Watch out

Oral sex can cause throat cancer - 09 May 2007 - New Scientist

From the article:

The new findings should encourage people to consistently use condoms during oral sex as this could protect against HPV, the team says.

That's going to go over well with groups such as American teens, for whom this activity presumably carries the benefit of requiring no contraception. Gay men won't like it either, and I think it is safe to assume that this is one warning that will have little effect on behaviour.

How to annoy Andrew Bolt

News Corp carbon neutral by 2010 | NEWS.com.au Business

Andrew has already noted this.

Scary justice in Japan

Coerced confessions: Justice derailed in Japan - International Herald Tribune

Do try and avoid being a suspect in Japan.

Everything you never wanted in kid's TV

Palestinian TV uses Mickey Mouse to promote resistance | Guardian Unlimited

Short budget comment

Costello provides vision beyond the pork-barrelling - Editorial - Opinion

If even The Age has an editorial with a heading like that approving of the Budget, it can't be a bad one.

One for every backyard

Clean Energy / Infinia Corporation

With funding for solar power expected to be increased in tonight's budget, I wonder whether home based solar thermal will ever become much of an option. I quite like the look of the system at the link above, which is still (unfortunately) not yet on the market.

I am a little dubious about solar cells on the roof because of their limited life, and the danger from hail storms. I am guessing that a solar thermal system may be more easily repaired if it suffers storm damage.

Proof of cold fusion?

DailyTech - Navy Heats Up Cold Fusion Hopes

There's no indication that the type of could fusion allegedly shown here will end up being useful, but it would still be good to see an idea that has been so attacked by other scientists proved true.

On other blogs...

1. Probably everyone who reads me also reads Tim Blair. Still, I think that in his most recent post he comes up with up his funniest line for a long time (after quoting from the NYT):

The children are all too familiar with the apocalyptic warnings of climate change. “A lot of people are going to die” from global warming, a 9-year-old girl from Harlem announced at one point. And a 7-year-old boy from Park Slope said with a quiet lisp, “When you use too much electricity, it kills animals.”

Well, it does if you hook up the electrodes right.

2. Andrew Bolt has a good post on the pessimism of science fiction, brought on by recently re-watching Blade Runner. His conclusion:

Yes, it’s only a film, but it also fits a pattern of imagining of our future.

We actually wind up not much different in our wants, and not less vigilant on the whole against threats, than is often feared. We remain in the West extremely inventive, and driven more by the wishes of the public than the demands of the leaders.

That probably explains why artists and “seers” so often get us wrong, and imagine us becoming in time so much gloomier, oppressed, bullied, atrophied and poor than we inevitably and eventually turn out. In reminding us of this, Blade Runner is a comfort.

True. I also have heard Orwell's 1984 being read on Radio National recently, while I have been driving around town. It reminded me how much I disliked that book, both from a stylistic point of view (I think it is plain awful writing,) and for its ridiculous over-reach in the dystopia it paints. By taking aspects of totalitarianism, which were bad enough in their current form when Orwell wrote, and then exaggerating them wildly with an imagined technology which is still off the mark, combined with a way of writing characters which robbed them of any realistic humanity, the effect became that I just could not take it seriously. (Even with a one child policy, did China develop an "Anti-sex League"? )

3. Zoe Brain has brought to my attention the very enjoyable site Paleo-Future, which seems devoted entirely to looking at how the future has been imagined in the past. (I think it has been mentioned at Boing Boing before, but maybe I didn't follow the link.) I love this sort of stuff, growing up as I did in the (generally) optimistic 1960's, and expect to visit there regularly.

More icky moments in medical history...

Found via Arts & Letters Daily, there's book out called "Impotence - a Cultural History". In the Daily Telegraph review, there's an amusing list of odd impotence cures through history. One that I found odd because it is so specific is this:

...according to Ovid the "right molar of a small crocodile worn as an amulet guarantees erection in men".

Not just any crocodile molar, evidently, but the one on the right. How did the ancients come up with some of this stuff?

The other link from Arts & Letters is to an extract from the book itself, from which one can read a little about early experiments in testicular transplant:

The first experiment in grafting an entire testicle was performed by Dr. G. Frank Lydston on himself, on January 16, 1914. Expressing his disappointment that vulgar prejudices heretofore had prevented the exploitation of the sex glands of the dead, Lydston coolly reported how he transplanted into his own scrotum a suicide victim’s testicle. [p. 186]

L. L. Stanley, resident physician of the California state prison in San Quentin, reported in 1922 that he had first implanted testicles from executed convicts and then moved on to inject into his subjects via a dental syringe solutions of goat, ram, boar, and deer testicles. Altogether he made 1000 injections into 656 men. Stanley had been inspired by work of Serge Voronoff, an eminent Russian-born medical scientist working at the Collége de France. Voronoff in 1919 scandalized many by transplanting the testes of chimpanzees into men. He asserted that “marked psychical and sexual excitation” typically resulted, followed by a resurgence of memory, energy and “genital functions.” [pp. 186-7]

I am sure I have heard of experiments with ground up animal testes before, but I don't recall reading about whole chimp testes bit.

