Torture not required

Reading terrorists minds about imminent attack: Brain waves correlate to guilty knowledge in mock terrorism scenarios

Yeah, the story's been out for a couple of weeks and maybe you've already read it, but I want to note it here for my own records.

It was pretty fascinating, if you missed it.

Both sides of the fence

I didn't get to see Four Corners last night, but I see from this report that Abbott is still trying to walk both sides of the fence, by making statements that will appeal to climate skeptics, but still making out that he is satisfied enough to spend money on reducing carbon.

If you ask me, as with his "I'm not a tech head" attitude to selling his broadband policy, Abbott comes across as lazy on detail. He'll grab a "big idea" of his own, such as his parental leave plan, and run with that as far as he can, but when it comes to anything with science content, it's all a shrug of the shoulders and admissions that he hasn't read much about it. (He said he started Plimer's disreputable book but didn't finish it. That in fact might be a good thing, but there is no indication that he has read material on the other side of the fence.)

Out there physics

Here's a paper on arXiv that I haven't had time to try and read yet, but I like the title:

Born in an Infinite Universe: a Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Max Tegmark is one of the authors, and I certainly recognize his name.

Why I like the Tiger

Last week's trip to Sydney was taken on Tiger Airways again. This is at least the third time I've flown them: once to Adelaide, Melbourne and now Sydney.

The reason I fly them is, of course, the incredibly cheap fares you can find by subscribing to their email sale notifications. Apart from that, their generally bad reputation for reliability and service gives me a perverse thrill every time I take a successful trip on them.

I don't think any other airline in Australia is as ruthless with weight limits for both check-in baggage and carry on. What's more, the explanation of their rules in this regard on the internet is incredibly complicated. In some respects it seems to me that their website is positively misleading (referring to having to check baggage in 2 hours before the flight. In fact, no one will be at the counter in many of their terminals until 2 hours before the flight.) Telephoning them seems to end up putting you in contact with an overseas call centre, and the "telephone tree" didn't seem to recognize my number selections. Checking my reservation on line to make sure that I had paid for 15 kg of luggage when I booked the trip 9 months ago did not make it clear whether I had or not. (Hence the need for the lengthy call to the call centre.)

When you check in, there is normally some passengers at the desk having to do a rushed re-arrangement of the contents of their check in luggage to keep within the weight limits, or arguing over the fees they have paid.

Yet, all this means that when one successfully manages to book, pay for, and get on board a flight without drama (well, my wife had to give me some books from her carry on luggage to keep hers under 7 kg) there is the pleasant sensation of triumph over adversity, having dodged a bullet yet again, and flown this bus in the sky for a ridiculously cheap price.

Yes, I quite like Tiger Airways.

Photos from down south

More details to come.

Home

I've been away again, and now have to work to pay for it. Trip report to come.

One thing I always notice when I get back from a holiday is that going through one's regular internet haunts to catch up over a week or so only takes up a small fraction of the time that one can waste on checking the same sites every day. Perhaps if the World Wide Web was open only on Sundays, work efficiency globally would increase sufficiently that a double dip recession could be avoided.

As for politics:

* Tony Abbott gave a very crook interview on Radio National this morning, sounding particularly evasive and devious about the company levy to pay for his Swedish parental leave plan. Labor should use parts of it for last minute advertising.

* I had been contemplating making an informal vote this election*, but now that Mark Latham has endorsed that idea, even that has become unappealing. Now I need to arrange to be bedridden with some 24 hour illness so that I can not vote without appearing to be taking a lead from a walking spleen vent. (By the way, I reckon Latham looks meaner and scarier now that he doesn't wear glasses. Must be the Superman effect that previously softened his appearance somewhat.)

* at least for the House of Representatives. For the Senate, the temptation to vote all over the enormous paper just to make life difficult for the vote counter may be too much.

Things to do

I'm going to be pretty busy this week.

Here are some things to do while I'm busy and (probably) not posting:

* watch a chemo affected Christopher Hitchens talk about his illness and God stuff here. (He doesn't get upset with people praying for his recovery, by the way.)

* read about Astana, the brand spanking new capital city of Kazakhstan. As the article says "it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia. " As it happens, I really like planned-from-scratch cities. I just wish some country would let Disney do their capital. Then again, when you look at this photo gallery of Astana, it does look quite a lot like that already. Cool.

