The vege burger

The New York Times reports that some chefs are coming up with vegetarian burgers that really are good.

I don't mind trying vegetarian products from the supermarket every now and then. It's sort of interesting to see how good they can make their fake meat products. My wife has started doing a curry with fake chicken from Malaysia or somewhere: it's not bad, and I had the fun the other night of telling my son he had been fooled into thinking it was meat.

I think I have even mentioned in this blog before that, when I was single, I used to sometimes make chilli con carne using chunk style textured vegetable protein. But the after effects were such that married life meant I had to give that up.

This story will horrify at least one reader, hey Jason.

Help me Obi Wan, they took my carrot

Of course, you would have needed more than one R2D2 projecting the image, but it's looking close:

Back to the Future correct

JF Beck links to a bunch of old black and white photos of the (American) frontier life taken around 1890.

Viewing them reminds me that, when watching Back to the Future Part 3, I had thought that the 1885 version of Hill Valley looked a little too old time Western. But this is obviously not the case, when you see photos of the real era.

Fukushima notes

With the news last night that a couple of workers from the reactor are in hospital with radiation burns, it’s clear that the current operations remain very dangerous.   Even modest advances are being greeted as big progress:  for example, yesterday’s news that lights have been turned on in a couple of control rooms. 

Time magazine has an interesting entry about the ongoing issues at the plant.  As the New York Times noted, one concern is the use of seawater as a temporary coolant:

As  seawater evaporates, salt scaling could insulate the reactor fuel and impede heat transfer and thus cooling. In a worst case, as the rods heat up, their zirconium cladding could rupture, and  gaseous radioactive iodine inside could leak out; the uranium core itself could even melt. This, of course, would release event more radioactive material.

The BBC has a sort of retrospective of the last couple of weeks which is well worth reading too.

Meanwhile, I have stumbled across another example (apart from Andrew Bolt) of a climate change skeptic who has been in an unseemly rush to declare that there has barely been a major problem at all.

The Register, as I recall, has long been keen to run anti climate change articles.    If you have a look at the list of article titles by one Lewis Page,  who himself appears to be quite the CO2 skeptic, it makes for mildly comic reading:

14 March:   Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

First lines: 

Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more nuclear powerplants, in the knowledge that no imaginable disaster can result in serious problems.

15 March: Fukushima update: No chance cooling fuel can breach vessels

16 March: Situation worsens - still no cause for alarm

17 March: Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

18 March: Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

21 March: Fukushima: Situation improving all the time. Food, water samples OK, Hyper Rescue Super Pump in action

22 March: Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear. Hysteria rages unchecked as minor incident winds down

23 March: Radioactive Tokyo tapwater HARMS BABIES ... if drunk for a year. Iodine isotope will all be gone in weeks, though

The glass is always more than half full for Mr Page.

A new political truism revealed

I have realised lately that, for some reason, male politicians who have too much curl in their hair just can't be taken very seriously. (I'm looking at you, John Paul Langbroek, Christopher Pyne, and Rand Paul.)

Sad for them, but true.

Consume a nut, anytime of day

Glenn Beck Contemplates Starting His Own Channel

Need I say more?

[By the way, this and the last post represent the return of my use of the Blog This doo-dah from Google. I thought it didn't work on current versions of Firefox, but seemingly it does. It is, by far, the easiest way to open a blogging post window. Just click the button while you are looking at a page, and it opens a blog post window with the title of the article as a link at the top. I have found no other blogging add on that does the same, wonderfully simple, thing.

I thought it was a Firefox add on which had gone missing, but I see now that it is a Google tool for use with Blogger. It's very good, anyway.]

Really worth it?

Hand transplant man faces long recovery

It's one thing to have transplanted internal organ, where you're not necessarily reminded daily that part of someone else is now part of you. But it seems to me to be quite another to have a hand transplant. There's quite a lot to any transplant:

There is also a danger Mr Walsh's body could reject the new hand, with the first few months the most dangerous period.

He will require medication for the life of the transplant to slow his immune system and ensure it doesn't attack the transplant.

St Vincent's doctor, Robyn Langham, said that leaves his body less equipped to deal with rogue cells that might appear in the body.

"Those rogue cells do have the potential to turn into cancers," she said.

She said Mr Walsh may also be at greater risk of contracting metabolic conditions such as diabetes and osteoporosis.

Personally, even with no hands, I think I would be much more interested in having the latest and greatest robotic version than a transplant: I have a preference for Luke Skywalker over Dr Strangelove.

A product endorsement

I like it:

To be fair...

I have been meaning to say this in relation to the carbon tax/emissions trading scheme that's heading our way via Labor and the Greens.

While I find Garnaut a very credible figure, and consider in principle (as did the Coalition until Tony Abbott took over) that carbon pricing is an important step to reducing Australia's greenhouse gases, it still has to be said that the full structure of the scheme that the government settles on might prove to be very ineffective and not really worthy of support for a number of reasons.

