The history of losing your head

Earlier this week, I noted how I was enjoying reading "Across the Nightingale Floor", a story set in medieval Japan. I also said it would make a good movie.

I have now finished the novel, and I can see the difficulties of making this into a movie. (In fact, in the last 1/3, the whole story becomes very Japanese, in that most major characters want to kill themselves!) I don't want to give the plot away entirely but:

SPOILER WARNING ! SPOILER WARNING !

a pretty crucial plot point happens when a major sympathetic character gets beheaded in a way which was, apparently, not unknown in medieval Japan, but it was quite shocking for me with my Western sensitivities. It's not the technical means of the beheading as such, it's the circumstances.

I have always felt particularly repelled by the idea of watching a beheading, even a fictional one in the movies. The novel was written before the recent spate of Islamic beheadings in Iraq, and this renewed appearance of the activity in the real world is unfortunate timing for someone having the film rights to a book in which this act plays a central role.

This made me wonder whether someone has written about beheadings as a cultural issue, and indeed Wikipedia has a gruesomely interesting entry for "decapitation". (In fact, it is this entry which makes me think that what happens in the novel sounds culturally and historically plausible.)

Maybe it is modern Western urban sensibilities that find it so appalling as an act: I imagine that people who live in countries where the open slaughter of animals by throat cutting is commonplace find the idea of killing people the same way not so extraordinary. (My witnessing the killing of some chickens as a young child hasn't desensitised me, though. I don't clearly remember the chopping, but do remember my mother cleaning out the entrails. The not completely formed eggs were interesting.)

Still, I don't like thinking about the act, and wish all heads to be kept firmly in place in novels and movies.

Howard, Costello, etc

The 7.30 Report - ABC

It seems to me that the media, and the ABC in particular, is disproportionately salivating over the issue of just how much Costello and Howard like/dislike each other.

The bottom line is this: Costello has felt hard done by for years, and we already knew that. But, for whatever reason, Costello polls very poorly in preferred PM stakes compared to Howard. No one in their right mind, including Costello, would think that means its a good idea to do a leadership swap now.

The only issue of relevance to the election is Howard being put under pressure to declare that he will really hand over the leadership in the next term. But, surely this time, that's a given anyway.

So Kerry, Tony, Michelle, that's about it really. Go have a Bex and a good lie down and find something else to talk about.

Unfortunate positioning

Quake-hit atomic plant sits atop a fault line | The Japan Times Online

From the article:

The fault along which Monday's magnitude-6.8 earthquake occurred appears to extend right beneath Niigata Prefecture's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, the world's largest atomic power complex, an analysis of aftershock data by the Meteorological Agency showed Wednesday.

Seems to me to be a good argument for the modular, smaller Pebble Bed Reactor. To get a big power station, you just string a half dozen of them together, and the modular design (I imagine) would mean less risk of all of them being taken out at once in one earthquake or other disaster.

Dr Haneef

There's a couple of things about this case that I haven't noticed being said yet:

1. One of the consequences of Dr H deciding to fight the Commonwealth's decision to revoke his visa is that the surety has not been paid and he is spending the next few weeks in remand in Brisbane instead of at Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney (where people undergoing immigration detention are kept.) The detention in Brisbane is described in The Age as follows:

Queensland Corrective Services Minister Judy Spence said Haneef would face a different regime to other prisoners.

He would be allowed no contact with other inmates and would be given an hour a day to exercise. Ms Spence said Haneef would be managed as a terror prisoner under terrorism legislation.

"Anyone who is charged under terrorist legislation is obviously seen as a greater threat to the good order of our society than other type of prisoners," she said. "A terrorist prisoner is required to be held apart from the mainstream prison population, so he will be held in a segregated environment."

It seems certain that the Villawood detention centre would have conditions nothing like this, as he would be bailed on the criminal charge and simply be there as a visa-less person awaiting his ticket overseas after the trial on the Brisbane charge.

I wonder whether his lawyers have made this clear to him, as spending a few more weeks in custody as a terrorist subject is a serious issue. (There is also the issue of the ease with which he can get access to lawyers when in Villawood. However, it's not like Sydney is a million miles from Brisbane, and I expect telephone contact is readily available. Who is paying for his representation anyway? That has never been made clear to me.)

2. I am curious as to what people think about this hypothetical: if the doctor were lodging his visa application today, after the attempted attacks in England by the relatives he has obviously been close to, should the government approve his visa? What would the media reaction be if it was disclosed that he had been approved to come here, despite the family connections, and sharing the same profession?

Should the government in that circumstance simply accept the applicant's claim that he knew nothing of his relative's plans, and only ever had "innocent" association with them?

If you think that the government in that hypothetical situation should not approve the visa application, acting on a precautionary principle, then how could you really complain about the government revoking his visa now?

There is too much hot air blowing around this case, mainly from lawyers. I don't like the media and other's role too (whoever was leaking before the barrister did too.) It's reflecting badly on both sides if you ask me, but I still don't think the government is going to (or should) lose on the issue of deporting him.

How England became England

New Scientist reports how the English Channel appears to have been carved out in a giant "mega flood".

Such stories of spectacular geological events are always interesting. The English Channel event was about 500,000 years ago, though. The flooding of the Black Sea is more interesting due to its affecting people.

The famous playwright

Dazzled again by Stoppard's big ideas

I wish Tom Stoppard plays were produced more often in this country. He seems to be the only English playwright of the last 30 years who deserves fame for having such a combination of wit and intellect.

But he's turning 70! I don't know that there is really anyone on the horizon who is likely to replace him.

From the "only in Japan" files

Sex seems to be the topic of quite a few posts here so far this week, and it's not even spring yet. Still, who can resist looking at some highly amusing packaging for Japanese condoms? (I think I may have seen some of these around the web before, but here they are together with some funny commentary.)

Found via the entertaining Japundit.

Questioning everything about CO2

In a series of posts late last year, I explained that the effect of increasing ocean acidification from the rapid rise in CO2 levels over the next century was enough for me to drop scepticism about the worthiness of programs to seriously reduce CO2 emissions. The benefit of this approach means you don't really have to continue worrying about who is right in terms of how much the temperature will increase, and what effect it will have on climate generally.

Still, it is interesting to see that arxiv has published last week a very lengthy article arguing that the physics of CO2 warming is completely wrong. (Maybe this argument has already been discredited, as I haven't followed all of the skeptics arguments all that closely over the years. It is hard to believe that thousands of other scientists are wrong.)

In any event, it would be nice if we didn't get as hot as predicted because of misunderstood atmospheric physics.

On marriage

Madeleine Bunting has an interesting column in The Guardian about the political response in England to high rates of family break up.

I don't agree with her conclusion (politicians should just give up on trying to promote marriage, and just make sure that there are plenty of services to ease the effect of separation on children.) Still, there is interesting information in the article, such as:

Relationship breakdown is not caused simply by poverty and inequality - they may contribute as a stress factor, but something else is going on too. Some of the world's highest separation rates are in Scandinavia, yet countries such as Sweden and Denmark are among the most equal and have the lowest rates of poverty. Other commentators attribute relationship breakdown to increasing working hours and the pressures of employment, but most Scandinavian working cultures are genuinely family friendly.

Just remember that when the ACTU and Labor party go on about Workchoices being bad for families!

She does allow that some deeper cultural issues are probably at play:

What's also involved is that a set of cultural assumptions about how to conduct long-term relationships, and what can be expected of them, have gone seriously askew - as one thirtysomething father said ruefully after the break-up of his relationship, "our generation just can't do it". The right likes to call this moral breakdown, but it's more tragic than that - often it's a kind of lack of emotional capability.

To which I quite liked this response from commenter simonx:

Why on earth are Guardian writers so loathe to praise and support the institution of marriage?

.....today, we have Ms Bunting blaming the break-up of relationships on a ' lack of emotional capability.' Yet loyalty itself should not be dependent, surely, on the whims of emotion. Instead, it is founded on the solemn promises and commitments couples make to each other when children become part of their relationship. There's nothing which underlines these vows better, surely, than the symbolism of marriage.

For the record

I really don't like The Australian's new website design. (What is it about News Limited: I have never learned to like the last re-design of the The Times website either.)

The blue pill that's good for the economy

The widespread use of Viagra seems to be causing significant problems, according to a long article in The Times. Some young idiots find it necessary to counter the effects of ecstacy:

Hayley, a 24-year-old fast-track civil servant, said men in her social circle take Viagra because it counters the effect of cocaine and ecstasy, which raise lust but cause impotence. “By about 3am you might have run out of everything else, so you might get two girls and a guy, or maybe a bigger group, taking Viagra and going off to have sex for the next three hours. With Viagra, guys can do it again and again.

So it would seem, according to a young man who gets it from a mate who fools his GP into giving him scripts:

“With Viagra you can do it four or five times in a row,” says Olly. “I’m sure I wouldn’t be completely crap at sex without it, but it puts your mind at rest that you’ll be able to perform.”

Even at the lust filled age of 24, there is something seriously wrong with wanting to "do it four or five times in a row", isn't there? I presume that the other recreational drugs might have something to do with the desire, as Hayley said.

The article goes on to explain that Vaigra use, and the husband's subsequent pressuring of the wife to have sex, is being increasing cited in divorce cases. Sounds plausible.

Yet there are doctors who won't have any of this talk of a downside:

John Dean, a doctor specialising in sexual medicine in London who took part in the original trials of Viagra, insists that its use has brought happiness to millions of couples, saved the cost of treating epidemics of depression and other illnesses linked to mental health, and allowed many men to increase their economic productiveness.

Finally, the key to never ending economic growth. I like this part too:

Pfizer is trying to persuade the Department of Health to allow routine NHS prescription of the drug, and it is developing a programme to help GPs recognise erectile dysfunction.

"Hullo, hullo, hullo. What's this we've got here? Erectile dysfunction I do believe. Wouldn't have recognized that unless Pfizer told me what to look for.."

All very interesting.

Monday Miscellany

There's a few things which I have read lately but haven't yet mentioned:

* It's been there for a couple of weeks, but there's an interesting interview in The Observer with an American author of a book comparing international attitudes to adultery. She points out that different countries have different "scripts" that most people expect to be followed in the course of adultery:

The key points of the American script resonate so strongly, it's almost tedious. For example - the first rule of infidelity in the US and the UK is that it becomes understandable, borderline-permissible even, if the prospective cheat says they're unhappy in their marriage. 'And of course,' says Druckerman, 'everyone has flaws in their marriages, things that aren't quite perfect... but here and the US, you start complaining about your marriage, and that way, you're not some lousy guy who cheats on his wife because he wants sex, you're a puppy dog who's looking for love.' Which might sound so trite that it hardly merits comment - until you consider the Japanese script, in which a cheating man praises his wife to his girlfriend, to demonstrate that he's a good husband.

I read a short novel about an Englishman having an affair in Japan a couple of years ago. He didn't mention his wife to his girlfriend, but then again, he was English. One thing the novel did point out, though, was that one of the hazzards of breaking up with a lover in Japan was the risk that she would commit suicide. The whole issue of the cultural attitude to adultery in Japan is an interesting topic. (A purely theoretical interest on my part, I hasten to add!)


* Speaking of Japan, I am currently reading "Across the Nightingale Floor", the first of a series of fairly popular novels set in a semi-fictionalised medieval Japan by Australian author Lian Hearn.

I am very impressed so far. The genre is a little hard to describe, as it contains a fantasy element, but it is really just a case of some characters having psychic abilities. (Sort of like psychic ninja, in a way.) I don't feel that the introduction of that alone means "fantasy" is an appropriate description for what I am reading.

I can say that the novel really has a very authentic sense of place. (I have spent my fair share of time around old Japanese temples, historical villages and castles.) The writing style is not overly ornate, but it has a very visual or "cinematic" quality to it, and it is a pleasure to read. I think it would be very easy material to convert to a screenplay.

I see from Hearn's website that Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (who have produced many films with Spielberg, and generally have a good track record) have acquired the film rights. I reckon it would make a great movie, except one would hope they use Japanese actors instead of Chinese, as in Memoirs of a Geisha. (That was one spectacularly good looking film, by the way, but the story only so-so.)

* Nick Cohen talks about the odd fact that, once Middle East terrorists really became a serious threat to the West, Hollywood stopped making films about them. He points out that the BBC drama "Spooks" went even one better:

The 2006 series of Spooks, for example, showed Islamist suicide bombers taking over the Saudi Arabian embassy. Nothing too far-fetched in that; real MI5 agents are running themselves ragged as they try to close down terror cells. The BBC's novel twist was that its fictional MI5 agents discovered that the Islamists weren't Islamists at all, just Mossad agents in disguise engaged in the perennial Jewish conspiracy.

An interesting read as usual.

* The Guardian has a "Comment is Free" article by a prominent gay activist who complains that, despite vast improvements in their legal position, homosexuals still have to put up with a lot of prejudice and hate, and suggests that in fact the title "gay" should be given up. (He suggests that bisexuality, or simply fluid sexuality, is more prominent than people realise.)

The odd thing about his argument is that he starts with a (I think) jokey thought that inadvertently shows why "gay" has an image problem:

I had a gratifyingly zeitgeist moment the other day in one of London's smarter clubs. It had met with a spot of bother; people were going into the loo cubicles together to share lines of coke. So now the loo doors brandish a strict sign: 'Any two people found in this cubicle using drugs will be ejected from the club.' And I just thought of a member of staff knocking on the door when a boyfriend and I were over-amorously engaged therein and being able to say: 'Don't worry we're just having sex,' and the doorman saying: 'OK. Carry on.'

It seems very odd to me that he doesn't realise that he is encouraging an image of gay men which he is seemingly arguing against in the rest of the article. If you want to "normalise" an image of sexuality, you don't do it by suggesting that toilets are appropriate place for sex, whether gay, straight or some other colour. Similarly, hasn't the concept of a gay Mardi Gras outlived its overall political usefulness? If you truly want to blend into a society and not be treated differently, why run a parade which has such an "in your face" approach to its participant's sexuality? As with sex in a toilet, it is far from dignified, and (I would argue) counterproductive in terms of changing the minds of those who may already either hate, dislike, or just be sceptical of, the whole modern Western concept of gay identity.

Something you didn't know

If you want some esoteric information to share around the dinner table tonight, try this. The keeping of rats as pets (in England, at least) seems to have started with Jack Black, who Wikipedia describes as:

...rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria during the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Black cut a striking figure in his self-made "uniform" of scarlet topcoat, waistcoat, and breeches, with a huge leather belt inset with cast-iron rats.

The title "mole destroyer" has a certain ring to it, don't you think? As Wikipedia goes on to explain:

When he caught any unusually coloured rats, he bred them, to establish new colour varieties. He would sell his home-bred domesticated coloured rats as pets, mainly, as Black observed, "...to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages." Beatrix Potter is believed to have been one of his customers, and she dedicated the book Samuel Whiskers to her rat of the same name. The more sophisticated ladies of court kept their rats in dainty gilded cages, and even Queen Victoria herself kept a rat or two.

How would you all manage without me providing such vital information?

Not common knowledge

Christopher Pearson's column in The Australian today talks about the "noble savage" view of aboriginal society, and mentions some extracts from Louis Nowra's recent book "Bad Dreaming".

While most people have probably heard of the traditional custom of female "child brides" in some aboriginal groups (as it is indeed still an issue today), I for one had not heard before of the customary pederasty in some aboriginal groups:

Nowra notes evidence of "boy-wife arrangements that are known to have existed late into the end of the 19th century", citing the work of Carl Strehlow. "Pederasty is a recognised custom among the Arunta and has a name, kwalanga. It prevails especially among the Western Loritja and tribes north of the MacDonnell Range, the Katitja, Ilpara, Warramunga, etc. Commonly a man, who is fully initiated but not yet married, takes a boy 10 or 12 years old, who lives with him for several years."...

