Maybe remote living is just kinda boring?

This is the synopsis of a story on ABC AM this morning:

In some of the Northern Territory's biggest remote communities Aboriginal organisations say youth crime is now so out of control that they can no longer deliver essential services.

They had hoped after the Northern Territory's Royal Commission into Youth Justice they'd get more support to help break their young people out of a cycle of offending.

But community leaders in the NT's largest remote community in Western Arhem Land say they've been facing a youth crime crisis for six months, and they're now begging for help.

On the audio version of the story I heard the following complaints:

*  need more housing (although part of the reason is some kids need to escape some of the dysfunctional households and so you get overcrowding in some houses)

*  need more diversion programs for kids - nothing much to do there; need more sports etc.  Kids think they are "ganstas";

*  government needs to do more.

You could have written the same story 20 or 30 years ago.

I actually assumed that Arnhem Land was probably one of the better "remote" areas for Aboriginal communities - it's green and fertile at least, isn't it?, unlike the useless, barren, hot red dirt of inland NT and South Australian remote communities.   Not that far from Darwin either.  But still, not much to do, there's apparently no economic activity and kids are bored.  

Just another example where "connection to land" of itself does not cut it as forming the basis of good living lifestyle for communities.   And all this reliance on government to fix dysfunction in the community

But how dare anyone say that out loud, hey?  

Your daily dose of "direct from Xi to you" CGTN propaganda (one is kind of cool, actually)

First, from the "dude, all the cool Hong Kong guys actually support China" files:  the "keybros" (who are doing this from London) might have made a spare pound or two by making their very sincere call to the citizens of their home city to be more open minded about mainland China:  

 

There's also a terrible attempt at pro-China rap to be found on the channel with the catchy title - the Song for the 14th Five Year Plan:

 

Gawd.  I can't quite work out how to feel about such shameless propaganda and the people who make it.   I mean, I guess it's at least better that it's cheerful rather than a full on racist diatribe against the rest of the world: but it's so unsubtle it keeps making me want to laugh, a bit like the pro-war propaganda segments in the Starship Troopers movie.

Anyway, one thing it seems the country is pretty good at is high speed rail, and this video about a new maglev version was pretty interesting, actually:

 

Porter and defamation

If PR smarts are any sign of suitability to be Commonwealth Attorney General, Christian Porter has spectacularly failed the test.

He was, apparently, so stressed out by having to deny a rape allegation that he couldn't work.  But he was cogent enough to spend (what is likely to have been) hours and hours in consultation with defamation lawyers.   

That's a very bad look for anyone, let alone a politician.

The media release seems to indicate that starting the action is about shutting down media commentary on the matter, and talks in a very legalistic sense about burdens and standards of proof.   Again, yeah, that's a real good look - using lawfare to try to stop a legitimate question in the mind of the public as to whether this guy is really suitable to be Attorney General.

Look, if Porter is about to resign from the position, and is going to be back in Parliament this week, I guess this action does not look so patently counterproductive.  

But if thinks this is otherwise a good move to help his career - well, he's too lacking in common sense to be AG, or even a politician.

I take some amusement, though, from imagining how Morrison - Scotty from Marketing - might be grinding his teeth about the PR aspects of this.  (If Porter has told him he is going to "tough it out" this way, at least.)   But then again, perhaps Porter ran this plan past the PM, who might have thought this is a good way to avoid having an enquiry.  But surely, keeping this whole issue in the public eye in the run up to an election early next year is not going to be helpful.  Is Morrison smart enough to see this as a PR disaster?   Who knows?

Update: fair point - 

Yet another dose of weekend stuff

*   Not much to report, really.   Bought a new hose for the Vacuum Maid ducted system.  The old one must have been nearly 30 years old, I reckon (assuming it was the original bought by the people who built the house.)   I doubt the new one will last as long.

*  Became more concerned that I am losing incentive to actually travel anywhere new, even when we can, because amateur/semi-professional Youtube vloggers do such a good job of documenting destinations.   I started watching a channel by young British guy Ben Morris (he seems OK-ish in personality, but a little tending to the shallow "rich kid turned influencer" genre) who has started living in Dubai.  Through him I got to see what a 7 million pound apartment in the Burg Khalifa looks like inside (he doesn't live there, but his "friend" Mohammed does.)   I was not overly impressed with the apartment, particularly with yet another example of the "this is what capitalism can lead to and it's kind of offensive" world of rich people collectibles:     

Apart from the cost of buying the apartment, which is large and I guess the price did not surprise me, the amazing thing was the cost of (what we would call) the body corporate levies.  I think he said 100,000 pounds a year ($180,000 AUD).   That's about 10 times the highest body corporate levies I have seen in Brisbane, in a nice, large, close to inner city apartment at Kangaroo Point.   Of course, that Brisbane apartment was probably about $2,000,000, so I guess we talking an apartment about 6 times lower in cost.  Still, the cost of living in the worlds tallest building (with those queasy full glass walls - which I don't trust) is expensive.

I also Ben Morris stay at that expensive hotel in Dubai, the Burj Al Arab (the one that looks like a sail, with a heliport near the top.)   Sure, the room is big, and I don't mind the hotel atrium, but the suite itself is Versace tacky in colour and style.  (How was Versace ever considered otherwise?)

 

So there, I feel I have sort of "done" Dubai now!

Porter watch

Let's watch Morrison continue trying to bat away calls for an enquiry:

A longtime friend of the woman who alleged she was raped by the attorney general, Christian Porter, as a teenager has said he had “clear recollections of relevant discussions” with Porter, from at least 1992.

Macquarie Bank managing director James Hooke released a statement on Friday afternoon as someone who has known Porter’s accuser, and Porter, for the past 30 years.

Hooke said the woman, who he considered to be a “very dear friend”, and he had “relevant discussions” about the event from “mid-1988 until her death”. Hooke also recollects speaking with Porter from 1992 onwards.

No wonder Porter was upset at his press conference - I reckon he knew there was more that might potentially come out, but he didn't know if it would or not.  That would cause considerable stress.

Now, it is always possible that James's conversations with Porter may confirm Porter has always denied everything.  Or, it may indicate something else.

Seems like James only wants to disclose that to an enquiry.   So, we won't know unless that happens.   

   

Good news and not so good news

The not so good news - the amount at which there was a clear benefit was only 2 drinks a week!  (I think a "standard" serving is 12 g of alcohol - the amount in one 100 ml glass of wine.)

Mind you, if I can read that graph correctly, it looks like "all cause" mortality is better at over 6 drinks a week than at under 6 drinks.  That's good to know!

Here's the abstract:

The new Rome?

Cullen Murphy writes at The Atlantic about America's current political state in "No, Really, Are We Rome?".  He wrote a book on the topic some time ago, and revisits the idea that we're watching a similar fall of an empire. 

If I were writing Are We Rome? today, one new theme I’d emphasize emerges from a phrase we heard over and over during the Trump administration: “adults in the room.” The basic idea—a delusion with a long history—was that an unfit and childish chief executive could be kept in check by the seasoned advisers around him, and if not by them, then by the competent career professionals throughout the government. The administration official who anonymously published a famous op-ed in The New York Times in 2018 offered explicit reassurance: “Americans should know that there are adults in the room.” Various individuals were given adult-in-the-room designation, including the White House counsel Don McGahn and Chief of Staff John Kelly. I sometimes imagined these adults, who included distinguished military veterans, wearing special ribbons. The obvious flaw in the arrangement was that the child could summarily dismiss the adults with an intemperate tweet.

