An odd connection

Gut bacteria may contribute to autism - health - 07 June 2010 - New Scientist

Children with autism appear to have a characteristic chemical signature in their urine which might form the basis of an early diagnostic test for the condition.

The finding also adds weight the hypothesis that substances released by gut bacteria are contributing to the onset of the condition.

The researcher is keen to point out that this has nothing to do with the discredited idea that vaccination causes autism.

More research is coming:

The next step is to confirm the results in a much larger group of age-matched children, as well as following high-risk children from birth in order to identify whether there are markers that precede the development of autistic symptoms.

Colebatch on the mining tax

Rudd In Fight Over 40% Mining Tax

Once again, a good, clear column by Tim Colebatch on the fight over a mining tax.

Meanwhile, Niki Savva makes a suggestion for Tony Abbott that makes a lot of sense to me: don't just resist all mining taxes; take up the miner's suggestion that they could afford to pay more tax and work out a deal with them.

But would Abbott be smart enough to do this?

Angry elephants

AFP: Elephants and humans clash over resources in Bangladesh

The wild Asian elephant wrapped its trunk around Parul Chambu Gong's husband and dragged him, kicking and screaming, into the forest.

His badly damaged corpse was recovered some hours later, and the father-of-five joined the list of an increasing number of Bangladeshis killed by wild elephants each year.

There aren't too many of them in Bangladesh, but those who get angry at being shoo-ed away from crops can be mean:

"I've seen an elephant snatch a torch from a man with its trunk while we were driving away a herd, and throw the flame on a house setting it on fire," said Luise, 51.

I guess it's just lucky that it's hard for an elephant to hold a box of matches with feet like that

Sunday at the Dominion

Yesterday went as follows:

* Breakfast: I make pancakes, of the instant "shake" variety. I used to like these, but after making my own from scratch quite a few times, I find I don't care for them anymore. I think it may be the real vanilla essence in the home made ones that makes a lot of difference, but I am not sure. Following my wife's advice, buttermilk does seem to make much nicer result too.

* Attend family church service at the kids school. Is it too curmudgeonly to say that I find the efforts of my kids' teachers to find ways to get their class involved in the once a year family service downright awful? I mean, yesterday's effort involved a little play (performed by four10 year olds) about the importance of "respect", in which a couple of parents made the family's elderly grandfather eat his dinner from a wood bowl in the corner of the room so that he didn't mess up the table with spilt food. I can't quite remember now how it was that the kindly child in the story convinced the parents they were wrong and let the grand-dad come back to the table for meals; somehow he shamed them into it.

Is this a scenario that is in any way likely to resonate with the middle class family kids in attendance? Who writes these stories? Hasn't someone written a book of better mini-plays for 10 year olds to perform in church services?

Furthermore, as I know some of the parents attending are not even Christian, let alone church going, does the church really have to use graphics (on their screens that show the words to the songs) which are all of "Jesus is my friend and likes to give me hugs" variety? Does this church only use these graphics for family services, or all the time?

(It is, I should hasten to add, not a Catholic church, although I admit the local Catholic church I am familiar with likes to use some of the same pop-ish "Jesus I really, really love you" songs too.)

Of course, you can't really say there is anything wrong with praise and worship per se in the Christian context. I suppose you could, if you are protestant, easily ridicule the Catholic veneration of the Eucharist which, incidentally, you don't see much anymore. But that Catholic style of worship had a certain, I guess, gravitas about it which seems much more appropriate to a God who is powerful and beyond complete human comprehension, rather than the singing of the equivalent of love songs to the guy next door.

* Lunch at McDonalds: happily, the kids generally prefer Subway as fast food now, which is definitely a healthier option, but the urge for McDonalds still arises sometimes. I see the fiddling with the menu is continuing apace, but I do think the Chicken Deluxe burgers are now pretty good. I'm still not convinced by the Grand Angus at all.

* Possibly succeeded in attempt to teach my mother about how to use Youtube. It was, of course, in the context of an 86 year old woman whose only interest in the internet is keeping up with the latest Colin Firth news. She wanted to see him accept his best actor award from the Venice Film Festival, even he only spoke in Italian. She was one of the hundred or so people who went and saw A Single Man in Brisbane, fully aware that it was about a depressed gay man, which is not the type of film she would normally seek out. But if Colin appeared in the equivalent of "Shortbus", she would be there to see it.

* Scared the kids. Showed them the first and end bits of The Twilight Zone movie. The middle is hardly worth bothering with, but the updated version of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet - my God it's fantastic. It's the perfect scary mini-movie, suspenseful and frightening without involving blood or loss of limbs at all. (I have no stomach for too much violence in horror.) Add a touch of unexpected humour, and it's perfect. Directed by George Miller I see. (I had forgotten that.)

That was followed by watching a couple of episodes of the original Twilight Zone. My wife had hired this at the library for me and the kids - which just goes to show that she is a good match for me. A couple of things I noticed:

- the two episodes I saw were written by Rod Serling himself and I was struck by their literary quality. The dialogue was quite dense and (to my mind) of a quality more akin to going to the theatre than watching the more "realistic" dialogue of today's TV dramas. (Not that I watch much of that to know, I guess.) It did make me feel a little as if the whole world has dumbed down quite a bit since I was a child.

- Rod Serling was really a deeply unattractive looking man.

* Dinner: my wife prepared a nabe cooked at the table with gyoza dumplings for the protein. A family sharing a meal at the table is good, but I think sitting around and participating in the cooking in front of you is even better. Some sake (Australian Go-Shu brand is fine) helps every Japanese style family meal too.

* Watched Dr Who: I actually thought last night's episode was pretty good, but it's the first of a two part-er, so we'll see how it pans out next week.

Update: it has occurred to me that a Twilight Zone style story may work well in church service requiring a morality mini-play put on by 10 year olds. Some kid in a suit could come out at the start with a fake cigarette and heavily made eyebrows to introduce the story, and then tell us the lesson at the end. I would be the one laughing loudly at the back of the congregation, while everyone else just gets confused.

Pardon?

I think Kevin Rudd swears in ways I don't even understand:

Meanwhile, there has been no official word yet from China after backroom comments Mr Rudd made during last year's Copenhagen climate change conference were reported in an essay by the Herald journalist David Marr. ''Those Chinese f---ers are trying to ratf--k us,'' Mr Rudd reportedly told a group of journalists and officials during a background briefing.

While our socially inept Opposition Leader doesn't know when to stop talking politics at an Italian Day function:

At this point, many in the 500-strong audience became agitated, murmuring among themselves that their guest was using the event to play politics.

Mr Abbott kept trying to make his point, but much of the last part of his speech was almost lost as crowd members yelled at him to keep politics out of the event. One man stood up, telling the Opposition Leader: ''I'm sorry Tony, this is not a political forum.''

This is the most depressing election choice in the history of Australian politics.

Those confusing glaciers

Glaciers' wane not all down to humans : Nature News

Hey, this isn't posted at Watts Up With That yet, but it's bound to be.  Some study is saying that maybe only half of glacier melt in 20th century was due to climate variations other than AGW:

"This doesn't question the actuality, and the seriousness, of man-made climate change in any way," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who led the study. "But what we do see is that current glacier retreat might be equally due to natural climate variations as it is to anthropogenic greenhouse warming."

Good video of "UFO" rocket

UFO talk rockets around Gold Coast Local Gold Coast News | goldcoast.com.au | Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

The big, glowing, spiralling thing seen in the early morning sky yesterday all over the east coast of Australia was, of course, a rocket stage in orbit and the best video I have seen of it is embedded at the link above.

Everyone seems to agree it was the privately owned Falcon 9, but why it was letting out such a large cloud of gas I haven't seen explained yet.

Who hates the leaders

George Megalogenis has some interesting commentary on the personal approval ratings of
Rudd and Abbott:

The price of the Opposition Leader’s plus 8 rating among men aged 35 to 49 is consistently poor numbers across all other groups: younger and older men, and all women.

His problem is, officially, with women.

Abbott turns off women of all ages at roughly the same rate - minus 10 - unlike Rudd, who has the young on his side.

Abbott is also in the red with men aged 18 to 34, where his net rating is minus 6. This is possibly the most interesting distinction of all because this is the group where Rudd has residual respect, notwithstanding his reversal on climate change.

Perhaps young people see through Abbott’s tough-guy pose, while adults and seniors see through Rudd’s pretence of having a personal connection to middle Australia.

As to why Abbott is more popular with middle aged men:

The Opposition Leader is increasingly popular with men aged 35 to 49, a sign that the triathlons have impressed blokes confronting midlife crises.

Well, that's kind of embarrassing for my own gender and age cohort.

Of interest to defence forces everywhere

Moving repeatedly in childhood linked with poorer quality-of-life years later

I'm not surprised by this study indicating that frequent moves in childhood is, generally speaking, not good for kids. I personally would have hated moving while I was at primary school especially.

It must be a very major problem for defence forces everywhere as to how to deal with this. (Well, maybe not so much if you are from a relatively small country like Britain, where a weekend commute is nothing like travelling from one end of Australia to another.)

I guess there is no easy solution, unless you go for a gay armed force again, as in the general vicinity of ancient Greece (apparently.)

