How not to regret

Last week, as I observed elsewhere on the internet, I immediately thought that Tony Abbott's response to the Indonesian phone tapping story was very peculiar when he started regretting the embarrassment "caused to" the President.   Why, I said, would we be suggesting that the President has anything to be embarrassed about - he has reason to be angry, not embarrassed.

I see from this weekend's press that my reaction was not alone:

Certainly, Abbott rankled Indonesia in the aftermath of the revelations by not only failing to provide an explanation or an apology, but the manner in which he conveyed his sentiments. Abbott said that the Australia's intelligence activities were to ''help our friends and our allies, not to harm them''.

This was no doubt an attempt to remind Indonesia about the crucial assistance the signals directorate provided in apprehending scores of terrorists. But, given he was responding to the furore over the surveillance of Yudhoyono, it was taken quite differently. As Marcus Mietzner, an analyst of Indonesian politics from the Australian National University, observed: ''To say 'we are spying on [Yudhoyono] for your own good' is outrageous.''

Then there was Abbott's well-intentioned expression of regret for the ''embarrassment'' suffered by Yudhoyono due to ''media reports'' of the spying.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa retorted it was Australia that should be embarrassed. Even so, Abbott repeated the comment in Parliament the next day. A few hours later, Indonesia announced the suspension of military and people-smuggling co-operation.

What I also find odd about this is that I have been assuming that Abbott has been careful to use words crafted for him by his Foreign Affairs specialists.   But if that is right, what is the explanation for the "tin ear" for diplomacy the words illustrate?   Has anyone important from that Department already left after the election?   Does Peta Credlin get to re-work suggestions they make?   Because I think it is pretty clear something has been going wrong here...
 

The Lewis legacy

It's good to see the 50th anniversary of CS Lewis' death is also being widely remembered, and his legacy analysed.

There's an very lengthy article about him up at the ABC.   The best part of it, I think, is it describes his revival in influence, after the somewhat silly cultural milieu of the 1960's:

Intellectual historians have noted that the cultural trends of this turbulent period reflected an assumption that the prevailing cultural trends represented permanent changes in western culture. Tom Wolfe's essay "The Great Relearning" (1987) captures the Promethean aspirations of this age, in which the past would be discarded as an encumbrance, and the future reconstructed from ground zero. Yet historians such as Adrian Hastings have suggested that this period merely witnessed a temporary change of cultural mood, which some were unwise enough to treat as a fixed and lasting change in the condition of humanity. Hastings remarked that the "dominant theological mood of that time in its hasty, slack, rather collective sweep reminds one a little painfully of a flight of lemmings," propelled forward by "a sheer surge of feeling that in the modern world God, religion, the transcendent, any reliability in the gospels, anything which had formed part of the old 'supernatualist' system, had suddenly become absurd." For Hastings, it was as if the bright new ideas of the 1960s were doomed to implode, incapable of sustaining serious reflection on the deeper questions of life.

He seems to have been right. In the 1970s, the disillusioned began to search again for meaning and existential depth. Lewis bounced back, securing a growing and appreciative readership which kept growing in the final decade of the twentieth century. The reasons for this reversal in Lewis's fortunes are not totally understood. However, there are a number of straws in the wind which help us understand this remarkable resurgence of someone who had been written off by many as a relic of the past. Let me note three.

In the first place, the cultural upheavals of the 1960s gradually gave way to a fresh engagement with some of the deeper questions that Lewis had championed, and to which he provided engaging and winsome answers. His relentless championing of the ongoing relevance and validity of the cultural heritage of the past offered stability in the midst of what many regarded as cultural chaos and anarchy. Lewis's rejection of what he termed "chronological snobbery" opened the way to a revalidation and reappropriation of the religious and cultural legacy of the past.

The rest of the essay is good too:  Rowan Williams has written very favourably of aspects of Lewis too.   (In some very convoluted language, I expect.)

Williams also made an appearance in an article in The Guardian about Lewis, which also mentions Pullman, who loathes Lewis.   [I certainly don't expect Pullman's legacy to count for much in 50 year's time though.   Is that too bitchy?  :) ]

The Guardian article does make the point that the Shadowlands movie with Anthony Hopkins was about as far from fact in characterisation as a movie based on a real person could possibly be.   The old (BBC?) telemovie version was infinitely better.  I would hope someone might be replaying that somewhere this weekend. 

 

A fight continued

For Philippa.  The rest of you can ignore it.

Old airships

That Time Jules Verne Caused a UFO Scare

When I was a child, my local Council library carried quite a few Jules Verne novels, and I used to enjoy reading them.   I bet their popularity amongst modern kids is pretty non-existant, which is a pity.  

