Seedy space

Asteroid soil could fertilise farms in space - space - 16 December 2014 - New Scientist

Quite a bit of interesting stuff here about experiments to grow plants on the ISS.

Fuel cell potential

Japan Promotes Home Fuel Cell on Path to Hydrogen Society - Bloomberg

It seems to me that we never hear enough about the potential for fuel cells for domestic use.  Japan has been pretty advanced in this regard, and they are still working on them, as this article indicates.

Within Australia, I wonder what their potential is as an alternative to battery back up for solar?

I never notice anyone writing about that....

A great Lego science moment

How to Measure Planck’s Constant Using Lego | MIT Technology Review

Very cute in a science geek sort of way.

Sometimes a higher profile doesn't help

David Leyonhjelm certainly gained himself a lot of media coverage by claiming that the answer to the Lindt hostage situation would have been for Australia to be more like Texas.

Of course, no other politician in the land that I know of has come out to agree with him (OK, maybe some State upper house nobody from a Shooters Party has - but who cares?), and every column about him that allows comments has been overwhelmed with negative reaction.

So I have my doubts this was good media strategy on his part.

I also thought it's about time his twitter profile was adjusted:

More from the Creighton files

I see that Adam Creighton returns to the line I noticed appearing recently from the Say's Law obsessive Steve Kates at Catallaxy - that the depreciation of the Australian dollar is now, according to these anti-Keynesian, simplistic, government-must-tax-and-spend-less-obsessives, not such a good thing after all.  It hurts people's buying power, don't you know?  

I wrote about this once before, at some length, but it remains all a bit rich, doesn't it?   As I noted then, Sinclair Davidson in 2009 argued that the "price signal" of an increasing dollar meant that Australia had to cut costs or improve quality to keep its exports attractive. I wouldn't mind betting that Creighton and Kates would argue that business and government should still cut costs because that always makes things better, and lets the government return to budget surplus so as to enable the dollar to rise to improve the lot of people who want to holiday overseas and buy their sneakers on line instead of supporting a local shopkeeper.

Businesses and government running things efficiently is obviously a good thing economically.  But the assumption that the answer to everything is "cut costs, cut spending" has to reach a point of diminishing returns somewhere, but you won't hear it from this school of economists.  (Or, in the case of Judith Sloan, if they mention it once - as with her brief advocacy of increasing unemployment benefits - they never like to mention it again.)

And there is this continual thing I see now, repeated by Creighton today, that they really, really like the on line purchasing on the global market, and hate the idea of anything increasing the cost of that (such as trying to make sure too much GST is not avoided that way.)   They also really enjoy their overseas holidays.  (Creighton completely fails to mention the Australian tourism industry - yet it is surely one of the biggest parts of the economy that suffer under a high dollar.)

Now, it's true, I have had Labor voting relatives on a double income with no kids complain about how much tax they were paying under the Howard government, so I know self interest doesn't flow only on one side of politics.   Nonetheless, it is very, very difficult not to conclude that the motivating factor on the small government, CIS/IPA, libertarian side of politics is basically simple selfishness.  "It's my money, leave it alone!"  is what it so often comes down to.

Update:  OK, maybe I am being mean to Adam by already not acknowledging his advocacy for an inheritance tax.  His line is more "it's my money, leave it alone, until I'm dead."    And in any event, his advocacy of it was only on the basis that his taxes while alive are reduced, so I'm not sure that he deserves much credit for altruism for that line of argument.

Hobbit off

Even though I have no interest whatsoever in the Hobbit movies, I see that quite a few reviewers really seem to be glad to see the back of the whole, drawn out, Peter Jackson obsession with Tolkien.

I got to that position ahead of them: after about 60 minutes into the first Rings movie.

In other "I am not alone about movie trends" news - I see Tim Burton says the Marvel superhero formula is getting boring.  True, even if I found Guardians of the Galaxy pretty good.  (But being an outright comedy meant it was not part of the formula - and the characters were not superheros, either.)

Wise choice

Professor Barry Spurr resigns from University of Sydney after email leaks

I wrote earlier that the emails left the University in a very difficult position - and I think it is a wise choice of the Professor to resign.

