Small fungus: big change

UK unveils plan to fight deadly ash disease : Nature News 

It sounds like quite a  major forestry change is underway in England:

The UK government today announced an action plan to control the spread of “ash dieback”, a disease caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea, but this will not stop the pathogen from killing up to 99% of the ash trees in the country, say scientists.

Diseased trees in nurseries — and those which have been newly-planted — will be identified and destroyed. Mature trees will be left standing, as the disease is not spread from tree to tree but via leaf litter. An import ban on ash trees, implemented at the end of October, will remain in place.

This however will not eradicate the disease from the United Kingdom. “There is absolutely no magic wand we can wave to make this disappear,” environment secretary Owen Paterson said at a press briefing in London this morning. Ash is the third most common tree in the UK, and with as many as 90 million ash trees at risk, the shape of the British countryside will be irreversibly changed.

 I thought that perhaps someone has pointed the finger at climate change for this fungus spreading, but my Googling around indicates this is not a connection that is really being made - yet. 

Save the mice

I had missed in my previous reading about the New York hurricane that there were actually thousands of lives lost - of mice and rats in the basement at New York University.

The BBC notes that this is bad news for research:

The genetically modified mice and rats were being used to study illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, autism and schizophrenia.

The animal colonies at the Smilow Research Center in Kips Bay were considered among the most important of their type in the US.

In shades of the inadequate planning for disasters reminiscent of Fukushima (well, they both involve ocean flooding,) the building the rodents were in was supposed to be designed to resist such problems:

The Smilow, which opened in 2006, can withstand a storm surge of about 3.7 metres — 20% higher than that expected from a once-per-century flood, according to the NYU. Now that Sandy has overtopped those defences, officials say that they will be assessing what they can do differently in the future.

 As pointed out in the Reuters report on this, lab animals appears to often be in the firing line when hurricanes strike America:

All told, said NYU spokeswoman Jessica Guenzel, the biomedical facility lost 7,660 cages of mice and 22 cages of rats. Each cage houses between one and seven animals, she said.

"This happens again and again and (research labs) never learn," said Fran Sharples, director of the Board on Life Sciences at the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences (NAS).  "Anybody with half a brain knows you do a site-specific analysis" to understand the risk of disasters, she said, "and it's really stupid to put your animals in the basement if you're in a flood zone."

It's not as if scientists didn't have recent lessons in the risk of natural disasters to biomedical research, she said. In 2001, tens of thousands of mice and scores of monkeys and dogs were lost when Hurricane Allison struck Houston; and in 2005, some 10,000 lab animals drowned when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

 I wonder if Queensland University, which I assume has its share of lab rats, did better than that last year during the Brisbane floods.

Simple mussels

How to cook perfect moules marinieres | Life and style | The Guardian

I now find myself enjoying Felicity Cloakes' Guardian blog which usually talks just a little too much about how to do some of the classic recipes.   Here she tackles the simplest recipe for mussels, and  actually does it with relative restraint.  One English cook apparently suggests using cider instead of wine.  Not sure how that would go, but I'm willing to try, if my wife approves.

Echo...echo......echo

The future of the Republican Party: What not to do | The Economist

I liked this paragraph in above short bit of commentary in The Economist:

 SEVERAL of my colleagues have written characteristically incisive pieces about what lessons the Republicans should take from losing an eminently winnable election. Over at the Corner, Michael Walsh and Mark Krikorian recommend a few lessons of their own. For Mr Walsh, the number one lesson learned from Tuesday's defeat is that "the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos." That's number one! "Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation," he writes, as if no such enterprises exist. The best-rated cable-news channel is Fox! Five of the top ten radio programmes (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Neal Boortz) are conservative! Messrs Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al have spent the last four years telling their listeners that Mr Obama is an incompetent Kenyan-Marxist-Muslim-Commie-Socialist doomed to defeat. Such sentiments soothe their listeners and are good for ratings, but the parts about incompetence and imminent defeat turned out to be false. The problem is not that conservatives lack media outlets; the problem comes when they fail to venture outside of them.

And words of wisdom from the Lexington blog at the same magazine:

Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.

It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.

Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.

Spielberg gets it right, apparently

Lincoln - Rotten Tomatoes

A bit to my surprise, given how dull and over-earnest Spielberg's last attempt at American costume history was (Amistad), there is strong consensus amongst the American critics that his Lincoln is very good.   Most reviews single out Daniel Day Lewis as being exceptionally good in the title role.  In fact, he sounds like a certainty for an Oscar nomination.

Given that the reviews also admit that it is a wordy film, you would have to wonder whether it will succeed at the box office.  And also, given the Obama victory, Spielberg's liberal reputation, and the film's concentration on compromise and deal making in politics, I suspect wingnutty types will give it a wide berth over fear of it being too "liberal."   (The slightest suggestion that Lincoln might have been attracted to men, which one gay guy writing in Slates thinks is in the film, will probably also annoy those on the far Right, perhaps.)   But again, I could be wrong.

Update:  the Slate articles on whether his wife was crazy, and what the real life characters in the film looked like, are well worth a look too. In particular, if you want a bit of a fright, have a look at the real life photo of Francis Preston Blair Snr.  Looks like proof that Lincoln had to fight zombies, if not vampires!

Update 2:  Ha!  As I predicted, the first really derisive review of the movie ("It’s a hopeless bore that, in an attempt to humanize an icon, turns him into a mere politician") is to be found on PJ Lifestyle - part of the Right wing PJ Media site.

I'll be on the look out for more sour grapes reviews of the movie from right wing reviewers.

Stewart enjoys the win

You can watch Jon Stewart on the Daily Show ripping into Fox News after the election win here:



After that, you might be a bit surprised and amused at just how derisive some at MSNBC felt they could be about the losers and their supporters:



Then I suggest that you read the list of "10 wrongest predictions" about the election outcome*, followed by how well uber wingnut Ted Nugent took the loss.  ("Not well" is the short answer.)

*  I used to think Peggy Noonan had relatively good judgement as a conservative-ish columnist, but her writing on how great Romney was going in the lead up to the election has convinced me otherwise.

The Obama win

It's not as if I think Obama has been an outstanding President, but looking at the current state of the Republicans, he certainly deserved re-election over them.

There's a lot of good commentary about this around with which I agree:  William Saletan shows how Obama has really acted like a moderate Republican of the past; Thomas Friedman correctly predicted that the election would show that Americans want centrist governments; and even Ross Douthat said that the Republicans failed to take Obama seriously as an opponent because of their belief that their cause was just obvious:

 You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous, in the way so many voices on the right sought to raise the ideological stakes at every opportunity, in the widespread conviction that the starker conservatives made the choice between left and right, the more votes they would win.

 As for how the Right is reacting in the blogosphere:  well, it seems to me a significant number are currently playing the extraordinarily unwise game of "blame the voters".  Take Roger Simon at PJ Media for example:

But even with that luck [Hurricane Sandy] you would think the electorate would have the brains (self-preservation really) to put him out of office.

So we have a problem with democracy. It’s not working or, more specifically, has been turned on its end, with the masses manipulated against their own self-interest, creating power elites similar to those described in Milovan Djilas’ The New Class.

How did that happen? I think many of us know there are three pillars of our own destruction: the educational system, the media and entertainment (the popular arts).

 See, the problem is not the Right, it's that the masses have been brainwashed by schools, the media and movies to just not be able to understand how magnificently correct the Right is.  The same attitude is currently also on abundant display on the allegedly "centre right" blog Catallaxy, where, as it happens (if Florida goes to Obama, as appears likely) I correctly predicted the final electoral college Obama tally of 332.

One thing is for sure:  it the Right doesn't become more evidence based and pragmatic, it is on the path for future irrelevancy in the US.  

Johnson speaks

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs summarises his feelings about the Republican Party:

The Republican Party … well, if you’ve been reading the site for the past couple of years you know what I think about them. They’re lost in cloud cuckoo land in so many ways and on so many levels, there’s just no doubt that they represent a serious danger to the future prosperity of this country — not just for their magical thinking on economics, but in their denial of many areas of modern science (based on either religious fanaticism or cynical political calculation for personal profit), their continuing, relentless attempts to roll back progress on women’s reproductive rights, and the shockingly prevalent racism and xenophobia that have bubbled up to the surface in a highly disturbing way since the election of our first black President.

At this point, it’s not even really about Mitt Romney, although he’s an especially cynical example of the Republican brand.   Nobody the GOP could prop up and nominate would ever convince me to vote for a Republican in the foreseeable future, because of what the party as a whole represents: reactionary paranoia, manifesting as authoritarian rule whenever they gain power.

In my life, I’ve voted twice for Republican presidents, and Democrats every other time — and the second time I voted for a Republican (John McCain) it was with grave misgivings.

I’ll have no misgivings at all about casting my vote for Barack Obama.

 I didn't recall that he had voted for McCain.  That's funny, given how despised he is now on the wingnuttery side of the blogosphere.

Regardless of where he has been in the past, most of what he says now sounds about right.  (Well, OK, the bit about authoritarian rule is a bit over the top, and if Americans want to have laws that discourage abortion, that's up to them, although if the same pro-lifers are against reliable contraception being readily available, then I have no patience with them.)  The Republicans need a thorough clean out of the Tea Party side, and come back to common sense, moderate right wing views on science and economics, and compromise for the common good.

Impetuous from before you were born

Prenatal testosterone levels influence later response to reward

I don't know:  it seems a bit depressing to read studies indicating that certain character traits come from such random-ish sounding things like the level of testosterone early in pregnancy:

Although present at low levels in females, testosterone is one of the primary sex hormones that exerts substantial influence over the emergence of differences between males and females. In adults and adolescents, heightened testosterone has been shown to reduce fear, lower sensitivity to punishment, increase risk-tasking, and enhance attention to threat. These effects interact substantially with context to affect social behavior.

 This knowledge about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood suggests that it is related to influencing the balance between approach and avoidance behavior. These same behaviors are heightened in the teenage years and also emerge in extremes in many neuropsychiatric conditions, including conduct disorder, depression, substance abuse, autism, and psychopathy.

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: