He's a poet, but didn't know it

Praise song for the first day for the school year (Brisbane version)

Hooray, hooray, is the cry of a million parents, as we catch the joy in each other’s eyes.

The noise all about us at home for the last six weeks is finished, and a tidied house again may stay that way for more than one hour.

No more cinema queues to be endured for the latest movie about dogs.

No more cartoons every morning.

No more outings just to find time in airconditioning.

Say it plain: we love you kids, but jeez it’s good to get you out of the house again.

Learn well, and don’t expect us to do your homework for you. (Tell the teacher that too.)

Praise the day, that domestic peace rules again for 8 hours a day.

Nudge nudge, wink wink...

Grand Arabian nights Geert Jan van Gelder TLS

This is a long review on a new translation of 1,001 [Arabian] Nights, which I found of limited interest. However, being kind, I will extract for you the best bit:

Some readers will be delighted to learn some naughty Arabic, but surely English has a profusion of equally vulgar words for the sexual organs. It should be stressed, however, that obscenities, Arabic equivalents of English four-letter words, are few and far between in the original, where sexual intercourse is often simply expressed as “lying with” or more elaborately by means of metaphors martial (“storming the fortress”) or religious (“circumambulating the Kaaba”, “putting the imam into the prayer niche”), with the mildly shocking profanity that was common in pre-modern Arabic.

Naked science revisited

Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?: Scientific American

Interesting article here arguing that a growing body of physicists are now not so sure that black holes always have an event horizon hiding their core from view. Some may be genuine naked singularities, the exact behaviour of which remains very unclear.

In September 2007, I mentioned a paper on arXiv which said that the Large Hadron Collider may also produce tiny naked singularities. Although the author was not worried that they would be dangerous, the issue of how a stationary one on the earth could behave has not, as far as I know, ever been addressed in the LHC safety reviews. (The general argument that cosmic ray collisions of higher energies have been safe for the earth is the only argument I suppose you could use, given the lack of knowledge about their behaviour. It's not a bad argument, except that the issue of whether there is a difference between moving and stationary ones would have to be addressed, as it was for micro black holes.)

Call me overly cautious if you want, but I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of a European lab possibly creating something the behaviour of which can only be guessed.

Bad ocean forecast of the week

Dramatic expansion of dead zones in the oceans

From the above report at PhysOrg:

A team of Danish researchers have now shown that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.

The New Scientist version of the story adds this detail:

Under the worst-case scenario, average ocean oxygen levels will fall by up to 40%, and there will be a 20-fold expansion in the area of "dead zones", like those already discovered in the eastern Pacific and northern Indian Ocean, where there is too little oxygen for fish to survive. Even in the mid-range scenario, dead zones would expand by a factor of 3 or 4. Cold, deep waters will also be affected if warming stifles the currents that deliver oxygen to greater depths.

Shaffer's projections suggest that the oxygen content in surface layers will dip to its lowest levels during the 22nd century, and in deep water a thousand years later. Recovery to pre-industrial levels will be very slow: "Even after 100,000 years, oxygen levels will only have recovered by around 90%," he says.

Go to the links for more details. Not exactly encouraging, as it shows what is potentially at stake if the warming skeptics are wrong. (And it is an additional risk to that of ocean acidification, which of itself is a major concern for future ocean health.)

The problems on Broadway

BBC NEWS | Mary Poppins - a tale for our times

The article is all about the current woes of Broadway. Strangely, though, it doesn't mention the lack of likeable or memorable musicals written in the last 30 odd years.

Remarkable

How low can you go? : Nature News

This is pretty mind boggling, even if it is of no practical application (yet!):

The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world — the fording of electrons across a transistor, or hard drives reliant on electrons' intrinsic spin — are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set: no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron.

But now, researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have used another feature of the electron — its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states — to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces. By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron.

Warnings to my mother (a ramble about some movies)

Readers may recall that I have an active 85 year mother. One of her main forms of entertainment, when not spending a few hours every week on the internet following all of the Colin Firth fansites, (as well as admiring the large Colin Firth calendar on her wall just near the autographed photo of him: you getting the idea?) is to watch movies, either in the cinema or on DVD.

