More Kael talk

Pauline Kael Reviews: The Ones She Got Wrong

I miss Pauline Kael reviews, and it's always interesting reading about her large and interesting body of work.

Bit busy....

But Qantas dispute dealt with at Dodopathy.

The thrifty Japanese

Japan Gets Electricity Wake-Up Call - NYTimes.com:

The Japanese did well with reducing electricity demand during summer, but they aren't out of the woods yet:

This past summer, traditionally a period of peak demand, Tokyo residents pared electricity use 16 percent in the inner-city area known as the 23 wards. But looming winter power shortages look to pose an even bigger challenge.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry predicts that unless power production is restarted at some of the nuclear reactors around the country that are now suspended for inspection, national demand will outstrip supply by 4 percent to 20 percent during December, January and February — the coldest winter months.

Spooky fun from Japan

The ridiculously frightening world of Japanese spooks | The Japan Times Online

Well, what a fun article this is about old supernatural tales and games in Japan. For example, this is how samurai would sometimes amuse themselves:

During the Edo Period, for example, there was a popular game among the samurai called Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (A Gathering of One Hundred Supernatural Tales). The players gathered in a room at night and, after lighting 100 candles, took turns telling scary stories. After each tale a candle was extinguished, and the room steadily grew darker and darker. It was believed that when the room was pitch black, a ghost would appear.

Pretty good fun before TV was invented.

The Japanese do have amusingly strange folkloric creatures. The one mentioned in the last paragraph is particularly impressive:

Another distinctive feature of Japanese folklore is a quite large gang of oddball demons and spirits called yōkai that walk a thin line between horror and ridiculousness. Not exactly human but capable of a wide range of human emotions, these creatures tend to be neither good nor bad but are certainly mischievous, often getting their kicks by playing tricks on their victims.

Matt Alt, an American yokai expert whose book "Yokai Attack!" is a guide to surviving an encounter with these monsters, says that their shape-shifting powers make them particularly hard to recognize. "Probably the easiest to grasp are the kappa (water goblin), the tengu (mountain goblin), the kitsune (fox) and the tanuki (raccoon dog)," he says.

The most famous Tokyo-specific yokai are probably the Nopperabo ("faceless ones"), which Lafcadio Hearn wrote about in his 1904 story "Mujina," and the huge leg featured in "Ashiarai Yashiki."

"The Nopperabo are normal-seeming humans but with horrifyingly smooth and featureless faces," explains Alt. "A century and a half ago they were often seen in Akasaka's Kiinokuni slope, once considered one of the scariest places in the city."

"Ashiarai Yashiki," on the other hand, is the tale of an enormous, disembodied leg and foot that smashes through ceilings without warning in the dead of night, demanding to be washed. "Legend has it that the first 'big foot' appeared in a royal mansion in the Edo district of Honjo, corresponding to Sumida Ward in present-day Tokyo," Alt says.

Problems for the Tone

Abbott Pledges Oath In Blood To Repeal Carbon Tax

George Williams explains that it may well be three years after the introduction of Labor's carbon pricing scheme before Abbott could repeal it.

Provided that Labor can keep its minority government together for the next 18 months to 2 years, and assuming the world economy does not tank completely, I strongly suspect that Abbott's gung-ho and shallow populism is not going to play as well leading into the next election as he currently thinks.

7 billion soon

India is the most likely place for the seventh billionth child to be born | Global development | The Guardian

I was just getting used to 6 billion people on the planet, and in a week or so I have to start saying 7 billion.

The article above talks about the population growth of India, and the associated problems.

I didn't realise this:

India is home to nearly a fifth of the world's population and around 2020 it is projected to overtake China as the most populous nation on Earth.

A PM with a significant friend

I'm surprised to read an opinion piece in the paper this morning co- authored by Julia Gillard and - wait for it - Bill Gates! It's about eradicating polio.

I'm impressed. The biggest name in technology and charity Tony Abbott has ever been associated with is probably Dick Smith.

(Speaking of Mr Abbott, he features in the next, long awaited by no one, post at Dodopathy.) 

The trouble with vegetarianism

Mind Hacks has an extract of an article looking at the psychology of vegetarianism, and it's a tad amusing:

How vegetarians are seen has shifted radically over time. During the Inquisition, the Roman Catholic Church declared vegetarians to be heretics, and a similar line of persecutions occurred in 12th century China (Kellman, 2000). In the earlier half of the twentieth century, the sentiment toward vegetarians remained distinctly negative, with the decision not to eat meat being framed as deviant and worthy of suspicion.
Major Hyman S. Barahal (1946), then head of the Psychiatry Section of Mason General Hospital, Brentwood, wrote openly that he considered vegetarians to be domineering and secretly sadistic, and that they “display little regard for the suffering of their fellow human beings” (p. 12). In this same era, it was proposed that vegetarianism was an underlying cause of stammering, the cure for which was a steady diet of beefsteak.

