... history buffs are sure to enjoy seeing a quarter-size model of the field toilet on which the famed feudal lord Takeda Shingen reportedly mulled strategies during the Warring States Period (1467-1568).
Monday, February 02, 2009
Famous battle toilets of Japan
I wish I was in Japan at the moment, to see the touring "toilet museum" exhibition. A highlight:
Expect fewer appointments today, doctor
Dubbo doctor in hot water for posing as prostitute on YouTube - National
This is pretty funny, at least if you don't live in Dubbo and stories of oddball doctors amuse you, but it remains a mystery to me as to why the police would be involved.
This is pretty funny, at least if you don't live in Dubbo and stories of oddball doctors amuse you, but it remains a mystery to me as to why the police would be involved.
Unusual delusion of the day
Mind Hacks: Shattered delusions
Mind Hacks has a post about an unusual delusion of old Europe, in which the sufferers believed that they (or parts of their body) were made of glass.
That is pretty strange. (If you go to the original article on this, you find some very odd similar exampes - such as "earthernware men, and "urinal man".)
You learn something new every day.
Mind Hacks has a post about an unusual delusion of old Europe, in which the sufferers believed that they (or parts of their body) were made of glass.
That is pretty strange. (If you go to the original article on this, you find some very odd similar exampes - such as "earthernware men, and "urinal man".)
You learn something new every day.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
From the formerly great Britain - a continuing series
Apparently, 2 million Britons watched Jamie Oliver masturbate a pig on TV last week. Seriously.
At the risk of further lessening my credibility as a conservative blogger (at least in the eyes of those who think that it is impossible to want action on greenhouse gases without being a crypto-socialist,) this is a subject that I reckon actually does deserve attention in Australia as well. It seems odd that chickens and their free range status is a matter of interest to many people when they are looking for eggs or chicken meat, yet the conditions in which a (roughly) dog like animal is raised does not seem to be on the radar of most Australians. (Well, it wasn't on my radar either until thoughts about whaling and cruelty made me look around at sites regarding farm animal welfare.)
But really, why put on a sideshow of semen collection as part of this. It's what the punters want, is it?
Sorry, I just can't get used to animal husbandry practices as a source of humour for television.
On a primary-coloured set, in front of a whooping audience, Oliver had four volunteers, plus Joanna Lumley, spending 24 hours in sow stalls, as an experiment called “Pig Brother”. There was a sow giving birth, live in the studio, as some kind of “Here come the little sausages!” sideshow. And in a moment more The Word than The Word ever managed, Oliver - face contorted with nausea - masturbated a boar into a jar as the audience cheered him on.It is surprising (well, maybe not, given the excision of anything resembling boundaries in British TV over the last decade or so) that this not the first time such activity has featured there:
Of course, Jamie isn't the first person to masturbate a boar on television - Rebecca “sex with David Beckham” Loos pioneered it as her signature manoeuvre on Five's The Farm, way back in 2004 - but there seemed to be a more palpable air of unwillingness here, as Jamie wailed, “It's spraying all up my arm”, and then asked “Why's it taking so long?” These were not “happy days” with the Naked Chef.I find this fairly puzzling, as Oliver's show was apparently a serious attempt to raise public awareness of pig farming animal welfare issues in England and Europe. It would appear that pigs are raised considerably more humanely in England, yet cheap European pork is overwhelming the English product in sales.
At the risk of further lessening my credibility as a conservative blogger (at least in the eyes of those who think that it is impossible to want action on greenhouse gases without being a crypto-socialist,) this is a subject that I reckon actually does deserve attention in Australia as well. It seems odd that chickens and their free range status is a matter of interest to many people when they are looking for eggs or chicken meat, yet the conditions in which a (roughly) dog like animal is raised does not seem to be on the radar of most Australians. (Well, it wasn't on my radar either until thoughts about whaling and cruelty made me look around at sites regarding farm animal welfare.)
But really, why put on a sideshow of semen collection as part of this. It's what the punters want, is it?
Sorry, I just can't get used to animal husbandry practices as a source of humour for television.
Coded messages
Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column by HG Cocks review | - Times Online
An amusing book review here about the history of the "personal column" in newspapers and magazines.
