Domestic report

Here’s what’s been going on at home:

*  In cute news:   the possum that lives under the balcony (well, most days anyway -  it would appear that brushtail possums like to keep alternative abodes going) has a baby.   My wife spotted this first, while handing the mother a piece of fruit.  The possum leaned down from its perch and a pink furless body was able to be seen in the forward facing pouch.  I saw it myself yesterday, when feeding it watermelon and kiwifruit.   It will be some months before the baby is furry and adorably cute, like this one, and I hope we get to see more of it.  Here's a recent photo of our possum eating:


She is much less shy than before, but I hope she never learns to knock on the front door.

*  Yesterday involved a bit of ambling driving around Brisbane, and on a whim, seeing we were at Hamilton already, I took a drive out to Pinkenba.

I grew up on the north side of Brisbane, and a trip out past the old airport to the strange combination of oil refinery, sewerage plant, houses and riverside shacks known as Pinkenba was always a novelty.   I am happy to report that a trip to this strange part of town is still interesting.   In fact, I am amazed as to how much of the old riverside land out beyond “Pinkenba Village” has been converted to light industrial.  During the weekday, at least, it looks as if it would be a much more lively place than it used to be in the 60’s and 70’s.  

There are more houses there than I remembered:  some of them not too bad looking for the area.   The small primary school, which looks very much like the old Nudgee Beach primary school also on the northside, appears to have closed late last year.

But the local hotel “The Pink” still exists, and from its website, looks a lot better on the inside than from the outside.  (A prominent sign for the scheduled “Hot Girls” shows mark it out as place catering for young male workers who go to the expanded industrial estate, I guess.)    While we drove past it, I suddenly remembered that I had brought something unusual from the bottle shop there once when I was young and used to visit unusual pubs occasionally for something to do.  I think it was there that I bought a bottle of Gekkeikan sake – the only brand you could ever get in Australia decades ago.    I didn’t care for the taste, but it represented a sort of foreshadowing of a turn my life would take.  Certainly, I enjoy sake a lot now…

The other reason to visit Pinkenba is because from the road you can get very close to one of the cavernous Qantas maintenance hangers, and watch planes being towed in if you’re lucky.   In fact, it might be Qantas workers, for all I know, who frequent the Hot Girls shows at the Pink; but I certainly hope it is only after work and they have their work on their minds while they check the fuselage of a 767.

*   Went kite flying today.   Brisbane is not the best place for kite flying, at least if you are not near the coast, as I just don’t think it is that breezy a place.  [Well, unless you are dealing with a summer storm, in which case it can be very breezy indeed, but only in short bursts.]  But today was a good day for my daughter to get out a birthday present she got last year from a friend.  It was from Aldi, which was a bad sign, and indeed it needed work with a pair of scissors usually reserved for eyebrows and nose hair to get rods into pockets which otherwise did not exist.  But despite all of this, it flew quite well.

I find getting a kite airborne and keeping there for more than 10 minutes at a time is an unusually satisfying experience.  I’m not sure about my daughter: I was reluctant to hand it over to her at all.  (I’m joking, but as it turned out, she did relinquish it to me often.)

Like taking kids fishing, having a go at kite flying with them is something that just has to be tried  at least once.   That reminds me, we need to go fishing again to see if they can catch something next time.  The first attempt only resulted in my wife getting something.   My manly abilities to provide food from the wild for my family are still in question.

An alternative outlet

Introducing Dodopathy.

May be gone a while ....

I really need to concentrate more on work at the moment. I probably won't post again until next weekend - possibly longer. Wish me luck with resisting the urge to post, and my attempt at ignoring the internet generally. (But I will be back.)

The Doctor is back

After complaining about Dr Who recently, I just wanted to note that the last two episodes, which were "stand alone" stories, were really quite good.

It confirms my earlier observation that the big story arcs are the worst aspect of the show now. It seems that I am not alone in these thoughts.

An interesting idea

Gravitational Waves Can Explain Dark Energy And Axis of Evil, Says Cosmologist - Technology Review

I've had a look at the paper, which is not written for the lay person, of course, but I remain a little uncertain as to whether he is claimed that this gravitational wave idea could explain away the apparent acceleration of the universe entirely, or only partially.

