Appleyard on the riots

One Hot Breath | Bryan Appleyard

I had been wondering what Bryan Appleyard would say about the recent British riots, and now I know.

He notes that it has made him feel as left as he ever has in his adult life, and he looks back at the role of Milton Friedman's influence. An interesting take, anyway.

A an odd app

The Book Bench: The Victorianator : The New Yorker

I thought of Tim, the only bushranger, right wing, cat and chicken wrangling pub poet and zine creator in all of Australia:

Here’s how it works: a poem appears on the screen of your iPhone (you need an iPhone for this app). You read the poem aloud into the phone (using the speaker setting) in a monotone. Then a steampunk robot takes you through a series of gestures that produce voice effects on the poem you just read. So, for example, sweeping an arm toward the sky will raise the pitch of the poem, whereas extending your arm will extend the sound of the word. The variations in pitch make the poem sound like it’s being read by an eminent Victorian; you’re scored on how closely your gestures match the robot’s.

I thought he would like that, wouldn't he, Tim?

Exhibition report 2011

I missed the Ekka last year – I think we were about to go to Sydney at the time – so last Sunday it was off for a full day of

with just a few other

Actually, they really have to do something about that showbag place: it’s too small and was really dangerously crowded on the day we went.  I think later in the week they did limit the number of people in there at any one time.  I miss the now demolished old Industrial Pavilion (just the facade has been kept, and a new convention type facility is being built, but I can’t tell for sure if showbags are going to be back in the new building.)

In fact, I hold some fear for the atmosphere of the show in future, having seen a model of the redevelopment this year.  For those readers outside of Brisbane:  the shows grounds are pretty close to the inner city, and as they don’t get used all that much for most of the year, the Council and State government had been trying for a long time to get the RNA to turn it into high density residential, and move out to some other site for the Ekka; pretty much as happened in Sydney.   However, the RNA owns the land outright, and instead has come up with the idea of building apartments around the site, along with some commercial retail,  but still leaving enough exhibition style buildings to run the show there every year.  This is going to take 15 years to achieve.  

As far as I could tell from the model on display,  the apartments are going to go on the outer edges of  the grounds,  which seemingly means demolishing the (admittedly unremarkable) wood buildings current used for cows and horses during the show.  It seemed as if a lot of  the show will be held in mere temporary structures, like the showbag half tent thing pictured above.  I’m not at all sure how this is going to work out.  Still, they have said in the past that part of the redevelopment would include a permanent farmer’s market,  which would be good to see in Brisbane.

Anyway, back to the present, and one of the more unusual entertainments this year  was the Sideshow Superstar show.  It was four people doing a modern version of slightly grotesque “sideshow”  acts in an auditorium room.  You know: sword swallowing; putting a spinning drill bit up your nose; a somewhat tattooed man lifting a car battery via chains attached to metal spikes through his nipples – that type of good clean fun.   I only took photos of Ruby Rubberlegs, a not very tall woman who managed to make herself very compressed indeed:

It was actually a pretty professional short show, and I found it pleasing to see this type of act at this venue.   I felt it was something the kids would remember for quite a while, even though my daughter couldn’t bear to watch many parts.

As for the day generally, my wife seems to have overcome her resistance to my desire to spend a full day there every year.  (As far as I’m concerned, you should try to arrive not later than 10am and then only leave at 8.30 after the fireworks.)   This year, she didn’t complain at all, despite 2 years ago saying next time I could take the kids by myself.   She didn’t even complain (much) as we found we were sitting right in the smoke and cinder drift from the fireworks.  I sort of like a bit of firework smell anyway, but perhaps not as much as this year.  

I just remembered, I’ve been meaning to make this point for some years now:  it makes me feel good about Australia when you see Asian or other immigrant families or teenagers sitting on Machinery Hill and enjoying the traditional “ring events” like the 4 cars doing the same driving tricks that they have been doing for, um, the last 45 years.   This is as good a sign of healthy cultural assimilation as I know of.  Lately, many young men also seem to really get into the freestyle motocross show, which has the advantage of only having been there for 7 years now, apparently*.   In fact, when we were leaving at about 8.45, there was a very long line of people waiting to get autographs from the riders at their autograph booth.  The act is pretty impressive and dangerous looking, though, I must admit.  I will probably start complaining that it’s getting stale in 10 years time, though.

On a final note, this feature outside the (pretty pathetic inside) Carnevil ride was very popular in Sideshow Alley:

Every garden should have one.

And that’s it, til next year.

* I guess there is a chance that, like the car driving, my son will still be watching it in 40 years time.   

Unlucky way to die

3 die of rare brain infection from amoeba in water

I think we've all heard of the fresh water amoeba that can kill if it gets into your nose. There have 3 cases in the US this summer, but this guy was particularly unlucky:

The third case, in Louisiana, was more unusual. It was a young man whose death in June was traced to the tap water he used in a device called a neti pot. It's a small teapot-shaped container used to rinse out the nose and sinuses with salt water to relieve allergies, colds and sinus trouble.

Health officials later found the amoeba in the home's water system. The problem was confined to the house; it wasn't found in city water samples, said Dr. Raoult Ratard, Louisiana's state epidemiologist.

A strange way to assess it

Boys reach sexual maturity younger and younger

The article starts:

Boys are maturing physically earlier than ever before. The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century.

Fair enough - although that sounds like a lot of earlier maturing has been going on. But look at the odd way this was assessed:

Goldstein resolved this gap by studying demographic data related to mortality. When male hormone production during puberty reaches a maximum level the probability of dying jumps up. This phenomenon, called the "accident hump", exists in almost all societies and is statistically well documented.

Goldstein discovered that the maximum mortality value of the accident hump shifted to earlier age by 2.5 months for each decade since the mid-1700s, or just over two years per century. Accordingly, the age of boys’ sexual maturity decreased at the same rate. Essentially, the data showed that the age of sexual maturity is getting younger and younger since the accident hump is occurring earlier and earlier. (Research included data for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Great Britain and Italy. Since 1950 the data is no longer clear but indicates stagnation.) The maximum of the accident hump occurs in the late phase of puberty, after males reach reproductive capability and their voice changes.

Huh. I didn't know that an "accident hump" so clearly existed.

Wow - clever dogs

Sniffer dogs can be used to detect lung cancer

There was some British documentary on TV a couple of years ago in which medical researchers were being very dismissive of the reliability of dogs to be able to smell cancer in humans.

Yet this story of success in dogs smelling lung cancer in Germany sounds very impressive:

This new study aimed to assess whether sniffer dogs could be used to identify a VOC in the breath of patients. The researchers worked with 220 volunteers, including lung cancer patients, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients and healthy volunteers. They used dogs that had been specifically trained.

The researchers carried out a number of tests to see if the dogs were able to reliably identify lung cancer compared with healthy volunteers, volunteers with COPD and whether the results were still found with the presence of tobacco.

The dogs successfully identified 71 samples with lung cancer out of a possible 100. They also correctly detected 372 samples that did not have lung cancer out of a possible 400.

The dogs could also detect lung cancer independently from COPD and tobacco smoke. These results confirm the presence of a stable marker for lung cancer that is independent of COPD and also detectable in the presence of tobacco smoke, food odours and drugs.

Author of the study, Thorsten Walles from Schillerhoehe Hospital, said: "In the breath of patients with lung cancer, there are likely to be different chemicals to normal breath samples and the dogs' keen sense of smell can detect this difference at an early stage of the disease. Our results confirm the presence of a stable marker for lung cancer. This is a big step forward in the diagnosis of lung cancer, but we still need to precisely identify the compounds observed in the exhaled breath of patients. It is unfortunate that dogs cannot communicate the biochemistry of the scent of cancer!"

Rating Republicans

Rabett Run: Republican climate cladistics

Eli Rabett saves me the bother of researching, and categories the Republican leaders who are or (or might be) in the Presidential race according to their climate change responses.

Currently, of those running, Romney and Huntsman come out in the lead, by at least not retreating on past acknowledgements that there is a problem to be addressed.

Morano approves Perry, which means we need lots more corndog photos. (See previous post.)

Flood statistics up in the air

So long, '500-year flood'? - Omaha.com

I have been saying recently that one of the largest effects of climate change - much more frequent, economically and socially disruptive, floods - may well be the first consequence of global warming that people find is convincing proof of AGW.

The above article talks about the revision of flood statistics in the US, following a lot of flooding recently.

One suspects the same thing may be said about Australia soon.

Captain a bit dull

Based on the pretty good reviews for Captain America at Rottentomatoes, I took the kids to see it today, but I think we were all a bit underwhelmed.

Sure, it looks great, but I only have middling interest in all Marvel stuff:  in fact, now that I think of it, the first and third Spiderman’s might be the only Marvel movies that I thought were very good. 

I think this movie suffered, a bit more than your average superhero special effects movie, with on screen physics that never felt dangerous.  I mean, the way the hero jumped, ran, shot and flung that shield around, he never really seemed to be in any danger; and even when his pal met his fate, it was all in such an obvious CGI background, it didn’t feel “real”either. 

