More about Texas and poor planning

It seems that Texas, and America, has an  ongoing problem with politicians taking not floods (and climate change) seriously:

In the months before deadly flooding in Texas killed at least 24 people, some of the state's politicians objected to the imposition of stricter building standards for federally-funded projects in floodplains.

Engineers said that such standards are needed if taxpayer money is not to be flushed away in the next flood. ...

Texas received a “D” in flood control in a 2012 report on its infrastructure by the state’s section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. It ranks among the top states in the country in dollars paid for flood claims — behind Louisiana and New Jersey and ahead of New York and Florida. But it still has no statewide floodplain management plan. Flood mitigation is divided among three state agencies, none of which has full authority to implement capital projects or manage the state’s 23 river basins.

The report warns that the population of Texas is expected to double in the next 30 to 40 years and development in the floodplains will likely increase, both of houses and commercial developments near the state’s streams, rivers and lakes and along the Gulf of Mexico.

Also, it appears the national flood insurance issue is not the "socialist" problem that another article indicated:

Texas is also not a participant in the National Flood Insurance Program, though many of its communities are, the report notes. Standard homeowners insurance does not cover flooding but residents can get insurance through the program provided their community participates. In return communities agree to meet or exceed Federal Emergency Management Agency requirements for reducing the risk of flooding. ..

And as for the problem across the nation:

A strong attachment to private property rights has gotten the United States into a cycle of spiraling flooding losses, said Nicholas Pinter, who in August will join the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Mitigation is far more expensive than avoiding floodplains in the first place, he said.

“This is a not a short-term problem in Texas, this is a nation-wide imbalance,” he said. “This is the history of our development, management of our floodplains.”

After massive flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 1993, the country spent $87 million in taxpayer funds to remove flooded structures, and stayed off the floodplain for three to five years, he said. But 10 years later, $2.2 billion of new infrastructure had been built on land that was under water.

“That’s the problem, it’s one step forward, two steps back,” he said.

The CRISPR way to danger

The sudden burst of interest in the ethics of human genome editing has come about because of the recent arrival of a new gene editing technique called CRISPR, and there is an excellent Nature News feature up about it, which notes warnings and misgivings from scientists about how it could go wrong.

Some extracts:

 CRISPR is causing a major upheaval in biomedical research. Unlike other gene-editing methods, it is cheap, quick and easy to use, and it has swept through labs around the world as a result. Researchers hope to use it to adjust human genes to eliminate diseases, create hardier plants, wipe out pathogens and much more besides. “I've seen two huge developments since I've been in science: CRISPR and PCR,” says John Schimenti, a geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Like PCR, the gene-amplification method that revolutionized genetic engineering after its invention in 1985, “CRISPR is impacting the life sciences in so many ways,” he says....

Biologists have long been able to edit genomes with molecular tools. About ten years ago, they became excited by enzymes called zinc finger nucleases that promised to do this accurately and efficiently. But zinc fingers, which cost US$5,000 or more to order, were not widely adopted because they are difficult to engineer and expensive, says James Haber, a molecular biologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. CRISPR works differently: it relies on an enzyme called Cas9 that uses a guide RNA molecule to home in on its target DNA, then edits the DNA to disrupt genes or insert desired sequences. Researchers often need to order only the RNA fragment; the other components can be bought off the shelf. Total cost: as little as $30. “That effectively democratized the technology so that everyone is using it,” says Haber. “It's a huge revolution.”

Now the warnings:

“This power is so easily accessible by labs — you don't need a very expensive piece of equipment and people don't need to get many years of training to do this,” says Stanley Qi, a systems biologist at Stanford University in California. “We should think carefully about how we are going to use that power.”...

“People just don't have the time to characterize some of the very basic parameters of the system,” says Bo Huang, a biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco. “There is a mentality that as long as it works, we don't have to understand how or why it works.” That means that researchers occasionally run up against glitches. Huang and his lab struggled for two months to adapt CRISPR for use in imaging studies. He suspects that the delay would have been shorter had more been known about how to optimize the design of guide RNAs, a basic but important nuance.

 ...Doudna has begun to have more serious concerns about safety. Her worries began at a meeting in 2014, when she saw a postdoc present work in which a virus was engineered to carry the CRISPR components into mice. The mice breathed in the virus, allowing the CRISPR system to engineer mutations and create a model for human lung cancer⁴. Doudna got a chill; a minor mistake in the design of the guide RNA could result in a CRISPR that worked in human lungs as well. “It seemed incredibly scary that you might have students who were working with such a thing,” she says. “It's important for people to appreciate what this technology can do.”

Andrea Ventura, a cancer researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a lead author of the work, says that his lab carefully considered the safety implications: the guide sequences were designed to target genome regions that were unique to mice, and the virus was disabled such that it could not replicate. He agrees that it is important to anticipate even remote risks. “The guides are not designed to cut the human genome, but you never know,” he says. “It's not very likely, but it still needs to be considered.”

As the article later notes, it might end up being a case like the earlier excitement about gene therapy falling apart, when researchers discovered it was a lot trickier to administer that hoped, and could kill.

This seems very likely to me.

My hunch, expressed in an earlier post, was that working on the molecular genetic scale is never likely to be easy and would be readily capable of having unintended consequences on other bits of the gene.  Seems I was right:

Yet many scientists caution that there is much to do before CRISPR can be deployed safely and efficiently. Scientists need to increase the efficiency of editing, but at the same time make sure that they do not introduce changes elsewhere in the genome that have consequences for health. “These enzymes will cut in places other than the places you have designed them to cut, and that has lots of implications,” says Haber. “If you're going to replace somebody's sickle-cell gene in a stem cell, you're going to be asked, 'Well, what other damage might you have done at other sites in the genome?'”

Keith Joung, who studies gene editing at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, has been developing methods to hunt down Cas9's off-target cuts. He says that the frequency of such cuts varies widely from cell to cell and from one sequence to another: his lab and others have seen off-target sites with mutation frequencies ranging from 0.1% to more than 60%. Even low-frequency events could potentially be dangerous if they accelerate a cell's growth and lead to cancer, he says.

What's more, I wouldn't be confident that even the successful removal of certain bits of DNA which cause disease might not turn out to have other, non desired, effects, but no one in the article addresses that.  

As the article goes on to also explain, the technique has the potential to bioengineering animals that always pass on the new characteristic, leading to the possibility of completely eradicating species very quickly.  But at what ecological cost?

So libertarians can get as uptight as they like about bioethicists who are philosophically opposed to editing the human genome for permanent changes down the line, but they ought to look at the real and practical issues with the process because they get too excited about its potential.

Oh the irony (and, possibly, I can stop talking about it now)

I've been thinking of the irony of how Tomorrowland, which specifically decries the popularity of pessimistic takes on the future in films and stories, is being outdone badly at the box office by a Max Mad movie.

It's like Brad Bird had a point...

I should explain:   the whole theme of Tomorrowland (in terms of pessimism becoming a self fulfilling prophesy) is something that I have often thought about over the years, especially in relation to how science fiction has changed, and now, in relation to the "it's too late anyway" excuses people come with up for not supporting government policies to minimise future increases in CO2 or spending on clean energy. 

I am also a long time fan of the techno-optimism of Disney's EPCOT centre.

Hence, the movie very much aligns with my opinions, up to and including the potential global benefits of elitist libertarians having large masses of metal fall upon them. 

Americans and flood insurance

Texas floods highlight need to reform key insurance program

Well, this is interesting - America has a government mandated insurance scheme for those who own houses in 1 in a 100 year flood zone, but it is broke and (allegedly) encourages development on said flood plains.

Hence the libertarian inclined have something government mandated to point the finger at as contributing to bad investment decisions.

But it doesn't stop the fact that in places like Brisbane, the local council simply prevents new residential development on land that is below the 1 in a 100 year flood line (or if it allows a build, the design has to be such that living areas are above the flood line.  Therefore, a raised house may be OK.)  

Well, that's OK then...

Toothbrush contamination in communal bathrooms

From the report of a study that finds that having your toothbrush in a bathroom with a toilet does indeed mean there will be some fecal contamination on it:

"The main concern is not with the presence of your own fecal matter on
your toothbrush, but rather when a toothbrush is contaminated with fecal
matter from someone else, which contains bacteria, viruses or parasites
that are not part of your normal flora," said Lauren Aber, MHS
(Graduate Student, Quinnipiac University). 

Texas and land use restrictions

In Texas, the Race to Build in Harm's Way Outpaces Flood-Risk Studies and Warming Impacts - NYTimes.com

I've seen precious little on this issue, other than some posts at Revkin's Dot Earth blog, such as the one above.

But it certainly appears that Texas' famously loose regulation of zoning and land use (which libertarians tend to celebrate, even if Houston seems to routinely score high on World's Ugliest Cities lists) is responsible for developers being free to build lots of homes on known dangerous flood plains.

It appears there have been plenty of warnings about it, all ignored.

Way to go, libertarians.  Cheaper housing for everyone, just don't be in it when it rains heavy.

And by the way, the rain in two American States last month really was record breaking:

A big ask

The United Nations climate conference: Making climate agreements work | The Economist

A couple of economists argue here why they still favour a cap and trade scheme to make international reductions in CO2 work.  But they do show a certain optimism, to put it mildly, about enforcement mechanisms.  Here are the concluding paragraphs:

There is no bulletproof solution to the problem of enforcement, but
at least two instruments should be used against countries which break
climate agreements. First, the WTO should treat non-compliance as a form
of dumping, leading to sanctions. Second, non-compliance should commit
future administrations and should be treated like sovereign debt. In a
cap-and-trade system, a shortfall of permits at the end of the year
would add to the public debt of offending country. The conversion rate
would be the current market price. Non-participating countries should be
punished with border taxes administered by the WTO.

There is no perfect solution to climate change that wraps economic efficiency in a
politically convenient package. But the current pledge-and-review strategy is unacceptable, and will just prolong the waiting game. A carbon tax, which is efficient and reasonable, is clearly superior. But the cap-and-trade approach combines the efficiency of the carbon tax with easier enforcement. For that reason we believe it should sit at the heart of any successful global climate agreement.

Any day now, I'll stop mentioning it...

Brad Bird's Movies Are About Creativity, Not Ayn Rand - The Atlantic

A pleasing article here about Brad Bird (and Tomorrowland).

Libertarian elitism

It's quite timely that Tomorrowland [yes, when will I stop talking about it?] has a plot which has prompted discussion about its quasi libertarian/Randian aspects, given the jailing of Ross Ulbricht for founding (and running) Silk Road as his libertarian dream.

Jason Soon has been tweeting (without comment) some libertarian articles expressing sympathy for Ulbricht.  This one from (I take it) libertarian cheer leader Kathryn Steele is completely and utterly over the top:

Make no mistake, in a society that slaps pedophiles and rapists on the wrist, Ross Ulbricht is sentenced to die behind bars because he dared to question the authority of the state.

Ghandi questioned the authority of the state and strove for a solution. Rosa Parks and MLK questioned the authority of the state and strove for a solution. Thomas Jefferson questioned the authority of the state and strove for a solution, George Washington questioned the authority of the state and strove for a solution.

What she doesn't mention is the issue of whether Ulbricht was putting contracts out to kill people threatening his business model.  (Maybe it was being done as pretensies, seems to be the libertarian response - like putting out fake contracts is a legitimate way of conducting business.)  But hey, what does that all matter, as long as Ulbricht was doing something that let people thumb their noses at the law of the land (several lands, actually) and libertarians could once again feel the righteousness of condemning a "war on drugs" that they have become utterly obsessed with as their favourite boogey man.     

I have previously posted about an article in AEON that explained why Silk Road, and enterprises like it, are doomed to become dangerously criminal.   It's worth reading again, as is this detailed report of the history of Ulbricht and the evidence that came out at trial:  it shows that Steele swooning over the alleged brilliance of her hero is just crap.  For one thing, the simple way he was caught indicates he was not the sharpest libertarian criminal mind in the drawer.   Ulbricht's defence that he was not the ring leader after setting it up is shown pretty convincingly to be improbable and (of course) self serving.   The work of the police in getting the laptop he was operating on was real crime movie stuff.

In any event, this case, and the libertarian support noticeable in Reason for direct human genetic modification, does demonstrate that the intellectual elitism of Ayn Rand's view of the world (you know, killing off moochers on a train)  is still a real issue within libertarianism.   National and international drug laws are for the little people, apparently.    Help facilitate their breach because you philosophically oppose criminalising drug trade on libertarian principles, and you're supposed to be a hero.

Yeah, no.

The judge's reasoning as to why this had to be hit with the harshest possible punishment was quite compelling:

Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country. This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.

And as for libertarian views on direct editing of the human genome - I'll come back to that later.

Tomorrowland Viewed - Blogger Happy

Saw Tomorrowland on the weekend, with the teen and almost teen kids, and we all liked it.

I don't understand the negative, or even mixed reviews.  There was nothing wrong with the third act:  it was not "too preachy":  it was all about what Brad Bird said he wanted to make - a movie about why optimism for the future had dissipated since the 50's and 60's.

Brad Bird remains a fine action director.    It consistently looks spectacular, and has elements of considerable charm.    (It's true, it's not a film for really young kids, but then, nor were the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and no one demands that of all Disney output these days.)

But now, let's get into the political analysis and spoiler territory.

Spoiler Alert:

As I have said, it is truly weird the enthusiasm with which some on the Right have taken a cue from the likes of Breitbart to hate the film, sight unseen.  (Oh no! - a two hour film mentions global warming as a serious threat to the planet for about 45 seconds of its running time, and it must be condemned.  Geez, the Right is truly intellectually enfeebled at this point in history.  When is it going to recover ?)

To be fair, though, at least one Right wing site gave it a good review.  That attracted this comment:

George Clooney, and the movie is being used by Government Motors to push Smart cars.

I'm pretty sure I already know what the movie is about. No thanks. I'm just sick to death of Communism.

?

On the other side of the political fence, the movie has attracted a fair bit of commentary about whether Brad Bird is a crypto libertarian, particularly at Slate.  (Reason also noted it could be called a version of Atlas Shrugged for Kids.) 

I reckon this Slate article answers this proposition correctly:  no, Bird is not a Randian fan, and is clearly a supporter of Democrat politicians.  Bird has respect for the innately talented (very clear from Ratatouille and The Incredibles), but his stories also emphasize the talented fitting in to society and benefiting it collectively.

I mean, (honestly, clear plot spoilers about to be stated)  even in Tomorrowland, the two characters who espouse the wonders of said titular dimension as a de-regulated realm where the best can succeed free of restraint (a distinctly libertarian idea) turn out to be evil killing robots; and the guy who has decided to keep the rabble out of his version of Galt's Gulch gets killed (we think) in the end.  

Aren't those plot points a fair enough hint that Bird thinks talent should be free to have its head, but that's about where his libertarian/Randian sympathies stop?

And a  final point:   the movie has made me realise that any movie which heavily features rocket packs is likely to be enjoyable.   I didn't mind The Rocketeer all those years ago;  but even a dark film featuring them, like Minority Report, was also good. 

