The first rule of holes

Oliver Kamm and William B. Shockley

Quite a lot of special in the comment thread of this piece, but I think there are 2 points to address:

[1] OK writes:

"T Tsikas of Media Lens, excuse me? In what possible respect is William B. Shockley a racist? How is it racist to make an estimate of possible casualties in a conventional invasion? What is notorious about him? Did he steal the Nobel Prize from someone else?"

I expect the reason that William Shockley was described as a racist is because he was, in fact, a racist. It hardly takes away from his achievements, but it is still true. It is dealt with in every biography of Shockley I have read. One might even describe it as notorious.

[2] A commenter posts a link to the Economist obituary of Yamaguchi Tsutomu (link here, more here from Mainichi, which leads to OK's remarkable response:

"Paul Hutton, as you raised the issue of Tsutomu Yamaguchi - let me add that one of my historian correspondents has pointed out that, however much in bad taste it may sound, Yamaguchi's account of having seen both A-bombs cannot be right. Even if he'd been totally uninjured, there is no way he would have been able to travel the 290 miles by sea or the 310 miles by rail from Hiroshima to Nagasaki. That of course doesn't obviate the sufferings of the civilians of both cities." [enphasis mine].

I don't know if Mr. Kamm's correspondent is a historian; he is certainly not a geographer.

PREDICTION: You know, one day, when the last hibakusha has died, there will be an entire industry devoted to denying the Americans ever dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Sunday evening brain dump
Stream of consciousness

I have a paper to draft and a number of characters to learn before tomorrow, so clearly the best thing to be done is write twaddle for 20 minutes. I've have been unconscionably lazy today:

1. While dallying in a coffee shop after church, I saw 5 loudspeaker-festooned black-gloss vans full of Japanese fascists speeding down by Kamiyacho. They were going so fast I thought that the vast rising sun flags were going to be torn off.

Less than a minute later, a fire engine was speeding in the opposite direction, although I am sure this was just a coincidence.

2. Speaking of the far-Right, I am currently working my way through "国家の品格" ("The dignity of the nation") by Fujiwara Masahiko. It is well mad. A review may be forthcoming, combined with the Yasukuni Jinja post that has been promised.

3. In addition to getting Dignity of the Nation (thanks, James!) for Christmas, I also got Tony Judt's "Reappraisals" and A.N. Wilson's Victorians/After the Victorians/Our Times trilogy (thank you Gareth!). In "After the Victorians" he records this epic wind up:

"My husband" remarked Mrs Sumner, wife of the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, when introduced to [Frederick, later Lord] Lindemann ('the Prof') "my husband always says that with a First in Greats you can get up science in a fortnight"(After the Victorians, page p.374)

Poor old Prof. Mind you, if you've read Most Secret War by RV Jones, you will recognise the attitude.

4. And on the subject of science, I have had a very pleasant time re-reading Andrew Hickey's series of hyperposts. Some excellent, thought-provoking writing here - I'm not a many-worlder myself (Bohmian mechanics FTW!), but this is just the sort of mind expanding stuff that science fiction can explore. I'm looking forward to AH's forthcoming zine, too.

5. Oh, and speaking of many worlds and it's enthusiasts, does anyone else think that equation 11 of Tegmark (2000) [1] is inconsistent with the claim that the brain is "too warm" for quantum computation to take place, and are in fact evidence that the brain is not warm enough? This isn't something I care about very much, and I certainly not familiar with the literature to offer constructive criticism on this point, but a coherence time proportional to a positive exponent of temperature strikes me as unusual to say the least. [There is a reason why experimentalists get through quite so much liquid helium...]

4. Friends of this blog PJ and LemmusLemmus have been very patiently educating me on statistics - I think I understand now.

5. And finally, my old uni mate MTPT has been interviewed on Charon QC's podcast. Well worth a listen.

[1] Tegmark Phys. Rev. E, 61 4194-4206 (2000). Link here, you can read an arXiv copy here.

The monopoles OF DEATH

Q. Are physicists trying to keep transgressive papers off the arXiv by blacklisting heterodox researchers?

A. Not nearly hard enough.

Whilst readers are encouraged to enjoy the whole thing, p. 829-832 contains Section III B (entitled "Even worse than destroying the earth"), which has brightened up my evening no end. I assume this is the "brilliant review" of which the AEI's Dr. Kevin Hassett speaks so highly of here (link via Professor DeLong).

