Welcome back Annabel

I'm not sure why Annabel Crabb was missing from Fairfax for a month or two, but it's good to have her back. In today's column:

Rudd likes to portray his policies as tougher than they really are because, like most Labor MPs who were around in 2001, he clearly remembers the Atomic Wedgie that he and his colleagues copped back then over immigration.

His buttocks now flinch reflexively every time the subject comes up, which is why he keeps saying things like, "I make no apologies for my staring-eyed, extremist, hardline, definitely not soft or anything ideas about illegal immigrants."

And why he persists with describing his policy approach as "humane toughness", a deeply Ruddesque contradiction in terms that fits well with his scores policy (Responsible Drunkenness) and his fiscal policy (Conservative Recklessness).

Listen to your fellow doctors

Womb transplants 'within two years' - Science, News - The Independent

This is just silly:

British scientists believe they will be able to carry out the first-ever successful womb transplant within two years. They have worked out how to transplant a womb with a good blood supply which could mean it lasts long enough to carry a pregnancy to term.

Um, do we know how the immunosuppressants affect babies? (Maybe we do: I suppose it is possible some young women on them have fallen pregnant.)

But even so, Smith, who has been practising this on rabbits, notes:

...there was little interest in the studies in the medical profession but the demand from patients was huge. He said: "There's a lot of dismissal in the profession in terms of this being a step too far in fertility management. But for a woman who is desperate for a baby, this is incredibly important."

Mr Smith, who presented his findings at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Atlanta, Georgia, said the womb would only stay in place until the woman had had the children she wanted. "The plan is that once a woman has had her children, the uterus comes out and she can come off immunosuppressants."

Mr (I assume it should be "Dr") Smith should spend more time telling patients to be more realistic and that medical science can't appropriately remedy all of life's misfortunes, rather than working on disposable uteri.

Life is simpler here

Get set for next year's overhaul of official kanji | The Japan Times Online

You get a good idea of the complexity of Japanese (and, I guess, Chinese) language when you read this article about a forthcoming government revision of "official" kanji next year. For example:

Vigorous debate about the list has taken place in committee meetings in the past four years. Japanese language educators have objected in vain to inclusion of such adult-themed kanji as 淫 (IN, lewd), 艶 (EN, charming, voluptuous) and 賭, (ka-keru, gamble). Two kanji much requested in a public-comment forum last spring were 鷹 (taka, hawk) and 柿 (kaki, persimmon), but the panel has decided not to include these. It has also elected not to axe forum participants’ least-popular kanji — 鬱 (UTSU, melancholy), written with an eye-popping 29 strokes.

Nearer but poorer

400,000 former Anglicans worldwide seek immediate unity with Rome

This seems all very complicated, this creation of a special branch of Catholicism to accommodate the conservative Anglicans who have lost the fight in their own church:

The Pope has made it significantly more attractive for Anglicans to move over this time by offering a universal solution that allows them to retain crucial aspects of their identity and to set up seminaries that will, presumably, train married men for the Catholic priesthood. But any serving clergyman would face a marked loss of income. A job as a clergyman in the Church of England comes with a stipend of £22,250 and free accommodation. Catholic priests earn about £8,000, paid by their parish and topped up by a diocese where the parish cannot afford even that.

That sounds a very small amount of money for a Catholic priest. Mind you, I have only the vaguest idea of how it all works in Australia. It's not something I have ever asked a priest about.

I have been told, however, that in Vietnam, being a priest can be quite a good earner, as the parishioners believe it is important to be very generous to their priests. (My source, himself a Vietnamese catholic, indicated that they usually are not shy about having girlfriends too.)

But back to the issue of married priests: if ever there was a simple action that could make the priesthood a much more attractive option, it would be for the Pope to allow all priests to marry. This would be unassailable in terms of Biblical prohibition, almost certainly lead to less situations of sexual abuse, and mean a much less lonely life for most priests. (I suspect that, at least from their middle age onwards, it may be the companionship of married and family life that priests regret missing more than the sexual side.) It is a much less controversial issue than women's ordination (and, of course, gay marriage), as it is reverting to a state the Church formerly accepted, rather than a novel invention.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has a compromise position: either get ordained single and commit to celibacy, or marry first and then get ordained. However, being ordained and married means no hope of being a bishop. But how many priests join for career progression anyway?

