The Fake Crisis continues

I see that The Australian (and Denis Shanahan in particular) are in full blown "campaign" mode to see Julia Gillard replaced as Prime Minister.  This has been obvious for some time, but some headlines from last week, and this morning in particular, just confirm it:

Coalition storms ALP strongholds: Newspoll
Labor leader has lost public's faith
Leaky boats could sink Julia Gillard 

It's obviously important to Shanahan that a 3% increase to Labor in Newspoll not be interpreted as a clear sign that Labor has bottomed out, so he writes as follows:

A three-point rise in the Newspoll primary vote for the ALP has avoided the unthinkable for the Gillard government of going to 25 per cent or below to have less support than the combined vote for the Greens and various odds and sods, but the broader view of this survey of public opinion about Labor - as well as the personal standing of Julia Gillard - is devastating. The electorate has not only stopped listening to Labor but rejected it on every front.

In fact, the way I read the poll, Labor is still preferred outright on IR and education, arguably has more people favouring their position on climate change if you make the assumption that the substantial number for "someone else" are mostly Greens, and is even pegging on health.    
 
People are saying the Coalition handles asylum seekers better, which as I have noted before, is at complete odds with other polls indicating that they are no so keen on offshore processing.   You just have to assume that people are completely (to put it generously) confused on this issue.  No, forget it:  people are stupid on this issue. And let's be clear here:  this extends to those on the Left too, who (as shown on Q&A last night) pretty much completely ignore the issue that a completely open and welcoming processing regime would be practically guaranteed to involve hundreds more deaths at sea on leaky boats.

On this issue, I note that the local UNHRC rep has again said that he thinks the Malaysia solution is better for people than being locked in detention centres in Australia:

ASYLUM seekers would receive better protections in Malaysia under the Gillard government's proposed transfer deal than being held in indefinite mandatory detention in Australia, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office has said.

Australia ''would fall well short'' of the human rights criteria demanded of Malaysia under the deal signed in July, the UNHCR's regional representative, Richard Towle, has told a parliamentary inquiry....

''In the context of the Malaysian arrangements, the assurances of legal stay and community-based reception for all transferees can be seen as a more positive protection environment that protracted - and in some cases indefinite - detention that many face here in Australia, provided the assurances are carefully monitored,'' Mr Towle wrote.

The High Court struck down the refugee swap partly because Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention. But Mr Towle said many signatories did not meet the ''the fundamental protection safeguards that were expected of Malaysia under the arrangements''.

The UNHCR has also dismissed a ''misperception'' that asylum seekers could be caned, saying the document to be issued proving their legal status would have been ''a significant safeguard''.
Mr Towle said the Malaysian government also planned to extend legal work rights to all refugees, not just those sent from Australia. This would allow refugees to access insurance and health schemes.

The Malaysians have an incentive to see that the Australian sent asylum seekers are not mistreated:  they get to give us lots more Burmese asylum seekers.  This idea, based as it is on Departmental advice given by the same public servants who advised the Coalition, should be tried.

Back to the Newspoll:  the Coalition leads Labor by a large, large margin on the economy, but here it is clear that the public is buying into the idea that there is some sort of crisis going on about how Labor has handled it.

The reality is that, although the Coalition under Turnbull might have spent a bit less money on the GFC spending, there is no credible economist around who is regularly condemning Labor's response. Internationally, it is difficult to find anything other than praise for how Australia handled it.

The worst thing about all of this is that some Labor supporting figures like John Quiggin have given up on Gillard at a time when she is just getting some major reforms through Parliament.  It has always been absurd to suggest that she should be replaced at this time. 

Meanwhile, Bruce Hawker has suggested today how Labor can improve.  I have always found him boring on TV, but he is right in this column.  It was a serious mistake for Gillard to appear with Bob Brown as if he was a virtual deputy leader.   Hawker suggests distancing herself from Brown, and coming up with simple, distinctive Labor policies, like universal dental care.  He's right.

Quite a surprise

Prenatal testing could spare babies from toxoplasmosis complications

A study from Stanford finds strong reason for routine testing of toxoplasmosis in the US:

Their research found much higher rates of serious brain and eye disease among U.S. infants with congenital toxoplasmosis than among similar infants in Europe, where the prenatal testing is routine....
Eighty-four percent of the North American infants studied had serious complications of the parasitic infection, including calcium deposits in the brain, water on the brain and eye disease that caused visual impairment or blindness. By contrast, few European infants had these problems – for instance, about 17 percent of French infants with the infection develop complications.

“It was a shock,” said Jose Montoya, MD, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases at Stanford. “We were dismayed to see so many little ones with severe eye disease, hydrocephalus and brain calcifications.”

The reason for the different outcomes between affect US and European babies:

...effective medications exist to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite – and babies who receive these drugs in utero have much lower rates of complications than the infants in Montoya’s study, whose mothers did not get the prophylactic meds.

The test is cheap too. I wonder if it is done in Australia?

As I like to say to my children when they're feeling down..

‘Humans are just modified fish’ (Science Alert)

Not a good place to be sick

South Pole Worker Stranded After Stroke - NYTimes.com

Oceans heating, but how deep?

RealClimate: Global warming and ocean heat content

This Real Climate post, and the comments and discussion following, are important.  The issue is heat going into the oceans, and whether once it gets there, it is possibly a problem again in the future.

There has been a skeptic argument around that if upper ocean heat is getting "buried" in the deep ocean (a fact which itself is very hard to measure, apparently) then the heat does not represent any future "threat" to surface temperatures again.  Yet Trenberth had made a statement that any heat going down "has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.” 

Gavin Schmidt seems to indicate that, whatever Trenberth had in mind (and, curiously, he doesn't seem to know exactly what it was,) heating of the deep ocean has never been considered a threat to surface temperature.

Roger Pielke Snr turns up in the thread too, and Schmidt dismisses most of he claims about Ocean Heat Content.  In particular, he says the ARGO system simply can't measure ocean heat moving from the top layer of the ocean to the deep ocean, whereas a skeptic meme (started by Pielke, I think) is that the "missing heat" can't be going into the deep ocean because ARGO hasn't seen it passing through the top 700 m.

This really does appear to be a very complicated topic, and it is surprising to see that this may be a case where climate scientists have contributed to a skeptic meme via their own looseness of language.

Domestic notes from the weekend

*  Yesterday morning started off with a bang, and being woken up by a loud clap of thunder at 6 am is not that common for Brisbane.  The storms seemed to hang around then for about 3 hours, and it was very dark with many close lightning strikes in my area during that time.   The weather bureau predicted a stormy summer for Brisbane, and maybe this is a sign they were right, as indeed they were this time last year when they warned the Government that conditions were right for big floods.    

*   The mother possum hasn't been seen for a few days now.  In fact, her spot under the balcony on Friday morning seemed to be occupied by two smaller possums (as far as we could tell - we could only see one head but what appeared to be two rear ends.)   What do possums do - play a game of musical nests each night, and just stay at the one nearest them when the sun comes up?