Pity he wasn't exercising wisdom when he wrote some of the emails.  And I am still of the view that the worst of the emails - the exchange about a sexual assault which I find impossible not to be appalled about - actually received less attention in media commentary than it deserved...*

*OK, I'll modify that - it's not that I wanted it to be widely published,  as it was an email which had the least justification for release from a public interest point of view.   But, once it was out, if anyone was going to defend Spurr, they really had to address the email which is likely to have the most direct impact on his student's views about him, since I can't imagine any sensible female student being comfortable being lectured by a guy who they know has indicated a private view that a woman who merely is at a "room party" should be condemned for going to the police about a sexual assault that happens while she's asleep.

Instead, the Right wing commentairiate ignored this email.   Probably because they knew it was indefensible at any level... 

Let's help the Senator who can't Google... (aka: a list of some Texas hostage situations)

David Leyonhjelm is shooting his mouth off on national radio this morning saying that the Sydney hostage situation wouldn't likely happen in places like Texas, because of concealed carry laws.  Let's Google the topic, shall we, and add some bold so the good Senator can't miss the relevant words:

My first Google brings up this  item, from 2010:

Police: Houston area bank standoff ends, all hostages safe

and this in 2007 isn't that hard to turn up either:

The Johnson Space Center shooting was an incident of hostage taking that occurred on April 20, 2007 in Building 44, the Communication and Tracking Development Laboratory, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, United States.

and 10 years before that:

 Police were negotiating with a gunman who was holding an unidentified number of adults and children hostage Wednesday evening at a day care center in Plano, Texas.

(concealed carry seems to have started there in 1995, by the way.)

Oh, and here's another one,  from 2012:

"This guy was driving crazy, and he was shooting, and we were shooting, and people were ducking under cars," Singletary said.
After the driver wrecked his car, he got out, ran into a building and took several people hostage, Stephens said. The suspect eventually surrendered to police, she said.

 How about 2013?:

Authorities shot and killed a gunman who took a woman hostage from a Central Texas department store and fled with her, leading police on a chase through multiple counties. 

Gee, get this starting to get boring now:  from 2011:

Gunman beat, tried to rape victim in hostage situation

OK, one more time, from 2012, and I think we can agree:  if the Senator loves concealed carry so much, he should move to the States where he can spend his time fondling his weapon to his heart's content:

 TEMPLE, Texas A hostage situation inside Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple ended in gunfire Sunday evening.

Nutty Randians and paranoia

Sorry that I keep on going about the nuttiness of Catallaxy, but when reading this article about a convention for Randians in Las Vegas, I was struck by how this is exactly the same paranoid political philosophy analysis you see continually in threads at that blog: 

“The Left dominates our intellectual world,” Brook declared. And yet, despite its success, the stated aims of the Left are merely a pretext for an agenda far more sinister than anything contained in the Democratic Party’s platform or, for that matter, a Michael Moore movie. Take the professed concern for the growing disparity between the very rich and the rest of America: The liberal impulse to address this gap may seem rooted in a sense of fairness or even a desire to promote social cohesion, but viewing it as such is extremely naïve. Indeed, it takes at face value the rhetoric of the Left, which keeps one from seeing it for what it really is: the language of a decades-long con game. “What they’re really after is not the well-being of anybody,” Brook explained. “They want power. They want to rule us.”

It gets worse. For if “the intellectuals” use fear-mongering around the so-called problem of inequality to seize power, they wield it in favor of a nihilistic vision of the human condition. They aim to systematically undermine and annul the great achievements of heroic men and women, an effort that will not only corrupt the “American sense of life” but one that stabs at the very heart of Ayn Rand’s vision. “We need to tell the truth about these bastards,” Brook said. “We need to reveal them for what they really are. We need to expose them to the American people for what their agenda really is. They’re haters. Their focus is on hatred. Their focus is on tearing down. Their focus is on destroying.” 

It would all be laughable if it weren't for the fact that there are scores of US politicians whose similar paranoia about the "real reason" for the UN wanting action on climate change (it's all a socialist plot, don't you know?) is actually affecting the future of the entire globe. 