The Orthodox position sounds tough for those who fall in love after a "celibate" ordination, but at least it has the virtue of not encouraging priests to hang around single bars on a Friday night.

I reckon it's a good idea, with one additional benefit that it may well result in the average age of new priests being a bit older, but probably more mature, and less likely to drop out later.

Yes, the sooner the Pope goes Orthodox on this issue the better.

UPDATE: one of the reasons (I suspect) that the Church doesn't feel much pressure about this issue might be because it is obviously part and parcel of "progressive" Catholics' set of beliefs about sexuality. Of course if you want your neighbour's gay son to be able to have a wedding in the Church you are not going to have an issue with a priest having a wife. (Indeed, you would probably welcome your priest and his new boyfriend over for dinner too.) So, it's easy to dismiss it as part of a progressive agenda that just doesn't "get it".

Unfortunately, strong conservatives are inherently unlikely to have any reforming bent at all when it comes to the Church. They like things just the way there are (or were, in their childhood) thank you very much.

So, who are the Catholics who could effectively press for this reform? That is the problem.

An interesting Hitchens

Why on earth would we wait to disarm Iran? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Who cares?

US scientist David Nozette charged with trying to sell secrets to Israel | csmonitor.com

Against cooling

Has global cooling begun? | csmonitor.com

Warming up the Arctic

Arctic Lake Sediments Show Warming, Unique Ecological Changes In Recent Decades

I didn't know this:

....recent warming around the Arctic is overriding a cooling trend caused by Earth's periodic wobble. Earth is now about 0.6 million miles further from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was in 1 B.C. -- a trend that has caused overall cooling in the Arctic until recently.

The study indicates marked increased warming since 1950. Although, I have to say, didn't we know that already from thermometers?

Real reductions

Club Troppo - It’s not easy being green

Ken Parish makes good points in his post on the uselessness of the Rudd government's ETS (with or without Liberal amendments.)

He also mentions an obvious way to make real CO2 reductions, by a rapid increase in natural gas for electricity generation.

Like Ken, I am not at all sure why this gets so little consideration as a policy measure. Is the ETS meant to make it happen anyway? It doesn't seem so.

Of course, there is also the issue of Labor's ban on nuclear power, which is mentioned in comments.

If Labor wants to be serious about CO2, they have to start debating nuclear. But instead, they'll probably ride the wave of sentiment that "at least they are doing something", which probably means they are actually quite a danger to real progress on the issue.

A good Henderson

Judges and juries called it as they saw it

This is a good Gerard Henderson column today. I wish I could find the Phillip Adams 2006 column he refers to.

Coral confusion

This seems like an important bit of research. Not all corals appear to stop calcifying with lower pH, and it would seem that the precise mechanisms for calcification are not as well understood as you might expect.

This paper reports that it would appear that what is crucial for good coral calcification (at least in one species) is bicarbonate concentration:

The corals responded strongly to variation in bicarbonate concentration, but not consistently to carbonate concentration, aragonite saturation state or pH. Corals calcified at normal or elevated rates under low pH (7.6 to 7.8) when the seawater bicarbonate concentrations were above 1800 μM. Conversely, corals incubated at normal pH had low calcification rates if the bicarbonate concentration was lowered. These results demonstrate that coral responses to ocean acidification are more diverse than currently thought, and question the reliability of using carbonate concentration or aragonite saturation state as the sole predictor of the effects of ocean acidification on coral calcification.

What is not explained is whether lower ocean pH has any consistent effect on bicarbonate concentration in shallow waters. It would appear from here that dissolved CO2 result in increased bicarbonate. However, I'm sure there have been lab based coral studies where they bubbled CO2 through the water and the coral calcified less. So what was the reason for that?

So: this may (or may not) represent relatively good news for the future of coral. But, let's wait for more news and analysis.