* Contemplate my mistake in thinking that competitive eating was as silly as competitions get. Little did I know that Finland was out-stupiding America by hosting the Sauna World Championships, which has just killed one "competitor" and sent another to hospital. Funny what can happen when the test is to see who can last longest in a 110 degree C heat:

Ladyzhenskiy and Kaukonen had made it through to the final ahead of more than 130 other participants, but six minutes into the contest, judges noticed something was wrong with the Russian, and dragged both competitors from the sauna.

Both middle-aged men were seen to have severe burns on their bodies and were given first aid after they collapsed.

* watch some video of the aftermath of a huge mudslip/flood in a part of China.

* put in an offer for a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pasadena. The price has already been reduced 35%; you might just get a bargain.

* be charmed by the twitching nose and rapid pace of the Rufous elephant shrew in this excerpt from the great documentary series Life currently showing on ABC on Sunday nights:

Concern from the other side of the world

The Independent runs a story about some evidence given to a Northern Territory inquiry about the pretty hopeless state of child welfare in aboriginal communities there.

It certainly does seem that resources are remarkably smaller than what I would have expected:

Claims that children are starving, or "failing to thrive", were contained in a submission to the inquiry in Darwin by child protection staff from the Northern Territory. They said resources allocated to indigenous communities were "grossly inadequate" and the spectacle of children who were failing to thrive was, to them, familiar.

The Darwin-based team covers a vast area and looks after 14,000 people, but has to make do with four welfare workers and four Aboriginal community workers. That level of staffing, combined with a "fly-in, fly-out approach", allows for "little more than superficial child protection responses", the inquiry submission said.

Staff also complained about the "incredible" volume of paperwork they had to plough through, saying: "We spend more time sitting at a computer than we do with our clients and their families."...

Meanwhile, Alice Springs Hospital has told the inquiry it is used by child protection workers as a "storehouse" for children awaiting foster placement. "[We are] an acute care facility, we are not able to provide appropriate supervision of children and their families," the hospital's submission said.

Dan Baschiera, a veteran social worker, told the inquiry he had seen child protection staff fresh from years of study and training "burn up" after a few months working in Aboriginal welfare. He accused the Northern Territory government of starving the child protection system of funds.

So, what's going on?

I didn't stay at the office yesterday, fearing the local clouds of wattle pollen. But then, the day before I felt generally ill, perhaps with a chill in the evening and feeling particularly tired. Is it in fact a virus, or was the tiredness from the (according to the woman in the pharmacy and the outside of the box) a non-drowsy antihistamine tablet that I took in the morning? (Strangely, the leaflet inside the box warned that for some people, it might make them sleepy anyway.)

Anyway, the nose didn't run much at home yesterday, and I generally felt not so bad while doing some work on my laptop on the dining room table. From that position, I got to watch the birds that come to the seed we leave outside (and to use the birdbath.) We now seem to have three regular types - a couple of bossy lorikeets, a pair of spotted doves, and now some top notch pigeons too. The lorikeets can't stand sharing the seed with the doves, and spend a lot of time trying to chase them away by hopping aggressively towards them. We've tried putting two plates of seeds out, then watched the lorikeets chasing pigeons away from both of them. [And now, as I type this, a spotted dove and top notch pigeon are having it out over a plate as well.] It's hard to make different species realise there's enough for everyone.

I've also noticed that spotted doves seem a particularly amorous breed. Doesn't matter what time of year it is, they seem up for it. But as far as nest building goes, they have extremely rudimentary ideas of what might be adequate. Lorikeets seem to be very private about their love life; we've never seen them do anything in or near the backyard. Maybe it's the mile high club only for them. Pigeons will try it anywhere.

I know getting wild birds too used to feeding is not supposed to be that good an idea, but we're only talking 6 regulars here, so I can't see we are going to cause any crisis to the local ecology.

So that's yesterday went; watching the local bird wars and amorous activities. Oh yeah, and peering into the computer as well. There are worse ways to pass the day.

The dreaded yellow flower

Near my office there are a few wattle trees. Every year, around this time, I either get sinus pain, or (as in this year) a full blown case of hayfever. It's then that I notice the wattles are in flower. They are evil.

Silly Brits

"Wild swimming" is apparently becoming popular in cold, polluted British waterways.  I did notice that Griff Rhys Jones seemed unusually keen on swimming in any murky brown stuff in his recent TV series about British rivers.  Odd people.

