Techno-optimism remembered

Tom Swift and the birth of American techno-optimism � Climate Progress

I should be doing something else, but can't help linking to this post about the Tom Swift novels, which have a much longer history than I realised.

I read the later incarnation of these (written in the 50's and 60's) when I was a child, and remember enjoying them a lot. As I have noted here before, there was a lot of basically optimistic science fiction written for the youth market in that period. Now that's been replaced by futuristic novels set in dystopias or otherwise pessimistic about the future, social realism about children dealing with broken families and such like, or fantasy that may be well written, but only connects with reality when dealing with relationships.

If I were a commissioning editor, I would be very interested in trying to re-establish the genre of techno-optimism for the youth market. You see, I haven't quite given up on that idea; just become depressed about the lack of political and social will to pursue it. Telling children not to expect science to help in the future is not a good way to break that cycle.

While I’m busy, consider the tortoise

Various issues are pre-occupying me at the moment, but while I am distracted, someone has written about the rise of pets, in particular tortoises, in England in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology:

As Dr. Thomas says, "Although we have archaeological evidence for terrapins and turtles from the 17th century, this is the first archaeological evidence we have for land tortoise in Britain. It seems very likely that this specimen was imported from North Africa or the Mediterranean; by the later 19th-century there was a dramatic rise in the commercial trade in tortoises from these regions to satisfy the growing demand for pet animals".

The morality of keeping pets was considered highly suspect in the strict religious doctrines of Medieval and Early Modern society, and although there was an avid fascination in exotic creatures at the time, this seems to have curiously bypassed the tortoise.

Attitudes towards pets began to change in the 17th century, particularly under the famously dog-loving Stuart kings, and the reputation of the tortoise had certainly risen high enough by the early 17th century for the ill-fated Archbishop Laud to have kept one.

During the 18th and 19th centuries a more 'modern' attitude to pet animals gradually emerged. The sculptor Joseph Gott created sentimental statues of dogs during the 19th century, and in 1824 the Society (later Royal Society) for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded.

Here’s something I didn’t know:  the great tortoise trade of the 20th century:

As Dr. Thomas reveals, "Unfortunately, this interest in keeping exotic pet animals resulted in the capture and translocation of millions of wild tortoises each year during the 20th century. The animals were crated in ships and kept in appalling conditions; countless tortoises died during this journey and those that survived fared little better, given away as fairground prizes and kept by people with little knowledge of their upkeep. It was not until an EEC regulation in 1988, that this trade in wild tortoises was prohibited".

Medieval report

Guess where we went yesterday?

It's a place where men oil themselves and wrestle, while other men watch:


It's a place where walking tree/wood nymph thing-ees wander:



It's where a hell of a lot of people dress up and wander around



and a woman can indulge her favourite past-time: firing replica breach canons, causing much smoke and sound,



while men dress up as old soldiers and hit each other for fun and (sort of) entertainment:

(I would move that crappy video to the centre if I could work out how.)

Yes, it was the Abbey 2010 Medieval Tournament, held just north of Brisbane.

It's been going on for years, but I've never made it there before.

One of the most interesting thing about it was that it made me realise the number of medieval themed club-like groups that must be around, lurking beneath the veneer of normal society. I spoke to one guy who was showing me how to make authentic medieval shoes and asked him: if one has a desire to be a medieval craftsman/soldier/musician, how does one go about finding entry into a group who can teach you how?

It does seem to come down to who you know, and (I suppose) attending these tournament events and begging entry into a quasi-secret society that catches your fancy. Then you too can dress up and yearn for the old (really old) days at least once a year.

Actually, it was all good fun, and next year I plan on attending as Thomas Aquinas.

Starfish Prime revisited

Bad Astronomy linked to a recent NPR story* with video of the 1962 Starfish Prime nuclear explosion in outer space. Interesting.

By the way, I've never been to the NPR news homepage before, but it has a very clean look that appeals.

* This is also, as it happens, how I found an NPR story on an old porn star. Just in case you were wondering.

Career choices of the older but not so wise

This whole stupid “cougar” business has to stop soon, doesn’t it?  NPR reports:

Diana Grandmason is a 50-year-old redhead who once ran an investments business in Florida. Perhaps an unlikely performer in adult films — but until a year and a half ago, she starred in X-rated movies, including Seduced by a Cougar.

