa Date Festival begins

It can be argued that the Liwa Date Festival is one of the truest experiences of all things date-related and the Emirati culture as a whole.

 It kind of makes me miss the days of HG & Roy on ZZZ.   (For Australian readers only.)

The NH cooling trend is not new...Grrr

I just Googled "long term cooling trend" and saw that many media and blog commentary about the Esper tree proxy study have headings like this:   "New Tree Ring Study Shows 2000 years of COOLING on Earth".  Obviously, they think that the existence of some long term cooling is a new finding.

This just shows how easily people are misled.

As this Skeptical Science post (last updated in 2010) shows via a few graphs - knowledge of a long term cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere (up to last century) is nothing new.

The point is also made in the Real Climate commentary on the Esper paper.  The Esper cooling trend, based on its Lapland trees, is just a bit higher than other proxy studies conclude.

This really is frustrating.

A wetter world? [Continued]

11 dead, 18 missing in record deluge | The Japan Times Online

Eleven people were killed, at least 18 others were missing and tens of thousands were ordered evacuated Thursday as downpours lashed Kyushu and other areas in the southwest, police and firefighters said.

The Meteorological Agency said rainfall in parts of Kumamoto and Oita prefectures reached levels that have "never been experienced before."

The agency meanwhile forecast heavy rain and landslides in other areas of Japan, including the west and northeast.

 The photos of the damage at this site show it to be quite severe.

A bunch of hypocritical twits

Over at Catallaxy, I see that Sinclair Davidson's tedious "broken promise" campaign entry for day 13 of carbon pricing put up a video of David Murray (an ex banker who headed our Future Fund) criticising the policy as bad economically.   Never mind that he (Murray) has long said he doesn't even believe CO2 can cause AGW.  That wouldn't make his views on the economic effects of the policy suspect now, would it?  Wayne Swan appears on the video making this point, and ABC host Emma is the other person who makes an appearance.

Anyway, in the comments following, in the middle of the night, we get this contribution from mareeS:



Last I looked, there were about 16 or so comments after Maree's, by Catallaxy regulars, none of whom make any comment about her contribution.

For a group of people who scoff at the idea that climate scientists have been at the receiving end of torrid and disgusting email campaigns  from skeptics who wish them dead, and quite a few of whom have spent time this week talking about how they wouldn't be surprised if  Gillard suspended the next election due to some drummed up, climate change related "state of emergency", they are a really a bunch of unselfaware and stupid people.

Public confusion via press release

As soon as I read the comments by Jan Esper last week on his team's Lapland tree study I knew that  climate change "skeptics" would exaggerate its significance.   The study indicates a long term cooling trend greater than previously expected, and that the previous warm periods of the last couple of thousand years were a bit warmer than earlier estimates.

That's quite a lot to get from one set of trees in one tiny part of the Northern Hemisphere, I thought.

True to form, climate change skeptics who only get their information from Watts Up With That were thrilled with the paper.  Strangely, it has only turned up on Tim Blair's site in Australia, not Andrew Bolt's yet, but give it another day.

You can bet your last dollar that no more than a few percent of those who note this would read the commentary on the paper at Real Climate, which deals with it as scientists in the field would - pointing out some of its strengths, but also its weakenesses and the reasons to be somewhat cautious about its authors' broader suggestions about the significance of their study.  Here's the important section:

Orbital forcing is indeed substantial on the millennial timescale for high-latitudes during the summer season, and the theoretically expected cooling trend is seen in proxy reconstructions of Arctic summer temperature trends (Kaufman et al, 2009). But insolation forcing is near zero at tropical latitudes, and long-term cooling trends are not seen in non-tree ring, tropical terrestrial proxy records such as the Lake Tanganyika (tropical East Africa) (Tierney et al, 2010) (see below).

Long-term orbital forcing over the past 1-2 millennia is also minimal for annual, global or hemispheric insolation changes, and other natural forcings such as volcanic and solar radiative forcing have been shown to be adequate in explaining past long-term pre-industrial temperature trends in this case (e.g. Hegerl et al, 2007). Esper et al’s speculation that the potential bias they identify with high-latitude, summer-temperature TRW tree-ring data carry over to a bias in hemispheric temperature reconstructions based on multiple types of proxy records spanning tropics and extratropics, ocean and land, and which reflect a range of seasons, not just summer (e.g. Hegerl et al, 2006; Mann et al, 1999;2008) is therefore a stretch.

Indeed, there are a number of lines of evidence that contradict that more speculative claim. For example, if one eliminates tree-ring data entirely from the Mann et al (2008) “EIV” temperature reconstruction (see below; blue curve corresponds to the case where all tree-ring data have been withheld from the multiproxy network), one finds not only that the resulting reconstruction is broadly similar to that obtained with tree-ring data, but in fact the pre-industrial long-term cooling trend in hemispheric mean temperature is actually lessened when the tree-ring data are eliminated—precisely the opposite of what is predicted by the Esper et al hypothesis.

As for the way the study is being mis-reported, one comment in the Real Climate thread does note that a significant part of the blame can be put down to Esper's comments in a press release:

Journalists should only be partially blamed for the bad coverage of the latest Jan Esper paper. Some of them wrote stories without interviewing the authors, which is wrong, but the press release issued by JG University in Mainz helps the denialist fringe by including a couple of odd quotes from Esper himself. Take a look at what he says:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php
“We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Esper. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.”

 And some of the Real Climate team do get stuck into that:

I wonder if you guys could please comment on this press release, because it’s very hard for journalists to deal with such vague statements. Do you really think Esper is advocating lowering the tone of the IPCC reports?

[Response: I have no idea. I'd say it was more related to emphasizing the potential implications of one's own work over anyone else's - a frequent occurrence in press releases. I generally find it prudent to wait for the work on the implications to be done (for instance). - gavin]

[Response: Gavin is again quite generous. It would appear that Esper's misleading statements and overstatement of larger implications directly fed the sort of denialist frame represented in the Daily Mail article. It is of course impossible, and unwise, to guess at whether or not that was his intent. -mike]

 Interestingly, John Nielsen-Gammon a couple of weeks ago had a long and useful post in which he looked at how a paper on one particular bit of one Antarctic ice shelve had its significance over-inflated by the skeptic press too.   He also noted at one point that the press release for that study did what seemed to be some exaggeration of the significance of the findings.

If climate scientists don't want the public to be so easily confused (and for their results to not be so readily twisted by "skeptics" who are motivated to twist it), they really need to be careful with how their work is explained in their own press releases.

Holt returns

Back in 2006 and 2007, I recommended articles by Jim Holt.  In fact, I see that my enjoyment of his science eriting (usually looking at the big, big questions of life, the universe, and everything) extends at least back to articles in Slate in 2004.  

So it's good to see he has a book out on the basic question Why Does the World Exist? and it's getting some very good reviews.  I like this extract from that last link:

... the very intractability of the problem turns out to have a salutary (and fun) side effect: All the ordinary kinds of answers being impossible, one begins to think in earnest about the extraordinary ones. This is a book that gets us to take seriously, at least for a few pages, the proposition that the universe was brought into being by the abstract idea of Goodness. (Hey, Plato thought so.) Elsewhere, we get a probabilistic, Bayesian case for the existence of God. We hear Heidegger speculate that nothingness is an agent, that noth-ing is a verb (“Das Nichts nichtet,” or “Nothing noths”: shades of Hopkins, for whom the self “selves”); perhaps, then, nothing nothed itself, thereby creating Being. We contemplate panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental property, irreducible to physical components and pervasive throughout the universe: that, in the words of the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

The weirdness goes on. We learn—and I am quoting here because my powers to intelligently paraphrase this are limited—that “a tiny bit of energy-filled vacuum could spontaneously ‘tunnel’ into existence,” and then, bang, expand to become the universe. We learn that a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter would suffice to generate a universe like ours, which means it’s conceivable that we were created by some extraterrestrial nerd in an extra-universal lab. We entertain the possibility, favored by some physicists, that “nothingness is unstable,” which means something was bound to happen. And we entertain the possibility that everything was bound to happen. That is the principle of fecundity: the idea that all possible worlds are real. Muse on the implications of that one for your personal life—or lives—on your next subway ride home.

Big (-ish) brother in your pocket

Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ Review | | Independent Editor's choice Blogs

From this review of the new Android operating system (made by Google), we get this description of the very futuristic sounding (and privacy damaging, I assume) Google Now:

With Android 4.1 Google have introduced a major new feature called “Google Now’. It is a kind of self aware personal organiser/assistant, designed to serve up useful information based on your location and behaviour. It sounds pretty ominous, but it’s actually quite brilliant. By analysing your search terms and cross-referencing them with your calendar and current location, Google Now provides an array of useful information without any effort on your part.

It provides public transport information when you’re near a bus stop or train station, it suggests places to eat and visit when you’re away travelling, as well as up-to-date weather, sports results for your favourite teams and routes back to your home when you’re out and about. It even takes real-time traffic data into consideration when suggesting your route home, then estimates your arrival time accordingly.

All of this is achieved without the user entering in any information. It intelligently guesses where you live and work, what teams you support, even which flights you might be taking, all with surprising accuracy. This is all thanks to the insight it gains from the location and use of your smartphone within the Google ecosystem. The results are elegantly displayed in a series of informative and well-designed cards, which you can simply swipe away with your finger if they are no longer needed.

This might sound a little ‘Big Brother-esque’ on paper, but Google Now manages to present the information it interprets in a very user-friendly and unobtrusive way. Rather than feeling like an invasion of privacy, it feels more like an essential addition to the modern mobile experience.

Nice house

It's been a while since I've looked through Dezeen for some nice architecture, but I do like this Japanese house, especially the bathroom on the top that has an unusual outlook.  (I would be nervous using it during a summer storm though.)  Here it is:

Banks discussed

The LIBOR scandal: The rotten heart of finance | The Economist

The Economist considers that that LIBOR scandal is a very serious matter, with international implications.

A libertarian inclined free market economist from Melbourne, who repeatedly at his blog notes that he doesn't watch the ABC and spends all of his time lately promoting political stuff (and cherry picked graphs with inadequate explanation) of benefit to the Coalition, taking his cue from one bit of Wall Street Journal commentary says (my paraphrase) "oh pooh, this is all boring and about nothing important."   I wonder if he has read another piece from the WSJ which seems to me to argue "of course the banks may have been manipulating this for profit, and we need to fix the system and move on because we just can't afford massive litigation about this."

Who to believe...?

NASA gets dramatic

The New York Times mentioned this NASA video as being slick and popular on Youtube, and a cut above their usual bland stuff.   All quite true.  And it does seems a very optimistic way to try to land a rover on Mars next month:

Tube problem

Getting your tubes tied: Why do young women have a hard time getting sterilized? - Slate Magazine

I would be pretty sure the same thing happens in Australia:  doctors being very, very reluctant to do tubal ligation at the request of young-ish women who simply say they never want to have children.

The article notes that there are figures on the number of women who actually go on to regret having this done:

According to analyses of the CREST data, there is a cumulative 12.7 percent probability that any woman would express regret within 14 years of sterilization. But for women under the age of 30 at the time of the procedure, there is a 20.3 percent cumulative probability that they would eventually want to take it all back (compared to only 5.9 percent in the older cohort). Of course, there are other factors that may predict regret, including partner/doctor pressure and disagreement among partners about the procedure. However, the CREST research shows that sterilization at a young age is the strongest predictor of regret. (Incidentally, this trend holds true with young men getting vasectomies.)

I was also surprised at the failure rate for the operation:

 According to the Collaborative Review of Sterilization (CREST) study, the 10-year probability of pregnancy following a ligation is 18.5 per 1,000 procedures, about seven of which could be ectopic, depending on surgical method and age.

 I guess I just assumed it could be done in such a way as to virtually assure success.   (I know vasectomies can also fail - let me check the rate - around 1 in a 1000 according to this site.  I guess that makes sense.)

Anyway, I fully understand doctors' reluctance to use tubal ligation on young women.  

Rain and the jet stream

BBC News - Why, oh why, does it keep raining?

Here's an article noting that the change in the jet stream position is the main reason for Britain's wet summer.  The possible relationship between this and climate change is not discussed much.

The oxtail noted (or ox tail, if you prefer)

Before I forget, and primarily for my own future reference, I followed this recipe for oxtail cooked in the pressure cooker on Saturday night.   Quite successful, although I did just use a can of tomatoes instead of fresh ones, added some celery and bits of left over fennel, and next time I would drain off some of the oil before frying the vegetables.  Still, the sauce was tasty and rich, and the cooking time was right.

I see now that the guy (Steffen) who put up this recipe is (or was in 2007) ""a Ph.D physicist, primarily working on data acquisition and computing at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory." !

I'm even more impressed now.

I love a good oxtail stew.  What the heck: just in case his website goes down, I'll copy the recipe here:
.

Doing my bit

Because I am fan of Wordperfect, I will now embed their (kinda dull) promo for version X6, which was released earlier this year:



It's not just me who likes it.   And here's another person.  In fact, given that it probably picks up virtually no new users, it may be a fair assumption that nearly all Wordperfect users have been dedicated to it for years and years and love it in a way that is a tad unnatural in the scheme of how people should feel about  word processing software.   

As for the X6 version I like the idea of the eBook publisher.  I would probably never use it, but take comfort in knowing it was there. 

Hunting down the museum

Well, this is slightly amusing.   In last night's post, I noted a reference in The Japan Times to a "Museum of Perverts" in Kagurazaka.   Oddly, Googling this place is drawing a blank, as far as I can see.   (Well, there is no obvious link, anyway.)   So I'm a bit puzzled about this.

But looking at my Sitemeter tonight, I see that it was not only me, but someone from UNESCO in Paris was Googling for it too:

Good to see a UN body putting in the effort to list all culturally significant museums of the world...

I'm sure the answer is "no"

Is crude Ted really a family film?

I won't be seeing "Ted":  I don't even care much for Family Guy, so I can hardly be called a Seth MacFarlane fan.  I don't appreciate much in the way of crude humour - but it seems the world can't get enough of it.   I sort of thought that most limits had been reached with the big bodily fluid joke in Something About Mary (which didn't even make sense, really) but how wrong I was.  (Apparently, because I don't go to see the movies which are reviewed as being adult raunchy movies anyway.)

What was formerly humour that was mainly between men in a private setting is now up on the screen for women and young teenagers to see as well.   The moviemakers who specialise in this might argue that it is really just being open about a level of humour that was always there, but I'm far from convinced that universalizing such stuff is a good thing.

And people really are pretty stupid when it comes to what they will take their kids to see.  That's a given.

A wetter world?

Of course, it may only be an impression given by better reporting, but I can't help but think that the world still seems to be a wetter place in the last 6 to 12 months, despite the easing of the la nina.

Locally, Brisbane has had an unusually grey and damp winter, and it seems that all of Queensland is affected, even as we are being warned that a el nino seems to be developing:

Unseasonable downpours have hit north and central west Queensland, sparking flood warnings, as the Townsville region recorded its wettest July day in more than 60 years. SINCE 9am (AEST) on Monday, the region has had between 80 and 100 millimetres of rain - well beyond the previous July record of 51mm in a day set in 1950, the ABC reported.

There has been lots of news of the wet summer in England:

Speaking in Yealmpton, Richard Cresswell from the Environment Agency says the "fifth flood event" of the 2012 summer is "unprecedented".

 and floods in Russia have killed scores.  Now that I Google the topic, I see that there have been floods in India, although the article notes that the total monsoon rainfall is currently "running at 31% below annual average."   As the monsoon season can last til September, I wonder what the figure will end up at. 

It may end up bolstering my hunch, developed over the last couple of years, that increased intensity of flooding may be the first really problematic aspect of global warming that is widely recognised.

Should I be surprised? - I can't decide

From phys.org:

“We present a novel twist present in quantum mechanics, absent in its classical counterpart: We are able to show that very natural, reasonable questions about quantum measurement are, intriguingly, undecidable,” Eisert told Phys.org. “At the same time, the corresponding classical problem is decidable.”

The problem in question involves a measurement device that generates any one of multiple outputs depending on the outcome of the measurement. The output state is then fed back into the device as the input, leading to a new output, and the process repeats. The question is whether there exist any finite sequences of measurement outcomes that never occur.

“The problem as such is simple - merely asking whether certain outcomes can occur in quantum measurements,” Eisert said.

When using a classical measurement device, the physicists show that they can always find an algorithm that can answer whether or not any outputs with zero probability exist. So in a classical context, the problem is decidable.

However, when using a quantum measurement device, the physicists show that there cannot be an algorithm that always provides the correct answer, and so the problem becomes undecidable. The scientists explain that the undecidability arises from interference in the quantum device, implying that, at least in this scenario, undecidability appears to be a genuine quantum property.