I see few adult movies these days, but I still like to read reviews and watch how successful some are. My mother doesn't follow the reviews much; she tends to go by what passes for star power these days. Hence, for example, she may well be the only 85 year old person in the country who ventured out to see the poorly received Colin Firth movie "St Trinians" last year. ("No girl or boy over the age of 12 would be attracted by anything so puerile" wrote the Financial Times. My mother agreed.)

This puts me in a position of having to warn her of the nature of certain movies which I can guess she may be planning on seeing.

Recently, for example, she brought a DVD of "The Departed". The reason: she quite likes Leonardo Di Caprio. But gritty, profanity-filled Scorsese gangsterfests are hardly my mother's favourite genre, and I could recall Margaret Pomeranz really disliking it. (She said "It's so violent, it's so vile in the language, you know, particularly the sexual language." That was enough to put me off seeing it too.)

I warned my mother; I think she was going to return it unopened.

Which brings me to another Di Caprio warning I have just issued to her. Revolutionary Road has received pretty good reviews, but I had to warn my Mum that, despite romantic looking scenes in the TV ads, it is a story entirely about a marriage break up.

Now I'll do my easily ridiculed trick of rubbishing a movie simply on the basis of reviews I feel are probably right. In the case of Revolutionary Road, about an apparently ideal 1950's middle class American marriage, and how stultifying the couple find it, it would seem that many reviewer's reactions are related to how "progressive" they are in their social views, particularly on the question of the importance of self fulfilment.

For example, Roger Ebert adores the movie, but writes:

Remember, this is the 1950s. A little after the time of this movie, Life magazine would run its famous story about the Beatniks, "The Only Rebellion Around." There was a photo of a Beatnik and his chick sitting on the floor and listening to an LP record of modern jazz that was cool and hip and I felt my own yearnings. I remember on the way back from Steak 'n Shake one night, my dad drove slow past the Turk's Head coffeehouse on campus. "That's where the Beatniks stand on tables and recite their poetry," he told my mom, and she said, "My, my," and I wanted to get out of that car and put on a black turtleneck and walk in there and stay.

Further down he says of the acting:

They are so good, they stop being actors and become the people I grew up around.

And he finishes with:

A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?

Comments such as this indicate that Ebert has residual disdain for conformism from his teenage years, and like many others, has fully absorbed the idea that happiness is reached via self-understanding and self-fulfilment. As such he is primed to admire movies on these sort of themes. Indeed, like most critics, he loved American Beauty, also directed by Sam Mendes. I found it terribly over-rated, theatrically directly, and far too contrived to be affecting.

The review of Road which sounds to me to likely be more correct is by Peter Rainer, the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, which opens with this:

What is it about the 1950s that brings out the worst in cultural historians? The received wisdom is that this era that gave us Mailer and Ginsberg and Kerouac and Brando and Dean was, in fact, a bastion of strait-laced – i.e., straitjacketed – conformity. People, suburbanites especially, lived lives of quiet desperation in their look-alike, ticky-tacky dwellings. Wives were obsessed with spotless kitchens. Commuter trains served up faceless men in gray flannel suits to the gaping maw of Manhattan and then back again, to the two-car garage and the 2.5 children.

The latest movie to plug into this cautionary myth is "Revolutionary Road," set in the mid-'50s and based, extremely faithfully, on the celebrated 1961 novel by Richard Yates. The director is Sam Mendes, who plumbed these shallows once before in "American Beauty," which, though contemporary, felt '50-ish. The new film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who previously appeared together in "Titanic." This is another kind of disaster movie, on dry land.

Rainer makes the point, as do other some other reviewers, that the well received TV show "Mad Men", dealing with men behaving badly in the same era, at least shows the characters as having some vitality. In my view, its even more instructive to watch some of the quality films or television made and set in the 1950s (rather than modern ones about the 1950's) to be reminded that people really did live then.

Although I am too young to know of the 1950's directly, this point about it being too easy to overlook the "vitality" of day to day life in earlier times is an important one to remember. Westerners today do feel greater freedom in all kinds of areas, such as sexual mores, career path, and preparedness to end a marriage. Yet such freedoms don't necessarily mean that there were huge numbers of people living in the 1950's sitting around in a blue funk all day because they didn't feel fulfilled. Sure, there were some people who felt unduly constrained then, but that will always be the case for some, no matter how many freedoms are allowed.