Nowra comments: "Boys in a boy-wife arrangement were called chookadoo (about age five) or mullawongah (ages five to seven). Some boys could remain in such a marriage up until the age of 11 ... Even into the 1930s, there was evidence of homosexuality (among) the Kimberley Aborigines. The youths of 17 or 18 who were still unmarried would take boys of 10 or 11 as lovers.

"The women did not regard it as shameful and considered the practice a temporary substitute for marriage."

Heterosexual abuse gets a mention too:

Nowra's evidence of heterosexual abuse is just as compelling. For example, he says that "when a nine or 10-year-old girl was handed over to her husband, there was generally no sexual intercourse (until) after puberty" but notes anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry's caveat that "sexual intercourse without penetration did take place but infrequently".

Anthropology has never been a huge interest for me, but common sense has always suggested that it is one of the "softest" sciences in which political and personal prejudices of academics in the field have played a huge role. It seems to me that such prejudices are behind the lack of common knowledge of the harshness of sexual and other aspects of many traditional aboriginal societies.

Too much

It's reaching the bottom of the barrel when I post about Rosie O'Donnell, but some days the regular news just doesn't inspire me much.

In case you have never seen it, Rosie O'Donnell maintains a blog (of sorts) which regularly features video addresses to her admirers. Her girlfriend/partner and kids feature sometimes too.

This is a good example of one of her video entries. Go have a look and see if you agree with my observations:

a. Without make up, a hair do and studio lighting, she becomes startlingly unattractive.

b. The way she interacts with her girlfriend/partner makes it seem like a relationship dominated by Ms O'Donnell.

c. She is currently on one of her gay family cruises, alone, as her partner has had a neck operation. If Rosie has a shipboard romance, would she blog about it? Probably. This sort of exposure of a happy domestic life just feels like a set up for a spectacular fall. (It's like couples who renew marriage vows. Don't do it! It will make you look much more of a goose than necessary when one of you has an affair within a year.)

Hitting the jackpot while spending a penny

Money flows free in men's toilets in Japan - ABC News

That heading was too hard to resist, sorry.

Anyhow, the story is that visiting a public toilet can be very profitable for some in Japan:

The suburban sprawl of Saitama, north of Tokyo, does not make the news that often. But it is not everyday that someone visiting the toilet finds a box of 10,000 yen notes - each worth $A100, each wrapped in a traditional Japanese paper envelope.

Reports of the find in the Saitama local government headquarters flushed out similar incidents across the country...

The first case now seems to have been in September 2006, in Shizuoka prefecture in central Japan. Similar events have been reported in 18 of Japan's 47 prefectures, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south.

National broadcaster NHK has tallied up the figures and believes around 400 envelopes have been found - the equivalent of $40,000.

Galactic geeks for science

Found via New Scientist: there's a potential contribution to science that you can make by looking at and categorising galaxies.

It's not just letting your computer grind away in the background on processing radio signals for alien contact, or working out how proteins fold; you have to use your own brain. As the site explains:

Welcome to GalaxyZoo , the project which harnesses the power of the internet - and your brain - to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you'll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you'll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky.

Why do we need you?
The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognising patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you.

Go have a look. The inner Geek in me finds this very appealing, and I'm very tempted to sign up.

Star rock's cot noping?

According to the Courier Mail:

Mr Garrett yesterday refused to say when he last took a drag on a joint but stood by an earlier statement saying it wasn't with Daniel Johns and it was a long time ago.

The rock star-cum-political wunderkind fronted the media yesterday after a speech on global warming and the tourism industry but the one burning question was about his own hazy past.

Even those observing his speech to the Tourism and Transport Forum could have been forgiven for thinking he was a touch out of it.

At one point he said he would "brief speakly" about part of the issue before criticising the Federal Government's funding cuts to heritage protection. Unfortunately he referred to them as "cunding futs", which briefly alarmed many in the audience.

It's all relative

Report: Iranian adulterer stoned to death

From the article:

A man convicted of adultery was stoned to death last week in a village in northern Iran, a judiciary spokesman said Tuesday, the first time in years that the country has confirmed such an execution....

Death sentences are carried out in Iran after they are upheld by the Supreme Court. Under Iran’s Islamic law, adultery is punishable by stoning...

Under Islamic rulings, a man is usually buried up to his waist, while a woman is buried up to her neck with her hands also buried. Those carrying out the verdict then throw stones until the condemned dies.

Capital offenses in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, adultery or prostitution, treason and espionage.

Meanwhile, in Australia, civil rights types are griping that anti-terrorism laws don't have an automatic time limit on detention:

Terrorism law experts and civil libertarians called for a limit on the time a suspect can be held without charge under the Anti-Terrorism Act, while Dr Haneef's lawyer, Peter Russo, said his client had fewer rights than someone charged with a criminal offence, as he couldn't even apply for bail.

"That's the craziness in the legislation," Mr Russo said. "There should be a mechanism for review. We need to put some balance in the system that has got some accountability."

This despite the fact that extensions have to be approved by a court, which has already not been granting the length of extensions sought by the police. (The stoned Iranian adulterer, by the way, had spent 11 years in custody before he was killed.)

Call me when the Magistrate starts granting 3 months extensions, rather than 48 hour ones, and then I might care.

A completely expected answer

Rudd stone cold on marijuana - National - theage.com.au

The least likely man in the universe to have ever tried marijuana confirms he has never smoked marijuana. (Nor have I, so I don't criticise politicians who haven't. Still, isn't it sort of funny to think that anyone might even bother asking supernerd Kevin this question?)

Polling day

It seems that there is a relatively subdued response in the left leaning blogosphere to the Newspoll out today that is still good news for Labor. Not much crowing at all compared to previous months.

I suspect that this is because, despite it not reflecting in voting intentions yet, the general feeling is still there (even amongst Labor supporters) that Howard's decisive action in the aboriginal crisis, and the renewed discussion of terrorism within Australia, are issues which are going to work in the Coalition's favour, with yet another resurrection of Howard's electoral performance still very possible.

People have to remember that, while a 12 point TPP lead seems impressive (and would be on an election day!), it only takes a shift of 6 points to make them even again.

Oddly, though, Howard's performance was not that great in the last week, when he dissembled on "oil is why we are in Iraq" issue (a problem caused by Brendan Nelson really, who I can't stand) and seems to have made a mistake on the Indonesian terror warning.

On the other side of the fence, surely some people are starting to tire just a little bit of Rudd's very mannered way of speaking (once he gets a phrase going during a speech or interview, he can't let it go.) And is it possible that just a little mud might stick via the "Peter Garrett smoked pot with me and Bono" story by seriously strange musician Daniel Johns?

Interesting political times coming up in the second half of this year.

Life in a North Korean gulag

There's a horrifying story of the gulag system in North Korea at the IHT.

King Jong-Il cannot die soon enough for the long suffering people of that nation.

The ABC has an opinion

Has anyone else noticed how the ABC News website now has a fairly extensive Opinion section?

As far as I can tell, it's only been running since May.

This seems to be dangerous ground for the ABC to be attempting to cover, as surely the editorial selection of whose essays and opinion articles get published can easily lead to allegations of bias. In fact, just doing a quick read of the topics and authors of the articles that are already there, I am surprised that (as far as I know,) no commentator or politician has yet raised this.

I think that ABC News would be better off leaving this sort of stuff well alone.

This will be interesting..

We've got the Brimble cruise death inquest resuming, and this is the evidence that is going to be presented:

Counsel assisting the inquest, Ron Hoenig, has told Glebe Coroners Court that intercepted telephone calls between the eight men implicated in the mother of three's death have been secured by police.

The 42-year-old woman died from a drug overdose on board P&O's Pacific Sky cruise ship in September 2002....

Mr Hoenig told the court "a considerable volume of material" would be placed before the inquest comprising a large number of intercepted conversations between the persons of interest.

"These conversations relate specifically to this inquest, what occurred on board, and (how) they are to give their evidence and describe Mrs Brimble and their view of her conduct on board," Mr Hoenig said.

