Brilliant move, Tony! Let's pretend science doesn't exist!

This morning I was longing to see Tony Abbott try on a bit of farce by appointing a climate change skeptic to be the Minister for Science.

He's done even better - he's pretending Science doesn't exist.

What a sign of the attitude and credibility of this government.   

Ha!

Bronwyn Bishop to be Speaker

While we're at it, can I please have a climate change denier in the science portfolio?  And give Nick Minchin that nice New York job?

The Gina Chronicles

The mother of all feuds

Wow.  This lengthy article that appeared in the weekend magazine of the Fairfax papers paints a fantastically unflattering portrait of Gina Rinehart.  One can't help but imagine that this does not please her, especially as owner of a fair slab of the company.

Gina does seem to be having a run of court action losses lately.  You would have to strongly suspect that she is about to lose her biggest case at the hands of her son, unless he suddenly decides to accept a compromise settlement before it goes to trial next month.  In fact, the article resolves one thing I had long wondered:  would Gina's argument (that extending the vesting date of the trust was in her children's interest because that way they would avoid a huge capital gains tax liability) hold up?   No, it seems not.  Apparently, within 12 months, her son had a ruling from the ATO that confirmed it would not attract CGT.  Once that was know, how did Gina really think she win the case? 

I haven't read all that much about Gina Rinehart's complicated life, and so I have also previously missed this bit of family bitterness:

Lang, noting the changes he saw taking place in his daughter after her second marriage, famously remarked in a letter to her: "At least allow me to remember you as the neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady of the 'Wake Up Australia' tour [when she was married to Greg Milton], rather than the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become. I am glad your mother cannot see you now."

Nasty, but somewhat amusing in a multi-generational soap opera sort of way.  (I never watched Dallas, but I wonder if the real life Rinehart saga indicates that the show may have been far more realistic than people imagined.)

High food

In defense of airline food: Airplane cuisine is a triumph of cooking, science, and logistics. - Slate Magazine

Yeah, I am with this guy:  I enjoy airline food, largely because it is usually palatable enough but also the end of a long chain of effort to get it to my little fold down tray.   

I also didn't realise until I read this article that no US economy domestic airline has a free meal service anymore. That's a bit surprising, given the length of some cross country flights.

Julia and I on the same wavelength

Julia Gillard's weekend essay is pretty good, I think, and I am particularly pleased to see that she agrees with what I wrong a fortnight ago about a key, disastrously bad, decision she made:

I erred by not contesting the label “tax” for the fixed price period of the emissions trading scheme I introduced. I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word “tax”. I wanted to be on the substance of the policy, not playing “gotcha”. But I made the wrong choice and, politically, it hurt me terribly.

Hindsight can give you insights about what went wrong. But only faith, reason and bravery can propel you forward.

Labor should not in opposition abandon our carbon pricing scheme. Climate change is real. Carbon should be priced. Community concern about carbon pricing did abate after its introduction. Tony Abbott does not have a viable alternative.

While it will be uncomfortable in the short term to be seen to be denying the mandate of the people, the higher cost would be appearing as, indeed becoming, a party unable to defend its own policy and legislation: a party without belief, fortitude or purpose.

Labor is on the right side of history on carbon pricing and must hold its course. Kevin Rudd was both right and brave to say this in the dying days of the campaign.

Why aren't I paid a lot of money to be a political adviser?

Hadn't thought of these before

Life-saving inventions, people, and ideas: Cotton, shoes, fluoride, the Clean Air Act. - Slate Magazine

This post in Slate's longevity series lists "14 oddball reasons you're not dead yet".  Most of them I had heard of before, but I found two which were a bit new to me:

Cotton. One of the major killers of human history was typhus, a bacterial disease spread by lice. It defeated Napoleon’s army; if Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were historically accurate, it would feature less cannon fire and more munching arthropods. Wool was the clothing material of choice before cotton displaced it. Cotton is easier to clean than wool and less hospitable to body lice.

And:

Pasteurization. This should be an obvious lifesaver, right up there with hand-washing and proper nutrition. But the rise of the raw milk movement suggests that a lot of people take safe dairy products for granted. Contaminated milk was one of the major killers of children, transmitting typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. One of the most successful public health campaigns of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries was for pure and pasteurized milk—so successful that we don’t really remember how deadly milk can be.

 (I didn't realise that so many diseases had been associated with unpasteurised milk.)

