The Leyonhjelm hypocrisy

On Lateline last night, bemoaning that ill health from wind turbines should be taken seriously by a "wind commissioner":

STEVE CANNANE: Alright so David, why not have an energy Commissioner, someone who at coals and gas, someone who looks into wind turbines, someone who looks into coal?

DAVID LEYONHJELM: Well that argument is based on the proposition if you can't solve all of the problems, don't try and solve any of them or don't try and solve this one.

While on Leyonhjelm's twitter feed yesterday, he retweets a link to a an American libertarian site with "the facts you need to know about the Charleston shooting" which ends with this:

President Barack Obama and other activists have tried to make this case about gun rights, saying America needs to make it more difficult to obtain guns. Gun rights advocates have vehemently refuted this, accusing the left of politicizing the tragedy and saying there’s no way to ever fully eradicate violence.

Update:   more specifically on point, a later tweet by the Bald One:

Pope understands science better than libertarian Senator

I had been wondering for what diversionary excuse American gun nuts would come up with

See, when a school gets shot up, they want armed guards at schools, and for teachers to carry pistols.

But it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest (although they probably will) that Ministers or congregations should pack heat for a bible class or service in their own Church.

So instead, from Drudge we have:

Update:  And from Breitbart, yeah, shock horror, a black American president makes the observation that other countries don't tend to have the same number of nutters who have the access to guns for shooting up black people for being black

Oh, and yes, it wants Ministers to be armed.

Catholic conservatism in modern America

Last Time Conservatives Dismissed Major Encyclical, It Ended Terribly | The New Republic

I found this article looking at the way Catholic conservatism evolved in the US over the 50's and 60's to be very interesting.

In short, the argument runs that the American conservative intellectual movement (gee, from the perspective of the early 21st century, that's a phrase that's hard to credit) had a strong Catholic component to it, largely from the Church's strong anti-communist stance.    But it was those Catholic commentators who attacked a 1961 encyclical (which I must admit, I was not aware of) by Pope John XXIII which reaffirmed the church's support for the welfare state, help to the Third World, and a retreat from colonialism.

This was unintentionally the precedent for liberal Catholics rejecting Humanae Vitae  seven years later, leading virtually all Catholics in the US to be "cafeteria Catholics."

Interesting theory, but in the case of countries outside of America, the Church's rejection of an easy to use method of contraception which did not interfere with actual pregnancy was alone enough to make Catholics selective in their attention to Papal teachings.

That said, it has always been clear that the current American alignment of libertarianism with conservative Catholicism is an aberration:   yes, the Church was staunchly anti-Communist in the 20th century, but it was never against government's involvement by way of policy in reducing poverty and helping workers.   Quite the contrary.

Similarly, it is no surprise that Pope Francis has endorsed government and international action on climate change.   Good on him.

Shorten overkill

I posted just recently that I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about Bill Shorten's performance as Opposition Leader, but I do have to say that the reaction of the political commentators as to how disastrous the Royal Commission evidence is supposed to be for him strikes me as very overblown.

I've only noticed one journalist/commentator who shares that view - I gather from his tweets that Bernard Keane thinks the allegations against him are nebulous.

And in a further bit of "bizarro world" business - as far as I can make out, union obsessive right wingers like Judith Sloan, who wake up in a sweat of indignation every single day that unions have high involvement in some super funds and ask for minimum pay increases - are actually criticising Shorten for doing deals that (allegedly) benefited the companies more than the workers.   Weird political opportunism, and it would delight me if one day she faces a defamation action from her continuous uber bitchy output at Catallaxy.

It's coming...

New study shows Arctic Ocean rapidly becoming more corrosive to marine species | EurekAlert! Science News

New research by NOAA, University of Alaska, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Oceanography shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044.

"Our research shows that within 15 years, the chemistry of these waters may no longer be saturated with enough calcium carbonate for a number of animals from tiny sea snails to Alaska King crabs to construct and maintain their shells at certain times of the year," said Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and lead author. "This change due to ocean acidification would not only affect shell-building animals but could ripple through the marine ecosystem."

South Korea and the education obsession

Foreign Correspondent the other night was a fascinating look at the obsessively competitive education industry in South Korea, which is rather like the Japanese system (where getting into "top" universities is seen a matter of great importance for future careers, and private tuition is often used to ensure entry,) but on steroids.

This strikes me as a foolish way to run an education system and society, and places way, way too much emphasis on institutional elitism.

Mutant mice, depressed scientists, and don't eat that raw fish dish

*   Nature News explains the problems with reproducibility in experiments using genetically engineered mice, and how the problem will only get worse now that the CRISP is going to allow much easier genetic modifications.  And how's this for a great name for science bodies? (my bold):

...laboratories that can make genetically modified mice are often unable to maintain them. Progeny frequently carry pathogens, lose carefully designed mutations or have other characteristics that confound experiments. So the mice that a researcher might dutifully ship to a colleague can be very different from those described in a paper. In 2013, the Mutant Mouse Resource and Research Centers (MMRRCs), a consortium of the US National Institutes of Health, found that 32 of around 200 mouse lines deposited with them from individual labs did not match researchers' descriptions. It is no wonder that many preclinical studies performed using mice are not reproducible¹.

*  Bee Hossenfelder explains the difficult time physics postdocs can go through, given their short term contracts and frequent moves.  (Her own mental health issues get an airing too.)

And here I thought the biggest warning parents should give is for their kids not to get into acting.  Turns out going in science in a big way can be quite an issue too.  Sad.

* I never cared for raw fish, but especially in Thailand, it should be avoided due to the risk it will give you liver cancer.  (Googling the topic, I see that the liver fluke/cancer link has been known for some time, but this is the first I've heard of it.)  From the BBC:

A local delicacy in north-east Thailand, made from raw fish, has been found to be behind a high incidence of liver cancer in the area, and doctors are trying to educate people about the risk.

The Isaan plateau of north-eastern Thailand is poor, dry, and far from the sea. Home to around one third of the country's population, most of them ethnic Lao in origin, it is renowned for its spicy and inventive cuisine, using whatever ingredients are available.

