How to blow $10 billion in one hit

Peter Martin: We've only just begun to try to stimulate the economy

Hmm. Peter Martin today explains why the Rudd government's Christmas bonuses were never likely to have lasting effect on holding off a recession, and didn't even really work to keep retail strong. (Adjusted for inflation, Christmas retail figures were not as good as they first sound, and in fact were barely above the preceding level.)

Funny, I thought he was pretty supportive of the idea when it was announced, although I must admit he did note that its effect would "fade" early this year. (This didn't seem to be an actual point of criticism though.)

Now he says:

Professor John Taylor of Stanford University devised the so-called Taylor Rule used by central banks to set interest rates. He told the American Economic Association's annual meeting in San Francisco this month that neither of the Bush government's two emergency tax rebates in 2002 and 2008 had made any difference to consumer spending. The problem was that they were temporary. We adjust our spending based on what we think we are going to be earning, not on the dollars that happen to fall into our pocket on any given week.

Given that the first of these failed rebates was in 2002, weren't Peter and other economics commentators aware that they did not make significant change to consumer spending? (I didn't know either, but economics is not something I profess to know much about.)

On 16 October last year I wrote:

I am still waiting to see more criticism of the short fuse of this spending too.

It seems economics commentary is a game anyone can play at these days.

A dissident on China's woes

A tidal wave of discontent threatens China | Wei Jingsheng - Times Online

The whole article is worth reading, but there was one point which surprised me:

China has a $2 trillion foreign currency reserve but it also suffers from a huge disparity between the rich and poor: while 0.4 per cent of the people hold 70 per cent of the wealth of the country, a fifth of the population - more than 300 million Chinese - have daily incomes of less than one dollar.

Now that's wealth disparity.

UPDATE: according to Wikipedia, the equivalent figures for the USA are:

...at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.

So, does this mean that wealth concentration is roughly 20 times worse in China than the US? Gosh. Good thing they are communist, or who know hows bad it could have been!

Another observation

Has anyone else noticed how relaxing it is not to have Kevin Rudd's face or voice on TV for a protracted period. (I suppose Laborites used to feel the same when Howard was on holiday too, but he wasn't the media tart that Rudd is.) It's a bit like the relief when you stop and remove an irritating pebble that's got into your shoe.

High density good or bad?

In comments a couple of posts back, I noted how the writer of the Slate article about environmentalism claimed that the "greenest" way of living was in a high density city like New York; not by being in a city with lots of suburbs.

But today, in the Sydney Morning Herald, someone from an organisation "Save our Suburbs" argues with figures that high density development in Sydney would make more CO2, not less. Here's some of his arguments:

The Australian Conservation Foundation's consumption atlas shows people living in high-density areas have greater greenhouse gas emissions than those living in low-density areas. A study by EnergyAustralia and the NSW Department of Planning shows the energy used by a resident in high-rise is nearly twice that for a resident in a detached house. Think of all the lifts, clothes dryers, air-conditioners and lights in garages and foyers. ...

Research in Melbourne shows people squeezed into newly converted dense areas did not use public transport to any greater extent and there was little or no change in their percentage of car use.

There is not enough difference in the emissions of public versus private transport to counter the increased emissions of high-density living. For each kilometre CityRail carries a passenger, it emits 105 grams of greenhouse gases, while the average car emits 155, and modern fuel-efficient cars such as the Toyota Prius emit just 70.

I am a little suspicious of the slant being put on some figures here. In the second paragraph, for example, he talks of little change in "percentage" of car use, but is that taking into account the much shorter distances that may be being driven when you live close to the city, even if you still use your car to get to work?

Similarly, given that air-conditioning is so popular now, I would expect that one saving in energy use would be that small apartments don't take much energy to heat or cool, and are insulated by the other apartments around them.

On the other hand, suburban gardens and plants must be given some credit for absorbing CO2, I guess.

Maybe (just guessing here) to get full credit as a low CO2 emitting city, you have to reach a threshold level of density where a very large proportion of residents almost never have to rely on a car, such as in New York or Tokyo.

I'm sure someone's looked at this, but I don't have time to find the answer now.

Not the wisest investment

Many home turbines fall short of claims, warns study | Technology | The Guardian

Here's an amusing bit of Green perversity:

Home wind turbines are generating a fraction of the energy promised by manufacturers, and in some cases use more electricity than they make, a report warns today. The results of what is thought to be the most comprehensive study undertaken of the industry show the worst performers provided just 41 watt-hours a day - less than the energy needed for a conventional lightbulb for an hour, or even to power the turbine's own electronics.