The movie’s production design was all retro with quite a dash of alternative universe; in this respect, I kept thinking about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in comparison.  I thought that earlier movie looked great, even though you knew it was all CGI background.  Maybe it was the fact that it wasn’t really trying for any realism at all that this didn’t bother me, as well as the publicity that indicated it had all been quite economically.  (A mere $70 million dollar budget, according to Wikipedia, which it failed to recover at the box office.)    I actually think the script for Sky Captain was a bit wittier than the later Captain, too. 

Anyway, I won’t be hanging out for The Avengers movies.  Ho-hum.

Corndog-gate

I noted at another blog yesterday that left wing brat-ster blog Daily Kos, which I used to check every now and again when Bush was President, but lost interest in after Obama’s election, had run a post by Kos himself making fun of photos of  Republicans eating corn dogs.   Kos also took the opportunity to specifically mention the sexuality rumour about Rick Perry, which apparently started in 2004. 

This is pretty low for someone who seemingly considers himself a serious mover and shaker on the Democrat front; if it was just a regular blogger it would just be a bit of (somewhat juvenile) mischief.  (I thought Mr Bachmann’s photo was pretty funny, but he is also the subject of rumour.)  And to be fair to Daily Kos participants, a lot of them did get stuck into Kos for this post.

Earlier at that other blog, regular bloviator CL had noted a Michelle Bachmann eating corndog photo had been run at a UK Telegraph blog – and he took that as a bit of left wing sleaze, despite the fact that I thought the Telegraph was well and truly toward the Right.

But now it gets interesting:  I see, when reading a Wall Street Journal blog that noted a mistake Perry had made, that this illustrious paper had run a Perry with corndog in mouth photo itself.

Someone in comments to that WSJ blog entry notes:

First Fox News shows Bachman throating a corndog and now the WSJ points out that Perry is a crazy dumbass. I guess that Murdoch has chosen Romney as the official Fox candidate.

So Fox News has been corndogging Republican candidates too!?

I see that the WSJ seems quite set against both Perry and Bachmann, but in the same editorial, they diss Romney too.

But it’s true, I have not yet seen a Romney with corndog in mouth photo.  Maybe he’s just careful not to eat them in view of the cameras, which would seem a good rule of thumb for any politician.

Anyway, I like the theory that this is how media tycoons signal whether or not they like a Republican candidate.  Maybe in this country, journalists from The Australian should just offer Julia Gillard a banana before her press conferences.

Things you preferred not to know

Your faeces, my furry friend, are blowin' in the wind - New Scientist

GO FOR a bracing winter stroll in a major US city and you will be inhaling more than vehicle fumes. A new study has demonstrated for the first time that during winter most of the airborne bacteria in three large Midwestern cities come from dog faeces.

Seems about right

I watched every Coen brothers movie. - By David Haglund - Slate Magazine

I used to be keen on seeing Coen Brothers movies, but lost interest after Fargo, which despite being a big critical success, indicated to me that people were seeing more in their oeuvre than was actually there.

This article sort of backs that up; I think.

I should still see the True Grit remake. Is it on DVD yet?

Stupid uses for reproductive technology

The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy - NYTimes.com

A inappropriate sense of entitlement to consumer goods has been the subject of much discussion since the English riots, but it's rare that anyone puts that label on the stories of reproductive technology.

But look at the main story that starts the above article: a 45 year year old pregnant woman who apparently went through 6 years of fertility treatment, including with donor eggs, who then chooses to abort one of the twins which she has conceived. And here's the kicker - she's already a mother:

The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children.

I have complained about cosmetic surgery as being the most inappropriate and wasteful use of medical resources around, but at least the patient is just mucking around with their own bodies; not creating a fetus to then decide whether to keep or not.

And look at the case at the end of the article:

A. and her partner had been together 15 years when they decided to get serious about having children. Because both women were 45, they tried to double their already slim chances by both being inseminated. They each tried it three times; nothing took. At their doctor’s suggestion, they chose an egg donor in her mid-20s. Both women went through I.V.F., each with two embryos transferred. Both women got pregnant, but A. quickly miscarried. Her partner (who did not want to be identified, even by an initial) gave birth to a healthy boy, whom they adore. A. did another round of I.V.F. with frozen embryos, hoping to provide their son with a sibling. It didn’t work. So when their boy was nearly a year old, both women underwent I.V.F. again. Given A.’s fertility history, the doctor predicted she had just a 5 percent chance of getting pregnant.

On their son’s first birthday, both women found out they were pregnant, both with twins. Four in all. “In our wildest expectations, we never imagined being in this situation,” A. said. “We both went through I.V.F. before, and we came out with one baby. We did it exactly the same way as last time, so we never expected this.”

