Gender and India

For a detailed report on the terrible problem of gender imbalance in India (caused primarily by gender selecting abortion), this Washington Times report is worth reading. Some extracts:

Many families therefore elect to not have a girl at all. Medical clinics -- which Sister Mary calls "womb raiders" -- have advertised "better 500 rupees now [for an abortion] rather than 50,000 rupees later" [for a dowry]. The first amount is about $11; the second is $1,100.
Dowries are theoretically banned under the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act, but enforcement is poor and other religious groups such as Muslims and Christians have been caught up in the custom...

Surprisingly, it seems it is the richer areas that have the biggest problem:

She cites the Indian state of Haryana, just north of New Delhi, which has the country's second highest per capita income. It also has India's second worst sex ratio, after Punjab state to the west. For every 1,000 boys born in Haryana, just 820 girls were born, according to the 2001 census. In 1991, it was 879 girls.
Punjab is similarly wealthy; thus, instead of the poor killing their children, it's the rich, says Ms. Chowdhry, a former senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Institute and Library.
"Punjab and Haryana are the two highest per capita income states, but they have such regressive trends," she says. "How can they call themselves modern?"

As for the extent of the problem worldwide:

Early this year, the British medical journal Lancet estimated the male-female gap at 43 million. Worldwide, Lancet said, there are 100 million "missing girls" who should have been born but were not. Fifty million of them would have been Chinese and 43 million would have been Indian. The rest would have been born in Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan and Nepal.
China gave an even bleaker assessment last month, with the government saying that its men will outnumber women in the year 2020 by 300 million.

There's a serious need for cultural re-education here.

UPDATE: if you don't trust the Washington Times on anything because of its right wing politics, you can read pretty much the same story (better written too) at The Guardian. The article confirms that richer areas in fact have the bigger problem:

India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant progress. Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand there has been new money and an awareness of family planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier - and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A recent survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees.

Wow. How is this going to be dealt with when even better education of the women is not helping?

The upside of gloom

There's an interesting piece in the Guardian about the pessimism of the European liberal intelligentsia. I like the last two paragraphs:

...instead of optimism we have a kind of European baby-boomer guilt - the feeling that we are the last privileged generation. And it is definitely a European thing - you do not find the same gloom in rising parts of the world or in the US. And if Europeans in general tend towards pessimism as a reflection of their reduced weight in the world, perhaps European intellectuals are even more pessimistic as a reflection of their reduced weight in their own societies too.

But perhaps we should draw some optimism from the pessimism of the British and European thinking classes. After all, 100 years ago the main emotion in politics was hope - and then look what happened. The despairing tone of some of these responses may be a sign that we are on the threshold of a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Reasons not to visit Saudi Arabia

From the IHT:

Three Frenchmen who lived Saudi Arabia were killed by gunmen Monday in the desert on the side of a road leading to the holy city of Medina in an area restricted to Muslims only....

The men were resting on the side of a road about 17 kilometers (10.6 miles) north of Medina when gunmen fired at their car, instantly killing two of them, al-Turki said. The third man died later after he was taken to a hospital, and the fourth Frenchman was in serious condition at an area hospital, al-Turki said.

Women and children also were with the group but they were uninjured, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The area the group was traveling in is restricted for Muslims only. Non-Muslims are barred from the area around Medina and neighboring Mecca, the holiest cities in Islam. ...

Al-Turki said the group was probably making a Muslim pilgrimage. But it was possible they were traveling to another ancient site north of Medina where the Saudi government recently started allowing non-Muslims to visit.

Were they killed for not looking like Muslims? Nice country.

Oh no, Maxine

I liked Maxine McKew as a journalist and had no objection to her working for Kevin Rudd. But she's straining the (entirely one way) friendship by deciding to run for Parliament, and choosing the PM's electorate in which to do it.

Even before it was known whether she really wanted to run for Parliament, it seemed to me that her background as the journalist with whom politicians of both sides could enjoy a friendly lunch/interview (even though it may have been "on the record") made it a little unfair of her to now want to actually be a political player. Isn't it likely that as a politician she is in a position to abuse information gleaned in her former occupation, which probably traded to some extent on a perceived trustworthiness to keep certain comments and asides confidential?

You could probably argue this for almost all political journalists, and say that you can't have a rule that they should not run for Parliament.

