The battle of the cutes

Trouble at Kangaroo Island - Nature - Environment - The Independent

I seem to have missed this, if it was in the Australian media:  

Kangaroo Island, south of Adelaide, is one of Australia's most popular tourism destinations, thanks to its profusion of native wildlife, which includes koalas, kangaroos and the world's smallest penguin species.

But lately there have been dark goings-on in the animal kingdom: the New Zealand fur seals have been devouring the fairy penguins.

Penguin numbers have dropped by half on the island, according to some locals, who want the seals to be sterilised, relocated or even culled. Now they have come up with a new suggestion: shoot them with beanbag rounds – a method more commonly used to control riots – if they approach penguin colonies.

Personal taste

Not all of these David Mitchell soapbox rants are so good, and as with nearly every single modern comedian except for Jerry Seinfeld, he's starting to swear a bit too much, but I quite liked this one:

                
                   
                   
                   
Some of the comments following this at The Guardian are pretty funny too.   Bacon is always a good subject for humour.

Speaking of swearing comedians, I saw Tony Martin's second book of autobiographical stories (A Nest of Occasionals) going for $5 in some remainder-ish bookshop, and have finished reading it.  He really is a talented and funny writer, even though he swears too much.  I particularly liked the last story, about a trip back to New Zealand to learn about his grandparents.   (Young Tony had a quite unsettled, and unsettling, childhood.  In fact, one gets the impression from an earlier chapter - about all of the medical probes he has had over the years -  that he may still suffer from the lingering stress of his childhood.)

I see from Martin's fairly extensive Wikipedia entry that he's now divorced.  His last TV venture was also not so good.  As far as I know his falling out with Mick Molloy has not yet ended in a Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin style televised reconciliation.   Maybe he needs a hug.

The universe and all that

There was a university press release that got a lot of publicity recently, about "quantum graphity" - rather a bad name by whoever came up with it, I thought.

Anyhow, ars technica has a cynical look at the PR exercise, and as I expected, there is probably less to this than it seems.

Of more interest, I think, is this story about measurements indicating that spacetime is pretty 'smooth':

Some theories of quantum gravity say that the universe is not smooth but foamy—made of fundamental units called Planck lengths that are less than a trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Planck lengths are so small that there's no way to detect them, except via photons like those that make up gamma-ray bursts. Here's why.

The wavelengths of these photons are some of the shortest distances known to science—so short they should interact with the even smaller Planck length. And if they interact, the photons should be dispersed—scattered—on their trek through Planck length–pixilated spacetime.

 In particular, they should disperse in different ways if their wavelengths differ, just as a ping pong ball and a softball might take alternate paths down a gravely hillside.

 You wouldn't notice the scattering over short distances, but across billions of light years, the Planck lengths should disperse the light. And three photons from the same gamma-ray burst should not have crashed through the Fermi telescope at the same moment.

 But they did, and that calls into question just how foamy spacetime really is. "We have shown that the universe is smooth across the Planck mass," Nemiroff said. "That means that there's no choppiness that's detectible. It's a really cool discovery. We're very excited."

Armstrong remembered

This ABC site has many tributes from all over the place to Neil Armstrong.

Isn't it funny how real life works out compared to fiction?   A science fiction story with the first man on the Moon being such an incredibly modest and self effacing character just wouldn't have worked, yet that's the way things panned out. 

Goodbye, ice

There is likely to be a lot of (well deserved) publicity about the new Arctic sea ice extent minimum that will be reached in the next day or two.   In fact, according to some ways of counting the sea ice, we're already there.

People also need to remember that it has been a long time since the Arctic was ice free in summer;   according to a 2005 article, it may be 800,000 years ago, although I think I have seen suggestions to the contrary elsewhere.   It seems the Eemian period of global warmth about 125,000 still had winter sea ice in the Arctic, even while ocean levels were 3-7 m higher than today.   (While Googling, I stumbled across the question posed by the Institute for Creation Research - "Are Polar Ice Sheets Only 4500 Years Old?"  What was I worried about?)

