Friday, February 23, 2007
Losing interest in cinema
It is almost certainly something to do with my stage in life, and if I was younger I would take risks again in seeing movies which may or may not turn out to be better than expected. But at the moment, I am lucky to be seeing one adult movie a year at the cinema, plus maybe another 2 child-friendly ones. The one adult movie, chosen because by all accounts I should like it, has been a disappointment in the last few years.
I only saw the last Star Wars on DVD about 6 months ago. Disappointing. (I reckon Orson Scott Card did a good job criticising the vacuousness of its moral philosophy here.) It's gorgeous to look at, but even that is just a cover for inadequate emotional logic in the story telling. I liked Village Voice's take on the visual style:
In debt to lurid sci-fi-novel cover art, Revenge of the Sith achieves the ultimate in what could be called Baroque Nerdism, a frame-filling aesthetic of graphic overdesign that began with The Phantom Menace and has now been jacked up to an absurd degree. Half the film takes place at dawn or dusk, so that the Marin County team can geek out on artificial roseate glow—a sugary luminence used so frequently one wonders if they developed a Maxfield Parrish plug-in to get the job done. On metropolitan Coruscant, background windows buzz with distant air-cars of various models; on DVD zoom mode, they will likely reveal individual license plate numbers.
What about Babel, this year's serious movie Oscar contender? I am not encouraged by the David Denby review in the New Yorker:
My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies. Iñárritu, who made “Amores Perros” (2000), is one of the world’s most gifted filmmakers. But I had the same reaction to “Babel” that I had to his most recent movie, “21 Grams” (2003): he creates savagely beautiful and heartbreaking images; he gets fearless performances out of his actors; he edits with the sharpest razor in any computer in Hollywood; and he abuses his audience with a humorless fatalism and a piling up of calamities that borders on the ludicrous.
As I have commented before, I think cinema goes through joyless phases from time to time, but this current one is lasting an inordinately long time. It's like waiting for a drought to break.
UPDATE: good to see it's not just me. I wrote this post before I read this Slate story, claiming that some Oscar voters are deliberately leaving the "Best Movie" ballot blank!
Also, it's probably an appropriate time to note again that some of the loss of interest in cinema is partly to do with the lack of charm or reliable likeability in the current raft of mainstream Hollywood actors. Can't any studio sign up a bunch of new, young-ish stars and promote it a new start in something resembling the old studio talent system? (Sign them up to an updated morals clause too, so they can be dumped as soon as they start turning up at parties without underwear.)
UPDATE 2:
I just read Danny Katz talking about Babel:
There was a huge selection of teary, jerky movies this year: there was the chirpy-weepy Little Miss Sunshine, and the baklava-syrupy The Pursuit Of Happyness - but the award goes to Babel, which was so magnificently miserable, for two and a half hours, all I could hear was the cast crying, the audience crying, and even the projectionist crying, from inside his sound-proofed, triple-glazed glass booth. I saw this film with my friend, Roger, and afterwards we were so shattered by the powerful themes of human fear and cultural isolation, we sat down in a cafe and discussed the movie's most profound question: how do you pronounce "Babel"? - I thought it was pronounced "Babble" but Roger said it was pronounced "Bay-bel" and I said "No, I'm pretty sure it's Babble" and he said "NO, IT'S DEFINITELY BAY-BEL" and this went on for about an hour and a half, yeah I really love those intense kind of post-cinema intellectual discussions.
Made me laugh.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Careers to avoid: clowning in Cucuta
Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say....
Local reports say the audience of about 20 people, mostly children, thought the shooting was part of the show before realising both men had been killed.
Last year, a prominent circus clown, known as Pepe, was also shot dead by a unknown assailant in Cucuta.
This is story crying out for further explanation.A new concept for the day
I will soon be doing a post about cosmologist Frank Tipler too, and his upcoming book claiming to show the physics behind various miracles in the Bible (or the New Testament, at least.) His previous book "The Physics of Immortality" got rubbished by most of his scientist colleagues, but I expect that will be nothing compared to the shellacking the new book is likely to take.
Targetting for beginners
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Debating the multiverse
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Good surgeons play with monkey
The LA Times notes:
New research today found that surgeons with the highest scores on "Super Monkey Ball 2," "Stars Wars Racer Revenge" and "Silent Scope" performed best on tests of suturing and laparoscopic surgery.....
"For as little as three hours a week, you could help your children become the cyber-surgeons of the 21st century," said Dr. James C. Rosser Jr. of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and lead author of the study in the Archives of Surgery.
The research looked at 33 surgeons attending a course on laparoscopic surgery and found that their game-playing skill was a better predictor of success on the surgical tests than years of medical practice or number of surgeries performed.
Expertise with "Super Monkey Ball 2," which involves steering a ball containing a monkey down a serpentine track while simultaneously targeting bananas, was most closely linked with high test scores.
No news today
Monday, February 19, 2007
The cause of ice ages
The comments to the post include these one, which I add here just to give some background on the whole history of ice ages:
...the question "What triggers ice ages?" only applies to the late Pleistocene (since about 800,000 years ago). From the onset of northern-hemisphere glaciation (about 3 million years ago) to the "mid-Pleistocene transition" (about 800,000 years ago), glacial advance and retreat follows a strong 41,000-year cycle, which has led to its being called "the 41 ky world" (Raymo & Nisancioglu 2003, Paleoceanography, 18, 1011). This is surely due to the changes of earth's obliquity, since changes in the amplitude of the climate signal correspond to changes in the amplitude of the obliquity cycle (Lisiecki & Raymo 2007, Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 56).
But since the mid-Pleistocene transition (not precisely since, this happens intermittently before that time) glacial changes are dominated by a 100,000-year cycle. The behavior during the "late Pleistocene" was originally attributed to changes in earth's eccentricity, but that idea has now fallen out of favor. Huybers & Wunsch (2005, Nature, 434, 491) and Huybers (Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 37) have convincingly shown that even during the late Pleistocene, the timing of deglaciations is strongly correlated to the obliquity cycle. They find no such relationship for the precession cycle or the eccentricity cycle.
(This comment seems to be by someone the scientists who run Real Climate trust.)
