More to be said later

Jury in Darcey Freeman bridge murder trial struggling for verdict | News.com.au

I find this very surprising, but given my famously widespread influence (ha) I guess I should not talk about it yet.

Update: so he's been found guilty.

Given all the usual cautions that it is hard to judge a trial from media reports, I have to say I found it extraordinarily hard to believe that the jury could have members who would be swayed by the one psychiatrist in six who examined Freeman long after the events and found that he was acting in a "dissociative state" at the time of the offence. Here's one of the longer reports of that evidence:

Earlier, Professor Burrows told the court that when he first met 37-year-old Arthur Freeman at the Melbourne Remand Centre last year he thought "this man may have a defence".

Professor Burrows told the jury that after examining Freeman twice more, he came to the conclusion he was in a "dissociative state" caused by depression.

Arthur Freeman does not dispute he threw his daughter off the bridge, but he has pleaded not guilty to murder by reason of mental impairment.

Professor Burrows told the court "we're talking about a man who was at the severe end of the condition" and that Freeman "didn't know what was going on".

He told the court that Freeman still does not believe he threw his daughter off the bridge, but that other people have told him he did it, so "he accepts that".

As far as I know, Freeman did not give evidence himself.

As against the dissociative state, there was this evidence:

Dr Skinner told the jury Mr Freeman's phone call to his former wife Peta Barnes, in which he said she would never see her kids again, suggested he knew what was happening and showed his intentions.

"There is no evidence to suggest that Mr Freeman was incapable of forming intentions," she read. "He was able to organise packing his car, to drive to Melbourne and to make phone calls."

The method of killing was far from spontaneous, and with the telephone call to his wife to "say goodbye to the kids", how is it that the jury had any member who believed he was not capable of forming intention?

I presume someone on the jury must have been persuaded by his apparent breakdown at the court afterwards. If anything, I think the evidence of that showed he was in no dissociative state at all: he knew what had happened and was already appalled at what he had done.

The more worrying possibility is that some jury members simply could not credit that any father not in a state of mental illness could kill his child in such a fashion. In fact, this defence by incredulity, as it were, was specifically run by his Counsel:

"Doesn't his act, don't all his actions, scream at us madness? What we say to you is, his impaired mind caused him to do this."

What an amazingly glib and convenient argument this is, yet it looks as if had a chance of working.

Jury trials can be a worry.

Talking iPad

I liked James Lilek's recent post about conversations concerning his iPad.

Radiation confusion

The stoic James Annan in Tokyo, who has not been inclined to worry about Fukushima unduly, is nonetheless sounding irritated with the TEPCO and Japanese government handling of information about radiation leaks around Fukushima. You can also learn a bit about how unclear the issue is by reading his previous post (and comments) about radiation here.

The news this morning does little to encourage faith in how TEPCO is handling it all:

THE company responsible for the Fukushima power station evacuated it again after immense levels of radiation were detected in the cooling system of one reactor.

At one point radiation of 1000 milli-sieverts per hour - a potentially lethal level said to be 10 million times higher than normal - was measured, although the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) later said that the reading was a mistake, which had not been double-checked because workers had then fled the building.

It was nevertheless clear that the situation remains unstable and that radiation continues to escape from the reactor containers.

There's clearly a need for robust, radiation reading robots.

No name too silly

The BBC has an interesting story up about the extraordinary popularity of odd names in the Philippines.    Funny isn’t it:  when Australians do it, it seems all precious and (often, but not always) rather “bogan”;  somehow, when it’s the Philippines, it just seems wryly amusing.   I was most surprised at this bit:

But the main thing Spain gave to the Philippines was Catholicism, and with it, tens of thousands of newly-christened Marias and Joses.

With the Americans came names like Butch, Buffy and Junior - and the propensity to shorten everything if at all possible.

Perhaps it is the combination of these two influences which has led to names like Jejomar - short for Jesus Joseph Mary.

The current vice president is called Jejomar Binay.

Wow.

Passive safety in the news

I posted very quickly on the importance of passive safety designs for future nuclear after the Fukushima accident, and now I see there is a fair bit of media talk on the subject (including about my old interest – pebble bed reactors.) Here are some articles:

* the New York Times talks about China pressing ahead with pebble bed. Lots of good points in a straight forward explanation. (It notes that the South Africans got stuck on using turbines that were to use the helium coolant directly. China is using the helium to boil water for less sophisticated steam turbines.)

I see that the Chinese program director is quoted as saying that pebble bed is yet to prove itself as cost effective as old style nuclear:

“The safety is no question,” Dr. Xu said, “but the economics are not so clear.”