The problem is, while the Coalition is on its "direct action is really a market scheme (and by the way, half of us believe there is no problem to be addressed at all)" wander in the wilderness, they are cutting themselves out of making credible contribution to getting the carbon pricing scheme right.

This is the tragedy of the current situation.

That went well

Catallaxy, a "centre right" blog which for years has firmly placed itself firmly in the climate change skeptic camp, recently had a post simply showing in large size a poster reading "Axe the tax - Dump the Frump" from the first (small scale) anti carbon tax protest at Werribee.

The blog then had at least one post notifying people of yesterday's larger scale organised protests.

After yesterday's protest in Canberra, quite of few of your rabidly climate change skeptic and vehemently anti-Gillard commenters (basically, apart from a handful, they don't come in any other variety there) decided that the "look" of the protest was not so good for Tony Abbott. (Who, as I have mentioned before, is now receiving criticism from Catallaxy commenters for not doing a good job. Yet the advice he has been offered by some there is to stop trying to straddle the fence and come out more vehemently against climate change as deserving any response.)

Tony Abbott has now said he "regretted" some of the posters yesterday.

It is odd that Catallaxy commenters think that the posters yesterday were bad PR for the right of politics. One might assume then that they must also understand then the bad language and wild hyperbole of their threads is a very bad advertisement for the "centre right".

As I noted yesterday, Julia Bishop complained some in Labor calling Coalition members "climate change deniers" by quoting scientists who don't think there is a problem with climate change.

As I have said ever since Abbott took over the leadership from Turnbull, climate change "scepticism" in the Coalition - which is apparently evenly split on the topic in Parliament - is a poison to its intellectual standing.

And Catallaxy is a joke.

Attention Jason: as should be clear from the low numbers of readers I've had for years, I've always blogged for my own satisfaction, and if others read it, that's fine. You can link to it at Catallaxy if you want, but it does not matter to me whether you do or not.

Update: this counts as a "meltdown"? At fairly regular intervals, I used to tell off many of the regulars at Catallaxy, in much more vehement terms than this, as a result of the absurdly personal (and wildly inaccurate) criticisms hurled towards me for my views on (virtually) any topic. So I am criticising it from here now. Big deal.

So that's what not doubting the science looks like...

I see via Andrew Bolt's blog that Julie Bishop has a column in the Age in which she rails against members of the Coalition being called "deniers" by - (wait for it) - quoting some scientists who deny there is a problem with global warming.

So much for Tony Abbot's party room strategy, which he broke first himself, of not questioning the science but just attacking the tax.

All very droll, if you ask me.

UPDATE: I've often wondered about the use of "denier" myself. There is no doubt at all that a significant fraction of those on the climate change sceptic side do not believe in it on purely ideological grounds, because they rehash continually arguments which even cursory thought (or cursory Googling) should have otherwise lead them to abandon long ago. (The argument from incredulity is perhaps the best example: "that tiny fraction of the atmosphere can cause that much trouble?! Bah, I don't believe it".) It seems to me that something stronger than "skeptic" is needed for that group.

On the other hand, I reckon that there has been a trajectory over the last few years, evident from blogs like Watts Up With That and others, for the main bulk of climate change scepticism to move from arguing that the temperature record does not really show modern warming (probably because their pet projects in that regard have failed) to the position of grudging acknowledgement that the world is warming, but not at a rate large enough to be a worry.

These people (the "lukewarmenists") don't deny climate change, and may agree that CO2 has probably caused it, although they may still deny that projections of future temperature increases (or sea level rise) can be given any credence as the basis of policy.

That's the problem with "denier". Different people "deny" different things. I don't think it really does invoke the Holocaust denying stigma to any greatly offensive degree. For one thing, it's been a long time since Holocaust denial was really a big cultural issue - David Irving must be getting on in age. I doubt younger folk automatically think of the connection when they hear "denier". But it's probably too blanket a word to cover the slippery world of the "inactionists."

(Has anyone used that before? Google seems to suggest not. It's pretty good.)

Make lots of cash from home

No, it's not one of those ads for some dubious internet scheme. It's from Ron Paul, who (some) loopy libertarian fan boys love:

On March 15, Paul reintroduced one of his pet bills, H.R. 1098: Free Competition in Currency Act of 2011." The bill, which has no cosponsors, is divided into three parts: the elimination of laws specifying what constitutes "legal tender"; the lifting of a federal ban on private mints; and the elimination of sales and capital gains taxes on gold and silver coin sales. Paul's vision is of a future in which anyone can mint their own currency, with the hope that "the prospect of American citizens turning away from the dollar towards alternate currencies will provide the necessary impetus to the U.S. government to regain control of the dollar and halt its downward spiral."

A human face on evacuation

The BBC has an interesting short video story up on the evacuated areas around the Fukushima reactors.

Update: Nature has a story up too about the highly uncertain science of low level exposure to radioactive contaminants. I think this is one of the most balanced stories on it that I have seen.

Another type of cautionary tale

As noted in Physorg:

People who exercise regularly have a much smaller risk of having a heart attack immediately after sexual or physical activity, said lead author Dr. Issa Dahabreh of Tufts Medical Center in Boston....

The studies involved only people who'd had heart attacks or had died suddenly from a heart problem. The studies looked at what the people were doing during the hour or two before their heart attacks and compared that to the same people's activity on normal days with no major heart problems.

That study design is used to try to answer the question, "Why did the heart attack occur now?"

Physical activity and sex increased the risk of heart attack by a factor of about three, according to the analysis of the pooled results. Exercise increased the risk of sudden cardiac death by nearly five times. The researchers didn't find a triggering relationship between sex and sudden cardiac death, that is, a sudden death from a heart problem.

So, it still sounds like exercise was the bigger danger than sex. That's the lesson I choose to take from it anyway!

Cautionary tales of instant expertise

I've noted before how Barry Brook and then Andrew Bolt were quick to link to an explanation of the Fukushima reactors by MIT Research Scientist Josef Oehman, which contained the prematurely reassuring words:

"there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors"

As it turned out, Oehman had not worked in the field of nuclear science at all, and New Scientist has an interesting report explaining how Oehman came to write the article, and how it was picked up as having more authority behind it than it deserved.

It was all sort of a mistake, not written for wide publication at all. Oh well. Everyone can be an instant expert on the internet, even by accident it seems.

A second cautionary tale tonight regarding Andrew Bolt. He quotes a story from his own paper today which claims an ANU study shows a temperature rise of .5 degree over 160 years. The IPCC figure was .76 degree C over the same period. What gives? say Andrew.

Answer: the accuracy of journalists, Andrew.

The full quote from the body of the report on the study is (with my emphasis):

"There is sufficient evidence in the long run of temperature records to support the existence of a warming trend," Prof Breusch said today. "From the 1850s to today it's somewhere over half a degree (celsius) a century.

That is, no inconsistency exists. Several people in comments have already pointed this out to Andrew, who has found time to make a couple of other posts but not to come back and acknowledge the error.

Poor Andrew. He's really become quite upset ever since Julia Gillard belled the cat (about time, I say) with this last week:

''I ask, who would I rather have on my side?'' she said. ''Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt?

''Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world?''

Exactly. Andrew's agitated response ever since that speech keeps reminding me of Jones' famous words from Dad's Army "they don't like it up 'em".

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt has corrected his post, but in a rather unusual way:

Readers point out that the report of the ANU survey is wrong. The survey found that rise to be about .5 degrees per century, thus about the same as the IPCC. Except, of course, that the IPCC has all that 0.7 degrees of warming since 1850 occuring in just the past century…

Wouldn't that be all the more consistent with AGW then? Or does he mean the IPCC is inconsistent with the ANU survey in a corrupt way? What's the point of his point?

Send in the robots

I had been wondering why there wasn't much talk about why robot loving Japan did not seem to have any robots suitable for helping fight a nuclear reactor disaster.

The always interesting William Saletan at Slate comes to the rescue. It turns out that different countries have been looking at such developing such robots, but the country which has actually got a bunch of them ready for nuclear disasters is (to my surprise) France:

Two years after Chernobyl, French nuclear operators created Group Intra, a consortium charged with maintaining a fleet of robots for use in major nuclear accidents. The group is on call around the clock and pledges to deliver equipment and operators anywhere in France within 24 hours. Its robots have hydraulic manipulator arms and can go 10 hours without external power. Some can be remotely controlled from a distance of 10 kilometers.

You can see some photos of the indoor French robots here (very Wall-E I reckon). The outdoor ones remind a little of equipment from Thunderbirds.

So they do cheese, wine and disaster robots very well. What more do you need?

Answer: no

An article on Huffington Post entitled "Sexism in the Marijuana Trade" asks: "Been to a cannabis trade show lately?"

(The sentence following that rhetorical question is: "The floors are crawling with barely-clothed women pitching products. People shrug and say that's what happens at trade shows, but why does that have to be the case at our shows?")

HP covers all the big issues.

A trifecta of wrong

As far as I can tell, this is a very rare alignment of wrong (or misleading) opinion from across the political spectrum.

As we know, Andrew Bolt has been busy downplaying any danger to both workers and the public from the Fukushima accident, to the extent of wondering whether nuclear physicist Ann Coulter may be on to something with her suggestion that it may be good for people.

He referred to a radiation chart made by the person who writes the comic xkcd. I'm sure many people have seen it.

Tim Lambert criticised Bolt for the "maybe its good for them" post, but then also linked to the xkcd chart.

Now I see that George Monbiot has posted that the accident has not hurt his belief that we must use nuclear to combat greenhouse gases. (You can never quite tell which way George will jump. He badly over-reacted at first to the "climategate" emails as if they were stunningly damaging to the science of climate change. He later calmed down and changed his mind.) But anyway, my point is that he has also linked to the chart.

So, all three think it's a cool chart.

I think they are all wrong, and the issue of contamination of food, water and the seas around Fukushima shows why. As a commenter David COG noted at Lambert's blog:

I'd say it's dangerously misleading. It says nothing about the different types of radiation and how they are delivered.

• A speck of plutonium on your skin which is quickly washed off: not so bad.
• A speck of plutonium inhaled and stuck in your lungs: not so good.

It also says nothing about the very real psychological impacts of radiation.

• give someone an x-ray: no drama
• tell someone the local nuke is spewing radiation out: stress, depression, sickness

• 
  

And later he expands:

dhogaza:

The chart's specifically about the effect of environmental radiation, not of the breathing in of a radioactive particle of plutonium which then becomes lodged in the lung or the like.

The "effect of environmental radiation" is that it is sometimes breathed in or eaten. The chart therefore gives a misleading impression because it's simply a representation of holding a Geiger counter next to each item.

Also, it starts off with the 'banana dose'. This nonsense is all over the tubes right now - people claiming that because bananas are radioactive that the radiation appearing in Japanese food and water is no big deal. This is bullshit. If you don't know why, read this.

In the context of what is happening at the moment in Japan, that chart is going to do nothing but mislead people in to thinking it's no big deal. It is dangerously misleading.

Now, this guy is clearly an anti-nuclear advocate, and I see that prominent climate change advocates such as Eli Rabbett are arguing with him:

David, Eli suggests you go think about the difference between washing off a speck of plutonium and ingesting it. Hint, one is with you longer than the other and so the dose is larger.

The Bunny also suggests that silly boys like you are one of the reasons people in the US are stocking iodine pills to protect against the problems in Japan.

How much sense does Eli's comment make? David COG pointed out that the chart does nothing to deal with the issue of ingested radioactive particles: Eli says (to paraphrase) "of course they are dangerous because you are exposed longer to them." Well, yeah.

Nope, I have to go with the anti-nuclear activist here: people running around with the xkcd chart without understanding its very major limitations are not really being honest about what a nuclear reactor failure with leaks to the environment is about.

And although people may think I'm spending a lot of time dissing nuclear if I promote it: I maintain my position from the start - to have credibility, you have to be honest about how wildly disruptive and potentially dangerous reactor failures of the Fukushima type can be.

Then you can talk about future reactors with passive safety as their key priority and have some vague hope about people believing you.

And again - yes, there have been some wildly exaggerated claims of danger from Fukushima which are without basis (for example, that there is any danger at all to the US West Coast.) But it's no use pretending that it's not a serious environmental issue in the area around Fukushima.

UPDATE: speaking of bad reporting, I note that the Australian (and the ABC) is saying:

Abnormally high levels of radioactive substances were later detected in seawater 100m from the troubled plant.

Yet the AFP report says:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said the level of iodine-131 was 126.7 times higher and caesium-134 was 24.8 times higher than government-set standards.

The substances were detected in seawater which was sampled Monday about 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of the Fukushima No.1 plant, a TEPCO official said.

Come on, who's right? (I hope, and would guess, it's the 100 m version.)

That was quick

Typically enough, the always hyperbolic “centre right” blog Catallaxy was, after the last couple of Newspolls, full of people claiming that this was the end of Julia Gillard, even the Labor Party.

I think I noted there that it was ridiculous to be paying much attention to a dire poll this far from an election, based as it almost certainly was on the carbon price turnaround. And as far as polling for carbon pricing goes, it is no worse than what it was for a GST for a decade.

Now that there appears to be a strong bounce back to Ms Gillard, they seem to have all turned on Tony Abbott. Why, I say? He’s been inconsistent on climate change, and unable to do a good interview, since day 1. Talk about your fair weather friends.

Duelling tabloids

So I see the duelling tabloid TV current affairs programs are continuing to approach the bullying video story from opposite sides. Today Tonight last night ran an interview with bully Ritchard (yes, even the spelling of his name annoys people) and his father.

It was complete with cliché sad/saccharine music, contemplative shots of kid in a park, and all, as was A Current Affair’s longer Sunday night story. It’s not going to help Ritchard win the popularity stakes, but it was a much better story than the Current Affair one for this reason: it talked about the bigger picture of whether it is good to encourage victims to get violent in response.

Short story: it’s not.