And this comment is make by one of the Real Climate authors, in response to the question of when would we be next due for an ice age were it not for global warming:
We've just come out of one of the big every-100KYr glaciations, and the normal course of events is to build up to another biggy through a series of small, short glaciations over the next 100KYr. In the normal course of events, the first try at an ice age would be due sometime in the next 20,000 years but I myself wouldn't try to pin it down more than that. One of the most interesting attempts so far to say what global warming might do to the glacial cycle is in the paper (pdf) by Archer and Ganopolski that appeared in the AGU journal GGG. I'll leave it to David to say whether that has been followed up by more detailed GCM work.
By the way, I don't post this to express scepticism about legitimate concern over CO2 levels, but it is interesting that something as significant as ice ages are not properly understood yet.
Japanese culture corner
I guess it's a similar phenomena to the decline of the Western as a genre. Anyone who was a child in the '60's can remember just how many cowboy and wild west shows were made in those days. I suspect the 1950's was probably the height of its popularity in the cinema, but I could be wrong. TV now is dominated by gritty crime shows, I suppose, and plain crap of all varieties. (Someday, a good sitcom about adults that doesn't always deal with sex will emerge again.)
Anyway, this got me thinking about the one childhood Japanese show that I can recall - The Samurai. The Wikipedia entry is relatively short, but points out that the show was very popular in Japan, Australia and the Phillipines, but was hardly shown anywhere else. How odd.
For those who can vaguely recall what the lead character Shintaro looked like, here he is:
(The picture is from a small fansite here.) Not exactly rugged good looks, but a sister-in-law of mine used to swoon over him, so she tells me.
I think most kids were most impressed by the evil ninja who jumped up backwards into trees, snuck around the houses with paper walls, and had an endless supply of throwing stars.
It would probably be seen as hopelessly violent for children today.
Pearson visits home
Talk about your intractable social problems. It's also interesting to note yet again how communities as a whole faired so much better under the Christian mission system.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Easy global cooling?
Benford has a proposal that possesses the advantages of being both one of the simplest planet-cooling technologies so far suggested and being initially testable in a local context. He suggests suspension of tiny, harmless particles (sized at one-third of a micron) at about 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere. These particles could be composed of diatomaceous earth. "That's silicon dioxide, which is chemically inert, cheap as earth, and readily crushable to the size we want," Benford says. This could initially be tested, he says, over the Arctic, where warming is already considerable and where few human beings live. Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns would mostly confine the deployed particles around the North Pole. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. "The fact that such an experiment is reversible is just as important as the fact that it's regional," says Benford.
"Benford" is Gregory Benford, the scientist/science fiction writer. A couple of years ago he was in Canberra talking up the prospects of a rotating space mirror as an engineering solution to global warming. He is evidently looking at more down to earth options now.
The quote is from Technology Review, which seems a pretty neat publication generally. What it doesn't explain is how to get the silicon dioxide up there, and how long it will stay. I thought you also were not supposed to breath the stuff (from what I recall of using diatomaceous earth in an old pool filter,) so I am not sure what is meant to happen when it comes back to earth.
Friday, February 16, 2007
The history of declining birthrates
Before the 1800s, children were educated at home or in church. Children became more expensive to care for and less helpful around the house once public schooling became available. At the same time, women were freed up from all-day children-rearing, allowing mothers to enter the paid labor force.
However, money isn't the only incentive for smaller families, experts say.
"We know for sure that you don't have to reach a high level of per capita income for fertility to decline, but we don't know exactly what sets it off," said historian George Atler at Indiana University. "Whether it's general change or attitudes about birth control is still a question debated among demographers today.
It's interesting, but still doesn't help answer why some Muslim countries have such high birth rates. I can't say I have ever seen much explanation of that.Who knows...
First one:
A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models....
“It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now,” he said. “Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It’s very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth.”
Bromwich says that the problem rises from several complications. The continent is vast, as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Only a small amount of detailed data is available – there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe. And the records that we have only date back a half-century.
The second report is about vast amounts of water under the ice:
Scientists using NASA satellites have discovered an extensive network of waterways beneath a fast-moving Antarctic ice stream that provide clues as to how "leaks" in the system impact sea level and the world's largest ice sheet. Antarctica holds about 90 percent of the world's ice and 70 percent of the world's reservoir of fresh water.
It's a very interesting place.
Ranking the sharks
The number of attacks in the United States, the world’s leader, dipped slightly from 40 in 2005 to 38 in 2006; well below the 53 recorded in 2000, he said.
As in past years, Florida was the world’s shark capital, with 23 attacks, Burgess said. This was slightly higher than the 19 cases reported in 2005 but considerably lower than the annual average of 33 between 2000 and 2003, he said.
Elsewhere in the world, Burgess tracked seven attacks in Australia, four in South Africa, three in Brazil, two in the Bahamas and one each in Fiji, Guam, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, La Reunion, Spain and Tonga.
Someone should do it on a per capita basis to get a better idea of how competitive our sharks are internationally.
The Catholics take over
Average Sunday attendance of both churches stood even at nearly one million in 2005, according to the latest statistics available for England and Wales, but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar.
A Church of England spokesman said: “I don’t think you can talk in terms of decline in the Church of England. It is fairly clear that with small fluctuations the worshipping population of the Church of England is 1.7 million a month. That is actually a stable figure.”
But looking at the total numbers shows how very, very few Anglicans attend church:Figures for 2005 show that there are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, under one fifth the 25 million baptised Anglicans and double the number of Muslims.
If it's anything like here, the migrants are going to have to bring their own priests with them. It will also be interesting to see if it means a more conservative Church, and a more conservative influence on politics. I certainly get the impression that the Tories have virtually given up on espousing anything much resembling social conservatism.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
On a meta-blogging note...
Anyway, a blog like one is just as much use to myself in terms of keeping track of articles and thoughts as it is a popularity exercise. But it would be nice to have a better idea about what sort of posts I make that have the most interest to most people.
I must go over to Catallaxy and read the recent reader's analysis post. I haven't got around to that yet...
Hitchens and Hillary
Great moments in Council politics
Some interesting energy stories
The standard 1.5 MW structure is now 40 stories, taller than the statue of liberty. The 3 MW towers waiting in the wings are as tall as New York's Citicorp Center, the third tallest building in Manhattan.
That is big.
2. This story was in Newsweek in January, but I missed it 'til now:
The Kremlin has set about recasting Russia's once top-secret nuclear industry as the world's leading mass marketer of cheap, reliable reactors. As energy prices soar, nuclear power has been gaining in popularity, and Russia is the market leader in cut-price reactors....
