Nurse!

Greg Sheridan thinks this:

JULIA should have made Kevin foreign minister already.

Well, I hope some of the Tony Abbott mental health money has been earmarked for journalists who have completely lost touch with reality.

Paris by Griff, and memories best forgotten

Griff Rhys Jones' series "The Greatest Cities in the World" has done New York and London, and I thought they were a little dull. The material was a touch too familiar, and Griff mugs a touch too much for the camera.

But the third one on Paris was very enjoyable. You can still catch it on ABC iView.

There was one long section in which he goes exploring under the city in the catacombs created by quarrying, and it made me realise I must still be capable of claustrophobia.

I once had a moderate attack of it while on a tour of some caves near Canberra. One section involved a narrow corkscrew type staircase, where the head height was pretty low, and it was while in this tight corner that the line of people ahead of me stopped, presumably while some goose ahead was admiring a particularly nice stalactite or something. There were people backed up behind me too, and it was this feeling of being stuck and being unable to move forward or backward in a space so confined that I couldn't even stand straight that suddenly made me feel panicky. I don't think I said anything, or maybe I did ask the people ahead of me if they could keep moving, but my heartbeat definitely rose and it felt a like a sinking feeling in the stomach. The line did start to move again soon enough, and I was able to complete the tour, as the cave opened up again a short time later. But I really wanted to get out as quickly as I could without making a scene.

This all came as a bit of a surprise to me, and for a couple of years later I was a little worried that it might come again in some other context. Would a aircraft make me feel like I have to rush to the door to open it at 30,000 feet? I did get a little worried on a couple of flights, but maybe it was worry about what would happen if I did get the claustrophobic feeling, rather than claustrophobia itself. Fortunately, that passed pretty soon, and long haul flights have not worried me since.

It made me feel a bit disappointed that maybe I was never cut out to be an astronaut after all, as per my childhood daydreams. (All capsules prior to the shuttle were an incredibly tight squeeze, and claustrophobia is something for which the astronauts are still definitely tested *.)

Anyhow, years later I did visit the Jenolan Caves, which I had been to as a boy with no trouble. I took a couple of tours and was OK; as long as there is plenty of headroom, I can get through it.

But last night, watching Griff wriggle down a hole that was the link between two underground tunnels gave me an instant reminder of the sensation of claustrophobia. It's been a while since I have felt that, but I think some other shows about cave explorers have reignited the feeling too.

For the same reason, I don't like to imaginatively put myself in the position of those Beaconsfield miners who survived the mine collapse in such a small space. Not that you would ever find me seeking work as a miner underground, but re-visiting in your mind a claustrophobic feeling is almost certainly not a good way to hope to avoid the feeling in the real world again..

For those who have worse attacks of it than me, it must feel very bad indeed.

* One site talking about being an astronaut as a career writes:

Astronauts-in-training participate in scenarios that simulate weightlessness, heavy gravity (excessive G-forces) and navigate nature's call in an unbroachable interstellar suit. Intensive psychological screening, required of all applicants, is supposed to weed out those with claustrophobia, but one or two are discovered annually in the program and dismissed.

Another article, talking about civilians who may be taking flights into space, writes this:

Jeff Feige, CEO of Orbital Outfitters, a commercial spacesuit developer, said that the training they envision for the use of their suits will range from basic classroom familiarization to simulated pressurization of suit and emergency egress from the vehicle while wearing the suit. Something as simple as testing putting on the suit can be useful for identifying people who have claustrophobia, he said. “A lot of people don’t realize they’re claustrophobic until that helmet is locked and they’re told they can’t take if off. And then all of a sudden they realize they are feeling a little uncomfortable and this isn’t exactly what they had expected.”

Aggressive agnosticism

The rise of the new agnostics. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

I really like this article in which Rosenbaum argues that the New Atheism is too much like the old Theism, and that it's time that agnosticism re-asserted itself as the true home of intellectual honesty.

All quite correct, in my opinion.

Don't tell the Japanese

Humpback survey indicates growing population

A recent humpback whale count indicates a recovery in the population of animals migrating along the mid-north coast of New South Wales.

In five hours last Saturday, 109 humpbacks were spotted off Tacking Point near Port Macquarie.

Sue Phillips from the local National Parks office says that is a 10 per cent increase on last year....

"Recent DNA testing has shown that after the whaling years it seems as if the humpback whale population in eastern Australia got down to around about 115 individuals," she said.

"Now we think it's back up over the 10,000 mark."

First the good news…

All very large asteroids at risk of hitting Earth should be identified fairly soon:

"In a few more years, we'll be able to say that there's nothing out there to cause a global catastrophe,” said David Morrison, director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and senior scientist for Astrobiology at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Then the bad news:

“But, there'll be a million that will be big enough to wipe out an entire city. It'll take a long time, if ever, to find them and figure out their orbits. The bottom line is, we could be hit by one of those small ones at any time, with no warning at all. Right now, I can say almost nothing about the probability of one of those small objects hitting us, because we simply haven't found all of them."

The article also notes that some scientists still think a nuclear bomb would be the best way of dealing with a large, threatening, asteroid.

Sensitive region

A new temperature estimate going back a few million years comes up with this conclusion:

"Our findings indicate that CO₂ levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F)," Ballantyne said. "As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic."

But they taste good

Someone has written a book about how introducing rainbow trout to its non-native rivers around the world has (allegedly) been an ecological disaster. 

I am not entirely convinced; they taste good, look nice, and don’t muddy the water.

Don’t do it Julia

Julia Gillard is undecided as to whether she will have a Twitter account.  Please don’t.

Rounding up the porn

This is just about the silliest thing I have heard a Christian lobby argue:

The pornography industry and the Christian conservative lobby have united in opposition to a proposal to create a new domain name catering specifically for pornography on the internet….

Australian Christian Lobby spokesman Lyle Shelton says the group opposes the new domain because it sees it as further legitimising the pornography industry.

"Anything which further mainstreams and legitimises the porn trade is obviously not a healthy thing for children," he said.

"It is not a healthy thing for the wider society because it just continues to take us down this path where profiting off naked young women continues to gather acceptance in our society and of course we are seeing the pornification of culture seeping into our everyday lives."

Further legitimising the porn industry! I would have thought having porn sites spread across all possible domains gives it an ease of access which should be much more of a concern for them than any alleged “legitimacy” rounding it up into one domain would create. In fact, the porn industry agrees with this lobby but for entirely the opposite reason: it doesn’t what an internet porn “ghetto” created, because people might be able to avoid it easier.

The porn industry also fears that conservative politicians, especially in the US, will seek to force all current porn into the new domain.

Well, I fail to see what the problem with that would be, apart from porn producers facing loss of revenue because it would make voluntarily filtering access to it much, much easier. In fact, now that I think of it, surely a lot of their revenue comes from people paying for access to the “quality” material, and how much of that goes on at work or in any place other than a guy’s house, late at night? In other words, maybe the feared loss of revenue is greatly exaggerated. And besides which, is there some reason I should be concerned that this industry might lose money?

I don’t see it should at all be a significant concern that different governments could have different standards for what they would want in .xxx. Surely it would be a major improvement even if only explicit sex was required to go there. I don’t see street protests going on about why XXX Adult bookshop material is not allowed into the front of the local newsagent. If a country tries to force too much into .xxx, its a matter for renewed debate about censorship and classification, and this is often a topic of some debate for movies and other material, for example. That it may become a debate in relation to internet content, big deal.

It’s not about preventing access to porn to any adult who wants it; its about making it much easier to prevent access to it in places it undoubted should not be, such as workplaces and the kid’s bedroom.

As for loss of value in existing .com porn address, whereby people could argue that they have lost an asset overnight, couldn’t that be partially addressed by having the .com name become a simple referral page to the new .xxx address for the same enterprise? Those who want to get to formerly .com material can still find it, just by one more click.

Unless there is some vital technical aspect to this I am missing, round it up, I say.

Clean energy blues

A few items of interest about clean energy:

* Technology Review has a pretty balanced report on the German experiment in boosting solar power generation by generous "feed in" tariffs for your domestic solar cells. On the one hand:

The German grid now gets more than 16 percent of its electricity from these sources, and the government has raised its target for 2020 from 20 percent to 30 percent. The country avoided pumping about 74 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2009. The German environment ministry also touts a side benefit: nearly 300,000 new jobs in clean power.

But on the other hand, some say:

..the German policy is a government boondoggle. "It's not surprising that if you throw enough money at a certain technology, people will use it," says Severin Borenstein, codirector of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Yes, the incentives triggered a frenzy of renewable-power installations, but at "very high prices," says Henry Lee, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The spending on photovoltaics has been especially cost-inefficient in terms of producing power, Lee adds, because "Germany is the cloudiest country in Europe." Despite the weather, Germany now accounts for half the world's 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. "What that gets you," says Lee, "is high prices for electricity, locked in for 20 years, from technology that will be out of date within three years." Concludes ­Borenstein: "That's a failure of public policy."

I do find it particularly odd that cloudy old (northern) Europe is the part of the world really going for solar. I remain sceptical of the wisdom of the program, although I presume it would all make more sense in places like the top half of Australia.

* Technology Review also has a long article about Zhengrong Shi, the Chinese businessman (but Australian citizen) and his hopes for improved solar cell efficiency in the not so distant future. Still no real talk in the article about how you store the electricity once the sun goes down, though.

* The 7.30 Report featured a story about an Australian company which is going off to Europe to build its ceramic fuel cells. These seem very promising, yet are getting little support from the Australian government because they run on natural gas. This seems pretty silly to me, especially if these claims are true:

Ceramic Fuel Cells claims its Blue Gen unit is much more efficient than the current power grid where up to 80 per cent of the energy can be lost in transmission and it says the unit produces two thirds less carbon dioxide emissions than coal fired generators.

Interestingly, the Greens think fuel cells should get feed in tariffs, and Senator Nick Xenophon points out that if the government is going to not pay feed in tariff for energy from natural gas, why do they pay renewable energy money on heat pump hot water systems, which run on electricity from coal? Fair point, and it certainly seems true that no single party has all the answers to sensible clean energy policy in Australia.

I first mentioned this Australian company here 2 years ago. Seems that they are moving slowing towards large scale production.

A surprise from the bottle

This is quite a surprising finding, I reckon:

Mothers who drink alcohol while they are pregnant may be damaging the fertility of their future sons, according to new research to be presented at the 26th annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Rome today (Tuesday 29 June). Doctors in Denmark found that if mothers had drunk 4.5 or more drinks a week while pregnant, then the sperm concentration of their sons, measured about 20 years later, was a third lower in comparison to men who were not exposed to alcohol while in the womb.

The researcher is happy to be cautious about this study, though:

However, because this is an observational study we cannot say for certain that the alcohol causes the lower sperm concentrations. It is possible that drinking alcohol during pregnancy has a harmful effect on the foetal semen-producing tissue in the testes – and thereby on semen quality in later life – but our study is the first of its kind, and more research within this area is needed before any causal link can be established or safe drinking limits proposed.

But, if it turns out to be true, it might be the (or at least part of the) answer to the question of why semen quality seems to have been on the decline globally in recent years:

"If further research shows that maternal alcohol consumption is a cause of reduced semen concentration in male offspring, then we are a bit closer to an explanation of why semen quality may have decreased during the last decades and why it differs between populations. If exposure to alcohol in foetal life causes poor semen quality in adult life, we would expect that populations with many pregnant women drinking, possibly heavily, in pregnancy would have lower fertility in comparison with populations of where pregnant women do not drink."

Purple health

BBC News - Nitrate content 'behind benefits of beetroot juice'

A study in the US journal Hypertension found that blood pressure was reduced within 24 hours in people who drank beetroot juice or took nitrate tablets.

The higher the blood pressure, the greater the impact of the nitrates.

This research suggests there is hope of using a more "natural" approach to bring down blood pressure. Nitrates are found in a number of vegetables.

A previous study found that drinking a pint of beetroot juice lowered blood pressure significantly in people with normal blood pressure.

I'm not entirely sure I would enjoy drinking a pint of beetroot juice, but this must be good news for any farmer that particularly enjoys growing this vegetable.

Good old Bettina

Bettina Arndt (who, incidentally, has been married twice herself) comes out with a rather conservative take on the question of the role model effect of Julia Gillard being in a de facto relationship.   I agree with all of it.  Some extracts:

It's fine for Gillard - a 48-year-old woman - to live with her bloke. Yet as a popular role model for women, her lifestyle choice may influence other women into making big mistakes about their lives.

Cohabitation produces two groups of losers among women and children. Most women want to have children - Gillard is an exception - and some miss out after wasting their primary reproductive years in a succession of live-in relationships which look hopeful but go nowhere, leaving them childless and partnerless as they hit 40….

While the de facto lifestyle leads some women to miss out on having children, others are taking the risk of becoming parents despite these unstable relationships. A growing proportion of children is now born to de facto couples - up from less than 3 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 2000, according to data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey.

It is often assumed these children will provide the glue to keep de facto relationships together, but sadly this is not so. David de Vaus, a sociology professor from La Trobe University, found cohabiting couples who have children are more like to break up than married parents, increasing their risk of the negative impacts of family breakdown.

She then makes this good point:

 Politicians today rarely question social trends, even when all the evidence is they are having negative social consequences. John Howard was the rare exception, when he went into bat for a child's rights to a father in the debate over single mothers and IVF.

Yes, I used to like that about John Howard. We all knew Paul Keating was personally conservative on the matter of gay marriage, for example, but he was politically constrained from saying it out loud. No such problem for John Howard.

As for Julia:  I think it is fair to say that very few people would take her relationship status as a reason for not voting for her.  However, it should be no shock, and a matter of social benefit, if she did marry her partner now or soon after winning an election.  I mean, she would be simply following a pattern that many others have, and I don’t see that it should be seen as a betrayal of feminist principles.    The fact that it would annoy some feminists is just an added benefit as far as I am concerned.

Richo agrees with me

Graham Richardson writes scathingly of K Rudd, the former PM now ordered to take a rest by Dr Julia*:

YOU didn't need a poll to know this tax was going down like a shower of the proverbial. Everybody from Julia Gillard down told Kevin Rudd the resource super profits tax was killing him and the government. But he wouldn't listen. He never listened. This genius actually believed he was the font of all wisdom.

No one moved against Rudd merely because he treated colleagues with total disdain. But it ensured that when the challenge came, success could be achieved at record pace. The margin, had a ballot occurred, would have been embarrassingly large. Faction leaders didn't make caucus members hate Rudd; no, that was all Kevin's own work.

Hate, by the way, was the right description. From lowly backbenchers to cabinet ministers, I have never come across such loathing towards a leader before, let alone a leader who achieved the biggest swing to Labor since World War II at the 2007 election.

*  I wish someone would tell him to take a break from twittering, too.  All normal people over 50 should have the appropriately disdainful attitude to that silly use of the internet, but I’ll take it as a sign of vanity that Kevin doesn’t stop.

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