Nice to have someone to chat to...

Corpse 'lay on sofa for up to eight years' | The Guardian |

The surprising thing about this (apart from the obvious point that the dead person's flatmate lived with this slight inconvenience) is that it would appear that a several year old corpse can still smell. I would have assumed it would be a relatively smell-less mummy-like thing by then, if not a bunch of bones.

Retro review and ramble

Watch this extract from Artists and Models, the 1955 Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis vehicle, and then some questions for discussion:



1. Would Rick (Dean Martin) risk court action if he was this "fresh" with a young woman today? (Probably; or at least risk a knee in the groin).

2. In dramatic terms, is his pursuit of the girl made acceptable by Shirley MacLaine's arguably even more forthright harassment of Jerry Lewis? (Probably.)

3. Did any women in the audience really think Dean Martin had sex appeal? (Seems a wildly unlikely proposition to me.)

4. Did the 1950's idea of beauty actually give women a longer shelf life as actresses, compared to women actors today? I mean, the shapely, far from skinny or taunt bodies tended to make younger actresses look a bit older, but then they could hold that look for longer than a waif-like starlet of today. (Shirley was just 21 at the time this film was made.)

5. Why are strong female characters from '50's films so appealing? (I saw a bit of Rear Window again, and was reminded how the Grace Kelly character was charming yet assertive in her own way.)

Maybe (I'm just thinking out loud here) it's that the feminist gains of today's Western women tempt one into one into assuming, almost subconsciously, that poor pre-feminist women must have had less character and willfulness as a consequence of their more restricted, pre-liberated state. Of course, this is not true, but maybe this playing against unconscious expectation that appeals. Of course, it could also just be that I really only want all women to only be liberated to a 1950's level!

6. The movie satirizes a 1950's moral panic about comic books, and indeed Wikipedia confirms that this did happen. According to this article, a popular book behind the panic saw implied homosexual love between Batman and Robin. (And here I thought finding repressed homosexuality everywhere was something that people only started doing in the 1970's or 80's!)

7. Why am I talking about a Martin & Lewis movie at all? Well, I liked them as a kid (the icky Dean Martin songs and kissy bits notwithstanding) and the wonders of DVD mean I can show them to my children in an attempt to brainwash them into being mini-me's. So far, it seems to be working.

(The range of Martin & Lewis movies are at Big W for about $9 each at the moment. You can do much worse than to re-visit these. Even better, if you are under 30 you probably have never seen them, and should do so on a rainy day or three.)

Sharia law for England

Ruth Gledhill - Times Online - WBLG: Has the Archbishop gone bonkers?

If you want to read some very strong rebuttal of the Archbishop of Canterbury's musings about Sharia law perhaps having some role in Britain, go to the above link.

Towards the end of the post, Ruth Gledhill repeats a claim she has heard from an informant who did not want to be identified. If true, it is a disturbing story:

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a 'no-go area' for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: 'The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?'

My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. 'You must write about this,' she begged.

'I can't,' I said. 'Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.'

She shook her head. 'I can't be identified,' she said. 'I would be killed. And so would the women.'

UPDATE: The Archbishop should really know he is in trouble when most of the Guardian's reader's comments are against him too.

UPDATE 2: I like some of the comments made about this over at Bryan Appleyard's blog, especially this one:

Pure intelligence, which I'm sure the ABoC has in abundance, is a pretty useless commodity unless it can be harnessed to awareness and character. We all know people who are so intelligent they can't tie their own shoelaces.

Now if he had any practical intelligence it might have given him the foresight to realise, no matter how well meaning, how this sounds. Instead he somehow though talking on Radio 4 was the same as having a chat at High Table in Balliol.

He's ba-ack

Pollies are financially self-interested schemers: Latham - National - smh.com.au

It's amusing while ever most of his venom is directed towards Labor.

UPDATE: Andrew Landeryou really rips into Latham about this (and also does us a service by posting a scan of the article.)

A bid for hits

Wonderful Wednesday: How to Insult Americans

Bryan Appleyard has discovered the secret to successful blogging: insult Americans. Maybe some of his success will rub off on me through this link to his post. (Don't worry, we both really love you.)

Make sure you read the comments too; they're very funny.

Depends from where you are looking

BBC NEWS | Business | Globalisation splits rich and poor

A funny result from this survey:

Half of all people polled across 34 countries say that the pace of globalisation is too fast, while 35% say globalisation is going too slowly.

But concern about globalisation is strongest among the world's richest countries, where it is closely correlated with a belief that the fruits of economic growth have been unfairly shared.

In many of the world's poorest countries, however, where large majorities say that the benefits and burdens of economic development have not been shared fairly, people are more likely to say that globalisation is proceeding too slowly.

