Car park terrorist

New Scientist Technology Blog: Hybrid cars: Too damned quiet?

The post above is about the issue of the potential danger of silent hybrid cars (well, at least until their petrol motor kicks in.) Should they make some sound when in electric mode?

I don't think this commenter was joking when she wrote this:

Personally, I find it great fun to drive around underground car parks in 'stealth' (electric only) mode, creeping up behind people with laden shopping trolleys and gaggles of screaming kiddies, and scaring them out of their wits.

On the open road I haven't hit any pedestrians - blind or otherwise - yet, but have nearly collected a couple of cyclists who didn't look, or signal, before changing lanes.

But seriously, I think education is the answer. Everyone, from littlies learning to cross the road, up has to learn to rely on their eyes and not just their ears. As for the blind - they should be able to feel the vibrations and hear the slight 'crunching' sound the tyres make on most paved surfaces. I've had to learn that pedestrians and cyclists aren't necessarily aware of my presence and are likely to try and throw themselves under my wheels.

Hitchens and a death in Iraq

A Death in the Family: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Christopher Hitchens writes very well about his dealings with the family of a young man killed in Iraq who had cited Hitchens as inspiring him to enlist.

Model

Recognize this?

The Japanese cartoon ran in Australia in the 70's. It's Space Cruiser Yamato, and this model was one of the fiddliest I've ever taken glue to. The boy is impressed, though.

Famous last words

Wild Thing: Books: The New Yorker

The oddest thing I learned from the above article about the (generally dislikeable) ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was that his last words were "Moby Dick". Not quite in the "Rosebud" league, is it?

Mark that one down for your next trivia competition.

Sounds interesting

How I faked it for the Nazis - Times Online

There's a movie on the way about a large scale Nazi counterfeiting operation. Sounds an interesting story, even if changed somewhat for the film.

He's right

Guardian Unlimited: God knows where all the religious novels went

Being quite the fan of Evelyn Waugh and CS Lewis, I agree.

As it happens, I have never tried Graham Greene, but will get around to him one day.

Yes, novels informed by a Catholic or quasi-Catholic sensibility are hard to come by these days.

Getting better

Sony Unveils Second Edition of Reader Digital Book

I don't think the first one was even released in Australia.

In any case, the features of this second version sound considerably improved.

Katz on Gillard (or so he wishes)

Rudd's right-hand woman is one foxy lady - Opinion - theage.com.au

I haven't recommended a Danny Katz column for a while, but this one is quite funny.

Update: I have noticed that, whenever I recommend a Danny Katz column, I seem to get quite a few visits from someone in Melbourne who is Googling his name. Does Mr Katz spend every Thursday searching for comments on his latest column? Not that there would be anything wrong with that, but if it's you, D Katz, just make a comment here, or send me a carton of wine as a reward for saying nice things about your writing. I probably increase your readership by at least 2 or 3!

A good point...

This link is to a post by Bryan Appleyard, which leads to his review of a book which claims to take a scientific approach to showing that something like a "soul" exists.

The book may be of interest, but I liked this first comment to the post, as it seems to me quite true:

One thing that intrigues and baffles me as a non-scientist observing this latest fad in materialist determinism is how enthusiastic, sanguine and comfortable modern "brights" have become with this stuff. Not so long ago, when guys like Sartre ruled the roost, atheistic materialism was supposed to be terrifying and only for the stalwart--remember all that stuff about having the near superhuman courage to stare into the abyss of nothingness? Now everybody seems to be having a big party scorning that scary old free will, and religion is positively terrifying.

More things I didn't know

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Volcano erupts on Red Sea island

Hey, it's quite an extensive list really (the things I don't know), but the fact that there are any volcanoes in the Red Sea could have been included until this story broke.

Having heard the report, I wondered whether anyone had ever speculated that volcanoes in that area might have something to do with some Old Testament stories.

And, of course, Google quickly reveals that someone has suggested it already. (Jeez, don't you hate how it's getting harder and harder to even imagine that you have had an original thought since the internet came along.)

