If the New York Times reads it this way

Under Friendly Veneer, China Pushes Back on Obama

then it's probably true.

McKee reviewed

Jason Zinoman on Robert Mckee | vanityfair.com

Jason Zinoman, who has a particular interest in horror films, reports on his attendance at a screenwriters seminar held by the famous screenwriting teacher Robert McKee.

McKee comes across as a bit of a jerk who wings it on browbeating self-confidence. Here's Jason's summary of how to replicate McKee's technique:

Rule One: Drop names shamelessly. McKee tells us that he once received a doctor recommendation from his friend John Cleese, bummed a cigarette from Toni Morrison, and corrected his pal Paul Haggis when he confused two genres over lunch. But my favorite is his anecdote about telling Stephen Hawking (whom he calls “Hawkings”) that he has never read a book by the scientist but is fascinated by the Big Bang. I imagine Hawking rolling quickly away.

Rule Two: Never express a scintilla of doubt. McKee is insightful about some things, especially with regard to structure, but his relative knowledge or ignorance of a subject in no way affects the manner in which he discusses it. He holds forth on politics (“Terrorism is a police problem and that’s all it is”) and the theater (“there is very little crime drama onstage”) as confidently as he does on the Incitement Incident.

Rule Three: Start in a rage and end with poetry. In Adaptation, a wildly imaginative movie that first sends up, then celebrates, and ultimately condescends to McKee, the teacher advises the screenwriter that any flawed movie can be saved with a “big finish.”

I wonder if McKee can explain the relative dearth of good movie ideas coming out of Hollywood for the last 5 to 10 years.

The calming light

More Tokyo train stations start using lights to stem suicides

This sounds very improbable:

Alarmed by a rise in people jumping to their deaths in front of trains, some Japanese railway operators are installing special blue lights above station platforms they hope will have a soothing effect and reduce suicides.

As of November, East Japan Railway Co has put blue light-emitting diode, or LED, lights in all 29 stations on Tokyo’s central train loop, the Yamanote Line, used by 8 million passengers each day.

There’s no scientific proof that the lights actually reduce suicides, and some experts are skeptical it will have any effect. But others say blue does have a calming effect on people.

Sadly, suicide is still a popular response to difficult times in Japan, although I bet everyone wishes people would choose a less public method:

Suicide rates in Japan have risen this year amid economic woes, and could surpass the record 34,427 deaths in 2003.

Last year, nearly 2,000 people committed suicide in Japan by jumping in front of a train, about 6 percent of such deaths nationwide.

Watching the sun

It was the Sun wot done it. Or was it? | Stuart Clark - Times Online

This reads as a reasonable summary on the controversy over the possible role of the sun on earth's temperature (via cosmic rays and the sun's magnetic cycle.)

The last paragraphs are important:

The smart money is on the level of solar contribution being somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, both solar activity and industrial gases play a role. There is credible scientific work that ascribes up to a third of current warming to solar influence. Studies show that the Earth’s temperature mirrored solar activity until the 1980s. Then the number of sunspots stabilised but the temperature continued to rise. In other words, something overtook the Sun as the primary driver of the Earth’s temperature. That is generally thought to be industrial gases.

Now the test can be made. It is time for all sides to put away the rivalry and begin to work together. Observations must be made, experiments performed and all data must be published, not cherry-picked. This golden opportunity to reach consensus must not be squandered.

Above all, we must not let any downturn in temperatures be used as an excuse by reluctant nations to wriggle out of pollution controls. Just as certainly as the solar activity has gone away, so it will return. If we have done nothing in the interim to curb man-made global warming, we will be in worse trouble than ever.

Conan's vampire

Conan O'Brien's emo teenage vampire segments are pretty funny:

Having already read all my usual sources of news and science, I hereby declare myself Officially Uninspired to post today.

Plastics and masculinity

Pilot study relates phthalate exposure to less-masculine play by boys | Eureka! Science News

Junk movie science

Observations: In 2012 , neutrinos melt the earth's core, and other disasters

Scientific American looks at the "science" of 2012.

As I don't like Roland Emmerich movies, I am not inclined to see it. On the upside, now that he has done the "ultimate" in end of the world destruction flicks, maybe he can't think of anything else to film?

Might still be a desert

Lcross Mission Finds Water on Moon, NASA Scientists Say - NYTimes.com

Of course I am pleased that the Lcross mission found some water, but it is still quite uncertain as to what it means in terms of readily use-able quantities:

Even though the signs of water were clear and definitive, the Moon is far from wet. The Cabeus soil could still turn out to be drier than that in deserts on Earth. But Dr. Colaprete also said that he expected that the 26 gallons were a lower limit and that it was too early to estimate the concentration of water in the soil.

Well, they'll just have to send some astronauts there to check it out.

