Not worth the effort

Mind Hacks: Paradise learnt

An interesting story here of a man who, starting at the age of 58, has pretty accurately memorised the whole of Paradise Lost (a mere 10,565 lines.) He's now 74 and still got it on (in?) his brain.

Do such amazing feats of memory training help your general cognitive abilities though? Apparently not:

Although not formally tested, JB's everyday memory is apparently normal for his age, with his exceptional memory for Milton's poem apparently arising from his relentless practice and dedication.

This is a common pattern in mental practice or 'brain training' style scenarios where we get better at the tasks we repeat but that improvement doesn't seem to carry over very effectively into other areas of mental life.

So I guess some mornings he still can't find his car keys, but at least he can recite line 8,576 of a poem while he's looking for them.

Smile your way to 100

Longevity subject to lifestyle

Professor Richmond and her team studied 188 Australians who had made it to 100, and found that maintaining social networks, keeping physically and mentally active, and being open to change were common traits.

“About 20 to 30 per cent of the likelihood of living to 100 is because of your genes. But that leaves 70 to 80 per cent up to environmental factors,” Professor Richmond said.

“The major finding of this study is the impact of personality.”

Sounds a little dubious to me, but what do I know?

Plenty more where they came from

There are many photos of lakes and mountains on my hard drive that I am yet to post here, and I may just keep doing it until someone says something nice about any of my photos.

Much trickier than a cat up a tree

Bear rescued from tree in Oxnard, on the way back to wild | L.A. NOW | Los Angeles Times

Have a look at the photo to see what I mean.

Unlucky for some

Are You Living in a Former Meth Lab?

According to this article in Discover, living in a house that used to be a methamphetamine lab is decidedly unhealthy:

The chemicals used in methamphetamine production are highly toxic and can include not only pseudoephenadrine—the main ingredient in meth and active ingredient in decongestants—but also 32 other precursor chemicals. These include acetone, the active ingredient in nail polish remover, and phosphine, a widely used insecticide.

Home-cooking meth spreads toxins to every inch of the room where the meth was cooked and beyond. Nothing escapes contamination—the carpet, walls, furniture, drapes, air ducts, even the air itself becomes toxic. "Ingesting some of these chemicals, even a tiny drop, can cause immediate death," said Smith.

There are specialist meth lab clean up businesses in America:

In dealing with toxic chemicals, most meth lab clean-up crews follow general guidelines. In the room where the meth was made, they scrub all surfaces, repaint the walls, replace the carpets and air filters, and air out the property. However, there are no national standards for meth lab cleanups—regulations differ from state to state. And in some states, getting a license to decontaminate a house is as easy as taking a few hours of class and a written test. "There are some bad certification methods out there. You could be a pizza delivery guy, study for a month, pay $250 and be certified," said Joe Mazzuca, a methamphetamine contamination expert and CEO of Meth Lab Cleanup, a nationwide meth-lab-specific cleanup company based in Boise, Idaho.

Finally, guess the State which is the meth lab capital of the world:

And although meth houses are more concentrated in certain states—Missouri is the meth capitol of the world, with 1,471 labs discovered in 2008 alone—there are meth houses in all fifty states, and they can be found in posh towns.

What a distinction. And why Missouri?

Revkin doesn't care for "clean coal" either

Coal Sans CO2: Appealing Pipe Dream - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

I see Andrew Revkin thinks CO2 capture from coal is a pipe dream, literally:

Overall, I have yet to see anyone rebut the simple calculations of Vaclav Smil, the resource and risk polymath at the University of Manitoba, who has shown how capturing and processing just a small percentage of today’s CO2 from coal combustion would require as much pipeline and other infrastructure as is now used globally to get oil — a costly commodity — out of the ground. Imagine the price required on carbon to make that doable beyond boutique scale.

Great moments in British legal history

Bid to impose asbo for wearing low-slung trousers dropped | Society | The Guardian

Prosecutors have abandoned a legal attempt to make a young man pull his trousers up, it emerged today.

