There goes the neighbourhood

Continuing this blog's determined (yet curiously without obvious motivation) vendetta against Dubai, this article in the New York Times indicates that it is definitely not the place to be during a global economic downturn:

With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.

The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.

OK, so the news is bad. (Real estate prices dropping 30% in the space of couple of months, for example.) How does the government there seek to improve things? By banning bad news, of course!:

Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.

Presumably, they want to ban rumours like this:

Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.

It was all built on sand: literally and metaphorically.

Nice mice

Mouse study reveals genetic component of empathy

From the report:

In the study, a highly social strain of mice learned to associate a sound played in a specific cage with something negative simply by hearing a mouse in that cage respond with squeaks of distress. A genetically different mouse strain with fewer social tendencies did not learn any connection between the cues and the other mouse's distress, showing that the ability to identify and act on another's emotions may have a genetic basis.

I'm mostly curious as to how you tell a strain of mice is "highly social". Do they spend a lot of time having friends over?

Carbon price sale!

What a slump in carbon prices means for the future - environment - New Scientist

Genius or not?

Oscar watch: Jerry Lewis is long overdue an Academy Award | Film | guardian.co.uk

Heh. The Guardian re-considers (in quite "high brow" fashion, it must be said) the history of the Jerry Lewis Wars: is he a remarkable auteur, or just an irritating schmuck? I like this part:

But, as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "Lewis's popularity in America is far greater than any French love of Lewis ... American denial of the American love of Jerry Lewis is pathological."

Let's just say that I feel he is now under-appreciated (indeed, probably virtually unknown by a deprived potential audience of children, even though nearly all of his movies are available for around $9 at Big W or K Mart.) Go on - at least get Artists and Models. Even if you are feminist, you can tell your children that Dean Martin was an evil man who should not be touching that woman without her consent.

As noted previously

'Apocalyptic predictions' mislead the public on climate change, say experts | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Basically, the British Met Office Hadley Centre makes the same point I have recently.

While both sides are at fault, I get crankier with the skeptics now because it is not as if there are no websites out there that are "moderate" in their claims, yet can point out the flaws in most skeptic arguments. Yet it seems increasingly clear that prominent media skeptics do make the attempt to read the other side. Indeed, as I have also complained recently, they just don't care about the issue of qualifications or experience of the skeptics.

Real Climate, although much derided by the likes of commenters at Marohasy's blog, has often had posts complaining about exaggerations or mis-reporting on the AGW side of the coin. (However, I have to admit, my recollection of their post on An Inconvenient Truth was too soft on big Al.)

Another noteworthy first hand account

ABC Online - ABC Bushfire Community - Billowing mass of Hell

This one is by one of the firefighters, who found themselves simply unable to do a thing for the doomed town of Marysville:

We knew this was something serious, something far beyond what we had ever seen before. The conditions were absolutely extreme. The winds were hurricane strength.

We proceeded into Marysville. This was a little tourist town of 1500 people surrounded by mountain ash forest, tree ferns and waterfalls. It was a town built around that environment. It had a commercial centre, guesthouses, all the trappings of tourism

We got to Marysville and day turned to night. There were burning embers and pieces of bark landing and starting numerous spot fires. Our intentions were to put out the spot fires, find houses and save them. That's what we are trained for: to save life and property. ...

it became clear very quickly that the scope of the fire was beyond what we were capable of. The apparent conditions were so extreme that everything was impossible. No form of active fire fighting was possible.

Our training told us that we had a resonsibility to save our own crew and it was obvious that was what we needed to do.

We made our way back to the anchor point at the oval. It was a typical country oval - a patch of clear ground. We had to sit it out. There was 30 minutes of intense stuff and we sat there for four or five hours as the town burned around us. There were houses burning everywhere we looked.

It was very confusing. A lot of residents were attempting to leave. It was pandemonium. People were pleading with us to help them free friends and family who were trapped in their houses.

A nightmarish situation.

