A pleasant day out

I'd been looking at Google maps and pondering places around Brisbane I had never been to, and settled on Jacobs Well - a small spot on the water stuck away between Brisbane and Southport, and mainly known (as far as I could recall) for fishing.   Insert map here:

I work on the assumption that all places are interesting for at least one visit, so it was the destination for a day out yesterday.

The drive between the motorway to Jacobs Well reminded me a lot of driving around Bundaberg - fields of sugar cane (which I thought had more or less stopped being grown in the South East corner) and very flat land.  Jacobs Well itself is, as I expected, small but pleasant enough.  It has a swimming enclosure in the bay waters, but the day was cloudier and much windier than expected, so no one felt like getting wet, or even fishing off the jetty.   I just took a photo of some slightly disgruntled pelicans instead:

Jacobs Well does feature a small tavern, but I saw a sign saying on the Sea Rescue building advertising an Irish pub at nearly "Calypso Bay"; an expensive canal/marina estate just outside of town that looks like its been there for a few years, but presumably has been suffering sales problems given the GFC.  There's certainly plenty of land still available around the millionaires houses.

But what a surprise Harrigans Drift Inn is.   It has a bland exterior, but inside it's very nice indeed:

The menu was very good and reasonably priced for an Irish pub: there was a four piece jazz band playing (music on a Saturday and Sunday is routine, apparently); it has a lovely beer garden area outside near the water; and its own jetty to pull up to when I own a two million motor yacht.   I guess it goes to show that it does help a small village to have rich people move in next door.

Anyway, after lunch, and given that it was still windy, we went back to the motorway and down another exit or two to visit Hope Island/Sanctuary Cove, which I haven't been to for some years (maybe 6 or 8?)   It seems to have been developed a hell of a lot more since then, and this area really reminds me a lot of parts of Florida.  (Mind you, it's been 25 years or so since I was happily spending days by myself at DisneyWorld.)

Someone had told me a couple of years ago that Sanctuary Cove itself was suffering quite a bit with the downturn in the economy, and that several cafes were closed.  As far as I could see, there were plenty open yesterday, and not many shop spaces vacant.   "Ladies who lunch" were very much in evidence, as well as rich Asians.   The place still screams money.

If ever a cyclone devastates the marina, I hate to think how many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage would be incurred - have a look at this local site for prices of new and used boats in the area.  All we could afford was an ice cream for the kids, but it's nice to dream. 

So, there's my recommendation, particularly if you are on the South side of Brisbane - Jacobs Well will take less than an hour, and an Irish pub awaits you.
 

Graham Lloyd's transparent war on science

Sea level fall defies climate warnings | The Australian

The defiantly transparent attempts to twist stories which do not contradict climate change warnings into ones that do continues apace at The Australian.

I mean, seriously Graham (and whoever it is who comes up with the headlines for your stories,)  people can read, you know.   Or do you simply hope (probably with good reason, I fear) that climate change fake skeptics simply read headlines and are convinced by them alone?

Anyway, the interesting thing in the article is the talk about how it does indeed seem that the drop in sea level rise over the last few years was due to water - a huge amount - going onto the land in the form of rain.  Queensland knows all about that.  I can't actually find the paper or articles Lloyd is talking about, however. 

As with my earlier post this week about the Brisbane floods, it seems that News Ltd has developed a special talent for headlines which don't gel with the material within the article.

The divided media

This article in the SMH today, about the sharply divided media coverage of the US presidential election, was a good read.

One thing I know for sure:  Fox News will be a pretty entertaining watch when Obama is re-elected.   (I'm on the media side that just can't see Romney coming back, because of the intrinsic problem that he is captive of the running away from reality element of the US Right.)

A long, long complaint about Hollywood

Has Hollywood Murdered The Movies? | The New Republic

Wow.  David Denby must have been working on this essay about what has gone wrong with Hollywood movies for a long time.  There may not be too much that hasn't been said before, but it's said in a lot of detail, and it is all convincingly argued and gives voice to many similar thoughts I have had over the years about the decline of Hollywood.   One of his main themes (about how digital technology has meant many directors don't really film "spatially" any more) makes for a good extract:  

 It is also a drama of space. What audiences feel about characters on the screen is probably affected more than most of us realize by the way the space surrounding the people is carved up and re-combined. In John Ford, the geographical sense is very strong—the poetic awareness of sky and landscape and moving horses, but also the attention to such things as how people are arrayed at a long table as an indication of social caste (the prostitute at one end, the fine lady at the other). The best use of space is not just an effective disposition of activity on the screen, it is the emotional meaning of activity on the screen.

Directors used to take great care with such things: spatial integrity was another part of the unspoken contract with audiences, a codicil to the narrative doctrine of the scriptorium. It allowed viewers to understand, say, how much danger a man was facing when he stuck his head above a rock in a gunfight, or where two secret lovers at a dinner party were sitting in relation to their jealous enemies. Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewer’s head—so that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that emotion, the movie wouldn’t have cast its spell.

This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn’t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.

 Any regular reader will know what I am likely to say next:  this is one reason why Spielberg remains an awesome director - he gives the audience an excellent sense of space; his action sequences are rarely too quickly edited and you can understand what's going on perfectly.  And,  to concur with Denby,  Spielberg's most artificial film of all, last year's Adventures of Tin Tin, was a failure because of the technology taking away the same sense of spatial and kinetic realism that his best films have.

One other incidental point near the start, which I didn't fully realise before:

In the 1930s, roughly eighty million people went to the movies every week, with weekly attendance peaking at ninety million in 1930 and again in the mid-1940s. Now about thirty million people go, in a population two and a half times the size of the population of the 1930s.

 I am not entirely sure about this next selection, but from my own childhood, there is a certain element of truth in it:

 My friends’ attitudes are defined so completely by the current movie market that they do not wish to hear that movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults. Sure, there were always films for families and children, but, for the most part, ten-year-olds and teens were dragged by their parents to what the parents wanted to see, and this was true well after television reduced the size of the adult audience. The kids saw, and half understood, a satire such as Dr. Strangelove, an earnest social drama such as To Kill a Mockingbird, a cheesy disaster movie such as Airport, and that process of half understanding, half not, may have been part of growing up; it also laid the soil for their own enjoyment of grown-up movies years later. They were not expected to remain in a state of goofy euphoria until they were thirty-five. My friends think that our current situation is normal. They believe that critics are naïve blowhards, but it is they who are naïve.

I remember sitting in the back seat at the drive in being bored by The Graduate, and falling asleep.   But certainly, I think that the moderation in the depiction of sex and swearing in pre-1960's cinema certainly meant that children could be exposed to what was still "adult" cinema and influenced their feel for the medium in a positive way.

All in all, a job well done, David.

That's ridiculous

Japan's NTT breaks fibre optic data speed record 

Japan's incumbent telecommunications carrier, NTT, is claiming a telecommunications speed record, demonstrating a fibre technology able to carry 1 Petabit-per-second - a million gigabits - over a distance of 50 kilometers, using a single fibre.

The technology - at this stage a research demonstration not ready for commercialization - would serve not end users, but the "trunk" links between exchanges. The carrier selected the 50 km distance as reflecting the typical distance between medium-haul telecommunications exchanges in Japan.

NTT's report states that it used a specially-designed optical fibre in which one fibre strand contained 12 "cores" - light paths within the fibre that don't interact with each other. Each of those fibres carried an 84.5 Terabit-per-second signal to achieve the total 1 Pbps throughput.

So, how much data does this really represent in something we can understand?:

 The 1 Pb/s capacity of the NTT-demonstrated link would carry the equivalent of 5,000 two-hour HDTV movies each second, the company says.

More on the Republicans not making sense...

A column in the Washington Post puts the problems with Romney squarely on where his party has gone:

Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.

It is obvious that, with a deficit at 8 percent of gross domestic product, any solution to our budgetary problems has to involve both spending cuts and tax increases. Ronald Reagan agreed to tax increases when the deficit hit 4 percent of GDP; George H.W. Bush did so when the deficit was 3 percent of GDP. But today’s Republican Party is organized around the proposition that, no matter the circumstances, there must never be a tax increase of any kind. The Simpson-Bowles proposal calls for $1 of tax increases for every $3 of spending cuts. But every Republican presidential candidate — including Romney — pledged during the primaries that he or she would not accept $10 of spending cuts if that meant a dollar of tax increases.

So Romney could present a serious economic plan with numbers that make sense — and then face a revolt within his own party. His solution: to be utterly vague about how he would deal with the deficit.

And it ends:

 The Republican Party has imposed a new kind of political correctness on its leaders. They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden. Romney has tried to run a campaign while not running afoul of his party’s strictures. As a result, he has twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously, avoiding specifics and refusing to provide any serious plans for the most important issues of the day.

 All sounds about right to me.

Williamstown discussed

Maritime and tide

This short article in The Age talks about some of the history of Williamstown, which is pretty much my favourite part of Melbourne.

Clever mice

BBC News - 'Scar free healing' in mice may give clues to human skin repair, says study

There was a report just a day or two ago that new work on how axolotls re-grew limbs indicated that it was trick unlucky to be able to be artificially copied in humans.

But then this article on some African mice can repair skin with no scars, and full hair, indicates mammals may be better at regeneration than we thought.

Rubbery figures?

Climate change already harming the global economy - environment - 26 September 2012 - New Scientist

I remain very skeptical that reliable economic modelling can possibly be done for the economic effects of global warming over the long term.

Just use common sense, and don't limit your thinking to some artificial target like the turn of the century.

I mean, can anyone reliably model the economic effects of eventual ocean level rise of (say) 3 metres over the course of 100 - 200 years?   I would rather just assume that turning many centres of civilisation (known as "cities") into empty versions of Venice is a bad idea, and you do what you can now to reduce the possibility in as economically sound way as you can.

We'll see

Short Sharp Science: Newly spotted comet may outshine the full moon

These predictions when new comets are spotted so far out are not at all reliable, but we'll see around Christmas 2013.

Unfortunate

Exercise increases life span (Science Alert)

Yes, but so might castration, and I wouldn't enjoy that either.

Hedley stamps his foot

First, I noticed that the Courier Mail website this morning has a headline that is utterly at odds with the contents of the story:

How strange.  An independent report that looks at the dam operation and backs the SEQWater engineers is going to "open lawsuit floodgates"?

The headline at the actual report page is just slightly better:

Multi-billion dollar lawsuit in wake of report backing Wivenhoe Dam flood engineers 

Readers might still be somewhat puzzled as to the chosen headline when the report opens:

A MULTI-BILLION-dollar lawsuit is set to become the next chapter in the January 2011 flood saga after a crucial US Government report backed the actions of the four flood engineers who controlled Wivenhoe Dam.
 
The report - by the Department of the Interior and the US Army Corps of Engineers - has warned the massive dam sitting above Brisbane is far more lethal than previously believed, and further re-inforced previous criticism of the dam's manual.

But it strongly backed the actions of the four dam engineers who were repeatedly accused in the $15 million flood inquiry of mismanaging the dam and confecting a fraudulent report to cover their tracks.

The report is a potential blow to flood victims seeking compensation but lawyers are determined to proceed with legal action, with thousands of claimants signed up to a class action demanding billions of dollars in compensation.

Where's Hedley Thomas' commentary about this?  Well, he's having a big stamping of the foot over at the Australian:

Why Campbell Newman has a billion reasons to airbrush the floods 'facade'

 Hedley complains that the Queensland government asking the US engineers to review the report that the SEQWater engineers wrote but without considering the inquiry's findings that the engineers had been not accurate as to how and when they made their water release decisions.

Hedley, you see, is exceptionally proud of having made life a living hell for the three engineers for about 18 months, despite the fact that the CMC recently declined to take any action against them, and explained in its review that the problem basically lay in a poorly drafted manual: 

Retired Appeal Court judge John Jerrard, QC, headed up the CMC investigation and wrote in his findings the engineers had believed they were following the dam manual when they adopted their water release strategies during the floods.

In his advice Mr Jerrard said prosecution of the trio would be ‘‘oppressive’’ if they were simply trying to follow a manual that contained contradictory statements....

‘‘An honest belief that the engineers had always intended to comply with the Manual would justify the engineers describing themselves as adopting strategy W3, when strategy W2 was not appropriate, even when they had earlier thought W2 was appropriate, and had said that they were in it,’’ Mr Jerrard said in the CMC report.

‘‘If the engineers believed they had followed the Manual, it is not dishonest, criminal, or misconduct, for any of them to say that they did.

‘‘Nor is it dishonest, criminal, or misconduct, to misunderstand what the Manual required.’’

Has Hedley ever done a detailed report on the findings of this review?   Not as far as I know.   (Correct me if you're reading, Hedley.)

No, instead, Thomas is still on a campaign to encourage people that there is someone to blame for a natural disaster.   His longer review article in The Australian today complains:

IT should be no easy feat to turn the serious, damning, evidence-based findings of a $15 million royal commission-style inquiry -- one that nailed an egregious cover-up - into a glowing endorsement barely six months later. 

But that is precisely what a group of US engineers, asked to review the performance of another group of engineers - those in control of Wivenhoe Dam's massive releases of water in January last year, water that became most of the Brisbane River flood - have managed to achieve.

 As ever, he is more interested in a populist campaign: 

Nine months ago, as a direct result of a series of stories in The Australian highlighting the evidence of a cover-up that had been overlooked by the floods inquiry, Holmes decided to restart public hearings and resume investigations. An inquiry that had effectively completed its year-long assignment, save for the release of a final report yet to be printed, went back to work. Flood victims saw a glimmer of hope that their concerns of a man-made disaster, or at least a disaster that could have been minimised with a more prudent dam operation, were justified.

 I have explained in detail before how the flood inquiry shows convincingly that this was not a man-made disaster, and it's only because of a shameful campaign of sensationalist reporting by News Ltd outlets and Thomas in particular that any member of the public should be thinking this way.

Furthermore, the evidence at the commission by the independent expert was that the rate of water release  (despite a technical non-compliance with the manual) was only likely to have been inappropriate for a period of about 7 hours.  That expert's modelling indicated that following other release scenarios was likely to have been only capable of modifying flood levels by (perhaps - subject to many uncertainties) 30 to 50 cm.  For a city that looked like this at the height of the flood, 30 cm was not going to make a hell of a lot of difference:

It is therefore no surprise that other water engineers should be agreeing that the engineers here had acted reasonably. 

Hedley Thomas, it's time you starting reporting realistically on the matter, and give up on running campaigns more in your own interests than those of the public.

One extreme to another?

Andrew Glikson from ANU has a new article up at The Conversation, arguing that there is ample evidence of an increase in the number of anomalous weather events since the 1970's to be confident that they have been caused by the AGW that has presently only reached .8 degree.  Give the planet  another 1 or 2 degree increase, and things can be expected to be much worse.

But as for the attribution of any individual extreme events, that work is still tricky, and Nature last week noted that some climate scientists doubted whether it was really useful to try to make attribution claims at all.  The editorial thought this was too harsh, and in any event, it seems to me that it was more concerned with whether climate modelling could predict future individual anomalous events, rather than attribution in hindsight.

There certainly still seems to be a tension between some folk at NOAA who were very, very fast to claim the Russian heatwave was just one of those things, and other scientists who thought it was attributable in significant part to AGW.   Climate fake skeptics, like Anthony Watts, lap this all up as reason to do nothing, of course.

At the local level, Brisbane's weather, which was extremely wet and cloudy about two years, just seems to have had the water turned off like a switch over the last couple of months.    A month ago they said it had been 32 consecutive days without rain; I would say that it has effectively been extended to 62 days now, even if at Brisbane Airport they might have had a day with technically 1 mm of rain.   On the side of town where  I live, there was one day last week where a very fine spray came down for about 10 minutes,barely damping the bitumen before it evaporated.  I'm not counting that as break in the dry spell.  The small-ish water tank we have at home has emptied for the first time since it first filled 3 or 4 years ago.

Well, at least I expect it will be good weather to be a the beach this year; but I also expect more fires around Brisbane than usual.

Update:  After yesterday's complaint, Brisbane got its first widespread storm of the season, with a bit of hail thrown in.   We'll see how this changes things. 

Roger defects? Maybe not...

Why doesn't Roger Scruton want to be labelled as "of the right"?

Well,  England has still got something going for it when people there can go to a debate between Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton.  The New Statesment notes that it was most interesting for the fact that Roger Scruton declared that he does not like being labelled as "of the Right" (although the magazine just uses small "r" right):

It was at this point that Scruton’s squirming began - both physically and rhetorically. He has, it turns out, a great aversion to being identified as “of the right”.

“People on the right don’t identify themselves as such, not as part of a group. We’re just holding on to the things we love,” he said, in what appeared to be a sleight-of-hand justification for secretly quite liking the Changing of the Guard.

“But you said of Thatcher...” Eagleton began, only to be interrupted as Scruton retorted: “I’ve grown up since then.”

I wonder what Scruton thinks of the Right as currently represented by the Republican Party. 

A good question

Christof Koch, Robert Sawyer: Could the Internet ever become conscious? - Slate Magazine

If memory serves me right, I think I suggested to friends years ago that you would know something was up with the internet when electronics factories start getting orders for chips and computers, and where to install them, but with only fake human authorisations.

I see that Robert Sawyer has novels about the internet becoming conscious.  I wonder if that happens in his stories.  Or did it happen in some short science fiction story I've read and forgotten about? 

Alternative ideas

Dark matter effect might be explained by modified way to calculate inertial mass

I've mentioned MOND theory from time to time as an alternative explanation for dark matter, but this MOND-ish proposal is possibly testable.

Furthermore, Mike McCulloch claims that his idea might explain the acceleration of the universe as well. 

