A Musical Interlude

I've pretty much always paid pretty low attention to pop music.  I might hear a song on the radio or somewhere else and it can half register as good, but won't bother looking up anything about who sings it or how popular it is with anyone else; then years later, I might hear it again in a different context and finally I think "hey, that's really good, let's find out more about it."  And with all people, I expect, this process has become even more pronounced both as I age, but also, as pop music has fractured severely and no one sits around any more watching TV just to see music videos.  If it weren't for X Factor (go Dami, by the way) giving me an annual summation of what's been popular over the last year, it would be even worse.

Speaking of  music videos, I am always a bit surprised to see that they are still made, and many look  quite expensive.   But given that the only place they are shown now in this country seems to be an overnight show which I assume barely rates (Rage), and MTV is said to only be a channel for trash youth shows, why do they still sink money into them?   This is a mystery that I have never seen explained anywhere.

In any event, it was because of an X Factor cover that I heard this song recently, then yesterday I heard it on the radio, and last night I looked it up and realised the band had done another popular song of the last couple of years, and are from Utah and at least the lead singer is apparently a practising Mormon.  And the song has one of these videos that looks quite expensive, but I've never seen it before.   I like it:

There they go, walking down the street...

The Monkees prove their staying power with latest tour | Las Vegas Review-Journal

It was hearing in the car today the recent-ish (well, it's years old now, I think, but in comparison to the original...) version of "I'm a Believer" that reminded me that, after the death of Davy Jones in 2012, Mike Nesmith had agreed to tour as The Monkees with the two surviving members.  Scary.  (He had declined to tour with the others while Jones was alive - perhaps it was him that he didn't care spending time with?)

So, I thought I would have a look at how this improbably sounding tour has gone down.  From the above link, dated August, it would seem that they haven't been embarrassing themselves after all.  Rolling Stone seems to agree. (And look at the set list.  It's not a short show.)

And now I read that Nesmith is doing a solo tour!  If I lived in the States, I'd be there.

Another day, another happy military briefing...

Derren Brown and free will

SBS 2 has been showing some Derren Brown stage shows, which I think are a few years old now, but have not been on TV here before. (Not that I've noticed, anyway.)

Last week's one was "Something Wicked This Way Comes", and while parts were impressive, other parts weren't.

But tonight was "Evening of Wonders", and it's very good, especially in the second half.   It turns out the whole show is on Youtube.

I had read a bit about it before, and knew that he did a demonstration of the old Spiritualist table turning act.   It was good to finally see it.   But the "Oracle" act, and the ending of the show, are just so puzzling as to how they are done.  Do yourself a favour, as they say, and watch it....

Going back to Something Wicked:  Brown's over-arching career misdirection, so to speak (and this is not a novel suggestion) seems to be to claim that he is a master of psychological influence.  This is a large part of the Something Wicked show, which is also on Youtube.  (You have to watch right to the end to understand.)   He is also interested in hypnotism, and some of his "experiment" TV shows have been all about that; sometimes in ways that have appeared to me to be ethically dubious. 

What occurred to me from watching Something Wicked, and thinking back on his hypnotism shows, is that Brown's career seems virtually designed to try to convince some people that they have no free will.  Yet he must know that some audience members won't be convinced and see it all as part of the act.  But surely some won't.

I am not entirely sure of the ethics of this.  There is some evidence  recently that suggesting to people they have no free will can affect their subsequent behaviour.  I would bet that Brown, given his background, would be somewhat interested in that.  He also claims, at times, to be all about people empowering themselves with self belief and confidence.  But this seems to sit uncomfortably with a stage act in which he probably convinces some that they had no choice but to pick a certain word on a page, because he had primed them to do so.

In any event, this is what I have enjoyed about discovering his work over the last year or so since he has turned up on SBS:  there is something very "meta" about trying to understand where he is coming from and what he is trying to achieve.  And yes, I know he's an ex Christian who has come out as gay and is now very keen to promote rationalism.  (Surprisingly, there is a pretty good profile of him here from the Daily Mail.)  I know all that, but as I say, I still find him and his oeuvre a bit puzzling.

What a country....

Belgian euthanised due to sex change distress

A 44-year-old Belgian in distress after a failed sex change was euthanised this week after doctors agreed to the mercy-killing on psychological grounds, national media said Tuesday.

