The dangerous tub

The Japan Times has an editorial on an unusual topic:

An investigation into one of Japan's favorite pastimes — bathing — has found a startling statistic: 14,000 people a year die during bath time. That's nearly three times more deaths than from car accidents, 4,612 people....

Bathing seems such a comforting and pleasant activity that it is hard to associate it with danger. However, the deaths come from several different problems. Some deaths resulted from drowning when bathers fell asleep. Other causes were heart attacks, subarachnoid hemorrhages or strokes from the sudden shift in temperatures. Dehydration and injuries resulting from slipping were also among the causes.

Researchers at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine found last year that the danger of heart attacks is nearly 10 times greater in winter than in summer — and much higher than the risk of cardiac arrest during exercise. The rapid blood pressure drop that happens when getting in the bath stresses the heart more on a cold day, which can lead to a number of complications.

Trying out the macro

My wife bought a new little digital, and readers would know I love how digital cameras, even the cheapies, do macro pretty well:

Not bad.  I must try and track down a bug now...

An interesting analysis

We need to talk about energy, not rates - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Alan Kohler is upset that badly needed investment in electricity in Australia is being stalled due to uncertainty, caused in large part by the Tony Abbott "must revoke the carbon tax" policy.

I'm sure Kohler is not alone in this view.   But where are the economists who feel this way?   Are they just going to sit on their hands, or wait until an election is looming and then say that dismantling the governments carbon pricing scheme, and replacing it with Abbott's second rate "direct action" really doesn't make sense?

Anyway, here is Kohler's depressing conclusion:

If they're all thrown out, as promised, then the new minister will have to start the process all over again. By the way, the shadow minister is Ian Macfarlane, who came within a bee's willy of negotiating an emissions trading scheme in 2009 with the then minister, Penny Wong.

Presumably he no longer believes in that crazy stuff.

Anyway, aside from whatever carbon abatement costs are imposed by either political party (they both have the same reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020), electricity prices are already set to double by 2017 because of chronic under-investment in east coast transmission and distribution over previous decades.

This price increase cannot be avoided – it is already locked in. In fact, it will be greater than that if the 20 per cent renewable energy target is to be met because renewable generation is always further away, so that transmission costs more.

The only antidote to the huge, looming increase in the price of electricity, not to mention the possibility of brownouts caused by the lack of investment in base load power, including nuclear, is energy efficiency.

Unless urgent action is taken, the rising price of power will destroy manufacturing and retail businesses far more effectively than the internet and the currency, which has a tendency to go down as well as up.

Japanese tornado

God really seems to have it in for Japan at the moment. 

A compilation video of yesterday's tornado, looking very much like footage we more commonly see from the middle of America, can be see here.

Of course, people interested in climate change will be curious as to how rare this is.  As the Wikipedia knows all, it indicates that tornadoes are indeed pretty rare, but not unknown, in Japan.  Other odd places that have had tornadoes on that list include Moscow in 1904.  I guess that wherever you can get a storm, a tornado may be possible.

Moogerah Dam

Enhanced version at Dodopathy. 

Good movies

First, Addams Family Values. The original Addams Family movie was on TV a couple of weeks ago, and went over well with the kids, so I went looking for the second at the DVD rental place. (Does everyone feel a bit of melancholy like I do for this slowly dying line of business which will probably be gone completely in 5 years?)

Both Addams Family movies are based almost entirely on the funny one-liner, but so many of them are terrific. I think the best from the second movie would have to be when Joan Cusack, playing Uncle Fester's conniving love interest, says "Isn't he a ladykiller", to get the cheery response from Gomez "Acquitted!"

Watching these movies made me realize how much I like the sense of humour of director Barry Sonnenfeld. He did the Men in Black movies too, and has a third one coming out soon. I will be there early unless it has catastrophic reviews: even though the second MIB was not thought of highly by many, and I found it to be better than I remembered when I re-watched it recently.

