The mysterious death of British culture

I've touched on these issues before in many posts, but tonight, after watching some British TV, I have a strong urge to rant about the state of British culture.

Of course, it could just be me reaching a premature "things were so much better when I were a lad" stage of my life. But no, it's not me: it's you, formerly great Britain, I am sure. For example:

* Britain's "celebrity culture" is shallow, as it is in all countries, but for some reason the bar seems set especially low in England. I've seen a couple of episodes of "Hestons Feasts" recently. It's a mildly diverting, if over-produced, show in which you learn something interesting about the history of exotic feasts. But it also involves the chef serving his strange, tricky food to a room full of six alleged celebrities. Usually I know one of them who became famous in the 1960's: the rest just seem so, well, incredibly uninteresting. Mind you, their job is just to go "ooh, ahh, what's this I am supposed to eat?" But still...

And as a service to the community, I warn you: if ever a television near you is showing "I'm a celebrity...Get me out of here" run a mile, and don't look back. It's the most excruciating TV ever to blight the medium.

It's like a new definition for horror: "B Grade British celebrity".

* British sitcoms and British movies, with very rare exceptions, have both been in a death spiral for the last 20 years. (Mind you, Australia has never made a completely convincing sitcom, but that's a different story.)

* British TV isn't always like this. But strangely, it usually has to have someone who was popular in the 1970's or 80's for it to be worthwhile. I've thoroughly enjoyed Griff Rhys Jones paddling about the pretty (and sometimes not so pretty) Rivers of England, which finished this week on ABC. And who in their right mind hasn't liked Michael Palin's travel shows? Parkinson was still a decent enough interviewer 'til the end, but the level of interest one could muster in his guests did suffer a severe downturn in his last couple of series.

Can you imagine in 20 years time wanting to watch "Jonathan Ross goes Up the Khyber", or whatever twaddle he would think witty? Graham Norton making witty but interesting cultural comment about some far flung country? I don't think so.

* British public art seems to have become a huge, vacuous joke:

Only last year, exhibitionism was elevated to "art" when people got to do their "thing" on a plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The Turner Prize (which I see only started in 1984) sets international benchmarks for the trivial, stupid, and/or grotesque in the genre, and at the same time seems to suck any sense of fun from the enterprise.

Further evidence this week of the nation's aesthetic judgment having mysteriously evaporated: the gigantic Olympic rollercoaster-after-the-apocalypse tower was not an April Fool's Day after all. It was also the winner of a competition. The winner had previously won the Turner Prize. Maybe the Turner Prize is the black hole through which British artistic taste has been sucked and eviscerated. It's as good a theory as any...

* Is there any current widely recognized British playwright whose works are anticipated by the populace? Not as far as I am aware. All the great playwrights are dead or at the end of their careers, leaving in their wake those who are only interested in social commentary from the perspective of left wing world view.

And, of course, Britain also seems to be the home of the pop song medley masquerading as theatre, which has promptly been exported internationally.

That's a pretty convincing line up of evidence, don't you think?

Just in time for Easter

Eating chocolate 'can cut heart attack and stroke risk'

Eating just one square of chocolate a day can cut the risk of heart attack and stroke by 39%, researchers said today.

Eating 7.5g of chocolate daily also leads to lower blood pressure, a study found.

Researchers in Germany followed 19,357 people aged between 35 and 65 for at least a decade.

Those who ate the most amount of chocolate - an average of 7.5g a day - had lower chances of heart attacks and stroke than those who ate the least amount (1.7g a day on average).

The difference between the two groups amounted to 6g of chocolate - less than one square of a 100g bar.

The study, published in the European Heart Journal, concluded that if those people who ate the least chocolate increased their intake by 6g a day there would be fewer heart attacks and strokes.

That's a tiny amount of chocolate for an effect. Further down it notes:

Frank Ruschitzka, from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), said: "Basic science has demonstrated quite convincingly that dark chocolate particularly, with a cocoa content of at least 70%, reduces oxidative stress and improves vascular and platelet function.

70% cocoa chocolate is not that nice, in my experience, so I'll eat twice as much 40% chocolate instead.

No Kindle for me

Elizabeth Farrelly has a somewhat eccentric column in the Sydney Morning Herald today, with its main point being problems with getting books through an Australian Kindle.

I definitely think it is worth waiting for the new generation of e readers to start being available.

