One year blogiversary

Happy...blogiversary..to me

Happy blogiversary to..me

Happy blogiversary Mr...OD

Happy...blogiversary to...me

(I paid $1.26 million for that dress, so it's got to get some use sometime.)

[Silly fantasy post- well, not fantasy exactly, I wish I did own a $1,260,000 dress, but purely for investment purposes of course (does something crassly masculine to emphasise the point) - ends here.]

Some scepticism on wind power

BBC NEWS | Business | Germany's wind farms challenged

OK, I'll admit something here. I really dislike windpower as a concept. I have never been near a giant wind farm, but from all photos of them, I think they are an aesthetic blot on the landscape. They are pretty noisy in a strong wind too, I believe. They must kill some birds, from time to time. What's worse, they spread their offensive features over large areas, not like a single power station that can be hidden behind a hill yet service an enormous area.

Apart from aesthetics, I think what annoys me is the idea of giving up so much control as to how much electricity is in the grid to mother nature. I don't trust her. Give me a power source that puts me in complete control instead. Put nature in its place, which is to serve us higher creatures at the pointy end of creation/evolution. (I could go on in that patriarchal, judaeo-christian vein, but it would only be worthwhile if I knew I did have readers that it would annoy.)

I guess the same could be said for the unreliability of solar power too. However, at least it has the good grace to not clutter up the landscape.

Anyway, any articles that criticise windpower will always be welcome here.

A prescription to do nothing

Vile acts cut across colour and class | Phillip Adams | The Australian

I knew Phillip Adams could not help but weigh in on the aboriginal abuse debate going on at the moment.

His column above is a typical example of an extremely common approach used by the Left. It's the old "mote and the beam" argument taken to a deadening extreme. Don't go criticising aboriginal abuse, says Phillip, as our own westernised suburbs are full of abuse against women too.

This is a formula for ignoring realities on the ground, and for doing nothing, or at least nothing effective. It is why the Left often fails on the issue of moral leadership. It lets itself become paralysed by a debilitating philosophy that is essentially relativist in its outlook, and expands a fear of hypocrisy away from the personal (which is the extent to which the Christian teaching is unexceptional and worthy) to the corporate. By this technique, no one is entitled to criticise other cultures too much (because their own is never perfect,) the United States in particular, but the West generally, is to be extremely circumspect in its dealings with all other nations (because the West is not perfect either,) and isolationism is the de facto "correct" response. [Unless of course a collectivist approach can be achieved, which it rarely can when the "collective" has to include those persons or nations deserving criticism in its decision making forums.]

Yet the same approach gives full permission to the Left to concentrate on the perceived inequities in their own societies or governments, regardless of how relatively minor such social issues may now be compared to those in the rest of the world.

It's a galling approach, as it means the Left usually claims to be the side taking the high moral ground, while simultaneously not realising that it is also the side more prepared to ignore or downplay clear instances of moral depravity deserving and requiring action. (They don't even like mere criticism of groups very much, if the group can argue it is acting on Left-ish collectivist "good intentions", such as ATSIC, or some of the communist regimes.)

There is more I can write, but it will have to wait.

The cat amongst the pigeons

Let's talk about nuclear power and other energy sources - Opinion

So Tim Flannery is very clearly in favour of having the nuclear debate, and does not want to dismiss it out of hand. I can hear him being quoted in Parliament by the government already.

As I said before, stubborn resistance to nuclear is not going to be the clear winner that much of Federal Labor thinks.

Baby must be perfect

Babies with club feet aborted - Sunday Times - Times Online

From the above article:

MORE than 20 babies have been aborted in advanced pregnancy because scans showed that they had club feet, a deformity readily corrected by surgery or physiotherapy.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics covering the years from 1996 to 2004, a further four babies were aborted because they had webbed fingers or extra digits, which are also corrected by simple surgery. All the terminations took place late in pregnancy, after 20 weeks. ...

Some parents, doctors and charities are increasingly worried by what they see as a tendency to widen the definition of “serious handicap”. The handicap provision, which does not exist in most other countries, permits abortions to be carried out until birth. It was intended to save women from the trauma of giving birth to babies likely to die in infancy...

One doctor in the north of England who did not want to be named, said a recent case in his hospital had involved the discovery of a hand missing from a foetus scanned at 20 weeks. “The father did not want the pregnancy to proceed because of his perception that the child would not be able to do all the usual things like sport,” said the doctor.

Of course, the followers of Peter Singer should have no problem with this. But for people of common sense, it's a pretty appalling state of affairs.

How did I miss this?

TIMEasia Magazine: Best of Asia - Meguro Parasitological Museum, Tokyo, Japan

Always good to know there is still something to see in place you've been to before!:

Though it occupies only two floors of a small office building, the museum boasts that it displays more specimens of roundworms, hookworms, flukes, nematodes and leeches than any other place on earth—not to mention gruesomely graphic images and descriptions of the havoc they can wreak on humans and other hosts.

