Lucky planet

Summer solstice: Did a rampaging planet create Earth's seasons? - CSMonitor.com

Of course I knew of the idea that it was a collision that formed the Moon, but I either didn't know (or had forgotten) that it may also have given us the Earth's very convenient axis tilt that gives us the seasons:

Without that tilt, we might've ended up with more seasons than we could deal with over the course of Earth's history, suggests Neil Comins, an astronomer at the University of Maine. He's written substantially on what alternate Earths might be like and how hospitable they would be for the emergence of life.

The collision thought to have generated the tilt also created the moon, which is responsible for stabilizing Earth's spin axis. Without a moon, "the Earth spinning on its axis is an unstable system in which the tilt goes from straight up and down to far closer to the plain of it orbit than the axis is today," he says.

At its most extreme, this could leave Earth orbiting the sun and spinning on its axis like a chicken roasting on a spit with head and tail alternately aimed at the fire, rather than cooking the bird broadside. Earthlings from one pole to the equator would be in darkness during the solstice, while the other half would be in toasty sunlight. The poles would swap lighting conditions at the next solstice.

Moreover, the moon's presence and its effect on the oceans act as a brake on Earth's rotation rate. By some estimates one turn of the Earth on its axis some 4.5 billion years ago would have taken 6.5 hours, versus 24 today. No moon means a far more speedy cosmic rotisserie.

I don't think the importance of the moon in keeping the axis tilt stable was something that I realised before. Very neat.

Impressive

BBC News - Tornado rips roof off sports arena in Montana

Some pretty impressive video here of tornado damage. Two things of note: the amount of rubbish a tornado can keep suspended in the air for a long time, and the cars and trucks that seem to be passing by quite close to it. (I would be speeding away as fast as possible, but these vehicles don't seem to be in that much of a hurry.)

Expensive brides

I commented a while ago that a documentary about a large restaurant in China seemed to show many Chinese women as being intensely materialistic, and a story about real estate in China seems to back this up:

Unlike in the United States, where home buying traditionally takes place after marriage, owning a place in China has recently become a prerequisite for tying the knot. Experts said securing an apartment in this market signals that a man is successful, family-oriented and able to weather challenging financial circumstances. Put succinctly, homeownership has become the ultimate symbol of virility in today's China.

"A man is not a man if he doesn't own a house," said Chen Xiaomin, director of the Women's Studies Center at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. "Marriage is becoming more and more materialistic. This is a huge change in Chinese society. No matter how confident a woman is, she will lose face if her boyfriend or husband doesn't have a house."

Dating websites are now awash with women stipulating that hopefuls must come with a residence (and often a set of wheels) in tow.

Medical technology's downside

A Pacemaker Wrecks a Family's Life - NYTimes.com

This is a long but quite interesting story about how the use of pacemakers in the elderly in the US appears to be prolonging lives that do not want to be prolonged. It has apparently proved difficult to get permission to turn the things off.

It appears that only very recently has the American Heart Association issued guidelines that patients or their "legal surrogates" (people with Enduring Power of Attorney in Australia's case) could request the withdrawal of medical treatment, including implanted pacemakers, and that this would not be euthanasia or assisted suicide.

I wonder if there has been any similar uncertainty in Australia, or if this was largely a product of American concern over litigation. Tell us, Geoff.

That's hot

AFP: Kuwaiti MPs call for shorter work hours to save power

From the report:

Last week, the oil-rich OPEC member almost resorted to power cuts after a sharp rise in demand in response to record temperatures that soared to 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 Fahrenheit), the highest in more than 30 years.

Surely a dry heat of 52 degrees is not exactly healthy without airconditioning, so I am curious as to what happens to death rates when the power is cut off during a day like that. (Then again, I suppose people have been living in the desert for a long time. Why on earth did they stay there?)

Interesting terms found on the Web today

1. Cat therapist. (From New York; not California as you might have expected.)

2. Sexually Satisfying Events. It's a medical term used in trials of libido enhancing drugs, apparently. I wonder if there’s a requirement that two people be involved?