But apart from the extent of Arctic ice, the volume of ice gives the better picture of what has been happening.  Tamino came up with this moving graph (click on it) some time ago, but he has reposted it.   It is pretty amazing.

20 years is a long time in politics - (subtitle: "Against the Hedley")

Last year, when the issue of Gillard and the AWU scandal came up, I made the observation that, given that virtually all Labor politicians can be counted on as having made some factional enemies during their life in the party, isn't it extremely unlikely that there is a bit of evidence out there that is only now being produced to harm her?  If there was something to prove her knowledge of, or involvement in, an obvious fraud, it would have been used against her before now.

A year or so later, we know that:

a.  her ex boyfriend Wilson still seems to support her, and has attacked the sleazy internet campaign;
b.  the Greek builder says Gillard paid for her renovations and has got nothing against her;
c.  she did some legal work that appeared quite minor without opening a file; it turned out subsequently to have a high embarrassment factor for her firm and the partners weren't happy.  There appear to have been tensions within the firm over other matters anyway, with several lawyers leaving around the time.  
d.  as predicted, there is no evidence being produced that she had knowledge of the fraudulent way the association was run by her then boyfriend, or that she benefitted in any substantial way.   (I am betting that maybe the Greek or one of the tradies working on her renovation might have been expecting to be paid by Wilson, but if he told Gillard that they owed him a favour, so what?)

As for the media treatment of this, Hedley Thomas is having a tantrum today that the rest of the media weren't showing enough interest in the office politics and embarrassment that Gillard caused Slater & Gordon nearly 20 years ago.

Hedley:  it was 20 years ago.

Quite frankly, Mr Thomas as a serial pest with no sense of proportion.   He gets lucky at times, noticing (for example) some inconsistencies in the Brisbane flood inquiry evidence, the embarrassment factor of which then seemed to lead to the lawyers for the inquiry going in too hard on the hapless dam engineers who had been exhausted working out what to do during a huge flood event.

And look at the final outcome:  the engineers referred to the Crime and Misconduct Commission, only to be found last week to have no case to answer. 

This was reported in brief detail by some other reporter in the Australian. As far as I can see, Thomas has made no comment.   He was too busy on a beat up of another story beyond its importance.

I mean, just imagine what a misery these engineers' lives have been with this hanging over their heads.  To get greater detail of the CMC's finding, you have to go to a Fairfax outlet, or the ABC report, but basically it is all put down to problems with the manual:

Mr Jerrard has found the dam was operated in breach of the operating manual but said this was due to shortcomings in the manual design.

"There is no evidence that I have seen which suggests the conduct of Mr Tibaldi, Mr Ayre and Mr Malone relating to the preparation of documents surrounding the January 2011 flood event, and oral testimony given to the flood inquiry, evidences offences against the Criminal Code or official misconduct under the Crime and Misconduct Act 2001," he said in advice released today.

Mr Jerrard said any inconsistencies in the engineers' explanations of how they managed the flood could be explained by the contradictions in the operation manual.

As I have argued in detail before, Hedley Thomas and the Australian's campaign to encourage flood victims to believe there was someone to blame for an unavoidable natural disaster, all based on the opinion of one of two engineers of dubious ability and knowledge of the true situation at Wivenhoe, remains a disgraceful example of journalism doing harm to public understanding.

Going back to Gillard, I think her being aggressive on the matter this week, even with the boring and pompous Paul Kelly, will help her public image.    And as for The Australian's coverage of the matter, I think Barrie Cassidy got it right:

Speers was also right to say, "These may not be serious matters."

And that goes to the heart of the coverage in The Australian. Of course the newspaper did well to gain fresh information. But the newspaper grossly exaggerated the value of that information and the worth of the story.

