Floods

Brisbane's floods will not directly affect my house, but certainly I live and work in suburbs which will have houses inundated. (There would seem to be a chance my office may be cut off, although it did not quite go under in 1974.)

This has been a strange disaster. For those who have seen the footage of the Toowoomba flash flood: this is not a town, sitting as it does on top of a range, that is known for such flooding.

As for the Lockyer Valley disaster - yes, people know it has creek and river flooding, but again, nothing like what has been seen on TV yesterday. It is amazing to think that the death toll may climb into the dozens.

The rain has stopped since yesterday afternoon, which is one thing at least. But it does feel odd, knowing that a large volume of water is still headed to the city. At least people will probably start to feel easier that the Wivenhoe dam will not be breached. At 190% capacity (for a dam built to go to 225%), some people were definitely wondering about that yesterday.

There will be many people who cannot work today. I may be distracted for a little while.

I may be a man, but I’m not taking any chances

WOMEN who habitually take strenuous exercise might be at risk of damaging their cognitive function later in life.

Steve's stupid but brilliant idea of the day

Brisbane and much of Queensland has been incredibly wet this summer, with thousands of homes flooded, and hundreds of thousands of parents with school children depressed that the kids have inside continuously for the last 4 weeks.

Now we get news that:

The Australian Building Codes Board is preparing the first technical standards for construction in areas liable to flooding.

Excellent. My plans for all flood prone houses to be Queenslander style built on pontoons may get a run yet.

Child-like drawings to come, as well as a photo of the really weird slug found on a tree yesterday at Mt Glorious during a break in the torrential rain. Yes, my wife was that desperate to get out of the house.

Update: here's the slug. (Easily 6 - 8 cm long):


As for the floods generally: amazing and pretty horrifying scenes of flash flooding in Toowoomba was on the news tonight. Two people were killed in a car swept away (I assume, not one of the cars in this video). Here's an amateur video from the town:



I see that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is saying that it is only the Wivenhoe Dam, which is full and letting go of a lot of water, that is preventing Brisbane from having the equivalent of a 1974 flood. There is actually some talk now of it being the biggest floods Queensland has ever seen, but exactly how you compare these things I'm not sure.

Make friends and influence people the Anglican way

There was a short story in the Courier Mail this morning about how the Anglican Church in Brisbane is looking for more, younger recruits to the priesthood. Apparently there is a shortage. I thought, last I heard, that they actually had quite a lot of women priests to spread around their increasingly dwindling congregation, but maybe not.

Anyway, the main point of the post is to note that this comment:

Executive director of Brisbane's ministry education commission, Reverend Steven Ogden, said the priesthood was desperately in need of educated men and women.

"We need university students with sharp minds, not the stereotypical, eccentric weirdos," he said.

I can only assume Rev Steve must have missed the sensitivity training day at theological college (or whatever it is Anglican clergy in training attend.)

UPDATE: I should have noted that the other possible explanation (in fact, probably the most likely one) would be an out of context quote by the Courier Mail. See comment below.

Graph noted

This graph appeared recently on a Scienceblog and has evidently been around for a long time. (Original source is Global Warming Art.) It is good, though, don’tcha think?:

New York Times finally gets ESP

The NYT website, at least, is featuring prominently the story of soon to be published ESP experiments of Daryl Bem.

You read about them at this very blog back in October. It takes a while for international journalism to catch up with me.

One small aspect of the experiments is a little amusing:

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

Every politician should have one

Romania is planning on taxing its witches, according to The Guardian. But they are fighting back:

Queen witch Bratara Buzea said she will lead a chorus of witches in casting a spell using a concoction of cat excrement and a dead dog.

Interestingly, the report goes on to note:

Such spiritualism has long been tolerated by the Orthodox Church in Romania. The late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, had their own personal witch.

Well, at last I understand the best role for this woman in the Australian parliament.

From the "only in Saudi Arabia" files

In the Gulf News:

Riyadh: A squad from the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has raided the house of a Saudi man following a tip off that he is practising sorcery.

It was reported that the suspect has bewitched a girl and married her without the knowledge of her family.

Following investigation, the suspect was put in jail, awaiting trial. Saudi Arabia applies capital punishment for sorcery.

The incident, which took place in Riyadh, came to light when a security guard, working for a private company, accused a fellow citizen of bewitching his daughter and his other family members and used magic to marry the girl without a marriage contract.

And the report ends:

The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice [gosh, that's an appealing name for a a government department, isn't it?] said it is conducting awareness programmes against the practice of withcraft.

Now there's a lecture that would be interesting to see.

The other funny thing is that, in the same edition of Gulf News, we can also read:

Saudi Arabia confirmed on Tuesday it plans to buy more F-15 fighter jets as part of a massive arms deal which the US State Department said in September could be worth up to $60 billion.

This is a tad odd, isn't it? If the government believes in sorcery enough to be giving public education programs and killing people for it, why do they need 20th century jet fighter technology to protect themselves? Can't they train up a crack elite squad of good sorcerers who will, I don't know, stand at the border and make the enemy forget that Saudi Arabia is there?

Now, although it's no fun to be fair when poking fun at Saudi Arabia, I suppose I should acknowledge that England was prosecuting Helen Duncan under the Witchcraft Act in 1944. However, as Wikipedia explains, this for the offence of fraudulently claiming to be procuring spirits. Still, it would appear that you could say England officially believed in witches until that act was repealed in 1951.

So, maybe I'm being unfair about Saudi paranoia. Let's see: what else is there in Gulf News today?:

Saudi nationals have seized a vulture wearing a Tel Aviv University tag and a transmitter, prompting speculations that it was used by Mossad, the Israeli spying agency, to gather intelligence on the area....

The vulture was handed over to the Saudi security.

According to Israeli media, the tags indicated that the six-year-old bird was part of a long-term research project into migration patterns.

No, clearly this is just a country that has been left out in the hot sun for too long.

The bugs, they’re all over me!

Those who are inclined towards itchy self consciousness after reading about the amazing variety of life to be found living on and in our bodies should probably not read The top 10 life-forms living on Lady Gaga (and you).

I thought I had heard of most kinds of bugs that live in and on us before, but the article still contained a few surprises (or things I had forgotten about.) For example:

Inside your lungs is a kind of fungi called Pneumocystis. It cannot live outside of human lungs. No one has been able to grow it anywhere else.

And (emphasis mine):

I will wager that Lady Gaga’s head is crawling with mites. They live in her pores and come out to have sex under the shade of her wig while she is on stage. Well, not just then. They do it other times too. She could have more than one kind of mite. Forehead mites (Demodex spp.) have not been well studied and they are so small that differences among species might be impossible to detect simply by studying how they and their parts look under the microscope (which is all that has been done). Where these mites have been studied, they have mostly just been counted. They are more common on older people than on younger people. The exception to this pattern is among the Tokelau islanders where the pattern is the reverse (more mites on younger people) for reasons unknown. On average--the Tokelau Islanders in the audience notwithstanding--more than half of us have forehead mites and quite a few of us host two species. Some of us may even host as of yet unnamed species. Every so often these mites are badly behaved (they are linked to rosacea, although innocent until more convincingly proven guilty), but mostly they seem to have no effect on our lives. Maybe they are even good for us? Who knows? What is clear is that they bury themselves in our pores and eat.

Update: you can read more about face mites here.

Actually, I did recall reading before about a particular mite that lives in the base of eyelashes, and it turns out they are the same thing. I was just a bit confused by them being called "forehead mites". Wikipedia notes:

It is quite easy to look for one's own Demodex mites, by carefully removing an eyelash or eyebrow hair and placing it under a microscope.

Umm, not sure I want to know, when they look like this:


As for their possible role in rosacea, it's interesting to note this (from a couple of links back):

Over the years, considerable evidence has accumulated that Demodex folliculorum may at least play a role in certain skin conditions, particularly papulopustular rosacea. Patients with immunity problems, such as AIDS patients, appear to be particularly susceptible. Symptomatic infestation with demodex mites is called demodicidosis or demodex folliculitis.

