Poor little rich country

Saudi Arabia: No satisfaction | The Economist
The Economist writes:

Yet rather than the ebullience you might expect, the mood among Saudi
Arabia’s 30m residents (a third of whom are foreign workers and their
dependants) is one of nagging unease. Even as shiny new buildings,
universities, “financial centres” and entire cities sprout, the
machinery of government has remained as creakily top-down and tangled in
red tape as ever. And even as Saudis grow ever more sophisticated and
worldly—about 160,000 of them are studying abroad on government
scholarships, and those left behind are among the world’s heaviest
internet addicts—social, political and religious strictures remain
stifling.

“The government keeps people quiet with money, and in the rare cases
where that doesn’t work, with threats,” says a diplomat in Riyadh. “But
this is not a happy place.” For one thing, ordinary Saudis have no say
in where the money is spent. All too often what they see, following the
much-trumpeted princely opening of each new project, is vast empty
buildings and unused facilities. What they hear is tales of which
privileged courtier or business mogul has pocketed how much.

That's all well and good, but I don't know how they can write about the country being unhappy and not note that there is no alcohol, little prospect of pre-marital sex, and religious police who can have you arrested for conducting black magic. 

The campaign continues

As inspired by this post.

Advice for Mark Steyn

Quark Soup by David Appell: Is the Hockey Stick "flaccid?"

A good post last week from David Appell.

Life suited to interstellar travel, perhaps?

This Leech Can Survive A 24-Hour Submersion in Liquid Nitrogen | Australian Popular Science

Apart from the surprise that you can freeze and reanimate a small parasitic fish leech in liquid nitrogen, there is this remarkable ability it has:

Every single leech placed in -130°F (-90°C) storage survived for nine
months. In other words, these leeches can easily survive at
temperatures lower than those ever measured by a thermometer on Earth, for
as long as it takes to conceive and give birth to a human child. Some
of the leeches survived at this temperature for 32 months, or more than
2.5 years.

They also don't appear to need any time to acclimate to cold, unlike other
cold-tolerant creatures. And they can survive being rapidly chilled to
-321°F and then being thawed to room temperature, repeated up to 12
times over a couple minutes. Some of the leeches put through this
torture, which according to the study no other species could tolerate,
survived for more than a month in a water bath, and apparently died due
to starvation - not because of injuries due to freezing.

Lucky to get through the 60's

The Truths Behind 'Dr. Strangelove' : The New Yorker

I'm a week or so late in posting it, but this story about how an accidental nuclear war could have easily been started by a rogue US nuclear commander is pretty startling.

Life in Antarctica

I'm a cook at one of Antarctica's research stations. Any questions for me? | Jessica Barder | Comment is free | theguardian.com

I see that her blog (linked to in the article) is not updated all that often.  Still, it's always interesting to hear stories about life in Antarctica. 

The odd story of Americans and alcohol - in space

Why Astronauts Were Banned From Drinking Wine In Outer Space

Maybe I had read something about this years ago, but here in detail is the story of how NASA nearly had wine (sherry) in space, as part of their official menu; but the prohibitionist tendencies of enough of the public led it to not happening.

To Canberra and back, Part 4

I hadn't been to Canberra for perhaps 20 years, so it was good to see it again.

I always thought it was a very pleasant urban environment, with all the extensive tree plantings, at least in the older suburbs.  But I have never lived there during an entire winter; I am sure that would be trying.

We stayed at Forrest Hotel and Apartments, within a couple of blocks of cafes of Manuka and across the road (and some extensive parkland stretches) to Parliament House.  It's a great location, and the apartments (I don't know about the motel style rooms in the other part of the complex  - the buildings they were in did look a fair bit more basic) were really well appointed, very comfortable, and good value.  Some photos:

Out the balcony, looking north:

The grounds in front of the apartment:

The lovely, tree lined streets of Manuka








So, where does one take the family in Canberra?   To all of the essentials.

Parliament House:

It is a pretty impressive building, with what is probably the best flag pole on the planet:

OK, so I have been playing with the filters on the tablet.  












Here's a night time shot, the colour came out nice as it was on this one:

 





The photo was taken just after we had sat on the grassy slope of the complex, watching the 9pm New Year's fireworks over the centre of the city.  (Lots of families go to sit on the side of Parliament House to do that; it feels a pleasantly egalitarian to use the building that way):

And everyone likes the long, straight lines of the city as viewed from it:

The free guided tours are informative, and there almost seemed to be almost more Indians, Chinese and others than white anglo saxon in the place when we went there.  Maybe those of foreign extraction appreciate our democracy more than we do...

