Not encouraging for California

California snowpack fades to shocking record low as water restrictions ordered - The Washington Post:

The mountain snows so crucial to California’s water supply failed to come yet again this winter and the normally white-capped high peaks are mostly barren. As of April 1, California snowpack is a scary-low 5 percent of normal....

Snowpack measurements have been kept in California since 1950 and nothing in the historic record comes close to this year’s severely depleted level. The previous record for the lowest snowpack level in California, 25 percent of normal, was set both in 1976-77 and last winter (2013-2014).

Always somewhat controversial

Yesterday morning, there was talk of a (fairly small) survey showing that teenage Australians are still, in significant number, not comfortable with having gay friends.  I'm not sure that this should be surprising, given the nature of adolescence, and I think the reporting of it as showing there is teenage "homophobia" rampant is PC exaggeration; but I have to admit, the Beyond Blue ad  aimed at teenagers against anti-gay bullying is pretty good, as far as these things go.   I still suspect that the media being so saturated with discussion of sexuality these days actually works to increase anxiety in teenagers to identify one way or the other, but what can you do about that?   A sudden increase in societal regard for privacy seems not exactly on the cards.

Then, there was this article about income comparison for gay and lesbian folk (gay men don't do so well, but lesbian women, working longer hours, do well compared to your average heterosexual woman), which made me notice another article at The Conversation which argues (not completely convincingly, I think) that "It turns out male sexuality is just as fluid as female sexuality."  The bit I don't find convincing is how it cites examples of men's ironic, often drunken, imitation of homosexual acts as evidence in favour of sexual fluidity.

But it does talk about something that sounds rather more interesting:  a 1994 book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 .  Looking back at how we got to where we are in terms of Western attitudes to homosexuality is always interesting, and here's a lengthy summary of the book's argument:

George Chauncey uncovers a previously hidden "gay male world" in New York City before World War II, a world that had been lost through the myths of "isolation, invisibility, and internalization." Instead, the world Chauncey describes is a vibrant and surprisingly visible gay culture between 1890-1940. In this world, the later homosexual/heterosexual binary was not yet in force, and men were defined on the basis of their masculinity or femininity rather than the sex of their sexual partners. In this way, working-class masculine men, particularly sailors and laborers, could have sex with effeminate "fairies" yet not be considered "gay" (provided they were the one doing the penetrating). In contrast, a growing middle class during the 1910s and 1920s turned to sexual preference to develop a heterosexual identity of masculinity in which "queers" (middle-class equivalents of "fairies") were defined by their attraction to men. Chauncey argued that this developed as an anxious response to working-class sexual practices (bottom-up influence on culture) and middle-class male anxieties over their own manhood.

In Part II, Chauncey describes how gay men produced the space of an urban "gay world." They turned to semi-public spaces as zones of security, such as local YMCAs, boarding houses, and cafeterias. Chauncey notes that, until the 1930s, authorities would often take a hands-off approach unless gay men's presence moved beyond the category of harmless spectacle. He also notes the tension between private and public, where gay men were often forced out of the public sphere to engage in activities and socializing in public areas (although places such as parks and streets were often dangerous). Chauncey links crackdowns on this public space to broader reformist crackdowns on the autonomy of working-class recreational spaces, such as Coney Island. Finally, he points to the development of two gay neighborhood enclaves: Greenwich Village in the 1910s (part of a larger bohemian culture) and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s (which was much more visible and vibrant). Chauncey notes that until the 1930s, these spaces, in particular Harlem, became a space for highly visible spectacles of gay life - for example, massive drag queen balls in which thousands attended and were covered by the press. These undermine any notions of gay life being in deeply in the closet until the 1960s. Chauncey ends with a discussion of the decline of this gay world. He points to the end of Prohibition as a watershed, whose repeal was inspired in part by fears over criminality and sordidness that it inspired by driving behavior underground. With its repeal the state had broader surveillance and regulatory powers which they used to limit gay public space. This occurs most vividly with violent crackdowns on any bars that allowed gay men visibility (leading to the rise of exclusively gay bars). Chauncey's narrative ends with the gay world being driven largely underground during the 1930s. 

