Old age in Japan

Here's trivia for you: how many centenarians do you think there would be in Japan?

Answer: 25,606. In Australia there seem to be about 3,000 (which is more than I would have expected here too). But Japan has about 6 times Australia's population, so at our rate they would only have 18,000. Obviously they are outdoing us in this area. Personally, I blame John Howard.

Lucky Queen Elizabeth is not their monarch. That would mean signing 70 cards each and every day of the year.

Sad but good news story from Jakarta

From the Jakarta Post, a sad but good story about the aftermath of the Australian Embassy bombing. I will copy it in full because I think the links to JP change very quickly. Sorry about length, but it is a nice story in several ways.

Embassy bombing hero gets promotion

Abdul Khalik, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Although his voice was barely audible, let alone understood, Brig. Asep Wahyudi, 21, one of the victims of the Australian Embassy bombing delighted both reporters and colleagues with his high spirits and persistence to remain in the police force.

"I want to remain a police officer. I don't want anymore bomb attacks to occur in Indonesia, and I hope that we police can capture both Azahari and Nurdin Moh Top as soon as possible," he said referring to the two Malaysian fugitives who are accused of masterminding the Sept. 9, 2004 bombing in Kuningan, South Jakarta.

Trembling and shaking, Asep was trying to stand on his feet to receive handshakes from his colleagues, who congratulated him for his promotion from second brigadier to brigadier, a two-rank leap.

Chief of Security for Vital Objects at the Jakarta Police, Sr. Comr. J.R. Hutajulu, said that the police awarded Asep with an extraordinary rank promotion as he had shown loyalty and courage on duty.

"He didn't run away from his duty of guarding a vital object such as an embassy in spite of the bomb explosion. He will stay with us as a police officer," Hutajulu said.

The suicide bombing outside the Australian Embassy killed 10 people and injured hundreds of others.

Asep had served as a police officer for less than a year when he and several other policemen were severely injured in the bombing. He had such a serious head wound that people could see the hole in his head.

With financial help from the Australian Embassy and Aisyah Foundation, Asep was treated for eight months in Singapore. He returned to Indonesia on May 27.

However, he has not fully recovered as he can't stand or walk without assistance.

"With help from the Australian Embassy and Aisyah Foundation, we will send him again for more therapy. We hope he can return to work after the therapy," Hutajulu said.

He said that both Asep's mother and father would accompany Asep to Singapore for his treatment.

Asep's mother Epong Karmina, 55, said that Asep, the fourth of five children, had always wanted to be a police officer.

"We are very proud of him. He has been very brave since childhood. The only thing he wanted was to become a police officer. Now, after the incident, his spirit has grown even stronger," she said.

She said that she, her husband Enang Soma, 60, and Asep's elder sister came all the way from their hometown in Sumedang, West Java, to attend the ceremony.

Asep said that he was not afraid of guarding an embassy or any other place.

"I don't feel the pain anymore. I am ready to be put on duty whenever my superior commands me. I think I can fulfill my duty as usual," said Asep, who celebrated his 21st birthday on Sept. 8.

Janet A strikes again

The Australian: Left unread on the shelf [September 14, 2005]

Hmm, Janet A and Anne C and swimming pool of jelly...

Oh sorry, was I typing then?

Janet's column today (above link) expands upon the general gist of my post here.

Back to reverie...

Hitchens takes on Galloway

George Galloway Is Gruesome, Not Gorgeous - Now, watch me debate him. By Christopher Hitchens

See link above for Hitchen's no holds barred Slate column on Galloway (and Jane Fonda). Better still - Hitchens and he are having a live debate in New York on 14 September! I wouldn't sit too close to the ring, as I expect blood may be spilt. Go Hitchens!

Should I trust my foreign trained hospital doctor?

More bad news from the revived health inquiry in Brisbane:

"PATIENTS at Hervey Bay Hospital were in "very unsafe hands" because of three overseas-trained orthopaedic surgeons, Queensland's medical malpractice inquiry has been told....

Dr North said in a submission that conditions at the hospital orthopaedic unit were third world.

Dr North said there were shortcomings in the trio's clinical assessment, basic communications with staff and patients and surgical skills.

"A summary of the cases noted confirm the investigators knew that the people of the Fraser Coast are in very unsafe hands from the point of view of doctors Naidoo, Sharma and Krishna," Dr North said in his report.

"It appears that there is a third world culture with respect to patient care at Hervey Bay Hospital simply as a consequence of the training of those employed there.

"Under the circumstances prevailing at this hospital patient's safety is at severe risk."

