Bound to go over well in the US

Cardinal Marx urges Europe to move ‘beyond capitalism’ | CatholicHerald.co.uk

Cardinal Reinhard Marx has called for a “social market economy” in the wake of the fiscal crisis that has gripped much of Europe over the past year.

In a talk delivered at Georgetown University in Washington, Cardinal Marx, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, said the economy needed to move “beyond capitalism” in order to be more fair.

He added that he was not calling for the abolition of capitalism, saying that capitalism was “an element” in the social market economy he has in mind. But Cardinal Marx suggested that it was the practice of “financial capitalism” in the era since the tearing down of the Iron Curtain that had brought Europe to its crisis point today....


Berkley Centre director Thomas Banchoff noted that some in the United States interpret the Catholic social teaching principle of subsidiarity – which holds that decisions or actions should not be made on a higher level when a lower level of competence would suffice – as meaning “keep the government out of it”.

Cardinal Marx replied: “The state is not a bad thing, as Aristotle told his disciples”, nor is the state “unfriendly”. Without the state, he said, “man does not come to the fullest possible life”, adding: “You cannot navigate the common good only with the assistance of families. It is not possible.”

The cardinal travelled from Washington to Chicago, where he was to lead a May 31-June 1 symposium called “Toward a Moral Economy”.

Seems an odd result

Top risk of stroke for normal-weight adults: Getting under 6 hours of sleep

The participants had no history of stroke, transient ischemic attack, stroke symptoms or high risk for OSA at the start of the study, being presented today at SLEEP 2012. Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham recorded the first stroke symptoms, along with demographic information, stroke risk factors, depression symptoms and various health behaviors.

After adjusting for body-mass index (BMI), they found a strong association with daily sleep periods of less than six hours and a greater incidence of stroke symptoms for middle-age to older adults, even beyond other risk factors. The study found no association between short sleep periods and stroke symptoms among overweight and obese participants.

"In employed middle-aged to older adults, relatively free of major risk factors for stroke such as obesity and sleep-disordered breathing, short sleep duration may exact its own negative influence on stroke development," said lead author Megan Ruiter, PhD. "We speculate that short sleep duration is a precursor to other traditional stroke risk factors, and once these traditional stroke risk factors are present, then perhaps they become stronger risk factors than sleep duration alone."

A three movie weekend

It's been a good weekend in Brisbane to be inside watching movies on TV, and I'm inspired to give mini reviews of a strange trio of viewing:

*  AI:  Artificial Intelligence - this is the first time I have seen it since at the cinema in  2001, where I distinctly remember a woman in the smallish audience saying loudly at the end "well, that was weird".   And let's face it, it is an odd movie:  certainly the most expensive and melancholic story about future robots ever made.  But it's a really remarkable looking film, and as with Minority Report, Spielberg manages a creepy vision of a half dystopian future that sticks in the mind for days after seeing it.   The acting is also really fine, I think, and the direction extremely pleasing in the way Spielberg routinely is.

Watching it this time, it occurred to me that it is pretty much a realisation of what I read was George Lucas' original idea for Star Wars - to tell a story from the robots' point of view.   While the film is not thematically novel (I think its most similar predecessor is actually Astroboy), it is the best treatment of the existential crisis  that embodied AI itself may suffer that has ever been made. 

Many people feel sure that the ending was Spielberg's idea tacked on to a story which probably originally ended with a robot suicide; certainly I can understand why people suspect this, as it has his familiar theme of "family" re-union.   But he has stated in interviews that the parts which people suspect are his (and he must be referring to the last 10 or 15 minutes) were always in the Kubrick treatment which he turned into a script.   Until someone else has seen Kubrick's treatment, I think we should just take his word for it, and so some of the criticisms about the movie are, in a sense, made on a false presumption.   In any event, I don't think the ending is overly sentimental; or at least, it's certainly a bitter-sweet type of sentimentality.  In fact, it is ambiguous as to exactly has happened with David - I have just read somewhere that John Williams says he dies at the end, and if the whole "resurrection" was designed to let him shut down in peace, that does make sense.  Yet the voice over is ambiguous on the point.  I guess ambiguity does not always hold back a science fiction film from greatness, but it tends not to help.   

