Still writing

Paul Johnson’s Darwin, Portrait of a Genius: Conservatives smear Darwin by blaming him for Holocaust. - Slate Magazine

I was only talking about Paul Johnson's work and life on another site last night.  Well into his 80's now, I was aware that he was still writing, but his recent books don't seem to attract much attention, and I haven't read him for many years.   I really think his reputation suffered somewhat from the disclosure of his long standing affair near the end of the 1990's, after he had spent years being critical of the Royal family for not sticking to their marriages. 

Anyway, this Slate review says his latest book, on Charles Darwin, is really quite good, until it starts (allegedly) blaming his work on for most of the ills of the 20th century.

In fact, if I recall correctly, early in his book Modern Times, he partially blamed the Theory of Relativity as promoting belief in moral relativity in 20th century society, or at least the Left-ist side of it.

So, yes; Paul is usually very happy to point the finger at science as having detrimental effects on society.   Mind you, Bryan Appleyard's book Understanding the Present, which I enjoyed a lot, could be said to have a similar thesis, but goes way back further into the matter of the development of science since the enlightenment.  Appleyard's take on the matter is more convincing, I expect.

Tiny message from space

CubeSats launched from the space station

Phys.org alerts me to the fact that 3 tiny Japanese cube satellites, looking for all of the world like escapees from a recent Dr Who episode, were recently released from the International Space Station.  Here's a photo:

They seem more of a novelty device than anything else, but one of them is full of LED's which will flash a simple morse code message which should be visible with binoculars, or perhaps the naked eye.   The story links to this Japanese site which shows one of them in more detail.

I'm not exactly sure how to check when they will be visible from Australia.  Will they just stay close to the ISS?

I'm surprised that LCDs from a small cube in orbit might be visible with the naked eye.  I will go looking for more information about sightings.  I can't see anything from Google blog search yet.

Where's the nerdy satellite watching community when you need them?

No green light

HPV vaccination does not lead to an increase in sex

A study in England found this amongst a group of teenage girls with a mean age of 17.

I suppose it is consistent with other, somewhat counter-intuitive, facts regarding how teenagers approach sex; such as the extremely open and detailed sex education in Holland not leading to earlier commencement of sex and teenage pregnancy compared to other countries. The issue is a bit complicated, though.

Space news Part 2

Testing Mars and Moon soil for sheltering astronauts from radiation

About time they got around to testing simulated Moon and Mars dirt for its radiation protection capacities.

The fact is, the long term living there is going to be underground.   We should know how deep the first astronauts will have to bury themselves.

I'm impressed...

BBC News - Sarah Brightman to travel to space station

This will be the first truly well known celebrity to become a space tourist, and I am sure her trip will attract a lot of attention.

Quite a surprise...

Offensive no matter male or female

How much is a man's virginity worth?

This is just a really weird story of a deeply offensive documentary.  

How it's (sometimes) made

Birth of ball lightning

I found this via a climate change site, or all places.  It sounds like an interesting paper on the still not well understood phenomena of ball lighting.  The abstract:

 Many observations of ball lightning report a ball of light, about 10 cm in diameter, moving at about walking speed, lasting up to 20 s and frequently existing inside of houses and even aeroplanes. The present paper reports detailed observations of the initiation or birth of ball lightning. In two cases, navigation crew of aircraft saw ball lightning form at the windscreen inside the cockpit of their planes. In the first case, the ball lightning occurred during a thunderstorm, with much lightning activity outside of the plane. In the second case, large “horns” of electrical corona were seen outside of the plane at the surface of the radome, just prior to the formation of the ball lightning. A third case reports ball lightning formed inside of a house, during a thunderstorm, at a closed glass window. It is proposed, based on two-dimensional calculations of electron and ion transport, that ball lightning in these cases is driven and formed by atmospheric ions impinging and collecting on the insulating surface of the glass or Perspex windows. This surface charge can produce electric fields inside of the cockpit or room sufficient to sustain an electric discharge. Charges of opposite sign to those outside of the window accumulate on the inside surface of the glass, leaving a ball of net charge moving inside of the cockpit or room to produce a pulsed discharge on a microsecond time scale.

