The problem with droughts

Climate models fail to ‘predict’ US droughts 

It's a bit surprising to see that climate models are still not good enough to replicate US mega-droughts.

The results were puzzling. Although the simulation produced a number of pronounced droughts lasting several decades each, these did not match the timing of known megadroughts. In fact, drought occurrences were no more in agreement when the model was fed realistic values for variables that influence rainfall than when it ran control simulations in which the values were unrealistically held constant. “The model seems to miss some of the dynamics that drive large droughts,” says study participant Jason Smerdon, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty who studies historical climate patterns.

Other climate models tested by the team fared no better, he says. In particular, the models failed to reproduce a series of multi-decadal droughts that occurred in the southwest during the Medieval Climate Anomaly, a period between AD 900 and 1200 when global temperatures were about as high as they are today.

The problem may lie in the models’ inability to reproduce the cycling between the ENSO’s El Niño and La Niña phases, especially given that many scientists think that La Niña is the major driver of drought in the southwest. The ENSO “behaves much messier in the real world than in climate models”, says Jessica Tierney, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who has investigated the role of the ENSO in East African rainfall variability². “We’re not sure how it has varied in the past, and we don’t know how it might change in response to climate change. This is really one of the big uncertainties we’re facing.”

In addition to their failure to reproduce El Niño and La Niña, existing models do not fully capture other factors that influence rainfall, such as clouds and vegetation. But Smerdon adds that the atmospheric and oceanic dynamics that inhibit rainfall and favour prolonged drought may be essentially random and so almost unpredictable.

Last week’s findings highlight the broader challenge of predicting how precipitation patterns will change as the global climate warms. Models are often at odds over the very direction of regional changes. For example, different projections prepared for the Colorado Water Conservation Board disagree on whether mean precipitation in the state will increase or decrease by 2050.

 Presumably, there is therefore legitimate reason to be somewhat skeptical of climate model predictions for changes in rainfall patterns in Australia due to climate change.  But then again, it may be that some climate effects in some parts of Australia are easier to model than those affecting the US.  The long term decline in rainfall in the southern corner of Western Australia is, I think I have read, consistent with climate modelling, for example.

But in any event, are these uncertainties reason to let what is essentially the biggest experiment ever devised to continue?   I mean, if some relatively small, random things determine US megadroughts, doesn't it mean that some clear non-random things (say, a 2 degree global temperature increase, and increased humidity) is likely to have a very big effect indeed?

The hilariously dim Detective Hoft

I guess people sort of expect the identification of suspects behind bombings to happen very quickly these days, and therefore we still have the news dominated by the Boston bombing and the apparent lack of success in working out who was behind it.

It's presumably not the work of a group that wants to claim responsibility, which one would think tends to make it a little less likely to be inspired by Islamist.  On the other hand, it does have the same indiscriminate terror aspect of the 2005 London bombings.

Speculation that it is the work of the extreme Right does have some things going for it:  the date, the recent wingnut hyperventilating about armed resistance over gun control laws, and the fact that it happened in a national Democrat stronghold.  On the other hand, it didn't target a government building or service, which seems a little odd.

For novelty value, I think I heard Alan Jones on Sunrise this morning speculating that it could be Left wing radicals from Harvard.  Why exactly they would want to target a marathon - surely the cleanest and Greenest of public events - remains a mystery only known to Alan.  (He's just out to try to even up the score.)

There's also the "generic, attention seeking nutter" scenario, which isn't getting all that much of a run, but didn't the last Batman film (which I didn't care to see) feature general terrorist mayhem caused by bombing public places?   Given the cinema shooting caused by a deranged Batman fan, I have to wonder if this will be another cinema inspired piece.

But the stupidest response to the event has been by dumb Right wing blogger Jim Hoft at his Gateway Pundit blog.  Amongst other dim sins, yesterday I noticed that in response to news that the police were searching someone's apartment, Hoft (for unfathomable reasons) decided it would be  a good idea to look up some address site to find a list of apparent residents in the building and link to it!  The reason he did this is pretty clear:  in a later post, he specifically says "several foreigners live in the building."   Ooh.  Scary stuff, hey?

Then, overnight, it was a bunch of photos of the young Saudi national who lived in the apartment taken from his Facebook page.   The scoundrel:  there he is, doing a silly jump at Disneyland.

But later of course:   whoops, sorry folks, he's been ruled out as a suspect by the police.  (Actually, I am making up the "sorry" bit:  there is no apology from Hoft.)

In fact, the dimwit is upset that "Left wing blogs" have "gone on the attack" about him.  Diddums, Jim?

But hey, who is the idiot who is blaming President Obama for the attack, before we have any clear idea  about who is behind it?

Hoft is the stupidest popular Right wing blogger out there, as Charles Johnson has said for years.

Build your own ice dome on the moon

Ice Dome Construction for Large Scale Habitats on Atmosphereless Bodies

Well, I suppose this could be useful if they found a lot of underground ice in the shadowed areas near the lunar poles.   Just start with a thin plastic film dome, inflate it a bit with nitrogen, and boil off the ice underneath to get it to sublimate on the film above.  Then pressurise it underneath.

Make it a meter thick, and it would even be reasonably good for cosmic ray protection. 

He's not talking tiny domes:  600 or 900 m diameter.   I wonder how chilly you might have to keep the breathable atmosphere beneath it. 

Neat, in any case.

A very Japanese app

Answering nature's call with a smartphone 

Users of Japan’s first smartphone-controlled toilet can simply touch their screens to flush, adjust bidet functions, change seat temperatures and even keep a “diary” of all those relaxing moments.

Housing equipment manufacturer Lixil Corp. said it developed the toilet after learning that an increasing number of people take their smartphones with them to the bathroom.
 .....
“It is popular among those who want to relax in their bathrooms,” said a Lixil public relations official. “It has also received positive responses thanks to its built-in speaker to play music downloaded into smartphones.”

The new toilet is remotely controlled through application software.
Users first register their favorite position of the water spray, water temperature and other settings in advance. When they enter the bathroom, their smartphones automatically relay the information to the toilet to change the settings.

That eliminates the troublesome task of manually changing the configuration set by family members and other people who share the same bathroom.

Pepsi Max may continue

Sweet news: No evidence that artificial sweetener aspartame's bad for you

I suppose I have, on average, 5 cans of Pepsi Max in a week.

The safety of aspartame is therefore of some interest.  This article is full of reassurance that it is.

However, some discussion in the comments regarding blood sugar reaction to it are of interest.  I hope this has been looked into adequately.

Arrietty appreciated

On Saturday night, the family watched the recent Studio Ghibli animation Arrietty on DVD.

I once read an interview in which Miyazaki (who didn't actually direct this, but has a writing credit, and his typical character design is very evident) said that he regrets that children today spend so much time in the "virtual" world, as it prevents them from getting out and exploring the natural world which he so lovingly illustrates in his movies.  He would rather they watched his films once, and then got outside.

That's a nice and quaint sounding sentiment, but the problem is, Miyazaki's films are so routinely  full of beautiful and detailed artwork, they are just about the most re-watchable animation ever made.

