Flaws will be found

Circumcision Doesn't Reduce Sexual Satisfaction And Performance, Says Study Of 4,500 Men

At last, a study that confirms what all sensible people guessed: circumcision is no big deal as far as change in sexual enjoyment for men is concerned.

You can safely bet, however, that the weird cult of the anti-circumcision movements on the Web will find flaws with the study.

Two Japanese stories

Here's a couple of Japan Times articles I didn't get to mention over the last couple of weeks.

First, there is a good article on the brief rise, and dramatic fall, of Christianity in Japan from 1549.

I have a book on the topic which I have never finished. One point the Japan Times article leaves out is that (according to the book) one difficulty in converting the Japanese was due to their distress at the idea that the souls of their deceased ancestors were condemned to Hell forever because they had been unlucky enough to not have heard about Christ before they died.

Anyway, the Japan Times article is a good read. It's interesting to note that one aspect of Japanese culture made the persecution of Christians that much easier:

As persecution intensified, the Jesuits were nonplussed by a Japanese trait they had not previously noticed. "They race to martyrdom," observed Father Organtino, "as if to a festival." The Christian view of suicide as sinful made few inroads against the traditional Japanese view of it as glorious.

The other JT article of note is one that details everything you ever wanted to know about Mt Fuji. This part in particular was new to me:

Fuji is said to be privately owned. Is that really true?

Surprisingly, yes, as far as the peak above the eighth station is concerned.

Fujisan Hongu Sengentaisha, a Shizuoka-based Shinto shrine, possesses an ancient document stating it was granted the parcel in 1609 by samurai warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603.

In 1957, the shrine sued for possession of the tract, citing a 1947 law returning state-held land to Shinto shrines that had previously held it.

In 1974, the Supreme Court upheld the claim, but transfer of the property rights wouldn't occur until 2004. Some national roads and the former meteorological observatory stayed under government jurisdiction.

HIV updates

Over the last week or so, the New York Times had 2 interesting articles about HIV.

One was an opinion piece by AIDS specialist Daniel Halperin, who worries that the large funding provided for HIV treatment in some African countries with relatively low rates of infection would be much better spent on basic health measures such as the provision of clean water. He writes:

As the United States Agency for International Development’s H.I.V. prevention adviser in southern Africa in 2005 and 2006, I visited villages in poor countries like Lesotho, where clinics could not afford to stock basic medicines but often maintained an inventory of expensive AIDS drugs and sophisticated monitoring equipment for their H.I.V. patients. H.I.V.-infected children are offered exemplary treatment, while children suffering from much simpler-to-treat diseases are left untreated, sometimes to die.

It seems to be basically the same point Lomborg has repeatedly made regarding getting priorities right.

The other article goes into detail about the medical complications that ageing HIV sufferers are increasingly facing. The outlook sounds pretty depressing, as they don't even understand what may be causing what illnesses. As I have said before, I would hope that HIV warnings to the young are including details of how the disease and its treatment compromise health in a major way, even if is not the immediate death threat that it used to be.

One foot on the floor, please

Guardian Unlimited: Why movie sex is better off faking it

This post at the Guardian's film blog was inspired by the (apparently) very real looking sex in Ang Lee's new film. The post makes this good argument against the increasingly common appearance of real sex acts in art house "R" rated cinema:

Sex changes in the presence of a camera, because it's no longer the business of the two people involved, but all about the third party - the viewer. What's always been dishonest about the likes of 9 Songs and The Brown Bunny is the slippery appeal to the audience that the sex is somehow scaling new heights of raw and fearless truth - when, in fact, it's just another performance sold as a non-performance, like everything else you see in a film. It's just that, rather than the strange, hairless, sheeny creatures of actual porn, you've got Tony Leung or Chloe Sevigny demonstrating their commitment to their craft. Not only is it all completely bogus, the results are usually far from erotic .... more importantly, they're not even dramatically potent.

In fact, the post reminds me of a general modern misapprehension about sex, perhaps particularly held by women, I suspect, that it is more revealing of true character than other day to day aspects of behaviour.

It is understandable that sex, particularly at the start of a relationship, can have a strong effect on each lover's perception of the other. But what I am questioning is the view held at an intellectual level that sex reveals "true" character.

The fact that the world's worst dictators, and probably a fair proportion of its worst criminals and murderers, have been married or in long standing sexual relationships, would suggest otherwise, wouldn't it? And surely everyone knows someone who ends up with a partner who is of bad or dubious character when not in bed with his or her partner.

There is every reason to suspect that the sex may be fogging the judgement of the partner, not enlightening it.

But do you need to have sex depicted explicitly in a film to realise this is true? Nah. Do you need to see an actor's genitals to understand the motivating role of sex in a character's life? Not at all.