Apart from doubting that they accurately reflect the general zeitgeist of the pre-60's world, the other grounds upon which a more conservative soul dislikes such movies is that they show no skepticism of the modern mantra of the importance of self fulfilment and "self realisation". As I think I have written here before, most people today have forgotten that this 20th century Western attitude is a huge turnaround from historic views that developing good character was something to be worked at, not a matter of self-discovery, and to lead a good life involved large components of duty and respect for others which often necessarily involved self-sacrifice.

I do know something of the 1960's, and of course there are some ways in which society now is significantly better, but other good features of the period have sadly been lost and show little sign of returning. I won't go into detailing the particular rights and wrongs of the recent past right now, but suffice to say that I have an inherent cynicism of movies which paint too bleak a picture of the pre-1960's world, when as an era it featured growing populations, strong economies, the birth of modern technology, a greater sense of obligation and duty, and movies as enjoyable as those of Hitchcock at his peak.

Registering a complaint

Yesterday, January 24 2009, was remarkable even by Brisbane standards for its extremely unpleasant combination of high humidity, high temperature and near complete lack of breeze or air movement for most of the day (especially in the western suburbs). The air in the house felt as if it lacked oxygen. Unwisely, (but I was being social,) I had two mid-strength beers at lunch and that was enough to leave me with the slightly thick head that I usually suffer if I drink any alcohol in the middle of the day, especially in hot weather. I clearly don't have the constitution to be an all-day alcoholic.

The internet tells me that at least one other person felt yesterday was horrible too. Oddly, the weather bureau's record of observations for the day doesn't make it sound as bad as it was.

Still, it was not as bad as an week in (I think) either early 1997 or 1998. I believe it was in February of one of those years that there was a run of hot humid nights, with minimums of 27 or 28 degrees, and one evening I had to go and see a movie just to get into airconditioning. On leaving the cinema, after 11pm, my glasses immediately fogged up completely. That is not a common occurrence here, even with our routine high humidity.

Financial woes

Alan Wood gave a pretty good explanation of the international financial system problems in The Australian today.

I am told by a friend who returned from Taiwan recently that in China there is a new expression (which I can't recall, sorry) for the hundreds of thousands of suddenly unemployed people in the southern cities who are out of work but not yet returning to their rural homes (partly out of embarrassment, and partly out of hope they'll find a job somewhere in another factory.) They are just milling around the cities during the day, apparently. Transport for return home for Chinese New Year would usually be fully booked, but this year it is said to be not so crowded.

And worse times are coming, of course.

Conspiracy of the day

I think I spotted it in comments in Huffington Post yesterday, and the writer may have been joking. But it was to the effect that the fluffed Presidential oath was deliberate, so that the "real" oath taken in the White House could be secretly done with a Koran!

This has probably spread wildly through certain corners of the internet already, but I can't be bothered checking. It is pretty good as far as nutty conspiracy theories go, though. (I am waiting for 9/11 Troofers to start being disillusioned with Obama. It won't take long.)

(And Lefties have nothing to feel superior about. It was conspiracy all the way after the second Bush election.)

Tiltshifting toy

Found via Red Ferret, I've been fiddling at TiltShiftMaker.com with attempts at tiltshifting some photos. (Boing Boing had a fair few posts about it: the 'art' of manipulating normal photos to make them look as if they are really of models.) Here's my best result, which I think does have a bit of a model town appearance (it'll look better if you enlarge it):



The original photo appeared at an old post here.

Small things amuse small minds, hey. (Boom boom).

Oddest story of the day

Monks pledge lush new life for 'the Paris Hilton of cows' - The Independent

It's kind of hard to summarise, just read it. And don't miss this line:

The decision to kill Gangotri, a 13-year-old Friesian blue injured by an overly vigorous mating session, enraged Britain's Hindu community who claim that animal welfare officers and police distracted the monks to make a lethal injection "in secret".

An advance, of sorts

Instant syphilis tests to be offered

The Age reports:

Health authorities thought they had consigned syphilis to the history books but the disease is back, and in epidemic proportions.

In 2001, there was just one case of syphilis recorded in Victoria compared with the 1,000 cases seen in the past two years.

Nationally, the rise has been more than seven-fold since 2003, with the number of infections rising from 164 to 1,166 in 2008.

