Claiming the credit

News today of another decrease in the rate of abortion in the US:

The latest report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, incorporating data from 47 states, said the abortion rate for 2013 was 12.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years. That's half the rate recorded in 1980.

It's mildly amusing watching pro-life organisations claiming all the credit for this.  While there are several articles around saying that there is no single factor at play, there are certainly good reasons for rejecting the pro-lifers "it's all our great work" claim.    Last year, for example, fivethirtyeight had an article arguing strongly that fewer pregnancies - almost certainly related to better access to contraception - is behind the lower abortion rate:

Although it’s impossible to attribute the decline to a single factor, the data shows that better contraception — combined with a bad economy and a falling teen pregnancy rate — is largely responsible. Abortion rates did fall in many of the states with new restrictions, but they also dropped in others, such as New York and Connecticut, where access to abortion is relatively unobstructed. In fact, some of the states with the biggest declines — Hawaii, Nevada and New Mexico — have enacted no new abortion laws in recent years, suggesting that something other than reduced access is spurring the trend.

Elizabeth Ananat, an associate professor of economics at Duke University who studies the economics of fertility, said the data also contradicts the notion that more women are rejecting abortion and choosing to stay pregnant. “If women’s attitudes were really shifting, we should see the birth rate go up,” she says. “Instead, birth rates are falling, too.” (The birth rate reached a record low in 2013, according to the CDC. It fell by 2 percent between 2010 and 2013, and by 9 percent between 2007 and 2013.) According to Ananat and other experts, the decline in abortions is a symptom of another trend: Fewer women are getting pregnant in the first place.
What’s behind the declining pregnancy rate is more difficult to pinpoint. One clear factor, said Joerg Dreweke, a spokesman for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, is the teenage pregnancy rate, which has been falling steadily since the early 1990s. According to Dreweke, this is partially due to better contraceptive use among teenagers. Other research on teen fertility rates supports this: In a paper published earlier this year, economists Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney found that other policy changes — such as sex education, whether it was comprehensive or abstinence-only — couldn’t explain the decline. Because the vast majority (82 percent in 2010) of teen pregnancies are unplanned, a reduction in teen pregnancy overall will have an effect on the abortion rate. Since teenagers account for only about 18 percent of abortions, though, their effect is limited.

With the distinct possibility that Republican changes to the health system will lead to more expensive contraception, and harder access to abortions, who knows what will happen to the rate in future.

But, to confound things further, I also note that, oddly, it may be that the abortion rate in Australia is now quite a bit higher than America, despite Medicare, easy access to contraception, and non religious sex education in schools.

Seems there is something we may not be doing right....  

Update:   Oh, and before any escapee from Catallaxy drops by and suggests that the higher Australia rate is evidence of the success of the much higher profile pro-Life culture in the US, I would point out that places like most of the the Nordic countries have rates either very similar to, or lower than, the new low in the US, and other corners of Europe, like Holland  have had a substantially lower rate for many years.    I doubt that the pro-Life movement has any significant profile in those countries.  In fact, the whole lesson of what happened in Eastern Europe (a dramatic drop in abortion rate after contraception became more available) is that contraception can massively reduce abortion.  

Surprise - a good environmental story

Mercury levels dropping in north Atlantic tuna

Neo Nazi murder

Far-right terrorist Thomas Mair jailed for life for Jo Cox murder | Politics | The Guardian

I had assumed that the guy who did this would turn out to be mentally ill.  But no, turns out he was a neo-Nazi who, it would appear, has no regrets about this murder done in the cause of Brexit, apparently.

Is it just me, or does it seem that the wingnut Right pays scant attention to murders when done by someone clearly on their end of the political spectrum?  

Killed four so far

Explainer: What is thunderstorm asthma?

Can't say I was even aware of this as a medical phenomena until the storm in Melbourne this week killed four people via the indirect route of asthma.   All a bit of a worry...

Sure...de-fund the most useful thing NASA does

Trump adviser says administration will eliminate NASA climate research.

