Kevin Rudd - needs practice

I reckon the damaging thing about Kevin Rudd's performance under pressure yesterday and today is his psychological reaction - the glum face, the look of a good boy who knows he really does deserve the scolding, the extra blinking on his Sunrise appearance this morning, the depressed sounding voice etc.

People criticise John Howard often for taking a "best form of defence is offence" approach, but I still think it may be taken by the public as showing a greater resilience to pressure than the Rudd approach.

(Mind you, admitting to and apologising for mistakes is something that Peter Beatty in Queensland has elevated to an art form, and it did him no harm in the last election. The big difference, though, is that there is no credible alternative government in the present opposition in Queensland.)

Just half a glass of wine a day...

...is all it may take to get its life extending health benefits. I would be happy to have a glass every night with dinner, except that if I am tired already it will usually send me off to sleep on the sofa earlier than I like.

Doctors and death

An article/book review in Slate takes an interesting look at the issue of how doctors, or at least American doctors, deal with death. Here's a point I have never heard before (highlighted by me):

In fact, doctors aren't bad at handling the details of dying. We know how to ease pain, promote comfort, and arrange the medical particulars. But we are disasters when it comes to death itself, just like the rest of the human species. (Morticians often have the same problem.) I admire Chen's and Stein's pep-club optimism, but they might have integrated Ernest Becker's seminal Denial of Death into their discussions. Becker's basic point is that all of human behavior can be traced to our inability to accept our own mortality. Cowards that we are, we not only refuse to consider our own inevitable death, but our patients', too: We duck the tough discussions, flinch and flutter and order another test, and finally leave it to a (usually much younger) colleague to sit down with the family. We don't slink away because we are bad people; we slink away because we are people.

I had never really thought before about how morticians cope with death in their own family.

By the way, I also had a conversation recently with someone with a lot of insider knowledge of the medical business world, who assured me that being a retail pharmacist with your own business in Australia is one of the most lucrative jobs around.

It doesn't seem particularly stressful, either. Is it too late for me to become one?

The enforcers

There have been too many words here lately.

Following the recent popularity of a YouTube video of a rabbit chasing off a snake, there's now a good one of chickens doing an extremely convincing impersonation of a couple of cops:



Why do these chickens care about 2 rabbits fighting?

The cat who loves Chavez

Ha! George Galloway (whose creepy cat act on Big Brother is forever preserved here) writes a comment piece in The Guardian strongly supporting the "so called" dictator Chavez.

As one commenter notes:

"So-called 'dictator'":

He rules by decree. What more does one need to be labeled a dictator?

This comment further down by MalachiConstant is amusing (be sure to read it to the end):

I must admit I have had a hard time making up my mind about Chavez. I like some of his policies very much, however he does seem a trifle ham-handed, autocratic, and a bit of a clown who is more concerned with scoring points on the world stage than sorting out the real problems of Venezuela (should he really be giving the people of London half-priced bus rides while the people of most Venezuelan towns use buses that would have been scrapped in the UK twenty years ago, all to buy friendship with a leftwing UK fringe of very limited influence?). However now that I know he is good buddies with George all doubts are put to rest - any friend of George's is certainly an authoritarian scum and to be opposed on all points. Thanks for sorting me out on that George.

Ride that laser

Found via Futurismic, here's a post about the potential use of solid state lasers for space propulsion. (It contains a link to this series of slides about a proposed modular laser launch system.)

All this talk is inspired by recent success in powering up solid state lasers.

What with heat beam weapons, laser battle guns, and a return to the Moon, the 21st century is starting to look as if it might live up to a futuristic image after all. Just waiting for those flying cars and personal rocket belts, though.

Inherently safer nuclear (and free advice to the the Howard government)

Technology Review has an interesting article on "gen III & IV" reactors, which are basically designed to be simpler and inherently safer than current reactor designs.

As you may expect, pebble bed reactors get a mention, but so does another reactor (the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor) which would, like Pebble Beds, could automatically shut down without any outside intervention:

The ESBWR replaces previous reactors' complex systems for residual heat removal with a design that uses no pumps or emergency generators--in fact, it possesses no moving parts at all, except for the neutron-absorbing control rods that are pulled partway out from its core so that nuclear fission can proceed. That fission reaction boils the water in the ESBWR's core, which becomes steam that gets carried away to large tubes in which it rises, releases its energy to turbines, and then condenses so that gravity causes it to flow back down to the core as water again. In short, the ESBWR runs wholly on natural circulatory forces. Rao says, "It could not be simpler. The control rods get pulled out, water comes in, and steam goes out, carrying heat that gets turned into electricity."

But even other, more complicated designs, are still much better than older plants:

This simplicity of design also features in other gen-III reactor designs like the Westinghouse AP1000, which has 60 percent fewer valves, 75 percent less piping, 80 percent less control cabling, 35 percent fewer pumps, and 50 percent less seismic building volume than currently operational reactors. This trend becomes more pronounced in gen-IV designs like the pebble bed reactor. In conjunction with "the modern computer-aided manufacturing technologies currently used most extensively in the ship-building industry," Peterson says, what's now possible is a modular approach to nuclear-plant construction, whereby large segments of the plants will be prefabricated in factories.

It seems to me that if the Howard government wants to defuse some of the Labor Party's "tell us where in Australia would you locate a reactor" scare campaign, it should be talking loudly about these new reactor designs which are safer, cheaper, and probably just becoming available when we would want our first reactor anyway.

