Tabloid TV deals with bullying, with the queasy results you would expect

This will annoy people, I know, and it's not as if I haven't talked about it already, but I have to say it: the ACA Sunday story on the bullying video was irresponsible, tabloid TV at its cringe inducing worst.

I remain amazed at the uncritical attitude to the video that not only downplays the danger that Casey - a kid who deserves some sympathy - faced as a result of his reaction to bullying, but claims it as a "feel good" story. The interview barely mentioned that he (Casey) acknowledges that there could have been some more serious injury out of it, then quickly cuts to the obsequious interviewer asking him if he feels he went too far. An adamant "no" is the answer.

I am not surprised, given the international hero worship that has been bestowed upon him. His father's attitude to it was quite cautious: he did show quite a degree of disturbance at the violence coming from both the bully and his son, and it seemed to me that he may have felt that the attention it is getting is over-the-top. But he did pull his punches a little and emphasised more his pride in his son standing up for himself, and his sympathy that the bullying had been going on for so long.

Stupid and dishonest commentators in the blogosphere are seemingly incapable of understanding that my complaint against celebrating the video is not an attack on the boy. It is a complaint about adults celebrating school yard fighting in any circumstances, as the real message of the video is this: fights get out of control and can easily lead to permanent injury or death. This in turn leads to legal issues. For these reasons, in the interests of the bullied themselves (who -like Casey - are unlikely to be fully in control if they do respond with violence), responsible adults don't encourage violence as a resolution to bullying.

For those who doubt the danger of the throw: do they watch rugby league? Do they ever doubt that a spear tackle, on grass, is a stupidly dangerous thing to do? If so, they have no credibility in doubting the seriousness of a wrestling style throw onto concrete. It's as plain as day that it was very lucky that the bully did not hit his head with substantial force on the concrete. (And not merely as a secondary consequence of a hit, but rather as a very direct result of the way Casey handled himself.)

For those who say "yes it was dangerous, but he was acting in self defence and provocation and he's excused": don't people have enough common sense to know that these legal defences do have elements of reasonableness and questions of proportionate response built into them? Of course you're not entitled to do anything in response to violence against you, even if you have been subject to bullying for some time. I think it's because it's a bullying incident that people are downplaying the issue of proportionate response, and are overconfident that the police or lawyers would assess the situation in the same way as them. They should not have such confidence.

There has been a particularly ugly line of commentary on the internet along the lines: "I don't care if he did break the kids neck; he deserved it. In fact, I would have happy to see Casey do more to hurt him." This really does annoy me intensely - young bullies do not always maintain that attitude into adulthood, and getting hurt in a fight is not the only way people learn maturity. Those idiots wishing for more physical injury in this fight are showing the same kind of intense immaturity towards physical violence that we don't want young bullies to copy.

They may be a small, not very outspoken, part of the population (who are not very likely to
be rushing to the Casey hero worship sites to make their views known,) but there are voices out there agreeing with me - if Casey had caused death or permanent disability to the bully, it would be a very "live" issue for the police to decide if he should face criminal charges. You can guarantee that the bully's mother would have had a much harder time accepting the justice of the injury he received if he had been killed, or left as a paraplegic or a brain damaged kid who could nothing for himself for the rest of the his life.

Others seemingly take the attitude "well, that didn't happen so let's just say congratulations anyway." I can't understand this and consider it a sign of immaturity. (Granted, there are a lot more immature adults out there than I would have credited.) It is, I suppose, a bit like the attitude people have to a rugby league brawl where no one gets seriously hurt. But then again, such brawls usually are punches thrown by both sides, which doesn't raise the very issue that this video does about the proportionate nature of the response.

I think most people agree that it's a bad thing that young men in bars get into brawls, and need to learn self restraint and to avoid violence if at all possible. At what age do they think this becomes the right thing to do?

Clearly, people hate bullying: that is perfectly understandable. If they think that an incident like this shows the best way to deal with it: that is not understandable at all. The one thing that the interview did show (and I don't mean this a criticism, since we know nothing of their relationship) is that not all avenues of help had been exhausted: the father might have been involved in resolving the bullying if he had known it's extent.

We also know from the bully's mother previous interview that she was upset with her son's bullying. The parents involvement via the school, or otherwise, may therefore have helped. But instead, people are just acting as if this was a desperate act of a victim who had tried to get adults to help. It is by no means clear that this was in fact the case, although this was an aspect the tabloid style interview did not pursue. It might interfere too much with the "feel good" nature of the story, I guess.

No, all I can see is danger and an incident of escalating violence that came close to tragedy. And the praise of strangers towards Casey is unlikely to have any long term positive outcome to other victims of bullying, particularly if some other take it as an example and do accidentally seriously injure someone.

Finally: the ACA story made me very uncomfortable because it raises questions about the long term outcome for Casey himself. I can't help but feel that this praise and encouragement via the media and internet may turn out to be a false dawn of a brighter emotional future for him. No matter how good he feels at the moment, he may not yet appreciate that media fame is a temporary and fickle thing; he's certainly not going to be hearing from any of his internet fan club again over any other life crisis. Given his talk about his troubled time ever since he started at high school, including thinking about suicide, I do feel that he has issues which the "good" outcome of this incident are not going to resolve.

It may be that his father recognises this now in a way he didn't before, and that some greater involvement or attention in his son's life does really make a difference. But I suspect that all this media attention might end up being counterproductive for Casey's emotional development in the long run. Let's hope not, but it seems to me to be a real risk.

Update: I wrote that before Michael Carr-Gregg said pretty much the same things this morning. For another journalistic reaction which at least dwelt on the danger as a real issue in the story, see John Birmingham's column from last week.

Update 2: More detail in another report of an interview with Carr-Gregg:

Basically, this boy should not have responded the way that he did. Dr Carr-Gregg said there was a real danger that the bully may have been permanently injured in the revenge attack.

“My fear is that by going on TV this will normalise, sanitise and glamorise hitting back.

Dr Carr-Gregg said the lack of supervision and the fact other children were standing around filming the incident rather than trying to stop it was an indictment on anti-bullying policies in schools.

He said studies had demonstrated that children who retaliated were victimized more.

There are better ways of dealing with this such as holding the boy in a bear hug “or just walking away”.

What he did doesn’t work long term.

We have to look at bullying and harassment properly in this country.

Dr Carr-Gregg has previously warned retaliation could prove fatal.

"In some contexts it is brave when someone is invading our country or threatening our freedom, but in a school situation it's fraught with difficulty," Dr Carr-Gregg said.

"If we condone these actions we end up saying that violence is a problem-solving device.

"Spending a significant part of your formative years in prison as a result of a serious error of judgment is a heavy price to pay."

After the report, there is a stream of comments still supporting Casey, and hurling abuse at the 12 year old bully.

There do seem to be an extraordinary number of people weighing in on this who say they have been bullying victims themselves. I wonder during what decade most of these people were at school, as I don't know that bullying was a specific subject that really had such widespread attention when I was at high school back in the 1970's. Yet now that schools do talk about it clearly, it seems that all these commenters feel that the schools are failing to deal with it.

But in any event, I re-iterate: this is not a story that the media should be playing up at all. The attention on the bully, his family and the victim is not doing any of them any good in the long run, is my bet.

Update 3: Andrew Bolt on radio this morning (you can listen at his blog) noted that he was entirely sympathetic to Casey's plight, but it was a dangerous throw and if it had resulted in death, people would not be talking about heroics. He had also declined to put the video on his blog because he did not want to encourage others to react this way, given the danger involved. Steve Price agreed with him.

So what'ya know. Two pretty right wing guys seem to have an issue with the danger the video represents.

They have more common sense than the Catallaxy crowd, then. That's not hard, though.

A kind of milestone

And before anyone disses the numbers, just remember this:

Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast. Combine the explosion of new books with the declining total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.

