A few updates

Here are some articles relevant to a couple of recent posts:

* An anthropologist supports my point that, even if a tribal culture has some practice of adult/child sexual contact as a part of initiation, how can a white man who grew up in Sydney claim this as mitigation for his having sex with a boy in his care? (In any event, the anthropologist suggests that that there is no evidence of such practices in Torres Strait.)

* On the issue of whether or not Muslim incursions into Europe were that bad a thing (David Levering Lewis has argued they more or less did Europe a favour,) here's a piece summarising the worst aspects of Muslim expansionism.

* Theodore Dalrymple has a go at Archbishop Rowan William's opaque use of language in his recent talk about Sharia law. Very true. I wonder what his theological writing is like: one suspects he seeks to overcome controversy in the ranks of believers simply by force of mystifying language.

Volcanoes don't help

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean

It seems some Antarctic glaciers have sped up, but no one seems certain why. It's not due to higher air temperature, and there is suspicion that a buried volcano may be to blame:

Much higher up the course of the glacier there is evidence of a volcano that erupted through the ice about 2,000 years ago and the whole region could be volcanically active, releasing geothermal heat to melt the base of the ice and help its slide towards the sea.

The consequence of a sudden increase in such activity could be pretty big, but it would take a while:

If the glacier does continue to surge and discharge most of it ice into the sea, say the researchers, the Pine Island Glacier alone could raise global sea level by 25cm.

That might take decades or a century, but neighbouring glaciers are accelerating too and if the entire region were to lose its ice, the sea would rise by 1.5m worldwide.

The story also talks about the difficulties of working there:

It is a very remote and inhospitable region. It was visited briefly in 1961 by American scientists but no one had returned until this season when Julian Scott and Rob Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic survey spent 97 days camping on the flat, white ice.

At times, the temperature got down to minus 30C and strong winds made work impossible.

At one point, the scientists were confined to their tent continuously for eight days.

"The wind really makes the way you feel incredibly colder, so just motivating yourself to go out in the wind is a really big deal," Rob Bingham told BBC News.

Just as people love to ask astronauts about toilets in space, I wonder how they deal with this in a freezing tent in Antarctica.

American politics

Found via Slate:

The club scene

Men who take Viagra 'put their fertility at risk' | Science | The Observer

The article notes concern that Viagra may affect men's sperm in such a way that it makes it harder for them to fertilise an egg. Of course, I would have thought most men who need it are of an age where they don't want kids, and those men who use it recreationally are probably not having sex for procreative purposes anyway.

Speaking of it recreational use, this I find surprising:

...Viagra has become a widely used recreational drug. It is mixed with cocaine, for example, and is sold in clubs.

I see from a quick Google that this has been going on for years, at least in Britain and Scotland. (I assume the same holds for Australia.)

This is debauchery of a very special kind: not just simply giving in to an appetite for pleasure, but deliberately seeking to increase the appetite itself. Screwtape would be delighted with modern pharmacology.

Fall of Singapore stories

Angels under fire - Telegraph

Go to the link to read a long article on some of the stories of incredible cruelty and survival from nurses who were unlucky enough to endure the fall of Singapore.

I recall some controversy some years ago about the Australian air force deliberately strafing Japanese lifeboats (from warships) in the later part of WWII. As this article shows, and people should recall, the Japanese had started the process of indiscriminate targeting of lifeboats and the killing of civilians right from the start.

Psi in history

Earlier this week I mentioned the vexed issue of paranormal powers, and today I want to talk about Uri Geller.

There's a lot of stuff on Youtube about him, mostly of a debunking nature. One thing I haven't found (yet) is video of what I seem to recall as a spoon bending appearance on British TV in the early 70's. From my memory, the way in which he bent the spoons seemed more authentic than his later demonstrations (or those by James Randi too.) However, it may well be my memory is faulty, and it may look unimpressive to me now. Famously, Geller was a complete flop on the Johnny Carson show, when the producers took particular care to make sure he couldn't cheat.

However, people may recall that part of Geller's fame was due to his convincing a couple of scientists at Stanford Research Institute (Targ and Puthoff) hat he did indeed have some sort of psi power. James Randi claimed they simply didn't have enough controls to ensure no cheating; but then I have also read some debunking of Randi's debunking. The Wikipedia article above lists some of the criticisms of the SRI team's procedures, but as I say there have also been some counterclaims. I am no fan of Randi; he exaggerates when it suits him to.

Anyway, Youtube has got a 4 part film from 1972 made by the SRI fellows about their tests with Geller. (The first part is an introduction that is hardly worth watching, except for it being pretty hokey.) The parts 2 to 4, however, are very interesting stuff. It shows they were not particularly impressed by the spoon bending or magnet moving (a low level stage trick Geller continues to this day), but they did think he had some sort of telepathy and perhaps a degree of telekinesis.

Geller performed very strongly on the sealed envelope image tests, and the suspicion is that he was able to see the targets before the test. Also, as I have seen TV magicians do equally impressive tricks, I don't put much faith in that, even though I have no idea how the trick is done.

It is also hard to see how he did the "guess which container has something in it" trick. The films show two of these. One does not impress me so much: the metal container had water in it, and it seems possible that condensation on the outside of the tin might have been a possible give away there. The other objects he found were metal, and I have read that Randi has claimed he probably located them by bumping the table and hearing or seeing which container moved differently. It would seem from the film, however, that he didn't do that, although his hands come suspiciously close to the containers at times. Also, if his cheating on the sealed envelope tests was based on his being able to see or find out what was going on in the other room, that may also explain how he was able to know which container had the object.

But the test that puzzles me most is his dice number guessing. The film does not make it perfectly clear how often he was tested on this, but to my mind, this was by far the hardest thing for Geller to have faked. (A tin with a die which SRI supplied is shaken, Geller has to guess the number on the top before anyone in the room sees it.)

These films have been on Youtube for a while, but I only just found them. As with many issues to do with the paranormal, I remain somewhat conflicted about what to make of it all. The "sensible" approach is to say that if he cheated most times, he has almost certainly cheated in every case. But I honestly don't know that Randi or his magician mates have ever reproduced exactly the same tricks as Geller as shown here.

UPDATE: I see from Wikipedia that Puthoff is a scientologist. Credibility warning!

Bad Jumper

Beamed Down: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

There have been many bad reviews for "Jumper", and I have been waiting for Anthony Lane's acerbic wit to get around to it. He doesn't disappoint, with this description of Hayden Christensen:

“Star Wars” fans will remember Hayden Christensen as the young Anakin Skywalker, or, to be accurate, as a kind of handsome void where Anakin was supposed to be.... One day, I feel sure, the rich mantle of charisma will descend upon him, but “Jumper” is not that occasion.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times also was pretty funny:

Snow white and close cropped, Mr. Jackson’s hair in this film dominates its every scene (it’s louder than the predictably voluble actor), rising out of the visual and narrative clutter like a beacon. It glows. It shouts. It entertains. (It earns its keep.)

Not so speedy post 3

1. Faith Restored: All this talk of Castro this week reminded me that I had read somewhere ages ago on the 'net conservative criticism of Steven Spielberg for saying that his meeting with Fidel in 2002 had been "the most important eight hours of my life." Indeed, The Telegraph and The Guardian both repeat the story this year.

Spielberg is a well known liberal, but that really did sound over the top and offensive. Well, it turns out Googling skills are not that strong in English journalism, as it is clear that Spielberg has long denied that he ever said it, and the original quote apparently came from the Cuban press.

The Guardian did post a retraction, as have other journals.

No, good people of earth, like me, you can still have faith in the Spielberg.

2. Adult themes. I like this week's Danny Katz column in The Age.

3. A disturbing night. Last night I dreamt that I was having lunch with Kevin Rudd after his election, but he was wearing a Muslim woman's style half face veil that covered his mouth, except that he would remove it when he was talking. I told a friend afterwards that I still didn't trust him.

Am I suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the election? I hope my trauma insurance covers it.

Never trust a chaise lounge

There are, of course, many esoteric and essentially useless things studied in the Humanities. While I have a soft spot for philosophy, one of the biggest wastes of time seems to be the academic over-analysis of eroticism in literature.

This review of a new two volume "Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature" illustrates the point. The reviewer writes:

The thematic subjects have been intelligently chosen. They include articles on syphilis as a literary muse, the rhetoric of seduction, confession and guilt, fairy tales, science fiction, slash fiction, grisettes, somatopia and furniture. The (very interesting) article on furniture concludes as follows: “In the fin-de-siècle, eros crosses over into sickness, and the furniture is caught up in the epidemic: the chaise lounge [sic] itself is sick with desire and pleasure. As the dominant notions of pleasure changed over time, so did the furniture”.

Uhuh.

Although the reviewer indicates there are many quality entries, he remains somewhat cynical of the overall effect:

I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed. Even thinking about sex has become difficult and it is being made more difficult year by year. For example, the American writer Pat Califia’s work “promotes lust in all its forms and her work contributes to the growing theoretical complexity about sexuality, both in relation to queer studies and the pornography debates”. The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s “works narrate a desire for an impossible plenitude beyond the binary oppositions and hollow conventions which structure mundane bourgeois reality”.

Social conservatives like me think people should take sex seriously, in the sense that it shouldn't be viewed merely as a recreational activity. But isn't there also something wrong with taking it too seriously, as do writers who portray it as an irresistible obsessive force, and the academics who then follow in their wake with arcane analysis?

Big numbers

Cosmic coincidence spotted : Nature News

The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10¹²². Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number — which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined¹. This ‘coincidence’, he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.

Seems odd that someone from a military college is making a name for himself in pointing out some big number co-incidences. Still, it's a good read.

Speed post 2

No time, no time.

1. a Howard adviser paints a quick picture of what it was like for his boss in the lead up to the election. He notes:

Try managing the equivocation of nervous colleagues who believe you should cut and run, when not so long ago they were begging you to stay. Try keeping your focus (and temper) while you and your family suffer cheap attacks fuelled by those ever-brave unnamed sources. Try maintaining your dignity while feral union activists wait outside hospitals and hotels to call you and your wife "Liberal c-ts" and tell you they wish you would die a "slow and painful death". All while your opponent coasts along, forgiven frequent errors of judgment, congratulated for the genius of his political flummery, by a largely uncritical media. Howard kept going where others would have faltered.

2. Contrast John Quiggan, a lefty who does indeed run an exceptionally polite blog, who said this recently:

Throughout the last few years of the Howard government, anyone who criticised the government, or suggested that Howard was not the best person to be Prime Minister of Australia, could be sure of being labelled a “Howard hater”....

This was always silly. Perhaps there were people motivated to oppose the government because of a personal animus against Howard rather than his actions and policies, but if so I never met any.

Yes, it would seem John needs to get out more.

3. Apparently, Peter Garrett was a bit hot under the collar in parliament yesterday, but I didn't see it on the TV news.

4. I didn't know that psychiatrists often had a very personal interest in mental illness:

Study after study has shown that psychiatrists have higher rates of mental illness than the general population.

Research published in 2001 revealed that 56% of female psychiatrists have a family history of mental illness, and just over 40% have experienced one themselves - almost twice the rate of other doctors. Undoubtedly as a consequence, psychiatrists have double the rate of suicide of the general population.

5. While on mental health, the Washington Post looks at Paranoia magazine. At last, I can publish my expose on the secret world of horses.

6. Now for the paranormal. Physicist Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance wants the American Association for the Advancement of Science to kick out the Parapsychological Association from its current affiliation membership.

Disheartened that some people would come to the defence of legitimate psi research, Sean follows up with a long post "proving" how (at the very least) telekinesis is not scientifically possible. More well argued rebuttal follows.

If ever a person deserved a mystifying experience that is not readily explicable in his scientific mindframe, it's him. It would seem, however, that if you refuse to believe that it is even possible, nothing strange ever happens to you. Of course, you could also be like me, an open-minded person, who nonetheless seems to be about as psychically inclined as a piece of wood.

To the vast international readership

Busy, busy. Blogging will be a bit more erratic this week.

Here's some almost random thoughts:

1. Try putting Cointreau in cream as you whip it. Delicious.

2. I am not sure how much I would pay to stay in a hotel which comprises of pre-fab shacks sitting on a frozen lake in the Arctic Circle, but if someone wants to pay me to visit it for a review, I'd go. (However, if I didn't get to see the Northern Lights, I would be very disappointed.) Go look at the photos as well as the article; they're really good.

3. Still seems a big puzzle as to what caused that 777 to crash. Sounds like the computers were not the problem, which was my hunch. Thus ends my alternative career as intuitive air crash investigator.

4. It's hardly worth getting excited about a 70% preferred PM rating when the alternative PM is Brendan Nelson.

5. It sounds like we will see someone being accidentally bitten by a deadly taipan on Foreign Correspondent tonight. Last week's story on Russian "democracy" was very interesting.

6. When toads ruled the earth.

Testing time?

Early Warning: PSA Testing Can Predict Advanced Prostate Cancer, Study Shows

My second prostate related post for the week. (It's my age that lends an interest in the topic.)

It seems from this story that a single PSA test, which (as I recall) is often of limited use in working out what to do about prostate cancer that is already there, may be very useful as a predictor for advanced cancer:

A single prostate specific antigen (PSA) test taken before the age of 50 can be used to predict advanced prostate cancer in men up to 25 years in advance of a diagnosis, according to a new study published by researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Lund University in Sweden. The findings should help physicians be able to identify men who would benefit from intensive prostate cancer screenings over their lifetime...

The results showed that the total PSA level was an accurate predictor of advanced cancer diagnosis in men later in life. The majority, 66 percent, of advanced cancers were seen in men whose PSA levels were in the top 20 percent (total PSA > 0.9 ng/ml). The average length of time from blood test to cancer diagnosis was 17 years.

Yet this article, which seems in need of editing, says next:

While this data does not have any immediate implications for general prostate cancer screening guidelines...

Why not? Sounds like a pretty useful thing to me.

Now that's porous

Technology Review: A Better Way to Capture Carbon

Very early days, but a new material shows promise for catching CO2 economically out of exhaust gases.

This sounds hard to be believe:

The new materials absorb carbon dioxide in part because they're extremely porous, which gives them a high surface area that can come into contact with carbon dioxide molecules. The most porous of the materials that Yaghi reports in Science contain nearly 2,000 square meters of surface area packed into one gram of material. One liter of one of Yaghi's materials can store all of the molecules of carbon dioxide that, at zero °C and at ambient pressure, would take up a volume of 82.6 liters.

Associated Press catches Fairfax disease

Danish youths set fires, attack police in 5th night of violence

The Associated Press points out that car torching in Copenhagen has been "mostly in immigrant neighbourhoods" and notes that "some observers" suggested that the reprinting of the Muhammad cartoons might have had something to do with it. Other than that, no mention of a certain religion.

To borrow a joke: probably Presbyterians, but who would know?

Even men in suits...

Susan Jacoby explains the point at which she decided to write her book "The Age of American Unreason":

....she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.

The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"

"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.

At that moment, Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."

Extending the intervention

Break the cycle of dysfunction | The Australian

The Australia puts a bit of a dampener on the "love in" week of reconciliation by running a lengthy article by a Cape York doctor who seemingly supports exactly the type of intervention that Howard started in the Northern Territory.