Ellis Drummond, 18, was facing an asbo preventing him from "wearing trousers so low beneath the waistline that members of the public are able to see your underwear". He would have been banned from displaying his underpants anywhere in public in the borough of Bedford, and wearing a hood up in any public place in the area.

Somewhere last week, I think it was in New Zealand, I did spot the lowest worn pants by a stupid teenager ever. I mean, the top of the back of his jeans sat at the base of his backside, so that his entire buttocks would be exposed if it weren't for his underpants. It looked very strange.

Surprised by salmon

During last week's drive through the south island of New Zealand, I was surprised to pass by a couple of salmon farms in the middle of the country, which obviously were based in fresh water. As Tasmanian salmon farming is in the ocean, I kind of assumed that salmon would not happily live all their life in fresh water. Seems I was wrong.

At the Mt Cook Salmon website, they talk of the history of salmon farming in that country:

In 1900 the first attempt was made to ship Sockeye ova (eggs) to New Zealand from Canada which had been gathered from Weaver Creek , British Columbia in 1898. This shipment turned bad en route. A second shipment of 500,000 ova was supplied free of charge by the Canadian Fisheries Department, collected from the tributaries of Shuswap Lake in the Kamloops district of British Columbia. This time 160,000 survived and were hatched at the Hakataramea Hatchery near the Waitaki River .

The bulk were carefully liberated into streams feeding into beautiful Lake Ohau . However, instead of running to the sea, and returning to fresh water to spawn (as is the normal life cycle) the Sockeye developed into a non-migratory population.

This is the only self-sustaining population in the Southern Hemisphere and forms the basis for the fish farmed today by Mt Cook Salmon. Chinook salmon introduced around the same time established normal migratory patterns and can be caught in the major South Island east coast river systems today.

I remember when visiting the Salmon Ponds in Tasmania many years ago (it's a historic trout hatchery, actually), it told the story of how some early fish pioneer tried to introduce salmon to Tasmanian rivers by importing fertilised salmon eggs (not an easy feat when they had to be shipped from England), then releasing them in the rivers and hoping that they would head out to sea and back to the rivers to spawn. They did leave the rivers, but never returned.

I always thought it was a sad image, this man going to the rivers every year for a decade or two, waiting forlornly for his cherished salmon to return.

But now that I think of it, the Salmon Ponds themselves contain some giant salmon, as well as very big trout, in its freshwater ponds, so I must have known then that salmon could spend all their life in fresh water. I must concentrate more on keeping my salmon knowledge current.

Incidentally, I did enjoy one very good salmon meal in New Zealand, in a Japanese restaurant which grilled the skin crispy, had a teriyaki sauce and put it on a bed of wasabi flavoured mashed potato. (The mild wasabi mash was very good of itself.) I thought the salmon was less fatty than Tasmanian salmon, and now I see that Mt Cook Salmon does claim this is a feature of its product:

Our salmon live in fast flowing cold water and develop firmer flesh with less inter-muscular fat. This makes for a tastier firmer textured fish.

Well, another reason to visit New Zealand again.

The shrinking children of Japan

Number of children in Japan falls to record low for 29th year in row | The Japan Times Online

From the report:

In a report issued on the eve of Children's Day, a national holiday, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said kids comprised 13.3 percent of the population as of April 1.

I wonder what the equivalent figure (for under 15 year olds) is in Australia.

Here we go - that just took one Google - it's at about 19%. I thought we might be higher than that.

Not great news for coral

New study sheds light on corals' susceptibility to temperature change | e! Science News

It's about coral and their symbiotic algae (the loss of which causes bleaching), and here's the bottom line:

"The differential mortality that we witnessed suggests that the relationship between certain populations of Pocillopora and the species of algae they associate with is quite stable," said Warner. "And this stability, ultimately, is an Achilles heel for Pocillopora. The inability of the corals to shuffle their symbionts or to establish symbioses with different species of algae means that we may see a significant loss of coral populations in the future, especially if extreme temperature disturbances, such as the cold anomaly we documented in 2008 or the hot anomaly that took place in 1997, become more frequent or severe."