But it must just be a rocket pack, not a rocket suit.   (Based on the fact I don't care for the Ironman movies.)   My rule of thumb regarding movies with rocket packs is quite specific.

Tall, liberal, poppy syndrome

Rarely do you get as much media attention to a movie having a disappointing opening  as you do with  Tomorrowland.

As I noted before, it's been absolutely clear from looking at comments at American sites in particular that Clooney is despised by those on the Right for his liberal stance, and when someone like Drudge calls on the Tea Party's flying monkeys, they are happy to visit any site (Variety! - ha) with comments rubbishing him and any movie he's in.  (Disney itself is somewhat of a target too.  I'm not sure that any truly dedicated Tea Partier in America can bear to go to one of its theme parks.)

Of course, it's true that the movie has received mostly mixed reviews.   But at IMDB, it's receiving a user rating of 6.9, which shows most people don't consider it a complete disaster.

The political getting involved in attitudes towards movies reminds me of John Carter in 2012.  I recall that, for some reason, Right wing sites tended to give it good reviews, but it was a genuine box office disaster - $73 million in the US in total.  When it turned up on free to air TV here sometime last year, I tried to watch it, but man, it was awful, and I gave up after 30 minutes.   I have no idea what make the Right side with it.

In any event, my allegiance to Brad Bird will ensure I see Tomorrowland this weekend.  (I think Clooney is likeable, especially in comedies, but I don't by any means see all of his movies.) 

Update:   for those who note that I can't stand Clint Eastwood - true, I can't, although I don't just put it down to his dopey politics (the empty chair routine helped Obama, if anything).  I have always found him a bad actor, don't care for his frequently recurring violence and revenge/vigilante themes, and never thought any of his films were interestingly directed.  And besides - he has wide respect even from notoriously liberal American film critics (see Sniper, for example), showing that (unlike the Right) the Left does not automatically write off Hollywood figures because of their politics.   

Big polling news

Newspoll closes as News Corp Australia replaces 150 staff with 'robopoll' | Media | The Guardian

I guess the obvious problem with Newspoll was its reliance on landlines, but on the other hand, I've always thought automated poll questions were easier for busy people to simply hang up on immediately.  I thought Newspoll was still very reliable, although how it manages that, I'm not sure.  Do they just keep ringing until they find enough people in each age bracket?  I guess they do...

I've been polled by both methods but my interest in politics is such that I was happy to participate in both.  I still think, though, that it is easier to exaggerate your opinion on individual issues to a machine if it gives you a 1 to 5 scale. 

Either/or

Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness

Seems that this experiment means either the future affects the past, or that atoms are everywhere (as a blurry probability smear) until they are measured.

In either case, this seems quite significant.

Nature on laser weapons

Military technology: Laser weapons get real : Nature News & Comment

The fog problem has still evidently not been overcome, which is a shame.   I guess that means fog machines may become an important bit of defence equipment in future, which seems a bit retro, doesn't it?

Sorry, David.

Well, seems to me that Bill Shorten is getting all the attention and kudos from gay marriage supporters for his move on the topic, and not David Leyonhjelm.   

Politics is a funny game, hey?  By which I mean, it amuses me no end that the Senator has been sidelined. 

Perhaps he'll have to go back to talking to an empty Senate about guns,  keeping kangaroos as pets, and how taxes give him hives.  Update:  oh, and how he's into "woo" about wind turbines.  About which, incidentally, see this post taking down some Graham Lloyd reporting.

Republican paralysis

Jeb Bush fumbles for "moderate" stance on climate, falls on face - Vox

This talks more broadly than just about Jeb Bush, and gives a good summary of the climate change policy paralysis the Republicans are in.

With any luck, some hot El Nino related weather shakes them up more, but I'm not overly optimistic.  There are too many people who have to admit they are wrong.

Lomborgian claims scrutinised

"Seven Nobel Laureates" Behind Climate Contrarian Bjorn Lomborg's Think Tank Are Not All They Seem, Or Even All Alive | DeSmogBlog

Turns out one of the Seven Nobel Laureates has been dead for two years; another is 94 and a climate change lukewarmer since the 1980's; a third is on the board at the libertarian Cato Institute.

What a surprise Lomborg's work leans towards doing stuff other than reducing CO2 in a hurry?

The yeast apocalypse cometh

Partly human yeast show a common ancestor's lasting legacy -- ScienceDaily

I've been writing about yeast for a while now, and contemplating ideas of yeast apocalypse of varying degrees of seriousness:

a.  cosmic ray mutated yeast on board a spaceship or colony becomes particularly well adapted to the human gut, causing nearly all people therein to be continually drunk;

b.  genetically engineered yeast to make fake milk goes rampant in the environment and causes thousands of  brewers to get obnoxious, cloudy, cheesey beer;

c.  genetically engineered yeast to make opiates goes rampant in the environment and gives all home brewers a morphine addiction.

 Now, with the story above about how many genes humans and yeast share, I can perhaps go further, and get some sort of yeast/human genetic cross over resulting in the yeast-ification of the human species.  Not exactly as exciting as The Fly, I guess; rather more like the original The Thing from Another World.  (It was an evolved vegetable, after all.)   

Napoleonic summary

Why We'd Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo | History | Smithsonian

Looks like a very readable summary of Napoleon's life (about which I know little) at the link.

Weird quasi friendship

William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Mailer’s Friendship - The New Yorker

Speaking of climate change....something known for more than 100 years

Guest post: Nothing New Under the Sun | …and Then There's Physics

Go read this excellent post which extracts a section from a 1904 book which sets out the clear understanding that already existed then as to the role of CO2 and  water vapour in regulating the Earth's climate.

Move forward a 100 years, and politically motivated, conspiracy minded idiots with a means of communication that lets them gather a gullible following easier than ever before are still denying it is possible.

Can you tell I'm feeling cranky today?

About the weather (and climate change)

Slate has an article about the recent, very intense, rainfall causing flash flooding in Texas.  It makes the point that the dumb decline to understand, or refuse to believe, or whatever (my bold):

Over the longer term, this kind of weather isn’t totally unexpected—extreme swings in precipitation are becoming the new normal. This month’s heavy rains are directly linked to a building El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is forecast to strengthen throughout the summer, meaning heavy rains could return to the southern plains at regular intervals.

A steadily escalating whipsaw between drought and flood is one of the most confident predictions of an atmosphere with enhanced evaporation rates—meaning, global warming. Since 1958, there’s been a 16 percent increase in the amount of rain falling in the heaviest rainstorms on the Plains, even as long-term projections point toward an increased risk of megadrought. Both of these can happen at the same time.

Texas’s quick transition from drought hellscape to underwater theme park was egged on by both El Niño and climate change. A quick check of the latest seasonal forecast shows there’s a lot more rain to come this summer.

The heat wave in India is making a lot of news too, and when you see scenes of the slums of that country, as were shown on Foreign Correspondent last night, it's hard to imagine a country less prepared for killing heat.  (Well, maybe Bangladesh, because one of the unsaid things about the story of the father and son working as rubbish collectors in India was "gee, how bad must Bangladesh be for this guy to think he had a better chance of getting ahead by doing this in India?")

Mind you, it's not clear that maximum temperatures are often setting new, all time records; but heat waves are measured by length, not just daily maximum records.  Does the Indian weather bureau think climate change is making them worse?   Yes, it seems so, but I guess they are just all part of the global UN socialist conspiracy, hey?:

And heat waves are increasing as a result of global climate change, according to the India Meteorological Department. Over the past half century, from 1961 to 2010, heat waves (when the temperature exceeds the average by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius) have increased by a third.

