Some secret

Two dead at James Arthur Ray The Secret sweat lodge retreat

Mr Ray appears to know everything except the fact that overheating can kill.

An Anthony Lane moment

“The Invention of Lying” movie review : The New Yorker

The Anthony Lane review of Ricky Gervais' "The Invention of Lying", a high concept comedy based on the idea that religion is simply a lie, contains this final, somewhat biting, comment:

Audiences here should be reminded, at this point, that Gervais found his fame on the BBC, with “The Office” and “Extras,” and that the execration of religious faith, specifically Christianity—plus a reflex sneer at the fools who fall for it—has, in the past decade, become the default mode of British cultural life. It makes sense, I suppose, for Gervais to use his film to air such mockery, if spiritual belief genuinely strikes him as a lie like any other; the plan would carry more weight, however, if he didn’t use the rest of the film to air his transcendent belief in Ricky Gervais.

Why doesn't every Miss World win, then?

As the BBC says:

In awarding President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian committee is honouring his intentions more than his achievements.

If he really wants to impress the world, Obama will decline to accept this, and tell the committee that he appreciates the thought, but he won't deserve it until he actually has some achievement to show for his efforts.

Lunar attack

Only an hour to go as I write this for the NASA LCROSS mission to smash into the moon. If it's lucky, the plume will show water or something else of interest under the lunar surface. Neat.

I'll be watching on NASA tv on the internet, unless I find a news show on cable is taking it live too.

Meanwhile, crashing a rocket into the moon is enough to bring out some, well, lunacy, in the form of blogs like "Do not bomb the moon". Amongst the comments by those who fear this is a bad, bad idea, I perhaps like this one best:

It’s a plot to destroy earth! A big enough chunk, like several tons of material, will be broken loose and since it’s between the moon and earth, it will eventually be caught up in earths’ gravity and flung into us much like a large astroid that wiped out all life on earth mellinium ago!

FInd a large deep cave to hide in and take enough food and for 4 years if you want to survive.

When I was bducted by aliens a few years ago, they warned me of this but nobody would listen. Now maybe they will.

UPDATE: well, that's it, and there wasn't a flash or anything to see visually. Funnily enough, on NASA TV after it, some guy admitted it wasn't clear what they had just seen - maybe the gain wasn't high enough. (In other words, he sounded as if he had expected to see something too.) Anyhow, information from other orbiting satellites will be sending back their observations soon.

Nuclear decay in your pocket?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Tiny 'nuclear batteries' unveiled

Remarkable.

The depths of racism

The discussion of racism and "blackface" that has been going on today reminded me of a BBC documentary I recently stumbled across and started watching.

I've only seen the first 15 minutes or so, but in that part (starting around the 7 or 8 minute mark) there is a pretty extraordinary section about lynch mobs in the United States in the 20th century. This is a topic of which I know little, so I had always imagined lynch mobs as comprising of maybe a few dozen men, most of them in KKK get up, getting their murders over and done with by stealth. But as the video shows, there were lynchings in which hundred or thousands of well dressed town folk turned up to view the spectacle, with many of them posing with glee in front of the corpses. Then photographs of the event were often later sold around town as postcards:



It's interesting to note that the person talking about this, James Allen, says that this aspect of American history is not one that the southern States are all that keen on being reminded of. (The introduction at this website indicates the same thing.) If you want to, you can see a flash movie of many of the lynching postcards which Allen has collected. (Although I must admit his narration is, in places, too self reflective.)

A general history of lynching in the US is also to be found on Wikipedia here.

It's remarkable to think that there could well be people in their old age today who, as a child in the first half of the 20th century, may have been taken to see the aftermath of a lynching.

It's worth being reminded as to why current American society is still getting over the legacy of this period in their history.

A proposal

Let's just save time, money and effort now, shall we, and do a deal with Kevin Rudd that he doesn't have to bother with the next election if will accept the status quo for another term? The Liberals can say that that money can be used to pay down our debt, and as such they are doing something good for the nation.

There would not be a half-interested voter in the nation who thinks that there is even the remotest possibility that the present rabble of a Coalition could win the next election.

As Alexander Downer was saying on the radio today, a change of leadership is not going to make one bit of difference. In fact, it will likely make matters worse, yet that is what the likes of brilliant mind Wilson Tuckey wants.

Andrew Bolt is again playing a disingenuous role in this: he writes well and is surely regularly read by most on the conservative side, but is encouraging the cultural divide within the party between those (who knows how many? - it seems damned few most of the time) who will accept there is a need to do something serious about CO2 and those who don't. I feel sure that, regardless of his promotion of all things skeptic about AGW, he is not convincing younger to middle age voters, and as such there is a political need to deal with the issue seriously regardless of what individual doubters about the science believe. He is naturally inclined towards conservatism, but is doing them no favours by encouraging this hopeless division.

Something in the water at Channel 9?

Hey Hey it's controversy | Herald Sun

The strangest thing about the Hey Hey show last night (apart from the evident lack of post- 1980's hair stylists in whichever part of Queensland Jackie McDonald now lives) was definitely the "is this meant to be blackface or not?" skit.

The make up did not include the 'traditional' white mouth and eyes, yet was so thickly black it was impossible to avoid the impression that it was the blackface you use when you can't quite bring yourself to do classic blackface. And then, to further add confusion, it was revealed that they were all doctors, this morning we hear two are Indian, and a clip from when they first did the skit 20 years ago indicated that at that time, their face makeup looked less "blackface" than this time.

What on earth were they thinking then? And what was Channel 9 (or the Hey Hey production staff) thinking? In the paper this morning a doctor from the group says:

"All six of us discussed this at length whether or not we should put this on because we realised it may be controversial," he said. "We did go to the trouble of checking with the production staff and they seemed to OK it."

So was there an ironic intent then - an element of "look at what we could away with 20 years ago"? Was the risk of offence to any visiting (or viewing) American completely overlooked by Channel 9, and a bunch of adult doctors? Did they only consider that it might be too soon after Jackson's death?

This is all very strange if you ask me.

I actually found Sam Newman's performance last month worse in that there was absolutely no other way to interpret it other than as 100% racism with intent. Yet that appears to have attracted much less condemnation. Let's show Harry Connick a clip of that event and see what he says.

In any event, there is something very peculiar about management in Channel 9 and their inability to see racist offence coming, if you ask me.

UPDATE: Also, is it only me, or did Daryl Somers suddenly look older last night compared to last week? Maybe it was Jackie McDonald's hair that somehow unbalanced the show into an unwelcome time warp, compared to last week's nostalgic one. All very odd.

Your bad ocean acidification news for the week

Poor Malcolm Turnbull. He sounds half reasonable to me on the topic of CO2 emissions but is caught in a bind. Even though the Rudd ETS is probably an extravagant waste of time from a scientific point of view, as is probably about 95% of all nations' approaches to greenhouse gases, people like the idea of doing something better than the idea of doing nothing. Politically something has to be done, but a divided Coalition is giving every reason for the public to think they can't be trusted to do a damn thing.

Why do no politicians talk of ocean acidification as an independent reason for taking action? Here's some more depressing news from the ocean acidification blog:

* two studies indicating bad news for corals due to effects on important symbiotic relationships

* some reef fish don't seem to like it either

* another study showing a couple of bivalves (clams and scallops) don't take lower pH well.

I saw Malcolm Turnbull on Insiders last Sunday arguing that action on AGW was the prudent thing to do given the weight of science. Quite right; but why not also mention ocean acidification, given that it appears increasingly well founded that future changes to ocean chemistry are a gigantic ecological crapshoot.

Delicious

Fries with your Mona Lisa? Big Macs move on Louvre

They'll be protesters in the streets of Paris threateningly waving french sticks around over this one. But as the story notes:

The French seem to love McDonald's. While business in brasseries and bistros is in free fall, the fast food group opened 30 outlets last year in France and welcomed 450 million customers.

