Apparitions, UFO's, belief, etc.

Significant numbers of Irish Catholics are getting excited by an alleged visionary's promises of apparitions of Mary at Knock. Curiously, the nature of the original Knock incident back in 1879 (stationary images appearing in the evening on a flat wall) means that it was one "miracle" that was quite readily explicable as a hoax (the use of a "magic lantern" to project the images.)

Meanwhile, I see that (if this source can be trusted) some Portuguese history professor has been looking again at the evidence for the Fatima apparition, and has noted the similarity of the reports of the dancing sun to UFO reports later in the century. (The sun was supposed to take on a metal sheen, with lights around the rim, and looked as if it was getting closer to the crowd.) The Wikipedia "miracle of the sun" entry is a pretty good place to get a description of what happened, and the various other explanations that have been suggested.

As it happens, when I was in high school, I read an entire book that set out the UFO at Fatima theory. I think it was actually in the high school library, but I could be mistaken. The idea struck me as pretty fascinating, and rather disturbing (why would mischievous aliens play that type of game with humans, and just how much religion may be based on a misinterpretation of what was going on in the universe?) Yet suggestibility to such radical ideas when you are a teenager is something you (should) outgrow.

I remember, for example, being strongly impressed by Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", again from my school library. (It seems, in retrospect, that my school library had a lot of pretty trippy titles. But hey, it was the '70's.) Now, I don't quite understand why that book impressed me so much. I certainly had not personally toyed with drugs of any variety, not even nutmeg tea,* so why a book about the consciousness expanding nature of one particular drug should have excited me seems rather odd.

As an adult, the suggestibility of a crowd which wants to see a miracle seems much more plausible that it used to. And, in the case of that Huxley book, skepticism that any drug can help you see reality more clearly seems much more compellingly.

Yet, I would still warn people against throwing babies out with the bathwater.** I am inclined to believe some accounts of paranormal events, and consider that they are potentially very important as evidence contradicting the purely materialist view of the universe that is so aggressively advocated by (seemingly) 90% of scientists now, the New Atheists, and the "non-realist" school of liberal Christianity.

It's where to draw the line between what is credible and what isn't that's the trick.

* Uncle Scrooges favourite drink, which, as I learnt later, might be capable of sending you on a trip.

** (Which is, essentially, what most climate change skepticism is doing too, in my opinion.)

Depressing images

Observations: Intolerable beauty: Plastic garbage kills the albatross

This featured on Hungry Beast last night (which, incidentally, seems to me to be an expensive failure. Just how many people were recruited for that show?)

Anyhow, apparently large numbers of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll out in the Pacific die because their mothers mistakenly feed them plastic picked up from the ocean. The stomachs fill up, meaning they can't eat real food and die, leaving skeletons filled with coloured bits of plastic.

I wonder: if there is that much plastic floating around in the Pacific Gyre, will it be worthwhile converting some former oil tanker into a skimming garbage collector?

The future is getting closer

You just can't help but be impressed by this MIT designed, completely autonomous, robot helicopter. It navigates not by GPS, but by scanning its environment and building up a picture of where it is. Very futuristic; very cool:



Now, if they can just build in some face recognition software, a poison blow dart and (I suppose) a way to knock on the front door, you'll have the perfect robot assassin to sent into the apartment block.

Ocean acidification at 450ppm

Southern Ocean acidification: A tipping point at 450-ppm atmospheric CO2 — PNAS

I don't think I have quoted before from this paper which came out last year. It predicts aragonite undersaturation in the Southern Oceans by 2038 (assuming we hit CO2 of 450 ppm by 2030), which is earlier than previously thought, and the consequences of that are set out pretty well in this paragraph:

Early aragonite undersaturation is of particular concern for the zooplankton species comprising Pteropods, which form aragonite shells. Southern Ocean Pteropods comprise up to one-quarter of total zooplankton biomass in the Ross Sea (13), Weddell Sea (14), and East Antarctica (15), can sometimes displace krill as the dominant zooplankton (16), and dominate carbonate export fluxes south of the Antarctic Polar Front (17), and even organic carbon export (18). Pteropods in Southern Ocean sediment traps show partial dissolution and “frosted” appearance of shells just below the aragonite saturation horizon (17, 19), indicating vulnerability to low carbonate ion concentrations. The most dominant Southern Ocean Pteropod species is Limacina helicina, with Limacina retroversa and others playing a smaller role (20). The dominant species, L. helicina, is known to have a life cycle of 1–2 years with important veliger larval development during winter months (20–22), which will be adversely impacted by early wintertime aragonite undersaturation. Given their multiyear life cycles, our results imply that Pteropods in the Southern Ocean will need to withstand aragonite undersaturation far sooner than previously predicted with possible significant effects throughout the Southern Ocean marine food web.

