Viewing recommendation

On ABC last night was the first part of the documentary series "How Earth Made Us", which, as the BBC explains, is "the epic story of how geology, geography and climate have influenced mankind".*

It was excellent viewing, making connections between geology and the dawn of civilisation which I certainly hadn't realised before. It also starts with one of the most weirdly spectacular places on earth - that giant gypsum crystal cave in Mexico, photos of which were circulating on the internet in the last year or two.

Get over to iView and watch it while you can, if you missed it.


* I've been noticing lately that "mankind" seems to be making some kind of a comeback, as against "humankind". That's odd, since as far as gender neutral talk goes, I had actually gotten used to "humankind". Now if BBC Two isn't using it, I feel I've been prematurely gender sensitive.

Unexpected downer

Spotted at Physorg:

Daily use of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, commonly known as NSAIDs, is associated with a 22 percent increase in the risk of erectile dysfunction, Kaiser researchers found in a study of more than 80,000 men in Southern California. The results were a surprise because erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated ED, is thought to be caused by inflammation, and the researchers expected that use of the drugs would alleviate the problem.

The monogamous Douthat

Well, that sex survey indicating a (surprising) increase in sexual restraint amongst American youth is attracting some interesting commentary.

Ross Douthat had a column "Why Monogamy Matters" which noted as follows:

...there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

One can imagine that such talk would annoy some people as sounding just far, far too much like what your well meaning parents may want to say to their daughter. And indeed, there's a (somewhat childishly) sarcastic article on Huffington Post:

Douthat teaches us that sexual restraint leads to "emotional well-being." Restraint is another word for: happiness! Not knowing too much is the biggest happiness of all. Little girls crave security, that's what you have to understand. Bunnies. Baa-Baa. Binkies! Mommmmy!

I see Andrew Sullivan has also weighed in, but without any venom. Someone at a Slate blog wrote:

I have yet to read a Douthat column without feeling deep embarrassment for the author. He has a completely disorganized mind and seems unable of self-reflection. I read that ... "thing" he wrote yesterday and chanted facepalm, facepalm, facepalm as a calming mantra.

Yes, talking about restraint in sex really upsets some people.

Update: it's been a long time since I linked to Mark Steyn, but his column on this has some more examples of amusingly appalled liberal readers of the Douthat column, and is worth a look.

Evolving dimensions - the start of something big?

Well, this is interesting. Bee at her Backreaction blog has post explaining (not exactly in layman terms, but you can get the general drift) a big, pretty new, idea in physics that may actually go somewhere:

The idea that space-time might not be higher-dimensional on short distances but instead be lower-dimensional has been around for some while, inspired by results from causal dynamical triangulation. In a paper last year, Anchordoqui et al proposed to examine the possibility of lower dimensionality at small distances for its phenomenology in their paper

Vanishing Dimensions and Planar Events at the LHC
Luis Anchordoqui, De Chang Dai, Malcolm Fairbairn, Greg Landsberg, Dejan Stojkovic
arXiv:1003.5914v2 [hep-ph]

Greg Landsberg gave a talk about this work on our last year's workshop on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity (recording of the talk here). The basic idea is that the dimensionality of space changes with distance in such a way that it is 3-dimensional on scales we have tested it, lower dimensional on distances shorter than we have probed yet (about 1/1000 of a femtometer) and possibly higher-dimensional on distances larger than we can observe. The picture suggested is that of a (one-dimensional) string being knitted, and the knitted sheet (2-dimensional) being crumpled to a ball (3-dimensional). The authors dubbed this "evolving dimensionality." The merit of having a smaller number of space-like dimensions at small distances or high energies is that it improves the renormalizability of quantum field theories and esp. that of quantum gravity. (In contrast to additional dimensions which actually make the problem worse.)

Sounds interesting. As Bee goes on to note, the idea has a big problem ("lacks a mathematical model for the new fundamental structure and the dynamics of quantum fields in it") but even so makes some (I think) testable predictions.

Now I'll annoy science types by admitting something: my reason for liking the sound of it is that it seems to get us back to a possible "higher dimension". I always thought it a pity that physics lost the 4th big dimension as a place in which locate God and places like heaven and hell. You can always get around that by living in a type of cyber-heaven in the mind of God, like Tipler uses for his Omega Point, but a hyper-dimensional realm has its own nice feel about it too.

Is it April yet?

There's a 1 April feel about the following story:

Japanese researchers have been immersing iron-based compounds in hot alcoholic beverages such as red wine, sake and shochu to induce superconductivity.

Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability.

But as it appears in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology, published on 7 March, it appears not to be a joke.

Red wine worked best, by the way...

Sex ed (and congratulations on the headline)

William Saletan at Slate has a detailed look at the recent (apparently reliable) sex survey that showed (amongst other things) something of a resurgence in virginity in young Americans.

But, as with some of his previous articles, he seems most interested in what the survey shows about, ahem, the prevalence of anal sex. Hence the title for this current article: Impure Lesbians of Sodom.

Whoever came up with that deserves some type of award.

As I'm more interested in the idea that people should treat sex seriously, I'll just extract the part about the (somewhat surprising) increase in youngsters not having sex:

In the 2002 NSFG survey, 22 percent of men and women between the ages of 15 and 24 said they had never had sexual contact with another person. But in the latest NSFG survey, taken from 2006 to 2008, that number increased to 27 percent of men and 29 percent of women (Table 7, Page 38). In the broader age pool, the trend is diluted but still shows up: Among people ages 15-44, the percentage reporting zero lifetime opposite sex partners increased by two points among men (Table 4, Page 35) and three points among women (Table 3, Page 34). (In case you're wondering, no, there was no shift in reported homosexuality that would account for this increase.) The percentage of men ages 15-44 who reported only one lifetime female partner also increased by two to three points. So if you thought sexual mores were moving inexorably in the direction of more, earlier, and kinkier activity, think again. Virginity can return, and apparently, it has.

Pro abstinence sex education groups in America claim that this vindicates their position:

Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association that these numbers are a positive change from 2002 when only 46% of boys and 49% of girls reported no sexual contact and she says the report challenges the wisdom of the recent federal funding cuts to abstinence education.

“One hundred sixty-nine abstinence education programs lost funding and over 1 million students lost access to the very programs that can support and encourage the positive trends represented by this data,” she told LifeNews.com. “If we are serious about decreasing teen sexual activity, we need to use the data to instruct public policy.”

But, as I've noted before, the wildly detailed and open type of sex education in Holland seems to lead to low teenage pregnancy rates and delayed start of sexual activity very effectively too. And America has a huge issue with single motherhood at any age, which is perhaps the much bigger issue to focus on in the long run.

Sex education, and encouraging good social attitudes and outcomes for families at any age, is obviously a complicated field.

Some perspective, please

Andrew Bolt, as well as the bunch of excitable commenters over at Catallaxy, are getting all worked up over an Essential Poll out today showing that a carbon pricing is not a popular idea with the voters.

Yet, given that only the intention to implement the tax/pricing scheme has been announced without the details, I find it hardly surprising that such a generic "new tax" announcement is not immediately popular.

The obvious comparison to make is to the introduction of a GST. A little bit of Googling and here's the Newpoll polling about it over a decade or so.

The percentage of voters "totally in favour" of GST was frequently in the mid 30's in the decade before, and shortly after, its introduction. This is exactly where a carbon tax is today, according to Essential.

Mind you, the successful introduction of a carbon price is almost certainly going to be with more complaint from business groups than the GST, so it's probably a harder political road that Labor will be taking than John Howard (although, of course, people were upset with him for changing his earlier undertaking on never having a GST.)

But still, at around 35% approval in the current circumstances, it is not as desperate a situation for Labor as many commentators are saying.

UPDATE: Newspoll today shows the expected decrease in Labor vote. Of course, the worsening primary vote is the worst feature for Labor, although at 46/54 TPP, this is hardly irrecoverable at this distance from an election. (Just look at the Newspolls Bolt himself showed recently for 2009.)

What happens ideally before the next election: a sensibly balanced carbon tax comes into effect, enough industry comes in behind it to make its removal impractical, tensions within the Coalition as to how to respond cause Abbott and the skeptics to lose control of the party, the pro-nuclear element within Labor changes party policy to allow nuclear power within Australia for environmental reasons, the Coalition does not disagree, the Coalition wins next election and dramatically winds back the National Broadband Network but keeps the ETS and starts the move to a major Australian nuclear power industry.

I can see just one or two potential problems with every step of the way, though!

Madness or breasts

Talk about your unwanted side effects:

Researchers have found the female hormone estrogen can be an effective treatment for men suffering schizophrenia.

The Alfred Hospital's Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne tested the hormone treatment, usually reserved for women, and found positive results for men with the mental disorder.

The centre found low doses of estrogen given during a two-week trial reduced depression and anxiety symptoms.

But Professor Jayashri Kulkarni says using estrogen is controversial because it creates female traits such as breasts.

I see from Googling around that a report last year said that estrogen had already been found to be effective for some women with schizophrenia (in fact, Professor Kulkarni did that study at Monash as well.)