Second movie from yesterday: Charade. I'm not sure, but I think I had only seen this once, as a teenager on TV. I remembered liking it very much, but only recalled a rooftop fight and the ending. Re-watching it 30 something years later therefore was a relatively fresh experience, and I have to say, the only wonder is why it isn't more often talked about as the classic bit of entertainment it truly is. In my books, it was Audrey Hepburn at her peak: a screen presence who (as we all know) was impossible to dislike in anything. But give her a script full of funny one-liners, and a role that let her do her vulnerable/playfully assertive act with Cary Grant as her love interest: well, what can go wrong? (Don't worry, nothing does.).

For those who don't know, it is like a funnier Hitchcock movie, and set in Paris in the early 1960's.  (JFK's photo is seen on the wall of the US Embassy, and the movie was released just a couple of weeks after his assassination.  I wonder if that unfortunate timing, when I imagine lots of Americans were too shell shocked to be seeking out lightweight entertainment, partly accounts for it not being as well known as it deserves.)  

 I see that Jonathan Demme did a remake which I have never heard of: why does anyone ever think it a good idea to remake movies which worked fantastically well in their first incarnation?

Anyway, a good viewing day was had by all.

Liking hospitals

I've been at hospitals on and off a fair bit in the last few years, but never for anything too dramatic - it's just what happens when you have kids and an elderly mother.  Getting my Mum to one over the last few days is why I haven't been posting much.

It almost feels like this is something that one shouldn't say - but I really like hospitals.   I like them architecturally - the way they grow and expand, usually with walkways joining different wings and buildings.  (Doesn't everyone like elevated walkways?)   I think being an architect working on a hospital re-vamp must be one of the most interesting jobs around.  I like the challenge of finding your way around these complexes. I like the way beds get pushed around and up and down different floors. 

I like buildings with helipads and red flashing lights on the roof.   I like high technology of all types, and x ray and medical imaging technology is some of the fanciest and cleverest stuff you are ever likely to see.

I usually like the staff:  working odd hours, usually with good cheer.  I like how hospitals are much more convenient places than they used to be - the car parks are usually not too expensive; there may be a Starbucks in the foyer, or a sushi place just outside, even in public hospitals.    During the day they'll probably be a volunteer at a desk to help find you something.  

I don't really care for waiting for 5 hours to see a doctor, but hey, it's a free service and I don't feel I can complain too much as long as the person I am with is not in pain.  Besides, waiting there is a bit like a free drama show - trying to overhear what the drug addicted or mentally ill person is complaining about at the admissions counter, or wondering what sort of illness the guy clutching his abdomen might be suffering.  It also gives me the opportunity to understand how boring and regrettably enduring is reality TV, because I will not sit at home to watch 4 couples arguing with each other about their designs and accidents while doing a renovation of a row of old terrace houses. 

I'm not sure how many people feel this way.  The Yahoo Questions page asking "Is it strange that I like hospitals"  has few responses.  Hospital fans need their own support group, perhaps.  I'm here to help.

Something you've never thought about before

YKK zippers: Why so many designers use them. - Slate Magazine

Exactly

What an excellent bit of video which was not shown on the ABC's fairly forgettable climate change documentary last week "I can change your mind about climate."



I think Nick Minchin (the skeptic ex-politician), obviously liked Anna Rose (the young climate change "believer"), so much so that by the end he tried to come up with a compromise, along the lines of saying that as all fossil fuel sources are finite, he could support a move towards renewable energy now.

It's a pity this position doesn't make much sense, as far as doing anything about emissions - especially in Australia, where we have enough coal to burn for hundreds of years.   There is no urgent imperative to implement clean electricity at all out of concern for running out of dirty ways to make it.  (The argument might have a chance of working if it restricted to finding a way to make good electric cars, given oil will presumably start running out sooner than coal.)

As someone wrote about Minchin:

In all, five of Minchin’s seven experts appeared in the documentary, but only three of Rose’s. While this might sound unfair to Rose, I think that Minchin’s experts did more harm to his cause than good.

That said, I was concerned to read Minchin being quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday as saying that the documentary was a “terrific opportunity to convey to an ABC audience that there remains a significant debate”. If Minchin had any insight he would realise that the documentary simply exposes his gullibility.

 Quite true, I think, and all the more galling that the documentary left out the video above.