Which leads me to the the major point that the movie can be faulted for - the lack of clarity about the spindly creatures at the end.  They are, everyone now accepts, meant to be advanced "robots"; but the cues by which one is meant to definitely understand that on first viewing are far from as clear as they should be.  I don't even like their design, and the quasi weightlessness they exhibit which also adds to the confusion over whether they are meant to be "otherworldly" or not.  There was, after all, one large spindly looking alien spied in the mists of the mother ship at the end of Close Encounters, and memory of that must surely have been in many viewers' minds.

But, having understood them as advanced, evolved "mechas", their apparent concern for David does raise a philosophical question of interest for transhumanism:    do we really have a solid basis for assuming that love and altruism would be the outcome of super-advanced AI?  Or would future intelligence, losing its connection to flesh and blood emotionalism, appear to us as just ruthless and cold?   Frank Tipler argued that game theory was reason to believe it would be altruistic, but I am not sure how convinced other futurists are about this.

In any event, despite its flaws, it is a highly original and interesting film, and more praise to Spielberg for even attempting such "difficult" material and nearly pulling it off.

* Lost Horizon (1973 version):    Oh Good Lord - I knew this film had a horrible reputation, but I attempted yesterday (mostly successfully) to plough through and check it out for myself.  (My kids kept walking in and out of the room saying "you said this was terrible, why are you still watching it?")

It is spectacularly bad in every conceivable respect - a cast completely unsuited to a quasi-romantic musical; horrendous, cringe-inducing acting by nearly everyone (Michael York and Sally Kellerman in particular); a bunch of truly terrible songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David with the only "memorable" one (The World is a Circle) working as an unpleasant ear worm that just won't stop; the rest of the music (melodramatic strings) sounding like it escaped from a 1940's film; an awful script; even sets which look cheap and tacky.

It's long; it's awful; it's a wonder anyone who appeared in it ever worked in film again.  Comes close to being recommended as "so bad its good", but like Ayn Rand, its length mitigates against that recommendation.

*Sunshine (2007):    I like space faring science fiction, generally, and while this one starts out in a sort of promising fashion, by the end it is a complete and utter mess.

The fault, I think, must be put down to the director Danny Boyle.   I just can't believe that an editor alone could be responsible for such a hash made in the last 30 minutes or so.  Sorry to keep bringing up Spielberg again, but Boyle here is like the anti-Spielberg in terms of making a film in which the action sequences become narratively nearly completely opaque.

As for science, we'll not dwell on the improbabilities of attempting to re-start the sun with all the fissile material on Earth.   That's just an improbability to accept, and without which there is no movie.  But it is remarkable that for a script which showed some vague concern for having a plausible looking massive spaceship, they get some science very wrong.  The super-fast freeze of a body in the vacuum of space is the main example, but the whole "everything that gets out of shield shadow instantly explodes in sparks" shtick was not very realistic either.  

I am really surprised that the movie scores 75% on Rottentomatoes, and am inclined, even without worrying about the science, to go along with this (spoiler containing) summary:

The crew seemed like a bunch of college dorm dwellers thrown into a really bad camping trip.  The crew seemed… unprofessional.  And far less trained and together than you would have expected.  They also make sure one, and only one, person can do any job on the ship.  For a crew replicating a previous failed mission, I might think they’d want to have multiple redundancies. And the worst part: I thought this was just an sci-fi thriller.  No, it’s a slasher film.  The director uses some stupid tricks (e.g., 1 to 2 frame still picture inserts to create a sense of foreboding) to goose the story, and the final bit with a psycho, 3rd degree burned astronaut from the first failed mission stalking the crew and slashing/stabbing them was just too much.  

I'm very glad I didn't spend money to see it.