*  Had a go at making limoncello this afternoon.  It now has to sit in the cupboard for a month before being strained and ready to taste.   I'm just hoping I sterilised the bottle enough - the last time I tried to do something with lemons (preserved lemons) they went mould pretty quickly in the jar.  I hope the alcohol in limoncello helps prevent that.  The recipe being followed is this one.   I'm using vodka as the base, which is a form of alcohol which I could never see the point of drinking.  I figure that even if one's intention is simply to get drunk, surely it's more interesting doing it with something with flavour.   In any event, I was aware that fancy schmancy vodkas of all varieties were trendy for a while, particularly in the US, I think, given that I had seen a Mythbusters segment in which they were seeing if they could really tell the difference between high end brands.  And indeed I was surprised to see today just how many brands are on the shelf in Australia too, most of which are only interesting for the nifty bottle designs.  It's funny, but in two different bottle shops, the cheapest brands were actually made in France.  When did they become a producer of cheap vodka?  I also see now that many flavoured vodkas are sold, which is fair enough, I guess.  Better than drinking plain old vodka.

*  Speaking of lemons, it's spring and the lemon and lime tree are having their annual outbreak of stinkbugs.  These bugs (the flat bodied bronze orange bug) appear to be extremely common on Australian citrus, and as this article notes, they do have a very vile smell when disturbed.   They  die pretty easily with any pyrethrum garden spray, but the big problem is reaching the one sitting up near the top of the lemon tree.  (By the way, while Googling around on the topic, I came this page:  Stink Bug Field Guide for Brisbane.   We do seem to have many, many stinking bugs in this region - something to be proud of, I guess...)

*  OK, this has nothing in particular to do with my weekend, apart from the fact that I just read it.  The Taiwanese have an indigenous population?  I didn't know that, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because I had heard about the Ainu, being the Japanese equivalent.  Funnily enough, if you watch the video at this link, you'll see a spokesman for the Ainu who looks a little bit like a younger version of Geoff Clark.

*  I found out today that the McFeast is still on the menu at McDonald's as a "birthday special", but I remain concerned how much longer this will be the case.

*  I guess I didn't mind the last Dr Who episode of this season, but as the final episode in this season's big story arc of how the Doctor avoids his (apparent) death at the start of the season, it did come up with a trick that seems just a little too "easy", if you ask me.  Again, I see the Guardian (gosh they discuss this show a lot) has a long article about whether everyone is completely happy with the direction it has taken under Steven Moffat.  It's good to see that I not alone in preferring the better stand alone stories to the overblown (and increasingly silly in their way)  story arcs that Moffat seems most interested in. 

Again...

That's: dodopathy.blogspot.com

Nasty utilitarians

Moral philosophy: Goodness has nothing to do with it | The Economist

Here's a short article about the apparent personality traits of the small-ish number of people who (in a thought experiment) think strongly enough of utilitarianism to kill someone innocent to save the lives of others.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they don't appear to be very nice:

They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.

Always had my doubts about them!

Possible explanations

Gas 'n' Air - Technology Review

Wow, that was quick. The link above has quite a few papers from arXiv talking about how the faster than light neutrino experiment may be flawed, and/or possible explanations as to what is going on if the result is real.

Strange experiment

Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change

I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to take a shot at magic mushrooms if you knew ahead of time about this:

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn't usually change significantly.

"Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older," says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

All of the participants were already "spiritual", however, and the fact that they were agreeing to an experiment with a hallucinogen indicates something about their "openness" already, surely. The article also notes:

As a word of caution, Griffiths also notes that some of the study participants reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their daylong psilocybin sessions, although none reported any lingering harmful effects. He cautions, however, that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.

Count me out, thanks.

The Right gets a recruit

Angry Anderson has joined the National Party and is looking at running for a Federal seat.

This post from his blog: The New World Order of the New Free World gives some idea of the scattergun mind of someone who the Nationals (and Abbott) seem to think would be a good candidate:

Do we really believe that this push for a Tax on Carbon pollution is about anything but raising more revenue for the government and the United Nations in league with the international banks using the “New World Order” as a blueprint for the Globalisation of the New Free World?

Are we so naive that we have ignored those warnings written about, not so long ago, by the likes of Toffler and his ilk about how these unseen people will have to come up with more and more ways to separate us from our hard earned cash?

I, for one, do not believe in this transparent lie of global warming, global warming created by us the population. Talking of population, why isn’t anyone talking about that as an issue related to this matter – the world is overpopulated but is anyone talking about reducing or slowing the population growth as a measure to slow this so called warming? No they aren’t!...

David Suzuki once said that to be a productive citizen of the world we should think globally and act locally. This is what we need to do now, to even begin to address issues that do now affect us and will affect us for years to come. The World was created by the perfect hand and prolific forests were always integral to the quality of life on this planet; I am suspicious of the attempt to take our focus away from such obvious problems as rampant logging of old growth forest and replacing them with new less understood but seemingly “hipper” subject matter....

I get suspicious. Who is pushing so hard? Gee, it’s big business cleverly or not so cleverly disguised as “do gooders”. This has been pointed out in emails that have been circulating in recent times worth investigating. Wouldn’t be the first time the international banking cartels have duped and enlisted the young and outraged to do their dirty work whilst preying on the fears of the older working population threatening them with their mortgage and livelihood, keeping us distracted with issues, like trying to educate our kids and keeping a roof over our heads, while they plot and scheme to fleece yet more of our money away from us.

The Right of politics in Australia and the USA , with few exceptions, is truly in an embarrassing state at the moment.

An Australian birthday

I had missed this last week - the neighbour's out of tune birthday trumpet serenade that Prime Minister Julia Gillard received on the national news.  (It's the first part of the video after the newsreader's intro):


This strikes me as a very distinctly Australian thing to happen - a sign of our egalitarianism that includes not taking the office of Prime Minister too seriously, and a politician who is definitely not "up herself". 

Domestic report

Here’s what’s been going on at home:

*  In cute news:   the possum that lives under the balcony (well, most days anyway -  it would appear that brushtail possums like to keep alternative abodes going) has a baby.   My wife spotted this first, while handing the mother a piece of fruit.  The possum leaned down from its perch and a pink furless body was able to be seen in the forward facing pouch.  I saw it myself yesterday, when feeding it watermelon and kiwifruit.   It will be some months before the baby is furry and adorably cute, like this one, and I hope we get to see more of it.  Here's a recent photo of our possum eating:


She is much less shy than before, but I hope she never learns to knock on the front door.

*  Yesterday involved a bit of ambling driving around Brisbane, and on a whim, seeing we were at Hamilton already, I took a drive out to Pinkenba.

I grew up on the north side of Brisbane, and a trip out past the old airport to the strange combination of oil refinery, sewerage plant, houses and riverside shacks known as Pinkenba was always a novelty.   I am happy to report that a trip to this strange part of town is still interesting.   In fact, I am amazed as to how much of the old riverside land out beyond “Pinkenba Village” has been converted to light industrial.  During the weekday, at least, it looks as if it would be a much more lively place than it used to be in the 60’s and 70’s.  

There are more houses there than I remembered:  some of them not too bad looking for the area.   The small primary school, which looks very much like the old Nudgee Beach primary school also on the northside, appears to have closed late last year.

But the local hotel “The Pink” still exists, and from its website, looks a lot better on the inside than from the outside.  (A prominent sign for the scheduled “Hot Girls” shows mark it out as place catering for young male workers who go to the expanded industrial estate, I guess.)    While we drove past it, I suddenly remembered that I had brought something unusual from the bottle shop there once when I was young and used to visit unusual pubs occasionally for something to do.  I think it was there that I bought a bottle of Gekkeikan sake – the only brand you could ever get in Australia decades ago.    I didn’t care for the taste, but it represented a sort of foreshadowing of a turn my life would take.  Certainly, I enjoy sake a lot now…

The other reason to visit Pinkenba is because from the road you can get very close to one of the cavernous Qantas maintenance hangers, and watch planes being towed in if you’re lucky.   In fact, it might be Qantas workers, for all I know, who frequent the Hot Girls shows at the Pink; but I certainly hope it is only after work and they have their work on their minds while they check the fuselage of a 767.

