Do this experiment

Plus, a large yellow orb in the sky burned me somehow - Daily Telegraph Tim Blair Blog

It's funny that Tim Blair should post about the travel complaints of the British.

Just the other day, after spending quite some time on Tripadviser reading hotel and resort reviews in various Australian and near Australian locations (just how much of Kevin Rudd's generosity is going to spent supporting the economy of Fiji, I wonder) I observed to my wife that it is a pretty confusing exercise. Often a resort or hotel will have many good visitor reviews, but suddenly someone will give it 1 star and complain that it was absolutely filthy and the most disgusting room they have ever been in. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of one star reviews (often the first one in the list) seem to be by someone from England.

Here's an of example: The Warwick Fiji: the first 20 reviews give it 5 or 4 stars. It clearly pleases many people. In the second set of reviews, there are two 1 star reviews: one from England, and the other (go on, guess): a New Zealander!

The Outrigger on the Lagoon: first page has 5 star reviews, one 2 star (by an Australian honeymooner), but the first 1 star review is from Norfolk (England, I assume.) She's even moved the bed to take photos of the dust bunnies beneath it. (Sad to say, I have to admit the bathroom photo doesn't look flash, though.)

Still, even if the bad review is not from England, I find the words often automatically play in my head with an English accent, for some reason.

UPDATE: I was just checking random Australian hotel reviews on Tripadviser, and I must say reviewers of all countries, when they have an unhappy experience at a hotel, really like to talk it up. For example, someone (an Australian, but maybe her parents were English) says of the mid-range SeaWorld Nara resort:

The website is very flashy, as is the foyer of the resort. That's where it ends. When you walk out past the reception and foyer you land in a block of flats out of a Dickens novel.

I haven't actually stayed there myself, but that comment has just a touch of exaggeration about it, I think.

Then there is the person from Sydney who had this experience at the Holiday Inn Surfer's Paradise:

We arrived in the room and had a quick sleep for an hour, when I woke, the eye which was touching my pillow could barely open, it was so swollen. My eye was perfectly normal before coming into contact with their bed and I don't suffer allergies to frangrances or lotions or anything, so it is unlikely to be a reaction to the laundry detergent.

Dangerous bed linen?

But maybe I should apologise to the English after reading these comments from someone in Redfern (Sydney) reviewing Brisbane's Sofitel:

The bathroom, similarly was five star standard but what is that poor suffering piece of ornamental bamboo in a vase about....doesn't clutter equal lack of clarity about customer service....

Oh diddums, that ornamental bamboo ruined your five star experience? He also takes exception to the (usually rhetorical) matter of being asked if he would like something fixed. This is what happened when he tried to get into the Club Lounge:

One needs to swipe ones room card, and mine didn't work. Imagine my pleasure as the staff stood inside looking out at me like fish in a bowl...while I signaled to them..then it became my problem that the card didn't work. 'Would Sir like me to fix the card?' 'You bet he would, immediately, and why do you need to ask?' Strike one.

"One needs to swipe one's room card." No, is still sounding English to me.

Teaching art

Olivia Cole writing in The Spectator (about her annoyance at the peculiar way Britain's big galleries now try to interest schoolchildren in art) has a witty line:

Online, the National Gallery’s kits for teachers show how very far they have come from the ‘visceral’. Monet’s ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ is an excuse for a lesson in engineering; ‘compare ornamental bridges with industrial ones’ is one teaching instruction. With this approach, presumably ‘The Raft of Medusa’ offers lessons in boat-building.

On bereavement and related matters

Dreaming of the dead. (1) - By Meghan O'Rourke - Slate Magazine

I've been meaning to mention the very insightful and well written essays appearing in Slate dealing with bereavement. The link above should take you to the first entry, in which O'Rourke writes:

Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me in the least. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. What makes it worse is that my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined having.

I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

That second paragraph rings very true. It is frustrating when undergoing grief to have a rational understanding of it, but still find that such knowledge doesn't seem to help at all with overcoming the emotional reaction.

I found a similar thing when, some months after my father's death, I began feeling a pain in the same location as where he first felt the effects of his cancer. It feels a little silly saying to a doctor "of course I know it is very, very likely this is a psychosomatic grief reaction, but the pain is still there."

O'Rourke's latest entry (number 5 in the series if that link stops working) talks about dreams of her late mother. Hers sound a bit different from mine. As far as I can recall now, most of mine were of the type where I found my father was alive, not dead after all, and that the news of his death had all been a terrible mistake. However, the effect of these on waking was mainly one of disappointment; not peaceful comfort. I suppose they are a little like the "visitation" sense that O'Rourke describes, but she also says that hers were comforting upon waking.

One thing they made me think about was whether such dreams were a plausible explanation for the origin of the belief in the resurrection of Christ. Did someone in his circle talk to a friend of being "visited" by Jesus during the night, and through a series of Chinese whispers it became a story of a physical occurrence?

It sounds plausible in an academic way, but it seemed to me after experiencing grief dreams to not be very likely. After all, people in Jesus' day presumably had more exposure to death in the family at a younger age, and therefore probably knew more of grief dreams than people do today. I suspect that this may have increased their skepticism of a report of physical visit of a deceased person, rather than making them more accepting of such a story.

I don't deny that it might have been a near universal belief then (as it still is for many people) that grief dreams are a real visit by the spirit of the departed. But the gospels spend a fair bit of time emphasising that it was not a purely spiritual body that was appearing. The conversion of a story of a spirit visit from Jesus during the night into a daytime bodily visit seems a rather improbable path to me.

This is not intended to convince any reader in any substantial sense, and of course I am aware of many of the other speculations on the origin of the resurrection accounts. It is just an explanation of my thoughts on the matter, perhaps of interest to a handful of readers.

Death in (or near) the bedroom

Some months ago, before leaving on a holiday, I bought one of those automated insect spray machines (like this example, although the brand is different) that squirt a bit of spray in the air every so often. (You can vary the timing: I set it for about every 30 minutes.)

This is supposed to kill all hapless insects within a considerable range of the machine. I bought it for the walk-in robe that separates the bedroom and the ensuite toilet. Silverfish like it in there, and they were the main target.

One problem I have found with the device is that it makes a bit of a whirring sound every time it goes off. It seems to know when to do it to maximise surprise, such as the other night as I was passing through the robe to make a mid-morning visit to the toilet. I know I can turn the thing off at night, but never think to. Besides, insects are active at night.

The other thing is, given the small amount of stuff it squirts out, I have been very sceptical that it can possibly be effective, unless the bug happens to be within a very small radius of the device. In fact, I was going to do a post about my suspicions that, as a class of product, they might be a great con job. Had any consumer organisation actually tested their effectiveness? (I still haven't looked up that point.)

But then this morning, I found a large, dead cockroach in the ensuite. I assume the spray was the cause of death.

This is enough to make me keep using it, although I still feel I am being unscientific, and it continues to enjoy making me jump at quiet times when I am near it.

That's all I wanted to say.*

* This is officially rated "APoLC." (A Post of Little Consequence).

Oz as economic allegory?

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Secrets of the Wizard of Oz

I hadn't heard this theory before, but it's kinda interesting:

...the story has underlying economic and political references that make it a popular tool for teaching university and high school students - mainly in the United States but also in the UK - about the economic depression of the late 19th Century.

Read the rest of the article to get the details. It does seem odd, however, that no one published the idea until 1964.

I just always thought that the story was quite anti-religion, with its strong themes of self reliance and the revelation that the Wizard has no clothes, so to speak. Sort of a gentler expression of Philip Pullman's themes.

Which leads me to note that a Pullman interview was recently in The Times. There is one comment he makes that I have some sympathy with:

When people talk of his books and about those characters of his who carry their daemons like visible souls, they talk also of spirituality. They may know less of his views than of his creations, but it is a good job he can't hear them as this is what he says of the S-word: “I never use it. I never know what it means. It could mean any one of a whole raft of things, from vague feelings of emotional uplift...and then you're off into the realms of the ‘intense inane', as Shelley called it. I find it almost unbearably stupid when people talk about exploring their spirituality because I don't know what the f*** they mean. I think they mean ‘I'm no end of a fine fellow and you ought to respect me because I've got a higher dimension than you material people'.”

I also tend to be rather leery of the usage of "spirituality" these days, but I don't have well thought out views on this, so it will have to await another post.

Gold flush

Japan's sewers paved with gold - Telegraph

This story appeared in the news last month, but it was dealt with on Radio National's AM this morning (no link available yet.)

Seems the gold in Suwa is either from the gold plating industries, or from the water from the local hot springs, as there used to be a gold mine in the area.

But the main reason to post about it to have fun with a pun.

This is Modern Art - Part IV

What has art got to do with beauty these days? | Roger Scruton - Times Online

A good article here by Roger Scruton, although I must agree with one comment that follows it that the meaning of one sentence is obscure.

I have been intending to write about my own conflicted feelings about modern art, after being prompted to think about it by a a couple of visits to the new-ish Gallery of Modern Art in South Brisbane. It's a fine building in a great location, and together with the adjoining Queensland Art Gallery, State Library and Queensland Museum, it's a very impressive precinct indeed. (My criticism of the museum will have to wait for another post, however.)

GOMA pretty much becomes a playground for children during the Christmas school holidays. While many of the activities are fun for them and their parents, their connection to art can be extremely tenuous, to say the least. These last holidays, for example, one installation invited kids to take a quiz on a touchscreen about pretend aliens, with success giving you an alien embassy swipe card. The card activated some video machines sited throughout the building. The videos featured the artist, who appeared to be aboriginal and sounded gay, talking cheerfully about what aliens like, with someone dressed up as a silly green alien dancing around and kids also featuring in the short videos. As I say, fun for kids under about 9, but connection with art? (No kid is going to cotton on to the aboriginal/gay/alien connection which I assume was at least partly its inspiration.)

In any event, as is usual in modern art, even the "adult" exhibits and installations are often more about simply attracting attention to themselves as a high brow concept, rather than displaying particular skill in their creation, or (as Scruton writes) having much in the way of connection with beauty.

The initial reaction can therefore justifiably be cynical. But on the other hand, the "gee, even I could have done that" thought can be taken in a positive, democratising sort of way: everyone can be an "artist" if they think about what they are making and create anything with forethought. It may not be particularly fair that some can make a living out of mere concept separated from any particular skill, but there will always be the unjustifiably rich and successful in the world.

The result is that I find it hard to resent the modern art I have seen at GOMA, and even if I think a particular installation is a waste of space, I still enjoy the ironic amusement derived from wondering how the artist has managed to receive recognition for their dubious work.

There are lines to be drawn, however. I will still object to the outright ugly as a legitimate form of conceptual art. (The dissected animals of a British artist, for example, or the digestion machine designed to make fake human excrement.) Conceptual art can become mere ugly tosh, there is no doubt about it.

But conceptual art in moderation, when it avoids mere ugliness or the incredibly facile, can be kind of fun:



Update: speaking of grotesque attention seeking as "art", the blood cooking guys from England (where else) are on their way to Melbourne.

Quentin's listening tour (and a grumble about sport)

Here's how Governor General Quentin Bryce recently described her African trip:

I’ll be taking a message of goodwill and renewed engagement, letting African countries know that Australia is ready to listen and learn from them, as well as to contribute to their progress and prosperity.

I await her report in the coming months on what Australia has learnt from Africa via Her Excellency's ear.

By the way, in another recent speech, the GG lavished praise on women's cricket, saying this:

This is a great achievement for cricket and will mean a lot to the 650,000 females playing cricket around the world. In Australia there are more females playing now than ever before – 70,000 – this has increased significantly over the last 4 years.

650,000 females around the world play cricket? This must only be if you count schoolgirls, as the BBC was reporting in 2001 that there were 640,000 girls playing cricket at school in the last 12 months, but only 4000 who played "at club level".

Quentin also claims:

I have observed that many successful achieving women have played cricket. It’s a sport that develops character.

Yeah? I reckon she's just buying into a generic sport's stereotype there: that it's inherently "good for character".

I've never quite understood that. When anyone thinks about their high school experience, for example, how many can honestly say "yes, all those jocks on the football team pretty clearly had the best character of all the people I knew." From my observation, they were in fact more likely to be the one showing their 15 year old girlfriend that they had a condom ready in their pocket for the evening's date, as well as being the most likely to be drinking underage and underperforming academically. They could be mocking of people with no sporting prowess (yes, that's me!) and although they could be reasonable people to meet again as adults, it was only with the additional maturity that they became reasonable conversationalists.

For every famous sportsperson of apparent good character, there is always someone you can find one who is the opposite. Seems to me to be self evidently, at best, a neutral influence on character.

Taking part in any group activity makes people feel well socialised and less isolated, so if I had a teenager who dressed as a Goth and spent most of his time in the bedroom writing poetry, I guess I would be happier if he was playing cricket. (Only just.)

But honestly, any group activity that didn't involve drugs would have the same effect.

Doctor behaving badly

A Medical Madoff: Anesthesiologist Faked Data in 21 Studies: Scientific American

The article notes that it took 12 years before a routine auditing of his studies revealed widespread fabrication.

The article makes a makes a good point at the end:

In hindsight, Anesthesia & Analgesia editors Shafer and White admit that it should have been a "red flag" that Reuben's studies were consistently favorable to the drugs he studied.

Theological question of the week

As posed by daughter (in Grade 1) last Sunday: "why can't I see God? Is it because he's camouflaged?"

(She also occasionally claims that God is not real because he doesn't give her every toy she prays for. Oh for a good Presentation sister to set her right in her religion instruction!)

It's off to court we go

The barristers will surely have little in the way of pleading precedents to rely upon as they draw up the application to have sacked but immobile parish priest Peter Kennedy taken to court in order that the Church can physically get St Mary's back.

According to the report, it's gone this way because Kennedy will not take part in the mediation the Archbishop proposed.

I happened to drive past St Mary's last weekend. As expected, a couple of tents have sprung up right in the front, occupied (I expect) by Sam Watson or other aboriginal figures who want to buy into the dispute. Or I could be wrong; it might be Raelians.

Speaking of Peter Kennedy, this week's "Q&A" on ABC television features him on the panel, together with Tony Abbott. (I hope they are separated, as Abbott seems to be exactly the robust kind of Catholic who might be tempted to lash out and hit him.)

And just so it's not all religion and politics, they also have sex covered too, in the form of panelist Bettina Ardnt. Thus it is covering every topic which it can be unwise to raise at a dinner party with people you've only recently met.

It's one episode I don't want to miss.

The real slippery slope

If harvesting embryos is OK, how about fetuses? - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

This story seemed to have much more limited coverage than it deserved. (And oddly enough, it seems it was the more "down market" media such as the Daily Mirror and Melbourne's Herald Sun which ran this story. Searches I've done on The Guardian and The Times appear to confirm they haven't mentioned it. What the hell's wrong with them?)

