Shirtfront Shennanigans

 

Seven years ago today, in the leadup to the G20 meeting in Brisbane, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, said that he would shirtfront Russian President Vladimir Putin over the murder of 298 people, including several dozen Australians, in the skies over Ukraine. While Australians are quite familiar with the former PM, I will give a brief explanation for overseas readers.

There is nothing moderate about Tony Abbott. Not now, and not when he was in Parliament. An unrepentant, abrasive conservative Catholic, he said what he thought, wore his heart on his sleeve, and made such an effective opposition leaver that he won the election in 2013. Just as abrasive in government as he was on the cross benches, he eventually wore his own party out, and got replaced with a technocrat who could actually govern after a few years in the top job.

However, he was still in power in July 2014, when the Russian shot down the Malaysian Boeing 777 airliner MH17 as it was flying over the Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. As Malaysia was then a popular stopover point for travel between Australia and Europe, there were 27 Australians on board, and it was the worst overseas attach on Australian civilians since the 2002 terrorist bombings in Indonesia killed 88 Australians.

In the leadup to the G20 meeting, Prime Minister Abbott said in a media interview that he intended to “shirtfront” the Russian President Vladimir Putin over the MH17 murders. This raised more than a few eyebrows, not only because of the lack of diplomatic tact, but also for the use of a 1970’s era term for tacking used in AFL football, a sport mostly played in Southern and Western Australia, and not on the East Coast, where both the meeting and Abbott’s home electorate are located. However, following the suspension of Russia from the G8 earlier in the year, it was considered a potential flashpoint.

Seven years on, it is fair to look at where things now stand. Putin is still President of Russia. Tony Abbott is no longer in politics. After being replaced as Prime Minister in 2015, he retreated to the back bench, and eventually lost re-election to independent Zali Steggall in 2019. However, it’s not just about him.

All over the English-speaking world, conservative political parties have moved away from straight-talking ideological politicians like Mr Abbott and towards those more like the truth-bending, ideologically flexible, power abusing Mr Putin.

This is of course most obvious in the USA, where strongman apologist Donald Trump took over the Republican Party when he became President, and has been guiding it in a pro-Russian, anti-democratic direction ever since. To a lesser extent it is true in the UK, where Boris Johnson, the creative-tongued, ideologically nebulous anti-European populist is now Prime Minister.

Even here in Australia, where the technocratic Prime Minister who replaced Abbott was himself replaced, straight talking and ideological coherence seems to be out of fashion. While the current Prime Minister is also conservative, straight talking, above board conduct, and consistency aren’t really hallmarks of the current administration.

So all-in-all, the shirtfront seems to come up short. Not only is Mr Putin still in power, but he has ensured that Mr Abbott’s brand of politics doesn’t even have a place in the English-speaking world anymore.

Shameless self-promotion and self-organizing

I keep losing the link to the Supplementary Information from my Geology paper (summarized as Geosonnet 42), so I'm posting the direct link here, where I hopefully won't lose it.
http://www.geosociety.org/datarepository/2016/2016176.pdf
And before you tell me a better way to keep track of things in the digital age, GET OFF MY LAWN!

Star Wars teaser far too tame

 The second biggest thing to hit the internet yesterday was the new Star Wars teaser. Like many, I clicked the link with interest.  But as a planetary scientist, I was disappointed from the first scene (via io9).

This is a wrecked star destroyer, half buried in desert sand.  The obvious implication is that the spacecraft has left space and crashed.  Is this realistic?  luckily, physics, and the internet, can answer this question.

According to this fan site a star destroyer weighs something on the order of 30-50 million metric tons. This makes it about 3000-5000 times larger that the meteorite which blew up over Chelyabinsk. If we assume the slowest possible re-entry, that from low orbit (about 8 km/s on Earth), then we can calculate what sort of impact this would have.  Better yet, we can use the internet to let the experts calculate it for us.

The Earth Impact Effects Program, by Marcus, Melosh, and Collins, simulates the effect of impactors of various sizes on Earth (our trusty stand-in for human-inhabitable worlds around the universe). Simplifying a star destroyer to a 1 km sphere with a density of 100 kg/m3 gives us the correct mass and a sensible size.  Falling from low Earth orbit, this object would need to dissipate 1.68 x 10¹⁸ Joules into the atmosphere or ground.  That’s about 400 megatons, or about 8 times more energy than the Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated.  Given a shallow impact angle, this object explodes in the atmosphere, raining small debris down onto the ground.