Anyhow, Colin Humphreys has suggested that Mt Sinai was an active volcano at the time Moses was hanging around there. Go have a read of his few pages from Google books (at the last link) and see if it sounds credible. (I suppose we should be asking geologists too, but they might ruin an otherwise plausible idea.)

Hitchens on China

Burma's foul regime depends on Beijing.

Christopher Hitchens points out the number of bad regimes that China supports, and it's very many indeed:

Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China.

A fantasy economy

It's amusing to watch the catfight going on at Larvatus Prodeo about whether it is fair enough or not to say something so obvious to common sense like "ideally, it is better for children to have two parents rather than one."

That's "too sweeping" for Mark Bahnisch, who one suspects has never had children. (I would post that over at LP itself, but because I am questioning motivations and his personal experience of life, I suspect I would be in breach of its "be nice, unless it's conservatives" comments policy.)

Mark's problem is he doesn't like marriage as an institution at all, and (despite the thousands of studies showing the better life outcomes for children with two parents, and the fact that marriages last longer than de facto relationships), to start sounding like you might even be heading towards the suggestion that the old fuddy duddy idea of marriage is generally the best way to raise children is just too conservative in principle to contemplate.

But this comment by Mark really caught my eye:

Btw, personally, I support a guarenteed minimum income and I’m not in the slightest bit troubled by whether people choose to work, or surf, or bring up babies. In a society where the incentives are as strong as they are for most people, most will choose to work. But it doesn’t worry me in the slightest if people don’t, and how they choose to spend their lives.

Well, if anyone can ever find better evidence to show why we don't let sociologists run economies and countries, let me know!

UPDATE: more explanation from a later comment by Mark:

....the proposal is not for the minimal levels of benefits grudgingly payed now and hedged around with nasty conditions (= “responsibilities”) but rather either through direct income transfer or through a negative income tax for a generous level of income to go to all adults in society as of right. Interestingly, there’s more support for this among libertarians than social democrats these days, though it’s a classic social democratic policy - both in providing equality of opportunity with a big kick along and in refusing the notion that work is a good in and of itself and to be valued no matter what its nature.

In fact, because the entire bureaucracy of surveillance and punishment would be abolished, you could probably have lower taxes and still give everyone 20k a year or whatever. Just imagine - no centrelink, no dole diaries, no… this stuff is inordinately expensive.

Colour me skeptical, as maybe the libertarians at Catallaxy think this is a serious idea, but it still sounds very silly to me. It might be able to sold on novelty value to someone like Pauline Hanson, though. I'll email her straight away.

More delegation

Rudd vows to charge Iran leader | The Australian

From the report:

In a dramatic lift in diplomatic pressure on a bellicose and defiant Iran, Kevin Rudd has committed a Labor government to take "legal proceedings against President Ahmadinejad on a charge of incitement to genocide".

The Leader of the Opposition said the charge of incitement to genocide "could occur through the International Court of Justice on reference by the UN Security Council" because of Mr Ahmadinejad's public statements.

Oh yes, I can see Ahmadinejad being terrified of this prospect.

Really Kevin, this just makes you sound all the more committed to sending problems off to someone else to solve.

Corrigan's robots take over Brisbane (Port)

Yesterday I took the day off to do something vaguely entertaining with the family for the school holidays. This turned out to be a trip to the Port of Brisbane and the bayside suburbs. The end result: increased admiration for Chris Corrigan.

More astute readers with an interest in wharf productivity may already know this, but I had missed the fact that since the end of 2005, Patrick's Brisbane container terminal has been operating a "world first" automated system. You have to take the Port of Brisbane guided bus tour to understand what is going on ($27 for a family ticket, complete with rather laconic guide) but you can see a bit of how it works and it's pretty fascinating.

