Slow medical research

Coffee can double risk of miscarriage - health - 21 January 2008 - New Scientist

The suggestion is that even 2 cups of coffee a day can increase the risk of miscarriage.

Seems to have taken medical research a hell of a long time to pin this down as really a risk factor after all.

Helping the Japanese

The West as cruel to animals as the Japanese - Opinion - theage.com.au

It doesn't really matter whether Peter Singer is right or not (and he probably is at least right to suggest that many people would find some factory farms to be cruel;) the point is more that by raising this now he is only going to serve the purposes of the Japanese whaling lobby.

Singer also doesn't give enough importance to the difference the type of animal makes to the issue of whether killing it is ever justifiable. It's pretty clear that whales are a hell of a lot smarter than kangaroos, isn't it?, and no species of kangaroo is threatened by culling. To draw a comparison is disingenuous.

Counting on the gullibility of men

Fancy an on-screen romance with a cherry on top? | The Japan Times Online

Read that article if you want to know about the modern way to separate the more gullible Japanese man from his money.

Good luck to Tim Blair

I've been remiss in not earlier sending good wishes to Tim Blair, but I particularly wanted to say that I think he did a considerable public service by describing the course of symptoms he went through in the lead up to the diagnosis of bowel cancer. The fact that he seems to have had very generalised pains for some time before it settled in a specific area was not something I would have expected from bowel cancer.

His theory as to how it is men ignore gradually increasing warning signs seemed plausible, and it should work as a good warning to any men who have the same thought processes.

(As for me, call me a big hypochondriac girlie man if you want, but there's no way that even one sleep interrupted night caused by a novel type of pain would not result in a GP visit.)

A handful of Melbourne photos

Now that Kevin Rudd has lost his sideburns (it's been many a decade since a Prime Ministerial hair fashion has received such universal condemnation,) I don't have much to post about except to put up more photos from Melbourne:

The place: Werribee Open Range Zoo:


It is a good quality zoo, where you don't have to feel guilty about most of the animals being too cooped up. The new hippo enclosure is fun for the kids, but you have to be lucky and be there before they disappear underwater for protracted periods:


When you finish the zoo, make sure you drop into the adjacent (and free) Victorian State Rose garden:


I try to grow roses in Brisbane, but it is a never ending battle against black spot and other humidity-loving diseases. While my wife loved Melbourne's roses, they also made her depressed about ours at home.

Back to the city. Who doesn't try taking this photo from the inside of Melbourne Central shopping centre? Still, came out quite well, I think:


Of course, food is what Melbourne does best (fish and chips excepted, of course.)


Fortunately, both my kids love spaghetti bolognese, and every cafe in Melbourne by law has to have it on the menu. (I may be exaggerating.)

(By the way, since when did restaurant touts start pestering passers-by on Lygon Street? An unwelcome addition.)

The docklands area of Melbourne is looking good, and getting the Williamstown ferry on a nice day is a good way to see part of it:


Cue corny travelogue music as we prepare to leave Melbourne with a nice sunset shot:


But finally, I admit I am particularly happy with this shot of the silly sculpture "Cow up a tree":

Flakey Melbourne

Give small children small fish: doctor

I found it a little surprising to read a couple of weeks ago that, even in Australia, parents should not feed too much large fish to their very young children, due to the risk they will get too much mercury.

Do big fish everywhere in the world have too much mercury in them? If so, how long has this been the case? Furthermore, even some not so huge sized fish can be a problem:

The NSW Food Authority's chief scientist, Dr Lisa Szabo, said there were only six types of fish parents needed to worry about - shark, broadbill, swordfish, marlin, orange roughy and catfish.

"In part it's because they're bigger," Dr Szabo told reporters.

"But they're also longer lived and they're predatory fish, which means that they eat a lot of small fish so that's why they tend to accumulate the mercury."

Orange roughy is an interesting, ugly fish, as being a member of the slimehead family would tend to indicate. (Oh the cruel taunting that must go on in fish schools. Ha ha.) But, as it lives in deep cold water, which I generally assume is far from mercury producing shores, I did not expect it to have a mercury problem. Still, if you live for a hundred years before someone eats you, I guess there is a lot of time to accumulate bad things in your flesh.

Anyway, this is all by way of long introduction to a minor anecdote about a problem with Melbourne, or perhaps it is with Victorians generally.

I have said for decades that, despite the fact that I really don't like its weather (particularly its winters which are grey, wet and seem to take forever to leave, and yet never have the hope of the prettiness of snow,) Melbourne is the best place in Australia to eat. My theory is that this was historically prompted not only by foreign immigrants, but also by the fact that the weather means there is nothing else to do for 8 months of the year other than to stay indoors.