Thinking about teenagers

Teenage Brains - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

Mind Hacks liked the above article in National Geographic a lot, as it gives a fresh perspective on why teenagers take risks, other than the overly simplistic "brain's not fully developed yet" meme.

In the garden today…

My wife grouped some flowers together in pots a couple of  months ago, and they look very nice now:

"Overshare" (The correct name for Facebook)

Facebook Ticker: Mark Zuckerberg's terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I saw something on TV about his last night, and thought it looked terrible.

Manjoo actually hates the whole devaluation of privacy that Facebook imposes much less than me, but his point is still good: if Facebook makes it easier to share any old rubbish, it is killing taste and the exercise of good judgement.

About Ebert

Life Itself - A Memoir - By Roger Ebert - Book Review - NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd wrote this review of movie critic Roger Ebert's new memoir.

I am not the world's greatest fan of Ebert's reviews. I tend to find him inconsistent; sometimes too forgiving, sometimes far too nitpicking. He doesn't write with the depth and wit of Pauline Kael, but still, I am usually curious to see what he thought of a movie if I have seen it and have my own strong reaction for or against.

Sometimes he really despairs of modern tastes in movies, and I understand the sentiment. He really hated Kick-Ass, for example, and called it morally reprehensible. This half tempts me to see it, because I don't really like morally reprehensible things to pass without enough condemnation.

I knew almost nothing of his personal life, except that his writing sometimes gave me the feeling that he may be gay. Turns out he's married (well, I think I did read that some time ago) to an African American (I didn't know that), but he did marry late due to the influence of a very domineering mother. Dowd writes:

Ebert writes about his own alcoholism — his last drink was in 1979 — and that of his mother, who wielded a ’50s Catholic sexual repression that retarded Roger’s ability to “make free” with girls and produced a few scenes with a whiff of ­“Psycho.”

His mother’s recriminations about his girlfriends, as well as his drinking, caused him to live vicariously through movies and kept him “unmarried for an unnatural length of time. Did I know drinking made me unmarriageable, or did I simply put drinking ahead of marriage?”

Well, certainly sounds like the conditions were right for my suspicion.

The review spends a fair bit of time on Ebert's illness (jaw and related cancers which have led to massive facial surgery which failed, and he's now unable to speak and has to eat through a gastric feeding tube.) Poor guy. As Dowd notes, though, he's remarkably upbeat about the fact that he is still alive.

Don't hold your breath

Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

As I hoped, Cosmic Variance has the best commentary on the faster than light neutrino story I've seen. I liked this in comments too:

a nicely nuanced and non-dismissive interpretation of a nicely nuanced and non-hyperbolic announcement that has, predictably but unfortunately, resulted in a comically un-nuanced (perhaps even anti-nuanced) avalanche of headlines.

Seems about right.

Violence down

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker - review | Books | The Guardian

This review contains a detailed summary of Pinker's book long argument that humanity has become much less violent over the centuries. It sounds like a fascinating read. Here are some extracts (of the review, not the book):

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. ...

At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend.

Heartwarming

Forgotten Japanese War Diary Returns Home - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This was a lovely story on 7.30 last night, about the return of a war diary to the daughter of a Japanese naval officer who died on New Guinea during the World War 2.

Getting closer

London fashion week finale: menswear - in pictures | Fashion | guardian.co.uk

Have a look at some of the photos half way through this slide show from fashion week, and see if you agree that we seem to be coming close to actually having the Urban Sombrero.

If you want more to worry about re methane...

Try reading this post: Idiot Tracker: More methane madness

An interesting situation

Paul Sheehan, who really hates this Federal Labor government, nonetheless starts his column this morning with the observation that he doesn't actually disagree with an assessment that Tony Abbott has " a streak of bogan" in him.

Sheehan, of course, then paints this as meaning he cuts through to the electorate. I take it as meaning that, despite being a Rhodes scholar (Sheehan notes he has degrees in law, economics and philosophy) Abbott does not sound very smart.

I mean, honestly, no one (even his admirers in the commentariate) can accuse him of approaching his current job from some grand and consistent intellectual position.

Yet the most interesting thing about Sheehan's article is that he goes on to explain that Abbott refusing to concede to amendments the government wants to let the "Malaysian solution" proceed is a mistake, and will be recognized as such by the "bogans" who admire him.

This is, I think, potentially important. Sheehan is always a conservative populist at heart, and despite the waffling Paul Kelly and the inconsistent Greg Sheridan in The Australian both strongly expressing the same view, I suspect Abbott and his supporters in Parliament are much more likely to be influenced by Sheehan's opinion.

Of course, the opinion they probably value most, Andrew Bolt's, is strangely ambiguous at the moment. Sure he wrote a column saying Labor should just go with Nauru, but I suspect he probably sees potential danger to Abbott too if the government doesn't follow his suggestion, but is unwilling to say so. Bolt is obsessed with Gillard being replaced, and the unprincipled games he has played over the last couple of months to see this achieved mean he opinion on anything political at the moment has to filtered through this lens.

Liquid something

The day I saw a saint’s blood become liquid

Apropos of nothing, the Catholic Herald has a description by a priest of his witnessing a decade ago the "marvel" (the Church does not formally acknowledge it as a miracle) of the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius in Naples.

There is also a link to a helpful Wikipedia article on the saint, which gives some details of the research that has been conducted on the "blood". (The most popular scientific explanation is that it is a thixotropic substance - a gel that liquefies when agitated.) The simple matter of extracting a small amount and putting it in a mass spectrometer is not on the cards, apparently, but I was surprised to learn that a light spectroscope has been used a couple of times, including as recently as 1989. These results are said to be consistent with the vial containing hemoglobin.

Wikipedia also mentions that there are a couple of other saints' blood relics around Italy which liquefy, and apparently it doesn't happen in other countries. This does suggest that the answer lies in an Italian who came up with a neat thixotropic compound, and put it to innovative use in the 1300's, but it is unusual that this type of compound is not mentioned in science until 1863 (this is mentioned in the update following).

UPDATE: I see this morning that there is a really good, detailed report by what looks like an Italian skeptic group (although the tone of article is moderate). It details how there have been attempts, going back to last century, to make mixtures which behave like the relic. The "marvel" has been the subject of skepticism for a long time.

Did everyone remember to bring their electrodes to school this morning?

BBC News - Stimulating brain with electricity aids learning speed

Uh-oh (for methane)

Contribution of oceanic gas hydrate dissociation to the formation of Arctic Ocean methane plumes

The abstract:

Vast quantities of methane are trapped in oceanic hydrate deposits, and there is concern that a rise in the ocean temperature will induce dissociation of these hydrate accumulations, potentially releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, such a release could have dramatic climatic consequences. The recent discovery of active methane gas venting along the landward limit of the gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) on the shallow continental slope (150 m to 400 m) west of Svalbard suggests that this process may already have begun, but the source of the methane has not yet been determined. This study performs 2-D simulations of hydrate dissociation in conditions representative of the Arctic Ocean margin to assess whether such hydrates could contribute to the observed gas release. The results show that shallow, low-saturation hydrate deposits, if subjected to recently observed or future predicted temperature changes at the seafloor, can release quantities of methane at magnitudes similar to what has been observed, and that the releases will be localized near the landward limit of the GHSZ. Both gradual and rapid warming is simulated, along with a parametric sensitivity analysis, and localized gas release is observed for most of the cases. These results resemble the recently published observations and strongly suggest that hydrate dissociation and methane release as a result of climate change may be a real phenomenon, that it could occur on decadal timescales, and that it already may be occurring.

Dam ideas

Why damn northern Australia? - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

OK, so the author is from the Wilderness Society. He still goes on to fill in some of the background as to why North Queensland (and the Ord River project) is not the new agricultural nirvana that one might hope.

I had been wondering what happened to the Ord River dam - I had a vague idea that it had never lived up to its promise. It is a long way from anywhere, but it would appear there are other problems too.

Thoughts on watching 7.30 last night