Cultural issues

A couple of weeks ago, Fox News carried a story which started:

An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns -- though they seem to be in complete denial about it.

The study, obtained by Fox News, found that Pashtun men commonly have sex with other men, admire other men physically, have sexual relationships with boys and shun women both socially and sexually -- yet they completely reject the label of "homosexual." The research was conducted as part of a longstanding effort to better understand Afghan culture and improve Western interaction with the local people.

The research unit, which was attached to a Marine battalion in southern Afghanistan, acknowledged that the behavior of some Afghan men has left Western forces "frequently confused."

Well that's all very interesting, I thought. What would they think of openly homosexual Western soldiers, then? Share some understanding, or hate them for being "gay"? In any event, it seemed odd that no other big news outlet talked about the study. And it is Fox News after all. Could their reporting be trusted?

Well, it would appear so. I see on Four Corners tonight they have a whole show on boy sex slaves of Afghanistan.

What an odd country.

Bye bye David

The last two Doctor Who episodes featuring David Tenant were distinctly underwhelming, I thought. I don't think it's good writing when, in about 130 minutes of television, you only have the plot explained at about the 80 minute mark.

In fact, it's pretty clear that Russell T Davies stayed on about a season too long. (I never took to Donna.)

It will be interesting to see where the series goes from here, though. I do hope we get an end to things like the Doctor playing cupid to gay guys, which was one weird little aspect of last night's show.

Imaginary eye witnesses to history

Doubts Raised on Book’s Tale of Atom Bomb - NYTimes.com

It appears certain that the late Joseph Fuoco, written up in a new book on Hiroshima as a witness to the dropping of the atomic bomb, was not on the bombing run at all. (He was on the recon trips before it, but there is very strong evidence that he was not on the actual bombing run.)

Apparently, the claim to have been on one of the planes involved is quite common:

Mr. Gackenbach, the flight’s navigator, said the misrepresentations of Mr. Fuoco were unusual only in that they showed up in a book. He said many former servicemen had falsely claimed to have flown over Hiroshima on the famous bombing run.

If all of them had actually been there, Mr. Gackenbach added, the aircraft “could never have taken off.”

How odd.

Burying your problems

Climate Feedback: Gut reactions to carbon storage

Annoying, this interesting post at the Nature Climate Feedback blog* has a couple of links to paywall protected articles in Nature about CO2 sequestration. (If I had any influence at all in the world of science, I would start a campaign to have all the major science journals make all climate change papers and article available for free as a public service on a vital issue.)

Anyhow, the post notes that residents in both Europe and the USA are protesting carbon sequestration near their homes; while other people want it to be buried on their land. (Why I don't know; can they make money from it?)

The post contains this observation:

At current rates of progress, asking about your gut reaction to practical carbon storage is a purely hypothetical question. But the schedule that the International Energy Agency have set the industry is staggering. By 2050, the volume of liquid carbon dioxide that must be injected underground for permanent storage each year would be three times the annual amount of petroleum we currently use (85 million barrels).

I remain very skeptical of the benefits of even attempting this.

*by the way, has anyone ever found a harder website to understand than the Nature.com site? I found this Feedback blog some weeks ago, didn't bookmark it, then took ages to re-locate it.

Problems with new nuclear

Scientific American talks about the problems with fast neutron reactors.

I haven't paid much attention to the issues with this type of reactor, which are supposed to help with reducing the disposal problem. But combining sodium and nuclear reactors not only sounds dangerous; it's been proved dangerous:

The most prevalent type of fast-neutron reactor, so-called because the neutrons used to initiate the fission chain reaction are traveling faster than neutrons moderated by water in conventional nuclear reactors, operate at temperatures as high as 550 degrees Celsius and use liquid sodium instead of water as a coolant. Sodium burns explosively when exposed to either air or water, necessitating elaborate safety controls. Nevertheless, as far back as 1951 at Idaho National Laboratory, such a sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor produced electricity.

But attempts to make that technology commercial have largely failed, mostly because of difficulties with controlling sodium fires and the steam generators that transfer heat from the sodium to water. Japan's Monju sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor caught fire in 1995—and has just received permission to resume operation this month after years of technical difficulties in repairing it, along with legal challenges to its restart. The French Superphenix sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactor operated successfully for more than a decade—but only produced electricity 7 percent of the time, "one of the lowest load factors in nuclear history," said nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider, an IPFM member during the call. An accident at the plant cost one engineer his life and injured four other people when a leftover tank with roughly 100 kilograms of sodium residue exploded, according to Schneider.

It's not like they haven't tried to improve them:

As far back as 1956, Adm. Hyman Rickover, who oversaw both the Navy's nuclear-propulsion efforts as well as the dawn of the civilian nuclear power industry, cited such sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors as "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair." That judgment remains despite six decades and $100 billion of global effort, according to physicist Michael Dittmar of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who wrote, "ideas about near-future commercial fission breeder reactors are nothing but wishful thinking" in a November 2009 analysis.

"For that $100 billion we did learn some things," remarked physicist Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, during the IPFM call. "We learned that fast reactors were going to cost substantially more than light-water reactors…[and]…that, relative to thermal reactors, they're not very reliable."

The article goes on to note that Bill Gates has been promoting a new type of reactor, the travelling wave reactor, which would have cores that contain fuel for 30 years. Trouble is, the materials needed for that aren't developed yet.

Thorium breeder reactors get a bit of a pessimistic hit too:

Wrapping highly fissile plutonium in a thorium blanket could produce enough nuclear fuel indefinitely, according to the vision laid out by the architect of India's nuclear program, physicist Homi J. Bhabha, in 1954. The Indian government is currently building such a prototype fast breeder reactor, despite limited success with a precursor, said Princeton physicist M. V. Ramana during the IPFM call. "The cost of electricity is 80 percent higher than from heavy-water reactors," he added. Uranium prices would need to increase 15-fold from current levels of roughly $80 per kilogram to make it economically attractive.

Nothing with nuclear is terribly easy, it seems.

It's also interesting to note that a French nuclear company has bought a major US solar thermal company. Maybe it pays to diversify.

How not to do tourism

Insensitivity makes waves with Japanese tourists

Most of the observations in this article about why Japanese tourism to Australia has dropped off seems true. Some of the points make are a bit amusing:

BEFORE Noriko Mochizuki travelled to Australia, she had heard about koalas, kangaroos, beaches, and strange men in cars who killed backpackers.

By the time she returns home to Tokyo, the 25-year-old will tell her friends that - the infamous Ivan Milat backpacker murders aside - Australians are relaxed, kind and sometimes very rude.

''Sometimes you go to buy something at a coffee shop and they don't want to understand or they just ignore you,'' she said during a surfing lesson with Surfs Up near Cronulla.

''The customer service is much, much better in Japan.''

Unfortunately, the customer service in Japan is probably the best in the world, so most Japanese travelling need to take that into account. (But I think most do to an extent.)

As for Australia's attempts to attract tourists again:

Professor Orito said Tourism Australia had done nothing to help itself with the disastrous 'So where the bloody hell are you?' advertising blitz, "whose meaning was lost on the Japanese".

"The campaign last year based on the movie Australia was an even bigger flop."

The problem has been compounded by a series of misguided tourism campaigns, which culminated last year in the ''Aussie Oji" competition, designed to lure Japanese women to Australia to look for their oji, or prince - a message a Japanese tourism expert described as "insensitive''.

One Japanese tourism operator in the Gold Coast said there was no point offering constructive criticism to the Australian tourism industry "because they ignore our complaints about the treatment of tourists. Nothing is going to change."

I think everyone would have to agree that the current New Zealand tourism campaign in Australia is really very good. Why can that little place manage it while we've been failing for more than a decade now?

You don't see that every day...

Have a look at this fascinating sky effect caused during a recent NASA rocket launch. (It happens around the 1.52 mark.):



It is apparently caused by acoustic shock wave travelling through a "sun dog". Looks cool whatever it was.

Drive by wire

Should we be worried that our cars are controlled by software? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise the extent to which cars had become "drive by wire" until the recent Toyota problems. This article explains all.

Can kitchen gadgets get any sillier?

Autonomous Saucier – auto-stir bot makes for perfect sauces

And here I thought that a cheese heater was about as over-specialised as a kitchen device could possibly be.

A bit of a surprise

An ibuprofen a day could keep Parkinson's disease away, study suggests

The research involved 136,474 people who did not have Parkinson's disease at the beginning of the research. Participants were asked about their use of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), including aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen. After six years, 293 participants had developed Parkinson's disease.

The study found regular users of ibuprofen were 40 percent less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than people who didn't take ibuprofen. Also, people who took higher amounts of ibuprofen were less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than people who took smaller amounts of the drug. The results were the same regardless of age, smoking and caffeine intake.

Things not greener on other side of our fence

Aid workers earning more than Rudd | The Australian

According to the article, being an Australian technical adviser to a near neighbour (and having your salary paid by government aid) can be very, very profitable.

But the reason I post about this is more because of this line:

...AusAID believes it is necessary to pay such amounts to persuade people with the needed skills to work in a place such as Port Moresby, recently listed by The Economist as the third-least liveable city in the world.

And to think, when I was a kid, there were always advertisements on TV for holidays to PNG.

How the market works in Dubai

Pepsi, Coke prices in UAE likely to increase

Why on earth is the government of UAE involved in this at all?? Are they scared of fizzy drink riots in the streets if the price of Pepsi and Coke gets too high??:

The Ministry of Economy will decide on a price increase request for Pepsi and Coca-Cola products by the end of next week, a top official said.

"We have received the request from both companies and we will send it to the higher committee of consumer protection for approval," Ahmad Abdul Aziz Al Shehi, director-general of the Ministry of Economy (MoE) told Gulf News in a recent interview.

Though the two companies have not stated the price yet, Al Shehi said that if approved, the increase would be less than 100 per cent.

So, as the current price of a regular can is Dh1, its new price would be under Dh2.

In all GCC countries except the UAE and Qatar, Pepsi and Coca-Cola prices have increased. While the proposal for an increase was given a year ago, the situation has changed and the companies have a better argument at this point, Al Shehi said.

Al Ahlia Gulf Line, manufacturer and distributor of Coca-Cola products in the UAE, said that it had several meetings with the MoE for a price increase request.

"We have maintained our price in [the] UAE for the past 22 years but with an increase in almost all raw materials and costs involved in the manufacturing of products ...there should be now a price review," Antoine Tayyar, Public Affairs and Communications Director for The Coca-Cola Export Corporation, Middle East said in a statement.

Amazing.

Things that make me happy, No 3

Series 3 of The IT Crowd is on ABC.

With the first episode last week, I thought it may be approaching shark jumping territory. The laugh track seemed way too pumped up for the jokes, and Jen had a very strange hair style.

But tonight, the second episode was much better. If you know the show, you'll understand how funny this bit was.

Mad clinic design

Dezeen MD. net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo

Japanese designers Nendo have completed the interior of a mental health clinic in Akasaka, Tokyo, where none of the doors open and patients and staff instead move around the building by opening sections of the walls.

Yes, because we can all imagine how people attending a psychiatric clinic would like to be confused and tricked by a bunch of fake doors.

You can see photos of the place, which looks to me more like some sort of trick house from Disneyland than a medical clinic, at the link above.

Conspiracy corner

David Aaronovitch’s ‘Voodoo Histories’ - Review - NYTimes.com

This review of The Times columnist's book on 20th century conspiracy theories sounds like it could be a good and entertaining read. I like this extract:

Of those who claim that the Pentagon was not hit on 9/11 by a terrorist-piloted American Airlines Flight 77, Mr. Aaronovitch sarcastically observes: “But there is always the possibility, however extraordinarily remote, that DNA might have been planted to the exact specifications of the missing passengers, crew and employees, that wreckage might somehow have been placed at the scene within minutes of the crash, and that the real occupants of the missing Flight 77 might have been spirited away to some unknown place, there to be butchered or to live in the world’s weirdest witness protection program.”