Under the sheets

Not much science attracting my attention this week, so it's back to the bedroom. Or car or playground, or where ever it is teenagers engage in an activity at too young an age:

The survey of 8800 year 10 and year 12 students in 300 schools around Australia was taken in three snapshots between 1997 and 2008.

The proportion of year 10 boys who had had sex rose slightly from 23 per cent to 27 per cent between 1997 and 2008, while for year 10 girls the rise was more significant, up from 16 per cent to 27 per cent.

In year 12, the number of boys who reported having had sex dipped slightly from 47 per cent in 1997 to 44 per cent in 2008, while the rate for girls rose from 48 per cent to 61 per cent.

Regardless of what you think about teenagers and sex (although my readership is probably unlikely to include hipsters without children who like to say "well, what's wrong with teenage sex anyway. As long as it's safe and done responsibly, I wouldn't mind my teenager ...etc,) surely everyone would have to be a bit puzzled about figures suggesting that the rate of school age girls reporting sex is much higher than for boys the same age.

And of course, the other thing is that they are not doing it so responsibly anyway:

Condom use had not increased since 1997, with 51 per cent of respondents in 2008 reporting they always used condoms.

Study co-author Anthony Smith said the increase in the proportion of students who had had more than one sexual partner potentially posed serious public health risks.

And back to The Age's version:

One of the authors of the La Trobe University research, Paul Aguis, said the lack of condom use was worrying because sexually transmitted infections among young adults had risen dramatically in the past 10 years and the survey showed only moderate knowledge of the infections. He said the rate of teenage pregnancy in Australia was also among the highest in the developed world. ''The notifications for chlamydia have risen year on year for the last decade and show no real sign of slowing,'' he said.

Meanwhile, if you want a highly detailed account of current sexual practices in America, William Saletan has a somewhat salacious article on it in Slate.

What's most surprising in it is the extent to which it would appear that sexual experimentation is indeed on the rise, and that bisexual experience is more common than I would have expected. As Saletan notes:

Apparently, a lot of people try gay sex, but only about half stick with it. By ages 18-19, 10 percent of men say they've performed fellatio. That number drops among men in their 20s and 30s. But among men in their 40s and 50s, 13 percent say they've done it, and 14 percent to 15 percent say they've received it from another man. Meanwhile, 11 percent of men aged 20-24 say they've received anal sex. For unknown reasons, that number declines in the next higher age bracket but then steadily rises in succeeding brackets, leveling off at 9 percent among men in their 40s and 50s.

I don't know, but those figures seem a bit suspicious to me. Are we sure there was even the correct understanding of the question here?

If they are accurate, I guess the other thing they mean is that, if Americans are like the English, few of them having the occasional same sex encounter would class themselves as "gay". It's probably a case of score one for Foucault, I think. (See the summary of his position in this interesting article by Keith Windshuttle.)

UPDATE: reading The Guardian's take on that American survey, I'm even more suspicious of some of the figures:

Of the 14- to 16-year-old boys and girls surveyed, only around 10% said they were engaging in any kind of sexual activity with a partner – whereas 62% of boys, and 40% of girls, in the same age group were happy to admit to masturbating on their own during the last year.

Oh come on. The true figure for that age range of boys who masturbated in the last year would easily be double that. That's right - 124%. (Female readers may be surprised by the figure, but if so, you're underestimating teenage boys.)

In the other direction what about this?:

Nearly 15% of women in their 30s, for example, reported having performed oral sex on another woman at least once in their lifetime, while 13% of men over 40 said they had done the same to another man and 50% of men aged 50-59 said they had received it.

Half of the men who were teenagers in the 1960's say they have received it from a man? I remain deeply skeptical.

I wouldn't mind betting that this has something to do with it:

(rather than through face-to-face interviews, the new survey was carried out online, a method believed to encourage more open and honest responses)

It's also easier to brag, misunderstand, or not pay attention.

Religion, sex and politics

Let’s talk about all those things that are dangerous to mention at a dinner party with people you’ve only recently met:

* Here’s a bit of trivia, but I have been meaning to say this for some time: this painting of John Henry Newman always reminds me of a young Jonathan Miller. Am I right, or am I right?