The doctor points out that aboriginal families in dysfunctional communities, as a start, simply need to be told what is right and wrong in their households (things like: feeding your kids once a day is bad, letting them watch and imitate porn is wrong.)

I still say that this is a harder thing for Labor governments, with their greater hand-wringing about cultural respect and equal rights, to effectively undertake than it is for conservatives.

Doctor, she's talking to ships

Running out of time to save our great bay - Opinion - theage.com.au

While reading Tracee's column this morning (which is just so easy to ridicule, I wonder if Tracee is offering it as a gift to Tim Blair during his recuperation), I kept being reminded of Spike Milligan in The Goon Show singing "I talk to the trees, that's why they put me away..."

(Oh, and it's a fine Blair column in the Telegraph today.)

UPDATE: "Doctor, he's talking to flowers."

Wow, two columnists from The Age are inviting psychiatric assessment today. Leunig is an apologising mood:

One day we must surely get down on our knees to every lizard and frog and orchid — and weep an apology.

Actually, I shouldn't be too harsh, he actually agrees with me on one point:

...I felt the wording of the apology, like the national anthem, was just a bit feeble. The spirit was there, but dulled by the cliched language of born-again motivational speeches. Mungo MacCallum lamented it was written by a platoon of public servants and not a poet...

New comedy

It seems to have taken a long time for the ABC to start showing the English sketch comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look. (The series that has just started was shown in 2006 in the UK.)

I missed much of the first episode, but what I did see seemed pretty promising. There are heaps of sketches from it on Youtube, and this one seems a good example of their style:



They have a second series soon in England, hence an interview with both of them in The Times.

An unpleasant case

Gang-rape judge in new child sex furore | The Australian

When I quickly read parts of this story on the Web this morning, I had vague thoughts that the teacher's claim that he was engaging in sex with a boy as part of islander "men's business" sounded very, very unlikely; but then again Torres Strait is close to New Guinea where there is that tribe that has (or used to have?) male initiation rites of a kind that this teacher presumably claims to be emulating.

You see, I kind of assumed that the teacher in question must have been a Torres Strait Islander himself; or at least have some islander blood in him.

But I just saw the news print version of The Australian, and the accused has his photo plastered all over the page. He looks completely white!

Furthermore, I see that the child concerned came from the Island of Saibai, about 4 kilometres from PNG. The famous semen initiation tribe of New Guinea is the Sambian, who come from the Eastern Highlands.

The prosecution has already said it has elders from Saibai who will confirm there is no such ritual on that island.

Apparently, the teacher claims to have had a part aboriginal father. The prosecutor told the court (see the Australian's story above):

.... he was not raised in a traditional manner and that he should receive a custodial sentence to send a clear message to the community.

"It is stated in the defence material that he was born in Sydney where he was educated to grade 12. He then went on to receive a scholarship and teach in Wollongong and undertake postgraduate studies," she said.

"He has gone on to have an illustrious and distinguished career. He is an educated man, using what he claims to be part of Papua New Guinea and Torres Strait Islander culture, that is, men's business, to explain away his offending behaviour. I have been instructed that this is not part of the culture."

I would have thought the point is that, even if the boy was from a tribe that still had this initiation, there is surely no conceivable way that the judge should be able find that this could be used in mitigation by an essentially white teacher from Sydney who has had absolutely no tribal background .

But, now that I think of it, it may not be a waste of time to allow this guy months to try to find an anthropologist to give evidence supporting his claims. Because if he comes up completely empty handed, the judge can presumably take a very dim view of his using this excuse with the boy at the time of the offences.

Yet if does find an anthropologist to support him (sounds very unlikely), the judge should say exactly what I suggested above.

If she doesn't, the public outcry will surely be enormous.

It seems to me that there should be no "up side" to this for Mr Last, except for the fact that he is buying time before heading off to jail.