Um, I think nuclear has to give safety the absolute priority at the moment, if its to go anywhere at all.

* Bloomberg had a longer article looking at passive safety generally. Pebble beds get a good mention too. It notes the passive safety in the new Westinghouse model:

The new Westinghouse AP1000 (the AP stands for Advanced Passive), for example, has a huge emergency water reservoir above the reactor vessel that’s held back by valves.

If the cooling system fails, the valves open and a highly reliable force takes over: gravity. Water pours down to cool the outside of the containment vessel. Then another highly reliable force, convection, kicks in. As the water turns to steam, it rises. Then it cools under the roof, turns back into a liquid, and pours down again.

Westinghouse estimates that the pool contains enough water to last three days, after which pumps operated by diesel generators are supposed to kick in and add water from an on-site lake.

Hmm. Doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as a pebble bed to me: get a crack in the vessel, and there goes your passive safety in a long stream of steam. Still, better than the older models, of course.

* Some in South Africa seem to be regretting that they gave up on pebble bed, just at a time it suddenly looks very attractive again:

Analysts have said the pebble-bed option is one the state and industry should reconsider on safety and other grounds.

"The reactor would not need any external cooling. It would cool itself. It's walk-away safe," said Kelvin Kemm, a Pretoria-based nuclear physicist.

But he said the programme may need to be industry-led, after South Africa invested nearly 10 billion rand in developing it over a decade before putting it on ice as it lacked a clear business case.

"There is lots of merit for the technology, specifically for building power plants away from places where you could potentially have tsunamis," said Cornelis van der Waal, an analyst at consultancy Frost & Sullivan.

Pebble-bed reactors are modular in nature and as they do not need a lot of water can be built away from coastal areas.

This modular nature, and the ability to not site them near major water bodies, seems to me to be a very important feature for Australia, where every bit of coast line any where near population centres is loved and used by someone.

Ah well, I’m feeling some vindication for saying for years that they sound like a good idea. (And cue music for “If I Ruled the World”.)

Back to the Dutch

Over the last couple of years I’ve noted articles in the English press about the very liberal Dutch attitude to sex education and its apparent connection to good things like a low rate of teenage pregnancy, and an older age at which they start having sex (compared to Britain anyway.)

I see that the Guardian is on the topic again, with a Comment is Free column headed “Let’s talk about sex – to four year olds”.

Mind you, the actual kindergarten “sex talk” at that age is relatively mild:

My son won't bring home the leaflet "Sex Yes, Worries No", about the use of contraceptives, until he is at least 10. He wouldn't be able to read it at the moment anyway. But his teachers will be talking about cuddling, friendship, newborn lambs in the fields and the differences between boys and girls. And his class might be visited by pregnant women and nursing mothers with their babies.

But the article, and the commentary following, is more noteworthy for its general discussion of the difference between Dutch attitudes to the role of government generally, and how it seemingly combines (despite its tourist reputation) social conservatism with very liberal inclinations towards government. As the article notes:

The Netherlands has a lurid reputation abroad when it comes to sex. Everyone knows about the red light district in Amsterdam and legalised prostitution. So it might come as a surprise to some to hear that deep down, the Dutch are very conservative people who take sex seriously. Very seriously, in fact. Sex education has traditionally been an important part of the school curriculum here. Lentekriebels is in line with the Dutch tradition of assigning to schoolteachers responsibilities that might elsewhere be handled within the family. As my teacher in primary school in the 1970s told me: "If your parents don't bring you up properly, our school has to do the job for them." The issue then was not sex but prayer (we didn't pray at home), but the principle is the same. Parents are not to be trusted to do a good job and sex is a danger zone, like drugs or smoking.

In comments there is a bit of a theme that it is the fact of their conservatism, in the sense that they take sex seriously, and generally have a much more stable family life, that accounts for the lower teenage pregnancy rate compared to Britain. (This was noted in an article I quoted from in a previous post.) In the current Guardian piece, this comment I found interesting:

If the Dutch are so conservative then that is the answer as to why a Dutch style of sex education won't work over here. The Dutch, like the Scandinavians are disciplined and conservative in the first place. That is how 'socialist' welfare states and low teenage pregnancy rates come about. And even conservatism can extend to helping others regardless, this is not socialism, but more like the Polder model. Polder models (and thus good welfare states) can often be seen where there is a harsh adversity, ie the weather which draws people together and cooperate.

Another comment from someone (from England, I assume) who lives in Holland:

2. "Teenage mothers" Any girl under 21 is considered a teenage mother. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anyone under 16 on the street with a pram containing their own child. And yes, if a girl under 18 is pregnant, her parents need to prove that they can support their child and grandchild emotionally and financially to stop that child being taken into care. Children have to be in education until they are 18 and after all, if you as a parent have some responsibility towards your child's actions.

3. "Teenagers" Probably have as much sex here as they do anywhere else in western Europe. Fact of life, can't stop it, so embrace it. Firstly, there's almost no single sex education here. This means that girls and boys are always very comfortable around each other. Boys are taught to respect girls and girls are taught to make sure they know what they want for themselves in terms of physical relationships.

You rarely see big gangs of girls or boys out in the town - they go out as mixed groups. They drink, of course, as much as the brits, but you never see hoards of them rolling around drunk, fighting, showing their boobs.

Parents give their children much, much more freedom here (they cycle to school alone from the age of about 8) and there's a mutual respect between many teenagers and parents that you just don't see in the UK. How many 18 year old English teenagers do you know that would want to go on the family summer holiday with their parents? It's quite common here.

It seems to be a fair conclusion to say that the effects and success of sex education in any country is highly dependent on the broader social attitudes to be found there.

And one can also conclude that a welfare state works best when the attitude of its citizens is to act responsibly in all aspects of life. Many on the conservative side of politics argue that it is the welfare state that is itself corrupting of a social sense of personal responsibility. But the example of the Netherlands appears to be a pretty strong counter argument to that, and that is why I find these articles and comments on that country so interesting.

I’m also reminded of Theodore Dalrymple’s interesting essay about changes in the British national character which I linked to in 2008. He argues that its conservative “stiff upper lip” came into being under King William IV (the king before Victoria), and that it has eroded away since the Second World War. His claim (not with a lot of detail in this particular essay) is:

The moralization of the British in the first third of the nineteenth century—their transformation from a people lacking self-control into exemplars of restraint—was the product of intellectual and legislative activity. So, too, was the reverse movement.

He argues that relaxed liquor licencing laws in Britain have been quite harmful in this respect, and urges the US to maintain a drinking age of 21. Yet he also seems to be happy with European attitudes to drinking, presumably because he considers they have more of the sense of the importance of responsible drinking than the British, for whatever reason, seem capable of. (This will mean that a bunch of libertarian types will not take him seriously at all.)

But how, today, any country achieves society wide re-conversion to the ideal of self control and taking personal responsibility seriously seems to be a puzzle. I can see the failure from both sides of politics: libertarian relaxation of regulation falls on barren ground if there is not a pre-existing sense of responsibility in place, and libertarians don’t think the government has a role in instructing attitudes; welfare state-ism which fully embraces individualism in lifestyle choices can be seen as rewarding lack of personal restraint and does seem to teach people that they can carry on regardless.

That’s the problem, I guess: if both ends of the political spectrum adopt a “hands off” attitude to trying to influence a society’s sense of personal responsibility, neither of them address the heart of the issue.

Update: I was thinking about what I was said about the different political sides on this, and feel I should acknowledge that the Left generally is inclined to run campaigns that encourage what might be called "better behaviour", be it from a public health perspective (anti-smoking, anti-obesity) or relationships (see the current "Draw the Line" campaign that I only noticed yesterday.) Apart from public health, which both sides of politics generally does support, partly for the pragmatic reason of keeping health costs down, the problem I guess I have with what we see in government social education is the feeling that this is not the appropriate source for moral instruction. Simply because of the source, it's easy to imagine the people who would benefit most from it dismissing it.

But, with the churches weaker than ever as a source of (for want of a better term) life instruction in society, where else can it come from? It's not as if the West has the same cultural background of a place like Japan either, which does so much for maintaining a sense of personal responsibility there.

The power of the gut

There’s a short article at Physorg about research into the relation between gut bacteria and the brain (and thereby personality, mental illness, etc.)

Using germ-free mice, Foster's research shows gut bacteria influences how the brain is wired for learning and memory. The research paper has been published in the March issue of the science journal Neurogastroenterology and Motility.

The study's results show that genes linked to learning and memory are altered in germ-free mice and, in particular, they are altered in one of the key brain regions for learning and memory – the hippocampus.

"The take-home message is that gut bacteria influences anxiety-like behavior through alterations in the way the brain is wired," said Foster.

Foster's laboratory is located in the Brain-Body Institute, a joint research initiative of McMaster University and St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton. The institute was created to advance understanding of the relationship between the brain, nervous system and bodily disorders.

"We have a hypothesis in my lab that the state of your immune system and your gut bacteria – which are in constant communication – influences your personality," Foster said.

I can’t help but think of Hitler, who had serious digestive problems all his life. This is from an interesting review of a book on the topic of his health:

Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that after Hitler downed a typical vegetable platter, "constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before."….

Morell's diaries (which were recovered from Germany and are kept in the National Archives in Washington, DC) make clear that the bouts of "agonizing flatulence" remained a regular occurrence.

Although I have noted in a previous post the cocaine eyedrops and methamphetamine that Hitler’s quack doctor Morell prescribed, I am not sure if I read this before:

Morell plied him with a remedy called "Dr. Küster's Anti-gas pills," which contained significant amounts of strychnine--and Hitler often took as many as 16 of the little black pills a day. The sallow skin, glaucous eyes and attention lapses noted by observers later in the war are consistent with strychnine poisoning; another ingredient in the pills, antropine, causes mood wings from euphoria to violent anger.

I see that someone on Yahoo Answers has asked whether Adolf might have suffered from celiac disease (the intolerance to gluten that seemingly has risen sharply – at least in diagnosis – lately.) This seems a pretty good suggestion, actually, especially if (as one person in the answers notes) he was “notoriously fond of cakes and pastries.” I see a source for that is Mental Floss Magazine ( a journal that has escaped my attention til now) blog which says:

In fact, Hitler’s favorite dessert chef, Gerhardt Shtammer, claims that Hitler asked him to make delectable desserts right up to the very end, when they were trapped in Hitler’s bunker with hard-core Nazi holdouts. According to Shtammer, Hitler’s favorite desserts were eclairs decorated with little swastikas and strudel.

Googling "Gerhardt Shtammer" does not come up with any more detail, though. If he lived today, he would have had appearances on Oprah, at the very least.

So, there you go. We can add “cream puffs” to our list of speculations as to the cause of World War II.

Keep counting them

Further in my series of “famous climate skeptic writers who made bad calls on the seriousness of Fukushima,” you can add the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

This morning, I see that the Japanese PM has said that the situation remains grave and he cannot be optimistic.  (That’s how the ABC is reporting it.)

What I suspect is going on – but could be wrong of course – is that they have realised they have a very dangerous leak of very radioactive water, probably from the reactor core itself, and no one knows how to get rid of it.

Update:   from Bloomberg:

Radiation levels in sea water inside quake-damaged reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant may be rising, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said.  Levels show signs of climbing, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said in Tokyo today. Readings of between 200-300 millisieverts per hour were found in water at the No. 2 reactor, he said, equivalent to the maximum-permitted exposure for workers during the crisis.

I think (although media reporting on this is often mucking up the figures) the anuual limit for US reactor workers is 50 millisieverts, and Japan has increased it to 250. If I, and Bloomberg, are correct, I assume that a worker can only be near the reactor 2 water for an hour and then not be able to work there again. They are going to run out of workers pretty fast, if they need to be close to the water.

On a lighter note, I was talking to a Japanese friend this morning whose parents live at Chiba in Tokyo.  They have told him that bottled water is sold out, as is toilet paper. 

We both do not know why there would be a run on toilet paper. 

The talented Mr Martin

Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers were on Colbert Report this week doing this song, but the sound quality was not as good as on this clip:

Uh-oh

I'm going to get accused of being into anti-nuclear disaster porn if I keep posting about this, but this is not good news that has just shown up on the New York Times:

Japan’s effort to contain the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant suffered a setback, an official said on Friday, citing evidence that the reactor vessel of the No. 3 unit may have been damaged.

The development, described at a news conference by Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, raises the possibility that radiation from the mox fuel in the reactor — a combination of uranium and plutonium — could be released.

One sign that a breach may have occurred in the reactor vessel, Mr. Nishiyama said, took place on Thursday when three workers who were trying to connect an electrical cable to a pump in a turbine building next to the reactor were injured when they stepped into water that was found to be significantly more radioactive than normal in a reactor. The No. 3 unit, the only one of the six reactors at the site that uses the mox fuel, was damaged by a hydrogen explosion on March 14. Workers have been seeking to keep it cool by spraying it with seawater along with a more recent effort to restart the reactor’s cooling system.

In another development on Friday, the Japanese government said it would help people who wish to leave the area around the crippled plant, a sign that efforts to reassure frightened residents have failed to persuade people to stay.

Can't see it happening

Step 1 in asteroid mission: Pick right space rock

Given the currently unsolved problem of radiation in space, and the complete lack of any planning for a spacecraft big enough to accommodate a crew for the (what, one to two year?) return trip without them going stir crazy, I just can't see that a trip to an asteroid makes a sensible next step in space. At least if you go to the moon or Mars, you can get to stretch your legs in gravity at the half way point.

Makes bed even better

Hands-free iPad stand

You have to lift your hands to touch the screen, though. Can't they do something about that?

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: