Considering evil

I don't often think to check the City Journal website, so this may have been there for some time already, but I see that it has an essay by Theodore Dalrymple (an agnostic, I think) on the issue of evil. Good reading.

Cautionary tales

John Horgan, writing in a Scientific American blog, says he’s “thrilled” that psychedelic drugs have been making a slow comeback as a possible way of treating various psychiatric disorders. But then he lists the significant reservations that Albert Hofmann, “the godfather of psychedelic research” had about LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs.

The post makes for interesting reading, explaining how Hofmann had bad trips. In fact, it seems that some of the “benefit” of the trips was from the relief of coming out of a bad trip.

There is also this important point:

Hofmann also worried about psychedelics' metaphysical implications. The fact that minute amounts of a chemical such as LSD can have such profound effects on our perceptions, thoughts and beliefs suggests that free will, which supposedly gives us the power to shape our destiny, might be an illusion; moreover, our deepest spiritual convictions may be nothing more than fluctuations in brain chemistry. To emphasize this point, Hofmann quoted from an essay that stated: "God is a substance, a drug!"

In other words, psychedelics can undermine as well as promote spiritual faith, and they can shatter as well as heal our psyches. We should keep these risks in mind as the psychedelic renaissance continues.

It does strike me as odd that some hallucinogens may give either a good or bad trip, yet I think other drugs may only have a uniformly bad effect on consciousness. I’m thinking of an anti-malarial which was renowned for causing nightmares. I’m sure this all means something about consciousness, but I don’t know what.

In any event, I remain very skeptical of any great beneficial potential in the use of a psychedelic drug, such as LSD, if the exact nature of the “trip” it delivers is always going to be uncertain at the outset.

Update: the real reason you shouldn't use drugs is disclosed in Rex the Runt, season two, episode 9 (Wendy's New Hairdo.) Vince discovers the true nature of reality starting at 5 min 4 seconds.

As I was saying...

This was found via Boing boing, and confirms I'm not alone in my puzzlement about the career of M Night Shyamalan*:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Saturday triumphs

* at the Famers Market (when on earth is Brisbane going to get a permanent version of these? I thought it had been mentioned as a possible part of redevelopment of the RNA showgrounds, but I haven’t anything about that whole topic for some time) tomatoes seemed to be in extremely plentiful, ripe and cheap supply. Today (Sunday) I will try using them in a very simple pasta recipe that I found on Salon. Report to come.*

* Getting a supermarket family size roast chicken for $5, 10 minutes before closing time.

* Watching the first Back to the Future with kids last night. (Son gave me the 3 disc set for my birthday, which was good as he had remembered that a long time ago I had picked this up in a shop somewhere and said to my wife “that’s a good buy”. Any gift that shows they have taken care to remember your tastes is pleasing.)

The kids are most familiar with Part III, which is arguably the best and perhaps most child friendly. They hadn’t seen the first one before, and despite the somewhat more adult themes, they seemed to enjoy it.

I did too: it’s a film I have rarely revisited, but viewing it retrospectively as part of a complicated trilogy does give a renewed appreciation for several things: the intricacy of the plotting, poor old Michael J Fox as a likeable but unassuming screen presence, and even the attention to detail in production design and set decoration. It’s also a reminder of the fun quality of much 1980’s cinema, and the pleasing youth market orientation of Spielberg’s producer role, which for me was much preferable to his current adult liberal iconoclastic interests as shown in the likes of American Beauty and (ugh) United States of Tara.

There was a very long appreciation of the Back to the Future trilogy in The Guardian recently, inspired by a re-release of the film in the cinema to mark its 25th anniversary. (Can’t see that that will be a success.) I think one of the comments is apt, even if weren’t a UK teen:

It reminds you of all the reasons a suburban UK teenager in the 80s wanted to be American. It had charm, values, humour and style, and still does. This movie was made in a boom, looked forward to a better time, and reminds us today of many things we have lost.

* A moderate success. Francis Lam suggested dicing ripe tomatoes, season and add olive oil, spread in bottom of bowl and add some green leaf and a single layer of very finely sliced salad onion. Put just cooked pasta on top and leave for 2 minutes, so the heat takes the edge off the onion and wilts the green. Add cheese and stir. It seems to work reasonably well, but as my wife noted, it could do with a herb to lift it a bit - probably lots of basil. Will try it again.

