Apparitions, UFO's, belief, etc.

Significant numbers of Irish Catholics are getting excited by an alleged visionary's promises of apparitions of Mary at Knock. Curiously, the nature of the original Knock incident back in 1879 (stationary images appearing in the evening on a flat wall) means that it was one "miracle" that was quite readily explicable as a hoax (the use of a "magic lantern" to project the images.)

Meanwhile, I see that (if this source can be trusted) some Portuguese history professor has been looking again at the evidence for the Fatima apparition, and has noted the similarity of the reports of the dancing sun to UFO reports later in the century. (The sun was supposed to take on a metal sheen, with lights around the rim, and looked as if it was getting closer to the crowd.) The Wikipedia "miracle of the sun" entry is a pretty good place to get a description of what happened, and the various other explanations that have been suggested.

As it happens, when I was in high school, I read an entire book that set out the UFO at Fatima theory. I think it was actually in the high school library, but I could be mistaken. The idea struck me as pretty fascinating, and rather disturbing (why would mischievous aliens play that type of game with humans, and just how much religion may be based on a misinterpretation of what was going on in the universe?) Yet suggestibility to such radical ideas when you are a teenager is something you (should) outgrow.

I remember, for example, being strongly impressed by Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", again from my school library. (It seems, in retrospect, that my school library had a lot of pretty trippy titles. But hey, it was the '70's.) Now, I don't quite understand why that book impressed me so much. I certainly had not personally toyed with drugs of any variety, not even nutmeg tea,* so why a book about the consciousness expanding nature of one particular drug should have excited me seems rather odd.

As an adult, the suggestibility of a crowd which wants to see a miracle seems much more plausible that it used to. And, in the case of that Huxley book, skepticism that any drug can help you see reality more clearly seems much more compellingly.

Yet, I would still warn people against throwing babies out with the bathwater.** I am inclined to believe some accounts of paranormal events, and consider that they are potentially very important as evidence contradicting the purely materialist view of the universe that is so aggressively advocated by (seemingly) 90% of scientists now, the New Atheists, and the "non-realist" school of liberal Christianity.

It's where to draw the line between what is credible and what isn't that's the trick.

* Uncle Scrooges favourite drink, which, as I learnt later, might be capable of sending you on a trip.

** (Which is, essentially, what most climate change skepticism is doing too, in my opinion.)

Depressing images

Observations: Intolerable beauty: Plastic garbage kills the albatross

This featured on Hungry Beast last night (which, incidentally, seems to me to be an expensive failure. Just how many people were recruited for that show?)

Anyhow, apparently large numbers of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll out in the Pacific die because their mothers mistakenly feed them plastic picked up from the ocean. The stomachs fill up, meaning they can't eat real food and die, leaving skeletons filled with coloured bits of plastic.

I wonder: if there is that much plastic floating around in the Pacific Gyre, will it be worthwhile converting some former oil tanker into a skimming garbage collector?

The future is getting closer

You just can't help but be impressed by this MIT designed, completely autonomous, robot helicopter. It navigates not by GPS, but by scanning its environment and building up a picture of where it is. Very futuristic; very cool:



Now, if they can just build in some face recognition software, a poison blow dart and (I suppose) a way to knock on the front door, you'll have the perfect robot assassin to sent into the apartment block.

Ocean acidification at 450ppm

Southern Ocean acidification: A tipping point at 450-ppm atmospheric CO2 — PNAS

I don't think I have quoted before from this paper which came out last year. It predicts aragonite undersaturation in the Southern Oceans by 2038 (assuming we hit CO2 of 450 ppm by 2030), which is earlier than previously thought, and the consequences of that are set out pretty well in this paragraph:

Early aragonite undersaturation is of particular concern for the zooplankton species comprising Pteropods, which form aragonite shells. Southern Ocean Pteropods comprise up to one-quarter of total zooplankton biomass in the Ross Sea (13), Weddell Sea (14), and East Antarctica (15), can sometimes displace krill as the dominant zooplankton (16), and dominate carbonate export fluxes south of the Antarctic Polar Front (17), and even organic carbon export (18). Pteropods in Southern Ocean sediment traps show partial dissolution and “frosted” appearance of shells just below the aragonite saturation horizon (17, 19), indicating vulnerability to low carbonate ion concentrations. The most dominant Southern Ocean Pteropod species is Limacina helicina, with Limacina retroversa and others playing a smaller role (20). The dominant species, L. helicina, is known to have a life cycle of 1–2 years with important veliger larval development during winter months (20–22), which will be adversely impacted by early wintertime aragonite undersaturation. Given their multiyear life cycles, our results imply that Pteropods in the Southern Ocean will need to withstand aragonite undersaturation far sooner than previously predicted with possible significant effects throughout the Southern Ocean marine food web.

Just thought you should know. Politicians seem so shy of mentioning the effect of CO2 on oceans, though.

Promising?

Upgrade helps solar harvest (Science Alert)

University of Sydney researchers Dr Tim Schmidt and Professor Max Crossley have come up with an ingenious low-cost device to harvest low energy photons, with the potential of significantly boosting the efficiency of conventional solar cells using a process called upconversion...

The findings, which are published in the most recent issue of the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, pave the way to boosting the efficiency limit to over 50 per cent under the standard solar spectrum and up to 63 per cent under 100 fold solar concentration.

Sounds too good to be true.

And besides: how do you store all the energy they create for more than a day?

Romancing the boot

Andrew Norton - Hello Lenin?

