About comedians

Alan Davies interview: 'I'm like a fine wine. I'm maturing' | Media | The Guardian

Alan Davies makes an interesting comment in this interview:

During his career he has seen plenty of clowns who could also benefit from time on an analyst's couch: "There are two types of comedians, self-harmers and golfers. The second lot are out on the golf course, they love being famous, playing golf, having their Rolls-Royce and house in Barbados, with no guilt. For others there is a sense that you had to pay your dues – 'my life is shit'. Why not just play golf and enjoy it?"

I see he is aged 46.  I'm not sure if he seems that age or not.

The Right in the US has gone nuts - Part Whatever

Noonan: His Terms Are Always Hostile Ones - WSJ.com

Peggy Noonan, who I don't read all that often, but who has seemed at times to represent moderate Republicanism reasonably well,  has well and truly decided she's on side with the nutty Tea Party wing of the Republicans after all:

President Obama has been using the days and weeks leading up to his inauguration to show the depth of his disdain for the leaders of the other major party and, by inference, that party's voters, which is to say more or less half the country. He has been spending his time alienating instead of summoning. It has left the political air more sour and estranged. 

As a presidential style this is something strange and new. That has to be said again: It is new, and does not augur well. 

 What was remarkable about the president's news conference Monday is that he didn't seem to think he had to mask his partisan rancor or be large-spirited. He bristled with unashamed hostility for Republicans on the Hill.  They are holding the economy "ransom," they are using the threat of "crashing the American economy" as "leverage," some are "absolutist" while others are "consumed with partisan brinkmanship." They are holding "a gun at the head of the American people." And what is "motivating and propelling" them is not a desire for debt reduction, as they claim. They are "suspicious about government's commitment . . . to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat, or whether we should be spending money on medical research." 

And yet, "when I'm over here at the congressional picnic and folks are coming up and taking pictures with their family, I promise you, Michelle and I are very nice to them."

You're nice to them? To people who'd take food from the mouths of babes? 

Then, grimly: "But it doesn't prevent them from going onto the floor of the House and blasting me for being a big-spending socialist." Conservative media outlets "demonize" the president, he complained, and so Republican legislators fear standing near him.

If Richard Nixon talked like that, they'd have called him paranoid and self-pitying. Oh wait . . .

 I'm happy to allow that Obama is not, and never was, the Messiah.  He may have a big streak of vanity for all I know.

But  Noonan's shock and outrage that Obama is telling Republicans that he doesn't think they are acting in good faith and criticising their 4 years of over-the-topic hyperbole and crank theories - that is ridiculous in the extreme.   Republicans have been absurd in the way they have argued under Obama - everything is "socialism", "death panels" (you don't need links for those, surely), "treason", deserving impeachment; even when the ideas under discussion are ones that Republicans at the State level have implemented and only now being expanded to the Federal level (Romney and health care; the contraceptive mandate in many States, Republicans in the New York Senate on gun control.)  The hypocrisy and hyperbole of the Republicans over the last 4 years has been breathtaking.

And as for the President's recommendations on gun control - Noonan thinks they are OK, but still has to struggle to find a way to criticise him:

His gun-control recommendations themselves seemed, on balance, reasonable and moderate. I don't remember that the Second Amendment died when Bill Clinton banned assault rifles; it seemed to thrive, and good, too. That ban shouldn't have been allowed to expire in 2004.

What was offensive about the president's recommendations is what they excluded. He had nothing to say about America's culture of violence—its movies, TV shows and videogames. Excuse me, there will be a study of videogames; they are going to do "research" on whether seeing 10,000 heads explode on video screens every day might lead unstable young men to think about making heads explode. You'll need a real genius to figure that out.

The president at one point asked congressmen in traditionally gun-supporting districts to take a chance, do the right thing and support some limits. But when it comes to challenging Hollywood—where he traditionally gets support, and from which he has taken great amounts of money for past campaigns and no doubt will for future libraries—he doesn't seem to think he has to do the right thing. He doesn't even have to talk about it. It wouldn't be good to have Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino running around shouting "First Amendment, slippery slope!" or have various powerful and admired actors worrying their brows, to the extent their brows can be worried.

What, pray tell, does Noonan think a President can do, exactly, about cinema violence?  (And putting Steven Spielberg in there as if his movies have been groundbreaking in the gratuitous gun violence stakes is ridiculous.   The trend was really started by Right wing Hollywood figures, if you ask me.)

Noonan's commentary has therefore officially become nuts.  The list of moderate Right wing commentary worth reading has become vanishingly small.

A mild dose

I mentioned a couple of posts back that I was having an interesting viral infection.   It's shingles - the illness you can get years after you've had chickenpox, when the varicella-zoster virus comes out of its hiding place on your nerves and gives you a skin rash with possible complications.

I don't like the way certain viruses do that "never leave your system" trick.  Like most in my family, I'm unlucky enough to get cold sores too, so now I've got two herpes related viruses always hanging around waiting to re-emerge if feeling run down.  (In fact, now that I think of it, how come people like me don't always get a break out of cold sores at the same time that they get shingles - both are thought to be related to the immune system dipping a bit.)

My chickenpox experience was as an adult and was of average unpleasantness, I guess.  My Mum had an attack of shingles in her 50's and it bothered her quite a bit for a couple of months; I remember David Letterman had one a decade or more ago which kept him off TV for a while.  So I was generally aware of the illness.  (One website says about 1 in 5 adults in Australia will have an attack.)

On Monday last week I noticed an itch on my back.  It felt a bit unusual, and looking in the mirror it seemed to be in a smallish oval red patch just off the spine, but I thought the redness may have just have been from scratching.  It was still looking like a rash on Tuesday evening though, and after checking some photos on the internet of what a shingles rash could look like, I headed off the GP.

He seemed to very much doubt it was shingles, as it was only moderately itchy, and didn't have any pain or much in the way of "pins and needles" feeling.   Anyway, he took a swab and gave me a week long course of anti-viral tablets just to be safe.

Over the next day or two, I asked everyone at work about whether they had shingles, and whether they had much pain with it.  As with the doctor, everyone I spoke to had the attitude "I think you'd really know about it if it was shingles - it's pretty painful."  Yet I was continuing with just mild itchiness.

The GP rang a couple of nights later and said the test was positive for the virus - it was shingles; just a very mild case apparently.  So I'll continue my anti-virals for a couple more days and just hope that is as bad as it gets.   (The rash is now less distinct and less itchy, but still there.)

I've had a look around at stuff on the internet about shingles.  I see that there is a vaccine they can give now for those aged over 60, when the complications can be worse.   But the most interesting thing I read was this - about how it is not clear whether widespread childhood immunisation against chickenpox may actually lead to more cases of adult shingles.  (I'll add a couple of the earlier paragraphs which set the scene before the most interesting bit):

 The varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is so named because it causes two distinct illnesses: varicella (chickenpox), following primary infection, and herpes zoster (shingles), following reactivation of latent virus....

  Herpes zoster or shingles is a sporadic disease, caused by reactivation of latent VZV in sensory nerve ganglia. It is usually self-limiting and is characterised by severe pain with dermatomal distribution, sometimes followed by post-herpetic neuralgia which can be chronic and debilitating in the elderly.^10,11 Although herpes zoster can occur at any age, most cases occur after the age of 50 with the incidence of complications also increasing with age.¹² However, children infected in utero or those who acquire varicella before the age of 1 year, and patients on immunosuppressive drugs or infected with human immunodeficiency virus, are also at increased risk of herpes zoster.^13–15 A new herpes zoster vaccine which is over 60% effective in reducing the burden of herpes zoster and post-herpetic neuralgia¹⁶ has been available on the private market in Australia since 2008. The zoster vaccine is formulated from the same VZV strain (Oka-derived) as the licensed varicella (chickenpox) vaccines but is of higher potency (at least 14 times greater).

  In 1952, Hope-Simpson proposed the hypothesis that exposure to varicella may boost immunity against herpes zoster.²⁰ There is increasing evidence to support that hypothesis, with two observational studies showing lower rates of herpes zoster in groups who have been exposed to varicella.^21,22 If exposure to wild varicella provides boosting and protection against activation of herpes zoster, universal infant varicella vaccination and the subsequent decline in wild varicella may result in an increase in herpes zoster incidence among those previously infected.²³ Mathematical modelling has also suggested that widespread infant varicella vaccination might result in a significant increase in the incidence of herpes zoster, possibly over a 40-year period.²³ An Australian study, performed to assess the potential impact of universal varicella vaccination based on this hypothesis, suggested that total morbidity due to varicella and herpes zoster in Australia would decrease for the first 7 years of a population program, but, for 8–51 years after vaccination commenced, total morbidity was predicted to be higher than pre-vaccination levels.²⁴ However, this model assumed 90% vaccination coverage and 93% vaccine effectiveness. These predictions might not be correct, particularly given that overall vaccine coverage and effectiveness are now estimated to be less than that originally used in the model. Currently, surveillance data from the USA, where varicella immunisation has been recommended for over a decade, indicates a large reduction in varicella morbidity with no increase in zoster disease yet demonstrated.²⁵

Chickenpox and shingles are therefore a little complicated.  If they go the way of smallpox, good for us.

Deep under [the] cover[s]

A load of Thunderballs: James Bond is fiction, not a police instruction manual | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian

Well, I haven't paid much attention to this before:  there's a case running in the UK in which a group of women (and one man) are suing the police service for allowing undercover operatives to engage in sexual relationships with them.   As the opinion piece above notes, a judge has referred to what James Bond would be allowed to get up, much to the annoyance of some observers.

This line of work is (or should be, if you were raised right) an ethical minefield for those engaging in it.  At least, you might think, the relationships are over and done with in a relatively short time.

But that is what's really surprising:  some of these relationships gone on for a very long time -

Some may question how much the women involved really suffered: they were with a man long ago who was not what he claimed to be – OK, not nice, but move on. Such an attitude was hinted at in the remarks by a male activist who slept with an undercover policewoman in a tent at a "climate camp" and who told the Guardian he did not want to sue the police because the one-night stand was "nothing meaningful".

But for the others these were not one-night stands, they were relationships of long standing – six years in one case, five in another – that were enormously meaningful. Those involved tell of deep and genuine attachments, the men integrated into their lives as partners, living together, travelling together, attending family gatherings, sitting at a parent's bedside, even attending a funeral.

There are at least four children from these relationships, some of whom have only now, decades later, discovered who their father really was – and that they were born of a great act of deception.

The greatest pain seems to have come afterwards. Uncannily, most of the relationships all seem to have ended the same way: a sudden departure, a postcard from abroad, and then silence. Some women spent months or even years trying to work out what had gone wrong, travelling far in search of answers. Others found that their ability to trust had been shattered. If the man they had loved turned out to be an agent of the state, what else should they be suspicious of? Could they trust their colleagues, their friends? And the question that nags above all others: was it all a fake, did he not love me at all? One woman tells friends simply: "Five years of my life was built on a lie."

There was rightly an outcry about the News of the World's hacking of people's voicemail messages. But this was the hacking of people's lives, burrowing into the most intimate spaces of the heart in order to do a job, all authorised by the police. It is state-sanctioned emotional abuse.

Remarkable.

In defence of thimerosal

Mercury treaty debate: Should thimerosal be banned as a vaccine preservative? - Slate Magazine

A detailed and interesting explanation here as to why the mercury compound thimersol should be allowed to remain in vaccines.

Other forms of problematic mercury are not so harmless, however:

Estimating its global impact is difficult, but in some populations almost 2 percent of children are born with mental retardation caused by mercury poisoning.

This all reminds me:  the 1980 science fiction novel Timescape by Gregory Benford, which I only partially read since I don't care for Benford's inability to write likeable characters, starts with a near future "mercury hunt" in the sewers under some university town.  If I recall correctly, it was an extrapolation that mercury for scientific use was becoming in shorter supply and much more expensive, and hence these scavenging trips through drains and sewers would be viable in the future.  If I am remembering it right, that was one (amongst many) predictions in the book that failed to pass.   [If you want to guarantee a science fiction book with a short shelf life, set it about the near future and make lots of detailed predictions about what will go wrong.]

Your dose of intense nerdiness for today

TheVine - The Right Way to Watch Star Wars 

It's an amusing read for the intensity of Star Wars nerdiness on display.  

As it happens, I was thinking about the silliness of the midichlorians while in the shower last night:  turning an appealing mystical/spiritual force in the first films into something sounding like a virus infection.

And speaking of virus infections - I'm having an interesting one at the moment.  Worth a separate post...

 

Australia heat wave in detail

What's causing Australia's heat wave?

I haven't commented on all the publicity about the nation wide heatwave of a couple of weeks ago, as I was waiting on a bit more explanation of how they work it out from the Bureau of Meteorology.

Well, the article above does give more detail, and is well worth reading.

No matter how much the reality disconnected Right wing of politics complains, it looks clear that it was a very unusual event.  

Update:  how appropriate that I posted this on the morning that Sydney has (unexpectedly)  had its hottest day on record by .5 degree.  (45.8 - which is by any standard remarkably hot.)

Hobart broke its record by a full 1 degree on 4 January.

A normally temperate place like that breaking its record by a full degree is very remarkable, I reckon.

Inflatable space homes on the way

Space station to get $18 million balloon-like room (Update)

NASA is partnering with a commercial space company in a bid to replace the cumbersome "metal cans" that now serve as astronauts' homes in space with inflatable bounce-house-like habitats that can be deployed on the cheap.

A $17.8 million test project will send to the International Space Station an inflatable room that can be compressed into a 7-foot (2.1-meter) tube for delivery, officials said Wednesday in a news conference at North Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace.

 If the module proves durable during two years at the space station, it could open the door to habitats on the moon and missions to Mars, NASA engineer Glen Miller said.

These will be rather useless as shelters from space radiation, though.

The odourless underarm gene

Deodorants: Do we really need them?

Well, I had always wondered why some people (like my father, actually) do not produce body odour no matter how sweaty a day they may have had.  I always assumed it was a quirk of the bacterial flora on the skin, but it appears that for some it is in the genes:

New research shows that more than 75 per cent of people with a particular version of a gene don't produce under-arm odour but use deodorant anyway. The study was based on a sample of 6,495 women who are part of the wider Children of the 90s study at the University of Bristol. The researchers found that about two per cent (117 out of 6,495) of mothers carry a rare version of a particular gene (ABCC11), which means they don't produce any under-arm odour....