*   Went kite flying today.   Brisbane is not the best place for kite flying, at least if you are not near the coast, as I just don’t think it is that breezy a place.  [Well, unless you are dealing with a summer storm, in which case it can be very breezy indeed, but only in short bursts.]  But today was a good day for my daughter to get out a birthday present she got last year from a friend.  It was from Aldi, which was a bad sign, and indeed it needed work with a pair of scissors usually reserved for eyebrows and nose hair to get rods into pockets which otherwise did not exist.  But despite all of this, it flew quite well.

I find getting a kite airborne and keeping there for more than 10 minutes at a time is an unusually satisfying experience.  I’m not sure about my daughter: I was reluctant to hand it over to her at all.  (I’m joking, but as it turned out, she did relinquish it to me often.)

Like taking kids fishing, having a go at kite flying with them is something that just has to be tried  at least once.   That reminds me, we need to go fishing again to see if they can catch something next time.  The first attempt only resulted in my wife getting something.   My manly abilities to provide food from the wild for my family are still in question.

An alternative outlet

Introducing Dodopathy.

May be gone a while ....

I really need to concentrate more on work at the moment. I probably won't post again until next weekend - possibly longer. Wish me luck with resisting the urge to post, and my attempt at ignoring the internet generally. (But I will be back.)

The Doctor is back

After complaining about Dr Who recently, I just wanted to note that the last two episodes, which were "stand alone" stories, were really quite good.

It confirms my earlier observation that the big story arcs are the worst aspect of the show now. It seems that I am not alone in these thoughts.

An interesting idea

Gravitational Waves Can Explain Dark Energy And Axis of Evil, Says Cosmologist - Technology Review

I've had a look at the paper, which is not written for the lay person, of course, but I remain a little uncertain as to whether he is claimed that this gravitational wave idea could explain away the apparent acceleration of the universe entirely, or only partially.

Thinking about teenagers

Teenage Brains - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

Mind Hacks liked the above article in National Geographic a lot, as it gives a fresh perspective on why teenagers take risks, other than the overly simplistic "brain's not fully developed yet" meme.

In the garden today…

My wife grouped some flowers together in pots a couple of  months ago, and they look very nice now:

"Overshare" (The correct name for Facebook)

Facebook Ticker: Mark Zuckerberg's terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I saw something on TV about his last night, and thought it looked terrible.

Manjoo actually hates the whole devaluation of privacy that Facebook imposes much less than me, but his point is still good: if Facebook makes it easier to share any old rubbish, it is killing taste and the exercise of good judgement.

About Ebert

Life Itself - A Memoir - By Roger Ebert - Book Review - NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd wrote this review of movie critic Roger Ebert's new memoir.

I am not the world's greatest fan of Ebert's reviews. I tend to find him inconsistent; sometimes too forgiving, sometimes far too nitpicking. He doesn't write with the depth and wit of Pauline Kael, but still, I am usually curious to see what he thought of a movie if I have seen it and have my own strong reaction for or against.

Sometimes he really despairs of modern tastes in movies, and I understand the sentiment. He really hated Kick-Ass, for example, and called it morally reprehensible. This half tempts me to see it, because I don't really like morally reprehensible things to pass without enough condemnation.

I knew almost nothing of his personal life, except that his writing sometimes gave me the feeling that he may be gay. Turns out he's married (well, I think I did read that some time ago) to an African American (I didn't know that), but he did marry late due to the influence of a very domineering mother. Dowd writes:

Ebert writes about his own alcoholism — his last drink was in 1979 — and that of his mother, who wielded a ’50s Catholic sexual repression that retarded Roger’s ability to “make free” with girls and produced a few scenes with a whiff of ­“Psycho.”

His mother’s recriminations about his girlfriends, as well as his drinking, caused him to live vicariously through movies and kept him “unmarried for an unnatural length of time. Did I know drinking made me unmarriageable, or did I simply put drinking ahead of marriage?”

Well, certainly sounds like the conditions were right for my suspicion.

The review spends a fair bit of time on Ebert's illness (jaw and related cancers which have led to massive facial surgery which failed, and he's now unable to speak and has to eat through a gastric feeding tube.) Poor guy. As Dowd notes, though, he's remarkably upbeat about the fact that he is still alive.

Don't hold your breath

Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

As I hoped, Cosmic Variance has the best commentary on the faster than light neutrino story I've seen. I liked this in comments too:

a nicely nuanced and non-dismissive interpretation of a nicely nuanced and non-hyperbolic announcement that has, predictably but unfortunately, resulted in a comically un-nuanced (perhaps even anti-nuanced) avalanche of headlines.

Seems about right.

Violence down

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker - review | Books | The Guardian

This review contains a detailed summary of Pinker's book long argument that humanity has become much less violent over the centuries. It sounds like a fascinating read. Here are some extracts (of the review, not the book):

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. ...

At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend.

Heartwarming

Forgotten Japanese War Diary Returns Home - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This was a lovely story on 7.30 last night, about the return of a war diary to the daughter of a Japanese naval officer who died on New Guinea during the World War 2.

Getting closer

London fashion week finale: menswear - in pictures | Fashion | guardian.co.uk

Have a look at some of the photos half way through this slide show from fashion week, and see if you agree that we seem to be coming close to actually having the Urban Sombrero.

If you want more to worry about re methane...

Try reading this post: Idiot Tracker: More methane madness

An interesting situation

Paul Sheehan, who really hates this Federal Labor government, nonetheless starts his column this morning with the observation that he doesn't actually disagree with an assessment that Tony Abbott has " a streak of bogan" in him.

Sheehan, of course, then paints this as meaning he cuts through to the electorate. I take it as meaning that, despite being a Rhodes scholar (Sheehan notes he has degrees in law, economics and philosophy) Abbott does not sound very smart.

I mean, honestly, no one (even his admirers in the commentariate) can accuse him of approaching his current job from some grand and consistent intellectual position.

Yet the most interesting thing about Sheehan's article is that he goes on to explain that Abbott refusing to concede to amendments the government wants to let the "Malaysian solution" proceed is a mistake, and will be recognized as such by the "bogans" who admire him.

This is, I think, potentially important. Sheehan is always a conservative populist at heart, and despite the waffling Paul Kelly and the inconsistent Greg Sheridan in The Australian both strongly expressing the same view, I suspect Abbott and his supporters in Parliament are much more likely to be influenced by Sheehan's opinion.

Of course, the opinion they probably value most, Andrew Bolt's, is strangely ambiguous at the moment. Sure he wrote a column saying Labor should just go with Nauru, but I suspect he probably sees potential danger to Abbott too if the government doesn't follow his suggestion, but is unwilling to say so. Bolt is obsessed with Gillard being replaced, and the unprincipled games he has played over the last couple of months to see this achieved mean he opinion on anything political at the moment has to filtered through this lens.

Liquid something

The day I saw a saint’s blood become liquid

Apropos of nothing, the Catholic Herald has a description by a priest of his witnessing a decade ago the "marvel" (the Church does not formally acknowledge it as a miracle) of the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius in Naples.

