A bit of history

The Last to Die | Military Aviation | Air & Space Magazine

Air & Space Magazine has a sad but interesting story about the last American killed in air combat in World War II. It was above Tokyo, after Japan had surrendered.

(That magazine is of such high quality, and puts a lot of its content on line. Thanks, Smithsonian!)

Your weekly dose of bad ocean news

Marine dead zones set to expand rapidly : Nature News

Rising levels of carbon dioxide could increase the volume of oxygen-depleted 'dead zones' in tropical oceans by as much as 50% before the end of the century — with dire consequences for the health of ecosystems in some of the world's most productive fishing grounds....

A team led by Andreas Oschlies of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, has now used a global model of climate, ocean circulation and biogeochemical cycling to extrapolate existing experimental results of the effects of altered carbon and nutrient chemistry on dissolved oxygen to the global ocean1. They found that a CO2-rich world will only have a small impact on waters at middle and high latitudes. But in all tropical oceans the volume of 'oxygen-minimum' zones will substantially increase as ocean bacteria feed on the algae that will flourish as a result of the elevated CO2 levels.

"Carbon dioxide fertilizes biological production," says Oschlies. "It's really like junk food for plants. When the carbon-fattened excess biomass sinks it gets decomposed by bacteria which first consume the oxygen, and then the nutrients."

In one of my earlier posts on ocean acidification, I had questioned whether algal blooms caused by more CO2 might be a bad thing for this very reason. (Some sceptics argue that more algae operating as a carbon sink will be a good thing. But obviously, it has a massive down side.)

Again, as far as I can see, this is an ocean danger story that is getting little press attention. Bah.

A danger sign hard to foresee

It takes courage to say the f-word: failure - Alan Ramsey

Hey, Alan Ramsey did us a favour last weekend by printing something I had missed earlier. Ken Henry (head of Treasury) had this to say at his Press Club lunch during the week:

"The array of financial instruments deployed within the global financial system has become so complex that it defies understanding. It's not just that nobody, no one person, understands the whole system. That would be hardly surprising. What is worrying is the very large number of senior finance sector executives who don't appear to understand the consequences of even their own decisions, of their own actions.

"The second dimension is closely related.

"It has to do with risk, it has to do with uncertainty. Complex financial instruments have been traded globally in ways that were thought to provide a more comfortable sharing of risk across the world. Instead, what they've shared is fear. People now not only don't know who they can trust, they don't even know who they need to be able to trust.

"And the third dimension I want to identify is the role played by regulation and, more broadly, the role played by governance systems. For decades to come, policy makers around the world are going to be asking why those with sufficient authority didn't, at some point, stand above the buzz of the financial markets and declare, in simple language, that all of this simply doesn't make sense."

It's the first bit about the complexity reaching a level that no one can understand that is the most interesting.

I mean, how do you judge exactly when that has happened? Which world famous economist is going to be the first to admit that he can't understand it all?

The future foreseen

One day, when the giant flying saucer arrives, it will beam an announcement to all TVs and radios, informing us that they are from the Pan Galactic Eugenics Society, and the world's smartest human must be delivered for intelligence testing via the most devious, intricate and maddening puzzle that has ever been devised. The fate of the earth will rest in that person's hands.

Inside the saucer, the chosen brainiac with mad scientist hair waits anxiously. "Here" booms the alien voice, "is the test." A curtain starts sliding open silently. "Assemble this!"

Behind the curtain is a digital flat screen TV the size of a house with 50 speaker surround sound system, disc player, three different types of media recorder and cable connection.

This is how the Earth will end.

A short, jumbled note

For a variety of reasons, not the least being the state government's refusal to do anything about daylight saving in Brisbane, so that at this time of year the sun is actually making it all bright and cheery (ha!) by rising at 4.45am, I am not getting enough sleep lately.

Maybe this is why I was having a peculiar dream last night in which I was busy investigating a rice throwing poltergeist which seemed to be connected with some bodies buried under a building, except that when I dug them up they weren't real bodies at all but dummies, which then led me to suspect that some engineers I knew were behind it all, and so on.

Usually, I can work out pretty quickly what it was that I had recently watched or read that caused me to have a jumbled dream, but I can't remember reading anything about poltergeists for quite a while. I suppose I idly think about the personality deficiencies of engineers I have known from time to time, though.

Anyhow, to continue the jumbled theme of this post, I note that time devoted to the internet is actually interfering way too much with my vague attempts to make money lately. I'm going to attempt to insist on limiting posts to the evenings for a while. Maybe this software will help in my task.

Meanwhile, please admire the giant playground robot in the last post, and tell me if you have seen anything better.

Unusual photos of Japan

Here's some of the more unusual photos from my recent Japan trip:

First, the impressive giant playground robot:



I am not sure how many of these may exist in Japan; it looked a little old but not in bad condition. The only semi-equivalent thing I can remember from Australia was a cage like three level rocket ship which used to grace the kids playground at Toombul Shopping Town in the late 60's. This giant robot was in a rather out of the way location in Japan, which I am willing to divulge for the right amount of money to any eccentric reader who wants to use it when videotaping their own fan version of The Wicker Man.

Secondly, breaking my rule that it's too cheap to make fun of foreigners and their English spelling mistakes:



Next, a sign encouraging people to dispose of their cigarette butts carefully, because if you don't, it'll upset the sewer rats (as always,click to enlarge):


Another sign, this one hard to read in full, but it encourages good behaviour on the trains, with some fairly obvious suggestions (which may be paraphrased as "smoke spreads" and "don't sit with your legs too far apart"):


(I have a feeling that I have seen this series of posters blogged about somewhere else some time ago, but haven't gone looking yet.)

Finally, the hungry, hungry fish:


OK, not the funniest photo to finish with, but it's late, alright?

Charles on cars

RealClearPolitics - Articles - A Lemon of a Bailout

Charles Krauthammer looks at the issue of saving the American car industry. All rather relevant to Rudd's plans too.

Unintended consequences

Neb. Parents Rush to Abandon Children - NYTimes.com

Silly legislators.

Urgent therapy needed

Jules Crittenden Why Palin Matters

I don't normally read Andrew Sullivan, but it's hard to avoid dropping in every day or two now to see whether his absolute obsession with crushing any political future for Sarah Palin is continuing.

Indeed it is! (If I am counting correctly, there are 10 separate posts dated 13 Nov referring to Palin in one way or another. Even after his readers have told him he is being obsessive - hence his posts seeking to justify why he is still writing about her.)

Jules Crittenden post about this (see above) it is amusing and to the point.

But it doesn't go far enough. If it's good enough for gays to always be claiming there's a hidden psycho-sexual reason behind things like opposition to gay marriage (you know, it's the repressed homosexuality that leads to homophobia that leads to...etc,) Andrew Sullivan seems to be a much more convincing case for hidden motives for hostility.

Jim Treacher has already gone partly this way in his comment to Crittenden's post: "Sullivan hates her because she’s obviously better at making a man happy than he is."

Possibly, but I think Sullivan has been having recurring dreams in which he's aroused by finding Sarah in his bed, beckoning him. The shame, the shame.

The talented neighbours from hell

Review: The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh

Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on the Wittgenstein family. They were brilliant, rich, and absolutely brimming with mental disorders and argument.

In Australian we generally expect renting neighbours to be more noisy and troublesome that owner-occupiers. This clearly did not apply in Austria, at least when it came to this family.

Is it OK to find this section blackly funny (especially the part about Hans' first word)?:

The sons of the household had a distressing habit of doing away with them selves. Handsome, intelligent, homosexual Rudolf strolled into a Berlin bar, dissolved potassium cyanide into his glass of milk and died in agony on the spot. Two years earlier, Hans Karl had disappeared without trace and is thought to have killed himself at sea. He was a shy, ungainly, possibly autistic child with a prodigious gift for maths and music, whose first spoken word was "Oedipus". He, too, was thought to be gay. Kurt seems to have shot himself "without visible reason" while serving as a soldier in the first world war. The philosopher Ludwig claims to have begun thinking about suicide when he was 10 or 11.

