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| I surrender .. |
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| Yes, the bounty of the sky! 30W! |
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| The Executioner |
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| An unwanted house guest |
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| Doreen Thomas orders treats (from Stoke Sentinel) |
"... we are now being told by experts on solar physics that we are heading into a period of exceptional inactivity on the surface of our local star — and therefore one of exceptionally cold temperatures.We're on the case for our little animal friends ...
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Richard Harrison, the head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire told the BBC. And Yuri Navogitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory is quoted along similar lines by Voice of Russia: “We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, we need extra greenhouse effect if we are not to suffer countless more fatalities from hypothermia and permafrosted farms. It’s frack or freeze."
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| Our house ... |
"During the latter half of the 17th Century, the Sun went through an extremely quiet phase - a period called the Maunder Minimum. Historical records reveal that sunspots virtually disappeared during this time. Dr Green says: "There is a very strong hint that the Sun is acting in the same way now as it did in the run-up to the Maunder Minimum."
Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics, from the University of Reading, thinks there is a significant chance that the Sun could become increasingly quiet. An analysis of ice-cores, which hold a long-term record of solar activity, suggests the decline in activity is the fastest that has been seen in 10,000 years.
"It's an unusually rapid decline," explains Prof Lockwood. "We estimate that within about 40 years or so there is a 10% to 20% - nearer 20% - probability that we'll be back in Maunder Minimum conditions."
The era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe. Londoners enjoyed frost fairs on the Thames after it froze over, snow cover across the continent increased, the Baltic Sea iced over - the conditions were so harsh, some describe it as a mini-Ice Age. And Prof Lockwood believes that this regional effect could have been in part driven by the dearth of activity on the Sun, and may happen again if our star continues to wane.
"It's a very active research topic at the present time, but we do think there is a mechanism in Europe where we should expect more cold winters when solar activity is low," he says.
He believes this local effect happens because the amount of ultraviolet light radiating from the Sun dips when solar activity is low. This means that less UV radiation hits the stratosphere - the layer of air that sits high above the Earth. And this in turn feeds into the jet stream - the fast-flowing air current in the upper atmosphere that can drive the weather. The results of this are dominantly felt above Europe, says Prof Lockwood.
"These are large meanders in the jet stream, and they're called blocking events because they block off the normal moist, mild winds we get from the Atlantic, and instead we get cold air being dragged down from the Arctic and from Russia," he says.
"These are what we call a cold snap... a series of three or four cold snaps in a row adds up to a cold winter. And that's quite likely what we'll see as solar activity declines."
"The Light of Other Days" was the title of a classic short story by Bob Shaw, one of the lesser known stars of science fiction. One of science fiction's biggest stars, Arthur C. Clarke, and one of its rising talents, Stephen Baxter, have combined forces to pay tribute to Shaw with their collaborative novel of the same title. One of the features of the Shaw story was the idea of "slow glass," which would transmit light so slowly that it could be used to view the past. The comparative device in the Clarke & Baxter novel is wormhole technology.This review is spot on as regards the style of the novel: it reads to me like a very late pulp novel of the nineteen fifties and sixties - the golden age of Heinlein, Asimov and, of course, Clarke. Though by content I suspect Baxter did most of the writing - Clarke's main contribution seems to have been the overarching plot, a reprise of "Childhood's End".
"Hiram Patterson, a latter-day Ted Turner/Bill Gates, has found a use for wormholes to broadcast news as it happens from remote locations without the time and expense of transporting a live reporter and camera crew.
"He can create a temporary wormhole, point a camera through it, and capture the images from a home office, no matter where it is located. Patterson's development team, headed by his son, David, continues to push the boundaries of this new technology while Clarke and Baxter begin to examine its social aspects.
"The spread of wormhole technology seems to be based on the internet. Like the internet, it spreads rapidly and reasonably inexpensively. There can be no interaction between the viewer and the subject of their spying. Most importantly, it completely alters the fabric of society and brings the world even closer together.
"The changes to society are continuous, especially since what can be done with wormhole technology and its cost keeps changing. Used to spy on individuals, particularly once the ability to look into the past is discovered, wormhole technology supplants the internet as the primary time-waster.
"People can now not only discover what their neighbours are doing at the moment, they can also see what their neighbours were doing at any time. Privacy has ceased to exist as anyone can spy on anyone else, at any time, without any chance of detection.
"Although there are some noble endeavours, such as the project to completely document the life of the historical Jesus, most people use the technology for more voyeuristic concerns. Given the attitude Clarke exhibited towards organized religion in such recent novels as 3001: The Final Odyssey, the irreverence paid to religion in The Light of Other Days is very understated.
"The Light of Other Days is definitely a novel of ideas. In addition to the primary concept of the wormhole, the story opens with the announcement of the discovery of an enormous asteroid, called the Wormwood, which will impact the earth in 2534, causing the destruction of all life on the planet. The knowledge of the Wormwood inflicts much of humanity with a sense of malaise, adding to the public's need for a diversion like wormhole technology. The authors have also inflicted water shortages on the world which have resulted in several water wars. Many countries have become balkanized and, perhaps the least likely situation, England has become the 52nd state of the US.
"With many interesting ideas, few of which are fully explored, and a dearth of exploration of the characters and their relationships, The Light of Other Days feels more like a work in progress than a finished novel. If the authors wanted to pay homage to Bob Shaw, producing a more complete work may have been the way to do it."
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| A chess lookahead tree |
"Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms across a range of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. Its acumen will grow, and its costs fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities.How likely is your job to be taken over by automation? The Economist article includes this chart.
"The machines are not just cleverer, they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale; in others it will allow firms to do more with fewer workers. Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories."
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| Lose your job to a machine? |
"With regard to phenomena, I recall wondering, as a student, why some of the fundamental things I studied in NRQM (non-relativistic quantum mechanics) seemed to disappear in QFT. One of these was bound state phenomena, such as the hydrogen atom. None of the introductory QFT texts I looked at even mentioned, let alone treated, it. It turns out that QFT can, indeed, handle bound states, but elementary courses typically don’t go there. Neither will we, as time is precious, and other areas of study will turn out to be more fruitful. Those other areas comprise scattering (including inelastic scattering where particles transmute types), deducing particular experimental results, and vacuum energy.And here is how the book begins - from chapter 1 (PDF):
"I also once wondered why spherical solutions to the wave equations are not studied, as they play a big role in NRQM, in both scattering and bound state calculations. It turns out that scattering calculations in QFT can be obtained to high accuracy with the simpler plane wave solutions. So, for most applications in QFT, they suffice.
"Wave packets, as well, can seem nowhere to be found in QFT. Like the other things mentioned, they too can be incorporated into the theory, but simple sinusoids (of complex numbers) serve us well in almost all applications. So, wave packets, too, are generally ignored in introductory (and most advanced) courses.
Wave function collapse, a topic of focus in NRQM, is generally not a topic of focus in QFT texts. It does, however, play a key, commonly hidden role, which is discussed herein in Sects. 7.4.3 and 7.4.4, pgs. 196-197. "
"Before starting on any journey, thoughtful people study a map of where they will be going. This allows them to maintain their bearings as they progress, and not get lost en route. This chapter is like such a map, a schematic overview of the terrain of quantum field theory (QFT) without the complication of details. You, the student, can get a feeling for the theory, and be somewhat at home with it, even before delving into the “nitty-gritty” mathematics. Hopefully, this will allow you to keep sight of the “big picture”, and minimize confusion, as you make your way, step-by-step, through this book."
"It’s a shame that Sherlock, the television show, changed from a brilliant and thrilling adventure based on the utterly exceptional qualities of its main character into a self-indulgent and self-referential soap-opera-cum-comedy based on one rather crude characterisation."Yes, I noticed that too.
"It is an equal shame that precisely the same thing has happened with the England cricket team. The Kevin Pietersen story once again dominates the plot-lines of English cricket. Like Sherlock, it is a drama centred on a uniquely talented individual with questionable social skills.The brutally-effective people I knew in business were more Steve Jobs than Sherlock. People who would call you at any hour of the day or night and calmly task you with impossible deadlines; give you jobs and then let slip that they had also asked some other people who had already delivered - so your efforts had been simply wasted (not that they cared or anything, or had bothered to mention this); people who, as peers, simply ignored your existence, wouldn't return calls or attend meetings. People who routinely shouted at people.
"In the first half of the most recent episode, someone describes Sherlock to his face as a psychopath. He contradicts, not without smugness: “No. High-functioning sociopath.”
"Well, let’s not stick labels on people. Leave that to those qualified. An “anti-social personality disorder” often includes such traits as small regard for the feelings and welfare of others, inability to learn from experience, no sense of responsibility, lack of moral sense, no change after punishment, lack of guilt, pathological egocentricity and inability to love.
"Pietersen’s perpetually sticky relationships with his cricketing colleagues unquestionably go personality-deep. With my level of expertise I think we can confidently describe him as a high-functioning awkward bugger. And it has been widely reported that his relationship with Andy Flower, the England team director, has broken down disastrously.
"It has even been suggested that Flower will not carry on if Pietersen remains on board. Another version states that Pietersen can stay on board so long as he devotes himself to scoring runs in county cricket at the beginning of the new season, instead of playing in the IPL. Kev can stay, but it’ll cost him getting on for a million quid.
"Flower was a great coach for England until the trip to Australia this winter spoilt his record. His greatest achievements? Defeat of Australia in Australia in 2010-11 and defeat of India in India from one-down in 2012. How did these things come about?
"In Adelaide in 2010, Pietersen changed the series with an innings of murderous certainty in which he scored 227. In Mumbai two years later, England were batting on a turning pitch tailored for India’s needs; Pietersen scored 186, another classic momentum-shifter.
"Flower, like all coaches, is essentially Watson. Coaches, even if they preen like José Mourinho, are at base facilitators, enablers and sounding boards. They don’t solve the case: they are just helping out as best they can.
"Cases are actually solved by the Sherlocks: the high-functioning ones. It was Pietersen, not Flower, who solved The Case of the Prematurely Celebrating Australians and The Case of the Indians Hoist With Their Own Petard.
"We would all sooner deal with Watson, we’d sooner have a drink or a cup of tea with Watson and we save most of our sympathies for Watson, who is always in a perfectly intolerable situation. But if we want to solve the case, we need Sherlock.
..."
"Jean Manco has a new book out on the peopling of Europe, Ancestral Journeys. The general picture is that Europeans arise from three main groups: the Mesolithic hunters (Hyperboreans), Levantine farmers, and Indo-Europeans off the steppe. It’s a decent synthesis of archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence. I suspect that her general thesis is in the right ball park: surely not correct in every detail, but right about the double population replacement.I'd classify "Ancestral Journeys" as a semi-popular book. Jean Manco's mastery of the details of populations and their movements across Europe, North Africa and the Near East across a time period stretching from 46,000 years ago to the early mediaeval is truly staggering - she seems to have absorbed and synthesised hundreds of sources. Somehow the clarity of her thinking and the organisation of her material saves the reader from being totally lost in the details.
"It is a refreshing antidote to previous accounts based on the pots-not-people fad that originated back in the 1960s, like so many other bad things. Once upon a time, when the world was young, archaeologists would find a significant transition in artifact types, see a simultaneous change in skeletons, and deduce that new tenants had arrived, for example with advent of the Bell Beaker culture. This became unfashionable: archaeologists were taught to think that invasions and Völkerwanderungs were never the explanation, even though history records many events of this kind.
"I suppose the work Franz Boas published back in 1912, falsely claiming that environment controlled skull shape rather than genetics, had something to do with it. And surely some archaeologists went overboard with migration, suggesting that New Coke cans were a sign of barbarian takeover. The usual explanation though, is that archaeologists began to find the idea of prehistoric population replacement [of course you know that means war - war means fighting, and fighting means killing] distasteful and concluded that therefore it must not have happened. Which meant that they were total loons, but that seems to happen a lot.
"But the book could be better. Jean Manco relies fairly heavily on mtDNA and Y-chromosome studies, and they are not the most reliable evidence. Not because the molecular geneticists are screwing up the sequencing, although there must sometimes be undetected contamination, but because mtDNA and Y-chromosomes are each single loci with an effective population size four times smaller than autosomal genes. They are more affected by drift, and drift can deceive you. Moreover, in some cases selection might affect the historical trajectory of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes, which would add to the confusion. Now to be fair, we have more ancient mtDNA results than autosomal DNA, and there is more published data on mtDNA and Y-chromosome than autosomal DNA in existing populations. This situation is rapidly improving.
