Possum problem

Last night, around 11.30, a lot of noise of unusual character started coming from the roof.   Stepping out onto the balcony, you could hear it from outside, but could not see the part of the roof it was coming from.  It sounded like something hitting a tile on the roof.

It persisted, and was loud enough to stop sleep, so after midnight I was carrying the stepladder upstairs and poking my head through the access hole with a torch.   A furry movement was noted, and eventually a possum appeared clearly, walking nonchalantly from one part of the roof it appeared to be intend on attaching, to another corner of the roof space.  It seemed to me to be trying to make or enlarge an access point through tiles.  The sound resumed about 20 minutes later, but did stop.

While rats in our roof space are common (I have already had to bait it once this so-called autumn), and I always assumed it might be next to impossible to block all tile roof entry spaces to prevent rat entry, when you find you have a possum in the ceiling, it's time to call in the professionals. 

I have done so already, and will post the results.

Update:  the possum man identified a clear gap in some roof flashing where he was sure the possum had entered, and it was at the spot where the possum had been noisily doing something on Wednesday night.   He said that the way the roof flashing had been pushed/chewed open, it possibly was finding it hard to get back out.   This is consistent with what I had guessed.  (He said it is unusual to have a possum in the roof at that time, as they usually leave of an evening to eat, returning in the morning.   This would also likely explain the 'walking' sound that we had heard from the roof/ceiling, as it was generally heard at those times.)

Trap cages were left in the roof space last night to try to catch the possum if it was still inside.  None caught yet, though.  

Bad ocean acidification news

Shell-shocked: Ocean acidification likely hampers tiny shell builders in Southern Ocean

The coccolithophore E. huxleyi is important in the marine carbon cycle and is responsible for nearly half of all calcium carbonate production in the ocean, said lead study author Natalie Freeman, a doctoral student in the CU-Boulder'sDepartment of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC). The new study indicates there has been a 24 percent decline in the amount of calcium carbonate produced in large areas of the Southern Ocean over the past 17 years.

The researchers used satellite measurements and statistical methods to calculate the calcification rate - the amount of calcium carbonate these organisms produced per day in surface ocean waters. Across the entire Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, there was about a 4
percent reduction in calcification rate during the summer months from 1998 to 2014. In addition, the researchers found a 9 percent reduction in calcification during that period in large regions of the Pacific and Indian sectors of the Southern Ocean.

Not quite sure how those percentages add up to 24% - I suppose it has to do with the area over which the reductions happen.

Anyhow, sounds bad.

That big a surprise?

Widely used herbicide linked to cancer : Nature News & Comment

 I dunno - I tend to assume that chemicals that pretty rapidly cause living things to die are probably going to be cancer causing if you're exposed to too much of them.

The issue is more about the dose, really.

And having said that, I still rely on my common sense to tell me that the Monsanto tactic of making Roundup tolerant crops so you can spray heaps of chemicals  on them to control weeds is not that great an idea, certainly in the long term, but also quite possibly in the short term.

Update:  I probably linked to it before, but here's a short report from the Nature website that explains how herbicide tolerant weeds have developed despite Monsanto's improbable claim that they wouldn't.

Hitler and the nude dude

BBC - Culture - The Discobolus: Greeks, Nazis and the body beautiful

Hey, I didn't know that Hitler liked the old Greek discus thrower statue so much that he bought it:

Hitler’s opportunity to acquire the statue arose in the 1930s, when the Lancellotti family fell upon hard times and offered it for sale. At first the sculpture was earmarked for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but the original asking price of eight million lire was deemed too high. By 1937, Hitler had made known his interest in the statue, and
the following year, despite initial misgivings on the part of the Italian authorities about exporting it, the Discobolus was sold to him for the still huge sum of five million lire. Funded by the German government, this was delivered in cash to representatives of the Lancellotti family in their palazzo.

By the end of June 1938, the Discobolus had arrived in Germany where it was displayed not in Berlin but in the Glyptothek museum in Munich. On 9 July it was officially presented as a gift to the German people. Hitler addressed the crowds: “May none of you fail to visit the Glyptothek, for there you will see how splendid man used to be in the beauty of his body… and you will
realise that we can speak of progress only when we have not only attained such beauty but even, if possible, when we have surpassed it.”

Some more interesting reading about the popularity of a Nazi era coffee table book of nude photos of the body beautiful is to be found here.

