Oh no, Maxine

I liked Maxine McKew as a journalist and had no objection to her working for Kevin Rudd. But she's straining the (entirely one way) friendship by deciding to run for Parliament, and choosing the PM's electorate in which to do it.

Even before it was known whether she really wanted to run for Parliament, it seemed to me that her background as the journalist with whom politicians of both sides could enjoy a friendly lunch/interview (even though it may have been "on the record") made it a little unfair of her to now want to actually be a political player. Isn't it likely that as a politician she is in a position to abuse information gleaned in her former occupation, which probably traded to some extent on a perceived trustworthiness to keep certain comments and asides confidential?

You could probably argue this for almost all political journalists, and say that you can't have a rule that they should not run for Parliament.

But still, with McKew, it seems to me a question of the style of some of her journalism which makes it questionable. Of course, all Liberals interviewed by her knew she was married to a key Labor identity, and that may have made them more cautious anyway, but I don't know. Maybe she was still able to charm comments out of them which they would now regret having made.

The other argument may be that she could cause just as much harm by being a Rudd staffer anyway. That would be true, but all politicians need media advisors and they are often former journalists. I just feel that is part of the political territory, but I still don't like journalists running for Parliament, or at least ones that you can imagine politicians finding charming. (By this criteria, I would have no objection to Margo Kingston or Alan Ramsay running for Parliament!)

Speaking of mice...

The Times provides a link to a Memri video in which an Iranian lecturer explains the secret meaning behind Tom & Jerry cartoons. It's all to do with the Jews, of course!

Bryan Appleyard's blog brought this to my attention. (Has it been on LGF before? If not, I guess it will be soon.)

Rat excitement in New York

Have a look at this story and video from the LA Times. It seems someone passing by a closed KFC in New York noticed a bunch of rats having the run the place. The news crews came and filmed it from outside. The audio is perhaps the best part, as you listen to a bunch of people getting grossed out by seeing this.

I find rats sort of cute, but there are limits as to where I would prefer to meet them.

Rocket explosion over Australia

The ABC seems to be the only news outlet in Australia reporting this at the moment. Maybe other media will pick it up over the weekend, because the photos are very cool.

Pebble bed in China

The science show Catalyst on ABC last night had a story about a Chinese prototype pebble bed reactor. A transcript is available here, but unfortunately no video. (Maybe later?)

It gives the impression that it is working fine already, but the detail was slim. It was good to see what the "pebbles" actually look like.

Profitable things to do on the Moon

There's a short article here about ideas for early profit from going to the Moon. Nothing too exciting yet.

I seem to recall that some years ago there was a proposal for privately funding a lunar rover to be operated remoting by paying customers on earth. Sounded cool to me.

Whoever does it, they really need to get some robotic exploration of interesting areas on the moon going. The lunar poles, and areas with possible lava tubes, are where I would be headed first.

Losing interest in cinema

Each year, my interest in the movies nominated for an Oscar seems to be reaching new lows never before seen. I mean, until perhaps 7 years ago, even if I haven't seen the films, it has been a matter of some regret that I have missed at least some of them. But in the last few years, my interest in nominated films has been virtually in free fall.

It is almost certainly something to do with my stage in life, and if I was younger I would take risks again in seeing movies which may or may not turn out to be better than expected. But at the moment, I am lucky to be seeing one adult movie a year at the cinema, plus maybe another 2 child-friendly ones. The one adult movie, chosen because by all accounts I should like it, has been a disappointment in the last few years.

I only saw the last Star Wars on DVD about 6 months ago. Disappointing. (I reckon Orson Scott Card did a good job criticising the vacuousness of its moral philosophy here.) It's gorgeous to look at, but even that is just a cover for inadequate emotional logic in the story telling. I liked Village Voice's take on the visual style:

In debt to lurid sci-fi-novel cover art, Revenge of the Sith achieves the ultimate in what could be called Baroque Nerdism, a frame-filling aesthetic of graphic overdesign that began with The Phantom Menace and has now been jacked up to an absurd degree. Half the film takes place at dawn or dusk, so that the Marin County team can geek out on artificial roseate glow—a sugary luminence used so frequently one wonders if they developed a Maxfield Parrish plug-in to get the job done. On metropolitan Coruscant, background windows buzz with distant air-cars of various models; on DVD zoom mode, they will likely reveal individual license plate numbers.