Astro Boy - go see

I dawdled about getting the kids to agree to take me to see Astro Boy, but I shouldn't have. I really enjoyed it, as did they, and it's a pity the movie has been pretty much a box office failure. (Releasing it outside of school holidays might just have something to do with that, though.)

How could I not like a cartoon which makes jokes about Descartes and other philosophers (when did you last see an animated film which shows us a copy of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"?); features a comedy trio of robot liberationists who have posters featuring Trotsky and Lenin in their hideout; and deals with the deep issue that was really the major theme of 1980's TV Astro boy - whether robots which act, think and feel like humans should actually be deemed to be human.

Some American reviewers thought it too politicised, but I am sensitive to such things and really did not find it objectionable.*

The arc of the story was, I thought, very satisfying, providing even an explanation as to why Astroboy, built as a replacement for a real boy, should have been provided with weaponry. It is a fine screenplay for such an entertainment, I reckon.

There really wasn't anything I disliked about it. Yes, it reminds you of some other animated and science fiction films, but in some cases, I would say that TV Astro boy dealt with those issues before the movies which then are reflected in this one. (Particularly when you think of the fighting robots of Spielberg's AI, and a similar scenario in Astro boy.)

It has nearly finished its cinema run here; and Tim Train, the only reader of this blog who might possibly be persuaded by this post, you should go see it.

* Update: If you thought the evil President wanting re-election by waging war was inspired by Bush, even though he doesn't look or sound like him, you at least have it balanced by the communist inspired robots who are ideologically sound but very inept. In fact, it is slightly curious that the film is doing well in China, which I thought might be a bit sensitive about that subplot.

Pig smarts

In Pig Cognition Studies, Reflections on Parallels With Humans

Pigs can understand mirrors. Pity (for them) they taste so good.

Strange science for the weekend

An experimentally testable proof of the discreteness of time

Doesn't sound completely loopy to me.

The gathering of the anti-Devenys

Yay, what a good way to start a Saturday. There's an anti-Deveny column by Tom Hyland in The Age, taking apart one of her recent columns which I missed. This is followed by a couple of hundred comments, nearly all of which agree with Tom. Some of the comments I like:

About the only thing you forgot to mention about Deveny is how she manages to combine screeching obnoxiousness with hair tossing smugness, to the detriment of all our digestion...

Catherine Deveny is the Pauline Hanson of the intelligent left. A complete embarrassment of flippant stereotypical arrogance based on pseudo analysis...

I have no problem with undergraduate humour, and when I first read her comments I thought she was a junior writer, but at her age it's just embarrassing.

Hmm. I can't find the comment now that said reading her provoked as many laughs as Schindler's List.

That's apt, because it's related to the reason I actually find her disturbing: she doesn't recognise that she's increasingly portraying people who aren't like her as not fully human.

I just tried to post a comment to that effect, but The Age's computer seems to be overloaded at the moment (I trust it's with people venting about Deveny.)

Nothing that a bulldozer couldn't fix

Fed Square, if you dare

Just because people don't mind using the inner city open space it provides as a venue says nothing at all about the architectural merits of the exterior of the buildings around the open space, if you ask me.

Solution modified

Well, some British doctors are getting more openly critical about the rise and rise of unnecessary cosmetic surgery around women's genital area.

I mentioned cosmetic surgery and vaginas only back in July, although I see it first made a brief appearance here in 2006.

In a spirit of generosity, I propose modifying my Gulag solution. Cosmetic surgeons can continue their (mostly) socially useless, but no doubt highly profitable, function for 9 months of every year, provided they serve 2 months annually with someone like Médecins Sans Frontières. (And not by working on genitalia while in Somalia, either.) That leaves a month to get over the malaria, and everyone is better off.

Seals falling like leaves

Elephant Seals Take Naps During Slow Dives Through the Sea

An oddly charming image of how elephant seals may sleep:

The monitors revealed that the seals periodically flip onto their backs and slip into slow, spiraling dives. The seals wobble as they drift down, and most of the time their bodies follow circular paths toward the bottom of the sea, said study co-author Russel Andrews…. “[They] resemble a leaf that has dropped from a tree branch and is falling toward the ground, fluttering from side to side,” he said [National Geographic]. It seems likely, the scientists say, that the seals catch a quick nap during these long drifts; in fact, once in a while they strike bottom without even noticing.

I wonder if submarines feel an occasional thud from a falling seal.

One other thing I didn't know about them:

These marine mammals undertake epics migrations of thousands of miles, in which they might not return to land for as long at eight months.