Phil Plait is rightly furious at the claim by a Trump adviser that they will be de-funding NASA's climate science research.  Of course, given Trump's recent reversal track record, it's quite possible that in fact funding for it will end up increasing.   But I wouldn't bet on that one.

I suppose I should note, however, that there has been talk of a Trump administration telling NASA to forget about Mars and concentrate on going back to the Moon.  That would actually be a policy I would endorse, and may well again prove that even the worst administrations struggle to do absolutely everything wrong.  

Update:   Stoat says that maybe Plait shouldn't be so upset - it's not really obvious why NASA should be the body doing climate research anyway.  This leads to one cranky response, and one funny-'cos-it's-true, in comments:

 Eli Rabett

http:/rabett.blogspot.com

2016/11/24

Idiot, what makes you think the pie won’t shrink to nothing?

The Republicans tried to take out NSF geoscience sciences last year along with cuts in NOAA and NASA climate sciences, Took a lot of work to hold the cuts in check. There is nothing holding them back this year and they are quite likely to try and shift programs without shifting money or people,

 And, the other one:

           Phil Hays

Amused and amazed.

2016/11/23

I think you don’t understand Donald J Trump.
He has no idea about any subject, other than how great Donald J Trump is. And how Donald J Trump is going to win every time. And how everyone is going to love Donald J Trump.
Climate? Ideas will depends on who he is talking to. If he can see how Donald J Trump can win by supporting a carbon tax, he is for a carbon tax. If he can see how Donald J Trump can win with cap and trade, he would be for cap and trade. If removing regulations like soot emission limits from burning coal is a winning subject, he is for that as well. And for clean air, he is for that at the same time. If green energy technology is the wave of the future, and Donald J Trump can win by promoting it, he is for green energy technology. You can’t agree with or disagree with his views, as they change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. He will be for or against the Paris agreement, depending on who he is talking to, where he is talking, the phase of the Moon, and probably other factors.
Don’t think his advisers know any better what he is going to say or do. Quoting them is a waste of bytes. Please don’t waste bytes.
As for should NASA be doing climate change research? Other than giving business to letterhead printing companies, I don’t see what possible advantage moving climate change research elsewhere would have.
Or stopping climate change research, for that matter. What we don’t know about can and will hurt us.

Conservatives in denial

“Fake news” hysteria just the latest form of elite paternalism � Hot Air

No, Hot Air.  There is no comparison between the lurid, often deliberately funny, front pages of the Weekly World News in the 1980's, and the gullibility of Trump voters on the matter of fake headlines about Hillary Clinton's alleged scandals.

I have argued for a long time that it is the internet which is behind the dogged persistence of climate change denialism - oddball and contrarian views were much, much harder to circulate in days when they had to rely on small run magazines and the odd mainstream article.  Now contrarians have an instantaneous direct line to their followers.

I am glad to see the problem with the dangerous propaganda enabling aspect of the internet finally being properly recognized.

Trump's taste on display

Donald Trump’s Love of Evita Says a Lot About His Presidency

I've never seen Evita, on stage or even the movie version.  I thought it wasn't really very highly regarded in the Lloyd Webber/Rice canon.  ("Canon" likely not being the appropriate word for them!)   But it seems Trump likes it, and as this article explains, it's consistent with his personality on display in the election campaign.

[Singing] "Folks are dumb where they come from"

Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump | FiveThirtyEight
Yes, I'm being rude about poor, misunderstood, ignore-them-at-your-political-peril Trump supporters.
You do have to wonder though, with Trump apparently walking himself back from things like pursuing Hillary, and saying a fence is as good as a wall anyway, and health reform might incorporate keeping parts of Obamacare, are some of his dumber voters cottoning on yet that they elected a BS artist?

Would be sensational, if true...

Activists Urge Hillary Clinton to Challenge Election Results: Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

Even if an audit did not show hacking across enough States to make a difference to Trump getting at least 270, it would be a sensational development if there were any hacking done to favour him. 