Well, we all know about Hitler now, don't we...

Space, technology, etc.

Some links of some interest:

*  small, modular, nuclear power continues to be developed, but not without some financial issues.

*  Russian cosmonaut says they ought to find a good cave for a moon base.   I agree.  Lunar cave exploring is a topic inadequately covered in science fiction, as far as I know, too.

*  American lunar scientist says you could build a decent sized moon base using tele-operated robotics before you send astronauts there.  First job:  dig up some water at the poles.   Easier said than done, and sounds rather improbable.  But whatever happened to the idea that a private company had, maybe during the 1980’s as I think I read it in Omni magazine:  put a tele-operated lunar rover on the Moon and let people on earth pay for time controlling it.   You would need it to be in a scenic part, though.  An hour of trundling across a flat plain is hardly going to be worth it.

  *  NASA has been thinking about using “fuel depots” in space instead of having to launch a spaceship full of fuel to get where it needs to go.  There are, however, some obvious problems:

Propellant depots carry risks, too. Fuels like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen must be kept at ultracold temperatures and, unless the depots were heavily insulated, would boil away over time. And transferring fuel in the weightlessness of space is not straightforward, although perhaps simply setting the depot and spacecraft into a slow spin would generate enough force to push the fuel into the spacecraft.

Sounds a bit improbable, again.

*  Somebody’s been studying sea monkeys ™, it would seem, to learn about their fluid dynamics.  Why one would remains a significant mystery of the universe.

Cranky Watts was wrong - again

Big news in the world of climate science - physicist Richard Muller's much ballyhooed independent re-assessment of the temperature record over the last hundred years or so is finished.

And guess what:

They say their results line up with previously published studies and suggest that the average global land temperature has risen by roughly 0.9 °C since the 1950s.

Muller says he is surprised at how well the findings line up with previous analyses, which he takes as evidence that the various scientific teams working on these data did indeed go about their work "in a truly unbiased manner". 

Anthony Watts, who early on pinned much hope on this effort showing that silly old climate scientists had stuffed this all up, is very annoyed.   It's not peer reviewed yet, you see.

Somehow, I would be surprised if that makes much of a difference.

Watts puts up the familiar meme we hear all the time from skeptics now: 

And, The Economist still doesn’t get it. The issue of “the world is warming” is not one that climate skeptics question, it is the magnitude and causes.

But remember folks, it was in the last year or so that Watts was on Andrew Bolt's radio show claiming that maybe .5 of a degree of the US temperature record increases of about .7 degree was due to poor siting of temperature stations.  Only problem was, within months of that claim, it was disproved by his own surfacestations project published paper.  Watts wanted people to believe the real temperature rise was so small it was ridiculous to worry about it.

Hey, maybe that's why Watts is so keen on  peer review: it helped prove his own estimates were completely wrong.   But actually, I think it was getting a real climatologist on board - John Neilsen-Gammon - to check the stats that showed up Watts' error even before it went into peer review. This is why I doubt peer review is going to show anything especially wrong with Muller's results.   (Of course, Muller himself is a self promoting show pony who was making big, populist claims about how outrageous the Climategate emails were.   I don't particularly hold him in much regard either, but if he and his team have taken some more wind out of the sails of the likes of Watts, he has done something useful.)

Watts has never apologised for those claims on Australian radio.  He has never explained how he got his own estimate, made so close to the paper being finished, wrong.

Andrew Bolt has never corrected Watts' estimate on his blog. 

The AGW skeptic movement is a sham, and should get out of the way and let real science guide policy response to a (likely) dangerously warming world.

The potato in history

It must be time for another potato post.  [Interested readers can use the search function on the right to find my previous forays into the field of potatoes.  (Ha.)]

This time, a BBC story looks at the recent decline of the spud, and whether its recent-ish poor reputation is really deserved.  But along the way we  get a bit of history, of which I was not really aware:

The potato used to be considered something of a wonder food. Grown originally in South America, its introduction to Europe literally transformed agriculture.

Before the introduction of the potato, those in Ireland, England and continental Europe lived mostly off grain, which grew inconsistently in regions with a wet, cold climate or rocky soil. Potatoes grew in some conditions where grain could not, and the effect on the population was overwhelming.

"In Switzerland, for instance, the potato arrived in the early 18th Century and you can see over and over again as people started growing potatoes, the population grew," says John Reader, author of The Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.

"Birth rates rose, infant mortality improved, women became more fecund and all of that can be absolutely attributed to the potato."

For decades, potatoes were one of the most reliable sources of energy. They grew when other grains and vegetables could not, they required little processing once grown, and they packed a healthy dose of nutrients.

I hope you noticed the title of the book in there.  I don't believe I have ever seen the word "esculent" before.  Let's double check the dictionary:  a thing, esp. a vegetable, fit to be eaten.   Well, we learn something every day.

Back to the BBC article.  It appears that somehow, the writer located a potato obsessive in New Mexico:

That is why Meredith Hughes, managing director of the Potato Museum, is not worried about pockets of anti-potato sentiment. "I don't agree that the potato is vilified," she says. "I think the potato is just taking off."

Ms Hughes and her family have built up the largest private collection of potato artefacts, currently located in New Mexico, but in search a permanent home. Both she and the museum are unaffiliated with the potato industry.

"The potato is an incredibly influential food," she says. "It has changed the course of history, it has influenced popular culture. It has saved people from starvation."

Actually, given that the potato is becoming more popular in China, she could have a point about the potato "just taking off".

Anyway, this makes me  feel like checking the potato recipe book I got from the book fair.  I guess I'm cooking again this Saturday.

Deliberate mistakes?

Arthur Sinodinas, who impresses me generally and I welcome as new Parliamentary blood for the Coalition, writes in the Australian today:

There is talk that Rudd is wooing Bob Katter so he can dispense with the support of Andrew Wilkie and the pesky pokies tax.

What? There is nothing "tax" about voluntary pre-commitment for pokies at all. Yet this same line had been used by Channel Nine spokesperson last week when they wrote about how it was a political ad was spoken during a high rating rugby league match:

''The comments relating to the federal government proposed poker machine tax reflect the views of the Nine Network regarding matters directly affecting the NRL community,'' she wrote, again misconstruing the pre-commitment policy as a tax.

This is a bit of a convenient mistake that keeps getting repeated, isn't it?

Lay by plan not such a good idea

IVF WARNING: Expert tells single women to settle for Mr Not-Quite-Right

I didn't realise clinics were "targetting" this service:

Director of Monash IVF Professor Gab Kovacs said that women should not be fooled into thinking that freezing their eggs for social reasons offered a "guaranteed family in the fridge".
Fertility clinics have begun targeting their services to women in their 20s and 30s, but Professor Kovacs warned women that the success rate from egg freezing was low and that women couldn't rely on it later in life, Fairfax newspapers report.
"I think they should be working harder to find a partner or changing their criteria for Mr Right," Professor Kovacs said.
"Maybe there is no Mr Right and you have to settle for Mr Not-Too-Bad. There is no such thing as a perfect person for anybody, and even if they're perfect now, they won't be perfect in five or 10 years time."

Egg freezing costs between $10,000 and $14,000 per cycle is not covered by Medicare if done for non-medical reasons.

Of course, in the comments following there are a smattering of women saying "well, I only got married late and had my first child at 38, these concerns about infertility are overblown.  You hang out for the right man, girls!" which probably annoys fertility clinic doctors no end, because they actually know what the figures are.

(Personal disclosure: my wife and I came late to parenthood too, but still, I don't doubt that age related infertility is a major issue.)

Art and Andy

On Andy Warhol | Bryan Appleyard

Sadly, Bryan Appleyard has stopped regular blogging again. (He disappeared for quite a while, popped back for a few weeks, but now is only notifying readers of his feature articles and interviews in the press.)

Anyway, the link above is to his recent, very lengthy, article on Andy Warhol, containing much erudite discussion of modern art in general, and a little in the way of biographical detail. It's fine writing.

I'm not sure, but I think I had read and forgotten this strange story of how he came to be shot:

Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist who believed in the violent creation of an all-female society. In 1967 she asked Warhol to produce her play Up Your Ass, but he lost the script and Solanas started demanding payment. Finally, in June 1968, she turned up at the Factory and shot him in the chest. It was a grievous wound – Warhol had to wear a corset for the rest of his life to, as he put it, “keep my insides in” – and he only just survived.

As Appleyard notes, his work went down in quality after this, but you do get the feeling Bryan still has a soft spot for him.

Referral

Spaceport America opens – but space tourists will have to wait | Science | The Guardian

This story led me to do this quickly this morning on the iPad, which I trust people will remember was inspired by this (even though when I first saw that photo, I assumed it was photoshopped.)

Christmas viewing sorted

The Adventures of Tintin - Rotten Tomatoes

Initial reviews for Spielberg's Tintin movie seem pretty good. But it doesn't start here until Boxing Day. :(

UPDATE:  There are some really glowing reviews coming out, but as might be expected with any "classic" comic which nerdy adult men obsess about, there are those who are outraged by the movie.  The Guardian (which really operates as nerd/geek central in the English press, given the amount of time their blog gives to the likes of Dr Who) has a half funny, over the top reaction:

Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape....

The sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.

As someone says in comments:

Dare I suggest you get out a bit more?

Warm water, warm air

There continues to be useful and interesting discussion around the climate science blog-o-sphere about ocean warming and climate change.

It really seems that limited understanding of how exactly it works, and its role in "pauses" in the climb in surface temperature rises, is a major unresolved issue in climate science. 

Have a look at Skeptical Science, Bart's site, and Rabbett Run for some of the interesting posts, which again
feature Roger Pielke Snr.

Some ideas for Malcolm in the middle

Missing in all the political commentary or reports about Tony Abbott's "pledged in blood" spoiler role for the future of the carbon trading scheme ("don't buy into it, companies, we're going to revoke it") I haven't yet seen anyone mention the person in the Liberals who must be absolutely grinding his teeth over this.

I refer, of course, to Malcolm Turnbull.

Not only has he had to go along with the vote against the legislation, he now has to sit back for 2 to 3 years while his leader charges ahead with "maintaining the rage" against it.   This must surely cause him some despair.

I wonder:  will this be enough to push him over the edge in future?   Let's face it, there are enough climate change deniers in the Coalition that must give Malcolm the pip, but he was probably at least hoping that after the scheme was in place, he didn't have to put up with listening to them anymore.  But now, it is going to again be a live issue in the lead up to the next election.

What is the best he can hope for?    That the companies who have to buy permits will, in the run up to the next election, tell the Coalition to face reality and let the scheme continue?   That the public will react against the loss of compensation?   Some (more) really bad weather internationally will convince more people that really adverse climate change is already upon us?

If Abbott resists the obvious reasons for not dismantling the scheme, surely it will fill Malcolm with despair.

Could he breakaway before the election on this issue?  Become an independent, or even form a new par1ty:  one that actually takes science and economists seriously?  He might even get to re-run his Republican campaign again.

I hope he is giving these sort of options some thought.   He may as well start planning now.

Jobs, health and Apples

Steve Jobs, neuroendocrine tumors, and alternative medicine : Respectful Insolence

Here's a really, really long blog post talking about Steve Jobs' health, which is of interest mainly because it notes his initial hope to treat a tumour by diet for the first 9 months.

He was, it would appear, a bit too alternative for his own good, although he eventually went as far as he possibly could with conventional medicine.

I have neutral feelings about Jobs and his products. Sure, I like the iPad a lot, but is anyone who puts iTunes on their Windows PC a fan of the software? I doubt it.

And news like this:

Apple claims the Korean technology company ''blatantly copied'' its highly successful tablet computer and infringed at least two patents related to touch screens and the gestures controlling them.

make it hard to embrace the company, surely. A patent for controlling hand gestures? I bet there a few hand gestures being made at Samsung towards Apple HQ all the time.

Witch doctor worry

BBC News - Where child sacrifice is a business

Wow. Quite a horrifying story of the apparent revival in child sacrifice in Uganda by witch doctors.

It doesn't appear to be a case of mass hysteria, as one might initially suspect, as there are injured and dead children, as well as an interview with a witch doctor, as evidence it is real:

For our own inquiries, we posed as local businessmen and asked around for a witch doctor that could bring prosperity to our local construction company. We were soon introduced to Awali. He led us into a courtyard behind his home, and as if to welcome us he and his helpers wrestled a goat to the ground and slit its throat.

"This animal has been sacrificed to bring luck to us all," Awali explained. He then demanded a fee of $390 (£250) for the ritual and asked us to return in a few days.

At our next meeting, Awali invited us into his shrine, which is traditionally built from mud bricks with a straw roof. Inside, the floor is littered with herbs, face masks, rattles and a machete.

The witch doctor explained that this meeting was to discuss the most powerful spell - the sacrifice of a child.

"There are two ways of doing this," he said. "We can bury the child alive on your construction site, or we cut them in different places and put their blood in a bottle of spiritual medicine."

Awali grabbed his throat. "If it's a male, the whole head is cut off and his genitals. We will dig a hole at your construction site, and also bury the feet and the hands and put them all together in the hole."

This situation has lead to one of strangest police task force names:

The Anti-Human Sacrifice Police Task Force, launched in response to the growing numbers, says the ritual murder rate has slowed, citing a figure of 38 cases since 2006.

It's a bit like living in a place where a Grimms' Fairy Tale could actually happen.