The Fearless Bolt

OK, we all know people are easily spooked by nuclear radiation scares, and anti-nuclear activists are no doubt making exaggerated claims and worrying some people unnecessarily.

But....

I think it's high time we did a quick pass the hat around to collect the air fare to get Andrew Bolt over the Fukushima area and reassure everyone that they are being very, very silly.

I mean, we have it on good authority from Andrew, even today, after his earlier reassurances were proved to be, um, groundless, that:

The problem remains serious, but still no one has been killed or is likely to be, although two workers are said to be missing.....

The panic this emergency has induced is astonishing.

As there actually seems to be a high degree of uncertainty as to whether the workers who remained at Fukushima have already exposed themselves to levels of radiation that will lead to a premature death, it is foolhardy in the extreme to be talking about no one "likely to be killed."

Americans advising an 80 km exclusion for their citizens is not advice coming from nutty Greenie types. It's called "taking sensible precautions based on scientific advice". (A phrase with which, as I will note again in a second, Andrew shows a complete lack of familiarity.) Does Andrew think it's no big deal to evacuate even a 30 km zone in a country like Japan, which is not exactly renown for its big empty spaces?

There are two effects that I can see from his over-the-top "bah humbug" attitude to this; one I welcome, and one I don't:

a. he makes pro-nuclear types look like right wing macho nutters with a surplus of testosterone that over-rides sensible caution. This I don't welcome, because I haven't given up on nuclear myself: although I have to say, some of the things that they seem to have not thought of in enough detail - like "is it really a good idea to store this many old fuel rods here for so many years, when , if we ever lose the water in the cooling pool, they'll start to burn" - are pretty surprising.

b. he makes himself, as a very influential anti AGW writer in Australia, especially for the followers of the Coalition, look like an untrustworthy twit when it comes to his judgement about science, technology, risk and sensible precaution. This is a very, very good thing. (And don't anyone in comments give me any grief that I want to see the Fukushima problems get worse so as to further discredit him. I figure his performance to date, with the silly and borderline offensive downplaying of the consequences of Chernobyl and atomic bombs, and his rush to promote the "it's already under control" line, when it clearly wasn't, he's already discredited himself mightily.)

If Andrew Bolt looks foolhardy on nuclear accidents - and he does - it should make him look foolhardy on climate change - as he is.

He also has quite a following at Catallaxy, a blog with which careful readers may note I am currently having something of a feud. While it's not as if they haven't been ridiculous for years, their gung-ho "people are wimps" jeering on this topic is making them look like the clowns they really are (with some honourable exceptions) on virtually any topic to do with the environment. That is also a good thing.

UPDATE: I see Andrew is hard at it again, posting this evening:

The accounting begins. Here’s a wall of shame of just some of the journalists who have fed the hysterical fear of a nuclear incident that has killed no one and probably never will.

Funny, as he writing that, the news was that Japan had upgraded the seriousness of the emergency from its previous level 4 to level 5. OK, apparently that's still only the same as Three Mile Island which didn't kill anyone; but the point is that it's still not exactly a good look to be upgrading a week after it started. And besides, the IAEA already had it at a six. Even Barry Brook said a couple of days ago "In sum, this accident is now significantly more severe than Three Mile Island in 1979."

Maybe the people of Japan worry a bit because: - not even regulatory bodies and experts can agree on exactly how serious it is.

But People of Japan: do not be alarmed: Andrew Bolt says there is no danger to life.

Look, it's one thing to complain about poor journalism (of which there has been much, as there is every day of the year) that exaggerates danger, and it is true to observe that some people will make bad decisions due to irrational fear of very low levels.

But it's also ridiculous to pretend that this is not very serious, particularly for the plant workers.

Have a look at these radiation figures from Barry Brook's blog for yesterday. They give a pretty good indication why the helicopters were not inclined to get too close to the reactor buildings they were trying to dump water onto:

Radiation Levels

o At 9:20AM (JST) on March 17, radiation level at elevation of 1,000ft above Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 4,130 micro sievert.

o At 9:20AM on March 17, radiation level at elevation of 300ft above Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 87,700 micro sievert.

o At 11:10AM on March 17, radiation level at main gate (approximately 3,281 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 646.2 micro sievert.

o At 7:50PM on March 17, radiation level outside main office building (approximately 1,640 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 3,599 micro sievert.

o For comparison, a human receives 2,400 micro sievert per year from natural radiation in the form of sunlight, radon, and other sources. One chest CT scan generates 6,900 micro sievert per scan.

I don't want to encourage people in China or California to swallow a mouthful of iodine either; but downplaying the danger to the extent that Bolt is doing is embarrassing in the other direction.

A question

Given the haphazard way water has been attempted to be delivered to the cooling pools and reactors at Fukushima, I assume there is a good chance some radioactive water is getting into the adjacent ocean.

Has anyone been talking about what this will mean for the safety of the fishing and seafood industry around the Japanese coast line?

I would assume this may be a very serious consequence for the Japanese in particular, given that they harvest and eat virtually every type of living thing to be found in their seas.

Update: on a related note, the New York Times again proves to have been a pretty good source of reporting on the nuclear crisis, and this report explains in detail that storage of used fuel rods at reactors is a widespread problem not only in Japan, but America too:

Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants: Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while China sends them to a desert storage compound in the western province of Gansu. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever-larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the plants.

Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves.

The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined.

There will be a lot of re-consideration about the America practices to come out of this, and none too soon, by the sounds.

No counselling required

Mind Hacks has a timely post noting the decline of "post disaster counselling" as a practice.

Pure idiocy

What does the media think it is doing, promoting this schoolyard bullying incident that has "gone viral"?

Everyone knows that the videoing of fights amongst school kids and posting them up on Facebook has become a large part of a bullying/cyberbullying vicious cycle. Apparently, this particular one was pulled from Facebook/Youtube pretty quickly, only to appear in the Fairfax media yesterday. What was Fairfax thinking? It was giving more publicity to a video that did not deserve it, and has only led to further appalling consequences.

The reason for it being pulled from Facebook (or Youtube?)was not clear to me, but from the Sky News report noted on this page of the Daily Telegraph, it might have had something to do with the fact that the idiots who posted it put a telephone number at the end as being the one for the young bully's home, and encouraged people to ring and abuse him and his family.

Turns out the number was for the home of a couple of old folk who have nothing to do with this at all, and received many highly abusive calls; some from overseas.

So, you might say: good on the Daily Telegraph for including this corrective.

Um, no, wait a minute. The body of the Daily Telegraph article says that the mother of the bully was interviewed on Channel 7 Today Tonight and "demanded an apology from the victim":

"We don't need this posted everywhere," she said. "I would like him to apologise."

This Daily Telegraph report was picked up in the (second) post on the story by right wing Anerican site Hot Air. Given that their first story was full of comments with gushing praise for the victim having had his revenge on the bully (with barely a handful of comments noting that it was pure good luck that he didn't accidentally kill the bully and end up at real risk of a trial for manslaughter) this revelation of the mother wanting an apology was too much:

Listen up, you worthless brood mare: if you raised your kids not to be bullies, they wouldn’t get bodyslammed. Now f**k off, because there’s a good chance you’re going to be demanding another apology in the future from the judge that puts your stupid brat behind bars.

That was a comment by "Madisonconservative". Yes, there is so much to admire on the Right of American politics at the moment.

One small problem: go look at the video of the story from Today Tonight (I am not sure how long it will be available) and it appears clear that the Daily Telegraph has misquoted the mother. She is referring to her own boy apologising.

The mother in fact comes across very well in the Today Tonight story. She is very embarrassed by her son's actions, and becomes emotional when she complains about it being splattered all over the internet. Who can blame her? She considers her son has made a big mistake and paid for it; it doesn't need to follow him indefinitely on line.