The story is that at a conference, Oxford professor Richard Gardner made it clear that he has no particular issue with the idea of using aborted fetal tissue to grow replacement kidneys or livers in adults who are awaiting organ donation. It works in mice, apparently.

The Daily Mirror quotes another professor, Stuart Campbell, as saying he has no ethical objection either:

He said many babies were aborted quite late, 'and if they are going to be terminated, it is a shame to waste their organs'.

As the First Things blog said "Slopes don't get much slipperier".

Although this would not be the first use of fetal cells in attempted treatments, the idea of directly using their partially formed organs (if ever adopted) would surely mean that the scale of fetal organ tissue harvesting would be massively increased.

Ethicists (if that is not too kind a word for it) like Peter Singer have been musing openly for quite a while that there is no real problem with the suggestion. But now it seems the doctors are getting enthusiastic about the idea too.

The culture war is are going to get more sharply defined as this century goes on.

Needlework defended

The British Medical Journal group is taking over publication of "Acupuncture in Medicine", and the doctor editor makes these interesting comments:

"One of the major problems facing medical acupuncture is preconceived notions. The perception is that acupuncture is all about chi and meridians.

"In the past, it was easy for scientists to dismiss acupuncture as highly implausible when its workings were couched in these terms. But it becomes very plausible when explained in terms of neurophysiology. Unfortunately, the scientific approach just isn't as sexy."

Scientific evidence had been building for 30 years showing that acupuncture stimulated the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, releasing "feel good" chemicals such opioids and serotonin.

Research also showed that needles placed outside of the traditional meridians also had an impact. Studies comparing needles placed according to traditional teaching and those placed randomly have shown similar effects.

"Points don't have any magical properties. They are simply convenient locations to needle," Dr White said.

I wonder why tiny needles stimulate that reaction in the brain? Does it happen with any perceived injury? But hitting your thumb doesn't make a sore back feel better, does it?

Unexpected

Jimmy Fallon Ratings Win: "Late Night" Tops, Besting Conan Average

I haven't seen much of it, but from I have seen, I thought he was awful in this format.

Meanwhile, here's an amusing clip from Colbert Nation this week (featuring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad):

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Mahmoud's Non-Consensual Endorsement Deal

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

Send a crate load to Hoyden About Town

Lady tester › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

I told you there was something seriously wrong with England

Michael Jackson's 50 London concerts sell out - News, Music - The Independent

How to over-analyse

Soccer Is Ruining America - WSJ.com

Look, I find soccer pretty boring to watch too, and don't really understand the appeal of a game where the scoring of a "good" match is so low. (Incidentally, basketball has the opposite problem: too much scoring means too little drama til the last few minutes.)

But this column is still a severe case of over-analysis (with little sign of any sense of humour). For example:

...soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.

More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair.

Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.

Hence, it is un-American.

God knows what he would make of cricket.

Pigs and drug resistant Staph

Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health - NYTimes.com

Here's something new to worry about over the weekend. (But the story is to be continued in Sunday's NYT.)

Black holes at CERN - a short update

This recent post noted a paper (by credible physicists) indicating that mini black holes that might be created at the LHC might live for minutes, rather than the previously popular suggestion of minuscule fractions of a second. They still did not think that there could be danger from such micro black holes (they still could not start serious accretion).

I see that the authors of the paper appear to have revised it to make it sound more emphatically safe than the wording used in first version indicated. (One suspects on the suggestion of physicists at CERN?)

This led me to wondering what Rainer Plaga was up to, given that he had defended his early "danger warning" paper from criticism that he had made a fundamental mistake in the formula he had applied.

So, I emailed him. (Gotta love the internet.)

He responded saying that he is working on a further appendix to his paper, which will refer to the Casadio/Fabi/Harms paper about the minute-long black holes. He says they use basically the same approach as him, and he notes that the Mangano/Giddings safety paper did not refer to this approach at all. (Remember Casadio and co acknowledge discussions with Plaga in their paper, indicating that he definitely has credibility.)

So, more to come yet on the issue.

The BBC on ocean acidification

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Coral lab' offers acidity insight

Go to the link to find a series of pages which provide a quite balanced treatment of the issue of ocean acidification.

As usual, the news is nearly all bad. (There are a couple of quasi-dissenting scientists noted, but still no one who seems to think the oceans and reefs are going to be OK.)

Something I didn't know

France moves to raise drinking age to 18 - International Herald Tribune

The drinking age in France varies depending on the type of alcohol involved and the place of sale. But anyone 16 or older can order beer and wine in bars.

French teenagers who suddenly find themselves underage may grow jealous of neighboring countries such as Germany or Italy where the legal drinking age is still 16 for beer, wine or liquor. Europeans overall take a more liberal view of alcohol than, for instance, the United States, where the legal drinking age is 21. In most of Western Europe, it ranges from 16 to 18.

And yet it is the British with the worst reputation for drunken yobs on the streets. So how do the French teenagers manage:

A study of French 16-year-olds showed an overall rise in regular alcohol use from 1999 to 2007, going from 8 percent to 13 percent. In 2007, almost one in five boys, and one in 10 girls, reported at least 10 drinking episodes during the month, according to the French Monitoring Center on Drugs and Addiction.

I don't find that too shocking, compared to what one imagines what would happen in Britain if the drinking age was lowered to 16.

I like the reaction from businesses in France:

Café owners complain that they cannot play the role of the police, checking everyone's identity. Some with a large under-18 clientele say business will suffer.

"Ten-year-olds, 12-year-olds, I agree. But to forbid 16-year-olds? You can't take people for idiots," said Anais Chettrit, owner of the café Le Molière in eastern Paris.

Chettrit said that 60 percent of the clients at her busy café, near two high schools, were under 18 and that it was "certain" raising the drinking age would cut into business.

Obviously, I need to spend more time in France observing society.

Better left unsaid

Doctor apologizes for saying people should smoke themselves to death › Japan Today

A doctor has apologized after saying that people should smoke themselves to an early death to save the country money on elderly care, according to his hospital. “It is clear that medical costs will increase if non-smoking spreads,” the doctor said last week, according to Ida Hospital in Kawasaki City. “It’s better that people smoke a lot and die early.”

Maybe he was an economics student before he did medicine.

In any event, did you realise how popular smoking still is in Japan?:

Japan’s overall smoking rate is declining. The rate for men was 39.5%, still high among developed countries but half of the rate of four decades ago, according to a 2008 survey by Japan Tobacco Inc. The rate for women was 12.9%, down from 15% in 1968.

I see that Australia was at that rate for men in 1980. (In 1945, 72% of Australian men smoked.) We're currently at about 22%. Japan has some way to go.

Prediction: Labor in Queensland gone

Clean oil spill by hand or stop, Sunshine Coast council told - ABC News

In case you hadn't heard, there's quite a big oil spill off the Queensland coast, affecting first Moreton Island, and now some of the nicest beaches on the Sunshine Coast.

You can't blame the Labor government for that, but I suspect the very slow and bureaucratic reaction to the clean up is quite likely to be the final nail in the coffin of the Anna Bligh government at the forthcoming election:

The Sunshine Coast Regional Council on the south-east Queensland coast has been ordered to stop the clean-up of 8.5 kilometres of beaches that have been coated in fuel oil that leaked from the ship Pacific Adventurer.

The ABC has learned that Maritime Safety Queensland has told the council it is inappropriate to use machinery on the beach to clean up the oil slick and that staff should use hand tools.

Sunshine Coast Mayor Bob Abbot says he can not understand the ruling.

"We're just thinking that's a bit ridiculous," he said.

