A musical interlude

I saw this on Rage on the weekend, and immediately liked its cute, quirky but slightly creepy vibe.  It's been around since 2009, I see:

Bursting through the advanced age reliability threshold

An aging scientist makes what I think a very unlikely prediction:

SEX will be entirely recreational by 2050, with all reproduction achieved in the laboratory, the inventor of the contraceptive Pill has predicted.
Us chemist Carl Djerassi says sex and reproduction will soon be separated in the Western world and that men and women will freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilised. By mid-century, most couples will have IVF through choice, not necessity, he believes.
“The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be _fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy,” he told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph.

His age:  91.

Sorry, but this bears all the hallmarks of a person who has exceeded the age related unreliability threshold.  Basically, the great majority of people, even when formerly sensible in their field of expertise, become an unreliable source of opinion by about the age of 80.   Maybe 85, max...

Seems sound advice

For a Lasting Marriage, Marry Someone Your Own Age - The Atlantic

Seriously?

Cuts to jobless benefits will boost economic growth, Australia tells G20: The Australian government has cited controversial cuts to unemployment benefits as one of the key structural reforms that will increase economic activity by 2 per cent, according to a draft of its growth strategy to be submitted to the G20 leaders' summit.

The reference to the jobless reforms – which include a measure preventing unemployed people under 30 from accessing welfare payments for up to six months – comes even though the changes have been blocked in the Senate.

The objective of boosting economic growth by 2 per cent "above what is currently expected" during the next five years is the main goal of the G20 meeting, to be held in Brisbane at the weekend.

Andrew Leigh is quoted further down in the article:

However, Labor assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said cuts to
welfare payments such as   the unemployment benefit, family tax
benefits and the pension would act to suppress economic growth.

"If you produce a budget that reduces the income of the poor,
it has an impact on consumer demand because they spend everything
they've got," he said.

"That will detract from economic growth."

When even Judith Sloan was suggesting a few years ago that there was a good case for increasing unemployment benefits (even though I think she doesn't like to repeat this moment of Lefty madness), I think I know which side of the argument has more credibility.   

Sad news

Wayne Goss, former Queensland premier, dies at 63 | Australia news | theguardian.com

I think Wayne Goss is widely regarded as an unworthy victim of the weird local politics of Queensland, having lost the premiership prematurely for no good reason at all.  Even my late, permanently rusted on Coalition supporting mother never bore him ill will, as I recall.  The only downside that I know of is that he did help bring on the rise of Kevin Rudd in politics.   No one's perfect...

Interstellar noted by Mr Soon

I'm never sure lately if some tweets by Jason Soon are out to deliberately goad me, even though I trust he knows that some of my posts are written knowing they will annoy him.   (Yes, my readership is so small, I can write posts with one person in mind!)

This latest one, on his reaction to Interstellar, seems designed to annoy:

Saw Interstellar on Sun – unapologetic celebration of exploration & progress, vs the ‘caretaker’ spirit of the new Green religion.

"New Green religion" - the line beloved of climate change denying, Andrew Bolt readers and Catallaxy??  Bah, humbug.

I note that one of the more improbable things that Phil Plait (I think) found about the movie was that NASA survives as some secret underground organisation capable of mounting interstellar exploration while the world crumbles around it in environmental catastrophe.

I would have thought that the long term interest in having a global economy strong enough to fund humanity eventually moving off planet actually points to serious action now to limit the potential effects of global warming by urgently reducing CO2.  This would help reduce the chance of environmental catastrophe that, unlike in Hollywood, I would not be surprised may prove dire enough economically to delay human expansion indefinitely.

But of course, I haven't seen the movie....

Update:   family friendly animation wins at the box office.  (And Nolan's movie opens worse than Inception.)  

Taking the Right personally

I like watching Kitchen Cabinet for the opportunity it gives to view politicians in what is meant to be a more relaxed atmosphere, talking to the very congenial Annabel Crabbe over a meal.

I know that people will say that it is simply a part of my complaint that the Right side of politics has been badly damaged here due to the poisonous influence to the ideologically motivated side of the American Right that has lost interest in both evidence based science and economics, but I have to say, I now find that nearly all Coalition politicians compare very poorly to Labor ones, even at a personality level.