However, there is one area where Melbourne is still disastrously backward in the matter of food: the suburban fish and chip shop.

While staying at Williamstown recently, my wife noticed a pretty new looking fish and chip shop that had lots of customers, and had a great position across the road from the water. She suggested we eat from there. Before we went into the shop, I told her that maybe it would be OK, but I knew from past experience that Melbournians had a peculiar feature in that they assumed fish and chip shops need only sell flake (shark).

In contrast, the Brisbane fish and chip shops of my childhood sold everything but flake - whiting, flathead, snapper, sea perch (a.k.a. orange roughy, incidentally.) Flake only started appearing in Brisbane as an option in (I would guess) the 1980's.

Maybe Melbourne has changed, I said to my wife. Surely it has caught up with the times and sells something other than the strangely textured gummy shark, which I think most Brisbane people still quite rightly disdain. (I think from childhood holidays in Sydney that it wasn't very popular there either.)

But no, the very fancy looking, popular fish and chip shop in question sold only flake, and I don't think it was because they had run out of other fish either.

We walked up the road to another fish and chip takeaway, a much less fancy looking one, and its extensive fish menu was flake and something sold as whiting (although the latter turned out to be something suspiciously large and not exactly of whiting shape.)

Although my sample of shops was admittedly small, I still feel confident in saying that Melbourne for some mysterious reason is still the worst city in Australia to eat take away fish and chips.

(Why did they ever accept small shark as the default choice for takeaway fish in the first place? Anyone know the history of that?)

Flying a 777 this weekend?

What pilots are saying about the BA 777 accident

This website indicates that some pilots speculate that fuel contamination is behind the Heathrow 777 crash this week.

However, the initial accident report says this is what happened:

Initial indications from the interviews and flight recorder analyses show the flight and approach to have progressed normally until the aircraft was established on late finals for Runway 27L.

At approximately 600ft and 3km (two miles) from touch down, the Autothrottle demanded an increase in thrust from the two engines but the engines did not respond.

Following further demands for increased thrust from the autothrottle, and subsequently the flight crew moving the throttle levers, the engines similarly failed to respond.

I wouldn't have thought that a fuel contamination would lead to this problem in both engines at exactly the same time.

Its sounds more like a problem with the avionics (if that is the right word for the electronics involved in control of the engines.) And if I am right at this guess, I wouldn't want to be flying in a 777 right at this moment.

I love making guesses in fields I know next to nothing about.

UPDATE: this article in The Times lists the possible causes, and yes, a computer/software problem is one of them.

Sentencing for rape

'Stinky rapist' gets 15 years | The Courier-Mail

I generally don't like to get involved in the populist debates about the appropriateness of certain sentences for certain convictions. The reason is that you can't rely on media reports to give a full picture of comments made in court by the judge or the barristers.

Having said that, there are some cases that do raise my eyebrows as to whether the sentence really could be adequate. The Aurukun child rape case was one, and now this Brisbane rape case is another.

Basically, the media story indicates that this was the creepiest, most pre-meditated form of rape possible. (Complete stranger - later found to have hepatitis - enters woman's house, ties her up, and forces her into shower afterwards in attempt to cover his tracks.) The jury took 40 minutes to find him guilty.

He got 15 years jail, of which 80% must be served. The newspaper report says he has "a violent history of offending", showed no remorse, and his prospects of rehabilitation are low.
As rape carries a maximum of life imprisonment in Queensland, the question is: just how much worse can a "straight forward" rape possibly be in order to justify a life sentence? To my mind, this case must be very close to deserving a life sentence.

Permit system

Back to a system that permits social rot | The Australian

Nicolas Rothwell criticises the decision to re-instate a "permit system" for entry on Northern Territory aboriginal communities.

I suspect he is right, and Labor's sensitivities to listening to all aboriginal voices is actually a prescription for lessening strong action to change communities.

Meanwhile, in the Souther Ocean

A tale of two ships | Environment | The Guardian

This article provides an informative background to the rivalry between Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd.

How low can it go?

Teen brat just loves the world's attention | NEWS.com.au

While I am reluctant to add my tiny bit to the publicity surrounding teenager "Corey" [I predict new parents will avoid giving their baby boys that name for a good few years now,] it is astounding to think that the makers of Big Brother could contemplate this:

While Corey was too young to be a housemate, he was being earmarked by Big Brother producers last night for a role somewhere in the franchise, Ten sources said yesterday.

"His fame and notoriety hasn't escaped the executive producers of Big Brother ... he would deliver the Ten demographic in droves," the source said.

Of course, the source could just be a publicist who sees this as a way to get some attention to a dying franchise, but I wouldn't put it past them.