Distracting drivers in Japan

Back to Japan for a minute. One thing about that country that I find surprising is the very common use of quite large in-dash LCD screens for GPS navigation, but also watching TV or DVDs.

You would think that this would be dangerous and distracting for the driver, but I have been in so many different cars in which the TV or a DVD has been on, I presume there is no Japanese traffic law against it.

It seems that it is blamed for some accidents, and that is hardly surprising. In New South Wales, the situation is like this:

..driving with a TV/VDU (visual display unit) visible to the driver carries the same penalty as mobile use: $225 and three demerit points. Factory-installed DVD players/TV screens in cars that are dash-mounted typically switch off when the vehicle is in motion.

If drivers in Australia were allowed to watch TV, I wonder which shows would cause the most accidents.

Disaster compassion fatigue

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Rain compounds Java quake misery

Don't you get the feeling that the media (and world) reaction to this latest Indonesian disaster indicates a significant degree of compassion fatigue? (Australian attention is also heavily distracted by having to send people in to try to deal with the East Timor troubles too.)

If the Java volcano goes sky high and kills another few thousand, at least dramatic pictures of an eruption gets attention, I suppose.

Leaving the dying for dead on Mt Everest

Missing from the record books: the unsung feats of everyday life - Opinion

Richard Glover's Saturday column about this incident was amusing, but only because the poor guy left for dead is in fact alive. Richard had spoken to Sir Edmund Hillary about it on his radio show:

He [Hillary] is particularly uneasy about the attitude of "get to the top at any cost" - itself a reflection of the big fees being paid to guides. Inglis's achievement - reaching the top with his artificial legs - may be remarkable, but it's been soured by his admission that he walked past a dying mountaineer on his way up.

For Hillary, that shows a value system that's all wrong: people "just want to get to the top [and] don't give a damn for anybody else in distress".

Inglis has defended his own actions - pointing out that his party at least paused to help the dying man. About 40 other mountaineers simply walked past.

Forty! Suddenly Everest seems like the Pitt Street of the Himalayas. Forget climbing it; I want the Starbucks concession. Indeed, Hillary told me there are often 60 people at the summit. You'd be more secluded in the Cross City Tunnel.

Hope he (the near dead guy) gets a good media deal to tell his story.

UPDATE: here's another odd thing that may, or may not, have happened on Mt Everest recently. (Why a sherpa would get naked there is not explained at all.)

UPDATE 2: OK, maybe I don't always pay close attention. When I first posted, I did not realise that two climbers had been left for dead in the last week, but the first (British one) actually did die.

Death for shorts?

Update 10: Iraqi Athletes Killed for Wearing Shorts - Forbes.com

If this report is true, Muslim extremists are even more screwed up than I thought:

Last week, gunmen in Baghdad stopped a car carrying a Sunni Arab tennis coach and two of his Shiite players, asked them to step out and then shot them.

Extremists have been distributing leaflets warning people in the mostly Sunni neighborhoods of Saidiyah and Ghazaliyah not to wear shorts, police said.

I assume this is talking about males not wearing shorts. How exactly is wearing shorts an activity deserving death? I thought from previous posts I made about Saudi Arabia that the thing with women having to be covered from head to toe was based on the idea that men just couldn't control themselves if all those seductresses showed so much as square centimeter of flesh. But why are men's legs a moral danger?

X men over-analysed?

X-Men: The Last Stand reviewed. By Michael Agger

I made it clear some posts back that I don't care much for movies based on Marvel of other comic heros. For me, it's a phenomena that should have been put down, oh, 20 years or so ago.

Therefore, I haven't seen the X men movies (other than snippets in the background while I while was doing something else.) So this opening section of the Slate review of the new X Men three surprised me, but it sounds sort of plausible:

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what's the most gay-friendly blockbuster series of them all? No, not Batman. And not The Lord of the Rings (which is more pre-sexual than anything else). Consider another series, one in which teenagers discover that they are "mutants" and long to run away from home and be with others like them. At a finishing school in the countryside, they learn to wear tight leather suits and follow Hugh Jackman. Plus, if you touch the hottest girl at the school (Anna Paquin), you die. Consider also that the director of X-Men, Bryan Singer, stages scenes in which the word mutant is an obvious stand-in for homosexual—most famously, in X2, when a mother asks her son: "Have you ever tried … not being a mutant?"

Nuclear debate is here

N-power 'viable, economical' | Science & nature | The Australian

The report above indicates that the question of nuclear power's economic viability in Australia is perhaps not the problem that many in the government think it is.

Labor's (with its foreshadowed scaremongering about where a nuclear plant might go) thinks it is on a winner already. I doubt it. It seems entirely possible to me that as global warming fears go up over next year or two, nuclear will start to smell better and better to a small but growing contingent of greenie types. With some environmentalists on side, the government's willingness to consider it will look good.

Are we a in a braneworld?

ScienceDaily: Scientists Predict How To Detect A Fourth Dimension Of Space

An interesting article that shows that there are tests that can soon be done to see if the universe we live in is a braneworld.