Oysters and risk

Is protecting consumers from uncooked oysters a rotten plan? - Slate Magazine

There's a discussion here of the reasons the FDA in America is banning the sale of raw Gulf oysters in summer: there is a nasty disease that can be caught from them, but nearly always only by people with underlying ill health. The disease does sound unpleasant:

On the unpleasant-experience scale, going septic from Vibrio vulnificus has got to rank right up there with acute radiation poisoning. Fever burns you up; big, ugly blisters bust out on your skin; and you wander into the hospital forgetting your name. These bloodstream infections, though rare, are so fast and furious that only 50 percent survive them. Others lose their limbs.

The FDA's answer is something I've never heard of before:
pasteurised oysters!:

A lot of oyster aficionados say the processed oysters lack the flavor of the fresh raw product. Too rubbery, too cooked-tasting, they say. The FDA says the processes "retain the sensory qualities of raw product," and double-blind consumer surveys don't show much of a difference in perception.

And then, there is the question of priorities here:

...coming down on the oyster is kind of an odd move for FDA to be making in the context of much larger food-safety issues that haven't been addressed. Nasty as Vibrio vulnificus is, it's a perfectly natural bacterium that's always been present in oysters. In the meantime, other bacteria have evolved in our factory-farming system to new levels of virulence and spread with little FDA control. (Legislation is pending in Congress.) Strains of salmonella, E. coli, listeria, campylobacter, and other microbes together kill an estimated 5,700 people a year in the United States. Yet few are calling for all chicken to be irradiated or all eggs to be pasteurized.

I guess you would have to compare rates of infection per quantity consumed, but it does sound like an over-reaction.

I don't eat a huge amount of oysters (my annual consumption of mussels would be much higher.) But neither has struck me down yet.

The Garfield technique

It seems that this was only recently posted to Youtube. It will only take up 12 seconds of your life, so what's the risk?

Trouble ahoy

Little Cargo, Loads of Debt - NYTimes.com

It turns out that many European banks are facing write downs due to bad loans to the shipping industry:

Banks with large shipping industry portfolios — among them Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds, and HSH Nordbank and Commerzbank in Germany — could face meaningful write-downs as ship owners confront plummeting charter rates from a 25 percent drop in global trade.

One analyst says:

“We estimate that there will be a 50 percent oversupply in container ships,” Mr. Brahde said. “And in the next five or six months you will see more banks repossessing ships. It is not life or death, but for those with real exposure there will be problems.”

I'm not exactly sure of the point of repossessing a container ship if, as the article suggests, a large oversupply will mean there is not much of a market in used vessels. But what do I know.

Apparitions, UFO's, belief, etc.

Significant numbers of Irish Catholics are getting excited by an alleged visionary's promises of apparitions of Mary at Knock. Curiously, the nature of the original Knock incident back in 1879 (stationary images appearing in the evening on a flat wall) means that it was one "miracle" that was quite readily explicable as a hoax (the use of a "magic lantern" to project the images.)

Meanwhile, I see that (if this source can be trusted) some Portuguese history professor has been looking again at the evidence for the Fatima apparition, and has noted the similarity of the reports of the dancing sun to UFO reports later in the century. (The sun was supposed to take on a metal sheen, with lights around the rim, and looked as if it was getting closer to the crowd.) The Wikipedia "miracle of the sun" entry is a pretty good place to get a description of what happened, and the various other explanations that have been suggested.

As it happens, when I was in high school, I read an entire book that set out the UFO at Fatima theory. I think it was actually in the high school library, but I could be mistaken. The idea struck me as pretty fascinating, and rather disturbing (why would mischievous aliens play that type of game with humans, and just how much religion may be based on a misinterpretation of what was going on in the universe?) Yet suggestibility to such radical ideas when you are a teenager is something you (should) outgrow.

I remember, for example, being strongly impressed by Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", again from my school library. (It seems, in retrospect, that my school library had a lot of pretty trippy titles. But hey, it was the '70's.) Now, I don't quite understand why that book impressed me so much. I certainly had not personally toyed with drugs of any variety, not even nutmeg tea,* so why a book about the consciousness expanding nature of one particular drug should have excited me seems rather odd.

As an adult, the suggestibility of a crowd which wants to see a miracle seems much more plausible that it used to. And, in the case of that Huxley book, skepticism that any drug can help you see reality more clearly seems much more compellingly.

Yet, I would still warn people against throwing babies out with the bathwater.** I am inclined to believe some accounts of paranormal events, and consider that they are potentially very important as evidence contradicting the purely materialist view of the universe that is so aggressively advocated by (seemingly) 90% of scientists now, the New Atheists, and the "non-realist" school of liberal Christianity.

It's where to draw the line between what is credible and what isn't that's the trick.

* Uncle Scrooges favourite drink, which, as I learnt later, might be capable of sending you on a trip.

** (Which is, essentially, what most climate change skepticism is doing too, in my opinion.)

Depressing images

Observations: Intolerable beauty: Plastic garbage kills the albatross

This featured on Hungry Beast last night (which, incidentally, seems to me to be an expensive failure. Just how many people were recruited for that show?)

