Ghosts validated

Did St. Thomas Aquinas Believe in Ghosts? | Dominicana Blog

I found this blogpost via First Things.  It notes that St Thomas Aquinas, apart from allegedly having a couple of personal encounters with ghosts, did specifically endorse the idea of ghosts as souls who are allowed to appear to living humans.

I don't think I knew that...

Drought wars

Global drought may have changed less than thought | Environment | Science News

A new paper in Nature says that it seems that, globally, drought has not increased much, contrary to previous studies saying it has.  The problem is to do with how you assess drought.  The matter appears to remain controversial:

Sheffield and colleagues calculated global drought trends from 1950 to 2008 using both equations on multiple datasets. Notably, they found a much smaller change in drought using the Penman-Monteith equation. The estimated yearly drought increase was only half as severe as that derived from the Thornthwaite equation. The weather records invariably contain some errors, but Sheffield says those errors don’t alter the conclusion that the simpler model overestimates rises in global drying. 

The finding comes in stark opposition to the results of several recent studies. “It presented a somewhat different view of the drying trend for the last 60 years,” says Aiguo Dai, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, whose own research suggests that the two equations yield very little difference in drought estimates. Dai says the new study fails to consider trends in soil moisture and other variables. He also claims that the new study relies on outdated weather records and questionable radiation data. However, Sheffield and colleagues attribute the disagreement to inconsistencies in the weather data used by Dai and others.

“I think the jury’s still out on why those groups looking at similar metrics come to different conclusions,” says paleoclimatologist Kevin Anchukaitis of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who was not involved in either study.

More successful than I knew

Kickstarter: the crowdfunding site that wants to spark a creative revolution in the UK | Technology | The Guardian

It seems that crowdsourced funding for creative work has been more successful than I thought it would be:

Since the site launched in April 2009, more than 2.5 million people have helped to successfully back more than 30,000 creative projects. It has helped fund Oscar-nominated short films and put new products on the market. Earlier this year, the creators of a watch that can wirelessly connect to a smartphone raised more than $10m (£6m) on the site after being turned down by traditional investors. The singer Amanda Palmer raised $1.2m (£745,000) to record her album and tour; this week, the film director David Fincher reached his goal to fund part of an animated film. In October, a role-playing game developer raised nearly $4m (£2.5m) from more than 73,000 backers. The site estimates that around 10% of the films accepted into the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals this year were funded by Kickstarter.

Hyper about inflation

I don't claim to understand economics all that well:  but then again, it's a field in which the alleged experts  can't agree, particularly when it comes to predicting the future, so I shouldn't feel so bad about it.

One thing that I don't get in particular is the inflation argument.

Paul Krugman, amongst others, has been arguing for some time that the US could do with more inflation.  He says:

First, about inflation obsession: For at least three years, right-wing economists, pundits and politicians have been warning that runaway inflation is just around the corner, and they keep being wrong.

And indeed, sites full of right wing economists such as Catallaxy have been taking about inflation as a major concern, both now and last year.   (Sinclair Davidson appeared on Andrew Bolt more than a year ago to warn of the risk of stagflation for Australia.  It hasn't come to pass, even with the carbon tax.)

To take it to even greater extremes, aging science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle's reaction to the re-election of Obama (which he really didn't see coming) has been to start talking about hyperinflation and the wisdom of people stocking non perishable food and following his old survivalist guides written during the 80's before the end of the Cold War!   He usefully notes:

Interesting times. They can be made a bit less interesting if one has a large stock of non-perishable food acquired quietly and without drawing attention. You do not want your neighbors to believe you are hoarding. Hoarding is evil. Being prepared means protecting yourself from having the reputation of being a hoarder.

 I see from this 2010 story, about a silly video warning of hyperinflation, as well as other right wing obsessions, that it is a favourite topic for goldbugs.

Again, I don't know much about goldbugs, except for the fact that Jonova and her husband David Evans are well and truly in that category.  Apart from being quasi professional climate change denialists, it seems to be how they make their living.  

