Psst...don't tell Kevin

It does seem odd that when thinking about ways to stimulate the Australian economy, one of the first things our PM should announce is spending on home insulation.

But, it could have been worse:

In their search to find programs upon which to rest the complaint that the stimulus bill is too generous, some conservatives have seized upon one of their favorite whipping boys: the arts. "Even [House Republicans] can't quite believe it... $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts," declared Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana).

Pence was being sarcastic, of course, but the rest of the article is a defence of government spending on the arts as a stimulus measure:

Arts are actually a great form of economic investment, particularly public art, and they should be amply funded in the stimulus package. Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government, according to Americans for the Arts. There is hardly a person more likely to go out and spend her stimulus check than a starving artist.

One suspects a certain rubberiness in those figures. It also continues the line that was behind much of Rudd's first stimulus idea: that that the poorest people are the best to "stimulate". If we follow that logic too far, we'll end up with the most confortable old age pensioners, unemployable Bachelor of Arts graduates and no-audience polemic playwrights in the world, while the government and those actually doing productive work get pooer. Then I guess it'll be their turn for stimulus.

Michael Crichton would have loved them

Technology Review: The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight.

A fuel cell and battery aircraft: cool

How Things Work: Flying Fuel Cells | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine

Well, it was only a powered glider, but it's still impressive:

....his HK 36 Super Dimona carried a 200-pound hydrogen fuel cell that ran an electric motor to turn its propeller. The fuel cell couldn’t quite put out the energy required for takeoff—45 kilowatts—and got help from a lithium ion battery to lift off the runway in Ocaña, Spain. At 3,300 feet Barberán disconnected the battery, and for the next 20 minutes the Super Dimona flew straight and level at about 60 mph on just the fuel cell. It was the first time a piloted airplane had flown powered by a fuel cell alone.

Urgent geek toy alert

A TARDIS Of Your Very Own | Discover Magazine

More details here.

Luke, use the Force

It sounds like this would be an interesting book: real life accounts of people who believe they have had otherworldly assistance when in a dire situation. (Well, some of them just believe it was their brain playing tricks, but it's still an interesting phenomena, even it you are allergic to the paranormal.) The comments after the article are worth reading too.

Famous battle toilets of Japan

I wish I was in Japan at the moment, to see the touring "toilet museum" exhibition. A highlight:

... 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).

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.

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.

From the formerly great Britain - a continuing series

Apparently, 2 million Britons watched Jamie Oliver masturbate a pig on TV last week. Seriously.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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....

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.”

[Could Ms Greene care to explain whether she is aware of the irony of calling a deer hit by a car "Miracle"?]

....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?”...

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.

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.

UPDATE: spelling of Alabama corrected. I must stop posting late at night.

Doesn't sound like a failed state

No Injuries Reported in Iraqi Elections - NYTimes.com

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.

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.

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.)

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:

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.

"Change" going well so far

Ahmadinejad demands Obama apology - World - smh.com.au