Anyhow, apparently large numbers of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll out in the Pacific die because their mothers mistakenly feed them plastic picked up from the ocean. The stomachs fill up, meaning they can't eat real food and die, leaving skeletons filled with coloured bits of plastic.

I wonder: if there is that much plastic floating around in the Pacific Gyre, will it be worthwhile converting some former oil tanker into a skimming garbage collector?

The future is getting closer

You just can't help but be impressed by this MIT designed, completely autonomous, robot helicopter. It navigates not by GPS, but by scanning its environment and building up a picture of where it is. Very futuristic; very cool:



Now, if they can just build in some face recognition software, a poison blow dart and (I suppose) a way to knock on the front door, you'll have the perfect robot assassin to sent into the apartment block.

Ocean acidification at 450ppm

Southern Ocean acidification: A tipping point at 450-ppm atmospheric CO2 — PNAS

I don't think I have quoted before from this paper which came out last year. It predicts aragonite undersaturation in the Southern Oceans by 2038 (assuming we hit CO2 of 450 ppm by 2030), which is earlier than previously thought, and the consequences of that are set out pretty well in this paragraph:

Early aragonite undersaturation is of particular concern for the zooplankton species comprising Pteropods, which form aragonite shells. Southern Ocean Pteropods comprise up to one-quarter of total zooplankton biomass in the Ross Sea (13), Weddell Sea (14), and East Antarctica (15), can sometimes displace krill as the dominant zooplankton (16), and dominate carbonate export fluxes south of the Antarctic Polar Front (17), and even organic carbon export (18). Pteropods in Southern Ocean sediment traps show partial dissolution and “frosted” appearance of shells just below the aragonite saturation horizon (17, 19), indicating vulnerability to low carbonate ion concentrations. The most dominant Southern Ocean Pteropod species is Limacina helicina, with Limacina retroversa and others playing a smaller role (20). The dominant species, L. helicina, is known to have a life cycle of 1–2 years with important veliger larval development during winter months (20–22), which will be adversely impacted by early wintertime aragonite undersaturation. Given their multiyear life cycles, our results imply that Pteropods in the Southern Ocean will need to withstand aragonite undersaturation far sooner than previously predicted with possible significant effects throughout the Southern Ocean marine food web.

Just thought you should know. Politicians seem so shy of mentioning the effect of CO2 on oceans, though.

Promising?

Upgrade helps solar harvest (Science Alert)

University of Sydney researchers Dr Tim Schmidt and Professor Max Crossley have come up with an ingenious low-cost device to harvest low energy photons, with the potential of significantly boosting the efficiency of conventional solar cells using a process called upconversion...

The findings, which are published in the most recent issue of the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, pave the way to boosting the efficiency limit to over 50 per cent under the standard solar spectrum and up to 63 per cent under 100 fold solar concentration.

Sounds too good to be true.

And besides: how do you store all the energy they create for more than a day?

Romancing the boot

Andrew Norton - Hello Lenin?

Andrew Norton has a good post about an small outbreak of rosy nostalgia for Soviet communism within Australia. It's from aged intellectual circles, of course.

Time to cut her loose

Catherine Deveny in The Age seems to be reaching some sort of peak in her recent obnoxious anti-everyone-except-those-who-think-exactly-like-her campaign:

I've recently found myself embedded in the above conversations with morons pretending to be people who have said things that made me wince and think: ''Where do I start? If they don't get the basics, what else don't they get?...

She's a "Bright" who shows how dangerous "Brights" can be.

She made a complete goose of herself on Q&A a couple of weeks ago.

Editors: when your columnist starts suggesting that her opponents are not human, it's surely time to cut her loose and let her practice her advocacy on the street corner.

A bit of a worry

Global oil supply 'far worse than admitted'

THE world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, says a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

Comparing smoking rates

Japan seems to be impressed that its smoking rate has dropped to 36.8% amongst men, and 9% amongst women. The rate for the total population is therefore about 22%.

Given that Japan still seems a much more smoker friendly country compared to here, it's a little surprising to realise that their total population smoking rate is now not far above Australia's. It was only in 2004 that we had the same rate at 22%, but it has dropped back to 19% since then. The main difference is that women here are a much higher proportion of the total number of smokers. I think I've said this before, but anyway: congratulations, modern Australian women, on your near parity in the field of stupid men's habits. (That's a thought that occurs to me regularly when witnessing tattooed women in the shopping centre, too.)

The Australian government wants to get the rate down to 9% by 2020, but at the current rate of decrease, it would appear likely that it won't be reached until 2040. The last cut is the hardest, it would seem.

Interestingly, this publication suggests that, as the rate of smoking amongst doctors and dentists (who are fully aware of its dangers) is around 3 -4 % "this may indicate the lowest "baseline" smoking rate that can be reasonably expected in a fully informed population."

I don't know: if it ever gets to 5%, just ban it, I reckon.

Dumb, dumb, dumb

Look, I don't like the ETS either, and I see that an increasing number of people are attacking the very idea of cap and trade schemes as being certain to set back effective action by a couple of decades, but I still find it impossible to see the political advantage in prominent Liberals or Nationals coming out as climate skeptics.

Nick Minchin is a dill who has ensured that the Liberals will not be trusted by the still very significant proportion of the population who think reducing CO2 needs to be tackled. Tony Abbott is not far behind, by seemingly confirming that he only assesses the importance of climate change policy according to how much the latest poll indicates the public are concerned about it. (Give Melbourne another run of 43 degree days and bushfires this summer, and we'll see how seriously they take it next year. Maybe Tony will be back on board then.)

Nick Minchin should just get out of Parliament, not for his ill-informed skepticism, but for his mischief making. Andrew Bolt claims there are skeptics in Federal Labor too, and I expect he's right, but at least they have enough political nous to know they will gain nothing by flaunting it.

I agree wholeheartedly with this comment by Matt at Barry Brooks blog:

Labor is positioning itself as the champion of climate, wedging the opposition as confused and mostly skeptical… but to the public it appears that the ALP are acting as demanded by the scientists, wheras it seems to me that the scientists are really saying that the proposed ETS is a mess, with too many loopholes, and does not achieve the scientific goals.

If Turnbull had control of his party he could suggest that they pounce on the growing unrest about the convoluted and innefective ETS, and have SCIENCE on his side… and use that as a tool to wait until after Copenhagen on the grounds that there is global uncertainty about Cap n Trade or Tax, and it is useless us making a premature and incorrect choice (like betamax vs VHS).

Unfortunately that would rely on his party believing the science.

But of course, there is barely a politician in the world who is willing to actually criticise cap and trade for the right reasons (it won't work fast enough, probably at great expense, and encourage deceptive), all because they are scared of the word "tax". (You can apparently help solve that problem by calling it "fee and dividend" instead.)

Scary nights

The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis | Chris French | Science | guardian.co.uk

I missed this good article last month about the phenomena of sleep paralysis. It's particularly interesting because of the comments following, where many people describe the type of terrifying hallucinations they have had during it.

Luckily, I've never experienced it myself, but my wife has had a couple of relatively mild cases. She hadn't heard of sleep paralysis when I explained it to her.

Then, more recently I discovered that a friend had experienced what he interpretted as a demonic visit in bed. I told him about the somewhat more likely explanation, but he had never heard of sleep paralysis either. Maybe I first read about it in Fortean Times; I'm not sure. In any event, it has been publicised for many years, but not everyone reads up on both the paranormal and science. It seems more people should know it is not that uncommon an experience.

Uh-huh

Cartoons 'should have movie-style ratings' to protect children from violence - Telegraph

Dr Karen Pfeffer, a senior lecturer at Lincoln University, said that risky behaviour which would normally lead to injury is rarely shown to have negative consequences in cartoons.

She claims to have found evidence that there children who watch violent programmes are more likely to engage in risky behaviour and injure themselves....

Among the programmes she deemed to contain the most risky behaviour were Scooby-Doo, Batman, X-Men and Ben 10.

Can this be true? Scooby-Doo encourages risky behaviour? It's inane, sure, and it annoys me that my kids like to watch it (at their age, I had already decided it was a bore) but it would have to be one of the most harmless cartoons imaginable, unless you could its encouragement towards overeating and being a coach potato.

When I was a kid, TV used to run the Three Stooges regularly in glorious black and white. (Can you get it at the DVD rental shop?) Dr Pfeffer would have a fit.

Parrot gnaws Nutt while Balls gets in Brown's ear

Novelists sometimes chose character names to reflect their character's character or interests.* There's probably a term for that practice.

On this basis, Britain currently seems more like a novel:

* the decision to have compulsory sex education (as noted in the previous post) was made by Secretary Balls;

* Professor Nutt has been in the news because of his disputing whether cannabis really does send that many people nuts;

* Professor Nutt has been attacked by Professor Parrott, with some accusing him of parroting conservatism;

* Gordon Brown seems about as convivial and happy as a brown painted room.

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh has taken over authorship of the country.

* (Help, I'm sure someone can improve that sentence!)

Europe, teenagers and sex

Sex and school don’t mix - Times Online

This article starts off with a paragraph which indicates a certain lack of seriousness, but it does eventually make some good points.

The thing is, Britain's response to a very high teenage pregnancy rate is to make sex education completely compulsory from age 15. Currently, parents can "opt out' their kids. Yet, I wonder, just how many parents take that option? Is there any evidence that children who are withheld have a higher rate of sex or pregnancy?

Fans of sex education like to point to Holland, which, as I have noted before, apparently has such open discussion of sex it would make most Australian parents cringe. But as this article notes:

...could it be that, although the Dutch teach their children about sex in graphic detail, their culture — with its rigorous Calvinist and Catholic moral framework, strong family cohesion, low proportion of single parents and, perhaps most significantly, minimal state benefits for teen mums — sends out an unmissable signal that teenage pregnancy is a bad idea.

By contrast, in Britain a pregnant 16-year-old can expect about £200 a week in benefits and possibly her own flat. For girls with limited prospects, often the offspring of teen mums themselves, a marriage to the state is not such a bad option. The taxpayer coughs up while the girl gets the unconditional love and status that being a mum affords.

Someone in comments also notes this:

Sue's comments regarding the importance of relationships with parents and the stability of family life are spot on. A couple of statistics:
For the year 1999, England and Wales teenage pregnancy rate 49 per 1000 of population. For Italy 6.9. For the year 2002 UK marriages ending in divorce 42%. For Italy 10%.
I am prepared to bet that with the Vatican in their midst the sex education delivered by Italian schools is modest compared to the Dutch immersion approach.

In short, it's all rather more complicated than just increasing sex education. Mind you, according to one report, the new sex education will include relationship stuff too (doesn't it already?):

...schools will teach about the importance of marriage, civil partnerships and stable relationships in family life, as well as how to have sex.

Well, I suppose you can't fault the intention, but how successful can mere teaching about stable relationships be when the kids almost certainly are going to model their relationship behaviour on the example of their own domestic home life?

And how does Australia compare? Not so great, with recent estimates of a teenage pregnancy rate of about 39 per 1000, compared to Britain's 42 per 1000.

High consumption

Cannabis takes toll on Aborigines | The Australian

The figures for use of cannabis in some aboriginal communities are startling high:

...cannabis use in remote communities was now as high as 70 per cent of people, with almost 90 per cent of users claiming to be addicted....

In a recent study of three remote Arnhem Land communities, Professor Clough and a team of researchers found that cannabis use exceeded six "cones" daily in almost 90 per cent of users. This was about twice the consumption of regular users elsewhere in Australia.

It's only twice the consumption of regular users elsewhere?

What's that doing there?

I had never seen a photo of the old San Francisco Cliff House before. It was built about 100 years ago, and was in a spectacularly dangerous looking location. A whole gallery of pictures of it can be found via this post. Wikipedia talks about the history of the site here.

Revisiting the War

Spielberg's War of the Worlds was on TV last night, and I hadn't seen it again since it came out in 2005. (I wonder if I have any readers today who were remember my 2005 comments on it. Probably not.)

Anyhow, I have to say again: what a creepy, disturbing, yet quite brilliantly directed movie it is. Yes, it ends abruptly, and via a means which makes little sense now compared to the time when the book was written. I assume that Spielberg and his writers just couldn't come up with an updated variation on the idea. (That was the one - the absolutely only - slightly clever thing about Independence Day. It was a virus that was the aliens downfall, but a computer virus, not a biological one. Unfortunately, that such a crap movie had recently used that updating trick presumably prevented Spielberg's writers from using it.)

While the movie creeped me out again, I was able to concentrate on the direction a little bit more last night. I'll say it again: Spielberg just blows away all the jittery camera, let's-create-hyper-action-by-ultra-fast-editing action directors of today. You know exactly what's going on, and can understand the sequences clearly. He is excellent with tension; he can make Tom Cruise act well.

Enough said? Yes, for now.

Calm Crabb

Annabel Crabb really amuses with this paragraph about a week in which everyone saw the desperation in our PM's media spin blitz:

Having experimented with tub-thumping and name-calling, the Ruddbot has entered a calm, methodical period, during which he calmly, methodically dials the direct line of every radio announcer he has ever met and invites himself on air to talk - with a certain methodical air of calm - about his plan to deal with the 78 Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking, a plan that takes considerable minutes to outline if you are the calm and methodical type, but for the slapdash and reckless can quite reasonably be summarised using just seven letters and one apostrophe: "We'll see."

A simile too far

I won't explaining how I ended up clicking onto this article, but in any event I have a strong urge to share its, um, wisdom:

If we do not have healthy bowel movements two or three times a day, we are like the tunnel that had three trains go into it, and only one train came out. THERE IS A WRECK IN THE TUNNEL. And that wreck in our intestines is the starting point for all illness.

The article also goes on to claim:

Unless your bowel is working perfectly three bowel movements daily, each the diameter of a banana, about a foot long, fully formed and floating on the water in the toilet bowl you need to get your digestive system in order to get healthy, which includes losing weight as a side effect.

Just a tad over-prescriptive, I think.