There is also a link to a helpful Wikipedia article on the saint, which gives some details of the research that has been conducted on the "blood". (The most popular scientific explanation is that it is a thixotropic substance - a gel that liquefies when agitated.) The simple matter of extracting a small amount and putting it in a mass spectrometer is not on the cards, apparently, but I was surprised to learn that a light spectroscope has been used a couple of times, including as recently as 1989. These results are said to be consistent with the vial containing hemoglobin.

Wikipedia also mentions that there are a couple of other saints' blood relics around Italy which liquefy, and apparently it doesn't happen in other countries. This does suggest that the answer lies in an Italian who came up with a neat thixotropic compound, and put it to innovative use in the 1300's, but it is unusual that this type of compound is not mentioned in science until 1863 (this is mentioned in the update following).

UPDATE: I see this morning that there is a really good, detailed report by what looks like an Italian skeptic group (although the tone of article is moderate). It details how there have been attempts, going back to last century, to make mixtures which behave like the relic. The "marvel" has been the subject of skepticism for a long time.

Did everyone remember to bring their electrodes to school this morning?

BBC News - Stimulating brain with electricity aids learning speed

Uh-oh (for methane)

Contribution of oceanic gas hydrate dissociation to the formation of Arctic Ocean methane plumes

The abstract:

Vast quantities of methane are trapped in oceanic hydrate deposits, and there is concern that a rise in the ocean temperature will induce dissociation of these hydrate accumulations, potentially releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, such a release could have dramatic climatic consequences. The recent discovery of active methane gas venting along the landward limit of the gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) on the shallow continental slope (150 m to 400 m) west of Svalbard suggests that this process may already have begun, but the source of the methane has not yet been determined. This study performs 2-D simulations of hydrate dissociation in conditions representative of the Arctic Ocean margin to assess whether such hydrates could contribute to the observed gas release. The results show that shallow, low-saturation hydrate deposits, if subjected to recently observed or future predicted temperature changes at the seafloor, can release quantities of methane at magnitudes similar to what has been observed, and that the releases will be localized near the landward limit of the GHSZ. Both gradual and rapid warming is simulated, along with a parametric sensitivity analysis, and localized gas release is observed for most of the cases. These results resemble the recently published observations and strongly suggest that hydrate dissociation and methane release as a result of climate change may be a real phenomenon, that it could occur on decadal timescales, and that it already may be occurring.

Dam ideas

Why damn northern Australia? - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

OK, so the author is from the Wilderness Society. He still goes on to fill in some of the background as to why North Queensland (and the Ord River project) is not the new agricultural nirvana that one might hope.

I had been wondering what happened to the Ord River dam - I had a vague idea that it had never lived up to its promise. It is a long way from anywhere, but it would appear there are other problems too.

Thoughts on watching 7.30 last night

Let play pretends

Burning Man: Why would anyone go? - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine

I do find this event hard to fathom, but I think someone in comments comes close:

I love how today's version of "Hippies" are upper-middle-class white people with plenty of money to take some time off from work, pay hundreds of dollars to get to/in an event where they can pretend they're "Counter-Culture" for a weekend.

Appalling stuff

More Cherry Ice from Joe D’Aleo | Open Mind

Read this, and the earlier post it links to at the beginning, to see the appalling examples of dishonest misinformation that get posted at Watts Up With That as part of climate change "skepticism".

A strange case of celebrity

gulfnews : Yemeni enjoys drinking motor oil and radiator water:

Riyadh: A Yemeni resident of Makkah who is employed at a vehicle maintenance workshop has been stunning viewers by drinking engine oil, radiator and battery water.

The Saudi Akaz newspaper said on Thursday that the Yemeni, Mohammad Omar, nicknamed "Bin Omar", drinks two to four cans of all motor oil daily.

He told the newspaper that "I enjoy drinking radiator, battery and brake water, and eat daily 2.5kg of grease used for cars. I have been doing that for quite a long time".

Omar added that he has been doing that as he spends 900 Saudi Rials per month to buy oil, grease and their derivatives as meals. "Praise Allah, my health is good", he said.

Uh huh.

Malaysian solution not the end of the world

Toxic Policy Helps No One | Asylum Seekers

It's interesting to note that in this article in which onshore compulsory detention for processing asylum seekers is strongly criticised, the writer still ends on this note:

That said, it is also prudent for Australia to pursue a regional agreement to handle the huge flow of refugees from strife-torn nations such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma and Sri Lanka. No single country can cope with this massive movement of people - not Australia, not Malaysia, Thailand or India.

On paper at least, the deal with Malaysia, which also provides for community-based processing, appears to be a balanced alternative to Nauru and Manus Island, where people would be detained in cultural and geographic isolation while their claims were assessed.

As I have noted before, the local UNHRC was also not appalled at the Malaysian idea, and Coalition supporters who have been acting as if it was the worst idea in the world have been ignoring the psychological suffering of the Nauru system which had originally led those who voted for Rudd to have some sympathy towards relaxing the whole system.

My belief is that voters don't know what they want for the asylum seeker issue. This is reflected in the polls which have actually indicated a majority support on shore processing, yet a large number also think the Coalition does a better job on the issue than Labor. This contradiction makes no sense at all, if you ask me. If the explanation is that people hate asylum seekers arriving by boat, and expect a government to stop that, how do they reconcile that with support for on shore processing which is surely going to do nothing to discourage boats from arriving?

I feel sorry for the Labor government trying to work out how to keep the very confused public happy on this issue.

More complicated that you thought?

We need to talk about HPV vaccination – seriously - opinion - 16 September 2011 - New Scientist

It's a bit surprising to see New Scientist running an opinion piece that questions whether the grounds for universal vaccination of girls with the HPV vaccine are really well enough established.

A possible explanation

Deep oceans can mask global warming for decade-long periods

Here's a good, succinct report on modelling that indicates the deep oceans indeed may be absorbing the "missing heat" that Trenberth wrote about famously in his "Climategate" email.

To track where the heat was going, Meehl and colleagues used a powerful software tool known as the Community Climate System Model, which was developed by scientists at NCAR and the Department of Energy with colleagues at other organizations. Using the model's ability to portray complex interactions between the atmosphere, land, oceans, and sea ice, they performed five simulations of global temperatures.

The simulations, which were based on projections of future greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, indicated that temperatures would rise by several degrees during this century. But each simulation also showed periods in which temperatures would stabilize for about a decade before climbing again. For example, one simulation showed the global average rising by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) between 2000 and 2100, but with two decade-long hiatus periods during the century.

During these hiatus periods, simulations showed that extra energy entered the oceans, with deeper layers absorbing a disproportionate amount of heat due to changes in oceanic circulation. The vast area of ocean below about 1,000 feet (300 meters) warmed by 18% to 19% more during hiatus periods than at other times. In contrast, the shallower global ocean above 1,000 feet warmed by 60% less than during non-hiatus periods in the simulation.

"This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean," Trenberth says. "The heat has not disappeared, and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences."

I wonder if work is being done on measurements to confirm it?

The future of food guesswork

Increasing Focus on Climate Change/Food Crisis:Beware ‘Single Factor’ Explanations, Uncertainties | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media

I just note this article from earlier this year that details a lot of the uncertainty that revolves around the issue of future food production under global warming and increased CO2.

I would suspect that, since the last IPCC report, there would have to be greater concern developing about the future effect of extreme weather events on local and global production.

A bit of a worry...

A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment | Serendipity

Quite an interesting post here about some modelling runs which show the importance at looking at the long term future (not just up to the end of the century.)