As for my current opinion of McD in Australia, I note:

* the Angus beef burgers are surprisingly bland. Neither my wife nor I were particularly impressed. I would stick to the McFeast if I were you.

* the deluxe cheeseburger is good for a quick lunch

* the hot coffee from the machine is pretty good, but the new iced coffee is just a premix from a bottle and is not so good

* some of the crispy chicken burgers are pretty good.

By the way, it would seem that the Australian menu is significantly more extensive than the one in France, especially when it comes to chicken choices.

In praise of cities

The Green Case for Cities - The Atlantic (October 2009)

Evolving goodness (and yes, back to God again)

Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy. - Slate Magazine

Further to today's lengthy post on the ultimate value of emotions, it's worthwhile reading this article on the increasing research into the animal predecessors to the "good" human emotions.

(You should at least read it to see how empathy is not evenly spread around the primate world. Baboons are apparently not very nice.)

Such "bottom up" arguments for the evolution of a human sense of morality are used to attack the "top down" (god derived) arguments for our sense of morality, of which CS Lewis was a notable proponent. In Mere Christianity, Chapter 2, Lewis tried to answer "objections" that morality is really all about instinct by arguing that if you have competing instincts in facing a particular situation, there is a third bit of your mind by which you judge one of those instincts as more worthy than the other. He has various ways of proposing why it is not merely a case of the strongest instinct always winning, but I don't really have time to set them out here.

Lewis' arguments still seem to me to be quite clever, but given the mystery of the workings of the inner mind, I can certainly see how they are also far from conclusive.

In any event, I'm not sure that increasing evidence of animal instinctive kindness is necessarily threatening to Catholic style belief in God, which by and large has accommodated evolution. Why should it surprise us that what we value in our feelings should be shared in some instinctively understood way by our closest animal relatives? The real issue (and here I guess I am more or less following the Lewis line) is how our human rationality deals with those instincts, and whether there is reason to believe that there is God who cares about those choices.

Against the silence

It's pretty quiet around here lately. Sure, Tim still comments sometimes, but Geoff and Caz haven't for a while, and I don't know what's happened to MCB. I get the occasional new commenter, which I don't always respond to. Is that impolite? Maybe I should start replying to the spam comments that turn up. WOW Gold, indeed.

Just feels a bit like rattling around an empty house on a Sunday afternoon here sometimes. (I never got the hang of Sunday afternoons. They still strike me as unsatisfactory.)

In praise of Stop Making Sense

Talking Heads: 'Stop Making Sense' 25th anniversary Blu-ray release: How well does the concert film age?

Extremely well, says this article, and I am sure I would agree. Anyone care to buy me a Blu Ray device and the disc in return for a review? No, thought not.

The difficulty of preserving forests

UN's forest protection scheme at risk from organised crime, experts warn | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Worth reading.

More God talk, sorry about that

'The Case for God,' by Karen Armstrong - Review - NYTimes.com

Well well. I had my own extended comments on Karen Armstrong's latest book back in July, in which I doubted her characterisation of early Christianity.

I think its fair to say that this review in the New York Times, while not entirely unsympathetic to Armstrong, pretty much supports my take. First, remember that her key argument (as summarised in the review) was that the Christian Church fathers:

...understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine.

The reviewer notes that this claim needs to be highly qualified:

Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was grounded in shared doctrines and constrained by shared assumptions. Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’ resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if he hadn’t.

Which is to say that it’s considerably more difficult than Armstrong allows to separate thought from action, teaching from conduct, and dogma from practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and vice versa. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion without believing that all its dogmas are literally true: a spiritually inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But the Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs.

I quite agree.

Divine thoughts. (Warning: God talk and stuff)

Did God give me the hiccups? The Guardian

A pretty amusing anecdote from an atheist here. I like to think the answer to the question is "yes". It's just the right level of divine action towards an atheist about to go out proselytising: enough to make them wonder a little, even though no harm was done.

While we're on the topic of God and atheists, I finally finished Julian Barnes' "Nothing to be Frightened of". It is, by and large, a pretty enjoyable rambling bit of self-analysis and family memoir dealing with why he's always dreaded death. Most reviews note that it starts with the unusual line "I don't believe in God, but I miss him". (Well, maybe not so unusual. I see from another recently read book that a similar line of thought is expressed by one of the characters in Catch 22.)

Barnes has never been a believer, but he can understand the attraction of faith. He moved from youthful atheism to middle aged agnosticism. I suppose on that trajectory, he might end up a believer by the time he dies, even though he would not see that as at all likely.

I quite liked this passage about a commonly repeated theme in modern atheism:

Atheists in morally superior Category One (no God, no fear of death) like to tell us that the lack of a deity should not in any way diminish our sense of wonder in the universe. It may have all seemed both miraculous and user friendly when we imagined God had laid it on especially for us, from the harmony of the snowflake and the complex allusiveness of the passion flower to the spectacular showmanship of a solar eclipse. But if everything still moves without a Prime Mover, why should it be less wonderful? Why should we be children needing the teacher to show us things? The Antarctic penguin, for instance, is just as regal and comic, just as graceful and awkward, whether pre- or post-Darwin. Grow up, and let's examine together the allure of the double helix, the darkling glimmer of deep space, the infinite adjustments of plumage which demonstrate the laws of evolution, and the packed, elusive mechanism of the human brain. Why do we need some God to help us marvel at such things?

We don't. Not really. And yet. If what is out there comes from nothing, if all is unrolling mechanically according to a programme laid down by nobody, and if our perceptions of it are mere micro-movements of biochemical activity, the mere snap and crackle of a few synapses, then what does this sense of wonder amount to? Should we not be a little more suspicious of it? A dung beetle might well have a primitive sense of awe at the size of the mighty dung ball it is rolling. Is this wonder of ours merely a posher version?

You can, of course, extend this line of scepticism about the sense of wonder to every thought or emotion any human ever has, and argue that atheists, if consistent, should really all end up being nihilists. (Wikipedia says "Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.") Most modern atheists don't take this line: they deny that their lack of belief is any detriment to the enjoyment of life; indeed, many argue that lack of belief in God is liberation to really enjoy all that life has to offer. The idea is that they are better off both intellectually and emotionally.

But if you take a merely naturalistic view of the universe, what intrinsic value does any emotion really have? Not much, when you get down to it. In a 1995 Richard Dawkins' interview for a Christian publication, he pretty much acknowledges this:

You would say that love is a spurious purpose?

Well, love is not a purpose, love is an emotion (which I certainly feel) which is another of those properties of brains.

A by-product?

Well, it's probably more than just a by-product. It's probably a very important product for gene survival. Certainly, sexual love would be, and so would parental love and various other sorts of love.

But to say that love is the purpose of life doesn't in any way chime in with the understanding of life which I feel we have achieved.

I will dip my toe into the dangerous world of theodicy now (and before doing so again offer my usual silent prayer that I not be personally tested by any intense experience of tragedy.)

It seems to me that atheists should really all intellectually be Zen Buddhists when it comes to the question of suffering. (Indeed, Susan Blackmore, the UK psychologist pretty popular in skeptic circles, follows Zen philosophy while not signing up fully with the religion.) That is, life is suffering, but it is ultimately all an illusion caused by desire which can be overcome by understanding the true nature of the universe.

But when they get into arguments on Christian style theodicy, it seems few atheists can avoid arguing as if the emotional power of suffering is itself the knock out blow against the idea of a good God. In doing so, aren't they elevating the emotional far above what their beliefs about the nature of the universe mean intellectually?

You could say that when it comes to Christians who suffer a crisis of faith due to (say) the death or suffering of a child, they also are experiencing a disjoint between their previous intellectual understanding of the universe (which accepts that a good God can allow suffering) against the intense pain and sense of injustice suddenly experienced in their own life. But at least in their case, the crisis has started from a belief that the love they have for the child is subset of the true, universal Love that is more than a passing emotion caused as by-product of the selfish gene. The Christian cannot undervalue love, hence the interference with the experience of it now is all the greater challenge.

