Rats know what they don't know

An interesting story at Science Daily about evidence for rats being capable of "metacognition".

Maybe this means rats can have failure dreams too?

Dreams of failure

Last night, I had one of those dreams of failure that I assume everyone has from time to time. It may be sitting down to an exam and realising that you know nothing about the topic whatsoever, or, in the case of my dream last night, trying to discuss a matter in dispute when it was clear my opponent knew everything about the topic, and I was totally unprepared. I have had missed deadline dreams too.

It occurred to me this morning that the consequences of failure of my job are no where near as spectacular as that in other, more dangerous professions. Does this mean that, for example, pilots dream of their plane taking a dive towards the ground because they forget to check the fuel before takeoff? Do surgeons dream of patients dying on the table in front of them for some really silly oversight? And, I wonder, do nuclear reactor operators dream of missing an obvious warning that leads to a meltdown.

Of course, it might just be that I am more insecure than other people, and such dreams are not as common as I expect. If that is true, just ignore this post. Otherwise, I would be curious to hear the nature of any other reader's failure dreams.

Make some comment, vast international readership!

An odd weekend

It seems a bit of an odd weekend when The Australian is getting pessimistic about John Howard, but on the Fairfax side it has a column criticising Labor's lack of policy decisiveness in The Age, and an SMH exclusive indicating that Rudd may be a bit too much into self-mythologising.

On the News Limited side, George Megalogenis warns that "Howard is in serious trouble", and draws comparisons to the 1969 election swing to Labor despite full employment at the time. (There's one big difference that comes to mind: conscription for an unpopular war.)

The Age column makes the point that Labor is still fuzzy on specifics in quite a few policy areas which it has had a long time to consider.

The SMH story on Rudd the Younger is here.

That's just not right...

For one of the most unusual clips from Japanese TV I have ever seen, have a look at this:



Found via Japundit, which also gives the explanation of what it's about.

Update: For an even more disturbing octopus related video, you can always view extremely fresh octopi bits being eaten here. (I found this posted at the brainiac site Cosmic Variance, OK?; I don't go out deliberately looking for grossness, you know.)

Death at the ABC

What is it about the supposedly religious themed Compass that makes it keep coming back to stories about euthanasia? Last Sunday, we had the story of a New Zealand woman who was looking after her dying mother at home, and killed her by morphine and putting a pillow over her face. She was not charged originally, but then she decided to press her luck by publishing a book about it. End result: 6 months in prison. Of course, international death hound Philip Nitschke was there offering his support, and the whole documentary was done in a way that was meant to elicit sympathy.

Only problem was, I didn't find the daughter very likeable at all. (Admittedly, she was put in a terrible situation, and the medical system didn't work as it should; but still, smothering relatives with pillows is something I think few people want to see encouraged.)

Then this Sunday coming, I see Compass is about a woman with a terminal illness giving a party before she heads off to Holland to hopefully [sic] be legally put down. Again, I am expecting nothing less than an emotional appeal for legalised euthanasia to be the main aim of the documentary.

The thing about this is that it would seem palliative care specialists are usually against euthanasia and insistent that the right sort of care can mean a relatively "good" death for most people. (OK, there will be always be exceptions. Nothing's perfect.) Yet the views of such practical experts rarely seem to get an airing. To my surprise, and to his credit, Norman Swan's Health Report on Radio National recently did devote a show to one such doctor. The transcript is here. I am guessing, though, that the audience was not large.

In a way, I don't like talking about this topic because it feels too much like tempting fate. No one who speaks against euthanasia wants to be personally tested in their attitudes by watching a close relative slowly die, or having a painful terminal illness themselves. Still, the pro-euthanasia lobby seems to get a pretty much unfettered run when it comes to the print media and television documentaries, and that bugs me.

UPDATE: I started to watch last night's Compass program (the one about the woman holding a party before heading off to Holland.) Unfortunately, I didn't get far past the first five minutes, then woke up as the end credits rolled. (I should not lie down on the sofa past 10 pm.) From the introduction, it seemed that maybe the party process made her change her mind about euthanasia, but I am not sure. People who are all for it don't often seem to be the type to change their mind. If anyone saw it, perhaps you could enlighten me? The show's transcript is not up yet.

