Silly old Americans

Report: U.S. failing to protect kids from HPV

We were filling in consent forms for vaccinations which will be given to our son, free of charge, at his high school this March.  (He's just started year 8.)  There were 3 forms, one of them for HPV.  I mentioned to my wife that maybe some very conservative parents object to this one.  We have no objection whatsoever.

I see that the vaccination rate in Australia for girls is pretty high:

Notified vaccination coverage for girls aged 12–17 years nationally was 83% for dose 1, 78% for dose 2 and 70% for dose 3.

So, how's it going in America?:

Although a safe and effective HPV vaccine has been available for
eight years, only one-third of girls have been fully immunized with all
three recommended doses, according to a report from the President's
Cancer Panel, which has advised the White House on cancer since 1971.
HPV, or human papillomavirus, is a family of viruses that causes cancer
throughout the body, including cancers that predominantly affect men,
such as a type of throat cancer. Only 7% of boys are fully vaccinated,
although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended
the shots for them since 2011.

Raising vaccination rates to atleast 80% of teen girls could prevent 53,000 future cases of cervicalcancer in girls alive today, according to the CDC.

 The reason appears to be partly the cost, and squeamishness amongst doctors (as well as parents, I bet):

And at a total cost of $400 for three shots, the HPV vaccine is also
more expensive than other vaccinations, although it's often covered by
insurance, Jackson says.

The real problem, research shows, is that doctors are treating HPV vaccinations differently than other shotsrecommended for kids at that age, such as meningitis and whooping coughboosters, Jackson says.

All too often, doctors offer HPV shots,giving parents the option to vaccinate, without strongly recommendingthem, says Debbie Saslow of the American Cancer Society, who served asan adviser on the report. That could be because doctors are leery of
initiating a discussion about sexual activity, which is how HPV spreads,
Saslow says. Doctors recommend giving HPV shots to kids at a young age,
when they're most effective.

 I find it hard to believe that parents could really feel that their kid will be led into early sexual debauchery because they now have a vaccine that will prevent an older age disease that has never stopped any teenager in history from having sex.

I would also bet that a huge number of boys and girls in the 12 to 14 year range would not even know or care which disease the jab is for.  As for the cost, thank heavens for our "socialised" medicine.  The Tea Party would prefer cervical cancer to that.

Americans have their quaint, and deadly, quirks.   (Pistols in cinemas, anyone.) 

Olympic sized openings

On Saturday night, I watched some of the replay of the Sochi Winter Olympic opening, although I did take the opportunity to doze through the athletes entry part.  (Always the most tedious part, isn't it?)

It was all on a very spectacular scale; in fact, these host country promoting spectacles have become so elaborate they're becoming almost unattractively elephantine and wasteful.

As for specific elements of it, I have to say that, not having read War and Peace, I was not assisted in my understanding of the story by watching an arty quasi re-enactment of it by hundreds of ballet dancers.   My main thought while watching this was that one of male leads in a key sequence with a heroine (she's torn between a few different men, is she?) had quite a "Robert Helpmann" look about him.  (But are Russian ballet dancers allowed to be gay?)   Yes, if ever there was an art form that is highly unsuited to a realistic depiction of romantic, heterosexual love, it's ballet.  (Women who go watch it will probably disagree - I suspect I have 95% of the male population on my side.)

I didn't make it to the end - the Russian Revolution occurred (portrayed in a kind of neutral way) then industrialisation started happening and Russians started having babies (I was moving in and out of the room by that stage and was having trouble following.)   I assume they didn't get to the modern part where about 40% of Russian working age men die of alcohol related illness:  an enormous bottle of vodka emerging from the stadium floor and hosing liquid from the top over the happy crowd of male ballet dancers falling over pretend-drunk might have been seen to be sending the wrong message.  

Come to think of it, the country might have done better by pouring billions of dollars into Alcoholics Anonymous style programs. 

I'm sure I'm not the only person to suggest it, but can't the Olympics go back to something less elaborate?   A few songs, a bunch of dancers, perhaps a 10 minute re-enactment of the original nude version (with the addition of women for the benefit of the modern viewer) would keep the ratings up games after games.  Then on with the athletes and a quirky lighting ceremony.   Fireworks display.  Done.  No more than 90 minutes all up (athletes should jog on if necessary.)   That's my suggestion.

Bigger chances of El Nino

Researchers suggest controversial approach to forecasting El Nino

This group is predicting a 75% chance of a return to El Nino this year.  We'll see.

We see it in Australia too

The conservative man-crush on Putin.

There's a very similar thing to be seen in threads at Catallaxy, where the mere "manliness" of Tony Abbott has been a matter of admiration for years, and they never recognize the Putin like PR techniques that were deployed by the Liberals during the election campaign and afterwards.  

A good question

Can Spinning Habs Solve the Zero g Health Issues? Can Humans Live in Mars or Lunar g? - So far, Nobody Knows

Mutliverse levels considered

Are Parallel Universes Unscientific Nonsense? Insider Tips for Criticizing the Multiverse | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Here's a pretty good column by maths fan Max Tegmark, in which he provides a useful table and short explanation of the different types of multiverse.

Mark Steyn insists on wearing his "So sue me (for lots and lots of money!)" t shirt

It's hard to credit the lack of common sense on display in the Steyn-o-sphere.

A recent post of his is incredible for a couple of reasons:

a.  it makes it sound as if he really has taken but a passing interest in the details of the entire Mann "hockey stick" issue before making his "fraud" claim; even more spectacularly unbelievable - he is making it clear that he is learning more about it from blogger Steve Goddard.   Yes, the blogger with severe credibility issues who no longer appears at Watts up With That. 

b. Steyn deliberately, when involved in a court case in which a judge has commented that it certainly appears Mann has grounds for defamation, takes the opportunity to again make a comment discrediting the bona fides of Mann in his work:

So why not just do a straight tree-ring graph of the last millennium? Ah, well. Because that doesn't tell the story that Mann & Co wanted to sell, and certainly doesn't make a hockey stick.

Wow.   "Make hole; keep digging; attempt bogus justification that freedom to dig holes anywhere is a right" appears to be the Steynian theory here.

c.  Apparently, lots of people are buying "gift certificates" to fund Steyn's self represented attempted defence of the defamation action.  Well, good luck with that folks.   Your hero appreciates your generosity in helping fund the damages to Mann that Steyn appears determined to send his way.

And here I was thinking the Japanese do some pretty odd things...

Can someone explain to me why the killing and butchering of an inbred giraffe in a Copenhagen zoo was a public event?   There are kids in the photo too, which seems a very odd choice of education by their parents.  (OK, so an argument can be made that kids these days are too isolated from the reality of life and death - cutting the head off a chook in the backyard was a family spectator event when I was a kid in suburban Australia.  But still, a giraffe is a big mammal, and this seems just a bit weird to me.)

