Gene fiddling caution

Scientists sound alarm over DNA editing of human embryos : Nature News & Comment

Note that the gene editing is said to be of benefit for preventing inherited diseases.

As with "three parent babies" - the obvious advice "just don't have your own baby" to people with clear inheritable, serious diseases just seems too hard in this age of entitlement.

The poor and their values

When Values Disappear - NYTimes.com

This short Krugman column leads to an interesting argument about the relationship between poverty and values.

If you want a dose of "brony" weirdness for today...

What a masculinity conference taught me about the state of men | Life and style | The Guardian

(Actually, there are some comments which make some decent points - and many that don't.  One that I agree with:  "Is the hairstyle affected by the author an attempt to be more like a My Little Pony?" Ha.)

A sign of things to come?

I have mentioned a few times how this summer seemed to involve relatively few storms in Brisbane (but more in Sydney - although that is just my impression.)   It turns out that the Brisbane weather may be an example of future weather under climate change:

In summer, however, the analysis of observational data coming from weather stations and satellites reveals a clear decrease in the average storm activity. This means a reduction in either frequency or intensity, or of both. The scientists studied a specific type of turbulences known as synoptic eddies, and calculated the total energy of their wind speeds. This energy, which is a measure for the interplay between intensity and frequency of high and low pressure systems in the atmosphere, dropped by roughly one tenth since 1979.

"Unabated climate change will probably further weaken summer circulation patterns which could thus aggravate the risk of heat waves," says co-author Jascha Lehmann "Remarkably, climate simulations for the next decades, the CMIP5, show the same link that we found in observations. So the warm temperature extremes we've experienced in recent years might be just a beginning."

One for the libertarian reader

It seems to me that Jason Soon has taken an unfortunate turn into increased enthusiasm for libertarianism, and it has been noted before that he and other libertarian inclined people have a bit of a "thing" for Victorian England as an example of a society where matters such as drug use and prostitution were sort of self regulated and every one (at least with money) had a jolly old time and society trundled on and inventors invented and everything worked out for the best.

Well, this review of a book about the invention of the modern police force puts a bit of a different light on that - in particular, with the way some were using (for about 70 years before they lost!) a libertarian argument against even having a professional police force:

Despite this collection’s title, the earliest extracts were written in the 1750s, and highlight the theoretical positions that would underpin the decades-long debate about whether a paid, uniformed, hierarchical body of men should be created to replace the local, unpaid constables responsible for keeping order in public spaces and bringing criminals to justice. Henry Fielding’s Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) is accepted as the first noteworthy plea for the methodical prevention of crime, rather than solely an improvement in the arrest and punishment of criminals after the fact. Fielding envisaged a new body of crime-fighters as just one element in a new moral order in which the poor would be prevented from turning to vice and crime in the first place. He advised severe curbs on places of entertainment, on the selling of alcohol, on gambling and any aspect of modern life that would tempt the weak-willed into becoming “vicious”. An instant refutation, by the journalist Richard Rolt, pointed out that top-down attempts to “moralize” the lower orders would undermine their liberty and sense of independence. A nation of cringing, hypocritical slaves would emerge, Rolt wrote; better to allow the poor to exercise their own moral choices and accept whatever punishments might follow their wrong decisions.

Later eighteenth-century “moral reformists” wished the poor to be able to benefit from the order and stability that a professionalized police force would foster. Writing in 1780, the philanthropist Jonas Hanway pointed out that not having an effective police was “enslaving” British men and women – who were prey to villains of various kinds and were the most vulnerable part of the population whenever serious civil disorder took place. A body of paid and trained “civil soldiers” – men drawn from the citizenry, not from the Army – would protect against the “atrocious violence” visited on people during criminal acts or breakdowns in order. Such an organization would obviate the need for the local militia or the standing Army to be called in during unrest. Or, as the Solicitor-General put it in 1785: “To keep the bayonet out of employ, the power of the civil officer must be rendered efficacious”.

