Monday, April 13, 2015

Maybe more time before there are no stars in the sky?

Accelerating universe? Not so fast

Let's hope there is no connection

Mass beaching fuels fears of impending quake | The Japan Times

The mass beaching of over 150 melon-headed whales on Japan’s
shores has fueled fears of a repeat of a seemingly unrelated event in
the country — the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed
over 18,000 people.

Despite a lack of scientific evidence linking the two
events, a flurry of online commentators have pointed to the appearance
of around 50 melon-headed whales — a species that is a member of the
dolphin family — on Japan’s beaches six days before the monster quake,
which unleashed towering tsunami and triggered a nuclear disaster.

The junk science Senator

David Leyonhjelm writing in the AFR last week:
The only losers would be the major wind-energy generators, which are eagerly waiting to build dozens of new wind farms in an effort to meet the target and get on the subsidy gravy train. Against that, many people are hoping these are never built, among them those who suffer adverse health effects from the inaudible infrasound they generate...

Krugman on laughing Laffer

The Laffer Swerve - NYTimes.com

The article in the Washington Post he links to is worth reading too...

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Drug madness

Experience: my anti-malaria drugs made me psychotic | Life and style | The Guardian

I had heard that there was one anti-malarial drug that often gave people vivid nightmares; I assume it was Lariam as described in this interesting first hand account of how it sent one young guy completely psychotic for a time.   I didn't realise that it could have that drastic an effect.  Lots of people in comments tell of their bad experiences with the drug, too. 

Friday, April 10, 2015

Fat but happy?

Underweight people face significantly higher risk of dementia, study suggests | Society | The Guardian

People who are underweight in middle-age – or even on the low side of
normal weight – run a significantly higher risk of dementia as they get
older, according to new research that contradicts current thinking.

The results of the large study, involving health records from 2
million people in the UK, have surprised the authors and other experts.
It has been wrongly claimed that obese people have a higher risk of
dementia, say the authors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine. In fact, the numbers appear to show that increased weight is
protective.

At highest risk, says the study, are middle-aged people with a BMI
[body mass index] lower than 20 – which includes many in the “normal
weight” category, since underweight is usually classified as lower than a
BMI of 18.5.

These people have a 34% higher chance of dementia as they age than
those with a BMI of 20 to just below 25, which this study classes as
healthy weight. The heavier people become, the more their risk declines.
Very obese people, with a BMI over 40, were 29% less likely to get
dementia 15 years later than those in the normal weight category.
This will set the fat cat amongst the public health policy pigeons.

Good news for me, at least, with my determined effort to keep at the very edge of BMI of 25.  (Actually, it seems according to one calculator, a 1 cm difference in my height is the difference between 25 and 26.  I must measure myself, somehow, again.)


The blob discussed

'Warm blob' in Pacific Ocean linked to weird weather across the US

In other weather/climate news, there was a story last night on 7.30 about the drought conditions out in Western Queensland, with many properties around Longreach being completely de-stocked.   As this is happening with (at best) a weak El Nino, it is not a good picture if a strong one develops later this year, as I think some suspect is on the cards.

Making rice better with coconut oil? (And let's talk food poisoning)

New coconut rice cooking method claims to slash kilojoules - Health & Wellbeing

Well, this sounds all very preliminary, and as if it is sponsored by a coconut oil manufacturer, but the claim is that adding a small-ish amount of coconut oil to cooking rice, then cooling and reheating it, makes it better for you by increasing the amount of resistant starch.  (It's funny how making starch indigestible seems to be a good thing for the gut, but there you go.)

The article also makes some points about being careful with re-heating rice so as to avoid food poisoning.

I've always had the intuition that, of the things that could give you food poisoning, reheated plain cooked rice would have to be on the low end of the scale of risk.  But, I was told decades ago by someone who worked in the microbiology, water and food safety field, that this was not true.  It's one of the riskier foods for it, apparently, but I don't know why.

The story above says to not keep rice in the fridge for more than 3 days.  I'm sure we often go way past that, and there is not a time I know of when eating re-heated rice has apparently made me sick.  In fact, I have been thinking lately, it's been a long, long time since I've had a stomach upset of any variety.

Re-heated rice from the microwave is a marvel.  In fact, if you only had a microwave for melting butter, defrosting meat, and re-heating cold or frozen rice, it would still be worth it.

And speaking of food poisoning, in my other wanderings around the net lately, I have come across a blog that is absolutely chock full of food poisoning news - the Barfblog.  (It's a more serious site that the name suggests.)

The main author at the site, Doug Powell, appears to be a Canadian who worked in Kansas, but his blog entries make enough references to Brisbane to make me suspect he might live here now. Maybe he can tell me what has caused a repeated series of food poisoning outbreaks at the wonderful (well, provided you don't eat there) Brisbane Convention Centre in the last 6 months?  I have never heard if the cause had been definitely identified.

The good news and the bad news (about Mars)

So, it turns out there might be quite a lot of ice just under the surface over quite a large part of Mars, and not just in the polar ice caps. 

The bad news for future human ice miners:  the planet also seems to have high levels of the toxic to the thyroid chemical perchlorate.   Bummer, hey?

The Laffer experiment the IPA doesn't talk about

Kansas GOP Governor Sam Brownback Retreats on Tax Cuts to Close $600 Million Budget Deficit — The Atlantic

How disappointing of Australian journalism was it that Arthur Laffer, on his recent IPA promoted comedy tour here*, was not asked about the complete failure of his policies in Kansas?  


* well, I didn't watch all of the video of his IPA talk, but it certainly opened with a sustained string of jokes to an adoring audience.

Thursday, April 09, 2015

The big smash

Puzzle of Moon’s origin resolved : Nature News & Comment

Would have been something to see - a Mars size planet smashing into the early Earth.  If time travel is invented, that event should be high on the list of "to do's".

The tax race to the bottom

Countries slow race to bottom on tax competition - FT.com

With the Senate asking questions about how the multinationals shift money around to minimise tax, the whole question of whether international tax competition is an ultimately harmful "race to the bottom" that countries ought to stop is of greater interest than ever.

The article above (which you may have to answer a question to get to) seems a decent summary of the controversy regarding the matter.   (Of course, seeing libertarians are of the view that tax competition is fine and dandy, I think its a very reasonable conclusion that of course tax competition has become harmful, and that it can all be fixed by war being declared on Ireland, Bermuda, Singapore and any other country that is getting rich by enabling companies to impoverish the rest of the world.)

In other tax musings, I see that many are talking about the advantages of increasing land tax for revenue, and reducing stamp duty and other taxes.

While Jessica Irvine did a good job the other day explaining the advantages, transitioning to such a system would surely be complicated, and the idea that people having attained the "Australian dream" of home ownership with no mortgage now having to pay for the privilege is surely a hard, hard sell politically.

How much easier from a fairness point of view is it to say that companies have to pay local tax in the country where they generate the profit?   Of course, achieving that result with international co-operation is the trick.  I think my warfare plan, as well as rounding up the libertarians as enemies of the State to be interned until the cessation of hostilities, might have trouble being endorsed by politicians:  although I may be in with a chance with the Greens.

The Muslim conspiracy issue - again

'Iraq Is Finished' — The Atlantic

I've asked this before on this blog, probably quite a few times over the years:  why is it that out of all the peoples in the world, Middle East Muslims seem to be the most extraordinarily prone to believing in persecutory conspiracy theories?   Take this, from the rather good article linked above about the situation in Iraq:
 The conversation soon turned to Daesh (known as ISIS in the West), and how the group had formed. A common view I’ve heard in the region, propagated by Sunni and Shiite alike, is that Daesh is the creation of the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq or
Islamic State before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Therefore, so the twisted reasoning goes, the United States must have deliberately created the group in order to make Sunnis and Shiites fight each other, thereby allowing the U.S to continue dominating the region. Local media had reported on alleged U.S. airdrops to Daesh. Some outlets even referred to Daesh's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as an Israeli-trained Mossad agent.
Anyhow, the article in total is well worth reading.

Update:  well, to state the obvious, isn't Google great?   Here's an article from New Statesman last year asking the very same question, and mentions some other "greatest hits" of Muslim nonsense, which the writer notes, extends far beyond the Middle East:
A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.

This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.

Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.

Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?
The explanations are limited:
I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time . . . everything becomes a conspiracy.”
The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.
Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.
It's all rather depressing.

And what about the irony of how in the United States, the biggest long term dangerous conspiracy going around (climate change is a hoax) is held by those on the Right who are most rabidly anti-Muslim?  Just thought I would throw that in for good measure.

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Arnie doesn't like what bodybuilding has become

Has gay panic ruined bodybuilding?

Well, Arnie's not a complete meat head, then.   But gosh he looks old and so far past his prime in those real estate ads showing on Australian TV.

When defence technology doesn't work

The Pentagon's $10-billion bet gone bad - Los Angeles Times

A great, eye catching photo starts this article on the Pentagon spending billions on technology that doesn't live up to its promise.

The LA Times also has a story today about the Cold War era games of Putin:
U.S. F-22 fighter jets scrambled about 10 times last year — twice as often as in 2013 — to monitor and photograph Russian Tu-95 "Bear" bombers and MiG-31 fighter jets that flew over the Bering Sea without communicating with U.S. air controllers or turning on radio
transponders, which emit identifying signals.

The Russian flights are in international airspace, and it's unclear whether they are testing
U.S. defenses, patrolling the area or simply projecting a newly assertive Moscow's global power.

"They're obviously messaging us," said Flores, a former Olympic swimmer who is in charge of Tin City and 14 other radar stations scattered along the vast Alaskan coast. "We
still don't know their intent."

U.S. officials view the bombers — which have been detected as far south as 50 miles off  California's northern coast — as deliberately provocative.
 

Speaking as I was about immaturity

Back in 2011, when David Leyonhjelm was only hoping that a party name confusing to the politically naive voter and a lucky ballot paper draw could inject him Federal Parliament (because his nutty gun loving, pet marsupial ideas certainly couldn't), he decided to drop into a dubious Catallaxy post to make an old, old sexist jape about how funny it could be if a man fooled a woman into having a grope of her breasts.

Hardly anyone at Catallaxy commented on the post, or the comment, and I suspected at the time because they realised that it was pretty immature and embarrassing.

But now that a couple of media outlets have highlighted it, the Catallaxy throng are out in defence of the Senator, and Sinclair Davidson has taken the utterly ridiculous defensive line that Lefties are attacking some valid contribution Leyonhjelm was making to breast cancer awareness.

Seriously. 

These twits can't just fess up to Leyonhjelm repeating an old fashioned, sexist, immature joke he first heard (as I probably did) 30 or so years ago?   Wasn't funny then, nor is it now.    

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

To Mars

Given that I have been ridiculing the Mars One project lately, I was amused to see in last night's Big Bang Theory that Sheldon was an applicant.  (Actually, I only saw half of the show, so I am not sure if Mars One was mentioned by name, but it's clearly what it was referring to.)

Anyhow, Sheldon's application video really did make me laugh:


Beefy success in Japan

Full plate for Meat & Livestock Australia ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Lots of interesting facts and figures here about the success of Australian beef in Japan.

In other meat news - on Sunday, I tried braising a rolled lamb shoulder in wine and stock, with onion, garlic, carrot, parsnip and celery in the mix, and lots of rosemary.  This smells fantastic while its cooking, and after 2 hours,  the meat is falling apart tender.  But the meat flavour tends to be a bit weakened by being cooked in liquid, in a way roast lamb isn't.  Sure, the stock mix tasted nice, although as usual with herbs, if you cook them too long their taste starts to disappear.   The liquid also had a fair bit of fat in it, and it tended  to run off the meat and so didn't work so well as a seasoning.  I suppose one could cook this one day, and refrigerate the liquid so as to remove the fat, and then boil it down a bit to reduce it to a thicker consistency.   But this is starting to reduce the benefit of braising - put it in the oven and just come back in two hours.

I still thought it a moderate success, but the family outvoted me from trying again.  Such is life.

(Actually, I think these problems can be dealt with by using the very, very slow baking method instead.   That's what I'll try next...)

The Victorian roller craze

The BBC has quite a charming magazine article about Victorian England and its (short lived) craze for roller skating.   It let the young men and ladies mingle in quite a novel fashion, apparently:
By the mid-1870s, a craze for indoor rollerskating had come to Britain, with 50 rinks in place in London at one point. The press dubbed the phenomenon "rinkomania", but the healthy exercise that Plimpton had boasted of was not all that attracted the young "rinkers".
"The skating rink is the neutral ground on which the sexes may meet," reported Australia's Port Macquarie News of goings-on in London and elsewhere, "without all the pomp and circumstances of society. The rink knows no Mother Grundy, with her eagle eye and sharp tongue, for Mother Grundy dare not trust herself on skates, and so the rinker is happier than the horseman of whom Horace sang."
Holding hands and whispering sweet nothings became easier without Mother Grundy - a contemporary term for a stern matriarch - and her ilk tagging along. Prolonged eye contact with one's intended replaced stolen glances...
But rollerskating became less popular by the 1890s, with many rinks, built in a hurry at the height of the craze, going out of business. 
There's probably a cable TV series to be made out of that, somehow.  Especially if there was ever arson and crime involved.

Update: just googling around, it seems that the Suffragette movement used to meet at some roller skating venues, and famously (well, except for me) stayed out all night at one in 1911 to avoid the census.   All good fodder for a TV series...

Monday, April 06, 2015

Worthy movies noted

Seeing I was complaining about un-worthy Hollywood movies, maybe I should I mention two decent ones watched over this weekend:

Defiance, the 2008 film with Daniel Craig in the lead was shown on one of the free to air stations Friday night.  I vaguely remember a review of it on the Movie Show, and I don't think it made much money at the box office, but I thought it was very good.   Telling the true-ish story of a few brothers who helped hundreds of East Polish Jews hide out from the Nazis in  the forest was engaging and very interesting.  I felt sorry for Daniel Craig, whose make up requirements for most of the movie seemed to involve being sprayed with fake dirt and grime, but he gave a solid performance.

I see that Ed Zwick directed it.  He also made the under-seen American Civil War movie Glory, and I must catch up with that one again.

*  The Maze Runner:  my son had read the books and wanted to see the movie, so we got it out on DVD.   Sure, it's Young Adult territory here, and, somewhat improbably, the group of young men who have been experimented on in some mysterious fashion have set up an ordered, polite, functioning mini society that is like the exact  opposite of  Lord of the Flies.   (It was also never explained how they managed good hairstyling after three years - at the very least, the elevator supplies should have been shown as including hair wax.)

But I'm nitpicking.   It's actually (for the most part) well acted and crafted, and is rather good for its genre.   Certainly, the setting truly shows how these days, if you can imagine a physical setting, digital effects can easily make it seem convincingly real.  

The movie is set for a sequel, and I hope it at least makes the improbable set up for creating the Maze more convincing...