Physics conference report from a physicist

Backreaction: Hawking proposes new idea for how information might escape from black holes

This provides a "live" insight into the reports of Stephen Hawking thinking they've solved the black hole information problem.

More in the series "Deep Thoughts while Wandering Sydney"

Dyson has a message

PS:  Labor still leading 54/46 in Newspoll?   Shorten improves in net satisfaction?

I think it's official: the Royal Commission is a politically backfiring blunderbuss. 

Fundamentalist idiots with explosives

Palmyra's Baalshamin temple 'blown up by IS' - BBC News

Some background as to why they do this can be found in this article.   Here's a crucial section:

Saudi authorities destroyed this mausoleum, part of the al-Baqi cemetery in Medina, in early 1926, shortly after taking power in the city in the prior year. In fact, they flattened the entire site, which dated back to the seventh century and is thought to have contained the bodies of some of the prophet Mohammed's early compatriots.

The act "shocked the international Muslim community," Dr. James Noyes, author of The Politics of Iconoclasm, told me.


The Saudis didn't just do this on a whim. They were, and still are, aligned with a religious faction called the Wahhabis — a group of Sunni fundamentalists who, like some Christian denominations, reject any form of worship through religious shrines and icons.

"The attacks on shrines and tombs are a rejection of 'shirk' (the worship of God through shrines)," Noyes explained.

Theologically, Wahhabis and other Islamists trace this back to the story of the golden calf that appears in the Koran and the Bible, in which the Israelites build and pray to an idol, sparking God’s fury. A number of Muslims see the story as a blanket prohibition against the worship of images and shrines altogether.

As the Wahhabis and Saudis consolidated control over what's now Saudi Arabia, they destroyed anything that even hinted at idol worship. "The Arabian peninsula used to have Jewish communities, pagan pre-Islamic tribes, shrines favoured by Shiite and Sufi pilgrims on the Hajj to Mecca and Medina, Ottoman and Egyptian influences, and the Hashemite kingdom," Noyes wrote via email.  "All of that is gone."

 

Perhaps more than you needed to know about Gore Vidal

Life out loud | The Economist

This review of a biography of Vidal notes this:

“NEVER lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television” is a
familiar Gore Vidal quip—and, as Jay Parini notes in a marvellous new
biography, Vidal enthusiastically followed his own advice. The sex was
almost always homosexual; invariably “on top”; and usually in the
afternoon, to allow for disciplined writing in the morning and
extravagant socialising in the evening. For Vidal, television meant a
show of eloquent punditry projected on both sides of the Atlantic, but
most memorably—as any trawl through YouTube will confirm—in the form of
confrontations on American chat shows with William Buckley, editor of
the conservative National Review, and with a pugnacious fellow writer, Norman Mailer. ...

Vidal, knowing everyone who was anyone (from Princess Margaret to
Rudolf Nureyev), was certainly a snob. He was also delighted to be rich,
having as a young man not known “where the next bottle of champagne
might come from,” Mr Parini writes. It mattered immensely to Vidal that
he could live well, whether in huge homes in America and Italy or in
comfortable suites at the best hotels in London, Paris and Bangkok.

Yet Mr Parini’s Gore Vidal is a man hiding his shyness with a mask of
suave sophistication and with viper-like scorn for his enemies (he
called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” in one TV clash, and said Truman Capote’s
death was “a wise career move”). Though Vidal accused Buckley of being a
“closet queen”, this was not the retort of a militant homosexual:
Vidal, a “pansexual”, always saw “homosexual” and “heterosexual” as
adjectives, not nouns.

Update:  some far more extreme details of the Gore-ian sex life may be found in this article.   Mind you, I'm mildly dubious about some of the actors he claimed to have slept with.    Gives the impression it was hard to find an actor in the 50's who was not bisexual.

Drugs and harm

FactCheck: is ice more dangerous and addictive than any other illegal drug?

I made a complaint recently that there is a lot of dubious rhetoric floating around when it comes to drug reform advocates talking about comparative risk for drugs.

This article does provide some useful figures, some of which are surprising:

 Fewer people use ice than alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, ecstasy and pharmaceuticals
for non-medical purposes; 2.1% of Australians are methamphetamine users
(1% use ice), while 80% are alcohol users and 10% are cannabis users.

