No wonder pandas are endangered

Video: Giant panda birth | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I saw the link to this video earlier this week, but didn't around to watching it 'til tonight.

It's truly startling, watching this (seemingly very rapid) birth, and the squealing, flopping Alien-esque character of the newborn cub. We all now know why they reproduce slowly: baby pandas freak out their mothers, and with some justification.

Of course, for funnier panda video, you can always re-visit the famous startled Panda sneeze clip. (It's like panda's just never get used to being parents.)

Weird

David Duchovny in sex addiction treatment |

It's either an elaborate publicity stunt for Californication, or the show has helped mess with his head.

Maybe if he had only done wholesome shows instead. Just like Bob Crane in the Donna Reed Show. (I like to point out the flaws in my own arguments sometimes.)

Nice man

That Mike Huckabee seems very likeable. Have a look at his appearance last night on Colbert Report:

In which we discuss fathers, sons, tobacco and God

Someone gave me (what I think is) a high quality cigar recently. It smells great, but I know that if I smoke it, I will be able to taste tobacco in my mouth for the next 48 hours, regardless of teeth-brushing and Listerine. Yes, non smokers have sensitive taste buds. (Or maybe that is more a function of cheaper cigars? The 10 or so that I probably had over my entire life were almost certainly lower quality.) I don't think I have ever tried a cigarette, as far as I can recall. Cigars are mainly smoked for mouth taste anyway, not for lung burning ingestion of nicotine. And they do go well with port. All I need to complete the picture is a smoking jacket, hey.

I don't like the long lingering after taste, but it's got to be smoked sometime. Or I could just let it sit near my desk for the next 12 months and smell it a few times a day. Nah, I don't think so.

I dare not let my 7 year old son see me smoking it: he seems strongly attracted to the idea of trying smoking, in a way I don't ever recall sharing, even though my father smoked well into his 50's. (Cause of death in his early 60's: lung cancer.) Yes, dammit, he is showing signs of an independent personality after all, despite my attempts at brainwashing by showing him Lewis & Martin movies and other popular entertainment from my childhood.

In other signs of independent thought, despite attending a Christian school, and church, he seems much more inherently skeptical of the concept of God than I ever was. I don't quite understand what part of a personality seems to predispose some people towards easy acceptance of religious belief, and others to be doubters from childhood. This was an interesting feature of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs. Despite being an active member of a church as a teenager, and obviously being able to have an easy intellectual grasp of the Bible, it just seems that he was never capable of having it mean much to him.

I suspect that having one parent as a non-believer (and hence a stay-at-home while the kids go to church with the other parent) may simply be enough to cause children to never "get" religion; I suppose someone has done some research on that. Also in my son's case, it seems he has seen the obvious parallel between pretend Santa and (potentially) pretend God. We actually never spent a lot of time playing up Santa as a figure with our kids, yet obviously it was still enough for him to see the implications.

Unfortunately, there is probably not a scary nun left in Brisbane who could take over my son's indoctrination, like I had for the first couple of years in primary school. (Actually, despite being good at terror, she was pretty lousy at teaching anything; but I can remember how impressive some other nuns were in their free wheeling talks on religion for 30 minutes every day. Then again, maybe that was just me and everyone else in the class was bored.)

Anyway, the mind-molding project must be continued, even while I sneak outside one night to smoke that cigar. Maybe the smoke rising past my son's window will be interpreted as a ghost, and at least he'll believe in the supernatural.

Appleyard's take on the Convention

Thought Experiments : The Blog: Suicide of the Democrats

It's pretty funny, Bryan's take on how the Democrat Convention is going.

I'm very curious to hear Obama's opening line as he appears at his faux Greek temple, as I felt certain as soon as I heard Kerry's corny "reporting for duty" opener that he had lost the election then and there.

UPDATE: Tim Blair's take on a New York Time's strangely ambiguous assessment of Obama canonisation is terribly funny. (The New York Times quotes more than one supporter who says that Obama is in strong control of his emotions. I don't necessarily take that as a good thing in a leader with the fate of other's people's lives in his hands.)

Scientists worried

Scientists Unveil "Honolulu Declaration" To Address Ocean Acidification

Hey, ocean acidification skeptics, when we will get to see something like an Oregon Petition on this topic?

Innovative school policies

Mum shocked as school puts daughter, 14, on Pill

The mother, who knew nothing of the school's role in this, is quoted as follows:

"It is really hard to get your head around the fact that when your child goes on an excursion they need to have a permission slip signed by the parent, but the school is within its rights to take a child to the doctor to be put on the pill."

It's easy to see her point.

High quality Crabb

Headmaster to teach teachers a lesson - Opinion - smh.com.au

It's another Annabel Crabb column that is both insightful and funny:

The PM's closet is positively bristling with instruments of domination and punishment for organised labour - the retention of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the introduction of a migrant fruitpicking army, and now the threat that substandard teachers will get the chop.

The fact that these are all John Howard's ideas must make the exercise even freakier, from the unions' point of view....

Kevin Rudd's diplomatic skills almost always compel him to opt for jargon instead of plain speech; he'll rarely settle for sacking someone when he can reassign their skills constructively in a fully benchmarked pilot separation scheme.

It's especially strange seeing Julia Gillard entirely supporting Rudd on the school rankings stuff, and criticising an Australian Education Union funded report. Who within the government is going to give the AEU comfort?

I see Andrew Bolt is full of praise for Rudd's intentions. But really, how is all of this planned discussion to implement an "education revolution" more than spin?

Small things amusing my small mind

VF Daily: vanityfair.com

See, I can't be the only middle aged man who, in idle moments in the shower, thinks about what could be a good "Macguffin" for one final outing for Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones.

Vanity Fair had a competition for suggestions back in June, and their winner was quite triumphantly silly. You can also see all of the most popular suggestions in handy tabular form.

I'll have to find my old "Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World" books to see if I can come up with something else.

More reason to worry about birds

Crows never seem to forget a face - International Herald Tribune

Great. Those noisy, raucous crows that chase other birds out of the neighbourhood are surprisingly smart too. Let's hope they never decide to gang up on us.

Mum, stop vacuuming, you have to die now

Diary of terminally ill woman who chose euthanasia | Life and style | The Guardian

The Dutch really are different. This account of the last days of a terminally ill woman in the Netherlands who chooses voluntary euthanasia is amazing to read. This is how the day she dies begins:

Mum leaves and comes back again three times. After the last visit, I can hear she is hoisting the vacuum cleaner up to the attic. It is just after 6am.

It is the start of an increasingly mad day, during which Mum hoovers the whole house and does six loads of washing (one of which consists of a single white shirt). She scrapes all the woodwork on the outside of the house clear of moss and cleans the windows.

After breakfast, I find Dad fuming after Mum has given him grief for not ironing fast enough.

Martin, the kindly suicide doctor, comes around that evening and this is how it goes:

6.15pm: The doctor arrives shortly after the scene with the toilets. Mum greets him, then disappears upstairs, saying, "Best let me potter for a bit." Nobody sees her for another 20 minutes.

"Does it happen at all that people pull out at the last minute?" I ask.

"Yes," Martin says. "Quite often I go home again and a new appointment is made. But in many cases the patient passes away between visits."

When Mum comes back, listing things she has put in bags and boxes, Martin gently interrupts her: "Can I just ask you something? Is there still a lot you feel you need to do?"

"Yes," she says, "I mean no. I'm just nervous."

"I can always come back later if you are not ready," says the doctor.

Mum sits down and listens to the doctor. Then she takes a deep breath and says, "OK. I am ready."

At 7pm, with my father, brother and me around her bed as well as Martin, who has given her the injection, Mum goes to sleep.

If this doesn't make you feel at least a little uneasy about how euthanasia can work in practice, then you're probably Philip Nitschke.

In Futurama, the ubiquitous Suicide Booth features in more than one episode. I am sure there is a Dutch engineer working on developing one right now.

Arctic ice melt update

Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

The NSIDC updates the current state of the summer ice melt up near the North Pole. As the graph shows, this year is not so far off 2007's record melt.

Bad news

Ahmadinejad appears to get a key nod - Los Angeles Times

Dangerous meats

Tainted deli meats in Canada kill 12

The pathogen: listeria monocytogenes. Pregnant women are warned against getting it, but I didn't realise it could kill so many of the general public.

It's effective enough to be a bio-terrorist agent, by the sounds.

Watch out for the falling flying foxes

Wind turbines make bat lungs explode - earth - 25 August 2008 - New Scientist Environment

I hate to think how many flying foxes might be taken out by a big wind farm anywhere near their habitat in Australia. (And they seem to be all down the east coast from North Queensland to at least Sydney.)

Cats will destroy the world

Pets eating into fish stocks�(ScienceAlert)

From the article:

Dr Giovanni Turchini, with colleague Professor Sena De Silva, has found that an estimated 2.48 million tonnes of forage fish—an increasingly limited biological resource—is used by the global cat food industry each year.

"That such a large amount of fish is used for the pet food industry is real eye opener," Dr Turchini said.

"What is also interesting is that, in Australia, pet cats are eating an estimated 13.7 kilograms of fish a year which far exceeds the Australian average per capita fish and seafood consumption of around 11 kilograms. Our pets seem to be eating better than their owners."

And they will look like this as the ocean's food chain collapses:


via videosift.com

Bob Carter - sensitive soul

Over at Real Climate, arch Australian AGW skeptic Bob Carter made this comment:

One of the reasons that RealClimate is discounted by some as a source of serious scientific comment is because of your continual allowance of unproductive ad hominem abuse.

We learn further down (comment 119) that what he was objecting to in the earlier comment (which RC later edited so we now can't see it) was the word "denialist". The bulk of comments to the thread are extremely moderate in tone, while making it clear that many challenge Dr Carter's views.

At Online Opinion earlier this year, in an article with the surly title "The IPCC: on the run at last", Bob wrote:

Given the occurrence also of record low winter temperatures and massive snowfalls across both hemispheres this year, IPCC members have now entered panic mode, the whites of their eyes being clearly visible as they seek to defend their now unsustainable hypothesis of dangerous, human-caused global warming.

He also uses the word "alarmists" many times, and says of the use of climate models:

Well, obviously, turn to virtual reality rather than real reality: PlayStation 4 here we come.

Yes, way to conduct a debate without ad hominem, Dr Carter.

Why pilots fly into the sea

Air and Space Magazine has an article about how pilots can get disoriented. All interesting, and relevant to the old Mackleman crash of 1986, I expect.

Hmm

Analyst warns of looming global climate wars - ABC News

My idea (the Carbon Wars, [TM]) is a little different, in that it's about warfare on other nation's greenhouse producing infrastructure. How come I never get interviewed?

Why would it help?

After glow of Games, what next for China? - International Herald Tribune

To continue my anti-Olympic theme, I just don't understand why anyone would think these Olympics ever had any hope of encouraging political change in China. Everyone already knew China could build modern looking stuff; you just have to see pictures of Shanghai's skyline to know that.

Instead, the staging of these Olympics has just confirmed to most Western eyes the repressive and heavy-handed nature of the Chinese form of government, but to many Chinese eyes it probably has encouraged a degree of pride that would hardly be an inducement to be more politically open.

Some disaster may have lead to hope of political reform, but games deemed to be even a moderate success were never going to have that result.