Grandmason says she got into the porn business to follow her daughter, Bess Garren.

"Basically, she called me at work and said, 'I'm gonna go do this,' and I said, 'No you're not.' And she said, 'Mom I'm 21, this is a courtesy call, I'm doin' it.' So what choice did I have?" she explains.

But then, she decided to follow Garren.

"Originally it was signing up just so I could accompany her, and then I kinda got sold on the idea myself," Grandmason says.

Geeky hobby success

Amateur metal detecting as a hobby never seems to have taken off in Australia the same way as it did in America or (apparently) Britain. Metal detectors have featured in the ads sections of geeky American science magazines for decades, but here, apart from the occasionally opportunistic aging coin hunter going over the beach sand in the evening, I’ve never noticed them much. Maybe it’s because there is so little history in this country waiting to be discovered. No pirate treasure from the Caribbean is likely to have found its way to the beaches of Coochiemudlo Island*, after all.

Anyhow, in England, the hobby can really pay off. At least for a museum:

The largest single hoard of Roman coins ever found in Britain has been unearthed on a farm near Frome in Somerset.

A total of 52,500 bronze and silver coins dating from the 3rd century AD – including the largest ever found set of coins minted by the self proclaimed emperor Carausius, who lasted seven years before he was murdered by his finance minister – were found by Dave Crisp, a hobby metal detectorist from Devizes, Wiltshire.

Crisp first dug up a fingernail-sized bronze coin only 30cm below the surface. Even though he had never found a hoard before, when he had turned up a dozen coins he stopped digging and called in the experts, who uncovered a pot bellied pottery jar stuffed with the extraordinary collection, all dating from 253 to 293 AD – the year of Carausius's death.

As I said it’s good for museums, not so much benefit for the discoverer:

The archaeologists praised Crisp for calling them in immediately, allowing the context of the find to be recorded meticulously. When a coroner's inquest is held later this month in Somerset, the coins are likely to be declared treasure, which must by law be reported. Somerset county museum hopes to acquire the hoard, which could be worth up to £1m, with the blessing of the British Museum.

* A quiet island in Moreton Bay, which makes for a pleasant enough day trip if your expectations are not high; actually, they should be somewhere between low and a touch below moderate. I thought I had previously posted this photo after a visit last October , but maybe not:

Good lines, Richard

My favourite paragraph from Richard Glover’s column today, about prejudices against men:

Why are we accused of not doing our share of the housework? Men are assiduous about this sort of stuff. For example, many Australian men clean out their online browsing history almost every day. Don't thank us; we're just naturally tidy.

My second favourite bit:

What's the story with the ABC and the interminable bonnet dramas on Sunday nights? Is there any Thackeray left? Just how many books did Dickens write? Are five versions of Pride and Prejudice enough, or could we squeeze in one more? Oh, oh, Mr Darcy, oh, oh. Really, how much more of this stuff are we expected to endure?

Pathetic weaklings

Health alert in high temperatures and humidity - Home News, UK - The Independent

I love the way the British go into a heat fearing panic as soon as temperatures reach some startling figure, like 30 degrees.

But wait - what if the minimum temperature never goes below 20! Panic!:

The first heat-health alert of the summer was in force today as parts of the country faced several days - and nights - of sweltering conditions

Highs of up to 31C (87.8F) are expected as temperatures peak across East Anglia and south-east England today and tomorrow.

But it is not the hot sunshine of the day that people need to be wary of, but roasting night-time temperatures of at least 20C (68F) in some parts which pose the most threat.

Head of health forecasting at the Met Office Wayne Elliott said: "While there is the possibility of daytime temperatures reaching trigger thresholds, it is the night time values which are of real concern.

Pathetic former rulers of the world!

Tales of Christian intrigue

Rowan Williams under siege over gay bishop veto | UK news | The Guardian

The intricate ties between State and Church in England leads to all sorts of strange political intrigue, such as in this story.

First, within the Church itself, there's a name leaking spy, and Rowan wants to know who it is:

Dr Jeffrey John, the dean of St Albans, was in the running for the senior position at Southwark until his name was leaked, enabling conservative clerics to stop the appointment. An embattled Williams has now launched an inquiry at Lambeth Palace to find out who divulged the name .

The archbishop was appalled that John's name was disclosed in a successful attempt to derail his candidacy, exactly seven years after he was forced to stand down as the prospective bishop of Reading following a previous outcry by conservative evangelicals against John's sexuality. Fingers are being pointed at the same evangelical hardliners who orchestrated the 2003 campaign.

Now the liberals in the Church want the PM to step in:

John's supporters called for David Cameron to demonstrate his gay-friendly credentials by overruling the Crown Nominations Commission and insisting that John's name be considered further. They accused the archbishop of betraying his old friend a second time.

One senior cleric said: "The time of reckoning has come for Rowan. The events of seven years ago have bitten him hard in the very week women bishops comes to the crunch. He should realise there are greater considerations, like truth, justice, openness, fidelity to the rules and all those things the church proclaims. Many are dismayed by his constant capitulation to the fringe noisemakers.

"He could recover some credibility if he went mitre in hand to the PM and asked him to intervene and use his constitutional prerogative to consider the second name, whoever that is, and then to reject both if he so chooses."

The "mitre in hand" bit sounds a bit threatening, if you ask me. Reminds me of "The Bishop."

Now to be even handed (for once), I'll also link to a story of the (not intended to be) rich and famous from the Catholic Church:

To his congregants, he lived the humble existence of a pastor.

But a high-flying Connecticut priest was charged this week with first-degree larceny in the theft of almost $1.3 million from his church's coffers to fund a lavish double life that included swanky hotels and male escorts, said Capt. Chris Corbett of the Waterbury Police Department in Connecticut.

Father Kevin Gray, 64, a former pastor at Sacred Heart Church in Waterbury, allegedly embezzled money from the church over the course of seven years.

He used it to pay for fancy restaurants, clothing, vacations, hotels, a New York City apartment and a male companion's tuition at Harvard University, according to an affidavit obtained by CNN affiliate WTIC and filed with the Connecticut Superior Court.

The affidavit says that between June 2003 and March 2010, Gray spent about $205,000 at high-end restaurants, $132,000 in hotel stays and $85,000 at clothing stores. While in New York City, he frequented the Waldorf Astoria, Omni Berkshire, and the W Hotel Times Square, among other posh hotels, the affidavit states.

I wonder if his male "companions" knew he was a priest at all?

Stupid games

The depravity of Major League Eating. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

I've never quite understood how grotesque eating contests have become popular in America. William Saletan looks at the issue, and the weird fact that food companies sponsor these events, and ends this way:

Fifty years from now, when historians are looking for a moment that captures the depravity of our age—the gluttony, the self-destruction, the craving for worthless fame—it won't be bathhouses, Big Love, or AdultFriendFinder. It'll be Joey Chestnut stuffing that 68^th hot dog down his unresisting gullet, live on ESPN. Or, worse, it'll be the guy who broke his record.

He could well be right.

That octopus

I see Spain beat Germany in the World Cup last night, as predicted by Paul the German psychic octopus.  (I didn’t know his name til this morning.)

Just how long has this octopus been getting soccer right?  According to Salon:

Paul, who's been calling the outcomes of German football matches for the last two years, has only failed once, unsuccessfully ripping into the German-designated mussels before the Euro 2008 final went to Spain. His predictions are so revered that they're carried live on German television, giving Europeans something to preempt reruns of "Baywatch."

He has his own Wikipedia page, which gives some more details of the numbers:

Paul is reported to have correctly chosen the winner in five of Germany's six UEFA Euro 2008 matches.[10] He predicted Germany to win every match except a loss to Croatia. He incorrectly predicted Germany over Spain in the final in 2008.[11] He has correctly chosen the winner in each of Germany's six matches in the 2010 FIFA World Cup.[12][13][14][15] He also correctly predicted Spain's victory over Germany in the semi-final of the World Cup 2010 in South Africa.[16]

That is a surprising record.  I am curious how this affects the betting market.  Wouldn’t they have an interest in seeing him gone?  

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?