I am pretty sure it was Currency Lad in a comment on on his site (although I cannot find it now) who had a bit of a go at Queensland public hospital patients for being apparently racist by continually asking for second opinions when they have foreign looking hospital doctors. But, in light of evidence like this, can you really blame them?

Oh, how helpful...

Hamas does not want to come to the party :

"HAMAS'S military wing vowed the Islamic group would keep battling Israel after its withdrawal from Gaza and fight any attempt by the Palestinian Authority to take away its guns."

And more helpful comment from the Greek church:

"THE September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States were a lesson from God to the "powerful of the Earth", the head of the Greek Orthodox Church said in a sermon released by his press office today."

A brain the size of a planet...

So it appears that the human brain is likely to keep evolving. Nice to know. Soon we will all look like this:Then this:



Both pics from "This Island Earth" (don't tell the copyright police).

Fun technology site

I stumbled across this site (Technovelgy) for the first time today. It's a bit like the "What's New" section of Popular Science, except it also relates the inventions to similar ideas from science fiction. It's a good fun browse.

While there, check out the highly over-engineered door from Japan that opens just enough to let you through. Still looks pretty cool, though....

Speaking of hi-tech, I didn't know that Honda was planning a fuel cell motorcycle (although whether it will definitely get out of prototype stage seems unclear. If it runs on hydrogen alone, there's a problem in itself.) The story also notes a 50cc hybrid petrol/electric sccoter, which presumably is closer to reality. (It is said to have 1.6 times the fuel economy of Honda's Dio Z4 petrol scooter. As the current Honda Dio 50cc model apparently has fuel economy of about 65km/l, (although at 30kph on the flat), that could mean the hybrid could get over 100km/l. Even at 30kph, that is pretty extraordinary.

The interesting problem with bikes or scooters running on electricity will be how quiet they may be. Look out pedestrians.

No wet hair in my court, please

Further to my criticism of the Beattie government re-appointing Di Fingleton as a magistrate, she is reported today at having a swipe at the government at a really sensible time - her re-appointment to the bench.

' During the swearing in ceremony Ms Fingleton criticised the process which led to her jailing.

"Over the last few years I have experienced total alienation from the legal system in Queensland following what has now been held to have been an unnecessary, self-righteous, wrong-headed and unjust process which saw me stripped of my career, my status and my reputation," she said.'

Oh great. Won't that give prosecutors appearing before her the confidence that she will be objective and fair in any all of the more contentious cases they might bring before her.

To be fair (although that's little fun,) this could be an example of bad reporting, in that she may have given some sort of qualification or re-assurance after this that she could still be completely unbiased to both sides in criminal matters. Who knows. I still think she is demonstrating exactly why I argued she should not be re-appointed.

And finally: are magistrates really worth $200,000 a year? Gees, although you have to put up with being posted to the back of Woop Woop for a few years the first time around, its not that hard to put up with anywhere for a relatively short time out of your career, especially when you have a nice safe job til you want to retire. (I also wonder how many weeks leave they get.)

Update: Yes, there was a fuller report in the Courier Mail this morning, in which Di Fingleton's words of re-assurance are reported.

" Even as she wiped away tears during her swearing-in as magistrate at the new Caloundra Courthouse on the Sunshine Coast, Ms Fingleton still managed a swipe at the legal system which she believed let her down.

"I had always hoped I would make a mark on the law," she said.

"I was not to know it would be so famously, as the recipient of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the history of the Queensland and Australian legal system."

I still can't get over the irony that the Chief Magistrate didn't find her own defence. (At least one ex judge was reported as thinking the High Court just got it wrong anyway.)

' Ms Fingleton also seized the moment to publicly refute allegations that she was a bully.

"It is important that those parties who will come before me in court and the staff at this courthouse know this . . . anyone coming into my court, or my chambers, will be treated with dignity and courtesy – no moods, no inefficiency, no baggage," she said.

"I will be on time and dry-haired. I will also be, as I have always believed myself to be, competent and fair."'

What's the dry hair bit all about? She made some comment on Enough Rope about her believing other magistrates were not pulling their weight. Was one of them famous for arriving to work with wet hair?

And there will be "no inefficiency" in her court? Sounds like another go at other magistrates.

I am very curious to hear how her court room behaviour develops over the next 6 months.

Lucky Snakes

The above list of good and bad snake omens comes from the Malaysia Star, in its article about the King Cobra that slithered into a temple for a few days and was taken to be a very good sign.
To my western mind, the list of when a snake sighting is good as opposed to bad has its amusements. But first the temple story:

"According to vasthu sastra (the Indian form of feng shui) expert Master Yuvaraj Sowma from Chennai, India, sighting a king cobra is considered a good omen and that explains the throng of visitors to the temple.