More religion talk. (Hey it is almost Easter)

Christian faith: Calvinism is back / The Christian Science Monitor

Here's a really good article on an alleged revival of Calvinism in the United States. In short, it's said to be a reaction against the "Jesus is your friend," mega-church style of Protestantism that's been the dominant model of late. Well, even if it takes a dose of depressing predestination to get those churches to stop being purely entertainment based worship, maybe that's not so bad?

The question of how one should react to the theological/philosophical issue of predestination is pretty similar to the question of whether we are really just meat robots who don't really have free will at all. Those materialists who say free will is an illusion argue that for society to really work, we still have to act as if we do. (So we don't, for example, let criminals run free because they don't really control their will.) I suppose Calvinists can argue the same - even though you may be pre-destined for Hell, you need to act as if you might get to Heaven. Maybe they argue that lack of knowledge of your predestination means you don't need to feel fatalistic about it. If everyone acted on the fatalistic reality that your eternal home is already determined, the whole damn system just doesn't work.

There, I've found a connection between Calvin and the likes of William James, Hume etc. Well, sort of, and even if I have, no doubt someone else has said this before.

At the end of the CSM article, we read this:

Bestselling religion writer Phyllis Tickle sees the interest in
Calvinism as the first phase of a backlash against the dominant
religious trend of today: the rise of "Emergence Christianity."

Emergence Christianity, which she identifies as a once-every-500-years
religious shift, is less a doctrine or a movement than a postmodern attitude toward religion itself. Loosely organized, it values experimentation over traditional rules and Christian practice. "When things go through this upheaval," Ms. Tickle says, "there's always those who absolutely need the assurance of rules and a foundation."

Or, as Ms. Hagopian puts it with uncompromising Calvinistic clarity: "The
dominant philosophy of American Christianity is so far removed from
biblical truth. Life is not hunky-dory."

Are the liberal Christian denominations which are happy with marrying same sex partners and who think (like priest Peter Kennedy of "St Mary's in Exile") that it doesn't really matter whether or not Jesus Christ even existed an example of "Emergence Christianity"? Possibly, I suppose, but I remain deeply convinced that any essentially non-realist way of thinking about a religion like Christianity is only a way to ultimately decrease its significance, influence and longevity. For that reason, I can't help but feel some empathy with a revival of a thoroughly realist strain of Christianity as in Calvinism.

All about modern nuns

How the health care bill made nuns rad. - By Noreen Malone - Slate Magazine

This is a pretty interesting article on the current state of nun-ship (sorry) in America. They just helped get the Obama health plan passed, against the wishes of the American bishops. (There is another version of that story here.)

As I suspected, it seems to be the more conservative orders (such as the contemplative ones) attracting newcomers at the moment, and "progressive" leadership is actually coming from the older nuns who have been around a while.

Update: for another unusual take on Catholicism, this article in the Guardian about the writer's experiences as an aide at Lourdes ten years ago is quiet interesting, and a little amusing. For example:

There was fierce, sometimes violent, competition between aides from different tour groups, which could make even the simplest tours treacherous. The candlelit procession and mass was notoriously difficult to get into, and hundreds of pilgrims lined up in the evening to be part of it. Instead of queuing, the Italians endeavoured to skip in front of us by burning our arms with their candles. Lining up for blessings in the Basilica of the Rosary, aides from other pilgrimages would kick our shins to get in there first.

It was, she says, quite the party town for the young aides after their hard day's work, but she doesn't paint experience with complete cynicism.

Update 2: for those who like to check out nun blogs (and who doesn't from time to time*) here's a list. And here's an order that looks very conservative, yet just held their first "nun run".

* What? Really?

A multi faith approach

BBC News - India holy man quits after sex claim

Well, as I like to point out how Islam can be, shall we say, overly legalistic about sexual scandal (especially when it concerns Dubai), it's only fair that I note that the Indians (of the other than Muslim variety) also get a bit carried away:

A Hindu holy man in India has quit as head of a religious organisation after police launched a probe into allegations of obscenity against him.

Nithyananda Swami's announcement came weeks after a video emerged apparently showing him engaging in sexual acts with two women.

The guru has said he had done nothing illegal and the video scandal was "a false campaign".

Nithyananda Swami has a huge following in southern India.

The video shocked his devotees and angered locals - his ashram near the southern city of Bangalore was vandalised after TV channels broadcast the video.

Police have launched an investigation into the incident - a senior detective told the BBC that they were investigating whether the guru had "outraged religious feelings" of his devotees.

Ocean acidification and poison seas

CO2 and phosphate availability control the toxicity of the harmful bloom dinoflagellate Karlodinium veneficum

I have commented here before that additional CO2 in the ocean may make some algae grow better, but my guess was that algal blooms are not necessarily something you want to encourage. The article above indicates that this is true, especially for toxin producing algae:

Growth rates or toxicity of K. veneficum could increase substantially in the future with high CO₂ levels in the ocean, depending on P availability, and so interactions between rising CO₂ and eutrophication could cause major shifts in present day patterns of harmful algal toxin production. These results suggest that over the coming decades, rising CO₂ could substantially increase karlotoxin damage to food webs in the often P-limited estuaries where Karlodinium blooms occur.

Eutrophication is additional nutrients in the water, typically from coastal run off. In other words, it would appear that coastal areas near cities that already have occasional toxic algal blooms can expect it to get worse with more CO2 in future.

Here's a good Australian article by a Tasmanian professor on the expected increase in harmful algal blooms. The conclusion:

We can expect: (1) Range expansion of warm-water species at the expense of coldwater species which are driven pole wards; (2) Changes in the abundance and seasonal window of growth of selected HAB species; (3) Earlier timing of peak production of some phytoplankton; (4) Knock-on effects for marine food webs, notably when individual zooplankton and fish grazers are differentially impacted by climate change (“match-mismatch” disturbances). Some harmful algal bloom phenomena (e.g. toxic dinoflagellates benefiting from land runoff and/or water column stratification, tropical benthic dinoflagellates responding to coral reef disturbance) may become worse, while others may diminish in areas currently impacted. The greatest problems for human society will be caused by being unprepared for significant range extensions or the increase of algal biotoxin problems in currently poorly monitored areas, thus calling for increased vigilance in seafood biotoxin monitoring programmes. Predicting the impact of climate change on algal blooms presents a formidable challenge!

Stem cells and snake oil

UK - Stem Cells & Miracles - Foreign Correspondent - ABC

There was an excellent BBC Panorama show on the ABC last night on the fetal stem cell therapy being promoted by shonky doctors and money making clinics in China and other countries.

The interview towards the end with the doctor who was secretly filmed during a high pressure consultation is especially worth watching. The only way he could have sold his therapy harder would be if he had said "you have to take the injection now, right now, as I have another patient outside who'll buy them if you don't."

Suburban failure

From bucolic bliss to 'gated ghetto' - latimes.com

In this story of a new estate near Los Angeles which has suffered badly from the recent financial woes comes this surprising claim:

There are dozens of places like Willowalk, and they are turning into America's newest slums, says Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. With home values at a fraction of their peak, he said, it no longer makes sense to live so far from the commercial centers where jobs are concentrated.

"We built too much of the wrong product in the wrong locations," Leinberger said.

Thanks to overbuilding, demographic changes and shifts in preferences, by 2030 there could be 25 million more suburban homes on large lots than are needed, said Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Utah. Nelson believes that as baby boomers age and as younger generations buy real estate, the population will abandon remote McMansions for smaller homes closer to shops, jobs and the other necessities of life.

A family that bought a house there in 2006 has seen its value drop dramatically:

The Lopez family plans to stick it out, knowing they can't sell their house for anywhere near the $440,000 they paid for it. Based on comparable prices in the neighborhood, the place is probably worth about $170,000 now, and maybe less. They're petitioning their bank for a loan modification.

There was someone on Radio National Breakfast this morning making the same point: a lot of America's housing crisis has been caused by building the wrong type of houses in the wrong locations.

I see his name was Jeb Brugmann, and he also noted that Australia seems to lack the wide range of urban housing that people find attractive in famous cities. I think he's right.

An unlikely solution

Bright water proposal to cut global warming

Harvard University scientist Russel Seitz’s proposal is to use ships to pump tiny “microbubbles,” about 0.05 mm in diameter, into the sea as they travel, in a strategy he terms “Bright Water”. Seitz said the bubbles would, in effect, act as tiny mirrors containing air, and could be created by mixing water supercharged with compressed air with swirling jets of water. This would emulate and amplify a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Using computer modeling, Seitz discovered that a concentration of only one part per million of microbubbles can double the reflectivity of water, and could cool Earth by up to 3°C if the system could be deployed. Adding microbubbles to a square kilometer of ocean is feasible, but Seitz admitted that scaling it to cover an entire ocean would be technically difficult, not because of the energy requirement, which he said would be equivalent to about 1000 windmills, but because of the fact that the bubbles may not last long enough to effectively spread over large areas.

