Nazi night was very good last night

Will SBS ever run out of World War Two documentaries to run on Friday nights, I wonder?

It's not like it's watchable every week, but last night I happened to catch episode 3 of The Last Nazis - Children of the Master Race, and found it very moving.

It was about Himmler's Lebensborn program, designed to help breed and propagate the so-called Aryan race, but concentrated on 3 adults who were children of the program and their sense of guilt and/or displacement because of what their parents did.

Although I had vaguely heard of Lebensborn before, I was not aware of the kidnapping of "right" type of blond/blue kid from the rest of Europe was carried out with casual and callous ruthlessness.

The whole show is still available for viewing on SBS, but it also appears to be permanently available here.

Do not discuss at the dinner table

A new study should finally convince parents to get their boys vaccinated against HPV

Slate talks about evidence regarding the connection between HPV and increasing oral cancers in men.

Although the idea sounds convincing, when they find HPV in the tumours, the second page of the article makes a good point about another puzzle:

It's easy to see why the notion that oral sex can give you cancer is so attractive. It makes for an irresistibly lurid headline, of course, and it appeals to the secret Victorian hidden less or more deeply in all of us. (Everything fun has a price—everything!) And to be fair, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It's well understood that HPV is transmitted through other kinds of intimate contact, such as vaginal sex. HPV seems to grow quite well on mucous membranes, those nonskin tissues that line the mouth, nose, vagina, anus, and a few other anatomic areas, and which may touch quite a bit during oral sex.

As an explanation for the uptick in oropharyngeal cancers, though, oral sex has one glaring problem: HPV-positive head and neck cancer is, inexplicably, a guy's disease. If oral sex were driving the issue, wouldn't we see a commensurate rise in HPV-positive tumors among women?

Even if the explanation was an upswing in bisexual behaviour in men in the last few decades, you would think the rate should be higher in women than men if only one form of oral was the cause.

All a bit of a mystery.

Libertarian utopians

Free State Project: What happens if 20,000 libertarians move to New Hampshire? - Slate Magazine

Here's a slightly amusing article about some Ron Paul libertarian/voluntaryist (?) twits who have a grand idea of living free in strange kind of do-whatever-they-like utopia in New Hampshire.

They sound rather like right wing hippies, and is a very strange, peculiarly American, movement.

Masters of distraction

Only In It For The Gold: Two Empty Kerfuffles

Michael Tobis is right. Climate change "sceptics" are all about distraction.

Watts Up With That is positively gleeful that the sun is not exacting behaving in a very predictable way, and more evidence suggesting the equivalent of a Maunder Minimum is coming out.

What WUWT and it's followers don't know, or remember, or ignore, is that this possibility has been considered by climate scientist years ago and has been dismissed as reason to ignore CO2.

Skeptical Science provides an update on this issue, noting the conclusion:

For both the A1B and A2 emission scenario, the effect of a Maunder Minimum on global temperature is minimal. The most likely impact of a Maunder Minimum by 2100 would be a decrease in global temperature of 0.1°C with a maximum reduction of warming by 0.3°C. Compare this to global warming between 3.7°C (A1B scenario) to 4.5°C (A2 scenario).

However, Barry Brooks blog had dealt with it in a post in 2008, as I am sure did other places.

It would seem that magnetic effects of a solar minimum could also make European winters colder, but again this would not mask global warming.

So sorry skeptics, it's been dealt with as an issue.

UPDATE: Richard Black at the BBC makes the same points, although he does quote someone as saying that the biggest effect of a really major minimum could be 1 degree of global cooling. This still doesn't offset 2 -4 degrees by the end of the century (by which time any minimum may well be over anyway.)

Black notes the political use to which this is being put:

All the studies I'm referring to above are out there in the public domain - which immediately raises a question over why some accounts claim big things for the new research but fail to take into account the context afforded by the larger body of published work.

The battle for public opinion on climate change is largely fought with memes; and solar changes leading to a cooling planet is one of them.

On this battleground, where the bigger picture can be conveniently forgotten, it has proven remarkably persistent.