On the "up" side; maybe the obese can market themselves as carbon sinks?

Breathing blows body fat away as carbon dioxide, Australian scientists find | The Australian

Cheap shots - (and Whoops! Milestone Reached!!)

US Navy laser cannon blows targets out of the water - at $1 a shot

I just watched the video that's been on line for a week or so about this ship board laser weapon.   It is amazing how pinpoint accurate it is, and the way it is controlled with a game console style handset.

I am also surprised at how cheap it is to run.  Not sure how rapidly it can fire, yet, though.

MILESTONE NOTIFICATION:   according to Google, my next post will be the 8,000th published.

What should it be about?   Let's see, here are some candidates:

*  I have been trying a new style of underwear lately, and I quite like them.

*  My wife was watching Love Actually when I got home last night, leading me to expound again upon its awfulness; but I think I've covered that enough in the past.  It did get me thinking, though, that I don't believe I have ever posted a list of my top ten most over-rated movies in history.   I have at least 6 in mind.

*  Just indulge in self congratulation?  

*  Commission my oldest regular reader that I know of, Tim from Will Type For Food, to write an epic poem to mark the occasion?   

UPDATE:   I have miscalculated.  This is

 PUBLISHED POST NUMBER 8,000.   

An extraordinary day in Australian Blogging History, I am sure you'll agree.

All my own work - not a guest post in sight.   Hours of dedication to the  task of producing a blog with a diminishing number of readers, but which satisfies me anyway.   As I have noted before, I've been writing here for so long that posts from years ago can be half forgotten, and on re-reading them, I am nearly always  pleasantly surprised by their quality.  Why the National Library isn't archiving it I'll never know. :)

Next year, it will be the 10 year anniversary.  I won't be up to post 10,000 by then, but it will be the next milestone nonetheless.

And as for the underwear:  it's those new-fangled (well, from 5 or 10 so years ago since they started appearing in numbers) boxer briefs.   They have been a pleasant surprise too.
 

Quiggin on nuclear

Tell them they’re dreaming • Inside Story

John Quiggin's take on the poor prospects of nuclear power for Australia sure sounds pretty convincing.

Death and torture

While mourning the innocent lives lost in Sydney over night, most Australians would be somewhat relieved to know that the perpetrator was a nutter well known to the police, rather than a previously unknown "lone wolf" inspired by IS to make a grandiose stand for their fetid view of Islam.  The latter would rightly raise the question "how many more are out there?"  and the media would not be able to get off the topic for days at a time.   It would also appear that the initial concern and rumour that this might be a widespread and co-ordinated terror event (with things like the Opera House being cleared) were unfounded.   The police appear to have acted very professionally, and were on the scene quickly.  So, despite the tragic outcome, there are some reasons for a sense of relief.

Not that it will be found in evidence at Catallaxy, where (as one would expect) the incident will end up with thousands of extreme comments about Islam.  You really have to wonder about how proud Sinclair Davidson, who (very, very occasionally) waves the flag of moderation towards the religion of some of his friends, must feel about his readership.

And, of course, the blog's same participants have had little to say about the US Senate report on torture, but what was said was pretty much fully in support of the "this is all a Democrat stitch up" line of most Republicans.

The Dick Cheney interview on Fox on the weekend showed what a moral vacuum he, and quite a few of the political Right, have become.  In this good article at Slate, the comparison is made between Republican complaints about how Obama is supposed to be "acting like Caesar" in making an executive decision about illegal immigrants, with their acceptance of the Cheney argument that it's  OK for the State to do "whatever it takes" to torture to the point of death some folk who were in fact innocent:

Still, if the immigration action is Caesarism—if, as Sen. Cruz has said, it’s the action of an “unaccountable monarch”—then the same is surely true of the torture program. In reality, it’s not even a comparison. On one hand, you have discretion for some unauthorized immigrants, rooted in congressional statutes. On the other, you have a secret and illegal program of kidnapping and torture, justified by wild claims of executive authority and defended in the name of “security.”

Barack Obama used his office to help illegal immigrants, and for this, Republicans have attacked him as a Caesar. That’s fine. But Dick Cheney used his office to claim dominion over the bodies and persons of alleged enemies, some of whom were innocent. If that isn’t Caesarism, if that isn’t despotism, then it’s something scarily close. But here, with few exceptions, Republicans are silent.

Indeed:  the Right has a long way to go to return to a sensible, moral, centre.

As readers know, I have been talking about the same despotism friendly policies of this Abbott government  in relation to boat arrivals - centralising decision making in the hands of one Minister; removing recourse to judicial review; justifying stopping boasts on the high seas, and imprisoning people from them on Australian ships for weeks at a time; returning them to their point of departure with no real review of why they are leaving.

This is much worse, in my view, than the libertarian hand wringing over government attempts to regulate data retention, because in fact the government proposals may end up with less access to the information for piffling reasons than currently exists anyway.  (And besides which, the information is already informally retained for some period - the internet has always been capable of leaking.  It is not as if the government is inventing some risk to individuals that is novel.)

Yet we have heard very little about the liberty abhorrent nature of the migration law changes in Australia, and both the media, and those who purport to be concerned about liberty in principal, should be ashamed.

Update:   talking of the morally bankrupt, Rupert Murdoch knows just the right thing to say about the tragedy.  [/sarc...and be sure to read the comments following.]

Update 2:   Tony Abbott this morning twice referred to it as "politically motivated" violence.   I would have thought, given this nutter's background, that most people would be thinking that's exactly what it wasn't.  Just because a nutter holds hostages and wants to talk to the PM (as was reported yesterday, although I know of no confirmation) I don't see that that makes it "political".   Once again, one has to question the smarts of this PM.   (Although,  for the most part,  he  and Mike Baird have deserve praise for seeking to ensure there is no general community backlash against the moderate Muslim community.)

Update 3:  I have to agree with Jason Soon, Brendan O'Neill, whose writing generally makes me grind my teeth, gets the reaction to this incident just about right.

Except that, perhaps, he might be playing down this guy's role in radicalising others if  Rachel Kohn's almost prophetic piece from 2009 is anything to go by.  She points out that he was actively promoting radicalism (she was a direct target of it!) and he should have been the subject of much more active condemnation from the broader Islamic community.   (And perhaps, even closer attention from the authorities - although, I guess we don't really know yet how closely he has been monitored over the years.)

I'm no expert, but...

I see that David Leyonhjelm had an article in the AFR in which he decried the Labor Party's re-regulation of Australian mercantile shipping.

Now I'm no expert on this topic, but nor do I suspect is Senator Blofeld.  The article reads very much as if it repeating information fed to him by a lobby group.  Yet that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't make some good points. 

Yet the reason I would take it with a grain of salt is that I had, for a number of years,  the acquaintance of an old former merchant ship captain, who I knew was a steadfast Liberal Party supporter and active in his local branch.  (He has, sadly, recently died.)   He was a great supporter of the Howard government, but was strongly of the opinion they got it completely wrong on the way they had deregulated coastal shipping.  The general gist of it was he believed the policy was severely undermining the nation's collective seamanship skills that would enable us to manage our own mercantile shipping fleet should the nation cease being serviced by those ships of other nations.   He essentially saw it as a long term national security issue.  (If I recall correctly, he also did not think that foreign shipping was up to scratch in safety or competency standards, either.)

Now, again, I have to say that I don't really know to what degree that the Labor re-regulation really improved this situation from his point of view.  But all I can say is that, from knowing this old sea captain with good conservative political credentials and a lifetime of experience in the industry, I do think there is something to be said for not completely deregulating this industry.

Weird

Isn't it more than a bit weird that some readers of Catallaxy can crack jokes during an actual hostage crisis underway in their own country?  People use black humour for disasters that have happened at some distance, sometimes, but during a hostage crisis in their own country?

Update:  not sure what the point would be of any Prime Minister doing a press conference only a few hours into a hostage situation, particularly a PM as prone to making gaffes as this one.   Leader of "Team Australia" trying to comfort the nation in fatherly manner?  Just issue a press statement, like Shorten did.