Two climate notes

*  Here's a good summary of a report from the UK Met Office which thinks climate change really is behind this winter's record English floods (although admits it is currently hard to do attribution studies that confirm it definitively.)

*  Despite the cold weather in (parts of) North America, even the UAH satellite temperatures show that, globally, as with December, January was not exceptionally cool.  (David Appell also does a bit of graphing that puts a different on the UAH record, as well as pointing out that Roy Spencer is making stupid, unhelpful claims in his basically political stance on climate change.) 

Reputation confirmed

What a smart aleck way to start his commentary in the Conversation on the Toyota closure.  Sinclair Davidson opens:

Immediately after the Toyota announcement that it will be ceasing its Australian manufacturing in 2017 isn’t the time to be saying, “I told you so”. Rather we should consider the hurt and confusion of the employees. To a large extent the investment they have made in their careers, their human capital, has just depreciated. This is a cost that we don’t fully consider when advocating industry policy.

Shorter version: " it would be inappropriate for me to say 'I told you so' so I'll just link to where I said "I told you" before."

As for industry policy:  have the economists at Catallaxy (a blog with intellectual credentials that continue in freefall) ever had one at all?  I don't think "tax businesses less, cut red tape, and the market will fix it" actually counts as industry policy.

Poor judgement noted

I see this in a post by John Quiggin, regarding the Abbott government:

... in political terms, the Abbott government’s toughminded attitude on the end of manufacturing represents a striking contrast with its eagerness to help favored groups like the financial sector (including the salary packaging industry) and primary industry. This produces bizarre contradictions. For example, as Peter Touhey of the Victorian Farmers Federation recently noted, the Coalition government is spending more than $1 billion to upgrade privately owned irrigation infrastructure in the Goulburn valley region, but is then unwilling to come up with $25 million to keep the processing end of the industry open.

What the Abbott government is interested in

As far as I can tell, on this afternoon when the end of the Australian car manufacturing industry has been announced, the Abbott government has a very limited range of interests:

a.  counting its money, and keeping it; except in the case of -

b.  politically motivated inquiries into political enemies, for which there is always a pile of spare cash to be found to pay for these expensive exercises that they plan on lasting up to the next election;

c.  treating the military as if it is a part of government which it is treasonous to question;

d.  claiming secrecy for military tasks even when it is clearly not needed;

e.   towing people in boats around the ocean and forcing them into other boats - an action of highly questionable legality which, one suspects, is bound to end up with a lethal accident;

f.  trying to re-start culture wars which most people have already moved past.

It is certainly completely uninterested in:

1.  science (not even a Science minister, for crying out loud);

2.  climate science (lining up a climate denialist into a top advisory position, for example)

3.  industry policy that is more nuanced than "let the market work it out".

This combination in its own way is a perfect storm of government uselessness.   Sure, manufacturing of cars has been problematic for years due to a variety of reasons, but one sector (energy) where you might have thought Australian manufacturing might try to find a niche market is more than likely going to be hit by change in government policy soon too.

This is a really appalling government led by a Prime Minister with poor, poor judgement.

It is hard to find a Minister who is not equally embarrassing and currently compromising their better sense by having to stick with the team.  Yes, I'm looking at you, Turnbull.

I actually didn't expect them to be quite this bad, and I hope their polling continues to go down. 

Update:   I see they are in an election losing position still, across all polls I think, although the 3 point swing from Labor to the Greens looks very odd to me.   I think Shorten's loss of points is partly due to his being absent overseas recently.    I wouldn't be in a panic over it.

Abbott's approval rating, while a net negative, is higher than it deserves to be.

I can't emphasise enough how creepy I find the way this government is using the military, not just operationally, but in a PR sense.  (And then going completely over the top in attacking media for reporting possible misbehaviour of members.  That performance by David Johnston was worthy of a full blown totalitarian state.) 

In fact, I am surprised that they seem to have found a current crop of top brass who seem to be happy to be used a part of government PR this way.  During the Howard era, the Navy's unhappiness with its role in dealing with boats was palpable.   This seems not to be the case now, and you have to wonder why.  And has Angus Campbell always been known as a bit of a government suck up?  He sure comes across that way.

I still predict it will all end abruptly and not in a way of the government's choosing.

Service will be resumed, sometime

We've got a technical problem waiting to be fixed on the landline at home, so posting will be light for a little while.

Weight loss, hooray

I find this hard to credit, but I started the 5:2 diet thing with my first "fast" day Tuesday last week.  (I do Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I completed my 4th fast day yesterday.)  Weight loss seems to definitely be over 2 kg, as I started on 89.something (I think it .5 or above, as the rapidly approaching 90 kg line is what finally convinced me I have to stop putting on weight.  But I didn't write it down.)   This morning:  87.1, after breakfast.

I have taken no exercise of note in the period.

A weight of 83.5 would get me into a BMI a shade under 25.   (I am currently 26).  My wife tells me I was 82kg when we married, although I honestly can't remember.

82 or 83 probably sounds a reasonable goal, and then I might watch what happens if I only do one day a week on 600 cal (as Michael Mosley says he found that was all that was necessary after taking off the weight.) 

This does seem a very impressive way to lose weight...

Just get married and have a kid, George

Look, George Clooney as an actor can be great.   He also, by and large, has his heart in the right place politically.   But surely I can't be the only person in the world who rolls his eyes every time I see another "Clooney pranks his friends - again!" story in the press?   I just don't bother reading them, and don't understand why he apparently does this so much, anyway.

Time to stop and reproduce, George.   That usually puts a stop to "pranks".

The Davidson rules noted...

The link, which I don't recommend be followed.

Talk about a meeting of disparate characters

BBC News - Steve Coogan and Philomena Lee meet Pope Francis

I see there was a good reason for the meeting (the report notes "They are campaigning for the release of 60,000 adoption files held by the Irish state, churches and private agencies.")

That's good, because I could not imagine any social reason Coogan (who I regard as talented in his way, but with a brand of comedy that is psychologically too claustrophobic to watch for long) would be meeting the Pope.

I haven't seen his Philomena film yet, but it has such good reviews I would like to.

I'm glad somebody else has noticed

At the end of a Guardian book review about a killing psychopath in a dystopian future New York (which he quite likes), Adam Roberts makes this observation:

Still, Sternbergh has created a memorable main character here. He is an unvarnished, murderous psychopath, happy to kill for money, no questions asked. On occasion, when the whim takes him, he'll even kill without getting paid. Yet it doesn't take long for us to warm to him, and by the end of the book I was keen to read the second Spademan novel (which Sternbergh is currently writing). A big film deal has already been signed. What's the appeal?