Coalition politicians nearly always come across as being nervous ninnies.  Tony Abbott and his "ha...ha...ha;"  Christopher Pyne and his career mother Amanda Vanstone didn't impress me (even though Vanstone is from the moderate wing of the spectrum); and while Andrew Robb might be admired for his gumption despite suffering long term depression, he does appear to now be a permanently glum robot incapable of pleasure (perhaps?) because of medication, and I was dismayed to be reminded that it was a man suffering long term mental illness who roused himself out of his sick bed to convince his fellow politicians to dump support for an ETS, leading to the current hopeless Prime Minister we endure.   I don't remember much about Joe Hockey's episode, except that he was another male politician who has an almost child like inability to cook anything other than a steak.  Yet he has so comprehensively stuffed up the Budget, and come out as an obsessive about wind power to the extent that a wind mill on the horizon 15 km away upsets him, he's turned out to be a pretty comprehensive embarrassment to the party.

There are exceptions, I suppose:  I certainly don't consider Barnaby Joyce to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can see why people like him anyway.   Nigel Scullion from the Northern Territory also has a certain pleasant air of frankness about him.

But in comparison, I usually find myself pleasantly surprised by the relaxed air of intelligence of your average Labor politician on the show.

I know Bill Shorten was just a bit too lovely dovey on screen with his wife for comfort, but I still felt better about him after the show than before.  (I have always felt relatively neutral towards him.  I think it was painful watching him suffer by the way he was caught up in the Rudd/Gillard battles.)   I am strongly against lesbian couples using some donor semen to make their own baby, but again, after watching Penny Wong I found myself liking her a lot more than before.   Craig Emerson presented as living in extremely modest circumstances, and really, what was he thinking with his little song and dance routine while he was still in power?   Still, I found it hard not to warm more to him as a result of Annabel's show.

And let's broaden this out a bit:  in commentary terms, Andrew Bolt has evolved into a self satisfied ugly caricature of  moderate Right wing analysis with his self pity and obsession with race and portraying Islam in the worst possible light.  As for climate change - he is a complete gullible joke, of course, never showing a scintilla of skepticism towards anything he reads from Watts Up With That or Professors Jonova and  Monckton.  His disingenuous enthusiasm for endorsing all of the Michael Smith sliming of Gillard (while always adding the disclaimer that "Gillard denies ever having knowledge of the matters") was really appalling.

Tim Blair doesn't seem to realise that the "frightbat" thing just carried too much Young Liberal style undergraduate sexism to be funny, and while he doesn't put the same enthusiasm into climate change denial as does Bolt, his reading list on the topic is clearly limited to denial sites.  It's hard to stay enthusiastic for his brand of lightweight critique of the silly elements of Left wing culture and attitudes when he so proudly wears his intellectual laziness on the key environmental issue of our day on his sleeve.

They both like Mark Steyn, of course, who thinks he can call a scientist a fraud, despite no support amongst other scientist in the field for such a view, and then defend it as free speech, while using his corner of the climate change culture war to get more money from his deluded readers.   

And as for News Corp Right wing female commentators and their attitude towards "feminism" (Miranda Devine, Albrechtsen, Sloan) gee, its got pretty ugly when they spent all their time criticising Gillard for "playing the feminism card" instead of  noting the appalling treatment she got from Right wing broadcasters and the patronising and offensive lines Abbott used.  

So it's remarkable how unlikeable I find so many on the Right have become.   And while I have been saying for a long time that attitude to climate change seems to have become an incredibly good bellwether on political judgement generally, it seems to give a good indication of  unpleasant aspects of personality too.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, even on the Left.   Step up, K Rudd, and take a bow...

About those old temperatures

I meant to link last week to a good explanation at The Conversation about the problem with old Australian temperature records from before 1910.   There, done.

Phil says sorry

Interstellar follow-up: Movie science mistake was mine.

Phil Plait at Slate says he got some of his science critique of Interstellar wrong, and apologises.   He still thinks it was a crook movie, though.   

Review of a show I don't watch anymore

OK, so the post title is not quite right.   You see, after giving Dr Who a big miss this season (and even my 14 yr old son agreed after the season opener that it is now unwatchable) I did, out of idle curiosity,  happen to see most of the two part season end.  Promising premise - Steven Moffat deals with "heaven" and the afterlife.  The result:  the show is now just incredibly awful.   Not so awful that it is worth watching, like some shows are.  Just mind numbingly, self referentially, spectacularly poorly written and unengaging dross.

The number of people agreeing with me at the obsessive fanboy comments threads at The Guardian is on the rise, too, I reckon.

Surely its ratings must be suffering?  I think a strong case could be made out that thinking the show is still quality story telling is a sign of some form of brain damage.

