More recently, other, potentially more controllable, ocean-based CO2-removal techniques have been suggested, such as the cultivation of seaweed to cover up to 9% of the global ocean12I suppose as long as it was edible varieties, it could help feed the planet too.
When I announced to my mother in the 1980s that I considered myself libertarian, she recoiled. How did people like me come to seem like kooks?She seems a smart woman, but perhaps she needs a few pointers, such as these:
During 13–17 June 2013, heavy rainfall occurred in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand and led to one of the worst floods in history and massive landslides, resulting in more than 5000 casualties and a huge loss of property. In this study, meteorological and climatic conditions leading up to this rainfall event in 2013 and similar cases were analyzed for the period of 1979–2012. Attribution analysis was performed to identify the natural and anthropogenic influences on the climate anomalies using the historical single-forcing experiments in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. In addition, regional modeling experiments were carried out to quantify the role of the long-term climate trends in affecting the rainfall magnitude of the June 2013 event. It was found that (a) northern India has experienced increasingly large rainfall in June since the late 1980s, (b) the increase in rainfall appears to be associated with a tendency in the upper troposphere towards amplified short waves, and (c) the phasing of such amplified short waves is tied to increased loading of green-house gases and aerosols. In addition, a regional modeling diagnosis attributed 60–90 % of rainfall amounts in the June 2013 event to post-1980 climate trends.It's an unfortunate thing that such attribution studies take some time to complete, and come out long after the event has faded from the public's memory.
Little wonder then that increasing the GST is as about as appealing to the electorate as a dose of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.As I noted yesterday, I would have thought that a Newspoll showing a 37% approval of a GST increase to 15%, before the government has even attempted to sell it as a policy, is actually pretty damned good. Dear Henry seems not to think so.
But imposing such a change would require “a strong hand and an outstretched arm” worthy of the divine intervention that allowed the biblical escape from Egypt; and even a moment’s reflection on the politics forces us to come tumbling down from the thunderbolts of Sinai to the insensate debauchery of the Cities of the Plain.I had not even heard of said comedians, or their dwarf joke, until now. Obviously, I am not as hip a dude as Henry, but the net effect of the line is not exactly amusing, or enlightening. Just - peculiar.
Nor is there much doubt what form that debauchery would take: as the battle over the proposed tax change heated up, giveaways to low income earners would proliferate at higher income earners’ expense. As a result, far from being compressed, effective rates would, in the immortal phrase of British comedians Max and Ivan, end up as stretched as a dwarf in an orgy, aggravating the damage our tax system causes.
1. a modest increase in the GST rate to 12.5%. This is low enough to not really be noticed, but I'm pretty sure it still raises quite a lot. As for its expansion - I would be inclined to leave it off fresh food, but wonder whether a reduced rate could be added to education services - say 5%? OK, that would be a hard sell to Liberal constituents, but it might be something Labor could live with;As for spending cuts: it's a continual irony that Liberals and Republicans always claim there is a government spending emergency, while at the same time ramping up defence spending and using defence in some of the most expensive ways possible.
2. superannuation tax concessions at the high end wound back harder;
3. a staged reduction in negative gearing. Not too staged. And didn't I suggest once that it be time limited, to like for the first 5 years? Increased turnaround in investment property sales would be good for stamp duty revenue too, as well as placing properties back on the market for potential owner/occupiers. Someone needs to point out to me the downside, as there almost certainly would be one.
“People don’t realize it, but the whole anthropomorphism is very mainstream,” says Gerbasi, who spearheaded the multidisciplinary Anthropomorphic Research Project, which has studied about 7,000 furry fans from all continents, except Antarctica (which actually had a small furry gathering, too). While there are certain demographic trends – almost 80% are male, many work in science or tech, with a disproportionate share not identifying as heterosexual – the data, by and large, shows no indication that furries would be psychologically unhealthy.What a world. Sometimes it seems to me that no one is told these days that their self understanding is nutty and/or quite possibly transient and/or best not indulged. Or at least not indulged in the way they want it indulged.
“Cartoon animals have a universal appeal,” says Conway, who fursuits as ‘Uncle Kage’: a samurai cockroach. “A love of animals and a fascination with the idea of them acting as we do transcends most national, geographic and religious boundaries.”
While the fursuits are the most visible, they only make up only about 20% convention-goers, Conway adds: the rest are performers, writers, puppeteers, dancers, artists and “just plain old fans”.
For a minority, however, it is more than that: 46% of furry fans surveyed by Gerbasi reported identifying as less than 100% human – with 41% admitting that if they could be not human at all, they would. Twenty-nine percent of them reported experiencing being a “non-human species trapped in a human body”.
The parallels with gender identity disorder, upon which the hypothesis was modeled, were striking: much like some transgender individuals report being born the wrong sex, some furries feel a disconnect with their bodies, as if they were stuck in the wrong species. The condition, which Gerbasi et al labeled “species identity disorder”, had a physiological component too, with many reportingexperiencing phantom body parts, like tails or wings.
Gerbasi still has no answers to why these individuals feel they’re not human, but stresses the importance for health providers to take them seriously, and without the ridicule that sometimes afflicts even her own research.
Microsoft on Monday revealed that as the world turns to computingVery odd, if you ask me...
power in the cloud it is working to put data centers under water.
Researchers working on “Project Natick” tested a prototype vessel on
the ocean floor about a kilometer off the U.S. Pacific Coast for about
four months last year....
With about half of the world’s population living near large bodies of
water and a shift to accessing software hosted in the Internet cloud,
having data centers submerged nearby could save money and speed up
access to information, Microsoft reasoned.
Currents or tides can be tapped to generate electricity to power data centers, and the cold depths provide natural cooling.
“Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment,” Whitaker said.
Riyadh spares Palestinian ‘apostate’ from beheading | GulfNews.com: Riyadh: A court in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday revised the punishment given to a stateless Palestinian poet convicted of apostasy, reducing it from death to eight years in prison, 800 lashes and public repentance, his lawyer said.
The poet, Ashraf Fayadh, had been sentenced to beheading because of the apostasy conviction announced in November, based partly on his published poetry.
Link.Well, in my pre-Iowa notes I called the Republican primary right:I know what will happen on the Republican side: someone horrifying will come in first, and someone horrifying will come in second.Let me add that someone horrifying also came in third. Marco Rubio may seem less radical than Cruz or Trump, but his substantive policy positions are for incredibly hawkish foreign policy, wildly regressive tax policy, kicking tens of millions of people off health insurance, and destroying the environment. Other than that, he’s a moderate.
When Cleve Jones, a longtime gay activist who led the creation of the Aids Memorial Quilt, went to his local gay bar in the Castro district, he saw something that shocked him.One would have thought that gay activists would welcome this as a sign of the normalisation of homosexual relationships; they no longer need their special enclaves. But no, they can be very hard to please...
“The tech bros had taken over The Mix. They commanded the pool table and the patio. These big, loud, butch guys. It was scary,” he said. “I’m not heterophobic, but I don’t want to go to a gay bar and buy some guy a drink and have him smirk and tell me he’s straight. They can go
anywhere. We can’t.”
Residents of San Francisco’s historically gay Castro district are worried that it’s changing, as speculators come in to flip the few remaining ramshackle old Victorians and the old-timer gay bars shutter. In a recent small survey, 77% of people who have lived in the neighborhood for 10 or more years identified as gay, while only 55% of those who moved in the past year did.
Zana reacts to the menu the way she reacts to everything: by sticking her lips out a metre in front of her face and looking like she's just been asked to bathe in urine. Zana thinks the menu is too simple. Zana thinks the human race is too simple. Zana is so sophisticated it's taking all her self-control to not spit on everyone at the table. Zana gets a look at the entrée and there is no vinegar on her rocket, which means "it's just lettuce", which means her mouth is now twisted into such a vicious sneer she's in danger of dislocating her jaw. Though why someone who doesn't know the difference between lettuce and rocket should act so superior I couldn't tell you....Zana is also no fan of the chips. She prefers her own chips. "Whose are better?" she asks Gianni, the threat of castration implied in her eyes. He agrees that his wife's chips are better than the strangers' chips, and Zana resumes sucking her invisible lemon with a look of triumph.Funny stuff.
In the EPR experiment, each measurement addresses the question "What spin
value has this particle along this orientation?" The outcome then proves that
the spin value has been affected by the distant experimenter's choice of spin
orientation. We propose a new setting where the question is reversed: "What is
the orientation along which this particle has this spin value?" It turns out
that the orientation is similarly subject to nonlocal effects. To enable the
reversal, each particle's interaction with a beam-splitter at t1 leaves its
spin orientation superposed. Then at t2, the experimenter selects an "up" or
"down" spin value for this yet-undefined orientation. Only after the two
particles undergo this procedure, the two measurements are completed, each
particle having its spin value along a definite orientation. By Bell's theorem,
it is now the "choice" of orientation that must be nonlocally transmitted
between the particles upon completing the measurement. This choice, however,
has preceded the experimenter's selection. This seems to lend support for the
time-symmetric interpretations of QM, where retrocausality plays a significant
role. We conclude with a brief comparison between these interpretations and
their traditional alternatives, Copenhagen, Bohmian mechanics and the Many
Worlds Interpretation.
Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macroeconomist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time against the techno-optimism that saturates our culture, with its constant assertion that we’re in the midst of revolutionary change. Starting at the height of the dot-com frenzy, he has repeatedly called for perspective. Developments in information and communication technology, he has
insisted, just don’t measure up to past achievements. Specifically, he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.
In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of
those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar.
Wondering if any more power might be available, the team turned to the film Interstellar, in which a world called Miller’s planet orbits very close to a massive, spinning black hole called Gargantua. General relativity means the black hole’s gravitational pull slows time on the planet so that 1 hour is equal to seven years off-world, a factor of around 60,000.
“We saw the movie, it was a very interesting idea, but then we started thinking about the problems,” says Opatrný.
The energy of light is proportional to its frequency. This means that when light from the CMB hits Miller’s planet, and its frequency is increased by this time dilation, its energy increases. With a time-dilation factor of around 60,000, Miller’s planet would be heated to nearly 900 ˚C.
In the film, the planet is swept by huge tidal waves of water, but Opatrný says his calculations mean molten aluminium would be more likely. Conditions would be cooler if the planet were slightly further out from the black hole, lessening the effects of time dilation and making it more hospitable to life. “It’s interesting that [the analysis] suggests the microwave background would be disastrous for observers on the planet, making the movie once again less realistic,” says Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University.
Mr Atamanenko claims that in December 1949, Soviet spies used this system to evaluate the Chinese leader Mao Zedong who was on a visit to Moscow. They had allegedly installed special toilets for Mao, which were connected not to sewers, but to secret boxes.
For 10 days Mao was plied with food and drink and his waste products whisked off for
analysis. Once Mao's stools had been scrutinised and studied, Stalin reportedly poo poo-ed the idea of signing an agreement with him.
Splitting the sample size roughly into two groups the study found that in Africa 60% of patients were resistant to Tenofovir, whereas in Europe the figure was only 20%.
The paper, which has been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal,
said poor administration of the drug, in terms of regularly taking the right levels of Tenofovir could be explanation for the discrepancy.
"If the right levels of the drug are not taken, as in they are too low or not regularly maintained, the virus can overcome the drug and become resistant," Dr Gupta told the BBC News website.
"Tenofovir is a critical part of our armamentarium against HIV, so it is extremely concerning to see such a high level of resistance to this drug," he added.
The paper also suggested that Tenofovir-resistant strains of HIV could be passed on from person to person.
"We certainly cannot dismiss the possibility that resistant strains can spread between people and should not be complacent. We are now conducting further studies to get a more detailed picture of how Tenofovir-resistant viruses develop and spread," Dr Gupta said.
Sinc: wish you would drop this embarrassing obsessionEvery time I see Simon Chapman on the TV talking up dropping smoking rates, I imagine a blood pressure spike happening in a certain office at RMIT. And then a scurry to look at some anti tobacco research or other to see what pointless nitpicking can be made of it.
The spread of Zika is part of an unnerving trend: Several mosquito-borne tropical illnesses have lately been spreading into regions of the world that have never experienced them.
A viral disease called chikungunya — which had never appeared in the Western Hemisphere until 2013 — has lately affected Central and South America, even making an appearance in Florida last year. (Its name comes from the Makonde language of Tanzania, where it was discovered in 1952; it means "that which bends up," referring to the contorted physique of a person afflicted by the virus.)
Dengue fever, known as "breakbone fever," has also seen new outbreaks in Puerto Rico, Florida, Gulf Coast states, and Hawaii — all places that hadn't usually been affected. In 2015, Brazil reported nearly 1.6 million dengue cases, a big increase from 569,000 in 2014.
Zika, dengue, and chikungunya are all spread by a species of mosquito called Aedes (in particular the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes). For reasons researchers don't understand, these mosquitoes have been more effective at bringing diseases to new places lately, affecting fresh populations that don't yet have the antibodies to fight off the viruses.
Heidi Brown, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Arizona, explained there are at least three factors that help these illnesses spread: the number of mosquitoes out there, the number that are biting humans infected with the virus, and the number that are surviving long enough to infect other humans.
