Indeed, the Messiah cometh

A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG: My Dad, John McCain

If you thought conservatives were exaggerating in their complaint that Obama was being treated as the Messiah, have a read of Mary Beard's blog, where she looks at the kid's books written about both McCain and Obama.

She starts off complaining about the giant airbrush waved over McCain in the "young readers" book about him, but then notes that the Obama books are significantly worse.

Of "Barack Obama, Son of Promise, Child of Hope", Mary notes:

Never mind maverick patriotism, here god him/herself appears to have a direct line to young Barack. One Sunday in church he (that’s god) says, “Look around you. Now look at me. There is hope enough here to last a lifetime.” And somewhere along the line, Obama seems to turn into Moses.

On two other books:

Religion is less in your face in Jonah Winter’s Barack, also aimed at under 10s. But you still have to put up with him being born on a “moonlit night” (really?) to a Mom “white as whipped cream”. And no less puke-making is Garen Thomas's, Yes, we can, aimed at slightly older kids. How about this, quoted by the New York Times reviewer: “There has emerged a new leader who seems to be granting Americans a renewed license to dream. . . . People believe he understands them, because by some measure he is them. . . . He manages, through what appears to be genuine concern, to uplift those who have fallen and bring hope anew to both the cynic and the idealist.”

Surprisingly, Mary says the books are selling well, and she assumes it can't all be to adults wanting a laugh.

When exactly did publishers realise there was a market for such guff?

Pretty moving picture time

There's been too many words here lately, so here's a bit of video of the Tokyo Disney light parade taken by me a couple of weeks ago. More commentary on the Japanese and Disney is to come, but just pretty pictures for the moment:




And hey, I've just learnt how to rotate an AVI file with the freeware VirtualDub. (Makes for a small image here, though):

Prediction: Ellen will weep for days

In California, the presidential race is taking a back seat to gay marriage. - Slate Magazine

Fascinating article here about the unexpected twists and turns in the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage that Californians will be voting on when they go to the Presidential polls.

The proposition initially looked doomed to fail, but a case of over-reach by some gay marriage supporters - a school taking its first graders on a field trip to their teacher's lesbian wedding (!) - has been a gift to their opposition.

Can you imagine how much Ellen DeGeneres will carry on about this if the ban gets up (as many think now will happen)?

Use it or lose it

BBC NEWS | Health | Internet use 'good for the brain'

So, using the internet might help older folk hold off dementia.

Good news for my 85 year old Mum, then. She took up the internet about 4 years ago (good), but spends about 90% of her time on line checking the latest on the Colin Firth fansites (embarrassing). She even wrote to his fan club and got a "signed" photo sent back to her. She likes to believe he signed it personally.

I suppose if she ever does get dementia, me and my brothers could keep her happy by just introducing ourselves as Colin when we visit her. (Don't worry, I think she would laugh at that suggestion if I told her.)

On target?

I said a few posts back that I expected there would be some criticism of the targeting of the Rudd's sudden spend. It took a couple of days, but it's finally here, via Mike Steketee in The Australian:

Less clear is the justification for making the same payments to all those on part-pensions, including couples who can earn private incomes of up to $66,000 a year and own assets of up to $857,000, not counting their home. Some of them will exercise the discretion to put the money into savings rather than spend it. Weaker still are the grounds for extending the payments to all those with a seniors health card, available to self-funded single retirees with incomes of up to $50,000 and couples up to $80,000. They already benefit from the superannuation tax concessions that become more generous as income rises.

If the Government thinks these people should receive payments, then why not those on much lower incomes who would relish the opportunity for some additional spending power? There still may be the odd bludger among those on Newstart, but they do not have the option of keeping their benefit while they earn $66,000 a year and hold substantial assets.

It's this sort of stuff that Labor always criticised Howard for.

