Looks fun

Kung Fu Panda Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

While you are busy ignoring my warnings of ocean-led environmental catastrophe, it looks like you could do worse than take the kids to go see Kung Fu Panda. (Or just take yourself anyway.)

I saw the shorts at Indiana Jones, and thought it looked "nothing special". But the initial reviews from the States (see link above) are generally very positive.

Ocean acidification, continued

Climate change effect on oceans under-estimated: CSIRO - ABC News

From this very short report:

CSIRO marine scientists say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and scientists worldwide are neglecting the earth's oceans in researching the effects of climate change.

In an article published today in the journal Science, the researchers argue that the effects of climate change on oceans is being underestimated.

Meanwhile, the Hobart Mercury reported recently about a conference there:

CSIRO marine scientist Bronte Tilbrook said what was already known about ocean acidification was troubling.

"Indications are that we will see some fairly significant changes in the ecosystem," Dr Tilbrook said.

"Under the CO₂ emissions scenarios -- and it's the high ones we seem to be tracking at present -- in about 2060 we'll cross a chemical threshold in the Southern Ocean where one form of calcium carbonate will become chemically unstable.

"It's very early days to say there will be a decline in (fishery) production or an increase -- some species will do better, we just don't know if they're going to be of much value for the ecosystem."

And earlier in the report:

The gathering of some of the region's leading climate change experts was told oceans would reach a carbon saturation tipping point within 50 years and nobody knew what might happen then.

Now, as the article makes clear, these problems are going to happen regardless of successful cuts in current CO2, because of the time it takes for the ocean to absorb CO2. So, you could argue that there is not much point in worrying now anyway.

But, go back to my original posts about this for my argument as to why we shouldn't let CO2 creep up towards 1000 ppm.

Pay attention, people.

Unkind cuts

Male circumcision is a weapon in the sperm wars - New Scientist

This article speculates on why circumcision (and more drastic forms of cuts around the genital area) developed at all.

While I had heard about subincision before, I didn't know about crushing a testicle:

In some African and Micronesian cultures, young men have one of their testicles crushed.

And you thought public circumcision would be something to fear as a 12 year old!

Anyway, the article argues that this is all to do with reducing the risk of younger men impregnating older men's wives. This is particularly the case in polygamous societies:

The older men have also gone through the ritual, and seen their own reproductive effectiveness reduced. But if a man with, say, four wives wants to ensure that any children his wives produce are his, there is pressure to make sure other men can't successfully impregnate them.

The husband's own reproductive ability is impaired, but continuous and repeated access to his wives makes up for it, while any genital mutilation is a greater handicap to an interloper trying to sneak brief occasional sex with his wives.

Sounds plausible, but caution is always advised in such matters of evolutionary biology.

(Incidentally, in the all the guff that anti-circumcision groups go on with, do they ever take into account a preference that women may have for circumcised men? As this article indicates, I would assume that circumcised young men have more of an issue with premature ejaculation, which women don't exactly welcome.)

Me, me, me

I got it right the first time | The Australian

Well, it's sort of fun to watch the emotionally needy Paul Keating say "it was me, me, me" again. He does go on about "lost years" of Howard government diplomacy, doesn't he? What exactly does he think Australia could be doing differently in China or Indonesia now if his great and glorious leadership had continued?

Anyhow, it's good to see Labor people being skeptical of any burst of symbolism from Rudd.

Speaking of needy personalties, as if you didn't know, we can add Richard Woolcott to the list:

....the Herald learnt that Mr Rudd's special envoy for the project, the former diplomat Richard Woolcott, found out about the proposal only two hours before it was announced on Wednesday night.

Can't he just develop an interest in fishing, or something?

Prat

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian - Film Reviews - Film - Entertainment

So, The Age gives us a review of Prince Caspian which is purely based on Philip Pullman-like ideological hatred of CS Lewis. Have a look at this line:

Sometimes critics are accused of reading sinister messages into works of harmless entertainment but that won't wash in the case of Lewis - a fierce polemicist who used fantasy as a platform to rail against everything he disliked in the modern world, including democracy, lipstick and progressive education.

I wouldn't mind betting that Wilson, the author of that "review", is a youngster atheist who has never read Lewis.

You can safely assume that Wilson is on his own planet here: both Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton gave it respectful reviews, and they are both liberal lefties who are uneasy about Christian stuff. (Oh, while you are at At the Movies, you should read the conflicting reviews of Sex and the City. It's pretty funny.)

I'll be off to see this weekend. Then I should go wave protest placards in front of Sex and the City.

Tim Train: I expect you to attend this weekend too. And you had better like it!

Red wine and the fountain of youth

New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging - NYTimes.com

A chemical in red wine is being tested for its potential to extend life:

He and others have tested resveratrol’s effects in mice, mostly at doses far higher than the minuscule amounts in red wine. One of the more spectacular results was obtained last year by Dr. John Auwerx of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. He showed that resveratrol could turn plain vanilla, couch-potato mice into champion athletes, making them run twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing.

Of course, the morning after a bottle of red, I'm not usually feeling like going out for a run. And how much bottle equivalent of this compound were the mice given?:

....the animals were fed such large amounts of resveratrol that to gain equivalent dosages people would have to drink more than 100 bottles of red wine a day.

Marathon runners should still hold back on the red the day before, then...

The chickens call her "Kali"

Notes on the urban chicken movement. - By L.E. Leone - Slate Magazine

Ms Leone has chickens at home, and butchers them herself. Her reaction?:

There's a part of me that likes to kill. When I do what I do with a hatchet and a chicken, I feel like crap, and I feel like God. I feel alive and in love and closer than ever to death. So I guess that is, for me, mixed feelings, yes. And the mix itself is welcome and intensely gratifying. In fact, it's almost too much. Too swirly, too soupy. I can tell you that the part of this swirl which seems "good," as opposed to "evil," has absolutely nothing to do with foiling the chicken industry or saving the environment or taking personal responsibility for my role in the food chain. It has to do with getting a little bit bloody and gross, like the complicated, hungry animal that I am.

I dunno: if I were Mr Leone (if he exists,) I'd be a feeling a little nervous after reading that description.

More on French annulments

Fake virgin ruling sparks storm in French parliament - ABC News

As I noted a few days ago, the French law regarding annulment of marriage sounds very peculiar to Australian ears. This article gives some examples of what the courts there have found to be "an error about the person or the essential qualities of the person":

....marriages have been annulled for reasons such as impotence, if a partner does not reveal a previous marriage or a child, or if the wife hides the fact that she had been a prostitute.

Very odd. These sort of factors are (apart from impotence) of a moral nature, and as such might be relevant to church law. But in a secular state, why not just let divorce deal with the issue of unhappiness with what might be called "inadequate disclosure" by the spouse, instead of pretending a valid marriage never took place?

My new retirement plan

Despite free land, no cry of northward ho in Japan - International Herald Tribune

Let's all sing now: (to the tune of "North to Alaska"):

"North, to Hokkaido, a-go north, the rush is on

Way up North, (North to Hokkaido)
Way up North, (North to Hokkaido)
etc"

Actually, I thought the words to that song were different, but I haven't heard it for decades. (And perhaps some of my younger readers will never have heard it.)

Here's an added bonus: with global warming, the weather will probably be nice on the (currently very snowy) Hokkaido within 30 years.

I'm seeing glasses half full today.

The International Herald Tribunal also ran an article last week suggesting that Japan had pretty reasonable prices for real estate now. I had a quick look around some websites, but it's hard to tell. Certainly, you can't beat the interest rates for mortgages:

Fixed interest rates for terms of more than 10 years can be as low as 2 percent at leading Japanese banks, with average rates standing around 3 percent. At GE Consumer Finance, interest rates vary depending on customers' credit profiles, but the top rate now is 4.6 percent.

Now, if only they will have people to run the country in 40 years time, everything would be fine.