Now, hopefully the mother has more sense than to be reading the internet to see what people are saying about this. But The Daily Telegraph has had the uncorrected story up all day - and unless they have seen some part of the Channel 7 video that we haven't - it is a clear mistake which should be corrected immediately. If she is receiving abusive phone calls, and given what happened earlier in this story, that would seem very likely, I hope she sues the Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Telegraph Facebook page has had a comment up for 7 hours pointing out they are mis-quoting the mother: why is the webpage uncorrected?

As for the continued simple minded praise and cheering that is coming from websites about this video: they continue to disgust me.

UPDATE:

The Daily Telegraph is featuring an apology this morning, but it's hardly profuse:

IN an article published in The Daily Telegraph yesterday headlined "Bully's angry mum wants victim to apologise", it was written that bully Ritchard Gale's mother Tina wanted her son's victim to apologise for slamming her son to the ground.

But she had, in fact, said she wanted her son to apologise to his victim.

The Daily Telegraph apologises for the error.

What's more, on line, it appears above the original story of the incident from (at least) a couple of days ago, not the story in which the paper defames the mother! In fact, as you can see from the screenshot, the apology is the most popular story; but the second most popular story is still the (uncorrected when you click on it) report from yesterday:


Clearly, as at the time I write this, there may still be hundreds (thousands?) of people following Tweeted, emailed or Facebooked links to the incorrect story, and they will not see the correction.

When I posted last evening, I noted there had been a message on the Daily Tele's Facebook page for at least 7 hours telling them they had got it wrong. It also looks like some of the commenters took to emailing the Tele to point out the mistake, as this poor woman was copping abuse from all over the world for something she never did.

The apology seems to have gone on line at midnight local time, and yet, as I say, the link to the original wrong story still does not carry the apology.

Hey, Daily Telegraph: look at the title of this post. It's for you.

UPDATE 2: I see that Hot Air has a large "correction" now - although it is not as clear as it could be:

Update: Corrected — bully’s mom wants son to apologize

Whose son? Why not try this - Corrected - bully's mom wants her son to apologize.

Idiots.

UPDATE 3: what did it take? A phone call from a lawyer? I see that sometime in the last hour or two, the Daily Telegraph finally made their incorrect story page disappear. Congratulations, and where's your cheque book?

UPDATE 4: the Daily Telegraph has dropped the apology from its front page already. (It is still on the site, if you know where to find it.) Barely 12 hours is considered enough to give the apology prominence, is it?

UPDATE 5: Pssst: Daily Tele. Your Facebook entry for this story is still headed:

The mother of a school bully whose video has gone viral wants the victim to apologise. See her side of the story.

And the only link is to the now removed story. Try putting a link to the apology and correction, you incompetents.

For urgent delivery to Catallaxy

Female hormone could be key to male contraceptive

A question of timing, part 2

A couple of physicists have been speculating on whether the LHC could send a particle to the past, with the suggestion being that messages could be sent that way.

Apart from “don’t buy Betamax” (a joke I have borrowed from “Good Omens”,)  messages from the future could be even more useful, as Japanese events are showing.

But here’s another interesting point:  is anyone connected with CERN looking at particle sprays with the intent of deciphering any encrypted messages therein?  Something of a long shot, I would have to admit.

Here’s an idea for a short story (possibly been already done?):  physicist interprets CERN message as “turn LHC off now!”, then has to convince his fellow scientists he’s not mad.

A question of timing - Part 1

I don't have any doubt that anti-nuclear campaigners take political advantage of nuclear crises while they are underway.

However, it seems to me to be actually counter-productive for the pro-nuclear lobby to have been continually talking down the seriousness of the problem at Fukushima, particularly in the early days when no one knew how it would pan out.

But this what the well meaning Barry Brook has been doing, not to mention those who are simply anti-Green for political reasons, such as Andrew Bolt.

Here, for example, is Barry Brook's opening comment on 11 March:

1. There is no credible risk of a serious accident.

A reactor building exploding and/or catching fire on TV every day since then does not, shall we say, seem entirely consistent with that.

Andrew Bolt had been running with "Chenobyl only killed 65", including on Insiders last week, but finally did a column explaining (pretty pathetically) why he was not acknowledging that the WHO expects the total toll to be 4000 "extra deaths". I see that the New York Times noted today:

The great tragedy of Chernobyl was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among people exposed to the radiation as children — more than 6,000 cases so far, with more expected for many years to come. There is no reason for it to be repeated in Japan.

If you're going to talk about Chernobyl honestly, this might be something worth acknowledging. (In fact, I see now, that he finally has in a post that has just appeared this evening.)

A few days ago, Andrew was also happy to quote from a Brook's column the words of MIT expert Oehman:

The plant is safe now and will stay safe.

Even William Saletan at Slate was complaining two days ago:

Early reports said four Japanese plants were in trouble. Now it appears only two were disabled. Early reports said three employees had radiation sickness. Now we're hearing only one is sick, and even in that case, the radiation dose appears relatively low. Two reactor buildings exploded, but these were explosions of excess hydrogen, not nuclear fuel, and neither of them ruptured the inner containers that encase the reactor cores. Some radiation has leaked, but according to measurements outside the plants, the amount so far is modest. Any leak is bad, and the area of contamination, even at low rates, will probably spread. Japan needs our sympathy and our help. But let's not exaggerate the crisis.

Doesn't that seem, after another couple of days of nothing under control, to sound like a pretty feeble attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?

Here's the lesson: with nuclear power, it doesn't pay to spend a lot of time downplaying a crisis until the crisis is actually resolved.

In all honesty, when you're evacuating tens of thousands of people within tens of kilometres from a nuclear accident, you just have to 'fess up and acknowledge that when nuclear goes wrong, it can really go wrong. At the very least, if you have nuclear anywhere near a populated area, it stuffs up the lives of a large number of people in a very major way. It may not end up killing any (or many) of them, but even so, they have a high degree of anxiety and uncertainty in all manner of things (safety for the kids to go back there, is the soil safe for food crops, are their houses now effectively worthless, can you eat the fish, etc.)

So, does this mean I have joined the nuclear nay-sayers club? No, not at all.

The pro-nuclear lobby is still right, in the big picture, and in the long run.

I still believe that nuclear power will be important to reduce CO2 emissions in the future, and the best moral argument to not abandon it is to say that, if you think the problems for people within a 30 km radius of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor are bad, it is likely to be small change compared to the suffering that the worst predictions of global warming and climate change may entail for a huge portion of the world's future population.

And people do need to be reminded of the huge, annually recurring, number of people directly killed globally in the coal mining and oil industries (not to mention the environmental damage of oil spills.)

But even so, don't start saying that yet. Once the current emergency is over, hopefully with much less radiation leaked than the worst case scenarios paint, that may be the time to start talking up nuclear again, emphasising the low number of casualties compared to other industries, and that there are ways that passive safety can be built into future reactors. (Not putting them right beside the ocean might help too.)

But talking up nuclear right now - it just won't wash.

Another danger

It’s a little surprising to read in the New York Times that it’s not only the Japanese reactors which are the source of danger, but the cooling pools around them too:

The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises.

By late Tuesday, the water meant to cool spent fuel rods in the No. 4 reactor was boiling, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said. If the water evaporates and the rods run dry, they could overheat and catch fire, potentially spreading radioactive materials in dangerous clouds. …

The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the reactors have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.

If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.

“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”

More on passive safety in nuclear reactors

I just found this at Technology Review (talking initially about the Japanese reactors):

The reactors at the nuclear plant, built in the early 1970s, rely on active cooling systems that require electricity. Newer plant designs would lessen or eliminate the need for active cooling, making use of natural convection or a "gravity feed" system to cool reactors in the event of an emergency.