Indeed.

Mark Bahnisch says today that Labor is in deep trouble. That's good. There really was no way that Labor deserved to win the last election, but a hopeless performance by the Liberals in particular just meant that people couldn't bring themselves to vote for the Opposition.

The timing of this election for the LNP is good. The awful situation in the Bundberg public hospital with wildly over-enthusiastic surgeon Patel, although known before the last election, is in the news again thanks to his commital trial. The Health Minister made himself sound a completely insensitive idiot by saying he should be the one receiving an apology following a long delayed report on how one of his nurses came to be raped. (The core security problem is also still to be fixed!) The police minister Judy Spence has always looked and sounded incompetent. The 30 year old Treasurer Andrew Fraser might be a smart guy for all I know, but it's not a good look to be in that position just as your State's finances take a nosedive, no matter whose fault it is.

Anna Bligh is trying to keep all the attention on herself, but she doesn't have the same roguish appeal of Peter Beattie. (Although, that said, it's hard to imagine him being able to overcome the "it's time" factor of this election either.) Her appearances with Prime Minister Rudd, who manages to maintain popularity by sending voters large cheques every 3 months, do not seem to be doing the trick.

A surprising number of people that I know who generally appear to be Labor inclined have said that they don't mind Lawrence Springborg. (In fact, they seem to like him more than I do.) I think he just has to pretty much keep his head down and he's in.

I suspect that most people will vote with the attitude that the LNP could not do any worse, and it is time for a break from Labor. It's not an unreasonable way of looking at it.

And it is, of course, always a delicious irony that it's Labor that keeps putting up women Premiers who promptly go on to lose government as soon as they have to face the electorate. (Maybe they will eventually cotton on that they should put one up as leader of the Opposition first and let them get into power that way.)

People of Queensland: let's keep up this proud Australian tradition. It is fun to annoy electioneering feminists, after all.

Gift solicited

Bitten: True Medical Stories of ... - Google Book Search

Looks to be a fun read:

We’ve all been bitten. And we all have stories.
The bite attacks that Pamela Nagami, M.D., has chosen to write about in Bitten take place in big cities, small towns, and remote villages around the world and throughout history, locales as familiar as New York or Hollywood, or exotic as Africa, the Middle East, or Indonesia. They include a six-year-old girl who descended into weeks of extreme lassitude from a tick bite; a diabetic in the West Indies who awoke to find a rat eating two of his toes; a California man who developed “flesh-eating strep” following a penile bite; and more.

Be the first reader to send me a gift in (nearly) 4 years of blogging! Postal address provided on request.

Breath will not be held.

Child brides of India

High Prevalence Of Child Marriage In India Fuels Fertility Risks

....nearly half of adult Indian women, aged 20 to 24, were married before the legal age of 18, and that those child marriages were significantly associated with poor fertility outcomes, such as unwanted and terminated pregnancies, repeat childbirths in less than 24 months, and increased sterilization rates.

I'm not entirely sure why they included "increased sterilization rates" under the heading "poor fertility outcomes", but in any event, it's the terminated pregnancies that are of more concern.

So, how young are they getting married in India?:

The study found that 44.5 percent of women ages 22 to 24 were married before age 18. More than one in five – 22.6 percent – were married before age 16, while 2.6 percent were married before age 13.

India, the largest and most prosperous nation in south Asia, raised the legal age for marriage to 18 in 1978.

Evidently, it's a law that isn't enforced.

These figures are pretty surprising. On the up side, it's good to see some fertility/sexuality issues for which no one can blame the Catholic Church!

Pope doesn't surf the web all that often

Pope embraces internet in apology over Holocaust bishop -Times Online

The Pope has admitted fallibility over the Vatican's handling of a Holocaust-denying bishop and has vowed to make full use of the internet to make sure the Holy See is not caught out again.

I guess we'll know he has embraced the internet when we see him start Twittering during Mass in St Peter's.

Less than zero photons?

Quantum physics and reality | I'm not looking, honest! | The Economist

Not all that many places picked up on this report that appeared in The Economist, of all places, probably because it is hard to understand what it means.

It seems that a team of clever Japanese physicists have confirmed another team's experiment in which they, in effect, directly observed a quantum paradox (called Hardy's paradox. No, I hadn't heard of it before either.)

The implications, according to the magazine are:

They managed to do what had previously been thought impossible: they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.

Well, that's encouraging, I suppose.

But the physical meaning of what they observed seems very unclear:

What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here.

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”.

That word appears in the abstract to the paper:

Unlike Hardy's original argument in which the contradiction is inferred by retrodiction, our experiment reveals its paradoxical nature as preposterous values actually read out from the meter.

The Science Daily version of the story doesn't add much.

This is all very interesting, but it seems to me that no one is doing a good job of explaining what it means from the point of view of the understanding of quantum physics and reality. I have some questions:

1. Is this relevant to the question of whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?

2. Is it relevant to the more famous quantum paradox of Schrodinger's cat? (My initial hunch is that it tells us the cat is really there, and it is both dead and alive!)

Philosophers of the quantum world, get to it!

The tiny, tiny radio

The World's Smallest Radio: Scientific American

Carbon nanotubes have already successfully been used as tiny radios, apparently. The implications:

The nanotube radio, its fabricators say, could be the basis for a range of revolutionary applications: hearing aids, cell phones and ­iPods small enough to fit completely within the ear canal. The nanoradio “would easily fit inside a living cell,” Zettl says. “One can envision interfaces to brain or muscle functions or radio-controlled devices moving through the bloodstream.”

I'm not entirely sure what the memory of an ear canal iPod would be based on, but it's a neat science fiction-y idea.

I like the first comment after the story:

Now the tinfoil hat battalions have something new to worry about; never mind the "implant that the ___ put in to control my brain", they can now fantasize about receiving nanoradio control devices from every vaccination or blood test!

Cats making people mad (and otherwise ill)

Research supports toxoplasmosis link to schizophrenia

Dr McConkey says: "It's highly unlikely that we will find one definitive trigger for schizophrenia as there are many factors involved, but our studies will provide a clue to how toxoplasmosis infection - which is more common than you might think - can impact on the development of the condition in some individuals.

"In addition, the ability of the parasite to make dopamine implies a potential link with other neurological conditions such as Parkinson's Disease, Tourette's syndrome and attention deficit disorders, says Dr McConkey. "We'd like to extend our research to look at this possibility more closely."

An unexpected finding

Older father, younger mother, bad idea for baby? - Science, News - The Independent

The offspring of older fathers are more likely to do less well in intelligence tests than the children of younger men, scientists say, and it may be the result of genetic problems with the sperm of men over 45. The children of older mothers, by contrast, tend to fare better in intelligence tests than children with younger mothers. The researchers believe this may be the result of better nurturing by more mature women.

It is one of the anomalies of modern life that bodies are best for healthy procreation at a relatively young age, but emotional maturity lags quite far behind.

Stem cell musings

You just won the stem-cell war. Don't lose your soul. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

Saletan is routinely an interesting writer on science and bioethics, and this column is no exception.

Useless research update

Belief and the brain's 'God spot' - Science, News - The Independent

Scientists searching for the neural "God spot", which is supposed to control religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief....

"Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal equivalent, and found in all cultures," said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington. "Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions."

Well, I am not entirely sure how one would ever be certain that there is "no accepted animal equivalent". We can be pretty confident that cats are atheists, but a good case could be made for dogs worshipping their owners.

But really, why does anyone really think that this research is worthwhile or beneficial? There are surely many psychiatric illnesses which are worth investigating very thoroughly with MRI and other probes; why waste time and money on research which is always going to be inconclusive and of no potential benefit?

You heard it here first (or elsewhere, maybe. And if it doesn't happen it wasn't mentioned here at all, OK?)

Famed pastor predicts imminent catastrophe

(Actually, there is another alleged prophesy I have been meaning to post about, and I will as soon as I can find it on the web again.)

More on Carbon Tax Vs Cap and trade

Technology Review: The Real Price of Obama's Cap-and-Trade Plan

Obama is planning on generating a lot of money from a cap and trade system. Sounds like building a budget on shaky foundations to me.

Anyhow, here's a good article listing succinctly the pros and cons of carbon tax vs cap and trade.

Remember, you saw it here first

There has been an unusual trend lately for Tim Blair, and now Andrew Bolt, to be posting the same videos that have appeared here months ago:

* Andrew Bolt today posts Youtube of dog with a ball throwing machine. Same video posted here in March 2008.

* On March 4, Tim Blair last week posts video of newscast in which a hamster is identified as a murder suspect. Same video had appeared here on 4 February 2009.

* Tim Blair posts the Youtube of the Mitchell & Webb "Bad Vicar" sketch on February 28, 2009. The same video was posted at Opinion Dominion on 11 April 2008.

At this rate, I figure that both Tim and Andrew are due to start believing in ocean acidification and the need to reduce CO2 by about May 2010.

Time for your bad ocean acidification news of the week

Proof on the Half Shell: A More Acid Ocean Corrodes Sea Life: Scientific American

The shells of tiny ocean animals known as foraminifera—specifically Globigerina bulloides—are shrinking as a result of the slowly acidifying waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. ...

The researchers found that modern G. bulloides could not build shells as large as the ones their ancestors formed as recently as century ago. In fact, modern shells were 35 percent smaller than in the relatively recent past—

Not encouraging.

Getting down to the nitty gritty

Moon base: Location, location, location | csmonitor.com

A pretty good article here speculating on the location and other practical details of a lunar outpost.

The lunar south pole still looks good:

The allure of Shackleton Crater is that it is relatively hospitable and practical. Explorers perched on its rim would experience a night of only 2 Earth days and 4 hours. The crater’s proximity to the moon’s day-night boundary – called the terminator – also makes it an ideal place to test technologies and find out what works and what doesn’t in both environments.

And here is a suggestion for another problem:

But habitats aren’t the only pieces of hardware that must be warmed. Robotic rovers and their batteries also need to survive. “We have a hard time keeping … trucks working in Siberia,” Dr. Ramachandran says. “We have no experience working at minus 150 degrees.”

The solution could be a “wadi” – a patch of lunar surface somewhat larger than a rover and covered with what is in effect a reflective tent. During the day, lenses would heat these strategically spaced wadis. As night nears, hardware would extend a reflective cover over the area – like tin foil over a turkey, shiny side down.

Sounds simple. But one of the main problems for humans is dealing with radiation for anyone needing to stay there for any length of time.

I don't know if this is being considered at all, but my idea is that building a covered framework over which a little bulldozer can gradually pile up a deep mound of dirt for cosmic ray protection might work. (The covering material itself could be airtight, or the whole interior could be sprayed with a sealant.) I would assume that the lower gravity means the framework can be considerably lighter than what you would need on earth.

This seems a lot simpler to me than the idea of baking lunar bricks in situ. You could be lucky and build such a shelter over a pre-existing little crater. Or maybe you just work on a low rise dome type structure. Maybe geodesic domes would work well?

I would be curious to know if this has been considered. Just send the cheque in the mail, NASA.

From the Jerusalem Post

My Word: In the holiday spirit | Columnists | Jerusalem Post:

In an op-ed in the Post on March 3, Michael Bar-Zohar noted that a survey published last month by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center indicates that 46.7 percent of the Palestinians believe that Hamas defeated Israel in the recent fighting in Gaza. On a visit to Egypt many years ago, I was taken aback to discover how many places marked the October 6 War 'victory.' I am not, however, surprised that Egypt - which did nothing to improve life in Gaza during the decades in which it was in control - does not want anything to do with its Palestinian brethren there even now. Let Israel open its border with Gaza, Egypt can't risk it, goes the common thinking in the Egyptian capital.

The terror attack in Cairo a week ago, in which a French schoolchild was killed, shows yet again that they do have reason to fear Islamization. Global jihad is, after all, global. But don't say it too loudly in London or Paris - you might offend the local Muslims.

Nothing like humility

Architect of desire: Frank Lloyd Wright's private life was even more unforgettable than his buildings

I recall from some documentary on him that FLW was an eccentric character with a convoluted love life that featured a gruesome axe murder, but I did not remember how much he liked himself:

When questioned about his vanity, Wright justified himself by saying: "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose honest arrogance."

Heh.

Why not to believe in carbon capture & storage

Carbon capture and storage | Trouble in store | The Economist

Here's a detailed article from the Economist explaining the huge uncertainties and problems with carbon storage and capture. Some key points:

In 2005 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists that advises the United Nations on global warming, came up with a range of $14-91 for each tonne of emissions avoided through CCS. Last year, the IEA suggested that the price for the first big plants would be $40-90. McKinsey, a consultancy, has arrived at an estimate of €60-90, or $75-115.

Either way, that is more than the price of emissions in the European Union: about €10 a tonne. America does not have a carbon price at all yet. A bill defeated last year in the Senate would have yielded a carbon price as low as $30 in 2020, according to an official analysis. So CCS might not be financially worthwhile for years to come....

Omar Abbosh, of Accenture, a consultancy, says that carbon trading as practised in the EU and contemplated in America does not give enough certainty about future carbon prices to justify an investment in a CCS plant. Mr Paelinck of Alstom agrees: no board would risk spending €1 billion on one, he says, without generous subsidies.

The article indicates that the cost of individual CCS plants could be anything from $1 billion to $1.8 billion US dollars. (And that might be based on the fact that the USA apparently has a pre-built system of pipelines in their oil areas that could be used for transported the CO2. I assume Australia does not have anywhere near as extensive a system.)

And will it even work long term? Even small leaks would be a problem:

Carbon dioxide forms an acid when it dissolves in water. This acid can react with minerals to form carbonates, locking away the carbon in a relatively inert state. But it can also eat through the man-made seals or geological strata intended to keep it in place. A leakage rate of just 1% a year, Greenpeace points out, would lead to 63% of the carbon dioxide stored in any given reservoir being released within 100 years, almost entirely undoing the supposed environmental benefit.

That CCS is being promoted so heavily seems simply to be a triumph of an industry's self preservation instinct over common sense.

Turnbull worth reading

PM's cheap money shot | The Australian

Malcolm Turnbull's take on the origins of the economic crisis, and Rudd's silly summer essay on the topic, is pretty good.

Hooked on worms

Can Parasitic Hookworms Help In Treatment Of Multiple Sclerosis?

Get this for a cute acronym:

The WIRMS (Worms for Immune Regulation in MS) study ...

Some doctor probably sat up in bed and had a "eureka" moment when he thought of that.

Anyhow, the study itself is kind of interesting:

The £400,000, three-year project funded by the MS Society, aims to determine whether infection with a small and harmless number of the worms can lead to an improvement on the severity of MS over a 12 month period...

The 25 worms are microscopic and are introduced painlessly through a patch in the arm. They are then flushed out after nine months.

Given that cancers can be fought by the immune system too, is there any anti-cancer parasite out there to be found?

