Tick alert

There is a surprising number of people turning up at hospital in the Sunshine Coast hinterland (Nambour Hospital?) with tick bites at the moment:

"We have had through our emergency department, maybe at least 15 to 20 in the last week or so through the doors.

"This season is very unusual in the fact that the bites are very serious and that people are developing very significant allergic reactions, in fact life-threatening allergic reactions to the tick bites.

"The main symptoms are rash, feeling grossly unwell, sometimes asthma and sometimes diarrhoea and vomiting."

Biofuel worry

If this report is anything to go by, European environmental groups have definitely developed cold feet about biofuels being a good idea:

European plans to promote biofuels will drive farmers to convert 69,000 square km of wild land into fields and plantations, depriving the poor of food and accelerating climate change, a report warned on Monday.

The impact equates to an area the size of the Republic of Ireland.

As a result, the extra biofuels that Europe will use over the next decade will generate between 81 and 167 percent more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels, says the report.

Ocean acidification updated – not much to celebrate

A news blog in Nature has some bad news:

Thanks to rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels, some Arctic waters are already experiencing pH dips that could be harmful to sea life. What’s more, this acidification seems to be happening more rapidly than models have predicted.

This sobering conclusion was reached by researchers who met on Wednesday to discuss ocean acidification at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver. “Models are probably underestimating at least by a few years the impact of ocean acidification in the Arctic,” says Jeremy Mathis, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We don’t know what the organisms’ responses are yet, but the conditions are already there to potentially be disruptive to the ecosystems.”

Marine organisms from plankton to crabs are dependent on carbonate ions in the ocean to build their skeletons and shells. But as CO₂ dissolves in the water it lowers the pH, which shrinks the pool of such ions available for animals to use.

One important source of carbonate ions is aragonite, a particularly soluble form of calcium carbonate. Seawater is usually saturated with aragonite. However a recent study in Biogeosciences estimated that by 2016, according to the IPCC’s mid-range emissions projections, aragonite will fall below this level in some Arctic waters for at least one month a year. By the end of the century, it predicts that the entire Arctic Ocean could be under-saturated with respect to aragonite.

“But we don’t have to wait until 2016,” says Mathis. “We’re already seeing places in the Arctic where these under-saturations are happening now.” High latitude waters in the Arctic and Antarctic are particularly sensitive to pH changes, as cold waters absorb more gas than warm waters.

Researchers at the symposium were particularly concerned about pteropods – tiny sea snails that are highly sensitive to acidification. Pteropods make up about half the diet of juvenile pink salmon living in Gulf of Alaska. And they could be affected at pH levels very close to those that the region is already experiencing. “It’s not going to take a great deal of CO₂ intrusion in high latitude seas to get to a point where the water could become corrosive to some marine calcifying organisms,” says Mathis.

As for the pteropods, decreasing pH is not good for them, but nor is increasing termperatures. A recent study reports:

We conclude that pre-winter juveniles will be negatively affected by both rising temperature and pCO₂ which may result in a possible abundance decline of the overwintering population, the basis for next year's reproduction.

Also, another recent study estimating pH changes in the Meditteranean reports:

For the first time, the level of acidification is estimated for the Mediterranean Sea. Our results indicate that for the year 2001 all waters (even the deepest) have been acidified by values ranging from -0.14 to -0.05 pH unit since the beginning of the industrial era, which is clearly higher than elsewhere in the open ocean.

And down around Australia, for those who love their Sydney rock oysters, a study suggests that they may be replaced by the bigger Pacific oyster due to increasing CO2 in the oceans. Pay attention, rock oyster lovers.

The only “upside” are some studies arguing that some coastal phytoplankton that are already used to large swings in water pH may not suffer as CO2 increases. It doesn’t tell us much about the wider ocean, though.

The effect of abuse

Although it’s easy to imagine how much childhood sexual abuse must play havoc with the victim’s emotional development, I must admit I didn’t realise that it is even related to later onset of psychosis:

A team of Monash University researchers has released the findings of a study, which indicates child sexual abuse may be a trigger for the onset of psychotic illness later in life….

