[jules' pics] 12/31/2010 04:39:00 AM

Fuji-san on New Year's Eve, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Last sunset of 2010, and some nice parallel waves.

[Fuji-san from Kamakura
- and the lighthouse on Enoshima Island is visible!]

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/31/2010 04:39:00 AM

Food glorious food

Having snarked at Japanese cuisine, I should redress the balance with a bit of well-deserved praise. I think I mentioned previously (oh yes, here) that the 2011 Michelin guide was supposed to expand from its previous focus on Tokyo to cover not only Yokohama but also Kamakura. I was a bit surprised as Kamakura mostly caters to day-trippers looking for a quick snack, though it is also quite a prosperous area - one of the nicest places you can live within commuting range of Tokyo.

Anyway, the guide is now out - or at least, being promoted in press releases - and there are indeed 10 restaurants in Kamakura that have been awarded one star each. And I was a little surprised, though perhaps I shouldn't have been to find that one of them is a place we frequent quite regularly, Hachinoki in Kita-Kamakura, which is an excellent shojin-ryori (Zen buddhist vegan) restaurant just outside the major Zen temple of Kencho-ji. It's an obvious place to take visitors (hi Andy) and there's also a pleasant walk directly though the hills from our house to the back of the temple which makes a relaxing morning trip. So I hope everyone is thoroughly impressed that we took them to a Michelin-starred restaurant during their visits! Actually according to Hachinoki's website the star seems to have been awarded to one other branches of the restaurant, there are 3 all quite close together, but I'm sure they are much the same (though one isn't actually vegan). For any reader(s) who went to the PMIP meeting in Kyoto, we think Hachinoki is better than the similar style shojin-ryori meal we had in Daitoku-ji temple, but it doesn't have an onsen so close by :-)

Incidentally, the PMIP meeting itself was also a bit of a tour de force of Japanese cuisine - one night we had boiled tofu at Nanzen-ji temple (at which various people were heard to mutter "when's the meat course coming", though it was not actually wholly vegetarian due to the sashimi starter), then next night the vegan shojin-ryori, and finally a shabu-shabu meal where we actually had some thin slices of meat to cook. Some people who had better remain nameless resorted to regular McDonalds visits, "but two of them were only for ice cream so that doesn't really count". That still leaves 3 Big Macs and fries, Dan, and you were only there for 5 days. I must admit even we searched out the local St Arbucks one morning for breakfast, but only because we went out for a morning run and couldn't face precisely the same hotel breakfast for the nth day in a row, honest...

I don't know any of the other Michelin-starred restaurants in Kamakura, and most of them don't look very exciting - almost all standard Japanese fare of the type that I try to avoid at weekends, with one obligatory overpriced French restaurant thrown into the mix. Our favourite remains T-Side, whose head chef was coincidentally featured in an article in the Japan Times recently (oops wrong link fixed). But currently we've got a pound of duck fat in the fridge to work though, the remains of a lovely Iwate-bred Japanese duck that I ordered from the local supermarket for our Christmas lunch.

[jules' pics] Cricket

James doesn't hold with black and white, so here he is proving that autumnal colour in Kamakura carries on past Christmas.

There are, however, no surroundings that can demand attention over the iPod and furry internet connection while The Ashes are being played.

[Both photos taken at top Zen temple, Kenchoji, on 27th December - my birthday!]

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/29/2010 11:15:00 PM

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

Cheap shot I know, but hard to resist. This is the Indescribablyboring from March 2000:

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

[...]

Professor Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, says that even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important.

"We don't really have wolves in Europe any more, but they are still an important part of our culture and everyone knows what they look like," he said.

David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes - or eventually "feel" virtual cold.

Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.

Of course snow falling always has and always will cause chaos in Britain. Until it stops falling completely, which may now be a few years further away than was previously thought :-)

(for those who've been living in a cave for the last few years, or at least outside the UK, it appears that in fact reports of the demise of snowfall are greatly exaggerated, at least according to the winters of 2008, 2009 and 2010).

Actually, it's better than that, because the latest research is that all this snowfall is actually more proof of global warming after all! I await with amusement the reaction of the detection and attribution community to this proof that all their results are bogus, since they have already proved that the "warmer winters" are being caused by anthropogenic global warming (eg here, a paper I just saw today). Personally, while I accept it's theoretically possible for AGW to cause some localised cooling (at least on a temporary basis), my money is on the D&A results for the time being. Invest in Scottish skiing resorts (at least for the long term) at your peril...

