Run away!

Let's talk about sleepovers - National - smh.com.au

This is a long, mildly interesting, article about Australian teenagers and sex today. It notes that:

Three-quarters of teens in year 10 remain virgins, says a national survey of secondary students in 2002, and the adolescents themselves tend to think this is a good thing.

But barely a few sentences later:

The average age for first intercourse among men 40 years ago was 18, and for women, 19. It has dropped to 16 for both sexes.

By year 10, most kids are deep kissing and genital touching. Roughly a third experience oral sex, with the practice widely seen as a safer alternative to intercourse. This development is new. Before the porno flick Deep Throat popularised fellatio in the 1970s, it tended to be the preserve of married couples.

Hmm. That's what we have to thank porn for; increasing this activity amongst 15 year olds?

Anyway, here is the section that is the reason for my title for this post:

Kids already know about bestiality, anal sex and the turkey slap, but they could use a word or two on how real intimacy might feel. Professor Susan Sawyer, a leading pediatrician who directs the Centre for Adolescent Health at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, thinks parents ought to start the conversation with their kids by giving condoms and the morning-after pill on their 15th birthday. Not as a green light, but as a reality check and an opening to confide. "By the time they're 16, kids ought to have opened up a condom, blown it up and played with it."

What an understatement opens the next sentence:

This won't be everyone's style...

Given the frequent perversity with which teenagers don't exactly follow their parents' world views, I can imagine that the (surely rare!) sort of parent that wants to play condom balloons with their son or daughter on their 15th birthday will sometimes find said child recoiling with horror at the affront to their desire to remain a virgin until married.

This has also just reminded me of the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Malcolm's mother horrifies and sickens him by holding him hostage in the car while he gets an extremely detailed talk on sex and relationships.

Oh - which reminds me of one of the funniest scenes in that show, at least in the later series, and it's on YouTube!

Here's the background: the evil girl in this episode has set up both Malcolm and his brother Rhys by lying to both of them that their brother has confided to her that he is gay. The brothers are both shocked, but nice enough to try to be "supportive" of their brother's apparent secret, leading to some very odd behaviour in front of the rest of the family. This scene is after the family has come back from seeing "Mama Mia" (again, I think it was the girl's suggestion):



It cracks me up.

Hitchens reviews Potter

Christopher Hitchens: To Harry Potter, what would Orwell say?

He's about the last person I would have expected to be called upon to review the last Harry Potter book.

Giving terrorists ideas

Last December, I noted how the use of polonium in the Litvinenko murder in London had raised concerns about how this very dangerous substance could be used to create a really devastating dirty bomb.

Security experts are still worrying about this:

The authors call such methods I3, for inhalation, ingestion and immersion. One of the writers, Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, said yesterday that a well-planned radiological attack "would be capable of killing several hundred, maybe upwards of a thousand, and paralysing a city without any question at all."

The article does not provide details of the most devastating method of attack the authors have conceived, for security reasons, but Professor Zimmerman described one scenario using a water-soluble radioactive isotope widely used in hospitals and industry: "I can then tap into the anti-fire spray in a theatre, and if I can trigger the spray, I can soak everyone in the room."

Polonium-210, which was used in Mr Litvinenko's murder, is even more deadly because it emits alpha radiation, which is not picked up by radiation sensors.

It's a worry.

You can lead a horse to water....

75% of the people who download Firefox don't become active users | Technology | Guardian Unlimited

That figure is pretty surprising. I just can't imagine why anyone doesn't use the incredibly customisable Firefox as their preferred browser. (I particularly like adding specialised search engines to it.)

Moon architecture

What will future lunar bases look like? - New Scientist Space

It takes me back to my childhood, reading about actual plans being made for lunar shelters and permanent bases. In the 1960's, there seemed no reason at all to imagine that the manned space program would come to a screaming halt for 50 years, at least as far as the moon is concerned. Books I read then were full of designs and ideas for all types of rockets, spacesuits, emergency re-entry gear, and so on. It seems to me now that a lot of ideas are being re-invented, or perhaps it is just that they are only now moving from concept to actual material prototypes.