Ruining a good story

DNA has a 521-year half-life : Nature News

Quite an interesting story on working out exactly how quickly DNA degrades:

Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process.

But palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions including a temperature of 13.1 ºC. The findings are published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B¹.

By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on.

The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.

“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.

 I guess mammoths and Tasmanian tigers are still in with a chance, though.

Foreign policy Mitt

Mitt Romney foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute was the most dishonest one he has delivered yet. - Slate Magazine

Fred Kaplan really serves up the criticism of Romney for his recent speech on foreign policy.

I certainly get the feeling that Romney is way, way too simplisitic and Tea Party populist in what he will say on foreign policy.   Whether that translates into action if he were president is another matter - in the same way that many Democrats are disappointed that Obama went way more "gung ho" on military matters as president that his earlier rhetoric might have indicated.

But that's the worry with Romney - a former moderate Republican who has had to swing Tea Party right to get the nomination, and now is making (some) vague swings a bit back towards the middle (re his tax promises), but all without detail.   Where he would end up as president seems to be anyone's guess.

Slipper slipping away

It suited the Right to act appalled at the "misogyny" of Peter Slippers' stupid and deeply embarrassing text messages to a staffer, and of course, it was not practically possible for Lefty politicians to defend the texts as acceptable.

But in truth, there is quite a lot of puffed up fakery in this:   as if there aren't thousands of things said every year by male (and female) politicians of a lewd, crude or ribald nature which would be deeply embarrassing if revealed to the public or other politicians. 

As far as I am concerned, the text message causing the most outrage is not an example of misogyny (a hatred of women) per se:  seriously, how often have drunk young women in a ribald mood talked to each other about how they think men's bits are not inherently attractive to them, and do we call them men haters?

However, there is also no doubt that the whole series of texts between Slipper and Ashby do show a character of great immaturity and poor judgement. It reminds me most of the Troy Buswell chair sniffing incident.  Even if he had done the act to an audience of men only after the woman concerned had left the room, surely people hearing it would think "what sort of mental 15 year old have we got doing this job?" 

Given Ashby's frequent ribald responses to Slipper's text, and his entire highly suspect and self serving way he has handled the matter, I think it's a very hard call to say whether it should be found to be sexual harassment by Slipper.   Certainly, if it is, Ashby deserves virtually nothing in compensation.

But regardless of the outcome, Slipper's character as exposed by the texts did render him as too embarrassingly immature a figure to be Speaker in the long run.   I think Labor would have moved to encourage him to resign anyway, but caught yesterday by Abbott's early move, they were in a difficult situation.

At least Abbot got to also shoot himself in the foot by, stupidly, using a similar refrain as Alan Jones.  What poor taste political judgement was that?   The Right in Australian politics at the moment is, to a large extent, very embarrassing in the way it is treating women politicians in Labor.   

Absorbed into the hive mind

iPhone 5 review: Marveling at the existence of the greatest phone ever made. - Slate Magazine

Farhad Manjoo apparently dissed the iPhone 5 at first, but now has been absorbed into the Apple hive mind, which has ordered him to pay penance by writing some of the most over the top praise of the product imaginable:

 When I pick up the iPhone 5 and examine it closely, I find it difficult to believe that this device actually exists. The iPhone 5 does not feel like a product that was mass produced. In a strange way, it doesn’t feel like it was built at all. This is a gadget that seems as if it fell into the box fully formed. If you run your hands around its face, you scarcely feel any seams or other points of connection; there’s little evidence that this thing is a highly complex device made from lots of smaller things. Instead it just feels like a single, solid, exquisitely crafted piece of machinery, and once you pick it up you never want to put it down....

