Ticks and a terrible allergy

I was catching up on some episodes of Catalyst last night, and came across the fascinating, if worrying, story of how it has recently been discovered that tick bits (on humans) can lead them to developing an allergy to red, mammalian meats.   What an incredibly annoying allergy that would be to develop! 

The story sounds so improbable, I wondered for a moment whether it was an April Fools show.

But now that I Google it, I see the topic got some publicity in 2013, but I had missed it back then.  Here's a medical journal article about it.

The show also displayed the new recommendation for how to remove a tick - by freezing it with one of the few skin freezing products you can now apparently get from the pharmacy.

This was therefore a really significant show.   (And, I note, that there is no equivalent of any type on commercial networks.)

Unexpected consequences

Drought-Stricken Sao Paulo Battles Dengue Fever Outbreak - WSJ

It turns out that restricting the water supply to a city in drought causes people to store it in in buckets and containers that then breed mosquitoes that spread a disease that is more common when it is wet.

An immature and churlish government

1.  Abbott must stop sacking Labor appointees | The Australian


2.   The Coalition is refusing to guarantee funding to scientific research in Australia, threatening over 1,700 jobs and 27 research facilities.

If you ask me...

...there is actually too little public interest in what the bright spots on Ceres are.

The thing that seems most peculiar to me is that there brightness seems to persist as the asteroid rotates in a way that doesn't look quite like a simple reflection from a flat bright spot.  (OK, it's a video from a nutty UFO source,  but I think its a genuine close up.)

And:  here is one of the "possible" explanations as listed on Cnet:

 6. Aliens' solar concentrators. In a 2008 TED talk, physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson suggested that the dwarf planets of the outer solar system, near Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, would be a good place to look for life. Dyson thought that although finding it might be unlikely, it might not be that hard to search if we simply looked for the reflection of the mirrors and lenses that any life forms would surely need to concentrate sunlight to survive on places like Europa and beyond. It sounds far out, but could it be that we've just found some ancient, abandoned solar concentrators even closer to home than Dyson imagined?

Weird experiences noted

When Things Happen That You Can’t Explain - NYTimes.com

Another big problem with smoking

Smokers responsible for increase in Adelaide house fires 

Wow.  The figures are really surprising:

An alarming rate of house fires linked to cigarettes in South Australia has prompted the Metropolitan Fire Service (MFS) to issue a public warning to smokers.

Since January 1 there have been 47 house fires linked to cigarettes and smoking with firefighters responding to about 160 cigarette-related fires each year.

Commander of community safety and resilience with the MFS, Greg Howard, said he
was concerned by the spike in such fires so far this year.

"If we keep going at this rate we're going to pass our annual level of house
fires caused by cigarettes by the middle of the year," Mr Howard said.

A misleading headline

No link found between psychedelics and psychosis 

Read the article and my point should be clear.   I would have thought the sub-editors for Nature would be more careful with such stuff.

The article notes a condition I had not heard of:

“This study assures us that there were not widespread ‘acid casualties’ in the 1960s,” says Charles Grob, a paediatric psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has long has advocated the therapeutic use of psychedelics, such as administering psilocybin to
treat anxiety in terminal-stage cancer⁴.

But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.

For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.

Krebs and Johansen, however, point to studies that have found symptoms of HPPD in people who have never used psychedelics⁵.

 

No, I would not watch

Gogglebox Australia: Here's what it is and why you would watch

I guess I have seen bits of Gogglebox for a total of aobut 30 minutes now.   I think it is an awful in concept and execution. 

That is all.

Does anonymous, informal, suicide counselling work?

Reddit and suicide intervention: How social media is changing the cry for help, and the answer.

Quite a detailed, interesting, article here on informal suicide quasi-counselling on Reddit and other on line forums.   I also learnt about one strange corner of the net that's new to me:

A couple of years ago, a mini-controversy erupted on Wizardchan, an online forum for reclusive male virgins. The site’s name is borrowed from a viral joke—the punch line is that when a man reaches age 30 without having sex, he’ll acquire magic powers—but the premise has amassed a base of sincerely dedicated users who go to the forum to comment on boards dedicated to hobbies, random thoughts, anime, and depression. After seeing that some posters in the depression board were discussing suicide plans and
self-harm, an administrator pinned a crisis hotline number to the board, encouraging users to pick up the phone if they were truly at risk.

Wizards were offended at the suggestion. This was a bunch of guys who had built a community around their own outsider status, and now some authority figure was stepping in to tell them that they had problems that needed to be fixed in the most conventional way possible: by calling a 1-800 number. The number was eventually removed from the board, and when one user recently suggested that Wizardchan bring it
back, another explained, “I think most people here are over normie advice, talking to some random guy who doesn’t understand where you’re coming from on the phone isn’t going to help them.” Another user said that hotline workers are just “not trained to handle the problems we face as [wizards]. It’s kind of sad how society treats us.”

