I didn't know that Cardwell grows nuts

So I'm being disparaging of people who claim UFO encounters, and who had a meeting up in Cardwell, North Queensland, last weekend.

But honestly, when you read their stories and look at the photos, I'm not convinced there will be a second Cardwell UFO Festival any time soon.

Space bugs

Space Station research shows that hardy little space travelers could colonize Mars

They've been exposing various microscopic lifeforms to the space environment at the ISS for some time now, and yes, some bugs have survived and are obviously very hard to kill.

I was wondering yesterday, on a related topic, as I made my first batch of "no knead" bread, about how much research has gone into the possibility that space radiation may make a normally mild natured (so to speak) microscopic lifeform into one that was dangerous.   As I was dealing with yeast, which is pretty much wandering all about the place all the time, that was the microscopic life that I was thinking about in particular.

Remember the story about the Texan man who by some fluke had a permanent colony of yeast in his gut that was brewing alcohol inside of him?   Well, you would hope that no future Moon or Mars colony ended up with at souped up yeast version which could take up home in everyone's gut and prove very difficult to remove.   It would be a particularly ignoble way for a colony to collapse (pretty much from unintentional alcoholic poisoning), wouldn't it?

OK, so maybe it's not a big enough premise for a science fiction blockbuster, but a short story at least...

Commission of Audit examined

What a great knock down of several of the Commission of Audit's key proposals by Greg Jericho.   His final paragraphs I would count as "tough but fair":

It would be nice to think this dopey regurgitation of libertarian masturbatory fantasy will be put to one side.

In the past, sensible heads would have prevailed. Many of the recommendations are similar to those in the 1996 commission of audit. A report John Howard largely ignored, and yet bizarrely Australia was able to continue to grow for another 18 years straight. But this government is too full of those who actually believe in this idiotic ideological view of the world – where “reform” is a synonym for “cut”, and ideology trumps evidence. And for them, the budget is just a first step to achieving it.

Nauseating idiots

Death threats stop gun store from selling 'smart' gun. Why? - CSMonitor.com

Read with amazement how the nauseating gun lobby in the US (or a large part of it) opposes the sale of "smart" guns that have the potential to reduce accidental gun deaths and injury, as well as their use when stolen.

Religion reconsidering that topic, continued

I've been doing posts about the religious reconsideration of homosexuality for a while now, and here's another report directly on the topic by Slate's William Saletan.   Slate also has up the story that (retired) bishop Gene Robinson is getting divorced from his gay partner.  (I half suspect that when there are some high profile, and bitterly contested, gay divorces, this will have an effect on the number of people taking it up - not that there are that many getting married anyway, I think.)

Someone at First Things blog seems to have an interest in the topic too, as they have a link up to a blog run by a couple of Christian women who are a some sort of relationship, describing themselves as:  "a celibate, LGBT couple with a queer calling."    Odd.

Giant statues photographed

Fabrice Fouillet photographs giant monuments in his series, “Colosses.” (PHOTOS.)

Giant statues are nearly always very impressive and awesome, if you ask me, and this series of photos shows one or two from around the world that I haven't seen before.   (I've also been inside the very first one in the series in Japan!)  

TIAs discussed

My husband Andrew Marr missed the warning signs of his stroke. Don't let it happen to you | Life | The Guardian

This is quite a good article warning people not to miss the signs of a TIA (or mini stroke.)

My Mum had some many years ago - perhaps 15 to 20 years - but I think they mainly manifested as a funny  sensation on her lip and/or the end of her tongue.  She went on medication and was fine for many years afterwards.

Spending and revenue

It's the debt, not the spending: why the budget is bleeding

Peter Martin's column above contains these useful figures:

Two years beforehand in 2010-11, Treasury forecast revenue equal to 24.1 per cent
of gross domestic product by 2012-13. It was a low forecast by the standards of the previous Howard government. But what the Gillard government got was 23.1 per cent of GDP, billions of dollars less.

By a staggering coincidence, government spending that year amounted to exactly 24.1 per cent of GDP, precisely the same figure as the revenue it had expected to get.

If revenue had rolled in as expected, the past financial year’s budget wouldn’t be in deficit in all. Wayne Swan would be crowing about his success in eliminating the deficit on time, as promised.

No one is too sure where the revenue has gone. It’s a murder mystery with multiple suspects.

Small government ideologues, who have been entertaining themselves at some "We Hate Tax" love in this weekend*, like to concentrate on absolute figures for spending and revenue rather than "relative to GDP" figures.  Unless someone cares to correct me, I take it that this is done as spin to try to portray spending as being out of control by ignoring factors that indicate why government spending would have some "natural" growth over the years.

With respect to looking at it compared to GDP,  I see that even last week's National Commission of Audit report - with as fine a Right wing pedigree as one could expect when appointed by a Coalition government - contains the graphs which put in clear perspective the "it's all Labor's overspending" line.

First:  Chart 4.1 in the report - Commonwealth spending as a share of GDP

Second:  Chart 4.2 - Commonwealth taxes as a share of GDP

Labor governments that spend and tax like there is no tomorrow?  Hardly.

*  I note a guest speaker was notorious climate change denying Patrick Michaels - anti tax libertarians (with few exceptions) must attack climate change as not really being a problem because the most sensible policy to address is a tax.  Eek - a tax!  

Was never at risk of participating

Another Solid Reason Not to Do a Mud-Obstacle Run - James Hamblin - The Atlantic

 Oh.

Apparently, there's been a growing fad for people to do staged, obstacle littered, endurance runs in America and elsewhere, involving things like mud courses,  frigid water swims, etc.

This trend had escaped my attention.  The article notes that doing the mud courses is a pretty good way to get diarrhoea.

I've never been sure why people can't enough satisfaction from merely sharing things like a long bushwalk, a bottle of wine with some cheese and bread, and a nice bed.

PS:    my challenge for the weekend is making my own bread.  A "no knead" recipe published a few years ago in the US seems to have been very popular there, and recently came to my attention via my Zite account.  The dough is made, and will be baked tomorrow.

Not impressed

Svengali of spin

Interesting profile of Mark Textor that, to my mind, paints a picture of a political jerk.

An amusing review

There's a review of a memoir about Jorges Luis Borges in this month's Literary Review that begins:

For rather a short book (259 pages of large print and generous spacing), Norman Thomas di Giovanni's odd memoir of Jorge Luis Borges includes a surprisingly large number of pages devoted to urination.

It made me laugh quite a bit...

Industrial scale blackmail

I'm not surprised it happens (Filipinos attempting blackmail of cyber "boyfriends" by recording some embarrassing on line video), but I am surprised at the apparent scale of it:

Operating on an almost industrial scale from call centre-style offices, such cyber-blackmail agents are provided with training and offered bonus incentives such as holidays, cash or mobile phones for reaching their financial targets.

Bad.  

First Dog noted

I quite like today's First Dog on the Moon cartoon re the Commission of Audit.   (As it happens, it's the first one since he moved his kennel to The Guardian that I thought was up to standard.)

Does he care if it is copied here, I wonder?

Attempted indoctrination fail

Interesting article at the Atlantic about how children who are brought up in very politically doctrinaire homes often rebel and adopt the opposite position as adults:

It’s understandable that parents with strong beliefs would feel it is their duty to see their children adopt those beliefs. But, however well-meaning these efforts are, they may be in vain. A study recently published in the British Journal of Political Science, based on data from the U.S. and U.K., found that parents who are insistent that their children adopt their political views inadvertently influence their children to abandon the belief once they become adults. The mechanism is perhaps surprising: Children who come from homes where politics is a frequent topic of discussion are more likely to talk about politics once they leave home, exposing them to new viewpoints—which they then adopt with surprising frequency.

The study, led by researcher Elias Dinas, also shows that these changes are especially likely to happen during the college years. Conservative culture warriors have warned for years that universities are outposts of liberal indoctrination—and the study seems to confirm at least some of that warning.

“Extreme parental views of the world give children a clear choice for being with the parents through agreement, or against parents through disagreement,” says Carl Pickhardt, an author and child psychologist. “Thus extremely rigid views of right/wrong, trust/distrust, love/hate can be embraced by children who want to stay connected to parents, and can be cast off by children who, for their own independence, are willing to place the parental relationship at risk.”

Another potential holiday destination to give a miss

Brunei introduces Islamic sharia penalties, including death by stoning for adultery

Not that I would be expecting to break the law if I went there, mind you. But no one should reward such a place with tourism.