Arrietty is no exception - in fact, it seemed to me to be just about the most consistently beautiful Ghibli film I've seen.  It's impossible to illustrate this adequately here, but if you click to enlarge the following, you'll get at least an idea of the detail with which it has been made:

   

I have looked on Youtube at the trailer for American and English voiced versions, and they both seem rather wrong for the Japanese atmosphere.  The Australian DVD can be watched in Japanese with English subtitles, and that's what I would recommend.

The story ends a bit abruptly for my liking; but it's more about the trip.  Highly recommended.

Not sure that they should always be listened to...

Architects back restoration of earthquake-hit New Zealand cathedral

I see that there is a bit of fight going on as to what Christchurch should do regarding the restoration of its Anglican cathedral, which currently looks like this:
 




(My own photo of how it used to look, a year or so before the earthquake, is here.)

The proposals are basically either to rebuild it to look something like it used to, or to go with something completely different, like this:

Call me an architectural heathen if you will, but I think that looks quite nice.  Here's how it is imagined to look inside:

I still can't see a problem.  It is, according to the Cathedral's website, where you can read more about the design, " a lightweight engineered timber structure reinterprets the gothic architectural tradition."

A timber cathedral in New Zealand seems quite reasonable to me.

Follow up to Simon Crean interview

Sounds encouraging...

Emissions from power sector drop to decade-low: study

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have fallen to a 10-year low as coal-fired power slumped to its lowest level in a decade, a new report says. 

At the same time, the share of renewable energy in the National Electricity Market (NEM) has soared beyond 12 per cent and looks set to continue rising.

In its latest quarterly emissions outlook, energy and carbon research firm RepuTex found coal power made up 74.8 per cent of the NEM in the three months ended in March - its lowest point in 10 years.
Coal was at more than 85 per cent of the NEM four years ago, when wind made up just half a per cent of the overall mix.

Today, wind generation is at 3.8 per cent, hydro 8.7 per cent and gas at 12.7 per cent of the NEM.
"Renewables are basically cancelling out coal," RepuTex executive director Hugh Grossman told AAP on Thursday.

But, hey, where is solar?

Things in Space

Three space related stories:

*  that video that's been around for a week or so showing the gloopy way tears would hang around an astronaut's face is worth watching:



*  that story about an experiment on board the International Space Station which might, or might not, finally solve what dark matter is about is given a pretty good treatment in New Scientist.  A key part:

Since May 2011, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has been sitting on the International Space Station, sifting through billions of charged cosmic rays for evidence of those annihilations. If it sees an excessive number of positrons relative to electrons at a certain energy, that might just be a compelling sign of dark matter.

On 3 April, AMS designer Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported an expected rise in the ratio of positrons to electrons at energies between 10 and 350 gigaelectronvolts. Frustratingly though, the upturn is not yet sharp enough to attribute to dark matter collisions since the extra positrons could still come from more mundane sources like pulsars. "It's an indication, but by no means is it a proof," Ting says.

In the meantime, a further quirk in the results suggests that if the particles are dark matter, they may not be vanilla WIMPs.

The simplest models predict there should be only a certain amount of dark matter hanging around, and that WIMPs should rarely meet. But AMS has spotted too many positrons for that – so what could make WIMPs collide in space more often than expected?

In 2008, when the PAMELA satellite found a similar excess of positrons, Neal Weiner of New York University and colleagues suggested that WIMPs are drawn together under a force of their own. This new force increases their collision rate but would have escaped our gaze until now because it ignores ordinary matter entirely.

 But perhaps the biggest surprise is:  who knew there was valuable science being done on the space station?

*   I'm sure why the story of the escaped poo during the Apollo 10 mission turned up on the internet s this week, but it is very hard not to laugh while imaging the crisis on board:

"Oh -- Who did it?" Tom Stafford asks at one point. Confused, Young and Cernan reply, "Who did what?"
Cernan: "Where did that come from?"
Stafford: "Get me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air."
Young: "I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine."
Cernan: "I don't think it's one of mine."
Stafford: "Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away."
Young: "God Almighty"
(laughter)

 See - an unmanned satellite has never made you laugh, has it?   

I wonder what Krugman says about this...

IMF ponders missing inflation mystery - Business - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Paul Krugman loves to point out that economists aligned with the Right have been Wrong in their warnings about dangerous inflation  being just around the corner for years.  So, it's interesting to hear the IMF saying they're not sure why inflation has gone away, too.

An amusing story found while looking for something else

A former Canberra journalist, writing about an incident in Canberra in the 1960's:

One of the more spectacular drunken performances of the 1960s was in the Senate chamber, when Labor Senator from Western Australia Harry Cant found himself seriously drunk and trapped by a division. The doors were locked and the division required Labor senators to cross to the other side of the chamber, sitting in the places of the government senators for the count, while the government senator moved to the opposition benches. Cant was overcome by an urgent need to vomit. Looking around desperately, he came to a decision. Opening the desk drawer of the government senator’s desk where he was seated, he was violently and noisily sick into it.

When the division was over and the senators resumed their normal places, the government senator in whose place Harry had sat was understandably disgusted. The stench created by this extraordinary happening filled the chamber. He did not draw the President of the Senate’s attention to the outrage or make a fuss. Urgent action was required. All this had taken place in the full view of the journalists in the Senate press gallery and those in the public gallery. News of the outrage was soon all over Parliament House and journalists rushed to get the story. Medical practitioner Dr Felix Dittmer, a Queensland Labor Senator, had the answer. He denied Cant was drunk and ordered that an ambulance be urgently called to take Cant to the Royal Canberra Hospital, just across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge in Acton. Dittmer stated that Cant was suffering from an acute case of ‘renal colic’.

The ambulance arrived and a Labor colleague suggested to Dittmer that it would be discreet for Harry, now prone on a stretcher, to be taken through the back exit of Parliament via the kitchen. Labor Deputy Senate Leader, Pat Kennelly, rejected this. So the little procession of the two ambulance officers carrying the stretcher with Cant prone, and Dittmer leading, made its way through the Senate opposition lobby, across King’s Hall where visitors gaped, and down the front steps to the waiting ambulance. In hospital, Cant made a speedy recovery and was discharged the next day. From then on, if an MP entered either the house or the Senate looking a little confused, the interjection would go out: ‘Renal colic.’

More reason to believe the importance of heat in oceans

New Study: When You Account For The Oceans, Global Warming Continues Apace | ThinkProgress

The abstract of the paper itself:

 Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period¹. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer^{2, 3} has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage. Contributions have also been suggested from the deep prolonged solar minimum⁴, the stratospheric water vapour⁵, the stratospheric⁶ and tropospheric aerosols⁷. However, a robust attribution of this warming slowdown has not been achievable up to now. Here we show successful retrospective predictions of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead, the analysis of which allows us to attribute the onset of this slowdown to an increase in ocean heat uptake. Sensitivity experiments accounting only for the external radiative forcings do not reproduce the slowdown. The top-of-atmosphere net energy input remained in the [0.5–1] W m⁻² interval during the past decade, which is successfully captured by our predictions. Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 m of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65% of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown. The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.

