A good interview

You don't always learn all that much about Colbert's guests' ideas, as the emphasis is more on jokes than information. But tonight's interview with Lisa Miller, whose book on the history of heaven has been the subject of a couple of posts here recently, gave her enough time to explain her book's key points, and was quite funny as well:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lisa Miller
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

That's the trouble with politics today - not enough eunuchs!

Tadpoles, eunuchs and testosterone deprivation - Science Show - 22 May 2010

A couple of weeks ago there was a somewhat interesting interview on The Science Show with Richard Wassursug, who, as a result of having to be "chemically castrated" himself because of prostate cancer, has developed a big interest in eunuchs.

For example, as to the role of eunuchs in history:

What I found from actually studying eunuchs in history is they were not wimps, as our modern presumption is, these were the most powerful people in government. From one end of Asia to another, for the last 3,500 years, the most stable governments were run by castrated people, and we actually know why. This is unpublished, but with a colleague we've been studying people who wish to be castrated, a very strange group of people, we ran what's called the big five personality test, and we now know what it actually means to have no balls, and it isn't what most people think. The major personality change appears to be in agreeability, which may sound to a macho male like somebody who just obligingly agrees with everybody, but if you actually look at the roles that eunuchs played in history, they had to be great negotiators, they had to be empathetic and listen to both sides of an argument in order to maintain a stable government. That skill is enhanced by getting off testosterone.

In the Australian context, it's hard to imagine Kevin Rudd being oversupplied with testosterone; I think his problems are more just a personality defect.

But Tony Abbott: his testicles have already led to one embarrassing incident, and his exercise obsession has a whiff of overly macho male competitiveness about it. He's the one who would do better as a eunuch, I'm sure.

Update: by co-incidence, I was just at the BBC website, and for some reason this item from 2005, which indicates how castration can be achieved at home, even without instruments, is currently in its "most popular shared story" column:

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

By the light of the moon

Japanese firm wants to transform the Moon into a giant solar power plant

The Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction firm, has recently proposed a plan to harness solar energy on a larger scale than almost any previously proposed concept. Their ambitious plan involves building a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) equator, converting the electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers to be beamed at Earth, and finally converting the beams back to electricity at terrestrial power stations. The Luna Ring concept, the company says, could meet the entire world's energy needs.

Someone there must be looking for free publicity.  I like the first comment:

Pfffft I say Dyson Sphere or bust!

Temperature watch

Temperatures reach record high in Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

Mohenjo-daro, a ruined city in what is now Pakistan that contains the last traces of a 4,000-year-old civilisation that flourished on the banks of the river Indus, today entered the modern history books after government meteorologists recorded a temperature of 53.7C (129F). Only Al 'Aziziyah, in Libya (57.8C in 1922), Death valley in California (56.7 in 1913) and Tirat Zvi in Israel (53.9 in 1942) are thought to have been hotter.

Temperatures in the nearest town, Larkana, have been only slightly lower in the last week, with 53C recorded last Wednesday. As the temperatures peaked, four people died, including a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and an elderly woman. Dozens are said to have fainted.

The extreme heat was exacerbated by chronic power cuts which have prevented people from using air-conditioning. The electricity has cut out for eight hours each day as part of a severe load-shedding regime that has caused riots in other parts of Pakistan where cities are experiencing a severe heatwave with temperatures of between 43C and 47C.

This article does go on to talk about how hot 2010 is shaping up to be globally, and ends on a cautious note about how some think this is part of "long-term climate change". (Note: journalists still seem too spooked to talk too clearly of AGW.)

It must be small, furry animal news week

Pet rats may harbour deadly fever

There's a warning from an Australian doctor here that some pet rat owners are catching a rare disease from their pets.

It's called "rat bite fever", but as far as I was aware, your "normal" hand raised pet rat pretty rarely bites. (I see from the comments at this site, thought, that it definitely happens.)

Still, the good doctor mentions a case of a Western Australian girl who got an infection but denied having been bitten by her rat. She did clean its cage, though, and perhaps got it that way.

Certainly, good hygiene around pet rats is important, and I would say that rat owners who let them (ugh) lick their teeth (Youtube gives many examples) are simply nuts. But I suspect the danger of a normally clean person catching something from a pet rat is probably no worse than catching toxoplasma from a cat.

In other small, furry animal news

Squirrels show softer side by adopting orphans, study finds

As squirrels rarely interact, they learn who their nearby relatives are by hearing their unique calls, he said. If they fail to hear a relative's calls for a few days, they may investigate. "We suspect that, if they find pups on the territory, they remember that their neighbour was a relative and carry the pups back to their nest. This would be quite intelligent behaviour for a squirrel."

It doesn't happen often though, it seems. I wonder if the much maligned grey squirrels of England do the same thing? It would be good for their PR.

From the "a propos of nothing" files...

Agents portrayed Hitler as gay Jewish eunuch

I think everyone knows that British propaganda in WW2 used to help spread the belief that Hitler was short at least one testicle, but I hadn't realised that they were quite this creative until I stumbled across this 1994 article in The Independent:

Special Operations in London sent out to Gibraltar for distribution in Morocco boxed sets of gramophone records in Arabic making lewd suggestions about Hitler's anatomy....

A po-faced official on the staff of Lord Gort, the Governor of Gibraltar, says side one 'records the story of an Arab caravan journeying to Marrakech'. He bemoans the stagnation of trade in Morocco, and blames Hitler and the fact that British ships are detained in Moroccan ports. But by side two the official is becoming upset. 'It states that Hitler cannot marry and that he hates both Jews and Arabs with a 'fiery hatred' and explains the reason.

'Hitler is a bastard - presumably of Jewish blood - and his original name was Schicklegruber. Some 30 years ago he was but a humble house-painter when one day he was painting the ceiling of a synagogue and fell and damaged one of his testicles]'

The doctor, trained by an Arab, is a former violinist used to giving encores, so when he is applauded for taking off the first testicle, he repeats the performance.

That last bit sounds more like an attempt at humour, really. But Adolf Schicklegruber, I like that.

It's also hard not to be amused by the next part of the article:

The second story has Hitler being visited in his bedroom by Mrs Goebbels, who is shocked to find the Fuhrer has gone to the front to have sex with his generals. The official says in his report to Lord Gort that the Arabs would be likely to be impressed rather than shocked by such behaviour.

Local warming

Hundreds die in Indian heatwave | World news | The Guardian

Record temperatures in northern India have claimed hundreds of lives in what is believed to be the hottest summer in the country since records began in the late 1800s.

The death toll is expected to rise with experts forecasting temperatures approaching 50C (122F) in coming weeks. More than 100 people are reported to have died in the state of Gujarat where the mercury topped at 48.5C last week. At least 90 died in Maharashtra, 35 in Rajasthan and 34 in Bihar.

Interestingly, The Guardian does not specifically mention global warming in the context of this story. I assume that is all part of the new sort journalistic reticence to raise AGW, just at the time global tempertures are in fact on the rise?

Hard to change

The science of a healthy marriage - Times Online

There's not much I particularly wanted to refer people in this article by the writer of a new book on the science of marriage. But this paragraph (about an American study on infidelity in marriage) amused me:

Overall, cheating rates were extraordinarily low—only 11 per cent of respondents reported infidelity. But the scientists also found that cheating was associated with some specific risk factors: being a man; thinking about sex several times a day; having a high number of sexual partners; living in the city; being in a long relationship; living together without marriage; having lived together before marriage and being unhappy.

Possibly important

Failure of Bell's Theorem and the Local Causality of the Entangled Photons

Physicist Joy Christian has had a string of papers recently at arXiv (well, I see now that he has been putting his position in print for a few years) in which he argues that "quantum non-locality" is actually an illusion.

His argument is hard to follow (even by other physicists, it seems) but he talk of an topological error and (to quote from an earlier abstract):

When topologies are correctly identified, local-realistic completion of any arbitrary entangled state is always guaranteed in our framework. This vindicates EPR, and entails that quantum entanglement is best understood as an illusion.

To put it another way, as the paper linked to at the top of this article says:

One of the first steps we often take towards measuring a physical quantity is to set up a Cartesian coordinate system {x, y, z} in the Euclidean space E3. This amounts to modeling the Euclidean space as a 3-fold product of the real line, IR3. This procedure has become so familiar to us that in practice we often identify E3 with its Cartesian model, and simply think of IR3 as the Euclidean space.

As we shall see, however, this seemingly innocuous act of convenience comes with a very heavy price: It is largely responsible for the illusions of “quantum non-locality.” Once a coordinate-free geometric model of the Euclidean space is used, the correlations observed in the EPR-type experiments involving photon pairs ... are easily understood, in a strictly local-realistic terms.

Well, it's not clear to me what this means, but my hunch is that if he might be onto something.

There's not too much about him on the web, but there is a bit of a bio here (and proof that he is a "he", not a she.)

Getting rid of quantum non-locality sounds a good way to make the world more aligned with common sense, but maybe Christian's ideas have their own form of counter-intuitiveness as well. (If only I could understand his explanation of the topological issue.)

One disc to rule them all

Japanese team discovers 'super disc' material

A Japanese research team has found a material that could be used to make a low-price super disc with data storage capacity thousands of times greater than a DVD, the lead scientist said Monday.

And the material is a form of titanium oxide, which has this advantage:

Titanium oxide's market price is about one-hundredth of the rare element -- germanium-antimony-tellurium -- that is currently used in rewritable Blu-ray discs and DVDs, Ohkoshi said.

"You don't have to worry about procuring rare metals. Titanium oxide is cheap and safe, already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint," the professor said.

Very clever, those Japanese. Now if only they would get out of the lab and have children...

My ovaries are safe, then

Drinking tea may reduce ovarian cancer risk

It's research from Queensland too. Yay.

Mercury still rising

Experts fear Taiji mercury tests are fatally flawed | The Japan Times Online

The Japan Times keeps up its (I think) single handed media attack on the issue of the mercury poisoning in Japan from eating dolphin.

This latest update questions whether the health of those found with high levels of mercury really has been assessed properly, and includes comments from more experts (including one from pilot whale eating Faroe Islands!) saying that it's crazy for the government to let them keep eating it.

For those interested...

in manufactured chicken sandwiches, I have updated my story about them a few posts back.

Funny 'cos it's true...

As a person who still works in Wordperfect, never uses IE if I can avoid it, and thinks Irfanview is the best image viewer, I understand entirely.