I guess there was little resembling ethics committees in those days.

A good reason to avoid diabetes...

Turns out that diabetic's foot ulcers, even those with antibiotic resistant staph infections, do well with maggot treatment. There's an unpleasant photo of the maggots in action on someone's foot at the linked article.

Adams confirms his philosopher of choice

Scott Adams has a funny post in which he explains that he has discovered he is a follower of Spinoza. His reaction on reading about him on Wikipedia:

Holy cow! My opinions match Spinoza’s perfectly. It turns out that being ignorant is almost exactly like being a well-read student of philosophy who can quote from the work of the masters. How lucky is that?

The rest of the post is fun too. He's quite a wit, although I have noticed that the topic of bestiality seems to appear with unwelcome frequency on his blog.

A small triumph for a woman in Saudi Arabia

BBC NEWS From Our Own Correspondent | The first woman to swim in Saudi

Interesting.

Womb fights

It's an unusual event for me to be agreeing with Alan Ramsey, but his take on Bill Heffernan's revived comments on Julia Gillard seem about right. (Of course, by the end of his article, Ramsey is off on a bit of Keating admiration, and my disapproval of this sets the world right again.)

Despite Bill's clumsy way of putting it (I suspect that about 75% of the problem was the use of the word "barren,") as an issue I still think it is pretty fascinating to watch the modern feminist reaction to this.

As I noted in an earlier post, Julia Gillard seems to have expressed an attitude of "you can't have it all" as her reason for not having children. Isn't this a pretty dramatic, and quite conservatively aligned, change of attitude from the school of feminism that insists that society needs to be arranged so that women can do family and work at once?

Even though she supports Julia, if I were a female politician with children, I certainly can't see that I would be treating Tracee Hutchison as an ally. Maybe you can read Gillard as simply meaning that no one can easily be a mother and federal politician. (In her quote linked at my previous post, she made the point that male politicians only manage because they leave the mother at home to look after the kids. But even that overlooks the fact that some female politicians do manage by having a stay at home father.) Maybe Julia's comments are limited to her own assessment of her own abilities? (Well, I don't think that is right, but I am just looking at all possible spin you can place on it). But Tracee takes the argument to a whole new level:

Gillard's supposition that she couldn't have done babies and politics simultaneously — and done justice to both — should be given the respectful consideration it deserves...

Do you know the people who'll be thinking most about your comments, Senator Heffernan? Women who don't have children, that's who.

Clearly the senator, and many like him, have never considered that women without children probably spend more time thinking about the consequences of choices and the dynamics of society than people who spend their lives flying around the country on parliamentary salaries or up to their elbows in nappy buckets and vomit.

Conversations about nappy buckets and birth choices do not a society make.

Ask a woman with kids how much she thinks family dominates the structure of her life and she'll tell you it occupies most of her waking hours, even if she's juggling a career around it. She won't have given much thought to it, mind you; it's just how it is and she hasn't got time for musing anyway.

Um, doesn't this seem to be saying that it is obvious that women with children have no time to think deeply about anything, apart from what to cook for dinner tonight? What are those mothers doing as politicians then?

One suspect's that Tracee's reaction may be based on her very personal reaction to how other women, and men, react to her as (I assume?) a childless woman:

...ask a woman without kids how often she feels like an outsider looking in on a world she can't connect with and she will have some real insight into the way society functions. Particularly the way it reflects the status of women...

Sounds to me like she has lost a friend or two after they've gone off and joined the world of motherhood. (I could be wrong, of course, and misreading her completely.)

Tracee also seems to hate the way parties like to support families:

Despite John Howard's and Peter Costello's attempts to distance themselves from their wayward senator's latest spray, they are the culprits of turning the family values mantra into political paydirt and their imminent budget sweeteners to families will reinforce it.

Forget about the clever country we once aspired to be, we've become the conception country.

Somehow, I don't the Labor campaign is going to keep her happy either.

The creepy side of Japan

Photos of preteen girls in thongs now big business | The Japan Times Online

What this article says is quite true - if you go to Akihabara in Tokyo, which most visitors do to look through the vast world of consumer electric goods - there are also stores selling magazines and DVDs which, by the cover, clearly are about underage girls in various states of undress.

That Japan tolerates this seems pretty remarkable. As the article indicates, it's not that it doesn't have child porn laws, it seems just to lack the will to enforce them.

Hitchens on Hitchens (and other stuff)

Go here for a short, half amusing, half serious, interview with Christopher H.