Once a certain age is reached, perhaps a more relevant term is needed, such as "Sexually Satisfying Event Equivalent." (I expect most of mine to involve cheese.)

3. The Theory of Exclusively Local Beables. This is from arXiv, which is a bit of an obvious source for novel phrases: every second paper has a title with a term I haven’t heard of before. Anyhow, “beables” is a charming sounding word, and is described as follows:

J.S. Bell introduced the term “beables” (a deliberate contrast to the vaguely-defined “observables” which, he thought, played too prominent a role in orthodox, Copenhagen quantum theory) to name whatever is posited, by a candidate theory, as corresponding directly to something that is physically real (independent of any “observation”).

The paper talks of “pilot wave” theories to explain the quantum world, and is of some interest, especially in its introductory explanation of how such theories to explain the dual particle/wave characteristics of light were considered from the beginning by Einstein, but they lost out to the “tranquilizing philosophy” of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. (The paper goes on to suggest that there is merit still in the pilot wave idea.)

4. Everyone has two puberties. Recently I link to a list of very dubious ideas Kant had about life, yet today while reading a bit of a rambling article in The Guardian about marriage, I found this:

I think Elizabeth Gilbert gets somewhere close to it when she quotes Kant in his assertion that we humans are so emotionally complex that we go through two puberties in life: the first when our bodies are mature enough for sex, and the second when our minds are.

Sounds about right; good on you Immanuel. (But having reputedly died a virgin, I wonder how he assessed his own preparedness for it.) *

* At another blog earlier this year, I imagined a movie involving Kant (who, apart from alleged sexual inexperience, also never travelled more than 100 miles from his home town of Konigsberg) as actually being a secret prototype James Bond character, involved in political intrigue and bedding femme fatales all over Europe and the Americas in the 1770's. (Wikipedia says he had a "silent decade" in his 40's.) I await the grant for the script from the Australian Film Commission: God knows they haven't funded enough films involving improbable historical fantasies based in Prussia.

Big brother death throes

Charlie Brooker writes pretty amusingly on the final series of the British version of Big Brother. (Yes, it is a sure sign of the cultural sickness at the heart of that country that its BB outlived, and seemed to attract more attention, than its Australian counterpart.)

It’s small, but my favourite line in the article is towards the end:

Throughout the first series, broadcast in 1912, the contestants occasionally sang "it's only a game show!" to keep their spirits up.

The Japanese way

This was reported last weekend, apparently, but I missed it:

Britain’s Sunday Times reported in its online edition that Japan had bribed small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) commissioner for Tanzania said “call girls” were made available at the hotels for ministers and senior fisheries civil servants during all-expenses paid trips to Japan, the paper reported.

The Sunday Times’ investigation revealed that officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the IWC. According to the report, the governments of St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Grenada, Republic of Guinea and Ivory Coast negotiated selling their votes in return for aid. One official said that call girls were offered when fisheries ministers and civil servants visited Japan for meetings.

A top fisheries official for Guinea said Japan usually gave his minister a “minimum” of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings, the paper reported.

A witty Glover

The five stages of grief; and preparing for the HSC

More floods = climate change?

String of floods raise climate change questions - Capital Weather Gang

I think this is a pretty balanced article about what the media can appropriately say about recent floods in the States and climate change.

Meanwhile, the UK Met Office says that even if CO2 dropped after its rise, rainfall changes caused by AGW would hang around for decades. Seems pretty academic to me: why bother looking at unrealistic theoretical drops in CO2? Anyway, their modelling for what rainfall changes AGW will cause indicates:

High latitude countries such as Canada and Russia would receive more rain and snow, whereas other regions such as the Amazon basin, Australia and parts of sub-Saharan Africa would receive substantially less.

As the oceans have huge capacity to store heat, releasing the heat relating to a temporary quadrupling of the man-made greenhouse effect would take many decades.

The Met Office computer model is known to project more drying of the Amazon than most others.

Last night's Catalyst had an interesting story on Western Australia being unusually dry for the last 30 years. They don't say it's all CO2's fault; changes to the ozone layer get much blame too.

All a bit of a worry.