 An early thought:  assuming quantum involvement in brain cells, does this have relevance to the question of free will?

Japan for the better, or worse?

Youth of the ice age - FT.com

Speaking of Japan, this long Financial Times Magazine article looks at the question of whether Japan's increased casualisation of its workforce, and general increase in concern for the quality of life amongst its younger generation, is actually a good thing.

It's very detailed and looks at all of the contradictory evidence, including decreasing interest in relationships and a high suicide rate, yet quite high levels of life satisfaction found in a government survey.  

There were a couple of points made in passing that I hadn't realised:

Japan’s economy has not performed as wretchedly as is sometimes believed, especially when measured in per capita terms. The unemployment rate, now 4.6 per cent, has never scaled the dreadful heights of the US or Britain, let alone Spain.

and:

Although it has risen slightly in recent years, Japan’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.4, well below 2, which is the rate needed to maintain a population. That is higher than South Korea’s 1.23 or Singapore’s 0.78, though – unlike Japan – Singapore supplements its dwindling native population with a steady inflow of immigrants.

 What the heck is going on with Singapore's birthrate?

From the Japan Times

Three articles of interest from the Japan Times:

*  Japan is the sort of place where dislike of tattoos is out and proud, so to speak:

The weekly magazine Aera recently discussed tattoos, which became a contentious issue in Osaka after Mayor Toru Hashimoto not only prohibited city employees from gettting them but suggested that any who already had tattoos resign. Hashimoto believes that Osaka citizens are offended by tattoos, which tend to be associated with gangsters and other lowlifes. Many young people get tattoos for reasons having to do with fashion, but the majority of citizens don’t make such a distinction. Public baths and onsen (hot springs) tend to prohibit patrons with tattoos, even if it’s just a tiny reproduction of a butterfly.

I'd vote for him...

* Can't say I've heard much before about a couple of oddball religions that arose in postwar Japan, but they are the subject of new book being reviewed:

Jikoson (nee Nagako Nagaoka) of Jiu ruled her small band of followers through divine oracles, while calling for a renewal of Japan and, by extension, the world, under the leadership of the emperor (who would presumably receive his marching orders from her). Cloistered from the public eye, Jikoson might have remained yet another in the long procession of obscure postwar religious cranks if her teachings had not been taken up by go master Go Seigen and sumo grand champion Futabayama.

When the latter physically defended Jikosan from a police raid of her Kanazawa headquarters in January of 1947 (a photo of him grappling with an arresting officer is thoughtfully included in the book), the media uproar was enormous and the resulting fallout, which included Futabayama's hasty departure from the group, was fatally damaging to Jiu.

Sayo Kitamura, the feisty farmer's wife who became the leader of Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo, proved to be a savvier manipulator of the authorities and the media, though she repeatedly clashed with both, as well as with representatives of established religions, which she derided as empty vessels.

Though tirelessly denouncing what she called the "maggot world" in her sermons, Kitamura had a magnetic personality that attracted the very "maggots" she was attacking, bolstered by her claims to faith healing powers, as well as by the singing and dancing featured in her services.

"Maggot world" has a certain ring to it, I think.

Googling "Jikoson" produces few leads on her story.   Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo seems to be more famous, and I have a feeling I have heard about the "dancing religion" before.  Encylopedia Britannica has an entry that explains:

She had a revelation in 1945 that she was possessed by a Shintō deity, Tenshō-Kōtaijin (another name for the Shintō sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami). She traveled widely and won followers in Europe and the Americas. Her eccentric behaviour and forthright condemnation of organized institutions of religion and government, whom she characteristically referred to as “maggot beggars,” won her an enthusiastic following, estimated at about 300,000 a few years after her death.

 They appear to still operate in Seattle, as well as other places, yet Googling for video for the dancing doesn't come up with anything.

*  Another review of a  book about the effect of defeat on Japan sexual politics and practices contains this curious line:

 Mark McClelland's excellent and intriguing appraisal of how Japanese responded to a new climate of sexuality under the American occupation draws on several years of research that began auspiciously enough at the Museum of Perverts in Kagurazaka.

 Is this the world's only Museum of Perverts, I wonder?