Rodent news

Rat plague bears down on Alice Springs

That's not quite as bad as it sounds - it's a native rat making a a reappearance, in a big enough way to be called "an eruption":

The long-haired rat normally lives on isolated black soil plains in the Barkly Tableland of the Northern Territory and in western Queensland.

But it is taking advantage of high rainfall across the region to migrate en masse.

The rats have been sighted in Alice Springs for the first time in 25 years, and has also been seen in the remote community of Aputula, 250 kilometres further south.

"It really is a huge event and is pretty much down to that run of consecutive good, high rainfall seasons," said Peter McDonald, acting scientist with Northern Territory Biodiversity Conservation.

Mr McDonald says the rat migration is a unique event.

"It is unusual in the rodent world but Rattus villosissimus are unique in that way and they are pretty famous for their eruptions," he said.

"Probably the only similar expansion by a rodent is seen in the lemmings in the northern hemisphere with their eruptions.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, there seems to be no doubt that at least one rat has taken up residence in the floor space between the downstairs living area and the upstairs level. I can hear it scurrying around while I blog late at night.

I guess it got there via the roof, where rats are an annual problem, and down through the walls. Maybe it moves between the roof and the floorspace daily: that would at least give me a chance of baiting it via the roof.

I just realised tonight that I can probably access the floorspace for baiting purposes by removing one of the kitchen downlights, and I did hear it scurrying a bit close to that area tonight. But if it dies in the floorspace, I'll have no hope of removing the dead body, and we know from experience that dead rat smell permeates ceiling plasterboard quite well.

I think we need a reliable rodent repellent that can be sprayed in ceiling spaces. That might be the only hope of keeping them away.

Ayn causes pain

Hey, another bit of anti-Randian material comes my way. (Must be the movie coming out soon that's prompting this?) Bit of a sad story, really, of a father who becomes a self absorbed objectivist (is there any other type?), and a pain to his daughter in the process. I like this anecdote:

One time, at dinner, I complained that my brother was hogging all the food.

"He's being selfish!" I whined to my father.

"Being selfish is a good thing," he said. "To be selfless is to deny one's self. To be selfish is to embrace the self, and accept your wants and needs."

It was my dad's classic response -- a grandiose philosophical answer to a simple real-world problem. But who cared about logic? All I wanted was another serving of mashed potatoes.

Woops, forgot the baby

The Economist notes that "White America" (sounds to me like there might have been a better way of putting it) is showing a dramatic drop in birth rate, while minority groups are growing strongly.

Not quite sure why this would be.

Recommended again

This short example of a Bryan Appleyard post (including comments following) shows why I am really pleased to have him blogging again.

Sounds important

The 'molecular octopus': A little brother of 'Schroedinger's cat'

Kind of a bad explanation of what they did here, but still the result sounds significant - a large organic molecule of about 430 atoms was shown to be in a state of "superposition", like the presumed state of Schroedinger's Cat.

I wonder if this leads us any closer to a theoretical understanding of what a quantum superposition means?

For those interested in this topic only

The topic being: how stupid is Catallaxy. (The rest of you should look away.)

I see that yesterday, a few of the regulars (CL, d-d and IT) decided that Tony Abbott really wasn't performing well at the moment. Policy cut through wasn't happening, with IT noting something like "he's too busy riding his bicycle for that".

What, I wonder, has changed in the last six months to lead to these conclusions? The answer: absolutely nothing, in fact. There is nothing in their present criticisms that wasn't true of Abbott in the immediate period after he became leader, and which I had been saying since then; including the fact that his enthusiasm for exercise makes him look not entirely devoted to thinking about policy.

Yet when yours truly made these comments, it was all derision and ridiculous psycho-sexual analysis of why I have an issue with a politician who seems to spend just as much time in the media in lycra as in suits.

