Referral

Spaceport America opens – but space tourists will have to wait | Science | The Guardian

This story led me to do this quickly this morning on the iPad, which I trust people will remember was inspired by this (even though when I first saw that photo, I assumed it was photoshopped.)

Christmas viewing sorted

The Adventures of Tintin - Rotten Tomatoes

Initial reviews for Spielberg's Tintin movie seem pretty good. But it doesn't start here until Boxing Day. :(

UPDATE:  There are some really glowing reviews coming out, but as might be expected with any "classic" comic which nerdy adult men obsess about, there are those who are outraged by the movie.  The Guardian (which really operates as nerd/geek central in the English press, given the amount of time their blog gives to the likes of Dr Who) has a half funny, over the top reaction:

Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape....

The sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.

As someone says in comments:

Dare I suggest you get out a bit more?

Warm water, warm air

There continues to be useful and interesting discussion around the climate science blog-o-sphere about ocean warming and climate change.

It really seems that limited understanding of how exactly it works, and its role in "pauses" in the climb in surface temperature rises, is a major unresolved issue in climate science. 

Have a look at Skeptical Science, Bart's site, and Rabbett Run for some of the interesting posts, which again
feature Roger Pielke Snr.

Some ideas for Malcolm in the middle

Missing in all the political commentary or reports about Tony Abbott's "pledged in blood" spoiler role for the future of the carbon trading scheme ("don't buy into it, companies, we're going to revoke it") I haven't yet seen anyone mention the person in the Liberals who must be absolutely grinding his teeth over this.

I refer, of course, to Malcolm Turnbull.

Not only has he had to go along with the vote against the legislation, he now has to sit back for 2 to 3 years while his leader charges ahead with "maintaining the rage" against it.   This must surely cause him some despair.

I wonder:  will this be enough to push him over the edge in future?   Let's face it, there are enough climate change deniers in the Coalition that must give Malcolm the pip, but he was probably at least hoping that after the scheme was in place, he didn't have to put up with listening to them anymore.  But now, it is going to again be a live issue in the lead up to the next election.

What is the best he can hope for?    That the companies who have to buy permits will, in the run up to the next election, tell the Coalition to face reality and let the scheme continue?   That the public will react against the loss of compensation?   Some (more) really bad weather internationally will convince more people that really adverse climate change is already upon us?

If Abbott resists the obvious reasons for not dismantling the scheme, surely it will fill Malcolm with despair.

Could he breakaway before the election on this issue?  Become an independent, or even form a new par1ty:  one that actually takes science and economists seriously?  He might even get to re-run his Republican campaign again.

I hope he is giving these sort of options some thought.   He may as well start planning now.

Jobs, health and Apples

Steve Jobs, neuroendocrine tumors, and alternative medicine : Respectful Insolence

Here's a really, really long blog post talking about Steve Jobs' health, which is of interest mainly because it notes his initial hope to treat a tumour by diet for the first 9 months.

He was, it would appear, a bit too alternative for his own good, although he eventually went as far as he possibly could with conventional medicine.

I have neutral feelings about Jobs and his products. Sure, I like the iPad a lot, but is anyone who puts iTunes on their Windows PC a fan of the software? I doubt it.

And news like this:

Apple claims the Korean technology company ''blatantly copied'' its highly successful tablet computer and infringed at least two patents related to touch screens and the gestures controlling them.

make it hard to embrace the company, surely. A patent for controlling hand gestures? I bet there a few hand gestures being made at Samsung towards Apple HQ all the time.

Witch doctor worry

BBC News - Where child sacrifice is a business

Wow. Quite a horrifying story of the apparent revival in child sacrifice in Uganda by witch doctors.

It doesn't appear to be a case of mass hysteria, as one might initially suspect, as there are injured and dead children, as well as an interview with a witch doctor, as evidence it is real:

For our own inquiries, we posed as local businessmen and asked around for a witch doctor that could bring prosperity to our local construction company. We were soon introduced to Awali. He led us into a courtyard behind his home, and as if to welcome us he and his helpers wrestled a goat to the ground and slit its throat.

"This animal has been sacrificed to bring luck to us all," Awali explained. He then demanded a fee of $390 (£250) for the ritual and asked us to return in a few days.

At our next meeting, Awali invited us into his shrine, which is traditionally built from mud bricks with a straw roof. Inside, the floor is littered with herbs, face masks, rattles and a machete.

