Waiter, waiter, percolator

High society - Health - Specials - smh.com.au

I had no idea that the levels of caffeine from espresso could be so wildly different:

Unless you drink instant coffee, it is impossible to control your caffeine intake if you're a regular coffee drinker. A Griffith University dietitian, Ben Desbrow, proved fresh coffee has wildly inconsistent content by buying 97 espressos, the base unit of coffees, from Gold Coast cafes and analysing the laboratory results. Some coffees contained up to nine times more caffeine than others; from 25 milligrams up to 214 milligrams.

The finding underscores a nightmare that caffeine scientists have long faced when trying to find out whether caffeine is beneficial, detrimental or neutral for, say, cardiovascular disease, cancer or diabetes. Researchers need to be able to measure a population's caffeine consumption as a starting point. But, as Desbrow demonstrated, recalling how many cups of coffee you consume a day is a dodgy and probably useless gauge. This cornerstone problem could be dissuading scientists from the area and leaving coffee addicts in the dark.

And the reason this may be a problem:

It is generally accepted that stress or edginess and other harmful effects of caffeine can kick in after an intake of 400 milligrams a day, so an unsuspecting person drinking three cups of high-caffeine coffee across the day could easily be in the danger zone without realising.

Sounds like caffeine addiction could be a much bigger problem than I would have expected, all depending on where people buy their coffee from.

Oscar irrelevancy

Oscar nominations 2008 in full - Telegraph

As with last year, I couldn't care less about 95% of the movies and actors nominated in this year's Oscars.

I was going to say that it seems a long time since Oscars truly reflected mass audience tastes, but I suppose the year that the last Lord of the Rings movie walked away with everything might disprove that. (Then again, I strongly suspect most people saw it out of obligation to finish the trilogy; not because it was inherently that great a film.)

It would be better for all concerned if the Oscars did not proceed this year; maybe it will actually make people look forward to a year when the nominations might align more with popular taste.

More on mercury in fish

High mercury levels are found in tuna sushi - International Herald Tribune

Hey, whenever I decide there's nothing to blog about, I find a few things in quick succession.

Further to my recent post about mercury in fish, here's an article indicating that it is a real problem even for the relatively small amounts of tuna eaten as sushi:

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.

"No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks," said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey

Canned tuna has been recognized as a potential problem for some years too, but these sushi tests were even worse:

In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration joined with the Environmental Protection Agency to warn women who might become pregnant and children to limit their consumption of certain varieties of canned tuna because the mercury it contained might damage the developing nervous system. Fresh tuna was not included in the advisory. Most of the tuna sushi in the Times samples contained far more mercury than is typically found in canned tuna.

The levels of mercury in large fish everywhere seems to be a phenomena that just doesn't attract the degree of public concern that it deserves. (In past posts, I have noted the problem with mercury in dolphins eaten in part of Japan, and in whale meat eaten somewhere else.)

What I don't understand is where the mercury is coming from, and is it too late to do anything about it? And if they have so much mercury in their flesh that we shouldn't eat them, how come the dolphins, whales and fish don't get sick themselves?

Quiet week

Anyone else notice how quiet this week seems to be for blogging? Even Heath Ledger doesn't seem to have attracted anything in the blogs I check regularly (and in any case, it's hard finding something novel to say about that, I suppose.)

How bad can aboriginal problems be?

Very, very bad is the answer. This article explaining the history of a troubled aboriginal teenager from Cape York makes for startling reading:

Welfare officials lose raped deaf girl | NEWS.com.au

"Dude" lead leads nowhere

A bizarre turn on the investigative trail | Salon.com

I don't really know why Salon journalist Mark Benjamin let this story be published. It is a little amusing, but mainly at his expense.

In short, he attempts to follow a lead about a war crime in Iraq from an ex-Marine who sounds, right from the start, very unlike an ex-Marine.

Despite all the warning signs that this guy was not the genuine deal, the reporter goes on a snowy trip only to find a paranoid young guy sitting in a chalet with his stoner friends in a haze of pot smoke. The interview ends abruptly when the CIA is mentioned. It is never clearly established whether he was really a Marine at all (despite some apparent early confirmation of it from other sources.)

I would not have been particularly happy about paying for the trip if I were Mark Benjamin's editor.

Googling a death

How does Google News work? It seems surprisingly slow sometimes.

This morning I heard that Heath Ledger had died on the ABC radio news at 8 am. At 8.30, I checked both the Australian and US Google news sites and it wasn't there yet. The News.com story would indicate it was posted at about 7.45 my time.

One gets used to Google search being so powerful that it seems a big let down for Google News to not have linked to major stories within 10 minutes.

As for Heath: Sounds like yet another case where too much success too young has proved problematic. As for how he was as an actor: you know, I don't think I have ever seen all of any movie or TV show he has been in.

He had a reputation for being difficult with the media, and that may explain some of the less than sympathetic comments being expressed at the News.com site.

Woohoo

Saudi allow women to stay in hotels without a male guardian - International Herald Tribune:

The daily Al-Watan, which is deemed close to the Saudi government, reported Monday that the ministry issued a circular to hotels asking them to accept lone women — as long as their information is sent to a local police station.

And elsewhere it is reported that by the end of the year, women will be allowed to drive a car. But not everyone there is ready to accept it, according to this letter to the editor quoted in The Telegraph:

"Allowing women to drive will only bring sin," a letter to Al-Watan newspaper declared last year. "The evils it would bring - mixing between the genders, temptations, and tarnishing the reputation of devout Muslim women - outweigh the benefits."

Overfishing

Until All the Fish Are Gone - New York Times

An interesting editorial in the NYT on the international problem of overfishing.

Incidentally, in Australia the Lifestyle Channel has started showing Rick Stein's latest series, in which he is travelling around the Mediterranean. (As always, it works very well as foodie travelogue.) His occasional trips on a fishing boat certainly indicate that the Europeans have just about fished the Mediterranean empty.

Why didn't the ABC or SBS pick up this series shown on the BBC?

Stupid

Reclaim the streets now! | Libby Purves - Times Online

Libby Purves (quite rightly) gets very, very upset with how Britain's Home Secretary (a woman) answered questions about safety on the streets. The comments are so startling wrong-headed, she deserves every criticism she gets:

The revelation occurred in an interview. The Home Secretary was droning peacefully on about how “people are safer in terms of crime than ten years ago” (ignoring, as they always do, the fact that much street crime goes unreported because there's no point, and that the drop in crime figures has more to do with car alarms than policing).

Then the canny reporter asked whether she personally, would feel safe walking alone in Hackney at night? And the minister said “No. Why would I do that?” OK then, Kensington or Chelsea: would she walk alone at night there? “No,” replied the Home Secretary again, adding the appalling line: “But I never would have done, at any point in my life. I just don't think it's a thing that people do. I wouldn't walk around at midnight. I'm fortunate that I don't have to.”

Boing, splat! She said it; and worse, she has no idea why it is dreadful. In a desperate attempt to spin her clear, an aide revealed that his boss bravely bought a kebab in Peckham recently.

Investigative hacks discovered that this was at 5pm, and with a protection officer. Later the Home Secretary said yes, she would walk around in her own constituency (expressing terror of one's voters is never politically helpful) but added: “You don't walk in areas you don't know, in any circumstances”; and that her task is to “persuade” people that they are safe.

No. The task is to make them safe. On any street, any time

Darkest Africa

BBC NEWS | Africa | I ate children's hearts, ex-rebel says

Milton Blahyi, a former feared rebel commander in Liberia's brutal civil war, has admitted to taking part in human sacrifices as part of traditional ceremonies intended to ensure victory in battle.

He said the sacrifices "included the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for us to eat."

There had been numerous rumours of human sacrifices during the 1979-93 conflict but this is the first time anyone has admitted publically to the practice.

He's now an Evangelist preacher. I assume that even Dawkins would approve of that as an improvement.

Lane on the monster that ate New York

Monstrous Times: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

Anthony Lane writes a witty review of Cloverfield, and although he seems to have found it somewhat silly fun, the whole concept of the movie (Blair Witch meets Godzilla, as several other critics have said) leaves me cold.

JJ Abrams is over-rated as a creative force, I reckon.

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.