Germs, sex, minds, behaviour, maths, philosophy and religion. (Not necessarily in that order.)

I am reminded, via a link tweeted today by J Soon, that I don't think I have ever noted here the odd theory of Greg Cochran that has been around for a few years that exclusive male homosexuality has arisen via an infectious agent.  I am not sure whether Cochran ties his theory to the "modern" version of the homosexual, but Peter Frost, at the last link in the following paragraph, certainly does, and he argues that it might be either an infection or an environmental chemical which led to what he thinks is a change in homosexuality since about the start of the 20th century.

Here's the first link from Jason (more generally about how certain sexually transmitted diseases might affect behaviour), and then you go to Frost's blog, and follow his series of posts on the topic.

It seems to me that the idea of Frost becomes unreliable at the first step, where he argues that it was only from the late 19th to early 20th century that there arose a lot of exclusively homosexual men.  Sure, the argument goes, there has always been homosexual behaviour, but:

In the Middle Ages, this behavior was seen as a ‘vice’ of older heterosexual men, typically with young boys or men of a servile status. In contrast, far fewer men were exclusively homosexual in the sense of being uninterested in women and resembling women in their sexual orientation (i.e., having a woman’s search image and desired self-image). This relative rarity is implied by the astonishment that European explorers felt on encountering Amerindian berdaches during the 18th and early 19th centuries (Désy, 1978).

Now I know Foucault argued that the idea of "the homosexual" is a modern construct (basically, a fundamental change in the way people understood sexuality and themselves), and I have written before that much of his theory sounds plausible;  but this "gay virus" idea (at least as adopted by Foster) takes it a step further, and suggests there is a biological reason as to why people started experiencing sexuality differently.

Surely, this is an improbable step too far.   For example, isn't it very likely that the matter of "third sex" categories turning up in quite a few indigenous societies must have encompassed not just what we would now call transgender individuals, but at least some exclusive homosexuals?   

And what of the difficulty of judging the experience of homosexuality based on historical records?   Just because most of the contemporary commentary we have of homosexual behaviour in a society might be about (say) the pederasty of older married men (see Greece), it may simply never have occurred to anyone to research carefully what men as a group felt about their own experience of sexuality over a lifetime.  I mean, it's even controversial now, the scientific studies of bisexuality that involve trying to work out what gets certain men subconsciously aroused.   (There was a good article about this earlier this year in the New York Times.  It seems that a study a few years back which got widely reported as showing that bisexual men really did respond more as homosexual is now accepted as having a particularly poor experimental set up.)

The point is this - what hope do we really have of a detailed understanding of subjective experience of sexuality across a population of men from 2000 years ago, before anyone really had ideas of objective, scientific surveys or any other detailed form of psychological research?

Foster is especially unconvincing when he argues that the "flapper" fashion of the early 20th century - where women strove to look more boyish and flattened breasts were in vogue - indicates anything meaningful about the heterosexual male "search image".   Doesn't the advent of Marilyn Monroe and other famous, buxom stars of a mere 30 years later put a serious dent in this suggestion?  

We certainly know there has always been a lot of concern in Abrahamic religions through the centuries as to how much homosexual behaviour was going on.   The article "The Experience of Homosexuality Across the Middle Ages" gives a good idea of that.   (And interestingly, its author now says in an updated preface that he has changed his mind about many of the paper's conclusions.  I don't really know what he believes now.)   My point would be:  who knows whether a monastery which had a particular reputation as a haven for homosexual activity in 1500 CE was that way because it had attracted exclusive homosexuals, or because of jail-like opportunistic homosexual behaviour, or in what proportion it was a case of one and the other?  Bishops and saints didn't really care to psychologically investigate it before condemning it.

In any event, not that I have made any detailed study, but it still seems to me that no one really understands the interaction between gender identity, sexual identity and sexual experience.  Sure, there is strong reason to believe the widely reported phenomena of a gay man who has "always known" he was different from other boys - but why does the difference sometimes manifest in conviction that they are the wrong gender, not just attracted to their own gender?

It's something of an understatement to observe that the brain and mind are complicated.  For example, I find anorexia as a psychological disorder incredibly hard to fathom - how it is that the rational part of the mind cannot convince the other part of something that I would have thought obvious from looking in the mirror, along the lines of  "OK, this is really getting unhealthy now, you look like skin and bones and as the doctor says, you're going to die unless you start getting food into your body."   I have a similar attitude towards late onset transgender cases - come on, fellas, you've been married, climbed mountains, had kids and presumably quite a few orgasms with your wife.  Why is changing gender now going to be some kind of fulfilment?  Can't you just take up quilting, or something a bit less dramatic?

In any event, history at least teaches us that varieties of same sex activity have always had some appeal to some people, and anthropology also indicates that people who want to be the other gender have always been with us .  It seems that in some societies, homosexual behaviour was treated as a mere matter of taste and not the subject of much in the way of analysis.   So much of the controversy about it since then seems to have come from attempted overanalysis which may well be forever doomed to be an example of one of the suggested implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem, that the mind may never fully understand itself.  See this quote from Hofstadter:

The other metaphorical analogue to Gödel’s Theorem which I find provocative suggests that ultimately, we cannot understand our own mind/brains … Just as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is it not inconceivable to expect that we cannot mirror our complete mental structures in the symbols which carry them out? All the limitative theorems of mathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally.

No wonder the current Synod is fretting about what to do, if (as I suspect) our whole understanding of sexuality, being an aspect of mind and personality, is always likely to be incomplete.

Update:   on re-reading this post, I think I need to clarify my position, because it perhaps got lost a bit in the ramble:

a.  it may be that a lot more men in the 20th century have started thinking of themselves as exclusively homosexual, but the reason for this is most likely the Foucaultian explanation about the change in thinking about sexuality - broadly, along Freudian lines that there is a large hidden element to it that people sooner or later uncover.  

b. But as to whether the number of pretty much exclusively practicing homosexual males has changed over history is very much guesswork, given the lack of any detailed interest in anyone until about the 20th century in trying to work out such numbers.

c. Even current thinking, of what we think to be enlightened modern thinking on sexuality, is very much a work in progress, and one in which people seem always too sure of themselves that they understand it and its intersection with gender, sexual experience and culture. 

Cheap at half the price!

Virgin buys low-cost airline Tigerair Australia for $1 | Business | theguardian.comgay

I was told by a gay Virgin flight attendant (comments made below by readers from Catallaxy will likely need to be culled)  some months ago that this is what would happen:  Virgin would finish an acquisition of Tiger to allow it (Virgin) to operate as the upmarket equivalent of Qantas, and use Tiger as the "downmarket" equivalent of Jetstar.

A conclusion that defies its elements

Ambitious foreign policy push yet to coalesce

Michael Fullilove's article in the SMH this morning seems to me to reach a conclusion that is rather at odds with the details.

He thinks Abbott has done well on foreign affairs, yet notes that in two respects (being a "globalist" not a "regionalist", and enthusiastic use of the UN Security Council) he is doing quite the opposite to what he indicated in Opposition.   Maybe "Windvane Comes Good" should be the true title of the piece.

But it gets worse.  Fullilove acknowledges that Abbott has had at least one really crook idea, but fortunately was been talked out of it:

A related concern is that Abbott shows a tendency towards imprudence.
The shirt fronting saga is a trivial example, but there is a more
serious one. According to news reports, in the aftermath of the MH17
crash he wanted to put one thousand Australian troops onto the crash
site in Eastern Ukraine. Such a deployment would have presented
unacceptable risks to Australian personnel as well as unprecedented
logistical problems for the Australian Defence Force. Why on earth would
we put so many of our people between such bitter enemies? Luckily,
cooler heads prevailed.

So Fullilove thinks the "shirt front" episode was just a bit of trivia:  I would have thought it a sign of stupid imprudence in language, which tends to be important in foreign affairs.