Are earthquakes more likely on a Sunday?

In which the earth moves

I experienced my second earthquake last month (woke me up, as did the first one in 2008), so I was interested to read this paper (via Prof. Rabbett) from Pieter Vermeesch about statistical significance.

Question to the stats-mavens (you know who you are): don't you really have 7 hypotheses (e.g. Monday is the most common, Tuesday ...) which you've selected one (Sunday) after you've looked at your data. Doesn't this need to be accounted for?

From Vermeesch, P., 2009. Eos Trans. Am. Geophys. Union, 90 (47), p.443

What about the International Students Society?

More things I don't understand

Today, I shall mostly be failing to understand Con Coughlin's statement:

Even though Abdulmutallab is not even a British citizen, he was still allowed to be elected president of the Islamic Society at University College London (UCL)... [source]

They are called student societies because their membership, and the officers drawn from that membership, are students. If Mr. Coughlin is unaware that non-citizens study at British Universities[1], it might be advisable for him to refrain from comment on university-related matters.

[1] And how many! About 30% of UCL students come from outside the UK. According to UCAS, "n the UK last year there were 1.8 million full-time undergraduate students in higher education, which included over 104,000 international students.". Definitionally, this doesn't account for graduate students.

[Via Malcolm Grant in THES who is excellent]

Irresolution

Happy New Year! This is what I hope to be writing about this year ('*' indicates things that were promised last year, but not delivered, so this might be a vain hope)

Physics

Introduction to lasers

Why you should care about electron spin*

Quantum whats? Semiconductors at the nanoscale

Photonic crystals

Space based solar power - WITH LASERS

The QW solar cell

Research blogging - doping quantum dots

[Update the links]

What I Did On My Holidays

“What do you tell the dead when you lose?” - Yasukuni Jinja

Shinjuku metropolitan building and aging modernity

Book reviews

A review of Japanese-English dictionaries

Public service and notes to self

Hermite polynomials

Python practice

A note on SESAMs

Trolling

Random Dictator with Quota - the best form of PR

Why Physics should be more like Media Studies

The history of the LASER as a counter-example to the Libertarian model of scientific innovation

Penrose: the case for the defence*

"How can I be silent? How can I rest?"

"When Enkidu whom I love is dust and I too shall die and be laid in the earth for ever?"

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10

RIP, Enkidu. But what a beautiful obituary, and I think he was a very lucky cat to be loved so much.

SET for Britian

Away day at the House of Commons?

Via my big sister, poster competition at HoC, being run by SET for Britain. I'm out the country, but it looks like a lot of fun. Happily, they've divided the competition into physical sciences, engineering, and bio-stuff. Deadline for abstracts is Monday 21st.

These things are sent to try us

Or possibly just me

There is quite a lot of special in the comment threads at LibCon, but I think this is my favourite:

"To continue… physicists can’t agree whether energy travels in “waves” or “packets” (google qualtum mechanics if you are interested), so there are competing theories, and the technology doesn’t yet exists to falsify (or not) the theory of relativity, so it remains a theory until/unless falsified.

I make my point again – you cant’ have empirical “consensus”, 2+2 either = 4 or it does not. If someone could prove that it equalled 5, then it would equal 5, not by consenus but by empirical evidence"

More seriously, an excellent article by John B taking the fight to the people-who-self-identify-as-climate-sceptics own turf, by considering two opposing conspiracy theories. (If only the editors would restore the sarcastic footnotes, my joy would be complete...)

Would write more about this, but I'm off to disagree with a colleague about wave-particle duality, and must google "qualtum mechanics" first.

THEY are tunnelling under Mr. Delingpole's house

Dark forces are at work

Mr. Delingpole suspects foul play:

What is going on at Google? I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal.

It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature. Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me…..

UPDATE: Richard North has some interesting thoughts on this. He too suspects some sort of skullduggery.

There are forces at work on this climate of which we know nothing.

Modern McCarthyism

Have you no decency, Mr. Monbiot?

I hope everyone who thought that while George Monbiot was a scientific illiterate, at least he was our scientific illiterate, are jolly well feeling ashamed of themselves.