 Sir Robert Peel would reuse the slavery/liberty arguments during the passage of his 1829 Act; and as his Bill passed, the journalist Albany Fontblanque, a supporter of Peel’s legislation, wrote of “the liberty we have hitherto enjoyed of being robbed and knocked on the head at the discretion of their honours, the thieves”. Legislation similar to Peel’s had failed in 1785 because of outrage at the attempt to centralize London’s policing – wresting control away from the parishes, and especially from the City of London, and handing it to government. Peel cleverly left the City out of his 1829 draft Bill, circumventing that particular vested interest; and he overcame the fears that the new force was to be a militarized body imposed from above by insisting that the Metropolitan Police would bear firearms only in exceptional circumstances and would wear uniform that was as close to civilian clothing as possible. Nevertheless, “Peel’s Private Army” was one of the many slang names Londoners gave to the new force, while the Weekly Despatch newspaper routinely referred to them as “police soldiers”.

 Well, the libertarians of 1750 to 1820 look rather like gooses now, don't they?   Just like Leyonhjelm.  (Although, the article does go on to give examples of some excessive powers of Victorian police, I must admit.)

Update:   when you look at things like this list of English legislation brought in during the Victorian era, it seems to me that the period is actually a good argument for sensible government regulation and intervention in matters relating to labour, public health and eduction, as against the libertarian inclination to be against regulation.  With few exceptions, the period serves as an example of the inadequacy and failure of libertarian philosophy to improve society, doesn't it?

Update 2:  this website appears to have reliable, and rather fascinating, information regarding the English criminal justice system  in the 18th century, including its gradual transition into something more recognisable as modern.  The section regarding the push for professional, government controlled, policing is here:

Policing, such as it was, was rather inefficient in this new urban context. The old system was a mixture of Night Watchmen and 'Thief takers' who were private individuals employed by the wealthy and by magistrates. The system was certainly vulnerable to corruption: thief takers on occasion entered into alliances with thieves to share rewards for the return of stolen property (one is reminded of the old saying: 'set a thief to catch a thief') The bad reputation thief takers is in no small measure due to the exploits of the notorious Jonathan Wild who styled himself as  'Thief Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland'. He was exposed in 1725 as a leading reciever of stolen goods. 
 
The wealthy themselves were frequently reluctant to be magistrates in urban areas. Many lower middle class magistrates, during the latter part of the century, accepted payment for executing warrants for the arrest of offenders. The quality of these 'trading justices' was regarded as low and the Conservative writer Edmund Burke denounced them as 'scum of the earth'  It is as well to remember, however, that payment for services can be seen as a continuation the older tradition in which personal relations predominated over any notion of the impartial application of law.

There was much talk in the latter part of the century about the establishment of a New Police at the turn of the century Robert Peel who became Tory Prime Minister made several attempts in parliament to set up a professional full time police force. He was thwarted (until he finally suceeded in 1829) by country landowners, still powerful in parliament before 1832. 

Their resistance was quite rational. As we have already seen, their control over the local criminal justice system enhanced their rule and status. If it came to tracking offenders then they had plenty of gamekeepers and retainers at their disposal. The traditional fear of the French model of a powerful centralised national police was anathema to the English gentry and their notion of liberty. But the urban middle and lower middle classes had quite a different problem of security. As Philips comments

"The squirearchy might treasure the discretion which the old system allowed them, to choose among a variety of punishments ranging from an informal reprimand to death; but the urban shopkeeper wanted something which would efficiently protect his commercial property." (Philips 1980: 126) 

In the early years of the nineteenth century it was the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the growing fear of the urban masses becoming revolutionary which finally tipped the balance in Peel's favour. But at that point the issue was public order and rebellion rather than tracking down criminal offenders. Indeed during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in 1780 a mob had taken over the centre of London for 5 successive days. This concentrated the minds of those who resisted the idea of a new police, again not so much from the perspective of effective thieftaking but the more general issue of public order. We shall discuss this in a future lecture.

 As for the attempt to crack down on crime by making hanging the punishment for all sorts of things, the section begins:

 As theft was becoming more of an issue as we have described above, so the authorities did the only thing they knew and intensified the penalties. It would be some time before it was generally understood that the best way to deal with crime is to increase the certainty of detection rather than simply impose more severe penalties. The ruling elites hung on to the law and the gallows as the main mechanism of rule at their disposal. The expansion of crimes which carry capital punishment (the death penalty) is a major feature of the period. Not only murderers but thieves, rapists, forgers, were hung. In 1688 there were 50 offences which carried the death penalty. This is amazing by modern standards when even murder gets only imprisonment, but by 1800 there were 200 offences punishable by hanging. The eighteenth century was thus a period of expanding use of capital punishment. People were being hung for all manner of petty crimes. Some court records show that during the two years 1774-6  people were hung for arson, cattle stealing, 'destroying silk on a loom', 'wilfully wounding a horse', sheep stealing, swearing false oathes, 'impersonating another to receive a seaman's wage', and similar.

Vindication 20 years later

How the “Disney Renaissance” marked a turning point in the animated movie musical, from Little Mermaid to Frozen.

Well, if only this video had been on the (then non-existent*) internet in 1994.  Because I do remember at a quasi-date dinner being undertaken in about that year that I was telling a woman that it seemed to me the Disney animated musicals were really replacing (if in somewhat shorter form) the Broadway musicals of the 50's and 60's, and she rather poo-poohed the suggestion.

Mind you, as a single man talking to a woman I had just met about anything to do with Broadway musicals was probably not sending exactly the right message, if you know what I mean.   Oh well:  as the link explains, I was exactly right.  (And I still say Frozen is one of the crappiest Disney musicals around.)

* there is no surer way of feeling old than to realise - "oh, that's right, that was pre-internet."
 

Four year anniversary remembered

250,000 Japanese still displaced 4 years after quake

Monsters Inc

The House That Stalin Built | The National Interest

Here's a very favourable review of (yet another) biography of Stalin.  A sample:

Stalin, whose party nickname was Koba, succeeded, against incalculable
odds, in helping to create a Bolshevik dictatorship in the world’s
largest country; through adroit maneuvering, he positioned himself in
absolute control of that dictatorship. The result, however, bore no
resemblance to the proletarian utopia predicted by Karl Marx. In fact,
the Bolsheviks were turning Marxism on its head by launching a
revolution in Russia. Marx always thought that the revolution would come
in Western Europe. The notion that a Communist revolution would emerge
in Russia, where there was no real proletariat, would have dumbfounded
him. According to Kotkin, the Russian empire’s dissolution in wartime
meant that “the revolution’s survival was suddenly inextricably linked
to the circumstance that vast stretches of Russian Eurasia had little or
no proletariat.” The regime scrambled to come up with a theory
justifying tactical alliances with local “‘bourgeois’ nationalists,” a
term that had as much bearing on reality as did the later employment of
“kulak,” which implied that any peasant who owned a cow or two was
somehow part of the exploitative class. 

 I've never read a book about Stalin, and this one sounds quite good.  (It is further described in the review as "uncommonly entertaining".)

I am currently reading a (not very big) book on Hitler, concentrating on his life up to the time he was diagnosed with hysterical blindness after being in a gas attack in World War 1.   (I knew he had been in a battlefield gas attack, and that this was believed to be why he would not countenance use of such weapons in World War 2, but had not  known he had psychological blindness as a result.)   The book's argument is that the doctor who treated him for his blindness really set Hitler off psychologically on his future path, but I haven't got to that part yet.

There are many other things I hadn't realised before - that he was very likely the result of an incestuous marriage; how long he had tried to make it as an artist, and that his school teachers found him irksome as well.  He was very depressed after his Mum died. 

Certainly, he was an oddball from a very early age. 

Update:  here is an interesting extract from an earlier review of Kotkin's bio of Stalin:

One might disagree, however, with Kotkin's assumption that Stalin's paranoid, vindictive nature was a product of, not a motive for, the pursuit of power and that it was slow to develop. Stalin's youthful sexual liaisons may have been normal ('Stalin had a penis, and he used it,' Kotkin remarks), but his impregnation of the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Siberian orphan Lidia Pereprygina was, even by the standards of the most unbourgeois Bolshevik, the kind of behaviour to be condoned only in a male stoat. Kotkin omits many of the acts of the young Stalin that mark him as a creature of exceptional turpitude among the thugs, bandits, fanatics and misguided adolescents of the Transcaucasian Social Democratic Party. For example, when General Griaznov was assassinated in Tbilisi in 1906 and a bystander, Joiashvili, was arrested, Stalin composed an incriminating pamphlet to ensure that Joiashvili and not the real assassin was hanged (Stalin admitted this with pride in the 1920s). Likewise, he tried to have fellow party members executed on false accusations of treachery. The best evidence for any semblance of humanity in the young Stalin is not in Kotkin's narrative but in the pictures. The photograph of a dishevelled Stalin standing with his mother and his in-laws by the open coffin in which his first wife lies is the sole picture of Stalin showing anything like remorse, sorrow and embarrassment. Kotkin might also have cited some of the postcards Stalin sent back to Georgia from London, in which he appears as just a laddish adventurer out to have a good time, hoping not to shock his new bride.

Stalin's childhood injuries and illnesses are well catalogued by Kotkin, but he does not pursue them as a possible source of Stalin's sadism (as some have done, on the Dostoevskian principle that the primary desire of a man suffering from toothache is that everyone should share his agony). Medical historians conclude that Stalin was in more or less acute muscular, neurological and dental pain all his adult life. His pain threshold was high - as is testified by his endurance of extensive root canal treatment from the bravest man in his circle, the dentist Yakov Shapiro. But Stalin's brutality towards the medical profession, hitherto sacred to all Russian authorities, hints at the frustrations of a man in unremitting pain. (Kotkin does not mention the first murder of a doctor attributed to Stalin: the death in 1927 of Dr Bekhterev, two days after he remarked that he had just examined 'a paranoiac with a withered arm'.)

 Hmmm.  It looks like my idea for history changing time travelling doctors (see previous posts referring to Hitler needing a fecal infusion to make him a nicer person) has to include a couple of good dentists to deal with Stalin.   

Not sure what this proves...

Jason Soon yesterday tweeted with approval this article by the Grattan Institute arguing in favour of electricity network privatisation.   You know the story - private companies can run networks cheaper instead of the unionised government networks.

Yet one of the key tables in the article is this:

But surely this chart is hardly conclusive of the privatisation argument if the comparison is between government owned network Queensland and privately owned network Victoria.

Given the geography and population spread of Queensland, wouldn't you expect network costs to be substantially more expensive?   Yet they are clearly less than double, and the total cost of electricity is virtually identical.  

OK, people can point to the New South Wales vs Victoria columns (and I admit, it's hard to understand why the NSW network costs should be so much larger than Queensland;)  but the point remains - it seems to me the charts show that public ownership is capable of maintaining reasonable network costs and the same electricity costs to consumers.  

Update:  I see that The Australian is even worse - it runs a "fact check" that privatisation is definitely better for electricity prices - but when you click through to the graphs some of them actually show Queensland with smaller electricity costs than Victoria!

The comparisons they rely on most heavily are always about the rate of price increases over the years, including to the network costs, while conveniently ignoring where we are now at with actual prices to the consumer.  

