Boy troubles

Found via Bryan Appleyard's blog is this fascinating article from Financial Times, explaining one theory about why socieities become violent:

In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.

More explanation as to why this should be:

The problem...is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honoured way for a second or third son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable. Europe's pacifism since 1945, in Mr Heinsohn's view, reflects an inability to wage war, not a disinclination.

Go read it all. As Appleyard indicates, as a general rule it's wise to be sceptical about simple explanations about human behaviour, but this one smells right.

Having too many nightmares?

Depression and sleep problems I have heard about, but a connection between having many nightmares and suicide attempts is new:

After factoring in other variables that may influence degree of suicidality, including other mental diagnoses, the investigators found that patients with frequent nightmares were almost four times as likely to be highly suicidal compared with patients who didn't report having nightmares.

Growth and prosperity

An interesting article from Spiked discusses the "paradox of prosperity", and argues it is not really something to worry about:

Contemporary critics of consumerism and popular prosperity are obsessed with what they see as a paradox. A central theme of their arguments is that economic growth does not make people happier. In their view, the pursuit of mass affluence is at best futile and is probably responsible for making humanity miserable. Often the growth sceptics argue that the pursuit of material goods is akin to a disease: they say the developed world is suffering from ‘affluenza’ or ‘luxury fever. Typically they conclude we should not attempt to become richer and often they argue for the pursuit of alternative social goals such as mental well-being.

Ben-Ami argues that:

The rise of mass affluence is an incredibly positive development. It has bolstered the quality of people’s lives enormously. But there never was any guarantee that such progress would bring happiness. One of the most positive qualities of human beings is that they often want more than they have got. They typically want the lives of their children and grandchildren to be better than their own. The growth sceptics would have us stay where we are or even retreat to living a life of lower living standards.

This is the section strikes me as particularly true:

What the growth sceptics identify as a lack of happiness can, at least in part, be more accurately described as social pessimism. There is no longer a sense that the future can be better than the present. On the contrary, potentially positive developments, such as technological or scientific advance, are routinely viewed with foreboding. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that survey data sometimes appears to indicate that people feel miserable. The happiness pundits themselves have taken on the idea that, at least in material terms, the future cannot be better than the present.

Good reading.

Blame 9/11, I guess

Pamela Bone in The Australian today writes about the current wave of anti-religious publishing, and notes that there new titles are headed our way:

Atheist Manifesto by French philosopher Michel Onfray; Against Religion by Melbourne philosopher Tamas Pataki; Have a Nice Doomsday by American writer Nick Guyatt. The one I am most looking forward to is Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Oh great.

Being an atheist or agnostic herself, her article welcomes the new wave, and she makes some valid points (that the faithful are often their own worst advertisement for their religion being the main one.)

This paragraph deserves some comment:

Non-religious people are fed up with all the talk about the emptiness, the barrenness and lack of meaning in "secular society". It may surprise religious people to learn that our lives are not empty. Some people might need to believe in an afterlife in order to find meaning in this one; others don't. Some might need to believe in a creator in order to be awed by the majesty of nature; others don't. Some might believe in something higher than themselves and call it God; others believe in something higher than themselves and call it humanity or nature. It makes no difference to how morally they behave. Everything good in religion can be had without religion.

As I noted when talking about Dawkins before, I reckon that there is bit of hidden elitism in this, in that a good education and opportunity to indulge an interest in science or philosophy makes it easy to think you are being deep and meaningful, but such opportunity is not available or inherent in much of the world.

The problem is not that the irreligious have no "meaning" in their lives, as you could argue that anyone who more or less happily gets on with living would be able to say something gives their life meaning. The issue is more with whether what they say gives meaning is really just a diversionary interest from facing the real existential questions of life.

Such diversionary interests become more widely available the richer a society becomes, which is a counter-influence to the other idea that increased riches gives more free time to be "deep". The way that better health has made death less of an obvious reality helps hide the existential issues too, of course.

Of course I don't want people to suffer so as force them to think philosophically; I'll leave that position to the quasi-religion of the Greens.

[In my first version of this post I mentioned "low brow" diversions, which made me sound too much like David Williamson. I should have been more even handed and noted that the rich have their empty diversions too. As do the ostensibly religious. I think that the romantic versions of environmentalism, which has a strong foothold across all classes in the West, mostly avoids the issue of the deeper meaning of humanity too, by concentrating on the rest of nature.]

Anyway, as it happens I agree with Bone that it would be ideal if moral values and ethics could always be agreed upon by arguments which do not rely on revelation. (This is why I like Kant, and John Rawls also made a decent effort. But then again, Kant thought masturbation was worse than suicide.)

But these philosophical exercises are all arguments made by creatures with no complete knowledge of their own true nature (there is, for example, presently a rash of articles arguing again about whether free will even exists) or that of the universe overall. Largely for this reason, purely rational philosophical exercises are never going to reach positions on morals that are self-evident and compulsively universal, as it were. Pure rationality is always going to have a problem with ultimate motivation for being 'good' too.

I therefore think it is better to stick with the not always easy task of trying to piece together faith in revelation and reason, and that the world would be a safer place if this attitude was widespread.

[I think what I have just done is more or less a summary of the Pope's recent controversial address that mentioned Islam. I wasn't really thinking about it when I started, though.]

That UFO...

Everyone who has the vaguest interest in UFO's would have heard about the O'Hare airport case by now. For some links about it that readers may not have seen yet: the NPR audio report with the journalist involved gives a little bit more background about the story, and notes that an FOI request for radar and the control tower recordings hasn't been answered yet. (It is an odd feature that an FOI request was needed to get confirmation of the event.)

Paul Kimball is being very appropriately cautious about the case, and links to a few good sites with many rather unusual "hole in the clouds" photos.

My take: it sounds too good to be true. Still, it's great to have a bit of aerial mystery around.

About China

Early last year I linked to an article sceptical of long term prospects for China's economy, at least without political reform.

Here's another article along the same lines which is an interesting read.

Serendipity

A couple of years ago, I unsuccessfully tried to track down an article from a science magazine I had read about how you could easily build huge solar cell farms with a system of self replicating (but quite dumb) robots. I could not remember which magazine I had found it in.

[I have kept most of my old popular science magazines (starting with Omni in the late 70's and 80's, New Scientists and Discover magazine, and the occasional Scientific American.) My wife does not appreciate the hoarding of magazines that, admittedly, I rarely have cause to look at again, but there is a spare room at my office that can hold the boxes.]

Anyway, by pure chance, tonight I found someone in comments at Futurepundit has linked to the story, from 1995. (It was in Discover and is still on line.)

I love the WWW.

Get out your telescopes

This article indicates that, surprisingly, things are not as bad in one or two villages in the Sunni triangle as one might think:

For the past three years though, there has been little sign of the al Nasseris or other residents of Owja and Tikrit honoring Saddam's tribal largesse by resisting the American presence. Many, indeed, are said to work in U.S. Army bases, something that would earn them a death sentence in other Sunni towns.

"We have good working relations with Saddam's tribe," a local U.S. military spokesman confirmed. "We work on many infrastructure projects together and they support the governor."
U.S. commanders attribute the pacification of Saddam's tribal homelands to the close attention they paid to the area after the invasion. Fearing that it could become an insurgent haven, they established a large military base in Tikrit and made strenuous efforts to hunt down senior regime figures who lived there.

