It's OK when Rupert does it...

So, how's this supposed to work?

The Guardian and the ABC report from the Snowden leaks that Australia had targeted the Indonesia President's wife's mobile phone, causing a major diplomatic falling out which is supposed to cured with some future protocol.  Presumably, this will involve an indication from us that we agree it's not a nice thing to spy on politicians' wives.

The ABC Collective* condemns the Guardian and the ABC for publicising the spying story.  Against our national interests, etc etc.

Story goes quiet for a couple of weeks.

Then today, The Australian comes out with headline stories that read:

Hey!  It's quite OK to spy on Indonesian President's wives after all!  Kevin Rudd made a good call!

How the hell is that supposed to help repair the relationship?

In fact, isn't it just about the worst possible thing that you could do if our robot Foreign Minister is still negotiating some future promises with the Indonesians?   No, according to Bolt, it's important that the Right attack the Left for criticising the decision to spy on her.

This is ludicrous behaviour by the Right, if you ask me.

 * The Australian, Andrew Bolt, and Catallaxy, for any new reader.

Who knows what this means for education policy?

Nature trumps nurture in exam success: GCSE results 'mainly determined by genes,' says landmark study of twins

Michelle's summary seems pretty right to me

Grattan on Friday: 100 days and the "adults" still have a lot of growing up to do.

It starts:

It is just 100 days on Monday since the election, but the Abbott government lacks that air of excitement that power often brings. Rather, it is staggering towards Christmas, mugged by moving from rhetoric to reality, from the disciplined order of opposition to the setbacks and unexpected challenges of office.

We will do, Abbott pledged before the election, reeling off intentions, only to find there are many things, including the core promises of repealing the carbon and mining taxes, that he can’t do, at least for the moment.

He’d run a government of no surprises, he said. Well, he has been surprised, unpleasantly – most notably by the revelations about Australian spying in Indonesia, as well as by Holden’s intended departure.

And there’s been the unsettling reminder that voters were more anxious to throw out Labor than enthusiastic about the Coalition; now they’re unimpressed by the government’s early efforts. This week’s Newspoll had the ALP leading 52-48%. Satisfaction with Abbott’s performance was 40% - it has fallen steadily from 47% in October. Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s satisfaction rating was 44% - it has risen steadily from 32% in October.

Spooky children's stories

The Science of Reincarnation | The University of Virginia Magazine

The work of the late University of Virginia Professor Ian Stevenson on reincarnation was mentioned in comments here recently, and I see now that the University still has a psychiatrist who conducts research on the topic.

The link gives a pretty good example of one case he knows about in detail.

I am  a bit surprised to see that 70% of children who suddenly claim to have lived before are male.   But it is interesting to hear of American cases.  If I recall correctly, one of the big issues with Stevenson's work which (I think) dealt with a lot of Indian cases, is that the kids were being raised in a society which already accepts reincarnation, and they would surely be influenced by that in their imaginative life.

That's a lot harder to see as an influence in America.  

You should also read the comments following the article.   Some people are "appalled" that the University magazine would run such an article.

Wasted trip

BBC News - Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars'

 The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have catapulted life to Mars and the moons of Jupiter, US researchers say.

They calculated how many Earth rocks big enough to shelter life were ejected by asteroids in the last 3.5bn years.

The Chicxulub impact was strong enough to fire chunks of debris all the way to Europa, they write in Astrobiology.

Thousands of potentially life-bearing rocks also made it to Mars, which may once have been habitable, they add.

"We find that rock capable of carrying life has likely transferred from both Earth and Mars to all of the terrestrial planets in the solar system and Jupiter," says lead author Rachel Worth, of Penn State University.

"Any missions to search for life on Titan or the moons of Jupiter will have to consider whether biological material is of independent origin, or another branch in Earth's family tree."

Sounds kind of improbable to me...

Life possible in the early Universe 

Aliens might have existed during the Universe’s infancy. A set of calculations suggests that liquid water — a pre­requisite for life — could have formed on rocky planets just 15 million years after the Big Bang.