Food needed

Rich nations must drop 'beggar thy neighour policies', says UN chief | Environment | guardian.co.uk

An interesting report here on the UN food summit:

Trade barriers should be lowered and export bans removed to stop the spread of hunger, the UN said at its summit on the global food crisis today, as its secretary-general Ban Ki-moon declared world food production must rise by 50% by 2030.

The decision that there is a crisis seems to have come on awfully quickly. Still:

Food prices have risen 83% in the last three years, according to the World Bank. It is also estimated that soaring food prices could push as many as 100 million more people into hunger.

The director-general of the UN's Food And Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, said wealthy nations had spent billions of dollars on farm subsidies and wasteful food consumption.

But of course it can't be a UN conference without some stupidity amongst delegates. The most spectacular example here is, of course, Robert Mugabe:

Speaking this afternoon at the summit, Mugabe defended his policy of seizing land from white farmers by saying he was undoing a legacy left by Zimbabwe's former colonial "masters".

He blamed international sanctions for many of Zimbabwe's problems and said his own policies have been "warmly welcomed" by his people.

"Over the past decade, Zimbabwe has democratised the land ownership patterns in the country, with over 300,000 previously landless families now proud landowners," he said.

Well, proud landowners who don't know how to farm it. Still, having a really, really big backyard for the kids to play in while they lose weight must make them feel good.

But some sense was spoken:

The foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, Mark Malloch Brown, said Mugabe's attendance was "like inviting Pol Pot to a human rights conference".

He said: "Zimbabwe is one of the few countries whose food crisis is not due to climate change or global prices, but due to the disastrous policies pursued by Mugabe."

Just one idiot speech is never enough for the UN. I didn't realise before, but Ahmadinejad turned up too. Guess whose fault he thinks it is:

...the appearance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prompted distraction after the Iranian leader attacked Israel.

"European peoples have been most hurt by the Zionists, and today the economic and political costs of this false regime are on the shoulders of Europe,'' he said.

I suppose the Hidden Imam will work it all out, when he arrives any day now.

UPDATE: here's a couple of articles at Online Opinion talking about the international problem.

The darkness

After Years of Effort, Dark Energy Still Puzzles Scientists - NYTimes.com

Here's a pretty good article about the puzzle of dark energy.

Those carbon eating trees

There's been a lot of attention given to Freeman Dyson's article in the New York Review of Books about global warming and its possible solutions.

As a writer, he does have an usually clear and succinct style, which makes the article a pleasure to read.

His discussion about the issue of discounting is a very helpful and useful contribution to debate, I think.

But the second major aspect of the review, in which he expresses confidence that the answer to excessive CO2 will be genetically engineered super trees, hardly seems something that we should make plans around. As some people have said, we're all still waiting for our rocketbelts, household robot servants and a cure for cancer and the common cold. The best predictions of practical applications of new-ish technology can be way off the mark.

Over at Real Climate there is criticism of his views both in regard to discounting and the genetically engineered solution. There are also hundreds of comments following the post arguing in each direction.

It's all interesting reading. Not a mention of ocean acidification though, although presumably Dyson would say that the trees will be the prompt answer to that too.

More Indian crime files

Wife poisons husband to death-Patna-Cities-The Times of India

More amusing choice of words from the loveable Times of India:

According to reports, wife Shobha Devi allegedly poisoned her husband in their house because he had come to know that something was brewing between her and a village guy, Dinesh Yadav.

I really should get back to work...

but in the meantime, have a look at some photos of some very cool buildings by a Japanese architect:

JAPAN-PHOTO | MODERN ARCHITECTURE | WATANABE MAKOTO SEI

I am particularly keen on the Aoyama Technical College, which looks from some angles like the top half of a giant robot.

Here are some much clearer photos of it.

Mahmoud's mouth just won't stop

Ahmadinejad: 'Israel soon to disappear.' | Jerusalem Post

You would think that he might tone down the rhetoric just a little, given that he has most of the world worrying about whether he's developing nuclear weapons. But no, Mahmoud keeps up the threatening language.

By the way, last week Phillip Adams interviewed an Iranian journalist who has written a biography of Ahmadinejad. In the introduction, Adams said:

After his suprise election as President of Iran in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quickly passed into caricature in the Western media - mocked as a diminutive blacksmith's son with a beaming grin, and demonised as an apocalyptic visionary who denies the Holocaust and seems intent on playing a game of nuclear 'chicken' with the US.

Who is Ahmadinejad really? And how much of a threat does he pose to his country and the rest of the world?

The funny thing is, I think it's fair to say that the journalist did nothing to indicate that he had been "caricatured" at all, and painted a picture of a potentially very dangerous, naive man too certain of his fundamentalist belief that he will hand over to the Hidden Imam.

Adams' cynical introduction, implying the unfairness of Western views of the man, were not vindicated.

Unfortunately, they don't do transcripts of Late Night Live, but if you have time to listen to it, the audio of the interview (at the previous link) is well worth it.

UFOs of the outback

An elderly couple in the Northern Territory say they were buzzed in their car by a "dark silvery" UFO. It's an interesting report, because it is said to have happened at 4pm, which rules out a lot of possible explanations (fireballs, etc) if it had happened at night.

No air force activity up there at the moment? An F111 using terrain following radar would fit the bill.

A good idea

Mile-high urinals | Gulliver | Economist.com

Possibly, we will see urinals in Airbus planes.

They have them in Shinkansen (the "bullet trains") in Japan, and I would have thought that women would appreciate the cleaner sit down toilets that they would leave.

Toxoplasma spreads out

The world's most successful bug hits dolphins - life - 02 June 2008 - New Scientist

Don't you hate toxoplasma gondii? It's everywhere on land, and now increasing evidence that it is spreading to marine mammals. Given that there is some evidence that infection affects human personality, I hope the dolphins don't start attacking swimmers any time soon.

Not only that, they may accumulate in oysters and mussels!

You mean my fondness for well-done meat, and never having a pet cat, is still not going to protect me ?

I think this calls for drastic measures. Outlawing pet cats may be a start.

Old attempts at culture change

Change drink habits? You're joking | David Aaronovitch - Times Online

Aaronvitch is cynical of government attempts to change the culture of drinking.

To back his case, he points out to some historical attempts to decree fashion:

Consider the announcement in 1574 by Elizabeth I of her Statutes of Apparel, telling free-born Englishpersons what they could not wear. The statutes laid down limitations on the fineries to be donned by subjects, and were - or so Her Majesty claimed - motivated by a concern that now sounds wholly modern. Viz, “the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen and others seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen, who, allured by the vain show of those things... run into such debts and shifts as they cannot live out of danger of laws without attempting unlawful acts”.

Elizabeth had the advantage that she could imprison anyone so much as questioning these laws, let alone breaking them. But not long afterwards we discover various proto-Mailites suggesting that antisocial dressiness had broken out again. Stephen Gosson lamented that hardly had Good Queen Bess “set downe the limits of apparel to euery degree: and how soone againe hath the pride of our harts over-flowen the chanel?” Huge ruffs bothered Philip Stubbes, who, in his The Anatomie of Abuses considered that: “If Aeolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his stormes chaunce to hit uppon the crafie bark of their brused ruffes, then they goe flip flap in the winde, like rags flying abroad, and lye upon their shoulders like the dishcloute of a slut.”

I don't think I was aware of the Elizabethan fashion laws. Still, if I were benevolent dictator, I would be tempted to have another crack at it.

Credit to the Taser

Vital Signs - After Taser Jolt, a Heartbeat Returns to Regular Rhythm - NYTimes.com

This was reported somewhere else last week, I think, but here it is in the New York Times.

Don't tell the Victorian police, though.

Polygamist hair

Judge Orders Sect Children’s Release - NYTimes.com

Have a look at the photo in the above article, and see if you don't agree that forcing embarrassing hairstyles on underage children should alone be enough to allow courts to remove children from that compound.

It's very creepy.

Really?