The witch doctor explained that this meeting was to discuss the most powerful spell - the sacrifice of a child.

"There are two ways of doing this," he said. "We can bury the child alive on your construction site, or we cut them in different places and put their blood in a bottle of spiritual medicine."

Awali grabbed his throat. "If it's a male, the whole head is cut off and his genitals. We will dig a hole at your construction site, and also bury the feet and the hands and put them all together in the hole."

This situation has lead to one of strangest police task force names:

The Anti-Human Sacrifice Police Task Force, launched in response to the growing numbers, says the ritual murder rate has slowed, citing a figure of 38 cases since 2006.

It's a bit like living in a place where a Grimms' Fairy Tale could actually happen.

Carbon price thoughts

What more can be said about the Gillard government finally passing its carbon price legislation? Typically, the right wing blogs are in a frenzy about the death of democracy, the coming glorious electoral defeat of leftism for all eternity, etc. (Have a look at this joke of a post at Catallaxy, where the resident obsessive about Say's Law quotes James Delingpole as some sort of authority.) I assume Alan Jones' radio show was absolutely chock full of this sort of guff today, and will continue in the same vein for the next couple of days at least. 

But once legislation like this is passed, it's hard to imagine any media figure being able to keep it as hot an issue for the next 12 months.

I have previously expressed here great doubts about an ETS being better than a carbon tax, but basically, it seems that credible and moderate economists (that is, those who are not wholly dedicated to right wing, anti-tax, as-small-a-government-as-possible ideology) think otherwise, and I'm willing to go with their judgement. I do get the impression that lessons have been learnt from the problems with the European ETS. Let's hope that's right.

How it will all pan out is still highly uncertain. As papers have already been noting today, Abbott's pledge to revoke it actually leaves some businesses in a bit of a limbo as to what to do over the next year or two. I suspect that most will have to assume that the tax will survive, and some will start to call on Abbott not to revoke it before the next election.

And honestly, if Abbott is to be taken at face value (in reality, most people who are strongly opposed to a carbon price hope that Abbott is lying about his intention to reach the same CO2 target) he is not going to find an economist around who is going to say that his means of achieving a similar reduction is going to be better than the ETS. Tony Windsor is on Lateline tonight making this point as I type.

The worst scenario is that the world economy tanks badly in the next 8 months, and the scheme commences operation at a time of great economic pessimism. Abbott's pledge would presumably then remain popular, and a double dissolution threat to ensure it is achieved may seem like a good bet.

I hope it doesn't come to that. There will never be an obviously "good" time to introduce such a scheme, but it would be bad luck indeed if this turned out to be the very worst time to introduce it.  

Finally, although you can be cynical and say that Gillard made a rod for Labor's own back by being wishy washy on an ETS after its initial failure under Rudd, I think Annabel Crabb is right to note that what she has been forced by circumstances to achieve still shows off her skills and practicality:

In bringing the Parliament to this point, Julia Gillard is picking up the can that has been kicked down the road by John Howard, Kevin Rudd and, in his own way, Malcolm Turnbull. It's maimed all of them, this diabolical issue, but Julia Gillard is still standing, and has today pulled off a legislative feat that - under the circumstances - deserves recognition even among the non-enthusiasts.

Bringing regional independents together with the Greens, to reach agreement on a fiendishly difficult economic reform like this one? Convincing the Greens to exempt petrol from the scheme?

Prevailing upon Bob Brown - hardly an International Man of Steelmaking, ordinarily - to rescue $300 million in assistance to steelmakers after Tony Abbott refused to vote for it?

All of these outcomes looked fairly unlikely as the New Paradigm was lowered nervously into place, and yet they have come to pass. Where her predecessor ached to be popular, this prime minister has made unpopularity into something of a personal art form.

In light of this, I find those on the Left who want to see Gillard replaced by Rudd, like John Quiggin, to be exercising perversely strange logic. This is actually an achievement by Gillard, and she should be given the opportunity to reap any benefits from finally being seen to take action. Success on the mining tax should also be seen as an achievement by the Labor base, and that is another thing Rudd didn't achieve.

Replacing Gillard anytime soon makes no sense, and I have much greater confidence in her achieving results than I had in Kevin Rudd.

The population at large is still easily conned by the boyish, earnest facade of Rudd, but that does not mean he is actually capable of good leadership.