Part of its appeal is that it has some scientific grounding; but it melts away in the light of the bigger research picture, and that's why it has little credence in mainstream scientific circles as a major factor in modern-day temperature fluctuations.

Could it be that the professional disseminators of climate scepticism are actually dishonest in the way they promote their case? Surely not....

Keeping up with the designers

Libertarian types, being interested in preserving people's right to do themselves harm in any innovative way possible, seem to have a problem with governments making new designer drugs illegal, such as the recent fate of the "legal high" cannabis substitute Kronic. (Well, correct me if I wrong, libertarian inclined readers.) Never mind that no one knows quite what they are getting when they buy this product, and that we get statements from people who know such as this:

Professor Jon Currie, who directs the Department of Addiction Medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, says he is now seeing one or two cases each week in emergency from people seeking help because of Kronic.

Presumably, libertarian types think it reasonable that food manufacturers have to list ingredients and thereby warn of possible side effects, particularly for those unfortunate enough to have peanut allergies. If so, I wonder what grounds they use to justify a legal recreational drug manufacturer being able to sell its mystery ingredient product that seemingly has a good chance of sending a fair few of its users to the emergency department of the hospital.

The other argument I am guessing they would run against banning is to argue for legalisation for all recreational drugs that it is a substitute for, and then the market for Kronic would fall apart anyway. However, given that I have read somewhere that Kronic and its ilk are popular with outback miners, one has to bear in mind that there is a significant group of employers who have legitimate reason not to have their employees doing things like turn up for work to drive their (I'm guessing) 30 tonne trucks while still having last night's THC at high levels in their bloodstream. In other words, there is reason to suspect that there would still be a market for a legal alternative to cannabis, at least for one which would not test positive for cannabinoids.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a preamble to an interesting short article at Nature by a UK forensic scientist arguing that other designer drugs - ones related to amphetamines - also deserve legal banning, simply because they are too dangerous.

He acknowledges that this is not without complications. As he notes, making a drug illegal often makes it more dangerous, because illegal drug manufacturers tend not to worry too much about quality control (to put it mildly.)

Of course, you could argue that the market for new dangerous drugs eventually sorts itself out. If enough users end up in hospital, eventually it will become unpopular within the drug taking community anyway. But do we really want such Darwinian free market methods be the guide for such matters? Certainly, the parents or other close relatives of victims of a new drug would find it hard to accept, unless they are libertarian purists.

What bothers me most about libertarian arguments along these lines (including their attitude to tobacco) is not so much their defence of people to self harm, but that they blithely also condone the effective exploitation of such people by manufacturers of dangerous products for profit. This is particularly objectionable when the product carries a high degree of addictivity, such as tobacco, and is one that is known to be particularly attractive to teenagers, who tend not to have the best developed set of skills for anything, let along starting addictions.

I mean, if the argument was only ever about, say, the wisdom of making illegal the consumption of a magic mushroom that everyone could pick out of their garden, then this aspect of the libertarian argument would not be such an issue. You could say the same about the right of people to grown their own marijuana, I suppose. Yet I bet that in those places that do have very relaxed attitudes to small amount of cultivation for personal use, the illegal trade of larger quantities does not magically fall away.

So the argument about relaxing drug laws is never simply about what people want to do for themselves; it's about the broader questions of how it affects society overall, including safety at work, on the roads and economic productivity generally, and how do you treat the manufacturers of dangerous compounds who are happy to take money with no regard for the health consequences of consuming their product.*


* What about alcohol, I hear you say. Well, it certainly has no parallel with Kronic manufacturers: you know exactly what you are getting and at what strength when you buy any legally sold alcohol. Alcohol is tightly regulated, and governments do discourage its overuse. But you always have the argument that is a product capable of safe consumption. Yes, so is cannabis for most people, I know; yet the evidence of the danger it does represent even for moderate use at some strengths, particularly for young users, continues to accumulate.

Clear and convincing

Speaking science to climate policy

There's been a lot of talk around about The Conversation's effort to bring calm science to the climate change debate. The article above is from there, and is very good.

I see the rest of The Conversation website looks very good too.