Back and forth on Limbo

A Doctrine in Limbo » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

You can read a long discussion here on the exact nature of the Catholic Church's teaching on Limbo.

All quite arcane, but of some interest.

It also reminds me: in a book I never quite finished on the history of Christianity in Japan, the point was made that the Jesuits found one of the greatest problems was getting people to accept the teaching that their deceased ancestors, who had never heard of Jesus Christ, were simply never able to reach heaven by an unfortunate circumstance of the time in which they had lived. Given the heartfelt reverence with which the Japan viewed their deceased relatives, many felt this was simply a hurdle which prevented them from accepting Christianity.

Priests and models

Catholic sexual abuse scandal sharpens church rift over what a priest should be - CSMonitor.com

A good article here on the debate over what type of priest the Catholic Church should aim for today. The complaint by some is that the current Pope wants to urge a model that some consider inappropriate for the modern, urban setting many work in:

Pope Benedict this spring put forward the Vatican model priest at the end of his letter to the Irish church. Jean Marie Vianney, a 19th century French priest who overcame a lack of education to serve his flock 16 hours a day or more and was known for his radical piety, is the model. Mr. Vianney’s talent for reading thought and tales of his levitation have also brought a cult of mysticism and secrecy around him; he is venerated by hardcore groups like the Society of St. Pius X, whose namesake pope beatified Vianney in 1904.

"Vianney is thought to be a useful model for many new Catholic priests in rural or developing nations," says Andreas Batlogg, editor of the Jesuit-based Catholic intellectual journal Stimmen der Zeit in Munich, Germany.

Yet Benedict’s choice of Vianney caused loud and palpable groans in many parts of US and Europe. Modern-oriented Catholics and theologians see the choice as a political model of a priest closed off from society, overly idealized, hard for young Catholics to relate to, and one whose effect will be to increase a sense of distance between priests and ordinary people, and promote a view of priests more spiritually gifted than regular Catholics.

“We need an example, but this is a pastor of 230 people in a small French village in the 19th century,” says Mr. Batlogg.

Well, more levitating priests would give a certain supernatural zing to going to Mass that's been missing for a while!

I don't mean to sound too sarcastic, though. My support for relaxation of the celibacy rule means the priesthood would comprise more a leadership which is not as set apart from the laity as the priesthood of old. But, with fewer and fewer priests, there is no doubt that more services (not actual Masses, but whatever they call the distribution of Communion when a priest is not available) will be lead by non-priests anyway. I would prefer to have married priests than these Mass substitutes that people envision.

Still, I can see the appeal of a priesthood that does retain some degree of separation from everyday life, so my feelings about this are somewhat mixed.

A funny line

From Mind Hacks:

The Independent covers the frankly mind-bending news that David Cronenberg is to make a film on the relationship between Freud and Jung with Keira Knightley playing Jung's lover. I would have gone for Bruckheimer for director myself.

An unhealthy habit

Vitamin D deficiency in pregnant Arab women requires urgent attention

I suppose Catholic nuns must have had the same deficiency, but then they weren't usually pregnant either.

Proof of holiday

Guess where I have been, from my photographic clues:

This country has very pretty ducks...


and enormous pigeons:


It has impressive bodies of water, that come with mountains...


and ducks:


Through the mountains there are some roads:


and some dangerous-looking landing approaches (click to see that white dash really is a jet):


(You can click on all the photos to get the best impression, by the way.)

Even the mushrooms are pretty in a storybook sort of way:


The accommodation has improved since the 1860's goldrush:


Now, even the shopping centres come with ridiculously scenic backdrops:


It has snow, though not much in autumn:


But it does have autumn colours:


There are more lakes, and lots of people willing to throw themselves towards them from great heights:


And did I mention ducks on the lakes?:


Yes, it's New Zealand, a country so photogenic that I suspect merely sending the camera alone via a stamped self addressed parcel would still result in a bunch of pretty landscapes imprinting themselves on the memory card.

There are some more things I need to say about NZ, but it will have to wait until my mind resumes full blogging mode.

Just in case you were wondering

I'm travelling. Back soon.

Made with the approval of aliens

I was vaguely aware of Australian based director Phillipe Mora, who seems to have made a remarkable number of barely noticed films in his day, but I hadn’t recalled that he directed the alien abduction movie “Communion”.  (Not that I ever saw that one either.)  In any event, for some reason, Mora is talking in the Sydney Morning Herald today about how it came to be made, giving us this amusing anecdote:

In 1986 I dined with Dr Andrija Puharich, famed para- psychologist, Tesla expert, UFO proponent and magic-mushroom maven was was reportedly funded by the CIA in the 1950s to undertake mind-control research. He introduced me and my wife to a little person, a woman he described as his "psychic bodyguard". Our hostess was a movie executive and we were to discuss my forthcoming film, Communion. Halfway through, Puharich excused himself, saying he had to telephone the aliens to get their OK on me. I said to the psychic bodyguard, "I didn't know the aliens had a phone number?" She replied, "Oh yes, they do." Puharich returned and declared, "Everything is fine; they approve you!" I was hoping he'd say they would also finance the movie or guarantee distribution.

Of course, this anecdote may not be entirely true, but I like it anyway.  It’s certainly less cringe-worthy than a certain other anecdote about Australian film maker circles.

One of the secrets of life

Richard Glover writes today about the European travel disruptions:

One woman from Birmingham told the Herald midweek that she was staggered when informed she might have to wait a fortnight before she could travel home: “I passed out, just fainted, from the sheer shock,” she said.

Really? The news was so unexpected she was rendered unconscious? Is Sydney Airport now like the scene of a Jim Jones massacre — scores of people flat on their back mumbling, “the horror, the horror”?

Personally, I feel like fainting when told that flying is possible: me and 400 people inserted into a metal tube and then hurled into the sky in the expectation we will be served very small packets of peanuts and then land, some hours later, in a different country.

I like that last paragraph in particular.   I think I may have said this before here, but like Richard, I have never gotten over the technological wonder that is flying.   Yet I don’t think that I would like a job that involved flying so often that it did become routine and I no longer reflected on how improbable it is that I am having a drink while hurtling higher than Everest through thin, instantly asphyxiating air of Antarctic temperature from which I am separated by bits of not-so-thick perspex and aluminium skin, all while watching some crappy movie.   (Well, mostly crappy.  The only exception I’ve experienced to the normal rule that an inflight movie can never be absorbing  was Shakespeare in Love.  Yes, I felt a bit teary by the end, but then maybe that was partly the effects of jet lag too.  This was especially remarkable given that I was viewing it on one of those old blurry projector systems.)

I imagine that too much flying is probably like living beside a beautiful Australian beach, which I did for a couple of years some time ago.  At one level you can still appreciate the beauty, but there’s no doubt it does become less of a wonder over time.   I certainly remember that the longer I lived there, the inclination to go for a swim got more and more put off  until the most perfect of weather conditions.   No, it’s better to have the enjoyment of going there with just enough frequency that it never completely loses novelty.

So this is one of Opinion Dominion’s secrets of life:  know enough to be impressed by flight, but if you start doing it so much that you no longer get at least a bit excited by the prospect, start doing it less.

Top marks for Brisbane house

Dezeen » Blog Archive » Hill End Ecohouse by Riddel Architecture

Don't be put off by the fact that it's called an "eco house".  This is a very cool looking residence, built in a very innovative, or at least rarely attempted, way.  What's more, it's in my home town and it has made slick design/architecture website Dezeen.  I'm very impressed.

The dulcet tones return

For those who just can't enough of William Shatner's unique way of mauling a song in a completely unselfconscious fashion, here''s the latest example hot off Youtube: