No Bond gadgets needed?

Uri Geller psychic spy? The spoon-bender's secret life as a Mossad and CIA agent revealed - Features - Films - The Independent

This sounds very improbable, but interesting:

We may know him for spoon bending antics and for his lengthy friendship with pop star Michael Jackson but showbiz psychic Uri Geller has seemingly had a lengthy second career as a secret agent for Mossad and the CIA, albeit one that was more Austin Powers than James Bond.

Geller was at the Sheffield Doc Fest this week for the premiere of Vikram Jayanti’s The Secret Life Of Uri Geller – Psychic Spy?, a new film that offers compelling evidence of his involvement in the shadowy world of espionage.

“Uri has a controversial reputation. A lot of people think he is a fraud, a lot of people think he is a trickster and makes things up but at the same time he has a huge following and a history of doing things that nobody can explain,” Jayanti says of his Zelig-like subject....

 The doc leaves a question mark in its title but provides so much background evidence that we are left in little doubt that even its most outlandish assertions are rooted in truth. Whether or not Geller had psychic powers, US security forces were certainly prepared to take a very hefty wager on him.

The documentary doesn't just rely on Geller's claims (in fact it says he is guarded in what he says):

Jayanti didn’t rely on Geller’s own cryptic testimony. Instead, he spoke to the high-level officials involved in recruiting and using him. These include scientists from The Stanford Research Institute as well as senior CIA operatives. Among the interviewees with first hand knowledge of Geller’s psychic spying activities are former CIA officer Kit Green, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man to walk on the moon), physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, and retired US army colonel John Alexander (of The Men Who Stared At Goats fame). A Brit, Nick Pope, once the British Government’s UFO boffin, also puts in an appearance. 

Hmmm.  Given that most of those named are prominent as believers in the paranormal, I wonder how reliable some their testimony might be.

Anyway, sounds well worth watching.

A comment made in absentia

I have a comment awaiting moderation for Catallaxy, where Julie Novak has attempted to answer the question "why are there no libertarian countries":

* Julie may well have read of this article elsewhere (it was getting a lot of publicity in the US), but I was the first to raise it at Catallaxy in an open thread some days ago. It attracted little comment, apart from the “just piss off” variety, and daddy dave accused it of being deliberately provocative to dare raise it at a libertarian themed site (even though, as many others now point out, the threads are dominated by conservatives.) This is an example of the completely out of whack treatment yours truly receives at the blog – it was an interesting argument well deserving of comment, but because I am the one to raise it, I am the one who deserves punishment.

* Isn’t it gob smackingly ironic for the complaints at this blog regarding the alleged crushing nanny statism which Australians are suffering under that Julie is citing recent research ranking the country high in the matters of economic and personal freedoms? I haven’t been able to download the paper at the link, but people who can should perhaps explain why it doesn’t support my contention that the blog is full of exaggerating panic merchants?

Oh, boo hoo

Of course, confirming that the Labor politicians who are still fighting the war for a Rudd return are not quite right in the head, Doug Cameron and Kim Carr have lined up to pretty directly condemn Gillard for seeing that Crossin loses her job.

But quite frankly, that's politics, isn't it?   People sometimes lose pre-selection for someone they think less deserving.

And after all - it's not as if Crossin hasn't had a good run.  In the Senate since 1998, and what sort of pension will she retire on?:

TERRITORIANS shouldn't feel too sorry for Trish Crossin following her dumping from the Senate.
She will get an annual tax-free pension of more than $100,000 a year and five free business class flights a year.

Oh, it's a right tragedy for her, that is.

Lift cables, skyscrapers, and space

Lifts and skyscrapers: The other mile-high club | The Economist

Here's another interesting piece up at The Economist website:

This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Kone’s technology—which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibres—could result in buildings truly worthy of the name “skyscraper”.

The problem with steel cables (or “ropes” as they are known in the trade) is that they are heavy. Any given bit of rope has to pull up not only the car and the flexible travelling cables that take electricity and communications to it, but also all the rope beneath it. The job is made easier by counterweights. But even so in a lift 500 metres tall (the maximum effective height at the moment) steel ropes account for up to three-quarters of the moving mass of the machine. Shifting this mass takes energy, so taller lifts are more expensive to run. And adding to the mass, by making the ropes longer, would soon come uncomfortably close to the point where the steel would snap under the load. Kone says it is able to reduce the weight of lift ropes by around 90% with its carbon-fibre replacement, dubbed UltraRope.

The article does note at the end that the development suggests that space elevators may be do-able:

Nor need carbon-fibre lift-cables be confined to buildings. They could eventually make an idea from science fiction a reality too. Space lifts, dreamed up in the late 1950s, are a way of getting into orbit without using a rocket. Building one would mean lowering a cable from a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit above the Earth’s equator while deploying a counterbalancing cable out into space. The cable from Earth to the satellite would not be a classic lift rope because it would not, itself, move. But it would perform a similar function of support as robotic cars crawled up and down it, ferrying people and equipment to and from the satellite—whence they could depart into the cosmos.

I'm guessing that the strength of this new cable has some way to go yet.

But as it happens, I was idly wondering recently about whatever happened to the idea of a "skyhook" system for helping get things into low earth orbit.  

I always thought the idea of space plane catching a ride up at the end of skyhook sounded like a good idea, and I wonder whether the strength of the Kone cable is enough for the job.   (Although a skyhook presumably needs to be rigid, not flexible like a lift cable.  I wonder if that is a problem?)

It does sound kinda stupid

Google's Project Loon to float the internet on balloons - tech - 18 June 2013 - New Scientist

I hadn't previously bothered reading the details of the Google trial of internet via balloon,  but now that I have, it's hard to imagine it working:

 Google will rely on weather prediction to keep its balloons in the right place, moving them up and down to take advantage of different air currents. "Project Loon uses software algorithms to determine where its balloons need to go, then moves each one into a layer of wind blowing in the right direction," Google announced. "By moving with the wind, the balloons can be arranged to form one large communications network."

An IT consultant also says it's a bit silly to think that access to the net will be of instant value to the poorest people of the world:

"It is a total myth to imagine a farmer in Mali using Google to find solutions for a disease his tomatoes have. Barriers are just huge: illiteracy, language, ICT training," Boyera says. The existing web is not that useful to the underprivileged populations of developing countries, and no amount of new connectivity options can fix that, he says.

Good point.

Day 10 of the prophecy that won't self fulfill despite everyone's best effort

Gee, isn't everyone getting sick of the media story that the Gillard leadership crisis is coming to a head, um, any day now.  The current countdown really got a kick along by Barrie Cassidy on Insiders the Sunday before last, and given that he is said to be close to the PM's partner Tim (well, they have often been seen at the footy together, I think the story goes,) I thought it might even have been some sort of authorised leak from the Lodge about Gillard re-considering her position.  This private theory of mine obviously had nothing to it, though.

Of course, the media is not entirely to blame:  but it is for continually repeating the musings of the line up of Labor politicians who want to have a cry on their shoulder about how Kevin is their only hope.

We also have left leaning academics to blame - John Quiggin, who has agitated for a Rudd return for a long time, and even the normally sensible Ken Parish is now advocating a completely cynical switch based on the theory that Rudd wouldn't win the House of Reps anyway, but would keep the Senate out of Coalition control, even though he really is a "treacherous turd" (Ken's own words) . 

I haven't seen the evening news on TV lately, but I've caught a bit of Question Time during the day, and Gillard has performed well.   She does not look like a leader who deserves to lose her position at all.

If only people of the Left would stop talking about the need for her to go, so that everything that happens in Federal politics is not being seen purely through that prism.   (Of course, this advice should have been followed for the last 2 years, as well.)

