Such is the worrying state of America

Egypt's pyramids for grain storage, not pharoahs' tombs, Ben Carson said in 1998 remarks - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The Atlantic notes that this idea is an old medieval one.   I find it remarkable that it could still be held by creationists today, since it suggests their ability to dismiss evidence extends to even being able to ignore the interior design of a building in front of their eyes.   What hope is there for convincing them they are wrong on the age of the universe, evolution, or climate change?

Please make him stop

The only good thing about Slate going behind a 5 article a month paywall (just clear your history and start again) is that it might stop you from reading another extremely silly bit of writing from the world's most irritating gay writer J. Bryan Lowder.  This one about how much he hates spooning.

Or perhaps you should read it (or, like me, just scan it and decide how embarrassingly bad it is within a couple of paragraphs) and then skip to the amusingly derisive comments.  Such as these (each is a separate comment):

This article is seriously making me reconsider being a Slate+ member. Yes, it is literally that bad of an article...

I can't tell whether this is satire or not.

I can imagine the Slate editorial meeting this morning. "Lowder! An editorial piece on my desk in fifteen minutes or else! I don't care what you write about as long as I see a text file in my inbox fifteen minutes from now, got it?"

 Not every idea one has needs to be shared, though I understand that idea is alien to millennials. And calling something like spooning "sexist" is why people stop taking accusations of sexism seriously.

Well, that was, um... ah...

 Seriously? This was green-lighted?

I finally realized what's going on:  Lowder hates Slate and everything it stands for and is trying to destroy it from the inside out.  He is SPOONING SLATE!  BRILLIANT!

Waves discussed

My son last night had a science question on his homework that asked how a change in frequency affects the speed of a wave.  I could remember the answer, but not a good way to explain it.   I thought there must be a decent Youtube video out there showing what happens, but on stuff like this, it can be surprisingly hard to find a good video for a high school level.

The best I could come up with, and it is pretty good, is from the Khan Academy talking about the speed of sound.  (It's the second in a series, but I don't think its essential to watch the first.  It also has more detail than necessary, but in the last 60 seconds, they deal with the frequency/speed issue pretty well.)

So, for all other parents with a similar problem, here it is:


    Speed of Sound:

Strange polling

Andrew Bolt is celebrating apparent skepticism showing up in the CSIRO polling story that I noted yesterday, yet if one reads more widely on the topic (he never does), there is reason to be somewhat skeptical of the CSIRO results.

This chart from ongoing polling (with a 1,000 person sample - which sounds reasonable) from the Lowy Institute, for example, indicates attitudes that hardly seem consistent with the CSIRO poll.

Odd that about 88% on this poll think there is a problem to be addressed in some form if (according to Bolt's reading of CSIRO) more than half of Australians aren't even sure there is a problem.

On the other hand, Essential polling from 2013 indicates that the CSIRO result may not be too far off the mark, but the "climate change is real and is caused by humans" has a clearer lead.

It's all a bit confusing.

I see that the CSIRO itself has studied the question of how the phrasing of questions on this topic affects outcomes. 


It is one of the trickier areas for polling.  

Private school problem

Brisbane readers in particular are likely noting with amazement the evidence to the Royal Commission into child abuse regarding what went on at Brisbane Grammar School in the 70's and 80's, including the former deputy headmaster denying he ever had any knowledge of anything amiss.  (Not only are former students saying this is wrong, but so are parents - a fact which seems to have been under-reported on the television summaries of the commission I have noticed.  UPDATE:sorry, I've confused evidence against the late headmaster with that against this deputy - but against him there was still evidence that he had questioned a student about his inappropriate relationship with Lynch.)

It seems the evidence of some ex-students is that, amongst the boys, knowledge of what the school's counsellor was doing in his locked door (hello, common sense warning sign) sessions with boys was pretty widespread.   But, somewhat oddly, there have been snippets on the radio of some ex students saying that (at the time) they appreciated his "caring" interest in them.  (I assume the fact that they are at the enquiry means they later appreciated that it was an incredible abuse of trust and authority.)

