So, no wind turbine was damaged?

I was concerned that the attack on the SA "let's blame renewables" story would suffer embarrassment if it later was revealed that in fact some of the State's turbines were damaged in the storms.  But so far, no word on that.  As I suggested the other day, it's kind of impressive if pylon toppling storms don't cause turbine damage, isn't it?  (Yeah, I know - the pylons may have been far from any turbines.  What I would like to see is the electricity authorities putting up a map of where all the damage happened to the grid during the storms - not just from wind, but also lightning.)  

The hard questions

Elon Musk plans to colonize Mars. We have many questions. - Vox

Sorry to be such a Mars skeptic (or sceptic, to keep Homer happy.)  But billionaires dreams can just run too far ahead of practical reality.

Lessons for today

Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer

Found at Jason Soon's tweets, a really interesting article about a brilliant but cranky statistician who chose to spend his retirement arguing against the medical establishment regarding their acceptance of the smoking/lung cancer causal link.

Two things about the story I wanted to note:

1.  I had never heard this before - one of the changes which researchers thought might have accounted for the rapid increase in lung cancer in Britain mid last century was something a bit hard to believe they ever took seriously - a rapid increase in road tarring. (!):

What was the cause? Theories abounded. More people than ever were living in large, polluted cities. Cars filled the nation’s causeways, belching noxious fumes. Those causeways were increasingly being covered in tar. Advances in X-ray technology allowed for more accurate diagnoses. And, of course, more and more people were smoking cigarettes.

Which of these factors was to blame? All of them? None of them? British society had changed so dramatically and in so many ways since the First World War, it was impossible to identify a
single cause. As Fisher would say, there were just too many confounding variables....

At the beginning of the study, Doll had his own theory.  “I personally thought it was tarring of the roads,” Doll said. But as the results began to come in, a different pattern emerged. “I gave up smoking two-thirds of the way though the study."

 (By the way, Doll is one of the researchers who confirmed the link with tobacco;  Fisher is the name of the statistic who went to his death disputing it was proved.) 

2.  The similarity with modern climate change contrarianism is clear and obvious.  A science consensus emerges and is widely publicised - a mere handful of credible scientists (well, I assume Fisher might have had some supporters) spend the end of their careers arguing that everybody else is wrong; it's not proved; it could be something else no one else has conclusively ruled out, etc.   Then cranky contrarians die, and everybody else gets on with what was always correct. 

The only pity here is that what's at stake for climate change is climate affecting billions.  At least Fisher was only harming himself and those who were silly enough to follow his arguments.

Just nuts

I Score the First Debate | Scott Adams' Blog

Hey, I haven't checked in on how nutty, nutty (or uber troll - it still seems possible to me that he's only pretending to be a Trump loving fruit loop) Scott Adams rated the first Presidential debate.

Let's see - second paragraph, scores Hillary the winner "on points".   Sounds not mad; but wait, debate scores don't matter - he's going to look at how they made people feel.  Uh oh.

Here's how he assesses Clinton:

Clinton looked (to my eyes) as if she was drugged, tired, sick, or
generally unhealthy, even though she was mentally alert and spoke well.
But her eyes were telling a different story. She had the look of someone
whose doctors had engineered 90 minutes of alertness for her just for
the event.... Clinton’s smile seemed forced, artificial, and frankly creepy.

Trump, on the other hand:

 Trump was defensive, and debated poorly at points, but he did not look crazy....

Speak for yourself, Adams.

And how does losing the debate work for Trump:  it makes him the winner, of course:

But Trump needed to solve exactly one problem: Look less scary. Trump
needed to counter Clinton’s successful branding of him as having a bad
temperament to the point of being dangerous to the country. Trump
accomplished exactly that…by…losing the debate....

Clinton won the debate last night. And while she was doing it, Trump won
the election. He had one thing to accomplish – being less scary – and
he did it.

Good Lord.  I don't think I have ever read a nuttier commentator on politics than the contorting delusionist that Trump love has turned Adams into.

Update:  hey look!   A couple of days later, and Slate has a lengthy article looking at the decline of Adams.

The comments are interesting too:  quite a few people agree with me - he used to come across as eccentric but relatively mild mannered and somewhat interesting.  Then, when I wasn't paying attention to him for a couple of years, he had an alt.right style conversion.  And some people (also like me) wonder if it it is a gigantic joke he is playing on readers - but it's gone on too long for that explanation, surely.

Also as I suspected - he is now divorced.   As people in comments write:

Professor Stagflation and his Home for Peculiar Adults makes another premature call

Who knew that electricity wind turbines could cause this amount of damage?:

Nick Xenophon, apparently.  [That's sarcasm.]  He normally seems to me to be more sensible, but yesterday he rushed in to make some "we're obviously doing renewable energy wrong" announcement as a result of the South Australian state wide blackout before having any idea what might have been the real cause of the problem.   (Something like 22 cases of pylons being bent - and lots and lots of lightning - has something to do with it.)

This in turn was too much of a temptation for Professor Davidson Stagflation, who posted an endorsement of Xenophon's comments at Catallaxy, the Home for Peculiar Adults.  (Apparently, the new Tim Burton film of similar name is pretty good.)  This, of course, lead to a pile on of nearly a couple of hundred peculiar, not to mention not very bright, adults, all also certain that turbines had something to do with this.

Now, I should caution:   I haven't heard anything about whether any of the State's wind turbines were damaged in the storms.  (It would be a little surprising if they escaped completely unscathed, to be honest.)

But if the electricity market folk are saying that this blackout would have happened regardless of the source of electricity, and there are twenty or so cases of pylons being bent like pretzels, I suspect we can believe them. 

Oh - and congratulations to commenter Brian at Catallaxy - who at 12.18 am, after the relentless pile on of know-it-alls about renewable energy had been mocking the State, finally said "err, actually it might not have had much to do with that, after all." I think he was the one voice of moderation in the thread.

Update:   Chris Uhlmann, who is the ABC's resident renewables/climate skeptic, also gets a low grade for pumping up the issue of "instability" in the SA grid (because of wind power) before the full extent of physical damage was known.   Come the revolution, he'd be the only ABC journalist I'd want sent to Siberia. 

Not your typical breakdown

Marilyn: ‘I sat in a room for 20 years, taking crack and watching the Alien films’ | Music | The Guardian

I have the vaguest memory of the minor pop celebrity Marilyn in the 1980's (although I hasten to point out I didn't even care for Culture Club and Boy George's music, let alone this guy's.) But, there's no doubt, his account of what he did for 20 years following a nervous breakdown is so odd you'd find it hard to believe in a movie:

He retreated to his mother’s house in Hertfordshire and stayed there for 20 years, “without going out, unless it was to the hospital or a dealer, or a doctor. But in general I just sat in a room for 20 years. I didn’t want contact with people. The phone would ring and I just wouldn’t pick it up. The curtains were always drawn, I didn’t know whether it was night or day.”

What did he do all day? “You know the Alien movies? I had the box set of that. I had my laptop and my drug paraphernalia was all set up around me. And I’d watch the first Alien film, then the second, then the third, fourth, fifth. And when it got to the end of the fifth one, I’d put the first one back on again. So that was it. Over and over again. It was, like, my life has gone out of control, but I can control this, this tiny little bubble of behaviour: that was my safety, sitting in front of this computer screen with what I’m watching, and I know all the dialogue
and I know what’s going to happen. I could control how I felt. ‘Oh, I’m bit tired, let me have some crack. Oh, I’m a bit depressed, let’s have some heroin. I need to go to sleep, I’ll take a downer.’ I just wanted to die, but I couldn’t do that, I think because I was brought up a
Catholic, with that idea that if you kill yourself you go to purgatory. I kept thinking, ‘Well, it’ll be just my ****ing luck, I’ll kill myself and wake up in exactly the situation I’m trying to get away from and it’ll be for eternity.’ At least I know this is going to end at some point.”

 He's OK now, though, so all's well that ends well; or something like that, I guess....

Update:  I see from comments at The Guardian (not as witty as I hoped in this case) that many are skeptical about how a one (minor) hit wonder had enough money to fund a 20 year drug habit.  Quite true.  It could all be a tall story. 

Read Hot Air grinding its teeth

Trump on Miss Universe: No, really, she gained a massive amount of weight - Hot Air Hot Air

Yes - it is hard to see how Trumpkins can possibly believe that their man is a brilliant media tactician when he, completely unnecessarily, revisits losing points and helps confirm that he is easily baited.

Also interesting to see the comments following this showing that a large number of this blog's readers thought Trump was terrible in the debate.  Of course, some of his supporters weigh in with fat Latino jokes, too. 

Vague dreams

Elon Musk Unveils His Plan For Colonizing Mars : The Two-Way : NPR

Let's see how his car business pans out, before anyone gets too excited that this guy's Mars dreams will do any better.

When will a billionaire do something really useful for off planet colonization - like sponsor some Moon exploration that is specifically about locating any large reserves of ice?

Clearly, Clinton won

I see that Right wing blogs from Catallaxy to Powerline have up posts either outright lamenting Trump's debate performance, or giving him luke warm praise for not self immolating completely (and claiming that it won't swing any voters anyway.)    This is most definitely conclusive evidence that Clinton came out the winner. 

Mind you, I can't wait for Catallaxy's nuttiest economist, Steve Kates, to weigh in on it.   I'm going for "A narrow win by Trump, who had to face the most biased moderation in Presidential debate history" as his line.   Or I could be wrong: he might have discerned through the haze of Trump love that clouds his mind that his hero stuffed it up, and he's on medication before he can write a post admitting it.

And by the way:  this column just up at The Atlantic is very obviously right - Trump has a clear cruel streak, evident repeatedly in this campaign by his bizarre personal taunting of not only people who he opposes, but even those who have capitulated and endorsed him.   

Yay for Australian tech

Australian technology runs world’s largest single-dish radio telescope in China – Astronomy Now

This new telescope looks pretty awesome.  And I wouldn't mind betting that some Hollywood type is thinking how it could be used as a location in the next James Bond or Mission Impossible film (helping guarantee Chinese box office, too.)   But - they had better use it in a way that makes at least some sense.  Not like the travesty of GoldenEye. 

New stuff for fillings

Professor unveils first data on new dental fillings that will repair tooth decay

Climate sensitivity fight

The Snyder Sensitivity Situation � RealClimate

An important post up at Real Climate disputing a high figure for possible climate sensitivity which is in at least the PR for a new paleo climate paper.  Jim Hanson appears in comments too.

This doesn't exactly fit in with the denier theory that climate scientists make stuff up to enhance research grants and their careers generally.  Would they admit that?  Hardly...

Great moment in social science

And this was before Pokeman Go, which almost certainly could form the basis for another silly essay...

The Democrat voting libertarian

Will the Left Survive the Millennials? - The New York Times

Oh yeah, I noticed this last week and forgot to pass it on.  Lionel Shriver has her say on the Brisbane Writer's Festival speech, and while most of it is OK, it is mainly of interest because she says she's been a life long "Democratic" voter. 

Doesn't this help confirm what I said when I posted about her column in which she said she identified as a Libertarian?   If you support gun control, think health care like the NHS works well, believe in climate change and have always voted Democrat, you're pretty far from being in the same tent as a libertarian.  If you ask me...

Ailes's long history

I didn't realise that former Fox News sleazemaster Roger Ailes had such a long history of supplying "zingers" to Republican Presidential candidates, until I saw this segment from Samantha Bee's show last night:



(I still don't care that much for her high strung comedy persona on this show, but you can learn things from anyone.) 

Let's get curious

How curiosity can save you from political tribalism – Mind Hacks

I hope that, if nothing else, this blog shows I'm curious about many things, with the exception of 98% of sports, poetry, and...well, I don't know, I'm at least a little interested in most other things.  So, by this criteria, I should not be very tribal when it comes to politics, and I don't think I am.

It's hard to summarise the study, and I'm not even entirely sure how reliable it is, but I like the conclusion.  So go read it.

Spotted wearing the Pauline Spring Collection today at Parliament House...

Well,  you tell me where the views of Bolt and Hanson haven't merged.   (I feel this needs a word or thought bubble somewhere to make it better, but am having trouble with what he should say.  Suggestions welcome...)

Old man writes nonsense

Adam Walinsky, Donald Trump, and the Kennedy Brothers' Dream of Peace - The Atlantic

What a great Fisking [haven't had the chance to use that word for a long time] of a patently silly piece by a former Robert Kennedy speechwriter, Adam Walinsky, who thinks Trump is the President for Peace.  

In fact, who could trust Trump on anything that requires calm consideration that's not to be outweighed by testosterone driven* one-upmanship?   How contradictory can one candidate get - to be promising that Iranians boats which harass US Navy ships would be blown out of the water; that ISIS has to be crushed, immediately, with overwhelming force [I hope you're all hearing this in your head in Trump's ridiculous voice]; that America must spend more money on its military; and yet he'll be slower to get involved in international conflicts that aren't really in America's interest?   But if they do - he'll keep the oil.  What is he meant to be, the Reluctant Imperialist? 

Despite the occasional fanciful and deluded pundit like Walinsky, it is clear that Trump's base wants him to be aggro with other countries, and they would not be adverse to the big stick being swung every now and again.  Given how he repeatedly plays up to his base - he so much wants to give the audience what it wants - how could anyone really think he would resist mititary adventurism when it's a matter of saving national face? 


And anyway,  how old must Walinsky be?  Speechwriting in 1964, he must be pushing 80, if not older.  Has he said other silly things lately?  I mean, he writes sentences well enough, but what else does he argue?

It would seem, from this site, that he thinks there is probably something being hidden about JFK's assassination; uh-oh, he's written for the Washington Times too - criticising Baltimore's politicians for not getting behind their police (hmmm).  He's worked for a long time as a consultant to police departments, it seems, urging large increases in police numbers.

Seems to me he hasn't been very reliable for quite a long time...



*What a transparent bit of theatre it was when Dr Oz noted with seeming awe Trump's testosterone level.  Never have we seen a candidate run so blatantly on the importance of his being a real man, a virile man, who looks Presidential, with stamina, and a penis that pleases da ladies.   As Colbert said recently, it's like we've reverted to a system where the hairiest guy who can lift the heaviest rock gets to be village chief.

Self interest and economics

More Virtuous Than We Think : Democracy Journal

Here's an extract from an interesting review:

To be clear, most policymakers probably recognize that people behave
from diverse motives. But standard economic analysis indicates that
policy should normally be based solely on the self-interest assumption.
Bowles’ second assertion is that policies based on the assumption that
people are motivated primarily or entirely by selfish motives often work
poorly and sometimes backfire. Worse, such policies may actually
promote selfishness and amorality.

Put more positively, public and
private policies often work much better if they are designed with the
recognition that people act in part from self-interest and in part from
“social preferences,” which include “altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic
pleasure in helping others, aversion to inequity, ethical commitments,
and other motives that induce people to help people more than is
consistent with maximizing their own wealth or material payoff.”
Furthermore, incentive-based policies may strengthen or weaken these
motivations. Simply put, public policy can promote or erode civic
virtue.

Planes should soon be harder to lose

Satellite tracking could prevent airliner disappearances, developers say ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I hope something like this is taken up.  The cost of lengthy ocean searches would reduce dramatically if it is.