Things I don't understand about movies

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas Have a Strange Vision of the Future - DailyFinance

As this article notes, it was very odd hearing the creators of the Hollywood blockbuster mentality complaining about how it has sucked dry financing for other films.   (Spielberg had to look hard for financing for Lincoln, apparently, even though I would have thought it was one he could have paid for himself.  Lucas self financed his last film, which was a critical and commercial flop that seems to have not even been released internationally.  [Or if it has, I hadn't noticed.])

Anyhow, Hollywood financing and accounting has always been an enigma and famously shonky, and although I mentioned this before fairly recently, I still need someone to explain the following about the present situation:

1.  we used to hear that a huge cost of putting out a film was the print costs and distribution.   The US now has a large number of digital cinemas, so what has happened to all those costs savings?

2.  similarly, digital video cameras should surely represent a huge saving in film stock and processing.   Where did the savings go?

3.  digital video and cheap computer graphics processing should presumably also have dramatically cut the cost of special effects, and there was even that video going around the internet a couple of years ago showing how TV shows can basically use digital sets which presumably is much cheaper than going to a location. Where did the savings go?

On a separate note, on Friday night I watched the SBS sex movie that traditionally follows their Nazi documentary.   (Who started this long standing tradition at the station, I wonder.) 

This movie ("Lower City") was from Brazil, and the synopsis is here:

When prostitute Karinna accepts a ride to Bahia on Deco and Naldinho's cargo boat, sexual services are part of the arrangement.

Both men quickly become enamoured with her and seek the means to take her away from her life as a prostitute and pole dancer.

Set in the beautiful Bahia de San Salvador in Northern Brazil. 

It fitted the European (and Australian) School of Pointless Realism perfectly:   follow the events in the life of a few characters who are small time criminals and on a "life's losers" trajectory.   End the film by having them get into a fight, but with no resolution of the situation that has developed in the film whatsoever.  (The two guys both fell in love with her; the prostitute is pregnant with someone's baby, but it could be anyone's.  The guys beat each other up, she washes their blood in her room, and has a cry.  End credits.)  

I thought to myself:  I have been complaining about this style of narrative in art house film (let's set up a situation for the characters:  let's not attempt any resolution of any kind at all!) for decades.   I actually find it so cliche now that it is funny.      

The oceans rise up

Coastal cities and climate change: You’re going to get wet | The Economist

Here's a good, detailed article on the very serious issue of how expensive and difficult it will be for the US to deal with rising sea levels.

Cartoonist idea

Has some cartoonist in Australia today done something combining the Gillard/Rudd leadership issue and the Nigella Lawson "just a playful tiff" story?   Seems sort of obvious...

And speaking of cartoonists, First Dog on the Moon's one from last week was very good.  (Particularly the talk back callers.)

Ben's right

Many men find gender debates too threatening to handle | Ben Eltham | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Whether you think Gillard has been a good prime minister or a poor one, the highly sexualised attacks against her person are on the public record for all to see. The avalanche of personal slurs against the prime minister has snowballed so far, overseas media outlets are starting to take note of it.

Except, unfortunately, many can't see it. For many Australians, including many men, the idea that Gillard is on the receiving end of a torrent of sexual abuse is just too hard to cope with. As a fellow on Twitter remarked to me yesterday about the Sattler interview, the interview was “hardly sexist”. No, he went on, “she is an incompetent leader who back-stabbed the PM of the country. That is why she is hated.” Incompetence and backstabbing – there's a couple of gender stereotypes we see time and again in the way the prime minister is discussed.

It's not just the froth and bubble of social media. Robust opinion poll data shows the trend. Gillard is particularly unpopular with men, and the trend shows up in different polls by different pollsters.

In the wake of Gillard's speech last about men in blue ties and abortion, the trend has worsened. Nielsen's John Stirton tells us that “Labor's primary vote was down 7 points among men.” The Australian Financial Review's front page screamed this morning, “Men in revolt against Gillard”.

There's no doubt that abortion is a divisive issue. But few seem to have bothered to read the full speech, which is actually quite moderate. Gillard's decision to raise abortion and gender issues is hardly beyond the pale. How can it be? These are vital social issues of the utmost ethical significance.

In any case, the Gillard hatred is not really about abortion. It's about power.

The truth is that many men find gender discussions uncomfortable. They find them uncomfortable because they threaten male power. The most anti-Gillard segment of the community is older white males – precisely the most privileged demographic in Australian society. For men like Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt and Howard Sattler, it really does appear as though a female prime minister threatens their sense of identity. Perhaps that's why Jones seems incapable of stopping himself referring to the prime minister as “this woman.” Andrew Bolt prefers a more subtle power dynamic: he likes to call Gillard a “professional victim”.

Mysterious and convenient timing, and a bunch of questions about Smith's crusade

Hedley Thomas re-appears today in The Australian to tell us that Victorian Police have taken files (under a search warrant) from Julia Gillard's old law firm.

Yet if you read the report carefully, one will see that there is no mention of when they did this.  Just that "sources told The Australian yesterday."

Given that Gillard is under intense leadership, doesn't this leak just appear a bit convenient?

I personally suspect that there is something deeply fishy and potentially scandalous about the whole matter of the Victorian police investigation into the Gillard "did she or did she not properly witness a Power of Attorney" question.

The point is - no one seems to be claiming that anyone lost any money out of this, and the person whose evidence is crucial (Ralph Blewitt) is both widely considered to be a crook, and does not deny signing the Power of Attorney.

A lawyer who improperly witnessed a document may certainly be guilty of unprofessional conduct, but it is a matter normally dealt with by the local Law Society, as this blog post by a barrister with lots of examples illustrates.  He points out that solicitors don't even usually lose the right to practice over such a matter.

Without knowing the exact details of what Blewitt has alleged, it is difficult to know completely what the Police are running with.   But it has always looked very strange to me that the Victorian Police have such an intense interest in a matter which is nearly 20 years old, and in which no one alleges any money was lost.  Furthermore, it has to be remembered that Michael Smith, a man well motivated to have a nutty personal obsession with politically hurting the PM, but who wasn't even involved in the matter, is apparently the one who has made the complaint that the police are investigating.   How does that work? 

Will it work like this:  Police conduct investigation for a year or more, hand it over to public prosecutor lawyers who decide there is insufficient evidence to charge anything, and it really is more a matter of professional misconduct?   Meanwhile, political damage has been maximised?   Wouldn't that be considered a somewhat scandalous outcome?

Or is it that Blewitt has made some other allegation of Gillard's knowledge of the source of funds to buy the house in Melbourne?  But as his partner in dodgy business Wilson is completely supporting Gillard, how would you ever hope that there is a credible case to be worth running?   

If it is only relating to the power of attorney, why has there been no lawyer or reporter out there asking "why are the police so interested in an old matter which would normally be one relating to professional conduct only"?  Or has there been, but I have missed it?

I have been meaning to make this point for many months, but today's report was the one to finally prompt me to do it.

The coming seafood buffet crisis?

It's been ages since I have had a post about ocean acidification.

Three recent stories on the topic caught my eye, however, and two of them are potentially bad news for those who like to partake of a seafood buffet:

1.   squid, including the type we routinely eat, seem to be adversely affected by increasing acidification (although the experiment in question did look at their growth at pH levels which won't be seen in the ocean for a hundred years or so);

2.  the mechanism via which oysters suffer under low pH appears to be better understood:

They discovered that the tiny larvae undergo a dramatic growth spurt during their first 48 hours of life, forming new shell at a rate 10 times higher than they do when they are five days old.

This spurt is fuelled by nutrients packed into each larva's egg. As well as powering shell construction, the nutrients also fuel the development of feeding organs – vital for getting energy once the food source from the egg has been used up. But such high growth rates are difficult to sustain when seawater pH falls. That's because the carbonate ions normally used to build calcium carbonate shells instead react with the more acidic water, reducing the amount available for shell material.