It may be premature to do so, but it could be even better to commit to only allowing reactors with strong passive safety, such as a pebble bed or that ESBRW described above. I mean, if the thing can't melt down, even if something goes wrong while everyone is at the Christmas picnic, that has to be a strong selling point in the public's mind.

This aspect of the future of nuclear power generation is not getting the publicity it deserves.

My other advice to John Howard: it's not too late to get rid of that goose of a Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

The Economist on reasons to be skeptical about carbon offsets

This Economist blog entry seems to be a good and simple explanation of why any carbon offset scheme is a very dubious exercise. The crucial paragraph:

When you donate money to build a new windfarm, you don't take any of the old, polluting power offline; you increase the supply of power, reducing the price until others are encouraged to buy more carbon-emitting power. On the margin, it may make some difference, since demand for electricity is not perfectly elastic, but nowhere near the one-for-one equivalence that carbon offsets would seem to suggest. Especially since the worst offenders, big coal-fired plants, are not the ones that renewables will substitute for; solar and wind power are not good replacements for baseload power. Instead, renewables are likely to take relatively clean (and expensive) natural gas plants offline, since those are the ones that provide "extra" power to the system. Similarly, by giving villagers in Goa energy-saving CFL bulbs, you do not lessen the amount of electricity consumed; rather, you make it possible for other people to purchase the extra energy freed up by more efficient lightbulbs. This may be excellent poverty policy, but it does not lessen the carbon footprint of your international flight.

The post is inspired by Al Gore's defence of his very energy hungry house by his use of carbon offsets.

No one has commented on the post at The Economist yet. I have no doubt there will be carbon offset defenders coming out in Al's defence, but it will interesting to see if they can counter the basic argument.

By coincidence...

It must be dissection day here. I just stumbled across a review of a biography of an important figure in the history of surgery and dissection (not that I have heard of him before.) His name: Astley Cooper. From the New Statesman review:

In 1792, with a revolutionary glint in his eye, he made a pilgrimage to Paris, and was an appalled witness to the violence of the mob as they processed through the streets with bits of the bodies they had torn apart, like a grotesque parody of the enlightened surgical techniques he had gone there to learn....

Burch doesn't gloss over the unpleasant aspects of Cooper's personality: the vanity that sometimes confused the "theatre" of surgery with a love of self-display; the clumsy sense of humour that led him once to ask his hairdresser to reach into a tub of hair powder which he had replaced with monkey entrails; the willingness to use body-snatchers in his quest for new anatomical specimens; and especially the obsession with dissection that seemed to go well beyond the needs of medical science. If some of Cooper's experiments are hard to stomach, such as his decision to close the urethra of a rabbit merely to see what would happen (the rabbit died a slow and painful death), others are merely hard to fathom. One wonders what contribution to the knowledge of human anatomy was made by his public dissection of, among others, "elephants, cuttlefish, baboons, polar bears, walruses, lemurs, leopards, the lymphatics of a porpoise, kangeroos, tortoises, porcupines, panthers and seals and the stomach of a cormorant".

Quite the dissecting showman, wasn't he.

Gruesome WWII story

The Times has an article about an old Japanese guy who talks about his gruesome war time activities:

Over the course of four months before the defeat of the Japanese forces in March 1945, Mr Makino cut open the bodies of ten Filipino prisoners, including two teenage girls. He amputated their limbs, and cut up and removed their healthy livers, kidneys, wombs and still beating hearts for no better reason than to improve his knowledge of anatomy.

“It was educational,” he said. “Even today when I go to see doctors, they are impressed by my knowledge of the human body. But if I’m really honest, the reason we did it was to take revenge on these people who were spying for the Americans. Now, of course I feel terrible about the cruel thing that I did, and I think of it so often. But at the time what I felt for these people was closer to hatred than to pity.”...

The “operation” took about an hour; when it was over the body was sewn up and thrown into a hole in the earth. Eight more vivisections followed, Mr Makino said, up to three hours long. “Over the course of time, I got used to it,” he said. “We removed some of the organs, and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were women, young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it, but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education.

Rather like young boys who play cruelly with insects, isn't it?

And some Japanese wonder why people get upset over visits to Yasukuni Shrine.

A fundamental problem for Hawking Radiation?

PhysOrg brings to attention a paper on the black hole information paradox that seems to be important to the issue of whether Hawking Radiation really exists. (Well, I think that is one possible implication of the article, even though that is not stated in explicit plain English.)

The actual paper is here. (Actually, it seems to be a year old, so why is PhysOrg running it now?)

Its conclusion:

A robust statement of this result leads to a severe formulation of the black-hole information paradox: Either unitarity fails or Hawking’s semi-classical predictions must break down. The
no-hiding theorem rigorously rules out any “third possibility” that the information escapes from the black hole but is nevertheless inaccessible as it is hidden in correlations between semi-classical Hawking radiation and the black hole’s internal state. This provides a criterion to test any proposed resolution of the paradox: Any resolution that preserves unitarity must predict a breakdown in Hawking’s analysis [2] even for cosmologically-sized black holes.

Hey, I didn't say it was easy! But I am assuming that a "breakdown in Hawking's analysis" means that possibly Hawking Radiation doesn't exist. (Which, for any new readers of this blog, is relevant to the issue of whether micro black holes that may be created at CERN soon will evaporate and be no danger to the Earth.)

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.