For long periods in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the Roman empire was literally in the hands of children, as reigning emperors died unexpectedly and sons as young as 4 and 8 ascended to the most exalted rank. Adults in the room were appointed to serve them—often capable generals such as Stilicho (who served Honorius) and Aetius (who served Valentinian III). The idea was to acknowledge imperial authority as sacrosanct but at the same time have people in charge who could handle the job. And often it worked, for a while. The diplomat and historian Priscus described what happened when Valentinian grew up. The emperor’s intemperate tweet took this form:

As Aetius was explaining the finances and calculating tax revenues, with a shout Valentinian suddenly leaped up from his throne and cried out that he would no longer endure to be abused by such treacheries … While Aetius was stunned by this unexpected rage and was attempting to calm his irrational outburst, Valentinian drew his sword from his scabbard and together with Heracleius, who was carrying the cleaver ready under his cloak (for he was a head chamberlain), fell upon him.

There is no substitute, it turns out, for actual leadership at the top. Even so, when the adults are gone, the next line of defense is bureaucratic heroism. A civil service is one reason entities as large as the Roman empire—or the British or American one—have had staying power. Watch the behavior of imperial functionaries in the fifth century, when much of the Roman world was falling apart, and you see the ability of bureaucratic procedure and administrative competence—food goes here, gold goes there—to hold bits of the rickety scaffolding together when no one seems to be in charge. I’m not aware of ancient references to a civitas profunda, but the “deep state” is neither a modern nor a malevolent invention.

I do like this caution he gives in the article, though:

The comparisons, of course, can be facile. A Roman state of some sort lasted so long—well over a millennium—and changed so continuously that its history touches on any imaginable type of human occurrence, serves up parallels for any modern event, and provides contradictory answers to any question posed. Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past.

Oh look - another "deep state" traitor (who Trump appointed)

From Axios:

Former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller told "VICE on Showtime" that he believes former President Trump incited the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his speech preceding the deadly riot.

Why it matters: Miller, who Trump appointed to lead the Pentagon after firing Mark Esper following the 2020 election, said, "it’s pretty much definitive" that the riot, which left five people dead, would not have happened without the president’s “Save America” rally speech.

10 years on

Does it feel like 10 years since the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster?   I suppose it does.

I did not realise until I saw Foreign Correspondent last week the extent to which Japan is seeking to prevent a repeat of the same damage by building huge sea walls.  (By the way, that series continues to be brilliant this season - I have such admiration for the journalists who work on it, and the ABC for funding it.)    

I see that there are several stories going around that the nuclear accident didn't cause an increase in cancer.  There is the argument that the evacuation itself caused more deaths via stress and reduced care for the elderly, etc;  but this always strikes me as a "that's easy to say in hindsight" argument; one not so easy to take into account when the radiation risk is invisible and silent and drifting around according to wind strength and direction at the time.   Also, it strikes me as a bit of rhetorical to play down the the cost of clean up to prevent contamination causing cancer in future - and the natural reluctance of people (especially parents) to return to areas where they are nervous as to whether the soil really is safe.

The economic cost of the disaster, particularly the nuclear clean up, is huge:

I will look for more interesting stories to add...

Update:  from The Economist, I get the diagram I was hoping for, showing the (not insignificantly sized) area that is still not safe to return to:

 Also from the article, these points:

Kowata Masumi’s husband’s family had lived for more than 200 years in the same house in Okuma, one of the two towns next to the plant, growing persimmons, weaving silk and brewing sake. It is now in the “difficult-to-return” zone (see map), subject to 50 times more radiation than is typically considered safe. Former residents are allowed to make short visits in protective gear, but not to stay overnight. Ms Kowata, one of Okuma’s town councillors, found a monkey in her living room on one such trip, “wearing our clothes like the king of the house”....