Andrew Norton has a good post about an small outbreak of rosy nostalgia for Soviet communism within Australia. It's from aged intellectual circles, of course.

Time to cut her loose

Catherine Deveny in The Age seems to be reaching some sort of peak in her recent obnoxious anti-everyone-except-those-who-think-exactly-like-her campaign:

I've recently found myself embedded in the above conversations with morons pretending to be people who have said things that made me wince and think: ''Where do I start? If they don't get the basics, what else don't they get?...

She's a "Bright" who shows how dangerous "Brights" can be.

She made a complete goose of herself on Q&A a couple of weeks ago.

Editors: when your columnist starts suggesting that her opponents are not human, it's surely time to cut her loose and let her practice her advocacy on the street corner.

A bit of a worry

Global oil supply 'far worse than admitted'

THE world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, says a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

Comparing smoking rates

Japan seems to be impressed that its smoking rate has dropped to 36.8% amongst men, and 9% amongst women. The rate for the total population is therefore about 22%.

Given that Japan still seems a much more smoker friendly country compared to here, it's a little surprising to realise that their total population smoking rate is now not far above Australia's. It was only in 2004 that we had the same rate at 22%, but it has dropped back to 19% since then. The main difference is that women here are a much higher proportion of the total number of smokers. I think I've said this before, but anyway: congratulations, modern Australian women, on your near parity in the field of stupid men's habits. (That's a thought that occurs to me regularly when witnessing tattooed women in the shopping centre, too.)

The Australian government wants to get the rate down to 9% by 2020, but at the current rate of decrease, it would appear likely that it won't be reached until 2040. The last cut is the hardest, it would seem.

Interestingly, this publication suggests that, as the rate of smoking amongst doctors and dentists (who are fully aware of its dangers) is around 3 -4 % "this may indicate the lowest "baseline" smoking rate that can be reasonably expected in a fully informed population."

I don't know: if it ever gets to 5%, just ban it, I reckon.

Dumb, dumb, dumb

Look, I don't like the ETS either, and I see that an increasing number of people are attacking the very idea of cap and trade schemes as being certain to set back effective action by a couple of decades, but I still find it impossible to see the political advantage in prominent Liberals or Nationals coming out as climate skeptics.

Nick Minchin is a dill who has ensured that the Liberals will not be trusted by the still very significant proportion of the population who think reducing CO2 needs to be tackled. Tony Abbott is not far behind, by seemingly confirming that he only assesses the importance of climate change policy according to how much the latest poll indicates the public are concerned about it. (Give Melbourne another run of 43 degree days and bushfires this summer, and we'll see how seriously they take it next year. Maybe Tony will be back on board then.)

Nick Minchin should just get out of Parliament, not for his ill-informed skepticism, but for his mischief making. Andrew Bolt claims there are skeptics in Federal Labor too, and I expect he's right, but at least they have enough political nous to know they will gain nothing by flaunting it.

I agree wholeheartedly with this comment by Matt at Barry Brooks blog:

Labor is positioning itself as the champion of climate, wedging the opposition as confused and mostly skeptical… but to the public it appears that the ALP are acting as demanded by the scientists, wheras it seems to me that the scientists are really saying that the proposed ETS is a mess, with too many loopholes, and does not achieve the scientific goals.

If Turnbull had control of his party he could suggest that they pounce on the growing unrest about the convoluted and innefective ETS, and have SCIENCE on his side… and use that as a tool to wait until after Copenhagen on the grounds that there is global uncertainty about Cap n Trade or Tax, and it is useless us making a premature and incorrect choice (like betamax vs VHS).

Unfortunately that would rely on his party believing the science.

But of course, there is barely a politician in the world who is willing to actually criticise cap and trade for the right reasons (it won't work fast enough, probably at great expense, and encourage deceptive), all because they are scared of the word "tax". (You can apparently help solve that problem by calling it "fee and dividend" instead.)

Scary nights

The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis | Chris French | Science | guardian.co.uk

I missed this good article last month about the phenomena of sleep paralysis. It's particularly interesting because of the comments following, where many people describe the type of terrifying hallucinations they have had during it.

Luckily, I've never experienced it myself, but my wife has had a couple of relatively mild cases. She hadn't heard of sleep paralysis when I explained it to her.

Then, more recently I discovered that a friend had experienced what he interpretted as a demonic visit in bed. I told him about the somewhat more likely explanation, but he had never heard of sleep paralysis either. Maybe I first read about it in Fortean Times; I'm not sure. In any event, it has been publicised for many years, but not everyone reads up on both the paranormal and science. It seems more people should know it is not that uncommon an experience.

Uh-huh

Cartoons 'should have movie-style ratings' to protect children from violence - Telegraph

Dr Karen Pfeffer, a senior lecturer at Lincoln University, said that risky behaviour which would normally lead to injury is rarely shown to have negative consequences in cartoons.

She claims to have found evidence that there children who watch violent programmes are more likely to engage in risky behaviour and injure themselves....

Among the programmes she deemed to contain the most risky behaviour were Scooby-Doo, Batman, X-Men and Ben 10.

Can this be true? Scooby-Doo encourages risky behaviour? It's inane, sure, and it annoys me that my kids like to watch it (at their age, I had already decided it was a bore) but it would have to be one of the most harmless cartoons imaginable, unless you could its encouragement towards overeating and being a coach potato.

When I was a kid, TV used to run the Three Stooges regularly in glorious black and white. (Can you get it at the DVD rental shop?) Dr Pfeffer would have a fit.