3.  To muddy the ocean acidification story further (almost a pun there), another recent study indicates the confusing situation regarding what is already doing well, and what's doing not so well, in the oceans, and the uncertainty as to what is causing the changes:

The study, published in PLoS One found that different species react in different ways to changes in their environment. As carbon dioxide emissions dissolve in seawater they lower the pH of the oceans making them more acidic and more corrosive to shells.

Foraminifera and coccoliths, which are small shelled plankton and algae, appear to be surviving remarkably well in the more acidic conditions. But numbers of pteropods and bivalves – such as mussels, clams and oysters – are falling.

'Ecologically, some species are soaring, whilst others are crashing out of the system,' says Professor Jason Hall-Spencer, of Plymouth University, who co-authored the paper.

The scientists are unsure whether this drop in certain species is because of changing pH levels, or whether it is due to a combination of stress factors like warming, overfishing and eutrophication -which results from a build up of excess nutrients in water.

Vacuum assisted aim

The video itself is a few years old, but it just appeared at Boing Boing, and it's genuinely interesting to see how well a vacuum system for space urination seems to work:

How to send a secret message without sending it

There's a really good article up at Vanity Fair, by a guy who seems to know what he's talking about, trying to correct the many misperceptions about the US PRISM program aspect of the current NSA "scandal". 

He makes a point (after a good technical explanation as to how the NSA works in the email spying business) which I have always thought pretty obvious:

Sure, people could make the argument that this could be the slippery slope to some sort of effort by the government to monitor your porn subscriptions, but . . . really? The N.S.A. is downloading petabytes of data every day with so many anonymizers and protections in place, it is incomprehensible to imagine (and illegal and technologically problematic) that someone would just somehow start surfing through private records. To me, the slippery-slope argument makes as much sense as the N.R.A.’s position that, if we use background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, the United States is on the way to the seizure of weapons. And they make the same silly argument—they think that the government invades their privacy by running those checks.

I was also interested to read of this pretty clever way of passing information without sending an email:

Sometime after 9/11, al-Qaeda members figured out that a great way to transmit information over the Internet was by not transmitting it at all. Instead, a terrorist would open an account with a free service like Hotmail or Google, write an e-mail, and rather than sending it or even writing in the address of a recipient, would store it in a “draft” folder. Then, through other means such as a satellite phone or another e-mail account, a coded message would be sent to the planned recipient telling him the account name and the password. The recipient would know to open the account, check the draft file, and then delete the account. Once the N.S.A. knew through other means of the existence of the message, it would gain access to the temporary account through a court-issued subpoena to the company, read the secret message, and watch what happened. By 2010, though, the terrorists figured out this wasn’t working anymore and changed tactics.

The good and the bad

Pope Pius XII, Hitler’s pawn? | TLS

This reads as a pretty even handed review of 2 new biographies of Eugenio Pacelli, who was Pope Pius XII (the World War 2 Pope).  It concentrates more on what he did in the lead up to the war, rather than during it.    For example:

In early 1933, Hitler, now Chancellor, but not yet dictator, surprised Pacelli by putting out feelers for a Reichskonkordat. Hitler was offering guarantees assuring Catholic rights to religious practice in exchange for the Church’s withdrawal from every kind of social and political action, assembly and association – including newspapers, scouting groups and women’s associations. As a sweetener, Hitler offered extra educational funding for Catholic schools – for buildings, places and teachers. But the condition laid down by Hitler was that the Centre Party should vote for the infamous “Enabling Bill”, awarding him dictatorial powers, followed by the Party’s voluntary disestablishment. Ventresca concludes that the Reichskonkordat left German Catholics with no “meaningful electoral opposition to the Nazis”, while the “benefits and vaunted diplomatic entente [of the Reichskonkordat] with the German state were neither clear nor certain”. 