In Fukushima prefecture 2,317 people died as a result of it, mostly because of disruption to medical care or suicide. That is more than the 1,606 who perished during the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown themselves. Some researchers argue the government should not have ordered a large-scale evacuation at all, or should have limited it to weeks rather than years.Yet it would have been hard to tell a fearful population, faced with the invisible threat of radiation, to stay put or return quickly. The meltdown destroyed confidence in experts. The lack of candour from officials in the early weeks and months after the disaster sapped trust in the authorities, pushing citizens to fill the gaps themselves. “There were so many things that weren’t convincing, so we decided to get our own data,” says Kobayashi Tomoko, an inn-owner and radiation monitor from Minamisoma, a city north of the plant. Even when the government lifted evacuation orders years later, putting an end to compensation payments for residents of those areas, some protested against what they saw as a ploy to force people to return under unsafe conditions. “Sensitivity to radioactivity depends on mindset, it’s difficult to treat as matter of policy,” says Iio Jun of the Reconstruction Design Council, a government advisory panel set up after the disaster.  ....

Many of those ordered to evacuate in the aftermath of the disaster, as well as others who fled the region of their own accord, have stayed away. In the areas where evacuation was ordered, only a quarter or so of the population has returned, mostly the elderly. As elsewhere in rural Japan, the prefecture’s population had been falling anyway, dipping by an average of 100,000 people in the nine years preceding the disaster. But 3/11 has accelerated the decline: in the nine years since, the population has fallen by an average of 180,000 a year (see chart 1)...

The enduring mistrust extends to nuclear power in general. Before 3/11 more than two-thirds of Japanese wanted to preserve or even expand it. The government wanted nuclear plants to generate half of Japan’s power by the middle of the century. A majority is now against it, including bigwigs such as Koizumi Junichiro, a former prime minister from the LDP, and Kan Naoto, who was prime minister at the time of the disaster. “I had supposed Japanese engineers were very high quality. I thought it was unlikely that human error could cause an accident in Japan,” says Mr Kan. “My thinking changed 180 degrees.”

 There is a lot more in the article, about the future of nuclear in the country.  Worth registering an account to read it for free. 

Update 2:  many astounding before and after slider pictures to be found here, at the Guardian.

Faking it for happiness

A short article at The Atlantic offers this suggestion for obtaining happiness:

None of us wants to be the purveyor of poison, especially toward those we love. Fortunately, research also shows that we have more control over how we affect others—and ourselves—than we might assume. The key is to act like a happy person would, even if you don’t feel like it.

Last year, researchers at the University of California at Riverside asked human subjects to behave in either extroverted or introverted ways for one week. They found that those purposively acting extroverted—which decades of research have shown is one of the most common characteristics of happy people—saw a significant increase in well-being. (Meanwhile, acting introverted led to a decrease.) Similarly, spending money on others and volunteering have both been shown to raise one’s own happiness levels.

One plausible explanation for why this works is that prosocial behaviors induce a cognitive dissonance—I feel unhappy, but I am acting happy!—which people resolve subconsciously by feeling happier. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, calls this the “As If Principle”: If you want to feel a certain way, act as if you already do, and your brain will grant you that feeling—at least for a while. In common parlance, “Fake it ’til you make it.”

 More specifically:

First, ask what happy people in your life situation would do to make things better for themselves and others. How would they greet others in the first Zoom call of the day? How would they write an email? Whom would they call just to check in? If you’re stuck, interview happy people you know about the little things they do for their acquaintances and loved ones.

Next, make a plan to follow through on everything you just imagined, and commit to it. Write three ideas for extra-kind greetings on a Post-it note and stick it below your computer screen before that Zoom call. Draft a sample email in the voice of a happy person, and use it as a template. Make a list of friends and family with whom you’re overdue for a chat, and schedule those calls in your planner.

These steps aren’t a set of direct happiness adjustments; they’re more of a bank shot. By deliberately preparing yourself to cheer up the people around you the way a happy person spontaneously would, you’ll create the conditions by which you can produce your own happiness naturally—and give the gift of happiness to others, as well.

 

I would have thought a lawyer might have something more to contribute than "my brilliant career - unlike hers"

There's an extraordinarily tin eared bit of reminiscence by Helen Dale in The Australia about her (apparent) time in high school debating in the late 1980's with the late rape accuser of  Christian Porter.

It will no doubt slide behind a paywall again soon, so let's preserve some bits here (with my bold):

I knew her for the best part of two years as she lived her best life, cutting a swathe through young Australia’s cultural and intellectual milieu, laying down a marker for future achievement that was never fulfilled.

Somewhere out there, there may lurk a television recording of us competing against each other in the national finals of a public speaking contest. My strong suspicion is that the recording no longer exists, for the simple reason that I went on to enjoy the sort of public success that everyone expected Jane to achieve, and that many of our contemporaries also achieved. That broadcast would surely have surfaced in 1995 if it were going to at any point; people were determined to find extant footage, and not merely photographs of me from high school.

Jane, Christian Porter, many of Jane’s friends so broken by her suicide, and I participated in a variety of events, organised in such a way that one kept running into the same clutch of high achievers from the same group of posh schools around the country over, usually, the last two years of high school. Jane was unusual in that she started young, in year 10, and so had a three-year run at the top.....

The activities in question formed part of an entire ecosystem — I have no idea whether it still exists — of debating, public speaking and academic competitions fought out among elite Australian high school students during the relevant period.

The largest of these was National Capital Seminar, held under the auspices of the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Trust for Young Australians. It’s the only event I will name, and I do so because it had 100 student ­attendees each year. There are simply too many people out there from Jane’s and my year who no doubt recall both of us for me to keep it hidden from their view. People from ­National Capital Seminar went on to become high-flyers in ­varied fields — politicians, QCs, scientists, ­industrialists, artists, entrepreneurs.

Rupert no doubt will be upset if I re-publish the whole thing, but let's just end with this:

At the time, Jane was openly spoken of as a future prime minister. Those friends who knew her post-high school and have suggested as much to the media are not dissembling on this point.

Mind you, the same was also said of me, and of another boy.

OK, Dale does go on to say that she never believed it herself, because she was closeted queer; but it's so refreshing, isn't it, to hear that everyone else thought she was brilliant.

Dale has long had people questioning her autobiographic claims, and not just the ones that formed the basis of her early identity scandal.  This article will do nothing to lessen the impression that she exaggerates when it suits.

In other, uh, "news"

 

Why aren't there more calls for an end to this self-gaslighting?

Honestly, I find the Right wing media's tactic of promoting every verbal stumble of Biden as evidence that he's virtually a nursing home patient let loose on the Presidency is despicable.

Not because I think the likes of Hannity actually believe their fool's game (although, you don't know - never underestimate the ease with which repeatedly pretending something is true eventually convinces you it really is);  but because far too large a slab of the country genuinely is in the grip of a miasma of politically self serving conspiracy theories, and Murdoch and his employees must know that this is bad and dangerous for functioning democracy, and society as a whole. 

It's especially ridiculous when the people buying this genuinely think Trump was the smart one.  

The end of this can only come from prominent Republicans calling for it to end - but they are gutless.

 

True crime issues

From an NPR review of a book about an apparently over-looked serial killer in New York in the early 1990's, this paragraph about "true crime" writing (and TV - it's really getting too prominent on Netflix, if you ask me) sounds about right:

Last Call is journalist Elon Green's first book, but he is not new to the genre of true crime, nor is he a stranger to the problems that lie within it, most notably the genre's enduring, pernicious whiteness, and how it has trained us to believe that white women are most often the victims of murder (this is not true; the most commonly murdered demographic are men, by other men). The genre has also trained us into believing that serial killers are masterminds, evil geniuses, rather than opportunists who get lucky — or that they treat murder like some kind of art (a la Hannibal). In other words, the killers often become the focus, the object of fascination.

This is not true in Last Call, which puts the victims first, and which, when it does reveal the discovery of the killer, doesn't attempt to make him seem like an anti-hero.

Another bit from further down, which I hadn't heard of before:

There's a stink to the judge's decision that's reminiscent of the attitude police had when one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims, drugged, naked, and bleeding, escaped into the street only to be politely returned to Dahmer's clutches by police officers who chalked up the incident as a "domestic squabble between homosexuals" (the victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was 14; Dahmer was 31).

Wow.

By the way, there is a little bit more description of the murders - committed by a gay man who found his victims in New York's gay bar scene in the early 1990's - in this review of the book at The Guardian.

Zapping desire

I haven't read anything about transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for cognitive improvement for a while.  Oddly, this seems a subject that has never attracted much mainstream media attention, for whatever reason.

But I see in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (thank you Sci Hub), that there is another purpose for which TMS has recently been tried - to see if it can dampen sexual arousal in those who suffer from hypersexuality.  Although this was just a "proof of concept" study, the authors seems encouraged that it did work on dampening sexual arousal.   

The study was pretty basic, though.  And if I read the graphs properly, it wasn't like it killed all arousal after a 15 minute treatment.  But it did seem to have a effect on those who received the real TMS over those who received the sham version.

Interestingly - the study seemed to confirm that stimulation to only the right side had an effect.  The area of the brain is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC to its friends:

Meta-analytic neuroimaging findings provide robust evidence for bilateral involvement of the DLPFC in neural processing ofvisual sexual stimuli.10  Our study complements this correlative evidence by showing a causal brain-behavior relationship between the right (but not left) DLPFC and sexual arousal. More specifically, it demonstrates that increasing the activity of the ight DLPFC by high-frequency rTMS leads to a decrease in sexual arousal. Thus, this relationship suggests a specific role of the right DLPFC in regulating, that is, inhibiting, sexual arousal.Moreover, our results affirm previous conclusions, drawn from fMRI, that the right DLPFC is involved in self-regulation of sexual arousal due to its increased activity during attempted inhibition of sexual arousal,  that seems to be specific to the sexual domain.

So, it seems that stimulating the part of the brain that is involved in resisting sex stimulation aids inhibition of arousal.

The paper also mentions that it had been thought that deep brain stimulation of the hypothalamus might work.  But (apart from requiring surgery), it might have an unwanted side effect (my bold):

Based on case reports of stereotaxic interventions in paraphilic patients in the 1970s, the ventromedial hypothalamus was recently hypothesized to represent a promising target for deep brain stimulation.  Although the side effects of deep brain stimulation in general might be lesser than systemic side effects of antiandrogenic drug therapies,it is undeniable that side effects of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques might even be comparatively negligible. Considering not only the involvement in sexual arousal but also its crucial role for encoding sexual preference,33neurostimulation of the hypothalamus might lead to unwanted side effects regarding sexual orientation, for example altered sexual partner preference as observed in male ferrets with lesions of the preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus. In contrast, our non-invasive approach of cortical stimulation may provide a more specific, better tolerated,and safer method that is easy to apply

Well, that's an invitation to Google the topic of "stereotaxic interventions" (I think just means surgical work on lesions) on the hypothalamus and its effect on human sexual behaviour.   From the 2006 paper Neurological Control of Human Sexual Behaviour: Insights from Lesion Studies:

In the 1970s, certain psychosurgical techniques were developed to target sexual behaviour. These were based on experimental work in animals that demonstrated that destruction of the hypothalamic ventromedial nuclei led to the conversion of feline post‐amygdalectomy hypersexuality to hyposexuality.¹³ Roeder and colleagues¹⁴ subsequently developed a stereotaxic method of treating “sexual deviations” in humans. Stereotaxic lesions of the ventral medial hypothalamic nucleus were performed in 10 patients with “sexual deviation” ranging from paedophilic homosexuality to intractable exhibitionism. The results showed that sex drive was diminished or abolished in all cases.¹⁴

Some more specific examples of how brain abnormality has led to problematic sexual behaviour: 

Poeck and Pilleri¹⁵ described a female patient who displayed periodic hypersexual and aggressive behaviour after encephalitis of unknown aetiology. Neuropathological examination revealed extensive lesions to limbic structures, including the hypothalamus, thalamic nuclei and the fornix. Ortego and colleagues¹⁶ described a woman with neuropathologically confirmed multiple sclerosis who developed hypersexuality and multiple paraphilias, including paedophilia, zoophilia and incest over the 2 months prior to her death. She had extensive lesions of limbic structures, including the hypothalamus, basal frontal, septal and temporal regions. Frohman and colleagues¹⁷ described a male patient with altered sexual behaviour characterised by an obsessive and insatiable desire to touch women's breasts. Neuroimaging showed enhancing lesions on the right side of the hypothalamus and mesencephalon.  