And it was, of course, where I bought my treasured Julia Gillard coffee mug, as featured in a previous post.  The shop there tries to be pretty up market and dignified; perhaps that's why it has trouble making a profit.  (Actually, looking at the linked story from August 2013, it seems the shop was putting a lot of hope on the sales of Prime Ministerial coffee mugs reviving its fortunes.  At least it worked on me.)

I see this is taking too much space to do Canberra justice.  It will need another instalment. 

Sinclair Davidson doesn't know there was a Coastwatch Oz TV show; verbals a Senator he still leaves being called a "bush pig"at his blog

With a headline to his post "Television isn't always real", Sinclair Davidson is clearly going along with the instant Right wing meme set up by his minions that Senator Hanson-Young was referring to the fictional Sea Patrol TV series in the question she asked yesterday.  In fact, the name of that show was said by one of public servants (and, if you ask me, he was acting in quite a smart ass fashion with his question.) The Senator indicated that was not the show in the way she responded.  She specifically referred to it as dealing with "fishing boats and so forth".  As I recall, Sea Patrol did not routinely deal with "fishing boat" stories; a recent reality TV show did.  (They also stopped making Sea Patrol a few years ago now.)

Coastwatch Oz, which Sinclair Davidson can watch on line here, was the recent reality TV show I believe she was referring to.  (Or, possibly, she may have been thinking of the New Zealand version of the same show, thinking from a quick viewing of it that it was Australian.)

Sinclair Davidson has also acknowledged that he read my earlier post re the Senator being referred to as a "bush pig"at his blog.  He is not concerned to moderate that comment.

He appears pretty often on ABC radio and TV.  He's a Professor at RMIT.  Why does no one ask him about his policy for what he will leave up on his blog?

Update:  I see Andrew Bolt, as is his wont, has merely copied the Catallaxy story and continued the verballing of the Senator.  Why Bolt doesn't just write directly for the blog, given that his ignorance on certain topics well qualifies him, I don't know.

Update 2:   I didn't actually realise when I first wrote this post, but Coastwatch Oz first screened on Channel 7 on the evening of 30 January.   The Senate hearing in question was on 31 January.   If anything, this make it all the more likely that the Senator was referring to the show, not 3 or 4 year old episodes of Sea Patrol.

I also have to point out, in fairness, that Latika Burke also went along with the "she was thinking Sea Patrol was real" meme.  Bad Latika.

Update 3:  in fairness to Bolt, he has updated his post with a reader comment pointing out the Coastwatch Oz explanation.  Will Catallaxy?  Probably not.

And besides:  clearly, Andrew Bolt does not care about the lack of moderation of "bush pig" at Catallaxy, otherwise he would not be recommending people to the blog.

What a hypocrite, when he posts continually about how objectionable he finds Left wing commentary on blogs and twitter.

Update 4:  the Senator complains to the Daily Telegraph that she was indeed referring to Coastwatch Oz, not Sea Patrol, which was not mentioned by her.  Tim Blair still being a smart arse about it.

Does Catallaxy update it's post?   No, of course not.  In fact, his last update tries to reinforce that she was referring to Sea Patrol.   "Bush pigs" don't deserve corrections, obviously.

The extraordinary drinking Russians

BBC News - Vodka blamed for high death rates in Russia

The high number of early deaths in Russia is mainly due to people drinking too much alcohol,particularly vodka, research suggests. 

The study, in The Lancet, says 25% of Russian men die before
they are 55, and most of the deaths are down to alcohol. The comparable
UK figure is 7%.

As ridiculously bad as those figures sound, they actually are an improvement on the not so recent past:

Russia brought in stricter alcohol control measures in 2006, including raising taxes and restricting sales.

Researchers say alcohol consumption has fallen by a third
since then and the proportion of men dying before they reach 55 years
old has fallen from 37% to 25%.

It must be hard running a good economy with so many people drinking themselves into early graves.

"Precious bodily fluids" more precious than thought

Gee.  This research seems quite surprising, and indicates again why IVF fiddling with fertilization is an area with higher adverse consequences for babies:

“We know from several studies that obesity in males can be tracked back to the father’s contribution at the moment of conception. But now we’re starting to understand the very complex signals and information being transmitted by the seminal fluid, and it turns out that seminal fluid and female tissues interact in surprising ways,” says Professor Sarah Robertson, research leader and Director of the Robinson Institute at the University of Adelaide.