More on the divided United States

U.S. runs hot and cold in record-shattering February - The Washington Post

I've been reading that the early indications are that February will be a globally warm month.

And, again, the reason the record cold in one half of the US does not contradict that is shown in this example of February temperature anomalies:

A shower time observation

I don't really get to see that many movies lately - and by "lately" I mean over the decade or so that usb memory sticks have become ubiquitous. 

Of all modern tech stuff, they remain one of my favourite.  Barely a dollar a gigabyte now, I'm just intrinsically impressed by their capacity, and continually marvel at the virtual library of information (or portable programs) that can, in theory, be carried around on a key ring.  I'm always tempted to buy a spare one or two when I see them on special at Harvey Norman or Dick Smith.

Yet for all of that, I would have thought that information stored on one would have turned up as a plot point in some spy or suspense movie or other.  Perhaps one could be swallowed to be smuggled out of a country.   Some important plot McGuffin could surely be built around what's on one of them.   Yet I do not recall a usb stick ever featuring in an important roll in a movie.  

Of course, it may be that I have just missed a movie where one featured.  So I would like to know if that is the case.  Or should I be writing the first movie starring one?  Perhaps the humans could be incidental to the plot.

Knox Grammar: the finest molestation money can buy

OK, this is one of those matters which is so gobsmacking it's practically laughable - more as  reaction of surprise than it actually containing humour, which it doesn't.   It's probably not even safe to admit to a tiny sense of Schnadenfreude, at least with respect to the super-rich fathers who sent their sons there just because their father, and his father before him, all boarded at Knox, and it doesn't really matter how the kid does academically, but the old boy network will see him into a good job.  No, not safe, and not very fair to the kid or even the father, really, but still.  No.  (In fact I should really change that title.)

Let's just go back to the original point:  the evidence of how they used to treat allegations of sexual interference with the boys at the elite Knox Grammar School in Sydney is pretty incredible.

The inquiry heard that a student came to Paterson in the late 1980s to complain a teacher, Damian Vance, had touched him inappropriately and asked him to engage in mutual masturbation. Paterson told the boy to go to the library and “think about what he was alleging”, he told the inquiry.

“He was a drama boy,” Paterson said as explanation for why he did not immediately believe the boy.

Paterson said he eventually believed him and counselled Vance but said he did not report it to police. “I was not aware it was a crime,” he said.

Paterson gave Vance a reference when he left Knox but said it had a code in it that signalled there was “more to say” on Vance because Paterson had written at the end he was happy to be contacted to discuss the reference further.

Paterson said it had not occurred to him the reference would be used by Vance to get another job as a teacher.

 Wow.   Then there is the next bit:

He also conceded he took more seriously allegations another teacher was giving senior boys alcohol and cigarettes than allegations he was molesting boys. He said he had since undergone a cultural change since the 1980s and now recognised the seriousness of child abuse allegations.

And another reference given to a man with serious, serious issues:

Chris Fotis was the teacher suspected of the groping and he was eventually dismissed after being caught masturbating in a car outside the school.

Paterson also wrote Fotis a positive reference when he left the school saying he was “enthusiastic for his job” and “meticulous in the standards he requires from students”.
He conceded the reference was “grossly inappropriate”.

Amazing.

I see that journalist and chronic bandana wearer Peter FitzSimons boarded at the school in the 1970s (and sent his sons there too - wait while I roll my eyes) and is rather incredulous as what is coming out of the inquiry too. 

It puts me in mind of the section of Evelyn Waugh's account of his early teaching career, and how an openly pederast teacher could move around, even getting better and better jobs - when he wasn't having to suddenly leave them in a hurry.   (You can read about it in this rather interesting account of visiting the former school where Waugh briefly taught.)

The difference is, Waugh was talking about the 1920's; this was going on at Knox in the late 1980's.

A plausible argument

Climate change implicated in current Syrian conflict : Nature News & Comment

The drought that ravaged Syria from 2007 to 2010 was the worst in that nation’s recorded history, devastating agriculture in the region. Roughly 1.5 million people fled rural areas for urban outskirts where, in March 2011, social unrest boiled over into civil uprising.

Now, researchers say that global warming helped to cause that drought — and,
by extension, helped to exacerbate the conflict, now a full-blown civil war, between armed insurgents and the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The study, published on 2 March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹,
documents a century-long trend of increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall in the region. Because the observed trend could be reproduced only when climate models took manmade greenhouse-gas emissions into account, the study’s authors conclude that global warming helped to drive the recent drought.

Sounds more plausible than the mere headline suggests, no?   (In an Australian context, it's hard to come to grips with the numbers involved in some of these drought/refugee situations around the world.  It's like the entire population of Brisbane and the Gold Coast relocating to Sydney - so hard to imagine.)

I'll also take this as support for my line that economists have no hope of working out the true economic effect of climate change in 80 years' time.