Both atheists and believers having a faith crisis may feel that some forms of theodicy are like an insult, in that in attempting to intellectually explain their pain, it seems to be excusing or devaluing the depth of their emotional experience. But, without intending any insult or demeaning of their emotions, isn't it true that atheists have an intellectual understanding that downplays the significance of emotion in the big scheme of things anyway?

Maybe the argument is that, by religion giving people hope that love does triumph, it is setting them up for greater sense of loss when the world doesn't seem to pan out that way. I can understand the point, except that it is also starts from the assumption that their atheism is clearly true, and that all sensible people, like children who give up belief in Santa Clause, will ultimately end up at that position. I don't accept that assumption and consider that, at most, if you are not going to believe in God, agnosticism is the only really intellectually defensible alternative. Agnostics tend to let believers be, and some, like Julian Barnes, seem to even allow for a degree of envy.

Ultimately, I agree with the view that few atheists are rigorous in following their beliefs where they should intellectually take them, yet they are not inclined to admit it.

And finally, I see that soon after his book about death was published last year, Julian Barne's wife died. Presumably, this was a sudden and unexpected event, as he gives no indication in his book or in interviews that his wife's health had anything to do with his writing about death. I have to admit to an intrusive, and some would say, morbid interest in how Barnes has coped with this, and whether it has changed his attitudes in any way. As with other examples I can think of (CS Lewis having a shot at theodicy in The Problem of Pain, and then suffering badly when he finally fell in love and his wife promptly died), it certainly encourages the superstition that it is bad luck to talk about such things at all, and hence I should stop right now.

Yawn

I'm feeling a little out of sorts lately. It's probably the spring time return of early morning sun. My body clock seems to have switched to a 6 am wake up, every morning, regardless of what time I go to bed.

The lack of daylight saving in Brisbane and the nearby coast can really play havoc with sleep. Years ago, I was living in a place where a particular wild bird used to start every summer morning with its loud and distinctive call at the very crack of dawn. Seriously, it was not when the sun rose (which is early enough - as you can see from this table, it's 4.45 am for a good few weeks of November and December) but just as soon as there was some vague brightening in the sky. (Actually, that table I just linked to includes listings for "civil twilight start", which might indicate roughly the time the bird started its call. You can see it's 4.19 am in November and December.) The call would continue for about 20 minutes, then stop. I never heard it again during the day.

Can you imagine how annoying it is to be woken for 20 minutes at 4.20 - 4.45 for about 3 months of the year? It was impossible to sleep through. I occasionally took to trying to throw things into the neighbour's tree that it seemed to live in, but it was just out of range. I never identified what the bird was, and now I have forgotten the exact sound it made.

In my books, going to bed after 10 pm is not all that radical an idea. In fact, I have routinely been about a 11 - 12 pm sleeper for about as long as I can remember. If you can sleep in til 6 to 7 am, that's fine. But 4.30 - that's ridiculous.

I don't have too big a problem with birds where I live at the moment. Instead, it's the stupid young adults in the house behind me that like to sit outside at 2 am (or, this last Sunday morning, 5 am) and have loud conversations. Their entertainment area is hidden from view from our bedroom window behind some palms, but they seem to think that if you can't see them you can't hear them. I recently wrote to the parents about it and (to their credit) did get a call of apology for what their sons and friends do. The number of times we have heard them late on a weekend night has decreased a little since then, as has the volume of conversation, but now it seems to be on the way up again. I wish them misery from noisy inconsiderate young people when they have reached my age.

Then, this morning, at 12.45am, someone let a bunch of fireworks off somewhere near the house. It was "cracker" type, perhaps left over from Chinatown, but the only house which may have Chinese neighbours mostly seems to be in darkness. There was no sign of who let them off when I looked at the window. No sound of laughing or anything. I don't think they were aimed at my house in particular, and I heard a neighbour's door opening to see what was going on. Strange.

Fly the not-so-friendly skies

Air India pilots, crew come to blows at 30,000 ft

A mid-air incident that would sound a little improbable in a comedy:

The cabin crew alleged that pilots harassed a 24-year-old female colleague who later filed a molestation complaint against them with the cops after the flight landed in Delhi.

The pilots, on the other hand, accused a male flight purser of misconduct that seriously compromised flight safety...

No party denied that blows and abuses were exchanged as bewildered passengers looked on. Sources said that the female cabin crew member and the co-pilot sustained bruises.....

There were unconfirmed reports that at one stage the cockpit was unmanned, as the crew was busy fighting outside. Things allegedly degenerated to the point where the captain threatened to divert the plane to Karachi, likening the situation, sources said, to a "hijack".

Cockroach lesson

Cockroach inspires heart created by Indian doctor Sujoy Guha - Times Online

This story starts with a very unexpected claim:

A ground-breaking £1,500 artificial heart inspired by the anatomy of the cockroach could revolutionise human cardiac care, scientists in India believe.

But it seems to make sense:

The human heart has four chambers, but only the left ventricle is responsible for building the pressure that moves blood around the body. Depending on one chamber to do the hard work places this part of an artificial heart under enormous strain....

By contrast, his prosthetic heart builds pressure in stages, through five chambers — a model based on the anatomy of a cockroach. He has been working on his prototype heart, which is made from titanium and plastic and runs on batteries that can be recharged from outside the body, since the early 1960s.

The heart of the cockroach has 13 chambers, which build pressure in a series of steps. If one fails, the animal still continues living. “When I was learning my biology I became fascinated by the cockroach,” Dr Guha told The Times. “It is hardy [and] survives extreme conditions. It came into this world before humans and will survive beyond us.”

You learn something every day.

Chronologically confused

This has been a chronologically confusing week. First, discovering that James Bond is much younger than me made me feel old; but by midweek, a TV show which seemed to me to have been off the air for longer than it actually has (Hey Hey It's Saturday) reappeared, except on a Wednesday night. Furthermore, its host looked like he had just stepped out of the deep freeze, with nary a wrinkle to be added to his face over the last 10 years. (I heard a Brisbane radio announcer saying the next day that "he's had work, no doubt about it.") But really, few of the crew looked as further aged as I had imagined they would.

The success of the Hey Hey reunion show is no doubt annoying Catherine Deveny, which is always a good thing. But it clearly was a winner: the comments of the mid to high brow readers of the ABC news website are overwhelmingly positive. An often repeated theme is that it was a pleasure to have back on TV something other than crime shows or reality TV.

I didn't see all of it, but was pleased enough with what I did see. (If, however, they do come back on some sort of permanent basis, they really do have to stop featuring the never-retiring John Farnham.) But overall, I was never too cool for the show.

It was always lightweight, friendly TV made by a fairly quick-witted bunch of people, even if you could tell that you wouldn't want to spend any time with Somers in person. You didn't need to sit down and watch from start to end, but as something on in the background that you could dip into while getting ready to go out somewhere; or on a dateless night, while having a few glasses of wine and a meal of some just cooked new recipe, it was just right.

Yes, here's to the return of daggy TV.

Another giant robot visits Japan

I can't seem to link directly to the story, but have a look at today's Japan Times [sorry, photo seems to have gone from here, see update below] to see a photo of full scale Tetsujin (otherwise known as Gigantor in the West) just finished in Kobe.

Why build a giant robot? The article mentions that the city was devastated by an earthquake in 1995, and:

Residents built the steel statue to express their hopes for the city's revival with the help of the classic comic hero from the 1950s

Of course. Devastating earthquake: build giant robot. Let's hope Indonesia reads the fine print in any offer of assistance from Japan.