The show badly needs to go away for 5 years or so.  And don't let Moffat anywhere near its return.

Ideological triumph? Yeah, sure...

I see that Sinclair Davidson goes with the "Americans finally coming to their senses" interpretation of the Republican wins, as he quotes an over the top column by bow tied cultural warrior Roger Kimball with evident approval:

Over the past six years, the American people have watched as Obama swept nearly 20 per cent of the nation’s economy under the arm of the federal government in the name of “reforming” healthcare. Obamacare, which passed into law without a single Republican vote, is the most unpopular piece of legislation since Prohibition. In a moment of quiet candour, candidate Obama noted that, under his plan, the price of energy would “necessarily skyrocket”, while the coal industry would be regulated out of existence. How’s that working out? About as well as things on our southern border. The United States already spends more on education per pupil than any other country, but we get far worse results because “investing in education” for Democrats means shovelling money into the troughs of teachers’ unions, diminishing parental authority and forcing a politically correct, multicultural agenda on schools.

The truth is that Obama is merely the latest spokesman for the Democrats’ agenda of dependency, the big-government, socialistically inclined welfare establishment that, since the 1960s, has colluded with public sector unions to substitute tax-funded entitlements for individual initiative and personal responsibility. More and more people have come to understand that the “fundamental transformation” that Obama promised was not the path to Shangri-La, but a new road to serfdom. At issue is the relationship between the individual and the coercive power of the state, economic freedom and, ultimately, our national security.

Never mind the fact that wins by the other side during Presidencies on the way out are not unusual, or that several commentators noted that quite a few Republicans were giving out a more moderate position, and I can find no one who claims that it is any sort of emphatic win for the Tea Party wing. 

Oddly enough, more reasonable commentary from a Right wing perspective can sometimes be found at American Conservative, which Jason Soon links to sometimes.  This article, for example:  Obama is a Republican made many valid points, including one about the nuttiness of the Republicans carrying on in such an ideological sense about "Obamacare" when it was modelled on what was formerly a Republican idea.

I see that there is also a very good cautionary post up at the site about why the Republican win means exactly not what Professor Stagflation thinks it does:

Here are six reasons for caution:

1. The president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections.
2. Obama’s approval, while low, is higher than Bush’s at the same point in his presidency.
3. We’ve seen this movie before. Remember the “permanent majority” of 2004? How about the “thumping” of 2006? Then there was the “new majority” of 2008. Of course, that was followed by the “Tea Party wave” of 2010. Which didn’t stop Obama from becoming the first president since Eisenhower to win a majority of the vote for a second time in 2012.
4. The midterm electorate skews older, whiter, and richer than in presidential years. These are Republican demographics, so Republicans tend to do better. The 2016 electorate, on the other hand, will probably look more like 2008 than 2010. Republicans probably won’t ever win many votes from blacks or single women, but they need to continue doing better among the young and Hispanics (as several candidates did last night).
5. The standard explanation of the results is that the election was a referendum on Obama’s policies. That’s not true for the simple reason that most voters have only the foggiest notion of what Obama’s policies are. (Polls on these matters can be misleading because they often ask respondents to choose from a predetermined set of responses to a leading question, which encourages unrepresentative, off-the-cuff answers.) Rather than voting on the success or failure of specific programs, many voters rely on a vague sense that things are going well or badly for the country.
6. The biggest factor in voters’ assessment of the direction of the country is the condition of the economy. Right now it’s pretty lousy, despite relatively favorable growth and employment trends. But if these trends continue over the next two years—and they’re far less dependent on Washington that either party likes to admit—they may start to pay off for ordinary people. Should that occur, many will discover that they liked Democrats more than they thought.

Krugman looks at the Republican win, and grinds his teeth

Triumph of the Wrong - NYTimes.com

Lots of good links in his column to back up his claims, too.

Animation wins

I see that Big Hero 6, the new Disney animated film with some Marvel roots, has scored a high 90% at Rottentomatoes, compared to 72% for Interstellar.   Certainly, the trailers for Big Hero indicated the film has considerable charm.  

Meanwhile on At the Movies, David loved Interstellar, Margaret didn't.   I never find myself agreeing consistently with either of them, so I don't know what that means.   Oh that's right - probably that I'll dislike it. 

I certainly hope that my prejudgement is irritating some reader out there.  :)

  

El nino confusion, again

I see that Eric Holthaus is waving the white flag about the prediction earlier this year that we were likely looking at a strong El Nino.   He now says it looks like we'll get a very weak one, if any.