Re-thinking global warming responses

Global-Warming Jujitsu - TierneyLab - Science - New York Times Blog

The Cato Institute has issued a report that disputes the Kyoto approach of cutting emissions as the most appropriate thing to do in response to global warming, even if you assume that the worst estimates of the amount of warming.

This will be, to put it mildly, somewhat controversial.

Still a worry

Iran's nuclear programme | As the enrichment machines spin on | Economist.com

In case you missed it, The Economist last week had a long, detailed article criticising the way the US intelligence agencies have stuffed up diplomatic efforts to deal with what is still a genuine problem. As the article says:

Unchanged is the suspicion hanging over Iran's nuclear intentions. Mr Ahmadinejad has never been able to explain convincingly why Iran is the first country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant without having a single civilian nuclear-power reactor that could burn its output (the ones Russia has all but completed at Bushehr will operate only on Russian-made fuel).

Reuters today has a fairly long article about it too.

Trouble coming, I fear.

UPDATE: Even Russia doesn't like Iran's recent long range rocket test.

The big, big picture

Don Page is a physicist who has worked with Stephen Hawking on issues in quantum cosmology. He is also a Christian, and some recent talks he has given on issue of God and the multiverse have popped up on Arxiv.

If you like thinking about the Big Picture, this article by Page is well worth reading. As The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy said:

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Well, just start taking the idea of the multiverse seriously, and even "space" starts to look puny. As the abstract of Page's talk puts it:

Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (1081) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space is vastly larger. Quantum theory suggests that there are very many different copies of space of the same basic kind as ours (same laws of physics). String theory further suggests that there may be many different kinds of space. This whole collection of googolplexes of galaxies within each of googolplexes of different spaces within each of googols of kinds of space makes up an enormously vast universe or multiverse. Human beings seem to be an incredibly small part of this universe in terms of physical size.

Page gives a potted history of the increasingly successful efforts of humans to measure the universe. Here is one blackly humorous episode:

Many countries cooperated in sending expeditions to distant parts of the earth to take these measurements of the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus. Wars and bad weather hampered many attempts, such as the one made by the unfortunate Guillaume Le Gentil of France [3]. In 1761 he could not land at Pondicherry, a French colony in India, because the British had seized it, and he could not make his measurements from his ship that was tossing about at sea. He stayed eight years to make measurements of the 1769 transit (the last transit before 1874) and this time was able to set up his equipment on Pondicherry, which was restored to France by then. But after a month of clear weather, the sky turned cloudy on the morning of the transit, and he again saw nothing. He nearly went insane but gained enough strength to return to France, which took another two years. After being away for nearly twelve years in his fruitless mission to help measure the size of the solar system, Le Gentil finally got back home to find that his “widowed” wife had remarried and his possessions had gone to his heirs.

Of course, there are still a lot of scientists around who think all talk of multiverses and the string theory Landscape barely counts as science, but this hasn't stopped the religiously inclined from starting to see if it can be incorporated into their world view. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong notes that even the Mormons are talking about this. (But then again this is perhaps to be expected, as their idiosyncratic idea of gods who have children who create worlds to further populate may make it easier for them to incorporate the multiverse into their theology.)

Don Page has a similar go at the topic, in his talk entitled "Does God so Love the Multiverse". (As you may guess, he expects the answer is "yes".) This paper is heavier going that the one about the scale of the universe, but I will again make the redundant statement that, if you like this sort of thing, you will like it.

Go away

'Jihad Sheilas' speak out - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I watched Jihad Sheilas last night.

If ever there was a show that could make you feel like reaching through the TV screen and slapping the interviewees, this was it.

I found the younger one the most irritating. Eight children to 5 husbands, and now many of them left in Australia while she lives in Africa with her latest husband and their 2 kids. (It was never explained who they live with, and she is only in her 30's.)

If Muslim husbands are generally as erratic as her life would indicate, it is hardly a good advertisement for the faith. It would have been good to hear specific questions about who she blamed for the failure of so many marriages.

The older one (Rabiah Hutchison) came across as capable of great evil, and I expect most viewers would have mixed feelings about the government refusing to give her a passport. (She would happily leave the country permanently if she could.) Still, I suppose it is best to keep watch on her here rather than let her try to hook up with her former Taliban mates.

That said, the show was done in a more tabloid style than your usual ABC fare. There were many points at which answers by the interviewees were cut off before they had finished, and indeed the reason as to why they found Islam attractive in the first place was skated over completely. (The women complain that they thought that was to be the focus of the show, but it must have become clear during the interview that it was about their lives generally.)

It was good television nonetheless, but I would have preferred more of a "Four Corners" style rather than "A Current Affair".

Hitchens' mistake

Christopher Hitchens and the racist Jewish court | Jerusalem Post

It's interesting to read criticism of Christopher Hitchens for promoting an urban myth of sorts: that Orthodox Jews would refuse to help a non Jewish person in need of medical treatment on the Sabbath. (Hitchens also claimed rabbinical court rulings had upheld this.)

It appears that this is completely untrue.

Libertarian against euthanasia

Forget a new euthanasia law | Mick Hume - Times Online

What a strange week. First, I find myself agreeing more with Mark Bahnisch than News Ltd; now I find a column by "Britain's only self-confessed libertarian Marxist newspaper columnist" against euthanasia law reform.

Let it be noted that it is not only conservative-ish Catholics who are leery of euthanasia.

Forearm lust

Female Muslim medics 'disobey hygiene rules' - Telegraph

Interesting story about concern in several English hospitals that female Muslim staff are refusing to expose their forearms for the purposes of a good handwashing. Which is a bit of a problem because medical authorities there have decided that, in the interest of reducing drug resistant bugs being spread by staff, hospital doctors and nurses are now to go "bare below the elbow". (The topic was the subject of a recent post here.)

From the article:

Dr Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said: "To wash your hands properly, and reduce the risks of MRSA and C.difficile, you have to be able to wash the whole area around the wrist.

"I don't think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally."

The Muslim medical association has different ideas:

"No practising Muslim woman - doctor, medical student, nurse or patient - should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow," it said.

Dr Majid Katme, the association spokesman, said: "Exposed arms can pick up germs and there is a lot of evidence to suggest skin is safer to the patient if covered. One idea might be to produce long, sterile, disposable gloves which go up to the elbows."

Oh come on. Surely with the fractious nature of teaching authority in Islam, they can round up at least a few religious leaders who will issue a fatwa to the effect that bare forearms, in the context of being in a hospital and not wanting to kill your patients, is a Good Thing. If your patients are sick enough, they are hardly going to get hot and bothered by the sight of a forearm, are they? (I can vaguely understand why a shapely calf was once considered sexy enough to hide; but just how much sex appeal can a forearm manage?)

As a conservative politician says:

"Perhaps these women should not be choosing medicine as a career if they feel unable to abide by the guidelines that everyone else has to follow."

Cheaper way to make hydrogen

Technology Review: Cheap Hydrogen

This report is about promising new technology to make hydrogen from water via the sun. (The only current method of using solar power to generate electricity to electrolyse water is inefficient, the article says.)

This new method works directly on the water, and holds the promise of making hydrogen at the same cost as stripping it out of natural gas, which I think is the currently the cheapest option.

As the article notes, the big advantage of this technology could also be as a energy storage method for solar power stations. I assume this would be by using part of the plant to make electricity directly, and another part to make hydrogen to store for later burning if the sun goes behind clouds for days at a time.

Gittins on the surplus

Labor brings a fresh eye to the economy — and pre-election baggage

The link is to Ross Gittins' column on the Labor government's plan to build up a bigger surplus as a way of helping curb inflation. (Yes, just as you need more money to pay for your mortgage, you may be about to have less of it if you are employed by the Commonwealth, or rely on some of its benefits.)

I think I can take quite a lot of support for my skepticism of the value of this exercise from Gittins piece. His message is that it really could be politically damaging to Rudd, as he is taking on more direct responsibility for inflation, yet the budget cuts that are politically palatable are hardly likely to make any significant difference anyway. In other words, those who suffer from the budget cuts won't really be able to see the point of them in either the short or long term. Here's the crucial paragraphs from Gittins' column:

The most recent estimates say we'll end the present financial year with an underlying cash surplus of 1.3% of GDP. So for Mr Swan to say he's raised the target surplus for next financial year from 1% to 1.5% is to promise a change in the stance of fiscal policy of negligible proportions.

My guess is that, to produce a change capable of being taken seriously by the Reserve, Mr Swan will need to budget for a surplus of at least 2.3%. That is, one expected to be at least $10 billion higher than last year's.

The spending cuts needed to jump that hurdle would require much hard work, toughness and bravery on the Government's part.

But even if it can rise to the challenge, the political reward is uncertain. For one thing, a contribution from fiscal policy of this size is unlikely to substitute for more than one 0.25 percentage point rise in the official interest rate, and there are likely to be a few more this year beyond the one expected tomorrow.

If I read that right, Gittins is saying that even a budget surplus of 2.3% would save the equivalent of one .25% interest rise? Well, I'm sure those who are directly hurt by the budget cuts will appreciate the vast difference their loss will make. Ha.

Why bother with the exercise at all?