Appleyard blogs

I discovered over the weekend that Bryan Appleyard has a blog.

He is a bit of an odd character, and can come across as fairly pompous, but his 1992 book "Understanding the Present" impressed me, even though it suffered by a sudden infusion of Wittgenstein at the end.

Anyway, his views seem never to be entirely predictable, which makes him an interesting read.

The problem with stem cells

Nature has a story that explains the problems with attempted stem cell treatment of Parkinson's Disease, which always seems to be the disease most mentioned as being potentially curable by such treatment.

The problem is cancer caused as a side effect.

I also saw most of an SBS Insight program about therapeutic cloning and stem cell research a few weeks ago. It was interesting to see at least some medical experts expressing scepticism of stem cell treatment:

JENNY BROCKIE: Jack Martin, you're former director of St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research. Do you share this optimism about stem cell research?

JACK MARTIN, FMR. PROF. OF MEDICINE, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY: No, I have to say I don't. And I would take issue with quite a number of things that Elizabeth Finkel has just said. She's implied that there has been proof of concept of efficacy of embryonic stem cell therapy in a number of diseases and mentioned Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury and diabetes, and that is absolutely untrue. There are temporary and partial improvements in chemically induced Parkinson's disease in rodents and in a couple of monkey studies, and in no case has this been prolonged and in no case has it been a long enough.. It's either been associated with a serious complication of cancer teratoma formation or it's not been carried out for long enough to determine whether that's been avoided or not.

Of course, there were others present who were much more optimistic than this.

Not a happy picture

This lengthy essay on the recent history of the Middle East in the Economist is pretty good reading. The article argues that all of the "threats to global order" that have come from there in the last 60 years have one thing in common:

They have all been, in essence, resistance movements, inspired by a seemingly unquenchable popular urge to challenge the dominant perceived injustice of the day, whether it be European colonialism, Zionism, American hegemonism or the grip of local governments charged with selling out to the West.

The most reliable populist cry today remains “resistance”. Sudan's strongman, Omar al-Bashir, blasts the proposed deployment of UN troops in Darfur as the spearhead of a new Western crusade. The Shias and Sunnis in Iraq may be fighting each other for dominance, but the call to “resist” the American occupiers and the weak (though elected) government they sponsor wins passionate followers to both camps. Hizbullah rouses region-wide cheers for bloodying Israel's nose. Clearly, although times have changed, this dynamic has not.

What has changed is that the call to resist now inspires unprecedented enthusiasm, galvanising many disparate political streams at once, secular and nationalist as well as Islamist. The religious element, boosted by the great revival that has swept Muslim societies across the globe, adds a scriptural drumbeat to the call. And lately the impulse to resist has also been strengthened by the failing prestige of traditional countervailing forces—America, the moderate governments in the region and the liberal-minded minority of their citizens.

Generally, my feeling is that the essay is too fast to point the finger at the USA and Israel, at the expense of any substantial mention of the social and political dynamic within the countries that has resulted in a group of nations with vast material resources having such unhappy citizens. Still, worth reading.

Dill

Serial sleeping driver George Michael sings the praises of marijuana. Problem solved for the advertising executives trying to come up with the next anti-drugs campaign.

In space, no one can hear you scream...(except for fellow astronauts)

An interesting article in New Scientist about "etiquette" recommendations to future space tourists. Much of it is obvious (be tidy to help prevent tensions with the other astronauts), but this risk of motion sickness drugs I had not heard before:

Space sickness will likely be a big issue for novice space flyers – even highly trained test pilots still get queasy in the new environment of microgravity. Buckey says medication will probably be part of the solution.

When NASA scientists started giving anti-motion sickness drugs to students who flew experiments on the C-9 aircraft that simulates weightlessness, they noticed a much lower rate of motion sickness than in students who had not taken the drug.

But the drug they inject to quell space sickness, promethazine – sold under the brand name Phenergan, has its own set of problems. In space, Phenergan has been linked to urinary retention. Four crew members have had to have catheters inserted into their bladders during spaceflights.

On the odd medical front

Slate's Human Nature column has two surprising stories in it at the moment:

1. A medical journal article cited refers to the complications of tongue piercing as having included brain abscess, heart infection, tetanus, dental damage. OK, so I knew about the dental damage before, but brain abscess and heart infection!

2. There are some cases of pre-schoolers hitting puberty. As Slate summarises it:

Suspected factors: 1) Adult use of Andro, testosterone skin creams, and "prohormone" sprays that are passed to kids by contact; 2) estrogen in cosmetics; 3) shampoos with estrogen or placental extract; 4) industrial byproducts in food made from contaminated animals. Internet sales pitch: Buy our cream, and we'll guarantee your erections. Fine print: And we'll throw in a few more for your first-grader.

Hey, I wonder if Zoe Brain has ruled out a change in shampoo as being the cause for her transformation. :)

Pressure in the biosphere

Wired has a short interview with Jane Poynter, who was one of the 7 people who locked themselves up in Biosphere 2 in the 1990's.

Apparently they stayed there for nearly 2 years, which is longer than I recall. I don't remember this aspect of the experiment getting much publicity:

Throughout their stay, short tempers, depression and even the specter of insanity kept life interesting for the "biospherians." In her new book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, Poynter gives an insider's view of the famous experiment.

It might be a fun read, just to hear about the psychological effects.

Daniel Pipes on modern war

Daniel Pipes' column here is quite interesting about how the world has changed. An extract:

....the solidarity and consensus of old have unraveled. This process has been underway for just over a century now (starting with the British side of the Boer War in 1899-1902). As I wrote in 2005: "The notion of loyalty has fundamentally changed. Traditionally, a person was assumed faithful to his natal community. A Spaniard or Swede was loyal to his monarch, a Frenchman to his republic, an American to his constitution. That assumption is now obsolete, replaced by a loyalty to one's political community - socialism, liberalism, conservatism, or Islamism, to name some options. Geographical and social ties matter much less than of old."

Sounds about right to me.

Mysterious weapons still around?

The Guardian revives the issue of whether some new weapon is being used by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza. I posted about this some months ago, expressing considerable scepticism at the time.

This new article adds a little:

"Bodies arrived severely fragmented, melted and disfigured," said Jumaa Saqa'a, a doctor at the Shifa hospital, in Gaza City. "We found internal burning of organs, while externally there were minute pieces of shrapnel. When we opened many of the injured people we found dusting on their internal organs."

It is not clear whether the injuries come from a new weapon. The Israeli military declined to detail the weapons in its arsenal, but denied reports that the injuries came from a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (Dime), an experimental weapon.

Aljazeera.net has a version of the story too.

Both articles say that a Dime is in fact intended to have a small blast area, thereby reducing the collateral (human) damage. If it does in fact do that, it's a good thing, isn't it?

Anyway, the Guardian quotes some Israeli figures as denying that there is any new weapon at all. Some Italian journalists are sending off some material from wounds for testing. I guess we should know sooner or later if there is any hard evidence about this one way or another.

Hold the caffeine, mother to be

A surprising finding reported in Nature, that even low doses of caffeine taken by pregnant mothers seem to have a developmental effect on their kids, at least in rats:

To see how the cellular changes were affecting behaviour, the Michigan team took baby rats whose mothers had been caffeined-up and ran them through a series of behavioural tests. Nunez says that the animals showed no cognitive defects, but were more active and less inhibited than those whose mothers had not received caffeine.

The rats were more willing to explore new environments, for example. When placed in a small dark space with an opening into a larger lit area, it took control animals around 4 minutes on average to emerge. But the caffeine rats left after an average of just 25 seconds.

Other tests showed similar, if less pronounced, changes. The rats were more likely to explore exposed environments, and spent more time interacting with other animals.

"You have an animal that doesn't know when to stop," says Nunez.

Anyone thinking ADHD in human kids?

Is it politics or theology - or both

A pretty pessimistic article from TCS Daily argues that Islamic fueled terrorism is both politically and theologically motivated, and that means there is not that much the West can do to settle down the troubles any time soon. It's a good review of the different sides of this debate, anyway.

Adams lies

Of course Phillip Adams could be expected to be all giddy over the Lancet's highly disputed estimate of fatalities in Iraq. However, what doubt can there be that he is an outright liar when it comes to repeating this line:

Three thousand Americans die on 9/11 and an incoherent Bush blames Baghdad.

This is complete and utter dishonesty.