This, of course, is exactly what happened when real spacecraft suffered uncontrolled or malfunctioning re-entry: Skylab and the space shuttle Columbia (at ~70 tons, almost a million times smaller than a Star Destroyer) both broke up high in the atmosphere, raining debris down over very wide areas.

Of course, the die-hard fan might claim that the Star Destroyer is much tougher than a 20th century spacecraft, and would reach the ground intact.  In this case, the kinetic energy would be adsorbed by the ground, not the atmosphere.  We can simulate that as well, by using a solid iron meteorite of the same mass (only 232 meters across, due to the higher density), with a vertical descent.  It still imparts 400 megatons of kinetic energy on the planetary surface. But instead of an airblast, we end up with a crater 4.5 km in diameter, and half a km deep.  Nothing of this scale is evident in the Star Wars teaser.

As shown in the Chelyabinsk post a few years ago, the speeds- and energy- associated with space travel are so huge that even the most creative minds of Hollywood are unable to grasp their enormity and power. This was forgivable 30 years ago, before the internet, but in this day and age, fantastical videos that are tamer than reality are disappointing.

Edit:
Related post: Viewing Imaginary Spacecraft from the Ground"

A conservative response to climate change

Climate change is in the news again, with the liberals renewing their call for collectivist action, and the anti-science branch of conservative practicing various forms of do-nothingness.  As a goal-oriented, pro science conservative, I am not really comfortable with either of these approaches. And the lack of a broad tent conservative response irks me, so I suggest we go with the following, simple yet powerful principle as a sensible, potentially unifying response to climate change:

No climate bailouts.

This is a good conservative approach for the following reasons:

1. It is uniting.  Under this approach, it doesn't matter if you believe in climate change or not.  Those who do not can oppose climate bailouts with the same principles which impel them to oppose bailouts for unicorn farmers.  So we can all stop arguing about climate science and respect each other’s differences.

2. It differentiates us from the liberals.  Al Gore and his ideological descendants basically push the following line: “Global Warming means we have to all turn into collectivists”  Needless to say, this upsets a lot of people.  By denying bailouts, we are placing the costs and risk assessment firmly in the hands of the polluters.  The market is the best way to determine the probability of climate change, and the associated cost.  Let the polluters deal with insurance and risk assessment and lawsuits associated with potential damages. While any costs will of course be passed on to consumers, if those costs are too high, then we can buy our energy from a non-polluting source.  That’s how free markets work.  The important thing is that it does not commit us to open ended government spending to bail out polluters.

3. It is flexible.  Drawing a line in the sand on bailouts does not prevent public or private action. There are many creative ways in which governments, companies, and people can tackle climate change and save money instead of spending it.  Whether it is streamlining approval processes or increasing government energy efficiency or requiring utilities to compete for the lowest energy price available, the list of potential actions goes on.  Similarly, this approach allows principled, can-do compromise on climate action, provided that the core principle remains intact.

There are several other proposals for how conservatives should react to the climate change issue.  While they are sensible, none are this simple.  Polluters have known about the possibility of climate change ever since Al Gore was thin and dark haired.  They’ve had plenty of time to study the issue and prepare based on the most likely outcomes.  If they are not competent to do that, then they don’t deserve to be propped up with our hard-earned money.

A dumb gun is not a smart gun

There has been a minor brouhaha in the American media this week about the refusal for gunshops to sell the  Armatix “smart” gun.  These revolve around fears that the sale of this weapon will restrict consumer choice in other, non-adjacent states.

This is not surprising.  The tactic of making a product that nobody wants to buy, and them compelling its purchase through legislation is not new.  Nor is it unique to liberals; rather is practiced by all sides of politics on everything from health insurance to self-propelled artillery to NASA rockets. And this is where the smart gun falls down.

Compared to every other smart product to hit the market in the last ten years, the smart gun is really, really fucking stupid. It make no attempt at all to leverage the information revolution to its core utility, in the way that smart phones, smart glasses, smart cars, and smart everything else do.  So unsurprisingly, not even people who like guns want to but a smart gun.

It doesn't have to be that way.  There is no reason a well-designed actual smart gun can’t be so compelling, useful, and clever that everyone with even a remote interest in physics would want to have one. A gun with integrated display/user interface/ cameras/ standard hand-held computer sensors could to all sorts of amazing things not currently available to current weapons. 

