A good idea

Mile-high urinals | Gulliver | Economist.com

Possibly, we will see urinals in Airbus planes.

They have them in Shinkansen (the "bullet trains") in Japan, and I would have thought that women would appreciate the cleaner sit down toilets that they would leave.

Toxoplasma spreads out

The world's most successful bug hits dolphins - life - 02 June 2008 - New Scientist

Don't you hate toxoplasma gondii? It's everywhere on land, and now increasing evidence that it is spreading to marine mammals. Given that there is some evidence that infection affects human personality, I hope the dolphins don't start attacking swimmers any time soon.

Not only that, they may accumulate in oysters and mussels!

You mean my fondness for well-done meat, and never having a pet cat, is still not going to protect me ?

I think this calls for drastic measures. Outlawing pet cats may be a start.

Old attempts at culture change

Change drink habits? You're joking | David Aaronovitch - Times Online

Aaronvitch is cynical of government attempts to change the culture of drinking.

To back his case, he points out to some historical attempts to decree fashion:

Consider the announcement in 1574 by Elizabeth I of her Statutes of Apparel, telling free-born Englishpersons what they could not wear. The statutes laid down limitations on the fineries to be donned by subjects, and were - or so Her Majesty claimed - motivated by a concern that now sounds wholly modern. Viz, “the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen and others seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen, who, allured by the vain show of those things... run into such debts and shifts as they cannot live out of danger of laws without attempting unlawful acts”.

Elizabeth had the advantage that she could imprison anyone so much as questioning these laws, let alone breaking them. But not long afterwards we discover various proto-Mailites suggesting that antisocial dressiness had broken out again. Stephen Gosson lamented that hardly had Good Queen Bess “set downe the limits of apparel to euery degree: and how soone againe hath the pride of our harts over-flowen the chanel?” Huge ruffs bothered Philip Stubbes, who, in his The Anatomie of Abuses considered that: “If Aeolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his stormes chaunce to hit uppon the crafie bark of their brused ruffes, then they goe flip flap in the winde, like rags flying abroad, and lye upon their shoulders like the dishcloute of a slut.”

I don't think I was aware of the Elizabethan fashion laws. Still, if I were benevolent dictator, I would be tempted to have another crack at it.

Credit to the Taser

Vital Signs - After Taser Jolt, a Heartbeat Returns to Regular Rhythm - NYTimes.com

This was reported somewhere else last week, I think, but here it is in the New York Times.

Don't tell the Victorian police, though.

Polygamist hair

Judge Orders Sect Children’s Release - NYTimes.com

Have a look at the photo in the above article, and see if you don't agree that forcing embarrassing hairstyles on underage children should alone be enough to allow courts to remove children from that compound.

It's very creepy.

Really?

Microgeneration could rival nuclear power, report shows | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I've only been to England for a couple of holidays, I think in an alleged spring and then an autumn, so the idea of solar hot water or photovoltaic panels working well there always makes me snigger a bit. Just how many warm, sunny days are there in that country?

But the renewables consultants always talk it up, and of course it's just my hunch that the figures must be very rubbery.

Sounds about right

Why China doesn't break | Comment is free

There's occasionally a "Comment is Free" piece in The Guardian in which there appears to be nothing to object to.

Stupid

Boris Johnson blamed for Tube party violence - Times Online

Isn't it extraordinary to think that people were allowed to drink on public transport in London before Boris Johnson? (And that he should then be blamed for stupid yobs who got drunk via Facebook organised Tube drinking parties before the ban came into effect.)

Britain certainly has become a strange place. Sounds like a good dose of conservatism needed, for a decade or so.

That anecdote...

I mentioned a few weeks ago my curiosity as to the details of an unsavoury Bob Ellis anecdote that David Stratton put in his autobiography. Andrew Bolt has revealed it here.

(There is quite a lot of overlap between posts here and at Andrew's lately. I get a small amount of pleasure from seeing when I have posted on a topic a few hours ahead of him, but I guess visitors to both sites might more often assume that I am following his lead. Well, of course sometimes that happens, but I seem to beat him to print on quite a few occasions. Is there any award for that, especially for an amateur blogger? :) )

An update on the LHC, mini black holes and strangelets

There are a few things of note that have happened over the last couple of weeks:

1. Physicist Bee at the Backreaction blog gets a little cranky at having to address the issue, but she sets out in detail in this post why she believes there is no danger at all from mini black holes at the LHC. More importantly, she then respectfully answers those who question or doubt her in the long string of comments that follow. She insists that any arguments against Hawking Radiation existing are not convincing, but she makes many good points. (Including the preliminary one that the extra dimensions that are required to even make mini black hole production at the LHC plausible may not exist.)

Of particular interest in the comments section is the involvement of Walter Wagner, one of the litigants who is trying to stop the start up of the LHC because of perceived dangers.

I have said before that I was not sure what to make of Walter. He has had a varied career, and asking for donations to run a legal case is usually a reason to be concerned about motive. But, his comments in this post impress me. He appears sincere and knowledgeable. It's well worth reading this post and the comments in detail.

2. There's a recent paper on arXiv which does some number crunching on cosmic rays hitting the sun and earth and how they compare to the LHC. Perhaps it's easiest if I just copy the summary here:

The high energy cosmic ray flux impinging on the sun and earth for 4 Gyr is compared to the operation of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at design energy and luminosity. It is shown by two different calculations that both the integrated luminosity and the total hadronic interaction rate from the cosmic ray flux of comparable energy are many orders of magnitude larger than that of the LHC operated for 10 years. This study indicates that it is extremely unlikely that pernicious exotic particles, such as mini-black holes, would be produced by the LHC that would destroy the earth.

Sounds good, except that it is still based on the assumption that Hawking Radiation exists, and therefore doesn't take into account the more complicated arguments as to why slow speed mini black holes created at the LHC might be more of a problem than high speed ones.

However, the section on strangelets (which are another potential worry, even though I haven't spent much time discussing them here) sounds more definitive. Taylor calculates that a negatively charged strangelet would be stopped by the sun, hence if they were capable of causing damage there, it would have already happened.

It sounds as if that is a solid argument.

(Indeed, a similar argument, but with neutron stars, may be the convincing argument about mini black holes not being a danger. That's what CERN is already telling people who email them, apparently. )

3. CERN is still promising to release their new safety report, any day now. I haven't spotted it yet.

A strong review

It's the movie I am destined to hate and despise (on the dubious assumption that I will ever actually see any of it), so I'm a little disappointed that Sex and the City has actually managed about a 50-something-percent approval rating at Rottentomatoes. I was hoping for it to do worse.

There are some savage reviews in there, though; but few of them I have read have lines particularly worth quoting. Roger Ebert gives a very disdainful review, but not a particularly witty one. He is not alone amongst reviewers in noting that a comedy "highlight" is a the uptight character (how shall we put this politely) soiling herself.

What's more puzzling is that there are a couple of good reviews from religious sites. Here's one at Beliefnet (not sure about that site; I've never spent time there, but it sure sounds like it specialises in soft edged spirituality). The one from Christianity Today seems particularly forgiving. This is very disappointing: who can I trust to incorporate reliable conservativism if it's not from a site called "Christianity Today"? (On the other hand, Anglicans still count themselves as Christians, so I should have known.) Funny how it is secular reviewers who are more offended by the empty materialism than the religious reviewers. Dana Stevens in Slate writes, for example:

The show's values are reprehensible, its view of gender relations cartoonish, its puns execrable. I honestly believe, as I wrote when the series finale aired in 2004*, that Sex and the City is singlehandedly responsible for a measurable uptick in the number of materialistic twits in New York City and perhaps the world.

The strongest short review of the movie is from the Orlando Weekly, and it is kinda funny in its savageness:

....we’ll continue to experience befuddlement verging on disgust whenever we’re reminded of Sex and the City (so named, we suppose, because Seriously Rethinking Third-Wave Feminism reads like ass on a poster). We’re totally down with the interpretation offered by a choreographer we know, who once pithily observed that SATC projects onto women “everything that’s wrong with men.” For real: Is it any sort of inroad for a summer film to prove that ladies, too, can surrender to pummeling materialism, a blinkered emphasis on self-gratification and hollow objectification of the opposite gender? Plus, Darren Star and his “creative” crew must be laughing their sphincters loose knowing that their amoral fantasia has been welcomed as gospel by genuine urban women, instead of their obvious target demo: Iowan paralegals too tipsy and titillated to notice that the characters are actually semiotic stand-ins for gay men.

So, no, we don’t have a strong opinion on the thing one way or the other.

I think it's the same reviewer with this even shorter summary (it's on the same page as the slightly longer review):

We’re realists here. We know that nothing we might write could dim a fan’s enthusiasm for rejoining the continuing adventures of Carrie and Samantha and … uh, Dopey, and … uh, the Pink Power Ranger. And maybe that’s as it should be, because everybody has the right to indulge his or her particular pop-culture obsession in a state of unmolested respect. So knock yourselves out, skanks.

UPDATE: I don't know why Rottentomatoes doesn't count Anthony Lane's reviews in New Yorker. Happily, Lane has reviewed it, and he's very funny. Speaking about the special preview he attended:

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

Interesting, he actually criticises it from a feminist perspective (the women mostly define themselves by their ability to snare and keep a man.) But he ends the review like this:

It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness.

Strange French law

BBC NEWS | Europe | Row over French bogus virgin case

An interesting case from France:

France's ruling UMP party has opposed a French court's decision to annul a marriage between two Muslims because the wife lied about being a virgin.

The Lille court's decision has also angered feminists who say it amounts to a fatwa against women's liberty.

The court granted the man's request for an annulment after ruling that he had been tricked into a marriage.

Both conservatives and feminists have joined forces to complain about the decision, but the government response:

....a justice ministry spokesman insisted the court's decision was not based on religion or morality but on the French civil code under which a marriage can be annulled if a spouse has lied about an "essential quality" of the relationship.

It sounds like there must be some interesting claims made in applications for annulment in France, then!

In Australia, incidentally, annulment of a civil marriage is exceptionally rare, as it is only available because one party was already married, or under age, or forced into a marriage under duress.

The fact that your partner lied about her sexual history seems an extraordinarily silly thing to consider for annulment.

Dalrymple on methadone

We must kick our methadone habit | Theodore Dalrymple - Times Online

Dalrymple has another go at pushing his line that methadone treatment for heroin addiction is a bad idea. (Or, at the very least, it is a bad idea to provide it indefinitely to addicts.)

I wonder what the situation is in Australia. In the early 1980's, I had a pharmacist friend who I saw dispensing liquid methadone to registered addicts from his pharmacy. This was in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen: I don't think many people really knew that conservative old Queensland had a methadone program going then. (In fact, I have an idea that Queensland program may have been more "liberal" for many years compared to the ones in the southern states.)

Still, I was under the impression that the Queensland program did not leave patients on it forever. I thought there was an expectation that the patient would move off it within a year or so. But maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, Dalrymple's article is a fascinating read.

Go UQ

Researchers make breakthrough in renewable energy materials

The University of Queensland gets some PR on line, but the practical application of it all still sounds very unclear.

More trouble coming

Penny Wong in clash with carbon emitters | The Australian

Funny how the Rudd government's honeymoon has been ended by conflicting petrol price policies which are both not going to have any substantial impact on prices.

(By the way: has anyone asked the question - if you have Fuelwatch as a national scheme, and given that volatility in oil prices is expected to continue, how does anyone expect to be able to tell whether the scheme has worked or not?)

Much, much more serious trouble is brewing over energy and carbon trading:

TENSIONS are emerging between major greenhouse emitters and Climate Minister Penny Wong after a number of hostile meetings before the release of the Government's green paper on emissions trading in July.

Senator Wong has told small groups of chief executives from major power and other energy-intensive companies that the Rudd Government's election promise of a renewable energy target was "not negotiable".