In the news again

Bigfoot discovered? Virginia man says he's on verge of Bigfoot discovery - CSMonitor.com

I can't resist a Bigfoot story, but there's nothing much to this one. Still, it's an excuse to refer people to the Messin' with Sasquatch beef jerky ads from America, which have been around for some years, but I only found them recently. Here's the first, which sets the tone for the rest:



I suppose it's not dissimilar to the Betty White ad I featured recently: I find unexpected violence pretty funny. Sorry.

Also - if you want to amuse yourself (or your kids) by making a film with your webcam of a mini animated Sasquatch doing stuff on your desk - click on the very neat application "Living Sasquatch" on the Jack Links Messin' with Sasquatch website.

Congratulations Alexito...

..for making a witty comment following this article with a self-explanatory title: World Cup puts boot into suffering UK box office

I don't know what the multiplexes expect when they throw me out for trying to add a bit of atmosphere to Sex and the City 2 with my vuvuzela.

Making babies: highly questionable research

Is there any greater sign of the modern over-enlarged sense of entitlement than the ART ("assisted reproduction technology") business? [Yes, I know, I was lucky enough not to have go looking into that to have kids of my own, but high abortion rates means that it's not for a lack of embryos in the West that there is a shortage of babies born. Indeed, despite the problems inherent in international adoption, I would still prefer to see more of that than kids left in the pathetic orphanages that exist in some countries.]

There have been quite a few stories of interest about ART this lately, and some really bad reporting. This will be a long post.

First: Let's oversell "Two Mums is good". It was widely reported, as in this example from the Sydney Morning Herald short report, with the jolly title "Two Mums Better than Dad":

"..researchers found children born to and raised by lesbian couples were better off socially, academically and more competent than their peers."

All complete with happy photo of (impliedly) happy lesbian family, although as they are not identified, for all I know they could be a couple of Fairfax reporters who posed with the bosses' toddler.

Anyhow, the study was based on following 154 pregnant (from artificial insemination) lesbian women from the 1980's and comparing them to heterosexual families. Beginning to suspect this study might have some flaws? Your suspicions would be right. As economist blogger David Friedman notes, one obvious way it might be unreliable would be if the two groups of parents were not closely matched for other factors that may very well be relevant to having a "better off" child:

The two groups might differ in important ways other than their sexual preferences. Most obviously, since the lesbian parents had conceived via artificial insemination, their pregnancies were all planned and all desired. If the comparison group contained a significant number of children from unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, that might explain why more of them had behavioral problems. One could imagine a variety of other possible explanations as well—and the news stories did not provide enough information to confirm or reject them.

He then reads the paper and reports:

The two groups were not closely matched, due to data limitations, a problem that the authors noted. They differed strikingly in geographic location, since the lesbian couples were all recruited in the Boston, D.C., and San Francisco meteropolitan areas, while the data on children of heterosexual couples, coming from another researcher's work, was based on a wider distribution of locations. They were not matched racially—14% of the heterosexual couples were black, 3% of the lesbian couples were. They were not matched socio-economically—on average, the heterosexual couples were of higher SES than the lesbian couples.

As someone commented in the Sydney Morning Herald guessed:

This study may be more about the socio-economic than about gender! In that regard it simply confirms what we already know: advantaged parents are able to raise advantaged children. It is not that "2 mums better than dad". Rather, it is that "2 advantaged parents are better than 2 less advantaged ones".

David Friedman then finds another startling problem with the research:

Questionaires went, at various points in the study, to both mothers and children. But the conclusion about how well adjusted the children were was based entirely on the reports of ther mothers. A more accurate, if less punchy, headline would have read: "Lesbian Mothers Think Better of Their Kids than Heterosexual Mothers Do."

Friedman is not out to criticise the authors, as the inadequacies are there to see in the paper. It certainly seems to me, though, that the authors are not above overselling their report to the media, such as when they are quoted as follows:

"Our findings show that adolescents who have been raised since birth in planned lesbian families demonstrate healthy psychological adjustment and thus provide no justification for restricting access to reproductive technologies or child custody on the basis of the sexual orientation of the parents."

Hmm. Does that sound just a tad like they have the view that they have a message to sell? Their funding did come from lesbian friendly foundations. What a surprise.

I don't think many people expect lesbian couples to be atrocious at parenting; at the same time, this is a bit of peer reviewed research that proves nothing and is being oversold by its authors.

Second: Let's not report a survey that indicates some kids are not so happy about not knowing their Dad:

OK, OK, this is not a peer reviewed bit of research and it comes out of a conservative foundation and was partly conducted by a person with a personal interest in the issue. But it got a run in Slate, which was kind of brave of them, as it would clearly upset many liberals because, you know, everyone is entitled to get knocked up via an anonymous sperm donor and who are we to question whether that's a wise thing to do?

The report is a survey which compared attitudes between 3 groups: "18- to 45-year-olds includes 485 who were conceived via sperm donation, 562 adopted as infants, and 563 raised by their biological parents." Some of the findings:

Regardless of socioeconomic status, donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. They are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse. And they are about 1.5 times as likely to report depression or other mental health problems.

As a group, the donor offspring in our study are suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused, and feeling more isolated from their families. (And our study found that the adoptees on average are struggling more than those raised by their biological parents.) The donor offspring are more likely than the adopted to have struggled with addiction and delinquency and, similar to the adopted, a significant number have confronted depression or other mental illness. Nearly half of donor offspring, and more than half of adoptees, agree, "It is better to adopt than to use donated sperm or eggs to have a child."

Of course, there may well be biases in the selection of the subjects here (although I haven't read anyone pointing out precisely how yet), and it's not "peer reviewed", but is it all that surprising that some adults from anonymous sperm donation would worry about things like whether someone they meet might actually be their half sibling? This is particularly so in America, which for some reason is still allowing anonymous donors to remain anonymous all their life. (This has been changed in Australia and much of Europe, with the result that very few men are now willing to be sperm donors. In Australia, the donor can't even be paid!)

Everyone knows that adopted kids, as adults, often feel that the fact of their adoption is an important issue about their life, hence all the shows and stories about the desire to re-unite with their biological parents. It makes many of them feel more complete.

So it should be no surprise at all that many sperm donor kids should feel the same way.

I reckon there is likely to be more truth and accuracy in this study than the lesbian parent one.

Of course, if you are going to allow companies to provide this service, the anonymity should be illegal. It is cruel to deliberately create a kid with this uncertainty in its future.

Yet, of course, it wasn't mentioned in the media much at all.

Third: just how many defects does ART create in babies?

There was some reporting of a new study that at first sounds like it should be a big worry for those considering IVF:

Slightly more than 4% of babies born via assisted reproductive technology such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) may have major birth defects, such as heart and urogenital tract malformations, according to a new study...

The major birth defects seen in babies born via IVF and/or ICSI included heart defects and malformations of the urogenital tract, such as hypospadias (an abnormality in the position of the opening of the urethra in boys). In the study, 110 children had genetic disorders, including six children with Beckwith-Weidemann syndrome, which is marked by body overgrowth, and may increase risk of certain cancers. Five children also had bilateral retinoblastoma (cancer of the eye's retina).

Children born via assisted reproductive technology had a five times higher rate for minor birth defects such as angiomas (a benign tumor of small blood vessels causing a red growth on the skin). Angiomas were twice as common in girls as in boys, the study found.

But:

U.S. experts are quick to point out that these risks are not much different from what would be expected in the general population. And the risks are much lower than what has been found in some other studies of babies born as a result of fertility treatments.

This research came from surveys in France, and the lead authors Geralidine Viot (see above link) is quoted as saying:

"our results are not so different from the general population and I consider them rather reassuring as some previously reported studies showed increased risk of major malformations around 9% to 11%," she says.

Wait a minute: why is so much discrepancy between the rate of defects in these studies? Just how hard is it to record defects from babies from IVF?

And what's going on here: in the report of this study from The Independent, we read:

The study, the largest of its kind, found evidence of a higher-than-expected rate of serious congenital abnormalities.

Research leader Geraldine Viot said: "We found a major congenital malformation in 4.24pc of the children, compared with the 2-3pc that we had expected from previous published studies.

"This higher rate was due in part to an excess of heart diseases and malformations of the uro-genital system. This was much more common in boys.

Those comments regarding what they expected from previous studies doesn't seem to match the earlier quote, where she was relieved that their rate was half that of previous studies.

There's some explaining that needs to be done about all this. There are studies from Australia indicating defect rates "twice" that of naturally conceived children, and an American report from 2 years ago that found:

The CDC reports that certain birth defects -- including heart wall problems and cleft lip/palate -- may be two to four times more common among babies conceived with assisted reproductive technology (ART) than babies conceived naturally.

They are also keen to note:

The study doesn't prove that ART was to blame for the birth defects.

"Subfertile women might have a higher risk of having a child with a birth defect regardless of whether infertility treatments are used," write Reefhuis and colleagues.

So it may not be the ART process itself that "causes" it, instead it may be the decision to use ART to get a baby with a higher risk of a major defect when your natural infertility would have prevented it. Well, I hope that IVF clinics make this subtle "it's not us, it's you" distinction known to their clients.

In fact, it seems to me ART doctors are dead keen to downplay the significance of increased rates of defects. For example, this is from the Melbourne Herald Sun report on the recent French study:

Dr John McBain, Melbourne IVF director and head of reproductive services at the Royal Women's Hospital, said the definition of "major" congenital abnormalities was contentious, and included conditions such as clicky hips and club feet.

He said it was difficult to compare the health of children conceived naturally and through ART.

"The children born from assisted conception have more rigorous physical examinations," he said.

This is self interested excuse making, if you ask me.

And funnily enough, when you go to the glossy IVF Australia website and search it for terms such as "birth defects", "congenital defects" or "birth abnormalities", you score nothing that talks about increased rates of these for IVF babies. (That's not to say that they don't give appropriate information to those who contact them, but I would be curious as to how they explain the risks, given the apparent conflict between results of studies over the last decade.)

I remain very cynical about virtually all aspects of "Assisted Reproductive Technologies", but it's a good little earner I'm sure.

A jelly education

Jelly clinic: how to deliver a quiver | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

This article from The Guardian, by a couple of authors flogging their book about jelly, does make some interesting points:

Jelly is the ultimate party food, an animal-based dessert that predates Christ and was eaten by Henry VIII for both the first and second course of his 1521 Garter Banquet.

Jelly predates Christ? Given the lack of refrigeration, how did they get them to set? Or is this just a Brisbane-centric lack of understanding, as I guess in many countries leaving it out overnight may well be enough. What about this claim:

Slap a jelly on your dinner table and guests will be hypnotized by its lewd wobbling and your kitchen prowess.

Easily hypnotised, those English.

I like the start of the next paragraph:

The origins of jelly are shrouded in mystery..

Wait a minute. This article has already referred to "before Christ" and "mystery." Clearly, this is material for the next Dan Brown novel. The secret of the origin of jelly is almost certainly being covered up in the foundations of the Temple in Jerusalem. I can see an important plot revelation already: you know those bits of paper being stuck in the Wailing Wall? - they're jelly recipes! You heard it here first.

The article then explains more history:

With sugar wildly expensive, sweet jelly became a potent status symbol. It remained at the centre of the tables of the rich and powerful well into the early 20th century. Ingredients, moulds, ice for refrigeration and the labour to clarify weird gelling agents like hartshorn and the swim bladders of sturgeon were all expensive.

I think this is something to share with the kids with great gusto when they are next served jelly: "You're eating like a King or a millionaire, you know!" "Bill Gates has swimming pools filled with jelly, it always impresses his guests."

A final important point:

Yes, jellying today is ridiculously simple. But you must respect the jelly.

We always stand to attention and salute while the bagpipes play during the ceremonial Presentation of the Jelly at our house.

Time for the annual "why are there so many movie sequels this summer" post

Film - An Old Pairing - Summer and Movie Sequels - NYTimes.com

AO Scott talks a lot about how many sequels there are coming out this year, but I get a distinct sense of deja vu while reading it. Doesn't an article like this appear in one of the major American media publications every summer?

Which is a pity because: oh my God why are there so many sequels to movies that don't deserve sequels coming out this year?

Of the bunch, perhaps I will see Toy Story 3, but even then I am not holding my breath; even though I loved the first Toy Story and am generally a pretty big fan of Pixar, I found Toy Story 2 very forgettable.

There is one sequel worth waiting for this year, and that's Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But it's a Christmas release, so it at least its not coming out with all the summer sequel dreck.

By the way, the first trailer for VDT comes out with Toy Story 3, and will be released on the web this Thursday. Yes, the fact that I know that is evidence of my Narnia fanboydom, I guess

All praise the Mockingbird

BBC News - Why is To Kill A Mockingbird so popular?

As this year is its 50th anniversary of publication, maybe there will be more articles like this around.

The only thing I find odd is this:

On the eve of its 50th birthday, To Kill A Mockingbird still has a generation of schoolchildren transfixed, while regularly figuring high on lists of the country's "favourite books".

A poll for World Book Day placed it fifth, behind Pride and Prejudice but ahead of the Bible. A similar BBC one puts it sixth.

I can only assume that more women answer World Book Day polls than men.

Parasites as friends

How the parasitic worm has turned

I've mentioned before the apparent benefits of having a good dose of intestinal worms for your immune system. The story has been turning up in various forms for a few years now, but it's apparently discussed recently in a Science article:

Professor Roberts, whose work is published in Science, explains: "It is like a three-legged stool - the microbes, worms and immune system regulate each other.

"The worms have been with us throughout our evolution and their presence, along with bacteria, in the ecosystem of the gut is important in the development of a functional immune system."

Professor Grencis adds: "If you look at the incidence of parasitic worm infection and compare it to the incidence of auto-immune disease and allergy, where the body's immune system over-reacts and causes damage, they have little overlap. Clean places in the West, where parasites are eradicated, see problems caused by overactive immune systems. In the developing world, there is more parasitic worm infection but less auto-immune and allergic problems.

"We are not suggesting that people deliberately infect themselves with parasitic worms but we are saying that these larger pathogens make things that help our immune system. We have evolved with both the bugs and the worms and there are consequences of that interaction, so they are important to the development of our immune system."

I don't know: it seems he is suggesting that catching them is a good idea. Here's more:

Intestinal roundworm parasites are one of the most common types of infection worldwide, although in humans increased hygiene has reduced infection in many countries. High level infections by these parasites can cause disease, but the natural situation is the presence of relatively low levels of infection. The team's work suggests that in addition to bacterial microflora, the natural state of affairs of our intestines may well be the presence of larger organisms, the parasitic roundworms, and that complex and subtle interactions between these different types of organism have evolved to provide an efficient and beneficial ecosystem for all concerned.

There's no mention of how you might get the benefits of a gut full of worms without actually having a gut full of worms, but I am sure someone must be thinking about it.

Colebatch on debt

Fiscal time bomb yet to explode

The quite spectacular looking fireball re-entry of the Japanese Hayabusa space probe can be viewed on this Youtube:

Leave Kanty alone!!

I think I might have read this a few months ago when it came out, but forgot to post about it.  Philosophy Professor Eric Schwitzgebel did a post listing Kant’s most peculiar and'/or odious views.   (I knew about his view of masturbation as being worse than suicide, but the Professor extends the list, and indeed one of the comments also throws in racism.)

Of course, there might be some excuse making to be found in the state of science was at the time.   Still, despite my general high regard for him, Kant did have some spectacularly odd views.  It also turns out that one writer has suggested that Kant wrote under the influence of a “massive left prefrontal tumor” which biologically prevented him from having proper empathy for people when he wrote his major works.

Somehow, I think that’s an unlikely scenario.  Reason can lead philosophers to all sorts of spurious and silly conclusions, as shown in my recent posts about the idea that people (even with the most “normal” lives) should logically think it would be better if people didn’t exist.  In that case, maybe it is excessive empathy that is leading to the result, but the conclusion is just as silly as anything Kant wrote.