As for the exhibition which inspired the BBC link  about Hitler and the statue, there is a more detailed article about it at The Guardian, including some odd bits such as: 

The Greeks could see their nudity was a bit odd, and wondered how it came about. One theory was that an early competitor at the Olympics had accidentally or deliberately lost his loincloth and went on to win the 200m sprint, thanks to some aerodynamic advantage. Not to be outdone, the other competitors copied him. More likely it has something to do
with primitive rituals of “stripping off” one’s childhood cloak and “running out” into the ranks of citizens at the age of 20, practices still going on in Sparta and Crete in the historical period.

In Athens, meanwhile, on Athena’s birthday at the hottest time of year, each graduating year of ephebes would streak all the way from the altar of Love in the gymnasium called “the Academy” to the Acropolis carrying torches, the laggards and the podgier ones getting slaps from the crowds as they huffed and puffed through the main city gate.

Nudity was a kind of costume, an idea enhanced by the fact that much time seems to have been spent oiling oneself up and scraping oneself down. The best condiment for the body was that olive oil produced from the sacred olive trees given to Athens by Athena and awarded as prizes
in the games that accompanied her birthday. The resulting salty “boy gloop” or paidikos gloios was sometimes collected and used to treat ailments and signs of ageing.

Erk.  The article gets a bit more sordid after that...

Because we wouldn't like to think it was a sign of things to come

Autumn's record-breaking hot spell - Agriculture - General - Weather - The Land

Several media outlets, including The Land, are reporting on the weather bureau special report about how ridiculously, record breakingly, hot March has been over a large slab of Australia.   (The weather in Brisbane was weird last week - very hot and humid for a couple of days, followed by two days of storms popping up from odd directions.)

But what is most amusing is this comment:

I must thank The Land for publishing a story about hot weather without mentioning climate change or global warming. This would have to be a first and hopefully it's something that will continue. 

I expect that person reads Catallaxy, too. 

Doing my bit for Tom

I think I read a comment about this that was like "Physics - who needs physics?"  And it's true, it seems some of the stunt fighting is starting to look a tad too enhanced via invisible cables.

On the other hand, it's a pretty funny joke at the end, and by the time the theme kicks in, well, who can resist? 

Big crunch mentioned again

Universe may be on the brink of collapse (on the cosmological timescale)

I posted about these guy's ideas last year.  They're still working on it, and I have no idea what other physicists/cosmologists think of it.

Uh huh

3D food printers could end famine, says academic Vivek Wadhwa | The Australian

Very hard to believe...

A change with unclear consequences

RealClimate: What’s going on in the North Atlantic?

No one seems 100% sure how big the effects will be as it continues to slow down and (perhaps) eventually stops.

But hey, let's just keep pumping CO2 into the air and see what happens, folks?

Explanation for Newspoll today...

I can't really see any other explanation.

Update:  Essential has the vote 54/46 in favor of Labor, which is quite a jump for the slow moving poll, while Newspoll jumped in the opposite direction.   All rather odd....

The pre-trailer trailer for Mission Impossible 5

Well, this seems a new marketing technique - put out a pre-trailer trailer announcing the arrival of the actual trailer in a couple of days.   Odd.

However, in the absence of really bad reviews, I will see it.  Tom Cruise just makes great action films, with only the occasional complete misfire.  (He is also what I assume is a rarity - an actor with not the slightest fear of heights.)

The battle of the Tims

Tim Wilson, the Human Rights Commissioner for Selfies, Gays and Things the IPA Wants, manages to turn a valedictory comment about Lee Kuan Yew into a message from the IPA:

Yeah, thanks for the heartfelt sentiment, Tim.*

Meanwhile, I have been meaning to comment that it seems to me that the other Tim at the HRC, Tim Soutphommasane, who I tend not to refer to much because his surname is even harder to memorise than Senator Blofeld's, might be on some sort of selfie twitter war with Wilson. I really think Tim S has increased the number of photos of himself with groups of people as a response to the intense selfie-ifcation of the work of a Human Rights Commission since Wilson arrived on the scene. (Maybe there is also a rumour around that the Commission will be defunded to just one Commissioner, and the one who seems busiest will get the job.)

But on the weekend, I think Tim Wilson struck back, and wow, with this tweet photo, allegedly about the fountain in the background, he is still winning the selfie twitter war by a country mile:

Congratulations, Tim. (Wilson: King of the Selfie.)

*  actually, from just Googling around, I'm not even sure what Wilson says makes sense.   Didn't LKY pay scant attention to property rights when refusing compensation to land owners when it was needed for economic development?   And I see that the public housing system, which has a very active role in the government providing housing (admittedly, with private ownership as the outcome) still shows an incredible amount of government involvement which one would have thought the IPA would run a mile from.

Is this a case of another small government Right identity praising Singapore for systems they are adamant should not be done in their own country?

Financial scandals of Rome

‘God’s Bankers,’ by Gerald Posner - NYTimes.com

Like most people, I guess, I have only the vaguest idea of the corruption issues relating to modern Vatican finances.  This review indicates the scale of the problem:

From there Posner weaves an extraordinarily intricate tale of intrigue, ­corruption and organized criminality — much of it familiar to journalists who cover the ­Vatican, though not widely known among more casual church watchers — from Pius XII down to Benedict XVI. These were years when the Vatican moved beyond the last vestiges of feudal restraint to become “a savvy international holding company with its own central bank” and a “maze of offshore holding companies” that were used as sprawling money-laundering ­operations for the Mafia and lucrative slush funds for Italian politicians.

Posner’s gifts as a reporter and story­teller are most vividly displayed in a series of lurid chapters on the ­American ­archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the arch-Machiavellian who ran the Vatican Bank from 1971 to 1989. Notorious for ­declaring that “you can’t run the church on Hail Marys,” ­Marcinkus ended up ­implicated in several sensational scandals. The biggest by far was the collapse of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco ­Ambrosiano, in 1982 — an event ­preceded by mob hits on a string of investigators looking into corruption in the Italian banking industry and followed by the spectacular (and still unsolved) murder of Ambrosiano’s ­chairman ­Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London shortly after news of the bank’s implosion began to break. (Although the Vatican Bank was eventually absolved of legal culpability in Ambrosiano’s collapse, it did concede “moral involvement” and agreed to pay its creditors the enormous sum of $244 million.)

In one of his biggest scoops, ­Posner ­reveals that while Marcinkus was ­running his shell game at the Vatican Bank, he also served as a spy for the State Department, providing the American ­government with “personal details” about John Paul II, and even encouraging the pope “at the behest of embassy officials . . . to publicly endorse American positions on a broad range of political issues, ­including: the war on drugs; the guerrilla fighting in El Salvador; bigger defense budgets; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and even Reagan’s ambitious ­missile defense shield.”

The cumulative effect of Posner’s detective work is an acute sensation of disgust — along with a mix of admiration for and skepticism about Pope Francis’ efforts to reform the Vatican Bank and its curial enablers. Pope Benedict, too, ­attempted to bring the bank into conformity with the European Union’s stringent money-­laundering and transparency

statutes. But the effort failed.

Agricultural State

The Economics of California's Drought — The Atlantic

I was surprised to read about how important agriculture is to California, and how thirsty the industry is:

California is known globally for its coastal beaches, mountains, and desert. But the state's most important economic region may be its Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural areas. Virtually all of the almonds, artichokes, lemons, pistachios, and processed tomatoes  grown in the United States originate from the valley, whose productive soil is unmatched elsewhere in the country. California's spinach yield, for example is 60 percent more per acre than in the rest of the United States. The state's marine climate allows it to grow crops like broccoli that wilt in humid climates.
California is the world's fifth-largest supplier of food, a big reason why the state would, if an independent country, be the 7th largest economy in the world.

But California's agricultural output demands a lot of water. Irrigation claims up to 41 percent of the state's water supply, while cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco demand comparatively little. Crops such as almonds, grown exclusively in California in the United States, consume 600 gallons of water per pound of nuts, more than 25 times the water needed per pound of tomato. These water-intensive crops tend to have high profit margins, providing farmers with an incentive to plant them.

A good sign

BBC News - Climate change: China official warns of 'huge impact'

The more seriously China takes climate change, the better.

And of course, it's remarkable how the global conspiracy of scientists and national weather organisations who make up pretend science about climate change extends even into this (nominally) communist nation, isn't it?    [Sarcasm for any visitor from Catallaxy.]

He's probably upset he won't get to make a Senate speech about gun rights for gay marsupials...

The Australian notes:

“I hope Bob Hawke doesn’t die soon, otherwise we’ll never get any work done,” Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm told reporters in Canberra on Monday...

Senator Leyonhjelm said he had no fond words to say about Mr Fraser, other than he defeated Gough Whitlam in 1975.

“My mum said if you can’t say anything good about someone don’t say anything at all. So I’ll be totally silent today."

I trust Julia Gillard will send Michael Smith a sympathy card?

The Michael Smith led smearing of Julia Gillard over 20 year old matters already exposed at the start of her political career, fully endorsed and promulgated by News Corpse figures such as Hedley Thomas, his editor at the OZ, and Andrew Bolt, was in my view a real scandal of extraordinarily protracted political much racking;  and why the Victorian police even entertained Smith's complaint about the witnessing of a Power of Attorney when he was not involved, and those who were lost no money from its use, is something that has been sorely lacking a deserved investigation of its own.

As I wrote of Smith back in 2012:

He makes stupid, bush lawyer comments continually about anyone who signs a false statutory declaration "exposing themselves to perjury", as if this gives more credibility to evidence in a stat dec which is merely reporting rumour.

Smith's courting of Blewitt is ludicrously over the top - playing up to Blewitt as an ex Vietnam vet on Smith's website, etc.

This fake matey bonhomie persona of Smith annoys me no end - he's a dill and a nasty bit of work with an unhealthy obsession with a female Prime Minister.  ..

He claimed many weeks ago - possibly months ago - that he had spoken to Bruce Wilson more than once - that he considered him a "mate" I think he went so far to say.  (Everyone is a "mate" to Smith if they don't tell him he's an asshat.)

Etcetera...

Well, while Julia Gillard seems to be enjoying an early forced retirement, the Australian this weekend (presumably with Smith's co-operation - he is looking for sympathy, I expect) recount how his asshattery has ended anything resembling a career, as well as his marriage to his "Czechoslovakian Princess".

It is in fact quite peculiar:  how Michael Smith got into any of his post police force/defence jobs, or managed to marry an attractive woman:

A former police constable, army corporal, Telstra executive and symphony orchestra managing director, he got his break at another Fairfax-owned station, Brisbane’s 4BC, in 2007. 

Well, actually, to be honest, I did hear him on 4BC occasionally when he started his radio career there, and first impressions were that he was something of a "natural" for that line of work.   But his political views and personality soon enough started to grate.  I presume that it is a great talent for displaying self-confidence in interviews that has got him in executive positions in novel fields - but never for very long, it seems - as well as quickly into some women's beds, I expect.

This Crikey profile actually indicated a flighty, obsessive man with possibly quite serious "personality issues," as Jackson alleges.  (Although I had also picked her as an attention seeking prima donna early in the piece too - I'm sure she has "issues" of her own.) 

My 2012 post was titled "Prepare to backfire".  For Smith, it well and truly did.

It may not be very Christian to gloat over his current circumstances - but if ever someone's life shows evidence of karma, his seems to be it.   (At least for now.)

Update:   I had forgotten about this, but this report was about Brandis and Barnaby Joyce both attending Smith's wedding (only in 2011 I see) at the cost of the taxpayer.   Moreover, if you can believe Smith, there were some quite nausea inducing scenes at the reception:

''Fair dinkum, he was tearing up the dance floor and every young chick there wanted to dance with George,'' Smith said at the time.

Yes.  Brandis has long been known as a chick magnet.   [Insert Julie Bishop eye roll emoti here].

Speaking of Julie, wasn't she happy to talk to Blewitt when Smith would put him on the phone?  That's right, she was.

Yes, the Coalition was up to their eyeballs in giving Smith moral support in what they thought was very politically useful slime.    

I wonder if any of them are offering him a place to sleep now?   Julie's single, I think, so I presume she has a spare room for a friend in need...

 

Sunday with physics and aliens

A fun article has appeared in Physicsworld.com talking of a novel way to look for extraterrestrial intelligence:

Has an advanced alien civilization built a black-hole-powered particle accelerator to study physics at "Planck-scale" energies? And if such a cosmic collider is lurking in a corner of the universe, could we detect it here on Earth?

Brian Lacki of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, has done calculations that suggest that if such an accelerator exists, it would produce yotta electron-volt (YeV or 10²⁴ eV) neutrinos that could be detected here on Earth. As a result, Lacki is calling on astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to look for these ultra-high-energy particles. This is supported by SETI expert Paul Davies of Arizona State University, who believes that the search should be expanded beyond the traditional telescope searches.

Oddly, one possible way of detecting such high energy neutrinos would be via an array of ocean hydrophones.   But the article indicates that they might also be detectable via radio signals when they hit the moon, and that experiment is underway in the NuMoon project, although how actively I can't really tell.  Here's a .pdf list of articles about it. 

All sounds rather fanciful, and as Paul Davies says, once the aliens find what they are looking for in this high energy experiment, why would they keep it operating anyway?

But speaking of detecting aliens, it just occurred to me that another possible explanation for the odd bright lights on Ceres (instead of the current speculation that they are natural ice plumes from solar heating) might be that they are the exhaust from an alien industrial process going on inside.

We like to think big on Sunday mornings....  

John Howard

Gee, on Insiders this morning, John Howard (there to talk about about Malcolm Fraser) was looking very healthy, and sounding articulate, generous and pretty reasonable.

At least, of course, until it came to the his "loyal to the party" line that Tony Abbott has great political skills and will make a recovery in the polls.   (He's also been sucked into climate change skepticism;  but I still suspect that he is persuadable out of the Dark Side on that issue in a way about 50% of Coalition parliamentarians are not.) 

The thing is, hearing Howard talk just reminds us how pathetic Abbott is in comparison when it comes to sounding genuine and reasonable.

Malcolm Fraser

I think even hardened Laborites felt some sympathy for Malcolm Fraser when he broke up in his election concession speech in 1983. His continued active role in the matters of human rights and justice then rehabilitated him well and truly from the Left's point of view.

As for how he acquired the top job - if the Whitlam government was happening now, I would certainly  be attuned to the way the Murdoch press was campaigning against him (I was only a teenager at the time!); but despite that, nothing has come out since then to challenge the view that it was (even when viewed from the Cabinet room) a genuinely shambolic government.

While I understand why the Left was so upset with the Dismissal and Kerr's role, I still find it hard to feel that the nation was badly done by, given that it quickly got to express its views at an election.   As far as I can tell, there is little to suggest that the government could have righted itself, given just a bit more time.   And while no one wants to see Governor-General's dismissing governments as a matter of routine, once or twice a century, provided an election is promptly held, is not a great problem for democracy.   It's one of those cases where practicalities trump principles; sorry.

I know that Fraser's period in government is seen by some as a lost opportunity for economic reform and advancement, but really, my impression is that the whole world was in a confused post Vietnam War/oil shock funk.   Criticisms about Fraser based on economic grounds just seem to be made with too much benefit of hindsight.

And I was thinking that yesterday before Fred Chaney turned up on Lateline and, after praising Fraser for all the humanitarian aspects of his leadership and post political career, he said more or less the same thing:

 But, can I say something, Emma, about the economic thing, which is the great criticism that's levelled against Malcolm: he didn't undertake economic reform quickly enough. It seems to me that Malcolm governed at the most difficult time, a time of change between the Federation settlement that ran from 1910, from the time of Deakin, right through to the 1970s when we'd had high protection, we'd had centralised wage fixing, we'd had a sort of certain pillars - what have been described very well by people like Paul Kelly as the standard pillars of Federation up to that point. Malcolm was there when the big debate was on: did we need an entirely different approach to economic management? There was a huge debate in the Liberal Party under Malcolm's leadership. That debate between the wets and the dries was quite a bitterly-contested one, but by the end of Malcolm's prime ministership, the soul of the Liberal Party had moved to a more open economy, the heart and the mind of the Liberal Party had moved. And part of the success of the - the great success of the subsequent government, the Hawke Government - the Hawks and Keating Government, was that we as an opposition understood that we had to have a more open economy in Australia. So, I would say that Malcolm was there at that most awkward of periods, the period of change, he was on the cusp, and I think that his government and the party that he led at that time was an honourable part of moving into that new space.

 EMMA ALBERICI: And yet, Malcolm Fraser was more inclined to allow the budget to - the deficit to blow out, whereas his Treasurer was a much more fiscal conservative-style Liberal, wouldn't you say?

FRED CHANEY: Well I think we see this battle in every government. I went through the papers that were released for the 1978 government, a government that I - I only became a minister at the end of that year, so they were new to me, and all the arguments about debt and how you would deal with the debt, all the arguments about immigration, refugees, are rehearsed in those documents so long ago. These are almost perpetual problems for government. I think that, as you'll see, any government is always having to moderate the pure economic arguments in favour of what the public are prepared to stand. I think that the Fraser Government could have moved the economic changes along more quickly, but that's the wisdom of hindsight. What I can recall is that in 1983, after we'd lost government, I remember reading in The Australian that Malcolm Fraser had been too tough on the unions. History gets rewritten all the time and I think that there was more movement and economic movement at the time of Fraser than is currently being admitted.

Another bit of praise for Fraser, this time from a rather unusual source (about whom I will post more soon) is at Michael Smith's blog.