Talk about a meeting of disparate characters

BBC News - Steve Coogan and Philomena Lee meet Pope Francis

I see there was a good reason for the meeting (the report notes "They are campaigning for the release of 60,000 adoption files held by the Irish state, churches and private agencies.")

That's good, because I could not imagine any social reason Coogan (who I regard as talented in his way, but with a brand of comedy that is psychologically too claustrophobic to watch for long) would be meeting the Pope.

I haven't seen his Philomena film yet, but it has such good reviews I would like to.

I'm glad somebody else has noticed

At the end of a Guardian book review about a killing psychopath in a dystopian future New York (which he quite likes), Adam Roberts makes this observation:

Still, Sternbergh has created a memorable main character here. He is an unvarnished, murderous psychopath, happy to kill for money, no questions asked. On occasion, when the whim takes him, he'll even kill without getting paid. Yet it doesn't take long for us to warm to him, and by the end of the book I was keen to read the second Spademan novel (which Sternbergh is currently writing). A big film deal has already been signed. What's the appeal?

It's a question with larger resonance. Think of some of the biggest TV serials of the last few years: The Sopranos; Breaking Bad; Dexter; Game of Thrones. These are all shows with psychopaths at their centre, not as baddies, but as the heroes. Dracula used to be a straightforward villain; nowadays vampires are our heroes even though their stock-in-trade is still (of course) killing people. When Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes boasts that he is a "high-functioning sociopath" and executes press barons in cold blood, we are not appalled. On the contrary, we lap it up. So what's with all the lovable murderers? Shovel Ready suggests, in an oblique kind of way, that the issue is one of a broader social disengagement, but I think there's something more designedly amoral going on. Sternbergh's thriller whisks us along so effortlessly we may miss the point at which we start to think: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could just break the bonds of all those petty frustrations of my day-to-day with a little bit of the old ultraviolence?" This may not be an entirely morally healthy thing to be doing.

I have been up front about my distrust and dislike of the "loveable murderer" theme ever since it started to appear in movies (I would say) in the early 1990's.   (Perhaps with Silence of the Lambs, I would guess.  Pulp Fiction didn't help.)   Are other people finally starting to notice there is something "off" about it?

What is going on, Paul

I was talking to my daughter over dinner last night about her school camp experiences while Paul Howes was on 7.30 in the background, so I could only vaguely get the gist of what he was on about, but my main impression was that it was rambling, confusing performance of highly unclear purpose.

Mark Kenny in Fairfax this morning says that Howe's intervention is helpful to Abbott, and I suppose it might be, except that I find it hard to believe that anyone watching Paul will think it anything other than positioning for his own future benefit in politics, somewhere.   As Kenny says, Howes seems to be alluding to some potential for a re-visiting something like the Hawke era wages accord, but the difference is that there is no potential for a "trade off"in higher social wage under the Abbott government.

Howes should just go away for a while.  Like 3 years or so.  Dissent within Labor is that last thing they need. 

Still, I doubt it is going to lead to any improvement to the Abbott government's popularity.  Pollbludger has its poll of polls at 52.6 to 47.4 in favour of Labor, with possibly the first Newspoll for the year being done over the next weekend.  As Newspoll has been lagging a bit in its assessment of the decline of Abbott popularity, if it joins the other polls and shows Labor in front, Coalition members will not be all that happy with the prospect of a West Australian Senate election.

The Bible and epilepsy

Tim in comments yesterday noted that he hadn't heard of the theory that St Paul's conversion experience was perhaps medically explained by epilepsy.  So, just for Tim, whose poetry is dictated to him by ethereal voices after he has enough home brew*, here's a link to the abstract of the 1987 article which presumably first dealt with the theory in detail.

I see at the side of that page, there are further medical articles suggesting Ezekiel may have also had epilepsy, or that St Paul was struck by lightning on the road.   (The latter theory has a bit more potential for divine involvement, I guess...)

*  I may be making that part up.  The voices come after he eats his home made cheese.

Record heat news

Astute readers will know about the remarkably warm winter Alaska is experiencing, but down in Brazil the summer has been dire, and record temperatures appear to be causing concern on all sorts of fronts:  for agriculture, power and industry generally.

This is all pretty remarkable, given that we are in neutral ENSO conditions.

Although the consensus forecast is that it won't appear in the 2014 northern summer, it does seem that the probability of El Nino returning soon-ish, with its expected effect of increased global temperature, is on the up.  See the information in this post, towards the end. 