Most of the wharf area is fenced off, leaving it alone to 20 or so of the straddle carriers that formerly need people to drive them. The ones at Brisbane instead operate all on their own. Here's a photo to see what I mean (the red things are the straddle carriers):


From the bus, you can see trucks park inside a few bays to collect containers. The driver gets out and the autostrad (for this last little section of its task) comes under the control of a wharfie with a remote control. The container is lowered on the truck, which drives off, while the straddle carrier goes back onto the wharf area and finds its own way back to pick up another container.

Here's some more information about it from Patrick's website:

The automated 10-metre high, 65-tonne straddle carriers are fitted with sophisticated motion control and navigation systems which allow them to operate unmanned - moving and stacking containers from the quay, into holding yards, onto vehicles, and back to quay cranes with pin-point accuracy.

Unlike other automated systems, the AutoStrad moves freely on a 'virtual' computer-generated grid which can be applied to most existing terminal facilities and does not expensive capital works to install in-ground nodes or wires to operate.

Speaking at the official opening, Patrick Managing Director at the time Mr Chris Corrigan said when it was decided to set about trying to automate a fleet of massive 65-tonnes machines - even some involved in the project suspected it was an impossible task.

"Almost a decade later, the result is far beyond our expectations and represents an entirely new approach to terminal design," Mr Corrigan said.

According to Forkliftaction.com (a website I am only likely to visit once in my life!):

The AutoStrad system was developed by Patrick Technology & Services (PTS), a joint venture between Patrick and Kalmar Industries. PTS claims the AutoStrad system is a world first.

Research on the automated straddle project began in 1996 and, in 2001, Kalmar joined PTS as an equity partner. Patrick, as majority shareholder, owns intellectual property rights for most of the on-board technology and all the essential real-time control systems.

So, right from 1996, when the wharfies were fighting to keep their privileges in place, Patrick (and, I assume, Corrigan) were preparing the true way of the future.

Ah, you lefties can have your Combets and Julian Burnsides as your heroes. Instead, I'll take someone who had the vision to create a field of giant roaming cargo robots.

Back to politics

Footy's over, back to politics.

Glen Milne's article in the Australian this morning reports on a speech George Brandis gave, in which he made the point that funding for the arts has grown significantly under the Howard government, not that you would ever know that by listening to artists. (If there is something funny about those figures, we'll hear it from LP soon enough.)

I liked this from the article:

In a speech to the Sydney Film School in July, Keating declared: "It is no secret that the arts are having a very bad time of it in Australia these days; a bad time of it not simply in terms of funding, which is the thing most often discussed, but rather in terms of the milieu for its growth and prosperity."...

At a recent speech to the National Press Club, Brandis took Keating on, acidly dismissing his Sydney Film School remarks thus: "I suppose if you spend 11 1/2 years in a sulk things would tend to get away from you a bit."

Newspoll is stick stuck where it's been forever. But if Howard doesn't call the election this week, now that the sport is out of the way, he will suffer from the impression that he is clinging to power. On the other hand, he does need a long campaign to have any hope. What's the longest election campaign in Australian history, I wonder? Is 8 weeks out of the question?

Andrew Bolt on Insiders yesterday made the point that Howard does not seem to be getting much value out of the spending announcements of late (such as increased drought relief). I agree.

Meanwhile, I see Four Corners is having a show about Dr Haneef tonight, with an extended interview with him. Somehow, I have my doubts he will win more public sympathy.

An inconvenient consultation

Muslim dentist ‘made patient cover her head’ - Times Online

From the story:

A Muslim dentist insisted that a young woman wear an Islamic headscarf before he would agree to treat her for toothache, the General Dental Council was told yesterday.

The patient, a community nurse, alleges that she reluctantly told Omer Butt, 31, who runs a dental practice in Bury, Greater Manchester, that she was a nonpractising Muslim.

It is alleged that the dentist then told her that he would refuse to register her as an NHS patient if she did not cover her head. She was in so much pain that she agreed to borrow a scarf from a nurse at the clinic.

OK, so how does this work with the Muslim doctors we have in Australia? If they work in our public health system, do they have an issue with seeing Muslim women (of which we have an increasing number) if their head is uncovered?

