Put down the can

Study finds caffeine poisoning on the rise

I suppose it's no surprise that the highly caffeinated soft drink market should cause a spike in the number of cases of apparent caffeine poisoning. Is this part of the report right, though?:

Caffeine toxicity can mimic amphetamine poisoning, cause seizures, psychosis, cardiac arrhythmias and rarely even death, but the most common symptoms reported include irregular heart rate, tremors, stomach upsets and dizziness.

Well, Google knows everything, and links me to this blog post, containing the following extract from a toxicologist's book:

“Caffeine-induced psychosis, whether it be delirium, manic depression, schizophrenia, or merely an anxiety syndrome, in most cases will be hard to differentiate from organic or non-organic psychoses….

The treatment for caffeine-induced psychosis is to withhold further caffeine.”

In fact, the entire website ("The Caffeine Web") describes itself as having the following purpose:

At CaffeineWeb.com, psychiatrists, allergists and toxicologists address caffeine's potential to induce symptoms of mental illness in healthy people.

But it appears to have been a short lived affair. Maybe the author had a relapse after a particularly hard night on the Starbucks.

The lucky tilt

Here's an interesting story from Physorg about the possible importance of planetary tilt for the emergence of life:

But take away the Earth's axial slant, and the place might become a lot less inviting.

With an obliquity of less than five degrees or so, an Earth-like planet's broader equatorial regions bear the full brunt of a sun's radiance. The polar regions also receive far less sunlight than they do with seasonal ebbs and flows. The result: extreme temperature gradients based on latitude. "Your equator is heated enormously while the poles freeze," said Heller.

In theory, bands of habitability in temperate, mid-latitude zones could persist. In a worst-case scenario, however, the entire atmosphere of a zero-obliquity planet could collapse, Heller said. Gases might evaporate into space around the planet's blazing middle and freeze to the ground in the bleak north and south.

Life, had it ever emerged, would be stopped dead in its tracks.

And the problem is, for life on other planets, that red dwarf stars may well erase planetary tilt relatively quickly.

It sounds like it may be an important reason as to why you can have billions of planets, but not many suitable for life.

Back to Pelagius?

I saw a link to an article in The Tablet about evolution and religion by Jack Mahoney, but it was behind the paywall and couldn't get to it.  (The Tablet offers very little for free.)

Anyway, a bit of Googling shows that Jack Mahoney is a Jesuit and has recently published a book "Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration".

It sounds very interesting.  As the review in The Independent notes:

Mainstream Christianity long ago dropped overt hostility to Darwin, and even manages to speak of him fondly on occasion, but it has held back from the next logical step, bringing theology and evolution into meaningful dialogue. Christianity, Mahoney argues, "has been strangely silent about the doctrine of evolution" because to accept it wholeheartedly would then involve a redrawing of the theological map. Yet that is precisely what he wants it to do.

It's true: there's an unresolved tension in the modern Catholic Church between the scientific understanding of evolution and the traditional understanding of the role of Christ; it is being ignored rather than dealt with adequately.  The fundamental problem is that evolution erodes the concept of Original Sin.   It certainly can't be understood in the previous sense of being the reason why death and suffering came to the Earth.

Thus, it is not surprising that Mahoney follows the path previously trod by another Jesuit interested in evolution, Teilhard de Chardin, in throwing doubt on the traditional understanding of Original Sin.  Of course, once you start questioning one traditional theological understanding, it can have a bit of a domino effect. From another review from a Jesuit website:

 Mahoney suggests that more traditional understandings of Original Sin, the Fall, Atonement, Justification and similar concepts no longer sit comfortably in an evolutionary context. His own position on sin in this context is very helpful: ‘Sin emerges as humanity’s yielding to evolutionary selfishness and declining to accept the invitation to self-transcendence: it is a refusal to transcend oneself in the interests of others.’ (p.43) Put like that, it makes sense of Paul VI’s claim that ‘the world is sick’ (Populorum Progressio, §66) and his diagnosis of its sickness as ‘the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples’. I also liked Mahoney’s comment: ‘What people in today’s culture need most is not the recovery of a sense of sin but the acquiring of a sense of purpose in their lives.’ (p.66)

I don't know:  I kind of miss the emphasis on personal sin in the Church these days.  But anyway, the review also notes:

He carries this approach to the Incarnation through to offer an interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection, too, suggesting that evolutionary theology:

proposes that the motive for the Word becoming flesh was not to save humanity from any inherited congenital sinfulness; it was for Christ to lead and conduct the human species through the common evolutionary fate of individual extinction to a new level of living with God. Nor was this done by the offering of Christ as an expiatory sacrifice to placate an injured God; it was achieved by Christ’s freely confronting death and winning through to a new phase of existence to be imparted to his fellow humans in their evolutionary destiny to share fully in the life of God. (pp.14-15)

Such suggestions will, one would think, not endear Mahoney to Pope Benedict; but then again, some people took the latter's mention of Teilhard de Chardin with brief approval in 2009 as indicating a softening of the previous Vatican warnings against his theological thoughts.

The problem, of course, is that Original Sin in its traditional form has been solidly maintained by the Church virtually since its inception.  Pelagius' views on the topic (that Adam merely set a bad example to humanity), which presumably can be more easily accommodated within modern understanding of evolution, lost out in the ideological battle with St Augustine.  (I see from Wikipedia that there was also Semipelangianism, which was an attempt to find a compromise between Augustinian and Pelagian views, but it was also promptly condemned as heresy.)

I would expect that Pelagianism gets covered in Mahoney's book, as it certainly seems he is effectively arguing that the modern understanding of evolution forces us to return to something resembling it.

Finally, while Googling around on the topic, I found this chapter of an online book * which deals with the theological response in the Catholic Church to evolution.   It is very detailed, but rather good.  Amongst other points if makes, it seems that it may have been well into the 20 th century before a majority of theologians really started believing that evolution was completely true.   This does not surprise me.  My own father, for example, never fully accepted evolution, and as it was a topic that the Church chose not to preach about, I expect many Catholics born in the first (say) third of the last century found evolution a topic easy to ignore, and a little hard to believe, and as such it did not represent much of a challenge their faith.

* the website it is from is said to be "Where Christian mysticism, theology and metaphysics meet Eastern religions, Jungian psychology and a new sense of the earth", and appears to be mostly the work of James Arraj, a psychologist who died a year or two ago.  I don't know about the quality of everything he has written, but the chapter I have linked to here seems pretty good.

Respect needed

BBC News - Eve teasing in India: Assault or harassment by another name

I didn't realise India could be such an unpleasant place for female tourists. Not just the article, but many of the comments following, indicate that it can be quite aggravating for them.

Terry Eagleton dissents

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review | Books | The Guardian

Terry Eagleton is always an interesting commentator, even if his Marxist take on Christianity is not for everyone. Here, he reviews Alain de Botton's book that argues in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, who (explains Eagleton):

....feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe.

The key criticism of this approach is in these paragraphs:

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.

A bigfoot-like creature

Did Bigfoot Really Exist? How Gigantopithecus Became Extinct | Hominid Hunting

Interesting blog entry from Smithsonian.com. I don't think they went extinct - they invented a time machine and just wander the Earth at whim.

TB back

Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India : Nature News & Comment

You don't hear too much about TB as an international disease these days, hence I didn't know this:

Tuberculosis trails behind only HIV as the world’s leading cause of death from infectious disease. But in spite of its impact on human health and economic growth, it has not ranked among the pharmaceutical industry's priorities.

“The pharmaceutical industry had scant interest in TB for decades,” says Richard Chaisson, director of the Center for TB Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “The industry pretty much concluded it wasn’t an attractive market, there was not enough potential profit.”

The article goes on to say that there has been an increase in development of TB drugs in the last 10 years or so, and none too soon, by the sounds:

Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease¹. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007² and Iran in 2009³.

A minor rat tale

Watching War Horse the other night, which I thought generally created a very realistic look to trench warfare in World War I, there was one quick shot in which there were a quite a few rats out in the middle of a trench while the last soldier was waiting there after all of his comrades had gone up over the wall and into battle.  Hmm, I thought, I know there were a lot of rats around the trenches, but did they really make such a sudden large scale appearance in bright daylight as soon as everyone had left? 

Then, this morning, in full sunlight, while idly staring out of the kitchen window, I noticed a rat boldly eating the left over bird seed sitting on the spa cover where we normally put the seed trays.

Time for some rat warfare action again at my house.

Comedy, science and religion

Today's reading:

*  the New York Times magazine has a long article on Stephen Colbert, and focusing more on his recent complicated toying with the Presidential race.  All pretty interesting.   Unfortunately, Comedy Central now blocks his website videos here, and his show is not shown on any free network, leaving him only accessible to those who get the Comedy Channel on cable TV.   This is a terrible outcome, as we recently gave up Foxtel at our house, to no discernible loss of quality of life except for my not being to watch Colbert Report. 

*  the Christian Science Monitor reports on Nicholas Steno, with the headline "The saint who undermined creationism".   Well, he's not quite a saint yet, but I don't recall reading about him before.  (He is apparently credited as the first to work out - in the 17th century - that different geological layers are laid down over time and contain a record of life in the very distant past.)  He went on to become a bishop.   As the article notes, the Catholic church has other clerics who have made big scientific contributions:

Steno was by no means the only Catholic cleric whose observations created models that counter literal Biblical accounts of creation. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, developed a model of inheritance that made Darwin's theory of evolution intelligible. In the 20th century, it was a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory.

Oddly enough, there is also the case of Lazzaro Spallanzani, who amongst other things:

...discovered and described animal (mammal) reproduction, showing that it requires both semen and an ovum. He was the first to perform in vitro fertilization, with frogs, and an artificial insemination, using a dog. Spallanzani showed that some animals, especially newts, can regenerate some parts of their body if injured or surgically removed.

Given the Church's current teaching, with its overly detailed theologising about the one and only legitimate place for semen to ever be, it's a tad ironic that it was one of their priests who was making discoveries about it.

Reich review

The man who started the sexual revolution | TLS

Here's an interesting review of a new book about all round loon Wilhelm Reich, whose core idea of the e-vil of sexual repression made him quite popular with middle aged Western men for much, much longer than he deserved.

In Australia, the aging Jim Cairns made it clear that he was very enamoured of Reich's theories, and on checking this I see that it was his she's-not-my-mistress mistress Junie Morosi who was largely responsible for introducing him to the books.

Fear of Horse conquered

I am happy to report that my not-so-happy Spielbergian experience with Tintin was not repeated with last night's viewing of War Horse.

It's a very impressive movie, and all the good reviews referring to it being in a grand, "classic" Hollywood style of movie making which petered out sometime in the 1960's are right.  I agree wholeheartedly with Stephanie Zacharek's comment the other day in Slate:

 I love the pure movieness of War Horse—I don’t see it as corny or overcooked.

It is, even by Spielberg standards, an exceptionally lush and beautiful film, and I don't recall a World War I movie which has ever evoked the look of the period in such an authentic feeling way.   The John Williams score is not over-powering, the actors are all fine, and the script works well too. 

But the largest praise must go to Spielberg himself.   The film does not (unlike Tintin) contain motifs repeated from his earlier work in any calculated way;  it references classic directors' works but (for the most part) with the added benefit of the graceful camera movement and careful regard to the composition of every single shot that is the hallmark of an extraordinary natural talent. 

You should see it at a cinema.

A bit of a surprise?

Marijuana use associated with cyclic vomiting syndrome in young males

Researchers have found clear associations between marijuana use in young males and cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS), where patients experience episodes of vomiting separated by symptom free intervals.

Since marijuana is well known as a help for some people with nausea and vomiting from things like chemotherapy, this would seem like a bit of a surprising finding.

Visiting Lenin

The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin's stage-managed show?

The Guardian has an interesting and entertaining account of what it is like to visit the body of Lenin these days.

Big battery news

Two potentially important battery development stories:

* Air battery to let electric cars outlast gas guzzlers

IBM claims to have solved a fundamental problem that may lead to the creation of a battery with an 800-kilometre (500-mile) range - letting EVs potentially compete with most petrol engines for the first time.

Would be very impressive if this pans out - but it is IBM making the claim, apparently.

*  new technology that sounds as if it would allow large scale battery storage of solar power:

Battery developer Eos Energy Storage claims to have solved key problems holding back a battery technology that could revolutionize grid energy storage. If the company is right, its zinc-air batteries will be able to store energy for half the cost of additional generation from natural gas—the method currently used to meet peak power demands.

This is a start up making the claims though, so caution is warranted.

The Anti Tattoo League

I am getting tired of waiting for fashion sense to turn against tattoos, particularly on women. 

Call me sexist, but young men generally are known to be silly risk takers in all  aspects of life.  Ask the insurance companies; and I noted last year the "accident hump" for young men, which apparently "exists in almost all societies and is statistically well documented."

So, it doesn't surprise me that garish and godawful tattoos which will fade into horrible splotchly things in 30 years time appear to be a good idea to some relatively young men.  Of course, this doesn't help explain why any man over 25 gets a tattoo, but who am I to disagree with a few decades of American sitcoms which sociologically prove that women are actually, unknown to their oblivious husbands, the most sensible ones in 9 out of 10 marriages.

So, women:  come on, you mature earlier and are supposed to be the moderating influence on stupid young men.  Hence, I am getting increasingly disturbed at the amount of awful, large tattoos appearing on women's arms.  There is no sense of the tattoo craze petering out for females at all yet - in fact, at this rate, I expect to see our Prime Minister return from summer holidays with a "Timbo 4 eva" tatt, complete with a facsimile of her beau armed with haircutting scissors and dryer emblazoned on the large expanse of skin she often shows between her chin and bustline.  (See here, here, and especially here.)   My previous cautious hope that tattooing has peaked seems to have been misplaced. 

I've said before that the small tattoo on the back of the neck (which seems popular with women) is a bit silly:  they're never going to see it themselves, so it's just self branding for the audience that's behind them in the shopping centre.  But at least it could always be hidden in future if they tire of it by virtue of longer hair. As for smallish tattoos on the breast line or ankle:  again, depends what they wear, but it's not always going to be on display if it turns ugly in future.

But lately I have been noticing absolutely horrendously large tattooing down arms on otherwise conservatively dressed and coiffed women, who don't particularly seem to be wanting to make a "look at me" statement to the world - except, that is (by way of recent example) for the ghoulish zombie like face that is on the forearm handing me change at the newsagent.   Or the shift manager (for goodness sake) at the MacDonalds I was at today, whose entire left arm was devoted to an extensive fairy world themed tattoo.   Granted, it was better than the newsagent's tatt, but you look at this otherwise attractive enough young-ish woman in short sleeves and all you can see is an enormous, arm-devouring fairy tattoo.  

I think it's time society (or at least, the over 50, wanting-to-control-the-rest-of-society-for-their-own-good part of society to which I subscribe) to start taking matters into our own hands.   I mean, would nice women with tatts in a public environment really punch out people for making the quiet observation "my God, that's a hideous tattoo", or "I would notice your nice face if it wasn't for the fact that you seem to want people to stare only at your arm", or the more vindictive take "tattoos are generally kitsch art*; yours particularly so.  I hope you regret it now, or will in the future"?  Maybe all of them could then be followed up with a quick "Nothing personal, mind you.  I hate the tatt, not the person, but nonetheless seek to encourage a severe reduction in tattooing by whatever guerilla tactic I can muster."

I mean, I seriously want to say those things to men too (well, not the bit about the nice face) but I'm not completely insane.  And let's face it:  women can have substantial influence on men, but it ain't going to happen with tattoos while ever they are in a competition for garish arm covering ones too.

So the tactic is identified, and all we need now is to apply it. Join the league.  I won't do it alone...

*  Oddly enough, I Googled "kitsch" to check the spelling, which led me to the Wikipedia entry on the topic which notes the important contributions of both Kant and Hegel to the philosophy of aesthetics; two philosophers who I have recently been discussing at this very blog in other contexts.   I was obviously destined to make this post.

UPDATE:  whaddya know:  Kant did discuss tattoos briefly, and did not approve.

Say anything..

I don't normally find myself reading the (Brisbane) Sunday Mail, but I had time to kill while my daughter and her friend were in the cinema watching the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks travesty (well, after no.2, I think we can safely assume the latest was dire for anyone over the age of 12) and found myself reading this story about the Walter Mitty style Facebook life of a sometime Brisbane school teacher.

Apparently, people enjoy reading Facebook pages of people they don't know and get upset when they realise there is not a shred of truth in them. According to the report, this guy named an imaginary girlfriend (well, at least the life story was imaginary) who was said to be a drugs squad police officer who had been shot during a raid last November, made a recovery, only to die unexpectedly of a heart attack at the end of December. An imaginary funeral was then announced and took place, and our fiction writing "hero" made the following entry on Facebook:

"One thing that Kell said to me the day before she passed away will always stay with me: 'You have made me the happiest woman in the world . . . I love you Clintypoo . . . I'll always be with you'," Mr Acworth wrote on his Facebook page last week.

People kept reading his Facebook after that? Really?

Was this all an in joke, or maybe a deliberate lesson to his students about the dangers of trusting strangers on Facebook? As far as I can tell from the odd comment I hear, Facebook has had nothing but a malign effect on high school student relationships. (I heard someone on talk back radio in the last year or two complaining that half of each Monday at a high school he/she was involved with was taken up with having to deal with the the fall out from the weekend's vindictive slagging off and bullying on Facebook.)

I remain quietly confident that Facebook has been a net detriment to the betterment of society.

Bryan Appleyard seems inclined to feel the same way, and a couple of days ago he was discussing "twittercide", the phenomena by which a politician or celebrity makes ridiculously unguarded, career-endangering comments on Twitter. Bryan seems to fear the worse:

I suspect there’s a neuroscientific aspect to all this. The neurological walls that divide public from private utterance are crumbling. Our brains are being hollowed out. At this rate there will be no unexpressed thoughts and all the sustaining complexity of the human world will drain away to be replaced by a featureless, babbling simplicity. But you’ll now have to buy my book to find out what I mean.

But to get back to Facebook, I am curious as to whether the possibly apocryphal story at the end of this comment to Appleyard's post is true:

Yes I’m shocked at some of what I see on my 17yr old nephew’s Facebook page but the shock is because I’m 40 and not used to seeing that sort of thing set out so publicly, not in the content itself (which, largely, is the same as anyone’s teenage years). This habit of documenting everything is becoming the norm so if he applies for a job in 15 years then all the other candidates – not to mention the hiring manager, HR department etc. – will be in a similar position. They may be apocryphal but I’ve heard stories about shops & supermarkets actively discriminating against applicants without Facebook profiles etc. on the grounds that it’s an indicator of a normal, hopefully gregarious teenager. In other words the absence of social media history may, in time, become more problematic than its presence.

God help us if this right.

Sweaty palms flying

Qantas passengers injured in turbulence

Given last week's news of small cracks developing in the wings of the A380, this is exactly the sort of flight in one which would make me a tad nervous:

Qantas says seven passengers have been injured on a flight from London to Sydney.

The airline says the seat belt sign was turned on and passengers were returning to their seats when an A380 experienced turbulence over India yesterday.

Seven people suffered minor cuts and bruises during the incident.

Extreme cuteness

As appearing inThe Age this morning:

It's a baby Leadbeater's possum. Irresistibly cute, no?

A remarkably warm winter temperature

Climate Central notes that much of the US has had little snow this winter, and some of the Plains states have just had some very high temperatures:

The National Weather Service said on its Sioux Falls, S.D., website that one sign pointing to the unusual nature of the warm weather was the fact that old records were exceeded by huge margins, as much as 17 degrees warmer than previous records, the agency's website states. As noted by the Weather Channel's Twitter account, the high temperature of 61°F in Minot, N.D., — an all-time January record — was the average high temperature in April, according to The Weather Channel.

Life is complicated

Mass prostate cancer screening doesn't reduce deaths: study

This seems pretty strong reason to not worry about PSA testing, but I bet it won't be accepted quickly.