Under the knife not good for the brain (and a rant against cosmetic surgery)

It seems to me that there is still a lot that is not understood about the possible consequences of modern anaesthetics. A story in Nature points out:

Exposure to widely used anaesthetic drugs increases production of a brain protein thought to cause Alzheimer's disease, a study of mice has shown. The research feeds concern that general anaesthesia may be linked to dementia in humans.

Inhaled doses of halothane, one of a class of drugs called volatile anaesthetics, increase the amount of a protein called amyloid beta in mouse brains, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have found.

Some 60 million people worldwide are given volatile anaesthetics each year. The drugs are known to cause 'post-operative cognitive decline' in many cases, which can last for days, weeks or years.

If these drugs boost production of amyloid beta, they may also be linked to long-term dementias such as Alzheimer's. The brains of Alzheimer's patients contain high levels of amyloid beta, although the molecule's links with disease are still unknown.

Clearly, being put under for an operation always carries some risks, and what puzzles me is that the cosmetic surgery industry seems to be booming despite this. Just how clearly are the risks of the anaesthetics alone explained to someone who is undergoing a voluntary operation for something as mundane an increase in bra size?

Four Corners had a good show about the industry in Australia last year, and I am not sure whether I had an earlier post about it. In any event, here's the link.

If there is one area where I have a sort of socialist urge to kill off a profession for ideological reasons, the cosmetic surgery industry is it. At a time when there are not enough doctors for everyday illnesses, it seems scandalous to me that so many should be diverting off into the world of facelifts, breast implants and tummy tucks. The TV shows that are devoted to cosmetic surgery "makeover" stories are just awful in the way they promote such surgery as crucial to self esteem. I say ban those shows! Only allow plastic surgery for those who are disfigured as a result of illness or accident. Liposuction should be illegal!

People will say that it is market forces at work. True, but we also regulate and restrict lots of things that, arguably, the market wants. Prostitution comes to mind. It can be regulated in such a way that it minimises harm, but we don't want brothels all over the place, and restrict the way it can be advertised. Also, there is no real argument as to the valuable resources it is diverting from an area of employment for which there is an urgent shortage. Most prostitutes aren't there because they don't want to use their degree (partly paid for by the government) for a more socially beneficial job.

So, cosmetic surgery is arguably in need of greater restriction.

I have no idea how it should be done, but if I were Australian Dictator, ordering doctors out of that industry and into a field of practice that is actually socially useful would be one of my first actions.

Note: revised considerably since first posted a couple of hours ago. The thing is, I often post first when I am busy and then re-read it an hour later and see mistakes or a better way of wording it. Provided I don't change my basic argument, I just revise it and don't bother telling people. Usually, only a few people would have read the first version by that time anyway.

An odd comment

Ronald Dworkin has a short comment piece in The Guardian in which he sets high standards for "genuine" democracy:

In a new book I argue that the conditions of genuine democracy are far from met in the US, the UK and other mature self-styled democracies. These conditions can easily be set out in very abstract terms. Government must respect human rights, it must respect religious freedom and other forms of freedom of conscience, it must distribute its wealth so as to give everyone a fair stake in its economy and, above all, it must conduct its elections and other political procedures argumentatively so that each citizen is treated as someone worth convincing not just outvoting.

In the comments that follow, I found this one, which starts off as if it is written by a normal intelligent person, but then suddenly ends with such aggression that it made me laugh in surprise:

I live in America.
I know I live in a democracy. I serve on my local town's water board, and on a county hospital board. Two of my friends are county supervisors. We argue our cases before our voters, the state, and the federal government. We've failed in some things but been successful at others and got funding to improve our hospital, our water system, our infrastructure. We've made a difference.
I discuss religion, politics, and economics on forums and blogs like this one before an audience of millions. My voice is heard. I get a fair hearing.
Because of this I know Ronald Dworkin is a sub-human, lying moron not fit to write advertising for toilet paper. He belongs in a sewage treatment plant where he can be converted to useful fertilizer.

You have to remember to take your pills before commenting, you know.

Fun in the diplomatic life

An ambassador is caught out having just a bit too much fun in the Embassy:

Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.

Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.

I just hope our likely future ambassador Amanda Vanstone doesn't get any ideas...

Slowing down the universe

It is possible that the current accelerating expansion of the universe will slow down and stop. There's a recent arxiv paper about it here, in which it seems to be argued that a natural process may lead to deceleration.

On the other hand, Frank Tipler believes that expanding intelligence in the universe will cause its slowing and eventual collapse. (But with the happy ending of the Omega Point, which is the equivalent of eternal heaven.) I like the idea; it's good to know there is useful work to be done until the end of time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Frank Tipler is writing a book in which he maintains that the most important miracles of Christianity can be explained by the same mechanism to be used to stop the universe expanding. Here's a sample of his ideas:

It is this mechanism of baryon annihilation via electroweak tunnelling that could have been used to accomplish ALL of the miracles described in the Gospels, in particular the Resurrection. I point out in my book [1] that Jesus' resurrection body, as described in the Gospels, has all the essential properties of the computer emulation resurrection bodies we all will have in the far future. The property most difficult to duplicate at the lowest level of implementation is the sudden dematerialization (vanishing from the appearance of His disciples) and re-materialization (suddenly appearing inside a locked room). De-materialization can be accomplished by electroweak quantum tunneling, which violates baryon number and lepton number conservation. The key reaction would be proton plus electron goes to neutrino plus antineutrino. This would convert all the matter in Jesus' body into neutrinos, which interact so weakly with matter that a person in a room with Jesus would see only Jesus appear to vanish. (If the matter of a human body were converted into photons rather than neutrinos, this would be equivalent to the detonation of a 1,000-megaton H-bomb, assuming Jesus weighed 178 pounds ([27], p. 2). The people of Judea would notice this, though the disciples would not, since they would be vaporized.) Materialization apparently out of nothing could be carried out by reversing the process . The Resurrection is then merely an example of first de-materialization of Jesus' dead body, followed by the materialization of a living body. The Resurrection, in other words, is a profoundly different process than the mere resuscitation of a corpse.

I must admit that I have not even read all of that article. It is very long, and deals with the Virgin Birth, Turin Shroud and even original sin. All are explained in a quasi scientific way (to the satisfaction of Tipler's mind, anyway.)

I don't think he is mad; he's a physicist/cosmologist who seems to have done good work for many years. However, I reckon his views are going to be taken as so eccentric and on the fringe that his book might not even be reviewed by the science community.

There is more I want to say about miracles, but don't have time today.

Metaphors on the march

In 2004, the SMH's Alan Ramsey went on and on about Latham being a Mack truck looming behind John Howard. (Handy list of links is at Tim Blair's.) Today, Phillip Adams writes:

There’s a hurricane called Kevin bearing down on John Howard.

I think there may be some law that silly metaphors doom a candidature, so conservatives can stop being quite so worried about those poll results now.

The Clinton character question

Captain's Quarters has a post about the latest evidence of Hillary Clinton's tendency to either confabulate or lie about her past. Some other examples were helpfully listed by Dick Morris in his Lateline interview here.

Such people make me uncomfortable in real life, as social politeness often prevents any correction to false recollections told to a group. Not every politician has to be personally likeable to achieve good things, but a repeated history of telling falsehoods about your past does reflect poorly on character, and on reliability of judgement in all aspects of your life.

On Kurdistan

I forget to mention last week that the always absorbing Foreign Correspondent on ABC had an interesting story on Kurdistan. You can watch it on streaming video via this page.

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.