Cheap real estate in Japan

We all saw on TV last year how you could buy abandoned houses in many parts of the US for a song. Unfortunately, it looked like many had been thoroughly vandalised, and were in neighbourhoods which might take a decade or so to feel safe and inhabited again. A house for a couple of thousand dollars in such a situation is not such a bargain.

But Japan is a different kettle of fish. (That’s a particularly apt expression for that country, come to think of it.)

Population decline has already set in, and about the only places growing are the big cities due to people leaving the rural areas. I had been wondering if bargains in housing were to be had, and this fascinating article claims that there are:

So just how many vacant properties are there in Japan? According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry in 2008, there were an amazing 4.127 million unoccupied housing units, up 451,900 from 2003.

Some of these are old decaying abandoned homes which you wouldn’t want anyway, but it is still a big number, and it’s only likely to get bigger. The article goes on to provide a website which lists properties for sale as a result of tax foreclosures, but unfortunately it is in Japanese only, and is not exactly what you would call a glossy looking real estate site.

There is one major cultural difference about Japan which is odd to Westerners: except for apartments, modern Japanese do not expect houses to last long:

One reason why foreigners are a good fit to solve the vacant housing problem is that they are more willing to live in older properties and to perform their own maintenance. Japanese have been educated over the last 50 years that housing older than 25 years old should be demolished and rebuilt, leading people to really only want to buy new places. I know this firsthand, after a relative bought a countryside property, built a substantial Japanese-style post-and-beam house on the land (and which will last another 50 to 100 years), but being told by the bank several years ago that the house itself is now considered to already have zero value!

Some suggest that the Japanese expectation for the life of a house is affected by the number of earthquakes it might be expected to endure. But I am sure it is more than that. I was recently speaking to a Japanese couple, now Australian residents, who explained how surprised they were to find that renovated older homes (particularly in the Queenslander style) in Brisbane were expensive and highly valued. I think there is an idea that houses carry any bad luck that happened in them into the future.

Lots of websites say that there is no equivalent to our Foreign Investment Review Board restrictions on foreign purchase of real estate in Japan. (They also say that dealing with real estate agents may not be easy, but the article I linked to says there is a move afoot to encourage real estate agents to be helpful to foreign investors.)

All of this certainly suggests that you don’t buy a house in Japan with an expectation of making capital gain. But the idea of having a holiday home in the very pretty countryside of Japan might be a quite viable option for foreigners in the future.

Cheap books, electronic and otherwise

E-reader prices have taken a tumble in America due to the success of the iPad.

Recently I saw at Dymocks the Kobo e-reader for $199, but they have sold out and you have to place them on order.   I thought the screen was a bit small though, but then I thought the same when I saw a Kindle.

Anyhow, I’ll still wait for the next generation of them before buying.  I’m currently getting plenty of cheap reading by going to the Lifeline Bookfest held every 6 months in Brisbane’s convention centre. 

In January, as I have reported here before, I got Clive James’ first volume of autobiography which I had been wanting to read for years.   This time (on the Queens Birthday weekend) I got the second volume.  I am also getting more Graham Greene, including his autobiography, and he is difficult to find anywhere other than second hand book stores.

One thing you do learn from going to the Lifeline book sale is this:  there are a hell of a lot of Bryce Courtney novels sold in Australia.  Unfortunately, he has no appeal to me at all.

For readers outside of Brisbane who may not understand the size of this Lifeline second hand book sale, here’s a photo from the Brisbane Times which gives a good indication:

We like out second hand books in Brisbane.

Lucky planet

Summer solstice: Did a rampaging planet create Earth's seasons? - CSMonitor.com

Of course I knew of the idea that it was a collision that formed the Moon, but I either didn't know (or had forgotten) that it may also have given us the Earth's very convenient axis tilt that gives us the seasons:

Without that tilt, we might've ended up with more seasons than we could deal with over the course of Earth's history, suggests Neil Comins, an astronomer at the University of Maine. He's written substantially on what alternate Earths might be like and how hospitable they would be for the emergence of life.

The collision thought to have generated the tilt also created the moon, which is responsible for stabilizing Earth's spin axis. Without a moon, "the Earth spinning on its axis is an unstable system in which the tilt goes from straight up and down to far closer to the plain of it orbit than the axis is today," he says.

At its most extreme, this could leave Earth orbiting the sun and spinning on its axis like a chicken roasting on a spit with head and tail alternately aimed at the fire, rather than cooking the bird broadside. Earthlings from one pole to the equator would be in darkness during the solstice, while the other half would be in toasty sunlight. The poles would swap lighting conditions at the next solstice.

Moreover, the moon's presence and its effect on the oceans act as a brake on Earth's rotation rate. By some estimates one turn of the Earth on its axis some 4.5 billion years ago would have taken 6.5 hours, versus 24 today. No moon means a far more speedy cosmic rotisserie.

I don't think the importance of the moon in keeping the axis tilt stable was something that I realised before. Very neat.

Impressive

BBC News - Tornado rips roof off sports arena in Montana

Some pretty impressive video here of tornado damage. Two things of note: the amount of rubbish a tornado can keep suspended in the air for a long time, and the cars and trucks that seem to be passing by quite close to it. (I would be speeding away as fast as possible, but these vehicles don't seem to be in that much of a hurry.)

Expensive brides

I commented a while ago that a documentary about a large restaurant in China seemed to show many Chinese women as being intensely materialistic, and a story about real estate in China seems to back this up:

Unlike in the United States, where home buying traditionally takes place after marriage, owning a place in China has recently become a prerequisite for tying the knot. Experts said securing an apartment in this market signals that a man is successful, family-oriented and able to weather challenging financial circumstances. Put succinctly, homeownership has become the ultimate symbol of virility in today's China.

"A man is not a man if he doesn't own a house," said Chen Xiaomin, director of the Women's Studies Center at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. "Marriage is becoming more and more materialistic. This is a huge change in Chinese society. No matter how confident a woman is, she will lose face if her boyfriend or husband doesn't have a house."

Dating websites are now awash with women stipulating that hopefuls must come with a residence (and often a set of wheels) in tow.

Medical technology's downside

A Pacemaker Wrecks a Family's Life - NYTimes.com

This is a long but quite interesting story about how the use of pacemakers in the elderly in the US appears to be prolonging lives that do not want to be prolonged. It has apparently proved difficult to get permission to turn the things off.

It appears that only very recently has the American Heart Association issued guidelines that patients or their "legal surrogates" (people with Enduring Power of Attorney in Australia's case) could request the withdrawal of medical treatment, including implanted pacemakers, and that this would not be euthanasia or assisted suicide.

I wonder if there has been any similar uncertainty in Australia, or if this was largely a product of American concern over litigation. Tell us, Geoff.

That's hot

AFP: Kuwaiti MPs call for shorter work hours to save power

From the report:

Last week, the oil-rich OPEC member almost resorted to power cuts after a sharp rise in demand in response to record temperatures that soared to 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 Fahrenheit), the highest in more than 30 years.

Surely a dry heat of 52 degrees is not exactly healthy without airconditioning, so I am curious as to what happens to death rates when the power is cut off during a day like that. (Then again, I suppose people have been living in the desert for a long time. Why on earth did they stay there?)

Interesting terms found on the Web today

1. Cat therapist. (From New York; not California as you might have expected.)

2. Sexually Satisfying Events. It's a medical term used in trials of libido enhancing drugs, apparently. I wonder if there’s a requirement that two people be involved?

Once a certain age is reached, perhaps a more relevant term is needed, such as "Sexually Satisfying Event Equivalent." (I expect most of mine to involve cheese.)