It's a question with larger resonance. Think of some of the biggest TV serials of the last few years: The Sopranos; Breaking Bad; Dexter; Game of Thrones. These are all shows with psychopaths at their centre, not as baddies, but as the heroes. Dracula used to be a straightforward villain; nowadays vampires are our heroes even though their stock-in-trade is still (of course) killing people. When Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes boasts that he is a "high-functioning sociopath" and executes press barons in cold blood, we are not appalled. On the contrary, we lap it up. So what's with all the lovable murderers? Shovel Ready suggests, in an oblique kind of way, that the issue is one of a broader social disengagement, but I think there's something more designedly amoral going on. Sternbergh's thriller whisks us along so effortlessly we may miss the point at which we start to think: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could just break the bonds of all those petty frustrations of my day-to-day with a little bit of the old ultraviolence?" This may not be an entirely morally healthy thing to be doing.

I have been up front about my distrust and dislike of the "loveable murderer" theme ever since it started to appear in movies (I would say) in the early 1990's.   (Perhaps with Silence of the Lambs, I would guess.  Pulp Fiction didn't help.)   Are other people finally starting to notice there is something "off" about it?

What is going on, Paul

I was talking to my daughter over dinner last night about her school camp experiences while Paul Howes was on 7.30 in the background, so I could only vaguely get the gist of what he was on about, but my main impression was that it was rambling, confusing performance of highly unclear purpose.

Mark Kenny in Fairfax this morning says that Howe's intervention is helpful to Abbott, and I suppose it might be, except that I find it hard to believe that anyone watching Paul will think it anything other than positioning for his own future benefit in politics, somewhere.   As Kenny says, Howes seems to be alluding to some potential for a re-visiting something like the Hawke era wages accord, but the difference is that there is no potential for a "trade off"in higher social wage under the Abbott government.

Howes should just go away for a while.  Like 3 years or so.  Dissent within Labor is that last thing they need. 

Still, I doubt it is going to lead to any improvement to the Abbott government's popularity.  Pollbludger has its poll of polls at 52.6 to 47.4 in favour of Labor, with possibly the first Newspoll for the year being done over the next weekend.  As Newspoll has been lagging a bit in its assessment of the decline of Abbott popularity, if it joins the other polls and shows Labor in front, Coalition members will not be all that happy with the prospect of a West Australian Senate election.

The Bible and epilepsy

Tim in comments yesterday noted that he hadn't heard of the theory that St Paul's conversion experience was perhaps medically explained by epilepsy.  So, just for Tim, whose poetry is dictated to him by ethereal voices after he has enough home brew*, here's a link to the abstract of the 1987 article which presumably first dealt with the theory in detail.

I see at the side of that page, there are further medical articles suggesting Ezekiel may have also had epilepsy, or that St Paul was struck by lightning on the road.   (The latter theory has a bit more potential for divine involvement, I guess...)

*  I may be making that part up.  The voices come after he eats his home made cheese.

Record heat news

Astute readers will know about the remarkably warm winter Alaska is experiencing, but down in Brazil the summer has been dire, and record temperatures appear to be causing concern on all sorts of fronts:  for agriculture, power and industry generally.

This is all pretty remarkable, given that we are in neutral ENSO conditions.

Although the consensus forecast is that it won't appear in the 2014 northern summer, it does seem that the probability of El Nino returning soon-ish, with its expected effect of increased global temperature, is on the up.  See the information in this post, towards the end. 

Back and forth: just go buy some SPC Ardmona products

In all of the politically motivated back and forth going on about whether SPC Ardmona really are too generous to their workers, I thought it interesting to note the submission the company made last year disputing the Productivity Commission's decision to not offer any assistance.  (Go to the second link here - it's a .pdf that is hard to link to directly.)

The company sounds really annoyed with the PC, and I have to say, it reads as if they have good reason.

In the meantime, one would hope the publicity might lead Australians to go out and buy some of their product.  I certainly did last week - the 60c premium to buy a can of diced tomatoes from them instead of the Coles Italian sourced brand seemed the least I could do.

And perhaps it's also time for SPC to wheel out Margaret Fulton for a new edition of her "Canned Fruit and Meat Recipe Book" which appears to have come out in 1971, possibly as part of newspaper or magazine one suspects.  (It was apparently only 15 pages long.)

I sound as if I am being sarcastic.  But honestly, canned peaches are pretty nice, and we should eat more of them. 

Obamacare not failing

It appears from this Krugman post, and an article in the LA Times, that "Obamacare" is not destined to fail after all. 

The nutty Right in the US will need to move on.   As they will have to, eventually, on climate change.

Data as old as the universe

Optical data storage has virtually unlimited lifetime

I don't know why, but I always find stories about developments in technology for long term data storage interesting. Perhaps it's because I feel there is science fiction potential there: if you came across alien data storage, it would be good to be able to recognize it.

So, from the link, you can read about an optical system that writes on quartz and should last a very, very long time:

The researchers calculated that the decay time of the nanogratings, and thus the lifetime of the data storage system, is about 3 x 1020 years at room temperature, indicating unprecedented high stability. The lifetime decreases at elevated temperatures, but even at temperatures of 462 K (189° C, 372° F), the extrapolated decay time is 13.8 billion years, comparable to the age of the Universe.

Wow.

Old mental illnesses

Elsewhere in the Atlantic, there was a recent shortish article looking at Greek and Roman understandings of mental illness.  Nothing too startling in there, I guess, although I don't think I had read before that Socrates heard voices:

Socrates seems to have had recurrent hallucinations of one particular type: A voice spoke to him, usually advising him not to do things. His disciples were in awe of this phenomenon, but some of his later admirers thought they needed to explain it away—they thought it suggested that he was slightly cracked.

Strange stories of American nudity

There's an article at The Atlantic with the somewhat unusual title Men, Manliness, and Being Naked Around Other Men.

It's a sympathetic look at the men (and boys) who do not care to be naked around other men, even if they be doctors.  While Europeans, and probably Australians, generally regard Americans as being unduly uptight about nudity generally (the Huffington Post just ran an article "Why Janet Jackson's Nipple Still Matters" to mark the faked wardrobe malfunction's ten year anniversary,) this article at first sounds as if it might be an example of American prudishness.   But it does deal with two rather odd aspects of the history of American, ahem, exposure.

The first is that, across many parts of America, and in some cases right up to the 1970's, schools, colleges and YMCAs enforced male nudity for pool swimming and swimming classes.  The article links to an NPR story about men who do not remember this fondly, particularly as they were not given any choice in the matter during the years of puberty in high school.

It seems that even most Americans under 50 have trouble believing this was so ubiquitous in their own country through most of the 20th century.   Apparently, it started as an alleged hygiene requirement, before chlorination of pools was even available*.   (Seems a dubious position right from the start, particularly as the rule was never rigorously applied to girls and women.)  Some public broadcaster has done a show on the history of this, available through this link.  It's not salaciously handled, although he does sound as if he is personally pretty keen on skinny dipping.  One of the more interesting things he talks about is how it has become forgotten so quickly.  (Part of the answer is that some states never believed in it - but a large number did.) 