Nobody is suggesting the newspaper should not have pursued the issue. It's a question of prominence.
According to The Age, The Australian has published more than 40 articles and opinion pieces about the allegations since 1995, three quarters of them in the last month.

Some of that coverage included front page banner headlines and full page transcripts. This was not the Loans Affair or Tampa. This was a story about the Prime Minister showing a lack of judgment 17 years ago. As the Australian and others repeatedly said, nobody was accusing Julia Gillard of wrongdoing, nobody apart from those Gillard has dismissed as misogynists and nut jobs.

There are a couple of things still confusing about this.   As I noted before, the Gillard sympathising Brisbane journalist Dennis Atkins referred to her living with Wilson, but I thought this was the particular claim that I thought cost Glenn Milne his job.   Gillard seemed to be claiming that Milne's 2007 article falsely claimed she set up an account and this was the subject of a retraction, but I'm not sure if that is quite right either.

In any event, it is, more than ever, "time to move on".  I don't blame Gillard for being furious about the way the right wing shock jocks in particular have dealt with this - particularly Michael Smith, the sympatico support Andrew Bolt offered him, and then the increasingly execrable Alan Jones.   And of course Larry Pickering - I mean the utter hide of a bankrupt (widely suspected of fraud) making obviously defamatory statements and then claiming that the lack of legal action against him somehow vindicated him.

There is no doubt at all that this campaign was a "dog whistle" one, where there were lists of "serious questions to be answered" (ignoring the fact that the material had been out there for years and repeatedly denied already) followed by pathetic attempts at arse covering by the occasional (very occasional) statement "not that we're saying Gillard knew what Wilson was doing."   Well, boys, that's exactly what you wanted people to believe, and don't pretend otherwise.

My opinion of Andrew Bolt in all of this has sunk further than ever before.   He was clearly gleeful that the obscene, bankrupt and utterly careless-of-facts Pickering was getting attention for his claims, and while not specifically referring people to his blog, eventually decided to comment that Pickering was "brave" to be doing this, and only belatedly making some reference to the scumbag nature of the campaign:

It was terrific how she made out the controversy started with the utterly scurrilous blog of Larry Pickering..

 As far as I am concerned, anyone associated with Labor should freeze him out completely by never appearing on his smug faced Sunday show.    He deserves their contempt. 

Movie mystery solved

Ratatouille with olives: a traditional Provençal summer vegetable stew.

Fans of the movie Ratatouille may have wondered about the version of the title dish that Remy the rat made at the dramatic climax of the film.  Well, I certainly did, anyway, as I had never heard of it being made with thin slices of vegetables.  But the above article from Slate explains:

Unfortunately, the adorable rat was doing ratatouille wrong. The version of ratatouille featured in Ratatouille, also known as confit biyaldi, is a visual delight: razor-thin slices of tomato, zucchini, and eggplant arranged artfully over a bell-pepper purée and baked for hours. But ratatouille is not supposed to be a visual delight; it’s supposed to make short work of as many late-summer vegetables as possible simultaneously. Ratatouille was invented by Provençal peasants, and Provençal peasants possessed neither the time nor the inclination to slice vegetables with such precision or to bake them as gently and slowly as possible. What they had the time and inclination for was stew.

The article then goes on to explain, roughly, how to made the real version of ratatouille.  I've never been that big a fan of the dish, but I'm half tempted to give it a go again.

Worth a look

Arctic Death Spiral: How It Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’ | ThinkProgress

Sure, Romm can be shrill sometimes, but in a post like this he has lots of links to scientists explaining the increasingly convincing proposal that less Arctic ice is leading to more heat in the Arctic ocean which is leading to jet stream changes which bring weird and extreme weather South.

Younger fatherhood encouraged

BBC News - Older dads linked to rise in mental illness

 According to Dr Kari Stefansson, of Decode Genetics, who led the research, the results show it is the age of men, rather than women, that is likely to have an effect on the health of the child.