Where there are rivers or lakes, they use the smaller fish they catch in a pungent dish called koi plaa.

The fish are chopped up finely, and mixed by hand with local herbs, lime juice and live red ants, and served up raw.

It is very popular, but also dangerous.

For decades, certain populations in the north-east have been known to have abnormally high levels of liver cancer.

In men it comprises more than half of all cancer cases, compared to an average of less than 10% worldwide.

The high prevalence has long been linked to infection by liver flukes, a kind of parasite, found in raw fish.

Call me a skeptic...

....but I find it hard to credit that the issue of aboriginal property rights, which exercises the IPA bred mind of Tim Wilson a great deal, is actually likely to make that much difference to their collective well being, especially in the parts of Australia where they are worst off.

Go to any small Australian town that has no local economy to speak of, and house prices will be very low, shops will be shut, and often the aging people who stay there won't be putting much into upgrading the appearance or utility of the residence they paid off 30 years ago. 

I expect pretty much the same thing for any remote aboriginal community that exists only so that the residents can feel connected to the land, regardless of whether they have freehold title to their house, or not.

The biggest "glass jaw" government in Australian history

I see the terminally boring Paul Kelly has now lined up with the rest of The Australian's columnists to attack Gillian Triggs.  

The uniformity and vitriol of attack from that paper is truly remarkable, and really makes one wonder how it operates.    It is incredible to watch the glass jaw this entire Abbott government (with the exception of Malcolm Turnbull) has shown towards Triggs.  

No one sensible can understand why they keep attacking her - the report which they continually misrepresent has had virtually no effect on public opinion of the government in any event.

Camping on the Moon

Habitat is designed to provide stay on the moon, sleeps two
Oddly enough, they might also be able to set up a solar still on the surface to collect drinking water:

The moon's gravity is so low and its atmosphere so tenuous that water molecules in the ground turn directly to vapour when heated. Free to bounce around at near the speed of sound, they condense again when they get cold, piling up as frost where temperatures are low. The greatest build-up is at the dawn terminator: the region where the sun is just rising.A lunar "day" is a full month long, so the water molecules have a lot of time to accumulate. Tim Livengood of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland wondered how much drinkable water you could collect if you set up a solar-powered distillery to catch the morning frost."When the sun rises – actually, when the surface rotates into sunlight – we just drop a clear plastic dome over our collecting surface and let the sun turn it back into vapour," Livengood says. The vapour then frosts up the inside of the surface, where it can be harvested.

Using hydrogen measurements taken between 2009 and 2011 by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Livengood calculated that the frost build-up at the terminator would be just under a fifth of a millimetre thick – enough to yield about 190 millilitres of water per square metre per lunar day, with a suitable set-up. That could include a small sun-tracking shade to cast a permanent shadow, mimicking the terminator and allowing astronauts to collect frost all day long.

"The quantity of water is much less than what we could dig up at the lunar poles, but we get it with very little energy investment on our part," Livengood says. "We just need to be patient."

The Kevin Rudd disaster

Gee, watching the smarmy performance of Kevin Rudd on The Killing Season is reminding me all over again how amazing it was that he was ever popular with his party and the public.
I never liked the guy, and always considered him a shallow egocentric with a fake public persona.
His only saving grace is that he is not Tony Abbott, a more "normal" person by most psychological criteria, but a dimwit of a political windvane with a pathetic willingness to overthrow ethics and decency for the sake of political advantage, and a spectacularly bad Prime Minister as a result.
Update: Kevin is still bitter that Swan hadn't told him what had to change if he wanted to keep his job. The problem is, of course, that it's hard to tell someone they need a complete personality transplant.

On paying people smugglers

So it seems virtually certain now that it would have been an ASIS spy on board an Australian navy ship who was paying money at sea to people smugglers to turn back.

It's absolutely certain that both Coalition and Labor governments have used ASIS operatives on Indonesian land who would use cash to disrupt people smuggling operations (by paying for information, and perhaps even paying them not to leave?)

But rather than shrugging shoulders, I would have thought it is bleeding obvious that the use of payments to boats at sea is different from splashing around money on shore in disruptive operations.

The Indonesian government is not likely to be happy with either, but surely anyone with common sense, rather than the appalling excuse makers like Bolt, can see that tactically, paying smugglers who are at sea is a dumb idea, given it provides an incentive to start the journey (update:  and presumably ensures that the smugglers have received money both from the "customers" and then the Australian government.)

And why would it harm a government to admit that its operatives have gone too far in this instance, and will be directed not to use such a tactic again?

The Nazi style guide

Hitler as Art Director: What the Nazis' Style Guide Says About the "Power of Design" - CBS News

I'm not sure I was aware until recently that Hitler, being an arty type,  personally designed the Nazi flag back in 1920.

While googling the topic, I also found this interesting story about a book that was effectively the Nazi style guide. 

This is why ISIS will never take over the world:  not enough attention to good style.

The real story

Ian Fleming ensures no cliches about Japan go unexploited in his ethnocentric masterpiece 'You Only Live Twice' | The Japan Times

I've only ever read one Bond novel a very long time ago, so I knew that the movies took extremely little from the books and crammed it into completely new stories.

But this summary of the plot of You Only Live Twice is still so different from the movie, it seems the only similarity is that both had parts set on a Japanese island.

What a moral vacuum

Andrew Bolt's first comment on the paying money to people smugglers scandal was to say he didn't know that he cared.

His latest is to note something like this:   "Hey, what's the big deal?  The AFP under the last Coalition government might have been paying for boats to be scuttled.   Who cares what happens in Indonesia or at sea?"

I think he's working his way up to "We used to strafe Japanese boats in those waters.  What are they complaining about?"

Update:  more moronic "Who cares!  They've stopped the boats!  Accountable government?   Who friggin' cares?" commentary from Bolt.  

Trouble for Abbott

It's good to finally see Abbott and his government facing some political damage from the "whatever it takes" attitude to stopping boats of civilians getting to our shores.  And don't you love the government's "but you're corrupt too!" response to Indonesian complaints delivered by Abbott's personal lacky Greg Sheridan.  What fun it would be to get the metadata belonging to Sheridan's mobile phone.