Watchmen not recommended

Geek boys everywhere who are into graphic novels seems to be all a-Twitter about the movie version of Watchmen, a movie with the odd distinction of featuring (amongst others) the first blue nude male superhero.

I'm no fan of the whole superhero genre, despite quite liking the last Spiderman. But Anthony Lane's review of Watchmen certainly puts me off any idea of seeing it (and is pretty funny.) Some highlights:

One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.” Both of these have been turned into motion pictures; the first was merely an egregious waste of money, time, and talent, whereas the second was not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch...

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along...

But here's the reason I won't see it:

The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead.

Thanks, but no thanks.

UPDATE: here's Dana Stevens in Slate on the violence in the movie:

Whenever a fight begins (and there's one about every 15 minutes in this 160-minute movie), brace yourself for an abundance of narratively pointless bone-crunching, finger-twisting, limb-sawing, and skull-hacking. These extreme sports are often filmed in Matrix-style slow motion, a technique that tends to grind the story to a halt. Like the money shots in porn movies, Snyder's action scenes are an end in themselves—gratifying if you like that sort of thing, gross if you don't.

Yet the movie is getting a 65% approval rating at Rottentomatoes. Do you ever get the feeling that reviewers (and the public at large,) have become just too immune to graphic movie violence?

UPDATE 2: The two Salon movie reviewers discuss the violence in this video. (One of them thinks highly of the movie, the other doesn't.) Whenever you get a reviewer talking of a violent sequence being "right on the edge" of what's acceptable to depict, (and that is from the guy who likes the movie,) it's almost certainly a sign that it is, in fact, highly objectionable and over that edge.

UPDATE 3: To my surprise, both David Stratton & Margaret Pomeranz on At the Movies liked it a lot, and hardly mentioned the violence. Oh well, just confirms my view that they are both fairly erratic reviewers. I can't say that I reliably find either of them align with my tastes.

GG gets noticed

Both Andrew Bolt and Michelle Grattan write about the, ahem, unusually high profile of Quentin Bryce as Governor-General.

Bolt finds her being far too political in her role, and I don't disagree.

You get the feeling from Michelle Grattan's column that even those with more left leaning sympathies may be feeling that Bryce's profile is higher than it should be.

She notes that (I shall paraphrase here), having already visited every country where an Australian is doing something useful, the GG has decided to visit countries where she'll have a hard time finding an Aussie outside of the consulate:

Africa? That's right. Less than a year into the job, Bryce this month embarks on a seven-nation tour of the continent, including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Ethiopia (with stopovers, the total is nine countries).

It might seem an odd destination for an Australian governor-general so early in her term. But it is all part of the Rudd Government's Africa strategy. This has two drivers.

First, Africa is seen as an area neglected by Australia for many years (Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke were Africanists — but that was a long time ago). Second — and very pertinently — the Government is lobbying intensively for a United Nations Security Council seat, and there are more than 50 African votes.

Bryce's African trip is tailored to the Government's foreign policy. In effect, she's an envoy at the highest level.

Sounds like a Rudd vanity project in reality.

Let's hope the Governor-General is offered some odd traditional tribal food that she must eat to be polite. (The Ethiopians will probably serve her a gigantic feast when they assume from her disturbingly thin frame that Australia must be suffering a famine too. Aren't steak and dairy products allowed on the menu at Yarralumla?) I'll be looking for the close up of her grimace at the official gallery, where's it's all Quentin all the time.

But seriously, is someone going to start questioning the travel costs for this Governor-General, and the utility of this trip in particular?

Pot meets kettle

The Age Blogs: Waste of Space: All Men Are Liars

Why on earth does Fairfax continue to run the Sam de Brito blog when he churns out nasty posts like this?

Lock him out

Rebel Catholic priest hopes for positive mediation - ABC News

The more he speaks, the more he appears to be an offensive goose who should be locked out of "his" church.

I refer to Peter Kennedy, sacked priest of St Mary's South Brisbane, whose idea of mediation is not only getting his own way, but punishing those who dared point out to the Church that he was no longer acting like a Catholic:

A mediation process involving solicitors for Father Kennedy is expected to begin next week.

Father Kennedy says he is hopeful of a positive outcome, but until it is finished, he is not going anywhere.

"The realistic outcome would be for me to be reinstated by the Archbishop as the administrator, the vigilantes who reported me to Rome be disciplined and I particularly and the community should be found not to be guilty of denying Catholic doctrine," he said.

Where are the flying monkeys when you need them?

How not to endear yourself to the French

Roger Cohen: One France is enough - International Herald Tribune

Roger Cohen worries that America is being turned into France MkII by Obama's policies (although he blames Bush for the initial problem):

I lived for about a decade, on and off, in France and later moved to the United States. Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery.

Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.

He should have just gone all the way and incorporated the phrase "cheese eating surrender monkeys".

On attitudes to drugs

Who are the addicts, the victims or their families? | Melanie Reid - Times Online

This article talks about a couple of notable drug cases in the UK at the moment, including an awful one in which a toddler died at the hands of a mother's heroin addicted boyfriend. Reid writes:

His mother sold her body for drugs while her son was dying from a fatal blow that ruptured his duodenum. The toddler, who had 40 injuries to his body, was then taken to a squalid drugs party, where he vomited brown liquid while, all around him, young addicts partied. They laughed at him being sick. Hours later he was dead. His killer was convicted on Tuesday.

Brandon was not on any at-risk register. Why should he have been, when social policy emphasises that drugs users be supported in their lifestyle, not told to wise up? From top to bottom in the existing system, that ethos rules.

Addicts are official victims. They are not regarded as people with a choice. The presumption, therefore, is on keeping their children at home with them, not removing them. Suggestions that contraception be a condition of receiving methadone for addicts caused an outcry in Scotland, with accusations about eugenics.

Which take precedence? The human rights of the infant born to the junkie, or the right of the junkie to have both lifestyle and children?

I bet that one of the practical problems with taking the child away would be that, as soon as it happened, the mother would claim she has broken up with the boyfriend, put herself on methadone, and then demand the child back. Or alternatively, if she takes a year to sort herself out, you have had the child bond with a foster family, only to be given back to the mother.

Perhaps what is needed is absolute rigidity in the rules: such as addiction to certain drugs as a mother of any children under 5 means you've lost the kid, permanently. Maybe you could allow contact rights in the future (once out of addiction), and always be kept informed as to how the kid is doing. But you don't ever get the child back.

Top post

Manne’s talking again about what bores him | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Top marks to Andrew Bolt for this post about Robert Manne's confusion as to whether or not he knows anything about economics.

Anti toilet paper

Christian Wolmar: Let's wipe out toilet paper | guardian.co.uk

Much explicit talk about wiping bottoms in this Guardian column.

Clearly, he needs to travel to Japan to really appreciate bidet technology.

Last Christmas, I saw a stall in a shopping centre promoting a Korean brand of bidet attachment to fit on top of an existing toilet. I don't think it was Hyundai, but I forget the name. Cost was around a $1000 I think.

Maybe environmentalists could argue that this is a good use for Kevin Rudd's "stimulus".

If they took off around the world, maybe it could mean a bidet led economic recovery from the decades of malaise in Japan (and now Korea.) Or perhaps Australia could establish its own bidet manufacturing plants, using all those left over car assembly line employees. (Suggested company slogan for a bidet start up: "Leading from the rear".)

Just trying to be helpful...

Labor not so good for aborigines

Without the will, the intervention is left without a way | The Australian

Paul Toohey reckons the improvements for Northern Territory aborigines have slowed and will continue to do so due to the Left's ideological opposition to the Howard intervention.

