Shuttle sightings at last

It seems to have been a long time since there was a shuttle mission with a good run of possible early evening sightings over Brisbane (and fine weather to go with them.) But this one seems to be it. See the NASA link here to find your Australian location sighting times over the next week.

This is especially noteworthy for South East Queensland, with its (usually) clear winter evening skies. (The moon won't be around either.) Here's the schedule for Brisbane:

[Apart from the date and time, the columns are: Duration in minutes, maximum elevation above horizon (in degrees), where it will approach from (in degrees and direction) and where it depart.]

Sun May 17/06:42 PM	3	24	10 above NNW	24 above NNE
Mon May 18/06:40 PM	4	33	10 above NW	33 above NNE
Tue May 19/06:38 PM	4	45	15 above NW	44 above NE
Wed May 20/06:06 PM	5	44	20 above NW	24 above ENE
Wed May 20/07:43 PM	<>	15	11 above W	15 above W
Thu May 21/05:25 PM	2	27	27 above ENE	10 above E
Thu May 21/06:59 PM	2	59	21 above W	59 above WNW
Fri May 22/06:15 PM	4	81	30 above WNW	37 above E
Fri May 22/07:52 PM	<>	11	11 above W	11 above W
Sat May 23/05:30 PM	6	74	38 above WNW	11 above E
Sat May 23/07:08 PM	2	41	16 above W	41 above WSW
Sun May 24/06:24 PM	3	77	26 above W	50 above ESE
Mon May 25/05:39 PM	6	78	32 above W	13 above E
Mon May 25/07:16 PM	2	30	13 above W	30 above W

UPDATE: For a nice video of the launch, and comments of a first time launch viewer, go to this Cosmic Variance post.

Hugo makes a trunk call

Chavez launches $15 mobile phone with a name to make his mother blush

It is perhaps the world's cheapest mobile phone. It is the latest offering from Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution. And its name is derived from a slang word for penis. Behold the Vergatorio.

Venezuela's president launched the handset on his TV show with a Mother's Day call to his mum and predicted it would conquer all rivals.....

Verga is slang for penis and vergatario is a newly minted word which signifies excellent but retains connotations from its root.

That smarts

An unusual cause for headache following massive alcohol intake

From the Abstract:

Massive alcohol intake usually resolves in a banal headache. We report a case of a patient presenting with acute alcohol intoxication in which the ensuing “hangover” was due to a knife blade deeply retained in the brain parenchyma.

(Found via Mindhacks, pun unintended.)

Question repeated

Group sex 'ingrained' in rugby league culture | The Australian

As noted here recently, what exactly is it about sport that gave it a reputation for being "character building"?

Update: A story about Australian cricketing hero Keith Miller, as noted by his biographer in Australian Story a couple of weeks ago:

Bill [Miller's son] I think suffered more than the other three. He arrived in England at age 18 to stay with his father, it was a big moment for him. And here was Keith playing around with girls younger than him. This caused a bit of confusion in him because he was the oldest boy and very close to his mother and that would have on reflection probably have been a bit damaging for Bill.

BILL MILLER, SON: He told me that Peg said, 'whenever you're overseas you can fool around but just don’t do it at home'. And of course, he’s my father, I believed him. And it wasn’t until years later I asked Peg that and she said 'do you really think that I would have said that'. And I said 'no you wouldn’t of'. She said 'exactly right'. So that sort of gutted me a bit, that he’d lied to me about that. But I still loved the guy. I used to have some great times with my father.

Update: I saw some of the Four Corners program about the NRL and sex last night. Was it really necessary to show the picture on the mobile phone instead of just saying "yeah, the guys will email me photos of their erection all the time"? The blond woman talking about this seemed to quite happy to run a free service via which women wanting sex with a footballer could have an arranged meeting.

While I guess it's useful to have football clubs running classes on how it's not right to trick your mate's drunk girlfriend into having sex with you, it's kind of disturbing to think that any young bloke needs telling. (I also wonder whether, if the camera is not there, the sessions are received with such gravity.)

Looks cool

Boeing aims sky-high with 'Phantom Ray'

A culinary note

I first mentioned this here a year ago, but it is worth repeating: try adding a splash of Cointreau to slightly sweetened whipped cream.

(The try that with raspberry jam on warm pancakes for breakfast.)

European rat owning readers take note

From Rats To Humans: Around Thirty Europeans Infected With Cowpox Virus By Their Pet Rats

Praising Scrubs

The only sitcom still worth watching in the last few years, the screening of the (likely) last episode of Scrubs has attracted a lot of comment in the States this week.

Slate had an article praising it, not for its comedic value, but for being "the most accurate portrayal of the medical profession on TV." (Bet you didn't see that coming.) Allegedly:

...if you talk to doctors, they'll often sing the praises of one medical show in particular, which they say captures the training process, the profession, and the dynamics of a hospital with remarkable accuracy. No, it's not House, the tale of a misanthrope who happens to be a doctor. It's not Grey's Anatomy, a torrid romance novel disguised as a medical show. It's not even the recently departed ER, which broke television ground with its realistic gore. It's Scrubs.

The article makes out its case reasonably credibly.

But of course, no one watches it for that reason. The show apparently is made by people with sufficient generosity that they allow a huge number of segments to remain posted on Youtube. It seems that with a little effort, you can find nearly any clip from the 8 seasons which you found particularly funny.

In Australia, the show has never has a decent chance to build a following on commercial TV due to the hopeless way (common to nearly every sitcom shown in the last 5 years) that the programmers have chopped and changed the schedule. Currently, I have been watching Season 6 which has had a rare continuous run on Comedy Channel (but even that has a hopeless way of jumbling seasons and episodes, so that still the only way to get a complete story cycle here is to rent the DVDs.)

Anyhoo, I recently saw the popular all-singing episode ("My Musical") from 2007. (It was probably shown here starting at 10.42pm one night of the summer holidays on Channel 7 in 2008.) The highlight was surely "Guy Love", which is good enough to embed:



(A clarification: the women in bed is featured because she has an aneurysm causing her to have musical hallucinations, a storyline evidently based on this true life report.)

I can't help it, I want to embed two other short clips that are particular favourites:

Janitor, the greatest comedic deadpan evil character ever created:



And Dr Kelso has his greatest moment here (although, bizarrely, the person who posted this clip gives away the joke in the heading - don't read it!):



Brilliant. When will there be another sitcom that makes me laugh out loud?

British Muslims are a worry

The Associated Press: Study: Poverty fueling Muslim tension with West

Lots of interesting stuff from this detailed survey:

Despite their desire to belong, only a small number of Muslims questioned in Britain, for example — 10 percent — consider themselves integrated into British society. That compares to 46 percent of Muslims in France and 35 percent in Germany....

Researchers found 38 percent of British Muslims said they had a job, much lower than the figure for the British general public — 62 percent — and lower than Muslims in Germany or France, where 53 percent and 45 percent respectively said they were employed. No figures were compiled for the United States....

...71 percent of Britain's Muslims considered themselves to be struggling to get by, as did 56 percent of Muslims questioned in the United States. Research for the study was conducted in mid-2008, before the full impact of the current financial crisis hit.

Yet, oddly, in another part of the report it says:

The study found that 77 percent of British Muslims feel a strong sense of British identity, compared to 50 percent of the country's non-Muslims. In France, around half of Muslims and non-Muslims say they feel a strong sense of patriotism.

Isn't that inconsistent with the preceding figures?

Jews and birds

On Colbert Report last night, there was an interview with Laurie Garrett, a woman who seems to know a fair bit about swine flu. (It was fairly amusing, and you can watch it here.)

One of the things she said, though, I didn't recall hearing before. It was that Indonesia, which has strains of the very worrisome bird flu, does not share information with the WHO because its Health minister believes that there is a US/Western/Jewish conspiracy to find new flus, make vaccines and force poor countries to buy them. (Colbert's response to this was pretty funny.)

This situation is perhaps even worse than that summary, as noted here:

Falling short of elaboration, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said on Tuesday that the deadly swine flu virus could have been genetically engineered. She had earlier accused Western governments of making and spreading viruses in developing countries to boost pharmaceutical companies' profits.

Since 2006, Indonesia has refused to share all of its bird flu virus samples with WHO researchers, citing fears that the system is being abused by rich countries to produce profitable vaccines, which impoverished nations have to buy.

A more detailed account of the Health Minister's views can be found here. It does not mention Jewish conspiracy as a possible part of her reasoning, as did Colbert's guest, but it does say that "she is a member of the moderate Islamic mass movement Muhammadiyah, but has also reportedly cosied up to radicals such as the Islamist Hizbut Tahrir group, which believes in replacing Indonesia's secular government with a Muslim caliphate."