A heat wave in Ahmedabad in 2010, with temperatures reaching 112 degrees Fahrenheit, caused an “excess mortality” of about 1,300 people, according to a study done in 2014. 
A heat wave in Andhra Pradesh in 2003 — still considered perhaps the worst in recent years — claimed more than 3,000 lives.

 And as for the El Nino, I was looking at the  Climate Reanalyser site for today's summary of sea surface temperature anomalies, and this is what it looks like:

Yep, sure looks like an El Nino, as far as I know...

Army problems

Iraqi Military Losing Ground to ISIS Reflects Political Dysfunction in Country - The Atlantic


And by the way, the America Right's attempt at putting all blame on Obama for the situation in Iraq is pretty shameful. 

Solar criticisms reviewed

The benefits of solar do outweigh its costs. Some have a hard time accepting it | Giles Parkinson | Comment is free | The Guardian

I knew that there would be a substantial pushback against the Grattan Institute report on roof top solar.  In what media I have read on the Grattan report, I don't quite understand the motivation of the authors, apart from something like attention seeking.   They seem broadly supportive of solar power, but (as this article linked above indicates pretty convincingly) they also went out of their way to exaggerate the issues with the policy mix up in certain years of its  introduction.

Compulsory cruises continued

Vietnamese asylum seekers kept on customs boat for a month

Seems an extraordinary far reach of Australian customs to be returning Vietnamese to that country.  And what about this?:

Major-General Bottrell said there was a "diplomatic exchange between the Vietnamese government" and the Australian government before the group were returned to the coastal town of Vung Tau, in southern Vietnam.

"There was a level of comfort provided for them," he said. He told a Senate estimates hearing that Vietnamese officials provided assurance that there would be no retribution for the group's illegal departure from Vietnam.

But Major-General Bottrell admitted the Australian government did not track asylum seekers once they have been returned, under questioning from Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young,

Easy to forget he's still alive

John Glenn: Evolution should be taught in schools

If you had asked me, I would have assumed that Mercury astronaut hero John Glenn had died but I had forgotten.   He is, in fact, still alive (age 93), although not exceptionally healthy, but the sounds.  Still got his marbles, though, which is nice..

Some commentary on the Irish gay marriage situation

It depends on what you want (and I note both of these were written before the vote):

*  some typical hyperventilating Brendan O'Neill commentary about how the forces of political correctness are evilly dominating and vilifying everyone against gay marriage;

*  an article in the Christian Science Monitor that suggests a combination of economic change and 20 years or so of sustained scandal about the past behaviour of the Catholic Church is behind it.  It's quite a good article, I think, noting that (contra O'Neill):

But on the whole, the Dublin campaigners are typical of the Yes effort: young, upbeat, and cosmopolitan – much as Ireland has become. Indeed, it resembles other EU nations, with its urbanization and a growing tech sector. This transformation runs from the silly – beards and boutique beers – to the substantial, with growing tension about the country’s traditionalist stances on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.

Hey, wait a minute:  there's nothing "silly" about boutique beers, although even I fear the micro brewing bar movement has become so popular that I might have to start to disdain the over-enthusiasm for them.  I'm too old to be a hipster.

I haven't seen Catholic commentary about it yet from The Tablet or the Catholic Herald.   I'm guessing one will be sorta pleased, the other not.

The tabloid economist

Gee, it's very tabloid of Sinclair Davidson to do a post that I find difficult to interpret other than as a dog whistle to the effect "Obviously pensioners and welfare recipients are getting too much money - look they are going on cruises!"

A few points spring to mind:

*  pensioners have friends and family, and sometimes they pay, or help pay, for them to go on holidays

*  the assets test runs from $200,000 to $433,000, depending on circumstances.  Does SD know how cheap cruises now are?    Even with Cunard, the website tells me you can get fares from as low as $2,539.   Clearly, any assets test with a level above even (say) $50,000 is going to allow for pensioners, who hold it mostly in cash, to have several cruise holidays, if they want.

*  SD has previously indicated he thinks the home should not be included in the assets test.   What does he want, then, pensioners to be asset rich but cash free, because they might choose to use cash for holidays?

*  What hypocrisy for a libertarian/small government type  to even imply we or the government should judge how much a pensioner should receive based on how they spend the money they do have.   Yeah, a real freedom endorsing position, that would be.

Twisty jet stream strikes again

Record heat roasts parts of Alaska, where it’s warmer than Washington, D.C. - The Washington Post

It's being caused by the jet stream buckling again, so that warm air stays over Alaska but cooler air heads further south (and across to the other side of the country.)

In other far Northern climate news, the Arctic Sea Ice extent has been tracking far on the low side for a few months now:

Dawkins and the foreskin

I had been curious as to the motivations of the father in this bizarre case from America about the mother who had agreed to her son's circumcision, then changed her mind, fled with the child, and eventually went to jail for her obstructionist efforts in which the courts had all sided with the father.

This article in Slate notes that the father believes the operation is needed for phimosis (a too tight, non retracting, foreskin.)  It appears one doctor suggested it, although the report notes:

Later, a urologist questioned that diagnosis, but agreed that Chase would benefit generally from a circumcision.

However, it is also reported elsewhere that the father thought circumcision was "just a normal thing to do", and that would appear to be consistent with his original motivation for getting it into the parenting plan when the kid was only 1 to 2 years old not being particularly medically motivated.  (You can't be sure that there is any problem with phimosis until  a boy is older than that.  I guess it might be put in as a mere precaution, but I would be surprised.) 

Anyway, as I say, all the courts have sided with the father, and the father is claiming medical support for having it done for phimosis at an age when it would start to appear the operation may be warranted.

So I would have thought that should be the end of the matter for smart people to leave the topic well enough alone.

But, I see from Slate that Richard Dawkins has been supporting the nutty, hyperbolic "Chase'sGuardians" group trying to raise money for the mother (and to scare off the judge and doctors with threats, including death threats to the father, at least.)

Here's some detail of the actions of the mother who Dawkins is specifically supporting:

Nebus also asked the court to have Hironimus stop allowing anti-circumcision activists to continue using their son's name and likeness on the internet. She had been ordered to do so in the past but has disobeyed that court order....

Nebus testified that three doctors who were supposed to perform the procedure on the boy had removed themselves from doing so after apparently receiving what he called "threatening letters" from activists calling for the father not to have the boy circumcised. Nebus claimed that he too had received death threats.

During his testimony, Nebus detailed an incident where Hironimus burst into a doctor's office where the child was being examined in order to schedule a procedure. Nebus said she "threw a tantrum" and yelled at the medical staff that she had not given consent for the boy to be examined by the doctor. Nebus said their son, who had witnessed the outburst, was "visibly shaken." He also claimed that the boy had expressed fear over getting a circumcision. Nebus hinted on the stand that this was due to Hironimus' using "scare tactics" on the boy, though he didn't make clear what those tactics might've been.

Nebus also testified that the mother had been allowing the anticircumcision activists to use the child's likeness and name on their websites, as well as on posters and picket signs during protests outside the courthouse as well as at CityPlace.

Seriously, who can doubt that it is the mother, pictured here in court, looking every bit driven close to insanity by her acceptance of the cult-like belief that circumcision is completely evil:

 is the one who is causing the most stress to the boy?

And as for those in the movement:

Supporting the mother's case is a band of so-called "intactivists." They're an army of special interest groups — Doctors Opposing Circumcision; Attorneys for the Rights of the Child; and Intact America. There's also a Facebook page called Chase's Guardians, and a petition with nearly 6,000 signatures at Change.org.

Amanda Petrillo said she heard about the case and decided to spread the word on social media and through the petition. She's the Broward-based director of Intact Florida, which is separate from Intact America.