The important  conclusion:  a "pause" in average surface temperatures does not mean the planet is not warming.

Laser weapons, yay...

Navy deploys laser weapon to shoot down drones. (video)

The video's not that exciting, but it was interesting to read this: 

On Monday, the Navy announced that it plans to deploy its first shipboard laser in the Persian Gulf next year, for use against Iranian attack speedboats and drones. The laser isn't powerful enough to shoot down a missile, but as the video below shows, it can burn right through a small unmanned aircraft.

Less-powerful settings give it the option to "dazzle" a drone's sensors without taking it down.

The laser system is still in development, but so far it has successfully destroyed all 12 of the small boats and drones that the Navy has tested it on, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The system is far from perfect. It doesn't work in bad weather, and it fires only in a straight line, so it can't aim around obstacles, limiting its usefulness on land.

The upside is that it's cheap and easy to use. A nonpartisan study for Congress puts the cost of a sustained pulse at less than a dollar, compared to some $1.4 million for a short-range interceptor missile.

 I didn't think they would be so cheap to run...

That odd 1960's event re-visited

UFO returns to park

I had a post in 2010 about this peculiar UFO incident in Melbourne in 1966.  (Something odd was definitely seen, and it seems the military knew about it, but what it was remains very obscure.)

Nice to see that they local area is to get a UFO playground to commemorate it!

More than you probably needed to know

Passing gas: A modern scientific history - Salon.com

This is a really long extract about flatulence, and other related intestinal facts.  There is quite a bit to be amused by, such as this about early research into smells:

I ask Levitt whether it was difficult to recruit volunteers for the flatus studies. It wasn’t, partly because the subjects were paid for their contributions. People who sell their flatus are more or less the same crowd who turn up to sell their blood.

“What was hard,” Levitt says, “was finding the judges.” Levitt needed a pair of odor judges to take “several sniffs” and rate the noxiousness — from “no odor” to “very offensive” — of each of the sixteen people’s flatal contributions. The hypothesis was that noxiousness would correlate with the combined concentrations of the three sulfur gases. And it did.

Curious as to which olfactory notes the different sulfur gases contributed to the overall bouquet of flatus, Levitt purchased samples of the three gases from a chemical supply house. The judges agreed on the following descriptors: “rotten eggs” for hydrogen sulfide, the gas with the strongest correlation to stink; “decomposing vegetables” for methanethiol; and “sweet” for dimethyl sulfide. Though lesser players like methylmercaptan contribute as well, it is for the most part these three notes, in subtly shifting combinations and percentages, that create the infinite olfactory variety of human flatus. To quote Alan Kligerman, “A gas smell is as characteristic of a person as a fingerprint is.” But harder to dust for.

But I did learn things I didn't know:  there is a tablet that is available that is very effective at removing the smell - Devrom.  But even in America - home of the TV advertisement for douching, for goodness sake - no one likes to see or hear advertisements for curing smelly farts.   Hard to believe:

Bismuth pills, on the other hand — and Levitt has tested these, too — reduce 100 percent of sulfur gas odor. Bismuth is the “bism” in Pepto-Bismol. Daily doses of Pepto-Bismol can irritate the gut, but not bismuth subgallate, the active ingredient in Devrom “internal deodorant” pills.

I had never before heard of Devrom. This may be because mainstream magazines often refuse to run the company’s ads. Devrom’s president, Jason Mihalopoulos, e-mailed me a full-page ad he had hoped to run in Reader’s Digest and AARP magazine. A smiling gray-haired couple stand arm in arm below the boldface headline “Smelly Flatulence? Not since we started using Devrom!” Mihalopoulos was told he could not use the phrases “smelly flatulence” and “stinky odor,” or the word “stool.” One of the magazines suggested changing the copy to say that the product “eliminates intestinal gas,” but that’s not what Devrom does. That’s what Beano does. So unless you read the Journal of Wound Ostomy & Continence Nursing or the International Journal of Obesity Surgery, you won’t see the happy, internally deodorized Devrom couple.

 And as for the hydrogen sulfide component, we get this useful bit of information, showing that the worst flatulence won't kill you:

The concentration of hydrogen sulfide in offensive human flatus is around 1 to 3 parts per million. Harmless. Ramp it up to 1,000 parts per million — as can exist in manure pits and sewage tanks — and a few breaths can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation. Workers die this way often enough that a pair of physicians, writing in a medical journal, coined a name for it: dung lung. Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus. ...

It is fitting that the Devil is said to smell of sulfur. Hydrogen sulfide is a diabolical killer. Its telltale rotten-egg smell, screamingly obvious at 10 parts per million, disappears at concentrations above 150 parts per million; the olfactory nerves become paralyzed.

 What a sneaky gas...

Personal hygiene from far away

I've just noticed that the new deodorant I bought on the weekend (novel because it contains silver ions, which readers will recall work for Japanese space underwear, and therefore hopefully will also work under my armpits) is made in Thailand.   (Mind you, it still contains aluminium, so perhaps the amount of silver ions is inconsequential.  How would you know?)

The toothpaste I am about to start using is from Germany.   So are my preferred toothbrushes.  (Guess which supermarket chain sell them.)   I have noticed razors that come from Greece and France.  I think I tried Korean ones from Aldi once, and they were terrible.   

A lot of soaps and detergents seem to come from New Zealand now.

I am worried that with such globalisation, come the collapse of civilisation, personal hygiene will be one of the first crises.  

Anyhow, the successful meal of the weekend was a beef and beer casserole, based on this recipe.  Next time I would add perhaps half of the sugar, and twice as much Worcestershire sauce.   (I also added a diced carrot and stick of celery too.)  The dumplings came out nice.  I had been wanting to try cooking with beer in a casserole instead of wine for some time.  Can scratch that off the list now.

Black holes and firewalls

Astrophysics: Fire in the hole! : Nature News

Here's a lengthy and interesting article about some relatively new ideas and problems with the physics of black holes.

It's pretty remarkable that working out the physics on the boundary of a black hole is still the subject of such controversy, so many decades after physicists started to think about it.  Still, I guess it's not as if they have one nearby to actually toy with.  In fact, now that I think about it, how close is the nearest likely black hole to Earth?  Seems it might be 1,500 light years - not so far if you're considering the galaxy as a whole.  From a 2012 article:

This beautiful photo from the Hubble Legacy Archive offers a striking look at the Trapezium, four closely packed stars found inside the Orion nebula, some 1,500 light-years away. Lurking inside that image might be our nearest black hole neighbor.

The question of which black hole is the closest to Earth is surprisingly tricky to answer. V4641 Sgr might be just 1,600 light-years away, or it might equally possibly be more like 24,000 light-years away. We've got a better sense of the location of V404 Cygni, which is just 7,800 light-years away. Considering we're a little under 30,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, those black holes are certainly in the cosmic vicinity, but they're not exactly super close.

That's why the Trapezium is so intriguing. Something about the stars' movements just isn't right, and the most likely explanation is a hidden black hole.

 Anyway, back to the Nature article.  It's mainly about the idea that the boundary of a black hole might, or might not, have a particularly dangerous aspect to it:

Hawking had shown that the quantum state of any one particle escaping from the black hole is random, so the particle cannot be carrying any useful information. But in the mid-1990s, Susskind and others realized that information could be encoded in the quantum state of the radiation as a whole if the particles could somehow have their states ‘entangled’ — intertwined in such a way that measurements carried out on one will immediately influence its partner, no matter how far apart they are.

But how could that be, wondered the Polchinski’s team? For a particle to be emitted at all, it has to be entangled with the twin that is sacrificed to the black hole. And if Susskind and others were right, it also had to be entangled with all the Hawking radiation emitted before it. Yet a rigorous result of quantum mechanics dubbed ‘the monogamy of entanglement’ says that one quantum system cannot be fully entangled with two independent systems at once.

To escape this paradox, Polchinski and his co-workers realized, one of the entanglement relationships had to be severed. Reluctant to abandon the one required to encode information in the Hawking radiation, they decided to snip the link binding an escaping Hawking particle to its infalling twin. But there was a cost. “It’s a violent process, like breaking the bonds of a molecule, and it releases energy,” says Polchinski. The energy generated by severing lots of twins would be enormous. “The event horizon would literally be a ring of fire that burns anyone falling through,” he says. And that, in turn, violates the equivalence principle and its assertion that free-fall should feel the same as floating in empty space — impossible when the former ends in incineration. So they posted a paper on the preprint server, arXiv, presenting physicists with a stark choice: either accept that firewalls exist and that general relativity breaks down, or accept that information is lost in black holes and quantum mechanics is wrong¹. “For us, firewalls seem like the least crazy option, given that choice,” says Marolf.

 There's lots more, and it is well worth reading.

As seen at the IPA dinner

When scientists think about morals

Backreaction: Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us

Sabine Hossenfelder has been thinking about philosophy, and now morals, in light of science.

It's both interesting and, um, a bit of a worry. 

Writing to formula

Everything you ever needed to know about screenwriting (but were afraid to ask) 

This article about what one is supposed to know about screenwriting doesn't add all that much to the world's knowledge, but I did find it interesting that "how to write a movie"books have been around for a long time:

 The rules that govern screenwriting are the fundamentals of narrative and there's a whole history of structural analysis preceeding the advent of film. What screenwriters now call Inciting Incidents (the explosion in a characters life that kick starts a story) were articulated as long ago as 1808 by AW Schlegel. The rise of film was inevitably accompanied by a rise in screenwriting gurus pedalling "how to" manuals – and Epes Winthrop Sargent has some claim to being the first. His The Technique of the Photoplay, written in 1912, is not only hugely entertaining, it has the virtue of being refreshingly honest. Much wisdom can be found in Sargent's book, but it's here that the drive to understand structure has become no longer an intellectual pursuit, but a profit-driven enterprise.

But where's your paper, Salby?

Last summer was not actually angrier than other summers | The Australian

So, renegade climate scientist Murry Salby has attacked the Climate Commission claim about the last summer being anomalously hot by referring to the satellite record.   Yet I thought I read elsewhere that the satellite average temperature did not include Tasmania, which did have an unusually hot summer.  No mention of that in Murry's article.

And more importantly, Salby became a temporary star in the Right wing denial-o-sphere in 2011 by giving a talk in the Sydney Institute which was difficult to follow, but came down to his believing that CO2 was "way down the back of the line" in driving climate change.  

I remember  John Nielsen-Gammon said he saw Salby give a summary of his theory at a conference in Melbourne, and it certainly didn't convince him nor (so the impression was given) any other scientist in the room.

Yet Salby was indicating that his theory was going to be published.

I'm sure if it had been, we would have heard about it.

Salby's talk made it clear that he was pretty much a Judith Curry figure, taking an intense personal dislike to "the Team" of mainstream climate scientists for their influence and claims.  He sounded politically motivated.  The only problem,  his claim to have found the crucial flaw has come to nothing. 

Next.

Useful eunuchs

The Modern Female Eunuch - The Atlantic

Back in 2010 I noted a story from the Science Show about how valuable eunuchs have been in history for helping run governments.

This topic gets a run again in the above article in The Atlantic.  (There's a photo of some unhappy looking palace eunuchs from China too.)  It also talks about what it is about testosterone that makes it, um, sometimes problematic:

Both historical accounts and contemporary research on how testosterone affects personality reveal that eunuchs had traits that made them different from intact males, and in some ways more like females. Their astuteness and objectivity in assessing others' strengths and weaknesses made them particularly effective as bureaucrats, diplomats and tacticians -- quite the opposite of what most people now think of when they hear the word "eunuch."  

When researchers examine how males and females differ in personality, one of the most consistently documented differences has been in agreeableness. 

Women in the maternal role, who have multiple offspring, need to be good negotiators in order to resolve conflict among their children in a way that maximizes their number of surviving descendants. It is thus not surprising that many studies show that agreeability is higher in women than men. That alone could lead natural selection to favor females to be low in testosterone. Indeed recent data from our own and our colleagues' labs on the effect of testosterone deprivation on adult males indicates that castration increases agreeableness and tends to push male behavior towards that of the female end of the spectrum.

High testosterone males are more disagreeable -- rather than only being more aggressive -- than females or low-testosterone males. In his book about testosterone and behavior, Heros, Rogues, and Lovers, James McBride Dabbs said that if there was one word that characterized an excessively high testosteronic individual, it was "obnoxious."

Gee, what Australian political/economic blog have I been saying for years obviously suffers from an excess of testosterone?   I didn't realise the research supported my hunch so strongly.   

Up in a balloon

Joseph and the Giant Balloon: The First Aeronaut of the American West - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic

The story of the first manned balloon flight in California in 1853 makes for a good read.

Rational suicide discussed

Yesterday The Age ran with the story of a relatively healthy 83 year old who committed suicide despite having no terminal illness, but felt she had lived long enough. I'm not entirely sure why this was in the paper, and it worries me a bit that such stories encourage the idea of rational suicide; on the other hand, it is the type of story that probably makes politicians more nervous about legislatively addressing euthanasia as it makes it clear that activists in the field are often sympathetic to suicide to anyone who wants it. (Philip Nietschke is so nuttily obsessed with helping anyone who wants to die achieve their goal painlessly that he has taken to driving a van with nitrogen gas for sale.)

So it is interesting to see an article by a doctor who notes the difficulties with the idea of having a legal framework to allow for assisted rational suicide.  Here are some key points:

Much of the research from the palliative care field such as this study on patients with motor neuron disease, this one on a patient with locked-in syndrome and this review of life satisfaction in tetraplegic people tend to support the view that social factors affect quality of life much more than health-related ones. Among survivors of failed suicide attempts, many are subsequently glad they made it, and would not attempt it again. Impulsive or crisis-related suicidality would have to be strenuously screened for. Do we have those tools yet? Are they reliable enough to be ethically justifiable to use in practice?

It seems reasonable to conceive that the more physically disabled a person is, the more dissatisfied they must be with their life. The problem is that the research largely doesn’t support this view, at least not in the most highly disabled groups. It seems that you can’t make generalisations about a person’s quality of life just by looking at their medical records. This is why I begin to feel uneasy when cases like Beverley Broadbent’s are discussed....


How could we reliably distinguish between a case like Beverley Broadbent, who is clearly making a long-considered decision with rational forethought free from mental illness or social coercion, and another who hasn’t been through the same emotional and mental journey, or who may be getting a nudge along? And what about younger people who have survived into their 40s and 50s with conditions like cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury? They are experiencing similar physical and social disadvantage to the elderly, but at a much earlier age. Would they be allowed to apply as well?

Much, much more research is needed about any proposal for voluntary ending of a life in the absence of terminal disease. As a humanist, I support the right to choose an early and dignified exit from intolerable circumstances. As a doctor, and a pragmatist, I have a lot of trouble thinking my way towards a legal and social framework in which this could be ethically brought about.

He ends on a point that I don't agree with, though:

We need to have a mature conversation about this. A conversation which respects shocking and awkward points of view.

 Why?

Those inclined to rational suicide have been around for ever.  Why is special accommodation for them needed now?

About that cold Northern Spring

Rabett Run has a translation of a blog post by Stefan Rahmstorf that appeared recently.  It looks at the recent papers arguing the loss of polar ice is causing air pressure and circulation changes that are leading to events like this, and makes a pretty convincing sounding case that this is indeed likely.

But the most remarkable thing was, I think, the first image, which shows that the unusual cold is almost matched  by large areas having unusual warmth:

As Rahmstorf notes, taken over the whole Northern hemisphere, it is actually close to the long term average.

You won't be reading that in The Australian anytime soon.

Easter at home

That was a bit of a bland Easter break.  We did go fishing at Raby Bay (Cleveland) on Friday morning though: only the adults caught a few small ones to release, but at least the kids got bites and some fun.  But then a cold took out the son for the next couple of days, and forecast rain for Sunday meant we were housebound, so I offered to finally get around to painting the bathroom and toilet with a can of paint bought for the purpose probably 5 or 6 years ago.  It had actually started rusting at one spot inside the can (I didn't realise this was possible) and so the paint job was enlivened by the occasional streak of brown amongst the cream colour.  It didn't happen too often, but the paint itself didn't seem great quality (it was a cheaper brand) and I have had better painting experiences.  It will soon be 10 years that we have been here - and this job means the interior repaint that started in the first year has now been finished.  (Probably just in time to start with new colours for the rest of the house.)

Going back to my son's cold, he did keep using the Samsung tablet despite my complaint that this would be the fastest way he could spread his illness, especially to the alternative person who mainly uses it (me.)  I have for a while been going to speculate here on this:  I wonder if the remarkable spread of tablet computers is going to be the main factor behind the next influenza epidemic that wipes out a large percent of the population.  Maybe after the collapse of civilisation,  Apple will be deemed to be a symbol of evil and pestilence. 

Anyway, Sunday morning featured what I guess counts as a family tradition.  The kids don't worry about eggs (in fact, my son still doesn't care for ordinary chocolate much, even though he'll eat chocolate cake and lamingtons), but they do like to eat a jelly rabbit with marshmellows for Easter breakfast:

You can tell it's a rabbit, can't you?  At least it didn't disintegrate on removal from the mould this year.  It's a real downer when that happens.  (Not really - the kids find that funny too.)

On the other up-sides, I've started reading a 1960's book I got last year by some German academic about Israelite religion (I skipped forward to the bit about human sacrifice), as well as a new (second hand from the Bookfest) Graham Greene - The End of the Affair.   It's pretty short, so that should be easy to finish quickly.  I also now have the second volume of the Norman Sherry bio of Greene.   I haven't read the first one yet, given that I am not entirely sure how interesting it is to read so much detail about such an odd character.  Well, no, I assume it is interesting; it's just that I keep giving priority to time on the internet.

I beat my daughter at cards on Saturday night, which was well deserved after she thrashed me the last two times we played.  (Spit and James Bond are the preferred games at the moment, with the occasional round of Jacks and Fives.)

I think the BBC comedy Rev., which I have been meaning to recommend, might have finished Sunday night on ABC1. (No, now that I check, it looks like it has one more episode to go, but it is also going to be coming back.)  I don't know how accurate it really is, of course, but it certainly feels like an insightful dig at the state of the Anglican church in England.  It has very good acting all around, and a title character who the writer is wise enough to let redeem himself somewhat by the end of most episodes.  I tire of shows where a jerk is a jerk throughout. 

Oh dear.  Back to work tomorrow... Or today, now.

A General Patton Easter

Lords of Karma and Military Reincarnation � Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

I've been looking at another history side about odd things, which I should add to the blogroll, and was reminded of something I think I have heard before:  George Patton's belief in reincarnation went so far as to at least speculate that he was the Roman soldier who pierced Christ's side during the crucifixion:

 Patton did write a poem  Through a Glass Darkly, which described these various lives. So Patton seems to suggest, with characteristic modesty, that he had been the soldier who had stabbed Christ on the cross: ‘Perhaps I stabbed our Savior/ In His sacred helpless side./ Yet I’ve called His name in blessing/ When in after times I died.’ The poem includes the words ‘So forever in the future/ Shall I battle as of yore,/ Dying to be born a fighter/But to die again once more’, which might go quite well to a heavy metal beat.

I wonder if that made George a bit sombre and prickly around Easter time?   And anyway, how come George seemed to believe he was always going to be a fighter?  Isn't the point of reincarnation to believe that you can change into something better/different over time, based on past experience?

It's Easter, so a bit about crucifixion

History of Good Friday execution method: When did we stop crucifying people? - Slate Magazine

This short Slate Explainer article notes that it is said that Constantine  outlawed crucifixion after his conversion, although the matter is not without doubt.  In any event, it is interesting to be reminded about the nastiness of the punishment (and to be reminded that Saudi Arabia still does it - even in this last week):

Even if Constantine did, in fact, end the practice of crucifixion, it’s not clear that he did so out of respect for Christ’s execution. Aurelius Victor, the earliest historian to claim that Constantine banned crucifixion, explained that the emperor was motivated by a sense of humanity rather than piety. Crucifixion is a pretty gruesome way to go—significantly worse than the New Testament makes it seem. Although Christ reportedly expired in a matter of hours, many crucifixion victims clung to life for days. Even in Roman times, it was considered an exceptionally cruel punishment, reserved mainly for those who challenged state authority, such as insurgents and enemy soldiers. (Joel Marcus of Duke described crucifixion as “parodic exaltation,” because it gave rebels the fame they sought, albeit in a grotesque form.) By some accounts, Constantine replaced crucifixion with hanging, a less painful execution method. Constantine’s supposed ban on crucifixion came as part of a package of reforms, further suggesting that he was merely exercising human mercy. Branding prisoners’ faces, for example, was also prohibited around the same time—a reform that had nothing to do with Christ’s execution.