Much warmer

US spring warming off the charts

The United States, excluding Alaska, Hawaii and overseas territories, had an average temperature of 57.1 degrees Fahrenheit (13.9 Celsius) from March through May, 5.2 degrees (2.9 Celsius) above the average from 1901 to 2000, the data showed.

"Spring 2012 marked the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record for the contiguous United States," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement.

This year's spring was up 2.0 degrees (1.1 Celsius) from the previous warmest spring in the United States which was recorded in 1910, the agency said.

In other news from Physorg, a study suggests that increased CO2 may make it much easier for wide varieties of rice (and other food crops) to exchange genes with farmed crops, which is not a good thing for agriculture.

A great writer departs

BBC News - Author Ray Bradbury dies, aged 91

At his best, Bradbury was a fantastically gifted writer, although I think his style was probably best shown in short stories rather than novels.  That said, I hold "Something Wicked This Way Comes" in very high regard.

Increased realism

Indigenous 'solutions' just disempower us further - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I think it says a lot about public attitudes towards the old, left wing, arguments about aboriginal issues that this article run at the ABC Drum website by an aboriginal activist bemoaning the lack of "empowerment" (amongst other platitudes we've heard many times before) being at the core of aboriginal problems in the Northern Territory is met (for the most part) with strong cynicism in the comments.

Fortunately, I think it is fair to say that the Labor Party is just not as captured by this rhetoric as it used to be.  But of course, they remain the party most likely to be hampered somewhat by internal conflict over how much weight to give to ideology to the detriment of outcomes.

Walter Shaw might also be impliedly giving permission for politicians to drop something that I am sure many people find annoyingly political correct:

Politicians and bureaucrats love to open speeches with: "I would like to pay respect to the traditional owners of the land in which we are meeting here today, both past and present."

But these are just words, and they are tokenistic words at that. They do not reflect the real actions of government. The 'present' they refer to is no different to the past.

It seems to me that many people would welcome a politician who at least modified the policy as to when this should be said to something like this:  "If I know a local aboriginal community leader of some note is present, I'll say it.  But if I am addressing general group of people, and the function has no connection whatsoever with issues of aboriginality or entitlement to land, I'm not going to continue mouthing a tokenistic formula of no import to the occasion."

Happy transit day

I might take my binoculars to work so I can try projecting the sun and see the small dot of Venus myself.  But if that doesn't work, there are many links of webcams to be found via Astroblogger's page.

As for the history of past transits and their significance, this article has an interesting summary.

Update:  as taken from my balcony, about 20 minutes ago:

The problems with immortality

Do You Really Want to Live Forever? - Reason.com

It's rare that I recommend something from Reason.com (as far as I can tell, everything is always a government's fault), but this lengthy review of a book talking about the technical and philosophical problems with imagining how immortality would work is very good.   

Crazy Mel

Heaven and Mel review: Joe Eszterhas's e-book makes the anti-Semitic star sound worse than ever.

Slate looks at a whole book Joe Eszterhas has written about the breakdown of his working relationship with Gibson, which was recently detailed when he (Joe) released a recording of Mel going berserk about why he hadn't finished a movie script yet.  

Apart from some further details about how dangerous Gibson sounds when he is upset (Eszterhas says he has a "pornographic snuff film" that plays inside his head), here's one novel theory that Mel's Dad apparently believes:

“Did you know that Cardinal Ottaviani sat on Pope John Paul I’s face and suffocated him so they could get the Pope they wanted, Pope John Paul II?” the elder Gibson asks Ezsterhas during a visit to a church built with the profits from The Passion.

I wonder if Mel believes that too...

Have my doubts

Science fiction review: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. - Slate Magazine

Go to the link for a gushing review of a new book by a pretty well known science fiction writer.  Personally, I didn't find the first novel in his Mars trilogy to be all that great, although there are parts of it which have stuck in my memory.  I didn't go on to try the next two books.

The review gives enough plot details to make me think the new book suffers at least one of the problems I had with the Mars novel - he seems wildly optimist about the speed of technological change in a way that just feels rather improbable.   It always seems safer to me for science fiction writers to not be so specific about their future chronology, and leave the reader guessing a bit as to how far in the future we are talking.