UPDATE: Sorry, the Japan Times seems to be making it hard to track down its Tetsujin photo. You can see it instead here at Kyodo News, and I'm sure there will be many more photos to come when it is officially open.

And in further big robot news, I see that South Korea plans to build the biggest giant robot statue of them all, of Voltar, a giant robot with which I am not terribly familiar. Yes, it's a regional Giant Robot Race, because we all understand the prestige that goes with having the biggest robot. Don't we?

Where did evolution go wrong?

Fruit fly sperm makes females do housework after sex

(Then again, maybe the female fruit fly keeps going back to the mate and saying "get out of bed, you haven't mowed the yard yet.")

Your hunch was probably right

Major quakes can weaken seismic faults far away, scientists say

I always thought that it seemed that major earthquakes in distant locations happened in clusters.

There also seems to be an unusually large amount of natural disaster and death and general mayhem going on around Australia at the moment. Maybe time to look for a suitable charity to donate to.

Not your average school fete...

Decapitation: School fete turns violen:

Police in Papua New Guinea are hunting for a notorious criminal after violence at a school fete left eight people dead and a severed head hanging from a power pole.

According to local media, an armed gang attacked villagers gathered at the fete in Kainantu district last Friday, and killed four people.

One report said the gang's leader interrupted a speech by a local magistrate, produced a gun and shot him dead.

The villagers retaliated by killing three of the gang members. One was beheaded and the head hung on a power pole.

Speaking of old...

I noted yesterday (in a report about the Hugh Jackman and the mobile phone incident) that his co-star, Daniel Craig, is only 41. Wikipedia confirms this.

I think I have discovered a new benchmark for deciding you are getting old: when James Bond is significantly younger than yourself.

Cranky old man

Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’ - Times Online

Is it possible for Gore to sound any crankier? A sample:

America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is...

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.”...

Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Restless youth (with some justification)

Gulfnews: Saudi Arabia flogs teenagers after rare riots in eastern region

Saudi Arabia flogged a group of teenagers after a rare riot in the eastern region of the kingdom in which shops and restaurants were ransacked, a witness and local newspapers said on Tuesday.

Human rights activists and liberals condemned Monday's flogging, which Saudi newspapers said happened after groups of young people smashed windows of restaurants and shops in Khobar on Saudi national day last week.

Quite reasonably, the suggestion is that youth has nothing to do in that country:

"This terrible event reflects the need to allow more space for the youth in terms of sport clubs, movie theatres and recreation facilities," said columnist Abdullah Al Alami, who lives in Khobar.

Restaurants, movie theatres and concerts are banned in the Gulf state, while many restaurants and sometimes even shopping malls cater to families only.

Religious police roam streets to make sure no unrelated men and women mix.

"Young males are shunted to the street, with nothing to do and no place to go," former US diplomat John Burgess said in his Saudi blog "Crossroads Arabia".

A strange version of dementia

Younger onset dementia - Health Report

Here's an interesting article which deals with a type of dementia I hadn't heard of before: young onset frontotemporal dementia:

John Hodges: Frontotemporal dementia means it's affecting the frontal lobes predominantly and the main hallmarks of that are personality change and language deficits, which we call aphasia.

Lynne Malcolm: Give me an example of the sort of behaviour that might present in frontotemporal dementia?

John Hodges: Becoming socially inappropriate, saying embarrassing things, the type of things one might think but not say. You know, meeting somebody that you haven't seen for a long time and saying 'oh, you've put on a lot of weight,' or, you know, 'you're very fat since I saw you last time.' Or often rather sexually disinhibited comments, particularly the men, which is usually put down to, oh well, you know, one too many drinks. Because part of this disinhibition is that people often do start to drink too much alcohol. Problems with judgment, often making unwise decisions, becoming very gullible to scams and losing a lot of money, making bad investment choices, these are all symptoms that are related to us by families that we see.

This range of symptoms mean that the cause is often not recognised for some time. Instead, depression is usually first suspected. So what are the early signs?:

John Hodges: Well we don't want an outbreak of everybody with a little bit of an occasionally inappropriate thing being thought to have frontotemporal dementia, but I think a persistent change in character. I mean the one thing the families say about people with frontotemporal dementia is, you know, 'they are no longer the person they used to be. There's been a real change in their empathy and judgment.' So I think that's a very important hallmark.

And it turns out that a difficulty with understanding sarcasm is part of it too.

I wonder to what exact there is a degree of self awareness of the personality changes in the early stages.

Overall, a very unusual disease.

In other dementia news: playing a game in which you stand a good chance of repeated concussion is not a good idea.

Another Andy still alive

Andy Williams accuses Barack Obama of following Marxist theory

The only reason I link to this is because of my surprise that he is still alive. It's the same type of surprise I had last year when Andy Griffiths turned up still looking sprightly too.

Andy's face is looking suspiciously smooth, if that's a recent photo.

Different approachs

Scrubbing the Atmosphere - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com

Apparently, an article in Science notes that research into technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is not getting government funding, but it may be able to make an economical contribution to the problem. Unfortunately, the article itself seems to be behind a paywall. (Is it about time that the science journals made all papers relevant to AGW and ocean acidification free to the public, as their contribution to public education on the topic?)

Another thing: a couple of year ago, I noted that there were a couple of suggestions on the 'net that CO2 from power stations could be turned into solid sodium carbonate. You would not have the problems associated with pumping liquid CO2 into the ground.

Is that idea completely without merit? Is that why we never seem to hear about it?

Not all ice after all

In my absence, I didn't get to mention how surprisingly pretty Iceland in summer looked in last week's Foreign Correspondent. It has grass and meadows? People swim there in summer? Who knew?

A question of maturity

Coming Out in Middle School - NYTimes.com

I haven't yet spotted any conservative comment on this lengthy NYT Magazine article about the increasing phenomena in America of very young adolescents "coming out" during Middle School, so I'll have to make my own.

The article is written by a young gay journalist who, while apparently very supportive of gay youth, does at least admit to some surprise that kids at that age (the article mentions mainly from 10 to 14 year olds) should be so confident of knowing or understanding their sexuality.

Indeed. Apart from the girl who decided she was bisexual at 10, and apparently went on a "date" with a girl soon after, if you read some of the conversation that goes on as a few young folk take the journalist around their Middle School, you get a strong sense of the teenage immaturity on display:

All three were members of the school’s G.S.A. “Even though this is a liberal area,” Alison explained, “it’s still hard to be gay at this school. Most people won’t even come to G.S.A. meetings because they don’t want people other than their close friends to know they’re gay or lesbians, even though straight people also come to meetings. I get called a lesbian all the time even though I’m not.” She continued, “People are totally paranoid.” She suggested that they “come up with some code words on the down low so we can tell you what’s up without anyone knowing what we’re saying!” (They settled on “paw” for gay and “woof” for bisexual.)

Hmm. Already we seem to have a couple of 12 year olds with an unhealthy, gossipy interest in other's sexuality, and resenting the fact that some other students resist the idea of being "out". Let's see how this pans out:

As we walked past the gym, a group of boys came rushing out. Justin pointed to a short, muscular eighth grader in a baseball cap. “Paw!” he said.

Alison looked surprised. “Isn’t he a woof?”

“No, he just thinks he’s a woof,” Justin said.

Amelia looked confused. “What does woof mean again?”

A minute later, they fixed their gaze on a boy sitting against a wall listening to his iPod. “Paw,” Alison told me. “I mean woof!”

“Yeah, he’ll make out with anyone,” Justin confirmed. “Totally bisexual.”

“No, he’s not!” Amelia said, apparently distraught by the news.

“Oh, stop getting all mad just ’cause you like him,” Alison told her. “Everyone knows he’s a woof.”

After pointing out a handful of girls who are “definitely woofs,” Alison turned to me and recalled a recent “lesbian moment” of hers. “I totally had the hots for this girl in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar,’ ” she said with a giggle. “I was, like, ‘Whoa, I’m really attracted to you right now!’ ”

“Jesus was hot in that, too,” Justin offered.

(Odd that the last comment was left in, given the ire it will raise in some Christians.) But further down:

As we came to the end of our tour, we approached a handful of boys sitting in a circle on the pavement eating lunch. “Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!” Justin said, barely able to contain himself. “They’re all woofs.” One boy heard him and turned to us. “What’s a woof?” he asked us.

“Never mind,” Justin said.

“I don’t think he’s really a woof,” Alison told me, referring to a boy in the circle. “I think he’s straight but just confused.”

“He’s not confused,” Justin assured her. “He’s confused,” he said, referring to another boy in the circle. “He doesn’t know what he is. He changes his mind a lot.”

I was certainly confused trying to keep track of it all, but Alison told me not to worry. “We can’t even keep up with who’s gay or bi and who’s into who, and we go to school here!” she said.

Are we supposed to feel good that there is an large support group movement (the GSA - Gay Straight Alliances - which are popping up in many American Middle Schools) for youngsters like this who spend their time assessing every passing person's sexuality? Justin, who I assume we are to believe is a gay boy in need of support, comes across as a pretty offensively immature individual who is happy to engage in exactly the type of labelling that is at the heart of "straight" bullying of "gays."

I'm not alone in finding the article doesn't exactly do some of the kids any favours by quoting them so clearly:

I have no doubt that the author meant to champion their pride and their cause, but along the way, certain passages (and especially quotes) come off as glib and disrespectful of the kids’ views of sexuality, magnifying their immaturity and forwardness for impact and humor.

If you ask me, the goal of preventing bullying (a worthy enough thing of itself) has swung way too far in the other direction if it is encouraging kids in the pre-teen to early teen range to concentrate on their sexuality, of whatever kind, at that age. Effective and strict rules against bullying on any grounds, including sexuality, should not be that hard to teach and enforce, surely, without the need for groups that seemingly encourage pre-pubescent sexuality self-analysis. The article, perhaps inadvertently, supports the concern that many kids simply do not at that age have the maturity to usefully engage in, or act upon, that sort of self analysis.

You should see the bathtub this goes with

Duck! › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Follow that pod

Are Magnetically Levitating 'Sky Pods' the Future of Travel?

Of course it's a good idea: it's futuristic, involves levitation, and means you can say "I'm catching the pod today". Everyone wants to travel by pod, don't they?

Nomination for Nobel prize

I had often wondered who had invented the suitcase with wheels, as it has always seemed to me that he or she deserved fame, riches and the travelling public's eternal gratitude. Now I know: In the bag

Going up

Paul Sheehan makes some very good points which I had not realised about Australia's growing population, and the Rudd government's role in this.

Week end catch up

I haven't posted for a week, but the lure of the internet remained too strong to resist. Here are some stories I would normally have posted about:

* What on earth does it take to get Channel Nine to sack Sam Newman? I'm appalled that there aren't enough people appalled by his recent, absolutely 100% offensive "monkey" comments to achieve the end of his career. What is wrong with the people of Melbourne in particular?

* Slate ran a review of a new book on "Greek Love" and suggested that it contained lessons for the current gay marriage debate:

In short, there was no single "traditional" way to conduct same-sex relationships in ancient Greece. This fact in itself might make us leery of any claims about what a "normal" or "traditional" domestic setup might look like. Love comes in many guises and gets culturally legitimized in many ways, and that has been true since antiquity. Any claim about "the way things have always been" is liable to be false.

Hmm. The only thing overlooked is that same-sex relationships have historically been "culturally legitimized" in "many" ways except marriage. See, it's not just old fuddy duddy conservative Christians saying gay marriage makes no sense, even the pagans were on side with that one.

* Let's not get overly excited about the reports of water on the moon. The quantities are not big:

So far, the water does not appear to be very abundant – a baseball-field-sized swathe of lunar soil might yield only "a nice glass of water", Pieters told New Scientist.

I'm still pinning hopes on underground ice at the poles.

* I did the truly pointless and got involved in a thread about theodicy at the Evolution blog at Science Blogs. How does Science Blogs get to pick its members? Do they have to pass some test of anti-religious sentiment before they can join the group?

* The dust cloud in Brisbane of last night (Saturday) was nearly as unpleasant in smell and sinus irritation as the day time one on Wednesday. I can recall no precedent for these at all for Brisbane. Let's hope they do not become a regular spring feature.

* Yay! Free will seems to not have been experimentally disproved after all. Always did have my doubts about the Libet experiments. (Funnily enough, the atheists calling me an idiot at Evolution blog seemed to find the idea of free will, upon which a lot of theodicy is based, a concept also not worthy of belief. Keep them away from moral philosophy, and don't let really serious scientific materialists sit on juries, I say.)

* Finally, especially for Geoff, I thought the middle section of this comment about transhumanists was very funny:

Transhumanists are like the eccentric uncle of the cognitive science community. Not the sort of eccentric uncle who gets drunk at family parties and makes inappropriate comments about your kid sister (that would be drug reps), but the sort that your disapproving parents thinks is a bit peculiar but is full of fascinating stories and interesting ideas.

They occasionally take themselves too seriously and it's the sort of sci-fi philosophy that has few practical implications but it's enormously good fun and is great for making you re-evaluate your assumptions.

Warning issued: blog to be ignored

Now that I have again warned you all about the (possible) end of the world, I have to go for a while and meet with the time travellers from the future who will help prevent this disaster.

The other possible explanation is that I have to stop wasting time on the internet and get serious about raising money at work.

You may choose the explanation that gives you the most satisfaction. I know which I would prefer.

See you soon. (A week should do it.)

Revisiting micro black holes from the LHC

On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders

I have been meaning to link to this for some time, but keep forgetting.

In August, physicist Rainer Plaga put out a revised version of his paper (see above) in which he raised a possible scenario via which the LHC could create a dangerous mini black hole. Basically, it's the original paper with another couple of appendices to it, responding to criticism by the physicists who had done the earlier papers giving reasons why the LHC could not do that.

It is hard for me as a lay person to read papers at this level and understand their maths and arguments. However, again I have the impression that Plaga is arguing in a reasonable fashion, and appears to be making points which are not receiving much attention.

He is apparently no longer working in astrophysics, and his attitude to criticism, and past changes of opinion, have been noted here.

However, the tone of Plaga's paper and response to its criticisms does not sound unreasonable to this lay reader. I just wish there was someone who could go through all three or four papers relevant to the issue, and tell me if my feeling is accurate.

Given the technical problems with getting the LHC running, my concern about this have been somewhat diminished lately. But I would still like to know the answer, as they are likely to get the thing working correctly some time or other.

Spotted in the newsagent today

As much as I like being around airports, I remain surprised that there is a magazine devoted to them: Airports of the World: Today's Gateways to the World

Why can't I get the New York Times?

For a good few days now, I have not been able to get onto the New York Times website, either via my bloglink, or a Google search, or even links from other websites. Is there any obvious reason why that should be?

A good line

You, Too, Can Write a Bestseller

Dan Brown, who is to history what Rasputin was to anti-coagulant therapy, has a new book out.

Scant attention

Gulfnews: More than 80 civilians killed in Yemen air raid, witnesses say

I've noticed for quite a while, via my visits to Gulf News, that there has been a lot of internal turmoil within Yemen. Now we get this alleged incident:

Details have emerged from a government air strike on a refugee camp in the Yemeni province of Amran on Wednesday, leaving more than 80 civilians dead.

Many of the victims were women and children according to witnesses on the ground.

There has been no government comment yet on the strike. Yemen has entered its fifth week of fighting between the government and the Shiite separatist rebels in the northern provinces.

Yet it seems that the Western mainstream media is paying scant attention. Given that it borders Saudi Arabia, I would have thought we should hear more about it.

