An old debate

The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate | Cosmic Variance

It's an old topic, the question of the exact nature of morals. Cosmic Variance, which always takes an atheist/scientific take on things, nonetheless has an interesting post (and comments following) debating the issue of the subjectivity of morals and related topics.

Looks good, but a bit small?

Samsung Announces eReader Launch For The US Market

You can write notes on this one, and this feature sounds interesting:

Samsung eReader users will also be able to take advantage of breakthrough Barnes & Noble features, such as the industry-first LendMe technology which enables consumers to lend a wide selection of eBooks to friends free of charge for up to 14 days. Just choose the book you want to share and send it to your friend’s Samsung eReader or a host of other computer and mobile devices with free Barnes & Noble eReader software.

The boy Ellen

Constance McMillen case: proms as gay-rights battleground

So, the ACLU sued a school district to try to force it to re-instate a prom cancelled so as to avoid a lesbian bringing her girlfriend. Where exactly does the ACLU gets its funding for such crucial legal cases?

But the main point of the post is indicated in the title: I sometimes see bits of Ellen DeGeneres' show when channel surfing at night, and I had been meaning to note the fact that she has had a "makeover" which has moved her image unambiguously into the androgynous zone. (Yes, that's a pleasingly contradictory sentence, no?) You can see a photo of her interviewing the miffed Prom-less teenage lesbian at the link above.

I always used to think DeGeneres had a likeable sort of face, even though I pretty much can't stand her chat show for more than 5 minutes. As a figurehead for the gay and lesbian political movement, her image was at least non-confrontational, and her self-deprecating comedy routines perhaps helped too. She was bearable in small doses, unlike the other famous TV lesbian Rosie O'Donnell, who is (good Lord no) going to be back on TV soon.

But with this boyish haircut and even more manly dress than before, well, she's moved well out of the "girl next door who just happens to like girls" vibe that she used to represent. To me, she now looks kind of mean and humourless; but that's how I interpret nearly all short haired butch lesbianism. (Sorry, all you nice and sweet examples of the genre out there, somewhere.)

I wonder if it will hurt her crossover appeal somewhat with the heterosexual viewers. (Mind you, her audiences always appear to be simply adulatory, for reasons I don't grasp.)

Triumph of social networking

Internet casual sex is blamed for rise in syphilis

People using social networking sites for casual sex are to blame for a four-fold increase in syphilis, a director of public health said today.

Sensitive Singaporeans

Apology - Correction - NYTimes.com

Important date noted

Happy birthday, William Shatner | Hero Complex | Los Angeles Times

He's just turned 79.  When he finally dies, I hope he's prepared some bizarre video to be played at his funeral.  

Science news of note

* "cold fusion" still getting some research, including in China, it seems. When it will produce enough heat at reasonable cost to be useful, though, still seems anyone's guess.

* another book on the universe as giant quantum computer gets a good review. Not entirely sure what the implications of that are.

* The Economist's long article on climate science last week was very good, arguing that the uncertainties still existing are no reason not to take action. Hear hear.

* Don't worry, you may as well keep eating meat even as you argue against the coal being burned.

* One day, I expect to be able to catch a scramjet to space. Australians are still working on it.

Interesting reasoning

Minister calls anti-smoking edict ‘unwise’ | The Jakarta Post

Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali has criticized Indonesia’s
second-largest Muslim organization for its anti-tobacco edict, calling
on it to “act more wisely” and not “cause public restlessness”.

The organization, Muhammadiyah, which has around 30 million followers
across the country, last week declared smoking to be haram, or forbidden
under Islamic law.

The edict has sparked protests, particularly from the country’s tobacco industry and groups protesting the perceived meddling by religious groups in private affairs....

Suryadharma added he did not agree with Muhammadiyah’s branding of smoking as haram, saying he believed Islam’s original stance on tobacco was makruh (frowned upon) but not haram.

“Unless it poses a direct threat to human health, such as by causing heart disease, then smoking should not be haram,” he said.

Wish I was there

My stressful fortnight begins at work. Not sure how often I will post.

Meanwhile, I've been fiddling with 2 ways to blog better. One is Scribefire, a Firefox add on that would be good if it always worked properly. At first, it was adding unwanted tracker code (until I realised how to turn that feature off.) Then it started stuffing up the formatting of indented quotes, requiring me to log into Blogger and fix up the edits there. It did, however, allow me to post larger sized pictures than what appears when adding a photo with Blogger. (Hence the larger the normal photo of the dog and the roses last week.)

Getting sick of its recent formatting issues, today I've loaded Windows Writer, which also allows posts like this one to be prepared and then published. It seems to specialise in giving more options with photos, such being able to add the photo and then crop and adjust it quite a bit within the unpublished post.  That’s quite clever, I think, and lets me easily tart up an old photo on my hard drive like this:

It seems pretty clever software, but as often happens, I actually would like some combination of features from both Scribefire and Writer to be in the one software.  Oh well.

Bad figures

Bubble prophet fears new disaster | The Japan Times Online

Quite a lengthy article here on the shaky looking future for Japanese public debt. The pessimists suggest government bankruptcy and hyperinflation in the not so distant future:

Japan's present debt-to-GDP ratio is only comparable with what it was at the end of World War II. At that time, the only way the government could reduce the debt was through hyperinflation, which wiped out much of the people's wealth with skyrocketing prices.

"I can't tell exactly what will happen (this time), but what actually happened after the war was that the price level surged 60 times in just over four years," Noguchi said.

"If the same thing happens again, a ¥10 million bank account will have the same net value of just ¥100,000 today. It's actually possible," he warned.

The answer, some suggest, is a serious increase in sales tax now, but it's a country not exactly known for having brave politicians.

Also in The Japan Times, land values dropped pretty substantially last year throughout the country.

Evil in pearls

The ABC News website today came up with this cracker of a photo of you-can-see-who, looking like Hitler's nastier grandmother, or something.

The problem with iced tea

Drug accused woman freed after substance found to be iced tea

Now for a problem in the Australian legal system. The poor woman:

A Filipina arrested last weekend at Melbourne Airport and charged with drug importation was freed today after the substance was found to be iced tea....

She had been charged with importing a commercial quantity of a border control drug and had been in custody since Saturday.

The court heard the three 800-gram packages of iced tea bought in the Philippines, tested positive on Saturday to a swab and again, in a presumptive test.

A drug dog also indicated a positive result for narcotics when it checked the packages.

But defence barrister Michael Penna-Rees told the court final analysis of the substance by the Australian Federal Police found it was lemon-flavoured iced tea.

He said there had previously been incidents of the tea being wrongly identified as a drug, which in this case was wrongly identified as methylamphetamine and then amphetamine.

I see she got $5000 costs awarded to her. I hope her lawyers, who surely didn't have a hell of a lot to do, aren't taking it all.

Jail for thought crimes

BBC News - Dubai jails Indian pair for 'sexy texts'

Steamy text messages have resulted in a three-month jail sentence for an Indian man and an Indian woman in Dubai.

Judges ruled that they had planned to "commit sin", a reference to an extramarital affair - which is illegal in the United Arab Emirates.

The unnamed pair, aged 47 and 42, were working as cabin crew for Dubai's Emirates airline....

The court said there was not enough evidence to determine whether the man and the woman had actually had an affair, which could have brought a harsher sentence.

What a joke of a legal system.

Small market

American space firm seeks professional astronauts - Telegraph

As opposed to those shonky, backyard operating, fly-by-night kind you see on A Current Affair all the time.

Let the Scientologists deal with it

Rogue star set on collision

I'm a bit slow posting on this one, but here it is anyway:

There is a high probability our solar system will feel the effect of a close encounter from a nearby star, according to a new study.

The star, known as Gliese 710, could disrupt planetary orbits and send a shower of comets and asteroids towards the inner planets when it passes in 1.5 million years time.

The only people alive today who'll need to worry about this are the Scientologists in Sea Org who have signed the billion year contract. Suckers.

Why impossible here?

Study: Daylight saving time a waste of energy

I didn't know this:

The US state of Indiana has 92 counties, but until 2006 only 15 of
them adjusted their clocks for daylight saving time, with the remainder
keeping standard time all year, at least partly to appease farmers who
did not want the change.

That's exactly what people have suggested for Queensland: the South East Corner do daylight saving, but not the rest of the State. The line could easily be drawn through the lightly populated rural stretch between Ipswich and Toowoomba, from the border up to just north of Noosa.

Anyway, Indiana shows that it doesn't save energy there. As you expect, the problem is airconditioning:

Kotchen and Grant's work reinforces the findings of an Australian
study in 2007 by economists Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who studied the extension of daylight saving time for two months in New South Wales and Victoria for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They also found an increase in energy use.

Daylight saving was initially introduced, and has been extended,
because it was believed to save energy, but the studies upon which this
idea was based were conducted in the 1970s. A big difference between
then and the present is the massive increase in the take-up of air
conditioning. In hot periods daylight saving time means air conditioners tend to be run more when people arrive home from work, while in cooler periods more heating is used.

Just give us solar panels to run our airconditioners, and we'll be OK.

Reason to be sceptical

Iron Fertilization In Ocean Nourishes Toxic Algae - Science News

It's a pity that an idea that initially sounded like a good candidate for geo-engineering to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere now seems to have many potential adverse consequences.

Just shows the importance of actually reducing the production of CO2 in the first place.

Blog added

I'll be adding a new blog to the blogroll (under "the meaning of life" category): Neuroskeptic. Found via Mind Hacks, it contains so many fascinating and well written posts that I wanted to bring it to people's attention. This latest one about quitting tobacco is a good example.

Where's the truth on soil carbon?

Abbott carbon plan 'unworkable'

From the report:

TONY ABBOTT'S ''direct action'' climate strategy would reduce emissions by only half as much as the Coalition claims because it made over-optimistic assumptions about the amount of carbon that could be stored in soil, a study suggests.

Soil carbon accounted for 60 per cent of the proposed emission reductions in Mr Abbott's climate policy, or about 85 million tonnes of carbon a year by 2020.

But according to the analysis, only 27 million tonnes a year is possible and only 18 million tonnes at the low price the Coalition has budgeted to pay for soil carbon from its multibillion-dollar ''direct action'' emissions reduction fund.

Last month the Coalition said its scheme would match the government's promise to cut emissions by at least 5 per cent by 2020, but would do this by buying abatement directly from farmers and industry - not by putting any price on carbon.

But the analysis, by ClimateWorks - a partnership between the Myer Foundation and Monash University - and McKinsey management consultants, suggests the scheme would either deliver far smaller emission cuts than the Coalition claims or would cost far more than the $3.2 billion budgeted over the first four years.

It seems to me that there are dubious claims being made by some scientists about the potential for soil carbon in Australia. I don't have time to search it out now, but a few weeks ago there was a woman talking on Phillip Adam's Late Night Live about soil carbon having a huge potential, even greater than what the Opposition seemed to allow for it. I thought her claims sounded far fetched, and this report indicates I might be right.