A brief look at Ayn (rhymes with "pine")

The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldn't Win -- New York Magazine

A pretty amusing review of a new Ayn Rand biography.

Some lines I liked:

"...her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces"

“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive,” she once wrote, “and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.”

As a child, she was solitary, opinionated, possessive, and intense—a willful and brilliant loner with literally zero friends. At 9, she decided to become a writer; by 11 she’d written four novels, each of which revolved around a heroine exactly her age but blonde, blue-eyed, tall, and leggy. (Rand was—by her own standards—unheroically dark, short, and square.) At 13, she declared herself an atheist. It’s hard not to suspect, based on many of these childhood anecdotes, that Rand suffered from some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder. Once, when a teacher asked her to write an essay about the joys of childhood, she wrote a diatribe condemning childhood as a cognitive wasteland—a joyless limbo in which adult rationality had yet to fully develop. (It was possibly a good thing that she never had children.)

The paragraph about William James' theory of the foundations of personal philosophy is pretty interesting, too.

By the way, Stephen Colbert explained Atlas Shrugged earlier this year:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Rand Illusion
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Religion

What a surprise

Overweight have less sex

A scientific halloween

Where do ghosts come from? - New Scientist

A good article here on the idea that magnetic fields can cause eerie sensations that are interpreted as ghosts.

The theory has taken several hits lately, it would appear. Particularly when people undergoing lab tests get the creeps whether or not the magnetic field is turned on!

Robotic videoconferencing

Theme-park dummy trick becomes teleconference tool

Have a look at the video. I reckon it is pretty effective at giving the impression of a real presence.

Scratch here, please

Itch: A symptom of occult disease

Stumbling around the internet looking for something else, I found the above article.

It caught my attention because, for the last nine years or so, I have had a persistent itch in the same spot around my left shoulder blade. It turns out it may be a demon poking me there. (Well, that is my initial reaction to hearing the phrase "occult disease".)

My actual theory is that it is caused by chicken pox, which I caught as an adult about 9 years ago. I don't recall having the itch until after that. As the virus sits there and may re-appear as shingles at any time, I think I may have a little bunch of it there that can't be bothered growing enough to actually give me shingles, but makes its presence felt anyway.

It's as good a theory as any.

Social issues

China strives to pleasure sex-starved | The Australian

They could've chosen a better headline, but the article is a pretty interesting one about social change in China.

The big dance

Elina-shatkin's list of L.A. Halloween Events 2009

As you can see from the above list, they certainly take Halloween as a very, very big opportunity for fun events in the US (or at least Los Angeles.)

Of note in the list is this:

Join thousands of participants around the globe for Thrill The World, an annual worldwide simultaneous dance of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." The event begins on Oct. 25 at 12:30 a.m.GMT (that's 5:30 p.m. Pacific time). Find an event in your area. Don't know the "Thriller" zombie dance? You can find an event in your area with rehearsals or you can check out Thrill The world's online instructional videos.

That does sound kind of fun, at least to watch if not participate.

It has its own website, and claims that 22,923 people danced this year, yet I don't believe I have ever heard of this before. I suggest Peter Garrett should lead the line up for the Australian version: he hardly needs the make up.

Chick lives

Trick or Tract: Satan, Jack Chick, and Other Halloween Horrors

If ever you had something even vaguely to do with some fundamentalist Christians, you probably have seen a Jack Chick cartoon book. I know I saw a few when I was in high school, although exactly where I got my hands on one I can't recall.

According to the above post, in America, some people like to give these to visiting kids as a Halloween "trick or treat" gift!

There's a link in the article to the Jack Chick publication website, from which I learn he is still alive, and still producing his idiosyncratic booklets in which he manages to make his preferred brand of Christianity look like humourless, creepy conspiracy-mongering. (You ought to read what he thinks about Catholics; many lines are very funny.) As Joe Carter aptly says, Chick produces fundamentalist tracts with cartoon artwork in the style of R Crumb.

Amazing, but not in a good way.

Mix up in the lab

IVF mother: 'I love him to bits. But he's probably not mine' | Life and style | The Guardian

There are, according to this story, increasing numbers of IVF mothers who fear they have been implanted with the wrong embryo. But they are then faced with the question of whether they get DNA testing to confirm their suspicions, because of the possible complications if it is not the mother's.

I seem to be the only person in the world, apart from the Pope, perhaps, who still actually considers the whole IVF industry as basically undesirable, and a poor reflection on a world with high rates of abortion of what would be adoptable healthy babies. Some fertility clinic practices have been an absolute scandal. Yet people are so swayed by seeing someone happy with their IVF baby that they don't give the bigger picture a second thought.

An unpleasant man

James Cameron and “Avatar” : The New Yorker

You only have to read the first couple of pages of this l-l-long profile of director James Cameron to get confirmation that he is, indeed, a complete jerk.

His new movie, Avatar, seems to me to run a risk of failing because it looks like the biggest CGI-fest ever, just at a time I suspect the public is getting sick of films where all of the background (and many characters) are obviously not real.

We'll see.

Unusual connections

Did Portnoy's Complaint deserve the "Booker Prize"?

Mary Beard in The Times writes about a recent literary festival in which she was on a panel considering which books from 1969 should have won the Booker Prize. This entailed her re-reading Portnoy's Complaint, which she really disliked. (I have never read it, nor seen the movie, and have no interest in doing so.)

The point of this post, however, is to note this comment on her blog, which shows there are some quite unusual theories out there:

I cannot resist praising Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (ZONE BOOKS, 2003) by my colleague here, Thomas Laqueur, which rightly links concern about masturbation with the development of ideas of credit in the eighteenth century.

What other sexual/financial connections might there be? The rise of cybersex is behind the global financial crisis, maybe?

Anyhow, this is curious enough to make me look for reviews of the Laqueur book. This one starts in way which I find funny, although I am not sure if that was intended:

Thomas Laqueur has been preoccupied with masturbation for more than a decade...

But for more detail on Laqueur's ideas, try this summary:

He sees the promise of abundance offered by the new commercial economy, with its reliance on credit, as strikingly similar to the lure of masturbation, with its addictive pull and reliance on the imagination; the consumer, the speculator, and the masturbator were thus all engaged in the same kind of activity...

I guess it's entirely appropriate that banker rhymes with ...... then.

I think Laqueur may have spent too much time alone.

The changing sea

Climate Change Caused Radical North Sea Shift | Wired Science | Wired.com

Quite an interesting report in Wired about long term changes in the ecology of the North Sea. It's all about less fish and more crabs and jellyfish.

Sure, overfishing has played a large part, but a slight change in temperature seems to have also caused significant changes in the plankton mix.

I didn't realise the North Sea had been so well studied for so long.

Next time you are doing business with a used car salesman...

try spraying him in the face with citrus scented cleaner:

...research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

How odd. (OK, the study is not about used car salesmen per se, but it's still worth a try.)

Nice house

Aluminium House, Kanazawa City, Japan by Atelier Tekuto-- The Architectural Review

Here's a pretty cool looking Japanese house made, it would seem, almost entirely of aluminium.

I am told that steel frame houses in Australia are noisy due to the expansion and shrinking of the frame in hot weather. I wonder how an aluminium house would compare.

Of course, being a Japanese architect designed house, there must be a death trap involved. In this case, it's probably the roof top "yard". Don't let the dog chase a ball up there.

Close shave - with video

Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences - space - 26 October 2009 - New Scientist

Why didn't I read about this somewhere else before now?:

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That's about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth's surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.

So how big was it likely to have been?:

The amount of energy released suggests the object was about 10 metres across, the researchers say. Such objects are thought to hit Earth about once per decade.

No telescope spotted the asteroid ahead of its impact. That is not surprising, given that only a tiny fraction of asteroids smaller than 100 metres across have been catalogued, says Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet objects as small as 20 or 30 metres across may be capable of doing damage on the ground, he says.

People did notice this (and it presumably would have been a big flash if it had been at night):

The explosion was heard by witnesses in Indonesia. Video images of the sky following the event show a dust trail characteristic of an exploding asteroid.

I recommend having a look at that last link to see the big smoky looking trail it left in the sky.

The lessons: at any time, your city could be taken out by an unexpected small asteroid. (Unless you encourage government to spend money on more extensive searches.)