Seals falling like leaves

Elephant Seals Take Naps During Slow Dives Through the Sea

An oddly charming image of how elephant seals may sleep:

The monitors revealed that the seals periodically flip onto their backs and slip into slow, spiraling dives. The seals wobble as they drift down, and most of the time their bodies follow circular paths toward the bottom of the sea, said study co-author Russel Andrews…. “[They] resemble a leaf that has dropped from a tree branch and is falling toward the ground, fluttering from side to side,” he said [National Geographic]. It seems likely, the scientists say, that the seals catch a quick nap during these long drifts; in fact, once in a while they strike bottom without even noticing.

I wonder if submarines feel an occasional thud from a falling seal.

One other thing I didn't know about them:

These marine mammals undertake epics migrations of thousands of miles, in which they might not return to land for as long at eight months.

Oysters and risk

Is protecting consumers from uncooked oysters a rotten plan? - Slate Magazine

There's a discussion here of the reasons the FDA in America is banning the sale of raw Gulf oysters in summer: there is a nasty disease that can be caught from them, but nearly always only by people with underlying ill health. The disease does sound unpleasant:

On the unpleasant-experience scale, going septic from Vibrio vulnificus has got to rank right up there with acute radiation poisoning. Fever burns you up; big, ugly blisters bust out on your skin; and you wander into the hospital forgetting your name. These bloodstream infections, though rare, are so fast and furious that only 50 percent survive them. Others lose their limbs.

The FDA's answer is something I've never heard of before:
pasteurised oysters!:

A lot of oyster aficionados say the processed oysters lack the flavor of the fresh raw product. Too rubbery, too cooked-tasting, they say. The FDA says the processes "retain the sensory qualities of raw product," and double-blind consumer surveys don't show much of a difference in perception.

And then, there is the question of priorities here:

...coming down on the oyster is kind of an odd move for FDA to be making in the context of much larger food-safety issues that haven't been addressed. Nasty as Vibrio vulnificus is, it's a perfectly natural bacterium that's always been present in oysters. In the meantime, other bacteria have evolved in our factory-farming system to new levels of virulence and spread with little FDA control. (Legislation is pending in Congress.) Strains of salmonella, E. coli, listeria, campylobacter, and other microbes together kill an estimated 5,700 people a year in the United States. Yet few are calling for all chicken to be irradiated or all eggs to be pasteurized.

I guess you would have to compare rates of infection per quantity consumed, but it does sound like an over-reaction.

I don't eat a huge amount of oysters (my annual consumption of mussels would be much higher.) But neither has struck me down yet.

The Garfield technique

It seems that this was only recently posted to Youtube. It will only take up 12 seconds of your life, so what's the risk?

Trouble ahoy

Little Cargo, Loads of Debt - NYTimes.com

It turns out that many European banks are facing write downs due to bad loans to the shipping industry:

Banks with large shipping industry portfolios — among them Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds, and HSH Nordbank and Commerzbank in Germany — could face meaningful write-downs as ship owners confront plummeting charter rates from a 25 percent drop in global trade.

One analyst says:

“We estimate that there will be a 50 percent oversupply in container ships,” Mr. Brahde said. “And in the next five or six months you will see more banks repossessing ships. It is not life or death, but for those with real exposure there will be problems.”

I'm not exactly sure of the point of repossessing a container ship if, as the article suggests, a large oversupply will mean there is not much of a market in used vessels. But what do I know.

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.