I really don't get how Fullilove then gets to the conclusion that Abbott has been impressive in foreign affairs:   especially since I think this week lots of people are probably starting to question what an odd look it is to be willing to spend hundreds of millions on a military deployment to Iraq that appears to be doing very little*, while at the same time looking scared and shy of getting meaningful assistance to the Ebola affected nations up and running.**

I will grudgingly agree that Bishop has performed better than I expected in her role.  It seems odd, doesn't it, the way some people turn out to be reasonable as foreign ministers - I always thought that Downer was a surprise success as well.  I think it probably just takes lawyers who are good in face to face "people skills", and perhaps being too intellectual (hello, Bob Carr) works against a foreign minister.

Anyway, I am rathered surprised at Fullilove's article, and have to view him with suspicion from now on!

* since I wrote this, it was announced that the RAAF had a couple of terrorist "kills", but we don't know any details.

**  And when, by the way, are any journalists going to start questioning the wisdom of sending over ground advisers who have nothing to do for weeks until the lawyers get the status of forces issue sorted out with the Iraqi government?)  

Fusion in 10 years? I don't think so....

People who don't want action to reduce CO2 like to promote any report that all of our clean energy problems are about to be solved by new forms of nuclear power.   "No need to worry, folks, the climate change [stage whisper:  which isn't real anyway] solution is just around the corner and you don't have to do anything now."

So we see the headline in The Australian today "Nuclear Fusion on the way" above an article by the ever unreliable Graham Lloyd, with the first line "THE “true atomic age” of limitless electricity without any radioactive waste or carbon dioxide emissions could be a reality within a decade."  As is usual with The Australian, Lloyd's writing contains some reservations further in, but the headline never gives that indication.  

Sounds good, hey?   But have a read of the somewhat more realistic take in Wired, a magazine not exactly known for its technological pessimism:

McGuire designed a magnetic container that shifts the strength of its magnetic field to match those plasma ripples. “If we have a perturbation or a ripple that sends it closer to the wall, the magnetic field gets stronger and stronger, so it has the right kind of feedback to keep it stable,” McGuire says.

The problem with that reactor? It doesn’t exist yet. “Some key parts of the prototype are theoretical and not yet proven,” says Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Canadian fusion company General Fusion.

And there are more skeptical takes on the matter from scientists in the field in this report in Business Insider.

As for the other new energy source, the mysterious E-cat, ridiculous anti climate science website NoTricksZone was keen to promote the paper that claimed it had been "independently verified".   But for some detailed response to how inadequate that paper is, have a look here and here and here and here:   
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1306/1306.6364.pdf

Re-watching Fiddler

Last weekend, having an idle Saturday afternoon to kill, I noticed that ABC was showing Fiddler on the Roof.  I'm pretty sure it was the first time I had watched it since I had seen it in the cinema in 1971.

I remember my parents were a bit underwhelmed by it, as was I at the time.  I think the basic problem was that, after The Sound of Music, there was a particularly high expectation that big musicals should end happily, and ones that didn't felt a tad unsatisfactory.   And it certainly seems, looking back on it, that with the end of Rodgers & Hammerstein, the not-quite-so-uplifting musicals seemed to be quite in vogue in the 60's:  Camelot, Sweet Charity, that little seen Julie Andrews movie Star!, Paint Your Wagon (which I haven't seen, but my mother said it featured lots of mud); and even Oliver and Mary Poppins have a somewhat melancholy feel about their happy endings, if you ask me. 

Re-watching Fiddler, though, I did enjoy its music more than I remembered, and was reminded of its strong thematic relevance to the 1960's. The same challenges that Tevye, the father, faced in terms of his daughters not following his authority and that of "tradition" were certainly the same ones you could see sweeping the West, particularly (I think) in Catholic households.   Yet the Broadway musical was from 1964, pretty much at the dawn of the sexual revolution and all the angst about contraception, and de facto relationships, etc.   It seems in retrospect to be a pretty prescient work.      

There's a very interesting recent article about the show up at the Guardian, written because it is its  50th anniversary.  (Perhaps that why it showed up on TV too?)    I see that the movie version was a big commercial success, although I wonder whether it was to the same extent here,  since at that time I don't know that Australians had had all that much cultural exposure to Jewish humour and characters.

I do still think the story makes one regrettable choice which doesn't work as well as it should.   Why couldn't Tevye's final scene with his 3rd daughter, the one who rejected tradition in the most direct way by marrying a Christian, have been more emotional?   He is packing his cart, about to leave the village forever, and cannot bring himself to look directly at his daughter and her husband who have come to say goodbye.  Tevye finally mutters softly, "And God be with you", which is relayed on by his other daughter, who is upset at her father's behaviour.  

And that's it.  Now, Tevye's attitude may be realistic, but if he is going to be shown to still care for his daughter, wouldn't it work better if he could soften just a bit more and look at, or embrace, the child who he may never see again?  I think it sort of also sours a little the final appearance of the Fiddler metaphor, where Tevye invites "tradition" along with him as he heads his way to America.

Still, a very worthy movie musical.

The "race to the bottom" question

I see that the headline is: Ireland moves to close corporate tax loophole" Well, about time, I think most people would say.

But I did note on his twitter feed a couple of days ago that Jason Soon thought that Bono defending Ireland's low tax regime was "sensible".

I would have been more sarcastic myself:  "Super rich tax minimiser thinks countries that charge less tax are great."  I generally would go along the line in this article.

Bono argues that lower tax is the only thing that Ireland has got going for it on which to build prosperity.     Yet aren't there plenty of other small countries that are doing OK in fairly niche fields?   Some of Scandinavian ones, with their corporate tax rates that range from about from 20 to 27%.  Even New Zealand, which (as far as I can tell - correct me, anyone) is riding high on the cow's back, of all things, to be doing OK, and with a corporate tax rate of 28% (versus Ireland's "standard" rate - before the offshore business - of 12.5%.)     International corporate tax rates all appear at this site.

They make for some interesting reading, and (as one would expect) national economic health is not always  co-related to the corporate tax rate.   Obviously, infrastructure and security issues matter.  The oddest example is at the extreme, where it would seem Vanuatu looks particularly attractive to companies at 0%, but then again, the note contains this summary:

Corporate income tax is not levied within the Republic of Vanuatu. Furthermore, there are no income taxes, estate duties, gift duties, capital gains taxes, tax treaties or withholding taxes.

I'm not at all sure what this means for how the country runs...

The main question I have to lovers of competitive tax regimes (who, largely, by not so odd co-incidence, also want governments to be as small as possible) is this:    how do you avoid the "race to the bottom" - that if all governments undercut each other, they must at some point develop the problem of not raising enough revenue to do the things reasonable people expect governments to do.

And don't just give me some rubbish that is along the lines of "well, government can just never get small enough, and people have to adjust to that."  Only a tiny minority of science fiction loving libertarians go along with the extreme views of how small government should be - the rest of the world is happy with the role of government in welfare developed over the 20th century, in a broad sense.

We know that governments can suffer from cuts that are too severe - look at Kansas, which seems to have Laffer-ed itself into some serious fiscal trouble.   (By the way, I know that the Right's answer to that is "just you wait and see.  They'll work....eventually."   Unfortunately, Stephen Moore, when defending himself on these grounds against Krugman seems to have made some embarrassing mistakes in his figures which had to be publicly corrected.)

And of course there has been much commentary that the Bush tax cuts just didn't work, and have cost "trillions" in revenue.

So tell, me, international tax competition advocates:  how does your theory avoid a race to the bottom that is going to harm countries?  

Sensible and Rotten

Johnny Rotten and I agree: neither of us wants Russell Brand’s ‘revolution’ | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian

I really don't care for Johnny Rotten's perpetually angry/aggro act (or genuine demeanour?), but he comes across as rather sensible and astute on politics in this interview. 

It's also remarkable to note how few young people vote in England.   Compulsory voting has a lot going for it.

Fear and loathing of divestment

I'm rather confused about the Right wing fury over the ANU divestment campaign.   I'm not sure Judith Sloan is sleeping at nights:  she seems to be too busy practising attempts at satire, perhaps because her "logic" is not gaining ground?

Back in February, Sinclair Davidson posted about how the South Africa divestment campaign was not actually a financial success.  (And he got very cross that anyone should argue that being anti fossil fuel mining is in any way a worthy cause - or at least worthy in the sense that being anti-apartheid was.) 

So if that's right, why is the divestment campaign against all that lovely, lovely coal being burnt such an outrage?   Are they worried for the universities losing money, or for the mining companies?

For the university, the ANU shares are apparently only 2% of its investment portfolio.  How much trouble can that cause?

For the mining companies, the hope is that divestment campaigns causes public pressure for them to move away from fossil fuel mining, but how bad does reputational damage have to be before it really does hurt them when there is a market paying good money for their product?

Given the fury on the Right, the suggestion is that this is a sign the campaign can have serious effects.  The best look at the issue seems to me to be this one by Frank Jotzo, who obviously thinks they can ultimately "work", but also notes the points I made above - the current reaction from the Right is rather over the top, and (in reality) probably works to give encouragement to those pushing divestment as worthwhile.

A good case can perhaps be made, then, that the Right wing hand wringing about it is actually counterproductive to their "interests".   Hee hee indeed, hey Judith?

Update:  Sinclair Davidson has missing out on the hyperbole, so he adds to it in a column on the Drum:

Australian universities simply do not have the social licence to trash the domestic economy or place the livelihoods of thousands of Australians at risk on a whim.

 Yes, it's economic apocalypse because a university made an investment decision he doesn't agree with.

And by the way:  the Drum article just contains the usual by-line that he's a Professor of Economics at RMIT.  Isn't it especially relevant to this topic that it also disclose this:

A paper to be released on Monday by the Minerals Council of Australia says the campaign "may contravene the letter or me spirit" of the Corporations Act, and calls on the corporate watchdog to assess tile potential breach.

The council commissioned Sinclair Davidson, a professor of institutional economics at Melbourne's RMIT University, to write die paper, in its most aggressive push-back to the anti-coal collective's urging investors to sell shares in coal companies.

'To the extent that stigmatisation deliberately causes investors to make valuation errors and consequently rebalance their portfolios away from fossil fuel stocks, a violation of the Corporations Act has occurred," Professor Davidson writes.

Has anyone other than an economist associated with the IPA ever found that Corporation Act argument convincing?   How did that other IPA big legal claim go - that tobacco companies could get $3 billion a year in compensation from the government for plain packaging laws?   Oh, that's right:  a complete bust.   (Well, subject to the outcome of a rubbish Hong Kong arbitration.)    Come to think of it, perhaps the Australian government should be sending Davidson over to the arbitration to give evidence - he's the one who thinks plain packaging hasn't had any effect on smoking rates, after all.  As with divestment, the Right can't seem to keep its argument straight.  

I suspect there is less to Thiel than meets the eye

Today in “Peter Thiel says things.” Does society really hate tech? | PandoDaily

and

Do venture capitalists say controversial things to get attention? Are Peter Thiel's Fall 2014 comments part of a larger trend?


and what about this from a recent interview:

You hold up the Apollo program, the freeway system, and the Manhattan Project as examples of the kind of big leaps in technology we need more of. But those were all government projects. Should the U.S. government return to funding such things?

There is an argument that there should be state funding to help things get started where there are not many profits that could be captured. It’s in the public interest. But the way the U.S. government today is dominated by lawyers rather than scientists or engineers suggests that it is very poorly suited for evaluating these kinds of projects. For example, you probably could not restart nuclear power in the U.S. without the role of government. But because our government does not believe in complex coördination and planning, it will not restart the nuclear industry.
It’s quite possible it will just not get restarted.

Really?  As if the US government was ever dominated by "scientists and engineers"?   Roosevelt and Kennedy, responsible for two of those things, were virtually raised to be politicians, weren't they?
The difference perhaps was that they listened to scientists as to what was possible.  The chronic problem today is that politicians on Thiel's side of ledger do not.  

New estimate for sea level rise

Rising sea levels of 1.8 meters in worst-case scenario

While Graham Lloyd is busy crapping on about how there is so much uncertainly about climate change, I haven't noticed the Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece mentioning a new study that gives an estimate of sea level rise that is worrying:

The researchers have combined the IPCC numbers with published data about the expectations within the ice-sheet expert community for the evolution, including the risk for the collapse of parts of Antarctica and how quickly such a collapse would take place.

"We have created a picture of the propable limits for how much global sea levels will rise in this century. Our calculations show that the seas will likely rise around 80 cm. An increase of more than 180 cm has a likelihood of less than 5 percent. We find that a rise in sea levels of more than 2 meters is improbable," Aslak Grinsted, but points that the results only concern this century and the sea levels will continue to rise for centuries to come.

Non existent wingnut donations to ANU to dry up

Well that's odd.  Judith Sloan, who has taken to commentary that includes photos of women she doesn't like and wondering if their tan is fake, is now stamping her foot about the ANU divestment campaign and telling her wingnut readership not to donate to the university.

Somehow, I can't imagine much cash from the aging, wingnutty fanbase at Catallaxy ever heading to ANU in the first place.  (Any spare cash they have has probably flowed into the already filled coffers of the IPA after Professor Stagflation has asked, yet again, for donations to help the IPA whinge about free speech and get their heads on the TV network they want shut down.)

Now, to be fair, I have noticed that even Craig Emerson has questioned the logic of some of the ANU's divestment decisions.  To be even fairer, Sloan actually makes a point I can partially sympathise with:

This whole episode is one reason why I have reservations about the government’s policy on university fee deregulation.  The governance of universities is a complete crock and the additional revenue will simply be pissed up against the wall in terms of more highly paid administrators, including the VC.

But seriously:  Sloan has surely done enough over the last couple of years with her increasingly bitchy, shrill, and dumb ("climate change? ha!") internet and media commentary that she would be about the last person to head an effective campaign to attract anyone other than the likes of Gina Rinehart.

Update:    seeing Judith likes photos so much now:

Update 2: I was reminded when doing this photoshop about Sarah Hanson Young suing Zoo for photoshopping her face onto a bikini model, with part of the grounds being it suggested that being a sex object was the only thing she was good for. I would like to go on the record as not intending to imply that Judith Sloan is only good for being a sex object.

A complete fool of a PM

Tony's Abbott's 'coal is good' line is familiar, and troubling | Lenore Taylor | Australia news | theguardian.com

Gee, Abbott's lines yesterday were worse than the mere "it's good for humanity" bit:

 “Coal is good for humanity”, Tony Abbott declared as he opened a new coalmine on Monday, and its use should go “up and up and up in the years and decades to come”. It’s a pronouncement at odds with the international climate goals his government says it supports but remarkably similar to the coal industry’s own global public relations campaign.

And more from the link in that quote:

"The future for coal is bright and it is the responsibility for government to try to ensure that we are there making it easier for everyone wanting to have a go."

“It is a great day for the world because this mine will keep so many people employed … it will make so many lives better.

“This mine epitomises the have-a-go spirit,” he said.

In May, Abbott told a minerals industry parliamentary dinner he could think of “few things more damaging to our future” than leaving coal in the ground.

This just continues the Abbott line of saying whatever he thinks his particular audience wants to hear, regardless of consistency with what he will say elsewhere.

Completely unreliable; clinging onto pet policies which are clearly unwarranted;  incorporating military leadership in press conferences and non military issues as much as possible for PR purposes like a 3rd world dictator; unable to please the Left or Right with an idiosyncratic set of budget choices that have little rhyme or reason:  he's a shocker of a Prime Minister. 

Serious drought getting very serious for 6.5 million

Sao Paulo Facing Water Shutoffs If Sabesp Withdrawals Cut - Businessweek

And here I was, thinking it was looking serious when a million or so people in Brisbane had our water dam down to about 17% (after very tight usage restrictions) before the rains came.   In Sao Paulo, it looks like about 6.5 million have a dam system at 5%, and the water supply is going to start stopping during parts of the day.

So Rupert like monopolies? What a surprise...

I see that "extreme libertarian" Peter Thiel likes monopolies, and so does Rupert Murdoch. What a surprise.

Update:  for a bit more nuance on Thiel's views, here's an extract from a review of his book:

You see, Thiel is not interested in funding entrepreneurs trying to build a business that will beat the competition; competition, in fact, is precisely what he thinks every company should avoid. The true goal of every startup is to become a monopoly, a company so dominant in its technological arena that it can give investors enormous financial returns with cash to spare for the intensive R&D that can ensure its long-term viability. Google, Thiel points out, is a handy case study. The profits from dominating the Internet search business since the early 2000s have allowed it to diversify into cloud computing, mobile devices, and robotics. According to Thiel, this kind of market supremacy offers returns to more than just investors: companies that create de facto monopolies and use the profits to innovate, as Google has, are truly valuable to society. “Monopolies drive progress,” he writes, in his contrarian way. “The promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.”

His point is a good one—at least as a source for debate. Consider that today’s communications infrastructure is largely built upon innovations—the transistor, UNIX, digital signal transmission—that came out of AT&T, the U.S. phone monopoly for most of the 20th century. For contrary evidence, you might look to Microsoft, which has typified a powerful company’s use of bullying and market share to limit consumers’ choices without creating innovations of comparable magnitude. In any event, Thiel seems bothered by the fact that many economists focus on the dangers of monopolies without considering the potential benefits. In his cosmology, they’re simply mistaken. His faith in the ameliorative forces of the marketplace assures him that even a dominant company (such as Microsoft) will eventually be eclipsed by a younger and more creative company (such as Google). Capitalism, he promises us, has a habit of righting technological wrongs in time. ...

Thiel has been asking a huge question for a few years now: How can we avoid a dismal future of resource depletion, environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and technological stagnation? He thinks the answer is a new wave of startups that grow as large as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon but take on bigger problems, such as curing cancer or providing cheap, clean energy. He claims we aren’t making progress on such things now because we’ve grown less ambitious as a society.

As the review then goes to note, Thiel (and I would add, libertarians generally) have an unrealistic take on how research happens, and their disdain for government money going into research is against the evidence and is merely ideologically driven:

You wouldn’t know it from Thiel, but investing is most of all about providing the feedstock with which some of the larger companies—not to mention universities and government agencies like NASA or DARPA—work to solve difficult problems. Our ecosystem for innovation is no doubt imperfect, but it has an established logic and a proven success rate. Sometimes a good idea is seeded through government funding: a 1994 NSF grant led Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin to found Google. In other cases, a startup’s ideas only really start to spread after the company gets swallowed by a larger one. The biotech companies that have been bought by pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Novartis provide good examples. Startups that wisely resist getting bought up, such as Facebook or Google, usually don’t have much impact until they grow much larger (as Thiel acknowledges in his arguments for monopolies). Tesla—which took a $465 million government loan in its early days—manufactures 35,000 electric cars a year, making it interesting and successful. Producing 100,000 electric cars a year, as Tesla hopes it will by 2016, would make the company important and transformational.

The other thing about monopolies is that we only get to see Google as a "benevolent" monopoly for the future of the planet because of the attitudes held by its leadership, which does not dispute the need for action on the planet wide issue of CO2.  Can you imagine the difference if somehow Rupert was in charge of that company?

There's no doubt in my mind that because of its ideological views, libertarianism is the enemy of effective action on climate change.

How many Australians are now imagining the G20 meeting....

Update: I was curious as to how The Australian would report this. I see it's no big deal to them. Of course, can you imagine the reaction if it had been a Labor PM using such a term? We simply have not seen such an intensely anti-Labor media outlet since the time of Whitlam, except that in economic and good governance terms, the public then genuinely did have reason to be concerned. This time around, the Murdoch sentiment is irrational, fickle (see his changing attitude to climate science), and ideologically driven.

Lead poisoning revisited

Look, we've all read about the sorry history of lead poisoning, but this lengthy BBC magazine article still manages to contain some stories I didn't know about concerning the various ways it has sickened people.   (The wine poisoning aspects I had either forgotten or didn't know much about.) http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29568505 

Potential weird physics refuted

Old textbook knowledge reconfirmed: Decay rates of radioactive substances are constant

I'm pretty sure I must have noted here before a study which indicated that radioactive decay was weirdly connected to the seasons.  Appears it was a measurement problem, which is a bit of an anticlimax, as so many weird physics suggestions turn out to be.

Why?

Google straps Street View camera on a camel to map Liwa Desert | SBS News

Eating crustaceans considered

They don't seem to appear in the frozen section of all Woolworths, but several months ago, my wife and I independently noticed that at one we visited they were selling boxes of frozen, raw scampi.   (We both tend to look at the seafood section of the supermarket when we are in a new one.)  

These interesting crustaceans come from somewhere in the North Atlantic, and we don't have anything very similar in Australian waters.   I am very fond of Moreton Bay bugs, which have a lot more meat in the tail, but they are so ridiculously expensive I pretty rarely eat them.

In fact, Australia has a pretty limited range of affordable crustaceans.  Sure, farmed prawns are now very reliable in terms of taste and often quite affordable.   But our blue swimmer crabs, the type most often available, tend to be somewhat watery and weak flavoured.  Mud crabs have a better flavour and can be nice, but tend to be expensive and I've never tried to cook one at home.   They tend to be an occasional treat from an Asian restaurant.    The lobsters from Tasmania we saw on holiday there can be enormous and (from little we ate of them) tasty, but again, they are really expensive.

So, I quite like eating crustaceans from other parts of the world, and when on holiday.   It's been a long time since I had one, but I remember being impressed with the gigantic prawn like thing served in Singapore.   When in Japan, it is definitely worth eating their crabs.  My wife believes that crabs from colder water are always tastier, and I think the Australian experience with blue swimmers backs that up.   I see that some supermarkets here now sell sections of the huge spiky crabs from somewhere cold - I've never tried them, as I am generally not so keen on defrosted, cooked, crustaceans.    (I'll take defrosted raw prawns though; they seem to do OK in the process.)

So, what about the scampi?    We had some in a soup some months ago, and they seemed OK, but their flavour was not all that obvious.

This weekend, we split some down the middle and grilled them, before serving them on a paella.    Well, this went quite well - it seemed quite clear that the meat (what little of it there is in each tail) was distinctly sweet and flavoursome.  The claws contain some meat but are very hard to get into.   Still, they were a pleasant surprise.

Only a week ago, I had been watching some SBS cooking show (Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Island Feasts) when he was on Mallorca (aka Majorca) and eating a local, very expensive, species of prawn which was famous for its sweetness (and also for being very red straight out of the sea.)   I thought it odd that a prawn should be "sweet", but this seemed definitely to be the character of the scampi meat too.

So, what about scampi generally?    I see via that authoritative source, the Daily Mail, that deep fried nuggets of what is called scampi have become a popular British pub food, after they were introduced as a way of dealing with (what appears to be) the unwanted catch when they were trawling for white fish.   However, the cheapest versions of pub scampi are apparently like our "crab sticks"  (who on earth actually buys those?) - a small amount of the actual crustacean with heaps of "extender" added.

Scampi thus seems to have followed the reverse culinary trajectory of oysters in Britain:  the latter went from being food for the working class until they were all dredged up (the English seem to have long been keen on fishing methods which scour the sea bed) to something for more exclusive tastes;  scampi have become a food that apparently is still only eaten on special occasions in Spain and Portugal but is mere "pub food" in England. 

Anyway, they were nice, and now I know more about them...

My path to creative riches ruined by advancing science

Study: Frozen poop pills may make fecal transplants simpler and safer - LA Times

Curses!  My proposed television series based on time travelling, fecal transplanting doctors (the scene involving Hitler plays particularly well in my mind) has already, probably, been made redundant by medical science.

It's been reported that taking the healthy poop by way of oral frozen capsule might work just as well as the tube in the butt method.

My path to riches is foiled again...

 

Galaxy song 2014

I'm glad I am not a big enough Monty Python fan to have paid to see their London farewell show livecast at the cinema  (I think they did that here?) seeing it turned up on SBS a couple of weeks ago.

