Still growing up...

A photo this morning of mother and child, who looks like a teenage possum now:

Romney tax still does not work...

The 6 Studies Paul Ryan Cited Prove Mitt Romney's Tax Plan Is Impossible - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic

Isn't it a bit puzzling that all Romney and Ryan do is keep repeating that their tax plan can work, and it would seem enough swinging voters are starting to believe them?   Mind you, unless voters go reading elsewhere, all they are getting in the debates seems to be "your plan can't work mathematically" versus "yes it can".

But as the article explains above, the main factor for arguing that maybe Romney's plan can work would be by factoring in strong growth.   Yet here is what the (key defender) Rosen paper (you can find it via the main link) actually says on what can be expected regarding growth (click on it to make it bigger):

That's it?    "No one knows for sure".    And all it seems that Rosen was out to show was that Romney's claim (of being able to knock out enough deductions in a way that won't hurt the middle class yet reduce everyone's tax) was not mathematically impossible.

Let's put it this way:  the best Romney and Ryan can really claim is - we have someone who says our plan might not be impossible - but even then, he doesn't know for sure.

(And, by the way, Rosen's assessment is strongly criticised as flawed for other assumptions too.)

Backing that Rosen's "no one knows for sure" statement was the recent release of a Congressional research paper concluding there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth at all.   This article notes that as early as late 1980's, Reagan's own economics adviser had acknowledged academically that he had no evidence that cuts to personal income tax had had any effect on growth.  I like the way the last mentioned article ends:

At some point, when observed reality keeps differing from predicted reality, it makes sense to examine your predictions. That is not what’s happening. This particular Republican argument continues to rest on a prediction—and because the test of any prediction lies somewhere out there in the awesome future, it can never be refuted. Lower income taxes and the economy will grow: It’s a unicorn of an idea, always feeding in the next meadow.

And if you want more loads of links to economists who have said there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth (or, at the very least, you have to look at what tax cuts achieved in the context of everything else that was going on economically at the time) have a look at this lengthy post at MediaMatters. 

There seems no doubt to me at all that the Republican's economic policy should simply be re-titled "The Return of Voodoo Economics". 

I am no economist, but I can read.   I just can't see how the criticisms of the Romney/Ryan tax plan are wrong.  American voters need to read a bit more, too.

Primitive mating rituals*

The Swingers’ Guide To Islam | The Global Mail

This is really a very surprising article on a way to get ahead in Java.  The key point is to be found in the middle of the second paragraph:

 Like the of thousands of pilgrims that have turned up this night to Gunung Kemukus, Sarimah is here to seek her fortune. According to local belief, the ritual here can guarantee success in business, usually for those at or near the bottom of the ladder – bus drivers, rice farmers, market stall traders and the like. Pilgrims mostly come from Indonesia’s Javanese-speaking core, but some travel days across the massive archipelago to get here.

But the ritual needs to be done right. First, prayers and offerings must be made at the grave of Pangeran Samodro and Nyai Ontrowulan. At some stage, pilgrims must wash themselves at either one or two of the sacred springs on the hill. Then they must find a sex partner who meets two conditions. First, your mate for the night must be of the opposite sex; and second, they cannot be your spouse. Many people believe the ritual only works if you return at seven consecutive, 35-day intervals, either the night before Friday intersects with Pon, or when it crosses with another Javanese day, Kliwon.

Read the whole thing; if you are like me, you had no idea that animism/Islam/Hindu/whatever mix had such practices.

*  from, if I recall correctly, the failed seduction scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

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.

But I have a question...

How intuitive morality has challenged the rationalists

Ross Gittins spends this column summarising a book he has just read:   The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Here's the key part at the end:

Haidt argues morality is, in large part, an evolved solution to the free-rider problem. We develop norms of acceptable, co-operative behaviour and find ways to sanction people who aren't co-operating.

His empirical research into the moral sentiments of people from around the world leads him to identify six dimensions to people's moral concerns. First is care/harm; we are sensitive to signs of suffering and need, and despise cruelty. Second is liberty/oppression; we resent attempts to dominate us. Third is fairness/cheating; people should be rewarded or punished in proportion to their deeds.

Then there's loyalty/betrayal; we trust and reward team players, but want to sanction those who betray the group. Next is authority/subversion; we recognise rank or status and disapprove of those not behaving properly, given their position. Finally there's sanctity/degradation; we care about what we do with our bodies and what we put into them.

Haidt believes these moral concerns are shared by people regardless of their culture, nationality or wealth. But, of course, people interpret them differently and put more weight on some than others.

Our differing moral emphases are reflected in our differing political sympathies. So the unending battle between small-L liberal and conservative policies is a manifestation of ''deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society''.

Haidt finds that small-L liberals' moral concerns are limited to just the first three dimensions: they care deeply about the harm suffered by minorities and the needs of the poor, about oppression and about fairness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, care about all six dimensions. Their most sacred value is to ''preserve the institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community''. So they worry also about maintaining loyalty, acceptance of authority and the sanctity of our bodies.

The conservatives' broader range of moral concerns means they understand the motivations of liberals better than liberals understand the motives of conservatives.

Haidt argues the community benefits from the ever-present tension between the two sides - each emphasises important aspects of maintaining a good society - if only we could restore a greater degree of civility between the contending parties.

OK, that sounds pretty good for conservatives.  But here's the thing: in the matter of the biggest free rider problem of all, why are conservatives in the US so prominent in climate change denial?   

Is it that they are merely temporarily in the midst of a over-inflated concern about liberty (the second moral sentiment listed above)?    Certainly, that would explain why US libertarians have (mostly) aligned against believing in AGW, but why are US social conservatives (including evangelicals, for example) along for the ride with them? 

Of course, the Pope and European conservatives are counter-examples and show conservatism does not have to be that way.   (See Roger Scruton in particular.)  But the US remains a special example.

Maybe a good product?

V3Solar | The Most Efficient Solar Energy Under the Sun

A somewhat dubious sounding report at phys.org  led me to the above site, for a company promoting its new spinning solar panel system.

Interestingly, it seems to be based in Australia.   Looking at the website, I'm not entirely sure that there aren't some big exaggerations.   Parts of their claims just don't sound right to me, but I'm no electronics engineer.

If it does work as claimed, and can mean a massive reduction in area devoted to solar panels, I wonder whether they would make PV solar farms a more viable thing.  We'll see.

Ignoring the evidence on "Dexter"

I see that Slate is giving Dexter publicity (again.)   It's funny how certain TV shows are deemed so important as to gain continual assessment on certain liberal media outlets, isn't it?   The Guardian does it with Doctor Who; Slate with various Showtime or other cable shows.

In any case, I've never watched more than 20 minutes or so of the show, but I've always had reservations about it thematically:  a man with a compulsion to kill who channels it only towards those who deserve to be killed.   The psychological set up for it is pure comic book:  as a kiddie he saw his own mother murdered and sat in her blood for days.

Apparently, the show did have its critics at the start who worried about it encouraging empathy with a serial murderer, as this discussion in the article linked above notes:

Waldman: I'm interested in the way the show portrays people stressed to the breaking point. Everyone has an idiosyncratic coping strategy. Quinn and Batista knock back doubles at the bar. Deb runs alone on her treadmill. Dexter murders people. Do you think the show is trying to normalize Dexter's kills? By showing us all these dysfunctional outlets for stress in other characters?

Bosch: I've always thought that this is less about normalizing serial killing—when the show debuted, many critics were disgusted at being asked to empathize with a murderer—than about trauma. How Dexter might have been a normal person had he not been subjected to the unthinkable trauma of witnessing his mother being murdered, then sitting in her blood for days. Really, the show tackles PTSD—and its lesser forms—in a spectacular way.

Waldman: Yes. I think you’ve nailed the show’s philosophy. But in its throwaway details, I sometimes feel we’re asked to believe that Dex isn’t that bad. And then there’s the question of whether he could be a vigilante hero.

But such quibbles seemed to stop worrying critics (and the studio) a long time ago.

Therefore, I was surprised to read a few months ago (it previously had some publicity apparently, but I had missed it) about a Canadian murderer who, it was clear, drew inspiration from the show: 

Twitchell, 31, was found guilty by a jury last April 12 in the October 2008 slaying of Johnny Altinger. He is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Altinger, 38, was lured to a southeast Edmonton garage by an ad on an internet dating site. He was bludgeoned and dismembered.

Twitchell's fondness for the television show Dexter was well documented during the trial, and he had a Facebook profile under the name of protagonist Dexter Morgan, a vigilante serial killer who masters the perfect crime.

Here's the article in the Fairfax weekend magazine that fills in more detail the highly imitative aspects of this gruesome murder.  It's a really horrifying read.

Googling around, this is not the only murder (or planned murder) associated with the show:   a 17 year old who strangled his 10 year old brother claimed to have felt "just like Dexter";   a 21 year old was committed to psychiatric care amidst allegations that he was directly inspired by Dexter to kill people who he thought had committed crime;   murderers in Sweden and Norway claimed similar inspiration; and a woman who killed and dismembered another in Los Angeles was very clear about the connection:

In a profanity-laced note in which she described in grisly detail how she killed a 22-year-old Marine wife, one of the three people now charged with murder says she patterned the killing after the television show "Dexter," about a serial killer.

In the note to police, Jessica Lopez describes strangling Brittany Dawn Killgore "as if my idol Dexter had spoken directly to me."

Lopez, 25, wrote that she then decided to dismember Killgore's body: "I made a few attempts to chop her up like Dexter with Masters power tools but I was afraid it was too loud and it sucked at cutting flesh."

Killing Killgore was not as easy as the television show, Lopez wrote: "I thought I was defending the family and it would be simple like Dexter."

Yet has this effect of the show received the attention that it deserves?  No.

Is it really necessary for there to be dozens of victims of a murderer imitating a movie villain (as in the "Batman" shootings) before people think hard about the effects of making fictional violence "cool", or deserving of empathy?

I've always been leery of movies that make "bad" cool, or darkly attractive in any way really.  "Silence of the Lambs" left me cold;  "Pulp Fiction" I have frequently complained about; and I can't think of another good example right now, since the genre is not one I am keen to see anyway.  But at least any individual movie is a short lived experience, compared to (what will end up as) 8 seasons of a TV show all about a serial killer.  How many hours of living in the mind of a serial killer is that for the psychologically disturbed viewer?

Now some people will say that this is an over-reaction: if it wasn't Dexter, a mad person might claim inspiration by something else, or indeed may find it convenient when caught to claim fictional inspiration.   (On the other hand, are there psycho killers out there who haven't mentioned to the investigators how they felt Dexter gave them ideas?)

I'm not convinced.   Basically, I think the makers of this show, the critics who got over their doubts about the "empathy with a serial killer" question, and the audience that is care free about its clear, demonstrated and repeated effect on encouraging psychos to attempt to imitate it,  all have something to be a bit ashamed of.  

Derren hunts ghosts

Last week's episode of Derren Brown Investigates was pretty much a waste of time.  No one sensible has ever seriously believed that some Russian system for teaching the blind to see via their psychic power was genuine, have they?   So why bother investigating them?  It was mildly amusing in parts, and showed that people can really fool themselves into believing anything, but still.

This week's episode dealt with more "concrete" psychic stuff:  an American ghost hunter who believed he had good EVP (electronic voice phenomena) and photos of spirits.  I had never heard of the guy before - Lou Gentile (who has died since the program was made) - but it appears he was reasonably well know in the States via a radio show.

Well, the evidence turned out to be very underwhelming.  In fact, I'm starting to suspect that atheist Derren might go looking for evidence of the paranormal from slightly flaky characters.

Still, the show was of interest because Lou showed a video of an exorcism he had organised, and Brown later went to a neurologist who specialised in epilepsy to discuss it.  The neurologist showed video of a woman having a type of fit which did suggest how exorcists could mistake some serious back bending as levitation.  The relevant part is shown starting at about 5min 20 sec into this section of the show:



Lou also got quite irate when an audio expert told him his EVP were most likely interference.  But Brown was basically gentle with the guy, concluding that he was just fooling himself, but not being dishonest.

Quite interesting.

Moonrise seen

I went off to see Moonrise Kingdom, the latest Wes Anderson film which was very well reviewed, yet has mainly had an art house release in Brisbane*.   I pretty much understand why now.

I enjoyed it well enough, but I do think it was a little too "art house arch" for its own good.  I'm a latecomer to WesWorld, and have only seen Fantastic Mr Fox and  The Life Aquatic (etc), so I don't really know whether he always gets a bit over the top silly in parts of  his films or not.  (Yes, I know, I must see Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums:  I will one day, they are waiting at the DVD hire.)  But this one did have a sequence or two which were too unrealistic even for a highly stylised movie like this one.

On the up side, the child actors are very good, but the adult parts are a bit underwritten and the eccentricity seemed bit forced.   The direction is pleasing in its own way; in many respects it is reminiscent of how he did Fantastic Mr Fox.    Music seems really important to Anderson, and this is certainly the case in this film, and it's one of its best features.   The staging of the Noah play in the church was particularly charming.

It's definitely worth a look if you are sympathetic to his eccentric approach.

* It's at the Palace Cinemas, which have (like all cinemas should) a bar in the foyer and the ability to bring your glass of wine into the cinema with you.  Sure, in Gold Glass cinemas they bring the wine to you, but this seems a much better idea.  I've never been to a Palace Cinema before, but I expect I will be going there again...

A fair look at budget woes

Where did the mammoth US budget deficits come from? - CSMonitor.com

This article from the CSM seems to me to take a very fair approach to the not so simple question of how to apportion blame for the US deficit.

While it agrees that the recent Obama response to a question on this was wrong, it remains clear that Republicans must allow for a very significant part of the problem to have come from George W Bush policies.  Given that tax cuts and defence spending were a large part of those, don't Republicans wonder that Romney  policies to reduce tax rates (yes, I know, even if removing deductions is supposed to make them revenue neutral,) and increase long term defence spending, just don't sound right?

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...