Rain

It started raining in the western suburbs of Brisbane last night at around 7.30. It was light to moderate intensity, and didn't stop all night.

But this morning, it has become heavier and heavier. It's 2.30pm now, and after a slight easing and lightening of the sky, it seems to have just re-started with renewed intensity. (Mind you, weather radar indicates it has stopped for a few hours north of the city.)

Rainfall totals around here for the last 24 hours are going to be phenomenal.

UPDATE: Well, glad that's over. It's Thursday morning, the sun is (nearly) out and rain has stopped after another solid drenching last night.

The good thing about it: if your house didn't get water inside during that event, it never will. (Save for wind blowing the roof off, of course.) Many parts of Brisbane had 200 - 300 mm of rain over 24 - 48 hours:


(Remember, this only shows one 24 hour period to this morning.)

Dam levels are up to 72% (yay) after being down to about 16% a couple of years ago.

My house is OK, except the phone is cut. Water in a Telstra pit somewhere, no doubt.

Someone who works at my office is an hour late to work, stuck in traffic somewhere. (A lot of roads are still cut this morning.) I think she's also had no power at home since yesterday afternoon.

Anyhow, work will be busy, I can't get onto the internet at home. Blogging will be light for a little while.

Lie down to lose weight

Sleep May Be Factor In Weight Control

Here's another study suggesting that there is a connection between inadequate sleep and weight gain. It has some surprises:

"When we analyzed our data by splitting our subjects into 'short sleepers' and 'long sleepers,' we found that short sleepers tended to have a higher BMI, 28.3 kg/m2, compared to long sleepers, who had an average BMI of 24.5. Short sleepers also had lower sleep efficiency, experienced as greater difficulty getting to sleep and staying asleep," said lead investigator Arn Eliasson, M.D.

Surprisingly, overweight individuals tended to be more active than their normal weight counterparts, taking significantly more steps than normal weight individuals: 14,000 compared to 11,300, a nearly 25 percent difference, and expending nearly 1,000 more calories a day—3,064 versus 2,080.

However, those additional energy expenditures did not manifest in reduced weight.

Go to sleep and lose some weight. I guess you could call it the Garfield Plan for weight loss.

Religion and violence

'Religious violence' a small part of the story

Dr John Dickson argues against the claim that religion causes violence, from the Christian perspective. It's not a bad essay.

But the main reason it is worth a post is because of some of the, shall we say, more than slightly antagonistic comments in response. For example, "No guy" writes:

Sorry "Doctor", bet you are a theist, therefor your reasoning is based on faith, which makes no sense, as reason and faith a polar opposites. Therefor everything you've said in this article is null and void because you believe in an invisible magical man in the sky. So all the effort you've put into writing this article is wasted. You are a religious person, therefor anything you say can not be trusted, because you blatantly and ignorantly refuse to think logically, with reason, and instead rely on faith, or an absence of reason.

Well, argument over then.

And Elizabeth S:

You believe you can only justify love and compassion because some celestial dictator has told you to do so or because only he/she/it can imbue value in the world??? What a creepy worldview.

(Elisabeth does raise an old philosophical question, it must be admitted, but it deserves more thought than dismissal as "creepy".)

There is certainly an aggressiveness in the new style atheism, isn't there?

An unusual suggestion

Is Everything Made of Mini Black Holes?

These guys suggest that the LHC may indeed make mini black holes, but they might behave exactly as "normal" sub atomic particles.

The suggestion has been made before that evaporating black holes may leave a "remnant", the exact nature of which seemed to be left rather vague, but I'm pretty sure it has been said that they may just look like an electron.

The difference in this paper is that they propose a different theoretical basis by which the LHC may create mini black holes in the first place. (Not via tiny extra dimension, which has been the idea behind existing speculation on the LHC creating mini black holes.)

If the new theory is true, I would assume it must have major cosmological implications. That's not really covered in the paper, I don't think, but maybe such further speculation will come soon.

Meanwhile, we may all have black holes in our brains.

Really?

Technology Review: TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor

Technology Review has a short article about a proposed new reactor design that sounds almost too good to be true:

As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs "theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years" without refueling, says John G­illeland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.

Gilleland's aim is to run a nuclear reactor on what is now waste.

...the traveling-wave reactor needs only a thin layer of enriched U-235. Most of the core is U-238, millions of pounds of which are stockpiled around the world as leftovers from natural uranium after the U-235 has been scavenged. The design provides "the simplest possible fuel cycle," says Charles W. Forsberg, executive director of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project at MIT, "and it requires only one uranium enrichment plant per planet."

I wonder how you stop the reaction, though...

That'd be right

There's a new branch of science yet to be investigated: how does a good space shuttle viewing schedule cause rain and cloud in Brisbane?

Remember this post of only a few days ago? Now read the forecast for Brisbane for much of the same period:

Forecast for Tuesday Evening
Rain periods with possible local thunder.

Forecast for Wednesday
Rain periods with possible local thunder.

Thursday      Rain periods, windy                    Min 16    Max 19
Friday        Showers, windy                         Min 15    Max 21
Saturday      Showers, windy                         Min 17    Max 23
Sunday        Shower or two                          Min 18    Max 25
Monday        Shower or two                          Min 17    Max 25
Tuesday       Shower or two                          Min 17    Max 25

Another reason coal is not cool

30% Ocean Mercury Rise Linked to Asian Coal Plants

The topic of mercury in fish (as well as dolphins and whales) has been discussed here before, so it's of some interest to read the article above about research indicating that coal burning has increased mercury levels in the oceans:

Data analysis of the water samples indicated that total mercury levels in the North Pacific Ocean water have risen about 30 percent over the last 20 years.

The authors attribute the rise to increases in global mercury atmospheric emission rates, particularly from Asia. “We believe the majority of Asian mercury emission comes from coal burning (for electricity generation),” stated William Landing, a marine scientist with Florida State University, one of the lead investigators for this study.

Sounds about right

First Things - For Obama, Talk is Cheap About Mutual Respect on the Life Issues

Empty

HASHIMA, Japan, 2002 documentary version on Vimeo

I haven't watched it all, but it's about a tiny abandoned Japanese mining island, and is full of post-apocalyptic images of suddenly deserted buildings. (It looks at its history as an incredibly densely populated place too.)

Found via Japansoc, which will be added to my bookmarks when I can finally bother editing them.

About Ikea

BBC NEWS | Europe | In search of Europe: Sweden

Here's an article talking about why Ikea is internationally popular, and asks the question "how does Ikea manage to unify Europeans around its brand and its products, where the parliament so often fails to do so?"

A professor from Stockholm suggests:

"..Customers are picking Ikea because it provides certain values."

Ikea's senior staff travel to Almhult, in southern Sweden, to have those values inculcated into them. It is as close to a company town as you get these days - there's an Ikea hotel, a private Ikea museum, and a host of Ikea laboratories, communications and personnel units. You are never far from a self-assembled bookcase or nice-looking but really very cheap mug.

I hope the town square in Almhult is full of plastic balls for everyone to play in.

Rudd's new health measure

BBC NEWS | Health | Keep working 'to avoid dementia'

What do you know: not being able to get the pension til 67 can be sold as a health measure.

While we're talking Catholicism...

Father Alberto Cutie's scandal doesn't change the debate about clerical celibacy. - Slate Magazine

How unusual. Slate runs a column that doesn't do a bad job at defending celibacy for the Catholic priesthood.

Personally, however, I believe the rules should be changed to something close to that within the Eastern Orthodox church.

I watch so that you don't have to

For people who are curious as to how the "St Mary's [South Brisbane] parish in exile" conducts its masses, they have been posting videos of their services at their website for the last few weeks.

Unfortunately, they only seem to stay up for a week at a time, but I have watched a few of them now.

The latest one, from yesterday, also has the homily in written form.

A few observations:

* I could be wrong, but the latest video indicates a significantly smaller congregation than in the first couple of weeks;

* They never seem to incorporate an Act of Penitence. Given that few Catholics regularly attend confession these days, I would have thought that this part of the Mass served an increasingly useful function (even if it does not, according to the Church, actually give absolution.) But dropping this is typical of the strand of Christianity that preaches social justice as its main theme: they love to tell others about the importance of being fair and nice to everyone, but don't spend a lot of time examining themselves for any sign of "sin". (For them, it's such an outdated, patriarchal sort of concept.)

Of course, you can argue that a lot of damage has been caused to the Church by those who hypocritically preached the rules, but failed to live up to the standards themselves. (The Church's reaction to child abuse in the clergy gets a lot of airtime from those who attend St Mary's.) But (I would argue) from an intellectual point of view, such hypocrisy is not as corrosive to the core of the faith as the modernising Gaia-incorporating semi-realism of the type of faith St Mary's seems to propagate.

* Nor do they seem to bother with the Creed. (I suspect that it is because it would require too many amendments to bear anything close to the original.)

* The Lord's Prayer is incorporated but begins "Our Mother, our Father ..." Does any reader know of any other parish that does this? I know the suggestion has been around for a while, as I recall the late Bede Griffiths came up with it during a talk he gave in Brisbane years ago. But I am not sure if the idea has been adopted anywhere other than St Mary's. (Bede Griffiths was an interesting character, an English Benedictine monk who "went native" in India, but whether he was really operating within Catholic doctrine by the end of his life is very doubtful. I think he just avoided official censure by spending most of his time in India and concentrating on meditation.)

* As you can see from Peter Kennedy's homily (linked above) , he's very big on the whole Gaia-ish, birthing, Creation, life-giving, it's all about relationships, God-(whatever that might be)-just-wants-us-to-be-nice-environmentalists-and-kind-to-gays, view of Christianity.

There seems little doubt that Peter Kennedy would be a fan of Matthew Fox, the former Catholic priest (now Californian Episcopalian) whose pagan incorporating "creation spirituality" brought him a lot of attention a couple of decades ago until he got banned from teaching theology and chucked out of his order by our present Pope. Like Fox, Kennedy like to quote Meister Eckhart, who also was in a spot of doctrinal bother during his life.

Kennedy quotes in his homily another Catholic writer who I hadn't heard of before (Diarmund O'Murchu - his status within the Sacred Heart Missionary Order remains unclear to me) but this from his website indicates he is doctrinally probably already outside of his Church:

Jesus did not come to rescue or redeem us – there is nothing from which we need to be rescued, other than our own patriarchal dysfunctionality which is our problem and not God’s...

In another essay, O'Murchu explains how the term "Kingdom of God" should rendered differently:

And what would we replace it with? John Dominic Crossan (in Borg 1998, 22-55) offers one of the best suggestions I know: a companionship of empowerment.

I can see it now: "Our Mother our Father...thy companionship of empowerment come".

For a priest who complains that his Archbishop is mistaken when he says he is operating outside of the Catholic faith, Peter Kennedy sure spends a lot of time quoting those who are doctrinally radical.

* Kennedy said when he set up his "parish in exile" that it would be reformed with a bigger role for women. Unless it decides that it can ordain its own woman priest (which I reckon it is likely to do sooner or later) it is hard to imagine a bigger women's role than it already seems to have.

It is clearly already a church dominated by feminist critique. At this week's mass, one of the congregation asked them to pray that the Family Law Act go back to taking protection seriously. (Clearly, she is involved in the current advocacy that is trying to get the government to reverse the presumption of shared care for children between parents.) Another women took the opportunity to give a mini lecture on how women giving birth lying down was a terrible patriarchal idea, and indigenous women knew how to do it better.

It's really eye-rolling stuff. I don't see that they are ever going to attract a broader band of followers from within the Church than that they already have, and it will likely dwindle over time as well.

I suspect that it was at the peak of its popularity during the long period of the Howard government, when nearly everyone in the congregation perceived that they had a fundamentally unjust government to rally against. Now that it's Labor all around, and the appeal of hearing an anti-Howard rant every week has gone, one wonders whether it can maintain its appeal.

Weekend view

The view from a lookout near O'Reilly's in the Lamington National Park.

Some encouragement to pro-lifers

US abortion views shift, majority are 'pro-life': poll

The "pro-life," anti-abortion opinion has risen from 44 percent a year ago, while the number of Americans who described themselves as "pro-choice" fell from 50 percent a year ago to 42 percent now.

The results "represent a significant shift," said Gallup, which interviewed 1,015 adults from May 7-10.

Perhaps a reaction to Obama's partial birth abortion position? (And his quip about not wanting his "punished" by a pregnancy.)

Science roundup from Science Daily

There's no common theme here, they just struck me as interesting:

* a common viral infection may have something to do with high blood pressure. (I think the idea has been around for a while, or at least with respect to atherosclerosis.) This research was done with mice. (The hardest part was probably putting the little blood pressure cuffs on their skinny arms.)

* Having a heart attack right now? Chewable aspirin gets in fast, just like blue liquid gets into chalk. (Sorry, vast international readership, the reference will only be understood to Australians of a certain age, and it's not even that funny.)

* Ginger really does seem to help with nausea caused by anything, even chemotherapy. (I presume it helps with hangovers too?)

* A bunch of students are trying to come up with a good form of radiation shield for a return to the Moon. Just burying the habitat must seem too much like hard work.

* Alcohol labelling helps older people drive safely, but younger people just use it to the strongest alcohol at the cheapest price. Kind of obvious, really. (And would support the idea that the alcopop tax will not be effective in the long run.)

Kind of catchy

You have to watch past the forty second mark to get the full benefit of this, um, unusual language lesson.

Progessive thinking

Peter Daou

Click the link above to read the excitable Peter Daou at Huffington Post:

But as always, the progressive community, a far more efficient thinking machine than a handful of strategists and advisers, is looking ahead and raising a unified alarm. The message is this: anything less than absolute moral clarity from Democrats, who now control the levers of power, will enshrine Bush's abuses and undermine the rule of law for generations to come.

Take some deep breaths, Peter, and calm your "thinking machine" down.

Eek, I agree with Andrew Sullivan

The carbon tax/cap-and-trade royal rumble By Phil Levy | Shadow Government

As I don't obsess about Sarah Palin's last pregnancy and need to read about gay marriage every day, I don't feel the need to visit Andrew Sullivan very often.

But it would appear from the above column in Foreign Policy that he's one of the main proponents of carbon tax over cap and trade.

Well, as I've started saying recently, it turns out that no one is wrong about everything. (If only teenagers could learn that lesson early.)

Actually, the column itself wonders why carbon tax is not taken seriously. It's a pretty good summary of the pros and cons:

Cap-and-trade can do a very good impersonation of a carbon tax when we know the demand for emissions with certainty, when we do a great job of regulating, and when we auction off all the emissions permits. If we're uncertain about the demand for producing emissions, if it is hard to keep tabs on what various emitters are doing, or if politics intrudes into the process of handing out emissions permits, then the two approaches veer apart.

For ease of use and immunity from political meddling, the carbon tax is the clear winner. Taxes can be applied early in the fuel distribution process, which makes the logistical task much easier. That sort of upstream application would make attempts at political interference much more transparent, as well. So what about uncertainty? The big critique of a carbon tax is that it cannot guarantee a country will come in under a pre-set emissions cap. If the desire to pollute is really, really high one year, we could find that a given tax won't serve as a sufficient deterrent, and we'll blow past our limits.

Europe, though, has had the opposite problem with their cap-and-trade system. In the first phase of the program, they printed more permits to pollute than anyone wanted. That drove the price of permits near zero, deeply annoying anyone who had paid up for the right to pollute. It also meant that the system was ineffective in restraining pollution. That would be hard to do with a carbon tax.

Maybe the key paragraph is this:

The Cap-and-Trade Kids argue that, whatever the economic merits, their approach is the only one with a political chance. But why? Carbon taxes have certainly been seen as a political third rail, at least since President Bill Clinton dropped a proposed BTU tax in 1993. People don't want to have to pay more for energy. But how does cap-and-trade overcome this critique? If it's going to rein in eagerness to pollute, it will have to raise the cost of pollution. It may be possible to win support by pretending this won't happen, but it's worth thinking hard about whether such deception is a sound basis for creating a major long-term policy.

Keeping it in perspective

Value for money in the budget? - Solar vs Coal - Rooted

The simple headline is that the budget gave $1.5 billion to solar power development in Australia. But, it is in fact over a 6 year period.

How much money has Kevin Rudd given to the public in the last 6 months? About $21 billion.

And another $28 billion to be spent over the next few years on insulation, school upgrades etc.

Not so encouraging.