Well, this is how I choose to interpret the situation....

but I could be misconstruing things... : )

PS: photo is from Sourcewatch, credited to Bob Burton. Someone should let me know if there is a copyright issue.

The Fake Crisis continues

I see that The Australian (and Denis Shanahan in particular) are in full blown "campaign" mode to see Julia Gillard replaced as Prime Minister.  This has been obvious for some time, but some headlines from last week, and this morning in particular, just confirm it:

Coalition storms ALP strongholds: Newspoll
Labor leader has lost public's faith
Leaky boats could sink Julia Gillard 

It's obviously important to Shanahan that a 3% increase to Labor in Newspoll not be interpreted as a clear sign that Labor has bottomed out, so he writes as follows:

A three-point rise in the Newspoll primary vote for the ALP has avoided the unthinkable for the Gillard government of going to 25 per cent or below to have less support than the combined vote for the Greens and various odds and sods, but the broader view of this survey of public opinion about Labor - as well as the personal standing of Julia Gillard - is devastating. The electorate has not only stopped listening to Labor but rejected it on every front.

In fact, the way I read the poll, Labor is still preferred outright on IR and education, arguably has more people favouring their position on climate change if you make the assumption that the substantial number for "someone else" are mostly Greens, and is even pegging on health.    
 
People are saying the Coalition handles asylum seekers better, which as I have noted before, is at complete odds with other polls indicating that they are no so keen on offshore processing.   You just have to assume that people are completely (to put it generously) confused on this issue.  No, forget it:  people are stupid on this issue. And let's be clear here:  this extends to those on the Left too, who (as shown on Q&A last night) pretty much completely ignore the issue that a completely open and welcoming processing regime would be practically guaranteed to involve hundreds more deaths at sea on leaky boats.

On this issue, I note that the local UNHRC rep has again said that he thinks the Malaysia solution is better for people than being locked in detention centres in Australia:

ASYLUM seekers would receive better protections in Malaysia under the Gillard government's proposed transfer deal than being held in indefinite mandatory detention in Australia, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office has said.

Australia ''would fall well short'' of the human rights criteria demanded of Malaysia under the deal signed in July, the UNHCR's regional representative, Richard Towle, has told a parliamentary inquiry....

''In the context of the Malaysian arrangements, the assurances of legal stay and community-based reception for all transferees can be seen as a more positive protection environment that protracted - and in some cases indefinite - detention that many face here in Australia, provided the assurances are carefully monitored,'' Mr Towle wrote.

The High Court struck down the refugee swap partly because Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention. But Mr Towle said many signatories did not meet the ''the fundamental protection safeguards that were expected of Malaysia under the arrangements''.

The UNHCR has also dismissed a ''misperception'' that asylum seekers could be caned, saying the document to be issued proving their legal status would have been ''a significant safeguard''.
Mr Towle said the Malaysian government also planned to extend legal work rights to all refugees, not just those sent from Australia. This would allow refugees to access insurance and health schemes.

The Malaysians have an incentive to see that the Australian sent asylum seekers are not mistreated:  they get to give us lots more Burmese asylum seekers.  This idea, based as it is on Departmental advice given by the same public servants who advised the Coalition, should be tried.

Back to the Newspoll:  the Coalition leads Labor by a large, large margin on the economy, but here it is clear that the public is buying into the idea that there is some sort of crisis going on about how Labor has handled it.

The reality is that, although the Coalition under Turnbull might have spent a bit less money on the GFC spending, there is no credible economist around who is regularly condemning Labor's response. Internationally, it is difficult to find anything other than praise for how Australia handled it.

The worst thing about all of this is that some Labor supporting figures like John Quiggin have given up on Gillard at a time when she is just getting some major reforms through Parliament.  It has always been absurd to suggest that she should be replaced at this time. 

Meanwhile, Bruce Hawker has suggested today how Labor can improve.  I have always found him boring on TV, but he is right in this column.  It was a serious mistake for Gillard to appear with Bob Brown as if he was a virtual deputy leader.   Hawker suggests distancing herself from Brown, and coming up with simple, distinctive Labor policies, like universal dental care.  He's right.

Quite a surprise

Prenatal testing could spare babies from toxoplasmosis complications

A study from Stanford finds strong reason for routine testing of toxoplasmosis in the US:

Their research found much higher rates of serious brain and eye disease among U.S. infants with congenital toxoplasmosis than among similar infants in Europe, where the prenatal testing is routine....
Eighty-four percent of the North American infants studied had serious complications of the parasitic infection, including calcium deposits in the brain, water on the brain and eye disease that caused visual impairment or blindness. By contrast, few European infants had these problems – for instance, about 17 percent of French infants with the infection develop complications.

“It was a shock,” said Jose Montoya, MD, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases at Stanford. “We were dismayed to see so many little ones with severe eye disease, hydrocephalus and brain calcifications.”

The reason for the different outcomes between affect US and European babies:

...effective medications exist to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite – and babies who receive these drugs in utero have much lower rates of complications than the infants in Montoya’s study, whose mothers did not get the prophylactic meds.

The test is cheap too. I wonder if it is done in Australia?

As I like to say to my children when they're feeling down..

‘Humans are just modified fish’ (Science Alert)

Not a good place to be sick

South Pole Worker Stranded After Stroke - NYTimes.com

Oceans heating, but how deep?

RealClimate: Global warming and ocean heat content

This Real Climate post, and the comments and discussion following, are important.  The issue is heat going into the oceans, and whether once it gets there, it is possibly a problem again in the future.

There has been a skeptic argument around that if upper ocean heat is getting "buried" in the deep ocean (a fact which itself is very hard to measure, apparently) then the heat does not represent any future "threat" to surface temperatures again.  Yet Trenberth had made a statement that any heat going down "has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.” 

Gavin Schmidt seems to indicate that, whatever Trenberth had in mind (and, curiously, he doesn't seem to know exactly what it was,) heating of the deep ocean has never been considered a threat to surface temperature.

Roger Pielke Snr turns up in the thread too, and Schmidt dismisses most of he claims about Ocean Heat Content.  In particular, he says the ARGO system simply can't measure ocean heat moving from the top layer of the ocean to the deep ocean, whereas a skeptic meme (started by Pielke, I think) is that the "missing heat" can't be going into the deep ocean because ARGO hasn't seen it passing through the top 700 m.

This really does appear to be a very complicated topic, and it is surprising to see that this may be a case where climate scientists have contributed to a skeptic meme via their own looseness of language.

Domestic notes from the weekend

*  Yesterday morning started off with a bang, and being woken up by a loud clap of thunder at 6 am is not that common for Brisbane.  The storms seemed to hang around then for about 3 hours, and it was very dark with many close lightning strikes in my area during that time.   The weather bureau predicted a stormy summer for Brisbane, and maybe this is a sign they were right, as indeed they were this time last year when they warned the Government that conditions were right for big floods.    

*   The mother possum hasn't been seen for a few days now.  In fact, her spot under the balcony on Friday morning seemed to be occupied by two smaller possums (as far as we could tell - we could only see one head but what appeared to be two rear ends.)   What do possums do - play a game of musical nests each night, and just stay at the one nearest them when the sun comes up?

*  Had a go at making limoncello this afternoon.  It now has to sit in the cupboard for a month before being strained and ready to taste.   I'm just hoping I sterilised the bottle enough - the last time I tried to do something with lemons (preserved lemons) they went mould pretty quickly in the jar.  I hope the alcohol in limoncello helps prevent that.  The recipe being followed is this one.   I'm using vodka as the base, which is a form of alcohol which I could never see the point of drinking.  I figure that even if one's intention is simply to get drunk, surely it's more interesting doing it with something with flavour.   In any event, I was aware that fancy schmancy vodkas of all varieties were trendy for a while, particularly in the US, I think, given that I had seen a Mythbusters segment in which they were seeing if they could really tell the difference between high end brands.  And indeed I was surprised to see today just how many brands are on the shelf in Australia too, most of which are only interesting for the nifty bottle designs.  It's funny, but in two different bottle shops, the cheapest brands were actually made in France.  When did they become a producer of cheap vodka?  I also see now that many flavoured vodkas are sold, which is fair enough, I guess.  Better than drinking plain old vodka.

*  Speaking of lemons, it's spring and the lemon and lime tree are having their annual outbreak of stinkbugs.  These bugs (the flat bodied bronze orange bug) appear to be extremely common on Australian citrus, and as this article notes, they do have a very vile smell when disturbed.   They  die pretty easily with any pyrethrum garden spray, but the big problem is reaching the one sitting up near the top of the lemon tree.  (By the way, while Googling around on the topic, I came this page:  Stink Bug Field Guide for Brisbane.   We do seem to have many, many stinking bugs in this region - something to be proud of, I guess...)

*  OK, this has nothing in particular to do with my weekend, apart from the fact that I just read it.  The Taiwanese have an indigenous population?  I didn't know that, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because I had heard about the Ainu, being the Japanese equivalent.  Funnily enough, if you watch the video at this link, you'll see a spokesman for the Ainu who looks a little bit like a younger version of Geoff Clark.

*  I found out today that the McFeast is still on the menu at McDonald's as a "birthday special", but I remain concerned how much longer this will be the case.

*  I guess I didn't mind the last Dr Who episode of this season, but as the final episode in this season's big story arc of how the Doctor avoids his (apparent) death at the start of the season, it did come up with a trick that seems just a little too "easy", if you ask me.  Again, I see the Guardian (gosh they discuss this show a lot) has a long article about whether everyone is completely happy with the direction it has taken under Steven Moffat.  It's good to see that I not alone in preferring the better stand alone stories to the overblown (and increasingly silly in their way)  story arcs that Moffat seems most interested in. 

Again...

That's: dodopathy.blogspot.com

Nasty utilitarians

Moral philosophy: Goodness has nothing to do with it | The Economist

Here's a short article about the apparent personality traits of the small-ish number of people who (in a thought experiment) think strongly enough of utilitarianism to kill someone innocent to save the lives of others.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they don't appear to be very nice:

They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.

Always had my doubts about them!

Possible explanations

Gas 'n' Air - Technology Review

Wow, that was quick. The link above has quite a few papers from arXiv talking about how the faster than light neutrino experiment may be flawed, and/or possible explanations as to what is going on if the result is real.

Strange experiment

Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change

I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to take a shot at magic mushrooms if you knew ahead of time about this:

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn't usually change significantly.

"Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older," says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

All of the participants were already "spiritual", however, and the fact that they were agreeing to an experiment with a hallucinogen indicates something about their "openness" already, surely. The article also notes:

As a word of caution, Griffiths also notes that some of the study participants reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their daylong psilocybin sessions, although none reported any lingering harmful effects. He cautions, however, that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.

Count me out, thanks.

The Right gets a recruit

Angry Anderson has joined the National Party and is looking at running for a Federal seat.

This post from his blog: The New World Order of the New Free World gives some idea of the scattergun mind of someone who the Nationals (and Abbott) seem to think would be a good candidate:

Do we really believe that this push for a Tax on Carbon pollution is about anything but raising more revenue for the government and the United Nations in league with the international banks using the “New World Order” as a blueprint for the Globalisation of the New Free World?

Are we so naive that we have ignored those warnings written about, not so long ago, by the likes of Toffler and his ilk about how these unseen people will have to come up with more and more ways to separate us from our hard earned cash?

I, for one, do not believe in this transparent lie of global warming, global warming created by us the population. Talking of population, why isn’t anyone talking about that as an issue related to this matter – the world is overpopulated but is anyone talking about reducing or slowing the population growth as a measure to slow this so called warming? No they aren’t!...

David Suzuki once said that to be a productive citizen of the world we should think globally and act locally. This is what we need to do now, to even begin to address issues that do now affect us and will affect us for years to come. The World was created by the perfect hand and prolific forests were always integral to the quality of life on this planet; I am suspicious of the attempt to take our focus away from such obvious problems as rampant logging of old growth forest and replacing them with new less understood but seemingly “hipper” subject matter....

I get suspicious. Who is pushing so hard? Gee, it’s big business cleverly or not so cleverly disguised as “do gooders”. This has been pointed out in emails that have been circulating in recent times worth investigating. Wouldn’t be the first time the international banking cartels have duped and enlisted the young and outraged to do their dirty work whilst preying on the fears of the older working population threatening them with their mortgage and livelihood, keeping us distracted with issues, like trying to educate our kids and keeping a roof over our heads, while they plot and scheme to fleece yet more of our money away from us.

The Right of politics in Australia and the USA , with few exceptions, is truly in an embarrassing state at the moment.

An Australian birthday

I had missed this last week - the neighbour's out of tune birthday trumpet serenade that Prime Minister Julia Gillard received on the national news.  (It's the first part of the video after the newsreader's intro):


This strikes me as a very distinctly Australian thing to happen - a sign of our egalitarianism that includes not taking the office of Prime Minister too seriously, and a politician who is definitely not "up herself".