With the iPhone, Apple is building products at a level of quality that may be unprecedented in the history of mass manufacturing. But the only way to know what that means for you, a user of the phone, is to pick it up and feel it, because objectively it does not sound like a big deal. If I tell you the greatest thing about the iPhone 5 is how it “feels,” you’ll accuse me of being a superficial aesthete who cares more for form than function. You don’t care how a phone was built or how it looks; you just want it to work. But I think that argument misses something important about what it means for a phone to “work well”: When you’re holding a device all the time, how it feels affects its functionality. Or, as Steve Jobs might say, how it feels is how it works.

 I think he just left his girlfriend for an iPhone5.

Across the light barrier

Physicists extend special relativity beyond the speed of light

I have no idea whether their work is likely to hold up or not, but it's always interesting listening to real scientists talking about faster than light:

Now two physicists – James Hill and Barry Cox from the University of Adelaide in Australia – have shown that Einstein's theory of special relativity can be logically extended to allow for faster-than-light motion.

They're quick to point out that their finding in no way contradicts the original theory, but simply provides a new aspect of it. "As far as I'm aware, this is the first natural, logical extension of Einstein's own theories," Hill said. "We certainly haven't superseded Einstein. The two theories are entirely consistent."

There have been other suggestions of objects exceeding c – tachyons, for example – but these superluminal motions require complicated mathematics such as imaginary masses and complicated physics to ensure real, meaningful outcomes. In contrast, Hill and Cox's proposal arises from the same mathematical framework as Einstein's theory.

The bit where they get a bit more speculative, perhaps for a PR boost?:

Although the theories cannot answer what happens at c, the scientists suspect that an object crossing the "light barrier" may have some very interesting consequences. They compare our current understanding of this boundary to that of an object crossing the sound barrier for the first time, an event that was highly disputed before it was achieved in 1947. "People wondered what would happen," Hill said. "Were we all going to disintegrate? Would the plane fall apart? It turns out passing through the speed of sound led to a big bang. I suspect going through the speed of light will be more interesting. I have a feeling the world will change in some dramatic way as we move through the speed of light. All sorts of things could happen. Time and space could interchange." He thinks that an experimental test of such a feat is not out of reach.

Food porn to the max

A wild goose barnacle chase | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian is a pretty good site for food porn, and there's no better example than this post about eating barnacles in Portugal.

The food itself is described as follows:

The goose barnacle has to be one of the most beautiful foods on the planet. The bright enamelled head with its ruby lips sits atop a snakeskin sleeve which pulls away to reveal a glossy, lucent finger of flesh, marbled and grey at the neck, bright orange at the tip. They're the punks of the crustacean family.

Actually,  the writer is making them sound like the disturbingly genitalia-like members of the crustacean family.

As to the experience of eating them, well:

Not a drop of goodness escapes the barnacle when it's cooked. The tightly-woven sleeve acts like a bag, sealing in the essence of the ocean. There's a gentle intensity to the barnacle flesh. Similar, in a way, to octopus, only more refined. They're nothing like a mussel, all tubes and organs. They're simpler. Purer. The best of the sea boiled down into a mouthful.

But goose barnacles don't just taste of the ocean: they actually immerse you in it. Quite often (unless you're an expert, which I'm not) when you pinch off the sleeve, you get a fat squirt of brine in the eye or down your chest. It's a strangely mimetic experience. In being eaten, the goose barnacle shares the theatre of its life with you.

You finish the meal wet, as if you've just been out on a wave-splashed rock with your mouth open.

For good measure, the writer concludes with a phenomena that often happens with that other pleasure of the flesh:

 And yet, after 20 minutes on the beach to dry the front of your shirt you find your thoughts turning back to the barnacle.

I trust I'm not the only person to have successfully decoded the writing.

In the comments that follow the article, there are quite a few people scoffing at the prose, but I liked this entry in particular:

Sweet? Living in Galicia. I've had them many times. To me, they taste of nothing but rubber in sea water. It's small wonder they need the myth that they are an aphrodisiac - just like oysters and the dreadful durian fruit.

Interesting to note that they used to used only as fertiliser on the fields and that, during Spain's years of hunger in the 50s, the locals still wouldn't eat them.

Wonderful what marketing can do.

Oh, and they can reach 300 euros a kilo at Xmas. In Madrid at least.