Yet he notes that parts of the world's weather have been looking El Nino like for a while:

In essence, a gradually warming Pacific Ocean is at once be reducing our ability to predict Earth’s single most important seasonal climate phenomenon, and tampering with it as well. For forecasters, that means this year’s El Niño tease has been “rather frustrating.” It mirrors another flash-in-the-pan-and-fizzle just two years ago.

Still, that doesn’t mean El Niño-like changes haven’t happened. “Borderline” El Niño conditions, depending on your definition, have persisted for months now. El Niño-like effects have already been felt around the globe—including the ongoing mega-drought in Brazil, a lackluster monsoon season in India, a whimper of an Atlantic hurricane season, and the opposing tropical storm fest in Hawaii. Oh, and the world is also on track for its warmest year on record, boosted by near-El Niño.

There were studies (including a recent one) indicating that global warming may result in more, damaging, strong El Nino's.   (And this year's failure does nothing to disprove that.)  But a strong El Nino right now would have been a handy thing to help convince politicians in 2015 to start talking CO2 reduction seriously.   Once again Nature is not working to a convenient timetable for convincing stupid politicians.   I suggest throwing a few libertarians and at least a couple of News Corp columnists into a volcano to get things back on track again.

Phil didn't like Interstellar

Interstellar science review: The movie’s black holes, wormholes, relativity, and special effects.

The Slate main page headline for this Phil Plait article is actually worse:

Interstellar is a bad movie.  Its science is even worse.

Well, I think this is getting me all prepared to really dislike it. 

Update:  I wrote the post without reading the review, for fear of spoilers. Well, now that I have read it, I must say it is absolutely chock full of spoiler, and the odds of my disliking it on similar grounds to Plait appear astronomically high.  (Heh)

Ghosts in the news

So there's a lot of publicity in the news today about a pretty simple experimental set up which seems to give at least some (actually, I am not sure how many of the 12 subjects) the impression of having one or more invisible presences in the room.   Some subjects found it very disturbing.

It's sort of hard to believe that this set up had that strong an effect.   It's also hard to believe that it has much relevance to visual ghosts, although it is probably more relevant to the "third man" factor that is commonly reported by people who are in isolation, especially at times of crisis.

As for visual ghosts, there was an article in the New York Times about the suggestion that ghosts have changed from solid to semi transparent over history.  Here are some extracts:

We think of ghosts as wispy and translucent — a vaporous woman, perhaps, who floats down the stairs, her dress trailing in the languid air behind her. But in early modern Europe, ghosts were often perceived as solid persons. The viewer discovered that they weren’t when they did something that ordinary humans could not, like bypassing a locked door to enter a room.

By the 19th century, people had begun to think of ghosts predominantly as spectral forms — ephemeral, elusive, evanescent. When the ghost of Marley appeared to Scrooge in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), and Scrooge looked his transparent body “through and through,” he illustrated a shift in the ways ghosts became real to people, how ghosts were seen and remembered.

In “Spectres of the Self,” the cultural historian Shane McCorristine points to two reasons for this transmutation. The first was skepticism about the supernatural, generated by the new developments in science. The concept of hallucination emerged to explain experiences like seeing an apparition. As the seeing of ghosts became a psychological phenomenon, it also became a pathological one. In 1848, the British skeptic Charles Ollier spoke for many when he wrote that “anyone who thinks he has seen a ghost, may take the vision as a symptom that his bodily health is deranged.” As a result, Dr. McCorristine writes, the ghost was gradually relocated “from the external, objective and theological structured world to the internal, subjective and psychological haunted world of personal experience.”

That's interesting, except that I thought that when the Society for Psychical Research did an extensive survey of ghost experiences back in the 1880s, one of the surprise findings was that ghosts often did appear solid.  (Especially, if I recall correctly, the "crisis apparition"  style of incident, where someone who had died miles away makes an unexpected appearance before loved ones or others at about the time of death.)

I'd certainly be checking the floorboards for weight bearing ability...

So Brisbane seems popular as a home for overweight mining billionaires?   OK, well we will have two now, it seems, at least, with a big splurge of publicity given to Gina Rinehart buying these fancy digs:

and The Australian writing:

GINA Rinehart has wasted no time making her new multi-­million dollar Brisbane house her home, applying to renovate the riverside property with more ­verandas and a lift.