Notes from all over–Spring edition

*  Because those making $1,000,000 a year are hurting.   How silly are Republicans who chose to call Obama’s proposal that tax be increased for the rich “class warfare”?     Very stupid, in my books; but then again, what do I expect from a party that is being held captive on what it can say about climate change by the Tea Party element?  

*  Jerry Pournelle has looked at the new NASA heavy lift vehicle proposal and is not impressed.   I don’t trust his skeptic assessment of climate change, but he knows a lot about rocketry and its developmental history, and his criticisms here are worth considering.

*  Americans not only have an un-natural degree of embarrassment over the sight of a used clothesline, they are not big on washing clothes in cold water either.  (But then, nor are Germans, according to the article.)   I would be very surprised if the majority of Australian washing is not done in cold water now.  The report says the Japanese mainly use cold water; why is there resistance to the idea in the US?

*  Good news for the PM?   At least one Labor idea, a mining tax, is quite popular according to a survey.   This is not the first survey to show this.   Doesn’t this mean that the Coalition promise to undo everything Labor implements might not get quite the universal acclaim that they expect it to during an actual election campaign, despite the fact that people are at the moment  in such an irrational  “anything but Gillard” mood  that they couldn’t care less what Tony Abbott is saying?

*  The New Yorker has a somewhat amusing article on sexual revolutions of the past.  I liked the bit about the “celestial bed” (top of page 2) in particular, because I hadn’t heard of it before.   It might have been a bit disturbing for the neighbours, I expect.

*  The possum under the balcony is getting and more used to us.  We feed it fruit most days now: 

Fish success

Last year, I posted a Mediterranean baked fish recipe which had been a success. For whatever reason, I haven't ever cooked that again, but last night I tried another Italian type of baked fish recipe by Neil Perry, which was in last weekend's Sydney Morning Herald. It too was a success, so I'll paraphrase it here:

Thinly slice a fennel bulb, a red onion, and a red (or as I used, yellow) capsicum. Skin, seed and dice four tomatoes and chop up a bit. Put in a flat type of casserole and mix most of 60 ml of olive oil. Add 6 anchovies, as many capers as you like (washed), and olives, and mix up with the veges. The recipe called for chilli flakes too, but as the kids were eating it, I left them out. Season liberally with sale and pepper.

Roast in 200 degree oven (uncovered, but you might have to stir around a bit half way through if your oven has hot spots) for one hour.

Put white fish fillets in a single layer (hence the flat casserole pan) into the sauce, put the rest of the olive oil over the fish, and back to the oven for maybe 15 minutes.

The roasted veges make an excellent sauce, and even the kids were happy to eat it (although I didn't serve them the olives.)

Thank you Neil: very nice.

(But then, I love fennel in anything.)

What 2 degrees means

It's a favourite line of some climate change skeptics that, if the world has already warmed up .8 degree over the 20th century, and the effects haven't been so bad, would we even notice an average warming of 2 degrees in future.

The argument is, I would have thought, obviously flawed for many reasons, not the least of which being that what climate scientists are actually saying is "hey, you'd better start working freaking hard even to have half a hope of keeping it to 2 degrees." The stupidest version of the skeptic argument says "well, so what if a previous hot day of 35 degrees becomes one of 36.5 degree?" You can point people to this well know bell curve:



but it doesn't seem to register that what is means hotter seasons, not just individual days.

So, they should read about research like this, indicating that what we currently consider an extreme summer will, in large parts of the world, become extremely common:

Researchers from Stanford University recently set out to learn at what point exceptionally hot summers will to become more commonplace around the world. Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh has studied how the warming to date has influenced the weather patterns that lead to unusually hot seasons. Projecting forward over the next few decades, he says the combination of warmer temperatures and changing weather patterns mean that the extremes will be changing quickly.

"According to our projections, large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years," Diffenbaugh said when his study was published earlier this summer in the journal Climatic Change Letters.

Scientists say the trend towards more hot extremes has already begun. In the U.S., for example, record breaking hot days have already become more common than they once were. According to climate scientist Jerry Meehl, recording breaking hot days used to be as common as cold ones. But in 2000, there were twice as many warm temperature records as cold records in the U.S., and he says that in 2011, so far there have been three times as many.

Go on, skeptics, keep reading. I know it's difficult to get you to think outside your ideological comfort zone, but do try. Here's the paper's abstract:

Given current international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit human-induced global-mean near-surface temperature increases to 2°C, relative to the pre-industrial era, we seek to determine the impact such a temperature increase might have upon the frequency of seasonal-mean temperature extremes; further we seek to determine what global-mean temperature increase would prevent extreme temperature values from becoming the norm. Results indicate that given a 2°C global mean temperature increase it is expected that for 70–80% of the land surface maximum seasonal-mean temperatures will exceed historical extremes (as determined from the 95th percentile threshold value over the second half of the 20th Century) in at least half of all years, i.e. the current historical extreme values will effectively become the norm. Many regions of the globe—including much of Africa, the southeastern and central portions of Asia, Indonesia, and the Amazon—will reach this point given the “committed” future global-mean temperature increase of 0.6°C (1.4°C relative to the pre-industrial era) and 50% of the land surface will reach it given a future global-mean temperature increase of between 0.8 and 0.95°C (1.6–1.75°C relative to the pre-industrial era). These results suggest substantial fractions of the globe could experience seasonal-mean temperature extremes with high regularity, even if the global-mean temperature increase remains below the 2°C target.

Given what happens as a result of extremely hot summers in Australia (bushfires, water shortages) it's also obvious that it's not just extreme temperatures that are the issue.

Another Texan who believes in AGW

How to talk to a climate sceptic | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I found this a few weeks ago but forgot to post it: a good interview with Katharine Hayhoe, another Texan climate scientist who is firmly on the AGW mainstream science camp, and who goes out of her way to convince the notoriously skeptic evangelical Christian demographic that it is a real problem.

Some extracts:

The third thing I like to tell people is that we do have projections about what the average conditions will be in the future, and so what we can say is that this summer is a picture of what it would be like every summer if we made certain choices regarding our energy sources, and if we reach certain levels of climate change. So for example this summer we've already had 43 days over 100 degrees in Lubbock, which is higher than normal. And if you look in the future this summer is what we'd expect the average summer to be like by the end of the century under lower emissions or by the middle of the century under higher emissions. So we're complaining about this summer, but this could be the average summer within our lifetimes if we continue to depend on fossil fuels....

.....in the southern Great Plains, we are a semiarid environment and we are very water-short already. West Texas is a huge agricultural area and it lies over the Ogallala Aquifer. Since irrigation began in the 1960s, the Ogallala Aquifer has shrunk by over 150 feet in many locations.

Estimates of how many years of water we have left in the aquifer, which has been there since the last ice age, say that as much as two-thirds of the aquifer could be unusable within 30 years. So then you overlay climate change on that existing problem, and you find that with higher temperatures you obviously need more water to provide plants with the same amount of irrigation because evaporation is a factor. We also find that precipitation patterns are becoming more unpredictable, we're getting more heavy downpours and more dry periods in between, which reduces aquifer recharge, because when you get heavy downpours it runs off into the surface water and then obviously you're not getting any recharge. So climate change is exacerbating the problem we have, and it's the same across most of the Southwest, which is very water-short.

She says about 65% of the evangelicals she talks to (I think she is of that brand of Christianity herself) do not believe climate change is real. She has her work cut out.

