Suspicion correct

Recently, when the issue of how much water the Murray-Darling system needs (and how much less will be available for irrigation) was the hot topic, Australians were also hearing a claim that the country had already become a “net importer”of food. 

I heard it on a right wing radio show (Michael Smith on 4BC in Brisbane, who, as with all right wing radio jokes jocks also swallows any climate science skeptic argument without a second thought.)  

I immediately thought that this claim could not be right.  And I was correct.

As Ross Gittins says: 

This is all nonsense. Australia? A net importer of food? Yeah, sure. If you fell for it, your bulldust detector has seriously failed you in the media space.

He then explains how this silly claim came to be calculated.   The true situation is as follows:

According to figures compiled by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in calendar 2009 we had total food exports of $25.4 billion and imports of $11 billion, leaving us with a surplus of $14.4 billion. Even if we ignore unprocessed and look only at processed food, we still had a trade surplus of $5.8 billion.

Why did it take so long for the media to note this correction? 

Colebatch on Indonesia

We don’t often read all that much about Indonesia in our press, unless its related to Muslim terrorism.

Colebatch’s article in The Age today gives a good catch up picture.

Wait a minute, I’m thinking

The Guardian has an opinion piece entitled Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?

It ends with:

The corporations that have funded the sowing of doubt on this issue are clearly doing this because they see greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategies as adversely affecting their financial interests.

This might be understood as a new type of crime against humanity. Scepticism in science is not bad, but sceptics must play by the rules of science including publishing their conclusions in peer-reviewed scientific journals and not make claims that are not substantiated by the peer-reviewed literature. The need for responsible scepticism is particularly urgent if misinformation from sceptics could lead to great harm.

We not have a word for this type of crime yet, but the international community should find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity.

I can see certain problems with the concept, but then again it could mean most participants at the Catallaxy blog in a Gulag while me and my side take a year or so to decide whether prosecutions are sustainable.    I therefore see a certain merit.  

Fry-ing feminists

Stephen Fry was in the English press last weekend due to some rather incautious (to put it mildly) comments he made regarding women and sex, part of which includes:

"I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

Fry says that heterosexual "beats" don't exist for this very reason.

One journalist feminist retorts with some sense, but also some silliness:

Women are just as capable as men are of enjoying sex. We don't go cruising or cottaging on Hampstead Heath because we don't need to. Cottaging on Hampstead Heath is presumably a hangover from the days when, sadly, [homosexuality] was illegal… Women have other ways to get our thrills, and we can go and get them in bars or clubs. Having said which, we probably also do it in parks sometimes too. It's just that we don't call it cottaging. I'm sure I've done it in parks in my time.

Well, surely both of them are over-selling their arguments. It's very silly of Fry to suggest (he now says it was out of context anyway) that all women view sex as a "price to pay" for having relationships. On the other hand, I'm sure the number of women who have met a man in a park and had sex with them in the bushes within 10 minutes is vanishingly small. (Although if you look at women who are silly enough to be impressed by, say, rugby players, the sex-in-the-toilet scenario they sometimes engage in is as close to gay men's behaviour as you can get. But, now that I think about it, there is a good chance that is more about bragging rights than their own sexual gratification, so in that sense it's not like men in the bushes after all.)

The simple truth lies in the middle (and of course I'm speaking in generalities here, but that doesn't mean it's inaccurate): yes, women enjoy sex, and yes, men are much more readily capable than women of separating sex from emotions.

The irony is that feminists think they are scoring a hit if women feel freer to act like men, when it would align more with the psychology of most women to concentrate on encouraging men to have more regard to the emotional and physical consequences of the act.

Re: Salmon

Nature has a story about a theory that a large patch of iron fertilized ocean caused by a volcanic eruption may have resulted in this year's big Canadian salmon run:

Parsons' suggestion relies on a study in Geophysical Research Letters by Roberta Hamme of the University of Victoria, British Columbia¹. The paper links the 7-8 August 2008 eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian Islands to a huge phyotoplankton bloom later that month. The eruption wasn't particularly large, but a storm spread its ash over a wide area. The resulting bloom was the biggest in 12 years of records, covering 1.5-2 million square kilometres of ocean. "We'd never seen anything like that," says Hamme.

Others are very skeptical that this is a very plausible explanation. All interesting, nonetheless.

Never too busy...

...to rubbish Tony Abbott.

