Short budget comment

Costello provides vision beyond the pork-barrelling - Editorial - Opinion

If even The Age has an editorial with a heading like that approving of the Budget, it can't be a bad one.

One for every backyard

Clean Energy / Infinia Corporation

With funding for solar power expected to be increased in tonight's budget, I wonder whether home based solar thermal will ever become much of an option. I quite like the look of the system at the link above, which is still (unfortunately) not yet on the market.

I am a little dubious about solar cells on the roof because of their limited life, and the danger from hail storms. I am guessing that a solar thermal system may be more easily repaired if it suffers storm damage.

Proof of cold fusion?

DailyTech - Navy Heats Up Cold Fusion Hopes

There's no indication that the type of could fusion allegedly shown here will end up being useful, but it would still be good to see an idea that has been so attacked by other scientists proved true.

On other blogs...

1. Probably everyone who reads me also reads Tim Blair. Still, I think that in his most recent post he comes up with up his funniest line for a long time (after quoting from the NYT):

The children are all too familiar with the apocalyptic warnings of climate change. “A lot of people are going to die” from global warming, a 9-year-old girl from Harlem announced at one point. And a 7-year-old boy from Park Slope said with a quiet lisp, “When you use too much electricity, it kills animals.”

Well, it does if you hook up the electrodes right.

2. Andrew Bolt has a good post on the pessimism of science fiction, brought on by recently re-watching Blade Runner. His conclusion:

Yes, it’s only a film, but it also fits a pattern of imagining of our future.

We actually wind up not much different in our wants, and not less vigilant on the whole against threats, than is often feared. We remain in the West extremely inventive, and driven more by the wishes of the public than the demands of the leaders.

That probably explains why artists and “seers” so often get us wrong, and imagine us becoming in time so much gloomier, oppressed, bullied, atrophied and poor than we inevitably and eventually turn out. In reminding us of this, Blade Runner is a comfort.

True. I also have heard Orwell's 1984 being read on Radio National recently, while I have been driving around town. It reminded me how much I disliked that book, both from a stylistic point of view (I think it is plain awful writing,) and for its ridiculous over-reach in the dystopia it paints. By taking aspects of totalitarianism, which were bad enough in their current form when Orwell wrote, and then exaggerating them wildly with an imagined technology which is still off the mark, combined with a way of writing characters which robbed them of any realistic humanity, the effect became that I just could not take it seriously. (Even with a one child policy, did China develop an "Anti-sex League"? )

3. Zoe Brain has brought to my attention the very enjoyable site Paleo-Future, which seems devoted entirely to looking at how the future has been imagined in the past. (I think it has been mentioned at Boing Boing before, but maybe I didn't follow the link.) I love this sort of stuff, growing up as I did in the (generally) optimistic 1960's, and expect to visit there regularly.

More icky moments in medical history...

Found via Arts & Letters Daily, there's book out called "Impotence - a Cultural History". In the Daily Telegraph review, there's an amusing list of odd impotence cures through history. One that I found odd because it is so specific is this:

...according to Ovid the "right molar of a small crocodile worn as an amulet guarantees erection in men".

Not just any crocodile molar, evidently, but the one on the right. How did the ancients come up with some of this stuff?

The other link from Arts & Letters is to an extract from the book itself, from which one can read a little about early experiments in testicular transplant:

The first experiment in grafting an entire testicle was performed by Dr. G. Frank Lydston on himself, on January 16, 1914. Expressing his disappointment that vulgar prejudices heretofore had prevented the exploitation of the sex glands of the dead, Lydston coolly reported how he transplanted into his own scrotum a suicide victim’s testicle. [p. 186]

L. L. Stanley, resident physician of the California state prison in San Quentin, reported in 1922 that he had first implanted testicles from executed convicts and then moved on to inject into his subjects via a dental syringe solutions of goat, ram, boar, and deer testicles. Altogether he made 1000 injections into 656 men. Stanley had been inspired by work of Serge Voronoff, an eminent Russian-born medical scientist working at the Collége de France. Voronoff in 1919 scandalized many by transplanting the testes of chimpanzees into men. He asserted that “marked psychical and sexual excitation” typically resulted, followed by a resurgence of memory, energy and “genital functions.” [pp. 186-7]

I am sure I have heard of experiments with ground up animal testes before, but I don't recall reading about whole chimp testes bit.

I guess there was little resembling ethics committees in those days.

A good reason to avoid diabetes...

Turns out that diabetic's foot ulcers, even those with antibiotic resistant staph infections, do well with maggot treatment. There's an unpleasant photo of the maggots in action on someone's foot at the linked article.