Parrot gnaws Nutt while Balls gets in Brown's ear

Novelists sometimes chose character names to reflect their character's character or interests.* There's probably a term for that practice.

On this basis, Britain currently seems more like a novel:

* the decision to have compulsory sex education (as noted in the previous post) was made by Secretary Balls;

* Professor Nutt has been in the news because of his disputing whether cannabis really does send that many people nuts;

* Professor Nutt has been attacked by Professor Parrott, with some accusing him of parroting conservatism;

* Gordon Brown seems about as convivial and happy as a brown painted room.

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh has taken over authorship of the country.

* (Help, I'm sure someone can improve that sentence!)

Europe, teenagers and sex

Sex and school don’t mix - Times Online

This article starts off with a paragraph which indicates a certain lack of seriousness, but it does eventually make some good points.

The thing is, Britain's response to a very high teenage pregnancy rate is to make sex education completely compulsory from age 15. Currently, parents can "opt out' their kids. Yet, I wonder, just how many parents take that option? Is there any evidence that children who are withheld have a higher rate of sex or pregnancy?

Fans of sex education like to point to Holland, which, as I have noted before, apparently has such open discussion of sex it would make most Australian parents cringe. But as this article notes:

...could it be that, although the Dutch teach their children about sex in graphic detail, their culture — with its rigorous Calvinist and Catholic moral framework, strong family cohesion, low proportion of single parents and, perhaps most significantly, minimal state benefits for teen mums — sends out an unmissable signal that teenage pregnancy is a bad idea.

By contrast, in Britain a pregnant 16-year-old can expect about £200 a week in benefits and possibly her own flat. For girls with limited prospects, often the offspring of teen mums themselves, a marriage to the state is not such a bad option. The taxpayer coughs up while the girl gets the unconditional love and status that being a mum affords.

Someone in comments also notes this:

Sue's comments regarding the importance of relationships with parents and the stability of family life are spot on. A couple of statistics:
For the year 1999, England and Wales teenage pregnancy rate 49 per 1000 of population. For Italy 6.9. For the year 2002 UK marriages ending in divorce 42%. For Italy 10%.
I am prepared to bet that with the Vatican in their midst the sex education delivered by Italian schools is modest compared to the Dutch immersion approach.

In short, it's all rather more complicated than just increasing sex education. Mind you, according to one report, the new sex education will include relationship stuff too (doesn't it already?):

...schools will teach about the importance of marriage, civil partnerships and stable relationships in family life, as well as how to have sex.

Well, I suppose you can't fault the intention, but how successful can mere teaching about stable relationships be when the kids almost certainly are going to model their relationship behaviour on the example of their own domestic home life?

And how does Australia compare? Not so great, with recent estimates of a teenage pregnancy rate of about 39 per 1000, compared to Britain's 42 per 1000.

High consumption

Cannabis takes toll on Aborigines | The Australian

The figures for use of cannabis in some aboriginal communities are startling high:

...cannabis use in remote communities was now as high as 70 per cent of people, with almost 90 per cent of users claiming to be addicted....

In a recent study of three remote Arnhem Land communities, Professor Clough and a team of researchers found that cannabis use exceeded six "cones" daily in almost 90 per cent of users. This was about twice the consumption of regular users elsewhere in Australia.

It's only twice the consumption of regular users elsewhere?

What's that doing there?

I had never seen a photo of the old San Francisco Cliff House before. It was built about 100 years ago, and was in a spectacularly dangerous looking location. A whole gallery of pictures of it can be found via this post. Wikipedia talks about the history of the site here.

Revisiting the War

Spielberg's War of the Worlds was on TV last night, and I hadn't seen it again since it came out in 2005. (I wonder if I have any readers today who were remember my 2005 comments on it. Probably not.)

Anyhow, I have to say again: what a creepy, disturbing, yet quite brilliantly directed movie it is. Yes, it ends abruptly, and via a means which makes little sense now compared to the time when the book was written. I assume that Spielberg and his writers just couldn't come up with an updated variation on the idea. (That was the one - the absolutely only - slightly clever thing about Independence Day. It was a virus that was the aliens downfall, but a computer virus, not a biological one. Unfortunately, that such a crap movie had recently used that updating trick presumably prevented Spielberg's writers from using it.)

While the movie creeped me out again, I was able to concentrate on the direction a little bit more last night. I'll say it again: Spielberg just blows away all the jittery camera, let's-create-hyper-action-by-ultra-fast-editing action directors of today. You know exactly what's going on, and can understand the sequences clearly. He is excellent with tension; he can make Tom Cruise act well.

Enough said? Yes, for now.

Calm Crabb

Annabel Crabb really amuses with this paragraph about a week in which everyone saw the desperation in our PM's media spin blitz:

Having experimented with tub-thumping and name-calling, the Ruddbot has entered a calm, methodical period, during which he calmly, methodically dials the direct line of every radio announcer he has ever met and invites himself on air to talk - with a certain methodical air of calm - about his plan to deal with the 78 Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking, a plan that takes considerable minutes to outline if you are the calm and methodical type, but for the slapdash and reckless can quite reasonably be summarised using just seven letters and one apostrophe: "We'll see."

A simile too far

I won't explaining how I ended up clicking onto this article, but in any event I have a strong urge to share its, um, wisdom:

If we do not have healthy bowel movements two or three times a day, we are like the tunnel that had three trains go into it, and only one train came out. THERE IS A WRECK IN THE TUNNEL. And that wreck in our intestines is the starting point for all illness.