To be honest, if I were a billionaire with vast coal interests, I'm not at all sure that I would be pleased with the media publicity about the location of my new mansion just before an event well known for its street demonstrations against capitalism.   I don't think she's living there, yet, though. 

The ridiculous Republicans

They weren't always the party of science nonsense, but they are now.  Talking about climate change, and the recent IPCC report:

So, if there’s one issue that should not be a partisan issue, this is it. After all, we’re talking about saving the planet. Surely Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on that. John McCain and Barack Obama did in 2008. But, sadly, that’s not the case today. Congress remains hopelessly deadlocked on climate change because Republicans, for whatever strange reason — be it ignorance or campaign contributions — either deny it’s happening, deny human activity is responsible or deny it’s serious enough to worry about.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, in fact, stirred up a little trouble back in May when he asserted there was “virtually no Republican” in Washington who accepted the science about climate change. As it turns out, he was right on target. Politifact tested his claim and rated it “Mostly True.” Out of 278 Republicans currently in Congress, they found only eight — or 3 percent — who believe in climate change. For the record, they are Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mark Kirk (Ill.), John Thune (S.D.) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Reps. Chris Smith (N.J.), Michael Grimm (N.Y.) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (N.J.). 

Sadly, the other 270 Republicans follow the lead of know-nothing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who denies any link between human activity and climate change. On May 11, Rubio told ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

The extraordinary pizza price of England

The preferred weekend takeaway evening meal for our family for the last year or so has been Domino's pizza.   They've improved their product and gone somewhat upmarket with the range of toppings, and although they are starting to share the McDonalds annoying habit of changing the menu a bit too often, they are usually of remarkably good value.  Last Sunday, for example, we had two of the rectangular "Chef's Best" ( I can recommend the chilli lime pulled pork) and one simple pepperoni.   Total cost, from memory, with an on line deal, was about $22 - $24.  There are always on line deals.

But the basic menu price ranges from $4.95 (value pizza) to $7.95 (value plus) to $11.95 (traditional pizza) to $10.95 (chef's best) and top of the range are those with prawns for $14.95.

Last night, I was talking to a friend who has moved to England, and somehow the topic of pizza cost came up.   Extraordinarily, these are examples of the cost of Domino's in that country:

The cheapest, with nothing on it bar cheese and sauce - is £13.50!!   A Hawaiian is £17!!!!   That's $31.70 in Australian!!!!! - for a Hawaiian pizza!!!!!!!.

I remember thinking back in about 1989 that the cost of pizza in London in £ was about the same as the price in AUD, and how expensive that was.  If anything, the British pizza price has worsened.

What is wrong with that country?

Update:   petrol I see is currently 125p per litre.    That's $2.27.   Australians freak out if petrol breaks over the $1.60 mark. 

So what about salaries?   Let's pick something easy to compare - a new teacher outside of London can expect to earn £22,000 as a minimum.   $40,000 here, roughly.   Looks like our starting salary is the same.

It's just a jump to the left...?

I think I have seen headlines around the net to similar effect:  the claim that that the Republicans succeeded in this mid term election by playing up to "lefty" issues.   William Salatan writes:

Republicans won big in the 2014 elections. They captured the Senate and gained seats in the House. But they didn’t do it by running to the right. They did it, to a surprising extent, by embracing ideas and standards that came from the left. I’m not talking about gay marriage, on which Republicans have caved, or birth control, on which they’ve made over-the-counter access a national talking point. I’m talking about the core of the liberal agenda: economic equality.

I'm not sure that how correct this is, but as I wrote earlier today, I certainly didn't have the impression that it was Tea Party ascendancy that had helped the Republicans this election.   Which means a particularly interesting time for fights within the GOP as to how far they use their congressional control.

And to be snide for a moment:  it's many a year since I can remember a less physically impressive politician than the turtle-like Mitch McConnell.

Update:  Someone in The Atlantic agrees with Salatan, so it must be right:

This year has been different: GOP activists have given their candidates more space to craft the centrist personas they need to win. First, in senate races in North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alaska, Tennessee, Georgia, Kansas and Texas, comparatively moderate Republicans triumphed over Tea Party-backed challengers. Then many of those Republicans downplayed their opposition to gay marriage and highlighted their support for greater access to contraception in an effort to win over the young and women voters who in past elections spurned the GOP as too extreme. “On social issues,” wrote Slate’s Will Saletan, “Republicans are mumbling, cringing, and ducking. They don’t want the election to be about these issues, even in red states.”