"Society has been very focussed on the age of the mother. But apart from [Down's Syndrome] it seems that disorders such as schizophrenia and autism are influenced by the age of the father and not the mother"....

 "The average age of fathers has been steeply rising [in industrialised countries] since 1970. Over the same period there has been an increase in autism and it is very likely that part of that rise is accounted for by the increasing age of the father," he said....

Older fathers and therefore genetic mutations have been linked with neurological conditions because the brain depends on more genes for its development and regulation.

So mutations in genes are more likely to show up as problems in the brain than in any other organ. But it is unclear whether the age of fathers has an effect on any other organ or system. The research has not yet been done.

The reason that men rather than women drive the mutation rate is that women are born with all their eggs whereas men produce new sperm throughout their adult life. It is during sperm production that genetic errors creep in, especially as men get older.

Under the sea

Life on board a British nuclear submarine | UK news | The Guardian

I can happily read about astronauts travelling in small spaceships without getting twinges of claustrophobia, but submarines are a different matter.  I think I can imagine too well how I would be  aware of the crushing pressure of dark water all around me.  How James Cameron could bear to drop, alone, kilometres to the bottom of the ocean while looking out into the darkness I'll never know.  (By the way, is there some special about that coming out?  I assume it would on National Geographic, which means I won't see it, but that's no great loss because that network seems to have a strange ability to make any documentary on any subject boring.)

Anyhow, this account by a Guardian journalist of a week in a British nuclear submarine is quite interesting.  Here's the bit that made me feel claustrophobic:

You can hardly move in the bunk – sitting up is impossible – and if you turn over you are likely to tip out and end up on the floor. You have to share your rack with a gas mask and various other bits of safety equipment, plus a lot of your own gear. There are small lockers, but I am never offered one, so sleep with bag, clothes and shoes in the bed. Each bunk has an air vent, which does offer some respite from the heat but also blows a blast of cold air into your right ear. "If the air stops blowing, it means something bad has happened," one of the men tells me reassuringly. One morning I am woken by a sudden thud and fear the worst. Later, I discover it was just air being released – a routine operation.

Several men mention "coffin dreams" – nightmares in which the sleeper shouts out that the control room is flooding or he is being pursued by a torpedo. I sympathise: though I have no nightmares – I don't sleep deeply enough for that – the racks do feel like coffins. A better option is to sleep in the "bomb shop", where the missiles and torpedoes are kept. It is the quietest, most spacious room on the boat and hugging an 18ft cruise missile keeps you cool.

A few men go "wibble" after years under water; they just can't stand it any more – the lack of proper sleep, the absence of privacy, the endlessly repeated conversations, the cycle of meals (it's Wednesday so it must be curry), the unspoken dangers. How do you know when someone has gone wibble? "The noisy ones go quiet, and the quiet ones suddenly become noisy," one man tells me. Chief Johnson recalls one experienced submariner who went wibble and started keeping a book of shipmates he thought had wronged him. "You're on my list as well," he told Johnson before being taken off the boat. He only agreed to leave as long as he could be designated captain of the rescue vessel.

 

Bugs R Us

The human microbiome: Me, myself, us | The Economist

Click the link for a quite long, quite interesting, article about how humans are incredibly reliant on the bacteria that we're full of.  For a start:

A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body’s commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds something to the body’s genetic mix.

The article then gives many examples of ways in which the bacteria may affect our health.  The one I found most surprising:

The link with diabetes was noticed in morbidly obese people who had opted for a procedure known as Roux-en-Y, which short-circuits the small intestine and thus reduces the amount of food the body can absorb. Such people are almost always diabetic. As a treatment for obesity, Roux-en-Y is effective. As a treatment for diabetes, it is extraordinary. In 80% of cases the condition vanishes within days.

Experiments conducted on mice by Dr Nicholson and his colleagues show that Roux-en-Y causes the composition of the gut microbiome to change. Dr Nicholson thinks this explains the sudden disappearance of diabetes.