  

That last bit is a surprising argument:  that the removal of Prohibition actually worked to help drive gay men more underground.   Sounds plausible, I guess.  I wouldn't have picked Harlem as a centre of gay life for a time, either.

Given the book was talking about New York in a period when vaudeville was one of the main entertainments, I then Googled the topic of it and homosexuality, which led to links about a guy I had never heard of before - Julian Eltinge - who had for a time a spectacularly successful career as a cross dressing, mainly comedic, stage and film actor in the first half of the 20th century.  (He even travelled to Australia with his shows in the 1920's.)  His Wikipedia page provides the bones of his story, but this article is much more interesting. 

He never married, and lived with his mother, but apparently deliberately adopted a macho off stage persona and resented the never ending questioning of his sexuality.    Another book talks about how much time Eltinge, and the press, devoted to reassuring the public that he was a man's man.  For example:

Of course, this now sounds rather like too much overcompensating.  The guy lived long enough to see the (perfectly understandable!) decline of the popularity of his type of show, and seems to have died a lonely and overweight alcoholic.  

From pages 61 to 67 of this same book then goes on to talk about the scandal sheet interest in homosexuality in California (Sacramento and Long Beach are discussed in detail) pre World War 1.  The details are a tad too salacious for reprinting here,  but it both gives a sense of the "moral panic" about the issue, at least amongst some; and notes how some of the gay parties had a kind of modern air of decadence.  I find this particularly surprising for the pre World War 1 era - I had thought the relative decadence of the 20's and early 30's was a reaction to having survived the trauma of the War.

Some of the details are blackly funny - although men going to San Quentin for 25 years for sodomy isn't.    In fact, the interesting thing is how the "queers" thought they were being very modern and progressive with regard to one particular practice:

I wonder if this was somehow tied up with the cultural and intellectual shifts going on in the West following Darwin and the apparent rise of science and humanism?  I'm not sure that America had the same issue with the sort of upper class elitism of the gay set at Cambridge, but it's curious how (at least some?) of those partaking of the activity also saw themselves as riding a wave of modernity.

Anyhow, one thing I guess we can learn from such histories is that homosexual activity has been around a long, long time, as has uncertainty and unease it has caused in many societies.  We should give the teenagers of today a bit of a break.

Update:  you can read more about Eltinge and the popularity of female impersonator shows generally in a .pdf article here.  She notes that female impersonators in America evolved out of the minstrel shows of the mid 19th century.  (!)  

The uncertain promise of electro-braining

Adventures in Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation - The New Yorker

A pretty good summary here of the uncertain position science is at regarding mild direct current electrical stimulation of the brain.

I should look around for the "do it yourself" versions of the devices which are apparently on the 'net.

Things I have enjoyed on TV lately

*  Tony Robinson's "Walking Through History" series on SBS.  Just finished, I think.   He makes history very accessible, and is a charming guide.  I see that at least a few episodes are on Youtube.

*  Brian Cox's Human Universe:  OK, I'm late to the party on this one, as it finished at least a month ago.  It was a bit, I don't know, vaguely New Age mushy in parts, but it was a really stunning looking show that looked a million bucks, as they say.  And it did take us to some unusual places and was, for the most part, quite interesting.

*  Some other show on lately that I can't think of now - will come back later.

Oh, that's right:  the doco "Inside the Commons" about the British Parliament.  A fantastic, inside look at how their Parliament works.  

Something I haven't enjoyed on TV lately:

The new version of The Odd Couple.   Terrible acting in an old idea that makes all the participants look like embarrassing, incompetent imitators rather than actors.

Zero company tax?

I understand Peter Martin's argument about stopping dividend imputation and reducing company tax, but I don't get the last bit:

Gruen believes  a 19 per cent company tax would push up demand for Australian shares and push their prices high enough to compensate existing Australian shareholders for no longer having imputation. He says the government could use the extra tax it got from the investment surge to cut the company tax rate further, to 15 per cent.
Eventually we will have no choice but to cut it even further, ever closer to zero. As long as just one nation undercuts all the others with a low tax rate, businesses will choose to invest there over other countries. It's why Google will sell you its products in Australia but routes  your money through Ireland, where its profits are taxed at 12.5 per cent.
The man who designed the dividend imputation scheme for Keating can see a zero corporate tax rate beyond the horizon. "The evidence before the Henry review is that cutting the company tax rate is the most helpful thing we could do," said Greg Smith shortly after the Henry Tax Review was released.
Smith served on Keating's staff throughout the tax reforms of the 1980s and later served on the Henry Tax Review. "I have thought seriously about a 15 per cent company tax rate partly funded by the abolition of imputation," he said. "There is an intellectual case for a zero rate. That's the way the world is going, that's the direction in which our competitors are moving."

Why does a race to the bottom on company tax make "intellectual sense"?   Do that, and the next thing the "taxes are bad - very bad" crowd will be arguing  that alternative sources of revenue should be reduced too, no?

Trolleys, psychopaths, utilitarians (and Catholics to boot)

The Last Word On Nothing | The trolley and the psychopath

Here's a good post on the trolley problem and what it may, or may not, show about utilitarianism.

(The site it's on looks like quite a charming mix of science and well crafted writing, too.)

Update:  as it happens, I just found a short animation that talks about the trolley problem, via Open Culture, a website I have been meaning to add to my blogroll:



And have I mentioned my own use of a sacrificial dilemma to challenge some Catholics at Catallaxy a couple of years ago?  Let 's say a supercriminal with a predilection to setting up ethical dilemmas for pro-Lifers sets up a scenario where 5, or 10, or 200, frozen embryos are sitting on a balance far above the ground, with a young, healthy, randomly chosen and innocent woman on the other side.  The physical set up only allows one side to be saved - removing one will cause the other side to tip and plummet to the ground to certain destruction.   Surely peoples' reaction to who should be saved tells us something about the status we give to life in embryonic form, compared to that of a healthy adult. 

The Catallaxy Catholics did not like this challenge.  As far as I can recall, it was never properly addressed.

Cryptic message (nearly all readers may safely skip)

For the instructions to mix a Tom Collins, a cocktail of great simplicity, try looking somewhere other than this blog - I'm too busy writing on it.

New South Wales election result explained graphically

The loser:

The winner:

Saturday morning duty

My daughter may, or may not, be visible in this picture. OK, she is.  This is how I'm spending my Saturday mornings this year, taking her to orchestra practice.

It's pretty interesting, actually, watching a strings orchestra learning new pieces in (what seems to me, a musical ignoramus) remarkably little time.  

This takes place in the Old Queensland Museum, a charming building of decorative brickwork that barely survived the Bjelke-Petersen era of historic building destruction.  Now used by Queensland Youth Orchestra, and some other music or dance groups, it's a really good venue for them, although parts of the building are still in a state of decay.  I think the State government maintains it to the minimum they can get away with.

I don't usually stay for the whole practice, and so I am becoming quite familiar with how the area around the Brisbane showgrounds and parts of the Valley are developing.  

The Royal National Association, which owns the freehold of this large slab of close to inner city real estate, has embarked on a huge development project of the precinct, the first residential part of which will be finished later this year.  The apartment blocks are in their final stages, and I am a bit surprised at how many there are.  They look a bit crammed together, to be honest, with some apartments looking to have not so fantastic views into the next block.  But who knows, it may look a lot better when fully finished and landscaped.   It is being built by Lend Lease, who I think have a good record. 

I dropped into the on site sales office today and was told they are all sold (bar 2 which the buyers handed back), and two new large blocks which are not yet started are fully sold as well, at significantly higher price than the first bunch.   I think he said 400 units will be in the new blocks; there must be at least that number, probably more, in the blocks that are nearly finished.   It seems clear that buyers are expecting this new precinct is going to be a success. 

In fact, looking at the huge number of number of future apartment blocks the RNA thinks it can build around the showgrounds, it's hard to believe there will be enough showgrounds left for a decent Exhibition.  It's also hard to believe the RNA won't end up incredibly wealthy from the development process.  They'll probably be able to h byave the first agricultural show on the Moon.

But back to young teens and kids playing music.   When I work out the best way to upload it, I'll link to a track from the first evening concert my daughter was in a couple of weeks ago.   They're pretty good, to my untrained ear, at least.

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?