Apart from talking about the peculiar plague of airship sightings that occurred before they existed outside of fiction, this article gives a very good background about the popularity of Verne in his day.   In Back to the Future 3, when Doc and his wife to be talk of their mutual admiration of the author, this was far more plausible than I realised.  

A good article.

"Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" used to be even more interesting 50,000 years ago

Mystery humans spiced up ancients’ sex lives 

I don't really try to keep up with human evolution news:  it seems to change too often on too little evidence.

But I do like to imagine what versions of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner could have been many years ago:

The results suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet-unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

The first published Neanderthal¹ and Denisovan² genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups bred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today.

Anti conspiracy summary

John F. Kennedy conspiracy theories debunked: Why the magic bullet and grassy knoll don’t make sense.

I was impressed by the documentary on ABC last week (JFK The Lost Bullet) which really took apart the "magic bullet" theory, and featured a couple of witnesses who were there.

As I said in another post recently, the 1960's seems a long time ago now, and it feels odd to see people who are witnesses to the event who don't look so old.  

Slate features another witness story too which is interesting.

Oh, and here's a detailed and convincing rebuttal of the recently revived Secret Service shot Kennedy by Accident theory.

A different sort of philosophical enquiry

The FBI files on being and nothingness

The FBI under J Edgar Hoover must have been a fun place to work:

The FBI had been keeping an eye on Sartre from as early as 1945. Soon after, they began to investigate his contemporary, Albert Camus. On 7th February, 1946, John Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, wrote a letter to “Special Agent in Charge” at the New York field office, drawing his attention to one ALBERT CANUS, “reportedly the New York correspondent of Combat [who] has been filing inaccurate reports which are unfavorable to the public interest of this country.” Hoover gave orders “to conduct a preliminary investigation to ascertain his background, activities and affiliations in this country.” One of Hoover’s underlings had the guts to inform the director that “the subject’s true name is ALBERT CAMUS, not ALBERT CANUS” (diplomatically hypothesizing that “Canus” was probably an alias he had cunningly adopted).

The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.
 

I hope this works...

Hola – free program lets you enjoy any website from any country [Freeware] | The Red Ferret Journal

...but I haven't tried it yet.

Update:   it works!   At last, Colbert is mine again.   (Don't spread this around too much, though.)

Some like it hot

Chilly lab mice skew cancer studies 

International guidelines call for laboratory mice to be kept at room temperature. Yet the rodents find that range — 20–26 °C — uncomfortably chilly, says immunologist Elizabeth Repasky of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. Mice, she notes, lose body heat more rapidly than humans, and, when given a choice, prefer to reside at a balmy 30 °C.

At stake might be more than just creature comforts. In a study published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, Repasky and her colleagues report that in mice housed at room temperature, tumour growth was faster than in those housed at 30 °C, and immune responses to cancer were suppressed.

Sea level rise is complicated

Changing winds dampen Antarctic sea-level rise 

Working out the future of global sea level rise under AGW is very complicated, as this article shows.

Anti Randianism noted

Ayn Rand’s vision of idiocy: Understanding the real makers and takers - Salon.com

I love a good bit of anti-Randianism, and this article is quite a detailed attack. 

Argument for age of consent reform

Lowering the age of consent: U.K. public health advocate John Ashton wants to relax the age of consent to 15.

From Slate, an interesting article on this issue starts as follows:

 In 16th-century England, the age of consent was set at 10 years old in an effort to protect young girls from sexual abuse by adult men. In 1875, parliament raised the age of consent to 13; in 1885, it upped it to 16. Now, a leading public health advocate has proposed that the United Kingdom bring the age down again in light of the high proportion of British adolescents who are having sex—with one another—before they’re legally capable of granting consent.

Lowering the age of consent to 15 (where it stands in Sweden) or 14 (where it’s set in Germany and Italy) would “take these enormous pressures off children and young people” who feel they need to hide their sexual activity, said John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health.

It makes quite a difference to realise the substantially lower age in some European countries hasn't caused their society to fall apart.

Update:  I would have thought that the most obvious necessary reform for this area would be the adoption of "Romeo and Juliet" style laws, which (as far as I can see from Wikipedia) has surprisingly been an innovation in some American states, including currently conservative ones.   

Krugman, Colebatch, and the big picture

Paul Krugman has an interesting column in which he seems somewhat persuaded by an argument that the world may have moved to a sort of permanent economic slump:

Again, the evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing. 

Why might this be happening? One answer could be slowing population growth. A growing population creates a demand for new houses, new office buildings, and so on; when growth slows, that demand drops off. America’s working-age population rose rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, as baby boomers grew up, and its work force rose even faster, as women moved into the labor market. That’s now all behind us. And you can see the effects: Even at the height of the housing bubble, we weren’t building nearly as many houses as in the 1970s. 

Another important factor may be persistent trade deficits, which emerged in the 1980s and since then have fluctuated but never gone away. 

Why does all of this matter? One answer is that central bankers need to stop talking about “exit strategies.” Easy money should, and probably will, be with us for a very long time. This, in turn, means we can forget all those scare stories about government debt, which run along the lines of “It may not be a problem now, but just wait until interest rates rise.” 

More broadly, if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time. 

In other economics talk of note, Tim Colebatch gives the thumbs up to a new book by Garnaut about what Australia should be doing:

What to do? The first priority, Garnaut insists, is to try to bring the dollar down, a lot. It's not the only thing we have to do, but without that, all else is in vain. Newman's contrary view that the dollar is only a minor issue is silly, as his muddled comparison of Australian and US wages shows. In $A, our average manufacturing wage rose 11 per cent between 2009 and 2012. In $US, it rose 42 per cent. Three-quarters of that rise came from the rising dollar. We cannot restore our lost competitiveness without bringing it down.

Garnaut hopes that more interest rate cuts could do the trick. Experience suggests that's optimistic: in my view, the Reserve Bank needs to intervene in the markets to drive the dollar down, with the government helping by removing the $2 billion a year tax break to foreign owners of government bonds.

What about the budget? Garnaut's forecasts imply that, without action, the deficit could blow out horribly ahead - yet to cut spending and/or raise taxes would slow the economy further. He advocates doing both, trimming middle class welfare while closing tax breaks, but offsetting this (as Hockey plans to do) by a strong push to build productivity-enhancing infrastructure - chosen on economic merit, not for political reasons.

St Francis revisited

Here's an enjoyable article by Joan Acocella reviewing a couple of recent biographies of St Francis of Assisi, which gives a decent short history of his life.

I had not realised he had been such an immediate success.  But I had heard of his eccentricities before:

A corollary of Francis’s devotion to humility was his distrust of book learning. Almost proudly, it seems, he called himself “illiteratus.” He never owned a complete Bible. He never became a priest. To him, book learning smelled of wealth—only rich people had books at that time—and thus of arrogance. One medieval source records his response to a novice who asked for a psalter: “When you have a psalter, you will want a breviary; and when you will have a breviary, you will install yourself in a throne like a great prelate, and you will command your brother: ‘Bring me my breviary!’ ” He then took some ashes from the hearth and rubbed them into his body, all the while repeating, “I’m a breviary, I’m a breviary!” Over time, his hostility to scholarship encouraged some people—for example, members of religious orders devoted to education, such as the Dominicans—to regard the Franciscans as a bunch of oddballs and half-wits, which, no doubt, some of them were. Francis accepted into the community anyone who applied. There was no test, no waiting period.

The story about the psalter seems to represent Francis as a man of rigid principles. He was not. To every rule, he made exceptions, on the spot. No friar could ride a horse (a symbol of wealth), but if the friar was sick, all of a sudden a friar could ride a horse. No new entrant, in divesting himself of his goods, could give them to his family, but if it turned out that the man’s giving away his ox would impoverish the family, the ox stayed home. Francis believed in discipline—fasting, hair shirts—but he didn’t eat bugs, and he warned the friars that excessive fasting was harmful to “Brother Body.” Also, he occasionally advised his followers to find their own way to salvation. On his deathbed, he said to them, “I have done what was mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours!” This is strange, since he had so clear a program for a Christian life. He may not have meant to be permissive, but he often was.

Which was certainly owing in part to another of his characteristics, attested to by everyone who knew him: an extreme natural sweetness. He was courteous, genial, extroverted—he was fun, a quality not always found in saints—and he laid it upon the brothers, as a duty, to be cheerful.

Read the whole thing.

Unusually preserved singers

English singer Petula Clark is back 'Downtown' - latimes.com

The 1960's now feels like a long, long time ago, and as with Shirley Bassey, it can be startling to realise a singer from that era is still alive and still working.

It turns out Petula Clark, aged 81, is still at it.  I haven't thought about her for a long, long time; but when thinking of "Downtown", I am inclined to join Gerald the Gorilla* and observe that the production on that album is amazing.  

Speaking on the big production values of the 1960's, I thought this recent article in The Guardian by Jimmy Webb about the making of Macathur Park with Richard Harris was interesting.  (When did Harris die?  2002?  Doesn't seem that long ago.)