It also perhaps helps to explain the reason the YMCA was the subject of  gay double entendre in the famous song.

Given that England sort of has a reputation for public school gay experiences and creepy teachers, one wouldn't be so surprised to hear of a history of this in that country.  But the fact that is it America makes it all the more surprising.  (I don't know that it was ever the practice in Australia either.)

So, the other odd thing in the Atlantic article, or at least in the comments following, is the number of people who talk about their schools having no doors on the toilet stalls.   In fact, this reminded me of hearing one of the Johns from They Might be Giants in an interview in the 80's or 90's mentioning having to go to hospital in Brooklyn, and the toilets had no doors so as to prevent patients shooting up (!)

I cannot, in all my life, ever remember any toilet stall anywhere deliberately not having a door.  Even in Japan, where people are by no means shy in onsen and women cleaners in mens toilets are unremarkable, when it comes to a toilet for defecation, I have never seen one that did not allow privacy.   (Which is a particularly good thing in Asia when it comes to the uncertain arrangements with pants and positioning when having to use a squat toilet.)  Yet this seems to have been an accepted precautionary practice in American schools and hospitals, at least up to the 1980's in the case of the latter.

I think I find the idea of being on the bowl in a semi public environment more disconcerting than having to shower occasionally without privacy.   (Sure, the Romans used to poop communally  and No Time for Sergeants made it clear that some US military barracks followed the same design - presumably it was thought to help "bonding".  But if you have always had privacy while so engaged since the age of 4 or so, it's a very odd idea.)

Update:  a columnist in Houston wrote back in 2008 about the nude school swimming policy he experienced (unhappily) in the early 1960's.  He spends time on the issue of why attitudes changed abruptly around the mid 60's, and thinks it is just to do with increased affluence meaning increased desire for privacy.  Not sure that this really makes sense - Japanese and Scandinavian countries are pretty affluent, and social nudity in the right circumstances is routine.  But then again,  I don't know that they would have ever had the  oddball American view that schools should teach boys only to swim in the nude.

* I wrote a bit about the history of pool chlorination in my post about a visit to Brisbane's old pool at Spring Hill.

Stupid, stupid piece

Philip Seymour Hoffman and a double standard over drugs | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free |

What an air headed piece of writing from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.

An actor dies of (apparently) heroin overdose, and he takes this as an opportunity to lament drugs being criminalised.

Hey, Simon, here's a few points:

*  how would legalisation of heroin have helped Hoffman?   The rich appear to be able to be buy good quality heroin in large quantities.  (If there is any evidence of contamination in Hoffman's heroin, get back to us.)

*  Hoffman's drug addiction was already being treated as a health problem for him, not a criminal one.   He had been into rehabilitation - he had not been referred to police by the staff there.

*  What do you want?  That the rich only inject themselves in safe injecting rooms, like at Kings Cross in Sydney?  You think if there was one of those in New York or LA that rich actors would make their way there daily to shoot up safely?

The fact is, as I have repeated endlessly, for heroin addicts who want help overcoming a dangerous addiction, the addiction has already been treated as a health problem in Australia, and (I am betting) in many Western countries for decades.

Drug reformers are always exaggerating the benefits of their hypothetical legalisation schemes, even for cases for this where the change would seem to make no difference whatsoever.

Economics isn't everything

Economists in reverse over our car industry

I think the sentiments expressed in this column are quite valid.

In particular, I want to hear from small government, uber free market types, where they think Australian economic future lies.  (I bet they shrug their shoulders and say something like "it's not up to me to decide, let the market work it out.")

The problems with letting long standing industries in manufacturing and food growing and processing die because of present difficulties not entirely within the industries' control are surely how quickly they can be replaced with alternatives, how viable the alternatives are in the long run, and whether you are allowing too much of a "monoculture" of economic activity to develop.
  
It seems to me that free marketeers have fanciful ideas that lowering wages enough, and de regulation, just magically leads to a wonderful diverse economic health, no matter which corner of the world you live in.   I am very skeptical.

Thirsty solar thermal

California Faces Solar Thermal Power’s Drinking Problem | MIT Technology Review

I didn't know that some current designs for solar thermal power plants were so thirsty:

The drawbacks are that solar thermal plants generate large amounts of waste heat, and they consume a lot of water for cooling, which is usually done by evaporating water. Solar thermal plants can consume twice as much water as fossil fuel power plants, and one recently proposed solar thermal project would have consumed about 500 million gallons of water a year.

A technology called dry cooling, which has started appearing in power plants in the last 10 years or so, can cut that water consumption by 90 percent. Instead of evaporating water to cool the plant, the technology keeps the water contained in a closed system. As it cools the power plant, the water heats up and is then circulated through huge, eight-story cooling towers that work much like the radiator in a car.

Dry cooling technology costs from two and a half to five times more than conventional evaporative cooling systems. And it doesn’t work well on hot days, sometimes forcing power plant operators to cut back on power production. In the summer, this can decrease power production by 10 to 15 percent, says Jessica Shi, a technical program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute. On extremely hot days, power production might be reduced even more than that

Poor little rich country

Saudi Arabia: No satisfaction | The Economist
The Economist writes:

Yet rather than the ebullience you might expect, the mood among Saudi
Arabia’s 30m residents (a third of whom are foreign workers and their
dependants) is one of nagging unease. Even as shiny new buildings,
universities, “financial centres” and entire cities sprout, the
machinery of government has remained as creakily top-down and tangled in
red tape as ever. And even as Saudis grow ever more sophisticated and
worldly—about 160,000 of them are studying abroad on government
scholarships, and those left behind are among the world’s heaviest
internet addicts—social, political and religious strictures remain
stifling.

“The government keeps people quiet with money, and in the rare cases
where that doesn’t work, with threats,” says a diplomat in Riyadh. “But
this is not a happy place.” For one thing, ordinary Saudis have no say
in where the money is spent. All too often what they see, following the
much-trumpeted princely opening of each new project, is vast empty
buildings and unused facilities. What they hear is tales of which
privileged courtier or business mogul has pocketed how much.

That's all well and good, but I don't know how they can write about the country being unhappy and not note that there is no alcohol, little prospect of pre-marital sex, and religious police who can have you arrested for conducting black magic. 

The campaign continues

As inspired by this post.

Advice for Mark Steyn

Quark Soup by David Appell: Is the Hockey Stick "flaccid?"

A good post last week from David Appell.

Life suited to interstellar travel, perhaps?

This Leech Can Survive A 24-Hour Submersion in Liquid Nitrogen | Australian Popular Science

Apart from the surprise that you can freeze and reanimate a small parasitic fish leech in liquid nitrogen, there is this remarkable ability it has:

Every single leech placed in -130°F (-90°C) storage survived for nine
months. In other words, these leeches can easily survive at
temperatures lower than those ever measured by a thermometer on Earth, for
as long as it takes to conceive and give birth to a human child. Some
of the leeches survived at this temperature for 32 months, or more than
2.5 years.