Nathan Verhelst died Monday in a Brussels hospital surrounded by friends after requesting assistance to die in a case that has been highly publicised in Belgium, which became only the second country in the world after the Netherlands to legalise euthanasia in 2002.

"He died in all serenity," said doctor Wim Distlemans, who told the daily Het Laatste Nieuws that he won permission to be euthanised because "we could clearly say he was in unbearable psychological distress."

What is even more surprising is the number of "psychological grounds" cases, and how they have been increasing:

While there were only six cases of euthanasia recorded on psychological grounds in 2004, there were 33 in 2011 and 52 last year.

I'm not sure why they don't go full on Futurama suicide booth and be done with:

Regarding SBY

Indonesia’s 2014 elections: Let the games begin | The Economist

According to The Economist, Tony Abbott's meeting was with a pretty lame president:

THESE days few Indonesians pay much attention to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The president cuts a forlorn figure: he still has just over a year left in office, but steady underachievement during his two terms has so diminished him that politicians long ago turned to the more exciting matter of his successor. Next year the presidential election takes place in July, after parliamentary elections in April. After months of shadow-boxing, the contest to succeed Mr Yudhoyono is set to become more lively.

I wonder what the new year will bring...

What an appalling hypocrite

Grow up, Gillard. No victim ever becomes Prime Minister | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Andrew Bolt has the appalling gall to criticise Julia Gillard for sometimes getting upset with her demeaning treatment at the hands of  certain parts of the internet.   Yet the most personal and appalling site for attacks was clearly Larry Pickering's - both his own columns (claiming to be outing details of her personal life which were utterly irrelevant and which Bolt would know cause offence to any politician) and the comments which would follow them.  Did this stop Bolt from referring his readers to his site?  Nope.

Bolt has become an incredible and morally bankrupt hypocrite, full of self pity over legal problems caused by his own mistakes, who thinks he has a grasp on science better than thousands of scientists, and reinforced in his beliefs by the likes of the IPA. 

The wartime government continues...

Popular TV

One good thing about Breaking Bad finishing is that, at last, the sort of websites I visit can stop talking about it.

I never get caught up in these series that develop a huge following about how they will end.   In any event, let's face it, most TV drama wears out its welcome long before the last series, no matter how impressive the first few years were.  (This has been brought to mind recently by my wife and kids watching early X Files on DVD from the library.  It's the classic case of "should've been killed off 3 years earlier.")

I see that the other example of the cultish "bad dude who people love to watch" drama which recently ended is Dexter.  Its ending went over very badly; Breaking Bad's pretty well.

I have no idea whether I would have liked any of Breaking Bad - I am inherently leery of the moral worth of TV series which dwell on pretty evil characters doing bad stuff for years, no matter how much good acting, wit or "coolness" is involved.   As I have said before, at least a movie of that type is over with in a few hours and doesn't have quite the same potential to influence people.   But I haven't heard of cases of people getting into drug manufacturing because of BB, unlike Dexter, where the connection with actual cases of murder seems to have been pretty much skipped by with little media attention.  Maybe everyone figures that they can kill; making drugs takes equipment and (as I understand it) BB also indicates it takes a certain cleverness.

As for my limited exposure to current TV dramas, last night, under the influence of weeks of ads shown during X Factor, I decided to watch the series opening of The Blacklist.   You know, the show where everyone's first reaction is "oh my gosh, James Spader looks old!"

It's completely over the top in nearly all respects, somewhat derivative, and poor at explaining how the characters are drawing connections to solve a terrorist attack.

But it mainly lost me with the pen in the neck.   I hadn't realised before that FBI training included how to unexpectedly thrust a pen an inch into a side of a neck in such a way that you can nearly, but not quite, cause their death during interrogation.

The show was, in other words, really ridiculous.  And James Spader is old.

That IPCC report

I'm sort of waiting for the more detailed parts of the report to come out before talking much about it, but I note a couple of things:

*  Judith Curry's attitude is "They're not listening to me!  They've all gone mad! Mad I say!"  And she's now recommending people read David Rose on "the pause"!   Her credibility was already shot.  Now it's toast.  Burnt toast.  In fact, crumbs of black carbon which have to be sent off to forensics to see if it actually ever was bread.

