Nightwalkers of all kinds

Transvestite Vicar Ghost in Interwar England - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beachcombing tells the tale of a night time cross dressing English vicar in the 1920's, and it is odd and somewhat amusing.

But before he gets into it, he notes:

First, it might be worth noting that there were many nightwalkers in
Victorian and Edwardian England who were often mistaken for ghosts. Some
were men or women who used the night to walk naked through familiar
countryside, and a rarer category were men who used the hours of night
to dress in their wife’s clothing.

Can't say that I've heard before of naked, pale night walkers of England as an explanation for some ghost sightings in Victorian England!  

Update:  I see that "nightwalker" had a much earlier meaning in England, as explained in this article from an interesting looking site.

Are Donald and Art even talking?

In April, Art Laffer was claiming:

“You know, [Trump] wants to cut tax rates, Poppy. He does not want to cut taxes. He wants to cut tax rates to bring economic growth back in. He wants to bring jobs back into the United States by having a corporate tax of 15 percent versus the highest tax in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]. And he’s completely right on that. And by the way, so is Ted Cruz completely right on that. Everyone else is missing this.”

Some other claims by laughing Art in that interview were, um, interesting:

Laffer then said that Trump would cut the national debt by using “asset sales.”
Adding, “You have all these properties, you have the post office, you have Camp Pendleton, which is worth $65 billion. There are all sorts of assets.”
Harlow interject, “Who are you going to sell it to?”
Laffer responded that “Southern California beachfront property is still going very nicely. You’ve got the oil reserves. You’ve got gold in Fort Knox. You’ve got all of these assets — it could probably bring down the national debt.

Again, Harlow interrupted, “I’m asking but who are you going to sell it to to eliminate $19 trillion in national debt?”
“Well, you couldn’t eliminate the whole 19 trillion with asset sales, but if you brought the budget back in, you got economic growth, you wouldn’t reduce it to zero, but you can make a huge hit. I mean the tax amnesty program by itself, Poppy, with a good tax plan could probably bring in $800 billion. I mean just past taxes being paid.”

Today, Trump is reported as saying this:

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday he was open to raising taxes on the rich, backing off his prior proposal to reduce taxes on all Americans and breaking with one of his party's core policies dating back to the 1990s."I am willing to pay more, and you know what, the wealthy are willing to pay more," Trump told ABC's "This Week."

From the rest of the report:

The billionaire real estate tycoon has said he would like to see an increase in the minimum wage, although he told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday he would prefer to see states take the lead on that front instead of the federal government.
"I don't know how people make it on $7.25 an hour," Trump said of the current federal minimum wage. "I would like to see an increase of some magnitude. But I'd rather leave it to the states. Let the states decide."
Trump's call for higher taxes on the wealthy is a break with Republican presidential nominees who have staunchly opposed tax hikes for almost three decades. Tax hikes have been anathema to many in the party since former President George H.W. Bush infuriated fellow Republicans by abandoning a pledge not to raise taxes and agreeing to an increase in a 1990 budget deal.
Democrats, including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, have pressed for increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans for years.
Trump released a tax proposal last September that included broad tax breaks for businesses and households. He proposed reducing the highest income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 39.6 percent rate.

He is evidently the "say anything" candidate. 

Oil sands and the fire

How bad will the fires in Fort McMurray hit the economy?

Interesting report in Macleans notes this:

There is also the risk no one wants to talk about just yet: the possibility that a return
to business-as-usual in Fort Mac may simply not be in the cards. Allan Dwyer, an assistant professor of finance at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, says the wildfire is merely the latest wound to be inflicted on the oil sands and its future—and therefore Fort McMurray’s as well.
In addition to a depressed global outlook for oil prices, the current list of headwinds facing the industry include the  fractious political debate over building more pipelines, mounting concerns about the impact on climate change and recently elected provincial and federal governments that promise economic diversification. “A few years ago, when oil was trading around US$110 a barrel, there would be no doubt about it being an all-hands-on-deck approach to rebuilding and getting people back to work,” Dwyer says. “Now it could be a different response.”

Dwyer also wonders how many homeless oil sands workers will be eager to return to Fort McMurray and rebuild given the doom and gloom that hangs over the sector. “There’s been a growing sense, as the global oil prices has gone down and stayed down, that the oil sands is
somewhat of a sunset industry—that it’s yesterday’s aggressive style of producing hydrocarbons,” Dwyer says. “This only adds to that creeping negative sentiment.”

 

A very cool video

Sky Magic Live at Mt.Fuji : Drone Ballet Show by MicroAd, Inc. from Sky Magic on Vimeo.

Nietzsche and his mum

From a review of new book about Nietzsche (and the reviewer, incidentally, in other parts of the review, is no anti-Nietzsche critic):

In fact, Nietzsche spent a good deal of his early years composing just such books. He completed his first memoir when he was just 13, and wrote another five over the next decade. They weren’t written to record his academic achievements (negligible), much less his prowess on field or track (non-existent), but, rather, according to Blue, as a ‘mirror’ in which, abstracted from history and environment, his ‘latent self’ would come into focus. ‘Autobiography’ was what Nietzsche wrote ‘in order to see who he was’.

On the evidence adduced here, what he was was a mummy’s boy. As late as her son’s undergraduate days, Franziska Nietzsche was still lecturing him on what coat and trousers to wear in the rain. And whenever a more metaphysical storm broke, mum was always Nietzsche’s first port of call. Even when he was called away from his studies for military service, he was granted a dispensation that posted him in his hometown — and allowed him not only to live at home with Mum, but to lunch and dine with her every day of the week. Blue, who seems to have read everything ever published on Nietzsche (and translated much new material hitherto available only in the German), doesn’t mention Joachim Köhler’s Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nonetheless, he does an awful lot to endorse Köhler’s suggestion that Nietzsche was a repressed homosexual.

Well, he was at the very least, rather eccentric from an early age.

More on Trump not winning

Donald Trump just threatened to cause an unprecedented global financial crisis - Vox

Scott Adams presumably thinks that things like this don't hurt the path of a "master persuader" to the Presidency.  Well, I have just checked on his blog, and all he seems to think Trump needs to do is this:

To be fair, Trump scares the pants off of about one-third of the public.
So “risky” will hit home for those voters. The problem for team Clinton
is that Trump has complete control of his persona. All he needs to do
is act less risky for a few months to prove his campaign persona was all for effect. That process is well underway.

I am completely unconvinced.  I think Adams himself is just a showman, milking this for all its worth.

Company tax cuts, again

I see Bernard Keane and Crikey are continuing the case against company tax cuts leading to increased investment.

Interesting.

Not so much furious as incredulous

That was my reaction at watching Fury Road last night.

Look, post apocalypse movies are not generally my thing; nor are movies based on car crashes and violence.  (Chases are OK, of course, but the Mad Max movies - I gather, as this is the first I have watched - are all about the revving engines and the grinding sound of metal upon metal, often with human flesh squished between it.)

So, it's not as if I was ever destined to like it.  But really, the utter, utter ridiculousness and perverse lack of thrills I was experiencing did mean I kept watching it.  It doesn't reach the "so bad it's good" level, although I strongly suspect that there must have been a substantial part of the cinema audience like me - incredulous at the inanity of what they were watching. Seeing it after knowing it was strongly reviewed, nominated for and had won several Oscars, and made a reasonable amount of money at the box office, only added to the incredulity level.

Let me be specific about a few points:

*  I did not consider it well directed at all.  Good action directing lets you know who (or what) is where in a scene; this quality seemed to me to be distinctly lacking in most of the action sequences.  How Miller got nominated for a directing Oscar indicates something quite worrying about the current crop of Hollywood directors: they don't know good action direction when they see it. 

*  The film was supposed to be one that used little CGI.  Yeah, sure.   I'm not sure how many bodies I saw face plant into sand at about 80kph - it seemed at least a few dozen - but every time one did, of course it was obvious CGI was involved.   It reminded me a bit of the publicity about the much maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which also claimed low CGI in its action sequences, but clearly there was plenty.  (Not that I minded much.  Unlike Road, it was a movie with a plot, after all.)

*  Of what little dialogue there was, I still had trouble understanding some of it, both audibly and narratively.   Was I alone in that?

*  What an embarrassing enterprise for adults to be involved in making; Miller in particular.  As someone writes at IMDB (where there is a bit of a backlash underway in user reviews, it seems):

 So what is this film's targeted demographic? I'm not sure. I can imagine that if you are a 13-year old boy, really into cars/trucks/slipknot, pretty redneck, and probably a little slow, this movie may seem pretty cool. I mean it does have ridiculous cars/trucks outfitted with lots of weapons, spikes, flame-exhausts, (breast-milk?) and guys playing "cool" guitar riffs for no apparent reason. There's also lots of explosions and fighting. And scantily clad women. And tornadoes. And skulls.

Exactly.  I said something more particular to my son as we watched it:  it's like it was written by a 13 year old boy - one who has grown up with aging heavy metal parents, still into Iron Maiden, who took him to every demolition derby and monster truck show in town since he was a toddler.  That Miller made the first couple of Mad Max films when he was a relatively young man is one thing; that he should want to wallow in this world with ever greater improbable visuals, scale and scenarios I have difficulty interpreting other than as an embarrassing sign of immaturity at heart.

*  The one thing I found vaguely interesting:  there was one, not very major, character who I suspect bore a deliberate physical resemblance to Philip Adams.  Adams famously loathed Mad Max, and wrote scathingly of it as violence porn.  (I suspect his reaction was actually a bit overblown, but that it still bore some truth.)   I am curious whether I am right about this being a deliberate joke on Adams on Miller's part. 


In any event, I see now that the movie was not quite the box office smash that its critical reputation suggests.  In the US it made a respectable but far from outstanding $153 million, and $378 million world wide.  

As I'm guessing that 1/4 to 1/3 of the audience actually didn't think highly of the film, I think I can fairly call it not that big a success after all.  Good.

Cheaper for youngsters

So, something interesting happens to weed after it’s legal - The Washington Post

In case you don't want to click - it becomes cheaper.

As the article says:

Falling pot prices create winners and losers. Because state taxes are
based on a percentage of the sales price, declining prices mean each
sale puts less money in the public purse. On the other hand,
bargain-basement prices undercut the black market, bringing the public
reduced law enforcement costs, both in terms of tax dollars spent on
jail and the damage done to individuals who are arrested.

For consumers who enjoy pot occasionally while suffering no adverse effects
from it, low prices will be a welcome but minor benefit; precisely
because they consume modest amounts, the price declines are only a
modest win. On the downside, young people tend to be price-sensitive
consumers, and their use of inexpensive pot may rise over time, as might
that of problematic marijuana users.

Of course, I choose to emphasise the downside...

Never too much when it comes to Nazis...

First, there's a review of a book about the diary of a key Nazi figure who I can't say I recall hearing about before.  (No explanation about the name, though.)  Anyway, worth reading the review.

And from Literary Review, an anecdote about Hitler being funny:

Was Hitler ever – intentionally – funny? The answer, surprisingly enough, is yes. After hosting Mussolini in Berlin in September 1937, the Führer helped his entourage let off steam by mounting a full-scale parody of the Duce: ‘His chin thrust forward, his legs spread and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like giovinezza, patria, victoria, macaroni, belleza, bel canto and basta.’ For a dictator who only spoke German, the act exceeded Hitler’s ordinary range and the court architect, Albert Speer, noted that the laughter was more than polite: the performance ‘was indeed very funny’. 

Of course!

Andrew Sullivan’s Blind Spot | City Journal

The subheading from this article:

Is America “ripe for tyranny?” Blame Barack Obama.

The nutty American Right isn't big on self awareness...

Adams is wrong

I see that Jason Soon has tweeted to a WAPO article giving publicity to the Scott Adams argument that Trump will win "in a landslide" because he's a "master persuader."


I doubt very much that JS actually agrees with Adams, but I have been meaning to note since I first read that Adams was running this line that he is a very eccentric character who is way overconfident in his understanding of humans.  (I posted years ago about his mysterious loss of voice, which he overcame.  He is very big on hypnosis, which is not exactly a practice to dismiss, but not one to tie your credibility to, either.)  

In the meantime, I see there is much laughter on the internet today about this tweet from Trump:

I can't see anyone disputing that it's real, so, yeah, what a "master persuader".  /sarc

My complaint about young(er) people

I see on Twitter and around the place that younger than me, lefty sort of people find the ABC's iView comedy "The Katering Show" hilarious.   Having watched a few episodes, I can see the potential - it's a funny concept, and while not exactly the original short form food/cooking porn parody (see England's rather funnier Posh Nosh from 13 years ago) the women are pretty funny actors.

But seriously, too much of the humour is from the cheap and simple device of a sudden outbreak of swearing, usually as part of a sudden outbreak of "honesty".

It doesn't appear in a natural context, either.   It's way too obvious.

The humour in Posh Nosh was more subtle and naturalistic and better for it.

Young people who find this technique hilarious - you're wrong and encouraging lazy comedy writing.   [Because I say so.]

Stable bugs

Our personal skin microbiome is surprisingly stable

I guess I am not surprised.  It probably explains why unfortunate people who have a skin biome which results in really strong body odour (or, on the other hand, the lack of it) are stuck that way unless they make a very major attempt to change it.

Bill on the rise

I don't normally pay attention to the Budget Reply, but the status of this one as effectively the first major election campaign speech meant it was worth watching.