(and as a footnote to the pedants, I know there doesn't necessarily have to be a contradiction between snowfall and warmth, but in fact this December has been not only snowy but also perhaps the coldest since records began in the UK).

Laugh? I nearly choked on my kani-jaga-mayo pizza

For those who aren't up on the lingo, kani = crab, jaga = potato and mayo, yes, mayo is mayonnaise. And rest assured that the title is not some gruesome post-Christmas culinary fantasy brought on by overindulgence, but one of the top billing choices of pizza on the flyer of the local "Pizza-La" delivery chain. Alternatives include crab, macaroni, corn and white sauce, or teriyaki chicken, seaweed, corn and mayonnaise, or...well I think you get the message. It makes me feel slightly queasy just typing it.

So I couldn't help but laugh at the latest installment of the "sushi police" as reported in the Torygraph

Now, Mr Kanda along with a string of leading Japanese sushi experts have declared war on so-called "pseudo sushi" in Europe – food which claims to be sushi in countless high street cafes, supermarkets and restaurants but in fact bears little resemblance to what is found in Japan.

Early next year, the sushi tsars will open Europe's first sushi academy in London devoted to professionally training chefs in a bid to correct increasingly erroneous misconceptions of what sushi should consist of.

"The Italians would never allow their pizzas not to be perfectly crusty outside Italy," said Mr Kanda. "The French are also protective of their cuisine. We want to do the same with Japanese food. There is no quality control at the moment."

I can only charitably assume that he has never lowered himself to the level of eating pizza - or indeed any sort of foreign food - in Japan. (not that "crustiness" is specifically the issue here, other than that of the men who think they should attempt to control what gets eaten around the world...)

[jules' pics] 12/22/2010 03:37:00 AM

Gavin, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Gavin insists that more images of people should appear on this blog. Wouldn't do to disobey Gavin. Hee heee.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/22/2010 03:37:00 AM

[jules' pics] 12/20/2010 08:33:00 PM

The Beatles break America, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

It seems that a popular music band from Liverpool called "now on iTunes" have broken the USA. There were huge banners all over San Francisco advertising them, including the one in the centre of this photo, which looms over Union Square.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/20/2010 08:33:00 PM

AGU part 2

On with the show!

Perhaps it's best to blog a little after the event, as it gives time for the boring and disappointing bits to fade away, leaving a more positive overall impression. And with an 11h flight I have ample time to wax lyrical about the good bits too, rather than struggling to scribble something down in a spare moment. Indeed I now see on checking through my notes that there were a couple of interesting talks on Tuesday, that I didn't mention before, in the section on uncertainty quantification. First Carol Snyder presented an unusually high estimate of climate sensitivity based on paleo data, which appears to hinge on a strong estimated LGM cooling. Not that this makes her wrong of course, but the previous week, Andreas Schmittner had presented a somewhat contrary result at the PMIP meeting, so I will email them to try to identify the discrepancy. Derek Lemoine also presented some evidence, probably compatible with Frank et al (who spoke in the morning), supporting a lowish (but positive) carbon cycle feedback at the bottom end of the model range. Jules went to a session on geoengineering where everyone seems to be trying to prove that even if we could restrain the rise in global mean temperature, it was only by screwing up all regional patterns of rainfall.