"The survival of the mosquito is driven a lot by temperature," she added. Mosquitoes thrive in warm and moist environments. "So people go to the idea of global warming — that climate change and changes in precipitation patterns and temperature are helping mosquitoes survive in different areas." In other words, warming is helping expand the range of places that are habitable to mosquitoes.
There are other factors that may be driving the trend, too: People are traveling more than ever, bringing diseases to new locales. More and more people live in crowded cities, where it's easy for viruses to jump from person to person and for mosquitoes to find large concentrations of humans to feast on.
It all begins with tears – or more precisely the tear film that coats our eyes. Mammalian eyes of the terrestrial variety, whether they're found on the faces of humans, dogs, hedgehogs, or elephants, are coated in a three-layered tear film that allows the eyes to function properly.
(Tears work somewhat differently in marine mammals like dolphins and sea lions.)
Closest to the eye is the glycocalyx layer – a layer made mostly of mucus. It coats the cornea and attracts water, which allows for the even distribution of the second layer: the water-based tear solution. It might be just four micrometres thick – about as thick as a single strand of spider silk – but this layer is very important. It keeps our eyes lubricated and washes away potential infections. Finally, there is an outer layer composed of an oily substance called meibum, which is composed of lipids like fatty acids and cholesterol.
Meibum has evolved to be exquisitely tuned to the mammalian body. At normal human body temperature, it is a clear oily fluid. At just one degree cooler, though, it becomes a white, waxy solid – the familiar eye gunk.
Large flakes of this solid can form during sleep for a couple of reasons. First, the body cools down a bit at night in general, so some of the meibum becomes cool enough that it moves below the melting point and turns solid. Second, according to Australian ophthalmologist Robert G. Linton and colleagues, "sleep relaxes the [muscular] action on the [meibomian] gland
ducts…[which] is sufficient to cause far in excess of the normal to exude onto the lids and eyelash roots during sleep". In other words, our eyes are coated with more meibum than usual at night – and so when that meibum cools we can end up with appreciable amounts of eye gunk.
The Transformers films, for example, are no longer being treated as a single series but as a larger world to explore.* To my surprise (as I didn't care much for the second one), Kung Fu Panda 3 is actually getting good reviews. It may be maintaining its popularity better than Shrek.
Last summer, Paramount hired a gaggle of writers to spend a few weeks brainstorming ideas to broaden the series, an effort that apparently produced at least nine different movie ideas — and producers have said that five of those ideas look viable.
As I noted before, we can’t prove that the stimulus reduced unemployment because we can’t
measure exactly what unemployment would have looked like otherwise. But the talking point that the stimulus failed because unemployment exceeded the forecasted level is not a serious argument. No reasonably informed person could take it seriously. And yet this blunt and easily refuted bit of propaganda continues to circulate seven years later within the airless bubble of the conservative echo chamber.
The myth is that evidence-based policy is good policy: nothing could be further from the truth. The value of public policy does not depend on whether it rests on evidence, but on whether it seeks goals that are worth pursuing.Well, talk about your succinct summary of all that gone wrong in Right wing politics and policy over the last decade or so, particularly in the US!
Evidence is perhaps a necessary condition for sound policy, but it is far from being sufficient."Perhaps"! How generous of him to allow evidence to reach the heights of "perhaps" being important to policy.
That is not to deride our institutions of higher learning. But a stroll down the corridors of even highly rated universities would shock the most hardened of troopers. Entire buildings seem to have been struck by specially developed neutron bombs: the structures are intact, but the academics are nowhere to be seen.This prompted actual teaching academic Harry Clarke to write:
What teachers there are tend to be tutors, all too often foreign postgraduates struggling with the mysteries of the English language, and part-timers on short-term contracts.
No doubt many academics take their vocation seriously, but they are swamped by those too intellectually feeble to get employment elsewhere, too satisfied ever to leave and too young to retire.
Your views on inactivity in the universities are just wrong and outdated. Education and teaching are central priorities and have been for several decades. But that is just my claim just as your views are a claim. You provide no evidence to justify your impressions. Why do Australian universities do so well in international rankings if they are so poor? Why do we attract so many international students? Is this export success story based on wrong information? Your judgement about academics being intellectually feeble likewise reflects pure prejudice partly because many of them don’t take you very seriously. Most academics regard your politics (and your propensity to dominate verbal exchanges with long rambling monologues) with well-deserved disgust. You are wrong about professors regarding teaching undergraduates as only a burden. It is simply untrue – good researchers are invariably good teachers since the two things go together.Now, I don't know much about Ergas' contribution to infrastructure economics, and (to my surprise) economics journalist Peter Martin seems to think Ergas is a worthy recipient, but I'm pretty convinced that his getting this award makes for a great case that the country is giving out too many.
The story begins when Augustine, as a Manichee, may have heard (must have heard according Lane Fox) an anti-Manichaean slander that the cult’s Elect, at their secret meals, had sex on top of flour spread on the floor. Their joint juices were spilled on the flour, and the male like some unknown Onan spilled his seed upon the ground, making the flour a carrier of the particles of light from the Elect, as the members of the Manichee sect were called. Bread was then made of the flour for the Elect to consume. Like most attacks of bigotry, this slur was illogical. What good would it do for the Elect to recycle light out into bread and then back into the source of the light in the first place? There is no way to know how widely this crude attack was known to people, much less to know how many credited its nonsense.Erk.
We investigate the effect of a black hole as a nucleation cite of a false vacuum bubble based on the Euclidean actions of relevant configurations. As a result we find a wormhole-like configuration may be spontaneously nucleated once the black hole mass falls below a critical value of order of the Hubble parameter corresponding to the false vacuum energy density. As the space beyond the wormhole throat can expand exponentially, this may be interpreted as creation of another inflationary universe in the final stage of the black hole evaporation.I'm pretty sure I saw another paper making the same argument on arXiv last month, but I forgot to note it. (I think Sabine H saw it too.) Should try to find it...
There’s a very good reason why I went public with my name, and I’m just getting warmed up. The hookers at the ABC are just one group who will eventually be taking a long walk off a short pier.He's ex-Army, rabidly Christian and anti-abortion, hates Islam with a passion, and has said he's going to be undertaking some speaking tour of Australia to convince everyone of God knows what.)
Fact 1. A mild warming of about 0.5 degrees Celsius (well within previous natural temperature variations) occurred between 1979 and 1998, and has been followed by slight global cooling over the past 10 years. Ergo, dangerous global warming is not occurring.Seems strangely like he is encouraging his readers in 2011 to believe that the "pause" is indeed climatically significant, but apparently it's not unless you look at the 30 year period. Which, a few days after his death, looks like this:
Fact 2. Between 2001 and 2010 global average temperature decreased by 0.05 degrees, over the same time that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased by 5 per cent. Ergo, carbon dioxide emissions are not driving dangerous warming.
Daniel Dion, the older brother of pop singer Celine Dion, died Saturday, just two days after the death of the entertainer’s husband, Rene Angelil....* a joke, dear reader. And for her fans: sorry for finding something a bit funny in a sad start to a year for the singer.
The announcement follows the death on Thursday of the 73-year-old Angelil in suburban Las Vegas after a long ballet with throat cancer.
To confirm the fade was real, Schaefer went to Harvard to look at the
original photographic plates and inspected them by eye for changes, a
skill few astronomers possess these days. “Since no one uses
photographic plates any more, it’s basically a lost art,” says Wright.
“Schaefer is an expert at this stuff.”
Schaefer saw the same century-long dimming in his manual readings,
and calculated that it would require 648,000 comets, each 200 kilometres
wide, to have passed by the star – completely implausible, he says.
“The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the
proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot,” he
says. “But now we have a refutation of the idea, and indeed, of all
published ideas.”
“This presents some trouble for the comet hypothesis,” says Boyajian.
“We need more data through continuous monitoring to figure out what is
going on.”
What about those alien megastructures? Schafer is unconvinced. “The
alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations,” he says,
as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn’t be able to build something
capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What’s more,
such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but
the infrared signal from Tabby’s star appears normal, he says.
“I don’t know how the dimming affects the megastructure hypothesis,
except that it would seem to exclude a lot of natural explanations,
including comets,” says Wright. “It could be that there were just more
dimming events in the past, or that astronomers were less lucky in the
past and caught more dimming events in the 1980s than in the 1900s. But
that seems unlikely.”
There’s no doubt KIC 8462852 is behaving strangely, so something must
be responsible, says Schaefer. “Either one of our refutations has some
hidden loophole, or some theorist needs to come up with some other
proposal.”
It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant).There's probably a definitional argument to be had here, but when I think of top-down causation I think of the matter of how peculiar it is that ideas that get transmitted between humans affect their decisions and moods. This seems pretty important when talking about free will and what it means, and I see that there have been recent symposiums devoted to the topic. (This one sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, who atheists dislike because they think it promotes mystery as a door to maintaining grounds for religion. I don't like it so much because it also turns out they give awards to crappy libertarian ideas such as opposing a carbon tax.)