It seems extremely likely that this evidence is going to be very embarrassing for these guys, and given the stuff that has already come out of the inquest, it would very surprising if no prosecutions result.

That last link, by the way, was to a site called Cruise Bruise which seems purely dedicated to maximizing bad publicity about anything that can possibly go wrong on a cruise ship. (Who knows, its summary of the Brimble case might not be the most accurate one in the world, given the strange obsession that it must take to create a website like this.) Still, it looks like a perversely interesting site, even though I haven't had time to look around it for long.

Hadn't heard that one before

Madeleine Bunting has an interesting article in The Guardian's "Comment is Free" today, in which she discusses an (apparent) new seriousness within the British Muslim community to take home grown Islamist terrorism seriously. She opens it with this interesting snippet:

Two days after the 7/7 bombings in London two years ago, Muslim community leaders gathered at the London Muslim Centre to consider the impact of the attacks and who might have organised them. Many present refused to accept it might have been Muslims - the common refrain was that it could have been the French, because they had just lost the bid to host the Olympics.

The article goes on to say this:

In the past few days, key Muslim community activists have admitted to me that what worries them is how certain theological issues have not been properly clarified, and can be used to justify extremism. The most important is the age-old distinction between dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) and dar al-harb (the land of the other, of unbelief - or of war, according to the literal translation from the Arabic). This demonisation of all that is not Muslim is the "paradigmatic, instinctive response that people fall back on in a moment of crisis", I was told. Extremists such as Hizb ut-Tahrir use this dualism, as do jihadis, to justify their contempt for the rights - and lives - of the kufr, the unbeliever.

How long it will take to weed out the jihadist theology, though, is another question.

Revisiting the many worlds

There's a good article available for free from Nature on the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics.

The article has a footnoted link to a short biography of Hugh Everett, who came up with the interpretation. Interestingly, he believed one of the odder ideas that some argue is implicit in the "many-worlds" theory:

Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death —and so on ad infinitum. (Sadly, Everett's daughter Liz, in her later suicide note, said she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father.)

Stranger than fiction.

Bjorkiness

There's a fairly entertaining interview article in The Guardian about nutty Icelandic pop star Bjork. I liked this part:

I didn't expect Björk to be eccentric in the flesh, although oddness is an integral part of her public persona, of course. ... Oddness, kookiness and quirkiness have been as much a part of Björk's brand as her off-kilter, jarring, powerful sound. Björk, who wore a swan costume up the red carpet at the Oscars in 2001. Björk, who sewed pearls into her own skin for the video to 2001's 'Pagan Poetry'. Björk, who battered a television reporter at Don Muang airport in Bangkok, when she tried to talk to her son Sindri, then 10. Björk, who was rumoured to have been so unhappy while filming a role in Lars von Trier's Dancer In The Dark that she ate her own cardigan.

Sadly, the interviewer does not actually establish whether the clothes eating incident was true.

UPDATE: Here's the link I forgot to add. Actually, the article was from The Observer, via the Guardian Unlimited site.

What's happened to Terry Lane?

Terry Lane's column in The Age today, about Howard's response to the aboriginal situation, is very, very surprising. There is virtually no criticism of Howard at all, and contains statements like this:

We may be as sentimental as we like about indigenous culture, but it is simply incompatible with real life and must change or be changed.

You can see how a can-do chap like Howard would eschew the pussy-footing and send in the army. The inquiry's message is inescapable — left to their own devices, the condition of Aboriginal life will go on getting worse until they disappear....

Realistically, there is no alternative to assimilation. Missions, protectors, citizenship, land rights, equal pay, affirmative action and self-determination haven't worked.

Such sentiments seem extremely out of character for the consistently left wing, and (I think it fair to say) Howard-hating Lane. In fact, I am worried he has had a bump to the head and the injury is not being treated yet.

Vindication 23 years later

The Internet is quite the tool for vindication, even if it comes decades later.

This week, science fiction author Fred Saberhagen died. This reminded me of an incident from 1984. I can be quite certain of the year, because of the place I was working at the time.

I shared an office with a guy who was reasonably well read in science fiction, as was I at that time. I mentioned to him that, although I had never read Saberhagen, I had been surprised while browsing in a bookstore to find that he had a novel which seemed to have references to Queensland.

My office friend managed to convince me that I must have imagined it. The memory (from probably a couple of years before this conversation) was vague. I think I actually said that my recollection was so vague, that maybe I had dreamt it.

However, a quick Google now reveals that one of Saberhagen's books has this plot:

The berserkers have chosen to focus their latest attack upon one individual. Their target, King Ay of Queensland.

Yes, well, maybe it has nothing to do with Queensland the Australian State, but finally there is proof that I did not completely imagine the connection.

If, in the afterlife, there is a super Google that lets you review the equivalent of Youtube clips of arguments had years ago, perhaps some souls spend years just watching it and keeping score of how many times they are vindicated. (Maybe that is why tests involving souls communicating secret messages back through mediums are usually failures.) Anyway, I can imagine that sort of afterlife activity keeping Paul Keating going for decades.

Way to attract tourists, Malaysia

Malaysian band detained after singer's top reveals bare skin | The Guardian

From the article:

Religious police in Malaysia have detained a Muslim singer and her band, accusing her of baring too much flesh during a recent performance at a nightclub.

Siti Noor Idayu Abd Moin's sleeveless white top exposed a triangle of skin on her back, prompting officials to charge her with "revealing her body" and "promoting vice".

The artist, who plans to contest the allegations, was released on £145 bail and ordered to appear before the sharia court in the northern town of Ipoh early next month. But Noor Idayu, 24, was bemused by the charge that her top was too skimpy and said it was a style she would feel comfortable wearing in public during the day.

Any gluttons for punishment out there?

At the Movies: West

When David Stratton says this about an Australian movie, you know it must be unpleasant:

It's beautifully acted, it's well-directed, it's, the cinematography is fine and it's possibly, probably, an authentic depiction of life in the western suburbs of our cities, but it's such a deeply, deeply depressing experience in the cinema.

And coming on the heels of other deeply depressing Australian films like CANDY and other films like it, I just sat through the film getting more and more miserable as the film went on...

And, the four-letter language all the way through - I'm sure it's like that but it makes me wonder what a film like, who, where the audience is for this film.

Yet, in the strange way of assessing films they use, he still gives it 3/5. (As always, there seems to be a 1 to 2 star bonus there simply for it being an Australia project.)

The writer/director, meanwhile, thought he was writing for an audience:

WEST grew out of, basically, things that had happened to me as a teenager. I wrote the first draft, kind of in a haphazard way, when I was very young. I was about 16. I didn't really know what I was doing and I just - I was just trying to write something that I felt that I would want to see or that my friends would want to see.

So it wasn't an intellectual process at all. It was just spewing it out, you know, I guess. And then - and then the script - I worked the script really for another eight years in between other jobs and the draft that we shot was completed in about '94 and then it took a long time to get the money after that. So it was an exercise in persistence and patience really.

He seemed very earnest in the interview, which makes the almost guaranteed failure to find an audience for the project that has been on his mind for many, many years seem rather sad. Sort of. The other part of me just wants to continue ridiculing him.

Really, someone should be giving a collective slap in the face to Australian film makers and start yelling "snap out of it. Make something other than dire films about losers. NO, not even about losers who seem to come good in the last five minutes! And you, funders, stop spending money on them!"

Silly

Comment is free: Distinct possibilities

Go to the link for a Guardian "Comment is Free" piece which gives Hamas a ridiculous number of big brownie points for its role in the release of Alan Johnston:

...it was the "Islamists" ... who made the difference in terms of bringing relentless worldwide appeal as well as action on the ground, and led to his eventual release. Indeed had the Hamas leadership had its way, Alan Johnston would have been freed many weeks ago, but its self-restraint and discipline in dealing with this matter as well as its tenacity, has brought about this welcome resolution.