But still, with McKew, it seems to me a question of the style of some of her journalism which makes it questionable. Of course, all Liberals interviewed by her knew she was married to a key Labor identity, and that may have made them more cautious anyway, but I don't know. Maybe she was still able to charm comments out of them which they would now regret having made.

The other argument may be that she could cause just as much harm by being a Rudd staffer anyway. That would be true, but all politicians need media advisors and they are often former journalists. I just feel that is part of the political territory, but I still don't like journalists running for Parliament, or at least ones that you can imagine politicians finding charming. (By this criteria, I would have no objection to Margo Kingston or Alan Ramsay running for Parliament!)

Speaking of mice...

The Times provides a link to a Memri video in which an Iranian lecturer explains the secret meaning behind Tom & Jerry cartoons. It's all to do with the Jews, of course!

Bryan Appleyard's blog brought this to my attention. (Has it been on LGF before? If not, I guess it will be soon.)

Rat excitement in New York

Have a look at this story and video from the LA Times. It seems someone passing by a closed KFC in New York noticed a bunch of rats having the run the place. The news crews came and filmed it from outside. The audio is perhaps the best part, as you listen to a bunch of people getting grossed out by seeing this.

I find rats sort of cute, but there are limits as to where I would prefer to meet them.

Rocket explosion over Australia

The ABC seems to be the only news outlet in Australia reporting this at the moment. Maybe other media will pick it up over the weekend, because the photos are very cool.

Pebble bed in China

The science show Catalyst on ABC last night had a story about a Chinese prototype pebble bed reactor. A transcript is available here, but unfortunately no video. (Maybe later?)

It gives the impression that it is working fine already, but the detail was slim. It was good to see what the "pebbles" actually look like.

Profitable things to do on the Moon

There's a short article here about ideas for early profit from going to the Moon. Nothing too exciting yet.

I seem to recall that some years ago there was a proposal for privately funding a lunar rover to be operated remoting by paying customers on earth. Sounded cool to me.

Whoever does it, they really need to get some robotic exploration of interesting areas on the moon going. The lunar poles, and areas with possible lava tubes, are where I would be headed first.

Losing interest in cinema

Each year, my interest in the movies nominated for an Oscar seems to be reaching new lows never before seen. I mean, until perhaps 7 years ago, even if I haven't seen the films, it has been a matter of some regret that I have missed at least some of them. But in the last few years, my interest in nominated films has been virtually in free fall.

It is almost certainly something to do with my stage in life, and if I was younger I would take risks again in seeing movies which may or may not turn out to be better than expected. But at the moment, I am lucky to be seeing one adult movie a year at the cinema, plus maybe another 2 child-friendly ones. The one adult movie, chosen because by all accounts I should like it, has been a disappointment in the last few years.

I only saw the last Star Wars on DVD about 6 months ago. Disappointing. (I reckon Orson Scott Card did a good job criticising the vacuousness of its moral philosophy here.) It's gorgeous to look at, but even that is just a cover for inadequate emotional logic in the story telling. I liked Village Voice's take on the visual style:

In debt to lurid sci-fi-novel cover art, Revenge of the Sith achieves the ultimate in what could be called Baroque Nerdism, a frame-filling aesthetic of graphic overdesign that began with The Phantom Menace and has now been jacked up to an absurd degree. Half the film takes place at dawn or dusk, so that the Marin County team can geek out on artificial roseate glow—a sugary luminence used so frequently one wonders if they developed a Maxfield Parrish plug-in to get the job done. On metropolitan Coruscant, background windows buzz with distant air-cars of various models; on DVD zoom mode, they will likely reveal individual license plate numbers.

What about Babel, this year's serious movie Oscar contender? I am not encouraged by the David Denby review in the New Yorker:

My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies. Iñárritu, who made “Amores Perros” (2000), is one of the world’s most gifted filmmakers. But I had the same reaction to “Babel” that I had to his most recent movie, “21 Grams” (2003): he creates savagely beautiful and heartbreaking images; he gets fearless performances out of his actors; he edits with the sharpest razor in any computer in Hollywood; and he abuses his audience with a humorless fatalism and a piling up of calamities that borders on the ludicrous.

As I have commented before, I think cinema goes through joyless phases from time to time, but this current one is lasting an inordinately long time. It's like waiting for a drought to break.

UPDATE: good to see it's not just me. I wrote this post before I read this Slate story, claiming that some Oscar voters are deliberately leaving the "Best Movie" ballot blank!