In one design, for example, the relatively new Westinghouse AP1000, water is suspended over the reactor housing. If pressure within the system drops, this allows the water to fall into the reactor area, submerging it in enough water to keep it cool.

While passive systems could be better in the event of electrical failures, they might not always be the safest systems. Kadak says that in an active system, it's easier to ensure that coolant gets exactly where it needs to be—it's simply pumped to the right location. Designing passive systems, on the other hand, requires complex models of how fluids will behave in a system that could be rendered incorrect if the system is damaged.

Kadak says that even more advanced reactor designs could overcome these issues. Some advanced reactors use molten metals to cool the reactor—the mass of these systems is enough to provide cooling in an emergency, he says, although if the molten metal were displaced by an earthquake, that could be a problem of its own. He's devoted much of his career to another advanced alternative, the "pebble bed reactor," which is designed to make it impossible for the fuel to get hot enough for a meltdown. The tradeoff is that the reactor has to be much larger--for a given amount of power--than a conventional reactor.

Life's too short...

....to spend too much time abusing other internet identities.

But it has to be said - I've been wanting to say it here for so long - Catallaxy has the largest collection of obnoxious, immature, misogynistic, unreasonable, dishonest, disingenuous, lazy, dumb, gullible, un-insightful, self absorbed, uncharitable, childish, abusive, detached from reality, unpleasant, unscientific, selfish, tribal, repetitive, hypocritical, pedantic, tedious, psychologically unbalanced, and flat out wrong collection of commenters in all of the Australian blogosphere.

They are free to choose which adjective goes with which of them. Most there deserve more than one epithet. This is no shock to them - most have been told at their own blog many times.

Now, to resume normal blogging....

Update: some mis-spellings corrected, although epitaph for epithet might be explained as a Freudian slip.

Huh. Scientists can really can sound like Sheldon

I normally really like James Empty Blog, run by climate scientist James Annan and his wife Jules, both of whom are living in Japan (near Tokyo.)

But I can't quite get around the tone of their posts regarding the Japanese earthquake. The first was by Jules who noted she had a "pleasant earthquake" in a new building that suffered no damage.

The next was headed "Earthquake fun" by James, talking about having to walk along the train track after the train he was on stopped short of the station.

Then came "Mildly Inconvenienced" by James, confirming that they were not suffering at all really.

Next, a series of pretty sunset photos.

And then, a post "Don't Panic", complaining that there is too much media hype (I think about the nuclear problems and the effects of the earthquake in Tokyo) and ending with:

Come on people, get a grip. It's an inconvenience. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a catastrophe down here, and the best thing most people can do is to get back to normality as quickly as possible. Turn off the wall-to-wall disaster porn on TV and have a look out of the window. It's a beautiful spring day and the cherries are starting to blossom.

I actually then sent a comment saying, in effect, that I like their blog and doubt that they really meaning to sound this way, but they were doing a very good job of sounding like they were completely insensitive to major human suffering happening just down the road, so to speak.

It must have sounded harsher than that, because it has not come out of moderation.

But they have let a couple of other comments through of similar effect.

I'm sorry, but this is weird. More than 10,000 of your neighbors have suddenly died and nearly all of your neighbors will suffer economic consequences well into the future. While the nuclear threat ight be overstated, it is certainly plausible. yet you wax indignant about "hype".

I agree. And as far as disaster porn is concerned, you can hardly expect a still evolving, unprecedented type of disaster in Japan with that amount of loss of life and property damage to not have blanket coverage.

My message to the Annans: you're probably not Sheldon-like scientists incapable of normal human empathy for suffering that is happening not all that far from where you live.

But if you keep making cheery posts making light of how a nearby disaster has not affected you, you're sure doing a damn fine job of sounding like insensitive arses.

Word games

After admitting on Insiders that Tony Abbott uses weasel words on climate change, so that his position of spending billions of dollars to attempt to match Labor’s target for CO2 reduction is somehow “sellable” to climate change skeptics/deniers, Andrew Bolt today tries to make out a case  that when other journalists/commentators say effectively the same thing, they are “verballing” him.  (OK, maybe Combet is to a degree by use of “denier”, but Lenore Taylor – I’m not accepting that she is at all.)

Passive safety in nuclear design

Long term readers of this blog would know that I used to follow with much interest the development of pebble bed reactors - in particular in the development program South Africa had going until they ran out of money. (Use the "search this blog" bar at the side for "pebble bed reactors" and you'll find lots of past posts.)

The big attraction of the pebble bed was its (claimed) passive safety features. As the Wikipedia article on pebble bed reactors notes (although it does sound like it has been written by a strong proponent of pebble beds):

When the nuclear fuel increases in temperature, the rapid motion of the atoms in the fuel causes an effect known as Doppler broadening. The fuel then sees a wider range of relative neutron speeds. U²³⁸, which forms the bulk of the uranium in the reactor, is much more likely to absorb fast or epithermal neutrons at higher temperatures. [2] This reduces the number of neutrons available to cause fission, and reduces the power of the reactor. Doppler broadening therefore creates a negative feedback because as fuel temperature increases, reactor power decreases. All reactors have reactivity feedback mechanisms, but the pebble bed reactor is designed so that this effect is very strong and does not depend on any kind of machinery or moving parts. Because of this, its passive cooling, and because the pebble bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the pebble bed reactor can passively reduce to a safe power level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble bed reactor, and it makes the pebble bed design (as well as other very high temperature reactors) unique from conventional light water reactors which require active safety controls.

The reactor is cooled by an inert, fireproof gas, so it cannot have a steam explosion as a light-water reactor can. The coolant has no phase transitions—it starts as a gas and remains a gas. Similarly, the moderator is solid carbon, it does not act as a coolant, move, or have phase transitions (i.e., between liquid and gas) as the light water in conventional reactors does.

A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor.^[6]. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage and there was none.

Wikipedia has a short article on passive safety design in nuclear reactors generally, noting that there are some designs using liquid metals as a heat sink for passive safety. Somehow, I can't help but think that using liquid metal just doesn't sound as passively safe as a gas cooled pebble bed.

In any event, surely recent events show that the goal of passive safety deserves to be a major component of future nuclear design.

Back to Australian politics

It feels a little early to go back to speaking about anything other than the death and destruction in Japan, but I’ll briefly note some recent political commentary about Australia that seems about right:

* Annabel Crabb wrote on Friday:

Let's look at the basics here.

Labor's problem is one of trust and consistency.

Political advocacy is about believing something, and setting out to bring a majority around to your point of view. In the best political advocates, principle and determination work together to the extent that even voters who fundamentally disagree with their position on a particular policy stance will grudgingly support them anyway.

Federal Labor is a long way from that right now, thanks to the messages it has sent out to the electorate on a number of issues.

Sounds about right to me. As I was arguing elsewhere on the weekend, with climate change policy in particular, it doesn't seem to be a case (unlike in the Coalition) where actual scepticism of the science has any real sway in Labor (if there were any strong private sceptics in the party room, I am betting we would have heard about it from Rudd aligned leakers during the last election campaign), but rather it just seemed to be lack of will to take on a populist campaign.

While I think there is some under-appreciated value in the way Gillard has announced the intention to have the carbon price in place before the details are worked out (it gives the “Ju-Liar” factor a longer time to burn out before an election,) what was the sense in announcing Tim Flannery was going to be paid to convince Australians of the need for a carbon price only a week or two before announcing we were getting one in a year's time anyway? And whoever thought that it was a good look to have two podiums at the announcement, making Bob Brown look like a co-Prime Minister, won’t be making that mistake again, I bet.

There has been something a bit screwy going on about how policy is made and announced in Labor ever since Kevin Rudd got elected, and it still seems kind of hard for the media to pin down exactly whose fault it has been.

Still, on climate change policy I remain as appalled as ever that Tony Abbott got the leadership on the back of a substantial number of climate change sceptics in the party room who (I am betting) get their science from reading Andrew Bolt.