A magazine devote to it was started in England in 1915, but it was considered a moral scandal:
An amusing book review here about the history of the "personal column" in newspapers and magazines.
A magazine devote to it was started in England in 1915, but it was considered a moral scandal:
The police were particularly interested in the number of young men who claimed to be artistic, musical, unconventional, or fans of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Officers also had their doubts about women who claimed to be “jolly” or “sporty”, thinking this might be a euphemism for what might now be called “up for it”.This part of the review is particularly interesting:
...the anthropologist Gilbert Bartell and his wife posed as swingers to compile a study of wife-swapping in the Chicago area (making excuses and leaving at the vital moment).The image of swinging, as sold by magazines such as Playboy, was all glamour and decadence. So the Bartells were surprised to find their fellow swingers were, well, rather dull. “The typical male was a slack-waisted, balding man of about 5ft 10in,” reports Cocks. “Women averaged 5ft 4in and, if not exactly fat, had succumbed to the early ravages of middle-aged spread. They were not enormously overweight, but at the very least tended to be over-endowed in the hips, thighs and stomach. For all the advertised charms of big breasts, the women tended to be relatively flat-chested.”
Well, I already knew that from watching Fast Forward a couple of decades ago.
On internet advertising
Roger L. Simon - Pajamas Media matters
Pajama Media's group advertising system has failed.
I know absolutely nothing about internet advertising, except for this fact: it is extremely rare for me to ever click on a advertisement on a blog, or a newspaper site. I would guess at about once a year.
And this is from a person who spends far too much time on blogs and the internet.
The internet is great for finding products and services, but that's what Google is for. I may click on a Google search "sponsored ad", but that's different.
Maybe I am the odd one out, but if a significant number of people are like me, I just can't see how any blogs or newspaper or magazine sites make significant money from advertising.
Pajama Media's group advertising system has failed.
I know absolutely nothing about internet advertising, except for this fact: it is extremely rare for me to ever click on a advertisement on a blog, or a newspaper site. I would guess at about once a year.
And this is from a person who spends far too much time on blogs and the internet.
The internet is great for finding products and services, but that's what Google is for. I may click on a Google search "sponsored ad", but that's different.
Maybe I am the odd one out, but if a significant number of people are like me, I just can't see how any blogs or newspaper or magazine sites make significant money from advertising.
Dominion over-rated
Attenborough: Genesis? It can go forth and multiply
As nice a man as he appears to be, Sir David Attenborough is just as much off the mark here as those fellow atheists who blame nearly every single war on religious motivation:
Some people might suggest that he's right, in that some societies such as the Australian aborigines and Native Americans lived in harmony with the environment. This always ignores, however, both the relative technological incapacity these groups had to stuff up their environment, and the damage or change that did manage to create anyway. Changing vast swathes of forest to grassland by regular burning is somehow OK for the aborigines when they arrived on the continent; I can't imagine Bob Brown being all that enamoured of the practice if a new island continent was discovered tomorrow. (Mega-fauna would almost certainly have been better off without aborigines too.)
That all humans like to arrange things to make themselves more comfortable, have developed better technology with which to do that over the years, and can find it hard to recognise the point at which to pull back and let an overused resource recover, has much more to do with it than any religious motivation.
UPDATE: overnight it also occurred to me that non-Christian Japan probably has the worst record for overfishing in recent decades.
UPDATE 2: what about China too? Barely a Christian influence to be seen there, yet hardly a beacon of environmental rectitude.
As nice a man as he appears to be, Sir David Attenborough is just as much off the mark here as those fellow atheists who blame nearly every single war on religious motivation:
Sir David, 82, said the devastation of the environment has its roots in the first words that God supposedly uttered to humankind, as detailed in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."Come on. I thought it was now commonly believed that many pagan societies collapsed as a result of over-flogging the environment. Did all of them have gods directing them to use the earth to maximum advantage too?
Some people might suggest that he's right, in that some societies such as the Australian aborigines and Native Americans lived in harmony with the environment. This always ignores, however, both the relative technological incapacity these groups had to stuff up their environment, and the damage or change that did manage to create anyway. Changing vast swathes of forest to grassland by regular burning is somehow OK for the aborigines when they arrived on the continent; I can't imagine Bob Brown being all that enamoured of the practice if a new island continent was discovered tomorrow. (Mega-fauna would almost certainly have been better off without aborigines too.)
That all humans like to arrange things to make themselves more comfortable, have developed better technology with which to do that over the years, and can find it hard to recognise the point at which to pull back and let an overused resource recover, has much more to do with it than any religious motivation.
UPDATE: overnight it also occurred to me that non-Christian Japan probably has the worst record for overfishing in recent decades.
UPDATE 2: what about China too? Barely a Christian influence to be seen there, yet hardly a beacon of environmental rectitude.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Lesbian separatists of Alabama
Lesbian Communities Struggle to Stay Vital to a New Generation - NYTimes.com
I could also have entitled this post "Nuttiest Lesbians Ever", and some people may have taken offence; but then, after reading the article, I suspect most people would agree with me.
The story is about some "womyn's" communities in the US which date from the 1970's, and comprise women who absolutely want nothing to do with men (and don't even trust transexual men who have had the operation). Some extracts:
UPDATE: spelling of Alabama corrected. I must stop posting late at night.
I could also have entitled this post "Nuttiest Lesbians Ever", and some people may have taken offence; but then, after reading the article, I suspect most people would agree with me.
The story is about some "womyn's" communities in the US which date from the 1970's, and comprise women who absolutely want nothing to do with men (and don't even trust transexual men who have had the operation). Some extracts:
Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate....[Could Ms Greene care to explain whether she is aware of the irony of calling a deer hit by a car "Miracle"?]
Ms. Greene trims branches of oak, hickory and sassafras trees and stops by the grave of a deer she buried in the woods after it was hit by a car. She named it Miracle. “I talk to Miracle every day,” Ms. Greene said. “That is one of my joys of living here.”
....the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”...As the article notes, most of these communities are dying, as young lesbians don't see the need to set themselves up as isolationists from the rest of humanity.
There is strident debate within and across the womyn’s lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.
UPDATE: spelling of Alabama corrected. I must stop posting late at night.
Victoria not coping well
Victoria without power for days
POWER outages caused by an explosion at an electrical substation wreaked havoc across heatwave-stricken Victoria last night.All Melbourne train services were cancelled and about 500,000 homes and businesses were left without electricity in the city's west, some parts of the CBD and western Victoria....
Connex staff told thousands of commuters at Flinders Street Railway Station trying to get home at the end of the working week that they would have to find other means of travel because there was no power for trains.
A number of city buildings were evacuated, with the firemen called in to rescue office workers trapped in stalled lifts.
Traffic lights in the city stopped working and signals on the rail network also failed.
How about this potentially expensive offer:
Power retailer Jemena offered to pay $150 towards the costs of hotels for residential customers who have been without power for 24 hours.I'll be waiting to hear the story of some poor family that leaves their powerless home for a night in an airconditioned hotel, only to get stuck in an unairconditioned lift for 3 hours.
Your odd quantum thought for today
0901.2073.pdf
This short paper up at arXiv seems to propose a simple quantum experiment that could have a puzzling outcome. In fact, the way it is described, it is hard to believe the experiment has not already been done, but I assume from the way this is written that it hasn't been tried.
All very odd.
This short paper up at arXiv seems to propose a simple quantum experiment that could have a puzzling outcome. In fact, the way it is described, it is hard to believe the experiment has not already been done, but I assume from the way this is written that it hasn't been tried.
All very odd.
Friday, January 30, 2009
An important read
The school Israel didn’t shell | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog
As much as I disagree with Andrew Bolt's take on greenhouse gases, posts such as this one provide a valuable service to those who fail to exercise skepticism when it comes to media reporting of Israel's actions and Palestinian's claims.
As much as I disagree with Andrew Bolt's take on greenhouse gases, posts such as this one provide a valuable service to those who fail to exercise skepticism when it comes to media reporting of Israel's actions and Palestinian's claims.