“We’ve discovered that it’s not just the sperm, but the entire composition of the seminal fluid which has an important role to play in establishing the offspring’s future health, and this is most notably seen in male offspring.

“If the seminal fluid is of poor quality, it affects the female’s capacity to support an embryo. If the embryo manages to survive despite the poor quality seminal fluid, the metabolism of the resulting fetus will be permanently altered, making it more likely to develop a syndrome of metabolic disorders including obesity, high blood pressure and glucose intolerance after birth,” she says.

The study found that seminal fluid contains signals which trigger production of proteins in the female reproductive tract. The balance between proteins which promote embryo survival and those which cause embryo demise are changed according to the signals present in seminal fluid.

 The recent paper referred to in my last link, by the way, gives me a feeling of some vindication for my innate caution against IVF right from the start.   Here's a crucial paragraph:

Concern has also been raised about the long term health of children born through IVF. Otherwise healthy children conceived by IVF may have higher blood pressure, adiposity, glucose levels, and more generalised vascular dysfunction than children conceived naturally (table 2⇑). These effects seem to be related to the IVF procedure itself rather than to underlying subfertility.33 34 35 36 Animal studies have shown epigenetic and developmental abnormalities after assisted reproduction, which give further cause for reflection.37 Until these concerns are resolved, there should be caution about using IVF in couples when the benefit is uncertain or the chances of natural conception are still reasonable.

Sinclair Davidson runs a blog where "bush pig" for a female politician has become a routine insult

Yes, economist Sinclair Davidson maintains Catallaxy and rarely moderates insults made to female journalists and politicians.  Today, "bush pig", and I'm sure "pig" was used again last week with respect to the same politician. 

He appears fairly often on ABC outlets.

Why is no one in the public challenging him about how he runs his blog?

Record rainfall news

BBC News - UK floods: January rain breaks records in parts of England

Record rains in parts of England; record drought in California.

Is such an intensification of the water cycle while the world gets hotter just a co-incidence?

Is it too early for an election?

It seems to me that the Abbott government, having made a decision to keep Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals happy with keeping ADM out of GrainCorp in Australia, decided that it couldn't be seen to be caving in to that wing of the government again, and went against Barnaby in the decision to not throw any money in to keep SPC alive.

It further seems to me that they got this precisely the wrong way around - they would have been better off allowing ADM's bid for GrainCorp and getting those facilities upgraded with foreign money, and doing their bit to keep the rural food and processing sector happy with supporting SPC to the tune of a pretty measly $25 million.

I say this because:

a. I found Sharmon Stone's defence of the case for government support on Radio National this morning quite convincing.  You can read the reasons which she was basically covering in this article.

b.  I just looked up the amount of money the Government spends on drought assistance, and see that it can range in recent years it has ranged from 700 to 400 million dollars.  Drought (and associated water expenses) is one of the reasons given for why SPC has been in trouble over the last few years (not to mention the high Australian dollar, which - as I have noted before - small government types simply don't like acknowledging is a serious problem for Australian industry).  The $25 million is a pittance compared to general drought support - why aren't small government purists complaining that farmers should just move off the land if they can't make their business turn a profit during the drought?  

c. I don't buy much canned fruit or vegetables, but when I try to support the Australian product, and certainly avoid Chinese products at all costs.  (OK, with tomatoes, I do buy Italian canned ones, but not always, and I feel guilty when I do.)  

So, I hope the Abbott government loses another point or two in popularity over this decision.  The downturn in the Abbott government's polling so soon after an election has been truly remarkable.  I expect it to continue that way.

I think he is incapable of good judgement.

Can't Shorten's mother in law declare some sort of canned fruit state of emergency before she hands over the job to Cosgrove, and let us have another election? 

Update:   what a symbol of the Abbott government, hey? - the fact that Cadbury is getting $16 million for its Hobart chocolate factory, as an election promise.  Compared to fruit growers and processors being told to take a hike.

The Abbott government - the "empty calorie" government that's bad for your health.

Worker's paradise

Shopping in Paris: Worker protections are good for employees, bad for business.

Wow.  Everyone knows the French are not like America when it comes to welfare (to put it mildly), but I was very surprised at the extent of worker's benefits as explained in this fascinating article by an American who lives in Paris.

It's like a small government advocate's nightmare.   

Space eye

I'll do a reverse Jason Soon (he quite often seems to get his tweeted material from here), and note that he has linked to a good article in the New York Times talking about health problems astronauts suffer in zero G, particularly relating to their eyes (about which I didn't know much before.)