But the real reason for this post is this part of the article:

"Why have there been no big attacks in Owja?" one Sunni from Baghdad asked last week. "They have sold their ground to the occupation for the money, and now they are protecting them. They should feel ashamed because the Americans arrested their relative and their leader."

Such charges are denied by Owja residents, who say they grieve for Saddam as hysterically as the pilgrims flocking to his grave. One day last week, for example, the village was buzzing with claims that Saddam had appeared as the Man in the Moon the night before.

Uh oh

From The Sunday Times:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

One good thing about such a plan, from the US point of view, is that if the nuclear "bunker busters" are actually made by Israel, this may deflect some of the blame for the attack from America.

Still, any use of nuclear weapon pre-emptively is a big step for a nation.

Those clever Japanese

From an interesting article in the IHT about how good Japan is at conserving energy:

Japan's population and economy are each about 40 percent as large as that of the United States, yet in 2004 it consumed less than a quarter as much energy as America did, according to the International Energy Agency, which is based in Paris.

On a per-capita basis, that means Japan consumed the energy equivalent of 2.8 million tons of oil per person in 2004, in contrast to 5.4 million tons per American. Germany, another energy- conscious country, used 3.2 million tons per person.

I guess the fact that the Japanese would have to have some of the smallest house/apartment sizes in the world, and live mostly in very high density urban areas, has something to do with this. Even so, it is quite cold in many parts in winter, unlike much of Australia, for example.

The other thing I did not know was that fuel cells can be purchased there (at heavy government subsidy) to generate electricity for the home:

One way has been a subsidy of about $51,000 per home fuel cell. This allowed Kimura to buy his cell last year for about $9,000, far below production cost. His cell, which generates 1 kilowatt per hour, provides just under half of his household's electricity, and has cut his electricity bill by the same amount, he said.

The device converts natural gas into hydrogen, which the fuel cell then uses to generate electricity. Heat released by the process is used to warm water.

The first two fuel cells were installed in the prime minister's residence in April 2005. Since then, 1,300 have been sold, according to the Trade and Industry Ministry. The ministry forecasts that as sales pick up, production cost will fall to about $5,000 by decade's end.

That's pretty impressive.

Can we stop talking about it yet?

It's good to see that the media is finding giving the fallout from the hanging a bit of a rest, although today many are running with the Egyptian's president's comments about Saddam becoming a "martyr".

Let's face it, he would been have treated as such by a large number of Arabs regardless of the exact circumstances of the last few minutes of his life. Denying him an (alleged) martyrdom completely, by letting him stay in a comfy European jail during the incredibly slow trial process of the international tribunal, ran the big risk that the Iraqi and Arab media would never have tired of showing him grandstanding in court and encouraging insurgency in his country. It was not a risk worth taking.

It is also interesting that the media does not make much fuss about the actual reaction in Iraq and elsewhere, in terms of violence, being rather muted in the last week. I would have predicted a surge, then a tapering off, and I guess that may still happen. But I still expect that the problems caused by his execution will not be as dire as the critics have predicted.

Shades of "A Clockwork Orange"

I missed reading this article by Richard Dawkins earlier this week. Saddam should not have been hanged, argues Dawkins, he should have been kept alive for scientific study.

Dawkins takes the anti-capital punishment line that would you expect (not that there is anything wrong with that, generally.) He generously allows this:

If President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Dawkins goes on to write:

...the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient support to take over an entire country.

What were the formative influences on these men? Was it something in their childhood that turned them bad? In their genes? In their testosterone levels? Could the danger have been nipped in the bud by an alert psychiatrist? How would Hitler or Hussein have responded to a different style of education? We don't have a clear answer to these questions. We need to do the research.

Is Dawkins really serious here, or just seeking publicity? The objections are so obvious, but I will list them anyway:

* Most psychological research surely requires the co-operation of the subject, and who says Saddam would ever have agreed to it? If he did not agree, would it have been OK to force him to undergo brain scans, blood tests, etc. Should he just have been filmed 24 hours a day and had conversations secretly recorded? If he is true to his liberal principles, Dawkins would have to admit that if Saddam didn't co-operate, nothing useful could be done.

* Even if he did co-operate, who could believe his own version of his life and influences anyway? There is every reason to suspect that Saddam was not particularly good at reliable self assessment or insight, as are sociopaths everywhere. We don't need to study another one to tell us that.

* Dawkins' idea that everything in evil behaviour is reducible to scientific explanation leads to the idea that criminals should be "cured" rather than punished for wrongdoing. Such a view, with its de-emphasis on free will, is actually dehumanising, despite its (apparent) good intentions.

Silly uses for your robot suit

The Japan Times has an article about the creator of the HAL suit, which had some publicity a year or so ago and looks like this:


The suit, which may be commercially available sometime, is meant to give additional strength to those who need it. But its creator has another idea for its use:

....our robots can be used in the field of entertainment. For instance, by having HAL wearers also wear head-mounted displays, they can watch somebody walking through deep snow and, by having HAL put pressure on their legs, they can feel the sensation themselves. Or we can create a situation where you might be watching a movie at home with a head-mounted display and a HAL suit on, then feel your right leg suddenly being harshly pulled just as Sadako (a creepy character in the horror movie "Ring") is grabbing someone's right leg in the film!

So, for those of you who don't already jump enough at surprises in scary movies, here's a possible answer. It sure is some trivial use for expensive technology.

Of course, what all boys long to see is cyborg soldiers in battle. That would be cool.

The black hole in Ireland

New Scientist's Christmas issue ran an interesting story about a physicist who thinks that a historical report of a "ball lightning" type phenomena seen by one man in Ireland in 1868 may have actually been caused by a tiny black hole. Full access to the article is not (yet) available on line, but sometimes New Scientist drops the restriction after a couple of weeks. I had to buy the paper issue.

The report in question is intriguing, because it involved the ball lightning apparently carving a trench in the soil/peat it passed over. I have read about ball lightning before, but had never heard of this effect. The article claims that the damage alleged caused is still visible at the site.

The idea that a small primordial black hole (left over from the big bang) was at the heart of the glowing ball assumes that Hawking radiation does not exist; a point which very, very few scientists seem willing to seriously consider as a possibility. (I don't have time to provide the links right now, but go search this blog for "black holes" and you'll see what I mean.)

It seems clear that a lack of a quantum gravity theory means there is a good degree of uncertainty about the finer points of how HR would work, particularly at the end of the evaporation process. That an evaporating micro black hole may leave a remnant, the exact nature of which I have not really seen explained clearly, seems a possibility still very much up in the air.

The black hole - ball lightning theory also has to come up with some fancy footwork to explain why the ball lightning bounced along the ground, and didn't eat up the earth by now. (In fact, the article does not mention at all what the physicist thinks was the eventual fate of the black hole in question.)

Still, it is interesting and potentially relevant to the issue of possible danger from the LHC.

Gore gored

If you happen to think that Gore Vidal is a self-important bore, you will find plenty of support for your view in an article in Salon (of all places.)

Never trust a President without creases

Tigerhawk points out one of the more ridiculous recent posts in Huffington Post. It really puzzles me as to why that site has any credibility at all.

Left, right, etc

Janet Albrechtsen ends a column with this:

So I'll leave you with a larger but somewhat cheeky hypothesis. Left-wing politics is essentially an emotional, instinctive utopian kind of world peopled by romantics and dreamers. Conservatism is, on the other hand, more rational, analytical and pragmatic. That is why creative types tend to come from the Left. Right-wingers, by contrast, have real jobs.

Of course, calling it "somewhat cheeky" indicates that she's hardly likely to consider it entirely defensible. But still it attracts a lot of criticism from the left-y side.

What do I think? Well, that the modern "creative type" is much more commonly left leaning is surely true, isn't it? (Why that is so is not entirely clear to me, nor is why it seems especially true of the last 40 years or so.) I would have also thought that Marxism was clearly utopian in nature, and a matter of faith masked as science. There is surely still an element of utopianism that runs through the Left.

But the issue of the rational/emotional divide is more complicated than Janet's take. Modern social conservatives of a religious bent (like me) understand the emotional appeal of the old faith, and regret that it has less influence on society. On the other side, there is often the unreflective atheistic utilitarianism of modern ethics, which prides itself as more rational than anything that is partly based on faith and mystery.

Of course, it is not as if mainstream Christian religious ethics doesn't employ rational argument too. (Pope Benedict reminded the world of this recently.) One of the most frustrating things about arguing with the irreligous Left can be their attitude that their conclusions are self-evidently more rational than that of those who have a religious influence. In fact, the different conclusions may arise more from the varience in fundamental assumptions about human nature and reality, and these are really matters of faith (or at least unproveable) for either side.

Someone else has probably explained this better than I can...

Who reads who

Over at Andrew Norton's blog a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned how bloggers' audiences are mainly people who already agree with them. I made this comment:

Andrew, yes the “echo chamber” function of blogs is clear, but I have a theory that it is worse on the Left than the Right. This is because many on the modern Left (particularly the idealistic youth) consider opinions different from their own as both irrational and morally defective, and therefore spending much time reading such opinions in blogs is like dabbling in evil (if they believed in evil). It often just gets them so annoyed they cannot continue reading.

As evidence in support, have a look at this post at Blogocracy. Turns out Tim Dunlop and his regular band of not so merry men (he does seem to attract few female commenters) find the moderate Right opinions of Gerard Henderson so annoying they can't bear to even read him anymore. As one commenter also notes, it's quite a hoot that Dunlop calls Henderson "predictable".

Henderson's other great benefit over Dunlop is brevity.

Musical instruments with a difference

Never having been to Nepal, I had not heard before about this surprising aspect of its version of Buddhism (from a recent travel article in The Times):

Rosa had been asked to take this particular damaru back to England for some Buddhist friends, and was understandably nervous about it. The hand drum was just as she had described. It was made out of human skulls — children’s skulls, to be precise. Over the highly polished craniums was stretched a thin membrane of human skin.

“One skull is female, the other is male,” she explained. “It symbolises the union of wisdom and compassion. It’s very powerful. If you get one made out of babies’ skulls, that’s even better — something to do with the energy flowing through the opening in the fontanelles.”...

The shops around Boudhanath are full of similar objects. In one, I was shown a selection of skull offering bowls; in another, half a dozen trumpets made from women’s thigh bones. Dusting one off, the shopkeeper put the hip joint to his lips and blew, making a noise like a hunting horn.

Rather disturbing to a Western mind, especially those instruments made out of kids or babies skulls.

Henderson on the hanging

Gerard Henderson's SMH column on the reaction to the hanging of Saddam is good. The best paragraph answers those who claim it is hypocrisy for the Australian government to only sometimes diplomatically complain about death penalties:

The Prime Minister's stance ignited criticism from the civil liberties lobby. Lex Lasry, QC, said this position "compromises our international standards" since "we cannot pick and choose on the death penalty".

But there is nothing inconsistent in attempting to obtain a reprieve for an Australian convicted of a serious drug offence in, say, Singapore and declining to put pressure on a democratic government intent on executing a mass murderer whose supporters form part of an extant murderous insurgency and who had been convicted in a public trial.

Death by Mochi - 2007 edition

The annual Japanese New Year mochi toll is in:

TOKYO — Four men choked to death on Monday and Tuesday in Tokyo, Niigata and Ibaraki prefectures, and seven others in the capital became critically ill after choking on mochi rice cakes, a traditional New Year's food in Japan, police and firefighters said.

A 68-year-old man in Tokyo's Fuchu and a 76-year-old man in the capital's Sumida Ward died Tuesday after choking on the rice cakes, while a 74-year-old man in Ojiya, Niigata Prefecture, and an 80-year-old man in Chikusei, Ibaraki Prefecture, died likewise on Monday, they said. In Tokyo, a total of 16 people ranging in age from 65 to 91 were hospitalized due to choking on rice cakes on Monday and Tuesday, and two of them died and seven lost consciousness and were in a serious condition, the Tokyo Fire Department said.

A New Year's Day Miscellany

Happy New Year everyone.

There's not much obvious to post about today. The Sydney Morning Herald gets off to a bad start by running an article by Bob Ellis which, even by his standards, appears to be written after an exceptionally long night on the claret. (It's about the death of Saddam, who he seems to think went to the gallows in a noble fashion, unlike how he imagines George W would behave.) It is truly a puerile read.

As for the future, reviewing psychic predictions for the year just gone is always a laugh. Have a look at this list of reader predictions from About.com. A more comprehensive list of inaccurate prophecy may be very hard to find. I like this one:

A book will be published in 2006 that completely explains existence. By doing so it will prove the world wrong on a Copernicus (flat-world) scale. The presentation will be that which will put traditional values on the defensive using simple logic that cannot be refuted.

How about this cryptic one in the "entertainment" section:

Harry Potter strikes again and again.

And under the "surprise predictions" category:

The Elizabethan collar will come back in style along with the poofy sleeves.

On another topic, I will be looking out for the figures on this New Year's Japanese mochi chocking deaths with interest. (It's a more interesting hobby than following the media obsession with holiday road accidents in Australia.)

Finally, the British Medical Journal has a more or less serious (I think) article that contains everything you ever wanted to know about sword swallowing. (And yes, it is often medically dangerous.) This extract about you learn how to do it is particularly interesting:

Some respondents swallowed a sword easily, but mastery for most required daily practice over months or years. The gag reflex is desensitised, sometimes by repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger. The
performer must then learn to align a sword with the upper oesophageal sphincter with the neck hyperextended. The next step requires relaxation of the pharynx and oesophagus and particularly the horizontal fibres of cricopharyngeus, which are not usually under voluntary control.

The more mysterious question of why anyone still bothers to learn this is not addressed.

On the death of Saddam

Long time readers would know that I agree with Roger Simon's point. Captain's Quarters' take on the execution is fair enough too.

I note that some of the critics of executing Saddam talk about how it will not help Iraqi "reconciliation". Well, it seems to me that the main example of successful national reconciliation is South Africa, but the history of that country, and the circumstances of the change in power there, are vastly different from what has happened in Iraq. (And who is the equivalent national hero to Mandela who would make a similar kind of reconciliation process in Iraq even vaguely possible?) It also seems rather improbable to me, although I stand to be corrected, that Iraqis don't already know enough of the genocidal actions of Saddam in relation to the Kurds.