 

Even more Mars deep skepticism

Cosmic cabin fever: Getting to Mars isn’t the hard part — it’s living there | National Post

Although I mainly know of National Post for its hosting climate change fake skepticism, this article about the psychological problems that have been found on long space missions is quite good.  For example:

In space flight studies, the worst manifestation of this is known as
“third-quarter syndrome,” for its typically late onset in a mission. It
was shown for example, in the Mars500 crew who emerged in November 2011
after 17 months in an isolation pod in Moscow, with ailments that
included severe insomnia.

“I’ve lived it, and I can describe it,” said Pascal Lee, a planetary
scientist and co-founder and chairman of the Mars Institute, who has
done 30 expeditions to polar regions, including as director of the
Haughton-Mars Project in the Canadian High Arctic. Priorities shift once
you get past the climax of a mission. “You get tired of holding back.
You get tired of accommodating other people’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.
… It’s psychological erosion.”

Missions to the International Space Station have typically lasted six
months or so, and psychological research has shown, over time, negative
feelings get displaced onto mission control, breeding resentment.
People get irritable; they make more mistakes. They get cabin fever on a
cosmic scale. One study documented “psychological closing” among
astronauts, who picked favourites among mission controllers and
perceived others as opponents.

More Mars deep skepticism

Mars Missions Are A Scam - BuzzFeed News

I have argued for years that the priority for off planet colonisation should be establishing the true extent of ice water on the Moon, and figuring if you make that work.

Emulsified

Widely used food additive promotes colitis, obesity and metabolic syndrome, research shows

Hmmm. A mouse study testing a couple of widely used emulsifiers in processed food suggests that they make changes in the gut microbiota which are not good for us.

Most interesting comment in the report:

While detailed mechanisms underlying the effect of emulsifiers on metabolism remain under study, the team points out that avoiding excess food consumption is of paramount importance.

"We do not disagree with the commonly held assumption that over-eating is a central cause of obesity and metabolic syndrome," Gewirtz says. "Rather, our findings reinforce the concept suggested by earlier work that low-grade inflammation resulting from an altered
microbiota can be an underlying cause of excess eating."

Storms noted

I don't know what an average summer there is like, as it is one Australian city I have never lived in for any length of time, but it really seems Sydney has had an unusually large number of big storms this summer. 

Brisbane, on the other hand, has been hot but seems to have had fewer storms than average.  (Although the billion dollar hail storm was a big one.)

Cold beer

BBC News - Why Iceland banned beer

Here's quite a long article on Iceland's odd history of alcohol control, including full strength beer being banned for most of the 20th century.

For amusement, here are some more peculiar drinks from the island:

• Brennivin - a clear schnapps, made from fermented grain or potato mash and flavoured with caraway; also known as Black Death, which one Icelandic blogger
  says "explains a lot". She continues: "Many Icelanders never touch it,
  and a majority of the ones who drink it only do so when feeling
  patriotic, such as... when trying to impress foreign visitors."
• Whale beer - the Icelandic micro-brewery
  Stedji has produced a number of ales flavoured with different parts of
  whale, including Hvalur 2, a brew infused with dried whale testicles; Stedji's beer has proved popular in Iceland, although the company has been criticised by conservationists

Mixed emotions

Well we seem to be in one of those anomalous polling periods.   A couple of polls have indicated something of a move in voting intention back towards the Coalition, even taking into account the spectacularly ugly attacks on Gillian Triggs last week.   Just as with Kevin Rudd's popularity, there is sometimes no accounting for what is going on in the mind of the swinging voter.  (Is it tough talk on security, or the abandonment of a couple of budget measures that is doing the trick?  Some even suggest people are already factoring in a new leader, given that Abbott still has such a low approval rating, and they don't expect him to last to the next election.  Who knows...)

One thing I feel certain about, though - those who already disliked Abbott before the last fortnight have had the intensity of their feeling against him greatly enhanced last week.  I mean, probably half of his backbench feel that way too.

I presume this deflates the rebels in his own party who want him replaced.  Which, for those who want to see the entire party lose next election, is almost certainly a good thing.   Still, he does deserve to be turfed out after an embarrassingly short run - he really does...

Update:  I forgot to mention Chris Uhlmann's comment on  Insiders yesterday that Four Corners are doing a story around Parliament House, with rumours that they have documents that will be very embarrassing for Abbott regarding a deal to buy Japanese submarines.   Hope it's true...

When libertarian idealism hits reality

Krugman recommended this article about how Silk Road began with libertarian inspiration but imploded.  Here's the key paragraph that sums up what it's about:

Ulbricht built the Silk Road marketplace from nothing, pursuing both a political dream and his own self-interest. However, in making a market he found himself building a micro-state, with increasing levels of bureaucracy and rule‑enforcement and, eventually, the threat of violence against the most dangerous rule‑breakers. Trying to build Galt’s Gulch, he ended up reconstructing Hobbes’s Leviathan; he became the very thing he was trying to escape. But this should not have been a surprise.

It's a good read.