Today's science reading assignments

* Technology Review talks up hybrid and plug in cars, but isn't optimistic that American companies will be the ones to succeed in this field.

* Purdue University keeps talking up its hydrogen generating technology (and they keep using the same dorky student photo).

* A telescope in Hawaii gets a new digital camera that definitely won't fit in your pocket to look for small asteroids. (The Howard government would gain some science credibility if it would re-instate the tiny funding it took away for looking for asteroids from down here too.)

* Those Germans sure know how to make buying a beer easy:

A new system that scans customers' fingerprints and deducts the grocery bill from their bank accounts has taken supermarkets in southwestern Germany by storm and is being picked up by hardware stores, school canteens and even the country's ubiquitous beer gardens.

Cheers!

By the way...

I am probably not the first to say it, but I really think that Kath & Kim might have "jumped the shark" with last week's episode. The story thread which did it for me was the part about Kim and her "do it yourself" botox kit.

That it would have dire consequences for Sharon was entirely predictable, and although they have presented the results of cosmetic surgery in an over the top fashion in a previous series, the Sharon as Frankenstein schtick was really just pushing an old idea too far.

The fact that Workchoices got an unfavourable mention didn't worry me. In fact, I thought it may be a bit satirical from a conservative aspect to show it as a concern of Kath in an episode where she was played as especially gullible and dumb.

A half serious, half stupid, post

Further to my last post, there are two clear events which may be contributing to the latest Newpoll: the huge inconvenience to Sydney-siders of APEC, and the horse flu epidemic being seemingly blamed on government run quarantine deficiencies.

I've seen it said many times (especially at LP) that, rather than inconvenience all of Sydney, they should have held the meeting on some resort, with Hamilton Island most frequently suggested. However, a quick Google around the net seems to indicate that it can accommodate 5,000 (and how many of them would be in apartments which are normally families of 3 to 5 sharing?)

A news story from July says that originally there were 7,000 visitors expected, but it had dropped back to 5,000.

As Hamilton Island is about the biggest single, isolated resort I can think of in Australia, the point seems to be that it was simply not a realistic prospect to ever plan to hold it there.

As for horses: those with flu shown on TV never look particularly sick to me. Sure, some die, but horses seem to be fragile flowers who can die of the weirdest things. (The world is divided into two camps: those who believe horses are noble and magnificent creatures, and those who think they are stupid and inscrutable. Guess which camp I belong to?)

I have a theory that there is a horse conspiracy to feign sickness either because:

* they would just like to have a good rest from all that running around, or

* they are all secret Labor supporters, and they know how to create bad PR for John Howard.

As I don't trust horses at the best of times, I think they have all been organising in secret at the racetrack, deciding on a "Cough for Kevin" policy or some such.

Just a theory...

Just ridiculous

I just heard on Lateline that tomorrow's Newspoll gives Labor an 18% two party preferred lead, with the Liberals on 41% TPP!

The air of unreality about the prospect of a severe punishment being handed out to a government that economically has performed so well, and is (despite what The Australian said last week) still showing signs of being policy proactive, is close to solidifying into some grim real life Twilight Zone episode of 3 years duration.

I mean, are people really concentrating out there? Rudd's health policy might be impressing people because all they hear is $2 billion extra funding, without (one suspects) the average Joe also noticing that the regular budget is already $42 billion. And haven't people noticed the problem of the staffing of hospitals, no matter who runs them, which is hardly something that any government can fix overnight? As for a constitutional take over of hospitals if the States don't "perform", well just how likely does anyone think it is that this would be truly desired and achieved by Federal Labor?

With Industrial Relations, small business, which we are told employs so many in the economy, didn't seem to get anything out of all of Rudd's worrying about not offending the "big end" of town. There is still room for a union dominated government to fiddle the final legislation further to the union side.

Greenhouse gases: people hear Rudd say that Labor has made a target commitment; but it's for 2050 for God's sake! Do people think that targets that far out, in the absence of the interim targets and the clear practical steps as to how any targets are to be met is in any way actually meaningful? The Kevin 07 site (see last link) even has the hide to list under its "Climate Change and Water fresh thinking" heading a commitment to "put an end to Mr Howard’s plan for 25 nuclear reactors, coast to coast across Australia." Oh yes, that will help with greenhouse gases. What a "fresh idea" it is to encourage a 1970's era fear of safety of nuclear power.

It may well be too late (I am expecting that will be the general thrust of all commentary tomorrow), but Howard is going to have to truly pull something out the hat policy-wise to win this election. I would think something dramatic in the following areas is needed:

* the housing affordability issue must be addressed. Howard did not dismiss the recent tax concessions suggested by John Symons, and something like that would be very welcome by the younger generation just trying to break into the market now;

* I still think a full reversal on the long ago withdrawn dental treatment support for the elderly would be worthwhile;

* why should Rudd have all the advantage of platitudes over reality? The Liberals could do something that sounds dramatic for greenhouse gases but in reality does nothing much overall. Some form of huge support for hybrid or plug in cars perhaps?

I thought Matt Price's column in the Weekend Australian summed things up pretty well too.

And to go back a few posts: should I get used to answering my own questions all the time? Yes, I fear, I must get used to it for the next 3 years.

UPDATE: just to be clear: there would be no surprise being expressed here if Labor was currently on, say, a 5 to 8% lead, as any government (and leader) of 11 years duration has its work cut out when it seeks re-election. It's the size of the lead, and the seeming never-ending triumph of platitudes, promises on the never-never, and smarminess, that's causing offence.

Some economic history

There was a good interview on Counterpoint today with economist Gregory Clark talking up his book "A Farewell to Alms" about economic history.

This book seems to have something of a slow burn. Clark's website lists reviews, and although the New York Times covered it well in November 2006, there have been a spate of recent reviews, including a short one in The Economist, which opens with his most controversial idea:

WHY did the Industrial Revolution begin in the 18th century? Why did it start in Britain, a medium-sized island in north-west Europe? And, once the revolution had occurred, why did the gains accrue so disproportionately to countries in Europe and North America?

These are questions that have kept economists busy for decades. Gregory Clark, of the University of California, Davis, thinks the answers lie in the nature of European societies. “Millennia of living in stable societies, under tight Malthusian pressures that rewarded effort, accumulation and fertility limitation, encouraged the development of cultural forms—in terms of work inputs, time preference and family formation—which facilitated modern economic growth,” he contends.

This is not a fashionable thesis. Indeed, it may well get Mr Clark into trouble, given the implication that other societies are less “evolved”. His argument is that throughout the Middle Ages British society was slowly acquiring characteristics that made it a favourable agent for rapid economic change. The rich tended to have more children who survived than their poorer compatriots and this led to a kind of downward mobility as sons of merchants became small traders, sons of traders became craftsmen and so on. The result was that middle-class attributes such as patience, hard work and education spread through society.

As other reviews note, this is a big contract to Jared Diamond's idea in "Guns Germs and Steel" that Europe took off because it was just geographically lucky. (Oddly, I used to quite like Diamond as an essayist in Discover magazine in the 1980's - 90's, but I find him an un-engaging writer when he is at book length.)

Clark come across well in the Counterpoint interview, and it is well worth listening to.

First ever poll

Horses for Courses

Inspired by horse flu fever in Australia, it at least provides proof that horses look a little like cows to me.

Backtracking over the last week

Here's some stuff I would have posted about last week if I had been posting:

1. Foreign Correspondent had an interesting story on how the residents of Greenland are quite happy about global warming. It was full of nice scenery of a part of the world that rarely shows up anywhere on television. You can go watch it on broadband at the link. Did Tim Blair miss this?

2. Slate had a handy article that teaches you all of the things that men not looking for sex should not do while in a public toilet. (For all of the activity that is said to take place in public toilets, I can't say I have ever been in one where it came to my attention that someone was hanging around for that purpose.) Also in Slate, Christopher Hitchens had a particularly salacious article about the same topic. He did a (I think) Vanity Fair article about oral sex some time ago, and it provoked in me the same feeling that, when he deals with the details of sex, he becomes a bit too creepily enthusiastic for my liking.

3. Julia Gillard turned up on Lateline (can't find the link right now) and did her voice coach proud.

4. Horses. This deserves a separate post later today.

Back again

So, how did my little holiday from blogging go? Not too bad thanks. What did I achieve? Well let me list the things that I achieved:

1. Saw too many Kevin Rudd advertisements on TV;

2. Did some long outstanding tax stuff;

3. Realised as a result of #2 the true extent of current indebtedness;

4. Nonetheless got a bank to agree to give me money for a new car;

5. Chose new car, but have not yet taken delivery;

6. Discovered how little present car is now worth, and it only has 176,000 km on it;

7. Came down with something that made me feel crook for a couple of days, but apart from nausea and occasional shivering, it came with no overt signs of illness and hence led to little sympathy;

8. Continued to creep out my son (age 7) by watching scary Doctor Who episodes with him (we actually had to abandon this week's episode with the angel statues, as it was too much for him);

9. I decided to become a woman;

10. Went to a big Indian restaurant in South Brisbane for the first time (Punjabi Palace) and was very impressed with the food.

Is this list completely accurate, you could ask? When it comes to lists, I can say without fear of contradiction, that no it is not.

And when it comes to doing a half-arsed parody of Rudd-speak, is it much of a challenge? No, not at all.

Break

It's not just this blog that is distracting me from work lately, it's all the links from my blog to the other sites of the wonderful WWW that I love to visit. (Many of them daily or more frequently, particularly if I comment on some other blog and then want to follow the responses.)

Really, I love the internet. This blog continues its useful function for me as a record of the things I find interesting, but as for its other purpose of having my take on the world noticed, well that seems to have found its natural, very low, level. A good day here is about 50 hits, but perhaps half a dozen (or more) of those will be me using the links as my bookmarks.

Anyhow, this is all preamble to saying I need a week's break to concentrate on work, and this I mean it! I actually want to give up looking at the internet completely for a week, but I don't know if I can avoid visiting the news sites. Especially if that long wished for video of Kevin R and Julia G turns up.

You watch, something spectacular that I long to comment on will probably happen this week. But I want someone to promise to come and break my typing fingers if I breach this self imposed absence.

Remember to come back. Fifty visits a day is pretty pathetic, but coming back and finding its now stuck on a twenty or so for the week after I start posting; that's just depressing.

And could someone apart from Caz, TimT and Geoff add a comment that might give me general encouragement? I seem to have some regular visitors who never say "boo", and it would just be nice to know who at least one or two of them are.

Pilger's latest

A gentle kick in the fundamentals - Times Online

Here's an extract from the above amusing review of John Pilger's latest effort at documentary:

Pilger’s journalistic compass is set by the position of America: wherever that is, he swings the other way. So, based on the sound principle of my enemy’s enemy is my friend, he set about an obscenely embarrassing tongue-bath of Hugo Chavez, the megalomaniac president of Venezuela.

Pilger’s interview technique is not to have any technique visible. He listens to himself asking questions that include answers, then to little else. He picks through the wreckage of people’s misfortune, gleaning shards of proof to complement his mosaic ideology, while dismissing and discarding anything that could be a contradiction. This relentless film looked like Brezhnev-era Soviet propaganda.

All about Chavez

Reason Magazine - The Caudillo in His Labyrinth

This week's happy alcohol news

Alcohol may lower risk of kidney cancer | Health | Reuters

Drinking more than two glasses of red wine per week was associated with a 40-percent reduction in kidney cell cancer risk compared with drinking no red wine, the investigators observed, and there were similar trends for more than two glasses per week of white wine or strong beer.

Could be an interesting movie...

Ahead of 'September Dawn,' Mormon Church revisits dark period | csmonitor.com

The root of all evil

Comment is free: Springtime in the desert

Dana Moss has an interesting post talking about the very, very limited progression towards women's rights in Saudi Arabia. Bear in mind that they currently cannot vote, drive, own real estate, or show their face in public.

One thing that is planned to "help" women is this:

.....an all-female industrial zone employing roughly 10,000 women in more than 80 factories.

So, the right to be a factory worker is recognized. I wonder how they will get there?

Anyway, these two paragraphs show that there is just a tiny bit of conservatism to be overcome yet:

Characteristic of such hostility from the religious elite is the reaction of the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, to the mixing of men and women - conventional practice in international business terms. In 2004, after witnessing mingling during the Jeddah Economic Forum, he issued a furious reprimand: "I am pained by such shameful behaviour ... allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe."

Nor is resistance to women's economic empowerment limited to the clergy. Hardline factions within the royal family, such as the mercurial Prince Nayef, currently interior minister, remain powerful. When faced with demands to allow women to drive, he proclaimed: "I am astonished as to why this issue is being discussed."

Good luck reformers. See you at the ground-breaking inaugural Young Men and Women's Chaperoned Tea Party and Evening Dance to be held in the year 2250.

Guns and teens

The short, happy life of Rhys Jones - Times Online

I haven't been reading much til now about the shooting death (by teenagers, apparently) of an 11 year old boy in Liverpool. The story above, and this report here, give some background, and ends on this surprising note:

Last year, 48 under-18s were arrested for gun crime in Merseyside.

Confusing the brain for science

Scientists induce out-of-body experiences in the laboratory. Slate Magazine

This is an interesting article on recent research on inducing something a little (though not that much) like an out of body experience.

It makes mention of an illusion I hadn't heard of before:

The "rubber hand illusion," for example, can trick you into losing track of a single body part. Someone strokes a rubber hand in front of you while at the same time stroking your real hand out of view. After a while, you start to think the rubber hand is your own.

How odd. Pity I don't have any rubber hands around the house with which to try.

Of course, Kevin Rudd has probably already doing it with a John Howard rubber head. Boom boom.

What doesn't it cover?

Breathe Islam :: Protect your child :: June :: 2007

From this post:

The Prophet said, “If anyone of you, when having sexual intercourse with his wife, says: Bismillah, Allahumma jannibna-Sh-Shaitan wa jannib-ish-Shaitan ma razaqtana,
and if it is destined that they should have a child, then Satan will never be able to harm him.”

The meaning of this prayer is given in the following post:

‘With the name of Allah! O Allah! Save us from the evil of Shaytan and save whatever children You bestow us.’

A religion whose founder recommends praying during sex is a religion too far.

On Shelley

Avenging Angel: Books: The New Yorker

I love reading about radicals who think they know what's best for the world, reject religion and all traditional morality, and yet never recognize their own nastiness. Shelley is a very good example of this, and this review of a new book about him has plenty of examples of his unpleasantness.

I suppose his first wife (aged 16) didn't fully appreciate his attitude to marriage:

When Harriet Westbrook, in rebellion against her father and her school, begged Shelley to rescue her, it was the kind of cause that he found hard to resist. He agreed to elope with a girl he had never considered more than a friend. “If I know anything about love, I am not in love,” he had written just weeks before the marriage. He loved the idea of getting married even less: “A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter.” But he recognized that living together out of wedlock would hurt Harriet’s reputation much more than his own, and he agreed to go through with the ceremony.

A child or two later he subsequently fell in love with another 16 year old:

....in the summer of 1814, Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin. Mary was then sixteen, the same age that Harriet had been when Shelley married her, and she had intellectual gifts that Harriet could never match. Just as important was her intellectual pedigree: she was the daughter of William Godwin, a radical thinker whom Shelley worshipped, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the crusader for women’s rights. Add the fact that Mary was instantly smitten with Shelley—it seems that they had sex for the first time by her mother’s grave, to mark their spiritual union—and Harriet never really had a chance.

There is a lot more detail in the review.

I had read about his life somewhere before, but it's good to be reminded about this sort of stuff.

Just nuts

Home is where the booze is - Times Online

The trend for some parents to let their teenage kids know that they can have alcohol at a party, rather than just let it be brought in secretly, seems to be taken to an insane extreme by some in England. Have a read of this account of a party for a group of 14 year olds:

The invitation read: “Let my mum know if you can drink and if so bring some.”...

On the way to the party, I asked my son if he wanted to take a bottle of wine. He declined then retracted, saying he supposed he would if others were drinking. Reluctantly, I bought a bottle of white wine. I did not want him to be embarrassed and besides, I was looking forward to a drink at the party myself....

By 10.30pm the consequences of my friend’s drinks policy were all too obvious. Everywhere I looked there was someone vomiting. I wondered what their parents would be thinking if they knew their children were quite so drunk. They had, after all, supplied the booze.

I don't think this comment which follows the article is meant to be funny, but it made me laugh:

A whole bottle of wine for one 14 year old's personal use? What lunacy! When I was 14, my parents would not let me take more than four bottles of lager to a party. I'd inevitably scrounge another couple, but that was outside their control. My parents have continued to place (low) limits on what I can take to parties - but these days I am more often in pubs and clubs.