Paul, a classmate of Adolf Hitler, became an outstanding concert pianist. Unusually for male members of the family, he was robustly heterosexual. The Wittgenstein ménage was more like a conservatoire than a family home: Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss dropped in regularly, while Ravel wrote his "Concerto for the Left Hand" specially for Paul, who had lost an arm in the first world war. Paul thought his brother Ludwig's philosophy was "trash", while Ludwig took a dim view of Paul's musical abilities. The Winter Palace resounded with constant yelling and vicious squabbling.

Only in Japan

Aso's fish slip gives game away | The Japan Times Online

Read the story for an amusing, and particularly Japanese, controversy about their Prime Minister.

Gunfight at the Catallaxy Corral

Obama the rorschach president at catallaxyfiles

Watch the bullets fly in the comments section between CL and Jason.

And further down, JC makes this comment, which sounds about right. It's hard to see why anyone would want to be president this time around, but I guess they didn't realise that 'til they were too far in.

The sad numbers game

Fears over shortage of sperm donors

The article is from The Independent, and is about the shortage of sperm donors in the UK, following changes to the law that gives adult children the right to trace their father.

The figures are surprisingly high:

The doctors said around 4,000 UK patients needed donor sperm each year.

Therefore, a minimum of 500 new donors were needed each year to meet demand, they argued.

Compared to how many abortions per year?: around 194,000.

One donor in Britain is allowed to father 10 children. Sounds high to me, but the doctors say this level is "very, very safe".

Even more surprising, however, is that the Dutch allow up to 25 children from one donor father (and that is in a population of only 16,000,000.) France, by comparison, allows only five, and it would appear that in one State of Australia it is 10.

Meanwhile, one "freelance" idiot in Australia is believed to have fathered 30 children (to lesbian mothers), and mostly in the one city.

I can't quickly find how many sperm donor births there would be overall in Australia, but the total number of "assisted conception" babies is now around 10,000 a year.

And in comparison, the number of babies put up for adoption in Australia last year: about 60. (Remarkably, you will see from page vii of that link that there were only 568 adoptions in total in Australia in 2006-07. Of these, 70% were from overseas.)

No one knows accurately how many abortions there are in Australia each year, but the guesstimate appears to be anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000.

Seems to me that it's about time some effort was put back in to suggesting adoption might be a preferred solution to the wild mismatch of reproductive desires that these figures indicate.

A useful clarification

Uncertain Principles: Many-World vs. Multiverse:

The Many-Worlds Interpretation talks (in its popular formulation) about "alternate worlds" in which particular measurements had different outcomes. It's not quite right to talk about these as separate universes in their own right (really, they're just different parts of the same universal wavefunction), but that's the basic idea-- there is a branch of the wavefunction corresponding to each of the possible outcomes of any particular measurement, and those branches are inaccessible to one another.

Multiverse Cosmology, on the other hand, posits the existence of other "universes" in which the constants of nature have slightly different values. Depending on which flavor of it you're dealing with, these may be completely separate parallel worlds (other Big Bangs leading to other universes) or "bubbles" within a single cosmos, stemming from the same Big Bang.

The comments that follow that post are also of interest.

Probably not a kimchi factory after all

Row over claims of Syrian nuclear find | World news | The Guardian

Unnamed diplomats said on Monday that samples taken by UN inspectors from Kibar in northern Syria contained traces of uranium combined with other elements. The uranium was processed, suggesting some kind of nuclear link.

"It isn't enough to conclude or prove what the Syrians were doing, but the IAEA has concluded this requires further investigation," said a diplomat with links to the Vienna-based watchdog.

For some reason, the Guardian story does not remind us of the North Korean connection. (Hence the title of this post.)

So that's why the British go there

Dubai hotel issues etiquette guide after sex on the beach scandal -Times Online

Dubai has been attracting a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons lately, and given that the weather is hellishly hot for most the year, and it appears to have no significant natural beauty (sand desert holds no interest for me at least), I am curious as to why people go there.

The above article may explain one reason:

Brunches take place across Dubai every Friday, the first day of the Dubai weekend, and are heavily promoted in Dubai's Time Out and enjoyed to the full by expatriates.

The lavish affairs last from late morning into the early evening when diners can enjoy unlimited food and alcohol for a fixed entry fee.

In the case of the Madinat Jumeirah the charge is £88, which includes bottomless champagne, cocktails and wine between 12:30pm and 4:30pm.

I like one of the comments that follow the story:

Oh dear, - I've been, I've seen and I won't be going back. A nauseating mix of Las Vegas and the 12th Century...

A day late

Truth and the casualties of war - Gerard Henderson - Opinion - smh.com.au

I meant to post this yesterday, but Gerard Henderson's column about the swings in the perception of Australia's role in WW1 seemed pretty good.

He referred to the Four Corners program on Monday evening, most of which I saw. One simple thing I noticed about it was that the historical black and white film looked unusually clear and sharp to my eye: perhaps it had been cleaned up recently with some software?

There was one historian who made comments that I did not agree with, but most of the comments in the show seemed fair enough.

There is so much complexity, ambiguity and revision about World War 1 that it is a topic I have always been reluctant to delve into too deeply. At least things got much, much clearer by the time of World War 2, and having parents involved in that makes it much more directly of interest.

Wind and the grid

If You Love Wind (and Solar)… - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

Here's another post about the problems that the current highly variable output from renewable energy can cause the electricity grid.

The parasite of love

Dopamine is key to a parasite’s ability to unite rat and cat, researcher says

Regular readers may well recall that it's been know for some time that rats infected with toxoplasma gondii lose their fear of the smell of cat urine.

What appears new to the story, however, is that the smell of cats not only doesn't worry them, it:

...also makes them mentally and sexually aroused each time their tiny pink noses detect cat smells. ...

"What this damn parasite knows how to do is make cat urine smell sexy to male rats," Sapolsky said. After being exposed in laboratory tests to different cat scents, infected male rats showed a spike in testosterone levels and their testes became engorged.

Not only that, but female rats find infected male rats pretty sexy too:

....female rats also responded to the change in hormone levels by showing preference toward infected males approximately 95 percent of the time, Sapolsky said, which came as another interesting find.

"One of the rules of evolutionary biology is if you're an animal, you don't want to mate with anyone full of parasites," Sapolsky said. "Somehow that doesn't happen with T. gondii infection."

Well then, maybe we are lucky that toxoplasma gondii didn't work out how to make the evolutionary proto-human males of Africa sexually aroused by lions.

(I can see the basis for some good science fiction in this story too.)

The Doctor Fizzles

I was away when the last episode of the last series of Dr Who screened here, and I finally saw it on tape last night.

I know from LP that it attracted criticism for the perceived anti-feminist way it treated Donna, but really, that was the least of its problems.

The last two episodes were pretty much a complete mess. Russell T Davies had really hit some sort of creative block, I reckon, in trying to wrap it all up. Here are my complaints:

1. it took the usual deus ex machina feature of the show to pretty ridiculous heights. Having a fake regeneration as a link between the last two episodes was a paticularly cynical trick, in my books.

2. the special effects (the 27 planets, the thousands of Daleks) all looked unusually cheesy. (Computer generated effects which mulitply anything too much - be it soldiers, ships, spaceships - just automatically look too fake to my eye.)

3. Rose still had the distracting bizarre thing where she couldn't seem to remember exactly how she used to speak. Her upper and lower teeth at times just seemed weirdly misaligned (or something) in her mouth. I find this all very odd.

4. All of the initial crying and carry on by the Doctor's pals when they saw it was the Daleks who had moved the earth seemed out of character defeatism.

5. The blaring music, which I have noted before is often what sells the excitement in the show, was really so continuous this time that it was annoying.

6. Bringing all the Davies created characters together was a nice idea, but it still did not allow enough time for each of them to impress. The sudden appearance of K9 seemed especially stuck on in a "tick the box" kind of manner.

7. Both Donna and Rose were just getting a bit too soppy about their relationship with the Doctor, if you ask me. For characters that are nearly killed in every episode, can't they take a bit more comfort in a return home and the occasional visit from the Doctor for a cup of tea?

There are probably more points, but that's all I can recall for now.