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed. -[source]

The idea, presumably, is that by throwing Jones under a bus, this will show the public that while there were a few bad apples, there is no problem now. This will not work: feeding crocodiles only makes them hungrier. This make-believe scandal is going to be spun into an attack on all climate science and every time the old nonsense gets warmed-up and served as left-overs ("Climate change stopped in 1998!"[cheap LOLZ]; "There's no such thing as the greenhouse effect!" [seriously: we're along way down the rabbit hole when people are pretending classical thermodynamics doesn't work]) people will think "Oh, wasn't there some fuss a while back when that bloke had to resign - scientists, eh, what do they know?". It's a masterstroke: the mere fact of having expertise means they don't have to take your opinion seriously. Brilliant. Horrifying, but brilliant.

A number of the more excitable brethren are describing the email hack as a "blue dress" moment. This is quite correct, only not in the way they mean it.

Wonky logic

It is quite remarkable how many people think you can move from the premise:

"Someone said something nasty about a dead person in an email"

to the conclusion

"Thermodynamics is wrong, and changing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will have no effect on the average temperature"

Whilst I have no expertise in climate change, I don't think physics works like that.

Relatedly, via PJ, this is composed entirely of win.

Britain, 2009

"The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret." - [source]

CiF belief bingo

Andrew Brown has created CommentIsFree-Belief bingo. This is an important achievement, as it will permit a suitably gifted programmer to create an ELIZA-style comment-bot. Will we be able to distinguish between the remarkably facile comments produced by - allegedly - real live CiFers, and an automated alternative?

This will certainly prove something, unless it proves something else.

Another Anscombe

Something completely different

When I read the phrase Anscombe's quartets, I thought of the mighty GEM herself, but this is brilliant:  4 datasets with the same x,y mean and variance, the same regression line and the same correlation coefficient, but with completely different properties that are obvious as soon as you graph them. Suitably modified, this would make a lovely introduction to practical work for 1st year undergraduates: if nothing else, it might get them away from bunging the data into excel and plotting a regression line without graphing them first. Hmmmm.

[via Ben's miniblog]

Or not

Ian Buruma attempts Japanese history, with mixed success

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you possibly the most ignorant paragraph to appear on comment is free, ever:

Even if the system were to become something like Japan's democracy in the 1920s, with two more or less conservative parties competing for power, this would still be preferable to a one-party state. Any opposition is better than none. It keeps the government on its toes.-[source]

I mean, really.

Gosh

Landslide

It's hardly unexpected, but WOW:

Exit polls and early vote counting indicated the DPJ was heading to a victory much larger than the LDP's landslide win in the Lower House election four years ago, when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's postal privatization plan gained widespread attention.

As the DPJ racked up seats to push it above the 241 needed for a Lower House majority--and even beyond the 296 seats won by the LDP in 2005--a who's who of prominent LDP lawmakers were going down in defeat.

Although Prime Minister Taro Aso won his seat in Fukuoka Prefecture, he indicated Sunday night he would step down as LDP president to take responsibility for the drubbing that many blame on the unpopular leader.

"We will have to accept the voice of the people that has produced such a severe result," Aso said.

The LDP now appears bereft of leaders. Party Secretary-General Hiroyuki Hosoda said he told Aso earlier Sunday that he and other top party executives would resign to take responsibility.

"We will seriously atone for our faults and prepare for the next election," he said.

The LDP came into the election in an unfamiliar spot: as the heavy underdog. Public opinion polls proved accurate, as the LDP was struggling to match the 113 seats the DPJ won when it was humiliated in the 2005 election.

So, a retread of 1993-4, or actual change? I liked this summary [via James Annan]:

One of the parties is led by an immensely wealthy grandson of a former conservative party prime minister, and the other is led by an immensely wealthy grandson of a former conservative party prime minister. One of these princelings 's tongue frequently gets tied in knots when he is trying to explain himself and the corruption of his colleagues, while the other's tongue frequently gets tied in knots when he is trying to explain himself and the corruption of his colleagues.

We'll be treated to a load of tribalist bollocks in the UK, of course, of both the "DPJ? Oh noes, teh leftisses and there socialism!!1!" and the "Democratic Party Japan = UK Labour Party = WIN!" varieties. 

Blast from the past

Toyama Kooichi rides again

Via Blood and Treasure, Toyama's speech from the 207 election for governor of Tokyo:

He came 8th, out of 14. And you thought Ishihara Shintaroo was colourful...