Adams confirms his philosopher of choice

Scott Adams has a funny post in which he explains that he has discovered he is a follower of Spinoza. His reaction on reading about him on Wikipedia:

Holy cow! My opinions match Spinoza’s perfectly. It turns out that being ignorant is almost exactly like being a well-read student of philosophy who can quote from the work of the masters. How lucky is that?

The rest of the post is fun too. He's quite a wit, although I have noticed that the topic of bestiality seems to appear with unwelcome frequency on his blog.

A small triumph for a woman in Saudi Arabia

BBC NEWS From Our Own Correspondent | The first woman to swim in Saudi

Interesting.

Womb fights

It's an unusual event for me to be agreeing with Alan Ramsey, but his take on Bill Heffernan's revived comments on Julia Gillard seem about right. (Of course, by the end of his article, Ramsey is off on a bit of Keating admiration, and my disapproval of this sets the world right again.)

Despite Bill's clumsy way of putting it (I suspect that about 75% of the problem was the use of the word "barren,") as an issue I still think it is pretty fascinating to watch the modern feminist reaction to this.

As I noted in an earlier post, Julia Gillard seems to have expressed an attitude of "you can't have it all" as her reason for not having children. Isn't this a pretty dramatic, and quite conservatively aligned, change of attitude from the school of feminism that insists that society needs to be arranged so that women can do family and work at once?

Even though she supports Julia, if I were a female politician with children, I certainly can't see that I would be treating Tracee Hutchison as an ally. Maybe you can read Gillard as simply meaning that no one can easily be a mother and federal politician. (In her quote linked at my previous post, she made the point that male politicians only manage because they leave the mother at home to look after the kids. But even that overlooks the fact that some female politicians do manage by having a stay at home father.) Maybe Julia's comments are limited to her own assessment of her own abilities? (Well, I don't think that is right, but I am just looking at all possible spin you can place on it). But Tracee takes the argument to a whole new level:

Gillard's supposition that she couldn't have done babies and politics simultaneously — and done justice to both — should be given the respectful consideration it deserves...

Do you know the people who'll be thinking most about your comments, Senator Heffernan? Women who don't have children, that's who.

Clearly the senator, and many like him, have never considered that women without children probably spend more time thinking about the consequences of choices and the dynamics of society than people who spend their lives flying around the country on parliamentary salaries or up to their elbows in nappy buckets and vomit.

Conversations about nappy buckets and birth choices do not a society make.

Ask a woman with kids how much she thinks family dominates the structure of her life and she'll tell you it occupies most of her waking hours, even if she's juggling a career around it. She won't have given much thought to it, mind you; it's just how it is and she hasn't got time for musing anyway.

Um, doesn't this seem to be saying that it is obvious that women with children have no time to think deeply about anything, apart from what to cook for dinner tonight? What are those mothers doing as politicians then?

One suspect's that Tracee's reaction may be based on her very personal reaction to how other women, and men, react to her as (I assume?) a childless woman:

...ask a woman without kids how often she feels like an outsider looking in on a world she can't connect with and she will have some real insight into the way society functions. Particularly the way it reflects the status of women...

Sounds to me like she has lost a friend or two after they've gone off and joined the world of motherhood. (I could be wrong, of course, and misreading her completely.)

Tracee also seems to hate the way parties like to support families:

Despite John Howard's and Peter Costello's attempts to distance themselves from their wayward senator's latest spray, they are the culprits of turning the family values mantra into political paydirt and their imminent budget sweeteners to families will reinforce it.

Forget about the clever country we once aspired to be, we've become the conception country.

Somehow, I don't the Labor campaign is going to keep her happy either.

The creepy side of Japan

Photos of preteen girls in thongs now big business | The Japan Times Online

What this article says is quite true - if you go to Akihabara in Tokyo, which most visitors do to look through the vast world of consumer electric goods - there are also stores selling magazines and DVDs which, by the cover, clearly are about underage girls in various states of undress.

That Japan tolerates this seems pretty remarkable. As the article indicates, it's not that it doesn't have child porn laws, it seems just to lack the will to enforce them.

Hitchens on Hitchens (and other stuff)

Go here for a short, half amusing, half serious, interview with Christopher H.

Labor knows how to recruit

Rudd's star recruit is raising eyebrows - Opinion - smh.com.au

A very funny opening to this SMH article:

LEADERSHIP, women and sport aren't often seen together. Sometimes when they are, the different worlds collide spectacularly. Take Nicole Cornes, the very blonde wife of Graham Cornes, a legendary South Australian AFL footballer. She remarked yesterday, after her awkward press conference announcing she would be the Labor candidate for the federal Liberal seat of Boothby had been splashed across the front page, that "first thing in the morning when you wake up, you think, oh God, I should have had my eyebrows waxed".