3-D burn out

Four theories on the death of 3-D. - By Daniel Engber - Slate Magazine

So, the return on the 3-D version of movies has really tanked. It seems, even for a good movie, people are just going along to see the 2-D version.

It doesn't surprise me. It needs to be used much more sparingly.

An over-interpreted study

Testosterone and fatherhood: Are men designed to nurture children? - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

William Saletan does an excellent job at looking at the ways the "fatherhood lowers testosterone" story has been way, way, over-interpreted by just about everyone.

An important argument in Texas

There is an important argument going on between two resident Texans John Nielsen-Gammon and Michael Tobis at the moment over climate change and "weather weirding" and attribution of events to climate change.

In short, John N-G did a long post in which he argued that the remarkably severe Texas drought and hot summer are (if I can risk paraphrase) not primarily due to climate change. He is no disbeliever in AGW by any means, but he is very, very cautious when it comes to attribution of single events to it.

Tobis, on the other hand, has issues with the whole approach to attribution which can be summarised by his last sentence:

You can't apply small-signal arguments to large signals in nonlinear systems. So please stop it.

And someone in comments expands on this in a way which Tobis basically agrees with:

As Jay Forrester and Ed Deming kept reminding us, people are not good at predicting the behavior of non-linear feed back systems. In particular weathermen and climate scientists study the one weather system, rather than the behavior of dynamic systems in general.

In his classes, Dr. Deming made his students look at the behavior of various systems as the systems went “out of control.” It was shocking how a dynamic system could be “in control” and apparently stable, then suffer some small chaotic event, “go out of control”, and exhibit violent behavior as the system moved toward an new equilibrium. We have been adding heat to the weather system, bumped it out-of -ontrol, and we can expect weather that we have never see before as the system seeks a new equilibrium.

John Nielsen-Gammon missed the point that he has a system that is out of control and that his system is violently seeking a new equilibrium. We can expect ongoing violent behavior until the weather system comes back into control. The studies that he cites all assume that the system is "in control" and that the old rules hold. However, those old rules do not apply to the new, “out-of-control” weather system.

This commenter goes on to point that climate models should be expected to not be good at predicting this.

Tobis' point seems to me to make sense, but I guess we may have to wait for another few years of "weather weirding" to see how it pans out.

UPDATE: Nielsen-Gammon makes a further point in clarification in comments:

We're a degree F warmer because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The standard deviation around the best-fit curve seems to be about a degree F. So an event which would have been close to the best-fit curve is one standard deviation off it. Given the lack of rainfall, a temperature which would have been expected to be attained about 16% of the time is now expected to be attained about 50% of the time.

So, this event (i.e., this particular combination of drought and heat) has been made three times as likely by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, with lots of assumptions built in. The least of which is what global warming is doing to our local PDF of precipitation in Texas, which could go either way.

Change the narrative

From a short review in New Scientist:

Do you think that airing your feelings right away will help you through trauma? Are you persuaded that bringing kids to prisons will scare them straight? Convinced that costly, intensive long-term interventions are needed to close the achievement gap in education, curb alcohol abuse and reduce teen pregnancies?

Think again, says psychologist Timothy Wilson. At the heart of his book Redirect: The surprising new science of psychological change is the conviction that many favoured approaches to changing behaviour are akin to "bloodletting" and may do more harm than good. Armed with the tools of experimental social psychology, he argues we can move beyond these untested, "common-sense" views and begin to make some real progress.

Central to Wilson's perspective is the idea that our interpretations of the world are rooted in largely unconscious "narratives" - stories we use to frame the world and that shape our sense of identity - and that these too often leave us unhealthy and unhappy. The good news, he says, is that there is a way to redirect these interpretations "that is quick, does not require one-on-one sessions, and can address a wide array of personal and social problems". Wilson calls this new way "story editing", and in his view it carries enormous potential for efficiently producing lasting positive change.

It sounds like an expansion of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, but this guy's idea sounds pretty much like what I have thought about on and off over the last few decades.

The "largely unconscious narrative" that you would have suspect causes problems is scientific materialism and its potential to discount free will as being "real" in any objective sense, as well as painting all emotion and thoughts as essentially mere molecular activity with no inherent meaning or purpose.

Of course, there are different ways of arguing that such ideas are not necessarily a consequence of scientific materialism, and biology is such that there is enough pleasure in life for nearly all people that they don't want to end it all because of an intellectual interpretation of what life is like, at heart. But I have long wondered whether people act unconsciously on a internal narrative that, when they get down to it, they are only diverting themselves from reality, do not even have a fundamental control over their own thought processes, and there is no reason for long term optimism.

This theme was also dealt with at length in Bryan Appleyard's book Understanding the Present, which I liked a lot, except for its proposed solution that we embrace Wittgenstein.

An old story

Surgeons use toe to replace lost thumb - Health News, Health & Families - The Independent

For some reason, I remember the same operation being done decades ago after reading about it in the Courier Mail. I suspect I may been in high school at the time.

As you were.

Melancholic kid's song

Last night I had to put up with another primary school kid's concert. The novelty of these wears off sharply after each kid has done their first two or three, and in all honesty, some teachers really struggle to come up with good ideas.

When I were a lad, it was simply a matter of each class learning off a couple of songs by heart (at least one of them probably of Irish origin,) standing on a couple of precipitously stacked long benches, and belting them out to the piano accompaniment of Sister Lawrence. (Actually, it may have been a different nun, but Sister Lawrence sticks strongly in memory due to her general reign of terror over Grade 1 and 2. Have I mentioned before that it was one of the most depressing days of my educational life to find on the first day of Grade 2 that I had her again for another year?)

But the point is - I am sure this was a relatively painless experience for the parents, and it was probably over with much quicker than what primary schools get away with now. Primary school teachers be aware: 6 year olds do not do choreography well. You don't do choreography well. Give it up - get them to sing some 2 songs while stationary and get off the stage.

And as for other content - look, even a climate change worrier like me gets sick of every year having one or two classes do some sketch or something or other related to recycling, being kind to the planet, etc. Do something cheerful.

Anyway - where was I? Oh yes: one thing one class did last night was to the Unicorn song (Irish Rovers, 1968.) I hadn't heard it for years, but you would have to call it a bit of melancholy Irish folk for kids. And this got me thinking of other melancholic kid's songs from my childhood, and how the genre seems to have gone away.

Surely the biggest of them all in the genre was Puff the Magic Dragon, which I see was by Peter Paul and Mary from 1963. Being Australian, I associate more it with The Seekers, the group for which every song strikes me as melancholic.

There was another sad sounding kids song that I thought about this morning, but it escapes me now.

In any event, how come we have environmental concern now at least as great as that in the 1960's, but we don't have a sad sounding kid's song about it? Maybe it's just that folk doesn't have the airplay that it used to have in that decade? I mean, it may be unfair, but I suppose I do usually associate "folk" with serious or depressing situations. (It's a bit like the image of Country & Western, I suppose, but my impression is that it is more "pop-y" in both sound and topic now.)

So get to it, songwriters. Some good, depressing songs about carbon dioxide, the rising sea levels covering the old holiday home on the beach, grandma being taken to hospital due to heat exhaustion; politicians too stupid to do anything: there's plenty of material. But I still don't want to hear it at a school concert.