Recent historiography of the behaviour of the professions, Churches and judiciary from 1933 onwards in Germany, suggests that Pacelli’s dealings with Hitler had devastating consequences. The role of the judges, scientists, academics, who individually and collectively did deals with, and took benefits from, Hitler, while remaining aloof from his vicious ideology, has been characterized as that of the Mitläufer: the fellow traveller. It could be argued that the Mitläufer did more damage than card-carrying Nazi members of the churches and professions. There were indeed several Nazi Catholic prelates, known as the “Brown Bishops”, who were figures of contempt among the faithful. But the consequence of “fellow-travelling” by figures of respect and distinction, and the institutions they represented, was to demoralize potential opposition, scandalize the young, and dignify Hitler at home and abroad. Pacelli was the Führer’s ideal prelate, and future Pope, because his diplomatic accommodations suited, albeit unintentionally, the dictator’s long-term purposes.

Writing in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Pacelli declared the Reichskonkordat a triumph for the Code of Canon Law. The subtext was that Hitler had accepted the imposition of the new Code on German Catholics, hence the shift of governing authority from the local Church to the Vatican. For Hitler, speaking in cabinet, the treaty meant the “recognition of the nationalist German state” by the Vatican, as well as withdrawal of the Church from political organizations, and the disbanding of the Centre Party. Finally, and ominously, Hitler declared that the treaty created a “sense of confidence” that would be “especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry”. Pacelli was not anti-Semitic in the Nazi sense; yet he had accepted on behalf of Pius XI educational benefits from a regime that was simultaneously depriving Jews of corresponding rights and resources. The circumstance signalled an acquiescence in Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies at the origins of the persecution of Jews in Germany.

I didn't realise that Pope Paul VI had "launched the cause for his beatification".   There does seem to be a bit of an unseemly haste, if you ask me, for recent Popes to want to make their predecessors saints.   But I see from Wikipedia that the recently retired Benedict was originally reluctant:

Benedict XVI had advocated waiting until the archives from Pius XII's papacy were opened to researchers in 2014.^[1][2] A selection, the ADSS, edited by a multinational team of Jesuits, was published between 1965 and 1981. Benedict XVI changed his mind and declared Pius XII Venerable on December 19, 2009, based on the recommendation of the committee.^[1] Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI's predecessor, was declared Venerable on the same day.

I expect waiting for the full archives to be read would be worthwhile.   

Grogonomics recommended

I've been forgetting to note how much I enjoy Greg Jericho writing on economics at The Guardian.

I particularly liked his post this week taking apart the Rupert Murdoch twitter summary about Australia's current economic position.   Rupert's view, by strange coincidence [/sarc] happens to be the ABCIG* collective view as well.

It also appears to be based on lack of knowledge of some actual figures, but is repeated to Murdoch in the circles he moves in so often, he clearly has started to believe it.

Speaking of the Catallaxy economists, as Jericho notes in his most recent post, the stagflation fear mongering which turned up on the ABC (which, by wide yet nonsensical acclaim at Catallaxy, needs to be sold immediately under a Coalition government because, I guess, not enough wrong predictions by their favoured economists have been appearing) and at Andrew Bolt's show (the collective in operation) is at its two year anniversary of non fulfilment.  Congratulations.

*  the Australian, Andrew Bolt, Catallaxy, IPA and Gina Rinehart collective.   It used to be just the ABC collective, but Gina and the IPA well and truly deserves their positions as well.  In fact, its become so bad, Andrew Bolt would only have about 1/3 of the content he currently runs on his blog if it were not for Catallaxy.

Fascists do the strangest things

BBC News - A gay island community created by Italy's Fascists

A somewhat interesting story here of an island exile which Mussolini set up in the 1930's for homosexual men.

The way fascist Italy dealt with them was a step up from Germany, I suppose, but still:  

No discriminatory laws were passed. But a climate was created in which open manifestations of homosexuality could be vigorously suppressed.