On placebo treatment

Bad science: Pinning down a remedy for backache | Science | The Guardian

The apparent success of acupuncture for treating back pain this week got a lot of publicity with media reports on a recent study.

The article above indicates that acupuncturists should not to be too excited about this. It appears that "random" needle puncturing (where there were needles inserted, but at random points, rather than the carefully chosen points that proper acupuncture theory would dictate) proved almost as effective as "real" acupuncture.

Yet both "fake" and "real" acupuncture did considerably better than the normal medical approach.

I can't be bothered Googling for the details now, but it is my understanding that acupuncture had come out reasonably well from many carefully controlled trials for certain conditions. Although the esoteric Eastern quasi-mystical theory that is behind it is not something I am ever going to sign up to, I have long had the impression that it is the most credible of the 'alternative' medicines. Simply putting pins in people sometimes seems to work at a much higher rate than other therapies.

Anyhow, the article I've linked at the top goes on to talk about the placebo effect generally. Everyone knows it works, but the problem for Western medicine is that both ethically, and from a point of view of medical litigation risk, its widespread use can't really be contemplated.

This has always seemed quite a pity to me. Maybe doctors can argue that the natural therapies have placebo all to themselves anyway. But the natural therapists don't think they are giving placebo treatment. They won't give a sugar pill any more than a GP will.

Can't there be a category of doctor that is given licence to prescribe any therapy whatsoever without risk of litigation, including alternative therapies and placebo? I mean, don't those who participate in studies like the acupuncture one know and consent to possibly be in the group that is given the placebo? Yet it still works for some of them.

So can't we have doctors that the public knows are permanently licenced to try placebo?

Just a thought.

UPDATE: I should've guessed. Horses have been getting acupuncture too. Oh, but horses don't have a placebo response, says a doctor, so that proves it's not working just by placebo effect on humans too.

Look, horses are the last animals to trust in an trial of anything medical. They would just find it funny to put up with the pain of 50 needles, then prance about as if their sore back is cured, because they know that this doctor will be encouraged, resulting in thousands more humans being pricked every year. I bet they have a chuckle about that.

...in which the author seeks to discredit horses, but is in for a surprise

I started out to try to prove horses will be the end of civilisation, but the figures led me somewhere else. Follow the story:

From this site we learn that no one knows how many horses there are in Australia. It's between 900,000 and 1.8 million. However, I assume this is talking about domestic ones. Another site estimates there are 300,000 feral horses. (It also says there are up to 5 million feral donkeys! Who knew that?) Let's just assume 1.5 million horses combined, to be conservative and get round figures.

How much methane does a horse produce? Easily found (more or less) : 18 kg per year.

So let me get my calculator. That's 27,000,000 kg of methane a year.

But remember, methane is much worse than CO2 for warming. It is 21 times worse in fact.

So this leads us to horses making the equivalent of 27,000 tonnes x 21 = 567,000 tonnes of CO2 each and every year.

According to this site, the average car makes 4 tonnes of CO2 a year. So the horse population is making the equivalent greenhouse gases of 142,000 cars every year.

There are two ways of looking at this. If we had no horses in Australia, we could safely run an extra 142,000 cars on the roads with no net increase in CO2 - equivalent gases. But how many cars are there already in Australia? I am surprised to see it is about 10,000,000!

Hardly seems worth doing away with all those horses after all. Damn!

In fact, if one car makes 4 tonnes of CO2 per year, and a horse makes 18 x 21 = 378 kg of CO2 equivalent per year, then every car owner could run instead 10 horses a year (4,000/378).

For the average family of 4, they could give up the car and have two and bit horses each!

No, horses are our salvation, after all. (At least if you ignore the greenhouse contribution of their decaying excrement and the cost of growing and moving tonnes of feed around the country. Also, at least a car doesn't die from an upset tummy (colic) or get a fright every time it sees an inanimate object it doesn't like the look of. This last point was made by Stephen Fry in an interview on Parkinson, if I recall correctly.)