I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised that famous singer from the 1960's are still with us, given Paul McCartney and the Stones rarely being out of the news.   But it's the ones who you don't think of for ages who suddenly turn up still alive who cause the surprise.  


* yes, I know, he was talking of Johnny Mathis, who I see is still alive and aged 78.  (I am contractually obliged to mention this sketch at least once a year.)

Stoic revival

I see via Mary Beard's blog that the second "Live Like a Stoic Week" is soon upon us, and more detail can be learnt from the "Stoicism Today" website.

Well, I suppose it's just lucky that we don't have any academics into reviving Cynicism by following the example of Diogenes:

From Life of Diogenes: "Someone took him [Diogenes] into a magnificent house and warned him not to spit, whereupon, having cleared his throat, he spat into the man's face, being unable, he said, to find a meaner receptacle."

That was from the Wikipedia entry on unpopular house guest Diogenes.  I also learn from there the origin of the "cynic":

The term "Cynic" itself derives from the Greek word κυνικός, kynikos, "dog-like" and that from κύων, kyôn, "dog" (genitive: kynos).^[48] One explanation offered in ancient times for why the Cynics were called dogs was because Antisthenes taught in the Cynosarges gymnasium at Athens.^[49] The word Cynosarges means the place of the white dog. Later Cynics also sought to turn the word to their advantage, as a later commentator explained:

There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them.

 Maybe I had read that before, but forgotten.   

Big hail

Having suffered some house damage in a hail storm exactly one year ago, I certainly have a good idea how scary it would have been to be in the huge and damaging hail that hit the Sunshine Coast on the weekend.   

The biggest hail stones appear to be the of the type which are make up by smaller hail freezing together, but that still makes for a massive chunk of  ice falling out of the sky.  I think there was a report of one person injured directly by the hail; it's a wonder there weren't more.

Dubious theory noted

I seem to have missed "biocentrism," as coined by medical Professor Robert Lanza, but it got a run in The Indpendent the other day, in a somewhat confusing article which says Lanza thinks his theory means that there is definitely life after death.  It sounds rather like Hugh Everett's idea that he would continue living in another corner of the multiverse - but not quite.   (I don't know that anyone has put this "multiple versions of everyone" idea to much philosophical, theological or science fiction consideration yet.  It always seems to me that it must be good for some interesting conjecture about God and the meaning of the universe, and it's a topic I often find myself thinking about in the shower.  Never with any worthwhile result, however.) 

Reddit has an article on it which contains more criticism, and there is a Wikipedia entry too.

Doesn't seem all that promising to me...

Captain Shaky

I knew nothing really about the events portrayed in Captain Phillips, even though they only occurred in 2009, and this is an excellent way to have seen the movie yesterday.

It's a very solid film:  good acting, pretty good writing, and just a really interesting story.  But there are a couple of, not exactly reservations, but at least observations I would make:

a.  the US military obviously fully co-operated with the film, and it's no wonder, given they are the heroes of the piece.   But the movie does perhaps treat them as so superbly efficient that, on reflection,  they seem just about too good to be true.   I can't really call this a criticism of the film - the US military probably deserves some unreserved cinematic high praise at least once in a while - but it wouldn't have hurt to shown one military character being a bit more human.

b.  Given that I have spent the last decade or so concentrating more on children's movies than adult ones, this was the first film I have seen by Paul Greengrass.  David Stratton and others have long complained or at least noted this director's love of hand held camera, or "shaky cam", and I have finally seen what it is like.

It's self evident that the style works best for documentary style story telling, and this movie certainly fits the bill.   As I have already indicated, it didn't ruin the movie for me, but I have got to say, it must surely make a director's job a hell of a lot easier to do an entire movie in this fashion.  I mean, it's virtually a complete jettison of concern about careful composition of a shot:  the actors just need to be approximately where they should be, and the cameraman just has to get them approximately in shot.  I would also assume it makes shooting the film a hell of a lot faster.

But given its limitations, it would seem almost a cheat to me if Greengrass got a Director's award for the film, no matter how much critics liked it.     

Still, I recommend it.

Yet another possible solar/hydrogen "breakthrough"

Researchers create a low-cost, long-lasting water splitter made of silicon and nickel

New proposals for putting together solar power and hydrogen production from water seem to be cropping up all the time.   It would be good if one of them ever got to production scale.

I see this article suggests the hydrogen would be used in fuel cells to generate power overnight or when it is cloudy.   (Well, hot salt systems seem to work overnight anyway.)   I wonder if this is more efficient than just burning hydrogen under the salts to keep them hot?  

Some other article I read recently suggested that putting small nuclear reactors at solar power stations could work well too.  I can't find it right now, though...