A result! Ships to sail over North Pole by mid-century

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere underwent one of its biggest single-year jumps ever in 2012, according to researchers at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2013, carbon dioxide levels increased by 2.67 parts per million — a rise topped only by the spike in 1998.

Meanwhile NBC News reports that by the middle of this century, thanks to climate change, anyone with a light icebreaker can spend their Septembers going anywhere they want in the Arctic Ocean, including straight over the North Pole.

This is the finding of a new study by University of California, Los Angeles.  Global warming to open 'crazy' shipping routes across Arctic is the headline NBC gave their story, whose angle appears to be that all this is “an upside to global warming”. It seems we are meant to understand it as “crazy” only in the sense that these seas will not be safe or open all year round.

The map is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and shows that the fastest navigation routes for ships seeking to cross the Arctic Ocean by mid-century include the Northwest Passage (on the left) and over the North Pole (center), in addition to the Northern Sea Route (on the right).

If you want to know where I get all this stuff from it's the Climate blog on the Think Progress site. I recommend it.

Tutu: No nation should own nuclear arms, not Iran, and not their critics

CND UK

No nation should own nuclear arms – not Iran, not North Korea, and not their critics who take the moral high ground, says Desmond Tutu on the Guardian’s comment is free website today.

“We cannot intimidate others into behaving well when we ourselves are misbehaving. Yet that is precisely what nations armed with nuclear weapons hope to do”, says Tutu. 

According to the declared nuclear states, a select few nations can ensure the security of all by having the capacity to destroy all. Until we overcome this double standard, we are unlikely to make meaningful progress in halting the spread of these monstrous devices, let alone banishing them from national arsenals, he says.

Comments on the article dwell on the theme that nuclear weapons once invented can’t be disinvented, and on Israel’s supposed need for nuclear weapons. Israel be it noted is an undeclared nuclear weapons state, not party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

I puzzle over surname extinction

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) movie title

Goodbye, Mr. Chips is the name of a 1934 novel by James Hilton and a 1939 film, which I once saw, about an aged school teacher and former headmaster of a boarding school. 

One thing that puzzled me was the eponymous character’s name.  I've never actually come across anyone with the surname Chips. I imagined it was a made-up name and I wondered why.  But last week I found out that Chips used in fact to be a fairly common surname which has died out.  It's one of tens of thousands to have disappeared in the UK over the past 100 years, research has shown. Others are Hatman, Rummage, Nithercott, Raynott, Temples, Southwark and Woodbead.  Clegg, whilst current now, faces extinction; and is likely to be joined by William, Cohen, Sutcliffe, Kershaw, Butterworth and Greenwood.

The research has been carried out by the Ancestry family history website. They compared surnames from the 1901 census with names from modern records and found that many had disappeared, and others are becoming rare.  William for example was the 374th most common surname in 1901, but has fallen to 12,500th.

Various media have carried this story, often spiced up with witticisms at the expense of deputy prime minster Nick Clegg, or references to the title of the Mr Chips film, in the Guardian for example.

But there's a puzzle here. What drives these trends? A few explanations are offered but strike me as inadequate. Many vanished surnames were later anglicised by their owners, including immigrants who changed their name to avoid complications with foreign spellings. Yes I can understand that one; but of the examples given, this seems applicable, if at all, only to Cohen.  One dreadful explanation offered is that the first world war played a part in wiping out some names when specific battalions suffered mass casualties, with towns or villages losing a whole generation of young men.

But what other factors are at work? What’s driving the extinction of Clegg and Sutcliffe today?  Sutcliffe might be a special case I suppose, being the name of a notorious Yorkshire murderer convicted in 1981. But did large numbers change their surname as a consequence? I doubt it. Things are going on that I don't get. I hunger for further explanation.  Whom to ask?  A genealogist? A mathematician? A geneticist?

Who compared apples and ideas? Shaw?

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

This aphorism should have been uttered by George Bernard Shaw and there's no shortage of websites claiming that it was.  But the excellent Quote Investigator has diligently sought compelling evidence that Shaw really made this remark, and has failed to find any. 

George Bernard Shaw: did he talk of swapping apples?

It seems the earliest quotation conforming to this theme was dated 1917, though dollars were mentioned rather than apples. It came in an advertisement for a magazine called System that was printed in the Chicago Tribune. The ad was titled “The Difference Between Dollars and Ideas”.  You'll find a full discussion by following the above link.

It's like this you see, when I find a good quote, I can't rest easy till I've sourced it. And when my dictionary of quotations doesn't help and I distrust what I'm seeing on the world wide web, that’s where the Quote Investigator comes in handy. It's a blog I can't praise too highly.

On a couple of occasions when stumped for the source of a quote, the Quote Investigator has tracked it down for me and put it on his blog. One was Einstein: “Everyone who is seriously interested in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe – a spirit vastly superior to man, and one in the face of which our modest powers must seem humble.” The other was Winston Churchill:  “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” In the event this sort of thing excites you (and I realise it very possibly doesn't) the discussions on both these quotes are worth reading. Follow the links.

Ban ‘killer robots’ before it’s too late

Stop the Killer Robots is a new global campaign to be launched in the UK by a group of academics, pressure groups and Nobel peace prize laureates. It aims to persuade nations to ban "killer robots" before they reach the production stage.  This is in today’s Observer.

