World War 1 discussed

The docu-drama 37 Days, which I mentioned favourably last week, became very compelling in last Friday's episode.   Well worth watching on SBS on Demand if you missed it.

Via Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, which is always brimming with great links, I caught up with two great pieces on the War over the weekend.  First, this article from the Guardian which I had overlooked, about the extraordinary and tragic circumstances in which many of the soldiers were executed for desertion.  It makes it very easy to understand the psychic scars it must have left on those who did come back from the war.

The other one was from the New Statesman, by Simon Heffer, looks at the history of the historians' attempts to analyse the causes of the war.  A good read.

Lockyer Valley visits

One of the nice things about living where I do in Brisbane is that it's not a far drive to get out to the Lockyer Valley, the large vegetable and fruit growing area between the city and Toowoomba.

Yesterday, we drove out to the Mulgowie Farmer's Market, which is held only on the first Saturday of every month, and even then only from 8 to 11am.   It was the second time we had been there, although we have now had a few trips to the Lockyer Valley in the last 6 months, for various reasons.

There is nothing else to see at Mulgowie - it has a (not very physically impressive) pub and a country hall beside it where the market is run.  That's it.  No shop, no school; but it's a lovely setting, closer to the hills than at many other parts of the so-called Valley.

The reason to go there is that it is genuinely a farmers market - there are several stalls with people who grow the produce they sell, and the freshness of most of what is on offer is really like nothing at any other market I have been too.   Yesterday, we bought beans, lettuce, corn, daikon, potatoes, radicchio, and the osso bucco we had for dinner.  The earth on the potatoes smelt fresh as I peeled them last night; the beans were as crisp as if picked from the yard.  The quality is just great, the price modest, and the stallholders all happy to talk about what they grow. We also had some nice olives, grown almost within sight of the market.

It's not the largest market around, and it feels a bit like a secret that you don't want too many people to know.  But from where we live, it's an easy and pleasant drive of just under an hour (I recommend going through Rosewood, if anyone is coming from Brisbane), but it really doesn't feel far.  I love it.

In fact, maybe I was a farmer in a previous life, because I just generally get a bit of a thrill from driving around fertile farm areas like the Lockyer, and guessing which vegetable or produce is in which field.*  The soil is a fantastically fertile looking black all around the region.  Some of the smaller roadside farm vendors are also worth visiting - yesterday we got some great strawberries from one of them, and the woman was able to point across the field to where they had been grown.

The region was badly hit by the 2011 floods.  Perhaps part of reason it is so fertile is that it is a bit of a flood plain.  But the bigger towns of Laidley and Gatton don't seem to be doing too bad.   We also drove into the Gatton University of Queensland campus yesterday, where they teach veterinary science and other agricultural related things - it has some pretty remarkable old buildings, but I didn't take photos.  Worth a look if you are in the area, though.  

*  some actual comments from me in the car:  "Look:  that's beetroot!...What's that?   Cabbage I think....Hey, we could recreate the cropsprayer scene from North by Northwest in that patch of dead corn stalks! ....Put away the iPod will you and look out the window you two!!"

Chromecast takes over the world

At the cinema today, there was an ad for the Chromecast.  I'm not sure how well it has sold, but I suspect it is really going to put more billions into Google's pockets.  It works well, even if it takes a bit of fiddling to get it to work with sites other than Youtube at the moment.

Tonight, I got Vimeo to work on it (using Chrome with Vidcast added - look it up), and it worked very well indeed.  All Vimeo content seems to be of very clear quality.

Back on Youtube, the recently viral video of a drone flying through fireworks does look great on a a big LCD TV.   Or you can watch it here:

At last - the problems of surrogacy noted

I'm not alone in being against surrogacy after all. The cultural soft left dominance of the media means that problems and ethical doubts about surrogacy are rarely discussed in detail (quite the opposite in fact - surrogacy by rich pop singers and movie or TV stars is positively celebrated with not a doubt in sight), so it is indeed refreshing to see that the New York Times has a lengthy and detailed article which gives some detailed examples of how it can and has gone wrong.

It's well worth reading.  

It's also surprising to see that quite a few comments are against it generally - it seems like a lot of people have been waiting to read something like this.  Here's one comment as an example:

As someone who is both gay and adopted I find it absolutely abhorrent the amount of couples I know who seem to think nothing of raising a child completely separated from one of its biological parents. 
The rallying cry seems to be the outdated notion that only the people who raised you are your parents and the resulting children should remain grateful and naive about the process. Anyone who has been in a similar situation will tell you life is more complicated than that. Simply loving someone doesn't trump their basic biological drive to understand their identity. 
This is much more complex than smiling pictures of babies and happy families implies. And it's an issue I feel like the media and public is largely ignoring because they don't want to trample on anyone's notion of 'gay rights.'

The future of Hollywood

Further to my recent post about the importance of the Chinese market to the future of Hollywood, this article in the Atlantic says that this is already the reason Hollywood has given up on comedies.  (Or, at least, non animated comedy.)   In fact, this chart from the story shows that animation has a strong, strong future:



Speaking of animation, the kids and I saw How to Train Your Dragon 2 today.  It's pretty good, for a sequel, and is really remarkable for the over the top complexity of some of the settings, let alone the quality of the foreground animation.  (It reminded me a little of a souped up version of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 in this respect.)    In a way, I think animation can overdo that aspect now - the level of detail can be a bit overwhelming.  Still, the movie does slow down a bit when it needs to, and hits emotional marks, so I forgave the over-busyness of many sequences.

For my future reference: spicy osso bucco recipe

Before I forget, tonight's successful osso bucco cooking must be recorded:

For 4:

About 1kg osso bucco
large carrot, diced
large onion, or a few small ones, diced fine
1 teaspoon each fennel seeds and cumin seeds
3 largish tomatoes
about half a small can of tomato paste
1 cup beef stock
1 cup red wine

Trim osso bucco pieces, season well with salt and pepper, and coat generously with flour.  In pressure cooker, fry for few minutes each side in olive oil to brown.  Puree the tomatoes in a blender.  Add onion, carrot and fennel and cumin seeds to the pressure cooker, stir with meat and fry off for a few minutes.

Add pureed tomatoes, beef stock and wine, and tomato paste.  Stir, and seal up pressure cooker (higher pressure setting.)   Cook for 40 - 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, get some mashed potatoes going, and beans or other green veges.

The meat will probably fall off the bone when serving, but doesn't matter.  I think it is the presence of the marrow dissolved in the sauce that gives it a rich taste.

Recipe is my version of one by Gabriel Gate, except he used white wine and water instead of red wine and stock, and he also stirs in fresh spinach at the end (which is nice).  Celery or fennel could be added to the pressure cooker too, if handy, but just this basic version works very well for a good sauce of the right thickness.

An enjoyable blast

Austrian Economists, 9/11 Truthers and Brain Worms - Bloomberg View

I don't really follow what the "Austrians" claim and know which economist I may have heard of is in that group, but from this enjoyable blast against them, they obviously hold many of the views that turn up in the posts of the libertarian/conservative economists of Catallaxy.  I wonder if obsession with Say's Law is an Austrian thang?

An appalling "doctor"

Euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke criticised over support for 45-year-old who committed suicide - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

There's no way this guy should continue to be allowed to be a doctor.  His attitude has always been to presume that everyone who wants to commit suicide, no matter what the age, and the reason why, is acting rationally and reasonably and who is he to stop them?  In fact, he'll tell them how to do it the easiest way possible.

He came over as a complete and utter jerk on the ABC interview last night.  The interviewer was calm and forensic; the only question I would have liked to hear was "when was the last time - if you ever have - you declined to advise someone who has asked you how best to commit suicide, or recommended they get properly assessed and treated for possible depression?"

The very dubious Bentham

The last time I mentioned Bentham, it was about his underpants.

It's not a stretch from there to note his libertine views on sex, which get a description in this recent review of a book on the subject.  

Jeremy, I take it from the (sometimes) reliable source of Horrible Histories*, was very eccentric in his personal conduct (and not just because of what he had done to his body after death,) but the review does point out that the permanent bachelor did fall in love with women, and seemingly slept with them.  But he does come across as something of a naive Jim Cairns "free love" type:

Of all enjoyments, Bentham reasoned, sex was the most universal, the most easily accessible, the most intense, and the most copious – nothing was more conducive to happiness. An "all-comprehensive liberty for all modes of sexual gratification" would therefore be a huge, permanent benefit to humankind: if consenting adults were freed to do whatever they liked with their own bodies, "what calculation shall compute the aggregate mass of pleasure that may be brought into existence?"

As someone says in comments following the review:

The article criticises Mill but actually supports his idea that Bentham did not really understand human feelings. Anyone who thinks sex=pleasure, pleasure=happiness and therefore more sex = more happiness doesn't understand human emotion.

On Bentham more generally, while Googling around I found this article from earlier this year, and I was somewhat surprised to read that Jeremy was an early proponent of the "Jesus had male lovers" idea which would re-appear again in 1970's gay rights activism.  (I remember some gay rights guy on the old Mike Walsh Midday show, probably in that decade, causing gasps in the largely female audience by making that claim.  I don't know if it was widely rumoured at the time, or later, that Walsh himself was gay.)

But I was more intrigued by this part of the article, showing that Jeremy was a radical in other ways which should cause people hesitation, at the least, about his judgement generally, and utilitarianism:

Bentham also took up the theme of infanticide. He had considerable sympathy for unmarried mothers who, because of social attitudes, were ostracized and had little choice but to become prostitutes, with the inevitable descent into drink, disease, and premature death. It would be far better, argued Bentham, to destroy the child, rather than the woman. Moreover, it was kinder to kill an infant at birth than allow it to live a life of pain and suffering. 

Well, we don't hear about that view of his so often, do we?

Update:  I see that the topic of Bentham and his justification of infanticide was dealt with at First Things last year.  It's a good article that concludes:

 Bentham has here laid out, quite clearly, a fundamental dispute of the modern age: the good life understood as the satisfaction of preferences and unfoiled desires on the one hand and the Platonic idea that justice is found only through the kind of self-restraint that looks beyond pleasure and pain on the other. There is, as Bentham was well aware, no middle ground. Not Paul, but Jesus excels in making this crystal clear.

* as confirmed with this paper, which notes he was extremely eccentric, and concludes he probably had Asperger's.  Bentham as Sheldon:  it does make sense.

This is getting confusing

Saudi Arabia sends 30,000 troops to Iraq border | GulfNews.com

Seems to be a case of Saudi Arabia getting ready to fight a monster of its (or its citizen's money) own creation.  

Well, that's depressing...

BBC News - Decline in trials for Alzheimer's disease

There is an urgent need to increase the number of potential therapies being investigated, say US scientists.

Only one new medicine has been approved since 2004, they report in the journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy.

The drug failure rate is troubling and higher than for other diseases such as cancer, says Alzheimer's Research UK.

Dr Jeffrey Cummings, of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, in Las Vegas, and colleagues, examined a public website that records clinical trials.

Between 2002 and 2012, they found 99.6% of trials of drugs aimed at preventing, curing or improving the symptoms of Alzheimer's had failed or been discontinued.  This compares with a failure rate of 81% for cancer drugs.

The failure rate was "especially troubling" given the rising numbers of people with dementia, said Dr Simon Ridley, of Alzheimer's Research UK.

"The authors of the study highlight a worrying decline in the number of clinical trials for Alzheimer's treatments in more recent years," he said.

"There is a danger that the high failure rates of trials in the past will discourage pharmaceutical companies from investing in dementia research.

A sure way to increase teenage use

Maureen Dowd's Marijuana Edibles Problem -- And Mine

This article in Forbes goes into a lot of detail about the "edibles" containing cannabis in Colorado, and my conclusion is:  why did they legalise this form at all if they have any interest in limiting teenage use and experimentation?