Speaking of Andrew Bolt, I was a bit surprised to see that even he acknowledged on Insiders yesterday that Abbott uses weasel words on the science which the climate change deniers in the Party can interpret so as to give “plausible deniality” to the idea that Tony might really take climate scientists seriously. Look at his words on Friday after Minchin said warming wasn’t happening:

Climate change does happen, mankind does make a contribution…

As Bolt said, you can easily interpret this to mean that the contribution is absolutely minimal compared to natural forces.

And look at the answers he gave to a series of on-line questions from climate change denying skeptics on Thursday. One of them brings up the “but a carbon tax by Australia it won’t affect the world’s temperature at all” line, as well as giving a spray about how all of climate science is completely corrupt, and Abbott comments:

Good point. People shouldn’t act out of mere environmental vanity

Well what exactly is the point of your plan to match Labor CO2 reduction targets by spending billions of taxpayer dollars, young Tony?

Journalists do know how inconsistent and willing to court climate change denial Abbott has been; I think they just tire of pointing it out all the time because they have bad poll numbers of Labor to talk about instead.

* But going back to Labor’s problems, David Penberthy wrote recently:

The best thing Gillard could do right now is to start a policy fight with the Greens – go and visit Olympic Dam perhaps and come out behind BHP’s push to expand its uranium exports – just to remind them and the voters that she’s the Prime Minister and is running the show. It’s not like Bob Brown is going to pack his bags and go and sit with Tony Abbott. On the current polling the alliance between Gillard and Brown is paving the way for an Abbott Government anyway.

I think that's probably right, although nuclear power is going to have a public image problem until we see how the Japanese post earthquake crisis evolves.

Japan on our minds

There is some anxiety in our house at the moment about the inability to contact some relatives in the earthquake affected areas of northern Honshu. One in particular works in one of the tsunami affected towns, quite close to the waterfront.

In the meantime, the best commentary on the Japanese character and its response to natural disasters I have read is by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. It is well worth a read.

Update: an email came through this afternoon that the people we were most worried about are OK, but there’s still a couple of others about whom we have not yet heard. They would not have been close to the water, however, so we trust they are OK.

Update 2: of course there are heaps of videos being put up on Youtube, but I haven't yet spotted the remarkable seaside town destruction footage that I was watching on TV earlier tonight. But Boing Boing had this video up, showing some very unnatural looking behaviour by some Tokyo buildings:

Actually, I see that a couple of million people have watched this version of the video on Youtube (because it has the link from Boing Boing), but only 5,000 or so have watched the original, uncropped version which the guy also has up on his Youtube account. I actually find the original more interesting, as you get to see other people on the street watching the sway:

Update 3:

I don't want to turn this into disaster porn, but the video below is similar to th longer one I mentioned above that I saw on TV earlier tonight. It does get a bit upsetting when it turns briefly to the scared child and shocked adults watching from their safe point:



Update 4: Let's hope he's wrong, but a UK geophysicist is quoted at the Nature web site saying this:

"Although certainly very big, today's quake was not totally unexpected," says John McCloskey, a geophysicist at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, UK. "Technically, it was in fact an aftershock of the weaker quake earlier in the week — even though it may sound odd that an aftershock can be stronger than the main shock." ...

"The previous quake, although much smaller, significantly increased stress in the fraction of the fault zone that ruptured today," says McCloskey.

The sequence of quakes has probably also affected the stress field further south along the fault zone, critically increasing the earthquake risk in the Tokyo region, he says.

"There is a strong interaction of quakes along a subduction zone, and we can certainly expect a number of major aftershocks in the next weeks," he says. "Some may be as large as, or even stronger than, the quake that last month devastated Christchurch in New Zealand. And chances are that another very large shock could occur to the south near Tokyo."

My apologies for worrying reader Geoff, who's due to fly into Tokyo soon.

Count me as a skeptic...

...when it comes to the Zero Carbon Australia plan that says Australia could be powered by renewable energy by 2020:

Our research was undertaken with two explicit parameters: energy technologies selected had to be both commercially available and from carbon-free renewable energy sources. This explains why the ZCA Plan identifies a 60/40 mix of concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and large-scale wind developments as the backbone of a decarbonised energy system. Together with existing hydropower, investment in CST with molten salt storage, backup from a small percentage of biomass power, an upgraded electricity grid, and comprehensive energy efficiency measures, Australia can reliably meet its energy needs from renewable electricity generation. The technologies selected were not preordained; rather they were chosen on the basis that they worked within ZCA’s parameters.

The ZCA scenario also includes natural gas. Under the plan, Australia would use existing gas infrastructure in a staged scale-back, until the last gas power plants are mothballed in 2020. The most carbon-intensive coal power plants must be first to be decommissioned as large-scale renewables come online, made possible by the deployment of CST power towers with molten salt storage for 24-h operation.

Brave New Climate has been critical of this plan before. Here's one post about it, but there are others.

Too big for my backyard

Time Magazine has a story on the newly retired space shuttle Discovery: it spent a total of a year in space; was the shuttle that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope; and first flew in 1983: a long time in aviation terms, let alone a space plane. (In fact, it's kind of surprising that it handles the vibration of repeated launches so well, isn't it?)

Here's something I didn't know from the story; there are twin astronauts:

The [next] mission will be commanded by the husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly. His identical twin brother Scott is currently the skipper of the space station; he returns to Earth next week on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The New York Times wrote about where the retired shuttles will end up. There is hot competition amongst various museums, but it seems the Smithsonian is sure to get one.

The Kennedy Space Centre wants one too. I reckon they'll need it, as the tourist value of that place while there's a big gap in developing a new manned rocket will likely diminish.

Higher water

Real Climate talks about the recent finding that some Antarctic ice freezes from the bottom, but also notes the big picture with ice melt:

....there is a new assessment of the net mass balance of Antarctica and Greenland. Rignot et al have updated results, including those from the GRACE gravity measurement satellite, to the end of 2010 and show that the downward trend in ice mass is continuing (stronger in Greenland than in Antarctica). The net rise in sea level associated with this decline is about 1.3 mm/yr, which will likely accelerate with further warming. Complementary analyses of the surface mass balance of Greenland (Tedesco et al, 2011) also show that 2010 was a record year for melt area extent.

This rate of melting is more than was figured into the tabulated IPCC AR4 estimates of sea level rise, and any further acceleration will obviously make the discrepancy worse. Indeed, even in the highest forcing A1F1 scenario, the IPCC calculated only a 0.3 mm/year contribution from the ice sheets averaged over the whole 21st Century! This was clearly a gross underestimate.

Extrapolating these melt rates forward to 2050, “the cumulative loss could raise sea level by 15 cm by 2050″ for a total of 32 cm (adding in 8 cm from glacial ice caps and 9 cm from thermal expansion) – a number very close to the best estimate of Vermeer & Rahmstorf (2009), derived by linking the observed rate of sea level rise to the observed warming.

The Song of the Mice

Physorg notes that there is research going on about how mice sing (ultrasonically):

Whether or not mouse song involves learning either through auditory imitation or behavioral feedback (e.g., from the mother)... is a subject of hot debate, and the answer is proving elusive. To highlight the difficulties facing researchers, two studies published on March 9, 2011 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE have come to differing conclusions about whether mouse vocalization patterns are innate or learned.

Rodents sing and they laugh. Sound like good company, really.

The problems with politics

On the Labor side, this announcement yesterday of a new regime of requiring businesses to report on gender equality issues feels like a real blast from the past, as I seem to recall that 1980's Labor used to like grand gender based social engineering ideas too:

Under the changes announced on Wednesday, companies with more than 100 staff will be required to report on how many workers are female and how their conditions compare to male employees.

Spot checks will also be carried out, with non-compliant businesses to be shut out of government-funded grants and industry assistance programs.

Wasn't there a time when the Howard government actually seemed to be achieving more (or just as much) in terms of women members of Parliament than Labor with all their Emily's List activism?

At least it has the benefit of putting Labor back in the grand tradition of being the time wasting bureaucracy party. It had been slipping in that regard in the last few years.

On the other hand, there's a brief history of the Liberal Party and its attitude to greenhouse gases in The Age today, which also shows the Coalition has taken a strong turn to the past since the Abbott ascendancy.

I remain unhappy with both sides of politics.

Hot places

There’s a short meteorology article out talking about the hottest places on Earth. Turns out that desert temperatures can be higher than I ever realised:

The Lut Desert, located in southeast Iran has long been regarded as one of the hottest places on Earth. Numerous studies have examined the relationship between the expression of severe thermal temperature across this hyper-arid landscape and the unique natural physical characteristics of the Lut, such as the wind-sculpted mega-yardangs, and the vast areas of closely packed rock fragments known as desert pavement (Alavipanah 2007; Azizi et al. 2007). The Lut Desert was determined to be the hottest spot on Earth in two of three years previously evaluated with the Aqua/MODIS satellite LST data (Mildrexler et al. 2006). Here we found that the Lut Desert had the highest surface temperature on Earth in 2004 (68.0°C; 154.4°F), 2005 (70.7°C;159.3°F), 2006 (68.5°C; 155.3°F), 2007 (69.0°C; 156.2°F) and 2009 (68.6°C; 155.5°F), five of the seven years analyzed in this study. The Lut is the only place on Earth to have a surface temperature above 70°C (158°F) and regularly has the largest, contiguous area of surface temperatures above 65°C of anywhere on Earth (Fig. 2).

But then the paper has a local surprise:

In 2003 a scorching temperature of 69.3°C (156.7°F), the second highest temperature of the seven-year dataset, was detected in the province of Queensland, Australia. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth with vast arid lands where annual maximum LSTs routinely exceed 60°C.

So, Queensland has recently had a temperature just a fraction under 70 degrees. Amazing.

UPDATE: my bad. As noted in the comment, the article is not talking about air temperature, the hottest measured record of which still seems to be 58 degrees in Libya. I thought that the article was talking about desert air temperatures measured by satellite, but it is talking about "skin temperature", which can be way higher than the air temperature.

Well, that explains why the temperatures seemed extraordinarily high to me. Must not post so quickly.

A brief observation about Charlie Sheen..

Given that he appears to need to smoke continuously during his web appearances, he's quite the gift for the anti-smoking campaigners of the world.

* his last broadcast - hopefully the last broadcast ever - can be viewed here, if you really need to watch a man going insane.

Viewing recommendation

On ABC last night was the first part of the documentary series "How Earth Made Us", which, as the BBC explains, is "the epic story of how geology, geography and climate have influenced mankind".*

It was excellent viewing, making connections between geology and the dawn of civilisation which I certainly hadn't realised before. It also starts with one of the most weirdly spectacular places on earth - that giant gypsum crystal cave in Mexico, photos of which were circulating on the internet in the last year or two.

Get over to iView and watch it while you can, if you missed it.


* I've been noticing lately that "mankind" seems to be making some kind of a comeback, as against "humankind". That's odd, since as far as gender neutral talk goes, I had actually gotten used to "humankind". Now if BBC Two isn't using it, I feel I've been prematurely gender sensitive.

Unexpected downer

Spotted at Physorg:

Daily use of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, commonly known as NSAIDs, is associated with a 22 percent increase in the risk of erectile dysfunction, Kaiser researchers found in a study of more than 80,000 men in Southern California. The results were a surprise because erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated ED, is thought to be caused by inflammation, and the researchers expected that use of the drugs would alleviate the problem.

The monogamous Douthat

Well, that sex survey indicating a (surprising) increase in sexual restraint amongst American youth is attracting some interesting commentary.

Ross Douthat had a column "Why Monogamy Matters" which noted as follows:

...there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

One can imagine that such talk would annoy some people as sounding just far, far too much like what your well meaning parents may want to say to their daughter. And indeed, there's a (somewhat childishly) sarcastic article on Huffington Post:

Douthat teaches us that sexual restraint leads to "emotional well-being." Restraint is another word for: happiness! Not knowing too much is the biggest happiness of all. Little girls crave security, that's what you have to understand. Bunnies. Baa-Baa. Binkies! Mommmmy!

I see Andrew Sullivan has also weighed in, but without any venom. Someone at a Slate blog wrote:

I have yet to read a Douthat column without feeling deep embarrassment for the author. He has a completely disorganized mind and seems unable of self-reflection. I read that ... "thing" he wrote yesterday and chanted facepalm, facepalm, facepalm as a calming mantra.

Yes, talking about restraint in sex really upsets some people.

Update: it's been a long time since I linked to Mark Steyn, but his column on this has some more examples of amusingly appalled liberal readers of the Douthat column, and is worth a look.

Evolving dimensions - the start of something big?

Well, this is interesting. Bee at her Backreaction blog has post explaining (not exactly in layman terms, but you can get the general drift) a big, pretty new, idea in physics that may actually go somewhere:

The idea that space-time might not be higher-dimensional on short distances but instead be lower-dimensional has been around for some while, inspired by results from causal dynamical triangulation. In a paper last year, Anchordoqui et al proposed to examine the possibility of lower dimensionality at small distances for its phenomenology in their paper

Vanishing Dimensions and Planar Events at the LHC
Luis Anchordoqui, De Chang Dai, Malcolm Fairbairn, Greg Landsberg, Dejan Stojkovic
arXiv:1003.5914v2 [hep-ph]

Greg Landsberg gave a talk about this work on our last year's workshop on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity (recording of the talk here). The basic idea is that the dimensionality of space changes with distance in such a way that it is 3-dimensional on scales we have tested it, lower dimensional on distances shorter than we have probed yet (about 1/1000 of a femtometer) and possibly higher-dimensional on distances larger than we can observe. The picture suggested is that of a (one-dimensional) string being knitted, and the knitted sheet (2-dimensional) being crumpled to a ball (3-dimensional). The authors dubbed this "evolving dimensionality." The merit of having a smaller number of space-like dimensions at small distances or high energies is that it improves the renormalizability of quantum field theories and esp. that of quantum gravity. (In contrast to additional dimensions which actually make the problem worse.)

Sounds interesting. As Bee goes on to note, the idea has a big problem ("lacks a mathematical model for the new fundamental structure and the dynamics of quantum fields in it") but even so makes some (I think) testable predictions.

Now I'll annoy science types by admitting something: my reason for liking the sound of it is that it seems to get us back to a possible "higher dimension". I always thought it a pity that physics lost the 4th big dimension as a place in which locate God and places like heaven and hell. You can always get around that by living in a type of cyber-heaven in the mind of God, like Tipler uses for his Omega Point, but a hyper-dimensional realm has its own nice feel about it too.

Is it April yet?

There's a 1 April feel about the following story:

Japanese researchers have been immersing iron-based compounds in hot alcoholic beverages such as red wine, sake and shochu to induce superconductivity.

Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability.

But as it appears in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology, published on 7 March, it appears not to be a joke.

Red wine worked best, by the way...

Sex ed (and congratulations on the headline)

William Saletan at Slate has a detailed look at the recent (apparently reliable) sex survey that showed (amongst other things) something of a resurgence in virginity in young Americans.

But, as with some of his previous articles, he seems most interested in what the survey shows about, ahem, the prevalence of anal sex. Hence the title for this current article: Impure Lesbians of Sodom.

Whoever came up with that deserves some type of award.

As I'm more interested in the idea that people should treat sex seriously, I'll just extract the part about the (somewhat surprising) increase in youngsters not having sex:

In the 2002 NSFG survey, 22 percent of men and women between the ages of 15 and 24 said they had never had sexual contact with another person. But in the latest NSFG survey, taken from 2006 to 2008, that number increased to 27 percent of men and 29 percent of women (Table 7, Page 38). In the broader age pool, the trend is diluted but still shows up: Among people ages 15-44, the percentage reporting zero lifetime opposite sex partners increased by two points among men (Table 4, Page 35) and three points among women (Table 3, Page 34). (In case you're wondering, no, there was no shift in reported homosexuality that would account for this increase.) The percentage of men ages 15-44 who reported only one lifetime female partner also increased by two to three points. So if you thought sexual mores were moving inexorably in the direction of more, earlier, and kinkier activity, think again. Virginity can return, and apparently, it has.

Pro abstinence sex education groups in America claim that this vindicates their position:

Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association that these numbers are a positive change from 2002 when only 46% of boys and 49% of girls reported no sexual contact and she says the report challenges the wisdom of the recent federal funding cuts to abstinence education.

“One hundred sixty-nine abstinence education programs lost funding and over 1 million students lost access to the very programs that can support and encourage the positive trends represented by this data,” she told LifeNews.com. “If we are serious about decreasing teen sexual activity, we need to use the data to instruct public policy.”

But, as I've noted before, the wildly detailed and open type of sex education in Holland seems to lead to low teenage pregnancy rates and delayed start of sexual activity very effectively too. And America has a huge issue with single motherhood at any age, which is perhaps the much bigger issue to focus on in the long run.

Sex education, and encouraging good social attitudes and outcomes for families at any age, is obviously a complicated field.

Some perspective, please

Andrew Bolt, as well as the bunch of excitable commenters over at Catallaxy, are getting all worked up over an Essential Poll out today showing that a carbon pricing is not a popular idea with the voters.

Yet, given that only the intention to implement the tax/pricing scheme has been announced without the details, I find it hardly surprising that such a generic "new tax" announcement is not immediately popular.

The obvious comparison to make is to the introduction of a GST. A little bit of Googling and here's the Newpoll polling about it over a decade or so.

The percentage of voters "totally in favour" of GST was frequently in the mid 30's in the decade before, and shortly after, its introduction. This is exactly where a carbon tax is today, according to Essential.

Mind you, the successful introduction of a carbon price is almost certainly going to be with more complaint from business groups than the GST, so it's probably a harder political road that Labor will be taking than John Howard (although, of course, people were upset with him for changing his earlier undertaking on never having a GST.)

But still, at around 35% approval in the current circumstances, it is not as desperate a situation for Labor as many commentators are saying.

UPDATE: Newspoll today shows the expected decrease in Labor vote. Of course, the worsening primary vote is the worst feature for Labor, although at 46/54 TPP, this is hardly irrecoverable at this distance from an election. (Just look at the Newspolls Bolt himself showed recently for 2009.)

What happens ideally before the next election: a sensibly balanced carbon tax comes into effect, enough industry comes in behind it to make its removal impractical, tensions within the Coalition as to how to respond cause Abbott and the skeptics to lose control of the party, the pro-nuclear element within Labor changes party policy to allow nuclear power within Australia for environmental reasons, the Coalition does not disagree, the Coalition wins next election and dramatically winds back the National Broadband Network but keeps the ETS and starts the move to a major Australian nuclear power industry.

I can see just one or two potential problems with every step of the way, though!

Madness or breasts

Talk about your unwanted side effects:

Researchers have found the female hormone estrogen can be an effective treatment for men suffering schizophrenia.

The Alfred Hospital's Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne tested the hormone treatment, usually reserved for women, and found positive results for men with the mental disorder.

The centre found low doses of estrogen given during a two-week trial reduced depression and anxiety symptoms.

But Professor Jayashri Kulkarni says using estrogen is controversial because it creates female traits such as breasts.

I see from Googling around that a report last year said that estrogen had already been found to be effective for some women with schizophrenia (in fact, Professor Kulkarni did that study at Monash as well.)

Psychological oddities

Men (particularly singers) with a deep, deep voice are often said to sound sexy, but the downside may be that women will also expect them to cheat:

"In terms of sexual strategy, we found that men and women will use voice pitch as a warning sign of future betrayal. So the more attractive the voice—a higher pitch for women and lower pitch for men—the more likely the chances he or she will cheat," says Jillian O'Connor, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University and lead author of the study.

"Infidelity is costly with the emotional impact, financial costs and potential loss of the family unit. But this suggests that through the evolutionary process, we have learned ways to avoid partners who may be unfaithful as a protection mechanism," she says.

Participants in the study were asked to listen to two versions of recorded clips from a male voice and a female voice, which were electronically manipulated to be both higher and lower in pitch. They were then asked which one, from each pair, was more likely to cheat sexually on their romantic partner.

"The reason voice pitch influences perceptions of cheating is likely due to the relationship between pitch, hormones and infidelity," explains David Feinberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and advisor on the study. "Men with higher testosterone levels have lower pitched voices, and women with higher estrogen levels have higher pitched voices. High levels of these hormones are associated with adulterous behaviour and our findings indicate individuals are somewhat aware of the link and may use this in their search for a romantic partner."

Higher levels of estrogen is associated with adulterous behaviour? I wasn't aware of that. With some women, low testosterone seems to be the issue with lack of libido. And besides which, a woman's voice can only be so high before it becomes irritating. I mean, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I have been watching a bit on re-runs lately), is Ted's girlfriend Georgette meant to be the sexiest sounding woman in the room?

The other odd story from last week was the one about how people are better at delaying rewards for themselves if the decision is made while having a full bladder:

In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes—the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder—the researchers assessed participants' self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.

The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.

It is obviously therefore important for parents to keep emphasising to their teenage children the importance of keeping very well hydrated as they leave to go to a party with any half disreputable boyfriend/girlfriend.

Free to question

I noted with interest last week how Pope Benedict’s new book re-declares the Catholic teaching since the 1960’s that the Jews are definitely not collectively responsible for the death of Christ.  As the Los Angeles Times and other media outlets noted, this seemed particularly good timing given that it was also only last week that some weird looking fashion figure, with whom I was previously unfamiliar, turned up on video spouting anti-semitic lines (and praise for Hitler) that is hard to credit as still existing post Holocaust. 

But I thought I would mention it here more because of the Tablet’s explanation of Benedict’s analysis:

Benedict follows the scholarly consensus that “the Jews” mentioned in St John’s gospel as calling for Jesus to be executed cannot possibly refer to the whole population of Israel at the time, but refers to the Jerusalem Temple authorities alone; and not even all of those. But the greater problem is presented by Matthew’s account, which refers to the demand of “the whole people” for Jesus to be crucified and which – alone of the four gospels – has them cry out, “His blood be on us and on our children!” This verse kept Christian anti-Semitism alive for many centuries, and was the basis of the charge of deicide or “Christ-killing” laid against all Jews, alive or dead.

Benedict simply rejects Matthew’s historical accuracy, preferring the account in John and Mark. Matthew had gone “beyond” historical considerations and “is certainly not recounting historical fact here”. Matthew is attempting a “theo­logical etiology”, he suggests, with which to account for the fate of the Jewish people in the forthcoming Jewish-Roman war. Furthermore, seen through the eyes of Christian faith, Jesus’ blood has the purifying power of redemption, so the words attributed to the crowd are not a curse but rather “redemption, salvation”. Why that matters, if the words were never uttered, Benedict does not explain.

How interesting.   Catholics don’t take a fundamentalist approach to Scripture, and of course has no problem with understanding Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament as not being written as literal history.

The New Testament, though, comes in for a lot less Catholic doubt as to its relationship with fact, and it’s interesting to see we have it from the top, so to speak, that the Gospels are not always historically accurate.