I wonder if braneworld ideas will ever lead to suggestions of a physical location for heaven on another brane. (Just as the ideas of a 4th dimension lead to some supernatural style speculation in the 19th century.) Of course, if you follow Tipler's Omega Point ideas, you don't need a physical location as such, since it is all in a cyberspace which gets to subjectively last forever at the end of the universe. Cyber heaven also lets it be anything God wants it to be, whereas a physical type of one has still got pesky physical laws to deal with.

Braneworld ideas are presumably not consistant with Omega Point theories.

Shuttle launch

Over at Bad Astronomy is a nice time exposure pic of a an old shuttle launch. What interested me, never having seen a rocket launch, was how curved the trajectory is. I guess it's not just up, up and out of sight like (I think) most people would have expected.

Japanese pizza post

A funnier than average post from Japundit.

Hurry up, I said...

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Aziz testifies for Saddam defence

From the above report of renewed games at Saddam's trial:

The latter accused the judge of "insulting a woman" by throwing out defence lawyer Bushra al-Khalil in the previous session.

"Sit down. If you continue with this I'll throw you out," the judge told Barzan al-Tikriti.

Saddam Hussein added: "Do you want to shut people's mouths this way?"

"Quiet. You are a defendant," the judge shouted.

"I am Saddam Hussein, your president, and you did elect me," the former leader shouted back.

Result: encouragement to armed Saddam loyalists to go shoot up a few more people.

Drinking with baby ..again

Further evidence suggesting that no level of alcohol is "safe" for a fetus:

Drinking under half an alcoholic beverage each day while pregnant can reduce the IQ of offspring by up to 7 points.

Consuming alcohol -- even small amounts -- especially during the second trimester of pregnancy produced pronounced IQ deficits among 10-year-olds surveyed for a study released Wednesday in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

(An earlier post about another study to the same effect is here.)

Some more on aboriginal housing

Blacks lose out as cash diverted: report - National - smh.com.au

Well, thank goodness the "report" mentioned above is an internal Labor memo. Gives it much greater credibility.

NT Leader Clare Martin's petulant reaction to the aboriginal abuse issue is doing her far more harm than good. It's interesting that she choses to try to divert argument into inadequate housing when, as I indicated in an earlier post, there are cultural and other issues relevant to why aboriginal housing seems to always be in crisis.

For example: how much of an issue is the abadonment of houses for a substantial period after a death? Has anyone ever come up with an answer to that if it does cause serious temporary shortages? I think I have heard it suggested that sometimes the number of people in a house is by choice or preference rather than need (eg, a desire to keep the whole extended family together.) If this is correct, have government or aboriginal funding bodies ever properly dealt with this in design of housing?

It has been an old theme that housing provided has to be extremely robust because of the rough treatment that alcohol or drug addled people can give it, and also because of the lack of maintenance skills usually found on reserves. How well has this issue been addressed? Is inappropriate construction style still taking place? (I would have guessed that a simple concrete block construction with whitewashed walls would have a lot going for it. Steel sinks and toilets probably the go too. Maybe new houses are built like this - I just don't know.)

How long will demountables that the Commonwealth is offering the NT (leftover from Woomera) last anyway? (I suspect, a very short time indeed.)

I am sure that all these issues have been discussed and considered by different bodies from time to time over the years. It's just that I think the general public should also be aware of all of these cultural issues so they can properly understand the problem and why better progress has not been made.

Gore bore?

news @ nature.com- Al Gore: Eco matinee idol�-An Inconvenient Truth showcases science of climate change.

From the above review about Al Gore's global warming doco:

If you find Gore to be a refreshingly un-phoney politician with more brains than most whole administrations, you will love this film. If you find Gore boring, annoying or prone to strange shifts in tone, you may well tire of shots of him gazing into the middle distance and ruminating, in voice-over, about the tragedies he's known and how each eventually taught him something about global warming.

Sounds a good bet that I would fall into the second category.

In the film, Gore gives his presentation in front of an audience from which sympathetic murmurs can be occasionally heard. One audience member wears a T-shirt that reads 'Sweet Jesus, I hate Bill O'Reilly', referring to Fox News' famously conservative talking-head. If these people are going to be the only ones buying tickets, Gore will be preaching to the choir.

As to the science in it, the review defers to the Real Climate review, which gave most of the science a tick.

They also note that:

Much of the footage in Inconvenient Truth is of Al Gore giving a slideshow on the science of global warming. Sound boring? Well, yes, a little.

I don't think I will be rushing to check it out.

UPDATE: This Slate article on the problems with the movie is well worth reading.

On the Code

Amongst the many articles about the historical "claims" in the Da Vinci Code, the one in Slate recently seemed to me to be one of the better summaries.

(I started the book, but the writing style has put me off coming back to it. I think it is worse than Michael Crichton on a bad day, and that's saying something.)

UPDATE: For the most savage, and very funny, review of the movie read Anthony Lane's in The New Yorker. There are so many lines I would like to quote, I just don't know which one to pick. Just go read it.