It's just nuts - no teen need ever worry about being found out via smell or smoking paraphernalia  - there appear to be hundreds of candies and chocolates (often containing multiple doses) on sale.   And you have gooses like libertarian Gary Johnson praising them as even better than smoking!

I can't imagine a surer way to make it easier for a teenager to try it, and keep using it, as long as an adult friend goes and buys multiple dose candy bars for them.

My prediction remains - give this a couple of years, maybe three.  See what has happened to education and rates of teenage use in the State and in nearby States.  Look at the rate of adult use, and the effect on the economy.   Then tell us whether it has been a success or not.  I expect that there will be at least some degree of walking back from this experiment.

Good writing

American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning : The New Yorker

This article by Arthur Miller, apparently from 1998, paints an evocative picture of hot New York summers of the depression era in particular.   He also reflects on hard work in those days:

Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse
than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect,
and my father, who normally had no sense of smell—no one understood
why—claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from
a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow
would start work at half past five in the morning and continue until
midnight. He owned Bronx apartment houses and land in Florida and
Jersey, and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful physique, a
very straight spine, a tangle of hair, and a black shadow on his cheeks.
He snorted like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his
patterns through some eighteen layers of winter-coat material. One late
afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he
held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical,
razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right. The blade sliced through
his index finger at the second joint. Angrily refusing to go to the
hospital, he ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel,
and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking. When the blood began
to show through the towel’s bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on
the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work
the next morning, and worked right through the day and into the evening,
as usual, piling up his apartment houses.

 Wow.

Moore missed

There's much Monty Python talk in the British media due to the remaining team members doing their "last reunion" shows to massive crowds in London, but to rather mixed reviews. 

The Guardian had a column in which various famous-ish people nominated their favourite sketches.  I don't believe anyone mentioned good old Dennis Moore.

I have posted before about this very silly series of sketches, and re-watching it, I have to say it is undeservedly overlooked and, unusually, sort of subtly funny for Python.  (The way Dennis digresses continuously, in particular.)

My previous post was of pretty poor video quality, though.  I have found these versions, with czech subtitles, are much clearer:

Another surprising dog story

Man's best friend linked to lower diabetes risk in infants

The study from Finland investigated whether microbial exposures from animal contact during infancy are associated with the development of diabetes. The researchers studied 3,143 children at two Finnish hospitals between 1996 and 2004.

Of nine early microbial exposures studied – including farm animals, day care and exposure to antibiotics – only indoor dog exposure was inversely associated with subsequent development of preclinical type 1 diabetes.

“Dog contact may affect the human immune system in many ways”, the researchers wrote.

In the benevolent dictatorship of Steveworld, all prospective parents have to have a puppy first.  [But parents found with marijuana will have their houses bulldozed, Israeli style.  A yurt will be supplied in compensation.]  Birth will be celebrated with a government supplied gift basket including a $10 bottle of Australian chardonnay pinot noir, several parsnips, and a chorizo*.

Update:  * and a big brie with a box of water crackers, of course.

Comedy improvement

I opined a few weeks ago that, after viewing a couple of recent-ish episodes of Big Bang Theory, it appeared to have improved considerably from a previous season in which I thought it showed signs of being in terminal decline.

After seeing a few more episodes since then, I think I was right:  it has definitely improved.

The episode watched last night in which Sheldon gets accused of workplace sexual harassment was, I thought, very funny; and showed sharp writing all around.

A sitcom that recovers like this is a rarity.

However, reading elsewhere, it would appear that the episodes I have seen recently are perhaps all season 6 (last night's episode definitely was), and season 7 has just finished in the US, with at least one person on the net thinking it's bad again   Also, it has been renewed for 3 seasons!  That's stretching the abilities of the writers to breaking point, I'm sure.

Hippy libertarians with guns

Ha.  Via Jason Soon, I see an entertaining article that reports on the anti-social, nutty, self-absorbed wankerdom of (at least one part of) the American libertarian movement. 

I was saying this from the start...