The never ending crisis

News Ltd papers, and Andrew Bolt in particular, have been in quite a frenzy over bad opinion polls for the Gillard government for some months. It's like it's a veritable crisis every day in terrible mismanagement by this the Federal government.

Except that, well, I haven't noticed many immediate crises to be mismanaged. As I've suggested before, the problem is one of stasis, not crisis. That is, there are various important policy initiatives waiting to be finalised and knocked into final shape with a Parliament that is more like a herd of cats than any other Parliament in living memory. But these are mainly longer term initiatives - climate change and mineral taxes most particularly - and even the social ones of plain packaging for tobacco and poker machine regulation have longer term effects. My point being that it is more than a tad hyperbolic to be talking up a daily sense of immediate crisis due to the slow negotiation and implementation of these policies.

It's no surprise that polling is bad for the government until they actually get something implemented.

I am particularly amused at Janet Albrechtsen's column this morning, also extracted by Andrew Bolt, with this key section:

Her public positions lack private convictions. From opposing a big Australia, gay marriage and a republic to supporting the flag and the importance of religion, Gillard so obviously echoes voters for no other reason than political gain. Her statements on everything from immigration to population are knee-jerk populism, aimed at dominating the media cycle and putting out potential policy bushfires, rather than presenting a genuine narrative about her political beliefs. Gillard darts all over the place depending on what she wants...

Funnily enough, Janet and Bolt don't seem to realise that this description works even better for Tony Abbott. OK, I'll concede, we all knew he would never be for gay marriage. But consistency with his own party's (theoretical) principles and his past views, as opposed to populism:

* "direct action" on climate change as better than a tax or an ETS? He has to pretend this works as a market, but we all know it is simply a case of him needing product differentiation after holding half a dozen or so different positions on an ETS before his rise to leadership. About half of Coalition supporters don't believe he is being honest about believing there is a need to take action on CO2 at all.

* a nasty big tax scare campaign on a carbon tax. No populism in that, no sir-ee.

* a parental leave plan more generous and expensive than the Labor one. Let's unnecessarily out-Labor at their own game, hey Tony?

* a promise of not touching IR laws, even though this used to be an item of clear product differentiation between Coalition and Labor.

* Back to Nauru; the place where you house boat people for 2 - 3 years and let them build a full case of depression before letting them into Australia anyway. No, that doesn't have a touch of populism about it at all!

Let's face it, Janet and Andrew, if you want inconsistency and leaps to populism, there is no better example in the Australian polity at the moment that Mr T Abbott.

Bee on extra dimensions

Backreaction: Extra Dimensions at the LHC: Status Update

It's rather technical in detail, but Bee Hossenfelder has a look at the early results from the LHC and what they mean for black hole production and theories involving large extra dimensions. The conclusion:

While it is in many cases not possible to falsify a model, but just to implausify it, large extra dimensions are becoming less plausible by the day. Nevertheless, one should exert scientific caution and not jump to conclusions. The relevance of CMS constraints on multi-jets depends partly on assumptions about the black holes' final decay that are not theoretically justified.

The last bit seems to be about her earlier comment that any LHC black hole would be "a quantum gravitational object and it is not correctly described by Hawking's semi-classical calculation. How to correctly describe it, nobody really knows."

Good to know they don't know what to look for, then!

This'll really make your cake rise...

Baking powder for environmentally friendly hydrogen storage

Boom tish.

Handy figures to keep in mind

Beyond Condoms: The Long Quest for a Better Male Contraceptive: Scientific American

This article gives a pretty comprehensive coverage of the never ending quest to find a decent male contraceptive. I was most impressed with this line, though:

Compared with the one-egg-per-month output of the female reproductive system, the roughly 1,000-sperm-per-heartbeat output of the male reproductive system is "a quantitatively challenging problem" for contraceptive research, Amory says.

Young single men: feel free to incorporate this factoid during your next venture in a singles bar. Married men: impress your wife by offering this new found knowledge during a dinner party with that nice new couple you recently met.