Just thought you should know. Politicians seem so shy of mentioning the effect of CO2 on oceans, though.

Promising?

Upgrade helps solar harvest (Science Alert)

University of Sydney researchers Dr Tim Schmidt and Professor Max Crossley have come up with an ingenious low-cost device to harvest low energy photons, with the potential of significantly boosting the efficiency of conventional solar cells using a process called upconversion...

The findings, which are published in the most recent issue of the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, pave the way to boosting the efficiency limit to over 50 per cent under the standard solar spectrum and up to 63 per cent under 100 fold solar concentration.

Sounds too good to be true.

And besides: how do you store all the energy they create for more than a day?

Romancing the boot

Andrew Norton - Hello Lenin?

Andrew Norton has a good post about an small outbreak of rosy nostalgia for Soviet communism within Australia. It's from aged intellectual circles, of course.

Time to cut her loose

Catherine Deveny in The Age seems to be reaching some sort of peak in her recent obnoxious anti-everyone-except-those-who-think-exactly-like-her campaign:

I've recently found myself embedded in the above conversations with morons pretending to be people who have said things that made me wince and think: ''Where do I start? If they don't get the basics, what else don't they get?...

She's a "Bright" who shows how dangerous "Brights" can be.

She made a complete goose of herself on Q&A a couple of weeks ago.

Editors: when your columnist starts suggesting that her opponents are not human, it's surely time to cut her loose and let her practice her advocacy on the street corner.

A bit of a worry

Global oil supply 'far worse than admitted'

THE world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, says a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

Comparing smoking rates

Japan seems to be impressed that its smoking rate has dropped to 36.8% amongst men, and 9% amongst women. The rate for the total population is therefore about 22%.

Given that Japan still seems a much more smoker friendly country compared to here, it's a little surprising to realise that their total population smoking rate is now not far above Australia's. It was only in 2004 that we had the same rate at 22%, but it has dropped back to 19% since then. The main difference is that women here are a much higher proportion of the total number of smokers. I think I've said this before, but anyway: congratulations, modern Australian women, on your near parity in the field of stupid men's habits. (That's a thought that occurs to me regularly when witnessing tattooed women in the shopping centre, too.)

The Australian government wants to get the rate down to 9% by 2020, but at the current rate of decrease, it would appear likely that it won't be reached until 2040. The last cut is the hardest, it would seem.

Interestingly, this publication suggests that, as the rate of smoking amongst doctors and dentists (who are fully aware of its dangers) is around 3 -4 % "this may indicate the lowest "baseline" smoking rate that can be reasonably expected in a fully informed population."

I don't know: if it ever gets to 5%, just ban it, I reckon.

Dumb, dumb, dumb

Look, I don't like the ETS either, and I see that an increasing number of people are attacking the very idea of cap and trade schemes as being certain to set back effective action by a couple of decades, but I still find it impossible to see the political advantage in prominent Liberals or Nationals coming out as climate skeptics.

Nick Minchin is a dill who has ensured that the Liberals will not be trusted by the still very significant proportion of the population who think reducing CO2 needs to be tackled. Tony Abbott is not far behind, by seemingly confirming that he only assesses the importance of climate change policy according to how much the latest poll indicates the public are concerned about it. (Give Melbourne another run of 43 degree days and bushfires this summer, and we'll see how seriously they take it next year. Maybe Tony will be back on board then.)

Nick Minchin should just get out of Parliament, not for his ill-informed skepticism, but for his mischief making. Andrew Bolt claims there are skeptics in Federal Labor too, and I expect he's right, but at least they have enough political nous to know they will gain nothing by flaunting it.

I agree wholeheartedly with this comment by Matt at Barry Brooks blog:

Labor is positioning itself as the champion of climate, wedging the opposition as confused and mostly skeptical… but to the public it appears that the ALP are acting as demanded by the scientists, wheras it seems to me that the scientists are really saying that the proposed ETS is a mess, with too many loopholes, and does not achieve the scientific goals.