Somewhat surprisingly, The Guardian's obituary is the one that seems to go into the most detail about Saddam's evil character.

As for those from the West who say "Bush and Blair should be next", they are the people who really worry me for the future of a sane world.

Waiting for the apology

A few weeks ago the Fairfax press, and indeed the Murdoch press, both ran with a story that that John Howard and Alexander Downer had "distorted" advice to them when using the phrase "biological agent" to describe a white powder that had been sent to the Indonesian embassy. The alleged reason for this was because documents obtained under FOI from ACT Pathology and the Federal Police never used the phrase. Have a look at Tim Dunlop's Blogocracy post about this, where he ends with this:

You simply can’t take at face value a word that comes out of their mouths. It’s about time the media stopped reporting this tendency as ‘smart politics’ and started calling it what it is, dishonesty.

For those who love reading stupid Howard conspiracy theories, read some of the comments to that post too.

Today, the Sydney Morning Herald points this out:

ADVICE relied on by the Prime Minister to describe flour sent to the Indonesian embassy last year as a "biological agent" appears to have originated in the ACT Emergency Services Authority, according to documents just released.

Unsigned situation reports produced by the authority's Emergency Co-ordination Centre on June 1 last year, the day the powder was found at the embassy, say the material "has been positively identified as a biological agent", that further testing was under way and a result was likely to take 24 to 48 hours.

Yet, according to the original report in The Age:

Staff at ACT Health and ACT Emergency Services were stunned when the Government called the powder a biological agent.

Obviously, whoever The Age spoke to at ACT Emergency Services did not know what was in its own situation reports. Did the reporter really speak to anyone of significance there?

Any sign of an apology from the press over this? Of course not. From further down today's SMH story:

Earlier this month Mr Howard and the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, denied a Herald report that they had distorted test results on the material. Mr Howard said he and Mr Downer had quoted directly from advice provided by the Protective Security Co-ordination Centre saying it had tested positive as a biological agent and that further testing would need to be carried out to determine what the substance actually was.

The Government has not released the full protective security advice but the new documents show the centre was liaising with the Emergency Co-ordination Centre, suggesting their reports were probably used in the protective security advice to the Commonwealth Government.

There seems to be no suggestion that the Emergency Co-ordination Centre's situation reports picked up the phrase "biological agent" from John Howard himself. (The SMH report could easily have clarified this by telling us the time of the first "situation report" was issued. If it was prior to Howard's press conference, there is no wriggle room left for conspiracy theorising at all.)

But basically, it seems to me that the SMH story comes as close as they can bring themselves to saying they were wrong, and Howard and Downer's version was completely correct, without actually saying it.

Today's story tries to salvage some criticism of the government because:

The biological terrorism scare continued until June 2, when the Government announced the powder was not harmful.

This was despite an email from the federal police national manager of intelligence, Grant Wardlaw, sent to the office of the Justice Minister, Chris Ellison, at 6.35pm on June 1 making clear there was no confirmed evidence the powder was a harmful substance. Dr Wardlaw said the powder had tested positive to gram bacilli.

"Gram bacilli is a commonly occurring bacteria. If spores of this bacteria are found to be growing in the substance this raises the level of potential risk.

"Information to date is that no spores have been identified by pathology," he said.

So, it is still some sort of scandal that the "scare" (which presumably only affected anyone working at the Indonesian embassy in the first place) was in place for about 24 hours? Talk about trying to make a story out of nothing.

And by the way, don't bother looking for this story in The Age today. It doesn't even appear there at all. News Limited doesn't seem to have run it either.

This is why our press is so respected.

Speaking of the weather...

Maybe it is just that by mid-life, really hot weather starts to annoy everyone much more than it did when they were younger. Whatever the reason, it has seemed to me that most Christmas Days, and summers generally, in Brisbane over the last 6 years or so have been unbearably hot and uncomfortable. So I have been delighted that this summer has been so unseasonably cool. All those holiday makers on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts might be regretting paying $2,000 and more for a week by the beach, though.

Anyway, while browsing the web looking for more details about the Federation drought of 100 years ago (it's not so easy to find,) I stumbled onto this page from the Australian Bureau of Statistics about Australian deserts. They can be a lot hotter than I thought:

The most famous long hot spell in Australian history was that at Marble Bar in the summer of 1923-24, when there were 160 consecutive days above 37.8°C (100 degrees Fahrenheit). Even in those areas where the most extreme heat is rare, there are many hot days; for example, at Giles, where the all-time record high is a relatively modest 44.8°C, there are an average of 100 days per year of 35°C or above, including 69 in succession during the summer of 1964-65.

While I am not exactly a global warming sceptic, it is very important to realise how bad Australian weather has been in the past before you start to talk about how bad it is at the present.

What you may have missed in my absence

Here's a list of some interesting stories from the last week:

Let me do the panicking for you: If the Large Hadron Collider or an asteroid does not get humanity first, a series of supervolcanoes will make life miserable enough sooner or later again anyway. Here's a Christmas Day story that did not attract much attention:

Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought...

Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.

But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.

They have published in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America evidence that the eruption in the Taupo Volcanic Zone was actually two supervolcanoes 30km apart which erupted within days or weeks of each other.

What's worse:

Last year, other research at Taupo - on the more recent Taupo supervolcano of only 26,500 years ago - changed accepted theories that it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the reservoir of molten rock, or magma, beneath a supervolcano to build up to an eruption.

They showed the period between super-eruptions can be much shorter, perhaps a few tens of thousands of years.

Dr Bruce Charlier, from Britain's Open University, showed the build-up at Taupo was no more than 40,000 years - a relatively short time period in geological terms.

A happy pre-Christmas report: having a drink before your head injury is a good idea. The trick is in making sure your drink does not cause you to have the injury in the first place.

Everyone's favourite cat borne disease gets noticed again: The Australian media noticed a toxoplasma story that talked about possible behavioural changes in people infected with it. (Funny, this was covered thoroughly in blogs, including mine, in August.)

But in fact, Science Daily notes recently that has been a cluster of new papers about toxoplasma. This part of their report was interesting:

Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Symptoms usually appear only in people with weakened immune systems, but on rare occasions, healthy people suffer serious eye and central nervous system problems from toxoplasmosis. Their babies can have birth defects. White said toxoplasmosis also may be linked to some cases of schizophrenia and bipolar disease. It can kill livestock and has devastated efforts to restore sea otters near Monterey, Calif. Because it's common, yet complex, toxoplasmosis is a potential weapon for bioterrorists.

Bioterrorism, when nearly half the world has it already? Sounds a little unlikely. But then again, it they gathered a ton of cat poo and put it in the local water supply, I guess it would put me off drinking water for some time.

Hitchens goes to Iraq

There's a short Slate piece by Hitchens about a recent trip to Iraq. Good reading, as always.

What I got for Christmas

They're boxer shorts, if you can't quite tell.

That Letterman Christmas song

I don't know if I have missed the 2006 edition yet, but David Letterman has had Darlene Love singing this song every Christmas for a decade. It is good. Here's the 2005 version:

The Guardian greens your Christmas

It's hard to find the right word to describe this article in The Guardian about how to have a green Christmas. Seeing it's from England, maybe "eco-naff" is appropriate?