"Our power stations are not a bit worse than anyone else's," says Sergei Shmatko, the president of Atomstroyexport, Russia's atomic-power-station construction company. "My dream," he adds, "is to make the export and construction of our nuclear stations as simple and as fast as putting IKEA furniture together."
3. My favourite underdog in the clean energy stakes, the Pebble Bed Reactor, continues to attract very little attention here, but in South Africa it is definitely going ahead after appeals against development approval were rejected. First demonstration plant due by 2010, and commercial modules may be available by 2013.
The cut that might sent you mad!
I wonder whether such a connection might only be noticed now due to (what I presume was) the relative infrequency of the operation until about the 1970's. Is the first big wave of men who had the operation only now reaching advanced ages?
(There is also the issue of how the operation is done. From what I read, sealing both ends was popular, but appears to be associated with increased risk of long term pain as a side effect. The new trend is therefore to leave the tap open, so to speak. This was the subject of my previous post here.)
More research needed, but personally I have never liked the idea of letting one's "boys" get out into the blood stream where they don't belong.
A new type of black hole to ask CERN about, as well as "bubbles of nothing"
Just like the central black hole, the ring would be defined by its event horizon, a boundary beyond which nothing can escape the object's gravity. The ring could be thin like a rubber band or fat like a doughnut, and the rotation would flatten it – "like a doughnut that you have squashed," says Elvang. The spinning ring would also drag space-time around with it, making the central black hole spin as well.
The black Saturn can only exist in a space with four dimensions, rather than the three we inhabit. In 3D, a black ring is impossible, so there are no big black Saturns out there for astronomers to spot – but at a microscopic level, they might really exist....
If extra dimensions exist, black Saturns might be produced in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Geneva, due to open at the end of 2007. Because there are so many ways to make a black Saturn, with different sizes of ring and different spins, they might even be produced in greater numbers than 'ordinary' black holes.Actually, I had noticed the arxiv paper on this recently, but as it was not clear whether the authors thought they may be made by a particle accelerator, I did not post about it.
New Scientist notes that, as with any micro black hole, the physicists expect it will evaporate instantaneously into Hawking Radiation, but as long time readers are aware, a few credible scientists wonder whether HR really exists.
So, if a stable (non evaporating) "black saturn" is created, would its ability to absorb particles be greater that your "normal" micro black hole? How would a string of them created close together interact? Let a bunch of slow moving ones sink into the centre of the earth and what happens?
Of course, CERN's other big argument against there being any danger from micro black holes is that the moon and earth have been bombarded by cosmic rays with much higher energies for billions of years, so if they are still here any micro black holes that can be created are not planet eaters. However, as long time readers would know, there are arguments that question this analysis. (Basically, ones created at CERN may be slow moving and readily fall into the earth. Ones made by cosmic rays move fast and may zip right through most astronomical bodies)
(One day I will get around to tagging my old posts on micro black holes, but my first long article is here. For the others, a use the blog search on this page and they will all appear.)
My argument remains that CERN appears to have done a poor job at taking risk analysis seriously. They have very high expectation that HR is really the answer, even though this radiation has not been observed anywhere. (Yet it is possible that the decay debris could be observed in the Earth's atmosphere if evaporating micro black holes are being created there by cosmic ray collisions. It is just, I think, that not enough experimental work has been done yet to clearly answer the question of whether it is there.)
There is plenty of theoretical work coming out all the time that raises questions about the very nature of black holes and their decay process that should be taken into account in proper risk assessment. If CERN is actually looking at each case and coming up with good reasons why they are not a risk, even if HR does not exist, it would nice of them to tell us. Instead, it seems to just all be on a "trust us we know what we are doing" basis.
Here's one other thing I have been reading about lately: the idea of "bubbles of nothing" being created as part of black hole decay. Some of these, if I understand it correctly, could expand and be a danger. As noted in a recent arxiv paper:
Horowitz [20] has recently argued that a class of charged bubbles of nothing are a possible
decay product of black holes/strings/branes in quantum gravity. If true this would be a new,
unsuspected and disastrous endpoint of quantum black hole dynamics.
They don't explain exactly what they mean by "disastrous endpoint", but I would like to know more. (It may be that the authors of the paper think there is no danger anyway, but they do not write in anything resembling plain enough English for the layperson to understand their points.)
Has CERN looked at this work? Are there reasons to also question the "cosmic ray" analogy that I expect may also be used to argue against danger?
All question worth asking, I think, but getting answers is not easy.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Why 6 megapixels is all you'll need
If a 6 megapixel camera is all that any amateur photographer really needs, and this is virtually the entry level size now, what features are the manufacturers going to come up with to entice us to keep upgrading?
Why England won't disappear under ice any time soon
Good to see such reporting in the NYT.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Obama reviewed
The overall feeling you get, though, is that his life experiences so far mean that he is not exactly ready for the Presidency.
A Steyn recommendation
Michael Ware - journalist?
To hear why, you should listen to his report on the state of Iraq on Radio National this morning. (You have to listen to it to get the full Steve Irwin-esque style of his delivery.)
He brings no sense of objectivity to his reporting, and in this he reminds me a lot of Robert Fisk.
Possibly encouraging news on glaciers
The variability over such a short time, reported online Feb. 9 on Science magazine's Science Express, underlines the problem in assuming that glacial melting and sea level rise will necessarily occur at a steady upward trajectory, according to lead author Ian Howat, a post-doctoral researcher with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The article is here.
I also see it appeared in the New York Times on 8 February. A Google news search indicates it has not been picked up in any Australian media. Typical.
Fat doctor
When she insisted on checking some unfortunate woman's poo, and then gave it a very bad visual assessment, any vague credibility she had went out the window for me. After all, anyone can have a bad poo day, can't they? (Sorry, I won't go any further in explanation.)
There is a very long and detailed article attacking Gillian McKeith in The Guardian. She does indeed appear to have very dubious qualifications, but she aggressively attacks people who question her pearls of wisdom. Worth reading if you have ever seen her show.
About Obama
...Mr Obama is spectacularly underqualified to be President. He has been in the Senate for 25 months. There are probably craftsman repairing things in that building who have been there longer. The notion that being no more than an enthusiastic tourist in the American capital is the same thing as serving an apprenticeship to become the most powerful person on the planet is profoundly disturbing.