Microgeneration could rival nuclear power, report shows | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I've only been to England for a couple of holidays, I think in an alleged spring and then an autumn, so the idea of solar hot water or photovoltaic panels working well there always makes me snigger a bit. Just how many warm, sunny days are there in that country?

But the renewables consultants always talk it up, and of course it's just my hunch that the figures must be very rubbery.

Sounds about right

Why China doesn't break | Comment is free

There's occasionally a "Comment is Free" piece in The Guardian in which there appears to be nothing to object to.

Stupid

Boris Johnson blamed for Tube party violence - Times Online

Isn't it extraordinary to think that people were allowed to drink on public transport in London before Boris Johnson? (And that he should then be blamed for stupid yobs who got drunk via Facebook organised Tube drinking parties before the ban came into effect.)

Britain certainly has become a strange place. Sounds like a good dose of conservatism needed, for a decade or so.

That anecdote...

I mentioned a few weeks ago my curiosity as to the details of an unsavoury Bob Ellis anecdote that David Stratton put in his autobiography. Andrew Bolt has revealed it here.

(There is quite a lot of overlap between posts here and at Andrew's lately. I get a small amount of pleasure from seeing when I have posted on a topic a few hours ahead of him, but I guess visitors to both sites might more often assume that I am following his lead. Well, of course sometimes that happens, but I seem to beat him to print on quite a few occasions. Is there any award for that, especially for an amateur blogger? :) )

An update on the LHC, mini black holes and strangelets

There are a few things of note that have happened over the last couple of weeks:

1. Physicist Bee at the Backreaction blog gets a little cranky at having to address the issue, but she sets out in detail in this post why she believes there is no danger at all from mini black holes at the LHC. More importantly, she then respectfully answers those who question or doubt her in the long string of comments that follow. She insists that any arguments against Hawking Radiation existing are not convincing, but she makes many good points. (Including the preliminary one that the extra dimensions that are required to even make mini black hole production at the LHC plausible may not exist.)

Of particular interest in the comments section is the involvement of Walter Wagner, one of the litigants who is trying to stop the start up of the LHC because of perceived dangers.

I have said before that I was not sure what to make of Walter. He has had a varied career, and asking for donations to run a legal case is usually a reason to be concerned about motive. But, his comments in this post impress me. He appears sincere and knowledgeable. It's well worth reading this post and the comments in detail.

2. There's a recent paper on arXiv which does some number crunching on cosmic rays hitting the sun and earth and how they compare to the LHC. Perhaps it's easiest if I just copy the summary here:

The high energy cosmic ray flux impinging on the sun and earth for 4 Gyr is compared to the operation of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at design energy and luminosity. It is shown by two different calculations that both the integrated luminosity and the total hadronic interaction rate from the cosmic ray flux of comparable energy are many orders of magnitude larger than that of the LHC operated for 10 years. This study indicates that it is extremely unlikely that pernicious exotic particles, such as mini-black holes, would be produced by the LHC that would destroy the earth.

Sounds good, except that it is still based on the assumption that Hawking Radiation exists, and therefore doesn't take into account the more complicated arguments as to why slow speed mini black holes created at the LHC might be more of a problem than high speed ones.

However, the section on strangelets (which are another potential worry, even though I haven't spent much time discussing them here) sounds more definitive. Taylor calculates that a negatively charged strangelet would be stopped by the sun, hence if they were capable of causing damage there, it would have already happened.

It sounds as if that is a solid argument.

(Indeed, a similar argument, but with neutron stars, may be the convincing argument about mini black holes not being a danger. That's what CERN is already telling people who email them, apparently. )

3. CERN is still promising to release their new safety report, any day now. I haven't spotted it yet.

A strong review

It's the movie I am destined to hate and despise (on the dubious assumption that I will ever actually see any of it), so I'm a little disappointed that Sex and the City has actually managed about a 50-something-percent approval rating at Rottentomatoes. I was hoping for it to do worse.

There are some savage reviews in there, though; but few of them I have read have lines particularly worth quoting. Roger Ebert gives a very disdainful review, but not a particularly witty one. He is not alone amongst reviewers in noting that a comedy "highlight" is a the uptight character (how shall we put this politely) soiling herself.

What's more puzzling is that there are a couple of good reviews from religious sites. Here's one at Beliefnet (not sure about that site; I've never spent time there, but it sure sounds like it specialises in soft edged spirituality). The one from Christianity Today seems particularly forgiving. This is very disappointing: who can I trust to incorporate reliable conservativism if it's not from a site called "Christianity Today"? (On the other hand, Anglicans still count themselves as Christians, so I should have known.) Funny how it is secular reviewers who are more offended by the empty materialism than the religious reviewers. Dana Stevens in Slate writes, for example:

The show's values are reprehensible, its view of gender relations cartoonish, its puns execrable. I honestly believe, as I wrote when the series finale aired in 2004*, that Sex and the City is singlehandedly responsible for a measurable uptick in the number of materialistic twits in New York City and perhaps the world.

The strongest short review of the movie is from the Orlando Weekly, and it is kinda funny in its savageness:

....we’ll continue to experience befuddlement verging on disgust whenever we’re reminded of Sex and the City (so named, we suppose, because Seriously Rethinking Third-Wave Feminism reads like ass on a poster). We’re totally down with the interpretation offered by a choreographer we know, who once pithily observed that SATC projects onto women “everything that’s wrong with men.” For real: Is it any sort of inroad for a summer film to prove that ladies, too, can surrender to pummeling materialism, a blinkered emphasis on self-gratification and hollow objectification of the opposite gender? Plus, Darren Star and his “creative” crew must be laughing their sphincters loose knowing that their amoral fantasia has been welcomed as gospel by genuine urban women, instead of their obvious target demo: Iowan paralegals too tipsy and titillated to notice that the characters are actually semiotic stand-ins for gay men.

So, no, we don’t have a strong opinion on the thing one way or the other.

I think it's the same reviewer with this even shorter summary (it's on the same page as the slightly longer review):

We’re realists here. We know that nothing we might write could dim a fan’s enthusiasm for rejoining the continuing adventures of Carrie and Samantha and … uh, Dopey, and … uh, the Pink Power Ranger. And maybe that’s as it should be, because everybody has the right to indulge his or her particular pop-culture obsession in a state of unmolested respect. So knock yourselves out, skanks.

UPDATE: I don't know why Rottentomatoes doesn't count Anthony Lane's reviews in New Yorker. Happily, Lane has reviewed it, and he's very funny. Speaking about the special preview he attended:

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

Interesting, he actually criticises it from a feminist perspective (the women mostly define themselves by their ability to snare and keep a man.) But he ends the review like this:

It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness.

Strange French law

BBC NEWS | Europe | Row over French bogus virgin case

An interesting case from France:

France's ruling UMP party has opposed a French court's decision to annul a marriage between two Muslims because the wife lied about being a virgin.

The Lille court's decision has also angered feminists who say it amounts to a fatwa against women's liberty.

The court granted the man's request for an annulment after ruling that he had been tricked into a marriage.

Both conservatives and feminists have joined forces to complain about the decision, but the government response:

....a justice ministry spokesman insisted the court's decision was not based on religion or morality but on the French civil code under which a marriage can be annulled if a spouse has lied about an "essential quality" of the relationship.

It sounds like there must be some interesting claims made in applications for annulment in France, then!

In Australia, incidentally, annulment of a civil marriage is exceptionally rare, as it is only available because one party was already married, or under age, or forced into a marriage under duress.

The fact that your partner lied about her sexual history seems an extraordinarily silly thing to consider for annulment.

Dalrymple on methadone

We must kick our methadone habit | Theodore Dalrymple - Times Online

Dalrymple has another go at pushing his line that methadone treatment for heroin addiction is a bad idea. (Or, at the very least, it is a bad idea to provide it indefinitely to addicts.)