So - the credibility connections here aren't looking good.

And given England's dismal economic recovery, which Krugman puts down to them not taking his Keynesian line, who am I to doubt him on this issue too?   (Actually, I suspect he is a bit too hard line in his own direction, but overall, seems to me he certainly has it over the right wing economists at the moment.) 

I don't think I am going to bother with the canned food hoarding just yet.

More about Fukushima fish

Ocean still suffering from Fukushima fallout 

Nature reports:

Whether originating from plankton or sediment, the contamination is finding its way into the food chain. Bottom-dwelling fish in the Fukushima area show radioactivity levels above the limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram set by the Japanese government. Greenlings, for example, have been found to have levels as high as 25,000 becquerels per kilogram. But the contamination varies widely between species. Octopuses and squid seem to have escaped contamination, whereas other fish such as red snapper and sea bass are only sometimes found to be contaminated. Overall, the levels of caesium in fish and marine life seem to have begun dropping slightly this autumn, says Tomowo Watanabe, an oceanographer with the Fisheries Research Agency in Yokohama.

The implications are serious for the fishing industry, which lost an estimated ¥100 billion to ¥200 billion (US$1.3 billion to $2.6 billion) in 2011 as a result of the accident. Many fisheries remain closed, and because of the persistent contamination "we can't answer the basic question of when these fisheries will be able to open", says Woods Hole oceanographer Ken Buesseler.

Elsewhere in Nature, the extraordinary cost of the clean up of the reactors is noted:

 On 7 November, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, announced that cleaning up the ruined reactors and surrounding countryside could cost ¥10 trillion (US$126 billion) — double the size of the clean-up fund set aside by the government.

Partial eclipse in Brisbane 2012

Taken just about 10 minutes ago from our balcony:

  

I just watched the total eclipse in Cairns on TV.  Very nice.

The Revenge of the Supa Nerds

On Sunday my son wanted to go to this year's Supanova (which bills itself as a Pop Culture Expo) at the RNA Showgrounds.   As this is the last year he would get in free, and some of his mates' Dads were taking them, it seemed worth a shot.  Actually, he really only wanted to go because he  thought it would have computer games on display, even though I warned him I thought it was more about nerds dressing up. I was right.

I didn't take too many photos, as I did not really know how to ask permission of people to take a photo without indicating that I was doing so to later mock them.  (I think a couple of blokes dressed up - non satirically as far as I could tell - as Japanese anime girls were the worst.)  But some people who put effort in were worthy of a pic:

Obviously, the family that nerds together, stays together.

There was quite a large contingent of the Star Wars Redback Garrison, which claims to have 100 members through Queensland. (!)

The Rebel Legion (the good guys) on the other hand appear to only have 94 Australia wide.  Truly, the dark side must have its appeal.




As you might expect, Doctor Who also made an appearance, with a Tardis courtesy of Hire A Tardis available.   "...very popular at Weddings, Corporate Events as a crowd gatherer or Childrens Parties" says the website.   Why have I never been invited to a Doctor Who themed wedding, I wonder...

And, of course, there was a Dalek, although its best feature was the "Dalek Parking Only" sign on the wall.



But for the really, really odd idea, you could hardly go past the life size (?) Zetan alien models, which you could buy on the spot for (if I recall correctly) $440.  A bargain if 1/10 the price:

More information available from the Zetan.net website.  If a rich person with too much money is reading this, if you buy me a set of 5, I'll quite happily use them for a Christmas Nativity scene in my front yard this year.

I'm sounding fairly cynical, I guess, but really, I wasn't quite prepared for the full extent of nerd-dom on display.   I found a couple of times that dress up funsters volunteering to run the show make for fairly cranky crowd Nazis, even when it's not very crowded.  I started to approach one stall (not knowing really what it was selling) from the wrong side, at a time when there was in fact no customers at the tables, only to have a young woman rush up and insert herself between me and the bored salespersons saying "Are you here to buy tokens?"    As tokens were only for people wanting to pay for (mostly B grade) actor autographs, I said "No".  "Well, this is only for the sale of tokens, so don't go there."  I expect that this was one of her rare moments in life of being able to exert authority, however unnecessary it was to do so at this particular time.

