Review of a show I don't watch anymore

OK, so the post title is not quite right.   You see, after giving Dr Who a big miss this season (and even my 14 yr old son agreed after the season opener that it is now unwatchable) I did, out of idle curiosity,  happen to see most of the two part season end.  Promising premise - Steven Moffat deals with "heaven" and the afterlife.  The result:  the show is now just incredibly awful.   Not so awful that it is worth watching, like some shows are.  Just mind numbingly, self referentially, spectacularly poorly written and unengaging dross.

The number of people agreeing with me at the obsessive fanboy comments threads at The Guardian is on the rise, too, I reckon.

Surely its ratings must be suffering?  I think a strong case could be made out that thinking the show is still quality story telling is a sign of some form of brain damage.

The show badly needs to go away for 5 years or so.  And don't let Moffat anywhere near its return.

Ideological triumph? Yeah, sure...

I see that Sinclair Davidson goes with the "Americans finally coming to their senses" interpretation of the Republican wins, as he quotes an over the top column by bow tied cultural warrior Roger Kimball with evident approval:

Over the past six years, the American people have watched as Obama swept nearly 20 per cent of the nation’s economy under the arm of the federal government in the name of “reforming” healthcare. Obamacare, which passed into law without a single Republican vote, is the most unpopular piece of legislation since Prohibition. In a moment of quiet candour, candidate Obama noted that, under his plan, the price of energy would “necessarily skyrocket”, while the coal industry would be regulated out of existence. How’s that working out? About as well as things on our southern border. The United States already spends more on education per pupil than any other country, but we get far worse results because “investing in education” for Democrats means shovelling money into the troughs of teachers’ unions, diminishing parental authority and forcing a politically correct, multicultural agenda on schools.

The truth is that Obama is merely the latest spokesman for the Democrats’ agenda of dependency, the big-government, socialistically inclined welfare establishment that, since the 1960s, has colluded with public sector unions to substitute tax-funded entitlements for individual initiative and personal responsibility. More and more people have come to understand that the “fundamental transformation” that Obama promised was not the path to Shangri-La, but a new road to serfdom. At issue is the relationship between the individual and the coercive power of the state, economic freedom and, ultimately, our national security.

Never mind the fact that wins by the other side during Presidencies on the way out are not unusual, or that several commentators noted that quite a few Republicans were giving out a more moderate position, and I can find no one who claims that it is any sort of emphatic win for the Tea Party wing. 

Oddly enough, more reasonable commentary from a Right wing perspective can sometimes be found at American Conservative, which Jason Soon links to sometimes.  This article, for example:  Obama is a Republican made many valid points, including one about the nuttiness of the Republicans carrying on in such an ideological sense about "Obamacare" when it was modelled on what was formerly a Republican idea.

I see that there is also a very good cautionary post up at the site about why the Republican win means exactly not what Professor Stagflation thinks it does:

Here are six reasons for caution:

1. The president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections.
2. Obama’s approval, while low, is higher than Bush’s at the same point in his presidency.
3. We’ve seen this movie before. Remember the “permanent majority” of 2004? How about the “thumping” of 2006? Then there was the “new majority” of 2008. Of course, that was followed by the “Tea Party wave” of 2010. Which didn’t stop Obama from becoming the first president since Eisenhower to win a majority of the vote for a second time in 2012.
4. The midterm electorate skews older, whiter, and richer than in presidential years. These are Republican demographics, so Republicans tend to do better. The 2016 electorate, on the other hand, will probably look more like 2008 than 2010. Republicans probably won’t ever win many votes from blacks or single women, but they need to continue doing better among the young and Hispanics (as several candidates did last night).
5. The standard explanation of the results is that the election was a referendum on Obama’s policies. That’s not true for the simple reason that most voters have only the foggiest notion of what Obama’s policies are. (Polls on these matters can be misleading because they often ask respondents to choose from a predetermined set of responses to a leading question, which encourages unrepresentative, off-the-cuff answers.) Rather than voting on the success or failure of specific programs, many voters rely on a vague sense that things are going well or badly for the country.
6. The biggest factor in voters’ assessment of the direction of the country is the condition of the economy. Right now it’s pretty lousy, despite relatively favorable growth and employment trends. But if these trends continue over the next two years—and they’re far less dependent on Washington that either party likes to admit—they may start to pay off for ordinary people. Should that occur, many will discover that they liked Democrats more than they thought.

Krugman looks at the Republican win, and grinds his teeth

Triumph of the Wrong - NYTimes.com

Lots of good links in his column to back up his claims, too.

Animation wins

I see that Big Hero 6, the new Disney animated film with some Marvel roots, has scored a high 90% at Rottentomatoes, compared to 72% for Interstellar.   Certainly, the trailers for Big Hero indicated the film has considerable charm.  

Meanwhile on At the Movies, David loved Interstellar, Margaret didn't.   I never find myself agreeing consistently with either of them, so I don't know what that means.   Oh that's right - probably that I'll dislike it. 

I certainly hope that my prejudgement is irritating some reader out there.  :)

  

El nino confusion, again

I see that Eric Holthaus is waving the white flag about the prediction earlier this year that we were likely looking at a strong El Nino.   He now says it looks like we'll get a very weak one, if any.

Yet he notes that parts of the world's weather have been looking El Nino like for a while:

In essence, a gradually warming Pacific Ocean is at once be reducing our ability to predict Earth’s single most important seasonal climate phenomenon, and tampering with it as well. For forecasters, that means this year’s El Niño tease has been “rather frustrating.” It mirrors another flash-in-the-pan-and-fizzle just two years ago.

Still, that doesn’t mean El Niño-like changes haven’t happened. “Borderline” El Niño conditions, depending on your definition, have persisted for months now. El Niño-like effects have already been felt around the globe—including the ongoing mega-drought in Brazil, a lackluster monsoon season in India, a whimper of an Atlantic hurricane season, and the opposing tropical storm fest in Hawaii. Oh, and the world is also on track for its warmest year on record, boosted by near-El Niño.

There were studies (including a recent one) indicating that global warming may result in more, damaging, strong El Nino's.   (And this year's failure does nothing to disprove that.)  But a strong El Nino right now would have been a handy thing to help convince politicians in 2015 to start talking CO2 reduction seriously.   Once again Nature is not working to a convenient timetable for convincing stupid politicians.   I suggest throwing a few libertarians and at least a couple of News Corp columnists into a volcano to get things back on track again.

Phil didn't like Interstellar

Interstellar science review: The movie’s black holes, wormholes, relativity, and special effects.

The Slate main page headline for this Phil Plait article is actually worse:

Interstellar is a bad movie.  Its science is even worse.

Well, I think this is getting me all prepared to really dislike it. 

Update:  I wrote the post without reading the review, for fear of spoilers. Well, now that I have read it, I must say it is absolutely chock full of spoiler, and the odds of my disliking it on similar grounds to Plait appear astronomically high.  (Heh)

Ghosts in the news

So there's a lot of publicity in the news today about a pretty simple experimental set up which seems to give at least some (actually, I am not sure how many of the 12 subjects) the impression of having one or more invisible presences in the room.   Some subjects found it very disturbing.

It's sort of hard to believe that this set up had that strong an effect.   It's also hard to believe that it has much relevance to visual ghosts, although it is probably more relevant to the "third man" factor that is commonly reported by people who are in isolation, especially at times of crisis.

As for visual ghosts, there was an article in the New York Times about the suggestion that ghosts have changed from solid to semi transparent over history.  Here are some extracts:

We think of ghosts as wispy and translucent — a vaporous woman, perhaps, who floats down the stairs, her dress trailing in the languid air behind her. But in early modern Europe, ghosts were often perceived as solid persons. The viewer discovered that they weren’t when they did something that ordinary humans could not, like bypassing a locked door to enter a room.

By the 19th century, people had begun to think of ghosts predominantly as spectral forms — ephemeral, elusive, evanescent. When the ghost of Marley appeared to Scrooge in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), and Scrooge looked his transparent body “through and through,” he illustrated a shift in the ways ghosts became real to people, how ghosts were seen and remembered.

In “Spectres of the Self,” the cultural historian Shane McCorristine points to two reasons for this transmutation. The first was skepticism about the supernatural, generated by the new developments in science. The concept of hallucination emerged to explain experiences like seeing an apparition. As the seeing of ghosts became a psychological phenomenon, it also became a pathological one. In 1848, the British skeptic Charles Ollier spoke for many when he wrote that “anyone who thinks he has seen a ghost, may take the vision as a symptom that his bodily health is deranged.” As a result, Dr. McCorristine writes, the ghost was gradually relocated “from the external, objective and theological structured world to the internal, subjective and psychological haunted world of personal experience.”

That's interesting, except that I thought that when the Society for Psychical Research did an extensive survey of ghost experiences back in the 1880s, one of the surprise findings was that ghosts often did appear solid.  (Especially, if I recall correctly, the "crisis apparition"  style of incident, where someone who had died miles away makes an unexpected appearance before loved ones or others at about the time of death.)

I'd certainly be checking the floorboards for weight bearing ability...

So Brisbane seems popular as a home for overweight mining billionaires?   OK, well we will have two now, it seems, at least, with a big splurge of publicity given to Gina Rinehart buying these fancy digs:

and The Australian writing:

GINA Rinehart has wasted no time making her new multi-­million dollar Brisbane house her home, applying to renovate the riverside property with more ­verandas and a lift.

To be honest, if I were a billionaire with vast coal interests, I'm not at all sure that I would be pleased with the media publicity about the location of my new mansion just before an event well known for its street demonstrations against capitalism.   I don't think she's living there, yet, though. 

The ridiculous Republicans

They weren't always the party of science nonsense, but they are now.  Talking about climate change, and the recent IPCC report:

So, if there’s one issue that should not be a partisan issue, this is it. After all, we’re talking about saving the planet. Surely Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on that. John McCain and Barack Obama did in 2008. But, sadly, that’s not the case today. Congress remains hopelessly deadlocked on climate change because Republicans, for whatever strange reason — be it ignorance or campaign contributions — either deny it’s happening, deny human activity is responsible or deny it’s serious enough to worry about.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, in fact, stirred up a little trouble back in May when he asserted there was “virtually no Republican” in Washington who accepted the science about climate change. As it turns out, he was right on target. Politifact tested his claim and rated it “Mostly True.” Out of 278 Republicans currently in Congress, they found only eight — or 3 percent — who believe in climate change. For the record, they are Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mark Kirk (Ill.), John Thune (S.D.) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Reps. Chris Smith (N.J.), Michael Grimm (N.Y.) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (N.J.). 

Sadly, the other 270 Republicans follow the lead of know-nothing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who denies any link between human activity and climate change. On May 11, Rubio told ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

The extraordinary pizza price of England

The preferred weekend takeaway evening meal for our family for the last year or so has been Domino's pizza.   They've improved their product and gone somewhat upmarket with the range of toppings, and although they are starting to share the McDonalds annoying habit of changing the menu a bit too often, they are usually of remarkably good value.  Last Sunday, for example, we had two of the rectangular "Chef's Best" ( I can recommend the chilli lime pulled pork) and one simple pepperoni.   Total cost, from memory, with an on line deal, was about $22 - $24.  There are always on line deals.

But the basic menu price ranges from $4.95 (value pizza) to $7.95 (value plus) to $11.95 (traditional pizza) to $10.95 (chef's best) and top of the range are those with prawns for $14.95.

Last night, I was talking to a friend who has moved to England, and somehow the topic of pizza cost came up.   Extraordinarily, these are examples of the cost of Domino's in that country:

The cheapest, with nothing on it bar cheese and sauce - is £13.50!!   A Hawaiian is £17!!!!   That's $31.70 in Australian!!!!! - for a Hawaiian pizza!!!!!!!.

I remember thinking back in about 1989 that the cost of pizza in London in £ was about the same as the price in AUD, and how expensive that was.  If anything, the British pizza price has worsened.

What is wrong with that country?

Update:   petrol I see is currently 125p per litre.    That's $2.27.   Australians freak out if petrol breaks over the $1.60 mark. 

So what about salaries?   Let's pick something easy to compare - a new teacher outside of London can expect to earn £22,000 as a minimum.   $40,000 here, roughly.   Looks like our starting salary is the same.

It's just a jump to the left...?

I think I have seen headlines around the net to similar effect:  the claim that that the Republicans succeeded in this mid term election by playing up to "lefty" issues.   William Salatan writes:

Republicans won big in the 2014 elections. They captured the Senate and gained seats in the House. But they didn’t do it by running to the right. They did it, to a surprising extent, by embracing ideas and standards that came from the left. I’m not talking about gay marriage, on which Republicans have caved, or birth control, on which they’ve made over-the-counter access a national talking point. I’m talking about the core of the liberal agenda: economic equality.

I'm not sure that how correct this is, but as I wrote earlier today, I certainly didn't have the impression that it was Tea Party ascendancy that had helped the Republicans this election.   Which means a particularly interesting time for fights within the GOP as to how far they use their congressional control.

And to be snide for a moment:  it's many a year since I can remember a less physically impressive politician than the turtle-like Mitch McConnell.

Update:  Someone in The Atlantic agrees with Salatan, so it must be right:

This year has been different: GOP activists have given their candidates more space to craft the centrist personas they need to win. First, in senate races in North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alaska, Tennessee, Georgia, Kansas and Texas, comparatively moderate Republicans triumphed over Tea Party-backed challengers. Then many of those Republicans downplayed their opposition to gay marriage and highlighted their support for greater access to contraception in an effort to win over the young and women voters who in past elections spurned the GOP as too extreme. “On social issues,” wrote Slate’s Will Saletan, “Republicans are mumbling, cringing, and ducking. They don’t want the election to be about these issues, even in red states.”

What are the research benefits of Virgin Galactic?

Those who are against criticisms of Virgin Galactic - you know I'm looking at you, JTFS, but you have a lot of friends out there - seem to have accepted some vague claims by Branson that his project is not just about making the world's longest rollercoaster ride, but involves doing research which will be generally helpful to humanity and transport in the future.

Now, while I accept that rich men are free to spend their money on vanity projects if they want, I detect a distinct lack of skepticism about Branson's claims.

Here, in this 2011 interview, he says that he hopes it will lead to very cheap small satellite launches, and superfast intercontinental airline travel.

Yet, as I've learnt from Googling after this crash, the height the SpaceShipTwo could reach has been downgraded somewhat because of engine issues (and the weight, I think, of carrying additional passengers compared to Rutan's SpaceShipOne.)  I know there was a new engine being tested, but it seems very unclear if it will get to the old, advertised height, too.

It might be that an unmanned future version of the SpaceshipTwo may truly be able to launch small satelittes into orbit, but has anyone looked at its likely cost compared to more regular rockets?   In fact, we already have an air launched small satellite system, and if you wanted to build an alternative one, surely you can get to that end a lot faster than via  mucking around with designing a spaceplane for passengers.   

And as for superfast intercontinental flight - as far as I'm aware, no one has ever seriously considered that rocket engines would be practical for that.  Scramjets, yes.   Does Branson's project have any relevance at all to scramjet research?  I doubt it.  

Being skeptical of Branson seems well worth the effort...

American politics is complicated and weird

That's really all you can say about it.  Well, no, there is a bit more you can add...

The amount of effort needed to just get people to vote; the mid week timing of voting; the staggeringly enormous amount of money put into advertising; the racial divide in those who actually vote and the effort put into limiting the number who can vote; the routine claims of fraud in voting, particularly electronic voting:  to an outsider, these all appear as signs of a pretty damn dysfunctional system.   Yet, in the name of "freedom", the Right in particular seems to put much effort into preserving the aspects which make the rest of the world say "Jeez, can't you run a political system  better than that, America?"

The only potential up side to large wins (as seems to be expected) by Republicans is that I haven't noticed that the Tea Party side of the Right as being particularly prominent in the lead up to the election.  But I could be wrong on that...

Certainly, Phil Plait fears that a Republican win in the Senate will result in some ludicrous appointments which may affect climate change policy:

Nowhere is this more important than the Environment and Public Works Committee. A Republican win will almost certainly make James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, chairman. This committee controls the Environmental Protection Agency, which is charged with addressing climate change and what to do about it. Inhofe is probably the most ludicrously adamant global warming denier in the Senate; he has called it a hoax and denies it to levels that would make the frothiest conspiracy theorists shake their heads in wonder.

Inhofe has indicated he will attack greenhouse gas regulators, so giving him control of this committee puts the "fox in charge of the henhouse" simile to shame.

Other committees will fare no better; as just one example Ted Cruz, R-Texas, could be chairman of the committee on science and space, and he also denies global warming. The irony is as excruciating as it is familiar.

What nauseating results they would be.

But on the upside, conservative over reach may well work in favour of the Democrats next time around:

Republican control of Congress could provide the stage for the next phase of the civil war in the GOP, with both wings jockeying for position ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Establishment and moderate figures like Senator Rob Portman want to improve the party's image—which, despite their projected success, remains awful—through constructive work. Hardliners like Representative Steve King and Senator Ted Cruz want to lay down a marker for an uncompromising conservatism, which they think will set the party up for victory in the presidential race, by obstructing any progress and investigating the administration. Many Democrats, as it happens, hope for the same thing. As their chances to hold on in the Senate have dimmed, many liberals' new fond hope is that Republicans will overreach and turn off voters, setting up a Democrat sweep of the White House, Senate, and perhaps even the House—an echo of what happened in 2012, following the GOP victories in 2010.

Coq au vin (future reference)

I usually do these recipe posts on a weekend, but as I'm heating up leftovers for lunch today, here we go:

There are few things more fun and satisfying to cook than coq au vin, given that nearly all recipes involve burning brandy on the stove top, and well as using copious amounts of red wine which (of course) you can also enjoy directly while cooking.

But there are quite a few variations on how to do the dish; some involving soaking the chicken in wine first, others with different components cooked separately and joined at the end.

Here's the simple recipe which I've settled on, recorded here in case I ever lose the book:

For four:

One chicken cut up however you like (but 8 pieces makes it easy)
about 6 bacon rashers
1/4 cup well seasoned flour (about a teaspoon of salt, and fair bit of pepper)
100 ml brandy (the book actually called for more, but that is plenty, I think)
2 cups red wine
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
small mushrooms in whatever quantity you like
dozen or so small onions

In the cast iron casserole thing, cut up and fry the bacon in a tablespoon or so of olive oil.   Til it's nearly crispy is OK.  Remove and drain

Using the flour in a bag method, coat all chicken pieces well and brown on all sides in two batches.

Put all chicken pieces back in, and turn the heat off while you get the brandy ready.  Pour brandy all over the pieces, turn heat on low and ignite.    Watch blue flames with pleasure.

When all burnt off, add the garlic, two cups of red wine and tomato paste.   If the flour was seasoned strongly, no need for more salt.

I also added the bacon back at that time, but the recipe didn't actually mention if that was the right time to do so.  It works OK doing it as I did. 

Stir well and cover and cook on low heat for 50 minutes in total.

In a fry pan, with a bit of oil, fry off the peeled whole onions til they start to caramelise on the outside.  Take them out and fry the mushrooms.

As the whole onions are tricky to cook the whole way through in a fry pan, I added them in to the casserole about half into the 50 minute cooking time.  Added the mushrooms a bit later, so they still have some texture in the final meal too.

You can add peas in to cook with it in the last ten minutes too, but I just went with beans as a side, with mashed potato too.   (Incidentally, I do better mashed potato than my wife.  This is a truth widely acknowledged - by the kids.)

The ingredients are pretty simple, but the sauce works out fine.

Future may be worse than thought for coral reefs

Well, what a depressing abstract in Nature Climate Change about the way scientists have been thinking about how acidification may affect coral reefs:

Changes in CaCO3 dissolution due to ocean acidification are potentially more important than changes in calcification to the future accretion and survival of coral reef ecosystems. As most CaCO3 in coral reefs is stored in old permeable sediments, increasing sediment dissolution due to ocean acidification will result in reef loss even if calcification remains unchanged. Previous studies indicate that CaCO3 dissolution could be more sensitive to ocean acidification than calcification by reef organisms. Observed changes in net ecosystem calcification owing to ocean acidification could therefore be due mainly to increased dissolution rather than decreased calcification. In addition, biologically mediated calcification could potentially adapt, at least partially, to future ocean acidification, while dissolution, which is mostly a geochemical response to changes in seawater chemistry, will not adapt. Here, we review the current knowledge of shallow-water CaCO3 dissolution and demonstrate that dissolution in the context of ocean acidification has been largely overlooked compared with calcification.

Aerodynamic prescience noted

Hey, what was I writing on Sunday (when everyone - including me - first thought that the Virgin spaceplane rocket engine had exploded?)  See update 3 in the post below.

(I also opined about this in a time stamped comment at Club Troppo,  just for anyone who doubts.)

And today:

Virgin Galactic’s space plane broke apart in mid-air seconds after its re-entry system deployed prematurely in an accident on Friday that killed one of its pilots and left another seriously injured, US crash investigators have said.

Christopher Hart, the acting chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board, told a press conference on Sunday night that the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury, had unlocked the feathering system, but that the second stage of the process, which moves the wings into the feathering position, happened “without being commanded”. 

OK, I'll admit, I was thinking more along the lines that the first accident would be caused by the wings not locking back into place properly after the "feathering" process.  But hey, I was close enough.

For once, I prefer The Australian over Fairfax...

Goodness me.   Newspoll has Labor at 54% TPP over the Coalition.  That's quite a welcome corrective to the gushing coverage over the new Fairfax poll saying Abbott has become vastly more popular, and giving a "only just ahead" TPP of 51% to Labor.

The best thing about the poll is the drop in the primary vote for the Coalition:  down from 45.6 at the election to 38% now.  Labor's primary is also showing a bit of a jump from the figure its been stuck on for some time (up to 36 from 34%.)  

Other welcome poll news this week:  the unpopularity of the Coalition's deregulation of Uni fees.  As I expected, this seems to be unpopular widely, probably because not just uni students don't like the idea, but nor do their parents.

Sensitive about their beards...

Another gob smacking story of life in Saudi Arabia from Gulf News:

A Saudi activist who has been reportedly arrested for a tweet she posted last year told investigators her words should be understood within their context and not misinterpreted.

Squad Al Shammari was apprehended on Tuesday in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah following formal complaints by religious figures over a tweet they found offensive to Islam and Prophet Mohammad (PBuH).

However, Suad said she was not targeting Islam claiming earlier tweets supported her argument, local daily Makkah reported on Sunday, citing ‘a well-informed’ source.

The activist waded into controversy last year when she said on the microblog that the Islamic saying that men should have beards to distinguish them from non-believers did not make sense.

“Several atheists, Jews and Communists in the past had, and in the present have, beards, and even Abu Jahl [a polytheist pagan leader] had a beard that was longer than that of Prophet Mohammad (PBuH),” she reportedly said.

Several senior religious figures in the Saudi kingdom condemned her tweet, accusing her of denigrating Islam and targeting the Prophet, and calling for severe action against her, including putting her on trial.

According to local news site Sabq, a commission to support Prophet Mohammad (PBuH) had repeatedly requested Suad to put an end to her ‘misleading and misinformed’ tweets that were offensive to Islam. The commission had also called the telecommunication authorities in the Saudi kingdom to shut down her accounts on social networks.

Richard's rocket problems

As I have written before, it will likely only take one fatal crash (perhaps of a passenger, if not a test pilot) of Richard Branson's rocket planes and that will be it for his business model.  

I had forgotten until I was searching for my past posts about this that I had written in 2007:  How to Make Space Tourists Nervous.    The late pilot is not the first person to die in Branson's project:

Three people have been killed in an explosion, during a test of rocket systems to be used in Richard Branson's proposed space tourism ventures. 

I remain of the view that this is a vanity project that is not worth the effort.

If tourists want to see the edge of space, a high altitude balloon would surely be a safer way of achieving it (see the first link above).   And a "vomit comet" can give a good enough sensation of weightlessness.

Update:   seems to me it is starting to look like this fatality may indeed kill off Virgin Galactic.  The British press is full of bad PR:

Sir Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic has been accused of ignoring a series of warnings that its $500 million rocket was unsafe for flight.

A number of senior aerospace engineers repeatedly voiced fears over the design of Sir Richard’s SpaceShipTwo and the safety protocols surrounding its testing.

The Telegraph has seen emails and other documents in the public domain — dating back several years, and as recently as last year — in which the engineers warned of the dangers of Virgin Galactic’s rocket engine system.

It also emerged on Saturday that three senior Virgin Galactic executives — the vice-president in charge of propulsion, the vice-president in charge of safety, and the chief aerodynamics engineer — had all quit the company in recent months.

Update 2:  David Walker at Club Troppo has a rather good post about the problem of getting into space.   (Very, very rarely does science of this kind get a run there, but it sure beats the chess posts!)

Update 3:  apart from the rocket engines, the thing about the Virgin rocket that I always thought looked ridiculously dangerous was the "feathering" wing.   (See how it moves on this video.)   As a design, my common sense suggested that this looked like an accident waiting to happen, and I was expecting that this would be the cause of the first crash. But I have never noticed any expert make this comment, so what do I know?  (Apart from the fact that I wouldn't fly in it.)

Update 4:   Oh look, maybe my common sense was not far off the mark after all:

In September 2011, the safety of SpaceShipTwo's feathered reentry system was tested when the crew briefly lost control of the craft during a gliding test flight. Control was reestablished after the spaceplane entered its feathered configuration, and it landed safely after a 7-minute flight.^[24]

I don't recall hearing about that at the time.  

Update 5:  cynicism from earlier this year on the poor performance of Spaceship Two.

Update 6:   I am reminded by this accident that Burt Rutan was the designer of SpaceShipTwo, and although he is now retired, he is notable for being a climate change denier.  He writes:

 Specifically, the theory of CAGW is not supported by any of the climate data and none of the predictions of IPCC since their first report in 1991 have been supported by measured data. The scare is merely a computer modeled theory that has been flawed from the beginning, and in spite of its failure to predict, many of the climate scientists cling to it.

My rule of thumb for trusting experts in any field still applies:   if they don't believe in CO2 causing potentially dangerous climate change, be very careful of  what they say or do on any topic. 

Romanticising the microbiome

There's a really good Ed Yong piece at the New York Times which argues convincingly that there is a lot of premature excitement about the possibilities of influencing health by deliberately altering the gut microbiome.  Sure, fecal transplants work for one particular problem, but the fact that  gut bacteria are changing rapidly all the time anyway means it's no simple task to fix other problems.

You should read the whole thing, but I found this section particularly interesting:

Take the Hadza. Their microbial roll call is longer than a Western one, with both omissions and additions. They are the only adult humans thus far sequenced who are devoid of Bifidobacteria — a supposedly “healthy” group that accounts for up to 10 percent of the microbes in Western guts. But they do carry unexpectedly high levels of Treponema, a group that includes the cause of syphilis.

Is this menagerie worse than a Western one? Better? I suspect the answer is neither. It is simply theirs. It is adapted to the food they eat, the dirt they walk upon, the parasites that plague them. Our lifestyles are very different, and our microbes have probably adapted accordingly. Generations of bacteria can be measured in minutes; our genomes have had little time to adapt to modern life, but our microbiomes have had plenty.

It may be that a Hadza microbiome would work equally well in an American gut, but incompatibilities are also possible. The conquistadors proved as much. As they colonized South America, they brought with them European strains of Helicobacter pylori, a stomach bacterium that infrequently causes ulcers and stomach cancer, and these European strains also displaced native American ones. This legacy persists in Colombia, where some communities face a 25-fold higher risk of stomach cancer, most likely due to mismatches between their ancestral genomes and their H. pylori strains.

 Yong mentions earlier in the article who the Hadza are:

In September, the archaeology writer Jeff Leach used a turkey baster to infuse his guts with the feces of a Hadza tribesman from Tanzania.....

 He experimented on himself because he views the Western microbiome as “a hot microbial mess,” he wrote on his blog. Poor diets, antibiotics and overly sanitized environments have gentrified the Western gut, he wrote, “potentially dragging us closer to ill health.” The Hadza, with their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, carry diverse microbial communities that are presumably closer to a healthier and disappearing ideal. Hence the stunt with the turkey baster. Mr. Leach billed it as “(re)becoming human.”

This reasoning is faulty. It romanticizes our relationships with our microbes, painting them as happy partnerships that were better off in the good old days.

Yong's a fine science writer.