"A forced circumcision at this stage will be extremely detrimental to not only the boy's physical well-being, but his mental and psychological well-being as well," Petrillo said.

Shame on Dawkins for getting involved with such a bunch of first world extremists with far too much time on their hands, undoubtedly causing harm to the boy psychologically by their contribution.

David's scary dream

Advanced toilet training

Amusing story (kinda) from America.

I've been thinking...

That story about developing yeast that could make opiates reminded me today of the recent story about geeks interested in developing yeast that could make milk proteins.  In that post, I speculated about such yeast proliferating in the wild and having the potential to ruin fermented products.   Well, rather than cheese tainted home brewed beer, opiate tainted ones could be even worse.

Yeast is easy to work with for such wannabe DNA tinkerers, but doesn't the fact that it lives happily in the wild, floating invisibly around us, make the potential for its accidental release more of a concern than the escape of other micro-organisms?

Well, my point is not completely unfounded.  In a Popular Mechanics article "Better Beer from Genetically Engineered Yeast":

The ecological concern is more nuanced, Verstrepen says. Here, his main concern is the prospect of introducing non-yeast genes into a yeast, with the worry that these new, human-picked genes could be bred or passed on across yeasts in the outside world. "And this is a serious concern. You need to understand what you're doing, and make sure you're not going to accidentally confer some ecological advantage to the outside population," he says.

Even if these new yeasts were to escape, he explains, the chances of them out-competing other, wild yeast species—given that beer yeast is tailored to perform in a very unnatural environment—is unlikely, but certainly worth watching for.

I see that anti GM advocates are ahead of me, and that genetically modified yeast has already been used for lots of purposes, including drug production.  This article speculates on the possible health effects on humans getting an accidental GM modified yeast in their gut.  ( I assume that they don't actually normally take up residence there, but I'd have to read more about it.)

Going back to a science journal, I see a link to a paper in 1994 about an experiment to see if a GM modified yeast did well in a "natural" environment.   I wonder if such tests are required on all GM modified yeasts before they are used?

Curious minds - well mine, anyway - would like to know....

Stay healthy, stay smart?

Infections can affect your IQ

A man who chooses to be gay against gay gentrification*

I've muttered before about the extraordinary amount of gay navel gazing that is hosted at Slate, and the most tedious writer they have, who is wont to take 1000 words to express what others could in 100 (OK, maybe 200), is J Bryan Lowder.

He recently wrote at length about gay as his adopted culture (as opposed to merely being homosexual), and while I am a part of that large section of the population that genuinely can't quite get its head around why a great many (but not all) men who like to sleep with men act gay, or camp, and share some odd and distinctive tastes in music and art,  I just couldn't be bothered staying with Lowder's boringly expressed attempt at explanation.   As someone in comments said:

....the title seemed to represent some interesting concepts. But I couldn't finish, in part because it became quickly evident that an essentially semantic argument had been overwrought and overthought. And in part because this article reads like a dissertation--one that lacked an outline.

This author clearly has writing talent, but loves his words more than he loves his story.

This week, Mr Lowder (a young man who writes as a young man) has an idealistic, no, actually naive, complaint:  that gay couples raising children in a now somewhat gentrified part of New York should not be complaining about gay sex shops and condom littered footpaths because they don't think these are good things for their kids to be walking past on the way to school:

I realize I’m being hard on these people, parents who I’m sure just want what’s best for their children. But they’ve got to realize that this campaign is a total betrayal of a history of sexually inclusive activism that has made it possible for them to even raise kids and build lives together in this now-fancy neighborhood in the first place. The desire on the part of many gays to assimilate into traditionally straight ways of living is not in itself a bad thing; the problem comes when that move is made as some kind of repudiation of other, gayer ways of living, particularly as manifested with regard to important gay spaces like bars and shops.

Lowder, deservedly, attracts quite a bit of ridicule in comments:

Take a pill, Lowder.   Preferably a horse tranquilizer. Jesus.
"I find condoms on the New York sidewalk a few times a week, and you know what I think, every single time? I’m glad someone decided to use this when they got laid."
No you don't.

And:

Stop prude-shaming gays and lesbians who do not wear their every sexual act and proclivity on their sleeves for their entire lives. The assimilation you criticize is likely the primary, if not only, reason for the sea change we have seen in heterosexuals' attitudes toward gays and lesbians this century. "Don't discriminate against me because of whom I love and build a life with" is a much easier sell than "Don't discriminate against me because all the people at my sex orgy are of the same gender."

And I like the sentiment, to a degree, although the reference to "perversion" makes one suspect the writer is perhaps just a little more intolerant than needed:

When it comes to raising children I would certainly HOPE parents are hypocrites! Boozers, should be hiding their boozing from their children, dopers should be hiding their dope from their children, abusers should be hiding their abuse from their children, perverts of any persuasion should be protecting their children from their perversions. America seems to have entirely forgotten the concept of 'discretion'.

Finally: 

It's not homophobic or prudish to shelter young children from constantly seeing things that they are developmentally unable to comprehend. And it begs the question, what should these parents do in the meantime until their kids are "old enough?" Change schools? Blindfold their kids when walking to school? There is a reason why most municipalities have zoning laws for shops that sell sex and adult-oriented products.

Ah, zoning laws!

That raises another topic on which certain commentators have an excessive obsession.  I've got a post coming about that too.

*  I felt bad about the earlier title, since I hate the sound of the anyone saying "oh, he's a gay" as if that was the crucial identifier for any personality.

The Letterman departure

Just finished watching the last David Letterman, and agree with the writer at Slate who said it was perfect.  

Sure, I think the show ran out of creative steam maybe, I am guessing, five or so years ago, and I had stopped watching it when it started being shown at erratic times.  But seeing so many clips of how great it used to be over the decades before its decline made for a nostalgic and very satisfying end.   He was clearly emotional but with no mawkishness, and his simple thanks to his family brought a tear to the eye.

And now, let's see how Colbert goes. It's hard to imagine his transition....

Far be it for me to criticise other people's taste in entertainment...

............................................

OK, have you finished laughing yet...no?   OK

.........................................

Alrighty.

But I am curious about why people like Jonathan Greene can merely "wonder" about the way rape (and violence) is used as entertainment in Game of Thrones, and not actually conclude that the show is unworthy of his, or other people's, support.  

He writes well, if a bit too overly flowery for my liking, on the topic, but merely teeters on the edge of that conclusion.

[In spooky voice heard inside his head]:  Join me, Jonathan.  Come over to the side of actually telling people a show can be a dangerous stain on the psyche of the public and should not be made or watched.  It is your destiny.....*  

(Not that I've ever watched it, of course.)

* And while we're at it, if you email me I'll tell you a few challenges I'd like you to put to Sinclair Davidson on air.

The big lego set in the computer

Minecraft Stars on YouTube Share Secrets to Their Celebrity - NYTimes.com

I have recently started fiddling with Minecraft, under instruction from my son.

Thus far, I have a cottage and a nearly completed house in "Steve is Great" world.   I think a temple to my magnificence is next called for.

As you were...

Squash the Tomato

Now at the risk of readers thinking I'm obsessing about Tomorrowland (which has now dropped down to 59% approval, making it a Rottentomato "miss") or George Clooney, I have been meaning to observe for a quite a while that the Rottentomatoes site has gone increasingly wonky over the last year or two.

First, the number of times the "key quote" seems quite contrary to whether the movie has been scored positive or negative seems to have increased, a lot.

Secondly, the number of well known movie reviewers who appear there has been heading down, down, down.  In their place are some folk who come from backwater sites most people have never heard of.

Thirdly, when you use the app version, you get a different bunch of reviews from the web version (I think.)  Or at least, last I looked, Australian reviewers got priority. 

I had forgotten about the Metacritic site, but it still seems to feature prominent critics only, and takes the immensely sensible approach of calling a mixed review "mixed" instead of trying to count it only as a "hit" or "miss".  Someone still gives reviews a number, and I guess if I read the site more carefully I might have a problem with some of those ratings, but still it seems a lot more sensible system than what Rottentomatoes has become.

And Metacritic still has Tomorrowland at 62.  So there...

Quantum weirdness under investigation - just down the road

Quantum physics: What is really real? 

I'm quite pleased to be reading an article about experiments to determine the true nature of quantum physics, particularly when it talks to physicists from two Brisbane universities.  

It's a little hard to credit that an incredibly important scientific finding that could change everything could come from Griffith University, or Brisbane generally, but who knows? 

You will all bow down and respect the intellectual greatness of the city when that happens, I'm sure...

That's weird...then the explanation found

I was scanning the largely unfavourable review of Tomorrowland at Variety, and then had a look at the comment thread.   Dominated by complete wingnuts: 

Clooney is generally one of the most over-hyped faces out of the lala land that is Hollywood. Wouldn’t waste my money. Tomorrowland will be free on Comcast soon enough…

I’ll never know….Clooney does not get any of my hard earned money no matter how good the show is.

Anything that the Liberal Loon Clooney stars in, is not worth seeing – Total trash!!

I knew the movie was crap as soon as I saw the calving glacier. This is just another shrill eco-whackjob movie with “stupid” as a plot and “even dumber” for dialogue. Only someone who wants their kids indoctrinated into the whacko Leftist theology of environmentalism is going to pay to let their kids see this propagandized drivel.

 Purge is coming says:

May 18, 2015 at 3:51 am

More pop psy liberal propaganda. Poor baby boomers. The world no longer wants you smelly hippies in the command chair.

Now who knew that American Tea Party nutters with their hatred for George Clooney would be big readers of Variety?  

I had to get down the thread a fair way to find the explanation:  

As suspected, it's a case of sending out the flying monkeys.

I expect a comment by avid Drudge reader Steve Kates might turn up there soon...

Heh

Just spotted at the New Yorker.

Update:  how could anyone deny this is a case of "it's funny 'cos it's true" when you read articles like this.

It's complicated

Colorado Marijuana Legalization 2015: Fighting The Black Market And The Everyday Challenges Of Selling Legal Weed

Interesting, detailed article here on how the Colorado legal marijuana experience is not wiping out the black market, nor raising as much revenue as forecast.  (Presumably, those two results are closely related.)

Not paranoid at all

Steve Kates, the Nutty (Associate) Professor of Economics at RMIT who posts at Catallaxy has long made utterly ridiculous statements about the United States and Obama in particular.  (He claimed recently not to watch TV at all, which is odd because he reads like the most gullible Fox News watcher on the planet.) 

I don't bother reading his posts in detail, but I did notice this in one of his shorter posts today, wherein he seems to have crossed the line into full blown right wing paranoia:

I am now convinced that Drudge has been gotten to in the US since there was one report yesterday and then nothing today about what you would think is the most disturbing event since the War in the Middle East began. This is “Nazis take Stalingrad”. Is the news now so suppressed that it can truly be said that we are at war with Eastasia in alliance with Eurasia, as we have always been, and no one notices a thing?

Meanwhile, Sinclair Davidson's contribution to the Right Wing War on the ABC has expanded to the sophisticated level of "I don't like the way she looked at him.  That's a real problem."   

Yet Davidson himself was one of the talking heads who appeared last week on 7.30 talking about the budget in a pre-recorded bit.   And he was on Jonathan Greene's Sunday breakfast show.  Do they treat him poorly or with contempt?

The real problem with the ABC is that it gives all IPA types - including Davidson - too easy a pass and too much time to appear in short bursts as "reasonable", when if you actually look into what they write and say elsewhere they are anything but.

Paying the price for blind opposition to harm minimisation

Fighting HIV where no-one admits it's a problem - BBC News

Quite an amazing story here about the rapid rise of HIV - mainly amongst the straight population too, it seems - in Russia; largely due to conservative policies which completely oppose harm minimisation:

In an interview this month with Agence France-Presse he was even blunter, saying the Kremlin's policy of promoting traditional family values had failed to halt the spread of the virus. "The last five years of the conservative approach have led to the doubling of the number of
HIV-infected people," he said.

When Pokrovsky argued for the introduction of sex education in schools - a step resolutely opposed by presidential children's rights commissioner Pavel Astakhov - the head of Moscow City Council's health committee, Lyudmila Stebenkova, called him a "typical agent working against the national interests of Russia".

Pokrovsky's approach, she told the Russian newspaper Kommersant, would only increase children's interest in sex and lead to a surge of HIV and other diseases

And as for drugs - there'll be no needle exchange programs or methadone in that upright country.

in Russia methadone is banned. The World Health Organization may see the synthetic opiate as essential in combating heroin dependence, but in Russia anyone caught using it or distributing it can face up to 20 years in prison.

Health officials rely instead on narkologia, a traditional form of treatment that dates back to Peter the Great's attempts to fight alcoholism in the early 18th Century. In essence, this
approach consists of isolating the drug user during a month of detoxification, followed up with rehabilitation - including lectures, self-help groups, physiotherapy, diet advice and so on.

Crumbling asteroids

[1505.03800] Quantifying hazards: asteroid disruption in lunar distant retrograde orbits

NASA has been toying with the idea of towing a small asteroid to a close Earth orbit, but as this paper explains, there's a risk any such asteroid may break up if you try to do anything with it.   (I like the term "loosely bound rubble pile": reminds me of a website I mention a lot.)  Would that end up being a problem for satellites in Earth orbit?  Maybe, at least for geosynchronous ones.

Drama Queen

Wow.  Sure, I at least knew a little about Queen Victoria's over-the-top and decades long mourning for her husband, but until I watched tonight's show on SBS "Queen Victoria's Children" I didn't appreciate what a nutty, harsh, control freak of a (literal) drama Queen she was with her sons.  The show featured extracts from many of her letters, and to call her "candid" in her assessments of them and their lives would be a hilarious understatement.

This was the last of 3 episodes, but I missed the previous ones.   The second is still available on SBS on Demand for another week, so I must go watch it.

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Oooh.  Early reviews for Brad Bird's Tomorrowland are good enough (some very positive) for me to be enthusiastic about seeing it.

Am waiting for reviews of the new Poltergeist to appear, soon...

Update:  Uh-oh.   And boy, do I mean uh-oh.  From the Time Out review (which is sort of positive) and in my bold:

 ‘Tomorrowland’ is singularly unafraid of weighty concepts, tackling climate change, our ongoing fascination with the apocalypse and the very Disney-ish idea of being ‘special’. It does get dry (some scenes feel suspiciously like TED talks) and the script’s fleeting efforts to unpick its dubious Ayn Rand-ish central ideology are completely undermined by a clunky, flat-as-a-pancake finale.

But when it puts down its copy of ‘Political Philosophy for Dummies’ and focuses on character and action, ‘Tomorrowland’ is a blast.

Update 2:  surely he's wrong.  The Guardian likes it:

It’s a brave family movie that invests in high-budget thrills without the safety-net of a franchise brand, mows down a small child with a pickup truck (it’s OK, she’s a robot), and subjects us to the sight of Hugh Laurie in black leather jodhpurs. But bolder still is Tomorrowland’s sincere attempt to jump-start humanity’s technological optimism, which it reckons stalled with the decline of the space race with potentially planet-threatening consequences. Whether or not that’s the answer to the planet’s current problems, director Brad Bird deserves praise for packing such big ideas into such an accessible, rip-roaring, retro-futurist adventure.

Carbon tax and the libertarians

Jason Soon linked to an article about this last week, but I see more writers are commenting about the promotion of a carbon tax by an American libertarian Jerry Taylor.  He's gone and set up his own think tank and his proposal is for a revenue neutral carbon tax that gradually rises.  In other words, it does not result in greater government retained revenue (hence is supposed to be libertarian friendly.)  And the political deal is that this is done in replacement of Obama's attempt to reduce carbon burning by regulating the power industry via the EPA.

I have a few immediate observations:

1.    James Hansen, the (I think) registered Republican (how he can live with himself on that matter I don't know) granddaddy scientist of climate change has been promoting the same idea since at least 2009, possibly earlier.   Are window licking Tea Party Republican types going to suddenly agree that he had a good idea all along?   I don't think so...

2.   I see that even Republican hero for stating the obvious and then taking it too far (Arthur Laffer) and Republican representative Bob Inglis have also been suggesting this since at least 2008.

3.   Jason may recall a thread from Catallaxy years ago in which he, Sinclair Davidson and I had some exchanges about this, and Sinclair acknowledged that if you had to do something about climate change, a revenue neutral carbon tax would be the preferable way to do it.   I'm pretty sure that I said that one practical problem I could see was how to match the level of tax to the desired target of reductions, likely meaning some  continual fiddling with the rate of the tax leading to investment uncertainties that business dislikes.   (On the other hand, it is less liable to the rorting involved in cap and trade scheme offsets which may prove to be off dubious value - planting a bunch of trees that go up in a forest fire in decade's time, for example, or paying for no forest clearing in a country where poor law enforcement means it happens anyway.)

4.   Sinclair Davidson then wrote in 2014 [2010 - the IPA confused me by having two publications both called "Climate Change - The Facts"] in the IPA's short collection of essays by climate change denialists/lukewarmers, based on the "climategate" emails:

...we can have no confidence in the observations that temperature has increased due to human activity because the mechanisms of science have been subverted.

 So his attitude:  problem?  what problem?; and I'll throw my weight behind trying to convince the public there's no problem.

5.   There is considerable uncertainty in terms of modelling about its effects.  I think there was a good exchange between Taylor and an economist on his website about this, but I haven't found it again, yet.  This article looks more broadly at the question from a "progressive" point of view, and I think makes some decent points.   Certainly, I would be skeptical of some incredibly optimist forecasts for its effects as cited in The Guardian, even if it would seem the British Columbian example has some positive reviews.

My initial conclusion is therefore:

a.  good on Taylor for actually believing science and not taking the libertarian "denial or lukewarmer" line.  Good on him for pointing out the obvious about the "free rider" aspect, that if large, rich economies do nothing to institute this, developing economies have no clear reason to either.

b. as the idea has been around for quite a while now, the problem is not that it theoretically appeals to libertarians, even the likes of Sinclair Davidson - the problem is the degree to which the great bulk of libertarians have adopted multipronged denialism/do-nothing-ism, and not moved an inch from the position that there is no problem worth addressing.  The proposal is going no where until that changes.

c.  the requirement of "revenue neutrality" is an unwarranted ideological add on that puts one aspect of a carbon tax less useful that it could otherwise be, in that internationally governments are scratching around looking at revenue sources and the problems of corporate tax minimisation.  I don't see why this should be a strict condition on the implementation of a carbon tax, even if the bulk of it is used to reduce other taxes.  

More detail on the prospects for home brew heroin

Engineered yeast paves way for home-brew heroin : Nature News & Comment

There's considerably more detail here on the story about yeast being engineered for making opiates.

I see that they haven't actually done it yet, or made it efficient, and the researchers are calling for serious discussion on regulation to prevent any such future engineered yeast from getting into the hands of the public.

In short, finding it being used by your neighbourhood bikies is likely many years away yet.

Sorry, any "war on drugs is futile" meme layers out there, this doesn't support your case.  It shows what sensible people should do - regulate to do their best to prevent foreseeable future problems. 

Worse than not watching the news

How Fox News Is (Still) Hurting the Republicans - The Atlantic

Some amusing findings in a recent report from a Republican aligned operative:

(a) that Fox’s core viewers are factually worse-informed than people who follow other sources, and even those who don’t follow news at all, and (b) that the mode of perpetual outrage that is Fox’s goal and effect has become a serious problem for the Republican party, in that it pushes its candidates to sound always-outraged themselves.

About designer babies

I see that Jason Soon is continuing his enthusiasm for the future enhancement of the human gene pool by direct genetic manipulation.   (I suspect all the clones under the masks in Star Wars look just like him.)

Skipping over, for a moment, the unforeseeable mistakes and unintended consequences that I would bet a testicle will be inherent in direct genetic manipulation, here's a thought pertaining to the supposed wisdom of people making such reproductive decisions:  given that there is one clear and obvious way in which the (illegal but enthusiastically used) market in baby selection has been already been given a good run in places like India, China and South Korea, namely gender selective abortion, why should anyone have grounds for optimism that the widespread selection for "good" qualities in future would be handled wisely and have any better result for society overall?

[The large disparity between male and female births in those countries is surely not a good thing, by anyone's reckoning.]

Rat empathy re-visited

Rats Forgo Treats to Rescue a Distressed Cage Mate - D-brief

Another great rat experiment here - showing that, most of the time, rats will save a drowning friend over having a tasty chocolate treat.

If the helper had been in the pool previously, they were more likely to save their buddy.

As it happens, over the weekend, my son and I had to sit through a Powerpoint presentation by my daughter as to why she should get a pet rat.  (All households work this way, don't they?)

This study, which I only read today, is helping her cause... 

Head down for 60 days

In Germany, there will be bed rest experiments to simulate the effect of weightlessness on health.  Sure, these have been done before, but the details make me feel queasy just thinking about it:

In the first major study to be carried out in Envihab, the challenge will be to lie in bed for 60 days in a row to study the effects of long duration spaceflight. The experiment starts this summer and the medical team is currently in the process of selecting 12 participants....

 “To cheat gravity, we tilt the subjects head-down by six degrees,” says Limper. “This is very important, so that the head is below the rest of the body.”

Stuck at this peculiar angle, the volunteers will also be expected to eat a nutritionally controlled diet and go to the toilet using bedpans and urine bottles. They will be monitored 24 hours a day on close-circuit TV and even be transferred to special water-proof tilted beds to take a shower.

Then, for more fun, they'll be put in a centrifuge:

Future studies will also employ a device located at the heart of Envihab: a human centrifuge. Contained within a large white (windowless) cylinder, it consists of four arms, around three metres long, arranged in a cross about a central axis. One of the arms is fitted with a bed, so doctors can spin volunteers to simulate varying accelerations.

It is deliberately smaller than most human centrifuges. “We think this is more or less the size we could implement on a space station,” says Limper.

I hope the participants are paid well...

Worst ban ever

I did tune in yesterday to watch Andrew Bolt try on his jihad against the ABC with Malcolm Turnbull, and noted that he claimed (again) that he has articles that are "banned" under the Racial Discrimination Act.

Since the article concerned (which appeared under two titles, as I understand it) is still hosted in full at his own blog, this must be the most ineffective "ban" ever made by a court [/sarc].

Update:  OK, so there were two articles, one is now at his blog and one on the Herald site;  I had forgotten.  For my Google challenged commenter I provide links here and here. 

The muted Right

Is it just me, or does it seem to anyone else that the criticism of last week's Budget from the ABC collective (the Australian, Bolt and Catallaxy) been rather muted? 

Sure, Sinclair Davidson has been on the media quite a bit saying that the Budget is not what the economy needs, but he seems to be saying it with a resigned shrug to the effect of "that's politics for you."  I see that Henry Ergas is taking a similar line, while saying he harshest words for Bill Shorten for being "shrill" and not compromising.  I'm pretty sure Judith Sloan also took a "heavy sigh" approach, but that was it.

I don't quite understand why - have they given up on being strongly influential on the Liberal Party?

Yet more Lomborg

Rabbet Run features a post about Lomborg's dubious method that (apparently) helps ensure that climate change drops in priority when he's doing his "let's decide what problem should be dealt with first" exercises.   The argument dates back to 2009, though, and it's surprising that it isn't more widely known than it seems to be.

The post also features this nice graphic that's been a recent hit on the twittersphere, and it sure doesn't hurt to promulgate it further:

Meanwhile, at The Conversation, there's an interesting post up with the title Bjorn Lomborg’s consensus approach is blind to inequality. 

The argument is that the cost-benefit analysis that is Lomborg's shtick now does not have adequate   regard to intergenerational inequality. The explanation of discounting is dealt with pleasing clarity:

The picture is complicated even more when considering issues where the benefits are deferred – such as taking action on climate change.

Cost-benefit calculations typically deal with this by using “discount rates”. Typically, humans are not good at deferred gratification; we would much rather have $100 today than next year, so discount rates place a lower value on returns the further they are in the future.

This approach is contentious, particularly in environmental economics, where the benefits of our investments accrue to future generations rather than ourselves. Do we have the ethical right to discount the value of the lives and livelihoods of future generations against our own shorter-term financial benefit?

In climate economics, the time horizons are so long that even a relatively low discount rate can generate apparently absurd conclusions. More generally, any discount rate can be interpreted as a preference for intergenerational inequality: it systematically values the welfare of future generations at a lower level than our own.

 But someone in comments disputes the take on "utility" in the article, saying this:

Your explanation of utility is not quite right and quite unfair to poor old Jeremy Bentham. Given diminishing marginal utility of income, a concept devised by Bentham, an investment that generates a smaller financial return but accrues to a poor person rather than a rich person could easily be considered superior in terms of utility. It seems to me your criticism of Lomborg is precisely that he doesn't assess investments in term of utility.

Regardless of that, another comment in the thread perhaps make a more general point that sounds about right:

I started working in the cost-benefit area in the 70s, directly applying the Tom Peters, Deming, et al methodologies. In those days the benefits in particular specifically included non-financial outcomes but this aspect seems to have been lost in today's economic rationalist approach.

Even this article says that in a CBA "You work out the economic cost of a particular investment (or policy) and estimate its economic benefits".

Admittedly it then points out the omission of inequality but there are many other omissions in the same line that we cannot quantify (basic health, environmental health, future opportunities of particular strategies such as pure research and education in the arts, etc.)

This is also the most glaring omission in Lomborg's approach, as he trivialises the science and ignores the intangibles. Even his claim of economic projections beyond say a couple of years have to be regarded with a pinch of salt.

Economics is only one discipline. We need more than that for human progress.

No need to see

Over the weekend, I see that the Fury Road movie got couple of bad reviews - one in The Conversation, and the other by David Stratton, who usually bends over backwards to be positive about Australian films.

On the other hand, overseas critics, even ones I enjoy and more-or-less trust, such as Anthony Lane, think it's great.  But when I read the description of what it's about (a cross between Titus Andronicus  and Cannonball Run, Lane indicates) I am thoroughly satisfied I should not see it.

A nose for physics?

Hey, a year ago I linked to a paper on arXiv about the transmission of information without the exchange of energy.

Now my favourite physicist blogger has posted about it too, and she seems to think it's quite significant.

I can't remember how I first found the paper (I do sometimes just read the long list of papers at arXiv, but have been doing less of it lately) but I am encouraged that perhaps I have a good nose for interesting physics, even if I can't quite comprehend it. 

The soon to be transgendered Gerard

Inspired by Jonathan Green's tweet this afternoon "Gerard's continuing journey through the past", I've had a quick scan of Mr Henderson's Media Watch Dog of today, and realised something.

At the risk of being accused of sexism:  what male partner of a lengthy relationship with a female has not had the experience of said wife or partner reminding them of some slight or offence caused by him years or decades ago, about which he has either completely forgotten or barely remembered?  

It seems to me that Henderson is psychologically already akin to a never forgetting wife/girlfriend, but worse by an order of magnitude or three.   In fact, it would not surprise me if he was a woman in a former life, or is one of those odd cases of a man of advanced age who suddenly announces he was always a woman on the inside and starts the "transition".  

Something to look forward to, and you read the prediction here first.

PS:  for God's sake Jonathan, you're a lovely chap and a good broadcaster, but we've seen enough photos of your horse being pampered to last a lifetime.

Politics is a difficult game

I rarely mention Bill Shorten, but after last night's reply to the Budget, it's time that I did.

First, as a politician, I feel neutral about him.   He did come out strong when he was first making a name for himself, but it was later clear he was undergoing some terrible stress from being caught up in the Rudd/Gillard wars (as well as from a not insubstantial amount of turbulence in his personal life.)  

Some people find his delivery now too often "mannered", and I can see where they are coming from; but bloody hell, we had a three word sloganeering, unprincipled, windvane of an Opposition leader who got the top job, which I find more offensive than some flat "zingers".

As for his performance this year - he's caught in the perennial problem of how much firm policy an Opposition can announce ahead of an election without risking it being semi-adopted (or flaws exploited) by the government of the day.

I thought the speech last night was praiseworthy for having some actual content (unlike Abbott's speeches in reply), but man, it is such a dangerous game for Labor to be talking about any form of new spending without being 100% clear about its funding.

As for the aim of lowering small business tax rate to 25% - despite my ridiculing of Laffer, and the race to the bottom in tax rates that small government types refuse to acknowledge - I don't actually dispute that there may be room for corporate tax to reduce given the international comparisons.  It is a bit weird for Labor to be sounding like Laffer endorsers, although I see that Shorten wasn't talking about the overall tax rate for companies.  And listening to Bowen on the radio this morning, he did say Labor acknowledges that "it is not easy" to get to that rate, and hence the need for bipartisanship, and I guess that sounds like they are at least not being simplistic about all tax cuts paying for themselves. 

In a general sense, though, unlike the "say anything" and frankly anti-science approach of this government, I find it hard to credit that people don't think that Labor at least sounds like a party that genuinely thinks about the role government policy can take in moving the economy into new directions, with their emphasis on education and investment in technology.   The Abbott government thinks the future lies in roads and new dams in Northern Australia, and the future will look after itself.   (It's like the Ord River project never happened.)

On the other hand, one thing that concerns me about Labor is there reflexive objection to any increase to the GST.  If you ask me, a modest increase to 12.5% would not kill consumers but immediately raise substantial amounts:

Based on 2014-15 data, each 1 per cent extra on the GST would raise about $5.4 billion (increasing to $6.4 billion in 2017-18), meaning a hike in the GST rate from the current 10 per cent to, say, 15 per cent would add more than $25 billion per year to government revenue, escalating to more than $30 billion per annum within three years - if nothing else changed.

I really wish Labor would reconsider their position on this, but as I say, politics is a difficult game.

At least the major parties are both realists as far as being prepared to look at revenue measures (Hockey and his attempt at recovering more tax from transnationals, for example;  although his hit on the already exploited class of young international workers who live on gruel and $5 a day while picking fruit - I think I barely exaggerate - seems a very odd priority.)   Labor is on a sensible line in its desire to gain some revenue from the wealthy with millions of dollars in superannuation.   I suppose that's a vaguely optimistic note to end on.