While the role of demodex in disease is still unclear, treatment for skin problems in cases where there are many mites present now often includes a topical antiparasitic cream. Treatment successes where the mites were targeted provide further indirect evidence that face mites cause skin problems, at least in some instances.

Excuse me while I go practice how long I can hold my breath while keeping my head in a bucket of rubbing alcohol.

Assange compared

There's a very good article in the Australian today contrasting Assange and "Wikileaks" to the leak of the Pentagon Papers, showing that those who think that Julian can justify his actions by comparing it to the former leak are badly mistaken.

Even so, it notes that the biggest effect of Wikileaks so far has been to actually make America look better than many thought:

...ironically, the leaks show that the US government is not an "authoritarian conspiracy" at all. They show, notably in the case of relations with the Arab states of the Middle East, an American government served by generally candid diplomats, trying to keep its balance and think its ways through a devilishly challenging set of problems, chief among them how to dissuade the theocratic and dangerously anti-Semitic regime in Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They show nuance and scruple, not authoritarian conspiracy. They show honest assessments of world leaders such as the corrupt and domineering former KGB thug Vladimir Putin, or the corrupt and irresponsible Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi. Moreover, as Robert Gates, heir to McNamara, has pointed out, the leaks were possible precisely because the US government had been trying to circulate more information to more of its civil servants in order to facilitate learning. That was Ellsberg's agenda. Assange wants to prevent just such learning.

Climate change this and that

Michael Tobis (and Gareth Renowden) have really been ripping into some recent bogus claims by climate “skeptics”lately. First, it was the non story of the New Zealand temperature record adjustments, somehow claimed by the skeptic group that forced a reassessment as some sort of triumph over the e-vil lying NIWA scientists. Yet, gullible skeptics lap this sort of stuff up.

Secondly, it was a takedown of a Watts Up With That post by Don Easterbrook, in which a puzzling graph was claimed to show something it patently did not. Again, about 95% of the comments following the story at Anthony Watts place brought this hook, line and sinker.

There really is a new definition for gullible, and it’s Climate Change Skeptic.

As someone commented at Tobis’ blog, it seemed clear that Watts Up With That has in the last couple of weeks been running with a pre-emptive campaign to argue why the possible hottest year on record title for 2010 (it will be a close call with 1998) is not really so important anyway. I reckon this sort of pre-emptive action was obvious in 2010 too, with respect to Arctic ice loss when it wasn’t clear just how wrong Steven Goddard’s prediction would be.

At other blogs:

* Barry Brook has an important post on the meaning of the “no statistically significant warming since 1995” line. In fact, he puts up a persuasive argument as to why it was (in effect) the wrong question that was being asked in the first place.

* Tamino looks at the GISS temperature record to once again emphasise via graph that there is no last decade decline in the warming trend, which is the key thing (not the annual ups and downs.)

* Stoat had a pretty good take before Christmas on the issue of explanations for the current (and previous year’s) cold European winter, which can be summed up as:

So before explaining such-and-such an event, the first thing you need to do is to show that there is something in need of an explanation. A cold December in Europe doesn't fall into that category.

He doesn't deny that the ideas being run as to why these winters have been so cold might be correct (see the Real Climate post on this), but he considers it safer to not try to over-explain weather and its relationship to climate change. Given the way skeptics smack their lips over decade old statements that snow was well and truly on the way out in Britain, he has a pretty good point.

* It’s easy to forget, in light of the well publicised extreme heat of Russia in 2010, that Japan also suffered a record hot, long summer last year. As I noted in my first post of 2011 earlier today, it seems that the record number of deaths for the elderly has been blamed on this. The Japan Meteorological Agency seems right on board with AGW, and it is fascinating how so many agencies from so many countries have been “fooled” according to the skeptics. It’s funny how the gullible think they can recognize the gullible, but it doesn’t work that way.