Anyhow, this New Scientist article talks of some ideas at the moment, and re-publishes a photo of a little mock up of an inflatable shelter design that I have seen somewhere before. As the article says:

The team is now weighing several options: an inflatable home that could be packed for launch and then inflated on the Moon's surface using oxygen transported in tanks, a rigid structure, or a combination of both. ...

All that’s needed to shield astronauts from deadly onslaughts of high-energy protons spewed from the Sun during solar flares, Thomas says, is a 5-centimetre layer of water. This could be integrated into an inflatable structure using a bladder-like layer filled with water, sandwiched into a rigid structure, or simply stacked on top of the habitat in tanks.

Used packing materials and other waste could be piled against the structure to provide even more protection. Meteorites larger than dust-sized grains could be deflected by aluminium or Kevlar shields like those used on the International Space Station.

I don't know. One of the prime things I would be looking at would be long lines of sight inside, rather than moving from one time cramped bubble of a spaceship into another tiny cramped bubble of a shelter for a couple of weeks.

I would have thought that an easy to erect, low slung geodesic dome framework supporting an inflatable shell would have a lot going for it. Being able to bury it with a foot or two of lunar dirt would be a good idea, and again (I imagine) a geodesic frame would be good at distributing the weight evenly all around the perimeter. As to how to get the dirt over it: some sort of mechanical aid would be needed, and one thing I don't know is how easy it may be to dig up the first inches of the lunar surface. (Given the footprints left around the Apollo landers, it isn't rock solid, but how compacted after 10 cm?)

This probably would count as my ideal fantasy job if I had my life to live over: actually being paid to come up with concepts for lunar shelters, knowing that they will be built and used.

Nice to be noticed

Back to whales.

Following my recent post on the New Yorker review/essay about Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, I was pleased today to receive a short e-mail from the author, Eric Jay Dolin, which I re-print here:

Thanks for mentioning my book..... Although I enjoyed the New Yorker Review, reading it barely scratches the surface of what my book contains. I hope you have a chance to delve a little deeper into the history of American whaling. LEVIATHAN will be coming out in Australia soon. If you have any suggestions for getting the word out about it in your part of the world, please let me know.

I had cheekily suggested that reading the New Yorker review made it unnecessary to actually read the book. Of course, I don't want to cause authors of interesting books to lose money, so I think we should all trust Eric's promise that there is much to be gained by reading the book, and go and buy it when it appears here.

As for publicity, I suggested that there would probably be a few ABC Radio National shows that would like to interview him, and they tend to have a very "bookish" audience too. Anyone with a better suggestion can add it below.

I see from Mr Dolin's website that the book has received quite a few favourable reviews. He also has a list of links that lead to a heap of free on line information about the history of whaling. You can read an 1839 magazine article telling the story of Mocha Dick, the real life inspiration for Moby Dick.

All fascinating.

How not to improve your public image

Priest charged over nude school jog - World - theage.com.au

Just what the archdiocese needed.

Fish Vs Malaria

Edible African fish could help beat malaria, study says | Science | Reuters

From the report:

Researchers have long known that the Nile tilapia feeds on mosquito larvae but the study was the first to test its potential to fight the disease in the field, said Francois Omlin, a researcher at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi.

"A fish in the field may act differently than a fish in an aquarium and it was important to test how effective it could be," Omlin, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "The tilapia species was never tested in the field for its ability to eat mosquito larvae."....

In the study, the team cleared three ponds of fish and vegetation in the highlands of Western Kenya and measured the mosquito population before introducing young tilapia.

Ten days later, no malaria mosquito larvae were recorded compared with a similar pond with no tilapia, and 41 weeks after the fish were introduced the number of mosquitoes fell by more than 94 percent, Omlin said.

Seems to have taken an unusually long time for someone to get around to testing their effectiveness.

Paris goes cycling

Parisians show their va va voom as city rolls out 'freedom' bike scheme - Times Online

I didn't realise Paris was trying a new "self service" bicycle scheme. It's a pretty interesting concept:

Subscribers must pay €29 (£20) a year, give their credit card details and leave a €150 credit card deposit to join the Vélib scheme. This buys half an hour’s pedalling a day and a card to lock and unlock bicycles from automated stations spaced every 300 metres in the city’s centre.

A simple swipe releases the bike and secures it at the other end, where a computer charges users on a sliding scale for any time over the first 30 minutes. This ensures that Vélib bikes are used for short journeys. Bikes are redistributed daily by electric trailers to avoid stations becoming empty or full.

I find it difficult to imagine the scheme working in Brisbane, or Sydney for that matter, simply because of the narrowness of many inner city streets.

Cycling is more popular in urban Japan than in many Western countries, and as with the Parisian bikes, everyone uses the "women's" style for commuting purposes. They are also more relaxed about riding on the footpath when necessary.

In Australia, Melbourne and Adelaide are more likely prospects for the Parisian style scheme, I expect. They are both pretty flat, and less humid in summer.

Dr Skippy

Scientist to treat lung cancer with bacteria from roos ABC Queensland

From the report:

A Queensland scientist has won a $750,000 fellowship to develop a lung cancer treatment from a bacterium found in eastern grey kangaroos...

Dr Wei says his research involves spores of bacteria that target cancer cells.

"By injecting the spores into the blood, the spores can get into the centre of the tumour and that would work as a live active and tumour seeking agent that destroys tumours from the inside," he said.

Let's hope the side effects don't include sleeping most of the day and then a strong urge to jump in front of cars in the evening.

Janet and Michael

Jihadists owe Kirby a thank you | The Australian

Janet Albrechtsen swings out a Justice Michael Kirby in a very satisfying way in her column today.

Kirby seems to have become the new Lionel Murphy, in that he seems continually to be in the minority in High Court, at least in cases that attract a high profile. The difference is that (from memory) Murphy's judgements used to be pretty short and along the lines of "This is unjust and its about time the Court recognised the injustice in these cases, and so I find for the [insert appropriate party]."

Kirby spends a lot of time on how he explains his decisions, but they still seem to come down to exercises in justifying a gut reaction.

(Of course, some people would argue that is how all judges really work, but I am not so sure.)

His need to see everything through the prism of a gay perspective is getting very tiring with Kirby, though. His comments in court about HIV killing more people than terrorism were justly criticised by Gerard Henderson in the articles I posted about yesterday. (Oh, and I know it's not a "gay disease" for most of the world.)

Back to whales

A few posts back I referred readers to a very interesting New Yorker article about the history of American whaling.

Reading about sperm whales made me realise I had a knowledge gap: why are they called that? The New Yorker review also mentioned spermaceti as being a whaling product, and I didn't know what that was. (Ambergris I knew about: it was featured in an Uncle Scrooge comic I read as a child.)

So Wikipedia to the rescue. Spermaceti is:

... a wax present in the head cavities of the Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and in the blubber of all whales. Spermaceti is extracted from whale oil by crystallisation at 6 °C, when treated by pressure and a chemical solution of caustic alkali. Spermaceti forms brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch, and are devoid of taste or smell, making it very useful as an ingredient in cosmetics, leatherworking and lubricants.

As for why sperm whales have it in their head, this is rather interesting:

One function of the spermaceti organs is a buoyancy or diving organ. Before diving, cold water is brought through the organ and the wax is solidified . The increase in specific density generates a down force (approx 40 kg equiv) and allows the whale effortless sinking. During the chase in deep levels (max 3km!) the stored oxygen is consumed and excess heat melts the spermaceti. Now only hydrodynamic forces (by swimming) keep the whale down before effortlessly surfacing.

Knowledge gap filled.

Henderson on lawyers and terrorism laws

Attack on freedom overstated - Opinion - smh.com.au

Worth reading. His earlier article on this topic was good too.

A good idea

Remedy for mistrust | The Australian

This article makes a case for having a national system of assessment for foreign doctors. Sounds sensible, doesn't it?

My polling commentary

Newspoll shows the coalition still stuck in the polls, but at least I take some consolation from the fact that a significant majority agree with the Haneef visa revocation, despite all the heat generated by left-y bloggers and the odd editorial campaign of The Australian against Andrews personally. Howard still leads in the "who would handle security better" question too.

As for the 10 point TPP lead to Labor at this stage: well it will just make the ultimate Coalition election victory all that more lauded!