As for the First Home Owners Grant, people tend to forget that the thing is not means tested at all, and is paid whether you are buying a $200,000 fibro house in Cunnamulla, or a $2,000,000 apartment with harbour views. As Steketee (jeez I wish he would change his name by Deed Poll) says:

If the aim was truly to maximise the spending bang for the government buck, at least some of the money could have been better used to expand the new and promising scheme to subsidise the building of low-rent housing. As well, the Government could have taken the opportunity of slack in the building industry to increase public housing, which, after taking account of population growth, has fallen 100,000 homes below the level of 10years ago.

I am still waiting to see more criticism of the short fuse of this spending too. If blown too quickly, I don't see how it will do much more than delay a big slow down by more than a quarter or two.

Putin's tactics still around

Toxic pellets found in car of Russian lawyer - International Herald Tribune

The French police are investigating how toxic mercury pellets ended up in the car of a human rights lawyer who fell ill in Strasbourg on Tuesday, a day before pretrial hearings in Moscow into the killing of one of her best-known clients, the journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya.

Always some good news somewhere

Flat-panel TV prices set to dive, analysts say

It's nice to know that while the world's finances dash themselves upon the rocks of ... hmm, I've started a metaphor I don't know how to finish... at least we will be all able to watch it on our new cheap flat screen TVs.

Maths, mind and God

Here's a couple of odd recent papers of interest to be found on arXiv:

* the first has the intriguing title: Modeling the creative process of the mind by prime numbers and a simple proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. Here's a bit from the abstract:

The creative process of the mind is lawfully determined but the outcome is unpredictable. The mathematical equivalent or model of this process is the creation of primes. Primes have the inherent property of unpredictability but can be generated by the creation algorithm of the mind, termed the Prime Law, via a fully deterministic lawful process. This new understanding of the essence of primes can deduce some of the best-known properties of primes, including the Riemann Hypothesis (RH).

I was not familiar with the Riemann Hypothesis, and the discussion of it in the paper is pretty interesting. The author perhaps gets a bit too much ying & yang-y, but overall it's worth a look.

* The significance of maths overall gets a run in a paper by a few mathematicians/philosophers (who one would at least have to suspect as being Catholic) entitled In whose mind is Mathematics an "a priori cognition"?

The argument, if I understand it correctly, is that if Kant's view of mathematics is correct ("an 'a priori' cognition"), then modern maths with its proof that there are some unsolvable questions for the human mind means that mathematics must exist in a mind greater than humans, which "can contain the whole of mathematics at once". Ergo, maths proves God.

I'm not entirely sure how original this argument is. Godel thought he had come up with a proof of God, but his argument was (I think) more esoteric.

The view that mathematics leads its own Platonic existence while waiting to be discovered by human minds can easily lead to theistic thoughts. I suppose you can avoid the issue of whether maths has to exist within any mind at all by arguing like cosmologist Max Tegmark, who goes as far as to say that the Universe is actually made of mathematics. However, I am not entirely sure that anyone can fully understand what that means.

Anyway, with my soft spot for Kant, I like the idea that he and modern mathematicians may have together proved an omniscient Mind exists throughout the universe.

If Fred Flintstone ran Ikea ....

Dezeen - Max Lamb at Johnson Trading Gallery

Oh come on. Even just as art it hardly takes much effort to do this. Surely.

Archi-talk

Dezeen - 102 Dwellings by Dosmasuno Arquitectos

Architects (or their PR firms?) can really talk crap when they put their minds to it. From the above link, about a blocky bunch of apartments in Madrid:

Despite the guidelines drawn on the plots, places need to express their own personality, to arise naturally, to construct themselves. And concretely this one is aligned against a green area, against the concatenation of public spaces that link the old Carabanchel district with its forest through the new neighbourhood. In response to these conditions, the dwellings are compressed onto one edge, onto a single linear piece, in search for the genus loci of the place, views and an optimal orientation in which east and west share the south, generating the limit of the activity, soothing the interior and defining the exterior.

Yeah.

It's a pretty weird building that looks half interesting from some angles, but (as many commenters note) it also will likely be a graffiti magnet. And what is in those bits sticking out?

Fearing for krill (and penguins, whales, etc)

The krilling fields: study fears catastrophe in Antarctic food chain | theage.com.au

From the report:

Captive-bred krill at the Australian Antarctic Division developed deformities and lost energy when they were exposed to the greenhouse gas at levels predicted globally for the year 2100.

The damage meant that the krill were unlikely ever to breed, a University of Tasmania investigator, Lilli Hale, said yesterday.

Polar life, from tiny seabirds through penguins and seals to whales, depend for food on Antarctic krill, Euphasia superba.

I see that Tim Blair today has a short post up linking to a different ocean acidification story, pretty much as if it is the first time he has heard of the issue. I have said it before, but I don't understand why it is a topic that attracts very intermittent coverage, as it will happen whether or not the planet heats or cools. Tim's commenters all appear to be dismissive experts on the topic without actually having read much about it.

On the (perhaps slim) chance that Tim or his readers will follow my advice to look at it harder before pooh-poohing the idea, I link to this article again. Then they can get back to me when they find an actual ocean scientist who has looked at the issue and come up saying "nah, it's nothing to worry about." (Seafriends website does not count, as I have explained before.)

Reading Lewis letters

Letter-writing professor reluctantly hounded by heaven - On Line Opinion - 14/10/2008

Greg Clarke dips his toe into a huge volume of published CS Lewis letters and finds it pretty fascinating.

Tim Train will be pleased: 3,900 pages to read! (Over 3 volumes, it seems.)

Simple idea

Technology Review: Better Solar for Big Buildings

What a neat, simple way of improving solar cells. (Thin film ones, at least.)

Australia stuffs up whaling gain

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Whale deal falls at last minute

It seems Kevin Rudd's push to be tough on a whaling issue is widely considered to have backfired. It's an interesting story, about how we nearly got Japan and Norway to agree to a resolution:

"there is inadequate scientific information to support an assertion that controlling great whale populations can increase fisheries yields".

This was seen as a way of getting Japan to stop running the argument that whales were eating their fish (a very populist argument with no solid science behind it). Instead:

The amendment tabled by Australia asked delegations instead to acknowledge "that the great whales play no significant role in the current crisis affecting global fisheries".

Twenty-nine nations, Japan among them, could not accept the wording or the manner of its introduction. Although it passed with a majority of about three governments in favour to every one against, the anti-whaling bloc will not be able to say that Japan accepted it.

Kevin (or at least his delegates), does not play whale politics well, judging by this reported reaction:

Japanese officials who had participated in an intensive series of consensus-building discussions during the week - at which Australia was also represented - were furious at the last-ditch attempt to introduce stronger wording than had been agreed.

"Australian bad behaviour has put the spirit of co-operation in jeopardy," said Hideki Moronuki, a senior official with Japan's fisheries agency.

"Australia had participated in the [consensus-building] process, they were in the room all the time - this is back-handed."

Officials from other anti-whaling nations agreed, one calling the last-minute intervention "despicable".

The Australian delegation here declined to comment.

Pokies expect a good Christmas

Rudd pumps in $10b - National - smh.com.au

There's some pretty surprising generosity from Kevin Rudd in his stimulus package. The part of it for pensioners and parents comes as a lump sum just before Christmas. The argument against that: they'll blow it all at once on holiday fun, and still can't afford groceries before or after. The argument for it (un-stated, but I would guess someone in Treasury has said it): we want them to spend it quickly, and not just on groceries.

It seems an odd choice to be using pensioners as the people you want to encourage to spend and stimulate the economy.

The new home buyers increases are good for builders and real estate agents, but is this the area of the economy that is in most need of stimulus?

I suspect there will be criticism from both left and right that this should have been better targeted.