As with what went on at Knox Grammar in Sydney, it seems to me somewhat ironic that this sort of thing went on at a school where parents were paying extraordinary sums for the best of care and education for their kids.   Given that I was at a (rather working class area) state high school in the 1970's, it's extremely difficult to imagine that the same sort of thing could have happened there - for one thing, the State system never had any money for intensive on site counselling, and for another, it's kind of hard imagining the kind of guys going to a mixed gender State school thinking that what Lynch was doing was above board.   It seems to me that going to a top private school probably gave some of these boys a more ready acceptance of authority and belief that everyone there was really acting in their best interests.

I was sure I had made similar comments about abuse allegations at Knox, but can't find that post now.  In any event, it sort of goes to show an upside to State schools not being able to afford to pay staff to have too much time with students...

Update:  found my Knox post from earlier this year - only by scrolling through my blog.  Proof again that for some mysterious reason, Google is really bad at searching for keywords through its own hosted blogs.  (I had tried advanced search, and all...)

Update 2:   just noticed at the lunchtime news:  more terrible evidence at the royal commission, with the former deputy headmaster giving exactly the wrong response to an invitation to apologise to the former students.    Also, another student gave evidence that a teacher who is still at the school utterly rejected his approach for help when he was dazed and confused about getting abused by the counsellor for help with bullying and homesickness.   What spectacularly poor PR for the school.  

Sardines noted, again

As I wrote earlier this year, after a long break, I've started eating canned sardines again.   (Dieter's tip:  a whole can is surprisingly modest in calories, too.   A can on a couple of those corn or rice disk things can come in at about 200 calories - or one meal if you are doing the 5/2 diet and spread your 600 calories evenly over 3 meals.)

But I am upset with Aldi.   After languishing in the cupboard for many months, last week I found a can of "sardine sprats" from Germany via Aldi, and they were smoked and extremely delicious.  (Unlike your more routine sardines in oil, or tomato sauce.  Actually today I had a can from Portugal in a chilli sauce which was quite nice.  I generally don't care for the tomato sauce versions, though.) 

But, as with their smoked mussels from Germany, Aldi no longer stocks these sprats.   In fact, there are no German produced canned seafood there at all.  The nearest I found was something from Poland.  (Herring, I think.)  But most of their stuff is now either Thailand or from the extremely dubious food processing standards of China.  (I refuse to buy such Chinese products.)

I don't know where I could find smoked sprats like the German ones again.   Perhaps I need to visit a few more Mediterranean delis around South Brisbane/West End.    Perhaps a reader from Melbourne might locate some, and could arrange a parcel to Brisbane?  

Update:  hey, someone has already written "The Sardine Diet".  Dang.

Some surprising figures

According to the CSIRO, there are actually more Liberal voters who think climate change is natural than National Party voters:

That's odd - I would have guessed the percentages between those two parties would be reversed.  Maybe being on the land does help convince people climate change is real?   Or maybe not - I see that 18% of Nationals think it isn't happening at all, compared to 13% of Liberals.

But I'm not sure this should be taken too much to heart.  First, the weather people experience affects how they think about climate change, so level of concern fluctuates all the time.  And as the report notes, people's responses don't always make sense:

The CSIRO survey found some confusion among respondents. For instance, even those who thought global warming was not happening still attributed just over a third of climate change to human activity.
Those who thought there was no climate change counted friends and family as their most trusted source of information on the issue. University scientists were the most trusted source of respondents saying humans are to blame for global warming.
"Politicians were also rarely nominated as a basis for opinions, despite the strong associations that opinions had with voting behaviour," the report noted. "This aligns with recent research suggesting politicians and political parties might be more influential than [people] think."

Still, there's no doubt about it:  on the major scientific and political issue of the century, Green voters are by far the most sensible in recognizing the problem, followed by Labor.  And it would seem about half of the Liberals and Nationals are caught up in the culture/ideology war that prevents them making sensible judgement about this.  Sad.

Illicit drug history

I've long been skeptical of the simplified version of how and why some drugs became illegal that is given by some pro-drug reform advocates, especially when it comes from a libertarian perspective that broader society really has no right or interest in trying to modify private behaviour.   So it is with interest that I have stumbled across Points:  The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

I haven't gotten too far into it, so I am not sure whether I will end up skeptical of some of its writers' positions too, but it at least seems to indicate that they deal with the problem as a complex one.   Here is a brief extract from one post:

Ironically, when one digs into the history of marijuana and its connection to the jazz world in the early 20th century, it appears white men were primarily responsible for introducing black musicians and Harlemites to weed (or in the parlance of their day, gage, tea, muggles or reefer, among many other names). Italian-American Leon Roppolo, the clarinetist for the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, was said to have introduced marijuana to the Chicago jazz scene, in particular to Jewish saxophonist Mezz Mezzrow, who later became weed dealer to Louis Armstrong and much of Harlem. “Mezz” became another nickname for pot, according to the saxophonist, who also considered himself an “honorary Negro.”

Notably, Mezzrow’s autobiography, Really the Blues – which is so peppered with terminology from jazz and African American cultures that it includes a lengthy glossary – exemplifies Becker’s theory of how one becomes a marijuana user (or in 1930s slang, a viper). Becker argues that one must learn “how to be high” and is usually coached into weed usage through friends who are already active users. The first time Mezzrow smoked, he didn’t feel a thing, and was reprimanded. “You ain’t even smokin’ it right,” he was told. “You got to hold that muggle so that it barely touches your lips, see, then draw in air around it. Say tfff, tfff, only breathe in when you say it. Then don’t blow it out right away, you got to give the stuff a chance.”
After receiving this instruction and finishing his first joint correctly, Mezzrow returned to his bandstand. He recalled that “the first thing I noticed was I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head…then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip, and my head buzzed like a loudspeaker…I felt I could go on playing for years without running out of ideas and energy…The people were going crazy over the subtle changes in our playing.” Mezz argued that “tea puts a musician in a real masterly sphere, and that’s why so many jazzmen have used it.”

Despite Mezz’s positive experiences with the drug, 1930s critics increasingly associated weed with black musical subcultures and pathological behavior.

Pteropods in the news, again

Abrupt onset and prolongation of aragonite undersaturation events in the Southern Ocean : Nature Climate Change : Nature Publishing Group: Ocean acidification may lead to seasonal aragonite undersaturation in surface waters of the Southern Ocean as early as 2030 (ref. 1). These conditions are harmful to key organisms such as pteropods, which contribute significantly to the pelagic foodweb and carbon export fluxes in this region. Although the severity of ocean acidification impacts is mainly determined by the duration, intensity and spatial extent of aragonite undersaturation events, little is known about the nature of these events, their evolving attributes and the timing of their onset in the Southern Ocean. Using an ensemble of ten Earth system models, we show that starting around 2030, aragonite undersaturation events will spread rapidly, affecting ~30% of Southern Ocean surface waters by 2060 and & greater than 70% by 2100, including the Patagonian Shelf. On their onset, the duration of these events will increase abruptly from 1 month to 6 months per year in less than 20 years in & greater than 75% of the area affected by end-of-century aragonite undersaturation. This is likely to decrease the ability of organisms to adapt to a quickly evolving environment. The rapid equatorward progression of surface aragonite undersaturation can be explained by the uptake of anthropogenic CO2, whereas climate-driven physical or biological changes will play a minor role.

 The Sydney Morning Herald report on this notes:

"What surprised us was really the abruptness at which this
under-saturation [of calcium carbonate-based aragonite] occurs in large
areas of the Southern Ocean," Axel Timmermann​, a co-author of the study
and oceanography professor at the University of Hawaii told Fairfax
Media. "It's actually quite scary."

Since the Southern Ocean is already close to the threshold for shell-formation, relatively
small changes in acidity levels will likely show up there first, Professor Timmermann said: "The background state is already very close to corrosiveness."

And of course, the "let's burn coal to make poor people rich and airconditioned into safety" crowd never address the point that their tactic will only accelerate potential food chain collapse in the oceans.

Sounds pretty reasonable, even if next to impossible given the nutty American political climate

Joseph Stiglitz on Fixing Economic Inequality - The Atlantic

Yeti tales from Bhutan

Why don't people see the yeti any more? - BBC News

I see that belief in the yeti is given as an explanation for low doorways into houses.  (Yeti can't bend down to get in, apparently.)

As always, I'm most fascinated by the foul smell said to be associated with all yeti/bigfoot creatures, especially as I knew a guy who got frightened by loud bush trampling sounds and a foul smell when he was camping once in state forest north of Brisbane.

The American white male mid-life crisis

Prospect has a lengthy article about a new paper showing a significant rise in white male (usually with low level of education) deaths in the US in the period 1999 - 2013.  Yeah, it is startling when you see this graph:

As Prospect says:

To conservatives, the white midlife mortality reversal in the United States may initially seem to confirm Murray’s argument about moral decay caused by the welfare state. But that interpretation runs into an obvious objection: Similar trends are not evident in the European countries that have even more generous systems of social protection than the United States does.

Although Case and Deaton are cautious about interpreting the data, they single out two possible causes of the mortality reversal. The first relates specifically to the timing of increased drug-related deaths: the introduction and ready availability of opioid prescription painkillers (such as Oxycontin) beginning in the late 1990s, followed by a shift to heroin, both directly linked to rising death rates among whites over the 1999-2013 period. But it is not clear, Case and Deaton point out, whether rising drug use is a response to an “epidemic of pain,” or whether the introduction and distribution of new prescription painkillers played an independent, causal role. One way or the other, however, Case and Deaton’s study puts in bold relief the sheer magnitude of the consequences of today’s drug plague.

A second potential cause highlighted by Case and Deaton (and possibly related to the first) is stress from economic change resulting from slower economic growth and rising inequality. “Many of the baby-boom generation,” they note, “are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education.” But they also observe that some other rich countries have seen “even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience.”

 It seems so very clear that the American experience with prescription painkillers and addiction has been a real disaster, yet it still seems one that attracts inadequate attention.

The magazine thinks this says a lot about the American welfare system:

Here is where the stronger systems of social protection in other countries may play a role in both reducing inequality and cushioning people from the adverse social psychological consequences of wage stagnation. One key difference potentially affecting people in midlife, as Case and Deaton point out, is that the other rich countries have maintained defined-benefit pensions, while employers in the United States have shifted increasingly to defined-contribution pensions (such as 401(k) plans) that do not provide the same degree of security. As a result, many Americans with only a high-school education not only lack the skills in midlife to find good jobs or even to stay employed but also face the likelihood of destitution in old age.

These trends put new light on current debates about disability insurance and retirement policy. Contrary to those like Murray who attribute the growth in Social Security Disability Insurance to a decline in the work ethic, Case and Deaton’s data suggest that the increased number of beneficiaries reflects a real deterioration of health in middle age. Raising the Social Security retirement age may seem to be no problem for the educated and affluent who are in good health and do little physical labor, but delaying retirement poses a much bigger problem for workers who are experiencing increased burdens of pain and disability in midlife.

We'll be reading a lot more about this study, I bet...

And by the way:   I reckon it indicates nothing good for the practical consequences of more libertarian views on social and economic issues.

Forgotten proto-hippies

I for one had never heard of a English arty-hippy-magical youth movement from the 1920's called the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (makes me think of "kibble"),  but The Guardian has remedied that.

It's a good read, with some amusing photos too.  (George Orwell dismissal of them as sex maniacs gets a mention, too, and I can't help but wonder if they somehow had a role in his idea for the Anti Sex League in 1984.)

Speaking of Orwell, I just found this from The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell:

Don't think I knew of the CIA involvement before....

An Antarctic surprise

For an organisation that climate change deniers have claimed is part of the self serving conspiracy to convince the world that it is heating up probelmatically, NASA sure doesn't know how to hide research that they know said deniers are going to leap on with joy.

So the Antarctic land ice sheet might (for now) still be putting on weight overall, not loosing it?   As a researcher says, though, this does raise an interesting question about the tricky field of sea level rise:

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

Anyhow, I'd be sure that there is more to come from Real Climate and others about this.  

Update:  here's a post at Hotwhopper that puts some perspective on this (including how it is a quite different different result from some other, recent work.)   It's all to do with the complexities of using satellites that measure different things, over different periods.  I would have guessed that the GRACE satellite that measures mass via changes in the gravity field would be the most reliable for working out the ice sheet balance, but this latest study (I think) doesn't use it. 

More about that passing Halloween asteroid

Radar images from those observations revealed asteroid 2015 TB145 true size (it's a bit larger than previously thought) and its speed. The asteroid is hurtling through space at a whopping 78,293 mph (126,000 km/h).

"This would generate a 6-mile-wide crater if it were to the Earth, something of this size and speed," asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in the Slooh webcast. He was also impressed by the early radar images of the 2015 TB145.

And it was only found a few weeks before its close fly by.  Link.

The modern blight of smoking

Meet the Melbourne oncologist now at the centre of Big Tobacco’s dartboard

Simon Chapman (the mortal enemy of Sinclair Davidson, incidentally - I suspect they are both in comic book costumes chasing each other around the city at night, such is the depth of their mutual disdain) has an interesting post up which references the way lung cancer really took off in the 20th century.  I remember Paul Johnson wrote about how the modern cigarette really sent smoking rates through the roof in the early 20th century, but I am curious as to the smoking rate in the earlier centuries.

Stick a fork in it

Well, it's amusing watching the hair pulling and shirt (and blouse) rending that is still going on at Catallaxy over the replacement of Tony Abbott with the popular (to normal people) Malcolm Turnbull.   I see that now that the obnoxious Jim Allen has joined in  with a post that spends a great deal of time complaining about the fact that a pro Turnbull challenge post was written by an anonymous contributor.  (Seriously, who cares?)  Earlier, Sinclair had called the Abbott whiners "unmanly" (?, given most male Abbott supporters there are ones who deride homosexuality routinely), leading to a complaint or 20 from some of his long standing supporters.   He in turn complained about getting sick of the criticism that he was stifling free speech on the topic, etc etc.

All highly amusing to see a site which, as far as I can tell, is unified only in its refusal to accept AGW, finding nothing else they can agree upon. 

The incredibly hard to please Kenny

Two decades of Media Watch abstinence | The Australian

I saw Media Watch last week and thought its position on Kenny was probably more than fair.   But according to Kenny, a media show cannot report on a media controversy (an allegation about Kenny which the show noted was hotly denied by Kenny) because it repeats an allegation.

The funny thing is, because of the Australian's paywall, a lot of people (like me) know nothing about what he wrote as a result of his visit to Nauru.

And his extremely politically partisan performance in commentary over the last decade would make every reasonable person question whether his reporting on this white hot issue was balanced, and give it a miss for that reason alone.

That said, I had forgotten that he had been a key figure in the Hindmarsh Island affair, which really was a left wing scandal.  But did he give up journalism for mere commentary and now wants to be seen as a journalist again?

Update:  Media Watch under Paul Barry also fully took Kenny's side in his big defamation complaint against the ABC, too.   (Even though I thought it wasn't really defamatory - just an unfunny joke in very poor taste.)  

Always had a soft spot for ELO

Jeff Lynne launches into new orbit with ELO's 'Alone in the Universe' - LA Times

I noticed an ELO video clip up on Vimeo yesterday, but didn't watch it all due to a stuttering connection.  So, the master of overproduction, Jeff Lynne, is still making music.   I suspect that even if one is not keen on his style, it's hard to positively dislike his music.  

Even Nature got into the Halloween spirit

Zombie physics: 6 baffling results that just won't die : Nature News & Comment