A naive suggestion?

Do people who feel suicidal usually try to hide it when asked directly?  Googling around indicates it is generally thought that they don't.  For example, from the book Psych Notes: Clinical Pocket Guide, we get this:

Would it hurt to have this question on the pre-flight check list that all pilots ask each other? 

What they do now seems not to be direct enough:

The FAA expects pilots and airlines to take joint responsibility when considering if a pilot is fit for duty, including fatigue resulting from pre-duty activities such as commuting. At the beginning of each flight segment, a pilot is required to affirmatively state his or her fitness for duty. If a pilot reports he or she is fatigued and unfit for duty, the airline must remove that pilot from duty immediately.

Update:  I heard some aviation expert or other on the TV saying that if the co-pilot really wanted to kill himself and passengers, he could almost certainly circumvent any procedural changes.   And I have heard Senator Leyonhjelm say, in relation to gun suicides, that people determined to suicide will find another way in any case. 

Apart from Leyonhjelm simply being statically wrong, this line of defeatism seems to me to pay no attention to the psychology of suicide.  If you can make impulsive acts harder to finish, you do reduce suicide. 

Protracted sarcasm can be pretty funny

Persistence! | …and Then There's Physics

The guy who writes And Then There's Physics has a post up about Richard Tol's never ending whinge about the John Cook's "97% consensus" paper, and it's a fun exercise in protracted sarcasm.

As Tol turns up in comments, it makes for some amusing reading.

Improbable alien artefacts

Physicists Describe New Class of Dyson Sphere | MIT Technology Review

In praise of sardines

I'm not sure why, but my wife has been accumulating cans of sardines from Aldi.  I have never seen her eating them, but a couple of days ago, while looking for some lunchtime eating, I found 6 cans, and decided I would try them.

Mashed sardines (with a bit of balsamic vinegar) on toast is not the most attractive looking lunch, but I had forgotten how nice they could be.  I don't think I had eaten canned sardines for at least a decade, possibly two.

As you were...

Let's not pretend, libertarians

David Leyonhjelm claims in the Fairfax press this morning:

"...the basis of contemporary marriage is love and affection." 

And then this:

"Support for marriage equality does not require, or indeed imply, approval of any particular marriage or marriage outcome. Nor does it open the door to bigamy, polyamory or any other dire outcomes that some people predict."

Of course it does.  The arguments have already started in America, and probably elsewhere, that multi partner marriages can have lots of love and affection, so why shouldn't the government recognise those as legal marriages, if we all agree that gay marriages should be allowed because marriage is about love and affection?   And in fact, I don't think polygamy is something to have a moral panic about; I don't think it is a good way to organize society, but there is a huge amount of cultural precedent for it around the world, contrary to same sex marriage.

Now, at the risk of being on the side of the nutty Catholic element of Catallaxy, what they argue about the libertarian claim that recognising gay marriage is about getting the government "out of the bedroom"  is correct.  That is, libertarians are being disingenuous:   if they truly wanted the government "out of the bedroom", they'd be arguing for it to recognise as few relationships as possible as marriages; not more. They would, I would have thought, be against the way de facto couples were brought completely within Family Law, despite the fact that they may have deliberately decided not to marry so as to avoid at least some of its legal consequences.  That it was done may be argued as a justified government intervention into regulating relationships for the social good, but it can hardly be argued as having increased liberty at the individual level.   Quite the opposite.

Government recognition of marriage confers benefits and (at least when it ends, if not before) imposes obligations.   Making marriage more open to diverse groups, including same sex and polygamous relationships (as the logic inevitably runs) means more government involvement in the regulation of private relationships across society; not less.

It's particularly ironic that libertarians are frequently non-traditionalists (as well as atheists or agnostics) who recognise no particular significance to marriage as a legal status in their own lives  - they take the Leyonhjelm line that you "don't need a marriage licence" to make a marriage "real".  Thus they seem to have both little regard for what legal marriage means personally, while insisting that government should take an expansionary view of it.   The reason?   Well, because it makes some (actually, a relatively small number of gay people) feel left out.  
  
Libertarians hate a welfare entitlement mentality in others, yet they are happy to endorse a "symbol entitlement" mentality, and have chosen to paint this argument as essentially a rights issue in the same way wet liberals and Lefty's do.   And libertarians are not normally all that taken by the idea of human rights, but they will make an exception for their gay friends, it seems.

As far as I'm concerned, there is very little that is intellectually consistent about the "libertarian" view on same sex marriage with the rest of their world views.   

I don't really care if they just argue "well, it's what people want"  (which, in much of the world, it is) and left it at that.   But don't try and argue it as being an issue particularly consistent with small government, libertarian instincts.

And while I am not going to lose any sleep over the possibility of same sex marriage arriving here soon, I suspect that long term it will be seen as an early 21st century faddish interest which relatively few gay couples will ever take up.   I would much prefer, though, that gay relationships be recognised as civil unions similar to, but without the exact same status, as heterosexual marriage, which has a long tradition in the West of being at its core about having kids.  And as a conservative on matters of biology - being against the use of surrogacy or IVF for anyone, let alone gay couples - the argument that gay couples have kids all the time now does not wash with me.  (And older couples who can marry even if they are not fertile - they get the "benefit of the doubt", so to speak.  Rules about marriage don't have to be entirely, 100%, logically consistent.) 

My view, in another irony, is arguably a truer "small government" view of marriage than that espoused by libertarians.  

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.]