There’ll be some Protestant churches decrying this is why you can’t trust the Catholic Church.  Mind you, few will go as far as the website www.popebenedictantichrist.com.  (Don’t bother going there, it’s only one page, but it has obviously picked a good name given how high it came up on my Google search results when looking for sources for this post.)  I like this line from the said site, though:

Could it be that Pope Benedict XVI will one day become the Antichrist?  Look closely at the coldness of his eyes in above photo.  Can you really trust this man?  Do his eyes remind you of Adolph Hitler's eyes?

Can't say I've noticed the Hitler resemblance myself.

Of course, the problem once you do allow for historical revision of the truth of Gospel statements, it can be a tricky issue as to knowing where to stop.  Still, it keeps life interesting.

Reefer madness, yet again

I only indirectly referred to a recent Australian study that said cannabis use in teenagers was associated with earlier onset of psychosis, and that alcohol use wasn’t. I see now that it was in fact a meta-analysis of other studies.

The most surprising thing I saw the authors say appeared in the ABC report:

"The risks for older people is about double, so instead of having a 1 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia you are probably likely to have about a 2 per cent chance," he said.

"But for young people who smoke cannabis regularly, instead of having around a 1 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia during their life, they will end up with something like a 5 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia."

I was a bit puzzled, with such a high increase in risk for teenager smokers of developing schizophrenia, that the authors were still hedging their bets on whether you could say cannabis caused their illness.

Anyway, here’s another just published study relevant to causation, and this one followed real people to see what happened:

The study took place in Germany and involved a random sample of 1,923 adolescents and young adults aged 14 to 24 years.

The researchers excluded anyone who reported cannabis use or pre-existing psychotic symptoms at the start of the study so that they could examine the relation between new (incident) cannabis use and psychotic symptoms.

The remaining participants were then assessed for cannabis use and psychotic symptoms at three time points over the study period (on average four years apart).

Incident cannabis use almost doubled the risk of later incident psychotic symptoms, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, use of other drugs, and other psychiatric diagnoses. Furthermore, in those with cannabis use at the start of the study, continued use of cannabis over the study period increased the risk of persistent psychotic symptoms

There was no evidence for self medication effects as psychotic symptoms did not predict later cannabis use.

Interesting. Of course, as I mentioned in my previous post, nothing annoys cannabis smokers more than the studies that keep indicating the connection between their habit and a debilitating disease, especially for those who start smoking young. See the comments following that Physorg at the above link for some examples. It’s such a shame how the evidence keeps piling up against them, though. (Ha.)

Disease news

* Amphetamines may increase risk of Parkinson's Disease:

According to the study, those people who reported using Benzedrine or Dexedrine were nearly 60 percent more likely to develop Parkinson's than those people who didn't take the drugs.

As the article notes, amphetamines plays around with dopamine in the brain, so it doesn't seem a stretch to see a connection.

* It's been noted before, but it looks like another study suggests that taking Ibuprofen reduces risk of Parkinson's.

* Alzheimer's disease has a liver connection?:

Unexpected results from a Scripps Research Institute and ModGene, LLC study could completely alter scientists' ideas about Alzheimer's disease -- pointing to the liver instead of the brain as the source of the "amyloid" that deposits as brain plaques associated with this devastating condition. The findings could offer a relatively simple approach for Alzheimer's prevention and treatment.

iPad2 noted

At the risk of sounding like an Apple fanboy convert, the new iPad2 does sound very good.   The basic iPad I got for free (well, as part of an office equipment deal) is often the subject of evening competition for its use.

For the record, the most popular applications on mine are:

*  Mercury browser:   abandon Safari, and use a browser that actually looks and feels like a Windows tabbed browser.   It’s fantastic, and cost all of $1.19.

*  Sketchpad Pro:   a very good sketch program that even my daughter has worked out how to use now, and enjoy.  I think it cost under $10.

*  For games, the kids have spent a ridiculous amount of time on hunting dinosaurs in Carnivore, the free version of hangman known as Doodlehang is fun for adults and kids, and my wife spents an inordinate amount of time on sudoku with Sudoku Joy.  I don’t actually use it for any games for any length of time.

*  I try to read downloaded (free books) on it using GoodReader, but I usually get too easily distracted and back to the internet instead.

Not wanting to be belong to the club to which I belong

As much as I value the ABC, I have always recognized that its listeners and watchers can be extremely pedantic and nitpicking. Remember when they used to have that feedback program on TV, and how trivial many of the complaints could be? I have a vague memory, from perhaps the 1980's, of hearing a plummy voiced woman complain on radio about the use of "kids" for children (that word refers to young goats, she pointed out.) But then, it was only last year (maybe the year before?) they had a long session on Geraldine Doogue's radio show about computer font changes, and the listener response was large and opinionated. (Worrying excessively about fonts is, in my books, close to the most trivial of obsessions that exist.)

So, I was amused to see at Slate that public radio listeners in America like to make pedantic and snobbish complaints too. They annoy Farhad Manjoo, to put it mildly. He writes of his fellow NPR listeners:

Oh, I hate them, hate them, hate them. Every time one of their narrow-minded, classist letters makes it on the air, I contemplate burning my tote bag in protest. The problem, for me, isn't just that some people don't like some things NPR covers. It's that these reflexively snobby pseudo-intellectuals see NPR as their own—a refuge from the mad world outside, a "safe," high-minded palace that should never be sullied by anything more outré than James Taylor (whom, of course, they love).

I understand where he is coming from, although I have to say, they sound quite a bit worse than Radio National listeners in Australia.

The personal hygrometer

This summer of high humidity and torrential downpours in Brisbane has quite often been marked by my glasses fogging up for a minute upon getting out of my airconditioned car after the short drive to work.

It's like having a personal hygrometer.

It happened again this morning.

I therefore predict more rain is coming.

Disaster someday

Greg Laden has a lengthy post talking about the potential for the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt in the future.  Lots of detail, a fair bit of uncertainty, but seems it’ll happen some day.

Neat theory in big trouble?

I don't know much about supersymmetry, except that it's an idea that's been around for some time.

Nature has an article up that explains it to some degree (it's one way to explain the incomplete knowledge of the standard model of particle physics,) but more importantly, it notes that early results from the LHC runs to date indicate that the theory may be in trouble. The implications are summed up towards the end:

"Privately, a lot of people think that the situation is not good for SUSY," says Alessandro Strumia, a theorist at the University of Pisa in Italy, who recently produced a paper about the impact of the LHC's latest results on the fine-tuning problem⁴. "This is a big political issue in our field," he adds. "For some great physicists, it is the difference between getting a Nobel prize and admitting they spent their lives on the wrong track." Ellis agrees: "I've been working on it for almost 30 years now, and I can imagine that some people might get a little bit nervous."

"Plenty of things will change if we fail to discover SUSY," says Lester. Theoretical physicists will have to go back to the drawing board and find an alternative way to solve the problems with the standard model. That's not necessarily a bad thing, he adds: "For particle physics as a whole it will be really exciting."

Hollywood or Bust (actually, just Bust)

Surely to God American TV cannot employ Charlie Sheen for the next couple of years at least.

As every media outlet in the world is reporting today, Sheen does not know when to leave a job disaster alone, and instead is trying to create his own career China Syndrome (even though I don't think even the Japanese would employ him for a canned coffee commercial at the moment.)

Here are highlights of his Today show interview:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you can't be bothered watching the clip:

"It's like, everybody thinks I should be begging for my job back, and I'm just going to forewarn them that it's everybody else that's going to be begging me for their job back."

"I am a man of my word, so I will finish the TV show. I'll even do Season 10, but at this point, (because of) psychological distress, oh my God, it's 3 mil an episode. Take it or leave it," he said.

"I'm tired of pretending like I'm not special," Sheen added. "You can't process me with a normal brain."

It looks even worse than it sounds on video, though.