Dr Noel Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert and professor at Sheffield University is prominent in the campaign. He says robot warfare and autonomous weapons are the next step from unmanned drones. They are already being worked on by scientists and will be available within the decade. He believes that development of the weapons is taking place in an effectively unregulated environment, with little attention being paid to moral implications and international law.

The two images are from a Human Rights Watch press release issued last November. 

The aircraft is a drone enabling an operator to strike distant targets, “even in another continent.” Whilst the Ministry of Defence has stated that humans will remain in the loop, Human Rights Watch says the Taranis “exemplifies the move toward increased autonomy”. The sentry robot can detect people in the Demilitarized Zone and, if a human grants the command, fire its weapons. The robot is shown here during a test with a surrendering enemy soldier.

Neither the aircraft not the robotic sentry are fully autonomous but Human Rights Watch sees full autonomy as being only a step away.

Here's a campaign video against military robots.



In the video, Noel Sharkey says there is nothing in artificial intelligence or robotics that could discriminate between a combatant and a civilian. It would be impossible to tell the difference between a little girl pointing an ice cream at a robot or someone pointing a rifle at it.

Advocates of military robots claim a moral argument in their favour. If you could build robot soldiers, you would be able to program them not to commit war crimes, not to commit rape, not to burn down villages. They wouldn’t be susceptible to human emotions like anger or excitement in the heat of combat. So, you might actually want to entrust those sorts of decisions to machines rather than to humans. 

Jody Williams of Human Rights Watch debates this point with in a Democracy Now episode last November.

What an exciting day

Well that was quite a coincidence.  Though we should consider this, if coincidences never occurred, that in itself would be a coincidence. 

At 3:30 UT yesterday (9:30 local time) we had the Russian meteor (top two photos).  And 16 hours later at 19:30 UT, we had the asteroid flyby (diagramme). The two events were each historic and entirely unrelated. The first was unexpected, the second accurately predicted. I'll start with three links for the Russian meteor:

• BBC News
• What Really Happened In Russia This Morning?  This is from Vice (not sure who or what Vice is, but this video was recommended in a tweet by the Royal Observatory, @ROGAstronomers)
• The Guardian (this too contains an exciting video)

     UT = Universal Time, the same as Greenwich Mean Time  

The asteroid flyby

I recommend this NASA broadcast which includes an interview with scientist Paul Chados explaining the similarities and differences between the two events.  He's from NASA’s Near Earth Object Program Office. “What an exciting day” he enthuses, “it's like a shooting gallery here, we have two rare events of Near Earth Objects approaching the Earth on the same day …”

Asteroid 2012 DA14 came nearer to the Earth yesterday than many communications satellites, which inhabit the geosynchronous ring shown in the diagramme above. (That's the orbit communications satellites use in order to appear stationary with respect to the Earth.)   At 45 metres wide, the space rock is the biggest ever observed object to swoop this close to Earth. Had it collided with the planet, it would have caused devastation akin to the 1908 Tunguska event that flattened 2000 square kilometres of trees in Siberia (photo bottom right).

Astronomers discovered DA14 a year ago and it's on an orbit round the Sun very close to the Earth’s. What's spooky to me is that for all we know it has been on this orbit since forever without anyone knowing until last year.

More about the Russian meteor

Russian officials put the number of people injured at almost 1,200, but seemingly only around 40 were taken to hospital (?), mostly as a result of flying glass shattered by the sonic boom created by the meteorite's descent, as people were drawn to their windows by the sound of explosions as the meteorite plunged to Earth in a series of fireballs just after sunrise. "There was a big explosion and then a series of little explosions. My first thought was that it was a plane crash" said one witness. There were no reported deaths.

The meteorite is thought to be 15m (about 48 feet) across, that’s one third the size of DA14. It entered the atmosphere travelling at a speed of at least 33,000 mph and broke up into chunks between 18 and 32 miles above the ground.

The event caused panic in Chelyabinsk, a city of more than 1 million people to the south of Russia's Ural mountains, as mobile phone networks swiftly became jammed by the volume of calls. The vapour trail was visible for hundreds of miles around.

Amateur video footage from the area showed the chunks of meteorite glowing more brightly as they approached the moment of impact.

Sources for Russian meteor: Guardian website yesterday, Russian Academy of Sciences (reported by Guardian) and Paul Chados of NASA.

Was the big march against Blair’s war in vain?

10 years today. The smudgy pink thing is my ticket to the biggest march in British history. I was bus monitor for bus no 19 from York. Or it might have been bus 17. I know it was a prime number. We sent 21 buses in all. Did we waste our time? Most people, even those who went, will tell you yes, but Peace News is trying to get us to think differently.

Peace News has dubbed 11 March 2003 Wobbly Tuesday, one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.  They say it’s time for the British anti-war movement to finally shake off the lie that the astonishing anti-war mobilisation of early 2003 had no effect whatsoever on the British government.

Though we all thought we had marched entirely in vain, the truth is that on Wobbly Tuesday the Blair government panicked. The Sunday Telegraph later reported that "Mr Hoon’s department [the ministry of defence] was frantically preparing contingency plans to 'disconnect' British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping." (Sunday Telegraph, 16 March)

This is taken from wobblytuesday.org a website set up by peace activist Milan Rai.

In the publicity for Ian Sinclair's The march that shook Blair: An oral history of 15 February 2003, to be launched later today, Peace News suggests that “on this evidence, the big march was shock and awe from the bottom up; it came within a hair’s breadth of derailing the warmongers and still shapes our politics today.”

Sadly when it comes to war a hair’s breadth is the difference between life an death.