The very mixed bag that is Singapore

BBC - Capital - Why expats call this utopia

Interesting article about Singapore - low income taxes, but some pretty extraordinary duties on some items.  And it now has the title of world's most expensive city.

I take it they also think that putting enormous sculptures of a naked baby in a park might encourage their young folk have children? 

Catchy title

Climate Change and Conservative Brain Death -- NYMag

Speaking of climate (and weather):   Brisbane forecast is for 34 degrees on Saturday.

Everyone is complaining about the heat and humidity here of a long lasting summer.  Not that the upper temperatures are breaking records: just that it seems to have been muggy and relatively breeze-less for so many days (and nights) this summer.   Not much rain, but enough that the place still looks green.

Googling around, it seems that many parts of the Northern Hemisphere are exceptionally warm so far this March.  I wouldn't be surprised if the February giant leap in global temperature anomaly is beaten again in March.

Of course I have to post about this...

....the news of a fifth Indiana Jones movie, of course.

Reading the comments under The Guardian's story on this, there are (of course) many condemnations of Crystal Skull (lefty people seem, in particular, to despise it), and there are many attempts at funny, age related, titles.  But it seems to me that not many of them are very good.

Perhaps my favourite comment so far is this one:

 I'm not sure being dragged along under a mobility scooter is going to have quite the same dramatic impact.

As for me, I'll put out there (again - I think I have suggested this years ago here) my idea for a Grand Unification of Spielberg films - that it end with a very old Indiana Jones turning up as a formerly unseen astronaut entering the mothership at the end of Close Encounters.

Brain stimulation backlash, and shaking up Alzheimers

Neurostimulation: Bright sparks : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

I overlooked this interesting article at Nature about the current state of research into mild brain stimulation (of the kind that some people are doing at home with as little as a 9 V battery, apparently.)

As it explains, it seems that there is currently something of a backlash against initially promising results, but this of itself may be a swing too far in the other direction.

I'm hoping that it turns out to be useful for Alzheimers, as well as the surprisingly blunt instrument of using ultrasound to attack the plaques on brain cells that cause the problem. 

And look, with this extract from a press release I get to make a political statement against economists like Le Sloan, who routinely dismiss government investment in medical research:

Queensland scientists have found that non-invasive ultrasound
technology can be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and restore memory.

University of Queensland researchers discovered that the innovative
drug-free approach breaks apart the neurotoxic amyloid plaques that
result in memory loss and cognitive decline.

Welcoming the findings today at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute,
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said they could have a wide
impact for the community.

“The Government’s $9 million investment into this technology was to
drive discoveries into clinics, and today’s announcement indicates that
together with the Queensland Brain Institute, it was a worthwhile
investment,” Ms Palaszczuk said...

“We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics,” Professor Götz said.

“The ultrasound waves oscillate tremendously quickly, activating
microglial cells that digest and remove the amyloid plaques that destroy
brain synapses.

“The word ‘breakthrough’ is often mis-used, but in this case I think
this really does fundamentally change our understanding of how to treat
this disease, and I foresee a great future for this approach.”

Wilful blindness

Steve Kates, one of the "brains trust" at Catallaxy (excuse me while I snigger), wrote just today:

For me, belief in global warming is as clear a sign of anti-capitalist ideologically-driven wishful thinking as I would care to choose. It may be a reality, but it is one for which the evidence is virtually non-existent....

which is good for either a laugh, or some serious head shaking, depending on one's mood, given the wide publicity this graph is getting today:

 Of course the monthly peak will drop again within the year, but it's a mighty impressive peak, and the trend of that red line is in danger of growing steeper.

 

Clearly, an inadequate system

Germanwings crash: victims' relatives say Lufthansa should have stopped pilot flying | World news | The Guardian

I wonder what the situation is in Australia, and other countries, regarding notification doctors can give to an employer of a employee's psychiatric state.

While not every employer needs to be kept in the loop, surely for those employees who work in an industry with the safety of others in their hands should expect that their employer should know of their doctor's concerns that they have psychosis. 

A weird place

Now, I don't care for snakes as much as the next city bred wimpy male who gets enough of a fright when seeing a blue tongue lizard head poking out from the undergrowth, but reading about this public festival of snake killing and skinning in Texas still made me feel queasy.    Are enthusiastic public tours of abattoirs a "thing" in Texas, too?

Bar

Had a beer here this afternoon.  it's The Charming Squire, the James Squire pub in a corner of the Brisbane Convention Centre, opposite South Bank, and it's ridiculously, incredibly, popular.


 The James Squire range of beers is reliably good: it's the craft beer-ish style beer you have when you aren't really in a craft beer pub.  I've been to this pub a few times, and I would love to see how much money they bank each day. 

The company could surely not be more pleased with how it's going.

Oh look...the entrance to the Prime Minister's office while Tony Abbott had the job....

The confusion continues

Feminists should speak up about Credlin, and the creeps should close their mouths

Seems to me that Jacqueline Maley writes a column that makes sense until half way through, then goes off the rails.

She claims:

Call it a failure of the imagination, but it still seems we can only understand a woman's power over a man in terms of sex.

Oh, bulldust.   I'm sure Margaret Thatcher had a powerful sway over her (mostly male?) cabinet during most of her Prime Ministership, and no one thought she was sleeping with them.  

And this:

The former prime minister, so beholden to his Amazonian chief of staff,
the Wallis Simpson over whom he lost his reason, is somehow exculpated
from the enormously bad decision-making which characterised his tenure.

Double bulldust!  I reckon this is just feminist reading between the lines to work up something to be offended about.  It seems to me that in everything she says, Savva argues that it was Abbott's fault for not remedying the poisonous situation that everyone (from John Howard down) was bringing to his attention. 

The best looking McDonalds in the world, I'm guessing

McDonald’s on Paris’ Champs-Elysees gets an upscale makeover.

Look at the photos.  It's ridiculously gorgeous.

(I had a particularly nice "Create Your Own" last Saturday, too.  The only thing wrong with the stores now is the annoying way the menu screen cycles every 8 seconds before you've had a chance to read everything.)

Um, maybe she was just a terrible Chief of Staff?

It's pretty hilarious, really.

Andrew Bolt cannot understand why Liberal women are not rushing to defend Peta Credlin  as an unfairly "smeared" sister worthy of support.

Why does he refuse to believe what this plainly suggests:  that Credlin was a terrible Chief of Staff who everyone (bar Abbott) could see was causing massive harm,  and that it's not about sexism at all.

And having said that, of course Abbott can take prime responsibility for the situation, as he is clearly incapable of making good judgements about who to listen to.

[Bolt also runs with approval a patently silly piece from The Age in which it is noted that Tony Blair had the sort of relationship with his (male) chief of staff such that they would discuss things while Blair was in various states of undress, including nude apparently.   So, hey, why should Liberal MP's look askance at famous "man's man" Abbott slapping his COS on the backside, or watching her put her head on his shoulder?   If he had her in the bathroom while he was having a shower, nothing wrong with that because guys are sometimes nude in front of guys and what's the difference?    Really, Andrew, you're a dill being sucked in by feminist false equivalence.]

Blood pressure alert

Every time I see Simon Chapman's head appearing on an anti smoking article (today, at The Conversation), I imagine an unhealthy rise in the blood pressure of Sinclair Davidson, and a mad rush to find something in it to nitpick about in a post that no one will care about at Catallaxy. 

It amuses me, somewhat.

The complicated radiation story

Is Fukushima's exclusion zone doing more harm than radiation? - BBC News

At the end of this article, which has one expert questioning why the Japanese government is setting such a relatively low level of background radiation as being needed before residents can return to land around Fukushima, there is this caution:

Of course this is a ferociously complex issue, and many will argue that I
am ignoring the dangers of "hot spots" and from ingesting radioactive
Caesium particles in food or water or dust. But five years after the
meltdowns at Fukushima 100,000 people are still unable to go home. That
is a massive human tragedy.

Yes, it seems to me (without knowing anything concrete about this) that the matter of how a background radiation level is being maintained is important.  If you live in an area where the rocks and minerals around you are naturally radiative, but are in a more or less solid state, wouldn't that be better than being in an area with a lower background reading that's come from dust that descended from the sky?   Because I would have guessed that getting that dust into your lungs is likely to do worse damage than standing near (say) a block of granite that has a naturally high reading.

But how do scientists take this difference (assuming I'm making a legitimate point) into account when declaring an area safe or not for long term residence?   Surely it's hard to measure the likelihood of dust ingestion?

Textor makes some enemies

Liberal strategist Mark Textor seems to have no love for the IPA, so he goes up a notch in credibility:

Wide-ranging changes introduced by Tony Abbott, such as the potential deregulation of universities, were the result of a broken political system where considered and experienced policy wonks were overlooked, Textor argued.

“During the time of great estrangement during the Abbott years, the reality is people who are close to the machine like myself thought that many of the reforms ... we were getting were completely out of step,” he said. “Don’t assume the government’s agenda and the political agenda are the same because governments aren’t political parties and their agendas are quite different.”

Instead, “21-year-old pimply theorists from the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs] and the Australia Institute” with little real-world experience have been running the show, Textor said.

I'm guessing he must be grinding his teeth about James Paterson's grab of the top Victorian Senate seat then.

Satellite or surface temperatures

A really clear video here explaining why the surface temperature record is way more robust than the satellite record.   Information totally lost on the highly dislikeable Ted Cruz, of course.

Sounds promising

10 Cloverfield Lane Reviews - Metacritic

The story sounds a bit Twilight Zone-ish, and I think I want to see it.  (I've always liked John Goodman, too, so it's nice to see him being a lead actor with a lot of screen time.)

Runs in the family

Second Wachowski Sibling Comes Out as Transgender Woman - The New York Times

OK, surely we must be at Peak Transgender?

No, wait on...

When Donald Trump becomes President, and then uses an Address to the Nation to declare he cannot hide the truth behind his unmanly tiny hands any more, and he will forthwith be known as "Ms President Donna Trump" - then we will have reached the peak.

Noooooooooooooooooo!

By rights, I should refuse to publicise this study.  On the other hand, out of respect and love for the work of Steven Spielberg, I have been thinking of having an "ET on a flying bike" tattoo, positioned so that my butt can look like the moon it's flying over:*

There's no known cure for the common cold, but receiving multiple tattoos can strengthen your immunological responses, potentially making you heartier in fighting off common infections, according to research by a trio of University of Alabama scholars. 

*  I may not be being serious.

Weird blindness of the Right

What fun it is to watch the outrage of frustrated Abbott lovers (and Turnbull haters - he believes in global warming, after all) over the Niki Savva book.   (Which, it would seem, has been selling like hotcakes.  I'm even tempted myself.)

Rowan Dean, about the most obnoxious of right wing warrior commentators in Australia at the moment, is quoted by Bolt as writing:

Moreover, in interviews Ms Savva has repeatedly trotted out the claim that Ms Credlin attempted to have herself and Peter van Onselen fired from the Australian (an irrelevance given they are both still there), as an excuse for not following the normal procedure of putting allegations of an affair to her two subjects prior to publication.

Um, it's more than "a claim":  in the Australian this morning she has the communication from then editor Mitchell confirming that not only had Credlin demanded it, but Abbott was on the case too!

And, quite frankly, your average person might think it is a pretty damn good reason for a writer not to bother asking them about an affair, especially when the claim in the book is not even that there were having one, but that a large slab of their own party thought it looked that way and that it was causing problems within the government.  (And Abbott's - and I think Credlin's? -  denials to the messenger is in the book too.)    Working up indignation about her not asking them is therefore just piffle.

As for the hypocrisy of all of this - a word Bolt is flinging around with his lack of insight - I thought Righties considered it an outrage when Gillard did her nut at The Australian for running a Milne piece which contained a claim that had previously been nixed by their lawyers as defamatory.   We don't know if she asked for his sacking, but he got sacked, and then this was supposed to be the biggest outrage to freedom of speech ever.

Now, clear evidence that Credlin (and possibly Abbott) was specifically telling Mitchell to sack Savva for her reporting unfriendly stories, and we're supposed to feel sorry for Peta??

Gillard, as her reward for being uppity about a report she didn't like, got a plethora of Right wing purely politically motivated witch hunting lasting years over allegations involving her love life  20 years ago, which had already been aired and denied about (I think) 12 years ago, and which Bolt chose to help re-publicise.   The end result was always predictable - if none of her internal enemies had evidence 12 years ago, they were hardly likely to turn it up now.  And the relevance of this to how she was doing her job now - precisely nil.   (The relevance of the Abbott/Credlin relationship - huge within his own party, right now.)  The only good thing to come out of it was the utter humiliation of Michael Smith.

The right wing pundits are absurd.   (Oh, and to be fair, so is Bernard Keane on this.  He's way off mark on this.)