They don't like it hot
There's sort of a vicious cycle of silliness going on about global warming and the day to day weather. It certainly started with proponents of warming (from Al Gore down) exaggerating the significance of particular weather events as being signs of global warming. The skeptics rubbished this, but then when the weather starts to turns cold, they start doing the same trick. Now that Melbourne and Adelaide are melting in (possibly) 1 in a 100 year heat, it's back to some on the AGW side (notably, Penny Wong) to claim it is "consistent" with warming. Which sets Andrew Bolt and the like back to the "no, it's only weather" argument again. (Until next winter, probably, when he may swing back to a run of cold weather being evidence of no warming.)
It's also particularly ironic that Andrew Bolt names his post on this "Wong wrong to pick that cherry", when his repeated claim that the warming has stopped since 1998 has long been criticised as the biggest cherry pick of all.
Everyone should just repeat the mantra: "Day to day weather is not climate. Day to day whether is not climate."
That said, would it be wrong for those on the AGW to at least say "well look, this is not proof itself of AGW, but this is what it will be like for longer according to the predictions of the vast majority of climate scientists." ? (Wong semi-qualifies her statements by saying it is "consistent with", but in my books that is still being a bit tricky. If she rephrased her comments in the way I suggest, then it would be completely unobjectionable, while still making the connection with AGW as a policy issue.)
It's also particularly ironic that Andrew Bolt names his post on this "Wong wrong to pick that cherry", when his repeated claim that the warming has stopped since 1998 has long been criticised as the biggest cherry pick of all.
Everyone should just repeat the mantra: "Day to day weather is not climate. Day to day whether is not climate."
That said, would it be wrong for those on the AGW to at least say "well look, this is not proof itself of AGW, but this is what it will be like for longer according to the predictions of the vast majority of climate scientists." ? (Wong semi-qualifies her statements by saying it is "consistent with", but in my books that is still being a bit tricky. If she rephrased her comments in the way I suggest, then it would be completely unobjectionable, while still making the connection with AGW as a policy issue.)
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Where not to invest
Raising the Roof - Beijing suspends restrictions on foreign buyers
By all means, if you want your own holiday apartment in an unusual location, consider Beijing. But don't expect capital growth:
By all means, if you want your own holiday apartment in an unusual location, consider Beijing. But don't expect capital growth:
Last week the Beijing Statistics Bureau reported price growth declined for the ninth straight month. Prices could fall by 20 percent in the next few months, a recent report by the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences predicted.
In case you missed it: micro black holes are news again
I've been slack lately and not following closely the arXiv papers on black holes at the LHC.
As those who read Instapundit would already have seen, there is a new paper by some credible European physicists (original is here) in which they re-visited the question of how long a micro black hole created at the LHC may last. The previous perceived wisdom was that it would be a tiny, tiny fraction of second before they disappeared into a spray of decay particles, which (presumably) the LHC could detect.
As I understand it, the new paper suggests that for a certain model, the decay rate may in fact be many seconds, even minutes; time enough for a micro black to shoot off through the earth. But they still think there is no likely risk of accretion starting and overwhelming the much-slower-that-previously-thought-possible decay rate.
As some are commenting (see the second link above), this still seems a pretty big revision of what was considered possible from the LHC, even if the authors are still arguing that there is no danger.
I note that the authors of the paper acknowledge discussions with physicists Giddings and Plaga, who themselves still (as far as I know) are stuck in disagreement as to whether Plaga's warning last year that a micro black hole could be an explosive danger was fundamentally flawed or not. At the very least, it indicates that other physicists consider that Plaga is not to be dismissed as a nutter.
Also on the topic of danger from the LHC, New Scientist has an article about a paper looking at (if I can paraphrase it correctly) how to judge the probabilities of something going wrong when you are not entirely sure of what may you might create in the first place. The general gist seems to be that it is potentially riskier than you think.
The guy who runs the Physics arXiv blog is probably really getting up the nose of CERN now, as the effect of both of these recent papers is to make him start worrying about safety issues. Fox News's version of the story probably annoys them even more.
As those who read Instapundit would already have seen, there is a new paper by some credible European physicists (original is here) in which they re-visited the question of how long a micro black hole created at the LHC may last. The previous perceived wisdom was that it would be a tiny, tiny fraction of second before they disappeared into a spray of decay particles, which (presumably) the LHC could detect.