Stick to the $10 limit

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

This was a very fascinating study on the how expectations influence perceptions:

Researchers ...have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

You see, people should just take my approach and make it a personal challenge to find the best wines you can at no more than $10 a bottle. (For many years, De Borteli's Sacred Hill range has usually been the most reliably pleasing sub-$10 wine, although you have to move between varieties from year to year. The Jacobs Creek sparkling range - often on special at $8 a bottle - is also consistently good.)

The report about the American study notes even this strange effect:

"Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles."

Very odd, hey?

Arabs got the blues

The Arabs | Between fitna, fawda and the deep blue sea | Economist.com

This is a pretty interesting review of the various reasons the Arab nations are all pretty depressed at the moment.

Here are a few points from the article that I don't think are so widely known:

* In Egypt, fewer than one in ten voters bothered to turn out for recent polls.

* Sex out of wedlock remains taboo, yet the cost of lavish weddings, hefty dowry payments and the bridal requirement of a furnished, paid-for home have pushed the average age of marriage in many Arab countries into the 30s.

* Religious texts still out-sell every other form of literature in most Arab countries.

* An oft-quoted statistic from the reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.

UPDATE: this is a fascinating article on how Egypt tries to iron out inequality by massive government subsidies for bread (amongst other things,) and how it goes wildly wrong. Here's the key paragraph, but go read the whole thing:

So the bread subsidy continues, costing Cairo about $3.5 billion a year. Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education. But it is not just the cost that plagues the government. The bread subsidy fuels the kind of rampant corruption that undermines faith in government, discourages investment and reinforces the country's every-man-for-himself ethos, say government officials and political experts, not to speak of bakers and their customers.

Government piggy bank to save us?

Rudd Government vows to cut fat - National - theage.com.au

According to the new Federal government:

THE budget surplus needs to be bigger and the Rudd Government's first budget will tighten fiscal policy "significantly", Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has warned, as he searches for fat around departments to cut.

Mr Tanner said the present inflationary pressure meant the budget situation needed to be stabilised. "Spending has accelerated too quickly," he said.

The surplus needed to increase as a proportion of GDP to put downward pressure on interest rates, he said.

"The projected surplus is a fraction over 1% of GDP. A surplus of 1% is good, but not necessarily good enough", he said. "There is a clear need for a significant tightening."

I have limited understanding of economics, but my intuition is that there is something very wrong about the very idea of using a budget surplus to control inflation.

It also places Labor in a very peculiar political position. It liked to accuse the Howard government of being "big taxing", and skimping on spending on infrastructure. Now Labor will keep the same taxes Howard would have, but just let them sit in the government piggy bank, and (presumably) still limit the spending on infrastructure and the public service. (How ironic too that I heard that there will be cuts to the Foreign Affairs department. I would have thought having more public servants posted overseas might help our economy if it meant they spent their salary in another country!)

Certainly, I have a problem with the idea, currently all the rage with many Left of Rudd, that the tax cuts should be abolished because they provide too much stimulus to the economy. As Harry Clarke points out, it's simply going to replace bracket creep anyone, which surely is only fair.

Has any other country ever been in a similar position to this and successfully used budget surplus increase to limit inflation?

Some economist comment needed, and I don't mean John Quiggan.

And: for God's sake, what does Kevin Rudd think he is doing with the length of his sideburns? Is he a secret Elvis fan?

UPDATE: I suppose that the good thing about economics is that you can hold any opinion and expect that there will be an economist somewhere who will support you. This article from The Australian indicates that there is indeed reason to be sceptical about an increased budget surplus helping significantly with inflation, but it would seem most economists think it at least won't do any harm.

Visiting Israel

Digging the Bible. - By David Plotz - Slate Magazine

Here's a nice travel piece by David Plotz, which explains why Israel would be such an interesting destination for people interested in the Bible. History everywhere.

Anything but self control

Cue the gluttony - Los Angeles Times

This article talks about the idea from the US that "environmental cues" make people eat more, and become obese:

Several recent studies, papers and a popular weight-loss book argue that eating is an automatic behavior triggered by environmental cues that most people are unaware of -- or simply can't ignore. Think of the buttery smell of movie theater popcorn, the sight of glazed doughnuts glistening in the office conference room or the simple habit of picking up a whipped-cream-laden latte on the way to work.

Accepting this "don't blame me" notion may not only ease the guilt and self-loathing that often accompanies obesity, say the researchers behind the theory, but also help people achieve a healthier weight.

To make Americans eat less and eat more healthily, they contend, the environment itself needs to be changed -- with laws regulating portion size, labeling or the places where food can be sold or eaten. That would be much easier, the researchers add, than overcoming human nature. The theory that our society -- not us -- is to blame for our overall expanding waist size is garnering support from health and nutrition experts.

