For my own reference...

Second Glance: Appreciation of Pauline Kael

I always liked Pauline Kael's reviews, and in fact mentioned her in conversation last weekend, not realising that there was this article about her to be found on Arts and Letters Daily.

The fading voice

Christopher Hitchens: Unspoken Truths | Culture | Vanity Fair

Poor old Christopher is losing/has lost his voice and writes about it, quite movingly, in this piece.

Great moments in university advertising

I noticed an ad at the top of Rottentomatoes that I thought had an amusingly inappropriate picture on it, and followed the link to this page of Open Universities Australia, which even the link says is about their "terrorism" related courses.

The picture is there (top left, in case you need to have it pointed out):



That seems a particularly enthusiastic grope going on, doesn't it? I'm sure that's why most people get into Security and Counterterrorism as a career.

Then the page also includes this heading:


Sorry, I can't enlarge this without blurring it more, so you have to click on it to see it more clearly, and see whether it's just me, or do all those heavily armed counter-terrorists look like they're about 16? (I know, I know, you hit your 40's and all police officers start to look like kids, but really...)

But then the body of the article starts like this:

Yes, the writing is about starting your studies in Early Childhood Education, for which lessons in use of a submachine gun would, no doubt, come in very handy for class control. (Nothing gets the kids' attention better than a burst of gunfire into the air, I guess.)

Anyway, count me as officially amused. And is someone at Open Universities having a lend? Maybe it was a student's work on display? Or is it deliberately diversionary advertising? (So you thought you wanted to be a heavily armed policeman/security dude, but did you consider teaching primary school kids first?)

Roman urban myth

BBC News - Rome braces for 'prophet-predicted quake'

It can't be allowed to happen: mad Muslims would probably claim it as punishment for the death of bin Laden.

Pays to look up every now and then..

BBC News - Dubai: 'Suicide jump' from world's tallest skyscraper

A man has committed suicide by jumping from the world's tallest skyscraper in Dubai, according to its owner.

The man, in his 20s, fell from the 147th floor of the 2,717ft (828m) Burj Khalifa, landing on a deck on the 108th floor, local media reported.

I wonder who uses the deck on the 108th floor. It seems from a previous article that it is not the tourist observation deck.

The future of coccoliths

Ocean acidification: Carbon dioxide makes life difficult for algae

Here's some bad ocean acidification news for us all, about coccoliths (the calcium carbonate shells of some algae.)

"We know that the world's oceans are acidifying due to our emissions of CO₂ and that is why it is interesting for us to find out how the coccoliths are reacting to it. We have studied algae from both fossils and living coccoliths, and it appears that both are protected from dissolution by a very thin layer of organic material that the algae formed, even though the seawater is extremely unsaturated relative to calcite. The protection of the organic material is lost when the pH is lowered slightly. In fact, it turns out that the shell falls completely apart when we do experiments in water with a pH value that many researchers believe will be the found in the world oceans in the year 2100 due to the CO₂ levels," explains Tue Hassenkam, who is part of the NanoGeoScience research group at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen.

Professor of Biological Oceanography Katherine Richardson has followed research in the acidification of the oceans and climate change in general and she hopes that the results can help to bring the issue into public focus.

"These findings underscore that the acidification of the oceans is a serious problem. The acidification has enormous consequences not only for coccoliths, but also for many other marine organisms as well as the global carbon cycle.".....

And from the abstract of the PNAS paper itself:

However, ancient and modern coccoliths, that resist dissolution in Ca-free artificial seawater at pH > 8, all dissolve when pH is 7.8 or lower. Ocean pH is predicted to fall below 7.8 by the year 2100, in response to rising CO2 levels. Our results imply that at these conditions the advantages offered by the biogenic nature of calcite will disappear putting coccoliths on algae and in the calcareous bottom sediments at risk.

This is the worst sounding bit of ocean acidification research that has come out for quite some time.