Previous studies established that abused children were more likely to develop depression, anxiety, substance abuse, borderline personality disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal behavior, according to background information in the article.

The authors found that "the possibility of a link between childhood sexual abuse and later psychotic disorders, however, remains unresolved despite the claims of some that a causal link has been established to schizophrenia."

The research data from police and medical examinations of sexual abuse cases was compared to a statewide register of psychiatric cases. Rates of psychiatric disorders among 2,759 individuals who had been sexually abused when younger than age 16 were compared with those among 4,938 individuals in a comparison group drawn from electoral records.

Over a 30-year period, individuals who had experienced childhood sexual abuse had double the rate of those in the comparison group of psychosis overall (2.8 per cent vs. 1.4 per cent) and schizophrenia disorders (1.9 per cent vs. 0.7 per cent).

The authors concluded that "the risks of subsequently developing a schizophrenic syndrome were greatest in victims subjected to penetrative abuse in the peripubertal and postpubertal years from 12 to 16 years and among those abused by more than one perpetrator."

A Curry made of nothing

Those who have an interest in climate change debates would know all about Judith Curry, a climate scientist who, after the "Climategate" emails, made something of a name for herself by talking about wanting to "build bridges" between climate skeptics and mainstream climate scientists.

As it turns out, Judith's idea of building bridges has culminated in her creating her own blog in which she talks about the IPCC "consensus" position being a "dogma", refers to the "high priests" of the movement, and to waffling on about being sure that the IPCC has not dealt with uncertainty appropriately, while simultaneously admitting that she's not an expert on risk, statistics and uncertainty, and inviting others to help her work out her position.

As many people have pointed out, while she takes umbrage at the fact that the "climategate" emails showed that scientists in question responded to the attacks upon their work and integrity by talking amongst themselves with disdain about the likes of McIntyre and others, she seems distinctly uninterested in acknowledging that it is indisputable that McIntyre, Anthony Watts and other "stars" of the skeptic world have consistently made highly personal attacks and run blogs absolutely brimming with comments that allege conspiracy, bad faith, fraud, and duplicity against climate scientists, as well as letting long disproved ideas continually reappear.

What's more, she has a pattern of making big claims and then running away from them; often simply failing to back them up, and saying that her claim was not really that important anyway to her bigger argument. The best summary of this (with links to follow if you have an interest) has been put up at James Annan's blog.

Why she has decided to take the position she has is anyone's guess. Someone at her blog claimed she has simply become addicted to getting attention, and I think there is almost certainly an element of truth in that. Some of her comments seem to indicate an element of jealously about some other scientist's careers progression. One thing for certain is that she seems to lack insight: she has recently posted about a "feedback loop" that allegedly keeps climate scientists on the "consensus" side from looking at their own claims carefully, yet she seems to be oblivious to her own personal "feedback loop" of broad brush, un-detailed criticisms of her fellow climate scientists, leading to people questioning her bona fides, which leads to her escalating indignation at how people want to label her a "heretic" etc.

But in the end it doesn't matter much. As I like pointing out to skeptics who get excited when some physicist or other says he thinks climate change is not a problem, it's not exactly hard to find scientists, engineers and academics who hold silly opinions, particularly when it is in a field outside their day to day work experience. The 9/11 Truther movement is the best example of that. Have a look at this site, for example.

In any event, like the Truther movement, Curry seems to be about hot air with no substance behind it, and it's all of her own misguided creation.

Update: a post at Rabbett's which sums this up too.

Update 2: see my more recent post about Judith's wild ride here.

Inserting the sheep

Inspired by a comment at another blog: "Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever seeing a sheep in any depiction of the US, either."

Geoengineering considered (again)

The Economist has a good article on some new-ish ideas for geo-engineering the climate.

Of course, at this stage, whether any of them would really work well enough, and with acceptable side effects, is anyone’s guess.  I suppose, however, that I cautiously adopt the article’s view, and agree that some experimentation may as well be tried now:

Polluting the stratosphere. Liming the oceans. Locking Greenland’s glaciers to its icy mountains. It is easy to see why sceptics balk at geoengineering. And if viewed as a substitute for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, a cover for business-as-usual into the indefinite future, then it might indeed prove a Faustian bargain. But that is probably the wrong way of looking at it. Better to use it as a means of smoothing the path to a low-carbon world. Most of the researchers working in the area of stratospheric hazing, for example, think that its best use might be reducing the peak temperatures the Earth would otherwise face at a time in the future when greenhouse-gas emissions have started falling but atmospheric levels are still going up.

Close up comet

This isn't the first time a spacecraft has taken a close up photo of the heart of a comet, but I don't recall previous ones showing such a clearly defined core. Lovely shot here of Hartley 2. Oh, wait, Bad Astronomy has a much better set of photos. Way cool.

The freshwater sharks of Brisbane

Brisbane residents who pay attention to the news are probably aware by now that the city’s river, even in its upper reaches, often has bull sharks of potentially dangerous size in it.

In fact, if you go to College’s Crossing, which is close to Ipswich and has a large picnic area on a stretch of the river with clean, fresh water full of swimmers in summer, there are shark warning signs permanently up.  (Brisbane gets its drinking water from just beside this spot, so the water is definitely 100% fresh.  For some reason I don’t understand, it’s only a relatively short distance further down from College’s Crossing that the river suddenly takes on its brown murky quality which is then maintained all the way to the mouth.)

The reason I’m talking about this is because a large bull shark appears to have been spotted this week up near College’s Crossing, which (according to this report) is 90km from the river mouth.   It also says that before the Mt Crosby weir was built, they had been recorded as far inland as Lowood.   That’s a long, long way further inland.

It’s also been reported recently that bull sharks jumping out of the river in the inner  city stretch is not an unusual sight for the ferry captains:

“The warmer the water, the more times you will see them jumping,” he said. As the sun gets up, that's when you will see them jumping.

“About two years ago the river was a little bit cleaner than usual and everybody was seeing them. You ask any City Cat master, they'll say the same thing. They see them jumping all the time.”

As well, their aerials show the sharks are also more active underwater as the river at this time of year.

Sharks found upstream are normally less than 1.5m long and pose little threat to people.

However, dog owners have been warned to keep their pets out of the river at dusk and dawn, when sharks are most active.

There have been numerous reports of dogs being taken from the river's edge and even instances of more ambitious sharks taking on larger prey.

In 2005, Ipswich locals were shocked after a bull shark attacked a race horse being put through its paces in the Brisbane River at Kholo.

So, how does this shark manage to live in fresh water? I see there was a story on ABC's Catalyst show in 2003 explaining this.  Here are some extracts from the transcript:

Richard Pillans: We’re about 85km from the mouth of the Brisbane River, we’ve got fresh water for at least 20 km downstream of us, and there are sharks in here, there’s a lot of sharks in here, and it is really unusual and most people in Brisbane don’t realise they’re basically in their backyard all the way through the Brisbane River. Almost all sharks will die in fresh water, but what’s really unique about the bull shark is that it’s equally at home in both salt water and fresh water. ...

The team think that there are four key organs involved - the liver, the kidney, the rectal gland and the gills. The liver of the bull shark is extra large, it’s the animal’s salt factory. It produces salt in the form of urea.

A/Prof Craig Franklin: Urea production and the liver is the major site so it has to be pretty big. If the shark is in salt water this salt is then stored in the kidney. As it swims upstream into fresh water, excess salt is excreted in the urine.

Neil: They will retain less urea in fresh water than sea water, so there’s a clear change between the two.

Narration: The shark also regulates salt levels using the rectal gland and the gills. Pure salt can be taken in or excreted through the gills depending on the outside water.

Richard Pillans: Different in structure between the two.

Narration: Incredibly they think the very structure of gills would gradually change as the shark swims from fresh to salt water.

Thus concludes today’s nature lesson.

More cautionary tales

Time for a perennial favourite topic: don't do it kids, something bad will happen.

[Hey, if a blogger who calls himself socially conservative can't try and point out that for humans, sex is, despite all its obvious fun aspects, actually a pretty serious thing with consequences, who can?] So here's the latest round up:

* Do I have to?

A "birds and the bees" talk with your kids isn't complete without a discussion of oral sex, according to a new study that found a connection between oral sex and old-fashioned intercourse. The three-year survey found that teens who had oral sex by the end of ninth grade were at the highest risk of having sexual intercourse during high school. These teens had a 25-percent chance of having intercourse by the end of ninth grade and a 50-percent chance by the end of 11th grade.

Well, I guess it's no great surprise that a teenager heavily into one form of foreplay is likely to soon try everything else, but still, explaining all varieties of sex (apart from the one that leads to babies) is a task that probably has only become a parental obligation in recent decades.

* Over-sharing again

I see that irritating writer-blogger Sam de Brito once again over-shared by telling us about how he caught genital herpes when he was in his 20's. (He's previously told us about catching crab lice from a backpacker in the same decade.)

The piece is all a bit of a two edged sword. On the one hand, you can take it as a cautionary tale for safe sex. On the other, he has a doctor talking about how people are rather hypocritical about this disease, with the aim of helping overcome the shame of having caught it.

The net effect: nothing in the article is likely to make people change behaviour, I reckon, which just reduces it to something else icky I wish de Brito hadn't shared with us. It does, however, have some interesting figures in it, regarding the percentage of people who have both forms of herpes.

* Oral not harmless, part 2

There's also been a fair bit of publicity lately about how another study (this one from Sweden - which is appropriate I guess given their libertine reputation) showing a correlation between high rises in oral cancers with increased rates of oral sex:

"This kind of cancer traditionally affects males who have been smoking and drinking all their life, and now in their mid-60s they are getting head and neck cancer," he said. "However, HPV cancer we are seeing in younger patients who have never smoked."

Strangely, though, this is noted:

Similarly high rates have also been seen in Europe, where a new Swedish study has shown a strong correlation between oral cancers and oral sex. Oddly, the rising rates have not been seen yet in the Southern Hemisphere in Australia and New Zealand.

The cause is thought to be the human papilloma virus, for which we now have the vaccine which I think few teenage Australia girls are not having.

This should improve things gradually for head and throat cancer too, I guess, but still if you're in your 20's or 30's and acting like Sam de Brito, you're not going to be getting the benefit of that.

* Start dating older women

If you're 13, probably best to avoid sex with your 10 year old girlfriend. (The article at the link notes that even this is not the youngest recorded age for pregnancy.) Ick.

* Now to contradict myself

Slate recently had an interesting slide show which contrasted the European approach to teenage sex education to that in America. It made some interesting claims:

Dr. Amy Schalet conducted in-depth interviews with teens and parents about adolescent sexual mores in both countries. She found that in the United States, teen sexuality is dramatized as an "overpowering force." Parents commonly talk about their kids' hormones "raging out of control." If teen sexuality is destined to be reckless and dangerous, then fear is the only hope of controlling it.

Europeans, such as the Dutch, by contrast:

...view teen sexuality as being "right." The Dutch use the phrase "being ready" to talk about how their teens will know they are prepared to have sex. They spend less time and effort trying to prevent young people from becoming sexually active, and more on educating them to be responsible when they do.

As I noted from another article some time ago, the Dutch teenagers generally start sex later, despite all the openness about how its done and precautions, etc. Yet, that earlier article noted that there are likely other cultural reasons going on to explain the low rate of teenage pregnancy, apart from the intense sex education.

It's interesting to contrast this with, say, alcohol use. It seems now that most experts here think the well meaning middle class parent who lets their 16 year old take some alcohol to a party on the basis that they should be allowed to do openly something they will do anyway, are in fact doing the wrong thing. Yet, the gradual introduction of alcohol with family dining in some European countries seems to work OK.

In the Australian context, I remain similarly skeptical of parents who allow (say) their 16 year old to have their girlfriend or boyfriend stay over for sex, on the basis that it's better that it's done there than in the back of a car or park.

Anyhow, the right balance in how to approach sex education seems as tricky as ever.

The potato correction

In March 2008, I noted a comment in a book review in The Guardian that a person could live indefinitely on potatoes alone.

According to this article, about a man who is going to eat only potatoes for 2 months, that's not quite right:

Much research has been conducted on potatoes, and the conclusion drawn by every medical doctor and nutritionist on the planet is that you have to be nuts to think you can live off of potatoes.

To Voigt's credit, his lighthearted stunt will educate the public about many healthy aspects of the potato: a decent and inexpensive source of vitamin C, vitamin B₆, potassium, magnesium and, with the skin left on, dietary fiber.

Also, low-carb advocates are harsher on the potato than science allows them to be. Some potato varieties, prepared correctly, can be as healthy as the much-lauded whole grains. [7 Diet Tricks That Work]

Voigt didn't enter this diet blindly. He told LiveScience he first consulted with a doctor and dietician to confirm he could go 60 days on just potatoes. You need healthy kidneys to process the excess potassium delivered by 20 potatoes a day. You also need a store of nutrients potatoes lack, such as vitamin A for proper vision, or else exit this diet blindly.

(If you're wondering why a man would eat potatoes only for 2 months, it's because he's executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission. I guess this part of the job wasn't mentioned in his salary package.)

Seeing this blog has an inordinate amount of international influence (ha), I just thought I should note this.

Just read a book

New Scientist reports that the latest airplane bomb scare may stop plans for in flight wi-fi and mobile phone use:

In-flight Wi-Fi "gives a bomber lots of options for contacting a device on an aircraft", Alford says. Even if ordinary cellphone connections are blocked, it would allow a voice-over-internet connection to reach a handset.

"If it were to be possible to transmit directly from the ground to a plane over the sea, that would be scary," says Alford's colleague, company founder Sidney Alford. "Or if a passenger could use a cellphone to transmit to the hold of the aeroplane he is in, he could become a very effective suicide bomber."

Manufacturers of the technologies will not welcome this fresh security concern, having finally gained airworthiness approval for their in-flight cellphone and Wi-Fi systems by proving that their microwave transmissions do not interfere with avionics.

Oh dear, how sad. (Actually, I couldn't care less. There should be more spaces in the world where mobile phones can't reach.)

LHC discussed

The New York Times has a good article about the Large Hadron Collider. 

Here’s a key part:

But for all the euphoria in Geneva these days, the collider is still operating under the cloud of Sept. 19, 2008. That is when the electrical connection between two of the collider’s powerful superconducting electromagnets exploded, turning one sector of the collider ring into a car wreck and shutting down the newly inaugurated machine for more than a year.

As a result, the machine is operating at only half power, at 3.5 trillion electron volts per proton instead of the 7 trillion electron volts for which it was designed, so as not to blow out the delicate splices. At the end of 2011, all the CERN accelerators will shut down for 15 months, so that the suspect splices — some 10,000 of them — can be strengthened and an unknown number of magnets that have mysteriously lost the ability to handle the high currents and produce the high fields needed to run the collider at close to full strength can be “retrained.” ….

The collider will start up again in 2013 with proton energies of 6.5 trillion electron volts, but it is not likely to reach full power until 2014, if ever.

The smart one writes

Malcolm Turnbull sounds smart and well informed in his column in the SMH today in which he talks about his support for a private member’s motion to stop the patenting of genes. 

Tony Abbott meanwhile was at the Melbourne Cup forgetting the name of the race favourite:

TONY ABBOTT, OPPOSITION LEADER: The Thing Is is plainly going to be the sentimental favourite.

So You Think, Tony?

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.)