Also, it's probably an appropriate time to note again that some of the loss of interest in cinema is partly to do with the lack of charm or reliable likeability in the current raft of mainstream Hollywood actors. Can't any studio sign up a bunch of new, young-ish stars and promote it a new start in something resembling the old studio talent system? (Sign them up to an updated morals clause too, so they can be dumped as soon as they start turning up at parties without underwear.)

UPDATE 2:

I just read Danny Katz talking about Babel:

There was a huge selection of teary, jerky movies this year: there was the chirpy-weepy Little Miss Sunshine, and the baklava-syrupy The Pursuit Of Happyness - but the award goes to Babel, which was so magnificently miserable, for two and a half hours, all I could hear was the cast crying, the audience crying, and even the projectionist crying, from inside his sound-proofed, triple-glazed glass booth. I saw this film with my friend, Roger, and afterwards we were so shattered by the powerful themes of human fear and cultural isolation, we sat down in a cafe and discussed the movie's most profound question: how do you pronounce "Babel"? - I thought it was pronounced "Babble" but Roger said it was pronounced "Bay-bel" and I said "No, I'm pretty sure it's Babble" and he said "NO, IT'S DEFINITELY BAY-BEL" and this went on for about an hour and a half, yeah I really love those intense kind of post-cinema intellectual discussions.

Made me laugh.

Careers to avoid: clowning in Cucuta

The BBC reports:

Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say....

Local reports say the audience of about 20 people, mostly children, thought the shooting was part of the show before realising both men had been killed.

Last year, a prominent circus clown, known as Pepe, was also shot dead by a unknown assailant in Cucuta.

This is story crying out for further explanation.

A new concept for the day

You know something is complicated and "out there" when someone who posts at Cosmic Variance finds it new and hard to fathom. Have a look at this post about "Boltzmann brains" and the decay of the universe. More detail about Boltzmann and entropy is at an earlier CV post here. It is not easy going.

I will soon be doing a post about cosmologist Frank Tipler too, and his upcoming book claiming to show the physics behind various miracles in the Bible (or the New Testament, at least.) His previous book "The Physics of Immortality" got rubbished by most of his scientist colleagues, but I expect that will be nothing compared to the shellacking the new book is likely to take.

Targetting for beginners

Former Spook, who has some experience in these matters, has a good post explaining why people should not think there is anything unusual going on when the media runs a "targets have been selected already" story.

Debating the multiverse

Here's an interesting account of the recent debate at a conference between top cosmologists who take opposing sides on the issue of the anthropic principle and whether a "multiverse" exists. (String theory gets a mention too.) It explains the issues in pretty straightforward fashion, and is well worth a read.

Good surgeons play with monkey

OK, something surprising to post about.

The LA Times notes:

New research today found that surgeons with the highest scores on "Super Monkey Ball 2," "Stars Wars Racer Revenge" and "Silent Scope" performed best on tests of suturing and laparoscopic surgery.....

"For as little as three hours a week, you could help your children become the cyber-surgeons of the 21st century," said Dr. James C. Rosser Jr. of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and lead author of the study in the Archives of Surgery.

The research looked at 33 surgeons attending a course on laparoscopic surgery and found that their game-playing skill was a better predictor of success on the surgical tests than years of medical practice or number of surgeries performed.

Expertise with "Super Monkey Ball 2," which involves steering a ball containing a monkey down a serpentine track while simultaneously targeting bananas, was most closely linked with high test scores.

No news today

My morning survey of the news is showing nothing I particularly care to post about. Instead, for diversion, have a look at this website for "weird and funny" photos. (Originally I found it via Red Ferret Journal, which linked to the post about cool aircraft-in-flight cockpit photos. However, the rest of the Static website is worth looking at too.)

The cause of ice ages

It would give everyone a greater degree of confidence in climate predictions if scientists had cracked once and for all the issue of what triggers ice ages. As this post at Real Climate makes clear, they are still several theories around, and no doubt more to come. (Cyclic orbit changes are a significant part of it, but the exact mechanism seems still very much up for grabs.)

The comments to the post include these one, which I add here just to give some background on the whole history of ice ages:

...the question "What triggers ice ages?" only applies to the late Pleistocene (since about 800,000 years ago). From the onset of northern-hemisphere glaciation (about 3 million years ago) to the "mid-Pleistocene transition" (about 800,000 years ago), glacial advance and retreat follows a strong 41,000-year cycle, which has led to its being called "the 41 ky world" (Raymo & Nisancioglu 2003, Paleoceanography, 18, 1011). This is surely due to the changes of earth's obliquity, since changes in the amplitude of the climate signal correspond to changes in the amplitude of the obliquity cycle (Lisiecki & Raymo 2007, Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 56).

But since the mid-Pleistocene transition (not precisely since, this happens intermittently before that time) glacial changes are dominated by a 100,000-year cycle. The behavior during the "late Pleistocene" was originally attributed to changes in earth's eccentricity, but that idea has now fallen out of favor. Huybers & Wunsch (2005, Nature, 434, 491) and Huybers (Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 37) have convincingly shown that even during the late Pleistocene, the timing of deglaciations is strongly correlated to the obliquity cycle. They find no such relationship for the precession cycle or the eccentricity cycle.

(This comment seems to be by someone the scientists who run Real Climate trust.)

And this comment is make by one of the Real Climate authors, in response to the question of when would we be next due for an ice age were it not for global warming:

We've just come out of one of the big every-100KYr glaciations, and the normal course of events is to build up to another biggy through a series of small, short glaciations over the next 100KYr. In the normal course of events, the first try at an ice age would be due sometime in the next 20,000 years but I myself wouldn't try to pin it down more than that. One of the most interesting attempts so far to say what global warming might do to the glacial cycle is in the paper (pdf) by Archer and Ganopolski that appeared in the AGU journal GGG. I'll leave it to David to say whether that has been followed up by more detailed GCM work.

By the way, I don't post this to express scepticism about legitimate concern over CO2 levels, but it is interesting that something as significant as ice ages are not properly understood yet.

Japanese culture corner

The Japan Times has an article about the declining popularity of period drama in Japan. You know: samurai, ninja, some very strange haircuts and all. The casual visitor to Japan will still find quite a bit of it on TV, but apparently not as much as before.

I guess it's a similar phenomena to the decline of the Western as a genre. Anyone who was a child in the '60's can remember just how many cowboy and wild west shows were made in those days. I suspect the 1950's was probably the height of its popularity in the cinema, but I could be wrong. TV now is dominated by gritty crime shows, I suppose, and plain crap of all varieties. (Someday, a good sitcom about adults that doesn't always deal with sex will emerge again.)

Anyway, this got me thinking about the one childhood Japanese show that I can recall - The Samurai. The Wikipedia entry is relatively short, but points out that the show was very popular in Japan, Australia and the Phillipines, but was hardly shown anywhere else. How odd.

For those who can vaguely recall what the lead character Shintaro looked like, here he is:



(The picture is from a small fansite here.) Not exactly rugged good looks, but a sister-in-law of mine used to swoon over him, so she tells me.

I think most kids were most impressed by the evil ninja who jumped up backwards into trees, snuck around the houses with paper walls, and had an endless supply of throwing stars.

It would probably be seen as hopelessly violent for children today.

Pearson visits home

For a depressing first hand account about aboriginal life in his home town in Cape York, Noel Pearson's column from Saturday's Australian is worth reading.

Talk about your intractable social problems. It's also interesting to note yet again how communities as a whole faired so much better under the Christian mission system.

Easy global cooling?

I don't think I have seen this exact suggestion before:

Benford has a proposal that possesses the advantages of being both one of the simplest planet-cooling technologies so far suggested and being initially testable in a local context. He suggests suspension of tiny, harmless particles (sized at one-third of a micron) at about 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere. These particles could be composed of diatomaceous earth. "That's silicon dioxide, which is chemically inert, cheap as earth, and readily crushable to the size we want," Benford says. This could initially be tested, he says, over the Arctic, where warming is already considerable and where few human beings live. Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns would mostly confine the deployed particles around the North Pole. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. "The fact that such an experiment is reversible is just as important as the fact that it's regional," says Benford.

"Benford" is Gregory Benford, the scientist/science fiction writer. A couple of years ago he was in Canberra talking up the prospects of a rotating space mirror as an engineering solution to global warming. He is evidently looking at more down to earth options now.

The quote is from Technology Review, which seems a pretty neat publication generally. What it doesn't explain is how to get the silicon dioxide up there, and how long it will stay. I thought you also were not supposed to breath the stuff (from what I recall of using diatomaceous earth in an old pool filter,) so I am not sure what is meant to happen when it comes back to earth.