Abraham Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has realized that in the early Universe, the energy required to keep water liquid could have come from the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, rather than from host stars. Today, the temperature of this relic radiation is just 2.7 kelvin, but at an age of around 15 million years it would have kept the entire Universe at a balmy 300 kelvin, says Loeb, who posted his calculations to the arXiv preprint server this month (http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613).

Loeb says that rocky planets could have existed at that time, in pockets of the Universe where matter was exceptionally dense, leading to the formation of massive, short-lived stars that would have enriched these pockets in the heavier elements needed to make planets. He suggests that there would have been a habitable epoch of 2 million or 3 million years during which all rocky planets would have been able to maintain liquid water, regardless of their distance from a star. “The whole Universe was once an incubator for life,” he says.

 But as one critic says further down in the article:

Christopher Jarzynski, a biophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, is not convinced that life could exist in a uniformly warm Universe. Life on Earth depends thermo­dynamically not only on the heat source of the Sun, but also on the cold cosmic microwave background, which provides a heat sink, he notes. “Life feeds off this,” he says. And Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, says that a few million years is too short a time to produce intelligent life.

 Anyway, if true, and aliens did evolve then, it certainly sets up well the idea that our alien overlords (like the ones in 2001 A Space Odyssey) are very old indeed. 

Love fight

A rather odd on line fight has broken out between those who hate the movie Love Actually, and those who defend it.  (The 10 year anniversary of its release seems to be the motivation for this re-assessment.)

Christopher Orr started it with his lengthy explanation of why he thinks the movie is awful and actually anti-romantic.  His critique is not perfect - he says he thinks Bill Nighy is terrific, whereas I always find him hammy and annoying.   But he makes a pretty strong case against the movie overall.

(I just found the movie extremely unconvincing in virtually every story thread.   I wrote at the time that I found some of the stories verging on creepy, but I've actually forgotten which ones now.)

Orr's article has now been followed by this:

I Will Not Be Ashamed of Loving Love Actually - Emma Green - The Atlantic

and she brings in CS Lewis to defend her take on the movie.  (!)  [I somehow have my doubts that he would have taken to the love story between actors doing fake porn scenes.]

Other haters and lover of the movie have taken this as a cue to join in.  I see that this Australian entry is pretty good - she seems to dislike it in pretty much exactly the same ways I do.  After than, you can read a defence of the movie on Mother Earth News.  Then you can go visit another Australian woman who dislikes the movie.

I think the "noes" have it.

UPDATE:  An English young bloke in The Guardian now has a go at Australians for criticising it, even though this round of criticism started in America, declaring it his favourite movie, ever.  (!)   I think he should be a little embarrassed about that, in all honesty.

Drink up

BBC News - Artificial sweetener aspartame 'is safe'

I work on the assumption that if the Europeans think a food additive is safe, it almost certainly is.

An early Christmas present...

...at least for those of us who didn't vote for Abbott.

From the Financial Review:

The Abbott government’s extraordinary collapse in public support has been confirmed in the latest Newspoll, which puts Labor well ahead on a two-party basis and shows the Coalition has lost its carbon tax advantage.

The Newspoll, published in The Australian on Tuesday, finds the Coalition’s election-winning margin has been erased in just three months, with Labor now leading the two-party preferred vote with 52 per cent compared with the Abbott government’s 48 per cent.

The poll result confirms an Australian Financial Review/Nielsen poll, published two weeks ago, which was the first since the election to show that voters had dramatically shifted allegiance away from the Coalition, despite the party’s landslide win on September 7.

This translates into a 5.5 per cent swing against the government since the country voted, a shift strongly represented in the Financial Review’s Poll of Polls.

 Actually, I don't really think that it was "a landslide victory", but apart from that, a good report!

Counting men

I've noticed in the last 6 months that some conservative Catholics in the blogosphere have taken to claiming that the CDC in the US thinks that only 2% of men engage in "same sex behaviour".   (And conclude from that "hardly anyone is gay - why is gay marriage needed?)

In fact, the 2011 study they rely on says this in the abstract:

Estimates of the proportion of men who engaged in same-sex behavior differed by recall period: past year = 2.9% (95%CI, 2.6–3.2); past five years = 3.9% (3.5–4.4); ever = 6.9% (5.1–8.6).

 Which, of course, indicates that the true percent of gay or bisexual men would likely be around 4 - 5%.

With that background, it was interesting to read this article in the New York Times  in which a guy with a PhD in economics looks at the different threads of evidence and agrees with a 5% figure for "men who are predominantly attracted to men".

The most interesting aspect of the article is, however, the evidence he looks at for those parts of America where it seems men are more likely to be "in the closet".   (It's centred in the Southern, evangelical States.)    I thought this part was an innovative bit of research, and a bit darkly amusing:

Additional evidence that suggests that many gay men in intolerant states are deeply in the closet comes from a surprising source: the Google searches of married women. It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband...,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.” 

Searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more common in the least tolerant states. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.

 The other point that gays rights activists can rely on when talking about the relevance of numbers is this (I only thought to look this up on the weekend):

By 1933, German Jews were largely urban, middle class, prosperous in business, and well represented in the professions (especially medicine and law). They were culturally integrated but represented less than 1 percent of the total population.

PS:  I still don't support gay marriage, and would prefer it be dealt with by civil unions, perhaps even following the Tasmanian model which allow for other co-dependency relationships to be registered too.  But at least I don't argue dishonestly about it.

The Australian applauds itself

Given that The Australian has possibly the most annoying paywall system on the planet, as well as being essentially a print version of the Catallaxy blog on its opinion pages and its politics generally, I missed a truly remarkable editorial they ran last week, until I read about it on John Quiggin's blog.

This loonpond post contains the editorial in full as illustrated by First Dog on the Moon.  (You may notice it is also where I read the Tom Tomorrow cartoon featured in my last post.)

Although we don't know who wrote it, as Uncle Milton at JQ's blog noted:

The Oz’s piece, while anonymous, reads like it was written by Nick Cater. His writing has the air of painful frustration that the enemies of everything he holds near and dear refuse to go away.

I find Cater very annoying and shallow.  I have read reviews of his book indicating that he really spends a lot of time on environmentalism as a culture war dividing line.   I suppose it is, but only because the Right went stupidly anti-science about it.

Asians and Republicans

GOP starts a tough struggle to win back Asian American voters - latimes.com

The LA Times has an interesting article here on the way the Republicans lost the Asian vote.

Until they return from the Tea Party Right wing policies (and there is little sign of that at the moment), it is hard to see Asians returning to them.  Some extracts:

Asian Americans have shifted dramatically away from the Republican Party over the last two decades — more so than any other voting group. In 1992, Republican George H.W. Bush won 55% of the Asian American vote against Democrat Bill Clinton. Last year, President Obama won 73% against Republican Mitt Romney, a better showing than the president's 71% support among Latinos, according to exit polls....

The shift in Asian American political sentiments started during the Clinton years and owes much to the prosperity of his two terms as president, which enhanced the appeal of a Democratic Party that, from the civil rights movement on, had always seemed more welcoming to minorities.

Hastening the trend has been the rightward turn of the Republican Party.

Opinion surveys have found Asian Americans more willing than white voters to support tax hikes to reduce the federal deficit, more supportive of a large, activist government, friendlier toward immigrants in the country illegally and more favorably disposed to Obamacare than voters overall. All those positions clash with today's prevailing GOP sentiment.

The harsh Republican tone on immigration, directed mainly at people crossing illegally from Mexico, has been especially damaging.

And speaking of the last US Presidential election, I came across this last week and found it quite funny.  I hope the words are readable:

A good summary

Abbott team in government loses control of conversation | World news | theguardian.com

I thought the above article by Lenore Taylor in yesterday's Guardian was a pretty good summary of how the Coalition government is going.  (Short version:  not very well.)

I liked this bit in particular:

Similarly, there were many in the Coalition who sought to deflect attention from Guardian Australia’s spying stories by trying to start a fight they were itching to have anyway about the role and remit of the ABC.

Both Guardian Australia and the ABC took the decision that publication on the Indonesian spy story, with all requested redactions on actual national security grounds, was in the public interest. Abbott himself acknowledged that “plainly it was a story”. The prime minister and the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, asserted the ABC had made an “error of judgement” in partnering with Guardian Australia to run and “amplify” the story, something that has also been done by many other media organisations around the world. (It is unclear how the amplification would have been appreciably reduced had Guardian Australia run the story on its own and the ABC had then begun following it ten minutes later.)

Cheese in detail

It's Saturday night, and I'm reading an article that contains far more detail about the chemistry and biology of cheese than I really need to know, including this:

In Quicke’s vat, this arrangement has broken down and become curds and whey, on its way to cheddar. If milk is left alone, bacteria quickly start converting its lactose sugar into lactic acid that can eventually start this curdling. This is probably how cheese was first made, but modern needs for safe storage and maturing demand a different approach. Quicke’s minimally pasteurises its milk, and like most modern cheesemakers adds a starter culture including lactic acid bacteria such as Streptococcus, Lactococcus and Lactobacillus. They work hand-in-hand to control which bacteria reach the final cheese, by outcompeting less welcome species and making the environment too acidic for them. And rather than these bacteria doing the curdling, acid conditions help an enzyme preparation known as rennet to do it. Their ongoing acidity development also controls the resulting solid curd’s texture.

Traditional rennet, which Quicke’s uses, comes from soaking a milk-fed calf’s stomach in brine.

 Had some nice goats cheese at dinner tonight, as it happens.

UPDATE:   I was wondering last night how someone first worked out that calf's stomach contained something that was useful in making cheese.  Another site provides the likely answer:

There is a great deal of mythology surrounding the history of cheesemaking, because humans have been making it for a very long time, and the steps involved are actually fairly complicated. The stomachs of ruminants have historically been used to make bags and sacks, and food historians theorize that someone must have stored milk in one a bit too long, allowing it to curdle, and the curdled milk was then turned into a food product. Modern rennet is created through an extraction process that yields neat, dry tablets or a liquid that is very easy to work with.

 Traditional rennet was made by washing the stomach of a young ruminant after it has been slaughtered, and then salting it. The salted stomach is kept in dried form, with cooks snipping off small pieces and soaking them in water when they have a need for the extract. Some cheesemakers continue to make and use it in this way, but the vast majority use commercially processed rennet, which is made by creating a slurry and then subjecting it to a compound that will cause the enzymes to precipitate out.

Another episode of "It's all in the Gut"

Bacterium can reverse autism-like behaviour in mice

Doses of a human gut microbe helped to reverse behavioural problems in mice with autism-like symptoms, researchers report today in Cell¹. The treatment also reduced gastrointestinal problems in the animals that were similar to those that often accompany autism in humans.

Applying this to humans might be a little tricky, although I wonder if you could really do much harm by just trying introducing different bacteria until you find one that helps:

Although many anecdotal reports and small studies have suggested that ‘probiotic’ bacteria, such as those found in yoghurt, and antibiotics can help with the symptoms of autism, Cryan says more research needs to be done. Because there are a number of types of autism in humans, it will be important to look at how different symptoms might be affected by different microbes. Another question is whether the microbiomes of the mice — whose symptoms result from maternal infection — differ from those of mice that are genetically predisposed to autism-like symptoms, Cryan adds.

Here's the main point, though:

“I think there is now sufficient proof of concept where people can start to look at probiotic bacteria to improve brain function in humans,” says gastroenterologist Stephen Collins of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. 

Maybe Freud should have worked with the Kellogg brothers.  (Although, now that I check, they had some freaky ideas about matters sexual such that they might have been a bad influence even on Sigmund.)