Wow, that Luc Besson 1990's Joan of Arc (on SBS tonight) looks absolutely fantastic, and is very enjoyable in its over the top sort of way. I see that Besson made it after the truly awful Fifth Element, yet it was that film which was his critical and commercial success. How wrong is that?
German clergyman Heinrich Kramer described the epidemic in Malleus Maleficarum (1486)—one of the most famous medieval treatises on witches—writing: “Witches ... collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them in a box.” But the disembodied penises didn’t just hang around. “They move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many,” Kramer wrote.It's the little detail of "eating oats and corn" that really floors me as a bizarre thing to dream up.
Tim Wilson has a long record of publicly fighting for Liberal values and has the scars to prove it.Like the "scar" of a directly gifted Human Rights Commission job worth about $400,000 in salary and benefits? What Bolt means is "Wilson supported me when the s.18C case was taken against me, which I could avoided by an apology and correction for mistakes, but instead decided to grandstand and lost. Of course he's well suited to be a Liberal candidate in a safe seat, then."
Ms Downer is a lawyer turned diplomat who served in Australia's embassy in Japan for four years. The mother of two has a Masters in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and degrees in Law and Commerce from the University of Melbourne. She is fluent in Japanese and French.The Liberal Party needs to distance itself from the mystery corporate funded ideologues of the IPA, not get tied up with them closer. If they go with Freedom Boy, it will be their loss.
New data published by the International Energy Agency extends the surprising finding, discovered last year, that global carbon dioxide emissions have stopped growing despite continued economic growth. The latest data show the trend has continued for a second consecutive year, which the IEA says is a result of renewable energy accounting for 90 percent of new electricity generation in 2015. China’s slowing economic growth has played a key role in these figures as well, though, and with India and several other developing economies set to grow substantially over the next several years, it’s not clear how long we can expect this “decoupling” trend to continue.
...new research on mice shows that the brain's energy reserves can be increased with a daily
dose of pyruvate, a small energy-rich molecule that sits at the hub of most of the energy pathways inside the cell. These results need to be replicated in human subjects, but could ultimately lead to clinical applications.
"In our new study, we show that long-term dietary supplementation with pyruvate increases the energy reserves in the brain, at least in mice, in the form of the molecules glycogen, creatine and lactate," says lead author Heikki Tanila, Professor of Molecular Neurobiology at the A. I. Virtanen Institute of the University of Eastern Finland.
Months of below-average rainfall have conspired to produce the worst
drought in Vietnam in the best part of 100 years. It has been reported
that the Mekong River is at its lowest level since 1926.
The ongoing El Nino weather pattern is thought to be the main cause of the lack of rainfall affecting the country.
Vietnam is not alone in suffering drought. Neighbouring Cambodia, and
Laos, as well as Thailand and Myanmar, have been experiencing water
shortages as a result of the weather phenomenon.
I'm not sure being dragged along under a mobility scooter is going to have quite the same dramatic impact.As for me, I'll put out there (again - I think I have suggested this years ago here) my idea for a Grand Unification of Spielberg films - that it end with a very old Indiana Jones turning up as a formerly unseen astronaut entering the mothership at the end of Close Encounters.
Queensland scientists have found that non-invasive ultrasound
technology can be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and restore memory.
University of Queensland researchers discovered that the innovative
drug-free approach breaks apart the neurotoxic amyloid plaques that
result in memory loss and cognitive decline.
Welcoming the findings today at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute,
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said they could have a wide
impact for the community.
“The Government’s $9 million investment into this technology was to
drive discoveries into clinics, and today’s announcement indicates that
together with the Queensland Brain Institute, it was a worthwhile
investment,” Ms Palaszczuk said...
“We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics,” Professor Götz said.
“The ultrasound waves oscillate tremendously quickly, activating
microglial cells that digest and remove the amyloid plaques that destroy
brain synapses.
“The word ‘breakthrough’ is often mis-used, but in this case I think
this really does fundamentally change our understanding of how to treat
this disease, and I foresee a great future for this approach.”