Just off the top of my dome, these include:

• Integrated tiltmeter/ compass/ gps system that shows you (on a map), where rounds are expected to fall when the gun is pointed into the air.
• Breathalayzer interlocks.
• Hunting and firearm regulation and helpful hints relevant to your GPS position.
• High precision integrated camera/gunsight that records a pic every shot, automatically scores targets based on image analysis, uses image recognition to identify targets.
• Digital map record of hunting sites, game seen, missed, taken, time spent.
• Programmable trigger lockouts from image recognition to block unwanted targets, such as:
• -children.
• -birds and beasts not in season.
• -cops.
• -unsafe elevation (see above).
• -people who have turned their back/ are retreating.
• -recognized “do not shoot” faces.
• -and any other targets where the shooter wants an extra layer of protection against accidents. 

There are all sorts of totally awesome things you could do with a computer-integrated, geospatially aware weapon.  And the fact that guns are exempt from consumer protection laws should only increase innovation in this area.  Done properly, a genuinely smart gun could make uncomputerized guns as obsolete as flip phones.

I don’t know who would make them, but perhaps a hugecomputer company in a gun-loving state desperate for a new product would be interested.

The crap app

As civilizations haul themselves out of traditional pre-industrial lifestyles, and into the modern world, they, collectively or individually, need to choose what to modernize and what to keep traditional.  That's fine, and I respect that.  And as an old manual typewriter, chemical film, rotary dial phone fossil, I realize that these things strike many young people of today as being as old fashioned as vacuum tubes, or crank-start engines.  And of course of the the great drivers of mechanization and automation is convenience.  But still, despite knowing these things intellectually, I still have my get-off-my-lawn moments.  So I gotta say.  Asia, you're amazing, and I love my phone and computer chips and clothes and everything else that you make.  And even though I don't like remote controls, I appreciate that others find them handy.  But seriously guys, You don't need them for everything.  And this one strikes me as just a little bit asinine.

Young rocks

Evy, the skepchick who is now geoblogging at georneys, recently expressed surprise at a paper which labeled rocks with an nine digit age as young. I see nothing wrong with this, however. Depending on how you define 'beginning', the Earth is between 4567 and 4460 million years old. using 4500 as a convenient round number, we can then take half that as a midpoint, and place the old rock / young rock divide at 2250 MA. Alternatively, we could lash out and use 1.5 billion year divisions to call rocks old (> 3.0 Ga), middle-aged (between 3 and 1.5) and young < 1.5 billion.

In Gondwanaland, the 1.2-1.0 Ma Grenville orogeny is much less prevalent than it is in laurentian rocks. It shows up here and there, but is not a major event. The middle proterozoic was in fact fairly quiet in Gondwana, with the Neoproterozoic-to-Cambrian Pan-African / Brasiliano / Ross orogens being the defining tectonic events that assembled the various pieces of Gondwanaland into the supercontinent that we all know and love. So for those of us interested in the pre-assumblage history of Gondwana, it makes perfect sense to describe anything after the midproterozoic as young. I even did so in my thesis, in this sketchmap of the geology of the Brazilian state of Bahia:

That's not old

Given that different people have different view on what 'old' is, I thought I'd share this figure from my thesis.



I apologize to any tectonicists who may have wandered in here for describing the Braziliano Orogen (The South American correlate of the Pan-African; one of several continental suture events that led to the amalgamation of the Gondwanaland supercontinent) as 'cover'. But let's face it folks. Thrust sheets get in the way just as much as mud piles do.

So if it seems like I haven't updated my blog for a while, use these numbers to keep a perspective on things...

Banning powerpoint is not enough

Recently, Kim suggested that an SMU dean was not acting correctly by banning technology from the classroom. I’d like to back this dean. In fact, I don’t think he goes far enough.

Powerpoint, podcasts, and filmstrips are just the tip of the Cryogenian iceberg here. If we really want to get back to teaching old-school, there is an equally pernicious development that has to be addressed before a classroom can be truly free of newfangled gimmicks. We need to ban chalk.

Forget about all the arguments over allergies, unfashionable smudges, and unacceptable strontium blanks. The real problem with chalk is that it is too new. How can the effects- and dangers- of a teaching technology be fully appreciated for a device that is a mere 0.07 gigayears old? When I was a kid, those slate blackboards weren’t even slate yet, and the Cretaceous was just a twinkle in a basal therapod’s eye.

Now, I am not a lubbite. I had no complaints about the moon-forming impact, the emergence of continents from the primeval sea, or even plate tectonics revolution. And I’m coming around on this whole oxygenated atmosphere thing. But chalk? Let’s be honest here, folks. For 85% of the Earth’s history, there were no fossils, much less undeformed diagenetically unaltered ones. Cemented coccoliths have no place in the 21st century classroom.