As I have commented several times, it is not only scandalous high seas behaviour to be using our military and customs to be stopping boats of civilians, locking them up on ships for weeks at a time, before returning them to fates unknown in countries like Sri Lanka and Vietnam; it is the most outrageous and ludicrous affront to transparency in a democratic government that it should persistently refuse to tell the voters what it is doing.  (Ludicrous because its hard to see how publicity of the success of the schemes could hurt in Indonesia.)

It is, of course, extremely difficult for Labor to "score" on this issue, but here at last is one way it might.

But before the next election, it also needs to be talking to Indonesia very specifically about what is going to be done at a regional level to ensure there is no repeat of an escalation of the boats should it win the next election.  (And they have to do something novel about Nauru and Manus Island too.)

Slow internet in space

How Do Astronauts Connect to the Internet in Space? - The Atlantic

Interesting article here explained that the internet connection astronauts get to use on the ISS is not so fast.  But lasers will soon help.

Some Mary Beard observations

Mary Beard turned up briefly on SBS a few weeks ago, on what looked like a new series on Roman stuff (about Pompeii), but I haven't noticed it on again.  If I recall correctly, the Eurovision Song Contest intervened, so I'm not sure if the other episodes followed or not.

Must go looking.  I did record the first episode but not watched it yet.

Anyway, I forgot to note weeks ago that she had come back from a trip in Algeria, and visited the city of Constantine, which I had remarked upon recently when it turned up briefly on Griff Rhys Jones African train show.   Anyhow, it just goes to show that I'm not the only person who didn't know about this place (or rather, its geography).  Mary knew the city, but not what it looked like:

But I did get the biggest surprise when I went to the city of Constantine, ancient Cirta. I have often had cause to mention the place and to think about it. There is a famous record of the contents of an early Christian house-church from there, and in the last stages of my book I have just been mentioning Marcus Cornelius Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius who came from there.

Now I dont know the exact location of the ancient town in relation to the new. But what I hadn't realised was that the whole place is perched on the edge of a vast ravine (now spectacularly bridged with a series of modern bridges). I dont know what it made such a difference to how I started thinking the place, but it did. It was if you had read about Venice for years, and the penny only dropped about the canals when you visited decades later.

Have a look at this photo of the place:

and this one on the same Flickr stream:

Impressive, no?

Anyhow, another reason I wanted to post about Professor Beard is because she is not a "dumbing down" pessimist, at least in her field:

When I started out in this game, when you marked exams every summer, there really were some dreadful answers. There were students who had clearly done little or no work, and had spent more time on the sports field than the in the library. They blagged a bit, sometimes with a degree of style, and they got at best a 2.2. You would come across grossly irrelevant answers that wrote about the favourite subject of the student that had not actually come up.

Why marks have gone up is because no one knows nothing any longer. All the students, beyond some sad casualties, have worked hard and done enough to get a 2.1 at least, and they actually answer the question asked, with clear information. The 2.1s now are as good as they ever were in my 30 years, I promise.

Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.

 That's encouraging.

Help, I'm a martyr!

What else are you not allowed to hear? | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Oh dear.   Andrew Bolt apparently wants to correct something to do with some aboriginal activist, but tells us that "lawyers" won't let him.

I assume that the lawyers involved are not his personally, but those of his employer.   And they might be partly motivated by the fact that Bolt (I am guessing - but I think it a fair guess) didn't personally pay the legal costs in his failed defamation case defence in 2002 or for the representation in the 2011 hearing about "white is the new black".

Of course, it is in fact entirely possible that Andrew may be able to say what he wants to in such a manner that it is not at any risk of contravening the RDA.  It may be that his employer just can't be bothered helping him address this topic, given that his attitude has always been that he did nothing wrong in the first place.  

Certainly, if he is that cut up about the restraints of his employer, or the lawyers, he is entirely free to quit his current position, and run as an independent news blogger who can publish what he likes at his own risk.   Or he could directly engage new lawyers to review his columns to ensure he isn't at risk of a new action.

But no, he would rather play the martyr, and keep raking in the hundreds of thousands that I would expect is his News Ltd income annually now (I understand they pay for his TV show as well as his written output.)  My heart bleeds for him...

Drinking blackouts

My drinking years: ‘Everyone has blackouts, don’t they?’ | Society | The Guardian

I think its basically an ad for a book, but I still thought this was a pretty well written account of by a woman with a very dangerous drinking problem.  (In her past now, I gather.)

True confession time - I did have one, brief, example of a drinking blackout period in my 20's.  Apparently, I was being very annoying to an acquaintance on the bus that was taking a group of us back from a night in town.  I had no recollection at all the next day of what I had done on the bus, although I certainly had got off it unaided at the end of the trip and got back to my room by myself.  I was told I was lucky I didn't get a punch in the face.

This was enough to convince me that getting anywhere close to a blackout period is dangerous...

Not exactly ready to take over the world

The most amusing video I have seen this weekend.  I felt particularly sorry for the last one and its appearance of a nervous breakdown:

A test...OK, seems to work (about tiny data storage)

DNA Assembly Tech is Making The World’s Smallest Data Storage

http://flip.it/bMCwy

Not sure if the link works...

Oh yeah, it seems to.   Here it is, and here are some extracts from the article:

Researchers at France's Institut Charles Sadro and Aix-Marseille Universite have built binary data into a strand of synthetic polymer, a minuscule chain of chemical information about 60,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

This technology promises to take the future of data storage down to nanometers in coming years, says researcher Jean-Fraçois Lutz, deputy director of Institut Charles Sadron and researcher on the article published in Nature Communications.

Right now, storing one zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) takes roughly 1000 kilograms of cobalt alloy, the material used in hard drives. A zettabyte of Lutz's synthesized polymer would be about 10 grams.

El Nino news

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : El Nino Continues to Ramp Up | Weather Underground

Can humans directly detect quantum weirdness?

Quantum technology probes ultimate limits of vision : Nature News & Comment

I see that the minimum number of photons detectable by humans has been measured currently as three, but the experiments are going further:

Gisin has pioneered experiments¹ to see how the human eye responds to ‘quantum-weirdness’
effects. Although effects such as photons being in multiple places at once are well known, making humans part of the experiment “brings us closer to the quantum phenomenon”, he says.

Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who is also at Urbana-Champaign and who inspired Holmes’s work, says that quantum weirdness should disappear somewhere between the scale of atoms and that of human bodies. “We don’t know at what stage it’s going to break down — or how." Holmes's study will probably validate standard interpretations of quantum physics, he says, which assume that a photon that is in a ‘superposition’ of two states will essentially choose one option when it comes into contact with a detector — whether that is an artificial photon counter or a rod cell.

But in principle, says physicist Angelo Bassi at the University of Trieste in Italy, each of the photon's personas could hit a rod cell, and that superposition could persist up to the brain. If so, there could even be “something like a superposition of two different perceptions, even if just for an instant”.

 Fascinating...

Woo considered

I see that The Australian got a credible sounding academic to say maybe there is something to infrasound from wind farms affecting some (perhaps a small percent) of people, in the same way that some people are more sensitive to seasickness.

A few issues to come to mind:

*  have reliable studies ever been done to assess whether people who claim severe reactions to such infrasound can even "sense" it (for example, by getting them to sleep in a lab and see if they are disturbed when the sound is off or on.)   If they have false cues as to when it is on, does that affect their perception of effects?  You would probably need them to stay in the lab more than one night, I guess.  This single study, by people living at home, is not considered reliable.

*  given that a lot of science on this notes that the wind or waves (or industry) creates a lot of background infrasound, and that windfarms make more infrasound in stronger wind, you would have to do a lot of careful measurements, I presume, to distinguish the amount of infrasound being created by the wind turbine as against the infrasound  just coming from the stronger wind around the house.   Has that ever been done?

* doesn't everyone get used to the infrasound of the beach?  If you camp near a surf beach, the sound from the ocean can make for a disturbed first night's sleep, but virtually everyone gets used to it, no?

Certainly, with the descriptions of symptoms that some people give in that study at my last link, I think it is entirely understandable why most scientists are more inclined to consider the problem a psychological one than anything else.  

I can't believe I'm posting a vegan recipe suggestion

Aquafaba: Baking with chickpea liquid for vegan meringues.

 Well, I do really like canned chickpeas (especially blitzing them with the few other ingredients you need to make houmos to get that ridiculously easy, cheap and tasty dip that I sometimes eat thickly on toast for lunch), and I would have wasted quite a few cans of chickpea liquid in my day.

But apparently, it whips into something that is very similar to meringue.

This sounds a bit science-y too, so I am keen to try...

Wind farms and politicians

I see that Alan Jones also hates wind turbines, and gets the always-wanting-to-please-whoever-he-is-talking-to PM to say he think's they're awful too.   And David Leyonhjelm got a run in The Australian (what a surprise it would be that paper) to crap on about how there really, really might be sickness caused by turbines.

A few comments I have about this, given that in the past I have expressed some cynicism about the value of them myself:

*  Joe Hockey's enormous offence taking at the Lake George turbines near Canberra was just ludicrous, given how far off they are in the distance and the unremarkable landscape that they are in.  If he is genuinely that sensitive to their appearance, it's more of an issue for psychological counselling than anything else.

*  That said, in some locations, particularly where they are closely grouped, I wouldn't ridicule the regret that some people feel about the change in the natural view.   But even in the "worst" cases, it's not going to be something that deserves the mental disturbance that some claim at their mere appearance.

*  I also wouldn't be surprised if some turbines, in some locations, cause audible noise issues which some people find annoying.   But then, people in cities have new roads and freeways (or ventilation outlets from new tunnels) built near them sometimes to, and regret the increase in background noise.   It's not a national disaster that people sometimes regret development near them.

* As far as the invisible infrasound "woo" of David Leyonhjelm:   he is the last person to have credibility on the issue, given his taking advice from an anti wind power advocate who is part of a astroturf spinoff group from the IPA and as such is full of members and advisers who have a complete non belief in climate change and have been fighting clean energy for ideological (and in all likelihood, funding) reasons  for a decade or more.

What's more, it is utterly disingenuous of anti turbine politicians to not note the active anti windfarm advocacy that is, from a scientific point of view, the likely cause of most psychological suffering of people who claim their local windfarm is ruining their lives.

*  Also, savor the irony, and/or hypocrisy, of Leyonhjelm, saying that the wind farm companies are like "big tobacco" in denying there is any evidence of detriment from their product.  Leyonhjelm happily takes donations from tobacco companies, who are still contenders for the most scurrilous corporate citizens on the globe.   (See the John Oliver report on their tactics.)

In any case, I think the public is paying little attention to Leyonhjelm's attention seeking enquiry, and I think most people rightly consider him to be an eccentric twit that he truly is.

Update:  I forgot to mention the way Leyonhjelm invokes a precautionary principle when it comes to wind farms and health effects (which, apparently, about 120 individuals in Australia have complained about out of about 20,000 living within a few km of windfarms), here in The Oz:

By the time further studies are published in recognised journals following peer review, many more people will have suffered. The fact we are not yet at that stage is no excuse for inaction and will not absolve the wind industry from liability for its negligent refusal to mitigate the harm it causes.

Yet he presumably finds the same precautionary principle not appropriate to consider for global climate change that could detrimentally affect, what, just a few billion people?  

What libertarian foolery....

Money making dinosaurs

Critic Reviews for Jurassic World - Metacritic

There are sufficient positive reviews for Jurassic World to be confident it will make a lot of money.  Which is nice for (executive producer) Steven Spielberg.

I see a few reviews mention Chris Pratt favourably.  It seems to me that if Spielberg wants one last Indiana Jones outing, it might be best to do a "James Bond" and just have Pratt doing the role as if he were the original character.   Alternatively, Pratt is only 35, certainly of an age where he could be 72 year old (!) Harrison Ford's son, but Jones was still being played as much younger than Ford's age, so I am not sure about that...Or perhaps, Pratt could turn up as Jones' other, completely unknown, son.  However it's done, it would surely be commercially very, very appealing to have Pratt take a large role in an Indiana Jones movie.
The obvious symbolism of Shia LaBeouf picking up his "father's" hat at the end of Crystal Skull simply has to be ignored, given poor old Shia's descent into complete loopiness.    