*  Andrew Bolt, of course, recommends Curry (his current favourite of the bare handful of dissenting climate scientists out of the actual huge pool of scientists who work in the area.)  Bolt also notes:

It now predicts as little as 0.3 degrees of warming or 4.8 at most. Anything under 2 degrees would actually be good for us, meaning more rain and better crops — not that the IPCC mentions reassuring news.

Of course, he couldn't care less about being accurate, but the .3 degree estimate is based on the smallest emissions scenario considered (see page 25 of the report) - RCP 2.6 - which I am pretty sure would take a massive effort to achieve.  And, as is common amongst the climate stupid:  the ranges Bolt refers to end at 2100.

The world does not end then, but it appears to be something Bolt, and his small brained followers, appear unable to contemplate, even though he has kids of his own.

If Bolt wants to be honest on this topic, he might point out that the actual estimates he should rely on are those which are in accord with his idea that the world should burn as much carbon fuel as it likes - let's take scenario RCP 6, then.

It gives a range of likely increases (on top of what we already have) of 1.4 degrees to 3.1 by 2100.

Unless I am mistaken, even 1.4 degrees puts us over the (very arbitrary, and quite possibly still dangerous) 2 degree limit, given that we have already gone up about .8 degree.

So, the short message should be  that Andrew Bolt thinks you should believe him, and a handful of ideologically motivated contrarian scientists, and burn away and take the risk that global temperatures will increase to 2 to 4 degrees higher by the end of the century, setting the world on a steady course of massive sea rises and massive climate change. 

No thanks.

The Putin-isation continues

Oh my gosh, it's spreading.

I didn't realise until I saw it on Insiders this morning:  the Putinisation of Australian government continued apace last week, and spread from its leader to its Foreign Minister in some "don't I look like a wrinklier Olivia Newtron Bomb, you old fella's who voted for Tony?" shots that turned up in the government PR machine known as the Murdoch press:



Makes me feel queasy, this does.  

Bat curry not a good idea

Toxic load: blue-green algae's role in motor neuron disease

This is really fascinating article about developments in understanding how certain naturally occurring toxins are linked to motor neuron disease.

For one thing, I didn't recall this:

Scientists have known for some time now that exposure to blue-green algae is linked to increased incidence of several neurodegenerative diseases. But the reason for the link has been a mystery until now.

Given that it's a reasonable guess that global warming will increase toxic blue-green algae blooms, I'm hardly encouraged.

But the rest of the article explains things such as how people in Guam who ate fruit bat curry soup were poisoning themselves.  Never heard that one before either, but Australia's outbreak of a deadly fruit bat borne virus had pretty much already convinced me not to eat bat, anywhere.

It's been hot

It really is an unusually hot spring in Queensland:

QUEENSLAND has sweltered through its hottest September day ever, with temperature records smashed in 30 towns across the state. 
 
The highest temperature recorded was 41.4 degrees Celsius at Taroom, west of Maryborough, while the mercury soared past 40 degrees in another eight localities.

Brisbane-based meteorologist Matthew Bass said Thursday's scorcher had rewritten the history books as many towns had records dating back more than 100 years.

``These are new records and some of these places have records dating back the late 1800s,'' he told AAP.

Roma, for instance, recorded a maximum of 40.1 degrees on Thursday - the highest since its weather station opened in 1889.

Longreach, Emerald, Moranbah, Dalby, Oakey and Toowoomba were also among the towns that sweated through their hottest September day.

A comment observed

One of the few relatively moderate, but nonetheless nearly always wrong, people at a certain blog that shall remain nameless writes tonight (in relation to Indonesia being quite aggro in its stance towards the Abbot government asylum seeker policy):

Their treatment of the Australian government is concerning. This is not the behaviour of a nation that wants to have good relations.

Gee, you don't think that Abbott and Morrison grandstanding  on the evening news with Generals  three times since the election and prattling on about military operations to deal with this alleged national emergency coming from Indonesia might be perceived as not being "behaviour of a nation that wants to have good relations, " do you?  Or a new foreign minister who specifically says she won't be asking their "permission", just seeking their understanding?

Of course,  there is strong contingent of nutters there (that blog) who think Indonesia needs to be put in its place.  Let's see how that pans out.  I have a fair idea as to which nation might be doing some backpedalling soon.

In public health news...

Yes, it's time to re-visit that old favourite topic - sexually transmitted diseases (and how people manage not to take risks seriously.)