Lesbian monkey killers

Loving bonobos have a carnivorous dark side

Fruit makes up much of their diet, but the primates aren't herbivores. Small ungulates called forest antelopes, or duikers, often fall prey to bonobos.

These hunts tend to be fairly simple, with a single bonobo cornering a duiker then quickly feasting on the still-living animal as more apes hurried to the scene. Hohmann says he has witnessed a duiker "still vocally blurting as the bonobos opened the stomach and intestines."

The lesson I take from this: evolutionary psychology tells me not to trust lesbians.

UPDATE: How odd. The New Scientist version quoted above (through some poor editing, I think) does not make it clear, as does the Phys.Org version, that in fact they hunt and eat other primates too:

The researchers have now seen three instances of successful hunts in which bonobos captured and ate their primate prey. In two other cases, the bonobo hunting attempts failed. The data from LuiKotale showed that both bonobo sexes play active roles in pursuing and hunting monkeys. The involvement of adult females in the hunts (which is not seen in chimps) may reflect social patterns such as alliance formation and cooperation among adult females, they said.

Overall, the discovery challenges the theory that male dominance and aggression must be causally linked to hunting behavior, an idea held by earlier models of the evolution of aggression in human and non-human primates.

Well, the former poster girls and boys of International Gay and Lesbian Review don't look so hot as role models anymore. Unless, of course, you happen to be a lesbian vampire killer.

Yay for whites!

Break out the bubbly: White wine may be good for you - health - 13 October 2008 - New Scientist

EU freebie makes Tim swoon

Best elements of left and right make Danes great | theage.com.au

Looks like the European Union hosted Tim Colebatch in Denmark, and he came back swooning over how well it's odd combination of right-ish and left-ish (but mainly left-ish) policies work.

I see the population of that country is 5.5 million, it has an area about 2/3 the size of Tasmania, and is within spitting distance of most its major trading partners.

Governing that country is perhaps just a little different from managing Australia. More like running Sydney as a country.

Weird economics

Step right up for the $20b red-spot special - Annabel Crabb - Opinion

Annabel Crabb sums up my feelings about the current economic circumstances pretty well:

COULD this crisis get any stranger? We're now in a state of confirmed international fiscal panic, but there's money everywhere.

And so much for my suggestion that every government guaranteeing their banks is not really a guarantee at all. Couldn't they have held off the rally for just one more day of losses so that I could feel clever?

UPDATE: a Salon writer suggests caution on yesterday's surge:

Monday’s irrational exuberance does not mean that the underlying problems are anywhere near fixed, however. Far from it — all that can be said for sure is that for a few hours today market participants believed that a truly serious effort to grapple with the financial crisis was underway — a promise by world leaders to engage in the largest globally coordinated government intervention in the economy in human history....

It’s quite possible that a worldwide bank rescue could succeed, and we’d still be facing a serious recession.

The Oregon Way

Katharine Whitehorn on assisted suicides in Oregon | World news | The Guardian

See above for an interesting report on how Oregon's assisted suicide laws have panned out.

Basically, the laws there seem to be much more tightly written than in some other places, and they presumably would not go far enough for many people. Although the doctor has to say that the patient has limited time left to live (not even necessary in Holland), in Oregon it need only be 6 months. Surely there would be a lot of rubbery estimates being made for those who are not clearly going to go within a week or two.

Even though it does not change my mind about euthanasia, it at least sounds to be a system which has worked in a less objectionable way than in other jurisdictions.

Interestingly, it is claimed that there is one unforeseen consequence:

A survey of Oregon doctors also showed that, since PAS, they have actually taken more care with areas such as pain relief - presumably in the hope of making their patients content to stay alive.

UPDATE: Our very own unhealthily-obsessed-with-suicide Dr Nitschke meanwhile evidently believes that information on easy suicide should be available over the internet to any person, whether terminally ill, neurotic, or just a teenager fed up with not being able to get a date on Saturday nights. He continues to be a disgrace to his profession and his cause's own worst advocate.