Bad algae

Killer algae a key player in mass extinctions

Today, just about anywhere there is water, there can be toxic algae. The microscopic plants usually exist in small concentrations, but a sudden warming in the water or an injection of dust or sediment from land can trigger a bloom that kills thousands of fish, poisons shellfish, or even humans.

James Castle and John Rodgers of Clemson University think the same thing happened during the five largest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Each time a large die off occurred, they found a spike in the number of fossil algae mats called stromatolites strewn around the planet....

"If you go through theories of mass extinctions, there are always some unanswered questions," Castle said. "For example, an impact - how does that cause species to go extinct? Is it climate change, dust in the atmosphere? It's probably not going to kill off all these species on its own."

But as the nutrient-rich fallout from the disaster lands in the water, it becomes food for algae. They explode in population, releasing chemicals that can act as anything from skin irritants to potent neurotoxins. Plants on land can pick up the compounds in their roots, and pass them on to herbivorous animals.

Some CO2 skeptics like to argue that it is a plant food and that a lush world will follow from higher concentrations. But as I have suggested before, if it makes toxic algal more likely, that is not going to be a good thing.

Back to basics

Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming

While my position is to concentrate on ocean acidification as sufficient reason to urgently seek a reduction in CO2, I have been complaining for some time that the popular skeptical pundits against global warming seem to show no interest at all in applying any degree of skepticism to the arguments that they think bolster their position.

So it's worthwhile going back to basics, and the always readable Skeptical Science blog has an excellent post (see above) on why it is known that CO2 is causing warming.

Handy information

Physicists Calculate Number of Parallel Universes

In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.

"Handy for what?" you might ask. I don't know - I'm working on that.

Pet peeve noted - please ignore if offended by the trivial

As I'm posting on the trivial today, and a blog is the ideal place to get a pet peeve that's bothered you for years off your chest, I note as follows.

For the first time in many years, I just had a strawberry milkshake (with malt.) The malt cost 50 cents extra, which must make it one of the more precious foodstuffs available at a milk bar, but that's not the peeve.

It's the fact that, after whisking the shake, the guy looked at the level in the container, and then topped it up with a bit more, unshaken, plain milk. Then it was served it to me.

I had forgotten about this fairly widespread and (to my mind) very irritating practice that I used to note when I was a more regular milkshake consumer. (We're talking university days now.)

I don't want my strawberry flavoured milk diluted at the last minute by the addition of more plain milk. It also doesn't do much for the frothy head either. If it is to be done at all (and it should not need to be if the original estimate was better) it should at the very least be put it back on the machine. But those who top up in this way never do.

I'm already planning my cranky old man tactic of just walking away when I see this done. (Unless, of course, I have already paid for it.)

A manly question

Nothing much to note in this interview with actor Robert Carlyle, except for the fact that he swears a lot and makes this observation about filming in deserts:

We were shooting in New Mexico in 117-degree heat for a week. You'd have to put sunblock up your nose and your ears because of the bounce. Transformers shot there before us, and one of the crew guys was going commando in shorts. He burnt his tackle badly. So we were very aware.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I have often wondered about how, since it made its appearance in Seinfeld (and, I think, Friends,) this "going commando" joke would appear to mean that some men actually do this as an occasional option.

Yet, it has never, in my entire life, occurred to me that not wearing underwear for the day would somehow make sense. Boxers instead of a more snug fit: well, I can see the point of that. I'll even allow for the logic of beach nudists who don't like sand in their swimsuit. But to wear your normal clothes without underpants? Why would any man since the invention of smooth woven cloth ever think that was a good idea?

Weekend report

This weekend:

* Friday night: while channel surfing, I once again came in late to watching Love Actually. (I have never seen the movie in one sitting; I've watched bits and pieces over the years and figure I must have seen about 90% of it by now.)

I am curious to see it all because, based on partial viewings, it has always seemed an awful, awful film, displaying less emotional realism about love and romance than the first Shrek movie. Yet, it has its defenders, including friend and regular reader here Geoff.