I wonder what the situation is in Australia. In the early 1980's, I had a pharmacist friend who I saw dispensing liquid methadone to registered addicts from his pharmacy. This was in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen: I don't think many people really knew that conservative old Queensland had a methadone program going then. (In fact, I have an idea that Queensland program may have been more "liberal" for many years compared to the ones in the southern states.)

Still, I was under the impression that the Queensland program did not leave patients on it forever. I thought there was an expectation that the patient would move off it within a year or so. But maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, Dalrymple's article is a fascinating read.

Go UQ

Researchers make breakthrough in renewable energy materials

The University of Queensland gets some PR on line, but the practical application of it all still sounds very unclear.

More trouble coming

Penny Wong in clash with carbon emitters | The Australian

Funny how the Rudd government's honeymoon has been ended by conflicting petrol price policies which are both not going to have any substantial impact on prices.

(By the way: has anyone asked the question - if you have Fuelwatch as a national scheme, and given that volatility in oil prices is expected to continue, how does anyone expect to be able to tell whether the scheme has worked or not?)

Much, much more serious trouble is brewing over energy and carbon trading:

TENSIONS are emerging between major greenhouse emitters and Climate Minister Penny Wong after a number of hostile meetings before the release of the Government's green paper on emissions trading in July.

Senator Wong has told small groups of chief executives from major power and other energy-intensive companies that the Rudd Government's election promise of a renewable energy target was "not negotiable".

One of these meetings in Melbourne last Tuesday completely broke down, with Senator Wong reportedly furious at the way she was being treated by the eight business leaders present, telling them "you wouldn't treat (former Treasurer) Peter Costello the way you are treating me".

I'm not so sure that playing the "you're not respecting me because I'm a woman" card was such a good idea, which is what I assume that report means. If that's correct, one of the guys should have responded "no, it's not that you are a woman. It's because you are a po-faced lesbian." That would have broken the ice; there would have been laughs all around, followed by questions about how good looking is her partner.

(I may have taken too much pseudoephedrine this week.)

Signs of unhappiness

Loyal workhorse escapes knacker's yard - for now - Annabel Crabb - Opinion

I won't be the first to say it, but it does seem a little surprising, doesn't it, that within 6 months of a government that (according to polls) is wildly popular, there are leaks from within.

Someone is not happy, and it would be interesting to know who.

Annabel Crabb notes this about our PM:

The Prime Minister's own attitude to what the Coalition is optimistically calling "Fuelgate" is one of professed nonchalance.

"I think actually having an exchange of views and having a debate where you have a complete embrace of different points of view is the way to go," he told Parliament smoothly on Tuesday.

"We are actually pretty relaxed about having a debate which has different points of view. We do not seek to suppress different points of view."

Poor Mr Ferguson. It was even worse than he had feared.

As all the Prime Minister's colleagues know, Mr Rudd reserves the expression "I'm actually pretty relaxed about that" for moments of particularly uncontrolled private rage.

I hope it is true, and that one day someone comes out and details the PM's private behaviour in more detail.

Something funny going on?

Cold-fusion demonstration "a success" (physicsworld.com Blog) - physicsworld.com

This appeared a few days ago, and apart from being noted on a couple of well read sites, it hasn't attracted any mainstream media attention.

I wonder if it is a hoax. According to the report, there was a lot of Japanese media present. But surely if it was splashed there, it would have been picked up in Western media too. Physicsworld has also not updated the report with any video or any other form of verification.

Anyway, we can always hope they've come up with something useful, regardless of whether it is cold fusion or something else.

Trouble in space

Spacemen call up Earth and ask for a plumber | Science | The Guardian

The International Space Station's toilet is not working. (Or not working properly.)

Most obvious joke about this: imagine what the plumber's call out fee is going to be. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

The prophet who never gives up

The end of the world is nigh. Its name is Gordon - Times Online

He's not easily discouraged, you have to give him that.

Gordon Ritchie believes he has worked out all the details of the end of the world. Trouble is, he keeps making predictions which turn out wrong:

His predictions have not been rash. They've all been thought through very carefully, but many have been wrong. His revelation came to him after a long period of bible study, including six years in the Jehovah's Witnesses. It all fell into place for him in McDonald's , he says. “I felt like leaping up on the tables, shouting, ‘Why are you eating those burgers?'”

He buys and sells shares with enough foresight to make a living, but look at his other predictions:

“Well, when I went on New York radio in front of two million people telling them they were going to be imminently destroyed and then they weren't, yes, I did feel a complete berk,” he says. Similarly, he took out £30,000 worth of advertising in The Sunday Times predicting that the UN would take overall political control of the world. He ran ads in March, July, September and November 2001, revising his prophecy each time. “Yeah, that turned out to be wrong, duh!” says Gordon.

There's more:

So what are his latest predictions? We meet in late April. He says there will be a terrorist attack on the weekend of April 26 in Europe and the US. Er, no there wasn't. On May 12, angels will start appearing to people, just popping up at dinner parties or when you're watching TV. I feel sure I would have noticed that. Don't book your holidays for next August because, by July half of mankind will be toast and we'll be ready for the new kingdom of Christ, he says.

The belief that keeps him going:

“I know I'm right,” he says. I point out that he's not right, in fact he's very publicly wrong. “Well there's a limit to how many mistakes I can make, I suppose,” he says.

Err, no there isn't.

Colbert on that O'Reilly tape

Infatuation

Movies: Whatever Happened to Karen Allen? | Newsweek Entertainment

This is an amusing article by a journalist who, despite talking to the big stars and directors, still didn't have the courage to speak to his heartthrob Karen Allen when he saw her on the street.

Trouble ever brewing

Nuclear agency accuses Iran of willful lack of cooperation - International Herald Tribune

Don't worry, though, Ken Lovell says we have nothing to worry about.

Sad

US director Sydney Pollack dies

I always thought he made or appeared in competent, generally likeable, films.

Mars skepticism

While most things space related interest me, I don't often blog about Mars missions. I don't begrudge planetary scientists their fun, and good science may still come out of these missions; but really, I am skeptical of any optimistic talk of finding life on Mars, or indeed of manned missions.

For humans to travel to Mars, there is a major issue with space radiation. Even on the surface, it's not shielded by a decent atmosphere (or magnetosphere?) and the radiation environment is not so good for permanent living. (Unless you have shielding, the easiest of which is to live under dirt.)

As for bacteria, this summary of a recent paper indicates that any bugs would have to be far underground:

The damaging effect of ionising radiation on cellular structure is one of the prime limiting factors on the survival of life in potential astrobiological habitats. Here we model the propagation of solar energetic protons and galactic cosmic ray particles through the Martian atmosphere and three different surface scenarios: dry regolith, water ice, and regolith with layered permafrost. Particle energy spectra and absorbed radiation dose are determined for the surface and at regular depths underground, allowing the calculation of microbial survival times. Bacteria or spores held dormant by freezing conditions cannot metabolise and become inactivated by accumulating radiation damage. We find that at 2 m depth, the reach of the ExoMars drill, a population of radioresistant cells would need to have reanimated within the last 450,000 years to still be viable. Recovery of viable cells cryopreserved within the putative Cerberus pack-ice requires a drill depth of at least 7.5 m.

Here's another article (based on the same paper, I think) explaining that that scrapping just below the surface is not likely to find anything living.

Really, until they come up with a good answer as to how to ensure astronauts won't be killed during a lengthy voyage to Mars, I just don't know that it is worth the effort to plan for manned missions.

I would much rather intensive investigation of the Moon, with a view to permanent, sheltered bases, to act as lifeboats for humanity.

Yes, but...

Cheap carbon trap cleans up power station emissions - tech - 26 May 2008 - New Scientist Tech

Most of the story is behind a paywall, but here is the start:

Now a team led by Maciej Radosz at the University of Wyoming in Laramie say they have designed a cheap filter that could capture 90 per cent or more of the CO₂ emitted by power stations. "This is a way to capture CO₂ for about $20 a tonne - less than half the cost of current methods," says Radosz.

Yes, but surely the bigger issue with CO2 sequestration is where to bury it, and how to get it there.

Charlie Brooker has doubts

I've made the point many times: the problem with many a Labor supporter is their assumption that those on the Right are either too evil, or too dumb, (or both), to see the obvious truth that only those on the Left have the moral and practical answers as to how to govern.

Charlie Brooker, whose silly scowling photo used by The Guardian has always made me laugh, illustrates this well in his column today. Warming to the idea that your personal view of politics is strongly affected by genetics, he writes:

This would explain a lot. For instance, I know in my bones that rightwing policies are wrong. Obviously wrong. They just are. It's Selfishism, pure and simple. Nasty stuff. Consequently I don't "get" Tories, never have and never will. We don't gel. There's something missing in their eyes and voices; they're the same yet different; bodysnatchers running on alien software. Yet that's precisely how I must seem to them: an inherently misguided and ultimately unknowable idiot. (I'm right and they're wrong, of course - but they can be forgiven for not working that out. They can't help it. They were blighted at birth.)

But even he is now having his doubts, in the sense that he is finding he can't stomach current Labor figures either. Poor boy, he may be starting a much feared middle age retreat towards the right.

I know he is trying to be a bit funny in the way he writes in this column, but I still think he is pretty much speaking the truth in the above extract.

Secret missions

Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission - Times Online

So, Robert Ballard was engaged by the US Navy to check out the wrecks of the nuclear submarines USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. He succeeded too:

Thresher, had imploded deep beneath the surface and had broken up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost as completely destroyed. “It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.” Dr Ballard developed a robotic submarine craft in the early 1980s and approached the US Navy in 1982 for funding to search for the Titanic, which sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives after hitting an iceberg.

He was told that the military were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to their submarines.The military were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.

The story of Thresher is particularly nightmarish:

Thresher, the US Navy’s most advanced attack submarine at the time, sank with all her 129 crew in April 1963 while undergoing seaworthiness tests after dockyard repairs.

A surface ship, Skylark, was in contact when the submarine’s crew reported that a high-pressure pipe supplying the nuclear reactor with cooling water had blown. The accident 1,000ft down, caused the vessel to lose power. It then sank so deep that the pressure hull imploded.

But, according to the Wikipedia entry, the wreckage was already examined in the 1960's after the accident, so it's not as if Ballard was the first to go there. In fact, this report seems to be based on publicity for a National Geographic special, so that may explain a degree of exaggeration here.

Still, an interesting story.

Frozen chips & the clown

Billionaire made fortune in frozen potatoes - Los Angeles Times

File this away in that small corner of your brain that you aren't using right now. The invention of the frozen chip and McDonalds hamburgers are closely connected.

For some reason, I find that interesting.

Want to take the gamble?

Ocean Acidification: Another Undesired Side Effect Of Fossil Fuel-burning

In this general article about ocean acidification, it is noted:

The expected biological impact of ocean acidification remains still uncertain. Most calcifying organisms such as corals, mussels, algae and plankton investigated so far, respond negatively to the more acidic ocean waters. Because of the increased acidity, less carbonate ions are available, which means the calcification rates of the organisms are decreasing and thus their shells and skeletons thinning. However, a recent study suggested that a specific form of single-celled algae called coccolithophores actually gets stimulated by elevated pCO₂ levels in the oceans, creating even bigger uncertainties when it comes to the biological response.

"There are thousands of calcifying organisms on earth and we have investigated only six to ten of them, we need to have a much better understanding of the physiological mechanisms" demanded Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a speaker from Laboratoire d'Océanographie Villefranche invited by EuroCLIMATE. In addition, higher marine life forms are likely to be affected by the rapidly acidifying oceans and entire food webs might be changing.

This is consistent with what I have said before. You already have big changes underway in ocean chemistry, due to the lag time in the ocean absorbing CO2. With thousands of creatures possibly directly affected, and thousand more in the food chain, it a huge gamble to do no planning for reduced CO2 emissions while waiting another 20 years or so for scientists to get on top of the biology of ocean acidification.

Maybe what is needed is some specific research on something people directly like, such as the effect on prawns or oysters. If research can show that ocean acidification will lead to the decline of the beloved Sydney rock oyster, maybe that would get people's attention.

Actually, now that I Google that topic I see that someone says that prawns and crabs won't be affected because of the way they make their shells. But I am sure I have read somewhere else that krill may be affected. (Maybe that is indirectly because of the effect on some types of plankton.) Anyway, here's the quote from The Telegraph:

Mussels, clams, scallops and oysters are expected to be the worst-hit as the oceans grow more acidic. However prawns, crabs and lobsters will escape unharmed as they produce their shells in a different way.

If the effect on oysters is so clear, I reckon a few good Youtube videos showing the effect might be enough to get ocean acidification more attention. I think at the moment people read about it and shrug their shoulders: there is no direct image of the problem for them to worry about. (Whereas if you concentrate on earth warming, you can do a Gore and use pictures of hurricanes and such like, and whether or not they are truly related to global warming, they have an emotional impact to some people.)

By the way, there are a few new posts up at the Ocean Acidification blog listed in my blogroll.

Homer Simpson will be pleased

Doughnut-shaped Universe bites back : Nature News

My opinion of you know what movie

Went and saw Indiana Jones & the KCS. I came out quite satisfied, though I still find Temple of Doom the most enjoyable of the series.

If you are one of those who think Last Crusade was excellent, you may as well ignore my opinion. Unlike that instalment, in which I found there were no thrills to be had and most jokes fell flat, this movie has genuinely exciting, protracted sequences, and a script that does provide some genuine humour. (The script is not perfect, though, and any flaws with the film really lie there, and not with the welcome re-invigorated action direction of Spielberg.)

One curious aspect of the film, though, was that the self referential bits gave me a feeling that it was like watching the last film in the career of an aging or ill director, who's doing a bit of a career summation. I assume that was not the intention.

You would, however, have to assume that the last scene was meant to telegraph that there would be one more Harrison Ford outing in the role before it is (possibly) handed over to Shia LaBeouf. I for one would welcome another outing with this cast.

An aside: They played the short for Baz Luhrmann's "Australia". It shows every sign of bearing as much resemblance to a realistic portrayal of this nation as "Moulin Rouge" did to 19th century Paris. It showed great promise as a great embarrassment, which I fully expect it to be, as I quite intensely dislike everything of Luhrmann's I have ever seen.

Crawford redux

I'll never forgive Mommie | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books

This mildly interesting article is about the soon to be re-issued "Mommie Dearest", the most successful adoptive parent character assassination ever.

It turns out many of the other adoptive kids in the Joan Crawford household, and staff who were around her, claim that Christina was wildly exaggerating. If she is, she's certainly very creative about it.

But the main reason I thought this worth a post was for this snippet which surprised me:

Her [Joan Crawford's] forceful personality and strident physical attractiveness meant she was used to getting what she wanted. She married four times and had a string of affairs with both men and women, including a one-night stand with Marilyn Monroe.

Who in American isn't said to have slept with Marilyn?

Tania goes international

Bollywood starlet Tania Zaetta accused of sex with soldiers in Afghanistan - Times Online

Just what Tania needed - the international press running with the story. Oddly enough, the general character of the comments that follow the Times article are more or less congratulatory for her keeping up the morale of the troops.

Surely, such rumours have followed each and every visit of a female entertainer to overseas troops ever since such entertainment tours began. It's the perfect material for a "friend of a friend" story, and the bragging motivation of whoever starts such a rumour is self evident. Why should this one be given any special credence by anyone? Unless the video turns up on the internet, you can safely assume it never happened.

So who's the idiot who even bothered putting it in some short lived Defence topic list? (Even on the very, very slim chance that it did happen, why would you even worry about it unless you knew a video was being circulated? Stay silent and sensible people who did hear the rumour would just dismiss it anyway.)

Never underestimate the stupidity of some of the people in Defence.