Chips cashed in

BBC NEWS | Americas | US 'shelves Europe missile plan'

I thought the idea was that the US would pull back on the missile plan in return for Russia changing its tune on Iran.

Instead, apart from getting entertainment from this oddly graphic metaphor:

Russia's ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, said the move was "a breakthrough" for US-Russian relations, although they were waiting for official confirmation from the US.

"It's like having a decomposing corpse in your flat - and then the mortician comes and takes it away.

"This means we're getting rid of one of those niggling problems which prevented us from doing the real work," he said.

there doesn't seem to be any trade off from Russia.

We'll have to wait and see, but if the world takes it as a sign of US weakness, I wonder if this may be seen as the start of a re-run of the Carter presidency.

Unhelpful thinking

Lightning kills five Cameroon children - Yahoo!7 News

A lightning bolt killed five children at their school in northwest Cameroon as they were preparing to begin their school day, a local doctor said on Wednesday.

Some 58 others were taken to a hospital near the small village of Bamali, which is some 460 kms northwest of the capital, Yaounde....

Several witnesses, including a prominent traditional ruler, said they believed the event had mystical roots. Belief in witchcraft is common in the West African nation, and a thunderbolt is traditionally seen as a way of settling disputes.

Belief that natural disaster can have a supernatural origin in God is one thing; it may be completely mistaken, but if the belief is in a fundamentally good God, surely the most likely result is self examination as to what sin the person or community has committed so as to deserve punishment.

But belief that accidental death and illness is almost always initiated by your enemy or rival is a different kettle of fish entirely: presumably such thinking is only destined to cause never ending cycles of disputes, fighting, bloodshed or torture in societies where the idea is widespread.

To the extent that Christianity does not have a particularly strong biblical basis for belief in the personal control of supernatural powers for evil purposes, its adoption is presumably an advance in such societies.

Of course, excessive belief in possession, which does have a strong basis in scripture, can be harmful in its own way. I would still think it an improvement for society overall to have some unfortunates mistreated for possession rather than a semi-permanent state of fighting between clans, etc.

Jungian thoughts

Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious - NYTimes.com

I was interested in Carl Jung for a time and read a couple of his books. Certainly, some of his ideas are at least culturally significant, and his conflict with Freud (in which an allegedly paranormal - or at least highly co-incidental - event featured) is pretty important in the history of the ways to think about the mind.

Yet, he didn't exactly lead an exemplary life himself, and some of his self reported dreams (a gigantic God defecating on a church for example) tend to just make the eyes roll.

What's more, he became a popular figure amongst new age nuns and others who want to just talk vague spirituality instead of facing the rigours of morality that traditional religion expects. I expect he was popular for a time amongst those at St Mary's in Exile, although I get the impression liberal Catholics have moved on a bit from him.

Anyhow, this is all preamble to referring readers to the long article in the New York Times Magazine about the release of a journal he kept during his (somewhat early) mid life crisis. Apparently it's full of lurid art and accounts of his hallucinations, and reader's reactions will probably depend on whether they are already an acolyte or not.

An interesting read anyway.

As I was saying

Too much radiation for astronauts to make it to Mars - New Scientist

In praise of Lileks

James Lileks is a fine writer. The only thing that stops me visiting him each day is that he is too much of a fine writer; i.e., he writes vast vistas of words and blog pages that are just too time consuming to keep up with.

In any event, this passage, about cleaning up around home, is a good example of his wry style:

And that’s another thing: out go the old colognes. I use the stuff very sparingly, but I’ve been dealing with two fragrances I can’t bear to toss because the containers are so cool, and the fragrances so distinctive. They’re so distinctive I cannot tell whether I like them or not. They have a top note of pepper and musty fireworks. Both came from the Bath & Body Shop; both were quickly discontinued, which makes me suspect they’re either really awful or cause genetic mutations. Back to the fall classic: a dash of Bay Rum slapped on the cheeks after a shave. I need only a straw boater and a celluloid collar; wear that stuff, and people wonder if you’re also wearing spats.

Deadly african lakes

Methane mining could trigger killer gas cloud - New Scientist

Interesting story about the potential for deadly gas outbursts from a Rwandan/Congo lake. The number of people at risk: only a couple of million!

Curious

BBC NEWS | Health | Genes blamed for early first sex

This study claims to have likely identified a significant genetic component behind the age at which teenagers first have sex:

Jane Mendle, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who led the study said: "The association between father's absence and children's sexuality is best explained by genetic influences, rather than by environmental theories alone.

"While there is clearly no such thing as a 'father absence gene', there are genetic contributions to traits in both mums and dads that increase the likelihood of earlier sexual behaviour in their children.

"These include impulsivity, substance use and abuse, argumentativeness and sensation seeking."

If true, how is sex education ever going to adequately address those issues?

Some others question the conclusion of this study:

Simon Blake, from the sexual health charity, Brook Advisory Centre, took issue with the idea that genes were the overriding factor in early sex.

He said: "We know from research that factors associated with young people having first intercourse at a younger age are: lower educational achievements; friends and the media being the main source of information about sex education; socio-economic status; early sexual experience and the earlier age at which girls start their periods.

On that last point, I'm not sure if it is widely accepted that father's presence in the house seems to somehow delay the start of menstruation. I wonder how big a factor that alone may be for accounting for early sex in girls?

Teenagers are very odd animals.

Sure

Weddings? I prefer funerals - they're far more real

Catherine Deveny, who I have previously observed as having the entrenched views typical of the most irritating kind of 15 year old, confirms this again today in her spray against the very concept of marriage.

The best part was this:

Me? No. Never have, never will, never wanted to. Better dead than wed. Wouldn't I like to be princess for a day? No thanks, I'm a princess every day.

Yes, the one with the title "sourest princess on earth".

I have a relative, quite the atheist (well, perhaps agnostic, I'm not certain) who became a civil marriage celebrant. She observed that it was extremely common for a quasi-cynical partner to say in the pre-wedding meeting that marriage didn't mean that much to them, as they had been living together for so long anyway, only to find at the wedding that they were often the ones who went all gooey and emotional.

Complaining about Tiger

A sting in the tail with $49 Tiger Airways flight | Fees | Fine print

There seems to have been a serious outbreak of complaints about Tiger Airways in the last few weeks. The latest, in The Age, does appear to have a strong grounding, at least in terms of a lost item and bad advice.

I have flown Tiger twice now (on return trips) from the Gold Coast. Both times were quite satisfactory, and at extraordinary low cost.

You can't judge its performance in the same way as a major airline like Qantas. At most, it is comparable to Jetstar I suppose, with the same strict cut off times for checking in and (presumably) strong compliance with baggage weight limits.

It is obvious, isn't it, that airlines that offer their cheapest prices on the basis of carry on only are going to be ruthless about checking weights? Same if your check in baggage increases the cost incrementally according to its weight. Anyone who complains about trouble with rearranging luggage at check in to make it comply with the rules are just careless, lazy or incompetent.

I would have also thought it obvious that an airline as small as Tiger which has (I think) the one plane doing the one return route, say, three times a day, is going to have more delays than larger airlines, with presumably longer delays as the day progresses. In my case, the flights have mainly been morning ones, and they were only slightly late.

You have to come to Tiger with very low expectations, because you really are just catching the equivalent of a flying bus with some strict rules. But the price can make it worthwhile.

The slow burn

Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal and Christopher Hitchens in Slate are pretty much on the same wavelength when it comes to pessimism about Iran and the prospects of the West stopping its nuclear advance.

Beautiful but mad

Dezeen - 55 Blair Road by Ong & Ong

It's been a while since we've looked at a fancy bit of house architecture at Dezeen, but here we go.

The re-design of a Singaporean house shop looks beautiful in a blue/white sort of way (even the books on the shelf have been given white covers so as not to ruin the purity of the look.)

But, as is often the case with sexy architect designed interiors, when you look at the layout of the place, there is something just wildly impractical. (In Japan, it will usually be a disastrously steep staircase with no rails and sharp edges.) In this case, it seems to be that every walk from the living area to the kitchen involves going across 'stepping platforms' over the pool, and appears to be open to the sky. This in a country which, if my short visits are a guide, seems to have a thunderstorm about every second day.

Children, or even the ever so slightly tipsy, need not apply. But it's pretty, there's no denying it.

A director of literature writes...

Books will survive, but not on paper - On Line Opinion - 15/9/2009

This section caught my eye from the above article:

For a number of years, the Australia Council has funded online journals and we are viewing with particular interest the rise of the well-written blog. Canadian blogger Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like was picked up by Random House for print publication and subsequently optioned for film. Our own Marieke Hardy was the key speaker at this year's NSW Premier's Book Awards.

A blog was optioned for a film?

Marieke Hardy gets to speak at book awards? Her blog was unreadable.

Big in Japan

Regurgitator hope to savor big-in-Japan feeling again

I didn't even know they were still around. Hoodoo Gurus are doing what sounds like a birthday party gig with them in Japan. Odd.

Gropers beware

Tokyo police launch weeklong anti-groping campaign on trains

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department launched an anti-groping campaign on Monday, with some 200 high school girls handing out fliers and tissues at Ikebukuro station and plain-clothed officers being posted aboard trains on lines which run through Tokyo.

Just in case you are wondering, the handing out of tissues has nothing to do with the private habits of the gropers. Free pocket tissues, for advertising anything from mobile phone deals to English language schools, are commonly handed out in Japanese cities.

Harassing for respect

Gee, people sometimes have the hide to complain about how Australia treats visitors and residents from Asia. Have they read the Jakarta Post recently?:

Dozens of NGO activists dubbing themselves Relawan Ganyang Malaysia (Anti-Malaysia Activists) Tuesday conducted a raid on a street in Central Jakarta in a hunt for Malaysian nationals until the police halted their activities.

Starting from 10 a.m., about 40 activists, sporting red-and-white attire and paraphernalia, stopped pedestrians, motorcyclists and cars in front of their office on Jl. Diponegoro in the plush area of Menteng.

They asked them to show their ID cards or passports to prove they were not Malaysian citizens.

No Malaysian citizens were caught in the raid.

And from another report last week, perhaps referring to the same incident:

Dozens of activists from the Ganyang Malaysia (Crush Malaysia) Volunteers conducted a street sweep against the neighboring country’s citizens on Jl. Diponegoro, in Central Jakarta, on Tuesday...

One of the volunteers, Aji Kusuma, said the group initiated the sweep as they were disappointed with the government's slow response to Malaysia’s repeated claims on Indonesian cultural heritage.

Last Saturday, and the idea is spreading:

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s call for an end to excessive reactions against Malaysian nationals has fallen on deaf ears as a Betawi (Jakarta native ethnic) group reportedly plans to harass citizens of the neighboring country.

Barisan Muda Betawi (BMB) activists said they would conduct an ID check targeting Malaysians in a show of protest against the government’s failure to take tough measures against Malaysia’s disrespect for Indonesia.

And the cause of all this:

The harsh reaction against Malaysia was triggered by last month’s Discovery Channel’s TV advertorial program Enigmatic Malaysia that featured Balinese Pendet dance as a Malaysian art form.

Both the Discovery Channel and the Malaysian Tourism Ministry have apologized over the polemics.

The world is sinking beneath the waves

Credit crunch signals end of The World for Dubai’s multi-billion dollar property deal -Times Online

It's about Dubai; it's about failure. Of course I'll blog about it.

The showerhead of doom

Daily bathroom showers may deliver face full of pathogens, says study

It's not surprising to find pathogens in municipal waters, said Pace. But the CU-Boulder researchers found that some M. avium and related pathogens were clumped together in slimy "biofilms" that clung to the inside of showerheads at more than 100 times the "background" levels of municipal water. "If you are getting a face full of water when you first turn your shower on, that means you are probably getting a particularly high load of Mycobacterium avium, which may not be too healthy," he said.

Just lucky this research wasn't done while Howard Hughes was around to hear it.

Engineers and terrorism

September 11 Reflections: Terror and Technology - Edward Tenner

Edward Tenner reminds us that engineering has figured pretty prominently as the career of choice of several Islamic terrorists.

Well, anyone who has worked with engineers knows that they are often, shall we say, a bit of a worry.

Unintended consequences

Elton John wants to adopt Ukrainian orphan who 'has stolen his heart' - Times Online

The international children’s charity EveryChild yesterday condemned Sir Elton’s plans, claiming that they could result in more youngsters being abandoned. Anna Feuchtwang, its chief executive, said research showed that news of adoptions by wealthy foreigners encouraged mothers to place their children in care in the hope that they would get a better life. “The actions of celebrities such as Madonna, and now possibly Elton John, could be actually increasing the number of children in children’s homes in countries like Ukraine,” she said.

Mind you, any international adoption from countries with serious levels of poverty, even by run-of-the-mill Western parents, runs the risk of initiating abandonment of children. Foreign Correspondent has a story tomorrow night about this happening in Ethiopia , and it goes on in India too.

I'm not sure the answer is clear, although not giving aging pop stars publicity about their adoption intentions would be a good place to start.

Germany gets the "no-nuclear" wobbles

Germany's energy debate: Nuclear power? Yes, maybe | The Economist

As the Greens think Germany is an outstanding example of a nuclear nation vowing to go non-nuclear, it's good to see that its plans look likely to fall into disarray.

How true

Hey, I do believe xkcd is satirising Ender's Game, which I only read a few years ago and came away utterly puzzled as to why it is held in high regard by many science fiction fans. It was, in my view, just awful.

All the popular topics

Sex in space could be the key to the survival of humans | The Japan Times Online

Here's an article made for this blog: it features rats, sex, space flight, and the future of humanity.

I didn't know this:

In 1979, the Cosmos 1129 space mission, also known as Bion 5, was a joint collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was primarily a biomedical program, and on this particular mission male and female rats were sent into space and allowed to do what comes naturally.

Whatever problems there might be with having sex in microgravity, floating in space, the rats managed it. I'm not surprised really. If you've ever dissected a male rat in biology class you'll have noted the size of their testicles: I'm sure that given a sniff of a female, even a rat floating in orbit round our planet would try to get it on.

Two other species were on board Bion 5, by the way: the Japanese quail, and some carrots. But my concern here is with the rats. When they returned to Earth, the female rats were examined. Two had become pregnant, but they did not give birth. Apparently the space-embryos were reabsorbed.

The concern is that humans may not reproduce well under less than 1 G.

Observations

Currently reading: A Wrinkle in Time (last read in primary school - it's even more Christian than I remember), Julian Barne's quasi-memoir Nothing to be Frightened Of, and that book about Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (it can be picked up and put down with gaps of weeks at a time without losing track.)

Currently sick of: politics. I find nothing of interest really going on in Australian Federal politics at the moment. I feel much better about it whenever Kevin Rudd is missing from the TV screens for any length of time. (If he disappeared entirely for 3 months, I am sure his approval ratings would be even higher.) I find Lindsay Tanner the most likeable Labor politician. Tony Abbott has a strange sense of public decency for a serious catholic: the more "s*it" he speaks, the less likeable a significant section of the community will find him.

Current movie viewing plans: see Up. Probably next weekend.

Current problems: work. Too busy, yet I want to check this blog and the internet about 12 times a day.

Something currently feeling vindicated about: my brother who is a semi-regular visitor at St Mary's in Exile in South Brisbane acknowledged it seems to be "losing its way," and attendances are probably down. (The last few sermons I have watched on the internet certainly indicate the place is still in intense navel gazing mode, and is just as dull in its own way as any "traditional" parish with an old priest who re-reads sermons from 30 years ago.)