Even the Guardian's commenters find this hard to take:

hahaha - you're a joke. Are you talking about the same Hamas organisation that only 3 weeks ago were throwing their fellow muslim brothers off 10 storey buildings, or going into hospitals tying men and kids up and shooting them in the back. All the while screaming Allah Acbbbarrrr...

Or this:

Any sensible and decent person would be very happy that Johnson has been freed, but I don't see how it changes anything. Hamas still believes in the destruction of Israel, still has Shalit, still launches rockets at Israel, and so on. Just because they did something good (which was for their benefit anyway, hardly altruistic) doesn't mean they have ebcome good.

"We must seize the opportunity of these groups coming out clearly against terrorism and violence, and work to cultivate the common ground."

There is the problem. Hamas, Muslim brotherhood et all have not come out against violence nor will they anytime soon.

Credibility lost

Time for a long look at bottom of the glass - Opinion - theage.com.au

David Campbell complains about drinking culture in Australia. He admits, however, to having a jaundiced view (hmm, medical pun there) as he is a non drinker. The reason:

Wine is bitter and beer is … well, why anybody would pour that stuff down their throat is one of life's little mysteries....

I've been asked all sorts of questions: "Is there a health reason?" "Is it a religious belief?" The plain answer — that I don't like the taste — is met with raised eyebrows and a visible turning of the mental wheels: "Hmmm … weird!"

Well, at the very least, it shows a startlingly low level of curiousity. People who stop trying new tastes in either food or drink at their teenage years deserve a degree of ridicule, I reckon. If you say you don't drink for ideological reasons, even if it is not particularly well founded (like saying you never want to lose any degree of self control), that at least makes some kind of sense. But to carry on about the taste for the rest of your life, that's just a bit childish in my books.

(It just occurred to me that he may be a supertaster, in which case my criticism is unfair. More likely, though, he's just a big .... well, I was going to humourously suggest girl, but that doesn't seem apt considering today's teenagers. He is like my mother, but she's in her 80's and you allow for a degree of lack of experimentation by that age.

I also don't want to suggest that the likes of Campbell should be hassled relentlessly about their abstinence; of course people can chose to not drink for whatever reason they want and don't have to justify it. It's just that if they make silly blanket statements suggesting that all wine is bitter and beer worse than car acid they should expect a rebuke.)

Queensland - mad doctor magnet?

What is it about Queensland and foreign doctors? First the awfully over-enthusiatic Dr Patel, whose Wikipedia entry notes that, even before he landed in Australia:

Medical staff alleged that he would often turn up, even on his days off, and perform surgery on patients that were not even his responsibility. In some cases, surgery was not even required, and caused serious injuries or death to the patient.

Then there was the case of the fake Russian psychiatrist working at Townsville hospital:

The Australian newspaper today published allegations that a bogus doctor engaged to work as a psychiatrist at the Townsville Base Hospital in North Queensland is a convicted paedophile. The newspaper claims that in 1987, Vincent Berg was jailed in the Soviet Union for indecently dealing with boys, and later deported from the United States after being accused of stealing church ornaments.

He was also allegedly defrocked as a Russian Orthodox priest in his home country.

When contacted by the newspaper, Mr Berg denied any wrongdoing and said the KGB had fabricated the allegations.

More recently, Cairns hospital had some youngsters with questionable qualifications:

Queensland's chief health officer, Jeanette Young, is investigating how the Cairns Base Hospital hired four foreign junior doctors before their credentials were checked by the medical board....

..a newspaper report alleging that one of the employees used an online medical degree from the Caribbean to get the job, while a Chinese woman's documents show she would have started medical school at the age of 14.

And finally, we get our very own doctor from Gold Coast hospital arrested and being investigated for possible connections with the mad (alleged!) doctor bombers of England. (Of course, he may end up being found completely innocent of anything, but it's not a good look.)

The big mystery is: why does this run of foreign doctors gone wrong stories seem centred on Queensland out of all of Australia? Sure, it adds a certain potential air of drama and excitement to visiting a public hospital here, as you wonder whether all the possible ways that Queensland foreign hospital doctors have been in trouble have yet been exhausted. I mean, about the only thing we haven't discovered yet is that Josef Mengele's grandson, who qualified in surgery under the guidance of faith healer Arigo ("surgeon of the rusty knife") in Brazil, has been stealing kidneys from Jewish patients. (OK, there aren't many Jews in Queensland, but they holiday here from Melbourne sometimes, surely.)

It's all very odd, if you ask me.

Drink up, kids

They have ads on TV for kid's beer in Japan. (You can see it on Youtube via the link.) I am not offended. This is a country, after all, where beer can be found for sale in vending machines on the street. (They're not all over the place, like the coffee, tea and various soft drink vending machines, but still.) Yet there is nothing like the ridiculous drunken teenage party invasions that go on here.

A journalist in Baghdad

I’m cowering under the bed. But I’m here -Times Online

Here's a short account of what it is like for a Western journalist (and a female one at that) to work in Baghdad at the moment. She deserves praise for being one of the few journalists willing to be there at all.

More deep thoughts from Paul Davies

We are meant to be here | Salon Books

Paul Davies is out promoting a new book, and gets a long interview in Salon to explain his ideas. It explains his views better than the last article I linked to.

Here's the key sections:

Now we're into another variant of the anthropic principle -- which is sometimes called the "final anthropic principle" -- where, somehow, the emergence of life and observers link back to the early universe. Now, Wheeler didn't flesh out this idea terribly well, but I've had a go at trying to extend it...

It's part of conventional quantum mechanics that you can make observations now that will affect the nature of reality as it was in the past. You can't use it to send signals back into the past. You can't send information back into the past. But the nature of the quantum state in the past can't be separated from the nature of the quantum state in the present.

What we're saying is that as we go back into the past, there are many, many quantum histories that could have led up to this point. And the existence of observers today will select a subset of those histories which will inevitably, by definition, lead to the existence of life. Now, I don't think anybody would really dispute that fact.

What I'm suggesting -- this is where things depart from the conventional view -- is that the laws of physics themselves are subject to the same quantum uncertainty. So that an observation performed today will select not only a number of histories from an infinite number of possible past histories, but will also select a subset of the laws of physics which are consistent with the emergence of life. That's the radical departure. It's not the backward-in-time aspect, which has been established by experiment. There's really no doubt that quantum mechanics opens the way to linking future with past. I'm suggesting that we extend those notions from the state of the universe to the underlying laws of physics themselves. That's the radical step, because most physicists regard the laws as God-given, imprinted on the universe, fixed and immutable. But Wheeler -- and I follow him on this -- suggested that the laws of physics are not immutable.

The mechanism by which they are changeable over time seems rather vague speculation to me, and he doesn't seem to suggest a way to test the idea. (Although there has been mention recently that whether changes to certain laws of physics have taken place over time is testable.)

One area in which I think is a bit inadequately addressed in the interview is the odd "Platonic world" feeling of mathematics.

In my previous post about Davies, I suggested that it was a bit of a stretch for him to say that there was "ultimate meaning" to the universe when he doesn't seem to believe in eternal life of any kind. However, maybe he is a secret admirer of Tipler's Omega Point after all:

Ultimately, it may not be living intelligence or embodied intelligence but some sort of intelligent information-processing system that could become omniscient and fill the entire universe. That's a grand vision that I rather like. Whether it's true or not is another matter entirely.

The whole interview is worth reading.

The kindness of rats

news @ nature.com-Generosity among rats-Rats do unto others as they have been done to.

Odd forms of rat research will always be welcome here. (I was particularly fond of the ticking rats story a few months ago.)

Now from Nature:

Rats that benefit from the charity of others are more likely to help strangers get a free meal, researchers have found.

This phenomenon, known as 'generalized reciprocity', has only ever been seen before in humans. A good example, says Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern, Switzerland, is what happens when someone finds money in a phone box. In controlled experiments such people have been shown to be much more likely to help out a stranger in need following their good luck.

In humans, such benevolence can be explained by cultural factors as well as by underlying biology, says Taborsky. But if similar behaviour can be found in other animals, he reasons, an evolutionary explanation would be far more likely.