In-vitro meat unlikely to become reliable food source

Yes, you could feed the world with microbial protein grown in vast factory vats and processed into something vaguely resembling soft meat (see "Quorn").  But growing actual muscle cells into something with the texture, taste and appearance of meat is always going to rely on much, much more complicated and energy intensive techniques, and putting an animal in the field to eat grass is always going to be more reliable and cheaper.

Come back in 50 years and tell me I'm wrong.

[It occurs to me that this is the same stupid use of technology that you see in fertility treatments.   If you have ethical doubts about eating meat, there is already a huge range of other tasty protein options to avoid doing so, or doing it less often than you currently do.   In fertility treatment, we see the desire to experiment with the life of children with "3 parent" embryos so that the incredibly tiny number of mothers with mitochondrial disease can have "their own" baby instead of adopting one.   These are both rich persons' vanity projects.]

Quite right

Silence on missing asylum seeker boat a disgrace to the nation

Julian Burnside ends his column with this:

And whatever the facts turn out to be, Morrison has treated theAustralian public with contempt. The public have a legitimate interest in knowing what is being done, in our name, to people who have done nothing worse than ask for our help. Morrison either knows the fate of the refugees or he does not.  If he does, he should tell us: either that
they have been rescued or helped, or that they have been sent to Sri Lanka.  The alternative is that he does not know, in which case he should be sacked for incompetence.

We should no longer be treated as if we do not care about the fate of other human beings.

I maintain my opinion that the media as a profession is not reacting strongly enough to the military junta-like behaviour  of this government.  It's not just wrong or annoying that Morrison and Abbott keeps secrets on this from the Australian public; it's positively outrageous.

Stop shrugging your shoulders, newspaper editors and columnists, and saying "we don't like this, but we can see that the Coalition does not fear public backlash against them as long as boats don't arrive."  You need to complain that you and the public are being treated as children in a way previous "tough" Coalition governments dealing with the boats have not, and that the reasons given are patent crap.  

Update:  I was reminded of this in a comment at The Guardian.  Tony Abbott during last year's election campaign:

QUESTION:
Will you commit to putting out an alert when every boat comes through?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well, I absolutely accept that you need to know how we're going. You absolutely need to know how we are going, and if we have a good week, a bad week, an in-between week, you will know all about it. One way or another, we will get full disclosure to the Australian people. The only point that Scott was making is that in the end, there are some bits of information which are operationally sensitive and that particular judgment has to be left to the commander of Operation Sovereign Borders.

The word you're looking for is "flake"

Annabel Crabb writes about Tony Abbott's complete backflip on the matter of federalism:

Of all the reversals and surprises for which the Prime Minister has been reproached over his political career, his change of heart on federalism must be the largest and most striking.

In 2009, when he wrote Battlelines, Tony Abbott was so convinced that the Commonwealth should be given more power to override state governments that he wrote his own Constitutional amendment to that effect and pasted it in the back of the book.

The failure of federalism, he wrote, was the key to many of Australia's worst problems. And people expected their national government to fix things, so the Constitution's fiendish section 51, with its pernickety and much-mulled-over list of things the Commonwealth is allowed to interfere with, should be simplified to give the Feds power to overrule the states on pretty much anything.

"Giving more authority and commensurate revenue powers back to the states is an option, but it is not a real one," Mr Abbott argued in a speech to a 2008 conference, Australian Federalism: Rescue and Reform.

"It is an implausible one in the modern era. The only real option I suggest is to give the national government the power to match people's expectations about who should really be in charge."

She then writes:

 One of the most mystifying yet persistent characterisations currently abroad in the Australian political arena is that the Prime Minister is some kind of obsessive ideologue.

Well, I agree.  He's not an ideologue:  he's a flake who is currently under the influence of obsessive ideologues. 

Some of the definitions of flake from Urban Dictionary:

 An unreliable person

A useless, shady, deceitful person who is so unreliable and selfish they cause you much anger and frustration. A Flake's only agenda is what they want to do.

A Frequently unreliable person who says that they will do somthing or attend somthing, but never shows.