On a general point, Compass is generally a pretty dull show these days. Maybe there is a lack of good religious themed documentary being made by anyone, which is a pity.

Russian roulette

Yet more poisoning in Russia:

A physician well-known in Los Angeles' Russian community and her adult daughter were poisoned during a trip to Moscow last month, U.S. Embassy officials confirmed today, the latest in a string of Russian poisoning cases that have sparked international intrigue.

Officials said Marina Kovalevsky, 49, and her daughter Yana, 26, were poisoned with thallium, an odorless, colorless toxin originally suspected in the death of a former Russian spy in London last year.

I like this part of the report:

They had been staying at one of Moscow's fanciest hotels.

"I think it's an accident because I can't imagine anything else. It's really bizarre," said Tabarovskaya, a chiropractor who works in the same West Hollywood office as her cousin.

How on earth do you have an accidental thallium poisoning while you are staying at one of the "fanciest hotels" in Moscow? Are Council health inspectors there always having to tell hotel kitchen staff not to keep the shaker of dissident poison next to the salt and pepper?

Stuck on Iraq

Tigerhawk is sticking to his pro-Iraq war guns.

Of course, overnight there is news of more large scale killings of Shiite pilgrims. One thing that I still don't understand about the situation there is this: Shiites have the control of the government, and (presumably) are the great majority of the armed forces. They would not have a supply line problem if there was a full scale civil war of the type that it is said the Sunni's suicide bombers are trying to promote. But where do the Sunnis expect to get their weapons supply with which to fight a full blown war?

Also, so much of this killing is being done by suicide bombers targeting civilians. Would it be so hard for Muslim clerics to declare repeatedly the moral judgement that we in the West find easy: namely, that suicide bombing against civilians is a depraved and essentially cowardly act. (It is, after all, an entirely one sided form of combat. A suicidal attack against an armed target that might get you first if they see you coming is different; there is scope for acknowledging a type of bravery there. But blow yourself up in a civilian street? Just obscene murder.)

I know that some clerics have condemned repeatedly the violence generally; but what I am getting at here is specific condemnation of this particular tactic. I am not sure whether that has been done.

More on carbon offsets

More sceptical views on carbon offsets are in this TCS Daily article. A key paragraph:

If you want to fight carbon emissions, then join the Pigou Club and push for taxes on bad energy. If you want to fight carbon emissions at a personal level, then act as if there were a high tax on your use of energy from carbon-emitting sources, and reduce your use of that energy. If you are not really all that worried about carbon emissions, but you get pleasure from making empty, self-righteous gestures, then do what Al Gore does -- buy carbon offsets.

Double guessing the past

David Aaronovitch's column in The Times about the fantasies about what would have happened if Gore had been President is well worth reading.

Some political predictions

Today's polling in The Australian (showing Labor still strongly ahead) is nothing to panic about for the Liberals. As Gerard Henderson writes today, the main effect of last week's attack on Kevin Rudd was to show he is not a saint. (Indeed, if you saw last night's tough grilling of him on The 7.30 Report, you would know that Rudd can be as evasive about his specific memory as any politician.) As others have also noted, the other thing about last week is that Kevin Rudd suddenly revealed an inclination to initially go to water when surprised by an attack. This reaction is of most interest to those in the government doing the tactical plotting against him.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that unless someone who attended the meetings with Rudd and Burke suddenly comes out with damaging information about what was discussed, Howard and Costello will have to let the issue slip away soon, or else they will definitely look like they are over-reacting. The true benefit of the attack has been achieved already.

Keating coming out in defence of Rudd only helps the government, despite the unbounded joy his nasty style of attack gives his old admirers. (As an aside, that link is to a post by the person who gets my vote for the most consistently irritating style of any current contributor to any political blog in Australia: Aussie Bob at Road to Surfdom. It's not even a contest.)

Today's polling shows other dangers for Labor. Australians are warming to the idea of nuclear power. Widespread scepticism about the initial reactions to global warming, such as carbon offset schemes, seems to be developing strongly over recent weeks, and I expect that it will continue to grow. This will mean an increased emphasis on emissions free power, and the limits of the use of windpower and solar for base load electricity will also be increasingly recognised.

I therefore expect that nuclear power for Australia will increasingly be seen by the public as a real alternative if you are serious about CO2, and the Liberals are the only party who will even contemplate it. As I suggested last week, if they were to grab the chance to run with new, inherently safer nuclear designs, they may gain extra credibility.

Other issues of danger for the Howard government - the trial of Hicks, progress in Iraq, the state of play in Timor, are all in too much of a state of flux to make firm predictions. Actually, there seems to be some reason to be vaguely optimistic on the "surge" in Iraq, despite the ease with which bombings can still take place. So I am not necessarily writing Iraq off as a clear detriment to the Liberals yet.

My final prediction: Brendan Nelson will remain a goose. He should be cut free.

Keeping them cool for baby

It's interesting to see that a study confirms that some men's sperm count is seriously affected by having hot baths.

The idea that heat is bad for sperm is well known, of course, but it surprises me that no one seems to have done studies on this in the one country where very hot baths are a really popular past time - Japan.

If hot baths can kill off a normal male's fertility, I would expect there to be at least a seasonal drop in conception in Japan during the winter months for those men who regularly bathe. They like their baths hot, and newer houses have ones with a water heater that keeps the bath water at a constant temperature, which certainly encourages a long soak. Has anyone looked at that?

Comedy from Conan

Conan O'Brien is a weird looking man with very strange hair. His style is sometimes irritating, and I can't really imagine why NBC thinks he has a broad enough appeal to be the replacement for Tonight Show host Jay Leno. (Leno is more or less harmless, but his scripted material is just fair to middling and fairly low brow. Letterman is much sharper and smarter, and the touch of crankiness appeals to me.)

But for my taste, Conan's show often has the best scripted eccentric comedy bits around. Have a look at this recent YouTube clip of him and Jim Carrey (who I really don't like) talking about quantum physics (sort of).

Update: bad link has been fixed.

Burning rhetoric

The IHT yesterday had a small article that, to this Australian at least, reads as somewhat overblown:

This summer, Australia feels like a war zone. Cities and towns across the country are enveloped in a perpetual smoke haze, and the braying of fire sirens is as commonplace as birdsong. Every evening television commentators deliver grim-faced reports from the front lines.

Tired farmers look dazedly into the camera. Firemen with soot-smeared clothes and chili-red eyes shake their heads and mumble that they have never known anything like it.

As with every modern war report, helicopters make a ubiquitous backdrop. They dip down in front of shrinking reservoirs, then stagger toward the fire front, their water pouches swaying marsupial-like underneath their bellies.

Look, I know that it was an early and harsh fire season in the South, and Melbourne had a lot of smoke haze. But still, writing like this is more for dramatic effect than reflecting most Australians' experience.

So who is the writer? It's Professor Iain McCalman from ANU, a historian of sorts. If he writes up current day events like this, I am curious as to the accuracy of the "colour" that he may add to his histories.

He certainly knows how to talk the academic talk to the right audience. This is from what seems to be an address in 2000:

Deeply imbued with deconstructionist theories and methods, New Historicists tend to juxtapose some aspect of a canonical text with a seemingly unrelated fragment of contemporary culture in order to demonstrate the multiple flux of meanings within. Their mission is to expose textual silences, elisions and contradictions, and to show that both text and context are fragmentary and incomplete, riddled with contradiction and uncertainty.

By contrast we historians are trained habitually to connect and construct, to seek out unitary as well as differential meanings, and to track similarities across our sources over time. When we work to recover lost or suppressed historical voices, it is usually to make normative claims, to argue for the value and dignity of those peoples and traditions that have suffered posterity’s enormous condescension.

I have read worse examples, but it still could do with a dose of de-jargonisation. Interesting view he has of the aim of many historians, too. (See the section in bold.)

