About that election date

So, last Sunday Tony Abbott had an event that everyone acknowledged as being exactly like an election campaign launch.  Everyone knows an election has to be held by November at the latest.

This week, Julia Gillard announces the election date, and she's the one some commentators are saying has started the election campaign?

This was certainly the line Chris Uhlmann took, with questions like these in last night's interview with Wayne Swan:

CHRIS UHLMANN: Why you have decided to run the longest election campaign in Australia political history?

CHRIS UHLMANN: Treasurer, this is now a campaign, no matter what you say.

I still say Uhlmann is not very bright and routinely gives soft interviews to Coalition figures and aggressive interviews to Labor figures.  His interview technique rarely adjusts questions much according to the responses.  

I cannot see what the drama is about announcing the election date.   Journalists and political commentators probably find it annoying because it cuts down by about a quarter the normal content of their annual writing in an election year.

It is disturbing that Rudd supporters within Labor are still backgrounding journalists like Uhlmann with their dissatisfaction with virtually anything Gillard done.  Uhlmann noted last night:

So is this a stroke of political genius, or in the words of one disgruntled Labor MP, an "unmitigated disaster of historic proportions".

There is no doubt at all that, in the event of a Labor loss, they will have to take a large amount of the credit.

Single Mums/Moms

What does Ross Douthat blame Roe v. Wade for today? The rise of single moms.

There's an interesting argument put here in Slate as to why there are more single mothers these days:

 The dynamics among abstinence, abortion, contraception, and the decline of marriage are complex, but here we’ll give the short version of an argument that we’ve made in various law-review articles and will continue to make in our forthcoming book, Family Classes. We think the big story of the past 40 years is the disappearance of the shotgun marriage. The shotgun marriage used to hide nonmarital pregnancies. It has disappeared not because of abortion, but because it didn’t work. The shotgun marriage kept couples together only when women had no ability to leave. The sexual brinkmanship of the 1950s (as teens discovered the car and lovers’ lanes) increased the number of brides pregnant at the altar to highs last seen in the 18^th century and fueled the divorce revolution of the 1970s. Douthat is right that a young woman with a promising future preferred the security of the pill and abortion to early marriage to a man who happened to get her pregnant. He refers to a perceptive study by economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen that observed that once women took charge of their own reproductive futures, men no longer had to “volunteer” to marry the women they had impregnated. The economists, however, were referring to the combined effect of abortion and the pill; a more recent study by economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that, between the two, contraception was a key development in the norm shift that began with college graduates. Douthat leaves that part out.

All of this, however, is so 1980s. In the era Akerlof and Yellen studied, men no longer had to propose to women who, after all, had the option of using contraception and had failed to do so. Something different is taking place today: The “Bristol effect” is that the women reject the men who do propose, and then they still have the child. They do so because marriage is no longer a good deal for women with more reliable incomes than the men in their lives. Blue-collar wages flatlined for white men in the ’90s (and did so a generation earlier for black men). During the same period, blue-collar jobs generally become much less stable. The men became less reliable earners at a time when women’s workforce opportunities continue to increase. And while wages alone do not determine marriage, the behavior that often accompanies the lack of a steady job is a turnoff. These trends had already begun in the ’80s for the worst-off portions of the population, but they accelerated for most of the working class in the ’90s.

So the issue is not whether we are going to use anti-abortion sentiment to bring back the scarlet letter. Certainly, not with Bristol celebrated on reality TV. Instead, the question is whether we are going to face up to the challenge of caring for the children who result and the pretense that abstinence can cure the problem.

In the Kansas heartland, the single moms we meet are in tears because the same politicians who oppose abortion are cutting health care and education funding, raising taxes on the poor to finance income tax cuts for the wealthy, and eviscerating protections that had helped keep single mothers employed. Let’s recognize that the celebration of the unintended birth comes with an obligation to care for all our children.

Certainly, the shotgun wedding has been around a long time, if some examples from my mother's family are anything to go by.  In fact, what went on in her rural, working class family in the 1930's and 40's dispels any idea that people held back from pre-marital sex at a time where contraception was extremely limited and - I presume -  abortion in country towns was not readily available.

The funny thing is, as far as I could see, the marriages that happened quickly due to pregnancy turned out to be long and pretty happy looking ones.   I don't really know why that should be - the economic arguments about stable jobs and income noted in the article above seems at first a bit improbable to me.  (It makes it sound like women are more into hard nosed calculations about what's best for them financially than I would have assumed.)  But then again, we are talking about marriages in the 40's and 50's to men with blue collar but long lasting and stable jobs, and limited opportunities for the women to make a good living.  (They also would have had to take much time off to raise children, as child care was not generally available like it is now.)   So, you could say, economics and limited options forced them into marriages.  That sounds unfortunate, except for the fact that they turned out to be happy enough,  long term marriages.  Arranged marriages are also often quite successful.  And there was that recent report about a study showing that people routinely underestimate how much they will change in the future.  

Of course, you can't credibly argue that women should go back to having less options, both economically and in terms of contraception.

But what about the attitude that children will likely be happiest - and have the best life outcomes  - when being raised with the stability of two parents who will be together for the long term?   Why does that have to get lost in the matter of more choice for adults?

And speaking of choices and consequences:  no one is going to put the genie back in the bottle of relatively reliable contraception encouraging fertile people into sexual relationships that are seen as convenient and experimental.  (In the sense that, at the start, people are not sure whether it would work long term.)  But the fact is, no contraception is 100% reliable, and if (unlike your grandparents) you cannot bear the idea of making a decision to live for the next 20 years with your bedroom partner if one of you falls pregnant, then you really should not be having the ongoing sexual relationship in the first place.  And besides which, stop panicking about how unhappy you might be if a partnering decision  is made in circumstances not entirely within your control.*

Well, that's how it seems to me anyway.    Kind of simple, really, yet I have a great deal of trouble seeing what's wrong with thinking that way.     

*  Of course, people will say I am taking no account of safe abortion as an option now in most Western countries.  The thing is, I am cynical about the number of not entirely committed relationships which actually survive an abortion decision.  I know that anti-abortion groups almost certainly exaggerate the psychological harm that abortion causes, but looking at some pro-choice pages, it seems most studies concentrate solely on how it affects women, and not so much on how it affects relationships in the long term.

This man does not deserve to be PM

Tony Abbott made a quasi campaign launch the other day.  It hasn't attracted that much attention both because of it coinciding with the Queensland floods, and the fact that he had no actual policies to announce.

I note, however, that he made this statement, indicating again his attempts at right wing ignorant populism which demonstrates he's just not a serious character when it comes to the serious matter of climate change:

We will have a cleaner environment. Isn’t it bizarre that this government thinks that somehow raising the price of electricity is going to clean up our environment, stop bushfires, stop floods, stop droughts? Just think of how much hotter it might have been the other day but for the carbon tax! We will bring in sensible measures to improve our environment. There will be more trees, better soils, smarter technology. There will be incentives, not penalties and there will be a Green Army marching to the rescue of our degraded bushland, our waterways under pressure. We will work with the Australian people, not against them.

This is childish and pandering to the Tea Party inspired rump of the Right in Australia.   As far as I can see, no economist of note thinks that the Liberal Party's policy, which is supposed to have the same goals in terms of emission reduction, is a more sensible way to do it than carbon pricing.  

Moreover, as this article notes, Abbott is proposing to have prominent climate change skeptics giving him advice. 

Abbott does not deserve the job of Opposition Leader or PM.  The Coalition does not deserve the job of running the country until it has purged itself of the element that is under the sway of the stupid wing of the American Right. 

Floods in the future

I've been muttering ever since the enormous floods in Australia in 2011 that I wasn't sure how well anyone could anticipate how much increased floods due to climate change could cause damage to the economies of countries so affected.

I've been poking around a bit and see that there certainly have been a lot of attempts to try to quantify this, but I guess I am just worried that predicting changed rainfall in regions is one of the less clear aspects giving current climate modelling, and while this may mean that current estimates may be overly pessimistic, they might also not be pessimistic enough.