3. The Theory of Exclusively Local Beables. This is from arXiv, which is a bit of an obvious source for novel phrases: every second paper has a title with a term I haven’t heard of before. Anyhow, “beables” is a charming sounding word, and is described as follows:

J.S. Bell introduced the term “beables” (a deliberate contrast to the vaguely-defined “observables” which, he thought, played too prominent a role in orthodox, Copenhagen quantum theory) to name whatever is posited, by a candidate theory, as corresponding directly to something that is physically real (independent of any “observation”).

The paper talks of “pilot wave” theories to explain the quantum world, and is of some interest, especially in its introductory explanation of how such theories to explain the dual particle/wave characteristics of light were considered from the beginning by Einstein, but they lost out to the “tranquilizing philosophy” of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. (The paper goes on to suggest that there is merit still in the pilot wave idea.)

4. Everyone has two puberties. Recently I link to a list of very dubious ideas Kant had about life, yet today while reading a bit of a rambling article in The Guardian about marriage, I found this:

I think Elizabeth Gilbert gets somewhere close to it when she quotes Kant in his assertion that we humans are so emotionally complex that we go through two puberties in life: the first when our bodies are mature enough for sex, and the second when our minds are.

Sounds about right; good on you Immanuel. (But having reputedly died a virgin, I wonder how he assessed his own preparedness for it.) *

* At another blog earlier this year, I imagined a movie involving Kant (who, apart from alleged sexual inexperience, also never travelled more than 100 miles from his home town of Konigsberg) as actually being a secret prototype James Bond character, involved in political intrigue and bedding femme fatales all over Europe and the Americas in the 1770's. (Wikipedia says he had a "silent decade" in his 40's.) I await the grant for the script from the Australian Film Commission: God knows they haven't funded enough films involving improbable historical fantasies based in Prussia.

Big brother death throes

Charlie Brooker writes pretty amusingly on the final series of the British version of Big Brother. (Yes, it is a sure sign of the cultural sickness at the heart of that country that its BB outlived, and seemed to attract more attention, than its Australian counterpart.)

It’s small, but my favourite line in the article is towards the end:

Throughout the first series, broadcast in 1912, the contestants occasionally sang "it's only a game show!" to keep their spirits up.

The Japanese way

This was reported last weekend, apparently, but I missed it:

Britain’s Sunday Times reported in its online edition that Japan had bribed small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) commissioner for Tanzania said “call girls” were made available at the hotels for ministers and senior fisheries civil servants during all-expenses paid trips to Japan, the paper reported.

The Sunday Times’ investigation revealed that officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the IWC. According to the report, the governments of St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Grenada, Republic of Guinea and Ivory Coast negotiated selling their votes in return for aid. One official said that call girls were offered when fisheries ministers and civil servants visited Japan for meetings.

A top fisheries official for Guinea said Japan usually gave his minister a “minimum” of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings, the paper reported.

A witty Glover

The five stages of grief; and preparing for the HSC

More floods = climate change?

String of floods raise climate change questions - Capital Weather Gang

I think this is a pretty balanced article about what the media can appropriately say about recent floods in the States and climate change.

Meanwhile, the UK Met Office says that even if CO2 dropped after its rise, rainfall changes caused by AGW would hang around for decades. Seems pretty academic to me: why bother looking at unrealistic theoretical drops in CO2? Anyway, their modelling for what rainfall changes AGW will cause indicates:

High latitude countries such as Canada and Russia would receive more rain and snow, whereas other regions such as the Amazon basin, Australia and parts of sub-Saharan Africa would receive substantially less.

As the oceans have huge capacity to store heat, releasing the heat relating to a temporary quadrupling of the man-made greenhouse effect would take many decades.

The Met Office computer model is known to project more drying of the Amazon than most others.

Last night's Catalyst had an interesting story on Western Australia being unusually dry for the last 30 years. They don't say it's all CO2's fault; changes to the ozone layer get much blame too.

All a bit of a worry.

In the news again

Bigfoot discovered? Virginia man says he's on verge of Bigfoot discovery - CSMonitor.com

I can't resist a Bigfoot story, but there's nothing much to this one. Still, it's an excuse to refer people to the Messin' with Sasquatch beef jerky ads from America, which have been around for some years, but I only found them recently. Here's the first, which sets the tone for the rest:



I suppose it's not dissimilar to the Betty White ad I featured recently: I find unexpected violence pretty funny. Sorry.

Also - if you want to amuse yourself (or your kids) by making a film with your webcam of a mini animated Sasquatch doing stuff on your desk - click on the very neat application "Living Sasquatch" on the Jack Links Messin' with Sasquatch website.

Congratulations Alexito...

..for making a witty comment following this article with a self-explanatory title: World Cup puts boot into suffering UK box office

I don't know what the multiplexes expect when they throw me out for trying to add a bit of atmosphere to Sex and the City 2 with my vuvuzela.

Making babies: highly questionable research

Is there any greater sign of the modern over-enlarged sense of entitlement than the ART ("assisted reproduction technology") business? [Yes, I know, I was lucky enough not to have go looking into that to have kids of my own, but high abortion rates means that it's not for a lack of embryos in the West that there is a shortage of babies born. Indeed, despite the problems inherent in international adoption, I would still prefer to see more of that than kids left in the pathetic orphanages that exist in some countries.]

There have been quite a few stories of interest about ART this lately, and some really bad reporting. This will be a long post.

First: Let's oversell "Two Mums is good". It was widely reported, as in this example from the Sydney Morning Herald short report, with the jolly title "Two Mums Better than Dad":

"..researchers found children born to and raised by lesbian couples were better off socially, academically and more competent than their peers."

All complete with happy photo of (impliedly) happy lesbian family, although as they are not identified, for all I know they could be a couple of Fairfax reporters who posed with the bosses' toddler.

Anyhow, the study was based on following 154 pregnant (from artificial insemination) lesbian women from the 1980's and comparing them to heterosexual families. Beginning to suspect this study might have some flaws? Your suspicions would be right. As economist blogger David Friedman notes, one obvious way it might be unreliable would be if the two groups of parents were not closely matched for other factors that may very well be relevant to having a "better off" child:

The two groups might differ in important ways other than their sexual preferences. Most obviously, since the lesbian parents had conceived via artificial insemination, their pregnancies were all planned and all desired. If the comparison group contained a significant number of children from unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, that might explain why more of them had behavioral problems. One could imagine a variety of other possible explanations as well—and the news stories did not provide enough information to confirm or reject them.

He then reads the paper and reports:

The two groups were not closely matched, due to data limitations, a problem that the authors noted. They differed strikingly in geographic location, since the lesbian couples were all recruited in the Boston, D.C., and San Francisco meteropolitan areas, while the data on children of heterosexual couples, coming from another researcher's work, was based on a wider distribution of locations. They were not matched racially—14% of the heterosexual couples were black, 3% of the lesbian couples were. They were not matched socio-economically—on average, the heterosexual couples were of higher SES than the lesbian couples.

As someone commented in the Sydney Morning Herald guessed:

This study may be more about the socio-economic than about gender! In that regard it simply confirms what we already know: advantaged parents are able to raise advantaged children. It is not that "2 mums better than dad". Rather, it is that "2 advantaged parents are better than 2 less advantaged ones".

David Friedman then finds another startling problem with the research:

Questionaires went, at various points in the study, to both mothers and children. But the conclusion about how well adjusted the children were was based entirely on the reports of ther mothers. A more accurate, if less punchy, headline would have read: "Lesbian Mothers Think Better of Their Kids than Heterosexual Mothers Do."