Speaking of psycho-sexual analysis: it's an ironic sign of his lack of insight that CL routinely answers criticism of his views and conduct in debate(at least if it is made by a perceived enemy) by claiming that his critic must be psychologically disturbed. No, he can't ever be wrong, or admit overstepping a line: instead, the explanation must be that it's the critic who is psychologically troubled. We saw this again in his counter-attack on HC last night, who pretty much followed my line in attacking Fisk and CL's ridiculous support for more Koran burning: because, you know, there just haven't been enough deaths of UN workers and police shooting into rioters to satisfy them yet. (Harry, you missed my point, though, that the most offensive thing in their rants was Fisk's use of "worthless sub-human animals" for the people of Afghanistan.)

Anyway, the weirdly tribal inner circle of Catallaxy has spoken - Abbott is a bit of a dud and a lightweight after all.

What a bunch of maroons.

Deathbed visions surveyed

Going into the light - The Irish Times - Tue, Mar 22, 2011

There's an interesting report here on a study from Ireland that asked members of the Irish Association of Palliative Care to report their experiences of deathbed visions.

It appears to confirm that deathbed visions of relatives, a white light in the room, or even the smell of roses, are well known events in palliative care circles. A sudden emergence from a coma, with an ability to recognise the people in the room, before then dying peacefully, seems also relatively common.

The drug or fever induced hallucination as an explanation is not widely believed:

One common sense explanation may be that the visions are drug- or fever-induced hallucinations. But 68 per cent of respondents agreed, or strongly agreed, that DBE have different qualities from such hallucinations.

MacConville says there appears to be a difference in the quality of the visions: they appear with greater clarity, and they are experienced as meaningful, with significant associations, rather than random, as they would be in drug-induced cases.

An earlier study also indicated that patients experiencing deathbed phenomena are usually calm and composed. In contrast, drug- or fever-induced hallucinations can be disturbing and frightening, with other symptoms of drug-induced toxicity and high temperature present as well.

All very fascinating.

A few things arising from Fukushima

Here's a few things I have learnt from the coverage of the Fukushima accident:

1. Criticality accidents: well, I'm not Homer Simpson, and haven't ever read that much about dangers of operating nuclear plants, but the uncertainty over whether Fukushima has had some criticality incidents led to this explanation of what they are at the Time Ecocentric blog:

To nuclear workers, there are few events more fearful than a criticality accident. In such a scenario, the fissile material in a reactor core--be it enriched uranium or plutonium--undergoes a spontaneous chain reaction, releasing a flash of aurora-blue light and a surge of neutron radiation; the gamma rays, neutrons and radioactive fission products emitted during criticality are highly dangerous to humans. Criticality occurs so rapidly--within a few fractions of a second--and so unpredictably that it can suddenly kill workers without warning. There have been 60 criticality incidents worldwide since 1945. The most recent occurred in Japan in 1999, at an experimental reactor in Tokai, when a beam of neutrons killed two workers, hospitalized dozens of emergency workers and nearby residents, and forced hundreds of thousands to remain indoors for 24 hours.

Nature has a post detailing the controversy as to whether small scale criticality accidents have been happening at Fukushima.

2. Jimmy Carter took part in a dangerous reactor rescue in 1952:

The reactor in Chalk River, Canada, about 180 kilometres (110 miles) from Ottawa, was used to enrich plutonium for America's atomic bombs. On December 12th 1952 it exploded, flooding the reactor building’s basement with millions of litres of radioactive water. Lieutenant Carter, a nuclear specialist on the Seawolf submarine programme, and his men were among the few people with the security clearance to enter a reactor. From Schenectady, New York, they rode the train up and got straight to work.

"The radiation intensity meant that each person could spend only about ninety seconds at the hot core location," wrote Mr Carter in "Why Not the Best?", an autobiography published in 1975 when he was campaigning for the presidency.

The team built an exact replica of the reactor on a nearby tennis court, and had cameras monitor the actual damage in the reactor's core. "When it was our time to work, a team of three of us practised several times on the mock-up, to be sure we had the correct tools and knew exactly how to use them. Finally, outfitted with white protective clothes, we descended into the reactor and worked frantically for our allotted time," he wrote. "Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up."

Impressive.