That surely must be taken as confirmation that safe sex campaigns are failing badly. The outbreak, incidentally, is almost entirely amongst men who have sex with other men.

The "advance" I mention in the title to this post: there is now a 15 minute pin prick blood test for it. And what's more, if you go to Melbourne's midsummer gay and lesbian festival, you can be tested for free. Huzzah.

As the Pope would say, kinda says something about a "festival" when one of its features is free STD testing, doesn't it?

Mmmm, polar bear - full of Vitamin C

Q and A - How Did People Avoid Malnutrition in Societies Where Historically There Was Little or No Produce?

Well, who knew this?:

The researchers, from the University of Calgary, also found that the fresh animal foods these Inuit ate, including fish, birds and animals like seal, whale, polar bears, musk ox and caribou, provided them with surprisingly high levels of vitamin C, in some cases more than a Canadian national study found in the diets of Inuit living in places with more access to processed foods.

Catholics with a fantastic advertising agency

I trust Currency Lad and Saint have seen this.

More sensitive souls you would rather not meet

Edmund White on the French 19th-century poet, Arthur Rimbaud

Pretty funny in parts, this description of the early relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. A highlight:

Rimbaud could certainly be as pitiless as a real assassin. He once had Verlaine play a "game" in which Verlaine would stretch out his hand on the table and Rimbaud would stab at his spread fingers. Verlaine thought the point of the game was to show that he wouldn't flinch, that he trusted Rimbaud. But Rimbaud quite simply stabbed him in the wrist.

Not just me, then

In my earlier post on the inauguration, I was too polite to mention that the parts of Obama's speech that I heard did not particularly impress. But I have always been cynical of his oratory skills (would he impress so much if he didn't have that voice?), so I did not feel I was in a position to judge.

But clearly, it was not just me.

(Incidentally, John F Kennedy did not that good a voice to listen to, but the eloquence of the words came through nonetheless. His inauguration speech is worth re-watching, but certainly the sense of it coming from a different era is very strong.)

Cheap

It would appear that electric cars will be extremely cheap to power:

... the i-MiEV — which goes on sale in the UK later this year — is based on the i, Mitsubishi's existing city car. With room for four adults, it has a top speed of 87mph and produces the equivalent of 57 horsepower. Its lithium-ion battery has a range of 100 miles and can be charged from flat to 80% in 20 minutes using Mitsubishi's bespoke high-powered charger; otherwise, a normal mains electricity socket will charge the battery from flat to full in six hours. Mitsubishi estimates that the car can travel 10,000 miles on £45 of electricity at current UK domestic prices.

About AUD$90 for 16,000 km? It seems a Honda scooter will get you about 50km per litre, so 16,000 km at $1 per litre would cost around $320. And you get wet with it. On the other hand, scooters are cheap to buy, although some do look a little toy-like. (Actually, now that I look at the latest models, there now seems to be quite an effort to make 50cc scooters look "sporty". Have a look at the European models in particular. It must be a pretty funny job, coming up with designs that try to make a 60kph machine look fast.)

Anyhow, electric still looks promising.

Noticed in today's real estate listings...

A medieval castle once ruled by Charlemagne, the “King of the Franks,” is for sale in Italy, dungeon included.

Located (exactly) on the border of Tuscany and Umbria, the castle dates to 802...

Features include restored stone battlements with gun ports, four turrets, a moat and the dungeon, an add-on amenity reportedly built in 1500. Five buildings are clustered around the circular courtyard and the property includes about 32 acres of olive groves and woodlands.

There are photos too.

Well at last. I've been looking for a house with those features for the longest time.

How "Hollywood"

The Los Angeles Times has an inauguration day editorial that calls on President Obama to actively support gay marriage. Talk about a Hollywood set of priorities.

The first comment from a gay reader is also noteworthy for its less than black-friendly attitude on a day when one might have expected a more congratulatory tone:

As a gay man, I have been active in the fight for gay rights for the last 30 years. One thing I have learned is that African-Americans have never been interested in any other civil rights struggle but their own. They certainly have not been friends of the gay or Jewish communities, and their relations with the Hispanic communities have been strained at best. They do not even show much interest in the struggles of other Africans in countries such as Sudan. These battles are mostly fought by wealthy whites such as George Clooney. Barack Obama's rejection of gay marriage is in keeping with his culture and no surprise.