Update 2:  After listening to John Quiggin on the radio this morning:  I should have also mentioned that South Australia did undergo a type of privatisation, yet has very high network costs for a very small and concentrated population, and substantially higher consumer prices.   How is this supposed to support the privatisation case?

Easily conned companies

I have never heard of this woman before, but given the contents of this report, I would be surprised if she turned out not to be an extraordinary fraud.

But what surprises me even more is that someone like her can get a publishing deal and (by the sounds of) a sweet deal with Apple, and those companies do not ask for the most basic of verifications that her claims are true. 

Well, I guess with Apple, Steve Jobs went all "alternative" on his cancer treatment, and fat lot of good it did him.  Maybe it's just in the company's genes, so to speak, to be gullible on matters relating to that illness.

Having second thoughts, Joe?

Hockey trial: 'I don't instruct or control' the North Sydney Forum

Somehow [he says with what he hopes readers will detect as understatement] I don't think the Hockey evidence is going all that well for him at his defamation trial.

Update:  has this been done before?  (I did see one with "Joke", but I thought this was more appropriate):

Now, the Hockey family seem such sensitive souls, I wonder if I should feel guilty about this?   But really, the guy lives in a $6 million Sydney mansion and has several other bits of real estate around the place, and a wife who is a good earner in her own right.    Why shouldn't he be ridiculed into what I would consider a happy, early retirement?   

The (uncertain) psychology of becoming a jihadist

ISIS and the Foreign-Fighter Phenomenon — The Atlantic

Here's a rather interesting article on the psychology of the foreign fighters joining ISIS.

I guess the situation is not entirely new - extreme ideologies have long attracted the unhappy outsider who desires a sense of belonging - but as with climate change denialism, I think it is a bit overlooked that the rapid promulgation (and continual repetition ) of the ideology because of the internet is a novel element. 

The internet is a pretty wonderful thing, but I don't think that anyone speculating on where it would lead us foresaw that it would also facilitate the outreach of some seriously dangerous ideas and ideology.

Local weather

It still seems unusually warm and humid in Brisbane for this time of year.  

I see that there is a cyclone watch for Far North Queensland, although no one seems to think it will affect the weather this far South.    Yet the nights have been still and clammy - it feels like the prelude to a cyclone even down here.

(And by the way, these new "wind speed visualisations", one of which is at the previous link, are very cool, no?) 

In other, not so local weather, (unless you live in the Arctic Circle, I guess)  there is considerable interest in the fact that the winter maximum extent of Arctic ice seems to have occurred very early this year, and is also very low.   Whether this means that the summer ice minimum will be a new record is anyone's guess at this time, but the current conditions are at least consistent with such a possibility.   Only 6 months to go til we know.

There was also a new study out last week indicating that long term measurements, including those by submarine, show a very substantial thinning of Arctic ice.

And finally, I haven't seen the GISS  temperature figure for February yet, but even the UAH satellite series shows that, despite it being very cold in parts of the US, it was not a globally cold month at all.

Local reaction

It would appear that Republicans think they can win the Presidency on the over 50 vote alone...

Rand Paul says calling same-sex unions marriage 'offends' him and that gay marriage should have been replaced with 'contracts'

Surely any potential presidential candidate isn't wise to use the word "offend" in relation to his view of gay marriage if he or she wants the under 50 vote. 

Japanese tourism in two parts

1.  Puts a different spin on writing a "glowing" review:

Fukushima is looking to recruit someone willing to visit the prefecture and help publicize its tourist appeal on a blog or other social media platform.

The position pays ¥10,000 an hour. Applications should be filed by March 15.

The prefecture hopes to attract more tourists while working with the Fukushima Destination Campaign tourism promotion initiative, which will be launched jointly with East Japan Railway Co. (JR East), in April.

Only one person will be hired for the SMS-based campaign, and the job will last for one week. The successful candidate should visit several locations and is expected to work eight hours a day, updating his or her blog or Facebook page at least once a day.

The prefecture will pay up to ¥560,000 for the job.