Whether or not Constantine put a stop to Roman crucifixions, he definitely kicked off the Christian fascination with crucifixion and the cross. Before Constantine’s reign, it appears that images of the crucifixion were mainly used by pagans to taunt Christians. The third century Alaxamenos graffito depicts a worshipper standing next to a donkey-headed man on a crucifix. The inscription reads, “Alexamenos worships god.” Not until the fifth century did Christians widely adopt the crucifixion as their own symbol, and the faithful then sought out pieces of Christ’s cross.

A technique not tried...

Hard-boiled eggs: Why you should never actually boil them.

As l usually find myself boiling eggs about once a month (for tuna salad), I feel I should give this a try.

Hearing voices

BBC News - The people who think they tune into dead voices

For some reason, the BBC News magazine has an article about the history of EVP - Electro Voice Projection - which all started with Konstantin Raudive in the 1960's.

I wouldn't have thought the whole business could be described like this:

Nowadays, EVP is a standard tool of ghost hunters worldwide. There are hundreds of internet EVP forums and many serious and well-educated people who see it as proof positive that the dead are trying to talk to us.

For example, Anabela Cardoso, a former Portuguese career diplomat who lives in Spain and publishes the Instrumental Transcommunication Journal. She has a well-equipped recording studio and claims to have replicated the Gerrards Cross findings. 

"My voices are not little voices," she says. "They are loud and clear and totally understandable." She offered to send me a CD.

Apparently the CD contained voices in Spanish and Portuguese which "are not really very clear", but they are voices.

Raudive's recordings are not very impressive, apparently, and he went into a loony direction:

 After Breakthrough was published, Raudive progressed from voices captured on tape to voices coming from animals, in particular a budgerigar named Putzi, who spoke in the voice of a dead 14-year-old girl.

 Uhuh.

The article does note some interesting psychology:

 As Joe Banks, a sound artist, points out, a dead person speaking in studio quality wouldn't be nearly so convincing as a voice you must strain to hear. 

Banks has an ongoing project called Rorschach Audio. He suggests that the voices are the aural equivalent of inkblot tests devised by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. He argues that while the EVP experimenters think they are doing parapsychology, they are actually unwittingly carrying out psychology experiments. 

For example, if you take recorded speech and replace every sixth of a second with white noise, the speech is still comprehensible. But if instead of white noise you use silence, it's much harder to understand. 

We are naturally well-adapted by evolution to imaginatively reconstruct speech against a noisy background - imagine trying to whisper in a windy forest to your hunting companions. 

EVP enthusiasts, Banks thinks, aren't idiots. They are just being fooled by audio illusions that take us all in.

 Interesting.

From the world of science fiction

Brain scans predict which criminals are more likely to reoffend 

In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner.

Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his collaborators studied a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the prisoners’ brains during computer tasks in which subjects had to make quick decisions and inhibit impulsive reactions.

The scans focused on activity in a section of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain involved in motor control and executive functioning. The researchers then followed the ex-convicts for four years to see how they fared.

Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹.

 Pretty amazing.  

White people's fears

The Roots of Anti-Government Gun Culture in America - The Daily Beast

David Frum has a look here at an interesting sounding book about how American attitudes to gun ownership have evolved.    The paranoid basis run by the NRA (Americans need to be allowed to be armed so as to defend themselves against their own tyrannical government) has its basis, the books argues, in the Black Panther movement in the late 60's.  The big change, of course, is that it is now the white and the (relatively) rich who say they fear their own government, not the poor blacks.

Quite a weird turnaround, isn't it?

Hello all you Gillard haters out there, part 2

The days of relying on natural resources are over

Ken Davidson summarises an important recent story:

Nathan Fabian is chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, which advises 65 major institutional investors who are responsible for funds with a market valuation of about $1 trillion.

Fabian told a recent business Climate Alliance conference in Melbourne: ''A positive trend in the evidence of climate change impacts, from actual recent events, is becoming clearer. This is an important development … As you would expect with these developments in the science, the notable additional scrutiny is coming not so much from civil society, but from the elite economic institutions around the world and the investment community as well.''

The science now suggests that 2 degrees of warming is no longer safe. The International Energy Agency says that the world has a 50/50 chance of keeping warming to less than 2 degrees, if only one-third of the known reserves of fossil fuels are exploited. The International Panel on Climate Change says that to reduce the risk of breaking the 2 degree barrier to one-in-five would require leaving 80 per cent of the known reserves in the ground. (More risky than Russian roulette!)

Fabian quoted a recent report by Jun Mao, chief economist for Deutsche Bank, which shows that China will switch from being a net coal importer to net exporter by 2017; that the price of seaborne coal will fall to $70 a tonne; that even at $87 a tonne, 43 million tonnes of production from Australia would be forced off line; and that new developments planned in the Galilee Basin would not be profitable and couldn't attract finance.

The respected Carbon Tracker says that companies reliant on coal revenues are in an asset bubble. This might help explain why the market price of equities of mining companies such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Anglo American have continued to fall, despite the recent recovery in the share market generally.

The writing is on the wall for the lucky country. Unless we can manage risk - impossible without incorporating the environmental damage of burning fossil fuel in the price - the chance of dodging the bullet of catastrophic climate change is remote.

Hello to all you Gillard haters out there...

You probably don't even understand the policy you hate the most:

Study finds widespread ignorance about carbon tax

Nine months after its introduction 54 per cent of people believed the tax, which specifically excludes motor fuel, had pushed up prices at service stations. Most people surveyed also estimated that their cost of living had risen by $20 or more a week, while 5 per cent put the increase at more than $100 a week.  The government's modelling came up with $9.90 a week.

Asked about compensation, 49 per cent said they had received nothing at all, whereas the compensation package introduced with the tax applies to 90 per cent of the population.

For all of you Julia Gillard fans out there.......(hello?)

Well, at least Harry Clarke likes her too...

Meanwhile, John Quiggin, who (despite otherwise sounding a sensible enough chap) has been a Rudd booster for a long time, has made no comment on Thursday's events.  He'll probably blame Julia for not resigning for the good of the Party. 

When Julia plays DayZ

OK, so it was a rush job...

Universal mysteries

There's a new, more detailed, map of the cosmic microwave background out.   It does not resolve some oddities:

It has also uncovered a surprise. The simplest models of inflation predict that fluctuations in the CMB should look the same all over the sky. But Planck has found asymmetries in opposite hemispheres of the sky, as well as a ‘cold spot’ that covers a large area, which were also noticed by WMAP. “It defines a preferred direction in space, which is an extremely strange result,” says Efstathiou. This rules out some models of inflation, but does not undermine the idea itself, he adds. It does, however, raise tantalizing hints that there may yet be new physics to be discovered in Planck’s data.

Today in politics

Today's spectacularly peculiar episode in the ongoing Rudd Wars just goes to show what serious damage can happen in political parties when personality based civil wars get entrenched.

Although I can't remember much of the detail now,  this all reminded me of the interminable years of the Peacock/Howard rivalry in the 1980's:  the big difference being that it all went on while their party was in Opposition, and helped keep it there.   I have trouble remembering when a party that was in government has had such a protracted internal division.

I suppose it is hard to know how active Rudd has been in encouraging the undermining of Gillard in the last month or two; it is possible that the journalistic backgrounding has been mainly initiated by his supporters off their own bat.  However, what is surely clear is that he has never got on the phone to call them off, telling them, for example, that he really did not want the job and they were only hurting the government.

Here's a suggestion for Kevin:  you are (puzzlingly) popular in Queensland.  The Labor Party here desperately needs a high profile leader in State Parliament.   Resign from Federal Parliament, take a year or two off, get some sleep, work your way into State Parliament, and you'll soon have a good crack at being a long term Queensland Premier.

An unpleasant sounding way to go

Man dies after parasitic worms invade lungs

The man died in California, but was a Vietnamese immigrant:

The 65-year-old man was apparently infected by the worms in Vietnam, one of many countries in the world where they're known to infect humans. About 80 percent to 90 percent of people die if they are infected by the worm species and then suffer from so-called "hyperinfection" as the worms travel through their bodies, said report co-author Dr. Niaz Banaei, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at Stanford University School of Medicine.

The man's case emphasizes the importance of testing patients who might be infected with the parasite before giving them drugs to dampen the immune system, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, who's familiar with the report findings. "You have to think twice before starting big doses of steroids," Hotez said. "The problem is that most physicians are not taught about this disease. It often does not get recognized until it's too late."

I wonder if this has ever happened here?

She makes it sound so attractive

Can you imagine Blackpool without swimming in the sea? I couldn't bear it | UK news | guardian.co.uk

Someone writing in The Guardian remembers fondly her childhood at the beach at Blackpool, with scenes like this:

As a Blackpool girl born and bred, I revel in the nostalgia of childhood summers spent dipping toes in shallow water before slowly heading deeper into the unknown, stepping carefully for fear of disturbing an angry crab with his pincers at the ready....

For as long as I can remember, Blackpool beach has never been particularly clean. I remember as a child wistfully looking at postcards of exotic destinations such as Italy and Turkey, where glittering green oceans made the yachts that sailed upon them appear brilliant white.

I remember wondering why our sea was brown, not turquoise, and why the sand was dotted with empty cans of Special Brew and the odd plastic bag.

 Heh.

Guess the Dad

BBC News - Kenya condom advert pulled after religious complaints

This is an interesting story from the BBC about an ad promoting condom use in Kenya getting pulled off air because it dealt with a real situation - a married woman having another lover.

It would seem that extra marital relationships are surprisingly common in that country:

Dr Cherutich told the BBC the advert had been launched because up to 30% of married couples had other partners.

Around 1.6 million people out of Kenya's population of 41.6 million are living with HIV, according to the UN.

In the video, the reporter says that a 2009 study also indicated that most people in these relationships do not use condoms.  Although the article doesn't mention it, this surely means there must be a lot of kids with different fathers from the presumed one.

The report says it is church and Muslim leaders who are unhappy with the advertisement, saying the government should promote faithful marriages instead.   But it also notes that 80% of the country is Christian.

As with the contraceptive mandate in the US, where the US bishops do not want increased access to a product their own congregations use against Church teaching, it seems to me that some Christians have become pretty good at blaming governments for their own failings in convincing their congregation to live differently.

More bad timing for Labor

Huge export earnings rise tipped for resources sector | The Australian

Of course, if the Coalition gets in, it's goodbye any form of mineral tax to help run the country.

New baby

Our fertile possum visitor and her new, squashed, offspring:

Hard to disagree

Poor planning has doomed Labor's media reform - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I find Bruce Hawker a dull analyst on TV, but I find it hard to disagree with his general take on how Labor seems to approach policy.

For the first time, I feel that Gillard will soon lose the leadership.  She presumably gave the go ahead to Conroy to run with the "it's all or nothing with these media reform proposals and we will not negotiate" tactic.  Conroy doesn't have a good head for politics - literally, with that haircut of his - but this is just the latest in a series of poorly judged approaches by him.

Whoever gets the leadership needs, I think, to make it clear that Labor needs to look at how it deals with processes.  No more announcing policies that have yet to be finalised (Gillard and using Timor for asylum seekers, for example).  

If Rudd does rise from the grave (groan) he at least needs not to be triumphalist.  In fact, he probably can't afford that due to the lack of people who would then work for him in the ministry.  But he should acknowledge that the haphazard approach to policy began with him, and say that he will work hard to make sure that the party's policy formulation appears, and in fact is, a result of careful and considered process, and not the results of running around at the last minute to get a policy seemingly just for the sake of having a policy.  He could also promise to slow down personally and let his staff get some sleep.  

It seems to me that Rudd is so puzzlingly popular with the public that the Coalition could not actually run for long with all of the deep personal criticism that Labor politicians came out with last year, because people would soon think the Coalition was being unfair. 

I find Crean harmless and reasonable but he doesn't have much charisma with the public.

As much as I think Rudd is not a man to be admired or liked, if it is between him and Crean I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the party would do better under Rudd. 

If Gillard retains leadership, I would still wish her well, and maintain my belief that she is the most unreasonably despised politician this country has ever seen.

Today's history lesson

BBC News - The African chief converted to Christianity by Dr Livingstone

Here's a short account of the missionary work in Africa by the famous Dr Livingstone.  Just one convert, but an important one.  The story has many interesting parts, including this:

This was how things stood when Sechele first met Livingstone - he ruled a half-tribe. Livingstone persuaded him to make peace with his other uncle by sending him a gift of gunpowder for his rifle.

The uncle was suspicious that the gunpowder was bewitched, tried to neutralise it with fire, and in the resulting explosion was killed. Sechele thus ruled over a reunited Bakwena.

And here's bit of bad luck:

As Sechele grew increasingly interested in Christianity, he found two huge barriers in his way. One was rain.

Tswana tribes had rainmakers, whose job was to use magic to make the rain come. Livingstone, like all missionaries, vehemently opposed rainmaking, on both religious and scientific grounds. 

Sechele happened to be his tribe's rainmaker as well as kgosi, and Livingstone's stay coincided with the worst drought ever known, so Sechele's decision to stop making rain was predictably unpopular.

Experiments best not done

CultureLab: The radioactive legacy of the search for plutopia

New Scientist talks about a new book (from Oxford University Press, so I assume it is credible) about some surprising Cold War experiments about radiation:

MAKING plutonium for nuclear bombs takes balls, but not in the way you might think. In 1965, scientists at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in Washington state wanted to investigate the impact of radiation on fertility - and they weren't hidebound by ethics.

In a specially fortified room in the basement of Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, volunteer prisoners were asked to lie face down on a trapezoid-shaped bed. They put their legs into stirrups, and let their testicles drop into a plastic box of water where they were zapped by X-rays.

The experiments, which lasted for a decade and involved 131 prisoners, came up with some unsurprising results. Even at the lowest dose - 0.1 gray - sperm was damaged, and at twice that dose the prisoners became sterile. They were paid $5 a month for their trouble, plus $25 per biopsy and $100 for a compulsory vasectomy at the end so they didn't father children with mutations.

Another idea re black holes and the LHC

It seems there is now a suggestion that the LHC could make stable quantum black hole remnants without their ever first having been black holes which radiate down to a remnant.

At least I think that's what this paper is saying.   It talks about how they may be detected.

Bugs in sinks

'Nightmare' superbug alarm

I didn't know that "superbugs"actually lived in sinks happily; even hospital ones, where they are presumably getting a rinse regularly with antibacterial soap off users' hands.  I suppose seeing mould growing up the insides of the drain of the bathroom sink where I shave daily (until I hit it with bleach every few weeks) should have given me a clue.   Anyway, I was still surprised:

An infectious disease physician at the hospital, Rhonda Stuart, said doctors had been concerned about a string of cases in the intensive care unit between 2009 and last year, but only acquired the technology last August to test surfaces for the bacteria known as CRE. Associate Professor Stuart said the tests revealed the bacteria were in the sinks where healthcare workers washed their hands. While it could not be proved, she said, this might have spread the infection to patients because the sinks' poor design caused water to splash back off the drain.

Despite this being discovered seven months ago, Associate Professor Stuart said the hospital was only now preparing to replace the sinks. When asked if cost had delayed this, she said ''there were always difficulties with trying to do things in budget-restrained times''. However, she said doctors were satisfied the intensive care unit was safe.

The sinks were being cleaned regularly with 170-degree pressurised steam, which removes the bacteria for about three days before they grow back. Staff were also being careful with infection control procedures to prevent further patient infections, she said.

''No patients have tested positive for the bacteria since we've undertaken this process, so we're happy things have been controlled with the new steam technology … There is no risk to anybody,'' said Associate Professor Stuart, who is also medical director of infection control for Monash Health. CRE (Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae) is a new class of multi-resistant bacteria alarming doctors worldwide because of their ability to spread drug resistance to other bacteria.

Reason to use the bleach at home more often, I guess...

Douthat on a change needed

What the Church Needs Now - NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat is pretty conservative on a all things Catholic, but he at least does not take the approach that I have seen often taken by Right wing Catholics in one prominent Australian blog:  denying the harm caused by the sex abuse scandals of the last few decades.  He writes:

But in a sense all of these challenges have one solution, or at least one place where any solution has to start. Francis’s reign will be a success if it begins to restore the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy and clergy, and it will be a failure if it does not. 

Catholics believe that their church is designed to survive the lapses of its leaders. The Mass is the Mass even if the priest is a sinner. Bishops do not need to be holy to preserve the teachings of the faith. The litany of the saints includes countless figures — from Joan of Arc to the newly canonized Mary MacKillop, an Australian nun involved in the reporting of child abuse by a priest — who suffered injustices from church authorities in their lifetimes. 

But it’s one thing for Catholics in a Catholic culture, possessed of shared premises and shared moral ideals, to accept a certain amount of “do as I say, not as I do” from their pastors and preachers.

It’s quite another to ask a culture that doesn’t accept Catholic moral ideals to respect an institution whose leaders can’t seem to live out the virtues that they urge on others. 

In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.

Not a good advertisement for the Witnesses

Slamming the door on Jehovah

This article paints a bleak picture of what it is like to be a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses.  It is a religion with a bad enough retention problem already:

The religion's proper name is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. It was founded by American draper Charles Russell in 1872. They believe in the end of the world and also the paradise beyond and have predicted five times that Christ would come again to signal it. The last time this happened was 1975. More than 1 million devotees abandoned them in the following six years. In America the Jehovah's Witness have the lowest retention rate of all religions.

They also believe Satan has ruled the earth since 1914. The only way to make things better is by creating a heavenly kingdom on earth of a small number of believers. The Jehovah's Witness' trait of being aloof and "separate" comes from this idea that Satan runs things, so the best way to survive is to avoid society.

Membership has flatlined against population growth in most developed countries. The reach of the internet has had a big impact as whistleblower groups, ex-Witness forums, websites, "leaks" sites and negative publicity abounds.

It's hard to see the appeal of the religion for a newbie:

Kingdom Halls are plainly decorated, like school classrooms, with no iconography or adornment. Congregations meet twice a week to listen to Biblical passages. The structure for disciples to live by is uniform and rigid. Moral conservatism (anti-gay, anti-abortion, no sex before marriage) is strictly enforced.

The British sociologist Andrew Holden says the church has a "quasi-totalitarian" approach in which converts "defer unquestioningly to the authority of those who are appointed to enforce its doctrine". The individual, he says, "becomes the property of the whole community"....

 Aron says new recruits are often unaware they will go without birthdays and Christmas. "It's a religion without a soul."

Even as far as cults go, it sounds like a particularly joyless one.

Drink up

Green tea, coffee may help lower stroke risk

A study from Japan has some cheering results for those of us who have just a cup or two of coffee per day:

*  People who drank at least one cup of coffee daily had about a 20 percent lower risk of stroke compared to those who rarely drank it. 

* People who drank two to three cups of green tea daily had a 14 percent lower risk of stroke and those who had at least four cups had a 20 percent lower risk, compared to those who rarely drank it. 

* People who drank at least one cup of coffee or two cups of green tea daily had a 32 percent lower risk of intracerebral hemorrhage, compared to those who rarely drank either beverage. (Intracerebral hemorrhage happens when a blood vessel bursts and bleeds inside the brain. About 13 percent of strokes are hemorrhagic.) 

Participants in the study were 45 to 74 years old, almost evenly divided in gender, and were free from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Update on black holes from LHC

Researchers find it would require 2.4 times less energy to create a black hole than thought

It's been quite a while since I've gone looking for this topic, but here's an article that says it may be easier to make one (based on your standard old physics) than previously thought, but it's still hard:

Researchers know that it is theoretically possible to create black holes because of Einstein's Theory of Relativity—particularly the part describing the relationship between energy and mass—increasing the speed of a particle causes its mass to increase as well. The computer model in this effort, which is based on Einstein's theories, provides a virtual window for viewing what happens when two particles collide—they focus their energies on each other and together create a combined mass that pushes gravity to its limit and as a result spawns a very tiny black hole. That result was expected—what was surprising was that the team found that their model showed that such a collision and result would require 2.4 times less energy than has been previously calculated to produce such a tiny black hole.

The team also notes that despite fears of researchers building a collider to replicate in real life what their model depicts—and in the process creating a black hole that would swallow the Earth—the science just isn't there yet. It would take billions of times more energy than even the LHC is able to generate and use. Also, even if they could create such a black hole, it would disappear just as quickly as it appeared, due to Hawking radiation.

The concern about black holes, though, used to be about the relatively low energies they could be created at if there were "extra dimensions" such as string theory predicts.  I don't think this present article is about that at all...