Message to Homer

My condolences on your recent loss.   (I would comment at your blog, but I have this problem with not being sure if my comment will lead to my Google + account..)  I saw Sinclair in comments at Catallaxy wanted to pass on the same message.

Seems selfishness always wins in libertarian land

Gee.  Could Sinclair Davidson possibly create a worse impression of the moral  and intellectual vacuum at the heart of small government/libertarian world view?:

Still missing the obvious after all these years. What about those of us who simply do not care if the planet is warming up, or cooling down, or going side-ways; we simply do not want to pay more tax. Or incur higher utility bills.

It has always struck me that this is the ultimate cause of so-called climate scepticism. Except few people want to say so. Lord Stern famously argued that if we don’t care about future generations, we won’t care about climate change. If we stop and think about how we treat other people living and breathing today, why imagine that we care about people who are yet to be born? Now this is a positive statement, not a normative statement. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about future generations, I’m suggesting that we don’t care about future generations.

As is not uncommon with SD, however, by the time you get to the end of an explanation, it can be hard to tell exactly what his position is... 

Bigger pupils means smarter person?

Pupil Size and Intelligence - Neuroskeptic

First of a three part series, apparently

The shifting sexual norms in Japan's literary history | The Japan Times

This is always an interesting topic - how sex and love has been viewed very differently in Japan over the centuries.   As the article says, though, it's easy to over simplify:

The homosexual bonds between samurai meanwhile, nurtured in the relationships between a wakashū (adolescent boy) apprenticed to an older man, were considered ennobling to both and the foundation of lifelong friendships — and used to bolster existing power relationships, giving young samurai added motivation to lay down their lives for their lord. One of the most
famous examples, later depicted in the kabuki plays of writers such as Tsuruya Namboku IV, was the devotion of the 17-year-old youth Mori Ranmaru (1565-1582) to the brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582). It was so intense that he died alongside his lord — possibly by his own hand.

When wakashudō (the pursuit of young boys) fanned out to the more commercially minded and fun-loving middle class in the Edo Period, the number of male prostitutes soared and young kabuki actors often moonlighted as prostitutes, desired by both men and women.

There is a temptation though to see the sexual attitudes of this period as relaxed and open compared to later repressions of the Meiji Era. But it should not be forgotten that this seeming “liberalism” was operating within highly prescriptive power structures controlled by a patriarchy. Relaxed attitudes to sex and gender did not extend to anything that might have disrupted the social order — women were subservient to their husbands and adultery was a criminal offense
punishable by death (for both men and women).

The oppressive aspect of Edo Period morality is acutely depicted in the bunraku and kabuki plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725). Also, the horrific consequences of adultery have been depicted in classic films, such as Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Crucified Lovers” (1954), based on a 1715 Chikamatsu’s play.

During this period, so-called pleasure quarters were demarcated as the only acceptable areas for men to relieve sexual frustration and energy with prostitutes before returning to the fold of social conformity. Falling in love with an indentured prostitute often had fatal consequences — the plot of many tragic works including Chikamatsu’s 1720 play “Shinju Ten no Amijima” (“The Love Suicides at Amijima”).

In the name of order, the ruling shogunate watched these quarters closely to ensure they did not exceed certain bounds. The Edo Period saw a long stream of edicts by the shogunate proscribing immoral behavior, including the banning of licentious books and art works

A very curious finding

U.S. Dementia Rates Are Dropping Even as Population Ages - The New York Times

Heh

Rabett Run: And Then They Came for Richard Tol

I've posted before, I think, about the great concerns Brexit is causing for academics, who formerly (I gather) enjoyed a great freedom of movement between jobs in Europe due to Britain being in the EU.

Now Richard Tol is complaining about this too, which, given the political company he keeps, is pretty funny.

Cheer up, Adele

I understand that tickets for the singer Adele's concert in Brisbane next year go on sale today.