< esm >Gee, didn't see that coming. < dsm >*

* Engage/Disengage Sarcasm Mode

Cultural difference noted

Cash handout? Stupid, wasteful idea, Japanese say

From the report:

Prime Minister Taro Aso is touting a one-time cash handout of 12,000 yen as the centerpiece of a stimulus package to revive the world’s second-largest economy, mired in one of its worst slumps since World War II.

But polls show that most Japanese oppose the idea—though many confess they’ll take the money anyway.

They argue that most people will just save the money, not spend it. Others say it’s a shortsighted plan that exacerbates the government’s ballooning budget deficit.

(That's about $190 AUD by the way.)

A telephone poll indicates that 75% disapprove of the idea.

In Australia last month, 57% of people surveyed by Newspoll approved the stimulus package (including cash handouts of $900.) (Well, they thought it would be good for the economy, at least.)

Take now, pay later.

No questions please

Look, I'll only post this if everyone promises not to make any joke-y comment about why I was reading a CSIRO journal's review of the new edition of "The Joy of Sex". (It is indeed the second time I have mentioned that book.)

OK? You promised.

Anyhow, here's the most curious bit from the review:

As a long standing sex educator, researcher and therapist, I have learned new snippets from this book, including the use of ear lobe manipulation and the big toe as a tool for full sexual satisfaction and orgasm.

The review does not further elaborate.

I wonder if Julia Gillard knows about this?

Too much information, Rod

Thirteen, Alfie? I’d almost given up on sex by the age of 13 | The Spectator

What to make of Rod Liddle's column in the Spectator in which he recalls his youthful sex life which started at 12? He can't quite understand the uproar over "Alfie", although he does ignore the point that young Alfie may be 13, but looks about 9. If he looked older than his age, the tabloid photos would not have attracted half as much attention.

I did note a few months back that reading books such as Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs does at least remind one that young teenage sex did take place in the 40's and 50's as well as now.

Still, I can't help but be a little irritated by the confession of youthful illicit activities (whether they be sexual or related to drugs, alcohol, etc) by the middle aged and relatively successful in life.

I know that there are not many 12 year olds reading the Spectator or Clive James and thinking to themselves "well if they did it, I may as well too." But there's something hypocritical about public and humorous confession of behaviour which they would not have wanted their own child imitating that annoys me in any event.

Babies make us nicer

Basics - In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue - NYTimes.com

A primatologist argues that:

...human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

The difference this makes, she argues, is that humans developed a comparatively good temperament. Sounds vaguely plausible, but the main reason I wanted to do a post about this is because of the odd hypothetical example she gives:

...our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.

So be warned: never fly Chimp Air, no matter how cheap the fare.

It gives me great pleasure...

Regular readers could guess how happy it would make me to see David Byrne appearing on Colbert Report. (The answer for irregular readers: very.)

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

David Byrne Pt. 1

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

(Honestly, it is really is a very relaxed and enjoyable interview of the Colbert variety.)

You can then watch Byrne performing the chair choreography song I like from his new CD.

Important stem cell news

It's good that the use of embryos for stem cell experiments or therapy may turn out to be unnecessary, although I still suspect that much of the promise of stem cell therapy as whole has been oversold.

Discover magazine explains more.

Wine wins one, loses one

Drinking wine lowers risk of Barrett's esophagus, precursor to esophageal cancer:

Drinking one glass of wine a day may lower the risk of Barrett's Esophagus by 56 percent... Barrett's Esophagus is a precursor to esophageal cancer, the nation's fastest growing cancer with an incidence rate that's jumped 500 percent in the last 30 years.

I find this a little surprising, given the bigger news of last week:

Low to moderate alcohol consumption among women is associated with a statistically significant increase in cancer risk and may account for nearly 13 percent of the cancers of the breast, liver, rectum, and upper aero-digestive tract combined...

Giant horse madness

Many Just Say Neigh to ‘Blue Mustang’ at Denver Airport - NYTimes.com

From the report:

A statue of a giant male horse — electric-eyed, cobalt blue and anatomically correct — was installed in February 2008 on the roadway approach to the terminal, and it is freaking more than a few people out.

What is it with artists and giant horses? As was recently noted here, England is to get an "angel" in the form of a giant horse statue.

Real horses are dangerous, but even as statues, they still manage to kill. As the NYT explains about that Denver blue horse:

Haters of this work say that “Blue Mustang,” as it is formally known, by the artist Luis Jiménez (killed in 2006 when a section of the 9,000-pound fiberglass statue fell on him during construction), is frightening, or cursed by its role in Mr. Jiménez’s death, or both.

I keep telling people that horses are evil, but do they listen?

The New York Times also notes this odd consequence of the horse:

... the controversy has also stirred up people in other ways. Conspiracies have floated around the Internet for years about secret bunkers or caverns beneath the terminals at the Denver airport. Symbols of Freemasonry are also said to abound on airport floors and walls.

“It’s brought out the conspiracy theorists who think there are aliens living under the airport,” said Patricia Calhoun, the editor of Westword, an alternative weekly paper in Denver

A story that features both evil horses and underground aliens: that's quite a rarity.

LP finally does St Mary's

I was wondering when Mark Bahnisch would make a comment on the renegade parish of St Mary's South Brisbane, given his Catholic background. Finally he has posted about it, and (surprisingly) in the comments section there is moderately voiced discussion between him and Currency Lad (amongst others) about the issues and matters liturgical.

I was a little surprised to see that the parish is not even to Mark's liberal tastes, and he also notes the peculiarity of why a priest such as Father Kennedy (who makes comments sounding as if he doesn't even believe in a "real" God anymore) wants to remain within the Catholic fold. This must be a sign that the parish is doomed.

UPDATE:

By the way, it would appear likely that Peter Kennedy, and [one suspects] many of those in the congregation at St Mary's, are non-realists when it comes to belief in God. Non-realism gets a decent explanation here. A key point from that link is this:

We should give up all ideas of a heavenly or supernatural world-beyond. Yet, despite our seeming scepticism, we insist that non-realist religion can work very well as religion, and can deliver eternal happiness.

Seems that for non realists, "eternal" gets a just as rubbery a definition as "God". It's basically a philosophy of re-defining away those elements of religion you can no longer believe in.

As I said once at CL's blog, the real fight within Christianity in the coming decades is going to be between adherents to realism and the growing band of non-realists.

Nothing like bad timing

While glancing through a (better than usual quality) table of half price books at a suburban bookshop yesterday, I found "Burn: the Epic Sory of Bushfire in Australia" by ABC favourite Paul Collins (better known for his commentary on religion.) It was published in 2006.

It must be annoying to find, just when your history book is suddenly all relevant, it's being flogged off on the cheap. Maybe there's a market for a revised edition now?

Anyhow, Paul Collins was interviewed on the ABC recently about his take on the recent events. It's an interesting read.

Do nothing til 2020?

Over at Unleashed, Alan Moran from the IPA has a reasonable article explaining some of the pros and cons of carbon tax Vs emissions trading scheme. (He leans towards a carbon tax.)

However, his controversial conclusion is this:

One key outcome of the Treasury modelling offers a particularly promising policy approach. This is the Treasury estimate of the costs of doing nothing to 2020 and then catching up with the 2050 target thereafter should the need and achievability of such action prove necessary. That cost is put at 0.3 per cent of GDP by 2050.