And yes, you guessed it, one of them "reduced" the pregnancy to one, and the other woman lost her pregnancy totally.

Call me crazy if you want, but what I'm seeing here is a fundamental problem of over-enlarged sense of entitlement to babies at any age, and even worse, regardless of the fact that a relationship already has a child (or children) to look after.

This is a true slippery slope that reproductive technology has led to, and for anyone who is even a bit uncomfortable about abortion, the selective abortion that is happening in these cases should just be seen as completely unacceptable, in large part because the pregnancies were unwarranted in the first place.

High hopes

I've explained this before: MI4 is directed by Brad Bird, who, based on his animation, I expect can do action well. The trailer looks pretty good, although let's hope the movie is not hyper-edited:

Mercury and autism

Pink disease: autism risk (Science Alert)

A genetic sensitivity to mercury appears to be strongly related to increased risk of grandchildren having autism.

Pink disease was a form of mercury poisoning prevalent in the first half of the 20th century. Affecting 1 in 500 young children with a hyper-sensitivity to mercury, it caused a range of severe symptoms including loss of speech, loss of interest in usual activities, hypersensitivity to light, pain and, in up to 20 per cent of cases, death. When mercury was identified as the culprit and removed as an ingredient in teething powders in the 1950s, the disease was essentially wiped out...

For the current study the Swinburne researchers surveyed over 500 Australian survivors of Pink Disease, asking them about the health of their descendents. This allowed them to collect detailed data about the survivors, as well as their 1100 children and 1360 grandchildren.

"We asked the pink disease survivors to report any health conditions that their children or grandchildren had been diagnosed with," Austin said. "The survey included questions about Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), epilepsy and autism."

The prevalence rate of most disorders was comparable to general population figures, however, the rate for autism was extremely high.

"Staggeringly, we found that one in 25 grandchildren of pink disease survivors aged 6-12 had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. This compares to the current Australian prevalence rate for that age group of one in 160.

I presume this is going to feed into the issue of mercury in vaccines again, as the author suggests:

....those with a suspected family history of pink disease to minimise their exposure to mercury. This is particularly important for young children and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.

"This can be done by observing the recommendations of Food Standards Australia regarding seafood consumption, opting for non-amalgam dental fillings and requesting preservative-free vaccines from your doctor," he said.

I thought the mercury/vaccine/autism thing was all sorted out. Now it seems less clear.

Sounds complicated...

Hybrid solar system makes rooftop hydrogen

This system uses roof top solar panels (of the heating variety, not PV) in a set up designed to make hydrogen that is then fed into a fuel cell for electricity.

Gotta love the internet

Hey, I posted a question at Real Climate's open thread this morning, and Gavin Schmidt has already answered me.

Very neat, the way anyone can engage with scientists like this.

Horrible history noted

I've been meaning to mention that my son has been a keen reader of the Horrible Histories series of books over the last year or two, and is now very happy to watch the TV series being shown on ABC2.

The TV show is pretty good, even for adults. It's got high production values, and most sketches are at least amusing, if not laugh out loud.

I see the books have been going for much longer than I expected, and have attracted some controversy in England on occasion.

All in all, it's a good product to see out there, even if I would hate to see it result in a surplus of unemployed wannabe historians in their 20's, roaming the streets, begging passers by for any tidbit of local historical interest.

Line drawn

Call me old fashioned, but I find nothing to celebrate about baby creation for relationships which are inherently, by a fundamental and intrinsic fact of biology, inconceivable. (Ha, a pun.)

Here's my simple rule: if you love someone and want a relationship with them, take the biological consequences with it. This applies just as much to heterosexuals as homosexuals, in that they should be ready for the possibility of a baby no matter how well they try and use contraception, and from the other side, they should also accept the possibility that their relationship may turn out to be incapable of producing children.

Yes, this all sounds harsh and unreasonable to everyone under the age of 35, and I speak as relatively late age husband who still managed to have a couple of kids. I'm not a doctor who has to deal with depressed woman crying all day because she can't have a baby naturally.

Sorry, but this is just how things were a mere 40 years ago, and reproductive technology interferes with a fundamental aspect of biology and creates something entirely different from medical technology which merely preserves and improves an already existing life. So don't try to tell me that, if I was consistent, I should be against vaccines, or heart valve operations, or whatever. It's different: I am drawing a line which I consider entirely justifiable. It is not an essential function of any life that it has to have reproduced.

I also have the Pope onside, even though I have to work on his attitude to contraception in at least one respect: neither the rhythm method nor a condom used by a husband and wife can turn sex from moral to immoral. His line drawing needs adjusting too.