This'll be interesting

Iran's Ahmadinejad 'ready' to talk with America | csmonitor.com

Determined chants of "Death to America" rang out in city after city in Iran Tuesday, even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a mass rally in Tehran that Iran was "ready" to talk to its arch-enemy if the US showed "real change."

Speaking as Iranians marked the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, Mr. Ahmadinejad declared Iran to be "officially … a real and genuine superpower," and that the "shadow of threat has been removed forever" from the Islamic Republic.

"From now on, which power in the world can be found that has the courage to threaten the Iranian nation?" Ahmadinejad asked to cheers.

Hint: it probably starts with the letter "I".

But back to the basis on which the Iranian public appears to want "dialogue":

Despite the nod toward dialogue, the message from state-run TV was unrelenting. The afternoon news broadcast on IRIB Channel 1 devoted 25 minutes to scenes of Tehran and huge rallies across the country, with primary emphasis in every city on the "Death to America" chant.

Great line

Andrew Norton - Labor and ‘neoliberal’ policy

Andrew Norton has a great line in his post about Kevin Rudd's attack on "neo-liberalism" (which Andrew writes after pointing out the obvious problem in Rudd's argument is that it was Labor that brought in the fundamental reforms he complains about):

Apparently when the Coalition introduces a market reform it is ‘economic fundamentalism’, but when Labor implements a market reform it is ‘economic modernisation’.

Bottlenecks to watch out for

Why sustainable power is unsustainable - tech - 06 February 2009 - New Scientist

While we are talking clean energy, this recent New Scientist article outlined some of the natural bottlenecks that may be involved in some clean energy ideas.

Newt's ideas

GINGRICH: Where does the conservative movement go from here?

Newt Gingrich is notable for being a Republican identity who takes greenhouse issues seriously. He thinks the "Bush-Obama" stimulus is all wrong, and argues:

At American Solutions, there is an American Energy, Jobs and Prosperity plan being built that will turn American energy assets (including clean coal, ethanol, more production of oil and natural gas, new technologies from hydrogen to wind and solar and a vastly expanded nuclear-power program, as well as a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation) into money that stays here at home.

The next building boom ought to be in America instead of the Middle East, and the future of American energy consumption should be built on paying Americans rather than paying Venezuela, Iran, Russia or any other unreliable foreign country. OPEC's efforts to cut production and raise prices should remind us that the time to invest in new energy resources is now, before the next crisis.

It's a wonder Bob Brown and the Greens here are not arguing along similar lines for a big redeployment of the next stimulus package into energy issues (other than mere insulation.)

This is modern art: Part II

'Angel of the South' to be giant white horse - News, Art - The Independent

Maybe I should be torn. I can be quite awed by big statues, but like all sensible people, I also know that horses are inherently evil.

No, actually I am not torn at all. This planned giant white horse, standing in a nondescript field surrounded by electricity towers, would have to take the award for stupidest big public art installation ever. And it is the winner in a design competition for a work that is to be called "Angel of the South"? Is there something funny leaking into the water in that part of England?

Incidentally, the other two shortlisted entries "included a steel latticework "nest" by Richard Deacon and a tower of stacked cubes by Daniel Buren. " Hardly angel-like either, one must concede.

I see that England already has an "Angel of the North", but at least one can some influence of the concept of "angel" in it.

Great Britain's decline continues. Further updates coming.

Woops

CCTV apologizes for fireworks that burned Beijing hotel - International Herald Tribune

It was a big building too: go to the link to see the photo.

The story is also of interest for the way China effectively censored the image from its public:

There were no pictures on the front page of The Beijing News. On Tuesday morning, the home page of Xinhua, the official news agency, featured a photo from another tragedy: a stampede in South Korea that left four people dead. Throughout the morning, CCTV's brief bulletins about the blaze omitted footage of the burning tower. By evening, the newscast skipped the story entirely.

Even before the flames had been extinguished early Tuesday, pictures of the burning hotel had been removed from most of the main Internet portals serving China. In the afternoon, the story had been largely buried, but by the evening, news of the fire was accessible via the Xinhua and CCTV Web sites.

The network's unusual public apology and the media's skittish approach to covering the fire suggested that the authorities were struggling with how to deal with a sensitive news event in the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube.

The concept of "openness" in that country has a bit of a way to go.

Further proof that no one is wrong all of the time

Pharyngula: Singularly silly singularity

The rabidly and offensively anti-religion scientist PZ Myers takes down Ray Kurzweil's silly "singularity" idea.

I have never taken Kurzweil seriously, but it's good to read another scientist's explanation of why my intuitive dismissal of the concept was well founded.

High brow author with high brow squeeze

Salman Rushdie steps out with statuesque actress half his age

Forward planning needed

Asteroid bound for Earth! Warn your grandchildren - New Scientist

AN ASTEROID that had initially been deemed harmless has turned out to have a slim chance of hitting Earth in 160 years. While that might seem a distant threat, there's far less time available to deflect it off course.

Asteroid 1999 RQ36 was discovered a decade ago, but it was not considered particularly worrisome since it has no chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years - the time frame astronomers routinely use to assess potential threats.

Now, new calculations show a 1 in 1400 chance that it will strike Earth between 2169 and 2199, according to Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa in Italy and colleagues (www.arxiv.org/abs/0901.3631).

With an estimated diameter of 560 metres, 1999 RQ36 is more than twice the size of the better-known asteroid Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 (New Scientist, 12 July 2008, p 12). Both are large enough to unleash devastating tsunamis if they were to smash into the ocean.

Although 1999 RQ36's potential collision is late in the next century, the window of opportunity to deflect it comes much sooner, prior to a series of close approaches to Earth that the asteroid will make between 2060 and 2080.

Maybe, this asteroid will be the target of the world's first attempt to nudge one out of harm's way.

No one is wrong all the time

Germaine Greer: From its artificial islands to its boring new skycraper, Dubai's architecture is beyond crass

Well, after just dissing Germaine, I'll now quote her dissing Dubai (a place I admittedly have never visited) with approval.

Research where it hurts

Cannabis linked to testicular cancer

The physicist and the novelist

Pajamas Media John Updike and Me

Oh good. My favourite physicist Frank Tipler has an article about his difference of opinion with the late John Updike.

Tipler sounds sensible in the article. As I have mentioned before, this is what makes him so fascinating. One minute it's Jesus walking on water via neutrino beams from his feet, the next he sounds quite reasonable.

Dubious

State of Victoria's forests fanned bushfire inferno | The Australian

David Packham, a researcher from Monash University's climatology group who has specialised in bushfires, said governments had abandoned responsibility for the one control they had over wildfires -- the state of the forests that fed the flames.

"Due to terribly ill-informed and pretty well outrageous concepts of conservation, we have failed to manage our fuel and our forests," Mr Packham said. "They have become unhealthy, and dangerous."

I could be wrong, I admit, but from the television images and descriptions of events in the media, it sounds rather like twaddle to be blaming poor forest management for the Victorian fires.

The impression one gets is that you would have had to perform precautionary clearing/burning of an absolutely huge area of forest to significantly reduce fires fanned by 100kph wind gusts after a bone dry month of heat wave conditions.

UPDATE: Germaine Greer, who seems to be regarded by the British media as the expert on absolutely everything Australian despite not having lived here for what, 4 or 5 decades?, says it is indeed poor forest management that is at fault. However, it also seems that the reason she is writing this is mainly to point out how clever the aborigines were in their fire management of forests.

No wonder there are fights over forestry management when there are such differing agendas swirling around the issue.

A fun career

This Doctor Makes 'House' Calls - WSJ.com

The article is about the young doctor who spends his time coming up with the rare and readily misdiagnosed diseases for "House" episodes. What a fun job that must be.

I rarely get to see the show now, but the medical mystery format is one that I have always enjoyed, even back to Qunicy.

For some reason, there is one episode of Quincy which I can remember clearly - some bad chilli was getting sucked back up via a hose connected to a tap into the water pipes at a sports stadium, causing those getting a drink at a particular water fountain to get botulism. To this day, I do not leave hoses attached to taps sitting in buckets full of rotting food for this very reason.