The Kevin Rudd disaster

Gee, watching the smarmy performance of Kevin Rudd on The Killing Season is reminding me all over again how amazing it was that he was ever popular with his party and the public.
I never liked the guy, and always considered him a shallow egocentric with a fake public persona.
His only saving grace is that he is not Tony Abbott, a more "normal" person by most psychological criteria, but a dimwit of a political windvane with a pathetic willingness to overthrow ethics and decency for the sake of political advantage, and a spectacularly bad Prime Minister as a result.
Update: Kevin is still bitter that Swan hadn't told him what had to change if he wanted to keep his job. The problem is, of course, that it's hard to tell someone they need a complete personality transplant.

On paying people smugglers

So it seems virtually certain now that it would have been an ASIS spy on board an Australian navy ship who was paying money at sea to people smugglers to turn back.

It's absolutely certain that both Coalition and Labor governments have used ASIS operatives on Indonesian land who would use cash to disrupt people smuggling operations (by paying for information, and perhaps even paying them not to leave?)

But rather than shrugging shoulders, I would have thought it is bleeding obvious that the use of payments to boats at sea is different from splashing around money on shore in disruptive operations.

The Indonesian government is not likely to be happy with either, but surely anyone with common sense, rather than the appalling excuse makers like Bolt, can see that tactically, paying smugglers who are at sea is a dumb idea, given it provides an incentive to start the journey (update:  and presumably ensures that the smugglers have received money both from the "customers" and then the Australian government.)

And why would it harm a government to admit that its operatives have gone too far in this instance, and will be directed not to use such a tactic again?

The Nazi style guide

Hitler as Art Director: What the Nazis' Style Guide Says About the "Power of Design" - CBS News

I'm not sure I was aware until recently that Hitler, being an arty type,  personally designed the Nazi flag back in 1920.

While googling the topic, I also found this interesting story about a book that was effectively the Nazi style guide. 

This is why ISIS will never take over the world:  not enough attention to good style.

The real story

Ian Fleming ensures no cliches about Japan go unexploited in his ethnocentric masterpiece 'You Only Live Twice' | The Japan Times

I've only ever read one Bond novel a very long time ago, so I knew that the movies took extremely little from the books and crammed it into completely new stories.

But this summary of the plot of You Only Live Twice is still so different from the movie, it seems the only similarity is that both had parts set on a Japanese island.

What a moral vacuum

Andrew Bolt's first comment on the paying money to people smugglers scandal was to say he didn't know that he cared.

His latest is to note something like this:   "Hey, what's the big deal?  The AFP under the last Coalition government might have been paying for boats to be scuttled.   Who cares what happens in Indonesia or at sea?"

I think he's working his way up to "We used to strafe Japanese boats in those waters.  What are they complaining about?"

Update:  more moronic "Who cares!  They've stopped the boats!  Accountable government?   Who friggin' cares?" commentary from Bolt.  

Trouble for Abbott

It's good to finally see Abbott and his government facing some political damage from the "whatever it takes" attitude to stopping boats of civilians getting to our shores.  And don't you love the government's "but you're corrupt too!" response to Indonesian complaints delivered by Abbott's personal lacky Greg Sheridan.  What fun it would be to get the metadata belonging to Sheridan's mobile phone.

As I have commented several times, it is not only scandalous high seas behaviour to be using our military and customs to be stopping boats of civilians, locking them up on ships for weeks at a time, before returning them to fates unknown in countries like Sri Lanka and Vietnam; it is the most outrageous and ludicrous affront to transparency in a democratic government that it should persistently refuse to tell the voters what it is doing.  (Ludicrous because its hard to see how publicity of the success of the schemes could hurt in Indonesia.)

It is, of course, extremely difficult for Labor to "score" on this issue, but here at last is one way it might.

But before the next election, it also needs to be talking to Indonesia very specifically about what is going to be done at a regional level to ensure there is no repeat of an escalation of the boats should it win the next election.  (And they have to do something novel about Nauru and Manus Island too.)

Slow internet in space

How Do Astronauts Connect to the Internet in Space? - The Atlantic

Interesting article here explained that the internet connection astronauts get to use on the ISS is not so fast.  But lasers will soon help.

Some Mary Beard observations

Mary Beard turned up briefly on SBS a few weeks ago, on what looked like a new series on Roman stuff (about Pompeii), but I haven't noticed it on again.  If I recall correctly, the Eurovision Song Contest intervened, so I'm not sure if the other episodes followed or not.

Must go looking.  I did record the first episode but not watched it yet.

Anyway, I forgot to note weeks ago that she had come back from a trip in Algeria, and visited the city of Constantine, which I had remarked upon recently when it turned up briefly on Griff Rhys Jones African train show.   Anyhow, it just goes to show that I'm not the only person who didn't know about this place (or rather, its geography).  Mary knew the city, but not what it looked like:

But I did get the biggest surprise when I went to the city of Constantine, ancient Cirta. I have often had cause to mention the place and to think about it. There is a famous record of the contents of an early Christian house-church from there, and in the last stages of my book I have just been mentioning Marcus Cornelius Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius who came from there.

Now I dont know the exact location of the ancient town in relation to the new. But what I hadn't realised was that the whole place is perched on the edge of a vast ravine (now spectacularly bridged with a series of modern bridges). I dont know what it made such a difference to how I started thinking the place, but it did. It was if you had read about Venice for years, and the penny only dropped about the canals when you visited decades later.

Have a look at this photo of the place:

and this one on the same Flickr stream:

Impressive, no?

Anyhow, another reason I wanted to post about Professor Beard is because she is not a "dumbing down" pessimist, at least in her field:

When I started out in this game, when you marked exams every summer, there really were some dreadful answers. There were students who had clearly done little or no work, and had spent more time on the sports field than the in the library. They blagged a bit, sometimes with a degree of style, and they got at best a 2.2. You would come across grossly irrelevant answers that wrote about the favourite subject of the student that had not actually come up.

Why marks have gone up is because no one knows nothing any longer. All the students, beyond some sad casualties, have worked hard and done enough to get a 2.1 at least, and they actually answer the question asked, with clear information. The 2.1s now are as good as they ever were in my 30 years, I promise.

Students aren't smarter, but they work harder. And we probably teach them better too. But dumbing down?? No.

 That's encouraging.

Help, I'm a martyr!

What else are you not allowed to hear? | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Oh dear.   Andrew Bolt apparently wants to correct something to do with some aboriginal activist, but tells us that "lawyers" won't let him.

I assume that the lawyers involved are not his personally, but those of his employer.   And they might be partly motivated by the fact that Bolt (I am guessing - but I think it a fair guess) didn't personally pay the legal costs in his failed defamation case defence in 2002 or for the representation in the 2011 hearing about "white is the new black".

Of course, it is in fact entirely possible that Andrew may be able to say what he wants to in such a manner that it is not at any risk of contravening the RDA.  It may be that his employer just can't be bothered helping him address this topic, given that his attitude has always been that he did nothing wrong in the first place.  

Certainly, if he is that cut up about the restraints of his employer, or the lawyers, he is entirely free to quit his current position, and run as an independent news blogger who can publish what he likes at his own risk.   Or he could directly engage new lawyers to review his columns to ensure he isn't at risk of a new action.

But no, he would rather play the martyr, and keep raking in the hundreds of thousands that I would expect is his News Ltd income annually now (I understand they pay for his TV show as well as his written output.)  My heart bleeds for him...

Drinking blackouts

My drinking years: ‘Everyone has blackouts, don’t they?’ | Society | The Guardian

I think its basically an ad for a book, but I still thought this was a pretty well written account of by a woman with a very dangerous drinking problem.  (In her past now, I gather.)

True confession time - I did have one, brief, example of a drinking blackout period in my 20's.  Apparently, I was being very annoying to an acquaintance on the bus that was taking a group of us back from a night in town.  I had no recollection at all the next day of what I had done on the bus, although I certainly had got off it unaided at the end of the trip and got back to my room by myself.  I was told I was lucky I didn't get a punch in the face.

This was enough to convince me that getting anywhere close to a blackout period is dangerous...

Not exactly ready to take over the world

The most amusing video I have seen this weekend.  I felt particularly sorry for the last one and its appearance of a nervous breakdown:

A test...OK, seems to work (about tiny data storage)

DNA Assembly Tech is Making The World’s Smallest Data Storage

http://flip.it/bMCwy

Not sure if the link works...

Oh yeah, it seems to.   Here it is, and here are some extracts from the article:

Researchers at France's Institut Charles Sadro and Aix-Marseille Universite have built binary data into a strand of synthetic polymer, a minuscule chain of chemical information about 60,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

This technology promises to take the future of data storage down to nanometers in coming years, says researcher Jean-Fraçois Lutz, deputy director of Institut Charles Sadron and researcher on the article published in Nature Communications.

Right now, storing one zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) takes roughly 1000 kilograms of cobalt alloy, the material used in hard drives. A zettabyte of Lutz's synthesized polymer would be about 10 grams.

El Nino news

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : El Nino Continues to Ramp Up | Weather Underground

Can humans directly detect quantum weirdness?

Quantum technology probes ultimate limits of vision : Nature News & Comment

I see that the minimum number of photons detectable by humans has been measured currently as three, but the experiments are going further:

Gisin has pioneered experiments¹ to see how the human eye responds to ‘quantum-weirdness’
effects. Although effects such as photons being in multiple places at once are well known, making humans part of the experiment “brings us closer to the quantum phenomenon”, he says.

Anthony Leggett, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who is also at Urbana-Champaign and who inspired Holmes’s work, says that quantum weirdness should disappear somewhere between the scale of atoms and that of human bodies. “We don’t know at what stage it’s going to break down — or how." Holmes's study will probably validate standard interpretations of quantum physics, he says, which assume that a photon that is in a ‘superposition’ of two states will essentially choose one option when it comes into contact with a detector — whether that is an artificial photon counter or a rod cell.

But in principle, says physicist Angelo Bassi at the University of Trieste in Italy, each of the photon's personas could hit a rod cell, and that superposition could persist up to the brain. If so, there could even be “something like a superposition of two different perceptions, even if just for an instant”.

 Fascinating...

Woo considered

I see that The Australian got a credible sounding academic to say maybe there is something to infrasound from wind farms affecting some (perhaps a small percent) of people, in the same way that some people are more sensitive to seasickness.

A few issues to come to mind:

*  have reliable studies ever been done to assess whether people who claim severe reactions to such infrasound can even "sense" it (for example, by getting them to sleep in a lab and see if they are disturbed when the sound is off or on.)   If they have false cues as to when it is on, does that affect their perception of effects?  You would probably need them to stay in the lab more than one night, I guess.  This single study, by people living at home, is not considered reliable.

*  given that a lot of science on this notes that the wind or waves (or industry) creates a lot of background infrasound, and that windfarms make more infrasound in stronger wind, you would have to do a lot of careful measurements, I presume, to distinguish the amount of infrasound being created by the wind turbine as against the infrasound  just coming from the stronger wind around the house.   Has that ever been done?

* doesn't everyone get used to the infrasound of the beach?  If you camp near a surf beach, the sound from the ocean can make for a disturbed first night's sleep, but virtually everyone gets used to it, no?

Certainly, with the descriptions of symptoms that some people give in that study at my last link, I think it is entirely understandable why most scientists are more inclined to consider the problem a psychological one than anything else.  

I can't believe I'm posting a vegan recipe suggestion

Aquafaba: Baking with chickpea liquid for vegan meringues.

 Well, I do really like canned chickpeas (especially blitzing them with the few other ingredients you need to make houmos to get that ridiculously easy, cheap and tasty dip that I sometimes eat thickly on toast for lunch), and I would have wasted quite a few cans of chickpea liquid in my day.

But apparently, it whips into something that is very similar to meringue.

This sounds a bit science-y too, so I am keen to try...

Wind farms and politicians

I see that Alan Jones also hates wind turbines, and gets the always-wanting-to-please-whoever-he-is-talking-to PM to say he think's they're awful too.   And David Leyonhjelm got a run in The Australian (what a surprise it would be that paper) to crap on about how there really, really might be sickness caused by turbines.

A few comments I have about this, given that in the past I have expressed some cynicism about the value of them myself:

*  Joe Hockey's enormous offence taking at the Lake George turbines near Canberra was just ludicrous, given how far off they are in the distance and the unremarkable landscape that they are in.  If he is genuinely that sensitive to their appearance, it's more of an issue for psychological counselling than anything else.

*  That said, in some locations, particularly where they are closely grouped, I wouldn't ridicule the regret that some people feel about the change in the natural view.   But even in the "worst" cases, it's not going to be something that deserves the mental disturbance that some claim at their mere appearance.

*  I also wouldn't be surprised if some turbines, in some locations, cause audible noise issues which some people find annoying.   But then, people in cities have new roads and freeways (or ventilation outlets from new tunnels) built near them sometimes to, and regret the increase in background noise.   It's not a national disaster that people sometimes regret development near them.

* As far as the invisible infrasound "woo" of David Leyonhjelm:   he is the last person to have credibility on the issue, given his taking advice from an anti wind power advocate who is part of a astroturf spinoff group from the IPA and as such is full of members and advisers who have a complete non belief in climate change and have been fighting clean energy for ideological (and in all likelihood, funding) reasons  for a decade or more.

What's more, it is utterly disingenuous of anti turbine politicians to not note the active anti windfarm advocacy that is, from a scientific point of view, the likely cause of most psychological suffering of people who claim their local windfarm is ruining their lives.

*  Also, savor the irony, and/or hypocrisy, of Leyonhjelm, saying that the wind farm companies are like "big tobacco" in denying there is any evidence of detriment from their product.  Leyonhjelm happily takes donations from tobacco companies, who are still contenders for the most scurrilous corporate citizens on the globe.   (See the John Oliver report on their tactics.)

In any case, I think the public is paying little attention to Leyonhjelm's attention seeking enquiry, and I think most people rightly consider him to be an eccentric twit that he truly is.

Update:  I forgot to mention the way Leyonhjelm invokes a precautionary principle when it comes to wind farms and health effects (which, apparently, about 120 individuals in Australia have complained about out of about 20,000 living within a few km of windfarms), here in The Oz:

By the time further studies are published in recognised journals following peer review, many more people will have suffered. The fact we are not yet at that stage is no excuse for inaction and will not absolve the wind industry from liability for its negligent refusal to mitigate the harm it causes.

Yet he presumably finds the same precautionary principle not appropriate to consider for global climate change that could detrimentally affect, what, just a few billion people?  

What libertarian foolery....

Money making dinosaurs

Critic Reviews for Jurassic World - Metacritic

There are sufficient positive reviews for Jurassic World to be confident it will make a lot of money.  Which is nice for (executive producer) Steven Spielberg.

I see a few reviews mention Chris Pratt favourably.  It seems to me that if Spielberg wants one last Indiana Jones outing, it might be best to do a "James Bond" and just have Pratt doing the role as if he were the original character.   Alternatively, Pratt is only 35, certainly of an age where he could be 72 year old (!) Harrison Ford's son, but Jones was still being played as much younger than Ford's age, so I am not sure about that...Or perhaps, Pratt could turn up as Jones' other, completely unknown, son.  However it's done, it would surely be commercially very, very appealing to have Pratt take a large role in an Indiana Jones movie.
The obvious symbolism of Shia LaBeouf picking up his "father's" hat at the end of Crystal Skull simply has to be ignored, given poor old Shia's descent into complete loopiness.    

A net to connect your brain to the net?

Science fiction which involves future humans having a permanent neural connection to the future internet has always been a bit vague about how that connection would be made. 

Seems to me that this story in Nature might be the first hint of the technology that could do it:

A diverse team of physicists, neuroscientists and chemists has implanted mouse brains with a rolled-up, silky mesh studded with tiny electronic devices, and shown that it unfurls to spy on and stimulate individual neurons.

 The implant has the potential to unravel the workings of the mammalian brain in unprecedented detail. “I think it’s great, a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain,” says Rafael Yuste, director of the Neuro­technology Center at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the work.

If eventually shown to be safe, the soft mesh might even be used in humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, says Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University on Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the team. The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology on 8 June¹.

The Harvard team solved these problems by using a mesh of conductive polymer threads with either nanoscale electrodes or transistors attached at their intersections. Each strand is as soft as silk and as flexible as brain tissue itself. Free space makes up 95% of the mesh, allowing cells to arrange themselves around it.

In 2012, the team showed² that living cells grown in a dish can be coaxed to grow around these flexible scaffolds and meld with them, but this ‘cyborg’ tissue was created outside a living body. “The problem is, how do you get that into an existing brain?” says Lieber.

 Update:  someone comments after the Nature News article that it's like the "neural lace" used by Iain Banks in his Culture books.  Never read him myself,  but yes, it does sound as if it might be physically similar.   Quite interesting that this is the first time I've really heard of work on something that could have widespread neural connections.

Japanese men's problems

No wonder their population is shrinking:

Takashi Sakai is a healthy 41-year-old heterosexual man with a good job and a charming smile. But he’s never had sex, one of a growing number of middle-aged Japanese men who are still virgins.

Sakai has never even had any kind of relationship with a woman, and says he has no idea how he might get to know one.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend. It’s never happened,” he said. “It’s not like I’m not interested. I admire women. But I just cannot get on the right track.”....

A 2010 survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research found that around a quarter of unmarried Japanese men in their 30s were still virgins—even leading to the coining of a specific term, “yaramiso”, to describe them.

The figure was up around three percentage points from a similar survey in 1992.