The really good stuff

Fromage fort: The cheese that tried to kill me - Salon.com

This paragraph, from an entertaining column by Francis Lam about cheese in France, contains a very amusing anecdote:

I have to say first that, of course, it's just stupidly easy to get your hands on socks-knocking-off-good cheese in France. On my very first day here, my friend Julia and I went down the street and randomly came home with a wedge of Brie from Melun so good, so soft and so sticky and so rich and woodsy and creamy that I caught her talking to it the next day. "Hey, Brie," she purred after getting home from work. "I've been thinking about you, baby. You been thinking about me?" (No, really. That happened.)

All of the article is good; you should read it.

A good interview

You don't always learn all that much about Colbert's guests' ideas, as the emphasis is more on jokes than information. But tonight's interview with Lisa Miller, whose book on the history of heaven has been the subject of a couple of posts here recently, gave her enough time to explain her book's key points, and was quite funny as well:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lisa Miller
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

That's the trouble with politics today - not enough eunuchs!

Tadpoles, eunuchs and testosterone deprivation - Science Show - 22 May 2010

A couple of weeks ago there was a somewhat interesting interview on The Science Show with Richard Wassursug, who, as a result of having to be "chemically castrated" himself because of prostate cancer, has developed a big interest in eunuchs.

For example, as to the role of eunuchs in history:

What I found from actually studying eunuchs in history is they were not wimps, as our modern presumption is, these were the most powerful people in government. From one end of Asia to another, for the last 3,500 years, the most stable governments were run by castrated people, and we actually know why. This is unpublished, but with a colleague we've been studying people who wish to be castrated, a very strange group of people, we ran what's called the big five personality test, and we now know what it actually means to have no balls, and it isn't what most people think. The major personality change appears to be in agreeability, which may sound to a macho male like somebody who just obligingly agrees with everybody, but if you actually look at the roles that eunuchs played in history, they had to be great negotiators, they had to be empathetic and listen to both sides of an argument in order to maintain a stable government. That skill is enhanced by getting off testosterone.

In the Australian context, it's hard to imagine Kevin Rudd being oversupplied with testosterone; I think his problems are more just a personality defect.

But Tony Abbott: his testicles have already led to one embarrassing incident, and his exercise obsession has a whiff of overly macho male competitiveness about it. He's the one who would do better as a eunuch, I'm sure.

Update: by co-incidence, I was just at the BBC website, and for some reason this item from 2005, which indicates how castration can be achieved at home, even without instruments, is currently in its "most popular shared story" column:

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

By the light of the moon

Japanese firm wants to transform the Moon into a giant solar power plant

The Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction firm, has recently proposed a plan to harness solar energy on a larger scale than almost any previously proposed concept. Their ambitious plan involves building a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) equator, converting the electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers to be beamed at Earth, and finally converting the beams back to electricity at terrestrial power stations. The Luna Ring concept, the company says, could meet the entire world's energy needs.

Someone there must be looking for free publicity.  I like the first comment:

Pfffft I say Dyson Sphere or bust!

Temperature watch

Temperatures reach record high in Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

Mohenjo-daro, a ruined city in what is now Pakistan that contains the last traces of a 4,000-year-old civilisation that flourished on the banks of the river Indus, today entered the modern history books after government meteorologists recorded a temperature of 53.7C (129F). Only Al 'Aziziyah, in Libya (57.8C in 1922), Death valley in California (56.7 in 1913) and Tirat Zvi in Israel (53.9 in 1942) are thought to have been hotter.

Temperatures in the nearest town, Larkana, have been only slightly lower in the last week, with 53C recorded last Wednesday. As the temperatures peaked, four people died, including a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and an elderly woman. Dozens are said to have fainted.

The extreme heat was exacerbated by chronic power cuts which have prevented people from using air-conditioning. The electricity has cut out for eight hours each day as part of a severe load-shedding regime that has caused riots in other parts of Pakistan where cities are experiencing a severe heatwave with temperatures of between 43C and 47C.

This article does go on to talk about how hot 2010 is shaping up to be globally, and ends on a cautious note about how some think this is part of "long-term climate change". (Note: journalists still seem too spooked to talk too clearly of AGW.)

It must be small, furry animal news week

Pet rats may harbour deadly fever

There's a warning from an Australian doctor here that some pet rat owners are catching a rare disease from their pets.

It's called "rat bite fever", but as far as I was aware, your "normal" hand raised pet rat pretty rarely bites. (I see from the comments at this site, thought, that it definitely happens.)

Still, the good doctor mentions a case of a Western Australian girl who got an infection but denied having been bitten by her rat. She did clean its cage, though, and perhaps got it that way.

Certainly, good hygiene around pet rats is important, and I would say that rat owners who let them (ugh) lick their teeth (Youtube gives many examples) are simply nuts. But I suspect the danger of a normally clean person catching something from a pet rat is probably no worse than catching toxoplasma from a cat.

In other small, furry animal news

Squirrels show softer side by adopting orphans, study finds

As squirrels rarely interact, they learn who their nearby relatives are by hearing their unique calls, he said. If they fail to hear a relative's calls for a few days, they may investigate. "We suspect that, if they find pups on the territory, they remember that their neighbour was a relative and carry the pups back to their nest. This would be quite intelligent behaviour for a squirrel."

It doesn't happen often though, it seems. I wonder if the much maligned grey squirrels of England do the same thing? It would be good for their PR.

From the "a propos of nothing" files...

Agents portrayed Hitler as gay Jewish eunuch

I think everyone knows that British propaganda in WW2 used to help spread the belief that Hitler was short at least one testicle, but I hadn't realised that they were quite this creative until I stumbled across this 1994 article in The Independent:

Special Operations in London sent out to Gibraltar for distribution in Morocco boxed sets of gramophone records in Arabic making lewd suggestions about Hitler's anatomy....

A po-faced official on the staff of Lord Gort, the Governor of Gibraltar, says side one 'records the story of an Arab caravan journeying to Marrakech'. He bemoans the stagnation of trade in Morocco, and blames Hitler and the fact that British ships are detained in Moroccan ports. But by side two the official is becoming upset. 'It states that Hitler cannot marry and that he hates both Jews and Arabs with a 'fiery hatred' and explains the reason.

'Hitler is a bastard - presumably of Jewish blood - and his original name was Schicklegruber. Some 30 years ago he was but a humble house-painter when one day he was painting the ceiling of a synagogue and fell and damaged one of his testicles]'

The doctor, trained by an Arab, is a former violinist used to giving encores, so when he is applauded for taking off the first testicle, he repeats the performance.

That last bit sounds more like an attempt at humour, really. But Adolf Schicklegruber, I like that.

It's also hard not to be amused by the next part of the article:

The second story has Hitler being visited in his bedroom by Mrs Goebbels, who is shocked to find the Fuhrer has gone to the front to have sex with his generals. The official says in his report to Lord Gort that the Arabs would be likely to be impressed rather than shocked by such behaviour.

Local warming

Hundreds die in Indian heatwave | World news | The Guardian

Record temperatures in northern India have claimed hundreds of lives in what is believed to be the hottest summer in the country since records began in the late 1800s.

The death toll is expected to rise with experts forecasting temperatures approaching 50C (122F) in coming weeks. More than 100 people are reported to have died in the state of Gujarat where the mercury topped at 48.5C last week. At least 90 died in Maharashtra, 35 in Rajasthan and 34 in Bihar.

Interestingly, The Guardian does not specifically mention global warming in the context of this story. I assume that is all part of the new sort journalistic reticence to raise AGW, just at the time global tempertures are in fact on the rise?

Hard to change

The science of a healthy marriage - Times Online

There's not much I particularly wanted to refer people in this article by the writer of a new book on the science of marriage. But this paragraph (about an American study on infidelity in marriage) amused me:

Overall, cheating rates were extraordinarily low—only 11 per cent of respondents reported infidelity. But the scientists also found that cheating was associated with some specific risk factors: being a man; thinking about sex several times a day; having a high number of sexual partners; living in the city; being in a long relationship; living together without marriage; having lived together before marriage and being unhappy.

Possibly important

Failure of Bell's Theorem and the Local Causality of the Entangled Photons

Physicist Joy Christian has had a string of papers recently at arXiv (well, I see now that he has been putting his position in print for a few years) in which he argues that "quantum non-locality" is actually an illusion.

His argument is hard to follow (even by other physicists, it seems) but he talk of an topological error and (to quote from an earlier abstract):

When topologies are correctly identified, local-realistic completion of any arbitrary entangled state is always guaranteed in our framework. This vindicates EPR, and entails that quantum entanglement is best understood as an illusion.

To put it another way, as the paper linked to at the top of this article says:

One of the first steps we often take towards measuring a physical quantity is to set up a Cartesian coordinate system {x, y, z} in the Euclidean space E3. This amounts to modeling the Euclidean space as a 3-fold product of the real line, IR3. This procedure has become so familiar to us that in practice we often identify E3 with its Cartesian model, and simply think of IR3 as the Euclidean space.

As we shall see, however, this seemingly innocuous act of convenience comes with a very heavy price: It is largely responsible for the illusions of “quantum non-locality.” Once a coordinate-free geometric model of the Euclidean space is used, the correlations observed in the EPR-type experiments involving photon pairs ... are easily understood, in a strictly local-realistic terms.

Well, it's not clear to me what this means, but my hunch is that if he might be onto something.

There's not too much about him on the web, but there is a bit of a bio here (and proof that he is a "he", not a she.)

Getting rid of quantum non-locality sounds a good way to make the world more aligned with common sense, but maybe Christian's ideas have their own form of counter-intuitiveness as well. (If only I could understand his explanation of the topological issue.)