He said the appearance of the snake signified that the 123-year-old temple has “matured and is now blessed with enhanced divine powers.”

“It is incorrect to perceive the snake as a sign of luck,” he added

He said, however, that those who prayed and made offerings of milk and eggs before the snake would find obstacles and challenges in life easier to overcome.

One would receive optimum blessings if the king cobra was sighted with its head raised and hood open and if there was direct eye contact, he said.

He believed that the arrival of the snake at the temple was not by chance and should be interpreted as the divine having come “alive” in the form of a snake."

OK....

Anyway, the omens which make least sense to me are these:

"If a snake crosses over an individuals leg it means the person will have longevity"

Well, for many Aussies, that would only apply if your heart doesn't give out from the shock.

Snakes in a poor house is good, but in a wealthy person's house, it means losing money. I wonder what a snake in Margo Kingston's house would currently mean, then. (Sorry, joke mainly for Australian readers!)

Sighting snakes having sex is good (other than in a perverted sort of way, I think that means), as is seeing one when building a house. Does a snake brought to the building site deliberately for sighting count?

Ah, making fun of other cultures omens is a half-guilty pleasure.

Daily Kos readers' media control techniques

Am I the only person to not read Daily Kos much because I just don't understand it? I mean, understand its politics, but its site design is just confusing isn't it?

Anyway, the political techniques of Daily Kos readers are far from subtle, as this post's suggestion shows:

'DKos logs almost a million hits a day now. We're the largest blog on planet earth. Over the past few months you may have noticed that stories which appear here and elsewhere first, show up on the cable networks shortly thereafter. No doubt, the media is paying attention to US and the reality based community in general. We are the growth, and thus we are the market share of desire to court. WE DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE THIS SHIT ANY LONGER.

I just sent this e-mail to Hardball because I was disgusted when Chris Matthew's allowed Bernard Kerik to lie on his program without presenting a rebuttal or the simple facts on record:

This is offered as a fair heads up so that you can correct yourselves. Most of the DKos readers like Hardball, we're a huge component of your viewership. But if you keep having liars like Kerik or anyone else on trying to shift the blame for Homeland Security to the goddamn local mayor, without rebuttal or the actual facts available and promptly presented, I and several others will feature your top sponsors by name and e-mail addresses on the biggest blog on earth and recommend to my fellow million plus readers and members that they boycott your program and sponsors for one week, and send your sponsors personal e-mails explaining why they're doing it.

This isn't politic guys, this is fucking survival. We can't afford to let these clowns off the hook to screw up again. Am I getting through?"

So, if a current affairs problem has an interview which doesn't go according to DKos' liking, they can expect their advertisers to hear the wrath of DKos? Why don't they just go the whole hog and demand editorial control, or a DKos censor sitting in the control room ready to pull the plug when it starts going the "wrong" direction?

I guess so many Kos readers and contributions are paranoid and (at least) half deranged that they don't recognize their own totalitarian leanings. One can only hope they gradually grow out of it, because maturity and any sense of generosity of spirit, or self criticism, are usually the last things evident on the site.

No wonder parasites have a bad name

Found via Slate, this story in the New York Times about a parasite that eats out grasshoppers, then for a finale injects a mind contolling protein into their little brain that gives them the urge to jump into water and drown, just so the worm can escape into the habitat it needs at that time to reproduce. Pictures of the worm are included.

I certainly hope that evolution is not working towards making smarter parasites. It's enough that maybe that cat borne one might be making humans less risk adverse, without worrying about ones in future that might give people the urge to try to swim to New Zealand or some such.

Is there any parasite that humans can find likeable?

Gravity sucks

An interesting theory here to help explain dark matter and its strange nature. (Short version: there are an extra 3 dimensions to the universe, of significantly larger size than the multi dimensions that string theory normally suggests, and the way they work alters the effect of gravity over short distances.)

Sounds like a neat solution, but the article doesn't mention how you can test it.

Straight to DVD?

The incoming new head of Disney is quoted as suggesting that it may be better for studios to shorten the window between cinema release and DVD release, and that it is not "out of the question that a DVD can be released, in effect, in the same window as a theatrical release.".

Seems very hard to believe that this can in any way offset the drop off in cinema attendance. All it means, I guess, is that the studios get their DVD money faster. But if cinema attendance still drops, it can't be good for the industry overall, can it?

By the way, I feel a bit shallow posting on this topic while still in the shadow of New Orleans.

Saturday Night Live - recommended sketch

SNL Transcripts: Kate Winslet: 10/30/04: NBC Special Report

Saturday Night Live runs in Australia about 6 - 9 months late on the Comedy Channel, and while its quality is highly variable, the sketch that played recently and linked to above (transcript only) was very funny and surprisingly liberal.

It won't read as good as it played on TV, but it's still good.

Update: I suppose I should give readers an idea of what it is about. It's a pretend bin Laden tape in which he talks about the choices in last year's Presidential elections. Michael Moore gets a mention too!

Lesbian Wars

From the SMH today, a story about the interesting legal problems when lesbian "parents" break up. (We are talking donor semen for the necessary biological trick here.)

I am curious to see future long term research on how successful such relationships are. I suspect, but could be proven wrong, that relationship break-up will run at a higher rate than for hetero couples, even though that is appalling enough in its own right.

Can't gay couples at least have the good grace to leave nature alone when it comes to the question of whether it is possible for them to have a child? (Hey I did warn you at the top it is a conservative blog...)

New Orleans, anti-Bush etc

Time to post on the appalling tragedy in New Orleans.

What seems surprising is how slowly the details of the destruction have come in, especially considering it's the First World. Images and detail of the asian tsunami destruction seemed to arrive more quickly. But perhaps it is just that the flood in New Orleans is so long lasting (and started in the midst of wild weather), that there were few people willing or able to record it and get the image to a news service. The impression now is of an immense area devastated, but each night the details just get worse and worse.

As to the "politics" of the event, I knew for sure that one of the centres for Bush blaming for this would be Salon.com. It's wildly one sided (and rampantly anti-Bush), and frankly its rants have long ago become tiresome to read. Having said that, it sometimes has stuff of interest in some quirky columns. (I am surprised too that it seems to attract little attention in the world of right wing blogging.)

As predicted Salon carries several New Orleans articles with anti-Bush headings, even if within the body of one article (with a link from the main page headed "War effort diverted funding") there actually is some balance:

"It is too early to tell, however, whether the additional funding would have prevented the levee breaches and overruns that have flooded New Orleans. Scientists, journalists and public officials have been warning for decades that New Orleans could not withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. Even SELA, which was started in the mid-1990s after flooding caused billions in damage, was designed to protect against smaller storms, though planners said it would reduce damages of "larger events."....

According to Michael Zumstein, a Corps official working to drain New Orleans, both of the major levee breaches in New Orleans were caused by more water than the Corps' current plans, even if funded, could handle. "It's just the law of physics, that's all," he said, noting that the system was designed to withhold a slow-moving Category 2 or a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4 storm when it hit land Monday morning. He said an unexpected break at the 17th Street Canal occurred 700 feet south of a bridge where the Corps recently completed a troubled construction project.

Flooding also occurred on the east side of New Orleans, in the St. Bernard Parish, an area that environmentalists have long warned would be susceptible to flooding because of a poorly designed canal built in the 1960s that joins the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1998, local politicians have been demanding that the so-called Mississippi River Gulf Outlet be closed, in part because it was allowing saltwater to destroy marshland, increasing the danger of a storm surge. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have been slow to respond to those demands, and earlier this week, the storm surge topped levees, flooding the parish, said Zumstein." (Emphasis mine)

Believe me, if something in Salon is even vaguely suggesting that maybe Bush isn't entirely to blame, you have to believe it.

The other point of interest goes to the question - why did the city seem to be so unprepared for emergency evacuation in the event of a levee break? Another article in Salon looks at this briefly too, but doesn't really answer it. (Briefly, a plan did exist, but just seemed to be hopelessly inadequate.)

Meanwhile, it's good to see Tim Blair countering the "it's all global warming's fault" line so quickly.

UPDATE: more reasons given for not blaming Bush and the Feds (well, not entirely anyway) from an unexpected source - the New York Times! One of the crucial points is this:

"While some in New Orleans fault FEMA - Terry Ebbert, homeland security director for New Orleans, called it a "hamstrung" bureaucracy - others say any blame should be more widely spread. Local, state and federal officials, for example, have cooperated on disaster planning. In 2000, they studied the impact of a fictional "Hurricane Zebra"; last year they drilled with "Hurricane Pam."

Neither exercise expected the levees to fail. In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."

And:

"Army Corps personnel, in charge of maintaining the levees in New Orleans, started to secure the locks, floodgates and other equipment, said Greg Breerwood, deputy district engineer for project management at the Army Corps of Engineers. "We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped," he said. "We never did think they would actually be breached." The uncertainty of the storm's course affected Pentagon planning."

UPDATE 2:

An extremely detailed post on this is at Michelle Malkin (which I found via Powerline). It is a must read.

Queensland, nice place to live, but...

Time for more teeth grinding over the woeful things that happen in the Queensland legal system.

The Dr Patel inquiry is all up in the air because a couple of the bureaucrats didn't like being questioned in a slightly sarcastic and rude sounding fashion. Poor boys.

As the News Ltd story says: "Justice Moynihan stressed in his written judgment that it was not important whether Mr Morris was biased, only whether a "fair minded" observer would perceive him to be so."

And strangely, Premier Pete says he won't appeal. (Given the number of times controversial decisions in Queensland courts are overturned on appeal, I would have thought it might be worth a shot!)

I can appreciate that the law has to be based on appearances here, since you can hardly just go and ask the commissioner himself whether he is "really" biased. However, it seems unsurprising that a commissioner in an enquiry like this, where he has statements of most (or all?) witnesses before they go in the box, and has a truth seeking mission that is completely different from what court trials are about, can give an appearance of bias if he questions a witness aggressively.

As it happens, I think Tony Morris was putting on too much "showmanship", and a part of me is a little happy to see him rebuked. However, overall his behaviour did have a positive effect on the victims who finally felt that they were receiving a very public, and very sympathetic, hearing. I also expect that the two bureaucrats who didn't like his style will ultimately gain nothing from this result. I cannot see that the facts against them can be read by anyone in a substantially different fashion.

So, despite misgivings about the Morris style, the judge hasn't done anyone any favours in this whole exercise. There was certainly room to make the decision the other way, and that's what he should've done.

And then there is the Di Fingleton case. She gets substantial compensation and a magistrate's job back. In any earlier post, I argued that having someone on the bench who has been in jail is not a good idea. Lots of room for perceived bias there (probably against sending convicted persons into jail. Or maybe she will be too keen to send some in, just to show she is not biased.) Not to mention that she will presumably be having magistrates conferences where the other magistrates, who were glad to see the back of her, will also be in attendance. A few post-conference drinks, and we could have something that will make the Brogden affair look trivial!

This is a bad mistake. Surely they could have come up with some other job for her. But then again, she admits to being combative and aggressive in style, and maybe now that her former champion Matt Foley is out of the government, no one else in the government was willing to put their hand up to take her.

The Beattie government is on a downwards spiral here. It's just a pity it is so far from an election.

All John Howard's fault: Part 1545

An opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning has author Mark Mordue (who feels sorry for John Brogden) concluding as follows:

"In some strange and ironic way I get the feeling Brogden's self-annihilating plummet is bound up in the culture John Howard has forged, a new 1950s mentality in which all our thoughts and actions are strictly defined in black and white; where it is too easy to say who is good and bad, who is right and who is wrong."

Wow. So even though the 1950's was a time when, without question, Brogden's drunken behaviour would never have been reported, and even if reported would not (in pre-feminist times) have had all of the "sexual harassment" connotations that it has today, a commentator can still find a way to link it to Howard's alleged record of having "taken us back to the 1950's."

What absurdity.

Cranky, hungry rodents

Most people have probably heard that deliberately underfeeding mice and other animals can have a dramatic effect on increasing their life span. Some people have been known to try it too. Problem is, according to this story, it seems it doesn't work to any very significant degree for human, 'cos we aren't rodents. To quote:

"Scientists have known for six decades that cutting the caloric intake of rodents by 40 percent or 50 percent results in dramatically longer lives for them.

"You can practically double their life span," Phelan said. "The same result has been found in fish, spiders and many other species. If it works for them, some thought, it should work for us; I'm here to tell you it doesn't." "

But for humans:

"Their mathematical model shows that people who consume the most calories have a shorter life span, and that if people severely restrict their calories over their lifetimes, their life span increases by between 3 percent and 7 percent -- far less than the 20-plus years some have hoped could be achieved by drastic caloric restriction. He considers the 3 percent figure more likely than the 7 percent."

What's more, just because a rodent lives longer doesn't necessarily mean they're enjoying it:

"The rodents placed on severely restricted diets bit people who tried to hold them, and had an unpleasant demeanor, unlike the more docile animals given more "normal" amounts of food, Phelan said."

And why does it work well for rodents but not humans?

""When you restrict the caloric intake of rodents, the first thing they do is shut off their reproductive system," said Phelan, citing a finding from his dissertation. A normal rodent reaches maturity at one month of age, and begins reproducing its body weight in offspring every month and a half. If humans shut off reproduction by severely limiting calories, "our reduction in wear and tear on the body is minimal," he said."

Makes sense.

I will go enjoy my moderately sized dinner tonight, and I probably won't feel like biting anyone either.