Beware the lead

Boys' sickness traced to an old crystal decanter

Alicia had been storing her expressed milk in an old crystal glass decanter - the type of family heirloom found in many Australian households.

But the brilliant old-fashioned crystalware, created by combining molten quartz with lead compounds, was slowly leaching lead into her milk.

It was making her twin boys sick.  It's an odd use to put the family crystal to, though.

This reminds me, there was once an episode of a medically themed show - I think it was Doogie Howser MD (before we realised he might have secretly had a thing for Vinnie) - in which an elderly woman's illness turned out to be lead poisoning from using some plates and bowls she got from (I think) Mexico.  It was a valuable lesson for doctors about sitting down and spending hours chatting about anything with their ill patients who have hard to diagnose problems, or something like that.  Or maybe it was an advertisement for more thorough toxicological testing when you can't tell what's going on.  One or the other.

Actually, I wonder if lead poisoning is more readily recognised in Australia than the US.  As this recent report noted, lead levels in kids in older Australian houses being renovated can often be a real problem.   In fact, I know of someone whose young daughter got dangerous levels many years ago before he had heard of this danger.   The first he knew something was wrong was the dog getting wobbly in the legs. 

Lead is nasty stuff.  Recently its continued use in shooting game birds in England was noted as a potential health problem too.  And even for those waterbirds that aren't shot, they often ingest lead shot and it can kill them.  The lead shot is not supposed to be used, but the law is apparently widely ignored.

I see that lead shot is also banned for hunting in Australia.  I wonder if our hunters are following that law?

Odd Asian pursuits

BBC News - Close up: Urban shrimp fishing in Taiwan

I knew that the Japanese liked to fish from stocked tanks for fun, but didn't know the Taiwanese do it for shrimp/prawns.    I also didn't know you could catch a prawn with a rod and tiny hook.   Some fine odd things to learn from the video story at the link, then.

The Secret to Scriptural Boredom

There's a somewhat long and fairly dull article at Salon entitled "Who Wrote the Book of Mormon," which spends a lot of time looking at the potential influence of John Bunyan (of "The Pilgrim's Progress" fame) on the composition of various stories in the Mormon scripture. 

Towards the end, however, there was a paragraph of interest:

 When Smith produced the Book of Mormon, he did not sit down and carefully compose and revise his narratives the way most authors do. Adapting a practice from folk magic, he placed a seer stone in the bottom of an upturned hat, held his face to the hat to block out light, and then proceeded to dictate the Book of Mormon to a scribe, without reference to texts or notes. In approximately sixty working days, he completed the Book of Mormon – a work in excess of 500 printed pages – and did not return to revise the text, beyond minor adjustments (mostly spelling and punctuation). Yet, the work contains a highly complex and powerful narrative structure that remains internally cohesive. The significance of the work, in literary terms, is that the text of the Book of Mormon represents a first draft – one with little revision to Smith’s original stream of narrative creation. Few authors have ever attempted a comparable feat.

I don't think I had heard before that the Book was dictated in such a peculiar way; or if I had, I had forgotten.  My recent assumption was that Joseph Smith had written it in private, working with the gold plates in front of him.  (Before they disappeared back into heaven, or whatever.)

So is there somewhere else to confirm this?

Well, the grandly named "Institute for Religious Research," an American Christian evangelical set up of unclear size which seems to devote much of its time to trying to convince Mormons to become mainstream Christians, appears to confirm it, with a drawing to illustrate:

The part about it being a "folk magic" method somewhat like trance mediumship is interesting.  The period of its creation (in the 1820's) is a couple of decades ahead of the creation of the modern Spiritualist movement, with its extensive use of trance mediumship, that got underway in New York at the end of the 1840's with the Fox Sisters. 

But can I trust this Christian group in its account?  Well, yes it seems I can, because a long article from the Journal of Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University acknowledges that much of it came this way:

During the translation process, the witnesses were able to observe, in an open setting, the following:
•Joseph Smith placing the interpreters (either the Urim and Thummim or the seer stone) in a hat and placing his face into the hat;
•Joseph dictating for long periods of time without reference to any books, papers, manuscripts, or even the plates themselves;
•Joseph spelling out unfamiliar Book of Mormon names;
•after each dictated sequence, the scribe reading back to Joseph what was written so that Joseph could check the correctness of the manuscript;
•Joseph starting a dictation session without prompting from the scribe about where the previous session had ended.