On average the turbines surveyed provided enough electricity to light an energy-efficient house, but this still only represented 5%-10% of the manufacturers' claims, said consultants Encraft. ...
It found the best performing turbines would generate "clean" electricity equivalent to that needed to manufacture them in less than two years, while the worst performing ones would take 40 years.

Nothing to dislike, except the price

Toyota pulls wraps off all-new Prius

Toyota says the new car, revealed Monday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, will achieve an estimated 3.7L/100km in the city and 4.0L/100km highway, for a combined rating of 3.8L/100km. The first-generation Prius was rated 4.6 L/100km combined fuel consumption, the second generation was 4.1....

Toyota says the 2010 model, which goes on sale this spring, has the lowest drag coefficient of any mass production car - 0.25. A normal sports car often has a drag of 0.32 or higher.

According to the Courier Mail, it will cost $40,000 here.

I wonder what is environmentally best for a moderate driver living in a family home: spend around $20,000 on a 3 year old Camry, and use the other $20,000 to put solar hot water and a small-ish solar cell system on the house, or buy a Prius?

Rationalist Vs Romantic Environmentalists

Environmental writing since Thoreau. - By Johann Hari - Slate Magazine

Here's an interesting discussion of the two branches of environmentalism. The romantics see it as a spiritual crisis which could be solved by most people living in caves again; the rationalists see despoiling the environment as simply a physical problem that doesn't need spirituality in response.

Hari makes an interesting point:

I'm with the rationalists. And yet this division—which seems so plain and irreconcilable to me—keeps being muddied by the contributors to this collection. Wes Jackson offers the most romantic fantasy of the book—but he is a distinguished scientist. Al Gore offers the most lucid popular summary of hard climate science we have—and then attributes the disaster, in an unexplained leap of logic, to a "spiritual crisis." Almost all the rational accounts here let romantic tropes seep into their writing as rousing quasi-religious end lines. Why? It feels as though the rationalists don't have enough confidence in their own intellectual tradition to inspire and rouse people. It's an old Enlightenment fear: Are we too irrational and poorly evolved a species to respond to neat reason?

I would say that opposition to nuclear being a substantial part of the response to greenhouse gases is largely based on the romantic view, yet typically it will be dressed up by Greens with facts and figures (talking about the long half life of isotopes, for example) to give it a more rationalist sheen.

The same is probably true for opposition to geo-engineering ideas, although they are all so novel in concept that there is plenty of room for debate by the rationalists as to whether the cure will be worse than the disease.

I guess the thing the romantics have on their side is that nearly any urban dweller (with the exception of people like Woody Allen, I guess) likes at least some connection with nature, whether it be by having a garden with birds, or just visits to a nice beach or national park every now and then. Still, going wholeheartedly into the clutch of romanticism is bad for humanity overall. (The ultra romantics don't want us here at all!)

An observation

Fierce Focus on Tunnels, a Lifeline for Gazans - NYTimes.com

Like many bloggers, I have resisted getting involved in commentary on the current Gaza/Israel war. It's hard coming up with anything original to say, but the above article in the New York Times (well worth reading despite its title which sounds somewhat biased) does raise an interesting question.

Why does the fact that Gaza has a significant border with Egypt seem to attract so little attention? The talk is always of Israel controlling Gaza's borders and even sea access, but it doesn't control the border with Egypt. If Israel imposes a blockade, and Egypt does not provide much in the way of legitimate access to aid via its border, why does Egypt seem to never attract much in the way condemnation from the EU and others for not assisting the Gazans?

Yes, Egypt does not want to encourage Hamas either; but if it is good to criticise Israel for creating a humanitarian crisis, why be so silent on Egypt's role?

The apparent use of tunnels to import food and other goods would hardly be necessary if Egypt allowed it to regularly enter via the above ground border, would it? So why doesn't that happen? Is it because a search regime to ensure trucks are not smuggling weapons along with other goods would be too hard to implement?

I am also not talking about the issue of what assistance Egypt should give right now; I am questioning the longer term issue of how Egypt deals with Gaza. If there is a (literally) underground economy, why not make it a legitimate "above ground" one instead, at least if you can guarantee that it is not involving supplying Hamas with weapons?

This Pajamas Media article from 2 January also raised the issue of why the Western media does not question more why Hamas dithers about opportunities to take Egyptian assistance (in this case, to take some of the wounded.) It's worth reading too.

What do you suggest?

I knew my relative anonymity here would come in useful one day.

For the last couple of months, my wife and I have been suffering with new neighbours in the rental house next door. It's a father and his 18 year old daughter. The owner of the house, with whom I had contact before these new tenants arrived, told me that she was letting it to a "mature age" man, suggesting that this was a good sign. It has proved anything but.

The problem is, the father, perhaps because he is a smoker (or perhaps he was raised in a tent, or some other reason I can't fathom) virtually lives in the outdoor entertainment area that is very close to one end of my house. He also speaks, and argues, with the volume set permanently on "11". His relationship with his daughter is, um, erratic in the extreme. By which I mean: on any given evening, there may be several shouting matches, much swearing at each other, demands from the father that the daughter respect him, shouted demands from the daughter that the father stop drinking and asking for her money, screams from the daughter (on the few occasions he has actually entered the house) that he is "hurting" her, but then also at random points during the evening the sounds of the daughter laughing and teasing him. The father has told other people on the phone that he thinks the daughter is on drugs. However, it is always the daughter who at least has the common sense to know that her father's voice may be disturbing the neighbours. She repeatedly tells him to keep his voice down; he never does.

This has made one end of our house (where the childrens' rooms are) virtually uninhabitable before about 10 pm. Being summer, this has not proved a huge obstacle yet, as the children are spending a lot of time sleeping in the air-conditioned room at the other end, but it has been clear for some time that I have to either:

a. have a calm, try-to-keep-it-cheery type talk to the father during the day along the lines that he should really realise that he talks very, very loudly, and my house is very, very close at one end to his, and sound travels very well of an evening. I could suggest that I now know so much about him that I could write his biography, and if he has any desire for privacy at all he should really try to spend his evenings inside his house; or

b. start calling to them from the kid's window of an evening that for God's sake they have to stop yelling and carrying on at each other every bloody night, as they are invading my privacy.

I came close to taking option b tonight. In fact, I also came close to calling the police because the daughter was again shouting and saying that he was hurting her, this time repeatedly. Yet, I still had the feeling from the tone of her voice that nothing really serious was going on. I suspected he may have had her arm and was trying to force an apology for something or other out of her.

Still, it went on long enough that I did attempt to ring the police, but not as an emergency. Maybe the constabulary just turning up to check them at any point in the evening might make them realise they can't carry on this way all the time. However, while waiting on the line, the daughter went silent. Then, both of them were outside, and the daughter was clearly not under threat.

However, this is still where it becomes more disturbing in a way. The daughter and father had a prolonged conversation about what the father was going to do about some man, who had "crossed the line". Her side went like this "you keep talking about breaking his legs, but I don't want it to be physical. I do want his life ruined. I want him in jail, and he has to know he can't live in Sydney. I want to live in Sydney. I want you to tell me exactly what you are going to do. You can't get anything physical done to him, because it will be traced back to you. But he has to be threatened, he has to have his life ruined; he has to know that what he has done is wrong, that he has crossed the line, and he can't live in this country. I was born in this country, he wasn't."

The father's responses was along these lines: "Don't worry I can arrange it. I can get him threatened all right. It's not so easy for me to get the physical stuff done now anyway. But I don't want you taking a phone call from him and then changing your mind and being manipulated by him again. Don't worry, I'll look after it" etc.

This would be followed by reassurances from the daughter that she was well and truly finished with the man (presumably an ex boyfriend), followed by more requests to have her father detail and promise exactly what he would do to him.

Ludicrously, the daughter frequently told the father to "just whisper" what he would do, as she didn't want the whole neighbourhood to know about this. She, however, was not shy about detailing her desires for (apparently criminal) action in a normal speaking voice so close to my house.

So, what do I do now? It half crossed my mind that I could simply tell them from the darkened window I was standing near: "well, too late now. I've heard all of this; I know who you work for and that they may not take kindly to this information. If you chose in future to live quietly inside your house for the rest of your lease, I may not have reason to pass on the information on." Maybe that could result in them both deciding against doing anything serious to the un-named Sydney man, as well as living more quietly. (I suppose it could also mean some threat being made to my well-being.)

I did not do that.

Now, I am left with information that a neighbour is apparently planning some serious interference with the life of some Sydney migrant, and while the father was indicating that he would not in fact arrange to "break his legs," it also sounded like what he does intend to arrange may well escalate into violence. Furthermore, the daughter insisted several times that she wanted the guy "in jail". How did she expect that to be achieved? The father did not make it clear exactly what he would do, but he did keep reassuring her that it would be something serious, and she had better not change her mind. There was, at the end, the suggestion that they would talk more about it in the morning.