The Great Soda Crisis of 2012

Here's The Colbert Reports funny take on the Bloomberg restriction on the sale of huge size sweetened soda:

Great criminal trials of Dubai

gulfnews : Businessman and sister-in-law in court over alleged public indecency

A businessman and his sister-in-law were in court for allegedly exchanging kisses in public while the man taught the woman how to use chopsticks in a restaurant.

They were later acquitted.

Prosecutors had charged the 35-year-old Egyptian businessman and the 39-year-old Emirati woman of committing a lewd act in public when they allegedly kissed on the cheeks and lips in a Chinese restaurant.

An Emirati, who was dining with his family at the same restaurant, reported to police that he had spotted the businessman moving from one side of the bench to the other. He sat beside the woman and kissed her while teaching her how to use chopsticks.

The suspects, 35-year-old M.M. and 39-year-old L.H., denied the accusations before the Dubai Misdemeanour Court. They said the charges were ridiculous and impossibile because they are related.
“It is impossible for me to kiss my sister-in-law and especially in front of my wife [L.H.’s sister]. I am innocent,” said M.M.

L.H. also said she could not have kissed her brother-in-law in public and in front of her sister.
The claimant testified that the incident happened when he was dining along with his wife and mother-in-law. “He started teaching her how to eat with chopsticks. He hugged her and kissed her neck. Then he kissed her cheeks and to my surprise he kissed her lips in front of all the diners. My wife informed the restaurant management, who said he could not do anything. My wife then called the police. They were seated just four metres from us and nothing was blocking our vision. They hugged and kissed in front of everyone,” said the claimant.

 All very odd.

I'm on a roll with bad news this week...

Climate change: Arctic passes 400 parts per million milestone - CSMonitor.com

More depressing news

Global economic crisis: China, India, Brazil are slowing down, plunging world into possible recession. - Slate Magazine

ABC viewing recommendations

Two TV stories that I recently found well worth watching on the ABC:

*  Foreign Correspondent did the story of the real Great Escape.   (That is, the true story that was behind the famous movie.)

*  Catalyst last a long science story on the earthquake devastation in Christchurch.  

As usual, top quality product from these shows.

Big solar thermal

In Pictures: The World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Plant - Technology Review

Have a look here for some interesting photos showing the construction of a large solar thermal power plant near Las Vegas.

They do require an enormous, flat area.   Australia  does have quite a lot of those, but not always near where most people live.

Safe for the moment

Volcanic super-eruptions may have surprisingly short fuses

While the article's heading may sound like a bit of a worry, the story indicates that there might be at hundreds of years warning of a truly massive super-eruption:

These eruptions are known as super-eruptions because they are more than 100 times the size of ordinary volcanic eruptions like Mount St. Helens. They spew out tremendous flows of super-heated gas, ash and rock capable of blanketing entire continents and inject enough particulate into the stratosphere to throw the global climate into decade-long volcanic winters. In fact, there is evidence that one super-eruption, which took place in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, may have come remarkably close to wiping out the entire human species.

Geologists generally believe that a super-eruption is produced by a giant pool of magma that forms a couple of miles below the surface and then simmers for 100,000 to 200,000 years before erupting. But a new study suggests that once they form, these giant magma bodies may only exist for a few thousand years, perhaps only a few hundred years, before erupting.

But the better news:

As far as geologists can tell, no such giant crystal-poor magma body currently exists that is capable of producing a super-eruption. The research team believes this may be because these magma bodies exist for a relatively short time rather than persisting for hundreds of thousands of years as previously thought.

Depressed about coal

EPA Coal Rule: Why the fuel won’t be replaced anytime soon. - Slate Magazine

A really quite depressing read about the international increase in the use of coal:

Coal use is soaring because demand for electricity is soaring. Between 1990 and 2010, global electricity production increased by about 450 terawatt-hours per year. That’s the equivalent of adding one Brazil (which used 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2010) to the electricity sector every year. And the International Energy Agency expects global electricity use to continue growing by about one Brazil per year through 2035.

