An odd idea

'The Youngness Paradox' --"Why SETI has Not Found Any Signals from Extraterrestrial Civilizations” 

According to MIT's  Alan Guth , originator of the inflationary universe theory, our Universe is a product of eternal inflation --eternal into the future, but not into the past. An eternally inflating Universe produces an infinite number of pocket universes , which in turn are producing more new universes.  The old, mature universes are vastly outnumbered by universes that have just barely begun to evolve. Guth called it the "Youngness Paradox."

Guth says that "the synchronous gauge probability distribution strongly implies that there is no civilization in the visible Universe more advanced than us. We would conclude, therefore, that it is extraordinarily improbable that there is a civilization in our pocket Universe that is at least one second more advanced than we are. Perhaps this argument explains why SETI has not found any signals from alien civilizations.”

I'm not sure what it means for the number of civilisations that might be one second behind us.   But if it  means there may be many of them around at the moment, and if within the next (say) 300 years that a significant proportion of them start to explore the stars, what does the maths suggest as to how long it may take before we are likely to bump into one?    A lot depends on whether faster than light travel is possible, I guess.

He's never been the same since he couldn't pat his AR-15

By way of understatement, I would say that David Leyonhjelm doesn't exactly come up smelling of roses from his Good Weekend profile today.  He has apparently upset many people involved in small party politics over the years, and some of their comments make him sound rather like Kevin Rudd in terms of control freakery.

And I haven't even touched yet on the parts that make him like a nut who we should rejoice lost his gun collection after the Howard government reforms:

What personally outraged Leyonhjelm was having to surrender much of his private collection, at first rifles and later some pistols, when the bans were extended. "I had lots of semi-automatic rifles," he says. "I had an M1 Garand, M1 Carbine, the AR-15, the FN FAL, a Rasheed semi-auto and a Norinco ... I had to relinquish them all.”

Prior to the compulsory federal buyback, he'd kept the cherished weapons in his attic and "every now and then I would take them out and pat them ... It was a big thing not being allowed to have them any more. It was no solace to know I was getting paid money [to hand them back]. It was an insult. There I was, being presumed to be unsafe because some nutter had got himself hold of a semi-auto in Tasmania.”

To this day, he won't attend a function if Howard is going to be in the room.

And does he not have enough sense to not talk about John Howard "deserving" to be shot? :

"All the people at [Sale that day] were the same as me," Leyonhjelm tells me, his light-blue eyes blazing. "Everyone of those people in that audience hated [Howard's] guts. Every one of them would have agreed he deserved to be shot. But not one of them would have shot him. Not one." He found it offensive, he adds, that Howard "genuinely thought he couldn't tell the difference between people who use guns for criminal purposes, and people like me".

He seems such a fool that he thinks the AFP should be able to tell when chatter about a PM "deserving to be shot" is serious, and when it's not.

Of course, for those Libertarian/Boltian fans of the LDP who comment at Catallaxy, if a Muslim migrant had said this, they would be demanding he be deported back to his country.   

There is little doubt that Libertarianism attracts the immature and selfish,  and these are qualities that appear to be on plentiful display in our Senator elect. 

Update:   let's add to the list of qualities that Libertarianism attracts: fantasies about the how the world could be and should be which ignore history and common sense.   For example, from this article -

His conviction that government should get out of our lives makes him ultra-dry on economic matters - arguing, for instance, that the state should not employ teachers, doctors or nurses, as these services can be privately delivered.

In the Financial Review this week, he went on a Right wing populist ramble about how the public service wastes money and has grown too big, and making reference to the state of Federal politics in 1927.

The fact is, we do not have a huge or inefficient public service by international standards, and while it is certainly possible that government is sometimes capable of doing things inefficiently and we can be vigilant about that, don't the 19th to 20th centuries gives us a good lesson in how social welfare and other services can be better run by government than by charity or private companies?   Don't they show that the welfare state grew because of the failure of the previous system?

The great improvement in global wealth over those centuries has been accompanied by the increase in the welfare State; Libertarians would have you think that it's what's holding the world back because they live in a fantasy land that everything is better if unregulated.   (It's like they all have a yearning to live either in the US or England in about 1830, as far as I can tell.)

It's interesting to note how the initial movement towards it was - apparently - at the instigation of conservatives who wanted to undermine socialists.   Current libertarian/small government ideologues seek to cut off conservatives from what good, common sense they used to exercise.   Of course, we see this in climate change too - where the truly devastating environmental vandals used to be the communist countries where economic theory overrode everything else.  Now it's the Libertarian extremists who encourage governments to do nothing and trust that everything will turn out OK.

Origins of WW1

This ABC discussion of the various factors behind WW1 is a pretty good read.  I hadn't heard much about this before:

"War by Timetable" was the provocative title of a 1969 book by one of the most acclaimed historians of the 20th century, AJP Taylor, who theorised that the cause of World War I could be traced back to an unexpectedly efficient transport system.

Taylor said none of the major powers actively sought a conflict prior to 1914, but depended on deterrence, through an ability to mobilise their armies faster than their rivals.

He argued that in the decade leading up to war, the generals of all the great powers had developed elaborate plans to move vast numbers of men by rail to confront any threat; a strategy intended to intimidate any potential aggressor while also serving as a useful extension of foreign policy.

The problem, according to Taylor, came following the 'July Crisis' of 1914, when the strategy, which was intended to prevent a war, had precisely the opposite effect.

All across Europe hundreds of trains and millions of soldiers were set in motion, swiftly and inexorably towards conflict.

Mass troop mobilisation had effectively become a declaration of war as politicians and diplomats were shunted aside by generals and station-masters.

"The First World War had begun - imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age," wrote Taylor.

I've also been watching 37 Days, the dramatisation of the political lead up to the war (being shown Friday nights on SBS), and the way the movement of German troops sort of committed the country to starting was dealt with to some extent on this week's episode.

All rather interesting, even if I still can't  hold in my head for long information regarding the part of Europe between Germany and Russia - it's ridiculously complicated.

Update:  in defence of my abandonment of even hoping to understand what was going on in a large slab of Europe, I offer this map, from a post of 40 maps (!) which "explain" World War 1:

Been busy with the photos today..

It's sort of like if Hollywood was doing scenes from last year's IPA 70th anniversary dinner.   

Dumbest government in decades

As seen in the IPA's magazine

We all know it happened like this..

As inspired by the heading spotted at Fairfax "Decoding PUP's Jedi mind trick".

Teen talk time

If you ask me, the chorus of Don't Stop by that Australian boy band sounds too much like parts of Everybody Talks. 

And I have to agree with my daughter that Que Sera is a good song.  And sometimes, the simplicity of a video and the image it manufactures is impressive marketing all by itself:



(It reminds me a bit of Fry at the Beastie Boys concert, though.  Pity it appears Youtube is thoroughly cleaned of Futurama clips.)

Questionable

I see that Tim Wilson uses not only his private twitter account to go on about how we don't need s18C RDA, he also tweets using the Human Rights Commission account too, promoting his column in The Australian against s18C, and by reprinting it on the HRC website:




I didn't think his view on this was the Commission's collective view, and doubt that it is appropriate for him to be promoting his own views in this fashion.

And I have to repeat - isn't it stupid of the Commission to give this particular commissioner the title of "Human Rights Commissioner".   They should all be Human Rights Commissioners, with their subcategory following.   (His being "Preening Lightweight Showpony for Selfie Rights"*.)

* have I mentioned before that I don't like him? 

Predisposition and causation

Study finds genetic links between schizophrenia and cannabis use | Reuters

Some pro-legalisation people will probably think this study helps throw doubt on cannabis as a cause of schizophrenia:

 The results chime with previous studies linking schizophrenia and cannabis, but suggest the association may be due to common genes and might not be a causal relationship where
cannabis use leads to increased schizophrenia risk.Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use ishigher among people with schizophrenia than in the general population.

"We know that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia. Our study certainly does not rule this out, but it suggests that there is likely to be an association in the other direction as well – that a pre-disposition to schizophrenia also increases your likelihood of cannabis use," said Robert Power, who led the study at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

But isn't the point this:  even if you are genetically predisposed to both use cannabis and get schizophrenia, does actually using cannabis help bring on the schizophrenia you're genetically predisposed to get?  

And as for the finding itself, I think it's hardly surprising.

Harry Clarke comments

From his blog, talking about the suggestion that ABC iView move to a user pays model:

The Australian might argue that the ABC gets unfair public funding which disadvantages those private media suppliers who must make a buck.  There is some truth to this but The Australian anyway services a different market to the ABC. The Australian services primarily  - the right-wing loony market of cretinous IPA/libertarian types.  The ABC has a more balanced view of the world.

Heh.  

An assessment of the IPA hard to disagree with

Detritus — Thankyou note to John Roskam
(OK, maybe a couple of lines are too harsh, but I'm right up there with the general sentiment.)

Folks are dumb where I come from

Look, it's a clear as anything that Clive Palmer gets votes by being the anti-politician politician, and as such his support is from the politically un-engaged.   We seem to have a lot of those in Queensland, where Palmer polls an extraordinary 14%.

Still, as with Pauline Hanson, it can't last.   The flakiness and insubstantiality eventually seeps through into enough of the electorate, although with Hanson it was perhaps the impression that she was a mere dumb puppet for the men around her who wanted to get ahead that caused her downfall. 

The problem is Clive is the opposite - he uses others as puppets, up to and including visiting US (former) Vice Presidents, and we have to wait for the breakup of his Senators into a fractious disunity, with inside stories of Clive behind the scenes, to see his downfall. 

Well, that's how I think it will go.   Labor doesn't seem quite up to raising money to fund the jailing of a political opponent, as Tony Abbott did.

Salt on Piketty

What a lightweight and snide discussion of Piketty by Bernard Salt in The Australian today.   I've never read Salt's column's much - I found most of them boring - but I didn't really know his political leanings til now.

Also on Piketty, I was interested to read this blog entry on debate now going on about inheritance and wealth taxes.   As I have written before, I had not even realised that the US had such a tax, but the blog entry explains why that may be - very few people pay it.  The British inheritance tax is much larger (I think), but how many people may escape it by positioning money in off shore accounts is something I don't know.

I presume there has been a lot of economic work done on inheritance tax (in fact, I see there was a 2013 paper co-authored by Piketty with the alluring title "A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Tax") , but it's something we never hear about as a prospect for Australia. 

Perhaps that should change?

Bell's theorem confusion

I'm pretty sure that the interpretation of Bell's Theorem in the popular physics books I read in the 1980's (written after the Alain Aspect experiments) was pretty consistent - that it showed reality was "non local".

But this article in Nature, which is not easy to follow but worth reading to get an idea of the continuing debate amongst physicists about some very fundamental concepts, goes into the alternative interpretation, and how the experiments still have unresolved "loopholes".   (Interesting, the suggestion at the end is that the loopholes may be experimentally covered by putting one end of the set up with a human on the Moon!)

Progress in this matter of resolving the very meaning of basic concepts in physics does seem very slow.

Yet another remarkable Jewish story from WW2

Surviving the Black Sea: An appreciation of David Stoliar, the sole survivor of the 1942 Struma disaster | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Read this lengthy review that tells the tragic story of the sinking of a ship in the Black Sea, full of Jews trying to get to Palestine, in 1942.

Suggestions for replacing the "honour killings are morally justified" talk

I don't know:  the Festival of Dangerous Ideas might have got away with a talk by a Caliphate favouring Islamist if they had called it "Understanding honour killings from within the culture," or some such;  but going with "Honour Killings are Morally Justified" was an absurd and offensive bit of trolling for attention. 

Now that the Festival has a gap in the program, I've been trying to think of alternative "dangerous" talk titles:

"Between Clive and the Buffet Table - a caterer reminisces"

"A Rinehart Family Christmas"

"The case for compulsory circumcision"

"The Phil Neitszke Guided Tour of Switzerland"

I'll keep working on it....

Mercury in fish, revisited

The Mercury-Laden Fish Floated for School Lunches | DiscoverMagazine.com

I've posted quite a few times over the years about mercury in fish, mainly because it seems to be a topic they follow closely in the US, but less so here.

At the link is a lengthy article looking at the issue with regard to the dogfish, a type of shark that the US government is looking at using in school lunches and prisons, but not everyone thinks it's a good idea.

Interestingly, I see that the article indicates that Spanish mackerel is pretty high on the list of mercury affected fish too, above tuna, which I don't think I realised before.  I don't mind a bit of mackerel every now and again.  Certainly, our more premium white fish have now become ridiculously expensive. 

Higgs causes confusion

Should the Higgs boson have caused our Universe to collapse?

British cosmologists are puzzled: they predict that the Universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This startling conclusion is the result of combining the latest observations of the sky with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Robert Hogan of King's College London (KCL) will present the new research on 24 June at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth.

Andrew Bolt: tired and emotional

Most fair minded people will be rather surprised at the jury verdict in favour of Rebekah Brooks, given that it was looking pretty obvious to readers, let alone the papers' editors, that the London tabloid staff must have been illegally hacking into private phones.     (Also, her sometimes lover was convicted, as well as 3 senior journalists who already pleaded guilty, and another 15 journalists apparently yet to go to trial.)  

Yet an apparently tired and emotional Andrew Bolt's reaction?:

May the Murdoch haters choke on their vomit at this result. 

Ha!  Yes, Andrew, it's like a complete vindication of everything good and noble about Murdochworld.

Oh - and who should join in - the hive mind of Catallaxy.  Sinclair Davidson thinks Andrew "sums it up nicely."

Look, fellas, I know you were at that big IPA shindig with Rupert as Guest of Honour last year, but wipe that gold dust from your eyes and get a grip, will you?  

*  If I were on the jury, I would have been tempted to convict her just for having such an annoyingly wild and woolly hair do.