I note this as an example of one estimate, from one IPCC page:

The impact of climate change on flood damages can be estimated from modelled changes in the recurrence interval of present-day 20- or 100-year floods, and estimates of the damages of present-day floods as determined from stage-discharge relations (between gauge height (stage) and volume of water per unit of time (discharge)), and detailed property data. With such a methodology, the average annual direct flood damage for three Australian drainage basins was projected to increase by a factor of four to ten under conditions of doubled atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (Schreider et al., 2000). 

That does sound serious.   I know nothing more of the paper; I should go looking for it.

Would prefer robot ones myself...

Soldier who lost four limbs has double-arm transplant (Update)

This guy has had some bad luck, to put it mildly:

Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been living with his older brother in a handicapped-accessible home on New York's Staten Island built with the help of several charities. The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

The weather report

Brisbane is having the cyclone you have when not having a cyclone.
It is currently very windy in the part of Brisbane where I live, which is not near the coast.   Funnily enough, on the evening news, all the reporters on the coast seemed to standing in calmer conditions.  

I hope it calms down in the suburbs soon...

Update:   It's gone 11.30pm and it's still a bit worryingly windy.   I see it's been gusting up to 90 kph earlier this evening, so its not just my imagination. Here are the BOM weather observations:

Update: Apart from a couple of leaks around windows which haven't happened before, everything was OK at home. Haven't even lost power.

As a child in the 60's and 70's, small-ish cyclones heading down the Queensland coast towards Brisbane were more common than these days, but my recollection is that they tended to peter out as a cyclone usually around the Sunshine Coast. Sure, they could turn into a rain depression, but I don't recall much in the way of wind in the suburbs. That's what made this ex cyclone unusual - the widespread wind across the city that started late yesterday and didn't end until late this morning.

The most remarkable video from this event which I saw on a News Ltd website this morning has turned up in several Youtube accounts. If you haven't seen "Surprise car", you ought to. (I think this happened up at the Sunshine Coast.)

As to how bad the flooding will get in Brisbane tomorrow - it seems all very much guesswork.  It seems that one small area near me might be affected again, but I am hoping the modelling is erring on the pessimistic side.  We will see.

Of course, there are parts of Queensland doing it much, much worse (especially Bundaberg, which appears to be facing an all time record flood.)

Interestingly, until this rainfall started in Brisbane, the city was having an exceptionally dry January.  Not sure how the figures will look now.  It did seem to be illustrating what a climate change paradigm of swings from one extreme to another might look like, and it's not pretty.   As I suggested after the 2011 flood, if climate change means one in a 100 year floods start happening (say) once a decade, it's going to be a change of big economic consequence.  

Cheese with an unwanted extra

Poisoning toll rises, 100 foods recalled

So, there's been a major outbreak of listeria from soft cheeses made by the Jindi Cheese company:

 In NSW, a further three cases of the bacterial illness have been identified, bringing the national total to 21. A 34-year-old woman in NSW has miscarried and two men - an 84-year-old Victorian, and a 44-year-old Tasmanian - have died. Each of the new cases have been in people aged over 65, and one of them is in a serious condition.

What I didn't realise before this was how long it can be between eating the contaminated food and getting symptoms - it has a 70 day incubation period!   

I am curious on another point - when you open a soft cheese but forget to finish it for a couple of weeks, you can get some pretty powerful stinky growths on it.  I always worry a bit about how safe it is to eat it, or eat the bits around it the worst bits which I cut off.  I am trusting that it can't develop into anything too dangerous.  After all, Francis Lam at Salon did tell us a couple of years ago about some extraordinarily strong French cheese that seemed it was trying to kill him:

Fromage fort translates as “strong cheese,” and is a bit of a Frankenstein — a potted mash of old bits and pieces, the Parliament-funky rinds of leftover cheeses, and left to molder together for a bit. There’s usually some kind of booze in there for extra kick (and extra protection from bacteria). Whether it’s a food or a dare is largely up to interpretation. You can only imagine what earns the title of “strong cheese” in the homeland of stinky cheese.

Hmm.  Maybe I should try mushing up the old soft cheese with a bit of wine or brandy and see what that comes out like...