That's fewer meth users than media attention to the problem might suggest, but as the article goes to note, the "ice" phenomena is about the growth of it as the preferred type of methamphetamine, and its increase in frequency of use:

The same data show that about half of methamphetamine users prefer
ice over other forms. The proportion of users who use ice as their main
form of methamphetamine has doubled since 2010 - from 22% of users to
50% of users. This suggests that regular users are switching from speed
to ice.

In addition, these data show that existing users are using more
frequently, with a larger percentage of users reporting using weekly or
daily, but a lower quantity. As a result of these changes, we have seen
an increase in harms associated with methamphetamine use.

The part that surprised me more, however, is the one about the number of ambulance attendances for cannabis use.  Don't hear that bandied about much in drug reform circles:

 In Victoria, there are an average of 4.7 methaphetamine-related ambulance attendances
a day (3.4 of those for ice) and about 87% of those cases are transported to hospital. This is less than alcohol (34 attendances per day), benzodiazepines (8.3 attendances per day) and heroin (5.1attendances per day). And it is similar to cannabis, with 4.4 attendances a day and around 86% transported to hospital.

Perhaps the article doesn't contain enough accurate information to be sure, but if alcohol is used by 80% of people versus 10% cannabis, it would seem the ambulance attendance figures for alcohol compared to cannabis are about the same.    Very interesting...

As for a valid comparison between the "danger" of different drugs, the article goes squishy at the end:

 While we certainly need to address the harms associated with methamphetamine use, we should keep in mind that our most widely used drug – alcohol - still results in more harms to individuals and the community, and other illicit drugs are also associated with more harms.

Of course alcohol causes more harms "to individual in the community" - it's used by 80 times more people.

And the article does link to a 2007 study by former UK drug policy adviser David Nutt. But as another article shows, the exercise Nutt went through with drug experts to rank drugs in terms of their danger is fraught with difficulties:

Nutt's analysis measures two different issues related to drug use in the UK: the risk to an individual, and the damage to society as a whole.

The individual scores account for a host of variables, including mortality, dependence, drug-related family adversities, environmental damage, and effect on crime.

Even if two drugs score similarly in Nutt's analysis, the underlying variables behind the scores can be completely different. For instance, heroin and crack cocaine are fairly close in the rankings. But heroin scores much higher for mortality risk, while crack poses a much bigger risk for mental impairment.

There's also some divergence within the specific categories of harm. Alcohol and heroin both score high for crime. But alcohol's crime risk is due to its tendency to make people more aggressive (and more prone to committing crime), while heroin's crime risk is based on the massive criminal trafficking network behind it.

The analysis doesn't fully account for a drug's legality or accessibility. If heroin and crack were legal and more accessible, they would very likely rank higher than alcohol. The harm score for marijuana would also likely rise after legalization, but probably not too much since pot use is already widespread....

"You can always create some composite, but composites are fraught with problems," Caulkins said. "I think it's more misleading than useful."

The blunt measures of drug harms present similar issues. Alcohol, tobacco, and prescription painkillers are likely deadlier than other drugs because they are legal, so comparing their aggregate effects to illegal drugs is difficult. Some drugs are very harmful to individuals, but they're so rarely used that they may not be a major public health threat. A few drugs are enormously dangerous in the short-term but not the long-term (heroin), or vice versa (tobacco). And looking at deaths or other harms caused by certain drugs doesn't always account for substances, such as prescription medications, that are often mixed with others, making them more deadly or harmful than they would be alone.

Excellent.  Backs up the skepticism I've had about comparative "drugs harms" claims for years.


 

More "something about the eyes"

Staring into someone’s eyes for 10 minutes induces an altered state of consciousness - ScienceAlert

It was a bit odd this week to read about an experiment indicating that staring into someone's eyes can induce hallucinations, when earlier in the year the big story was how staring into your partner's eyes could be a key part of falling in love, if you do it right.

As I wrote at the time "what is it about the eyes?".   Since then, I have wondered if it is to do with bonding with babies.  Seems as good an explanation as any.

Anyhow, the link at the top notes that the same Italian psychologist who did this recent experiment also wrote back in 2010 about how staring at your own face in the mirror in a dimly lit room is a good way for a lot of people to have some weird, face changing, hallucinations.   This discussed in detail at the time at the Mind Hacks blog, and the very long thread that follows indicates that anyone with a susceptibility to mental illness is well advised not to try it.