The article goes on to give lots of other examples of problems within other parts of the brain that can led to hypersexuality.   

It's all a little disturbing to read such cases, due to the damage they may cause to "faith" in self control and free will.   I would hope it's more an example of "extreme cases making for bad law", so to speak:  you really don't want people who don't have brain lesions to think they can follow impulses because they're just a meat robot with no control.      

On the up side, maybe someone is working on Woody Allen's orgasmatron via TMS?  Ha.  (Actually, the only thing I see about using TMS to increase libido has been about women.)

 

Twitter humour

 

Consider the colon

There's a rather interesting article at Scientific American:

Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

and I thought this paragraph, taking a sort of comparative overview of our digestive systems, was pretty interesting:

Our guts are remarkably similar to those of chimpanzees and orangutans--gorillas are a bit special--which are, in turn, not so very different from those of most monkeys. If you were to sketch and then consider the guts of different monkeys, apes and humans you would stop before you were finished, unable to remember which ones you had drawn and which ones you had not. There is variation. In the leaf-eating black and white colobus monkeys (among which my wife and I once lived in Boabeng-Fiema, Ghana) the stomach is modified into a giant fermentation flask, as if the colobus were kin to a cow. In leaf-eating howler monkeys the large intestine has become enlarged to take on a similarly disproportionate role, albeit later on in digestion. But in most species things are not so complex. An unelaborated stomach breaks down protein, a simple small intestine absorbs sugars and a large (but not huge) large intestine ferments whatever plant material is left over. Our guts do not seem to be specialized hominid guts; they are, instead, relatively generalized monkey/ape guts. Our guts are distinguished primarily (aside from our slightly enlarged appendix) by what they are missing rather than what they uniquely possess. Our large intestines are shorter than those of living apes relative to the overall size of our gut (more like 25 percent of the whole, compared to 46 percent of the whole in chimps). This shortness appears to make us less able to obtain nutrients from the cellulose in plant material than are other primates though the data are far from clear-cut. The variation in the size and details of our large intestines relative to those of apes or gorillas have not been very well considered. In a 1925 study the size of colons was found to vary from one country to the next with the average Russian apparently having a colon five feet longer than the average Turk. Presumably the differences among regions in colon length are genetically based. It also seems likely that the true human colonic diversity has not yet been characterized (the above study considered only Europe). Because of the differences in our colons (and ultimately the number of bacteria in them) we must also vary in how effectively we turn cellulose and other hard to break down plant material into fatty acids. One measure of the inefficiency of our colons is our farting, which we all know varies person to person. Each stinking fart is filled with a measure of our variety.³ Aside then from the modest size of our colon, our guts are strikingly, elegantly, obviously, ordinary.  

 

At last, a Dr Seuss excuse

I'm not making this up:  for some years, I have occasionally wondered if I could find an excuse to insert a joke reference in a post to an unpopular Dr Seuss title "My Testicles Need Spectacles" - and I could never think of one.

The time has now arrived.  I will soon start looking for Seuss like illustrations that can be adapted for the cover art...

Singapore and floating solar

I've been complaining for a year or two that floating solar cells are an obviously good idea, but no one listens.

But look, my favourite effectively one Party state with very competent technocratic inclined leadership is building quite a bit of it.

Space-starved Singapore builds floating solar farms in climate fight

Neat.

Although floating solar cells at sea must be fraught with difficulties in most parts of the world due to the problem of waves, I would assume that the permanently pretty calm conditions around Singapore must make it pretty ideal for this system.  Only if there weren't so many ships wanting to be there, too.

More American nonsense