Absurd Apple

Apple trademarks "distinctive design" of stores

DNA trying to tell us something

Synthetic double-helix faithfully stores Shakespeare's sonnets 

This was a surprising story:

A team of scientists has produced a truly concise anthology of verse by encoding all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in DNA. The researchers say that their technique could easily be scaled up to store all of the data in the world.

Along with the sonnets, the team encoded a 26-second audio clip from Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream" speech, a copy of James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper on the structure of DNA, a photo of the researchers' institute and a file that describes how the data were converted. The researchers report their results today on Nature’s website¹.

The project, led by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, marks another step towards using nucleic acids as a practical way of storing information — one that is more compact and durable than current media such as hard disks or magnetic tape.

Here's the  most amazing part:

DNA packs information into much less space than other media. For example, CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data on some 100 tape drives. Goldman’s method could fit all of those data into 41 grams of DNA.

 Lots more detail of how it is done is in the article.  As to its potential long term value:

Goldman adds that DNA storage should be apocalypse-proof. After a hypothetical global disaster, future generations might eventually find the stores and be able to read them. “They’d quickly notice that this isn’t DNA like anything they’ve seen,” says Goldman. “There are no repeats, and everything is the same length. It’s obviously not from a bacterium or a human. Maybe it’s worth investigating.”

I wonder if this means there might be a short to medium length message put there by my Creator for use at about this time in history.  "Don't buy Betamax" maybe*.
 
Has science fiction ever covered this?  The nearest I can think of is the ending of Carl Sagan's "Contact", where a message is found hidden inside of Pi.

*  A joke stolen from Good Omens.

Maybe built that way?

Chameleon pulsar baffles astronomers

An international team has made a tantalizing discovery about the way pulsars emit radiation. The emission of X-rays and radio waves by these pulsating neutron stars is able to change dramatically in seconds, simultaneously, in a way that cannot be explained with current theory. It suggests a quick change of the entire magnetosphere....

Pulsars are small spinning stars that are about the size of a city, around 20 km in diameter. They emit oppositely directed beams of radiation from their magnetic poles. Just like a lighthouse, as the star spins and the beam sweeps repeatedly past the Earth we see a brief flash.

Some pulsars produce radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including at X-ray and radio wavelengths. Despite being discovered more than 45 years ago the exact mechanism by which pulsars shine is still unknown.

It has been known for some time that some radio-emitting pulsars flip their behaviour between two (or even more) states, changing the pattern and intensity of their radio pulses. The moment of flip is both unpredictable and sudden. It is also known from satellite-borne telescopes that a handful of radio pulsars can also be detected at X-ray frequencies. However, the X-ray signal is so weak that nothing is known of its variability.

To find out if the X-rays could also flip the scientists studied a particular pulsar called PSR B0943+10, one of the first to be discovered. It has radio pulses which change in form and brightness every few hours with some of the changes happening within about a second.

Dr Ben Stappers from The University of Manchester's School of Physics and Astronomy said: "The behaviour of this pulsar is quite startling, it's as if it has two distinct personalities. As PSR B0943+10 is one of the few pulsars also known to emit X-rays, finding out how this higher energy radiation behaves as the radio changes could provide new insight into the nature of the emission process."...

Geoff Wright from the University of Sussex adds: "Our observations strongly suggest that a temporary "hotspot" appears close to the pulsar's magnetic pole which switches on and off with the change of state. But why a pulsar should undergo such dramatic and unpredictable changes is completely unknown."

Bat family life

Bats split on family living

An odd report here on how one species of bat has different family arrangements depending on where they live.  That seems unusual.

This part suggests that bat bachelors are unlike human ones:

"But it is also possible that the males choose not to roost with the females. When you look at the nursery colony in Ilkley, mothers and pups often have a lot of ectoparasites like ticks and mites. In a warm, crowded nursery, parasites can thrive, especially if there's less time for good personal hygiene. Parasites not only make life uncomfortable but can affect a bat's health. The males that live by themselves are usually very clean in their bachelor pads, so you can understand why they might not want to move in," he added.

I continue to be amazed at how black flying foxes in the colony I pass every day still hang around in the summer sun instead of going for shadier trees.

When the American Right used to be sensible

7 uncovered quotes that reveal just how crazy the NRA’s become - Salon.com

I like this one in particular:

“There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,” said California Gov. Ronald Reagan in May 1967, after two dozen Black Panther Party members walked into the California Statehouse carrying rifles to protest a gun-control bill. Reagan said guns were “a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”

 This article notes that Reagan then swung around to be very pro-gun rights in 1975 in "his column"  in Guns and Ammo magazine, but post presidency he swung again:

The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 will be remembered as an important piece of legislation for gun rights. However, Reagan also cast his support behind the two most controversial pieces of gun control legislation of the past 30 years. His support of the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994 may have directly led to the ban winning the approval of Congress. Congress passed the ban by a vote of 216-214. In addition to Klug voting for the ban after Reagan’s last minute plea, Rep. Dick Swett, D-N.H., also credited Reagan’s support of the bill for helping him decide to cast a favorable vote.

Does the NRA blame Alzheimer's Disease for his later support of gun control, I wonder?  I see from this article that he was not formally diagnosed with it until 2004, even though many suspect he started to suffer from it during his second term.  (That linked article makes out a pretty convincing sounding case that he was, actually.) 

A spot of good news

With group effort, Japan suicides fall to 15-year low - CSMonitor.com

Of minor interest:

“As they keep blaming themselves for business failure, saying, ‘I’ve done wrong’ or ‘I’ve caused trouble to society,’ that totally impairs their judgment,” says Hisao Sato who started a suicide prevention program in 2002 in Akita city, some 720 miles north of Tokyo. The region is notorious for being home to the highest suicide rates.

I've been within 80 km or so of Akita quite a few times but never visited it.   I am told there is not much there, but it is such a lonely looking corner of the country I've always felt it would welcome my presence as an international tourist.  It is also close to a Marian apparition, complete with weeping statue.  (Mind you, we briefly had one of those in a Brisbane suburb a few years ago, and I went and had a look.  I think I have mentioned that before.)

A look at Hare Krishna

My years as a Hare Krishna

This is an interesting account of a woman who got into Hare Krishna but who has now moved away from it.  She's still sympathetic to the religion, though.

I note that she was obviously no stranger to recreational drug taking before she got into it.  I have a family member who is (last I heard) still in the religion, who came to it with some recreational drug experience (of a worrying degree, apparently.  I don't know the full details, though.)

I guess this is of no great surprise:  I tend to think anyone who tries anything more psychoactive than, say, marijuana, is showing signs of spiritual aimlessness which a strong communitarian religious practice like Hare Krishna is able to address.  (Gee, I still don't like using the word "spiritual".)  

Anyhow, one of the comments that follow the article is cruel, but funny:

I used to live over the back fence from a Hare Krisna house in Brisbane - 24 hour cycle chanting hare krisna, hare krisna, hare rama, rama rama etc. - so I got to know the words.

My take was it suited wimpy directionless people attracted to traditional conservative roles with an appearance of something special and different

Just when you thought nuclear holocaust had gone away...

Nuclear war accidents: Minutemen missiles in silos should be abolished. - Slate Magazine

Ros Rosenbaum argues that the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange is still high, particularly from the land based Minuteman missiles.   Computers are now a large part of the problem:

The silo-based missiles have been "detargeted," we've been told, but can easily be retargeted in seconds with a burst of code containing—say, Moscow's GPS coordinates. They've been detargeted but not de-alerted (something I called for back 2008 in Slate). They're still ready to go, at a moment's notice, vulnerable to hackers despite the claims by some security experts they're "air gapped from the internet"—but think USB sticks.

Nobody has yet explained the incident in late 2010 when 50 nuclear missiles in Wyoming stopped responding to the C3I system for a frightening period of time. The Pentagon hastened to say, hey, no problem, don’t worry that our computer system isn't capable of error-proof command and control of 50 nuclear missiles for just a little while. The episode was not confidence-inducing, and it reminded us how much world-destroying power is entrusted to glitch-prone computer architecture. The fact that this sensational story was virtually ignored is further evidence of head-in-the sand consciousness we have about nuclear power. 

When I discussed the matter of our "launch posture" with a Pentagon general who specialized in nuclear affairs, he refused to say whether these missiles could still be launched on the basis of "dual phenomenology." This obfuscatory euphemism means that once we receive signals from two electronic tracking systems—radar and satellite—that something on the screens looks like an attack, we'd face the "use it or lose it" choice. We'd have to "launch on warning" before we knew that the warnings were not "false positives" like the flock of geese. Fortunately, it's unlikely there could be two simultaneous false positives in our dual phenomenology, but a statistician's analysis has argued that eventually it would happen. One prominent statistics expert, Martin Hellman, one of the inventors of the "trap door" and "public key" methods of encryption for the Internet, calculated a 1-in-10 chance of a nuclear exchange in the next decade, and Scientific American put it at a not-so-reassuring 1-in-30 for the same period.

Bad news from the Andes

Unprecedented glacier melting in the Andes blamed on climate change

While judging what's going on with glaciers in the Himalayas seems to be quite tricky, it has always seemed that the fate of South American glaciers has been clearer.  And it does have serious implications for water supply:

The Santa River valley in Peru will be most affected, as its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants heavily rely on glacier water for agriculture, domestic consumption, and hydropower. Large cities, such as La Paz in Bolivia, could also face shortages. "Glaciers provide about 15% of the La Paz water supply throughout the year, increasing to about 27% during the dry season," says Alvaro Soruco, a Bolivian researcher who took part in the study.

I should also mention that this is one reason I liked Quantum of Solace:  the writers seemed to be well aware of climate change causing problems in that part of the world, and hence the evil scheme to store desperately needed water underground kinda made sense.

An interesting list

What doctors won't do | Life and style | The Guardian

I don't know how came up with the idea for this, but it's interesting to read a list of medical things doctors would not do.

PSA testing gets a mention more than once...

The cold up there explained

Stratospheric Phenomenon Is Bringing Frigid Cold to U.S | Climate Central

People don't like The Bunker

King George Square designer wouldn't change a thing despite calls to bring back the grass  | The Courier-Mail

Obviously, it's not just me then.

I reckon the redesigned King George Square in the heart of Brisbane is a horrendous hot, glare-y and unwelcoming space which people scuttle across as soon as possible to avoid heat stroke, with lines that make it look like there's a bomb shelter beneath it.

Many people seem to agree.

In fact, I have long thought that Brisbane's general appearance took a turn for the worse under Campbell Newman as Lord Mayor.   I never liked his predecessor Jim Soorley at a personal level, but at least he seemed to have a team of urban designers who had decent ideas for the look of the city.  I think Newman  is a typical engineer;  all interested in efficiency and machines, but wouldn't recognize pleasing aesthetic design if it bit him.

More details needed

Spacecraft caused car crash, say pair

Here's a peculiar story from just outside of Brisbane that happened last weekend.  Surely if they were genuine, one of the guys involved is going to turn up on TV to explain more?:

TWO men who walked away from a car crash near Brisbane's Wivenhoe Dam claimed to be chasing an alien spacecraft when found by police.

Police and the driver's insurance company received several sketchy phone calls from the men, who appeared to be convinced paranormal activity caused the crash.

Police received the first call from the men at 2.25am on Friday, saying they had been in an accident at Split Yard Creek and asked for the RAAF to attend...

Police said the conversations with the men were vague and at times barely understandable.

The men began to ''freak out'', telling the insurance company they were about to disappear and referred to the area as the Bermuda Triangle, police said.

Police called the men back, with the second male answering the phone, telling police there were ''some really weird things going on'' and they had abandoned the car.

Police received another call from the men at 4am, claiming that ''something paranormal'' had occurred and ''big bright lights'' caused the car accident.

Police found the men at 4.10am at the intersection of Wivenhoe-Somerset and Hyne roads. They were armed with knives and appeared to be protecting themselves.

The men became aggressive, claiming ''there were more of them around''.
The car's driver was breathalysed. He was over the limit and given a notice to appear in court.

The drink driving offence doesn't necessarily mean much with our .05 limit.  Drunks rarely freak out that way anyway, I reckon.   I have a hunch there might have been more in their system than alcohol, but I would like to be wrong.