Even if this is not overstated, 0.3 per cent of GDP seems a reasonable insurance policy price to pay rather than imminently embarking on measures that will be in the White Paper's words, "the most significant structural reform of the economy since the 1980s". By 2020 we will be clearer on the need for emission reduction policies and will, presumably, have access to all the technological advances that Treasury claim will be forthcoming.

At one level, this makes sense, in that Australia's overall contribution to CO2 is so low anyway. But if the real global problem is turning around the carbon producing juggernauts of China and India, putting off a decision until 2020 is hardly going to encourage them to start taking faster action now.

Meanwhile, the global economic crisis should have the contradictory effects of reducing emissions for now, but also making it harder to fund the research and development needed to get really serious changes to energy production.

Life is complicated.

One seriously strange fish

This blog needs something interesting to look at again, and this is the best I can up with at the moment: a very weird looking fish with a transparent head and dopey looking eyes.

Links clean up and additions

This post is just to remind me of some of the websites I want to add to my blog. It's well overdue a bit of a clean out. I'll get around to editing the blog soon enough, and anyone who has any other suggestions to sites I might like, let me know.

My additions to come (more may be added when I remember then again): Backreaction (physics blog); Dezeen (architecture and design); Air and Space Magazine; Bravenewclimate; Watts Up with That; Modern Mechanix blog; Treehugger; Marohasy.

Big Hollywood.

Near miss noted

Crikey - Sky not falling, just passing quite close

An "intruder" asteroid was detected by Australian comet hunter Rob McNaught at an observatory on Siding Spring Mountain on Friday night and will have a close encounter with Earth at about 1am tomorrow.

The object, estimated to be around 35-60 metres at its widest, is similar in size to the dead comet shard that exploded with the force of a large hydrogen bomb over a then largely uninhabited region of central Siberia on 30 June 1908.

This time there will be no collision, but the object catalogued as 2009 DD45 will come as close as around 63,000 kilometres from the earth’s surface somewhere over the Pacific west of Tahiti.

Ready for your close up, Your Excellency?

Glenn Milne informed us on the weekend that Governor-General Quentin Bryce has, for reasons unknown, been requesting (and getting) briefings from government officials including the head of the Defence Force, the head of Foreign Affairs, and Treasury. This is not normal, apparently:

A spokeswoman confirmed the official briefings by three departmental heads was the first of its kind in the 107-year history of the office.

If I were the suspicious type who found this Governor-General kind of irritating (oh, wait a minute, that is me) I would say that it sounds something like a reverse palace coup in the planning. I suspect Bill Shorten (still dating the GG's daughter, I assume) may be installed as first Australian Emperor if the Labor Party loses the next election. (Remember you heard it here first, unless someone at Andrew Bolt's has already noted this.)

But even before this weekend's news, I had been meaning to point readers towards the gallery section of the Governor-General's website. I would be curious to know who selects the photos there, as it seems that under Quentin Bryce's reign there has been a significantly increased emphasis on having her appear, if at all possible, in every single photo. (There are very few exceptions.)

Now of course, any gallery of the activities of an GG is going to mainly feature scenes in which the he or she appears. But try this: go to the archives and compare, say, the 2007 photos of our last Governor-General to those of Quentin Bryce. Under Michael Jeffery, you will find quite a few photos of other people without the GG being in shot. (There are a couple of "Santa" photos too; if one ever appears while Quentin Bryce is there, I would be looking very closely at the eyes to check that it isn't her.)

Back to the current photo selections: the one from 9 November 2008 in particular (see a full-sized version here) makes it seem that there is a distinct emphasis now on Governor-General herself, rather than the office.

Not very endearing for this reader, at least.

Perfectly apt, really

Imagine ... Lennon's classic played on church bells

Apt because it is to be performed in an Anglican cathedral.

But he's getting really tired of eating crackers

Parrots teach man to speak again - Telegraph

Proof the internet is evil

Internet 'is causing poetry boom' - Telegraph

Opinion Dominion explains...

It's war: minister takes aim at defence | smh.com.au

Our Defence Minister thinks his department is "at times incompetent".

No doubt it is. The problem is that, at least as far as the uniform side of the fence is concerned, they expect people who may be quite good and competent at one job (flying a plane, being an engineer or battlefield tactician) to be sensible and competent in another role they never really intended taking on when they joined (management of personnel, running a quasi-judicial system for disciplinary breaches, conducting fair internal enquiries.)

Time and again, you can see a person who may have been quite good at his or her original job making a complete hash of the more generalist duties that certain positions may require. It's not for lack of attempted training and assessment; Defence spends an inordinate amount of time on management training, and assessment is continual. It's just that some people with good technical skills in some areas just don't seem to be able to engage common sense when it comes to other areas.

It's often truly puzzling as to how some really bad decisions can be made by uniform men or women who are clearly not dumb. Of course, this also means that Defence then has to spend an inordinate amount of time on internal review of such decisions.

I don't know the answer; maybe its inherent in having a relatively small defence force. But it is still discouraging.

Local food in Japan

This is a feature of Japanese towns and cities that I have often noticed as being quite different from most Western cities:

"Locally grown for local consumption" is a common practice in many cities in Japan. Small plots of urban land dedicated to farming can be found in cities of all sizes. Kunio Tsubota of the Kyushu University Asia Centre writes in Urban Agriculture in Asia: Lessons from Japanese Experience "The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) estimates that about 1.1 million hectares of farmland exist in "urban-like areas" and are producing ¥2.6 trillion worth of products."

Tsubota states that municipalities desire some farmland in urbanized areas because the land provides open areas necessary for emergencies, residents don’t want buildings constructed on green spaces, and that it’s more cost effective to grow crops than to convert urban farm plots into parks, and then maintain the parks.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that a lot of these Japanese urban farms may be right beside busy roads, and I wonder whether car and truck exhausts so close leaves a residue on fruit and veggies. (I guess it would just wash off anyway.)

There are parts (but getting smaller over the years) of some Brisbane suburbs which still contain small market farms. In fact, fruit and vegetables brought in some of the Vietnamese dominated shops, which I think get their stuff from such local farms, can be incredibly cheap compared to the supermarket. We usually get our pork from a "pork butcher" that seems to supply all the local restaurants too, and is always cheaper than the supermarket.

Urban farming therefore makes some sense, doesn't it? (As does living near asian migrant areas!)

Further to that Tarantino post...

A few posts back I had a link to a Guardian blog which embedded the ugly trailer for Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (yes, that spelling is apparently correct.)

The trailer is also on Youtube, but this time it has the Motion Picture Association of America preview rating at the start, which says the preview is "Suitable for All Audiences".

Are they mad?

Probably as mad as Quentin Tarantino, who thought that Kill Bill was a film that would be quite fun for boys and girls above the age of 12.

Given that he displays an emotional age of a 13 year old boy (and an unpleasant one at that,) I shouldn't be surprised. (Look at how juvenile most of the comments following any Tarantino clip on Youtube are as well.)

That young men should be getting excited about such a splatter-fest film is not a good sign. The only positive thing is that critics have become cynical of Tarantino's endless repetition of his one trick oeuvre.

Mad grandmother

BBC NEWS | Americas | US fortune 'not solely for dogs'

Talking about the $8 billion estate of the late Leona Helmsley, the article notes:

Helmsley also left $12m to her pet dog, Trouble, while explicitly leaving out two of her grandchildren.

A Manhattan judge later reduced the trust fund for the nine-year-old Maltese to $2m and the grandchildren received $6m each.

How do you spend even $2 million on a dog? Diamond encrusted collars?

On David Cameron's loss

A lesson for us all in a short life, well lived | Libby Purves - Times Online

Libby Purves writes very well about this.