A net to connect your brain to the net?

Science fiction which involves future humans having a permanent neural connection to the future internet has always been a bit vague about how that connection would be made. 

Seems to me that this story in Nature might be the first hint of the technology that could do it:

A diverse team of physicists, neuroscientists and chemists has implanted mouse brains with a rolled-up, silky mesh studded with tiny electronic devices, and shown that it unfurls to spy on and stimulate individual neurons.

 The implant has the potential to unravel the workings of the mammalian brain in unprecedented detail. “I think it’s great, a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain,” says Rafael Yuste, director of the Neuro­technology Center at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the work.

If eventually shown to be safe, the soft mesh might even be used in humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, says Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University on Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the team. The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology on 8 June¹.

The Harvard team solved these problems by using a mesh of conductive polymer threads with either nanoscale electrodes or transistors attached at their intersections. Each strand is as soft as silk and as flexible as brain tissue itself. Free space makes up 95% of the mesh, allowing cells to arrange themselves around it.

In 2012, the team showed² that living cells grown in a dish can be coaxed to grow around these flexible scaffolds and meld with them, but this ‘cyborg’ tissue was created outside a living body. “The problem is, how do you get that into an existing brain?” says Lieber.

 Update:  someone comments after the Nature News article that it's like the "neural lace" used by Iain Banks in his Culture books.  Never read him myself,  but yes, it does sound as if it might be physically similar.   Quite interesting that this is the first time I've really heard of work on something that could have widespread neural connections.

Japanese men's problems

No wonder their population is shrinking:

Takashi Sakai is a healthy 41-year-old heterosexual man with a good job and a charming smile. But he’s never had sex, one of a growing number of middle-aged Japanese men who are still virgins.

Sakai has never even had any kind of relationship with a woman, and says he has no idea how he might get to know one.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend. It’s never happened,” he said. “It’s not like I’m not interested. I admire women. But I just cannot get on the right track.”....

A 2010 survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research found that around a quarter of unmarried Japanese men in their 30s were still virgins—even leading to the coining of a specific term, “yaramiso”, to describe them.

The figure was up around three percentage points from a similar survey in 1992.

An amusing protest

David Leyonhjelm swears at satirical protest group outside windfarm inquiry | World news | The Guardian

I like protesters who put a bit of creativity into it.

And incidentally - as Senator Madigan's "submarines are the spaceships of the seas" comment gets a mention in the article - I always thought he was unfairly maligned for that.   Especially in light of the fact that I remember reading of a science fiction novel that had a submarine adapted for use as a spaceship.   (I haven't read it, just I remember reading about it in a science fiction encyclopedia decades ago.  Looks like it was Harry Harrison's In our Hands, the Stars.)   Interesting what bits of trivia a mind can retain...

Smelling ants

Yes, that ant does smell like blue cheese

Apparently, there are ants in North America that smell like blue cheese.

I have always hated the acrid smell of any Australian crushed ants.  I might prefer blue cheese ones, actually.

Increase in flash flooding not in your imagination

Flash flood risks increase as storm peak downpours intensify

Good to see some clear study showing that rainfall intensity in storms is increasing, as most people in Australia have probably been guessing anyway:

Civil engineers from the UNSW Water Research Centre have analysed close to 40,000 storms across Australia spanning 30 years and have found warming temperatures are dramatically disrupting rainfall patterns, even within storm events.

Essentially, the most intense downpours are getting more extreme at warmer temperatures, dumping larger volumes of water over less time, while the least intense periods of precipitation are getting weaker. If this trend continues with future warming, the risk of flooding due to short-term extreme bursts of rainfall could increase even if the overall volume of rain during storms remains the same. The findings were published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Mind you, not sure why the authors are even talking about the effect under a future 5 degrees of warming.  Rainfall intensity in that case is probably the least of anyone's worries.

Try reading

If there is one topic* related to climate change that the likes of Andrew Bolt and England's lost village idiot Nick Cater can't get their head around, it's polar ice.

Cater's column today is full of bulldust, but the best example is his obvious complete lack of understanding of the difference between sea ice around Antarctica (on the rise lately) and ice from glaciers on the continent (clearly melting in parts, at least.)

Similarly, you would think that but a moment's thought would make them realise that massive Arctic ice loss in summer (lots of sun, lots of dark land around the ocean) is not offset in effect by an increase in Antarctic sea ice that is happening when it is winter there (little sun.)  But no, this seems never to have occurred to Bolt.

Too dumb and smug to read, that's their problem.  

*  actually, the other topic I could have nominated for this is the persistent refusal to understand the long standing prediction that global warming can make both droughts and floods worse.

Update:  well I was wrong, Bolt does read - primarily Watts Up With That, where 90 year old Fred Singer is airing again his view that maybe global warming is all an illusion. 

Seriously,  when will Bolt ever read anything that isn't telling him what he already has decided is true.   When will he ever admit that Anthony Watts made a big call to his face, which was shown to be wrong by Watts' own paper a short time later.  Never noted by Bolt, who is willingly fooled by an eccentric bunch of aging twits. 

Anthony Watts and his big mouth

HotWhopper: The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

I've said for years that Anthony Watts is a twit who craves approval and respect yet can't understand why he doesn't get it when:

a.  his own pet project comes up a dud (his years' long campaign to show that poor siting of thermometers was behind the increase in temperatures in all long term records) and
b. he is happy to have those whose respect he seeks trashed every single day by his band of gullible, dumb, conspiracy believing, followers.

This latest example shows up his personality defect quite clearly, in a case where his own dumb, insulting claims against scientists just doing their job is given some publicity.

Update:  I should have also linked to Sou's later post, noting that Watt's has been tweeting that he's the one who has been "slimed".   He's just an idiot. With weird insecurities.

Go get them, Michelle

Brandis and Dutton play some dirty pool in their fight with Gillian Triggs

Michelle Grattan is unusually forthright in her condemnation of the Brandis/Dutton attack on Gillian Triggs.

