Living up to its reputation

BBC News - In Paris, the customer is not always right

Here's a somewhat amusing story of the famously surly service in Paris. (I visited once for a few days in the 1980's, and yes, the service for a foreigner barely able to cope with ordering a steak was pretty crook. But in a way, my travelling companion and I found it kind of amusing that it lived up to its reputation.)

There is a reason offered for this attitude, but I am not really convinced:

The revolution of 1789 has burned the notion of equality deep into the French psyche and a proud Parisian finds it abhorrently degrading to act subserviently...

In America, your waiter comes to your restaurant table to tell you his name is Joe. Here, your waiter expects to be addressed formally as Monsieur, in exactly the same way he will address you.

It is made clear from the start that no-one has the upper hand. The strict code of manners in Paris is a deliberate class-leveller.

Actually, I thought people sometimes complain that service in America was kind of surly in its own way now, with the reliance on tips to make any kind of decent living meaning that waiters will expect a decent tip regardless of the level of service offered.

And of course, I reckon the best service in the world comes from Japan. But commit a crime, and all bets are off. (See previous post.)

Punishment in Japan

Record 85% favor death penalty | The Japan Times Online

Wow. Amnesty International presumably has its work cut out for it in Japan.

Mind you, according to reports in the mid 1990's, prisoner treatment in Japan was so bad they might not thing execution is so bad. I wonder if things have improved since then?

Serious TV

Four Corners - 08/02/2010: A Good Death

When I first saw the topic for tonight's Four Corners (four terminally ill people let the program follow them in their last months) I thought that it was likely to be yet another bunch of pro-euthanasia people wanting publicity.

But from the program description, it's all about a palliative care centre in Sydney (and a Catholic one at that), so it's not what I expected.

A couple of years ago I mentioned that the Health Report on Radio National had a surprisingly good segment on palliative care. It's good to see occasional coverage of alternatives to euthanasia on "our" ABC.

And just before Four Corners, I see that Australian Story is about Red Symons and a fight with brain cancer that one of his sons had to go through when he was only 4. (He survived, but the family kept it quiet all these years.) Should be worth watching.

Christmas break 2009

I haven't got around to posting about the short Christmas holiday to Ballina, Northern New South Wales.

In 2008, the family made a brief incursion into Byron Bay (warning - best not attempted in peak holiday season), which at that time was the furthest south I had ever been along the northern NSW coast. (As I noted recently, the ocean does get cold very fast one you cross the border.)

Late last year, we started looking for somewhere to stay in the Christmas - New Year week, and found the Ramada Hotel & Suites at Ballina. It's a very new place, was pretty good value and had vacancies. I can recommend it.

The one bedroom suites are very nice, with a kitchenette, two big LCD TVs and a pretty large balcony. If you are on the side facing the Richmond River, you get pretty nice views too:


There's a good Indian restaurant downstairs, and not a bad Italian one as well. The main street of town is a block away. The beaches are only a short drive away, although you could walk a bit and just swim in the river if you wanted to. Here's a view of the town from the local lookout:


The coastal drive from Ballina up to Lennox Head is particularly nice. Here's a north looking photo just before Lennox Head, with Byron Bay in the distance:


The best thing about Lennox Head is Lake Ainsworth, a freshwater tea tree stained lake just across from the surf beach, which has the very nice feature of being exquisitely warm when the ocean is cold:


One other tourist place just outside of Ballina is the tea tree plantation of Thursday Plantation, which makes all those tea tree oil products. It features a free, though mosquito infested, maze which contains odd bits of artwork, such as these which seem to have gone missing from a scary sequence in a Harry Potter film:


Yes, despite some less than ideal weather for much of the time, we were suitably impressed by Ballina and environs, and decided we would particularly like to visit Lennox Head again. But let's end with the traditional sunset shot (I thought the dark rays were a little odd):



(As always, you can click on the photos to enlarge.)

A plainer form of CO2 cap

Lexington: A refreshing dose of honesty | The Economist

The Economist seems pretty impressed with the relative simplicity of this alternative proposal in American to "cap and trade":

Enter Maria Cantwell, the junior senator from Washington state. She is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend”. Under her bill, the government would impose a ceiling on carbon emissions each year. Producers and importers of fossil fuels will have to buy permits. The permits would be auctioned, raising vast sums of money. Most of that money would be divided evenly among all Americans. The bill would raise energy prices, of course, and therefore the price of everything that requires energy to make or distribute. But a family of four would receive perhaps $1000 a year, which would more than make up for it, reckons Ms Cantwell. Cap-and-dividend would set a price on carbon, thus giving Americans a powerful incentive to burn less dirty fuel. It would also raise the rewards for investing in clean energy. And it would leave all but the richest 20% of Americans—who use the most energy—materially better off, she says.

Ms Cantwell’s bill is refreshingly simple. At a mere 40 pages, it is one-thirty-sixth as long as the monstrous House bill (known as “Waxman-Markey”, after its sponsors), which would regulate everything from televisions to “bottle-type water dispensers” and is completely incomprehensible to a layman. Instead of auctioning permits to emit, Waxman-Markey gives 85% of them away, at least at first. This is staggeringly inefficient: permits would go to those with political clout rather than those who value them most. No one is proud of this—Mr Obama wanted a 100% auction—but House Democrats decided that the only way to pass the bill was to hand out billions of dollars of goodies to groups that might otherwise oppose it. (There was plenty of pork left over for its supporters, too.)

Certainly, it would seem that Rudd' CPRS has much the same deficiencies as the Waxman-Markey proposal.

I wonder if anyone has modelled this simpler suggestion for Australia?

Cheers

Whisky recovered after 100 years on ice

Five crates of whisky and brandy belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after being buried for more than 100 years under the Antarctic ice, explorers said on yesterday.

The spirits were excavated from beneath Shackleton's Antarctic hut which was built in 1908.

It's not confirmed yet that there are intact bottles inside the crate, but if there is, what should they do with it? I get the feeling that auctioning some bottles for some charity would be just as good a use as keeping it in a museum.

How to annoy the Left

The New Abstinence-Education Study Is Good News. So Why Are Liberals Freaking Out?

A good post here about the Left's seeming annoyance that any type of abstinence based sex education could possibly work.

The type of programme the subject of this study is described as follows:

...the study authors looked at African-American middle-school students in the Northeast who enrolled in an abstinence-only program (no instruction on contraceptives) and were taught, sans moral or religious arguments, that they should delay sex until they were ready. Marriage was notably left out of it.

The students in this program were more likely to delay sex in the two years after the program, as opposed to those who enrolled in no program or those who were instructed in safe sex.

As the post further notes:

The generally negative reaction from the left really gets at how incredibly polarized the sex-education debate has become, to the point where supporters of comprehensive sex education can barely mumble a word of praise for a successful program.

Honour killing reaches a new low

Turkish teenager buried alive because friendship with boys shamed family - Times Online

The father and grandfather of a Turkish teenager are to face trial for burying her alive because they were concerned that her friendship with boys had brought dishonour on their family.

Although honour killings are not infrequent in Turkey, the especially gruesome manner of Medine Memi’s death has shocked the nation.

A coroner said that Medine had been discovered bound and lifeless in sitting position in a 2m hole dug beneath a chicken coop outside the family’s house in the town of Kahta in Southeastern Turkey, 40 days after she had disappeared. The hole had been cemented over.

According to a post-mortem examination the large amount of soil in her lungs and stomach showed that she had been buried while conscious and suffered a slow and agonising death.

The circumstances get worse:

It also emerged that Medine had repeatedly tried to report to police that she had been beaten by her father and grandfather days before she was killed. “She tried to take refuge at the police station three times, and she was sent home three times,” her mother, Immihan, said after the body was discovered in December.

Medine’s father is reported as saying at the time: “She has male friends. We are uneasy about that.”

Who is responsible for this headline?

Learning from climate's sedimental journey

I'm warning you, I'm ringing the Bad Pun Police now.

How will this play out in Australia?

What Will Obama's Energy Bill Look Like Without Cap-and-Trade? - The Atlantic Business Channel

Interesting post here suggesting that Obama is going to abandon cap and trade for now (due to the impossibility of getting it through his Senate) and basically come up with a plan of incentives, just like Tony Abbott's plan.

How will this play out politically here? Abbott can claim that his plan is now like the US one. But, as the above article notes, every credible commentator believes that is a formula for achieving next to nothing.

It seems to me more and more likely that Rudd here should do a deal with the Greens that sets a low carbon price and leaves open future changes if ETS's do start taking off in enough other countries.

I suspect that if it was done quickly, it would deflect the "new tax" scare campaign of the Liberals by the time an election came around at the end of the year.

Being an average intellect is not so bad

You don't have to be bipolar to be a genius – but it helps - Science, News - The Independent

I find it pretty laughable that in the last bit of this article they list creative people who have claimed to be bipolar, and include Stephen Fry and Sting. Great Britain much be running out of creative geniuses.

Good idea

OECD queries cost of new broadband network | The Australian

...the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Australia desk, Claude Giorno, called on the Rudd government to apply more rigorous cost-benefit analysis to its infrastructure spending, including its $43 billion broadband network. Mr Giorno said "questions need to be answered" about Labor's broadband network because of the amount of spending involved and the apparent lack of any cost-benefit analysis.

The Coalition's plan was substantially better for a country like ours.

Another late TV recommendation

Monster Moves

SBS has moved Mythbusters from Saturday night to Monday, but new episodes are showing (yay.)

In the old Saturday night 7.30 slot they are showing (for a short time, anyway) Monster Moves, about how they manage to relocate buildings. It was very interesting and impressive show last week, I thought.

It looks like its been on Discovery channel for some time (see link above) but I had never seen it before.