To test for this behaviour in animals, Taborsky trained rats to pull a lever that produced food for its partner, but not for itself. Rats who had received a free meal in this way were found to be 20% more likely to help out an unknown partner than rats who had received no such charity

Maybe all rats go to heaven too.

How did this slip through?

PM warms to his task - Opinion - theage.com.au

It was most surprising to see in The Age yesterday some commentary by Jason Koutsoukis talking up John Howard's policy initiatives on greenhouse gases:

NOW that winter has settled in and taken some of the heat out of global warming as a political issue, it's worth taking stock of who is offering the best policies on climate change.

At this stage the answer, surprisingly, is John Howard, who in a few short months has managed to cobble together a decent looking framework for a national emissions trading scheme, plus a host of other measures.

Despite harping on about the urgent need for government to do more on climate change for the past six years, Labor is still unable to articulate what it would do.

Gosh, editorial control seems to be slipping at The Age!

Farms of the air

The Vertical Farm Project - Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond...

This idea (to start seriously developing farms in high rise buildings) sounds very futuristic, and that's why I like it. The fact that it may actually make practical sense too is just an added bonus.

Humour

So, there's a site that posts some of the US late night talk show jokes. Neat. Here's David Letterman on Paris getting out of jail:

Paris said she hated prison. There’s some insight.
She said she had to eat mystery meat. I think I’ve actually seen video of her doing that.

About time

Egypt bans female circumcision after death of 12-year-old girl | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

The numbers for female circumcision in Egypt are much higher than I would have guessed:

In 2005, research by Unicef found that 96% of Egyptian women aged 15 to 49 who had ever been married reported they had been circumcised. The Egyptian government says a more recent study found 50.3% of girls aged 10 to 18 had been circumcised.

And this is after a quasi ban in 1997, although the article says it was still allowed "under exceptional circumstances". I wonder what exactly would be counted as good reason for that.

Chinese Catholics explained

How an American program bridged the gap between China's divided Catholics. - By Adam Minter - Slate Magazine

The situation with Chinese Catholics is more complicated that I realised. An interesting explanation is in the Slate article above.

Computers no match for Go

Why computers can’ t surpass Go and collect $1 million -Times Online

Well, that's something I hadn't heard before:

...there is one game in which the computer is still no match for Man, a game in which a competent teenager can beat the world’s most sophisticated computer program with ease: and that is the ancient Chinese board game Go, the oldest game in the world, and the only one at which man remains the undisputed champion.

So, my alternative ending for 2001: A Space Odyssey would involve Dave challenging HAL to a game of Go, on a bet that the winner gets back control of the mission.

Fisk-like in its accuracy

You've got to read this. Professional lefty panic merchant author Richard Flanagan has a "Comment is Free" article in The Guardian about the aboriginal situation here. Where ever he is writing from, it seems to be somewhere that is free of talk back radio, TV news and all Australian papers. Here's some extracts; you decide how accurate it sounds:

Howard's response - a five-year takeover of 60 indigenous communities, with soldiers and police overseeing alcohol and pornography bans, the part-quarantining of welfare payments to parents to ensure money is spent on food and other necessities, and the compulsory testing of Aboriginal children for sexual abuse - stunned Australia. Initial confusion soon gave way to condemnation of the plan as draconian, racist, unworkable, an ill-conceived shock-and-awe campaign, a cunning land grab and a black Tampa doomed to fail. Howard's past was rebounding.

It took many back to the horror of the infamous "stolen generation", thousands of Aboriginal children taken, often forcibly, from their families into institutions in a misguided attempt at assimilation through the 20th century. Despite Howard's reassurances, fear and panic were reported to have seized Aboriginal communities. Families were already fleeing to the bush, fearful of seeing soldiers take their children away.

Then condemnation transformed into what is now being described as "a widening revolt", joining together Labor state premiers, a former Liberal prime minister, indigenous leaders, religious leaders, police, and more than 60 community and indigenous groups.

So, the most he can say about the initial response is "initial confusion"?

And how's this for a short summary of the Cronulla riots last year:

He [Howard] has overseen a transition from a national commitment to multiculturalism to a strident advocacy of "national values" - an oily phrase that appears to be a stalking horse for a new intolerance. When riots broke out between white supremacists and Lebanese youths on Sydney beaches in 2005, he described it as an issue of law and order, rather than race.

Talk about a slanted description of the parties involved. "White supremacists" makes them sold like 30 year old neo-Nazis; "Lebanese youths" makes it sound like they were all younger than the young white men involved, as if a pack of 13 years old on the Lakemba Youth Group picnic were attacked.

For some context on Richard, there's this from the Kerry O'Brien interview linked to above:

There are a lot of disturbing tendencies in Australian public life. We have this language which I haven't heard used since the Stalinist era of elites, a word that was first used by Stalin when he wanted to attack Jewish intellectuals in 1948, the use of the idea that there are things that matter more than individual freedom. Again, that's a Stalinistic argument. We have the rise of hit men in the media who are there to do the Government's bidding and seem to have no conscience or scruple in attacking any individual who has a position different than that of the Government or is questioning government policy. We have an ever more conformist society. We have an ever more cowed media and we see daily anybody who rightly questions or simply interrogates the process of government or government policy being destroyed. Those sort of things, when people who are simply seeking the truth have to put their reputations on the line, when that starts happening, I become very frightened.

Richard seems to have avoided conformism and destruction so far; he must be living in a bunker somewhere avoiding the police with their packs of dogs trying to ferret him out. Prat.

Science fiction ideas

New Scientist Space Blog: Have researchers found the Tunguska crater?

As the article indicates, there are many reasons to be very sceptical of the claim that a small lake in Siberia may be an impact crater from the Tunguska event.

Still, it seems to me to be to the good start for a science fiction movie to have a submarine down there, discovering in the mud an alien artefact that was left over from Tunguska.

Speaking of movies, some years ago it occurred to me (while reading some fan boy ideas as to what would be good stories for future Indiana Jones episodes) that it could be a nice idea if Indiana Jones was involved in some intrigue surrounding the (alleged) Roswell UFO crash. (UFO followers will recall there was a claim that some of the "ufo" pieces had symbols on them, resembling some ancient or alien script. This would be a reason for the scientists to call in Jones.) There could also be a tie in with Raiders, because, you will recall, one of the bad guys thought the Ark of the Covenant was a radio transmitter to God. (Maybe it is a transmitter to the nearly God-like aliens instead.) The end result of it could be a message sent out to aliens, resulting at the end of the movie in the eventual arrival in the 1970's of the mother ship as depicted in Close Encounters. You could digitally insert Indiana Jones into the end of that movie, and have him leave into alien immortality.

Hey, I did say it was many years ago that I idly thought about such stuff. I was single for a long time before I got married, you know!

All about AI

Technology Review: Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods

This is a good article from an "anti-cognitivist", who thinks AI research is largely going down the wrong path. Very interesting reading.

Suicide watch

Suicide | Elusive, but not always unstoppable | Economist.com

The Economist has a good piece about suicide, and the wildly varying factors that seem to be behind it in different parts of the world.

There were a couple of things in the article that were new to me:

China is one of the few countries in which more women kill themselves than men. Over half the world's female suicides are Chinese; among Chinese under 45, the female rate is twice the rate among males. Why should things be different in China? Part of the explanation clearly lies in the high rate among rural women, which in turn may be partially explained by the ready availability of poisons (weedkillers and pesticides), and the absence of any effective treatment.

And the law of unintended consequences can certainly apply to this area when the government tries to help:

Government action certainly makes a difference, though sometimes results are perverse. Some Indian states pay bereaved families compensation for the loss of a breadwinner who has killed himself; this seems to increase the suicide rate.

Coming attractions

Pixar's new film Ratatouille (which has not yet opened in the States) is receiving very positive early reviews. I saw the trailer for it before Pirates, and it did look promising, especially given that it is directed by Brad Bird, who did the very enjoyable The Incredibles. (He also did Iron Giant in old freehand animation style, and it is well worth watching on DVD. It got great reviews when released at the cinema, but for some reason was a box office flop.)