I see that in the Middle East, back in 2006, the Jewish - bird flu conspiracy appeared there:

... the Syrian state-controlled paper al-Tawhra asserted that Israel was responsible for the expanding bird flu phenomenon. It said Israel had spread the virus in the Far East to mislead the world while aiming to attack the Arabs.[2]

Damn those Jews are clever.

But seriously, it would be a disaster if belief in Jewish conspiracy contributes to the death of millions of people (including Muslims) due to delays in getting out a vaccine to combat a future mutated bird flu.

Maybe this needs covert operations: blacked up CIA agents who roam Indonesian farms at night, taking blood from chickens and ducks.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia...

Here she comes: Saudi Arabia's Miss Beautiful Morals

Extracts from the story:

...at Saudi Arabia's only beauty pageant, the judges don't care about a perfect figure or face.

What they're looking for in the quest for "Miss Beautiful Morals" is the contestant who shows the most devotion and respect for her parents. ...

So after the pageant opens Saturday, the nearly 200 contestants will spend the next 10 weeks attending classes and being quizzed on themes on inner strength and leadership.

Pageant hopefuls will also spend a day at a country house with their mothers, where they will be observed by female judges and graded on how they interact with their mothers, Al Mubarak said.

All that work for what? A new car? (Oh, wait a minute, we're talking women in Saudi Arabia.) No, the first prize is a glorious $2,600. Hardly worth sucking up to Mum for the day for that.

But even the Gulf News must recognise that this bit sounds funny:

There are few beauty pageants in the largely conservative Arab world. The most dazzling is in Lebanon, the region's most liberal country, where contestants appear on TV in one-piece swimsuits and glamorous evening gowns and answer questions that test their confidence and general knowledge.

There are no such displays in ultra-strict Saudi Arabia, where until Miss Beautiful Morals was inaugurated last year, the only pageants were for goats, sheep, camels and other animals, aimed at encouraging livestock breeding.

I hope next year they allow contestants from Australia. Kevin Rudd in an abaya would be a shoo-in.

Enough said

Fury at exhibit of corpses having sex

(It's taken a long time for Europe to start objecting to the use of corpses as entertainment, but there finally seem to be people who agree with me who are prepared to take action.)

American food

Thought Experiments : The Blog: Not Breakfast in America

Bryan Appleyard has a funny grumble here about American breakfasts, but I think his comments could be extended generally to all American food.

It's been many years since I have been there, but one of the lasting impressions of the place is that all of the food seems to have a heightened artificiality to it, and as Bryan notes, it even extends to fruit and supposedly "natural" products. (I remember an Australian I was visiting commenting that she had no idea what they put in their bread, but it just never went mouldy like old Australian bread. Then again, she was slightly mad in some other ways, so I shouldn't take her word I suppose.)

It remains a deep mystery how this fakeness in all food is achieved.

All about iron

Ocean carbon: A dent in the iron hypothesis

Quite a lengthy explanation here of recent research into what happened in a couple of experiments on iron fertilization, and why it may not be such a great way to sequester carbon. (Still seems worth looking into further though, is my impression.)

Podcast recommendation

John Mattick - ABC Brisbane (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Richard Fidler does pretty good interviews, and I caught most of this one on the radio earlier this week. The interviewee is Queensland molecular biologist John Mattick, and the talk is about DNA, "junk DNA", and Mattick's upbringing and views on education.

All very interesting, but you do need a spare hour to listen to it.

Putting the knife into the Rudd ETS

I noted below how John Quiggin thinks the amended Rudd Emissions Trading Scheme should be supported by the Greens.

The very Green David Spratt (at his Climate Code Red blog, which I found via some comment at Quiggin's blog) really puts the knife to the scheme, and then twists it.

One of the key points I liked was to do with the proposition (which we are bound to hear again and again) that the Liberals have to support passage of the legislation so that it is in place before the Copenhagen conference. The suggestion never made sense to me, and Spratt agrees:

ISSUE 1. Passing the CPRS is necessary for Australia to be credible at Copenhagen.

No, quite the opposite. If there were no legislation, Australia's position would not be tied by law to Rudd's poor target and pressure would be maintained to catch up with the leading bunch. The targets in the proposed CPRS legislation are out of whack with the major players such as the UK, US and EU, who have agreed to unconditional cut emissions of 34-46%, 20% and 20-30% from 1990 levels respectively. Let's be honest, what happens at Copenhagen depends more than any other factor on what the G2 – the USA and China — strike by way of a climate deal, and what Australia puts in the table has little relevance to that. They are used to Australia behaving badly.

Self inflicted harm

Kabul Journal - In Afghanistan, Drugs Hollow Out Lives in Shell of Cultural Center - NYTimes.com

Now that I think of it, there never seems to have been much attention paid to the issue of whether heroin production was causing addiction within Afghanistan itself. (Maybe everyone thought that good Muslims were able to avoid the temptation of a product they were happy to export to the evil West.)

But, it seems they are suffering after all. The article paints a pretty ugly picture of a massive drugs den in Kabul.

What is up at The Australian?

Until recently, I was never keen on the Tim Lambert (or whoever coined it) term "The Australian's War on Science" (referring to their frequent columns given over in that paper to global warming sceptics.) They are probably just courting controversy for readership, I thought.

But in the last few weeks, at least as far as I can tell from from the volume of skeptic columns on their website, there's absolutely no denying that the powers that be in that paper are heavily promoting climate change skepticism. As far as I can see, they devote very little effort to putting the opposing side in response.

Now look: regular readers know I argue that ocean acidification is enough of a worry to limit CO2, and while it seems to me that the "warmenists" are also very likely correct, I do worry that the exact role of the sun is not properly understood. (It does seem odd, doesn't it, that an unusually quiet period of sunspots is immediately coinciding with a very cold northern winter, and a very early start to winter in parts of Australia?)

But really: isn't it plain to all objective people that a great many of the skeptic's arguments running in The Australian are not science at all? I mean all this stuff that Ian Plimer and others go on about how it is "hubris" to think that mankind can influence climate, or that it is all a UN inspired conspiracy, or is driven by completely corrupted grant seeking by scientists, etc. What the hell has that got to do with the actual science? (Yes, even complaining that scientists have "an interest" in providing results that confirm global warming does not show how their actual results are wrong.)

Of course, a lot of non-scientist environmentalists have carried a lot of ideological baggage around with them, and they can be criticised for that (I've done it myself.)

But when about half (well, that's my guess) of the response to climate scientists work is clearly non-scientific in nature, they are not really seriously engaging in the argument.

I strongly suggest people read Skeptical Science, which has been updated recently, to view the complete list of responses to the warming skeptics arguments. If your only source of information on the topic is The Australian, Andrew Bolt, Marohasy (God forbid), or even Watts Up With That, you are not really seriously following the issue.

Science notes from all over

* Back in 2006, I posted about some doubts about the effectiveness of widespread flu vaccination. Now, Norman Swan on the Health Report has a guest explaining why the benefits are actually so small they are hard to measure. My mum continues to be vindicated, it seems.

* My other favourite Radio National broadcaster, Alan Saunders, talks about philosophy and quantum mechanics. It's a pretty good discussion and summary of the topic, I reckon, and well worth reading. (Retro-causation gets a mention too, but not enough discussion.)

* This post at Cosmic Variance has embedded a recent Daily Show clip dealing with the Large Hadron Collider but (to my mind) with only slight comic effect. However, there is no doubt that Walter Wagner, who is also interviewed in the clip, does his credibility a lot of harm when he describes how it is that he believes the chance of a micro black hole being created is 50/50. (He's the guy who sued in Hawaii to try to stop the LHC, but I hasten to point out that I have never given him any direct support.) I note that the show does not mention Plaga, who appears to be a much more credible figure with concerns about micro black holes.

* As for psychology, The Economist reports that how well you smile in your college appears to have some predictive power as to whether you will divorce in future. Say "cheese" for future happiness...:)

Innovation from the country you can always trust

Birth control for men in one injection - Science, News - The Independent

From the report:

Researchers at the National Research for Family Planning in Beijing injected 1,000 healthy, fertile male patients with a testosterone-based jab over a two-year period and found only 1 per cent went on to father a child....

For the testing in China, a country which has invested heavily in reproductive technology because of its overpopulation problems, the men were given 500mg of testosterone undecanoate (TU) in tea seed oil. ...

The scientists claim that there were none of the usual side-effects and say the process is reversible. Six months after coming off the injections, the men's sperm count had returned to healthy levels.

Tea seed oil? Make mine Earl Grey with milk, but hold the melamine, thanks.