The only thing I would add is this - even if Triggs had specifically said that the Abbott government boat turnback policy made it extremely unlikely that the Indonesian government would be inclined to grant Abbott a diplomatic "win" regarding the death sentence on  Chan and Sukumaran, she would have been right.  (Sure, Indonesia had granted no favours to any country in this regard, but common sense suggests that the Australian policy would have made us about the least likely government on the globe to expect a sympathetic hearing.    I can't see the big deal about admitting that.)

Changing Britain

From The Tablet:

The British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of British adults describing themselves as Anglican has fallen from 21 per cent in 2012 to 17 per cent in 2014, a loss of around 1.7 million. That brings the number of Anglicans in Britain to 8.6 million people.

The proportion of Catholics remained roughly stable at 8 per cent, or just over 4 million, as did that of “other” Christians, including Methodists, Presbyterians and non-denominational Christians.

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain. Its population has grown ten times since 1983, to account for around 5 per cent of the total population in 2014.

Almost half – 49 per cent – of the population described themselves as being affiliated to no religion. That proportion is up from 31 per cent in 1983.

I am surprised that the number of Muslims is that close to the number of Catholics.

Gershwin oddity

Language Mystery Redux: Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way? - The Atlantic

James Fallows makes a fair enough observation, about how the American accent, at least amongst some who were speaking formally, used to have a phony-British aspect to it, which has disappeared.

But that photo of George Gershwin at the top of the article - he had a pretty odd looking face/head, didn't he?  It looks a bit puffy in places you don't expect a face to look that way. Maybe it was re-touched poorly?

Actually, out of all the Google image photos of him, that is just about the worst.    Pity.

The Guardian set

Comments at the Guardian are frequently amusing, particularly when there is a underwhelming column, and especially if it is about a personal experience.

Thus it was with Philippa Perry, apparently a psychologist or something, who wrote about the "moment that changed me" as being sleeping with a guy who had forgotten he had slept with her the previous week.

The column is poorly written, with many people confused about the men's names used, and as several people note in comments, it appears entirely possible that she misunderstood the guy's comment in any event, perhaps rendering this life changing moment a bit of an embarrassing error.

Some of the wittier comments:

Sometimes forgetting is an unconscious act of self-mercy.

I seem to have stumbled into some revenge porn.

I got a free upgrade to first class as the power wasn't working in standard on my train to London today. Dull but on the basis of this article the sort of thing the guardian wants it's readers to know. Tune in next week to find out what i had for lunch!

And for more commenting narkiness, do read those to the column "Do my short-shorts make you feel weird about your masculinity?" like this:

If only the article was as short as the shorts.

Quantum bayesianism - the weirdest quantum interpretation there is?

There is an interview with Christopher Fuchs up at Quanta in which he tries to explain Qbism - quantum bayesianism.  This attempt at explaining the quantum world seems rather odd and to give a boost to solipsism; but then again, the Many Worlds interpretation would probably have to stand as being at least as odd, and lots of scientists appear to lean towards it these days.

There is an article about it from 2014 at Nature, in which the solipsism issue is dealt with as follows:

QBists are often charged with solipsism: a belief that the world exists only in the mind of a single agent. This is wrong. Although I cannot enter your mind to experience your own private perceptions, you can affect my perceptions through language. When I converse with you or read your books and articles in Nature, I plausibly conclude that you are a perceiving being rather like myself, and infer features of your experience. This is how we can arrive at a common understanding of our external worlds, in spite of the privacy of our individual experiences.

I'm still confused...

Announcement

I am now going to cook a prawn curry, in an allegedly Filipino style.  I have never done this before.

Update:  that was nice.  Followed roughly this recipe, noting that a 14 oz can is half a "normal" can.  And that five prawns for each serve seems about right, and the recipe forgot to add the ginger.  (I added it just before the curry powder.)

The anti-matter generator on my kitchen table

I see that a recent New Scientist article started as follows:

IT'S an odd thought that the banana on your kitchen counter, squished in your lunch bag or tucked away in your desk drawer is the embodiment of one of the universe's great mysteries, just waiting to be unpeeled.

Whatever its state of ripeness, that banana is made of particles of matter, just like you: its intrinsic matteryness is why you can see, feel and taste it. What you don't see is what a banana does 15 times a day or so. Blip! It produces a particle of something else, something that vanishes almost instantaneously in a flash of light.

That something else is antimatter.

It is an odd thought, but then again, we generate our own too:

This occurs because bananas contain a small amount of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. As potassium-40 decays, it occasionally spits out a positron in the process.

Our bodies also contain potassium-40, which means positrons are being emitted from you, too. Antimatter annihilates immediately on contact with matter, so these antimatter particles are very short-lived.

Body design problems - for both men and women

I think we can all agree that there are bits of the human body which indicate that, if it was directly designed by God, He did a Him-awful job at working it out.

No where is this on better display than in the reproductive system.  I mean, for men, what's with the prostate gland and it's almost guaranteed destiny to swell and, in far too many cases, cause dire interference with the essential function of urination?   I have a brother who has recently, after quite suddenly developing a problem, had to have the TURP operation, so I have heard all about how unpleasant it is.

This gland is in a seriously dumb position, wrapped around the urethra.  If via gene editing it becomes possible to change positions of organs, I wouldn't be so worried about relocating testicles to an internal spot (as I recall Arthur C Clarke suggested in one of his novels as a feature of future males), but getting the prostate to do its job from a position beside the urethra, like the Cowper's gland, would make a hell of a lot more sense, no?

Moving on to women.  Childbirth is ridiculously dangerous, we know that, and I think I have  mentioned before that if you redesigning the system from scratch, the marsupial system of giving birth to a tiny jelly bean which matures in a pouch has an awful lot to recommend it.

But now to the more fundamental issue of women and menstruation - it seems that of the animal kingdom, the human body has absolutely the worst time of it:

Yes, many animals do menstruate, but only a handful menstruate overtly like humans do (where there is blood flow from the uterus through the vagina). Other animals menstruate covertly (by simply reabsorbing the uterine lining into the body). Female animals with overt menstruation are generally sexually active throughout their cycle. In comparison, females with covert menstruation are only ‘in heat’ mid-cycle.
Overt menstruation occurs in humans; most primates (including chimpanzees, organutans, gorillas & rhesus monkeys); some types of fruit bats; and elephant shrews. The average cycle length in orangutans and opossums is the closest to that of humans, 28 days, while the cycle for chimpanzees is 35 days. Menstrual bleeding in non-human primates is minimal.

The topic of how women deal with the inconvenience of menstrual blood flow got a detailed airing in a recent Atlantic article about the history of the tampon.   First manufactured specifically for this purpose in the 1920's, the article notes its rise in popularity, and the toxic shock crisis of the 1980's.

I found the article particularly interesting for reasons of cultural comparison:   I had assumed that the tampon had very much dropped in popularity due to the toxic shock issue, and the article does say that by 1990, about half of American women surveyed had moved to using pads alone.  Yet further down, someone estimates that usage amongst women there is up to about 80% again.

In Australia, thanks to the campaign against the trivial $1 or so a month of GST women don't want to spend on sanitary items (while nearly 30% of  young women are out getting tattoos at a minimum cost of about 10 - 20 years of said GST), we have some very recent market research from Roy Morgan indicating that only about a third of women are buying tampons.

In fact,  I infer from this lengthy post about the comparative availability of pads and tampons around the world, that tampons might be most popular in American.  Certainly, it looks like they are not readily available in many poorer, third world countries. 

Even where they are available, the Atlantic article does mention the issue of the applicator/digital insertion divide.   Apparently, in Europe and Australia, ones without applicators are most popular. 
In America, applicator use seems extremely popular.

As the Atlantic article notes:

Outside North America, digital tampons have outsold applicator tampons for decades. “If you interview women in Europe and ask why they like digital tampons, they’ll tell you about [environmental] concerns. They’ll also tell you that it’s a hygienic concern—that they don’t trust the applicator being inserted inside their bodies,” Keighley says. Conversely, tampon users in the U.S., who largely prefer applicators, “will tell you it’s a hygienic thing—they don’t want to gunk up their fingers,” he explains. “Consumers develop very strong opinions on usage habits—polar opposites, for the same reason.”

If you want to read an example of how extremely seriously (some) American women take the alleged horror of ever getting their own bodily fluid on their finger, even for the briefest moment (as I assume at least toilet paper will invariably be handy), read this 2012 post from one who is distraught about not being to get applicator tampons of her choice in Australia.  An extract:

First of all, there’s disgusting stuff up inside there during menstruation that I’m not particularly interested in touching. Second of all, my finger is probably not always totally sterile, being a finger and all, and I don’t really want to stick it up there and give myself an infection.

You can sort of get around some of the ew-factor in your own bathroom at home, but let’s say you have to do this in a public restroom. I don’t want to put the same fingers I’ve used to touch the bathroom stall door up inside an infection-prone part of my body. I know that some women probably do this anyway and it disgusts me nearly to the point of vomiting to think of them doing that and then touching the handle on the stall door afterwards. GROSS!!!!! Now all their menstrual germs are all over the handle! Even more disgusting is the number of women who don’t wash their hands at all.

I wonder how many STIs have been transmitted through public bathrooms in Australia for this very reason?

Fortunately, I’m such a germophobe that I always use a paper towel or tissue of some kind to manipulate the handle if I absolutely must use a public restroom. If you ever see a blonde girl doing this in a public restroom, it’s probably me. Feel free to say hello.

So yeah. Tampons without applicators are just a no-go. That is so beyond disgusting that it doesn’t even bear thinking of.

What's worse - there are a stream of comments from fellow American agreeing with her.

Seriously - this woman sounds just short of endorsing the idea that her gaze while menstruating could curdle milk.

It also puts me in mind of the peculiarly American thing about douching, although it is more concentrated along ethnic lines (African Americans and Hispanics are particularly inclined to do it, for reasons I have never seen explained.)

I'm not at all sure as to why, but it seems that an unusually large proportion of American women have developed a particular "thing" about the cleanliness of their reproductive tract, particularly during menstruation.

Which strikes me as rather odd...

Unelected official able to make criticism without fear of immediate sacking

Look, it's like shooting fish in a barrel to go to Catallaxy and find dumb and ludicrous commentary by academics who post to a dumb and ludicrous audience (sorry, but sheesh), yet I must point to Professor Stagflation's odd post today in which he doesn't actually disagree with Gillian Triggs, but attempts to have a go at her anyway.

Is it beyond his intellectual grasp that her unelected status and security in the position is what lets her speak forthrightly in criticism of the government on the matter of human rights?

And in what sense are any of her rulings or commentary even potentially a "threat to democracy", given that (as far as I know) she can only recommend actions? If she has no power to enforce anything, why should be in an elected position?

The Abbott government's personal pursuit of Triggs, aided and heartily endorsed by the Murdoch press, and lapped up by Sinclair Davidson's drooling audience, is one of the most disgusting and vile features of any Australian government in living memory.

We've heard it before, but look at the figures

Swedish sex education has time for games and mature debate | Education | The Guardian

Years ago I posted about the very open Dutch sex education system, and it's no surprise to learn that Sweden's is very detailed as well.   But look at the teenage pregnancy comparison:

Not all Swedish schools will spend quite as long on the subject as
they do in Gnesta – some get through it in four or five weeks – but the
course is a great deal more comprehensive than what is on offer in most English schools, where sex education still not a statutory requirement and is often delivered in a single “drop-down day” at the end of term.

The UK birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds is 19.7 births per 1,000 women, while in Sweden the figure is 5.2 per 1,000.

Seems to confirm the finding, repeated all over the place, I think, that open and frank sex education reduces teen pregnancy, and can even delay average age at which youngsters first try anything.  (If only they could get that up to about 25, he muses.)

Just out of curiosity, let's look at how this compares internationally (in births per 1,000 for 15 to 19 year olds): 

United States:  30  - worse than the supposedly degenerate UK.  But then again, according to this table, UK's rate is a steady 26, not 19.7. 

Australia:  11 - a semi-respectable figure, I guess.  Better than the US and UK; not as low as the rest of Europe.  

Austria:  3 (!) - I'm assuming teenagers there simply have no sex.  Why?

Oddly, even Japan manages a 5.   (One suspects mostly from girls in school uniforms accidentally falling pregnant to creepy guys in their 40's.  I don't know that young Japanese men are having sex at all.)

The lowest on the table:   1 each in North Korea (honestly, life must be too depressing there for a libido) but also Slovenia.  (Well, that's in that East European region of the world that I have long written off as too complicated in history to ever bother understanding.  I have no idea...)

And the highest regions:    at the very top of the table - Niger at 205.   In fact, I think every single country with a rate about 100 is African.  

Well, you learn something every day.

Nice work

RealClimate: NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’

A cool, calm and reasoned post from Gavin Schmidt about the new NOAA paper and the "hiatus" which isn't there when you look at longer periods.  

Seems more than that

More than a fashion choice: the everyday aesthetics of tattooing

This article, basically sympathetic to the modern fashion for tattooing that I live in hope will one day fade, starts with this:

According to the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, 22% of Australian men and 29% of women aged 20 to 29 have at least one tattoo.

In a 2013 survey conducted by Sydney-based McCrindle Research, a third of people with
tattoos regretted them to some extent, and 14% had looked into or started the removal process. Laser removal has become cheaper and more readily available, but there are serious safety concerns around cheap lasers, poorly-trained operators and the risk of serious burns and scars to clients.

Oh, I just noticed:  the percent is substantially higher for young women than men!

That's it:  I find myself having to join the ranks of Catallaxy nutters in expressing the view that feminism has obviously gone completely off the rails, and the repeated warnings to my daughter that any tattoo will be viewed extremely poorly by her parents will have to be increased to at least weekly.

Blue Cat diplomacy

Success of Doraemon film in China reflects thaw in ties with Japan: expert | The Japan Times

Hot and cold

Interruption of the Gulf Stream may lead to large cooling in Europe

A repeat of this scenario is still a possibility in the future, it seems:

The investigated time interval, called the Eemian, occurred before the last Ice Age and was characterized by warmer-than-present temperatures in large parts of the globe. The Eemian climate evolution can therefore serve as an analogue for a future warmer climate.

The study of fossil remains, such as plants and insects, preserved in geological deposits in northern Finland revealed an abrupt climatic cooling event that happened in an otherwise warmer climate. During this event the temperatures dropped 2–4°C and remained low for a period of  500–1000 years. Comparison with seafloor sediment records from the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic indicates that the rapid cooling was associated with a sudden slowdown in North Atlantic deep water
formation and a reduction in the northward extension of the Gulf Stream that transports heat to northern Europe.

The new evidence shows that the last time when temperatures were significantly warmer than today, climate instability occurred.

"This may have been caused by melt water coming from the Greenland Ice Sheet, disrupting the North Atlantic Ocean circulation. While the exact mechanism behind the sudden cooling still remains uncertain, the study illustrates the potential for major climatic instability in and around the North Atlantic regionunder future global warming", says Karin Helmens at the Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University.

I am assuming, by the way, that a 4 degree drop in present temperatures for centuries would be disastrous for present day northern Europe.  On the other hand, if it comes after the region has warmed 2 or 3 three degrees, I'm not sure.

Furthermore, although Hansen has made the point that a future industrial society can readily and cheaply produce enough warming gases that would hold off  a new Ice Age, there would like be much controversy about using them for a situation of only one part of the world needing it, while the rest of the world is already too hot.

But continue with your geo-engineering dreams, libertarians!

Computers and schools

Why Technology Alone Won't Fix Schools - The Atlantic

I know this is just one guy writing, but if this is true, the conclusion is what I suspected would be the case:

Over the last decade, I’ve designed, studied, and taught
educational technology in different parts of the world. In Bangalore,
India, I experimented with multiple mice plugged into a single personal
computer to increase student interaction. In rural Uganda, I cringed as
students played a typing game with their index fingers, hunt-and-peck
style. In Seattle, Washington, I wrestled with the distraction posed by
technology in an after-school computer literacy class for pre-teens.
Across all of those projects, a single, simple pattern held in every
case. I call it technology’s “Law of Amplification”: Technology’s
primary effect is to amplify human forces, so in education, technologies
amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there.


Amplification seems like an obvious idea—all it says is that
technology is a tool that augments human power. But, if it’s obvious,
it nevertheless has profound consequences that are routinely overlooked.
For example, amplification explains why large-scale roll-outs of
educational technology rarely result in positive outcomes. In any
representative set of schools, some are doing well and others poorly.
Introducing computers may result in benefit for some (the ones
highlighted in pilot studies), but it distracts the weaker schools from
their core mission. On average, the outcome is a wash.

Piglet witness

Goodness.  Beachcombing notes some rather unfair trials that happened in 17th century America relating to bestiality:

Take George Spencer who was executed in April 1642 in New Haven for having sex with a pig. It all began when a pig gave birth to a still-born piglet in 1641. A God-fearing colony would only too naturally have taken interest in a prodigious animal, but why did they care about George Spencer?  Well, George had one good eye and one ‘pearled’ eye: as did the piglet! There is a very good description of the case over at Executed Today: not the least fascinating thing about the sorry affair is that, lacking the necessary two witnesses, the local magistrates used George’s pig child as a mute witness. Before George was hung the pig was executed before him: the pig certainly and George possibly were the first two innocents on death row. In 1646 one Thomas Hogg (had to resist so hard here) was likewise suspected of having sex with pigs in New Haven: what kind of place was this? A pig had had two piglets that resembled him apparently: one was white skinned and bald; and one had a bigger eye on one side than the other. Thomas was very lucky to get off: unlike George he was intelligent enough to deny and to keep denying. He did have to pass through a particularly disturbing ordeal though. He was taken to barnyard, where his transgressions were believed to have taken place, and obliged to scratch the sows to excite their lust: apparently one sow responded by pouring out ‘seede’ before the assembled host (?), whereas another sow just wasn’t interested (‘it’s not you it’s me, Tom’). Beach wondered whether there were any other attempts to blame bestiality on folks on the basis of supposed shared physical characteristics.

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.