Make Arabs anXious

This was on Little Green Footballs a few weeks ago, but I missed it then.

Memri has a clip up showing some Arab guy on TV claiming (with apparent sincerity) that Pepsi stands for "Pay Every Pence to Save Israel". It's such a stupidly creative rumour, I'm almost impressed.

Some Googling around shows that Time magazine mentioned this as a rumour spread on Iranian TV in 2006. (The Time article also mentions Oprah being on TV in Iran too. Why is she popular there?) Snopes mentions the rumour in 2007 entries here, and again here, where it's said that it spread through Eygptian high schools via chain letters. (It makes you wonder how spectacularly stupid some stuff in chain letters in the Middle East must be.)

As Snopes points out, this urban myth of the Middle East is particularly ironic given that both Coke and Pepsi were strongly criticised in the 1960's by American Jews for not selling in Israel, in order to keep the more lucrative Arab markets. There's a whole Snopes entry about that period.

As for the heading of the post, it's my guess as to what the "Max" must stand for in Pepsi Max.

I'm tempted to post it on some Arabic/Iranian forum, and wait and see how long before it turns up on a Memri clip.

The barmy, barmy Mitfords

Hitler, my sisters and me | Hay Festival | guardian.co.uk Books

It's hard to resist yet another article about the Mitford sisters and their jolly adventures with fascists and communists. One of them is still alive, Deborah, and she is interviewed in this article about a new collection of the sisters' letters.

Just how balmy some of the family were is illustrated well by this passage:

Unity stalked Hitler, sitting in his favourite cafe, staring, until he noticed her, and then met him more than a hundred times; he gave her a flat that had belonged to a young, now absent, Jewish couple. "The Führer was heavenly, in his best mood, & very gay," she wrote to Diana in 1935. "He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely." She signs off "With best love and Heil Hitler! Bobo", and writes breathlessly about her various encounters. In some ways, the most disturbing aspect of the letters is their clash of tone and content, the gushing of a star-struck schoolgirl about the heyday of the Reich.

Charlotte and Deborah both stress that Unity, who thought it amusing to take a white rat to parties, was, as Charlotte puts it, "completely unsophisticated, rather young for her age. And she was just bowled over". But this does not apply to Diana, whom Deborah believes was the brightest of the sisters. Diana's letters are nearly as gushing. She and Mosley married at the Goebbels' home in Berlin, and, she wrote to Unity, "I felt everything was perfect, the Kit [Oswald Mosley, whom she called 'kitten'], you, the Führer, the weather, my dress ..." (Many Mitfords were drawn in to some degree: Unity persuaded her parents to support fascism, while, in the 30s, Himmler offered Nancy a tour of a concentration camp. "Now why? So that I could write a funny book about them.")

One thing I didn't know before is that the Kennedy family knew the Mitfords too:

The Kennedys were childhood friends; when Joseph P Kennedy was made ambassador to London in 1938, he moved for a while into a house on Princes Gate, in London. The Mitfords had a place nearby. "Kick [Kathleen Kennedy, who married Andrew Cavendish's elder brother] was 18 and Jack, I suppose, was 19 or 20. Young Joe, who was killed, was maybe 22. And so they were just this very exuberant, charming, wonderful family who happened to live in the next street. The odd thing was, at a dance once, my mother said to Andrew, my husband, to whom I wasn't even engaged then, about Jack, 'Mark my words, that young man will be president of the United States.' Isn't that extraordinary?"

It's hard to believe that a 20 year old John Kennedy would not have been leading an active sex life at that time, and the article indicates that some have claimed that Deborah herself was his lover, but she denies it.

It's a small world for the rich and powerful, isn't it?

UPDATE: the original heading I had on this for nearly a day was "balmy balmy Mitfords". As the Mitfords were not exactly like a warm and soft breeze, I actually meant "barmy", but then again I see from Chambers online dictionary that "balmy" is sometimes used for "barmy". So I haven't completely embarrassed myself. Yet.

For the love of Kevin

I saw most of Q&A last night, which was basically an hour of the Prime Minister taking questions from a (mostly) loving audience.

Andrew Bolt has already noted how the audience was stacked.

The odd thing I noticed about it was that the audio on the audience seemed really turned up to 11. Kevin would make a mildly humorous comment, and the audience laughter in response sounded like a laugh track from Seinfeld.

Although there were questions coming from a critical perspective, the whole thing was so controlled it was far from a challenging environment. Our PM is good at avoiding the question, and is still at the stage of blaming the previous government for most things.

I still can't warm to his personality. Beneath all the standard politician talk, I get the impression that he's a tightly sprung, over-controlling robot, who is not as self-effacing as he likes to portray. There is a faux humility in the continued references to his upbringing in Nambour, which I am very tired of hearing about.

Taking fuel efficient flying seriously

It's interesting to see that soaring fuel costs are leading to jets being flown a bit slower, in order to increase fuel efficiency.

But, for the short inter-city hops in Australia, why don't airlines seriously consider going back to modern turbo-prop aircraft? According to to The Times last month:

“Propeller-driven planes achieve massive fuel benefits on shorter journeys,” Kapil Kaul, of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, said.

For a trip of less than 600 nautical miles, or about 90 minutes’ flying time, a turboprob may use as much as 70 per cent less fuel than a similar-sized jet, he said.

According to Treehugger, the environmentalist website, travelling on an aircraft such as a Bombardier Q400, one of the most advanced turboprops, can be more environmentally friendly than going by car (but not quite as green as taking a train).

This post makes the same point.

Of course, such fuel efficiency doesn't hurt from a greenhouse gas point of view, but even if you are a complete skeptic on that, the economics still make a lot of sense.

On IslamicTube today

Wandering around the internet today, I stumbled across IslamicTube.net. It's an Islamic version of YouTube; full of Islamic fun.

In today's "featured" category, there's an extract of a talk from an American sounding black Muslim about how AIDS was deliberately injected into Africans as part of an evil American/WHO plan to keep the population down. You can see it here.

They also seem very keen on little kids who can talk about Islam. There's this 2 year old who knows a series of answers to questions about Islam. Watch it and guess which question and answer I find most worrying:



(This version is on Youtube; I don't think you can embed the videos from Islamictube.)

Going back to AIDS, you can go to the "Science and Facts" channel on IslamicTube and watch the series "Medicine and Islam", which seems entirely devoted to camel's milk. I haven't watched it all, but it would seem from the heading that AIDS gets a mention.

Yes, I must spend more time on IslamicTube.

Of interest if you want to live on the moon

100 Explosions on the Moon

NASA has started watching the Moon to see just how often they can see the flash of a meteor hitting it. It turns out they can see a lot of flashes:

Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times.

"They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope."

As an example, he offers this video of an impact near crater Gauss on January 4, 2008.

Long term residents would live under a couple of meters of dirt to avoid radiation anyway, but here's another reason for them to find a nice cave to live in.

A pleasant surprise

A Modest Glass of Wine Each Day Could Improve Liver Health

Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine are challenging conventional thinking with a study showing that modest wine consumption, defined as one glass a day, may not only be safe for the liver, but may actually decrease the prevalence of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD).

Who'd have thought you can say "I'm drinking for my liver"?

Good one, Kevin

CSIRO cuts could have 'unforseen consequences' - ABC News

The science research agency says it has no choice but to close its laboratories at Mildura in Victoria, and Rockhampton in Queensland, after a Federal Budget funding cut of more than $60 million over four years.

And I imagine most CSIRO scientists probably voted Labor too.

Not a good look

Orthodox Jewish youths burn New Testaments in Israel - International Herald Tribune

Just when you thought there was enough trouble in Israel already, we have the additional fun of friction between Orthodox Jews, Messianic Jews and Christians.

Here's an idea for sorting out the Middle East: the UN should mandate that the Disney corporation take it over. Disney World in Florida seems nearly as big as Israel anyway.

They really know how to make queues for attractions work, and they have probably got hundreds of lawyers who can sort out those fights between the different churches over who runs the holy sites.

As for the more serious issue, like resettlement rights for Palestinians: put Mickey and Farfur in a boxing ring and let them sort it out.

This post was brought to you by pseudoephedrine. (I have a cold.)

Unfortunate

Shitterton: The village that dare not speak its name - This Britain, UK - The Independent

From the article:

This isn't the only place in Britain proudly to wear the Shit– prefix – an unholy trinity is formed with Shittlehope and Shitlington Crags, both in the North-east of England – but Shitterton is the only one of the three actually to be named after excrement. According to the mathematician Keith Briggs, who keeps an informative website on this burning topic, the name is probably derived from a river called Shiter, "a brook used as a privy".

The whole article is funny, in a Benny Hill/Two Ronnies kind of way:

Shitterton probably started a slow metamorphosis towards Sitterton during the Victorian era, at the same time as towns and villages on the river Piddle were being renamed to Tolpuddle, Affpuddle and Puddletown – presumably in order not to cause embarrassment to travellers asking for directions.

I see that the Independent ran another article recently on rude place names in England. Go and pick a favourite.

Green heresies

Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green

I haven't had time to read all of this yet, but this list of 10 "Green heresies" about how to tackle greenhouse gas looks very interesting.

It includes "embrace nuclear". There really do seem to be a lot of articles from the 'States at the moment promoting nuclear.

When are we going to see the same in Australia?

I just tried to find the on-line copy of John Howard's Nuclear Energy Task Force report, and Googling took me to a page in The Age which contained a link, which takes you to an "error" page in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, noting that the content on the website is being "reviewed".

No matter, here it is archived by the National Library.

Another possible lung cancer test

Blood Test For Lung Cancer May Be Possible

This one, is, I think, different from a couple of other tests that have been noted in the last year or so:

Rather than screening for factors released by the incipient tumor into the blood stream, the test Dr. Vachani and colleagues used looked at gene expression in the subject's own circulating white blood cells. "We found that the types of genes present in these cells could tell us whether or not cancer was present," explained Dr. Vachani.

Sounds promising

Vaccine Triggers Immune Response, Prevents Alzheimer's In Mice

Vaccinated mice generated an immune response to the protein known as amyloid-beta peptide, which accumulates in what are called "amyloid plaques" in brains of people with Alzheimer's. The vaccinated mice demonstrated normal learning skills and functioning memory in spite of being genetically designed to develop an aggressive form of the disease.

Things I would rather not think about

One of the more peculiar things to come out of greenhouse gas concerns has been an interest in innovative (and environmentally friendlier) ways to dispose of human bodies.

First, on the New Inventors recently, there was the idea of burying the corpse in a sack, which discretely drops out of a reusable coffin. Hard to object to the idea really; coffins are expensive, and seem quite a waste. It could do a lot of coffin carpenters out of work very quickly, though, if it catches on.

Secondly, the topic came up on The Science Show last week. The basic proposal discussed there was that cremation produces a lot of CO2, and it would make much better sense to bury people vertically near a tree. The carbon from the bodies will end up in wood in the tree. Again, sounds quite sensible really, and the only objection is probably aesthetic, in that a standing body doesn't look as restful as a supine one.

But the next idea is a step too far. Apparently, it is being taken seriously in the States by the funeral industry. Here it is, from William Saletan's Human Nature blog at Slate :

You may soon have a new option: being dissolved in lye. Well, let's not call it that. Let's call it "alkaline hydrolysis." According to AP reporter Norma Love (what a byline!), the process leaves a "brownish, syrupy residue":

It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers. ... In addition to the liquid, the process leaves a dry bone residue similar in appearance and volume to cremated remains. It could be returned to the family in an urn or buried in a cemetery. The coffee-colored liquid has the consistency of motor oil and a strong ammonia smell. But proponents say it is sterile and can, in most cases, be safely poured down the drain, provided the operation has the necessary permits.

This has a very high "yuck" factor to overcome. I think I would even prefer being left to be eaten by birds (as do the Parsis, although the lack of vultures is causing a bit of a concern to the neighbours) than being turned into industrial sludge.

Now I must find a more pleasant topic for my next post...

Just what we need...

Extinct gene brought back to life - Science - Specials - smh.com.au

According to the article, this research does not mean it would be easy to recreate an entire Tasmanian tiger; but further work with individual genes may lead to Frankenmouse creations:

Future experiments may be able to extract more specialised genes - such as those that were responsible for giving the thylacine its dog-like features, or its distinctly patterned skin, into a mouse.

"We might be able to produce a striped mouse," said Dr Pask, even one with a thylacine pouch.

Just be careful you don't make a ravenous, sharp toothed killer mouse, Dr Pask.

By the way, after reading some of Larry Niven's science fiction in the 1970's, which featured all sort of genetically modified creatures, I came up with the idea that humans modified to have pouches for fetus growing would have a fair few advantages compared to the current set up. Maybe the future belongs to human/kangaroo hybrids.

Love Saudi Style

She’s never met the man she’s marrying: it’s love, the Saudi way - Times Online

This was an interesting article about a couple of young Saudi men and their views on love and finding a partner.

The two guys interviewed are described as:

...average young Saudi men, residents of the nation’s conservative heartland, Riyadh, a flat, clean city of 5m that gleams with oil wealth, two glass skyscrapers and roads clogged with oversized SUVs. It offers young men very little in the way of entertainment, with no movie theatres and few sports facilities. If they are unmarried, they cannot even enter the malls where women shop.

So what do they do when not working?:

There are eight other children in the house where Enad lives with his father, his mother and his father’s second wife. The apartment has little furniture, with nothing on the walls. The men and boys gather in a living room off the main hall, sitting on soiled beige wall-to-wall carpeting, watching a television propped up on a crooked cabinet. The women have a similar living room, nearly identical, behind closed doors.

The house remains a haven for Enad and his cousins, who often spend their free time sleeping, watching Oprah with subtitles on television, drinking cardamom coffee and sweet tea – and smoking.

Well, I assume the recent episode of a man [sic] having a baby must have gone down a treat!

Clearly, the way to change Saudi society is to insert subliminal messages via Oprah. Maybe Obama could convince her to be a secret psyops agent.

Unhappy campers

Labor's leaders have eclipsed our solar power hopes - Opinion - theage.com.au

The domestic solar power industry is very unhappy with the budget.

I know that a huge amount of government money being spent on this would not be an effective way to fight greenhouse gases, but if only a modest amount is spent encouraging families to use solar, I don't think that it hurts.

Ouch

Europe, please stop funding this man | Features | guardian.co.uk Film

Joe Queenan writes a fierce, but amusing, attack on the recent career of Woody Allen. I haven't cared for much since Crimes and Misdemeanors.

(Meanwhile, that Indiana Jones movie is hovering around a 70% approval rating at Rottentomatoes. Maybe that's not a bad thing: if I'm disappointed in an extremely well received movie, it's hard not to get annoyed at why so many other people over-praised it.)

Just a little creepy

A Purity Ball - The New York Times

Hey, I'm as much for young unmarried people not having sex as the next conservative, but even so I can't help but cringe at the symbolism used at the "Purity Ball" shown as a slideshow linked above.

It's all too much setting themselves up for a fall, if you ask me. Just go and stay a virgin quietly.

A history of Pebble Bed Reactors

There's a blog run by Robert Hargraves devoted entirely to Pebble Bed Reactors. It was dormant for a while, but he appears to have revived it recently, and he's got a link to an interesting recent article by an engineer about the history of the reactors. Well worth a read, and I'll add the blog to my links soon.

McCain has fun

Found via the always interesting Tigerhawk, here's John McCain doing an amusing short sketch on Saturday Night Live:



Glad to see he doesn't take himself too seriously.

Just as I said

Rudd and Swan fudged paltry spending cuts | smh.com.au

My initial reaction to the budget was to call it a con, because of the difference between how it was spun and what it actually did.

Ross Gittins today makes out a very convincing and detailed case that I was right.

Bring it on

Turnbull denies fuel excise leak | NEWS.com.au

I didn't see Insiders yesterday, but heard part of it on the radio. Gerard Henderson was being scathing of Nelson's petrol tax excise policy. Now it appears the preliminary fun and games of a leadership challenge are probably underway.

I guess the plan may well be to see if Nelson can increase his approval rating to anything significant in the next poll. If he is still Mr Around-Ten-Percent, I really can't see the point of letting him hang around any longer, even if the ideal may have been to let Turnbull get more experience as shadow treasurer first.

Nelson is a liability as leader; he should go.

Eye candy

Wild China, a 6 part BBC nature documentary, started on the ABC last night, and it was spectacularly good to look at. Why is the BBC so accomplished at this sort of thing?

Highly recommended.

Begging to differ

Shirley Hazzard: Greatest novelist of the 20th century? - Times Online

Based on Bryan Appleyard's high regard for Shirley Hazzard, I recently bought her last novel "The Great Fire." Now Bryan's gone and interviewed her (see above link), and his admiration is set out clearly there.

Sadly, I am almost half way through the novel and am finding it close to unbearable; last night I nearly decided to simply give up.

I don't mind the more ornate style of writing of your typical mid 20th century author: I have read nearly everything of Evelyn Waugh, and quite admire Brideshead Revisited in particular. In the last few years, I finally got around to The Great Gatsby, and while I felt the material was somewhat slight, I thought the writing had some of the same appeal as Waugh's. Going back further, Conrad can be a bit of struggle for me, but I could still understand him.

The problem with Hazzard, who is old enough to have started writing mid last century, is that I keep finding apparently carefully constructed sentences or paragraphs (she took 20 years to finish it) which none the less I have to re-read to discern the information or mood they are intended to convene. Even then I am not always successful in getting her point.

I don't think I am a particularly thick reader. As she has generally been very well reviewed, I have to give examples to try to validate my complaint.

This first paragraph is, I think, important to the theme of the novel, set shortly after the end of WWII; but that's only my guess, given the way it is written:

In the pattern of disruption that had been Aldred Leith's life for years, arrival had kept its interest. Excitement dwindled, curiosity had increased. Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afreash not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties. On the sea that evening, such expectation was negilible. Earlier in the day, in the swaying train, Leith had written to a wartime comrade: 'Peace forces us to invent our future selves.' Fatuity, he thought now, and in his mind tore the letter up. There was enough introspection to go round, whole systems of inwardness. The deficiency didn't lie there. To deny the external and unpredicatable made self-possession hardly worth the price. Like settling for a future without coincidence or luck.

I hope someone out there agrees with me, but I find that to be a semi-opaque mess; not good writing at all.

I learn from Appleyard's interview that much of the novel must have been inspired by Hazzard's real life adventures as a young women in post war Asia. She also makes it clear that she was an artistically inclined youth who longed to escape Australia, and that explains why she has one major character who views the country the same way:

He and Rysom had been raised on the Australian myths of desecration - on tales of fabulous vomiting into glove compartments or punch bowls, of silence ruptured by obscene sound: the legends of forlorn men avenging themselves on an empty continent, which, in its vast removal, did not hear or judge them.

These things, Peter Exley knew, who had been born and raised to it all, and endangered by it. Who had released himself into the lavish hospitality of art. Because of his own hairbreadth escape, the condition did not excite his compassion: the attack on whatever withheld itself in mystery - a woman, a culture, a work of art; the sense of private self. All could be exorcised with a beer and a jeer; the mockery, like the drink, being passing assuagement only, of the wound that would not heal.

Of course, this section makes Hazzard sound like a snob too; but who knows, maybe I would not have been entirely happy in mid 20th century Australia either.

No, I restrict my complaint to her prose style, which I guess is a result of what happens when an author keeps revising her writing over twenty years: it becomes elaborate but tedious and unclear.

The review of the book at Slate I can partially agree with. It notes that:

For all her subtlety and depth, Hazzard does not create memorable or particularly believable characters, or, if she manages to, she doesn't seem to favor them....

Moreover, all of Hazzard's characters lapse at intervals into unconvincingly poetical speech: "Decent people, but the place is laconic. Surprised by peace" is how the old scholar describes conquered Hiroshima to Leith upon first acquaintance.

Her style is described as "oblique", whereas I definitely would say "opaque".

Actually, now that I read more of the reviews, a lot of them do seem to acknowledge flaws, yet somehow they still come around to forgiving them. Take this from another review:

Hazzard's prose is crisp and whittled, sometimes even cryptic. We never get a fully fleshed story of Leith's heroics, nor of the mysterious mentor, a former Japanese prisoner who, on his deathbed, presciently foretells Leith's passage back to a personal life. Horrors are hinted at but never dwelt upon. Hazzard revels in oblique distillation, but she is by no means a minimalist. Her sentences are rich in clauses, and her observations run deep, as do her characters' self-awareness and interior lives.

There's that word "oblique" again. And I would not say that her prose is "sometimes" cryptic; it happens on about every second page, and I just find that intolerable.

Bryan Appleyard wonders why she isn't better known, but it doesn't surprise me at all.

Confusing Fisk

It's hard to tell why The Independent continues to pay Robert Fisk. His style is increasingly confused, and in dire need of editing. Here are some recent examples.

First, talking about a nice meal he was able to have despite the recent violence in Lebanon:

But I brought up the tiny matter of the little massacre in northern Lebanon in which 10 or 12 militiamen were captured and then murdered before being handed over to the Lebanese army. Their bodies were – I fear this is correct – mutilated after death.

"They deserved it," the elegant woman on my left said. I was appalled, overwhelmed, disgusted, deeply saddened. How could she say such a thing? But this is Lebanon and a huge number of people – 62 by my count – have been killed in the past few days and all the monsters buried in the mass graves of the civil war have been dug up.

I chose escalope du veau at the Cocteau – I am sickened by how quickly I decided on it – and tried to explain to my dear Lebanese friends (and they are all dear to me) how much fury I have witnessed in Lebanon.

Fisk should have more self loathing about his writing style than his choice of lunch.

If you need more convincing of his self-indulgent and increasingly opaque style, try the latest column. It contains such gems of journalism such as this:

So let us start at the beginning (be that the Ottoman, French, post-Versailles beginning of Lebanese history). Or let us begin yesterday, when it was broadcast that two Hizbollah members (for which read Shia Muslims) were knifed to death in Aley by Druze Muslims. Outrageous, if true. So let us begin with the statement that the Lebanese army command has decided to let Brigadier General Wafiq Chucair remain in command of security at Beirut airport. And that the Lebanese army commander – General Michel Sulaiman (the favourite for president if parliament, after 18 sittings, decide to choose one) – was determined to restore "law and order".

Thus (if the reader is not already confused) we should advance to the near-present.

Then, talking about an exhibition of Lebanese civil war posters, he writes:

And when I walked round that exhibition, I thought – yes – that this war could never be recreated. I even contemplated an article saying that there would not be another civil war here. On reflection, I should have sent that story to this paper. For despite everything that we have witnessed these past three days (or two years, or the 30 years or 2,000 years, you take your pick), I don't think the Lebanese want another civil war.

Five days ago, I recorded an interview for Saad Hariri's Future channel about my new book, and told my interviewer that I did not think there would be another civil war in Lebanon. Because Hizbollah has cut the cables of the channel, there will be no programme. "You did it for nothing," the young Lebanese woman interviewer told me yesterday. Yes, I think she was right. But I still suspect that the Lebanese will not tolerate another civil conflict.

Whatever you think of his politics, you would surely have to agree that his writing has become awful.

Now it's engineers

High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers - New York Times

First, it was doctors, now it's engineers. Of course, the basic problem is, Japan is going to run out of people soon. It's one of the nations that forgot to have children, and it's kind of sad to watch.