Reading this reminded me of how the Quran is supposed to have been a recited, received text as well.    

And this, I realised, explains why both books are incredibly dull to read.

Yeah, yeah, I know:  the Quran is supposed to be like powerful poetry in its original Arabic and loses a lot in translation.  (I have read Karen Armstrong's book Muhammad - A Biography of the Prophet recently, and that is how she explains it anyway.  I must give a review of the book soon.)  But as I have noted before on this blog, you can get great narrative stories in the Bible that can keep your interest; yet in comparison reading either the Quran or the Book of Mormon (in the short periods I have tried) is  perfectly described as "chloroform in print," as Mark Twain said of the Mormon source.   

Is it any wonder this is the case when they were both composed via lengthy dictation? 

It's also somewhat amusing to realise that a modern, influential religion was derived, literally, from a man talking into his hat.

The problem with living close to the sea

BBC News - Sandy: New Jersey devastation

Any time a hurricane goes up the East Coast of America, I am a bit surprised to see photos of houses built right on the beach getting washed away.    This style of house in particular:

This photo is actually from Hurricane Irene last year.

Hurricane Sandy has had the same effect, of course.  The link at the top shows the extent of the flooding in New Jersey, which appears to have a very large number of houses built very close to sea level.

Given that hurricanes on the East coast are not exactly rare, I'm not sure who would build or buy a house so close to such danger.

I suppose you could say the same thing about Australia, and the Gold Coast in particular.   The main  thing arguably different is that very large cyclones have never been so common so far south.  When I was a child, small cyclones coming down towards Brisbane seemed much more common, but even then they used to peter out by about the time they reached the Sunshine Coast.   As Brisbanites know, since the 1970's, it seems even those smallish cyclones have stopped coming that far South.

In other reading about the hurricane damage, I was amused to read a great bit of sarcasm in a thread at The Atlantic.  The article itself was about how the range of damage across Manhattan ranged from severe, to barely noticeable.  Someone in  the comments went on about how it hardly affected his corner, in this fashion:

My impression of the Monday Night storm does not correspond with
apocalyptic vision now being presented by The New York Times for free on
 its web page.

In my area there was never really any storm, as in storm qua storm,
or storm per se, although some miles to the south a few Atlantic Ocean
frontages reportedly got slammed. 

Which got the response:

I was under the impression something important had happened to NYC.  But
 now that you've told me nothing important happened to you, I can stop
being confused.  I will never again be under the impression anything
important happens in NYC.  Thank you so much for being the only person
whose perspective and experience matters.

Heh.

Method actor

Daniel Day-Lewis on Playing Abraham Lincoln - NYTimes.com

I'm not overly confident that Spielberg's Lincoln biopic will work:  I suspect it will be too "talky" for it's own good.     But still, it's interesting reading about Daniel Day Lewis' acting methods. 

As approved by Bugs

Carrots Gain Bigger Roles at Some Restaurants - NYTimes.com

If this article is any guide, we might be seeing more new varieties of carrot in our supermarkets soon.   I haven't even tried the purple ones yet, though. 

Could it work?

Disney buys Lucasfilm and Star Wars franchise 

I don't know:  it seems to me that it might just be possible that, if you keep George Lucas' hands away from the script and themes and direction, someone else could come up with another decent movie in the Star Wars universe.

Still, it is hardly a good sign for those who like to complain that Hollywood has run out of ideas.

Lakeside disaster

Ancient tsunami devastated Lake Geneva shoreline 

I didn't know this:

 In ad 563, more than a century after the Romans gave up control of what is now Geneva, Switzerland, a deadly tsunami on Lake Geneva poured over the city walls. Originating from a rock fall where the River Rhône enters at the opposite end of the lake to Geneva, the tsunami destroyed surrounding villages, people and livestock, according to two known historical accounts.