3. A commentary piece in Nature News today shares my view that the rush of some nuclear proponents to downplay the extent of the problems from this accident has not been helpful. It notes three lessons with wide implications for the nuclear industry around the world:

a. co-siting of nuclear reactors is (apparently) common in Western countries "because the only communities that will accept new nuclear plants are those that already have them." Yet the problem is, as we can see, have one go seriously wrong, and it can badly hamper the safe operation of the rest on the same site.

b. light water reactors melt if the water isn't there:

These designs are compact and relatively inexpensive, but their potential for meltdown was once obvious enough that Britain spent 30 years trying to develop gas-cooled alternatives. But, now that PWRs are the only viable design for new nuclear build, that extensive search for a safer design seems to have been forgotten by many of those who promote a nuclear future.

c. spent fuel rods have no where to go in Britain and the US.

The commentary then notes:

These legitimate technical criticisms of Fukushima, and of planned nuclear build, have been largely drowned out by the flood of technical reassurance offered by nuclear scientists and engineers in the wake of the disaster. For example, reassuring soundbites offered to journalists by the London-based Science Media Centre (which is funded by a variety of scientific bodies and industries, including Nature Publishing Group) in the days immediately after the earthquake contained barely a cautionary note on how serious the situation at Fukushima was set to become. Instead, the scientific establishment and those whose careers are invested in nuclear power have sought to convince the public that 'science' supports nuclear power. Too many specialists have assured us of the general safety of nuclear power without adequately addressing specific concerns.

Pretty much what I said.

For my benefit (and yours?)

Often, when helping the kids with something for school being prepared on the computer, I want to find a free bit of relevant clipart. Unfortunately, mere Googling often takes me to clipart sites that are not actually entirely free, and it can take a while to again find collections that are.

The always fun to read Red Ferret Journal (I still say its the wittiest gadget blog around) has had a few links to completely free clipart over the years, and I usually go and search that site. But it's probably simpler to list them all here, for faster searching:

WP Clipart

Open Clip Art Library

Public Domain Clipart

Free Graphics.com

FreeFoto.com (not clipart per se, but useful)

Stockvault (photos)

On a different topic, Red Ferret also had a recent post entitled:

15 Best Websites for Free E-Books

I haven't checked any of them yet, but I will one day. The only free book download place I have used before is ebook3000.com, but now it seems to be mainly full of illegal scans and copies; although if you into old esoteric copies of Playboy (Playboy Latvia, March 2011 is already there, for example), it would seem to be the place to go.

The Return

Well, that was remiss of me, not noticing the return of Bryan Appleyard to regular blogging after a significant break.

And he's in fine, cheery form. Here, for example, is his short take on Ayn Rand:

Now I have just been watching a film by a friend of mine which includes some startling material about Rand, all of which confirmed my dismal judgment of this ‘thinker’ as a dud novelist, a terrible philosopher and a political theorist of staggering and dangerous naivete. Hearing about her life with her circle of infatuated admirers, it suddenly came to me who she is. Ayn Rand, a Russian, is the reincarnation of another Russian – Madame Helena Blavatsky, the theosophical prophetess who wowed polite but gullible London society until her death in 1891. Blavatsky did, in fact, promise reincarnation, her last words were, ‘Keep the link unbroken! Do not let my last incarnation be a failure.’ The reincarnation was a roaring success: Rand was a chain smoker, like Blavatsky, and a total bozo, like Blavatsky.

A very good comparison, I think. And Rand gets a mention in passing later, when talking about Alan Greenspan's apparent recant of his recant, which I'll copy in full:

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and one of Ayn Rand’s innermost circle, writes a curious piece in the FT. The piece is curious, first, because Greenspan writes a little like F.R.Leavis – incredibly badly, clotted, pompous, circumlocutory in away that is designed simultaneously to advertise and conceal high intelligence. It is, secondly, curious because, it seems, Greenspan, having created the over-financialised system that made the crash inevitable, then having recanted, is now recanting his recantation. Leaving aside the details of the Dodd-Frank Act, Greenspan points out that nobody forecast the crash, quite the contrary, that there is no hard science of markets, and that, on the whole, global financial markets are good for growth. He points out that finance has seized a much larger share of all major economies and, finally, wonders whether this larger share ‘has been a necessary condition of growth in the past half century‘ and whether there is a necessary link between greater financial complexity and higher standards of living. This is obfuscation, as is the suave justification of bankers’ bonuses. In power, Greenspan got it wrong because of his Randian market superstition and, as many of the commenters say, that fact alone is enough to destroy his authority in these matters. Recent evidence suggests strongly that excessive financialisation of our economy increases risk and, in the long term, reduces growth. Doesn’t everybody know that?