Detective Rat

From the BBC:

Five "sniffer rats" have been in police training in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, learning how to distinguish between scents - including blood, drugs and explosives.

The brown rats are due to go into active service next year, operating under the names Poirot, Magnum, Derrick - TV detectives popular in the Netherlands - and Jansen and Janssen, the Dutch names for the bowler-hatted detectives in Tintin.

It means the Netherlands will be the first country to use trained rats in civilian police investigations.

There's video at the link, but wasn't working when I tried it.

Brie snobbery

Slate’s rules for entertaining: never bring brie cheese to a party, it’s clich, bland, and fake.

Seeing I haven't eaten American brie, I don't know how much truth there is in this article.  But given that it appears that America has the same cheese making rules as Australia (pasteurised milk only) one suspects that its brie might be the same as ours, and the writer reckons its bland and should be completely avoided.

Yet how different is French brie, really?  In the comments that follow the article (where a heated back and forth about whether the article is just food snobbery) someone says they didn't find the French cheese all that different.

One thing I do know for sure - if you want funky, overpowering cheese in Australia, all you have to do is buy some Blue Castello*, eat half of it, forget about the other half for a fortnight or so in the fridge, and try it again.  It's always a matter of curiosity to me whether the yellowish, somewhat slimy looking patches that develop (and which taste very strong indeed) could actually put one's health at risk.  (I usually try to cut off the worst looking bits, but the taste still lingers.)

*  My goodness - the company has a very fancy shmancy website

Body and soul

The extent to which, during my lifetime, Catholic devotion and teaching has moved away from emphasising Mary is something which often crosses my mind as an interesting topic which seems to attract little, or inadequate, attention academically.  (Not that I have really gone looking for it, I suppose.  But why isn't this really major, and rapid, change in Church emphasis, at least in the Western branch of Catholicism, more discussed?)

While not directly on that point, Phillip Jenkins here notes some relatively early "alternative gospels" which talk about Mary's death, and says they are little studied, which he thinks is a pity.  He writes:

One reason for this, of course, is that for most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense.

As I’ll argue in a forthcoming post, that response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.

A sarcastic Jericho

Joe Hockey wants an external auditor – I volunteer for the job | Greg Jericho | Business | theguardian.com

Ha!  Greg Jericho gets very sarcastic in his column, explaining why Hockey's "we must audit the Treasury's forecasting" was political grandstanding bumpf.

More "something you don't see every day"

 

Apparently, a privately owned lion was found wandering Kuwaiti streets, and ended up in a police car.  From the report:

Police are seeking the owner of the lion, believed to be someone who was illegally rearing it as a pet in a country where such animals are sometimes considered status symbols. 

   I wonder if the RSPCA there takes in all strays?

On thin ice

Arctic ice continues to thin, and thin, European satellite reveals - CSMonitor.com

More Traditionalist concern, I expect

Archbishop Pietro Parolin says in an interview that celibacy in Roman Catholic Church is open for discussion

Archbishop Pietro Parolin said in response to an interview question with Venezuelan newspaper El Universal that “celibacy is not an institution but look, it is also true that you can discuss (it) because as you say this is not a dogma, a dogma of the church.” Parolin also noted, even though the church is not a democratic institution, it must "reflect the democratic spirit of the times and adopt a collegial way of governing."

According to the National Catholic Reporter, Parolin’s comments “are raising eyebrows today, with some wondering if they herald looming changes in Catholic teaching and practice.”

Traditionalists must be getting agitated

You don’t have to believe in God to go to heaven, Pope Francis assures sceptics 

The Pope has again said conciliatory things to atheists?   He must be starting to concern traditionalist Catholics of the Michael Voris, Father Z variety.  The latter has not commented yet, but surely something is coming...

A call out to Catallaxy

Gab, and any other woman, who reads this morning's open thread and simply passes over a comment made by a new regular at 6.25, is an absolute disgrace.

The future may be panda powered

Study: Panda Poo May Be Coup for Future of Biofuels | Climate Central

Good to see innovative uses for pandas:

Brown’s team has found more than 40 different microbes living in the guts of giant pandas at the Memphis Zoo that could help decompose the corn cobs and other tough plant materials so it can be more easily and efficiently processed to make ethanol.

The study is using the feces from giant pandas Ya Ya and Le Le. Pandas, which have a short digestive tract, feast on a diet of tough bamboo. Bacteria with extremely potent enzymes break down the woody bamboo efficiently and quickly.

“The time from eating to defecation is comparatively short in the panda, so their microbes have to be very efficient to get nutritional value out of the bamboo,” Brown said. “And efficiency is key when it comes to biofuel production — that’s why we focused on the microbes in the giant panda.”

Brown’s team found the specific bacteria that break down lignocellulose into simple sugars, which can be fermented into bioethanol, and they found other bacteria that can transform those sugars into oils and fats for biodiesel production.

The microbes in pandas’ guts are accessible via their feces and can easily be cultured, Brown said.

What's better than acid on your teeth? Hot acid!

Coca-cola to introduce world’s first canned hot fizzy drink in Japan - Asia - World - The Independent

I wonder if they have buffered the acidity in this drink some way; because I can't imagine that heating up soft drink does any wonders for your tooth enamel.

Hormones are complicated

Middle-Aged Men Can Blame Estrogen, Too - NYTimes.com

The article starts:

 It is the scourge of many a middle-aged man: he starts getting a pot belly, using lighter weights at the gym and somehow just doesn’t have the sexual desire of his younger years.

The obvious culprit is testosterone, since men gradually make less of the male sex hormone as years go by. But a surprising new answer is emerging, one that doctors say could reinvigorate the study of how men’s bodies age. Estrogen, the female sex hormone, turns out to play a much bigger role in men’s bodies than previously thought, and falling levels contribute to their expanding waistlines just as they do in women’s. 

The discovery of the role of estrogen in men is “a major advance,” said Dr. Peter J. Snyder, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading a big new research project on hormone therapy for men 65 and over. Until recently, testosterone deficiency was considered nearly the sole reason that men undergo the familiar physical complaints of midlife.

What a complicated design is the human body, heh? 

Is that right?

Coalition rhetoric a real confidence builder

Michael Pascoe talks about the self fulfilling prophecy of improved business confidence after the election, but ends on this note:

 It is a little bemusing that the only concrete decision taken by the yet-to-be-sworn-in government is to waste money – having to pay Steve Bracks a couple of years’ wages for nothing amidst suggestions that the New York consul general’s post will instead go to a Liberal Party worthy.

Is that right, the bit about the 2 years salary?

In any case, it's not a good sign of the Coalition swinging the axe for party political reasons.

More attention to reef needed

Coral will dissolve if CO2 emissions don't change

I think that, coming out as it did during an election campaign, this story about new and significant sounding research didn't attract much attention.

I did see it at the time, but forgot to come back to it.  I also thought to myself that Ove Hoegh-Guldberg has long been very pessimistic on everything he says about the reef, so maybe this press release is over-stating it too, but now that I read the detail about what they did, it seems I was wrong. Here's the abstract itself:

Increasing atmospheric partial pressure of CO₂ (pCO₂) is a major threat to coral reefs, but some argue that the threat is mitigated by factors such as the variability in the response of coral calcification to acidification, differences in bleaching susceptibility, and the potential for rapid adaptation to anthropogenic warming. However the evidence for these mitigating factors tends to involve experimental studies on corals, as opposed to coral reefs, and rarely includes the influence of multiple variables (e.g., temperature and acidification) within regimes that include diurnal and seasonal variability. Here, we demonstrate that the inclusion of all these factors results in the decalcification of patch-reefs under business-as-usual scenarios and reduced, although positive, calcification under reduced-emission scenarios. Primary productivity was found to remain constant across all scenarios, despite significant bleaching and coral mortality under both future scenarios. Daylight calcification decreased and nocturnal decalcification increased sharply from the preindustrial and control conditions to the future scenarios of low (reduced emissions) and high (business-as-usual) increases in pCO₂. These changes coincided with deeply negative carbonate budgets, a shift toward smaller carbonate sediments, and an increase in the abundance of sediment microbes under the business-as-usual emission scenario. Experimental coral reefs demonstrated highest net calcification rates and lowest rates of coral mortality under preindustrial conditions, suggesting that reef processes may not have been able to keep pace with the relatively minor environmental changes that have occurred during the last century. Taken together, our results have serious implications for the future of coral reefs under business-as-usual environmental changes projected for the coming decades and century. 

But no, we were probably too distracted at the time it came out by the searing political story about how  Kevin Rudd failed to chat to a make up artist.