I just watched most of it online.  Some dubious sketch choices early on, I thought, and I have to say that in the current world of porn at the touch of a keyboard, the main theme of Gilliam animations (riffs on dirty old men wanting to see nudity in any form) is well beyond redundant.  (He did have a weird imagination though.) 

But the highlight for me was the cameo at the end of the Galaxy song.  Most amusing:

Would be good if the Korean problem was suddenly resolved

The Koreas: Till Kimdom come | The Economist


Hmmm.  Young Kim hasn't been seen for more than a month, and while he's gone, 3 powerbrokers turn up to shake hands with South Korea?  Seems a potentially good sign?

Capitalism and legalisation

Colorado pot shops reaching out to marijuana novices | CPR

The stupidest heritage move ever?

Northbourne redevelopment in doubt after public housing registered by Heritage Council - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


The biggest, most embarrassing, eyesore in Canberra has a provisional heritage listing?   This is such a ridiculous idea, I think the offices the Heritage Council work from will need a listing to prevent people from burning them down.

Now that's a trailer

I was recently dissing Nolan fanboys for their excitement over the mundane trailer for Interstellar.

Now this is a teaser trailer that really gives a thrill:


As Brad Bird is the director, I am really looking forward to this.

A pulsing mystery

Pulsar as bright as 10 million suns baffles astronomers

He probably doesn't know that it's mental health week on the ABC

My oh my.  Is it just me, or does Sinclair Davidson seem to be skirting close to sounding paranoid when he writes today about Media Watch?:

The thing is this: Media Watch – part of a government agency – exists to monitor and intimidate the private media. That is their sole function and they do it well. I suppose we should welcome the fact that in Australia the government does this in plain sight – many other countries would have a division within the secret police undertaking these functions.

Media Watch is part of the state apparatus that keeps tabs on journalists and journalism and so undermines the ability of the fourth estate to expose government misbehaviour and creeping statism. With some, very few, honourable exceptions within Fairfax, News Corp Australia is the only media organisation holding government to account and that is why Media Watch focusses on them.

And he writes this in a column in which it is acknowledged that Media Watch has criticised the government's national security legislation?  (I also see that the show has added a highlight to its website to note that Leyonhjelm did vote against the legislation.)

As it happens, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the potential effect of the legislation on journalists.  But the trouble with the IPA and Davidson being effective critics of it is that they were so over the top about the free speech consequences of both s18C of the Race Discrimination Act, and the Finkelstein report on beefing up media self regulation,  that they now sound like the Think Tank That Cries Wolf with respect to legislation that has actual serious free speech implications.  


As for the title of this post, I don't know if he is being entirely serious or not, but Davidson has for a long time claimed that he barely watches ABC, certainly not for its political journalism, and seems to get most of his political TV news from Sky News.   I've always found this a very surprising claim by someone who (presumably) wants to be taken seriously by politicians, as I expect few of them would deny that the ABC political coverage is detailed and serious, and if you want to be well informed, you don't ignore it.

Update:  if SD's complaint is that Media Watch has only criticised the Act now, after it has been legislated,  can he also please explain why he isn't outraged that one of Murdoch's strongest supporters of everything Abbott (especially his security and defence actions), Greg Sheridan, has only today come out with a column attacking the legislation?  

Peak "Mistress"

You may have noticed I have been a bit busy for much posting this last few days.

But, while you miss me, I trust you haven't missed this startlingly clear computer generated head:



This reminds me very much of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", in which the revolution's "leader" is a talking head generated by the moon colony's gigantic computer, which still has to stop doing other things to concentrate on the graphics.

Isn't it weird the unexpected ways technology evolves?    Just as with Heinlein's use of slide rules on spaceships, the idea that you would have an advanced lunar colony run by a computer which has gained consciousness but can barely cope with realistic graphics illustrates what a tough job it is for science fiction to be correct in the details.   (And another great example of anachronistic technology being used alongside futuristic stuff we are miles away from realising: the way the characters in Mote in God's Eye are using what we now take as routine - tablet like devices connected by wireless to the ship's mainframe - when they are on an interstellar planet.  Mind you, Pournelle has also been keen in his other science fiction on implants which allow direct communication with a computer, but as far as I know, there is still no idea at all about how you would do the neural connections for that to work. Well, OK, I guess cochlear implants give us some idea, but I still wonder whether this is a science fiction idea too far to ever be practical.)

Karen Armstrong on religion and war

Religion does not poison everything - everything poisons religion  - The Spectator

A sympathetic review here of Karen Armstrong's latest book "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence."

Climate sensitivity and what it means in practice

RealClimate: Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

The significance of a lowering of the transient climate response (which is what the recent paper from Nic Lewis and Judith Curry suggests) gets a run in this post at Real Climate, which are deals with criticisms of the choices Lewis and Curry made in their paper.

These seem to be the crucial paragraphs:

The median estimate of the TCR from Lewis and Curry (1.3K) is towards the lower end of the IPCC likelyrange and lower than the CMIP5 median value of around 1.8K. A simple
way to understand the importance of the exact TCR value for mitigation policy is via its impact on the cumulative carbon budget to avoid crossing a 2K threshold of global surface temperature warming. Using the Allen and Stocker relationship between TCR and TCRE (the transient climate response to cumulative emissions) we can scale the remaining carbon budget to reflect different values for the TCR. Taking the IPCC CO₂-only carbon budget of 1000 GtC (based on the CMIP5 median TCR of 1.8K) to have a better than 2 in 3 chance of restricting CO₂-induced warming to beneath 2K, means that emissions would have to fall on average at 2.4%/year from today onwards. If instead, we take the Lewis and Curry median estimate (1.3K), emissions would have to fall at 1.2%/year. If TCR is at the 5^th percentile or 95^th percentiles of the Lewis and Curry range, then emissions would need to fall at 0.6%/year and 7.1%/year respectively.

Non-CO₂ emissions also contribute to peak warming. The RCP scenarios have a non-CO₂ contribution to the 2K peak warming threshold of around 0.5K [IPCC AR5 WG1 – Summary
for Policymakers]. Therefore, to limit total warming to 2K, the CO₂-induced contribution to peak warming is restricted to around 1.5K. This restricts the remaining carbon budget further, meaning that emissions would have to fall at 4.5%/year assuming a TCR of 1.8K or 1.9%/year
taking TCR to be equal to the Lewis & Curry median estimate of 1.3K (assuming no mitigation of non-CO₂ emissions).

While of some scientific interest, the impact for real-world mitigation policy of the range of conceivable values for the TCR is small (see also this discussion in Sci. Am.). For targets like the 2 K guide-rail, a TCR on the lower end of the Lewis and Curry and IPCC ranges might
just be the difference between a achievable rate of emissions reduction and an impossible one…

 The take home points (which climate change lukewarmenists do not want to know) seem to be this:

1.      the lower sensitivity estimates that some recent studies suggest do not mean you can burn carbon and have no risk of breaching the nominal 2 degree limit;

2.      the lower estimates make achieving a "safe" limit significantly more do-able, but effort to achieve it is still necessary.

Burka-ed again. (Oh alright, it's the niqab this time)

The Guardian has had some lively comment to its Comment is Free piece by a woman of unspecified age and domocile (British, perhaps, even though she refers to the controversy in Australia, and presumably fairly young) who decided to start wearing the niqab, and talks up the quasi-feminist aspect of it.  The trouble is, she finds it liberating in pretty much the same "up yours" manner as do people who wear obviously offensive T shirt slogans:

I feel liberated by the fact that I choose what you see. We pass judgement on how a person looks before we know them. When you deal with me, you deal with my mind, my personality, my emotions and what I have to offer as a person – and that’s it.

Yes, and a personality that sounds pretty much stuck in the mindset of the teenager:

I don’t want to be controlled and told what I can and can not wear: that is oppression.

Anyhoo, I doubt anyone serious in Australia is going to try on a street ban on the burka or niqab. 

But as someone in comments says in response to her "you can't judge me" attitude:

 If you think wearing the now niqab stops you being judged based on your looks you're deluded.