Not exactly comforting

Strangely enough, it was via the religious blog First Things that I found this video in which a bunch of physicists answer questions. Given that we are all supposed to trust physicists to judge that the LHC is not actually dangerous to the planet, I find it somewhat disconcerting that they don't know how to answer the question "what would happen if someone put their hand in the particle beam at the LHC":



Interesting viewing, and there are several other "big physics" questions dealt with too.

In other LHC news, I see that they may have found some unexpected behaviour already, even though it must (if memory serves me correctly) still be operating at substantially less than its highest power. The glass half full way of looking at this is that it's good that spending all that money has turned up something. The half empty perspective is along the lines: are their safety calculations reliable when they are turning up unpredicted stuff already?

Are we there yet?

Some fascinating stuff in this report of studies on the time slowing effects of relativity, which starts with the subheading:

As Einstein predicted, a slow drive or a step up a ladder is enough to warp time.

I think this might explain the common kid’s question while on a drive.

Moving extremely sensitive clocks is how it was tested:

Chou and his team used an optical clock invented in 2005. This uses laser light, which has a frequency some 100,000 times higher than microwaves. Optical clocks are thus tens or hundreds of times more accurate than microwave clocks — NIST's loses less than one second in three billion years.

And here I thought my Pulsar Kinetic (for which I haven't had to replaced the rechargeable battery since I got it about 9 or 10 years) was good. Anyway, this is what they did:

General relativity states that time speeds up for objects as gravity weakens. To demonstrate this, Chou and his colleagues raised one optical clock 33 centimetres above another. The slightly lower gravity at that height meant that compared with the reference clock, the raised clock ticked with a fractional boost in frequency of 4 × 10–17, equivalent to a gain of 90 billionths of a second over 79 years.

To demonstrate special relativity, which says that time slows down for moving objects, the researchers jolted the single atom in their optical clock so that it oscillated at relative speeds of less than 10 metres per second, or 36 kilometres per hour. This time, the clock's ticks seemed to drop by a fractional frequency of almost 6 × 10–16.

Cool.

Death by vampire

Wow.  Vampires (of the bat variety) really can be dangerous:

A fifth child has died in Peru in an outbreak of rabies spread by vampire bats, say health officials.

The death in the northern Amazon region brings the total number of people killed in the outbreak to 20.

A local health official said 3,500 people had been bitten by the bloodsucking bats.

Well, technically, if I remember some old David Attenborough show correctly, I think they are more blood licking than blood sucking, but still...

Suicide and rationality

I think I've posted before about how, in Japan, suicide pacts have been arranged with strangers via the internet. This appalling use of modern technology seems to have caught on in England, where a man and woman in their 30's, whose families did not know were depressed or particularly unhappy, met and killed themselves after arranging it all via a suicide newsgroup:

The fatal pact began on 13 September when Lee, using the username Heavens Little Girl, posted: "I'm desperately seeking a pact in the UK. I'm 34, female, and live in the Essex area."

She then explained her preferred method was gas and asked for a partner with a car who could pick her up. "My time frame is As Soon As Possible," she said. "If you are very serious, please email me."

The previous month she had posted about planning to kill herself in a cupboard or bathroom and other users shared tips about how to overcome practical problems she had encountered.

By 9 September she reported she was "looking into partners right now, hopefully I have found the right one," and last Sunday afternoon, Lumb, using the username Endthis, wrote: "I'm just saying goodbye … and to all you people suffering I hope you find what your looking for."

Eight fellow forum members wished him luck and bade him farewell, but none tried to dissuade him.

People who participate in such groups clearly think that suicide is a "rational" response to either their own problems, or even worse, the problems of strangers. And indeed, we know that many people don't oppose euthanasia for those close to death anyway, seeing it as a reasonable and rational response to suffering.

But for the depressed but otherwise healthy, like this English pair, there is a perfectly rational argument against suicide - namely that millions of people over the centuries have wanted, or tried, to commit suicide, failed and then later led happy lives.

I can understand why the non religious might reject a call to give up on suicide if it comes from a religious perspective about the inherent value of life and what God wants. But the real evil in these anonymous people instructing others about how to do suicide right is that they are not encouraging rationality at all, and it's not even their own families who will be affected. Yet they will think they can justify their role philosophically, I bet.

So that’s why they do it

I didn’t realise that frequent flyer programs could be a good little earner:

WHEN Qantas announced profit results last month, it revealed it had earned $328 million, before tax, from its frequent-flyer program.

How so?:

Reichlin says frequent-flyer programs are hugely profitable for airlines due to a combination of "enormous demand" and having control over supply.

"They get cash for the points [from banks] and then they control the supply of seats," he says.

Oh, I see.

Ocean acidification – the past, present and future clam

Time for more ocean acidification bad news. This report describes the results of a novel study that looked at what happens when you raise two different species of “commercially important” – I think that means we eat them - bivalves not only in water with predicted future levels of pH, but also in a tank with pre-industrial levels of CO2.

The surprise is not so much that the clams and scallops did worse under future conditions, but they did considerably better in the past conditions than they do today:

At the 750ppm level, basic shell structures like the hinge were severely malformed, while the surface of the shell had holes that were apparent when it was examined via scanning electron microscopy. There was also a significant drop in the viability of the larvae, and those that did survive were developmentally delayed compared to those raised at today’s concentrations. Matters got worse at the higher levels.

The interesting twist in the new work is that the authors also run the experiment under preindustrial CO₂ levels of about 250ppm (actual levels were closer to 280ppm). For both species of shellfish, the mortality was much lower and development proceded more quickly. For the quahog, viability doubled (from 20 percent to 40 percent), while for the bay scallop, viability went from 43 percent to 74 percent. The animals made major developmental milestones more quickly—metamorphosis at day 14 occurred in half the animals at preindustrial CO₂ levels, but that dropped to less than seven percent at modern levels.

In other words, it may be that even the current decrease in pH may be adversely affecting bivalves.

Overall, they suggest that population crashes in bivalves have been ascribed to a number of stresses, like overfishing and pollution, but it’s possible that ocean acidification has also been at work in these cases. Given that the Earth has experienced higher CO₂ levels in the past, why are they being hit so hard now? According to the paper, it’s actually been over 24 million years since levels are likely to have been this high, and many shellfish have diversified more recently than that; any changes in CO₂ in the intervening time have also been far more gradual than the current pace.

Not great news.

Why mice

Last week I mentioned a study on the importance of lab mice being handled nicely.  This week it’s a more fundamental question:  why are there so many lab mice anyway?

Neuroskeptic provides the answer.  Rats used to rule the roost, but then they worked out how to knock out single mouse genes.  A bit of bad luck for the mice of the world. 

Hello possum

The kids have noticed a possum has made a nest of sorts under the deck at home:

Cute, very.

Drug policy considered

There’s a good and sensible opinion piece on the appropriate response to illicit drug use in the Sydney Morning Herald today, arguing that a combination of both prohibition and treatment of it as a health issue is the correct approach. The arguments are set out clearly, and fully take into account the unintended consequences of often suggested reforms.

I certainly have complained for a long time that, at least in the Australian context, those who talk of major drug law reform often leave the impression that the “health problem”approach has been ignored. Yet, as far back as about 1980, I knew first hand that heroin users in Queensland were able to get on the methodone program and visited pharmacies to get their daily dose.

In fact, reader Geoff should be able to enlighten me here. If anyone turns up at a GP practice in Queensland today and says they want help to stop using heroin, speed, cannabis or alcohol, are they able to be readily referred to a free or cheap health program relevant to them? (Not just the alcoholics/drugs anonymous type that have been around forever, and are done in a group context that (I expect) may put some people off.)

I get the impression that methodone programs might not always have been as readily embraced in all Australian States, but also that access to at least some type of health programs to help drug addiction has been readily available for some time, regardless of whether people are in the criminal justice system or not.

Moral revolutions reviewed

Slate has a review of “The Honor Code”, which looks at how significant social moral changes have happened. The abolition of slavery, Chinese footbinding and English duelling all get a mention, and while the reviewer does not entirely agree with the author’s idea that it was changes in the sense of honour that led to reform, it still sounds like an interesting read.

The author has no clothes?

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom has been highly praised ("the novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale" said Slate), yet descriptions of its themes have made me very suspicious that it is really a novel about nothing terribly important - like most current literature. Here's how someone at NPR sums it up:

Franzen tells the story of a deteriorating middle class family in Minnesota. The mom, Patty, is a former college athlete, a sort of basketball Emma Bovary who suffers from deep depression and a long unrequited longing for her husbands best friend from college, a successful rock 'n' roller named Rick Katz.

The husband, Walter, is a naive corporate do-gooder, oblivious to his wifes pain and his own. Their son Joey finds life more appealing in the house next door and he moves in with the neighbors, beginning an affair with their teenage daughter that extends throughout the entire novel.

Franzen tells this story in a form thats rather odd, marked by long sequences of exposition and a long middle section written by Patty for her therapist, which she composes in the third person.*

So it's good to see that my suspicions may well be right: there's a very negative review of the book (and Franzen's writing style) in The Atlantic. It certainly sounds like the sort of book I would dislike, and it seems extremely likely I should not bother following this writer.

* That reviewer finds the writing often "brilliant", but still finds the book unappealing. The pretty savage conclusion:

...every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didnt want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to.

A depressing (and depressed) Monbiot

George Monbiot writes about the complete failure of the Kyoto protocol and the unlikelihood that there will be anything effective to replace it. Any claimed national reductions, he says, are in fact illusory.

What depressing reading. Fortunately, 2010 global temperatures don't seem to be dropping nearly as quickly as skeptics expected. Seriously, the world needs some more really bad weather that is consistent with AGW to change the international politics of this. (Particularly American politics, where climate skepticism on the Tea Party/Republican side is likely to get more power soon.)

Don't mention the M word

There's an interesting post (and comments following) at The Economist about Christine O'Donnell and her "laughable Catholicism". (I'm taking that from the title.) Take this, for example, talking about her claim that she wouldn't even lie to a Nazi to protect the life of a hiding Jew:

Is this the Catholic line on lying? I didn't think so, leading me to believe for about 20 minutes that Ms O'Donnell might be a devotee of the great Prussian moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant. (Compare their views on lying to murderers and "wanton self-abuse".) However, further Googling led me to conclude that Ms O'Donnell's take on lying does indeed conform to the teachings of the Catholic Church. One Catholic encyclopedia reports:

The chief argument from reason [against the permissibility of lying] which St. Thomas and other theologians have used to prove their doctrine is drawn from the nature of truth. Lying is opposed to the virtue of truth or veracity. Truth consists in a correspondence between the thing signified and the signification of it. Man has the power as a reasonable and social being of manifesting his thoughts to his fellow-men. Right order demands that in doing this he should be truthful. If the external manifestation is at variance with the inward thought, the result is a want of right order, a monstrosity in nature, a machine which is out of gear, whose parts do not work together harmoniously.

Sounds like Ms O'Donnell paid attention in confirmation class!

There are many amusing comments too, including one that is just this quote:

"Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell."

- H.L. Mencken

The article notes that, with respect to masturbation, she is only speaking the Church's line:

Could it be that Catholic doctrine is a risible barrier to office only if one is willing, as Ms O'Donnell clearly is, frankly to defend it in public without a hint of embarrassment?

The answer does seem "yes", but then again you do have to take into account that this is the consequence of having church teaching that is not sufficiently informed by nature. As for masturbation as a political topic, one commenter has it right:

How can we reconcile the idea that Ms. O'Donnell's views on masturbation are risible, with the fate of Joycelyn Elders who was fired for airing the opposite views?

Is it just political suicide to mention masturbation at all, whatever you say about it?

For those with toddlers

Children swallowing a “disc battery” face more risk of injury than you might think:

"A disc battery is an increasingly common foreign body ingested by children," the authors write as background information in the article. The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported a total of 2,063 disc battery ingestions in 1998; the number increased 80 percent during the next eight years. When the battery is lodged in the esophagus, its alkaline contents can leak, causing tissue death and burns from electrical discharge.

Ancient germs

From New Scientist:

WITH a hibernation period of up to 100 million years, bacteria discovered on the Arctic sea floor may have longest life cycle of any known organism.

Casey Hubert from the Geosciences Group at Newcastle University, UK, and colleagues came across the bacteria while studying biological activity in sediment samples from the sea floor off the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

There might be another explanation for what he found, but I like this one.

China moon

The Guardian reports:

China could put an astronaut on the moon in 2025 and launch probes to explore Mars and Venus within five years, according to the boss of a Chinese space programme.

Ye Peijian said China could make its first manned moon landing in 15 years, send a probe to Mars by 2013 and to Venus by 2015.

"China has the full capacity to accomplish Mars exploration by 2013," he added.

It's entirely possible they could get there before Americans return. I suppose that if they open a takeaway, it won't be such a bad thing.