They also don't appear to need any time to acclimate to cold, unlike other
cold-tolerant creatures. And they can survive being rapidly chilled to
-321°F and then being thawed to room temperature, repeated up to 12
times over a couple minutes. Some of the leeches put through this
torture, which according to the study no other species could tolerate,
survived for more than a month in a water bath, and apparently died due
to starvation - not because of injuries due to freezing.

Lucky to get through the 60's

The Truths Behind 'Dr. Strangelove' : The New Yorker

I'm a week or so late in posting it, but this story about how an accidental nuclear war could have easily been started by a rogue US nuclear commander is pretty startling.

Life in Antarctica

I'm a cook at one of Antarctica's research stations. Any questions for me? | Jessica Barder | Comment is free | theguardian.com

I see that her blog (linked to in the article) is not updated all that often.  Still, it's always interesting to hear stories about life in Antarctica. 

The odd story of Americans and alcohol - in space

Why Astronauts Were Banned From Drinking Wine In Outer Space

Maybe I had read something about this years ago, but here in detail is the story of how NASA nearly had wine (sherry) in space, as part of their official menu; but the prohibitionist tendencies of enough of the public led it to not happening.

To Canberra and back, Part 4

I hadn't been to Canberra for perhaps 20 years, so it was good to see it again.

I always thought it was a very pleasant urban environment, with all the extensive tree plantings, at least in the older suburbs.  But I have never lived there during an entire winter; I am sure that would be trying.

We stayed at Forrest Hotel and Apartments, within a couple of blocks of cafes of Manuka and across the road (and some extensive parkland stretches) to Parliament House.  It's a great location, and the apartments (I don't know about the motel style rooms in the other part of the complex  - the buildings they were in did look a fair bit more basic) were really well appointed, very comfortable, and good value.  Some photos:

Out the balcony, looking north:

The grounds in front of the apartment:

The lovely, tree lined streets of Manuka








So, where does one take the family in Canberra?   To all of the essentials.

Parliament House:

It is a pretty impressive building, with what is probably the best flag pole on the planet:

OK, so I have been playing with the filters on the tablet.  












Here's a night time shot, the colour came out nice as it was on this one:

 





The photo was taken just after we had sat on the grassy slope of the complex, watching the 9pm New Year's fireworks over the centre of the city.  (Lots of families go to sit on the side of Parliament House to do that; it feels a pleasantly egalitarian to use the building that way):

And everyone likes the long, straight lines of the city as viewed from it:

The free guided tours are informative, and there almost seemed to be almost more Indians, Chinese and others than white anglo saxon in the place when we went there.  Maybe those of foreign extraction appreciate our democracy more than we do...

And it was, of course, where I bought my treasured Julia Gillard coffee mug, as featured in a previous post.  The shop there tries to be pretty up market and dignified; perhaps that's why it has trouble making a profit.  (Actually, looking at the linked story from August 2013, it seems the shop was putting a lot of hope on the sales of Prime Ministerial coffee mugs reviving its fortunes.  At least it worked on me.)

I see this is taking too much space to do Canberra justice.  It will need another instalment. 

Sinclair Davidson doesn't know there was a Coastwatch Oz TV show; verbals a Senator he still leaves being called a "bush pig"at his blog

With a headline to his post "Television isn't always real", Sinclair Davidson is clearly going along with the instant Right wing meme set up by his minions that Senator Hanson-Young was referring to the fictional Sea Patrol TV series in the question she asked yesterday.  In fact, the name of that show was said by one of public servants (and, if you ask me, he was acting in quite a smart ass fashion with his question.) The Senator indicated that was not the show in the way she responded.  She specifically referred to it as dealing with "fishing boats and so forth".  As I recall, Sea Patrol did not routinely deal with "fishing boat" stories; a recent reality TV show did.  (They also stopped making Sea Patrol a few years ago now.)

Coastwatch Oz, which Sinclair Davidson can watch on line here, was the recent reality TV show I believe she was referring to.  (Or, possibly, she may have been thinking of the New Zealand version of the same show, thinking from a quick viewing of it that it was Australian.)

Sinclair Davidson has also acknowledged that he read my earlier post re the Senator being referred to as a "bush pig"at his blog.  He is not concerned to moderate that comment.

He appears pretty often on ABC radio and TV.  He's a Professor at RMIT.  Why does no one ask him about his policy for what he will leave up on his blog?

Update:  I see Andrew Bolt, as is his wont, has merely copied the Catallaxy story and continued the verballing of the Senator.  Why Bolt doesn't just write directly for the blog, given that his ignorance on certain topics well qualifies him, I don't know.

Update 2:   I didn't actually realise when I first wrote this post, but Coastwatch Oz first screened on Channel 7 on the evening of 30 January.   The Senate hearing in question was on 31 January.   If anything, this make it all the more likely that the Senator was referring to the show, not 3 or 4 year old episodes of Sea Patrol.

I also have to point out, in fairness, that Latika Burke also went along with the "she was thinking Sea Patrol was real" meme.  Bad Latika.

Update 3:  in fairness to Bolt, he has updated his post with a reader comment pointing out the Coastwatch Oz explanation.  Will Catallaxy?  Probably not.

And besides:  clearly, Andrew Bolt does not care about the lack of moderation of "bush pig" at Catallaxy, otherwise he would not be recommending people to the blog.

What a hypocrite, when he posts continually about how objectionable he finds Left wing commentary on blogs and twitter.

Update 4:  the Senator complains to the Daily Telegraph that she was indeed referring to Coastwatch Oz, not Sea Patrol, which was not mentioned by her.  Tim Blair still being a smart arse about it.

Does Catallaxy update it's post?   No, of course not.  In fact, his last update tries to reinforce that she was referring to Sea Patrol.   "Bush pigs" don't deserve corrections, obviously.

The extraordinary drinking Russians

BBC News - Vodka blamed for high death rates in Russia

The high number of early deaths in Russia is mainly due to people drinking too much alcohol,particularly vodka, research suggests. 

The study, in The Lancet, says 25% of Russian men die before
they are 55, and most of the deaths are down to alcohol. The comparable
UK figure is 7%.

As ridiculously bad as those figures sound, they actually are an improvement on the not so recent past:

Russia brought in stricter alcohol control measures in 2006, including raising taxes and restricting sales.

Researchers say alcohol consumption has fallen by a third
since then and the proportion of men dying before they reach 55 years
old has fallen from 37% to 25%.

It must be hard running a good economy with so many people drinking themselves into early graves.

"Precious bodily fluids" more precious than thought

Gee.  This research seems quite surprising, and indicates again why IVF fiddling with fertilization is an area with higher adverse consequences for babies:

“We know from several studies that obesity in males can be tracked back to the father’s contribution at the moment of conception. But now we’re starting to understand the very complex signals and information being transmitted by the seminal fluid, and it turns out that seminal fluid and female tissues interact in surprising ways,” says Professor Sarah Robertson, research leader and Director of the Robinson Institute at the University of Adelaide.