Given my brain's dogged reluctance to experience weirdness, even though I find the paranormal and unusual perceptions very interesting topics, I pretty much expect my face would not morph a bit if I tried it.  Perhaps I should give it a go and report back.  (If the blog ends abruptly, someone send around the men in white coats, please.)

Secret thoughts of a Royal Commissioner

For a while now, everytime I see Dyson Heydon's picture, I've been thinking "Gawd, he's got a high forehead."   I associate high foreheads with large brains, and large brains remind me of brains the size of a planet (that is, Marvin the glum, paranoid android), and Dyson does look sort of glum to me all the time too.  Hence, the following:

Even if he's right, he's wrong

It's funny how Sinclair Davidson's posts at Catallaxy about poring over government figures to try to work out if "tobacco clearances" really went up or down after plain packing laws attract so little attention in comments at the site.   Maybe the meta message he's not getting is this - people are over it.  And the true sign of the success of the policy was never going to be instantaneous anyway.

But while I can't judge whether his claim in the post above is accurate or not (it's a complicated argument in which we're invited to never believe the bona fides of the Treasury, but to trust the analysis of a member of a think tank that has done the policy PR of big tobacco for years)  even if he's right, he then goes on to obvious wrong over-reach in his next barely read tobacco post.  Here:

 The fact is we now know the plain packaging policy is based on fabricated evidence.

This links back to his own post, the one I linked to first, in which he disputes that tobacco clearances went down in the first 12 months after the introduction of the policy.

Given that he was talking about trying to judge the effectiveness of the policy by evidence collated after it's introduction, how can he claim that the policy is "based on fabricated evidence"?   (His entire post is also about looking at one 12 month period - the one with confounding factors involved - and ignores the tobacco clearance rates for subsequent periods.  It's a desperate, nitpicky argument that refuses to look at the big picture, just like he did with the "climategate" emails and  statistic significance of the global temperature record.)

The policy was and is based on it's anticipated long term effect on helping continue the downward trend of tobacco consumption.  It certainly was not introduced based on "fabricated evidence" that didn't exist at the time.  And tobacco clearances are not the only evidence, in any case.

As with stagflation, and climate change, he's on a long term losing argument here, and the longer we go the sillier he'll look.   Neat.

The giant cannabis experiment

There's a lengthy, cautious and sensible sounding article over at Nature News about the giant experiment in public health that cannabis legalisation is going to represent.  

There are so many complicating factors when trying to judge what may happen (or even in working out which other countries' present experience make for a good comparison) that prediction seems little more than guesswork.

Still, I lean towards the "it'll all end in tears" side, as you may expect.

Update:   as I have noted before, it's actually pretty astoundingly weird how drug problems differ from country to country.    Russia has virtually always been off its face on alcohol; China has had its opium and now meth and heroin problems on quite a vast scale;  I'm not sure for how long Japan has been drinking heavily, yet they barely touch anything else (apart from tobacco);  apparently some small Pacific Islands are actually way at the top of the table of heavy marijuana users (beating the Caribbean, surprisingly); Sweden, while famously relaxed about sex, is an outstanding drug free country, although their controlled use of alcohol is no doubt partly due to a system (a State monopoly on the sale of any above 3.5%) which would horrify a  libertarian; and who would have thought 20 years ago that ice would become a chronic problem in rural Australia, more so than in the inner cities, it seems?   (As it happens, I was today talking to someone from Western Queensland whose family had been devastated by it.) 

My point being - given the curious lack of any clear pattern about which country develops overuse problems with which drugs, it wouldn't be surprising if full legalisation of cannabis in one nation did not lead to any great problem, while in another place it sent the country into a sort of stoner lead economic decline. 

It may sound like I'm just giving myself an "out" if, in 10 years time, everyone declares cannabis legalisation in the States a great success.   But honestly, I think I am making a valid point.

So, Trump apologists now, hey?

Wow.  The American Right is flaying around not knowing what to do until Trump crashes and burns.  "What if he doesn't?" is their concern.

Now, true, some are not giving up the attack, particularly after his announced immigration policy which had huge slabs of the patently absurd:

Mr. Trump wants to remove all illegal aliens from the United States. This is, of course, impossible and, even if it were possible, an outrageous waste of tens or hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. When asked by Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press if he would split up families in which one or more of the parents is an illegal alien but their children are U.S. citizens, Trump said no, clarifying in one of the most reprehensible statements I have ever heard from an American candidate for public office, “We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go.” Yes, Trump would try to deport American citizens. Did I mention how ignorant of history Donald Trump sounds to this Jewish columnist?

What amazes me most is not that Trump would say such a thing, proposing something obviously both immoral and illegal, but that so many Americans still support a man bursting with hatred and idiocy. Donald Trump is to politicians what P.T. Barnum was to entertainers, knowing that you can reach great success by pandering to the many suckers out there. (Actually, the attribution of “there’s a sucker born every minute” to Mr. Barnum is probably both erroneous and unfair, but it remains a powerful piece of American lore.)

By contrast, look at the heading for this editorial at National Review:

Trumps' Immigration Plan is a Good Start - for all GOP Candidates. 

Hahahaha.

Apparently:

It is sensible in its basic outline and better in many respects than the ideas presented by his rivals.

Sure, the column goes on to note that key parts of the policy are "obviously illegal" and never going to withstand the Supreme Court, even if they could be enacted, but you know, it's like they want to write "he has his heart in the right place."  

I find it impossible to read that piece without getting a distinct whiff of some 1920's apologists for Hitler.  "Sure, he seems a bit of a hot head, but who can doubt his basic good intentions for his country?"

Glass apartments

Something you would have noticed if you watched the ABC report on Tianjin linked in my last post (not seen it? - well go back and do so now) was how many apartment tower blocks in the area lost every window in the blast.

I have been noticing in my wanderings around Brisbane lately that quite a lot of the new high rise apartments are being build with full length glass walls to the street, at least in some of the rooms.   Blinds provide privacy as needed.

I don't care for this trend.  Apart from glass being problematic from a heat regulation point of view (well, sometimes it works well if you want to warm a room in winter, but let's face it, for most of the year in Brisbane you are trying to keep a room cool), it just makes for what looks to me like a structurally insubstantial building.    I like bricks and concrete to provide shelter to me from the outside elements, and don't other people feel this way too?   (As well as not particularly wanting to feel like their block look like one of those kid's ant farms from the outside?) 

And, of course, you never really know when your building might be subject to a destructive air blast of human or celestial cause, and having your entire bedroom or living room wall blown over you is not an optimal outcome.

No, give me apartments with some external solid concrete walls, any day.

The ABC earning its keep, again

After Tianjin explosions, angry families return to toxic wasteland - 19/08/2015

The single best report I've seen on the Tianjin disaster was on the ABC last night by its resident foreign correspondent Stephen McDonell.

Excellent work which you just don't see from commercial networks.   

Dirty work

I would assume that someone, somewhere, is presently doing a word search through this enormous file for Australian parliamentarians' names. 

As discussed on Saudi social media...

Well, they don't have cinemas or pubs, and while spectacularly stupid things happening on their roads provides some entertainment, mostly it seems the Saudis amuse themselves by discussing the big topics on social media:

Manama: Saudi social media users have poured scorn on a fatwa that allowed young men married to ugly women to take drugs before intimate relations in order to have the delusion they are as beautiful as houris.
The fatwa said that hallucinogenic drugs can be taken for 30 minutes during sexual intercourse and only by men who are less than 40 years old. The drugs can be used only in the evening, it added.
“This is the ideal men who are unfortunately married with ugly-looking wives so that they can see them, under the effects of the drugs, as beautiful women, like Houris or lovely nymphs,” the fatwa said.
Houri is a Quranic term referring to “to be beautifully dark-eyed” women in heaven.
The origin of the religious edict is not known, although some users attributed it to a Moroccan figure, but it went viral on the Internet and sparked a huge debate in which most people expressed shock and sarcasm

Sounds nutty, but you should read more

Apollo Astronaut Says UFOs Came to Prevent Nuclear War

Edgar Mitchell, who has long believed in ESP and the paranormal, is turning up sounding like a nutter for talking about UFOs and nuclear war.

But - before you dismiss him entirely, you should read the surprisingly good Wikipedia entry explaining the very real controversy and concern in the late 1940's that mysterious green fireballs were indeed spying on the American nuclear program.

While I had read a short account of this before in some UFO book or other, the Wiki explanation makes it pretty clear that many people had seen them, including the scientists and technicians in New Mexico, and many genuinely thought they were so odd that were not a mere natural phenomena.

It does appear to be one of the greatest UFO style mysteries still around. 

Update:   Ooh.  This report, which I don't think I read at the time, contains a suggestion from a physicist in Brisbane that sometimes meteors might cause a ball lightning effect close to the ground.   I have a feeling that there was at least one case of what looked like ground following ball lighting in New Mexico at the time of the green fireball panic, so that idea does sound half plausible:

"A transient electrical link between the ionosphere and ground, created by meteors or some other means, could help to solve the mystery of many UFO sightings," Hughes told LiveScience. "Since such balls would be very insubstantial they would be able to move and change direction very fast as has often been observed."

Hughes detailed his findings online Nov. 30 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

El Nino and La Nina from an Australian viewpoint discussed

2015-16 is shaping up to deliver a rollercoaster from strong El Nino to La Nina

A good explanation here of how these things usually pan out.  (Short answer - not good for Australia.)

Abbott, Heydon and the self inflicted wounds

I dunno, maybe I'm just reflecting my own judgement about this appalling government, but with all the TURC controversy going on, I strongly suspect that the public view of the Royal Commission has turned in a serious political negative for Abbott.   I think the Labor movement has succeeded in its PR to cast it as a political witch hunt, and that voters are thinking it is a sign of a government that is politically self indulgent and has no idea about getting on with more important priorities.   That the Abbott commissioned enquiries could backfire as political revenge over-reach was always on the cards, and I think it has indeed worked out that way.

And why does Tony Abbott even answer questions about bias of the Commissioner by praising him?  By doing so, he makes it sound all the more to the public that he has (or wants) the Commissioner in his pocket.  Surely the wise politician (yes, I know, we're talking Abbott) would take more a line of expressing confidence in the Commissioner making appropriate decisions regarding the conduct of the Commission, and leave it at that.  But Abbott goes further - much further - and hence worsens the self inflicted wound.

Much the same can be said about the Abbott approach to same sex marriage.   It seems that people really like the idea of a plebiscite (about 80% in favour in this morning's Newspoll of Canning), and that doesn't surprise me.  But Abbott wanting to not hold it until 2 or 3 years time? - as with the Royal Commission, this will all too obviously come across as mere playing politics.   Isn't that clear to Abbott's political advisers, especially when an election in 12 month's time is the obvious opportunity when the plebiscite could be conducted, at minimal cost?

PS:  having viewed a bit of Heydon's conduct of the commission yesterday, I think his skill and talent for this type of work may well have been (actually no, has been)  over-estimated.   Telling the ACTU barrister that he had an hour to decide whether to apply to disqualify himself?   It was a tactic that could only make Heydon look more biased.   He backed down, but it was a bad look that could only hurt himself.  Again, wasn't that kind of obvious?    He may have been great in other forms of jurisprudence, but I see no clear sign that he has a talent for this line of legal work.

Judith does a Steyn

I assume that Judith Sloan assumes she will never have another government or government authority job in which she professionally has to interact with any economist in the Productivity Commission, or indeed any economist who has ever so much as hinted at believing that climate change is real, and hence she can spend her early semi retirement in slagging off others to her heart's content, especially at Catallaxy.

In her latest outburst of note, I see she has followed the Mark Steyn route, using the "f" word:

As the Cats realise, the long march through the institutions continues.  But when it comes to the Climate Change Authority, no marching was required – it was set up with all the required poseurs and frauds in place from the getgo....

But how could chair of the CCA, Bernie Fraser, think it appropriate to give a running commentary on government policy, opposition policy and the wild estimates the CCA puts on these policies?

This is serious weird – nay outrageous – stuff and Bernie knows it (given his history in the bureaucracy).  But I guess he is on a mission, in part to help his mates in the industry super funds which are still overweight renewables.

The CCA comprises Bernie Fraser, Ian Chubb, David Karoly, Clive Hamilton and John Quiggin.

I wonder if Judith could expand upon which of them are the "frauds".   I note the use of the plural.

I also wonder why economists and academics on the receiving end of her condescending, and now (in my view) clearly defamatory vitriol never call her out for it. 

And not for the first time, I wonder why Sinclair Davidson never seems very worried about his potential legal liability for what the blog under his control says?   Maybe he can claim ignorance of some thread content, but he certainly can't do that very credibility for what one of his "star" contributors writes.

The Economist goes multiverse

From an article in The Economist.