In the same address, the Professor makes the following claim:

Let me finish by taking us closer to home by referring to one specific example of a cultural narrative that is still gripping most of us today—the harrowing story of the ‘stolen generation’. Here surely is one of the most powerful narratives to emerge out of the sorry history of Australian European–Aboriginal contact, and it is a story that will not go away. If John Howard thinks that he can argue it out of existence by statistical and semantic cheeseparing about what percentage of people constitutes a ‘generation’ or by claims that Aboriginal children were not ‘stolen’ but borrowed for their own good, he is yapping in the wind. This story obtains its emotional power not only from a mosaic of individual tragedies enacted over successive epochs, but also because it crystallizes our deepest guilts as European Australians and taps our deepest mythic memories as western moderns. ...

Our formative early reading and film viewing has been steeped in stories about stolen generations of children: whether it is the lost boys of Peter Pan, the stolen children in Pinocchio, the street waifs of Victorian England snared by Fagin, the abducted young girls of Parisian bordellos, or the lost generation of young men blasted out of existence on the beaches of Gallipoli. All these prior traces feed the cultural purchase and power of cultural narrative that has become, and will long remain, European Australia’s brand of shame.

Nice theory, Professor, but hands up any Australian readers who think the "stolen generation narrative" is actually politically significant today? The problems in Aboriginal communities are severe and extremely difficult to remedy regardless of whether the "stolen generation" is true or not, and which political party is trying to address them. I reckon the flurry of sympathy the stolen generation story got from a segment of white Australia has more or less burnt itself out, and the Professor didn't seem to see that coming.

Despite this, his bio states:

In February 2005, he was appointed to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He chaired an inquiry into Creativity and the Innovation Economy, presenting the report to Prime Minister and Cabinet in December 2005.

I guess the pool of potential appointees for such inquiries isn't all that big here.

Missed it by that much...

According to a report in The Guardian, the UK's reduced CO2 target will be missed by, oh, only 30 years or so:

An independent scientific audit of the UK's climate change policies predicts that the government will fall well below its target of a 30% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 - which means that the country will not reach its 2020 milestone until 2050.

Anyway, I plan to be living on the Moon by then in my transhumanist engineered robo-body. Either that, or in a retirement village close to the sea (which by then, will mean in Toowoomba.) This is assuming that CERN hasn't ended the universe beforehand.

I remain a "glass is half full" sort of guy.

Unimportant disasters

Some languages are dying out. Some people who make a living by studying them take this very seriously:

Humans speak more than 6,000 languages. Nearly all of them could be extinct in the next two centuries.

So what?

University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Michael Krauss addressed that question during his presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, which begins today in San Francisco.

"I claim that it is catastrophic for the future of mankind," Krauss said. "It should be as scary as losing 90 percent of the biological species."

I have no idea how to judge how scary that would be. Given nature's particular fondness for insects, I am guessing you could get close to 90% before even reaching the creatures we actually like. And if a significant number of the blood sucking, disease carrying ones went away, I may not be too worried at all. (Yes, I am half joking here. It's all very complicated, this inter species diversity stuff, so I am told. Still, I am not entirely sure what irreplaceable benefit to the ecosystem are, say, the malaria carrying mosquitoes.)

But back to languages:

Humanity became human in a complex system of languages that interacted with each other.

"That is somehow interdependent such that we lose sections of it at the same peril that we lose sections of the biosphere," Krauss said. "Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive."

I have heard this sort of argument before, and never found it convincing. I would have thought that the evolution of language was something that just happened, and government intervention could only slow the inevitable. Furthermore, the idea used to be that a universal language would help promote world peace and understanding; but now that forecasts of ecological disaster are culturally popular, by analogy a loss of languages will also be a catastrophe.

How can any linguist really prove that losing a language is a detriment to society overall? What he is spruiking here does not even sound like real science to me.

If this line of argument is the best they can come up with, I will remain a firm non-believer.

Global warming and Europe

Tigerhawk has an interesting post up suggesting a possible explanation for why Europeans seem to take global warming more seriously as an issue than Americans.

