Still witty after all these years

Steve Martin can still be amusing, as evidenced by this video from earlier this year:

Kant and rats

Hmm.  Kant keeps making an appearance in stuff I read lately.  Here he is again, in the context of new science about how rat brains get spatial cognition.  Cool.

Bunyip tales

A somewhat interesting article appeared in The Age recently about the Australian aborigines mythological bunyip.   I don’t recall reading this specific theory before:

Australian Museum naturalist George Bennett was first to suggest formally (in 1871) that the bunyip might be an indigenous cultural memory of extinct Australian megafauna, passed down through oral tradition. By 1991, the authors of Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia were postulating that, "When confronted with the remains of some of the now extinct Australian marsupials, Aborigines would often identify them as the bunyip."

And in 1998, geologist Greg McNamara told Australian Geo-graphic magazine his theory that the remembered bunyip was actually a prehistoric turtle, Meiolania prisca, "a most impressive beast" up to two metres long with a metre-long, bony club tail and curved 25-centimetre horns.

More Crowe stories

Maybe it's a bit unfair to keep repeating stories of stupid or strange things Russell Crowe has said or done, but it is fun. Today from The Age, it's Russell the film critic:

Howden reveals that Crowe had been originally ‘‘earmarked’’ to play the title role in Shakespeare in Love (1998), but then had problems with the script and decided not to be involved. Which is any actor’s prerogative, of course. But then Crowe continues: ‘‘I was f---ing right about that movie too. It was a 100 per cent f---ing home run, except the central character of William Shakespeare was not a f---ing writer ... He was some prissy pretty boy. What the f---? That’s so disrespectful.’’

LOL, as they say.

Very droll

Dating site RSVP has come up with an ad for our dear departed Prime Minister Rudd. The humour is pretty gentle, but it's a good idea. Click to see the first part below, or go to the link to see it all.

Even worse than salt and vinegar

Lung-on-a-chip | Science | guardian.co.uk

Space weather and you

Quite a surprise here as to how the sun may affect electronics to a much greater degree than previously realised:

Relatively minor space storms now appear to be behind a range of mysterious mishaps - railway signals malfunctioning in Archangel province in north-western Russia, for example, between 2000 and 2005. A study led by Eugenia Eroshenko of the Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation in Troitsk, Russia, examined episodes when signals turned red for minutes or even hours though the track ahead was clear, then spontaneously reverted to green.

Eroshenko's team found that 16 malfunctions of this sort observed between 2000 and 2005 coincided with space storms (Advances in Space Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2010.05.017). "We were surprised by such a clear correlation," Eroshenko says…

As for transformers:

Intense power surges due to big space storms can heat transformers enough within minutes to damage the insulation needed to prevent short circuits, which can cause them to explode.

More recently, there are signs that transformers can be destroyed by smaller currents over a period of hours or more. A long-lasting 2003 space storm delivered only relatively low-intensity currents to the South African power grid, but damaged several transformers anyway, notes US-based storm analysis consultant John Kappenman.

What next? Tin foil hats work too?

The results are preliminary, but appear in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry (sounds legit):

Applying magnets to the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers helps them understand what is said to them. The finding by Italian scientsts, who conducted a randomised controlled trial of the treatment, suggests that magnets may alter "cortical activity" in the brain, readjusting unhealthy patterns caused by disease or damage. The study was small, involving just 10 patients, and the results are preliminary.

Surprising, but it's not as if it was just a matter of putting magnets in a headband:

For the latest study, Maria Costelli and colleagues applied repetitive TMS – a rapid succession of magnetic pulses – to the prefrontal lobes of the Alzheimer's patients for 25 minutes at a time. Half the patients received daily doses five days a week for four weeks and half received a dummy treatment for two weeks followed by two weeks of TMS. Tests showed that those who had the full course of TMS had significantly higher scores on comprehension of what was said to them – up from 66 per cent to 77 per cent. The improvement was still evident eight weeks after treatment. The authors say the technique did not affect other language abilities or other cognitive functions, including memory, which suggests that it is "specific to the language domain of the brain when applied to the prefrontal lobes".

Half my wish fulfilled

Recently, I indicated that my depression over what looked like the coming appalling electoral choice between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott would be resolved if Labor installed Gillard as Leader, and the Liberals went back toTurnbull.

Well, looks like half of my wish has come true.

Basically, Rudd suddenly imploded because he is a two-faced, control freak, vain, celebrity-seeking, boss-from-hell, media tart of a politician who was only installed as leader as a result of his smiley Sunrise appearances which gave Labor the feeling that he was just the right person to not scare the voters from blasting Howard out of the chair which he had unwisely decided to keep for one election too many. There always existed plenty of evidence for all of this; it is amazing that it took the public as long as it did to turn on him (and even now, that it has not turned as completely as it could,) but it is not really that surprising that Labor turned on him at the first possible opportunity.

Now, how am I to hope for Abbott to lose his position? The only way I see is for him to (literally) be caught with his pants down somewhere with someone other than his wife.* It's possible; I should never give up hope!

* Now that I think about it, I speculated once or twice on this blog during Rudd's puzzling rise to power that this was how he might come to grief too, but it was only with his ETS backflip that we all realised he had no testicles anyway. Maybe I'm just longing for another scandal as good as the Gareth Evans/ Cheryl Kernot one.

Odd headline of the day

French cannibal ate cellmate's lung in 'cry for help'

Bad Republican!

How Time and Life magazines helped turn America on to LSD. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Well, that's interesting! I didn't know that the Time and Life magazine co-founder and his wife (Henry and Clare Luce) were right into LSD, and this explains why those conservative magazines gave oddly sympathetic coverage of the drug in the late 50's and into the 1960's.

One pleasing strange aspect of this:

Clare's acid trips, which she recorded in her papers now at the Library of Congress, were of the garden variety. She sorts mosaic glass by her swimming pool. She entertains herself looking through a kaleidoscope. During a March 11, 1959, trip, Richard Nixon telephoned Clare at her Phoenix home. An active Republican who served in Congress and as an ambassador, Clare declined to speak to Nixon. How history might have changed if she had shared a little acid with him!

It could have been a stranger conversation than the one Nixon had with Elvis.

It’s ours, all ours

In what would probably be a rare bit of good news for Australian professional astronomers:

MORE than 35 years after Prince Charles opened Australia's biggest optical telescope - a joint venture between our two nations to explore the southern skies - we are bidding goodbye to the Brits.

From next month, the Anglo-Australian Observatory near the NSW town of Coonabarabran will become the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Its director, Matthew Colless, said the decades of collaboration with Britain had led to many big discoveries about the universe, including a measurement of the matter it contains.

But 100 per cent ownership of the observatory's four-metre telescope, which is still ranked highly in the world, would open up new opportunities for research in the coming decade.

I’ve been there once in the late 1980’s, and I recall it as having a pretty good visitor centre. Somewhere in a drawer I probably have a photo, but here’s one from the web.

Cheap real estate in Japan

We all saw on TV last year how you could buy abandoned houses in many parts of the US for a song. Unfortunately, it looked like many had been thoroughly vandalised, and were in neighbourhoods which might take a decade or so to feel safe and inhabited again. A house for a couple of thousand dollars in such a situation is not such a bargain.

But Japan is a different kettle of fish. (That’s a particularly apt expression for that country, come to think of it.)

Population decline has already set in, and about the only places growing are the big cities due to people leaving the rural areas. I had been wondering if bargains in housing were to be had, and this fascinating article claims that there are:

So just how many vacant properties are there in Japan? According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry in 2008, there were an amazing 4.127 million unoccupied housing units, up 451,900 from 2003.

Some of these are old decaying abandoned homes which you wouldn’t want anyway, but it is still a big number, and it’s only likely to get bigger. The article goes on to provide a website which lists properties for sale as a result of tax foreclosures, but unfortunately it is in Japanese only, and is not exactly what you would call a glossy looking real estate site.

There is one major cultural difference about Japan which is odd to Westerners: except for apartments, modern Japanese do not expect houses to last long:

One reason why foreigners are a good fit to solve the vacant housing problem is that they are more willing to live in older properties and to perform their own maintenance. Japanese have been educated over the last 50 years that housing older than 25 years old should be demolished and rebuilt, leading people to really only want to buy new places. I know this firsthand, after a relative bought a countryside property, built a substantial Japanese-style post-and-beam house on the land (and which will last another 50 to 100 years), but being told by the bank several years ago that the house itself is now considered to already have zero value!

Some suggest that the Japanese expectation for the life of a house is affected by the number of earthquakes it might be expected to endure. But I am sure it is more than that. I was recently speaking to a Japanese couple, now Australian residents, who explained how surprised they were to find that renovated older homes (particularly in the Queenslander style) in Brisbane were expensive and highly valued. I think there is an idea that houses carry any bad luck that happened in them into the future.

Lots of websites say that there is no equivalent to our Foreign Investment Review Board restrictions on foreign purchase of real estate in Japan. (They also say that dealing with real estate agents may not be easy, but the article I linked to says there is a move afoot to encourage real estate agents to be helpful to foreign investors.)

All of this certainly suggests that you don’t buy a house in Japan with an expectation of making capital gain. But the idea of having a holiday home in the very pretty countryside of Japan might be a quite viable option for foreigners in the future.

Cheap books, electronic and otherwise

E-reader prices have taken a tumble in America due to the success of the iPad.

Recently I saw at Dymocks the Kobo e-reader for $199, but they have sold out and you have to place them on order.   I thought the screen was a bit small though, but then I thought the same when I saw a Kindle.

Anyhow, I’ll still wait for the next generation of them before buying.  I’m currently getting plenty of cheap reading by going to the Lifeline Bookfest held every 6 months in Brisbane’s convention centre. 

In January, as I have reported here before, I got Clive James’ first volume of autobiography which I had been wanting to read for years.   This time (on the Queens Birthday weekend) I got the second volume.  I am also getting more Graham Greene, including his autobiography, and he is difficult to find anywhere other than second hand book stores.

One thing you do learn from going to the Lifeline book sale is this:  there are a hell of a lot of Bryce Courtney novels sold in Australia.  Unfortunately, he has no appeal to me at all.

For readers outside of Brisbane who may not understand the size of this Lifeline second hand book sale, here’s a photo from the Brisbane Times which gives a good indication:

We like out second hand books in Brisbane.

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.