It's from Catalyst tonight, and it started with a bit of history that reinforced my puzzlement about how syphilis for centuries did not manage to stop people sleeping around: 

 Professor Basil Donovan
Syphilis used to kill more people every year - year in, year out - than HIV did in its worst ever year. And it did that for 400 years. Back in 1908, one in eight babies were said to be dying of syphilis in Melbourne.

It seems to me that such a devastating and relatively common disease ought to have featured more in the novels of the pre-antibiotic era; yet from my limited knowledge of the "classics", it's not that often a plot point.   I mean, how come when AIDs was at its height it was the subject of umpteen plays, movies, books, etc, yet people seemed to shrug off the mayhem syphilis was causing ever since it turned up in Europe?   Anyway, that's another post, perhaps...

Back at Catalyst, the whole point of the story was that it seems medical scientists are virtually at panic stations about the likely spread of antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea:

Professor Matt Cooper
For gonorrhoea, we've now got to the stage where we have one particular strain, H041, where we've only got one antibiotic that kind of works, and even that's not effective.

NARRATION
It's this - Ceftriaxone.

Dr Graham Phillips
So, what happens when that doesn't work anymore?

Professor Matt Cooper
You're screwed, pardon the pun. So we have no therapy left. And in 2011, in a sex worker from Japan, they isolated a Ceftriaxone-resistant gonorrhoea. So no antibiotics worked....

NARRATION
And the rogue Japanese strain is now here, as well as other cities around the world.

Professor Basil Donovan
You know, there's every possibility that within a couple of years that that strain of the organism could take over.

NARRATION
Untreatable gonorrhoea is not a nice prospect. It can cause infertility in women, and blindness, even in babies born to infected mothers. It can also spread through the body to the heart and bones. The bacteria are particularly clever at getting around our defences.

One of the links from the Catalyst web site is to a paper from 2012 co-authored by some of the Professors who appeared on the show. Here's the abstract, which pulls no punches:

From a once easily treatable infection, gonorrhoea has evolved into a challenging disease, which in future may become untreatable in certain circumstances. International spread of extensively drug-resistant gonococci would have severe public health implications. It seems clear that under the current treatment pressure from extended-spectrum cephalosporins, and owing to Neisseria gonorrhoeae's remarkable evolutionary adaptability, further rise of ceftriaxone-resistant strains around the world is inevitable. Simply increasing the doses of extended-spectrum cephalosporins will likely prove ineffective in the long run, and has been a lesson learnt for all single-agent therapies used for gonorrhoea to date. We recommend that dual therapy, especially those consisting of extended-spectrum cephalosporins and azithromycin, be adopted more widely and complemented by strengthening of antimicrobial resistance surveillance. Unless there is urgent action at international and local levels to combat the problem of N. gonorrhoeae antimicrobial resistance, we are in for gloomy times ahead in terms of gonorrhoea disease and control.

In the conclusion it is noted:

It is probably only a matter of time before extensively drug-resistant N. gonorrhoeae strains become widespread and treatment failures, particularly for pharyngeal gonorrhoea, become commonplace.  

Pharyngeal gonorrhoea?  Hard to say what would be more depressing, having an untreatable genital problem, or a throat infection that just would not go away.

Anyway, the end point is this:

Action is therefore urgently needed at local and international levels to combat the problem. We advise that government agencies take this threat seriously and provide urgently needed funds for increased research, surveillance activities and vaccine development.

Well, yes.  A vaccine would be a good idea for an untreatable form of infection, no? 

I see that it has been the subject of some research going back to at least the 1970's, but as the article at that last link shows, other diseases have been the subject of much greater effort in vaccine research.

It seems it's time for that to change....
  

Meatballs return

It seems that Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs has a decent enough sequel.  Yay.

Who's been a naughty Education Minister, then?

Tony Abbott says Government has 'no plans' to scrap university amenities fee 

So, Chris Pyne was on a bit of a frolic of his own the other day, then?

I presume the wrath of Peta was upon him, perhaps.

Dare I predict:  Pyne will be a liability for this government.

Bill Gates saves the world?

Atomic Goal - 800 Years of Power From Waste - NYTimes.com

The technical problems with the Gates' sponsored "TerraPower" reactors sound daunting, but it's nice that he's trying, I guess.

I choose to believe it is important to believe in free will

Does non-belief in free will make us better or worse?

An observation

The new layout for Slate is awful.