I think it is fair to say that Bird's storytelling always contains more "adult" themes than other animation, but he never bores young children either. After the instantly forgettable Cars, I have high hopes for being very impressed by another Pixar film.

Before that, I think it likely that my son will need to be taken to see Transformers, which is opening here tomorrow, actually ahead of the US release. There are only a couple of official reviews out, but the impression seems to be that, for a basically silly boy's concept, and one directed by noise-Meister Michael Bay, it's not bad.

Lastly, any Indiana Jones tragics who might read this probably already know that there's a photo released of Harrison Ford in costume. Seems to be holding his age better when in a fedora, I guess.

I personally do not hold high hopes for Indiana 4: George Lucas's involvement in this might mean the series continues to follow the same trajectory as Star Wars, where the second in both series were the best, followed by a plummet in story quality in the third. Interest was well and truly lost by the fourth. But at least George isn't directing.

Undercover in Scientology

The Spectator.co.uk

Follow the link above for an article about a woman who spent 3 months as an undercover reporter who joined the Scientologists via their London "Celebrity Centre". It's very interesting.

I must say that, while her experience confirms the flakiness of the Scientologists, it also indicates that the therapy courses (at least at this level) are not exactly sinister in nature.

I object to their crusades against all medication for psychiatric conditions, and the science fiction silliness of its core beliefs, but it does seem to me that the Europeans in particular have over-reacted to this trite form of therapy masquerading as religion.

Rain rain come again

Brisbane has now had about 24 hours of continual, light to moderate, rain. While my guess is that it is still not going to add all that much to the dam levels (currently right on 18%,) there should at least be a substantial halt to the death of trees, shrubs and lawns that has been very noticeable throughout the city. Also, all the new water tanks that have been installed in the last 6 months should finally be full. (Shareholders in companies that make water tanks must be very happy here. The demand for them has been huge.)

Paul Davies, the laws of physics, and God

Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it

Former Aussie resident Paul Davies has a neat summary of his recent thinking in the above article from "Comment is Free" in The Guardian.

His suggestion that the physical laws of the universe are changeable over time, and in some sense, have created themselves in such a way as to be hospitable to life, certainly feels counter-intuitive. I am also not sure what he means by this:

Thus, three centuries after Newton, symmetry is restored: the laws explain the universe even as the universe explains the laws. If there is an ultimate meaning to existence, as I believe is the case, the answer is to be found within nature, not beyond it. The universe might indeed be a fix, but if so, it has fixed itself.

Yet he has never claimed to believe in a personal God, or a creator God, and presumably does not believe in an afterlife, even of the Tipler Omega Point (eternal cyber-heaven at the end of the universe) variety.

So within that framework, how does he think you can say there is "ultimate meaning" to existence?

While I am mentioning God, I have been meaning for some time to post this passage from CS Lewis, which I have always thought makes a very valid point about "modern" thinking about God:

". . . When [people] try to get rid of man-like, or, as they are called, 'anthropomorphic,' images, they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds. 'I don't believe in a personal God,' says one, 'but I do believe in a great spiritual force.' What he has not noticed is that the word 'force' has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation. 'I don't believe in a personal God,' says another, 'but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all' -not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.

"A girl I knew was brought up by 'higher thinking' parents to regard God as perfect 'substance.' In later life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.) We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God, are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the manlike images aroused by Christian theology. For man, after all, is the highest of the things we meet in sensuous experience."

I think there is more benefit in that passage than in most full length books of theology.

A big problem

Town at the coalface in fear of overflow | Indigenous Welfare | The Australian

The mayor of the Northern Territory town of Katherine notes this:

Ms Shepherd points out that part of the problems of her town ironically stem from existing alcohol bans in the dry Aboriginal communities around Katherine, ranging from 50km to 600km away. With Katherine their regional hub, Aborigines come in for shopping and medical services, and many buy grog they can't get in dry communities.

Some don't make it back.

"At any time we can have 300 or more visitors from Aboriginal communities sleeping in doorways and drains, many severely affected by alcohol," Ms Shepherd said.

There is a town camp owned by the Territory Government and leased to an Aboriginal-run community organisation, but it's a dangerous hell-hole with tension between those who live there permanently and visitors from other clans.

"It has not been properly managed in the past, and although the current manager is doing his best, it needs to be safe for temporary residents," Ms Shepherd said, adding that she worried for the children there.

When Ms Shepherd visited a camp called Geyulkan yesterday, there was no one sober enough to string together more than a sentence.

It certainly is a big and complicated problem that Howard is taking on.

As to the issue of how much change needs to take place in consultation with the communities, isn't the fundamental problem that it's difficult to identify those residents who have the authority to bind the communities? As many people point out, aboriginal women have been asking for change for years, but what authority are they perceived to have by the rest of their community? Same with male tribal elders. If in a community a significant number of them have an alcohol problem, or a history of being a sexual abuser themselves, are they excluded from consultation?

So, while many are complaining that a more authoritarian approach is unlikely to succeed, my suspicion is that this fundamental practical difficulty of the consultative approach has been downplayed for years.

One of the more surprising sections in the Report was this:

The Inquiry found that at many community meetings, both men and women expressed a keen desire to be better informed about what constituted child s-xual abuse and the health, social and legal responses to it. However, people did not want to be talked at. They wanted to be able to enter into a dialogue in their own language through which they could develop this understanding, with information, assistance, support and time being given by the relevant agency to facilitate this process of learning.

Well, this is an area where I think most people should rightly react along the lines: "forget cultural sensitivities when it comes to knowing what is child (or even adult) sexual abuse. They just need to be told in English (or if they don't understand that, their own language) a few key points: incest is illegal at whatever age; sex between adults and children is illegal. Sex without consent is always illegal too, no matter what age. No one who has an STD should have sex with anyone until it's cured. "

The basic rules just aren't all that complicated, surely.

The main grey area may be about consensual sex between unrelated teenagers below the age of consent, as indeed it is within the white community too. But that's probably the least of our worries anyway when it comes to abuse in these communities.

Pick me

Libs are making it up | The Australian Your Say Blog

Let's see. Howard and Costello say they are sick of Keating claiming sole credit for economic reform, as the Liberals commissioned the Campbell Report which recommended the key changes. Keating says - but look, in 1977, I told Parliament that foreign banks should be let in, Hayden agreed with me, and so I had the reform idea first.

Soon, I reckon Keating will be pulling out notes of conversations he had with high school teachers to prove it all started with him.

I like Keating's claim that Howard and Costello were "stunned" by his recent Lateline performance.

I reckon the people more likely to be "stunned" are Rudd's team, who must grind their teeth every time electoral poison Paul makes another self-aggrandising media appearance.

Higher education in Japan

Japan's universities fighting to attract students

The competition amongst universities in Japan for new students means offering some luxuries previously unknown in Japanese uni dorms:

Perched immodestly on the edge of a steaming bath, a dozen judo teammates soaking happily next to him, the junior in economics said he picked this university when he saw the spa pictured in a brochure. The university's resort-like new dormitories also boast private karaoke rooms, an English garden with pink roses and a swimming pool.

"This was the only university to recruit us by offering a hot spring," Iwanaga, 21, said.

"They really wanted us to come here."

The most interesting thing in the article is the demographic information:

According to census statistics, the number of 18-year-old Japanese has fallen to 1.3 million this year from 2.05 million in 1992, when the second peak of Japan's baby-boomers' children were entering universities. Estimates show it dropping to 1.21 million in two more years. This year, as a result, nearly a third of the nation's 707 four-year universities were unable to fill all of their openings, according to the Education Ministry and university groups.

That seems a huge drop in the number of 18 year olds over 15 years, doesn't it?

Not coping with green energy

Energy crisis cannot be solved by renewables, oil chiefs say - Times Online

Some pessimism from the oil and energy industry:

Shell’s chief gives warning that supplies of conventional oil and gas will struggle to keep pace with rising energy demand and he calls for greater investment in energy efficiency.

Instead of a great conversion to wind power and solar power, Mr van der Veer predicts, the world will be forced into greater use of coal and much higher CO2 emissions, “possibly to levels we deem unacceptable”.

Alternative energy sources, such as renewables, will not fill the gap, says Mr van der Veer, who forecasts that even with major technological breakthroughs, renewables could account for only 30 per cent of energy supply by the middle of the century.

“Contrary to public perceptions, renewable energy is not the silver bullet that will soon solve all our problems,” he writes.

And the chief executive of Exxon agrees:

Mr Tillerson said that world energy demand would rise by 45 per cent by 2030, and fossil fuels – oil, natural gas and coal – were the only energy sources of sufficient size, adaptability and affordability to meet the world’s needs.

Might be time to start taking geo-engineering more seriously, I think.

Antony goes to Iran

The peripatetic Antony Lowenstein has turned up talking in the Guardian about a recent visit in Iran.

To paraphrase that line from Grapes of Wrath:"where ever there are peoples who hate Jews, he'll be there."

Actually, I have to begrudgingly say that most of the column is an interesting read, concentrating as it does on the difference between private views and the "official" views expressed in Iran, and the fierce form of censorship that exists there. (I found it particularly interesting that he claims that "many people" told him that they don't want America to leave Iraq yet, because of the chaos it would cause.)

However, Antony can't help himself and goes mad in the very last two sentences. They go like this:

Iranians may be the most hospitable people in the world, and yet any American or Israeli attack against the country's nuclear facilities would be met with even-greater repression at home and rallying around the conservative leadership.

Um, fair enough point. I am thinking "Antony, you have written a piece in which I can't find much to object to at all." But then, out of the blue, comes this last sentence:

For many westerners, the concept of Islam at the heart of a prosperous nation is too much to bear. It's a sad indictment of many post 9/11 mindsets.

What?? The rest of the column has said nothing about the "prosperity" of Iran. In fact, this last sentence seems to have absolutely nothing to do with what has preceded it. It's like he just can't control his fingers from typing out commentary without fitting in some criticism, no matter how off the wall, of westerners for being "anti-Islamic".

You only have to go a few posts down in the comments section to see someone who challenges his "prosperous nation" comment, which is pretty good considering this is the Guardian after all.

Congratulations Antony, your goose-dom is saved by your last sentence!

A Saturday Miscellany

* A fascinating story on what it is like to visit North Korea was on Foreign Correspondent this week. If you missed it, there's repeat at 1pm on ABC TV today, and the story should be available on broadband at the link above sometime soon.

* The SMH reprints a David Brooks piece from the NYTimes on his understanding of human nature and why it means school based sex education doesn't work. While his assessment seems plausible, it also seems to me to have fairly pessimistic implications for how you change an individual's perceptions and behaviour. It's an interesting read anyway.

* Michael Duffy has an interesting column in the SMH too, talking about why experts can be bad at forecasting. Two thoughts:

1. If correct, it's a good sign for the future of blogs, as we are all qualified to guess abut the future;

2. Does this also explain why Michael Duffy wrote a book that was half about the political future of the self -detonating Mark Latham?

* They use about 8 tonnes a year of human antibiotics on farmed Tasmanian Salmon? Does not sound like a good idea.

* Matt Price confirms that the puzzlement political journalists have always expressed about Kevin Rudd's public popularity is due to their knowing him better than you and I:

And let me let you in on an insider's secret. Most of us know, or feel we know, Rudd too well. He's a decent and intelligent fellow who has nonetheless grovelled and scraped and dissembled to get to the top, earning the wrath of colleagues and the suspicion of journalists. While the rest of Australia falls under the spell of Kevinism, his stratospheric personal ratings seem faintly surreal to those acquainted with the baby-faced Messiah, and that includes many Labor MPs.

* If you have missed it from Boing Boing, you really should spend the 5 seconds it takes to watch the dramatic chipmunk (even though it's a prairie dog):

On aboriginal issues

Well, the media and blogs in Australia are running hot today on John Howard's sudden announcement of drastic measures to help stop child abuse in the Northern Territory remote communities.

This seems as good a time as any, then, to express some thoughts on some of the problems with aboriginal housing and culture generally.

1. Second hand experience. I have close relatives who have lived in one of the big Cape York communities, and still live in the area and recently went back to do more work on the community. Although the tavern there has been greatly restricted in its operation (shut completely on welfare payday, I think,) I am told that the atmosphere at the community has still become worse in the last year or so. My relative, for example, recently had to get police help to remove a stone throwing group who were attacking the Council offices because they were upset that their dog had been put down by the vet. (Mangy, decrepit and uncared for dogs are a problem in the community, and they paid for a vet to come and put down the worst ones.)

Alcohol entry into the community is tightly policed.

It seems that alcohol restrictions do not always mean a immediate improvement in general atmosphere of a community. Presumably, there is some improvement in terms of assaults and property destruction, but it's not a magic bullet for making residents feel happier in themselves.

This particular community has recently started a tourist venture (but a very expensive one for anyone to experience.) I am told that it is getting bookings, but having seen it on television, I doubt that it has long term prospects. The local area is simply not particularly attractive.

2. Housing. I think it is well known that for some (or most, or all?) remote aboriginal communities, the problem with housing is exacerbated by their spiritual/religious belief that a house in which a person has died has to be left vacant for some months before it can be re-occupied again, and then only after a ceremony to make sure the spirit is really gone, or happy.

When it is already hard enough to get a barely adequate number of houses built in remote localities, I would like to know how much of a problem this really is. Given high aboriginal mortality, does it mean that, say, you ideally would have an extra pool of (I am guessing) 20% vacant houses if you want death affected families to have a temporary house once every few years?

It sounds as if it could be a really significant reason why housing is always crowded.

Some years ago when discussing this with a (left leaning) brother, I half seriously suggested that perhaps the real solution is to have moveable housing; a sophisticated tent, perhaps. He was horrified that I would suggest condemning aboriginals to such accommodation.

But really, I still think I have a valid case for this. As to the cultural appropriateness of housing, people see Mongolians living in yurts, or Bedouins in tents, and find it sort of romantic. Aborigines living rough in the Northern Territory will live in a humpy, making a modern canvas and wood construction a palace by comparison. Yet there is still the perception that suggesting anything less than a house of bricks is insulting.

You wouldn't make every building in a community like this: they have to be able to get shelter from cyclones and such. But I like to imagine that for (at a guess) maybe $30,000 you could come up with a "super tent" and platform floor combination that is just moored on a bit of land and moved as necessary.

There has been a lot of talk over the years of making appropriately designed, very solid, low maintenance houses for these communities. My suggestion is to go in the other direction: make it virtually disposable, making maintenance as irrelevant as possible.

They can have a new one every couple of years, maybe a new one if they believe they still need to vacate it if a death occurs, and still be ahead of the permanent brick and mortar style housing costs.

Just thinking outside the box, folks.

Electric jet engine of the future?

For Low-Emission Planes, Try Superconductivity: Scientific American

A very cool idea. (There's a pun in there, if you know anything about superconductivity.)

China takes the lead

China tops CO2 emissions - Developing nation overtakes America, and is set to rise.

The news@nature links never work for long, but here is the crucial part:

But how fast are Chinese emissions rising?

Fast, because the standard of living is rising too. The country is building about 2 power stations a week. Its emissions from fossil fuels went up 8% from 2005 to 2006, contributing heavily to the overall global rise of 2.6%.

Can anything be done about that?

China unveiled its first national plan on climate change earlier this month. The scheme outlines the country's aim to reduce 'energy intensity' — the amount of energy needed per unit of GDP — by 20% by 2010. But the Chinese economy is, today, growing at 10% a year. If it were to keep that up, then in 2020 its economy would be 3.5 times larger than it is today. That would mean far greater carbon dioxide emissions even if the energy intensity goals were met.

China also aims to increase renewable energy sources and re-forest the countryside. But what it really needs to keep emissions in check are clean coal technologies. "It can't do much about cement except use less in its construction," says Olivier.