The article also goes on to claim:

Unless your bowel is working perfectly three bowel movements daily, each the diameter of a banana, about a foot long, fully formed and floating on the water in the toilet bowl you need to get your digestive system in order to get healthy, which includes losing weight as a side effect.

Just a tad over-prescriptive, I think.

Rooting for the psychopath

Earlier this week I briefly noted some extracts of a new biography of Ayn Rand, who, puzzlingly, still attracts something of a following if sales of her books are anything to go by.

Well, now there's a even more informative review in Slate of the two (not just one) new books about her.

She was even loopier than I first imagined:

Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."

I take it she would have been laughing and cheering in all the wrong places during Silence of the Lambs. (And probably weeping when Hannibal was so cruelly being carted around on a trolley in a straightjacket.)

Really, I don't know how anyone can trust her take on anything (economics, morality, government, whatever) when she was such a fruitloop.

And also, now that she's been dead for quite a while, isn't there scope for a very funny satirical film about someone like her?

Finally, I get the impression that this bit sums up her most famous novels well:

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.

Time travelling baguette

Large Hadron Collider stalled again... thanks to chunk of baguette - Times Online

The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.

The £4 billion particle-collider faced more than a year of delays after a helium leak stymied the project in its first few days of operation. It is gradually being switched back on over the coming months but suffered a new setback on Tuesday morning.

Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.

Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.

Funnily enough, I was just reading again last night about the possibility that the future is preventing the LHC from starting.

Clearly, the future is economical with its methods. Instead of sending back killer cyborgs, it just puts its lunch inside the time machine.

Friends of the Earth don't care for trading

carbon trading 'the next Sub Prime' - Friends of the Earth Australia

Friends of the Earth have come out with a long report critical of carbon trading due to not being an effective means to reduce CO2.

While I have much sympathy with their arguments, it seems they are leaving their run a bit late.

Now that all politicians seem to be utterly committed to an emissions trading schemes, it is hard to see how long it will take for the whole idea to be revised in light of inadequacy. I mean, it'll take years to get it up and running fully, then a number of years to realise it's not working. Probably a good decade or so of wasted time, I reckon.

Kitchen Stadium could not contain him

Who knew that the Chinese were such fans of the host of Iron Chef?:


(Photo found on today's version of The Independent website, but actually comes from Reuters I think. I can't find the description of who it actually is.)

Update: Gosh, it's a Chairman alright, but not Chairman Kaga. It's Mao in young, hirsute mode.

Letting people vote

Maine Voters Repeal Law Allowing Gay Marriage

This seems to be attracting much less attention in Australia than the Californian Proposition 8 vote, but it's interesting to see how, when Americans get to vote on it, they reject gay marriage.

I also note how this is framed in many newspaper reports as "heartbreaking". (It seems that an AP writer is behind a lot of the reports, and his sympathies are clear.)

Credit due

Spencer on Lindzen and Choi climate feedback paper

I don't usually comment on the minute detail of some AGW debates, as they can get very complicated, and other blogs can explain it better.

But - it is interesting to note that skeptical blog Watts Up With That has run a post by soft skeptic Roy Spencer in which he finds a paper by fellow scientist skeptics Lindzen & Choi does not really show what they claim.

Monckton has promoted the Lindzen & Choi paper on Fox News recently, saying that it proves that the IPCC wildly overestimates climate sensitivity.

So, it's skeptical science in dispute with itself. At least I suppose Spencer deserves credit for being forthright about this.

I note, however, that a dispute like this attracts a relatively small number of comments at WUWT. If it's an anti AGW post, though, there tends to be much more excitement in comments.

Agreed

Steve Martin is the Oscars host with the most | Xan Brooks | Film | guardian.co.uk

He may have forgotten how to make a good movie, but I agree with Brooks that Martin is always funny as Oscar host:

Martin, for my money, has been the most reliably witty and sure-footed of all the recent presenters; the host that best navigates the perilous terrain of this most cramped and compromised of roles. His banter is drier, more tart than the showbiz razzle-dazzle provided by Crystal and Jackman. At the same time, however, he appears more at ease with the format than such nervous interlopers as Chris Rock or Jon Stewart. He is the insider's outsider; a pampered creature of the establishment who is still smart enough to treat the whole gaudy affair with an amused contempt.

Because we can

Suicide letter couple found dead

I don't know why people who are over-enthusiastic about suicide think they make good advocates for euthanasia:

Dennis and Flora Milner, aged 83 and 81, were found dead in their home in Newbury on Sunday, police confirmed.

A letter and statement saying they had "chosen to peacefully end our lives" was delivered to BBC South on Tuesday.

They said they wanted to highlight the "serious human dilemma" which prevents people from legally ending their own lives with loved ones around them.

Mr and Mrs Milner's daughter Chrissy said her parents had been in good health but did not want to get to a stage were they would be too ill to care for themselves.

The children are said to "supported their parents decision". One big happy suicide family.

Energy dreamtime, & George finds the prostate connection

I was deeply suspicious when I saw Scientific American running an article that claims the entire world's energy can be from renewable sources within 20 years. After all, if that were plausible, any nation with an interest in avoiding reliance on other countries' oil, gas or coal would already be on board with advanced planning for energy independence in our lifetime. Yippee.

Well, Barry Brook and friends have been looking at it closely, and basically rip it to threads. I'm convinced (by Brook, not by Scientific American.)

Meanwhile, on the related topic of global warming skepticism, George Monbiot is getting very depressed that polls indicate people are not so worried about global warming now. He writes in The Guardian: "There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease."

Actually, I don't worry too much about this. People are incredibly fickle when being polled. I suspect that reduced concern may partly be explained by some people (the type that media spin works on) feeling that with Obama as President, and Rudd as PM here, something effective is being done about it, so we can relax. But it only takes an unseasonably warm or hot month to change their minds again, in all likelihood.

What worries me more is that virtually all politicians are displaying absolutely no skepticism towards the economist driven proposal that cap and trade schemes are capable of providing sufficient technological innovation and rapid deployment of clean (or cleaner) energy to make a difference. When you need them to be skeptical, they're not.

But back to Monbiot. He says climate change denial is like a disease, and as I have recently identified, that is true: it must be prostate disease. George sees the old age connection, but hasn't yet caught on to my innovative bit of deductive reasoning:

The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, that it’s caused by humans or that it’s a serious problem(9). This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

He doesn't specify, but I would bet that perhaps 90% of those argumentive oldies are also men. As for women skeptics: well, we always have hormone imbalances to fall back on. (Hey if I am being silly about men, I have to be about women too.)

Anyhow, George then goes in for a bit of psychoanalysis about why older people should be more skeptical. It could be all about death denial.

Interesting theory, but I don't know. Does death denial make old folk just get generally cranky and irrational on other topics. (My mother has become so annoyed at what she perceives as other women in her retirement village big-noting their children's careers, she has taken to telling some of them that all of her 7 children have been to university. In fact, it's only one.)

Older people can get wise in some ways, but you probably can't expect them to be reliable in telling where the scientific consensus lies when there are exaggerations on both sides of the debate. I would bet there would be a certain percentage of post 60-ish women who believe everything Andrew Bolt says because he's a nice looking chap.

And finally, speaking of Bolt, I had to laugh on Insiders on Sunday when antagonism erupted between Annabel Crabb (I believe everything she writes because, well, she is cute) and Andrew. If I am not mistaken, Annabel derided Andrew for always quoting "some professor from the University of East Bumcrack." That may not be a precise recall, but "bumcrack" was definitely in there.

Another case of "as I suspected"

The Sydney Morning Herald carries a short story on a New Zealand study indicating that super high speed broadband is not the economic powerhouse that governments like to pretend it will be:

The study found that while there were economic benefits in having ADSL rather than dial-up, there was little extra value in faster forms such as fibre-optic cable.

Motu Economic and Public Policy Research mapped data from a 2006 study on more than 6000 firms' internet services against administrative tax and employment data to measure productivity. It found those firms that took up the kind of slower broadband services that are readily available in Australia achieved a 10 per cent productivity boost by using it to enter new export markets and buy goods and services online, but there was ''no discernible additional effect'' gained from a faster service.

Ken Davidson in The Age recently wrote:

Telstra is obliged under the universal service obligation to offer telephone customers a basic telephony service for $30 a month. The Rudd Government wants to replace this with a new service - the national broadband network - which on the most favourable assumptions will cost customers $60 to $70 a month for a basic telephone service.

And to ensure customers will take up the new service, the Telstra copper wires that enable the $30 a month service will be ripped up.

Sure, very high speed broadband would be nice to have, but I remain far from convinced that it is essential, and certainly it should be done the cheapest way possible.

A brief look at Ayn (rhymes with "pine")

The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldn't Win -- New York Magazine

A pretty amusing review of a new Ayn Rand biography.

Some lines I liked:

"...her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces"

“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive,” she once wrote, “and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.”

As a child, she was solitary, opinionated, possessive, and intense—a willful and brilliant loner with literally zero friends. At 9, she decided to become a writer; by 11 she’d written four novels, each of which revolved around a heroine exactly her age but blonde, blue-eyed, tall, and leggy. (Rand was—by her own standards—unheroically dark, short, and square.) At 13, she declared herself an atheist. It’s hard not to suspect, based on many of these childhood anecdotes, that Rand suffered from some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder. Once, when a teacher asked her to write an essay about the joys of childhood, she wrote a diatribe condemning childhood as a cognitive wasteland—a joyless limbo in which adult rationality had yet to fully develop. (It was possibly a good thing that she never had children.)

The paragraph about William James' theory of the foundations of personal philosophy is pretty interesting, too.

By the way, Stephen Colbert explained Atlas Shrugged earlier this year:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Rand Illusion
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Religion

What a surprise

Overweight have less sex

A scientific halloween

Where do ghosts come from? - New Scientist

A good article here on the idea that magnetic fields can cause eerie sensations that are interpreted as ghosts.

The theory has taken several hits lately, it would appear. Particularly when people undergoing lab tests get the creeps whether or not the magnetic field is turned on!

Robotic videoconferencing

Theme-park dummy trick becomes teleconference tool

Have a look at the video. I reckon it is pretty effective at giving the impression of a real presence.

Scratch here, please

Itch: A symptom of occult disease

Stumbling around the internet looking for something else, I found the above article.

It caught my attention because, for the last nine years or so, I have had a persistent itch in the same spot around my left shoulder blade. It turns out it may be a demon poking me there. (Well, that is my initial reaction to hearing the phrase "occult disease".)

My actual theory is that it is caused by chicken pox, which I caught as an adult about 9 years ago. I don't recall having the itch until after that. As the virus sits there and may re-appear as shingles at any time, I think I may have a little bunch of it there that can't be bothered growing enough to actually give me shingles, but makes its presence felt anyway.

It's as good a theory as any.

Social issues

China strives to pleasure sex-starved | The Australian

They could've chosen a better headline, but the article is a pretty interesting one about social change in China.

The big dance

Elina-shatkin's list of L.A. Halloween Events 2009

As you can see from the above list, they certainly take Halloween as a very, very big opportunity for fun events in the US (or at least Los Angeles.)

Of note in the list is this:

Join thousands of participants around the globe for Thrill The World, an annual worldwide simultaneous dance of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." The event begins on Oct. 25 at 12:30 a.m.GMT (that's 5:30 p.m. Pacific time). Find an event in your area. Don't know the "Thriller" zombie dance? You can find an event in your area with rehearsals or you can check out Thrill The world's online instructional videos.

That does sound kind of fun, at least to watch if not participate.

It has its own website, and claims that 22,923 people danced this year, yet I don't believe I have ever heard of this before. I suggest Peter Garrett should lead the line up for the Australian version: he hardly needs the make up.

Chick lives

Trick or Tract: Satan, Jack Chick, and Other Halloween Horrors

If ever you had something even vaguely to do with some fundamentalist Christians, you probably have seen a Jack Chick cartoon book. I know I saw a few when I was in high school, although exactly where I got my hands on one I can't recall.

According to the above post, in America, some people like to give these to visiting kids as a Halloween "trick or treat" gift!

There's a link in the article to the Jack Chick publication website, from which I learn he is still alive, and still producing his idiosyncratic booklets in which he manages to make his preferred brand of Christianity look like humourless, creepy conspiracy-mongering. (You ought to read what he thinks about Catholics; many lines are very funny.) As Joe Carter aptly says, Chick produces fundamentalist tracts with cartoon artwork in the style of R Crumb.

Amazing, but not in a good way.

Mix up in the lab

IVF mother: 'I love him to bits. But he's probably not mine' | Life and style | The Guardian

There are, according to this story, increasing numbers of IVF mothers who fear they have been implanted with the wrong embryo. But they are then faced with the question of whether they get DNA testing to confirm their suspicions, because of the possible complications if it is not the mother's.

I seem to be the only person in the world, apart from the Pope, perhaps, who still actually considers the whole IVF industry as basically undesirable, and a poor reflection on a world with high rates of abortion of what would be adoptable healthy babies. Some fertility clinic practices have been an absolute scandal. Yet people are so swayed by seeing someone happy with their IVF baby that they don't give the bigger picture a second thought.

An unpleasant man

James Cameron and “Avatar” : The New Yorker

You only have to read the first couple of pages of this l-l-long profile of director James Cameron to get confirmation that he is, indeed, a complete jerk.

His new movie, Avatar, seems to me to run a risk of failing because it looks like the biggest CGI-fest ever, just at a time I suspect the public is getting sick of films where all of the background (and many characters) are obviously not real.

We'll see.

Unusual connections

Did Portnoy's Complaint deserve the "Booker Prize"?

Mary Beard in The Times writes about a recent literary festival in which she was on a panel considering which books from 1969 should have won the Booker Prize. This entailed her re-reading Portnoy's Complaint, which she really disliked. (I have never read it, nor seen the movie, and have no interest in doing so.)

The point of this post, however, is to note this comment on her blog, which shows there are some quite unusual theories out there:

I cannot resist praising Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (ZONE BOOKS, 2003) by my colleague here, Thomas Laqueur, which rightly links concern about masturbation with the development of ideas of credit in the eighteenth century.

What other sexual/financial connections might there be? The rise of cybersex is behind the global financial crisis, maybe?

Anyhow, this is curious enough to make me look for reviews of the Laqueur book. This one starts in way which I find funny, although I am not sure if that was intended:

Thomas Laqueur has been preoccupied with masturbation for more than a decade...

But for more detail on Laqueur's ideas, try this summary:

He sees the promise of abundance offered by the new commercial economy, with its reliance on credit, as strikingly similar to the lure of masturbation, with its addictive pull and reliance on the imagination; the consumer, the speculator, and the masturbator were thus all engaged in the same kind of activity...

I guess it's entirely appropriate that banker rhymes with ...... then.

I think Laqueur may have spent too much time alone.

The changing sea

Climate Change Caused Radical North Sea Shift | Wired Science | Wired.com

Quite an interesting report in Wired about long term changes in the ecology of the North Sea. It's all about less fish and more crabs and jellyfish.

Sure, overfishing has played a large part, but a slight change in temperature seems to have also caused significant changes in the plankton mix.

I didn't realise the North Sea had been so well studied for so long.

Next time you are doing business with a used car salesman...

try spraying him in the face with citrus scented cleaner:

...research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

How odd. (OK, the study is not about used car salesmen per se, but it's still worth a try.)

Nice house

Aluminium House, Kanazawa City, Japan by Atelier Tekuto-- The Architectural Review

Here's a pretty cool looking Japanese house made, it would seem, almost entirely of aluminium.

I am told that steel frame houses in Australia are noisy due to the expansion and shrinking of the frame in hot weather. I wonder how an aluminium house would compare.

Of course, being a Japanese architect designed house, there must be a death trap involved. In this case, it's probably the roof top "yard". Don't let the dog chase a ball up there.

Close shave - with video

Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences - space - 26 October 2009 - New Scientist

Why didn't I read about this somewhere else before now?:

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That's about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth's surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.

So how big was it likely to have been?:

The amount of energy released suggests the object was about 10 metres across, the researchers say. Such objects are thought to hit Earth about once per decade.

No telescope spotted the asteroid ahead of its impact. That is not surprising, given that only a tiny fraction of asteroids smaller than 100 metres across have been catalogued, says Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet objects as small as 20 or 30 metres across may be capable of doing damage on the ground, he says.

People did notice this (and it presumably would have been a big flash if it had been at night):

The explosion was heard by witnesses in Indonesia. Video images of the sky following the event show a dust trail characteristic of an exploding asteroid.

I recommend having a look at that last link to see the big smoky looking trail it left in the sky.

The lessons: at any time, your city could be taken out by an unexpected small asteroid. (Unless you encourage government to spend money on more extensive searches.)

Suitable for comedy

Dear Prudence answers readers' questions live at Washingtonpost.com. - - Slate Magazine

I hope that link always works to the right page. If it does, I strongly recommend question 3 and the advice that follows.

It certainly sounds like a situation that, if shown on something like Seinfeld, you might find improbable.

Perfect for that Fail blog

Cop caught taking up-skirt videos during anti-pervert campaign

Still nutty

Film-maker Paul Haggis quits Scientology over gay rights stance | World news | guardian.co.uk

This story is noteworthy in two respects:

a. Haggis leaves Scientology over anti gay marriage statements by someone in the San Diego branch. This makes them "bigots, hypocrites and homophobes", and the organisation one "where gay-bashing is tolerated". Where once Haggis was dupe of a dubious religion, he's now a dupe of gay rights propaganda.

b. He also is upset that the organisation denies the policy of "disconnection", in which followers are encouraged to break off contact with those who have criticised the church. Says Haggis:

"I was shocked," wrote Haggis. "We all know this policy exists. I didn't have to search for verification - I didn't even have to look any further than my own home. You might recall that my wife was ordered to disconnect from her own parents … although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them."

Um, how long ago did this happen, and is it not a much, much more important reason for doubting the bona fides of the group than its support for Proposition 8?

A not so arrogant Hitchens

What I've learned from debating religious people around the world. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

A little surprisingly, Hitchens does not come across as terribly arrogant in this account of his debates with the faith defenders of the world. I am even more-or-less sympathetic to his position in one respect:

Wilson isn't one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just "metaphors." He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn't waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he "allows" it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

He also points to some reason to be skeptical of polling about American's religious/scientific beliefs:

...you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don't truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think. Every now and then I read reports of polls that tell me that more Americans believe in the virgin birth or the devil than believe in Darwinism: I'd be pretty sure that at least some of these are unwilling to confess their doubts to someone who calls them up on their kitchen phone.

A possible explanation

Further confirming my theory that global warming skepticism is probably caused by prostate* problems, I see that Clive James has come out as an AGW skeptic.

I'm not sure if my theory explains Bolt's and Blair's skepticism, but it would not surprise me at all if they take longer in the toilet than one might expect for men of their age. Anyone who ever seen them at a urinal can report here.

Meanwhile, I see that Lambert has a good post showing (once again) the highly selective use of someone else's work by Ian Plimer in his book.

I really wish someone would go through Plimer's pages on ocean acidification in the same way: I feel a high degree of confidence that he has done exactly the same in that area, but I am not willing to fork out the money to confirm it myself.

* I find it nearly impossible not to type "prostrate" instead of "prostate" despite my best intentions. Error has not been fixed.

Fair comment

Gerard Henderson today talks briefly and fairly about the political difficulty of dealing with unauthorised arrivals by boat. He ends with this point:

The unintended consequence of the Government's criticism of the Opposition on this issue has been to send out a message that Australia is now softer on border protection. In reality, Rudd's Indonesian solution may turn out to be tougher and crueller than Howard's Pacific solution. Australia had some say about how asylum seekers were handled in Nauru and Manus Island. We will have less influence about what goes on in Indonesian detention centres.

As Andrew Bolt points out, this makes no difference to some Rudd supporters, who will praise him for exactly the same things they condemned Howard.

An unapologetic recommendation

Annabel Crabb

Kimchi Christianity

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Will South Korea become Christian?

An interesting article here on the success of Christianity in South Korea. Unfortunately, it would seem that the most successful church is one of the American style "prosperity gospel" churches. I wonder how Catholicism is doing there...

Incidentally, I recently saw the episode of King of the Hill called "Church Hopping", in which Hank and his family try going to a Megachurch. It was very funny while also giving (what I assume to be) a good insight to Texas style Christianity.

Pretending the complicated is simple

Something Mad about refugee policies

Leslie Cannold is typical of the kind of commentator who belittles the humanitarian aspect of the Australian government trying to stop people smuggling via boat. Bob Ellis is the same.

They both decry a supposed "lowest common denominator" "hysteria" about boat people.

Yet, I can't see how it is "hysterical" to say that people smuggling in boats places vulnerable people in dangerous, life threatening situations. It is not a hypothetical danger. Surely it is difficult to argue against the proposition that aggressive action to deter future people smuggling via boat actually saves lives.

There is a legitimate argument to be had over how "tough" that action should or needs to be to stop people smuggling. I was one of those of the view that the processes used by the Howard government were in some respects too tough. But the basic idea of keeping boats from reaching our shores is surely an important way of trying to stop such attempts.

For someone like Ellis to say that support for "toughness" is all about ignorant racism is a facile response to a difficult issue. (Indeed, the evidence of increased African migration we can all see in Australian cities indicates the government is hardly motivated by the colour of the skin of those who want to live here.)

Even though the Rudd government has modified the processes (with support from the Coalition), refugee advocates seem to think they haven't really "won" unless all people turning up on boats are given an easy run through our system. But making the process too easy is going to result in more arrivals via that method, and more drownings.

What about Bob Ellis saying that if we are so concerned about their safety on boats, the government should just let them fly in:

We put the people in physical danger by not letting them come here on aeroplanes and wait in Villawood for a month or so to have their claims assessed. We put them in danger by harassing the boats they were on, and at gunpoint ordering them to go back into stormy seas. We put them in danger by burning the boats others came in on the beach, which meant they had to buy new boats, cheaper and cheaper boats, to come here in. Does anyone have the right to burn another's boat? Isn't that piracy?

Again, he can only afford to say this because he is not a position of responsibility. By what criteria would Ellis have the government decide to let asylum seekers (probably many without papers) get on a 747 to Australia? Those that sign an affidavit saying they will get on a boat if we don't do it?

How many people does Ellis want to migrate here that way, compared to the number of refuges who have been assessed already by the UN and been waiting in a camp for years for a country to take them?

There is nothing easy about the issue, despite what these commentators claim.

It's complicated

Foreign capital | tax | Brazil | Australia | Kenneth Davidson

Ken Davidson talks about what's behind the rising Australian dollar, and to my uneducated in economics eye, appears to make some sense.

Certainly, it's a good time to be buying stuff from America, at least.

Moon cave found?

Found: first 'skylight' on the moon - New Scientist

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.

The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock.

Their existence on the moon is hinted at based on observations of sinuous rilles – long, winding depressions carved into the lunar surface by the flow of lava. Some sections of the rilles have collapsed, suggesting that hollow lava tubes hide beneath at least some of the rilles.

But until now, no one has found an opening into what appears to be an intact tube.

The problem of the floating space bowel

In The Museum: Toilet Training | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine

Having read quite a bit about the space program in my time, I knew most of the information in the above short article on the history of zero-g toilets, except this bit:

The space shuttle’s toilets are based on the Skylab model, and also operate with a fan and a vacuum. “No matter how much training you’ve had on the ground in how to operate it,” says Neal, “it’s difficult to actually use the first time. So when you finally do succeed, there’s a bit of celebration; they announce to everybody, ‘Okay, I went!’ It’s an accomplishment to master it in microgravity.”

On this ESA page about daily life in the International Space Station, the point is made that it is not just the contraption that is the problem:

Some crew members find the toilet difficult to get used to. As well as the device itself, they have to accustom themselves to the disconcerting fact that their bowels actually float inside their bodies - like the rest of their internal organs and of course everything else on board.

Is this a subtle way of suggesting that constipation is a problem in space? Yes, it appears that it is. A Google search brings a link to a book which comments:

Because the GI tract requires gravity assistance to function optimally, some astronauts suffer constipation which resolves in several days.

Apart from the always fascinating issue of space toilets, it did occur to me recently that we really don't see much on TV showing the interior of the ISS. It's usually just a short snippet on the news showing a bunch of astronauts greeting each other when there is a crew changeover.

In fact, the ESA website has some good pages of school educational material, and I particularly like this page with its videos of such interesting things such as an astronaut brushing his teeth, showing you the bathroom (including the toilet), getting some exercise, etc. It' s interesting to see the interior of the ISS is somewhat humanised by photos and other stuff that the astronauts have obviously brought with them. Well worth a look.

Don't inhale

How I Survived China - The Atlantic (November 2009)

James Fallows has a short but interesting comment on how bad pollution is in China.

Swiss cheese universe

Hey, who can resist an arXiv paper with an abstract that starts like this:

We present strong arguments that the deep structure of the quantum vacuum contains a web of microscopic wormholes or short-cuts. We develop the concept of wormhole spaces and show that this web of wormholes generate a peculiar array of long-range correlations in the patterns of vacuum fluctuations on the Planck scale.

Well, I can't, even though I need to converted into a more pop science format.

Master of my neurons?

You can control your Marilyn Monroe neuron

All sort of odd sounding, and probably has some deep philosophical implications for mind/body stuff, but you can go read it yourself.

Tough talk on Japanese men

The age of listless, wary, anxiety-ridden and insecure young men

A Japanese women's magazine notes:

The term “soshoku danshi” (herbivorous male, as distinct from the carnivores of earlier generations) has grown widely current since being coined in 2006 to describe the timid, emotionally stunted specimens now on the threshold of the prime of life. It’s hard to blame them. As consultant Takao Maekawa points out, with salaries stagnant and jobs, if you’re lucky enough to have one, insecure, “it’s enough to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for their work.”

Herbivorous—more or less passive, that is to say—attitudes toward courtship are a direct result. “Young men don’t have the confidence their fathers had that they will be able to support a family,” says Ushikubo. “That tends to drain a man’s romantic impulses.”

Adding insult to injury, women, with less vested interest in the way things used to be, are adapting better than men to the way things now are. “Seeing women emerge stronger than themselves,” observes Maekawa, “has further undermined many men’s confidence.”

The answer, apparently, is for women to offer:

"...generous doses of praise, encouragement, and understanding."

[I'm emailing the article to my wife now, as I figure what's good for the Japanese is good for me too.]

But in comments, readers beg to differ:

The listless, insecure young men of today are carbon copies of their fathers. Japanese men are as selfish, immature and emotionally underdeveloped as they have always been. That's simply the very nature of this beast.

I say on behalf of my Japanese brothers: Ouch!

Fusion: the third way

A novel form of fusion power: Psst, kapow! | The Economist

Hadn't heard this one before, but who knows if it will lead anyway.

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?