The United States once had a race problem in that black people were effectively excluded from the political process. Forty years on it has the reverse dilemma — those who would dismiss a white figure because he was unprepared for the most prominent national position will not do the same for a black one.
The whole thing is worth reading.Howard & Obama
One point I want to make is about the use of parliamentary censure. It is, I reckon, one of the most overused tactics, as it seems to me to rarely make a difference to public perception of a matter. It is, instead, all about the atmosphere in Parliament itself, and about the confidence of both sides. Canberra journalists love it, because the theatre of Parliament is their bread and butter. But really, the question of who wins this type of debate, where the outcome of the vote is clear from the start and it will make no difference to public voting intentions, makes politicians appear far too absorbed in the game of politics, rather the serious issue of making and implementing good policy.
Just my opinion.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
YouTube time
Remember to sign that mortgage first
BANGKOK: A $29,000-a-head gourmet dinner in Bangkok is making some Thais feel a bit sick.
Fifteen international high-rollers from the world of real estate, casinos and shipping have already booked seats for the black-tie dinner Saturday, which comes with a price tag of 1 million baht, or $29,240, plus 17 percent service and tax...
The Mezzaluna manager, Deepak Ohri, defended the all-European menu and said it was impossible to start making price comparisons.
"We are not selling a meal — we are selling the whole experience," he said. "You cannot put a value on the experience."
Preparing for doom
The decline of Christian Europe
Just one tenth of the nation’s Christians attends church, and churches are now closing faster than mosques are opening. Practising Muslims will, in a few decades, outnumber practising Christians if current trends continue.
Very "Mark Steyn" territory.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Big Mac economics
I note that Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland all have greatly over-priced Big Macs. Indonesia and Thailand are some of the cheapest around. Why does cold weather make
hamburgers more expensive?
In Japan, even the underworld is polite
The nation's two largest underworld syndicates reached a truce Thursday following recent shootings that sparked fears of a full-scale turf war and prompted police to raid one of the groups believed involved in the violence.
Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi and Tokyo-based Sumiyoshi-kai separately reported to the Metropolitan Police Department on Thursday afternoon that they made peace in the wake of Monday's gunning down of a senior Sumiyoshi-kai member, MPD officials said.
Investigators hope the recent violence -- believed part of a turf war between the two crime syndicates -- will halt with Thursday's truce, but said they will continue to monitor the mob's activities.
Nice of them to keep everyone informed.From another part of the Japan Times, there is an article about the number of Yakuza the police know about:
Full-time yakuza numbered 41,500, while part-timers or semiregular members -- those not directly affiliated with the mob -- increased slightly to 43,200. In 1991, there were an estimated 63,800 full-time mobsters, and some 27,200 part-timers.
In reality, yakuza are appearing to detach themselves from full-time mob activity by engaging in business, political or social activities in a bid to camouflage their underworld affiliation, the NPA said.
This yakuza system is difficult to understand from the Western point of view. It seems extremely well tracked by the police, which makes it sound semi-tolerated. I should go looking around the internet for some background information...Edwards doomed
If they survive, Edwards is dead in the water, as far as Presidential aspirations go.
By the way, few seem to have noticed this column in Huffington Post that came out shortly after Michelle Malkin had the hide to point out how offensive Marcotte & McEwen had been in their blogs. Here's an extract from the HP column:
The basic story is that uber-moronic Right-tards such as Michelle Malkin, whose IQ has been in an internment camp for the better part of her life, thinks it's really bad that Amanda said words like "fuck" on her blog.
(As if Malkin's criticism was about the use of one word.)How much sense does it make to answer criticism of immature, intemperate and offensive expression of political views by making your own immature, offensive and intemperate attack?
Now for a discouraging Iraq story
But then again, the deputy Health Minister is arrested for supporting murder.
There seems a chance of improvement, at least.
Some slight optimism
Sadr officials — seemingly determined to bleach clean the Mahdi image — said that the militia's members would disarm temporarily during the Baghdad security plan. Even if Sunnis attacked, even if American and Iraqi troops arrested Mahdi commanders, they said, the militia would not fight.
"Whatever the provocation, with the surge against us or anything else, we will not kidnap anyone or take revenge by ourselves," said Daraji, the Sadr City mayor, who has been negotiating with American and Iraqi government officials over the role of the militia. "We will leave everything to the government."
Ah well, I still take some slight encouragement from the story.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
First reaction: not enough toilets
From the IHT report:
The novelty began at the gate, which offered upper- and lower-deck access to the plane. Emirates, the largest customer for the A380, plans to put premium and economy-class seats on separate decks — as on an ocean liner — allowing people to board from their VIP lounges.
I can see a new version of Titanic in this. Except I guess I would generally feel safer on the lower deck this time (unless they had to evacuate the aircraft.)
But the crucial thing about long distance flight is the number of toilets:
Packed full of seats, the A380 can seat up 840 people. Airbus used this plane for evacuation drills last year, and it said all 840 were able to pile out in 78 seconds. It is not clear what would happen if they needed to use the toilet simultaneously.
Speaking of toilets, there were 15 on this A380, including one in the first-class cabin that has a window above the commode. Except for the view, its cramped confines did not invite loitering.
Let's see, that is about one toilet for 56 people. Maybe even worse on the "economy" level. Can that be enough for a 840 person configuration?Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Judging inequality
Leaving all other matters aside, we expect globalization to produce a rise in income inequality in the United States (and the other industrialized societies). We also expect it to raise incomes in the poor countries and thus reduce global income inequality. That does indeed seem to be what is actually happening.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing to be happening is another matter entirely, that depends upon our own moral senses....
....in this particular instance I find that my own answer is quite simple. Those poor who are getting richer in other countries are not moving from one level of luxury to a slightly higher one. They are moving from destitution, from not knowing where the next meal is coming from, to something close to a middle class income. They are doing this in their hundreds of millions, across the globe, and that has to be a good thing.
Note that he hasn't mentioned the issue of income mobility in the United States too, which is relevant to the morality argument too.
For all your camel milking needs...
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, the ban on Israeli goods continues:
RIYADH, 4 January 2007 — Director General of Saudi Customs Saleh Al-Barak reiterated that the Saudi regulations do not permit the import of goods manufactured in Israel.
“The official regulation followed by every customs house at the Kingdom’s border crosspoints is a total ban on any goods of Israeli origin,” Al-Watan Arabic newspaper quoted Saleh Al-Barak as saying yesterday.
Anyone found breaking the regulation would be treated as a smuggler of contraband goods to the Kingdom and fined accordingly and the seized goods destroyed, the director general said.
Says something about the Middle East, doesn't it?What happens when it rains?
Problem is, as far as I can see, the article says nothing about what happens if a protracted cloudy period covers the power stations. Still, if environmentalists don't go nuts about tens of square kilometres of desert being covered by mirrors, I guess it could help, provided you don't lose much of the benefit in the process of getting the electricity the hundreds of miles to where it is needed.
At least if you use solar power to do the direct electrolysis of water into hydrogen, you have something you can store to generate power later. Someone's looked at that, I assume?
Monbiot right
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
On military commissions
Sperm for the taking
With court approval, Israeli parents are using their dead son's sperm to inseminate a woman he never knew. It appears to be the first explicit legal authorization to make a baby using a corpse and a stranger. Argument from the dead man's mother: "He would always talk about how he wanted to get married and have children." After he died, "His eyes he told me that it wasn't too late, and that there was still something to take from him. … Then I realized it was his sperm."
That last line is both funny and creepy.
Actually, the Chicago Tribune version of the story (linked to by Slate) gives some even weirder detail. After her son's death:
A year went by, and the bereaved mother saw her son in a dream. "He said, `What about my children? Why aren't you doing anything about it?'" Cohen said. "I woke up shaking and told my husband that we have to do something."
This has a quasi-biblical feel about it. A new form of virgin birth for a child heralded in a dream.
Completely indefensible action by the parents and court, in my opinion.
Bad astronaut?
A NASA astronaut is charged with attacking her rival for another astronaut's attention early Monday at Orlando International Airport, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.
Lisa Marie Nowak drove from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the male astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.
It's all trenchcoats, stalking and other fun stuff. Lucky this is sorted out on the ground and not the shuttle!
Walking bags of microbes
In research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Blaser and his colleagues took swabs from the forearms of six healthy people to study the bacterial populations in human skin -- our largest organ.
"We identify about 182 species," Blaser said in an interview. "And based on those numbers, we estimate there are probably at least 250 species in the skin."...
The researchers noted that microbes in the body actually outnumber human cells 10-to-1.
"Our microbes are actually, in essence, a part of our body," Blaser said.
Super-intelligent emotionless artificial intelligences of the future should not know this information: they may consider killing humans as nothing more than microbe pest control.
Monday, February 05, 2007
A late weekend video
Last weekend I missed posting a Youtube. Turns out there's plenty of David Byrne stuff there. This song comes from his early solo period, with its heavy South American influence. I had never seen a clip for it before. (Actually, it's not visually all that interesting, but the music makes me very feel very happy.)
Busy
Anyway, we'll see how we go. Blogging at night might still be OK, but even so it is far too easy for me to be distracted by looking at the web all day for interesting articles to post about.
For example, here's a few things of interest that I see right now:
* Newsweek says China might want to go to the Moon to mine it for Helium 3. Seems to me it would be a good idea if you knew fusion reactors using it would actually work. (Maybe there is a bit of chicken or egg problem here, though.) Also, this line in the article caught my eye:
If significant deposits are found, China's engineers still need to design the world's first lunar mining machines and send them up—while the rest of us shrink in horror at the thought of strip mines on the moon.
Hey don't mark me up as one of the horrified. What exactly is the problem here? It's a sterile, pre-cratered landscape with no obvious inhabitants to upset by having the view from their condo ruined. Does lunar dirt have an inherent right to lie unmoved except by the next meteor?
* Legal battles over movie deals get a lot of coverage in the LA Times, being the industry town that it is. The latest is about "Sahara", which did look expensive on the screen, and was (I thought) very well directed for an action film. Unfortunately, it also starred Matthew McConaughey, a male lead who for some reason I have always found irritating.
Anyway, a reclusive multi-billionaire lost $110 million on the film and isn't happy. The story is of moderate interest.
* Paul Sheehan must be running the risk of getting death threats himself (or maybe he already has?) with articles about Islam in Europe like this one.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Half a story
SEA levels are rising faster than the International Panel on Climate Change predicted, showing computer models have tended to underestimate the problem.
Since 1993 sea levels have climbed at a rate of 3.3 millimetres a year, compared with the panel's best estimate for this period of less than 2 millimetres a year.
The only hint of uncertainty in the report is on the pessimistic side. (A CSIRO scientist is quoted as saying that the contribution of melting ice sheets is still not properly quantified.)However, in their report on the same story in Nature is this:
Rahmstorf and his colleagues calculate that sea-level rise over the past 20 years has been 25% faster than for any other 20-year period for more than a century. But they accept that this could be due simply to natural variations over decadal timescales. "Sea-level rise has been tracking along the uppermost limit for 16 years now, but it could still be decadal variability, so we don't predict that this will continue," Rahmstorf says.
Another study published last month2 suggests that sea-level rises during the twentieth century were indeed very variable. According to calculations by Simon Holgate of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, UK, sea levels rose by an average of more than 2 millimetres per year in the first half of the century, but by less than 1.5 millimetres per year on average in the latter half.
The uncertainty could cut both ways, then.
In any event, those who worry about Tuvalu have to remember that the ocean was still rising at 2mm per year in the first half of the 20th century. (In fact, note how the rate dropped in the second half.) Now it is rising at 3 mm per annum. Tuvalu was never a long term proposition even without global warming.
One other point: the SMH article says this:
In a separate study in the same journal, Helen McGregor, of the University of Wollongong, has found global warming has already changed ocean currents in a way that could have a serious impact on fisheries.
Her team's research off the north-west coast of Africa shows it has led to an increase in a phenomenon called ocean upwelling, in which deep, cold water, usually rich in nutrients, moves upwards to replace warmer surface water.
"Our research suggests that upwelling will continue to intensify with future greenhouse warming, potentially impacting the sensitive ecosystems and fisheries in these regions," Dr McGregor said.
Again, note the emphasis on pessimism. Yet only a few days before, we had this story:The world's oceans are already in a warming trend that could alter fish stocks, perhaps damaging coral reefs that are vital nurseries for tropical species while boosting northern stocks of cod or herring...
In a sign of how higher temperatures might help some fish stocks, a period of warmer waters in the 1920s allowed cod to spawn off Greenland and let a new stock break away from Icelandic waters. In the cooler 1960s, cod were unable to reproduce off Greenland and the stock collapsed.