I half watched a replay of her "Adele Live" at the BBC show last week, and while I think she's certainly a talented singer and songwriter, has she ever written a song which has a simple "I'm in love and happy" theme?   I get the impression that a whole concert with her would be quite a downer.  

My daughter - soon to be 14 - half heartedly asked about seeing her, mainly in the context of her recent realisation that all of her friends have been to at least one blockbuster concert already.   I pointed out that a string of "it could have been great, but wasn't" failed relationship songs are not all teen girl friendly, really, regardless of the quality of her great vocals, and my daughter did not disagree.   Besides, the acoustics of a concert at cricket grounds would be pretty awful, I expect.    

Thin skinned weirdo

The President-Elect Can’t Stop Criticizing “Overrated” Hamilton, Insists on Apology

Yes, for those keeping count at home that’s the fourth time
the president-elect took to Twitter in a span of 24 hours to hit out
against a Broadway musical that has received lots of praise for, among
other things, bringing some much-needed diversity to a Broadway stage.

How the hell does anyone expect this weird President elect to be able to keep things in perspective?

Update:  Even Hot Air gets it:

Someone seriously needs to take away Trump’s iPhone or Droid and never let him touch it again. His demand of an apology from the Hamilton creators and actors is rather #headdesk inducing, because there’s no need for it. Trump is going to have to get used to being criticized or this is going to be a long four years for him. If anything, Trump’s thin skin and hyperbolic statements will only enhance the fear from his detractors that he’s some dictator in waiting, looking to crack down on dissent whenever possible. 

Actually, as it helps remind the world that it's dealing with an emotionally needy nitwit, perhaps it's best that he be allowed to continue to tweet.

Note the Parkes connection

Long-sought signal deepens mystery of fast radio bursts : Nature News & Comment

Whales and cannibals

Here's another late review you never knew you needed.

Watched "In the Heart of the Sea" last night on Stan (the home of the "not quite A level" movie, it seems.)    You may or may not recall - this was the fairly recent box office flop of Ron Howard (and star Chris Hemsworth) based on (one of the) real life inspirations for Moby Dick:  the sinking of the whaling ship Essex after being rammed a couple of times by a whale.

First things first:   yes, it's a chance for me to whine about historical movies again, and whether or not I approve of what liberties they take with facts.

But, as far as how factual it was, I don't have too much to complain about:  it seems it was more or less accurate, with one notable exception.

Spoiler section:   No, the whale didn't pursue the survivors as the movie suggests.   This story element is understandable in a dramatic sense, but also a bit patently silly.   I think it should have been dropped, but true, it is hard to come up with dramatic highlights in a story of lifeboats drifting at sea.  End of Spoiler section.

But, apart from that, I have to say, it seemed a very good attempt at the general depiction of Nantucket whalers' lives at that time.   And the practical side of how whaling was done was, I'm pretty sure, quite authentic.   There are couple of articles linked below which certainly indicate this.

And while aware of the Essex story, I had forgotten about the cannibalism that was a large part of it;  the movie isn't gory in what it shows, but it doesn't shy away from the topic either.   The bit where the bones were strewn on the floor of the boat when the captain was saved was, apparently, accurate.

So, overall, I recommend the movie for this reason alone.

However, at the technical level, there were two very curious problems.

The minor one:   Chris Hemsworth did seem to have trouble with staying in the same accent.  Not that I'm sure what a Nantucket whaler from the 1800's should have sounded like, but his accent did seem to wander.  Did the voice coach give up?  Is Chris too big a star to correct?

The major one:  For a big budget movie with a famous director and star, it did have some really serious issues with the uneven quality of the special effects.   The land based look of the film is very fine - the recreation of Nantucket looks authentic.  But at sea, it is sometimes a very different matter.  As my son said during one of the worst looking sequences (when the ship first runs into bad weather), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End  looked more convincing, even in fantasy like conditions. (I still feel that that movie is seriously underrated, by the way.)