Of course, if acting out of pure self interest, it would suit me to see the daughter move to Sydney.

I also can see the police not being particularly interested in an overheard conversation if it did not end up detailing exactly what the father would arrange to "ruin" this guy's life.

However, given that I know what the father does for a living, it is conceivable that he does have connections to arrange something bad for the guy. The funny thing is, he has talked to his daughter of the moral corruption of young people these days, and how his work has really "opened his eyes" to this.

I am inclined to talk to the police tomorrow anyway. Anyone else have any other suggestions?

UPDATE: police spoken to, note taken of general concerns about domestic violence possibly taking place. Headed home for my regular dose of evening shouting and swearing. Swearing becomes particularly loud and agitated at around 10pm. I go to the end of the house where I can hear all: daughter had put Tabasco sauce in father's mouth (I think) while he slept. Reason remains unclear (she swears as much as he does, so it presumably wasn't punishment for using naughty words). I think I heard her say from inside the house "you weren't breathing," but I could be wrong.

Maybe I should arrange for the Sydney guy's legs to be broken so she can move to Sydney and I can get some peace and quiet.

UPDATE 2: last night's outdoor discussions under my window went something like this:

Father: you manipulate me.
Daughter: no, you manipulate me.
Father: you lie too.
Daughter: I don't lie, or if I do, I learnt it from you. You lie all the time.
Father: So I lie, do I?
Daughter: Yes you do, you lie all the time, and you manipulate...
Father: it's you who manipulates
Daughter: Stop f****in interrupting me! You do that all the...
Father: You're the manipulator...

[Repeat with minor variations for the next 20 minutes.]

As for the fate of the Sydney fellow, things are looking up. It would appear that the daughter (aged 18) up and went to Sydney over Christmas to visit him, not telling her father where she was. (She was actually upset last night that her father had gone to a party on the second night of her absence, instead of staying at home and fretting about where she was.)

But, crucially, at one point of the daughter/father love in last night, she complained that, despite their discussions for days, her father had not yet arranged to "frighten" him. The father said he wouldn't, because she was still infatuated with him. (A point she strenuously denies.)

So, Ahmed of Sydney, (from Turkey originally, I think,) you may be spared an intimidating visit yet.

Holiday movie report (like you care)

Here's my short takes on 3 current holiday movies:

* Madagascar 2: many good jokes, including one Twilight Zone reference early on which made me laugh a lot, but no one else in the cinema seemed to understand. The penguins are certainly given a larger starring role, but I don't rate it as highly as the first, mainly because I missed the more measured pacing of the original, and a key part of the plot (how the giraffe is in love with the hippo) just doesn't make much sense.

* Bedtime Stories: horrible mishmash writing that tries desperately to maintain adult insider jokes (including references to Paris Hilton being a slut, and Howard Hughes' phobias) while getting most of its kiddie appeal by repeated cuts to a CGI hamster with fake big eyes. The story features the lamest idea for creating a dramatic climax that I think I have seen for a couple of decades. You would have to adore Adam Sandler's schtick to like this film if you are over 10.

(Speaking of Sandler, I found him remarkably unfunny in a recent Leno interview, and the joke at 2min 40sec manages to be both in very poor taste and very stupid, although I thought Leno's response was appropriate.)

* Tale of Despereaux: The pick of the bunch so far. I am surprised to see it's had a mixed reception, but I am certainly on the side of those who found it extremely charming. For once, I felt I had an understanding of what it means to see an animated film that is well directed. It is very distinctively cinematic and clever, the animation is really outstanding, and the facial expressiveness really seemed right on the spot.

It also has a surprising moral seriousness by the end. As some reviewers have noted, it has no pop-culture gags at all, and that in itself is rather refreshing in quality animation.

The storytelling could have been tightened a little (one plot point really deserved an explanation that was never given) but it still seemed to be well received by the audience I was with.

Highly recommended.

More on sabotage from the future

The apocalypse has been postponed | Science | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian has a handy page (above) with links to articles relevant to the issue of whether backwards causation from the future is the reason why the LHC broke down.

One of the papers I was familiar with (the one where a couple of physicists suggested drawing cards to decide whether to turn the thing on!), but the other article about vacuum collapse is new to me.