One of these meetings in Melbourne last Tuesday completely broke down, with Senator Wong reportedly furious at the way she was being treated by the eight business leaders present, telling them "you wouldn't treat (former Treasurer) Peter Costello the way you are treating me".

I'm not so sure that playing the "you're not respecting me because I'm a woman" card was such a good idea, which is what I assume that report means. If that's correct, one of the guys should have responded "no, it's not that you are a woman. It's because you are a po-faced lesbian." That would have broken the ice; there would have been laughs all around, followed by questions about how good looking is her partner.

(I may have taken too much pseudoephedrine this week.)

Signs of unhappiness

Loyal workhorse escapes knacker's yard - for now - Annabel Crabb - Opinion

I won't be the first to say it, but it does seem a little surprising, doesn't it, that within 6 months of a government that (according to polls) is wildly popular, there are leaks from within.

Someone is not happy, and it would be interesting to know who.

Annabel Crabb notes this about our PM:

The Prime Minister's own attitude to what the Coalition is optimistically calling "Fuelgate" is one of professed nonchalance.

"I think actually having an exchange of views and having a debate where you have a complete embrace of different points of view is the way to go," he told Parliament smoothly on Tuesday.

"We are actually pretty relaxed about having a debate which has different points of view. We do not seek to suppress different points of view."

Poor Mr Ferguson. It was even worse than he had feared.

As all the Prime Minister's colleagues know, Mr Rudd reserves the expression "I'm actually pretty relaxed about that" for moments of particularly uncontrolled private rage.

I hope it is true, and that one day someone comes out and details the PM's private behaviour in more detail.

Something funny going on?

Cold-fusion demonstration "a success" (physicsworld.com Blog) - physicsworld.com

This appeared a few days ago, and apart from being noted on a couple of well read sites, it hasn't attracted any mainstream media attention.

I wonder if it is a hoax. According to the report, there was a lot of Japanese media present. But surely if it was splashed there, it would have been picked up in Western media too. Physicsworld has also not updated the report with any video or any other form of verification.

Anyway, we can always hope they've come up with something useful, regardless of whether it is cold fusion or something else.

Trouble in space

Spacemen call up Earth and ask for a plumber | Science | The Guardian

The International Space Station's toilet is not working. (Or not working properly.)

Most obvious joke about this: imagine what the plumber's call out fee is going to be. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

The prophet who never gives up

The end of the world is nigh. Its name is Gordon - Times Online

He's not easily discouraged, you have to give him that.

Gordon Ritchie believes he has worked out all the details of the end of the world. Trouble is, he keeps making predictions which turn out wrong:

His predictions have not been rash. They've all been thought through very carefully, but many have been wrong. His revelation came to him after a long period of bible study, including six years in the Jehovah's Witnesses. It all fell into place for him in McDonald's , he says. “I felt like leaping up on the tables, shouting, ‘Why are you eating those burgers?'”

He buys and sells shares with enough foresight to make a living, but look at his other predictions:

“Well, when I went on New York radio in front of two million people telling them they were going to be imminently destroyed and then they weren't, yes, I did feel a complete berk,” he says. Similarly, he took out £30,000 worth of advertising in The Sunday Times predicting that the UN would take overall political control of the world. He ran ads in March, July, September and November 2001, revising his prophecy each time. “Yeah, that turned out to be wrong, duh!” says Gordon.

There's more:

So what are his latest predictions? We meet in late April. He says there will be a terrorist attack on the weekend of April 26 in Europe and the US. Er, no there wasn't. On May 12, angels will start appearing to people, just popping up at dinner parties or when you're watching TV. I feel sure I would have noticed that. Don't book your holidays for next August because, by July half of mankind will be toast and we'll be ready for the new kingdom of Christ, he says.

The belief that keeps him going:

“I know I'm right,” he says. I point out that he's not right, in fact he's very publicly wrong. “Well there's a limit to how many mistakes I can make, I suppose,” he says.

Err, no there isn't.

Colbert on that O'Reilly tape