Travel in Morocco

Airport organisation leaves a lot to be desired in Morocco, apparently.

A short Greene note

I just finished reading Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter”, which, according to the blurb on the back, is “widely considered one of his finest novels.”

I beg to differ.  As with Brighton Rock, there’s a deep psychological improbability about the main character.  Worse still, many of the musings on God and theology are so cryptically expressed, I can’t even understand them.  Evelyn Waugh, as a very Catholic writer, was much easier to understand in this regard.  

It’s interesting to note that I can broadly agree with George Orwell’s review of the book, to which Wikipedia conveniently links.   (I would feel even better about that if I liked 1984, but I am amongst the handful of people in the world who can’t stand it.  And while we’re on Orwell,  why does comedian Will Anderson seem to be taking styling tips from him?)

This is the fourth Greene that I have read.  I liked two, and thought the other two were bad.  I might give one more a go.  The Quiet American, perhaps? 

Housing should be cheap in Russia soon, too

Population Decline in Russia

Inspired by a report that large numbers of (probably drunk) Russians have drowned during this year's heat wave, I did a Google and came up with the above recent report on Russian demographics. The situation there is much worse than I expected:

Russia has a very high death rate of 15 deaths per 1000 people per year. This is far higher than the world's average death rate of just under 9. The death rate in the U.S. is 8 per 1000 and for the United Kingdom it's 10 per 1000. Alcohol-related deaths in Russia are very high and alcohol-related emergencies represent the bulk of emergency room visits in the country.

With this high death rate, Russian life expectancy is low - the World Health Organization estimates the life expectancy of Russian men at 59 years while women's life expectancy is considerably better at 72 years. This difference is primarily a result of high rates of alcoholism among males.

Wow.

As for the low birth rate, they have a pretty "big government" way of tackling that problem:

Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said 14-year-olds will undergo more intense medical checks at school starting next year, which could help reveal possible reproduction problems and start treatment on time.

"More intense medical examinations of teenagers are planned to start from 2011 with the goal of examining their reproductive function and recommending individual medical courses, which would identify and treat reproduction problems," Golikova said.

....she said illnesses among schoolchildren rose 9.3% in the past decade, with more than 20% of schoolchildren having chronic illnesses and over 50% of teenagers having health problems that could affect their reproduction ability in the future.

Golikova also highlighted growing alcohol consumption and smoking habits among children.

Sounds like a depressing place.

Tuesday miscellany

There have been quite a few stories around lately worth noting, even if I don’t have time to do full posts on them:

*  A scientist cautioned against burying CO2, again. 

*  Ziggy takes the Gulf oil disaster as an opportunity to favourably compare nuclear to fossil fuels.   Some good figures included in there.

*  Last night’s Four Corners, the first of a two part show on the Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, was great viewing, and the soldiers and officers interviewed presented as  intelligent, compassionate and competent.    The country itself presented as pretty much the opposite and, frankly, hard to care about, but the problem is it can be good at exporting trouble.

*   A Melbourne woman discovers that not drinking 8 cups of coffee of day changes her personality for the better.  She should be shaking less, anyway.

*  Julia Gillard makes her first major policy mistake.  She decides to be a Twitter. 

*  Slate examined the novel idea that our favourite mind altering parasite, toxoplasma gondii, may help soccer performance.   Don’t tell your kid’s coach, especially if he has access to kitty litter.

Revisiting ocean acidification

I’m pretty busy this week, but if I can get readers to look at one article, it would be the very balanced one that appeared in The Economist on ocean acidification.

The article’s subtitle is “ocean acidification threatens the world’s oceans, but quantifying the risks is hard”, which is probably a fair statement given the current state of play in the research.  

It has always been suggested that there will likely to be winners and losers in the ocean from acidification, and this year some researchers have proposed that a meta-analysis of studies to date indicate that sea life may be more resilient than originally thought.  This has been immediately attacked by other researchers pointing out the complexity of the problem:  you have to look at how lower pH affects organisms at all stages of life, as well as warming ocean temperatures, and nutrient levels too.

There are still studies just coming out which have tried to work out more details as to different species’ responses.   Here are a few:

*  it’s still not looking great for the pteropods, one of the major fish foods of the cold oceans, although this study got some results a bit different from previous ones, and much uncertainty seems to remain.  (In fact, my general impression from reading  about this topic for a number of years now is that there is still a surprising lack of detailed knowledge about the detailed bio-chemistry of  sea creatures that build shells, in particular.) 

*  for the blue mussel, the effects on the larval stage are not good.

* on the other hand, for one species of clam, lower pH seemed to do no harm at all.

The problem with some of these studies must surely be how hard it is to accurately replicate the ocean environment in the lab for certain creatures, particularly if they don’t just float at one depth all day, as is the case (I seem to recall) with pteropods.

There has also been renewed comment about how widely the pH of ocean areas (particularly near the coast, I think) changes naturally in a short space of time.  The suggestion is that if creatures can survive that already, they are possibly resilient to forecast lowering of pH.  Yet, surely a significant drop of the  average pH a creature experiences during the day could be very important, even if the same creature spends part of its day/week at such a lower pH already.

Anyhow, as I said, The Economist article does a good job at explaining the current uncertainties, and suggests that it may well be coral reef studies that come up with the definitive proof that acidification will have major effects.  Here are the concluding paragraphs:

If reshaping food webs marginalises the pteropods, the salmon will have to adapt or die. But though the mesocosms may shed light on the fate of the pteropods, the outlook for the salmon will remain conjectural. Though EPOCA is ambitious, and expensive, the mesocosms are too small to contain fish, and the experiments far too short to show what sort of adaptation might be possible over many years, and what its costs might be.

This is one of the reasons why the fate of coral reefs may be more easily assessed than open-water ecosystems. The thing that provides structure in open-water ecosystems is the food-web, which is hard to observe and malleable. In reefs, the structure is big lumps of calcium carbonate on which things grow and around which they graze and hunt. Studies of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef show that levels of calcification are down, though it is not yet possible to say changes in chemistry are a reason for this. Current research comparing chemical data taken in the 1960s and 1970s with the situation today may clarify things.

But singling out the role of acidification will be hard. Ocean ecosystems are beset by changes in nutrient levels due to run off near the coasts and by overfishing, which plays havoc with food webs nearly everywhere. And the effects of global warming need to be included, too. Surface waters are expected to form more stable layers as the oceans warm, which will affect the availability of nutrients and, it is increasingly feared, of oxygen. Some, including Dr Riebesell, suspect that these physical and chemical effects of warming may prove a greater driver of productivity change in the ocean than altered pH. Wherever you look, there is always another other problem.

No reason for complacency, I say.

An anti-Rudd cornucopia

I am happy to admit that I was completely unmoved by Rudd’s farewell press conference, which many people have called “emotional” and “hard to watch”.  As I had long decided that there was a high level of artificiality in his public persona, it was simply a curiosity to me that he does seem to have a nice supporting family, which I can only assume he treats very differently to how he reportedly treats co-workers and underlings. 

And to justify my feelings about Rudd, it’s good to read the stories that many people now feel freer to talk about since his departure.     The Australian has put together a long article full of  anti-Rudd anecdotes.  Good reading.

Steganography appears before our eyes

There’s an interesting report here in the Christian Science Monitor about those (alleged) Russian spies arrested in America using steganography:

The alleged Russian spies recently arrested by the FBI are accused of encoding messages into otherwise innocuous pictures, marking the first confirmed use of this high-tech form of data concealment in real life, experts say.

The accused spies posted the seemingly mundane photos on publicly accessible websites, but then extracted coded messages from the computer data of the pictures, according to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI. Although computer scientists have theorized about the existence of this communication technique for over a decade, this is the first publicly acknowledged use of the technique.

A good explanation of the technique follows:

To generate the picture on a computer screen, the computer assigns every pixel three numeric values that correspond to the amount of red, green or blue in the color the pixel displays. By changing those values ever so slightly, the spies could hide the 1’s and 0’s of computer language in the picture’s pixel numbers, but without altering the picture’s appearance to the human eye, Bellovin said.

When this was first widely discussed a decade or so ago, it did strike me as a particularly clever idea, and the growth in online photo sharing sites since then must make the number of places coded photos could be sitting there waiting to be read by the right person ridiculously large.

What’s more, it’s not as if the software to do it is particularly hard to find.  If you search Sourceforge, quite a few different open source programs for it are available.

It’s all so James Bond, I only wish I had a dire secret and someone to share it with.

Most unusual

Found via Tigerhawk, here’s something I don’t recall ever seeing before in a political ad:  good natured humour.  What an innovation!

Why does this man get paid to direct?

“This man” being M. Night Shyamalan, a one hit wonder whose career success rate can’t take any steeper trend downwards; it’s been in freefall for a few years already.

Latest evidence:  “The Last Airbender”, with Roger Ebert opening his review with:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

and ends with:

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

Amusing.  In the WSJ review, we get this bit about the lead actor:

According to Mr. Ringer's understandably slim curriculum vitae, he holds a first-degree black belt in taekwondo. To judge from an informal interview posted on YouTube, he is extremely personable, lively and humorous when he's off screen. On screen, alas, he is none of those things, thanks to the reverse wizardry of his director. (No one else can be blamed when an actor has had no professional experience.)

The review then ends with the exactly the same key question I started with (I only realised this after I started the post):

All of which brings us back to the question of expectations, and how Mr. Shyamalan keeps getting work. Eleven years ago he electrified the movie world with the emotional power and dramatic surprise of "The Sixth Sense." He followed up with two flawed but intriguing features, "Unbreakable" and "Signs." In the past eight years, though, his oeuvre has gone from bad ("The Village") to worse ("Lady in the Water") to worst ("The Happening.") Purists might argue that his last film was less dreadful than his penultimate one, but the hallmarks were the same: stilted language, robotized acting, glacial pace, ponderous style, dramatic ineptitude and negligible energy. I never meant to make this review an exercise in career assassination, but I can't help thinking of all the lavishly talented filmmakers who have earned and never gotten a shot at big-budget success. What's the secret of this guy's failure?

Not great news

Per-Capita Emissions Rising in China

Carbon dioxide emissions per person in China reached the same level as those in France last year, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said Thursday.

The Dutch agency said that per capita emissions were 6.1 tons in China in 2009, up from only 2.2 tons in 1990. Among the French, emissions were 6 tons per person last year, said Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the Dutch agency.

Per capita emissions in France tend to be lower than in some other industrialized countries because of the country’s heavy reliance on nuclear plants to generate electricity rather than fossil fuels. Per capita emissions in 15 nations of the European Union were 7.9 tons in 2009, down from 9.1 tons in 1990, the study said. In the United States, the figure was 17.2 tons in 2009, down from 19.5 tons in 1990.

Over all the Dutch agency found that global emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, were unchanged last year. That came as a surprise: Because of the onset of the worst economic crisis in decades, other bodies like the International Energy Agency had predicted a significant decline in 2009, the report said.

But the hefty increase in emissions from fast-developing parts of the world like China and India had the effect of canceling out the sharp decline in emissions elsewhere. Emissions from China and India “completely nullified CO2 emission reductions in the industrialized world,” the report said.

Bye bye Mel

I never cared for his work anyway, but I think we can safely say that if these recordings are true, Mel Gibson will never likely “do lunch” in Hollywood again.  At least, not with anyone who matters.

Nice blog

Well, that's handy. I've added to the blogroll James' Empty Blog, which has the pretty unique feature of covering my interests in both climate change and life in Japan. (James Anann is a climate scientist living there, and lovely photos of the country - usually taken by his wife I think - are a frequent feature.)

There is also an interesting post on marriage in Japan, and how the ceremony has no legal significance at all.

One for me, please

This is a product that does address an actual problem which has bothered me many times: fitting all those different plugs and transformers in the one power board. I hope it is coming to Australia:

Holy digital fraud!

I have to admit to a certain admiration for the chutzpah of the mix of the religious and the scientific in this fraud from Korea:

A South Korean medical professor who invented a digital device he claimed could transform tap water into holy water is facing fraud charges, Seoul police say.

Authorities say the professor claimed to have digitally captured the supposed curative powers of holy water on devices he sold to more than 5,000 people for a total profit of nearly 1.7 billion won ($1.7 million)….

Police say the 53-year-old professor claimed he obtained holy water from the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes - a world-famous Catholic pilgrimage site in France - and preserved its supposed healing powers in digital form.

He claimed to be able to digitally transfer those powers onto ceramic and paper filters and plastic cards used in water purifiers.

He and his associates allegedly told customers that different devices cured different illnesses including diabetes and tumours.

The professor sold the ceramic filters, which cost 1,500 won ($1.50) in stores, for 40,000 won ($39).

 

Movie "meh"

I came home the other night to find my son watching Avatar on DVD. I watched 10 minutes or so of alien action, and came away not so impressed with their realism. They felt only marginally better than the completely computer created aliens of the last Star Wars trilogy, I thought. Yes, the faces had overcome some of the "uncanny valley" that fully digital humans still have, but the motion of entire bodies looked completely convincing only sometimes. I assume some of the figures were created by digitising film of actors running, jumping etc, and some not.

The sense of gravity acting completely realistically on digitally created bodies always seems to me to be the weakest point in these movies. They just don't seem to fall or jump in quite the right way.

And anyway, as I have written before, I am pretty much over any movie where the digitally created nature of certain scenes with hundreds or thousands of figures is inherently obvious.

So, maybe I'll devote more time to watching Avatar before I give it a verdict, but my initial reaction is a big "meh".

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.