Last week, we had this excruciating display of self inflicted gormlessness:



I mean, what was his initial refusal to back Hockey's plan, which had been discussed in Shadow Cabinet, all about?

But today I see that Tone's real agenda over the last few weeks has been to get fit for a half Iron Man event, despite a calf injury:

While the Opposition Leader has been carrying a sore calf muscle for a few weeks, it didn't stop him from swimming 1.9km, cycling 90km and running 21km in yesterday's Half Ironman race at Port Macquarie, midway between Sydney and Brisbane.

Cheered on by wife Margie, who planted a congratulatory kiss on his cheek as he crossed the finish line, Mr Abbott completed the course in six hours, 43 minutes and 42 seconds....

He did, however, express some pride in his time of two hours and 38 minutes for the 21km running leg, given that he has been struggling with a calf muscle twinge for the past few weeks, which hampered his training.

If only he devoted the same amount of effort to looking and sounding like a credible alternative PM. (Oh yes, he's apparently already conned a significant number of voters in that regard, just as did a certain K Rudd for an inordinate length of time.)

In praise of Sheldon

I only started watching The Big Bang Theory a few months ago in re-runs,but I have to say, I find much of it very funny. There's not much doubt that for most viewers the comedic core of the show is Sheldon, who Slate noted last year is (presumably, even though the writers deny it is deliberate) the first sitcom character with Aspergers Syndrome.

Despite the frequent sexual elements and jokes, I would say that the two funniest episodes I have seen concentrated on Sheldon and hence were pretty asexual. The first one was the story of how Leonard first came to move in with Sheldon, (The Staircase Implementation).

The second was on TV last night, featuring Sheldon deciding to stay safe in his bedroom until the singularity arrives and he can upload himself into a robot. In the meantime, he creates a tele-presence robot version of himself, which he get Leonard to drive to work. This sequence is currently on Youtube, and brought tears to my eyes.

Live long and prosper, Sheldon.

UPDATE: I am happy to see, from this recent LA Times episode review of the current season, that Sheldon's "girlfriend" Amy is still around. She has also been amusing me greatly in the couple of episodes I have seen in which she makes an appearance.

Slum life this is

The first of Kevin McCloud's 2 part doco "Slumming It," in which he spends a fortnight living with families in the middle of Mumbai's biggest slum, was great TV on the ABC last night. One minute appalled by the open sewer drains (full of mystery chemical sludge as well as excrement,) the visiting rats in the bedroom at night and the terrible working conditions in the mini industries in the slum, the next minute McCloud is marvelling at the apparent general happiness of the community and the high degree of social interaction of all age groups in such a place. (Well, the latter is kind of hard to avoid with things like 21 people sharing a tiny house. He also notes often that it is a million people living in about one square mile.)

As an architect, McCloud is interested in how the built environment works in a place like this. (He notes that many planners, and Prince Charles, have taken to saying that it has lessons to teach the West.) Yet the one factor he hasn't mentioned is the obvious high degree of religiosity of the people there, and the role that the degree of fatalism in the Hindu religion almost certainly has on the perception of the residents.

I also thought the show should be watched by the libertarian inclined as an object lesson in the limitations of self regulation of society. The industries there are completely unregulated and untaxed; a perfect little Randian experiment, I would have thought. And yes, the slum does show the inherent innovation and capitalist tendencies in self organised human societies. But it also shows that capitalism, at least in a culture such as India's, can be very slow to self correct for the abuses and poor treatment of its workers.

You can catch the show on the ABC’s iView still.

Salmon mystery

The BBC has a detailed story about the surprising strong return of sockeye salmon to their spawning rivers in Canada this year.  Last year only a million came back; this year, 34 million!

The problem is no one understands what is going on.

Islamic news

*  There’s always someone in the family who has an unusual conversion.  Tony Blair’s sister in law has had a conversion experience in Iran:

She decided to become a Muslim six weeks ago after visiting the shrine of Fatima al-Masumeh in the city of Qom.

"It was a Tuesday evening and I sat down and felt this shot of spiritual morphine, just absolute bliss and joy," she said in an interview today.

When she returned to Britain, she decided to convert immediately.

I could be wrong, but sudden conversions to this religion seem pretty rare,  unless you’re in an Indonesian prison.   Seeing she’s a TV journalist, I would have been more amused if she had started to insist on an on screen burqa instead of just a hijab.

*  There are two stories about men in legal trouble in the Middle East for using the internet for sexual purposes.   An Egyptian Imam in Dubai is alleged to have sent rude pictures of himself to women via Blackberry (and was the victim of a “sting” by a male policeman posing as a woman).   In Saudi Arabia a man who was making money by “renting” on line rooms in which women would strip is facing arrest.

I am curious:  just how large are the cyberpolice departments in these middle east countries?   If there are going to try to stop every man who sends a rude pic of himself from his mobile phone, they will be the biggest employment field in the region.   And if these countries don’t block overseas sites, when will they realise there is no holding back the tide?

Suffer, snow bunnies

Look, if people grow up in a snowy country, skiing is an unobjectionable past time.  But in Australia, where (if you live outside of Sydney or Melbourne at least) you can just about have 7 days in London (or, at the very least, a week in Tokyo)  for the same price as a long weekend on the skifields, it’s always struck me as an elitist hobby.  And besides, the couple of times I did try to stand up and move on skis, I fell over a lot.

So, being the jealous, nasty person that I am, if the Grammar school kids all end up with osteoarthritis, I’ll just snigger in the background. 

Not your average Parisian evening…

There was a story in the SMH yesterday which is notable for the fine sense of understatement in the final line.   First, I’ll edit the events (tragic as they are):

A baby was killed and several more people seriously injured when a family of 11 threw themselves from a third-floor flat to flee a man they mistook for the devil, French investigators said….

Among the injured they found an entirely naked man of African origin with a knife wound in his hand and two children, a baby and a two-year-old girl. The baby died later after receiving hospital treatment in Paris.

The assistant prosecutor from Versailles, Odile Faivre, told reporters the incident began in the early hours when a group of 13 people were watching television in an apartment and the naked man heard the baby cry.

"The man got up to prepare a bottle for the baby when his wife, seeing him, screamed 'It's the devil, it's the devil'," Faivre explained.

In the confusion following this apparent case of mistaken identity, the naked man's sister-in-law stabbed him in the hand and he was ejected through the front door of the flat. When he attempted to get back in, panic erupted.

"The other occupants of the flat fled by jumping out of the window," Faivre said. According to police, one man jumped with the two-year-old in his arms and crawled two blocks away to hide in bushes, screaming: "I had to defend myself."

And the final line:

"A number of points remain to be cleared up," Faivre said.

Things of note

I’m going to be pretty busy this week, and really should try to impose a ban on myself using the internet. But such attempts usually fail, so you may as well keep checking in and seeing what turns up here.

This morning, I recommend the following:

* quite a good, long article in The Guardian on daily life in the nearly completed International Space Station. (They don’t dwell on the toilet, but you already know all about that from my earlier posts.)

* yet another tragic case of erotic autoasphyxiation actually ends up teaching medical science something new.

* GQ, of all magazines, has a long article on suicide chat rooms, and the coming trial of a guy charged with encouraging suicides. All very chilling, although the article also claims that some suicide chat rooms have positive effects and can help talk people out of it. But surely you would have to look at the net effect. Actually, I see Mind Hacks links to another story (this one from the BBC) about suicide chat rooms, but I haven’t listened to it yet.

Irresistible

Lunar greenhouse to nowhere

At the University of Arizona, they're figuring out designs for hydroponic, easily transported greenhouse systems for growing vegetables on the moon.

What a pity there's no way of actually getting them there for the foreseeable future. Maybe they should sell them to the Chinese.

More on Morals

There's a short interview with Sam Harris at New Scientist, in which he's talking about his new book in which he argues that morality should simply be based on science. The interview includes this quote:

I happen to think that the scientific study of morality is the lever that, if pulled hard enough, will completely dislodge religion from the firmament of our concerns.

Why, yes, Sam, the first round of science's attempt to inform ideas of morality went just swimmingly well in the 20th century, didn't it?

Suicidal thoughts

No, no, I'm not having them personally, but if you are interested in a very detailed examination of the characteristics of the way people think or feel when they are susceptible to suicide, you could do much worse than read this long column by Jesse Bering* in Scientific American.

* For once, he is not talking about sex and its variations, and I wish he would avoid the topic more often.

You knew you were going to read this

Psychology Today notes that there is soon to be published evidence of people having a small, but apparently consistent, ability to be influenced by the future. The experiments sound quite interesting:

For example, we all know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words on the list as practice words and the participants were asked to retype them several times. The results of the study showed that the students were better at recalling the words on the surprise recall test that they were later given, at random, to practice. According to Bem, practicing the words after the test somehow allowed the participants to "reach back in time to facilitate recall."

In another study, Bem examined whether the well-known priming effect could also be reversed. In a typical priming study, people are shown a photo and they have to quickly indicate if the photo represents a negative or positive image. If the photo is of a cuddly kitten, you press the "positive" button and if the photo is of maggots on rotting meat, you press the "negative" button. A wealth of research has examined how subliminal priming can speed up your ability to categorize these photos. Subliminal priming occurs when a word is flashed on the computer screen so quickly that your conscious brain doesn't recognize what you saw, but your nonconscious brain does. So you just see a flash, and if I asked you to tell me what you saw, you wouldn't be able to. But deep down, your nonconscious brain saw the word and processed it. In priming studies, we consistently find that people who are primed with a word consistent with the valence of the photo will categorize it quicker. So if I quickly flash the word "happy" before the kitten picture, you will click the "positive" button even quicker, but if I instead flash the word "ugly" before it, you will take longer to respond. This is because priming you with the word "happy" gets your mind ready to see happy things.

In Bem's retroactive priming study, he simply reversed the time sequence on this effect by flashing the primed word after the person categorized the photo. So I show you the kitten picture, you pick whether it is positive or negative, and then I randomly choose to prime you with a good or bad word. The results showed that people were quicker at categorizing photos when it was followed by a consistent prime. So not only will you categorize the kitten quicker when it is preceded by a good word, you will also categorize it quicker when it is followed by a good word. It was as if, while participants were categorizing the photo, their brain knew what word was coming next and this facilitated their decision.

There are other types of experiments as well. I see now that the actual paper is available, but at the moment I don't have time to read it.

The effect was apparently small but statistically significant and consistent, and also showed that some people showed stronger future influence than others.

Well, this is all pretty fascinating, isn't it? It would be great if this type of experiment can be repeated and holds up over time in different labs. Until now, I think it's fair to say that Ganzfeld experiments have been held up as the most convincing proof of a psi effect, as they have been repeated in many different labs and generally been considered to show small but positive results. (A good detailed history of this type of experiment, and the controversy over whether they really are showing a psi effect or not, is given in this Wikipedia article.)

However, as the examples that Dean Radin has been providing at his website lately show, there is always an element of interpretation involved in scoring the "hits". (In fact, in this example Radin gives of someone trying to guess the correct photo, what I find surprising is that all 4 photos seem to have elements the woman is "receiving", even though the "sender" only sees the target.) But clearly, it would be great to get away from experiments that involve interpretation of what constitutes a "hit" in proving a psi effect.

Of course, we are yet to hear the skeptic take on the new Bem studies, and I guess we do have to wait to see if other psychologist can replicate them, but they sound rather promising.

The origins of morality considered

There's a good article in the New York Times at the moment by Frans de Waal about the evolution of morals as a mammalian thing. He maintains a certain respect for religious views on morality too, however.

There are many things that could be said about this topic, but I don't have the time right now.

It did come to mind when I was watching the second episode of Last Chance to See on Sunday night, when they were showing two orphan chimps being introduced to a new chimp group. You can watch the clip here. The evolutionary aspect of human bonding and how touching we find it is illustrated well.

Can the sensible one come back now, please?

Has anyone else noticed how, while Tony Abbott has been doing things like travelling the world, shooting off  guns and his mouth, and changing his opinions more often than a Japanese astronaut changes his underwear,  Malcolm Turnbull has been doing things like, well, making sense. 

Yesterday it was his proposal to force the government into the proper investigation into the financial viability of the National Broadband Network.  Today, it’s an article emphasising the importance of spending money to get irrigation in the Murray – Darling system water efficient.

On the latter, I’ll admit it’s an issue I have not followed in detail, and it does appear to be both a scientifically and politically complicated one.  As far as I can tell, the Coalition is saying that Labor pulled back spending on water efficiency and is now wanting to concentrate purely on water buy back, but I could have that wrong.

During the angry scenes of rural meetings last week where the idea of 30% water allocations was going over like a lead balloon, the thought did occur to me that if we are talking of inefficient irrigation still existing on many of those farms, is it possible to still get the same yields with the lower allocation being compensated with increased efficiency in delivery?   Has the relevant body had Israel involved in how to grow stuff with minimal water?

Probably all this has been taken into account, but there’s no harm in asking.