And if I can be allowed to be exceedingly shallow for a moment, has anyone else thought that Peter Garrett's face recently is looking more gaunt and, well, scarier than ever? Compare this photo with this one. (Actually, I don't know how recent the second one is, but if he doesn't smile, he looks pretty crook.)

A gift for pun writers

TV ban is hard cheese for dairymen-News-Politics-TimesOnline

Apparently, England has banned cheese advertisements from children's TV, because it is deemed to be high in fat and salt. (I thought it was also good for teeth and an important source of calcium, but there you go.)

Naturally, cheese makers are not happy:

A survey published in The Grocer magazine, of 100 senior people in the dairy industry, confirmed that the overwhelming view was that cheese is under siege.

Only 2 per cent believed that the Government was supportive of the cheese industry while 52 per cent said that it was actively “anticheese”.

What foods can they advertise on kid's TV, I wonder. Green salad? As a fan of cheese (in moderation) myself, I hope to see rioting in the streets of London over this, and the downfall of the government.

Issues with reproductive technology

There's an interesting article at Slate about a couple of new books on the problems with assisted reproduction (IVF and other techniques).

The main current problem: the number of embryos which are often implanted has lead to a large rise in the number of multiple births, which tend to be bad for everyone (mothers, children and society.) There are also higher rates in IVF children of other odd medical conditions, and no one yet understands why.

The situation in Australia is summarised in a fairly recent Medical Journal of Australia article. It would seem that maybe only 30% of women here try a single embryo implant, and the rest go for double embryo transfer. This is despite the very significant health risks of having twins.

(The Slate article indicates that in America, some clinics may offer to implant 3 or even 4 embryos, which is pretty crazy really.)

I love technology, but have old fashioned views when it comes to reproduction. I can't quite reconcile how a country like Australia can have both an abortion rate of perhaps 80,000 or so per year, and around 5,000 births through IVF. There are clearly thousands of healthy embryos going to waste, while at the same time a relatively small proportion of women are going through expensive, painful and potentially dangerous treatment to have a child that stands a higher rate of illness than a naturally conceived one.

One final, slightly off the wall, point to make. I hope people have not forgotten about the 2001 study which indicated a very strong positive relationship between third party prayers and the success of IVF.

I had wondered why such a startling result was not the subject of follow up studies. However, it seems that the paper was pursued hard by a group associated with the Skeptical Inquirer, who pointed out the generally fraudulent activities of one of the authors. The skeptics attack is explained here. It is worth noting that it is based on guilt by association, rather than establishing how any fraud may actually have been done. (The skeptic's report seems also wrong where it indicates that the Journal of Reproductive Medicine removed the report from its website. It still seems to be there now, as shown by my link above.)

The skeptics also get a bit silly, I think, when they say that the head doctor of the study:

...was investigated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Human Subject Protections, because the researchers never got informed consent from the patients in the trial. Such misconduct is a serious violation of medical ethics and federal rules that were adopted to prevent the kind of atrocities that occurred in Nazi Germany and in the United States during the infamous Tuskeegee Syphilis Study.

Oh come on. What they were studying was something that could only have positive results if successful. Unless skeptics think that there is a risk that God punishes those hopeful women who were being prayed for, this is a pretty trivial issue, isn't it?

I would like to know if anyone else is going to do a similar study, but Googling has not brought up any quick answer to that.

If it was confirmed, it would certainly indicate that, if nothing else, God seems to like babies.

A problem with Starbucks

Bryan Appleyard has an amusing post about irritating people who effectively set up office in Starbucks. (I like the punchline especially.) Can't say that I have ever witnessed this behaviour in Brisbane, but then I don't like Starbucks and rarely visit them.

As far as I can tell, most Australians think Starbucks coffee is not great. I am no great fan of the beverage, but I really like a medium size Very Vanilla Chiller from Gloria Jeans. The GJ franchise just seems a lot more relaxed and less pretentious than Starbucks, too.

Do black holes exist at all?

Could black holes be portals to other universes? - space - 27 April 2007 - New Scientist Space

I missed this last week. Seems that maybe it is hard to tell a black hole from a wormhole.

This is also relevant to the issue of micro black holes. As the article says:

And there might be a way to test the conjecture. Some physicists say that future particle accelerator experiments could produce microscopic black holes (see Atom smasher may give birth to 'Black Saturns').

Such tiny black holes would emit measurable amounts of Hawking radiation, proving that they are black holes rather than wormholes. But if Solodukhin is right, and microscopic wormholes are formed instead, no such radiation would be expected. "In that case, you would actually see if it is a black hole or a wormhole," he says.