Well, sorry Geoff, but after my longest stretch of viewing in one sitting, my opinion against it has well and truly solidified. I accept it may not be appropriate to judge it as a realistic film (apart from the ludicrous Hugh Grant as British PM, he appears to do the job from home in his spare time with a staff of about 3.) But, even allowing for 2 minutes of convincing crying from Emma Thompson, it just doesn't even ring true emotionally (for me, of course.) I actually find some of the plotlines rather creepy (oh, sorry, I have accidentally slipped into Hugh Grant talk), the use of the swelling orchestral score to make some scenes more "important" to be really irritating, and nothing in the film (unless it is in the 10% I still haven't seen) makes me laugh.

But don't worry, when appointed benevolent dictator, I will add aversion therapy to adjust errant opinions of this film to Medicare coverage. It is, after all, important that all people think like me.

* Sunday night: Speaking of partially watched movies, I saw some of Speed Racer. What an obvious dud of a film. How on earth was Lego ever convinced that there would be a market for a line of sets built around this film? (They were all heavily discounted after the box office failure.)

As many critics correctly noted, it is not possible to make car racing exciting when there are no laws of physics involved. Its directorial tricks were repeated endlessly, and it contains as much tension as watching an electric car racing set being played by a couple of kids for 100 minutes. Less, possibly.

* Sunday: Completing a movie theme post, the family went to Warner Brother's Movieworld for the first time yesterday.

It was an good enough day that the kids enjoyed, but two rides showed technical faults, and one needed some general cleaning up. One comedy routine was clearly in need of a re-write (no one watching laughed at any of the jokes), and the "character street parade" is embarrassingly short. (There are more characters from the Warner world than this, surely.)

As I suspected, if you have spent time in Disney theme parks, and seen the extraordinary commitment to perfection that they show, other theme parks suffer in comparison. It makes them just seem to not be trying hard enough.

Further proof of no credibility in Nobel Peace prize

A-ha to break up after 25 years

So, a band you assumed had broken up about 20 years ago was still around.

But what about this:

...after the commercial failure of 1993's Memorial Beach, the band went on hiatus, only reforming after being invited to play the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 1998.

Who's playing the 2009 concert...Cheap Trick?

Useful

Just How Sensitive Is Earth's Climate to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide?: Scientific American

This article gives a good explanation of a couple of recent studies relevant to the issue of climate sensitivity to CO2.

It is not encouraging.

Feed the boy sheep

Meat and milk stop anaemia

Oddly, it would appear that in New Zealand at least, it is not uncommon for toddlers to be deficient in iron:

A survey carried out by Dr Elaine Ferguson at the University of Otago showed that up to 1 in 3 toddlers have low iron levels. Although severe iron deficiency is rare, these high levels of iron depletion are a concern because they increase a child’s risk of developing iron deficiency anaemia which can have serious consequences.

In a country full of delicious lamb, which most children seem to like a lot, this should not be happening.

Boat problems

Ken Parish from the far from right wing Club Troppo writes well about the problem of unauthorised immigrants arriving by boat. Welcome to the real world of hard decisions, Kevin Rudd.

The power of TV

The grisly truth about CSI degrees | Education | The Guardian

I knew lots of people want to work in forensics now, but this is ridiculous:

Let's call it the CSI Effect: thanks to the uncontrolled proliferation of cop shows focusing on forensic investigation, including Bones, Silent Witness, CSI and its Miami and New York spin-offs, the number of degree courses in forensic science being offered in the UK has rocketed, from just two in 1990 to 285 this year.

I like the last line in this final paragraph of the report:

The biggest problem, however, is that crime has not kept pace with the explosion in TV detective shows. The government-owned Forensic Science Service currently finds 1,300 scientists sufficient for its crime-solving needs. The UK's largest private provider, LGC Forensics, employs 500 people. In 2008 alone, 1,667 students embarked on forensic science degree courses. In order to ensure there are enough jobs to go round, more than half of them will have to retrain as serial killers.

I must admit, I saw the "classic" version of CSI recently and was sufficiently amused that I might start watching it again, but only if the station doesn't stuff around with the timeslot, as is their wont.