It seems to have been caused by a rock fall, but not involving an earthquake.  How odd. 

The Ayn Rand Show

Ayn Rand Private Access Show from Michaela Watkins     

Sounds like a lot...

Not-so-permanent permafrost

As much as 44 billion tons of nitrogen and 850 billion tons of carbon stored in arctic permafrost, or frozen ground, could be released into the environment as the region begins to thaw over the next century as a result of a warmer planet according to a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey. This nitrogen and carbon are likely to impact ecosystems, the atmosphere, and water resources including rivers and lakes. For context, this is roughly the amount of carbon stored in the atmosphere today.

The article is a bit vague and unclear, but maybe we'll be hearing more about this estimate soon.

Steve's Data Dump

Darren the Robot from Good Game Spawn Point gets some humour every few weeks by talking about the enormous data dump he can barely contain. Who am I to not follow such champagne humour?  Here are some things that have caught my eye the last coupla weeks:

 * The Guardian had a profile of Derren Brown, whose shows on SBS I have recently mentioned. Interesting.

* Another Guardian profile, this one of David Mitchell, who is probably the funniest comedian/actor in Britain at the moment. He's written an autobiography (probably at an inappropriately young age) but still, as he is soon to be married, I forgive him.

* Localised electronic warfare via cruise missile appears to be getting closer (remember, I suggested this sort of device, which I guessed may already exist, would be useful in any Israeli attack on Iran):

The Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) is an effort to build a missile that flies over -- not into -- a target, be it an entire military base, neighborhood, or a even a lone tank and shuts down all the electronics inside without harming a soul. (Think of it almost as a mini-EMP in a rocket.) On Oct. 16, a CHAMP missile flew an hour-long preprogrammed route low over the Utah desert, "degrading and defeating" the electronics inside seven different targets. In a building along the route packed with computers, the screens all went dark as CHAMP sailed by, emitting a blast of high-power microwaves, according to CHAMP-maker Boeing's Oct. 22 press release announcing the test flight. (The weapon even took out the remotely controlled TV cameras that were monitoring the tests, claimed Boeing.)

 *  Here are two Fukushima stories:

1.   Cosmic rays may be able to be used to provide a sort of "x-ray" of the interior of damaged nuclear reactors.  Cool.

2.   Fish from near Fukushima are still not safe to eat, which is hardly surprising, I guess.

*   New York's finest:  via Mind Hacks, you can read a New York Times story about the police Emergency Service Unit, which has the task of talking down would be suicide jumpers off the city's building and bridges.   They get about 500 jobs a year, by the looks, and if you want some confirmation of the type of person who might be expected to be the most selfish, look no further:

 On building rescues, the reactions of onlookers are as varied as the city’s neighborhoods. In Midtown Manhattan or the financial district, for instance, pedestrians are more likely to yell, “Jump!”; in residential areas, like Harlem or Brooklyn, where the would-be jumper might be a familiar face, residents will provide officers with information about the person. They will cheer and applaud officers who make a successful grab, Detective Taylor said.

*  One of the oddest ideas for a medical test ever:

The medical engineers at Queen Mary used 60 healthy volunteers and 60 patients to test whether self-measurement of the shape of the urine stream could be used to predict maximum urine flow rate. They found that a simple measurement of the characteristic shape of the flow pattern could accurately predict the maximum urine flow rate; important in the diagnosis of urinary problems such as those associated with prostate enlargement.

 *  A study indicating that sea surface temperatures (in at least parts of the ocean) 250 million years ago could have been very hot indeed:

It is also the first study to show water temperatures close to the ocean's surface can reach 40°C – a near-lethal value at which marine life dies and photosynthesis stops. Until now, climate modellers have assumed sea-surface temperatures cannot surpass 30°C. The findings may help us understand future climate change patterns. The dead zone would have been a strange world – very wet in the tropics but with almost nothing growing. No forests grew, only shrubs and ferns. No fish or marine reptiles were to be found in the tropics, only shellfish, and virtually no land animals existed because their high metabolic rate made it impossible to deal with the extreme temperatures. Only the polar regions provided a refuge from the baking heat.

 *  The Babbage blog at the Economist said that its possible that the future zero emission car of the future will be powered by vaporising liquid nitrogen.  I had never heard of this idea before...

*  Horrible Histories continues to amuse.  I did like this Shakespeare song the other week, even if it wasn't laugh out loud funny:  it was just clever and well done:

For those desperately missing possum photos…

Testing still....

The Secret of Our Non-Success - NYTimes.com
More testing of blog entries from android tablet....

A test from an android tablet

Here we go:

Away to climb a mountain of books

Here's some of the backlog of books I've got waiting to be read, by description if not title:
a Charles Sheffield science fiction novel; the first volume of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene; three Graham Greene novels (I'll have to space them out, as too much "Greeneland" in one go is almost certainly depressing); "The First Blitz" about Zepplin bombing raids in WW1;  "The Third Man Factor" about the experience people in crisis or isolation often have of some other presence;  a book from the 1960's by some German author about religion in ancient Israel; "Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis; a memoir about growing up in Ireland in the 50's and 60's; "Johnno" by David Malouf (actually, I haven't spotted that for a while, but it will turn up somewhere); "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" by Simon Winchester; an early Michael Crichton medical thriller I had never heard of until my wife found it;  two books of World War 2 memoirs (one about the air force, the other POW experiences); and a James Glieck book about information.

And I haven't even mentioned the 3 or 4 I have somewhere on the iPad (two about paranormal stuff, and one fairly academic tome about Thugee in India).

Most of these have come from second hand book purchases or were free downloads.

I need to take a couple of weeks off from blogging, and start reading of an evening instead.

I should do something stupid for Dodopathy again too.  

Remember to come back!

The uncertain Abbott

It was interesting to read yesterday that Tony Abbott, in letters to BA Santamaria before he moved into politics, did not really seem clear about the side in which he should seek a home:

But which of the major parties was the more suitable?

Labor's previous 30 years of hostility to Santamaria weighed against it but Abbott wrote, "our roots and the origins of our political culture are there". But if the ALP was not "dominated" by Santamaria-style ideas, it would succumb to "the grip of the Left or of soulless pragmatists". This was intolerable.

However, the Liberal Party was just as problematic. It was "without soul, direction or inspiring leadership", while its members were divided between "surviving trendies and the more or less simple-minded advocates of the free market".

The Liberal Party's mixture of "hand-wringing indecision or inappropriate economic Ramboism and perhaps their lack of political professionalism" struck Abbott as a fatal combination.

The choice on offer was bleak. "To join either existing party involves holding one's nose," he wrote. "Either way would upset some. But to do nothing dooms us to extinction." For a while, the choice for Abbott seemed to be the ALP. The NSW Labor government led by right-wing stalwart Barrie Unsworth was due to fight an election in March 1988 and this was surely "a window of opportunity" to be exploited.

In a careful but forceful reply, Santamaria rejected the suggestion of the NCC "going back to our Labor origins in an organised way, as our central strategy".

Santamaria noted that Catholics had largely run the NSW ALP since the 1950s but that the only result of Catholic influence in Labor governments, both in NSW and federally, had been "jobs for the boys".

Santamaria also was dismissive of "the reptilian Liberals", who lacked the capacity to win or wield power.

So perhaps Abbott was not so wrong after all. Santamaria did not doubt that, in the person of young Tony, there was an opportunity for "a real apostolate in Labor ranks".

I find the "the Party no longer knows what it stands for" analysis of either Labor or Liberals rather boring, and this story of Abbott's uncertainty as to where to jump just goes to confirm how the lines between both were pretty blurred since the 1980's.

I also am reminded that Bob Carr had a very clever come back at Lindsay Tanner's "Labor has lost its purpose" burst of publicity a few weeks ago.  He's what Bob noted on 7.30:

I just think there've been so many books on the subject "What's wrong with Labor?," it's become like other - it's just become another genre, it's like vampire fiction. I've dug out a quote because I knew you were going to raise Lindsay's book with me. The earliest book written analysing the experience of Labor in government is called How Labor Governs, by Vere Gordon Childe. It came out in 1923. And here's one sentence from it: quote: "The Labor Party, starting with a band of inspired socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use that power when attained except for the profit of individuals," unquote. Now, this line of indictment has been used against every Labor government, against Ben Chifley's government, against John Curtin's, against Gough Whitlam's, against Hawke and Keating, until years after the government has passed, it's seen as being a champion of Labor values. The tradition of writing books lamenting the decline of real Labor is almost as old as the party itself.

 Clever Carr.

Choice at whose cost?

New singers, old songs: alcohol bans in Aboriginal communities

Here's an interesting article by a researcher in the area about the Liberal governments in Queensland and the NT plans to ease restrictions on alcohol in aboriginal communities.  

The issue is complicated, and but the writer thinks there is much danger in relaxing the restrictions.  I wasn't aware of this:

Another favoured policy response has been to urge remote communities to establish licensed clubs (as the Bjelke-Petersen government did in Cape York in the 1980s), in the belief that communities with clubs will export fewer drinkers to towns. The limited evidence available to test this proposition does not support it, but its plausibility to urban voters is obvious. The real problem for NT governments, however, has been that most communities have repeatedly made it clear that they do not want clubs. Out of more than 100 Aboriginal communities in the NT, just seven currently operate licensed clubs, and one has a licensed store. All of these are located in the Top End.

A few other communities have run clubs in the past, only to abandon them as too much trouble. In two or three other communities, discussions are currently under way that may or may not lead to those communities applying to the NT Licensing Commission for club licenses.

I think the Liberal Party's approach on this is quite cynical, and more about capturing the aboriginal vote than caring about the cost.

A simulating idea

Is it real? Physicists propose method to determine if the universe is a simulation

The report contains the abstract, which I think is (sort of) clear:

Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

Update:  here's a more detailed explanation, from the arXiv blog.

Still growing up...

A photo this morning of mother and child, who looks like a teenage possum now:

Romney tax still does not work...

The 6 Studies Paul Ryan Cited Prove Mitt Romney's Tax Plan Is Impossible - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic

Isn't it a bit puzzling that all Romney and Ryan do is keep repeating that their tax plan can work, and it would seem enough swinging voters are starting to believe them?   Mind you, unless voters go reading elsewhere, all they are getting in the debates seems to be "your plan can't work mathematically" versus "yes it can".

But as the article explains above, the main factor for arguing that maybe Romney's plan can work would be by factoring in strong growth.   Yet here is what the (key defender) Rosen paper (you can find it via the main link) actually says on what can be expected regarding growth (click on it to make it bigger):

That's it?    "No one knows for sure".    And all it seems that Rosen was out to show was that Romney's claim (of being able to knock out enough deductions in a way that won't hurt the middle class yet reduce everyone's tax) was not mathematically impossible.

Let's put it this way:  the best Romney and Ryan can really claim is - we have someone who says our plan might not be impossible - but even then, he doesn't know for sure.

(And, by the way, Rosen's assessment is strongly criticised as flawed for other assumptions too.)

Backing that Rosen's "no one knows for sure" statement was the recent release of a Congressional research paper concluding there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth at all.   This article notes that as early as late 1980's, Reagan's own economics adviser had acknowledged academically that he had no evidence that cuts to personal income tax had had any effect on growth.  I like the way the last mentioned article ends:

At some point, when observed reality keeps differing from predicted reality, it makes sense to examine your predictions. That is not what’s happening. This particular Republican argument continues to rest on a prediction—and because the test of any prediction lies somewhere out there in the awesome future, it can never be refuted. Lower income taxes and the economy will grow: It’s a unicorn of an idea, always feeding in the next meadow.

And if you want more loads of links to economists who have said there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth (or, at the very least, you have to look at what tax cuts achieved in the context of everything else that was going on economically at the time) have a look at this lengthy post at MediaMatters. 

There seems no doubt to me at all that the Republican's economic policy should simply be re-titled "The Return of Voodoo Economics". 

I am no economist, but I can read.   I just can't see how the criticisms of the Romney/Ryan tax plan are wrong.  American voters need to read a bit more, too.