"Autosomal DNA has zillions of loci and a larger effective population size. Most of it is neutral. That’s what you want, for investigating past mixing and movement – and autosomal DNA yields interesting hints using publicly available data and software. For example, using the program ADMIXTURE, you find a West Asian-like component in almost all Europeans (from Spain to Russia, and at about the same level) – but not in Sardinians or Basques. Which must be telling us something.
"In addition, she’s not bloody-minded enough. She thinks that a fair fraction of the big population turnovers involved migrants moving into areas that had been abandoned by the previous owners. I can imagine that happening in a few cases. Maybe the Greenlanders, living in an extremely marginal country for their kind of dairy farming, mostly left and/or died out before the Eskimos showed up. That is, in my dreams, because we know that the two groups fought. The Greenlanders may have been in trouble, but they didn’t just fall - Eskimos pushed. The European colonization of the New World is closer, since there was a dramatic population collapse from the newly introduced Eurasian and African diseases, but even then there was a fair amount of fighting. I’m sure that there were serious epidemics in European prehistory, but it seems unlikely they compared with the impact of the simultaneous arrival of bubonic plague, diphtheria, leprosy, malaria, measles, typhoid, and whooping cough on the Amerindians (with yellow fever and cholera for dessert).
"I mean, when the first farmers were settling Britain, about 4000 BC, they built ditched and palisaded enclosures. Some of these camps are littered with human bones – so, naturally, Brian Fagan, in a popular prehistory textbook, suggests that ”perhaps these camps were places where the dead were exposed for months before their bones were deposited in nearby communal burials”! We also find thousands of flint arrowheads in extensive investigations of some of these enclosures, concentrated along the palisade and especially at the gates. Sounds a lot like Fort Apache, to me.
"There are some new and fascinating results about European prehistory that beg to be incorporated in a revised version of this book, for example the stuff about how the Hyperboreans contributed to the ancestry of modern European and Amerindians, but that info is so new that she could not possibly have incorporated it. Not her fault at all.
"Read it."
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| Evolutionary Tree of Y-DNA haplogroups (from Wikipedia) |
"The true story of a father who, on his death bed, handed his son a dusty journal containing details of his secret past as a Second World War hero and founding member of the 2nd SAS. Just weeks prior to his death Horace Stokes asked his son Peter to return home as he had 'something important' to leave him, and presented him with a battered diary.
"Peter, himself a decorated military officer, said: "He wanted me to come home so that he could talk to me about his life growing up in the shadow of war and also about his part in some of the most famous raids during the Second World War; throughout his life he'd never revealed these secrets”. His secret journal, published now as a book, recalls daring missions behind enemy lines in France, the Mediterranean and Italy. It also documents his capture, escape and recapture in Italy and Germany.
"Stokey, as he was known to his war-time comrades, served with 12 Commando, the Small Scale Raiding Force and the SAS. This book tells the story of a modest man who epitomised a generation now nearly all gone, someone who lived no ordinary life."
| R1b1b2a1a2f* defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| N/A | ||||
| R1b1b2a1a2f defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs11799226 (L21) | G | C |  | G |
| R1b1b2a1a2 defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs34276300 (P312) | C | | A | |
| R1b1b2a1a defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs13304168 (L52) | T | C | | T |
| rs9785659 (P311) | G | A | | G |
| rs9786076 (L11) | C | T | | C |
| rs9786283 (P310) | C | A | | C |
| R1b1b2a1 defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs9786140 (L51) | A | G | | A |
| R1b1b2a defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs9785971 (L23) | G | | A | |
| rs9786142 (L49) | A | T | | A |
| R1b1b2 defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs877756 (S3) | C | T | | C |
| rs9786153 (M269) | C | T | | C |
| R1b1b defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs9785702 (P297) | C | G | | C |
| R1b1 defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs150173 (P25) | C | | A | |
| R1b defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs9786184 (M343) | C | | A | |
| R1 defining mutations | ||||
| variant | call | anc | der | |
| rs1118473 (P286) | T | C | | T |
| rs17307070 (P225) | T | G | | T |
| rs2032624 (M173) | C | A | | C |
| rs7067478 (P242) | G | | A | |
| rs9785717 (P238) | A | G | | A |
| rs9785959 (P236) | G | C | | G |
| rs9786197 (P234) | C | T | | C |
| rs9786232 (P233) | G | T | | G |