Short answer: no

The Christian Science Monitor asks the question "is the moon really a 'been there done that' world?"

The answer, of course, is "no". There was a forum at NASA last month which went into the details of why, and you can read about it at the link.

Powered by the sun

A solar salamander : Nature News

It turns out that a particular salamander incorporates photosynthetic algae in its cells:

Kerney reported that these algae are, in fact, commonly located inside cells all over the spotted salamander's body. Moreover, there are signs that intracellular algae may be directly providing the products of photosynthesis — oxygen and carbohydrate — to the salamander cells that encapsulate them.

This reminds me of the greenish, genetically engineered super bodies that were given to the aging soldiers in John Scalzi's "Old Man's War". If you're going to get into transhumanism, then incorporating chlorophyll would seem to be a good idea.

Babies at risk

Killing babies

Mary Beard discusses here on the practice in the Greco-Roman world of exposing unwanted babies. It's an unpleasant topic, but interesting.

Space airconditioning issue

I know very little about how the International Space Station works, despite my interest in all things spacey, but they have a cooling system that has gone on the blink:

The crew of the International Space Station have been forced to reduce power after half the cooling system suddenly shut down over the weekend.

Nasa officials insisted the three Americans and three Russians aboard were not in danger.

Urgent spacewalk repairs are being discussed for this week…

Flight controllers tried to restart the disabled ammonia pump early on Sunday but the circuit breaker tripped again.

Any repairs later this week almost certainly will involve replacing the faulty ammonia pump, a difficult job that would require two spacewalks, AP adds.

Two spare pumps are stored on the outside of the station.

Politics

A noteworthy addition

China Hush is a good quality blog that seems to have a new post almost every day about some odd or unusual story from China, so I’ll add it to the blogroll.

Two recent examples of its content: the proposed “straddling bus”concept which, if ever implemented, would make the morning drive alone its route pretty disconcerting; and the jarringly cutesy animated abortion ad that shows that China and huge slabs of the West are, at least in certain aspects, still culturally very far apart.

Get it while it’s hot

In Japan, eel is seen as an energy reviving summer food. This Japan Times blog post notes that no one is sure how this idea developed, although one rather mundane theory is that it was an early marketing ploy by the fishmongers of the Edo period who were having trouble “moving” their eel catch. I hope the true reason is at least a little more romantic.

Anyhow, the other reason the article is blogworthy is because it discusses eel farming . (Most eel sold in Japan is farmed.) It had never occurred to me before that the odd life cycle of the eel does not make it an ideal candidate for farming:

It’s impossible to grow unagi from eggs because despite the fact that unagi is designated as a fresh water fish, it lays its eggs in the ocean. (Anago, another eel species that is a popular dish in Japan, live in seawater their whole lives.) Their life cycle is the opposite of salmon, which lay eggs in freshwater but live their lives in the sea. In fact, no one knows precisely where unagi lay their eggs, though the most common theory is some place in the vicinity of the Marianas. After hatching the fry make their way back to Japan waterways and are caught in nets. These fry are then sold to unagi farms where they are raised to adulthood.

So that's how they do it. But it would be having a significant impact on eel numbers in the natural waterways of Japan, wouldn't it?

Germs and smarts

I missed this story when it came out in May, but I heard it being discussed on the radio today.

In mice at least, eating a common soil bacteria seems to make them learn faster.  From the Science Daily report:

"Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature," says Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks.

Previous research studies on M. vaccae showed that heat-killed bacteria injected into mice stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety.

"Since serotonin plays a role in learning we wondered if live M. vaccae could improve learning in mice," says Matthews.

Matthews and Jenks fed live bacteria to mice and assessed their ability to navigate a maze compared to control mice that were not fed the bacteria.

"We found that mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice," says Matthews.

In the radio interview today, the researcher said they really have no idea whether the same thing happens in humans.  But all the same, it's an intriguing idea that being too hygienic may not only be bad for allergies, but might make learning slower too.

Add this to the “things I didn’t know were possible”list

Simon Dexter, a consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Meeta's surgeon, said that although it was a major operation it was possible to live without a stomach.

That’s from a BBC story about a couple of sisters in England who, due to their genetic susceptibility to stomach cancer, had theirs removed as a precaution.  Unpleasant.