Rooting for the psychopath

Earlier this week I briefly noted some extracts of a new biography of Ayn Rand, who, puzzlingly, still attracts something of a following if sales of her books are anything to go by.

Well, now there's a even more informative review in Slate of the two (not just one) new books about her.

She was even loopier than I first imagined:

Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."

I take it she would have been laughing and cheering in all the wrong places during Silence of the Lambs. (And probably weeping when Hannibal was so cruelly being carted around on a trolley in a straightjacket.)

Really, I don't know how anyone can trust her take on anything (economics, morality, government, whatever) when she was such a fruitloop.

And also, now that she's been dead for quite a while, isn't there scope for a very funny satirical film about someone like her?

Finally, I get the impression that this bit sums up her most famous novels well:

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.

Time travelling baguette

Large Hadron Collider stalled again... thanks to chunk of baguette - Times Online

The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.

The £4 billion particle-collider faced more than a year of delays after a helium leak stymied the project in its first few days of operation. It is gradually being switched back on over the coming months but suffered a new setback on Tuesday morning.

Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.

Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.

Funnily enough, I was just reading again last night about the possibility that the future is preventing the LHC from starting.

Clearly, the future is economical with its methods. Instead of sending back killer cyborgs, it just puts its lunch inside the time machine.

Friends of the Earth don't care for trading

carbon trading 'the next Sub Prime' - Friends of the Earth Australia

Friends of the Earth have come out with a long report critical of carbon trading due to not being an effective means to reduce CO2.

While I have much sympathy with their arguments, it seems they are leaving their run a bit late.

Now that all politicians seem to be utterly committed to an emissions trading schemes, it is hard to see how long it will take for the whole idea to be revised in light of inadequacy. I mean, it'll take years to get it up and running fully, then a number of years to realise it's not working. Probably a good decade or so of wasted time, I reckon.

Kitchen Stadium could not contain him

Who knew that the Chinese were such fans of the host of Iron Chef?:


(Photo found on today's version of The Independent website, but actually comes from Reuters I think. I can't find the description of who it actually is.)

Update: Gosh, it's a Chairman alright, but not Chairman Kaga. It's Mao in young, hirsute mode.

Letting people vote

Maine Voters Repeal Law Allowing Gay Marriage

This seems to be attracting much less attention in Australia than the Californian Proposition 8 vote, but it's interesting to see how, when Americans get to vote on it, they reject gay marriage.

I also note how this is framed in many newspaper reports as "heartbreaking". (It seems that an AP writer is behind a lot of the reports, and his sympathies are clear.)

Credit due

Spencer on Lindzen and Choi climate feedback paper

I don't usually comment on the minute detail of some AGW debates, as they can get very complicated, and other blogs can explain it better.

But - it is interesting to note that skeptical blog Watts Up With That has run a post by soft skeptic Roy Spencer in which he finds a paper by fellow scientist skeptics Lindzen & Choi does not really show what they claim.

Monckton has promoted the Lindzen & Choi paper on Fox News recently, saying that it proves that the IPCC wildly overestimates climate sensitivity.

So, it's skeptical science in dispute with itself. At least I suppose Spencer deserves credit for being forthright about this.

I note, however, that a dispute like this attracts a relatively small number of comments at WUWT. If it's an anti AGW post, though, there tends to be much more excitement in comments.

Agreed

Steve Martin is the Oscars host with the most | Xan Brooks | Film | guardian.co.uk

He may have forgotten how to make a good movie, but I agree with Brooks that Martin is always funny as Oscar host:

Martin, for my money, has been the most reliably witty and sure-footed of all the recent presenters; the host that best navigates the perilous terrain of this most cramped and compromised of roles. His banter is drier, more tart than the showbiz razzle-dazzle provided by Crystal and Jackman. At the same time, however, he appears more at ease with the format than such nervous interlopers as Chris Rock or Jon Stewart. He is the insider's outsider; a pampered creature of the establishment who is still smart enough to treat the whole gaudy affair with an amused contempt.

Because we can

Suicide letter couple found dead

I don't know why people who are over-enthusiastic about suicide think they make good advocates for euthanasia:

Dennis and Flora Milner, aged 83 and 81, were found dead in their home in Newbury on Sunday, police confirmed.

A letter and statement saying they had "chosen to peacefully end our lives" was delivered to BBC South on Tuesday.

They said they wanted to highlight the "serious human dilemma" which prevents people from legally ending their own lives with loved ones around them.

Mr and Mrs Milner's daughter Chrissy said her parents had been in good health but did not want to get to a stage were they would be too ill to care for themselves.

The children are said to "supported their parents decision". One big happy suicide family.

Energy dreamtime, & George finds the prostate connection

I was deeply suspicious when I saw Scientific American running an article that claims the entire world's energy can be from renewable sources within 20 years. After all, if that were plausible, any nation with an interest in avoiding reliance on other countries' oil, gas or coal would already be on board with advanced planning for energy independence in our lifetime. Yippee.

Well, Barry Brook and friends have been looking at it closely, and basically rip it to threads. I'm convinced (by Brook, not by Scientific American.)

Meanwhile, on the related topic of global warming skepticism, George Monbiot is getting very depressed that polls indicate people are not so worried about global warming now. He writes in The Guardian: "There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease."

Actually, I don't worry too much about this. People are incredibly fickle when being polled. I suspect that reduced concern may partly be explained by some people (the type that media spin works on) feeling that with Obama as President, and Rudd as PM here, something effective is being done about it, so we can relax. But it only takes an unseasonably warm or hot month to change their minds again, in all likelihood.

What worries me more is that virtually all politicians are displaying absolutely no skepticism towards the economist driven proposal that cap and trade schemes are capable of providing sufficient technological innovation and rapid deployment of clean (or cleaner) energy to make a difference. When you need them to be skeptical, they're not.

But back to Monbiot. He says climate change denial is like a disease, and as I have recently identified, that is true: it must be prostate disease. George sees the old age connection, but hasn't yet caught on to my innovative bit of deductive reasoning:

The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, that it’s caused by humans or that it’s a serious problem(9). This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

He doesn't specify, but I would bet that perhaps 90% of those argumentive oldies are also men. As for women skeptics: well, we always have hormone imbalances to fall back on. (Hey if I am being silly about men, I have to be about women too.)

Anyhow, George then goes in for a bit of psychoanalysis about why older people should be more skeptical. It could be all about death denial.

Interesting theory, but I don't know. Does death denial make old folk just get generally cranky and irrational on other topics. (My mother has become so annoyed at what she perceives as other women in her retirement village big-noting their children's careers, she has taken to telling some of them that all of her 7 children have been to university. In fact, it's only one.)

Older people can get wise in some ways, but you probably can't expect them to be reliable in telling where the scientific consensus lies when there are exaggerations on both sides of the debate. I would bet there would be a certain percentage of post 60-ish women who believe everything Andrew Bolt says because he's a nice looking chap.

And finally, speaking of Bolt, I had to laugh on Insiders on Sunday when antagonism erupted between Annabel Crabb (I believe everything she writes because, well, she is cute) and Andrew. If I am not mistaken, Annabel derided Andrew for always quoting "some professor from the University of East Bumcrack." That may not be a precise recall, but "bumcrack" was definitely in there.

Another case of "as I suspected"

The Sydney Morning Herald carries a short story on a New Zealand study indicating that super high speed broadband is not the economic powerhouse that governments like to pretend it will be:

The study found that while there were economic benefits in having ADSL rather than dial-up, there was little extra value in faster forms such as fibre-optic cable.

Motu Economic and Public Policy Research mapped data from a 2006 study on more than 6000 firms' internet services against administrative tax and employment data to measure productivity. It found those firms that took up the kind of slower broadband services that are readily available in Australia achieved a 10 per cent productivity boost by using it to enter new export markets and buy goods and services online, but there was ''no discernible additional effect'' gained from a faster service.

Ken Davidson in The Age recently wrote:

Telstra is obliged under the universal service obligation to offer telephone customers a basic telephony service for $30 a month. The Rudd Government wants to replace this with a new service - the national broadband network - which on the most favourable assumptions will cost customers $60 to $70 a month for a basic telephone service.

And to ensure customers will take up the new service, the Telstra copper wires that enable the $30 a month service will be ripped up.

Sure, very high speed broadband would be nice to have, but I remain far from convinced that it is essential, and certainly it should be done the cheapest way possible.

A brief look at Ayn (rhymes with "pine")

The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldn't Win -- New York Magazine

A pretty amusing review of a new Ayn Rand biography.

Some lines I liked:

"...her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces"

“Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive,” she once wrote, “and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.”

As a child, she was solitary, opinionated, possessive, and intense—a willful and brilliant loner with literally zero friends. At 9, she decided to become a writer; by 11 she’d written four novels, each of which revolved around a heroine exactly her age but blonde, blue-eyed, tall, and leggy. (Rand was—by her own standards—unheroically dark, short, and square.) At 13, she declared herself an atheist. It’s hard not to suspect, based on many of these childhood anecdotes, that Rand suffered from some kind of undiagnosed personality disorder. Once, when a teacher asked her to write an essay about the joys of childhood, she wrote a diatribe condemning childhood as a cognitive wasteland—a joyless limbo in which adult rationality had yet to fully develop. (It was possibly a good thing that she never had children.)

The paragraph about William James' theory of the foundations of personal philosophy is pretty interesting, too.

By the way, Stephen Colbert explained Atlas Shrugged earlier this year:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Rand Illusion
www.colbertnation.com
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What a surprise

Overweight have less sex