A pretty remarkable advance

Cold Comfort: Young Women with Cancer Can Freeze an Ovary to Keep Kids in the Picture

Young women who have to undergo cancer treatment which might destroy their fertility will soon have this option:

Before starting cancer treatment, one walnut-size ovary is removed in a 30-minute, minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure. The tissue is then cut into pieces the size of rice grains and flash frozen in liquid nitrogen at temperatures nearing –200 degrees Celsius by a process called vitrification.

After the treatment regime is completed, should the survivor choose to become pregnant, the tissue is thawed and re-implanted onto the surface of the remaining ovary or the ligament next to the fallopian tube. Four months later—the time it takes for thawed primordial follicles (the functional units of the ovary) to mature and start ovulating—the survivor can conceive without hormones and in vitro fertilization, making the procedure a "natural" and effective way to preserve fertility in young women and girls with cancer, says Sherman Silber, director of Saint Luke's Hospital's Infertility Center of Saint Louis.

Small mystery explained

Which e-reader will conquer Japan? | Japan Pulse

When I was last in Japan, I asked some people if they knew of the Sony e-reader, which I was hoping I might be able to buy and use in Australia. However, they didn't know about it.

This article explains why. (Short version, an early version of it was a market failure, and Sony stopped selling them in 2007. They are now considering a come back in the market, because it has sold pretty well in the US and England.)

As for buying them here: I thought I read the other day that they were finally going to start selling them, but now I can't find the story. Maybe I was dreaming...

On the US abandoning space

Obama Budget Plan Grounds NASA Despite Increased Funding - TIME

Not a bad column here (with interesting comments following) on the bleak looking future for people in space.

An odd urban legend from Japan

‘Ririkan’ fast-food mystery meat ::: Pink Tentacle

Interesting post here about an urban myth from Japan that involves imaginary Australian giant rats.

Modern marriage in Saudi Arabia

gulfnews : 12-year-old Saudi girl drops divorce requests: reports

Riyadh: A 12-year-old Saudi girl has dropped her petition to divorce an 80-year-old man her father forced to marry in exchange for a dowry, according to media reports on Tuesday.

The girl and her mother reportedly withdrew the case on Monday in a court in Buraidah in Al Qasim province.

The girl told the court that her marriage to the man was done with her agreement, according to Okaz newspaper.

According to reports, the girl's father, who is separated from her mother, arranged her marriage to the 80-year-old in exchange for a dowry payment of $22,667 (Dh83,414).

An interesting point

Abbott's great big axe | Alan Kohler | News | Business Spectator

Alan Kohler is one of the few commentators to give more-or-less support to the coalition policy (well, he calls it "clever" anyway), and he makes this interesting point:

....the coalition is proposing to pay the Latrobe Valley companies to convert from brown coal to gas. There are a few other ideas tacked on to make it look like a policy, not a deal, but that’s the guts of it.

It’s a good idea – first proposed in Business Spectator last November. I’m not sure the amount of money nominated – a total of $3.2 billion, with up to $2.55 billion available for power station conversion – will be enough, but it’s an opening gambit.

Hunt spelled it out towards the end of yesterday’s press conference when the journalists were nodding off listening to Tony Abbott, so what he said has been largely ignored.

He said: “One of the large power companies has provided us with their advice. Because it’s commercial-in-confidence, they didn’t want it released – but they provided us with their advice that they could convert from coal to gas for $13 per tonne under this system.

“Now we want to check that, but … the oldest and least efficient of the power providers has said to us that under the government’s ETS we’re just not going to be able to afford the capital to transition because we will be struggling just to survive… Under this they’ve said that if our balance sheets are clear and there’s an incentive to change from coal to gas, this is very attractive and we are more likely rather than less likely to change under this system.”

But the fly in the ointment is this:

Presumably Tony Abbott didn’t just announce a deal with the owners of Yallourn and Hazelwood because firstly Greg Hunt didn’t have to enough time to negotiate one, and secondly because saying you’re going to hand over large dollops of cash to Hong Kong and British companies is not as good politically as saying “No Great Big New Tax” over and over (and over).

This leaves a big opening to Labor to exploit.

The other problem for Abbott is that no one believes that big enough changes can be done without raising some extra money to pay for it. If he really wants an alternative that is simpler to understand, he should go for an actual low carbon tax with revenue devoted to cleaner energy research and deployment.

Sickly drinks may may make you sick

Energy drinks 'increase heart attack risk' - ABC News

I've never understood the success of the energy drink market. They are uniformly sickly sweet (even those with artificial sweetener) and while I know younger people have a greater tolerance for sweetness until their palate gets a bit more mature, the taste of these products has always seemed over the top.

So it's interesting to note that they may be positively dangerous as well:

Gulping down a single energy drink can significantly boost the blood pressure in healthy adults, according to new Australian research.

The work by researchers at the University of Adelaide and Royal Adelaide Hospital shows that the popular drinks, used by young clubbers, exercise enthusiasts and sleep-deprived mothers, can also increase the stickiness of the blood and damages blood vessel function.