In any event, my idea is more dramatically satisfying: that it is active interference from humans in the future that is caused the blow up.

Since I made my first post about this, I have remembered reading Gregory Benford's Timescape novel, which involved tachyon messages from the future to prevent ecological catastrophe involving the oceans. (I didn't care for the novel much: like too much "hard" science fiction, it was technically of interest but the characters were just not very likeable.) Maybe it is the subconscious influence of that novel that lead to my interest in ocean acidification too!

My suggestion is very close to that, although the idea of direct sabotage from the future is a little different. (And, almost certainly, is the subject of another science fiction story somewhere.)

One of those "apropos of nothing" posts

I recently saw a story on Japanese TV about the incredible mechanical dolls of the Edo period, and while Youtube doesn't have that particular clip, it does have this one from a chat show last year. I promise you, these dolls are amazing. (You will also see why Japanese chat show formats can be quite irritating):



I see from Wikipedia that the Japanese inventor who made these (Tanaka Hisashige) also started what eventually became the Toshiba company in 1875. Store that away in your brain somewhere, it might just one day come in useful. Or not.

More odd features of the libertines

Doing It: Books: The New Yorker

Didn't a new edition of The Joy of Sex come out a year or two ago, with updated text and pictures? I have a vague feeling of reading about that then, but there is a current New Yorker article about a recent edition, and it's fascinating and funny.

It seems that, to be at the forefront of sexual liberation, it helps (like Alfred Kinsey), to be quite the oddball in your private life. Take this for example:

Comfort had a tendency to focus single-mindedly on a given notion or project at the expense of any kind of balance: while he was a student at Highgate School, in London, he became convinced that he could concoct a superior version of gunpowder. He blew off much of his left hand. By the time he was finished with his experiments, his thumb was the only remaining digit. Later in his life, when he was practicing medicine, he said that he found this claw he’d created “very useful for performing uterine inversions.”

Of course, it is also important not to get too hung up about fidelity in marriage:

For more than a decade, Comfort had been sleeping with Ruth’s best friend, Jane Henderson. (Comfort met both women at Cambridge.) Comfort and Henderson took dozens of Polaroids of their erotic experiments, which they gave to the publisher Mitchell Beazley along with Comfort’s manuscript—originally titled “Doing Sex Properly.” The artists Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss were charged with transforming those photographs into pencil drawings, although the couple they depicted looked nothing like Comfort and Henderson.

And naturally, you wouldn't be on the conservative side of politics:

Comfort and his wife, Ruth, divorced shortly after “Joy” came out: the unpleasantness of his infidelity seems to have been heightened for Mrs. Comfort when her husband became internationally known as “Dr. Sex.” In 1973, a few months later, Comfort married his mistress and muse, Jane, and the two moved to Santa Barbara so that Comfort could assume a post at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank. The move also gave them closer proximity to the Sandstone, a clothing-optional community of utopian swingers in Topanga Canyon, which was reportedly visited by Timothy Leary, Sammy Davis, Jr., Betty Dodson, and the porn star Marilyn Chambers, and which Comfort and Jane had frequented since 1970. “Often the nude biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net,” Gay Talese wrote in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.”

Of course, conservatives are just as capable of infidelity, but it has long seemed to me that for those on the Left (especially politicians), their scandalous predilections are usually ones of scale (sleeping with large numbers of different people), whereas those on the Right tend more towards fewer bodies but kinkier sex.

In other sex news: Opinion Journal reports on the wrong-headed spin that the media recently gave a study about teen pledges.

You too can play President

In hard times, White House replica goes up for sale

Heh.

We'll see

'Big Bang' machine to be ready by summer - The Independent

The £4bn "Big Bang" machine, which suffered a catastrophic malfunction soon after being switched on last September, is expected to be restarted in June.

Not if my call to time travelling agents from the future to intervene works again.

(Well, OK, if you insist, I did not actually send out a specific call that led to the first breakdown, but I like to think they read my blog.)

More big statues needed

Rio's famous Christ statue faces bigger rival

So, a Brazilian town wants to build a bigger statue than Rio's famous one.

Everyone likes giant statues, don't they? Yet not many people seem to know about the giant white Kannon statue in Sendai, Japan. There is a series of photos of it here. (My own date from pre-digital days, but if I can find them in a drawer somewhere, I'll scan one.)

The statue is hollow and you can walk up ramps looking at various vignettes about Buddhist thoughts. All quite impressive.

Yes, the world needs more giant statues. The UN should designate "Giant Statue Day" to raise awareness of this important issue.

Update: here are photos of the 9 biggest statues in the world. There are a few in there that I didn't know about before. See - there is clearly a need for increased giant statue awareness.

Some further thoughts: in this era of every city having a giant ferris wheel observation platform thingee (I predict they will go out of fashion overnight,) I would much prefer that each city have their own giant statue. Much community interest, and probably shed blood, could be generated by competitions for the preferred theme of the statue, which must incorporate a human shape. Sydney clearly is the perfect place for a new equivalent to the Collosus of Rhodes, straddling the Harbour Bridge. I can see Paul Keating offering to be a face model for it.

A cool Japanese house

It's been a while since I linked to a nice bit of archi-porn, but this one is well worth the "click". (Although, it is reminding me of some other building I can't quite recall. It could even be something from a Gerry Anderson show I am thinking of.)

Oh. It's just occurred to me that 1960's puppet shows have been a significant influence on my taste in architecture.

Furry love

Here's a pretty remarkable video of interspecies fondness:



I found it via this post at one of the Scienceblogs, where the writer wonders whether the rat loves the cat because it has toxoplasmosis (a favourite topic here at OD). I tend to agree with one commenter, though, that it seems much more likely a case of animals that were socialised together while young. If toxoplasmosis were the explanation, wouldn't it mean that every house cat on the street would be being chased by adoring wild rats?

The Artistic life

Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites by Franny Moyle review

It's hard to resist reading about the erratic and convoluted sex lives of famous artists or writers. From the review above:

Desperate Romantics opens in 1848 with the ambitious art students Hunt, Millais and Rossetti founding the mysteriously named PRB in order to represent poetic, religious and mythical stories in a bold, realistic style. They joked that the sign on the studio door would be interpreted by the uninitiated as “Please ring the bell”, but for the raffish associate member Walter Deverell, PRB stood for “Penis rather better”. A moot point perhaps, as far as the priapic Rossetti was concerned, but the same could not be said of Ruskin. In the year that the Pre-Raphaelites formed, the critic who would do more than anyone else to champion the Brotherhood married 19-year-old Effie Gray. Their honeymoon night, as Moyle puts it, “did not go well”.

What happened when Effie removed her nightgown has kept biographers occupied for decades, and Moyle suggests that the groom was overcome by innocence as much as horror. Either way, Ruskin's inability, or refusal, to consummate his marriage runs parallel to the inability, or refusal, of Rossetti to resist seducing everyone he met.

It is hard to tell which was the more lethal, Ruskin's fear of the female form or Rossetti's fetishistic obsession with it. Ruskin told Effie that he would make her “his wife” when she was 25, at which point he housed her with Millais in a cottage in the Highlands and placed himself in a hotel on the other side of a bog. Within a year, the breakdown of the Ruskin marriage was discussed more than the Crimean war and Effie had become Mrs Millais. Ruskin's next infatuation was with the 10-year-old Rose La Touche. After being besieged by Ruskin for 17 years, Rose starved herself to death.

I always have the impression that the number of famous artists who married once, were faithful to their spouse, raised a happy family, and died financially secure at home must be very small. Instead, their private lives usually seem to be a walking disaster zone for themselves or those around them.

Tipler and crackpottery

The Varieties of Crackpot Experience | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Oh dear. My favourite physicist Frank Tipler has come out as a global warming sceptic. (Well, just remember I don't pin the need for CO2 reductions on global warming anyway.)

This post about him is not very fair, but it's by Sean Carroll, a physicist who (despite his group blog moving to Discover magazine) keeps bringing up politics, religion and gay rights in a typical leftie atheist scientist fashion in a blog that is ostensibly about science and physics. The paraphrase of Tipler's comments on global warming make his comments sound much worse than they are.

Still, part of the reason I like Tipler is because it is never 100% clear whether (or at what point) he has truly fallen into crackpottery. (He also answered a couple of my emails years ago.) Certainly, it would seem he was stretching the credibility way too thin with his last book in which the miracles of Christ were given quasi-scientific explanation. He gets up atheist's noses by talking about the Omega Point God as a scientific fact.

Still, I suspect that his science work is more important than is usually acknowledged.

But there is no reason in particular to expect that a moderately famous physicist who has made his name in work on relativity and cosmology should have any special expertise in atmospheric physics and climate studies, so I don't think anyone skeptic should be too heartened by his views.

Maybe I should email him with some of the anti-Skeptic blogs that are around...