Back and forth: just go buy some SPC Ardmona products

In all of the politically motivated back and forth going on about whether SPC Ardmona really are too generous to their workers, I thought it interesting to note the submission the company made last year disputing the Productivity Commission's decision to not offer any assistance.  (Go to the second link here - it's a .pdf that is hard to link to directly.)

The company sounds really annoyed with the PC, and I have to say, it reads as if they have good reason.

In the meantime, one would hope the publicity might lead Australians to go out and buy some of their product.  I certainly did last week - the 60c premium to buy a can of diced tomatoes from them instead of the Coles Italian sourced brand seemed the least I could do.

And perhaps it's also time for SPC to wheel out Margaret Fulton for a new edition of her "Canned Fruit and Meat Recipe Book" which appears to have come out in 1971, possibly as part of newspaper or magazine one suspects.  (It was apparently only 15 pages long.)

I sound as if I am being sarcastic.  But honestly, canned peaches are pretty nice, and we should eat more of them. 

Obamacare not failing

It appears from this Krugman post, and an article in the LA Times, that "Obamacare" is not destined to fail after all. 

The nutty Right in the US will need to move on.   As they will have to, eventually, on climate change.

Data as old as the universe

Optical data storage has virtually unlimited lifetime

I don't know why, but I always find stories about developments in technology for long term data storage interesting. Perhaps it's because I feel there is science fiction potential there: if you came across alien data storage, it would be good to be able to recognize it.

So, from the link, you can read about an optical system that writes on quartz and should last a very, very long time:

The researchers calculated that the decay time of the nanogratings, and thus the lifetime of the data storage system, is about 3 x 1020 years at room temperature, indicating unprecedented high stability. The lifetime decreases at elevated temperatures, but even at temperatures of 462 K (189° C, 372° F), the extrapolated decay time is 13.8 billion years, comparable to the age of the Universe.

Wow.

Old mental illnesses

Elsewhere in the Atlantic, there was a recent shortish article looking at Greek and Roman understandings of mental illness.  Nothing too startling in there, I guess, although I don't think I had read before that Socrates heard voices:

Socrates seems to have had recurrent hallucinations of one particular type: A voice spoke to him, usually advising him not to do things. His disciples were in awe of this phenomenon, but some of his later admirers thought they needed to explain it away—they thought it suggested that he was slightly cracked.

Strange stories of American nudity

There's an article at The Atlantic with the somewhat unusual title Men, Manliness, and Being Naked Around Other Men.

It's a sympathetic look at the men (and boys) who do not care to be naked around other men, even if they be doctors.  While Europeans, and probably Australians, generally regard Americans as being unduly uptight about nudity generally (the Huffington Post just ran an article "Why Janet Jackson's Nipple Still Matters" to mark the faked wardrobe malfunction's ten year anniversary,) this article at first sounds as if it might be an example of American prudishness.   But it does deal with two rather odd aspects of the history of American, ahem, exposure.

The first is that, across many parts of America, and in some cases right up to the 1970's, schools, colleges and YMCAs enforced male nudity for pool swimming and swimming classes.  The article links to an NPR story about men who do not remember this fondly, particularly as they were not given any choice in the matter during the years of puberty in high school.

It seems that even most Americans under 50 have trouble believing this was so ubiquitous in their own country through most of the 20th century.   Apparently, it started as an alleged hygiene requirement, before chlorination of pools was even available*.   (Seems a dubious position right from the start, particularly as the rule was never rigorously applied to girls and women.)  Some public broadcaster has done a show on the history of this, available through this link.  It's not salaciously handled, although he does sound as if he is personally pretty keen on skinny dipping.  One of the more interesting things he talks about is how it has become forgotten so quickly.  (Part of the answer is that some states never believed in it - but a large number did.) 

It also perhaps helps to explain the reason the YMCA was the subject of  gay double entendre in the famous song.

Given that England sort of has a reputation for public school gay experiences and creepy teachers, one wouldn't be so surprised to hear of a history of this in that country.  But the fact that is it America makes it all the more surprising.  (I don't know that it was ever the practice in Australia either.)

So, the other odd thing in the Atlantic article, or at least in the comments following, is the number of people who talk about their schools having no doors on the toilet stalls.   In fact, this reminded me of hearing one of the Johns from They Might be Giants in an interview in the 80's or 90's mentioning having to go to hospital in Brooklyn, and the toilets had no doors so as to prevent patients shooting up (!)

I cannot, in all my life, ever remember any toilet stall anywhere deliberately not having a door.  Even in Japan, where people are by no means shy in onsen and women cleaners in mens toilets are unremarkable, when it comes to a toilet for defecation, I have never seen one that did not allow privacy.   (Which is a particularly good thing in Asia when it comes to the uncertain arrangements with pants and positioning when having to use a squat toilet.)  Yet this seems to have been an accepted precautionary practice in American schools and hospitals, at least up to the 1980's in the case of the latter.

I think I find the idea of being on the bowl in a semi public environment more disconcerting than having to shower occasionally without privacy.   (Sure, the Romans used to poop communally  and No Time for Sergeants made it clear that some US military barracks followed the same design - presumably it was thought to help "bonding".  But if you have always had privacy while so engaged since the age of 4 or so, it's a very odd idea.)

Update:  a columnist in Houston wrote back in 2008 about the nude school swimming policy he experienced (unhappily) in the early 1960's.  He spends time on the issue of why attitudes changed abruptly around the mid 60's, and thinks it is just to do with increased affluence meaning increased desire for privacy.  Not sure that this really makes sense - Japanese and Scandinavian countries are pretty affluent, and social nudity in the right circumstances is routine.  But then again,  I don't know that they would have ever had the  oddball American view that schools should teach boys only to swim in the nude.

* I wrote a bit about the history of pool chlorination in my post about a visit to Brisbane's old pool at Spring Hill.

Stupid, stupid piece

Philip Seymour Hoffman and a double standard over drugs | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free |

What an air headed piece of writing from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.

An actor dies of (apparently) heroin overdose, and he takes this as an opportunity to lament drugs being criminalised.

Hey, Simon, here's a few points:

*  how would legalisation of heroin have helped Hoffman?   The rich appear to be able to be buy good quality heroin in large quantities.  (If there is any evidence of contamination in Hoffman's heroin, get back to us.)

*  Hoffman's drug addiction was already being treated as a health problem for him, not a criminal one.   He had been into rehabilitation - he had not been referred to police by the staff there.

*  What do you want?  That the rich only inject themselves in safe injecting rooms, like at Kings Cross in Sydney?  You think if there was one of those in New York or LA that rich actors would make their way there daily to shoot up safely?

The fact is, as I have repeated endlessly, for heroin addicts who want help overcoming a dangerous addiction, the addiction has already been treated as a health problem in Australia, and (I am betting) in many Western countries for decades.

Drug reformers are always exaggerating the benefits of their hypothetical legalisation schemes, even for cases for this where the change would seem to make no difference whatsoever.

Economics isn't everything

Economists in reverse over our car industry

I think the sentiments expressed in this column are quite valid.

In particular, I want to hear from small government, uber free market types, where they think Australian economic future lies.  (I bet they shrug their shoulders and say something like "it's not up to me to decide, let the market work it out.")

The problems with letting long standing industries in manufacturing and food growing and processing die because of present difficulties not entirely within the industries' control are surely how quickly they can be replaced with alternatives, how viable the alternatives are in the long run, and whether you are allowing too much of a "monoculture" of economic activity to develop.
  
It seems to me that free marketeers have fanciful ideas that lowering wages enough, and de regulation, just magically leads to a wonderful diverse economic health, no matter which corner of the world you live in.   I am very skeptical.

Thirsty solar thermal

California Faces Solar Thermal Power’s Drinking Problem | MIT Technology Review

I didn't know that some current designs for solar thermal power plants were so thirsty:

The drawbacks are that solar thermal plants generate large amounts of waste heat, and they consume a lot of water for cooling, which is usually done by evaporating water. Solar thermal plants can consume twice as much water as fossil fuel power plants, and one recently proposed solar thermal project would have consumed about 500 million gallons of water a year.

A technology called dry cooling, which has started appearing in power plants in the last 10 years or so, can cut that water consumption by 90 percent. Instead of evaporating water to cool the plant, the technology keeps the water contained in a closed system. As it cools the power plant, the water heats up and is then circulated through huge, eight-story cooling towers that work much like the radiator in a car.

Dry cooling technology costs from two and a half to five times more than conventional evaporative cooling systems. And it doesn’t work well on hot days, sometimes forcing power plant operators to cut back on power production. In the summer, this can decrease power production by 10 to 15 percent, says Jessica Shi, a technical program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute. On extremely hot days, power production might be reduced even more than that

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.