An amusing protest

David Leyonhjelm swears at satirical protest group outside windfarm inquiry | World news | The Guardian

I like protesters who put a bit of creativity into it.

And incidentally - as Senator Madigan's "submarines are the spaceships of the seas" comment gets a mention in the article - I always thought he was unfairly maligned for that.   Especially in light of the fact that I remember reading of a science fiction novel that had a submarine adapted for use as a spaceship.   (I haven't read it, just I remember reading about it in a science fiction encyclopedia decades ago.  Looks like it was Harry Harrison's In our Hands, the Stars.)   Interesting what bits of trivia a mind can retain...

Smelling ants

Yes, that ant does smell like blue cheese

Apparently, there are ants in North America that smell like blue cheese.

I have always hated the acrid smell of any Australian crushed ants.  I might prefer blue cheese ones, actually.

Increase in flash flooding not in your imagination

Flash flood risks increase as storm peak downpours intensify

Good to see some clear study showing that rainfall intensity in storms is increasing, as most people in Australia have probably been guessing anyway:

Civil engineers from the UNSW Water Research Centre have analysed close to 40,000 storms across Australia spanning 30 years and have found warming temperatures are dramatically disrupting rainfall patterns, even within storm events.

Essentially, the most intense downpours are getting more extreme at warmer temperatures, dumping larger volumes of water over less time, while the least intense periods of precipitation are getting weaker. If this trend continues with future warming, the risk of flooding due to short-term extreme bursts of rainfall could increase even if the overall volume of rain during storms remains the same. The findings were published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Mind you, not sure why the authors are even talking about the effect under a future 5 degrees of warming.  Rainfall intensity in that case is probably the least of anyone's worries.

Try reading

If there is one topic* related to climate change that the likes of Andrew Bolt and England's lost village idiot Nick Cater can't get their head around, it's polar ice.

Cater's column today is full of bulldust, but the best example is his obvious complete lack of understanding of the difference between sea ice around Antarctica (on the rise lately) and ice from glaciers on the continent (clearly melting in parts, at least.)

Similarly, you would think that but a moment's thought would make them realise that massive Arctic ice loss in summer (lots of sun, lots of dark land around the ocean) is not offset in effect by an increase in Antarctic sea ice that is happening when it is winter there (little sun.)  But no, this seems never to have occurred to Bolt.

Too dumb and smug to read, that's their problem.  

*  actually, the other topic I could have nominated for this is the persistent refusal to understand the long standing prediction that global warming can make both droughts and floods worse.

Update:  well I was wrong, Bolt does read - primarily Watts Up With That, where 90 year old Fred Singer is airing again his view that maybe global warming is all an illusion. 

Seriously,  when will Bolt ever read anything that isn't telling him what he already has decided is true.   When will he ever admit that Anthony Watts made a big call to his face, which was shown to be wrong by Watts' own paper a short time later.  Never noted by Bolt, who is willingly fooled by an eccentric bunch of aging twits. 

Anthony Watts and his big mouth

HotWhopper: The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

I've said for years that Anthony Watts is a twit who craves approval and respect yet can't understand why he doesn't get it when:

a.  his own pet project comes up a dud (his years' long campaign to show that poor siting of thermometers was behind the increase in temperatures in all long term records) and
b. he is happy to have those whose respect he seeks trashed every single day by his band of gullible, dumb, conspiracy believing, followers.

This latest example shows up his personality defect quite clearly, in a case where his own dumb, insulting claims against scientists just doing their job is given some publicity.

Update:  I should have also linked to Sou's later post, noting that Watt's has been tweeting that he's the one who has been "slimed".   He's just an idiot. With weird insecurities.

Go get them, Michelle

Brandis and Dutton play some dirty pool in their fight with Gillian Triggs

Michelle Grattan is unusually forthright in her condemnation of the Brandis/Dutton attack on Gillian Triggs.

The only thing I would add is this - even if Triggs had specifically said that the Abbott government boat turnback policy made it extremely unlikely that the Indonesian government would be inclined to grant Abbott a diplomatic "win" regarding the death sentence on  Chan and Sukumaran, she would have been right.  (Sure, Indonesia had granted no favours to any country in this regard, but common sense suggests that the Australian policy would have made us about the least likely government on the globe to expect a sympathetic hearing.    I can't see the big deal about admitting that.)

Changing Britain

From The Tablet:

The British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of British adults describing themselves as Anglican has fallen from 21 per cent in 2012 to 17 per cent in 2014, a loss of around 1.7 million. That brings the number of Anglicans in Britain to 8.6 million people.

The proportion of Catholics remained roughly stable at 8 per cent, or just over 4 million, as did that of “other” Christians, including Methodists, Presbyterians and non-denominational Christians.

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain. Its population has grown ten times since 1983, to account for around 5 per cent of the total population in 2014.

Almost half – 49 per cent – of the population described themselves as being affiliated to no religion. That proportion is up from 31 per cent in 1983.

I am surprised that the number of Muslims is that close to the number of Catholics.

Gershwin oddity

Language Mystery Redux: Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way? - The Atlantic

James Fallows makes a fair enough observation, about how the American accent, at least amongst some who were speaking formally, used to have a phony-British aspect to it, which has disappeared.

But that photo of George Gershwin at the top of the article - he had a pretty odd looking face/head, didn't he?  It looks a bit puffy in places you don't expect a face to look that way. Maybe it was re-touched poorly?

Actually, out of all the Google image photos of him, that is just about the worst.    Pity.

The Guardian set

Comments at the Guardian are frequently amusing, particularly when there is a underwhelming column, and especially if it is about a personal experience.

Thus it was with Philippa Perry, apparently a psychologist or something, who wrote about the "moment that changed me" as being sleeping with a guy who had forgotten he had slept with her the previous week.

The column is poorly written, with many people confused about the men's names used, and as several people note in comments, it appears entirely possible that she misunderstood the guy's comment in any event, perhaps rendering this life changing moment a bit of an embarrassing error.

Some of the wittier comments:

Sometimes forgetting is an unconscious act of self-mercy.

I seem to have stumbled into some revenge porn.

I got a free upgrade to first class as the power wasn't working in standard on my train to London today. Dull but on the basis of this article the sort of thing the guardian wants it's readers to know. Tune in next week to find out what i had for lunch!

And for more commenting narkiness, do read those to the column "Do my short-shorts make you feel weird about your masculinity?" like this:

If only the article was as short as the shorts.

Quantum bayesianism - the weirdest quantum interpretation there is?

There is an interview with Christopher Fuchs up at Quanta in which he tries to explain Qbism - quantum bayesianism.  This attempt at explaining the quantum world seems rather odd and to give a boost to solipsism; but then again, the Many Worlds interpretation would probably have to stand as being at least as odd, and lots of scientists appear to lean towards it these days.

There is an article about it from 2014 at Nature, in which the solipsism issue is dealt with as follows:

QBists are often charged with solipsism: a belief that the world exists only in the mind of a single agent. This is wrong. Although I cannot enter your mind to experience your own private perceptions, you can affect my perceptions through language. When I converse with you or read your books and articles in Nature, I plausibly conclude that you are a perceiving being rather like myself, and infer features of your experience. This is how we can arrive at a common understanding of our external worlds, in spite of the privacy of our individual experiences.

I'm still confused...

Announcement

I am now going to cook a prawn curry, in an allegedly Filipino style.  I have never done this before.

Update:  that was nice.  Followed roughly this recipe, noting that a 14 oz can is half a "normal" can.  And that five prawns for each serve seems about right, and the recipe forgot to add the ginger.  (I added it just before the curry powder.)

The anti-matter generator on my kitchen table

I see that a recent New Scientist article started as follows:

IT'S an odd thought that the banana on your kitchen counter, squished in your lunch bag or tucked away in your desk drawer is the embodiment of one of the universe's great mysteries, just waiting to be unpeeled.

Whatever its state of ripeness, that banana is made of particles of matter, just like you: its intrinsic matteryness is why you can see, feel and taste it. What you don't see is what a banana does 15 times a day or so. Blip! It produces a particle of something else, something that vanishes almost instantaneously in a flash of light.

That something else is antimatter.

It is an odd thought, but then again, we generate our own too:

This occurs because bananas contain a small amount of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. As potassium-40 decays, it occasionally spits out a positron in the process.

Our bodies also contain potassium-40, which means positrons are being emitted from you, too. Antimatter annihilates immediately on contact with matter, so these antimatter particles are very short-lived.

Body design problems - for both men and women

I think we can all agree that there are bits of the human body which indicate that, if it was directly designed by God, He did a Him-awful job at working it out.

No where is this on better display than in the reproductive system.  I mean, for men, what's with the prostate gland and it's almost guaranteed destiny to swell and, in far too many cases, cause dire interference with the essential function of urination?   I have a brother who has recently, after quite suddenly developing a problem, had to have the TURP operation, so I have heard all about how unpleasant it is.

This gland is in a seriously dumb position, wrapped around the urethra.  If via gene editing it becomes possible to change positions of organs, I wouldn't be so worried about relocating testicles to an internal spot (as I recall Arthur C Clarke suggested in one of his novels as a feature of future males), but getting the prostate to do its job from a position beside the urethra, like the Cowper's gland, would make a hell of a lot more sense, no?

Moving on to women.  Childbirth is ridiculously dangerous, we know that, and I think I have  mentioned before that if you redesigning the system from scratch, the marsupial system of giving birth to a tiny jelly bean which matures in a pouch has an awful lot to recommend it.

But now to the more fundamental issue of women and menstruation - it seems that of the animal kingdom, the human body has absolutely the worst time of it:

Yes, many animals do menstruate, but only a handful menstruate overtly like humans do (where there is blood flow from the uterus through the vagina). Other animals menstruate covertly (by simply reabsorbing the uterine lining into the body). Female animals with overt menstruation are generally sexually active throughout their cycle. In comparison, females with covert menstruation are only ‘in heat’ mid-cycle.
Overt menstruation occurs in humans; most primates (including chimpanzees, organutans, gorillas & rhesus monkeys); some types of fruit bats; and elephant shrews. The average cycle length in orangutans and opossums is the closest to that of humans, 28 days, while the cycle for chimpanzees is 35 days. Menstrual bleeding in non-human primates is minimal.

The topic of how women deal with the inconvenience of menstrual blood flow got a detailed airing in a recent Atlantic article about the history of the tampon.   First manufactured specifically for this purpose in the 1920's, the article notes its rise in popularity, and the toxic shock crisis of the 1980's.

I found the article particularly interesting for reasons of cultural comparison:   I had assumed that the tampon had very much dropped in popularity due to the toxic shock issue, and the article does say that by 1990, about half of American women surveyed had moved to using pads alone.  Yet further down, someone estimates that usage amongst women there is up to about 80% again.

In Australia, thanks to the campaign against the trivial $1 or so a month of GST women don't want to spend on sanitary items (while nearly 30% of  young women are out getting tattoos at a minimum cost of about 10 - 20 years of said GST), we have some very recent market research from Roy Morgan indicating that only about a third of women are buying tampons.

In fact,  I infer from this lengthy post about the comparative availability of pads and tampons around the world, that tampons might be most popular in American.  Certainly, it looks like they are not readily available in many poorer, third world countries. 

Even where they are available, the Atlantic article does mention the issue of the applicator/digital insertion divide.   Apparently, in Europe and Australia, ones without applicators are most popular. 
In America, applicator use seems extremely popular.

As the Atlantic article notes:

Outside North America, digital tampons have outsold applicator tampons for decades. “If you interview women in Europe and ask why they like digital tampons, they’ll tell you about [environmental] concerns. They’ll also tell you that it’s a hygienic concern—that they don’t trust the applicator being inserted inside their bodies,” Keighley says. Conversely, tampon users in the U.S., who largely prefer applicators, “will tell you it’s a hygienic thing—they don’t want to gunk up their fingers,” he explains. “Consumers develop very strong opinions on usage habits—polar opposites, for the same reason.”

If you want to read an example of how extremely seriously (some) American women take the alleged horror of ever getting their own bodily fluid on their finger, even for the briefest moment (as I assume at least toilet paper will invariably be handy), read this 2012 post from one who is distraught about not being to get applicator tampons of her choice in Australia.  An extract:

First of all, there’s disgusting stuff up inside there during menstruation that I’m not particularly interested in touching. Second of all, my finger is probably not always totally sterile, being a finger and all, and I don’t really want to stick it up there and give myself an infection.

You can sort of get around some of the ew-factor in your own bathroom at home, but let’s say you have to do this in a public restroom. I don’t want to put the same fingers I’ve used to touch the bathroom stall door up inside an infection-prone part of my body. I know that some women probably do this anyway and it disgusts me nearly to the point of vomiting to think of them doing that and then touching the handle on the stall door afterwards. GROSS!!!!! Now all their menstrual germs are all over the handle! Even more disgusting is the number of women who don’t wash their hands at all.

I wonder how many STIs have been transmitted through public bathrooms in Australia for this very reason?

Fortunately, I’m such a germophobe that I always use a paper towel or tissue of some kind to manipulate the handle if I absolutely must use a public restroom. If you ever see a blonde girl doing this in a public restroom, it’s probably me. Feel free to say hello.

So yeah. Tampons without applicators are just a no-go. That is so beyond disgusting that it doesn’t even bear thinking of.

What's worse - there are a stream of comments from fellow American agreeing with her.

Seriously - this woman sounds just short of endorsing the idea that her gaze while menstruating could curdle milk.

It also puts me in mind of the peculiarly American thing about douching, although it is more concentrated along ethnic lines (African Americans and Hispanics are particularly inclined to do it, for reasons I have never seen explained.)

I'm not at all sure as to why, but it seems that an unusually large proportion of American women have developed a particular "thing" about the cleanliness of their reproductive tract, particularly during menstruation.

Which strikes me as rather odd...

Unelected official able to make criticism without fear of immediate sacking

Look, it's like shooting fish in a barrel to go to Catallaxy and find dumb and ludicrous commentary by academics who post to a dumb and ludicrous audience (sorry, but sheesh), yet I must point to Professor Stagflation's odd post today in which he doesn't actually disagree with Gillian Triggs, but attempts to have a go at her anyway.

Is it beyond his intellectual grasp that her unelected status and security in the position is what lets her speak forthrightly in criticism of the government on the matter of human rights?

And in what sense are any of her rulings or commentary even potentially a "threat to democracy", given that (as far as I know) she can only recommend actions? If she has no power to enforce anything, why should be in an elected position?

The Abbott government's personal pursuit of Triggs, aided and heartily endorsed by the Murdoch press, and lapped up by Sinclair Davidson's drooling audience, is one of the most disgusting and vile features of any Australian government in living memory.

We've heard it before, but look at the figures

Swedish sex education has time for games and mature debate | Education | The Guardian

Years ago I posted about the very open Dutch sex education system, and it's no surprise to learn that Sweden's is very detailed as well.   But look at the teenage pregnancy comparison:

Not all Swedish schools will spend quite as long on the subject as
they do in Gnesta – some get through it in four or five weeks – but the
course is a great deal more comprehensive than what is on offer in most English schools, where sex education still not a statutory requirement and is often delivered in a single “drop-down day” at the end of term.

The UK birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds is 19.7 births per 1,000 women, while in Sweden the figure is 5.2 per 1,000.

Seems to confirm the finding, repeated all over the place, I think, that open and frank sex education reduces teen pregnancy, and can even delay average age at which youngsters first try anything.  (If only they could get that up to about 25, he muses.)

Just out of curiosity, let's look at how this compares internationally (in births per 1,000 for 15 to 19 year olds): 

United States:  30  - worse than the supposedly degenerate UK.  But then again, according to this table, UK's rate is a steady 26, not 19.7. 

Australia:  11 - a semi-respectable figure, I guess.  Better than the US and UK; not as low as the rest of Europe.  

Austria:  3 (!) - I'm assuming teenagers there simply have no sex.  Why?

Oddly, even Japan manages a 5.   (One suspects mostly from girls in school uniforms accidentally falling pregnant to creepy guys in their 40's.  I don't know that young Japanese men are having sex at all.)

The lowest on the table:   1 each in North Korea (honestly, life must be too depressing there for a libido) but also Slovenia.  (Well, that's in that East European region of the world that I have long written off as too complicated in history to ever bother understanding.  I have no idea...)

And the highest regions:    at the very top of the table - Niger at 205.   In fact, I think every single country with a rate about 100 is African.  

Well, you learn something every day.

Nice work

RealClimate: NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’

A cool, calm and reasoned post from Gavin Schmidt about the new NOAA paper and the "hiatus" which isn't there when you look at longer periods.  

Seems more than that

More than a fashion choice: the everyday aesthetics of tattooing

This article, basically sympathetic to the modern fashion for tattooing that I live in hope will one day fade, starts with this:

According to the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, 22% of Australian men and 29% of women aged 20 to 29 have at least one tattoo.

In a 2013 survey conducted by Sydney-based McCrindle Research, a third of people with
tattoos regretted them to some extent, and 14% had looked into or started the removal process. Laser removal has become cheaper and more readily available, but there are serious safety concerns around cheap lasers, poorly-trained operators and the risk of serious burns and scars to clients.

Oh, I just noticed:  the percent is substantially higher for young women than men!

That's it:  I find myself having to join the ranks of Catallaxy nutters in expressing the view that feminism has obviously gone completely off the rails, and the repeated warnings to my daughter that any tattoo will be viewed extremely poorly by her parents will have to be increased to at least weekly.

Blue Cat diplomacy

Success of Doraemon film in China reflects thaw in ties with Japan: expert | The Japan Times

Hot and cold

Interruption of the Gulf Stream may lead to large cooling in Europe

A repeat of this scenario is still a possibility in the future, it seems:

The investigated time interval, called the Eemian, occurred before the last Ice Age and was characterized by warmer-than-present temperatures in large parts of the globe. The Eemian climate evolution can therefore serve as an analogue for a future warmer climate.

The study of fossil remains, such as plants and insects, preserved in geological deposits in northern Finland revealed an abrupt climatic cooling event that happened in an otherwise warmer climate. During this event the temperatures dropped 2–4°C and remained low for a period of  500–1000 years. Comparison with seafloor sediment records from the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic indicates that the rapid cooling was associated with a sudden slowdown in North Atlantic deep water
formation and a reduction in the northward extension of the Gulf Stream that transports heat to northern Europe.

The new evidence shows that the last time when temperatures were significantly warmer than today, climate instability occurred.

"This may have been caused by melt water coming from the Greenland Ice Sheet, disrupting the North Atlantic Ocean circulation. While the exact mechanism behind the sudden cooling still remains uncertain, the study illustrates the potential for major climatic instability in and around the North Atlantic regionunder future global warming", says Karin Helmens at the Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University.

I am assuming, by the way, that a 4 degree drop in present temperatures for centuries would be disastrous for present day northern Europe.  On the other hand, if it comes after the region has warmed 2 or 3 three degrees, I'm not sure.

Furthermore, although Hansen has made the point that a future industrial society can readily and cheaply produce enough warming gases that would hold off  a new Ice Age, there would like be much controversy about using them for a situation of only one part of the world needing it, while the rest of the world is already too hot.

But continue with your geo-engineering dreams, libertarians!

Computers and schools

Why Technology Alone Won't Fix Schools - The Atlantic

I know this is just one guy writing, but if this is true, the conclusion is what I suspected would be the case:

Over the last decade, I’ve designed, studied, and taught
educational technology in different parts of the world. In Bangalore,
India, I experimented with multiple mice plugged into a single personal
computer to increase student interaction. In rural Uganda, I cringed as
students played a typing game with their index fingers, hunt-and-peck
style. In Seattle, Washington, I wrestled with the distraction posed by
technology in an after-school computer literacy class for pre-teens.
Across all of those projects, a single, simple pattern held in every
case. I call it technology’s “Law of Amplification”: Technology’s
primary effect is to amplify human forces, so in education, technologies
amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there.


Amplification seems like an obvious idea—all it says is that
technology is a tool that augments human power. But, if it’s obvious,
it nevertheless has profound consequences that are routinely overlooked.
For example, amplification explains why large-scale roll-outs of
educational technology rarely result in positive outcomes. In any
representative set of schools, some are doing well and others poorly.
Introducing computers may result in benefit for some (the ones
highlighted in pilot studies), but it distracts the weaker schools from
their core mission. On average, the outcome is a wash.