Speaking about the novel finding, published today in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, the lead author Professor Ian Day said: 'An important finding of this study relates to those individuals who, according to their genotype, do not produce under-arm odour. One quarter of these individuals must consciously or subconsciously recognise that they do not produce odour and do not use deodorant, whereas most odour producers do use deodorant. However, three quarters of those who do not produce an odour regularly use deodorants; we believe that these people simply follow socio-cultural norms.  This contrasts with the situation in North East Asia, where most people do not need to use deodorant and they don't.' ...

The authors highlight that people who carry this rare genetic variant are also more likely to have dry (rather than sticky) ear wax and that checking ear wax is a good indicator of whether or not a person produces under-arm odour.

Previous studies have shown that there is a link between a genetic variant located in the ABCC11 gene and under-arm odour. Sweat glands produce sweat which, combined with bacteria, result in under-arm odour. The production of odour depends on the existence of an active ABCC11 gene. However, the ABCC11 gene is known to be inactive in some people.

Miller talks, a lot

Bryan Appleyard :  Jonathan Miller: Talking About Termites

Here's a cheery article by Bryan Appleyard about a recent interview with Jonathan Miller.   

Paranoia and the Republicans

From a column in the LA Times, a very accurate take on the nuttiness infecting large slabs of the Right in the US at the moment:

Although assault weapons have been banned in the past without a loss of liberty, and no regulation Obama is considering comes close to negating the right to keep and bear arms, one congressman from Texas said he would push impeachment of the president for trying to nullify the 2nd Amendment.

Tea party hero Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky equated Obama’s proposed administrative actions with the monarchy of King George III and pledged to fight the president “tooth and nail” as if 2013 were 1776.

Clearly, the debate about guns is not going to be a reasoned discussion about how to better regulate the hundreds of millions of guns in America and keep them out of the hands of criminals and crazy people. At least on the right, it will be an exercise in paranoia and fear-mongering.

Meanwhile, in the sane state of New York, Republican and Democratic legislators have joined together to pass new gun restrictions that will ban high-capacity magazines, strictly limit ownership of assault weapons and ban their sale online. They did it quickly in a bipartisan fashion and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the measure into law on Tuesday. So far, the Empire State shows no sign of turning into a Stalinist nightmare. Other than the significant exceptions of Illinois and Michigan, gun deaths are generally lower in states, such as California, that have strict guns laws. New York was on that list even before this newest law was passed.

Of the annual 30,000 gun deaths in the U.S., only 200 are homicides resulting from acts of self-defense, according to the FBI. Still, no one is talking about stripping away the right of anyone to own a gun to scare off a prowler or hold off a rapist (even though most people shot by guns in homes are relatives and friends). The only types of gun anyone is talking about restricting are the assault rifles that former Gens. Colin Powell and Stanley McChrystal say should only be in the hands of soldiers -- the kind of weapon used by a mentally unstable young man to murder first-graders in Newtown.

 But folks on the right disagree with the generals. Apparently, that is the kind of weapon they think they may desperately need in the event of civil war against the would-be monarch in the White House.

Legal issues

Virgin threatens to pull out of projected spaceport | Science | guardian.co.uk

I've said before that this complicated and expensive form of short joyride may well have a very short life if there is any accident.  It's not like air travel, where people are always going to need and want the product.

This article talks about some of the liability limitation that is involved in the project.  I guess that, given it is only rich people with plenty of money to sue who can afford it,  such limits are absolutely essential.

I still think that high altitude balloon rides into space, (perhaps using cheaper hydrogen?), may well be a better product.

Yet another exotic disease I barely knew

Step closer to parasite vaccine (Science Alert)

 Scientists - including a geneticist at The University of Western Australia - are a step closer to developing a vaccine against a fatally infectious parasite carried in the bite of sandflies.

Visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever, is the second-largest parasitic killer in the world after malaria.  The parasite migrates to organs such as liver, spleen and bone marrow and if left untreated will almost always be fatal. Symptoms include fever, weight loss, mucosal ulcers, fatigue, anemia and substantial swelling of the liver and spleen.

Leishmaniasis affects 12 million people and there are an estimated 1.5 million new cases annually mainly in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Brazil.

I'll add it to the list of "exotic diseases I feel I should have known about, but didn't."

Stem cell competition

Court lifts cloud over embryonic stem cells : Nature News

Here's an interesting report noting that stem cells sourced by reprogramming adult cells are well on their way to replacing embyronic stem cells in terms of total research volume.

This is a good thing.

To test or not to test

Change in PSA levels over time can help predict aggressive prostate cancer

I think I read years ago that earlier testing - in the mid 40's - was perhaps more useful than a first test in one's 50's, perhaps for the same reason.

I never got around to it then, though, but last night I got the form for some blood tests and PSA is included.  The doctor basically said "well, it's the only way we've got of detecting anything", which is true, I guess.   He agreed though that it may well result in unnecessary further investigation or treatment.
 My impression is Australian doctors are more reluctant to give up testing PSA routinely than are some American doctors.  But I could be wrong.

Bond noted

So, I finally saw Skyfall yesterday.

My impressions:    It is, without doubt, the best directed and most visually impressive Bond film ever made.   In particular, I thought it remarkable how seamlessly visual effects are incorporated into the film.   Unlike the Bonds of old, there is really no point (which I can recall) at which you can think "oh, now its cut to the actor  in front of a blue screen," yet there are incredible scenes of destruction and mayhem which just must be visual effects.   (That's the upmarket term now for "special effects" isn't it?)  It just all looks real and terrific.  There is also a well acted loony villain for a change, and in fact the whole Daniel Craig era of "actors who take it seriously" continues.

A few quibbles though - I thought Quantum of Solace was going to be the end of Bond having mid life "do I really want to be doing this job" style crises, but the first third of this film is back to that thematically.  The competitive drinking scene was too much like the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark, although the addition of the scorpion was a nice touch.  (If Spielberg were directing, one would say it was definitely self referential.)   And really, as for the readiness to leap into bed with the most available woman: it is, I think, pretty much recognised now as being dated sexual politics, but the producers still presumably consider it an essential element.  It seems that the way they deal with it in this film is to make these scenes as short as possible - so much so that one of them happens so quickly it makes him look (at first) more like a break in rapist than a welcome lover.  Would they really lose anything by not showing him bed a woman in the next film?  I doubt it.

But, overall, I would have to say the film remains quite satisfying.   I particularly like Ralph taking over a key role:  I have long admired him as an actor in virtually whatever he does.

Update:  the biggest quibble perhaps should be - where is the extra bullet hole from the opening scene?    That's never explained.  I see that the issue has been given some detailed internet analysis. 

Galaxy mystery

I should have noted this story from last week:

"When we looked at the dwarf galaxies surrounding Andromeda, we expected to find them buzzing around randomly, like angry bees around a hive. "Instead, we've found that half of Andromeda's satellites are orbiting together in an immense plane, which is more than a million light years in diameter but only 30 000 light years thick. These dwarf galaxies have formed a ring around Andromeda."

 "This was completely unexpected – the chance of this happening randomly is next to nothing. It really is just weird," said Professor Lewis.

 Large galaxies, like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, have long been known to be orbited by an entourage of smaller galaxies. These small galaxies, which are individually anywhere from ten to at least hundreds of thousands of times fainter than their bright hosts, were thought to trace a path around the big galaxy that was independent of every other dwarf galaxy.

 For several decades, astronomers have used computer models to predict how dwarf galaxies should orbit large galaxies, and every time they found that dwarfs should be scattered randomly over the sky. Never, in these synthetic universes, did they see dwarfs arranged in a plane like that observed around Andromeda.

It's odd how much mystery is still involved in understanding the motion of galaxies, both individually and collectively.

Hitting the wall

How do you know if you ran through a wall? Testing the nature of dark energy and dark matter

Researchers from Canada, California, and Poland have devised a straightforward way to test an intriguing idea about the nature of dark energy and dark matter. A global array of atomic magnetometers – small laboratory devices that can sense minute changes in magnetic fields – could signal when Earth passes through fractures in space known as domain walls. These structures could be the answer to the universe's darkest mysteries.

Can't say I've ever heard of "domain walls" before.  Interesting.

Three below the belt

A few articles all with a "below the belt" theme - sort of:

*  the first is a bit of a cheat:  Mary Beard has an interesting review of a new book about shopping in ancient Rome, but because part of the material relates to a poet who was making a bit of a joke, she gives it the title "Banter About Dildoes".   It's a very interesting read anyway.

*  Slate had an article a week ago about the history of condoms in the US.  Again all very interesting.  [As an aside, the availability of condoms in Australia is significant for family reasons.  My maternal grandparents were divorced - or maybe permanently separated, I forget which - by the time I was born.  My mother told me that the relationship had gone bad when, on one of his return visits to their country  home  after working down in Brisbane in World War 2, my grandmother was furious to find he had a condom in his pocket.  She took as a sure sign he was up to no good while away.  I wonder if it was a US condom?]

*  Slate also has a fascinating article about the importance to reproductive health of the microbacterial mix in a vagina:

A healthy vaginal microbiome produces lactic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which maintain a level of acidity that keeps troublemaking microbes at bay. When the vaginal community becomes unbalanced, on the other hand, acidity decreases. The wrong microbes may then invade or, if they’re already present, bloom.

This disturbance can cause bacterial vaginosis—not really an infection, but an out-of-whack ecosystem. It sounds like a trifling problem, and half of women with vaginosis may display no obvious symptoms. But this minor-seeming imbalance can have major consequences.

Vaginosis increases the risk of contracting secondary infections, from herpes to HIV. But even on its own, the microbial shift may prompt low-grade inflammation that can derail reproduction. It can prevent fertilization in would-be mothers, prompt spontaneous abortion in pregnant women, and increase the risk of preterm birth later in pregnancy.

If the vaginal microbiome were suddenly to shift across the entire human population, it's not unreasonable to predict that humanity would go extinct.

 Amongst other fascinating details, there is also the question of how far bacteria get into the female reproductive system:

In 2011, a group at Harvard found that 40 percent of placentas from more than 500 preterm children born by C-section contained culturable microbes. In this case, those placentas colonized by vaginosis-associated species were slightly inflamed. But the placentas coated with lactobacilli were not.

Australian fertility specialists have observed that fluid extracted from ovaries wasn’t sterile, either; it also contained bacteria. The study group consisted of women seeking help with conception. Women who harbored lactobacilli, the researchers found, more often had successful outcomes than those who carried other species.  

The microbes may have been introduced during the egg retrieval process, the scientists acknowledged. But they also asked, “Do we really believe that the female upper genital tract is sterile?”

“I think that there's organisms up there all the time, in healthy people,” Reid says. Some of these microbes likely ascend from the vagina.

And, in the last section, the peculiar American obsession with douching comes in for criticism:

When I asked Cottrell about douching, she told me a story. About a decade ago, flummoxed by the high infant mortality rates in some African-American communities in the Florida panhandle—which were more than twice the rate for Caucasian infants—she began looking for explanations.

“I kept seeing bacterial vaginosis present in mothers whose babies died,” she recalls. “That’s when I started reading about vaginosis.”

She happened on statistics suggesting that one in three American women douche and that some African-American cohorts douched nearly twice as often. Showing that douching directly causes infant mortality remains difficult, yet her resulting paper, published in 2010, reads like an anti-douching manifesto.

Douching has been linked to preterm birth, an elevated risk of acquiring HIV, ectopic pregnancies, cervical cancer, and endometriosis, she points out. It may perpetuate the very condition it’s often intended to address: vaginosis. Scientists at Johns Hopkins have found that, after stopping the practice, bacterial imbalances resolved on their own.

“We recommend not doing it, that's the bottom line,” says Cottrell.

 *   is there any other country that has these products advertised on TV?  Do they still advertise them - I haven't been there for some years - but look at this creepy 1980's ad .  I see that they are certainly still used:

An estimated 20% to 40% of American women between ages 15 and 44 say they use a vaginal douche. Higher rates are seen in teens and African-American and Hispanic women. Besides making themselves feel fresher, women say they douche to get rid of unpleasant odors, wash away menstrual blood after their period, avoid getting sexually transmitted diseases, and prevent a pregnancyafter intercourse. 

 I find this very odd.

Let India do your head in

Last week, SBS showed the first episode of a 3 part documentary "Welcome to India" and it made for fascinating, if rather disturbing viewing.

I've heard people who have been there say that the country is confronting and confounding to Western eyes; the mix of beauty, poverty, striving, and resignation to fate is apparently very hard to process, and I think this documentary illustrates this extremely well.

(These themes were also evident in last years' 2 part doco by Kevin McCloud "Slumming It", which I think I recommended at the time.)

Welcome to India basically tries to spin an optimistic take on how people in India seek to improve their lot by hard, but often disgusting and dangerous, work.   On the one hand, you can admire this, as well as the mutual support that some families, even work families, display.  On the other, the show seems to acknowledge but never wants to dwell on the exploitation that is clear in much of what goes on in the country.  Yeah, the guy who supervises the workers who sluice mud from the jewellery district's drains for the tiny amount of gold dust they may recover pays them every week (after, it seems, spending much of his day by napping in the middle of the workplace,) but he's ruthless in what he'll pay the guy who gets into the rat infested drains to dig out the mud overnight, and he just shrugs his shoulders about how dangerous it is for the other workers who smelt down a mercury mixture to get out the gold.  But "everyone loves gold" he beams at one point.   (Well, that makes it all worthwhile, then.)  And those people who live on a beach growing fenugreek have made themselves a nice enough business, and live in a beach slum which is better than many in India, but they resent the late comers to the beach and don't care if the government moves those ones on.

Anyway, I see that the first episode can still be viewed on SBS on Demand, but is also up on Youtube permanently.   Part 2 is on tonight at 9.30 as well.   Well worth your time.

Fickle fate

A lot of people are worried about bushfire danger in New South Wales today, with Sydney expecting 43 degrees and high winds. 

Of the recent bushfire experience in Tasmania, I thought the following photo of Dunalley was remarkable:

I mean, this just doesn't match my mental image of a town likely to burn down due to bushfire:  it looks just like a bit of seaside suburbia with an unremarkable number of trees in backyards or nearby.  And, of course, there is plenty of water nearby.   (Fighting large scale fires with sea water probably doesn't do a lot for any surviving garden, I guess.)

Anyway, good luck New South Wales.

An early opinion for 2013

"Gangster Squad" is an amazingly bland and boring name for a movie, isn't it?  (I've seen billboards around town for it, and have this thought every time I see them.)

Holidays past and past

Happy New Year, Readers.

Christmas was pretty pleasant at the Opinion Dominion household, seeing relatives and friends that we haven't for some time; and on Boxing Day, heading up for a too short stay at Noosaville - that beautiful "just around the corner from Noosa" part of the world that we used to holiday in, but had given a miss for a number of years, especially the last two summers that had the horrendous weather.

It's easier from where we live to visit the Gold Coast, but (apart from that coast's rainforest hinterland areas, which are beautiful but not part of a normal beach holiday) I still say that the Sunshine Coast (the Noosa end of it in particular) runs rings around the area from Southport to the border for physical beauty. Of course, the fact that as a kid my family used to take summer holidays on the beach at Maroochydore, where camping seemed to stretch for miles on either side of the lifesaver clubhouse may influence my feelings as well.  Here's how happy being at the beach used to make me:

(I feel pretty much the same about a good beach holiday 50 years later.)

But seriously, have a look at how nice the water is in these couple of photos, the first of the river at Noosaville just 30 m or so from where we stayed.   (If you don't care for my efforts at producing a moving panorama effect, just click on it and see the whole stitched thing*):

(I'll slip back into nostalgia for a moment and share a photo of me at - I think - Cotton Tree near the mouth of the Maroochy River some years ago:

and as an aside,  note how annoying it is that, even without eating more than before, my almost-post-middle-age torso is wanting to revert to that shape.)

Back to Noosa Heads 2012, where we still managed to find a car park in the bushy part at the end of Hastings Street provided we got there by about 8 am or after about 3.30pm:

Yes sure, driving into Noosa's Hastings Street is a nightmare in the middle of the day at peak holiday season, but you normally want to avoid the sun at that time of day anyway.  

I was extremely happy that the weather was good for the whole week this year:  just one threatened afternoon storm that curtailed things a bit but that was it.   South Easterly winds picked up on the last couple of days, but Noosa Heads is well sheltered from them and the surf was always gentle but intermittently large enough to be fun for people on body boards.  The water seemed particularly glassy and clear and warm this year.  (I have long maintained that you only have to go 20 km south of the Queensland border to find that the ocean water feels noticeably colder, even at the height of summer.  On the other hand, even if you brave the potential killer jelly fish of tropical north Queensland waters in summer, they are like having a tepid bath and not very refreshing at all.  Water at the Sunshine Coast is just right.)

Noosaville still has a great bunch of cafes and bars on the riverfront, although (sad to say) I don't recommend having a meal in the "French bistro" there.  The owners do seem French and bake a nice croissant and assorted pastries for breakfast, but their evening meals are distinctly ordinary.  [On the other hand, if you are visiting Southbank in Brisbane, I do strongly recommend French Martini on Grey Street, which we ate at before Christmas.  Servings sizes are not huge, but the food was very pleasing.]   Back at Noosaville, for simple takeaway, the Red Emperor fish and chip shop opposite Pelican Beach on the river continues to do excellent work feeding hundreds of people a night; Elvis's takeaway next door does decent standard burgers; many of the local pizzas are good and most of the more upmarket places also do takeaway if you don't care to eat in.  It is a good place to eat.

We also hired a boat for a morning of fishing, and my son was happy to catch his first edible sized fish, a whiting.   I didn't realise before that there is a stretch of the river behind a canal developed part which has a a large stretch of foreshore left bushy:  if you nose your boat towards that side and don't look behind you, you can imagine for a minute that you are in a very undeveloped river:

As for the whiting itself, it was kept in a large bucket of water while we tried to see if we could catch another fish to make a shareable meal; we didn't and it was decided that I would take a photo of son holding it before releasing it into the water.  While holding it, it make a clear squeak sort of sound - perhaps regular anglers know that whiting can squeak, but it surprised us and confirmed that it should be released, in case it had just promised us 3 wishes, or something.

I must have forgotten to ask for a million dollars in the end of year Gold Lotto, or maybe it was released under false pretenses.

Anyway, all in all, a very good time was had, both in 1962/3 and 2012.

*  Readers who are interested in stitching photos together for a panorama, and who (like me) have misplaced software for that which came with an older camera, might be interested to note that I found Microsoft's free ICE program did the job very well.   I also actually have deleted my kids from 2 of these photos using the clone tool in PhotoImpact, which has always seemed to me to be a good cheap alternative to Photoshop.

Christmas elsewhere

NRA Fail

NRA press conference: The lesson of Newtown—when gun nuts write gun laws, nuts have guns. - Slate Magazine
This is just one of the many savage media attacks on the NRA approach that "more guns, more guns" is the only response it will consider to mass shootings. 

Funny how it won't acknowledge that it was legally acquired guns that caused the latest horror.   Or that it is not even clear that any increased regime of reportable mental illnesses would have helped.  (For an organisation so keen on civil liberties, I would like to see how many mental or personality issues it thinks should be notifiable to a government register, and how close to access to guns such a person has to be to be included.)

The fact that the Columbine shooting happened in a school that regularly had an armed, uniformed deputy from the local sherriff's office eating lunch in the caferteria was probably something they weren't keen to take questions on either.

It may be early days yet, but there seems to be a sense that the latest killing has turned the tide of opinion against the likes of the NRA.  I  have to say, though, that I agree that the issue of violent games (and movies) is not getting enough attention.  It's just that the NRA is the last organisation that can credibly bring that up...

Scruton appears

High culture is being corrupted by a culture of fakes | Roger Scruton |

Nice to see Roger Scruton turning up somewhere again.

Abbott considered

What does it profit a man? Between Tony's faith and Abbott's ambition – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This essay by fellow Catholic Chris Uhlmann about Tony Abbott is very good, I think.

It certainly raises the question of how much conflict Abbott may privately feel about what he does in his current role in politics.

I just still think he is a man who has been appointed above his level of competency and comfort, and I do not imagine him being a good PM.

PS:  Uhlmann does made a crack about Greens being modern pantheists - which has an element of truth to it, I suppose - but it also indicates to me that he can't get over his previously stated belief that climate change is not really science but a religious belief.   He may be OK on the humanities and religion; I don't think he's smart when it comes to science.

Gun control discussed

Well, I certainly hope it is annoying gun lovers of Australia that Slate is running an article noting how John Howard's gun buyback actually did put a sudden end to mass shootings of the kind all so frequent in the US.

While no one realistically suggests such a buy back is politically possible in the US, and the general tone is of pessimism as to what can really be achieved in a country already brimming with private weaponry, Slate does have an interesting article arguing that history tells us the certain forms of violence have been successfully tackled in the US.  I wasn't aware of the incidents mentioned in this aspect of US history:

 One example is class violence, once seen a shameful but ineradicable feature of American life. Beginning in the 1870s, the United States became infamous around the world for the brutality of its labor clashes, in which gun battles, dynamitings, and hand-to-hand combat produced what seemed to be an unending stream of senseless death. Sometimes the violence came at the hands of police: 100 strikers killed during the rail uprising of 1877, 11 children burned to death in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. On other occasions, it came as retaliation from below. In 1910, men employed by the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers blew up the headquarters of the anti-union Los Angeles Times, killing 21 printers and laborers working inside.

Elsewhere in Slate, a comment in National Review Online that the Bushmaster semi-automatic is not worth worrying about banning because it is (apparently) not powerful enough to reliably kill a deer is given a thorough ridiculing, including showing this ad that illustrates the mentality behind some gun ownership in the States:

 

If I had enough time, I'd adjust the slogan to "Consider your penis inadequate".

But one thing about Slate bothers me:  amongst all this talk of gun control and violence, they are still running prominently an episode by episode commentary on the series Dexter - a show about a psychopath made for entertainment value that has nonetheless (as I detailed a couple of months back) been clearly implicated as having inspired several murders by nutters internationally.

I haven't noticed anyone in the comments section following the Dexter article comment on this weird juxtaposition, where the same liberal leaning publication is both deeply concerned about violence in culture, and celebrating it as entertainment on the same page.

Meanwhile, over in the Atlantic, James Fallows puts succinctly the case against the "more guns is the answer" argument:

To spell it out:

• Being in a shopping mall, on a train, in a theater, or at a school where someone starts shooting is statistically more frequent in America than anywhere else, but is vanishingly unlikely for any individual. Yet if we were to rely on the "more guns make us safer" principle, logically we'd have to carry guns all the time, everywhere, because ... you never know. Jeff Goldberg and I have both railed against TSA policies based on the premise that every single passenger is a potential terrorist. A more-guns policy would involve a similar distortion in everyone's behavior based on outlier threats.
• There is very little real-world evidence of "good guys," or ordinary citizens who happen to be armed, taking out shooters in the way the more-guns hypothesis suggests. After all, and gruesomely, the mother of the murderer in Newtown was heavily armed and well experienced with weapons, and that did not help her or anyone else.
• It is all too easy to imagine the real-world mistakes, chaos, fog-of-war, prejudices, panic, and confusion that would lead a more widely armed citizenry to compound rather than the limit the damage of a shooting episode.

It is, to Australian ears, extremely odd that such an argument even has to be explained.  But we're not talking a normal country here. From another Salon article (worth reading in full):

Although the NRA has temporarily gone to ground, it’s no secret that its solution to this sort of gun violence is more guns. Indeed, chief spokesman LaPierre has made clear that he believes every American should be armed with a concealed weapon.  “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection,” LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention, and he wasn’t trying to establish his feminist credentials.  LaPierre thinks every man in America should be packing heat as well.  The NRA believes that armed citizens in places like Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Columbine can stop determined killers.  ”The presence of a firearm makes us all safer,” LaPierre said.  ”It’s just that simple.”

Whether or not a “responsible,” law-abiding adult trained in the use of firearms could make a difference in any particular situation is worthy of discussion.  Likewise the question of how to ensure that adult gun owners are responsible.  The problem is that the NRA and its congressional allies don’t want a rational debate about guns.  Two months after the 2011 Tucson rampage, which left six dead and 14 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, LaPierre rejected an invitation from President Obama to discuss ways of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable.  LaPierre said there was no point talking to “people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment.”  Following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which left 13 dead, the NRA urged a similar boycott of a meeting called by President Clinton to discuss ways of addressing teen violence.

The challenge today is not coming up with “the answer” to the nation’s gun violence; rather it is to move beyond the absurd but prevailing myth perpetrated by the extremists who currently run the NRA that nothing should be done because any effort to limit access to guns will lead to gun confiscation and tyranny.

When it comes to random mass shootings, Americans don't need protection from crims:  they need protection from the insane paranoia of the NRA and its supporters.

Update:  a good article here in Salon, citing lots of academics and their studies, on why more guns is not the answer.

The violent Hobbit

Peter Jackson's Violent Betrayal of Tolkien - Noah Berlatsky - The Atlantic

I don't intend seeing The Hobbit, but I am happy to note criticism of it.  

Given that my impression was that even Lord of the Rings movies graphically hyped  up the battle and slashing quite a bit compared to the books (which I haven't read fully - yes please just ignore me it attacking things I haven't seen really gets up your nose), this commentary in The Atlantic on The Hobbit sounds convincing:

Bilbo then (in both film and book) leaps over Gollum's head, leaving the creature despairing but unharmed. Later, in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf suggests that Bilbo's pity for Gollum "may rule the fate of many." At the end of Rings, it is ultimately Gollum who, inadvertently, destroys the ring and saves Middle Earth. Mercy is ultimately salvation, and Bilbo's decision not to use violence is at the heart of the quasi-Christian moral order of Tolkien's world. 

If Jackson meant for Gandalf's comment to highlight Tolkien's nonviolent ethic, though, the rest of his film undercuts it—and, indeed, almost parodies it. The scene where Bilbo spares Gollum in the movie comes immediately after an extended, jovially bloody battle between dwarves and goblins, larded with visual jokes involving decapitation, disembowelment, and baddies crushed by rolling rocks. The sequence is more like a body-count video game than like anything in the sedate novel, where battles are confused and brief and frightening, rather than exuberant eye-candy ballet.

The goblin battle is hardly an aberration in the film. I had wondered how Peter Jackson was going to spread the book over three movies. Now I know: He's simply added extra bonus carnage at every opportunity. The dwarves, who in the novel are mostly hapless, are in the film transformed into super-warriors, battling thousands of goblins or orcs and fearlessly slaughtering giant wolves three-times their size.

Extraordinary Christmas house

On the weekend I took the family on the annual run around suburbs not too far from us to view Christmas lights.

There is one house, which I had never seen before, that is set up with an extraordinarily professional  light and sound show, with hundreds of people coming on a warm night to sit across the road (in supplied chairs, I think) to watch.  I can imagine this might be kind of annoying to the other people in the street!

But here is a little bit to illustrate, when the lights are co-ordinated with that classic Christmas song(?), the Chicken Dance: 

Gun violence, revisited

On Friday, I was going to do a post noting disappointment that the latest Quentin Tarentino movie had received very strong reviews.   I didn't read many of them, but noted that they seemed to have a common thread, with phrases like "the director's trademark violence" turning up often.  Here is an example from Rolling Stone:

 In his last class, cataloged as Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino burned down the damn Third Reich, Hitler included. This time, with Django Unchained, he lines up slave traders so a black man can blow their fool heads off.

As noted in detail in my post after the Batman cinema shooting in the US earlier this year, there are few people in the world who note anymore the extent to which violence as entertainment in the cinema has reached levels that would simply have been inconceivable 45 years ago.   Back then, Bonnie and Clyde was very controversial, and although it has been years since I have seen it, this critical reaction remains to my mind entirely appropriate.   (Interestingly, Tony Martin, a real cinema fan and sometime director and screenwriter, made the point in his autobiographical book that it was this film, shown perhaps by mistake to his class at high school, that showed him the power of movies, due to the highly excited reaction the ending got from one of his schoolmates.)  That movie should make people think hard about whether it is violence being depicted as quasi porn.  To my mind, all realistic ultra violence in cinema that is being presented for entertainment should make people think. 

But now it rarely does.   It doesn't matter that movie reviewers are nearly all politically liberal; they nearly all accept it in all forms and in all contexts - praise it even if it is "done well".  I am not one of those people.  Tarentino is at the forefront of moviemakers who use violence for entertainment, and he concentrates in particular on realistically depicted, violent revenge scenarios. He does not deserve his success.

I also have a son who is of an age where computer games are of intense interest, and we usually watch together the ABC's Good Game, which reviews computer games of all varities, including quite violent ones.

Even from the clips I see there, I frequently object to the level of violence, regardless of whether the splattered figures are meant to be zombies or not.   Call me naive, if you want; but games featuring increasing realistic buckets of blood sprayed all over the room, often from a first person shooter perspective, are not a healthy thing for society.  Parents frequently ignore age ratings for games, and simply let their kids play them because their mate has it already.   Again, this would have met with some moral outrage only (say) 20 or 30 years ago.  Not now.

Yes, I know:  bright people play them; they are not made into rampaging killers by doing so, and sure, they tell the difference between reality and games.  (As can nearly all movie goers - see my comment regarding ironic detachment in my earlier post linked above.)

And yet, when mass rampage killings show up in countries such as the US, with the appalling and upsetting Connecticut school shooting, people are always asking "but why"?

As with some previous shootings, it appears this guy did the shooting in military like dress.  It is said he was very much into computers and (I would guess) gaming.    It is being reported this morning that he had some altercation with staff at the school last week - hence revenge for a real or imagined slight is once again an issue, as it frequently seems to be for the socially isolated who take it out on school or university grounds.    (Mind you, it is also early days since the incident, and there already are signs that there has been much initial misreporting.)

Where do mentally disturbed people get the mental image of the (to them) justified vengeful excitement of a mass shooting?   Is it that hard to tell?  Really?  

Of course, Americans are (in very large proportion) sickeningly mad when it comes to the issue of  gun ownership, and of course one of the responses to this year's shootings should be a legislative response which any other country would be able to manage. 

But to my mind, it is a pity that it takes a shooting to happen inside a cinema to make the country, and indeed the world generally, to think culturally about the depiction of fictional violence and the "frog sitting in the slowing heated pot" situation that has developed with scant objection over the span of my life.

And finally - Charlie Brooker had a point about the counterproductive nature of over publicising mass shootings in 2009.   It is a lesson impossible for the media to follow, it seems.  Mind you, without such an approach in the US, it would seem that the political movement to increase gun control would never have a chance of making any inroad at all.  It is, therefore, a dilemma in that nation as to whether the blanket coverage is for good or bad.

Update:   William Salatan has an article up at Slate in which he, quite rightly, notes that the problem with guns in the school yard attack scenario is the speed with which they allow large numbers of people to be killed.   Laughably, gun advocates in the US thought they were on a winner when, by co-incidence, there was a school yard attack in China on the same day.  They were so overjoyed to run the "this can happen anywhere regardless of guns" argument that they forgot to note the number of kids killed via the knife attack - none.

Salatan also notes a Wikipedia list of school yard attacks.   Now, Salatan takes the view that these have happened in so many countries that:

 They’ve falsified every pet political theory about what kind of culture or medical system or firearms legislation prevents mass murder.

Maybe, but here's what I've noticed from the list:  look at the decades in which they have occurred.

Even though there was the largest shooting of all in 1927, there is a mere handful of incidents before the 1970's.   The concentration of incidents in the 1990's and 2000's  is clear.

It can be dangerous to draw conclusions from Wikipedia lists, but I would have thought that my general concern with the cultural influence of fictional violence in games and the media is given a bit more credence with this information.

And the award for most hypocritical performance by an Australian newspaper goes to...

The Australian, with Dennis Shanahan in his column this morning, opining that the public is tired of politicians trying to smear each other.   Yes, that would be the same paper that was running for months Hedley Thomas' protracted game of "but what about this bit of paper?", attempting to smear the PM over a minor bit of legal work and her poor choice of boyfriend 20 years ago.

Now, of course, when a Coalition candidate gets a shellacking from a judge for legal games that went on a mere 10 months ago, it's time to move on, isn't it Dennis?   The obviously shifty game of denying knowledge that went on amongst Canberra Liberals 9 months ago is of no interest whatsoever, hey.

Oh, and of course the political hypocrisy continues as far as the prospect of investigations are concerned.

Tony Abbott (additional words by me]:

"There are all sorts of rumours that have been running around about Mr Slipper for years," Mr Abbott said.  [And I have supported him wholeheartedly throughout this.] ... "I think any such inquiry would plainly be a bit of a witch-hunt" [whereas my promise to hold an inquiry as to the PM's choice of boyfriend 18 years ago and legal matters for which no criminal prosecution has ever been instituted despite investigation at the time would be a matter of crucial public interest and not motivated by political self interest at all.]

A hard life

Abraham Lincoln, bare-knuckle brawler? - Salon.com

Well, this interview with an author of (yet another) book about Lincoln contains a lot of stuff that I didn't know.  He had a hard life:

The thing I hope readers take away from my book is this: Lincoln truly suffered in life.  He had horrible bouts of depression. He was on suicide watch several times. He was sometimes completely bed-ridden. He said he was haunted by the thought of rain falling on graves all of his life. His mother died when he was nine; his sister died when he was sixteen. The first woman he ever loved died within a few months of him meeting her. He had one son die before the boy was four years old. He lost another son named Willie not too long after they got to the White House.  And given Lincoln’s depressive nature, all of that almost pushed him over the edge. He suffered with the massive themes of his administration: slavery, spies, and ordering troops into battle. But I think, like Churchill, it was his private suffering that prepared him to help a nation that was suffering. William Herndon, Lincoln’s first biographer, said that he, “dripped melancholy as he walked.” I think his suffering drove him to faith and deepened his faith once he got to it. But he also had an atheist phase earlier in life.

 OK, some of that I knew, but a fair bit is new to me.  As is this:

  His family were what used to be called “hard-shelled” Baptists, and they were caught up in the second great awakening, which swept the frontier and was really, quite frankly, violent. It was barking and being “slain the in Spirit.” People would run around and climb trees and it was all too emotional, all too sweaty for Lincoln. His father was the kind of man that would get all weepy at dinner over something that was happening in the revival, and then beat his son the next day to make him work. Lincoln had a hard childhood but he’s the archetype of a person who rises largely through self-education. He probably didn’t have a year of school in his entire life. He read voraciously. All the stories about walking miles to borrow books are absolutely true. He began to read religious skeptics: Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbons —those men challenged Christianity. A lot of the American heroes of the Revolution were that way, Ethan Allen and others. Lincoln bought into it and went through quite a long “village atheist” phase. He schooled himself on how to attack the myths of Scripture and would carry around a Bible just to undercut it. He called Christ a bastard; it was very heated. This is one of the keys to understanding Lincoln’s life: Lincoln’s mother was illegitimate. Her grandmother had been raped by a Virginia aristocrat and Lincoln concluded that God had rejected him, given him the mark of Cain because his mom was “a bastard.” He would even call her that. So, strange as it is to us, Lincoln thought he was cursed. And he began to conclude that all of the sufferings he’d endured were because God had cursed him. So his atheism, his friends said, really was not that he didn’t believe in God, it was that he was angry at God.

Feeling for others

Understanding How Children Develop Empathy - NYTimes.com

A somewhat interesting column here on the human sense of empathy.  

It seems that this is something that must be worked out so we can program it into AI - have a look at Bryan Appleyard's recent piece on whether AI will be the death (or enslavement) of us. 

(It did occur to me, though, in reading the Appleyard piece, that given the amount of trouble viruses and bacteria can cause us, I don't know that we should have too much concern about AI's being able to wipe humanity out of contention.)

Currency woes

Dollar dazzler: why they want our money

Michael Janda seems to be saying that the high Australian dollar is a problem, but there's nought to be done about it now.

Alan Kohler blames our economic blues on another thing as well:

....Australians have had it up to here for three long years - nothing but mad, hysterical politics, day in, day out. And a strong currency.

So what we are seeing in Australia is the effect of a very unusual double whammy: political instability coupled with a strong currency.

Usually the first leads to the opposite of the second, but unfortunately the credit ratings agencies don't watch Question Time in Federal Parliament: if they did they would have cut Australia's credit rating several notches below AAA long ago.

But one of the worst things about the current popular mis-perception of the Australian economy was in the media again recently - the idea that Australia's budget deficit would not have happened under a Coalition government.

This is absolutely outrageously wrong - and Christopher Pyne's dishonest (but probably successful) attempt to further lodge this meme in the brain of the public just illustrates further why I cannot see myself voting for the Coalition next election.

Update:   it occurs to me that, if the sudden deterioration in polling for Federal Labor in Newspoll is correct, and is maintained next year, the electorate is going to be acting in pretty much the same way as it did in the run up to the 2007 election win of Kevin Rudd.   That is, it will not be under the influence of much in the way of credible policy alternatives, or acting against a government that the great majority of economists have a problem with:  it will simply be voting because of the "vibe".

Update 2:  as I understand it, this news this morning only makes worse for our over valued currency problem:

Fed makes new rate pledge, pumps cash into US economy

Life in London

iPad mini, Kindle Fire HD, or Google Nexus 7? What's in your stocking? | Money | The Observer

So, I'm not too interested in the article itself, comparing a few (but only a few) different options for people buying a tablet device for Christmas.

But what did catch my eye was that in the comments section, a few people noted that the photo in the article (showing a woman reading an iPad on a bus) was definitely something you should not do in London if you don't want to be an ex-iPad user.

That surprised me a bit.

I still want to write about how I've found using an Android vs an old iPad, as I know the world is just waiting for my erudite comments...

Reason to go to Sydney?

Wallace and Gromit get a hand at home

A Wallace and Gromit exhibition is at the Powerhouse museum.    Sadly, though, the article says no W & G film is currently in production.  

Wouldn't have guessed that

Caffeinated coffee may reduce the risk of oral cancers

High or Low?

Studies differ on climate change and warming severity, researchers trade jabs - Capital Weather Gang - The Washington Post

There's a really good post here summing up the contradictory conclusions of two recent papers - one saying climate sensitivity is likely to be at the higher end of the range (Trenberth), and one saying it should be on the lower side (Schlesinger).

Each criticises the other's approach quite strongly.  

But even Schlesinger is pragmatic and thinks the world still needs to be cautious:

Despite Schlesinger’s more optimistic outlook, he stresses sharp emissions reductions must begin, in case his estimates are wrong.

“...for argument’s sake, let’s suppose the [climate sensitivity] is larger than the values we determined....humanity must act sooner and more rapidly...” Schlesinger said.

Indeed.

A useful figure to know

BBC - Future - Health - Sex: What are the chances?

I missed this article from earlier in the year, but I reckon it has a good figure that is handy to know for anyone who needs to talk to teenagers about consequences:

 The bottom line is that a single act of intercourse between a young couple has on average a one in 20 chance of pregnancy – this assumes the opportunity presented itself on a random day, as these things tend do when you are young.

 However, the article then goes on to talk about the effectiveness of various forms of contraception, but only seems to quote figures if they are used correctly.   This seems a bit of an oversight.

Stupid right wing moochers

If there's a right wing thing I can't stand, it's when they use the Randian term "moochers", even if half in jest.   Anyone who has been a fan of Rand is automatically suspect, in my books; but to use her terminology just shows the continuing influence of a crank and a sympathy to her appalling lack of a social conscience.

But the funniest thing is when right wing starts "mooching" themselves.   Climate change fake skeptics are pretty expert at this.  Who can forget the request for money from the American family who ran into environmental problems with their feed lot in WA.    They blamed their alleged prominence in the climate change skeptic movement for their problems (never with any real evidence, as far as I could see.)   Promoted via Jonova and Watts Up With That, there appeared to be a lot of money pledged for their "save the farm" action, which may or may not be continuing, as they decamped back to the US anyway.

Now look at the latest example - Mark Steyn, who has stupidly decided to go out of his way to insult and defame Michael Mann on the pages of National Review Online, got full NRO support, which now publishes this ad:

Oh diddums?  More from their webpage:

As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have. Of course, we’ll do whatever we have to do to find ourselves victorious in court and Professor Mann thoroughly defeated, as he so richly deserves to be. Meanwhile, we have to hire attorneys, which ain’t cheap.

Righto.  So a publication that is making no profit decided to escalate a fight by challenging him to sue after they called him "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus" and approved this quote:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.

What idiots.

Steyn and (much of) the Right in the US have become an intellectual embarrassment. 

And yes, it's affecting the Right as constituted in Australia:

South Australian senator Cory Bernardi, formerly Mr Abbott's parliamentary secretary, said: ''I do not think human activity causes climate change and I haven't seen anything that changes my view. I remain very sceptical about the alarmists' claims.''

Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce said the whole debate about whether humans were causing the climate to change was ''indulgent and irrelevant''.

The Coalition has a large fracture line within its ranks on this issue, and it has serious consequences on leadership and policy more broadly, since dismantling the Labor carbon "tax" and replacing it with the half baked Abbott scheme (which no economist supports as a better scheme for its intended purpose) will have  serious knock on budgetary consequences.   

It's the issue that poisons everything on the Right.  

Eurine-eka

Brain cells made from urine 

It's about using kidney cells excreted in urine and reprogramming them to be (something like) embryonic stem cells.

Hobbit hobbled

Time for celebration for those of us in the very, very small club of  "Go Away, Tolkien" (an incorporated association):  The Hobbit has only* got 74% on Rottentomatoes, and quite a few of the more prominent critics have been giving it a pretty good thrashing for being way, way too long and mostly dull.

But the most interesting thing is the poor reaction to the high frame rate version.  This, from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, is pretty typical:

The second unexpected point is the look of the thing. Jackson has pioneeringly shot The Hobbit in HFR, or High Frame Rate: 48 frames a second, as opposed to the traditional 24, giving a much higher definition and smoother "movement" effect. But it looks uncomfortably like telly, albeit telly shot with impossibly high production values and in immersive 3D. Before you grow accustomed to this, it feels as if there has been a terrible mistake in the projection room and they are showing us the video location report from the DVD "making of" featurette, rather than the actual film.

Some other critics have noted that it makes it way easier to spot the changes from special effects shots to reality, and that it makes fast motion look wrong (speeded up, I think they say.)

Isn't this fascinating?  I'm pretty sure I read about high frame rate film back in about the 1980's, maybe in something like Omni magazine, or perhaps Discover.   It was thought to be the way of the future.

But, it turns out, too much clarity look bad. 

I wonder why that is.  I could go for the philosophical explanation:  maybe we prefer soft edges over reality, just as people don't like to think too much of the materialist/existentialist view of the world that says it is ultimately meaningless after the suffering and temporary bursts of happiness of life. (I am full of Christmas cheer, hey?)   Of course, the religious and (in particular) Christian come back is that ultimate reality is better than what we get living in this muck.  I take it that Heaven looks better than high quality video, though.

Or it could be that part of our normal vision that we concentrate on means the perimeter is not sensed as if it is in focus, and hence our normal vision does not have a widescreen clarity that sharp digital has?

Anyway, all that matters is that some people don't like it.  Yay. 

*  all of the Lord of the Rings movies scored in the 90 percent range.  It was a lonely job, being bored with those films.