And when will there be the long awaited episode in which the architects who built the Las Vegas CSI lab are sued for negligence for failing to provide adequate ceiling lights. It must be the only workplace in the world where they have to use torches inside every day.

Important robot news

Astro Boy Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

Early reviews for Astro Boy are largely positive.

But why on earth is it being released outside of school holidays in Australia?

Vaccination silliness

Slate runs a useful article on how the far Left and far Right both circle around and bump into each other when it comes to silly reasons to distrust vaccination. Some of the history is interesting:

Indeed, there's nothing more universal than fear of shots. "I just think there are people wired that way," says Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic. "They operate on the basis of emotion and anecdote—what they read at the University of Google—rather than a fact-based or data-driven point of view." In the 19^th century, people thought the cowpox vaccine would cause pieces of cow to grow out of their arms. Canadian medical giant William Osler was widely mocked when he urged British troops at the beginning of World War I to get inoculated against typhoid fever. The French government stopped offering vaccinations for hepatitis B in schools in 1998 while it investigated the relationship between shots and multiple sclerosis. (Subsequent studies found no causation.)

As for some of the loopier bits of paranoia about the swine flu:

Several Web sites have suggested that H1N1 is a vehicle for the government to implant microchips in our bodies to detect "bio-threats." At least one site posits that the vaccine contains a "Bible Code" connecting swine flu to prophesies in the Book of Revelation.

It's all clear to me now.

UPDATE: Well, well. One of the vaccination doubters is none other than smug know-it-all atheist and alleged comedian Bill Maher. What a maroon.

It's gold, gold, gold for Australia

Mungo MacCallum: Four decades in the fourth estate | The Jakarta Post

Mungo was in Bali recently, sharing this with out Indonesian neighbours:

I’ve known, personally, 12 Australian prime ministers and I can only say that three of them were chaste. The rest were adulterers of Olympic standards.

Of course, I assume John Howard was amongst the chaste, although there were scurrilous rumours put around about him at one time. Who would the other two be (especially if he is not counting Rudd as "personally known")?

Drinking the English way

Binge drinking spreads to Italy | csmonitor.com

It's interesting to note how the Italians are blaming British and American tourists for spreading the contagion of youthful drinking to excess.

The Italian drinking age is, according the article, currently 16 (as it is in several European countries, although it seems there is a widespread movement to increase it). European countries have managed to live with that for some years. In Japan, the drinking age is 20, and although they are not everywhere, beer vending machines can be found in some places which anyone can access. Teenage drinking does not seem to be a significant problem.

In Australia, I've noticed the TV advertising against parents allowing their teenagers to start having a drink at home, on the basis that the gradual introduction of alcohol to immature teenage brains is now believed to be dangerous, according to recent research.

It's all a pretty fascinating area, this issue of drinking and culture.

UPDATE: By the way, that link to the Wikipedia entry on drinking ages around the world contains lots of interesting bits. In Denmark, for example, it says "There is no drinking age, only a purchase age, and an adult can buy alcohol for a minor. By tradition youths are privately allowed to drink alcohol after their confirmation" (That's one way to increase youth participation in church: put on a keg after the confirmation ceremony.)

Even more fun is the detail about UK drinking laws (assuming it is correct):

Children under 5 must not be given alcohol unless under medical supervision or in an emergency (Children and Young Persons Act 1933, Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act 1937).^[50][51]. However, children aged 5 and over may legally consume alcohol in their own home or someone else's as long as they are under the supervision of an adult.

Well it's good to know that the fine olde English tradition of giving children gin in the home can continue to this day!

Unexpected medical news

Shingles increases risk of stroke by a third - The Independent

The risk is significantly greater when the infection, caused by the chickenpox virus, involves the eyes.

Shingles affecting the eyes sounds mighty unpleasant, even without being associated with an increased stroke risk.

Important news from Dubai

gulfnews : Man cleared of groping woman in Dubai beach

The Gulf News website has had a makeover, and now looks very, um, Western and spiffy, but don't worry, all of the important news is still given extensive coverage. (See above.)

Interestingly, to be acquitted, it only took a strong denial from the accused, and a mere pointing out of witnesses who would support him:

Prosecutors accused I.A. of swimming behind the 27-year-old Filipina, B.B., into the deep waters where he touched her posterior.

"I didn't do that… I have witnesses who can counter her claims," he said in court earlier.

The accused pointed out at two defence witnesses whom he had brought to court to testify his claim. The judge refused to hear them saying: "It is not needed."

Such procedures could no doubt speed up trials in courts in Australia.

Obviously *

Wildlife expert claims gorilla dung is critical to containing climate change

* sarcasm

Nuisance design students

Dezeen - Nuisance Machines by Andrew Friend

While I am sure there have been a million wacky ideas created by design students trying to come up with something original, there is an excellent chance that this is the silliest design student conceit ever. Congratulations Mr Friend!

Please follow the link. It is bound to amuse.

Oh dear...(or should it be "Arrggh"?)

Arrggh. My favourite cosmologist/physicist Frank Tipler continues his global warming skepticism in articles appearing in (of all places) Men's News Daily.

This recent article is just ridiculous, and indicates he should also write for that esteemed website of all things Carbon and green, CO2 Science, which promotes the philosophy that too much CO2 could never be enough.

Ah well, he is getting old after all. Hasn't everyone noticed that CO2 climate skepticism attracts people primarily on the far side of 50, and the degree of silliness such skeptics are willing to promote increases proportionately with increasing age? Add to age a conservative religious belief (as I think Tipler shares), and you have the perfect storm for an impervious skepticism that is, oddly, willing to risk the future wellbeing of the grandchildren they probably already have.

The only thing that consoles me is that, according to Tipler's own ideas, there is another universe nearby in which there is an alter-Tipler who is quite reasonable about climate science.

You read it here first (well, before this anyway)

Essay - The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate - NYTimes.com

Hey. For some reason the New York Times has an essay on the idea the future itself is interfering with the start up of the LHC.

Meh, you read about it here in February 2008.

Update: in another case of the media out-of-the-blue dealing with the big questions, there was a reasonable review of the idea of the multiverse in The Guardian recently.

Suicide champion

Why do so many Greenlanders kill themselves? - Slate Magazine

Interesting article on Greenland and the mystery of how it came to be (by far) the country with the highest suicide rate in the world. From an Australian perspective, it's interesting to see the role of welfare in indigenous community getting a mention:

It's true that the island's Inuit, who make up 88 percent of Greenland's population, suffer from the same rampant alcoholism that plagues many North American indigenous groups. On one evening in August, I stood in the checkout line at Nuuk's only supermarket and watched an obviously intoxicated man sing "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" to a display of Haribo gummi bears. A few minutes later, a woman tried to pocket a bottle of wine. Security nabbed her. Later, at the police station, where the woman sat on a wooden bench, laughing hysterically and giving spirited high-fives, a police officer blamed alcohol for Nuuk's three biggest public-safety problems: unsupervised children wandering the streets, theft, and people shooting themselves or one another. "Ninety five percent of our cases involve drinking in some way," he said.

Peter Bjerregaard from Denmark's National Institute of Public Health has noted that while Greenland's suicide problem began in 1970, almost all the deaths involved people born after 1950—the same year that Greenland began its transformation from remote colony to welfare state, as the Danes resettled residents to give them modern services and tuberculosis inoculations. Hicks, the Canadian researcher, said the correlation is present in other Inuit societies as well.

"It happened first in Alaska, then Greenland, and finally in Canada's Eastern Arctic," he told me. "It's not the people who were coerced into the communities as adults who began to exhibit elevated rates of suicidal behavior—it was their children, the first generation to grow up in the towns."

The lesson may be that you have to hunt to get your food, your days are too busy to get depressed. If you then move (with the encouragement of government to allow better delivery of services) to a town or mission, you become more welfare dependent and (especially for the young) bored and hopeless for the future.

As it is difficult to encourage aborigines to go back to being hunter/gatherers in the harsh Australian outback, the important thing in the communities would be to make sure there is the hope of social mobility for the young. Or, at the very least, meaningful, daily employment.

Why Australia is slow to go nuclear

Going fission

Here's a long article in The Age looking at why Australia is very, very slow to consider nuclear seriously. I didn't know this:

A poll conducted this year by the Uranium Information Centre found the 40 to 55 years age group most trenchantly opposed to nuclear power.

So, it's my own demographic which is the stupidest. How encouraging.

Nice TV

Just a quick note to observe that the 3 part nature documentary series "Ganges", which started last night on the ABC, was very spectacular. I see that it has taken a couple of years to make it to screen here, which is a pity.

I know this is a bit of silly prejudice, but I am always kind of surprised when India shows up on documentaries as having a lot of open space and natural beauty. You get so much concentration on the crowded cities on TV, you kind of expect the whole country to look like one giant stretch of humanity from end to end.

Sunday night ABC nature documentaries have become a family favourite at my house.

A new type of controversy at the LHC

Physicist working at CERN arrested : Nature News

This news broke last week, but I wasn't sure if the guy arrested was working on the LHC or not. Seems he was:

He is believed to be a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) who, since 2003, has been performing data analysis on one of four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

French antiterrorism police arrested the 32-year-old researcher together with his 25-year-old brother. The duo is suspected of passing along information about possible terrorism targets inside France to members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — the North African wing of al-Qaeda.

There is no evidence that his work at CERN is connected to terrorism, according to laboratory spokesman James Gillies. All work at the laboratory is published in the open domain and is not military in nature, said a CERN statement.

Hey, maybe some al-Qaeda operative reads my blog and thinks mini black holes from the LHC have potential as a terrorist weapon. (Well, I did refer once or twice to the fact that some physicists talk of evaporating black holes having similar power to atomic bombs.)

It is also possible that my fretting about mini black holes contributed to a premature loss of virginity (this even happened in my own home town!).

Of course, given the number of readers this blog maintains, it's just as likely that I caused the election of Pope Benedict.

Pipe dreams

Technology Review: Carbon Capture Remains Elusive

Technology Review usually seems a wildly optimistic magazine, so when it has an article expressing doubts about CO2 sequestration, we should take note. Here are some reasons why government plans to rely heavily on this technology should be taken with a bucket of salt:

One of the geological challenges faced by Duke Energy and others investigating in CCS is ensuring that the pressure inside reservoirs deep beneath the surface of the earth doesn't climb too high as carbon dioxide is injected. "There are only certain safe levels that you can raise the pressure to before you get into issues of seismicity," Herzog says....

As I suspected, finding the right places to pump it in is the biggest problem, even in geologically diverse North America:

...one of the biggest remaining questions is whether sufficient reservoirs exist to store all of the carbon dioxide that may be captured.

The best-studied storage deposits are former oil and gas reservoirs capped by layers of nonporous rock that kept the petrochemicals locked deep underground for millions of years. Yet of an estimated 3,947 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide storage capacity under the U.S., only 1 percent consists of depleted natural gas and oil reservoirs. The vast majority of capacity--3,630 gigatonnes--consists of deep saline formations that have received less scrutiny.

"We're at the place where there is no problem doing millions of tonnes a year, but to solve the climate problem we need to do billons of tonnes or gigatonnes a year, and at that scale, storage becomes a real issue," Herzog says.

The Greens Senator Christine Milne was on Radio National this morning complaining that the Rudd government's plan relies almost exclusively on CO2 sequestration coming on line in (I think) 2030, and it providing the actual reduction in greenhouse gases that Australia makes. Before that, it's all overseas permits.

Her criticism is very valid, but on the other hand the Green's solution (that Australia is capable of making a rapid changeover to run purely on renewable energy) seems wildly off the mark too. (Especially if you read Barry Brook's blog.)

Why is it impossible at the moment to find any political party in Australia that actually makes sense on CO2?

Encouraging

Better to be fat at 40 than thin: study | The Japan Times Online

Good news if you are slightly overweight. (Emphasis on slightly.)

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.