Wednesday

On Wednesday morning I started off at writers corner, where several authors of popular science books discussed their work and/or their lives. And then at the end of this session we had Greg Craven. It tended rather to the hysterical, and I don't mean that in a good way. My complete unabridged notes on his presentation read "I am insane. Apocalpyse soon." although in the interests of fairness I should point out that only the first sentence was a direct quote, the second was merely my personal summary of events. Perhaps the most I should say is that since Stephen Mosher wrote in detail about how much he didn't like the panel discussion later that day, I can only assume that he did not attend the prior presentations. I actually walked out of the panel discussion at the point that Greg started telling an uppity woman (president of some equal opportunities organisation, no less) that she had said her piece and could she please shut up and sit down. Pot, meet kettle. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, gave a sensible talk that I found interesting, if not too earth-shattering. He argued that scientists have a general duty to engage with the public, and even if we didn't want to do it individually, we can't necessarily avoid it in a world where merely being a climate scientist puts us in the firing line. However, under the rubric of "engaging" he discussed a wide range of options, and I was amused to see him list blogging as ranking higher than merely participating in assessments such as the IPCC and NAS :-) He also emphasised the importance of only speaking in areas where you had earnt credibility based on your published record, which formed an interesting backdrop to Judith Curry's talk later that day. She devoted her time to accusing the IPCC of ignoring the tails of the pdfs of climate sensitivity that were clearly presented in the very figure that she repeatedly referred to and explicitly emphasised in the summary ("values substantially higher than 4.5C cannot be excluded"), then read out a few cartoons and finally, literally out of nowhere, concluded that therefore they had underestimated the magnitude of decadal variability and that their detection and attribution results were unsound! Really, I'm not making this up, it was actually how it happened. These latter topics were first introduced on her concluding slide and there was no hint of supporting argument. She also talked about the "modal falsification" of Betz 2009, (which I haven't read but just googled now, is there a free version somewhere?) so I asked if and how this "falsification" (and she used the scare quotes herself) was distinct from assigning a low posterior probability in a Bayesian sense. She replied that it could be considered the same, at which point some of the audience were shaking their heads and others were nodding in agreement. From which I conclude that nobody, including Judith, knows what Judith means. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to be anywhere to be found at the end of the session and I didn't see her at any of the other relevant sessions where people actually dealing with these sorts of issues were actually presenting concrete results.

Thursday

There was more communication stuff on Thursday morning, much along the lines of wailing about how nasty everyone (well, Republicans and/or denialists, at least) was being to climate scientists, and how we need to educate everyone about the Truth of climate change. Which of course is true to some extent, but I'm not really convinced it is worth the time and energy that was devoted to it at the AGU. Tim Palmer gave a really good Bjerknes Lecture, which I nearly didn't go to as I've seen most of the content before (at the INI) but I'm glad I did as it seemed much better this time round. Of course, as he mentioned, it was a sort of anti-Bjerknes lecture in some ways, because the eponymous scientist was firmly rooted in the deterministic world and Tim is very much in the probabilistic/ensemble forecasting mould (as everyone in NWP has to be, of course, and I'm sure Bjerknes would agree were he around today). In fact Tim is a strong and convincing advocate of the use of stochastic parameterisations in climate models, which formed the main content of his talk. I agree they are a good idea and must remember to mention some time that Jim Hansen used a random number generator in the cloud scheme of his 1984 model :-) One of the numerous modelling groups here is using a more modern equivalent, so I don't think it's something that people are particularly hostile to. Where I part company with Tim is in his advocacy of a single coordinated model-building effort, which to be fair he hardly mentioned this time. I think it is clear that even with stochastic physics, we would still need a range of different models to investigate our uncertainty in long-term climate change meaningfully, and Suki Manabe made exactly this point in his inimitable style in the questions after the talk.

After lunch there was even more on communication. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or not, but the session discussing how to cope with this blogospheric "other" that scientists don't really understand was running in parallel with a panel of science bloggers offering advice to those who were prepared to join in. I only stayed for a little of the latter, it was pretty anodyne stuff. As jules noted, they all seemed to be "normal" geoscientists, none of them were involved in the post-normal world of climate science so their take on questions of debate, argument and abuse seemed somewhat rose-tinted to me. Not that that should put anyone off who is considering getting involved. I also thought their attitude towards discussing on-going and unpublished work was rather 20th century.

Then it was time for us to head off to defend our posters, which we had planned for beer o'clock to ease the pain. Unlike the EGU where the poster session was arranged every evening, here the poster session was scheduled for a full half-day (4h20m) out of which you were supposed to pick at least an hour that you would be there. Of course this is horribly inefficient and made it very hard to meet specific people, though perhaps there were enough random encounters that it didn't matter and a good poster should be pretty self-explanatory anyway. I didn't have that many visitors but made up for that by having long chats with several of them.

Friday

Friday was probably the most fun, with lots of sessions on using data together with models. First the reanalysis session, where various improvements and new analyses were presented. There are still lots of problems with inhomogeneities in observations which make the trends in precipitation extremely dubious - even at the global average scale, different analyses gave substantially different results. Jules heard about various attempts at carbon sequestration, but it wasn't clear if they would be practical and effective. Then in the afternoon there was a big session on using observations to test and validate models, which is of course right up our street. There is a big push for more of this in the context of the CMIP5 model runs, and it seems there will be some basket of comparisons proposed although it must be remembered that no-one actually knows what particular features are important in improving model predictions. As well as a number of fairly detailed and specific studies Wendy Parker spoke about the broader context of how we could think about model adequacy and performance. There had already been a whole session on more philosophical aspects of model interpretation which I did not attend but jules did, I think many people are generally aware of the issues, but struggling to find concrete solution. Anyway, I didn't think that anyone presented anything particularly earth-shattering in this session but unlike some of the other more disappointing parts earlier in the week, they were at least presenting some new ideas and results, rather than either merely re-reading an old long-published paper I already knew about (which are few had done) or else talking vaguely about what they were hoping to do in the next few years. I also stuck my oar in with a few questions and comments, which at least made it interesting to me :-) I also have a few more things to chase up with some of the speakers via emails as I didn't quite understand what they had done, or perhaps why they had done it.

So in the end I suppose the whole thing was quite fun and I'm certainly happier on the plane on the way home than I was a few days ago when I wrote the previous post. Given that we were tired before we even started (following on directly from the PMIP meeting in Kyoto last week) and that jules came down with a cold that hung around all week, we are glad to be heading home. In fact our devotion to duty is such that we turned down the offer of $800 each to get bumped off the plane which was over-booked. Maybe we should have taken the money and gone straight back to the Mac store but we are sufficiently worn out that another day of sightseeing in SF (especially given the rain) didn't really appeal. Jamstec would also have had a fit of course, which almost tipped the balance in favour of staying, but not quite. And anyway, they've already bought us everything that the Mac store sells :-)

[jules' pics] Spot the difference

PMIP - Kyoto [Tofukuji]

AGU - San Francisco [Moscone Center (sic)]

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/18/2010 05:58:00 AM

AGU aftermath

I know, I haven't actually blogged much of the content yet. I will try to work through my notes on the flight. Which thankfully we have managed to check in to on-line, jules having eventually guessed that the seats were booked in the name of Annan, Jamesdouglas and Hargreaves, Juliacatherine. These are not, needless to say, either the names in our passports or those that we were christened with! The joys of Japanese confusion over naming conventions never ceases to amuse... As a result of this, on the way out we were both unpleasantly stuck in centre-block seats in different rows, this time we should be together at the exit row with a bit of leg room. That's assuming we get though the security groping unscathed. Usually we are treated with extra suspicion, presumably due to perfectly fitting the profile of international tourists with weapons of maths instruction. No, I'm not going to make any such jokes at the airport.



Most of the reason for writing this is as a reminder to myself for next time, that there is an alternative at the Thirsty Bear to standing in the crowded bar area shouting at/with drunk scientists and failing to get served at the bar. I realise this makes me sound like an old fuddy-duddy (as does using the term "fuddy-duddy") but Americans are REALLY LOUD. No, I mean REALLY REALLY LOUD. DANGEROUSLY, INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH LOUD. ESPECIALLY IN BARS. ARE YOUR EARS HURTING YET?

Now where was I? Oh yes, I must also remember for next time that the best of their beers is probably the plain old Brown Bear (jules liked the stout too). The more exotic things don't always come off quite as well, and some are a bit too strong to be quaffable in the British style. It's all better than the stuff we had elsewhere though, including the inexplicably popular Anchor Steam and some other IPA which, like last time, reminded us of rather amateurish homebrew. Oh, and the beer service at the posters starts at 3:30 and ends shortly thereafter when it runs out, so get there sharp. That's also only Anchor Steam, but it's free...

As for the conference, well it had its moments, though perhaps a few fewer than we might have hoped for during such a large affair. I got to meet a handful of new people which was useful and interesting, and re-meet a few others, which is always worth doing. But to be honest, I wasn't here so much for the science as to spend some budget as quickly and easily as possible (and hopefully at least with some benefits), and it was a roaring success on that front. I know that will probably outrage some people in these times of straitened circumstances, but bear in mind that this is only Japanese money. In fact it's not even Japanese taxpayers' money really, just stuff the Govt prints and makes us spend to keep the economy afloat. If we didn't spend it, the whole house of cards might fall down.

Now just one Eggs Benedict to force down before we head off to the airport...