Psychological oddities

Men (particularly singers) with a deep, deep voice are often said to sound sexy, but the downside may be that women will also expect them to cheat:

"In terms of sexual strategy, we found that men and women will use voice pitch as a warning sign of future betrayal. So the more attractive the voice—a higher pitch for women and lower pitch for men—the more likely the chances he or she will cheat," says Jillian O'Connor, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University and lead author of the study.

"Infidelity is costly with the emotional impact, financial costs and potential loss of the family unit. But this suggests that through the evolutionary process, we have learned ways to avoid partners who may be unfaithful as a protection mechanism," she says.

Participants in the study were asked to listen to two versions of recorded clips from a male voice and a female voice, which were electronically manipulated to be both higher and lower in pitch. They were then asked which one, from each pair, was more likely to cheat sexually on their romantic partner.

"The reason voice pitch influences perceptions of cheating is likely due to the relationship between pitch, hormones and infidelity," explains David Feinberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and advisor on the study. "Men with higher testosterone levels have lower pitched voices, and women with higher estrogen levels have higher pitched voices. High levels of these hormones are associated with adulterous behaviour and our findings indicate individuals are somewhat aware of the link and may use this in their search for a romantic partner."

Higher levels of estrogen is associated with adulterous behaviour? I wasn't aware of that. With some women, low testosterone seems to be the issue with lack of libido. And besides which, a woman's voice can only be so high before it becomes irritating. I mean, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I have been watching a bit on re-runs lately), is Ted's girlfriend Georgette meant to be the sexiest sounding woman in the room?

The other odd story from last week was the one about how people are better at delaying rewards for themselves if the decision is made while having a full bladder:

In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes—the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder—the researchers assessed participants' self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.

The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.

It is obviously therefore important for parents to keep emphasising to their teenage children the importance of keeping very well hydrated as they leave to go to a party with any half disreputable boyfriend/girlfriend.

Free to question

I noted with interest last week how Pope Benedict’s new book re-declares the Catholic teaching since the 1960’s that the Jews are definitely not collectively responsible for the death of Christ.  As the Los Angeles Times and other media outlets noted, this seemed particularly good timing given that it was also only last week that some weird looking fashion figure, with whom I was previously unfamiliar, turned up on video spouting anti-semitic lines (and praise for Hitler) that is hard to credit as still existing post Holocaust. 

But I thought I would mention it here more because of the Tablet’s explanation of Benedict’s analysis:

Benedict follows the scholarly consensus that “the Jews” mentioned in St John’s gospel as calling for Jesus to be executed cannot possibly refer to the whole population of Israel at the time, but refers to the Jerusalem Temple authorities alone; and not even all of those. But the greater problem is presented by Matthew’s account, which refers to the demand of “the whole people” for Jesus to be crucified and which – alone of the four gospels – has them cry out, “His blood be on us and on our children!” This verse kept Christian anti-Semitism alive for many centuries, and was the basis of the charge of deicide or “Christ-killing” laid against all Jews, alive or dead.

Benedict simply rejects Matthew’s historical accuracy, preferring the account in John and Mark. Matthew had gone “beyond” historical considerations and “is certainly not recounting historical fact here”. Matthew is attempting a “theo­logical etiology”, he suggests, with which to account for the fate of the Jewish people in the forthcoming Jewish-Roman war. Furthermore, seen through the eyes of Christian faith, Jesus’ blood has the purifying power of redemption, so the words attributed to the crowd are not a curse but rather “redemption, salvation”. Why that matters, if the words were never uttered, Benedict does not explain.

How interesting.   Catholics don’t take a fundamentalist approach to Scripture, and of course has no problem with understanding Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament as not being written as literal history.

The New Testament, though, comes in for a lot less Catholic doubt as to its relationship with fact, and it’s interesting to see we have it from the top, so to speak, that the Gospels are not always historically accurate.

There’ll be some Protestant churches decrying this is why you can’t trust the Catholic Church.  Mind you, few will go as far as the website www.popebenedictantichrist.com.  (Don’t bother going there, it’s only one page, but it has obviously picked a good name given how high it came up on my Google search results when looking for sources for this post.)  I like this line from the said site, though:

Could it be that Pope Benedict XVI will one day become the Antichrist?  Look closely at the coldness of his eyes in above photo.  Can you really trust this man?  Do his eyes remind you of Adolph Hitler's eyes?

Can't say I've noticed the Hitler resemblance myself.

Of course, the problem once you do allow for historical revision of the truth of Gospel statements, it can be a tricky issue as to knowing where to stop.  Still, it keeps life interesting.