The diabetes in question is known as type-2. It is caused by the insensitivity of body cells to insulin, a hormone that regulates the level of blood sugar. Insulin sensitivity is part of a complex and imperfectly understood web of molecular signals. Dr Nicholson suspects, though he cannot yet prove, that some crucial part of this web is regulated by the microbiome in a way similar to the role played by formic acid in the case of high blood pressure. The intestinal bypass, by disrupting the microbiome, resets the signal, and the diabetes vanishes.

Dealing with the voices

Michael Prescott's Blog: Who's there?

Michael Prescott has a particularly interesting post here about a movement that is encouraging schizophrenics who hear voices to engage with them.   It works for some, apparently.

Quite fascinating. 

Breakfast discussed

On a bit of a whim while in the supermarket some weeks ago, I decided to vary my breakfasts (usually cereal based) by buying this:

Not too bad.  Throw in some sultanas before you microwave it, and quite nice.  I always had the vague idea that Uncle Tobys was an Australian brand, too. 

But last week, I tried this instead:

and I have to say, it makes a nicer oat porridge.   But I feel slightly guilty for going with a brand which has an odd American character as its symbol.  (Even though this is made in Australia with Australian oats.)

But the real puzzle is:  why do oat brands insist on 19th (or 18th?) century characters as being appropriate for their product?   The original of the Quaker man is explained in Wikipedia:

The company has no formal ties with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). When the company was being built up, Quaker businesspeople were known for their honesty (Truth is often considered a Quaker testimony). The Straight Dope writes "According to the good folks at Quaker Oats, the Quaker Man was America's first registered trademark for a breakfast cereal, his registration taking place on September 4th, 1877. "The name was chosen when Quaker Mill partner Henry Seymour found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described — integrity, honesty, purity — provided an appropriate identity for his company's oat product."^[19] In the 1800s, when the company was formed, Quakers did wear clothes similar to those shown in the picture. This was because of the Quakers' Testimony of Simplicity — they did not want to show off their wealth with expensive clothing. Most Quakers currently do not tend to dress in that manner — they might instead avoid clothing with brand names advertised.

Well, yes, but new consumers today are not likely to know much about the reputation of 19th  century Quakers, are they?

As for Uncle Toby's, the explanation is even more obscure:

 The UNCLE TOBYS logo was designed by Nellie Love who was a keen artist and a student of literature. It is based on the character Uncle Toby who is prominent in the literary classic ‘The Life And Times of Tristram Shandy’ by Laurence Sterne, first published in 1759. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic novels in the English language. The most familiar and important character in the book is Uncle Toby, gentle, uncomplicated lover of his fellow man. In 1893 the name was accepted and Nellie Love proceeded to design the original logo of Uncle Toby standing with the Widow Wadman, a design which to this day has hardly changed.

 Well, I'm sick of this.  It's about time an oat brand using a robot came out.  Bender from Futurama, maybe?  

Three strange stories of biology

1.    Aphids are weird, and Nature reports that they show the first evidence for photosynthesis in insects:

The biology of aphids is bizarre: they can be born pregnant and males sometimes lack mouths, causing them to die not long after mating. In an addition to their list of anomalies, work published this week indicates that they may also capture sunlight and use the energy for metabolic purposes.

Aphids are unique among animals in their ability to synthesize pigments called carotenoids. Many creatures rely on these pigments for a variety of functions, such as maintaining a healthy immune system and making certain vitamins, but all other animals must obtain them through their diet. Entomologist Alain Robichon at the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France, and his colleagues suggest that, in aphids, these pigments can absorb energy from the Sun and transfer it to the cellular machinery involved in energy production¹.

This reminds me of how the advanced modified bodies given to the characters in John Scalzi's Old Man's War had (I think) greenish tinged skin because they could photosynthesise.  I wonder if aphid genes could be the way to do that.  (I didn't care for the book much, by the way.)

2.   It still pays to look carefully, it seems.  Isn't it odd that this is only being found now?:

A previously unrecognized system that drains waste from the brain at a rapid clip has been discovered by neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center....

The highly organized system acts like a series of pipes that piggyback on the brain's blood vessels, sort of a shadow plumbing system that seems to serve much the same function in the brain as the lymph system does in the rest of the body – to drain away waste products.

 Nedergaard's team has dubbed the new system "the glymphatic system," since it acts much like the lymphatic system but is managed by brain cells known as glial cells. The team made the findings in mice, whose brains are remarkably similar to the human brain. Scientists have known that cerebrospinal fluid or CSF plays an important role cleansing brain tissue, carrying away waste products and carrying nutrients to brain tissue through a process known as diffusion.

The newly discovered system circulates CSF to every corner of the brain much more efficiently, through what scientists call bulk flow or convection. "It's as if the brain has two garbage haulers – a slow one that we've known about, and a fast one that we've just met," said Nedergaard. "Given the high rate of metabolism in the brain, and its exquisite sensitivity, it's not surprising that its mechanisms to rid itself of waste are more specialized and extensive than previously realized."

 3.    Israel seems to have a particularly clear case of decreasing sperm quality, and no one is sure why:

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the concentration of sperm samples collected by the bank dropped 37% from 106 million cells per milliliter to 67 million, according to Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a leading Israeli infertility researcher at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center.

Though declining sperm quality is an international phenomenon, the change in Israel is occurring at nearly twice the pace as other developed countries, Haimov-Kochman said. If current trends continue, she said, by 2030 the concentration of sperm from Israeli donors will drop below 20 million cells per milliliter, which many international health experts define as abnormal.

One of the more surprising possible reasons is from their dairy practices:

"People in Israel are getting quite a load of estrogen," said Laurence Shore, a retired hormone and toxicology researcher at the Kimron Veterinary Institute near Tel Aviv. "I don't think it's a good idea to expose children to such high levels of estrogen."

He said that no studies so far have determined that estrogen levels in Israel are harming humans, adding that exposure may be too low for that. But he said it might be a factor in the sperm decline.  His research has found Israeli milk and associated products such as butter and cheese can contain 10 times as much estrogen as products from other countries because of Israel's aggressive milk-production practices.

Israel is a world leader in producing milk, pumping twice as much from its cows as other parts of the world, he said. That's partly because cows here are milked up to their eighth month of pregnancy, when natural estrogen levels in the milk soar, according to Shore. In nature, he said, cows usually stop giving milk to their own young when they are three months pregnant with a new calf.

Even though many other nations have adopted similar milking practices, Shore said, Israel is one of the first and most aggressive, so it could be seeing the effect sooner.

Local mystery

That's odd.  I would have thought mysterious stars would all be distant objects that are hard to study, but I seem to have missed that there's something quite simple that's not understood about the sun:

The sun is nearly the roundest object ever measured. If scaled to the size of a beach ball, it would be so round that the difference between the widest and narrow diameters would be much less than the width of a human hair.

Apparently, it's not supposed to be like that, but new satellite measurements confirm its shape:

Because there is no atmosphere in space to distort the solar image, they were able to use HMI's exquisite image sensitivity to measure the solar shape with unprecedented accuracy. The results indicate that if the Sun were shrunk to a ball one meter in diameter, its equatorial diameter would be only 17 millionths of a meter larger than the diameter through its North-South pole, which is its rotation axis.

They also found that the solar flattening is remarkably constant over time and too small to agree with that predicted from its surface rotation. This suggests that other subsurface forces, like solar magnetism or turbulence, may be a more powerful influence than expected.

Kuhn, the team leader and first author of an article published today in Science Express, said, "For years we've believed our fluctuating measurements were telling us that the sun varies, but these new results say something different. While just about everything else in the sun changes along with its 11-year sunspot cycle, the shape doesn't."