There's one other quote that I thought interesting from the article:

In animal models the compound bisdichloroacetyldiamine safely and reversibly induces infertility by inhibiting an enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 1a2, required for retinoic acid synthesis in the testes. Unfortunately, bisdichloroacetyldiamine also inhibits a similar enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, required for alcohol metabolism in the liver—meaning that animals on bisdichloroacetyldiamine were unable to process alcohol. "And some would say that if it weren't for alcohol no one would need a contraceptive anyway," jokes Amory

What happens if you "can't process alcohol"? Would five drinks keep you drunk for a week? (I guess it takes a while to for it to get out of you via the lungs.) Would 12 drinks in a day pickle your insides?

Things achieved on a long weekend

* Unblocked the Vacumaid via the application of the old (normal) vacuum cleaner to the inlet that was not sucking. My handyman (handyperson?) credentials have soared, but from a very low base.

* Went to Lifeline Bookfest, and about the first thing I spotted, sitting in a face up position, was volume 1 of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry. Purchased for $3, I doubt I will venture past this volume, but having read Greene's short autobiography of the first part of his life last year, I'm curious to see what he left out. See, I told you that the Bookfest was great.

* Saw Super 8. I'm surely not the first to say it, but it's "ET with teeth and a bad temper." I thought it was not bad, but not likely to linger long in memory; still, it's probably the best JJ Abrams movie I have seen. You see, long time readers know I have a problem with him, and dammit, he's still doing it.

He's the Director of the Giant Faces, who seems to think you need to be able to see skin pores to understand the emotion of a scene.

I get tired of pointing this out. Someone - Spielberg, his wife, his dog - I don't care who it is - tell him to frame a shot and then pull back half way and re-compose it. It is just the Abrams rule of thumb that will never let you down - "you are too close."

Anyway, as many reviewers noted, the young teenage(?) actors are really good, and the script as a homage to early Spielberg is quite good too. I liked the ideas better than the execution; but that always seems to be my fate with JJ Abrams.

* Taught the children how to play poker, as well as Pig. (I only found Pig as an adult in a Hoyles book, but it is a remarkably good party game for kids and adults.)

By nuclear power to the Pole

Last night, quite by accident, I saw the second half of Charlie Bird Explores the Arctic, in which the Irish journalist joins a Soviet nuclear powered icebreaker that takes passengers to the North Pole every summer.

The fact that this is now a quite routine tourist event that has been running for years had escaped my attention.

It costs about $20,000 per person, and the ship is quite well appointed, as far as nuclear powered icebreakers go. Once at the pole, everyone gets off and stands around a temporary North Pole pole stuck in the ice, a bar-b-q takes place on the ice, and several made people go for a dip in the water that is exposed around the ship.

Unfortunately, I can find no Youtube clip of this, but you can currently watch the show on the SBS TV website. The first half is spent with some Inuit, and there is a fair bit of discussion about how they definitely know the climate is changing.

I see that there is an old Youtube of an English woman making this trip in 2001, which gives you the general idea.

I must try and keep up more with fantasy ways to spend spare money I don't have.

Barr explains

Roseanne Barr: 'Fame's a bitch. It's hard to handle and drives you nuts' | Culture | The Guardian

I really did like Roseanne for the first 3 or 4 seasons. Like most sitcoms, it grew tired and was pretty much unwatchable (and unwatched) in its last season, but the first few years were pretty innovative in the way Barr describes in the article above.

In fact, in the first few paragraphs, Ms Barr sounds quite sensible, but then we get a long recount of how and why she felt abused soon after her famous sitcom started. I have read much of this before; it certainly sounds like it must have been a nightmare on the set for the rest of the cast while Roseanne and the producers/writers fought bitterly and openly. And who really know who's right here? Barr can swing wildly from sounding credible, to sounding half nutty.

But towards the end, she criticises Hollywood for tolerating the likes of Charlie Sheen, and here she is on the money again:

Based on Two And A Half Men's success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world's most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife – sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn't make it right. People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the "culture".

But when it comes to his abusing his producers, she does relate:

Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that's expected of him on his own time.