Here are some of its suggestions:

"Use slightly fewer fairy lights, and try not to leave them on all day." (Just how "slightly" will this affect the amount of CO2 put out by your local power plant, which in England might be nuclear anyway?)

green gifts " include everything from giving a goat to organic underwear to recycled glass objects"

"Wrap those ethically thoughtful presents in old newspaper and string. " (I hope the goat stays still long enough.)

"...if you're flying for Christmas it's usually because you haven't seen your family for a while, and the trip is less likely to be negotiable. You could deny yourself air travel for the rest of the year, or make the rest of your Christmas so green that you offset your evil ways." (I would like someone to do the figures on how many millennia of using newspaper to wrap gifts it would take to offset a trans-Atlantic flight.)

The incredible shrinking country

Japan's population to fall 30% by 2055, study finds

The story is from the Japan Times. The longer term projection is more surprising (the total population is forecast to fall to 44.59 million by 2105,) but just how accurate can such projections be?

Of course, part of Japan's problem is its distrust of immigrants, but surely that is going to have to change soon to keep the economy going.

Comparative religion

For a provocative take on the differences between the great religions, you can't get much better and more succinct than this paragraph from a Christmas article in American Spectator:

All religions are not alike. Christianity, as it happens, is religion built around forgiveness. "Turn the other cheek," "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" -- you don't have to look very far. All this may seems natural, routine, inevitable -- maybe even boring to educated people -- but it is not universal. Hinduism is a religion that established a caste system and revolves around helping people escape the great chain of being. Buddhism is a reform of Hinduism that rejected the caste system but still seeks escape from the suffering of being by attaining non-being. Islam is a religion built on forced conversion and conquest. It does not put a value on forgiveness. The Shi'ia have still not forgiven the Sunni for the death of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 A.D.

Well, I am betting that characterisation of Islam would have Karen Armstrong frothing at the mouth, and to be honest, I don't really know how fair it is. All of the article is interesting, though, and worth reading.

It does seem to me, as I may have said somewhere here before, that Christianity and Islam as religions must have had to approach violence from two opposite directions. In the former, being founded by a "peacenik" whose closest brush with violence was overturning some tables, the religion that follows him had to rationalise against pacificism as the apparent default position.

Islam, on the other hand, being created by a political warrior figure, has to come up with reasons why not to resort to violence as a legitimate way of promoting itself. (Of course there are parts of the Koran that emphasize the merits of peace, and Armstrong claims - with questionable accuracy, apparently - that at the end of his life Mohammed renounced violence, but my point is still valid I reckon.)

I am surely not the first person to make this point, but what the heck.

The Libyan HIV case

There is one thing the recent reporting about the Libyan conviction of Bulgarian nurses (and a Palestinian doctor) for infecting children with HIV does not cover much: what motive was alleged for the medics to do this?

Well, as the New York Times reported in 2005:

They were also charged with working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

"Nurses from little towns in Bulgaria acting as agents of Mossad?" said Antoanetta Ouzounova, 28, one of Ms. Chervenyashka's two daughters. "It all sounds funny and absurd until you realize your mother could die for it." Although the motive of subversion has been dropped, the death sentence stands.

I see that Judith Miller did a long article on the case in September this year. I missed it at the time, but it is a fascinating report. She says that the conspiracy theory originated with Col. Gadhafi himself, yet one of his sons has helped the defence case. Miller writes:

Saif al-Islam has challenged his father's argument that the outbreak was a foreign plot. "There is no conspiracy," he told me. "There is no hand of Mossad or the CIA. This was a question of mismanagement, or negligence, or bad luck, or maybe all three." Conspiracy theories, rooted in Libyan and Arab culture, had created a terrible dynamic in this case, he said.

Well, maybe it is OK for me to continue to believe Arab cultures to be peculiarly prone to conspiracy nonsense, now that I have Col Gadhafi's son supporting me!

Bound for the "odd news" columns

From the LA Times:

A woman going through security at Los Angeles International Airport put her month-old grandson into a plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine....

A screener watching the machine's monitor immediately noticed the outline of a baby and pulled the bin backward on the conveyor belt.

The infant was taken to Centinela Hospital, where doctors determined that he had not received a dangerous dose of radiation.

But you can't say the Transportation Security Administration has done nothing to prevent this type of incident:

On its website, the TSA posts extensive tips for travelers, including a section titled "Traveling With Children." One item reads: "Never leave babies in an infant carrier while it goes through the X-ray machine."

Hanukkah wars

A pretty funny column in the LA Times about the "war on Hanukkah". An extract:

These should be good times for Hanukkah and the Jews. After all, the Christmas story offers nothing besides a guy who erases all our sins, but the tale of Hanukkah centers on a magical, super-efficient oil that causes an eightfold decrease in carbon emissions. But instead of this being our year, we had the worst run-up to Hanukkah in 62 years: Iran hosted David Duke at its Holocaust denial conference; Mel Gibson got a Golden Globe nomination; Jimmy Carter equated Israeli policy with apartheid; Ehud Olmert — the least-smooth Jew since Jerry Lewis — accidentally admitted that Israel has the bomb; and the subtext of "Charlotte's Web" is that pork is irresistible.

I must admit to forgetting what Hanukkah is about. Wikipedia enlightens me:

Spiritually, Hanukkah commemorates the Miracle of the Oil. According to the Talmud, at the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem following the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Empire, there was only enough consecrated olive oil to fuel the eternal flame in the Temple for one day. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days - which was the length of time it took to press, prepare and consecrate new oil.

Escape via niqab

A pretty remarkable story in The Times about how a British man wanted for murder was apparently able to leave the country by wearing the niqab:

One of those who was wanted for this murder — Mustaf Jama — is believed to have fled Britain in the days after the shooting, disguising himself as a veiled woman. His brother was one of five other men left to be tried and convicted of murder or manslaughter. Jama was able to sneak on to an international flight at Heathrow dressed in a niqab despite extensive publicity about this murder....

While it is compulsory for those wearing the niqab to be examined (by a female immigration officer if that is what is preferred) when they enter this country, arrangements appear to be far less stringent if a woman (or in this dire incident, as it transpires, a man) is leaving a British airport, even Heathrow. According to the Immigration Act 1971, the authorities “reserve the right” to look at those who wear the veil, but it is not a legal obligation. In theory, the airlines should authenticate any passport photograph both as a passenger checks in and at the boarding gate immediately before departure. In practice, though, most companies are reluctant to make what might be considered an insensitive demand of people who are their customers, particularly on routes where it is common for those travelling to be fully covered.

I wonder what the equivalent rules and practice are in Australia.

The polonium lesson: don't trust the BBC and ABC

This time last year, Radio National's Science Show (run by the rather Left leaning Robyn Williams) had a show in which the risks of a radioactive "dirty bomb" were portrayed as being just a scaremongering invention of the media. He took extracts from a BBC documentary as follows (Adam Curtis is the BBC producer):

And the media took the bait. They portrayed the dirty bomb as an extraordinary weapon that would kill thousands of people, and in the process they made the hidden enemy even more terrifying. But in reality the threat of a dirty bomb is yet another illusion. Its aim is to spread radioactive material through a conventional explosion. But almost all studies of such a possible weapon have concluded that the radiation spread in this way would not kill anybody because the radioactive material would be so dispersed, and providing the area was cleaned promptly the long-term effects would be negligible. In the past both the American army and the Iraqi military tested such devices and both concluded that they were completely ineffectual weapons for this very reason.

Adam CurtisHow dangerous would a dirty bomb be?

Interviewee: The deaths would be few if any, and the answer is probably none.

Adam CurtisReally?

Interviewee: Yes. And that’s been said over and over again, but then people immediately say after that, but you know people won’t believe that and they’ll panic. I don’t think it would kill anybody and I think you’ll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise. The Department of Energy actually set up such a test and they actually measured what happened. The measurements were extremely low. They calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose, not life threatening but fairly high, and I checked into how the calculation was done and they assume that after the attack no one moves for one year. One year. Now that’s ridiculous.

I always felt sceptical about this story. Even assuming only a few people die relatively quickly from a dirty bomb, people are not going to feel comfortable about having a possible increased risk of cancer for the rest of their lives. To call the threat "an illusion" when it would also require the evacuation and cleaning of a large area, and probably involve the public not coming back into that area again for a long time, seems to be downplaying the significance of the economic threat too. I mean, if a dirty bomb was let off in Times Square, just how soon do you think the public would be comfortable living and working in any building within, say, a kilometer radius?

Anyway, a very disturbing article in the International Herald Tribune now says the polonium death in London has made analysts realise that a dirty bomb using such alpha emitting radioactive could make a very deadly weapon, capable of killing tens or hundreds of people if set off in a crowded area. The relative ease with which enough polonium could currently be purchased is also discussed, which seems a dubious thing to be explaining to terrorists who read the paper.

Back to the drawing boards, BBC and ABC, to find another way to portray a dirty bomb as a right wing fear invention?

A Loewenstein low

Glamour anti-Zionist boy Antony Loewenstein got a short segment on Radio National breakfast this morning, and a transcript of what he said is here.

The end paragraph indicates that he is joining Iranian President Ahmadinejad in hoping for Israel to disappear:

Israel's long-term future remains in serious jeopardy
- due primarily to its inability to make friends in
the Arab world, expanding the occupation and refusing
to recognise Palestinian demands - and the Australian
Jewish News wants to focus on "media bias."

Tick tock, Zionists.

An inability to "make friends" in the Arab world? Give me a break.

Funnily enough, host Paul Barry said that he could hear "the phones ringing out the back already" (not exact quote maybe, but close enough) when this segment finished.

Back to a favourite theme - toilets in Japan

This article in the Japan Times deals with that fascinating issue: why men's toilets in Japan are "open door" in a way Westerns ones typically are not.

Also, this bit of history:

Japan has a long history of privies in public places, according to Eiki Morita, a high school teacher in Chiba Prefecture who has written several books on toilets in Japan, including one that catalogs 1,114 different ways to say "toilet" in Japanese. Morita told me it was common practice in the Edo Period (1603-1867), and probably much earlier, for farmers to put out shallow wooden tubs to collect waste from passersby, which they then used as fertilizer. Later, the government took over; the first privies paid for with public funds were built in Yokohama in 1872, largely as a public-health measure in response to new information from the West about waste-borne diseases.

Reminds me of that old story about how the innuit have thousands of words for "snow".

Bryan Appleyard interviews Michael Crichton

There's a good interview of Crichton by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times.

I also recommend again Bryan Appleyard's blog.

Hitchens' latest on Iraq

From Slate, Hitchens' latest column sounds a sensible analysis. His short columns manage to add much more usefully to the debate than the endless words Tim Dunlop manages to find every week to complain about Howard's and Bush's role in this.

A Christmas related post

I thought this article from The Times was interesting and relevant to the season. It's about buying real estate in Finnish Lapland, inside of the Arctic Circle. Talk about your "Northern Exposure":

It is close to midnight on a Saturday night, 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, and the karaoke machine in the wood- panelled Yllashumina restaurant and bar is humming. Most of the performers opt for Finnish tango, a melodious if somewhat improbable mix of Nordic and Latino culture that is highly popular with the locals. But then a British voice mangling an old Gloria Gaynor number sounds out through the clink of glasses....

The rental market is a varied one. In December, when the sun never even makes it above the horizon, it is dominated by Britons on Santa tours. Finns, French and Germans tend to come up to ski from February to May, when the days get longer, or visit in September to appreciate the brilliant autumn colours. June and July when the sun barely sets at all, is much quieter — not least because of the mosquitoes that emerge from the swampy ground.

The cost of real estate there seems not too bad, I guess:

The majority of Above the Arctic’s properties for sale are in Akaslompolo. Flats start at £57,175 for a 33sq m studio up to £90,750 for a 55sq m two-bedder. Most British buyers prefer wooden cabins, which also rent more easily, especially outside high season. A 56sq m one-bedder made out of kelo logs — a very hard kind of pine several hundred years old — will cost £91,600, while £114,150 will buy a 76sq m two-bedder.

Rental return is also comparable:

Like many of the Britons buying, the Birds plan to use their cabin, which should be completed in February 2008, for only a week or so a year. The rest of the time they hope to rent it out. Local rental agents put the season realistically at 20-25 weeks, which should ensure a rental yield of 6%-8%.

Of course, getting an Australian bank to lend on a Lapland cabin might be a challenge.

Anyway, have a look at Above the Arctic website to see what real estate in Lapland looks like.

While I am on the theme, I saw the Christmas Edition of "New Scandinavian Cooking" on the Food Channel last night. Even at Christmas, nearly everything involves fish, which is not a bad thing until they start talking about the fermented variety. But the main reason to watch the show is to see the host Tina Nordstrom. Have a look at the website.

Dilbert worries

I like Scott Adams list of "top ten things that worry me". I have been thinking of doing my own, which will include a review of ending the earth by running the LHC next year. Adam's concerns are more lightweight.

Get out your stopwatch

The New York Times reports on a study that shows that, even amongst experienced physicians, the rate of "success" from a colonoscopy can vary enormously:

The study, of 12 highly experienced board-certified gastroenterologists in private practice, found some were 10 times better than others at finding adenomas, the polyps that can turn into cancer.

One factor distinguishing the physicians who found many adenomas from those who found few was the amount of time spent examining the colon, according to the study, in which the gastroenterologists kept track of the time for each exam and how many polyps they found.

They discovered that those who slowed down and took their time found more polyps.

How much can the time taken vary?:

Dr. Barclay added, “if our group is representative of an average group, you will see people who take 2 or 3 minutes and people who take 20 minutes” to examine a colon. Insurers pay doctors the same no matter how much time they spend. Gastroenterologists say colonoscopies can help prevent colon cancer, but warn that there is a pressing need for better quality control.

Still, the experts say, the onus remains on patients to ask for data on how proficient their doctors are.

Oh come on. Shouldn't there be just a wee bit of emphasis on telling gastroenterologists that it is clear that doing the job in 3 minutes means they are not doing it properly?

Having had this procedure myself, I was given a videotape of it afterwards. (Watching the bit of smoke as a polyp is burnt off is kind of fun.) I wonder if the 3 minute wonders in American give out videos too? If so, get out your stopwatch and check.

Controlling retired judges

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, retired High Court Judge Michael McHugh thinks some parts of the Federal anti terrorism laws could be constitutionally invalid:

He said restrictive control orders imposed on people who had not been convicted of anything appeared to be invalid because they breached the separation of powers between government and the judiciary.

Well, if that is an accurate account of his objection (newspaper reports of legal argument can be very inaccurate,) then I await the Judge's outcry over the tens of thousands of domestic violence protection orders that have been issued over the past decade. (The linked paper indicates that they were 13,000 issued annually in Queensland alone some years ago.) These frequently do not involve any prosecution or conviction of the respondent for any offence; all that is required is that the applicant have reasonable grounds to fear for his or her safety.

Middle East Mess

Three significant stories on the Middle East:

1. Palestinians continue to have trouble getting their act together, so to speak:

Gunmen loyal to the two main Palestinian factions openly fought each other in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank today after an alleged attempt on the life of the Palestinian Prime Minister last night.

Hamas officials accused members of the rival Fatah movement of trying to kill Prime Minister Ismail Haniya during a chaotic gunfight at the Rafah border crossing....

Many of the Hamas followers were on their way to a rally of an estimated 70,000 people in Gaza City, where Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas figure shouted to the crowd: "What a war Mahmoud Abbas you are launching, first against God, and then against Hamas." His call was answered by a chant of "God is Greatest" and bullets fired into the air. Mr al-Hayya also called for revenge against Fatah.

Closely guarded by bodyguards, Mr Haniya then addressed the crowd. In an aggressive speech, punctuated by bursts of celebratory gunfire, he said: "We tell all those who believe in the logic of assassination that this does not scare even little children in Hamas."

"We joined this movement to become martyrs, not ministers."

How encouraging...

(Incidentally, I would be curious to know just how many Palestinians die each year from "celebratory gunfire". I would have thought that if even the government of little Puerto Rico can recognize it as a stupid practice, the Palestinians might have cottoned on by now too.)

2. Former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a very telling piece in the International Herald Tribunal in which she explains that growing up in Saudi Arabia meant she didn't even know of the Holocaust until she got to Holland at age 24! She writes:

Western leaders today who say they are shocked by the conference of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world the Holocaust is not a major historical event they deny; they simply do not know because they were never informed. Worse, most of us are groomed to wish for a Holocaust of Jews.

She claims that when she showed her 21 year old half sister her history book about the Holocaust, the reaction was this:

With great conviction my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed nor massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."

3. In a typical wrong-headed reaction, a bunch of artists write to The Guardian to announce that they will respond to the Palestinian call for an "academic and cultural boycott " of Israel. I note that Brian Eno is a signatory. That'll hurt.

When I see a list of artists calling for the "radical" cultural change in the Muslim Middle East of teaching their children and young men and women:
a. about the Holocaust;
b. that Jews are not intrinsically evil, and
c. that good deeds on earth are more important than entry into Paradise by "matyrdom"
then I'll give the "cultural boycott" call against Israel some credibility.

Giants

For anyone who has never seen this 20 year (!) old video of They Might be Giants first hit song, Don't Let's Start, here it is:



For me, this is close to the perfect modern pop song, being extremely catchy and having a lyric that almost, but not entirely, makes sense. The video's silliness still gives me a high degree of pleasure that is hard to explain. My 2 kids love it too, and run around the house copying the synchronised moves from this and TMBG's other early clips, most of which are also on YouTube. (They are also on the documentary DVD "Gigantic".) My wife thinks it's a form of brainwashing, but I think she secretly likes the songs too.

Odd medical photo of the day

If you want to see an inside view of 15 cm spoon in the stomach of a woman who accidentally swallowed it while laughing (!), click here. (Stomachs seem to have a lot more folds inside them than I imagined.)

While you're at the Medical Journal of Australia, you might want to read their sort of silly Christmas offering "The hazards of watching football - Are Australians at risk?"

Steyn on France

Mark Steyn has a column that puzzles over France's foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. It has some snippets from history that I did not know about:

....it’s sobering to be reminded that the French were doing the Israelis-are-the-new-Nazis shtick within ten minutes of the end of the Second World War. Jews, wrote the consul-general Rene Neuville, in a lengthy cable from Jerusalem in 1947, are “racist through and through… quite as much as their German persecutors”. The dispatches of Pierre Landy, French consul in Haifa, rely heavily on “the Israeli Gestapo” and similar formulations. In public the political class was usually more circumspect, though not always. President de Gaulle famously raged at a press conference that the Jews were “an elite people, self-assured and domineering” with “a burning ambition for conquest”. In the ensuing controversy, M le President assured the Chief Rabbi that he’d meant it as a compliment.

A different Advent countdown

From BBC radio, this Advent countdown gives short cranky, but amusing, audio reviews of the year's movies. The one about The Da Vinci Code is good, but his most despised movie is "Little Man", which I have to say did look appalling when I saw shorts for it.

Why electric cars makes sense

This article in Scientific American addresses the point that occasionally crosses my mind: if electric cars became popular, how much of a greenhouse gas benefit would be achieved when you take into account the extra electric power generation needed? Here's some good news for a change:

...a new analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) offers more good news: existing electric power plants could fuel 84 percent of "light duty" vehicles if all 220 million cars and trucks converted to electric power overnight....

The analysis noted that the capacity of the U.S. power infrastructure is underutilized. Every evening--and during days of low demand--there is a large amount of spare capacity that could easily be tapped. By charging cars and trucks with electricity at night, American drivers could reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil while potentially cutting power prices as well. "Since gasoline consumption accounts for 73 percent of imported oil, it is intriguing to think of the trade and national security benefits if our vehicles switched from oil to electrons," notes PNNL energy researcher Rob Pratt. "Plus, since the utilities would be selling more electricity without having to build more plants or power lines, electricity prices could go down for everyone."

The researchers specifically excluded power resources such as nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and solar as each of these already produce electricity at maximum capacity. Yet, plugging in our cars could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 18 percent.

A commuting horror story

Talk about unexpected ways to die:

A 21-year-old woman was beheaded in front of horrified onlookers at a bus terminal in in the capital of the Caribbean island of St Vincent.

Must find something more pleasant for next post.

It's the season for Virgin Birth discussion

The Times has a lightweight piece about the importance of baths, which mentions a legal case that I had never heard about before:

For much of the 20th century it was popularly believed that a woman should never get into the bath after a male member (no pun intended) of the household. The fear was that if he had been abluting himself a little too vigorously she might be in danger of impregnation. The famous paternity case involving Lord Ampthill gave this myth widespread credence. He filed for divorce after his wife produced a son, even though the marriage had not been consummated. It was suggested that she had conceived after using a sponge in a bath they had shared.

A Google search turns up this Time Magazine article from 1976 ("Was Mother a Virgin?") about the case (which happened in the 1920's). The sponge theory doesn't get mentioned, but I assume it must have come up in court as one of the theoretical ways that a "virgin birth" can happen.

Moon doubters

Skepticism about the value of manned space exploration is never far away, and just when NASA starts to firm up a little on a lunar colony, the nay-saying doubters get into print. See this article in Slate, and here at the New York Times. Both sound like re-runs from the early 70's, when the thrill of Apollo 11 was over with pretty quickly.

In the Slate article, when it comes to the question why build a moon base:

NASA itself can't really offer an answer, though it does offer a free, downloadable "Why the Moon?" poster. According to the poster, a moon base would "enable eventual settlement" of Earth's satellite—which might happen someday, but represents an absurd waste of tax money in the current generation. (No one has any interest in settling Antarctica, which is much more amenable to life than the moon and can be reached at far less than 1 percent of the cost.)

The New York Times writes:

Mars has water, apparently, and an atmosphere that greater minds than mine contend could be transformed and thickened enough to breathe, and maybe even past or future life forms. Someday, a few dreamers say, our descendants could walk to a pool of water in the red sand, like the settlers in Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles,” look at their reflections and see Martians.

I haven't read about terraforming information for some time, but I am sure that even the most optimistic time scales for creating a breathable Martian atmosphere is in the order of hundreds or thousands of years. Even by the standards of someone (like me) who wants humanity to expand beyond earth, it's a very long term proposition.

Basically, for a long time, living on Mars is going to be like living on the Moon, with the added benefit of more water. (Assuming the moon has some somewhere.) The disadvantage is that help is a year or two away, compared to a few days for the Moon.

But my main point is that these articles do not address the obvious potential function that a Moon colony can provide, and that's a lifeboat for planet Earth. It's close, it's old, seems relatively stable, and provides a smallish target for passing asteroids. The decentralisation of information by virtue of its digital format perhaps makes its off-planet storage less important than previously, but still it is hard to say what the human and political effects of a truly global catastrophe would be. (For example, an asteroid strike large enough to darken the skies for a few years, leading to starvation and massive loss of life.) Recently, the idea of using the Moon as "gene bank" was mooted too, and maybe this is a more important reason, if you assume that digital information is unlikely to be lost completely.

I don't understand why science writers can't see that this "big picture" idea, which is familiar to all science fiction readers, is something worth taking seriously if it is within technical reach.

Modern robotics not quite there yet

You must watch this video over at Japundit if you find robot mistakes funny.

(Actually, it is sort of sad too, but the way the screen comes out as if it is a horse about to be put down is what really makes me laugh.)

About Pauline Hanson

An excellent post by Andrew Norton about the silly argument that Howard has implemented all of the Hanson agenda. Read and memorise for the next time that argument comes up at a dinner party.

Silly names

This article in the Times about how the British chose the names for their kids is pretty funny, and quite accurate for Australia too, I think:

By and large, of course, it’s wise to try to avoid making decisions that will last the rest of your life when you’re 14. One of the primary arguments against teenage pregnancy — but one that the Government has, as yet, been too scared to address — is that 13-year-old girls tend to bestow awful names. Names which commit to an implacable destiny. Indeed, Destiny is one of them. Destineee is even more one of them. It’s hard to imagine a Governor of the Bank of England called Chantelle. Not least because the headline the next day would be “Oh my God!”, and the Bank of England would have to be renamed the Bank of Blingland. ....

The main difference between chav names and ponce ones is that the working classes deploy names that reflect success in the present — Ashanti, Britney, Justin. This is because, for the working classes, there is no rose-spectacled nostalgia for the past. The further you go back in time, the more incrementally awful it was to be poor. For the working classes, there’s no time like the present — or, indeed, the future.

The middle classes, on the other hand, have no fear of the past — when, as far as they’re concerned, all food was organic and free-range, and children played in streams all day while wearing lovely smocks. To reflect this longing for a simple, earthy, “real” childhood, they give their children the names that the working classes in their grandparents’ era would have favoured: Ruby, Charlie, Mabel, Fred.

Bad car news

From the Japan Times:

A top Nissan Motor Co. executive in North America said the hybrid market remains an unprofitable proposition in the auto industry despite the interest in alternative vehicles.

"Hybrids today are not a very viable economic proposition. It's still a loss-making proposition," said Dominique Thormann, Nissan North America's senior vice president for administration and finance, on Thursday...

Hybrids currently comprise more than 1 percent of the auto market. Federal legislation approved last year provides up to $ 3,600 in tax credits to U.S. consumers who buy hybrids, but automakers are subject to a production limit of 60,000 vehicles eligible for the entire credit.

As for the US automotive industry generally, this does not sound good:

"Fifty percent of cars sold in America are sold by companies that lose money selling cars, and that's not sustainable," Thormann said.

What are they doing there?

A surprise from the Aljazeera report on the Iranian Holocaust conference. Here's a photo of some of the attendees:


The article indicates that they are anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews, who don't deny the Holocaust. What strange bedfellows they make.

Iranian Jews are not very impressed with the whole conference idea:

The conference has upset Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community, said Moris Motamed, the sole Jewish representative in Iran's parliament.

"Denying it [the Holocaust] is a huge insult," he said. "By holding this conference, they [the government] are continuing to insult the Jewish community."

Many ordinary Iranians admitted to embarrassment about the event, which follows Iran's decision to hold a competition for cartoons about the Holocaust in October.

Seems to me the whole idea is backfiring anyway.

Penguin film cops a blast

The Independent's Jonathan Romney really, really, took a dislike to Happy Feet (which has generally received good press). The highlights of his review:

But the nadir of digital animation - absolutely the most joyless, imaginatively bankrupt spectacle it has produced - is the penguin extravaganza Happy Feet. I'd rather have spent seven days and nights on an ice floe than have watched this. This tender-hearted eco-minded musical by George Miller (yes, Mad Max George Miller) scores an own goal: you go in favourably disposed to penguins, and you come out wishing you could personally nuke every last one of the wretched creatures out of the Antarctic. Happy Feet is as hideous as its title suggests.....

Happy Feet is so mendaciously dewy-eyed about the wildlife it feigns to respect that it makes Bambi look like a Werner Herzog documentary....

But in terms of humour, or humanity, or real imagination, the film is crass, ugly, wasteful and an impasse for an art form that has, in a mere decade, transformed the way we see screen images. Is this what digital animation has come to - a multi-million-dollar screensaver?

For those who share my love of the art of aggressively negative movie reviews, this one is pretty damn good.

Sucking up to Huffington

The Observer Magazine had a story on the weekend about Arianna Huffington that went into hyperbole mode when it comes to describing the Huffington Post:

The Post is now the fifth most popular site in the world. It shapes the debate of American politics and gives Arianna real power and prestige. This year she made Time magazine's list of the 100 most important people in the world, and next year she looks likely to climb the list...

The Post has already broken major news stories, changed perceptions and challenged the old way of doing things. Arianna is a media magnate for a new age and uses her position to hammer away for liberal causes: the Iraq war, environmentalism, corporate greed.

How nauseating.

Huffington Post has always struck me as having the most lightweight and bile-filled analysis of any "serious" commentary blog, as if it were run by a whole school yard full of Maureen Dowds. I think it annoys me more than Daily Kos, for example, because the Kos crowd are kids, and can be half forgiven for some of their posing and misplaced idealism.

As for HP, if you value the opinion of has-been Hollywood stars, screenwriters and general hangers-on who want their invitations to Arianna's next cocktail party but backing up Arianna's scathing assessments of everything Bush, visit it by all means.

But don't go there if you want to see any evidence of independence of thought.

(At least for readers who are not from the USA, the Observer article fills in some details of Arianna's background, and is worth a look for that.)