Why Richard Dawkins is no fun

Recently, Richard Dawkins was interviewed in Salon, promoting his new anti-religion book.

There is nothing terribly surprising in it, but this section is intriguing:

[Salon]: But it seems to me the big "why" questions are, why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?

[Dawkins]: It's not a question that deserves an answer.

Well, I think most people would say those questions are central to the way we think about our lives. Those are the big existential questions, but they are also questions that go beyond science.

If you mean, what is the purpose of the existence of the universe, then I'm saying that is quite simply begging the question. If you happen to be religious, you think that's a meaningful question. But the mere fact that you can phrase it as an English sentence doesn't mean it deserves an answer. Those of us who don't believe in a god will say that is as illegitimate as the question, why are unicorns hollow? It just shouldn't be put. It's not a proper question to put. It doesn't deserve an answer.

I don't understand that. Doesn't every person wonder about that? Isn't that a core question, what are we doing in this world? Doesn't everyone struggle with that?

There are core questions like, how did the universe begin? Where do the laws of physics come from? Where does life come from? Why, after billions of years, did life originate on this planet and then start evolving? Those are all perfectly legitimate questions to which science can give answers, if not now, then we hope in the future. There may be some very, very deep questions, perhaps even where do the laws of physics come from, that science will never answer. That is perfectly possible. I am hopeful, along with some physicists, that science will one day answer that question. But even if it doesn't -- even if there are some supremely deep questions to which science can never answer -- what on earth makes you think that religion can answer those questions?

On reflection, this is probably just a statement of some version of positivist philosophy, which is nothing new. However, hearing it stated this way seems to unintentionally make it sound like, at best, a terribly dull philosophy, and at worst, a heartless and almost dehumanising one.

Actually, reading the sequence of questions makes me think that maybe Dawkins has oversimplified the question (when he says "if you mean, what is the purpose for the existence of the universe..") into such a form that he can claim it to be a nonsense question. But in doing so he seems have dismissed a personal concern for purpose in one's own life as being just as illegitimate as demanding that the universe as a whole have a purpose.

Does he really believe that? If he does, the interviewer was right to express some astonishment.

Anyway, even if he is not as dry a positivist as this interview makes him sound and he allows some legitimacy to the question of how people may find purpose in their life, his dismissal of the relevance of purpose to the universe does not sit well with modern discussion of the anthropic principle in cosmology. It is the apparent co-incidences of the physical constants of our universe that lead to such speculation. Yet Dawkin's attitude would seem to deny that this is a fair question to even ask. At the very least, thinking about ideas like the anthropic principle and the possible multiverse strikes me as intellectual fun, yet it would seem Dawkins attitude seems rather a wet blanket on the issue.


Maybe it would just annoy Dawkins too much if it turned out that the religious impulse had intuited a truth about the universe that science took a few thousand years to confirm, so he just dismisses that as a possibility out of hand.


For the record: I am actually only lukewarm on the anthropic principle and have not really followed the intelligent design argument with much care. I don't think ID in terms of biological evolution is a valid science topic in a school science curriculum, but am happy for the anthropic principle to be covered if any high school science spends much time on cosmology now.


I also know how atheists go on about not needing God to have a sense or awe and wonder from the scientific understanding and observation of the universe. No one need point out to me that Dawkins would say this. Being thrilled by nature is probably a natural impulse that is shared by everyone. The issue of how humans are valued and treated within nature is the more interesting point where materialists and the religious can start to wildly diverge.

Getting off drugs

Theodore Dalrymple has been going on about his quite contrarian views about illicit drugs for a few months now; I think I have not previously mentioned it.

This article gives a summary of his idea: that addiction to drugs (heroin in particular) has been long romanticised, and that the modern assumption that it can only be overcome with medical treatment is wrong:

When, unbeknown to them, I have observed addicts before they entered my office, they were cheerful; in my office, they doubled up in pain and claimed never to have experienced suffering like it, threatening suicide unless I gave them what they wanted. When refused, they often turned abusive, but a few laughed and confessed that it had been worth a try. Somehow, doctors—most of whom have had similar experiences— never draw the appropriate conclusion from all of this. Insofar as there is a causative relation between criminality and opiate addiction, it is more likely that a criminal tendency causes addiction than that addiction causes criminality.

Furthermore, I discovered in the prison in which I worked that 67% of heroin addicts had been imprisoned before they ever took heroin. Since only one in 20 crimes in Britain leads to a conviction, and since most first-time prisoners have been convicted 10 times before they are ever imprisoned, it is safe to assume that most heroin addicts were confirmed and habitual criminals before they ever took heroin. In other words, whatever caused them to commit crimes in all probability caused them also to take heroin: perhaps an adversarial stance to the world caused by the emotional, spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuity of their lives.

He goes on to defend his position in this article.

It is certainly a controversial view, and an interesting one from someone who seems so conservative on this point but who is not personally religious. He was interviewed by The Brussels Journal recently, and it is well worth reading.

Moving up in life

Why should only Islam be getting all the bad publicity? It's good to see some attention being given to this aspect of Hinduism:

Like tens of thousands of other untouchables — or dalits — across India yesterday, Mr Cherlaguda ritually converted to Buddhism to escape his low-caste status....

"Untouchability" was abolished under India's constitution in 1950, but the practice remains a degrading part of everyday life in villages.

Dalits in rural areas are often bullied and assigned menial jobs such as removing human waste and dead animals.

The sometimes intense violence against them has led to a migration to the cities, where caste is easier to submerge.

At yesterday's mass conversion of dalits — almost 200,000 changed religion — they all repeated 22 oaths, including never worshipping Hindu gods and never drinking alcohol.

So, you have to give up alcohol to get out of being on the bottom of the social scale. Must be a hard choice for some.

This was from The Age, taken from The Guardian.

Rudd's first hand experience

Kevin Rudd's first hand experiences with North Korea make for very interesting reading in today's Australian. Jasper Becker's background piece is good too.

Japan's economic sanctions have been decided:

Japan's measures include a ban on all North Korean ships entering Japanese ports, a ban on North Korean imports, and barring entry by North Korean nationals other than those living in Japan.

I wonder how this is going to go over in Pyongyang.

The corkscrew into Baghdad

Air and Space Magazine seems to have a lot of its content online. From their website comes this description of the corkscrew approach aircraft landing at Baghdad still use:

Once the plane arrives at about 18,000 feet—still safely beyond the range of weapons like the SA-7 shoulder-fired missile—the pilot banks sharply and descends toward the runway in a slow, tight circle, like someone walking down a spiral staircase. During the spiral the crew keeps an eye out for other air traffic, and for anything coming at them from the ground. After several turns, the pilot pulls out of the rotation with careful timing, straightens out, and lands. The whole thing takes seven to 10 minutes, roughly the same as a regular approach, but it all takes place directly overhead, instead of beginning 20 miles from the runway....

....for passengers, particularly those making their first landing in Baghdad, the corkscrew can be intimidating. “You have no forward-looking vision,” notes Neuenschwander, “so if you’re looking out the side windows, you’re seeing either the sky or the ground. A lot of people tense up, especially if they don’t have much flying experience.” Flying into Baghdad on an Air Serv aircraft, journalist Betsy Hiel recalls “a woman across the aisle gritting her teeth so hard that she snapped one tooth off.”

Ouch.

A spoon full of sugar

Hmm, this is just one of those days where I find little on my scan of the WWW that seems worth blogging about.

Here's a couple of minor things barely worth mentioning:

* a review of a biography of "Mary Poppins" author PL Travers notes that she was not that nice a person (and a real pest for the Disney company, even though they made her rich):

Travers was hardly all sweetness and light. She could be imperious and dictatorial - she bullied illustrator Mary Shepard when they worked together - and was notoriously tough to interview. She would blithely lie about her age and upbringing (she liked to claim her dad owned a sugar plantation). Like her famous creation, she boasted that she "never explained" anything.

...Travers's troubled relationship with her adopted son, Camillus, is more hinted at than detailed. (She failed to adopt his twin brother and then never told him that he was adopted or had a twin. The twins found each other by chance in a pub when they were 17.)....

After long coveting the rights to "Mary Poppins," Disney finally got what he wanted. The deal made Travers a millionaire, but she was deeply conflicted about the movie. She harangued Disney and the writers with pages of notes about items she felt were untrue to the spirit of her books. At the première (which she attended, although not at Disney's invitation), the 65-year-old Travers wept.

* The Departed, Scorsese's return to gangster territory, gets rave reviews, except (oddly) from Margaret on At The Movies. She comments:

It's so violent, it's so vile in the language, you know, particularly the sexual language.

Generally, I have always felt Scorsese is over-rated. I used to think maybe I had to be older to appreciate him, in the same way I came to like some of Woody Allen as I aged. But it hasn't really happened for me. He is obviously very knowledgeable of cinema history, and seems basically a nice enough man, but I find it hard to warm to his subject matter.

* In the Baldwin family, there is no middle ground. Salon reports that Stephen Baldwin is the complete opposite of evil brother Alec, in that he is a born again Christian (of a particularly nutty variety, it would seem) with the ear of the White House. (Well, if you can believe Salon on that sort of thing.) Very odd.

Cats control the population

Long time readers know of my interest in the ongoing research into the weird effects of toxoplasma infection.

Now it turns out that it seems to affect the gender balance of offspring from infected mothers!:

The parasite, toxoplasma, infects around 15% of Britons, but up to 80% of the population in some countries. It is spread by contaminated cat faeces, but also lurks in uncooked pork and beef.

Researchers in the Czech Republic collected medical records from 1,803 newborn babies between 1996 and 2004 and checked them for information on the mothers and babies including gender, the number of previous pregnancies, and the mother's levels of toxoplasma antibodies.

They discovered that women whose antibody count was high - suggesting a substantial infection - had a much higher chance of having baby boys. In most populations the birth rate is around 51% boys, but women infected with toxoplasma had up to a 72% chance of a boy. Toxoplasma causes congenital defects in newborns and can trigger miscarriages, but a link with the gender of newborns has never been identified before.

What other surprises about this bug are out there yet to be discovered?

By the way, this fairly recent study, if I read it right, implicates strong maternal toxoplasma infection with schizophrenia in their adult children. I believe men are much more likely to get schizophrenia than women. Does the discovery that the maternal infection favours boy babies account for this higher rate in men?

Repeat after me: cats really are evil.

About the Iraqi death figures

It's interesting to compare the BBC's report on the latest survey with the report in Nature.

According to the BBC, the latest estimate of 600,000 odd dead:

...is vigorously disputed by supporters of the war in Iraq, including US President George W Bush.

True, but wording it that way gives the impression that it is only supporters of the war who are disputing. Later in the article it makes mention of "critics" and never gives any indication of who they are.

Nature, on the other hand, gives a clear indication that there are critics who are unlikely to be considered "war supporters":

"I doubt it is large as they say," says Jon Pedersen, a social scientist at Fafo, an independent research centre is Oslo, Norway. Pedersen helped run a United Nations study that concluded between 18,000 and 29,000 people died as a result of violence between the start of the war and May 2004.

He says that violence has become more frequent since his study, but doubts whether the real number can be so much bigger than media reports suggest. Iraq Body Count, a website that collates mortality figures from media sources, puts the current figure at around 45,000.

"We are told about at least 30 to 40 deaths per day just from news reports," says Pedersen. "But 500 per day is very different."

Pederson also points out that the pre-invasion death rate recorded by the Al Mustansiriya team is very low. Figures from the United Nations Children's' Fund from before the war put the number at around 13 deaths per thousand per year. If correct, this suggests almost no increase that can be attributed to the conflict.

Further down, the report notes:

Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, says that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts.

Of course, Tim Lambert's unerring faith in statistics, how they are collected (and the objectivity of scientists) leads him him to support the study to the hilt. Funny how a science person can seem to lose all sense of common sense skepticism of their own field. (Can't say he ever shows a sense of humour, or any other likeable characteristics either.)

Here's one thing that strikes me as a bit fishy: the Lancet authors say that the deaths claimed by the families were backed up by death certificates in 92% percent of cases (according to Nature.) Given the poor infrastructure in Iraq since the war, what is the reliability of the information in death certificates? Frankly, I am a little surprised that there were even that many death certificates issued. Is there a financial incentive for relatives to falsely claim a death in the family?

Also, who is responsible for burying the dead in Iraq? Is there the equivalent of an undertaker's profession there? Or do Mosques have a role in this? Is this survey method really the best way they think they can up with to estimate deaths?

Just saying...