Reefer madness, yet again

I only indirectly referred to a recent Australian study that said cannabis use in teenagers was associated with earlier onset of psychosis, and that alcohol use wasn’t. I see now that it was in fact a meta-analysis of other studies.

The most surprising thing I saw the authors say appeared in the ABC report:

"The risks for older people is about double, so instead of having a 1 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia you are probably likely to have about a 2 per cent chance," he said.

"But for young people who smoke cannabis regularly, instead of having around a 1 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia during their life, they will end up with something like a 5 per cent chance of developing schizophrenia."

I was a bit puzzled, with such a high increase in risk for teenager smokers of developing schizophrenia, that the authors were still hedging their bets on whether you could say cannabis caused their illness.

Anyway, here’s another just published study relevant to causation, and this one followed real people to see what happened:

The study took place in Germany and involved a random sample of 1,923 adolescents and young adults aged 14 to 24 years.

The researchers excluded anyone who reported cannabis use or pre-existing psychotic symptoms at the start of the study so that they could examine the relation between new (incident) cannabis use and psychotic symptoms.

The remaining participants were then assessed for cannabis use and psychotic symptoms at three time points over the study period (on average four years apart).

Incident cannabis use almost doubled the risk of later incident psychotic symptoms, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, use of other drugs, and other psychiatric diagnoses. Furthermore, in those with cannabis use at the start of the study, continued use of cannabis over the study period increased the risk of persistent psychotic symptoms

There was no evidence for self medication effects as psychotic symptoms did not predict later cannabis use.

Interesting. Of course, as I mentioned in my previous post, nothing annoys cannabis smokers more than the studies that keep indicating the connection between their habit and a debilitating disease, especially for those who start smoking young. See the comments following that Physorg at the above link for some examples. It’s such a shame how the evidence keeps piling up against them, though. (Ha.)

Disease news

* Amphetamines may increase risk of Parkinson's Disease:

According to the study, those people who reported using Benzedrine or Dexedrine were nearly 60 percent more likely to develop Parkinson's than those people who didn't take the drugs.

As the article notes, amphetamines plays around with dopamine in the brain, so it doesn't seem a stretch to see a connection.

* It's been noted before, but it looks like another study suggests that taking Ibuprofen reduces risk of Parkinson's.

* Alzheimer's disease has a liver connection?:

Unexpected results from a Scripps Research Institute and ModGene, LLC study could completely alter scientists' ideas about Alzheimer's disease -- pointing to the liver instead of the brain as the source of the "amyloid" that deposits as brain plaques associated with this devastating condition. The findings could offer a relatively simple approach for Alzheimer's prevention and treatment.

iPad2 noted

At the risk of sounding like an Apple fanboy convert, the new iPad2 does sound very good.   The basic iPad I got for free (well, as part of an office equipment deal) is often the subject of evening competition for its use.

For the record, the most popular applications on mine are:

*  Mercury browser:   abandon Safari, and use a browser that actually looks and feels like a Windows tabbed browser.   It’s fantastic, and cost all of $1.19.

*  Sketchpad Pro:   a very good sketch program that even my daughter has worked out how to use now, and enjoy.  I think it cost under $10.

*  For games, the kids have spent a ridiculous amount of time on hunting dinosaurs in Carnivore, the free version of hangman known as Doodlehang is fun for adults and kids, and my wife spents an inordinate amount of time on sudoku with Sudoku Joy.  I don’t actually use it for any games for any length of time.

*  I try to read downloaded (free books) on it using GoodReader, but I usually get too easily distracted and back to the internet instead.

Not wanting to be belong to the club to which I belong

As much as I value the ABC, I have always recognized that its listeners and watchers can be extremely pedantic and nitpicking. Remember when they used to have that feedback program on TV, and how trivial many of the complaints could be? I have a vague memory, from perhaps the 1980's, of hearing a plummy voiced woman complain on radio about the use of "kids" for children (that word refers to young goats, she pointed out.) But then, it was only last year (maybe the year before?) they had a long session on Geraldine Doogue's radio show about computer font changes, and the listener response was large and opinionated. (Worrying excessively about fonts is, in my books, close to the most trivial of obsessions that exist.)

So, I was amused to see at Slate that public radio listeners in America like to make pedantic and snobbish complaints too. They annoy Farhad Manjoo, to put it mildly. He writes of his fellow NPR listeners:

Oh, I hate them, hate them, hate them. Every time one of their narrow-minded, classist letters makes it on the air, I contemplate burning my tote bag in protest. The problem, for me, isn't just that some people don't like some things NPR covers. It's that these reflexively snobby pseudo-intellectuals see NPR as their own—a refuge from the mad world outside, a "safe," high-minded palace that should never be sullied by anything more outré than James Taylor (whom, of course, they love).

I understand where he is coming from, although I have to say, they sound quite a bit worse than Radio National listeners in Australia.

The personal hygrometer

This summer of high humidity and torrential downpours in Brisbane has quite often been marked by my glasses fogging up for a minute upon getting out of my airconditioned car after the short drive to work.

It's like having a personal hygrometer.

It happened again this morning.

I therefore predict more rain is coming.

Disaster someday

Greg Laden has a lengthy post talking about the potential for the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt in the future.  Lots of detail, a fair bit of uncertainty, but seems it’ll happen some day.

Neat theory in big trouble?

I don't know much about supersymmetry, except that it's an idea that's been around for some time.

Nature has an article up that explains it to some degree (it's one way to explain the incomplete knowledge of the standard model of particle physics,) but more importantly, it notes that early results from the LHC runs to date indicate that the theory may be in trouble. The implications are summed up towards the end:

"Privately, a lot of people think that the situation is not good for SUSY," says Alessandro Strumia, a theorist at the University of Pisa in Italy, who recently produced a paper about the impact of the LHC's latest results on the fine-tuning problem⁴. "This is a big political issue in our field," he adds. "For some great physicists, it is the difference between getting a Nobel prize and admitting they spent their lives on the wrong track." Ellis agrees: "I've been working on it for almost 30 years now, and I can imagine that some people might get a little bit nervous."

"Plenty of things will change if we fail to discover SUSY," says Lester. Theoretical physicists will have to go back to the drawing board and find an alternative way to solve the problems with the standard model. That's not necessarily a bad thing, he adds: "For particle physics as a whole it will be really exciting."

Hollywood or Bust (actually, just Bust)

Surely to God American TV cannot employ Charlie Sheen for the next couple of years at least.

As every media outlet in the world is reporting today, Sheen does not know when to leave a job disaster alone, and instead is trying to create his own career China Syndrome (even though I don't think even the Japanese would employ him for a canned coffee commercial at the moment.)

Here are highlights of his Today show interview:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you can't be bothered watching the clip:

"It's like, everybody thinks I should be begging for my job back, and I'm just going to forewarn them that it's everybody else that's going to be begging me for their job back."

"I am a man of my word, so I will finish the TV show. I'll even do Season 10, but at this point, (because of) psychological distress, oh my God, it's 3 mil an episode. Take it or leave it," he said.

"I'm tired of pretending like I'm not special," Sheen added. "You can't process me with a normal brain."

It looks even worse than it sounds on video, though.

The itch

When I saw this headline on a Physorg story a couple of weeks ago:

Tiny 'microworms' could be implanted under the skin for continuous medical monitoring

it immediately struck me as something you would not want a potential sufferer of Morgellons disease to read. But, if you did have a delusional belief that you had itchy fibres under your skin, wouldn't it be more comforting to believe they are a high tech monitoring device implanted by aliens (or time travelling doctors) rather than a mystery bug or fungus? I'd go for the high tech explanation; it would make me seem more special.

In any event, I've just noticed that Neuroskeptic has a long and interesting post about the "disease". Well worth reading, if you like strange diseases of the mind.

By the way, while I'm certainly a Morgellon's skeptic, I have had this persistent itchy spot on my left shoulder blade for years. If ever I start talking about finding fibres coming out that of it, readers are authorised to email me with strong recommendations to see a psychiatrist.

Carbon taxing

There are three opinion pieces about pricing carbon today which are of interest:

*  Henry Ergas runs the “traditional” arguments against acting unilaterally.  In The Australian (of course.)

*  Kenneth Davidson goes apocalyptic and believes the Australian scheme and targets are a pittance anyway, and arguments that people should get used to the fact that much, much more to reduce CO2 will be necessary:

A safe climate scenario requires that the present global warming of just under 1 degree not be exceeded. Globally, this requires the end of the fossil fuel industries.

According to David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action, ''This requires emergency action, and probably 10 per cent or more of world production will be required for a sustained period to build a new energy system and economy. This is huge but is about a third of the production countries such as Australia, the United States and Britain diverted to defence production during World War II.''

The latest scientific modelling of climate change suggests that if the globe warms by 4 degrees - the likely result if the commitments made at Copenhagen in 2009 are all that is done - the consequences would be far more serious than if the allies were defeated in WWII.

According to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain, ''If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4, 5 or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving.''

Well, we all hope it's not as bad as that.

*  Phillip Coorey speculates (in a plausible way, I think) about the future politics of all this.