The Kevinburg finale

As I wrote elsewhere last night:

Rudd performed well in initial interviews on his return, but his old policy-on-the-run habit re-asserted itself during the campaign, as well as his vanity. Still, it’s true, I would have preferred Labor to have won this election under him, as I consider Abbott has certainly become a flakey politician with no sign of having good intuitions on anything currently important.

But having lost the election, it is indeed a good thing to see the final end of the Rudd experiment, which in terms of the internal affairs of Labor, was a clear disaster.

Update:   

Julia Gillard has wished Kevin Rudd well following the announcement of his resignation from Parliament.

Ms Gillard tweeted her best wishes on Thursday morning to the man who ended her prime ministership.

 She's obviously not an embittered ex politician.   She was always likeable, and remains so.  

High dollar frustration

Reserve Bank should intervene to push down the Australian dollar

Tim Colebatch continues his argument that the ongoing problem for the Australian economy is the high Australian dollar, and it deserves Reserve Bank intervention.

I had thought that the Abbott government would reap the benefit (under false pretences) of an Australian dollar which appeared to be heading down to a permanently lower rate.  But it keeps hovering around the mid 90's, which is not good enough.  As Colebatch argues:

The high dollar cannot last forever. But there is a limit to how long companies can go on losing money while waiting for the dollar to fall. We are allowing a temporary over-valuation to shut down economic capacity permanently. This is not how the successful Asian economies operate.

I find this a very convincing take on the matter.

How many still displaced in Japan

Little hope of evacuee homecoming | The Japan Times

I had been wondering recently about the number of people in Japan who are still displaced as a result of the Fukushima reactor accident, but it's been hard to find current numbers via Google.

The article above gives an indication, however:

There is still little prospect that nuclear refugees will be able to return to their homes near the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, the government said in a new report.

The report, submitted to the Diet on Tuesday, notes that the reclassification of evacuation zones around the plant has been completed and that the cleanup is continuing.

But the government failed to specify when evacuated residents — some 81,000 as of September — will be able to return to their hometowns.

Challenges cited by the government include the need to ease health worries and stop false rumors about radiation exposure.

According to the report, which covers progress between October 2012 and September this year on reconstructing areas hit by the 2011 natural and nuclear disasters, the total number of evacuees is now around 280,000, compared with about 470,000 shortly after the disasters.

 So, about 81,000 appears to be the answer.

When nuclear goes wrong, it is massively disruptive and hugely expensive to clean up.

They chose the wrong typhoon

HotWhopper: Ethically-challenged Anthony Watts is seeking revenge, playing games with tragedy. How low can he go?

I have been meaning to add a link to the Hot Whopper blog, where Sou puts in what is now almost certainly the most detailed and comprehensive critiques of Anthony Watts and his increasingly desperate Watts Up With That blog.

As the story linked above explains, Watts unwisely chose to publish a way-too-early post along the lines of "you see, this typhoon wasn't as bad as the media made out" post.

I'm not sure if they are still updating the number of dead, but the post is one of the most embarrassing things Watts has ever published.

As David Appell and Andrew Friedman note, actual climate scientists are cautious in their comments about climate change and typhoons.   But even Lomborg says it would seem the research is pointing towards possibly fewer, but stronger, typhoons in the future.   Then he goes on to complain that it is immoral (!) to use this typhoon to argue for CO2 cuts, because adaptation is better!   He's become a one track idiot - adaptation to 6 m storm surges in seaside towns and villages in poor countries like the Philippines or Bangladesh?  Yeah, sure. 

UPDATE:   someone in comments wanted me to update this.   You can see my response, but I will add an update after all, from a blog post that has a good discussion of why typhoons are particularly destructive and deadly in that part of the world.  I thought this part was especially interesting:

There are hints that global warming may be playing a  role here: One 2008 study (pdf) in Nature found that the very strongest typhoons in the northwest Pacific seem to have become somewhat more intense since 1981 — by about 20 mph, on average — as the oceans have warmed. Yet making out a clear trend in tropical cyclones over the past few decades is notoriously difficult, and attributing the strength of a single storm like Haiyan to man-made climate change is even harder.

Interesting.  You have to wonder whether those scientists in the "attribution wars" who always urge caution (to the point of being dismissive) on AGW contribution to an extreme weather event are actually the ones being somewhat prematurely misleading.

In defence of Tom

Tom Cruise did not make widely reported claim that acting is as tough as combat 

I saw them talking about this on Sunrise over the weekend - how Tom Cruise had said that making movies was like fighting in Afghanistan.

If you read the above link, in fact poor old Tom was careful to be specifically dismissive of the suggestion. 

This was just an appalling bit of mischief making by someone in the media, by the looks.

Tom may be in a nutty religion, but he has made many very good science fiction and action films, and I just want people to leave him alone.  (Readers are invited to imagine me overly emotion in a Youtube video making this plea.)  

Ted Cruz - Student jerk

Ted Cruz was a polarizing figure at Harvard Law, foreshadowing his partisan profile in the Senate - Politics - The Boston Globe

Tea Party "hero" (for leading a campaign that failed and led to the Republican's loss in popularity, but hey, whoever said the Tea Party had smarts?) Ted Cruz is the subject of a not very complimentary story in the Boston Globe about his time at Harvard.  An example:

As they were entering their second year in law school, Melissa Hart agreed to give Cruz a ride from New York, where Cruz was at the end of the summer, back to Cambridge. She didn’t know him well, but he sought her out after she had been given a prestigious award for first-year students.

“We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ,” Hart said. “When I told him I didn’t know, he asked, ‘Well, what’s your SAT score? That’s closely coordinated with your IQ.’ ”

“It went from, ‘Nice guy,’ ” she said, “to ‘uh-oh.’ ”

 Strangely, he was very keen on acting at that age.   The article suggests he still is.

I also see that the Australia Tea Party sub branch known as Catallaxy has commenters who think he is a promising Presidential candidate.  I suspect the Democrats would celebrate if he does run.
 
 

Arty photography made easy

The range of free or cheap apps available on tablets these makes arty photo manipulation ridiculously easy.  One effort by my primary school daughter, for a school project, for example:

I am still a little surprised, however, that it is hard to find a photo app that really does everything you can on (say) some PC software.  There is usually something I can't do on my Android tablet.  Then again, I haven't gone and just got the Adobe Photoshop Touch app, which I see is only $10.  

This will probably be my Christmas present to myself.

PS:  for anyone who cares what I think about apps, I find Sketchbook Pro is really a very good art app which is very useful for dealing with photos too.  It does take a bit of getting used to, though.

Recent possum visits

Babies and bugs

Babies weak immune systems let good bacteria in 

As any new parent knows, infants are notoriously susceptible to bacterial infections. A study now suggests that the body engineers this vulnerability deliberately, allowing beneficial microbes to colonize the baby’s gut, skin, mouth and lungs. Learning to manipulate this system could lead to treatments for infections in newborns, and perhaps even improve the way babies are vaccinated.

n the womb, a fetus is sterile. But from the moment that a baby travels down the birth canal, bacteria and fungi begin their colonization. How the immune system tolerates this sudden influx of invaders has been a mystery.

I wonder, from where do babies born via caesarian pick up their useful bugs.   Must look around for that information later...

Update:  an answer? -

In vaginally-born babies, the bacteria destined for the gut microbiota originate primarily in the maternal birth canal and rectum. Once these bacteria are swallowed by the newborn, they travel through the stomach and colonize the upper and lower intestine, a complicated process that evolves rapidly.

Infants born by cesarean section—particularly cesareans performed before labor begins—don’t encounter the bacteria of the birth canal and maternal rectum. (If a cesarean is performed during labor the infant may be exposed to these bacteria, but to a lesser degree than in vaginal birth.) Instead, bacteria from the skin and hospital environment quickly populate the bowel. As a result, the bacteria inhabiting the lower intestine following a cesarean birth can differ significantly from those found in the vaginally-born baby.

The wages of sin (or at least, dubious taste)

To dye for? Jury still out on tattoo ink causing cancer

Given that I would be pleased if the entire tattoo industry was banned, and my "anti tattoo league" post continues getting hits and (often) upsets the tattooed of the world, I have been reading the stories about the possible dangers of tattoo ink with interest.  The article above is not sensationalist enough for my purposes, but it gives a reasonable background.

I hear the trip is going well...

Just trying to get an extra click or two...

Longer lives

An extra six months to live: babies can now expect to reach 82 in Australia 

That's nice.

But I was surprised that we are third behind not only Japan (that was expected) but also Hong Kong.

Given that I would say the average diet in Hong Kong contains much more fat than Japan, I am surprised it is up there in the longevity stakes.  Is it because they both eat a lot of fish?

Uh-oh

Risk of massive asteroid strike underestimated 

The asteroid that exploded on 15 February this year near the city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals region of Russia was the largest to crash to Earth since 1908, when an object hit Tunguska in Siberia. Using video recordings of the event, scientists have now reconstructed the asteroid's properties and its trajectory through Earth’s atmosphere. The risk of similar objects hitting our planet may be ten times larger than previously thought, they now warn....

The rock was an ordinary chondrite from the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, as revealed by its trajectory and by its elemental and mineral composition, mainly silicates that formed the Solar System billions of years ago. At the time it entered the atmosphere, its mass was of the order of 12,000–13,000 metric tonnes, report two studies published online today in Nature¹ and another study published at the same time in Science². This is nearly twice as heavy as initial estimates had suggested and also larger than revised estimates published in June.

The asteroid roared through Earth’s upper atmosphere at an initial speed of around 19 kilometres per second — more than 50 times the speed of sound. At an altitude of between 45 and 30 kilometres, the heavily fractured, and hence rather fragile, body broke into pieces and finally burst into gas and dust at around 27 kilometres' altitude.

“Luckily, most of the kinetic energy was absorbed by the atmosphere,” says Jiří Borovička, an asteroid researcher at the Astronomical Institute, part of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Ondřejov, near Prague. ”A more solid rock that might have blasted closer to the ground would have caused considerably more damage.”

Where Pope Francis is coming from

This does sound consistent with the way Pope Francis has talked since taking on the top job, and it is very remarkable:

What is the fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity? Writing for Commentary in 1948, Irving Kristol argued that while Judaism took human experience as its starting point, Christianity began with principles it believed to be eternally true and demanded that human life conform to them. Judaism, he averred, posits “an unbreakable bond between the love of God and the love of all reality” and sanctifies all dimensions of life. Christianity, in contrast, encourages asceticism as a means of transcending our creaturely nature.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio—now better known as Pope Francis—strongly disagrees. In On Heaven and Earth, a series of conversations with Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Argentina translated in April, he asserts that Christianity must understand the needs of humans. He rejects attempts to impose dogmatic principles onto human life, and thinks that the Church must be sensitive, and even sometimes deferential, to cultural change. Indeed, he notes, “religion has a right to give an opinion as long as it is in service to the people.” In so arguing, he presents a vision of Catholicism that is both deeply principled and unabashedly heterodox.   
               
Bergoglio insists that the Church cannot transcend culture. He is unafraid to illustrate how the Church has changed in response to shifting cultural trends, pointing to, for instance, its recent acceptance of divorcees as full members. He takes this point further by suggesting that more changes might be necessary. In an astonishing concession, he opines that the Church’s sensitivity to the course of human events might someday lead it to discard the celibacy requirement for the clergy.

Krugman rubs it in

Paul Krugman has some fun in yet another post about Republicans who refuse to give up on their "dire inflation just around the corner" warnings:

Back to the evidence versus the orthodoxy. I can, in a way, understand refusing to believe in global warming — that’s a noisy process, with lots of local variation, and the overall measures are devised by pointy-headed intellectuals who probably vote Democratic. I can even more easily understand refusing to believe in evolution. But the failure of predicted inflation to materialize is happening in real time, right in front of our eyes; people who kept believing in inflation just around the corner lost a lot of money. Yet the denial remains total.

I guess it’s a matter of who you’re gonna believe — Ayn Rand or your own lying eyes.

Norman explains

What the research says about cholesterol and statins - Health Report

I tend to trust Norman Swan when he summarises where medical science is at, so this article in response to the recent kerfuffle about the Catalyst program seems pretty good to me.

(It certainly seems the first episode of the two parter - neither of which I happened to see - relied on doctors of the shonky salesmen variety.  Why would a normally good show like Catalyst do that?)

They could be right

Nuclear energy needed to head off climate change, scientists say

I still say that there really needs to be a serious look, perhaps by an internal scientific/engineering commission of some sort, at the type of smaller scale, passively safe nuclear reactor designs which could be more rapidly deployed than the enormously expensive large nuclear power plants which take a decade or more to build and forever to decommission.

But I've been saying that for years...

Goal achieved

Health Check: should we aim for daily bowel movements?

This article, by a doctor who seems to have a particular interest in constipation, is most notable for the Bristol Stool Chart.  I am slightly amused at the prospect of being able to assign a particular category to my daily "habit".  

My body seems to have adapted to a daily pattern identical to my father's.  I wonder how other many people find that...

Direct brain stimulation for self improvement coming?

If this story does not end up in Jason Soon's twitter feed, I'll eat my hat.

A fascinating article in the New York Times (Jumper Cables for the Mind) indicates that there has been a lot of study on how mild (very mild) brain stimulation can help improve brain performance.

I have briefly noted such claims before, but I had no idea that it had been the subject of a lot of study.  I thought it was just the odd (possibly crankish) scientist here and there who said it seemed to work well.  But read this:

Fregni and his collaborators at Harvard have published more than 200 papers on tDCS. In 2005, he co-wrote a paper showing that stimulating the left prefrontal cortex while you are doing a particular task can enhance working memory, the ability to track and mentally manipulate multiple objects of attention. He has since tested its effects on migraine, chronic pain, post-stroke paralysis, Parkinson’s disease, depression, tinnitus, fibromyalgia, marijuana craving and, strangely enough, the tendency to lie (or, as the paper more delicately put it, “the modulation of untruthful responses”). 

The evidence, he said, is strongest for depression. Earlier this year he published a study in JAMA Psychiatry involving 120 people suffering from major depression. They received either 2 milligrams per day of the antidepressant Zoloft, 2 milliamps of tDCS, both or a placebo. After six weeks, the mood of those treated with either Zoloft or tDCS alone improved about equally well compared with those in the placebo group. “By itself, tDCS was exactly the same as Zoloft at relieving depression. But when you combine the two, you have a synergistic effect, larger than either alone. That’s how I see the effects of tDCS, enhancing something else.” 

One of the most striking examples of cognitive enhancement comes from research supported by the U.S. Air Force, showing that tDCS improves pilots’ vigilance and target detection. “The military has been looking at how to improve vigilance for the past 50 or 60 years,” said Andy McKinley, a civilian biomedical engineer who has been studying tDCS at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. “At minimum we get a twofold improvement in how long a person can maintain performance. We’ve never seen that with anything else.”

Why isn't this better known?

Late for Halloween

I'm a few days late for stories which make for some good Halloween reading, but here you go anyway:

*   George Orwell thought he had once seen a ghost in a graveyard.   (Or, at least, thought he had a hallucination which resembled a ghost sighting.)  It wasn't a particularly clear sort of encounter, by the sounds, but it does appear to have puzzled him.

All atheists should have a ghost sighting, I think.  It would be good for their soul.

*  Goblins were not necessarily bad.  A benedictine monk wrote about them in 1746:

Calmet stressed goblins’ helpfulness and lack of malevolence, which meant that they were not devils. They only became dangerous when angered, like Hecdekin. But neither were they angels, their “waggish tricks” lacking dignity. Goblins were somewhere in between.

Brand classified the goblins linguistically. They were the same as Brownies in Scotland, related to fairies, and “a Kind of Ghost”. Brand believed that ‘goblin’ came from ancient Greek, meaning ‘house spirit’, and that hobgoblins were a species known for hopping on one leg. The name ‘Brownies’ referred to their swarthy colour, which came from their hard labour. The origin of the belief itself, Brand suggested, was Persia or Arabia. However, since Samuel Johnson had noted that no one had spoken of Brownies “for many years”, Brand thought they were extinct.

Goblin beliefs were, indeed, changing. Calmet might have dismissed the existence of vampires, but he believed in goblins because of good eyewitness accounts. William Bourne in 1725—and Brand who agreed with him—would have seen this as Calmet’s popish credulity. Goblins only flourished “in the benighted Ages of Popery, when Hobgoblins and Sprights were in every City and Town and Village”. These were stories told around winter fires that added “to the natural Fearfulness of Men, and makes them many times imagine they see Things”. Goblin extinction, then, was a move from superstitious excess (as Bourne and Brand saw it) towards reason. The classification of goblins was a way of putting them in their place.

*  Smithsonian.com has a fascinating, lengthy article on the origins of the ouija board, as well as talking about some of the fascinating modern studies of it from a psychological point of view.  For example, I don't think I had heard of this before:

 Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. In actuality, the robot’s movements simply amplified the participants’ motions and the person in the other room was just a ruse, a way to get the participant to think they weren’t in control. Participants were asked a series of yes or no, fact-based questions (“Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil? Were the 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney?”) and expected to use the Ouija board to answer.

What the team found surprised them: When participants were asked, verbally, to guess the answers to the best of their ability, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they answered using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time. “It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” recalled Fels. “It was so dramatic we couldn’t believe it.” The implication was, Fels explained, that one’s non-conscious was a lot smarter than anyone knew.