China problems

A couple of weeks ago, I heard a (ABC Radio National) Counterpoint interview with George Friedman from Strategic Forecasting about the future of China. He made out a pretty convincing sounding case for possibly quite severe economic troubles ahead. A transcript is now available.

This seemed to be a crucial point:

George Friedman: The conservative count of non-performing loans is $600 billion in non-performing loans. A more realistic estimate that comes from companies like Ernst & Young are $900 billion in non-performing loans. There are some who say that non-performing loans are in the $1.2 to $1.3 trillion range. However you look at it, we're talking about somewhere between 30% and 60% of the Chinese GDP being bound up in bad loans. To benchmark it, when Japan reached about 15% non-performing loans of GDP it began its severe generation-long recession.

When East Asia, particularly South Korea, for example, reached about 20%, 22% it began to tumble.

The news today that China is expanding its military spending was in line with what Friedman said here:

China is not that difficult a country to blockade, and the Chinese regard the Americans as highly unpredictable, not fully rational, and that makes them very nervous. So one of the things we've seen the Chinese do, we saw a Chinese submarine penetrate an American carrier battle group a few months ago which is a pretty aggressive and unusual move. We've seen them in space use lasers to try to blind American satellites, and we've seen them demonstrate an anti-satellite system.

So the Chinese are moving fairly aggressively in the high-tech side of things to develop counters to American power, and quite frankly they've got people in Washington quite concerned because they seem to be very good at it.

You really should read the whole interview.

A very trivial post

The Japan Times has a travel story about the extremely busy Shinjuku area in Tokyo. (You should read it if you are going to be in Tokyo soon.) Maybe I am easily amused, but the name of this old association struck me as very funny:

Outbreaks of cholera and eventual deterioration of the wooden Tamagawa conduits brought about the Shinjuku-based Yodobashi Purification Plant in 1892. Impressed with the plant's engineering, the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association of London presented Shinjuku with a ponderous commemorative fountain, which today sits just outside the east exit of Shinjuku Station.

I'm also not sure if these are official or unofficial names:

The claustrophobia-inducing underpass toward the west side of Shinjuku Station feeds into a web of yokocho (side alleys) with a postwar patina. The names of some alleys, shomben (urine) and gokiburi (cockroach) might be better lost in translation, but the Lilliputian yakitori and drinking joints are fully packed by 5 p.m. every night.

I think I have a photo of me in one of those.

Charles on the Moon

Well what d'ya know. I didn't realise that likeable conservative Charles Krauthammer was such a space nut. He has a nice column today about why going to the Moon is a Good Thing.

As he notes, a lot of the criticism of human space exploration comes from those on the left of politics, because of some crazy idea they have that human society on Earth is perfectable if only you spend enough money on it. As Charles says:

I find this objection incomprehensible. When will we stop having problems here on earth? In a fallen world of endless troubles, that does not stop us from allocating resources to endeavors we find beautiful, exciting and elevating -- opera, alpine skiing, feature films -- yet solve no social problems.

Well said, Charles, although he then hastens to add there is good science to be done on the Moon anyway.

Not only does he love space, we agree on priorities:

Sure, Mars would be better. It holds open the possibility of life and might even have water on its surface today. But the best should not be the enemy of the good. Mars is simply too far, too dangerous, too difficult, too expensive. We won't go there for a hundred years.

Given the disinclination of lefties to want to be in on colonizing anything (even barren rocks currently devoid of life), it would seem a fair bet that the politics of future space colonies might of the rather conservative, or perhaps libertarian, bent. (By the way, I have increasingly felt that the later novels of Robert Heinlein, with their libertarian societies and all kinds of marriage and sexual arrangements, have actually turned out to be more prophetic, and at much greater speed, than I ever expected when I read them in the 1980's. I still can't get over how quickly Western society has swung in its acceptance of gay marriage as a concept, for example.)

Anyway, I doubt there are going to be any socialists on the Moon, even if there will be a high degree of interdependence amongst the residents in small colonies.

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.)