As I understand it, the new paper suggests that for a certain model, the decay rate may in fact be many seconds, even minutes; time enough for a micro black to shoot off through the earth. But they still think there is no likely risk of accretion starting and overwhelming the much-slower-that-previously-thought-possible decay rate.
As some are commenting (see the second link above), this still seems a pretty big revision of what was considered possible from the LHC, even if the authors are still arguing that there is no danger.
I note that the authors of the paper acknowledge discussions with physicists Giddings and Plaga, who themselves still (as far as I know) are stuck in disagreement as to whether Plaga's warning last year that a micro black hole could be an explosive danger was fundamentally flawed or not. At the very least, it indicates that other physicists consider that Plaga is not to be dismissed as a nutter.
Also on the topic of danger from the LHC, New Scientist has an article about a paper looking at (if I can paraphrase it correctly) how to judge the probabilities of something going wrong when you are not entirely sure of what may you might create in the first place. The general gist seems to be that it is potentially riskier than you think.
The guy who runs the Physics arXiv blog is probably really getting up the nose of CERN now, as the effect of both of these recent papers is to make him start worrying about safety issues. Fox News's version of the story probably annoys them even more.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
"Chris, want to know who I just spoke to?"
Obama and Rudd discuss financial crisis - Yahoo!7 News
So, Obama finally got around to ringing our PM. I like to imagine Kevin doing a little dance in his office in celebration and relief. Then a phone call to Chris Mitchell to tell him all about it.
So, Obama finally got around to ringing our PM. I like to imagine Kevin doing a little dance in his office in celebration and relief. Then a phone call to Chris Mitchell to tell him all about it.
The trouble in Egypt
Gaza crisis threatens outlook for Mubarak - International Herald Tribune
Egyptians and Arab countries complained that Mubarak kept the official border crossing between Egypt and Gaza closed before and during much of the war. The most populous Arab country - and the first to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979 - Egypt has been subject to scorn in Yemen and Lebanon, where mobs have marched on its embassies in the past few weeks. It has also been the target of criticism from the tiny Gulf oil state of Qatar, as well as Syria and Iran. All support Hamas.Surely this issue with the Egyptian control of the border is not an insurmountable problem.
At the same time, Israel complained that the Egyptian police turned a blind eye to arms smuggled though hundreds of tunnels beneath the Gaza border.
This is modern art (Part 1)
Kulik confounds critics with multisensory Monteverdi in Paris | guardian.co.uk
This is a somewhat amusing report on a very avant garde reworking of classical concert material in Paris:
This is a somewhat amusing report on a very avant garde reworking of classical concert material in Paris:
Behold, the classical concert is reborn! Its saviour? A man whose career high until now has been crawling naked on all fours barking like a dog. The Russian artist Oleg Kulik is notorious for biting critics when his canine alter ego occasionally breaks the leash in galleries — now he has taken a nip at the heels of an artform that has been getting a bit doddery on its feet....As for that dog act of Kulik, it sounds like he, um, role plays it to the extreme:
The resulting two-and-a-half hour "trip" – think William Blake meets Jean-Michel Jarre, crossed with Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books – is either a flabbergasting reworking of one of the most sublime works in the classical repertoire, or what the dependably crusty French daily Le Figaro today called an "indigestible visual minestrone".
The critic accused Kulik of doing to Monteverdi what French police suspected the artist did to a dog in some of his "man-dog, couple of the future" photographs recently seized from a Paris art fair.Ugh.
Synergy
Last night I read this story:
Then this morning I learn that:Seven diners fell ill, one critically, after eating "fugu" globefish at a restaurant whose owner was unlicensed to safely prepare the notorious winter delicacy, police said Tuesday.
The seven consumed sashimi and fish testes at Kibun-ya restaurant in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, at around 6:30 p.m. Monday and one of them, identified as Asakichi Sato, 68, fell ill on the spot and was taken to a hospital, where he was listed in critical condition, the police said.
Taiwan has a smorgasboard of theme diners, including one modeled after a hospital ward, one that holds puppet shows and two that seat customers on toilet bowls.Am I the only person in the world to see the potential for a fugu restaurant done up as a hospital ward? (Or cut out the middle man: just locate it in a real ward.)
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