If Turnbull had control of his party he could suggest that they pounce on the growing unrest about the convoluted and innefective ETS, and have SCIENCE on his side… and use that as a tool to wait until after Copenhagen on the grounds that there is global uncertainty about Cap n Trade or Tax, and it is useless us making a premature and incorrect choice (like betamax vs VHS).

Unfortunately that would rely on his party believing the science.

But of course, there is barely a politician in the world who is willing to actually criticise cap and trade for the right reasons (it won't work fast enough, probably at great expense, and encourage deceptive), all because they are scared of the word "tax". (You can apparently help solve that problem by calling it "fee and dividend" instead.)

Scary nights

The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis | Chris French | Science | guardian.co.uk

I missed this good article last month about the phenomena of sleep paralysis. It's particularly interesting because of the comments following, where many people describe the type of terrifying hallucinations they have had during it.

Luckily, I've never experienced it myself, but my wife has had a couple of relatively mild cases. She hadn't heard of sleep paralysis when I explained it to her.

Then, more recently I discovered that a friend had experienced what he interpretted as a demonic visit in bed. I told him about the somewhat more likely explanation, but he had never heard of sleep paralysis either. Maybe I first read about it in Fortean Times; I'm not sure. In any event, it has been publicised for many years, but not everyone reads up on both the paranormal and science. It seems more people should know it is not that uncommon an experience.

Uh-huh

Cartoons 'should have movie-style ratings' to protect children from violence - Telegraph

Dr Karen Pfeffer, a senior lecturer at Lincoln University, said that risky behaviour which would normally lead to injury is rarely shown to have negative consequences in cartoons.

She claims to have found evidence that there children who watch violent programmes are more likely to engage in risky behaviour and injure themselves....

Among the programmes she deemed to contain the most risky behaviour were Scooby-Doo, Batman, X-Men and Ben 10.

Can this be true? Scooby-Doo encourages risky behaviour? It's inane, sure, and it annoys me that my kids like to watch it (at their age, I had already decided it was a bore) but it would have to be one of the most harmless cartoons imaginable, unless you could its encouragement towards overeating and being a coach potato.

When I was a kid, TV used to run the Three Stooges regularly in glorious black and white. (Can you get it at the DVD rental shop?) Dr Pfeffer would have a fit.

Parrot gnaws Nutt while Balls gets in Brown's ear

Novelists sometimes chose character names to reflect their character's character or interests.* There's probably a term for that practice.

On this basis, Britain currently seems more like a novel:

* the decision to have compulsory sex education (as noted in the previous post) was made by Secretary Balls;

* Professor Nutt has been in the news because of his disputing whether cannabis really does send that many people nuts;

* Professor Nutt has been attacked by Professor Parrott, with some accusing him of parroting conservatism;

* Gordon Brown seems about as convivial and happy as a brown painted room.

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh has taken over authorship of the country.

* (Help, I'm sure someone can improve that sentence!)

Europe, teenagers and sex

Sex and school don’t mix - Times Online

This article starts off with a paragraph which indicates a certain lack of seriousness, but it does eventually make some good points.

The thing is, Britain's response to a very high teenage pregnancy rate is to make sex education completely compulsory from age 15. Currently, parents can "opt out' their kids. Yet, I wonder, just how many parents take that option? Is there any evidence that children who are withheld have a higher rate of sex or pregnancy?

Fans of sex education like to point to Holland, which, as I have noted before, apparently has such open discussion of sex it would make most Australian parents cringe. But as this article notes:

...could it be that, although the Dutch teach their children about sex in graphic detail, their culture — with its rigorous Calvinist and Catholic moral framework, strong family cohesion, low proportion of single parents and, perhaps most significantly, minimal state benefits for teen mums — sends out an unmissable signal that teenage pregnancy is a bad idea.

By contrast, in Britain a pregnant 16-year-old can expect about £200 a week in benefits and possibly her own flat. For girls with limited prospects, often the offspring of teen mums themselves, a marriage to the state is not such a bad option. The taxpayer coughs up while the girl gets the unconditional love and status that being a mum affords.

Someone in comments also notes this:

Sue's comments regarding the importance of relationships with parents and the stability of family life are spot on. A couple of statistics:
For the year 1999, England and Wales teenage pregnancy rate 49 per 1000 of population. For Italy 6.9. For the year 2002 UK marriages ending in divorce 42%. For Italy 10%.
I am prepared to bet that with the Vatican in their midst the sex education delivered by Italian schools is modest compared to the Dutch immersion approach.

In short, it's all rather more complicated than just increasing sex education. Mind you, according to one report, the new sex education will include relationship stuff too (doesn't it already?):

...schools will teach about the importance of marriage, civil partnerships and stable relationships in family life, as well as how to have sex.

Well, I suppose you can't fault the intention, but how successful can mere teaching about stable relationships be when the kids almost certainly are going to model their relationship behaviour on the example of their own domestic home life?

And how does Australia compare? Not so great, with recent estimates of a teenage pregnancy rate of about 39 per 1000, compared to Britain's 42 per 1000.

High consumption

Cannabis takes toll on Aborigines | The Australian

The figures for use of cannabis in some aboriginal communities are startling high:

...cannabis use in remote communities was now as high as 70 per cent of people, with almost 90 per cent of users claiming to be addicted....

In a recent study of three remote Arnhem Land communities, Professor Clough and a team of researchers found that cannabis use exceeded six "cones" daily in almost 90 per cent of users. This was about twice the consumption of regular users elsewhere in Australia.

It's only twice the consumption of regular users elsewhere?

What's that doing there?

I had never seen a photo of the old San Francisco Cliff House before. It was built about 100 years ago, and was in a spectacularly dangerous looking location. A whole gallery of pictures of it can be found via this post. Wikipedia talks about the history of the site here.

Revisiting the War

Spielberg's War of the Worlds was on TV last night, and I hadn't seen it again since it came out in 2005. (I wonder if I have any readers today who were remember my 2005 comments on it. Probably not.)

Anyhow, I have to say again: what a creepy, disturbing, yet quite brilliantly directed movie it is. Yes, it ends abruptly, and via a means which makes little sense now compared to the time when the book was written. I assume that Spielberg and his writers just couldn't come up with an updated variation on the idea. (That was the one - the absolutely only - slightly clever thing about Independence Day. It was a virus that was the aliens downfall, but a computer virus, not a biological one. Unfortunately, that such a crap movie had recently used that updating trick presumably prevented Spielberg's writers from using it.)

While the movie creeped me out again, I was able to concentrate on the direction a little bit more last night. I'll say it again: Spielberg just blows away all the jittery camera, let's-create-hyper-action-by-ultra-fast-editing action directors of today. You know exactly what's going on, and can understand the sequences clearly. He is excellent with tension; he can make Tom Cruise act well.

Enough said? Yes, for now.

Calm Crabb

Annabel Crabb really amuses with this paragraph about a week in which everyone saw the desperation in our PM's media spin blitz:

Having experimented with tub-thumping and name-calling, the Ruddbot has entered a calm, methodical period, during which he calmly, methodically dials the direct line of every radio announcer he has ever met and invites himself on air to talk - with a certain methodical air of calm - about his plan to deal with the 78 Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking, a plan that takes considerable minutes to outline if you are the calm and methodical type, but for the slapdash and reckless can quite reasonably be summarised using just seven letters and one apostrophe: "We'll see."

A simile too far

I won't explaining how I ended up clicking onto this article, but in any event I have a strong urge to share its, um, wisdom:

If we do not have healthy bowel movements two or three times a day, we are like the tunnel that had three trains go into it, and only one train came out. THERE IS A WRECK IN THE TUNNEL. And that wreck in our intestines is the starting point for all illness.

The article also goes on to claim:

Unless your bowel is working perfectly three bowel movements daily, each the diameter of a banana, about a foot long, fully formed and floating on the water in the toilet bowl you need to get your digestive system in order to get healthy, which includes losing weight as a side effect.

Just a tad over-prescriptive, I think.

Rooting for the psychopath

Earlier this week I briefly noted some extracts of a new biography of Ayn Rand, who, puzzlingly, still attracts something of a following if sales of her books are anything to go by.

Well, now there's a even more informative review in Slate of the two (not just one) new books about her.

She was even loopier than I first imagined:

Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."

I take it she would have been laughing and cheering in all the wrong places during Silence of the Lambs. (And probably weeping when Hannibal was so cruelly being carted around on a trolley in a straightjacket.)

Really, I don't know how anyone can trust her take on anything (economics, morality, government, whatever) when she was such a fruitloop.

And also, now that she's been dead for quite a while, isn't there scope for a very funny satirical film about someone like her?

Finally, I get the impression that this bit sums up her most famous novels well:

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.