Well, it seems to me Sheen has a lot less to complain about, given that (unlike Barr) he didn't get a comedy show by developing a character in years of tough stand up comedy. It seems he only had to lead a dissolute life, and a comedy based on that fell into his lap. (I'm assuming that's how it happened anyway.)

Finally, I note that The Middle - a very solid, enjoyable sitcom that is underappreciated - is a pretty clear successor to Roseanne. Maybe it's my own working class family background that makes me like these comedies.

A free plug

Brisbane Bookfest | Lifeline Community Care Queensland

Any South East Queensland reader is reminded that the Lifeline Bookfest is on at the Southbank Convention Centre this long weekend.

As their January one had to be cancelled because of the floods, I assume they will have a lot of books to sell.

You really should go; it's great.

And turning now to international hamster news...

France caught in a legal trap over rare rodent

The story feature as very good portrait of a hamster too.

Today's bit of curious medical research

Magnetic fields reduce blood viscosity - physicsworld.com

In their experiment, Tao and Huang showed that applying a 1.3 T magnetic pulse to a small sample of blood can significantly reduce it's viscosity. About 8 ml of blood with a viscosity of 7 centipoises (cp) – above healthy limits – was contained at body temperature (37 °C) in a test tube. The tube formed part of a device called a capillary viscometer used to measure viscosities. The sample was then exposed to a magnetic field applied parallel to the direction of flow of blood via a coil around the edge of the test tube. After one minute of exposure to the field, the blood's viscosity had been reduced by 33% to 4.75 cp. With no further exposure to the field, the viscosity had only risen slightly to 5.4 cp after 200 min, which is still within healthy limits.

I guess it would be good to know how long the effect does usefully last for. Still, it's all very interesting.

Not exactly a night at the opera

Spat at by a naked dancer: St-Pierre's Un Peu de Tendresse

A Guardian reviewer gets more than he bargained for during a night at the dance theatre.

Really, it's just a case of the avant garde dance movement, such that it is, running out of ways to shock its audience. Pretty pathetic, really.

Finding dark matter in the dark

The Dark Matter Data Bonanza - Technology Review

An interesting account here of some (apparently) successful attempts to detect dark matter via experiments at the bottom of mines.

If confirmed, this would be a major step towards understanding the universe. I think.

Julia has a cow

Julia Gillard can't take a trick at the moment, that's for sure. The latest one being on the Indonesian cattle issue. Of course no one was happy seeing the conditions in some Indonesian slaughterhouses, but stopping the whole export industry for six months when thousands of cattle are about to get on ships?

This was also a rare occasion when Bob Katter also came close to making sense. On Lateline last night, he made the point that I have not seen much of in the media reporting: how the hell did the Australians involved in setting up that box system that is designed to get cattle on their side in about the clumsiest way possible ever think that was going to look good to Australian animal rights people?

As Katter said:

I mean, when I saw that box I just couldn't believe that anyone could have been so stupid as to design that thing. ...

This person tonight admitted that they knew what was going on, that they'd sent people in to have look at this, they knew what was going on and they've known for years and years and years about it and they've done absolutely nothing about it except to provide a stupid box.

If you're going to but the animal in a box anyway, why not make it one which properly holds the beast while you have access to slit its throat while thus constrained? Surely this is possible.

There was also a decent bit of commentary about the issue in an article in the Australian this morning too.

Speaking of Hitler...

Hitler's first draft of the Holocaust: unique letter goes on show | World news | The Guardian

Hitler apparently was writing of his anti-Semitic plans in a letter in 1919:

... Hitler spouted an antisemitic diatribe, in which he said Jews were "pure materialists in thought and aspirations" and that their effect was "racial tuberculosis on the nation".

Crucially, he went on to set out his vision for a calculated antisemitism that would operate through strong governments rather than the emotion of the people. Emotional antisemitism, he wrote, merely ended in pogroms.

"The antisemitism of reason must lead to a struggle for the legal battle to abrogate laws giving [Jews] favoured positions, differentiating the Jew from other foreigners. The final goal must be the uncompromising removal of Jews altogether. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable, and never a government of national weakness."