So good to have him back.

Makes me feel better

Gee, when the very reasonable Ken Parish at Club Troppo does a post that talks at length about aboriginal problems being intractable until traditional aboriginal cultural ideas change (such as the belief in sorcery and curses, which lead to protracted payback violence between clans, and "sorry business" that means aboriginal businesses close for a long period to mourn a death), it makes me feel better about having suggested years ago that maybe it's currently pointless trying to built permanent, vandal proof housing in all remote localities. Really nice tents, or yurt-y type things, sited around shared ablution blocks was my suggestion. Just give then a new one every year or two. They can pack up and move away from the clan they're fighting with, too.

I'll keep repeating this idea once a year until someone notices and mentions it to the Minister.

Told you they were evil...

BBC - Earth News - Males make pregnant horses abort

Horse breeders, including thoroughbred breeders in the UK, often send mares to stables to be mated with stallions.

But a study reveals that, when they return, the pregnant mares engage in "promiscuous sex" with males in their home stables, in an attempt to disguise the paternity of the foal.

When this is not possible, the mares often abort the pregnancy.

So, they look dumb and are depraved. I miss the days when animals were put on trial...

Wrong again, times two

Watts Up With That from 24 March ran at the top of its blog for a good few days the story of the excruciatingly tedious Steve McIntyre finding that there was “deleted data” at the starting end (so to speak) of a graph of tree ring proxy data by Briffa that appeared in Science in 1999. “Where are the academic cops?” asked Watts in a facetious post heading.

Of course, this then got picked up by Andrew Bolt on 25 March, and Catallaxy, the blog where the centre right and libertarians go to be wrong about climate change, on 28 March. The only surprise in this process is that Tony Abbott didn’t turn up in Parliament flourishing a copy of the graph.

Someone at Watts (after scores of comments claiming this was another outrageous outrage) did suggest that, well, maybe excluding the data that is so obviously not a reliable proxy in the period in question is the right way to go if, you know, you are trying to work out the correct temperature in the period.

Turns out the explanation is even better. Nick Stokes explains:

A file had been discovered which showed data down to 1400, and if you plot it, it goes into oscillations in the years before 1550. Since it is clear that this is in a period of rapidly diminishing data, and very likely caused by that, I thought that would die fairly quickly, but no, as these things go, it was promoted to a grand ethical violation, megaphoned at WUWT, and taken up at the Air Vent, where it was seen as "unbelievable fraud"….

Well, it seemed clear to me that the available data is just getting low as we go back beyond 1550, and the wild swings are just the result of the growing noise, as you'd expect. And I haven't found anyone who seems to seriously think they reflect any kind of reality. So Briffa sensibly stopped at 1550 to avoid misleading the public….

[Referring to graphs of the number of sites plotted to produce the data]: As you can see, the number of sites is dropping rapidly before 1600, and is down to about 40 near 1550. Here is the expanded region between 1400 and 1600

As you can see, the rate of decrease is quite sharp near 1550. There's no absolute rule on where you have to say that a plot has to be stopped. The noise rises relative to the signal in a continuous way, and I don't curently know how to quantify whether 40 sites is likely to be sufficient. But neither do the critics. What is clear is that the observed rapid changes observed in McIntyre's graph are closely associated with the steep reduction in data. In those circumstances, I would be very uncomfortable about presenting them as real. And I don't think referees would let me.

Nick goes on in the next post to show why having fewer sites can easily lead to spurious oscillations.

So, as expected, there is an explanation, and it is not sinister, especially in the context of a Science piece which was also (apparently) only a short commentary.

Will the readers of Andrew Bolt ever know that? Will Andrew ever have read this explanation.

Would Sinclair Davidson ever offer an explanation post at Catallaxy? Does he ever offer anything other than skeptic stories recycled from skeptic sites?