And I'm glad I did.  Shorten clearly did well, sounding confident and reasonable and, well, rather like a Prime Minister.   I don't actually agree with all of his policy positions, but he is sounding good....

Is the true situation "nobody knows"?

Adam Creighton has another one of his peculiar columns up where the headline position doesn't seem all that well supported by the details.  It says in the opening paragraph that Treasury has "hit back" at claims a tax cut for companies will hurt Australia, but the details of the analysis don't sound all that convincing.

For example:

Labelling it a “tax on foreign capital”, the analysis said a company tax cut to 25 per cent would increase employment in the long run by 0.1 per cent, equivalent to about 12,000 jobs, and boost real wages 1.1 per cent.

0.1% is supposed to be impressive??

Creighton then goes on to note one dissenter:

Janine Dixon, a researcher at Victoria University, last month challenged the orthodox view, finding gross domestic product and workers’ wages would rise but not by enough to make up for the transfer of government revenue to foreigners, which could no longer be spent on public services.

“The right indicator of national benefit is the impact of a company tax rate cut on national income and that’s clearly negative,” she said.

Of course, there is the fact that Ken Henry was a supporter of a company tax cut to 25% to make us "more competitive with Asia."   On the other hand, the US doesn't exactly seem crippled by its corporate tax rate, although no doubt there is the argument that big corporations find motivation for their off shore tax shenanigans in the relatively high tax rate.

I reckon the truth is that no body really knows how good an idea it really is.

Climate change and Canadian fires

Did climate change contribute to the Fort McMurray fire?

It's a short article, but some surprising figures in there for the increase in the area of Canada burnt in bushfires over recent decades.

Agreed

Donald Trump isn’t going to be president.: Donald Trump begins the general election with a huge deficit in head-to-head polls, deep unpopularity, and major demographic headwinds. Unless he wins unprecedented shares of black and Latino voters, or, barring any improvement with nonwhite voters, unless he wins unprecedented shares of white voters, he loses. And he has to do this while running as the most unpopular nominee in 30 years of polling. He has to do it while running against a Democratic Party operating at full strength, with popular surrogates (including a former president) crisscrossing the country against his campaign. He has to do it with a divided Republican Party. He has to do it while somehow tempering his deep-seated misogyny and racism. All this, again, in a growing economy with a well-liked president—solid conditions for a Democratic candidate.

Donald Trump has to become a radically different person to win.

Donald Trump isn’t going to win.

Budget reaction

M'eh.*

A bit more detail:

*  is the Murdoch press in the can for full on support for a Coalition win in July, or what?

*  a significant danger for the Coalition in the election campaign should be the deferral of a decision on university fee deregulation and HECS support.   But will that get swamped by the "big picture"?

*  the IPA and small government types are not going to be impressed with this budget, but seriously, how many of them would really manage to vote without at least preferences going to the Coalition?  (Bolt has already put the boot into it to a surprising degree - but he tends to take his economics talking points straight from the IPA.  I would bet a pile of money that he will not, however, endorse a vote for Shorten.) 

*  the danger - the big, big danger - for Labor will be things like that downwards revised estimate for revenue from tobacco taxes.   People are too easily convinced that Labor is too optimistic on revenue to justify its spending.  

*  listening to Richard de Natale on Radio National this morning - he's really the best Greens leader we've ever had.   Sounds extremely reasonable.

*  why did aged care have to take such a hit?  Have we got too many nursing homes now?

*  politically, it's not great; but on the other hand, it looks fantastic compared to the dire first attempt by Abbott.

Update:   hey, hell is about to freeze over:  I will now quote Judith Sloan as making a useful contribution in economic commentary:

Why should we believe this when none of the other budget projections have come to pass? We are expected to believe that nominal GDP growth, the key driver of revenue, will jump from 2¼ per cent this financial year to 4¼ per cent next year and 5 per cent per annum thereafter. Note that nominal GDP grew by only 1.6 per cent in 2014-15.

The reasoning behind this optimism is Treasury’s view that the economic output gap (the difference between actual and potential output) must eventually narrow. However, any significant hiccup in the world economy or China means the assumptions on ­nominal GDP growth are out the window.

And just take a look at what is expected to happen to revenue. Next financial year, general government revenue is expected to come in at 24.2 per cent of GDP. By the end of the forward estimates, revenue will be bringing in 25.9 per cent of GDP.

In historical terms, this would be an extraordinary outcome. In the period since 1996-97, there have been only two years when revenue as a percentage of GDP exceeded 25.9 per cent, in 2000-01 and 2005-06. Now many of us would agree that we live in extraordinary times, just not the sort of extraordinary times that would generate the surge in government revenue assumed in the budget.

And there are a number of breathtaking assumptions. Capital gains tax revenue is expected to go from $13.4bn this year to $17.5bn in 2019-20. And superannuation taxes will rise from $6.6bn this year to $10.9bn at the end of the forward estimates, an increase of 65 per cent.

Even taking into account the changes to the taxation of superannuation contained in the budget — a series of measures that will no doubt induce anger among the ­Coalition’s base and negate the Treasurer’s pledge to spare current retirees — the increase in superannuation taxes looks implausible. There is a long history of appalling forecasting of super­annuation taxation receipts on the part of Treasury.

In other words, it is quite on the cards that the Budget will suffer the same fate as those under Swan - based on cheery Treasury forecasts which don't sound all that likely, and will have to be revised downwards.

Update 2:  Peter Martin really praises the good bits of the budget.

Yeah, I agree up to a point.   The bigger issue, and one for which I blame both sides of politics, is that a moderate increase in GST (I was arguing for 2.5%)  would have given a substantial, and pretty much dead certain, boost in revenue.  Instead, we get changes which are of uncertain revenue impact over many years.   Both sides aren't really being serious about revenue measures.   And the Coalition is especially profligate when it comes to defence.  There has also been no serious discussion about the Coalition's climate change spend - when a modest carbon tax would make much more sense.



*  I see the "correct" spelling is "meh", but I always have the urge to put in an apostrophe.  I can't see why both can't be right.

Japanese ghosts are nasty

In the early 2000's, I was busy baby wrangling (with my wife, of course) and so didn't catch up with the Japanese ghost/horror genre of the likes of The Ring, and The Grudge.

Well, on Sunday night my son declared an interest in watching something scary, so I found the 2004 US version of The Grudge available on the streaming service Stan.

The movie received mixed reviews at the time, and I'm not the biggest fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar, but it did strike me (and my son, more so) as being very efficient at delivering scares.    I liked the way it was set in the complete opposite of a gothic city (Tokyo), and the silence that accompanied many of the dreaded "walking up the stairs to see what's making that sound" scenes.   I see that it was only rated PG-13 in the US (on Stan it showed as M), and I am quite surprised at that - it would have to be one of the creepiest movies to get that rating, surely?

After it finished, something fell unexpectedly out of the cupboard behind the living room, delivering an appropriate final fright for the night.

Airport security is not just "security theatre"

Carry-Ons Bristle With Loaded Guns At Airport Security - The New York Times

Just last night, on SBS on Demand, I was watching for the first time (and with my son) Adam Ruins Everything, and it was pretty entertaining.

But the second one we watched spent time dissing American's TSA, and claimed that airport security was more "security theatre" than effective.

I said to my son that I don't find this a convincing argument, and today by coincidence, I come across this in the NYT:

Anyone annoyed at long airport security lines and
picayune-seeming inspectors should be grateful that watchful agents of
the Transportation Security Administration have been confiscating guns
at an unfortunately record pace from travelers who mindlessly pack them
in their carry-on bags.

This is plainly illegal, but last year, 2,653 firearms —
83 percent of them loaded!  — were seized from carry-on luggage, up 441
guns from the previous record haul in 2014. The pace keeps rising. In
the week of April 18, airport agents detected and seized 73 guns from
carry-ons, the most ever in a week. Sixty-eight of them were loaded and
27 had a round chambered and ready to be triggered. That violates the
most basic safety precautions that the gun lobby insists most
law-abiding, gun-carrying citizens carefully observe in indulging their
Second amendment rights in public.

Stopping a couple of thousand loaded guns getting on board aircraft is not mere "security theatre".

A new dark matter solution?

Speculative theories of gravity are a dime a dozen on arXiv, and I don't usually pay that much attention to them (well, they are hard to understand); but I am interested to see that there are two recent papers up, one by a handful of European physicists, and another by a couple of Japanese ones, talking about a bimetric theory of gravity that incorporates something that makes sense as a dark matter particle.  Here's the European abstract:

Observational evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is limited to its gravitational effects. The extensive program for dedicated searches has yielded null results so far, challenging the most popular models. Here we propose that this is the case because the very existence of cold Dark Matter is a manifestation of gravity itself. The consistent bimetric theory of gravity, the only known ghost-free extension of General Relativity involving a massless and a massive spin-2 field, automatically contains a perfect Dark Matter candidate. We demonstrate that the massive spin-2 particle can be heavy, stable on cosmological scales, and that it interacts with matter only through a gravitational type of coupling. Remarkably, these features persist in the same region of parameter space where bimetric theory satisfies the current gravity tests. We show that the observed Dark Matter abundance can be generated via freeze-in and suggest possible particle physics and gravitational signatures of our bimetric Dark Matter model.

You heard it here first.  Probably.

How ignorant can you get?

Very, very ignorant, if you just live in the Right wing climate change denial-o-sphere, as does Steve Kates.    (Climate change denial goes hand in hand with believing Obama has crushed and killed freedom, the American economy, and all Western values, by the way.  That's Kates' other favourite line at Catallaxy.)

Anyway, my evidence for his extreme, gob smacking ignorance, is this from his recent short post:

Global warming is almost totally out of the news since the evidence that is happening has all but disappeared.

This is by way of introduction to a video by retired climate scientist Lindzen, which had already been thoroughly debunked (at length) by Barry Bickmore.  

Not that Kates would have known of the Bickmore post.   It's outside his denial-o-sphere. 

I see that only a few comments have been made at the Catallaxy post.  Is it possible that even they can see when Kates is exaggerating to a ridiculous extent?

Skepticism on company tax cuts

From Crikey.   (Bernard Keane is a real mix of policy beliefs, no?   Often, when it comes to "nanny state" issues like licensing hours, he sounds like a libertarian.  But he hates them on guns, and hardly follows their small government economics to the letter.)  

About those submarines...

It's been a little while since the Turnbull government announced it was going to go with a fleet of French designed, Australian built, submarines.  Twelve of them, in fact, but (as I understand it) to be built at a somewhat glacial pace.

A few observations, if I may:

a.  of course this will be criticised.  Surely the public has noticed that all major Defence acquisition programs look, at one stage or another, to have been a wrong decision: at least in terms of cost, and often in technical  ways too. So it doesn't matter which of the contenders had been chosen - any would have been criticised and would go wrong in one way or another.

b.  Apparently, Defence came out strongly in favour of the French bid.   Given that Abbott had told the Japanese, apparently on a handshake (and probably one of his stupid winks) that they had the deal in the bag, this gives someone like me who disliked PM Abbott decidedly mixed feelings.   On the one hand, it's deprived us of the criticism of the Japanese subs which would have been inevitable (see above), and hence the blaming of Abbott when the Defence preference was made known;  on the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that Abbott might have been right - the Japanese submarine probably would have been ultimately fine; cheaper too.  The Japanese remain good at hi tec stuff at a reasonable price.  The French do well in aerospace, but not sure about cost.   Is it silly of me to think I can judge a nation's likely submarine building capacity from their car making ability?   Because I would prefer a Japanese luxury car to a French one.   Not that I know anything really about luxury cars, either.

c.  The criticism of the contract is already starting, and, amusingly, it's the "delcons" who don't like Turnbull, such as Andrew Bolt, leading the charge.   All further evidence of the internal crisis in the Coalition.  Does Bolt really think he is doing the Coalition a favour by criticising them for making a decision that Defence wanted?  Or that he is helping Australia's diplomatic standing by dredging up what France did 50 years ago?   Once again, I sense a Turnbull "with friends like Bolt, who needs enemies" response coming.

d.  Twelve submarines?  Really?   As I have mentioned before, without a willingness to have Filipino seaman run them under contract, I thought we couldn't even manage [insert gender neutral word for "manning"] the 2 or 3 Collins class that are available at any one time.  And that's despite throwing money at sailors to try to convince them to become submariners.  Seriously, how does the government intend dealing with that problem?   And is there room for Labor to make political headway by announcing that if it wins the next election, it'll only be going to contract for 9 or 10 submarines, saving a substantial amount of money in the process?  I reckon there could be.

e.  Building them here was an inevitable result of politics trumping dry economics, but I have no big problem with that.   There does seem to be speculation, though, that what the Liberals are doing in concentrating spending in Adelaide and WA is going to be at the expense of votes in Queensland - especially with them not being able to at least throw Queensland the bone of some patrol boat builds. 

A somewhat more serious take on the economics of supporting industry (esp defence industry) can be found here at the Lowy Institute.

Following the Republicans

It's kind of fascinating, if not edifying, to watch the Coalition in Australia follow the path of the Republicans.

I don't know how long the Liberals have sent people over to America to study Republican electoral tactics, and I suppose that you can't blame them for thinking they might learn something useful.

Instead, it has just encouraged a contagion of the American Republican problem to Australian right wing politics - what with the climate change denial, economic rabid anti-Keynesians and Laffer-ites continually decrying economic pragmatists in Treasury (and confused Coalition Treasurers trying to walk a path between the two), and the revival of culture wars amongst the conservatives with more than a dash of misogyny thrown in.

On the last point, it's hard to read the return of Chris Kenny to his own vomit of the Abbott/News Ltd attack of Gillian Triggs in any other way.   It's just the nuttiest and most strangely obsessive personal attack on a statutory appointment I can ever recall coming from the Right of Australian politics. 

I expect it must also dismay Malcolm Turnbull, too.  But one of the mysteries for which we have to wait (perhaps) another few years, until he publishes his account of his time in office, is how he must really feel about having to dance with and corral the conservative ideologues in his party.   Surely he is doing his part, with hypocritical walking back from former views on everything from climate change policy to negative gearing, but is he really happy doing it? 

The split within the Right in Australia at the moment is such an obvious (but smaller scale) version of the split within the Right in America.   Sure, we don't have a populist like Trump shaking up the corridors of Right wing power; but we did have the pretty close analogue of blowhard Clive Palmer.   Perhaps in that respect we are slightly ahead of the Americans, in that Palmer has (politically) blown apart already, but we are waiting another 6 months or so before we see it happen to Trump.  Who can doubt that, if we had some similar electoral system to the Americans, that Palmer would have run for President in the same self funded manner?  

It could be right, what the dimwitted Abbott diehards are muttering to themselves - that the best thing that can happen to the Coalition is a surprise fail at the next election.   [It's hilarious reading Catallaxy at the moment, where the pro Abbott supporters congregate and threaten a Labor vote, while openly dissing Sinclair Davidson for his support of the Turnbull overthrow.  It seems that SD can't ban anymore commenters who are rude to his face (up to and including one who now openly calls him an "idiot") because of the large number he would have to cull.]   The only thing is, the "delcons" (delusional conservatives) think that it will vindicate them - so their imperviousness to evidence will remain a problem, unless they are the ones to then leave the fold and establish a breakaway conservative party.   Yes, let that happen, and let the moderates of the Right tell their Party they have to decide whether to stand with the evidence free, ideologically driven side of the Right, or go with the centrist and and pragmatic Right.   It may be the only way to resolve the current problems.

MIT needs a new writer

The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

What's this?  MIT Technology Review appears to have a  writer who is completely on board with the EmDrive being a real, new physics thing.

I remain deeply skeptical.  And someone in comments claims (not sure if it is right, though), that the EmDrive, if true and configured right, could generate its own power and zip around forever.  So you could build your own UFOs powered by perpetual motion, I guess.  Would be rather cool, but come on, how likely is that? 

I'll take it up when they can get it down to 45 seconds

The Case for the 1-Minute Workout Is Getting Stronger | TIME: In the latest study, published in PLOS One, exercise scientists led by Martin Gibala, chair of kinesiology at McMaster University, who has spent the last several years documenting the health benefits of interval training, found that as little as one minute of intensive exercise could have the same health benefits for the heart, respiratory fitness and muscles as 45 minutes of more typical continuous exercise over three months.

Granted, those 60 seconds have to be at a sprint-like pace, as if you’re being chased down by a tiger and fueled by adrenaline. But it’s just 60 seconds. “I think there is good evidence that shows you can see comparable benefits despite the fact that intervals require less total exercise and reduced time commitment,” says Gibala.

Stiglitz on economists

Joseph Stiglitz Talks About Inequality and the Economy - The Atlantic: 

Stiglitz: The prevalent ideology—when I say prevalent it’s not all economists— held that markets were basically efficient, that they were stable. You had people like Greenspan and Bernanke saying things like “markets don't generate bubbles.” They had precise models that were precisely wrong and gave them confidence in theories that led to the policies that were responsible for the crisis, and responsible for the growth in inequality. Alternative theories would have led to very different policies. For instance, the tax cut in 2001 and 2003 under President Bush. Economists that are very widely respected were cutting taxes at the top, increasing inequality in our society when what we needed was just the opposite. Most of the models used by economists ignored inequality. They pretended that macroeconomy was unaffected by inequality. I think that was totally wrong. The strange thing about the economics profession over the last 35 year is that there has been two strands: One very strongly focusing on the limitations of the market, and then another saying how wonderful markets were. Unfortunately too much attention was being paid to that second strand.

What can we do about it? We've had this very strong strand that is focused on the limitations and market imperfections. A very large fraction of the younger people, this is what they want to work on. It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.

Gut microbiome research, continued

Lifestyle has a strong impact on intestinal bacteria

This study of some healthy Dutch people still concludes that having a higher diversity bunch of bugs in your gut is healthier.  Not exactly an intuitive result, compared to what people probably would have thought until recently:

This DNA analysis made it possible to examine which factors impact the diversity of the microbiome (the intestinal bacterial community unique to each of us). And that appears to be many. Wijmenga says, "You see, for example, the effect of diet in the gut." People who regularly
consume yogurt or buttermilk have a greater diversity of gut bacteria. Coffee and wine can increase the diversity as well, while whole milk or a high-calorie diet can decrease it.


"In total we found 60 dietary factors that influence the diversity. What these mean exactly is still hard to say," explains UMCG researcher Alexandra Zhernakova, the first author of the Science article. "But there is a good correlation between diversity and health: greater diversity is better."

Clear writing on negative gearing

How negative gearing replaced the great Australian dream and distorted the economy | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian

An excellent, clear bit of explanation from Greg Jericho on the investment distorting effect of our current negative gearing/CGT system in Australia.

It's pretty appalling, really, that once again, political games prevents politicians (I'm looking at you, Malcolm Turnbull) speaking honestly about an economic issue.  (It's going to do the same to him on climate change policy, too.)  This is why people become cynical about politics.  

Disturbing food

The BBC has an article up about food photographers, and it includes this example:

I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be the only person who would be feel a tad queasy if served that dish in a restaurant.   Oh, sure, everyone with a phone would probably want to photograph it (although I personally have never done that in public), but that's not the point.

A pretty convincing analysis

The truth about gun ownership after Port Arthur - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

One thing that interested me in this is the explanation that the increase in gun numbers in Australia in the last decade or so has not been into more households - proportionally, about the same number of households have guns.  As the author notes, this is a similar phenomena as has occurred in America.

In America, I take it as pretty convincing evidence of the paranoid streak that runs in its right wing politics (especially in the last decade or two), and reading the gun nutters who comment at Catallaxy, I find it hard to deny there is a similar strain in Australia.

Those in Australia who buy one (or want to buy one) for self protection ignore the risk to themselves and their family that having a gun in the household creates.  (Nor the fact that there's a good chance the crim's gun they are worried about had a good chance of having originally come from a legal owner.)   But then again, scratch a gun obsessed nut, and you'll have a much better than even chance of finding a climate change denier, too.   They just aren't good at understanding the big picture.

The seriously immature Senator

Wicked Campers critics 'authoritarians disguised as hippies or feminists': Senator

Yes, it's Leyonhjelm, who says of the seriously sexist and routinely offensive Wicked Campers slogans:

"You need to be a particularly wowserish type of person to not find them funny."

Actually, Senator, you need to have a sense of humour of the kind found in immature 14 year boys, as you do, to find any of them funny.

Hot in Asia

Punishing Heat Wave Sets Records Across Asia

You really have to feel sorry for the poor people in these regions who do not have airconditioning.  This really sounds like heat that will kill:

And just how hot is it?

Titlagarh in the Indian state of Odisha sizzled at 48.5°C on April 24
— the highest reliably measured temperature for the country in any
April. Schools in Odisha were unexpectedly let out for the summer on
Tuesday. Classes will remain suspended until, at least, the third week
of July.

Cambodia saw a national all-time record high of 42.6°C set in Preah
Vihea province on April 15. That was two days after its neighbor to the
north, Laos, set its own national all-time high temperature of 42.3°C at
Seno.

Dozens of Thai weather stations have broken or tied their all-time record maximum temperatures this month.

The thermometer has been reaching 46.0°C in several towns in Myanmar,
still shy of the national record high of 47.2°C at Myinmu observed on
May 14, 2010.

A greener Earth with local droughts

Global Droughts: A Bad Year – Significant Figures by Peter Gleick

Peter Gleick lists the areas which have recently (over the past couple of years) had drought problems.

This seems to me a good thing to keep in mind when reading about the Earth becoming greener.  Not much benefit to be had if its greener (and slightly wetter) where no one's living.

Rudd chat

I haven't seen all that many episodes of The Weekly this year (I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I have MKR to blame), but I watched it last night, and was annoyed with the clearly increased amount of swearing on it.

Look, honestly, the writing is (generally) smart, it's only on at 8.30 pm (not like 11pm or later with the routinely sweary equivalent shows - such as John Oliver's - in the US), and the use of 4 or 5 "f...s" in a half hour really doesn't make it any funnier.   Get your act together, ABC, and resist the intrusion of language we don't really want to normalise amongst your teen viewers.  (As I tell my kids, swearing is partly wrong because it's boring when people develop it as a routine tic.  And so many people do.)

Anyhow, I post here mainly to note the "Hard Chat" interview with Kevin Rudd, which was pretty funny.   But I thought Rudd looked puffy faced, tired and not very well.  I really do suspect his health may not be up to any high powered job, and why on Earth do people like him keep trying to get into positions of power when they can easily retire early and develop other interests and hobbies.  (Or do charitable works, or whatever.)

As some dimwits used to say about Hitler...(Well, they did)

I hate Donald Trump's views. But his tenacity inspires me | Michael Arceneaux | Opinion | The Guardian

Eating in the news

It's seems it's either too much or too little:

*  The BBC reports about some amazing changes in obesity rates in China:

Researchers found 17% of boys and 9% of girls under the age of 19 were obese in 2014, up from 1% for each in 1985.
The 29-year study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, involved nearly 28,000 students in Shandong province.
The study used a stricter cut-off of the Body Mass Index (BMI) than the World Health Organization standard.
"It is the worst explosion of childhood and adolescent obesity that I have ever seen," Joep Perk from the European Society of Cardiology told AFP news agency.
The study said China's rapid socioeconomic and nutritional transition had led to an increase in energy intake and a decrease in physical activity.

*  In Japan, in the meantime, they apparently don't so well at dealing with anorexia and eating disorders.  Culturally, I'm not sure they generally handle mental health issues all that well, but I think they are improving.  Slowly.

*  In other eating disorder news, I was surprised to read about the search for the genetic role in anorexia nervosa.  (I just hadn't really thought of genes playing much of a role in it.) 

Given that the disease (often/always?) involves people developing a persistent ill founded reaction to their own body image (merely imagining that they are overweight), and transexualism can involve a not dissimilar distress at the look of their body, I wonder if anyone has looked for a genetic component to that?

In praise of an add-on

I use Firefox as my preferred Windows browser.  (It's not bad in Android too, but just a little bit slower than Chrome.)

But I just have an odd urge to praise its add-on Lightshot, a screenshot addition that I use frequently in blogging, but also quite often at work.   It is just one of the handiest things to have at hand, and I really appreciate its simplicity, reliability and utility.  Thank you, its creators.

And now back to your regular programming...

Much, much bigger on the inside

It's hard not to think of the Tardis when reading a paper like this one:  On the volume inside old black holes.   It talks about the mind boggling concept of the insides of evaporating black holes being much larger than the exterior surface indicates.  The abstract reads:

Black holes that have nearly evaporated are often thought of as small objects, due to their tiny exterior area. However, the horizon bounds large spacelike hypersurfaces. A compelling geometric perspective on the evolution of the interior geometry was recently shown to be provided by a generally covariant definition of the volume inside a black hole using maximal surfaces. In this article, we expand on previous results and show that finding the maximal surfaces in an arbitrary spherically symmetric spacetime is equivalent to a 1+1 geodesic problem. We then study the effect of Hawking radiation on the volume by computing the volume of maximal surfaces inside the apparent horizon of an evaporating black hole as a function of time at infinity: while the area is shrinking, the volume of these surfaces grows monotonically with advanced time, up to when the horizon has reached Planckian dimensions. The physical relevance of these results for the information paradox and the remnant scenarios are discussed. 

And then, from within the paper itself:

A few numbers
Before closing this section, let us put the above in perspective: when a solar mass (1030 kg) black hole becomes Planckian (it needs 1055 times the actual age of the universe), it will contain volumes equivalent to 105 times our observable universe, hidden behind a Planckian area (10−70 m2).

Perhaps more pertinent is to consider small primordial black holes with mass less than 1012 kg. Their initial horizon radius and volume are of the order of the proton charge radius (10−15m) and volume (10−45m3) respectively. They would be in the final stages of evaporation now, hiding volumes of about one litre (10−9m3).

 Impressive, to put it mildly.

And as we approach the solemn occasion of the 5th anniversary of the "stagflation" warning...

The ABC reports:

Consumer prices have fallen for the first time since December 2008, with deflation of 0.2 per cent in the March quarter.

The Bureau of Statistics data show inflation was just 1.3 per cent over the past year.
Economists surveyed by Bloomberg has expected inflation for the quarter to come in at 0.2 per cent and 1.7 per cent over the year.

(One) of my earlier posts on the 2011 warning (which has proved to be about as wrong as it could possibly be) by Sinclair Davidson here. 

Update:   I see today that Sinclair was to be on Andrew Bolt's show on Sky News  last night.   I don't get cable TV, so I wonder whether Andrew asked him what happened to the stagflation warning that he talked about on the Bolt Report nearly 5 years ago.  

Another good question

Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy - The Atlantic

Here's a key paragraph from the interview:

Raghunathan: That's the plight of most people in the world, I would say. There are expectations that if you achieve some given thing, you're going to be happy. But it turns out
that's not true. And a large part of that is due to adaptation, but a large part of it also is that you see this mountain in front of you and you want to climb over it. And when you do, it turns out there are more mountains to climb.

The one thing that has really really helped me in this regard is a concept that I call “the dispassionate pursuit of passion” in the book, and basically the concept boils down to
not tethering your happiness to the achievement of outcomes. The reason why it's important to not tie happiness to outcomes is that outcomes by themselves don't really have an unambiguously positive or negative effect on your happiness. Yes, there are some outcomes—you get a terminal disease, or your child dies—that are pretty extreme, but let's
leave those out. But if you think about it, the breakup that you had with your childhood girlfriend, or you broke an arm and were in a hospital bed for two months, when they occurred, you might have felt, “Oh my goodness, this is the end of the world! I'm never going to
recover from it.” But it turns out we're very good at recovering from those, and not just that, but those very events that we thought were really extremely negative were in fact pivotal in making us grow and learn.

Everybody's got some kind of a belief about whether good things are going to happen or bad things are going to happen. There's no way to scientifically prove that one of these beliefs
is more accurate than another. But if you believe life is benign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. If you think life is malign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. It's kind of like a placebo effect. Given that all of these beliefs are all equally valid, why not adopt the belief that is going to be more useful to you in your life as you go along?

Ice on the way out

Citizen scientists collected rare ice data, confirm warming since industrial revolution

Interesting use of old ice formation records from two parts of the world explained here.

My Kitchen Rules wrap up

Things I learnt from watching MKR this year:

*  pasta seems to be extraordinarily "in", again.   It seemed that only a couple of episodes (and there were many, many episodes) didn't feature at least one of the team making their own pasta, using the tortuous pasta machinery that 99% of Australian households cannot be bothered with, given the range of fresh and dried pasta available everywhere.

*  smearing stuff on plates still seems to be "in", despite my hearing a restaurant food critic in Brisbane on the radio earlier this year say that it was definitely "out".  But, I guess, given that the same critic said that fine dining was generally "out" too, in favour of more casual, relaxed (and cheaper!) eating, who would know.

*  not enough people understand the magic of serving food on wood platters.  These made a disappointingly small number of appearances on the show (actually only once that I can recall now - I notice because I do tend to loudly assure whoever is watching with me that the food must be good because of that.)   What is it?   Because MacDonalds use them on their "create your own" burgers they are now too downmarket?

*  cauliflower is way "in".   One of my least favourite veges tastes pretty good as a quasi chip, apparently.  I would never have worked that one out myself.  A recent article in The Guardian also confirmed the cauli's rise.

*  never try making your own gnocchi on a food competition show.  It only ever seems to work right about half of the time.

*  no one in the universe thinks a meal of one giant meatball on pasta is a good idea:  except for that (normally more sensible and somewhat funny)  woman on MKR.

*  chefs (or at least wannabe chefs) really touch the food you're about to eat an awful lot.   I'm not sure I'd even be comfortable within my family as to the amount of direct food massaging on the plate that seemed to go on this year, but from these strangers?   I hope professional kitchens use plastic gloves more than that.

That's all I can think of for now.   Ben Pobjie's final comedy review about the show perhaps wasn't one of his strongest (like the judges, he does start to run out of steam by the end of the season), but I liked the opening paragraph:

And so it has come to this. Who would have thought, when this season of My Kitchen Rules began, that it would one day end? And yet, after sixty-eight months of intense culinary competition, laughter, tears, success, failure, drama, failure, suspense, failure, heartbreak and some more failure, we come to the 2016 MKR Grand Final, the night of nights for people whose friends once told them they were good at cooking.

An Army too far

I was surprised recently at the cinema to see the trailer for a movie version of Dad's Army.  It certainly inspired no enthusiasm to see it: if you can't make a good trailer out of 100 minutes of material it's generally a warning about the quality of the full length version.  And it seemed very strange that they assumed audience knowledge of the characters and situation - whereas you have to be pretty much over 50, surely, to be in that category.  How many movies aiming for that demographic succeed commercially?   (Although, it is true, there does seem to be a minor industry in twee British films featuring aging characters made for an aging audience.)

In any case, reading the comments in the Guardian following Peter Bradshaw's lukewarm review lead me to this interesting aspect of the original series.  I may have read about this many years ago, but had forgotten:

The main difference of course is that many of the actors in the original series were real WW2 veterans themselves.
Most interestingly, Arnold Ridley, who played the gentle pacifist, Private Godfrey, was actually a very badly injured and highly decorated veteran of WW1 and WW2.
In WW1, as a volunteer with the Artists Rifles, he was gassed, shot, injured by shrapnel, and suffered bayonet wounds to the extent he was invalided out of the army in 1916.
In 1939, he was recalled to the colours and received a Commission, although as an officer looking after supplies in France. But circumstances thrust him into action again, and he found himself commanding one of the rear-guard elements protecting the evacuation of Boulogne. His command fought to the final minute and just made onto the last RN Destroyer in Boulogne Harbour. They sailed out under continuous by attack German dive bombers, where once again Lt Ridley was badly wounded by machine gun-fire.
He was once again invalided out of the forces, but as soon as he had recovered sufficiently, volunteered for the Home Guard, the real "Dads Army"!
John Le Mesurier, (Sergeant Wilson) commanded a Tank Squadron through North Africa and Western Europe, while other members of the cast had similar backgrounds.

 Maybe that's what Hollywood is lacking these days - ex military who are now actors.

Speaking of which, there is a long list at IMDB of actors who served in the US military.  Some are well known (Jimmy Stewart, for example), but others are new to me:   Jamie Farr (Klinger on MASH) actually did serve in Korea?  But so did Alan Alda.  Didn't know that...

And Rock Hudson served in The Philippines as a Navy aircraft mechanic?   Huh.  And for true action heroes:  Paul Newman flew as a turret gunner on torpedo bombers in the Pacific, and Don Adams was a marine who served in the Battle of Guadalcanal

Makes our modern crop of under 50 actors seem like self indulgent wimps.   

The Whitening (and the Wrinkling)

The coming Republican demographic disaster, in 1 stunning chart - The Washington Post

The demographics for the Republicans do look really bad.

A politician being a politician - but it's still annoying

Federal election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull out on a limb over negative gearing

Peter Martin illustrates well that Turnbull is being an opportunistic politician of the typical kind in his willingness to now run a scare campaign on changing negative gearing, when he used to criticise its economic effects.

Suicide in Greenland

Greenland Has The World's Highest Suicide Rate, And Teenage Boys Are Especially Vulnerable : Goats and Soda : NPR

What a great, if somewhat depressing, bit of journalism here - a lengthy consideration of the high rate of suicide in Greenland.  And even if you don't read it all, have a look at the stunning photos of a very bleak looking part of the world.

For an Australian, the similarities between the problem in that country and that in remote aboriginal communities are obvious.  Despite smaller communities supposedly having the benefits of  social connections, it seems a combination of being caught between two cultures, and the lack of opportunity that physical isolation brings, makes for a high suicide rate.

NPR investigates

How Much Money Do Uber Drivers Really Make? Send Us Your Screenshots : All Tech Considered : NPR

I'll be interested to see what they come up with.

NPR really does some good work - I must get around to adding them to my blogroll.

Missing from any Anzac Day march I've ever seen

...is anyone dressed like this:

....although I suppose if they were allowed in the march, they'd be slipping over anything resembling a banana skin on the road. 

Yes, I guess these chaps (real soldiers from World War 1 - you can read about their entertainment troupe at the Australian War Memorial blog) could give a whole new meaning to "Company clown".  

I'm tempted to try to make some pun or other about how they died - many times, on stage - but that would be inappropriate.

Lurking around

I have my doubts I should have been there, but the creaky old stairway that looked not very safe was no longer blocked off (probably due to some work being done on the weekday, by the looks), and there was no one around.   So I had a look in this roof space area that I'm not sure has ever been open to the public.  (Maybe it was when it used to be used for something else.   And I do have childhood memories of its former use.  But now that I think of it, the handrail you can see in one photo looks fancy enough that it used to be for public access.   And why put a nice big stained glass window in if it couldn't be seen by the public?  So yes, I think it probably was formerly open, but hasn't been for a long time.)

The very observant reader of this blog may know which Brisbane building I refer to.

Good Lord - Donald Trump sounding not unreasonable

Donald Trump was asked about anti-transgender bathroom bills. His answer was … correct. - Vox

No, this is not the start of any turn around in his credibility.

It's just that it's near impossible for any person to be completely wrong on every single political/cultural issue.

Not grokked

Prince Defied Conventional Notions of Race and Gender - The New York Times

He did?

Not meaning to sound mean spirited; and not meaning to detract from the sadness felt by his fans; and perhaps showing my musical and cultural ignorance to an embarrassing degree:  but I "grokked" Prince to an even lesser degree than Bowie.

Bowie in interviews could come across as a knowing performance artist who was witty and pretty normal beneath it all:  I'm not sure that Prince ever seemed to be more than an embodied performance.  (Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that, people.  You could say that about quite a few eccentric but talented artists. And, of course, it is not as if I - or many people, it seems - knows what he was like in private.)

I should stop writing now, as it's generally not wise to be going against the popular flow so soon after an artist's death.

Good to know

Need to remember something? Better draw it, study finds

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that drawing pictures of information that needs to be remembered is a strong and reliable strategy to enhance memory.

We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always
came out on top," said the study's lead author, Jeffrey Wammes, PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology. "We believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive memory trace that better integrates visual, motor and semantic information."

Extraordinary video

China dust devil lifts boy into air - BBC News

(Note:  boy not seen lifted into the air in video, but seeing the effect on the ground, the picture showing him in the air is entirely plausible.)

Canned fish, re-visited

Last year, I wrote of my search for the nicest canned sardines (and referred readers to a much more extensive taste guide than I could manage.)  (By the way, I recently found that, oddly, the deli style shop sitting in the middle of the spanking new Pacific Fair extension on the Gold Coast had a really extensive range - including my favoured Portuguese brand - at very cheap prices.   Haven't tried the Croatian ones yet - not sure if I should.)

Since I'm trying to shed a few kg again (I now know I definitely have to do what Michael Mosley said he does - move from a 2/5 diet to a 1/7 diet if I want any hope of maintaining my lower weight,)  I'm back on the sardines for lunch kick, but I've also been trying the range of canned herring which seems to have become popular.

And I must say, I am enjoying them.  King Oscar's are fine, and even the attractively packaged Brunswick brand (which I quite disliked for sardines) has a  canned kipper in water which was quite acceptable.  I haven't tried the Aldi brand yet - I think they are from Poland, but in a can which is a bit inconveniently too much for one person.

The canned fish I never care for is the "flavoured" tuna (or salmon).   They're never terribly nice, and it just seems a way to minimise the amount of tuna in the can with cheaper filling.  But a good quality tuna in olive oil is always nice:  and it forms the basis of my daughter's favourite meal - salad nicoise, as prepared by me.  (It is one of the few dishes - very few dishes - which my children acknowledge as being better when made by their father instead of their mother.  I did win the Great Chicken Cook off last Christmas too, with my Italian baked chicken versus teriyaki baked chicken, even though my wife did not realise it was a competition.  But I digress...)

Although I haven't had it for a while, there are some cans of broiled fish in soy sauce sold in Asian supermarkets which make for a nice enough light meal on rice.  Just as with the old cans of braised steak and onions, you can heat it up by boiling the can before you open it, and just tip onto a bowl of rice.  Here it is, this brand:

Next up:  it's about time I put pen to paper about my observations of precipitation (and shovels) when I visited Yorkshire.  :)

Speaking of people who annoy me...

...I'm so glad that we now have the IPA view on Britain exiting the European Union getting an airing in our Senate via its conservative fop James Paterson.

Next up:  I expect a decent lecture on the righteous adventures of Milton Friedman in Chile. 

[All /sarc, of course.]

Irritation noted

Beyondblue anxiety mental health campaign worthless: Helen Razer

I've recently noted how annoying I find Razer's whole writing oeuvre,  which I find difficult to describe clearly.  "Tendentious anti-tendentiousness" seems to summarise this column which I don't recommend.  She has something of the quality of perpetual irritant Brendan O'Neill: writes a 100 words when 20 would do, always seems to be wanting to find something to complain about.

Little reported drought

India drought: '330 million people affected' - BBC News

Some more detail on the fairly dire sounding conditions in India at the moment to be found at this report in the Times of India.

The long term issue, is, of course, what effect climate change will have on the variability of monsoon seasons.   What's pretty certain is that India would have to be one of the most sensitive countries to climate change, and building coal powered electricity plants is not going to much help them deal with drought or floods.

Update:  here's a story about the continuing drought in parts of Africa, too.

Have the anti-circ obsessives responded yet?

Circumcision Does Not Reduce Penile Sensitivity Or Affect Sexual Pleasure Later In Life

I presume they have, but a quick Google hasn't shown up where.

Update:  haven't located the outrage yet, but I'm not looking very hard.  In the meantime, I see that Village Voice ran a story late last year on the "wacky world" (their words, but I agree with them) of foreskin restoration.