Stem cell musings

You just won the stem-cell war. Don't lose your soul. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

Saletan is routinely an interesting writer on science and bioethics, and this column is no exception.

Useless research update

Belief and the brain's 'God spot' - Science, News - The Independent

Scientists searching for the neural "God spot", which is supposed to control religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief....

"Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal equivalent, and found in all cultures," said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington. "Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions."

Well, I am not entirely sure how one would ever be certain that there is "no accepted animal equivalent". We can be pretty confident that cats are atheists, but a good case could be made for dogs worshipping their owners.

But really, why does anyone really think that this research is worthwhile or beneficial? There are surely many psychiatric illnesses which are worth investigating very thoroughly with MRI and other probes; why waste time and money on research which is always going to be inconclusive and of no potential benefit?

You heard it here first (or elsewhere, maybe. And if it doesn't happen it wasn't mentioned here at all, OK?)

Famed pastor predicts imminent catastrophe

(Actually, there is another alleged prophesy I have been meaning to post about, and I will as soon as I can find it on the web again.)

More on Carbon Tax Vs Cap and trade

Technology Review: The Real Price of Obama's Cap-and-Trade Plan

Obama is planning on generating a lot of money from a cap and trade system. Sounds like building a budget on shaky foundations to me.

Anyhow, here's a good article listing succinctly the pros and cons of carbon tax vs cap and trade.

Remember, you saw it here first

There has been an unusual trend lately for Tim Blair, and now Andrew Bolt, to be posting the same videos that have appeared here months ago:

* Andrew Bolt today posts Youtube of dog with a ball throwing machine. Same video posted here in March 2008.

* On March 4, Tim Blair last week posts video of newscast in which a hamster is identified as a murder suspect. Same video had appeared here on 4 February 2009.

* Tim Blair posts the Youtube of the Mitchell & Webb "Bad Vicar" sketch on February 28, 2009. The same video was posted at Opinion Dominion on 11 April 2008.

At this rate, I figure that both Tim and Andrew are due to start believing in ocean acidification and the need to reduce CO2 by about May 2010.

Time for your bad ocean acidification news of the week

Proof on the Half Shell: A More Acid Ocean Corrodes Sea Life: Scientific American

The shells of tiny ocean animals known as foraminifera—specifically Globigerina bulloides—are shrinking as a result of the slowly acidifying waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. ...

The researchers found that modern G. bulloides could not build shells as large as the ones their ancestors formed as recently as century ago. In fact, modern shells were 35 percent smaller than in the relatively recent past—

Not encouraging.

Getting down to the nitty gritty

Moon base: Location, location, location | csmonitor.com

A pretty good article here speculating on the location and other practical details of a lunar outpost.

The lunar south pole still looks good:

The allure of Shackleton Crater is that it is relatively hospitable and practical. Explorers perched on its rim would experience a night of only 2 Earth days and 4 hours. The crater’s proximity to the moon’s day-night boundary – called the terminator – also makes it an ideal place to test technologies and find out what works and what doesn’t in both environments.

And here is a suggestion for another problem:

But habitats aren’t the only pieces of hardware that must be warmed. Robotic rovers and their batteries also need to survive. “We have a hard time keeping … trucks working in Siberia,” Dr. Ramachandran says. “We have no experience working at minus 150 degrees.”

The solution could be a “wadi” – a patch of lunar surface somewhat larger than a rover and covered with what is in effect a reflective tent. During the day, lenses would heat these strategically spaced wadis. As night nears, hardware would extend a reflective cover over the area – like tin foil over a turkey, shiny side down.

Sounds simple. But one of the main problems for humans is dealing with radiation for anyone needing to stay there for any length of time.

I don't know if this is being considered at all, but my idea is that building a covered framework over which a little bulldozer can gradually pile up a deep mound of dirt for cosmic ray protection might work. (The covering material itself could be airtight, or the whole interior could be sprayed with a sealant.) I would assume that the lower gravity means the framework can be considerably lighter than what you would need on earth.

This seems a lot simpler to me than the idea of baking lunar bricks in situ. You could be lucky and build such a shelter over a pre-existing little crater. Or maybe you just work on a low rise dome type structure. Maybe geodesic domes would work well?

I would be curious to know if this has been considered. Just send the cheque in the mail, NASA.

From the Jerusalem Post

My Word: In the holiday spirit | Columnists | Jerusalem Post:

In an op-ed in the Post on March 3, Michael Bar-Zohar noted that a survey published last month by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center indicates that 46.7 percent of the Palestinians believe that Hamas defeated Israel in the recent fighting in Gaza. On a visit to Egypt many years ago, I was taken aback to discover how many places marked the October 6 War 'victory.' I am not, however, surprised that Egypt - which did nothing to improve life in Gaza during the decades in which it was in control - does not want anything to do with its Palestinian brethren there even now. Let Israel open its border with Gaza, Egypt can't risk it, goes the common thinking in the Egyptian capital.

The terror attack in Cairo a week ago, in which a French schoolchild was killed, shows yet again that they do have reason to fear Islamization. Global jihad is, after all, global. But don't say it too loudly in London or Paris - you might offend the local Muslims.

Nothing like humility

Architect of desire: Frank Lloyd Wright's private life was even more unforgettable than his buildings

I recall from some documentary on him that FLW was an eccentric character with a convoluted love life that featured a gruesome axe murder, but I did not remember how much he liked himself:

When questioned about his vanity, Wright justified himself by saying: "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose honest arrogance."

Heh.

Why not to believe in carbon capture & storage

Carbon capture and storage | Trouble in store | The Economist

Here's a detailed article from the Economist explaining the huge uncertainties and problems with carbon storage and capture. Some key points:

In 2005 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists that advises the United Nations on global warming, came up with a range of $14-91 for each tonne of emissions avoided through CCS. Last year, the IEA suggested that the price for the first big plants would be $40-90. McKinsey, a consultancy, has arrived at an estimate of €60-90, or $75-115.

Either way, that is more than the price of emissions in the European Union: about €10 a tonne. America does not have a carbon price at all yet. A bill defeated last year in the Senate would have yielded a carbon price as low as $30 in 2020, according to an official analysis. So CCS might not be financially worthwhile for years to come....

Omar Abbosh, of Accenture, a consultancy, says that carbon trading as practised in the EU and contemplated in America does not give enough certainty about future carbon prices to justify an investment in a CCS plant. Mr Paelinck of Alstom agrees: no board would risk spending €1 billion on one, he says, without generous subsidies.

The article indicates that the cost of individual CCS plants could be anything from $1 billion to $1.8 billion US dollars. (And that might be based on the fact that the USA apparently has a pre-built system of pipelines in their oil areas that could be used for transported the CO2. I assume Australia does not have anywhere near as extensive a system.)

And will it even work long term? Even small leaks would be a problem:

Carbon dioxide forms an acid when it dissolves in water. This acid can react with minerals to form carbonates, locking away the carbon in a relatively inert state. But it can also eat through the man-made seals or geological strata intended to keep it in place. A leakage rate of just 1% a year, Greenpeace points out, would lead to 63% of the carbon dioxide stored in any given reservoir being released within 100 years, almost entirely undoing the supposed environmental benefit.

That CCS is being promoted so heavily seems simply to be a triumph of an industry's self preservation instinct over common sense.

Turnbull worth reading

PM's cheap money shot | The Australian

Malcolm Turnbull's take on the origins of the economic crisis, and Rudd's silly summer essay on the topic, is pretty good.

Hooked on worms

Can Parasitic Hookworms Help In Treatment Of Multiple Sclerosis?

Get this for a cute acronym:

The WIRMS (Worms for Immune Regulation in MS) study ...

Some doctor probably sat up in bed and had a "eureka" moment when he thought of that.

Anyhow, the study itself is kind of interesting:

The £400,000, three-year project funded by the MS Society, aims to determine whether infection with a small and harmless number of the worms can lead to an improvement on the severity of MS over a 12 month period...

The 25 worms are microscopic and are introduced painlessly through a patch in the arm. They are then flushed out after nine months.

Given that cancers can be fought by the immune system too, is there any anti-cancer parasite out there to be found?

Watchmen not recommended

Geek boys everywhere who are into graphic novels seems to be all a-Twitter about the movie version of Watchmen, a movie with the odd distinction of featuring (amongst others) the first blue nude male superhero.

I'm no fan of the whole superhero genre, despite quite liking the last Spiderman. But Anthony Lane's review of Watchmen certainly puts me off any idea of seeing it (and is pretty funny.) Some highlights:

One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.” Both of these have been turned into motion pictures; the first was merely an egregious waste of money, time, and talent, whereas the second was not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch...

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along...

But here's the reason I won't see it:

The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead.

Thanks, but no thanks.

UPDATE: here's Dana Stevens in Slate on the violence in the movie:

Whenever a fight begins (and there's one about every 15 minutes in this 160-minute movie), brace yourself for an abundance of narratively pointless bone-crunching, finger-twisting, limb-sawing, and skull-hacking. These extreme sports are often filmed in Matrix-style slow motion, a technique that tends to grind the story to a halt. Like the money shots in porn movies, Snyder's action scenes are an end in themselves—gratifying if you like that sort of thing, gross if you don't.

Yet the movie is getting a 65% approval rating at Rottentomatoes. Do you ever get the feeling that reviewers (and the public at large,) have become just too immune to graphic movie violence?

UPDATE 2: The two Salon movie reviewers discuss the violence in this video. (One of them thinks highly of the movie, the other doesn't.) Whenever you get a reviewer talking of a violent sequence being "right on the edge" of what's acceptable to depict, (and that is from the guy who likes the movie,) it's almost certainly a sign that it is, in fact, highly objectionable and over that edge.

UPDATE 3: To my surprise, both David Stratton & Margaret Pomeranz on At the Movies liked it a lot, and hardly mentioned the violence. Oh well, just confirms my view that they are both fairly erratic reviewers. I can't say that I reliably find either of them align with my tastes.

GG gets noticed

Both Andrew Bolt and Michelle Grattan write about the, ahem, unusually high profile of Quentin Bryce as Governor-General.

Bolt finds her being far too political in her role, and I don't disagree.

You get the feeling from Michelle Grattan's column that even those with more left leaning sympathies may be feeling that Bryce's profile is higher than it should be.

She notes that (I shall paraphrase here), having already visited every country where an Australian is doing something useful, the GG has decided to visit countries where she'll have a hard time finding an Aussie outside of the consulate:

Africa? That's right. Less than a year into the job, Bryce this month embarks on a seven-nation tour of the continent, including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Ethiopia (with stopovers, the total is nine countries).

It might seem an odd destination for an Australian governor-general so early in her term. But it is all part of the Rudd Government's Africa strategy. This has two drivers.

First, Africa is seen as an area neglected by Australia for many years (Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke were Africanists — but that was a long time ago). Second — and very pertinently — the Government is lobbying intensively for a United Nations Security Council seat, and there are more than 50 African votes.

Bryce's African trip is tailored to the Government's foreign policy. In effect, she's an envoy at the highest level.

Sounds like a Rudd vanity project in reality.

Let's hope the Governor-General is offered some odd traditional tribal food that she must eat to be polite. (The Ethiopians will probably serve her a gigantic feast when they assume from her disturbingly thin frame that Australia must be suffering a famine too. Aren't steak and dairy products allowed on the menu at Yarralumla?) I'll be looking for the close up of her grimace at the official gallery, where's it's all Quentin all the time.

But seriously, is someone going to start questioning the travel costs for this Governor-General, and the utility of this trip in particular?

Pot meets kettle

The Age Blogs: Waste of Space: All Men Are Liars

Why on earth does Fairfax continue to run the Sam de Brito blog when he churns out nasty posts like this?