"The thing's hollow - it goes on forever- and oh my God!"

It's full of hippies

Selections from the climate camp programme [link via LC]:

Interactive Theatre on Climate Justice

SM1, Sat, 14:30-16:00

2% of fear and desire. A fun but challenging interactive show that uses Augusto Boal's Cop in the Head techniques helps examine what stops people taking effective action on climate change.

Eco-Feminist Story Telling (Part 1)

Kids' Space, Mon, 10:30-11:30

We will read some eco-feminist stories for children, and then you will get a chance to create your own story! We will play ‘circle stories’ and each child will add to the collective story line-by-line. We will write down the story, and it can be illustrated and printed within a zine. We can make puppets and act out our story too!

DSEi 2009: 8th September, City of London. Destroy the Banks! Destroy the Investors! Destroy the Arms Trade

MM4, Sat, 14:30-16:00

This year's DSEi will be making the link between climate chage and the arms trade. Come to the workshop , find out more, get involved, and let's hold the investors accountable for the death and destruction they cause worldwide!

Everything you Need to Know to Occupy your University

Student Space, Sun, 10:30-11:30

Occupations are back in vogue and this participative workshop - run by a student involved in organising the Cardiff University occupation in February of this year- will give a you step by step guide to practical knowledge of what you need to do to successfully occupy your university.

If not Carbon Trading, then what?

MM4, Sun, 16:30-18:30

We know the European Trading Scheme is a disaster, and Kyoto was a joke. But is it possible to design a carbon descent framework which would guarantee equity as well as the necessary carbon reductions? If so, what would it look like? And what possible steps could an activist/campaigner take to get us closer to this ideal? Is it worth our precious time thinking about this nerdy stuff at all? This is a mini-plenary discussion with Charlie Kronick (Greenpeace’s senior climate advisor), Ruth Davies (head of climate change policy at RSPB), Oliver Tickell (architect of the "Kyoto 2" initiative), Niel Bowerman (advocate for Contraction & Convergence), and Shaun Chamberlin (advocate for Tradable Energy Quotas).

Copenhagen and Carbon Trading - where did it all go horribly wrong

MM3, Sat, 16:30-18:30

What is going to be discussed at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December? What is carbon trading, and why should we care? What role does the European Union play? Discussions on a new global climate agreement are shrouded in a cloud of acronyms and obscure market schemes. This workshop decodes what is at stake in Copenhagen, exposing how the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), sectoral carbon markets, and schemes aimed at Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) would exacerbate local social and environmental conflicts and incentivise land grabs whilst failing to tackle the climate crisis. It will then explore some alternatives needed to promote climate justice in the UK, the EU and beyond.

************

The thing I want to go to is the workshop on Nuclear Power, which is fairly and unbiasedly called "If Nuclear is the Answer, you're asking the wrong question". 

 

Promises, promises

The DPJ and LDP manifestos are here. More comment on this tomorrow.

Both parties are promising to ban "hereditary" Diet seats. "Hereditary", in this context, means seats that were held by by the candidates father[1] and then "inherited". The DJP don't say how this ban will be enforced, but the LDP say they will not "endorse[ment n]or support" candidates "within three degrees of kinship" of a retiring candidates, although only from the next general election.

Meanwhile, Yomiuri is reporting : 

The Democratic Party of Japan has featured "three icons" of the party in its campaign for the Aug. 30 House of Representatives election to convince voters that the main opposition party is well equipped to take the reins of government.

The prominent coverage given to DPJ President Yukio Hatoyama, Secretary General Katsuya Okada and Acting President Naoto Kan--the latter two also have served as party leader--stands in stark contrast to the approach adopted by the Liberal Democratic Party, many of whose candidates hope to cash in on the popularity of Health, Labor and Welfare Minister and House of Councillor member Yoichi Masuzoe to boost their campaigns. - [source]

I don't think we're going to see anything comparable to the phenomenon that was Kazuhiko Yamauchi this time round, tho'.

[1] The actual Hereditaries, the Peerage, were abolished after the second world war, and the House of Peers replaced by the elected House of Councillors. The adoption of a bicameral rather than a unicameral legislature was one of Matsumoto's few successes in the face of GHQ's "advice".