The other “Watts is wrong” story making the news is the “hero to zero” path that Berkley physicist Richard Muller has made in the space of a few months.

Once again, Sinclair Davidson gave this story recent prominence at Catallaxy by posting a Youtube of Muller’s lecture about “hide the decline”. Muller’s take on this always appeared to me to show self-aggrandisement about how it wouldn’t be done like that at Berkley, and he had been criticised at ">Skeptical Science for muddling the details.

But his other claim to fame was to be on the BEST project to independently compile a temperature record set.

As everyone knows by now, Muller has told Congress that the early results show close uniformity with the existing temperature sets: you know, the ones that Anthony Watts has spent years trying to show were defective and misleading.

The Economist has the story, told in relatively dispassionate terms, and many on the “AGW is real” side of the fence are now enjoying enormously the swing against Muller from the climate skeptics side. Of particular amusement is the vehemence with which the professional disinformation site Climate Depot, of Marc Morano fame, has gone for his jugular. As the headlines will change, have a look at this screenshot (complete with Muller with a snake photo, presumably designed to make him look at tad nutty):

Of course, sites like Salon are enjoying the whole turnaround, as well they should.

I said before recently that the climate skeptics have been slowly moving away from their pet idea that temperature increases over the 20th century were all an illusion. This only confirms the move – from now on it’ll be nearly all “lukewarmenist” arguments: yes, the temperature has increased over the 20th century, but not quite as fast as climate science said, and look at the last [insert cherry picked period] has not got significantly hotter at all: it’s probably all stopped now and that just shows what idiots those scientists were! And besides, even when the graphs go up again, maybe it’s all a good thing. etc etc.

Update: I just typed a really long comment in response to the politely worded skepticism of sfw in comments, but Blogger did not want to accept it (Blogger seems to be having some widespread comment issues lately). I did not want to lose the work, so here goes:

Hey, it's nice to have someone on your side of the fence who is moderate in tone, and thanks for the comments on the blog.

I'm not sure if you've been reading me for long time, but I was initially a bit of a fence sitter on the AGW issue. But I decided that ocean acidification was a sufficient enough reason to push for less CO2 urgently anyway. It is a problem with no easy solution other than "stop putting so much CO2 in the air", and initial studies nearly all showed serious problems with the sea critters they were testing.

Over the years, I think it fair to say that the fact of the ocean pH drop at the predicted rate has been confirmed by measurements, but the results of lab tests have become more ambiguous. My initial thoughts were that these tests would be straight forward in identifying which creatures would suffer first and and which wouldn't, but the process of doing this accurately was a lot more complicated than I initially credited. Also, a bit to my surprise, the detailed biochemistry of sea life seemed to have a lot more gaps in it than I would have expected. So, the type of test results that have been coming out in the last year or two have been harder to understand.

I still think it is a serious issue. I have particular concern about the future of pteropods, which appear to be a very important link in the food chain in polar waters. As for reefs, I still have an open mind as to how soon or how badly they will be effected. Some corals do worse than others in lab tests, and generally it seems to me they are hardier than expected, although combining acidification with much higher ocean temperatures just makes predicting their future very hard.

In any event, it now seems to me that the slow moving nature of the process makes it harder to convince people of the need for action on CO2.

At the same time, it seemed to me that the evidence for AGW and associated climate change was firmer than I had understood, and as I was never convinced of the issue by popularisers like Gore and Flannery (in fact, I have always been a tad suspicious of them), it mattered little to me that they had made mistakes in their presentations.

I also realised that the opposition to it is in fact ideologically driven. I genuinely find the climate science sites of Real Climate and Skeptical Science to be measured in tone and reasoned in exactly the way that the likes of WUWT are not. Skeptics just continually ascribe the worst motives to climate scientists, usually from a position of ignorance.

The popularisers of the skeptic side, with their grab bag of arguments, also made me realise there was no genuine attempt to be rationally critical of climate change science; the likes of Monckton and his ilk had clearly decided that it was all rubbish (often alluding to ludicrous conspiracies behind it) and anything would go in advocacy. Mistakes would be repeated and believed, all because it fitted into preconceived ideas in the audience.

Now, I do accept that there are actual scientists on the climate change side who have made careless overstatements, but usually on very particular things like glaciers, droughts, the future of snow etc.

And I can understand why people like you say that it looks like its unfalsifible.

Here's what I think: it's actually really complicated, and not easily communicated with simple messages. Messaging mistakes will happen, and will cynically be exploited by ideological skeptics, but that's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

It turns out, for example, that a significant number of papers had talked about more drought in the long term for Australia, but broken by more intense periods of rain. This is what we just saw happen. Yet it is so easy to point the finger at Flannery and say "hey, he said cities would be running out of water by now."

I figure: he's not even a climate scientist per se, and big deal, he made an exaggerated comment here and there. M'eh, if papers are there that did predict what would happen, big deal.

The same with heavy snow in the Northern Hemisphere this last couple of winters. Yes, it seems few scientists predicted it before it happened, but some in fact did. The mechanism seems credible (less ice over northern areas such as Hudson Bay), but won't be proven for some time yet. So, one guy said British kids wouldn't see snow again. He was wrong, he exaggerated. But he wasn't speaking for every scientist and simply should have been more cautious.

The Russian heatwave: a really severe event, which (I note) some NOAA scientists say wasn't really caused by AGW. I'm kind of expecting that they have in fact leapt too far to the cautious side on that one. In any event, it (together with the European heat wave of some years ago,) shows how serious (including for food supply) more regular severe heatwaves could be.

Climate change scientists are always going to be hobbled to a degree by the complexity of the climate system and the short term blips along the way to seeing the long term trend.

I think it is reasonable in such a system to make allowances for things that may yet happen to the weather that were not predicted in detail or more widely. (In fact, as I say, it can turn out they were predicted, but were just less emphasised in the public arena.)

But here's the key thing: the uncertainty in how exactly the climate change manifests locally (and, in a sense, globally) is no reason to dismiss the seriousness of AGW. The examples of the last couple of years of floods, heat waves and even blizzards have not been (more or less unexpectedly) good events: they have been (more or less unexpectedly) bad events, and there are mechanisms to explain them as a consequence of AGW.

So, while you see non falsifiability, I see danger, and all the more reason to take CO2 reduction seriously.

Quite a length for a comment, hey!

Cowardice and Catallaxy

I used to read left wing blogs to laugh at extremists and get annoyed with their lack of common sense and pragmatism.

Now I just go to "centre right and libertarian" blog Catallaxy instead.

Over the weekend, for example, news of the appalling deaths in Afghanistan prompted by a grandstanding pastor of a trivially unimportant church in America, who the media should know better than give publicity to, was met by Catallaxy's nuttiest commenters (and, man, there's some competition) - CL and Michael Fisk - with calls for more Koran burning.

CL ends one comment with "More power to the Pastor’s right arm."

Fisk: " Burning the Koran will bring these issues to a head. We cannot afford to delay them any longer.

We must burn the Koran at once."

And, funnily enough, given that Yobbo (I forgot - he also likes the Koran burning idea) mentions it as being no worse than burning Mein Kampf, Fisk then goes on to use some distinctly Mein Kampf-ian terminology (you know, the parts that suggest that some people are "sub humans"):

That is the ethical response to the rioting of worthless sub-human animals who hate freedom.

Now, there are people in the thread calling them out (but in very mild terms, especially for that blog). In fact, you really know some at Catallaxy have gone berserk when JC starts sounding like the voice of moderation.

Yet, as far as I can see, there are no regulars there who have said the obvious - Fisk and CL are freaking nuts, and if their argument is so compelling, why weren't they taking the lead in organising Koran burnings in a public park yesterday, with media invitations to boot. (Even if the media wouldn't attend, why not post pictures on the internet?)

I mean, in this day and age, small scale protests are organised in the trivial amount of time it takes to post the time and date on a Facebook page.

I've suggested this to Yobbo some months ago when he first came up with the "burn more" idea: he said he didn't have police protection so it wasn't going to be up to him. (I think he suggested the Army could do it from their bases in Afghanistan, though!)

As for CL and Fisk: I don't know the reason for their craven cowardice in not taking the lead to organise Koran burnings. Fisk talks about the Afghanistan murders in the following context:

The first phases of any war, particularly an ideological one, will always have unfortunate victims who will be the first to fall.

There's ample opportunity to show solidarity with the victims, Fisky: why don't you go to it? Or are personally too valuable to the cause?

And as for the rest of the Catallaxy commenters - including blog controller Sinclair Davidson - no one has called out Fisk for the use of the "sub human" epithet.

And CL has the hide to suggest the fight against fundamentalist Islam is like the fight against 20th century fascism. Hey, CL, I would have thought the absolute worst aspect of some branches of 20th century fascism was not the subjugation of free speech: it was the adoption of a categorisation of some people into "sub human" - like your pal Fisky argues.

Go let us know when the Koran burning starts. It's a very Lenten thing, I'm sure.

PS - I'll delete whatever comment I like here. Offensive language is a guarantee of deletion.

I'm also still busy this week, so posts will probably be light.

PPS - Let's deal with the CL conundrum.

CL used to run his own, well written, blog, and there is no denying that he represents to me a deep psychological puzzle. His comments at Catallaxy are routinely couched in triumphalist, hyped up, quasi-violent terms - arguments or their proponents have always been "destroyed" or "demolished"; "beclowned" themselves, or been "humiliated". He doesn't just want to win arguments (and he is famously noteworthy for that); he wants to belittle opponents. He is always claiming a person has "lied" with no regard to whether a statement was made knowing that it was untrue; and often the very claim that it was an untruth is dependent on accepting his own skewed interpretation of facts.

As far as I can recall, he has indicated that he is in his 30's (late 30's, I think) and never talked of having travelled anywhere, even within Australia. Recently he has described a spartan bathroom suitable for a monk, and seems to have simple taste in beer and food. The impression I've often had is of a man in his (late) 50's in the body of someone younger. Certainly, his Catholicism seems to lean to a fondness for the old Latin mass. He does not claim to be a "good" Catholic, yet has a chip on his shoulder about any Catholic criticism about the same size as his head, as if he had actually experienced the sectarianism that started to fade in Australia in (I would say) the 1970's.

He's not wrong on every issue, yet even those opinions on which I would basically agree are now nearly always couched in terms in which it feels a tad embarrassing to acknowledge agreement. (It's rather the same with Andrew Bolt and his commentary on aboriginal issues.)

Also like Bolt, he is foolhardily certain of his opinion on the science of climate change. (This is another sign of having "older" attitudes than his chronological age.) Appeals to a Catholic sense of justice for future generations, such as those seemingly held by the Pope himself, fall on deaf ears, and in fact are routinely ridiculed. He is right to point out that it is not a matter of Catholic doctrine to believe in AGW; what he (and Cardinal Pell, for that matter) don't address is the question of how moral it is to continually advocate that the current generation do nothing to address what mainstream science expects to be a major problem for the coming generations. To trivialise concern for our children's future is to gamble that the handful of contrarian scientific voices in the field are right, but how is that morally appropriate when the stakes are so high?

Instead, he has been desperately, and laughably, keen to belittle my own engagement with, or understanding of, Catholicism. While I claim no deep involvement in a parish, I have routinely criticised liberal Christianity (and the expelled liberal South Brisbane Catholic priest Peter Kennedy in particular), and thus (I would have thought) have pretty mainstream views that you would think he could acknowledge. (The most I have advocated being the relaxation of celibacy for the priesthood.) But poor CL seems to think that Catholics should never criticise him from a Catholic perspective, otherwise they are not Catholics "in any meaningful sense." (He has claimed to detect lack of Catholic cultural knowledge in the way I have made comments. Corrections of the failings of his own interpretations are usually ignored.) He has set himself as sole arbiter of this; I suppose it is just another aspect of his hubris.

I always feel that his participation at Catallaxy is - literally - bad for his soul. It has allowed for an extremeness of expression, a serious lack of charity, and an obnoxious hubris to flow freely. I know that this makes me sound like a bit of a prig (and it's true I have said things there I shouldn't have at times too) - but it's a sincerely held view, and I have suggested as much to him before in comments, but to no obvious effect. The constant puzzle is whether he knows he is using misrepresentation and truth twisting of other's arguments with full knowledge that it is wrong (but, I am guessing, rationalised as part of a mere "game",) or whether he is psychologically incapable of recognizing wrongdoing in his tactics.