2.  Here's what Japanese tourism really needs:  more ninja.

Japanese officials are enlisting one of the country’s best-known historical figures — the ninja, the martial arts masters and assassins of feudal times — to encourage tourism.

Governors and mayors from prefectures around the country traded their usual bland suits for ninja costumes Sunday to announce the launch of the Ninja Council.

The council sees local authorities forming alliances with tourism agencies to thrust the ninja — usually known for their ability to become nearly invisible — into the spotlight.

The council will gather and provide information on its website about ninja and about tourist destinations, organizers said. It will also respond to inquiries from home and abroad, and is scheduled to host events to boost the popularity of the dark warriors.

Doing arithmetic unconsciously

The smart unconscious � Mind Hacks

Interesting account here of an experiment which seems to show the unconscious mind can do arithmetic reasonably well.   (Actually, I kinda expected this might already have been known via other experiments.)

Still, you'll read it if your unconscious is interested...

Dream type 2

Last night provided an example of another type of dream - the story driven one,  which can be annoying not to finish, because I wanted to see how it ended.  

This one involved time travel, and a secret, but the secret was not revealed.  I did go into the future, but only into the same household.  The lead female, in this movie-like scenario, was still pleased to see me, which was nice.  Actually, now that I think about it, it seemed I was both actor and participant, but again the details are getting sketchy. 

Dream combinations

So, I was at the doctor's on Friday; yesterday both prawns and wine did come up in conversation with my wife; and last night I noticed a video on line that was something to do with a comic book store, but I didn't watch it.

I suppose that's why I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was in a doctor's surgery, and he had all these comic books laid out on the floor, while also mentioning that he sold wine - made from "air prawns".  In fact, everything he sold was made from "air prawns".  I said something about air prawns being related to silverfish (one of which, incidentally, had been spotted and killed in the house sometime in the last week.)  The dream then got into some protracted nonsense about removing a build up of ear wax, but the details are sketchy now.

Soon after I woke up, and while using the tablet in bed, I noticed a silverfish stationary on the wall beside the bed.  (It is now an ex silverfish.)

Look, it's not exactly up there with Jung's scarab story, and synchronicity related to insects is easier if you haven't put down any surface spray in the house for a while;  but I'm still not sure why my jumble box brain came up with "air prawn"...  

Quantum physics for birdbrains

From Physics World:

Scientists believe that some species of birds navigate using Earth's magnetic field – an idea known as magnetoreception that is backed up by experiments that show that captive birds will respond to changing magnetic fields. Understanding how this happens is tricky. Although electron spins in biological molecules are affected by the Earth's magnetic field, the size of the effect is so small that it should be completely washed out by thermal fluctuations. However, some quantum systems can be extremely sensitive to external magnetic fields, and this is why scientists believe that some birds could navigate by making quantum measurements.

One such bird is the European robin, which appears to have magnetoreceptor molecules located in its visual system. Physicists believe that the measurement process is triggered when a "cryptochrome" protein absorbs light. This causes a flavin adenine (FAD) nucleotide on the protein to form an excited singlet spin state, which involves two electron spins with a combined spin of zero. This state then decays in picoseconds to a "radical pair state" in which the spin of one of the FAD electrons is transferred to an amino acid that is located about 1.5 nm away along the length of the protein.

This transfer is believed to preserve quantum coherence and because each spin is isolated from its surroundings, the resulting radical pair remains in a coherent quantum state for times greater than 10 ns. This, physicists believe, should be long enough for a robin to make a quantum measurement.

The direction in the protein along which this separation occurs provides a spatial reference for measuring the Earth's magnetic field. In particular, the relative orientation of the separation direction and the Earth's field affects the rate at which the radical pair will decay to a protonated state that provides a signal to the bird's nervous system. Scientists believe that it is this protonated state – or subsequent chemical reactions – that links the bird's sensory system to the magnetic-field measurement.