Learn something

'Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know,' by Alexandra Horowitz - Review - NYTimes.com

You will probably learn something you didn't know about dogs if you read this book review.

A late cartoon

Regrets

Mighty Mouse takes off – thanks to magnets - New Scientist

Sometimes I really wish I had become a scientist:

With the aid of a strong magnetic field, mice have been made to levitate for hours at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The floating rodents could provide a valuable insight into how astronauts are affected by extended spells in zero gravity.

Refer to Peter Singer

Mind Hacks: Brain scanning unborn babies

Scientists can now do MRI on unborn babies. Peter Singer, who now just seems to bang on about social justice, but presumably is still of the view that even newborn babies "do not have the same right to life as a person", should read it.

Ocean acidification update, part whatever..

Some recent studies report:

* subtropical corals showing a net loss of calcium carbonate under decreased ocean pH:

These experimental results provide support for the conclusion that some net calcifying communities could become subject to net dissolution in response to anthropogenic ocean acidification within this century.

* the results of experiments on a couple of planktonic foraminifera (which are a small critter that produces calcium carbonate shells) do not like more CO2:

At the [CO32−] expected for the end of the century, the calcification rates of these two species are projected to be 6 to 13% lower than at present conditions, while the final shell weights are reduced by 20 to 27% for O. universa and by 4 to 6% for G. sacculifer. These results indicate that ocean acidification would impact calcite production by foraminifera and may decrease the calcite flux contribution from these organisms.

* bivalves in Antarctic waters (the first predicted to suffer increased ocean acidification) don't take it well either:

After 5 weeks the shells and thallus of the coralline alga had suffered significant dissolution when compared to controls. Moroever, one of the shells of the bivalve L. elliptica in acidified seawater became so fragile it fragmented into multiple pieces. Our findings indicate that antarctic calcified seafloor macroorganisms, and the communities they comprise, are likely to be the first to experience the cascading impacts of ocean acidification.

* Pteropods, and important fish food, show significantly reduced calcification at pH levels predicted for 2100:

This result supports the concern for the future of pteropods in a high-CO2 world, as well as of those species dependent upon them as a food resource. A decline of their populations would likely cause dramatic changes to the structure, function and services of polar ecosystems.

Remember, boys and girls, reducing CO2 is not just about warming.

All about hoki

An Unlikely Star Among Seafood Causes a Row - NYTimes.com

I knew about orange roughy, but until now, didn't know anything about hoki, despite it being a pretty popular fish in the freezer compartment of the supermarket.

Well, now I know.

Just ridiculous

Astronauts could reach Mars in 2020s, panel says

Apparently, it is being suggested that it may be a worthwhile thing to not bother developing landing vehicles for Mars, but just send a crew to orbit around the planet and get close to its moons.

(Or alternatively, go and doodle around an asteroid.)

Is there no limit to the silliness of suggestions that are being put up at the moment?

Using current rockets, a manned trip to Mars is going to be long and tedious, as well as dangerous due to the unresolved issue of how to provide adequate protection from radiation. That you would even think about doing it just to provide more pictures from orbit is about the most ridiculous idea I have ever heard.

If you aren't going to land on the planet, moon or asteroid, you just wouldn't seriously contemplate it.

Naughty names

Teachers believe Callum, Connor and Jack are the naughtiest boys in class - Telegraph

Researchers also found that teachers keep a close eye on those called Chelsea, Brandon, Charlie, Courtney and Chardonnay.

A study of 3,000 school teachers formulated the 'Teachers Pet and Pest Name Chart' which showed that more than a third of teachers expect children with certain names to be more trouble than others.

Just lucky I didn't go ahead with plans to name my daughter Pinot Gris, then.

AIDS and belief in Africa, and related notes

The New Atlantis - AIDS Relief and Moral Myopia

This article is a great read that I can't recommend highly enough. It paints a very convincing picture of how the typical African "world view" of the importance of the spiritual world, and the nature of sexual relationships, means that Western faith in the condom as the solution to the spread of AIDS just doesn't work.

In fact - oh horror, it's just like the Catholic Church likes to say - behavioural and psycho/social change in that continent is ultimately the more important issue.

The article is also interesting in that it seems to suggest that the Pentecostal Churches, which psychologically are more "in tune" with traditional African belief in witchcraft and routine miracles, is not helping much.

Anyone interested can go back and look at my earlier lengthy post prompted by criticism of the Pope's comments on Africa and AIDS earlier this year.

In another AIDs story of interest, The Age ran a long article about a nun in New Guinea who has had a major role in limiting HIV spread in that country. (And she makes it clear she has no problem with condom use for the infected.)

Finally, in Australia the number of new HIV infections every year is still roughly 1,000. 64% of that are men who have sex with men. Obviously, warnings are not being heeded.

Mind you, on the heterosexual side of the ledger, the same article points out that there are 58,000 new cases of Chlamydia annually, mostly in the young, which is a number heading in the wrong direction. Condoms don't appear to be too popular in the youth demographic, then, despite sex education presumably being more widespread and detailed than ever before.

On pointless challenges

How can I resist commenting on the misfortunes of Jessica Watson, the 16 year old who wants to be the youngest person to sail around the world, but has trouble avoiding large freighters before her boat even gets to the (metaphoric) corner of the block?

The public reaction is interesting. Apart from the armchair sailors debating maritime right of way (kind of an academic point if your boat starts sinking, I would have thought,) the comments in the Courier Mail (see at the end of the above link) are split between those who think:

a. she's clearly too young and inexperienced, and what the heck are her parents doing encouraging her to do this anyway; and

b. she's an inspiration, living her dream, seizing the day, full of courage, etc, and all you naysayers should be ashamed.

I note that within category b is one prominent politician:

Premier Anna Bligh urged Jessica to continue her "big dream" once she has recovered from the accident.

Ms Bligh said Jessica was "a determined young woman" who would almost certainly continue her quest.

"There's been a lot of discussion about whether this young woman is up to it; I think she is".

One suspects that there's a bit of "Girls can do anything" motivation there that would not be present if she were a he.

I can't say that I have spotted any comment that reflects my position, which is:

1. People, at least if they are adults, should be free to set themselves whatever pointless personal challenges (PPCs) they want to in life and attempt them. (Subject to their not expecting inordinately large public costs to be incurred in rescue services or medical treatment.)

2. PPCs are, however, indeed pointless.*

3. The undertaking of a PPC is therefore rarely worthy of admiration. Maybe some are technically interesting, but not admirable. "Following your dream" is rather overstated as a sensible motivation in life.

4. Indeed, being the youngest by a few months or a year to achieve something inherently dangerous and which has been done before by umpteen others is probably the most pointless form of PPC possible.

Sorry, but Jessica has negative admiration in this corner of the woods. As for her parents - I find it hard to fathom their mindset. If she comes to harm, I guess they'll run the "died while doing something she loved" line.

* To clarify: personal challenges which involve an actual or potential income, such as striving for sporting excellence, are not entirely pointless. Nor is being the first person to explore a corner of the earth - who knows what you may find. But being the first to do something that has already been done, just in a more difficult way; that's pointless.

Busy, but someone book me a cruise

Cruises to Alaska, Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico and the world on Holland America, one of the best cruise lines

Is it just my ignorance, or are the prices for the cruises from this company - which is advertising heavily on the internet at the moment - unusually good value?

How generous

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Saudi cleric urges prayer reform

A leading Saudi cleric has called on Muslims not to pray for the destruction of unbelievers.

A supplication to that effect is often reiterated at the end of every Friday prayer in Arab countries, something critics say can radicalise youth...

It is very common for the Friday prayer in Arab societies to end with the Imam calling for the destruction of the "kuffar", the un-believers, to which the worshippers respond "Amen".