For me, belief in global warming is as clear a sign of anti-capitalist ideologically-driven wishful thinking as I would care to choose. It may be a reality, but it is one for which the evidence is virtually non-existent....which is good for either a laugh, or some serious head shaking, depending on one's mood, given the wide publicity this graph is getting today:
Call it a failure of the imagination, but it still seems we can only understand a woman's power over a man in terms of sex.Double bulldust! I reckon this is just feminist reading between the lines to work up something to be offended about. It seems to me that in everything she says, Savva argues that it was Abbott's fault for not remedying the poisonous situation that everyone (from John Howard down) was bringing to his attention.
Of course this is a ferociously complex issue, and many will argue that IYes, it seems to me (without knowing anything concrete about this) that the matter of how a background radiation level is being maintained is important. If you live in an area where the rocks and minerals around you are naturally radiative, but are in a more or less solid state, wouldn't that be better than being in an area with a lower background reading that's come from dust that descended from the sky? Because I would have guessed that getting that dust into your lungs is likely to do worse damage than standing near (say) a block of granite that has a naturally high reading.
am ignoring the dangers of "hot spots" and from ingesting radioactive
Caesium particles in food or water or dust. But five years after the
meltdowns at Fukushima 100,000 people are still unable to go home. That
is a massive human tragedy.
Wide-ranging changes introduced by Tony Abbott, such as the potential deregulation of universities, were the result of a broken political system where considered and experienced policy wonks were overlooked, Textor argued.I'm guessing he must be grinding his teeth about James Paterson's grab of the top Victorian Senate seat then.
“During the time of great estrangement during the Abbott years, the reality is people who are close to the machine like myself thought that many of the reforms ... we were getting were completely out of step,” he said. “Don’t assume the government’s agenda and the political agenda are the same because governments aren’t political parties and their agendas are quite different.”
Instead, “21-year-old pimply theorists from the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs] and the Australia Institute” with little real-world experience have been running the show, Textor said.
There's no known cure for the common cold, but receiving multiple tattoos can strengthen your immunological responses, potentially making you heartier in fighting off common infections, according to research by a trio of University of Alabama scholars.* I may not be being serious.
Moreover, in interviews Ms Savva has repeatedly trotted out the claim that Ms Credlin attempted to have herself and Peter van Onselen fired from the Australian (an irrelevance given they are both still there), as an excuse for not following the normal procedure of putting allegations of an affair to her two subjects prior to publication.Um, it's more than "a claim": in the Australian this morning she has the communication from then editor Mitchell confirming that not only had Credlin demanded it, but Abbott was on the case too!
She has denied the rumours and that should be the end of speculation based on evidence amounting to no more than Credlin feeding Abbott off her fork, buying them matching Tumi luggage, holidaying together, and various other tidbits, mainly unsourced, which have swirled around Canberra for years.Yes, because a male boss and his female chief of staff holidaying together with matching luggage is never a reason to suspect something going on...
Savva’s book documents the avoidable trajectory of his downfall, with on-the-record recollections which fill in details about Credlin’s questionable behaviour and dominance of Abbott.
Despite the damage she was doing, Credlin remained in her job. Her response to criticism was to play the gender card. Abbott’s indulgence of this nonsense was surreal as he castigated his colleagues as sexist. “Do you really think that my chief of staff would be under this criticism if her name was P-e-t-e-r and not P-e-t-a?” he asked the ABC in 2014.
The week after Abbott was dumped, Credlin spoke at an Australian Women’s Weekly event and also blamed criticism of her on sexism. She also made the extraordinarily self-aggrandising claim that she “got them into government, from opposition I might add.”
Credlin’s harshest critics were women, not because they are self loathing misogynists, but because men are cowed into silence by exactly the arguments she mounts. Criticise a woman and it’s sexism. Criticise a man and it’s criticism.
Credlin continued to play the gender card yesterday in a column, saying she wasn’t the first woman to be attacked about the “nature of her professional relationships, and sadly I doubt I will be the last”. Abbott’s not the first man either, so it’s hardly a gender issue.
Turnbull heckled by own party as NSW Liberals vote for climate debates - 9news.com.au: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has reportedly been heckled by parts of his party at a meeting where NSW Liberals voted for his government to conduct public debates about climate change and whether the science is settled.I am reminded of John Quiggin's "Parallel Universes" post of yesterday, too.
An overwhelming majority voted in favour of the motion at the party's state council meeting on the NSW central coast following a speech by Mr Turnbull at the weekend, revealing the persisting level of climate change scepticism among the party, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
In temperament, he was “bombastic, inconsistent, shallow and vainglorious.” On political questions, “he made up his own reality as he went along.” Physically, the qualities that stood out were “the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth.” His “compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo.” He spoke “in short, strident sentences.” Journalists mocked his “absurd attitudinizing.”
Remind you of someone?
The description of Benito Mussolini comes from English historian Piers Brendon’s definitive history of the 1930s, “The Dark Valley.” So does this mean that Donald Trump is the second coming of Il Duce, or that yesteryear’s Fascists are today’s Trumpkins? Not exactly. But that doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to the parallels with the last dark age of Western politics.Stephens then goes to note how the current period of economic problems do not go anywhere near matching those of the 1920's and 30's. In fact, he goes on to point to the positives in the American economy, as a way of deflating the Trump fanbase's feelings that the country needs a new, quasi-fascist, style of leaderhsip.
Mildura set to swelter - so supplier cuts power for scheduled maintenance work: Almost 200 households in Mildura will be without power on Tuesday thanks to scheduled maintenance work, despite temperatures forecast to hit 40 degrees for the eighth day in a row.
That "fiscal path" comprised four components. First, "all ministers should now be put on notice that there will be no room for new spending proposals, no matter how 'worthy'". Second, existing spending needed to be cut hard. "The problem is not the absence of targets for cutting, but the government's faint-heartedness in approaching that task". Third, any and all tax increases should be firmly ruled out. Finally, as one carrot among these sticks, the government should legislate for a 5 (or preferably 10) percentage point cut in corporate taxation, introduced in five equal yearly stages beginning in 2015-16.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, focused on the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, an emerging global breadbasket that as of 2013 supplied 10 percent of the world's soybeans. The researchers used variations in temperature and precipitation across the state over an eight-year period to estimate the sensitivity of the region's agricultural production to climate change. Those historical comparisons can help in making predictions about the sensitivity of agriculture to future climate change.2. An Australian study, on the other hand, notes some possible compensating effects:
The study found that, if the patterns from 2002 to 2008 hold in the future, an increase in average temperature in Mato Grosso of just 1 degree Celsius will lead to a nine to 13 percent reduction in overall production of soy and corn. "This is worrisome given that the temperature in the study region is predicted to rise by as much as 2 degrees by midcentury under the range of plausible greenhouse gas emissions scenarios," said Avery Cohn, assistant professor of environment and resource policy at Tufts, who led the work while he was a visiting researcher at Brown.
Elevated atmospheric [CO2] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves
The idea that my relationship with the prime minister was anything other than professional is completely falsewhich leaves open the possibility that her comment is limited to the time he was PM.
In government Abbott held a meeting of cabinet ministers in his office and one of them told an off-colour joke about submarines. “Credlin stood up and stormed out of the room. A distressed Abbott took off after her. She walked back in a few minutes later, with Abbott following closely behind her. The prime minister addressed his bemused colleagues, saying: ‘I think we owe Peta an apology.’ He turned to the towering inferno beside him. ‘Sorry, Peta,’ he said. A couple of them, including Joe Hockey, chimed in: ‘Sorry, Peta.’ Credlin then launched into an angry lecture, telling them they were the reason the government was doing so badly among women.”Yes, but - if she is that sensitive to sexism, how on earth did she put up with her boss's condescending treatment of Gillard? Really, how can anyone sympathise with Credlin (even from a feminist perspective - like Jane Caro seems to be doing) given her supportive role with Abbott during that?
Some Liberals and even people from outside the party confronted Abbott before the February spill over the affair he was supposed to have been having with Credlin, the least original rumour in Australian politics. They were worried less about the reality than the perception.So the news is actually at least 3 months old. (And Hartcher might be a bit miffed about why it is that Savva can attract all the attention on this story, but it looks like no one reads his columns carefully!)
...this seems to have attracted little attention from the rest of the media today. (I find that odd. But I find it even odder that both News Ltd and Fairfax outlets have taken to innuendo about Abbott and Credlin - going skiing together, staying in France together, Tony sleeping on her couch instead of spending his allowance on an actual hotel room - and neither of them, nor their spouses, come out to complain about it. If I were the subject of such innuendo, and if I had not slept with my staffer, I think I could at least muster a press release of denial and then say I was not going to dignify it by addressing it again. But just remaining silent despite the increasing openness of the innuendo? Strange...)Now, since I wrote that, we have had Abbott being accompanied by his wife on overseas trips, which is pretty strong evidence that if anything was ever on, it had probably long since finished.
After a series of tests, the R-100 embarked on her first great voyage. Originally planned for India, the destination was changed to Canada over concerns about the engines’ performance in tropical heat. The R-100 departed from England on July 29, 1930, arriving at Quebec Airport 78 hours later. It flew some short flights in the area and returned to the UK on Aug. 16.And then, the R101 met the same fate as the Hindenburg:
There were a few minor hitches on the journey. A storm caused the outer membrane to rupture, which had to be repaired in-flight and replaced in Montreal. The galley’s electric oven also broke down due to water damage on the way back.
Meanwhile, on Oct. 4, 1930, the R-101 set off for a voyage to India. It crashed in France due to bad weather, killing 48 of the 54 passengers and crew, including several major figures of British aviation.The Wikipedia article on the R101 gives a lot of detail.
While egg freezing is not yet commonplace, an estimated 76,000 women will electively freeze their eggs by 2018, according to EggBanxx, a fertility marketing company. The procedure was considered “experimental” and came with a cautionary warning until 2012, but it would be a few more years before it took its first big step towards the cultural mainstream—in October 2014, Facebook and Apple announced they would begin offering female employees a health benefit worth up to $20,000 to freeze their eggs, and several other private-sector companies have since followed suit.
War has been the direct driver of the refugee flux and behind that is a complex mix of social and political factors both inside and outside the region. One fiercely studied and debated driver has been a recent dip into a series of severe droughts starting in the late 1990s.
Previous work has prescribed some of the drought — and its impact on the socioeconomic fabric in the Middle East — to climate change. New findings published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres put it in even starker context, showing that the drought is likely the worst to affect the region in 900 years. The Mediterranean as a whole has been subject to widespread drought at various points in the past 20 years. Climate models project that the region is likely to get drier in the future, which Ben Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said drove the new line of inquiry.
“These recent drought events have motivated a lot of concern that this could be an indication of climate change, with the eastern Mediterranean and Syrian droughts being the most obvious,” Cook said....The projections for the region show a continued drying trend throughoutI take it that the economists' models for future effect of climate change on global GDP have trouble factoring that one in?
the coming century as climate change contributes to a shift in circulation patterns. That means what’s happening there now could just be the start of more prolonged, more severe drought. In a region already wracked by water scarcity and conflict, more drying could ratchet up
tension even further.
For starters, it's a small group. Just 20 percent of American adults vote in presidential primaries. They tend to be older, whiter, and better-educated than your average general election voter.
Primary voters also tend to be highly partisan, which helps explain why ideas at the fringes of each party (free college for all, a giant wall along the Mexican-US border) gain traction
during the primaries.
Primaries in the US are also sequential; rather than everyone voting on the same day, some states have their primaries early in the year, some later (for more on why, check out our previous videos).
Unless you live in a state with an early primary, there's a good chance your party will already have a nominee by the time you get to vote, meaning your vote is basically meaningless.
Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form black holes. The fate of the bubble itself depends on the resulting black hole mass. If the mass is smaller than a certain critical value, the bubble collapses to a singularity. Otherwise, the bubble interior inflates, forming a baby universe, which is connected to the exterior FRW region by a wormhole. A similar black hole formation mechanism operates for spherical domain walls nucleating during inflation. As an illustrative example, we studied the black hole mass spectrum in the domain wall scenario, assuming that domain walls interact with matter only gravitationally. Our results indicate that, depending on the model parameters, black holes produced in this scenario can have significant astrophysical effects and can even serve as dark matter or as seeds for supermassive black holes. The mechanism of black hole formation described in this paper is very generic and has important implications for the global structure of the universe. Baby universes inside super-critical black holes inflate eternally and nucleate bubbles of all vacua allowed by the underlying particle physics. The resulting multiverse has a very non-trivial spacetime structure, with a multitude of eternally inflating regions connected by wormholes. If a black hole population with the predicted mass spectrum is discovered, it could be regarded as evidence for inflation and for the existence of a multiverse.I'm still a bit unclear whether this is relevant to the black hole and information issue. This gets a mention at the end of the paper, but I don't understand their point.
The Olympic champion Ian Thorpe has said he would have come out earlier if he’d had more time to become comfortable with his sexuality.....Again, I should say that I think much of the concern about the program is being overblown by conservatives (the latest politician to attach himself to outrage about it - Tony Abbott! Could this man possibly "do a Rudd" any more thoroughly than he clearly is?)
Thorpe said he was first asked about his sexuality when he was just 15.
“If I had a little bit more time when I was younger I would have come out, because I would have been comfortable with that,” Thorpe said. “And that’s why I think, we’re all making the same point, around why we don’t push people to come out.
There is research that suggests green tea extract can become toxic at median level at the equivalent of 24 cups in a day.
"Let me guess," I said, leaning forward. "One day you were doing something you always do, and suddenly you started to pay attention to yourself in a different way. As you focused on yourself, the thought suddenly came into your head, "Maybe this means I'm gay. How do I really know I'm not?" I kept on, "Since then, you keep checking yourself, you know, like looking at guys or girls and trying to see who you're attracted to. Maybe you watch the way you talk, or walk, or move your hands, to see if you do these things the way a gay or straight person would. How am I doing so far, Mike?" He stared at me and answered, "I feel creeped out, like you're reading my mind."
I went on to explain that I definitely didn't have ESP (as far as I knew), but that he was suffering from a very common form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (also known by the abbreviation OCD); one that doesn't get talked about very much, and certainly not a lot by people his age. Many people with obsessive sexual identity thoughts shared the particular symptoms I had outlined, so they weren't very hard to guess at. I related to him that at one time, a few years ago, I actually found myself treating six different people at once for this type of OCD, and that we had even held a support group meeting just for this group. I added that these thoughts weren't confined to heterosexual people, and that I had even treated a gay patient who was troubled by obsessive thoughts that he might be straight.
Michael went on to confirm that his doubtful thoughts of being gay came on suddenly one day when he was looking through one of his bodybuilding magazines. He remembered looking at one picture in particular and thinking, "I wonder if I find this guy attractive?" With that, he suddenly became very anxious and horrified that he could have such a thought. He also found that in the days following, he couldn't get the thought out of his head. What made things worse, was that the other guys in school had a habit of teasing each other about being gay, a not unusual occurrence. Remarks that he used to shrug off now became very frightening. "What if they really can tell?" he remembered asking himself. He found himself avoiding his usual crowd. He threw away the bodybuilding magazines. He stopped going to school. Nothing helped. It seemed like the harder he worked to avoid thinking about whether or not he was gay, the more he would think about it. "But I'm not gay," he emphasized, "I'm not attracted to guys, so why am I thinking this? I've never been attracted to guys!" He paused for a moment. "But the thoughts seem so real."OK, it may not be very common, but it's possible that the Safe Schools program leads to this in some teenagers.
As in many of these pieces, one thing that comes across in[Kant, I will remind the reader, was supposed to good dinner party company.]
Malcolm’s memoir is how incredibly difficult Wittgenstein was. “It was
always a strain to be with Wittgenstein”, Malcolm writes; “not only were the
intellectual demands of his conversation very great, but there was also his
severity, his ruthless judgements, his tendency to be censorious, and his
depression.” Von Wright concurs: “each conversation with Wittgenstein was
living through the day of judgement. It was terrible”.
In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurnsOuch, as they say.
not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies
about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities,
accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. Trump
validates the maxim that in presidential primaries, the opposition
party tends to choose a candidate who differs temperamentally from the
incumbent. Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a
child.
