As told by the Liberal Party...

Enders discussed

The movie version of Enders Game has caused so much discussion, partly because of the author's strident and conservative views on homosexuality, partly because Harrison Ford has apparently been acting as grumpy and difficult as ever in interviews, and (possibly) because it is sort of a hard novel to imagine being well filmed.  

I see that the movie has received some reasonable reviews, and some poor ones.

But I liked this article from Salon that, while treating the novel more seriously than I am sure it deserves, does make the point that story is, well, ridiculous, even by the standards of young adult science fiction:

In this respect, “Ender’s Game” is less about the ethics of total warfare than it is about wanting to be a hero and a victim at the same time. Is there anything sillier than the idea that the entire planet would entrust its survival to a 10-year-old boy? Despite Card’s narrative bushwa about them being somehow more adaptable to warfare, children are simply developmentally incapable of exercising the judgment required to command an army. Only a kid would find the idea of one doing so even remotely credible, in the same way that only as a child did I find it thrilling that Aslan let Peter and Edmund Pevensie (about the same age, or younger, than Ender) strap on armor and take up swords to defend Narnia. Even those people who are so depraved as to use child soldiers do so because children can be completely dominated, not because they make good leaders.

I read the novel only a few years ago, and came away completely puzzled as to why it is held in high regard by anyone.    

I thought it was poorly written, with the psychology of the characters poorly developed, sadistic in tone, and the action in the training sequences exceedingly dull. 

The Heinlein juveniles were great literature in comparison.  While Heinlein movies have a poor record of good translation to the screen, I would much rather see some of those stories updated and on the screen instead of this dross.

Seems an odd bit of defence planning...

Navy new destroyer: USS Zumwalt is bigger, badder than any other destroyer ( video) - CSMonitor.com

This sounds odd:

The USS Zumwalt is big: It is 610 feet long, has an 11,000-square foot flight deck, and displaces 14,564 tons of water. That’s about 100 feet longer and 50 times the water displacement of other destroyers, the Military Times reported.

Despite its colossal size, Zumwalt is also stealthy, with concealed antennas and an angular frame that makes it much less detectable to radar than are current warships. It also packs a punch. Its “Advanced Gun System” fires warheads at a range of about 63 miles with impeccable precision, three times farther than current destroyers can fire, CNN reported. Its massive electrical capabilities are also expected to support future laser weapons.

But, as precedent suggests with ships of unprecedented size, there’s a problem: Engineers aren’t quite sure if Zumwalt ships are capable of weathering giant waves, according to Defense News. A single sizable swell that hits the ship’s back end might take the ship down, engineers have said. That’s because these ships sport a new, downward-sloping hull that primes the ship to move stealthily, but not necessarily stably; traditional ships have upward-flaring hulls.

The ships are controversial for more than just their Achilles hull: They are expensive – the most expensive Navy ships ever built, to be exact.

 Not sure that I would want to be on the crew of the first one that gets into very heavy seas.

(The Defence News article in the link is from 2007, so the issue has been discussed for a long time.)

Dark matter is really hard to find

First results from LUX dark matter detector rule out some candidates

It sounds like a big, expensive experiment that may well turn up nothing.  Still, the challenges of finding dark matter are huge:

Though dark matter has not yet been detected directly, scientists are fairly certain that it exists. Without its gravitational influence, galaxies and galaxy clusters would simply fly apart into the vastness of space. But because dark matter does not emit or reflect light, and its interactions with other forms of matter are vanishingly rare, it is exceedingly difficult to spot.

"To give some idea of how small the probability of having a dark matter particle interact, imagine firing one dark matter particle into a block of lead," Gaitskell said. "In order to get a 50-50 chance of the particle interacting with the lead, the block would need to stretch for about 200 light years—this is 50 times farther than the nearest star to the Earth aside from the sun. So it's an incredibly rare interaction."

Capturing those interactions requires an incredibly sensitive detector. The key part of the LUX is a third of a ton of supercooled xenon in a tank festooned with light sensors, each capable of detecting a single photon at a time. When a particle interacts with the xenon, it creates a tiny flash of light and an ion charge, both of which are picked up by the sensors.

To minimize extraneous interactions not due to dark matter, the detector must be shielded from background radiation and cosmic rays. For that reason, the LUX is located 4,850 feet underground, submerged in 71,600 gallons of pure de-ionized water.

But even in that fortress of solitude, occasional background interactions still happen. It's the job of LUX physicists to separate the signal from the noise.

The JFK anniversary

Adam Gopnik: The Assassination of J.F.K., Fifty Years Later : The New Yorker

Quite a good essay by Gopnick.   I liked the last couple of paragraphs in particular, even though I'm not keen on the very last sentence:

Again and again, the investigation discloses bizarre figures and coincidences within a web of incident that seem significant in themselves. The case of Judith Campbell Exner is famous. She really was J.F.K.’s mistress, and a Sinatra girlfriend, and the mistress of the Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana, all within a few years. Even if she wasn’t actually a go-between from one to the other, that would not alter the reality that she had slept with all three, and so lived in worlds that, in 1963, no one would have quite believed could penetrate each other so easily. Still more startling is the case of the painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was also unquestionably one of Kennedy’s mistresses. She was the ex-wife of a high-ranking C.I.A. officer (who himself had once had pacifist leanings), an intimate of Timothy Leary, at Harvard, and an LSD user. She was murdered, in 1964, on the towpath in D.C., in murky circumstances. Even if none of this points toward a larger occult truth—even if her death was just a mugging gone wrong—the existence of such a figure says something about the weave of American experience. Worlds that seemed far apart at the time are now shown to have been close together, unified by men and women of multiple identities, subject to electric coincidences—no one more multiple than J.F.K. himself, the prudent political pragmatist who was also the reckless erotic adventurer, in bed with molls and Marilyns, and maybe even East German spies.

The passion of J.F.K. may lie in the overlay of all those strands and circles. The pattern—weaving and unweaving in front of our eyes, placing unlikely people in near proximity and then removing them again—is its own point. Mailer was right when he claimed that the official life of the country and the real life had come apart, but who could have seen that it would take a single violent act, rather than “existential” accomplishment, to reveal how close they really were? Oswald acted alone, but the hidden country acted through Oswald. This is the perpetual film-noir moral lesson: that the American hierarchy is far more unstable than it seems, and that the small-time crook in his garret and the big-time social leader in his mansion are intimately linked. When Kennedy died, and the mystery of his murder began, we took for granted that the patrician in tails with the perfect family and the sordid Oswald belonged to different worlds, just as Ruby’s Carousel Club and the White House seemed light-years apart. When Kennedy was shot, the dignified hierarchy seemed plausible. Afterward, it no longer did. What turned inside out, after his death, was that reality: the inner surface and the outer show, like a magician’s bag, were revealed to be interchangeable. That’s why the death of J.F.K., even as it fades into history, remains so close, close as can be, and closer than that. ♦

Elves are big in Iceland

Why So Many Icelanders Still Believe in Invisible Elves - Ryan Jacobs - The Atlantic

A few paragraphs of particular interest:

Though Jónsdóttir’s belief in elves may sound extreme, it is fairly common for Icelanders to at least entertain the possibility of their existence. In one 1998 survey, 54.4 percent of Icelanders said they believed in the existence of elves. That poll is fairly consistent with other findings and with qualitative fieldwork, according to an academic paper published in 2000 titled “The Elves’ Point of View" by Valdimar Hafstein, who now is a folkloristics professor at the University of Iceland. “If this was just one crazy lady talking about invisible friends, it's really easy to laugh about that,” Jónsdóttir said. “But to have people through hundreds of years talking about the same things, it’s beyond one or two crazy ladies. It is part of the nation.” ...

The elves differ from the extremely tiny figures that are typically depicted as assistants to Santa Claus in popular American mythology. And unlike the fairies of Britain and other parts of Europe, Icelandic elves live and look very much like humans, according to Simpson and other experts. “You’ve got to get right up close before you can be sure it is an elf and not a human,” said Simpson, who began studying Old Icelandic in her undergraduate days and later compiled a book full of Icelandic legend translations. When elves are spotted, they are typically donning “the costume of a couple of hundred years ago,” when many of the stories really came alive.

 Their behavior is also similar to that of people: “[T]heir economy is of the same sort: like humans, the hidden people have livestock, cut hay, row boats, flense whales and pick berries,” Hafstein writes. “Like humans, they too have priests and sheriffs and go to church on Sundays.” This would explain the elf church in the lava field. According to Jónsdóttir, elves can range wildly in size, from a few centimeters to three meters in height. But Icelanders typically come into contact with the smaller ones: one “around one foot tall” and “the other...is perhaps similar to a 7-year-old child.” They may live in houses, sometimes with multiple floors, and, if you leave them alone, they’ll generally mind their own business. According to Simpson, “treat them with respect, do not upset their dwelling places, or try to steal their cattle, and they’ll be perfectly ... quite neutral, quite harmless.”

The whole article is a great read, actually.  (Including views from the elf skeptics of Iceland.)

I guess this may explain a lot about the peculiarity of Bjork, too....

Two years without trial for "blasphemy"

Saudi 'blasphemy' prisoner Hamza Kashgari tweets for first time after release | GulfNews.com

Don't think I had heard this story before:

A writer and newspaper columnist in the Saudi city of Jeddah, Kashgari in February 2011 tweeted a series of comments reflecting meditatively on the human side of the Prophet, and imagining a meeting between himself and the Prophet.

Religious conservatives in the kingdom called the tweets blasphemous. Clerics — one of whom posted a video on YouTube of himself weeping at the perceived insult to the Prophet — called for Kashgari’s death.

After fleeing Saudi Arabia to escape death threats, Kashgari was arrested in Malaysia. Saudi authorities jailed him for nearly two years without trial.

Yeah, well, good on you Malaysia. [/sarc].

(It's pretty obvious, given his release, that the tweets were not truly blasphemous.)

We already knew it, but again - Tony Abbott is a "say anything" flake

I didn't note this from a few days ago:

Mr Abbott also said the carbon tax was a socialist policy in disguise.

"Let's be under no illusions the carbon tax was socialism masquerading as environmentalism," he said.

"That's what the carbon tax was."

Rhodes scholarship or not, this man is a not very bright flake of a politician who will just take a "say anything" approach to policies - particularly on climate change - depending on the audience he is talking to.

I am completely unconvinced that he has good judgement in this or any other field.

Having said that, it is near impossible for any government to make only bad decisions.  Being a collective thing, some good policy will get through.

But there are no grounds at all to believe that it will be due to Tony Abbott's intellectual credentials or good judgement.

Government spending needed

Is Australia ready for 2.3 million more people?

Michael Pascoe makes a convincing case that, with significant population growth, it is not the time to be talking of small government:

Thus there's a difficult contradiction at the heart of the new government. It aspires to small government, but it is responsible for a growth country that requires greater public investment. There is a potentially dangerous faith that everything can be left to the private sector to fix, but our duopoly and oligopoly-riddled private sector doesn't make for the purest of market mechanisms.

How to feel inadequate

Restoring F. P. Ramsey | TLS

Can't say I had heard of FP Ramsey before, but this review in TLS says he was a rather important contemporary of Wittgenstein:

F . P. Ramsey has some claim to be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. In Cambridge in the 1920s, he singlehandedly forged a range of ideas that have since come to define the philosophical landscape. Contemporary debates about truth, meaning, knowledge, logic and the structure of scientific theories all take off from positions first defined by Ramsey. Equally importantly, he figured out the principles governing subjective probability, and so opened the way to decision theory, game theory and much work in the foundations of economics. His fertile mind could not help bubbling over into other subjects. An incidental theorem he proved in a logic paper initiated the branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory, while two articles in the Economic Journal pioneered the mathematical analysis of taxation and saving.

And here's the kicker:

Ramsey died from hepatitis at the age of twenty-six in 1930.

Something else of interest from the article is yet another illustration of the way intellectuals at that time seemed to all know each other.  It's particularly odd to hear of Wittgenstein upsetting Keynes' wife!:

Ramsey was by no means all work. As his celebrity grew, so did his circle of acquaintances. Readers of conventional 1920s memoirs will be pleased to find Virginia Woolf, Liam O’Flaherty, Kingsley Martin, Lewis Namier and other luminaries making appearances. Not everybody is shown in a good light, but it should be said that for bad behaviour Wittgenstein was in a league of his own. When Ramsey first met him in Austria, he had given away his vast inherited fortune, and was refusing all offers of financial assistance. This occasioned many practical difficulties, to which he would react like a spoiled child, falling out with well-meaning friends who tried to help him circumvent his problems. Somehow Ramsey and Keynes managed to remain in his good books and arranged for him to visit Britain in 1925. He turned up shortly after Keynes’s wedding to the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Small talk was not Wittgenstein’s thing. He quarrelled badly with Ramsey and reduced Lopokova to tears with his furious responses to her friendly remarks.

Drunk authors, again

Hemingway hits the bottle | TLS

A few posts back, I mentioned the badly behaving famous writers of the first half of the 20th century.

Well, here's a review of a new book about their problems with alcohol.  A taste:

The reasons why these particular writers drank, or more precisely why they became dependent on alcohol, were inter alia weak, suicidal or resentful fathers (when Cheever was conceived his father’s first act was to invite the local abortionist to dinner), suffocating mothers, class anxiety, sexual anxiety (Cheever endured the dual burden of passing for both bourgeois and heterosexual), shyness, guilt, pram-in-the-hall pressures, disastrous role models (Dylan Thomas in the case of Berryman, who trailed his bad mentor through New York’s traditional stations of dissolution, the White Horse, the Chelsea Hotel; Hart Crane, the alcoholic poet and suicide, in the case of Williams), and a shared genius for self-sabotage. None of them drank to improve his writing, but addiction and recovery became for some an important theme, something to chronicle, and, moreover, had a subterranean but profound impact on their literary styles. Laing is acute about the warping impact alcoholism has on memory, a writer’s major resource. Reading Cheever, for example, she identifies “a persistent attribute of his work: a kind of uncanniness produced by radical disruptions of space and time”. Excess drinking might have contributed special effects to Cheever’s prose, but Laing refuses to romanticize this given the damage done. Similarly, after waxing lyrical about the landscape of Port Angeles, Washington, and empathizing with Carver’s view of Morse Creek as a “holy place”, she adds: “Watching water work through rock, you might come to a kind of accommodation with the fact that you’d once smashed your wife’s head repeatedly against a sidewalk for looking at another man”. 

Tea Party stupidity noted

A Very Expensive Tea Party 

The shutdown and debt ceiling brinkmanship did real damage to the economy. The immediate and direct costs are nicely summarized in a blog post by James H. Stock – an academic economist on the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. His assessment is that the effect is a

0.25 percentage point reduction in the annualized G.D.P. growth rate in the fourth quarter and a reduction of about 120,000 private sector jobs in the first two weeks of October (estimates use indicators available through Oct. 12th).

This is actually lower than the impact expected by some private-sector forecasters; after talking with people I trust, I would not be surprised if the overall impact ends up being closer to a 0.5 percentage point reduction in the fourth-quarter growth rate (annualized, as in the quotation from Mr. Stock.)
Does the country make up this growth later, for example because federal workers can now pay their bills? Probably not, because there is a persistent effect in terms of increasing uncertainty about public finances and about economic performance – and this will depress both some kinds of consumption and many forms of productive investment....

Members of the Tea Party movement express concern about the longer-run federal budget – and the potential negative impact of future debt levels. But their tactics are directly worsening the budget over exactly the time horizon that they say they care about.

Dami admiration

As prepared by my daughter, and posted while watching the X Factor final:

Krugman, Nordhaus, climate

It must be a weekend for reviews.

Paul Krugman has an excellent one of a new book by somewhat controversial climate change economist Nordhaus.

There are many interesting points made in the review, but I'll just extract some parts from the end about why Krugman thinks it is impossible to get Republicans, as currently constituted, to take climate change seriously:

The point is that there’s real power behind the opposition to any kind of climate action—power that warps the debate both by denying climate science and by exaggerating the costs of pollution abatement. And this isn’t the kind of power that can be moved by calm, rational argument.

Why are some powerful individuals and organizations so opposed to action on such a clear and present danger? Part of the answer is naked self-interest. Facing up to global warming would involve virtually eliminating our use of coal except to the extent that CO2 can be recaptured after consumption; it would involve somewhat reducing our use of other fossil fuels; and it would involve substantially higher electricity prices. That would mean billions of dollars in losses for some businesses, and for the owners of these businesses subsidizing climate denial has so far been a highly profitable investment.

Beyond that lies ideology. “Markets alone will not solve this problem,” declares Nordhaus. “There is no genuine ‘free-market solution’ to global warming.” This isn’t a radical statement, it’s just Econ 101. Nonetheless, it’s anathema to free-market enthusiasts. If you like to imagine yourself as a character in an Ayn Rand novel, and someone tells you that the world isn’t like that, that it requires government intervention—no matter how market-friendly—your response may well be to reject the news and cling to your fantasies. And sad to say, a fair number of influential figures in American public life do believe they’re acting out Atlas Shrugged.

Finally, there’s a strong streak in modern American conservatism that rejects not just climate science, but the scientific method in general. Polling suggests, for example, that a large majority of Republicans reject the theory of evolution. For people with this mind-set, laying out the extent of scientific consensus on an issue isn’t persuasive—if anything, it just gets their backs up, and feeds fantasies about vast egghead conspiracies.

 Nordhaus thinks that immediate action to start reducing carbon is important; but it would seem Krugman's hunch is that he is too optimistic in many respects.

This is also noted in Eli Rabbet's post via which I found the review:

 Of course, these models have both their uses and abuses like any model.  One of the problems, of course, is that damages are a non linear function of the warming and that is hard to capture if the economic world, the one we function in has never experienced such conditions.  For example, since progress, encapsulated as an increase in world GDP, is assumed to grow, one finds that economic damage in IAM models tends, shall one say, to be charitable, to be limited for even global warmings of 10 C.  There is a lot of misplaced confidence by practisioners of IAMism.

Yet another aspect of the War considered

Literary Review - David Cesarani on the disturbing role of women in the Nazi era

I was in the only newsagent I know that carries Literary Review this morning, and once again I found myself thinking how good a publication it seems.   I must put a link to their website at the side.

Anyhow, checking the site this afternoon, it's got a review of an interesting sounding book that takes a bit of a revisionist view of the role of women in Nazi Germany.  It's not pretty:

Making superb use of postwar investigations, interrogations and the transcripts of trials in both West and East Germany, Lower reconstructs the short, frequently brutal careers of 13 woman who served in the East, either on assignment or as volunteers. Some followed boyfriends or spouses, taking a job nearby or moving in with them. With a few exceptions, they took to genocide like little girls take to dolls....

Secretaries who typed up orders and instructions for ghetto clearances were already a species of 'desk murderer'. Yet some did more than just the paperwork. They joined the lads in the shooting, carousing with the killers in breaks between murder. Killing invaded sensual life. One woman recalled that after a day of executions men would return to base and require their female assistants to complete the after-action reports, leading to more than a spot of dictation. It was common for a secretary to become the girlfriend or mistress and then the wife of an SS man, sharing his bed and his murderous pastimes. In these relationships the boundary between the home front and the front line blurred. Already a racially determined process in the Third Reich - what Lower dubs 'racial mating' - marriages in the East 'became essentially partnerships in crime'. Handsome marital homes were available thanks to state-run pillaging, while slave labour provided a supply of (expendable) domestic servants. The power to kill heightened erotic experiences.

In some of the most shocking evidence that she has unearthed, Lower describes how race overrode supposedly natural maternal instincts. One woman, married to an SS officer, beat a Jewish child to death with her bare hands. Another, whose husband ran an expropriated estate, personally killed starving Jewish children who had escaped from a transport. She offered them sweets then shot them in the mouth. Her own child was three years old.

Update:   I just had a read of another review on the site: this one of a second volume of collected Hemingway letters.  I haven't really read any major work by him (at high school, we read "The Old Man and the Sea", but I think that is considered one of his less significant efforts) but it's always sort of fun to read about authors who behaved badly.   (And, indeed, it seems that all the big ones from the first half of the 20th century did.)  In that vein, I enjoyed these paragraphs:

The first volume of the Letters, closes with a disastrous setback to Hemingway's literary aspirations - the theft of all his manuscripts, left unguarded by his wife, Hadley, in a suitcase at the Gare de Lyon - and the second opens with another, no less crushing blow: Hadley's pregnancy. Fatherhood was an unwelcome cramp on Hemingway's style, as the intoxications of European travel and bohemian life in the Latin Quarter gave way to the sober prospect of parental responsibility. Plans were made to return to Toronto, where the couple quickly settled into a new apartment and Hemingway started work as a staff writer for the Toronto Daily Star.

The pall of domestic drudgery dogs Hemingway's letters of this time. He wrote to Gertrude Stein with news of the baby's birth, adding, 'The free time that I imagined in front of a typewriter in a newspaper office has not been. There hasn't been any time free or otherwise for anything.' To Ezra Pound he complained, 'I can't sleep just with the horror of the Goddam thing. I have not had a drink for five days.' He begged his friend to throw him the lifeline of a letter from Europe. The complaints continued even after the family's move back to Paris. 'We have been experimenting with living with a baby etc,' wrote Hemingway to Pound, apologising for the lack of correspondence. 'Hadley sick in bed for quite a while, me for a few days, baby hollers etc. Have tried to write but couldnt bring it off.'

Mawson reconsidered

Mawson doubts: hero or heel?

My handful of long time readers will recall my post about Heather Rossiter's enjoyable book about a (one time) cross dressing Antarctic explorer who was on the Mawson expedition.  (Heather made an appearance in comments too.   That's pleasing.) 

Those people may recall that I found the book's take on Mawson particularly interesting, given that it argued he was actually a bit of a jerk, as it seemed to me he has a fan base to this day.

In light of this, it's of interest to read of a new book that suggests Mawson night have eaten one of the two expeditioners who died on his trip away from the hut!

I only suggested that maybe there had been a bit of a push and shove fight on the edge of a crevasse that caused the first one to disappear.  I hadn't gone as far as to think he might have covered up cannibalism.

Good fun.

A corrective

Are Japanese people really having less sex than anyone else?

I was nearly going to link to the Slate article about young Japanese giving up not just on marriage, but sex, but I am sort of glad I didn't in light of this follow up which puts a more balanced view of the matter.

While it remains true that Japan does have a serious fertility decline, one can play up the weirdness of the culture a little too much.

Surprising news from inside your mouth

Well, I would not have expected this:

The bacteria in the human mouth – particularly those nestled under the gums – are as powerful as a fingerprint at identifying a person's ethnicity, new research shows.

Scientists identified a total of almost 400 different species of microbes in the mouths of 100 study participants belonging to four ethnic affiliations: non-Hispanic blacks, whites, Chinese and Latinos.

Only 2 percent of bacterial species were present in all individuals – but in different concentrations according to ethnicity – and 8 percent were detected in 90 percent of the participants. Beyond that, researchers found that each ethnic group in the study was represented by a "signature" of shared microbial communities.

"This is the first time it has been shown that ethnicity is a huge component in determining what you carry in your mouth. We know that our food and oral hygiene habits determine what bacteria can survive and thrive in our mouths, which is why your dentist stresses brushing and flossing. Can your genetic makeup play a similar role? The answer seems to be yes, it can," said Purnima Kumar, associate professor of periodontology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

"No two people were exactly alike. That's truly a fingerprint."

Well, that's creepy...

Trick or Treat

All about performing masked monkeys in Indonesia.  (Have a look at photo 3 in the slide show in particular.)

Take in moderation

Death by caffeine really is a thing, if you're susceptible

A good explanation of death by caffeine here.