I still think they are stupid.

VITAL UPDATE (in which the author is vindicated by new information) : No, they are evil after all! Their relatively "green" greenhouse gas bottoms might make you think it is better for the planet to own ten horses instead of one car. But it is all a plan to lure humans to death and injury. Here, from the Australian Medical Journal, no less:

The risk of injury while horse riding has been estimated as between 1 per 320 to 1 per 1000 hours of riding.^4,6 The variation in reported population-based risk of horse-related trauma of between 18.7 injuries per 100 000 to 9.5 injuries per 1000 population per year illustrates the difficulties of accurate data collection and variable inclusion of non-riding injuries.⁷ Interestingly, the overall risk of injury from horse-related activity has been determined to be greater than that of car racing or riding a motorcycle, and the rate of hospitalisation from falls from a horse equivalent to that from playing rugby.

Hehe. I know what horses are thinking. "Get on my back, stupid bipedal feed provider. See how long you last. The earth will be ours! Hahahahahahahaha!"

No, I've upgraded them from "stupid" to "evil".

Nurse?

Lovelock's idea

Scientists propose 'plumbing' method to solve crisis of global warming - Times Online

James Lovelock mentioned this idea while he was in Australia recently, but here it is spelt out in more detail. The New Scientist version of the story spends more time on the skeptic's reaction.

(Short version of the idea: lots and lots of pipes in the ocean that use wave action to pump up nutrient rich water to the surface, leading to more plankton, and more CO2 uptake.)

This idea has been around in a slightly different version since the 1970's at least, as it was featured in Jerry Pournelle's book "A Step Further Out," which is still on my bookshelf. His idea was to use the water sucking tubes to generate electricity too.

In New Scientist last week they had a pretty good article on the proposals for fertilizing the oceans with either iron or urea. Unfortunately, it's not on line for free.

The article did point out that one of the unknown issues of any form of using plankton growth to take up more CO2 is that it is not very clear how much of it ends up at the bottom of the ocean, which is where it really needs to be for long term sequestration.

Still, even if fish eat a lot of the plankton, how much fish poop sinks and how much of it floats? In a post last year, I noted an article that said that krill like to poo at depth, which makes them a (literal) CO2 sink. So who knows. Maybe the concentration should be on fertilizing the southern ocean, which is where I think most of the krill hang out.

Seems to me worthwhile trialling these ideas anyway.

Promises promises

Mike Steketee has made many posts critical of the Coalition this year, so it's good to see him making some pretty cutting remarks about Kevin Rudd's propensity to make commitments that he is never likely to be around to see achieved:

The Government is wrong to characterise Rudd as a policy-free zone: he has announced reams of initiatives. It is just that many of them have an elusive quality. Take his promise to ensure that nine out of 10 schoolchildren complete Year 12. It’s a laudable goal, but when would it be delivered? By 2020 is the solemn promise. That is in the fifth term of a Rudd government, unless it is the Gillard or Shorten government by then, or perhaps the Turnbull government after Malcolm’s frustrated ambitions get the better of him and he switches over to the winning side.

Don’t imagine that Labor is not accountable for such a promise: it has set an interim benchmark of 2015 to lift retention rates to 85 per cent. That is only three or four elections away.

Are we getting slightly ahead of ourselves here?

And he then goes into detail on the other policies "on the never-never." (Funny, I did a shorter version of this Steketee column a few of weeks ago.)

Also, journalists have indicated before that Kevin is not personally genuinely liked even within his own parliamentary party, and his refusal to commit to anyone getting the job they currently shadow if they form government will do nothing to alleviate that. It seems a particular insult to Wayne Swan if he won't commit to him being Treasurer. (It's a marriage of convenience for both Swan and Gillard to be seen as so close to Rudd at the moment anyway, as I understand it.)

Update: Rudd has had to come out today and promise Swan, Gillard and Tanner their positions. A bit of a turnaround, and something to do with faction power too, I suspect. I imagine there were a few calls last night about his attitude yesterday.