Trouble ahead

UK could face widespread seventies style blackouts - The Independent

The UK faces widespread power cuts for the first time since the 1970s, according to the Government's own predictions.

Demand for electricity from homes and businesses is set to exceed the available supply within eight years....

The latest figures cast doubt over the Government's pledge that renewable sources can make up for lower output from nuclear and coal.

They were slipped out in an appendix to the Low Carbon Transition Plan, which was launched in July. The main document set out a target for "clean" technology - such as wind, wave and solar - to supply 40% of the country's power by 2020.

But the extra section suggests that there will be a shortfall by 2017, when the "energy unserved" level is predicted to reach 3,000 megawatt hours per year...

By 2025 the situation is expected to worsen, with the shortfall hitting 7,000 megawatt hours per year.

That would be equivalent to an hour-long power cut for half of Britain over the course of a year.

Actually, in some recent stormy summers in Brisbane, we've had a lot more than an hour-long power cut in a year.

Yurts for all

Why a yurt is better than a country cottage - Times Online

Here's an article in the Times about a family that uses a yurt as its holiday home. The kids have to find firewood to boil the kettle, and there is no toilet, which is getting just a little too "back to Nature" for my taste.

Still, reading about yurts reminds me of my widely ignored thought that maybe the neverending problem with providing adequate housing for remote aboriginal communities is due to the inappropriateness of trying to provide permanent housing for remote aboriginal communities.

When I read about the current controversy over the cost of a current program to improve housing in the Northern Territory, I can't help but feel I was onto something with my half-baked idea. According to that last linked news report, some people think that it is going to end up costing $1 billion to provide 750 new houses, 230 "rebuilds" and refurbishment to 2,500 other existing houses.

Let's see: a company in Bangalow will sell a 10 metre diameter yurt with a heavy canvas cover for around $20,000.

Let's be generous, and allow another $20,000 for changes in design, some sort of decent flooring, etc. (A clan's bunch of yurts could share a central, simple ablutions block, but admittedly I have no idea how to estimate the cost of that.) Maybe $10,000 to get it there and put it up? Rough figure - $50,000 per yurt. Pretty expensive for a tent, but...

If you assume the 750 new houses will take 1/2 of the billion dollars that may be spent on the current program, you can get ten thousand $50,000 yurts for that price. Let's say that my back of the envelope figuring is way out - surely 5,000 is still in the ball park.

At that rate, it hardly matters if you have to replace them every five years.

Maybe I should start the Yurts for All Party as a way of publicising this idea.

Good TV

Last night's Australian Story was a nice one about competitive paper airplane throwing (and a brain tumour.) Happily, the subject recovered from the latter, and has many years of competitive paper plane folding and throwing ahead of him. (I did get the feeling, though, he would be a bit annoying to live near, as your yard or balcony would always be littered with paper planes.)

The episode can be watched here. (After this week it will be archived as "Fly with Me".)

Last Friday's documentary on the Last Day of World War One was also good. Michael Palin makes an good narrator of serious material, and he recounted many stories of soldiers who were, with great pointlessness, ordered on the battle field in the 6 hours or so between the announcement of the ceasefire agreement being signed, and the time it came into effect (at 11am on 11/11.)

It would seem that the full documentary can be viewed via the link here.

Another African problem?

Interesting claim made here that pornography is behind a lot of sexual violence (and lack of safe sex practices) in Africa.

Occasionally there is talk of the similar effect of pornography in remote aboriginal settlements, but the problem never seems to get detailed reportage.

More notes for future reference

Study debunks daily aspirin to guard heart | The Australian

The study on alcohol, carried out on 8830 people in Britain, Scandinavia and the US, found those who drank the equivalent of 10 standard drinks a week - about 15 units - had an 80 per cent higher risk of having an irregular heartbeat diagnosed within five years.

And the study of aspirin found that healthy adults who took a daily aspirin for up to eight years did not significantly reduce their risk of a heart attack or stroke, but did increase their risk of stomach bleeding.

I think I would average 5 to 7 standard drinks a week, so I trust I'm OK.

At last

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | 'Major win' for Japan opposition

Can you imagine the same party governing Australia for nearly 54 years?

Visit to Narnia (South East Queensland version)

Of course, I had to make the trip to Cleveland Point to have a look at the full-scale Dawn Treader, built for the third Narnia movie. It turned out to be a very pleasant family afternoon out.

Cleveland and the southern bayside parts of Greater Brisbane are not areas I get to all that often, but it is a very pleasant area for a drive. Lunch was had at a much better-than-average quality fish and chip place at Raby Bay, which has a row of nice looking outdoor/indoor eateries overlooking the boat harbour. Most satisfactory.

Then it was onto Cleveland Point. You can get very close to the ship:

and there are a lot of people making the trip to have a look.

Filming has not yet started on the ship, so I don't know how close people will be allowed when that happens.

Here is a better side view of the ship, although there is a fair bit of machinery in the way (as always, click to enlarge):


As you can see from the men standing on the ground on the far side of it, it's really full scale. Compared to the various book cover illustrations over the years, it certainly lives up to expectations.

You can't see it so clearly in the photo, but there does appear to be a purple furled sail on board now.

They were apparently testing the rocking mechanism for the ship today, as you can see from the (rather poor quality Blogger-ified) video below:



All terribly interesting, at least for someone who holds the Narnia films in high regard.

Famous actor sees famous ghost?

Patrick Stewart saw ghost performing Waiting for Godot - Telegraph

Would be good to hear it in Stewart's own words, though.

Noted for future reference

Patient Money - Treatments for Erectile Dysfunction Go Beyond a Pill - NYTimes.com

An article all about alternatives to Viagra and similar drugs, which don't always work anyway:

Even among the name-brand drugs, which also include Cialis and Levitra, the medications do not work for about half of the men with E.D.

Just getting healthier can help:

In a recent study of men with E.D., or at risk for developing it, researchers in Italy found that the men could improve their erections by losing weight, improving their diet and exercising more frequently. After two years of significant lifestyle changes, 58 percent of the men had normal erectile function, according to the study, which was published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in January.

But if that still doesn't work, you can always go for the needle:

If the pills don’t work for you, you might want to try self-administered injections of alprostadil, a drug that helps blood vessels expand and facilitates erections. Granted, this may sound onerous, but the shot, which is sold under the brand names Edex and Caverject, is done with a fine needle, feels no worse than a pinprick and produces an erection that can last up to four hours, according to doctors who recommend it.

Four hours? You would kind of start worrying at the 3 hour 45 minute mark, I reckon.

Fictional 1930's lawyer not modern enough

Atticus Finch and Southern liberalism : The New Yorker

As mentioned here before, I (like millions of other people) hold "To Kill a Mockingbird", both as a novel and movie, in very high regard. Thus, it is always interesting to read an article considering the work in a new way.

The above New Yorker piece starts well, explaining the nature of racial politics in the South in the 1950's.

But then it takes a strange turn when it starts noting, and seemingly agreeing with, criticism of the fictional Atticus Finch for not having the "top down" civil rights activist attitude that came into being in the 1960's. The article provides quotes from the novel that, quite accurately, show Finch as believing racism would be overcome by getting people to realise the error of not recognising the humanity of their black neighbours. As the articles says:

[In relation to the guilty finding in the centrepiece trial in the story] If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds...

Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.

How much sense does this make, though, when Mockingbird is set in the 1930's? The article mentions the period of the novel, but never seems to acknowledge that it may be quite unrealistic to have a small town lawyer sprouting a civil rights activist agenda in that setting.

Besides which, how can you really object to the philosophy of Atticus Finch when it is, at its core, the true explanation of racism? The book is so appealing partly because of the truth people recognise in that.

The article ends on what I think is a very peculiar note. It criticises the way the novel ends with Atticus Finch agreeing to let the Sheriff lie to the town about how the villain died. (He will say that it was an accidental self-inflicted stab wound, whereas the reader knows the reculsive Boo Radley did it to save Scout.) Here's what the article says:

“Scout,” Finch says to his daughter, after he and Sheriff Tate have cut their little side deal. “Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?”

Understand what? That her father and the Sheriff have decided to obstruct justice in the name of saving their beloved neighbor the burden of angel-food cake? Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell. A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.

This is just silly. Boo Radley is not your average citizen, for one thing, and the Sheriff's decision makes perfect sense, and is perfectly just, in terms of the story.

What the hell does this article's author want Atticus Finch to do - tell the Sheriff "No, no, that's not right. I want you to take Boo, the man who has been so cripplingly shy that he hasn't come out of his house in daylight for the last 20 years, but nonetheless just saved my daughter's life, down to your office in the morning for a good and thorough statement to be taken"? Yeah, like readers would think that makes emotional sense.

Admission of a creepy practice

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China admits death row organ use

According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.

The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.

The truth behind Andrew's holiday

What's this? Andrew Bolt unexpectedly up and left for a month long holiday in Europe to (ostensibly) celebrate his 50th birthday.

Yet at the very same time:

Britain's climate campers set up their annual protest camp yesterday on Blackheath, the historic London open space that was key in the peasants' revolt.

The 1,000-plus green activists are camped this morning on the fields where Wat Tyler's peasant army assembled for its assault on The City of London in June 1381. And they are planning their own assault – on what they see as the companies, institutions and government departments helping to cause global warming (or not doing enough to stop it).

Co-incidence? In my semi-comedic fantasies, Andrew mixes it up with a bunch of semi-feral climate change advocates, either as a convert or a spy.

Anyhow, his column on turning 50 contained a pleasing humility, I thought. The only odd thing is how it doesn't seem to extend to the prospect that his opinion on climate change might be wrong.

100% female domination

Ant has given up sex completely, researchers say

Add this to the list of things I didn't know:

The complete asexuality of a widespread fungus-gardening ant, the only ant species in the world known to have dispensed with males entirely, has been confirmed by a team of Texas and Brazilian researchers.

Most social insects—the wasps, ants and bees—are relatively used to daily life without males. Their colonies are well run by swarms of sterile sisters lorded over by an egg-laying queen. But, eventually, all social insect species have the ability to produce a crop of males who go forth in the world to fertilize new queens and propagate.

Queens of the ant Mycocepurus smithii reproduce without fertilization and males appear to be completely absent, report Christian Rabeling, Ulrich Mueller and their Brazilian colleagues in PLoS ONE this week.

"Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant," says Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behavior graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. "Asexual species don't mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don't generally persist for very long over evolutionary time."

If I was in a wittier mood, I guess I could come up with some comment about what a completely female ant society must be like to live in. But I'm not.

On Venezuela

Venezuela: The true cost of cheap gas | csmonitor.com

The Christian Science Monitor has a short item on the cost of gasoline in Venezuela:

Gasoline doesn’t flow from fountains in Venezuela, but it might as well. At 4 cents a gallon, the country has the cheapest gas in the world: Bottled water is 67 times more expensive.

But cheap gas comes at a cost, mainly for the government. The Chávez government is believed to be subsidizing consumption to the tune of $8 billion a year.

Chavez may be left wing, but he obviously hasn't yet caught on with the idea that carbon should have a price..

A few weeks ago, there was a whole half hour about the country on Foreign Correspondent. I didn't see all, but it was very interesting. It certainly showed it as a dirt poor country.

People need gravity to reproduce?

Egg tests find space may be tough place for humans to conceive babies | The Japan Times Online

It is a fascinating topic if you have an interest in the long term prospects for humanity to expand off-planet: how will low gravity affect reproduction.

If this Japanese mouse study is anything to go by, sex in zero-gee might be athletic fun, but it may be bad for fertile eggs:

...the group reported that the growth of fertile eggs slows in a near-zero-gravity environment, lowering the birthrate by half when the eggs are put back into the wombs of mice.

The eggs of humans, as a mammal, could face the same problem, the scientists said...

"If we find out how much gravity is needed for a (human) fertile egg to grow, we may be able to know if a baby can be born at a lunar base," said Teruhiko Wakayama of Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, who headed the joint group with Hiroshima University.

What I'm most curious to know is whether mice (or humans) conceived and born on the Moon will look different and be capable of adapting to full Earth gravity. The suspicion could be that a low gravity human would grow tall and thin, but nature has a way of confounding such predictions, so maybe they would be small instead. As someone somewhere has suggested before, maybe grey aliens are the time travelling descendants of off-planet humanity...

Getting fat from fasting

Gulfnews: Warning against unhealthy eating habits after fasting

I think it has been reported often that the weird eating habits that the month of Ramadan fasting induces often leads to weight increase, which seems a little bit inconsistent with the point of the exercise. As the Gulf News article above notes:

People tend to get more obese and diabetic due to irregular eating and overeating after ending the fast, a senior doctor from the Ministry of Health warned, advising people to eat healthy during the Holy Month.

Fasting during Ramadan can improve a person's health, but if the correct diet is not followed, can possibly worsen it, it warns. The deciding factor is not the fast itself, but rather what is consumed in the non-fasting hours, the Ministry said.

Quite.

But what about this new-age-ish claimed health benefit for Ramadan fasting:

Dr Prem Jagyasi, managing director of ExHealth, the organisers of the initiative, said Ramadan is a great opportunity to focus on bringing back a balanced and healthy lifestyle in people's lives who do not normally watch their eating habits. "Ramadan requires to give the stomach a break, and by doing so one will be able to break down and expel the collected toxins from body," he said, but notes that it is very important to understand the proper practice of eating healthy.

Is there any scientific justification at all for believing fasting eliminates "toxins" from the body? I would be surprised if there was.

The unlikely economics of carbon capture

Carbon capture project in West Virginia illustrates obstacles to 'clean' coal -- latimes.com

AEP executives estimate that the cost of carbon capture for a modest-size coal plant of about 235 megawatts would start at $700 million. That works out to about $100 for a ton of carbon dioxide, far above the projections made by the Environmental Protection Agency about prices under a cap-and-trade scheme similar to one passed by the House in June. MIT put the cost of carbon capture and storage at $50 to $70 a ton. (The Waxman-Markey bill would give the first six gigawatts of plants -- equal to about seven average-size plants -- a $90-per-ton subsidy in the form of free allowances.)

Capture-and-storage devices also require large amounts of energy. The Alstom approach uses about 15% of the power plant's energy output; other processes use as much as 30%. That means the utility must buy other energy sources to cover the shortfall. (The energy lost is part of the $700-million cost, AEP executives said.)

Obama is apparently being advised that "There is no credible pathway towards prudent greenhouse gas stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction from existing coal power plants."

I can't see it working.

Do not provoke the cows

Hoofed and dangerous: Britain's killer cows

Four people have been trampled to death by cows in just over eight weeks this summer, prompting British farmers and the Ramblers Association to warn yesterday of the potential dangers.

The spate of incidents is regarded as highly unusual; in the past eight years there have only been 18 deaths in total caused by cattle of all kinds – including incidents involving bulls, which have always been known to present risks.

When chickens ruled the earth

Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.

Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

I didn't think much was known about how to "flip" genetic levers, let alone specific ones.

I can't imagine the likes of PETA being too impressed with this, if it will involve lots of deformed chicks being born.

A quick quote

The 10 most historically inaccurate movies - Times Online

Mel Gibson movies keep featuring in this list, and I like this line from the article about The Patriot:

Gibson (rugby) tackles history again with his turn as an honest farmer drawn into the American Revolutionary War, which historian David Hackett Fischer claimed in the New York Times “is to history as Godzilla was to biology.”