What about Babel, this year's serious movie Oscar contender? I am not encouraged by the David Denby review in the New Yorker:

My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies. Iñárritu, who made “Amores Perros” (2000), is one of the world’s most gifted filmmakers. But I had the same reaction to “Babel” that I had to his most recent movie, “21 Grams” (2003): he creates savagely beautiful and heartbreaking images; he gets fearless performances out of his actors; he edits with the sharpest razor in any computer in Hollywood; and he abuses his audience with a humorless fatalism and a piling up of calamities that borders on the ludicrous.

As I have commented before, I think cinema goes through joyless phases from time to time, but this current one is lasting an inordinately long time. It's like waiting for a drought to break.

UPDATE: good to see it's not just me. I wrote this post before I read this Slate story, claiming that some Oscar voters are deliberately leaving the "Best Movie" ballot blank!

Also, it's probably an appropriate time to note again that some of the loss of interest in cinema is partly to do with the lack of charm or reliable likeability in the current raft of mainstream Hollywood actors. Can't any studio sign up a bunch of new, young-ish stars and promote it a new start in something resembling the old studio talent system? (Sign them up to an updated morals clause too, so they can be dumped as soon as they start turning up at parties without underwear.)

UPDATE 2:

I just read Danny Katz talking about Babel:

There was a huge selection of teary, jerky movies this year: there was the chirpy-weepy Little Miss Sunshine, and the baklava-syrupy The Pursuit Of Happyness - but the award goes to Babel, which was so magnificently miserable, for two and a half hours, all I could hear was the cast crying, the audience crying, and even the projectionist crying, from inside his sound-proofed, triple-glazed glass booth. I saw this film with my friend, Roger, and afterwards we were so shattered by the powerful themes of human fear and cultural isolation, we sat down in a cafe and discussed the movie's most profound question: how do you pronounce "Babel"? - I thought it was pronounced "Babble" but Roger said it was pronounced "Bay-bel" and I said "No, I'm pretty sure it's Babble" and he said "NO, IT'S DEFINITELY BAY-BEL" and this went on for about an hour and a half, yeah I really love those intense kind of post-cinema intellectual discussions.

Made me laugh.

Careers to avoid: clowning in Cucuta

The BBC reports:

Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say....

Local reports say the audience of about 20 people, mostly children, thought the shooting was part of the show before realising both men had been killed.

Last year, a prominent circus clown, known as Pepe, was also shot dead by a unknown assailant in Cucuta.

This is story crying out for further explanation.

A new concept for the day

You know something is complicated and "out there" when someone who posts at Cosmic Variance finds it new and hard to fathom. Have a look at this post about "Boltzmann brains" and the decay of the universe. More detail about Boltzmann and entropy is at an earlier CV post here. It is not easy going.

I will soon be doing a post about cosmologist Frank Tipler too, and his upcoming book claiming to show the physics behind various miracles in the Bible (or the New Testament, at least.) His previous book "The Physics of Immortality" got rubbished by most of his scientist colleagues, but I expect that will be nothing compared to the shellacking the new book is likely to take.

Targetting for beginners

Former Spook, who has some experience in these matters, has a good post explaining why people should not think there is anything unusual going on when the media runs a "targets have been selected already" story.

Debating the multiverse

Here's an interesting account of the recent debate at a conference between top cosmologists who take opposing sides on the issue of the anthropic principle and whether a "multiverse" exists. (String theory gets a mention too.) It explains the issues in pretty straightforward fashion, and is well worth a read.

Good surgeons play with monkey

OK, something surprising to post about.

The LA Times notes:

New research today found that surgeons with the highest scores on "Super Monkey Ball 2," "Stars Wars Racer Revenge" and "Silent Scope" performed best on tests of suturing and laparoscopic surgery.....

"For as little as three hours a week, you could help your children become the cyber-surgeons of the 21st century," said Dr. James C. Rosser Jr. of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and lead author of the study in the Archives of Surgery.