Now look - no doubt "supersizing" meals is one of the unhealthiest ideas American fast food ever came up with; but the idea of laws to limit portion size is surely the most inappropriate thing anyone has ever suggested legislating about.

A requiem for the sitcom

I've written before about how sitcoms over the last, I don't know, 5 years or so, seem to have just fizzled out to a sad death. (When did "Malcolm in the Middle" end? It was the last one I could whole-hearted recommend.)

AA Gill in The Times is in despair of British sitcoms in particular; although I would say it has been moribund for perhaps 15 or 20 years. (OK, perhaps one small, short, silly exception: The IT Crowd.) What Gill says of British sitcoms applies to the US ones too, in my opinion:

I don’t believe in golden ages, on TV or anywhere else, and I am constantly telling people that if they’re not seeing the best television of their lives at the moment, it’s only because they’re not looking in the right places. I honestly believe every aspect of television is better than it’s ever been – except for the sitcom, which is far worse than it was 20 years ago, 10 years ago, last year and probably last Wednesday. It seems to be an artistic form, like weaving corn dollies and plate-spinning to music, that has reached a point where nobody can remember what its point is supposed to be. Sitcoms used to be about anger and hubris and the small man standing against the slings and arrows of life. The difference between British and American sitcoms was that ours were all about failure and theirs about success – they’d bake a cake, our lot would fall into a cake.

Now the situation has gone missing. It’s just about pushing comedians into rooms. The comedy lacks structure or tension or even interest. They’re not about life, they’re about the tired conventions of sitcom, so every scene, every exhausted setup and wan punch line, has been handed down until it’s ragged and sticky with overuse. The sitcom has become the Oxfam shop of telly.

Even Kevin has not saved us

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A senseless belligerence

Waleed Aly goes to town in this Guardian piece about the treatment of Dr Haneef and David Hicks, and claims that the new Labor government is probably not going to be all that different despite its "softer" rhetoric.

But this comment (by "Phorein") caught my eye, as one of the finest examples of over-the-top condemnation of Australia I have recently seen:

Unfortunately for Australia, those who have been living down there for a long while know first hand that this article does describe a sad reality: that of a country which has progressively become a totalitarian society based on surveillance and hatred. Yes, it's a regime, because there is no political debate, because the political elites go hand-in-hand with a clique that utterly dominates the mass-mediad, and because most gullible and holier-than-you "Aussies" are happy to be sheep.

I love condemnations of Australia by Guardian readers. It just wouldn't be as much fun to read without them.

Kid's holiday movies

The kids and I have seen 2 holiday season movies so far.

First, the power of TV advertising convinced both son and daughter that they must see Alvin and the Chipmunks. My observations: at first, I thought the lead actor (Jason Lee) just seemed particularly bad at pretending that the computer generated characters are really there when he talks to them; but then I noticed that he also seemed to be seeing through the human actors when they were in a scene. He just seems not quite "there" in his acting.

For a kids film, it is perhaps surprising to note that it tackles the issues of corporate greed, exploitation of artists, and men over 30 who still have a 20 year old's aversion to commitment to having a family. And let's face it, when the average age of the target audience will be about 5, expectations should be low. But even so, it's not a movie that will stick in anyone's mind for more than 10 minutes after leaving the cinema, even if the chipmunks first song in the movie (a rendition of "Funky Town") drew spontaneous applause from an easily pleased audience I saw it with.

It also raises the most incredibly inconsequential question ever: was that Paris Hilton in a black wig doing an uncredited appearance as the French maid? Even Yahoo answers does not know for sure.

Secondly: The Water Horse - Legend of the Deep. This is more like it. The poster heavily promotes that it is a Walden Media production, the same company that is making the Narnia series, and with good reason. It shares with "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" a very similar tone of basic seriousness, as well as great production values, solid acting and good script.

Yes, it is a little derivative in certain respects, and it certainly helps if you are not too familiar with the geography of Scotland. My (5 year old) girl found it a bit too scary in parts, but I would expect that most children (particularly boys) from about 7 to 12 should be really impressed.

Indeed, overall, I liked it a quite a lot, especially as I tend to give bonus points to any intelligently made family movie that can touch the adult audience as well as please the kids.

(It seems to be underperforming at the box office in the States, but everyone involved should be pleased with the product.)

Next on the list: the well reviewed "Enchanted". That should keep my daughter happier.

Oratory and politics

Is Eloquence Overrated? - New York Times

In light of the good reviews Obama gets for some of his speeches (personally, I am not so convinced; it seems to me the deep, smoker's voice would get him half way to acclaim even if he were reading a McDonald's menu), this is an interesting article on the value of politic oratory.

There is an actual connection to the Kennedy speeches too.