I'm not even sure I should have blogged this, the idea sounds so silly.

Gypsy stories

Four Corners - 29/03/2010: Gypsy Child Thieves

Four Corners had an interesting BBC documentary tonight about the urban gypsies of Europe. It's amazing that their situation seems to change so slowly over time.

The first section was about a Gypsy camp near Madrid, and the conditions were extremely third world, especially for the children. The ineffectiveness of the Spanish government social services in dealing with child thieves the police bring to them was almost laughable.

The fact that fathers get good money for marrying off their 13 year old daughters got a mention too.

I didn't really get to watch the rest of the show carefully, although I did catch some of the segment in Italy, where some charity was making a difference, but a right wing Italian noted that they deserved to killed, and seemingly felt it was a pity that that would be illegal now!

Firefox issue

For those of you using Firefox on an XP computer, have you noticed it slowing down? Over the weekend, I checked and the amount of CPU it is taking up was just continually fluctuating, often up to the 90% range.

It appears to be a problem with the latest version (3.6.2), although I also had the same problem in the 3.6 version before I updated it. I see that people have been complaining about it since 3.5 too.

The specific thread on Mozilla on the problem with 3.6.2 has been marked as "solved", but the answer it refers to is no such thing.

This page talks about the problem generally, but I am bit puzzled why it has only come to light on my computer now.

UPDATE: I seem to have solved the problem by updating both Flash and Java, as some website suggested.

I am tempted to try Chrome now though, as I understand it is starting to provide extensions.

Rare medical condition noted

Schizophrenia in Children: Families Grapple With Costs, Emotional and Financial - ABC News

Tonight I happened to see the ABC news magazine show 20/20 featuring 3 American families with children with schizophrenia.

I knew schizophrenia most commonly was a young adult onset disease; it had never really occurred to me before that there would be some cases of young children suffering with it.

What a horrible disease for parents to face in a child. Oddly, all three featured in this show were girls. I would have expected it to be more common in boys. (Certainly, the average onset age for men is considerably younger than for women.)

It certainly makes for a strong reminder, if one is needed, of the blessings of a routine domestic life.

Racking up the deaths

BBC News - China flooding 'traps 152 miners'

This is a very brief report of yet another coal mining accident in China.

The number of Chinese miners killed every year is simply amazing. In Australia or the US, an accident killing a dozen people is huge news and is viewed as a great tragedy for virtually all of the nation. In China, with (as this article notes) thousands of deaths in the mines every year, it's hard to imagine any but the largest incidents getting much coverage. Some years in the last decade have had close to 7,000 deaths.

Strange how a communist nation manages to do the least to protect its workers.

Yay for John

A Physics Maven’s Take on Skeptical Science - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

I've been a fan of Skeptical Science for quiet a while, and have wondered about its creator John Cook.

Now that his fame has spread world wide, it takes Andrew Revkin of the New York Times to publicise him.

He is not quite what you would expect: studied physics and astrophysics at University, has serious concerns about the environment and AGW, yet is a serious enough Christian to mention it in this interview. This is not exactly a common combination, I'm sure.

He also appears to been born earless, if the crook photo (which I assume he supplied) is anything to go by. I take it as a sign he does not suffer from vanity.

That's big of him

Cleric: Don’t cut too much female genital to avoid sexuality loss | The Jakarta Post

A Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) cleric said on Friday that circumcision on women was not supposed to cause the loss of their sexuality.

“Don’t cut too much. Just cut the small skin on the tip of the clitoris. Otherwise, a woman would lose her sexuality, and you males don’t like that to happen, do you?” prominent cleric Mohammad Masyhuri told a press conference.

Masyhuri, also a member of NU Suriah (lawmaking body), said that a proper female circumcision should not cause any damage to woman genitals. “No bleeding, if you do it properly.”

He suggested that circumcision was conducted on a female baby at the age
of 7 days.

Sort of good news

NASA Study Finds Atlantic 'Conveyor Belt' Not Slowing

Another study finds that the Atlantic conveyor (the current that keeps Europe warmer than it would otherwise be) is not slowing down.  I suppose it's good for North Atlantic bordering countries that there's no imminent ice age; but then again it's not so good that global warming in those regions won't be moderated by cooler ocean water.

Please make the movie

"Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" from Aaron Paul

Promising

How to Train Your Dragon Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

I see that How to Train Your Dragon is receiving very strong reviews. Good news for those of us who like good kids films.

Brave woman

BBC News - Saudi female poet whose verse inflames and inspires