The Bogan that was nearly in Star Wars

Readers may have noticed that I rarely use the word "bogan,"  even though I did a couple of posts back when referring to Senator Lambie.  (Seriously, resistance to class-ist forms of insult sometimes just has to crumble in response to overwhelming provocation.)

In any event, this last weekend I learnt something that is hilarious from an Australian point of view.  There's a very lengthy article at Salon about the early drafts of the very first Star Wars movie, and from this we learn something very important:

Their still very human leader is General Darth Vader, still just Sith Knight Valorum’s righthand man. Deak—one of the sons of the Starkiller—makes short work of the Stormtroopers. Deak, a Jedi, uses a blaster, while the Stormtroopers wield laser swords. Vader defeats Deak because he is “strong with the Bogan”—Lucas’s initial name for the Dark Side of the Force.

It gets even more explanation a bit further in:

After a dinner of “thanta sauce” and “bum-bum extract,” Luke embarks on a long-winded, jargon-filled explanation to his younger brothers about the Force of Others. Originally discovered by a holy man called the Skywalker, the Force is divided into the good half, “Ashla,” and the “paraforce,” called the Bogan. To prevent people with “less strength” from discovering the Bogan, the Skywalker only taught it to his children, who passed it on to theirs. And there you have it: as conceived for the first time, the Force was an exclusive, aristocratic cult.

Even better, there's some actual script extract, and I defy any Australian to read this and not laugh (my bold, incidentally):

As they start blasting their way out, Han is overcome by a mysterious attack of depression:

HAN: It’s no use. We’re lost.
LUKE: No, no, there’s a debris chute. It’s the Bogan force making you feel that way. Don’t give up hope. Fight it!
HAN: It’s no use, it’s no use.
LUKE: Well, we’re going anyway. Think of good things. Drive the Bogan from your mind.

It’s astonishing how much the word “Bogan” crops up in this draft: thirty-one times in total, versus ten mentions for the light-side Ashla Force. It’s not hard to picture the depressed writer whiling away the long hours at his door desks, trying to drive the Bogan from his mind.

Maybe Lucas got it right in this part:

 On the ship, it turns out Deak is badly injured. Threepio can’t do anything for him: “These are spiritual wounds,” he explains. “The Bogan arts often run contrary to the ways of science and logic.”

 Another draft and the Bogan started to fade:

 The Ashlan Force is gone in the new draft, but Lucas clung to the name of the evil Bogan force, eager to have us understand it. “Like Bogan weather or Bogan times,” Luke says when he learns about it from Ben Kenobi. “I thought that was just a saying.” The Bogan only crops up eight times in this draft, however.

 Now, to be fair, it would appear from this site that the use of the word in Australia only was becoming common from about the mid 1980's.  Wikipedia suggests it started in the late 70's, and Lucas was apparently writing his very first draft in about 1973.

I suppose it's even possible that the use of Bogan in the actual Star Wars movie may have prevented the rise of the Australian use of the insult.   If the multiverse is true, this is probably the case in an alternative reality.

Still, this reads as extremely amusing in our local universe...

Gratuitous insult time

Well, that's a bit weird

Fly Babies Inherit Traits From Semen of Mom's Past Lovers - D-brief | DiscoverMagazine.com

The explanation may be this:

Scientists believe this quirk in inheritance could be due to some unknown molecule in the males’ seminal fluid, which could be absorbed by the females’ immature eggs. The lingering molecule could affect offspring once another male fertilizes them.

The findings resurrect Aristotle’s theory of telegony, which posits that males leave a mark on a woman’s body that influences her children, even if another man sired them. That idea was discredited in the 20^th century as modern genetics emerged. However, in light of this study the
idea of telegony appears to warrant a revisiting, to see if it also might occur in other species.

Inheritance, it seems, can take lots of forms — a continuing complication of Mendel’s simple idea.

Burqa, burka, berko...

What with every politician and pundit in the land talking about it, I feel I have to have an opinion on this burqa/burka business.  It's all driving me a bit berko...

First of all, why has the ABC gone completely with the spelling as "burka" instead of "burqa" which I reckon most other media outlets are sticking with?  Odd.

Secondly, this morning, Waleed Aly complains that people are actually going on about the niqab, not the burqa/burka.  Yet a certain Senator to be mentioned in the next paragraph did post a picture of the burka in her bit of misleading, Islam baiting, PR about it.  In fact, I'm getting a bit peeved by people like Waleed who seem to claim you'll virtually never see a burka in Australia, when I'm certain I have, and I do not live in any particularly "muslim" part of town.

Thirdly, surely there is one - and probably only one - thing we can all agree on:   bogans attacking Muslim women in the street or on public transport for wearing a mere hair covering that leaves the face open (the hijab, for example) are offensive, dumb nuts.    OK, bogans attacking or yelling at women in the street for wearing a burka/niqab are offensive too, but the absolute height of stupidity and offensiveness is for those who are deeply upset by mere hair covering.  I mean, I would like to be able to yell at men or women on the street with horrendous tattoos every day, but in the interests of civil society, I keep my opinions to a blog, so that they can abuse me in return without causing a scene...

But once we get past that point, I have a bit of a problem:  even if one did generally support the idea of a ban on the burka/berka/niqab, how could one admit to it when the main proponents are the Senator from Bogan Central Casting (Lambie) and  Tea Party (anti abortion wing) wannabe Cory Bernardi?

But on the other hand, can I live with the embarrassment of finding myself in agreement with selfie superstar and classic liberal values bore Tim Wilson?  [I mean, if the European Court of Human Rights can uphold a wide ranging ban on Muslim face covering in France, surely to God that proves there is no conclusive "rights" argument one way or the other on this.]

And what's up with Andrew Bolt?  After running a full blown Muslim Panic Station campaign on his blog for a month or so, he can't bring himself to agreeing to a segregation of the burka clad in Parliament? 

Despite this confusion and worry about who I might be accidentally agreeing with, here are a few points I want to make:

1.    for those women who feel compelled by males to wear it, the feminist argument against this form of dress is obvious.  Even if the women don't feel compelled as such, as a symbol of male dominated religion's control and possession of women (as in Saudi Arabia, where the religions police once preferred to hinder girls escaping a fire rather than let them be seen on the street without the required gear) it is still, obviously, objectionable;

2.   I'm more interested in the quasi feminist justification for wearing it that we see being run a lot lately (the women who say they feel empowered by wearing it, as it means they don't have to meet anyone's standard for fashion, as well as protecting them from the gaze of strange men on the street).  I count this as a nice try, but it doesn't wash for two reasons:

a.   there is no credible need to cover the face to make a statement about freedom from societal standards of fashion - heaps of women go to the shops without makeup, and plenty of Western women - even rich ones - set a sterling example of being carefree from the tyranny of fashion.

b.  if the argument is out of genuine concern about the face being exposed makes a woman the potential object of lustful attention of men - this is sexist in the extreme (towards men) - and to be honest, it's close enough to the nuttiness of Andrea Dworkin (of "all heterosexual sex is rape" fame) to deserve derision.

3.   What of women who don't overthink it, but just feel it is a religious obligation or a matter of cultural solidarity, or whatever?   Well look, I think we're talking an extreme here - the example of (old style) Catholic nuns, or Buddhist monks, is not a valid comparison in the face covering stakes.   What's more, even in societies with  a religion that takes nudity seriously as a sign of religious asceticism (see the nude Hindu holy men in India, or Jainism), there is surely still a time and place for where their choice of religiously motivated (un)dress is acceptable.    And as much as it pains me, I have to come to a quasi defence of Tony Abbott here - talk of how his wearing speedos offends people is snide and silly.  He is not trying to address Parliament in one, and unless you want to start buying into Islamic arguments about how women should wear head to foot coverings on the beach,  you need to leave the question of modesty on the beach well alone.

No, my final decision is this:    Parliament, courts and other government bodies are part of a basically secular set of institutions (and please, let's replace the Lord's Prayer at the start of Parliament with something else to make that clearer) that should reflect the type of society that the nation aspires to be - one where the extremes of religious or social views do not interfere with some really fundamental things, such as the respect that men should have towards women to not control them in terms of appearance, and for women not to treat men as if they can't see a female face without thinking of sex.  Faces allow for proper and good communication - and to be open to good communication with all other people regardless of gender is a sign of respect for them.

People on the street can dress, modestly, as they like; and I would not see the need for the full extent of a French ban here.

But if coming to Parliament, or court, it is not security concerns that should motivate a "ban", but a question of respect for the society they are in.  Just as I expect no Westerner to kick up a stink about having to remove shoes if visiting a temple that requires it in a foreign land.

I would support a rule that all faces - male and female (remembering that a man who wants to wear a motorcycle helmet, or a nutty V for Vendetta face mask as a political statement, is not going to be allowed to do that either) - should be open in Parliament or within similar institutions.

But is it worth having that argument now?  Probably not, even though it is hard to say when it is the right time to do so.   

I think this means that I can declare - Everyone Else is Wrong.

Puzzling excitement

I am honestly not getting the geek boy (and girl) excitement about the final trailer for Nolan's "Interstellar" movie.

In terms of science fiction trailers which look awesome, it has nothing, nothing, on those for Gravity.

Depp spotting ahead

Fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film to be shot in Queensland | Film | theguardian.com

My family spends an inordinate amount of time re-watching the Pirate movies on DVD (even the much derided No 3), so it's pleasing in a way to see one will be made near by.

Mind you, the third Narnia film (the fake ship for which we were able to visit) was not so good, so here's hoping  for a better script for Depp.

Update:  I just heard that Depp is not yet "committed" to the movie.  Hard to imagine it without him...

The leaping dentures of France

Literary Review - John Brewer on the French Smile Revolution

Also from Literary Review, here's a piece about the change in smiling and dentistry in 18th century France.

I liked this paragraph, with its particularly amusing final image:

 The 18th-century cult of sensibility, spread through performances on the
Parisian stage and nurtured by novels of deep emotional intensity by
the likes of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, loosened the grip of the
costive, courtly smile. Charming and tender smiles - transparent
expressions of feeling intended to be shared by all men and women,
though, in practice, chiefly enjoyed by the Parisian cultural and social
elite - became fashionable. Teeth and smiles were chic - and so were
dentists. Practitioners like Pierre Fauchard made dental care a
profession: they abandoned the street (where teeth had been brutally
pulled by colourful showmen like 'Le Grand Thomas', who operated on the
Pont Neuf and was known as the 'Pearl of the Charlatans' and 'Terror of
the Human Jaw') and set up offices (upstairs so the patients' screams
could not be heard in the street below) in fashionable spots like the
Rue Saint-Honoré. They encouraged tooth conservation, not brutal
extraction, wrote treatises that established dentistry as a science, and
emphasised the importance of patient self-care, which helped them
peddle a succession of cleaners, whiteners, gargles, toothpicks and
breath sweeteners. Fauchard invented spring-loaded denture sets, which,
as Jones reminds us, 'had the unfortunate habit of leaping dramatically
out of the owner's mouth at unguarded moments'.

The highly eccentric English

Literary Review - Alexander Waugh on a truly uncommon family

Well, it's all rather trivial in a way, but this review of a biography, which covers some of the circles that Evelyn Waugh moved in, certainly paints a picture of an England with more than its fair share of highly strung, eccentric, sexually diverse, characters.  

2 degrees of confusion

Of course, Graham Lloyd, or whoever writes his headlines, has twisted the (admittedly rather confusingly argued) commentary that appeared in Nature about the 2 degree limit favoured by the IPCC to make it sound as if the limit is nothing to worry about.

Then the coal miners' economist of choice, Sinclair Davidson, goes on a self serving ramble about how this is climate scientists admitting the 2 degree target is a "failure", and (it would seem) reading the article to mean that because scientists now think that it is not going to be hit, or not going to be hit as soon as previously thought, they have to add other "fudge factors".

As I have already indicated, the Nature commentary piece is confusingly constructed, but one would have thought that even a libertarian could see that the part where they say the 2 degree limit is "unachievable" means that they are concerned that the world will easily surpass it.

But of course, in the multi headed beast that is climate change skepticism, anything is clutched at as reason not to do anything.  It's any or all of the following (amongst dozens of other reasons):  "the scientists are fraudulently fiddling the temperature record", "it's warming but who knows if it will be harmful?", "hey, maybe it's cooling!"  "the cost of doing anything would be worse than adapting" or "it's too late, the world will overshoot 2 degrees and we should only worry about adaptation."

There is no logical consistency - only ideology driven positions against governments taking serious action against planet changing, possibly very disastrous for huge numbers of our descendants, greenhouse gas emissions.

So - actual good articles on the 2 degree matter are at Stoat and Real Climate.

Read them if you want to make some sense of the situation.

As Real Climate notes, if anything, the worry amongst scientists has increasingly been that the 2 degree limit is set too high - but (I would add) this is no reason for defeatism: if (say) 1.8 degrees is more damagingly planet changing that first feared, then overshooting it by another .5 to 1 degree is also way worse than originally thought and still worthy of avoidance.

And as I understand it, even on the lowest estimates of climate sensitivity, if you keep burning carbon the way libertarians think we should, the planet will still exceed 2 degrees in a matter of decades, not centuries.

That's my take on it anyway...

A very bad year

Jacqueline Kennedy’s Struggle After J.F.K.’s Assassination: The Nightmares, Drinking, and Suicidal Thoughts | Vanity Fair

Anyone with even a passing interest in the Kennedy story should be interested in this lengthy article about how badly Jackie Kennedy suffered from what we would now call PTSD in the first year after his assassination.

Announcement of the death of black holes almost certainly premature

Backreaction: Black holes declared non-existent again.

Bee knows a fair bit about this stuff, and she thinks the recent paper arguing that black holes cannot form are mistaken.   

GM crops and herbicides - again

A report at Wired recently points out that there are quite a few science types who are saying that GM crops for increasing tolerance for herbicides is only going to lead to a continuation of the resistance wars which glyphosate has already (pretty much) won.

This view seems to involve much common sense, and (I assume) it is short term economic imperatives that are against it.   A bit like climate change really:  it'll come to bite the short sighted in the backside soon enough.

Open carry nut

What Happens When a White Man Parades Around Outside a School in a Bullet-Proof Vest With an AK-47? - Little Green Footballs

Nietzsche on Love

Nietzsche on Love | Issue 104 | Philosophy Now

I'm not sure that I would trust Nietzsche on anything to do with love and eros and stuff, apart from the wisdom of wearing a condom (oh, he didn't advise that?), but I guess this paragraph made some sense for his time:

In aphorism 71, ‘On female chastity’, Nietzsche comments on the lack of
sexual education particularily of upper-class women, and the adverse
psychological impact this has on them. These women are made shameful and
ignorant of all sexual matters as part of their feminine honour for the
securing of their husband. However, once they are married, they are
faced with the expectations of a sexual life without any preparation;
and the man they respect and love most now asks of them precisely what
they were previously taught to consider vulgar and unacceptable.
Nietzsche empathises with this paradoxical situation for women when he
writes, “to catch love and shame in a contradiction and to be forced to
experience at the same time delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror, and
who knows what else, in the face of the unexpected neighbourliness of
god and beast… Thus a psychic knot has been tied that may have no equal”
(71). In other words, the gender roles that are part of the formula of
courtship and love, in many instances have an adverse psychological
affect on women.

Looks pretty, but...

  

Sunflower solar harvester provides power and water - tech - 30 September 2014 - New Scientist

Did you see this design for pretty efficient solar power and lots of hot water?:

It looks pretty, but I really wonder how it stands up to hail and wind.  (The mirrors are metallic foil, not glass.) 

It's either a warming catastrophe or complete rubbish

Is it some sort of rule at The Australian that it can only run a story about projections for a hot summer in Australia if at the same time they run a column by an aging ignoramus of a business man that warming is all a weather bureau conspiracy?  

Don't train lizards

If morphic resonance is true, this is dangerous research:

Scientists from the University of Lincoln set out to investigate whether the bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps) was capable of imitating another lizard.

They created a wire door and placed a tempting mealworm behind it. The team found that the lizards could be taught to open the door, and then pass on that information to other creatures.

Because we don't want to see more stories like this.

All about Japanese prefab

20 shades of beige: lessons from Japanese prefab housing

The author is a bit of an architectural snob, I reckon, but I must admit I didn't know the prefab house industry in Japan was so big.

Sounds unwell

I was wondering why he hadn't commented here for a while, but I see that Homer Paxton was/is unwell.   Sounds very unpleasant: get well soon...

Bad news for reefs

Ocean acidification could lead to collapse of coral reefs: To better understand the effect of acidification on coral growth decline, Hebrew University scientists led by Prof. Jonathan Erez and Prof. Boaz Lazar at the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences, together with Carnegie Institute colleagues Dr. J. Silverman and Dr. K. Caldeira, carried out a community metabolism study in Lizard Island at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

The researchers compared calcification rates documented in 2008 and 2009 to those measured using similar techniques in 1975-6. Despite the fact that the coral cover remained similar, the researchers found that the recent calcification rates had decreased by between 27% and 49%. These lower rates are consistent with predictions that took into account the increase in CO2 between the two periods, suggesting that ocean acidification is the main cause for the lower calcification rate at Lizard Island.

While previous studies on individual reef building corals have shown that they lower their calcification rates in response to ocean acidification, in the present study this was demonstrated for the whole community. These findings suggest that coral reefs are now making skeletons that are less dense and more fragile. While they still look the same, these coral reefs are less able to resist physical and biological erosion.

According to Erez and Silverman, "The results of this study show a dramatic decrease in the calcification of the reef, and that it was likely caused by ocean acidification. When the rate of calcification becomes lower than the rate of dissolution and erosion, the entire coral ecosystem could collapse and eventually be reduced to piles of rubble. The collapse of this habitat would ultimately lead to the loss of its magnificent and highly diverse flora and fauna."

This strikes me as a pretty significant study, as I would expect that Lizard Island is a bit less affected by river run off issues than reefs further south. 

More depressing Islam news

Iran executes man for heresy | World news | theguardian.com

Well, in the story itself, it appears that the Iranian judiciary is denying it was because of heresy - instead it was more to do with "illicit sex" with his followers;  although it is also said that there was no evidence of the sexual activities.  What's more, there are several long term prisoners for religious reasons:

Iranian authorities are sensitive towards those practising Islam in
ways not conforming to the official line. In recent years, several
members of Iran’s Gonabadi dervishes religious minority have been
arrested and are currently serving lengthy prison terms.

Amnesty said last week that a group of nine Gonabadi dervishes were
on hunger strike in protest at their treatment in prison. They were
Mostafa Abdi, Reza Entesari, Hamidreza Moradi and Kasra Nouri, as well
as the five lawyers representing them who have also been jailed: Amir
Eslami, Farshid Yadollahi, Mostafa Daneshjoo, Afshin Karampour and Omid
Behrouzi.

“The men were mostly detained in September 2011, during a wave of
arrests of Gonabadi dervishes. They were all held in prolonged solitary
confinement, without access to their lawyers and families, and were
sentenced, after two years and following grossly unfair trials, to jail
on various trumped-up charges,” Amnesty said. “The men are prisoners of
conscience, imprisoned solely for practising their faith and defending
the human rights of dervishes through their legitimate activities as
journalists and lawyers.”

All of this from a country that could be useful in the fight against IS!

Drink and violence in the NT

Protecting the right to drink trumps the safety of Indigenous women in the NT | Nova Peris | Comment is free | theguardian.com: In Darwin alone domestic violence-related assaults have jumped 35% in the last two years. It is even worse outside the capital city. The rates of domestic violence in Tennant Creek are 12 times higher than in Darwin. In Tennant Creek police statistics show that only 10% of domestic violence assaults don’t involve alcohol.

In the NT, the right to drink trumps the rights of victims, who are continually bashed in alcohol fuelled violence. I am extremely concerned that the Abbott government has decided to sign up to this approach.

A domestic violence strategy that does not even mention alcohol is not worth the paper it is written on. A domestic violence strategy that continues to allow people who commit alcohol related domestic violence to keep drinking as much as they like will not work.

You would have to suspect she's right.   Also, as someone in comments notes, this is a much more important practical issue than Aboriginal recognition in the constitution.

I put it down as yet another case of bad Abbott government priorities.

Did you hear? - the Minerals Council has made a film as part of its PR campaign...

[Apologies to Laika, which seems a very progressive company and probably won't mind righteous ridicule.  I will review their film shortly...]

Don't tell Rupert Sheldrake...

Stone Age groups made similar toolmaking breakthroughs

Different palaeolithic populations around the world might have developed
a crucial toolmaking skill independently. This conclusion, based on the
analysis of hundreds of artefacts from a recently excavated
archaeological site in Armenia, weakens a long-held theory that Stone
Age people in Eurasia learnt sophisticated techniques from migrating
African tribes. The work is published in Science¹.

A case of morphic resonance, no doubt.  (Heh).

The intellectual quality of Barnaby on climate change

I enjoyed Jane Cadzow's retrospective on the years she has spent writing profiles of well know personalities for the Fairfax Weekend Magazine.   (Her paragraphs about Warwick Capper are especially amusing.)

But her description of what it was like talking to Barnaby Joyce in 2011 about climate change show the dire lack of intellectual rigour we see in so much of this Abbott government:

Joyce, now the federal agriculture minister, talked non-stop, though not always in complete sentences. As we sped along a south-east Queensland highway one morning, he laid out his case against evidence that global warming was caused by carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity. "I'm going to just pour bullshit on that," he told me, "and just say, well, I just, you know, I, and okay now I'll go beyond that ..."

I waited until he paused for breath, then suggested that even if there weren't conclusive proof of man-made climate change, it might be sensible to reduce our emissions. Why not err on the side of caution?

"Erring on the side of caution means we should drop a bomb on Tehran," he replied.

"Does it?" I asked doubtfully. "Well, you know," he said, "because there's a possibility that they're developing a nuclear weapon."

Now, I think everyone finds Barnaby likeable at a personal level (very down to earth and self deprecating much of the time) and, surprisingly, he has been actively telling some other Right wingers around the place to stop with the "Australia can be the food bowl of Asia" overblown rhetoric.  But seriously, it's clear he takes his climate science from Professor Andrew Bolt, as so many in this government do.

He's getting old...

It's as if The Australian is written by Rupert personally.  Here he is, tweeting like he's Alan Moran (maybe he is):

That first word, being used by him, is causing much hilarity (and wishes for his early earthly departure) in many of the tweets that follow.

Hey, I had that weird thought first

In only the second paragraph of his Guardian column about the (rather unimportant) issue of who pays for the first date, David Mitchell, who is making a welcome appearance back at the paper, wonders whether in the future drones will carry embryos across the sky, such that the stork story will turn out to have been a premonition of the future.

I would like to point out that I had odd thought 9 months ago.

That's OK, maybe someone else had written about it before me.   But if he writes soon about my proposed TV series of time travelling, fecal transplanting doctors who change the course of history, I'll expect an acknowledgement.

The ever reliable tobacco industry speaks

BBC News - France to introduce plain cigarette packaging

Hey, interesting to note that France is going the "plain packaging" route for cigarettes.  Apparently, youthful smoking has been on the increase, despite the EU already requiring that packets be plastered with health warnings.

Most amusing, though, is a claim from a tobacco aligned company (although the article does not say what it actually does):

Celine Audibert, a spokeswoman for French firm Seita, which is a
subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco, described the move as "completely
incomprehensible".

"It's based on the Australian experience which, more than a failure, was a complete fiasco," added Ms Audibert.

She should work for the IPA; she makes about as much sense.  

Well known skeptic has some doubts

Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core - Scientific American

This is a rare story - a widely known skeptic getting a bit spooked by a remarkably meaningful co-incidence (or more?)

It would be great if this sort of thing happened more often.  Skeptics should doubt their skepticism a bit more often than they do, I think. 

(I also trust that this isn't some sort of playing with his readership on Shermer's part.)