And one particular police prefect in the Sicilian city of Catania took full advantage of the official mood.

"We notice that many public dances, beaches and places in the mountains receive many of these sick men, and that youngsters from all social classes look for their company," he wrote. 

He said he was determined to halt this "spreading of degeneration" in his city "or at least contain such a sexual aberration that offends morality and that is disastrous to public health and the improvement of the race".

He went on: "This evil needs to be attacked and burned at its core."

So in 1938 around 45 men believed to be homosexuals in Catania were rounded up and consigned to internal exile.

They were locked up in dormitories at 8pm (under police supervision, it says), and had no electricity or running water, but apart from that, it appears the days were pretty relaxed:

"In those days if you were a femminella [a slang Italian word for a gay man] you couldn't even leave your home, or make yourself noticed - the police would arrest you," he said of his home town near Naples.

"On the island, on the other hand, we would celebrate our Saint's days or the arrival of someone new... We did theatre, and we could dress as women there and no-one would say anything."
And he said that of course, there was romance, and even fights over lovers.

Then the war broke out, and they had to go back home to "a kind of house arrest", and some were disappointed to leave.It does sound like most sent to the island were effeminate, although there is reference to a seminarian who somehow was exiled there.

The article ends on a point I hadn't realised about the state of gay politics in Italy today:

There is still no real social stigma attached to homophobia in Italy, Scalfarotto says, and the state doesn't extend legal rights of any kind to gay or lesbian couples.

The influence of the Church, I assume?   One thing I have never understood, though, is why the Spanish Latin countries seem to have adapted to gay relationships very quickly, given that the macho culture reputation and Catholic influence.   Why have they changed very quickly, yet Italy is conservative on the matter?  I also don't really understand the strength of the anti gay marriage sentiment in France:  a country I had assumed had little Catholic influence.  I know there are other elements in the protests there, but still... 

Is this why dogs have sometimes detected it?

Scent of melanoma: New research may lead to early non-invasive detection and diagnosis

It's only tests in the lab so far, but still:

The researchers used an absorbent device to collect chemical compounds from air in closed containers containing the various types of cells. Then, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry techniques were used to analyze the compounds and identified different profiles of VOCs emitting from melanoma cells relative to normal cells.

Both the types and concentrations of chemicals were affected. Melanoma cells produced certain compounds not detected in VOCs from normal melanocytes and also more or less of other chemicals. Further, the different types of melanoma cells could be distinguished from one another.

Noting that translation of these results into the clinical diagnostic realm would require a reliable and portable sensor device, the researchers went on to examine VOCs from normal melanocytes and melanoma cells using a previously described nano-sensor.

Constructed of nano-sized carbon tubes coated with strands of DNA, the tiny sensors can be bioengineered to recognize a wide variety of targets, including specific odor molecules. The nano-sensor was able to distinguish differences in VOCs from normal and several different types of melanoma cells.

Another 4 billion?

World population could be nearly 11 billion by 2100, research shows

African fertility is not slowing at the expected rate, and hence:

The current African population is about 1.1 billion and it is now expected to reach 4.2 billion, nearly a fourfold increase, by 2100.

That's pretty remarkable.  

The boss divorces

That's interesting.  Rupert Murdoch is getting divorced from his Chinese wife.

I've been puzzled by his swings on issues - he was an early enthusiast on climate change, and I suspected her influence.   (She is said to have introduced him to a younger crowd.)    Of course, he now rarely mentions it and has no regrets about running media outlets which are an absolute disgrace in their coverage against climate change being real, and I wonder how this sits with her.   His politics lately has been swinging harder Right, it seems to me.  

I therefore wonder if he will soon be worse in that regard. 

One other thing:  I find it truly remarkable that Britain still has "page 3 girls" running his Sun newspaper.  Earlier this year, it was noted that maybe Rupert was considering stopping it.

Obviously, his wife either had no interest in the topic, or had not been able to influence him on it for a decade or so before this year.