Agreed

Club Troppo - In Praise of Gillard’s Malaysia Solution

I think Ken Parish's assessment of Gillard's "Malaysia solution" is pretty much spot on. Even Andrew Bolt was conceding on his show that it may well work to stop boats coming, and the trade off is not as bad as it seems.

Best almost flying toy ever?

I have seen something about this device before; maybe I even had a video here, but I can't be bothered checking. But this video seems new, and it's awe-some. (Did I sound like a cool dude just then? Oh well, must try harder.)

A bit more detail needed, but still..

Small Modular Reactors: Safer and Cheaper? | Climate Central

How come I've missed the Climate Central blog til now? It looks pretty good.

Anyhow, a few weeks ago they had the post linked above about small nuclear reactors, which I have speculated before might be the better route towards rapid roll out of nuclear power. But I did wonder about the wisdom of burying them.

The post does deal with some of their questionable aspects, but more detail is needed.

And I need to clean up my blog roll again.

Great heading

Spotted in the New York Times: Apart From The Vampires, Lincoln Film Seeks Accuracy

Tim Colebatch on the budget

Takes guts to squeeze the middle class

I haven't noticed Tim Colebatch writing at The Age much lately, but here's his take on the budget delivered last night.

I still say he's the clearest, most balanced economics columnist around today, so I find his view of the budget pretty convincing. Short version: it does cut quite a bit, and the real issue in getting back to surplus is the drop in revenue.

Harrison the Wise

‘Cowboys & Aliens’ star Harrison Ford: Most special-effects films are soulless now

I've said much the same myself at this blog over the years:

“I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you’ve lost human scale,” Ford said. “With the CGI, suddenly there’s a thousand enemies instead of six – the army goes off into the horizon. You don’t need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That’s something that’s consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that’s a soulless enterprise. It’s all kinetics without emotion. I don’t have time for that.”

I certainly hope the oddball combination of cowboys and aliens works.

Ecstacy down; shamans up.

Designer drugs beat Ecstasy�(Science Alert)

Here's a story detailing the current trend in ecstasy and "designer drug" use in Australia and elsewhere.

The trend is down, as it has been in many other countries over a number of years. I thought the explanation may be in the recognition of undesirable effects on long time users, but it might be more mundane than that:

Regular ecstasy users have also indicated that there has been a marked drop in the purity of ecstasy, with a significant number of tablets containing no MDMA, the active ingredient of ecstasy.

Ha.

Mind you, drug users value playing with their brain chemistry over common sense:

Designer drugs which have been picked up by the survey, albeit in small numbers, include mephedrone and BZP, a central nervous system stimulant which reportedly has more side effects than amphetamines.

“In our 2010 survey, 16 per cent of users reported recent use of mephedrone, a synthetic stimulant closely related to amphetamines but with hallucinogenic properties,” said Dr Burns.

Oh yes, like that sounds like a good idea: combine amphetamines with hallucinations. Not only will you find bugs under your skin, you'll be awake for 30 hours to watch them.

It is of interest to me, though, to note that one particularly intriguing drug, DMT, has a small number of illegal users here. This drug was the subject of an interview with researcher Rick Strassman at Boing Boing recently.

If you're going to have a hallucination, I suppose having one in which spirit guides or angels are there to meet you is probably the most interesting kind to experience.

But, as with nearly everyone else older than a teenager, I don't believe the "Doors of Perception" theory that any drug is really letting you see into the true nature of reality. I therefore still wouldn't trust what exactly DMT is doing to my neurons to let me "see" the "spiritual" world. My intuition is that it can't be healthy.

Thanks, Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi helps fund Qld cyclone shelters

Since I have done my fair share of ridiculing the laws and society of the Gulf states over the years, I should say that this gift to my home State was very nice of them. Thanks.

Do not trust them

Favorite Denier Tricks, or How to Hide the Incline | Open Mind

Good post by Tamino (he's been on a roll lately) showing why you cannot take any graph, or any statement, at Watts Up With That on face value.

In other climate change news, this paper, about observed changes to cloud cover over 25 years sounds to me like an important one, but I haven't seen it written up anywhere yet.