Then there are later sequences where some shots look fine, but they are intercut with other shots which have the glow-y fake look that I've complained about in the Lord of the Rings movies and the Star Wars prequels.  The inter-cutting of variable quality shots in the one sequence makes it look very obvious, if you ask me.  

I would guess that two different effects companies worked on the shots which were then spliced together, and somehow they never got the "look" to match.  If I were Ron Howard, I would be rather upset about this.

Or am I imagining it all?  I doubt it.

Anyway, I don't want to put anyone off watching it for these reasons.   Because, well, the life of the seamen in those days was ridiculously tough, and the history of whaling from Nantucket is very fascinating.

To get a good summary, here's a lengthy article in The Smithsonian by the author of the book (Nathaniel Philbrick) that the film is based on.  It's a great read.

As for an article that talks more generally about how often whales sank ships, you probably can't do better than this one at Quartz.   Here's a key section:

In fact, nearly 200 years after the Essex went down, a huge mystery still hangs over the story: Was the sperm whale that attacked the Essex actually acting out of vengeance—and are these great animals even capable of such calculated violence?

Not just the Essex

It might seem that way given that the Essex was hardly the only whaleship to be rammed by a sperm whale. Others include the Pusie Hall in 1835, the Lydia and the Two Generals in 1836, the Pocahontas in 1850, the Ann Alexander in 1851, and the Kathleen in 1902 (all except the Pusie Hall and the Pocahontas sank). Another, the Union, went down near the Azores in 1807 after running into a whale in the night. These perilous encounters with sperm whales ended abruptly after the mid-1800s, thanks in part to the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859—a substitute for whale oil—as well as to rising wages, as Derek Thompson explained in The Atlantic. Another factor was that after 1850 most new ships were built not with wood but iron, which even an 80-ton whale can’t splinter. Tellingly, the last ship that sank due to a run-in with a sperm whale, the Kathleen, had been built in 1844, and was therefore made of wood.

The mystery of Mocha Dick

However, there might have been other sperm-whale attacks than just these seven—particularly if the legend of Mocha Dick is true. The story, first recorded by newspaper editor Jeremiah Reynolds, tells of a mammoth white whale near Isla Mocha, off the Chilean coast, that was famed for assailing whaleships. (As you probably have guessed, Melville took even more of his inspiration from the Mocha Dick legend than the story of the Essex.) The whale was said to have sunk some 22 whaleships between 1810 and 1830.

And as for cannibalism at sea:  this review in The Economist of Philbrick's book indicates he talks in detail about it:

With almost voyeuristic minuteness he has found out that when a body is deprived of water, the lips shrink as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length, and the skin so contracts round the eyes as to prevent blinking. He has discovered that the fat on starving bodies turns to a “translucent gelatinous substance” and that the meat such a body could yield would be of doubtful nutritional value without fat to accompany it. He can tell us too about the psychological effects of starvation, and the descent into “feral” behaviour as evidenced by Auschwitz survivors. 

On that gruesome note, I'll end.

The frightening appointments begin....

Michael Flynn, Trump’s new national security adviser, loves Russia as much as his boss does - Vox

From the article, look what Powell thinks of him:

Colin Powell wasn’t pulling punches.

“I spoke at DIA last month,” the former secretary of state wrote
in a hacked email released this summer. “Flynn got fired as head of
DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got
fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad
management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since.”

Update:  wow, look at what CNN's reporting about the right wing social media nuttiness of Flynn's son, who works closely with Dad.

Update 2:  perhaps Flynn won't accept, because there are some real issues with his on line behaviour.  In July, the Jerusalem Post reported:

The former general– who GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump considered for his running mate, and who last week delivered a primetime speech to the Republican National Convention– was responding to accusations by the Clinton campaign that Russia was behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, and a subsequent leak of e-mails, in order to help Trump's candidacy.

Flynn wrote that "the corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything" to get Clinton elected. "This is a new low," he said, retweeting a message that read: "Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore."

He has since apologized for the retweet, calling it "a mistake."