* I recently found an article on why Catholics don't go to confession anymore which I thought was pretty good. (It noted the recent change in the concept of sin from the strictly personal to more "corporate" or social sense as being in large par responsible.) But now I can't find it again. In any event, I was going to add that I think the power relationship between priest and penitent is also now an issue, with people no longer confident of the confession of sins as an anonymous exercise which does not change the relationship between them and their parish priest. (And, sure, you could travel out of your parish to get true anonymity, but that is a bit troublesome.)

So, I thought, couldn't the internet help out? Confessions by Skype to an anonymous priest who could be anywhere in the world? But it seems Rome has already dismissed this as a possibility back in 2001. Yet, would it be better to have some form of one-on-one confession than none at all? I think the fact that sins are stated out loud is important, rather than merely thought about during, say, the penitential part of the Mass. (Just in the way that the spoken declaration of love carries more power to the person saying it than the mere thought of it.)

Hence my wish list for reform of the Catholic Church grows: relax celibacy rules for priests; and get with the internet for a real revival of confession.

* A few weeks ago, there was a news story about the rate of HIV amongst American gay men which I forgot to mention:

One in five sexually active homosexual men in the US has HIV, and almost half of those who carry the virus do not know they are infected, a study has found.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention tested more than 8000 men in 21 cities in 2008, and found that even as infection rates were climbing among men who have sex with men, young, sexually active gay men and those in minority groups were least likely to know their health status, while the rates of other at-risk groups - heterosexuals and intravenous drug users - were falling.

Aren’t they just extraordinarily high figures after all these years of attempted education and behaviour modification?

* In other news I overlooked noting earlier, everyone was also surprised last month that a big survey indicated that Britain was not as gay as it seems. (1% identifying as gay, .5% as bisexual.) People say that, as it was based on doorstep and telephone questioning, there may well be some under-acknowledgement, but no one seems to expect that the “true” rate is dramatically higher.

It certainly seems that the gay lobby has a political and general agenda setting clout far beyond their numbers.

* I’ve taken to trusting Tim Colebatch’s economic/political commentary of late, and today’s column talks about the issue of cutting back government spending. He seems to believe it is more a case of tax reform needed, rather than urgent spending cuts.

* Green preferences to Labor were no higher in the recent election than at the 2007 election. In fact they were slightly less. That’s a bit surprising.

* Finally, I liked Charlie Brooker’s column on the Franzen book mix up, where some file mix up meant the wrong version of Freedom was published in some numbers. Charlie writes of his own technique:

At first glance, this looks like an almighty disaster, albeit an understandable one. Like anyone who's ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I'm writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as FINALSCRIPT2a.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1b-IGNORE-ALL-OTHERS-AND-USE-THIS.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1c- I-AM-SPARTACUS.DOC.

Tired

Went away for the weekend. Feel tired.

Four Corners looks interesting tonight. Most likely will be a post due after I see that.

The assimilation begins...

Now look, I wouldn't go out and buy one, OK?

But, if through a particular deal that seemed good anyway, a sales rep was going to throw one in, I wouldn't knock one back.

I found out last night that it enables me to do something in bed that I have never done before, and it gave me considerable pleasure. My wife was able to join in too, but really, even if she wasn't there I would still have enjoyed it. Perhaps in a different way, but it would still be enjoyable.

Strangely, but it may be their normal practice, I suppose, it comes with no instructions. I think it is assumed that everyone is so used to using it, of course instructions are not necessary.

I'll report later once the novelty has worn off. In the meantime, I will be away a short time while I am being assimilated.

Testing

Just testing a few things. You may safely ignore this post if it changes.

Who said hung parliaments were a bad thing?

I don’t think any commentator predicted the outbreak of good behaviour during Answer Time yesterday.   Annabel Crabb explains:

You see, Question Time used to feature common displays of rowdiness, after which the Speaker would ritually expel the troublemakers.

Some MPs were regular warmers of the bench; Wilson Tuckey used to be especially naughty on a Thursday, which cynics used to ascribe to the Qantas flight schedule to Perth (early sin-binning equals home by tea-time).

But in this new chamber, suspension from the House now entails more serious consequences than an early minute and the chance of a televised flounce-out.

These days, suspension or expulsion could mean the difference between winning and losing legislation in the Parliament.

But the best anecdote from her column is this:

Could the delicate balance of the new brevity requirements withstand its most gruelling acid test - a ministerial answer from The Hon Kevin Michael Rudd, MP?

The four-minute system met its nemesis at Question Twelve, when Melissa Parkes, Labor's Member for Fremantle, asked Mr Rudd to tell the chamber what was going on in Pakistan.

Mr Rudd rose, and opened with an acknowledgment of Australia's responsibility to help Pakistan recover from its dreadful floods.

"When you have a friend in need..." he began.

And then drew breath. Which gave an Opposition heckler just enough opportunity to holler: "Don't call Julia!" whereupon the place fell apart.

Nothing new, I think

Here's a skeptical take from the Washington Post on the National Press Club "UFOs have interfered with nuclear weapons" conference the other day.

The events described are interesting, and have been know about in UFO circles for a long time, but the main problem was the press conference did not (as far as I can tell) add anything substantially new to what was already known.

Reports of UFOs being “interested” in nuclear weapons facilities have been around for a long time.  As to the military’s general interest in them,  the sensible journalist and author Bryan Appleyard has commented that he's been told by sources he considers reliable that US radar tracks have been taken as convincing proof by some within the military that unexplained objects have zoomed around our atmosphere. (He's written a whole book about aliens, but I haven't read it, and it apparently is more interested in the cultural aspects of the phenomena.) In any event, it would seem logical to say that if nuts and bolts type of UFOs exist, the US military would have some evidence of them.

A tad speculative

New Scientist explains that there’s a new idea about the end of the universe around – it just runs out of time:

"We could run into the end of time," Ben Freivogel tells a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Several colleagues seem nonplussed, and one Nobel laureate looks downright exasperated. "I'm aware that this sounds like a crazy conclusion," Freivogel admits, generating a round of what sounds like relieved laughter. But perhaps their relief is short-lived.

The nature of time, our perception of it and even whether it exists at all are hot topics for both physicists and philosophers. But Freivogel isn't pushing a strange new concept of time.

His idea is arguably even more baffling. He thinks that time, as described by Einstein's theory of general relativity, could simply end in our universe, taking us with it. He gives us another 5 billion years or so before the axe falls (see "Five billion years to go", below).

However, the article goes on to explain that this is all very speculative, and it seems not so many are convinced that it makes sense. Good. Although, I must say, if cosmologists came up with a theory in which time and the universe could end at any minute, it would probably be adopted by Christians as the justification for the Gospel expectation that the end of the world could sneak up on us at any minute, in the same way that Genesis is seen to be reflected in the Big Bang. (In fact, the idea that the universe is a giant simulation being run on someone else's computer already gives us that possibility, I suppose; but theologians probably don't want to run with that idea because it might mean that God is a pimply alien teenager.)

Tuesday's list

There doesn't seem much that is blogworthy at the moment, but there's always something:

* Discover magazine looks at a "zero carbon" city that has been partially completed in UAE. It links to a New York Times article about it, which is extremely critical of it being a "gated community". But there are not enough photos for my liking.

* Hey, there's another critic who doesn't care for Franzen and Freedom.

* A neuroscientist and writer explains why he likes to call himself a "possibilian". It's just a fancy name for an agnostic who likes science fiction ideas, I reckon. I think I count as a Christian with possiblian interests.

* Have a look at the video at this link to see a Japanese apartment in which you would never, ever want to wake up with a hangover.

That's the second biggest prize cup I've ever seen

From the Japan Times, a photo of the winner of the Emperor's Cup at the Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament:



That's ridiculous. Clearly, you have to be a Sumo wrestler to be able to hold the thing without falling over. (In fact, I suppose it explains why Sumo have to be so fat :) .)

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.