Update: I see that the China Meteorological Agency also put out a 2010 year end summary noting the extreme weather, and putting it down to global warming. For example:

Extreme rainstorms followed the hot weather. Ninety-seven weather stations around China reported record-breaking daily rainfall, and 133 stations broke their annual records. Only seven record-breaking daily rainfall figures were reported from 2000 to 2009.

Something wrong with the universe?

This intriguing article “The Truth Wears Off”appeared in the New Yorker before Christmas, but I’ve only just read it.

It’s all about the “decline effect”, whereby effects that initially appear strong in experimental studies seem to start declining in effectiveness as more and more scientists try to replicate the original findings.

Some (or all) of this is understandable in terms of better experimental set ups, and publication bias, which means that it’s much easier to get an apparently new effect published than a study that has a negative result.

But the article is of most interest when discussing cases where the scientists who first made a positive finding discover that they can’t replicate it themselves. A good example is given from parapsychology, where pioneer JB Rhine initially seemed to have a star subject, but he subsequently seemed to lose all of his ESP powers. Sure, the simple explanation may be that, even though Rhine may have thought the replication set up was identical with the previous one, it really wasn’t, and a trick the subject was previously using subsequently failed him. But it does seem a little odd to me that Rhine wouldn’t find the trick in a case like this: one feels sure that this would be more satisfying in its own way than admitting that he can’t explain why a subject lost his power.

There are other examples of this given in the article, and from less contentious fields than parapsychology. It’s well worth a read.

Talk of all this couldn’t help but remind me of Rupert Sheldrake and his odd morphic resonance idea. In short, he believes that you can scientifically show that it becomes easier to acquire knowledge as more and more subjects learn it, be they birds, dogs or humans. (And, of course, in his theory, it’s not via simple imitation of the first creature who learnt the talent.) A genuine decline effect would seem to be the opposite of that.

A possible example of the decline effect that came to my mind was the original cold fusion experiments, and perhaps some of the subsequent ones too. These are not mentioned in the article, however.

If it were true (the decline effect) I guess it could be explicable (warning: wild speculation about to embarked upon) by either:

a. the universe really being a computer simulation game run by a mega intelligence that changes the rules for some obscure purpose while the program runs; or

b. God, his opposite number, or aliens (take your pick) finding it important that certain things not be discovered by humans until the time is right. I personally like the idea of undercover teams of angels, demons, aliens or Men in Black interfering with important experiments in very subtle ways to confound humans at particular points in time. Of course, this may make “sense” for something fundamentally groundbreaking like the discovery of ESP, or perhaps cold fusion, but why it should apply to the effects of antipsychotic drugs would be rather harder to explain.

I guess there is probably some science fiction (or supernatural fiction) that has been written along the lines of b, but I can’t bring any to mind. The nearest may be the idea in the Day the Earth Stood Still that aliens would give us a warning to mend our ways by one spectacular demonstration of their power. But that was far from an discrete way of interfering. And I do recall David Brin wrote “The Practice Effect”, in which inanimate objects get better with “practice”, but again that is more akin to Sheldrake’s idea than a decline effect.

A decline effect has better fiction possibilities than morphic resonance, and maybe that is its most endearing feature.

Mochi deaths 2011 (this year with video, and other “Japan is shrinking” news)

Happy New Year, everyone, and once again, condolences are due to those in Japan who just lost someone due to the annual New Year’s mochi eating habit.

Yes, as my Google search ranking for “mochi deaths” remains very high (number one in fact, something I acknowledge as a dubious distinction), I know that I have visitors waiting for this annual post.

But as with last year, it seems that the English Japanese news media have lost interest in providing the numbers of (usually elderly) Japanese residents who choke on their New Years mochi.

So again I have had to resort to searching in Japanese, this time with the ever helpful Google translate. It seems the numbers in the Tokyo area (see 3rd story at the linked page to Yomiuri Shimbun), at least, are pretty much as high as ever:

Between one or two days in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, and Wakayama prefectures of five, died choke on rice cakes from a total of 10 elderly people.

Tokyo Fire Department is "good hair cut is a small cake, for the elderly and children, accompanied by family members want," and has called for.

According to the agency, in Tokyo, the 24 people taken to the hospital by 8:00 pm two days, killing six of them. The 70 year-old woman died and five 95-year-old man 82. Five of them were at home eating rice cake.

In the other 4 provinces, 61 hours a day to choke on rice cakes 89-year-old male and female four people died.

So, the take home message from that seems to be: 10 dead, at least 24 taken to hospital. You can watch video of this deadly New Year's treat here at the link to Fuji TV. Fortunately, none of the participants keel over and die for the crew filming it.

There is another TV news story (see link to Japan TV NNN) about it, sadly showing an elderly person in a nursing home, by the looks, not being fed mochi. It is, I suppose, a hard story to illustrate well, but still I wish they had come up with something better than this.

Anyhow, my searching around hasn’t found any obvious links to the national mochi death toll this year, but if there were 10 dead around Tokyo, the total for the entire country must be considerably higher.

It’s no wonder that articles like this, warning of the danger, appear just before New Years. Incidentally, maybe this gives an indication of how many people die nationally from mochi, if I can trust Google Translate:

According to the Tokyo Fire Department, four years until 2009, the number of cases in food spending by 4719 the risk of suffocation. Of these, 444 of rice accounts for about 10 percent, are concentrated in the month of January to about 40% of the 171. The ratio becomes more severe 53%, and 70 years or older in most cases by a lot of food.

The Cabinet Office Food Safety Commission in June this year, the probability of risk of suffocation on food, and summarizes the results of the cake at highest risk. And is calculated by assuming 100 million people took a bite, the cake is to be up to 7.6 at the frequency of accidents….

According to the Ministry of Health, Vital Statistics, the number of deaths due to suffocation incidents of food in 2009 4679 people. Account for nearly 90 percent of those over 65.

So, if Tokyo Fire Department has about 4,719 deaths over four years from all choking, and the total national figure is about the same per year, maybe we can assume the national New Year's mochi death toll is about 3 to 4 times the Tokyo average? Well, someone with actual Japanese ability can correct me, but it seems a fair guess.

Onto more death in Japan news, the Japan Times notes the following:

A total of 4,863 people died from traffic accidents in 2010, down 51 from the previous year, according to preliminary data from the NPA.

So, roughly the same amount of Japanese die annually in car accidents as from choking? How does that compare to other countries? Well, it appears well above the American choking rate:

According to the National Safety Council, choking remained the fourth leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States as of 2004. In 2006, a total of 4,100 deaths (1.4 deaths per 100,000 population) from unintentional ingestion or inhalation of food or other objects resulting in airway obstruction was reported.

But the real point I was linking to the Japan Times article was due to the coverage on the shrinking Japanese population generally:

Death record reset KYODO An estimated 1,194,000 Japanese died last year, the most since record-keeping began in 1947, according to the latest health ministry data.

The data also said an estimated 1,071,000 babies were born 2010, up slightly from 2009.

The difference between births and deaths — 123,000 — also set a record high, blowing by the previous record of 71,830 set in 2009.

"The number of deaths is on the rise due to aging and the number of births will not grow because of a decline in the population of women who give birth," a Health, Labor and Welfare ministry official said.

The difference "will continue to be greater in the future," the official said.

In 2009, total deaths fell by 542 from 2008 to stand at 1,141,865. In 2010, however, total deaths surged by around 52,000 as elderly people succumbed to the hottest summer on record, the official said.

Japan's population decline has certainly taken a surge for the worse, by the sounds. (It's also interesting to note how many deaths they blame on the hot summer, even in a country where small houses and apartments make air conditioning easier and more economical than in countries like Australia.)

The Japan Times also recently ran an interesting opinion piece noting that Japan's fertility decline was by no means unique, being shared by other East Asian countries (Korea and Taiwan both, oddly enough) as well as strong welfare state countries such as in Scandinavia. This is true enough, but it still doesn't address the major issue of Japan being reluctant to take substantial immigration. It's not like they're going to be short of houses anytime soon.

1980’s justified

Long term readers may recall that, apart from They Might be Giants, my other main pop music interest has been David Byrne and Talking Heads.

Tonight, I was looking at a Youtube of Once in a Lifetime, as I was going to show it my son.  But he was too busy hunting dinosaurs on the iPad, so he didn’t pay much attention.  I’ll get him to watch it yet.

But the thing of interest is that this upload of the clip (done in Jan 2010) is still attracting recent comments.  (I presume it must the version that everyone watches when they search for it.)

And generally speaking, nearly everyone commenting seems young, but very appreciative.   I like this one:

my parents will do the arm thing and say "same as it ever was" all the time!! LOLOL

And this comment:

Such a cool video even till today

and

 Best. Video. Ever

That’s nice.  I feel the 1980's doesn't have much to be ashamed of after all.

Dr Who Christmas

I'm not the world's biggest Dr Who fan, but still, I like to comment on it sometimes.

This year's Christmas special was, I thought, a very pleasing combination of mad, clever, funny and touching. It was also, I thought, much better directed than some of the previous season; it hung together pretty well.

Let's hope the forthcoming season works a tad better than the last, which had it moments, but not quite enough of them.

Must catch up with TMBG

My favourite band, They Might be Giants, spend a lot of time doing kids albums lately, which I don’t usually buy, even though they write some pretty catchy stuff that usually gets them a Grammy nomination.

But I think I will get the current one: Here Comes Science. Most of the songs seem to be up on Youtube, and I like many, including this one:

And I’ve also found a video for another song of there’s from a couple of years ago. Since we all like drinking and smoking puppets, it’s worth a look:

Watch it while you can

It was a couple of years ago that I mentioned I had seen (and then bought) the DVD for the 1999 "movie" of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. As that happened around Christmas, it's become a minor family tradition to watch it at the this time of year; hey, it might not be Christian, but the story is not inappropriate for the season.

We all still really like it: as I've said before, I think it does a filmed musical stage production in about as perfect a way as I can imagine.

As for the musical highlight, I've always really liked this song (A Pharoah
Story) at the start of the second act, sung here by the lovely Maria Friedman. While this part is not staged in any way to give you an impression of what the rest of the DVD production looks like, it sounded pretty good through my computer speakers, so have a look.

I see that an earlier Youtube I had up has been pulled for breach of copyright. I expect the same fate this one too, especially as the guy seems to have put the whole movie on Youtube. That really must push the patience of Mr Lloyd Webber. So enjoy while you can:

Christmas Greetings 2010

Three videos

1. Sega can be played in all sorts of places now (read the comments following this post too: quite witty.)



2. The funniest ads I saw all year, from Gruen Transfer.

3. I never cared for Rudolph anyway (you can skip through the first minute or so)

Not exactly Christmassy

I’ve been looking around The Guardian’s Comment is Free Belief section, and it’s pretty good.  (Generally speaking, I preferred The Guardian’s website when they gave more prominence to CIF articles on their main page.  Now you have to make the extra click, and I miss a lot of stuff there.)

This article about modernising Hinduism is pretty interesting.  Apparently, the Hindu America Foundation has a report that tackles the caste system head on.  I was interested to read this part:

Noting that there are defenders of the caste system, not just the curmudgeon and cruel among Hindus, but the likes of Voltaire and Diderot who fought against the monotheistic intolerance of Christians and Muslims, to sociologists like Louis Dumont who argued that the "distribution of functions leads to exchanges", to the great Indophile, Alain Daniélou who argued that caste does not equate to "racist inequality but… a natural ordering of diversity," the HAF report argues that a birth-based hierarchy is unacceptable, that inequities against and the abuse of the Dalits/SCs is a human rights issue, and that the solution to this social ill is available within Hindu sacred texts themselves, and that Hindus should be at the forefront of putting an end to the system of birth-based hierarchy as well as taking the lead in energising the Dalit community to fight discrimination.

It's always good to see how outsider intellectuals justified crap systems.