I guess it will callos (tripe) next for the treatment.

 Update:   I suppose if I'm talking seafood as a stand-in for genitalia, it's hard to avoid the fuss being made over the whole Slipper/Ashby texts which give new meaning to "things you wish you never knew a politician thought or said".   If Slipper likes mussels, even if he also has a interest in goose barnacles, does talking this way really indicate misogyny?   Bad taste and embarrassing to hear, sure; much like Prince Charles' weird way of chatting to his girlfriend.   And it's not as if a lot of women don't have less than complementary things to say about men's rude bits:  if you Google the topic, you'll see a lot of consensus on the matter that quite a lot of straight women think they may be useful but aren't at all attractive.

I think a lot of right wingers like Bolt are just getting precious about this because they want to see Slipper go, and Labor embarrassed.

Moving pictures for those who do not understand words

It has been widely noted that climate change fake skeptics from Anthony Watts, to Graham Lloyd in The Australian (if he isn't one, he sure writes like one) have been trying to deflate interest in the remarkable Arctic ice loss of past couple of decades by pointing to increasing sea ice in Antarctic, as if one off sets the other.

Climate scientists know and have explained in media articles that this is a rubbish comparison, but still it seems that fake skeptics just can't read, or have trouble with comprehension, or something.

Now I'm doubt I am the first blogger to put these videos in the same post, but here they are.

You, yes you - the climate change skeptic in the back row - don't you dare leave this post without clicking on both videos, and then say after me "I'm sorry, I didn't really understand before what a con this argument was.  There is no comparison whatsoever between the minor differences in Antarctic sea ice over recent years and the amount of Arctic ice lost over the same period."

One:  Antarctic sea ice in September over the last few decades:



Two:  Arctic sea ice over the same period:

Economics and climate change, again

Andy Revkin recently linked to this post talking about how can you make the best judgements about dealing with climate change when there is still a lot of uncertainty about the exact extent of the problem, particularly at the small regional level.

I thought it pretty much confirmed what I had been thinking recently about the dubious use of economics to try to forecast the effects many decades into the future:

The politicians and other leaders who make (or influence) such decisions do not like deep uncertainty. They do not like it, Sam I Am. They want something specific to plan for. Expert recommendations. Metrics, targets, and “deliverables.” Otherwise there’s no way to determine the most efficient use of resources, how to minimize costs and maximize benefits, which course is optimal. So they ask analysts for cost-benefit analysis (CBA).

CBA is useful in some circumstances, particularly where there are bounded time spans and known risks. But remember, there’s a difference between risk (statistically quantifiable) and uncertainty (not). It is the difference, if you will, between Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and his “unknown unknowns.”

As time horizons and uncertainty increase, CBA becomes less and less useful, more and more “a knob-twiddling exercise in optimizing outcomes,” as economist Martin Weitzman put it. Differences in social/political/ethical assumptions, like discount rates, start determining model outcomes. “Results from the CBA,” says the World Bank, are “extremely dependent on parameters on which there is no scientific agreement (e.g., the impact of climate change on hurricanes) or no consensus (e.g., the discount rate).” It’s still possible to construct models and get answers, but the danger becomes higher and higher of getting the wrong answer, i.e., optimizing for the wrong thing.

The answer, says David Roberts, (and he is quoting the approach that is argued in a World Bank white paper) is to go "robust":

Now, whenever I criticize cost-benefit analysis, someone will ask, Well, what’s the alternative? What else can you do but weigh costs and benefits? How else would you make decisions?

Funny you should ask! Turns out the World Bank white paper everyone’s* talking about has a great deal to say on that very subject. It describes various alternative decisionmaking procedures and gets into the weeds of some case studies. And if that doesn’t sate your nerd thirst, have no fear, the literature on climate change and uncertainty is extensive. Go nuts.

For the rest of you, though, I just want to focus on the top-line idea. It is this: Shift the focus from optimality to robustness. Rolls right off the tongue, no?

The optimal decision is the one that achieves the best cost-benefit ratio in a given set of conditions. A robust decision can be expected to hold up, and perform reasonably well, under a wide variety of possible conditions. To make the optimal decision, you must be able to quantify risks. When there is uncertainty rather than risk — “multiple possible future worlds without known relative probabilities” — one is better off with robust decisions.

The optimal decision aims for efficiency; the robust decision aims for resilience. A resilient solution may not be — probably won’t be — the one best suited for whatever circumstances do end up coming to pass. But it is, from the present-day perspective, the one most broadly suited to the widest array of possible futures.

An optimal solution is cost-effective, if you get it right (obviously). But strategies aiming for optimality are brittle. If you optimize for one thing and run into another, you risk degradation or collapse (or, like Ho Chi Minh City, just wasting a buttload of money). Robust decisions and investments often cost more in the short- to mid-term; the extra money is effectively spent as insurance against unforeseen outcomes. A robust solution retains its integrity in a wide array of circumstances.

When it comes to climate change, most economic models are premised on CBA — the search for efficiency. The World Bankers suggest an alternative, based on robustness, and yes, it involves yet another acronym: CIDA, or Climate Informed Decision Analysis, also known as “decision scaling.”

This sounds quite sensible to me.

Another documentary recommendation

I see this is the second episode in the series, and I missed the first one, but tonight's documentary on SBS "Battle Castle - Chateau Gaillard" was very good. 

I did point out to my son that I somehow doubted that Richard the Lionheart and King Philip of France really had their strategy meetings while fully suited up in chainmail, as the re-enactments indicated.

Still, it taught us quite a bit about castle design, and then castle siege techniques, of 1200.

The show is available on SBS for another 2 weeks.  Beyond that, I can't see it on Youtube, but the Wikipedia entry on the castle is pretty detailed.

The increasingly odd quantum world

Photon reaches from beyond the grave in quantum trick - physics-math - 04 October 2012 - New Scientist

This sounds quite significant:

 If you have two pairs of entangled photons, taking one photon from each pair and entangling them disengages the two original pairs, and creates a second, fresh entanglement between the two, left out photons. Eisenberg's team used the swap to entangle a photon with one that no longer existed.

More details in the article.

An atheist assesses the movement

Why Richard Dawkins' humanists remind me of a religion | Michael Ruse | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

I'm not familiar with Michael Ruse, but it is evident from this column that he an atheist of some prominence who nonetheless sees that the in-fighting within the broader atheist movement is very much like the fights between religions.  An entertaining and accurate sounding assessment.

Words needed

The somewhat alarming appearance of John Laws at the start of his 7:30 interview last night is another photo crying out for a caption, word or thought bubble.   I've been toying with some ideas, but a winner is not yet obvious...

The New York Times does not approve

Mr. Romney’s Government Handout - NYTimes.com

The above editorial in the New York Times really takes a torch to Mitt Romney's use of complicated tax system to minimise his taxes.   Their position is this:

What his tax practices show is not illegal or unethical behavior, but rather the unfairness of a tax system that provides its most outlandish benefits only for the very, very rich and savvy. What is worse is that Mr. Romney has proposed making this profoundly dysfunctional system even more unfair.

After detailing ways Mitt has avoided gift taxes, the article ends on a note that I think really hones in on the point that he not only wants to maintain benefits that only the rich use, but make the tax changes to benefit the rich even further:

Like most Republicans, Mr. Romney wants to eliminate the estate tax entirely, even though it currently applies only to estates of more than $10 million for a married couple. That would cost the treasury more than $1 trillion over a decade, but it would be a huge benefit for Mr. Romney’s heirs and for the other 0.3 percent of estates rich enough to qualify for the tax. Getting rid of the estate tax would subvert the gift tax (it was established as a backstop, to keep estates from being passed on before death) and would spare the rich all this complicated “estate planning,” which is just a euphemism for avoiding the tax.

As Warren Buffett has said, the estate tax increases equality of opportunity and curbs the movement toward a plutocracy. Mr. Romney’s plan to get rid of it, helping his family but few others, is one of the sharpest illustrations of his distance from ordinary Americans.