Quantum strangeness: a reminder

It doesn't hurt to remind oneself every now and then about quantum strangeness, and I quite like the way this article in Aeon (which seems a pretty good on line magazine, incidentally) explains it. 

Here's the key part:

Here’s the basic problem. While the mathematics of quantum theory works very well in telling us what to expect at the end of an experiment, it seems peculiarly conceptually confusing when we try to understand what was happening during the experiment. To calculate what outcomes we might expect when we fire protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider, we need to analyse what – at first sight – look like many different stories. The same final set of particles detected after a collision might have been generated by lots of different possible sequences of energy exchanges involving lots of different possible collections of particles. We can’t tell which particles were involved from the final set of detected particles.

Now, if the trouble was only that we have a list of possible ways that things could have gone in a given experiment and we can’t tell which way they actually went just by looking at the results, that wouldn’t be so puzzling. If you find some flowers at your front door and you’re not sure which of your friends left them there, you don’t start worrying that there are inconsistencies in your understanding of physical reality. You just reason that, of all the people who could have brought them, one of them presumably did. You don’t have a logical or conceptual problem, just a patchy record of events.

Quantum theory isn’t like this, as far as we presently understand it. We don’t get a list of possible explanations for what happened, of which one (although we don’t know which) must be the correct one. We get a mathematical recipe that tells us to combine, in an elegant but conceptually mysterious way, numbers attached to each possible explanation. Then we use the result of this calculation to work out the likelihood of any given final result. But here’s the twist. Unlike the mathematical theory of probability, this quantum recipe requires us to make different possible stories cancel each other out, or fully or partially reinforce each other. This means that the net chance of an outcome arising from several possible stories can be more or less than the sum of the chances associated with each.

To get a sense of the conceptual mystery we face here, imagine you have three friends, John, Mary and Jo, who absolutely never talk to each other or interact in any other way. If any one of them is in town, there’s a one-in-four chance that this person will bring you flowers on any given day. (They’re generous and affectionate friends. They’re also entirely random and spontaneous – nothing about the particular choice of day affects the chance they might bring you flowers.) But if John and Mary are both in town, you know there’s no chance you’ll get any flowers that day – even though they never interact, so neither of them should have any idea whether the other one is around. And if Mary and Jo are both in town, you’ll certainly get exactly one bunch of flowers – again, even though Mary and Jo never interact either, and you’d have thought that if they’re acting independently, your chance of getting any flowers is a bit less than a half, while once in a while you should get two bunches.

If you think this doesn’t make any sense, that there has to be something missing from this flower delivery fable, well, that’s how many thoughtful physicists feel about quantum theory and our understanding of nature. Pretty precisely analogous things happen in quantum experiments.

You should read the whole thing...

Dumb politics, again...

Nothing illustrates the Republican culture war going off the rails better than their obsession with the contraceptive mandate part of "Obamacare".

Mike Huckabee made a spectacle of himself and tried to pretend it was all the media's fault; then Sean Hannity turned up defending the stance with sarcasm, and complaining about why "the government" should pay for birth control when it was so cheap at Walmart.

As Amanda Marcotte notes (and I have seen this repeated endlessly at a certain Tea Party lite blog in Australia), the claim that it is all about the government paying for it is simply not true:

Hannity's boo-boo here was the result of a larger lie, perpetuated by Mike Huckabee and the folks at Fox News and other right wing media outlets: That the contraception mandate is about the "government" or "Uncle Sugar" buying women's birth control. In reality, the contraception mandate is closer to a consumer protection law. It's really part of a larger program in the Affordable Care Act to set minimum standards about what your insurance plan must cover. It's really no different than a law requiring a car to have four wheels and two headlights to be considered a street legal vehicle. It's telling that Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, Bill O'Reilly, and company feel the need to simply lie about this and claim that there's some kind of taxpayer program directly providing free birth control to women (ironically, they largely ignore actual, long-standing, politically popular programs that do this), because objecting to the real program—women buy insurance, that insurance covers contraception—sounds an awful lot like you are unduly obsessed with what other people get up to in bed.

A similar contraceptive mandate had been in place in many States for years; often being brought in under Republican leadership.

It is a sign of their appalling lack of political common sense that the Republicans now want to make to make it a big issue.

A Krugman particularly worth reading

Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression, AFF Edition - NYTimes.com

Deserves a documentary

Strange events lead Ind. family to resort to exorcism

Well, you don't often hear of an alleged demonic possession case involving levitation, walking backwards up walls, horse flies in the house, and so on.  And with independent witnesses to at least some of the key events.

This sounds like it would be well worth an hour long documentary to get a better idea of what was going on.