Population increase

Hey monty - I see you have a new baby.  Just like my family - a son and a daughter a couple of years apart. 

Congratulations - the second one is easier, too.

Re-calculation requested

With the figures for 2016 in, I am reminded - I don't think that Sinclair Davidson has done the "Phil Jones" test on global warming since 2013 on his climate change denial site Catallaxy.  

Not that the test was ever important - it was always a clear cherry pick latched onto by climate change denialists - but it would indicate a degree of honesty if the good Professor would update us on the exercise that he used for propaganda purposes for (I think) several years...

Or would it throw him out of the Catallaxy culture club to do so?  (Yes, it would.)  

Yes, wealth disparities are pretty big

I haven't paid too much attention to the Oxfam claims about wealth distribution (you know, that 8 men control the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the world), but Peter Whiteford has looked at the criticisms of the methodology and notes this:

Critics of these figures point to two main issues. Firstly, the Credit Suisse figures calculate wealth as assets minus debts, so the bottom 1 per cent of the world wealth distribution actually have a negative net worth.

But people with negative net worth can include students, with student debts but who are about to enter a high paying job and people who have just purchased a house and whose equity is less than the mortgage outstanding. Should these people be counted as impoverished?

Oxfam directly addresses this issue, pointing out that if you take out net debt then the wealth of the bottom 50 per cent rises from around US$400 billion to US$1.5 trillion. This means the wealth of the bottom half is roughly equal to the richest 56 individuals in the world.

While this figure is not as dramatic as focusing only on the richest eight people, it still shows enormous disparities in wealth.

Update:  The Onion makes this contribution to the story:

For the record

 

You know it's true...

Yeah, I need lessons...

 

Update:  Here's a second attempt:

 

Wig heists in history

An amusing read here about a theft problem of C18th England - those stupid wigs of the era were the target of thieves.

Worse than Nixon

Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean says the coming Trump presidency has literally been giving him nightmares:

He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves. “I’m not somebody who remembers the details of dreams,” he told me in a recent phone call from his home in Los Angeles. “I just know that they were so bad that I’d force myself awake and out of bed just to get away from them.”

He thinks Trump will be much worse than Nixon:

Dean’s near-panicked take on the incoming president is shaped in large part by his years in the Nixon White House. In Trump, Dean says he has observed many of his former boss’s most dangerous traits—obsessive vengefulness, reflexive dishonesty, all-consuming ambition—but none of Nixon’s redeeming qualities.

“I used to have one-on-one conversations with [Nixon] where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean unmolested by any such struggle.

He also puts up a case to be pessimistic about  Trump being brought down by impeachment:

Those hoping Trump’s presidency will end in a Watergate-style meltdown point to the litany of scandals-in-waiting that will follow him into office—from his alleged ties to Russia, to the potential conflicts of interest lurking in his vast business network. Dean agrees that “he’s carrying loads of potential problems into the White House with him,” and goes even further in his assessment: “I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”

Yet, he’s profoundly pessimistic about the prospect of Trump facing any true accountability while in office. In the four decades since Nixon resigned, Dean says, the institutions that are meant to keep a president’s power in check—the press, Congress, even the courts—have been rendered increasingly weak and ineffectual by a sort of creeping partisan paralysis. (Imagine, if you dare, the Breitbart headlines that would follow Woodward and Bernstein’s first scoop if they were breaking their story today.)

He may have a point there.  The problem being that hoping for impeachment relies on the American Right not being nuts.   There's not much sign of that at the moment.

Logic in history

I've never been that interested in logic as a topic per se, and this article on the rise and fall of logic in history helps explain why. 

It's a good read, although my impression was that such a survey should include a reference to Wittgenstein towards the end...

Opposite conclusions about renewables

There was a really good explanation on Radio National's breakfast show this morning about how the complicated effect of renewable energy on Australia's electricity costs is capable of being interpreted completely differently by the Right and the Left. 

Unfortunately, there is no transcript, you have to listen to the interview.  Well worth it, though.

For economics graphs lovers

I think I spotted this on Twitter - Piketty and others have launched a the World Wealth & Income Database which lets you look at, and fiddle with, lots of graphs, such as these:

The graphs for Australia, unfortunately, currently don't seem to allow for the same comparisons.

But those US graphs are pretty startling...

About cava

I've taken to trying the cheap-ish Spanish cava available at our run-of-the-mill liquor outlets, and I have to say, it compares very favourably to cheap Australian sparking wines, and might even be more enjoyable than your standard, cheaper genuine champagnes.

(And by the way, the sequence in Travel Man when they have a cava tasting session in Barcelona, is a very funny bit of television.  In fact, the whole episode is one of the funniest in the series.) 

Just wanted to pass that on...

A tricky issue

Well, this is a tricky issue to deal with.

Is watching porn in public properly viewed as harassment?  

I am sympathetic to the feminist view expressed here that it virtually is, yet at the same time, it seems to me that a nation that tolerated the page 3 topless model in its national daily press for so long only has itself to blame.  

But yes, lines have to (or should) be drawn somewhere, for the sake of civil society, and moving up to watching sex on public transport, within proximity of any other passenger, does deserve a special offence of its own, as a form of public nuisance, I reckon.   Perhaps the first step ought to be the right to require them to leave the public space, but if that fails, the back up of potential prosecution is warranted.  I think.  

CGI agreement

Further to my post about Rogue One - I see that Guardian readers by and large agree with me that the digital resurrection of Peter Cushing (and Carrie Fisher) was not entirely convincing.

Normalising STDs

Slate has an article about rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the US, particularly amongst gay and bisexual men, and looks at the question of whether the problem is that those groups have normalised catching STDs as "no big deal" (as well as the carefree attitude towards use of condoms that the Truvada HIV prophylactic drug encourages.)

At the end of the day (and a tad disappointingly for my conservative attitude against promiscuity), the gay writer ends up making the case that the national increase is driven more by a combination of budget cuts and closures of sexual health clinics and conservative attitudes towards restrictive sex education in the red states.

I feel I need more information to be entirely convinced...

How climate deniers are fooled

Good post at Real Climate about how climate change deniers are willingly fooled by charlatans. 

Unfortunately, it seems that once you reach a certain age, having been fooled for years becomes psychologically an impossible admission.  Hence, if you're talking fervent denialists above the age of (roughly) 65 or 70, it seems we're just going to have to wait til they die out rather than continue to try to convince them.    

Anyway, here's a key chart from the post that (maybe) I've posted before?:

As the Real Climate post says about it: 

If climate scientists were trying to exaggerate global warming they’d show you the unadjusted raw data!