Friedman is not out to criticise the authors, as the inadequacies are there to see in the paper. It certainly seems to me, though, that the authors are not above overselling their report to the media, such as when they are quoted as follows:

"Our findings show that adolescents who have been raised since birth in planned lesbian families demonstrate healthy psychological adjustment and thus provide no justification for restricting access to reproductive technologies or child custody on the basis of the sexual orientation of the parents."

Hmm. Does that sound just a tad like they have the view that they have a message to sell? Their funding did come from lesbian friendly foundations. What a surprise.

I don't think many people expect lesbian couples to be atrocious at parenting; at the same time, this is a bit of peer reviewed research that proves nothing and is being oversold by its authors.

Second: Let's not report a survey that indicates some kids are not so happy about not knowing their Dad:

OK, OK, this is not a peer reviewed bit of research and it comes out of a conservative foundation and was partly conducted by a person with a personal interest in the issue. But it got a run in Slate, which was kind of brave of them, as it would clearly upset many liberals because, you know, everyone is entitled to get knocked up via an anonymous sperm donor and who are we to question whether that's a wise thing to do?

The report is a survey which compared attitudes between 3 groups: "18- to 45-year-olds includes 485 who were conceived via sperm donation, 562 adopted as infants, and 563 raised by their biological parents." Some of the findings:

Regardless of socioeconomic status, donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. They are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse. And they are about 1.5 times as likely to report depression or other mental health problems.

As a group, the donor offspring in our study are suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused, and feeling more isolated from their families. (And our study found that the adoptees on average are struggling more than those raised by their biological parents.) The donor offspring are more likely than the adopted to have struggled with addiction and delinquency and, similar to the adopted, a significant number have confronted depression or other mental illness. Nearly half of donor offspring, and more than half of adoptees, agree, "It is better to adopt than to use donated sperm or eggs to have a child."

Of course, there may well be biases in the selection of the subjects here (although I haven't read anyone pointing out precisely how yet), and it's not "peer reviewed", but is it all that surprising that some adults from anonymous sperm donation would worry about things like whether someone they meet might actually be their half sibling? This is particularly so in America, which for some reason is still allowing anonymous donors to remain anonymous all their life. (This has been changed in Australia and much of Europe, with the result that very few men are now willing to be sperm donors. In Australia, the donor can't even be paid!)

Everyone knows that adopted kids, as adults, often feel that the fact of their adoption is an important issue about their life, hence all the shows and stories about the desire to re-unite with their biological parents. It makes many of them feel more complete.

So it should be no surprise at all that many sperm donor kids should feel the same way.

I reckon there is likely to be more truth and accuracy in this study than the lesbian parent one.

Of course, if you are going to allow companies to provide this service, the anonymity should be illegal. It is cruel to deliberately create a kid with this uncertainty in its future.

Yet, of course, it wasn't mentioned in the media much at all.

Third: just how many defects does ART create in babies?

There was some reporting of a new study that at first sounds like it should be a big worry for those considering IVF:

Slightly more than 4% of babies born via assisted reproductive technology such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) may have major birth defects, such as heart and urogenital tract malformations, according to a new study...

The major birth defects seen in babies born via IVF and/or ICSI included heart defects and malformations of the urogenital tract, such as hypospadias (an abnormality in the position of the opening of the urethra in boys). In the study, 110 children had genetic disorders, including six children with Beckwith-Weidemann syndrome, which is marked by body overgrowth, and may increase risk of certain cancers. Five children also had bilateral retinoblastoma (cancer of the eye's retina).

Children born via assisted reproductive technology had a five times higher rate for minor birth defects such as angiomas (a benign tumor of small blood vessels causing a red growth on the skin). Angiomas were twice as common in girls as in boys, the study found.

But:

U.S. experts are quick to point out that these risks are not much different from what would be expected in the general population. And the risks are much lower than what has been found in some other studies of babies born as a result of fertility treatments.

This research came from surveys in France, and the lead authors Geralidine Viot (see above link) is quoted as saying:

"our results are not so different from the general population and I consider them rather reassuring as some previously reported studies showed increased risk of major malformations around 9% to 11%," she says.

Wait a minute: why is so much discrepancy between the rate of defects in these studies? Just how hard is it to record defects from babies from IVF?

And what's going on here: in the report of this study from The Independent, we read:

The study, the largest of its kind, found evidence of a higher-than-expected rate of serious congenital abnormalities.

Research leader Geraldine Viot said: "We found a major congenital malformation in 4.24pc of the children, compared with the 2-3pc that we had expected from previous published studies.

"This higher rate was due in part to an excess of heart diseases and malformations of the uro-genital system. This was much more common in boys.

Those comments regarding what they expected from previous studies doesn't seem to match the earlier quote, where she was relieved that their rate was half that of previous studies.

There's some explaining that needs to be done about all this. There are studies from Australia indicating defect rates "twice" that of naturally conceived children, and an American report from 2 years ago that found:

The CDC reports that certain birth defects -- including heart wall problems and cleft lip/palate -- may be two to four times more common among babies conceived with assisted reproductive technology (ART) than babies conceived naturally.

They are also keen to note:

The study doesn't prove that ART was to blame for the birth defects.

"Subfertile women might have a higher risk of having a child with a birth defect regardless of whether infertility treatments are used," write Reefhuis and colleagues.

So it may not be the ART process itself that "causes" it, instead it may be the decision to use ART to get a baby with a higher risk of a major defect when your natural infertility would have prevented it. Well, I hope that IVF clinics make this subtle "it's not us, it's you" distinction known to their clients.

In fact, it seems to me ART doctors are dead keen to downplay the significance of increased rates of defects. For example, this is from the Melbourne Herald Sun report on the recent French study:

Dr John McBain, Melbourne IVF director and head of reproductive services at the Royal Women's Hospital, said the definition of "major" congenital abnormalities was contentious, and included conditions such as clicky hips and club feet.

He said it was difficult to compare the health of children conceived naturally and through ART.

"The children born from assisted conception have more rigorous physical examinations," he said.

This is self interested excuse making, if you ask me.

And funnily enough, when you go to the glossy IVF Australia website and search it for terms such as "birth defects", "congenital defects" or "birth abnormalities", you score nothing that talks about increased rates of these for IVF babies. (That's not to say that they don't give appropriate information to those who contact them, but I would be curious as to how they explain the risks, given the apparent conflict between results of studies over the last decade.)

I remain very cynical about virtually all aspects of "Assisted Reproductive Technologies", but it's a good little earner I'm sure.

A jelly education

Jelly clinic: how to deliver a quiver | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

This article from The Guardian, by a couple of authors flogging their book about jelly, does make some interesting points:

Jelly is the ultimate party food, an animal-based dessert that predates Christ and was eaten by Henry VIII for both the first and second course of his 1521 Garter Banquet.

Jelly predates Christ? Given the lack of refrigeration, how did they get them to set? Or is this just a Brisbane-centric lack of understanding, as I guess in many countries leaving it out overnight may well be enough. What about this claim:

Slap a jelly on your dinner table and guests will be hypnotized by its lewd wobbling and your kitchen prowess.

Easily hypnotised, those English.

I like the start of the next paragraph:

The origins of jelly are shrouded in mystery..

Wait a minute. This article has already referred to "before Christ" and "mystery." Clearly, this is material for the next Dan Brown novel. The secret of the origin of jelly is almost certainly being covered up in the foundations of the Temple in Jerusalem. I can see an important plot revelation already: you know those bits of paper being stuck in the Wailing Wall? - they're jelly recipes! You heard it here first.

The article then explains more history:

With sugar wildly expensive, sweet jelly became a potent status symbol. It remained at the centre of the tables of the rich and powerful well into the early 20th century. Ingredients, moulds, ice for refrigeration and the labour to clarify weird gelling agents like hartshorn and the swim bladders of sturgeon were all expensive.

I think this is something to share with the kids with great gusto when they are next served jelly: "You're eating like a King or a millionaire, you know!" "Bill Gates has swimming pools filled with jelly, it always impresses his guests."

A final important point:

Yes, jellying today is ridiculously simple. But you must respect the jelly.

We always stand to attention and salute while the bagpipes play during the ceremonial Presentation of the Jelly at our house.

Time for the annual "why are there so many movie sequels this summer" post

Film - An Old Pairing - Summer and Movie Sequels - NYTimes.com

AO Scott talks a lot about how many sequels there are coming out this year, but I get a distinct sense of deja vu while reading it. Doesn't an article like this appear in one of the major American media publications every summer?

Which is a pity because: oh my God why are there so many sequels to movies that don't deserve sequels coming out this year?

Of the bunch, perhaps I will see Toy Story 3, but even then I am not holding my breath; even though I loved the first Toy Story and am generally a pretty big fan of Pixar, I found Toy Story 2 very forgettable.

There is one sequel worth waiting for this year, and that's Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But it's a Christmas release, so it at least its not coming out with all the summer sequel dreck.

By the way, the first trailer for VDT comes out with Toy Story 3, and will be released on the web this Thursday. Yes, the fact that I know that is evidence of my Narnia fanboydom, I guess

All praise the Mockingbird

BBC News - Why is To Kill A Mockingbird so popular?

As this year is its 50th anniversary of publication, maybe there will be more articles like this around.

The only thing I find odd is this:

On the eve of its 50th birthday, To Kill A Mockingbird still has a generation of schoolchildren transfixed, while regularly figuring high on lists of the country's "favourite books".

A poll for World Book Day placed it fifth, behind Pride and Prejudice but ahead of the Bible. A similar BBC one puts it sixth.

I can only assume that more women answer World Book Day polls than men.

Parasites as friends

How the parasitic worm has turned

I've mentioned before the apparent benefits of having a good dose of intestinal worms for your immune system. The story has been turning up in various forms for a few years now, but it's apparently discussed recently in a Science article:

Professor Roberts, whose work is published in Science, explains: "It is like a three-legged stool - the microbes, worms and immune system regulate each other.

"The worms have been with us throughout our evolution and their presence, along with bacteria, in the ecosystem of the gut is important in the development of a functional immune system."

Professor Grencis adds: "If you look at the incidence of parasitic worm infection and compare it to the incidence of auto-immune disease and allergy, where the body's immune system over-reacts and causes damage, they have little overlap. Clean places in the West, where parasites are eradicated, see problems caused by overactive immune systems. In the developing world, there is more parasitic worm infection but less auto-immune and allergic problems.

"We are not suggesting that people deliberately infect themselves with parasitic worms but we are saying that these larger pathogens make things that help our immune system. We have evolved with both the bugs and the worms and there are consequences of that interaction, so they are important to the development of our immune system."

I don't know: it seems he is suggesting that catching them is a good idea. Here's more:

Intestinal roundworm parasites are one of the most common types of infection worldwide, although in humans increased hygiene has reduced infection in many countries. High level infections by these parasites can cause disease, but the natural situation is the presence of relatively low levels of infection. The team's work suggests that in addition to bacterial microflora, the natural state of affairs of our intestines may well be the presence of larger organisms, the parasitic roundworms, and that complex and subtle interactions between these different types of organism have evolved to provide an efficient and beneficial ecosystem for all concerned.

There's no mention of how you might get the benefits of a gut full of worms without actually having a gut full of worms, but I am sure someone must be thinking about it.

Colebatch on debt

Fiscal time bomb yet to explode

The quite spectacular looking fireball re-entry of the Japanese Hayabusa space probe can be viewed on this Youtube:

Leave Kanty alone!!

I think I might have read this a few months ago when it came out, but forgot to post about it.  Philosophy Professor Eric Schwitzgebel did a post listing Kant’s most peculiar and'/or odious views.   (I knew about his view of masturbation as being worse than suicide, but the Professor extends the list, and indeed one of the comments also throws in racism.)

Of course, there might be some excuse making to be found in the state of science was at the time.   Still, despite my general high regard for him, Kant did have some spectacularly odd views.  It also turns out that one writer has suggested that Kant wrote under the influence of a “massive left prefrontal tumor” which biologically prevented him from having proper empathy for people when he wrote his major works.

Somehow, I think that’s an unlikely scenario.  Reason can lead philosophers to all sorts of spurious and silly conclusions, as shown in my recent posts about the idea that people (even with the most “normal” lives) should logically think it would be better if people didn’t exist.  In that case, maybe it is excessive empathy that is leading to the result, but the conclusion is just as silly as anything Kant wrote.

Another Chinese problem

An increase in the use of prostitutes (and the number of bisexual men) is being blamed for some pretty startlingly bad figures on the recent rise in syphilis in China:

Syphilis was almost wiped out in China 50 years ago, but has increased 10-fold over the past decade to emerge as one of the country's top five infectious diseases, the China Daily said, quoting the ministry of health.

The rate of mother-to-child transmissions jumped alarmingly to 57 cases per 100,000 newborns between 2003 and 2008, from a previous seven cases per 100,000, it said.

What's the rate in Australia, I wonder? This site paints a very mixed picture:

The rates of syphilis in Australia are about 10/100 000, nearly double that in New South Wales, and up to 140/100 000 in the Northern Territory, with a national indigenous rate of 300/100 000.  Despite remaining fairly stable in the heterosexual community, syphilis rates continue to rise in homosexually active men.  Other groups in Australia at risk of syphilis include rural and remote indigenous communities and those from overseas. Most infections are detected in the late latent phase, when the patient is asymptomatic, having passed the early infectious stages unrecognised and undiagnosed. 

The total rate in China, according to this graph that was in the New England Journal of Medicine article that is that basis of this story, indicates a rate of about 20 per 100,000.   So, in fact, the national rate is not all that huge, although I see that some Shanghai is a particularly bad place for it.  But the sharp rise in congenital cases is remarkably steep.  According to the NEJM:

…more than half of pregnant women with syphilis have a spontaneous abortion or stillbirth; and babies with congenital syphilis may have serious, irreversible sequelae with rates of death in infancy of more than 50%

That’s pretty sad.

Crowe stories

A rude awakening

The Sydney Morning Herald has run a story from The Telegraph by the author of a new book on the now (as I understand it) existing-in-name-only Dreamworks studio.  It's all pretty interesting, but as we all love a "Russell Crowe is a vain, preening idiot" story, it's mainly worth reading the bits near the beginning about him, such as this:

While filming [Gladiator] in Morocco, he walked off the set twice. For ''fun'', he challenged crew members to foot races only to lose and then complain for days that he couldn't ''run in the sand in sandals''. Years before the actor would become famous for the kind of short-tempered fuse that launched airborne telephones in the direction of hotel receptionists, his diva antics were already at a remarkably impressive level: upset that his assistants' pay wasn't high enough, he placed an angry call to Gladiator  producer Branko Lustig at 3am. Lustig, in turn, called Spielberg in Los Angeles: ''Steven, I'm leaving. Russell wants to kill me.'

But by far the most detailed first hand account of, shall we say, Crowe's personality "issues" was by Jack Marx in 2006, and happily it is still available at Fairfax.

Why bother existing, revisited

I could put this as an update to my post a few days ago about philosophers (and others) who think it's not such a bad idea for people to just, you know, go away from the universe, but who's going to notice if I do that?

Hence, I'll point out here that the ridiculously productive blogger James Lilek has also visited the story, with pretty much the same reaction that I had, but expressed in wittier form:

You have to love this: let’s say everyone agreed not to have children. Then is there anything wrong with this scenario? The obvious answer is “yes; no children” but since the childless future with no humans at all, just birds and fish and bugs, doesn’t mean any human suffering, then the net amount of suffering is reduced, and we can all have a party. This is also an argument for smothering everyone under 15 so they don’t suffer broken hearts and angsty 20s, which happen to everyone. But don’t worry; he’s just asking questions.

It's all worth reading.

Depends how you define "disaster", I suppose

This is, of course, a very fair and reasonable blog, and although it has long decided that the world ought to be working hard to urgently limit CO2 reductions, it's not above pointing out some of the confusions and exaggerations which occur on my side of the argument.

Hence, regular readers might recall that in January this year, I noted that papers talking about the effect of loss of glaciers in the Himalayas on water flow in Indian and Chinese rivers seemed to be using some pretty confusing figures which were hard to reconcile.

Well, my confusion was justified, it seems. Nature reports on a new paper which tries to put the issue of glaciers and water flow in that area more into perspective. It starts with the heading "Global warming impact on Asia's rivers overblown", which appears to be part of environmental journalists new campaign not to be caught exaggerating again, even when the thing they are reporting on is quite seriously bad. Here are some extracts:

Although global warming is expected to shrink glaciers in the Himalayas and other high mountains in Central Asia, the declining ice will have less overall impact on the region's water supplies than previously believed, a study concludes.

It's an important finding, says Richard Armstrong, a climatologist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who notes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously predicted dire restrictions on water supplies in Asia. "There clearly were some misunderstandings," he says.

Yes, well, OK, but while the current study did find that the importance of glacier meltwater is not so important for some rivers, it's still pretty important for others:

The researchers behind the latest study began by calculating the importance of meltwater in the overall hydrology of five rivers: the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the Yellow River and the Yangtze in China¹. The authors found that meltwater is most important to the Indus, with a contribution roughly 1.5 times that from lowland rains. In the Brahmaputra, meltwater flow is equivalent to only one-quarter of the volume supplied by lowland rainfall, and, in the other rivers, it forms no more than one-tenth of the input.

Furthermore, the study found that in the Indus and Ganges basins, glacial ice contributes only about 40% of the total meltwater, with the rest coming from seasonal snows. In the other three rivers its contribution is even lower.

OK, so with some model's predicted changes to rainfall/snow, what effect might AGW have?:

Climate change will therefore have two effects, Immerzeel says. One will be to reduce the contribution of glaciers to total run-off. The other will be to change weather patterns, including rain and snowfall. Combining these and looking at averages from five climate models, Immerzeel and colleagues concluded that the change in upstream water inputs will range from a decrease of 19.6% for the Brahmaputra to a 9.5% increase for the Yellow River. The latter, he notes, is due to increased winter rains. "The Yellow River depends only marginally on meltwater," he says, "and, on average, the models project an increase in winter precipitation in the Yellow River basin."

What this means, Armstrong says, is that river flows are dominated by seasonal rains. "The glaciers are tiny, compared with the monsoon," he says.

All sounding relatively comforting, kind of, until you hit the next paragraph:

Nevertheless, the study concludes that climate change will reduce water supplies enough that by 2050, declines in irrigation water are likely to reduce the number of people the region's agriculture can support by about 60 million — 4.5% of the region's present population.

So the previous over-estimation of how many in India may be badly effected by AGW within 40 years is downgraded to a mere three times as many as the population of Australia.

How very comforting for them.

Of course, precise predictions of changes to rainfall is one of the rubberiest areas of climate science at the moment, but still, it would seem a fair bet that one of the worst hit areas from human induced climate change will be the relatively helpless poorer people in parts of Asia.

Mysterious programming

I see that in 2008, I mentioned how enjoyable I was finding the BBC's current incarnation of Robin Hood. (One suspects it gives much more pleasure than Russell Crowe's movie version.) It's one of those rare programs that is sufficiently sophisticated for adults, yet is enjoyable for the younger family members too.

After the traumatic ending of series 2 (it really was a surprise, and quite moving, and if you have no intention of watching it, you can find out what happened here), I was aware that a third series was in production and was on the look out for it on Australian TV.

Well, sad to say, ABC has decided to run it on ABC2, which I don't always think to check on Saturday night, and as a result I've come in late to this series 3.

I still think it's a good show, although it's probably right that it ends with this series. It's hard to see where else it could go.

Free speech in Kuwait

Kuwaiti activist's detention extended until June 21

A Kuwaiti court on Monday extended the detention of Kuwaiti lawyer
and columnist Mohammad Al Jasem until June 21.

The court said that it would hear the testimony of an investigation
officer on the case that has divided the Kuwaiti society and sparked
international calls for the release of the 54-year-old detainee.

Al Jasem, charged with damaging national interests, told the court
that his detention was illegal and his team of lawyers called for his
immediate release, according to Kuwaiti media.


The court kept the defendant in police custody, but agreed to have him
examined by a medical team to assess his health condition. His family
said that he had had heart problems in the past.

The public prosecutor last month imposed a gag on the coverage of the
trial of Al Jasem who last November was detained for 12 days in a
separate case initiated by the Kuwaiti prime minister who accused him of
slander.

I assume America, which took more than a little effort to help this place, is making representations.

Helen's legacy

Gosh, it's been a slow news week as far as I'm concerned. There just hasn't been anything much that I have deemed blogworthy.

But, Colbert's handling of the Helen Thomas resignation amused me:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Helen Thomas's Reputation
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

I also thought that the next segment on Colbert, in which he dealt with the Israeli "aid flotilla", was pretty remarkable in that it managed to be funny without being offensive, and even featured the Israeli ambassador to the US in one of Colbert's interviews which manage to amuse but let some real information and commentary in too.

Reversable eunuchs

BBC NEWS | Europe | 'I was chemically castrated'

In light of Poland introducing compulsory chemical castration for some sex offenders, the BBC has this interview with a Canadian sex offender who found his voluntary undergoing of the procedure quite helpful.

Interestingly, he talks about how, now that he is out of jail but still undergoing the chemical castration, he has a girlfriend, and he's trying to work out how to tell her about his background. (His plan is to stop the treatment at some point.)

Talk about delicate topics to bring up over your dinner date!

MRI videos

I forget what I was looking for when I found these, and they have been around for some time.

But - here a few videos about MRIs that interested me:

* here's a staged demonstration of the powerful magnets in them;

* here's what appears to be the un-staged consequences of forgetting about the powerful magnets;

* here is the latest in Japanese MRI's (it's silly, but I still find it pretty funny.)

Philosopher thinks himself out of existence

Should This Be the Last Generation? - NYTimes.com

This is kind of amusing. Peter Singer looks at the big question of whether it is better to exist or not exist, and notes one recent ultra pessimistic book:

Schopenhauer’s pessimism has had few defenders over the past two centuries, but one has recently emerged, in the South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.”

Singer sounds quite sympathetic to the arguments, but in the end outs himself as an optimist after all. That's a shame in the way; I would find it quite funny if he joined a philosophical movement that seemed to want to apologise for drawing breath, and causing a new icky human life form to trod the earth.

Reasons he drinks

It's interesting to read Christopher Hitchens explaining in detail his drinking routine, and his very cheery view of the habit.

An odd connection

Gut bacteria may contribute to autism - health - 07 June 2010 - New Scientist

Children with autism appear to have a characteristic chemical signature in their urine which might form the basis of an early diagnostic test for the condition.

The finding also adds weight the hypothesis that substances released by gut bacteria are contributing to the onset of the condition.

The researcher is keen to point out that this has nothing to do with the discredited idea that vaccination causes autism.

More research is coming:

The next step is to confirm the results in a much larger group of age-matched children, as well as following high-risk children from birth in order to identify whether there are markers that precede the development of autistic symptoms.

Colebatch on the mining tax

Rudd In Fight Over 40% Mining Tax

Once again, a good, clear column by Tim Colebatch on the fight over a mining tax.

Meanwhile, Niki Savva makes a suggestion for Tony Abbott that makes a lot of sense to me: don't just resist all mining taxes; take up the miner's suggestion that they could afford to pay more tax and work out a deal with them.

But would Abbott be smart enough to do this?

Angry elephants

AFP: Elephants and humans clash over resources in Bangladesh

The wild Asian elephant wrapped its trunk around Parul Chambu Gong's husband and dragged him, kicking and screaming, into the forest.

His badly damaged corpse was recovered some hours later, and the father-of-five joined the list of an increasing number of Bangladeshis killed by wild elephants each year.

There aren't too many of them in Bangladesh, but those who get angry at being shoo-ed away from crops can be mean:

"I've seen an elephant snatch a torch from a man with its trunk while we were driving away a herd, and throw the flame on a house setting it on fire," said Luise, 51.

I guess it's just lucky that it's hard for an elephant to hold a box of matches with feet like that

Sunday at the Dominion

Yesterday went as follows:

* Breakfast: I make pancakes, of the instant "shake" variety. I used to like these, but after making my own from scratch quite a few times, I find I don't care for them anymore. I think it may be the real vanilla essence in the home made ones that makes a lot of difference, but I am not sure. Following my wife's advice, buttermilk does seem to make much nicer result too.

* Attend family church service at the kids school. Is it too curmudgeonly to say that I find the efforts of my kids' teachers to find ways to get their class involved in the once a year family service downright awful? I mean, yesterday's effort involved a little play (performed by four10 year olds) about the importance of "respect", in which a couple of parents made the family's elderly grandfather eat his dinner from a wood bowl in the corner of the room so that he didn't mess up the table with spilt food. I can't quite remember now how it was that the kindly child in the story convinced the parents they were wrong and let the grand-dad come back to the table for meals; somehow he shamed them into it.

Is this a scenario that is in any way likely to resonate with the middle class family kids in attendance? Who writes these stories? Hasn't someone written a book of better mini-plays for 10 year olds to perform in church services?

Furthermore, as I know some of the parents attending are not even Christian, let alone church going, does the church really have to use graphics (on their screens that show the words to the songs) which are all of "Jesus is my friend and likes to give me hugs" variety? Does this church only use these graphics for family services, or all the time?

(It is, I should hasten to add, not a Catholic church, although I admit the local Catholic church I am familiar with likes to use some of the same pop-ish "Jesus I really, really love you" songs too.)

Of course, you can't really say there is anything wrong with praise and worship per se in the Christian context. I suppose you could, if you are protestant, easily ridicule the Catholic veneration of the Eucharist which, incidentally, you don't see much anymore. But that Catholic style of worship had a certain, I guess, gravitas about it which seems much more appropriate to a God who is powerful and beyond complete human comprehension, rather than the singing of the equivalent of love songs to the guy next door.

* Lunch at McDonalds: happily, the kids generally prefer Subway as fast food now, which is definitely a healthier option, but the urge for McDonalds still arises sometimes. I see the fiddling with the menu is continuing apace, but I do think the Chicken Deluxe burgers are now pretty good. I'm still not convinced by the Grand Angus at all.

* Possibly succeeded in attempt to teach my mother about how to use Youtube. It was, of course, in the context of an 86 year old woman whose only interest in the internet is keeping up with the latest Colin Firth news. She wanted to see him accept his best actor award from the Venice Film Festival, even he only spoke in Italian. She was one of the hundred or so people who went and saw A Single Man in Brisbane, fully aware that it was about a depressed gay man, which is not the type of film she would normally seek out. But if Colin appeared in the equivalent of "Shortbus", she would be there to see it.

* Scared the kids. Showed them the first and end bits of The Twilight Zone movie. The middle is hardly worth bothering with, but the updated version of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet - my God it's fantastic. It's the perfect scary mini-movie, suspenseful and frightening without involving blood or loss of limbs at all. (I have no stomach for too much violence in horror.) Add a touch of unexpected humour, and it's perfect. Directed by George Miller I see. (I had forgotten that.)

That was followed by watching a couple of episodes of the original Twilight Zone. My wife had hired this at the library for me and the kids - which just goes to show that she is a good match for me. A couple of things I noticed:

- the two episodes I saw were written by Rod Serling himself and I was struck by their literary quality. The dialogue was quite dense and (to my mind) of a quality more akin to going to the theatre than watching the more "realistic" dialogue of today's TV dramas. (Not that I watch much of that to know, I guess.) It did make me feel a little as if the whole world has dumbed down quite a bit since I was a child.

- Rod Serling was really a deeply unattractive looking man.

* Dinner: my wife prepared a nabe cooked at the table with gyoza dumplings for the protein. A family sharing a meal at the table is good, but I think sitting around and participating in the cooking in front of you is even better. Some sake (Australian Go-Shu brand is fine) helps every Japanese style family meal too.

* Watched Dr Who: I actually thought last night's episode was pretty good, but it's the first of a two part-er, so we'll see how it pans out next week.

Update: it has occurred to me that a Twilight Zone style story may work well in church service requiring a morality mini-play put on by 10 year olds. Some kid in a suit could come out at the start with a fake cigarette and heavily made eyebrows to introduce the story, and then tell us the lesson at the end. I would be the one laughing loudly at the back of the congregation, while everyone else just gets confused.

Pardon?

I think Kevin Rudd swears in ways I don't even understand:

Meanwhile, there has been no official word yet from China after backroom comments Mr Rudd made during last year's Copenhagen climate change conference were reported in an essay by the Herald journalist David Marr. ''Those Chinese f---ers are trying to ratf--k us,'' Mr Rudd reportedly told a group of journalists and officials during a background briefing.

While our socially inept Opposition Leader doesn't know when to stop talking politics at an Italian Day function:

At this point, many in the 500-strong audience became agitated, murmuring among themselves that their guest was using the event to play politics.

Mr Abbott kept trying to make his point, but much of the last part of his speech was almost lost as crowd members yelled at him to keep politics out of the event. One man stood up, telling the Opposition Leader: ''I'm sorry Tony, this is not a political forum.''

This is the most depressing election choice in the history of Australian politics.

Those confusing glaciers

Glaciers' wane not all down to humans : Nature News

Hey, this isn't posted at Watts Up With That yet, but it's bound to be.  Some study is saying that maybe only half of glacier melt in 20th century was due to climate variations other than AGW:

"This doesn't question the actuality, and the seriousness, of man-made climate change in any way," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who led the study. "But what we do see is that current glacier retreat might be equally due to natural climate variations as it is to anthropogenic greenhouse warming."