The research looked at 33 surgeons attending a course on laparoscopic surgery and found that their game-playing skill was a better predictor of success on the surgical tests than years of medical practice or number of surgeries performed.

Expertise with "Super Monkey Ball 2," which involves steering a ball containing a monkey down a serpentine track while simultaneously targeting bananas, was most closely linked with high test scores.

No news today

My morning survey of the news is showing nothing I particularly care to post about. Instead, for diversion, have a look at this website for "weird and funny" photos. (Originally I found it via Red Ferret Journal, which linked to the post about cool aircraft-in-flight cockpit photos. However, the rest of the Static website is worth looking at too.)

The cause of ice ages

It would give everyone a greater degree of confidence in climate predictions if scientists had cracked once and for all the issue of what triggers ice ages. As this post at Real Climate makes clear, they are still several theories around, and no doubt more to come. (Cyclic orbit changes are a significant part of it, but the exact mechanism seems still very much up for grabs.)

The comments to the post include these one, which I add here just to give some background on the whole history of ice ages:

...the question "What triggers ice ages?" only applies to the late Pleistocene (since about 800,000 years ago). From the onset of northern-hemisphere glaciation (about 3 million years ago) to the "mid-Pleistocene transition" (about 800,000 years ago), glacial advance and retreat follows a strong 41,000-year cycle, which has led to its being called "the 41 ky world" (Raymo & Nisancioglu 2003, Paleoceanography, 18, 1011). This is surely due to the changes of earth's obliquity, since changes in the amplitude of the climate signal correspond to changes in the amplitude of the obliquity cycle (Lisiecki & Raymo 2007, Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 56).

But since the mid-Pleistocene transition (not precisely since, this happens intermittently before that time) glacial changes are dominated by a 100,000-year cycle. The behavior during the "late Pleistocene" was originally attributed to changes in earth's eccentricity, but that idea has now fallen out of favor. Huybers & Wunsch (2005, Nature, 434, 491) and Huybers (Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 37) have convincingly shown that even during the late Pleistocene, the timing of deglaciations is strongly correlated to the obliquity cycle. They find no such relationship for the precession cycle or the eccentricity cycle.

(This comment seems to be by someone the scientists who run Real Climate trust.)

And this comment is make by one of the Real Climate authors, in response to the question of when would we be next due for an ice age were it not for global warming:

We've just come out of one of the big every-100KYr glaciations, and the normal course of events is to build up to another biggy through a series of small, short glaciations over the next 100KYr. In the normal course of events, the first try at an ice age would be due sometime in the next 20,000 years but I myself wouldn't try to pin it down more than that. One of the most interesting attempts so far to say what global warming might do to the glacial cycle is in the paper (pdf) by Archer and Ganopolski that appeared in the AGU journal GGG. I'll leave it to David to say whether that has been followed up by more detailed GCM work.

By the way, I don't post this to express scepticism about legitimate concern over CO2 levels, but it is interesting that something as significant as ice ages are not properly understood yet.

Japanese culture corner

The Japan Times has an article about the declining popularity of period drama in Japan. You know: samurai, ninja, some very strange haircuts and all. The casual visitor to Japan will still find quite a bit of it on TV, but apparently not as much as before.

I guess it's a similar phenomena to the decline of the Western as a genre. Anyone who was a child in the '60's can remember just how many cowboy and wild west shows were made in those days. I suspect the 1950's was probably the height of its popularity in the cinema, but I could be wrong. TV now is dominated by gritty crime shows, I suppose, and plain crap of all varieties. (Someday, a good sitcom about adults that doesn't always deal with sex will emerge again.)

Anyway, this got me thinking about the one childhood Japanese show that I can recall - The Samurai. The Wikipedia entry is relatively short, but points out that the show was very popular in Japan, Australia and the Phillipines, but was hardly shown anywhere else. How odd.

For those who can vaguely recall what the lead character Shintaro looked like, here he is:



(The picture is from a small fansite here.) Not exactly rugged good looks, but a sister-in-law of mine used to swoon over him, so she tells me.

I think most kids were most impressed by the evil ninja who jumped up backwards into trees, snuck around the houses with paper walls, and had an endless supply of throwing stars.

It would probably be seen as hopelessly violent for children today.