A novel topic

A meta-post

I'm becoming very aware lately of the lack of new topics dealt with in this blog.  Sure, it's good to keep building on knowledge about climate change, the 5 year madness of the Right in the US (with crossover effects in Australia), nudity in Japan, the cuteness of rats, the evil of horses, ocean acidification, World War 2 stories that I haven't heard about before, the magnificent talents of Steven Spielberg, how gay men aren't what they used to be, the troubles of Christianity, strange mythology, micro black holes, other strange physics, the stupidity of Catallaxy, ghosts, cryptozoology, Adolf Hitler's digestive system and (possible) venereal disease, pebble bed reactors, possums, yurts for aborigines, good reviews of bad movies, the Omega Point and my plan for resurrection via blogging; but eventually one feels the need for a string of novel topics.  (And not just about novels - I'm reading few enough of them lately anyway.) 

It also seems clear that everyone is reading fewer blogs lately.  Maybe all blogs feel a bit repetitious after 7 years.  A seven year blog itch, perhaps? 

So, I must put my mind to novel purposes.   Perhaps a special week of ALL NEW material - but I'm not going to go Seinfeld and throw out all of the past. 

I'll think about it....

Rats placebo-ed

Some time ago, I noted that horses getting acupuncture was meant to show that the treatment does not work via a placebo effect.   (I also accused horses of only pretending acupuncture works as a way of punishing humans.  I should start my anti-horse themed posts again - they amuse me.)

But now I see a recent study of the placebo effect in rats.  It works with them.  Who knew rats could be fooled like humans?

Well, now that I look via the wonders of Google - this has been known for a long time.  There are studies back to at least 1963 on a placebo effect in rats.   It turns out that dealing with animals has been an important bit of working out what the placebo effect is all about.  There's a long paper from 2004 about the effect to be read here.  (I've just skimmed it, but seems interested.)

I wonder how far down you have to get in the tree of life before the placebo effect doesn't work?

Good essay on the bad ending

On Great Novels with Bad Endings : The New Yorker

I quite like this short piece on bad endings in great novels.

I have to say, though, that one very good novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, has a great ending. 

Rude bits in history

Public nudity has been in the news in the States lately, leading to Slate running a short article "Why is Public Nudity Illegal?"  The main answer given is as follows:

Because it’s so difficult to ignore. The late political philosopher Joel Feinberg’s “offense principle” offers one persuasive theory for why nudity is illegal. Feinberg argued that an act need not be objectively harmful to merit prohibition—it need only produce an unpleasant mental state such as shame, disgust, or anxiety in observers. Plenty of obnoxious but legal behaviors, like chewing with an open mouth or failure to bathe, can create the same reaction, but Feinberg claimed that nudity has a unique ability to demand our attention. He wrote, “The unresolved conflict between instinctual desires and cultural taboos leaves many people in a state of unstable equilibrium and a readiness to be wholly fascinated, in an ambivalent sort of way, by any suggestion of sexuality in their perceptual fields.” We are drawn ineluctably toward the sexual suggestiveness of the naked body, Feinberg argued, then ashamed of our own reaction. 

All fair enough from a Western point of view, I suppose, but I don't know that it takes into account countries with a rather more relaxed attitude to social nudity.   Which led me to Google up stuff about changing attitudes to nudity in Japan.  This site spends a fair bit of time on the topic, making several interesting observations along the way.  For example:

Members of the samurai class, men and women, did not (or at least were never supposed to) appear in public without being fully clothed. Many norms and values of the samurai class resembled those of Chinese elites, for whom incomplete dress indicated incomplete civilization. In Japan’s terribly hot and humid summers, men and women performing manual labor outdoors *often worked semi-naked*. Scant clothing, therefore, was mainly an indication of manual labor, and one way that samurai distinguished themselves from laborers was by their more formal and complete attire. In the summer, male laborers in rural and urban areas commonly wore only a loincloth both during work hours and while relaxing. Women often went topless and in any case did not wear underwear (more on this below).

It is common in today’s world to link nudity with sex. Clothing serves as a personal boundary marker, and its removal or lack in the sight of others is often an invitation to intimacy. The lack of clothing was especially an invitation to intimacy in Western society of the nineteenth century because the skin itself, along with the secondary sexual characteristics of the body (e.g., curve of hips, breasts, etc.—but not the genitalia) had long been eroticized in visual representations. But clothing or its lack need not function this way in all times, places, or circumstances. While sexuality does have a biological basis, the ways in which it manifests itself are largely products of complex social codes. In Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, *clothing—not nakedness*—played a greater role in eroticism than it did in most of the Western world. As Timon Screech explains:

Other than the rich (who would not be much encountered in the ordinary townsperson's life), then, fine clothes meant the garb of theatricality or of paying sex. The Edo male would have touched finer fabrics in the arms of these two categories of provider than on any other occasion. The *sexual power* of texture and look in first-rate cloth was commensurately great; it may very well have excelled in excitement the feel of skin, since good cloth was harder to come by than good skin and was more expensive when one did.²

Fine clothing, worn in certain ways and accompanied by certain gestures, typically conveyed sexual messages. Nudity per se, however, usually did not convey sexual messages in Japan at this time, especially cases of habitual nudity such as a woman doing laundry outside topless. A scholar of the relationship be­tween clothing and eroticism explains: “In general, when any­thing is constantly exposed to view, it leaves nothing to the ima­gination, tends to be perceived as ordinary, and, eventually, is hardly noticed at all. The eye be­comes jaded; habitual nudity is notably unerotic.”³

The page points out that it was part of the Meiji period that the government sought to regulate away public nudity (or semi nudity) as part of their modernisation process.  I was amused to read about this early form of protest:

Police enforcement of the law brought forth a brief period of public protest—in the form of #streaking#—but the reaction of the state was to crack down even harder. People began to cover up. In 1890, the Tokyo police issued an order prohibiting mixed ba­thing (police had broad powers to issue orders for the “public good”). Most bath owners could not afford elaborate renovations, so they typi­cally ran a rope across the center of the tub to separate it into sections for men and women. In this way, they complied with the letter of the law but not its spirit.

There's lots more on the page that is interesting, including the rise of underwear (so to speak) in modern Japan.

The site also has another chapter about evolving views on sex in Japan, which contains a lot of interesting information too.  On the older issue of homosexuality, the picture painted is one similar, I suppose, to that of ancient Greece and (to a lesser extent) Rome:

In today's terminology, therefore, the typical Tokugawa Japanese was more or less bisexual, although Tokugawa Japanese generally recognized that people tended to have a preference for one flavor of sexuality or the other. But either way, joshoku and nanshoku were not radically different things. They were simply two broad varieties of sexuality and sexual activity. Was there any major condemnation of those who preferred nanshoku? The answer depends on what is meant by "major." Mark Ravina makes the following observation in the context of discussing an institution called gojū, neighborhood schools consisting of boys and teenagers in nineteenth-century Satsuma (a domain):

Was gojū culture gay? The question is both intriguing and anachronistic. "Homosexual," as a label for people, did not exist in Saigō [Takamori]'s day: sex with men was a practice rather than an identity. Like drinking or fishing, one could enjoy homosexuality regularly, occasionally, or never, according to personal preference. Lacking a biblical story of Sodom, Tokugawa-era Japanese had no concept of sodomy, and Tokugawa-era laws did not criminalize homosexual conduct itself. Legal injunctions against male-male sexuality focused largely on the result of "outrageous" or "provocative" sexual conduct. Like consorting with a geisha or drinking, male-male intercourse became a vice rather than a diversion only when taken to extremes. When Yonezawa domain issued regulations on homosexual activity in 1775, for example, it mentioned violence rather than perversion. Any conflict among a handsome young samurai, his father, and his lover could easily lead to drawn swords and mayhem. Homosexuality was a problem only because male lovers' quarrels tended to grow violent and threaten the public order. (Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori [Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004], p. 33.)

In addition to violence, another possible "extreme" of homosexual behavior would have been failure to reproduce. Elite and commoner society expected men and women to marry and produce some offspring, and exclusive indulgence in homosexuality would have a hindered fulfilling this expectation. The *third Tokugawa shōgun Iemitsu* is a good example of nanshoku, its potential for violence, its possible conflict with expectations to reproduce, and connections between sexuality and politics. Looking at the wide range of social commentary in Tokugawa Japan, we can find a few Confucian scholars and other moralists who denounced nanshoku as morally improper, though often in the context of a broader critique of a society allegedly obsessed with sex. Overall, however, these moralists did not enjoy a large or influential audience. Generally speaking we can say say that there was little or no social censure of non-violent nanshoku in Tokugawa times for those who met their basic social obligations.

I find it somewhat amusing that the main concern about intense homosexual relationships was the threat of samurai running around the streets battling over their lovers!  How different can you get from the modern Western idea of the "problem" (for want of a better word) with homosexuality?   There are many things a visitor fear accidentally seeing in San Francisco (well, the new anti nudity law might help with that), but bloody battles between armed men over their lovers is not one of them.

Message re another blog

I am presently not getting comments through, for reasons unknown, at another blog.

Someone from there might care to point that out, over there...

Back to that ocean problem

Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean - environment - 25 November 2012 - New Scientist

It's been ages since I have posted anything about ocean acidification.   I still read about it, but a lot of the studies that have come out in the last year or so have been kind of dull and very technical.   I think there is a realisation that ocean biology, chemistry and ecology are more complicated than previously thought, making forecasts of the effects of ocean acidification a field with a lot of uncertainty.  

I have also been waiting for something more specific about some species that everyone thought would be first affected, and pteropods are high on that list.  So at last there is a study out about them, noting field research from a 2008 field trip.  (They take their time, don't they?).

From the link above:

In a small patch of the Southern Ocean, the shells of sea snails are dissolving. The finding is the first evidence that marine life is already suffering as a result of man-made ocean acidification.

"This is actually happening now," says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion.

As well as warming the planet, the carbon dioxide we emit is changing the chemistry of the ocean. CO₂ dissolves in water to form carbonic acid, making the water less alkaline. The pH is currently dropping at about 0.1 per century, faster than any time in the last 300 million years....

It gets worse:

Aragonite is still relatively plentiful in most of the ocean, but Tarling suspected that some regions might already be affected by shortages.

He visited the Southern Ocean near South Georgia where deep water wells up to the surface. This water is naturally low in aragonite, meaning the surface waters it supplies are naturally somewhat low in the mineral – although not so much so that it would normally be a problem. Add in the effect of ocean acidification, however, and Tarling found that the mineral was dangerously sparse at the surface.

"It's of concern that they can see it today," says Toby Tyrrell of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK.

Aragonite-depleted regions are still rare, but they will become widespread by 2050, says Tarling. The polar oceans will change fastest, with the tropics following a few decades after. "These pockets will start to get larger and larger until they meet," he says.

Tyrrell says the Arctic will become undersaturated with respect to aragonite before the Antarctic. Patches of undersaturation have already been seen, for instance off the north coast of Canada in 2008.

The only way to stop ocean acidification is to reduce our CO₂ emissions, Tyrrell says. It has been suggested that we could add megatonnes of lime to the ocean to balance the extra acidity. However, Tyrrell says this is "probably not practical" because the amounts involved – and thus the costs – are enormous.

 

Prepare to backfire

Little observed in the media is the fact that, despite the circus last week of a sacked shock jock courting (to the extent of sharing a room with) a self confessed fraud who obviously hates Julia Gillard and admits to a bad memory of events, Newspoll yesterday indicated that the AWU scandal (TM News Limited and Michael Smith) is having absolutely no effect on public opinion.

You would think that this might give the Coalition some cause for concern about pursuing this much further.


But no, an Opposition that is almost completely devoid of characters that can provide any confidence in their political judgement is ploughing on, regardless.

After Gillard's second conference yesterday, I think there is every chance this is on its way to backfire on the Opposition.

Here is a list of points and questions that are not being made, or not often, in commentary on this matter:

1.   It was always the case that, if there was some solid evidence of Gillard having personally profitted from Wilson's association fund 18 years ago, it would have come out by now, probably via her factional enemies within her own party.   The fact that it hadn't always indicated that it did not exist.    This observation remains valid.

2.   The reporting on the matter has become a complete shambles of confusion and mixed up terminology.   Even those who are sympathetic to Gillard have made some comments which I think indicate carelessness  or confusion.   I think this only works to make the public disengage from the matter, because it is obvious that those campaigning most strongly on this (The Australian and News Ltd commentators) are out to damage Gillard and cannot be trusted to interpret events objectively.

3.  This has been a bush lawyer picnic, with the major bush lawyer the execrable Michael Smith.   This guy lost his job because he wouldn't pull a report which his boss had not been cleared through lawyers for defamation.   Smith claims it had been cleared - his boss disagreed. 

If Smith was so unfairly treated, why did he not sue his bosses?

Instead, Smith decided to go on a internet campaign against the PM.  He makes stupid, bush lawyer comments continually about anyone who signs a false statutory declaration "exposing themselves to perjury", as if this gives more credibility to evidence in a stat dec which is merely reporting rumour.

Smith's courting of Blewitt is ludicrously over the top - playing up to Blewitt as an ex Vietnam vet on Smith's website, etc.

This fake matey bonhomie persona of Smith annoys me no end - he's a dill and a nasty bit of work with an unhealthy obsession with a female Prime Minister.  And I have a particular question for him:

4.  He claimed many weeks ago - possibly months ago - that he had spoken to Bruce Wilson more than once - that he considered him a "mate" I think he went so far to say.  (Everyone is a "mate" to Smith if they don't tell him he's an asshat.)

Yet Smith has never indicated Wilson's attitude to this. 

Wilson was reported weeks ago as saying that he thought the media was "hounding" Gillard, and this indicated he thought it was unfair.  This weekend's report of Wilson finally coming out and saying that the media can give up - Gillard knew nothing and they won't find anything to the contrary raises the question - did he say the same to Smith?

If Smith knew this - has he ever even hinted at it?

I strongly suspect Wilson has told him the same, and Smith has sat on exonerating comments from the person who was the key player in the matter, just so he could continue the smear campaign.

I hope he never gets another job on radio.

5.  Smith is even the complainant to the police about an Power of Attorney signed by Blewitt nearly 20 years ago:  a power of attorney which Blewitt says he signed, was used to buy a house that Blewitt knew about, and sign a mortgage that the conveyancing file indicates Blewitt must have know about (because of letters and phone calls made to him about it.)   Blewitt now claims that he knew nothing about the mortgage - this man has extremely convenient memory gaps if it serves his purposes.

Now, assuming the worst version of events is true - that Gillard was not there when Blewitt signed it and should not  have witnessed it as if she were - there is no fraud against Blewitt that has been committed by use of the Power of Attorney.

Instead, it is Michael Smith, for blatantly political purposes, who wrote to the police asking for an investigation.

Why did the police take the matter on at all?  They have a great interest in documents signed twenty years ago that a lawyer witnessed as a favour for someone? 

I would be extremely surprised if the police complaint goes anywhere - and the police should deal with this and make their decision as soon as possible to not appear as part of a political vendetta.

6.   The whole "Gillard did something illegal by helping the association be set up" has always been a crock.

A journalist on Insiders about a month ago said he spoke to the current person in charge of incorporated associations in WA and asked whether incorporating an association with broad terms which would allow it to collect money for re-election would be illegal, and was told "no".

Again, this has barely been reported.

Finally:  unless Bishop and "scared that he can't speak about Gillard in case he again puts his foot in his mouth" Abbott have got something incredibly compelling in documentary evidence on Gillard re the incorporation - and I very much doubt they have - this is going to backfire on them soon.

They should drop it if they have any sense.

PS:  sorry about the lack of links - this story annoys me so much I can't be bothered putting too much effort into relevant work.

What is it used for?

BBC - Future - Technology - X-37B: Secrets of the US military spaceplane

A good article here on the funny looking mini shuttle thing that the US is about to launch again.

Pebble bed - it lives again

Catalyst: Next Generation Nuclear Power - ABC TV Science

I used to comment on pebble bed reactors as a new nuclear design with impressive sounding passive safety.   But the South African plans to build one ran out of money, and was deemed to be too ambitious in design, and we don't hear much about them any more.  (Apart from the fact that China had built at least one; I'm not sure that it has ever been more than a research reactor, though.)

So, I was surprised to see on Catalyst a few weeks ago as story about continuing research into them in California.

This one is to use molten salts as a coolant (instead of helium as per the defunct South African plan.)  The advantages:

 Dr Graham Phillips
This reactor doesn't use water to flow through the fuel elements and extract the heat - it uses melted salt. Now not table salt, sodium chloride, but the related substances lithium and beryllium fluoride. Heat these guys to about 450 degrees Celsius and they turn into a clear liquid.

Mike Laufer
One of the big advantages of the salt is that it's very effective in moving heat around, but it's at low pressure.

NARRATION
Low pressure means a less accident-prone reactor. Today's generation IIIs run at a staggering 70 times atmospheric pressure.

Prof Per Peterson
If we switch to liquid coolants, like these fluoride salts that we're using, then we can build much more compact, high power density systems that operate at atmospheric pressure, and that gives us a system which is intrinsically safe, because there's no source of pressure to disperse radioactive material.

 Sounds good to me.

Archbishop humour

Unthinkable? Rowan decides to write | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

The Guardian has a bit of fun with this mock column by Rowan Williams, about the top 10 things he found "tricky" as Archbishop of Canterbury.  I liked number 3 in particular:

3) Critics saying that I can't compose a sentence without wandering off into some ontological reflection, although we need not human words that will decisively capture what the word of God has done but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the word's light has been made manifest. 

Possum survival

Possum fans may be interested to know that last Sunday, the day of the very big hail, the possums were not in their under-the-deck home.  (They are not there every day; they can be away for days at a time, but recently they have been here more often.)  So, we were a bit worried about how they had fared in a tree during the storm, and they had been away all of this week.

But today, they are back, looking as happy as ever:

I hope it is a good sign that their ability to be away for days at a time means they are not dependant on our fruit.

Crypto search

Bigfoot search from blimp: Cryptic species are real but Bigfoot, Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, Jersey Devil are not. - Slate Magazine

Here's a good article in Slate discussing why it is wildly unlikely that Bigfoot (or yowies, or any of the big man-ape-ish things around the world) are really there, due to matters such as the complete lack of relevant body remains.

At least the article does a rare thing by discussing the topic of cryptozoology seriously.

On the other hand, it doesn't even mention the Bigfoot as alien or paranormal theory, which seems a bit of an oversight.  As noted in Wikipedia:

One fringe theory, supported by paranormal investigator Jon-Erik Beckjord, theorizes that the lack of hard evidence supporting Bigfoot's existence may be due to the creature being an interdimensional being that slips in and out of dimensions. Many Bigfoot advocates distance themselves from the paranormal position and regard it as an embarrassment.^[69]

 Yet it deals with the lack of bodily remains quite handily.    I find the theory oddly appealing.  Apemen as a cross over from an alternatively evolved Earth?   

And I have  mentioned before, one of the more puzzling things about yowie sightings is the awful smell that is said to accompany them in a number of cases.   You can read an odd paper here about the bad smells sometimes associated with Bigfoot.  (Strangely, it seems some people associate the smell with smegma (!) - an odour with which I am happily unfamiliar.)

Especially in the Australian context, there really is no animal I can think of which could be emitting foul smells while crashing through branches.  While smells do suggest the "it's an unidentified man/ape" theory,  there are cases of hauntings, and even UFO sightings, that have a smell element.  (I can't find a very credible link for UFOs and smells.  It is one of the major disappointments of the internet that UFOs, as a topic that you would have thought would gain credibility by allowing more serious analysis be widely seen, has instead suffered badly by being smothered in internet dross. I still don't know of a very reliable website on the topic.)  

Anyhow, it's all part of life's fun to have some mysteries around.

A big bunch of nothing

This year long smear campaign against Julia Gillard is getting ridiculous.

Last night, a lawyer who used to work in Slater and Gordon  who obviously didn't care for Gillard at the time (the firm is said to have had some partnership tensions) said he noticed evidence that Julia Gillard knew of solicitor's finance arranged for her boyfriend.

When asked by her firm in 1995 she said:

Mr Gordon: ''Were you aware at any time that the balance of the funds to make up the capital was to be provided by contributory mortgage of which Jonathan Rothfield [a Slater & Gordon partner] was trustee?''

Julia Gillard: ''I don't, I don't think I knew that at the time, where the source of funds was. It's subsequently been raised with me that that was done through the Slater & Gordon mortgage register but I didn't have any recollection of that.''

Now there is a  one bit of paper on file which indicates she might have known, or asked for, a Certificate of Insurance needed for such finance in 1993.

There are 2 obvious points here which the media, and public just does not get:

1.    It is certainly no proof that she was involved to any detailed extent in arranging the mortgage.  In fact, if that is the only thing they have got on the file that connects Gillard to the mortgage, it suggests that probably had peripheral involvement in it.  [Update:  I have since read the conveyancing file and, yes, the mortgage correspondence is from another solicitor or paralegal in the firm.]

2.   More importantly, even if she been completely involved in the provision of finance sourced through her firm (a practice common in those days; not very common at all now)  there is nothing illegal about that and would show nothing at all about her knowledge of the source of the other funds Wilson used.

This is the worst smear campaign against a politician that I have ever seen:  trawling over details from nearly 20 years ago without actually alleging that the person has done anything illegal - in fact when pressed the mainstream media says "not that we're alleging anything illegal".  But the obvious point of the campaign is to operate as a dogwhistle - to make people think she has done something wrong while denying that is what you are alleging.

There is also now an element of misreporting to this - I could swear that I heard on Sunrise this morning at the 7 am news bulletin that last night's 7.30 interview alleged that she had knowledge of the use of the slush fund money to buy the property.

If I heard that right (the reporting was changed by the 7.30 bulletin) that is completely wrong.

The supply of the solicitors finance says nothing about the use of the "slush fund".

If I were Gillard, I would be on the phone to Channel 7 demanding a formal retraction of the 7 am report. 

Update:   even if I misheard Sunrise at 7am, here is an example of completely wrong reporting on the matter:

 Julia Gillard has dismissed suggestions by a former work colleague that she knew of the purchase of a house with misappropriated money years earlier than she first said.

Important Mars news

Mars is safe from radiation – but the trip there isn't - space - 21 November 2012 - New Scientist

I've never been 100% sure on this point - just how safe would the Martian surface be for astronauts from a radiation point of view?   Now it seems the answer is a bit clearer:

You needn't fry on Mars. Readings from NASA's Curiosity rover suggest radiation levels on the Red Planet are about the same as those in low Earth orbit, where astronauts hang out for months on the International Space Station. A Mars visit would still be dangerous though, due to the years-long return trip.

Unlike Earth, Mars has no magnetosphere shielding it from solar and galactic radiation. But it does have a thin atmosphere, and readings from two of Curiosity's instruments suggest this provides some protection.

"This is the first ever measurement of the radiation environment on any planet other than Earth," Curiosity team member Don Hassler said at a press briefing on 15 November. "Astronauts can live in this environment."

The overall picture is still not rosy, though:

The biggest threat to Mars voyagers would be the cumulative radiation exposure during the long trip. NASA estimates that a return human mission to Mars would take three years. During that time astronauts might receive more than seven times the radiation dose they get during six months on the ISS.

And:

Solar flares would also be a problem. On Earth these eruptions of charged particles from the sun are largely deflected by the magnetosphere. But Mars enjoys no such protection, and since Curiosity has yet to see a flare, it is unclear how much shielding the thin atmosphere would provide. '

Dartnell suggests that a base or colony on Mars could be built underground to avoid surface radiation. Or, with enough advance warning, astronauts could retreat to protective shelters during a flare. But is all that trouble worth it just to send humans where robots already thrive?

 As I have argued before, if you're going to have to live underground on Mars, in an atmosphere that is barely there, why would you bother travelling so far when you could do the same on the Moon, and always be just two days away from seeing a Broadway show?

I think water is the key difference, and if it is on the Moon in any useful quantities, I'm just not sure that Mars is worth it.

The writing life

Give Philip Roth the Nobel Prize as a retirement present - Telegraph

I've never read Roth, and don't feel particularly inclined to.  But I was a bit amused to read how being an author can have its own distinct downside, even though us readers might admire their achievement:

 “My autobiography,” he said as long ago as 1981, “would consist almost entirely of chapters about me sitting alone in a room looking at a typewriter. The uneventfulness … would make Beckett’s The Unnamable read like Dickens.” 

And, as it turns out, he wasn’t joking. When his relationship with Claire Bloom was in its first romantic flush, he invited her to spend three weeks at his home in rural Connecticut. According to one of the many slightly bewildered sections in her autobiography Leaving A Doll’s House, he then spent every day writing in his study — and every evening reading Conrad, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. When the Berlin Wall fell, he warned fellow novelist Ivan Klíma of the dangers now posed to Czech literature by commercial television — which “almost everybody watches all the time because it is entertaining [his, presumably scornful, italics].”

Makes me sound like an action man, in comparison.  

The Madness of King Clive

Clive's giant vision unveiled as Jeff the dinosaur on loose | Sunshine Coast Daily

LOVE it or hate it, Clive Palmer's dinosaur collection is going to leave quite a footprint in the Mt Coolum area.
The mining magnate quietly unveiled his T-Rex, the first of more than 150 replica dinosaurs set to "roam" the grounds and fairways of his resort.

And it is enormous. The tyrannosaurus rex Mr Palmer has christened Jeff is 8.5m high, 20m long, and weighs 1.7 tonnes.

The giant creature towers over golfers using the resort's famous course, and with the possibility of another 149 prehistoric giants joining him, the effect will be stunning...

Mr Palmer has spoken of importing 150 replica dinosaurs to create the largest dinosaur park in the world but is waiting to hear if he will need council permission.

I just heard on the radio this morning:  Council says "yes, he does need permission for more than 4."  And it was noted that this would be a bizarre transformation for a resort (formerly a Hyatt Regency) that had a reputation for being a high class golf/health spa-ish place.   (Never stayed there myself.)

Here's the photo from the Sunshine Coast Daily as to what Clive thinks looks good:

I didn't realise that so many boys aged 10 and under played golf....

The 1950's and the rich

This section of Paul Krugman's recent column contained some things about the 1950's of which I was not aware:

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.  ....

Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live,” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat. 

The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?

Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America. 

Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.

OK:  I knew about the high tax rate.  I didn't know about the relative modesty of lifestyle that a drop in income meant.  And yet, as Krugman notes, this is the period often thought by people as being the best of times for conservatives.  

Big solar in a spot of bother

BBC News - Solar storm as desert plan to power Europe falters

Desertec was set up in 2009 with a projected budget of 400bn euros to tap the enormous potential of solar and other renewables in North Africa. 

The hope was that by 2050, around 125 gigawatts of electric power could be generated. This would meet all the local needs and also allow huge amounts of power to be exported to Europe via high-voltage direct current cables under the Mediterranean sea. 

But three years later, the project has little to show for its efforts. Two large industrial partners, Siemens and Bosch, have decided they will no longer be part of the initiative. 

Recently, one or two large scale Australian solar plans failed to get government backed funding too.  A balance account of that can be found at Climate Spectator.

I wonder:  when some solar thermal plants go on line overseas, will their (I hope) success make it easier to get ones funded here.

Eruption coming

Eruption fears rise at 'Mount Doom' › News in Science (ABC Science)

In the story, there is mention of a disaster which I'm not sure I've heard about before:

The 2797-metre mountain last erupted in 2007, sending a lahar - a fast-moving stream of mud and debris - down the mountain but causing no injuries.

In 1953, a massive lahar from the mountain caused New Zealand's worst rail disaster when it washed away a bridge at Tangiwai and a passenger train plunged into the Whangaehu River, claiming 151 lives.

 That's real disaster movie stuff, isn't it?