I go further than the author of the post: story telling in modern cinema could be greatly improved if we went back to the almost non-depiction of the actual sex that existed in the cinema of (say) the 50's. Adults still understood when couples were lovers, without having to see them naked. The passionate kiss in the surf made the lust clear enough, didn't it? The sight of the train going into the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest was both funny and about sex. (Although that's not a trick you can repeat more than once, I suppose!) Adults knew that Black Narcissus was largely about repressed sexuality, and hardly a naked nun was to be seen.

The abandonment of the need for any degree of subtlety has worked against the interests of better story telling, and has lead now to the distracting stuff about whose breasts or penis are actually able to be spotted in the latest film.

Is there any spot on the censorship board coming up soon?

First Weird Science post of 2008!

Is time slowing down? - fundamentals - 21 December 2007 - New Scientist

This story, the bulk of which is unfortunately still behind the paywall, appeared in the Christmas edition of New Scientist, and seems to have attracted scant attention. It's certainly a novel idea, though.

Anyone with even a vague interest in astronomy knows that astronomers now believe the universe is currently expanding at an accelerating pace, and the nature of the "dark energy" behind this is the current major puzzle of physics and cosmology.

But, what if it is all an illusion, caused by Time itself slowing down?

What a great idea. Unfortunately, if true, it means that in billions of years the universe freezes.

Ha! And here you thought time stood still when you had to sit through a couple of Merchant Ivory films with your former girlfriend. It was just the universe preparing you for the real deal.

Update: here's a post from the nicely named "Daily Galaxy" blog which summarises what was in the New Scientist article.

I feel sleepy already

Comment is free: Blogging the Qur'an

The Guardian is going to spend a year "blogging the Koran". This opening explanation of what they are going to do acknowledges that it is a difficult book to read.

This came to mind when I recently watched Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for the first time, which led me to re-read the story in the Bible. (I am not sure whether I had ever read this section from beginning to end before.) It's a good story, and made me think about the simple pleasure of narrative that is to be found in many parts of the Old Testament.

As far as I know, there is no extended story telling in the Koran. Certainly, you come up pretty empty handed when you type in "great stories from the Koran" in Google.

Anyway, the first column in The Guardian about their experiment is of cultural interest at least.

It seems a curious feature, however, that good education results in the east asian cultures is sometimes thought to be due to large role of rote learning and increased use of memory that their language requires. However, the common exercise of children memorising an entire book in Muslim cultures does not have the reputation of having the same result.

Weirdest anniversary gift ever...

Comment is free: The virginity dialogues

From the above:

Other coping mechanisms [for Egypt's "sexual counter-revolution"] include non-penetrative sex and the increasingly common practice among the wealthier classes of pre-marital hymen restoration. According to Seif el-Dawla, this has reached the point where some middle-class Egyptian couples celebrate their wedding anniversaries by re-bridging the wife's "maidenhead", a practice that is also joining boob jobs as a gift of choice for some "discerning" western spouses.

Normal transmissions to be resumed soon

I'm back from holiday travels, only to face work with reduced staff for another week.

There's lots of stuff I can post about, but probably can't for another 12 hours or so...

Holiday Greetings - back in 2008

My posting came to a halt faster than I expected.

I'll be off for a week or two. Here's a cartoon hurriedly done before my wife yells at me for not packing:

Been done before...

Believers enjoy flush of success | The Australian

This report notes that the current situation in Australian politics (all Labor, all over the place) is quite not as historic as it seems to be being portrayed:

The last time there was a similar alignment of the political stars was 1969, when John Grey Gorton was prime minister and the premiers included the indomitable and bull-headed Robert Askin, Henry Bolte and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, as well as Steele Hall, David Brand and Angus Bethune. Between the defeat of the Reece government in Tasmania in May 1969 and the election of the Dunstan government in South Australia in May 1970, there were Liberal or Country Party governments in all six states and the commonwealth.

Labor has several times held government federally and in five states, but never six.

Yeah, what was that about the arts suffering under Howard?

Local film industry gets $250m boost

The National Survey of Feature Film and TV Drama Production 2006/07 released by the Australian Film Commission yesterday shows that $625 million was spent on production activity in Australia during the 12 months to July this year, compared with $371 million during the preceding year.

Of course, it doesn't really matter how much money is spent, Australian films will continue to be unpopular while ever they have the crappy downer stories that 95% of them seem to want to tell.

Take that, soft parents

Parenting - theage.com.au

.... the study found parents who ban their children from using any alcohol at home significantly reduce the risk of creating teenage drinkers.

Deakin University Professor of Psychology John Toumbourou said the findings were a wake-up call for parents who believed they were doing the right thing by allowing their children to have a sip of alcohol.

Let the disillusionment begin!

Melbourne digs deep to let big ships pass

I assume that Tracee Hutchison will be very upset with Peter Garrett:

THE controversial dredging of Port Phillip Bay's shipping channels is set to begin in February, after federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett granted approval yesterday.

A different Joseph

Although it is always being staged by a high school somewhere, I had never got around to seeing a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

So, last weekend I hired the 1999 video version from the local video library.

If you too have never seen the show, go and get this DVD and have a look. It's great fun, and (I think) about the best video version of a stage show I have ever seen.

Sure, if you have an allergy to Donny Osmond without his shirt on for 90 minutes, you will have your reservations, but he does really well. The show is the complete opposite of the video version of Cats: lively, witty, lots of fast cuts, and very imaginative staging. (I don't like the modern style of overly fast editing of action movies, or even dance movies. But if you are more- or-less just filming a stage show, then lots of cuts between various degrees of distance from the action is one way to keep it more interesting.)

My boy liked it a lot too (although, like most fathers, I don't really want him to show too much of an interest musical theatre, if you know what I mean. He found the fake goat being pulled apart about the funniest bit of the show, though, so maybe it's OK.)

Appleyard -v- Pilger

Thought Experiments : The Blog: John Pilger

This is quite a witty take down of Pilger's latest Guardian offering by Bryan Appleyard. I like this line:

It has no substantial content other than the usual demand for action against everything.

Too true.

Intervention justification

Under-5s found with sex diseases | The Australian

From the report:

CHILDREN under the age of five in the Northern Territory have been found to have sexually transmitted diseases, according to new figures released by the Northern Territory Government.

Between January and June, there were 41 cases each of gonorrhoea and chlamydia in children under 15, including one case of each in children underfive.

The shocking figures reinforce the high level of abuse among children in remote indigenous... communities...

Oddly enough, this story was a "headline" one at the SMH website last night; this morning I can't see it there even under the "national news" section. But they run another story indicating how bad things are in Aurukun.

Anthony Lane's wit

He can make me laugh, that Anthony Lane. See this example from this week, reviewing a French animated feature in the New Yorker:

The film is largely in black-and-white, yet the result, far from seeming gloomy, has the pertness and the simplicity of a cutout. I found it, if anything, too simple. The faces are no more than tapered ovals, which makes some of the characters hard to distinguish, and I was left with the nagging, if ungallant, impression that I had been flipping through a wipe-clean board book entitled “Miffy and Friends Play with Islamic Fundamentalism.”

The puzzle of the laws

Universe - Laws of Nature - Physics - New York Times

Here's a very pleasing article about the recent controversy over what Paul Davies said about the laws of the universe and the nature of science.

The mysteries of existence don't seem at all close to being solved.

News snippets

* Queer eye for the (presumably) straight Pope: While I still think that aging, gay Italian director Zeffireli was just seeking attention with his widely reported offer to do a makeover of sorts for the Pope, I was surprised to see in the BBC report that he has had a bit of a Papal connection in the past:

Zeffirelli, a Roman Catholic, was employed several times by the Vatican during John Paul II's reign as a designer for the staging of major papal ceremonies.

* The Bali Irony: The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

AMID talk of offsetting the hefty carbon footprint of the United Nations climate conference in Bali, organisers missed a large elephant in the room.

The air-conditioning system installed to keep more than 10,000 delegates cool used highly damaging refrigerant gases - as lethal to the atmosphere as 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and nearly the equivalent of the emissions of all aircraft used to fly delegates to Indonesia.

Incidentally, was it really necessary to have 10,000 delegates there? There are less than 200 countries in the world, and surely some of the tiny ones would have had only a few attendees.

* Ruth Ritchie wrote amusingly of Nigella Lawson on the weekend:

Her show is for people who don't cook but just buy cookbooks as presents. When they watch and purchase Nigella, the way she sells it, they are investing in the services of a high-class culinary hooker, for their family and friends. The rest of us just see a woman melting chocolate with very long hair hanging into the bowl. Long hair is the secret ingredient in her luscious, sensuous, dark chocolate cherry sex trifle.

I don't think I have ever been tempted to try any recipe she has licked her fingers over, but I have the same reaction to most of the cream, butter, duck and goose fat obsessed English TV cooks.

* Big of him:

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has pardoned a teenage girl sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes after being gang raped

Getting rid of CO2

Well, here's another post where I just go about educating myself, and you can follow along if you wish.

It would seem that the problem with "clean coal technology" is not likely to be the CO2 capture part. The CSIRO seems particularly optimistic about this, talking about retrofitting capture devices to existing power stations. The National Energy Technology Laboratory in the US seems fairly upbeat about it as well:

Carbon capture and sequestration begins with the separation and capture of CO₂ from power plant flue gas and other stationary CO₂ sources. At present, this process is costly and energy intensive, accounting for the majority of the cost of sequestration. However, analysis shows the potential for cost reductions of 30–45 percent for CO₂ capture. Post-combustion, pre-combustion, and oxy-combustion capture systems being developed are expected to be capable of capturing more than 90 percent of flue gas CO₂.

For a general background on how coal burning power plants work, the Australian Coal Association gives a good short explanation. There are clearly some efficiencies (and CO2 to be saved) just by using better ways of burning coal, and I suppose getting China and India to use the most efficient methods would at least be a start. But for dramatic reduction of CO2 release, it doesn't look like you can pin too much hope on that.

But back to what to do with the CO2. Geosequestration seems to be the only idea being given serious consideration.

There's a post at Treehugger which gives reasons for being sceptical. Mostly it quotes from tim Flannery, who (despite exaggerating about aspects of global warming) may be onto something here.

It's important to get an idea of the scale of the problem. In the Treehugger post there is an attempt to picture the volume, but as is clear from the comments, it makes a mistake here.

It seems Karl Kruszelnicki made the same mistake in the lead up to the election, but he corrected himself at his blog. As he explains, the correct figure for the volume of CO2 made in Australia by power stations can be roughly calculated as follows:

The daily amount of carbon dioxide emitted from burning coal, when you liquify it, would fill a box 100 metres on a side - not 1,000 metres. And this is from burning coal to supply electricity for all of Australia, not just one of the states or one of the capital cities.

Well, that's an appalling enough figure anyway, isn't it? Every day, even if you captured only half of the CO2, you would still be left (Australia wide) with a volume of liquid CO2 that is 100m square by 50 m high. Seems a hell of lot to be looking to put down a hole somewhere every single day.

The thing is, it's not only the issue of where to put it, but how to get it there. It would seem that both the liquidification process (itself using significant amounts of energy) and its transport would be the really expensive aspects of this; not so much the pumping into the ground. If you were using pipes to move it around as a gas, you have the issues of the years it seems to take to build pipes of any length, and how long the place it eventually gets to can keep taking the gas. I suspect in the United States this may be somewhat less of a problem, as the geography seems more varied over shorter distances than Australia, and as such there might on average be shorter distances to get to useful places to pump the gas into the ground.

Earlier this year, a former head of BHP was quoted as expressing scepticism about its viability from the point of view of public concern about its safety:

Paul Anderson, who ran BHP-Billiton in 2002 and still sits on its board, told the Herald: "People can't believe you're safe putting nuclear waste five miles under the ground when it's petrified in glass. How are they going to feel safe putting pressurised gas under the ground?

"I think it's as big as the issue of nuclear waste. What are you going to do with millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that is not nearly as compact as nuclear waste?"

So...are there any alternatives to pumping liquid CO2 into the ground?

The comments in that Treehugger post listed above include one promoting Enpro, a Norwegian company which is promoting a process using salty water to convert CO2 into solid sodium carbonate (with clean water as a by-product.) The website is short on detail, and there is no mention of what can be done with the mountains of sodium carbonate this would produce. (There is also the added problem of the source of salty water if your power station is not near the ocean or adequate bore water.) The website claims these appealing features:

Unlike any other solution proposed thus far, EnPro technology:

• Provides a 95% reduction in CO₂ emissions from flue gases.
• Provides a 95% reduction of CO₂ in natural gas.
• Is effective in oil, gas or coal-powered plants.
• Can be retrofitted to existing plants at a reasonable cost.
• Produces commercially valuable by-products.
  (water suitable for industrial use and sodium carbonate etc.)

Given the very significant problems associated with geosequestration, surely anything leaving open the possibility of a solid that can be safely buried is worth looking into in detail.

(By the way, the Enpro site links to the Wikipedia entry on the similar Solvay process, which links to the abstract to a paper which sounds very significant on the issue. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it. But the abstract notes:

Long-term storage of a gaseous substance is fraught with uncertainty and hazards, but carbonate chemistry offers permanent solutions to the disposal problem. Carbonates can be formed from carbon dioxide and metal oxides in reactions that are thermodynamically favored and exothermic, which result in materials that can be safely and permanently kept out of the active carbon stocks in the environment. Carbonate sequestration methods require the development of an extractive minerals industry that provides the base ions for neutralizing carbonic acid.

The Wikipedia entry on carbon sequestration is not as detailed as one might expect.

I doubt that ocean dumping of liquid CO2 is a good idea, and would be seen as a big environmental unknown. (Iron fertilization would seem to me a much safer thing to try.) Pumping CO2 into areas where it is expected to be mineralised in the ground quickly gets mentioned in quite a few places on the Web, but again, you have transport and safety issues to consider.

A Google search shows up a fair few ideas for using carbonate reactions for CO2 sequestration.

Seems to me that, as with pebble reactors, it is an idea that is being pursued rather slowly, but in theory sounds very promising. At some stage, governments may have to start trying to pick winners if this is to be investigated as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.