Sounds like an important paper

From Science:

Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming. Efforts to detect this long-term response in sparse surface observations of rainfall and evaporation remain ambiguous. We show that ocean salinity patterns express an identifiable fingerprint of an intensifying water cycle. Our 50-year observed global surface salinity changes, combined with changes from global climate models, present robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of 8 ± 5% per degree of surface warming. This rate is double the response projected by current-generation climate models and suggests that a substantial (16 to 24%) intensification of the global water cycle will occur in a future 2° to 3° warmer world. 

Still busy...

For ANZAC Day

Prisoner of war: my father's story - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Barrie Cassidy tells at length the story of his father's war.  A good read.

A bit busy....

More Beard

Lucky me. Here's another, meatier, bit of writing by Mary Beard. She's reviewing a new book about Caligula.

While he was undoubtedly a terrible man, Beard notes that some of the stories about him are not quite what they seem. In fact, the worst thing he did in I Claudius (the TV series of which I have only seen, once, when it was first run on TV in the 1970's) was completely invented:

Much more shocking was the portrayal of Caligula in BBC Television’s 1976 adaptation of I, Claudius. In his novels, Robert Graves had exploited the ancient allegations that Caligula had a suspiciously close relationship with his sister Drusilla. The inventive Jack Pulman, author of the screenplay, went even further. In a terrifying scene that has no source either in ancient accounts or in Graves’s narrative, he has Caligula (John Hurt) take on the guise of Jupiter and cut the baby Drusilla is carrying from her belly and – on the model of some versions of divine gestation and paternity in Greco-Roman myth – eat the foetus. The ‘Caesarian’ itself was not shown on screen, but Caligula’s very bloody mouth was. Deemed too much for American audiences, the scene was cut out of the PBS version of the series.

Odd how we got the full scene on the ABC, but the Americans didn't.

Anyhow, there is lots more good stuff in the review, and as usual, Beard is a good read.

Revelation considered

A witty and informative review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker about a new book by Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation can be found here.

In my experience, Revelation has not been paid much attention in Catholic education or liturgy.  I think most see it as a bit of an oddball book full of obscure references and not really worth trying to decode in full.   Protestant evangelicals, on the other hand, do treat it as a big Hollywood movie, as Gopnik amusingly compares it to in his opening paragraphs:

That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

Gopnik notes the unoriginal part of Pagel's book:

Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back.

but goes on to point to the more novel argument put by her:

 Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua. Jezebel, in particular—the name that John assigns her is that of an infamous Canaanite queen, but she’s seen preaching in the nearby town of Thyatira—suggests the women evangelists who were central to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema to a pious Jew like John. (“When John accuses ‘Balaam’ and ‘Jezebel’ of inducing people to ‘eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,’ he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them,” Pagels notes.) The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.

 All interesting stuff.

 

But, as a long time fan and promoter of the importance of gnostic writings (perhaps too much so), Pagel's book apparently goes on to talk about them, again, in the context of the times.  Gopnik quotes a "feminist" poem found at Nag Hammadi with this very funny line:

As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song.

As to how the book got into the Bible at all:

Pagels’s essential point is convincing and instructive: there were revelations all over Asia Minor and the Holy Land; John’s was just one of many, and we should read it as such. How is it, then, that this strange one became canonic, while those other, to us more appealing ones had to be buried in the desert for safekeeping, lest they be destroyed as heretical? Revelation very nearly did not make the cut. In the early second century, a majority of bishops in Asia Minor voted to condemn the text as blasphemous. It was only in the three-sixties that the church council, under the control of the fiery Athanasius, inserted Revelation as the climax of the entire New Testament. As a belligerent controversialist himself, Pagels suggests, Athanasius liked its belligerently controversial qualities. “Athanasius reinterpreted John’s vision of cosmic war to apply to the battle that he himself fought for more than forty-five years—the battle to establish what he regarded as ‘orthodox Christianity’ against heresy,” she writes.

That's probably about as much as I should fairly quote.  Go read the whole thing: it's great.

Credibility down

Roy Spencer, man of mystery | Open Mind

Roy Spencer, the satellite temperature lukewarmer climate scientist, has been fiddling with figures from the US Historical Climate Network (which is supposed to be accurate) and speculates that urban heat island type effects accounts for nearly all of recent US temperature increase.

As Tamino points out, this doesn't make sense when you consider Spencer's own satellite work contradicts this.

Spencer is firmly amongst the "skeptic" group that just spends all day speculating that something, anything, must be able to explain that temperature rises from increased CO2 will not be dangerous.

Believing, more or less

Belief in God strongest in US and Catholic countries, surveys find

According to this research looking at changes in belief in God internationally since 1991,  theism is gradually declining, but is increasing in a few places such as Russia, Slovenia and Israel.  (The last one is a bit of a surprise.  Maybe the Holocaust took its toll in that respect.)

But in an international survey that did not include China, one surely couldn't place too much  faith in the accuracy of the estimates.

The most curious part of the research is perhaps this:

Belief is highest among older adults. On average, 43 percent of those aged 68 and older are certain that God exists, compared with 23 percent of those 27 and younger, according to the report.

"Looking at differences among age groups, the largest increases in belief in God most often occur among those 58 years of age and older. This suggests that belief in God is especially likely to increase among the oldest groups, perhaps in response to the increasing anticipation of mortality," Smith said.

He noted that the higher level of belief was not simply a cohort effect, in which people carry forward attitudes shaped in younger years.

In the United States, for instance, 54 percent of people younger than 28 said they were certain of God's existence, compared with 66 percent of the people 68 and older.

In countries with low overall belief in God, the difference in belief between age groups is also strong. In France, for example, 8 percent of younger people said they were certain that God exists, compared with 26 percent of the people 68 and older. In Austria, 8 percent of the younger generation said they were certain in their belief, while 32 percent of people 68 and older were confident of God's existence.

I'm not sure if this is somehow related to decreasing belief in global warming amongst older people, which has often shown up in surveys. (I have long been maintaining that such denial is, essentially, a matter of faith in its own way.) It's worth remembering, though, in the US at least, all ages in the Evangelical churches are prominent disbelievers in AGW. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Catholics in any country are more likely to not dispute it.

Someone else will have to work out what this all means.

Hopeless

A remarkable and sad article here on the incredibly high rate of suicide in aboriginal communities in the Kimberley region. Alcohol abuse, and (it seems) a sort of cultural hopelessness is at the heart of the problem, making it very hard to address adequately.

The not so secret life of Richard?

So, here's how it goes. A not very interesting article found via Arts and Letters Daily about Walt Whitman leads me to a page full of links to essays by a homosexual academic and author which are, actually, pretty interesting about the history of this activity, particularly in England; particularly in the Georgian period. Have a look at this page where he lists many primary sources about the situation in the 18th century London. I saw a bit of documentary on SBS about the somewhat strange "Molly" gay culture in England at the time, but this website provides a lot of detail.

With all the disproportionate media attention that is given to gay marriage and rights these days, it's odd to realise that even three hundred years ago in London, I might have still been cursing that the local paper was carrying on so much about the topic, albeit from a very different perspective.

I don't believe everything Norton says on the whole subject; as with other gay academics, he seems inordinately keen to claim anyone in history as homosexual. But somewhere in there he notes Richard the Lionheart as been suspected of having a relationship with (at least) King Philip II of France. I think I had seen this article in the Guardian a couple of years ago, but noted that some historians were keen to explain that the idea of two blokes sharing a bed back then, even if they later talked about how much they liked each other, didn't necessarily mean sexual contact of any kind had taken place. (And, in fact, if it was just one overnight bedsharing visit - a point I'm not entirely clear on - it does seem unlikely.)

Fair enough, but when I Google the topic of Richard, this link comes up. From a Jesuit university. And it notes that the contemporary chronicler Roger of Hovedon wrote, apart from the short passage usually quoted about Richard and Philip sharing a bed and plate and really, really liking each other's company, another story about Richard which seems to directly record that Richard did not have a problem with "illicit intercourse":

In the same year, there came a hermit to king Richard, and, preaching the words of eternal salvation to him, said: "Be thou mindful of the destruction of Sodom, and abstain from what is unlawful; for if thou dost not, a vengeance worthy of God shall overtake thee". The king, however, intent upon the things of this world, and not those that are of God, was not able so readily to withdraw his mind from what was unlawful, unless a revelation should come to him from above or he should behold a sign. For he despised the person of his advisor, not understanding that sometimes the Lord reveals to babes the things that are hidden from the wise; for the lepers announced the good tidings to Samaria [2 Kings 7], and the ass of Balaam recalled its master from the unlawful way. Wherefore, the hermit, leaving the king, went his way, and hid himself from before his face. In the process of time, however, although the before-named king despised the admonitions of the poor hermit, still, by inspiration of Divine grace, he retained some part of his warning in his memory, having faith in the Lord, that He who recalled the publicans and the Canaanitish woman to repentance, in his great mercy would give to him a penitent heart.

Hence it was, that on the Lord's day in Easter when the Lord visited him with a rod of iron, not that he might bruise him, but that he might receive the scourging to his advantage. For on that day the Lord scourged him with a severe attack of illness, so that calling before him religious men, he was not ashamed to confess the guiltiness of his life, and after receiving absolution, took back his wife, whom for along time he had not known, and putting away all illicit intercourse, he remained constant to his wife and the two become one flesh and Lord gave him health of both body and soul…"

It's hard to read that any other way, isn't it? Unless one assumes he liked "illicit intercourse" only with women other than his wife. That seems a bit unlikely when the hermit's warning was specifically about sodomy, though. (In fact, had someone close to the king arranged the visit to encourage him to stop embarrassing behaviour, I wonder.)

As I see now from the Wikipedia entry on Richard notes that the "gay" theory only started in 1948, and summarises the situation as follows:

Victorian and Edwardian historians had rarely addressed this question, but in 1948 historian John Harvey challenged what he perceived as "the conspiracy of silence" surrounding Richard's homosexuality.^[102] This argument drew primarily on available chronicler accounts of Richard's behaviour, chronicler records of Richard's two public confessions and penitences, and Richard's childless marriage.^[103] This material is complicated by accounts of Richard having had at least one illegitimate child (Philip of Cognac), and allegations that Richard had sexual relations with local women during his campaigns.^[104]

Leading historians remain divided on the question of Richard's sexuality.^[105] Harvey's argument has gained considerable support;^[106] However, this view has been disputed by other historians, most notably John Gillingham.^[107] Drawing on other chronicler accounts, he argues that Richard was probably heterosexual.^[108]

Historian Jean Flori states that contemporary historians quite generally accept that Richard was homosexual.^[106][109] Flori also analysed contemporaneous accounts; he refuted Gillingham's arguments and concluded that Richard's two public confessions and penitences (in 1191 and 1195) must have referred to the "sin of sodomy".^[110] Flori cites contemporaneous accounts of Richard taking women by force^[111] and concludes that Richard was probably bisexual.^[112]

Flori and Gillingham agree that the contemporaneous accounts do not support the allegation that Richard had a homosexual relation with King Philip II of France, as suggested by some modern authors.^[113]

So, there is more to this than I thought, and I find it rather odd to think that such a figure, more commonly thought of now for gallivanting around Europe on a Crusade, and turning up unexpectedly at the end of Robin Hood movies, was actually the subject of much speculation as to his sex life at the time.

Well, I found it interesting, anyway.

A minor lunar mystery

Scientists suggest evidence of recent lunar volcanism

The article notes:

A team of researchers at India’s Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) claims it has found evidence of relatively recent volcanic activity on the Moon, using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Chadrayaan-1 spacecraft. According to the findings the central peak of Tycho crater contains features that are volcanic in origin, indicating that the Moon was geologically active during the crater’s formation 110 million years ago.

But the more interesting bit:

In addition, large boulders ranging in size from 33 meters to hundreds of yards across have been spotted on Tycho’s central peaks by LRO, including one 400-foot (120-meter) -wide specimen nestled atop the highest summit. How did such large boulders get there and what are they made of?

The researchers hint that they may also be volcanic in origin.

“A surprise findings revealed the presence of large boulders–about 100 meter in size –on top of the peak. Nobody knew how did they reach the top,” said Prakash Chauhan, a PRL scientist.