“We’ve discovered that it’s not just the sperm, but the entire composition of the seminal fluid which has an important role to play in establishing the offspring’s future health, and this is most notably seen in male offspring.

“If the seminal fluid is of poor quality, it affects the female’s capacity to support an embryo. If the embryo manages to survive despite the poor quality seminal fluid, the metabolism of the resulting fetus will be permanently altered, making it more likely to develop a syndrome of metabolic disorders including obesity, high blood pressure and glucose intolerance after birth,” she says.

The study found that seminal fluid contains signals which trigger production of proteins in the female reproductive tract. The balance between proteins which promote embryo survival and those which cause embryo demise are changed according to the signals present in seminal fluid.

 The recent paper referred to in my last link, by the way, gives me a feeling of some vindication for my innate caution against IVF right from the start.   Here's a crucial paragraph:

Concern has also been raised about the long term health of children born through IVF. Otherwise healthy children conceived by IVF may have higher blood pressure, adiposity, glucose levels, and more generalised vascular dysfunction than children conceived naturally (table 2⇑). These effects seem to be related to the IVF procedure itself rather than to underlying subfertility.33 34 35 36 Animal studies have shown epigenetic and developmental abnormalities after assisted reproduction, which give further cause for reflection.37 Until these concerns are resolved, there should be caution about using IVF in couples when the benefit is uncertain or the chances of natural conception are still reasonable.

Sinclair Davidson runs a blog where "bush pig" for a female politician has become a routine insult

Yes, economist Sinclair Davidson maintains Catallaxy and rarely moderates insults made to female journalists and politicians.  Today, "bush pig", and I'm sure "pig" was used again last week with respect to the same politician. 

He appears fairly often on ABC outlets.

Why is no one in the public challenging him about how he runs his blog?

Record rainfall news

BBC News - UK floods: January rain breaks records in parts of England

Record rains in parts of England; record drought in California.

Is such an intensification of the water cycle while the world gets hotter just a co-incidence?

Is it too early for an election?

It seems to me that the Abbott government, having made a decision to keep Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals happy with keeping ADM out of GrainCorp in Australia, decided that it couldn't be seen to be caving in to that wing of the government again, and went against Barnaby in the decision to not throw any money in to keep SPC alive.

It further seems to me that they got this precisely the wrong way around - they would have been better off allowing ADM's bid for GrainCorp and getting those facilities upgraded with foreign money, and doing their bit to keep the rural food and processing sector happy with supporting SPC to the tune of a pretty measly $25 million.

I say this because:

a. I found Sharmon Stone's defence of the case for government support on Radio National this morning quite convincing.  You can read the reasons which she was basically covering in this article.

b.  I just looked up the amount of money the Government spends on drought assistance, and see that it can range in recent years it has ranged from 700 to 400 million dollars.  Drought (and associated water expenses) is one of the reasons given for why SPC has been in trouble over the last few years (not to mention the high Australian dollar, which - as I have noted before - small government types simply don't like acknowledging is a serious problem for Australian industry).  The $25 million is a pittance compared to general drought support - why aren't small government purists complaining that farmers should just move off the land if they can't make their business turn a profit during the drought?  

c. I don't buy much canned fruit or vegetables, but when I try to support the Australian product, and certainly avoid Chinese products at all costs.  (OK, with tomatoes, I do buy Italian canned ones, but not always, and I feel guilty when I do.)  

So, I hope the Abbott government loses another point or two in popularity over this decision.  The downturn in the Abbott government's polling so soon after an election has been truly remarkable.  I expect it to continue that way.

I think he is incapable of good judgement.

Can't Shorten's mother in law declare some sort of canned fruit state of emergency before she hands over the job to Cosgrove, and let us have another election? 

Update:   what a symbol of the Abbott government, hey? - the fact that Cadbury is getting $16 million for its Hobart chocolate factory, as an election promise.  Compared to fruit growers and processors being told to take a hike.

The Abbott government - the "empty calorie" government that's bad for your health.

Worker's paradise

Shopping in Paris: Worker protections are good for employees, bad for business.

Wow.  Everyone knows the French are not like America when it comes to welfare (to put it mildly), but I was very surprised at the extent of worker's benefits as explained in this fascinating article by an American who lives in Paris.

It's like a small government advocate's nightmare.   

Space eye

I'll do a reverse Jason Soon (he quite often seems to get his tweeted material from here), and note that he has linked to a good article in the New York Times talking about health problems astronauts suffer in zero G, particularly relating to their eyes (about which I didn't know much before.)

Quantum strangeness: a reminder

It doesn't hurt to remind oneself every now and then about quantum strangeness, and I quite like the way this article in Aeon (which seems a pretty good on line magazine, incidentally) explains it. 

Here's the key part:

Here’s the basic problem. While the mathematics of quantum theory works very well in telling us what to expect at the end of an experiment, it seems peculiarly conceptually confusing when we try to understand what was happening during the experiment. To calculate what outcomes we might expect when we fire protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider, we need to analyse what – at first sight – look like many different stories. The same final set of particles detected after a collision might have been generated by lots of different possible sequences of energy exchanges involving lots of different possible collections of particles. We can’t tell which particles were involved from the final set of detected particles.

Now, if the trouble was only that we have a list of possible ways that things could have gone in a given experiment and we can’t tell which way they actually went just by looking at the results, that wouldn’t be so puzzling. If you find some flowers at your front door and you’re not sure which of your friends left them there, you don’t start worrying that there are inconsistencies in your understanding of physical reality. You just reason that, of all the people who could have brought them, one of them presumably did. You don’t have a logical or conceptual problem, just a patchy record of events.

Quantum theory isn’t like this, as far as we presently understand it. We don’t get a list of possible explanations for what happened, of which one (although we don’t know which) must be the correct one. We get a mathematical recipe that tells us to combine, in an elegant but conceptually mysterious way, numbers attached to each possible explanation. Then we use the result of this calculation to work out the likelihood of any given final result. But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other. This means that the net chance of an outcome arising from several possible stories can be more or less than the sum of the chances associated with each.

To get a sense of the conceptual mystery we face here, imagine you have three friends, John, Mary and Jo, who absolutely never talk to each other or interact in any other way. If any one of them is in town, there’s a one-in-four chance that this person will bring you flowers on any given day. (They’re generous and affectionate friends. They’re also entirely random and spontaneous – nothing about the particular choice of day affects the chance they might bring you flowers.) But if John and Mary are both in town, you know there’s no chance you’ll get any flowers that day – even though they never interact, so neither of them should have any idea whether the other one is around. And if Mary and Jo are both in town, you’ll certainly get exactly one bunch of flowers – again, even though Mary and Jo never interact either, and you’d have thought that if they’re acting independently, your chance of getting any flowers is a bit less than a half, while once in a while you should get two bunches.

If you think this doesn’t make any sense, that there has to be something missing from this flower delivery fable, well, that’s how many thoughtful physicists feel about quantum theory and our understanding of nature. Pretty precisely analogous things happen in quantum experiments.

You should read the whole thing...

Dumb politics, again...

Nothing illustrates the Republican culture war going off the rails better than their obsession with the contraceptive mandate part of "Obamacare".

Mike Huckabee made a spectacle of himself and tried to pretend it was all the media's fault; then Sean Hannity turned up defending the stance with sarcasm, and complaining about why "the government" should pay for birth control when it was so cheap at Walmart.

As Amanda Marcotte notes (and I have seen this repeated endlessly at a certain Tea Party lite blog in Australia), the claim that it is all about the government paying for it is simply not true:

Hannity's boo-boo here was the result of a larger lie, perpetuated by Mike Huckabee and the folks at Fox News and other right wing media outlets: That the contraception mandate is about the "government" or "Uncle Sugar" buying women's birth control. In reality, the contraception mandate is closer to a consumer protection law. It's really part of a larger program in the Affordable Care Act to set minimum standards about what your insurance plan must cover. It's really no different than a law requiring a car to have four wheels and two headlights to be considered a street legal vehicle. It's telling that Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Bill O'Reilly, and company feel the need to simply lie about this and claim that there's some kind of taxpayer program directly providing free birth control to women (ironically, they largely ignore actual, long-standing, politically popular programs that do this), because objecting to the real program—women buy insurance, that insurance covers contraception—sounds an awful lot like you are unduly obsessed with what other people get up to in bed.

A similar contraceptive mandate had been in place in many States for years; often being brought in under Republican leadership.

It is a sign of their appalling lack of political common sense that the Republicans now want to make to make it a big issue.

A Krugman particularly worth reading

Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression, AFF Edition - NYTimes.com

Deserves a documentary

Strange events lead Ind. family to resort to exorcism

Well, you don't often hear of an alleged demonic possession case involving levitation, walking backwards up walls, horse flies in the house, and so on.  And with independent witnesses to at least some of the key events.

This sounds like it would be well worth an hour long documentary to get a better idea of what was going on.

Article title says it all

Reviving Wind Turbine Syndrome is just what you'd expect from a PM without a Science Minister

John Quiggin rips into this too.

Weighty issues

For the first time ever, the slow upwards creep of weight has inspired me to try actual dieting. The very popular (in England in particular, it seems) 5:2 diet will be given a go, and today was the first "fast" day.

To keep within the 600cal limit for such a day does take a fair bit of planning and calculating, but I seem to have done quite OK in terms of volume of food and hunger. The old diet stand bys do help - low fat cottage cheese (I like it anyway), puffed rice cakes (about half the calories of bread), beans, salad and low fat salad dressing. For what it's worth, here's how they assembled today for my 600cal menu:

 Breakfast - 2 rice cakes topped with a mashed up boiled egg and a small tomato. (I mean small: one of those mini roma tomato ones.) Coffee (using almond milk instead of normal milk) and a stevia based sweetener.

Lunch - 2 rice cakes with 100g cottage cheese, small tomato. (OK, so I like tomato when dieting.) A can of Pepsi Max.

Dinner - salad with small (95g) can of tuna in brine, 75 g of 4 bean mix, 50 g of lettuce (that was all that was left - I could've gone to double that and been OK), 100 g of celery, a couple of the mini roma tomatoes. 20ml of low fat dressing. A cup of coffee (decaf this time) as in the morning.

I've done the calculations and think this came in at 590 cal. I'm not exactly feeling full; nor am I feeling particularly hungry. It is meant to be a fasting day, after all, but as far as fasts go, that was a pretty satisfactory one. All very simple, obviously.

Normal food tomorrow. Calculating calories again Thursday. This could well provide a whole new bunch of material with which to bore readers!

Warm up north

The Alaskan Winter That Never Was? – Greg Laden's Blog

Greg Laden has a good post up noting how extraordinarily warm the winter has been in Alaska, as the cold polar air has by passed it on the way to the rest of mainland America.   Remarkable.

The trouble is, "skeptics" only believe Roy Spencer's chart

RealClimate: Global temperature 2013

Real Climate notes at the link above:

The global temperature data for 2013 are now published. 2010 and 2005
remain the warmest years since records began in the 19th Century. 1998
ranks third in two records, and in the analysis of Cowtan & Way,
which interpolates the data-poor region in the Arctic with a better
method, 2013 is warmer than 1998 (even though 1998 was a record El Nino
year, and 2013 was neutral)....

In all four data series of the global near-surface air temperature, the linear trend even from the extreme El Niño year 1998 is positive, i.e. shows continued warming, despite the choice of a warm outlier as the initial year.

In all four data series of the global near-surface air temperature, 2010 was the warmest year on record, followed by 2005.

 

The year 1998 is, at best, rank 3 – in the currently best data set of Cowtan & Way, 1998 is actually only ranked 7th. Even 2013 is – without El Niño – warmer there than 1998.

 
The German news site Spiegel Online presents these facts under the headline Warming of the air paused for 16 years (my translation). The headline of the NASA news release, NASA Finds 2013 Sustained Long-Term Climate Warming trend, is thus completely turned on its head.This will not surprise anyone who has followed climate reporting of Der Spiegel in recent years. To the contrary – colleagues express their surprise publicly when a sensible article on the subject appears there. For years, Der Spiegel has acted as a gateway for dubious “climate skeptics” claims into the German media whilst trying to discredit top climate scientists (we’ve covered at least one example here).

As I say at the title to the post, the problem with this is that "skeptics" still cling to Roy Spencer's satellite temperature chart as "proving" that 1998 was the hottest year ever.

Until Spencer's figures show a peak above 1998, (likely in the next El Nino), they will not change their belief.

To Canberra and back, Part 3

So by late morning we were heading out of Coonabarabran and down the Newell to Gilgandra and onto the outskirts of Dubbo.   (Lunch at Subway, where the young girl microwaved the steak pieces before putting them on the roll and then toasting it with the cheese on top.  In my local Brisbane one, they don't do that - just put the cheese on top and toast it.   Well done, Dubbo Subway.)

Continue onto Parkes, where we did a right left turn out towards Orange and the tiny town of Manildra, where we turned south to Canberra.  See the Bing map:

  

According to Bing it's 615 km and 6 hours 44 min driving, but it sure seems longer than that.  The countryside has some geography to it, but not a lot.   The driving is easy enough, but rolling hillsides stretching off into the distance for scores of kilometres do get a bit same-y.  (This is particularly true of the stretch from Cowra south to Canberra.)   

It was also tricky knowing exactly the right route out of Parkes, especially as I had missed printing out the Google map for that section.We worked it out eventually, but a proper touring map would have helped.

The real reason for taking this slightly indirect route to Canberra was to drop in on the Parkes radio telescope.   It has a nice new-ish visitor centre, paid for from money made from the movie The Dish (which I have never fully seen, seeing it got luke warm reviews.)  It's a very photogenic piece of science kit:

Here's another photo showing an old bit off the telescope, which everyone must assume looks like a mock lunar lander:

But here's the explanation as to what it really is (click to enlarge and you should be able to read it):

The telescope was built in 1961, but it has been upgraded many times.  The CSIRO explains how actively it is still used:

The telescope operates twenty four hours per day, through rain and cloud. About 85 per cent of all time each year is scheduled for observing. Less than five per cent of that is lost because of high winds or equipment problems. Most of the rest of the time each year is used for maintenance and testing. Around 300 researchers use the telescope each year, and more than 40 per cent of these users are from overseas.

The moving part of the dish is not fixed to the top of the tower but just sits on it. Because the large surface catches the wind like a sail, the telescope must be 'stowed' (pointed directly up) when the wind exceeds 35 km an hour.

There is a folder in the visitor centre explaining what listening programs are currently underway.  I noted that they are still listening to pulsars, but I don't think the reason why was really explained.  (I also wondered how often they continuously listen to any individual pulsar.  If, as I suspect, it is only a matter of minutes, not hours, one hopes they haven't ever missed out on one suddenly doing the equivalent of chiming at midnight - or playing Jingle Bells.) 

We did see the dish rotating around too - yay.  See - it was pointing in a different direction when we first arrived:

So there you go.  The visitor centre does the best it can, perhaps, on a kinda difficult area of astronomy to explain quickly to the public or the kiddies.   And another odd thing about the place - they have lots of warning signs about snakes being around the gardens and lawns as you walk out of the building.  I assume they are a particular problem there, although given it's pretty much in the middle of ordinary farming land, it's hard to see why.



From there it was out to buy some roadside cherries (from "down the road" at Young) - they were delicious when we ate them later in Canberra.  And then out through the never ending, rolling brown hills that surround Canberra for a long way out.

(We passed through Cowra, but only stopped for petrol.  It looks a nice enough town too.)

I think we got into Canberra around 7.30 or 8 pm.  More about that in Part 4.

Right wing fruit loopery of the highest order - courtesy of Catallaxy and Sinclair Davidson

Only a few days ago, I had several thousand visitors from Mark Steyn's blog because I made the simple claim that climate change denialists seem too silly to know when they are losing a legal case. 

(Why did Steyn's blog bother linking to me, I wonder...)

Now, over at Catallaxy, Steven "why oh why am I the only economist in the world to understand Say's Law" Kates has a post up re-quoting Steyn's latest whine about the American legal system, and swallows whole heartedly Steyn's approach that it's a crucial matter of free speech that he be allowed to defame a climate scientist.  (I believe I paraphrase only slightly.)

Anyhow, that's not the dangerously nutty part.  It's this comment from fruitiest of Catallaxy fruitloops, Mk50, following the post:

Simply put, the alternatives in the USA to facing up to the leftists are becoming binary. Either you do not do it, or you literally kill them from ambush.

Their legal system is broken and skewed to ‘weaponise’ one side of the political spectrum (notice I did not say ‘Justice’ System). Once that becomes obvious to all, then the only recourse is to take responsibility back from the state into private hands. Steyn would have been better off in terms of money, convenience and even stress if he had shot Mann from a distance than to go through the ghastly and incredibly expensive legal idiocy he is currently experiencing. He would also have a very high chance of getting away with it, given his intelligence. Probably 99% plus.

This character - an ex Australian military gun lover who grandiosely calls himself an "Imperialist" (and who was caught red handed plagiarising great swathes of a guest post or two Sinclair Davidson published at the blog) -  has expressed fantasies before about the armed Right wing "citizen militias" having to have a second American revolution because of the Obama presidency.  I can't remember what sparked this last time - it could have been Obama merely talking up tighter gun control after the school shooting, or it might have been some other issue the Tea Party obsesses over.

But surely this takes the cake.   Because a journalist is being sued by a climate scientist for defamation, and said journalist has been losing important procedural steps in the case, this Australian character is telling his mates in the US that it's becoming clear that the only answer is to shoot climate scientists!  (Well, OK, actually "leftists" - that makes his counsel worse rather than better.)

Hey, Sinclair Davidson - tell me how else to interpret this comment being hosted at your blog?  You seem pretty keen on Mk50's contributions to the blog - he only had one of his trite and stupidly exaggerating guest posts published there last week.  (And as far as I know you've never removed his plagiarised content in the previous posts.) 

Hey, Andrew Bolt, seeing you're the publicist in chief of this Right wing blog, tell me if you approve of MK50's musings?   Is there some wafer thin grounds on which you don't see it as an endorsement of generic violence against "leftists" in the US?

And anyone else - can you explain why Sinclair Davidson is not pilloried across our country for hosting a right wing nut job who appears to endorse political violence in the US on the slightest of pretexts?  Why instead does he turn up on the ABC several times a year?

That is one of the biggest mysteries for me...

To Canberra and back Part 2 - Coonabarabran

Coonabarabran is the closest town to what now appears to be called the Australian Astronomical Observatory at Siding Spring.  I also see that it is run by Australian Department of Industry (?), which is a bit of a worry given that the Abbott government's anti-science minions are scrapping around looking for cost cutting exercises.

The 30 odd km drive up to the observatory from town is very pleasant, but the whole area suffered a major bush fire a year ago.  Here's one business that survived, apparently, although there is a distinct lack of the product on display:

If you click to enlarge, you can see the burnt trees on the hills in the distance.  There is a vast area that looks like that.

On upwards to the observatory:

It was unharmed in the fire, although some staff accommodation was burnt.  The fire clearly came right up close to it, though, when you see some of the photos below taken from the base of the main observatory building.

I have been here once before, around 1990 or 1991 I think, and to be honest, I don't think the visitor centre has really changed at all.

It could well do with a revamp, although I must say that one of the simplest things, a large photographic negative of an immensely packed star field in the Milky Way with which you had to use a magnifying glass to see the thousands of stars, impressed them quite a bit.  

The viewing level inside the dome allows for some pretty good shots of the telescope itself:

 
But even if you have little interest in what they do there, the view from the base over the observatory over the Warrumbungles National Park is pretty good.  (If you don't like the scroll effect, just click on it for the whole, stitched panorama):

Notice how the burnt trees are often re-growing leaves along all of their trunks?  It's an odd look.

Here's a simpler shot, which only looks good if you click on it.

So, the place is well worth visiting, and the National Park looks as if it would be good too, but perhaps not in the middle of summer, and not this trip.

By about 11.30 we were back on the the road to Parkes, and the next science-y installment.