Who is he, though?   Well, I would be a little surprised if stunning new understandings of physics come from some who works part time at the Plymouth University School of Marine Science and Engineering, and whose personal page features  cartoons of dubious quality (yes, I know - I should talk!) and bad short stories, but I should retain an open mind, I suppose.

Gopnick does fantasy

“The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and Young-Adult Fantasy Books : The New Yorker

The always readable Adam Gopnick has a discussion here about "high fantasy for young adults", and starts with a look at Tolkien in a way that I can almost approve (ie it's sort of disparaging.)

I liked the wittiness of this bit:

It’s true that his fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”—big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.

 this too:

Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and forth. Betrayal and temptation happen; inner doubts do not. 

and this:

What substitutes for psychology in Tolkien and his followers, and keeps the stories from seeming barrenly external, is what preceded psychology in epic literature: an overwhelming sense of history and, with it, a sense of loss. The constant evocation of lost or fading glory—Númenor has fallen, the elves are leaving Middle-earth—does the emotional work that mixed-up minds do in realist fiction. We know that Westernesse is lost even before we know what the hell Westernesse was, and our feeling for its loss lends dimension to those who have lost it. (There is also, in Tolkien, the complete elimination of lust as a normal motive in daily life. The wicked Wormtongue lusts for Éowyn at the court of Rohan, but this is thought to be very creepy.)

Of course, as I am happy to explain that I dismiss LOTR on the basis that I lost interest after about 100 pages both times I tried it, and found the first movie boring, I have no idea what characters Gopnick is talking about in that last sentence; but anything that criticises the book in any respect appeals to me.  It's very, very hard to find other people who share my attitude.   You try Googling for anti-Tolkien mutual support groups - it's been a while since I did, but I couldn't find one.

But seriously: I think Gopnick has given me better justification for my disdain, so for this he must be praised.

By the way, the rest of the article talks about other examples of fantasy that appeal to young adults, particularly the Eragon series, and even Twilight, and he makes some pretty good points that I think my regular reader Tim would like to see.  This part in particular:

 And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda. Yet the spell such works cast on their audience wasn’t diminished by what we find tedious. The incantation of names is, on its own, a powerful literary style.

True, I think.   Although I did like what the Coen brothers did with the Odyssey.  :)

Yet more sound Republican judgement

Herman Cain: Let’s face it, I’d probably have a substantial lead right now if I was the nominee 

Are they competing for some sort of comedy award in the Republican Party at the moment?

Uh-huh

Rand Paul Says 2012 Election Over, Romney has Already Won

Even without his making silly statements like that, I still find Rand Paul's hair prevents me taking him seriously.  Curly hair on a male politician just has that effect on me.  I am not sure why...

Living forever...kind of...

Multiverse: A Religion ?

Why have I never paid much attention to the Science 2.0 site?   Somehow or other, I stumbled onto this recent blog post by particle physicist Tommasco Dorigo talking about whether the idea of the multiverse is popular with the public because it's a bit like religion-like:

The discussion was scheduled to last one hour, but we kept our audience glued to their chairs for almost two, without boring ourselves nor apparently them. Being unfamiliar with discussions of the multiverse in public, it was interesting to me to detect how the idea is fascinating to most laypersons. I believe one reason is the religious aspect of the whole thing.

Indeed, long ago man invented religion as a way to explain what he could not figure out by logical methods, as well as to accept his own mortality: religion made acceptable the concept of death, as well as give an explanation to other natural phenomena. And man is now inventing the multiverse in what appears to me a new, albeit well disguised, attempt in the same direction. One as reassuring and sweet as the idea of an almighty entity: because by throwing one's hands up with the idea of a landscape of universes with any possible combination of parameter values one relieves the pressure of feeling powerless, as of yet, in the task of understanding the new layer of mysteries that fundamental science has come to face.

 I think one additional appeal of the idea of a continuous birth of universes of all kinds is the built-in feature of an eternal comeback of the same initial conditions, or infinitely similar ones. We might be immortal after all, but not in the sense that Tipler figured out in his entertaining but crazy book "The Physics of Immortality" - a host of intelligent computers allowing the best of us to be reborn as emulations short before the big crunch. Rather, if we accept that the universe is a multiverse unlimited in time, with bubbles continuously regenerated, we must conclude that we are bound to live again not one, but an infinite number of times. Hopefully still with a choice of what to do with our lives.

 I have mentioned way back in 2007 that Hugh Everett, who came up with the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics actually thought it guaranteed him a type of immortality.   Seems to me that the multiverse could be argued to guarantee something more like re-incarnation. 

I must think about this more.