Some reasons why I am not giving up on the Coalition yet:

* You would need to see polling on a State by State basis to see how many seats are in danger. Western Australian is still mentioned as not good for Labor, and there is fierce opposition to Beattie's out-of-the-blue council amalgamation plan in Queensland. It seems that the actual amalgamation process will be still underway during the Federal election, and it is bound to cause some vote changing in some rural seats at least. Maybe not much, but some. Meanwhile, the hospital decision in Tasmania might have worked for Howard in that one seat. (It's going to take a lot to win the election one seat at a time, though!)

* Is it possible for Rudd to be a smaller target than he has been in the last few weeks? If people like him for being "Howard lite," is there a chance they will actually switch allegiance back to Howard when it comes to a crunch? And I don't expect that people currently siding with Rudd in polls are thinking of Labor as a team at the moment. Wayne Swan does not seem to me to be performing well in interviews this year; I reckon there is danger that Peter Garrett is going to self-implode due to some guilt over having to sell his idealism to be part of the party; and I still think that Julia Gillard is not entirely loveable despite the various make overs and appearances on women's magazines indicate.

* There was some mention somewhere in the last couple of weeks that Tony Abbot's comment that the "darker aspects" of Rudd's political career may come to light was a reference to some journalistic digging that he knows about. It would have to be very dirty indeed, though, not to backfire. Still, if Rudd displays a glass jaw again, it may have an effect.

* John Howard seems certainly to have been right in his prediction earlier this year that he did not expect the polling to change significantly until the election is called. Still, that's little comfort to his supporters when even the betting is starting to go strongly against you.

The body electric

ScienceDaily: Electric Fields Have Potential As A Cancer Treatment

An interesting report on hopeful indications of low level electric fields to the head helping treat some forms of brain cancer.

The idea that electric fields could be helpful therapy has been around a long time (ever since electricity was understood, I guess.) It also gets a mention in science fiction every now and then, if I recall correctly. So its good to see there may be something in it after all.

Improbable research

Speaking out | eG weekly | EducationGuardian.co.uk

From the article:

In the 1990s, daring researchers finally tackled a question that was discussed everywhere except in formal academic settings. When someone's speech "sounds gay", what makes it sound that way?

Not exactly crucial to the advancement of the human condition, but it's good to see that I am not the only person to have wondered why (some) gay men sound so gay.

Sex and children

I’m single, I’m sexy, and I’m only 13 - Times Online

This article from The Times is a week old, but worth reading.

It's all about the ridiculously early sexualisation of young girls, especially young teenage girls.

It does cite some odd research, though, such as this:

The APA report also featured a 1998 study, in which the same researchers asked college-aged girls to try on either a swimsuit or a sweater, assess their appearance, then perform mathematical tests. The girls asked to wear swimsuits performed significantly worse.

“This is how sexualisation fragments consciousness,” says Dr Lamb. “These girls were so hung up on their appearance they literally didn’t have room in their heads to do maths. They learn that preoccupation from the women they look up to in the media.”

One psychologist explains the problem this way:

Though Dr Wilson believes flirtation and exhibitionism are natural for young girls, he says that clear lines must be drawn. “Children want to be looked at, but wearing items like thongs and revealing clothes sends the message that they are sexually available. It also implies knowledge of sexuality that just isn’t there,” he says.

As to the group think of girls, it also points out this:

But while criticism of the media is the answer Dr Lamb hopes for, it is girls criticising each other that is beginning to change attitudes among some groups. “There is a backlash beginning,” she says. “Girls quickly go from being popular to being derided for their slutty behaviour. It’s sad because they do all these things to fit in, but go too far and they are soon turned against.”

I wonder if anyone has looked at the comparative "early sexualisation" behaviour of girls from mixed gender schools and girls only ones.

Drive more and save the planet

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’ - Times Online

This is possibly the funniest thing Tim Blair would ever have read about greenhouse gases (with considerable justification , I might add), and he's missing out on blogging about it 'cos he's off on holiday somewhere.

Short version: raising cows makes so many greenhouse gases, you are better off driving the car to the supermarket than walking and having to replace those calories with extra intake of beef or milk.

But there's more:

Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.

Makes me feel so much better.

As for flying, there seems to have been a bit of a backlash against the "the world must fly less" views of George Monbiot and others, and a good article in The Observer a couple of weeks ago talked about the difficulties of comparisons between different modes of transport.

And now for something completely different

Found by accident, here's some very innovative looking stage magic with (what looks like) laser light.



Very, very cool!