At the very least, his terminology and attitude to opposing views at Catallaxy constantly indicates a degree of combativeness that seems to show a certain bitterness of character, or perhaps frustration. A (possibly fictitious) character at another blog recently suggested he might be a wheelchair-bound invalid. Presumably, this is not true, as he has talked about swimming and jogging for fitness, but the funny thing was, I could understand where this amateur psychoanalysis came from. [Update: I forgot to mention: it recently occurred to me that, despite some at Catallaxy loving to accuse another blog identity of having "short man syndrome", I find it's actually a pretty good description of CL behaviour at Catallaxy.]

As with all attempts at character analysis from such material, there is a huge amount of guesswork involved here. It may also be that he's a regular saint in his private life. Difficult and prickly characters may be dislikeable yet achieve much that is very worthy. Yet it's hard to see why they can't do well without the baggage.

There: I have been meaning to deal with this ongoing puzzle here for some time. It's done.

Must do something else.

Update: noted at Catallaxy already. CL just latches onto the Catholic issue again. I'm starting to suspect he really is a monk.

It seems IT and Dover would like a character assessment. Maybe I should charge for it. Nah, it's free:

IT: a more-or-less harmless goose, who needs to be told every month or two that his gratuitous swearing and irrelevant sex and sexuality related insults to all and sundry that he disagrees with reflect more on his inability to mature past high school humour than his enemies. As with JC, part of his brashness at Catallaxy seems to be to compensate for having to be well behaved at home with a strict wife who knows how to keep him in line. In IT's case, it also seems to be part of a reaction against a conservative Christian upbringing. The fact that he sometimes uses moisturiser, has given up alcohol and (so he says) likes modern animated movies indicates he's not a completely insensitive twit; just primarily an insensitive twit.

dover-beach: relatively polite, shows signs of a reasoned conservatism on some issues, but also frequently the most incredibly, boringly, pedantic-yet-wrong debater since Steve McIntyre first made his tedious entry onto the internet. There's something about a girlfriend that Tal keeps mentioning, but I have absolutely no idea how old he is. I suspect he is another CL in that respect - sounds much older than he actually is.

Back soon (-ish)

Good for a giggle

Argentina gives Hugo Chavez press freedom award

An Argentina University, that is.

The university said it was giving Mr Chavez the Rodolfo Walsh award for "his commitment to defending the liberty of the people, consolidating Latin American unity, and defending human rights, truth and democratic values".

Update: as prompted by Jason, here's my animation of a key passage from the Gandhi letters in the news. (If anyone can suggest what an "eternal toothpick" is, I'm happy to hear it):



Update: I created two versions of this, and it's the first time I have tried using xtra normal. The second version had better timing in the dialogue, and I changed over to it here. But then the "camera angles" were worse. It seems you have no control at all over the angles that are used each time xtra normal "renders" the final product. I've therefore gone back to the first version. Meanwhile, I should be working. Oh well.

Happy place unhappy

All's not well at Tokyo Disneyland after quake

Tokyo Disneyland has not re-opened since the quake, not because of damage, but uncertainty over power supply. It remains unclear when it will be able to start up again.

Futurepundit wrote about Japanese power supply issues a couple of days ago. As he notes, this summer may not be the best one to be visiting the top half of Japan.

Not eBay, I trust

Used aircraft carrier up for sale

Britain has put aircraft carrier Ark Royal, the former flagship of the Royal Navy, up for sale on a military auction website.

Evolving delusions

Psychosis keeps up with the times � Mind Hacks

Well, we all knew this was true, didn't we? Still, it's an interesting enough topic (namely, how the content of delusions of those with psychosis tends to change with the type of technology and social concerns of the day.)

I remember thinking about this years ago when reading Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which was based on his own psychotic episode.

Answer: a definite "maybe"

Can caffeine make us healthy? - Features, Food & Drink - The Independent

The article talks about lots of different possible health effects of caffeine, and is quite interesting.