A confusing matter, and a Dr Who complaint

When do gay kids start "acting gay"? - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine

Prompted by news of a lawsuit in America to do with anti-gay bullying in a school, Brian Palmer looks at the somewhat interesting question of whether a young child acting outside of "traditional gender roles" is an indication of future sexual identity. In brief:

A hefty pile of research shows that boys as young as 3 years old who break from traditional gender roles have a high likelihood of becoming gay adults. Predictive behaviors include playing with Barbie dolls, shying away from roughhousing, and taking an interest in makeup and women's clothing. (Read the Explainer's take on why boys prefer to play with sticks while girls go for dolls here.) The relationship isn't one-to-one, however, and it's certainly not the case that all boys who love Barbie dolls will later identify as gay. The correlation is much weaker in the other direction: A disproportionate number of boys who don't conform to gender stereotypes turn out to be gay men, but lots of gay men played with G.I. Joe as boys and quarterbacked the high-school football team. Neither does the relationship appear to be as strong among girls. Tomboys aren't as likely to become lesbian adults.

Psychiatrist Richard Green conducted the leading study in this field in the 1970s and '80s. He followed 44 boys who defied traditional gender roles from early childhood to adulthood. Thirty of them became gay or bisexual adults while just one child from a 34-member gender-conforming control group turned out to be gay. The subjects who strayed the most from conventionally boyish behavior were the most likely to be gay. Green's study has since been repeated by other researchers with similar outcomes. (Studies on females show that only around one-quarter of gender nonconforming girls grow up to be lesbians.)

The complicated thing about this is that acting outside of normal gender roles is also commonly seen as a sign of future gender identity issues. Why is it that some boys with this apparent inborn inclination to feminine interests will go on to develop a deep unhappiness with their own body to such an extent that they feel they can't be happy unless they hormonally/surgically modify it, and others will go to be "merely" homosexual, with varying degrees of feminine behaviour as part of that?

Of course, lots of people have written extensively about sexual identity and gender issues, but I am not inclined to waste a huge amount of time on reading about it; I just note that it is a matter that I think is obviously complicated, and far from properly understood.

I think I noted recently here that Native Americans (supposedly) saw cross-gender behaviour in kids as a sign they were a special, virtually holy, "two spirits" combining both male and female spirits. According to this article:

Every tribe watched their young carefully to determine if one of their children were two-spirits. If a boy leaned towards female clothes and mannerism, the tribe encouraged his explorations and vice versa for females.

Given the political use to which such anthropology can be put in the gay marriage debate, there is reason to be a bit suspicious about over-statements on this, and indeed, here's a site that claims reverence of "two spirits" was by no means a universal practice:

According to researcher Will Roscoe, former coordinator of the Gay American Indians History Project, there is no single belief about Two-Spirits among the more than 800 tribes in the United States and Alaska, about 200 of which are not federally recognized. Two-spirits may be respected within one tribe and ostracized in another, while the topic of sexuality could be ignored altogether in yet another tribe.

As I said, human behaviour and psychology in this field is very complicated.

It certainly also makes it a bit of a challenge wondering how one should explain "gay" issues to children. I have not yet had to discuss the "gay" question with my own kids, despite the best efforts of Dr Who to continually bring up gay issues again and again. Surely I can't be the only father in the world who finds this annoying. Even after the departure of the gay re-inventor of the show, Russell Davies, who you could clearly see was inserting a subtext of all types of pan sexual behaviour as being cool and normal, the new producer Steven Moffat, who is not gay, is openly going out of his way to keep introducing gay characters. Here's what he said in an interview:

But also someone pointed out to me [that] in the previous Doctor Who, the first one I had run, there were no gay or bisexual characters and I was sort of slightly appalled. I was thinking, I’m not like that at all. I would never have done that. So I was thinking, “Dammit, it’s the one criticism I’ve ever listened to. Good point, Doctor Who should always be…" It’s not because it’s politically and morally correct. It’s right for Doctor Who, isn’t it? It’s cheeky and off-centered. And fun.

Yeah, well, thanks a lot Steve. You've made it into a psyops program aimed at educating kids on sexuality. Yep, that's why we watch Doctor Who, which is, after all, still primarily a kid's science fiction program, just that it is well enough acted with good enough production values that adults watch it too. And, by the way, although I like the cast quite a lot, its stories are not as good as they were a few years ago, before the Davies decline. In fact, it's nearly time to give it a rest again, I think, after this season.

Anyway, back to kids and the "gay" explanation. I spoke to another father who said he simply answered the question "what's a lesbian" by saying it was a woman who loved a woman. Easy peasy. Maybe that is suitable for an 8 year old, but honestly, explaining homosexuality purely in terms of "love" isn't being realistic with a slightly older kid who has something of an understanding about heterosexual sex.

Part of the problem, as I say, is that it's not clear that adults understand it at all properly from a biological, psychological or cultural point of view either. So I don't care what others may say - it's a tricky issue to explain to a child/young teenager.

More calls for realism

Bishop of Derry calls for end to celibacy in Catholic church | UK news | The Guardian

I liked the last paragraph:

The reordination into the Catholic church of married Anglican priests has pointed up the fact that priestly celibacy is not a doctrine, but a discipline. In 1970, the decline in priesthood vocations persuaded nine leading theologians to sign a memorandum declaring that the Catholic leadership "quite simply has a responsibility to take up certain modifications" to the celibacy rule. Extracts from the document were reprinted in January. Not least because one of the signatories was the then Joseph Ratzinger, now pope Benedict.

Debriefing debriefed

Escaping from the past of disaster psychology � Mind Hacks

Here's a fascinating article about how trauma counselling by group debriefing gradually recognized as probably doing more harm than good.

Interestingly, it points out that you couldn't even tell that by asking the victims who had received it:

In one study, 80% of patients said the intervention was “useful” despite having more symptoms of mental illness in the long-term compared to disaster victims who had no treatment. In another, more than half said ‘debriefing’ was “definitely useful” despite having twice the rate of postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a year.

Debriefing involves lots of psychological ‘techniques’, so the psychologists felt they were using their best tools, while the lack of outside perspective meant it was easy to mistake instant feedback and regression to the mean for actual benefit.

This sounds a little counter-intuitive, but as the article notes, that the only way to reliably tell its effects is by comparing the future progress of groups who receive it to those who don't.

The Brisbane Space Pants Foundation

Free Shuttle Artifacts! | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine

From the article:

Currently up for grabs on a government website: a pair of astronaut pants, a spacewalker’s life-support backpack, a spacesuit glove, and thousands of black insulating tiles from the bellies of the space shuttle orbiters.

Now that the shuttle has retired after 30 years, NASA is having the equivalent of a massive going-out-of-business sale.

While most of the media attention last spring focused on where the vehicles themselves would go on display (Washington, Los Angeles, Florida's Kennedy Space Center and New York) thousands of lesser pieces of shuttle history are still looking for permanent homes. With help from the General Services Administration, NASA is giving away everything from spare main engines to sunglasses worn by the astronauts.

Sounds great. The only catch is in the next sentence:

The artifacts will go to museums, universities, elementary schools, libraries and planetariums all over the country to become part of their permanent collections.

Since there's another Brisbane in California, I think the best I can do is set up the Brisbane Space Pants Foundation, and see if I can score a free set of astronaut pants. Straight to the pool room, they would go. (If I had a pool room.)

I wonder if they have a set of the Japanese space underpants that were worn for 2 months straight? I probably wouldn't even have to pay for postage: give them the address, and they could probably walk their way to Australia.

Hormones are strange

In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone - NYTimes.com

The report notes:

Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops.

So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children. Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men and even health issues like prostate cancer.

Given that other studies have indicated testosterone can bounce around for all types of reasons, including whether your political party has just lost an election, or if (you are soccer goalkeeper), depending on if you are playing away or at home, I don't know that it is really that surprising.

Testosterone is a bit strange.

Good catches

It was interesting to note from last week's Economist that the TSA, the much maligned security service* in the US that is responsible for airport screening, has a "Good Catch" site up which makes occasional report of all the unusual and potentially dangerous things they have stopped getting on board flights. The TSA blog article about the site contains some of the comments you might expect against the TSA.

This is an entertaining idea for a website. The posts are coming in much too infrequently, though.

* usually by right wing libertarian types with psychological problems about their "junk" being vaguely seen by some bored screen watcher in another room, or brushed against during a pat down

McDonalds in the spotlight

Employment: Defending jobs | The Economist

According to the chart at the link, McDonald's is the world's 4th largest employer (following the US Dept of Defence, China's army, and Walmart. There must be a lot of Walmarts in America.)

On the weekend, I went to McDonalds and had their "birthday special" of the return of the McFeast and Shaker Fries. I actually don't recall shaker fries, but the disappearance of the McFeast two or three years ago has been a matter of deep regret. Its replacement, the "Angus" burgers, often feel a bit too heavy for lunch for me. The McFeast is their "just right" burger.

I seem that someone else in the blogosphere has done a detailed culinary review of the return of the McFeast, and gives it a big "fail". But then, he starts with an admission that he never liked it in the first place, as he doesn't like tomato on a burger (?) The bad review also notes that "the salad was too cold" and with the shaker fries " the shaking was embarrassingly loud." U-huh.

I see from his blog that he is from England (culinary heartland of the universe - ha) and has an entry about a Dr Who birthday cake that starts with what I hope is a joke, but I'm not sure:

I love Doctor Who…my lounge room is full of Doctor Who paraphernalia and my wedding cake had two Daleks on the top.

His taste in anything is, I'm afraid, not to be trusted...

Adventures in dioramas

You wouldn’t believe how long this diorama took to put together.  My son showed great talent in painting the tiny mining figures we found by good luck at a hobby shop, and he’s pretty good at construction with matchsticks and a hot glue gun too.   The trees are made from green scouring pads which are pulled apart and stuck onto a twig with appropriate “branches” (something I learnt from the internet.)

Yes, it took me half a century to learn how to make a diorama to primary school level.   (I don’t recall ever doing one at school.  It was all project posters with lots of words and illustrations in my day:  these seem to not be popular now.)

Great moments in Japanese politics

Radiation gag backfires on trade minister | The Japan Times Online

Trade minister Yoshio Hachiro crossed swords with the media Thursday by attempting to rub his body against a journalist after touring the stricken Fukushima power plant, sources said Friday.

"I'll give you radiation," he reportedly said to the journalist.

Dear Gillian

Change agent | Gillian Anderson

She's not looking bad, the older Agent Scully. (I bet she hates that. Mind you, I always get the impression from interviews that would be a bit intimidating to meet.)

Analysing people analysing Julia

As my regular reader Jason has an intense and somewhat irrational hatred of both Julia Gillard and Richard Glover, I'm sure he's happy to note this morning's column by Glover which starts "Can someone explain to me why people hate Julia Gillard with such intensity?"

I basically agree with all of it.

Elsewhere, I note that reaction to At Home With Julia has varied widely. It is, let's face it, a silly show that does not attempt to paint a realistic picture (someone somewhere said it's a bit like a human version of the old Rubbery Figures puppet show, extended out for 30 minutes, and I think that's about right.) But still, as I wrote before, as I was very pleased to be hearing some really good politician impersonations again, and found it pleasingly not mean spirited, I liked it.

Yet some on the Left thought it was awful: Mike Carlton hated it (and, I see from the same article, he's another Lefty who has joined the "Julia will go, and Rudd replace her" school of unreality. Why Kevin would be forgiven for the carbon tax, but not Julia, is a bit of mystery to me.)

The most over the top condemnation for the show came from Larvatus Prodeo, where it interpreted purely on feminist principles. Apparently, showing a male partner as feeling left out, ignored, or tormented by teenage boys for being a househusband means you are showing him as emasculated, and that just is so offensive. Yeah, whatever. As much as I can't stand where much of the Right is at the moment, I do not find myself being at all attracted to the dour feminism and sociological waffle of the prominent females at LP. (I like it when Anne Winter does a withering takedown of CL or someone else at Catallaxy occasionally, but I'm not unrealistic enough to think she doesn't hold me in low regard too.)

Oddly, on the Right, I heard Andrew Bolt on his radio spot say that he liked the show more than he expected, and in a way it made him more sympathetic to Gillard. Yet it seems as if he might be gearing up to criticise the ABC on his show tomorrow for trying to help Gillard this way. Again, whatever.

Anyway, it certainly is a show that has received a diverse reception.

UPDATE: I see Annabel Crabb confirms what I have said about Kevin Rudd for a long time. (Maybe I got the idea from her in the first place, I can't quite recall now.)

There's a fascinating, almost mathematical equation going on here.

With Julia Gillard, the probability that any given person will support the Prime Minister decreases with distance from the subject; she is supported by a majority of Cabinet and Caucus colleagues and viewed benignly in the public service, but despised by voters who have never met her.

Mr Rudd's equation is precisely the inverse; the warm support he continues to enjoy in the populace at large tails away sharply, the closer you get to the 2600 postcode. Outside Parliament House, voters might wonder why they can't bring that nice Kevin fellow back again. Inside it, people talk vigorously about chewing their own arms off before doing anything to hasten such a return....

I don't think I'll ever forget the conversation I had with one backbencher a few months after Rudd's overthrow. "I agree with Kevin on just about every policy inclination he has," the backbencher said. "In fact, there probably isn't another person in the party with whom I am more in line." There was a pause, and then the backbencher added, calmly and without even the mildest hint of melodrama: "It's just that I hate him so very much."

Warming water problem

Warming seas could smother seafood - New Scientist

All a bit of a worry:

More than half of a group of fish crucial for the marine food web might die if, as predicted, global warming reduces the amount of oxygen dissolved in some critical areas of the ocean – including some of our richest fisheries.

The prediction is based on a unique set of records that goes back to 1951. California has regularly surveyed its marine plankton and baby fish to support the sardine fishery. "There is almost no other dataset going back so far that includes every kind of fish," says Tony Koslow of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who heads the survey. The survey records also include information on water temperature, salinity and the dissolved oxygen content.

Koslow's team studied records of 86 fish species found consistently in the samples and discovered that the abundance of 27 of them correlated strongly with the amount of oxygen 200 to 400 metres down: a 20 per cent drop in oxygen meant a 63 per cent drop in the fish. There have been several episodes of low oxygen during the period in question, mainly in the 1950s and since 1984.

Global climate models predict that 20 to 40 per cent of the oxygen at these depths will disappear over the next century due to warming, says Koslow – mainly because these waters get oxygen by mixing with surface waters. Warmer, lighter surface waters are less likely to mix with the colder, denser waters beneath.

It's complicated...

Switching from coal to natural gas would do little for global climate, study indicates

Maybe the Greens with their distrust of going heavily into gas as a stopgap on the way to completely clean energy have a point after all. It's all very complicated and debatable though, I'm sure.

Bee will

Backreaction: Predetermined Lunch and Moral Responsibility

Physicist Bee has been thinking and writing about free will. It's a long post that I have read yet, but I am sure it will be worthwhile. I'll get back to it later.