Perhaps the best example of growing electricity demand can be seen in Vietnam. Between 2001 and 2010, electricity use and coal use in the country increased by 227 percent and 175 percent, respectively. And more coal is on the way. Last September, Virginia-based AES Corp. finalized a deal to build a $1.5 billion, 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Vietnam’s Quang Ninh province.

Or consider China, which uses more than three times as much coal as the United States. About 70,000 megawatts of new coal-fired electric generation capacity will likely come online in China over the next two years. And the world’s most populous country has plans to build another 270,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity. Over the next two decades, India will likely add another 72,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity. For comparison, the total of all U.S. coal-fired electric capacity is about 317,000 megawatts, and that capacity is declining as generators switch to natural gas, which, in some regions of the country, is now cheaper than coal.

But we needn’t look only at developing countries. Germany may lead the world in solar-photovoltaic capacity with some 25,000 megawatts of installed panels, but RWE, the German utility, will soon begin operating the world’s largest lignite-burning power plant, a new 2,100-megawatt facility located south of Dusseldorf. Over the next two years or so, Germany will add 8,400 megawatts of new coal-fired generation capacity. And another 5,500 megawatts of coal-fired capacity is awaiting approval.

In fact, thanks to the slumping European economy, electricity producers in the region are already ramping up their use of coal. On May 8, Reuters reported that German utilities are likely to produce about 12 percent more electricity from coal this year than they did in 2011 thanks to abundance of cheap permits issued under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

Colebatch on bonds and debt

Here's the key passage from Tim Colebatch's column today, again attacking the idea that Australia is in trouble because of too much debt:

Since 1998, our bond yields have usually ranged between 5 and 6 per cent. But in recent days, the Office of Financial Management issued a new 10-year bond at a yield of just 3.15 per cent, a five-year bond at 2.65 per cent, and a three-year bond at just 2.52 per cent. Yields have fallen by half in a year.

Why? Because global investors have flocked in to buy Australian government debt. Their concern is not that we have too much debt, but too little. IMF figures show that of the 34 advanced economies, Australia has the third smallest ratio of gross debt to GDP: including state and municipal debt, it's just 24 per cent of GDP. By comparison, Germany has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 79 per cent, the United States 110 per cent, and Japan 241 per cent.

The Coalition and its allies are like a broken record warning that Australia is swimming in debt and putting itself in danger. That is simply untrue. Ask yourself: if Labor's borrowing has put us in danger, why is Australia one of only eight countries rated AAA by all three global ratings agencies? Sure, ratings agencies make mistakes, as we all do, but are they that incompetent?

He really is Labor's best friend - he has a dispassionate way of writing that I always find pretty convincing.

Weekend reviews

*  Men in Black 3:   it's pretty good, but to be honest does not contain all that many laughs.  It really is more of an science fiction action adventure movie (where the science is unimportant, like on Dr Who), and as such it works well.  I did not see the twist coming near the end that many reviewers noted is surprisingly moving.  (It is, and a great idea for the plot.  In fact, what is also surprising is that the movie was reported to have started filming without a finished script.  You would never guess it from the final product.) 

*  The McDonald's Sydney Stack burger:  features pineapple, tomato, bacon and (I think) beetroot.   I liked it a lot.  Another damned "limited time only" burger though, d'oh.

*  Picked up a flea market for $1 a dvd set of the complete second season of Scrubs (now 10 years old!).   Was very amused listening to some of the audio commentary (they don't do it for every episode, but still).  The creator Bill Lawrence and actors involved in the show come across as very down to earth types, and as they were doing commentary for shows they had made a couple of years previously, it was funny listening to them laughing at some stuff they had half forgotten.  And talking about trivia like their previous haircuts, etc.

Apparently, Neil Flynn (as Janitor) after the first season just improvised as huge number of his lines. 

It remains an enormously likeable show.