[I would also have thought that cold water upwellings rich in nutrients would be good for plankton growth, which is a major CO2 sink. It has long been suggested that Ocean Thermal Power Generation would have this as a side benefit.]
So lets get it right people: oceans have been warming and cooling even before current global warming. It had already had major effects on fish populations a century ago. It will continue to affect fish, with some winners and some losers. (Everyone used to bemoan the loss of cod fisheries. Now that global warming may help them, the tragedy will be fewer tropical fish. )
What bugs me most about this is that it is teaching pessimism to our children. Apart from what children read for themselves in the press, there will be lot of school teachers who pass this on, as they often don't show much inclination towards independent thought. (Sorry, they do a hard job, but you know that is true.)
Wait for the wave of pessimism when the entire IPCC report comes out.
UPDATE: just to be clear, I do take CO2 levels seriously, as explained in a few posts last year. It is just that I don't see any benefit in promoting pessimism as the response to the issue. The attitude I want is optimism that effective action can be taken, and an acknowledgement that things were never static and perfect in the global environment anyway. (Just ask the dinosaurs and the Australian megafauna, the latter increasingly looking like an example of very early technology causing havoc. As for aborigines "living in harmony with the land for 50,000 years": well yeah, after they changed the landscape entirely by fire and hunting.)
Thursday, February 01, 2007
When natural is not good
Three young boys grew breast tissue after exposure to lotions and shampoos containing lavender or tea tree oil, researchers say.
It is not uncommon for boys to develop breast tissue during puberty or just after, but the boys affected by the plant oils were aged four, seven and 10.
The natural oils may be “gender-bending” chemicals mimicking effects of the female hormone, oestrogen, the findings suggest. The boys were otherwise normal, and lost the breast tissue within months of discontinuing use of the products.
Bone digs Cohen
One point I may have missed making in my previous post is this one taken up by Bone in her final paragraphs:
The Left used to be about the future and improving the lot of mankind. The problem for it today, as Cohen points out, is that it has got most of what it wanted. Although there is still a way to go, the Left of a century ago would see the prosperity of today's workers, the equal opportunity laws, the intellectual freedoms, as a paradise. It is harder today to see yourself as a victim of a pernicious system.
So the Left now is about resistance to material progress, to globalisation, and most of all to American power. There is plenty to criticise about Western lifestyles. Still, it should be obvious to all but the most blinkered that the system the US wants to impose on the Middle East is far better than the system the Islamists want to impose on us. Democracy is at least self-correcting. I hope the wearers of the "George Bush, World's No.1 terrorist" T-shirts, never have to find that out.
Affluenza attacked
The central contention of Affluenza is, oddly, contained in an appendix. Here it is posited that there is “a strong and statistically significant linear Pearson correlation between the prevalence of any emotional distress and income inequality”. In other words, in countries where there is high inequality, there appear to be high levels of emotional distress. James uses this statistical relationship to go further than other “happiness” theorists. Where they argue that greater prosperity has not produced greater levels of happiness, he argues that what he calls “selfish capitalism” has produced inequality and, through it, mental illness.
The whole book rests on this.Finkelstein mentions two possible alternative explanations:
Let me provide an alternative, much less comfortable, explanation of increased rates of mental illness in developed countries — social mobility. In his compelling book The Scent of Dried Roses, Tim Lott tries to make sense of his own encounters with mental illness, including his suicidal depression. He concludes that the disappearance of the English lower middle class from which he came and his own rise (he is now a justly successful novelist, then already well on his way) made him feel disorientated. He lost a sense of who he was, a sense of his story.
I find this very convincing. But its implications are disturbing. It suggests that the best way for James to reduce Affluenza would be for everyone to know their place. With fewer aspirations and ambitions people might be more content. I don’t think he, or the other happiness theorists for that matter, are far away from this view. James is already pretty scathing about the consequences of the drive towards female equality. And if he is right that China and Nigeria are happier (or at least have less emotional distress), presumably they would be better off staying as they are.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Some recommended posts
* Zoe Brain has a lengthy post post about the amazing (and dangerous) Muslim/arab rumour mill of the Middle East. Is the Holocaust the only thing they won't believe?
* Andrew Norton points out the holes in Clive Hamilton's "dissent is being silenced in Australia" schtick in a great post here.
* Tigerhawk wonders whether dove-ish US Senators might inadvertently help convince Iran that they Bush must be getting ready to strike.
* Last weekend, a Daily Kos post got very worked up over the question of whether any Vietnam vet was ever actually spat upon in America. Called baby killers, yes, no one doubts that, but those who have claimed to be spat upon? Well, apparently a sociologist wrote an entire book about it claiming it was actually an urban myth. What a vital debate to have now. Funny thing is, I bet 90% of Kos readers who label it an urban myth still believe in the plastic turkey, despite actual media retractions.
Update: to be fair, it is not just Daily Kos, but also Slate (which seems to be down a lot today) which has now had a go at Newsweek for bringing up allegedly discredited the 'gobbing' on vets story. I see Jack Shafer wrote the Slate article, although I have not been able to read it yet. I note that he spends a lot of time at Slate arguing that crystal meth use is not the crisis (in the States) that the media likes to make out it is. I am sceptical of much of his analysis.
Woops
Just a few years ago, politicians and green groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the country's early and rapid adoption of "sustainable energy," achieved in part by coaxing electricity plants to use some biofuel — in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia....
Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the razing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rain forest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there. Worse still, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peat land, which sent huge amount of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Factoring in these emissions, Indonesia had quickly become the world's third-leading producer of greenhouse gases that scientists believe are responsible for global warming, ranked after the United States and China, concluded a study released in December by researchers from Wetlands International and Delft Hydraulics, both in the Netherlands.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Maybe the fine print clears it up...
Against the wind (farm)
But if you build them in deserts instead:
The ecological impact in these environments is largely unstudied. Somnath Baidya Roy from Princeton University and his team have done research suggesting that rotating turbine blades lead to desiccation of the surrounding area, which may be particularly damaging in deserts (Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, DOI: 10.1029/2004JD004763). In addition, a recent study of Californian ground squirrels reveals that those living close to wind farms are more edgy and cautious than those that inhabit areas of desert where there are no turbines.
Well, maybe I wouldn't lose too much sleep about squirrels getting nervous. But the birds, well that is a different matter. The article goes on:
After re-analysing previous studies last year, researchers at the University of Birmingham, UK, concluded: "Available evidence suggests that wind farms reduce the abundance of many bird species at the wind farm site." But the most striking aspect of their report was how little evidence is available. The researchers found just 15 articles drawing on 19 datasets, of which only nine were complete. Lead author Gavin Stewart says that many studies are kept secret, sometimes for commercial reasons, with statistics on bird kills being kept from bird conservationists.
And there is more detail in the article about how many birds are killed in some locations.
It's always fun when later studies bolster a hunch.
Update: I see this was actually an article from July 2006 which the New Scientist website has only just made available for free. No matter. Still good reading.
So the French really are good at this?
Another possible birth incentive in France, which may not be copied elsewhere, is its 35-hour workweek. It has been suggested that the French have so much leisure now that they have found nothing more interesting to do with it than have babies, combining fun with demographic patriotism.
Nuns aren't what they used to be
A young disabled man who receives care for his life-limiting illness at a hospice run by a nun spoke yesterday of his decision to use a prostitute to experience sex before he dies.
Sister Frances Dominica gave her support to 22-year-old Nick Wallis, who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Sufferers usually die by their thirties.
Mr Wallis told staff at the Douglas House hospice in Oxford that he wanted to experience sexual intercourse. ...
The hospice staff, after taking advice from a solicitor, the clergy and health care professionals, decided to help him.
Hmmm. I wonder what the clergy person's advice was.It seems unclear as to whether Mr Wallis is Christian himself, but if it was the job of Christians to help non-Christians have a morally dubious time, the work of charitable nuns is going to involve a lot more fun than it has for, oh, the last 2,000 years or so.
As for the nun herself:
Sister Frances described Mr Wallis as "delightful, intelligent and aware young man".
"I know that some people will say 'You are a Christian foundation. What are you thinking about?'. But we are here for all faiths and none," she said.
"It is not our job to make moral decisions for our guests. We came to the conclusion that it was our duty of care to support Nick emotionally and to help ensure his physical safety."
OK, so many people are going to have a lot of sympathy for the guy. (The actual experience didn't seem to be so great for him anyway, and if he was a sensitive soul the nun perhaps could have told him to expect that out of a one-off commercial relationship.)Seems to me that liberal nuns aren't exactly helping the cause of the Church by being flexible to this extent.
Mean looks
Monday, January 29, 2007
A question
In the past month, according to Interior Ministry officials, primary and secondary schools in and around Baghdad have been targets at least six times. In some cases, gunmen ambushed schools during classes and guards fought them off.
In other cases, mortar shells struck, killing 10 at Al Gharbiya, for example, a secondary school in central Baghdad.
Several principals and teachers have been kidnapped and killed, a pattern of terror that started with university professors and seems to have trickled down the educational chain.
Can the "withdraw now" crowd explain how coalition troops leaving Baghdad is going to assist the school kids?Islam and public health
Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them “haram”, or unlawful for Muslims to take....
Katme’s appeal reflects a global movement by some hardline Islamic leaders who are telling followers torefuse vaccines from the West.
In Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, Muslims have refused to be immunised against polio after being told that the vaccines contain products that the West has deliberately added to make the recipients infertile.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Famous nudist Trekkie
Richter, it turns out, was also an avid nudist, a frustrated but prolific poet, a Trekkie, a devoted backpacker profiled in the pages of Field and Stream, and a philandering spouse who was quite possibly in love with his sister and whose globe-trotting wife may have been a lesbian. While that may not sound all that unusual to the modern-day San Franciscan, keep in mind that the guy was born in 1900. ...
Richter was a reputed publicity hound, on one hand, and hopelessly awkward in social situations, on the other. Hough speculates, also late in her book, that he may have suffered from Asperger's syndrome. Indeed, this theory does neatly reconcile some of his more contradictory traits: his inability to make small talk with his adeptness at one-sided conversations with the press, or his lack of focus on long-term research projects with the obsessive logs he kept of "Star Trek" episodes.
Suburban 'roo
I live about 18 km from the centre of Brisbane, in a large slab of suburbia. (There is some undeveloped land a few kilometres away, and I have seen wallabies there, but they keep to themselves.)
This morning, when I was about to start mowing the front yard, I was surprised to see a pretty large kangaroo coming down the street. It went into the little park opposite my house, stayed a short time, then hopped its way back up the street in the direction from which it came.
This is not an every day occurrence. Here's a couple of pictures:
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Clever photons
Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image's worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.
If by slim chance I have someone reading who knows what the future may hold for this, why not enlighten me in comments.
Hydrogen on Earth, Oxygen on Mars
His objections about the economics of making, transporting and storing hydrogen all sound pretty convincing, but it would be good to see who disagrees with him.
His suggested practical solution to US dependence on oil sounds somewhat more credible: the government to mandate "flex-fueled" cars, which can run on any mix of alcohol or gas. Interesting, although it doesn't help that much on the greenhouse gas issue, does it?
Meanwhile, Zubrin's ideas about terraforming Mars are set out in Popular Science here. All it takes is a 1,000 years to have a habitable atmosphere. (Mind you, it also involves things like crashing 40 asteroids on the planet.) It is, perhaps, the plan you would use if you had unlimited money and foolproof technology.
At least you can't accuse him of thinking small.
UPDATE: the prospects for a legislative requirement for flex fuel cars are looking up. See this CSM article which goes into some detail.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Some Iraq posts
Francis Fukuyama thinks that modern radical Islam can correctly be described as an outgrowth of modern "identity politics". His article about this is broad ranging and interesting, as it talks about the origins of identity politics in the first place, but I sure that there are grounds on which to disagree. If he is correct, he argues that it has this unfortunate consequence:
...the problem of jihadist terrorism will not be solved by bringing modernisation and democracy to the middle east. The Bush administration's view that terrorism is driven by a lack of democracy overlooks the fact that so many terrorists were radicalised in democratic European countries. Modernisation and democracy are good things in their own right, but in the Muslim world they are likely to increase, not dampen, the terror problem in the short run.
Note the last words there. Maybe in the longer run it still is likely to help end it?
Like I said, I am not entirely convinced by his argument, but it is interesting.
The Moon becomes more dangerous
It had been thought that the X-rays were not copious enough to be a major hazard, but a new study suggests X-rays really do pose a threat to astronauts working outside of protective spacecraft or bases. The research was carried out by David Smith at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, US, and John Scalo of the University of Texas in Austin, US.
Using the observed rate of solar X-ray outbursts of different magnitudes, they worked out that a lunar astronaut has a 10% chance of receiving a dangerous dose of X-rays from a solar flare for every 100 hours of activity outside of shelters.
The level of radiation they consider harmful is 0.1 Gray or more, which can cause bleeding ulcers and other internal damage, and would certainly increase an astronaut's risk of cancer. The Sun has even produced flares that could kill an unprotected spacesuited human on the Moon, they say, although these are extremely rare.
Astronauts working far outside need to have an x-ray umbrella with them for protection from such outbursts.It's sad that Robert Heinlein's stories of boy scouts camping on the Moon are not likely to ever come true. (Exploring deep lava tube caves might still be an alternative, though.)
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The Left and Iraq
His story is similar to Christopher Hitchens: he comes with excellent Left credentials, completely understands why the Left criticised Western support of Saddam in the 1980's, but argues that it is the Left which changed its stripes and became hypocritical in its approach to the Iraq war and its aftermath.
This has puzzled me for some time. The anti-War Left feels vindicated over the issue of the justification for war. Fine, let's not quibble over the actual details, which they constantly misrepresent, and just assume for the sake of the argument that the decision to invade was a grave error, and even an immoral act. (This is just "for the sake of the argument" talk, remember.)
Second point: does any serious analyst anywhere in the world suggest that the withdrawal of coalition forces at any point up to and including now would have meant immediate greater stability in Iraq and the region? Not as far as I know.
The crux of the matter then is this: how does promoting a step that would now make the average Iraqi's position worse suddenly become defensible from the moral high ground that the Left supposedly occupies?
Cohen explains it this way:
There was too much emotional energy invested in opposing the war, too much justifiable horror at the chaos and too much justifiable anger that the talk of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be nonsense. The politically committed are like football fans. They support their side come what may and refuse to see any good in the opposing team. The liberal left bitterly opposed war, and their indifference afterwards was a natural consequence of the fury directed at Bush.
It is a fair argument, which I've heard many times, although I wince at the implied passivity. People don't just react to a crisis: they choose how they react. If a man walks down the street trying to pick a fight, you can judge those he confronts by how they respond. Do they hit back, run away or try to calm him down? The confrontation is not of their making, but they still have a choice, and what choice they make reveals their character and beliefs. If you insist on treating the reaction to the second Iraq war as a one-off that doesn't reveal a deeper sickness, I'll change the subject....
The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed.
Cohen argues that no such support was offered. (I note that those European countries which opposed the war might have grounds to argue that their troops' lives should not lost because of an error of the pro-War countries, but even so, have they tried to offer diplomatic or other assistance of any form between the regional powers?)The likelihood of success of the current "surge" is hotly debated, which is fair enough. (Even Hitchens seems fairly pessimistic about it.) I freely admit to not knowing enough to really be able to judge its chances of success; Bush's critics on this issue all appear to be armchair experts on counter-insurgency tactics. (That some retired Generals oppose it is far from conclusive; some of those still around must have given it support, and in a situation as politicised and unique as this one, dissenting voices even within the military are to be expected.)
If the surge fails, and the political process within Iraq is unable to rise above sectarianism, there will be a point in the future where the US will have to exit as gracefully as possible. But the problem Cohen writes about is the anti-War Left's immediate isolationism after the fall of the regime and continuing today. It is not a position that should be held with pride.
Porn and technology
But apart from that, the article points out that the porn industry is worth a lot of money:
Although the vagaries of entertainment accounting have become legendary, it is universally acknowledged that the U.S. adult-film industry, at around $12 billion in annual sales, rentals, and cable charges in 2006, is an even grander and more efficient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream American cinema (the latter's annual gross came in at $9 billion for 2006).
Figures of around $10 billion a year always interest me, because that is getting pretty close to the budget of NASA. (Well, now it's up to close to $17 billion, but as recently as 1999 it was only $13 billion.)
This may be a handy figure to keep in mind when you next have to argue with someone who whines about the expense of the space program. People hear "billions" and without context it means nothing.
Also, with figures like this, is public direct sponsorship of a space program really out of the question? All we need is an entrepreneur who is out to raise money to set up an orbiting studio specifically to make zero-G porn. (All the earth bound variations of sex were surely filmed by about 1985 anyway. ) Richard Branson is probably already considering a sex hotel anyway, I reckon.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Hitchens steps up to praise Steyn
Super fit to super dead
I therefore take some mean spirited pleasure from reading this:
People who regularly take part in endurance sports could be putting their lives at risk from damage to the right side of the heart, research suggests.
Marathons and triathalons are fast-growing events, more than 10,000 people regularly running, cycling and swimming long distances. But the super-fit athletes who train hard for such races can develop a life-threatening condition called ventricular arrhythmia (VA), in which the heart beats at an irregular rate and rhythm, according to the Belgian study. The condition increases the chance of sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, which kills 500 healthy Britons a year.
So, it's essentially a pointless activity that can also induce heart problems. Ban the fun run, I say!From the "only in Japan" files
Here, you can choose from a wide selection of delectable delights ranging from Spam to asparagus, and enjoy them in their purest form -- straight out of the can. No need to heat anything up (there's no oven on the premises), no need to have a waiter deliver the dish to your table and no need for fancy plates or silverware, as management thoughtfully provides plastic spoons and forks upon purchase. After you've ordered, pull your food and drink up to one of the steel barrels that serve as tables in the dining area, which is actually a bare lot, open to the air in summer and enclosed with plastic sheeting during the colder months....
Kanso is the brainchild of Osaka-based Clean Brothers, a company specializing in the design of restaurants and cafes...
You might well ask why anyone would pay to eat cold food out of a can?
"It's a combination of the friendly atmosphere and the novelty of the place," explained one customer. "A lot of people I know have started coming here."
I have an idea for Australia: this might be the simplest cafe franchise system, ever!
Maxine on board
As for Maxine McKew working for Kevin Rudd: well, being married to a Labor identity has long indicated where her sympathies lie, but from the way she has conducted interviews over the years I have always assumed she has quite moderate and reasonable views. It's no surprise that she is helping Rudd, and if she makes the party more centre or right wing, good on her.