An added benefit of wormholes is that they could resolve the so-called black hole information paradox.

Is there any safety significance to a micro wormhole being created at CERN instead of a micro black hole? I suspect not, but it would good to have someone who knows more than a blogger from Brisbane saying it.

Charming

I've complained before about the dire quality of Road to Surfdom since Tim Dunlop handed over the reigns to the likes of Ken L and Aussie Bob.

It's not that it's just anti-Howard; the name calling is offensive. Have a look at the description Aussie Bob gives to ABC newsreader Juanita Phillips in his recent comment here.

Oh yes, the Left is full of respect for women.

Dunlop himself in a post felt free to use c**t for humourous effect, and his commenters were happy to follow suit. JF Beck also had a post on his site recently showing the sophisticated level of debate that Ken L exhibits when challenged. (I might have had something to do with that...)

Anyway, my point is that it's a pathetic site that is only saved from criticism by the Left by being on the Left.

More than you ever needed to know about duck anatomy

In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia - New York Times

Who knew that duck's had such strange genitalia:

Dr. Brennan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University and the University of Sheffield, visits the sanctuary every two weeks to measure the phalluses of six species of ducks.

When she first visited in January, the phalluses were the size of rice grains. Now many of them are growing rapidly. The champion phallus from this Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring.

Not much chance of a duck hiding his interest during summer.

Mad scientist at work?

One of my ongoing duties to my embarrassingly small readership is to keep an eye on arxiv.org and report on papers that I don't understand but which still seem important, or at least entertaining.

My latest find is a topical one for Australia. The extremely prolific Russian-American scientist Alexander Bolokin has a recent paper with two novel approaches to extracting water from the air in large quantities. The paper itself, in far from perfect English, is here.

The two ideas:

1. A 3 to 5 km high (!) and 200 m wide inflatable tube is erected and supported by wire cables. Moist air is heated at the bottom, rises up through the tube (drawn up by the wind shear at the top of the open tube.) Moisture condenses at high altitude, is collected and on its way back down is used to generate electricity (through a turbine at the base, I think he means.) He also has a wind turbine at the top, although one expects that this may be rather heavy and not be good for the balance of a 3 km high inflatable tube. Solar cells on the outside of the tube get a mention too.

As I will explain below, Bolokin has a real fondness for high inflateable towers as potential tourist attractions, and this tower also has elevators and tourism built into the concept.

How much water does he think this will produce? About 224,000 Kilolitres a day. According to the Courier Mail, the south east region of Queensland was currently still using about 700 megalitres a day. So one tower does not do away with the need for rain entirely, but would make up a very reliable big percentage of daily use.

2. The second idea is to pump moist surface air through a tube beneath the sea to a depth of perhaps 30 m, where (so he says) the water temperature is 5 - 10 degrees. I assume water is then condensed out too, but the details of this method seem poorly explained compared to the big tower. Certainly, though, the engineering involved in getting air down to 30 m below sea level sound a lot less daunting than getting it up a tube 3 km high.

You can't accuse him of not thinking big, at least.

But is he making any sense at all?

One of his other recent ideas is for an inflatable space elevator filled with electron gas. His "electrostatic mast" would simply be built from the ground up, up to 36,000 km high or more. (Actually, he says that current strength materials would allow one to be built up to 500 km high; bigger ones require new material, I think.)

Bolokin notes that a feature of such a tower would be the "entertainment and observation platform", although he does not specify at what dizzying height this could be.

One other idea he mentions:

The airship from the thin film filled by an electron gas has 30% more lift force then conventional dirigible filled by helium. (2) Electron dirigible is significantly cheaper then same helium dirigible because the helium is very expensive gas. (3) One does not have problem with changing the lift force because no problem to add or to delete the electrons.

So, while he appears to have done sane enough work in past, has Bolokin jumped the shark with these ideas? Or is the future really inflatable?

Current movie dross

It's good to see Quentin Tarantino having a certified flop. His main oeuvre of ironic dark splatter fun has never appealed to me, and (dare I say it, because he does have his intelligent defenders) has always seemed to me to be the work of an immature man made primarily for immature men.

There are worse films around, though, and it always surprises me that the surge in misogynistic horror (including Australia's own recent entry - "Wolf Creek") has been attracting an audience, but little in the way of public outcry. The Guardian has a good article about this disturbing trend. You would have thought that even "third wave" feminists might have been more vocal about this, but it seems to attract very little attention, apart from the odd scathing review.

Even without the misogynistic element, I just don't get horror generally. Tension and scares are fine, enjoyable even, but a desire to see the blood and guts and body bits dismembered - what exactly is the appeal? Give me Hitchcock and a knife in the back any day over a realistic depiction of decapitation.