One part of the show which was of more interest was the artists area, where there were quite a few comic and graphic artists, with their comics and books.   There are more people around doing their own comics and graphic novels than I realised; although it also seemed a little depressing to see that it seems difficult it is in this country to make a living out of it.   I can only assume that Japan would be the ideal type of society for them, where the consumption and admiration for graphic art (via manga and animation) must be at least of an order of magnitude greater than it is here.   I have never seen any documentary about how many people are involved in that industry in Japan; it would be interesting to know more about how they manage to put out so much comic art so regularly.

I did have a chat to a young woman, Caitlan Major, who had studied animation, and made a short film after not being able to find work.  It's pretty good (and certainly looks great).  Maybe a bit too deep and meaningful for its own good, but you can watch it for yourself and decide:



 At the end of the visit, we went and saw a little bit of the official dress up competition, where the entries really did need to put a lot of effort into it:

It's not a great photo, but I was at the back, where a young female helper told me we couldn't stand there but had to go to the side.  While standing at the side, she re-appeared to tell me we weren't standing far enough up along the side.   She was slightly nicer about it than the first female who threw herself between me and a stall with no one around it, but still, I felt it best to retreat out of the auditorium altogether.

So, it was interesting.   The nearest thing it reminded me of was the Medieval Fair that is held yearly north of Brisbane.  (My post about visiting that for the first time is here.)  Even though I thought it odd that there are many clubs for people devoted to the hobby of dressing and living like people from centuries past,  I could understand how this was a hobby that could involve detailed research about historical matters, and involve developing skills that are not common and have their own fascination.

People at Supanova, however, who just want to copy the look of characters in fictional movies, anime or TV, appeared to me to have much more of a "look at me" neediness about them; as a group, I didn't think they seemed as happy as those camping out in medieval gear.

Still, worth a visit, once.  I got to see Billy West, the voice of Bender in Futurama.  No photos allowed, however.

Big furry butt of the week

Time for a new possum photo:

Surely the teenage possum (facing us) is going to get the hint to leave home soon....

A handy Krugman summary

Delusions of Reason - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman had a short post at his blog summarising the problem with the current Republican Party:

Brad likes to tell the (second-hand) tale of Larry Lindsey arriving at the Council of Economic Advisers in 2001 and declaring that the people who really understood economics had arrived. A lot of 1-percent Romney supporters believed that only the unwashed masses could actually believe that Obama was making more sense on economic policy. And so on.

What’s so strange about this is that everything — everything — that has happened for the past decade has demonstrated the opposite. Modern Republicans are devotees of faith-based analysis on every front. On economics, in particular, they are devoted to supply-side fantasies that keep being refuted by evidence — and their reaction is to try to suppress the evidence. They’ve spent pretty much the whole past four years issuing dire warnings about inflation and soaring interest rates that keep not coming true; they cling to the belief that if only a Republican were in office we’d have a 1982-style recovery even though economists who actually studied past financial crises predicted the slow recovery in advance.

And don’t even get me started on climate change.

The truth is that the modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment. Yet there are some wannabe intellectuals who delude themselves into believing that they have aligned themselves with the party of objective (as opposed to Objectivist) analysis.

You might think that the election debacle would force some reconsideration. But I doubt it; if the financial crisis didn’t do it, nothing will.

Well, "the rollback of the Enlighenment" might be taking it one step too far, but generally speaking, it's hard to disagree that on both science and economics, the Right in the US seems more devoted to ideology than evidence.

 

A bit of a breathing space?

Greenland ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise buffered by meltwater storage in firn : Nature 

This is quite an interesting abstract about what is happening to melt water in Greenland.   It's possibly not contributing much to sea level rise at the moment because a lot it may be sinking, filling in gaps in the partly compacted snow (know as "firn" - you learn something every day) and refreezing.

The article estimates that this process may go on for decades as a buffering effect to the contribution to sea level rise, although it also notes that " once the pore space is filled it cannot quickly be regenerated."

Small fungus: big change

UK unveils plan to fight deadly ash disease : Nature News 

It sounds like quite a  major forestry change is underway in England:

The UK government today announced an action plan to control the spread of “ash dieback”, a disease caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, but this will not stop the pathogen from killing up to 99% of the ash trees in the country, say scientists.

Diseased trees in nurseries — and those which have been newly-planted — will be identified and destroyed. Mature trees will be left standing, as the disease is not spread from tree to tree but via leaf litter. An import ban on ash trees, implemented at the end of October, will remain in place.

This however will not eradicate the disease from the United Kingdom. “There is absolutely no magic wand we can wave to make this disappear,” environment secretary Owen Paterson said at a press briefing in London this morning. Ash is the third most common tree in the UK, and with as many as 90 million ash trees at risk, the shape of the British countryside will be irreversibly changed.

 I thought that perhaps someone has pointed the finger at climate change for this fungus spreading, but my Googling around indicates this is not a connection that is really being made - yet. 

Save the mice

I had missed in my previous reading about the New York hurricane that there were actually thousands of lives lost - of mice and rats in the basement at New York University.

The BBC notes that this is bad news for research:

The genetically modified mice and rats were being used to study illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, autism and schizophrenia.

The animal colonies at the Smilow Research Center in Kips Bay were considered among the most important of their type in the US.

In shades of the inadequate planning for disasters reminiscent of Fukushima (well, they both involve ocean flooding,) the building the rodents were in was supposed to be designed to resist such problems:

The Smilow, which opened in 2006, can withstand a storm surge of about 3.7 metres — 20% higher than that expected from a once-per-century flood, according to the NYU. Now that Sandy has overtopped those defences, officials say that they will be assessing what they can do differently in the future.

 As pointed out in the Reuters report on this, lab animals appears to often be in the firing line when hurricanes strike America:

All told, said NYU spokeswoman Jessica Guenzel, the biomedical facility lost 7,660 cages of mice and 22 cages of rats. Each cage houses between one and seven animals, she said.

"This happens again and again and (research labs) never learn," said Fran Sharples, director of the Board on Life Sciences at the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences (NAS).  "Anybody with half a brain knows you do a site-specific analysis" to understand the risk of disasters, she said, "and it's really stupid to put your animals in the basement if you're in a flood zone."

It's not as if scientists didn't have recent lessons in the risk of natural disasters to biomedical research, she said. In 2001, tens of thousands of mice and scores of monkeys and dogs were lost when Hurricane Allison struck Houston; and in 2005, some 10,000 lab animals drowned when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

 I wonder if Queensland University, which I assume has its share of lab rats, did better than that last year during the Brisbane floods.

Simple mussels

How to cook perfect moules marinieres | Life and style | The Guardian

I now find myself enjoying Felicity Cloakes' Guardian blog which usually talks just a little too much about how to do some of the classic recipes.   Here she tackles the simplest recipe for mussels, and  actually does it with relative restraint.  One English cook apparently suggests using cider instead of wine.  Not sure how that would go, but I'm willing to try, if my wife approves.

Echo...echo......echo

The future of the Republican Party: What not to do | The Economist

I liked this paragraph in above short bit of commentary in The Economist:

 SEVERAL of my colleagues have written characteristically incisive pieces about what lessons the Republicans should take from losing an eminently winnable election. Over at the Corner, Michael Walsh and Mark Krikorian recommend a few lessons of their own. For Mr Walsh, the number one lesson learned from Tuesday's defeat is that "the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos." That's number one! "Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation," he writes, as if no such enterprises exist. The best-rated cable-news channel is Fox! Five of the top ten radio programmes (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Neal Boortz) are conservative! Messrs Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al have spent the last four years telling their listeners that Mr Obama is an incompetent Kenyan-Marxist-Muslim-Commie-Socialist doomed to defeat. Such sentiments soothe their listeners and are good for ratings, but the parts about incompetence and imminent defeat turned out to be false. The problem is not that conservatives lack media outlets; the problem comes when they fail to venture outside of them.

And words of wisdom from the Lexington blog at the same magazine:

Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.

It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.

Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.

Spielberg gets it right, apparently

Lincoln - Rotten Tomatoes

A bit to my surprise, given how dull and over-earnest Spielberg's last attempt at American costume history was (Amistad), there is strong consensus amongst the American critics that his Lincoln is very good.   Most reviews single out Daniel Day Lewis as being exceptionally good in the title role.  In fact, he sounds like a certainty for an Oscar nomination.

Given that the reviews also admit that it is a wordy film, you would have to wonder whether it will succeed at the box office.  And also, given the Obama victory, Spielberg's liberal reputation, and the film's concentration on compromise and deal making in politics, I suspect wingnutty types will give it a wide berth over fear of it being too "liberal."   (The slightest suggestion that Lincoln might have been attracted to men, which one gay guy writing in Slates thinks is in the film, will probably also annoy those on the far Right, perhaps.)   But again, I could be wrong.

Update:  the Slate articles on whether his wife was crazy, and what the real life characters in the film looked like, are well worth a look too. In particular, if you want a bit of a fright, have a look at the real life photo of Francis Preston Blair Snr.  Looks like proof that Lincoln had to fight zombies, if not vampires!

Update 2:  Ha!  As I predicted, the first really derisive review of the movie ("It’s a hopeless bore that, in an attempt to humanize an icon, turns him into a mere politician") is to be found on PJ Lifestyle - part of the Right wing PJ Media site.

I'll be on the look out for more sour grapes reviews of the movie from right wing reviewers.

Stewart enjoys the win

You can watch Jon Stewart on the Daily Show ripping into Fox News after the election win here:



After that, you might be a bit surprised and amused at just how derisive some at MSNBC felt they could be about the losers and their supporters:



Then I suggest that you read the list of "10 wrongest predictions" about the election outcome*, followed by how well uber wingnut Ted Nugent took the loss.  ("Not well" is the short answer.)

*  I used to think Peggy Noonan had relatively good judgement as a conservative-ish columnist, but her writing on how great Romney was going in the lead up to the election has convinced me otherwise.

The Obama win

It's not as if I think Obama has been an outstanding President, but looking at the current state of the Republicans, he certainly deserved re-election over them.

There's a lot of good commentary about this around with which I agree:  William Saletan shows how Obama has really acted like a moderate Republican of the past; Thomas Friedman correctly predicted that the election would show that Americans want centrist governments; and even Ross Douthat said that the Republicans failed to take Obama seriously as an opponent because of their belief that their cause was just obvious:

 You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous, in the way so many voices on the right sought to raise the ideological stakes at every opportunity, in the widespread conviction that the starker conservatives made the choice between left and right, the more votes they would win.

 As for how the Right is reacting in the blogosphere:  well, it seems to me a significant number are currently playing the extraordinarily unwise game of "blame the voters".  Take Roger Simon at PJ Media for example:

But even with that luck [Hurricane Sandy] you would think the electorate would have the brains (self-preservation really) to put him out of office.

So we have a problem with democracy. It’s not working or, more specifically, has been turned on its end, with the masses manipulated against their own self-interest, creating power elites similar to those described in Milovan Djilas’ The New Class.

How did that happen? I think many of us know there are three pillars of our own destruction: the educational system, the media and entertainment (the popular arts).

 See, the problem is not the Right, it's that the masses have been brainwashed by schools, the media and movies to just not be able to understand how magnificently correct the Right is.  The same attitude is currently also on abundant display on the allegedly "centre right" blog Catallaxy, where, as it happens (if Florida goes to Obama, as appears likely) I correctly predicted the final electoral college Obama tally of 332.

One thing is for sure:  it the Right doesn't become more evidence based and pragmatic, it is on the path for future irrelevancy in the US.  

Johnson speaks

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs summarises his feelings about the Republican Party:

The Republican Party … well, if you’ve been reading the site for the past couple of years you know what I think about them. They’re lost in cloud cuckoo land in so many ways and on so many levels, there’s just no doubt that they represent a serious danger to the future prosperity of this country — not just for their magical thinking on economics, but in their denial of many areas of modern science (based on either religious fanaticism or cynical political calculation for personal profit), their continuing, relentless attempts to roll back progress on women’s reproductive rights, and the shockingly prevalent racism and xenophobia that have bubbled up to the surface in a highly disturbing way since the election of our first black President.

At this point, it’s not even really about Mitt Romney, although he’s an especially cynical example of the Republican brand.   Nobody the GOP could prop up and nominate would ever convince me to vote for a Republican in the foreseeable future, because of what the party as a whole represents: reactionary paranoia, manifesting as authoritarian rule whenever they gain power.

In my life, I’ve voted twice for Republican presidents, and Democrats every other time — and the second time I voted for a Republican (John McCain) it was with grave misgivings.

I’ll have no misgivings at all about casting my vote for Barack Obama.

 I didn't recall that he had voted for McCain.  That's funny, given how despised he is now on the wingnuttery side of the blogosphere.

Regardless of where he has been in the past, most of what he says now sounds about right.  (Well, OK, the bit about authoritarian rule is a bit over the top, and if Americans want to have laws that discourage abortion, that's up to them, although if the same pro-lifers are against reliable contraception being readily available, then I have no patience with them.)  The Republicans need a thorough clean out of the Tea Party side, and come back to common sense, moderate right wing views on science and economics, and compromise for the common good.

Impetuous from before you were born

Prenatal testosterone levels influence later response to reward

I don't know:  it seems a bit depressing to read studies indicating that certain character traits come from such random-ish sounding things like the level of testosterone early in pregnancy:

Although present at low levels in females, testosterone is one of the primary sex hormones that exerts substantial influence over the emergence of differences between males and females. In adults and adolescents, heightened testosterone has been shown to reduce fear, lower sensitivity to punishment, increase risk-tasking, and enhance attention to threat. These effects interact substantially with context to affect social behavior.

 This knowledge about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood suggests that it is related to influencing the balance between approach and avoidance behavior. These same behaviors are heightened in the teenage years and also emerge in extremes in many neuropsychiatric conditions, including conduct disorder, depression, substance abuse, autism, and psychopathy.

Beware the lead

Boys' sickness traced to an old crystal decanter

Alicia had been storing her expressed milk in an old crystal glass decanter - the type of family heirloom found in many Australian households.

But the brilliant old-fashioned crystalware, created by combining molten quartz with lead compounds, was slowly leaching lead into her milk.

It was making her twin boys sick.  It's an odd use to put the family crystal to, though.

This reminds me, there was once an episode of a medically themed show - I think it was Doogie Howser MD (before we realised he might have secretly had a thing for Vinnie) - in which an elderly woman's illness turned out to be lead poisoning from using some plates and bowls she got from (I think) Mexico.  It was a valuable lesson for doctors about sitting down and spending hours chatting about anything with their ill patients who have hard to diagnose problems, or something like that.  Or maybe it was an advertisement for more thorough toxicological testing when you can't tell what's going on.  One or the other.

Actually, I wonder if lead poisoning is more readily recognised in Australia than the US.  As this recent report noted, lead levels in kids in older Australian houses being renovated can often be a real problem.   In fact, I know of someone whose young daughter got dangerous levels many years ago before he had heard of this danger.   The first he knew something was wrong was the dog getting wobbly in the legs. 

Lead is nasty stuff.  Recently its continued use in shooting game birds in England was noted as a potential health problem too.  And even for those waterbirds that aren't shot, they often ingest lead shot and it can kill them.  The lead shot is not supposed to be used, but the law is apparently widely ignored.

I see that lead shot is also banned for hunting in Australia.  I wonder if our hunters are following that law?