Good video of "UFO" rocket

UFO talk rockets around Gold Coast Local Gold Coast News | goldcoast.com.au | Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

The big, glowing, spiralling thing seen in the early morning sky yesterday all over the east coast of Australia was, of course, a rocket stage in orbit and the best video I have seen of it is embedded at the link above.

Everyone seems to agree it was the privately owned Falcon 9, but why it was letting out such a large cloud of gas I haven't seen explained yet.

Who hates the leaders

George Megalogenis has some interesting commentary on the personal approval ratings of
Rudd and Abbott:

The price of the Opposition Leader’s plus 8 rating among men aged 35 to 49 is consistently poor numbers across all other groups: younger and older men, and all women.

His problem is, officially, with women.

Abbott turns off women of all ages at roughly the same rate - minus 10 - unlike Rudd, who has the young on his side.

Abbott is also in the red with men aged 18 to 34, where his net rating is minus 6. This is possibly the most interesting distinction of all because this is the group where Rudd has residual respect, notwithstanding his reversal on climate change.

Perhaps young people see through Abbott’s tough-guy pose, while adults and seniors see through Rudd’s pretence of having a personal connection to middle Australia.

As to why Abbott is more popular with middle aged men:

The Opposition Leader is increasingly popular with men aged 35 to 49, a sign that the triathlons have impressed blokes confronting midlife crises.

Well, that's kind of embarrassing for my own gender and age cohort.

Of interest to defence forces everywhere

Moving repeatedly in childhood linked with poorer quality-of-life years later

I'm not surprised by this study indicating that frequent moves in childhood is, generally speaking, not good for kids. I personally would have hated moving while I was at primary school especially.

It must be a very major problem for defence forces everywhere as to how to deal with this. (Well, maybe not so much if you are from a relatively small country like Britain, where a weekend commute is nothing like travelling from one end of Australia to another.)

I guess there is no easy solution, unless you go for a gay armed force again, as in the general vicinity of ancient Greece (apparently.)

The really good stuff

Fromage fort: The cheese that tried to kill me - Salon.com

This paragraph, from an entertaining column by Francis Lam about cheese in France, contains a very amusing anecdote:

I have to say first that, of course, it's just stupidly easy to get your hands on socks-knocking-off-good cheese in France. On my very first day here, my friend Julia and I went down the street and randomly came home with a wedge of Brie from Melun so good, so soft and so sticky and so rich and woodsy and creamy that I caught her talking to it the next day. "Hey, Brie," she purred after getting home from work. "I've been thinking about you, baby. You been thinking about me?" (No, really. That happened.)

All of the article is good; you should read it.

A good interview

You don't always learn all that much about Colbert's guests' ideas, as the emphasis is more on jokes than information. But tonight's interview with Lisa Miller, whose book on the history of heaven has been the subject of a couple of posts here recently, gave her enough time to explain her book's key points, and was quite funny as well:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lisa Miller
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

That's the trouble with politics today - not enough eunuchs!

Tadpoles, eunuchs and testosterone deprivation - Science Show - 22 May 2010

A couple of weeks ago there was a somewhat interesting interview on The Science Show with Richard Wassursug, who, as a result of having to be "chemically castrated" himself because of prostate cancer, has developed a big interest in eunuchs.

For example, as to the role of eunuchs in history:

What I found from actually studying eunuchs in history is they were not wimps, as our modern presumption is, these were the most powerful people in government. From one end of Asia to another, for the last 3,500 years, the most stable governments were run by castrated people, and we actually know why. This is unpublished, but with a colleague we've been studying people who wish to be castrated, a very strange group of people, we ran what's called the big five personality test, and we now know what it actually means to have no balls, and it isn't what most people think. The major personality change appears to be in agreeability, which may sound to a macho male like somebody who just obligingly agrees with everybody, but if you actually look at the roles that eunuchs played in history, they had to be great negotiators, they had to be empathetic and listen to both sides of an argument in order to maintain a stable government. That skill is enhanced by getting off testosterone.

In the Australian context, it's hard to imagine Kevin Rudd being oversupplied with testosterone; I think his problems are more just a personality defect.

But Tony Abbott: his testicles have already led to one embarrassing incident, and his exercise obsession has a whiff of overly macho male competitiveness about it. He's the one who would do better as a eunuch, I'm sure.

Update: by co-incidence, I was just at the BBC website, and for some reason this item from 2005, which indicates how castration can be achieved at home, even without instruments, is currently in its "most popular shared story" column:

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

By the light of the moon

Japanese firm wants to transform the Moon into a giant solar power plant

The Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction firm, has recently proposed a plan to harness solar energy on a larger scale than almost any previously proposed concept. Their ambitious plan involves building a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) equator, converting the electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers to be beamed at Earth, and finally converting the beams back to electricity at terrestrial power stations. The Luna Ring concept, the company says, could meet the entire world's energy needs.

Someone there must be looking for free publicity.  I like the first comment:

Pfffft I say Dyson Sphere or bust!

Temperature watch

Temperatures reach record high in Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

Mohenjo-daro, a ruined city in what is now Pakistan that contains the last traces of a 4,000-year-old civilisation that flourished on the banks of the river Indus, today entered the modern history books after government meteorologists recorded a temperature of 53.7C (129F). Only Al 'Aziziyah, in Libya (57.8C in 1922), Death valley in California (56.7 in 1913) and Tirat Zvi in Israel (53.9 in 1942) are thought to have been hotter.

Temperatures in the nearest town, Larkana, have been only slightly lower in the last week, with 53C recorded last Wednesday. As the temperatures peaked, four people died, including a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and an elderly woman. Dozens are said to have fainted.

The extreme heat was exacerbated by chronic power cuts which have prevented people from using air-conditioning. The electricity has cut out for eight hours each day as part of a severe load-shedding regime that has caused riots in other parts of Pakistan where cities are experiencing a severe heatwave with temperatures of between 43C and 47C.

This article does go on to talk about how hot 2010 is shaping up to be globally, and ends on a cautious note about how some think this is part of "long-term climate change". (Note: journalists still seem too spooked to talk too clearly of AGW.)

It must be small, furry animal news week

Pet rats may harbour deadly fever

There's a warning from an Australian doctor here that some pet rat owners are catching a rare disease from their pets.

It's called "rat bite fever", but as far as I was aware, your "normal" hand raised pet rat pretty rarely bites. (I see from the comments at this site, thought, that it definitely happens.)

Still, the good doctor mentions a case of a Western Australian girl who got an infection but denied having been bitten by her rat. She did clean its cage, though, and perhaps got it that way.

Certainly, good hygiene around pet rats is important, and I would say that rat owners who let them (ugh) lick their teeth (Youtube gives many examples) are simply nuts. But I suspect the danger of a normally clean person catching something from a pet rat is probably no worse than catching toxoplasma from a cat.

In other small, furry animal news

Squirrels show softer side by adopting orphans, study finds

As squirrels rarely interact, they learn who their nearby relatives are by hearing their unique calls, he said. If they fail to hear a relative's calls for a few days, they may investigate. "We suspect that, if they find pups on the territory, they remember that their neighbour was a relative and carry the pups back to their nest. This would be quite intelligent behaviour for a squirrel."

It doesn't happen often though, it seems. I wonder if the much maligned grey squirrels of England do the same thing? It would be good for their PR.

From the "a propos of nothing" files...

Agents portrayed Hitler as gay Jewish eunuch

I think everyone knows that British propaganda in WW2 used to help spread the belief that Hitler was short at least one testicle, but I hadn't realised that they were quite this creative until I stumbled across this 1994 article in The Independent:

Special Operations in London sent out to Gibraltar for distribution in Morocco boxed sets of gramophone records in Arabic making lewd suggestions about Hitler's anatomy....

A po-faced official on the staff of Lord Gort, the Governor of Gibraltar, says side one 'records the story of an Arab caravan journeying to Marrakech'. He bemoans the stagnation of trade in Morocco, and blames Hitler and the fact that British ships are detained in Moroccan ports. But by side two the official is becoming upset. 'It states that Hitler cannot marry and that he hates both Jews and Arabs with a 'fiery hatred' and explains the reason.

'Hitler is a bastard - presumably of Jewish blood - and his original name was Schicklegruber. Some 30 years ago he was but a humble house-painter when one day he was painting the ceiling of a synagogue and fell and damaged one of his testicles]'

The doctor, trained by an Arab, is a former violinist used to giving encores, so when he is applauded for taking off the first testicle, he repeats the performance.

That last bit sounds more like an attempt at humour, really. But Adolf Schicklegruber, I like that.

It's also hard not to be amused by the next part of the article:

The second story has Hitler being visited in his bedroom by Mrs Goebbels, who is shocked to find the Fuhrer has gone to the front to have sex with his generals. The official says in his report to Lord Gort that the Arabs would be likely to be impressed rather than shocked by such behaviour.

Local warming

Hundreds die in Indian heatwave | World news | The Guardian

Record temperatures in northern India have claimed hundreds of lives in what is believed to be the hottest summer in the country since records began in the late 1800s.

The death toll is expected to rise with experts forecasting temperatures approaching 50C (122F) in coming weeks. More than 100 people are reported to have died in the state of Gujarat where the mercury topped at 48.5C last week. At least 90 died in Maharashtra, 35 in Rajasthan and 34 in Bihar.

Interestingly, The Guardian does not specifically mention global warming in the context of this story. I assume that is all part of the new sort journalistic reticence to raise AGW, just at the time global tempertures are in fact on the rise?

Hard to change

The science of a healthy marriage - Times Online

There's not much I particularly wanted to refer people in this article by the writer of a new book on the science of marriage. But this paragraph (about an American study on infidelity in marriage) amused me:

Overall, cheating rates were extraordinarily low—only 11 per cent of respondents reported infidelity. But the scientists also found that cheating was associated with some specific risk factors: being a man; thinking about sex several times a day; having a high number of sexual partners; living in the city; being in a long relationship; living together without marriage; having lived together before marriage and being unhappy.

Possibly important

Failure of Bell's Theorem and the Local Causality of the Entangled Photons

Physicist Joy Christian has had a string of papers recently at arXiv (well, I see now that he has been putting his position in print for a few years) in which he argues that "quantum non-locality" is actually an illusion.

His argument is hard to follow (even by other physicists, it seems) but he talk of an topological error and (to quote from an earlier abstract):

When topologies are correctly identified, local-realistic completion of any arbitrary entangled state is always guaranteed in our framework. This vindicates EPR, and entails that quantum entanglement is best understood as an illusion.

To put it another way, as the paper linked to at the top of this article says:

One of the first steps we often take towards measuring a physical quantity is to set up a Cartesian coordinate system {x, y, z} in the Euclidean space E3. This amounts to modeling the Euclidean space as a 3-fold product of the real line, IR3. This procedure has become so familiar to us that in practice we often identify E3 with its Cartesian model, and simply think of IR3 as the Euclidean space.

As we shall see, however, this seemingly innocuous act of convenience comes with a very heavy price: It is largely responsible for the illusions of “quantum non-locality.” Once a coordinate-free geometric model of the Euclidean space is used, the correlations observed in the EPR-type experiments involving photon pairs ... are easily understood, in a strictly local-realistic terms.

Well, it's not clear to me what this means, but my hunch is that if he might be onto something.

There's not too much about him on the web, but there is a bit of a bio here (and proof that he is a "he", not a she.)

Getting rid of quantum non-locality sounds a good way to make the world more aligned with common sense, but maybe Christian's ideas have their own form of counter-intuitiveness as well. (If only I could understand his explanation of the topological issue.)

One disc to rule them all

Japanese team discovers 'super disc' material

A Japanese research team has found a material that could be used to make a low-price super disc with data storage capacity thousands of times greater than a DVD, the lead scientist said Monday.

And the material is a form of titanium oxide, which has this advantage:

Titanium oxide's market price is about one-hundredth of the rare element -- germanium-antimony-tellurium -- that is currently used in rewritable Blu-ray discs and DVDs, Ohkoshi said.

"You don't have to worry about procuring rare metals. Titanium oxide is cheap and safe, already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint," the professor said.

Very clever, those Japanese. Now if only they would get out of the lab and have children...

My ovaries are safe, then

Drinking tea may reduce ovarian cancer risk

It's research from Queensland too. Yay.

Mercury still rising

Experts fear Taiji mercury tests are fatally flawed | The Japan Times Online

The Japan Times keeps up its (I think) single handed media attack on the issue of the mercury poisoning in Japan from eating dolphin.

This latest update questions whether the health of those found with high levels of mercury really has been assessed properly, and includes comments from more experts (including one from pilot whale eating Faroe Islands!) saying that it's crazy for the government to let them keep eating it.

For those interested...

in manufactured chicken sandwiches, I have updated my story about them a few posts back.

Funny 'cos it's true...

As a person who still works in Wordperfect, never uses IE if I can avoid it, and thinks Irfanview is the best image viewer, I understand entirely.

Inconsistent from the start

Abbott no Captain Courageous

Lenore Taylor gives a lists of the ways in which Tony Abbott has been inconsistent in policy since he became leader. She doesn't mention how many positions he had on the ETS in the half year before he became leader, but his flexible views are still on display now:

To audiences such as the listeners of climate sceptic and 2GB host
Alan Jones he says things like ''in the end, this whole thing … should
be a question of fact, not faith - and we can discover whether the
planet is warming or not by measurement and it seems that,
notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man-made CO2 emissions over
the last decade, the world's warming has stopped''.

To the environmental business leaders on Thursday he had a
differently nuanced argument: ''I am confident, based on the science we
have, that mankind does make a difference to climate, almost certainly
the impact of humans on the planet extends to climate.''

There are changes in the last few months that even I hadn't noticed, such as the "Green Army" being downsized from 15,000 to 1,000. It's a corny idea in the first place. There is the hint that he will still try to introduce a bigger "baby bonus" as an election promise.

As Taylor notes, it's only the "ham-fistedness" that has suddenly swept over the Rudd government that has stopped more media concentration on this. But it seems to me a very cogent case she makes for Abbott's unsuitability for top office.

And in other commentary: Michelle Grattan rips into Rudd for the decision to run an expensive ad campaign for his mining tax changes:

TO SAY the government is hypocritical is an understatement. After all Kevin Rudd's sanctimonious statements about getting the politics out of taxpayer-funded advertising, we have Labor's $38 million campaign to sell a new tax.

It's back to John Howard and the GST campaign, ''Unchain My Heart''. Politicians with their backs against the wall can't resist dipping into the public honey pot to help get across their message.

Still, you have to wonder about Rudd's reasoning. Maybe the government is simply desperate - the miners' onslaught has bitten more than expected. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why the PM, already under attack for backflips and broken promises, would further trash his reputation.

Yet the advertising was planned only days after the tax was announced. Maybe the government thinks we won't remember what Rudd said three years ago.

Once again the PM is victim of his own hyperbole. In 2007, he condemned partisan government advertising as a ''cancer on democracy''.

The government doesn't just look hypocritical, but dodgy too.

What an appalling choice between hopeless, awful leadership we have coming up in the next election.